VI. Looking Backward

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, merely substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk

The young Southern fanatic who murdered Abraham Lincoln said, according to the New York Times, April 21, 1865:

… This country was formed for the white, not the black man; and looking upon African slavery from the same standpoint held by the noble framers of our Constitution, I, for one, have ever considered it of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us) that God ever bestowed upon a favored nation. Witness heretofore our wealth and power; witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere. I have lived among it most of my life and have seen less harsh treatment from master to man than I have beheld in the North from father to son. Yet Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition. But Lincoln's policy is only preparing the way for their total annihilation.

The South had risked war to protect this system of labor and to expand it into a triumphant empire; and even if all of the Southerners did not agree with this broader program, even these had risked war in order to ward off the disaster of a free labor class, either white or black.

Yet, they had failed. After a whirlwind of battles, in which the South had put energy, courage and skill, and most of their money; in the face of inner bickerings and divided councils, jealousy of leaders, indifference of poor whites and the general strike of black labor, they had failed in their supreme effort, and now found themselves with much of their wealth gone, their land widely devastated, and some of it confiscated, their slaves declared free, and their country occupied by a hostile army.

The South faced all sorts of difficulties. The hostilities, military and naval, had practically destroyed the whole commercial system of the South, and reduced the people to a pitiable primitive, almost barbaric level. …

It has been said that the ruining of the planting class in the South through war was more complete than the destruction of the nobility [ 129 ] and clergy in the French Revolution. The very foundations of the system were shattered. ¹

There was at the end of the war no civil authority with power in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas; and in the other states, authority was only functioning in part under Congress or the President. "The Northern soldiers were transported home with provisions for their comfort, and often with royal welcomes, while the Southern soldiers walked home in poverty and disillusioned."

Lands had deteriorated because of the failure to use fertilizers. The marketing of the crops was difficult and the titles to land and crops disputed. Government officials seized much of the produce and the cotton tax of 3 cents a pound bore hard upon the planters. The mortality of the whites was so great in the decade following 1865, as to be "a matter of common remark." ²

When a right and just cause loses, men suffer. But men also suffer when a wrong cause loses. Suffering thus in itself does not prove the justice or injustice of a cause. It always, however, points a grave moral. Certainly after the war, no one could restrain his sorrow at the destruction and havoc brought upon the whites; least of all were the Negroes unsympathetic. Perhaps never in the history of the world have victims given so much of help and sympathy to their former oppressors. Yet the most pitiable victims of the war were not the rich planters, but the poor workers; not the white race, but the black.

Naturally, the mass of the planters were bitterly opposed to the abolition of slavery. First, they based their opposition upon a life-long conviction that free Negro labor could not be made profitable. The New Orleans Picayune said, July 8, 1862:

In sober earnest, we say, and we believe all who know anything from observation or experience will corroborate our assertion, that this is an absolute impossibility. There could be no full crop produced under that system. The earlier processes might be performed in a manner and to some extent; but the later and more arduous, those upon the prompt performance of which depends the production of any crop at all, would be slighted, if not indeed entirely lost. The thriftless, thoughtless Negro would jingle his last month's wages in the planter's face and tell him to do the rest of the work himself. Look at Jamaica, Barbadoes, Antigua, and the other British West Indies where this experiment is having a most suggestive trial.

The Texas Republican, a weekly newspaper, said: "The ruinous effects of freeing four millions of ignorant and helpless blacks would not be confined to the South, but the blight would be communicated to the North, and the time would come when the people of that section [ 130 ] would be glad to witness a return to a system attended with more philanthropy and happiness to the black race than the one they seem determined to establish; for they will find that compulsory labor affords larger crops and a richer market for Yankee manufacturers." The masters were advised, therefore, not to turn their slaves loose to become demoralized, but to maintain a kind and protecting care over them.

In addition to this, it was said that even if free Negro labor miraculously proved profitable, Negroes themselves were impossible as freemen, neighbors and citizens. They could not be educated and really civilized. And beyond that if a free, educated black citizen and voter could be brought upon the stage this would in itself be the worst conceivable thing on earth; worse than shiftless, unprofitable labor; worse than ignorance, worse than crime. It would lead inevitably to a mulatto South and the eventual ruin of all civilization.

This was a natural reaction for a country educated as the South had been; and that the mass of the planters passionately believed it is beyond question, despite difficulties of internal logic. Even the fact that some thought free Negro labor practicable, and many knew perfectly well that at least some Negroes were capable of education and even of culture, these stood like a rock wall against anything further: against Negro citizens, against Negro voters, against any social recognition in politics, religion or culture.

The poor whites, on the other hand, were absolutely at sea. The Negro was to become apparently their fellow laborer. But were the whites to be bound to the black laborer by economic condition and destiny, or rather to the white planter by community of blood? Almost unanimously, following the reaction of such leaders as Andrew Johnson and Hinton Helper, the poor white clung frantically to the planter and his ideals; and although ignorant and impoverished, maimed and discouraged, victims of a war fought largely by the poor white for the benefit of the rich planter, they sought redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter.

This brought singular schism in the South. The white planter endeavored to keep the Negro at work for his own profit on terms that amounted to slavery and which were hardly distinguishable from it. This was the plain voice of the slave codes. On the other hand, the only conceivable ambition of a poor white was to become a planter. Meantime the poor white did not want the Negro put to profitable work. He wanted the Negro beneath the feet of the white worker.

Right here had lain the seat of the trouble before the war. All the regular and profitable jobs went to Negroes, and the poor whites were [ 131 ] excluded. It seemed after the war immaterial to the poor white that profit from the exploitation of black labor continued to go to the planter. He regarded the process as the exploitation of black folk by white, not of labor by capital. When, then, he faced the possibility of being himself compelled to compete with a Negro wage worker, while both were the hirelings of a white planter, his whole soul revolted. He turned, therefore, from war service to guerrilla warfare, particularly against Negroes. He joined eagerly secret organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, which fed his vanity by making him co-worker with the white planter, and gave him a chance to maintain his race superiority by killing and intimidating "niggers"; and even in secret forays of his own, he could drive away the planter's black help, leaving the land open to white labor. Or he could murder too successful freedmen.

It was only when they saw the Negro with a vote in his hand, backed by the power and money of the nation, that the poor whites who followed some of the planters into the ranks of the "scalawags" began to conceive of an economic solidarity between white and black workers. In this interval they received at the hands of the black voter and his allies a more general right to vote, to hold office and to receive education, privileges which the planter had always denied them. But before all this was so established as to be intelligently recognized, armed revolt in the South became organized by the planters with the cooperation of the mass of poor whites. Taking advantage of an industrial crisis which throttled both democracy and industry in the North, this combination drove the Negro back toward slavery. Finally the poor whites joined the sons of the planters and disfranchised the black laborer, thus nullifying the labor movement in the South for a half century and more.

As the Civil War staggered toward its end, the country began to realize that it was not only at the end of an era, but it was facing the beginning of a vaster and more important cycle. The emancipation of four million slaves might end slavery, but would it not also be the end of its four million victims? To be sure there were many prophets, South and North, who foretold this fate of Negro extinction, but they were wrong. It was the beginning of Negro development, and what was this development going to be?

Back of all the enthusiasm and fervor of victory in the North came a wave of reflection that represented the sober after-thought of the nation. It harked back to a time when not one person in ten believed in Negroes, or in emancipation, or in any attempt to conquer the South. This feeling began to arise before the war closed, and after it ended it rose higher and higher into something like dismay. From [ 132 ] before the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War, the nation had asked if it were possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word. The answers to this problem, historically, had taken these forms:

1. Negroes, after conversion to Christianity, were in the same position as other colonial subjects of the British King. This attitude disappeared early in colonial history.

2. When the slave trade was stopped, Negroes would die out. Therefore, the attack upon slavery must begin with the abolition of the slave trade and after that the race problem would settle itself. This attitude was back of the slave trade laws, 1808-20.

3. If Negroes did not die out, and if gradually by emancipation and the economic failure of slavery they became free, they must be systematically deported out of the country, back to Africa or elsewhere, where they would develop into an independent people or die from laziness or disease. This represented the attitude of liberal America from the end of the War of 18 12 down to the beginning of the Cotton Kingdom. §

4. Negroes were destined to be perpetual slaves in a new economy which recognized a caste of slave workers. And this caste system might eventually displace the white worker. At any rate, it was destined to wider expansion toward the tropics. This was the attitude of the Confederacy.

It is clear that from the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War, when the nation was asked if it was possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word, it answered by a stern and determined "No!" The persons who conceived of the Negroes as free and remaining in the United States were a small minority before 1861, and confined to educated free Negroes and some of the Abolitionists.

This basic thought of the American nation now began gradually to be changed. It bore the face of fear. It showed a certain dismay at the thought of what the nation was facing after the war and under hypnotism of a philanthropic idea. The very joy in the shout of emancipated Negroes was a threat. Who were these people? Were we not loosing a sort of gorilla into American freedom? Negroes were lazy, poor and ignorant. Moreover their ignorance was more than the ignorance of whites. It was a biological, fundamental and ineradicable ignorance based on pronounced and eternal racial differences. The democracy and freedom open and possible to white men of English stock, and even to Continental Europeans, were unthinkable in the case of Africans. We were moving slowly in an absolutely impossible direction.

Meantime, there was anarchy in the South and the triumph of brute physical force over large areas. The classic report on conditions in the South directly after the war is that of Carl Schurz. Carl Schurz was of the finest type of immigrant Americans. §§ A German of education and training, he had fought for liberal thought and government in his country, and when driven out by the failure of the revolution of 1848, had come to the United States, where he fought for freedom. No man was better prepared dispassionately to judge conditions in the South than Schurz. He was to be sure an idealist and doctrinaire, but surely the hard-headed and the practical had made mess enough with America. This was a time for thought and plan. Schurz's reports on his journey remain today with every internal evidence of truth and reliability.

His mission came about in this way: he had written Johnson on his North Carolina effort at Reconstruction and Johnson invited him to call.

President Johnson received me with the assurance that he had read my letters with great interest and appreciation, and that he was earnestly considering the views I had presented in them. But in one respect, he said, I had entirely mistaken his intentions. His North Carolina proclamation was not to be understood as laying down a general rule for the reconstruction of all 'the states lately in rebellion.' It was to be regarded as merely experimental, and he thought that the condition of things in North Carolina was especially favorable for the making of such an experiment. As to the Gulf States, he was very doubtful and even anxious. He wished to see those states restored to their constitutional relations with the general government as quickly as possible, but he did not know whether it could be done with safety to the Union men and to the emanicipated slaves. He therefore requested me to visit those states for the purpose of reporting to him whatever information I could gather as to the existing condition of things, and of suggesting to him such measures as my observations might lead me to believe advisable. ³

In his report, Schurz differentiated four classes in the South:

1. Those who, although having yielded submission to the national government only when obliged to do so, have a clear perception of the irreversible changes produced by the war, and honestly endeavor to accommodate themselves to the new order of things.

2. Those whose principal object is to have the states without delay restored to their position and influence in the Union and the people of the states to the absolute control of their home concerns. They are ready in order to attain that object to make any ostensible concession [ 134 ] that will not prevent them from arranging things to suit their taste as soon as that object is attained.

3. The incorrigibles, who still indulge in the swagger which was so customary before and during the war, and still hope for a time when the Southern confederacy will achieve its independence.

4. The multitude of people who have no definite ideas about the circumstances under which they live and about the course they have to follow; whose intellects are weak, but whose prejudices and impulses are strong, and who are apt to be carried along by those who know how to appeal to the latter.⁴

He thus describes the movements immediately following the war:

When the war came to a close, the labor system of the South was already much disturbed. During the progress of military operations large numbers of slaves had left their masters and followed the columns of our armies; others had taken refuge in our camps; many thousands had enlisted in the service of the national government. Extensive settlements of Negroes had been formed along the seaboard and the banks of the Mississippi, under the supervision of army officers and treasury agents, and the government was feeding the colored refugees who could not be advantageously employed in the so-called contraband camps.

Many slaves had also been removed by their masters, as our armies penetrated the country, either to Texas or to the interior of Georgia and Alabama. Thus a considerable portion of the laboring force had been withdrawn from its former employments. But a majority of the slaves remained on the plantations to which they belonged, especially in those parts of the country which were not touched by the war, and where, consequently, the emancipation proclamation was not enforced by the military power. Although not ignorant of the stake they had in the result of the contest, the patient bondmen waited quietly for the development of things.

But as soon as the struggle was finally decided, and our forces were scattered about in detachments to occupy the country, the so far unmoved masses began to stir. The report went among them that their liberation was no longer a mere contingency, but a fixed fact. Large numbers of colored people left the plantations; many flocked to our military posts and camps to obtain the certainty of their freedom, and others walked away merely for the purpose of leaving the places on which they had been held in slavery, and because they could now go with impunity. Still others, and their number was by no means inconsiderable, remained with their former masters and continued their work on the field, but under new and as yet unsettled conditions, and under the agitating influence of a feeling of restlessness.

[ 135 ] In some localities, however, where our troops had not yet penetrated and where no military post was within reach, planters endeavored and partially succeeded in maintaining between themselves and the Negroes the relation of master and slave partly by concealing from them the great changes that had taken place, and partly by terrorizing them into submission to their behests. But aside from these exceptions, the country found itself thrown into that confusion which is naturally inseparable from a change so great and so sudden. The white people were afraid of the Negroes, and the Negroes did not trust the white people; the military power of the national government stood there, and was looked up to, as the protector of both. …

Some of the planters with whom I had occasion to converse expressed their determination to adopt the course which best accords with the spirit of free labor, to make the Negro work by offering him fair inducements, to stimulate his ambition, and to extend to him those means of intellectual and moral improvement which are best calculated to make him an intelligent, reliable and efficient free laborer and a good and useful citizen. …

I regret to say that views and intentions so reasonable I found confined to a small minority. Aside from the assumption that the Negro will not work without physical compulsion, there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the South which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution of the problem. It is that the Negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice and sugar for the whites, and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge, like other people, in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way. …

I made it a special point in most of the conversations I had with Southern men to inquire into their views with regard to this subject. I found, indeed, some gentlemen of thought and liberal ideas who readily acknowledged the necessity of providing for the education of the colored people, and who declared themselves willing to cooperate to that end to the extent of their influence. Some planters thought of establishing schools on their estates, and others would have been glad to see measures taken to that effect by the people of the neighborhoods in which they lived. But whenever I asked the question whether it might be hoped that the legislatures of their states or their county authorities would make provisions for Negro education, I never received an affirmative, and only in two or three instances feebly encouraging answers. At last I was forced to the conclusion that, aside from a small number of honorable exceptions, the popular prejudice is almost as bitterly set against the Negro's having the advantage of education as it was when the Negro was a slave.

[ 136 ] There may be an improvement in that respect, but it would prove only how universal the prejudice was in former days. Hundreds of times I heard the old assertion repeated, that 'learning will spoil the nigger for work,' and that 'Negro education will be the ruin of the South.' Another most singular notion still holds a potent sway over the minds of the masses – it is, that the elevation of the blacks will be the degradation of the whites. …

The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual master, he is considered the slave of society, and all independent state legislation will share the tendency to make him such. The ordinances abolishing slavery passed by the conventions under the pressure of circumstances will not be looked upon as barring the establishment of a new form of servitude.

Carl Schurz summed the matter up:

Wherever I go – the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat – I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen's affairs in their own hands, to use their own expression, 'the niggers will catch hell.'

The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.

Corroboration of the main points in the thesis of Schurz came from many sources.⁵ From Virginia:

Before the abolition of slavery, and before the war, it was the policy of slaveholders to make a free Negro as despicable a creature and as uncomfortable as possible. They did not want a free Negro about at all. They considered it an injury to the slave, as it undoubtedly was, creating discontent among the slaves. The consequences were that there was always an intense prejudice against the free Negro. Now, very suddenly, all have become free Negroes; and that was not calculated to allay that prejudice.

A colored man testified:

There was a distinct tendency toward compulsion, toward reestablished slavery under another name. Negroes coming into Yorktown from regions of Virginia and thereabout, said that they had worked all year and received no pay and were driven off the first of January. The owners sold their crops and told them they had no further use for them and that they might go to the Yankees, or the slaveholders offered to take them back but refused to pay any wages. A few offered a dollar a month and clothing and food. They were not willing to pay anything for work.

The courts aided the subjection of Negroes. George S. Smith of Virginia, resident since 1848, said that he had been in the Provost Marshal's department and

have had great opportunities of seeing the cases that are brought before him. Although I am prejudiced against the Negro myself, still I must tell the truth, and must acknowledge that he has rights. In more than nine cases out of ten that have come up in General Patrick's office, the Negro has been right and the white man has been wrong, and I think that that will be found to be the case if you examine the different provost marshals.

It was common for Virginians in 1865 and 1866 to advocate wholesale expulsion of the Negroes. This attitude arose from the slave trade:

The slave system in Virginia has been such as to exhaust very largely the able-bodied laborers; I have been informed that twenty-thousand of that class were annually sold from Virginia; consequently, a very large portion of the colored population there is composed of the aged, infirm, women and children, and the being freed from the necessity of supporting them is really a great relief in the present poverty of the people – a relief to their former owners."

Of course, those who wanted Negro labor immediately and were pushed on by the current high prices for products, were willing to compromise in some respects.

The more intelligent people there, those who have landed estates, need their labor. Being dependent upon them for labor, they see the necessity of employing them, and are disposed to get along with them. All of the people, however, are extremely reluctant to grant the Negro his civil rights – those privileges that pertain to freedom, the protection of life, liberty and property before the laws, the right to testify in the courts, etc. They are all very reluctant to concede that; and if it is ever done, it will be because they are forced to do it. They are reluctant even to consider and treat the Negro as a free man.

Lieutenant Sanderson, who was in North Carolina for three years, said that as soon as the Southerners came in in full control, they intended to put in force laws,

not allowing a contraband to stay in any section over such a length of time without work; if he does, to [ 138 ] seize him and sell him. In fact, that is done now in the county of Gates, North Carolina. The county police, organized under orders from headquarters, did enforce that.

Mr. Parker told me that he had hired his people for the season: that directly after the surrender of General Lee, he called them up and told them they were free; that he was better used to them than to others, and would prefer hiring them; that he would give them board and two suits of clothing to stay with him till the 1st day of January, 1866, and one Sunday suit at the end of that time; that they consented willingly – in fact, preferred to remain with him, etc. But from his people I learned that though he did call them up, as stated, yet when one of them demurred at the offer, his son James flew at him and cuffed and kicked him; that after that they were all 'perfectly willing to stay'; they were watched night and day; that Bob, one of the men, had been kept chained nights; that they were actually afraid to try to get away.

Sometimes the resentment at the new state of affairs was funny. A county judge near Goldsboro, who had never been addressed by a Negro unbidden, came to the quarters of Lieutenant Sanderson:

'Lieutenant, what am I to stand from these freed people? I suppose you call them free. What insults am I obliged to suffer? I am in a perfect fever.' I told him I saw he was, and asked him what he complained of? If there was anything wrong I would right it. 'Well,' said he, 'one of these infernal niggers came along as I sat on my piazza this morning and bowed to me, and said good morning; – one of your soldiers!'

From Alabama it was reported:

The planters hate the Negro, and the latter class distrust the former, and while this state of things continues, there cannot be harmonious action in developing the resources of the country. Besides, a good many men are unwilling yet to believe that the 'peculiar institution' of the South has been actually abolished, and still have the lingering hope that slavery, though not in name, will yet in some form practically exist. And hence the great anxiety to get back into the Union, which being accomplished, they will then, as I have heard it expressed, 'fix the Negro!' …

It is the simple fact, capable of indefinite proof, that the black man does not receive the faintest shadow of justice. I aver that in nine cases out of ten within my own observation, where a white man has provoked an affray with a black and savagely misused him, the black man has been fined for insolent language because he did not receive the chastisement in submissive silence, while the white man has gone free.⁶

The New York Herald says of Georgia:

Springing naturally out of this disordered state of affairs is an organization of 'regulators,' so called. Their numbers include many ex-Confederate cavaliers of the country, and their mission is to visit summary justice upon any offenders against the public peace. It is needless to say that their attention is largely directed to maintaining quiet and submission among the blacks. The shooting or stringing up of some obstreperous 'nigger' by the 'regulators' is so common an occurrence as to excite little remark. Nor is the work of proscription confined to the freedmen only. The 'regulators' go to the bottom of the matter, and strive to make it uncomfortably warm for any new settler with demoralizing innovations of wages for 'niggers.' ⁷

A committee of the Florida legislature reported in 1865 that it was true that one of the results of the war was the abolition of African slavery.

But it will hardly be seriously argued that the simple act of emancipation of itself worked any change in the social, legal or political status of such of the African race as were already free. Nor will it be insisted, we presume, that the emancipated slave technically denominated a 'freedman' occupied any higher position in the scale of rights and privileges than did the 'free Negro.' If these inferences be correct, then it results as a logical conclusion, that all the arguments going to sustain the authority of the General Assembly to discriminate in the case of 'free Negroes' equally apply to that of 'freedmen,' or emancipated slaves.

But it is insisted by a certain class of radical theorists that the act of emancipation did not stop in its effect in merely severing the relation of master and slave, but that it extended further, and so operated as to exalt the entire race and placed them upon terms of perfect equality with the white man. These fanatics may be very sincere and honest in their convictions, but the result of the recent elections in Connecticut and Wisconsin shows very conclusively that such is not the sentiment of the majority of the so-called Free States.

Some Southerners saw in emancipation nothing but extermination for the Negro race. The Provisional Governor of Florida became almost tearful over the impending fate of the Negroes and the guilt of the North.

This unfortunate class of our population, but recently constituting the happiest and best provided for laboring population in the world, by no act of theirs or voluntary concurrence of ours; with no prior training to prepare them for their new responsibilities, have been suddenly deprived of the fostering care and protection of their old masters and are now to become, like so many children gamboling [ 140 ] upon the brink of the yawning precipice, careless of the future and intent only on revelling in the present unrestrained enjoyment of the newly found bauble of freedom. … ⁸

Judge Humphrey of Alabama said:

I believe in case of a return to the Union, we would receive political cooperation so as to secure the management of that labor by those who were slaves. There is really no difference, in my opinion, whether we hold them as absolute slaves or obtain their labor by some other method. Of course, we prefer the old method. But that question is not now before us!

A twelve-year resident of Alabama said:

There is a kind of innate feeling, a lingering hope among many in the South that slavery will be regalvanized in some shape or other. They tried by their laws to make a worse slavery than there was before, for the freedman has not now the protection which the master from interest gave him before.⁹

Every day, the press of the South testifies to the outrages that are being perpetrated upon unoffending colored people by the state militia. These outrages are particularly flagrant in the states of Alabama and Mississippi, and are of such character as to demand most imperatively the interposition of the national Executive. These men are rapidly inaugurating a condition of things – a feeling – among the freedmen that will, if not checked, ultimate in insurrection. The freedmen are peaceable and inoffensive; yet if the whites continue to make it all their lives are worth to go through the country, as free people have a right to do, they will goad them to that point at which submission and patience cease to be a virtue.

I call your attention to this matter after reading and hearing from the most authentic sources – officers and others – for weeks, of the continuance of the militia robbing the colored people of their property – arms – shooting them in the public highways if they refuse to halt when so commanded, and lodging them in jail if found from home without passes, and ask, as a matter of simple justice to an unoffending and downtrodden people that you use your influence to induce the President to issue an order or proclamation forbidding the organization of state militia. ¹⁰

In Mississippi:

In respectful earnestness I must say that if at the end of all the blood that has been shed and the treasure expended, the unfortunate Negro is to be left in the hands of his infuriated and disappointed former owners to legislate and fix his status, God help him, for his cup of bitterness will overflow indeed. Was ever such a policy conceived in the brain of men before?"

Sumner quotes "an authority of peculiar value" – a gentleman writing from Mississippi:

I regret to state that under the civil power deemed by all the inhabitants of Mississippi to be paramount, the condition of the freedmen in many portions of the country has become deplorable and painful in the extreme. I must give it as my deliberate opinion that the freedmen are today, in the vicinity where I am now writing, worse off in most respects than when they were held slaves. If matters are permitted to continue on as they now seem likely to be, it needs no prophet to predict a rising on the part of the colored population, and a terrible scene of bloodshed and desolation. Nor can anyone blame the Negroes if this proves to be the result. I have heard since my arrival here, of numberless atrocities that have been perpetrated upon the freedmen. It is sufficient to state that the old overseers are in power again. … The object of the Southerners appears to be to make good their often-repeated assertions, to the effect that the Negroes would die if they were freed. To make it so, they seem determined to goad them to desperation, in order to have an excuse to turn upon and annihilate them.

General Fisk early in 1866 said:

I have today received the statement of two very respectable colored men who went into northern Mississippi from Nashville and rented plantations. Both of them were men of means, and one a reputed son of Isham G. Harris, a former Governor of Tennessee. Both were very intelligent colored men. They have been driven out and warned not to put their feet within the state again. Their written statements and affidavits I have, and will cheerfully place them in the hands of the committee if they desire it. They are reliable men; I know them both.

A former Mississippi slaveholder wrote:

As a man who has been deprived of a large number of persons he once claimed as slaves, I protest against such a course. If it is intended to follow up the abolition of slavery by a liberal and enlightened policy, by which I mean bestowing upon them the full rights of other citizens, then I can give this movement my heart and hand. But if the Negro is to be left in a helpless condition, far more miserable than that of slavery, I would ask what was the object of taking him from those who claimed his services.

General Chetlain tells us that while he was in command, for two months, of the Jackson District, containing nine counties, there was an average [ 142 ] of one black man killed every day, and that in moving out forty miles on an expedition he found seven Negroes wantonly butchered. Colonel Thomas, assistant commissioner of the [Freedmen's] bureau for this state, tells us that there is now a daily average of two or three black men killed in Mississippi; the sable patriots in blue as they return, are the objects of especial spite.

Governor Sharkey of Mississippi said:

My expectation concerning them is that they are destined to extinction, beyond all doubt. We must judge of the future by the past. I could tell you a great many circumstances to that effect; I am sorry I did not come prepared with means to state the percentage of deaths among them. It is alarming, appalling, I think they will gradually die out.

General Fisk received a letter from a rich planter living in DeSoto County, Mississippi. "He had on his plantation a little girl, and wrote me a long letter in relation to it, which closed up by saying: 'As to recognizing the rights of freedmen to their children, I will say there is not one man or woman in all the South who believes they are free, but we consider them as stolen property – stolen by the bayonets of the damnable United States government. Yours truly, T. Yancey.'

There is one thing that must be taken into account, and that is there will exist a very strong disposition among the masters to control these people and keep them as a subordinate and subjected class. Undoubtedly they intend to do that. I think the tendency to establish a system of serfdom is the great danger to be guarded against. I talked with a planter in the La Fourche district, near Tebadouville; he said he was not in favor of secession; he avowed his hope and expectation that slavery would be restored there in some form. I said: 'If we went away and left these people now, do you suppose you could reduce them to slavery?' He laughed to scorn the idea that they could not. 'What!' said I. 'These men who have had arms in their hands?' 'Yes,' he said; 'we should take the arms away from them, of course.'

There was no inconsiderable number of Southerners who stoutly maintained that Negroes were not free. The Planters' Party of Louisiana in 1864 proposed to revive the Constitution of 1852 with all its slavery features. They believed that Lincoln had emancipated the slaves in the rebellious parts of the country as a war measure. Slavery remained intact within the Federal lines except as to the return of fugitives, and might be reinstated everywhere at the close of hostilities; or, in any case, compensation might be obtained by loyal citizens through the decision of the Supreme Court.

The situation in Texas was peculiar. During the war, Texan produce had been sent to Europe by the way of Mexico, and a steady stream of cash came in which made slavery all the more valuable. At the end of the war slavery was essentially unimpaired. When the Federal soldiers approached, some of the planters set their Negroes free and some Negroes ran away, but most of the Negroes were kept on the plantations [ 143 ] to await Federal action, and there was widespread belief that slavery was an institution and would continue in some form.

The Houston, Texas, Telegraph was of the opinion that emancipation was certain to take place but that compulsory labor would replace slavery. Since the Negro was to be freed by the Federal Government solely with a view to the safety of the Union, his condition would be modified only so far as to insure this, but not so far as materially to weaken the agricultural resources of the country. Therefore, the Negroes would be compelled to work under police regulations of a stringent character.

Mr. Sumner reported in 1866 a special slave trade from the South to the West Indies and South America.

Another big trade is going on; that of running Negroes to Cuba and Brazil. They are running through the country dressed in Yankee clothes, hiring men, giving them any price they ask, to make turpentine on the bay, sometimes on the rivers, sometimes to make sugar. They get them on the cars. Of course the Negro don't know where he is going. They get him to the bay and tell him to go on the steamer to go around the coast, and away goes poor Cuffee to slavery again. They are just cleaning out this section of the country of the likeliest men and women in it. Federal officers are mixed up in it, too.

So much for the attitude of the owning class, the former slave-owners. But the great mass of the Southerners were not slaveholders; they were white peasant-farmers, artisans, with a few merchants and professional men. Large numbers of these were fed by the Federal government and formed a considerable proportion of the fugitives after the war.

General Hatch reported in 1866:

The poorer classes of the white people have an intense dislike" toward Negroes in Mississippi. Five-sixths of the soldiers in the Confederate Army were not slave-owners, and had fought against the competition of Negroes, and for their continued slavery

The most discouraging feature was the utter helplessness of the white community in the face of the terrible problem. Almost any thoughtful traveler could see that the majority of the whites were parasites, idlers and semi-vagabonds. According to Sidney Andrews, 'The Negro, as bad as his condition is,' said he, 'seems to me, on the whole, to accommodate himself more easily than the whites to the changed situation. I should say that the question at issue in the South is not 'What shall be done with the Negro?' but 'What shall be done with the whites?' The blacks manage to live comfortably for the most part and help each other; but the whites, accustomed to having all their affairs managed by an aristocracy which was then ruined, seemed [ 144 ] powerless. They chose committees and reported cases of suffering, but any organized action on a large scale could not be expected. It was hoped that aid for the whites would come from the North, for fearful distress from hunger was inevitable.

General Turner said of the conditions in Virginia:

Among the lower classes of the whites there is a spirit of aggression against the Negro. … And a great many of the Negroes are inclined to take the thing in their own hands; they are not disposed to be imposed upon by those people, if they can have half a show to defend themselves. …

With the lower classes – I speak now more particularly of the city of Richmond – probably the feeling does not exist to such an extent in the rural districts – there is an impulsive feeling of aggression – a desire to get the Negro out of the way. They do not think of his rights; they do not appear to know what it means; only they feel that the Negro has something.

General Fisk spoke of Tennessee:

It is a melancholy fact that among the bitterest opponents of the Negro in Tennessee are the intensely radical loyalists of the mountain district – the men who have been in our armies. …

The poorer classes of the white people have an intense dislike toward them," said General Hatch. He especially emphasized the situation in Tennessee and spoke of the aid that was being given the white fugitives. He said that the Negro knew that without legal rights he was not safe from the poor whites, and that they had not issued to the Negroes one-tenth of the rations that they had given the poor whites.

The hatred toward the Negro as a freeman is intense among the low and brutal, who are the vast majority. Murders, shootings, whippings, robbing and brutal treatment of every kind are daily inflicted upon them, and I am sorry to say in most cases they can get no redress. They don't know where to complain or how to seek justice after they have been abused and cheated. The habitual deference toward the white man makes them fearful of his anger and revenge.

The Union members of the Tennessee legislature said:

That long before the war common laborers had learned to curse the Yankees and Abolitionists and to talk about Negro equality and his rights in the territories. With all this went a great degree of personal violence. Leaving out for the moment the group violence, the organized fight against the Negro which was continuous, the personal physical opposition was continually in existence.

A candidate for Congress in Virginia in 1865 said:

I am opposed to the Southern states being taxed at all for the redemption [ 145 ]of this national debt, either directly or indirectly; and I will vote to repeal all laws that have heretofore been passed for that purpose; and, in doing so, I do not consider that I violate any obligations to which the South was a party. We have never plighted our faith for the redemption of the war debt. The people will be borne down with taxes for years to come; even if the war debt is repudiated, it will be the duty of the government to support the maimed and disabled soldiers, and this will be a great expense; and if the United States Government requires the South to be taxed for the support of Union soldiers, we should insist that all disabled soldiers should be maintained by the United States Government without regard to the side they had taken in the war.

The national debt doubtless seems to you beyond the reach of any hand. Yet I regard it as very probable that one or two or all of three things will be attempted within three years after the Southern members of Congress are admitted to seats – the repudiation of the national debt, the assumption of the Confederate debt, or the payment of several hundred million dollars to the South for property destroyed and slaves emancipated.

A leader from South Carolina, James H. Campbell, said:

I believe that when our votes are admitted into that Congress, if we are tolerably wise, governed by a moderate share of common sense, we will have our own way. I am speaking now not to be reported. We will have our own way yet, if we are true to ourselves. We know the past, we know not what is to be our future. Are we not in a condition to accept what we cannot help? Are we not in a condition where it is the part of wisdom to wait and give what we cannot avoid giving? I believe as surely as we are a people, so surely, if we are guided by wisdom, we will by the beginning of the next presidential election which is all that is known of the Constitution – for when you talk of the Constitution of the United States it means the presidential election and the share of the spoils – I believe then we may hold the balance of power.

Thus gradually, the South conceived a picture. It deliberately looked backward towards slavery in a day when two Southern poor whites were Presidents of the United States.

Although he was the Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, too, in many respects, was looking backward toward the past. Lincoln's solution for the Negro problem was colonization. In this respect he went back to the early nineteenth century when the American Colonization Society was formed, with what proved to be two antagonistic objects: The first was the philanthropic object of removing the Negro to Africa and starting him on the road to an independent culture in his [ 146 ] own fatherland. The second and more influential object was to get rid of the free Negro in the United States so as to make color caste the permanent foundation of American Negro slavery. The contradiction of these two objects was the real cause of the failure of colonization, since it early incurred the bitter opposition of both Abolitionists and Negro leaders. The result of the movement was the establishment of Liberia in an inhospitable land and without adequate capital and leadership. The survival of that little country to our day is one of the miracles of Negro effort, despite all of the propaganda of criticism that has been leveled against that country.

When the Negro question became prominent before the war, the project of colonization was revived, and Abraham Lincoln believed in it "as one means of solving the great race problem involved in the existence of slavery in the United States. … Without being an enthusiast, Lincoln was a firm believer in colonization." ¹¹

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln said at Peoria, Illinois:

If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia – to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me that, whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then ? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think that I would not hold one in slavery at any rate, yet the point is not clear enough for me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.¹²

Later, speaking at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln declared: "That the separation of races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation."

Several prominent Republicans espoused deportation in 1859. F. B. Blair of Missouri wrote to Senator Doolittle of Minnesota:

I am delighted that you are pressing the colonization scheme in your campaign speeches. I touched upon it three or four times in my addresses in Minnesota and if I am any judge of effect it is the finest theme with which to get at the hearts of the people and [it] can be defended with success at all points. ... I made it the culminating point and inevitable result of Republican doctrine." ¹³

When the general strike of slaves began during the war, and the black fugitives began to pour into the Federal lines, Lincoln again [ 147 ]brought forward his proposal of colonization, not simply for the freedmen, but for such free Negroes as should wish to emigrate. He suggested an appropriation for acquiring suitable territory and for other expenses.

By an act of April 16, 1862, which abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, Congress made an appropriation of $100,000 for voluntary Negro emigrants at an expense of $100 each; and later, July 16, an additional appropriation of $500,000 was made at Lincoln's request. The President was authorized "to make provision for transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States, of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this act, as may be willing to emigrate, having first obtained the consent of the government of said country to their protection and settlement within the same, with all the rights and privileges of freemen."¹⁴

By an act of July 17, 1862, the President was authorized to colonize Negroes made free by the confiscation acts. Proceeds from confiscated property were to replace monies appropriated for colonization.

Charles Sumner vigorously attacked these plans. He said colonization was unwise:

Because, besides its intrinsic and fatal injustice, you will deprive the country of what it most needs, which is labor. Those freedmen on the spot are better than mineral wealth. Each is a mine, out of which riches can be drawn, provided you let him share the product, and through him that general industry will be established which is better than anything but virtue, and is, indeed, a form of virtue.¹⁵

In several cases, President Lincoln interviewed delegations on the subject. He believed that a good colonization scheme would greatly encourage voluntary emancipation in the Border States. He spoke to the Border State representatives and said that room in South America for Negro colonization could be obtained cheaply. He received in August, 1862, a committee of colored men, headed by E. M. Thomas, and urged colonization on account of the difference of race.

Should the people of your race be colonized and where? Why should they leave this country? You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted it affords a reason why we should be separated. If we deal with those who are not free at the beginning and whose intellects are clouded by slavery, we have very poor material to [ 148 ]start with. If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter much might be accomplished.¹⁶

A bill was introduced into the House in 1862 appropriating $200,000,000 – $20,000,000 to colonize and the rest to purchase 600,000 slaves of Unionist owners in Border States. The bill was not passed but the committee made an elaborate report on colonization July 16, 1862, declaring:

The most formidable difficulty which lies in the way of emancipation in most if not in all the slave states is the belief which obtains especially among those who own no slaves that if the Negroes shall become free they must still continue in our midst, and … in some measure be made equal to the Anglo-Saxon race. … The belief [in the inferiority of the Negro race] … is indelibly fixed upon the public mind. The differences of the races separate them as with a wall of fire; there is no instance in history where liberated slaves have lived in harmony with their former masters when denied equal rights – but the Anglo-Saxon will never give his consent to Negro equality, and the recollections of the former relation of master and slave will be perpetuated by the changeless color of the Ethiop's skin. Emancipation therefore without colonization could offer little to the Negro race. A revolution of the blacks might result, but only to their undoing. To appreciate and understand this difficulty it is only necessary for one to observe that in proportion as the legal barriers established by slavery have been removed by emancipation the prejudice of caste becomes stronger and public opinion more intolerant to the Negro race. ¹⁷

In his second annual message, December 1, 1862, the President referred to communications from colored men who favored emigration, and to protests from several South American countries against receiving Negroes. He requested further appropriations for colonizing free Negroes with their own consent, but showed a deviation from his former philosophy:

I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization; and yet I wish to say there is an objection urged against free colored persons remaining in the country,[ 149 ] which is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious. It is insisted that their presence would injure and displace white labor more by being free than by remaining slaves. If they stay in their old places they jostle no white laborers; if they leave their old places, they leave them open to white laborers. Logically then there is neither more nor less of it. Emancipation, even without deportation, would probably enhance the wages of white labor and very surely would not reduce them. Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborer out of the country and by precisely so much you increase the demand for and wages of white labor.

Several negotiations were begun with foreign countries that owned colonies in the West Indies, and with South American countries. The Cabinet discussed the matter. Bates wanted compulsory deportation, but the President objected to this. Finally, he settled on two projects: one, in Panama, and the other in the West Indies, where an island was ceded by Haiti. An adventurer, named Kock, undertook to carry five thousand colored emigrants to the island, but the result was a fiasco and a large number of the four hundred actually sent died of disease and neglect, and were finally brought back to the United States on a war vessel.

As late as April, 1865, President Lincoln said to General Butler: 'But what shall we do with the Negroes after they are free?' inquired Lincoln.

I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot, if we don't get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of some 150,000 men. I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves. You have been a staunch friend of the race from the time you first advised me to enlist them at New Orleans. You have had a great deal of experience in moving bodies of men by water – your movement up the James was a magnificent one. Now we shall have no use for our very large navy. What then are our difficulties in sending the blacks away? …

I wish you would examine the question and give me your views upon it and go into the figures as you did before in some degree so as to show whether the Negroes can be exported.' Butler replied: 'I will go over this matter with all diligence and tell you my conclusions as soon as I can.' The second day after that Butler called early in the morning and said: 'Mr. President, I have gone very carefully over my calculations as to the power of the country to export the Negroes of the South and I assure you that, using all your naval vessels and all the merchant marine fit to cross the seas with safety, it will be impossible for you to transport to the nearest place that can be found fit for them – and that is the Island of San Domingo, half as fast as Negro children will be born here.' ¹⁸

The Secretary of the Interior in December, 1863, reported that the Negroes were no longer willing to leave the United States and that they were needed in the army. For these reasons, he thought that they should not be forcibly deported. On July 2, 1864, all laws relating to Negro colonization were repealed.

Lincoln was impressed by the loss of capital invested in slaves, but curiously never seemed seriously to consider the correlative loss of wage and opportunity of slave workers, the tangible results of whose exploitation had gone into the planters' pockets for two centuries.

A. K. McClure says:

Some time in August, 1864, I spent an hour or more with him alone at the White House, and I, then, for the first time spoke with frankness on the subject of restoring the Insurgent States. … He startled me by his proposition that he had carefully written out in his own hand on a sheet of note paper, proposing to pay the South $400,000,000 for the loss of their slaves. He was then a candidate for reelection, and grave doubts were entertained, until after Sherman's capture of Atlanta and Sheridan's victories in the valley, as to the result of the contest between Lincoln and McClellan; and he well knew that if public announcement had been made of his willingness to pay the South $400,000,000 for emancipation it would have defeated him overwhelmingly." ¹⁹

This project of compensation for lost capital invested in slaves was permanently dropped and Lincoln had to turn to the question of the relation of the seceded states to the Union once the war was ended. The situation was absolutely unique. It was impossible to appeal to constitutional precedence, for the Constitution never contemplated anything like the things that had happened between 1861 and 1865.

The grave question of the future relation of the seceded states to the Union could not be settled by Lincoln's pragmatic procedure. It must be visioned as a whole and put into law and logic. Toward this, Lincoln was moving slowly and tentatively seeking a formula that would work and yet be just to all men of all colors, and consistent with the legal fabric of the nation.

Charles Sumner first laid down a comprehensive formula February 11, 1862:

1. Resolved, That any vote of secession, or other act, by a state hostile to the supremacy of the Constitution within its territory, is inoperative and void against the Constitution, and, when sustained by force, becomes a practical abdication by the State of all rights under the Constitution, while the treason it involves works instant forfeiture of all functions and powers essential to the continued existence of the State as a body politic; so that from such time forward the territory falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, as other territory, and the State becomes, according to the language of the law, felo-de-se.²⁰

This plan was too radical for Lincoln, but that spring he proceeded to appoint military governors in Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas and Louisiana, where the Union Army held parts of the states. During the summer, he corresponded with Southern friends in Louisiana, and [ 151 ] in December, clue to his pressure, two members of Congress were elected in Louisiana from New Orleans and its suburbs, which was the only part under the control of the Union Army.

The Confederate legislature which was meeting simultaneously at Shreveport declared:

(1) Every citizen [Negroes were not citizens] should vote who had not forfeited his citizenship by electing to adhere to the government of the United States.

(2) Five hundred thousand dollars were voted to pay for slaves lost by death or otherwise, while impressed on the public works.

(3) Any slave bearing arms against the inhabitants of the state or the Confederate States, or who should engage in any revolt or rebellion or insurrection should suffer death. ²¹

The two Louisiana Congressmen were admitted to Congress with some hesitation, and Lincoln was encouraged to make further experiment along this line. In his message of December 8, 1863, therefore, he outlined a general plan of Reconstruction.

He regarded the states as still existing, even during the war, and that the rebellion was a combination of disloyal persons in the states. Reconstruction was an executive problem which consisted in creating a loyal class in the states and supporting that class by military power until it organized and operated the state government. The loyal class was to swear allegiance to the United States and to the Acts of Congress unless they were held void or changed, and all persons could take this oath unless they were civil officials of the Confederate Government, or military officers above the rank of Colonel or Lieutenant in the navy; or unless they had resigned from Congress or the United States Courts, or from army and navy, in order to aid the rebellion; or unless they had not treated colored soldiers or the leaders of colored soldiers as prisoners of war.

Such a loyal class he was prepared to recognize in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina, when they formed not less than one-tenth of the votes cast in their state at the presidential election of 1860. Lincoln was careful to say that whether members who went to Congress from any of these states should be admitted or not rested exclusively with the Houses of Congress and not with the President.

Virginia was not included because Lincoln had already recognized the government at Alexandria as the true government of Virginia during the war, and, therefore, assumed that Virginia needed no Reconstruction, but was to be treated like Kentucky and Missouri. Of course, the support of a government consisting of only one-tenth of its voters had to come from the outside; that is, from the Federal [ 152 ] army. In his accompanying proclamation of the same date, the President also engaged by this proclamation not to object to any provision which might be adopted by such state governments in relation to the freed people of the states which should recognize and declare their permanent freedom and provide for present condition "as a laboring, landless, and homeless class."

Here emerged a clear feature of the Lincoln plan which has not been emphasized. On this matter of the freedom of the Negroes, and a real, not a nominal freedom, Abraham Lincoln was adamant. In December, 1863, his "message contained an unusually forcible and luminous expression of the principles embraced in the proclamation. The President referred to the dark and doubtful days which followed the announcement of the policy of emancipation and of the employment of black soldiers; the gradual justification of those acts by the successes which the national arms had since achieved; of the change of the public spirit of the Border States in favor of emancipation; the enlistment of black soldiers, and their efficient and creditable behavior in arms; the absence of any tendency to servile insurrection or to violence and cruelty among the Negroes; the sensible improvement in the public opinion of Europe and of America.

In justification of his requiring, in the oath of amnesty, a submission to and support of the anti-slavery laws and proclamations, he said: 'Those laws and proclamations were enacted and put forth for the purpose of aiding in the suppression of the rebellion. To give them their fullest effect, there had to be a pledge for their maintenance. In my judgment they have aided and will further aid the cause for which they were intended. To now abandon them would be not only to relinquish a lever of power, but would also be a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.'

The reception of Lincoln's message to Congress in December, 1863, was enthusiastic:

Men acted as though the millennium had come. Chandler was delighted, Sumner was joyous, apparently forgetting for the moment his doctrine of state suicide; while at the other political pole, Dixon and Reverdy Johnson said the message was 'highly satisfactory.' Henry Wilson said to the President's secretary: 'He has struck another great blow. Tell him for me, God bless him.' The effect was similar in the House of Representatives. George S. Boutwell, who represented the extreme anti-slavery element of New England, said: 'It is a very able and shrewd paper. It has great points of popularity, and it is right.' Owen Lovejoy, the leading abolitionist of the West, seemed to see on the mountain the feet of one bringing good tidings. 'I shall live,' he said, 'to see slavery ended in America.' … Francis W. Kellogg of Michigan [ 153 ] went shouting about the lobby: 'The President is the only man. There is none like him in the world. He sees more widely and more clearly than any of us.' Henry T. Blow, the radical member from St. Louis (who was six months later denouncing Mr. Lincoln as a traitor to freedom) said: 'God bless old Abe! I am one of the Radicals who have always believed in him.' Horace Greeley, who was on the floor of the House, went so far as to say the message was 'devilish good.'²²

The causes of this jubilation were, however, dangerously diverse; the Abolitionists saw mainly the determination of Lincoln utterly to abolish slavery. This had not been clear before. Lincoln had never been an Abolitionist; he had never believed in full Negro citizenship; he had tried desperately to win the war without Negro soldiers, and he had emancipated the slaves only on account of military necessity. On the other hand, Lincoln learned; he stood now for abolishing slavery forever; he gave full credit and praise to Negro soldiers; and he was soon to face the problem of Negro citizenship.

Northern capital and Southern sympathizers in the North hailed the message because it carried no note of revenge or punishment, and contemplated speedy restoration of political independence in the South and normal industry.

Now came the very pertinent question as to just how this freedom of Negroes was to be enforced and maintained. Lincoln, working at this problem in Louisiana, in his correspondence with Banks, who was now in command, and Shepley, Military Governor, encouraged preparations for a reconstructed state government. Banks arranged to elect state officials and accepted as the basis of voting the provisions of the Louisiana Constitution of 1852 which, of course, allowed no Negroes to vote.

Accordingly, he declared the electors to be:

"Every free white male, 21 years of age, who had been resident in the state 12 months, and in the parish 6 months, who shall be a citizen of the United States and shall have taken the oath prescribed by the President in December, 1863." The total vote on February 22, 1864, was 11,355, of which Hahn received 6,171, Fellows, 2,959, and Flanders, 2,225, giving a majority to Hahn for Governor. ²³

If this experiment in Reconstruction had been attempted anywhere but in Louisiana, it is possible that the whole question of Negro suffrage would not have been raised then or perhaps for many years after. But by peculiar fate, it happened that a problem of Negro voting was immediately raised in Louisiana by the election of 1864, which simply could not be ignored. Usually, the argument concerning Negro suffrage after the war was met by an expression of astonishment that anybody could for a moment consider the admission of ignorant, brutish [ 154 ] field hands to the ballot-box in the South. But that was not the problem which faced General Banks and Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

In Louisiana, where the question of Negro suffrage first arose as a problem, there existed a group of free Negroes. Their fathers had been free when Louisiana was annexed to the United States. Their numbers had increased from 7,585 in 1810 to 25,505 in 1840, and then declined to 18,647 in 1860, by emigration and by passing over into the white race on the part of their octoroon and lighter members.

Negroes in Louisiana in 1860 owned fifteen million dollars' worth of property. The Ricaud family alone in 1859 owned 4,000 acres of land and 350 slaves, at a total value of $250,000. The development of this mulatto group was extraordinary. Beginning under the French and Spanish, they played a remarkable part in the history of the state. The Spanish government while in possession of Louisiana had raised among them two companies of militia, "composed of all the mechanics which the city possessed."

This group of Negroes took part in the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, and was extravagantly praised by Andrew Jackson. They were the cause of an extraordinary blossoming of artistic life, which made New Orleans in the early part of the nineteenth century the most picturesque city of America. Negro musicians and artists arose. Eugene Warburg, a colored man, went from New Orleans to become a sculptor in France. Dubuclet became a musician in France, and the Seven "Lamberts taught and composed in North and South America and Europe. Sidney was decorated for his work by the King of Portugal, and Edmund Dede became a director of a leading orchestra in France.

Alexandre Pickhil was a painter, who died between 1840 and 1850. Joseph Abeillard was an architect and planned many New Orleans buildings before the war. Norbert Rillieux invented the vacuum-pan used in producing sugar; as an engineer and contractor Rillieux had no rivals in Louisiana. The general periodicals in New Orleans praised him but seldom alluded to his Negro descent.

In 1843-1845, New Orleans colored folk issued a magazine and seventeen of the young mulatto poets collected an anthology called Les Cenelles, which they published as a small volume. They were all men educated either in France, or in private schools in Louisiana, and were in contact with some of the best writers and literature of the day. It is doubtful if anywhere else in the United States a literary group of equal culture could have been found at the time. In 1850, four-fifths of the free Negroes living in New Orleans could read and write, and they had over a thousand children in school. Among them were carpenters, tailors, shoemakers and printers, besides teachers, planters and professional men.

James Derham, a colored man in New Orleans in 1800, had a medical practice of $3,000 a year. He was especially commended by Dr. Benjamin Rush. Below the professional level were numbers of Negroes of ability. There was the celebrated sorceress, Marie Laveau, who, about 1835, exercised an extraordinary influence throughout the city. In 1850, Louisiana had a colored architect, 6 physicians, 4 engineers, and over 20 teachers in schools and in music. As early as 1803, free colored men were admitted to the police force to patrol outside the city limits, to catch runaway slaves and stop looting and crime.

There was systematic common law marriage between whites and mulattoes. The connections formed with the quadroons and octoroons were often permanent enough for the rearing of large families, some of whom obtained their freedom through the affection of their father-master, and received the education he would have bestowed upon legitimate offspring.

When Butler came to New Orleans, it was one of these colored Creoles who entertained him at a banquet of seven courses served on silver.

The secret, darling desire of this class is to rank as human beings in their native city; or, as the giver of the grand banquet expressed it, 'No matter where I fight; I only wish to spend what I have, and fight as long as I can, if only my boy may stand in the street equal to a white boy when the war is over.'²⁴

The best blood of the South flowed in their veins, and a great deal of it; for 'the darkest of them,' said General Butler, 'were about of the complexion of the late Mr. Webster.' ²⁵

This was the history of the free Negroes of New Orleans, and to this must be added their labor, cooperation and enlistment as soldiers. Could the government of the United States allow Confederate soldiers to vote simply because they were white, and exclude Union soldiers simply because they were yellow or black? Even if the Negroes had been quiescent and willing to be ignored at this critical time, their rights were indisputable. But they were not quiet.

The Negroes themselves made strong statements. In November, 1863, the free men of color held a meeting in New Orleans and drew up an appeal to Governor Shepley "asking to be allowed to register and vote." They reviewed their services under Jackson, who called them "my fellow citizens" just after the battle of New Orleans, and they declared their present loyalty to the Union. "For forty-nine years," the petition ran, "they have never ceased to be peaceable citizens, paying their taxes on assessments of more than nine million dollars."

But, however strongly this petition appealed to Shepley, it was manifestly impossible to grant it at this time. The decisive reason was [ 156 ] that if Negroes had been allowed to vote in this election they would have formed the majority of the voting population of Union Louisiana!

So far as is known, Shepley returned no answer to the appeal; for in the following January, the colored Union Radical Association sent a committee to call on Shepley requesting him to recognize the "rights" of the free colored population to the franchise. Shepley, unwilling and unable to assume such responsibility, referred the committee to General Banks, but the latter gave them no definite reply. He explained later:

I thought it unwise to give them the suffrage, as it would have created a Negro constituency. The whites might give suffrage to the Negroes, but if the Negroes gave suffrage to the whites, it would result in the Negro losing it. My idea was to get a decision from Judge Durell declaring a man with a major part of white blood should possess all the rights of a white man; but I had a great deal to do, and a few men who wanted to break the bundle of sticks without loosening the band defeated it." ²⁶

Accordingly, the colored committee sent P. M. Tourne to Washington to advocate their claims before the President. The President sent a man named McKee to New Orleans to study conditions among the colored people. Lincoln was impressed but characteristically reticent and slow in action.

General Banks next issued a call for a constitutional convention to be held March 28, 1864, to amend the Constitution of 1852. Contrary to this Constitution, he based representation in the new government on the white population alone, so as to reduce the power of the great landholders; and Negroes were not allowed to vote. The total vote for this convention was only 6,400.

When asked to direct the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1864, Lincoln refused and wrote:

While I very well know what I would be glad for Louisiana to do, it is quite a difficult thing for me to assume direction in the matter. I would be glad for her to make a new Constitution recognizing the Emancipation Proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the state to which the Proclamation does not apply. And while she is at it, I think it would not be objectionable for her to adopt some practical system by which the two races could gradually lift themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new. Education for young blacks should be included in the plan. After all, the power or element of 'contract' may be sufficient for this probationary period, and by its simplicity and flexibility be better.

As an anti-slavery man, I have a motive to desire emancipation [ 157 ] which pro-slavery men do not have; but even they have strong enough reasons to thus place themselves again under the shield of the Union, and to thus perpetually hedge against the recurrence of the scenes through which we are now passing. …

For my own part, I think I shall not, in any event, retract the Emancipation Proclamation; nor, as executive, ever return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that Proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress. If Louisiana shall send members to Congress, their admission will depend, as you know, upon the respective Houses and not upon the President.²⁷

Here again was the same insistence that Negro freedom must be real and guaranteed and again the puzzling question, how could this be accomplished? Abraham Lincoln took a forward step and by his letter of March 13 to the newly elected Governor Hahn, he made the first tentative suggestion for a Negro suffrage in the South. Evidently, the persistent agitation of colored New Orleans inspired this:

Executive Mansion,
Washington, March 13, 1864.

My dear Sir: In congratulating you on having fixed your name in history as the first Free State Governor of Louisiana, now you are about to have a convention, which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise, I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in, as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help in some trying time in the future to keep the jewel of Liberty in the family of freedom. But this is only suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.

Truly yours,
A. Lincoln.²⁸

This was a characteristic Lincoln gesture. He did not demand or order; he suggested, and incidentally adduced logical arguments of tremendous strength. This letter of Lincoln's, says Blaine, was "of deep and almost prophetic significance. It was perhaps the earliest proposition from any authentic source to endow the Negro with the right of suffrage." ²⁹

Thus, with his unflinching honesty of logic, Lincoln faced the problem of Negro voters. It was unthinkable that Negroes who had fought to preserve the Union or that Negroes of education and property should be excluded from the right to vote by the very nation whose life they had saved. On the other hand, unless a state saw this clearly, he did not see how it could be forced to see it. He made the suggestion, [ 158 ] therefore, quietly and secretly, and he knew that he had a slowly growing public opinion in the North behind him.

"To keep the jewel of Liberty in the family of freedom," was a splendid and pregnant phrase and it had back of it unassailable facts.

The delegates met April 6, 1864, and sat for 78 days. The convention was divided on the question of compensation for loyal slave-holders, the education of the freedmen at the expense of the state, and Negro suffrage. Slavery was abolished by a vote of 72-13. An appeal was made to Congress for compensation for slaves; and on May 10, the convention adopted a resolution declaring that the legislature should never pass any act authorizing free Negroes to vote. Banks and Hahn, however, brought pressure to bear and some forty votes were changed, so that June 23, Gorlinsky moved that "The legislature shall have power to pass laws extending the right of suffrage to such persons, citizens of the United States, as by military service, by taxation to support the government, or by intellectual fitness, may be deemed entitled thereto." Many members did not understand this, but Sullivan of New Orleans denounced it as "A nigger resolution," and moved to lay it on the table. Without discussion, it was adopted 48-32.

Before the assembling of the convention, Banks on his own responsibility had appointed a Board of Education, of three members, for the freedmen's schools and given it power to establish schools in every school district, and to levy a tax to support the system. This order was discussed in the convention, and finally approved by a vote of 72-9. Also, by a vote of 53-27, general taxation for the support of free public schools for all was approved. The convention discussed a proposition of recognizing all persons as white who had less than one-fourth of Negro blood. But this involved too intricate inquiries into ancestry, a matter which often in Louisiana led to duels and murder. It was, therefore, voted down.

The expense of this white convention amounted to more than $1,000 a day and included liquor, cigars, carriage hire, stationery and furniture. It illustrated the extravagant habits of the time, and was quite as bad as any similar waste in South Carolina when Negroes were part of the legislature. The New Orleans Times described some of the proceedings of the convention as "sickening and disgusting" and said that the president was "drunk and a damned fool," and that "pandemonium" had reigned. ³⁰

The Constitution was finally adopted, 67-16, and the convention adjourned in August with a provision that it could be reconvoked by the president for further amending the Constitution. The Constitution was adopted by a vote of 6,836 to 1,566.

On September 5, 1864, a legislature was elected according to the [ 159 ] new Constitution. There were 9,838 votes cast, and it was alleged that many colored persons were allowed to register and vote. The new legislature met October 3, 1864. This legislature is said by some authorities to have refused by a large majority to grant the suffrage to the Negro. Ficklin, on the other hand, says that no final vote was actually taken. Certainly the legislature was against Negro suffrage. And when a petition was introduced from five thousand Negroes, "many if not the majority" of whom had been in the Federal army, asking for the suffrage, no action was taken. One member, apparently expressing the general sentiment, said: "It will be time enough to grant this petition when all the other free states grant it and set us the example. When this state grants it, I shall go to China."³¹

Governor Hahn made no suggestion, and when he resigned from office, said that universal suffrage would be granted "whenever it is deemed wise and timely. Louisiana has already done more than three-fourths of the Northern states."

The Legislature refused to permit marriages between blacks and whites, and there was one attempt to refer the question of Negro suffrage to the people. The Thirteenth Amendment was adopted and United States Senators were elected, including Governor Hahn for the term beginning in 1865.

Meantime, the whole problem of Reconstruction in Louisiana came up in Congress and met the opposition represented by the Wade- Davis Bill.

In Arkansas, in a similar way, by white suffrage, an anti-slavery Constitution was adopted, and Senators and Representatives elected in the spring of 1864.

Yet, after all, this was general and preliminary, and certain details must be settled before Representatives and Senators from these states could be received in Congress; especially the question loomed as to how far Reconstruction was going to be an automatic executive function and how far a matter of Congressional supervision.

Congress, thereupon, decided to lay down a fundamental plan. The part of the President's message on Reconstruction was referred in the House to a select committee, of which Henry Winter Davis was chairman. The result was a congressional scheme of Reconstruction.

The Wade-Davis Bill, passed July 4, 1864, provided that the eleven states which had seceded were to be treated as rebellious communities, over each of which the President would appoint a Provisional Governor. This Governor should exercise all powers of government until the state was recognized by Congress as restored. Whenever the Governor regarded the rebellion in his state as suppressed, he was to direct the United States Marshal to enroll all resident white male [ 160 ] citizens, and give them an opportunity to swear allegiance to the United States. When a majority of these citizens had taken the oath, they could elect delegates to a convention and the convention would establish a state government. Persons who had held any office under the Confederate government could not vote for delegates, or be elected as delegates to the convention. The Convention was to adopt a state constitution which must abolish slavery, repudiate Confederate and state debts incurred by the Confederates, and disqualify Confederate officials from voting, or being elected Governor or a member of the Legislature. When this Constitution was ratified by a majority of the voters, the President, with the consent of Congress, would proclaim the state government as established. After that, Representatives, Senators, and presidential electors could be chosen. The bill also abolished slavery in the rebellious states during the process of Reconstruction.

Thus Congress followed Charles Sumner's "State Suicide" theory and formulated Reconstruction measures which regarded the seceding states as territories and administered them as such by civil government until they were re-admitted.

This bill did not differ radically from the President's plan. It was quite as liberal to the Confederates and wiser in requiring a majority of voters, instead of only one-tenth, for Reconstruction. It was more methodical and complete because Lincoln had been leaving the matter vague until he could sense more clearly the possibilities.

Both the Wade-Davis plan and the Lincoln plan excluded the Negro from the right of suffrage. In the House there was a motion to strike out the word "white," but this was cut off by the previous question. Boutwell regretted, May 4, that this limitation of the right to vote seemed required by the present judgment of the House and of the country. When the bill came to the Senate July 1, Wade, as Chairman, reported it to the Committee with an amendment striking out the word "white." This amendment received only five votes, including that of Charles Sumner. Sumner, however, finally voted for the bill because of its provisions against slavery. He had already introduced, May 27, 1864, another resolution anticipating the Committee of Fifteen in the 39th Congress, and declaring that no representatives from Confederate states should be admitted without a vote of both Houses. Lincoln, however, became more and more obdurate. He wrote: "Some single mind must be master," and he wished strongly to carry through Reconstruction without too much interference.

When the Wade-Davis Bill came to the President July 4, 1864, he laid it aside and refused to sign it, explaining his position July 8, 1864, in a proclamation:

While I am – as I was in December [ 161 ] last, when by proclamation I propounded a plan of restoration – unprepared by formal approval of this bill to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration; and while I am also unprepared to declare that the free State constitutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, shall be set aside and held for naught, thereby repealing and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same as to further effort, or to declare a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in states; but am at the same time sincerely hoping and expecting that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the nation may be adopted, nevertheless, I am fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the bill as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any state choosing to adopt it; and I am, and at all times shall be, prepared to give the executive aid and assistance to any such people, so soon as military resistance to the United States shall have been suppressed in any such state, and the people thereof shall have sufficiently returned to their obedience to the Constitution and the laws of the United States, in which cases military governors will be appointed, with directions to proceed according to the bill.

Senator Wade and Representative Davis took their contentions to the country in the summer of 1864.

We have read without surprise, but not without indignation, the proclamation of the President of the 8th of July, 1864. The supporters of the Administration are responsible to the country for its conduct; and it is their right and duty to check the encroachments of the Executive on the authority of Congress, and to require it to confine itself to its proper sphere.

They denounced Lincoln's Reconstruction plan and emphasized the distinction between Executive and Legislative power in Reconstruction. Despite the manifesto and opposition on other grounds, Lincoln was reelected; but the issue remained to be fought out between Congress and Johnson.

Again in his message of December, 1864, Lincoln returned even more emphatically to the matter of the freedom of the slaves. One cannot be in much doubt as to what Abraham Lincoln's reaction would have been to the black codes of South Carolina and Mississippi. Certainly no state with such laws concerning the black laborer would have been admitted to the Union with Abraham Lincoln's consent:

While I remain in my present position I shall not 'attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation. Nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that Proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress. If the people should, [ 162 ] by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to reenslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it. ³²

The Trumbull Resolution of February 18, 1865, recognizing the restored Louisiana government, revealed a disposition in the Senate to yield to Lincoln. But the rising Abolition-democracy protested. Wendell Phillips spoke in Faneuil Hall.

Gentlemen, you know very well that this nation called 4,000,000 of Negroes into citizenship to save itself. (Applause.) It never called them for their own sakes. It called them to save itself. (Cries of 'Hear, Hear.') And today this resolution offered in Faneuil Hall would take from the President of such a nation the power to protect the millions you have just lifted into danger. (Cries of 'Played out,' 'Sit down,' etc.) You won't let him protect them. (Cries of 'No.') What more contemptible object than a nation which for its own selfish purpose summons four millions of Negroes to such a position of peril, and then leaves them defenseless."

In the Senate, Sumner was adamant in his demand that all men, irrespective of color, should be equal as citizens in the reconstructed states. He believed that a first false step in this matter would be fatal. The debate began February 23, 1865, and Sumner fought every step. He moved a substitute which received only eight votes. He tried to displace the resolution, and filibustered. When asked to give up, he replied, "That is not my habit."

Sumner sent in a second substitute declaring that the cause of human rights and of the Union needed the ballots as well as the muskets of colored men. He offered another amendment imposing equal suffrage as the fundamental condition for the admission of the seceded states. A night session was called which lasted until nearly Sunday morning. Sumner was rebuked for his arrogance and assumed superiority and the Senate finally adjourned, half an hour before midnight.

Only five days of the session remained. Wade now entered the debate and denounced the Louisiana government as a mockery and compared it to the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas. Sumner again bitterly arraigned the proposed Louisiana state government as "a mere seven months' abortion, begotten by the bayonet, in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished, whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong." ³³

The bill finally failed. It was Sumner's greatest parliamentary contest and with his triumph, the cause of Negro suffrage was won. Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury and others wrote to congratulate Sumner. Douglass said:

The friends of freedom all over the country have looked to [ 163 ] you and confided in you, of all men in the United States Senate, during all this terrible war. They will look to you all the more now that peace dawns, and the final settlement of our national troubles is at hand. God grant you strength equal to your day and your duties, is my prayer and that of millions!

Ashley's Reconstruction bill came before the House of Representatives January 16, February 21, and February 22, 1865. Each draft confined sulTrage to white male citizens, except one, in which colored soldiers were admitted to the suffrage. Ashley opposed this discrimination, but his committee overruled him.

In his last public speech, April 11, 1865, Lincoln returned to the subject of Reconstruction.

The new Constitution of Louisiana, declaring Emancipation for the whole State, practically applies the proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed people, and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal, and not a single objection to it from any professed emancipationist came to my knowledge until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July, 1862, I had corresponded with different persons supposed to be interested [in] seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana. When the message of 1863, with the plan before mentioned, reached New Orleans, General Banks wrote me that he was confident that the people, with his military cooperation, would reconstruct substantially on that plan. I wrote to him and some of them to try it. They tried it, and the result is known. Such only has been my agency in setting up the Louisiana government. …

We all agree that the seceded States, so-called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the Government, civil and military, in regard to those States, is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge his own opinion whether in doing the acts he brought the States from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it. The amount of constituency, so [ 164 ] to speak, on which the new Louisiana government rests, would be more satisfactory to all if it contained 50,000, or 30,000, or even 20,000, instead of only about 12,000, as it does. It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

Still, the question is not whether the Louisiana government, as it stands, is quite all that is desirable. The question is, will it be wiser to take it as it is and help to improve it, or to reject and disperse it? Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State government? Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave State of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed the rightful political power of the state, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free State constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowered the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment, recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union and to perpetual freedom in the State – committed to the very things, and nearly all the things, the nation wants – and they ask the nation's recognition and its assistance to make good their committal.

Now, if we reject and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We, in effect, say to the white man: You are worthless or worse; we will neither help you, nor be helped by you. To the blacks we say: This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize and sustain the new government of Louisiana, the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man, too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance and energy and daring to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps towards it than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it [ 165 ] should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it." ³⁴

The tragic death of Lincoln has given currency to the theory that the Lincoln policy of Reconstruction would have been far better and more successful than the policy afterward pursued. If it is meant by this that Lincoln would have more carefully followed public opinion and worked to adjust differences, this is true. But Abraham Lincoln himself could not have settled the question of Emancipation, Negro citizenship and the vote, without tremendous difficulty.

First of all he was bitterly hated by the overwhelming mass of Southerners. Mark Pomeroy, a Northern Copperhead, voiced the extreme Southern opinion when he wrote:

It is you Republicans who set up at the head of the nation a hideous clown … who became a shameless tyrant, a tyrant justly felled by an avenging hand, and who now rots in his tomb while his poisonous soul is consumed by the eternal flames of hell.³⁵

Even conservative Southern papers continually referred to Lincoln as a "gorilla" or a "clown." And when we consider the fact that Lincoln was determined upon real freedom for the Negro, upon his education, and at least a restricted right to vote, it is difficult to see how the South could have been brought to agreement with him.

In the South there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln. Here comes the penalty which a land pays when it stifles free speech and free discussion and turns itself over entirely to propaganda. It does not make any difference if at the time the things advocated are absolutely right, the nation, nevertheless, becomes morally emasculated and mentally hog-tied, and cannot evolve that healthy difference of opinion which leads to the discovery of truth under changing conditions.

Suppose, for instance, there had been in the South in 1863 a small but determined and clear-thinking group of men who said: "The Negro is free and to make his freedom real, he must have land and education. He must be guided in his work and development but guided toward freedom and the right to vote. Such complete freedom and the bestowal of suffrage must be a matter of some years, but at present we do not propose to take advantage of this and retain political power based on the non-voting parts of our population. We, therefore, accept the constitutional amendment against slavery; we accept any other amendment which will base representation on voting, or other proposals which will equalize the voting power of North and South. We admit the right of the government to exercise a judicious guardianship over the slaves so long as we have reasonable voice in this guardianship, and that the interests of the employer as well as [ 166 ] the employee shall be kept in mind. And in anticipation of this development, we propose to pass a reasonable code of laws recognizing the new status of the Negro."

If there had been in the white South at this time far-seeing leadership or even some common sense, the subsequent history of Reconstruction and of the Negro in the United States would have been profoundly changed. Suppose a single state like Louisiana had allowed the Negro to vote, with a high property qualification, or the ability to read and write, or service in the army, or all these? Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens would not have been wholly satisfied, but certainly their demands would have been greatly modified. Both of them were perfectly willing to wait for Negro suffrage until the Negro had education and had begun his economic advance. But they did insist that he must have the chance to advance.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that such a program would have gathered enough support in the North to have made the history of Reconstruction not easy and without difficulty, but far less difficult than it proved to be. There were in the South in 1865 men who saw this truth plainly and said so. But true effective leadership was denied them; just as before the war public opinion in the South was hammered into idolatrous worship of slavery, so after the war, even more bitterly and cruelly, public opinion demanded a new unyielding conformity.

Here was a land of poignant beauty, streaked with hate and blood and shame, where God was worshiped wildly, where human beings were bought and sold, and where even in the twentieth century men are burned alive. The situation here in 1865 was fatal, and fatal because of the attitude of men's minds rather than because of material loss and disorganization. The human mind, its will and emotions, congealed to one set pattern, until here were people who knew they knew one thing above all others, just as certainly as they knew that the sun rose and set; and that was, that a Negro would not work without compulsion, and that slavery was his natural condition. If by force and law the Negro was free, his only chance to remain free was transportation immediately to Africa or some outlying district of the world, where he would soon die of starvation or disease. Such colonization was impracticable, and Southern slavery, as it existed before the war, was the best possible system for the Negro; and this the vast majority of Southerners were forced to believe as firmly in 1865 as they did in 1860.

The whole proof of what the South proposed to do to the emancipated Negro, unless restrained by the nation, was shown in the Black Codes passed after Johnson's accession, but representing the logical result of attitudes of mind existing when Lincoln still lived. Some of [ 167 ] these were passed and enforced. Some were passed and afterward repealed or modified when the reaction of the North was realized. In other cases, as for instance, in Louisiana, it is not clear just which laws were retained and which were repealed. In Alabama, the Governor induced the legislature not to enact some parts of the proposed code which they overwhelmingly favored.

The original codes favored by the Southern legislatures were an astonishing affront to emancipation and dealt with vagrancy, apprenticeship, labor contracts, migration, civil and legal rights. In all cases, there was plain and indisputable attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name. They were given certain civil rights: the right to hold property, to sue and be sued. The family relations for the first time were legally recognized. Negroes were no longer real estate.

Yet, in the face of this, the Black Codes were deliberately designed to take advantage of every misfortune of the Negro. Negroes were liable to a slave trade under the guise of vagrancy and apprenticeship laws; to make the best labor contracts, Negroes must leave the old plantations and seek better terms; but if caught wandering in search of work, and thus unemployed and without a home, this was vagrancy, and the victim could be whipped and sold into slavery. In the turmoil of war, children were separated from parents, or parents unable to support them properly. These children could be sold into slavery, and "the former owner of said minors shall have the preference." Negroes could come into court as witnesses only in cases in which Negroes were involved. And even then, they must make their appeal to a jury and judge who would believe the word of any white man in preference to that of any Negro on pain of losing office and caste.

The Negro's access to the land was hindered and limited; his right to work was curtailed; his right of self-defense was taken away, when his right to bear arms was stopped; and his employment was virtually reduced to contract labor with penal servitude as a punishment for leaving his job. And in all cases, the judges of the Negro's guilt or innocence, rights and obligations were men who believed firmly, for the most part, that he had "no rights which a white man was bound to respect."

Making every allowance for the excitement and turmoil of war, and the mentality of a defeated people, the Black Codes were infamous pieces of legislation.

Let us examine these codes in detail.³⁶ They covered, naturally, a wide range of subjects. First, there was the question of allowing Negroes to come into the state. In South Carolina the constitution of 1865 permitted the Legislature to regulate immigration, and the consequent [ 168 ] law declared "that no person of color shall migrate into and reside in this State, unless, within twenty days after his arrival within the same, he shall enter into a bond, with two freeholders as sureties … in a penalty of one thousand dollars, conditioned for his good behavior, and for his support."

Especially in the matter of work was the Negro narrowly restricted. In South Carolina, he must be especially licensed if he was to follow on his own account any employment, except that of farmer or servant. Those licensed must not only prove their fitness, but pay an annual tax ranging from $10-$100. Under no circumstances could they manufacture or sell liquor. Licenses for work were to be granted by a judge and were revokable on complaint. The penalty was a fine double the amount of the license, one-half of which went to the informer.

Mississippi provided that

every freedman, free Negro, and mulatto shall on the second Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and annually thereafter, have a lawful home or employment, and shall have written evidence thereof … from the Mayor … or from a member of the board of police … which licenses may be revoked for cause at any time by the authority granting the same.

Detailed regulation of labor was provided for in nearly all these states.

Louisiana passed an elaborate law in 1865, to "regulate labor contracts for agricultural pursuits." Later, it was denied that this legislation was actually enacted; but the law was published at the time and the constitutional convention of 1868 certainly regarded this statute as law, for they formally repealed it. The law required all agricultural laborers to make labor contracts for the next year within the first ten days of January, the contracts to be in writing, to be with heads of families, to embrace the labor of all the members, and to be "binding on all minors thereof." Each laborer, after choosing his employer,

shall not be allowed to leave his place of employment until the fulfillment of his contract, unless by consent of his employer, or on account of harsh treatment, or breach of contract on the part of the employer; and if they do so leave, without cause or permission, they shall forfeit all wages earned to the time of abandonment. …
In case of sickness of the laborer, wages for the time lost shall be deducted, and where the sickness is feigned for purposes of idleness, … and also should refusal to work be continued beyond three days, the offender shall be reported to a justice of the peace, and shall be forced to labor on roads, levees, and other public works, without pay, until the offender consents to return to his labor. …
When in health, the laborer shall work ten hours during the day [ 169 ] in summer, and nine hours during the day in winter, unless otherwise stipulated in the labor contract; he shall obey all proper orders of his employer or his agent; take proper care of his work mules, horses, oxen, stock; also of all agricultural implements; and employers shall have the right to make a reasonable deduction from the laborer's wages for injuries done to animals or agricultural implements committed to his care, or for bad or negligent work. Bad work shall not be allowed. Failing to obey reasonable orders, neglect of duty and leaving home without permission, will be deemed disobedience. … For any disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed on the offender. For all lost time from work hours, unless in case of sickness, the laborer shall be fined twenty-five cents per hour. For all absence from home without leave, the laborer will be fined at the rate of two dollars per day. Laborers will not be required to labor on the Sabbath except to take the necessary care of stock and other property on plantations and do the necessary cooking and household duties, unless by special contract. For all thefts of the laborers from the employer of agricultural products, hogs, sheep, poultry or any other property of the employer, or willful destruction of property or injury, the laborer shall pay the employer double the amount of the value of the property stolen, destroyed or injured, one half to be paid to the employer, and the other half to be placed in the general fund provided for in this section. No live stock shall be allowed to laborers without the permission of the employer. Laborers shall not receive visitors during work hours. All difficulties arising between the employers and laborers, under this section, shall be settled, and all fines be imposed, by the former; if not satisfactory to the laborers, an appeal may be had to the nearest justice of the peace and two freeholders, citizens, one of said citizens to be selected by the employer and the other by the laborer; and all fines imposed and collected under this section shall be deducted from the wages due, and shall be placed in a common fund, to be divided among the other laborers employed on the plantation at the time when their full wages fall due, except as provided for above.

Similar detailed regulations of work were in the South Carolina law. Elaborate provision was made for contracting colored "servants" to white "masters." Their masters were given the right to whip "moderately" servants under eighteen. Others were to be whipped on authority of judicial officers. These officers were given authority to return runaway servants to their masters. The servants, on the other hand, were given certain rights. Their wages and period of service must be specified in writing, and they were protected against "unreasonable" tasks, Sunday and night work, unauthorized attacks on their persons, and inadequate food.

Contracting Negroes were to be known as "servants" and contractors as "masters." Wages were to be fixed by the judge, unless stipulated. Negroes of ten years of age or more without a parent living in the district might make a valid contract for a year or less. Failure to make written contracts was a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of $5 to $50; farm labor to be from sunrise to sunset, with intervals for meals; servants to rise at dawn, to be careful of master's property and answerable for property lost or injured. Lost time was to be deducted from wages. Food and clothes might be deducted. Servants were to be quiet and orderly and to go to bed at reasonable hours. No night work or outdoor work in bad weather was to be asked, except in cases of necessity, visitors not allowed without the master's consent. Servants leaving employment without good reason must forfeit wages. Masters might discharge servants for disobedience, drunkenness, disease, absence, etc. Enticing away the services of a servant was punishable by a fine of $20 to $100. A master could command a servant to aid him in defense of his own person, family or property. House servants at all hours of the day and night, and at all days of the week, "must answer promptly all calls and execute all lawful orders."

The right to sell farm products "without written evidence from employer" was forbidden in South Carolina, and some other states. "A person of color who is in the employment of a master, engaged in husbandry, shall not have the right to sell any corn, rice, peas, wheat, or other grain, any flour, cotton, fodder, hay, bacon, fresh meat of any kind, poultry of any kind, animals of any kind, or any other product of a farm, without having written evidence from such master, or some person authorized by him, or from the district judge or a magistrate, that he has the right to sell such product."

There were elaborate laws covering the matter of contracts for work. A contract must be in writing and usually, as in South Carolina, white witnesses must attest it and a judge approve it. In Florida, contracts were to be in writing and failure to keep the contracts by disobedience or impudence was to be treated as vagrancy. In Kentucky, contracts were to be in writing and attested by a white person. In Mississippi, contracts were to be in writing attested by a white person, and if the laborer stopped work, his wages were to be forfeited for a year. He could be arrested, and the fee for his arrest must be paid by the employer and taken out of his wages.

There were careful provisions to protect the contracting employer from losing his labor. In Alabama,

When any laborer or servant, having contracted as provided in the first section of this act, shall afterward be found, before the termination of said contract, in the service or employment of another, that fact shall be prima facie evidence that [ 171 ] such person is guilty of violation of this act, if he fail and refuse to forthwith discharge the said laborer or servant, after being notified and informed of such former contract and employment.

Mississippi provided

that every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service without good cause; and said officer and person shall be entitled to receive for arresting and carrying back every deserting employee aforesaid the sum of five dollars, and ten cents per mile from the place of arrest to the place of delivery, and the same shall be paid by the employer and held as a set-off for so much against the wages of said deserting employee.

It was provided in some states, like South Carolina, that any white man, whether an officer or not, could arrest a Negro.

Upon view of a misdemeanor committed by a person of color, any person present may arrest the offender and take him before a magistrate, to be dealt with as the case may require. In case of a misdemeanor committed by a white person toward a person of color, any person may complain to a magistrate, who shall cause the offender to be arrested, and, according to the nature of the case, to be brought before himself, or be taken for trial in the district court.

On the other hand, in Mississippi, it was dangerous for a Negro to try to bring a white person to court on any charge

In every case where any white person has been arrested and brought to trial, by virtue of the provisions of the tenth section of the above recited act, in any court in this State, upon sufficient proof being made to the court or jury, upon the trial before said court, that any freedman, free Negro or mulatto has falsely and maliciously caused the arrest and trial of said white person or persons, the court shall render up a judgment against said freedman, free Negro or mulatto for all costs of the case, and impose a fine not to exceed fifty dollars, and imprisonment in the county jail not to exceed twenty days; and for a failure of said freedman, free Negro or mulatto to pay, or cause to be paid, all costs, fines and jail fees, the sheriff of the county is hereby authorized and required, after giving ten days' public notice, to proceed to hire out at public outcry, at the court-house of the county, said freedman, free Negro or mulatto, for the shortest time to raise the amount necessary to discharge said freedman, free Negro or mulatto from all costs, fines, and jail fees aforesaid.

Mississippi declared that:

Any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto, committing riots, routs, affrays, trespasses, malicious mischief and cruel treatment to animals, seditious speeches, insulting gestures, language [ 172 ] or acts, or assaults on any person, disturbance of the peace, exercising the functions of a minister of the gospel without a license from some regularly organized church, vending spirituous or intoxicating liquors, or committing any other misdemeanor, the punishment of which is not specifically provided for by law, shall, upon conviction thereof, in the county court, be fined not less than ten dollars, and not more than one hundred dollars, and may be imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, not exceeding thirty days.

As to other civil rights, the marriage of Negroes was for the first time recognized in the Southern states and slave marriages legalized. South Carolina said in general: "That the statutes and regulations concerning slaves are now inapplicable to persons of color; and although such persons are not entitled to social or political equality with white persons, they shall have the right to acquire, own, and dispose of property, to make contracts, to enjoy the fruits of their labor, to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property."

Florida forbade "colored and white persons respectively from in- truding upon each other's public assemblies, religious or other, or public vehicle set apart for their exclusive use, under punishment of pillory or stripes, or both."

Very generally Negroes were prohibited or limited in their ownership of firearms. In Florida, for instance, it was "unlawful for any Negro, mulatto, or person of color to own, use, or keep in possession or under control any bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms, or ammunition of any kind, unless by license of the county judge of probate, under a penalty of forfeiting them to the informer, and of standing in the pillory one hour, or be whipped not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury."

Alabama had a similar law making it illegal to sell, give or rent firearms or ammunition of any description "to any freedman, free Negro or mulatto."

Mississippi refused arms to Negroes.

No freedman, free Negro, or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States Government, and not licensed to do so by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry firearms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk, or bowie-knife; and on conviction thereof, in the county court, shall be punished by fine, not exceeding ten dollars, and pay the costs of such proceedings, and all such arms or ammunition shall be forfeited to the informer.

A South Carolina Negro could only keep firearms on permission in writing from the District Judge.

Persons of color constitute no part of the militia of the State, and no one of them shall, without permission [ 173 ] in writing from the district judge or magistrate, be allowed to keep a firearm, sword, or other military weapon, except that one of them, who is the owner of a farm, may keep a shot-gun or rifle, such as is ordinarily used in hunting, but not a pistol, musket, or other firearm or weapon appropriate for purposes of war … and in case of conviction, shall be punished by a fine equal to twice the value of the weapon so unlawfully kept, and if that be not immediately paid, by corporal punishment.

The right of buying and selling property was usually granted but sometimes limited as to land. Mississippi declared: "That all freedmen, free Negroes and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this State, and may acquire personal property and choses in action by descent or purchase, and may dispose of the same in the same manner and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided, that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free Negro or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated towns or cities, in which places the corporate authorities shall control the same."

The most important and oppressive laws were those with regard to vagrancy and apprenticeship. Sometimes they especially applied to Negroes; in other cases, they were drawn in general terms but evidently designed to fit the Negro's condition and to be enforced particularly with regard to Negroes.

The Virginia Vagrant Act enacted that

any justice of the peace, upon the complaint of any one of certain officers therein named, may issue his warrant for the apprehension of any person alleged to be a vagrant and cause such person to be apprehended and brought before him; and that if upon due examination said justice of the peace shall find that such person is a vagrant within the definition of vagrancy contained in said statute, he shall issue his warrant, directing such person to be employed for a term not exceeding three months, and by any constable of the county wherein the proceedings are had, be hired out for the best wages which can be procured, his wages to be applied to the support of himself and his family. The said statute further provides, that in case any vagrant so hired shall, during his term of service, run away from his employer without sufficient cause, he shall be apprehended on the warrant of a justice of the peace and returned to the custody of his employer, who shall then have, free from any other hire, the services of such vagrant for one month in addition to the original term of hiring, and that the employer shall then have power, if authorized by a justice of the peace, to work such vagrant with ball and chain. The said statute specified the persons who shall be considered [ 174 ] vagrants and liable to the penalties imposed by it. Among those declared to be vagrants are all persons who, not having the wherewith to support their families, live idly and without employment, and refuse to work for the usual and common wages given to other laborers in the like work in the place where they are.

In Florida, January 12, 1866:

It is provided that when any person of color shall enter into a contract as aforesaid, to serve as a laborer for a year, or any other specified term, on any farm or plantation in this State, if he shall refuse or neglect to perform the stipulations of his contract by willful disobedience of orders, wanton impudence or disrespect to his employer, or his authorized agent, failure or refusal to perform the work assigned to him, idleness, or abandonment of the premises or the employment of the party with whom the contract was made, he or she shall be liable, upon the complaint of his employer or his agent, made under oath before any justice of the peace of the county, to be arrested and tried before the criminal court of the county, and upon conviction shall be subject to all the pains and penalties prescribed for the punishment of vagrancy.

In Georgia, it was ruled that

All persons wandering or strolling about in idleness, who are able to work, and who have no property to support them; all persons leading an idle, immoral, or profligate life, who have no property to support them and are able to work and do not work; all persons able to work having no visible and known means of a fair, honest, and respectable livelihood; all persons having a fixed abode, who have no visible property to support them, and who live by stealing or by trading in, bartering for, or buying stolen property; and all professional gamblers living in idleness, shall be deemed and considered vagrants, and shall be indicted as such, and it shall be lawful for any person to arrest said vagrants and have them bound over for trial to the next term of the county court, and upon conviction, they shall be fined and imprisoned or sentenced to work on the public works, for not longer than a year, or shall, in the discretion of the court, be bound over for trial to the next term of the county court, and upon conviction, they shall be fined and imprisoned or sentenced to work on the public works, for not longer than a year, or shall, in the discretion of the court, be bound out to some person for a time not longer than one year, upon such valuable consideration as the court may prescribe.

Mississippi provided

That all freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes in this state over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling with [ 175 ] freedmen, free Negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free Negroes or mulattoes on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freedwoman, free Negro or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding, in the case of a freedman, free Negro or mulatto, fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars and imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, the free Negro not exceeding ten days, and the white men not exceeding six months.

Sec. 5 provides that

all fines and forfeitures collected under the provisions of this act shall be paid into the county treasury for general county purposes, and in case any freedman, free Negro or mulatto, shall fail for five days after the imposition of any fine or forfeiture upon him or her, for violation of any of the provisions of this act to pay the same, that it shall be, and is hereby made, the duty of the Sheriff of the proper county to hire out said freedman, free Negro or mulatto, to any person who will, for the shortest period of service, pay said fine or forfeiture and all costs; Provided, a preference shall be given to the employer, if there be one, in which case the employer shall be entitled to deduct and retain the amount so paid from the wages of such freedman, free Negro or mulatto, then due or to become due; and in case such freedman, free Negro or mulatto cannot be hired out, he or she may be dealt with as a pauper.

South Carolina declared to be vagrants all persons without fixed and known places of abode and lawful employment, all prostitutes and all persons wandering from place to place and selling without a license; all gamblers; idle and disobedient persons; persons without sufficient means of support; persons giving plays or entertainments without license; fortune-tellers, beggars, drunkards and hunters. If a person of color is unable to earn his support, his near relatives must contribute. Pauper funds were composed of fines paid by Negroes and taxes on Negroes. On the other hand, former slaves who were helpless and had been on plantations six months previous to November 10, 1865, could not be evicted before January 1, 1867.

In Alabama, the "former owner" was to have preference in the apprenticing of a child. This was true in Kentucky and Mississippi.

Mississippi

provides that it shall be the duty of all sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other civil officers of the several counties in this state to report to the probate courts of their respective counties semi-annually, at the January and July terms of said courts, all freedmen, free Negroes and mulattoes, under the age of eighteen, within their respective counties, beats, or districts, who are orphans, or whose parent or parents have not the means, or who refuse to provide for and support said minors, and thereupon it shall be the duty of said [ 176 ] probate court to order the clerk of said court to apprentice said minors to some competent and suitable person, on such terms as the court may direct, having a particular care to the interest of said minors; Provided, that the former owner of said minors shall have the preference when, in the opinion of the court, he or she shall be a suitable person for that purpose.

South Carolina established special courts for colored people, to be created in each district to administer the law in respect to persons of color. The petit juries of these courts were to consist of only six men. The local magistrate

shall be specially charged with the supervision of persons of color in his neighborhood, their protection, and the prevention of their misconduct." Public order was to be secured by the organization of forty-five or more militia regiments.
Capital punishment was provided for colored persons guilty of willful homicide, assault upon a white woman, impersonating her husband for carnal purposes, raising an insurrection, stealing a horse, a mule, or baled cotton, and house-breaking. For crimes not demanding death Negroes might be confined at hard labor, whipped, or transported; 'but punishments more degrading than imprisonment shall not be imposed upon a white person for a crime not infamous.' ³⁷

In most states Negroes were allowed to testify in courts but the testimony was usually confined to cases where colored persons were involved, although in some states, by consent of the parties, they could testify in cases where only white people were involved. In Alabama "all freedmen, free Negroes and mulattoes, shall have the right to sue and be sued, plead and be impleaded in all the different and various courts of this State, to the same extent that white persons now have by law. And they shall be competent to testify only in open court, and only in cases in which freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes are parties, either plaintiff or defendant, and in civil or criminal cases, for injuries in the persons and property of freedmen, free Negroes and mulattoes, and in all cases, civil or criminal, in which a freedman, free Negro, or mulatto, is a witness against a white person, or a white person against a freedman, free Negro or mulatto, the parties shall be competent witnesses."

North Carolina, March 10, 1866, "gives them all the privileges of white persons before the courts in the mode of prosecuting, defending, continuing, removing, and transferring their suits at law in equity," and makes them eligible as witnesses, when not otherwise incompetent, in "all controversies at law and in equity where the rights of persons or property of persons of color shall be put in issue, and would be concluded by the judgment or decree of courts; and also in pleas of the State, where the violence, fraud, or injury alleged shall be charged [ 177 ] to have been done by or to persons of color. In all other civil and criminal cases such evidence shall be deemed inadmissible, unless by consent of the parties of record."

Mississippi simply reenacted her slave code and made it operative so far as punishments were concerned. "That all the penal and criminal laws now in force in this State, defining offenses, and prescribing the mode of punishment for crimes and misdemeanors committed by slaves, free Negroes or mulattoes, be and the same are hereby reenacted, and declared to be in full force and effect, against freedmen, free Negroes, and mulattoes, except so far as the mode and manner of trial and punishment have been changed or altered by law."

North Carolina, on the other hand, abolished her slave code, making difference of punishment only in the case of Negroes convicted of rape. Georgia placed the fines and costs of a servant upon the master. "Where such cases shall go against the servant, the judgment for costs upon written notice to the master shall operate as a garnishment against him, and he shall retain a sufficient amount for the payment thereof, out of any wages due to said servant, or to become due during the period of service, and may be cited at any time by the collecting officer to make answer thereto."

The celebrated ordinance of Opelousas, Louisiana, shows the local ordinances regulating Negroes.

No Negro or freedman shall be allowed to come within the limits of the town of Opelousas without special permission from his employer, specifying the object of his visit and the time necessary for the accomplishment of the same.

Every Negro freedman who shall be found on the streets of Opelousas after ten o'clock at night without a written pass or permit from his employer, shall be imprisoned and compelled to work five days on the public streets, or pay a fine of five dollars.

No Negro or freedman shall be permitted to rent or keep a house within the limits of the town under any circumstances, and anyone thus offending shall be ejected, and compelled to find an employer or leave the town within twenty-four hours.

No Negro or freedman shall reside within the limits of the town of Opelousas who is not in the regular service of some white person or former owner, who shall be held responsible for the conduct of said freedman.

No Negro or freedman shall be permitted to preach, exhort, or otherwise declaim to congregations of colored people without a special permission from the Mayor or President of the Board of Police, under the penalty of a fine of ten dollars or twenty days' work on the public streets.

No freedman who is not in the military service shall be allowed to [ 178 ] carry firearms, or any kind of weapons within the limits of the town of Opelousas without the special permission of his employer, in writing, and approved by the Mayor or President of the Board.

Any freedman not residing in Opelousas, who shall be found within its corporate limits after the hour of 3 o'clock, on Sunday, without a special permission from his employer or the Mayor, shall be arrested and imprisoned and made to work two days on the public streets, or pay two dollars in lieu of said work.³⁸

Of Louisiana, Thomas Conway testified February 22, 1866: "Some of the leading officers of the state down there – men who do much to form and control the opinions of the masses – instead of doing as they promised, and quietly submitting to the authority of the government, engaged in issuing slave codes and in promulgating them to their subordinates, ordering them to carry them into execution, and this to the knowledge of state officials of a higher character, the governor and others. And the men who issued them were not punished except as the military authorities punished them. The governor inflicted no punishment on them while I was there, and I don't know that, up to this day, he has ever punished one of them. These codes were simply the old black code of the state, with the word 'slave' expunged, and 'Negro' substituted. The most odious features of slavery were preserved in them. They were issued in three or four localities in the state, not a hundred miles from New Orleans, months after the surrender of the Confederate forces, and years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

I have had delegations to frequently come and see me – delegations composed of men who, to my face, denied that the proclamation issued by President Lincoln was a valid instrument, declaring that the Supreme Court would pronounce it invalid. Consequently they have claimed that their Negroes were slaves and would again be restored to them. In the city of New Orleans last summer, under the orders of the acting mayor of the city, Hugh Kennedy, the police of that city conducted themselves towards the freedmen, in respect to violence and ill usage, in every way equal to the old days of slavery; arresting them on the streets as vagrants, without any form of law whatever, and simply because they did not have in their pockets certificates of employment from their former owners or other white citizens.

I have gone to the jails and released large numbers of them, men who were industrious and who had regular employment; yet because they had not the certificates of white men in their pockets they were locked up in jail to be sent out to plantations; locked up, too, without my knowledge, and done speedily and secretly before I had information of it. Some members of the Seventy-Fourth United States Colored [ 179 ] Infantry, a regiment which was mustered out but one clay, were arrested the next because they did not have these certificates of employment. This was done to these men after having served in the United States army three years. They were arrested by the police under the order of the acting mayor, Mr. Hugh Kennedy. … ³⁹

The aim and object of these laws cannot be mistaken. "In many cases the restraints imposed went to the length of a veritable 'involuntary servitude.' ⁴⁰

Professor Burgess says: "Almost every act, word or gesture of the Negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and then consigned to a condition of almost slavery for an indefinite time, if he could not pay the bill." ⁴¹

Dunning admits that "The legislation of the reorganized governments, under cover of police regulations and vagrancy laws, had enacted severe discriminations against the freedmen in all the common civil rights." ⁴²

A recent study says of South Carolina:

The interests of both races would have been better served had there never been a 'black code.' This would be true even if there had been no Northern sentiment to take into account. Economically, the laws were impracticable, since they tried to place the Negro in a position inferior to that which competition or his labor would have given him. ⁴³

But it is monotonous iteration to review the early legislation of the reconstructed governments established under the proclamation of the President. In most of the states the laws established a condition but little better than that of slavery, and in one important respect far worse; for in place of the property interest, which would induce the owner to preserve and care for his slave, there was substituted the guardianship of penal statutes; and the ignorant black man, innocent of any intention to commit a wrong, could be bandied about from one temporary owner to another who would have no other interest than to wring out of him, without regard to his ultimate condition, all that was possible during the limited term of his thraldom.⁴⁴

These slave laws have been defended in various ways. They were passed in the midst of bitterness and fear and with great haste; they were worded somewhat like similar vagrancy laws in Northern States; they would have been modified in time; they said more than they really meant. All of this may be partly true, but it remains perfectly evident that the black codes looked backward toward slavery.

This legislation profoundly stirred the North. Not the North of industry and the new manufactures, but the ordinary everyday people [ 180 ] of the North, who, uplifted by the tremendous afflatus of war, had seen a vision of something fine and just, and who, without any personal affection for the Negro or real knowledge of him, nevertheless were convinced that Negroes were human, and that Negro slavery was wrong; and that whatever freedom might mean, it certainly did not mean reenslavement under another name.

Here, then, was the dominant thought of that South with which Reconstruction must deal. Arising with aching head and palsied hands it deliberately looked backward. There came to the presidential chair, with vast power, a man who was Southern born; with him came inconceivable fears that the North proposed to make these Negroes really free; to give them a sufficient status even for voting, to give them the right to hold office; that there was even a possibility that these slaves might out-vote their former masters; that they might accumulate wealth, achieve education, and finally, they might even aspire to marry white women and mingle their blood with the blood of their masters.

It was fantastic. It called for revolt. It called in extremity for the renewal of war. The Negro must be kept in his place by hunger, whipping and murder. As W. P. Calhoun of Greenville, South Carolina, said as late as 1901: "Character, wealth, learning, good behavior, and all that makes up or constitutes good citizenship in the black man is positively of no avail whatever. Merit cannot win in this case."⁴⁵

The cry of the bewildered freeman rose, but it was drowned by the Rebel yell.

I am a Southerner;
I love the South; I dared for her
To fight from Lookout to the sea,
With her proud banner over me.
But from my lips thanksgiving broke,
As God in battle-thunder spoke,
And that Black Idol, breeding drouth
And dearth of human sympathy
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South,

Was, with its chains and human yoke,
Blown hellward from the cannon's mouth,

While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!

Maurice Thompson