VII. Looking Forward

How two theories of the future of America clashed and blended just after the Civil War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intelligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass wealth and power. The uncomprehending resistance of the South, and the pressure of black folk, made these two thoughts uneasy and temporary allies

A printer and a carpenter, a rail-splitter and a tailor -- Garrison, Christ, Lincoln and Johnson, were the tools of the greatest moral awakening America ever knew, chosen to challenge capital invested in the bodies of men and annul the private profit of slavery.

This done, two quite distinct but persistently undifferentiated visions of the future dominated the triumphant North after the war. One was the prolongation of Puritan idealism, transformed by the frontier into a theory of universal democracy, and now expressed by Abolitionists like Wendell Phillips (§), students of civilization like Charles Sumner, and leaders of the common people like Thaddeus Stephens (§|§), together with some of the leaders of the new labor movement. The other trend was entirely different and is confused with the democratic ideal because the two ideals lay confused in so many individual minds. This was the development of industry in America and of a new industrial philosophy.

The new industry had a vision not of work but of wealth; not of planned accomplishment, but of power. It became the most conscienceless, unmoral system of industry which the world has experienced. It went with ruthless indifference towards waste, death, ugliness and disaster, and yet reared the most stupendous machine for the efficient organization of work which the world has ever seen.

Thus the end of the Civil War was the beginning of vast economic development in the industrial expansion of the East, in the agricultural growth of the Middle West, in the new cattle industry of the plains, in the mining enterprises of the Rockies, in the development of the Pacific Coast, and in the reconstruction of the Southern market.

Behind this extraordinary industrial development, as justification in the minds of men, lay what we may call the great American Assumption, which up to the time of the Civil War, was held more or less [ 183 ] explicitly by practically all Americans. The American Assumption was that wealth is mainly the result of its owner's effort and that any average worker can by thrift become a capitalist. The curious thing about this assumption was that while it was not true, it was undoubtedly more nearly true in America from 1820 to 1860 than in any other contemporary land. It was not true and not recognized as true during Colonial times; but with the opening of the West and the expanding industry of the twenties, and coincident with the rise of the Cotton Kingdom, it was a fact that often a poor white man in America by thrift and saving could obtain land and capital; and by intelligence and good luck he could become a small capitalist and even a rich man; and conversely a careless spendthrift though rich might become a pauper, since hereditary safeguards for property had little legal sanction.

Thus arose the philosophy of "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves," on which the American theory of compensated democracy was built. It asked simply, in eighteenth century accents, freedom from government interference with individual ventures, and a voice in the selection of government officials. The continued freedom of economic opportunity and ever possible increase of industrial income, it took for granted. This attitude was back of the adoption of universal suffrage, the disappearance of compulsory military service and imprisonment for debt, which characterized Jacksonian democracy. The American Assumption was contemporary with the Cotton Kingdom, which was its most sinister contradiction. The new captains of industry in the North were largely risen from the laboring class and thus living proof of the ease of capitalistic accumulation. The validity of the American Assumption ceased with the Civil War, but its tradition lasted down to the day of the Great Depression, when it died with a great wail of despair, not so much from bread lines and soup kitchens, as from poor and thrifty bank depositors and small investors.

The American labor movement, founded in the spirit that regarded America as a refuge from oppression and free for individual development according to conscience and ability, grew and expanded in America, basing itself frankly upon the American Assumption. Its object was rule by the people, the wide education of people so that they could rule intelligently, and economic opportunity of wealth free for thrift. It found itself hindered by slavery in the South: directly, because of the growing belief of the influential planter class in oligarchy and the degradation of labor; and indirectly by the competition of slave labor and the spread of the slave psychology. It became, therefore, at first more and more opposed to slavery as ethically wrong, politically dangerous, and economically unprofitable.

Capital, on the other hand, accepted widespread suffrage as a fact forced on the world by revolution and the growing intelligence of the working class. But since the new industry called for intelligence in its workers, capitalists not only accepted universal suffrage but early discovered that high wages in America made even higher profits possible; and that this high standard of living was itself a protection for capital in that it made the more intelligent and best paid of workers allies of capital and left its ultimate dictatorship undisturbed. Nevertheless, industry took pains to protect itself wherever possible. It excluded illiterate foreign voters from the ballot and advocated a reservoir of non-voting common labor; and it stood ready at any time by direct bribery or the use of its power to hire and discharge labor, to manipulate the labor vote.

The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America, lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy. What were to be the limits of democratic control in the United States? If all labor, black as well as white, became free, were given schools and the right to vote, what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men, regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship would rule, and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy. It still remains with the world as the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations.

The abolition-democracy was the liberal movement among both laborers and small capitalists, who united in the American Assumption, but saw the danger of slavery to both capital and labor. It began its moral fight against slavery in the thirties and forties and, gradually transformed by economic elements, concluded it during the war. The object and only real object of the Civil War in its eyes was the abolition of slavery, and it was convinced that this could be thoroughly accomplished only if the emancipated Negroes became free citizens and voters.

The abolition-democracy saw clearly the difficulties of this step, due to the ignorance and poverty of the freedmen. For the first time in the classic democracy in the United States, it was made aware that the American Assumption was not and could not be universally true. Some of the leaders of the labor movement even came to see that it was not true in the case of the mass of white labor. But that [ 185 ] thought came to the Abolitionists afterwards and in the minds of only a few clear-sighted men like Wendell Phillips.

At the time of the Civil War, it was, however, perfectly clear to Sumner and Stevens that freedom in order to be free required a minimum of capital in addition to political rights and that this could be insured against the natural resentment of the planters only by some sort of dictatorship. Thus abolition-democracy was pushed towards the conception of a dictatorship of labor, although few of its advocates wholly grasped the fact that this necessarily involved dictatorship by labor over capital and industry.

On the other hand, industrialists after the war expected the South to seize upon the opportunity to make increased profit by a more intelligent exploitation of labor than was possible under the slave system. They looked upon free Negro labor as a source of profit, and considered freedom, that is, a legal doing away with individual physical control, all that the Negroes or their friends could ask. They did not want for Negro labor any special protection or political power or capital, any more than they wanted this for Irish, German or Scandinavian labor in the North. They expected some popular education and a gradual granting of the right to vote, which would be straitly curtailed in its power for mischief by the far larger power of capital. The South, however, persisted in its pre-war conception of these two tendencies in the North. It sought to reestablish slavery by force, because it had no comprehension of the means by which modern industry could secure the advantages of slave labor without its responsibilities. The South, therefore, opposed Negro education, opposed land and capital for Negroes, and violently and bitterly opposed any political power. It fought every conception inch by inch: no real emancipation, limited civil rights, no Negro schools, no votes for Negroes.

In the face of such intransigence, Northern industry was, on the whole, willing to yield, since none of these concessions really obstructed the expansion of industry and capital in the nation. When, however, the South went beyond reason and truculently demanded not simply its old political power but increased political power based on disfranchised Negroes, which it openly threatened to use for the revision of the tariff, for the repudiation of the national debt, for disestablishing the national banks, and for putting the new corporate form of industry under strict state regulation and rule, Northern industry was frightened and began to move towards the stand which abolition-democracy had already taken; namely, temporary dictatorship, endowed Negro education, legal civil rights, and eventually even votes for Negroes to offset the Southern threat of economic attack.

The abolition-democracy was not deceived. It at once feared and dared. It wanted no revenge on the South and held no hatred. It did want to train Negroes in intelligence, experience and labor, the ownership of land and capital, and the exercise of civil rights and the use of political power. In the advocacy of these things it reached the highest level of self-sacrificing statesmanship ever attained in America; and two of the greatest leaders of the ideal, Stevens and Sumner, voluntarily laid down their lives on the altar of democracy and were eventually paid, as they must have anticipated they would be paid, by the widespread contempt of America.

Even to this day, the grandsons of Abolitionists, ashamed of their fathers' faith in black men, are salving their conscience with a theory that democratic government by intelligent men of character is impossible, when, in fact, nothing else is possible; and the grandsons of the planters and of the poor whites who displaced them are excusing their apostasy to civilization by charging the Negro with all the evil caused by war, destruction and greed, and by the deeds of white men, Northern and Southern.

The abolition-democracy advocated Federal control to guide and direct the rise of the Negro, but they desired this control to be civil rather than military, like the strict government of territories until new states should develop. They had to help them in the furtherance of this plan a degree of enthusiasm, humility and hard work on the part of the depressed Negro which is not paralleled in modern history. When now they were offered alliance with Northern industry, temporary military control instead of civil government, and then immediate citizenship and the right to vote for Negroes, instead of a period of guardianship, they accepted because they could not refuse; because they knew that this was their only chance and that nothing else would be offered. Their theory of democracy led them to risk all, even in the absence of that economic and educational minimum which they knew was next to indispensable. When Sumner saw his failure here, he went home and wept. But the belief in the self-resurrection of democracy was strong in these men and lent unconscious power to the American Assumption. They expected that both Northern industry and the South, in sheer self-defense, would have to educate Negro intelligence and depend on Negro political power.

The South was too astonished for belief, when it saw industry and democracy in the North united for a policy of coercion. In the past, the South had always been able by mere gesture of concession to bring Northern industry to its knees begging. It did not realize how strong Industry had grown and how conscious its power; and how boundless its plans. It did not realize that the basis of the [ 187 ] South's own power had literally been swept away. Even the West, on which the South had long counted in theory, although sympathy had seldom led to effective action, while it fought industrial monopoly, the national debt and the money power, yet when it had to choose between a continuation of Southern oligarchy and a great democratic movement, swung inevitably towards democracy. Northern capital went South and vied with the planters for the direction of the Negro vote. The poor whites scurried to cover, now here, now there, and a dictatorship of labor ensued, with a new democratic Constitution, new social legislation, public schools and public improvements. But of that we shall speak more in detail in later chapters.

On the other hand, Northern industry seemed at last free and untrammeled. It began in 1876 an exploitation which was built on much the same sort of slavery which it helped to overthrow in 1863. It murdered democracy in the United States so completely that the world does not recognize its corpse. It established as dominant in industry a monarchical system which killed the idea of democracy.

The basis of the argument for Negro suffrage has usually been interpreted as a gesture of vengeance. But it was much deeper than this. It was phrased, first by Abraham Lincoln himself, as a method of retaining "the Jewel of Liberty in the Family of Freedom"; this was echoed, however unwillingly, by Andrew Johnson as a sop to the Radicals; but it gradually came in the thought of the nation to be an inescapable thing. Votes for Negroes were in truth a final compromise between business and abolition and were forced on abolition by business as the only method of realizing the basic principles of abolition-democracy.

All of the selfishness, cunning and power that were back of the new industry of the North have been looked upon as simply the other side of abolition-democracy; and the reason for this was that in several cases, the two ideas were mingled in individuals' minds. One can see that in the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher (§), who was a great advocate of votes for Negroes, but nevertheless instinctively capitalistic; standing on the side of the exploiter, he had scant sympathy for the exploited. There was something of this, although not nearly as much, in the case of Thaddeus Stevens, who was at heart the greatest and most uncompromising of abolitionist-democrats, but who advocated not only universal suffrage and free schools, but protection for Pennsylvania iron; yet in that protection he had just as distinctly in mind the welfare of the laborer as the profit of the employer.

What, then, was the strength of the democratic movement which succeeded the war? In many respects it was emotional. It swept the land with its music and poetry. A war, which to the intense dissatisfaction [ 188 ] of the Abolitionists had begun with the distinct object, even on the part of the great Emancipator, to save and protect slavery, and in no way to disturb it, except to keep it out of competition with the free peasant of the West, had resulted in Emancipation. Men like William Lloyd Garrison, who had no sympathy with the platform of the Republicans in 1860, became suddenly the center of the stage of the new dispensation. Thus, a legal-metaphysical dispute, involving the right of slave states to expand into the territories, was rapidly changed, first to a question of freedom for slaves, and then to a struggle for inaugurating a new form of national government in the United States.

When the physical war ended, then the real practical problems presented themselves. How was slavery to be effectively abolished? And what was to be the status of the Negroes ? What was the condition and power of the states which had rebelled? The legal solution of these questions was easy. The states that had attempted to rebel had failed. They must now resume their relations to the government. Slavery had been abolished as a war measure. This should be confirmed and extended by a constitutional amendment. Some control of the Negro population must be devised in the place of slavery, so as to introduce the Negro into his new freedom. The power of the national government had been greatly expanded by war. This expansion must be consolidated so that in the future secession would be impossible and slavery never reestablished.

The difficulty with this legalistic formula was that it did not cling to facts. Slavery was not abolished even after the Thirteenth Amendment. There were four million freedmen and most of them on the same plantation, doing the same work that they did before emancipation, except as their work had been interrupted and changed by the upheaval of war. Moreover, they were getting about the same wages and apparently were going to be subject to slave codes modified only in name. There were among them thousands of fugitives in the camps of the soldiers or on the streets of the cities, homeless, sick and impoverished. They had been freed practically with no land nor money, and, save in exceptional cases, without legal status, and without protection.

Negroes deserved not only the pity of the world but the gratitude of both South and North. Under extraordinary provocation they had acted like decent human beings; they had protected their masters' families, when their masters were away fighting for black slavery. They did this naturally because they were not sure that the North was fighting for freedom, and because they did not know which side would win. But, at any rate, they did it. And even when they understood that the North, willing or unwilling, was bound towards freedom, and [ 189 ] that they could fight for their own freedom, they were neither vindictive nor cruel towards their former masters, although they were quite naturally widely accused of "laziness" and "impudence," which are the only weapons of offense which a rising social class can easily use.

These black men wanted freedom; they wanted education; they wanted protection. They had been of great help to the Union armies and that help had been given under great stress. Black soldiers had been outlawed, and in many cases ruthlessly murdered by the enemy who refused to regard them as soldiers or as human. They took chances every time they put on a uniform. Yet after the war they were still not free; they were still practically slaves, and how was their freedom to be made a fact? It could be done in only one way. They must have the protection of law; and back of law must stand physical force. They must have land; they must have education. How was all this to be done?

Lincoln tried hard in the Border States, long before the end of the war, to get voluntary emancipation and pay for the slaves, so that a new system of labor under favorable circumstances could be arranged. The Border States would have none of it. The war ended in anarchy as war always ends. The cost had been so great that there could be no thought of pay for the slaves, even on the part of the South, after the first flush of Reconstruction. There was no possibility of paying for capital destroyed in other ways, or of quickly restoring the neglected land and tools.

Thus by the sheer logic of facts, there arose in the United States a clear and definite program for the freedom and uplift of the Negro, and for the extension of the realization of democracy. Some of the men who had this vision were identified with the new industry, but saw no incongruity or opposition between their ideas or between the rise and expansion of tariff-protected corporations and their equally sincere beliefs in democratic methods. Others were not identified with industry at all. They were, some of them, rich men, supported by incomes derived from industry; most of them were poor men earning a salary. Some of them were laborers. These men started from the Abolitionist's point of view. Slavery was wrong because it reduced human beings to the level of animals. The abolition of slavery meant not simply abolition of legal ownership of the slave; it meant the uplift of slaves and their eventual incorporation into the body civil, politic, and social, of the United States. There was, of course, much difference as to the exact extent of this incorporation, but less and less desire to limit it in any way by law.

The Negro must have civil rights as a citizen; he must eventually have political rights like every other citizen of the United States. And [ 190 ] while social rights could not be a matter of legislation, they, on the other hand, must not be denied through legislation, but remain a matter of free individual choice. This outlook and theory of the Abolitionists received tremendous impetus from the war. Those who had been classed as fanatics, who had been left out of the society of the respected, and mobbed, North, East and West, suddenly became the moral justification by which the North marched on to victory.

All of the great literature of the Civil War was based mainly upon human freedom, and in so far as it stressed union, it had to make it "liberty" and union. The war songs, the war stories, the war afflatus, were based on the freedom of the slaves, just as in the World War we mobilized the mass of mankind in a war to end war and to promote the freedom and union of nations.

Moreover, the new abolition-democracy that came after the war had a tremendous and unexpected source and method of propaganda, and that lay in the crusade of the New England schoolmarm. "The annals of this Ninth Crusade are yet to be written -- the tale of a mission that seemed to our age far more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis seemed to his. Behind the mist of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field guns rang the rhythm of the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work in planting the New England schoolhouse among the white and black of the South. They did their work well. In that first year they taught one hundred thousand souls, and more." ¹

Here for the first time there was established between the white and black of this country a contact on terms of essential social equality and mutual respect. There had been contact between Negroes and white people in the old South; and in some cases contact of beautiful friendship, and even warm love and affection. But this was spasmodic and exceptional and had to be partially concealed; and always it was spoiled by the sense of inferiority on the part of the Negro, and the will to rule on the part of the whites.

But in a thousand schools of the South after the war were brought together the most eager of the emancipated blacks and that part of the North which believed in democracy; and this social contact of human beings became a matter of course. The results were of all sorts. Sometimes the teachers became disgusted; sometimes the students became sullen and impudent; but, on the whole, the result was one of the most astonishing successes in new and sudden human contacts. We must also remember that the population of the sixties was divided into church congregations, and the great majority of these Methodist, [ 191 ]Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Quaker congregations in the North were represented directly or indirectly in the South, after the war, by one of their members who reported the work that she (and it was usually she) was doing with colored people. This work, to an unusual degree, was so successful and so helpful that her words carried widespread conviction.

At the beginning of the war probably not one white American in a hundred believed that Negroes could become an integral part of American democracy. They were slaves and cowards, ignorant by nature and not by lack of teaching. Even if they were going to be freed, they must be got rid of or rid the land of themselves. During the war came the first real revulsion of feeling when it was found that Negroes could and would fight; were apt subjects for military discipline, and indispensable in the conduct of the war. Beyond that came the change in feeling when the rise of schools over all the South showed that the Negro would and could learn. There might be continued doubt as to the extent of the learning and the height to which the race could rise; but nobody in that day of widespread immigration from Europe could doubt that the Negro was capable of at least as much education as the ordinary Northern laborer.

Present America has no conception of the cogency of this argument. In 1865, the right of all free Americans to be voters was unquestioned, and had not been questioned since the time of Andrew Jackson, except in the case of women, where it interfered with sex-ownership. The burden of the proof lay on the man who said there could be in the United States four or five million Americans without the right to vote. What would they be? What status would they hold? Would they not inevitably be slaves, in spite of the fact that they were called free? There were, to be sure, Northern states which would not allow Negroes to vote; but many of the Northern states did; and most of those that did not had comparatively few Negroes. The whole argument against Negro suffrage, even in those states, had been based on the status of the slave in the South. When the slave became free, a new problem was staged for such Northern states.

Two men stand in the forefront of this new attempt to expand and implement democracy: Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens.

Sumner had been fighting steadily not simply against slavery, but for the manhood rights of the free Negro, ever since he entered Congress. By amending the Act of March 3, 1863, he stopped discrimination on street cars between Washington and Alexandria and by the Act of March 3, 1865, extended this to all the railways of the District. June 25, 1864, by amending an appropriation bill, he stopped discrimination in the United States courts, a result which he called "The most [ 192 ] important of all in establishing the manhood and citizenship of the colored people. … For this result, I have labored two years."

He fought for equal pay to Negro soldiers and finally secured a favorable decision of the Attorney-General. In 1863-1864, he fought unsuccessfully against "white" suffrage in the new territory of Montana; he tried to include colored citizens among the voters of the city of Washington, but lost again.

At this moment of revolution, when our country needs the blessing of Almighty God and the strong arms of all her children, this is not the time for us solemnly to enact injustice. In duty to our country and in duty to God, I plead against any such thing. We must be against slavery in its original shape, and in all its brood of prejudice and error."²

Four years later, Senator Doolittle said that Sumner had "always been in favor of pushing Negro suffrage; he was the originator of that notion; he is the master of that new school of Reconstruction."

In December, 1864, Sumner sketched an anti-slavery amendment. This was adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society and early in the session was moved by Ashley of Ohio and Wilson of Iowa in the House, and Henderson of Missouri in the Senate. Sumner yielded to Trumbull, who adopted the formula of the Ordinance of 1787, which finally became the Thirteenth Amendment (§) in 1865. Sumner secured a special committee on slavery and freedmen in the Senate in January, 1864, and became the Chairman. He introduced a bill to repeal all fugitive slave laws and the Committee reported it. It was opposed by both Democratic and Republican Senators. It was amended so as to save the law of 1793, and the Committee dropped it. Two months later, a House bill reached the Senate, and Sumner reported it. Saulsbury of Delaware wanted "one day without the nigger." The bill was finally passed, 27-12, and Lincoln signed it June 28, 1864.

Sumner indeed assumed a mighty task, and one realized it as he stood February 5, 1866, before the Senate of the United States, before all the Representatives that could crowd into the hall, before an audience including the whole nation and in some degree the whole world. He spoke four hours on two successive days. Public interest was intense; the galleries of the Senate were crowded, and there were a number of colored people, including Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnett. (§|§)

The voice of the speaker was solemn and earnest. His style and presence held the audience to every word.³ "Rarely, if ever did he make a deeper impression in the Senate or awaken wider interest in the country." Thomas Wentworth Higginson found nothing in contemporary statesmanship, here or abroad, to equal the speech, and when Sumner [ 193 ] sat down, the audience broke into applause. Charles Sumner was at the time fifty-five years of age, handsome, but heavy of carriage, a scholar and gentleman, no leader of men but a leader of thought, and one of the finest examples of New England culture and American courage. His speech laid down a Magna Charta of democracy in America.

I begin by expressing a heart-felt aspiration that the day may soon come when the states lately in rebellion may be received again into the copartnership of political power and the full fellowship of the Union. But I see too well that it is vain to expect this day, which is so much longed for, until we have obtained that security for the future, which is found only in the Equal Rights of All, whether in the court-room or at the ballot-box. This is the Great Guarantee, without which all other guarantees will fail. This is the sole solution of our present troubles and anxieties. This is the only sufficient assurance of peace and reconciliation. …

Our fathers solemnly announced the Equal Rights of all men, and that Government had no just foundation except in the consent of the governed; and to the support of the Declaration, heralding these self-evident truths, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. . . . And now the moment has come when these vows must be fulfilled to the letter. In securing the Equal Rights of the freedman, and his participation in the Government, which he is taxed to support, we shall perform those early promises of the Fathers, and at the same time the supplementary promises only recently made to the freedman as the condition of alliance and aid against the Rebellion. A failure to perform these promises is moral and political bankruptcy. …

Twice already, since rebel slavery rose … [necessity] has spoken to us, insisting: first, that the slaves should be declared free; and secondly, that muskets should be put into their hands for the common defense. Yielding to necessity, these two things were done. Reason, humanity, justice were powerless in this behalf; but necessity was irresistible. And the result testifies how wisely the Republic acted. Without emancipation, followed by the arming of the slaves, rebel slavery would not have been overcome. With these the victory was easy.

At last the same necessity which insisted first upon emancipation and then upon the arming of the slaves, insists with the same unanswerable force upon the admission of the freedman to complete Equality before the law, so that there shall be no ban of color in court-room or at the ballot-box, and government shall be fixed on its only rightful foundation -- the consent of the governed. Reason, humanity, and justice, all of which are clear for this admission of the freedman, may fail [ 194 ] to move you; but you must yield to necessity, which now requires that these promises shall be performed. …

The freedman must be protected. To this you are specially pledged by the Proclamation of President Lincoln, which, after declaring him 'free,' promises to maintain this freedom, not for any limited period, but for all time. But this cannot be done so long as you deny him the shield of impartial laws. Let him be heard in court and let him vote. Let these rights be guarded sacredly. Beyond even the shield of impartial laws, he will then have that protection which comes from the consciousness of manhood. Clad in the full panoply of citizenship he will feel at last that he is a man. At present he is only a recent chattel, awaiting your justice to be transmuted into manhood. If you would have him respected in his rights, you must begin by respecting him in your laws. If you would maintain him in his freedom, you must begin by maintaining him in the equal rights of citizenship.

Foremost is the equality of all men. Of course, in a declaration of rights, no such supreme folly was intended as that all men are created equal in form or capacity, bodily or mental; but simply that they are created equal in rights. This is the first of the self-evident truths that are announced, leading and governing all the rest. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are among inalienable rights; but they are all held in subordination to that primal truth. Here is the starting-point of the whole, and the end is like the starting-point. In announcing that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, the Declaration repeats again the same proclamation of Equal Rights. Thus is Equality the Alpha and the Omega, in which all other rights are embraced. Men may not have a natural right to certain things, but most clearly they have a natural right to impartial laws, by which they shall be secured in Equal Rights. Equality in rights is the first of rights. …

Taking the sum total of the population in the eleven states, we find 5,447,222 whites to 3,666,110 colored persons; and you are now to decide, whether in the discharge of your duties under the Constitution, and bound to guaranty a republican form of government, you will disfranchise this mighty mass, shutting them out from those Equal Rights promised by our fathers, and from all voice in the government of their country. They surpass in numbers by at least a million the whole population of the colonies at the time our fathers raised the cry, 'Taxation without Representation is Tyranny'; and now you are to decide whether you will strip them of representation while you subject them to a grinding taxation by tariff and excise, acting directly and indirectly, which dwarfs into insignificance everything attempted by the British Parliament. …

[ 195 ] Let me be understood. What I especially ask is impartial suffrage, which is, of course, embraced in universal suffrage. What is universal is necessarily impartial. For the present, I simply insist that all shall be equal before the law, so that, in the enjoyment of this right, there shall be no restriction which is not equally applicable to all. Any further question, in the nature of 'qualification,' belongs to another stage of debate. And yet I have no hesitation in saying that universal suffrage is a universal right, subject only to such regulations as the safety of society may require. These may concern (1) age, (2) character, (3) registration, (4) residence. Nobody doubts that minors may be excluded, and so, also, persons of infamous life. Registration and residence are both prudential requirements for the safeguard of the ballot-box against the Nomads and Bohemians of politics, and to compel the exercise of this franchise where a person is known among his neighbors and friends. Education also may, under certain circumstances, be a requirement of prudence, especially valuable in a Republic where so much depends on the intelligence of the people. These temporary restrictions do not in any way interfere with the rights of suffrage, for they leave it absolutely accessible to all. ...

The ballot is a schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable value, but the ballot teaches what these cannot teach. It teaches manhood. Especially is it important to a race whose manhood has been denied. The work of redemption cannot be complete if the ballot is left in doubt. The freedman already knows his friends by the unerring instinct of the heart. Give him the ballot, and he will be educated into the principles of the government. Deny him the ballot, and he will continue an alien in knowledge as in rights. His claim is exceptional, as your injustice is exceptional. For generations you have shut him out from all education, making it a crime to teach him to read for himself the Book of Life. Let not the tyranny of the past be an apology for any further exclusion. …

Having pleaded for the freedman, I now plead for the Republic; for to each alike the ballot is a necessity. It is idle to expect any true peace while the freedman is robbed of this transcendent light and left a prey to that vengeance which is ready to wreak upon him the disappointment of defeat. The country, sympathetic with him, will be in a position of perpetual unrest. With him it will suffer and with him alone can it cease to suffer. Only through him can you redress the balance of our political system and assure the safety of patriot citizens. Only through him can you save the national debt from the inevitable repudiation which awaits it when recent rebels in conjunction with Northern allies once more bear sway. His is our best guarantee. Use [ 196 ] him. He was once your fellow-soldier; he has always been your fellow-man. …

I speak today hoping to do something for my country, and especially for that unhappy portion which has been arrayed in arms against us. The people there are my fellow-citizens, and gladly would I hail them, if they would permit it, as no longer a 'section,' no longer 'the South,' but an integral part of the Republic -- under a Constitution which knows no North and no South and cannot tolerate any 'sectional' pretensions. Gladly do I offer my best efforts in all sincerity for their welfare. But I see clearly that there is nothing in the compass of mortal power so important to them in every respect, morally, politically, and economically -- that there is nothing with such certain promise to them of beneficent results -- there is nothing so sure to make their land smile with industry and fertility as the decree of Equal Rights which I now invoke. Let the decree go forth to cover them with blessings, sure to descend upon their children in successive generations. They have given us war; we give them peace. They have raged against us in the name of Slavery. We send them back the benediction of Justice for all. They menace hate; we offer in return all the sacred charities of country together with oblivion of the past. This is our 'Measure for Measure.' This is our retaliation. This is our only revenge. …

In the fearful tragedy now drawing to a close there is a destiny, stern and irresistible as that of the Greek Drama, which seems to master all that is done, hurrying on the death of Slavery and its whole brood of sin. There is also a Christian Providence which watches this battle for right, caring especially for the poor and downtrodden who have no helper. The freedman still writhing under cruel oppression now lifts his voice to God the avenger. It is for us to save ourselves from righteous judgment. Never with impunity can you outrage human nature. Our country which is guilty still, is paying still the grievous penalty. Therefore by every motive of self-preservation we are summoned to be just. And thus is the cause associated indissolubly with the national life. …

Strike at the Black Code, as you have already struck at the Slave Code. There is nothing to choose between them. Strike at once; strike hard. You have already proclaimed Emancipation; proclaim Enfranchisement also. And do not stultify yourselves by setting at naught the practical principle of the Fathers, that all just government stands only on the consent of the governed, and its inseparable corollary, that taxation without representation is tyranny. What was once true is true forever, although we may for a time lose sight of it, and this is the [ 197 ] case with those imperishable truths to which you have been, alas! so indifferent. Thus far the work is only half done. …

According to the best testimony now, the population of the earth -- embracing Caucasians, Mongolians, Malays, Africans, and Americans -- is about thirteen hundred millions, of whom only three hundred and seventy-five millions are 'white men,' or little less than one-fourth, so that, in claiming exclusive rights for 'white men,' you degrade nearly three-quarters of the Human Family, made in the 'image of God' and declared to be of 'one blood,' while you sanction a Caste offensive to religion, an Oligarchy inconsistent with Republican Government, and a Monopoly which has the whole world as its footstool.

Against this assumption I protest with mind, soul, and heart. It is false in religion, false in statesmanship, and false in economy. It is an extravagance, which, if enforced, is foolish tyranny. Show me a creature with erect countenance looking to heaven, made in the image of God, and I show you a man who, of whatever country or race, whether darkened by equatorial sun or blanched by northern cold, is with you a child of the heavenly father, and equal with you in title to all the rights of human nature."

The second seer of democracy was Thaddeus Stevens. He was a man different entirely in method, education and thought from Charles Sumner. We know Stevens best when he was old and sick, and when with grim and awful courage he made the American Congress take the last step which it has ever taken towards democracy. Yet in one respect Stevens in his thought was even more realistic than Charles Sumner, although Sumner later followed him; from the first, Stevens knew that beneath all theoretical freedom and political right must lie the economic foundation. He said at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, September 7, 1865:

"The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed, and it never can be done if this opportunity is lost. … How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse, exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs; of the owners of twenty thousand acre manors with lordly palaces and the occupants of narrow huts inhabited by 'low white trash'? If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners or the free labor of intelligent citizens. This must be done even though it drives her nobility into exile! If they go, all the better. It will be hard to persuade the owner of ten thousand acres of land, who drives a coach and four, that he is not degraded by sitting at the same table or in the same pew, with the embrowned and hard-handed farmer who has himself cultivated his own thriving homestead of 150 acres. The country would be well rid of the proud, bloated and defiant [ 198 ] rebels. … The foundations of their institutions … must be broken up and relaid, or all our blood and treasure have been spent in vain.⁴

He figured that there were in the rebel states four hundred sixty-five million acres of land. Of this three hundred ninety-four million acres were owned by 70,000 persons, each of whom possessed more than two hundred acres. He argued that these three hundred ninety four million acres ought to be confiscated by the government. To each adult freedman should be given forty acres which approximately would dispose of about forty million acres. The remaining three hundred fifty-four million acres, he would divide into suitable farms and sell to the highest bidder. Including city property it should bring an average price of ten dollars an acre, making a total of three billion five hundred forty million in six per cent bonds, the income of which should go towards the payment of pensions to the deserving veterans, and the widows and orphans of soldiers and sailors who had been killed in the war. Two hundred million dollars should be appropriated to reimburse loyal men in both North and South whose property had been destroyed or damaged during the war. With the remaining three billion, forty million dollars he would pay the national debt. Stevens argued that since all this property which has to be confiscated was owned by 70,000 persons, the vast majority of the people in the South would not be affected by this policy. These 70,000 were the arch-traitors and since they had caused an unjust war they should be made to suffer the consequences." ⁵

Sumner, thinking along these lines, had hesitated. He said in June, 1862, when confiscation first was broached:

"I confess frankly that I look with more hope and confidence to liberation than to confiscation. To give freedom is nobler than to take property. . . . There is in confiscation, unless when directed against the criminal authors of the rebellion, a harshness inconsistent with that mercy which it is always a sacred duty to cultivate. … But liberation is not harsh; and it is certain, if properly conducted, to carry with it the smiles of a benignant Providence." ⁶

Later, however, he began to see the economic demands of emancipation and he wrote to John Bright, March 13, 1865: "Can emancipation be carried out without using the lands of the slave-masters? We must see that the freedmen are established on the soil, and that they may become proprietors. From the beginning I have regarded confiscation only as ancillary to emancipation. The great plantations, which have been so many nurseries of the rebellion, must be broken up, and the freedmen must have the pieces. It looks as if we were on the eve of another agitation. I insist that the rebel states shall not come back except on the footing of the Declaration of Independence, with all [ 199 ] persons equal before the law, and government founded on the consent of the governed. In other words, there shall be no discrimination on account of color. If all whites vote, then must all blacks; but there shall be no limitation of suffrage for one more than for the other. It is sometimes said 'What! let the freedman, yesterday a slave, vote?' I am inclined to think that there is more harm in refusing than in conceding the franchise. It is said that they are as intelligent as the Irish just arrived; but the question has become immensely practical in this respect: Without their votes we cannot establish stable governments in the Rebel States. Their votes are as necessary as their muskets; of this I am satisfied. Without them, the old enemy will reappear, and under the forms of law take possession of the governments, choose magistrates and officers, and in alliance with the Northern Democracy, put us all in peril again, postpone the day of tranquillity, and menace the national credit by assailing the national debt. To my mind, the nation is now bound by self-interest -- ay, self-defense -- to be thoroughly just. The Declaration of Independence has pledges which have never been redeemed. We must redeem them, at least as regards the rebel states which have fallen under our jurisdiction. Mr. Lincoln is slow in accepting truths. I have reminded him that if he would say the word we might settle this question promptly and rightly. He hesitates. Meanwhile I feel it my duty to oppose his scheme of government in Louisiana, which for the present is defeated in Congress." ⁷

Stevens' declaration found few echoes. Senator Wade of Ohio was the only one who blazed a further path toward industrial democracy. He "declared in public meetings that after the abolition of slavery, a radical change in the relations

of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day." And Wade added frankly that this democratic movement of freedom and power for men was easily confused in men's minds with the older slogans of freedom for trade and industry.

"There is no doubt," he also remarked, "that if by an insurrection [the colored people] could contrive to slay one half their oppressors, the other half would hold them in the highest respect and no doubt treat them with justice."

All of this simply increased Industry's fear of Western radicalism and was regarded as advocacy of industrial revolution. These were the demands of the extreme leaders of abolition-democracy; leaders like Phillips and Douglass agreed with the demand for the ballot. Wendell Phillips said at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1865:

Our philosophy of government since the Fourth day of July, 1776, is that no class is safe, no freedom is real, no emancipation is effectual [ 200 ] which does not place in the hands of the man himself the power to protect his own rights. That is the genius of American Institutions.

The Negro must be given the franchise because we have no other timber to build states with, and unless we build with him, we must postpone reconstruction for so many years, that the very patronage of territorial government would swamp republican institutions. Keep them territories, let the democracy come in eight years or four, with the money power of this bank system in one hand and territorial government in the other, and republican government will be almost a failure.

At a Tremont Temple meeting in Boston, it was "Resolved, That since the denial of rights to black men was the cause of the disruption of the Union, their enfranchisement and free equality before the law must be the cornerstone of the Reconstruction."

Douglass said, "I am for the 'immediate, unconditional and universal' enfranchisement of the black man, in every state in the Union. Without this his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for, in fact, if he is not the slave of the industrial master, he is the slave of society, and holds his liberty as a privilege, not as a right. He is at the mercy of the mob, and has no means of protecting himself."

Not all Abolitionists agreed, however; Garrison in the Liberator refused to demand immediate enfranchisement. He said, in 1864, in reply to an English critic,

When was it ever known that liberation from bondage was accompanied by a recognition of political equality ? Chattels personal may be instantly translated from the auction-block into freemen; but when were they ever taken at the same time to the ballot-box, and invested with all political rights and immunities? According to the laws of development and progress, it is not practicable. To denounce or complain of President Lincoln for not disregarding public sentiment, and not flying in the face of these laws, is hardly just. Besides, I doubt whether he has the constitutional right to decide this matter. Ever since this government was organized, the right of suffrage has been determined by each state in the Union for itself, so that there is no uniformity in regard to it. In some free states, colored citizens are allowed to vote; in others, they are not. It is always a state, never a national matter.

Nor, if the freed blacks were admitted to the polls by Presidential fiat, do I see any permanent advantage likely to be secured by it; for, submitted to as a necessity at the outset, as soon as the state was organized and left to manage its own affairs, the white population, with their superior intelligence, wealth, and power, would unquestionably alter the franchise in accordance with their prejudices, and exclude [ 201 ] those thus summarily brought to the polls. Coercion would gain nothing. In other words -- as in your own country -- universal suffrage will be hard to win and to hold without general preparation of feeling and sentiment. But it will come, both at the South and with you; yet only by a struggle on the part of the disfranchised, and a growing conviction of its justice, 'in the good time coming.' With the abolition of slavery in the South, prejudice or 'colorphobia,' the natural product of the system, will gradually disappear -- as in the case of your West Indian colonies -- and black men will win their way to wealth, distinction, eminence, and official station. I ask only a charitable judgment of President Lincoln respecting this matter, whether in Louisiana or any other state.⁸

Here was sound political argument but unsound economics based on the American Assumption of wealth through thrift, applied to slaves, where Thaddeus Stevens alone knew it could not be applied. Nevertheless the demand for Negro suffrage grew, chiefly because of the necessity of implementing emancipation and making Negro freedom real. The New York Times said in April, 1865:

Nobody, we believe, wishes to keep any Southern state under disabilities simply as punishment. Mr. Sumner, himself, probably does not want to transform the Southern states into territories for any such object. The real concern herein is whether the Southern states, if restored at once to their full state rights, would not abuse them by an oppression of the black race. This race has rendered an assistance to the government in times of danger that entitles them to its benign care. The government cannot, without the worst dishonor, permit the bondage of the black man to be continued in any form. It is bound by every moral principle, as well as every prudential consideration, not to remit him to the tender mercies of an enemy. But it is to be hoped that the Southern people will understand that the interests of both races require a just relation between them and that they will secure this by a prompt change of their state constitution and laws.

The New York Tribune laid down seven points in May, 1865:

1. Everyone must realize that the blacks will not emigrate but stay in America.

2. The blacks may not be spared, for their labor makes land valuable, and the land may not be spared.

3. Fair pay for fair work is a sine qua non.

4. Education for freedmen.

5. With education comes self-elevation, and the desire to deny him the vote will disappear.

6. However, white men who are ignorant and vicious, vote. Suffrage for blacks regardless of this ignorance.

[ 202 ] 7. Fidelity to the political creed of the nation to secure the happiness of all.

Later, Horace Greeley said: "We would consent to submit to the suffrage only those who could read and write or those who pay taxes or are engaged in some trade. Any standard which could limit the voting privilege to the competent and deserving would be agreeable to us." He adds, "The Abolitionists are most anxious that political rights, and especially the right of self-protection by suffrage, shall be accorded to the freedmen of the South; and waiving all questions of power, they would gladly prefer that such extension of suffrage be accorded by, rather than imposed on, Southern whites. They cannot realize that hanging some of the late insurgents as rebels and traitors will dispose the survivors toward according the elective franchise even to the most capable of emancipated blacks. In fact the obstacles to such extension of suffrage are many and formidable -- they are not to be surmounted (though many act as though they could) by a mere order from the War Department, nor even by an act of Congress." ⁹

The most popular argument for Negro suffrage was that of Carl Schurz:

It would seem that the interference of the national authority in the home concerns of the Southern states would be rendered less necessary, and the whole problem of political and social reconstruction be made simplified, if, while the masses lately arrayed against the government are permitted to vote, the large majority of those who were always loyal, and are naturally anxious to see the free labor problem successfully solved, were not excluded from all influence upon legislation. In all questions concerning the Union, the national debt, and the future social organization of the South, the feelings of the colored man are naturally in sympathy with the views and aims of the national government. And while the Southern whites fought against the Union, the Negro did all he could to aid it; while the Southern white sees in the national government his conqueror, the Negro sees in it his protector; while the white owes to the national debt his defeat, the Negro owes to it his deliverance; while the white considers himself robbed and ruined by the emancipation of the slaves, the Negro finds in it the assurance of future prosperity and happiness. In all the important issues the Negro would be led by natural impulse to forward the ends of the government, and by making his influence, as part of the voting body, tell upon the legislation of the states, render the interference of the national authority less necessary.

As the most difficult of the pending questions are intimately connected with the status of the Negro in Southern society, it is obvious that a correct solution can be more easily obtained if he has a voice in [ 203 ] the matter. In the right to vote, he would find the best permanent protection against oppressive class-legislation, as well as against individual persecution. The relations between the white and black races even if improved by the gradual wearing off of the present animosities, are likely to remain long under the troubling influence of prejudice.

It is a notorious fact that the rights of a man of some political power are far less exposed to violations than those of one who is, in matters of public interest, completely subject to the will of others. A voter is a man of influence; small as that influence may be in the single individual, it becomes larger when that individual belongs to a numerous class of voters who are ready to make common cause with him for the protection of his rights. Such an individual is an object of interest to the political parties that desire to have the benefits of his ballot. It is true, the bringing face to face at the ballot box of the white and the black races may here and there lead to an outbreak of feeling, and the first trials ought certainly to be made while the national power is still there to prevent or repress disturbances; but the practice once successfully inaugurated under the protection of that power, it would probably be more apt than anything else to obliterate old antagonisms, especially if the colored people -- which is probable, as soon as their own rights are sufficiently secured -- divide their votes between the different political parties.

The effect of the extension of the franchise to the colored people upon the development of free labor and upon the security of human rights in the South being the principal object in view, the objections raised on the ground of the ignorance of the freedman become unimportant. Practical liberty is a good school, and, besides, if any qualification can be found, applicable to both races, which does not interfere with the attainment of the main object, such qualification would in that respect be unobjectionable. But it is idle to say that it will be time to speak of Negro suffrage when the whole colored race will be educated, for the ballot may be necessary to him to secure his education. It is also idle to say that ignorance is the principal ground upon which Southern men object to Negro suffrage, for if it were, that numerous class of colored people in Louisiana who are as highly educated, as intelligent and as wealthy as any corresponding class of whites, would have been enfranchised long ago.

It has been asserted that the Negro would be but a voting machine in the hand of his employer. On this point opinions seem to differ. I have heard it said in the South that the freedmen are more likely to be influenced by their schoolmasters and preachers. But even if we suppose the employer to control to a certain extent the Negro laborer's [ 204 ] vote, two things are to be taken into consideration: 1. The class of employers or landed proprietors will in a few years be very different from what it was heretofore; in consequence of the general breaking up, a great many of the old slaveholders will be obliged to give up their lands and new men will step into their places; and 2. The employer will hardly control the vote of the Negro laborer so far as to make him vote against his own liberty. The beneficial effect of an extension of suffrage does not always depend upon the intelligence with which the newly admitted voters exercise their right, but sometimes upon the circumstances in which they are placed; and the circumstances in which the freedmen of the South are placed are such that when they only vote for their own liberty and rights, they vote for the rights of free labor, for the success of an immediate important reform, for the prosperity of the country, and for the general interests of mankind. If, therefore, in order to control the colored voter, the employer or whoever he may be, is first obliged to concede to the freedman the great point of his own rights as a man and a free laborer, the great social reform is completed, the most difficult problem is solved, and all other questions it will be comparatively easy to settle.

In discussing the matter of Negro suffrage, I deemed it my duty to confine myself strictly to the practical aspects of the subject. I have, therefore, not touched its moral merits nor discussed the question whether the national government is competent to enlarge the elective franchise in the states lately in rebellion by its own act.

I deem it proper, however, to offer a few remarks on the assertion frequently put forth that the franchise is likely to be extended to the colored man by the voluntary action of the Southern whites themselves. My observation leads me to a contrary opinion. Aside from a very few enlightened men, I found but one class of people in favor of the enfranchisement of the blacks: it was the class of Unionists who found themselves politically ostracized and looked upon the enfranchisement of the loyal Negroes as the salvation of the whole loyal element. But their numbers and influence are sadly insufficient to secure such a result. The masses are strongly opposed to colored suffrage; anybody that dares to advocate it is stigmatized as a dangerous fanatic; nor do I deem it probable that in the ordinary course of things, prejudices will wear off to such an extent as to make it a popular measure. Outside of Louisiana, only one gentleman who occupied a prominent political position in the South expressed to me an opinion favorable to it. He declared himself ready to vote for an amendment to the constitution of his state bestowing the right of suffrage upon all male citizens without distinction of color, who could furnish evidence of their ability to read and write, without, however, [ 205 ] disfranchising those who are now voters and are not able to fulfill that condition. This gentleman is now a member of one of the state conventions, but I presume he will not risk his political standing in the South by moving such an amendment in that body.

The only manner in which, in my opinion, the Southern people can be induced to grant to the freedman some measure of self-protecting power in the form of suffrage is to make it a condition precedent to 'readmission.'

Practical attempts on the part of the Southern people to deprive the Negro of his rights as a freeman may result in bloody collisions, and will certainly plunge Southern society into restless fluctuations and anarchical confusion. Such evils can be prevented only by continuing the control of the national government in the states lately in rebellion, until free labor is fully developed and firmly established, and the advantages and blessings of the new order of things have disclosed themselves. This desirable result will be hastened by a firm declaration on the part of the government that national control in the South will not cease until such results are secured. Only in this way can that security be established in the South which will render numerous immigration possible, and such immigration would materially aid a favorable development of things.

The solution of the problem would be very much facilitated by enabling all the loyal and free-labor elements in the South to exercise a healthy influence upon legislation. It will hardly be possible to secure the freedman against oppressive class legislation and private persecution unless he be endowed with a certain measure of political power.

As to the future peace and harmony of the Union, it is of the highest importance that the people lately in rebellion be not permitted to build up another 'peculiar institution' whose spirit is in conflict with the fundamental principles of our political system; for as long as they cherish interests peculiar to them in preference to those they have in common with the rest of the American people, their loyalty to the Union will always be uncertain.

I desire not to be understood as saying that there are no well-meaning men among those who were comprised in the rebellion. There are many, but none of these in number nor in influence are strong enough to control the manifest tendency of the popular spirit. There are great reasons for hope that a determined policy on the part of the national government will produce innumerable and valuable conversions. This consideration counsels leniency as to persons, such as is demanded by the human and enlightened spirit of our times, and vigor and firmness in the carrying out of principles such as are demanded [ 206 ] by the national sense of justice and the exigencies of our situation." ¹⁰

The inevitable result of the Civil War eventually had to be the enfranchisement of the laboring class, black and white, in the South. It could not, as the South clamored to make it, result in the mere legalistic freeing of the slaves. On the other hand, it would not go as far as economic emancipation for which Stevens and the freedmen clamored, because the industrial North instinctively recoiled from this and the Northern white working man himself had not achieved such economic emancipation. The politically enfranchised slave was accused, as every laboring class has been, of ignorance and bad manners, of poverty and crime. And when he tried to go to school and tried to imitate the manners of his brothers, and demanded real economic emancipation through ownership of land and right to use capital, there arose the bitter shriek of property, and the charge of corruption and theft was added to that of ignorance and poverty, just as we have seen in our day in the case of Russia.

Democracy, that inevitable end of all government, faces eternal paradox. In all ages, the vast majority of men have been ignorant and poor, and any attempt to arm such classes with political power brings the question: Can Ignorance and Poverty rule? If they try to rule, their success in the nature of things must be halting and spasmodic, if not absolutely nil; and it must incur the criticism and raillery of the wise and the well-to-do. On the other hand, if the poor, unlettered toilers are given no political power, and are kept by exploitation in poverty, they will remain submerged unless rescued by revolution; and a philosophy will prevail, teaching that the submergence of the mass is inevitable and is on the whole best, not only for them, but for the ruling classes.

In all this argument there is seldom a consideration of the possibility that the great mass of people may become intelligent, with incomes that insure a decent standard of living. In such case, no one could deny the right and inevitableness of democracy. And in the meantime, in bridging the road from ignorance and poverty to intelligence and an income sufficient for civilization, the real power must be in someone's hands. Shall this power be a dictatorship for the benefit of the rich, the cultured and the fortunate? This is the basic problem of democracy and it was discussed before the people of the United States in unusual form directly after the Civil War. It was a test of the nation's real belief in democratic institutions. And the fact that the ideal of abolition-democracy carried the nation as far as it did in the matter of Negro suffrage must always be a source of intense gratification for those who believe in humanity and justice.

In a republic the people precede their government. Throughout the war the people demanded more stringent and more energetic measures than the administration was prepared to adopt. They called for emancipation before it was proclaimed; for a Freedmen's Bureau before it was organized; for a Civil Rights bill before it was passed; and for impartial suffrage before it was finally, by act of Congress, secured. In the history of emancipation the voluntary activities of a portion of the people in benevolent, philanthropic and Christian effort preceded, prepared for, and helped to produce that governmental action which has largely contributed to the present condition and well-grounded hopes of the colored people." ¹¹

The reports on conditions in the South gained wide currency and had great influence. Salmon P. Chase, Whitelaw Reid, Carl Schurz, all supported with views and logic the prevailing trend of abolition-democracy. In the South itself, long before there was any unanimity in the North on the subject of Negro suffrage or signs of pressure, the question of votes for Negroes came to the front. It was first precipitated by the proposed Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. December 14, 1863, Ashley of Ohio had introduced into the House an amendment prohibiting slavery, and Wilson of Iowa introduced a similar amendment. Both were referred, but not discussed until five months after their introduction. Four other similar amendments were introduced in the House during the season.

In the Senate, January 11, 1864, Henderson of Missouri introduced an amendment to abolish slavery, which was referred. A few days later, Charles Sumner submitted a joint resolution against slavery. The committee preferred Henderson's resolution. The Border State men were especially opposed and Garrett Davis of Kentucky made long and fiery speeches and offered eight amendments. Senator Powell of Kentucky also offered various amendments.

A proposed Thirteenth Amendment finally passed the Senate April 8, 1863, by a vote of 36-6. It was considered in the House the last day of May. On June 15, it was approved by a vote of 95-66, but this was less than the necessary two-thirds majority.

Meantime, Lincoln had been reelected, receiving 2,216,067 out of 4,011,413 votes; Maryland had abolished slavery, and there was a movement for abolition throughout the Border States. At the second session of the 38th Congress, the President urged the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. On January 31, 1865, Ashley called the proposed Thirteenth Amendment for reconsideration. Eleven Democrats deserted their leader and enabled the resolution to pass, on January 31, 1865.

Blaine said: "When the announcement was made, the Speaker [ 208 ] became powerless to preserve order. The members upon the Republican side sprang upon their seats cheering, shouting, and waving hands, hats, and canes, while the spectators upon the floor and in the galleries joined heartily in the demonstrations. Upon the restoration of order, Mr. Ingersoll of Illinois rose and said, 'Mr. Speaker, in honor of this immortal and sublime event, I move that this House do now adjourn.' " ¹² This amendment was signed by the President and submitted to the states. On December 18, 1865, it was declared adopted by the Secretary of State.

The Amendment carried an unusual provision in Section II which asserted: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation." Charles Sumner and others declared that this gave Congress power to enfranchise Negroes if such a step was necessary to their freedom. The South took cognizance of this argument. Of the states which seceded, Virginia and Louisiana ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in February, 1865, and Arkansas in April. All of these states were at the time in the control of minorities supported by the Union armies, and strong pressure was exerted on them by the administration in Washington.

In November, 1865, South Carolina ratified with this proviso:

That any attempt by Congress towards legislating upon the political status of former slaves, or their civil relations, would be contrary to the Constitution of the United States as it now is, or as it would be altered by the proposed amendment; is in conflict with the policy of the President, declared in his amnesty proclamation, and with the restoration of that harmony upon which depend the vital interests of the American Union."¹³

Alabama ratified the Amendment the same month with this proviso:

That this amendment to the Constitution of the United States is adopted by the Legislature of Alabama with the understanding that it does not confer upon Congress the power to legislate upon the political status of freedmen in this State.¹⁴

North Carolina and Georgia ratified in December just before the amendment was proclaimed. Mississippi refused ratification until after the Amendment was in force. Florida ratified it with the Alabama reservations. Texas did not ratify until 1870. It is difficult to see in these proceedings any indication that the South was willing to abolish slavery and certainly there was not the slightest indication of granting any Negro political rights.

In South Carolina, "the assembly shunned all suggestions that suffrage be given the Negro in any form." When a number of Charleston [ 209 ] Negroes prepared a memorial on this, the convention refused to hear it. "It cannot but be the earnest desire of all members," said the Charleston Daily Courier, "that the matter be ignored in toto during the session. … The white democracy, especially that of the up-country, felt that a restricted suffrage which took no account of racial discriminations would disfranchise a large portion of the white vote and give the large landowners an unfair influence through their control of Negro votes. …" "It may safely be said," wrote the Columbia correspondent of the Charleston Daily Courier, "that the views and opinions of Sumner, Thad Stevens, Wilson, and some other Northern Radicals have been considered too unworthy to be seriously commented upon by the members of the convention. It is well known that the sentiments of those gentlemen are extremely unpopular in the North." ¹⁵

Universally, the South was reported as adamant on the subject of Negroes voting. "That is not a question they even allow themselves to debate. They consider it too monstrous a proposition even to debate. That is one of the things they imagine they will never submit to. They will suffer confiscation and everything before they will endure the degradation." ¹⁶

Governor Walker of Florida said in his inaugural speech: "Each one of us knows that we could not give either an honest or conscientious assent to Negro suffrage. There is not one of us that would not feel that he was doing wrong, and bartering his self-respect, his conscience and his duty to his country and to the Union itself, for the benefits he might hope to obtain by getting back into the Union. Much as I worship the Union, and much as I would rejoice to see my State once more recognized as a member thereof, yet it is better, a thousand times better, that she should remain out of the Union, even as one of her subjugated provinces, than go back, 'eviscerated of her manhood,' despoiled of her honor, recreant of her duty, without her self-respect, and of course without the respect of the balance of mankind -- a miserable thing, with seeds of moral and political death in herself, soon to be communicated to all her associates." ¹⁷

Judge Underwood of Virginia reports a candid gentleman of Alexandria talking to him in friendly conversation:

'Sooner than see the colored people raised to a legal and political equality, the Southern people would prefer their total annihilation.' I had regarded him as well informed and almost as candid a man as we have among the Rebels.¹⁸

Grattan, a native of Virginia, said February 10, 1866: "I believe that if the blacks are left to themselves, if all foreign influence were taken away, the whites would control their votes. It is [ 210 ] not in that the difficulty lies, but it is in the repugnance which the white race would feel to that sort of political equality. It is the same sort of repugnance which a man feels toward a snake. He does not feel any animosity to the snake, but there is a natural shrinking from it." ¹⁹ He thought that any attempt to give the Negroes a vote would lead to their extermination.

In all this reported opposition to Negro suffrage, the grounds given were racial and social animosity, and never the determination of land and capital to restrict the political power of labor. Yet this last reason was the fundamental one.

While the South was in suspense, and the abolition-democracy was slowly debating and crystallizing opinion, industry in the North was forging forward with furious intensity; and this movement was foremost and predominant in the mind and vision of living persons in that day. During the war, business prospered. There were few failures and the inflated currency increased prices and favored business profits; while, on the other hand, it decreased real wages and the income of farmers. Wealth became concentrated among the manufacturers, merchants, the financiers and the speculators. There was, consequently, a large accumulation of capital for investment in new business enterprises; industrial development was hastened. Inventions and technical improvements increased. Plants became larger and more efficient; steel manufacture became the basis of modern industry and developed rapidly because of the demands of war. The metal industry, thus expanded, turned to the production of peace goods. The war itself called for more efficiency and larger plants and consolidation of plants.

The freeing of the nation from the strangling hands of oligarchy in the South freed not only black men but white men, not only human spirit, but business enterprise all over the land. This happened in surprising ways. Quite naturally, and logically, under the stress of war, national and local taxes rose and rose and rose yet again, forcing the whole community and nation to pay for things formerly paid for by individuals. First, necessary money was provided by taxing imports; then, to encourage local manufacturers of goods that must be had for war; thus by imperceptible transition, the nation was taxed to support manufacturers. The South had forced down the tariff until in 1857 there was practically free trade. Northern manufacturers during the war pressed for higher tariff rates. Taxes on imported goods were the easiest method of raising money. The tariff acts of 1862-1864 raised the average rates of taxation to 37.2% and 47%. And since then the tariff rates have been raised higher and higher so as to foster industrial monopoly.

The industrialists were not without scientific support. Henry Carey, [ 211 ] the American economist, published his "Principles of Social Science" in 1858-1859. He attacked free trade and joined the German Liszt in a demand for a self-contained national economy. Carey sought to show the beneficial effects that the proximity of protected industry would have upon agriculture. Thus in the name of the new national spirit, came "America for Americans" as a great and self-sufficing farming and manufacturing country.

We emerged, therefore, from the war with a tremendous industry, over-organized, but efficient in many directions through the exigencies and demands of war. Two things beckoned further; first, the discovery and realization of the extraordinary natural resources of America, its iron, coal and oil, its forests, and of course raw materials like wool, sugar and cotton; secondly, a unified and wonderful system of transportation. The nation borrowed three billion dollars for war and paid heavy interest because of the price of gold. The money borrowed by the government had to be spent and spent quickly without deliberation, without careful decision. Contractors and managers, therefore, who furnished goods to the government could make, legally and illegally, fabulous sums. The prosperity which thus came to them had to be passed on in part to the workers, who received higher wages, and who, despite the increased cost of living, had money to spend freely. Boom times were on. There was plenty of money for investment and plenty of chances for investment. Speculation ran riot. The whole moral fabric of the country was changed, not simply by the blood and cruelty, hate and destruction, of war, but by the prospects of a golden future. We are told that when the Secretary of the Treasury visited New York early in 1864, he found business men interested not in the blood of battle but in the stock market. Workers and foreigners caught the fever and naturally enough held the South to blame for the past. Had not the South held up the distribution of the Western lands since 1845 against the protest of Northern farmers and new immigrants; against Southern poor whites led by Andrew Johnson, and with sympathy on the part of the managers and hirers of labor of the North? Early in the war, the Homestead Law was passed and threw open the Western lands to settlers on easy terms. The new farmers and the new immigrant laborers were scarcely aware when this land was given mostly to railroads to help finance them, and then sold to farmers at prices which made profitable farming increasingly difficult. They saw agricultural prices rising; they expected them, of course, to continue to rise.

Railways in the United States increased from three miles in 1828 to 23,476 miles in i860, 30,283 miles in 1870, and over 50,000 miles in 1880. The railroads had been financed by selling bonds abroad before [ 212 ] the war and after the war by large increases in domestic capital invested. Gifts of public lands were showered upon the railway builders, amounting to half the farm area opened by the Homestead Act. Great railway systems began to be consolidated, and through them population drifted to the cities.

Especially did industry begin to fear the unrest in the West after the war. The West was uneasy. It became more uneasy on account of the land distribution to the railroads, the high and discriminatory railroad rates, the whole money situation, and the taxation. Finance and industry, therefore, after the war, while it looked forward confidently to tremendous industrial development, was wary. It proposed to protect itself. There was going to be no new free trade, no agricultural bloc, no drives for cheap money, no state intervention in industry. The new national development, protected from foreign competition, must be protected from state intervention. Otherwise state control of railroads and industries, state taxation and regulation, would reduce the United States to a series of small exclusive industrial territories instead of one vast market.

All this thought and development went on with little attention to the social or political results of the war. But soon attention had to be given to these matters. Although industry was now in control of the national government, the Republican party which represented it was a minority party; and Northern and Southern Democrats, especially Southern Democrats with increased power by counting the full Negro population, together with Western malcontents, could easily oust the Republicans. It was because of this thought that Northern industry made its great alliance with abolition-democracy. The consummation of this alliance came slowly and reluctantly and after vain effort toward understanding with the South which was unsuccessful until 1876.

When Lincoln first laid down his general proclamation concerning Reconstruction, industry paid little attention to it: let the South come back; let it come back quickly, and let us go to work and make money and repair the losses of the war by increased business; and then let the nation go far beyond this through domination of the American market, and perhaps even of the markets of the world.

However, right here the dreams of the industrialists were quickly shadowed by unwelcome reflections. In the harsh voices of certain leading citizens of the South, who were about to return to Congress, there was something of that same arrogance that had cowed the North in days gone by. What these voices said concerning Negroes and, indeed, concerning slavery, was of little importance to industry; but if they proposed to come back with increased political power, would this [ 213] mean a drive for free trade? Would it mean a drive against the national banks? Would it mean an attempt to readjust and tax the immense profit made in the rise of the national debt? Beyond this, could it be that the new South was set upon some move to make the whole country assume all or part of the Confederate debt and pay for emancipated slaves? Perhaps not, but this was something to watch. State economic rights must be curbed. Southern opposition to finance and the tariff must be kept in bounds. Very soon, then, the party which represented sound money -- that is, the payment of interest on depreciated currency at the same rate as though it had been gold -- and who wanted Federal control of industry, began to see the necessity of consolidating their political power.

This point of view of industry began to be expressed frankly. Brewer of Newport wrote Sumner: "In a selfish point of view free suffrage to the blacks is desirable. Without their support, Southerners will certainly again unite, and there is too much reason to fear successfully, with the Democrats of the North, and the long train of evils sure to follow their rule is fearful to contemplate … a great reduction of the tariff doing away with its protective feature – perhaps free trade to culminate with repudiation . . . and how sweet and complete will be the revenge of the former if they can ruin the North by free trade and repudiation."

The most selfish argument was made by Elizur Wright of Boston in 1865. He said that it would take years of military subjugation to educate the white South out of its rebel propensities so that a majority of it could be relied on for loyal state government. In the meantime two things would happen: "1st. The public debt would accumulate, for a military occupation never pays as it goes. 2nd. The blacks are largely trained to arms, for they are the cheapest and best troops we can have under the circumstances. Hence, when we arrive at the period when loyal state governments -- that will go alone -- can be set up, the blacks must be enfranchised or they will be ready and willing to fight for a government of their own; and here is more war, and more public debt, and more taxation.

If the Southern states are brought back in too soon the North would either have to pay the rebel debt or borrow the rebel theory and secede from the very Union that had been restored by conquering the rebels.

There is only one way to avoid this and make our victory immediately fruitful. In two states, a decided majority of the population is black, and, by necessity, loyal. In five others, the black element is more than one-third; and it is strong enough to make an effective balance of power in every state where the rebellious element is of any serious [ 214 ] magnitude. Again, the particular chivalry which got up and engineered the rebellion has such an honor of sharing political power with its former chattels that when the enfranchisement of the blacks is determined on as the sine qua non of Reconstruction, and its own military power is overthrown, it will emigrate to a more congenial political atmosphere. We have then nothing to do but convert whites enough to make a majority when added to the enfranchised blacks, to have state governments that can be trusted to stand alone. I think I could easily convince any man, who does not allow his prejudices to stand in the way of his interests, that it will probably make a difference of at least $1,000,000,000 in the development of the national debt, whether we reconstruct on the basis of loyal white and black votes, or on white votes exclusively, and that he can better afford to give the government at least one-quarter of his estate than have it try the latter experiment.

I am not disputing about tastes. A Negro's ballot may be more vulgar than his bullet. Being already in for it, the question with me is, how the one or the other can be made to protect my property from taxation; and I am sure I would rather give away half the little I have, than to have the victories of 1865 thrown away, as I am sure they will be, if, endeavoring to keep the South in subjugation by black armies, the government allows 4,000,000 of black population to continue disfranchised.

Thus industry between 1860-1870 was in control of the government but was insecure. The Republican party which represented it was a minority party, and if Northern and Southern Democrats had been able to unite with the disaffected West, the Republicans would have been swept out of power. But the Republican party, united with abolition-democracy and using their tremendous moral power and popularity, their appeal to freedom, democracy and the uplift of mankind, might buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry. And finally in extremity, votes for Negroes would save the day. Thus a movement, which began primarily and sincerely to abolish slavery and insure the Negroes' rights, became coupled with a struggle of capitalism to retain control of the government as against Northern labor and Southern and Western agriculture.

The union of these two points of view is seen in an Ohio pamphlet then current. "What is to be done with six millions of rebels? What shall be done with four million blacks?

1. Loyal white men only shall vote.

2. Loyal white men and rebels, except certain classes, shall vote.

3. Loyal men, white and black, shall vote.

4. Loyal men, white and black, and as many of the rebels as can be controlled by loyal voters, shall vote.

[ 215 ] 5. Educational standards.

6. Segregation of whites and blacks. The blacks to be in one territory with full rights to vote.

7. Rebel states to be held by military power until the rebels have purged themselves.

In the first plan, 1,200,000 voters in the rebel states will have as much voting power as two million voters in the North. Under the second plan before the Rebellion, the South, with six million whites, boasted as much political power as 8,400,000 of the North. By this second plan, 6,000,000 would possess the power of 10,000,000 of the North. By the third plan, one voter in the South would have more voting power than two voters in the North. Under the fourth plan, the uneducated blacks are almost the only friends of the government, while the educated whites are all wrong. This illustrates the folly of an educational standard. Under the sixth plan, the whites forced the mixing of the races of the country, and those men who have been raised on Negro milk, and some of them who have children by Negro mothers, should not talk about separation."

Slowly the rank and file of the nation began to respond to the combined argument of industrialists and Abolitionists, especially as their seeming unity of purpose increased. A correspondent of the New York Tribune writes in 1865 from the South:

The freed people are truly and unreservedly our friends, and they are almost the only ones. They are more intelligent as a class, and more available as a trustworthy material for citizenship, than I expected to find them. The poor whites whom I saw are decidedly inferior to the average of the slave population. If there is to be for the future a stable basis for loyal states in the South, it must be made up largely of the freed people. It will not do at present to trust the ballot in the hands of the white men who have been rebels, and still are such under the guise of Union men. I believe this to be true whether the blacks be allowed to vote or not. There should be a long intermediate probationary state prescribed before they are again allowed to approach the ballot-box." ²⁰

The abolition-democracy found support in the West. The German and Scandinavians, who had settled in the Northwest, were naturally democratic. Before the war, they had stood against Southern pretensions, and in their midst, the Republican party was born. They disliked aristocracy and they disliked the South because the South was against foreigners and immigration. Among the Germans were many labor leaders and doctrinaires, so that the Northwest could be counted on for democracy. But at the same time, it could be counted on for opposition to the new industrial organization with which the Northeastern [ 216 ] Abolitionists were making alliance. However, the union of industrialists and the Abolitionists became closer, and since it was unanswered by any move towards democracy in the South or any sympathy for democracy by Johnson, the West followed the Abolitionists, until later they were seduced by the kulak psychology of land ownership.

In the displacement of Southern feudal agriculture by Northern industry, where did the proletariat, the worker, stand ? The proletariat is usually envisaged as united, but their real interests were represented in America by four sets of people : the freed Negro, the Southern poor white, and the Northern skilled and common laborer. These groups never came to see their common interests, and the financiers and capitalists easily kept the upper hand. On the other hand, the West and South bore peculiar relations to the new industry. The South clung to the ideal of aristocracy and had no thought of the real democratic movement. Even the poor whites thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners and employers of Negro labor, and never until the twentieth century envisaged themselves as a labor class. The Western farmers in the same way vacillated between the ideal of speculative landholders and peasant farmers. They harked back to the opportunism of the frontier and wanted freedom to exploit as well as to vote. In New York, Negroes had replaced workers who were on strike, and the two parties fought on the docks of the Morgan Line. In Ohio there were various outbreaks; in Cincinnati and in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo and Albany, race riots occurred during the war. In 1862, Negro longshoremen were assaulted, and colored working men employed in a Brooklyn tobacco factory were mobbed in August. In July, 1862, there were disturbances in New York City, and finally, in 1863, July 13, came the terrible draft riot. As Abraham Lincoln said, March 21, 1864,

None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people. Let them beware of prejudice, working division and hostility among themselves. The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so. The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds.

When Lincoln died a year later, Irish organizations refused to march with Negroes, and the common council of New York City refused to allow Negroes in the Lincoln funeral procession; but the New York Tribune announced that through the intervention of the Police Commissioner, "a place in the procession had been assigned to the colored [ 217 ] societies and other personages, and the police will see that they occupy it without hindrance from any quarter." Meantime, the common council declined to revoke their order.

When the war closed, a million men were returning to the labor market. Gold was at its height, prices were high, and unemployment spread. Strikes took place, soldiers were used to put them down, and laws were introduced to prevent strikes.

The labor movement comprehended, therefore, chiefly Northern skilled laborers. Among them organization was growing. Recovering from the oppressions of war, there were 79 craft unions at the end of 1863, and they had grown to 270 in 1864. Ten national unions were formed between 1863 and 1866, and by 1870 there were 32 national unions. But almost none of these unions mentioned the Negro, or considered him or welcomed him. A "National Assembly of North America" was held at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1864, and passed resolutions concerning working men and labor conditions; but it said nothing of the greatest revolution in labor that had happened in America for a hundred years -- the emancipation of slaves.

Meantime, a new flood of cheap immigrant labor was brought into the country to work on the railroads and in the new industries. Northern mill owners who had feared free farms because they might decrease the number of laborers and raise their wages, were appeased by the promotion of alien immigration. It was interesting to hear the Union Party, as the Republicans called themselves in 1864, say, in their platform: "Foreign immigration which in the past had added so much to the wealth and development of resources and the increase of power to this nation -- the aspirations of the oppressed of all nations -- should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy." That year the Bureau of Immigration was created, and it was authorized to import workers bound for a term of service. The letter of the law was afterwards changed, but the practice continued for a long time.

In 1860, immigrants were coming in at the rate of 130,000 a year. The outbreak of the war brought the number down, but the new homestead laws began to attract them so that after the war immigration quickly rose from 200,000 to 350,000 a year, and in 1873, had reached 460,000 annually.

It was all too true, as Senator Wilson of Massachusetts said in the 38th Congress, but it was a truth that white laborers did not yet realize: "We have advocated the rights of the black man, because the black man was the most oppressed type of toiling man of this country. I tell you, sir, that the man who is the enemy of the black laboring man is the enemy of the white laboring man the world over. The same [ 218 ] influences that go to keep down and crush the rights of the poor black man bear down and oppress the poor white laboring man."

The First International Workingmen's Association formed by Karl Marx in London in 1864 wrote Lincoln after his second election and said: "From the commencement of the titanic American strife, the workingmen of Europe felt distinctly that the Star-Spangled Banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world 'Slavery' on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European Revolution of the eighteenth century, when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding 'the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution' and maintained 'slavery to be a beneficial institution,' indeed, the only solution of the great problem of the 'relation of capital to labor,' and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice' -- then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes, for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warnings, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention importunities of their betters, and from most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good of the cause.

While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe felt sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendency for the Middle Class, so the American Anti-Slavery war will do for the working classes. [ 219 ] They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social world." ²¹

The first fruit of the growing understanding between industrial expansion and abolition-democracy was the Freedmen's Bureau. While industry in the North was dividing the labor movement and establishing a far more effective dictatorship of capital over labor than it had ever had before, it was compelled in the South to institute another dictatorship, designedly and expressly for the protection of emancipated Negro labor. In the Freedmen's Bureau, the United States started upon a dictatorship by which the landowner and the capitalist were to be openly and deliberately curbed and which directed its efforts in the interest of a black and white labor class. If and when universal suffrage came to reenforce this point of view, an entirely different development of American industry and American civilization must ensue. The Freedmen's Bureau was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted. It had to do, not simply with emancipated slaves and poor whites, but also with the property of Southern planters. It was a government guardianship for the relief and guidance of white and black labor from a feudal agrarianism to modern farming and industry. For this work there was and had to be a full-fledged government of men. "It made laws, executed them and interpreted them; it laid and collected taxes, defined and punished crimes, maintained and used military force, and dictated such measures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplishment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as General Howard has said, 'scarcely any subject that has to be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau.'"²² Thus the Freedmen's Bureau, which rose automatically as a result of the slaves' general strike during the war, and came directly out of the consolidation of the various army departments of Negro affairs, now loomed as the greatest plan of reasoned emancipation yet proposed. For this reason, the bill for its establishment met covert and open opposition. It was opposed by all advocates of slavery, and all persons North and South who did not propose that emancipation should really free the slaves; it was advocated by every element that wanted to achieve this vast social revolution by reasoned leadership, money and sacrifice. It was finally emasculated and abolished by those in the North who grudged its inevitable cost, and by that Southern sentiment which passed the black codes.

A bill to establish a Bureau in the War Department for the care of refugees and freedmen was passed March 3, 1865. It had been proposed as early as 1863, when a number of petitions for a bureau of emancipation were presented to Congress. In January, 1863, less than a month after the Emancipation Proclamation, T. D. Eliot introduced into the House the first bill. But the committee did not report it, and the Freedmen's Aid Societies renewed their petitions.

At the opening of the new session in December, 1863, Eliot introduced another bill. This bill was objected to in the House because of its cost, its charitable features, and the possible corruption of its employees. Eliot defended the bill vigorously. The Negroes had been freed by proclamation, law, and force, and their freedom must be maintained. They were freed through selfish motives, to weaken the enemy. It would be the depth of meanness to let them now grope their way without guidance or protection. The President, by proclamation, had pledged the maintenance of Negro freedom, and Congress had recognized its obligation to secure employment and support of Negroes on abandoned lands. Negroes were now oppressed by Southerners and Northern harpies. Further legislation was imperatively demanded. In the ensuing debates, the bill was defended as encouraging the enlistment of colored soldiers, and as calculated to bring order out of the present chaos. It would form a new class of consumers for Northern products. On the other hand, opponents insisted that the Bureau would open a vast field for corruption, and that it was a revolutionary effort on the part of a government of limited powers. Brooks of New York denounced it because it would put black labor under Northern taskmasters in competition with white labor and capitalists in the North. It was passed March 1, 1864, by the close vote of 69-67.

In the Senate it was referred to the Committee on Slavery and Freedom, of which Charles Sumner was chairman. Here it was transformed from a temporary makeshift and war expedient and began to take the form of a great measure of social uplift and reform. The Bureau was attached to the Treasury Department. Sumner pressed the bill, arguing that private benevolence could not cope with the problem and that a bureau was necessary; that the Treasury was already in charge of abandoned property and had special agents in the field. The bill passed the Senate, June 28, by a vote of 21-9. The House refused to concur and the whole subject went over to the next session. Renewed arguments and petitions came in favor of the bill. In July, seven Freedmen's Aid associations of the West met in Indianapolis. They drew up a memorial complaining of the current methods of dealing with the freedmen and asking for a supervising agent, because of the failure of Congress to establish a bureau.

December 20, 1864, the matter was taken up again in the House and a conference committee appointed with Sumner and Eliot. This committee reported February 2, 1865, and recommended an independent Department of Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. In the debates, there was great diversity of opinion. Some feared that the freedman would be too strictly controlled and that this would curtail his "initiative" and "self-reliance." Others urged the necessity of the bill to rescue these wards from ignorance and pauperism, and guide them into confidence and self-control. The bill passed that House by another close vote of 64-62.

However, there appeared at the same time another bill for the relief of both white refugees and freedmen and the temporary use of abandoned property. It was a short and temporary measure. Both these bills went to the Senate. Sumner stoutly defended the comprehensive measure agreed upon in conference. But the opposition of both Democrats and Republicans was too strong and the conference report was rejected. A second conference was held and a new bill presented, creating a Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in the War Department.

All these proposals meant that there was a question as to whether this bureau was to be a temporary war measure, or a permanent institution for abolishing slavery and inducting Negroes gradually into economic and political freedom. If it were attached to the War Department, it would end with the war. In the Treasury, it would serve to settle problems of taxation, crops and finance, but presumably end when war finance yielded to peace. In the Interior Department or as a separate department, the Freedmen's Bureau would be permanent, with regular revenues and a wide and comprehensive program of work.

The debate on the final bill was limited, and without a vote the report of the Conference Committee was accepted March 3rd. Abraham Lincoln immediately signed the bill. This bill provided for a Bureau to last "during the present War of Rebellion, and for one year thereafter." It had at its head a commissioner appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, and assistant commissioners might be appointed for each of the ten states in rebellion. Army officers could be used as assistant commissioners. The Secretary of War was to issue necessary provisions, clothing, and fuel, and under the direction of the President, the Commissioner could set aside for freedmen and refugees tracts of land of not more than forty acres to be leased to tenants; the lessees were to be protected in the use of the land for three years at a low rent. At the end of the term, the tenant could purchase the land at an appraised value.

Some Congressmen, like Conness, could not conceive of a Freedmen's [ 222 ] Bureau conducted for the benefit of labor. "Where will the freedman get the capital to buy his horse or his oxen and other agricultural implements, to put his crop of cotton or corn in the ground? All these require capital far beyond the ability of the freedman to command, and renders the scheme impractical so far as it professed to be of benefit to the freedman.

"The inevitable result will be that the freedman will lease no land. He will not be able to lease and cultivate land. He will not be able to purchase equipment of horse and agricultural implements that will be necessary for its cultivation. Then he must fall into general line and become simply a laborer to be hired to some man with whom they are secretly in partnership, with whom they share the profits and the produce of the freedman's labor from these abandoned lands."²³ The inevitable corollary that under the especial circumstances of emancipated slave labor, the state must furnish capital, was inconceivable to men like Conness. He, like Lane of Indiana, made the old American Assumption of economic independence open to all. "I am opposed to the whole theory of the Freedmen's Bureau. I would make them free under the law. I would protect them in the courts of justice; if necessary, I would give them the right of suffrage, and let loyal slaves vote their rebel masters down and reconstruct the seceded states; but I wish to have no system of guardianship and pupilage and overseership over these Negroes."

There was in the debate, inside and outside of Congress, distinct evidence that industry, rather than pay the cost of social uplift on the scale which an efficient Freedmen's Bureau evidently demanded, would accept immediate Negro suffrage as a preferable panacea. Just as the refuge of those who opposed the right to vote was work for the freedman and regular habits of labor; so on the other hand, those who opposed systematic organization of such work, found refuge in the ballot. Pomeroy had seen thousands of colored and white refugees "coming into my state and I say here distinctly that the colored people are able to take care of themselves and find their places and adapt themselves to their new conditions easier and quicker than the poor white refugees who are driven out of the Border States.

I desire that those who advocate this bill will stop here and spend their time and talent in demanding for the Negro race all the rights and privileges of freedom. Do this and no Freedmen's Bureau at all is necessary.

Sir, I am for all races of men. I do not believe that it is necessary to secure the property of one race that another shall be destroyed …

Let us refuse admittance to every rebel state unless the privilege [ 223 ] of the elective franchise is granted to the colored man. I believe the future permanency of this government depends upon this, and I believe those who have fought this war have no safety or security without it.

Here was a logical resting place; no funds or permanency for a Freedmen's Bureau, and Negro suffrage to defend Northern industry; and no element fought harder and more determinedly to make this possible than the white South. With the possibility of a government guardianship to conduct the Negro in freedom by industry, land, and education at the expense of the nation, the South deliberately and bitterly fought and maligned the Bureau at every turn, and in the end it received the Reconstruction bills as its just reward.

For the stupendous work which the Freedmen's Bureau must attempt, it had every disadvantage except one. It was so limited in time that it had small chance for efficient and comprehensive planning. It had at first no appropriated funds, but was supposed to depend on the chance accumulations of war time, unclaimed bounties of Negro soldiers, confiscated land and property formerly belonging to the Confederate Government, and rations. Further than this it had to use a rough military machine for administrating delicate social reform. The qualities which make a good soldier do not necessarily make a good social reformer. And while in many instances the Bureau was fortunate in its personnel, in others it was just as unfortunate, and had to put in administrative positions military martinets, men disillusioned and cynical after a terrible war, or careless and greedy and in no way suited for farsighted social building.

The most fortunate thing that Lincoln gave the Bureau was its head, Oliver Howard. Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man, but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty. "His high reputation as a Christian gentleman gave him the esteem of the humane and benevolent portion of the public, upon whose confidence and cooperation his success was largely to depend."²⁴

The task that Howard had was of the gravest, because there were three things that the conquered South fought with bitter determination:

1. Any Federal interference with labor.

2. Arms in the hands of Negroes.

3. Votes for Negroes.

This opposition did not arise primarily from any failure of the Bureau in the performance of its duty, or because its work functioned imperfectly. Even if it had been a perfect and well-planned [ 224 ] machine for its mission, the planters in the main were determined to try to coerce both black labor and white, without outside interference of any sort. They proposed to enact and enforce the black codes. They were going to replace legal slavery by customary serfdom and caste. And they were going to do all this because they could not conceive of civilization in the South with free Negro workers, or Negro soldiers or voters.

Howard, therefore, had a battle on his hands from the start. His bureau was limited by temporarily extended and incomplete laws until its main work was practically done in 1869, although some of its functions extended until June 30, 1872. Under these circumstances, the astonishing thing is that the Bureau was able to accomplish any definite and worth-while results; yet it did and the testimony in support of this comes from its friends and enemies.

Howard says:

The law establishing the Bureau committed to it the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen under such regulations as might be prescribed by the head of the Bureau and approved by the President. This almost unlimited authority gave me great scope and liberty of action, but at the same time it imposed upon me very perplexing and responsible duties. Legislative, judicial and executive powers were combined in my commission, reaching all the interests of four millions of people, scattered over a vast territory, living in the midst of another people claiming to be superior, and known to be not altogether friendly. …

The conditions facing the Bureau were chaotic.

In every state many thousands were found without employment, without homes, without means of subsistence, crowding into towns and about military posts, where they hoped to find protection and supplies. The sudden collapse of the rebellion, making emancipation an actual, universal fact, was like an earthquake. It shook and shattered the whole previously existing social system. It broke up the old industries and threatened a reign of anarchy. Even well-disposed and humane landowners were at a loss what to do, or how to begin the work of reorganizing society and of rebuilding their ruined fortunes. Very few had any knowledge of free labor, or any hope that their former slaves would serve them faithfully for wages. On the other hand, the freed people were in a state of great excitement and uncertainty. They could hardly believe that the liberty proclaimed was real and permanent. Many were afraid to remain on the same soil that they had tilled as slaves lest by some trick they might find themselves again in bondage. Others supposed that the Government would either take the entire supervision of their labor and support, or divide among them the lands of the conquered owners, and furnish them with all that might be necessary to begin life as an independent farmer.²⁵

Twelve labors of Hercules faced the Freedmen's Bureau: to make as rapidly as possible a general survey of conditions and needs in every state and locality; to relieve immediate hunger and distress; to appoint state commissioners and upwards of 900 bureau officials; to put the laborers to work at regular wage; to transport laborers, teachers and officials; to furnish land for the peasant; to open schools; to pay bounties to black soldiers and their families; to establish hospitals and guard health; to administer justice between man and former master; to answer continuous and persistent criticism, North and South, black and white; to find funds to pay for all this.

In four years the Bureau issued over twenty-one million rations to the hungry and unemployed -- fifteen and a half million to blacks and five and a half million to whites. The number rose to five million in 1866, and then fell from three and one-half to two and one-half million in 1867-1868. The total cost of food and clothing, 1865-1871, was set down at $3,168,325.

In the eyes of a nation dedicated to profitable industry, as well as in the eyes of bureau officials, the first major problem was to set the Negroes to work under a wage contract. "To secure fairness and to inspire confidence on both sides, the system of written contracts was adopted. No compulsion was used, but all were advised to enter into written agreements and submit them to an officer of the Bureau for approval. The nature and obligations of these contracts were carefully explained to the freedmen, and a copy filed in the office of the agent approving it; this was for their use in case any difficulty arose between them and their employers. The labor imposed upon my officers and agents by this system was very great, as evinced by the fact that in a single state not less than fifty thousand (50,000) such contracts were drawn in duplicate and filled up with the names of all the parties."

The purely economic results of this effort were unusually satisfactory. There was cheating by employers, and malingering by laborers, and widespread disorder; yet "in spite of all disorders that have prevailed and the misfortunes that have fallen upon many parts of the South, a good degree of prosperity and success has already been attained. To the oft-repeated slander that the Negroes will not work, and are incapable of taking care of themselves, it is a sufficient answer that their voluntary labor has produced nearly all the food that supported the whole people, besides a large amount of rice, sugar and tobacco for export, and two millions of bales of cotton each year, on which was paid into the United States treasury during the years 1866 and 1867 a tax Β°f more than forty millions of dollars ($40,000,000). It is not claimed that this result is wholly due to the care and oversight of this Bureau, but it is safe to say, as it has been said repeatedly by [ 226 ] intelligent Southern white men, that without the bureau or some similar agency, the material interests of the country would have greatly suffered, and the government would have lost a far greater amount than has been expended in its maintenance. …" Three-quarters of a million of dollars was spent in transporting laborers to homes and to work, and teachers and agents to their fields of duty.

The insistent demand of the Negro, aided by army officers and Northern churches and philanthropic organizations, began the systematic teaching of Negroes and poor whites. This beginning the Freedmen's Bureau raised to a widespread system of Negro public schools. The Bureau furnished day and night schools, industrial schools, Sunday schools and colleges. Between June 1, 1865, and September 1, 1871, $5,262,511.26 was spent on schools from Bureau funds, and in 1870 there were in day and night schools 3,300 teachers and 149,581 pupils. Nearly all the present Negro universities and colleges like Howard, Fisk, and Atlanta, were founded or substantially aided in their earliest days by the Freedmen's Bureau.

There were systematic plans to care for the sick. In the summer of 1865 there were detailed in the several states fourteen surgeons and three assistant surgeons, who took care of white and black people in distress, and engaged local surgeons to help them. By September, 1867, there were forty-six hospitals with 5,292 beds. The hospitals were distributed in fourteen different states, and the annual appropriation for medical purposes was nearly $500,000 in 1866 and 1867; the total expenditure for the Medical Department has been estimated to have been $2,000,000. With this money, 452,419 cases were treated, and perhaps an equal number unrecorded. In all, nearly a million persons were given medical aid. The death rate among the freedmen was reduced from 30% to 13% in 1865, and to 2.03% in 1869. Something was done in providing physicians in large towns, inspecting sanitation, and treating lame, blind, deaf and dumb and aged persons and orphans. Temporary care was given the insane.

The judicial work of the Bureau consisted in protecting the Negro from violence and outrage, from serfdom, and in defending his right to hold property and enforce his contracts. It was to see that Negroes had fair trials and that their testimony was received, and their family relations respected. The Commissioner laid down general rules for the administration of justice by bureau officials. Freedmen's courts and boards of arbitration were organized when needed, and while an attempt was made to secure uniformity in these courts, they presented much variety in composition and procedure. Sometimes the Assistant Commissioner constituted the court; sometimes it consisted of an agent appointed by him, and a representative of the freedmen and one [ 227 ] of the whites. They acted only in cases where one or both parties were Negroes, and they imposed fines and enforced their judgments.

The financial support of the Bureau was haphazard. No appropriations were made under the original Freedmen's Bureau Bill, but funds were supplied from many departments of Negro affairs and from the handling of abandoned property and from taxes and fees. Nearly eight hundred thousand acres of farming land and about five thousand pieces of town property were transferred to the bureau by military and treasury officers, or taken up by assistant commissioners. Of this enough was leased to produce a revenue of nearly four hundred thousand dollars. Some farms were set aside as homes for the destitute and helpless, and a portion was cultivated by freedmen prior to its restoration. The necessary task of settling the Negroes on their own homesteads was begun by the bureau but soon rendered impossible by lack of land and funds and deliberately hostile executive action. Through the agency of the bureau, the government paid out eight thousand dollars in bounties to over five thousand Negro soldiers and their heirs, and thus helped furnish some capital to the new laborers.

Under the second Freedmen's Bureau Bill, passed in 1866, these sources were being exhausted so that the Army Appropriation bill included $594,450 for the Bureau. Succeeding appropriations brought the total to $12,961,395. Adding the cost of various army supplies used, Howard estimated "the total expenses of our Government for refugees and freedmen to August 31, 1869, have been $13,579,816.82."²⁶ If we add to this the increase in the army payroll caused by the Bureau, and other items, Pierce estimates that the total expenditure for the Bureau was between $17,000,000 and $18,000,000.

This does not prove that the Freedmen's Bureau was a complete success, for it was not; from the nature of the organization and its limitations it could not be. The white South made it the object of its bitterest attacks. It accused the agents of every crime and mistake and planned for its removal. This was natural; for, in its essence, the bureau was a dictatorship of the army over property for the benefit of labor. It was aimed at the worst methods of exploitation; it sought to give the Negro some standing at law; it compelled the keeping of contracts; and while the testimony as to the net results varies it seems true, as Pierce says:²⁷

Notwithstanding abuses and extravagances, the bureau did a great, an indispensable work of mercy and relief, at a time when no other organization or body was in a position to do that work.

To the Negro was imparted a conception -- inadequate and distorted though it may have been -- of his civil rights as a freeman. In a [ 228 ] land long dominated by slavery, when freedom had just been decreed, when neither black nor white well understood the value of free labor, and before the law of supply and demand could readjust labor relations, the bureau set up a tentative scale of wages. … When under the direction of broad, temperate, capable agents, the labor division unquestionably accomplished much of the larger purpose for which it was ordained and which its friends maintain that it fulfilled. All things considered in this branch of the work, more marked success was achieved than a calm study of the perplexing situation would lead the thoughtful man of today to think that such an abnormal and shortlived institution could have attained."

A white citizen of Louisiana adds: "The best influence in settling the state of things in Louisiana, would be to maintain there for some years a rigid administration of the Freedmen's Bureau to protect the blacks and their rights, as well as to see that they complied with reasonable and proper contracts they might make. I consider that such an establishment would stand as a barrier to the encroachments of one class upon the rights of the other."²⁸

Other critics are worth hearing. A Virginian, J. M. Botts, said: "I have heard of a great many difficulties and outrages which have proceeded, in some instances, if the truth has been represented to me, from the ignorance and fanaticism of persons connected with the Freedmen's Bureau. … On the other hand, there are many of the persons connected with the Freedmen's Bureau who have conducted themselves with great propriety; and where that has been so, there has been no difficulty between the whites and blacks."²⁹ Judge Hill writes, "Like all other efforts of humanity, the results of the Freedmen's Bureau depended very much upon those appointed to carry it out and give it the aid intended. Where the agent was a man of good sense and free from prejudice to either party or race, good results were attained; but, in many instances, the agents were deficient in these necessary qualifications, and the results were, not only a failure to accomplish the purpose of the bureau, but a decided evil." ³⁰

Wallace bitterly arraigns the bureau officials in Florida:

"The Freedmen's Bureau, an institution devised by Congress under the influence of the very best people of the Northern States, and intended as a means of protection of the freedmen, and preparing them for the new responsibilities and privileges conferred, in the hands of bad men proved, instead of a blessing, to be the worst curse of the race, as under it he was misled, debased and betrayed." ³¹

The various investigations of the bureau brought out damaging facts as to the handling of funds and careless administration and yet "the peculiar difficulties of the bureau's financial problems must not be [ 229 ] lost sight of. The amount involved was large. It was impossible to avoid errors in identifying the hordes of nameless, irresponsible claimants to public money entrusted to the bureau. The thousands of agents scattered over a vast area were beyond the close personal supervision of higher officials, and much of the irregularity and fraud was clearly traceable to unscrupulous local agents. There is no reason to believe that the commissioner was guilty of embezzlement, fraud, or personal dishonesty; but he certainly was not a strict constructionist. Doubtless his liberal interpretation of statutes was designed to benefit the freedmen and refugees to whose protection and welfare his efforts were directed. Often such interpretation was due to the delay of Congress in making appropriations demanded by the exigencies of the hour." ³²

Grant brought forward some hearsay criticism during the first year. President Johnson sent two generals South who uncovered cases of fraud and maladministration, but commended Howard and believed the Bureau had done much to preserve order and to organize free labor. A final court of inquiry was commenced by act of Congress in 1874, and sat for forty days.

The committee gave in its majority report its judgment of this extraordinary experiment.

The general effect of the policy pursued by this people towards the freedmen and the general results of the administration of the Freedmen's Bureau by General Howard are matters of history. Without civil convulsion, without any manifestation of violence or hate towards those who had subjected him and his ancestors to the accumulated wrongs of generations of servitude, the enfranchised Negro at once and quietly entered upon new relations of freeman and citizen. During the five years since the bureau has been established, General Howard has directed the expenditure of twelve million nine hundred and sixty-five thousand, three hundred and ninety-five dollars and forty cents; has exercised oversight and care for the freedmen and refugees in seventeen States and the District of Columbia, a territory of 350,000 square miles, and cooperated with benevolent societies, aiding in the education of hundreds of thousands of pupils, and in the relief of vast numbers of destitute and homeless persons of all ages and both sexes. …

The world can point to nothing like it in all the history of emancipation. No thirteen millions of dollars were ever more wisely spent; yet, from the beginning this scheme has encountered the bitterest opposition and the most unrelenting hate. Scoffed at like a thing of shame, often struck and wounded, sometimes in the house of its friends, apologized for rather than defended; yet, with God on its side, the Freedmen's Bureau has triumphed; civilization has received a new impulse, and the friends of humanity may well rejoice. [ 230 ] The Bureau work is being rapidly brought to a close, and its accomplishments will enter into history, while the unfounded accusations brought against it will be forgotten."³³

This is perhaps an overstatement. The Freedmen's Bureau did an extraordinary piece of work but it was but a small and imperfect part of what it might have done if it had been made a permanent institution, given ample funds for operating schools and purchasing land, and if it had been gradually manned by trained civilian administrators. All this was clear when Andrew Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau bill in 1866.

For the first time in history the people of the United States listened not only to the voices of the Negroes' friends, but to the Negro himself. He was becoming more and more articulate, in the South as well as in the North.

Also the actions of the Negroes were telling on public opinion, and were given for the first time intelligent and sympathetic publicity. Black soldiers paraded; black petitions, some illiterate, some like that from the District of Columbia, in excellent and logical form, were published. Black men began to enter public movements and there was a subsidence of ridicule and caricature. The meetings and petitions of Southern Negroes were significant and cannot be discounted. Many were doubtless instigated by white friends, but not all; and even these had significant internal evidence of genuine thought and action.

In May, 1864, the Negroes at Port Royal, South Carolina, participated in a meeting which elected delegates to the National Convention at Baltimore in June. Robert Smalls and three other Negroes were among the sixteen delegates, but were denied seats. "On the seventh of August last [1865] a convention of colored men was held in this city [Nashville].

... It was resolved that the colored people of the State of Tennessee respectfully and solemnly protest against the congressional delegation from this State being admitted to seats in your honorable bodies until the Legislature of this State enact such laws as shall secure to us our rights as freemen.

"We cannot believe that the General Government will allow us to be left without such protection after knowing, as you do, what services we have rendered to the cause of the preservation of the Union and the maintenance of the laws. We have respectfully petitioned our Legislature upon the subject, and have failed to get them to do anything for us, saying that it was premature to legislate for the protection of our rights."³⁴ September 3, 1865, a Negro convention was held in Raleigh, North Carolina, and adopted resolutions for proper wages, education, protection for their families, and repeal of unjust discrimination. October 7, 1865, the colored citizens of Mississippi protested [ 231 ] against the reactionary policy of the state and expressed the fear that they were to be reenslaved. "They set forth that, owing to the prejudice existing there, they have not been able to assemble in convention, but that they have done as well as they could, through a few of their number to set forth their grievances. They represent four hundred and thirty-seven thousand four hundred and four citizens of the United States, being a majority of nearly one hundred thousand in that State. These people, in a very brief petition, asked Congress to grant them the right of suffrage, that 'we may,' they say, 'the more effectually prove our fidelity to the United States; as we have fought in favor of liberty, justice, and humanity, we wish to vote in favor of it and give our influence to the permanent establishment of pure republican institutions in these United States; and also that we may be in a position in a legal and peaceable way to protect ourselves in the enjoyment of those sacred rights which were pledged to us by the emancipation proclamation.'³⁵

A colored people's convention met in Zion Church, Charleston, S. C, in November, 1865, to protest against the work of the convention and legislature. This began concerted political action by the Negroes of the state. Robert C. DeLarge, A. J. Ransier, J. Wright, Beverly Nash, Francis L. Cardozo, M. R. Delany, and Richard H. Cain, were there. They declared that this was "an extraordinary meeting, unknown in the history of South Carolina, when it is considered who composed it and for what purposes it was allowed to assemble." Complaint was lodged against the state authorities in depriving Negroes "of the rights of the meanest profligate in the country"; Congress was asked to throw "the strong arm of the law over the entire population of the state," and grant "equal suffrage," and abolish the "black code." ³⁶

The petition of this meeting, signed by people of South Carolina, was presented to the Senate in December. "They respectfully asked Congress, in consideration of their unquestioned loyalty, exhibited by them alike as bond or free, as soldier or laborer, in the Union lines under the protection of the Government, or within the rebel lines under the domination of the rebellion, that in the exercise of our high authority over the reestablishment of civil government in South Carolina their equal right before the law may be respected; that in the formation and adoption of the fundamental law of the State, they may have an equal voice with all loyal citizens, and that Congress will not sanction any State constitution which does not secure the exercise of the right of the elective franchise to all loyal citizens otherwise qualified in the common course of American law, without distinction of color." ³⁷

The colored people of Alabama, in convention at Mobile, in 1866, called upon Congress to provide some means of making their freedom secure. "They say that in the city where they were assembled in convention several of their churches had been already burned to the ground by the torch of the incendiary, and threats are frequently made to continue the destruction of their property; the means of education for their children are secured to them only by the strong arm of the United States Government against the marked opposition of their white fellow-citizens, while throughout the whole State the right to participate in the franchises of freemen is denied as insulting to white men; and a respectful appeal addressed by some of their people to the late State convention was scornfully laid upon the table, some of the members even refusing to hear its reading. They also state that many of their people daily suffer almost every form of outrage and violence at the hands of whites; that in many parts of the state their people cannot safely leave the vicinity of their homes; they are knocked down and beaten by their white fellow-citizens without having offered any injury or insult as a cause; they are arrested and imprisoned upon false accusations; their money is extorted for their release, or they are condemned to imprisonment at hard labor; that many of their people are now in a condition of practical slavery, being compelled to serve their former owners without pay and to call them 'master.' They express a hope that Congress may be led to give them an opportunity to verify these statements by suitable testimony, and also further hope that Congress will grant them the protection they need." ³⁸

In 1866, January 10, a Negro convention at Augusta, Georgia, appealed to the Georgia legislature. The freedmen declared that during the period of the war the majority of them had remained silently at their homes, although they had known their power to rise, and to "fire your houses, burn your homes and railroads, and discommode you in a thousand ways." During the war, they had been forced into war service by the South. They had been compelled to throw up breastwork forts and fortifications and do the work of prisoners under the guns of the enemy, where, said they, "many of us in common with yourselves were killed." But now, they declared that they could no longer remain indifferent when the state was passing laws which would bind them in future years. Against these laws, they would protest firmly and openly. Another address in the same year called attention to the treatment which the Negroes were receiving in all walks of life throughout the state. On the railroads they paid equal fare with others, but they did not "get half the accommodation." They were "cursed and kicked by the conductors" -- their wives and sisters were "blackguarded and insulted by the scrapings of the earth" -- and if [ 233 ] they spoke of their treatment they were "frowned upon with contempt and replied to in bitter epithets." ³⁹

Major Martin R. Delaney, the most distinguished Northern Negro in South Carolina, declared in a letter to President Johnson, "What becomes necessary to secure and perpetuate the Union is simply the enfranchisement and recognition of political equality of the power that saved the nation from destruction -- a recognition of the political equality of the blacks with the whites in all their relations as American citizens. … ⁴⁰

"A correspondent of the Charleston Daily Courier writing from Sumter, South Carolina, reported November 4, 1866, an organized movement among Negroes to better their condition. They held a large assembly to deal with the problems of the hour, this being a meeting on a larger scale than that of many other such which had been held for that purpose in that section. During the four hours of this meeting the correspondent reported that there was not uttered a word about Negro suffrage and other political questions. The keynote of the meeting was to secure 'a fair and remunerative reward for labor.' The contract system had proved to be unequal and unjust and they were advised to resort to the share system.

The black West protested to the admission of Colorado with white suffrage. On January 24, 1866, Senator Brown of Missouri said: "I present a petition of certain citizens of Denver, in the Territory of Colorado, showing that the State Constitution, framed by a citizens' convention, and adopted by an almost insignificant majority of the legal voters of Colorado, preparatory to admission as a State, excludes all colored citizens of the Territory of Colorado from the right of suffrage by the incorporation in that instrument of the words 'all white male citizens.' The petitioners, therefore, beseech your honorable body not to admit the Territory as a State until the word 'all white' be erased from her constitution." ⁴¹

The most significant meeting took place in the North where a National Convention met in Syracuse, New York, in October, 1864. Besides Frederick Douglass, it was attended by George L. Ruffin, who afterwards became the first Negro to sit on the bench of Massachusetts, George T. Downing of Rhode Island, Robert Hamilton of New York, William Howard Day of New Jersey, Jonathan C. Gibbs, who later became Secretary of State and Superintendent of Education in Florida; Peter H. Clark of Ohio, Henry Highland Garnet, the Negro preacher, Dr. Peter W. Ray of Brooklyn, and many other leaders of the free Negroes. The resolution said:

The weakness of our friends is strength to our foes. When the Anti-Slavery Standard, representing the American Anti-Slavery Society, denies that the society asks for the [ 234 ] enfranchisement of colored men, and the Liberator apologizes for excluding the colored men of Louisiana from the ballot-box, they injure us more vitally than all the ribald jests of the whole pro-slavery press …

In the ranks of the Democratic party, all the worst elements of American society fraternize; and we need not expect a single voice from that quarter for justice, mercy, or even decency. To it we are nothing; the slave-holders everything. …

How stands the case with the great Republican party in question? We have already alluded to it as being largely under the influence of the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored race. This is seen by the slowness of our Government to employ the strong arm of the black man in the work of putting down the rebellion; and in its unwillingness, after thus employing him, to invest him with the same incitements to deeds of daring, as white soldiers; neither giving him the same pay, rations, and protection, nor any hope of rising in the service by meritorious conduct. It is also seen in the fact, that in neither of the plans emanating from this party for reconstructing the institutions of the Southern States, are colored men, not even those who had fought for the country, recognized as having any political existence or rights whatever. ...

Do you, then, ask us to state, in plain terms, just what we want of you, and just what we think we ought to receive at your hands? We answer: First of all, the complete abolition of the slavery of our race in the United States. We shall not stop to argue. We feel the terrible sting of this stupendous wrong, and that we cannot be free while our brothers are slaves. ...

We want the elective franchise in all the states now in the Union, and the same in all such states as may come into the Union hereafter. We believe that the highest welfare of this great country will be found in erasing from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor or against any class of its people, and by establishing one law for the white and colored people alike. Whatever prejudice and taste may be innocently allowed to do or to dictate in social and domestic relations, it is plain, that in the matter of government, the object of which is the protection and security of human rights, prejudice should be allowed no voice whatever. …

Your fathers laid down the principle, long ago, that universal suffrage is the best foundation of Government. We believe as your fathers believed, and as they practiced; for, in eleven States out of the original thirteen, colored men exercised the right to vote at the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution. …

Fellow-citizens, let us entreat you, have faith in your own principles. [ 235 ] If freedom is good for any, it is good for all. If you need the elective franchise, we need it even more. You are strong, we are weak ; you are many, we are few; you are protected, we are exposed. Clothe us with this safeguard of our liberty, and give us an interest in the country to which, in common with you, we have given our lives and poured out our best blood. You cannot need special protection. Our degradation is not essential to your elevation, nor our peril essential to your safety. You are not likely to be outstripped in the race of improvement by persons of African descent; and hence you have no need of superior advantage, nor to burden them with disabilities of any kind. …

We may conquer Southern armies by the sword; but it is another thing to conquer Southern hate. Now what is the natural counterpoise against this Southern malign hostility? This it is: give the elective franchise to every colored man of the South who is of sane mind, and has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and you have at once four millions of friends who will guard with their vigilance, and if need be, defend with their arms, the ark of Federal Liberty from the treason and pollution of her enemies. You are sure of enmity of the masters, -- make sure of the friendship of the slaves; for, depend upon it, your Government cannot afTord to encounter the enmity of both.⁴²

And so at first Abraham Lincoln looked back towards some stable place in the relation of blacks and whites in the South on which men could begin to build a new edifice for freedom, and he gave only one word that had in it a ring of harshness. He was willing to accept almost any overture on the part of the South except that he would not return the Negroes to slavery, and if any law compelled the executive to do this, that executive would not be Abraham Lincoln. There can be no doubt that Abraham Lincoln never would have accepted the Black Codes. He began by looking backward and then turned with this forward-looking word.

On the other hand, Andrew Johnson started looking forward, towards free land, and the interests of the suppressed laborers in the South; and then realizing that one-half this laboring class was black, he turned his face towards reaction. He accepted the Black Codes, and thus he faced in the winter of 1865 the representatives of the people of the United States in the 39th Congress assembled.

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Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons, 
Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom's bars, 
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set, 
Still visioning the stars! 

Jessie Fauset.