A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction (35 page)

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 ascendency 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. . . .

The great interests of the country require immediate relief from these enactments. Business in the South is paralyzed by a sense of general insecurity, by the terror of confiscation, and the dread of negro supremacy. The Southern trade, from which the North would have derived so great a profit under a government of law, still languishes, and can never be revived until it ceases to be fettered by the arbitrary power which makes all its operations unsafe. That rich country—the richest in natural resources the world ever saw—is worse than lost if it be not soon placed under the protection of a free constitution. Instead of being, as it ought to be, a source of wealth and power, it will become an intolerable burden upon the rest of the nation.

Another reason for retracing our steps will doubtless be seen by Congress in the late manifestations of public opinion upon this subject. We live in a country where the popular will always enforces obedience to itself, sooner or later. It is vain to think of opposing it with anything short of legal authority backed by overwhelming force. It can not have escaped your attention that from the day on which Congress fairly and formally presented the proposition to govern the Southern States by military force, with a view to the ultimate establishment of negro supremacy, every expression of the general sentiment has been more or less adverse to it. The affections of this generation can not be detached from the institutions of their ancestors. Their determination to preserve the inheritance of free government in their own hands and transmit it undivided and unimpaired to their own posterity is too strong to be successfully opposed. Every weaker passion will disappear before that love of liberty and law for which the American people are distinguished above all others in the world.

How far the duty of the President “to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution” requires him to go in opposing an unconstitutional act of Congress is a very serious and important question, on which I have deliberated much and felt extremely anxious to reach a proper conclusion. Where an act has been passed according to the forms of the Constitution by the supreme legislative authority, and is regularly enrolled among the public statutes of the country, Executive resistance to it, especially in times of high party excitement, would be likely to produce violent collision between the respective adherents of the two branches of the Government. This would be simply civil war, and civil war must be resorted to only as the last remedy for the worst of evils. Whatever might tend to provoke it should be most carefully avoided. A faithful and conscientious magistrate will concede very much to honest error, and something even to perverse malice, before he will endanger the public peace; and he will not adopt forcible measures, or such as might lead to force, as long as those which are peaceable remain open to him or to his constituents. It is true that cases may occur in which the Executive would be compelled to stand on its rights, and maintain them regardless of all consequences. If Congress should pass an act which is not only in palpable conflict with the Constitution, but will certainly, if carried out, produce immediate and irreparable injury to the organic structure of the Government, and if there be neither judicial remedy for the wrongs it inflicts nor power in the people to protect themselves without the official aid of their elected defender—if, for instance, the legislative department should pass an act even through all the forms of law to abolish a coordinate department of the Government—in such a case the President must take the high responsibilities of his office and save the life of the nation at all hazards. The so-called reconstruction acts, though as plainly unconstitutional as any that can be imagined, were not believed to be within the class last mentioned. The people were not wholly disarmed of the power of self-defense. In all the Northern States they still held in their hands the sacred right of the ballot, and it was safe to believe that in due time they would come to the rescue of their own institutions. It gives me pleasure to add that the appeal to our common constituents was not taken in vain, and that my confidence in their wisdom and virtue seems not to have been misplaced.

The popular Northern writer John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916), author of the antislavery novel
Neighbor Jackwood
(1857), visited eight Southern states in mid-1865 and early 1866, recording his observations of places and conversations with a broad range of whites and blacks. He first summarized his findings in
The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, a Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People
(1866) and two years later brought the story up-to-date in
A Picture of the Desolated States; and the Work of Restoration.
Trowbridge likened the condition of the South to “a man recovering from a dangerous malady: the crisis is past, appetite is boundless, and only sustenance and purifying air are needed to bring health and life in fresh waves.” Much like
The Nation
's proposal for solving the Indian problem, Trowbridge urged simply that justice be accorded all men. He predicted that Southern whites ultimately would accept black suffrage. Like social change across time and place, it too would take time.

. . . It now only remains for me to sum up briefly my answers to certain questions which are constantly put to me, regarding Southern emigration, the loyalty of the people, and the future of the country.

The South is in the condition of a man recovering from a dangerous malady: the crisis is past, appetite is boundless, and only sustenance and purifying air are needed to bring health and life in fresh waves. The exhausted country calls for supplies. It has been drained of its wealth, and of its young men. Capital is eagerly welcomed and absorbed. Labor is also needed. There is much shallow talk about getting rid of the negroes, and of filling their places with foreigners. But war and disease have already removed more of the colored race than can be well spared; and I am confident that, for the next five or ten years, leaving the blacks where they are, the strongest tide of emigration that can be poured into the country will be insufficient to meet the increasing demand for labor.

Northern enterprise, emancipation, improved modes of culture, and the high prices of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, cannot fail to bring about this result. The cotton crop, if no accident happens to it, will this year reach, I am well satisfied, not less than two million bales, and bring something like two hundred and fifty million dollars,—as much as the five million bales of 1859 produced. Next year it will approximate to its old average standard in bulk, and greatly exceed it in value; and the year after we shall have the largest cotton crop ever known. Meanwhile the culture of rice and sugar will have fully revived, and become enormously profitable. Nor will planting alone flourish. Burned cities and plantation-buildings must be restored, new towns and villages will spring up, old losses must be repaired, and a thousand new wants supplied. Trade, manufactures, the mechanic arts, all are invited to share in this teeming activity.

Particular location the emigrant must select for himself, according to his own judgment, tastes, and means. Just now I should not advise Northern men to settle far back from the main routes of travel, unless they go in communities, purchasing and dividing large plantations, and forming societies independent of any hostile sentiment that may be shown by the native inhabitants. But I trust that in a year or two all danger of discomfort or disturbance arising from this source will have mostly passed by.

The loyalty of the people is generally of a negative sort: it is simply disloyalty subdued. They submit to the power which has mastered them, but they do not love it; nor is it reasonable to expect that they should. Many of them lately in rebellion, are, I think, honestly convinced that secession was a great mistake, and that the preservation of the Union, even with the loss of slavery, is better for them than any such separate government as that of which they had a bitter taste. Yet they do not feel much affection for the hand which corrected their error. They acquiesce quietly in what cannot be helped, and sincerely desire to make the best of their altered circumstances. . . .

Of another armed rebellion not the least apprehension need be entertained. The South has had enough of war for a long time to come; it has supped full of horrors. The habiliments of mourning, which one sees everywhere in its towns and cities, will cast their dark shadow upon any future attempt at secession, long after they have been put away in the silent wardrobes of the past. Only in the case of a foreign war might we expect to see a party of malignant malcontents go over to the side of the enemy. They would doubtless endeavor to drag their States with them, but they would not succeed. Fortunately those who are still so anxious to see the old issue fought out are not themselves fighting men, and are dangerous only with their tongues.

Of
unarmed
rebellion, of continued sectional strife, stirred up by Southern politicians, there exists very great danger. Their aims are distinct, and they command the sympathy of the Southern people. To obtain the exclusive control of the freedmen, and to make such laws for them as shall embody the prejudices of a late slave-holding society; to govern not only their own States, but to regain their forfeited leadership in the affairs of the nation; to effect the repudiation of the national debt, or to get the Confederate debt and the Rebel State debts assumed by the whole country; to secure payment for their slaves, and for all injuries and losses occasioned by the war; these are among the chief designs of a class who will pursue them with what recklessness and persistency we know.

How to prevent them from agitating the nation in the future as in the past, and from destroying its prosperity, is become the most serious of questions. If you succeed in capturing an antagonist who has made a murderous assault upon you, common sense, and a regard for your own safety and the peace of society, require at least that his weapons, or the power of using them, should be taken from him. These perilous schemes are the present weapons of the nation's conquered enemy; and does not prudent statesmanship demand that they should be laid forever at rest before he walks again at large in the pride of his power?

All that just and good men can ask, is this security. Vindictiveness, or a wish to hold the rebellious States under an iron rule, should have no place in our hearts. But if the blood of our brothers was shed in a righteous cause,—if for four years we poured out lives and treasures to purchase a reality, and no mere mockery and shadow,—let us honor our brothers and the cause by seeing that reality established. If treason is a crime surely it can receive no more fitting or merciful punishment than to be deprived of its power to do more mischief. Let peace, founded upon true principles, be the only retribution we demand. Let justice be our vengeance.

It was my original intention to speak of the various schemes of reconstruction claiming the consideration of the country. But they have become too numerous, and are generally too well known, to be detailed here. The Southern plan is simple; it is this: that the States, lately so eager to destroy the Union, are now entitled to all their former rights and privileges in that Union. Their haste to withdraw their representatives from Congress, is more than equalled by their anxiety to get them back in their seats. They consider it hard that, at the end of the most stupendous rebellion and the bloodiest civil war that ever shook the planet, they cannot quietly slip back in their places, and, the sword having failed, take up once more the sceptre of political power they so rashly flung down. Often, in conversation with candid Southern men, impatient for this result, I was able to convince them that it was hardly to be expected that the government, emerging victorious from the dust of such a struggle, and finding its foot on that sceptre, should take it off with very great alacrity. And they were forced to acknowledge that, had the South proved victorious, its enemies would not have escaped so easily.

This plan does not tolerate the impediment of any Congressional test oath. When I said to my Southern friends that I should be glad to see those representatives, who could take the test oath, admitted to Congress, this was the usual reply:—

“We would not vote for such men. We had rather have no representatives at all. We want representatives to
represent
us, and no man
represents
us who can take your test oath. We are Rebels, if you choose to call us so, and only a good Rebel can properly represent us.”

This is the strongest argument I have heard against the admission of loyal Southern members to Congress. And if the white masses of the lately rebellious States are alone, and indiscriminately, to be recognized as the people of those States, it is certainly a valid argument.

“It is enough,” they maintained, “that a representative in Congress takes the ordinary oath to support the government;
that
is a sufficient test of his loyalty;”—forgetting that, at the outbreak of the rebellion, this proved no test at all.

Such is the Southern plan of reconstruction. Opposed to it is the plan on which I believe a majority of the people of the loyal States are agreed, namely, that certain guaranties of future national tranquillity should be required of those who have caused so great a national convulsion. But as to what those guaranties should be, opinions are divided, and a hundred conflicting measures are proposed for the settlement of the difficulty.

For my own part, I see but one plain rule by which our troubles can be finally and satisfactorily adjusted; and that is, the enactment of simple justice for all men. Anything that falls short of this falls short of the solution of the problem.

The “Civil Rights Bill,”—enacted since the greater portion of these pages were written,—is a step in the direction in which this country is inevitably moving. The principles of the Declaration of Independence, supposed to be our starting-point in history, are in reality the goal towards which we are tending. Far in advance of our actual civilization, the pioneers of the Republic set up those shining pillars. Not until all men are equal before the law, and none is hindered from rising or from sinking by any impediment which does not exist in his own constitution and private circumstances, will that goal be reached.

Soon or late the next step is surely coming. That step is universal suffrage. It may be wise to make some moral or intellectual qualification a test of a man's fitness for the franchise; but anything which does not apply alike to all classes, and which all are not invited to attain, is inconsistent with the spirit of American nationality.

But will the Southern people ever submit to negro suffrage? They will submit to it quite as willingly as they submitted to negro emancipation. They fought against that as long as any power of resistance was in them; then they accepted it; they are now becoming reconciled to it; and soon they will rejoice over it. Such is always the history of progressive ideas. The first advance is opposed with all the might of the world until its triumph is achieved; then the world says, “Very well,” and employs all its arts and energies to defeat the next movement, which triumphs and is finally welcomed in its turn.

At the close of the war, the South was ready to accept any terms which the victorious government might have seen fit to enforce. The ground was thoroughly broken; it was fresh from the harrow; and then was the time for the sowing of the new seed, before delay had given encouragement and opportunity to the old rank weeds. The States had practically dissolved their relations to the general government. Their chief men were traitors, their governors and legislators were entitled to no recognition, and a new class of free citizens, composing near half the population, had been created. If, in these changed circumstances, all the people of those States had been called upon to unite in restoring their respective governments, and their relations to the general government, we should have had a simple and easy solution of the main question at issue. Our allies on the battle-field would have become our allies at the ballot-box, and by doing justice to them we should have gained security for ourselves.

But are the lately emancipated blacks prepared for the franchise? They are, by all moral and intellectual qualifications, as well prepared for it as the mass of poor whites in the South. Although ignorant, they possess, as has been said, a strong instinct which stands them in the place of actual knowledge. That instinct inspires them with loyalty to the government, and it will never permit them to vote so unwisely and mischievously as the white people of the South voted in the days of secession. Moreover, there are among them men of fine intelligence and leading influence, by whom, and not by their old masters, as has been claimed, they will be instructed in their duty at the polls. And this fact is most certain,—that they are far better prepared to have a hand in making the laws by which they are to be governed, than the whites are to make those laws for them.

How this step is now to be brought about is not easy to determine; and it may not be brought about for some time to come. In the mean while it is neither wise nor just to allow the representation of the Southern States in Congress to be increased by the emancipation of a race that has no voice in that representation; and some constitutional remedy against this evil is required. And in the mean while the protection of the government must be continued to the race to which its faith is pledged. Let us hope not long.

The present high price of cotton, and the extraordinary demand for labor, seem providential circumstances, designed to teach both races a great lesson. The freedmen are fast learning the responsibilities of their new situation, and gaining a position from which they cannot easily be displaced. Their eagerness to acquire knowledge is a bright sign of hope for their future. By degrees the dominant class must learn to respect those who, as chattels, could only be despised. Respect for labor rises with the condition of the laborer. The whites of the South are not by choice ignorant or unjust, but circumstances have made them so. Teach them that the laborer is a man, and that labor is manly,—a truth that is now dawning upon them,—and the necessity of mediation between the two races will no longer exist.