WHAT is called the period of "Reconstruction" came at last; and in tracing our Fool's story it will be necessary to give some brief attention to this era of our nation's history. It is a short story as one reads it now. Its facts are few and plain. There is no escape from them. They were graven on the hearts of millions with a burning stylus. Short as is the story, it is full of folly and of shame. Regarded with whatever charity, folly and cowardice appear as its chief elements; and it has already been too bitter a harvest of crime to believe that the future holds, enough of good springing from its gloom to make it ever tolerable to the historian. Let us as briefly as possible retrace its essential features.
At the close of the great war of the Rebellion these conditions presented themselves to the statesmen of the land: — the hostile army was dispersed; the opposing governmental forms were disrupted; the Confederacy had set in a night which was declared to be eternal, and its component elements — the subordinate governments or states of which it had been composed — were dissolved.
The North, that portion of the country which for four years had constituted alone the United States of America, was full of rejoicing and gladness, which even the death of its martyr President could not long repress. Sorrow for the dead was lost in joy for the living. Banners waved; drums beat, and the quick step of homeward-marching columns echoed through every corner of the land. The clamor of rejoicing drowned the sighs of those who wept for their returning dead. All was light and joy, and happy, peaceful anticipation. The soldier had no need to beat his spear to a plowshare, or his sword into a pruning-hook. He found the plow waiting for him in the furrow. Smiling, peaceful homes, full of plenty and comfort, invited him to new exertion; and the prospect of rich returns for his labor enabled him all the more easily to forgive and forget, to let bygones be bygones, and throwing away the laurels, and forgetting the struggles and lessons of the past, contentedly grow fat on the abundance of the present and the glowing promise of the future.
At the South it was far different. Sadness and gloom covered the face of the land. The returning braves brought no joy to the loving hearts who had sent them forth. Nay, their very presence kept alive the chagrin of defeat. Instead of banners and music and gay greeting, silence and tears were their welcome home. Not only for the dead were these lamentations, but also for the living. If the past was sorrowful, the future was scarcely less so. If that which went before was imbittered by disappointment and the memory of vain sacrifice, that which was to come was darkened with uncertainty and apprehension. The good things of the past were apples of Sodom in the hand of the present. The miser's money was as dust of the highway in value; the obligor, in his indefinite promise to pay, had vanished, and the hoarder only had a gray piece of paper stamped with the fair pledge of a ghostly nation. The planter's slaves had become freedmen while he was growing into a hero, and no longer owed fealty or service to him or his family. The home where he had lived in luxury was almost barren of necessities: even the ordinary comforts of life were wanting at his fireside. A piece of cornbread, with a glass of milk, and bit of bacon, was, perhaps, the richest welcome-feast that wifely love could devise for the returning hero. Time and the scath of war had wrought ruin in his home. The hedgerows were upgrown, and the ditches stopped. Those whom he had been wont to see in delicate array were clad in homespun. His loved ones who had been reared in luxury were living in poverty. While he had fought, interest had run. War had not extinguished debt. What was a mere bagatelle when slaves and stocks were at their highest was a terrible incubus when slaves were no more, and banks were broken. The army of creditors was even more terrible than the army with banners, to whom he had surrendered. If the past was dark, the future was Cimmerian. Shame and defeat were behind, gloom and apprehension before.
Here and there throughout the subjugated land were detachments and posts of the victorious army, gradually growing smaller and fewer as the months slipped by. The forerunners of trade appeared before the smoke of battle had fairly cleared away. After a little, groups of Northern men settled, to engage in commerce, or to till the soil. The cotton and tobacco which remained of the slender crops of the years of war brought fabulous prices. The hope of their continuance was the one bright spot in the future.
The freedmen, dazed with new-found liberty, crowded the towns and camps, or wandered aimlessly here and there. Hardly poorer than their late masters, they were better prepared for poverty. They had been indurated to want, exposure, and toil. Slavery had been a hard school; but in it they had learned more than one lesson which was valuable to them now. They could endure the present better than their old masters' families, and had never learned to dread the future.
So a part of the re-united country was in light, and the other part in darkness, and between the two was a zone of bloody graves.
The question for the wise was: How shall this be made light, without darkening that? Not an easy question for the wisest and bravest; one which was sure of no solution, or only the ill one of chance or mischance, as the Fates might direct, at the hands of vanity, folly, and ambition.
For two years there were indecision and bickering and cross-purposes and false promises. The South waited sullenly; the North wonderingly.
There were four plans proposed: —
The first was, that the State machinery of the ante bellum days in the lately denationalized sections should be set in motion, and the re-organized communities restored to their former positions without change, except as to individuals; just as you renew a wheel in a worn-out clock, and, starting the pendulum, set it again to its work.
This, without unnecessary verbiage, was the President's plan. It would have done no harm if he had been content to suggest it merely; but he tried to carry it into execution, and thereby not only endangered himself, but raised hopes which he could not satisfy, and sowed the seeds of discontent with whatsoever might be done afterwards.
The second scheme was a makeshift, inspired by fright at what had been done, and a desire to avoid what must be done. Emancipation had left four millions of people in most anomalous relations to the other five or six millions under whom they had been enslaved. They were a new and troublesome element. They must be taken care of by their liberators, or abandoned. This plan was devised in the hope of finding a way to escape doing either. It was, in short, to allow the vagrant States to come back into the national fold, shorn of such strength as they might lose by deducting from their representation the ratio of representative power formerly allowed to the non-voting colored race, unless the same should be enfranchised by their organic law.
The South, which had been led by the foolish usurpative acts of the President to expect an unconditional restoration, rejected his proposition with scorn. They regarded it as an attempt to bribe them into the acceptance of the results of emancipation by the offer of power as a reward for their concurrence. Such a view can not be claimed to have been illogical.
The third plan, which remains to be considered, was of a different character. It neither shirked nor temporized. It accepted the past, and sought to guarantee the future. It did not regard immediate re-organization of the recently rebellious communities upon a Federal basis, as necessary or desirable. Without seeking vengeance, it took warning from what had been, and sought to prevent a recurrence of evil. It recognized the fact that a doctrine which had been known as State Sovereignty was at the root of the evil, and that the nation had taken a race from bondage which it was morally bound to prepare for freedom. So it proposed that the States which had been in the infected region should be quietly left to molder in the grave of rebellion, — the bed they had themselves prepared; that the region they once embraced should be divided up into Territories without regard to former statal lines, and so remain for a score of years under national control, but without power to mold or fashion the national legislation — until time should naturally and thoroughly have healed the breaches of the past, till commerce had become re-established, and the crude ideas of the present had been clarified by the light of experience. It recognized as an undeniable fact the idea that men who had gazed into each other's faces over gleaming gun-barrels, by the fateful blaze of battle, were not so fit to adjust the questions arising out of the conflict as those yet unborn. It was based upon the fact, too, that the slave was not made fit for unrestrained political power by the simple fact of freedom. Slavery might be ended as a legal status by proclamation, but as a living fact it could not. The hands could be unshackled by a constitutional amendment; but heart and brain must have an opportunity to expand, before the freedman could be capable of automatic liberty.
To this doctrine the Fool subscribed all the more readily, because he thought he saw the exemplification of its principles about him day by day. Besides that, he thought it only fair and honest that the government which had cut the freedman loose from slavery should watch over him until he could walk erect in his new estate.
The second Christmas in his new home had come before any thing was done; then a plan was adopted which was a compromise among all these ideas. This was the fourth plan. It was not selected because those who chose it deemed it the best manner for settling the ills with which the body politic had been afflicted; not at all. No one can be so simple-minded as to believe that. The far future was very dim as the legislators' eyes when they adopted it: the near future was what they dreaded. A great election was at hand. The President and his supporters were going to the country on his plan of reconstruction. When the Congress threatened impeachment, he sought for justification at the ballot-box. Some plan must be devised with which to meet him. What should it be? The logic which carries elections answered, "One on which all who are opposed to the presidential plan in the North can be induced to unite." From this womb of party necessity and political insincerity came forth this abortion, or, rather, this monster, doomed to parricide in the hour of its birth.
Like all compromises, it had the evils of all the plans from which its pieces came, and the merits of none of them. The coward, who, running with his conscience and holding with his fear, makes a compromise by taking the head of one thought and the tail of another, is sure to get the wrong ends of both.
Added to this was the very remarkable fact that this plan, in common with two of the discarded ones, took no account of that strange and mysterious influence which ranges all the way from a religious principle to a baseless prejudice, according to the stand-point of the observer, but always remains a most unaccountable yet still stubborn fact in all that pertains to the governmental organisms of the South, — the popular feeling in regard to the African population of that section. That a servile race, isolated from the dominant one by the fact of color and the universally accepted dogma of inherent inferiority, to say nothing of a very general belief of its utter incapacity for the civilization to which the Caucasian has attained, should be looked on with distrust and aversion, if not with positive hatred, as a co-ordinate political power, by their former masters, would seem so natural, that one could hardly expect men of ordinary intelligence to overlook it. That this should arouse a feeling of very intense bitterness when it came as the result of conquest, and the freedom enjoyed by the subject-race was inseparably linked with the memory of loss and humiliation in the mind of the master, would seem equally apparent. But when to these facts was added the knowledge that whoever should advocate such an elevation of the blacks, in that section, was certain to be regarded as putting himself upon their social level in a community where the offender against caste becomes an outlaw in fact, it seems impossible that the wise men of that day should have been so blind as not to have seen that they were doing the utmost possible injury to the colored race, the country, and themselves, by propounding a plan of re-organization which depended for its success upon the effective and prosperous administration of state governments by this class, in connection with the few of the dominant race, who, from whatever motives, might be willing to put themselves on the same level with them in the estimation of their white neighbors. Of these there could be but the following classes: martyrs, who were willing to endure ostracism and obloquy for the sake of principle; self-seekers, who were willing to do or be any thing and every thing for the sake of power, place, and gain; and fools, who hoped that in some inscrutable way the laws of human nature would be suspended, or that the state of affairs at first presenting itself would be but temporary. The former class, it might have been known, would naturally be small. Martyrs do not constitute any large proportion of any form or state of society. Especially were they not to be looked for in a section where public opinion had been dominated by an active and potent minority, until independent thought upon certain subjects had been utterly strangled. Self-seekers, on the contrary, those who can be swayed by motives of interest or ambition, regardless alike of principle and the approbation of those by whom they are surrounded, are to be found in all ranks and classes; while fools who have stamina enough to swim for any great time against a strong popular current are not to be looked for in any great numbers in any ordinary community.