Been in the Storm So Long (114 page)

“S
TRANGE
, novel, and anomalous,” the editor of the
New Orleans Tribune
wrote of the position of occupied Louisiana in the Union. He might have said the same of any of the ex-Confederate states. With few precedents to guide the victors, the proper legal status of the vanquished South defied any immediate or easy solution. That it became an issue at all stemmed from sharply conflicting notions about the content of southern reconstruction and whether the President or Congress should assume responsibility. For the ex-slave, the furious debate that raged in Washington, D.C., over this problem took on critical importance when its resolution spelled the difference between a congressional reconstruction in which blacks participated as political equals with whites and a presidential restoration in which they remained political mutes. “Be careful,” the
Tribune
advised Congress, after assessing the results of President Lincoln’s all too lenient proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction. “Magnanimity and amnesty are noble things; but do not deliver yourselves into the hands of your enemies—the enemies of progress, justice, and freedom.”
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The skepticism with which southern whites greeted the conciliatory
pronouncements of the black conventions resembled the suspicions they had often attached to the professions of loyalty emanating from their slaves. If anything, the evidence of possible duplicity seemed even more compelling when whites compared the many recitals of regional loyalty in the convention declarations with resolutions and petitions to Congress which suggested betrayal. The same North Carolina convention that had been so moderate in its demands and so loquacious in stating its identification with the South also praised the Radical faction of the Republican Party, including individuals like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, who were an anathema to whites. Many of the same black meetings that advised their people to cultivate good relations with the white population also endorsed the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Civil Rights bill, and the Fourteenth Amendment, any one of which aroused intense emotional responses from white Southerners. The same conventions and newpapers that cautioned their people against recriminations also urged Congress not to accept the elected representatives from the southern states until blacks had a voice in their selection. The Louisiana Equal Rights Convention even refused to memorialize the state legislature in 1865, lest such an action be misunderstood as recognizing the legitimacy of that body.
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The apparent contradictions in their pronouncements about conciliation and reconstruction were not viewed by blacks as contradictions at all. While wishing to live in racial harmony with their fellow whites, they asked only that the relationship henceforth be based on legal equality. While asking no indemnities for the past and expressing a willingness to forgive whites for the sins of slaveholding, they did insist upon security for the future. That consideration, more than any other, informed the attitude toward southern reconstruction developed in the immediate postwar years by a coterie of black leaders, many of whom would subsequently play a significant role in the political life of their respective states. Revealing at times a fine grasp of political strategy, they viewed the various proposals regarding amnesty for former Confederates as inseparable from their own claims to be admitted to all political privileges. That is, white men who had committed treason (as defined by the Constitution) by waging war against the United States could obviously not be trusted again with political power, unless they shared that power with blacks who had proven their loyalty to republican principles and to the sanctity of the Union. Nor could such power be safely reposed in the exclusive hands of southern Unionists, as President Lincoln envisioned, for their love of the Union reflected a desire to return to the past and their forced acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation indicated no real concern for the condition or future of the ex-slave.
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Whatever might be done with the “political criminals” who had led the South out of the Union, the
New Orleans Tribune
, voicing the usually more radical position of the city’s mulatto community, insisted that any magnanimity be within well-defined limits and acknowledge the need for a different organization of southern society.

Considering the punishments usually meted out to a people defeated in war, the editor’s amnesty proposal seemed eminently fair. Rather than execute or imprison the men who had betrayed the country, he suggested only that the wealthy among them be reduced to poverty—that is, to a condition already shared by millions of people who had stood by their government and had fought and sacrificed their lives to preserve it. If many whites who knew little of labor were thereby forced to work, that would also be a most constructive form of rehabilitation.

Although large numbers of blacks—both the politically articulate and the masses—might have sympathized with such “radicar” notions of amnesty and reconstruction, few black spokesmen publicly embraced a position they deemed politically untenable. In subsequent years, in fact, black leadership, although united in the determination to preserve the gains of Reconstruction, sharply divided over the wisdom of removing disfranchisement from ex-Confederate leaders. To permit them to return to active political participation seemed like the best way to win their approval of the work of black reconstructionists. But the democratic propensities of black leaders in this respect would also prove to be their undoing. The
New Orleans Tribune
clearly anticipated as much more than two years before the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Neither the Civil War nor emancipation, that newspaper argued, had really altered the mentality of the old slaveholding class, nor should blacks expect any genuine conversion to racial egalitarianism and democratic principles.

Since the policies of Presidents Lincoln and Johnson seemed calculated to produce precisely that result, the warning had been well grounded.

Despite the disappointment over Lincoln’s lenient amnesty program, his misplaced confidence in southern Unionists, and his “moderate” experiments in state reconstruction, the assassination of the President silenced his black critics and threw a stunned black community into deep mourning, as though it had lost its only white friend and protector. The President’s initial doubts about the wisdom of emancipation and the enlistment of blacks were now forgotten, his equivocations on civil rights ignored, his schemes of colonization, expatriation, and reconstruction forgiven. Even the cold language and forced nature of his Emancipation Proclamation no longer seemed relevant, giving way to the legend of the Great Emancipator. “Hereafter, through all time,” prophesied one black newspaper, “wherever the Black Race may be known in the world; whenever and wherever it shall lay the foundations of its power; build its cities and rear its temples, it will sacredly preserve if not deify the name of ‘
Abraham, the Martyr.
’ ” In heaping their praise on the fallen President, black clerics, editors, and common laborers tended to repeat the same themes and evoke the same images. He had completed the noble work begun by John Brown—“two martyrs, whose memories will live united in our bosoms.” He was “the only President who ever had the courage to acknowledge the true manhood of the negro.” He had been “the greatest earthly friend of the colored race,” “a Martyr to his cause, and a Sacrifice to his country.”
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In a church on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, freedmen prayed for Lincoln as they would have prayed only for the Saviour himself. Christ had saved them from sin, Lincoln had rescued them from slavery, and more than one freedman thought them indistinguishable: “Lincoln died for we, Christ died for we, and me believe him de same mans.” The manner of his death made him a logical black hero, victimized by the same spirit of malice and hatred that had brutalized black people for generations. For that very reason, the South could not escape responsibility by ascribing the act to “individual insanity,” at least not in the view of numerous black spokesmen. To treat the assassin as a madman, they argued, would be to ignore the record of deliberate and rational oppression from which four million black men and women had only begun to emerge.
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Among substantial numbers of freedmen, the initial shock of Lincoln’s death was compounded by apprehension over the future. If the President (“Massa Sam”) and the government were one and the same, as some blacks assumed, the results of the war, including emancipation, appeared to be jeopardized. “We going to be slaves again?” more than one freedman
thought to ask. To Jack Flowers, who had made a spectacular wartime escape to the Union lines in South Carolina, the assassination threatened to undo his exploit. “I ’spect it’s no use to be here,” he said dejectedly. “I might as well stayed where I was. It ’pears we can’t be free, nohow. The rebs won’t let us alone. If they can’t kill us, they’ll kill all our friens’, sure.” Former slaveholders had seized upon the President’s death to taunt the freedmen about the suddenly dim prospects of freedom, a concerned missionary wrote from Florida, “and some of our people began to talk of going north to escape enslavement again, for as Massa Lincoln was gone they feared their hope was gone too.” More typical may have been the many whites who expressed immediate concern over how the freed slaves would react to the assassination. Not unexpectedly, new rumors of insurrectionary conspiracies circulated and the white residents of a number of towns implored Federal authorities to double their precautions to keep the blacks quiet and orderly.
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To black spokesmen who had been openly critical of President Lincoln’s reconstruction and amnesty programs, and to those who had repressed their misgivings, the significance of the assassination seemed abundantly clear. The President had been victimized by his own magnanimity. His confidence in southern redemption and repentance had been rewarded with an assassin’s bullet. The
New Orleans Tribune
, which had been highly critical of the President, used the assassination to demonstrate that the nation’s enemies had not yet been vanquished.

Upon hearing of the assassination, black clergymen attending a conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore reacted in virtually the same manner, praising Lincoln’s good works, forgiving his sins (“His errors were errors of the head, not of the heart”), and, most importantly, urging “a sterner course” and the application of “more rigid principles” toward the defeated South. If the American people heeded the obvious lesson of this event, black spokesmen declared, they would realize soon enough that most white Southerners remained “incorrigible rebels” who willingly and deceitfully took the oath of allegiance to recover their property and political power; the Rebels expected to win at the ballot box what they had lost on the battlefield, and President Lincoln had been naïve enough to believe their protestations of loyalty. Fortunately, his successor knew better. The future lay in good hands, most of these same black spokesmen agreed, for the new President understood “Southern pretenses and Southern excesses” from his own experience and he would now do his duty. “Agag is to be hewn into pieces,” a confident black cleric proclaimed, “and
Samuel must come forward and wield the sword of destruction—that man is Andrew Johnson.”
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