Quotes Concerning Reconstruction

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As the war progressed and more Union armies occupied Southern territory, church buildings of each denomination were turned over to the corresponding Northern body, and Southern ministers were permitted to remain only upon agreeing to conduct "loyal services, pray for the President of the United States and for Federal victories" and to foster "loyal sentiment." The Protestant Episcopal churches in Alabama were closed from September to December 1865, and some congregations were dispersed by the soldiers because Bishop Wilmer had directed his clergy to omit the prayer for President Davis but had substituted no other. The ministers of non-liturgical churches were not so easily controlled. A Georgia Methodist preacher directed by a Union officer to pray for the President said afterwards: "I prayed for the President that the Lord would take out of him and his allies the hearts of beasts and put into them the hearts of men or remove the cusses from office."

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In the border states, society was sharply divided, and feeling was bitter. In eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and parts of Arkansas and Missouri, returning Confederates met harsher treatment than did the Unionists in the lower South. John T. Trowbridge, New England author and journalist, while in east Tennessee wrote: "Returning rebels were robbed; and if one had stolen unawares to his home, it was not safe for him to remain there. I saw in Virginia one of these exiles, who told me how homesickly he pined for the hills and meadows of east Tennessee, which he thought the most delightful region in the world. But, there was a rope hanging from a tree for him there, and he dared not go back. 'The bottom rails are on top,' said he, 'that is the trouble.' The Union element, and the worst part of the Union element, was uppermost." Confederates and Confederate sympathizers in Maryland, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, were disfranchised. In West Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, "war trespass" suits were brought against returning Confederates for military acts done in war time. In Missouri and West Virginia, strict test oaths excluded Confederates from office, from the polls, and from the professions of teaching, preaching, and law.

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There were vastly differing opinions about the defeated Southerners and their attitudes at the conclusion of four years of war. For the North, the South seemed a strange land, with strange customs and principles, not to be considered as quite normal and American. From the correspondence of different writers one would conclude that they weren't even speaking of the same area of America.

General Grant: "I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith . . . . The citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return to self-government within the Union as soon as possible."

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There were plenty who agreed with the usual Northern sentiment concerning the South. Carl Schurz was one of these, not favorably impressed:"The loyalty of the masses and most of the leaders of the southern people, consists in submission to necessity. There is, except in individual instances, an entire absence of that national spirit which forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism."

A government official sent to Florida showed his blatant feelings for the Southern whites when he wrote: "I would pin them down at the point of the bayonet, so close that they would not have room to wiggle, and allow intelligent colored people to go up and vote in preference to them. The only Union element in the South proper . . . is among the colored people." "The whites will treat you very kindly to your face, but they are deceitful. I have often thought, and so expressed myself, that there is so much deception among the people of the South since the rebellion, that if an earthquake should open and swallow them up, I was fearful that the devil would be dethroned and some of them take his place."

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General John Tarbell, before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, testified that "there are, no doubt, disloyal and disorderly persons in the South, but it is an entire mistake to apply these terms to a whole people. I would as soon travel alone, unarmed, through the South as through the North. The South I left is not at all the South I hear and read about in the North. From the sentiment I hear in the North, I would scarcely recognize the people I saw, and, except their politics, I liked so well. I have entire faith that the better classes are friendly to the Negroes."

Benjamin C. Truman, New England journalist and soldier, whose long report was perhaps the best of all came to the conclusion: that "the rank and file of the disbanded Southern army . . . are the backbone and sinew of the South . . . . To the disbanded regiments of the rebel army, both officers and men, I look with great confidence as the best and altogether the most hopeful element of the South, the real basis of reconstruction and the material of worthy citizenship."

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Most of the Negroes, through their widened experience on the plantations during the war, or with the armies, and in the colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they had been in 1861. However, their years as slaves had done something for them: they knew how to work and they had adopted in part the language, habits, religion, and morals of the whites. But slavery had not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or educated.

Frederick Douglass said of the Negro at the end of slavery: "He had none of the conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky." To prove that he was free the Negro thought he had to leave his old master, change his name, quit work for a time, perhaps get a new wife, and hang around the Federal soldiers in camp or garrison, or go to the towns where the Freedmen's Bureau was in process of organization.

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"As early as May 5, 1865, The Independent, which spoke for what came to be called the Radical Republicans in Congress was asserting:"

"There is one, and only one, sure and safe policy, for the immediate future, namely: the North must remain the absolute Dictator of the Republic until the spirit of the North shall become the spirit of the whole country......The South is still unpurged of her treason. Prostrate in the dust she is no less a traitor at this hour than when her head was erect."

........."They cannot be trusted with authority over their former slaves; they cannot be trusted with the re-cemented Republic....The only hope for the South is to give the ballot to the Negro and in denying it to the rebels."

"In like spirit George W. Julian of Indiana would "indict, convict and hang Jefferson Davis in the name of God; as for Robert E. Lee, unmolested in Virginia, hang him too. And stop there? Not at all. I would hang liberally while I had my hand in." Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio suggested that "if the negroes by insurrection could contrive to slay one-half of the Southern whites, the remaining half would then hold them in respect and treat them with justice." Thaddeus Stevens would wipe out southern state lines and reduce the section to a territory where rebels would learn to practice justice to all men. Charles Sumner would seize all rebel property and distribute it to the Negroes, give them the vote, and let them rule the section." (And these self same hypocrites would not allow the Negroes to come to their states when the dust settled unless they had work permits. Once those work permits were up they'd better get out of Dodge real fast!)
(Text in blue from Reconstruction: The Ending of the Civil War, Avery Craven,Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1969, p. 93)

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Some of the differences of opinion within the U.S. government after the end of the war are quite telling.

Andrew Johnson, it's clear was interpreting the Constitution as he understood it. Under it, he proclaimed the states were perpetual and as such had not through rebellion become conquered territory. Their vitality had been impaired but not extinguished; their functions suspended but not destroyed. His policy had aimed at the restoration, gradually and quietly, of normal state functions.

In one speech in which he was explaining why he could not give the Southern Negro the vote without giving it to all Negro men everywhere. By patience and manly virtue, he thought, the Negroes would gradually win it for themselves. He closed by asking,"Who will not join me in prayer that the Invisible Hand which has led us through the clouds that gloomed around our path will guide us onward to a perfect restoration of fraternal affection that we of this day may be able to transmit our great inheritance of state governments in all their rights, of the general government in its whole constitutional vigor, to our posterity, and they to theirs through countless generations?"

This message was an appeal for acceptance of a most difficult task but it also seemed to imply that with the adoption of the 13th Amendment and his own work of restoration, the major tasks of reconstruction had been completed.

On the whole it was well received throughout the nation and by moderate Republicans and most Democrats accepted it as a statesmanlike appeal for national unity. But Sumner and Stevens saw it as a challenge. With their congressional committee they would check the growth of executive power as it had grown up during the war and replace it with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a modified English parliamentary form of government. (Weilliam Edward Burrghardt Du Bois, author of Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935) was the first "revisionist". In spite of a rather extreme quality and a Marxian approach, his volume deserves a careful reading for an occasional penetrating grasp of basic problems.) As Du Bois wrote, "It was the business of the Committee of Fifteen to see how the government of the United States was to be changed after the war, from its form before the war--changed in the basis of popular representation, in the clarification of the status of the Negro, and in a modification of the relation of the national government to state government. "It was, Du Bois added, "a plan to set up, temporarily at least, a cabinet form of responsile government in the United States."

What happened as both the executive , by impeachment, and the Supreme Court, by partial avoidance of involvement, left Congress and the nation more or less in the hands of the Joint Committee. Presidential reconstruction was at an end.

As for Johnson, Stevens had this to say: "I cannot begin to attempt to unfold the policy of that man, in whom the people confided as a true patriot, and whom we have now found to be worse than the man who is incarcerated in Fortress Monroe." (referring to Jefferson Davis.)

"You remember that in Egypt the Lord sent frogs, locusts, murrain, and lice, and finally demanded the blood of the first born of all the oppressors; almost all of these have been sent upon us. We have been oppressed with taxes, and debts, and he has sent us more than lice, and has afflicted us with Andrew Johnson." (Excerpts from Reconstruction: The Ending of the Civil War, Avery Craven, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1969, 134-137)

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EX-CONFEDERATES BEGIN TO REGAIN POWER

By 1870 ex-Confederates had regained control of Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, as well as the loyal border states of West Virginia and Missouri, through cooperation with dissatisfied Republicans, and through fraud and violence.

"Union and Loyal citizens will be left out in the cold, or what is worse, be at the mercy and beck and call of a set of Rebels whose hands are yet red with the Blood of Loyal men," lamented a Tennessee Republican. "Great God is there no hope, and are men who stood by the Government now at this late day to be subgugated and controled by the Enemies of the Government?"

From the book, The Fruits of Victory, Alternatives in Restoring the Union, !865 - 1877, edited by Harold M. Hyman.

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"Reconstruction begins when the South yields up her ideas of civilization and allows the North to permeate her channels and to make her over......until that process commences, reconstruction has not commenced." --Wendell Phillips

In other words the South must cease to be Southern.