CHAPTER ONE

What Were They Reconstructing?

The Duty of Congress, 1865

When the Thirty-Ninth Congress convened on December 4, 1865, the great question facing the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives was how to rebuild the nation. During the war, Congress had addressed Reconstruction policy, but victory was the paramount concern of the government. Now the war was over. On that December day, the Congress met for the first time since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Reconstruction replaced the war as the top policy priority. The initial movements of the Congress reveal how senators and representatives understood their task.

Immediately after the House of Representatives was organized, the newly elected Speaker of the House, Republican Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, delivered a short address. The subject of his address was Reconstruction policy. The duties of Congress were “as obvious as the sun’s pathway in the heavens”: “Its first and highest obligation is to guarantee to every State a republican form of government. The rebellion, having overthrown constitutional State government in many states, it is yours to mature and enact legislation which, with the concurrence of the Executive, shall establish them anew on such a basis of enduring justice as will guaranty all necessary safeguards to the people, and afford, what our Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims is the chief object of government—protection to all men in their inalienable rights.”1

In specifying this obligation, “to guaranty to every State a republican form of government,” Colfax quoted directly from Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution. The “first and highest obligation” of Congress warranted by the Constitution is to guarantee the establishment and maintenance of a certain kind of political regime in each of the several states. Immediately next, he said that the governments of the insurrectionary states were not constitutional. They were not constitutional because they lacked governments that were republican in form. They had deviated from that form of government; they had revolutionized. Following the defeat of the combined insurrectionary states in war, the yet unchanged fundamental political condition of these states encumbered Congress with the duty to exercise its “highest obligation,” to fulfill and maintain the constitutional guarantee of republican government.

If the new state governments were to renounce rebellion, their renunciation would not by itself meet the standard of constitutional or republican government. More was expected, and Colfax explained how those states could meet the standard. When Congress enacted legislation reorganizing the state governments so that they met the “chief object of government-protection to all men in their inalienable rights,” then those state governments would be regarded as constitutional, that is, republican in form, per Article IV, Section 4. In other words, to Speaker Colfax, the principles of the Declaration informed the meaning of that clause in the Constitution. A government that protects inalienable rights is one that meets the definition of republican. The governments in the insurrectionary states had not met that standard. After Congress successfully discharged its duty, Colfax continued, new loyal members from the former insurrectionary states would take their places in the House of Representatives, “their hearts devoted to the Union for which they are to legislate, jealous of its honor, proud of its glory, watchful of its rights, and hostile to its enemies.”

His vision of patriotic unity and loyalty shared by representatives from the reconstructed states would be expected to follow the establishment of true republican government in those states, not to come before it. Colfax linked the states’ prospective loyalty, the desired effect, to the successful establishment of republican government, the cause. In so doing, he tacitly linked the cause of those states’ disloyalty to the absence of republican governments in those states. Difference between the political regime in and among the insurrectionary states and the political regime in and among the loyal states accounted for national division and disharmony. Composed of dissimilar, geographically separated political regimes, national union could not hold together. The cause of secession and the Civil War rested upon this difference.

The presence and absence of slavery in the different parts of the Union constituted a salient difference between the loyal and insurrectionary states and correlated to a difference in political regimes. The success of Reconstruction was predicated upon first recognizing the regime difference, which might not disappear after the imminent constitutional abolition of slavery. Colfax was pointing Congress in the direction of changing the political regimes of the insurrectionary states before political reunion could be contemplated.

Over in the Senate, Republican Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced a blast of legislation. Almost immediately after business began, he presented six bills, one joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution, one concurrent declaratory resolution, and two sets of declaratory resolutions of the Senate. All of his proposed legislation recognized the same problem and the same higher aim that Colfax recognized in his brief speech. Senate Bill 3 was titled “A Bill to Carry Out the Principles of a Republican Form of Government in the District of Columbia.” Senate Bill 4 required voters in the formerly rebellious states to take an oath swearing to uphold a republican form of government. Senate Bill 5 was entitled “A Bill in Part Execution of the Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government in the Constitution of the United States.” It read, “Whereas it is declared in the Constitution that the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government . . . in all States lately declared to be in rebellion there shall be no oligarchy, invested with peculiar privileges and powers.”2

Senate Bill 7 was titled “A Bill to Enforce the Guarantee of a Republican Form of Government in Certain States Whose Governments Have Been Usurped or Overthrown.” This bill laid out a new plan of Reconstruction, that the rebel states would be held out of the Union and barred from participating in the national government until they could prove to the satisfaction of Congress as well as the president that they had established a republican form of government. The bill required new state constitutional conventions and banned all who took arms against the national government or served in office during the rebellion from electing delegates. To be acceptable, a new state constitution would have to incorporate in perpetuity certain provisions necessary to meet the guarantee clause. Among those provisions was that all future officers of the state would have to take the oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and the prescribed oath to “maintain a republican form of government.” The states could not resume their proper practical relation to the Union except by presidential proclamation, requiring the assent of Congress.³

Of the two sets of declaratory resolutions, the first set required a majority of electors in the rebel states to vote positively for five conditions of reunion, among which were “the complete suppression of all oligarchical pretensions, and the complete enfranchisement of all citizens, so that there shall be no denial of rights on account of color or race; but justice shall be impartial, and all shall be equal before the law.” The second set addressed what was not republican government, namely, governments of states wherein “large masses of citizens who have been always loyal to the United States are excluded from the elective franchise,” which would give an “oligarchical minority recently engaged in carrying on the rebellion the power to oppress the loyal majority.” The resolutions also ruled out governments of states wherein “a large proportion of native-born citizens . . . is left wholly unrepresented.”4

Within days of convening, the Thirty-Ninth Congress established the Joint Committee on Reconstruction by a resolution of both houses and directed the committee to report on the condition of the insurrectionary states and whether they were entitled to federal representation. The committee report named the kind of government that had developed in the insurrectionary states and contrasted that kind of government with republican government constitutionally required by the guarantee clause: “Slavery, by building up a ruling and dominant class, had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions, which finally inaugurated civil war.” The first step to restoring the insurrectionary states to the Union, the committee reported, “would necessarily be the establishment of a republican form of government by the people.” In view of these circumstances, the committee recognized the constitutional duty incumbent on Congress “to guarantee to each state a republican form of government,” the report quoting Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, as did Colfax and Sumner.⁵ The insurrectionary states’ governments had to be reconstructed at their foundations, from oligarchic to republican. Reconstruction meant regime change. To strengthen the foundation of republicanism, the committee proposed to amend the Constitution. That proposal became the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified the requirements that a state government had to meet to be deemed “a republican form of government.” This aimed at foreclosing the possibility that politically motivated, self-serving arguments that disputed the meaning of republicanism could ever arise again.

These officially expressed understandings of the problem of Reconstruction, and the higher aims of Reconstruction policy to deal with that problem, did not need greater elaboration. The nineteenth-century American audience had heard all this before and would continue to hear it. Before, during, and after serving in the Reconstruction Congress, the Republicans elaborated these views. They presented detailed analyses of Southern political society that complemented and cohered with each other. In their analyses, the oligarchic rulers of the South were the root cause of all the major political difficulties of their national era. The oligarchy was the offspring of domestic slavery, and for that reason they proscribed domestic slavery as a political evil as well as a moral evil.

The Republican-led Union had recently defeated the oligarchy’s armies on the battlefield. But they believed that neither the end of the war nor the impending ratification of the constitutional abolition of slavery had sealed the end of the crisis of the house divided. The threat of losing in peacetime the advantages gained for republicanism by war precipitated Sumner’s broadside against oligarchy and the speech by Colfax. The aim of Reconstruction policy was to destroy the oligarchic regime politically, thereby forever removing that cause of civil discord and oppression within the Union, and to replant true republicanism in the insurrectionary states. Theirs was an effort to reconstruct Southern government on republican principles. Above all else, that meant the elimination of oligarchic inequality and the substitution of republican equality before the law.

Ultimately, they aimed at the regeneration of American republicanism, which the Southern oligarchy had corrupted for decades, and their achievement of that aim depended upon successful regime change in the South. They regarded their own work in the same way as they regarded the work of the American founders. Both they and the founders were engaged in regime change, from monarchy in the one case and from oligarchy in the other, to republicanism.

When the House of Representatives was heatedly debating what to do in February 1866, Representative Martin Welker of Ohio intervened to call attention to the weightiness of their deliberations. He repeated the refrain that became a watchword of Reconstruction Republicans, “make haste slowly,” that is, to measure carefully every step but to act decisively. Theirs was a unique charge. The current of events had handed them the opportunity to purify the Republic in all of its parts. Finally, freed from the corrupting power and influence of the crushed oligarchy, American statesmen faithful to the principles of the founding could extend those principles everywhere in the nation. If they failed in that duty, the oligarchy might return to power.

 

The perpetuity, the very life of the nation, is now at stake. No graver or more responsible duties ever devolved on an American Congress than are now upon us. This is the time and this the occasion to settle for all time in this country the great ideas and principles lying at the foundations of our noble structure of government. Let these foundations now be made strong, that in coming time the winds and storms of rebellion and revolution may beat in vain against the grand fabric erected thereon. Our fathers made this for a free Government; one to which the persecuted and downtrodden of the world might fly and find secure asylum and equal rights. In the short period of less than a century, which is but a day in the life of a nation, the grand idea of our fathers was so far forgotten and departed from that we held four million of God’s creatures as the brutes of the field to be sold in the market, and their unrequited toil used to nurture and support a purse proud and haughty oligarchy of oppressors in the land. Let us now make it what our fathers intended it to be, and secure to all their God-given rights, secure equal and exact justice to all men. To accomplish this we must not be in a hurry with the work.6

 

The next day, on February 8, Senator Henry Lane of Indiana noted that events had placed the Republican Congress in the position of the republican fathers, as founding statesmen. Holding that trust, Lane exhorted them to refound the American Republic. He asked:

 

What is, under Providence, the sublime mission now devolved upon the Congress of the United States? “To break every yoke and let the oppressed go free;” to batter down prison walls and prison bars; to declare the equality of all men before the law, as they are equal before God. This is the grand mission, which is now upon us, which we may not avoid or evade.

And, Mr. President, history is continually repeating itself. After three quarters of a century, after we have run the round of long outrage and oppression against the poor African, to-day we have come back to the proud stand-point where our ancestors stood when they gave utterance to that proud, that noble enunciation which shook the despotisms of the world, that “all men are created equal,” have inalienable rights. After making the whole circle of history—it has taken us seventy-five years—we have come back to the proud position of the fathers, and we stand upon that principle, and there may stand with safety.⁷

 

The next month Representative Godlove Orth, also of Indiana, echoed Welker’s call to “make haste slowly.” Their work, he reminded the House, was “second only in importance and difficulty to the work of the fathers.” Taking a pause from the debate, Orth accounted the work of the fathers, the late war, and their own pending work among the most consequential events for liberty in American political history, past and future: “The terrific contest has left its traces wide and deep; the foundations of society in the immediate theater of the war have been broken up; . . . the shock has shattered and broken some of the majestic columns of our political edifice; . . . the grand old foundation of the fathers, laid strong and deep in the principles of universal freedom and humanity, still remains, ready to receive a superstructure more beautiful in design, more perfect in all its parts; a superstructure which it is the duty of wise statesmanship to erect.”8

Senator Richard Yates of Illinois also regarded the importance of their work equal to the work of the fathers in the long sweep of human history.

 

Senators, sixty centuries of the past are looking down upon you. All the centuries of the future are calling upon you. Liberty, struggling amid the rise and wrecks of empires in the past, and yet to struggle for life in all the nations of the world, conjures you to seize this great opportunity which the providence of Almighty God has placed in your hands to bless the world and make your names immortal, to carry to a full and triumphant consummation the great work begun by your fathers, and thus lay permanently, solidly, and immovably the capstone upon the pyramid of human liberty.⁹

 

The aim of the Republican Congress was to refound the American Republic on the restored principles of the American founding. The Southern oligarchy had contended against those principles upon which republicanism rested. Defeated in war, the oligarchic regime was routed but not dead. Therefore, that regime in the South stood in the way of the highest ambition of their statesmanship and the vindication of the American founding.

The Ruling Class

From the moment the Republican Party of Massachusetts formed in 1854, Senator Charles Sumner argued that the Southern states were oligarchies, ruled by a “caste” or “privileged class” of the few, for the advantage of those few. During his twenty-three-year senatorial career, Sumner reprised this theme so often and so forcefully that his Republican colleague Senator William Fessenden of Maine said, “If the brain of the honorable Senator from Massachusetts should ever chance to be dissected, I think those words [oligarchy, aristocracy, caste, and monopoly] would be found very strongly impressed on it.”10

Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts had long argued that Southern government had revolutionized during antebellum times into an oligarchic or aristocratic regime. In speeches before the war, he said that a “relentless despotism” had been established in the slave states¹¹ and that “a mere handful of men” not only ruled the South, but also fashioned “at its pleasure the policy of the General Government.” They commanded the Northern wing of the Democratic Party as “the Emperor of Austria” commanded his army to maintain “his despotic rule in Hungary and Venetia,” and sought to extend slavery and empire into “Cuba, Central America and Mexico.”¹² These aristocratic few formed an interstate ruling class “bound together by the cohesive attraction of a vast interest,” by which he meant slavery.¹³ Writing retrospectively after the war, Wilson showed that he never departed from these views. He wrote that within the slaveholding states, the powerful antebellum Southern slaveholders “had transformed the self-government of freemen into the hardly disguised despotic control of an oligarchy, contemptible in point of numbers, and more contemptible in the spirit, purposes, and means of its long-continued and fearful domination.”¹⁴

In an 1860 speech to Congress, Representative James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio claimed, “In all these fifteen slave States, a class is dominant which fills all the offices, and controls the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the government.” In a public letter written in 1861, Ashley described this class’s political domination of the Southern states and called the rulers an “infamous oligarchy.” Again, in Congress in 1868, he spoke of this class “numbering but a few hundred thousand slave-owners, the most offensive and infamous oligarchy in history.”¹⁵

Writing retrospectively in 1866, Representative Isaac Newton Arnold of Illinois wrote that before secession and the war, “The slaveholders in the slave States had practically subverted the Constitution and established a despotism on its ruins. . . . The despotism of the oligarchy was supreme.”¹⁶

In his two-volume memoir of his public service published in the 1880s, James Gillespie Blaine of Maine, a past Speaker of the House, senator, and future secretary of state, also depicted antebellum Southern government as, “in short, an oligarchy.”

 

The South was the only section in which there was distinctively a governing class. The slave-holders ruled their States more positively than ever the aristocratic classes ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian. The nobles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich class of slave-holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States.17

 

In other words, the size of the Polish ruling class in proportion to the Polish political society equaled the size of the Southern American ruling class in proportion to its Southern political society. Although the Southern American ruling class lacked formal titles of nobility, their power and control over the majority population were comparable to the power of the Polish ruling classes that did possess titles of nobility.

In 1886 Senator John Sherman of Ohio delivered an address titled “Grant and the New South.” The theme of the address was Reconstruction. He broached the fundamental problem of Reconstruction at the top of his address:

 

We know what the old south was. It was an oligarchy called a democracy. I do not speak this word in an offensive sense, but simply as descriptive of the character of the government of the south before the war. . . . Less than one-fourth of the population were admirably trained, disciplined and qualified for the highest duties of manhood. The south was very much such a democracy as Rome and Greece were at some periods of their history; a democracy founded upon the privileges of the few and the exclusion of the many. Very much like the democracy of the barons of Runnymede, who, when they met together to dictate Magna Charta to King John, guarded fully their own privileges as against the king, but cared but little for the rights of the people.¹⁸

 

Sherman meant that if democracy did exist in the antebellum slaveholding South, it did in a very qualified and misleading sense—only among the equal members of the small ruling class. This kind of equality was the kind that ruling noble peers shared among each other, as among those nobles who ruled Poland. But political equality in the antebellum South did not extend further than that, as it must in a democratic political regime. Outside the ruling class in the South, all others, black domestic slaves but also whites, were unequal and were ruled.

The Southern Oligarchy’s White Vassal Class

In 1852 Representative George W. Julian of Indiana recognized and described three political classes in the slave states: the rulers, the slaves, and the poor whites. According to the Census of 1850, “the slaveholders of the country,” who were the rulers of the South, amounted to “one twenty-fifth,” or 4 percent, of the roughly six million white Americans in the slave states and less than 3 percent of the total population. These few constituted a “wicked and domineering oligarchy.”19 This “squad of despots” ruled “the three millions and more whom they hold in bondage.” Those “three millions” were

 

denied that principle of everlasting justice, a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, sold like merchandise to the highest bidder, despoiled of their dearest rights and the holiest relations of life, and plundered even of their humanity by law. . . . Let no man regard lightly, either the moral or physical power of such a people; for every ray of light which dawns upon their minds, every kindling passion which fires their hearts, is the sure prophecy of their deliverance. Well may the slaveholder tremble, when he reflects that “God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

 

In addition, the oligarchy ruled over a separate class, “millions of their own race in the South, who hold no slaves.”

 

Multitudes of these feel that they are crushed to the earth by this heartless aristocracy, degraded to a condition which slaves themselves need not envy, and that all hope of bettering their lot is denied them, so long as the reigning order of things continues. This hostility to slavery will increase just in proportion as its hands are strengthened and its exactions multiplied, thus hastening a fearful crisis, by the action of causes that must inevitably produce it, were the millions in bondage to continue quiet and submissive. We have good reasons for believing that at this time there are thousands among the non-slaveholders South, . . . smarting under the relentless power of slavery, and meditating schemes of resistance.

 

In 1860 James Ashley similarly distinguished the ruled classes of domestic slaves and poor whites. He also contrasted the liberties of the people in the free and slave states to show where republican government did and did not exist. In the free states, “an untrammeled press and free speech are guaranteed, and public schools and a free church are secured to every inhabitant.” He continued: “These institutions the free States have, to an extent unknown to any government or people on earth; and to them, more than to any other cause, are these States indebted for their unsurpassed development, and for that prosperity and growth which have made them the wonder and admiration of the world.” But in the fifteen slave states, “practically, the reverse of all this is true.” In “all the slave States the constitutional rights of an American citizen are not respected, the constitutional guaranty for free speech and a free press is a mockery, free schools and an enlightened Christianity an impossibility.”20

First, Ashley addressed the oligarchy’s political oppression of the class of domestic slaves: “The laborers upon whose toil these States exist are slaves, and have been declared not to be citizens, though born upon the soil, but simply persons, with no moral, social, or natural rights, that the dominant race are bound to respect, if the mere IPSE DIXIT of the Supreme Court is to be regarded as law. Their obedience and subjugation are secured by enactments and usages the most barbarous and tyrannical ever known to man.”²¹

Immediately following, Ashley separately addressed the oligarchy’s oppression of their white political vassals:

 

A reign of terror secures the obedience and co-operation of the poor whites; and because of this submission, they are claimed as loyal friends of the institution of slavery. But their loyalty is, in fact, a humiliating submission to the privileged class—a submission as abject in most of these fifteen States, as is the submission of the most spirit-humbled slave. The guaranties of the national Constitution, so far as they affect the individual rights of an American citizen, are denied alike to all men who are not of this privileged class or their open allies; and to be an American citizen secures no protection from insult and outrage, unjust imprisonment and terrible punishments, or even death. So complete is this reign of terror, that no man can print, or speak, or preach, or pray, unless he does it in the manner prescribed by this privileged class.

 

Early in the war in 1862, Representative John P. Shanks of Indiana accused the Southern slaveholders of having degraded poor whites, the “poor and laboring masses who constitute the majority.” These poor had “been ignored in elections” and lacked a “voice in affairs” of government. The slaveholders’ “teachings and practices,” he said, “are at variance with the principles of liberty and genius of free government.” Among their aims was the “the subjugation of the poor of all classes.” Not only because the slaveholders led their states into a rebellion against the national government but also because they had taken away self-government from the people in the states, Shanks believed, it was the duty of the national government to enforce Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, guaranteeing a republican form of government to the people of those states.22

In 1864 Representative Daniel Morris of New York claimed that those who owned most of the slaves and best lands “for years have wielded the civil and the political influences which have controlled these States” and that “the white population, not owning lands, are as dependent and subservient to these ‘lords of the manor’ as are the slaves.”²³

Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress who had represented low-slaveholding districts in slave states bordering free states before the war were particularly instructive on the character of Southern government and the plight of poor whites under those governments. Unlike Republican congressmen drawn from the free states, they lived in close proximity with slaveholders, giving them a unique view of the character of slave-state political society. And unlike the congressional delegations from other slave states, these congressmen were not always drawn from the ruling slave-state class. Often, this small class of representatives presented the most trenchant criticisms of Southern oligarchy, whose rule they and their oppressed constituents resisted when they could. These representatives sometimes expressed sympathy for other slave states’ nonslaveholding people whose free speech was silenced and whose political representation was denied by the minority class of rulers. These congressmen were in a better position than most to survey the character of slave-state governments.

One of these congressmen was Representative Francis Preston Blair Jr. of Missouri. He was, as Henry Wilson told the Senate, “a champion of the rights of the non-slaveholders of the South. Let the oppressed poor whites heed the voice and follow the councils of such a leader, and the day of their deliverance from their galling degradation will soon dawn.”²⁴ In 1858 Blair spoke on the admission of Kansas as a slave state. He began, “There is . . . one point of view in which it has not been treated in this hall.” He proposed to speak for “a large class of citizens of the southern States—the non-slaveholding people of those States.”²⁵

He quoted from Southern accounts of the terrible condition of nonslaveholders in Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia. This picture “is not true, where slavery obtains nominally, or where the slaves are few; and especially it is not true of the city and county which I represent upon this floor,” but it was a true account where slavery obtained decisively. That is, in proportion with the increase of slavery, the condition of nonslaveholders living in proximity to slavery worsened. Blair represented a district where slaves were few in number, and the conditions of the nonslaveholders were better there than in other slave states. Since his district was located in the slave state of Missouri, Blair lived close enough to the slaveholders to believe he understood them—and he harshly denounced them. These “oligarchs” degraded “the man who lives by daily labor, and the whole class of manual laborers and operatives.” They preferred their “slaves to the citizens of the Republic, and would have the latter deprived of the right of elective franchise, as his negro slaves.”26 Blair claimed that the ruling class was intent on destroying the political liberty of the nonslaveholding class in order to reduce them to the level of the slaves. In the three pages of the Congressional Globe that recorded his speech, the term oligarchy occurs seven times, oligarchs twice.

Another one of these congressmen was Senator Waitman T. Willey of western Virginia, which bordered the free states of Pennsylvania and Ohio. In an 1864 Senate speech, he also arraigned the Southern oligarchs for crushing the liberties of other Southerners as an adjunct and necessary aim of their regime. The territory constituting Willey’s West Virginia belonged to the slave state of Virginia before the war, when Willey was already engaged in politics. He claimed to know the character and aims of the Virginia oligarchy, which he deplored.

Willey said that the ultimate purpose of secession, rebellion, and the founding of the Confederacy was to establish formally its oligarchic regime as an independent political nation. Of these secessionists, he argued that “their dissatisfaction went further than hostility to the Union; it consisted, in fact, in hostility to the fundamental principles of republican government. It was a revolt against popular institutions—a repudiation of democracy. The ultimate result contemplated was and is the establishment of an oligarchy, if not a monarchy.”²⁷

This new nation, the Confederate States of America, would complete “the destruction of the equal rights and liberties of the southern people.” Similarly, in 1865 Representative Henry Winter Davis blamed the rebellion on an “oligarchy of slaveholders” who had “brought on the war.” Davis represented a district in the border state of Maryland. Willey quoted oligarchic Southern statesmen to prove their unrepublican character and intentions. He recalled sitting in the Virginia convention of 1861 that debated secession. A committee appointed by the convention explicitly denounced democratic republicanism in its report. The report stated that, in democratic systems of government in which common laborers participated equally with others, “the tendency is to what Mr. John Randolph graphically described as ‘the despotism of king numbers.’” The committee believed that the state government should consult common laborers’ interests but not be controlled by their votes. The report blamed “unlimited suffrage” for the insecurity of property (the most prominent species of property in the South being slaves and land). Willey quoted the report’s example of agrarian (or “socialist”) misappropriation of others’ property under democratic forms of government: “This tendency to a conflict between labor and capital has already manifested itself in many forms, comparatively harmless, it is true, but nevertheless clearly indicative of a spirit of licentiousness, which must, in the end, ripen into agrarianism. It may be seen in the system of free schools, by which children of the poor are educated at the expense of the rich.”28

Willey and the Republicans knew that the Virginian aristocracy’s attacks on “agrarianism” were rational and typical of the ruling class, because the common people’s suffrages would be expected to aim at undermining the aristocracy’s land monopoly and ownership of slaves and at provisioning common school education. The Republicans knew that education monopoly, land monopoly, and especially slavery were institutional supports of oligarchic rule.

The Institutions of Oligarchy: Popular Ignorance

“KNOWLEDGE,” Thaddeus Stevens said in 1835, “is the only foundation on which republics can stand.”²⁹ This theory and its opposite, that ignorance is the only foundation on which oligarchy can stand, runs through the Republicans’ criticism of the slave states’ abstention from establishing a healthy common school system. They argued that the slave-state rulers deliberately prevented the development of common schools because popular ignorance was their policy goal. The arrangement of educational institutions in the slave states secured this goal and supported oligarchic rule.

The Republicans frequently alluded to the suppression of primary education in the Southern states, in contrast to the thriving common schools of the free states. Sometimes they used evidence drawn from Southern sources to corroborate their claims. For example, in 1858, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan quoted from the annual message of South Carolina governor Whitemarsh Seabrook: “Education has been provided by the Legislature but for one class of the citizens of the State, which is the wealthy class. For the middle and poorer classes of society it has done nothing, since no organized system has been adopted for that purpose.”30 Often, they referred to Census statistics to demonstrate this sharp difference in the Southern section. In 1860 Charles Sumner noted, “Virginia, an old State, and more than a third larger than Ohio, has 67,353 pupils in her public schools, while the latter State has 484,153. Arkansas, equal in age and size with Michigan, has only 8,493 pupils at her public schools, while the latter State has 110,455. South Carolina, three times as large as Massachusetts, has 17,838 pupils at public school, while the latter State has 176,475. South Carolina spends for this purpose, annually, $200,600; Massachusetts, $1,006,795.”³¹ In 1864 Representative John F. Farnsworth of Illinois contrasted 1850 literacy rates between Massachusetts and Alabama. Among native white adults, less than one-half of 1 percent in Massachusetts were illiterate, but in Alabama between 18 and 20 percent could not “read the ballot they cast, nor sign their own names to a poll-book.”³²

The Republicans generally attributed this underdevelopment of common education, in Farnsworth’s words, to the “baneful” effects of slavery. But the Republicans were more detailed in explaining the immediate cause. They believed that the dearth of common schools was no accidental effect of slavery. It was, rather, a policy calculated to produce a desired and certain outcome: the ignorance of the majority population of the South. By promoting low public intelligence, the slaveholding oligarchy could better control the ruled majority and check challenges to the regime’s power.

In 1860 Representative Charles Van Wyck of New York charged Southerners in Congress: “Your despotism is as galling upon the whites as the blacks.”³³ The despotism depended upon the denial of common school education to poor whites, which was the policy of the Southern state governments. Van Wyck quoted a principled defense of this policy by his colleague in the House Representative Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina:

 

Mr. KEITT adds:

“It is also incontrovertible that all the inhabitants of a State cannot be educated; the ordinance of God condemns mankind to labor, and certain menial occupations are incompatible with mental cultivation.”³⁴

 

Van Wyck first excoriated Keitt’s blasphemous denial that God’s ordinance to work fell upon his class, comprising those who did not labor, and then called the governing ways of the slave states “a system whose corner-stone is the ignorance of the people.” He added that wherever that system spread, it “will establish the policy that labor ‘is incompatible with mental cultivation.’” This policy to perpetuate nonslaveholders’ ignorance, combined with a policy of censorship, rendered the nonslaveholders more easily controlled and ruled: “Slavery must prescribe what books they shall read. Your population is about eight million; yet you control their destinies, and compel their opinions.”

By “Slavery” and “you,” Van Wyck meant the slaveholders; by “they,” he meant the Southern nonslaveholders. Van Wyck understood that the Southerners he was addressing in Congress were all slaveholders. Van Wyck correlated the Southern nonslaveholders’ lack of access to education with their political powerlessness, which Van Wyck measured by their invisibility in federal office: “How many men from the South on this floor are non-slaveholders? How many in the Senate, and among the foreign appointments? . . . [Y]our own people feel more keenly than we, that ‘The badge of the slave is the scorn of the free.’”35

In 1861 one of the oligarchs’ “own people” who felt this scorn, Waitman Willey, directly explained why the oligarchy opposed free schools: “Sir, great astonishment has been expressed at the hostility of southern statesmen to popular education. But, sir, we ought not to be surprised at it. Knowledge is power; and to keep the masses in ignorance is a necessary precaution to keep them in subjection. To maintain the oligarchy of the few owning the capital, it is necessary to bind down with the slavish chains of ignorance the many who perform the labor. . . . Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.”³⁶

In 1862 Willey’s colleague from western Virginia Representative Kellian Whaley similarly denounced the policy of the slaveholding aristocrats in eastern Virginia and imputed to them the same motive. The eastern Virginian aristocracy jealously guarded their power over the state. “For eighty years,” the people of western Virginia had petitioned the state government for the “oppression, insult, and contumely of eastern legislation without redress and without relief.” Forty years earlier, Whaley said, western Virginians had even attempted to separate from Virginia and escape the rule of the “eastern aristocracy,” without success. “One of the greatest injuries sustained by our western people has been an organized opposition to a system of free schools and popular education, by which the bright but untutored minds of our mountain ranges and humbler classes have not been developed, while colleges and seminaries for the rich have been fostered by eastern legislation. To keep the people in ignorance is a part of the policy of their masters, the forty thousand slave-owners of East Virginia.”37

Whaley indicated that the nonslaveholding whites in the western part of the state were effectively slaves to “their masters,” the eastern aristocrats. Immediately next, he tabulated western Virginians’ lack of representation in the state government, linking the eastern aristocrats’ education policy to their political domination: “Since 1776, Virginia has had thirty-three Governors, of whom West Virginia has had five, and twenty-four United States Senators, of which West Virginia has had but three.”

Markedly different results on public intelligence flowed from free states’ and slave states’ contrary policies on education. In 1861 Representative John B. Alley of Massachusetts noted this difference to explain why the Southern majority did not thwart the secessionists. “Freedom and free institutions,” he said, depended on “the intelligence of the people.” “If this Constitution and Government are overthrown, it will be by one section of the Confederacy, because its people were not sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their blessings or comprehend their value; and for them a military despotism may be demanded by the necessities of their condition.”³⁸

Lower public intelligence was an aspect of the Southern people’s “condition,” and all of those peculiar aspects or “necessities” taken together “demanded” a “military despotism.” Alley’s analysis applied the logic behind a phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free People.” A corollary claim is that tyranny or despotism is a fit ruler of a people whose character is not free. But because the Northern people were educated, they “could no more be subjected to despotic rule than could the lightning of heaven be curbed.” To Alley, the difference in public intelligence highlighted the difference between the unfree condition or character of the Southern majority who were ruled despotically and the free character of the free-state people who ruled themselves.

In 1860 Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont made the same theoretical point on education, or the lack thereof, and the fitness or unfitness for self-government, albeit in a different context. Morrill objected to Southern statesmen’s pressure to conquer new territories beyond the nation’s boundaries, particularly Cuba. Among his reasons for opposing “the acquisition of new territories and foreign inhabitants,” he argued: “Our Government is founded upon the intelligence and virtue of the people, and there is no other basis which can make Democracy or Republicanism possible for a day.”³⁹

Because these foreign people lacked education, Morrill explained, they would have to be held either in “pupilage,” to be trained in the arts of liberty and self-government, or by “chastisement,” that is, despotically ruled. But according to the Republicans, the augmentation of national territory with lands populated by an ignorant majority fitted the preferred model of Southern leaders who were accustomed to despotic rule.

The deficits in the condition or character that Morrill observed in foreign despotically ruled people also applied to some degree to the majority population in the Southern states. In 1862 Senator Lot Morrill of Maine claimed that the Southern majority had been “deceived and misled” into supporting secession, the purpose of which was “to overthrow republican institutions, and to erect on the ruins of the Republic an oligarchy,” that is, to change the form of the national government into one that reflected the form of government prevalent in the slave states.40 Looking to the successful conclusion of the war, Morrill counted free schools among the new institutions that the national government should plant in the South to increase popular intelligence that would counter the oligarchy’s deception.

Morrill did not believe that the majority of Southerners could have wittingly supported the ultimate designs of the secessionists, since those designs were aimed at formally establishing the national independence of an oligarchic regime that had already ruled over and oppressed that majority in the Southern section. To claim that the Southern majority had wittingly supported the further entrenchment of their own domination would be “a libel on human nature,” since nobody aware of his natural right to self-government would rationally consent to oppression. The only way the secessionists could gain the support of the Southern majority was through deception, and deception’s antidote was education, which the Southern people lacked.

Anticipating the war’s end and Reconstruction, Representative James Wilson addressed the need to educate the common people of the South. This was one important task subsumed by their pending mission, “the establishment of a pure Republic.” An educated Southern people would stand as a bulwark against the regeneration of the oligarchy after the war. He looked “forward to the time when the child of the ‘poor white’ of the South shall possess the same educational advantages which the free spirit of the North has accorded to the offspring of the rich and the poor in common.”⁴¹

In the same year, Representative William B. Allison of Iowa echoed Wilson’s emphasis on the need to provide for the Southern people’s education, adding Lot Morrill’s point to his analysis. By keeping the poor Southern whites in ignorance, the Southern oligarchy easily swayed their opinions, in order to use them more easily for the regime’s purposes: “The wealthy and intelligent few have controlled and directed the poor and ignorant many, and have thus led them into the vortex of a revolution causeless as it is wicked.” The antidote to the oligarchy’s political misuse of the Southern people was education. The Southern people’s “oppressors conquered, the Government should extend to them its fostering care and protection; should encourage labor and protect all in the enjoyment of its fruits. We must restore the great body of that people by the establishment in those States of free schools and free churches.”42

To replant republicanism successfully in the South and to guard against the designs of the oligarchy to reestablish itself, the Republicans did attempt to establish improved common school education in the South. In 1866 Representative James Garfield of Ohio drew up a bill establishing the National Bureau of Education. In his speech urging his colleagues to vote for the bill, he said, “I will not trouble the House by repeating such commonplaces, so familiar to every gentleman here, as that our system of government is based upon the intelligence of the people.”⁴³ Then he attended to the need for the development of education in the South:

 

When the history of the Thirty-ninth Congress is written, it will be recorded that two great ideas inspired it, and made their impress upon all its efforts; namely, to build up free States on the ruins of slavery, and to extend to every inhabitant of the United States the rights and privileges of citizenship. Before the Divine Architect builded order out of chaos, he said, “Let there be light.” Shall we commit the fatal mistake of building up free States, without first expelling the darkness in which slavery had shrouded their people? Shall we enlarge the boundaries of citizenship, and make no provision to increase the intelligence of the citizen?⁴⁴

 

He argued that schoolmasters were needed to remove a key institutional support of the Southern oligarchy: the ignorance of the majority.

The Institutions of Oligarchy: Suppression of Liberties and Denial of Rights

The Republicans frequently attacked the denial of civil rights and suppression of civil liberties by the Southern state governments, which they attributed to the oligarchic rulers of those states. The Republicans accused them of suppressing freedom of speech, the press, religious expression, and political association and denying the right to habeas corpus and to due process of law.

While the slave-state governments refrained from establishing common school education, they actively promoted censorship. Republicans attributed censorship policy to the same proximate and ultimate causes that motivated the oligarchy to refrain from establishing common schools. Censorship aided in perpetuating low public intelligence among the white majority of the South, so that the slaveholding minority might more easily perpetuate their rule.

With regard to specific abridgments of civil liberties, the Republicans almost always pointed to proscriptions of sentiments and associations that were antislavery in character. They understood that domestic slavery was the basis for the oligarchy’s power over the whole political community. Therefore, they did not view this class of restrictions of civil liberties as an exception to what was otherwise a free or democratic society. Since slavery was integral to the ruling oligarchy’s power, the proscriptions of antislavery speech and associations were integral to the preservation of the regime governing the Southern states.

In 1856 Henry Wilson contrasted the freedom of speech in the free and slave states. On the one hand, Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, “whose views upon this question of slavery are known to be extremely ultra,” had recently visited Boston, given a lecture, and been “received by all with . . . courtesy.” At that very time, Thomas Benton was in the North lecturing without any threat to himself, “although he holds views in regard to slavery that not one man in ten thousand in that section approves.” On the other hand, Northerners could not safely visit the slave states and speak their views without encountering threats and censorship. Wilson concluded, “In the slaveholding States free speech and a free press are known only in theory.”45

As many Republicans did until the war, Wilson detailed several examples of prominent Southerners who had affiliated with or had shown sympathy toward his Republican Party and were driven from the South. Addressing the Southerners directly, he said, “When you are able with your iron despotism to crush out all there who would go with us, you turn round and tell us we are getting up a sectional party. I assure you, there are tens of thousands of men in the South whose sympathies are with us, but they have no opportunity so to vote.”⁴⁶ Wilson guessed that “thousands of men in the South”—probably with reference to the vassal class of nonslaveholders—might have voted Republican had those states protected personal liberty.

In St. Louis, he pointed out, thousands of immigrant Germans did show their inclination toward Republicans in the presidential election of 1856 and wrote “Protest” on their ballots because the slave state prohibited the name of Republican candidate John C. Frémont in the election. This demonstrated “your despotism, and shows that these men who were true to liberty in the Old World will not be false to their cherished convictions in the new.”

In 1860 Wilson assailed the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights in Southern law. He held up an enactment in South Carolina by which free colored persons arriving on shipboard from the North were to be incarcerated without recourse to a writ of habeas corpus and could be sold as slaves. Others in the North believed this law was unconstitutional, and so, in 1843, “Massachusetts sent to South Carolina one of the foremost advocates and men of our State. He went to that State to have this law tested in the judicial tribunals of the country.” But South Carolina expelled him by force, “and to add to that indignity, a law was passed imposing the highest penalties if any person came into that State for the purpose of obstructing this law by any legal process.”47 For merely challenging the constitutionality of the law, an individual could be imprisoned for life.

Wilson read aloud a summary of each section of the enactment to show that the South Carolina government blocked a fair legal process. He then referred to a Virginia law similar to South Carolina’s 1820 law, authorizing warrantless searches of any vessel for fugitive slaves and imposing a tax on the vessels for the cost of the search.

According to Isaac Arnold, the chief magistrates of antebellum Southern state governments approved of censorship and openly flouted due process of law in order to attack antislavery men. Some slave-state governors had offered “large pecuniary rewards” as bounties “for the persons of prominent men in the free States, because of their opposition to slavery.” Virginia governor Henry Wise had said, “‘The best way to meet abolitionists is with powder and cold steel.’” South Carolina governor George McDuffie “recommended that abolitionists be punished with death without benefit of clergy.”⁴⁸ These executive actions accorded with the antirepublican character of the slave states:

 

Neither at the bar, nor in the pulpit, neither from the newspaper, the stump, nor from the bench; among the people, before the courts, nor in the legislative halls, was the voice of liberty secured by law, permitted to be heard. Negroes, fugitives from slavery, were scourged, whipped, and in some cases burned to death. The literature of the English language, school books, and books upon religion, literature and painting, were expurgated, and the generous, manly, eloquent utterances of liberty, stricken from their pages. Such was the dark despotism which settled over the land of Jefferson and Washington.49

 

The power behind these oppressions, Arnold said, was “an aristocracy of slaveholders.”

Leading up to the 1860 presidential election, Republicans again heard the charge that they were a sectional party. They replied that they would not be a sectional party if Southern governments respected civil liberties. Representative Owen Lovejoy of Illinois addressed the “sectional party” charge in 1859: “Oh, we have no delegates from slave States to attend our national nominating conventions! Why have we none? Mark! because, if delegates attend these conventions they are mobbed and driven into exile.”⁵⁰ Lovejoy then illustrated the contrast between the freedom of political association in the free states enjoyed by minority Democrats and the political intimidation faced by would-be Republicans in the slave states. He presented this hypothetical: “What if we, in the free States, should say to the [Northern] Democrats, ‘if you attend the [Democratic national] Charleston convention we will hang you,’ and thus keep them all at home, and then reproach them with being a sectional party, because only the slave States were represented?” The answer Lovejoy predicted would be, “‘Well, you have no votes in the slave States; your principles do not circulate with us at all; you dare not even proclaim your doctrines among us.’” The reason Republican principles did not circulate in the slave states was that Southern governments violated other civil liberties: “And why do not our principles circulate in the slave States? They used to, for they are the principles of Washington and Franklin and other founders of the Republic. The reason why our principles do not circulate in the slave States is, that this despotism has, like another Napoleon, crushed out the freedom of speech and of the press.” He predicted that if the slave states protected the liberty of “the non-slaveholders of the South,” Republican support in the slave states would equal Democratic support in the free states. In early 1860 Charles Van Wyck made the same argument as Lovejoy: “Remove the despotism of opinion and anarchy of violence from your own people and an unfettered judgment in your own States would rally thousands around the [Republican] standard of free labor, free schools, and free soil. See the once proud State of Virginia laying her hands on the mails and authorizing some prejudiced justice to sit in judgment and condemn to the flames all publications that excite his ire.”51 He added that their outrageous system of government depended “upon the destruction of all those rights which should be the boast of a free people.”

In the debates over the upcoming 1860 election, Representative Daniel Gooch of Massachusetts contrasted freedom of speech and association in the North and the South. He called on Southern leaders to “frame your platform as you please; present it, with your candidates for office, to the people. . . . We [Republicans] will do the same. If we are beaten, we will acquiesce, live in obedience to the Constitution and the laws, and see to it that the Union is preserved.”⁵² Gooch added, “We intend to act in good faith,” but he needed assurances that Southern statesmen would act in the same good faith, asking them to “pledge yourselves anew to the same course,” and promised that he and his Republican colleagues would “not question that you intend to do the same.” The Republican Party intended to canvass “every portion of the American people where free speech is tolerated and the rights of the citizen under the Constitution respected.” Gooch doubted that constitutional rights were respected in “every Community in the land.” If those rights were breached in the coming canvass, “we have only to say to you, perform your constitutional obligations.” He and his Republican Party proposed “to appeal to the reason and judgment of the people, not to their fears, prejudices, or passions. We hold that threats are poor arguments, and that he who addresses them to any portion of the American people fail to appreciate his audience.” At this point, Gooch balked at directly accusing Southerners of suppressing civil liberties.

But secession having commenced, Gooch shed circumlocution. Less than one year later, in 1861, he directly blamed secession on the suppression of civil liberties in the South, for if the state governments had respected the rights and liberties under the Constitution, the Southern people would have directed their governments away from that course.⁵³ Why secession now? Gooch noted that some political radicals in both sections were making demands to secede—on the one hand, to break fellowship with the slave states; on the other, to break fellowship with the free states. He said it was not strange to find these radicals in both sections of the country, but the radicals ruled only in the South:

 

Why this difference? The people of the North know and understand everything that pertains to the South. Your newspapers are found in all our villages, and are read by all classes of men. Southern men speak freely their opinions at the North, both in public and private. Freedom of speech and the press, liberty of thought and action, are everywhere protected. We ask no safeguard against error, but truth. Not so in the South. Your people do not understand the feeling, principles, and motives of the people of the North. No northern man, who honestly represents the sentiments of the North, is permitted to speak to your people. No northern newspaper, representing the political sentiments of the North, is permitted to enter or be read in your States. All that your people know of the principles and intentions of the Republican party they have learned from our political opponents.

 

“Freedom of speech and the press is everywhere in the South denied,” he continued, and free expression of opinion exposed Southerners “to indignity, and sometimes to death.” Had it been otherwise, he argued, secession would never have happened. “Distrust and fear of the Government,” as well as popular hostility toward the North, were the “natural fruits” of these proscriptions.54

In 1860 Representative Thomas Dawes Eliot of Massachusetts denied that individuals in the South had recourse to due process when charged with violating laws limiting freedom. As a result, Southern governments had delivered a crushing blow to civil liberties. First, he conceded that “the right of free discussion . . . must, perhaps of necessity, be affected, qualified, controlled, in a degree, by the character of the social or domestic institutions within the State.”⁵⁵

The character of peculiar state institutions affected the different ways that laws limited free speech. If a slave-state legislature enacted a law prohibiting the utterance of antislavery opinions in order to prevent “insurrectionary violence,” Eliot acknowledged he had “no right to violate that law. It is plain enough that free speech is to that extent controlled.” Similarly, a free-state legislature might, “for reasons of State policy or necessity,” decide to “prohibit the dissemination of doctrines subversive of the laws of God.” Likewise, “to that extent the right of free speech would also be controlled.”

The difference between the two sections that Eliot wanted to highlight was this: “But if, in a northern State, a man should disobey, claiming that the law itself was in violation of his constitutional rights, he would act at his peril, but it would be a peril under the law. He might discuss its constitutionality with perfect safety. If the law were sustained, punishment would follow his offense. That he would expect. If not sustained, his right of free speech would be vindicated. No gentleman will say, I think, that a like security would be afforded in a southern State.” Rather than giving each their day in court, Southern government tended to forbid “discussion by law,” punish “discussion by summary administration of Lynch law,” and deny “all appeals by which the constitutionality of prohibitory laws may be tested.” Like Wilson, Eliot doubted that Southern governments upheld due process of law, essential to republicanism. In this respect as well, Southern governing principles were hostile to republican government. Eliot believed that “the courts of the South” were not open, “as those of the North always are, to the freest inquiry and the fullest latitude of examination.” Because of this, “the rights of free discussion and of free speech” in the South were not acknowledged “in deed and truth,” but only “by word of mouth.”

He understood the ultimate motive behind these restrictions on free speech regarding slavery. Arguing for confiscating and liberating slaves in the rebel states during the war, he said, “Slavery is the cause of this rebellion,” but he further specified that slavery was the rebels’ “power and strength.” The rebel leaders had said so, even in Congress. “We have heard it from Mr. Keitt and Mr. Stephens here, and from Mr. Keitt and Mr. Stephens there.”56 Any threat or blow to that institution sapped “the power and strength” of those who possessed political power, and this explained how and why the restriction of antislavery speech supported the maintenance of that minority’s power.

Southern statesmen attempted to counter the Republicans’ arguments that poor whites were oppressed. In 1860 James Ashley took up an argument by a South Carolina representative who bragged about the happiness of the slaves and loyalty of the poor whites and who “stated that out of a large number who volunteered to go to Virginia and aid Governor Wise during the John Brown troubles, but five or six were slaveholders; and instanced this fact as proof of their loyalty.”⁵⁷ At this claim, Ashley countered that slave-state governments’ restrictions of freedom of the press were proof that this was not so:

 

If it be true that they are thus loyal . . . why is it that this class of poor whites are not permitted to read whatever they may prefer to read, as the slaveholders do themselves? . . . There can be but one answer to these questions; and that is a distrust on the part of the ruling class of the fidelity of the poor whites, and fear of their political power, should they unite, as they might do, and, at any time, take possession of all the southern State governments, and administer them for the benefit of the whole people, instead of permitting them to be administered as they are today—exclusively for the benefit of a class interest.

 

In 1860 Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts said that a Southerner who might dare print or distribute printed antislavery material “against this self constituted censorship, is sunk beyond fathom, and the editor himself . . . is shot down and made food for dogs.” The Constitution “wraps itself like a coat of mail around the citizen, for his protection, wherever his footsteps may lead him within the broad limits of this Republic.” But in the slave states, the Constitution “is set at naught, and its very joints pierced as worthless gossamer, by the fell spirit of this demon in its mad attempt to bend every knee at its altar. . . . A Northern man may to-day roam the world over, outside of the Southern States, free in thought and speech, in more safety of person than he can inside them.”58 This was an astonishing claim. Americans were freer in the unrepublican world outside the boundaries of the Republic than in the putatively republican slave states of the American South.

The Institutions of Oligarchy: Organization of Government

According to the Republicans, the small class of Southern slaveholders controlled Southern politics and governments and used that control for their exclusive benefit. In particular, Republicans from the border states specified how the organization of Southern state government supported oligarchic rule.

Like Waitman Willey, Jacob Blair was from the western part of Virginia before the war and served in the House of Representatives when Virginia seceded and most other Virginian seats in Congress were vacated. During Reconstruction, Blair represented the new state of West Virginia. In 1862 he explained how the aristocratic eastern section of Virginia dominated his and Willey’s western section of Virginia prior to the war. In Blair’s western section, few owned slaves and the institution was dying. As a result, he said, “The habits, tastes, and industrial pursuits of the people residing in the two sections of the State are as unlike each other as perhaps any two States in the Union.”⁵⁹ The people in Blair’s western section were like free-state people, “hardy, industrious and energetic.” But they chafed under the yoke of the aristocratic eastern section. He recounted the fight between the two sections in the Virginia state constitutional convention of 1850. The western section wanted representation in the state legislature to be apportioned by “the white basis.” By enumerating white population alone and then dividing representation equally into that enumeration, the state constitution would not apportion additional representation to the eastern section on account of the eastern section possessing a much larger share of slaves.

In Virginia, as in other states that enumerated slaves in apportioning representation in the state legislature, slave owners could gain disproportionate influence over the state government in this fashion. The more slaves they owned, the more representation they would receive. Similarly, slaveholding states received more representation in the U.S. House of Representatives, because Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution enumerated “three-fifths of all other persons,” that is, slaves, in apportioning representation to that body. But within slave states like Virginia, slaves were more numerous in proportion to the total state population than the number of slaves in the whole United States in proportion to the total national population. And slave density considerably varied within the slave states. When the slave-state constitutions enumerated slaves in apportioning representation using the federal three-fifths ratio or by other formulas, intrastate sections where slaves were concentrated would receive a substantial grant of political power for slave ownership. In contrast, low slave-owning sections of the state would lose political representation and political influence over the state. This contributed to the nonslaveholders’ loss of political liberty in the slave states and provided a direct means by which the slaveholders acquired and maintained their rule over nonslaveholders.

Covering this ground, Blair explained that, in the Virginia constitutional convention of 1850, the aristocratic eastern section struck a deal with the central section of the state. This deprived Blair’s western section of the “white basis” formula they were seeking for apportioning representation to the state legislature. The aristocracy of Virginia preserved its domination. They “secured for themselves the control of the legislative department of the State until the day of judgment and a day after, and leaving those residing west of the Alleghenies to shift for themselves the best they could.”60

Blair and Willey’s western Virginia colleague Kellian Whaley summed up the instructive conflict between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding sections of their state:

 

But the greatest wrong and insult which has degraded us politically and socially is what is called the “mixed basis of representation.” In the west portion of the State there exists a large majority of white population, and in the other portion the slave property interest, and giving rise to diversity of sentiment. The east insists upon protection of property by apportionment of representation; that the majority of the people should not rule, but the majority of interests; that the great wealth of the State is in slaves, and that the forty-thousand slaveholders of the east should rule; that while eight hundred and ninety-eight thousand people have, say fifty representatives, $495,000 of taxes must also have fifty representatives; that slavery, and not free white men, is the element of political power; that more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand citizens of the west are properly denied representation in the councils of the State; that, with an immense majority of free white men in the west, the legislative power is rightly placed in the hands of the minority, giving them thirty majority on joint ballot in General Assembly, as Mr. Scott said in Virginia convention, “to secure property [slaves] by not surrendering the legislative control to a majority of mere numbers.” As Mr. Beale also said, “to protect slavery from West Virginia.”61

 

In Southern states that enumerated slaves in apportioning representation, each incremental slave weighted the scales of political power within the state in favor of slaveholders. Slave numbers, combined with these Southern state constitutional provisions, contributed to the elevation of Southern oligarchy and the degradation of nonslaveholders’ political liberty in the South. The increase and uneven concentration of slaves under such constitutions made this class of nonslaveholding Southerners politically irrelevant to the government of these states.

Waitman Willey understood that the slave-owning oligarchy knew what kind of national government they formed when founding the Confederacy. He adverted to antebellum slave-state constitutions containing provisions already securing the political ascendancy of the oligarchic class in the slave-holding states, as that class had done in his own Virginia. Willey indicated that his audience of free-state Republican senators knew this. In evidence of the secessionists’ purpose to establish an independent oligarchic regime as an independent nation, he said, “I need hardly remind Senators of the arbitrary provisions existing in the fundamental law of many of the southern States, such as the qualifications of members of the General Assembly of South Carolina, requiring that they should own slaves and land, and the apportionment of representation upon the basis of property, as in Virginia. Nor is it necessary to do more than allude to the indisputable fact that free labor in the South is everywhere esteemed as degrading.”⁶²

Blair and his constituents experienced what the slave-owning aristocracy did with this power in his own state. In the 1850 constitutional convention in Virginia, the aristocrats of the East also gained for themselves a provision in the constitution that exempted two hundred million dollars of slave property from taxation. But, Blair complained, “every knife and fork; every bed, whether feather or straw; every horse, mare, and gelding, whether blind, spavined, or wind-broken; every old clock, whether it had refused to tell of the passing hours or not; in a word, every species of property, real, personal, and mixed, west of the Alleghany mountains, was taxed, taxed, taxed!” Blair’s western section of Virginia paid the state’s bills, and the state “spent millions upon millions in wild schemes of internal improvements” for the aristocratic eastern part of the state. The western people were ruled and used for the advantage of the rulers. Western Virginians, Blair said, “do not claim by birth or otherwise to be superior to their eastern brethren or their countrymen at large, [but] they do maintain they are the equals of either. . . . We do not belong to the ‘mudsills’ of society.”63

Blair’s denial that he and his constituents were “mudsills” referred to the name Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina gave to all laboring classes, free or slave, in a 1858 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate.⁶⁴ To Hammond, the laboring mudsill class was unfit for any participation in government and was not politically equal to the ruling elite. Blair imputed that same view to the aristocratic eastern section of Virginia, showing that his western Virginians were held in political vassalage by design and not by accidental circumstances.

Another provision in the constitutional organization of slave state governments by which the aristocracy secured their rule was viva voce voting, or voting by live voice or open ballot. This provision required that electors declare their votes in person or on a ballot that could be viewed. In 1867 Senator Charles Drake alluded to this when proposing an amendment to a supplementary reconstruction bill. His amendment required secret ballots in elections in the former insurrectionary states and prohibited the use of viva voce or open ballots. Drake, a Missourian, strongly urged his amendment, which surprised his sympathetic Republican colleague Henry Wilson. Coming from town hall–schooled Massachusetts, Wilson did not understand the fuss. He recalled his fellow citizens’ initial enthusiasm and then indifference to their state’s adoption of a secret-ballot law.⁶⁵

But voting secrecy mattered in the domain where slavery had reigned and where the common people had reason to fear the controlling frowns of aristocrats. Drake gave a very different account of the ballot system in his state: “I have offered this amendment because of my knowledge from actual observation during a large portion of my life of the power which the minority of the people have exercised over the majority in some of the States of this Union through the viva voce system of voting. . . . It is perfectly manifest to me that whenever these States are reconstructed the power is no longer to be in the hands of their aristocracy.”66 The states would be reconstructed when the power of government was vested in the hands of the whole people, he continued. But if viva voce voting was not prohibited, “They will form their constitutions and they will perpetuate viva voce voting in every one of these States,” and then “each one of them will still be governed, as it has been in all time past, by an aristocracy.” Drake claimed that through the institution of the viva voce or open-ballot vote alone, the aristocracy would preserve its old rule over the people, whereas in Massachusetts electors apparently became bored with the closed ballot and indifferently returned to the open ballot. This contrast highlighted the different effects of the institution among a politically equal versus an unequal people. The viva voce vote had no effect on a republican political society but provided a powerful support to the rulers in an oligarchic political society.

The Institutions of Oligarchy: Land Monopoly

The Republicans claimed that the interstate ruling class of the slave-state oligarchy depended upon its monopoly of land to maintain its rule and to prevent the development of republicanism. George Julian is most instructive on the relationship between the specific arrangement of landownership in the South and the form of Southern government. Julian served as chairman of the Committee on Public Lands from the Thirty-Eighth Congress through the Forty-First Congress, 1863–71. The position he held afforded him unique access to information and influence on land policy and Reconstruction in the South. Since Julian was the senior House member overseeing land policy in the Republican-dominated Congress, his position can be fairly construed as representative of Reconstruction Republican opinion on land issues.

Writing retrospectively in 1884, Julian reflected that land laws “not only affect the well-being but frequently the destiny of a people.” Then he contrasted the laws regulating the ownership and disposition of lands in the free and slave states. On the one hand, “The system of primogeniture and entail adopted by the Southern States of our Union favored the policy of great estates, and the ruinous system of landlordism and slavery which finally laid waste the fairest and most fertile section of the Republic and threatened its life.” On the other hand, “The New England States, in adopting a different system, laid the foundations of their prosperity in the soil itself. . . . Their political institutions were the logical outcome of their laws respecting landed property, which favored a great subdivision of the land and great equality among the people, thus promoting prosperous cultivation, compact communities, general education, a healthy public opinion, democracy in managing the affairs of the church, and that system of local self government which has since prevailed over so many States.”67 What form of government did the land laws in the South predestine? In 1850 Julian publicly said “a domineering oligarchy,” in 1852 a “heartless aristocracy,” in 1857 a “Slave Oligarchy” and a “merciless aristocracy in human flesh,” in 1862 a “remorseless oligarchy,” in 1863 a “mighty aristocracy based upon the ownership in men,” in 1864 a “grinding aristocracy resting upon large landed estates” and an “aristocracy founded on the monopoly of the soil,” in 1865 a “pampered oligarchy,” and in 1868 a “relentless landed aristocracy.”⁶⁸

Some Republicans, including Julian, served and spoke in Congress long before Reconstruction, when they debated land policy in the territories of the United States. The higher question in those debates was whether the land policy for the territories would support the development of republicanism or oligarchy. The arguments of the Republicans in the earlier Congress cohered with their analysis of Southern land monopoly in the Reconstruction Congress. Julian first entered the House of Representatives in 1849 as a member of the Free Soil Party, dedicated to keeping U.S. territories free from slavery. In his first major speech in 1851, he advocated the passage of a homestead bill that would divide public lands as New England land was divided, into small farms for actual settlers.

Julian noted that from 1785, the U.S. government had disposed of some 150 million acres of public land. The government at that time held 1.4 billion acres, nearly ten times the amount of land the government had released since 1785. The bill under consideration, Julian said, would fundamentally change American policy on public lands. Rather than using the lands to generate revenue for the U.S. Treasury or for grants to state governments, as the national government had previously done, the bill that Julian supported directed the government to give limited parcels of land to “actual settlers, on condition of occupancy and improvement.”⁶⁹ This policy, he said, served the goal both of economy and of “humanity and justice.”

With respect to justice, he claimed “the broad ground of natural right,” the “first principles” of government. He rejected the disposition of the public lands as “merchandise,” that is, as stolen booty for visionary projects profiting a favored few, and he disclaimed “Agrarianism,” “Socialism,” and “leveling,” which were other forms of stealing. Government, in his view, should abstain from both. Rather, he pointed out that the condition of the “vacant territory” approximated the state of nature, and he affirmed “the natural right of the landless citizen of the country to a home upon its soil.”70

 

The earth was designed by its Maker for the nourishment and support of man. The free and unbought occupancy of it belonged, originally, to the people, and the cultivation of it was the legitimate price of its fruits. This is the doctrine of nature, confirmed by the teachings of the Bible. In the first peopling of the earth, it was as free to all its inhabitants as the sunlight and the air; and every man has, by nature, as perfect a right to a reasonable portion of it, upon which to subsist, as he has to inflate his lungs with the atmosphere which surrounds it, or to drink of the waters which pass over its surface. This right is as inalienable, as emphatically God-given, as the right to liberty or life; and government, when it deprives him of it, independent of his own act, is guilty of a wanton usurpation of power, a flagrant abuse of its trust.⁷¹

 

When establishing new states, he continued, “these principles should always have been recognized.”

Julian argued that the right to property, including property in the earth, is a natural right no less than personal rights and persists after people form the social compact and leave the state of nature. In the state of society, the people are cosovereign by right, and therefore the lands held by the American government belonged to the people, jointly, by right. Only the general good of the whole people can justify any attenuation of the natural right to the earth. Because the United States held 1.4 billion acres of public land, the government could claim no defensible reason to limit the right of the people to take possession of it.

If the government withheld the people’s natural right to the earth, it would unjustly reduce many to dependency and begging. Julian asked, “Does government then fulfill its mission when it encourages or permits the monopoly of the soil, and thus puts millions in its power, shorn of every right except the right to beg?” Such neglect of the people by government had been “one of the great scourges of the world.”⁷² With so much available land at the government’s disposal, national legislators “now have it in our power, without revolution or violence, to carry [their principles] into practice, and reap their beneficent fruits.” Justice in land policy would prove to the citizen that the government was faithfully serving “the promotion of the public good, by a scrupulous regard for his private interest.” Policy guided by this principle would “establish the strongest of all ties between him and the State.”

He exhorted his colleagues, “Give homes to the landless multitudes in the country, and you snatch them from crime and starvation, from the prison and the almshouse, and place them in a situation at once the most conducive to virtue, to the prosperity of the country, and to loyalty to its government and laws.” Rather than becoming “paupers and outcasts,” the people “will become independent citizens and freeholders.” Seeing that their government protected their interest, citizens would become “pledged by their gratitude to the government, by self-interest.” Due to “the affections of our nature,” that is, the affection human beings have for what belongs to them, these citizens would “consecrate to honest toil the spot on which the family altar is to be erected and the family circle kept unbroken.” They would cultivate and develop their property and build a prosperous, durable foundation for their communities, families, and religious lives. In consequence, “They will feel, as never before, the value of free institutions, and the obligations resting upon them as citizens.”73

And according to Julian, they will fight: “Should a foreign foe invade our shores, having their homes and their firesides to defend, they would rush to the field of deadly strife, carrying with them ‘all the animosity of a personal quarrel.’”⁷⁴ Citizens in such communities feel such a strong sense of personal ownership in a nation that they regard foreign foes as personal enemies. By contrast, in a monarchy, whereby the royal head is sovereign and the proprietor of the nation, only the monarch so regards a foreign foe as a personal enemy. A nation established on the basis of every citizen owning a personal stake in the nation’s property is a nation that is owned by the people in fact as well as in law. Diffused property ownership annexes a material foundation to the legal foundation of the sovereignty of the people. In war, “an army of such men, however unpracticed in the art of war, would be invincible.” The true power of a nation, its wealth and its supply of soldiers willing to fight, is rooted in its government’s goodness, which consists in the laws’ due regard for the natural rights of the people, especially for their right to property. For his examples, Julian pointed to the nations of western Europe to show that their prosperity and strength increased “just in proportion as freedom has been communicated to the occupiers of the soil.” The changes in those western European governments’ respect for the natural rights of the people could be seen in the change in the political condition of the cultivators, from “slave” to “villains” to “metayers” and then to “farmers.”

Julian looked home for examples of governments that showed an extreme form of carelessness toward the natural rights of the people. In Virginia “the soil is tilled by the slave” who “feels no interest in the government, because it allows him the exercise of no civil rights. It does not even give him the right to himself. . . . His own offspring are the property of another.” The slave, he explained, has no personal stake in the fruits of his own industry, and excellence in his work will not improve his condition, so he will not work as hard or as well as free labor. Only force impels him to toil. Julian asked, “Can the cultivation of the soil by such a population add wealth or prosperity to the commonwealth?”75

But across the river in Ohio, “how changed the scene!” Not the lash but interest and affection “animate the toils of the husbandman, and strengthen his attachment to the government; for the man who loves his home will love his country.” His success and the success of his country are linked. He knows that while “he is rearing a virtuous family on his own homestead, he is contributing wealth and strength to the State.” These incentives encouraged the rapid growth of the Ohio population, and “new towns are springing up almost as by magic.” Manufacturing, the arts, churches, schools, and “smiling habitations” were flourishing.⁷⁶ The enactment of laws that respect natural right, encompassing the rights to life, liberty, and property, accounted for Ohio’s prosperity and power.

The effects of the security of these rights and, alternatively, the effects of the insecurity of these rights were indissolubly chained together. Laws that protect these rights communicate to individuals that they can expect to keep the fruit of their own unequal labors, and this would “animate the toils of the husbandman.” Even if the results of their labors disappointed their efforts, they would be free to try again, and they would remain an equal party to the social compact. They would know that their success or failure in the race of life would not impair their enjoyment of free institutions arising from the state of nature organized on that basis—free churches, free schools, and freedom of speech and the press.

On the other hand, carelessness of government toward the natural rights of persons logically corresponded to the disregard of property rights. Under these governments, monopolists of the soil coerced labor, and the fruit of this labor was unjustly taken from the laborer. Both slave labor and monopoly of the soil served the selfish interests of monopolists. In such a society, to work was to serve others slavishly rather than to make strides for self-improvement.

Under the former governments, independent farms cultivated by republican citizens, free institutions, and thriving political communities would predominate. Under the latter governments, wasting large estates cultivated by slaves and despotic institutions would predominate. In the first case, labor was honorable; in the second case, it was degrading. These two contrary conditions of labor in the North and South developed around contrary opinions of justice that shaped each political regime.

So strong was the effect of just laws toward property, Julian believed, that where Congress did not legally block slavery from the territories but did protect the natural right to the earth, slavery could not take root. “In a country cut up into small farms, occupied by as many independent proprietors who live by their own toil, it would be impossible,—there would be no room for it,” because slavery required large estates. The homestead bill, Julian said, was “therefore an anti-slavery measure.” The law would “weaken the slave power by lending the official sanction of the government to the natural right of man, as man, to a home upon the soil, and of course to the fruits of his own labor.” The law would repudiate “the vicious dogma of the slaveholder that the laborious occupations are dishonorable and degrading.”77

Due regard for equal rights corresponded to due regard for the general welfare of the people. In 1860 Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania spoke in favor of protectionist policy on trade and argued that protectionism would improve the prospects for broader employment and good wages. The diffusion of wealth would lead to the diffusion of education, which would elevate public intelligence and enhance citizens’ loyalty to free government, finally resulting in a solid republican society. He argued, “The stability of free governments depends upon the intelligence and moral culture of the governed.”⁷⁸ It followed that “the laborer and the artisan should be afforded the means of so educating their children.” The means of education were “only to be derived from the protection and encouragement of those branches of industry necessary to the development of the resources of States.” Moderate prosperity would secure the means of public education and elevate public intelligence upon which free government depended.

During the war, and especially when considering confiscation of rebel property, the Republicans often recognized that the Southern land monopoly followed oligarchic principle, supported oligarchic rule, and was a powerful material barrier to the establishment of republicanism. In 1864 James Wilson of Iowa argued for land redistribution in the South. Property there, he said, “is owned by comparatively a few persons. Property is not distributed among the people there as it is in the northern States.”79 He supported the “sale and division of the large landed estates in the South,” which “would be of incalculable benefit to the mass of the people after the rebellion passes into history.” As a result, “The people can then become landholders, and no longer be subject to the despotism with which a privileged class has heretofore ruled that whole country.” The leaders of the rebellion were “the great lordly landholders who have almost crushed humanity out of the poor people who are squatted on their princely estates.” Those rebel leaders constituted an “aristocratic class” that had held “the immense slave and land power in its hands for the purpose of crushing and grinding the common people into an intellectual darkness almost as dense as barbarism itself.” An “aristocratic few” ruled “the poor, the oppressed, the betrayed mass of the southern people.” They ruled “the people of the South with a rod of iron which pierced and seared every subject conscience before the rebellion, and now rule it.”

Wilson presented his vision of triumphant republicanism, “a ‘redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled,’ South.” Together with the new South, they would “march forward in the accomplishment of the grand mission of this Republic.” Power would transfer from “the hands of a ‘cruel and remorseless’ aristocracy, and [would be] restored to the rightful possession of a whole people.” To accomplish this, “the first step” was “the destruction of that aristocratic and semi-feudal system which has heretofore existed in the South.” He proposed to “make the mass landholders by breaking up the land monopoly of the rebel slaveholders of the South and placing land within the reach of the poor.”⁸⁰

William Allison also advocated Southern land redistribution in order to destroy the oligarchy and plant republicanism. He likened the pending legislation to the recently passed homestead law for the public lands. The pending legislation opened Southern lands to homesteads for Union military servicemen and would impart the same republican effects on the political reorganization of the South that the homestead law imparted on the political organization of vacant public lands.

Allison averred that “land monopoly, with its attendant evils, has ever been the bane of empire.” In Rome labor was once esteemed when proprietors tilled the soil, but when property “passed into the hands of the privileged few,” political power also passed into those same hands and labor became dishonorable. The few controlled the power and wealth of the state; the many became landless and oppressed. Mexico furnished a more contemporary example: “The successive revolutions in Mexico have been but a struggle of the people against the lordlings of the soil.” Their continuing struggles proved how difficult it was “to maintain a permanent republican government over the few selfish, proud aristocrats who own the soil and wealth of the country, even without the demoralizing and aggravating evils of slavery.” The American South had suffered from those same evils and, in consequence, could not meet the conditions prerequisite to thriving republicanism. In free states, he said, “labor must not only be free, but the cultivator of the soil must have a proprietary right in the soil itself.” On the other hand, in the slave states, “the slaveholders not only owned the soil but the labor that tilled it. Labor thus degraded became dishonorable. Here the poverty of the many, with its evils of want, of ignorance, and dependence, was to be found side by side with the excessive wealth and opulence of the few.”81

Without proprietor-cultivators, the necessary consequences were ignorance and dependence. To reverse this condition, the South needed free education and free churches, but, Allison added, “This can only be done successfully by a division of the large estates, now abandoned, into small farms, which shall be tilled by their owners.” And, he warned, “No permanent cure can be effected except by the adoption of some permanent system looking to the division of these immense estates among those who till them, and who by every rule of justice are entitled to the fruits of their labor.” As George Julian had argued more than a decade before, Allison argued that free institutions, the bedrock of republican government, depended upon political communities formed by proprietor-cultivators. From that new beginning, all good things would flow. Free schools, churches, production and consumption, manufacturing, and the arts would all flourish. The “slave-pens and whipping-post” would disappear. In his vision of the future, “The people will become homogeneous, our internal and external commerce will be increased, and with it enhanced the wealth and glory of the nation.”

To reorganize Southern society on a republican basis, Julian also favored the creation of homesteads from the confiscated rebel land, warning that without this redistribution of land, the oligarchy would retain an institution that would support its regeneration and perpetuity. The few would continue to rule both the freedmen and the poor whites. Land redistribution was necessary to “secure a loyal population, since every man who has a home to love and to defend will naturally love his country.” This was necessary because the results of the war “will present the strongest temptations to land monopoly that were ever offered to the greed of avarice and power.” If Congress did not interpose, the old land monopoly “will be continued, and vitalized anew by falling into fresh hands,” and once again, “a grinding aristocracy, resting upon large landed estates, will convert the mass of the people into mere drudges and dependents.”82

The same principles Julian had invoked when arguing for a homestead bill for the territories in the 1850s recurred in the remedy he advanced for establishing republicanism in the South. He urged them, “We must not only cut up slavery, root and branch, but we must see to it that these teeming regions shall be studded over with small farms and tilled by free men.” Again he turned to natural right, just as he had done when advocating a generous land policy toward the vacant territories:

 

We must guard the equal rights of the people as a religious duty, for “Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of man.” . . . Instead of the spirit of Caste and the law of Hate, which have so long blasted these regions, we must build up homogenous communities in which the interest of each will be recognized as the interest of all. Instead of an overshadowing aristocracy, founded on the monopoly of the soil and its dominion over the poor, we must have no order of nobility but that of the laboring masses of the country, who fight its battles in war, and constitute its glory and its strength in peace. Instead of large estates, widely scattered settlements, wasteful agriculture, popular ignorance, political and social degradation, the decay of literature, the decline of manufactures and the arts, contempt for honest labor, and a pampered aristocracy, we must have small farms, closely associated communities, thrifty tillage, free schools, social independence, a healthy literature, flourishing manufactures and mechanic arts, respect for honest labor, and equality of political rights.⁸³

 

The unjust gains of the land monopolists were permitted by the unjust principle of inequality and the rejection of natural equality. As a result, the regime had laid “waste the fairest and most fertile half of the Republic, staying its progress in population, wealth, power, knowledge, civilization.”⁸⁴ Julian’s favored policy would reorganize the vast expanse of Southern lands as if they were in the state of nature, just as he sought to reorganize the vacant national territories in 1851. The first principles of American republicanism, the principles of natural right, would be applied anew to the South. The reorganization of Southern society would undo decades of unjust land accumulation. This reorganization would give the inhabitants confidence in their government, which would stimulate labor. By following their self-interest and toiling, they could expect to keep what their pursuit of happiness yielded. Free institutions would develop amid these communities of toiling cultivators. Self-interest would bind the people’s loyalty to republicanism. The communities would resemble Northern communities, where free labor and free institutions predominated. Their answer to the question of land reform would decide the political destiny of the South, and it would determine whether the United States could truly reunite as one people, under “a new dispensation of liberty and peace.”85