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

freedpeople toward literacy and economic independence. The Northern “Gideonites” who descended on Port Royal in 1862 set up schools and churches and pressed the Lincoln administration (through their own influential political networks at home) to have the plantations that had been abandoned by Port Royal’s white masters before the Union seizure of the Sea Islands divided among the former slaves who had once worked those lands. Even so, as the abolitionist William Kimball protested in 1864, the United States could not simply “unloose the chains that have bound them” and then take no further action; to “set them adrift to contend and compete under our methods of individualism or isolated interests, is to doom them to conditions hardly to be preferred to those from which they are about to escape.” In 1865, Congress took its own steps for setting the freedpeople on their feet by organizing the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was designed to establish schools, educate blacks in the intricacies of labor contracts, oversee wage and labor relations, and open up public lands to black settlers. But the experiment in land redistribution at Port Royal foundered on the greed of Northern white land speculators (who had the money to outbid the freedpeople at the open auctions of seized Confederate property) and on postwar legal challenges lodged by former plantation owners who successfully disputed the federal government’s wartime authority to seize their property. And the Freedmen’s Bureau was never sufficiently funded or staffed to deal with the multitude of problems arising from the needs of 2 million newly freed slaves. Yet it was the most significant step toward actively engineering some small measure of racial equality taken by the United States before the 1960s.25

In the end, the most important agents for change would have to be the freedpeople themselves, since (in the abolitionists’ lexicon) self-transformation was the most appropriate form of change in a republic. As the freedpeople soon learned, even the most well-intentioned white assistance (such as Kimball’s) reeked of paternalism and was based on condescending perceptions of blacks as “a people in a state of infantile weakness and inexperience; whom, from the irrepressible laws and conditions of the human mind, we must govern and control, either wisely and beneficently or otherwise.” Many freedpeople simply hit the road, sometimes in a nameless determination to put the scenes of slavery behind them, sometimes in a pathetic search for family members who had been sold away to other parts of the South years before, sometime in pursuit of land or work they could own and define for themselves. “They had a passion, not for wandering, as for getting together,” wrote one white observer in South Carolina, “and every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search of his mother; every mother in search of her children. In their eyes the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.” Others sought to strike down roots in the soil they knew the best. In central Tennessee, the number of farms shot up from 19,000 in 1860 to nearly 30,000 in 1870, with more than three-quarters of that increase representing black farmers who either owned or rented their land.26

That did not mean, however, that they were eager to assimilate themselves to white society. Blacks withdrew from the white churches where their masters had ruled over faith and practice, and formed their own congregations. In defiance of the most vicious symbol of white dominance under slavery, the freedpeople rushed to county courthouses to legalize slave marriages and adopt surnames of their own choosing. In July 1865 Tennessee’s Bedford County courthouse issued marriage licenses to 422 couples, 406 of which were black; in nearby Rutherford County that September, 431 black couples had their marriages legalized in a single week. Never again would a white man with an auctioneer’s bill in his hand come between black husband and black wife, and never again would an African American be known simply as so-and-so’s Tom or Dick or Cuffee or Caesar. Mr. Carver’s George would become George Washington Carver; James Burroughs’s child slave Booker would borrow his stepfather’s first name to create a last name for himself and become Booker Taliaferro Washington.27

So many of these steps seem so basic, and others so halting, that it is easy to lose sight of how much ground was really gained by African Americans in their stride toward civil equality. On one hand, it was disappointingly true that, as late as the 1850s, whites in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon had voted to ban any free black settlement in their states. Outside New England, where free black males already had some measure of voting rights, not a single Northern state initiative to extend voting rights to blacks succeeded during the war, and publicly funded schooling remained closed to blacks in most Northern states. On the other hand, the thick carapace of prejudice and legalized discrimination was also showing clear and open cracks under the hammer blows of the black soldier and the black orator. Five New England cities voted to abolish segregated schools; California and Illinois repealed all of their invidious “black laws” (except, in Illinois, the ban on black voting). On the federal level, Congress repealed exclusionary laws on racial hiring and abolished its restraints on black participation in the federal court system, and on February 1, 1865, John S. Rock was presented by Charles Sumner to plead before the bar of the Supreme Court, the first African American to be admitted as counsel before a court that a decade before had declared that he was not even a citizen. “The Dred Scott Decision Buried in the Supreme Court,” ran the New York Tribune’s headline. The article went on to say, “Senator Charles Sumner and the Negro lawyer John S. Rock [were] the pall-bearers—the room of the Supreme Court of the United States the Potter’s Field—the corpse the Dred Scott decision!”28

For African Americans, the future seemed without limits: three centuries of bondage had passed