XI THE BALLOT AND LAND FOR THE FREEDMEN: 1861-1865

RECONSTRUCTION emerged as a burning issue even before the war began. At first the word “reconstruction” was used by Democrats and conservatives to designate a restoration of the Union on the basis of compromise with the Confederacy. In this form radicals and abolitionists shunned the term. By the second year of the war, however, “reconstruction” was beginning to acquire its later meaning of a genuine reconstruction of southern society and politics. In January 1862, George Cheever published an article in the Independent outlining a theory of reconstruction very similar to the later “conquered provinces,” “state suicide,” and “forfeited rights” theories of Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Samuel Shellabarger. Cheever argued that by virtue of their rebellion the Confederate states had forfeited all rights and protection under the United States Constitution. They were out of the Union de facto. When finally conquered they should be administered as territories until they could return to statehood under conditions imposed by Congress.1

This was the essence of reconstruction as conceived by abolitionists and radical Republicans throughout the war. The theories of Stevens, Sumner, and Shellabarger varied slightly in details, but at their core was the idea that conquered Confederate states had no rights under the Constitution. Their social and political systems lay prostrate and malleable. It was the job of Congress to remodel southern institutions into a form that would guarantee liberty and equal rights to all men.² In February 1862, Sumner introduced a series of Senate resolutions embodying these ideas in his “state suicide” theory of reconstruction. Several abolitionists expressed support for Sumner’s resolutions. John Jay succinctly summed up the radical theory of reconstruction as it emerged in 1862: “The Southern states have ceased to be states of the Union—their soil has become National territory.”³

This theory was certain to come into collision with the presidential plan of reconstruction as developed tentatively and experimentally by Lincoln and hardened into doctrinal rigidity by Andrew Johnson. The presidential theory denied that the Confederate states, as states, had ever really left the Union. It was a rebellion of individuals, not states. Therefore the function of reconstruction was to appoint loyal state officials to breathe the spark of loyalty and life back into the states. When certain minimum requirements were met these states would again take their place in the Union, their institutions unimpaired and their rights unchanged except for slavery, which was a casualty of the war.4 In line with these ideas Lincoln appointed a military governor for Tennessee early in 1862 and for several other Confederate states as they came under partial Union control in subsequent months. Some abolitionists expressed opposition to this policy of establishing provisional governments in rebel states. George Cheever protested that such a procedure usurped Congress’s powers of reconstruction and defeated the very purpose of Sumner’s “state suicide” resolutions, which had envisaged the administration of conquered states as territories under congressional control. In this argument can be found the germ of the later clash between Congress and the executive over the terms of reconstruction.⁵

From the start of the war abolitionists pondered the conditions of reconstruction that would best secure the permanent freedom of emancipated slaves. As early as 1862 many abolitionists came to the conclusion that there could be no security for freedmen without Negro suffrage. But suffrage for the newly emancipated slaves seemed to be an impractical idea in 1862-1863, and several abolitionists hesitated to demand it as a condition of reconstruction. Samuel Sewall declared that he would be satisfied with a policy that granted equal civil rights and left the question of suffrage in abeyance. Not so Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, who were in the vanguard of the movement to require Negro suffrage as a condition of reconstruction. Phillips drew a parallel between the Irish immigrant and the emancipated Negro. When the number of Irishmen in the United States was small and politically insignificant, they were the butt of jokes and derision by politicians. But as soon as they became numerous and acquired political power, the attitude of politicians underwent a miraculous change. Phillips asked: “Do you know a politician who dares to make a speech to-day, without a compliment to green Erin? The moment a man becomes valuable or terrible to the politician, his rights will be respected. Give the negro a vote in his hand, and there is not a politician, from Abraham Lincoln down to the laziest loafer in the lowest ward in this city [New York] who would not do him honor…. From the possession of political rights, a man gets means to clutch equal opportunities of education, and a fair space of work. Give a man his vote, and you give him tools to work and arms to protect himself.” In May 1863, Douglass stated boldly that he would demand for the emancipated Negro “the most perfect civil and political equality.” Negro suffrage was “the only solid, and final solution of the problem before us.”6

After the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, there was a great increase in public discussion of reconstruction. The North believed that these victories heralded the collapse of the Confederacy, and the upsurge in reconstruction debate resulted from the assumption that peace was just around the corner. Northern opinion on the issue of reconstruction ranged from the Democratic demand that emancipation not be made a condition of peace to the call of radical abolitionists for Negro suffrage. The whole country looked to Lincoln for a statement on reconstruction. As a supplement to his annual message on December 8, 1863, the president announced his long-awaited policy of restoration. He offered a full pardon to all Confederates (except a small class of prominent military and civilian leaders) who would take an oath of future loyalty to the Constitution and swear to uphold all acts of the executive and Congress relative to slavery. Furthermore, whenever a number of white voters equal to one-tenth of those who had voted in 1860 took the oath, they could proceed to reestablish a state government that would be recognized by the president. Lincoln declared that any provision adopted by reconstructed states with respect to the freedmen, “which shall recognize and declare their permanent freedom, provide for their education, and which may yet be consistent, as a temporary arrangement, with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class” would be acceptable to him.7 In other words, southern whites were to be allowed to handle the race problem in their own way, even if they adopted a temporary apprenticeship system and excluded Negroes from equal civil and political rights.

Recognizing that the president’s plan was designed more as a measure to weaken the rebellion than as a permanent policy of reconstruction, the New York Tribune and several abolitionists approved the message. Even Theodore Tilton, who disliked parts of Lincoln’s program, wrote that “the Message is only a suggestion, not a final plan—only a hint for the hour. It will create a good deal of wholesome discussion; and while this discussion goes on, the public sentiment marches steadily forward, & makes the politicians ready for a better plan.”⁸

But many abolitionists feared the consequences of Lincoln’s conservative policy. Wendell Garrison, son of the pioneer abolitionist, denounced the president’s exclusion of freedmen from the suffrage. “To free the slave, and then to abandon him in an anomalous position betwixt bondage and manhood, is not this as cruel as slavery?” asked young Garrison. He called for a total reorganization of southern society and politics. “There is no safety short of absolute justice. The reconstruction of Southern society must be thorough, and affect constitutions, statutes, and customs.” The Anti-Slavery Standard thought that “the proposition to commit the care and education of the freedmen to those revived States is too much like giving the lambs to the nurture and admonition of wolves. That is a duty which belongs, by eminence, to the Nation, and should be entrusted to none but trustworthy hands.”⁹

The Boston Commonwealth published a blistering editorial denouncing the concept of states’ rights which allowed the individual states to determine and regulate the rights of citizenship. “Are [we] going to slink any longer behind the sham, the miserable evasion, that the protection of personal rights and liberty for every citizen of the United States within the limits of any State belongs entirely to the State and in no case to the United States?” asked the Commonwealth. “This deplorable nonsense cost us the war, and the nation’s life within an inch.” Taking Tennessee as an example, the Commonwealth produced figures which showed that under Lincoln’s 10 per cent plan, 14,000 voters could establish the government of a state that contained more than one million inhabitants. These figures illustrated “the thoroughly anti-republican, undemocratic character of the President’s proposition,” asserted the Commonwealth. “This insignificant fraction determines who shall govern the State hereafter. They have the power to prevent every colored man from voting, and, in the present state of public opinion in all the slave States, they will prevent it. … Besides being such a burlesque upon popular sovereignty, the thing is impossible.”10

During the winter of 1863-1864 more and more abolitionists began to condemn Lincoln’s reconstruction policy. In January the Principia warned that “there is danger that some scheme of apprenticeship—such as that adopted but repudiated in Jamaica—may defeat, delay, or greatly impede and embarrass the progress of the country toward peace, unity, and freedom.” The Principia joined the growing list of radicals calling for Negro suffrage to avert this danger.¹¹ Theodore Weld and Anna Dickinson lectured frequently during the winter, raising their eloquent voices in impassioned pleas for equal justice to the freedmen.¹² The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society adopted a resolution written by Wendell Phillips demanding for the Negro “an equal share with the white race in the management of the political institutions for which he is required to fight and bleed, and to which he is clearly entitled by every consideration of justice and democratic equality.”13

Phillips was the most persistent, eloquent, and biting critic of the administration’s reconstruction program. He traveled up and down the East Coast in the winter of 1863-1864 giving his lecture on reconstruction to scores of audiences in crowded halls. Phillips called for a constitutional amendment to prohibit every state from passing laws “which make a distinction among her citizens on account of race. (Cheers)” Reconstruction was impossible on any other basis. Phillips declared: “Never will this nation be a unit until every class God has made, from the lakes to the Gulf, has its ballot to protect itself. (Applause) … The negro has earned land, education, rights. Before we leave him, we ought to leave him on his own soil, in his own house, with the right to the ballot and the school-house within reach. (Loud applause) Unless we have done it, the North has let the cunning of politics filch the fruits of this war.”¹⁴

Radical censure of Lincoln’s reconstruction policy focused on Louisiana in early 1864. The president had ordered General N. P. Banks, commander of the Department of the Gulf, to proceed with the reconstruction of Louisiana under the amnesty and reconstruction proclamation of December 8, 1863. The nucleus of a Unionist political force existed in New Orleans in the form of a Free State General Committee, controlled by native radicals. Many members of the Committee supported a moderate degree of suffrage for the free Negroes of the city. The Committee favored the calling of a convention to write a new constitution prior to the election of state officers. With the approval of Lincoln, however, Banks scheduled elections for state officials on February 22, 1864, under the old Louisiana Constitution. White men who took the oath of allegiance would be eligible to vote. New Orleans radicals and Negroes were outraged by what they considered Banks’ high-handed proceedings. By scheduling state elections before the convening of a constitutional convention, Banks had cut the ground from under the radicals. New Orleans’ free Negroes sent a delegation to Washington armed with a petition requesting the ballot. Abolitionists in the North loosed a barrage of attacks on Banks for restricting the suffrage to whites.15

Three parties in Louisiana nominated candidates for governor in the February 22 election: conservative, moderate, and radical. Both the moderate and radical parties were pledged to end slavery, but the moderate candidate, Michael Hahn, attacked the radicals for their support of Negro equality. Banks threw his support to Hahn, and with the backing of the United States Army, Hahn won an easy victory.¹⁶ Abolitionists denounced the whole affair. The exclusion of Negroes from the polls, protested the Commonwealth, “has no parallel for meanness.” Tilton asserted: “Prejudice, even with Gen. Banks to back it, and President Lincoln to confirm it, is a weak foundation for an enduring State. Official injustice is the very worst disturber of the public peace…. Let us establish no skin-deep discrimination among our citizens.”¹⁷

The representatives of New Orleans’ free Negroes arrived in Washington in March 1864, bearing their petition for suffrage. They cited the high rate of literacy and the large amount of property owned by free colored men in Louisiana. Their request, added to other radical pressures, prompted Lincoln to write a private letter to Governor Hahn, who was preparing for the Louisiana constitutional convention scheduled for early April. “I barely suggest for your private consideration,” wrote the president, “whether some of the colored people may not be let in [to the suffrage]—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”¹⁸ This idea of a qualified Negro suffrage was gaining considerable support in the North. But most abolitionists wanted no qualifications which were not applied equally to both races. To give the ballot to only a limited number of Negroes would elevate them “into a caste which is dangerous to its members, humiliating to those of inferior grade, an anomaly in free republican society,” argued Tilton. “One rule must be applied to all classes, or no rule must be made.”19

In Louisiana most of the radicals boycotted the constitutional convention that opened in April, declaring angrily that the whole thing was a farce and that Banks had packed the convention with moderates. Banks responded to northern radical pressure to the extent of forcing the convention to empower the legislature to enfranchise Negroes. The provision was permissive, not mandatory, and the legislature elected under the new constitution did nothing whatever in the direction of Negro suffrage. Tennessee and Arkansas, the other states reconstructed under Lincoln’s plan in 1864-1865, also refused to enfranchise colored men. Frustrated radicals and abolitionists turned increasingly to Congress in their efforts to obtain equal civil and political rights for freedmen as a condition of reconstruction.²⁰

Congress was in a mood to listen to radical demands. Under the leadership of Henry Winter Davis and Benjamin Wade, congressional Republicans had been slowly maturing their reconstruction policy. On March 22 Davis finally got his bill before the House for its third reading. By implication the Wade-Davis bill endorsed the “state suicide” theory of reconstruction. It asserted that restoration of the Union was a congressional rather than executive function. Whereas Lincoln’s policy envisaged the reestablishment of state governments by 10 per cent of those voters who took an oath of future loyalty, the Davis bill stipulated that not until 50 per cent of the white men of voting age took such an oath could a civil government be reestablished. Moreover, no one who had voluntarily participated in or supported the rebellion could vote for delegates to the constitutional convention, and no rebel officeholder could vote or hold office under the new state constitution.²¹

Abolitionists approved many features of this bill, but sharply disapproved of its limitation of the franchise to whites. “And this is called ‘guaranteeing to the States a Republican form of Government,’ is it?” asked William Goodell sarcastically. “What shall be said of the folly of excluding the votes of that part of the community that is most decidedly and unquestionably loyal [that is, the freedmen]?”22 Josiah Grinnell in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate tried to amend the bill to include Negro suffrage, but their amendments were voted down by large majorities in both Houses. Wade explained that he favored the Negro suffrage amendment in principle, but “I would rather it should not be adopted, because, in my judgment, it will sacrifice the bill.”²³ Many proponents of the Wade-Davis bill probably considered it a stopgap measure to mark time until northern public opinion could be educated up to the point of accepting Negro suffrage as a basis of reconstruction.

The Wade-Davis bill was finally passed by Congress on July 2, but Lincoln slapped a pocket veto on the radicals’ handiwork. Incensed by the president’s action, Davis and Wade issued a blistering manifesto denouncing Lincoln’s usurpation of Congress’s rightful function of controlling reconstruction.²⁴ Wendell Garrison sympathized with their anger, but declared that he was just as glad to see the bill vetoed because it had left the Negro entirely out of the reconstruction process. The Commonwealth had “no tears to shed over the loss of this bill, which though in the main a good one, was … disfigured by a requisition that none but ‘white’ persons should take part in the work of reconstruction. Until Congress has sense enough and decency enough to pass bills without the color qualification, we care not how quickly they are killed.”²⁵

Education and the ballot for the Negro were two of the most important abolitionist requirements for a sound reconstruction of the South. But many abolitionists realized that political equality and education would mean little to the freed slave without a solid foundation of economic independence. The freedmen must “be made proprietors of the soil in fee simple, as speedily as possible,” wrote a correspondent of the Liberator in 1864. Otherwise the white planter would keep the Negro in a state of semi-serfdom by paying him low wages and making him economically dependent on the old master class. “It is going to make a mighty difference to the ‘landless and homeless,’ whether they are to get only the poor pittance of twenty-five or thirty cents per day, and be thus kept dependent, or whether they shall receive four or five times this amount by planting on their own land,” asserted the Liberator correspondent. “The conflict between capital and labor is as old as the world; but in this case the contest could never be more unequal.”26

This was not a new idea to abolitionists. From the outset of the war many of them had desired the breakup of large southern plantations and their redistribution among landless farmers, black and white. Such action would accomplish two important objectives: it would promote democracy in the South by destroying the economic basis of the “landed aristocracy”; and it would promote the economic independence of the freedmen. Less than a month after the firing on Fort Sumter, William Goodell called for the confiscation of land belonging to rebels and its redistribution among freed slaves.²⁷ In subsequent months many other abolitionists repeated and endorsed this proposal. When Congress opened its special session in July 1861, several drastic confiscation bills were introduced. But the bill that finally passed was a very mild measure confiscating only property (including slaves) used in direct support of the Confederate military effort.²⁸

Abolitionists continued to press for full-scale expropriation. “By all the laws and usages of civilized nations,” declared Charles K. Whipple in the Liberator in June 1862, “rebels against a government forfeit their property, as well as their other rights and privileges, under it.” He urged the administration to confiscate rebel lands and allot a portion of them to the landless laborers who had worked them under compulsion for generations and had thus earned a clear title to the land. This act of simple justice to the freedmen would build the new South on a foundation of small landowners thoroughly loyal to the government. It would expiate the sin incurred by the nation in allowing men to be kept in slavery for so many generations.29

The Confiscation Act of July 1862, as originally passed by Congress, met many of the abolitionists’ demands. It provided for the permanent confiscation of all property belonging to traitors. Lincoln objected, however, that this provision violated the constitutional ban on bills of attainder that worked forfeiture of property beyond the life of offenders. Under presidential pressure Congress passed a joint resolution declaring that nothing in the act should be construed to work a forfeiture of real estate beyond the life of the offender. Abolitionists were dismayed. If such an interpretation of the Constitution were sustained, the possibility of confiscation and redistribution of southern lands would disappear. In the third edition of his War Powers of the President, William Whiting argued learnedly that the constitutional prohibition of bills of attainder did not debar Congress from confiscating property permanently by separate legislative act as a punishment for treason.³⁰

Whiting’s legal erudition was widely respected, and his arguments were later utilized by Republican congressmen in their efforts to repeal the joint resolution of 1862. Meanwhile, some abolitionist spokesmen explored other means of accomplishing a revolution in southern land ownership. Even before passage of the 1862 Confiscation Act, Elizur Wright had published anonymously a pamphlet suggesting confiscatory taxation as a method of abolishing the southern landed aristocracy. Wright proposed that a tax of $15 per acre be levied on all Confederates who owned more than 300 acres or who had owned slaves before the war. In nearly all cases this tax would not be paid and the government could seize the land and sell part of it to help defray the cost of war. The remainder could be sold or granted to the freedmen. “If the Federal Government, under its war power, has a right to charge batteries with projectiles that sweep down the active and [passive] rebels alike,” declared Wright, “can it not charge a battery with an agrarian law which will only annihilate without killing the real rebels?” In a later article for the Commonwealth Wright asserted that “a free Republic is utterly impossible … where the soil chiefly belongs to a limited small number of princes, patroons, nabobs or ex-slave-holders.” He realized that northern conservatives would throw up their hands in horror and conjure up visions of the Jacobin’s excesses in the French Revolution. “But an agrarian law for the South is just the next inevitable question,” Wright stated. “Let the programme be, not only liberty to the loyal, but the SOIL TO THE TILLER.”31

When emancipation became an official northern war aim in 1863, abolitionist demands for agrarian reform in the South became more insistent. In an oft-repeated address entitled “Amen to the Proclamation,” Wendell Phillips declared that “the whole social system of the Gulf States is to be taken to pieces; every bit of it.” All vestiges of slavery and the old aristocracy must be wiped out, said Phillips, and this could be done only by granting land to the freedman, for to him land was the symbol and substance of freedom.³² Senator Sumner introduced in February 1863, a bill to grant 10 acres of land to every Negro soldier. The bill did not pass, but it was a sign of the increasing congressional concern over the land question in the South. Early in 1863 Indiana Congressman George Julian, a veteran antislavery crusader and foe of land monopoly, urged Congress to adopt “an equitable homestead policy, parcelling out the plantations of rebels in small farms for … the freedmen … instead of selling it in large tracts to speculators, and thus laying the foundation for a system of land monopoly in the South scarcely less to be deplored than slavery itself.”³³

Julian’s remarks probably referred in part to the land sales about to take place on the South Carolina sea islands. In August 1861, Congress had levied a direct tax on every state to raise revenue for carrying on the war. Of course this tax could not be collected in most parts of the Confederacy, and the 1861 law made no provision for collection in the Union-occupied portions of rebel states. This was rectified by an act of June 7, 1862, authorizing the president to appoint tax commissioners to assess the proportion of taxes owed by occupied areas of the Confederacy and to offer the land of delinquent taxpayers for sale at public auction. In effect this was a confiscation act similar to Elizur Wright’s proposal.34

The tax commissioners arrived at Port Royal in October 1862. They scheduled a public auction of lands for February 11, 1863. Many of the Gideonites became alarmed, fearing that northern speculators would descend upon the islands and buy up most of the desirable land, leaving the Negro with little or nothing. Led by Mansfield French, some of the Gideonites began putting pressure on their friends in Washington to reserve part of the land for the freedmen. “I am greatly troubled in view of the land sales,” wrote French to Secretary Chase. “The sharp-sighted speculators are on hand & with larger purses than those of the friends of humanity. If the plantations fall into their hands, most of the colored people will suffer greatly.” French proposed that General Rufus Saxton, military governor of the islands, be allowed to purchase some of the land with the proceeds of the cotton fund and resell it in small lots to the freedmen.³⁵ At the beginning of February 1863, Laura Towne suggested to Saxton that he should request a postponement of the sales on grounds of “military necessity.” Saxton, who sympathized entirely with the Gideonites, thought this a good idea and persuaded General Hunter to order a postponement of the auction until the whole question was clarified. News soon reached the Gideonites that their efforts in Washington had paid off. On February 6 Congress amended the tax law to allow the tax commissioners to reserve a certain amount of land for educational and charitable purposes. There was “general jubilation” on the islands. The land sales were rescheduled for March 9 and the tax commission reserved most of the saleable property for the future benefit of the freedmen.³⁶

Many of the Gideonites believed with Mansfield French that the freedmen had earned a grant of land by long years of suffering and toil. Another group of northern plantation superintendents, led by Edward S. Philbrick of Boston, disagreed with them. Philbrick was a hard-headed practical businessman with years of experience as a successful civil engineer and entrepreneur. He was inclined at times to regard the philanthropic wing of the Gideonites as naïve do-gooders. Philbrick was alert to the danger of speculators grabbing all the good land. But instead of a direct grant of land to the freedmen or the sale of property to them on special terms, he wanted an opportunity for sympathetic northern capitalists to purchase plantations and continue the free-labor experiment on a private-enterprise basis.37 William Gannett agreed with Philbrick. He thought the freedmen would learn self-reliance best by being thrust into the labor market just like other men. Special grants of land would only reinforce their lack of initiative and self-reliance bequeathed by slavery. “To receive has been their natural condition,” argued Gannett. “Give them land, and a house,—and the ease of gaining as good a livelihood as they have been accustomed to would keep many contented with the smallest exertion.”³⁸

At the land sales of 1863 on the sea islands, 16,479 acres were put up for general sale (the rest of the land was reserved by the government). About 2,000 acres were purchased by freedmen who had pooled their savings. Most of the rest—nearly 8,000 acres—was bought by Edward Philbrick, representing a group of Boston capitalists, at an average price of less than $1 per acre. Philbrick hired several of the government’s plantation superintendents, including Gannett and Charles Ware, to run his plantations in 1863 on the basis of private enterprise. The freedmen raised a large cotton crop on these plantations in 1863, and Philbrick cleared a huge profit. He publicized his successful crop and profits in the northern press as an unanswerable argument for emancipation and free labor. Many of the Gideonites, however, remained unconvinced that Philbrick’s motives were entirely unselfish. During 1863 there was an undercurrent of belief among the more philanthropic-minded abolitionists that Philbrick’s protestations of concern for the freedmen’s welfare were mostly a cover for his own desire to make money.39

Most northern abolitionists who gave serious thought to the land question agreed with the “do-gooder” wing of the Gideonites. “The confiscated lands of the Southern Rebels ought to be given in suitable portions to the colored people, who so long have tilled them without wages,” wrote Samuel J. May in April 1863. A month later the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society adopted a sweeping resolution calling for permanent confiscation of property owned by Confederates and the allotment of homesteads from these lands to freedmen, loyal southern whites, and Union soldiers.⁴⁰ Wendell P. Garrison attacked Lincoln’s pardon and amnesty proclamation because it provided for the restoration of confiscated property to southerners who took a loyalty oath. Wendell Phillips was angry because the president’s reconstruction plan “leaves the large landed proprietors of the South still to domineer over its politics, and makes the negro’s freedom a mere sham. Until a large share of those estates are divided, the aristocracy is not destroyed, neither is any fair chance given for the development of a system of free labor.”⁴¹

During the winter of 1863-1864 the abolitionist-controlled Boston Commonwealth published a series of powerful editorials urging agrarian reform as a condition of reconstruction. “What do we gain in point of peace, union, republicanism, or genuine democracy by converting Jeff Davis and his patriarchs into Lord Palmerston and a fox-hunting, rent-roll gentry?” asked the Commonwealth. A landless peasant class in the South would be a constant source of social unrest. “To be safe, peaceable and permanent,” reconstruction “must be primarily economical and industrial; it must commence by planting a loyal population in the soil of the South, not only as its cultivators but its rightful and actual owners.” The Commonwealth denounced Lincoln’s pardon and amnesty program. “If the President can restore to these traitors all their rights to the land,” wrote the editor, “then the Confiscation Act is a farce, and the war will have been a gigantic crime and failure.”42

In February 1864, a committee of prominent abolitionists and antislavery Republicans representing the secular freedmen’s aid societies petitioned Congress “to give to the slaves made free by the power of the government, a legal and quiet possession of adequate land for their residence and support.”⁴³ On the South Carolina sea islands, plans were being carried out for precisely that purpose. In September 1863, Lincoln had ordered the tax commissioners to put up for public sale at auction most of the lands reserved by the government at the previous auction in March 1863. The president specified that certain tracts of this land were to be sold to freedmen in 20-acre lots at the special price of $1.25 per acre. Gideonites and freedmen on the islands were overjoyed by Lincoln’s order. General Saxton and the Reverend Mansfield French went even further than the order allowed in their zeal to obtain land for the freedmen. They encouraged the Negroes to preempt not only their allotted 20 acres each, but to build cabins on adjoining lots in the hope that bidders would respect their squatters’ rights on these adjoining properties. Saxton and French defended their action on the ground that Lincoln’s order reserved only 16,000 of 60,000 government-held acres for the freedmen. This, they argued, was hardly enough to support the 15,000 freedmen on the islands. Preemption would enable the Negroes to acquire much more property at the special price of $1.25 per acre than specified in Lincoln’s orders.⁴⁴

Saxton actually issued instructions of his own on November 3 telling the freedmen to stake their claims wherever they wished. He was supported by most of the Gideonites, by Colonel Higginson, and by the Free South, a small Port Royal newspaper edited by Philadelphia abolitionist James Thompson. The tax commissioners, supported by Philbrick, were strongly opposed to the scheme, and put pressure on Washington to stop the activities of Saxton and French. But French went personally to Washington in December 1863, to obtain a new set of instructions to ratify General Saxton’s preemption orders. French returned triumphantly to Port Royal in January, bearing a new order dated December 31, 1863, allowing Negro heads of families to preempt any government-owned property on the islands up to 40 acres apiece.45

The Gideonites were elated. They immediately informed the freedmen of their rights. The tax commissioners’ office was soon swamped with preemption claims. But the commissioners were adamantly opposed to preemption. They carried out passive resistance to the new instructions, ignoring some of the preemption claims, attacking the legality of the instructions, and complaining to Washington. Philbrick was outspoken in his opposition to special privileges for the freedmen. They had not earned the land, he argued, and special consideration would break down their moral fiber and vitiate their self-reliance. The Gideonites counterattacked. French and others denounced Philbrick as a selfish capitalist seeking to build a fortune on the sweat and toil of an “agricultural peasantry.” In a milder tone Higginson remarked that few of the men in his regiment agreed with Philbrick’s arguments. “Sergeant Rivers … summed it up in conversation the other day,” Higginson reported. “Every colored man will be a slave, & feel himself a slave until he can raise him own hale of cotton & put him own mark upon it & say dis is mine!” Philbrick lost some of his allies; Gannett, for example, was converted to the proposition that the freedmen must have land and deserved special opportunities to acquire it because of their lifetime of unrequited toil. Nevertheless the tax commissioners persuaded Washington to reverse its policy and cancel the preemption privileges.⁴⁶

French was dismayed, but he was not through fighting. He asked Chase to allow those claims to stand that had been filed before the preemption instructions were rescinded. Since more than a thousand claims had been filed, this would have accomplished nearly everything French desired. Meanwhile in a series of incendiary speeches he urged the freedmen to take the land they needed and defend it with their hoes if necessary. French received no word from Chase, however, and when the sales took place on February 18 there was the utmost confusion over preemption rights, property claims, and so on. In most cases the tax commissioners ruled against the preemptors and sold large slices of preempted land to the highest bidders at an average price of $11 per acre. The freedmen purchased only 2,276 acres at the special rate of $1.25 per acre. In addition several groups of freedmen pooled their resources and purchased 470 acres at an average price of just over $7.00 per acre in the competitive bidding. The whole affair left a sour taste in everybody’s mouth. French and the “do-gooder” Gideonites were furious with Philbrick, the tax commissioners, and the government for what they considered deliberate treachery to the freedmen. Philbrick was irritated by abolitionist attacks on him in the press. The freedmen themselves were angry, resentful, and distrustful toward the Yankees who first promised them land and then withdrew the promise.47

Meanwhile there was increasing support in Congress for some degree of confiscation. Early in 1864 George Julian introduced a bill to extend the Homestead Act of 1862 to cover the abandoned and confiscated estates of the South. Under Julian’s bill these estates would be carved into 40 and 80 acre tracts and made available to Union soldiers, southern freedmen, and loyal southern whites on the homestead principle of full ownership after five years’ residence and cultivation. Lydia Maria Child congratulated Julian for his speech in support of the bill, and proclaimed her opinion that land monopoly was “only another phase of Slavery; another form of the absorption of Labor by Capital, which has tormented and degraded the world from the beginning.” The House passed Julian’s bill on May 12, 1864, by a vote of 75-64; it was reported from Senate committee, but did not come up for discussion before the end of the session in July.48

Julian realized that his confiscation-homestead measure would be of little value unless Congress repealed the joint resolution of 1862 (tacked on to the second Confiscation Act) limiting forfeiture of property to the life of the offender. In February 1864, the House voted to amend the joint resolution to read no forfeiture “contrary to the Constitution,” hoping that the Supreme Court would uphold permanent confiscation of rebel property. Julian confidently expected an endorsement of repeal by the Republican National Convention. The National Union League convention meeting the day before the Republican conclave approved repeal, but conservatives on the resolutions committee squelched a similar endorsement by the Republican convention. On June 28, however, the Senate passed an amendment to the Freedmen’s Bureau bill repealing the 1862 joint resolution outright. Encouraged, Julian went to see Lincoln on July 2, hoping to convince the president of the constitutionality of permanent confiscation. Lincoln admitted that when he had forced Congress to adopt the joint resolution in 1862 he had not examined the question thoroughly. William Whiting’s written and spoken arguments, the president said, had since convinced him of his error, and he was now ready to sign a bill repealing the joint resolution of 1862. The 1864 session of Congress ended, however, without House and Senate agreement on the precise form such a repeal should take. On February 24, 1865, the House repealed the joint resolution outright by the margin of one vote. But in the final conference committee report on the Freedmen’s Bureau bill the repeal amendment was dropped in order to win conservative support for the Bureau. Thus, although Congress had voted on three separate occasions to repeal the 1862 joint resolution, failure of both houses to get together on the exact form of repeal had defeated the measure. Nor was Julian’s confiscation-homestead measure passed during the 1864-65 session.49 Abolitionists and radical Republicans were disappointed, but they looked hopefully to the next session of Congress for favorable action on the land question.

One provision of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill encouraged this hope. William Whiting had used his influence with members of Congress to get a land proviso inserted in the bill. As finally passed on March 3, 1865, the act contained a section stating that to every male refugee or freedman “shall be assigned not more than forty acres” of abandoned or confiscated land at rental for three years and an option to purchase at the end of that time with “such title thereto as the United States can convey.” This was rather vague and indefinite, but it was the best Congress could do at the time. Friends of the freedmen hoped that subsequent legislation would provide the freedmen with clear and definite titles to land of their own in the reconstructed South.⁵⁰

As Sherman marched through Georgia in the last month of 1864, thousands of ragged and destitute freedmen straggled along behind his troops. When the army reached Savannah the problem of providing for the refugees became acute. General Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton, who was visiting Savannah, held a conference on January 12 with twenty Negro leaders of the city. Four days later Sherman issued Special Field Order no. 15, designating the coastline and riverbanks 30 miles inland from Charleston to Jacksonville as an area for exclusive Negro settlement. Freedmen settling in this area could take up not more than 40 acres of land per family, to which they would be given “possessory titles” until Congress “shall regulate the title.” No white persons except authorized military personnel were to be allowed in the area. Sherman’s order gave General Saxton full power over freedmen’s affairs from Charleston to Key West.⁵¹

Abolitionist reaction to the order was mixed. Sydney Gay commended the provision granting land to the freedmen, but he disliked the feature setting the Negroes apart from the white race. This smacked too much of colonization. Sherman was known as a conservative on the Negro question, and Gay distrusted his motives. The Commonwealth also criticized the order and asserted that “all this effort at segregating the negroes will fail. If they were good enough to live in the presence of white men as slaves, they are good enough to dwell in their presence as freemen.”52

On the other hand, Tilton wholeheartedly approved of the measure, considering it a long-overdue effort to settle a large number of freedmen on land of their own. He discounted the colonization fears of other abolitionists, and expressed the belief that white teachers and officials of freedmen’s aid societies would be allowed in the area. Secretary Stanton sent a private letter to Garrison seeking to allay the suspicions of abolitionists, pointing out that the Negro leaders themselves had expressed a desire to be set apart from whites. Stanton enclosed the minutes of the conference with Savannah Negroes, which Garrison published in the Liberator along with a defense of Sherman’s order.⁵³ Abolitionists received private assurances from General Saxton that white teachers and missionaries would be allowed in the area. In fact, said Saxton, the segregation aspect of the order had been designed to keep out speculators, slick traders, and other whites who might take advantage of the freedmen. Saxton had full power over admission or exclusion of whites, and any who had legitimate business in the area would be admitted.⁵⁴

These assurances mollified suspicious abolitionists and converted them to supporters of Sherman’s order. Saxton, however, had been by no means as confident at first of the advantages of the plan as he appeared later in his assurances to abolitionists. He was reluctant to accept the duties of administering the order, fearing that it was just one more promise of land to the freedmen destined to be broken. Stanton, however, assured him that all would be well, and Saxton went vigorously to work to place thousands of Georgia and South Carolina freedmen on the land. He appointed Reuben Tomlinson inspector general of Freedmen’s Affairs. French and Gannett also assisted Saxton in the massive project. By the end of June 1865, they had settled more than 40,000 freedmen on the coastal lands. Many of the Negroes were growing good crops on their new land. The experiment seemed to be a success.55

By 1865 abolitionists had achieved partial success in their drive to obtain land for the freedmen. Powerful congressional leaders such as Julian, Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens were committed to the principle. Congress had gone on record in favor of repealing the joint resolution of 1862 forbidding permanent confiscation. The promise of land for the freedmen was embodied in legislation creating the Freedmen’s Bureau. Freedmen on the South Carolina sea islands had purchased several thousand acres of land at tax sales. Freedmen from all over the southeastern United States were being settled with “possessory titles” on thousands of acres in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Abolitionists looked ahead hopefully to action by future Congresses guaranteeing these titles and setting aside more land for the freedmen. During the war abolitionist spokesmen had called for a three-cornered policy to insure the safety and permanence of reconstruction: education, land, and the ballot for the freedmen. At the war’s end there were encouraging signs in favor of the realization of all three objectives.

1 Independent, Jan. 16, 1862.

2 Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago, 1960), 99-101, 110-19; Liberator, Mar. 28, July 11, 1862; Independent, May 22, 1862; Principia, Nov. 28, 1862.

3 Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 1 Sess., 736-37; Elizur Wright to Sumner, Feb. 16, 1862, Thomas Garrett to Sumner, Feb. 24, 1862, George Cheever to Sumner, Feb. 27, 1862, John Jay to Sumner, Feb. 12, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU.

4 McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, 101-10.

5 Cheever to Sumner, Feb. 27, 1862, Sumner Papers, HU; Principia, June 19, 1862.

6 Samuel Sewall to Sumner, Jan. 4, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; speech of Wendell Phillips at Cooper Union on May 12, 1863, published in Liberator, May 29, 1863; Douglass’ Monthly, June 1863.

7 Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (9 vols., New Brunswick, N.J., 1955), VII, 53-56.

8 Tilton to W. P. Garrison, Dec. 16, 1863, Garrison Papers, RU. See also New York Tribune, Dec. 10, 11, 1863; John Jay to Sumner, Dec. 10, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; Commonwealth, Dec. 11, 18, 1863; Independent, Dec. 17, 1863.

9 Wendell Garrison, writing under the pen-name, “M. du Pays,” in the Liberator, Dec. 18, 1863; N.A.S. Standard, Dec. 19, 1863.

10 Commonwealth, Dec. 25, 1863, Jan. 1, 1864.

11 Principia, Jan. 14, 1864.

12 Independent, Feb. 18, 25, 1864; Theodore Weld to Samuel Johnson, Jan. 23, Feb. 4, 1864, Johnson Papers, Essex Institute.

13 Liberator, Feb. 5, 1864.

14 New York Tribune, Feb. 16, 17, 1864; Liberator, Feb. 5, Mar. 25, Apr. 8, May 20, 1864.

15 Fred H. Harrington, Fighting Politician: Major General N. P. Banks (Philadelphia, 1948), 140-44; New York Tribune, Jan. 18, 1864; Independent, Jan. 28, Feb. 18, 1864; Commonwealth, Mar. 4, 1864; N.A.S. Standard, Jan. 28, 1865.

16 Harrington, Banks, 144-46.

17 Commonwealth, Mar. 18, 1864; Independent, Mar. 10, 1864.

18 New York Tribune, Mar. 16, 18, 1864; Liberator, Mar. 11, 1864; N.A.S. Standard, Mar. 19, 1864; Lincoln to Hahn, Mar. 13, 1864, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, VII, 243.

19 Independent, Mar. 10, 1864. See also Commonwealth, Mar. 18, Apr. 29, 1864.

20 Harrington, Banks, 146-49; J. M. Ashley to Garrison, Mar. 22, 1864, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, Apr. 8, 1864; Independent, Apr. 14, 1864.

21 Charles H. McCarthy, Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction (New York, 1901), 224-85; Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 82-85.

22 Principia, May 12, 1864.

23 New York Tribune, May 5, 1864; Liberator, May 13, 1864; Wade quoted in Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 3,449.

24 Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, VII, 433-34; Wade-Davis Manifesto published in New York Tribune, Aug. 5, 1864.

25 Wendell Garrison quoted in Liberator, Aug. 19, 1864; Commonwealth, July 15, 1864.

26 Liberator, Feb. 5, 1864.

27 Principia, May 4, 1861.

28 N.A.S. Standard, July 13, 1861; Liberator, Oct. 18, 1861; Anglo-African, Nov. 23, 1861; Principia, Dec. 1, 1861; article by Lewis Tappan in the New York Evening Post, Jan. 30, 1862; John Jay to Sumner, Nov. 19, 1861, Sumner Papers, HU; Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 1 Sess., 11, 23, 120, 142, 218-20, 415, 430-31, 434, 454.

29 Liberator, June 13, 1862.

30 Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, 164-66; Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, V, 328-31; William Whiting, The War Powers of the President, and the Legislative Powers of Congress in Relation to Rebellion, Treason, and Slavery (Boston, 1862), 95-128.

31 [Elizur Wright], The Programme of Peace. By a Democrat of the Old School (Boston, 1862), 15-22; Commonwealth, Nov. 15, 1862.

32 New York Tribune, Jan. 23, 1863.

33 E. Wright to Sumner, Feb. 1, 1863, Sumner Papers, HU; New York Tribune, Feb. 12, 1863; Julian’s speech quoted in Cong. Globe, 37 Cong., 3 Sess., 1,069.

34 Willie Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1962, 260-61; U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 294ff., 422-23.

35 French to Chase, Jan. 2, 1863, Chase Papers, LC; French to Chase, Jan. 6, 1863, Lincoln Papers LC.

36 Rupert S. Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne, Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862-84 (Cambridge, Mass., 1912), 100-03; Elizabeth Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal (Boston, 1906), 154, 159-60; Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 262-65, 276-77; U.S. Statutes at Large, XII, 640.

37 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 277-80; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 117-18, 147-48, 165-67.

38 William Pease, “Three Years Among the Freedmen: William C. Gannett and the Port Royal Experiment,” Journal of Negro History, XLII (Apr. 1957), 106.

39 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 280-85; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 170-72. Despite his good year, Philbrick’s cotton crop was not as large as the better crops raised under slavery, and his profits were due mainly to the war-inflated price of cotton.

40 S. J. May to Garrison, Apr. 16, 1863, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, May 29, 1863.

41 W. P. Garrison, in Liberator, Dec. 18, 1863; Phillips to Benjamin Butler, Dec. 13, 1863, Butler Papers, LC. In his lectures on reconstruction during the winter of 1863-64, Phillips called repeatedly for a confiscation policy. See, for example, reports of his speeches in the New York Tribune, Dec. 23, 1863, and Feb. 17, 1864. The New York Herald predicted that the Republicans would eventually adopt Phillips’ radical confiscation proposals. “Emancipation, abolition, confiscation, southern lands for landless negroes! This is the programme,” declared the Herald. “The Tribune will, as usual, wait six months, and then follow Wendell Phillips’ lead, face foremost. The Times will wait about ten months, and then follow, as usual, back foremost.” New York Herald, Dec. 23, 1863.

42 Commonwealth, Dec. 25, 1863, Jan. 1, 8, 15, 22, Mar. 4, 1864.

43 Liberator, Feb. 12, 1864.

44 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 355-59; Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, VI, 453-59.

45 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 359-73; Commonwealth, Jan. 15, 1864; Higginson to Louisa Higginson, Jan. 14, 1864, Higginson, Journal, entry of Jan. 20, 1864, Higginson Papers, HU.

46 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 373-80; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 247-49, 251, 254-55, 257, 265-66, 276-77; quotation is from Higginson, Journal, entry of Nov. 21, 1863, Higginson Papers, HU.

47 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 382-88; Holland, Letters and Diary of Laura Towne, 129-30; Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, 251, 254-55, 257, 265-66, 277-78; Higginson to S. H. Gay, Feb. 13, 1864, Gay Papers, CU; Independent, Apr. 21, May 5, 1864, Jan. 26, 1865.

48 Patrick W. Riddleberger, “George W. Julian: Abolitionist Land Reformer,” Agricultural History, V (July, 1955), 109-10; L. M. Child to Julian, Mar. 27, 1864, Giddings-Julian Correspondence, LC. For additional expressions of abolitionist support for Julian’s bill, see Gerrit Smith to Julian, Mar. 25, 1864, and Lewis Tappan to Julian, Mar. 28, 1864, ibid.

49 LaWanda Cox, “The Promise of Land for the Freedmen,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLV (Dec. 1958), 432-34; George Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago, 1884), 242, 245-46; Cong. Globe, 38 Cong., 1 Sess., 519, 3,327, 38 Cong., 2 Sess., 1,026, 1,125.

50 Cox, “Promise of Land for the Freedmen,” op.cit., 414-18, 426, 432; U.S. Statutes at Large, XIII, 507-09.

51 O.R., Ser. 1, vol. XXVII, part ii, 60-62.

52 New York Tribune, Jan. 30, 1865; Commonwealth, Feb. 4, 1865. See also W. L. Garrison, Jr. to Ellen Garrison, Feb. 5, 1865, Garrison Papers, SC; and S. B. Anthony to E. C. Stanton, Feb. 14, 1865, Stanton Papers, LC.

53 Independent, Feb. 2, 1865; Edwin M. Stanton to Garrison, Feb. 12, 1865, Garrison Papers, BPL; Liberator, Feb. 17, 24, 1865.

54 T. W. Higginson to Anne and Louisa Higginson, Mar. 6, 1865, Saxton to Higginson, Apr. 4, 1865, Higginson Papers, HU.

55 Rose, “Rehearsal for Reconstruction,” 428-30; Holland, Letters and Diary of Laura Towne, 151, 153; The Freedmen’s Record, I (August 1865), 128.