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

exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs? … If the South is ever to be made a safe Republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners, or the free labor of intelligent citizens.” A few even advocated, as “the only certain road to Unionizing the South, to plant in it colonies of Northern men.” The South thus would be remade into the image of a New England landscape, with small factories, free enterprise, banks, schools, and wages. “I look to a popular education so advanced that under … impartial law all creeds and all tongues and all races shall be gathered with an equal protection,” Phillips explained. “The great trouble of the South lies in its ignorance. Awake it to enterprise.”44

These advocates could not have had more willing recruits than the freedpeople, who at once began to organize Loyal Leagues, Equal Rights Leagues, and Union Leagues in the South to demand full citizenship rights. The slave, wrote Frederick Douglass, had wanted “no war but an Abolition war,” and as freedmen, they now wanted “no peace but an Abolition peace; liberty for all, chains for none; the black man a soldier in war; a laborer in peace; a voter at the South as well as the North; America his permanent home, and all Americans his fellow-countrymen.” Alongside the freed slave, helping to inch along the progress toward a New Englandized, free-market South, was the Freedmen’s Bureau. Created in March 1865, the bureau’s mandate was “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen” in those “declared to be in insurrection.” Although the bureau was originally conceived as a relief agency, “for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen,” it had within it the germ of radicalism, since the bill that created the bureau authorized it to divide up plantation lands that had been seized from Southern whites for nonpayment of taxes or confiscated as retribution for rebel war service, and assign “not more than forty acres” of these lands to black applicants as their own farms.45

After six decades of Jacksonian hands-off-slavery policies in Washington, the Freedmen’s Bureau was an unprecedented venture into new administrative waters—so unprecedented that the scope of the bureau’s enabling legislation was far from clear. Title to the lands that the bureau distributed was only “such title thereto as the United States can convey,” which meant that it could easily be challenged in the state courts by former landowners. The freedmen, clearly, had no compunction about taking over their former masters’ lands as their own. “We has a right to the land where we are located,” explained a freedman named Bayley Wyat. “For why? I tell you.”

Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. … And den didn’t we clear the land, and raise de crops ob corn, ob cotton, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn’t dem large cities in de North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made …? I say dey has grown rich and my people poor.46

But how far were white Northerners willing to go in support of what could easily appear as a cynical strategy to extend civil rights to the freedpeople, and then buy their votes with confiscated Southern property? William Tecumseh Sherman, who otherwise lavished no affection on black people, seemed to be willing to go quite a long way when he issued Special Field Orders No. 15, setting aside “the islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint John’s River, Fla. … for the settlement of the negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States … so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground … in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title.”47

But in reality, this was an agreement Sherman had made only after warnings from Halleck in December 1864 that Sherman was attracting unwanted attention for his “almost criminal dislike to the negro,” and only under the eye of Secretary of War Stanton, who had come down to Savannah on January 11 to make some not-so-discreet inquiries about “the negro question.” Even then, Special Field Orders No. 15 only granted the freedmen “a possessory title” to their forty acres, subject to “all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same”—which could mean very nearly nothing.48

In fact, just how tone-deaf Sherman might really be to “the negro question” became manifest when Sherman met with Joseph Johnston to negotiate the surrender of Johnston’s broken-down army of Confederates at Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 18. Sherman offered Johnston the kind of terms he thought Lincoln had authorized: the disbanding of all remaining Confederate armies, which were to “deposit their arms and public property” in their respective state arsenals; a general amnesty; reestablishment of the federal courts; and “the recognition by the Executive of the United States, of the several State governments, on their officers and Legislatures taking the oaths prescribed by the Constitution of the United States. …” No judgment, trials, or imprisonment, no mention of slavery, and certainly no allusion to black civil rights.49

These arrangements were far beyond Sherman’s powers as an army commander to grant, even in the fairest of seasons; and as Sherman was to learn, they were infinitely beyond what Stanton as secretary of war and the Radicals in Congress were willing to tolerate. One of Sherman’s staff members hand-carried the surrender terms to Washington, where Stanton read them on the afternoon of April 21.