CIVIC AND MATERIAL DESOLATION
THE surrender of Lee and Johnston left the South in a deplorable condition. Its people were without money or credit, and their labor system was destroyed. Its legislators and judges were fleeing or hiding from Federal soldiers. The organic and statutory laws of the South that were in existence before the war had been changed by State conventions and legislatures during the war. Twelve millions of people, white and black, were not only without representation at Washington, but they were without local law, without civil government of any kind, without other protection than the bayonets of Federal troops. Somewhere there must exist the power to create, to adjust, to set the machinery of government again in motion. Clearly the creative power was in the people of each State capable of giving their consent to be governed, and not in a few, or in a class who should assume to govern the others. The adjusting power was in Congress under Section 8 of Article I of the Federal Constitution, which provides that Congress “shall have the power to provide for the general welfare of the United States.”
The national statesmen of those days were confronted with a perplexing problem. They desired to remove the blight from the fair face of the South, to open her seaports to the ships of the world, to restore her marts to commerce, her fields to plenty, her people to prosperity, to citizenship, to equality, and to a place in the councils of the Government. Nothing less than this was intended by those who undertook the task of reconstruction. There was no vengeful outbreak of passion, no proscription of the Southern people, no spirit of retaliation in the hearts of Union men.
The new nation which was to issue from the war began to take form before the surrender of Lee or the assassination of President Lincoln. The Thirteenth Amendment, validating the Emancipation Proclamation and abolishing slavery, had been ratified by eleven of the States which had joined the Confederacy, also by Maryland and Missouri of the border States, and by all the Northern States. Delaware and Kentucky alone had refused to ratify. But it was unfortunate for the Southern people that their leaders in the fighting did not participate in the public affairs of the South and advise the politicians that they could not expect to win from Union statesmen what their armies had failed to gain on the battle-field. Southern soldiers, as a whole, showed the spirit of men who had fought bravely and lost fairly, and recognized the duty, not less than the patriotism, of submitting to the inevitable. Almost without exception, Union soldiers of the line and their officers stood ready to reflect in their acts, attitude, and feelings the sentiments of their great commander General Grant, who had said to the vanquished at Appomattox: “Take your horses home with you; you will need them to put in your crops.” Had the Southern people, the non-combatants among them, taken the attitude of the mass of the Confederate soldiers, the difficulties of reconstruction would have been lessened. But in the first year after the close of the war the country, as already described, was convulsed by disturbing political events, in which the rebellious spirit shown by the Southern people caused deep anxiety and created marked revulsion in the North. There were strong exhibitions of aroused and indignant sentiment in Union conventions and other public assemblies, and there was a tremendous outpouring of protest and warning. At the same time the South was aflame with claims of Southern rights denied and of wrongs suffered.
INCIDENTS OF PROVOST-MARSHAL RULE
TWO incidents within my personal knowledge illustrate the inconvenience caused by the total absence of civil law in the South at that juncture. In June, 1865, I was serving as provost-marshal at the town of Harrisonburg, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, with instructions to preserve order, gather up various sorts of United States military property scattered through the country, arrest outlaws and marauders, and receive the surrender of, and give paroles to, bands of scattered Confederate soldiers who had not been “in” at the all-compelling surrender at Appomattox Court House two months before. The country was honeycombed with stragglers, and I was burdened with my unique tasks. Civil government being non-existent, there was not even authority for the issuance of marriage-licenses and for the performance of like civic duties. One day, in this emergency, I received a personal application from an ardent Virginia swain, who announced that he wished to get married, and appealed to me for instructions as to how to go about the tender though untimely task. Rising to the occasion, I told him that I would issue him a license, and accordingly did so in my capacity as a captain of United States Volunteers, and for the time being provost-marshal of that district. I wrote out the necessary authority, observing no forms, empowering any minister of the gospel, or any former justice of the peace under the Confederacy, to perform the ceremony. Then I sent the happy lover on his way rejoicing, and assumed that the knot was tied with due solemnity, that the couple would live happily ever after, and rear a family of Virginia children.
As provost-marshal I imposed a fine on a portly Negro saloon-keeper for violating a military order commanding the closing of all liquor shops in the town. The amount of the fine was fifty dollars in greenbacks, which was promptly, albeit ungraciously, paid by the aggrieved dispenser of firewater. Then, not knowing what to do legally with the money, I transmitted it to the regimental and post commander. He, also, not knowing how to dispose of this exceptional collection under any section of the army regulations, sent it to the Treasury of the United States at Washington, accompanied by an explanatory letter. The treasury officials, likewise “stumped” by the unusual problem, sent the fifty dollars back to the colonel commanding. He in turn threw the money back upon me, with a hint that in the unique dilemma the colored man’s unwilling contribution might not inappropriately be covered into the treasury of a certain regimental fund which was then being raised to promote a permanent, patriotic, and reverent object. Without delay I proceeded to act upon the hint, and to this day I hold among my private military archives the receipt of the regimental quartermaster for the money thus forcibly extorted from that Negro at Harrisonburg who had undertaken to sell Virginia apple-jack without a military license.
OPPOSITION TO THE EDICT OF FREEDOM
THE Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, which was pending when Lee surrendered, was not acceptable to the South. Almost the first acts of the Southern legislatures which assembled under President Johnson’s proclamation of amnesty, and the provisional organizations provided for by these agencies, breathed antagonism to the abolition of slavery. In November, 1865, Mississippi provided by legislative enactment that any Negro over eighteen years of age found in that State with no lawful employment or business should be deemed a vagrant. Conviction of vagrancy was punished by fine, and for non-payment of fine for five days it was made the duty of the sheriff to hire out the “vagrant” to any person who for the shortest period of service would pay the fine. In March, 1865, three months after the Thirteenth Amendment was declared in force, Georgia enacted a vagrant law authorizing the sale of the black man’s time for a year. The same law provided for the return and punishment by fine and imprisonment of runaway black employees, and authorized the employer to pay the fine and deduct it from the servant’s wages. Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia had vagrant laws similar to those of Mississippi, and Louisiana had an additional provision requiring employers to pay only half-wages, and giving them the right to keep the remainder if the laborer quit before his time was out; and also the right to complain of a laborer who might quit work, and cause him to be put on the public works, without pay, until he returned to his employer.
Union men who had left their Southern homes during the war came back to find their property, real and personal, in the hands of Confederates, who refused to surrender it. Returning Unionists encountered such persecution as compelled them to leave again. There was, under “the black law,” a virtual reënslavement of Negroes. Confederate sentiment was nearly as dominant from the Potomac to the Gulf as when the Stars and Bars floated from every flagstaff. Georgia elected, or tried to elect, Alexander H. Stephens a United States Senator. Mobile made Raphael Semmes, the captain of the Alabama, a probate judge. Monroe was elected mayor of New Orleans, and Robert E. Lee was offered the nomination for Governor of Virginia. National airs were hissed in the theaters, and the national flag was insulted in the streets. The local press extolled the “Lost Cause” and flouted those who had overthrown it. Former Confederate officers were the chosen leaders of public sentiment. Taxation was levied to pay municipal indebtedness contracted to fit out Confederate regiments. The generally expressed Southern opinion was that, if reconstruction was necessary, it was the Confederates who should do the reconstructing.