Penguin History of the United States of America (68 page)

Finally, there were the institutional auxiliaries of the federal and state governments: the churches (operating through the American Missionary Association); the army; the state militias, which were raised after the army had shrunk to its normal size and returned to its normal job of hunting Indians; the Union League, the nearest thing there was to a full-time Republican party organization; and, above all, the Freedmen’s Bureau (officially known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands). The Bureau was set up by Congress just before the end of the war; during the immediate post-war period it did heroic work in feeding the freedmen, in organizing hospitals and schools for them, and in supervising the terms under which they were hired as free labourers.

Overall, this was a formidable array of weapons, and it was not wholly ineffective. The new state constitutions did effectively overhaul Southern government, sweeping away the indirect elections of South Carolina, for example, by which in the ante-bellum period the choice of all the highest state officials had been kept in the hands of the planter oligarchs. Property qualifications for voting and office-holding were abolished for ever; the first
systems of public education were set up, for whites as well as for blacks, that the South had ever known;
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imprisonment for debt was abolished; state orphanages and lunatic asylums were set up; and a framework of law was provided, modelled on those of the Northern states, within which capitalist corporations could function safely – a major departure for the land of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. All these important and valuable innovations survived the years of controversy without difficulty, and did something towards the modernization of the South. Even the stimulus to black education, largely the work of the church groups, was not wholly lost in the years ahead; such distinguished universities as Atlanta, Howard (at Washington, DC; named after the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard) and Fisk date from this period. The great amendments remained part of the Constitution. But there the credit side of the ledger stops.

For the question of reconstruction would not ultimately be settled by reason, common sense, good intentions and Congressional enactment. Even the freedmen were not necessary to a settlement, though they had more at stake than anyone else: they were too few, as the slaves had been too few, for their own good. Like the anti-slavery struggle, like the Civil War itself, this was a fight that would be settled by time, will and physical force; but now the greater strength was on the wrong side.

Time alone would have been enough to defeat the North, had it not had to struggle against the folly and impatience of the white South as well. Most Americans find it hard to keep up a quarrel. They are a friendly, outgoing people; they like to be liked; the slightest show of goodwill and they forget their strongest grievances. To judge by their behaviour, the Northerners were never very vindictive to the Southerners: they could not imagine, for instance, treating fellow-Americans as the Russians treated the Poles after the unsuccessful rising of 1863. They were disconcerted by the relentless hostility that the defeated South displayed: by the insults offered to their soldiers by Southern ladies, the steely refusal of Southern politicians to compromise. ‘At a distance I felt a great sympathy for the people here: now that I am here and know how the pulse of the people beat, I have lost a great portion of my sympathy,’ one young Northerner wrote to his friend, a future President, in 1865.
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Bewilderment changed to rage as the Black Codes were passed, as violence mounted, as Mississippi refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment because, forsooth, it gave Congress power to enforce the abolition of slavery, and as Louisiana repudiated the Constitution
which Lincoln had defended so earnestly against radical critics, on the grounds that it was ‘the creature of fraud, violence and corruption’.
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‘We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves,’ said the
Chicago Tribune
in December 1865. Fine words: but the North could not keep it up. Not all the bad behaviour of the South could ultimately overcome the wish to bury the old dispute, to be magnanimous to a fallen foe, to forget an intractable problem and turn to the rich challenges of the new era of industrialism that was opening. The bloody shirt could not forever distract attention from the excitements of life in the new cities, in the new West, the new factories, the new farms, the new professions, the new pleasures (baseball had suddenly become a national obsession). The attention of the North to affairs below the Mason-Dixon line slackened, and so it became easy to believe the propaganda which said that the reconstructed governments were all insufferably corrupt and incompetent, that the white supremacists knew what was best for blacks, that the radical Republicans were mere twisted fanatics. Besides, time killed off the radical leaders, and they had no successors. The Republican party did not repudiate its old programme (it was far too useful at election times) and indeed continued for another twenty years, though ineffectively, to try to protect the hard-won black right to vote; the Civil War veterans who rapidly came to dominate the party did not forget the cause for which they had fought; but the passion died, or shifted to other issues. Politics was no longer a crusade, but much more a matter of day-to-day business: it was convenient for Presidents, Senators and Congressmen, few of whom would have made convincing crusaders, to seek the co-operation of the Southern leaders rather than their destruction. Besides, the Democratic party in the North soon abandoned the racism which it had embraced so fervently during and immediately after the war, and was prepared to compete for black votes; in return it seemed only fair that the Republicans should compete for white supremacist votes, or at least not stimulate the Southern racists into vigorous action against them. This sort of attitude was made easier by the persistence of race prejudice in the North. As an effective political force it was broken by the war and reconstruction; Northerners were now much more concerned to hate the Irish and the other European immigrants flooding in upon them, rather than the blacks, of whom they saw few; but still, there was no love of the black to make it impossible to forget his injuries. In fact one of the reasons why the North saw so few blacks was that they were not allowed to compete for good Northern jobs. They were excluded from the rising labour unions, and so from the factories, except as strike-breakers recruited by the factory-owners, which did not increase their popularity. By the mid-seventies, in
short, the African-American was seen, at best, as a bore and a nuisance. There was no political risk for anyone in abandoning him.

Southern attitudes were not ductile like Northern ones. The reason was simple enough: too much was at stake. For the North, the Civil War had been primarily a defensive enterprise, which had ended by greatly strengthening the American Union – indeed, by superseding the term: ever since, Americans have tended to talk of ‘the nation’, an even more cohesive idea. For the South, the war had meant the Emancipation Revolution, which had shattered society and all its structures. For the North, ‘reconstruction’, that curiously dry term, meant primarily the political task of reintroducing the defeated states to full participation in politics on tolerable terms. For the South, it meant rebuilding society from the foundations. The task was too important to be either postponed or left to other hands. Decisions taken after Appomattox would settle the fate of the South for the foreseeable future; no wonder there was a bitter competition to have the preponderant influence in their making, and bitter argument as to what they should be.

Two fundamental facts conditioned everything that happened. The first was that the South was not united. Apart from the division between the races and between ex-Confederates and Republicans (whether scalawags or carpetbaggers), there was the continuing division between the classes. It is hardly possible to overstate the bitterness felt, in those parts of the South where the yeomen farmers or poor whites predominated, against the planter class, immediately after the war. A traveller in northern Alabama reported:

They are ignorant and vindictive, live in poor huts, drink much, and all use tobacco and snuff; they want to organize and receive recognition by the United States government in order to get revenge – really want to be bushwhackers supported by the Federal government; they ‘wish to have the power to hang, shoot, and destroy in retaliation for the wrongs they have endured’; they hate the ‘big nigger holders’, whom they accuse of bringing on the war and who, they are afraid, would get into power again; they are the ‘refugee’, poor white element of low character, shiftless, with no ambition.

That was in 1865. Three years later the Republicans of Georgia thought these class attitudes still strong enough to be worth appealing to at election time:

Be a man! Let the slave-holding aristocracy no longer rule you. Vote for a constitution which educates your children free of charge; relieves the poor debtor from his rich creditor; allows a liberal homestead for your families; and more and more than all, places you on a level with those who used to boast that for every slave they were entitled to three-fifths of a vote in congressional representation. Ponder this well before you vote.

The Republicans were perfectly right in thinking that these divisions were of permanent importance; but they boded no good for the future of Southern society.

The second decisive fact about the South was the fashion in which the economic question was settled. We have seen how quickly the freedmen’s hopes were blighted. The planter class, though disgraced, bankrupt, disfranchised and unpopular, kept the land. Some individuals, of course, went down to economic defeat. Others rose, the class survived. The strategy was not at first clear. Strenuous efforts were made, of which the Black Codes were part, to restore the old plantation system, but after some years it was clear that without slavery this was impossible: the ex-slaves simply would not co-operate. So the great estates were divided up into family farms and let out to tenants, black and white. Thus a version of the Republican hope for the South was realized: a caricature of Northern homesteading.

The new pattern of Southern agriculture was dominated by debt. Many of the planters had mortgaged their lands to raise desperately needed capital, or just to get their hands on some cash again, after they had seen all the profits of slavery vanish into the Confederate war-effort. Since their new tenants had even less in the way of cash or capital they were obliged to borrow from the landlords in order to get started, and in consequence had to pay debt-charges as well as rent. The system that emerged was that known as sharecropping: a somewhat primitive economic form, since it turned essentially on transactions in kind, not money. Tenants agreed to farm the land; in return they were given a share of the crops they raised. Some brought tools or a mule to their new life and were therefore allowed to keep a relatively high proportion of the crop; but most depended entirely on their landlords for seed, tools, ploughs, mules (to draw the ploughs) and, eventually, food, since it paid the landlord to compel his tenants to get their supplies at his own country store rather than to allow them to raise corn and pigs themselves. Food production in the South after the Civil War was about 50 per cent less than it had been before: the region ceased to be self-supporting in that item. The corollary was that the production of cotton was greatly increased.

On a long view of the South’s best interests, this was worse than absurd, as many people pointed out at the time. Monoculture puts a country, or a region, too much at the mercy of the market, the weather and tradition (since to grow the same thing everywhere all the time discourages useful innovation: for example, cotton-picking was not mechanized until after the Second World War). Cotton, furthermore, depleted the soil, so that farmers had to add the price of fertilizer to their other costs. But stark structural realities gave the South no choice. The producers were all debtors; their creditors demanded collateral for their loans; the only collateral that all knew and trusted was cotton. Not surprisingly, the only men to do well out of this system were the merchants. These were usually no more than owners of the little country stores that began to speckle the Southern countryside.

They were the only sources for the necessities of life; among those necessities was credit, which they were ready to extend on easy terms; but the return they exacted was absolute control of what the farmers grew, when and how. They lent the money, placed high prices on the goods they sold, took the cotton and with the proceeds bought themselves into the planter class. Before long the South was as hierarchically organized as ever. Once more a dominant class monopolized the economic surplus. The only difference was that, because of the shortage of labour and the depressed price of cotton, the surplus was smaller than it had been under slavery.

Debt-slavery, or peonage, became the rule for most of the poor farmers of the South, white and black, as it was for the peasants of Latin America. It was made worse in bad years, when the price of the crop did not equal the outstanding debt; and good years seldom did much to improve matters, especially since many landlords were expert at cheating their tenants when it came to settling accounts. So the entire labouring class of the South sank into hopelessness, ill-clothed, ill-fed (the deficiency disease, pellagra, became very common), illiterate (the freedmen’s zeal for schooling fell off noticeably as it became clear that education would not necessarily lead to a better way of life). It was the worst possible basis for social progress. The despair of the South was expressed sometimes in a turn to rhapsodic religion; sometimes in savage race conflict (lynching, rare in the ante-bellum South, became all too usual); all too rarely, and never effectively, in politics, which was based, as before the war, on the determination of the planting class to maintain its rule.