* Except in Texas, the work of constitution making was completed between November 5, 1867, and May 18, 1868.

These elections gave rise to more violent contests than before. They also were double elections, as the voters cast ballots for state and local officials and at the same time for or against the constitution. The radical nominations were made by the Union League and the Freedmen's Bureau, and nearly all radicals who had been members of conventions were nominated and elected to office. The Negroes, expecting now to reap some benefits of reconstruction, frequently brought sacks to the polls to "put the franchise in." The elections were all over by June 1868, and the newly elected legislatures promptly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment.

It now remained for Congress to approve the work done in the South and to readmit the reorganized states. The case of Alabama gave some trouble. Even Stevens, for a time, thought that this state should stay out; but there was danger in delay. The success of the abstention policy in Alabama and Arkansas and the reviving interest of the whites foreshadowed white majorities in some places; the scalawags began to forsake the radical party for the conservatives; and there were Democratic gains in the North in 1867. Only six states, New York and five New England States, allowed the Negro to vote, while four states, Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, and Ohio, voted down Negro suffrage after the passage of the reconstruction acts. The ascendancy of the radicals in Congress was menaced. The radicals needed the support of their radical brethren in Southern States and they could not afford to wait for the Fourteenth Amendment to become a part of the Constitution or to tolerate other delay. On the 22d and the 25th of June, acts were therefore passed admitting seven states, Alabama included, to representation in Congress upon the "fundamental condition" that "the constitutions of neither of said States shall ever be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizens or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote in said State, who are entitled to vote by the constitution thereof herein recognized."

The generals now turned over the government to the recently elected radical officials and retired into the background. Military reconstruction was thus accomplished in all the States except Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas.



CHAPTER VII. THE TRIAL OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON

While the radical program was being executed in the South, Congress was engaged not only in supervising reconstruction but in subduing the Supreme Court and in "conquering" President Johnson. One must admire the efficiency of the radical machine. When the Southerners showed that they preferred military rule as permitted by the Act of the 2nd of March, Congress passed the Act of the 23d of March which forced the reconstruction. When the President ventured to assert his power in behalf of a considerate administration of the reconstruction acts, Congress took the power out of his hands by the law of the 19th of July. The Southern plan to defeat the new state constitutions by abstention was no sooner made clear in the case of Alabama than Congress came to the rescue with the Act of March 11, 1868.

Had it seemed necessary, Congress would have handled the Supreme Court as it did the Southerners. The opponents of radical reconstruction were anxious to get the reconstruction laws of March 1867, before the Court. Chief Justice Chase was known to be opposed to military reconstruction, and four other justices were, it was believed, doubtful of the constitutionality of the laws. A series of conservative decisions gave hope to those who looked to the Court for relief. The first decision, in the case of ex parte Milligan, declared unconstitutional the trials of civilians by military commissions when civil courts were open. A few months later, in the cases of Cummings vs. Missouri and ex parte Garland, the Court declared invalid, because ex post facto, the state laws designed to punish former Confederates.

But the first attempts to get the reconstruction acts before the Supreme Court failed. The State of Mississippi, in April 1867, brought suit to restrain the President from executing the reconstruction acts. The Court refused to interfere with the executive. A similar suit was then brought against Secretary Stanton by Georgia with a like result. But in 1868, in the case of ex parte McCardle, it appeared that the question of the constitutionality of the reconstruction acts would be passed upon. McCardle, a Mississippi editor arrested for opposition to reconstruction and convicted by military commission, appealed to the Supreme Court, which asserted its jurisdiction. But the radicals in alarm rushed through Congress an act (March 27, 1868) which took away from the Court its jurisdiction in cases arising under the reconstruction acts. The highest court was thus silenced.

The attempt to remove the President from office was the only part of the radical program that failed, and this by the narrowest of margins. During the spring and summer of 1866, there was some talk among politicians of impeaching President Johnson, and in December a resolution was introduced by Representative Ashley of Ohio looking toward impeachment. Though the committee charged with the investigation of "the official conduct of Andrew Johnson" reported that enough testimony had been taken to justify further inquiry, the House took no action. There were no less than five attempts at impeachment during the next year. Stevens, Butler, and others were anxious to get the President out of the way, but the majority were as yet unwilling to impeach for merely political reasons. There were some who thought that the radicals had sufficient majorities to ensure all needed legislation and did not relish the thought of Ben Wade in the presidency.* Others considered that no just grounds for action had been found in the several investigations of Johnson's record. Besides, the President's authority and influence had been much curtailed by the legislation relating to the Freedmen's Bureau, tenure of office, reconstruction, and command of the army, and Congress had also refused to recognize his amnesty and pardoning powers.

* Senator Wade of Ohio was President pro tempore of the Senate and by the act of 1791 would succeed President Johnson if he were removed from office.

But the desire to impeach the President was increasing in power, and very little was needed to provoke a trial of strength between the radicals and the President. The drift toward impeachment was due in part to the legislative reaction against the executive, and in part to Johnson's own opposition to reconstruction and to his use of the patronage against the radicals. Specific grievances were found in his vetoes of the various reconstruction bills, in his criticisms of Congress and the radical leaders, and in the fact, as Stevens asserted, that he was a "radical renegade." Johnson was a Southern man, an old-line State Rights Democrat, somewhat anti-Negro in feeling. He knew no book except the Constitution, and that he loved with all his soul. Sure of the correctness of his position, he was too stubborn to change or to compromise. He was no more to be moved than Stevens or Sumner. To overcome Johnson's vetoes required two-thirds of each House of Congress; to impeach and remove him would require only a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate.

The desired occasion for impeachment was furnished by Johnson's attempt to get Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War, out of the Cabinet. Stanton held radical views and was at no time sympathetic with or loyal to Johnson, but he loved office too well to resign along with those cabinet members who could not follow the President in his struggle with Congress. He was seldom frank and sincere in his dealings with the President, and kept up an underhand correspondence with the radical leaders, even assisting in framing some of the reconstruction legislation which was designed to render Johnson powerless. In him the radicals had a representative within the President's Cabinet.

Wearied of Stanton's disloyalty, Johnson asked him to resign and, upon a refusal, suspended him in August 1867, and placed General Grant in temporary charge of the War Department. General Grant, Chief Justice Chase, and Secretary McCulloch, though they all disliked Stanton, advised the President against suspending him. But Johnson was determined. About the same time he exercised his power in removing Sheridan and Sickles from their commands in the South and replaced them with Hancock and Canby. The radicals were furious, but Johnson had secured at least the support of a loyal Cabinet.

The suspension of Stanton was reported to the Senate in December 1867, and on January 13, 1868, the Senate voted not to concur in the President's action. Upon receiving notice of the vote in the Senate, Grant at once left the War Department and Stanton again took possession. Johnson now charged Grant with failing to keep a promise either to hold on himself or to make it possible to appoint some one else who would hold on until the matter might be brought into the courts. The President by this accusation angered Grant and threw him with his great influence into the arms of the radicals. Against the advice of his leading counselors, Johnson persisted in his intention to keep Stanton out of the Cabinet. Accordingly on the 21st of February he dismissed Stanton from office and appointed Lorenzo Thomas, the Adjutant General, as acting Secretary of War. Stanton, advised by the radicals in Congress to "stick," refused to yield possession to Thomas and had him arrested for violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The matter now was in the courts where Johnson wanted it, but the radical leaders, fearing that the courts would decide against Stanton and the reconstruction acts, had the charges against Thomas withdrawn. Thus failed the last attempt to get the reconstruction laws before the courts. On the 22nd of February, the President sent to the Senate the name of Thomas Ewing, General Sherman's father-in-law, as Secretary of War, but no attention was paid to the nomination.

On February 24, 1868, the House voted, 128 to 47, to impeach the President "of high crimes and misdemeanors in office." The Senate was formally notified the next day, and on the 4th of March the seven managers selected by the House appeared before the Senate with the eleven articles of impeachment. At first it seemed to the public that the impeachment proceedings were merely the culmination of a struggle for the control of the army. There were rumors that Johnson had plans to use the army against Congress and against reconstruction. General Grant, directed by Johnson to accept orders from Stanton only if he were satisfied that they came from the President, refused to follow these instructions. Stanton, professing to fear violence, barricaded himself in the War Department and was furnished with a guard of soldiers by General Grant, who from this time used his influence in favor of impeachment. Excited by the most sensational rumors, some people even believed a new rebellion to be imminent.

The impeachment was rushed to trial by the House managers and was not ended until the decision was taken by the votes of the 16th and 26th of May. The eleven articles of impeachment consisted of summaries of all that had been charged against Johnson, except the charge that he had been an accomplice in the murder of Lincoln. The only one which had any real basis was the first, which asserted that he had violated the Tenure of Office Act in trying to remove Stanton. The other articles were merely expansions of the first or were based upon Johnson's opposition to reconstruction or upon his speeches in criticism of Congress. Nothing could be said about his control of the patronage, though this was one of the unwritten charges. J. W. Schuckers, in his life of Chase, says that the radical leaders "felt the vast importance of the presidential patronage; many of them felt, too, that, according to the maxim that to the victors belong the spoils, the Republican party was rightfully entitled to the Federal patronage, and they determined to get possession of it. There was but one method and that was by impeachment and removal of the President."

The leading House managers were Stevens, Butler, Bingham, and Boutwell, all better known as politicians than as lawyers. The President was represented by an abler legal array: Curtis, Evarts, Stanbery, Nelson, and Groesbeck. Jeremiah Black was at first one of the counsel for the President but withdrew under conditions not entirely creditable to himself.

The trial was a one-sided affair. The President's counsel were refused more than six days for the preparation of the case. Chief Justice Chase, who presided over the trial, insisted upon regarding the Senate as a judicial and not a political body, and he accordingly ruled that only legal evidence should be admitted; but the Senate majority preferred to assume that they were settling a political question. Much evidence favorable to the President was excluded, but everything else was admitted. As the trial went on, the country began to understand that the impeachment was a mistake. Few people wanted to see Senator Wade made President. The partisan attitude of the Senate majority and the weakness of the case against Johnson had much to do in moderating public opinion, and the timely nomination of General Schofield as Secretary of War after Stanton's resignation reassured those who feared that the army might be placed under some extreme Democrat.

As the time drew near for the decision, every possible pressure was brought by the radicals to induce senators to vote for conviction. To convict the President, thirty-six votes were necessary. There were only twelve Democrats in the Senate, but all were known to be in favor of acquittal. When the test came on the 16th of May, seven Republicans voted with the Democrats for acquittal on the eleventh article. Another vote on the 26th of May, on the first and second articles, showed that conviction was not possible. The radical legislative reaction was thus checked at its highest point and the presidency as a part of the American governmental system was no longer in danger. The seven Republicans had, however, signed their own political death warrants; they were never forgiven by the party leaders.

The presidential campaign was beginning to take shape even before the impeachment trial began. Both the Democrats and the reorganized Republicans were turning with longing toward General Grant as a candidate. Though he had always been a Democrat, Nevertheless, when Johnson actually called him a liar and a promise breaker, Grant went over to the radicals and was nominated for President on May 20, 1868, by the National Union Republican party. Schuyler Colfax was the candidate for Vice President. The Democrats, who could have won with Grant and who under good leadership still had a bare chance to win, nominated Horatio Seymour of New York and Francis P. Blair of Missouri. The former had served as war governor of New York, while the latter was considered an extreme Democrat who believed that the radical reconstruction of the South should be stopped, the troops withdrawn, and the people left to form their own governments. The Democratic platform pronounced itself opposed to the reconstruction policy, but Blair's opposition was too extreme for the North. Seymour, more moderate and a skillful campaigner, made headway in the rehabilitation of the Democratic party. The Republican party declared for radical reconstruction and Negro suffrage in the South but held that each Northern State should be allowed to settle the suffrage for itself. It was not a courageous platform, but Grant was popular and carried his party through to success.

The returns showed that in the election Grant had carried twenty-six States with 214 electoral votes, while Seymour had carried only eight States with 80 votes. But an examination of the popular vote, which was 3,000,000 for Grant and 2,700,000 for Seymour, gave the radicals cause for alarm, for it showed that the Democrats had more white votes than the Republicans, whose total included nearly 700,000 blacks. To insure the continuance of the radicals in power, the Fifteenth Amendment was framed and sent out to the States on February 26, 1869. This amendment appeared not only to make safe the Negro majorities in the South but also gave the ballot to the Negroes in a score of Northern States and thus assured, for a time at least, 900,000 Negro voters for the Republican party.

When Johnson's term ended and he gave place to President Grant, four states were still unreconstructed—Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi, in which the reconstruction had failed, and Georgia, which, after accomplishing reconstruction, had again been placed under military rule by Congress. In Virginia, which was too near the capital for such rough work as readmitted Arkansas and Alabama into the Union, the new constitution was so severe in its provisions for disfranchisement that the disgusted district commander would not authorize the expenditure necessary to have it voted on. In Mississippi a similar constitution had failed of adoption, and in Texas the strife of party factions, radical and moderate Republican, had so delayed the framing of the constitution that it had not come to a vote.

The Republican politicians, however, wanted the offices in these States, and Congress by its resolution of February 18, 1869, directed the district commanders to remove all civil officers who could not take the "ironclad" oath and to appoint those who could subscribe to it. An exception, however, was made in favor of the scalawags who had supported reconstruction and whose disabilities had been removed by Congress.

President Grant was anxious to complete the reconstruction and recommended to Congress that the constitutions of Virginia and Mississippi be re-submitted to the people with a separate vote on the disfranchising sections. Congress, now in harmony with the executive, responded by placing the reconstruction of the three states in the hands of the President, but with the proviso that each state must ratify the Fifteenth Amendment. Grant thereupon fixed a time for voting in each state and directed that in Virginia and Mississippi the disfranchising clauses be submitted separately. As a result, the constitutions were ratified but proscription was voted down. The radicals secured control of Mississippi and Texas, but a conservative combination carried Virginia and thus came near keeping the state out of the Union. Finally, during the early months of 1870 the three states were readmitted.

With respect to Georgia a peculiar condition of affairs existed. In June 1868, Georgia had been readmitted with the first of the reconstructed States. The state legislature at once expelled the twenty-seven Negro members, on the ground that the recent legislation and the state constitution gave the Negroes the right to vote but not to hold office. Congress, which had already admitted the Georgia representatives, refused to receive the senators and turned the state back to military control. In 1869-70, Georgia was again reconstructed after a drastic purging of the legislature by the military commander, the reseating of the Negro members, and the ratification of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The state was readmitted to representation in July 1870, after the failure of a strong effort to extend for two years the carpetbag government of the state.

Upon the last states to pass under the radical yoke, heavier conditions were imposed than upon the earlier ones. Not only were they required to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, but the "fundamental conditions" embraced, in addition to the prohibition against future change of the suffrage, a requirement that the Negroes should never be deprived of school and office-holding rights.

The congressional plan of reconstruction had thus been carried through by able leaders in the face of the opposition of a united white South, nearly half the North, the President, the Supreme Court, and in the beginning a majority of Congress. This success was due to the poor leadership of the conservatives and to the ability and solidarity of the radicals led by Stevens and Sumner. The radicals had a definite program; the moderates had not. The object of the radicals was to secure the supremacy in the South by the aid of the Negroes and exclusion of whites. Was this policy politically wise? It was at least temporarily successful. The choice offered by the radicals seemed to lie between military rule for an indefinite period and Negro suffrage; and since most Americans found military rule distasteful, they preferred to try Negro suffrage. But, after all, Negro suffrage had to be supported by military rule, and in the end both failed completely.



CHAPTER VIII. THE UNION LEAGUE OF AMERICA

The elections of 1867-68 showed that the Negroes were well organized under the control of the radical Republican leaders and that their former masters had none of the influence over the blacks in political matters which had been feared by some Northern friends of the Negro and had been hoped for by such Southern leaders as Governor Patton and General Hampton. Before 1865 the discipline of slavery, the influence of the master's family, and of the Southern church had sufficed to control the blacks. But after emancipation they looked to the Federal soldiers and Union officials as the givers of freedom and the guardians of the future.

From the Union soldiers, especially the Negro troops, from the Northern teachers, the missionaries and the organizers of Negro churches, from the Northern officials and traveling politicians, the Negroes learned that their interests were not those of the whites. The attitude of the average white in the South often confirmed this growing estrangement. It was difficult even for the white leaders to explain the riots at Memphis and New Orleans. And those who sincerely wished well for the Negro and who desired to control him for the good of both races could not possibly assure him that he was fit for the suffrage. For even Patton and Hampton must tell him that they knew better than he and that he should follow their advice.

The appeal made to freedmen by the Northern leaders was in every way more forceful, because it bad behind it the prestige of victory in war and for the future it could promise anything. Until 1867, the principal agency in bringing about the separation of the races had been the Freedmen's Bureau which, with its authority, its courts, its rations, clothes, and its "forty acres and a mule," did effective work in breaking down the influence of the master. But to understand fully the almost absolute control exercised over the blacks in 1867-68 by alien adventurers, one must examine the workings of an oath-bound society known as the Union or Loyal League. It was this order, dominated by a few radical whites, which organized, disciplined, and controlled the ignorant Negro masses and paralyzed the influence of the conservative whites.

The Union League of America had its origin in Ohio in the fall of 1862, when the outlook for the Union cause was gloomy. The moderate policies of the Lincoln Administration had alienated those in favor of extreme measures; the Confederates had won military successes in the field; the Democrats had made some gains in the elections; the Copperheads* were actively opposed to the Washington Government; the Knights of the Golden Circle were organizing to resist the continuance of the war; and the Emancipation Proclamation had chilled the loyalty of many Union men, which was everywhere at a low ebb, especially in the Northern cities. It was to counteract these depressing influences that the Union League movement was begun among those who were associated in the work of the United States Sanitary Commission. Observing the threatening state of public opinion, members of this organization proposed that "loyalty be organized, consolidated and made effective."

* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W. Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America"), pp. 156-7, 234-5

The first organization was made by eleven men in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1862. The Philadelphia Union League was organized a month later, and in January 1863, the New York Union League followed. The members were pledged to uncompromising and unconditional loyalty to the Union, to complete subordination of political views to this loyalty, and to the repudiation of any belief in state rights. The other large cities followed the example of Philadelphia and New York, and soon Leagues, connected in a loose federation, were formed all through the North. They were social as well as political in their character and assumed as their task the stimulation and direction of loyal Union opinion.

As the Union armies proceeded to occupy the South, the Union League sent its agents among the disaffected Southern people. Its agents cared for Negro refugees in the contraband camps and in the North. In such work the League cooperated with the various Freedmen's Aid Societies, the Department of Negro Affairs, and later with the Freedmen's Bureau. Part of the work of the League was to distribute campaign literature, and many of the radical pamphlets on reconstruction and the Negro problem bore the Union League imprint. The New York League sent out about seventy thousand copies of various publications, while the Philadelphia League far surpassed this record, circulating within eight years four million five hundred thousand copies of 144 different pamphlets. The literature consisted largely of accounts of "Southern outrages" taken from the reports of Bureau agents and similar sources.

With the close of the Civil War the League did not cease its active interest in things political. It was one of the first organizations to declare for Negro suffrage and the disfranchisement of Confederates; it held steadily to this declaration during the four years following the war; and it continued as a sort of bureau in the radical Republican party for the purpose of controlling the Negro vote in the South. Its representatives were found in the lobbies of Congress demanding extreme measures, endorsing the reconstruction policies of Congress, and condemning the course of the President. After the first year or two of reconstruction, the Leagues in the larger Northern cities began to grow away from the strictly political Union League of America and tended to become mere social clubs for members of the same political belief. The eminently respectable Philadelphia and New York clubs had little in common with the leagues of the Southern and Border States except a general adherence to the radical program.

Even before the end of the war the League was extending its organization into the parts of the Confederacy held by the Federal forces, admitting to membership the army officers and the leading Unionists, though maintaining for the sake of the latter "a discreet secrecy." With the close of the war and the establishment of army posts over the South, the League grew rapidly. The civilians who followed the army, the Bureau agents, the missionaries, and the Northern teachers formed one class of membership; and the loyalists of the hill and mountain country, who had become disaffected toward the Confederate administration and had formed such orders as the Heroes of America, the Red String Band, and the Peace Society, formed another class. Soon there were added to these the deserters, a few old line Whigs who intensely disliked the Democrats, and others who decided to cast their lot with the victors. The disaffected politicians of the up-country, who wanted to be cared for in the reconstruction, saw in the organization a means of dislodging from power the political leaders of the low country. It has been estimated that thirty percent of the white men of the hill and mountain counties of the South joined the Union League in 1865-66. They cared little about the original objects of the order but hoped to make it the nucleus of an anti-Democratic political organization.

But on the admission of Negroes into the lodges or councils controlled by Northern men the native white members began to withdraw. From the beginning the Bureau agents, the teachers, and the preachers had been holding meetings of Negroes, to whom they gave advice about the problems of freedom. Very early these advisers of the blacks grasped the possibilities inherent in their control of the schools, the rationing system, and the churches. By the spring of 1866, the Negroes were widely organized under this leadership, and it needed but slight change to convert the Negro meetings into local councils of the Union League.* As soon as it seemed likely that Congress would win in its struggle with the President the guardians of the Negro planned their campaign for the control of the race. Negro leaders were organized into councils of the League or into Union Republican Clubs. Over the South went the organizers, until by 1868 the last Negroes were gathered into the fold.

* Of these teachers of the local blacks, E. L. Godkin, editor of the New York Nation, who had supported the reconstruction acts, said: "Worse instructors for men emerging from slavery and coming for the first time face to face with the problems of free life than the radical agitators who have undertaken the political guidance of the blacks it would be hard to meet with."

The native whites did not all desert the Union League when the Negroes were brought in. Where the blacks were most numerous the desertion of whites was general, but in the regions where they were few some of the whites remained for several years. The elections of 1868 showed a falling off of the white radical vote from that of 1867, one measure of the extent of loss of whites. From this time forward the order consisted mainly of blacks with enough whites for leaders. In the Black Belt the membership of native whites was discouraged by requiring an oath to the effect that secession was treason. The carpetbagger had found that he could control the Negro without the help of the scalawag. The League organization was soon extended and centralized; in every black district there was a Council; for the state there was a Grand Council; and for the United States there was a National Grand Council with headquarters in New York City.

The influence of the League over the Negro was due in large degree to the mysterious secrecy of the meetings, the weird initiation ceremony that made him feel fearfully good from his head to his heels, the imposing ritual, and the songs. The ritual, it is said, was not used in the North; it was probably adopted for the particular benefit of the African. The would-be Leaguer was informed that the emblems of the order were the altar, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the flag of the Union, censer, sword, gavel, ballot box, sickle, shuttle, anvil, and other emblems of industry. He was told to the accompaniment of clanking chains and groans that the objects of the order were to preserve liberty, to perpetuate the Union, to maintain the laws and the Constitution, to secure the ascendancy of American institutions, to protect, defend, and strengthen all loyal men and members of the Union League in all rights of person and property, to demand the elevation of labor, to aid in the education of laboring men, and to teach the duties of American citizenship. This enumeration of the objects of the League sounded well and was impressive. At this point the Negro was always willing to take an oath of secrecy, after which he was asked to swear with a solemn oath to support the principles of the Declaration of Independence, to pledge himself to resist all attempts to overthrow the United States, to strive for the maintenance of liberty, the elevation of labor, the education of all people in the duties of citizenship, to practice friendship and charity to all of the order, and to support for election or appointment to office only such men as were supporters of these principles and measures.

The council then sang "Hail, Columbia!" and "The Star Spangled Banner," after which an official lectured the candidates, saying that though the designs of traitors had been thwarted, there were yet to be secured legislative triumphs and the complete ascendancy of the true principles of popular government, equal liberty, education and elevation of the workmen, and the overthrow at the ballot box of the old oligarchy of political leaders. After prayer by the chaplain, the room was darkened, alcohol on salt flared up with a ghastly light as the "fire of liberty," and the members joined hands in a circle around the candidate, who was made to place one hand on the flag and, with the other raised, swear again to support the government and to elect true Union men to office. Then placing his hand on a Bible, for the third time he swore to keep his oath, and repeated after the president "the Freedmen's Pledge": "To defend and perpetuate freedom and the Union, I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor. So help me God!" "John Brown's Body" was then sung, the president charged the members in a long speech concerning the principles of the order, and the marshal instructed the neophyte in the signs. To pass one's self as a Leaguer, the "Four L's" had to be given: (1) with right hand raised to heaven, thumb and third finger touching ends over palm, pronounce "Liberty"; (2) bring the hand down over the shoulder and say "Lincoln"; (3) drop the hand open at the side and say "Loyal"; (4) catch the thumb in the vest or in the waistband and pronounce "League." This ceremony of initiation proved a most effective means of impressing and controlling the Negro through his love and fear of secret, mysterious, and midnight mummery. An oath taken in daylight might be forgotten before the next day; not so an oath taken in the dead of night under such impressive circumstances. After passing through the ordeal, the Negro usually remained faithful.

In each populous precinct there was at least one council of the League, and always one for blacks. In each town or city there were two councils, one for the whites, and another, with white officers, for the blacks. The council met once a week, sometimes oftener, nearly always at night, and in a Negro church or schoolhouse. Guards, armed with rifles and shotguns, were stationed about the place of meeting in order to keep away intruders. Members of some councils made it a practice to attend the meetings armed as if for battle. In these meetings the Negroes listened to inflammatory speeches by the would-be statesmen of the new regime; here they were drilled in a passionate conviction that their interests and those of the Southern whites were eternally at war.

White men who joined the order before the Negroes were admitted and who left when the latter became members asserted that the Negroes were taught in these meetings that the only way to have peace and plenty, to get "the forty acres and a mule," was to kill some of the leading whites in each community as a warning to others. In North Carolina twenty-eight barns were burned in one county by Negroes who believed that Governor Holden, the head of the State League, had ordered it. The council in Tuscumbia, Alabama, received advice from Memphis to use the torch because the blacks were at war with the white race. The advice was taken. Three men went in front of the council as an advance guard, three followed with coal oil and fire, and others guarded the rear. The plan was to burn the whole town, but first one Negro and then another insisted on having some white man's house spared because "he is a good man." In the end no residences were burned, and a happy compromise was effected by burning the Female Academy. Three of the leaders were afterwards lynched.

The general belief of the whites was that the ultimate object of the order was to secure political power and thus bring about on a large scale the confiscation of the property of Confederates, and meanwhile to appropriate and destroy the property of their political opponents wherever possible. Chicken houses, pigpens, vegetable gardens, and orchards were visited by members returning from the midnight conclaves. During the presidential campaign of 1868, the North Carolina League sent out circular instructions to the blacks advising them to drill regularly and to join the militia, for if Grant were not elected the Negroes would go back to slavery; if he were elected, the Negroes were to have farms, mules, and offices.

As soon as possible after the war the Negroes had supplied themselves with guns and dogs as badges of freedom. They carried their guns to the League meetings, often marching in military formation, went through the drill there, marched home again along the roads, shouting, firing, and indulging in boasts and threats against persons whom they disliked. Later, military parades in the daytime were much favored. Several hundred Negroes would march up and down the streets, abusing whites, and shoving them off the sidewalk or out of the road. But on the whole, there was very little actual violence, though the whites were much alarmed at times. That outrages were comparatively few was due, not to any sensible teachings of the leaders, but to the fundamental good nature of the blacks, who were generally content with mere impudence.

The relations between the races, indeed, continued on the whole to be friendly until 1867-68. For a while, in some localities before the advent of the League, and in others where the Bureau was conducted by native magistrates, the Negroes looked to their old masters for guidance and advice; and the latter, for the good of both races, were most eager to retain a moral control over the blacks. They arranged barbecues and picnics for the Negroes, made speeches, gave good advice, and believed that everything promised well. Sometimes the Negroes themselves arranged the festival and invited prominent whites, for whom a separate table attended by Negro waiters was reserved; and after dinner there followed speeches by both whites and blacks.

With the organization of the League, the Negroes grew more reserved, and finally became openly unfriendly to the whites. The League alone, however, was not responsible for this change. The League and the Bureau had to some extent the same personnel, and it is frequently impossible to distinguish clearly between the influence of the two. In many ways the League was simply the political side of the Bureau. The preaching and teaching missionaries were also at work. And apart from the organized influences at work, the poor whites never laid aside their hostility towards the blacks, bond or free.

When the campaigns grew exciting, the discipline of the order was used to prevent the Negroes from attending Democratic meetings and hearing Democratic speakers. The leaders even went farther and forbade the attendance of the blacks at political meetings where the speakers were not endorsed by the League. Almost invariably the scalawag disliked the Leaguer, black or white, and as a political teacher often found himself proscribed by the League. At a Republican mass meeting in Alabama, a white Republican who wanted to make a speech was shouted down by the Negroes because he was "opposed to the Loyal League." He then went to another place to speak but was followed by the crowd, which refused to allow him to say anything. All Republicans in good standing had to join the League and swear that secession was treason—a rather stiff dose for the scalawag. Judge (later Governor) David P. Lewis, of Alabama, was a member for a short while but he soon became disgusted and published a denunciation of the order. Albion W. Tourgee, the author, a radical judge, was the first chief of the League in North Carolina and was succeeded by Governor Holden. In Alabama, Generals Swayne, Spencer, and Warner, all candidates for the United States Senate, hastened to join the order.

As soon as a candidate was nominated by the League, it was the duty of every member to support him actively. Failure to do so resulted in a fine or other more severe punishment, and members who had been expelled were still considered under the control of the officials. The League was, in fact, the machine of the radical party, and all candidates had to be governed by its edicts. As the Montgomery Council declared, the Union League was "the right arm of the Union-Republican party in the United States."

Every Negro was ex colore a member or under the control of the League. In the opinion of the League, white Democrats were bad enough, but black Democrats were not to be tolerated. It was almost necessary, as a measure of personal safety, for each black to support the radical program. It was possible in some cases for a Negro to refrain from taking an active part in political affairs. He might even fail to vote. But it was actually dangerous for a black to be a Democrat; that is, to try to follow his old master in politics. The whites in many cases were forced to advise their few faithful black friends to vote the radical ticket in order to escape mistreatment. Those who showed Democratic leanings were proscribed in Negro society and expelled from Negro churches; the Negro women would not "proshay" (appreciate) a black Democrat. Such a one was sure to find that influence was being brought to bear upon his dusky sweetheart or his wife to cause him to see the error of his ways, and persistent adherence to the white party would result in his losing her. The women were converted to radicalism before the men, and they almost invariably used their influence strongly in behalf of the League. If moral suasion failed to cause the delinquent to see the light, other methods were used. Threats were common and usually sufficed. Fines were levied by the League on recalcitrant members. In case of the more stubborn, a sound beating was effective to bring about a change of heart. The offending party was "bucked and gagged," or he was tied by the thumbs and thrashed. Usually the sufferer was too afraid to complain of the way he was treated.

Some of the methods of the Loyal League were similar to those of the later Ku Klux Klan. Anonymous warnings were sent to obnoxious individuals, houses were burned, notices were posted at night in public places and on the houses of persons who had incurred the hostility of the order. In order to destroy the influence of the whites where kindly relations still existed, an "exodus order" issued through the League directed all members to leave their old homes and obtain work elsewhere. Some of the blacks were loath to comply with this order, but to remonstrances from the whites the usual reply was: "De word done sent to de League. We got to go." For special meetings the Negroes were in some regions called together by signal guns. In this way the call for a gathering went out over a county in a few minutes and a few hours later nearly all the members in the county assembled at the appointed place.

Negroes as organizing agents were inclined to go to extremes and for that reason were not so much used. In Bullock County, Alabama, a council of the League was organized under the direction of a Negro emissary, who proceeded to assume the government of the community. A list of crimes and punishments was adopted, a court with various officials was established, and during the night the Negroes who opposed the new regime were arrested. But the black sheriff and his deputy were in turn arrested by the civil authorities. The Negroes then organized for resistance, flocked into the county seat, and threatened to exterminate the whites and take possession of the county. Their agents visited the plantations and forced the laborers to join them by showing orders purporting to be from General Swayne, the commander in the state, giving them the authority to kill all who resisted them. Swayne, however, sent out detachments of troops and arrested fifteen of the ringleaders, and the League government collapsed.

After it was seen that existing political institutions were to be overturned in the process of reconstruction, the white councils of the League and, to a certain extent, the Negro councils were converted into training schools for the leaders of the new party soon to be formed in the state by act of Congress. The few whites who were in control were unwilling to admit more white members to share in the division of the spoils; terms of admission became more stringent, and, especially after the passage of the reconstruction acts in March 1867, many white applicants were rejected. The alien element from the North was in control and as a result, where the blacks were numerous, the largest plums fell to the carpetbaggers. The Negro leaders—the politicians, preachers, and teachers—trained in the League acted as subordinates to the whites and were sent out to drum up the country Negroes when elections drew near. The Negroes were given minor positions when offices were more plentiful than carpetbaggers. Later, after some complaint, a larger share of the offices fell to them. The League counted its largest white membership in 1865-66, and after that date it steadily decreased. The largest Negro membership was recorded in 1867 and 1868. The total membership was never made known. In North Carolina the order claimed from seventy-five thousand to one hundred and twenty-five thousand members; in states with larger Negro populations the membership was probably quite as large. After the election of 1868, only the councils in the towns remained active, many of them transformed into political clubs, loosely organized under local political leaders. The plantation Negro needed less looking after, and except in the largest towns he became a kind of visiting member of the council in the town. The League as a political organization gradually died out by 1870.*

* The Ku Klux Klan had much to do with the decline of the organization. The League as the ally and successor of the Freedmen's Bureau was one of the causes of the Ku Klux movement, because it helped to create the conditions which made such a movement inevitable. As early as 1870 the radical leaders missed the support formerly given by the League, and an urgent appeal was sent out all over the South from headquarters in New York advocating its reestablishment to assist in carrying the elections of 1870.

The League had served its purpose. It had enabled a few outsiders to control the Negro by separating the races politically and it had compelled the Negroes to vote as radicals for several years, when without its influence they would either not have voted at all or would have voted as Democrats along with their former masters. The order was necessary to the existence of the radical party in the Black Belt. No ordinary political organization could have welded the blacks into a solid party. The Freedmen's Bureau, which had much influence over the Negroes, was too weak in numbers to control the Negroes in politics. The League finally absorbed the personnel of the Bureau and turned its prestige and its organization to political advantage.



CHAPTER IX. CHURCH AND SCHOOL

Reconstruction in the state was closely related to reconstruction in the churches and the schools. Here also were to be found the same hostile elements: Negro and white, Unionist and Confederate, victor and vanquished. The church was at that time an important institution in the South, more so than in the North, and in both sections more important than it is today. It was inevitable, therefore, that ecclesiastical reconstruction should give rise to bitter feelings.

Something should be said of conditions in the churches when the Federal armies occupied the land. The Southern organizations had lost many ministers and many of their members, and frequently their buildings were used as hospitals or had been destroyed. Their administration was disorganized and their treasuries were empty. The Unionists, scattered here and there but numerous in the mountain districts, no longer wished to attend the Southern churches.

The military censorship in church matters, which continued for a year in some districts, was irritating, especially in the Border States and in the Union districts where Northern preachers installed by the army were endeavoring to remain against the will of the people. Mobs sometimes drove them out; others were left to preach to empty houses or to a few Unionists and officers, while the congregation withdrew to build a new church. The problems of Negro membership in the white churches and of the future relations of the Northern and Southern denominations were pressing for settlement.

All Northern organizations acted in 1865 upon the assumption that a reunion of the churches must take place and that the divisions existing before the war should not be continued, since slavery, the cause of the division, had been destroyed. But they insisted that the reunion must take place upon terms named by the "loyal" churches, that the Negroes must also come under "loyal" religious direction, and that tests must be applied to the Confederate sinners asking for admission, in order that the enormity of their crimes should be made plain to them. But this policy did not succeed. The Confederates objected to being treated as "rebels and traitors" and to "sitting upon stools of repentance" before they should be received again into the fold.

Only two denominations were reunited—the Methodist Protestant, the northern section of which came over to the southern, and the Protestant Episcopal, in which moderate counsels prevailed and into which Southerners were welcomed back. The Southern Baptists maintained their separate existence and reorganized the Southern Baptist Convention, to which came many of the Baptist associations in the Border States; the Catholics did not divide before 1861 and therefore had no reconstruction problems to solve; and the smaller denominations maintained the organizations which they had before 1861. A Unionist preacher testified before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that even the Southern Quakers "are about as decided in regard to the respectability of secession as any other class of people."

Two other great Southern churches, the Presbyterian and the Methodist Episcopal, grew stronger after the Civil War. The tendency toward reunion of the Presbyterians was checked when one Northern branch declared as "a condition precedent to the admission of southern applicants that these confess as sinful all opinions before held in regard to slavery, nullification, rebellion and slavery, and stigmatize secession as a crime and the withdrawal of the southern churches as a schism." Another Northern group declared that southern ministers must be placed on probation and must either prove their loyalty or profess repentance for disloyalty and repudiate their former opinions. As a result several Presbyterian bodies in the South joined in a strong union, to which also adhered the synods of several Border States.

The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was confronted with conditions similar to those which prevented the reunion of the Presbyterians. The Northern church, according to the declaration of its authorities, also came down to divide the spoils and to "disintegrate and absorb" the "schismatic" Southern churches. Already many Southern pulpits were filled with Northern Methodist ministers placed there under military protection; and when they finally realized that reunion was not possible, these Methodist worthies resolved to occupy the late Confederacy as a mission field and to organize congregations of blacks and whites who were "not tainted with treason." Bishops and clergymen charged with this work carried it on vigorously for a few years in close connection with political reconstruction.

The activities of the Northern Methodists stimulated the Southern Methodists to a quick reorganization. The surviving bishops met in August 1865, and bound together their shaken church. In reply to suggestions of reunion they asserted that the Northern Methodists had become "incurably radical," were too much involved in politics, and, further, that they had, without right, seized and were still holding Southern church buildings. They objected also to the way the Northern church referred to the Southerners as "schismatics" and to the Southern church as one built on slavery and therefore, now that slavery was gone, to be reconstructed. The bishops warned their people against the missionary efforts of the Northern brethren and against the attempts to "disintegrate and absorb" Methodism in the South. Within five years after the war, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was greatly increased in numbers by the accession of conferences in Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, and even from above the Ohio, while the Northern Methodist Church was able to organize only a few white congregations outside of the stronger Unionist districts, but continued to labor in the South as a missionary field.*

* The church situation after the war was well described in 1866 by an editorial writer in the "Nation" who pointed out that the Northern churches thought the South determined to make the religious division permanent, though "slavery no longer furnishes a pretext for separation." "Too much pains were taken to bring about an ecclesiastical reunion, and irritating offers of reconciliation are made by the Northern churches, all based on the assumption that the South has not only sinned, but sinned knowingly, in slavery and in war. We expect them to be penitent and to gladly accept our offers of forgiveness. But the Southern people look upon a 'loyal' missionary as a political emissary, and 'loyal' men do not at present possess the necessary qualifications for evangelizing the Southerners or softening their hearts, and are sure not to succeed in doing so. We look upon their defeat as retribution and expect them to do the same. It will do no good if we tell the Southerner that 'we will forgive them if they will confess that they are criminals, offer to pray with them, preach with them, and labor with them over their hideous sins.'"

But if the large Southern churches held their white membership and even gained in numbers and territory, they fought a losing fight to retain their black members. It was assumed by Northern ecclesiastics that whether a reunion of whites took place or not, the Negroes would receive spiritual guidance from the North. This was necessary, they said, because the Southern whites were ignorant and impoverished and because "the state of mind among even the best classes of Southern whites rendered them incapable... of doing justice to the people whom they had so long persistently wronged." Further, it was also necessary for political reasons to remove the Negroes from Southern religious control.

For obvious reasons, however, the Southern churches wanted to hold their Negro members. They declared themselves in favor of Negro education and of better organized religious work among the blacks, and made every sort of accommodation to hold them. The Baptists organized separate congregations, with white or black pastors as desired, and associations of black churches. In 1866 the Methodist General Conference authorized separate congregations, quarterly conferences, annual conferences, even a separate jurisdiction, with Negro preachers, presiding elders, and bishops—but all to no avail. Every, Northern political, religious, or military agency in the South worked for separation, and Negro preachers were not long in seeing the greater advantages which they would have in independent churches.

Much of the separate organization was accomplished in mutual good will, particularly in the Baptist ranks. The Reverend I. T. Tichenor, a prominent Baptist minister, has described the process as it took place in the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. The church had nine hundred members, of whom six hundred were black. The Negroes received a regular organization of their own under the supervision of the white pastors. When a separation of the two bodies was later deemed desirable, it was inaugurated by a conference of the Negroes which passed a resolution couched in the kindliest terms, suggesting the wisdom of the division, and asking the concurrence of the white church in such action. The white church cordially approved the movement, and the two bodies united in erecting a suitable house of worship for the Negroes. Until the new church was completed, both congregations continued to occupy jointly the old house of worship. The new house was paid for in large measure by the white members of the church and by individuals in the community. As soon as it was completed, the colored church moved into it with its pastor, board of deacons, committees of all sorts, and the whole machinery of church life went into action without a jar. Similar accommodations occurred in all the states of the South.

The Methodists lost the greater part of their Negro membership to two organizations which came down from the North in 1865—the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion. Large numbers also went over to the Northern Methodist Church. After losing nearly three hundred thousand members, the Southern Methodists came to the conclusion that the remaining seventy-eight thousand Negroes would be more comfortable in a separate organization and therefore began in 1866 the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, with bishops, conferences, and all the accompaniments of the parent Methodist Church, which continued to give friendly aid but exercised no control. For many years the Colored Methodist Church was under fire from the other Negro denominations, who called it the "rebel," the "Democratic," the "old slavery" church.

The Negro members of the Cumberland Presbyterians were similarly set off into a small African organization. The Southern Presbyterians and the Episcopalians established separate congregations and missions under white supervision but sanctioned no independent Negro organization. Consequently the Negroes soon deserted these churches and went with their own kind.

Resentment at the methods employed by the Northern religious carpetbaggers was strong among the Southern whites. "Emissaries of Christ and the radical party" they were called by one Alabama leader. Governor Lindsay of the same state asserted that the Northern missionaries caused race hatred by teaching the Negroes to regard the whites as their natural enemies, who, if possible, would put them back in slavery. Others were charged with teaching that to be on the safe side, the blacks should get into a Northern church, and that "Christ died for Negroes and Yankees, not for rebels."

The scalawags, also, developed a dislike of the Northern church work among the Negroes, and it was impossible to organize mixed congregations. Of the Reverend A. S. Lakin, a well-known agent of the Northern Methodist Church in Alabama, Nicholas Davis, a North Alabama Unionist and scalawag, said to the Ku Klux Committee: "The character of his [Lakin's] speech was this: to teach the Negroes that every man that was born and raised in the Southern country was their enemy, that there was no use trusting them, no matter what they said—if they said they were for the Union or anything else. 'No use talking, they are your enemies.' And he made a pretty good speech, too; awful; a hell of a one; ... inflammatory and game, too.... It was enough to provoke the devil. Did all the mischief he could... I tell you, that old fellow is a hell of an old rascal."

For a time the white churches were annoyed by intrusions of strange blacks set on by those who were bent on separating the races. Frequently there were feuds in white or black congregations over the question of joining some Northern body. Disputes over church property also arose and continued for years. Lakin, referred to above, was charged with "stealing" Negro congregations and uniting them with the Cincinnati Conference without their knowledge. The Negroes were urged to demand title to all buildings formerly used for Negro worship, and the Constitutional Convention of Alabama in 1867 directed that such property must be turned over to them when claimed.

The agents of the Northern churches were not greatly different from other carpetbaggers and adventurers taking advantage of the general confusion to seize a little power. Many were unscrupulous; others, sincere and honest but narrow, bigoted, and intolerant, filled with distrust of the Southern whites and with corresponding confidence in the blacks and in themselves. The missionary and church publications were quite as severe on the Southern people as any radical Congressman. The publications of the Freedmen's Aid Society furnish illustrations of the feelings and views of those engaged in the Southern work. They in turn were made to feel the effects of a merciless social proscription. For this some of them cared not at all, while others or their families felt it keenly. One woman missionary wrote that she was delighted when a Southern white would speak to her. A preacher in Virginia declared that "the females, those especially whose pride has been humbled, are more intense in their bitterness and endeavor to keep up a social ostracism against Union and Northern people." The Ku Klux raids were directed against preachers and congregations whose conduct was disagreeable to the whites. Lakin asserted that while he was conducting a great revival meeting among the hills of northern Alabama, Governor Smith and other prominent and sinful scalawag politicians were there "under conviction" and about to become converted. But in came the Klan and the congregation scattered.

Smith and the others were so angry and frightened that their good feelings were dissipated, and the devil reentered them, so that Lakin said he was never able to "get a hold on them" again. For the souls lost that night he held the Klan responsible. Lakin told several marvelous stories of his hairbreadth escapes from death by assassination which, if true, would be enough to ruin the reputation of northern Alabama men for marksmanship.

The reconstruction ended with conditions in the churches similar to those in politics: the races were separated and unfriendly; Northern and Southern church organizations were divided; and between them, especially in the border and mountain districts, there existed factional quarrels of a political origin, for every Northern Methodist was a Republican and every Southern Methodist was a Democrat.

The schools of the South, like the churches and political institutions, were thrown into the melting pot of reconstruction. The spirit in which the work was begun may be judged from the tone of the addresses made at a meeting of the National Teachers Association in 1865. The president, S. S. Greene, declared that "the old slave States are to be the new missionary ground for the national school teacher." Francis Wayland, the former president of Brown University, remarked that "it has been a war of education and patriotism against ignorance and barbarism." President Hill of Harvard spoke of the "new work of spreading knowledge and intellectual culture over the regions that sat in darkness." Other speakers asserted that the leading Southern whites were as much opposed to free schools as to free governments and "we must treat them as western farmers do the stumps in their clearings, work around them and let them rot out"; that the majority of the whites were more ignorant than the slaves; and that the Negro must be educated and strengthened against "the wiles, the guile, and hate of his baffled masters and their minions." The New England Freedmen's Aid Society considered it necessary to educate the Negro "as a counteracting influence against the evil councils and designs of the white freemen."

The tasks that confronted the Southern States in 1865-67 were two: first, to restore the shattered school systems of the whites; and second, to arrange for the education of the Negroes. Education of the Negro slave had been looked upon as dangerous and had been generally forbidden. A small number of Negroes could read and write, but there were at the close of the war no schools for the children. Before 1861, each state had developed at least the outlines of a school system. Though hindered in development by the sparseness of the population and by the prevalence in some districts of the Virginia doctrine that free schools were only for the poor, public schools were nevertheless in existence in 1861. Academies and colleges, however, were thronged with students. When the war ended, the public schools were disorganized, and the private academies and the colleges were closed. Teachers and students had been dispersed; buildings had been burned or used for hospitals and laboratories; and public libraries had virtually disappeared.

The colleges made efforts to open in the fall of 1865. Only one student presented himself at the University of Alabama for matriculation; but before June 1866, the stronger colleges were again in operation. The public or semi-public schools for the whites also opened in the fall. In the cities where Federal military authorities had brought about the employment of Northern teachers, there was some friction. In New Orleans, for example, the teachers required the children to sing Northern songs and patriotic airs. When the Confederates were restored to power, these teachers were dismissed.

The movement toward Negro education was general throughout the South. Among the blacks themselves there was an intense desire to learn. They wished to read the Bible, to be preachers, to be as the old master and not have to work. Day and night and Sunday they crowded the schools. According to an observer,* "not only are individuals seen at study, and under the most untoward circumstances, but in very many places I have found what I will call 'native schools,' often rude and very imperfect, but there they are, a group, perhaps, of all ages, trying to learn. Some young man, some woman, or old preacher, in cellar, or shed, or corner of a Negro meeting-house, with the alphabet in hand, or a town spelling-book, is their teacher. All are full of enthusiasm with the new knowledge the book is imparting to them."

* J. W. Alvord, Superintendent of Schools for the Freedmen's Bureau, 1866.

Not only did the Negroes want schooling, but both the North and the South proposed to give it to them. Neither side was actuated entirely by altruistic motives. A Hampton Institute teacher in later days remarked: "When the combat was over and the Yankee school-ma'am followed in the train of the northern armies, the business of educating the Negroes was a continuation of hostilities against the vanquished and was so regarded to a considerable extent on both sides."

The Southern churches, through their bishops and clergy, the newspapers, and prominent individuals such as J. L. M. Curry, John B. Gordon, J. L. Orr, Governors Brown, Moore, and Patton, came out in favor of Negro education. Of this movement General Swayne said: "Quite early.... the several religious denominations took strong ground in favor of the education of the freedmen. The principal argument was an appeal to sectional and sectarian prejudice, lest, the work being inevitable, the influence which must come from it be realized by others; but it is believed that this was but the shield and weapon which men of unselfish principle found necessary at first." The newspapers took the attitude that the Southern whites should teach the Negroes because it was their duty, because it was good policy, and because if they did not do so some one else would. The "Advertiser" of Montgomery stated that education was a danger in slavery times but that under freedom ignorance became a danger. For a time there were numerous schools taught by crippled Confederates and by Southern women.

But the education of the Negro, like his religious training, was taken from the control of the Southern white and was placed under the direction of the Northern teachers and missionaries who swarmed into the country under the fostering care of the Freedmen's Bureau, the Northern churches, and the various Freedmen's Aid Societies. In three years the Bureau spent six million dollars on Negro schools and everywhere it exercised supervision over them. The teachers pursued a policy akin to that of the religious leaders. One Southerner likened them to the "plagues of Egypt," another described them as "saints, fools, incendiaries, fakirs, and plain business men and women." A Southern woman remarked that "their spirit was often high and noble so far as the black man's elevation was concerned, but toward the white it was bitter, judicial, and unrelenting." The Northern teachers were charged with ignorance of social conditions, with fraternizing with the blacks, and with teaching them that the Southerners were traitors, "murderers of Lincoln," who had been cruel taskmasters and who now wanted to restore servitude.

The reaction against Negro education, which began to show itself before reconstruction was inaugurated, found expression in the view of most whites that "schooling ruins a Negro." A more intelligent opinion was that of J. L. M. Curry, a lifelong advocate of Negro education:

"It is not just to condemn the Negro for the education which he received in the early years after the war. That was the period of reconstruction, the saturnalia of misgovernment, the greatest possible hindrance to the progress of the freedmen.... The education was unsettling, demoralizing, [and it] pandered to a wild frenzy for schooling as a quick method of reversing social and political conditions. Nothing could have been better devised for deluding the poor Negro and making him the tool, the slave of corrupt taskmasters. Education is a natural consequence of citizenship and enfranchisement... of freedom and humanity. But with deliberate purpose to subject the Southern States to Negro domination, and secure the States permanently for partisan ends, the education adopted was contrary to commonsense, to human experience, to all noble purposes. The curriculum was for a people in the highest degree of civilization; the aptitude and capabilities and needs of the Negro were wholly disregarded. Especial stress was laid on classics and liberal culture to bring the race per saltum to the same plane with their former masters, and realize the theory of social and political equality. A race more highly civilized, with best heredities and environments, could not have been coddled with more disregard of all the teachings of human history and the necessities of the race. Colleges and universities, established and conducted by the Freedmen's Bureau and Northern churches and societies, sprang up like mushrooms, and the teachers, ignorant, fanatical, without self-poise, proceeded to make all possible mischief. It is irrational, cruel, to hold the Negro, under such strange conditions, responsible for all the ill consequences of bad education, unwise teachers, reconstruction villainies, and partisan schemes."

* Quoted in "Proceedings of the Montgomery Conference on Race Problems" (1900), p. 128.

Education was to be looked upon as a handmaid to a thorough reconstruction, and its general character and aim were determined by the Northern teachers. Each convention framed a more or less complicated school system and undertook to provide for its support. The Negroes in the conventions were anxious for free schools; the conservatives were willing; but the carpetbaggers and a few mulatto leaders insisted in several States upon mixed schools. Only in Louisiana and South Carolina did the constitutions actually forbid separate schools; in Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas the question was left open, to the embarrassment of the whites. Generally the blacks showed no desire for mixed schools unless urged to it by the carpetbaggers. In the South Carolina convention, a mulatto thus argued in favor of mixed schools: "The gentleman from Newberry said he was afraid we were taking a wrong course to remove these prejudices. The most natural method to effect this object would be to allow children when five or six years of age to mingle in schools together and associate generally. Under such training, prejudice must eventually die out; but if we postpone it until they become men and women, prejudice will be so established that no mortal can obliterate it. This, I think, is a sufficient reply to the argument of the gentleman."

The state systems were top-heavy with administrative machinery and were officered by incompetent and corrupt officials. Such men as Cloud in Alabama, Cardozo in Mississippi, Conway in Louisiana, and Jillson in South Carolina are fair samples of them. Much of the personnel was taken over from the Bureau teaching force. The school officials were no better than the other officeholders.

The first result of the attempt to use the schools as an instrument of reconstruction ended in the ruin of several state universities. The faculties of the Universities of North Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama were made radical and the institutions thereupon declined to nothing. The Negroes, unable to control the faculty of the University of South Carolina, forced Negro students in and thus got possession. In Louisiana the radical legislature cut off all funds because the university would not admit Negroes. The establishment of the land grant colleges was an occasion for corruption and embezzlement.

The common schools were used for radical ends. The funds set aside for them by the state constitutions or appropriated by the legislatures for these schools seldom reached their destination without being lessened by embezzlement or by plain stealing. Frequently the auditor, or the treasurer, or even the legislature diverted the school funds to other purposes. Suffice it to say that all of the reconstruction systems broke down financially after a brief existence.

The mixed school provisions in Louisiana and South Carolina and the uncertainty of the educational situation in other States caused white children to stay away from the public schools. For several years the Negroes were better provided than the whites, having for themselves both all the public schools and also those supported by private benevolence. In Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina the whites could get no money for schoolhouses, while large sums were spent on Negro schools. The Peabody Board, then recently inaugurated,* refused to cooperate with school officials in the mixed school states and, when criticized, replied: "It is well known that we are helping the white children of Louisiana as being the more destitute from the fact of their unwillingness to attend mixed schools."

* To administer the fund bequeathed by George Peabody of Massachusetts to promote education in the Southern States. See "The New South", by Holland Thompson (in "The Chronicles of America").

As was to be expected, the whites criticized the attitude of the school officials, disapproved of the attempts made in the schools to teach the children radical ideas, and objected to the contents of the history texts and the "Freedmen's Readers." A white school board in Mississippi, by advertising for a Democratic teacher for a Negro school, drew the fire of a radical editor who inquired: "What is the motive by which this call for a 'competent Democratic teacher' is prompted? The most damning that has ever moved the heart of man. It is to use the vote and action of a human being as a means by which to enslave him. The treachery and villainy of these rebels stands without parallel in the history of men."

A Negro politician has left this account of a radical recitation in a Florida Negro school:

After finishing the arithmetic lesson they must next go through the catechism:

"Who is the 'Publican Government of the State of Florida?" Answer: "Governor Starns."

"Who made him Governor?" Answer: "The colored people."

"Who is trying to get him out of his seat?" Answer: "The Democrats, Conover, and some white and black Liberal Republicans."

"What should the colored people do with the men who is trying to get Governor Starns out of his seat?" Answer: "They should kill them."....

This was done that the patrons, some of whom could not read, would be impressed by the expressions of their children, and would be ready to put any one to death who would come out into the country and say anything against Governor Starns.

The native white teachers soon dropped out of Negro schools, and those from the North met with the same social persecution as the white church workers. The White League and Ku Klux Klan drove off obnoxious teachers, whipped some, burned Negro schoolhouses, and in various other ways manifested the reaction which was rousing the whites against Negro schools.

The several agencies working for Negro education gave some training to hundreds of thousands of blacks, but the whites asserted that, like the church work, it was based on a wrong spirit and resulted in evil as well as in good. Free schools failed in reconstruction because of the dishonesty or incompetence of the authorities and because of the unsettled race question. It was not until the turn of the century that the white schools were again as good as they had been before 1861. After the reconstruction native whites as teachers of Negro schools were impossible in most places. The hostile feelings of the whites resulted and still result in a limitation of Negro schools. The best thing for Negro schools that came out of reconstruction was Armstrong's Hampton Institute program, which, however, was quite opposed to the spirit of reconstruction education.



CHAPTER X. CARPETBAG AND NEGRO RULE

The Southern States reconstructed by Congress were subject for periods of varying length to governments designed by radical Northerners and imposed by elements thrown to the surface in the upheaval of Southern society. Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina each had a brief experience with these governments; other States escaped after four or five years, while Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were not delivered from this domination until 1876. The states which contained large numbers of Negroes had, on the whole, the worst experience. Here the officials were ignorant or corrupt, frauds upon the public were the rule, not the exception, and all of the reconstruction governments were so conducted that they could secure no support from the respectable elements of the electorate.

The fundamental cause of the failure of these governments was the character of the new ruling class. Every state, except perhaps Virginia, was under the control of a few able leaders from the North generally called carpetbaggers and of a few native white radicals contemptuously designated scalawags. These were kept in power by Negro voters, to some seven hundred thousand of whom the ballot had been given by the reconstruction acts. The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870, brought the total in the former slave states to 931,000, with about seventy-five thousand more Negroes in the North. The Negro voters were most numerous, comparatively, in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. There were a few thousand carpetbaggers in each State, with, at first, a much larger number of scalawags. The latter, who were former Unionists, former Whigs, Confederate deserters, and a few unscrupulous politicians, were most numerous in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The better class, however, rapidly left the radical party as the character of the new regime became evident, taking with them whatever claims the party had to respectability, education, political experience, and property.

The conservatives, hopelessly reduced by the operation of disfranchising laws, were at first not well organized, nor were they at any time as well led as in antebellum days. In 1868, about one hundred thousand of them were forbidden to vote and about two hundred thousand were disqualified from holding office. The abstention policy of 1867-68 resulted in an almost complete withdrawal of the influence of the conservatives for the two years, 1868-70. As a class they were regarded by the dominant party in state and nation as dangerous and untrustworthy and were persecuted in such irritating ways that many became indifferent to the appeals of civil duty. They formed a solid but almost despairing opposition in the black districts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina. For the leaders the price of amnesty was conversion to radicalism, but this price few would pay.

The new state governments possessed certain characteristics in common. Since only a small number of able men were available for office, full powers of administration, including appointment and removal, were concentrated in the hands of the governor. He exercised a wide control over public funds and had authority to organize and command militia and constabulary and to call for Federal troops. The numerous administrative boards worked with the sole object of keeping their party in power. Officers were several times as numerous as under the old regime, and all of them received higher salaries and larger contingent fees. The moral support behind the government was that of President Grant and the United States army, not that of a free and devoted people.

Of the twenty men who served as governors, eight were scalawags and twelve were carpetbaggers, men who were abler than the scalawags and who had much more than an equal share of the spoils. The scalawags, such as Brownlow of Tennessee, Smith of Alabama, and Holden of North Carolina, were usually honest but narrow, vindictive men, filled with fear and hate of the conservative whites.

Of the carpetbaggers half were personally honest, but all were unscrupulous in politics.' Some were flagrantly dishonest.* Governor Moses of South Carolina was several times bribed and at one time, according to his own statement, received $15,000 for his vote as speaker of the House of Representatives. Governor Stearns of Florida was charged with stealing government supplies from the Negroes; and it was notorious that Warmoth and Kellogg of Louisiana, each of whom served only one term, retired with large fortunes. Warmoth, indeed, went so far as to declare: "Corruption is the fashion. I do not pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics."

The judiciary was no better than the executive. The chief justice of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina who could not read.

Other officers were of the same stripe. Leslie, a South Carolina carpetbagger, declared that "South Carolina has no right to be a state unless she can support her statesmen," and he proceeded to live up to this principle. The manager of the state railroad of Georgia, when asked how he had been able to accumulate twenty or thirty thousand dollars on a two or three thousand dollar salary, replied, "By the exercise of the most rigid economy." A North Carolina Negro legislator was found on one occasion chuckling as he counted some money. "What are you laughing at, Uncle?" he was asked. "Well, boss, I'se been sold 'leben times in my life and dis is de fust time I eber got de money." Godkin, in the "Nation", said that the Georgia officials were "probably as bad a lot of political tricksters and adventurers as ever got together in one place." This description will fit equally well the white officials of all the reconstructed states. Many of the Negroes who attained public office showed themselves apt pupils of their carpetbag masters but were seldom permitted to appropriate a large share of the plunder. In Florida the Negro members of the legislature, thinking that they should have a part of the bribe and loot money which their carpetbag masters were said to be receiving, went so far as to appoint what was known as a "smelling committee" to locate the good things and secure a share.

From 1868 to 1870, the legislatures of seven states were overwhelmingly radical and in several the radical majority held control for four, six, or eight years. Negroes were most numerous in the legislatures of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, and everywhere the votes of these men were for sale. In Alabama and Louisiana, Negro legislators had a fixed price for their votes: for example, six hundred dollars would buy a senator in Louisiana. In South Carolina, Negro government appeared at its worst. A vivid description of the Legislature of this State in which the Negroes largely outnumbered the whites is given by James S. Pike, a Republican journalist*:

*Pike, "The Prostrate State", pp. 12 ff.

"In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw, invested with the functions of government. It is the dregs of the population habilitated in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them the rule of ignorance and corruption.... It is barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force. It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet. And, though it is done without malice and without vengeance, it is nevertheless none the less completely and absolutely done.... We will enter the House of Representatives. Here sit one hundred and twenty-four members. Of these, twenty-three are white men, representing the remains of the old civilization. These are good-looking, substantial citizens. They are men of weight and standing in the communities they represent. They are all from the hill country. The frosts of sixty and seventy winters whiten the heads of some among them. There they sit, grim and silent. They feel themselves to be but loose stones, thrown in to partially obstruct a current they are powerless to resist....

"This dense Negro crowd... do the debating, the squabbling, the lawmaking, and create all the clamor and disorder of the body. These twenty-three white men are but the observers, the enforced auditors of the dull and clumsy imitation of a deliberative body, whose appearance in their present capacity is at once a wonder and a shame to modern civilization.... The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the doorkeepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black. At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costumes, visages, attitudes, and expression, only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer. It must be remembered, also, that these men, with not more than a half dozen exceptions, have been themselves slaves, and that their ancestors were slaves for generations...

"But the old stagers admit that the colored brethren have a wonderful aptness at legislative proceedings. They are 'quick as lightning' at detecting points of order, and they certainly make incessant and extraordinary use of their knowledge. No one is allowed to talk five minutes without interruption, and one interruption is a signal for another and another, until the original speaker is smothered under an avalanche of them. Forty questions of privilege will be raised in a day. At times, nothing goes on but alternating questions of order and of privilege. The inefficient colored friend who sits in the Speaker's chair cannot suppress this extraordinary element of the debate. Some of the blackest members exhibit a pertinacity of intrusion in raising these points of order and questions of privilege that few white men can equal. Their struggles to get the floor, their bellowings and physical contortions, baffle description.

"The Speaker's hammer plays a perpetual tattoo to no purpose. The talking and the interruptions from all quarters go on with the utmost license. Everyone esteems himself as good as his neighbor, and puts in his oar, apparently as often for love of riot and confusion as for anything else.... The Speaker orders a member whom he has discovered to be particularly unruly to take his seat. The member obeys, and with the same motion that he sits down, throws his feet on to his desk, hiding himself from the Speaker by the soles of his boots .... After a few experiences of this sort, the Speaker threatens, in a laugh, to call the 'gemman' to order. This is considered a capital joke, and a guffaw follows. The laugh goes round and then the peanuts are cracked and munched faster than ever; one hand being employed in fortifying the inner man with this nutriment of universal use, while the other enforces the views of the orator. This laughing propensity of the sable crowd is a great cause of disorder. They laugh as hens cackle—one begins and all follow.

"But underneath all this shocking burlesque upon legislative proceedings, we must not forget that there is something very real to this uncouth and untutored multitude. It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize and respect.... They have an earnest purpose, born of conviction that their position and condition are not fully assured, which lends a sort of dignity to their proceedings. The barbarous, animated jargon in which they so often indulge is on occasion seen to be so transparently sincere and weighty in their own minds that sympathy supplants disgust. The whole thing is a wonderful novelty to them as well as to observers. Seven years ago these men were raising corn and cotton under the whip of the overseer. Today they are raising points of order and questions of privilege. They find they can raise one as well as the other. They prefer the latter. It is easier and better paid. Then, it is the evidence of an accomplished result. It means escape and defense from old oppressors. It means liberty. It means the destruction of prison-walls only too real to them. It is the sunshine of their lives. It is their day of jubilee. It is their long-promised vision of the Lord God Almighty."

The congressional delegations were as radical as the state governments. During the first two years, there were no Democratic senators from the reconstructed states and only two Democratic representatives, as against sixty-four radical senators and representatives. At the end of four years, the Democrats numbered fifteen against seventy radicals. A Negro succeeded Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and in all the race sent two senators and thirteen representatives to Congress; but though several were of high character and fair ability, they exercised practically no influence. The Southern delegations had no part in shaping policies but merely voted as they were told by the radical leaders.

The effect of dishonest government was soon seen in extravagant expenditures, heavier taxes, increase of the bonded debt, and depression of property values. It was to be expected that after the ruin wrought by war and the admission of the Negro to civil rights, the expenses of government would be greater. But only lack of honesty will account for the extraordinary expenses of the reconstruction governments. In Alabama and Florida, the running expenses of the state government increased two hundred percent, in Louisiana five hundred percent, and in Arkansas fifteen hundred percent—all this in addition to bond issues. In South Carolina the one item of public printing, which from 1790 to 1868 cost $609,000, amounted in the years 1868-1876 to $1,326,589.

Corrupt state officials had two ways of getting money—by taxation and by the sale of bonds. Taxes were everywhere multiplied. The state tax rate in Alabama was increased four hundred percent, in Louisiana eight hundred percent, and in Mississippi, which could issue no bonds, fourteen hundred percent. City and county taxes, where carpetbaggers were in control, increased in the same way. Thousands of small proprietors could not meet their taxes, and in Mississippi alone the land sold for unpaid taxes amounted to six million acres, an area as large as Massachusetts and Rhode Island together. Nordhoff* speaks of seeing Louisiana newspapers of which three-fourths were taken up by notices of tax sales. In protest against extravagant and corrupt expenditures, taxpayers' conventions were held in every state, but without effect.

*Charles Nordhoff, "The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875".

Even the increased taxation, however, did not produce enough to support the new governments, which now had recourse to the sale of state and local bonds. In this way Governor Holden's Administration managed in two years to increase the public debt of North Carolina from $16,000,000 to $32,000,000. The state debt of South Carolina rose from $7,000,000 to $29,000,000 in 1873. In Alabama, by 1874, the debt had mounted from $7,000,000 to $32,000,000. The public debt of Louisiana rose from $14,000,000 in 1868 to $48,000,000 in 1871, with a local debt of $31,000,000. Cities, towns, and counties sold bonds by the bale. The debt of New Orleans increased twenty-five fold and that of Vicksburg a thousandfold. A great deal of the debt was the result of fraudulent issues of bonds or over-issue. For this form of fraud, the state financial agents in New York were usually responsible. Southern bonds sold far below par, and the time came when they were peddled about at ten to twenty-five cents on the dollar.

Still another disastrous result followed this corrupt financiering. In Alabama there was a sixty-five percent decrease in property values, in Florida forty-five percent, and in Louisiana fifty to seventy-five percent. A large part of the best property was mortgaged, and foreclosure sales were frequent. Poorer property could be neither mortgaged nor sold. There was an exodus of whites from the worst governed districts in the West and the North. Many towns, among them Mobile and Memphis, surrendered their charters and were ruled directly by the governor; and there were numerous "strangulated" counties which on account of debt had lost self-government and were ruled by appointees of the governor.

A part of the money raised by taxes and by bond sales was used for legitimate expenses and the rest went to pay forged warrants, excess warrants, and swollen mileage accounts, and to fill the pockets of embezzlers and thieves from one end of the South to the other. In Arkansas, for example, the auditor's clerk hire, which was $4000 in 1866, cost twenty-three times as much in 1873. In Louisiana and South Carolina, stealing was elevated into an art and was practiced without concealment. In the latter state, the worthless Hell Hole Swamp was bought for $26,000 to be farmed by the Negroes but was charged to the state at $120,000. A free restaurant maintained at the Capitol for the legislators cost $125,000 for one session. The porter who conducted it said that he kept it open sixteen to twenty hours a day and that someone was always in the room eating and drinking or smoking. When a member left, he would fill his pockets with cigars or with bottles of drink. Forty different brands of beverages were paid for by the state for the private use of members, and all sorts of food, furniture, and clothing were sent to the houses of members and were paid for by the state as "legislative supplies." On the bills appeared such items as imported mushrooms, one side of bacon, one feather bed, bustles, two pairs of extra long stockings, one pair of garters, one bottle perfume, twelve monogram cut glasses, one horse, one comb and brush, three gallons of whisky, one pair of corsets. During the recess, supplies were sent out to the rural homes of the members.

The endorsement of railroad securities by the state also furnished a source of easy money to the dishonest official and the crooked speculator. After the Civil War, in response to the general desire in the South for better railroad facilities, the "Johnson" governments began to underwrite railroad bonds. When the carpetbag and Negro governments came in, the policy was continued but without proper safeguards. Bonds were sometimes endorsed before the roads were constructed, and even excess issues were authorized. Bonds were endorsed for some roads of which not a mile was ever built. The White River Valley and Texas Railroad never came into existence, but it obtained a grant of $175,000 from the State of Arkansas. Speaker Carter of the Louisiana Legislature received a financial interest in all railroad endorsement bills which he steered through the House. Negro members were regularly bribed to vote for the bond steals. A witness swore that in Louisiana it cost him $80,000 to get a railroad charter passed, but that the Governor's signature cost more than the consent of the legislature.