“The Price of Disaster” in “Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880”
The Price of Disaster
The price of the disaster of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of ignorant laborers in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government; of overthrowing a slave economy and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal.
The year 1867 comes. The election of 1866 has sent to the 40th Congress a Republican majority of 42 against 11 in the Senate and 143 against 49 in the House. The decisive battle of Reconstruction looms. Abolition-democracy demands for Negroes physical freedom, civil rights, economic opportunity and education and the right to vote, as a matter of sheer human justice and right. Industry demands profits and is willing to use for this end Negro freedom or Negro slavery, votes for Negroes or Black Codes.
The South, beaten in war, and socially and economically disorganized, was knocking at the doors of Congress with increased political power and with a determination to restore land monopoly, and to reorganize its agrarian industry, and to attempt to restore its capital by reducing public taxation to the lowest point. Moreover, it had not given up the idea that the capital which it had lost through the legal abolition of slavery, should and might be reimbursed from the Federal Treasury. Especially it was determined to use for its own ends the increased political power based on voteless Negroes. Finally, there was the West, beginning to fear the grip of land and transportation monopoly, rebelling against the power of Eastern industry, and staggering under the weight of public debt and public taxation.
In the midst of these elements stood Andrew Johnson, with the tremendous power which lay in his hands as commander-in-chief of the Army, with the large patronage which arose through the expansion of governmental functions during the war, and with a stubborn will and a resourceful and astute Secretary of State. Logically, Andrew Johnson as an early leader of land reform, and of democracy in industry for the peasant-farmer and the laboring class, was in position to lead the democracy of the West. But perversely, he had been induced by flattery, by his Southern birth, and his dislike of New England puritanism, to place himself at the head of the Southerners. Between the program of the South and that of the West, then, there was absolutely no point of alliance. The South represented the extreme of reactionary capitalism based upon land and on the ownership of labor. It showed no sign of any more sympathy with the labor movement in the North or the extension of democratic methods than it had before the war. There was not a single labor voice raised in the Southern post-war clamor. Yet Johnson could not see this. He continued to flirt with Western liberalism at the very time he was surrendering completely to Southern reaction and ultra-conservatism.
In his advice to the South, he no longer contemplated Negro suffrage in any form, and he said nothing of poor whites. In 1867, Negro votes were refused in the municipal elections in Virginia. Judge Moore asked President Johnson concerning the right of freedmen to participate in these elections, but Johnson gave no answer. On the other hand, in an interview with Charles Halpine, March 5, he sought again to make alliance with the Western unrest. He said:
To the people the national debt is a thing of debt to be paid; but to the aristocracy of bonds and national securities it is a property of more than $2,500,000,000, from which a revenue of $180,000,000 a year is to be received into their pockets. So we now find that an aristocracy of the South, based on $3,000,000,000 in Negroes, who were a productive class, has disappeared, and their place in political control of the country is assumed by an aristocracy based on nearly $3,000,000,000 of national debt—a thing which is not producing anything, but which goes on steadily every year, and must go on for all time until the debt is paid, absorbing and taxing at the rate of six or seven per cent a year for every $100 bond that is represented in its aggregation.
The war of finance is the next war we have to fight; and every blow struck against my efforts to uphold a strict construction of the laws and the Constitution is in reality a blow in favor of repudiating the national debt. The manufacturers and men of capital in the eastern States and the States along the Atlantic seaboard—a mere strip or fringe on the broad mantle of our country, if you will examine the map—these are in favor of high protective, and, in fact, prohibitory tariffs, and also favor a contraction of the currency. But against both measures the interests and votes of the great producing and non-manufacturing States of the West stand irrevocably arrayed, and a glance at the map and the census statistics of the last twenty years will tell every one who is open to conviction how that war must end.1
This was a maladroit argument. It placed the national debt against the loss of slave property as equally sinister phenomena. It suggested partial repudiation and thus frightened and antagonized investors. It rightly protested against the extravagance of war-time finance, but this protest came from a man who was now the acknowledged leader of property and reaction in the South. What basis of alliance could there be between those determined to control and exploit freed labor in the South and those who wished to fight exploitation and monopoly in the West?
Moreover, in his effort to conciliate and lead the West, Johnson attacked the most powerful enemy before him. That enemy was not abolition-democracy, as he falsely conceived. It was a tremendous, new, and rising power of organized wealth and capitalist industry in the North. Monopoly profits from investments were increasing, and destined to increase, and their increase depended upon a high protective tariff, the validity of the public debt, and the control of the national banks and currency. All of these things were threatened by the South and by Andrew Johnson as leader of the South. On the other hand, humanitarian radicalism, so far as the Negro was concerned, was not only completely harnessed to capital and property in the North, but its program for votes for Negroes more and more became manifestly the only protection upon which Northern industry could depend. The Abolitionists were not enemies of capital.
The American Abolitionists were typical bourgeois-democratic revolutionists under specific American conditions. They felt their movement linked up with the great humanitarian causes of the day (the “labor question,” the “peace question,” the emancipation of women, temperance, philanthropy) and with the bourgeois revolutionary movement in Europe. “He hailed the revolution (of 1848) in France,” Moor-field Storey tells of Sumner, “and similar outbreaks in other countries as parts of the great movement for freedom, of which the anti-slavery agitation in America was another part.”2
But the former Abolitionists were gradually developing. Under the leadership of Stevens and Sumner, they were beginning to realize the economic foundation of the revolution necessary in the South. They saw that the Negro needed land and education and that his vote would only be valuable to him as it opened the doors to a firm economic foundation and real intelligence. If now they could get the industrial North, not simply to give the Negro the vote, but to give him land and give him schools, the battle would be won. Here, however, they were only partially successful. Stevens could not get them to listen to his plan of land distribution, and Sumner failed in his effort to provide for a national system of Negro schools. But they could and did get the aid of industry, commerce, and labor for Negro suffrage, and this vast step forward they gladly took. Public opinion followed philanthropy, but it was guided by Big Business.
In the meantime, the nation was in the midst of the transition period. Nothing could be settled until the fate of the Fourteenth Amendment was known, and during this time of waiting, from July 16, 1866, until July 20, 1868, the status of the South and its relation to the Union was unsettled. Slowly, the nation voted on the Fourteenth Amendment, destined to curb the political power of the South. Most of New England and two Western states ratified it in the summer and fall of 1866. Before January, seven Southern states rejected it almost unanimously, and in the first three months of 1867, the whole South and the Border States had pronounced against it. They said, in effect, no Negro citizens nor voters; no guaranty of civil rights to Negroes; and all political power based on the counting of the full Negro population. The North, by 1868, had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment unanimously, although New Jersey, Ohio and Oregon made attempts to reverse their decision, when Democrats gained power in those states.
There was not only the vast final problem of economics and government—there was an immediate transition problem. In the interval during which the nation was awaiting the fate of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, what was to be the status of the South? The South was in the midst of industrial, civil and political anarchy. Crime, force, and murder, disorganized and wandering laborers, unorganized industry, were widely in evidence. The United States as a sovereign nation could declare the Southern states, where rebellion had occurred, unorganized territory, and could rule them by civil government, backed by Federal police. By those who regarded the Constitution as a fetich, this might be pronounced sacrilegious, but to ordinary human beings it was by far the best and sanest thing that the nation could have done, and it would have saved the United States and the whole world untold injury, retrogression and world war.
This was the plan of both Stevens and Sumner, and constitutional lawyers have pronounced it reasonable. With some reluctance, the nation refused to do this while the South and its friends howled in opposition. It was, one would have thought, an unhallowed attempt to rock the foundations of the universe and overthrow the kingdom of Almighty God. The refusal of the nation was chiefly because the new industry, the money-making financiers and organizers of a vast economic empire, hesitated at a government guardianship of labor and control of industry on a scale that might embarrass future freedom of exploitation, and certainly would increase present taxation.
Many advocates of abolition-democracy were also doubtful. They were still under the “freedom” cry of the eighteenth century and obsessed by the American Assumption of the nineteenth. They were still, on the whole, afraid of the full logic of democracy and the ability of the state to secure servants as honest and efficient as private industry. Only their most courageous leaders dared all.
The easiest way out, then, was to prolong the military rule already established as a necessity of the war. This was cheapest and easiest; but also it was of necessity temporary. It must be a step toward civil rule and it must inaugurate civil rule. The law of March 2, 1867, was enacted. It provided for Negro suffrage. What else could it have provided for? If it had confined the vote to whites, not only would the anti-Negro legislation be confirmed, but the gift of additional political power to the South to be used against Northern industry and against democracy would be outright and irrevocable. Johnson vetoed the bill, and when it was passed over his veto, had recourse to executive action which would nullify it. Eventually it was this that led to the attempt to impeach him.
Let us now, more in detail, study the facts of this development. The second session of the 39th Congress assembled in December, 1866, with a distinct mandate from the people. This mandate called for the re-organization of the Southern states on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, and for the definiteness of this mandate the South had only itself and Andrew Johnson to blame.
From 1864 to 1868, by a succession of elections, with wide publicity on both sides, and unusually full discussion, national public opinion had come to these decisions by a large majority.
- The emancipated slave must be protected because he had helped save the Union which slavery had disrupted.
- The first protection for the slave was a legal status of freedom. This the South opposed in the fifteen former slave states, including the Border States. Four flatly refused to accept the Thirteenth Amendment. Three others accepted but only on condition that freedom should not imply full civil and political rights. Eight states accepted the Thirteenth Amendment, but five of these and the three which accepted on condition, acted under pressure from Johnson, and their action expressed the opinion of a minority of the former voting population, and for this reason these states feared to refer their action to popular approval.
- A legal status of freedom without actual civil rights would mean almost nothing. The answer of the South to a proposal of civil rights was the Black Codes, which established a new status of slavery with a modified slave trade.
- The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill represented an attempt at Federal intervention to enforce freedom by Federal law.
The South bitterly opposed these attempts on the part of the national government and declared with Johnson that such attempts were unconstitutional.
- To set this point at rest, the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed which made Negroes citizens, guaranteed them civil rights by national law, and political rights, if they were counted as a basis of representation in Congress. The South promptly rejected this overture unanimously, except in Tennessee, and there the majority of white voters had to be disfranchised before the acceptance was carried through.
But behind all this, and explaining this interest in the Negro on the part of most Northerners, was a growing conviction that an arrogant South was returning to Congress with increased political power; that its leaders were essentially the same men who had disrupted the Union and precipitated a costly and bloody war; that there was no reason to suppose that these men had changed their convictions in the slightest or surrendered for a moment their determination to dominate the country, and fight monopoly in industry with monopoly in agriculture.
In the face of their fatal failure, Southerners were demanding increased political power, and that political power could and in all probability would be used for everything disadvantageous to the majority of the nation: it would be used against the spread of democratic ideals; it would be used for further increasing the political power of the South; it would be used against industry, property, and capital as buttressed by the tariff, the national banks, and the public debt.
It was in vain that before, during and since the war, the North had offered to compromise with this unyielding bloc. There was only one defense against the power of the South and while that was revolutionary and hitherto undreamed of, it was the only way, and it could not be stopped by the stubbornness of one narrow-minded man. That was Negro suffrage.
Senator Sherman of Ohio said March 11, 1867: “A year ago I was not in favor of extending enforced Negro suffrage upon the Southern states.”3 But the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment led him to give his support.
There was evidently an understanding among the Republican Senators and Representatives that if the legislatures of the Southern states organized under Johnson’s scheme of Reconstruction accepted the Fourteenth Amendment and thus would say that either they would allow the Negro to vote or, in case they did not allow him, would forego representation based upon his numbers; then these states would be recognized and admitted to Congress. This was more than fair to the South. Charles Sumner to be sure would not consent to it and Stevens did not like it; but the industrial North was willing to throw the Negro over on these terms.4
However, with the exception of Tennessee, the Southern states rejected the Fourteenth Amendment almost unanimously and insisted upon the Black Codes, and accompanied their demand by widespread violence.
Meantime in minor measures the sentiment for Negro suffrage was seen to be crystallizing. Colorado had sought admission in 1866 and had less than 100 Negroes. Sumner opposed the application because of the small population and chiefly because the suffrage was confined to white males. He spoke March 12 and 13, April 17, 19 and 24 on the subject. The bill passed the Senate despite Sumner. In the House, the attempt to strike out the word “white” as a qualification for voters was defeated. The President vetoed the bill on account of insufficient population.
Next session, Sumner’s amendment prevailed, but the President again vetoed the bill. Sumner made at the close of the session an unsuccessful attempt to make the same condition in the bill to admit Nebraska but failed; the President did not sign that bill. At the next session, the bill with Negro suffrage was passed over the President’s veto. Sumner opposed the admission of Tennessee because Negroes were denied the right to vote. He failed to influence public sentiment but made his opponents apologetic.5
Sumner wrote to F. W. Bird, January 10, 1867:
I think you will be satisfied with the result on Nebraska and Colorado. The declaration that there shall be no exclusion from the elective franchise on account of color is not in the form which I preferred; but you have the declaration, which to my mind is a great gain. Is it not? And thus ends a long contest, where at first I was alone. Mr. Stewart of Nevada, who is sitting near me, says that “it cannot be said now that the Republican party is not committed to Negro suffrage.” You have (1) The District Bill; (2) The Nebraska Bill; (3) The Colorado Bill; and (4) The Territorial Bill passed today, declaring that in the territories there shall be no exclusion from the suffrage on account of color.
In February, 1867, from the Committee of Fifteen, Stevens presented the leading Reconstruction measure. This measure declared that life and property were not safe in the former Confederate states, and that good order had to be enforced until loyal governments could be legally established. It divided the Confederate states into five military divisions: one, Virginia; two, North and South Carolina; three, Georgia, Alabama and Florida; four, Mississippi and Arkansas; five, Louisiana and Texas. A general with sufficient forces was to be assigned to each of these districts. These generals might use the United States civil courts to enforce the laws, but if these were not effective, they might govern through military commissions. The sentences of commissions must be approved by the commanding officers. United States courts should issue no writs of habeas corpus against the acts of these commissions.
This bill established martial law, after the President had declared the war was ended. It put the appointing of the district military masters in the hands of the General of the Army instead of the President, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Congress hesitated at these thorough-going terms. Blaine suggested an Amendment which would provide a way of escape from martial rule by promising admission when a state adopted the Fourteenth Amendment and provided for Negro suffrage. Stevens refused to accept this and the bill was passed February 13.
The Senate began to consider the bill February 15, and stayed in session until three o’clock in the morning. Resort was had to a party caucus, the Republican Senators meeting at 11 A.M., February 16. Sherman, Sumner, Fessenden and four others were put on a sub-committee to revise the House bill, and remained in session a greater part of the afternoon. The bill was changed so as to restore the appointment of heads of the military districts, and adopt the Blaine amendment. The House had already passed Eliot’s bill admitting Louisiana with Negro suffrage and Sumner wished that taken as a model. Sumner asked for Negro suffrage but only one of his committee supported him. At 5 P.M. the caucus met and Sumner renewed his proposition, excluding discrimination as to race and color for the basis of suffrage. It was carried in the caucus, 15 to 13 or 14. This action committed the Republicans to the requirement of suffrage irrespective of race or color in the election of delegates to the Reconstruction conventions, and as the basis of suffrage for the constitutions of the rebel states. Senator Wilson of Massachusetts said that “then and there in that small room, in that caucus, was decided the greatest pending question of the North American continent.”6 It was accepted by the caucus, although Fessenden was greatly displeased. He left the caucus and sought to defeat it by personal appeals. This led to an acrimonious debate in Congress, February 19, but the bill passed after a night’s session at 6:22 Sunday morning, February 17.
Congress had a difficult time passing this Reconstruction bill. The House rejected the Senate bill and time was flying. Finally agreement was reached February 20 and Congress expired by limitation on March 4. The essential parts of the bill on Negro suffrage remained.
The President by taking the full time allowed by law in returning his veto would leave only two days for Congress to pass the bill over his veto. Johnson and Seward immediately saw this and the veto was held up to the last moment, reaching the House on the afternoon of March 2. The President said that the bill placed the people of ten states under the complete domination of military rulers; these states had made provisions for the preservation of order, yet it was proposed to put them under military law; “the Negroes have not asked for the privilege of voting, and the vast majority of them have no idea of what it means”; we carried on a four years’ war to punish the “crime of defying a constitution; if we now ourselves defy the constitution we prove that they were in fact fighting for Negro liberty.”
Stevens demanded immediate consideration of the veto but allowed short statements from Democratic members who declared this bill a death knell of republican liberty.
One opponent declared that the bill should not pass unless he was “overpowered from physical exhaustion, or restrained by the rules of the House.” Stevens, in closing the debate, said that he had listened to the gentlemen, because he appreciated “the melancholy feelings with which they are approaching this funeral of the nation,” but as he desired the passage of the bill he asked Mr. Blaine to move a suspension of the rules. Mr. Blaine accordingly made the motion, and after an ineffectual attempt at filibustering, the bill was passed over the veto by a vote of 135 yeas to 48 nays. The Senate speedily took similar action, and the Reconstruction bill became a law.
As finally passed, the bill set up the five districts, declaring that no adequate protection for life and property existed there. The President instead of the General of the Army was to assign an army officer to each of these districts. These commanders might rule by martial law, but sentence of death had to be approved by the President. To escape from this régime, there must be universal suffrage without regard to race or color, and the framing of a state constitution with a convention composed of delegates not disqualified by participation in rebellion. The constitution so adopted must provide for universal suffrage, and this constitution must be ratified by a majority of the voters. The constitution must also be approved by Congress. The state could not be admitted until the Fourteenth Amendment had been approved by three-fourths of the states of the United States. Thus Congress avoided making the admission of the states conditional upon their individual acceptance of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Still Andrew Johnson was not beaten; as commander-in-chief of the army he could execute the Reconstruction legislation and he could throw its interpretation into the courts with a good chance of favorable decision; just as the faltering attempt of Congress to give the Negroes land was at last utterly nullified by Johnson’s edicts of restoration, so there was equal chance to frustrate Congress in restoring states’ functions.
Congress tried to tie Johnson’s hands with the Tenure of Office Bill. It was introduced in December, 1866. The Constitution gave the President no express power to dismiss persons from office. But custom and logic had allowed it. The Republicans feared that by dismissal from office Johnson would gain control of the entire executive division of the government at a time of crisis. The bill proposed that all officers appointed with the consent of the Senate could be removed only with the consent of the Senate, except in the case of cabinet officers. The House insisted on including cabinet officers and finally the bill was passed providing that cabinet officers should hold their offices during the term of the President by whom they were appointed and one month thereafter; during that time they could be removed only with the consent of the Senate. This measure went to the President on the 20th of February, together with the Reconstruction bill, and was vetoed March 2. The veto argued, from statutes and uniform practice, that Congress had no power to force the President to retain in office against his judgment subordinates whom he had appointed.
Johnson said with curious logic: “Whenever administration fails, or seems to fail, in securing any of the great ends for which republican government is established, the proper course seems to be to renew the original spirit and forms of the Constitution itself.” Who was to be the judge of the “original spirit”—Andrew Johnson or the Congress? Which was to yield? Congress must yield to one stubborn, narrow-minded man or it was forced by the necessity of controlling the Executive, to adopt this revolutionary measure.
Sumner said in December, 1866:
It is possible that the President may be impeached. If we go forward and supersede the sham governments set up in the rebel states, we encounter the appointing power of the President, who would put in office men who sympathize with him. It is this consideration which makes ardent representatives say that he must be removed. Should this be attempted, a new question will be presented.7
Through fear of Johnson’s actions, the 40th Congress assembled in special session immediately after adjournment of the 39th, so that Congress was practically in continuous session and there was no interregnum during which Johnson could exercise his uncurbed power.
The new Congress immediately passed a supplementary Reconstruction bill to implement the main measure. This bill laid down a plan of registration for all male citizens, twenty-one years of age and over, who could take the oath of loyalty, and made it the duty of the commanding generals to order elections and choose delegates for constitutional conventions. If the voters favored such conventions, constitutions were to be formed and if adopted transmitted to Congress. The whole machinery of election was placed in the hands of the commanding generals.
The veto of this supplemental bill came immediately. The President in effect declared that the rise of the masses of black labor to political power was “an untried experiment” which “threatened” the whites with “even worse wrongs” than disfranchisement for attempted rebellion, and made “their condition the most deplorable to which any people can be reduced.” And this from the life-long man of the people and champion of the rights of the poor!
It was bad enough when Johnson confined himself to speeches, as at Antietam, but when he came to action, Congress was further aroused. First, June 20, he issued liberal instructions concerning the loyal oath and the duty of commanding generals. He decided on advice of his Attorney General, Stanbery, that those taking the oath of loyalty were judges of their own honesty and could not be questioned by the Board of Registration; that actual disfranchisement for rebellion could only be made valid by law or court decision. Disloyal sentiments alone did not involve disfranchisement.
Moreover, in appointing generals, Johnson evidently proposed to appoint, as far as possible, generals who were sympathetic with the South. In July he removed Sheridan from Louisiana and Texas and appointed first General Thomas, a Virginia Democrat, in his place, and finally General Hancock, a loyal follower of Johnson. The removal of Sheridan caused great excitement. The Loyal Legion held a great meeting asking for the immediate summoning of Congress and the deposition of the President. He replaced General Sickles in the Carolinas with General Canby. Sheridan and Sickles were given posts in the North.
These instructions were published June 20 and Congress replied by the Act of July 19, 1867. This act specifically included Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana and Arkansas in the states to be reconstructed; it provided that all the so-called governments in the South should be subject to the orders of the District Commanders and the General of the army and not of the President. The bill made the Boards of Registration judges of fact in regard to persons seeking to take the oath of loyalty and it extended the time limit for registration of voters.
The bill passed the Houses July 13, and was vetoed July 19. Johnson protested against the attempt of the Federal Government to carry on state governments, and especially against the invasion of the constitutional powers of the President. His words were bitter:
Whilst I hold the chief executive authority of the United States, whilst the obligation rests upon me to see that all the laws are faithfully executed, I can never willingly surrender that trust or the powers given for its execution. I can never give my assent to be made responsible for the faithful execution of laws, and at the same time surrender that trust and the powers which accompany it to any other executive officer, high or low, or to any number of executive officers.
The bill was passed over the veto by both Houses by overwhelming majorities, and talk of impeachment started anew.
The discussion which has raged round the Reconstruction legislation is of the same metaphysical stripe characterizing all fetich-worship of the Constitution. If one means by “constitutional” something provided for in that instrument or foreseen by its authors or reasonably implicit in its words, then the Reconstruction Acts were undoubtedly unconstitutional; and so, for that matter, was the Civil War. In fact, the main measures of government during 1861-1870 were “unconstitutional.” The only action possibly contemplated by the authors of the Constitution was secession; that action, the constitutional fathers feared and deprecated, but their instrument did not forbid it and distinctly implied the legality of a state withdrawing from the “more perfect union.”
Certainly no one could argue that the founders contemplated civil war to preserve the Union or that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Yet, unconstitutionally, the South made it a pro-slavery document and unconstitutionally the North prevented the destruction of the Union on account of slavery; and after the war revolutionary measures rebuilt what revolution had disrupted, and formed a new United States on a basis broader than the old Constitution and different from its original conception.
And why not? No more idiotic program could be laid down than to require a people to follow a written rule of government 90 years old, if that rule had been definitely broken in order to preserve the unity of the government and to destroy an economic anachronism. In such a crisis legalists may insist that consistency with precedent is more important than firm and far-sighted rebuilding. But manifestly, it is not. Rule-following, legal precedence, and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain commonsense. Through the cobwebs of such political subtlety, Stevens crashed and said that military rule must continue in the South until order was restored, democracy established, and the political power built on slavery smashed. Further than this, both he and Sumner knew that land and education for black and white labor was necessary.
On the first day of the second session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, Sumner was on hand with his bill for establishing universal suffrage in the District of Columbia. He had accepted a place on the Committee of the District of Columbia, in addition to his other duties, to secure Negro suffrage. The Committee reported a bill in December, 1866. Reading and writing as a qualification was moved as an amendment but was rejected by a vote of 15-19. Sumner voted “No.” The bill did not reach a final vote but came up again December 10, 1867, when it passed after four days’ debate by a vote of 32-13. The next day it passed the House, and went to the President.
Johnson and Seward, in the veto, kept hammering at the old thesis. Northern states will not allow Negro suffrage to be forced upon them against their will. The Negro population of the District has recently been greatly increased by migration. Their rights can be protected in the District without the right of suffrage, just as much as in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, which refuse Negroes the right to vote. Because of slavery, the Negro is not as well fitted to vote as the intelligent foreigner. And yet five years’ residence and a knowledge of our government are required of the latter.
The bill was re-passed over the President’s veto, January 7, and after it came the first proposal to impeach the President.
A great step along the path to universal suffrage without color distinctions has just been taken in the House of Representatives, in its session of the 18th. The bill giving the right to vote to the blacks in the District of Columbia passed with a majority of 114 to 54. An anxious crowd, of whites and blacks mixed, filled the galleries of the House and all the approaches to the Capitol, and the passage of the bill was hailed with a great outburst of frenzied applause.8
Three days after the 40th Congress opened, Sumner offered a series of resolutions to provide homes and schools for freedmen. This supplemented the Freedmen’s Bureau law and provided a permanent policy of national aid to education and economic redress of the robbery of slavery. The resolutions did not come to a vote; Sumner then tried to amend the Reconstruction Acts of March 22 and July 19 by provisions for free schools in the South without discrimination as to race. A tie vote defeated this effort, although a majority of the Republicans stood by him. He tried again and failed July 11 and July 13. “His disappointment at his failure in 1867 to secure schools and homes for the freedmen was so keen that he left the Senate chamber, and when he reached his house, his grief found vent in tears.”9
Charles Sumner, frustrated in these demands, continued to direct the line of attack which he had initiated during the Civil War. He had in mind relief for free Negroes in the North as well as freedmen in the South, and he was determined that petty race prejudice in the North should not escape attention because of the fight against slavery and its aftermath in the South.
Early in the spring of 1867, March 11, Stevens introduced a set of resolutions for the enforcement of the Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, with preamble as follows:
Whereas it is due to justice, as an example to future times, that some proper pain should be inflicted on the people who constituted the “Confederate States of America,” both because they declared an unjust war against the United States for the purpose of destroying republican liberty and permanently establishing slavery, as well as for the cruel and barbarous manner in which they conducted said war, in violation of all rules of civilized warfare, and also to compel them to make compensation for the damage and expense caused by said war, therefore: Be it enacted that all public lands belonging to the ten states that formed the so-called “Confederate States of America,” shall be forfeited by said states and become vested forthwith in the United States.
The measure further provided as follows:
Section 2, that the President should proceed at once to condemn the property forfeited under the aforesaid Act of July 17, 1862; section 3, that a commission of appraisers be appointed to appraise said property; section 4, that the land so seized and condemned should be distributed among the slaves who had been made free by the war and constitutional amendments, and who were residing on said land on the 4th of March, 1861, or since: to each head of a family 40 acres; to each adult male whether head of a family or not, 40 acres; to each widow, head of a family, 40 acres; to be held by them in fee simple, but to be inalienable for ten years after they should become so seized thereof. Section 5 provided for the raising of the sum of fifty dollars for each homesteader, to be used for the erection of a building on his homestead; and that the further sum of five hundred million dollars be raised for the purpose of pensioning the veterans of the Union army.
The bill contained several other sections dealing with the subject in connection with the main features as above set forth.
Stevens called up this measure for consideration by the House on March 19, when he made one of his characteristic speeches, brilliant and pungent; age seems never to have had any effect upon his mental vigor nor any tendency to modify his sharp invectives. Said he:
I am about to discuss the question of pain of belligerent traitors… . The pain of traitors has been wholly ignored by a treacherous executive and a sluggish Congress… . I wish to make an issue before the American people and see whether they will sanction the perfect impunity of a murderous belligerent and consent that loyal men of this nation who have been despoiled of their property shall remain without remuneration, either by rebel property or the property of the nation. To this issue, I desire to devote the small remainder of my life… . No committee or party is responsible for this bill. Whatever merit it possesses is due to Andrew Johnson and myself.
Andrew Johnson did not falter and began to pin his faith on the fall elections of 1867. On September 7, 1867, Johnson extended full pardon to Confederates. His former proclamation, according to the Tribune, had “left about one hundred thousand citizens outside the amnesty, but this one leaves out one or two thousand.”
Undoubtedly at this time Johnson was being urged toward stronger counter-revolutionary measures. He entertained the idea of ordering the military governors of the five Southern districts to enroll as voters the former Confederates whom he had included in his last Proclamation of Amnesty. Clemenceau said that when some of his Southern friends called on him, he admitted frankly that only the fear of being deposed prevented him from acting and he advised them to take the matter into court.
To court the South flew. Johnson’s provisional governor of Mississippi tried in the name of his state to enjoin the President from executing the Reconstruction laws. The Supreme Court found in April, 1867, that its interference would be improper. Thereupon Governor Jackson of Georgia sought to enjoin the Secretary of War, the General of the Army, and the District Commander in Georgia; but the court decided it had no jurisdiction. A second time Georgia went to the Supreme Court and failed. Finally, late in 1867, W. H. McCardle of Mississippi, arrested by military authority under the Reconstruction acts, appealed from the Circuit to the Supreme Court, but Congress over the President’s veto repealed the statue which allowed such an appeal, and by this revolutionary procedure made good its supreme power in Reconstruction over court and President.
Radical newspapers published in October a statement that the President had told certain friends in Tennessee that he would resist by force if Congress attempted to impeach him. Johnson denied that he had said anything of the sort, but Republicans made much of the fact that Johnson had ordered cannon furnished to Swann, Governor of Maryland, who like Johnson had been elected by the Republicans and had gone over to the Democrats. Swann asked the government to furnish him with cannon. Johnson gave Stanton the order to deliver the weapons needed. Stanton flatly refused. When General Grant took his place as Secretary of War, the Governor of Maryland renewed his request, which was again granted by Johnson and again refused by Grant. Finally, Swann made up his mind to buy the cannon. Most of the officers serving in Swann’s militia were former Confederates.
During the fall campaign of 1867, there was fear of panic in the air on account of the vast circulation of greenbacks and bank notes to the extent of a billion dollars. With money fluctuating in value, trade became a lottery. Higher protection was put on steel and woolen goods. But curiously enough, the Democrats in general avoided the tariff issue. They did not follow Johnson’s attack on finance because they saw its inconsistency with the reaction of property in the South. Leaving the economic argument, they embraced with avidity race prejudice and concentrated their campaign on this.
Clemenceau said,
The best point of attack for the Democrats is the Negroes. Any Democrat who did not manage to hint in his speech that the Negro is a degenerate gorilla, would be considered lacking in enthusiasm. The idea of giving political power to a lot of wild men, incapable of civilization, whose intelligence is no higher than that of the animal! That is the theme of all Democratic speeches.10
With this, of course, went fetich worship of the Constitution.
Johnson looked forward with hope. October elections took place in Ohio and Pennsylvania and showed reaction toward the Democrats.
In Ohio, R. B. Hayes, afterward president, ran against Allan G. Thurman, and Negro suffrage played a large part. Hayes denied the assertion that the government was a white man’s government. “It is not the Government of any class or sect or nationality or race… . It is not the Government of the native born or of the foreign born, of the rich man or of the poor man, of the white man or of the colored man—it is the Government of the freeman.” The “monstrous inconsistency and injustice of excluding one-seventh of our population from all participation in a Government founded on the consent of the governed” was held to be impossible. There was no necessary antagonism between the two races which could not be broken down by justice and equality.11
Hayes won by less than 3,000 votes, as compared with a Republican majority of 42,000 in 1866. Also, at the same time, the voters rejected the Negro suffrage amendment by 38,000 votes, and elected a Democratic legislature. There were, however, certain other elements. The Republicans had sought to disfranchise deserters from the army, and Ben Wade had aroused the bitter hostility of Southern elements in southern Ohio.
Ohio expressed itself against the high tariff “to fill the pockets of Eastern monopolists,” and in favor of agricultural labor, showing the peculiar contradiction in the minds of the voters. Johnson telegraphed Ohio: “Ohio has done its duty and done it in time. God bless Ohio.” Pennsylvania lost nearly the whole of its Republican majority of thirty thousand. In New York cannon were kept firing for two days.
Most of the state elections came in November, and showed some reaction toward the Democrats but not so great as in October. The Republicans won in Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri and Illinois, but were completely defeated in New York, New Jersey and Maryland.
New Jersey refused to strike out the word “white” from the requirements for suffrage; in New York, the Republicans did not dare to submit to popular vote the proposal to drop the property discrimination against Negro voters. Maryland adopted a new registry law which gave the vote to whites only.
On the other hand, during 1867, Iowa and Dakota admitted Negroes to the ballot, and Minnesota in 1868. In this latter year Negroes were voting in all the New England states except Connecticut, in Iowa, Minnesota and Dakota—a total of 8 Northern states. The South and its friends had a right to charge that 8 other Northern states refused to enfranchise a class to which they were forcing the South to give the vote.
In the third annual message of Andrew Johnson, December 3, 1867, all masking of the Negro problem is removed. He is no longer evasive as to the relation of the black worker to the white worker and his whole economic argument is drowned in race hate. There is no suggestion that Negro soldiers or Negro property owners or Negroes who can read and write should have any political rights. He bases his whole argument flatly on the inferiority of the Negro race.
“It is the glory of white men,” he proclaims magniloquently,
to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed. But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations, Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. In the Southern States, however, Congress has undertaken to confer upon them the privilege of the ballot. Just released from slavery, it may be doubted whether as a class they know more than their ancestors how to organize and regulate civil society. Indeed, it is admitted that the blacks of the South are not only regardless of the rights of property, but so utterly ignorant of public affairs that their voting can consist in nothing more than carrying a ballot to the place where they are directed to deposit it.
The great difference between the two races in physical, mental and moral characteristics will prevent an amalgamation or fusion of them together in one homogeneous mass. If the inferior obtains the ascendancy over the other, it will govern with reference only to its own interests—for it will recognize no common interest—and create such a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed. Already the Negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder. They are taught to regard as an enemy every white man who has any respect for the rights of his own race. If this continues it must become worse and worse, until all order will be subverted, all industry cease, and the fertile fields of the South grow up into a wilderness. Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now making to Africanize the half of our country.
It is easy to believe now that the idea that Andrew Johnson and the South planned a coup d’état was fanciful. The point is that sane and thoughtful men at the time widely believed it. No matter how incredible it may seem to us, we must remember that this was a generation to which it had seemed incredible that the South should secede. They had seen the incredible happen at fearful cost. It might happen again. The Republicans, therefore, refused to be frightened by the elections of 1867. Carl Schurz said that
I think that I do not exaggerate that an overwhelming majority of the loyal Union men, North and South, saw in President Johnson a traitor bent upon turning over the national government to the rebels again, and ardently wishing to see him utterly stripped of power, not so much for what he had done, but for what, as they thought, he was capable of doing and likely to do.
Impeachment proceedings now hurried forward. They had begun in December, 1866. On February 28, 1867, the Committee on Judiciary had refused to recommend impeachment of the President but asked for further investigation. March 2, the Reconstruction Act passed, and March 7, impeachment was moved for the second time in the House. Johnson had notified the Senate of the suspension of Secretary Stanton in December, 1867. Early the next year, the Senate refused to concur, Grant gave up the office, and Stanton resumed his duties. Stanton was dismissed again in February, 1868, and the impeachment of Johnson was determined upon in March.
The beginning of the attempt to impeach President Johnson was a memorable scene. Thaddeus Stevens made his speech February 16, 1868. He was hopelessly broken in health, and a hushed and expectant audience listened to every word. He spoke with force and solemnity. “I doubt,” said Charles Sumner, “if words were ever delivered to more effect.”12 He was a dying man and this was his last word.
Who in 1867 represented the considered will of the people of the United States? Certainly not Andrew Johnson, backed by Northern copperheads and the supporters of a futile attempt at secession. Just as certainly two-thirds of the members of Congress, with the South excluded as it had been excluded for six terrible years, had a clear right to express the repeatedly registered popular will.
The problem was a difficult one. When can a ruler rule in the United States? The nation by overwhelming majority had declared for union, for emancipation to preserve the Union, for no increase in the political power of the white South, and for Negro suffrage to prevent this increased political power and reward Negro loyalty.
This clear will of the majority of the people, represented in Congress, was frustrated by a President who repeatedly refused to obey the plain mandate of the party which elected him. Johnson virtually declared Congress illegal because the South was unrepresented. Congress denied that a criminal could be his own judge. Who could settle this dispute? By the whole theory of party government, a President must be at least in general accord with his party. His utmost power should not go beyond a suspensory veto compelling a plebiscite. Yet no president in the history of the United States up to this time had used the veto power like Andrew Johnson to oppose the expressed will of the nation. In twenty-three cases, he opposed his will to the will of Congress, while Andrew Jackson, his closest competitor, made only eleven vetoes and pocket vetoes. Party responsibility in government was absolutely blocked at a time of crisis. Under any, even partial, theory of such responsibility, Johnson would have been compelled to resign; but the antiquated constitutional requirements of a system of laws built for another age and for entirely different circumstances were now being applied to unforeseen conditions.
The Constitution made the removal of the President contingent upon his committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Here then came a plain question of definition: was it a crime, in the judgment of the people of the United States in 1867, for a President to block the overwhelming will of a successful majority of voters during a period of nearly three years? Stevens and those who followed him said that it was. They did not all pretend that Johnson was personally a criminal with treasonable designs, although some believed even that; on the other hand it was clear even to many of Johnson’s friends that he was “an unfit person to be President of the United States.”13 They all did assert that he had broken the rules by which responsible government could be carried on.
The trial started March 30, 1868, and ended May 6. Over two-thirds of the members of the United States House of Representatives, 35 out of 54 Senators, and the great majority of the voters of the nation, outside the former slave states, agreed that Johnson should be removed from office. Whether they were right or wrong, the failure legally to convict Johnson has remained to frustrate responsible government in the United States ever since. But no President since Johnson has attempted indefinitely to rule in defiance of Congress.
The leaders of abolition-democracy still pressed on. Sumner was especially active and destined for several more years of active work.
Thaddeus Stevens was near death, but to the very end he fought on. He wished to ask Congress to declare by law that no state had the right to forbid citizens of the United States from taking part in the national elections.
Thaddeus Stevens died August 11, 1868, three weeks after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment was announced, and in his last breath and even after death, stood true to his principles.
Two colored clergymen called, and asked leave to see Stevens and pray with him. He ordered them to be admitted; and when they had come to his bedside, he turned and held out his hand to one of them. They sang a hymn and prayed… . It was then within ten minutes of midnight, and the end was to come before the beginning of the new day. He lay motionless for a few minutes, then opened his eyes, took one look, placidly closed them, and, without a struggle, the great commoner had ceased to breathe.14
Thaddeus Stevens was buried in a colored graveyard. Upon the monument there is the following inscription, prepared by himself:
I repose in this quiet and secluded spot, not from any natural preference for solitude, but finding other cemeteries limited as to race by charter rules, I have chosen this, that I might illustrate in my death the principles which I advocated through a long life, [the] Equality of Man before his Creator.
As Charles Sumner said:
Already he takes his place among illustrious names, which are the common property of mankind. I see him now, as I have so often seen him during life. His venerable form moves slowly and with uncertain steps; but the gathered strength of years is in his countenance and the light of victory on his path. Politician, calculator, time-server, stand aside! a hero statesman passes to his reward!15
As a result of the legislation of the 39th and 40th Congresses, the United States in 1867 took a portentous forward step in democracy.
For the mass of the nation, it was a step taken under compulsion of fear, without deep forethought and with a rather didactic following out of certain conventional principles which made universal suffrage seem natural and inevitable. To the South, it was the price of that disaster of slavery and war which spelled its history from 1830 to 1865; and it was the only price adequate to that fatal mistake.
To those men who were guiding American industry toward a new and fateful path, the Southern experiment was simply a political move by which they silenced and held in check the tremendous political power built on slavery, which in many ways and for a generation had threatened the nation and checked its economic development.
To a few far-seeing leaders of democracy this experiment appeared in its truer light. It was a test of the whole theory of American government. It was a dictatorship backed by the military arm of the United States by which the governments of the Southern states were to be coerced into accepting a new form of administration, in which the freedmen and the poor whites were to hold the overwhelming balance of political power. As soon as political power was successfully delivered into the hands of these elements, the Federal government was to withdraw and full democracy ensue.
The difficulty with this theory was the failure to realize that such dictatorship must last long enough really to put the mass of workers in power; that this would be in fact a dictatorship of the proletariat which must endure until the proletariat or at least a leading united group, with clear objects and effective method, had education and experience and had taken firm control of the economic organization of the South. Unfortunately, the power set to begin this dictatorship was the military arm of a government which more and more was falling into the hands of organized wealth, and of wealth organized on a scale never before seen in modern civilization.
The new organization of Northern wealth was not comparable to the petty bourgeoisie which seized power after the overthrow of European feudalism. It was a new rule of associated and federated monarchs of industry and finance wielding a vaster and more despotic power than European kings and nobles ever held. It was destined to subdue not simply Southern agrarianism but even individual wealth and brains in the North which were creating a new petty bourgeoisie of small merchants and skilled artisans.
It was inconceivable, therefore, that the masters of Northern industry through their growing control of American government, were going to allow the laborers of the South any more real control of wealth and industry than was necessary to curb the political power of the planters and their successors. As soon as the Southern landholders and merchants yielded to the Northern demands of a plutocracy, at that moment the military dictatorship should be withdrawn and a dictatorship of capital allowed unhampered sway.
We see this more clearly today than the nation of 1868, or any of its leaders, could possibly envisage it; but even then, Northern industry knew that universal suffrage in the South, in the hands of Negroes just freed from slavery, and of white people still enslaved by poverty, could not stand against organized industry. They promptly calculated that the same method of controlling the labor vote would come in vogue in the South as they were already using in the North, and that the industry which used these methods must in the meantime coöperate with Northern industry; that it could not move the foundation stones upon which Northern industry was consolidating its power; that is, the tariff, the money system, the debt, and national in place of state control of industry. This would seem to be what the masters of exploitation were counting upon and it certainly came true in the bargain of 1876.
Thus by singular coincidence and for a moment, for the few years of an eternal second in a cycle of a thousand years, the orbits of two widely and utterly dissimilar economic systems coincided and the result was a revolution so vast and portentous that few minds ever fully conceived it; for the systems were these: first, that of a democracy which should by universal suffrage establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ending in industrial democracy; and the other, a system by which a little knot of masterful men would so organize capitalism as to bring under their control the natural resources, wealth and industry of a vast and rich country and through that, of the world. For a second, for a pulse of time, these orbits crossed and coincided, but their central suns were a thousand light-years apart, even though the blind and ignorant fury of the South and the complacent Philistinism of the North saw them as one.
Reconstruction was an economic revolution on a mighty scale and with world-wide reverberation. Reconstruction was not simply a fight between the white and black races in the South or between master and ex-slave. It was much more subtle; it involved more than this. There have been repeated and continued attempts to paint this era as an interlude of petty politics or nightmare of race hate instead of viewing it slowly and broadly as a tremendous series of efforts to earn a living in new and untried ways, to achieve economic security and to restore fatal losses of capital and investment. It was a vast labor movement of ignorant, earnest, and bewildered black men whose faces had been ground in the mud by their three awful centuries of degradation and who now staggered forward blindly in blood and tears amid petty division, hate and hurt, and surrounded by every disaster of war and industrial upheaval. Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood. Reconstruction was the turn of white Northern migration southward to new and sudden economic opportunity which followed the disaster and dislocation of war, and an attempt to organize capital and labor on a new pattern and build a new economy. Finally Reconstruction was a desperate effort of a dislodged, maimed, impoverished and ruined oligarchy and monopoly to restore an anachronism in economic organization by force, fraud and slander, in defiance of law and order, and in the face of a great labor movement of white and black, and in bitter strife with a new capitalism and a new political framework.
All these contending and antagonistic groups spoke different and unknown tongues; to the Negro “Freedom” was God; to the poor white “Freedom” was nothing—he had more than he had use for; to the planter “Freedom” for the poor was laziness and for the rich, control of the poor worker; for the Northern business man “Freedom” was opportunity to get rich.
Yet, with interpretation, agreement was possible here; North and South agreed that laborers must produce profit; the poor white and the Negro wanted to get the profit arising from the laborers’ toil and not to divide it with the employers and landowners. When Northern and Southern employers agreed that profit was most important and the method of getting it second, the path to understanding was clear. When white laborers were convinced that the degradation of Negro labor was more fundamental than the uplift of white labor, the end was in sight.
Not only did all those factors becloud this extraordinary series of movements so that the truth of the matter in itself was baffling to observers and interpreters—but over all has spread, to this day, a cloud of lying and slander which leaves historians and philosophers aghast and has resulted in a current theory of interpretation which pictures all participants as scoundrels, idiots and heroes—a combination humanly improbable and demonstrably untrue.
One cannot study Reconstruction without first frankly facing the facts of universal lying; of deliberate and unbounded attempts to prove a case and win a dispute and preserve economic mastery and political domination by besmirching the character, motives, and commonsense, of every single person who dared disagree with the dominant philosophy of the white South.
The campaign of slander against “carpetbaggers” rose to a climax which included every Northern person who defended the Negro, and every Northern person in the South who was connected with the army or Freedmen’s Bureau or with the institutions of learning, or who admitted the right of the Negro to vote or defended him in any way. It was the general, almost universal, belief that practically without exception these people were liars, jailbirds, criminals and thieves, and the hatred of them rose to a crescendo of curses and filth. Later, this universal attack upon the carpetbaggers was modified considerably, and it was admitted that there were among them some decent and high-minded men, although most of them still were regarded as selfish stealers of public funds.
On the other hand, so far as the Negro was concerned, almost no exceptions were admitted. It was easier to traduce him because everyone was ready to believe the worst and no reply was, for the moment, listened to. There was not a single great black leader of Reconstruction against whom almost unprintable allegations were not repeatedly and definitely made without any attempt to investigate the reliability of sources of information.
For the first time in national history interstate migration became a crime. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners had gone North and West and had been welcomed and integrated into the various states despite their divergent ideas and alien heredity. But when there came a comparatively small number of Northerners into the South, they were reviled unless they conformed absolutely in thought and action with a dead past.
The Northern whites were of many classes: former soldiers and officers, lingering in the South in connection with the army or the Freedmen’s Bureau, or as investors and farmers. They were reënforced by an army of men who came South with small capital and in many cases succeeded in making their fortune. Most of these had no especial love for the Negroes. They had come into a white man’s war, and now that the Negro was free, they were perfectly free to use him and to organize his industrial and political power for their own advantage.
Many of these were agents for capital and went down from the North with something of the psychology of modern investment in conquered or colonial territory: that is, they brought the capital; they invested it; they remained in charge to oversee the profits; and they acquired political power in order to protect these profits.
On the other hand, there were teachers who came down from the North, army chaplains, social workers and others, who whole-heartedly went into the new democracy to the limit. Extraordinary persons stood forth in this rôle, like General Fisk and Erastus Cravath at Nashville, Edmund Ware at Atlanta, General Armstrong at Hampton, and dozens of others. They were crusaders in a great cause and meticulously honest. Naturally, their numbers were comparatively small. They reached primarily students, teachers and preachers among the Negroes and only incidentally the class of field hands.
It was a battle between oligarchy whose wealth and power had been based on land and slaves on the one hand; and on the other, oligarchy built on machines and hired labor. The newly organized industry of the North was not only triumphant in the North but began pressing in upon the South; its advance guard was represented by those small Northern capitalists and officeholders who sought to make quick money in raising cotton and taking advantage of the low-priced labor and high cotton prices due to the war famine.
The labor on the market, instead of being owned like the slaves or excluded from competition like the poor whites, suddenly found itself bid for and offered not only money wages, but political power and social status. The bidders had no realization at first how high their labor bids were in Southern custom; they were offering something below the current price of labor in all civilized lands; the Northern United States, England, France, most of Germany and parts of Italy were giving labor some voice in governing and a money wage contract.
To the plantation planters such a wage contract was economic heresy and social revolution. It was blasphemy and eternal damnation to them, and they fought by every conceivable weapon—political power, social influence, murder, assassination and systematic lying.
The mass of poor whites were in an anomalous position. Those of them who were intelligent or had during slavery accumulated any capital or achieved any position, had always attached themselves in sympathy and interest to the planter class. This meant that the mass of ignorant poor white labor had practically no intelligent leadership. Only here and there were there men, like Hinton Helper, who were actual leaders of the poor whites against the planters. The poor white was in a quandary with regard to emancipation. He had viewed slavery as the cause of his own degradation, but he now viewed the free Negro as a threat to his very existence. Suppose that freedom for the Negro meant that Negroes might rise to be landholders, planters and employers? The poor whites thus might lose the last shred of respectability. They had been used to seeing certain classes of the black slaves above them in economic prosperity and social power. But after all, they were still Negroes and slaves. Now that freedom had come, poor whites were faced by the dilemma of recognizing the Negroes as equals or of bending every effort to still keep them beneath the white mass in income and social power.
Here and there certain leaders appeared among the planters, among the more intelligent of the poor whites, and even among the masses, who looked toward political combination and economic alliance with the Negro. Such persons, the Southerners called “scalawags,” but they were in fact that part of the white South who saw a vision of democracy across racial lines, and who were willing to build up a labor party in opposition to capitalists and landholders. They were, therefore, especially to be feared and were endlessly reviled. They were forced into certain extreme positions as compared with the carpetbagger and the planter. Men like Hunnicutt of Virginia asked not only political rights, but full social equality for the Negroes, and taunted planters and the carpetbaggers when they did not dare advocate this.
When Andrew Johnson said in his veto of the Reconstruction bill, March 2, 1867: “The Negroes have not asked for the privilege of voting; the vast majority of them have no idea what it means,” he was exaggerating. Negroes had certainly voted, not only in the North but in South Carolina in the eighteenth century and in North Carolina, Louisiana and Tennessee in the nineteenth. They had asked to vote in the South repeatedly since Emancipation. The difference that now came was that an indefinitely larger number of Negroes than ever before was enfranchised suddenly, and 99% of them belonged to the laboring class, whereas by law the Negroes who voted in the early history of the country were for the most part property holders, and prospective if not actual constituents of a petty bourgeoisie.
When freedom came, this mass of Negro labor was not without intelligent leadership, and a leadership which because of former race prejudice and the present Color Line, could not be divorced from the laboring mass, as had been the case with the poor whites. The group of intelligent, free Negroes in Washington, Richmond, Charleston and especially New Orleans, had accumulated some wealth and some knowledge of group coöperation and initiative. Almost without exception, they accepted the new responsibility of leading the emancipated slaves, unselfishly and effectively. Free Negroes from the North, most of whom had been born in the South and knew conditions, came back in considerable numbers during Reconstruction, and took their place as leaders. The result was that the Negroes were not, as they are sometimes painted, simply a mass of densely ignorant toilers. The rank and file of black labor had a notable leadership of intelligence during Reconstruction times.
It was, however, a leadership which was not at all clear in its economic thought. On the whole, it believed in the accumulation of wealth and the exploitation of labor as the normal method of economic development. But it also believed in the right to vote as the basis and defense of economic life, and gradually but surely it was forced by the demand of the mass of Negro laborers to face the problem of land. Thus the Negro leaders gradually but certainly turned toward emphasis on economic emancipation. They wanted the Negro to have the right to work at a decent rate of wages, and they expected that the right to vote would come when he had sufficient education and perhaps a certain minimum of property to deserve it. It was this among other things that was the cause of the tremendous push toward education which the Negroes exhibited.
On the other hand, their desire for economic enfranchisement, for real abolition of slavery, had been affronted by the Black Codes. They were scared and hampered in the very beginning of their freedom by these enactments and by the way in which these and other laws were executed.
The government replied before the death of Abraham Lincoln with government guardianship in the shape of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This bureau never had a real chance to organize and function properly. It was hastily organized. It had to use the persons at hand and on the ground largely for its personnel. It had at first no government appropriations and in the end only limited appropriations and it was always faced by the probability of quick dissolution. It was surrounded from the beginning by the spirit which enacted the Black Codes. Southerners were desperately opposed to it because it stood between them and the exploitation of labor toward which they were impelled by their losses and the high price of cotton. If they had been allowed to exploit and drive black labor after the war, many Southerners despite their losses could have partially recouped their fortunes. But here came an organization which demanded money wages of employers who had no money, and demanded the modern treatment of labor from former slave drivers.
Beside the Freedmen’s Bureau and before it, there was the chance for the Negroes to seek the advice of their former masters and in many cases this was willingly and wisely given, particularly in the case of masters ready to assist a new economic régime; but it was hindered by several considerations. First, any new union between former masters and Negroes was rekindling the old enmity and jealousy of the poor whites against any combination of the white employer and the black laborer which would again exclude the poor white. The planter, therefore, had to be careful of any open sympathy or coöperation with the black laborer. Already his ranks had been decimated by war and his social status threatened by poverty. Then, too, insofar as the black laborer was guided by the Freedmen’s Bureau, by Northern philanthropy and by Northern capital, he brought upon himself the bitter enmity of the former master; so that on the whole, while there was considerable advice and help from the former master, in the long run it did not and could not amount to much.
Then, too, we must remember that these former slaveholders did not believe that Negroes could advance in freedom. They knew, of course, that some could, but even if these could, how could white men and masters coöperate with them? The whole trend of teaching had been that this was utterly impossible. If Negroes succeeded and insofar as they did, it would lead straight to social equality and amalgamation; and if they did not succeed it would lead to deterioration in culture and civilization.
The real economic battle, then, lay finally in a series of attempted compromises between planters, carpetbaggers, scalawags, poor white laborers and Negroes. First, the planters moved toward the political control of Negroes to fix their economic control. This the poor whites had of course feared and their fears were voiced repeatedly by Andrew Johnson. Many people in the North looked upon this as a possible and threatening answer to the enfranchisement of the blacks. The combination was frustrated because the carpetbaggers offered the Negroes better terms; offered them the right to vote and to hold office and some economic freedom. When this economic freedom looked toward landholding and higher wages, it could be accomplished only at the expense of the employing class, and so far as Negro labor accepted, as it had to accept the offer of the carpetbaggers and scalawags, it alienated the planters, and not only that, but it frightened the poor whites.
Here again, as in the case of slavery, there was a combination in which the poor whites seemed excluded, unless they made common cause with the blacks. This union of black and white labor never got a real start. First, because black leadership still tended toward the ideals of the petty bourgeois, and white leadership tended distinctly toward strengthening capitalism. The final move which rearranged all these combinations and led to the catastrophe of 1876, was a combination of planters and poor whites in defiance of their economic interests; and with the use of lawless murder and open intimidation. It was a combination that could only have been stopped by government force; and the army which was the agent of the Federal Government was sustained in the South by the organized capital of the North. All that was necessary, then, was to satisfy Northern industry that the new combination in the South was essentially a combination which aimed at capitalistic exploitation on conventional terms. The result was the withdrawal of military support and the revolutionary suppression not only of Negro suffrage but of the economic development of Negro and white labor.
It was not until after the period which this book treats that white labor in the South began to realize that they had lost a great opportunity, that when they united to disfranchise the black laborer they had cut the voting power of the laboring class in two. White labor in the Populist movement of the eighties tried to realign the economic warfare in the South and bring workers of all colors into united opposition to the employer. But they found that the power which they had put in the hands of the employers in 1876 so dominated political life that free and honest expression of public will at the ballot-box was impossible in the South, even for white men. They realized that it was not simply the Negro who had been disfranchised in 1876, it was the white laborer as well. The South had since become one of the greatest centers for exploitation of labor in the world, and labor suffered not only in the South but throughout the country and the world over.
Curious and contradictory has been the criticism and comment accompanying this great controversy and revolution of 1866-1876. Floods of tears and sentiment have been expended on the suffering and disillusionment of the slave baron, while the equally great losses of Northern and Southern labor have been forgotten. And above all, the plight of the most helpless victims of the situation, the black freedmen, has been treated with callous and hardened judgments, cemented with hate. The Northern business man has justly been accused of being motivated, during this period, chiefly by greed and profit. But the profit and greed of the slaveholder which caused the whole catastrophe, and of the planter who forced an unjust and still dangerous solution, has been sicklied o’er with sentiment.
In all this, one sees the old snobbery of class judgment in new form—tears and sentiment for Marie Antoinette on the scaffold, but no sign of grief for the gutters of Paris and the fields of France, where the victims of exploitation and ignorance lay rotting in piles.
The South, after the war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and meaning of the labor movement in the United States.
After Lincoln’s assassination, the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, under Karl Marx, sent an address to Andrew Johnson:
After a gigantic Civil War, which if we consider its colossal extension and its vast scenes of action, seems in comparison with the Hundred Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War and the Twenty-three Years’ War of the Old World scarcely to have lasted ninety days, the task, Sir, devolves upon you to uproot by law what the sword has felled, and to preside over the more difficult work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. The profound consciousness of your great mission will preserve you from all weakness in the execution of your stern duties. You will never forget that the American people at the inauguration of the new era of the emancipation of labor placed the burden of leadership on the shoulders of two men of labor—Abraham Lincoln, the one, and the other, Andrew Johnson.16
In 1865, September, another address over the signature of Marx declared boldly:
Injustice against a fraction of your people having been followed by such dire consequences, put an end to it. Declare your fellow citizens from this day forth free and equal, without any reserve. If you refuse them citizens’ rights while you exact from them citizens’ duties, you will sooner or later face a new struggle which will once more drench your country in blood.
The National Labor Union of workers was organized at Baltimore, Maryland, August 20, 1866. There were sixty delegates and on their banner was inscribed “Welcome to the sons of toil from the North, East, South and West.” An address was issued on coöperation, trade unions, apprenticeship, strikes, labor of women, public land and political action. As to the Negroes, the union admitted that it was unable to express an opinion which would satisfy all, but the question must not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The Negro worker had been neglected. Coöperation of the African race in systematic organization must be secured. Otherwise, Negroes must act as scabs, as in the case of the colored caulkers, imported from Virginia to Boston, during the strike on the 8-hour question. There should be no distinction of race or nationality, but only separation into two great classes: laborers and those who live by others’ labor. Negroes were soon to be admitted to citizenship and the ballot. Their ballot strength would be of great value to union labor. If labor did not accept them, capital would use the Negro to split white and black labor, just as the Austrian government had used race dissension. Such a lamentable situation should not be allowed to develop in America. Trade unions, eight-hour leagues, and other groups should be organized among Negroes.
Here was a first halting note. Negroes were welcomed to the labor movement, not because they were laborers but because they might be competitors in the market, and the logical conclusion was either to organize them or guard against their actual competition by other methods. It was to this latter alternative that white American labor almost unanimously turned.
This was manifest at the second annual meeting in Chicago in 1867, where the Negro problem was debated more frankly and less successfully. The President called attention to Negroes whose emancipation had given them a new position in the labor world. They would now come in competition with white labor. He suggested that the best way to meet this situation was to form trade unions among Negroes. A committee of three on Negro labor was selected. The Committee on Negro Labor reported that having had the subject under consideration, and after having heard the suggestions and opinions of several members of this convention—pro and con—they had arrived at the following conclusions:
That, while we feel the importance of the subject, and realize the danger in the future of competition in mechanical Negro labor, yet we find the subject involved in so much mystery, and upon it so wide diversity of opinion amongst our members, we believe that it is inexpedient to take action on the subject in this National Labor Congress.
Resolved, that the subject of Negro labor be laid over till the next session of the National Labor Congress… .
The report of this committee brought a whirlwind of discussion which lasted throughout the whole day:
The Negro will bear to be taught his duty, and has already stood his ground nobly when a member of a trades’ union… .
Did not like to confess to the world that there was a subject with which they were afraid to cope… .
This very question was at the root of the rebellion, which was the war of the poor white men of the South, who were forced by the slaveholders into the war… .
In New Haven, there were a number of respectable colored mechanics, but they had not been able to induce the trades’ unions to admit them… . Was there any union in the states which would admit colored men?
The colored man was industrious, and susceptible of improvement and advancement… .
There was no need of entering on any discussion of the matter.
There was no necessity for the foisting of the subject of colored labor, or the appointment of a committee to report thereon… . The blacks would combine together of themselves and by themselves, without the assistance of whites. God speed them; but let not the whites try to carry them on their shoulders… .
Time enough to talk about admitting colored men to trades’ unions and to the Congress when they applied for admission… .
Whites striking against the blacks, and creating an antagonism which will kill off the trades’ unions, unless the two be consolidated. There is no concealing the fact that the time will come when the Negro “will take possession of the shops if we have not taken possession of the Negro. If the workingmen of the white race do not conciliate the blacks, the black vote will be cast against them.”
The capitalists of New England now employ foreign boys and girls in their mills, to the almost entire exclusion of the native-born population. They would seek to supplant these by colored workers… .
Little danger of black men wanting to enter trades’ unions any more than Germans would try to join the English societies in America… .17
The whole question was finally dodged by taking refuge in the fact that the constitution invited “all labor.”
Sylvis, President of the International Labor Movement, spoke out in 1868 on slavery:
Whatever our opinions may be as to immediate causes of the war, we can all agree that human slavery (property in man) was the first great cause; and from the day that the first gun was fired, it was my earnest hope that the war might not end until slavery ended it. No man in America rejoiced more than I at the downfall of Negro slavery. But when the shackles fell from the limbs of those four millions of blacks, it did not make them free men; it simply transferred them from one condition of slavery to another; it placed them upon the platform of the white working men, and made all slaves together. I do not mean that freeing the Negro enslaved the white; I mean that we were slaves before; always have been, and that the abolition of the right of property in man added four millions of black slaves to the white slaves of the country. We are now all one family of slaves together, and the labor reform movement is a second emancipation proclamation.18
In the meeting of the National Labor Union in New York in 1868, there was no mention of Negroes, but in 1869 at Philadelphia among 142 representatives, there appeared nine Negroes representing various separate Negro unions and organizations. This pointed a way out which labor eagerly seized. Contrary to all labor philosophy, they would divide labor by racial and social lines and yet continue to talk of one labor movement. Through this separate union, Negro labor would be restrained from competition and yet kept out of the white race unions where power and discussion lay. A resolution was adopted saying that the National Labor Union would recognize neither color nor sex in the question of the rise of all labor, and the colored laborers were urged to form their own organizations and send delegates to the next conference. The Negroes responded and declared that all Negroes wanted was a fair chance and no one would be the worse off for giving it. Isaac Myers, their leader, said: “The white laboring men of the country have nothing to fear from the colored laboring men. We desire to see labor elevated and made respectable; we desire to have the highest rate of wages that our labor is worth; we desire to have the hours of labor regulated as well to the interest of the laborer as to the capitalist. Mr. President, American citizenship for the black man is a complete failure if he is proscribed from the workshops of the country.”19
In 1869, the General Council of the National Working-Men’s Association sent a letter signed by Karl Marx to the President of the National Labor Union.
The immediate tangible result of the Civil War was of course a deterioration of the condition of American Workingmen. Both in the United States and in Europe the colossal burden of a public debt was shifted from hand to hand in order to settle it upon the shoulders of the working class. The prices of necessaries, remarks one of your statesmen, have risen 78 per cent since 1860, while the wages of simple manual labor have risen 50 and those of skilled labor 60 per cent. “Pauperism,” he complains, “is increasing in America more rapidly than population.” Moreover the sufferings of the working class are in glaring contrast to the new-fangled luxury of financial aristocrats, shoddy aristocrats and other vermin bred by the war. Still the Civil War offered a compensation in the liberation of the slaves and the impulse which it thereby gave your own class movement. Another war, not sanctified by a sublime aim or a social necessity, but like the wars of the Old World, would forge chains for the free workingmen instead of sundering those of the slaves.20
Sylvis, President of the International Labor Movement, acknowledged this letter but said nothing about slavery, confining himself to attacking the monied aristocracy.
Thus American labor leaders tried to emphasize the fact that here was a new element; new not in the sense that it had not been there,—it had been there all the time—but new in the sense that the Negro worker must now be taken account of, both in his own interest and particularly in their interest. He was a competitor and a prospective under-bidder. Then difficulties appeared; the white worker did not want the Negro in his unions, did not believe in him as a man, dodged the question, and when he appeared at conventions, asked him to organize separately; that is, outside the real labor movement, in spite of the fact that this was a contradiction of all sound labor policy.
As the Negro laborers organized separately, there came slowly to realization the fact that here was not only separate organization but a separation in leading ideas; because among Negroes, and particularly in the South, there was being put into force one of the most extraordinary experiments of Marxism that the world, before the Russian revolution, had seen. That is, backed by the military power of the United States, a dictatorship of labor was to be attempted and those who were leading the Negro race in this vast experiment were emphasizing the necessity of the political power and organization backed by protective military power.
On the other hand, the trade union movement of the white labor in the North was moving away from that idea and moving away from politics. They seemed to see a more purely economic solution in their demand for higher wages and shorter hours. Ira Stewart spoke for “men who labor excessively… robbed of all ambition to ask for anything more than will satisfy their bodily necessities, while those who labor moderately have time to cultivate tastes and create wants in addition to mere physical comforts.”21 But Stewart was not thinking of Negroes and only once barely mentioned them:
That we rejoice that the rebel aristocracy of the South has been crushed, that we rejoice that beneath the glorious shadow of our victorious flag men of every clime, lineage and color are recognized as free. But while we will bear with patient endurance the burden of the public debt, we yet want it to be known that the workingmen of America will in future claim a more equal share in the wealth their industry creates in peace and a more equal participation in the privileges and blessings of those free institutions, defended by their manhood on many a bloody field of battle… .
Not a word was said of Negro suffrage and the need of the labor vote, black and white, if the demands of labor were to be realized. Indeed, at the very time that Southern labor was about to be enfranchised, Northern labor realized that the right to vote meant little under the growing dictatorship of wealth and corporate control. It made little difference what laws were made as long as their interpretation by the courts and administration was dictated by capital. Some proposed, therefore, to fight their battle out directly with the employer, on the one battle ground of economic bargaining, with strikes, violence and secret organization as the methods.
The National Labor Union veered from consumers’ and producers’ coöperation into a fight to control credits and capital and afterward through the Greenback party into an attempt to gain these ends by manipulating money. With falling prices and unemployment directly after the war, and rising prices and normal employment in 1868-1873, labor leaders became increasingly petty bourgeois and turned their backs on black labor. Farmers organized the Grange but not for black farm tenants and laborers, not for the struggling peasant proprietors among the freedmen. The Knights of Labor did not turn their attention to Negroes until after 1876.
There was, too, no rapprochement between the liberal revolt against big industry and Northern labor. Horace Greeley, a pioneer of the labor leaders, drew little labor support. The labor leaders went into the labor war of 1877 having literally disarmed themselves of the power of universal suffrage. And thus in 1876, when Northern industry withdrew military support in the South and refused to support longer the dictatorship of labor, they did this without any opposition or any intelligent comprehension of what was happening on the part of the Northern white worker.
Labor and Negro history illustrate these paradoxes. For instance in 1869, there came up the celebrated case of Lewis H. Douglass, the son of Frederick Douglass, who worked in the government printing office and was not allowed to join the Printers’ Union. Rather than face the question, the matter was postponed for three years and all sorts of excuses given. This and other cases led and practically compelled the Negroes to form not only separate local trade unions but to work toward a separate national organization. White labor was organizing to fight against the new industrial oligarchy, which was growing in the North; but it was this same oligarchy which in its own self-defense had forced the South to accept Negro suffrage, allying itself temporarily with the abolition-democratic movement in the North.
This placed the white and black labor movement in a singularly contradictory position. The alliance of the black labor movement with the Republican Party was simply the political side of an economic fact. The Republican Party had given the black man the right to vote. This right to vote he was going to use to better his economic and social position. To oppose the Republican Party, then, was to oppose his own economic enfranchisement.
On the other hand, the white Labor Party had allied themselves with the Democrats, chiefly because the Democratic Party had opposed the “Know-nothing Party.” The anti-foreign immigration movement was now the only organized political opposition to the great industrial forces represented by the Republicans in the North. It represented in some degree and voiced the radical demands of the West for low tariff and cheap money; but it was at the same time violently opposed to the new enfranchisement of black labor in the South. These two sets of facts alone put white and black labor in direct opposition, and because their leaders did not altogether understand the basis of this opposition, it made the attempt to achieve a common platform for white and black workers exceedingly difficult, especially when the anomalous position of the Northern Negro worker was taken into account.
Negro leaders, naturally, resented the attack made by white labor organizations on the Republican Party. Nor did they understand how far this new Southern labor government was dependent on Northern industrial reaction and capitalistic oligarchy. Northern labor was equally ignorant and did not dream that in the South the Republican Party was par excellence the party of labor.
This matter came to a crisis at the meeting of the National Labor Union in Cincinnati in 1870. A number of Negroes were present, including Isaac Myers, Josiah Weirs and Peter H. Clark. John M. Langston wanted to speak, but the labor leaders opposed him because he was a Republican politician. The motion to grant him the privilege to speak was lost by a vote of 29 to 23. There was excitement. Weirs remarked that a Democrat had been allowed to speak and that he regarded the Republican Party as a friend of the workingman. Myers lauded the Republicans amid cries of approval and disapproval. Senator Pinchback, colored leader of Louisiana, was also denied the privilege of the floor. Nevertheless, in the resolutions adopted after much debate, it was said, “The highest interest of our colored fellow-citizens is with the workingmen, who, like themselves, are the slaves of capital and politicians.”
The Negroes, especially the Northern artisans, tried to keep in touch with the white labor movement. In September, 1870, Sella Martin, a colored man, went as delegate of the colored workers to the World Labor Congress in Paris. In 1871, the International Workingmen’s Association, with its headquarters in London, and under the influence of Karl Marx, began to organize labor in the United States on a large scale, and in a parade held in New York in 1871, Negro organizations appeared.
The international movement, however, took no real root in America. Even the white National Labor Union began losing ground and ceased to be active after 1872. The main activity of the International was in the North; they seemed to have no dream that the place for its most successful rooting was in the new political power of the Southern worker.
Negroes, however, increased their attempts to organize and to think in groups. In 1865, an Equal Rights League met in Pennsylvania and tried to influence Negroes to secure real estate and give their sons business education.
In the District of Columbia, in 1867, a meeting of colored workers took place. They asked Congress to secure equal apportionment of employment to white and colored labor. Their petition was printed and a committee of fifteen was appointed to circulate it. In 1868 a similar petition was sent to Congress asking for equal share in work on public improvements authorized by law. There was a state colored convention in Indiana in 1865, another one in Pennsylvania in 1866, and in July, 1869, a Negro convention was held in Louisville, Kentucky, as a result of the agitation for immigrant workers. At this last convention there were 250 delegates who discussed political, economic and educational matters. They asked for the final abolition of slavery, equal education, rights in the courts, equality of taxation, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. They recommended the purchase of land and the learning of trades.
A national convention of Negroes met in Washington in January, 1869. This convention was more really national than most Negro conventions hitherto. It was not simply a convention of Southern Negroes as that at Louisville, nor of Northern Negroes like the various conventions at Philadelphia and New York. In 1869, Negroes, representing a number of trades, met in Baltimore in July to form a state organization. Later, colored representatives in the same city urged Negroes to enter the movement for the formation of labor unions. In the Washington convention, there were a number of colored delegates from the South, including Henry M. Turner, a black political leader of Georgia, and in all, 130 delegates, including many men of intelligence and ability, came together. Frederick Douglass was elected permanent President and resolutions were passed in favor of the Freedmen’s Bureau, a national tax for Negro schools, universal suffrage, and the opening of public land especially in the South for Negroes. The reconstruction policy of Congress was commended and there was opposition to colonization.
This was not primarily a labor convention, but it illustrated the connection in the Negroes’ minds between politics and labor. They were beginning, more and more clearly, to see that their vote must be used for their economic betterment, and that their right to work and their income depended upon their use of the ballot. They were consequently groping for leadership in industry and voting, both within and without the race. In their conception of the ballot as the means to industrial emancipation, they were ahead of the Northern labor movement. But in their knowledge of the lurking dangers of the power of capital, they were far behind. This January convention was followed the same year by a national Negro labor convention sponsored by the Baltimore meeting which assembled in Washington in December. This had been called by Negro artisans of the North, and was again national in its membership. This national labor convention assembled in Union League Hall, Washington, December, 1869. There were 159 delegates present, and Isaac Myers called the meeting to order.
While the committees were at work, James H. Harris addressed the convention. He was an astute and courageous Reconstruction leader of North Carolina and saw politics and labor in clear alliance. He stated that several millions of colored men were looking to the convention with much interest, and that the South, having passed through a political reconstruction, needed another reconstruction in the affairs of the laboring classes. John M. Langston spoke of the treatment of Negroes in public places and at their work. He especially scored the Printers’ Union for its action toward Lewis H. Douglass. Remarks were made also by Richard Trevellick, the President of the white National Labor Convention, and A. M. Powell, the editor of the Anti-Slavery Standard.
The convention was permanently organized with James M. Harris of North Carolina as President. Committees were appointed on education, finance, business, platform and address, female labor, homesteads, travel, temperance, coöperative labor, bank savings, and agriculture. The platform of the convention covered the following subjects:
- The dignity of labor.
- A plea that harmony should prevail between labor and capital.
- The desirability of an interchange of views between employers and employees.
- Temperance in liquor consumption.
- Education, “for educated labor is more productive and commands higher wages.”
- Political liberty for all Americans.
- The encouragement of industry.
- The exclusion from the trades and workshops regarded as “an insult to God, injury to us.”
- Immigrant labor should be welcomed, but coolie labor was an injury to all working classes.
- The establishment of coöperative workshops, building and loan associations.
- Gratitude to the agencies interested in Negro education.
- Protection of the law for all.
- The organization of workingmen’s associations which should coöperate with the National Labor Union.
- Capital must not be regarded as the natural enemy of labor.
At the third day’s session, a special committee of five was appointed to draft a plan for the organization of mechanics and artisans, in order to secure recognition for them in the workships of the country. Langston addressed the meeting concerning his observations in the South. There he had found skilled workers among the Negroes in gold, silver, brass, iron, wood, brick, mortar and the arts. He stated that all these workmen were asking for themselves and their children was that the trades should be open to them and that no avenue of industry should be closed, whether in workshops, printing offices, factories, foundries, railroads, steamboats, warehouses or stores.
On the fifth day, a resolution was passed which urged the delegates to call and organize state labor associations so that they might work in full coöperation with a committee which was to conduct its work as a labor bureau. This bureau was planned to serve as a clearing house for all questions of Negro labor and it was to aid in opening new labor opportunities. Isaac Myers was selected permanent President of the organization, and in his acceptance he stated that he expected to rely upon the Labor Bureau in reaching the Negro workingmen of the United States.
It is interesting to note that this convention was more representative of the large groups than the first general convention, and it deserves for this reason, as well as for its work, to be called the first organized national group of Negro laborers. Many political and religious leaders were not present at its sessions. These absentees included Douglass, Garnett, William Wells Brown, Purvis and Whipper. The definite results of this meeting included the organization of a permanent national Labor Union and a Bureau of Labor. Before the sessions were ended it was stated that there were 23 states represented and 203 accredited delegates in attendance during the period of five days.
The American Workingman of Boston called attention to the fact that this separate Negro organization had been formed and the writer said: “The convention of colored men at Washington last week was in some respects the most remarkable one we ever attended. We had always had full faith in the capacity of the Negro for self-improvement, but were not prepared to see, fresh from slavery, a body of two hundred men, so thoroughly conversant with public affairs, so independent in spirit, and so anxious apparently to improve their social condition, as the men who represented the South, in that convention.”
There were some white fraternal delegates present and Langston attacked them as emissaries of the Democratic Party, but Sella Martin replied and told the convention plainly that they could not afford to repel the sympathy of white friends of the labor cause, and that the interests of the laboring classes, white and black, on this continent, were identical. Of the presiding officer, the writer in the American Workingman says:
And here we feel impelled to say that in all our experience in tumultuous public assemblies, we have never seen a presiding officer show more executive ability than Mr. Harris, and certainly he does not owe it to white blood, as he is evidently a full-blooded Negro, so far as color and features are any evidence of being so. His success was largely owing, we think, to the fact that he possessed the entire confidence of the convention, as well as superior ability for the position.
He is sorry that a separate union has been formed.
But we are convinced that for the present at least, they could not do better. It is useless to attempt to cover up the fact that there is still a wide gulf between the two races in this country, and for a time at least they must each in their own way work out a solution of this labor problem. At no very distant day they will become united, and work in harmony together; and we who have never felt the iron as they have must be slow to condemn them because they do not see as we do on this labor movement. For ourselves, we should have felt better satisfied had they decided to join the great national movement now in progress, but fresh as they are from slavery, looking as they naturally do on the Republican Party as their deliverers from bondage, it is not strange that they should hesitate joining any other movement. Although they did not distinctly recognize any party in their platform, yet the sentiment was clearly Republican, if their speeches were any indication. Still, strange as it may seem, parties were ignored in their platform, and this course was taken mainly through the influence and votes of the Southern delegates.
The resolutions of this body stressed education as one of the strongest safeguards of the republic; advocated industrious habits, and the learning of trades and professions, and declared:
That the exclusion of colored men and apprentices from the right to labor in any department of industry or workshops, in any of the states and territories of the United States, by what is known as “trades unions,” is an insult to God, injury to us, and disgrace to humanity; while we extend a free and welcome hand to the free immigration of labor of all nationalities, we emphatically deem imported, contract, coolie labor to be a positive injury to the working people of the United States—is but the system of slavery in a new form, and we appeal to the Congress of the United States to rigidly enforce the Act of 1862, prohibiting coolie importations, and to enact such laws as will best protect free American labor against this or any similar form of slavery.
They recommended the establishment of coöperative workshops, building and loan associations, the purchase of land
as a remedy against their exclusion from other workshops on account of color, as a means of furnishing employment, as well as a protection against the aggression of capital, and as the easiest and shortest method of enabling every man to procure a homestead for his family; and to accomplish this end we would particularly impress the greatest importance of the observance of diligence in business, and the practice of rigid economy in our social and domestic arrangements.
RESOLVED, that we regard education as one of the greatest blessings that the human family enjoys, and that we earnestly appeal to our fellow citizens to allow no opportunity, no matter how limited and remote, to pass unimproved; that the thanks of the colored people of this country is due to the Congress of the United States for the establishment and maintenance of the Freedman’s Bureau, and to Major General Howard, commissioner; Reverend J. W. Alvord, and John M. Langston, Esq., general inspectors, for their coöperative labors in the establishment and good government of hundreds of schools in the Southern States, whereby thousands of men, women and children, have been, and are now being taught the rudiments of an English education… and we appeal to the friends of progress and to our citizens of the several states to continue their efforts to the various legislatures until every state can boast of having a free school system, with no distinction in dissemination of knowledge to its inhabitants on account of race, color, sex, creed or previous condition.
The low wages of labor in the South were cited, and according to the New York Tribune, December 11, 1869, it was said:
To remedy this, labor must be made more scarce, and the best way to do that was to make laborers landowners. Congress is to be asked, therefore, to subdivide the public lands in the South into twenty-acre farms, to make one year’s residence entitle a settler to a patent, and also to place in the hands of a Commission a sum of money, not exceeding two million dollars, to aid their settlement, and also to purchase lands in states where no public lands are found, the money to be loaned for five years, without interest. Congress will also be asked not to restore to Southern railroads the lapsed land grants of 1856, and to require that Texas, prior to readmission to representation, shall put her public lands under the operations of provisions similar to the United States Homestead Law of 1866… .
. . . Mr. Downing from the Committee on Capital and Labor, submitted the following… . Your committee would simply refer to the unkind, estranging policy of the labor organizations of white men, who, while they make loud proclaims as to the injustice (as they allege) to which they are subjected, justify injustice, so far as giving an example to do so may, by excluding from their benches and their workshops worthy craftsmen and apprentices only because of their color, for no just cause. We say to such, so long as you persist therein, we cannot fellowship with you in your struggle, and look for failure and mortification on your part; not even the sacred name of Wendell Phillips can save you, however much we revere him and cherish toward him not only profound respect, but confidence and gratitude… .
In February, 1870, the Bureau of Labor issued an address to the colored people which stressed the need of organizing Negro labor, and said that the lack of organization was the cause of low wages. It stated the following purposes of the Colored National Labor Union and the Bureau of Labor:
- To encourage and superintend the organization of labor.
- To bring about legislation which would secure equality before the law for all and enforce the contracts for labor.
- To secure funds from bankers and capitalists for aid in establishing coöperative associations.
- To overcome the opposition of white mechanics who excluded workers from their unions and shops.
- To organize state labor conventions.
- To organize, where there were seven or more mechanics, artisans and laborers of any particular branch of industry, separate labor associations and to advertise their labor in the daily papers.
- To encourage independent effort in creating capital, buying tools, building houses, forging iron, making brick.
- To own a homestead.
The address was signed by Isaac Myers, President, and G. T. Downing, Vice-President… .22
Local organizations were formed, meetings held, and a weekly paper, The New Era, was made the national organ. On February 21, a plan was adopted to send an agent South to organize Negro labor. Isaac Myers, President of the Union, was selected. He held a meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, urging the union of white and colored workmen in the same trade. Other labor meetings took place in 1870 in New York and the District of Columbia.
The second annual meeting of the National Labor Union took place January 9, 1871, with delegates from North and South, including Alabama, Virginia, Texas and North Carolina. Congress was petitioned for a national system of education with technical training. The convention desired to see industries and factories because the South was confined to a few staples, which created ignorance and poverty among both white and colored laborers and among the owning classes fear that industry would help elevate the status of the laborer.
The next annual meeting of the National Labor Union was called at Columbia, South Carolina, coincidental with the Southern convention which was a political gathering. Here there began to appear rivalry between the economic and political objects of the Negro. The Neu’ Era, national organ of the National Labor Union, inquired into the real objects of this meeting. It wanted to know if this union was another name for communism, or if it was a colored offshoot of the International, which intended eventually to impose a mobocracy on America?
The convention at Columbia was presided over by H. M. Turner of Georgia. Committees were appointed on education and labor, on printing, finance, civil rights, organization, immigration, and on Southern outrages. The committee on the address made a report which called for political rights, justice, protection of the courts, and advancement in the industrial arts.
In 1872, in April, a Southern states’ convention assembled at New Orleans with Frederick Douglass presiding. Evidently, the National Labor Union was steadily becoming political in its influences and leadership. Efforts were made to show that Negro labor could only achieve its end by political organization. Frederick Douglass wrote an editorial to this effect, and concluded with the words: “The Republican Party is the true workingmen’s party of the country.” This sounded strange for the North but it was at the time true of the South. The National Labor Union issued an address to its state unions, saying that while it was not a political organization, it regarded it as the duty of every colored man to be interested in the Republican Party and stand by it.
“By its success, we stand; by its defeat, we fall. To that party we are indebted for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the homestead law, the eight-hour law and an improved educational system.” The presidents of the state labor unions were directed to read this address before their organizations.
As the Negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist.
Thus labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor. Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the bargain of 1876 and maintained the power of the labor vote in the South; and suppose that the Negro with new and dawning consciousness of the demands of labor as differentiated from the demands of capitalists, had used his vote more specifically for the benefit of white labor, South and North?
If the basic problem of Reconstruction in the South was economic, then the kernel of the economic situation was the land. This was clear to the sophisticated leadership of Stevens and to the philanthropy of Sumner and Oliver Howard; but it was equally clear to the ignorant and inexperienced of the freed slaves.
The Northern labor leaders and the mass of the North were slow in realizing that the center of the South’s labor problem was the land, and not as yet industry. Here in the South, after the war, was a chance to keep the economic balance between farm and factory. And if it had been done, the result would have been fateful for the nation and for the world.
The Negro unerringly and insistently led the way. The main question to which the Negroes returned again and again was the problem of owning land. It was ridiculed as unreasonable and unjust to the impoverished landholders of the South, and as a part of the desire for revenge which the North had. But in essence it was nothing of the sort.
Again and again, crudely but logically, the Negroes expressed their right to the land and the deep importance of this right. And as usual here the government played fast and loose because it had two irreconcilable ideas in mind. Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner were perfectly clear; the Negroes must have land furnished them either for a nominal sum or as a gift, and this land should be furnished by the government and paid for either out of taxation, or as Stevens repeatedly insisted, as an indemnity placed on the South for civil war. Moreover, for 250 years the Negroes had worked on this land, and by every analogy in history, when they were emancipated the land ought to have belonged in large part to the workers.
On the other hand, to the organized industry of the North, capital in machines or land was sacred; they did not wish to appear to punish the South by taking any more of its already partly confiscated capital. They did not want to set an example of confiscation before a nation victimized by monopoly; and they were bitterly opposed to giving capital to workers or redistributing wealth by public taxation. The result was that the nation moved backward and forward according as to one or the other idea gained the upper hand. Sir George Campbell said:
All that is now wanted to make the Negro a fixed and conservative element in American society is to give him encouragement to, and facilities for, making himself, by his own exertions, a small landowner; to do, in fact, for him what we have sought to do for the Irish farmer. Land in America is so much cheaper and more abundant, that it would be infinitely easier to effect the same object there. I would by no means seek to withdraw the whole population from hired labor; on the contrary, the Negro in many respects is so much at his best in that function, that I should look to a large class of laborers remaining; but I am at the same time confident that it would be a very great benefit and stability to the country if a large number should acquire thrift and independent position as landowning American citizens.23
Most writers and speakers thought of the land problem so far as the Negro was concerned as an incidental thing; it was something that “would come.” On the other hand, the former slave holders knew that land was the key to the situation and they tried desperately to center thought on labor rather than on land ownership. “One universal opinion is that they shall not be allowed to acquire or hold land. I have heard that expressed from the first. They say that unless Negroes work for them they shall not work at all.”24
The freed slaves were desperately poor; the poor whites had always been poor except insofar as they were pensioners of the planters. How could industry be set going again and what was the relation of free Negro labor to this industry? Of course, the full realization of freedom could not be accomplished in a minute. Unless crops were raised and the wheels of industry started, emancipation would have been an experiment so costly that no nation could have supported it. And we must remember that in the end and as a logical matter of dollars and cents, emancipation paid. This is so much a matter of common knowledge today that we forget how bitterly and with what absolute certainty the South and even many in the North declared that free Negro labor was economically impossible.
What they insisted on during Reconstruction was labor, continuous, steady labor to continue production of high-priced crops. What they slurred over or refused to discuss was the object of this labor and the distribution of its product. Of labor for the economic benefit of the laborer except to the extent of the lowest possible wage that would sustain him they had no conception; and to any transfer of capital in land to the laborer as a basis of his right to demand a fairer share of the products, they were bitterly opposed.
The white South believed that it was being deliberately insulted in a petty spirit of vengeance by the North. But this was a childish way of attributing human emotions to an economic situation. The North as a whole harbored no thoughts of vengeance. Sumner wrecked his career on a deed of forgiveness; and Stevens punished the slave system and its promoters only insofar as they still interfered with freedom, or kept the ill-gotten capital accumulated by exploiting slaves.
The party of Northern industry watched the beginnings of democratic government in the South with distrust. They did not expect Negro suffrage to succeed, but they did expect that it would soon compel the Southern oligarchy to capitulate to the dictatorship of industry. Their hopes were fulfilled in 1876.
The abolition-democracy faced the Southern conventions of 1867 with fear. It was the greatest test of democracy that the nation had known. Even after the great Reform Bill of 1832, England had less than one million voters. It was not until 1867 that a million or more skilled laborers in England got the vote.
Here, at the stroke of the pen, more than one million Negroes were given the right to vote, of whom probably three-fourths could not read or write; and at the same time more than one million whites were given the same right, and at least one-third of them were equally illiterate. This was a desperate venture forced by a slave-minded régime; it had refused to grant complete physical freedom to black workers; it refused them education and access to the land and insisted on dominant political power based on the number of these same serfs. Under these circumstances the experiment had to be made. For to surrender now was to have sacrificed blood and billions of dollars in vain.
But, it was the American Blindspot that made the experiment all the more difficult, and to the South incomprehensible. For several generations the South had been taught to look upon the Negro as a thing apart. He was different from other human beings. The system of slave labor, under which he was employed, was radically different from all other systems of labor. There could be no comparison between labor problems in the South and in the North; between the Negro and white laborer.
It must be confessed that the representatives of the white oligarchy are having a hard time, being forced to consider their own former slaves no longer as Negroes, “niggers,” that is to say, members of a category unrecognized in any natural history, somewhere between men and monkeys in the animal scale, but as men, who have, as Jefferson phrased it, equal rights with them in the free development of their talents and in the pursuit of happiness; or, in other words, as citizens on an equal footing with themselves.25
The Northern Democrats encouraged resistance on the part of the South, and yet some of them saw the situation clearly. The intrinsic difficulties of the situation are not to be denied. The ruling classes of the Southern people had attempted to disrupt the Union in order to establish their own independence. The overthrow of their armies had not changed their opinions nor their feelings. Necessity compelled their submission, but necessity could not make them love a union with the victorious North, nor make them cordially recognize and support the rights of the freedmen.26
During the winter and spring of 1867-1868 in accordance with the legislation of Congress, Southern conventions met and adopted new constitutions. These constitutions provided for equal civil rights, established universal suffrage and disfranchised disloyal whites. After the framing of these constitutions, they were voted on by the people. Also, state officers and members of the legislature were chosen at the same election and by the same voters. The army commanders did their best to bring out the vote and to counteract various devices for keeping Negroes away from the polls. The polls were kept open two and three days and in Georgia even five days.
Officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau helped in the enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts. The act of March 23 provided that registration and elections should be conducted by boards of three loyal officers or persons appointed by the district commander. They were required to take the “Iron Clad Oath.” Bureau officials were often appointed as members of these boards and Negroes were often used. The bureau officials advised Negroes about registration and voting and disabused their mind of fears of taxation or military service or reënslavement. They promised to protect them in case of a boycott of employers against those that voted.
Thus in 1867 there took place in the South a series of elections in which a new electorate registered and expressed its desire as to constitutional conventions to reconstruct the states. One million, three hundred and sixty-three thousand, six hundred and forty persons voted, of whom 660,181 were whites, and 703,459 were Negroes, as compared with a total vote of 721,191 whites voting in 1860.27
At first, the planters thought to defeat Reconstruction by refusing to vote and thus making the whole experiment a failure at the very start. Many leading whites, small in total number but large in influence and in former wealth and power, were disfranchised, perhaps 200,000 in all.
On the other hand, the poor whites must have voted widely, especially when we note the large white vote in most of the states despite war, mortality, abstentions and disabilities. It is probable that in 1868 not only did Negroes vote freely, but more poor whites than ever before exercised the franchise. Democracy for the first time in at least a century succeeded oligarchy in the South. The voting of nearly three-fourths of a million Negroes was especially significant and represented a very large proportion of, perhaps, a million eligible black voters.
The elections which reconstructed the South under the Congressional plan were fair and honest elections, and probably never before were such democratic elections held in the South and never since such fair elections. Indeed, as a special champion of the South says: “It would be hard to deny that, so far as the ordinary civil administration was concerned, the rule of the generals was as just and efficient as it was far-reaching. Criticism and denunciation of their acts were bitter and continuous; but no very profound research is necessary in order to discover that the animus of these attacks was chiefly political.”28
As a result of the elections, constitutional conventions were decided on in all the Southern states and the following number of members of the Conventions elected:
| Delegates—1868 | Per Cent | |||
| State | Black | White | Total | Negro |
| South Carolina… … … … … | 76 | 48 | 124 | 61 |
| Louisiana… … … … … | 49 | 49 | 98 | 50 |
| Virginia… … … … … | 25 | 80 | 105 | 24 |
| Georgia… … … … … | 33 | 137 | 170 | 19 |
| Mississippi… … … … … | 17 | 83 | 100 | 17 |
| Alabama… … … … … | 18 | 90 | 108 | 17 |
| Arkansas… … … … … | 8 | 58 | 66 | 12 |
| North Carolina… … … … … | 15 | 118 | 133 | 11 |
| Texas… … … … … | 9 | 81 | 90 | 10 |
As these conventions were being voted on, the presidential election approached. The campaign began in May, 1868. The Republican national platform did not dare to stand squarely for Negro suffrage but evolved this illogical compromise:
The guaranty by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of suffrage in all the loyal states properly belongs to the people of these States.29
Grant and Colfax were nominated. Colfax declared that peace had been prevented by
executive opposition, and by refusals to accept any plan of reconstruction proffered by Congress. Justice and public safety at last combined to teach us that only by an enlargement of suffrage in those States could the desired end be attained, and that it was even more safe to give the ballot to those who loved the Union than to those who had sought ineffectually to destroy it.
In 1865-1868, the Democratic Party controlled from 44 per cent to 50 per cent of the voters in the North, so that if the white people of the South had been included, undoubtedly the Democratic Party would have been in the majority. By the exclusion of the South, the Democratic Party had been beaten in 1866, and in 1867 had carried only Maryland and Kentucky, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California; nevertheless, on the whole, the Democratic vote increased, as compared with the Republican.
The elections of 1867 made it clear that if the Democrats won in 1868, the entire system of Reconstruction would be changed. The business elements of the North, therefore, while not willing to follow abolition-democracy to the extreme, were even less willing to put Reconstruction entirely in the hands of Southerners. Congress, therefore, prepared to clinch its political hold on the South, and reconstruct Southern states on a basis of Negro suffrage.
While, then, the conservative and commercial elements in the North went into the Republican Party, on the other hand, former Democrats began to return to the Democratic Party, where they were received with more or less suspicion. Meetings began to be held by Democratic leaders to determine candidates and procedure. On Jackson Day, January 8, 1868, a meeting was held in Washington, at which President Johnson spoke and many Democratic leaders. This meeting was dominated by the War Democrats, rather than by Copperheads, and emphasis was laid upon coöperation between the War Democrats and the Johnson administration, on the one hand, and the Democratic organization on the other. New measures and new men were sought. August Belmont, the banker, was chairman of the National Committee. New York was chosen as the seat of the convention, and a general invitation was issued to former Democrats.
The New York Herald enumerated the elements of the new democracy: merchants who opposed the protective tariff, the unemployed, the foreign born, the Catholics, the women opposed to Negro suffrage, the opponents of military control in the South. Many papers warned the pro-Southern elements in the Democratic Party not to oppose the loyal sentiment in the nation. The Springfield Republican, July 1, mentioned “the mere stupid, causeless, aimless hatred of the Negro” in the Democratic Party.
The opposition of the Democrats to Negro suffrage was not clearly expressed. Evidently, the tide in favor of democracy had risen so high in the country that as a party the Democrats did not dare oppose it. The party, therefore, would not come out flatly in opposition to Negro suffrage but simply declared that suffrage was a question to be settled by the states. Twenty-two state Democratic conventions were held in 1868. Eleven of these opposed Negro suffrage anywhere. Only the convention of South Carolina in April approved it. Ten other conventions either were silent on the subject or announced their belief that this was a matter of state control.
The various state platforms illustrated local Northern thought. California Democrats declared that they “now and always confide in the intelligence, patriotism, and discriminating justice of the white people of the country to administer and control their Government, without the aid of either Negroes or Chinese.”30
The Democrats of Washington territory agreed with California in opposing the extension of the elective franchise to Negroes, Indians and Chinese.
The Ohio Democrats declared that the attempt to regulate suffrage in Ohio was “subversive of the federal Constitution.” The Democrats of Pennsylvania were opposed to conferring upon the Negro the right to vote. Most of the Republican conventions approved the Fifteenth Amendment. A minority report of the Virginia Conservatives called for white control and said:
We call upon white men, whether native or adopted citizens, to vote down the Constitution, and thereby save themselves and their posterity from Negro suffrage, Negro office-holding, and its legitimate consequence—Negro social equality.
This was a time of changing of political allegiance. The Johnson movement collapsed. Conservative Republicans, like Fessenden and Trumbull, united with the Republicans. Seward, McCulloch, and Welles, former supporters of Lincoln, stood staunchly by President Johnson. Other Republicans, like the Blairs, Doolittle, and Chase, drifted toward the Democrats. But the Democratic Party, by its action during the campaign, repelled many of the Conservatives on account of its attitude on money, and its radical attitude on Reconstruction. State and local elections in the spring of 1868 encouraged the Democrats. The Republican vote was reduced in New Hampshire; in Michigan Negro suffrage was defeated by a vote of 110,000 to 71,000, and the Democrats triumphed in Connecticut.
Before the war, Salmon P. Chase was a prominent Abolitionist, and after the war, a Radical Republican. He advocated Negro suffrage, and in May, 1865, made a trip to the South to investigate the position of the Negro. In Charleston, he spoke to the Negroes, and urged them to deserve the suffrage, even if they did not get it.
On the other hand, Chase did not like the military governments of the South, and favored state rights as against the increased power of the Federal Government. He said once: “While we freed the Negro, we enslaved ourselves.” Becoming Chief Justice, he presided at Johnson’s impeachment and favored Johnson possibly on account of his dislike of Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio. Wade would have become President if Johnson had been impeached. Chase’s daughter Kate was said to have made some fiery declarations at “the idea of that horrid Ben Wade being put over my father.” For his stand in this trial, he was practically read out of the Republican Party, and became a formidable candidate for the Democratic nomination.
The Chase supporters had headquarters in New York, and his daughter was there in person. It was suggested that Chase should declare Reconstruction acts unconstitutional “as the Supreme Court would probably decide.” This statement, of course, Chase could not make, and he had to warn his daughter against too great activity. A small group of some twenty Negroes assisted the Chase movement, and argued that Chase would carry many Southern Negro votes. After a long deadlock, Seymour of New York, the former Copperhead Governor of Draft Riot fame, was nominated chiefly because he failed to swing his followers to Chase, as he had promised.
The platform of the convention recognized slavery and secession as closed questions. It demanded the immediate restoration of all states, amnesty for all political offenses, and the regulation of suffrage in the states by their citizens. It asked for the abolition of the Freedmen’s Bureau and all agencies for Negro supremacy. It said that the Republicans, instead of restoring the Union, had dissolved it, subjecting ten states to military despotism and Negro supremacy; and that the corruption of the Radical Party had been unprecedented.
The New York Herald called Seymour “the embodiment of copperheadism.” Greeley declared that Seymour had proposed resisting secession by force; had declared that if the Union could only be maintained by abolishing slavery, then the Union should be given up; had given grudging support to the government while war governor, and had opposed the draft. The New York Sun said that he represented fairly the average sentiment of his party. Seymour accepted the platform but did not discuss it in detail. He attacked Congressional Reconstruction, but pointed out that no violent change could take place since the Republicans would continue to control the Senate. Frederick Douglass, writing in the Independent, August 20, 1868, said that Seymour’s letter of acceptance “was smooth as oil and as fair-seeming as hypocrisy itself, containing every disposition to deceive but without the ability. It was cunning and cowardly.” Seymour made no reference to finance or suffrage.
Blair, the Democratic candidate for Vice President, was a wild Missourian given to drink, who openly advocated that the new President “disperse the carpetbag governments” by force as soon as his party triumphed.
President Johnson was disgusted and chagrined at not receiving the nomination and said that Seymour had not lifted a finger to sustain his administration. In the campaign, he was finally induced to give some support to the Democratic ticket. Seymour, on the other hand, practically offered Johnson an appointment if he should be elected. Seward took little part in the campaign, although he spoke once for the Republican ticket, and included praise for President Johnson.
Thus the campaign started with contradictions inside the Democratic Party. Seymour opposed the greenback idea before the national convention, and then ran on a platform that advocated it. Blair advocated revolution; Hampton opposed Negro suffrage, and appealed to Negro voters. Chase asked universal suffrage, and remanded the question to the states. There were charges that the Democrats proposed to repudiate the national debt and pay for emancipated slaves and property lost during the war. Southern Democrats were prominent. Toombs, Cobb, and Forrest took part. The New York Nation said that “these Southerners were of more service to the Republicans than all of their orators and literature.” Many of them were accused of incendiary speeches. Vance of North Carolina was accused of saying that Seymour and Blair would win what the Confederates fought for. Hill of Georgia declared that the South was going to regulate its own internal democratic affairs in its own way. Toombs declared that if the Democrats were victorious, the Reconstruction governor and legislators would be made to vacate at once. Howell Cobb said that those in control of the Southern states would be ousted, while Albert Pike of Arkansas wrote in the Memphis Appeal: “The day will come when the South will be independent.”31
Violence and intimidation were widespread in the South during this election, and bribery and fraud were prevalent in the North. In Philadelphia, a Supreme Court justice issued over five thousand naturalization papers within two weeks.
The Nation, November 12, charged that Georgia and Louisiana were carried by “organized assassination, and New Jersey and New York by fraud.” The Democratic majority of 165 in Oregon was due, it was said, to voters brought in from neighboring states. Late in October, there was a movement to get Seymour to withdraw and substitute Chase or Johnson. The New York World led the movement, but nothing came of it. Grant was elected by 214 electoral votes to 80 for Seymour, and 3,012,833 to 2,703,249 popular votes. Thus Grant received 52.71%. Seymour carried Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Oregon. Virginia, Mississippi and Texas did not vote. During this campaign, Negro suffrage was defeated in Missouri by 74,053 to 55,236. In Minnesota, it was carried. In Nevada, it was carried by the Republican legislature.
At Christmas, 1868, President Johnson proclaimed general amnesty, pardoning every person engaged directly or indirectly in the rebellion. His last presidential message was an interesting and rather curious argument. He declared, in effect, that the dictatorship of labor, attempted in the South under the Reconstruction acts, had led to corruption and bloodshed and, therefore, prevented the rise of industry in the South, which was the real solution of the race problem. He believed that the bondholders had already received an amount larger than the principal which they owed and that, hereafter, the interest paid should be applied to the reduction of that principal.
Johnson thus illustrated again the way in which the color problem became the Blindspot of American political and social development and made logical argument almost impossible. The only power to curtail the rising empire of finance in the United States was industrial democracy—votes and intelligence in the hands of the laboring class, black and white, North and South.
The chief act of the third session of the 40th Congress was the Fifteenth Amendment. Early in 1867, two amendments on the suffrage were introduced: one which prohibited any color distinction, and the other requiring $250 property qualification or an additional tax. The victory of the Republican Party in 1868 made the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment paramount.
In 1868, eleven amendments were introduced to extend the right of suffrage to the freedmen. Of these amendments, seven were presented in the House and four in the Senate. All except one were referred to the Committee on Judiciary in each House. The House Committee on the Judiciary reported June 11, 1869, a proposed Fifteenth Amendment. This caused long debate in the House and many proposed modifications. Among the propositions was that no educational attainment or possession of property should be made the test of any citizen’s right to vote. The resolution proposed by the committee with a minor change was passed by the House by a vote of 150-42, January 30, 1869.
Meantime, the Senate had been discussing a similar proposition and many modifications had been proposed. January 30, on reception of the House Amendment, the Senate discussed it. Eight other amendments were offered, and some fifteen substitute propositions. Finally, a substitute suggested by Wilson was adopted by a vote of 31-27. It read:
No discrimination shall be made in any State among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elective franchise or in the right to hold office in any State, on account of race, color, nativity, property, education or religious creed.32
This was amended so as to insure Congress power to direct the manner in which the election should be conducted, and thus the Senate agreed to the House proposition with amendments. The House refused to concur. The Senate declined to recede and the measure failed.
Thereupon, February 17, 1869, the Senate resumed consideration of its own resolution and eleven amendments were proposed and rejected. Finally, the Fifteenth Amendment was passed 35-11, in its present form, except that the words “to hold office” were added after “the right to vote.”
February 20, the House considered this proposal and there were five attempts to amend it, of which one was successful and added “nativity, property and creed,” to the other qualifications. It then passed the House 140-37. The Senate rejected the House amendment and asked for conference. Finally, the present Fifteenth Amendment was agreed upon, and it passed the House 145-44, and the Senate 39-13. It was thus recommended to the states February 26, 1869.
Some Americans think and say that the nation freed the black slave and gave him a vote and that, unable to use it intelligently, he lost it. That is not so. To win the war America freed the slave and armed him; and the threat to arm the mass of the black workers of the Confederacy stopped the war. Nor does this fact for a moment deny that some prophets and martyrs demanded first and last the abolition of slavery as the sole object of the war and at any cost of life and wealth. So, too, some Americans demanded not simply physical freedom but votes, land, and education for blacks, not only in order to compass the economic emancipation of labor, but also as the only fulfillment of American democratic ideals; but most Americans used the Negro to defend their own economic interests and, refusing him adequate land and real education and even common justice, deserted him shamelessly as soon as their selfish interests were safe. Nor does this for a moment deny that unselfish and far-seeing Americans, poor as well as rich, by supplying public schools when the Negroes demanded them and establishing higher schools to train teachers, saved the Negro from being entirely reënslaved or exterminated in an unequal and cowardly renewal of war.
We are the hewers and delvers who toil for another’s gain,—
The common clods and the rabble, stunted of brow and brain.
What do we want, the gleaners, of the harvest we have reaped?
What do we want, the neuters, of the honey we have heaped?
What matter if king or consul or president holds the rein,
If crime and poverty ever be links in the bondman’s chain?
What careth the burden-bearer that Liberty packed his load,
If Hunger presseth behind him with a sharp and ready goad?
James Jeffrey Roche
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