The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

Eleven States, all the old Confederacy, had been restored by the spring of 1870; but one, Georgia, was ejected after restoration, and thus became the last item in congressional reconstruction. In 1868 Georgia had ratified her new constitution and moved her capital from its ante-bellum location at Milledgeville to the new town growing upon the ashes of Atlanta. She had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but her first legislature had so poorly read the meaning of Congress that it expelled every negro whom the radicals had elected to membership. Congress had thereupon declined to seat the Georgia delegation at Washington, and had renewed the probationary period until the legislature, humbled and browbeaten, had undone the expulsion, whereupon Georgia received her final recognition.

The arbitrary acts of Congress, passed by the radicals over the unvarying vetoes of Johnson, find little sanction in the Constitution, but it is to be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war. Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment (effective December 18, 1865), was expected by all and accepted without a fight. The next amendment, inspired by a fear that the freedmen would be oppressed and by a hope that they might be converted into a political ally of the Republicans, was submitted to the States before the Reconstruction Acts were passed, and was proclaimed as part of the Constitution July 28, 1868. Only compulsion upon the Southern States procured its ratification. It left negro suffrage optional with the States, but threatened them with a reduction in representation in Congress if they refrained from granting it. In the Southern States Congress had already planted a negro electorate by law. The Fifteenth Amendment forbade the denial of the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and was not submitted to the States until after the inauguration of General Grant. A fear that the South would disfranchise the freedmen, pay the price, and revert to Democratic control seems to have been the prime motive in its adoption. When it was proclaimed, March 30, 1870, the radical Republicans had done everything in their power to save themselves, and had inflicted on the conquered States, in malice, ignorance, or mistaken philanthropy, a condition that in the North, with its trifling number of negroes, was tolerated with reluctance.

The South was in name completely restored in 1870, but neither restoration nor reconstruction was in fact far advanced. In the latter process it was yet clearing away the wreckage of the institution of slavery, breaking up the plantations, devising new systems of tenure and wage, rebuilding the material equipment that the war had left desolate. The former process was only commenced. It was unthinkable that an American community should permit itself to remain subject to the absolute control of its least respected members, yet this was the aim of white disfranchisement and negro suffrage. Law or no law, the restoration of the South was not complete until its government was back in the control of its responsible white population.

Almost without exception, until 1870, the Southern State Governments were what Congress had chosen to make them. Their Senators and Representatives in Congress were Republican, commonly of the carpet-bag variety. Their governors, administrative officers, and legislatures were Republican, too. Rarely were they persons of property or standing in their communities, and often, as their records show, they were both black and illiterate. Had all possessed good intentions they could hardly have hoped to meet the local needs, which called for a wise revision of law in order that the community might recover and live. That their work should be accompanied by error and waste was inevitable.

From the contemporary accounts of travelers in the South, from public documents, from the growing body of Southern biography and reminiscence, it is easy to gather a mass of detail upon the extravagance of the Reconstruction Governments. Printing bills and salary lists rose without a corresponding increase in service done. When expenditures exceeded the revenues, loans were created carelessly and recklessly. For negroes, only a few months out of the cotton-field, there was an irresistible attraction in the plush carpets, the mahogany desks, and the imported cuspidors that the taxpayers might be forced to provide for the comfort of their servants. A free and continuous lunch, with ample food and drink, was set up in one of the capitols. Gratuitous waste was the least of the burdens inflicted upon the South.

It is unreasonable to lay all the corruption of the Reconstruction Governments to the account of the congressional policy. The period of the Civil War was one of abuse of power by local officials everywhere. It took a Tweed in New York to drive a Northern public to revolt, and a Nast to focus public attention upon the crime. In other States, where rogues were less brutal in their methods, or prosecutors less acute, the evil ran, not unnoticed but unchecked. In the South the same phenomena were resented with greater vigor than in the North because the crimes were more openly and clumsily committed, and because they were the work of "outsiders."

Deliberate theft of public money was so common as to occasion no surprise. In no State were books so kept that the modern student can be sure he knows where all the money went. Graft in contracts, fraud in the administration of schools and negro-relief schemes, sale of charters and votes, illegal issues of bonds, improvident loans to railroads, combined to enrich the office-holder and to increase the volume of public debts. A long series of repudiations of these debts injured Southern credit for many years. South Carolina occasioned the most vivid description of the orgy in a book entitled The Prostrate State, by a Maine abolitionist and Republican, named Pike; but several other States would have furnished similar materials to a similar historian.

So far as law was concerned, the South was helpless in those regions in which the negroes approached a majority. The military garrisons which Congress kept on duty saw to it that the freedmen were protected, yet were unable in the long run to control the white population. It is a vexed question whether negro violence or white was the first to appear, but by 1867 events had begun to point the way to the elimination of negro control by force or fraud. By law it could not be destroyed unless the whites struggled and argued for negro votes, treating the negroes as citizens and equals, which was generally as impossible as an acceptance of their control.

The Ku-Klux Klan was a secret movement, with slight organization, that appeared earliest in Tennessee, but spread to nearly every crossroads in the South. It began in the hazing of negroes and carpet-baggers who were insolent or offensive to their neighbors. Its members rode by night, in mask, with improvised pomp and ritual, and played as much upon the imagination of their victims as upon their bodies. Frequently it revenged private grievances and went to extremes of violence or murder. From hazing it was an easy step to intimidation at election time, the Ku-Klux Klan proving to be an efficient means of reducing the negro vote. It was so efficient, indeed, that Grant asked and Congress voted, in 1871, special powers for the policing of the South. In this summer a committee of Congress visited Southern centers and accumulated a great mass of testimony from which a picture of both the Ku-Klux Klan outrages and the workings of reconstruction may easily be drawn. The reign of terror subsided by 1872, but it had done much to dissuade the negro from using his new right, and had started the movement for home rule in the South.

That the normal politics of the South was Democratic is shown by the votes of the border States, where a population of freedmen had to be assimilated and Congress could not interfere. Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky voted against Grant in 1868, although all the restored Confederate States but two voted for him. In Georgia the Democrats swallowed their pride, electioneered among the negroes, and elected a conservative State Government in 1870. Tennessee escaped negro domination from the start. Virginia, late to be readmitted, had consolidated her white population as she watched the troubles in South Carolina and Mississippi, and never elected a radical administration. In North Carolina, after a fight that approached a civil war, a Democratic State Government was chosen in 1870. The rest of the Confederate States followed as opportunity offered; after 1872 the process was rapid, and after 1876 there was no Republican administration in the old South. The Republican party, itself, almost disappeared from the South at this time. A bare organization, largely manned by negroes, endured to enjoy the offices which a Republican National Administration could bestow, and to contribute pliant delegations to the national conventions of the party. But the South had become solid in the sense that its votes were recorded almost automatically for the Democratic ticket.