Various - McClure\'s Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908

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_Restless Foot-loose Negroes_

It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at
that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the
fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population
remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts
touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so,
the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented
the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to
sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its
enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the
plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within
reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as
soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in
the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves
against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the
Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a
single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a
white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition
of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to
freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them,
especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments,
very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their
freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many
others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in
other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various
parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose
colored people.

I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or
report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless.
There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty
pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious
depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout
very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing,
and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But,
while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under
different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the
situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the
plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops
of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to
save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts
were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the
plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon
colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine
personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals
negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose
bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons,
or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable
numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or
strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people
were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane
irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were
only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of
inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked
sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the
presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the
country.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL O. O. HOWARD

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN IN DECEMBER, 1862, JUST AFTER HIS PROMOTION TO
MAJOR-GENERAL OF VOLUNTEERS]

_The Freedmen's Bureau_

Indeed, nothing could have been more necessary at that time than the
active interposition of the Federal power between the whites and the
blacks of the South, not only to prevent or repress violent
collisions, but to start the former masters and the former slaves on
the path of peaceful and profitable cooeperation as employers and free
laborers. This was a difficult task. Northern men who had come to the
South to purchase or lease plantations enjoyed the great advantage of
having money, so that they could pay the wages of their negro laborers
in cash, which the negroes preferred. The Southern men, having been
stripped almost naked by the war, had, aside from current sustenance,
only prospective payment to offer, consisting mostly of a part of the
crop. While many planters were just and even liberal in the making of
cash contracts, others would take advantage of the ignorance of the
negroes and try to tie them down to stipulations which left to the
laborer almost nothing, or even obliged him to run in debt to his
employer, and thus drop into the condition of a mere peon, a
debt-slave. It is a very curious fact that some of the forms of
contract drawn up by former slaveholders contained provisions looking
to the probability of a future restoration of slavery. There was, not
unnaturally, much distrust of the planters among the negroes, who, in
concluding contracts, feared to compromise their rights as freemen or
to be otherwise overreached. To allay that distrust and, in many
cases, to secure their just dues, they stood much in need of an
adviser in whom they had confidence and to whom they could look for
protection, while, on the other hand, the employers of negro labor
stood in equal need of some helpful authority to give the colored
people sound instruction as to their duties as freemen and to lead
them back to the path of industry and good order when, with their
loose notions of the binding force of agreements, they broke their
contracts, or indulged themselves otherwise in unruly pranks.

To this end the "Freedmen's Bureau" was instituted, an organization of
civil officials who were, with the necessary staffs, dispersed all
over the South to see that the freedmen had their rights and to act as
intermediaries between them and the whites. The conception was a good
one, and the institution, at the head of which General O. O. Howard
was put, did useful service in many instances.

Thus the strain of the situation was somewhat relieved by the
interposition of the Federal authority between clashing elements, but
by no means as much as was required to produce a feeling of security.
The labor puzzle, aggravated by race antagonism, was indeed the main
distressing influence, but not the only one. To the younger
Southerners who had grown up in the heated atmosphere of the political
feud about slavery, to whom the threat of disunion as a means to save
slavery had been like a household word, and who had always regarded
the bond of Union as a shackle to be cast off, the thought of being
"reunited" to "the enemy," the hated Yankee, was distasteful in the
extreme. Such sentiments of the "unconquered" found excited and
exciting expression in the Southern press, and were largely
entertained by many Southern clergymen of different denominations and
still more ardently by Southern women. General Thomas Kilby Smith,
commanding the southern districts of Alabama, reported to me that when
he suggested to Bishop Wilmer, of the Episcopal diocese of Alabama,
the propriety of restoring to the Litany that prayer which includes
the President of the United States, the whole of which he had ordered
his rectors to expurge, the bishop refused, first, upon the ground
that he could not pray for a continuance of martial law, and,
secondly, because he would, by ordering the restoration of the prayer,
stultify himself in the event of Alabama and the Southern Confederacy
regaining independence.

_Pickles and Patriotism_

The influence exercised by the feelings of the women of the South upon
the condition of mind and the conduct of the men was, of course, very
great. Of those feelings I witnessed a significant manifestation in a
hotel at Savannah. At the public dinner-table I sat opposite a lady in
black, probably mourning. She was middle-aged, but still handsome, and
of an agreeable expression of countenance. She seemed to be a lady of
the higher order of society. A young lieutenant in Federal uniform
took a seat by my side, a youth of fine features and gentlemanly
appearance. The lady, as I happened to notice, darted a glance at him
which, as it impressed me, indicated that the presence of the person
in Federal uniform was highly obnoxious to her. She seemed to grow
restless, as if struggling with an excitement hard to restrain. To
judge from the tone of her orders to the waiter, she was evidently
impatient to finish her dinner. When she reached for a dish of pickles
standing on the table at a little distance from her, the lieutenant
got up and, with a polite bow, took it and offered it to her. She
withdrew her hand as if it had touched something loathsome, her eyes
flashed fire, and in a tone of wrathful scorn and indignation she
said: "So you think a Southern woman will take a dish of pickles from
a hand that is dripping with the blood of her countrymen?" Then she
abruptly left the table, while the poor lieutenant, deeply blushing,
apparently stunned by the unexpected rebuff, stammered some words of
apology, assuring the lady that he had meant no offense.

The mixing of a dish of pickles with so hot an outburst of Southern
patriotism could hardly fail to evoke a smile; but the whole scene
struck me as gravely pathetic, and as auguring ill for the speedy
revival of a common national spirit.

[Illustration: A PHOTOGRAPH OF GENERAL HOWARD, TAKEN AT GOVERNOR'S
ISLAND IN 1893 AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR GENERAL HOWARD WAS APPOINTED
CHIEF OF THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU]

_The South's Hopeless Poverty_

Southern women had suffered much by the Civil War, on the whole far
more than their Northern sisters. There was but little exaggeration in
the phrase which was current at the time, that the Confederacy, in
order to fill its armies, had to "draw upon the cradle and the grave."
Almost every white male capable of bearing arms enlisted or was
pressed into service. The loss of men, not in proportion to the number
on the rolls, but in proportion to the whole white population, was far
heavier in the South than in the North. There were not many families
unbereft, not many women who had not the loss of a father, or a
husband, or a brother, or a friend to deplore. In the regions in
which military operations had taken place the destruction of property
had been great, and while most of that destruction seemed necessary in
the opinion of military men, in the eyes of the sufferers it appeared
wanton, cruel, malignant, devilish. The interruption of the industries
of the country, the exclusion by the blockade of the posts of all
importations from abroad, and the necessity of providing for the
sustenance of the armies in the field, subjected all classes to
various distressing privations and self-denials. There were bread
riots in Richmond. Salt became so scarce that the earthen floors of
the smoke-houses were scraped to secure the remnants of the
brine-drippings of former periods. Flour was at all times painfully
scarce. Coffee and tea were almost unattainable. Of the various little
comforts and luxuries which by long common use had almost become
necessaries, many were no longer to be had. Mothers had to ransack old
rag-bags to find material with which to clothe their children. Ladies
accustomed to a life of abundance and fashion had not only to work
their old gowns over and to wear their bonnets of long ago, but also
to flit with their children from one plantation to another in order to
find something palatable to eat in the houses of more fortunate
friends who had in time provided for themselves. And when at last the
war was over, the blockade was raised, and the necessaries and
comforts so long and so painfully missed came within sight again, the
South was made only more sensible of her poverty. It was indeed an
appalling situation, looking in many respects almost hopeless. And for
all this the Southern woman, her heart full of the mournful memories
of the sere past and heavy with the anxieties of the present, held the
"cruel Yankee" responsible.

From time to time, traveling from State to State, I reported to
President Johnson my observations and the conclusions I drew from
them. Not only was I most careful to tell him the exact truth as I saw
it; I also elicited from our military officers and from agents of the
Freedmen's Bureau stationed in the South, as well as from prominent
Southern men, statements of their views and experiences, which formed
a mighty body of authoritative testimony, coming as it did from men of
high character and important public position, some of whom were
Republicans, some Democrats, some old anti-slavery men, some old
pro-slavery men. All these papers, too, I submitted to the President.
The historian of that time will hardly find more trustworthy material.
They all substantially agreed upon certain points of fact. They all
found that the South was at peace in so far as there was no open armed
conflict between the government troops and organized bodies of
insurgents. The South was not at peace inasmuch as the different
social forces did not peaceably cooeperate, and violent collisions on a
great scale were prevented or repressed only by the presence of the
Federal authority supported by the government troops on the ground for
immediate action. The "results of the war," recognized in the South in
so far as the restoration of the Union and the Federal Government,
were submitted to by virtue of necessity, and the emancipation of the
slaves and the introduction of free labor were accepted in name; but
the Union was still hateful to a large majority of the white
population of the South, the Southern Unionists were still social
outcasts, the officers of the Union were still regarded as foreign
tyrants ruling by force. And as to the abolition of slavery,
emancipation, although "accepted" in name, was still denounced by a
large majority of the former master class as an "unconstitutional"
stretch of power, to be reversed if possible; and that class, the
ruling class among the whites, was still desiring, hoping, and
striving to reduce the free negro laborer as much as possible to the
condition of a slave. And this tendency was seriously aggravated by
the fact that the South, exhausted and impoverished, stood in the most
pressing need of productive agricultural labor, while the landowners
generally did not yet know how to manage the former slave as a free
laborer, and the emancipated negro was still unused to the rights and
duties of a freeman. In short, Southern society was still in that most
confused, perplexing, and perilous of conditions--the condition of a
defeated insurrection leaving irritated feelings behind it, and of a
great social revolution only half accomplished, leaving antagonistic
forces face to face. The necessity of the presence of a restraining
and guiding higher authority could hardly have been more obvious.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM

FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH]

_Johnson's Haste for Reconstruction_

During the first six weeks of my travels in the South I did not
receive a single word from the President or any member of the
administration; but through the newspapers and the talk going on
around me I learned that the President had taken active measures to
put the "States lately in rebellion" into a self-governing
condition--that is to say, he had appointed "provisional governors";
he had directed those provisional governors to call conventions, to be
elected, according to the plan laid down in the North Carolina
proclamation, by the "loyal" white citizens, an overwhelming majority
of whom were persons who had adhered to the Rebellion and had then
taken the prescribed oath of allegiance. On the same basis, the
provisional governors were to set in motion again the whole machinery
of civil government as rapidly as possible. When, early in July, I had
taken leave of the President to set out on my tour of investigation,
he, as I have already mentioned, had assured me that the North
Carolina proclamation was not to be regarded as a plan definitely
resolved upon; that it was merely tentative and experimental; that
before proceeding further he would "wait and see"; and that to aid him
by furnishing him information and advice while he was "waiting and
seeing" was the object of my mission. Had not this been the
understanding, I should not have undertaken the wearisome and
ungrateful journey. But now he did not wait and see; on the contrary,
he rushed forward the political reconstruction of the Southern States
in hot haste--apparently without regard to consequences.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL H. W. SLOCUM

FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1894]

Every good citizen most cordially desired the earliest practicable
reestablishment of the constitutional relations of the late "rebel
States" to the national government; but, before restoring those States
to all the functions of self-government within the Union, the national
government was in conscience bound to keep in mind certain debts of
honor. One was due to the Union men of the South who had stood true to
the republic in the days of trial and danger; and the other was due to
the colored people who had furnished 200,000 soldiers to our army at
the time when enlistments were running slack, and to whom we had given
the solemn promise of freedom at a time when that promise gave a
distinct moral character to our war for the Union, fatally
discouraging the inclination of foreign governments to interfere in
our civil conflict. Not only imperative reasons of statesmanship, but
the very honor of the republic seemed to forbid that the fate of the
emancipated slaves be turned over to State governments ruled by the
former master class without the simplest possible guaranty of the
genuineness of their freedom. But, as every fair-minded observer would
admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political
restoration of the "late rebel States" as self-governing bodies on the
North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole
legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men
ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed
that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was
generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire
necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the
negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible
regard for their new rights. The consequences of all this were
witnessed in the actual experiences of every day.

[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY

COMMANDER OF THE DEPARTMENT OF LOUISIANA]

_Arming the Young Men of the South_

At last I came again into contact with the President. Late in August I
arrived in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and visited the headquarters of
Major-General Slocum, who commanded the Department of the Mississippi.
I found the General in a puzzled state of mind about a proclamation
recently issued by Mr. W. L. Sharkey, whom President Johnson had
appointed provisional governor of that State, calling "upon the
people, and especially upon such as are liable to perform military
duty and are familiar with military discipline," and more especially
"the young men of the State who have so distinguished themselves for
gallantry," to organize as speedily as possible volunteer companies in
every county of the State, at least one company of cavalry and one of
infantry, for the protection of life, property, and good order in the
State. This meant no more nor less than the organization under the
authority of one of the "States lately in rebellion" of a large armed
military force consisting of men who had but recently surrendered
their arms as Confederate soldiers.

Two days before my arrival at Vicksburg, General Slocum had issued a
"general order" in which he directed the district commanders under him
not to permit within their districts the organization of such military
forces as were contemplated by Governor Sharkey's proclamation. The
reasons for such action, given by General Slocum in the order itself,
were conclusive. While the military forces of the United States sent
to the State of Mississippi for the purpose of maintaining order and
of executing the laws of Congress and the orders of the War Department
had performed their duties in a spirit of conciliation and forbearance
and with remarkable success, the provisional governor, on the alleged
ground that this had not been done to his satisfaction, and without
consulting the department commander, had called upon the late
Confederate soldiers, fresh from the war against the national
government, to organize a military force intended to be "independent
of the military authority now present, and superior in strength to the
United States powers on duty in the States." The execution of this
scheme would bring on collisions at once, especially when the United
States forces consisted of colored troops. The crimes and disorder the
occurrence of which the provisional governor adduced as his reason for
organizing his State volunteers had been committed or connived at, as
the record showed, by people of the same class as that to which the
governor's volunteers would belong. The commanding general, as well as
every good citizen, earnestly desired to hasten the day when the
troops of the United States could with safety be withdrawn, but that
day would "not be hastened by arming at this time the young men of the
South."

[Illustration: SENATOR WILLIAM LEWIS SHARKEY

APPOINTED PROVISIONAL GOVERNOR OF MISSISSIPPI BY PRESIDENT JOHNSON]

General Slocum--by the way, be it said, not at all an old anti-slavery
man, but a Democrat in politics--was manifestly right. He showed me
reports from his district commanders which substantially anticipated
his order. But the General was anxious to know whether the President
had authorized or approved Governor Sharkey's action. This he asked me
to ascertain, and I telegraphed to President Johnson the following
despatch:

"General Slocum has issued an order prohibiting the organization of
the militia in this State. The organization of the militia would have
been a false step. All I can see and learn in the State convinces me
that the course followed by General Slocum is the only one by which
public order and security can be maintained. To-day I shall forward by
mail General Slocum's order with a full statement of the case."

_The President Defends Southern Militia_

It is hard to imagine my amazement when, at two o'clock on the morning
of September 1, I was called up from my berth on a Mississippi
steamboat carrying me from Vicksburg to New Orleans, off Baton Rouge,
to receive a telegraphic despatch from President Johnson, to which I
cannot do justice without quoting it in full:

Washington, D. C.,
August 30, 1865.
To Major-General Carl Schurz,
Vicksburg, Mississippi.

I presume General Slocum will issue no order interfering
with Governor Sharkey in restoring functions of the State
Government without first consulting the Government, giving
the reasons for such proposed interference. It is believed
there can be organized in each county a force of citizens or
militia to suppress crime, preserve order, and enforce the
civil authority of the State and of the United States which
would enable the Federal Government to reduce the Army and
withdraw to a great extent the forces from the state,
thereby reducing the enormous expense of the Government. If
there was any danger from an organization of the Citizens
for the purpose indicated, the military are there to detect
and suppress on the first appearance any move
insurrectionary in its character. One great object is to
induce the people to come forward in the defense of the
State and Federal Government. General Washington declared
that the people or the militia was the Army of the
Constitution or the Army of the United States, and as soon
as it is practicable the original design of the Government
must be resumed and the Government administrated upon the
principles of the great chart of freedom handed down to the
people by the founders of the Republic. The people must be
trusted with their Government, and, if trusted, my opinion
is they will act in good faith and restore their former
Constitutional relations with all the States composing the
Union. The main object of Major-General Carl Schurz's
mission to the South was to aid as far as practicable in
carrying out the policy adopted by the Government for
restoring the States to their former relations with the
Federal Government. It is hoped such aid has been given. The
proclamation authorizing restoration of State Governments
requires the military to aid the Provisional Governor in the
performance of his duties as prescribed in the proclamation,
and in no manner to interfere or throw impediments in the
way of consummating the object of his appointment, at least
without advising the Government of the intended
interference.

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