Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

the end of the year. In the summer of 1863 Lincoln approved a plan for electing a Unionist state legislature in Louisiana that would rescind the state secession ordinance and adopt a new state constitution. In March 1864, Lincoln urged the new Unionist governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn, to make some limited provision in the new state constitution for black voting rights. “I barely suggest for your private consideration,” Lincoln proposed softly (since he had no more authority as president to require things of a civilian Unionist government than he had of the old slave-state government), “whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom.”20

In the event, Hahn’s constitutional convention abolished “slavery and involuntary servitude” and prohibited the legislature from making any law “recognizing the right of property in man.” It balked at granting full voting rights to blacks, however, and would only concede that in the future the legislature might consider “extending suffrage to such other persons, citizens of the United States, as by military service, by taxation to support the government, or by intellectual fitness, may be deemed entitled thereto.” But the camel’s nose was in the tent, and Lincoln had signaled that the federal government would back up any steps taken toward political equality, even if granted grudgingly and of necessity. When Lincoln sent one of his White House staffers, William O. Stoddard, to Arkansas as a federal marshal in 1864 to assist in the organization of a Unionist state government there, he enjoined Stoddard to “do all you can, in any and every way you can, to get the ballot into the hands of the freedmen!”21

It proved harder to turn the tide of Northern white opinion at home than it had been among Northern soldiers in the army, and black soldiers were the first to discover this, almost literally in the streets of Northern cities. In the great Northern urban centers of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, segregated streetcar systems immediately became a flashpoint for conflict, especially when, as in New York City, streetcar operators began throwing black soldiers off the cars and into the streets. When the widow of a black sergeant was pushed off a New York City streetcar by a policeman, a public scandal followed, with Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune growling, “It is quite time to settle the question whether the wives and children of the men who are laying down their lives for their country… are to be treated like dogs.”22

In Philadelphia, where white and black abolitionists had been demanding an end to segregation on the city rail lines since 1859, a coalition of Republican and black civic organizations appealed to the city’s Democratic mayor, and then finally to the state legislature, to end racial discrimination in public accommodations throughout Pennsylvania. In occupied New Orleans, fights broke out between streetcar drivers and black soldiers and were resolved only by a compromise that allowed black officers to ride with whites while relegating black enlisted men to the “star cars” (blacks-only streetcars marked with a black star). In Washington, D.C., the veteran black abolitionist Sojourner Truth deliberately challenged a whites-only rule on the city streetcars by standing at streetcar stops and screeching “I want to ride!” at the top of her lungs. When a conductor on another streetcar tried to throw Truth off the car, he dislocated her shoulder; she promptly hired a lawyer, sued the streetcar company, and forced the company to abandon its racial discrimination policies. “Before the trial was ended,” Truth announced sardonically, “the inside of the cars looked like pepper and salt.”23

Not every battle for equality ended so happily. Free Northern blacks could achieve the victories they won because they operated in a largely urban context, where many of them had already established visible places in Northern society and where white allies were fairly close at hand. Even then, only Massachusetts enacted significant bans on segregation in hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Among the newly emancipated freedpeople of the South, the story was bleaker. Lacking education, property, or even a clear sense of what emancipation might mean, slaves slipped away to the Union armies or celebrated their liberation as the Union forces marched southward past them, even as they had no certainty what the next step might be. A Federal officer marching down toward Murfreesboro wrote that “at every plantation negroes came flocking to the roadside to see us. … They have heard of the abolition army, the music, the banners, the glittering arms… [and they] welcome us with extravagant manifestations of joy. They keep time to the music with feet and hands and hurrah ‘fur de ole flag and de Union,’ sometimes following us for miles.” An estimated ten thousand liberated slaves packed up and trailed after William Tecumseh Sherman and his army in 1864, shouting, “Yesterday I was a slave, to day I am free. We are all white now.” However, they quickly learned that emancipation was only the beginning of a new and uncharted future, and they did not receive much in the way of direction from either Northern or Southern whites. In December 1864 one of Sherman’s corps commanders—the inaptly named Jefferson C. Davis—marched his troops across Ebenezer Creek, just north of Savannah, on a pontoon bridge built by his engineers, then took up the bridge and abandoned some 2,000 “contrabands” to the mercies of pursuing Confederate cavalry. The Federal armies frequently seized newly freed slaves and forced them into service as manual laborers, while embittered Southern whites evicted their former slaves from white-owned property and refused to hire freedpeople to work for them. Another 135,000 freedmen, lacking any particular direction for the future, simply enlisted in the USCT and hoped for the best.24

In a few places in the South, conscientious whites attempted to intervene and help the