The presidential plan of Reconstruction had been promptly accepted by the people of the prostrate States. Almost without exception they had, when permitted, taken the oath and returned to their allegiance.
The wretchedness of these people in the spring of 1865 was indescribable. The labor system on which they depended for most of their money-producing crops was destroyed. Including the disabled, twenty per cent of the whites, who would now have been bread-winners, were gone. The credit system had been universal, and credit was gone. Banks were bankrupt. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. Provisions were scarce and money even scarcer. Many landholders had not even plough stock with which to make a crop.
There was some cotton, however, that had escaped the ravages of war, and a large part of this also escaped the rapacious United States agents, who were seizing it as Confederate property. This cotton was a godsend. There was another supply of money that came from an unexpected source. The old anti-slavery controversy had made it seem perfectly clear to many moneyed men, North, that free labor was always superior to slave labor; and now, when cotton was bringing a good price, enterprising men carried their money, altogether some hundreds of thousands of dollars, into the several cotton States, to buy plantations and make cotton with free negro labor. Free negro labor was not a success. Those who had reckoned on it lost their money; but this money went into circulation and was helpful.
Above all else loomed the negro problem. Five millions of whites and three and a half millions of blacks were to live together. Thomas Jefferson had said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines between them."[92] And it may truly be said of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently he was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, President of Cornell University, the "apostle of reason, and reason alone."
What system of laws could Southern conventions and legislatures frame, that would enable them to accomplish what Jefferson had declared was impossible? This was the question before these bodies when called together in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabilitate their States. Two dangers confronted them. One was, armed bands of negroes, headed by returning negro soldiers. Mr. Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of that very year, 1865, he said to General Butler: "I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we can get rid of the negroes, whom we have armed and disciplined, and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of one hundred and fifty thousand." Mississippi, and perhaps one other State, to guard against the danger from this source, enacted that negroes were only to bear arms when licensed. This law was to be fiercely attacked.
The other chief danger was that idleness among the negroes would lead to crime. It soon became apparent that the negro idea was that freedom meant freedom from work. They would not work steadily, even for their Northern friends, who were offering ready money for labor in their cotton fields, and multitudes were loitering in towns and around Freedmen's Bureau offices. Nothing seemed better than the old-time remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, then found in every body of British or American statutes. These laws Southern legislatures copied, with what appeared to be necessary modifications, and these laws were soon assailed as evidence of an intent to reduce the negro again to slavery. Mr. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," selected the Alabama statutes for his attack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to be very similar to and largely copied from the statutes of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
Had Mr. Lincoln been living he would have sympathized with these Southern law-makers in their difficult task. But to the radicals in Congress nothing could have been satisfactory that did not give Mr. Sumner's party the "allies it needed."
The first important step of the Congress that convened December 4, 1865, was to refuse admission to the congressmen from the States reconstructed under the Lincoln-Johnson plan, and pass a joint resolution for the appointment of a Committee of Fifteen to inquire into conditions in those States.
The temper of that Congress may be gauged by the following extract from the speech of Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, on the passage of the joint resolution:
"They framed iniquity and universal murder into law.... Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce on the sea. They carved the bones of your dead heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains; put mines under your soldiers' prisons; organized bands, whose leaders were concealed in your homes; and commissions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your cities and to your women and children. They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri," etc.