Ever since 1865, people who have taken an interest in Reconstruction have asked themselves and each other how the process and the period might have been different if Lincoln had lived to preside over its first four years. Of course, we can never know what Lincoln would have done, but we can take an educated guess or two based on his previous actions.
As president-elect, Lincoln had been willing to accept even a constitutional amendment stipulating that the Constitution could never be amended so as to ban slavery, if such an amendment would satisfy white southerners and persuade them to step back from secession. Southern leaders were not satisfied, and so the proposal went nowhere. In his first inaugural address, Lincoln had gone out of his way to reassure southerners of his peaceful intent. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine,” Lincoln had said, “is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’” But when the secessionists had become the aggressors, Lincoln had held firm to his oath and his purpose of preserving the Union and had accepted war. He had held to a conciliatory policy during the first year of the war, hoping the Rebels would not persevere in secession. When they proved intransigent, he took the further step of emancipation.
Throughout the deepening crisis, Lincoln had shown himself eager to conciliate but willing to be firm if pushed. At the heart of Lincoln’s greatness as a statesman was the fact that he kept a firm grip on a few very clear moral goals and pursued them unflinchingly, no matter where that led him. He was committed to securing freedom for the slaves, and for Lincoln freedom included the opportunity of bettering one’s lot in life. He was also on record that at least some of the slaves should vote. It is easy to imagine that had he lived, he would have shaped his course by those landmarks. Perhaps he would have met southern cooperation with generosity, but in the face of intransigence, he might well have shown as much firmness, determination, and willingness to take harsh measures as he had done during the war’s conventional phase. We can never know. One thing is certain, though, and that is that the process of Reconstruction was going to be much more difficult without Lincoln.
His successor, Andrew Johnson, had been born to poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1808. Apprenticed as a tailor, young Johnson had run away to Greeneville, Tennessee, several years later, where he married a wife who bore him five children and taught him to read and cipher. Elected alderman at age twenty-one, Johnson went on, through the usual ups and downs of politics, to be mayor, state legislator, congressman, governor, and finally U.S. senator. That was the office he held at the outbreak of the Civil War. Johnson saw himself as the champion of the poor and middling whites of the South, hostile to slaveholders but at best indifferent to their slaves. He was a Buchanan Democrat in the 1850s, but when secession came, Johnson, alone among U.S. senators from seceding states, remained loyal to the Union. In 1862 Lincoln appointed him military governor over the Union-occupied portion of the state, and two years later the Republicans, in their National Union Party guise, tapped him as Lincoln’s second-term vice president.
He got off to a bad start as vice president. Johnson, who did not have the reputation of a problem drinker, was sick with typhoid fever on inauguration day and had taken a drink or two of whiskey, which in those days was considered to have medicinal value. The Senate chamber, in which the vice-presidential inauguration took place, was stuffy, and the liquor seemed to affect Johnson more strongly than he anticipated. After taking the oath of office, he gave a rambling, incoherent speech that did nothing to enhance his standing in the capital city.
In the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination, however, it appeared that Johnson would get along very well with the most powerful political faction in town, the Radical Republicans. He talked tough about punishing traitors, and leading members of the Radical faction expressed the belief that now that Johnson was in charge, there would be no difficulty about Reconstruction, none of the tension between president and Congress that had shown up in the dispute over the Wade-Davis Bill. They were in for a surprise.
During the seven months between his taking the oath of office as president in April and Congress’s convening for its next session in December, Johnson took several key steps in the Reconstruction process. He issued a proclamation offering amnesty to former Confederates who would take the oath of allegiance. The offer was good for any Rebel except those in certain specified classes, including Confederate civil officials, high-ranking army and navy officers, and those owning more than twenty thousand dollars of taxable property. He also recognized the four state governments Lincoln had established in former Confederate states before the end of the war. Johnson went on and set up similar governments in the remaining seven states of the former Confederacy, stipulating that the new governments must accept emancipation, nullify secession, and repudiate the debts their states had incurred during the rebellion. He also encouraged the restored southern state governments to extend the vote to literate blacks. This was very close to Lincoln’s final announced Reconstruction policy except that it left out the vote for former black soldiers.
As it turned out, the finer points of Johnson’s position on black suffrage were irrelevant since every one of the new state governments ignored his recommendation to extend the vote to at least some blacks. Some southerners cited the Dred Scott decision as proof that blacks were not citizens. It was almost as if the preceding decade with its more than half a million war deaths had never happened. No former Confederate state enfranchised a single black man, and some states even declined to repudiate their wartime debts. Rather than reacting as Lincoln always had with increased firmness and severity in the face of defiant white southerners, Johnson tamely acquiesced.
As the summer wore on, Radicals criticized Johnson’s actions, while white southerners flattered him. Gradually Johnson slid more and more into sympathy with the former Rebels. In August he allowed the provisional governor of Mississippi to set up a state militia composed of former Confederate soldiers, and he rebuked two U.S. Army generals stationed in Mississippi who objected to the governor’s ominous move. Meanwhile former Confederates who were members of the special classes excluded from Johnson’s previous pardon flocked to the White House in droves seeking from the president the special, individual pardons that would restore them to full political privileges. Johnson swelled with pride to see members of the southern aristocracy finally treating him with deference, and he granted pardon after pardon—an average of five hundred a day during the month of September. In all, Johnson granted 90 percent of the fifteen thousand or so pardon requests he received.
Meanwhile the amazing political recovery of the recent Rebels was having a direct effect on the former slaves, who were often called freedmen. Congress, on March 3, 1865, had passed a bill for the establishment of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Under the leadership of its commissioner, General Oliver O. Howard, the bureau strove to help the former slaves make the transition to freedom. During the tumultuous final days of the war and the early months of peace, the bureau provided emergency food, housing, and medical care to displaced freedmen as well as to white refugees.
Increasingly thereafter, its chief task was helping the freedmen find gainful employment. At first, there were high hopes that this might be accomplished by settling the former slaves as landowning farmers on small parcels carved from the abandoned (during the war) plantations of many of their former owners who had been active Rebels. Johnson quickly put a stop to that and saw to it that the pardoned Rebels got their land back. Next, the Freedmen’s Bureau tried to help the former slaves get fair work contracts to farm on the lands of their former masters, with mixed success. Old attitudes died hard, and many of the former slaveholders tried as much as possible to treat the blacks as if they were still in bondage. The political resurgence of the former Rebels made the task of the Freedmen’s Bureau more difficult.
Keeping the blacks in a subordinate role was the chief purpose of special “black codes” passed by the newly restored legislatures of the former Confederate states. Before the war, every slave state had had, as part of its laws, a slave code, containing the laws that enabled, supported, and protected slavery. Now that slavery was gone, a number of the former Confederate states replaced their slave codes with black codes that provided a separate—and lower—legal status for blacks, a sort of legal netherworld between slavery and freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau, together with the army occupation forces in the South, suspended the operation of the more onerous portions of the slave codes.
The southern states were by no means alone in an unwillingness to accord legal equality to blacks. That year three northern states—Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—had rejected referenda that would have given the vote to blacks in those states. However, the passage of a specific black code went farther than a mere denial of the vote. It was more blatant, and it smacked of an attempt to continue many of the features of slavery. The southern black codes, combined with a rising tide of violence against blacks and Unionists in the South, helped convince many congressional Republicans that the former Confederate states were rejecting the outcome of the war.
In December 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery throughout the United States, received the needed ratification by three-fourths of the states and went into effect. The amendment supported and broadened the impact of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and removed any possibility that the proclamation might be challenged in the courts. Slavery, which had been at the heart of the sectional crisis and the rebellion, was at last dead. It remained to be seen, however, how effective the rebellious states would be in setting aside the result of the war by creating for the blacks a legal status that, if it was not quite slavery, was nevertheless well short of freedom.
When Congress convened in that same December 1865, the Republicans, who controlled both houses, refused to seat the representatives and senators from the former Confederate states. They believed these states were still, in effect, in rebellion though not openly in arms because they were continuing to reject the outcome of the war. To remedy the situation, Congress passed two bills. One broadened the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect blacks in the South, and the other was aimed at extending civil rights to the blacks, canceling the legal legacy of the Dred Scott decision and according blacks citizenship and the “full benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property as is enjoyed by white citizens.” The bill stopped short of requiring states to allow blacks to vote or to sit on juries or of forbidding segregation.
Johnson vetoed both bills. Some of the arguments he put forward in his veto messages would have been sound in ordinary times of peace but ignored the fact that the nation was still in the process of restoring peace and stability after a massive civil war or of working out the war’s chief effect of ending slavery. Regarding the Freedmen’s Bureau Johnson pointed out that the Constitution made no provision for a “system for the support of indigent persons.” He objected to the civil rights bill for infringing on the rights of the states. Both bills, he maintained, were unacceptable because when they were passed, “there was no Senator or Representative in Congress from the eleven States which are to be mainly affected by [their] provisions.” This last argument begged the question of whether the state governments he had set up without congressional authorization were actually legitimate. It also negated any possibility of enforcing the outcome of the war in the southern states.
The vetoes alone would have been enough to incur the wrath not only of the Radical Republicans but of the former moderates as well, virtually uniting the majority party in opposition to Johnson. But the president went farther. In shrill and intemperate speeches Johnson denounced the party that had elected him to the vice presidency as a band of traitors and likened himself to Christ and the Republicans to Judas, plotting his death. This sort of overheated rhetoric had always played well for him on the stump in backwoods Tennessee, but it shocked the nation when coming from the White House. Johnson fell far short of Lincoln’s political skills either in dealing with potential political opponents or in explaining his views to the American people and persuading them to support him. Lincoln would no doubt have needed every bit of his skill to navigate the difficult political waters of Reconstruction. Johnson was lost at sea.
Congressional Republicans, now much closer to unity between Radicals and moderates, overrode both vetoes in the spring and summer of 1866. During that time the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction hammered out the provisions of another constitutional amendment, the Fourteenth. Meant to address most of the outstanding issues of Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment became a grab bag of different provisions. Section 1, aimed at securing black civil rights on a solid constitutional basis, was at once the most sweeping and the most succinct:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2 was intended to prevent white southerners from experiencing an increase in the congressional overrepresentation they had already enjoyed as a result of the Three-Fifths Compromise. Under that compromise, though no southern state allowed slaves to vote, three-fifths of slave numbers counted toward a state’s representation in Congress. Now that the slaves were free, their whole number would count toward representation of the states in which they lived, but they still could not vote. Whites in slave states were thus over-represented in Congress relative to people living in other parts of the country, and emancipation ironically threatened to make the problem worse. To remedy this, the Fourteenth Amendment reduced the congressional representation of any state in proportion to any segment of its adult male population to which it denied the vote.
Section 3 banned from civil or military office anyone who had previously taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States but then had participated in a rebellion. This meant that men who had held civil or military office in the United States before the war but then had supported the Confederacy could not subsequently return to such office in the United States after the war. Its provisions disqualified most of the congressional delegations that Johnson’s hastily reconstructed states had sent to Washington. The section further provided that Congress could make exceptions to the rule but only by a two-thirds vote of both houses.
Section 4 of the amendment guaranteed repayment of the U.S. national debt but forbade repayment of any state debt contracted in support of the rebellion or of any compensation for the loss of alleged property in slaves.
The first section of the amendment has been the subject of much litigation over the past century and a half, much of it unrelated to the purposes for which the amendment was passed. The earnest members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, as well as those who subsequently passed and ratified the amendment, would have been amazed if they could have seen the interpretations the Supreme Court would make of their words in the twentieth century, but then so would the original framers of the Constitution.
Both houses of Congress passed the amendment by the necessary two-thirds majorities, and it went to the states for ratification.
With the election of 1866 approaching, Johnson and the Republicans campaigned vigorously against each other. Johnson made a whistle-stop campaign speaking tour from Washington to Chicago to St. Louis and back. His behavior was unpresidential, as he traded insults with hecklers and suggested that abolitionists ought to be hanged. Most voters were unimpressed. Johnson’s cause was further discredited by a race riot in New Orleans in July in which former Confederate soldiers attacked a convention that had met to advocate black suffrage. The rioters killed thirty-seven of the blacks and three white supporters of black civil rights. Disturbed by this indication of continued rebellion in the South as well as the president’s repulsive statements, the voters gave Republicans a landslide victory and a three-to-one ascendancy in both houses of Congress.
With the election over, Congress passed a Military Reconstruction Act, providing for military occupation and administration of the still-rebellious states of the South. The act provided that any state could be readmitted to the Union and its representatives admitted to Congress as soon as it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and adopted a state constitution banning slavery. Johnson vetoed the act, and both houses of Congress overrode his veto the same day.
That day, March 2, 1867, was a busy day in Congress. Both houses also passed, once again over a presidential veto, two additional acts. One was the Tenure of Office Act, stipulating that the president could not dismiss a cabinet member without the consent of the Senate. Congress wanted to make sure that Johnson did not fire Secretary of War Stanton, who supported its policies. The second act was an army appropriations bill containing a rider stipulating that all of Johnson’s orders to the army had to go through the general of the army, Grant, and further requiring that Johnson could not fire Grant without the Senate’s approval. Like many other Americans, Grant had been deeply disturbed by the previous summer’s race riot in New Orleans and by Johnson’s stubborn refusal to recognize the continued rebellion in the former Confederate states. He would see to it that Johnson did not issue orders to the army that would nullify the Military Reconstruction Act. Three weeks later Congress passed a second Military Reconstruction Act, directing the army to begin registering voters, including former slaves, in the occupied states, setting in motion the process of adopting the new constitutions that would restore those states to their proper function within the Union.
Johnson continued to fight Reconstruction tooth and nail, interpreting the laws in such a way as to negate most of their intended effect. Early in 1867 Republicans considered trying to impeach him but found that they were not unified on the question of whether to take such an extreme step. Yet as Johnson continued his obstinate resistance to everything the Republicans tried to do, support for impeachment steadily rose. In August Johnson took the opportunity of the Senate’s adjournment to dismiss Stanton, at least pending the Senate’s reconvening. As interim secretary of war Johnson appointed Grant, who accepted the job only in order to try to protect the army from more of Johnson’s efforts to hamstring it and its mission of Reconstruction. Despite his best efforts, however, Grant was unable to stop Johnson from relieving Sheridan as military governor of Texas and Louisiana and assigning in his place a general more amenable to the maintenance of white supremacy in those states. Johnson’s efforts encouraged white southerners to stand fast against the ratification of the new state constitutions or any move toward the acceptance of black suffrage or civil rights.
In December 1867 the Senate reconvened and the following month voted to disapprove Johnson’s removal of Stanton as secretary of war. In obedience to the Tenure of Office Act, Grant vacated the office, and Stanton resumed his old duties. On February 21 Johnson openly defied the act by firing Stanton again and appointing the army’s adjutant general, Lorenzo Thomas, as interim replacement. This was a blatant violation of law, and the House of Representatives reacted by impeaching Johnson three days later.
The Constitution provides that an official impeached by the House should then be tried by the Senate and, if found guilty, removed from office. Impeachment by the House is analogous to indictment by a grand jury in a criminal case, and the Senate stands in the place of the trial court. Johnson’s trial in the Senate began on March 4, 1868, eight days after his impeachment by the House. Johnson’s team of very skillful defense lawyers argued that since violation of the Tenure of Office Act was not a crime for which an ordinary citizen could be indicted, it was not impeachable either. They further argued that Johnson was merely trying to have the constitutionality of the act tested by the Supreme Court and that in any case the act did not apply to him in Stanton’s case since Stanton had been appointed by Lincoln, not Johnson.
Of more practical aid to Johnson’s case was the discomfort some moderate Republicans in the Senate felt about the process. Removal of a president seemed disturbingly radical. Worse, if Johnson were removed, the notorious longtime abolitionist and Radical Speaker of the House Benjamin Wade was in line to become president. Some of the moderate Republicans quietly reached out to Johnson through intermediaries to suggest that perhaps it might not be necessary to impeach him if he would show some restraint. For once, Johnson took a hint. He stopped making incendiary speeches and started enforcing the Reconstruction acts. When the roll call vote was taken on Johnson’s removal from office, the tally was thirty-five yea and nineteen nay. The shift of a single senator’s vote would have been enough remove Johnson from office. As it was, seven Republican senators had voted to acquit, joined by the Senate’s twelve Democrats.
Over the course of the next several months, one southern state after another adopted the necessary state constitution abjuring slavery and embracing black suffrage and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, fulfilling the terms of the Military Reconstruction Act so as once again to have senators and representatives accepted in Congress. By the end of 1868, seven former Confederate states had been readmitted to representation in Congress. Despite the setback they had suffered in failing to remove Johnson from office, the Congressional Republicans had scored a major success in their program of Reconstruction.
Many white southerners had fought the process with all their might and would continue to do so. Employers and landowners tried to intimidate their black employees or tenants into staying away from the polls. Some whites organized themselves into night-riding organizations to carry out murders, beatings, and other acts of terror against blacks and their white allies. Chief among these night-riding organizations was the Ku Klux Klan.
Founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, by bored former Confederate soldiers, the Klan was initially a relatively innocuous fraternal organization. By 1868, however, it had become a terrorist organization, frequently murdering politically active blacks, as well as Scalawags and Carpetbaggers, as the opponents of civil rights referred to southern Unionists and northern settlers in the South, respectively. Additional Klan targets included freedmen’s schools and their teachers along with any “uppity” blacks. Klansmen dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes, often featuring robes (frequently but not always white) and white, conical hats or hoods. Too cowardly to own up to their deeds, they generally covered their faces with masks. At the head of the Klan was its “Grand Wizard,” former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. Local Klan chapters acted more or less independently, with the Grand Wizard serving mainly as an inspirational figure. As the election of 1868 approached, Forrest publicly announced that if the authorities attempted to use the militia to prevent the Klan from suppressing Republican voting in Memphis, his men would murder every Republican political leader in the city.
As the 1868 election campaign got under way, the Republicans nominated Grant for president. The Democrats passed over Andrew Johnson, who had hoped for their endorsement. Instead the party gave its nomination to Horatio Seymour. New York’s wartime Copperhead governor, Seymour had referred to the New York rioters of 1863 as “my friends.” The Democratic campaign appealed strongly to racism, demanding that the government should remain strictly a white man’s concern. The night riders went all out, committing more than two hundred murders in the state of Arkansas alone, including the killing of a U.S. congressman. Georgia saw somewhat fewer murders but more beatings. Louisiana, on the other hand, saw not only numerous assassinations but at least three anti-Republican riots and had a total death toll well over one thousand. The intimidation worked, and tens of thousands of southern blacks stayed away from the polls, allowing the Democrats to carry several southern states despite majorities of black voters in those states. In the North, however, Grant ran as well as Lincoln had in 1864, carrying almost exactly the same states and localities for a total of 214 electoral votes to Seymour’s 80. The Republicans retained dominant majorities in both houses of Congress.
One of the first goals of Congress after the election was the passage of yet another constitutional amendment, the third of three amendments known as the Reconstruction Amendments and the fifteenth overall. This one stipulated that the right to vote was not to be denied by any state on the account of race. It was much needed in the North as well as the South since eleven of the twenty-one northern states still did not permit black suffrage, and referenda allowing suffrage had gone down to defeat in a number of northern states since the war. Congress approved the amendment in February 1869. All across the North, Republican-controlled legislatures ratified it, and Democratic ones rejected it. Four southern states—Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas—had still not been readmitted to representation in Congress, so Congress required them to ratify both the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth amendments in order to regain their seats in the national legislature. All four states did so and were restored to representation in 1870. That same year the Fifteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution.
Grant has gone down in history, unfairly, as one of the nation’s worst presidents. In truth, he was not as good a president as he was a general. He had been a master of the political nuances of wartime generalship, but he was less skillful in coping with the far different set of political problems generated by life in the White House at the very center of the political cauldron that was Washington, D.C. He had been an exceptionally good judge of the character and ability of officers with whom he served closely in wartime, and he had prospered as a general in part by surrounding himself with a team of such trusty subordinates. Yet even during the war he was far less effective in judging the traits of generals with whom he merely held interviews, as his experience with Butler and Meade demonstrated.
As president, Grant was sometimes sadly lacking in the ability to judge which men would be trustworthy in the turbid waters of Washington politics or New York high finance. Scrupulously honest himself, Grant tended to trust those around him. When he misjudged men who were not worthy of his trust, the result could be costly, as when Secretary of the Interior (and former general) William W. Belknap betrayed Grant’s trust by engaging in corruption or when financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk misused indirect connections to Grant in order to promote their attempt to corner the market on gold, leading to the Black Friday crash. Grant was free of wrongdoing in both affairs.
Some of the opprobrium heaped on Grant’s administration for its supposed corruption actually involved the administration’s exposure and cleanup of graft that had been carried out under the previous administration. Such was the case of the Creédit Mobilier scandal of 1872. The United States had completed its first transcontinental railroad in 1869, along the general route that Stephen A. Douglas had envisioned a decade and a half before. Douglas’s efforts to pave the way politically for such a railroad had resulted in the Kansas-Nebraska Act back in 1854 and had moved the nation another large step closer to civil war. As Douglas and virtually everyone else at that time had assumed was necessary, the railroad had been built with hefty subsidies from the federal government. Unfortunately, government money attracts corruption the way a carcass draws flies, and the transcontinental railroad was no exception. The builders of the railroad set up a dummy company called Creédit Mobilier and used it to skim millions of dollars in excess construction costs from the government, generously bribing members of Congress to grease the wheels along the way. Grant’s administration exposed and cleaned up the mess, but, partially thanks to hostile Democratic newspapers, the public associated the scandal with Grant.
Grant’s administration pressed the issue of Britain’s responsibility for the financial losses caused by raiding vessels such as the CSS Alabama and other instances of tacit—or at least negligent—support of the Confederacy. Some in Congress, notably Senator Charles Sumner, believed that Canada would be about the right compensation. After several years of tense negotiations, American diplomats persuaded Britain to accept a treaty submitting the disputed claims to international arbitration. The three arbitrating countries—Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil—ruled unanimously in favor of the United States, awarding $15.5 million in damages. Great Britain paid the claims, opening the way for a period of steadily improving Anglo-American relations that would have important consequences in the twentieth century.
The depredations of the Ku Klux Klan continued apace, and Republican state governments in the South proved unable to suppress the terrorist organization. Congress and the Grant administration set out to take the matter in hand in 1870, passing and enforcing an act making it a federal offense to interfere with voting rights. When this measure proved too weak to break the Klan, Congress in 1872 added a second enforcing act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, strengthening the provisions of the first act and authorizing the president to deploy the army and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus when and where necessary. Grant sent troops to the South, and over the next few months his administration made thousands of arrests and secured hundreds of convictions. Other Klansmen fled the country to escape arrest. The campaign broke the power of the Klan, which officially disbanded. However, other similar night-riding organizations, such as the Red Shirts, continued to terrorize blacks and other southern Republicans in their relentless quest to rid the South of any taint of black equality or civil rights.
In 1872 the Republicans nominated Grant for a second term. The main issue of the campaign was Grant’s “bayonet rule” in the South and his supposedly cruel and tyrannical suppression of the Ku Klux Klan. A different twist was added when members of Grant’s own Republican Party took up the accusation, splitting from the rest of the party and calling themselves the Liberal Republican Party. They were an odd conglomeration of men with personal grudges against Grant, idealistic nineteenth-century liberals (something like what would be called libertarians in the twenty-first century), and people who had simply become tired of the effort to suppress southern terrorism and just wanted to move on.
As their presidential candidate the Liberal Republicans nominated the always unstable but tremendously well-known newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Their platform called for the reduction or removal of protective tariffs, a blanket amnesty for all former Rebels, repentant or not, and an end to the army’s protection of civil rights in the South. The Democrats knew a good thing when they saw it and added their endorsement to Greeley’s Liberal Republican nomination. However formidable the alliance of Democrats with a splinter faction of the Republican Party may have seemed at the outset, it proved less so in the actual campaign. When election day came, Grant won reelection in one of the most impressive landslides since the days of Andrew Jackson.
Throughout the years of Reconstruction, the majority of white southerners never accepted the legitimacy of the changes the Civil War had brought, and many of them kept up a constant struggle to extinguish black political activity and black civil rights and to reestablish white supremacy in their states. Democratic Party politics made up one arm of this effort, and night-riding terrorism was the other. As long as the North retained the political will to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and to protect blacks and white Republicans in the South, the efforts of the white supremacists proved mostly in vain.
But in the mid-1870s northern political will began to weaken. Americans are not very good at long, low-intensity wars. Eager to get on with their lives and their profitable enterprises, they readily tire of contending with the same, almost faceless enemy year after year. So it was in the 1870s. Besides that, racism was not limited to the South by any means, and those who favored civil rights for the former slaves had struggled to maintain power even in the North. After nearly a decade of guerrilla war against white-supremacist terrorism in the South, four years of the nation’s bloodiest war before that, and decades of political strife against the slave power before that, Americans were growing very, very weary of the great struggle. Their generation had accomplished much, very much, in ending slavery, but it was nearing the end of its strength.
One by one, southern states fell under Democratic rule—Tennessee in 1869, Virginia and North Carolina the following year, Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, and Arkansas and Alabama the year after that. And as the Republican state governments went down, black voting and civil rights winked out, state by state. As the election of 1876 approached, only four states—Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—still had Republican governments, and Mississippi fell to Democratic rule and white supremacy that year.
The Republican convention that year passed up front-runner James G. Blaine and instead nominated Civil War veteran Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. The Democrats nominated New York governor Samuel J. Tilden. Since Tilden had suppressed the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall, his Democratic supporters touted him as the antidote to the corruption they had for years been claiming characterized the Grant administration. Republicans emphasized that the plight of the southern freedmen and their white allies was at stake as well as the fruits of the Civil War. When election day came, Tilden carried his home state of New York, plus the Democratic Party’s most reliable northern stronghold, New Jersey. He also succeeded in snagging the northern states of Connecticut and Indiana. The rest of the North went for Hayes.
In the South, however, the Democrats carried every single former slave state with the exception of the three states where U.S. Army troops were still protecting black voting rights: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. Elsewhere throughout the South, the night riders of the White League and the Red Shirts, considering themselves the armed wing of the Democratic Party, had carried out the same tactics that had brought Democratic victory in Mississippi only a few months before. Brutally and aggressively they broke up Republican rallies; threatened, beat, or murdered Republican leaders and party workers; and intimidated potential voters into staying home. The tactic worked.
The Democrats also claimed victory in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, but Republican state authorities were able to identify more than enough blatant fraud and voter intimidation (despite the army’s efforts to keep order) to yield revised returns showing Republican victory in all three states. Slates of electors for both parties from each state demanded recognition of their votes. Hayes needed the votes of all three states to win. Tilden would triumph if he gained any one of the three.
Faced with a constitutional crisis not quite like any it had encountered before, Congress passed a bill setting up a complicated system for deciding the dispute. The law called for a fifteen-member Electoral Commission to investigate the rival claims and decide who should get the votes of the three disputed states. The commission’s members would include five senators— three from the majority Republicans and two from the minority Democrats. Five more members would come from the House—three from the Democrats, who then held the majority there, and two from the Republicans. The final five members would come from the Supreme Court—two Republicans, two Democrats, and one other chosen by those four. When the fifteen members were in place, the commission spent the month of February listening to arguments from lawyers for both sides. Then in a series of eight-to-seven votes it decided to award all twenty disputed electoral votes to Hayes, giving him the election.
The commission finished its work and adjourned on March 2. Inauguration day was two days away, and Congress still had to give its formal acceptance to the commission’s findings. Congressional Republicans naturally backed acceptance, as did the leadership of the Democratic Party, but a coterie of disaffected Democratic senators threatened a filibuster to prevent approval. This would at least delay inauguration day and exacerbate the constitutional crisis. In the end, the recalcitrant southern senators refrained, possibly, as some have suggested, because of informal discussions with representatives of Hayes who had promised them that in exchange for their acquiescence in his inauguration, Hayes would withdraw federal troops from the three remaining southern states, throwing their Republican governments to the night-riding wolves. In fact, Hayes had been talking about a pullout even before the election, and Grant had withdrawn the troops from Florida before inauguration day. If such discussions did take place, they concluded not in a formal deal but, at the most, in an informal understanding that came to be known as the Compromise of 1877.
Thus Reconstruction came to an end. The North, politically weary after decades of sectional conflict, finally gave in to white southern intransigence on the issues of voting rights and civil rights for southern blacks. White Democratic regimes came to power in all of the southern states, and they used both legal means (such as literacy tests and poll taxes) and the well-tried illegal means of lynching and intimidation to maintain their control and deny blacks the right to vote. White supremacy was maintained, and blacks were relegated to a legal netherworld of second-class citizenship known as “Jim Crow.”
By the 1890s, a renewed emphasis on national unity and sectional reconciliation led to northern acceptance of a substantial segment of the white South’s mythology regarding the nature of the conflict. In the new reconciliationist version of history, embraced on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the war had never had any fundamental relationship to issues of race or slavery. Each side had, so the story ran, fought nobly for a different aspect of the American ideal—the South for self-determination and the North for majority rule.
The claim of the Declaration of Independence that all men were “created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” was best not remembered in connection with the Civil War, though it had been Lincoln’s theme from start to finish. Also better forgotten in the reconciliationist synthesis of the 1890s and beyond were the blacks themselves, who became the innocent bystanders of the war. In exchange, white southerners allowed that the restoration of the Union had been a good thing after all. That was the story the country maintained, for the most part, for the next three generations, and so the history books were written. Only in the second half of the twentieth century, with the centennial of the Civil War rapidly approaching, did Americans (or some of them) begin to recognize a much different story in the diaries, letters, and speeches of the participants, a story well known during the war but forgotten or out of the nation’s conscious memory for almost three-quarters of a century.
The Civil War remains one of the largest phenomena in U.S. history, and in the nineteenth century it dwarfs all other events. About 2.9 million men served as Union soldiers during the course of the conflict, about 1.5 million of them under regular three-year enlistments. Total enrolled Confederate soldiers came to roughly 1.2 million men, of whom perhaps eight hundred thousand were long-term enlistees. This means that about one in every four northern men served in the army during the course of the war and almost one in three southern white men. Additionally, a little more than one in nine African American men served as soldiers during the war.
In numbers of casualties the Civil War far exceeded any other American conflict. The roughly 620,000 soldiers who died between Fort Sumter and Appomattox was almost half again the total U.S. dead in World War II, the nation’s second-costliest conflict. When the war dead are considered as a percentage of the country’s population at the time, the cost of the Civil War appears in even starker terms. The dead of the Civil War made up 8 percent of the total male population of the United States between the ages of thirteen and forty-three. The 360,000 northern dead equaled 6 percent of northern males of that age-group, while the South’s 260,000 deaths took an appalling 18 percent of that cohort of its population. In addition to the dead, 270,000 Union and at least 90,000 Confederate soldiers suffered wounds. To this day, about half of all the American men who have died in the nation’s wars were casualties of the Civil War.
The war brought devastation to the South, where most of the fighting and marching to and fro of armies had taken place. Many public buildings, factories, and warehouses had been destroyed, as had private houses in some areas. Thousands of miles of railroad track had been torn up and destroyed, the ties burned, and the rails heated over the fires and then twisted or else bent around trees or telegraph poles into what had been nicknamed Sherman neckties. Crops had been trampled, consumed, or burned by the armies. Burning was also the fate of untold thousands of miles of rail fence, the only barriers protecting growing crops from grazing animals. Not that there were as many grazing animals as there had been four years before. Nineteenth-century wars had a voracious appetite for horses and mules, which died in their thousands—shot, starved, or worked to death. Hogs, cattle, and poultry had found their way into the stomachs of the passing armies in vast numbers. Nearly one-third of the white men—and those the most active and vigorous—had been absent for most of the past four years, while their farms had languished and been overrun by weeds. Worst of all, the South had lost its chief capital investment and a large part of its labor force in the form of almost four million slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. The region would take decades to recover economically.
Although the conventional military phase of the conflict most commonly called the Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865, Reconstruction represented an unconventional phase of conflict. Though unconventional, it was still very much a civil war, often with real bloodshed though not in the vast quantities the conventional phase had elicited. The U.S. government won a clear and overwhelming victory in the conventional phase of the conflict because of a combination of superior resources and manpower and superior civilian and military leadership, which overcame the Confederate advantages of the strategic defensive, the vast size of its territory, and the tangible nature of its war aims. Thanks especially to Lincoln’s superb civilian leadership, northern will to fight endured long enough to allow northern superiority in numbers and generalship to crush the Confederacy’s uniformed armies.
In Reconstruction, however, the phase of the conflict that followed 1865, the advantages went the other way. The American people have never been very good at coping with a situation that is not quite open war but not quite peace. They have also fared poorly at waging a disputed occupation far from home against a hostile local civilian population. Lincoln was gone, and even he would have had difficulty making the aim of continued struggle clear to northern voters and convincing those voters that the goal was worth the effort, especially since many even in the North partook of the racist assumptions of their day. In the end, a desperate white southern commitment to maintain white supremacy finally wore out the North’s will to complete a revolutionary transformation of society that almost no one had envisioned when the guns first spoke at Fort Sumter almost sixteen years before. The result was a modification of the original peace terms. The Union was preserved and slavery abolished, but if the slaves were not slaves any more, neither were they fully free American citizens.
Yet in noting the failure of the Civil War generation to complete the overwhelming task it faced, we should not lose sight of the amazing things it did accomplish. These were twofold. First, the Civil War generation established that a free government truly could function and survive—that, as Lincoln said, it need not be either too strong to allow its people liberty or else too weak to secure its own survival. Second, the Americans of this generation removed the blot of slavery from the escutcheon of American freedom. In doing so they had answered the question Lincoln had put to the 164th Ohio in August 1864 as to “whether your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have enjoyed.” If they had left the final working out of all the fruits of their accomplishments to future generations, the Americans of the 1860s had nevertheless, in what they had accomplished, risen “to the height of a generation of men worthy of a free Government.”1