These notes are part of the Black Reconstruction Reading Group‘s study material.
Chapter: VI. “Looking Backward”
(53 Pps: 128-181)
Time period: 1865, end of Civil War and after assassination of Lincoln on April 14, 1865
Location: The former Confederate States
Main Topic: Planters trying to re-assert where they left off and trying to establish a new Black serfdom, Black Codes/Jim Crow….Administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson work to administer reintegration of the Confederate States back into the United States.
Themes: Codifying the end of slavery, but institutionalizing the continued denial of democratic rights to Black people, with clear relevance to the present.
Notable Quotes:
“How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, merely substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk.”
(The planters had amassed great wealth with the system of African slavery and theft of labor, including establishment of offspring from rape as commodity. An agricultural-based system that produced a global empire with an aspiration of expansion to the West and South. But the general strike of the slaves yearning for freedom and their entry in the the Union army forces was the downfall of the planters’ empire. Much of the wealth of the planters was gone, their land devastated, some of it confiscated and their territory occupied by a hostile army.)
“The hostilities, military and naval, had practically destroyed the whole commercial system of the the South, and reduced the people to a pitiable primitive, almost barbaric level…”
“There was at the end of the war no civil authority with power in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas; and in the other states, authority was only functioning in part under Congress or the President.”
“…The mortality of the whites was so great in the decade following 1865, as to be “a matter of common remark.””
(In their opposition to the end of slavery, the planters maintained that free Negro labor could not be made possible. This view was reflected in the New Orleans Picayune on July 8, 1862:
“…The thriftless, thoughtless Negro would jingle his last month’s wages in the planter’s face and tell him to do the rest of the work himself.”
(Basically the planters continued to deny free slaves’ humanity – “They could not be educated and really civilized. And beyond that, if a free, educated black citizen and voter could be brought upon the state this would in itself be the worst conceivable thing on earth….It would lead inevitably to a mulatto South and the eventual ruin of all civilization.’
“The poor whites, on the other hand, were absolutely at sea…Almost unanimously…the poor white clung frantically t the planter and his ideals….they sought redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter.”
“He joined eagerly secret organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan, which fed his vanity by making him co-worker with the white planter, and gave him a chance to maintain his race superiority by killing and intimidating (“n-words”); and even in secret forays of his own, he could drive away the planter’s black help, leaving the land open to white labor. Or he could murder too successful freedmen.”
“It was only when they saw the Negro with a vote in his hand, backed by the power and money of the nation, that the poor whites who followed some of the planters into the ranks of the “scalawags” began to conceive of an economic solidarity between white and black workers. In this interval they received at the hands of the black voter and his allies a more general right to vote, to hold office and to receive education, privileges which the planter had always denied them. But before all this was so established as to be intelligently recognized, armed revolt in the South became organized by the planters with the cooperation of the mass of poor whites…Finally the poor whites joined the sons of the planters and disfranchised the black laborer, thus nullifying the labor movement in the South for a half century and more.”
“..From before the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War, the nation had asked if it were possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word.”
The answers to this problem, historically, had taken these forms:
1. As colonial subjects, converted to Christianity.
2. That Negroes would die out.
3. Systematic deportation.
4. Perpetual slaves in caste, expanded into the tropics.
Aside from the freed Negroes, especially educated ones and some abolitionists, the answer was “a stern and determined, “No!””
“…The very joy in the shout of emancipated Negroes was a threat…Negroes were lazy, poor and ignorant. Moreover their ignorance was more than the ignorance of whites. It was a biological, fundamental and ineradicable ignorance based on pronounced and eternal racial differences. The democracy and freedom open and possible to white men of English stock, and even to Continental Europeans, were unthinkable in the case of Africans. We were moving slowly in an absolutely impossible direction.”
P.133-134: Carl Schulz reporting to Andrew Johnson on the various groupings of “classes” in the South;
1. Those yielding to the national government, accepting of the outcome of the war.
2. Those seeking to restore their position of influence and control
3. Incorrigibles still hoping to return to the glory of the Confederacy
4. The multitude who have no definite ideas, whose intellects are weak but prejudices and impulses strong and apt to be influenced by those who know how to appeal to the latter.
“Wherever I go–the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat–I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen’s affairs in their own hands, to use their own expression, ‘the niggers will catch hell.’
The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President’s emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large.”
P.137 “There was a distinct tendency toward compulsion, toward re-established slavery under another name. Negroes coming into Yorktown from regions of Virginia and thereabout, said that they had worked all year and received no pay and were driven off the first of January. The owners sold their crops and told them they had no further used for them and that they might go to the Yankees, or the slaveholders offered to take them back but refused to pay any wages. A few offered a dollar a month and clothing and food. They were not willing to pay anything for work.”
“The courts aided the subjection of the Negroes…”
“…not allowing contraband to stay in any section over such a length of time without work; if he does, to seize him and sell him. In fact that is done now in the county of Gates, North Carolina. The county police, organized under orders from headquarters, did enforce that.”
P 139-141
Notion that abolition of slavery meant that the protections provided by slave masters put the slaves in increased vulnerability…daily average of 2-3 Black men killed in Mississippi…
P. 142-143
“There was no inconsiderable number of Southerners who stoutly maintained that Negroes were not free. The Planters’ Party of Louisiana in 1864 proposed to revive the Constitution of 1852 with all its slavery features. They beleived that Lincoln had emancipated the slaves in the rebellious parts of the country as a war measure. Slavery remained intact within the Federal lines except as to the return of fugitives, and might be reinstated everywhere at the close of hostilities; or, in any case, compensation might be obtained by loyal citizens through the decision of the Supreme Court.”
(In Texas, slavery was essentially unimpaired.) “When the Federal soldiers approached, some of the planters set their Negroes free and some Negroes ran away, but most of the Negroes were kept on the plantations to await Federal action, and there was widespread belief that the slavery was an institution and would continue in some form.”
Mr. Sumner reported in 1866 an active slave trade ongoing from the South to the West Indies and South America.
P 143-144 – In Tennessee, the majority of poor whites and spirit of aggression and violence against the Negroes. Infantry of the Confederate army…murders, shootings, whippings, robbing and brutal treatment of every kind are daily inflicted upon them, with no recourse to obtain redress or seeking of justice.
P.145-149: LINCOLN ASPIRATIONS TO DEPORT AND COLONIZE as the solution to the “Negro Problem.”
(In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Peoria, IL, Lincoln stated his first impulse was to send them all to Liberia, but also then reflected upon the impracticality of it)
“If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days…What next? Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of whites will not.”
July 16, 1862 – Lincoln was authorized “to make provision for transportation, colonization, and settlement, in some tropical country beyond the limits of the United States, of such persons of the African race, made free by the provisions of this act, as may be willing to emigrate, having first obtained the consent of the government of said country to their protection and settlement within the same, with all the rights and privileges of freemen.”
Lincoln received a committee of colored men, thinking they could help him implement his colonization aspirations. Negotiations were begun with the West Indies and other South American countries. Lincoln settled on two projects, one in Panama and the other in the West Indies, on an island ceded by Haiti. “An adventurer, named Kock, undertook to carry five thousand colored emigrants to the island, but the result was a fiasco and a large number of the four hundred actually sent died of disease and neglect, and were finally bought back to the United States on a war vessel.”
“As late as April, 1865, President Lincoln said to General Butler:
‘But what shall we do with the Negroes after they are free?’ inquired Lincoln. ‘I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we get rid of the Negroes. Certainly they cannot, if we don’t get rid of the Negroes whom we have armed and disciplined and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of some 150,000 men. I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves. You have been a staunch friend of the race from the time you first advised me to enlist them at New Orleans. you have had a great deal of experience in moving bodies of men by water –your movement up the James was a magnificent one. Now we shall have no use for our very large navy. What then are our difficulties in sending the blacks away?…
(Two days after receiving Lincoln’s instructions to examine the question and come up with his views and figures to show whether the exportation of the Negroes was feasible, Butler replied that it would be impossible.)
“The Secretary of the Interior in December, 1863, reported that the Negroes were no longer willing to leave the United States and that they were needed in the army. For these reasons, he thought that they should not be forcibly deported. On July 2, 1864, all laws relating to Negro colonization were repealed.
P.150-At one point, Lincoln considered the idea of compensation of $400,000,000 for loss of slaves and emancipation.
There was no allowance in Constitutional Law for the issue of seceded states, so re-integration of them into the Union was not going to be easy.
P. 151, paragraph 6 – Lincoln framework for Reconstruction.
Lincoln position on freed slaves – praise for their participation in military victory and re-iteration of emancipation (though nothing explicit about suffrage), applauded by abolitionists.
P. 152-155…Louisiana. The high-culture of the mulattos, demand sent to Governor Sheply for Negro voting rights (they would have been the voting majority) denied.
Lincoln hints at Negro suffrage in communication with newly elected Governor Hahn of Louisiana.
Louisiana delegates met for 78 days. 72-13 vote to abolish slavery. A resolution opening the door for Negro suffrage passed 48-32, called an “N-word” resolution by Sullivan of New Orleans.
The convention voted for establishment and tax funding for free public education.
A resolution to measure whiteness as “less than 25% Negro” was voted down due to “involving too intricate inquiries into ancestry.”
(No action was taken on a petition signed and submitted by 5,000 Negroes asking for suffrage. Many, if not the majority who signed it had been in the Federal army.
Reconstruction in Louisiana was met with opposition by the Wade-Davis Bill.
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-wade-davis-bill-and-reconstruction-104855
Charles Sumner’s “State Suicide” theory and the formulation of Reconstruction measures:
(Both the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill (rejected by Lincoln) and the Lincoln plan excluded the Negro from the right of suffrage while calling for an end to slavery. Lincoln’s plan only asked for 10% of the seceded states white male vote to take loyalty oaths. The Wade-Davis Bill asked for 50% to take loyalty oaths and to swear to have never aided the Confederacy.)
“The Trumbull Resolution of February 18, 1865, recognizing the restored Louisiana government, revealed a disposition in the Senate to yield to Lincoln. But the rising Abolition-democracy protested….” (Charles Sumner “offered another amendment imposing equal suffrage as the fundamental condition for the admission of the seceded states.” Sumner “was rebuked for his arrogance and the Senate finally adjourned, half an hour before midnight.” Wade entered the debate and “denounced the Louisiana government as a mockery…”
“The bill finally failed. It was Sumner’s greatest parliamentary contest and with his triumph, the cause of Negro suffrage was won. Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglas, Parker Pillsbury and others wrote to congratulate Sumner.”
“Ashley’s Reconstruction bill came before the House of Representatives January 16, February 21, and February 22, 1865. Each draft confined suffrage to white male citizens, except one, in which colored soldiers were admitted to the suffrage. Ashley opposed this discrimination, but his committee overruled him.”
Page 164: Long quotes of Lincoln expressing his views on Louisiana – favorable to accepting them back into the Union – “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”
“The tragic death of Lincoln has given currency to the theory that the Lincoln policy of Reconstruction would have been far better and more successful than the policy afterward pursued. If it is meant by this that Lincoln wuld have more carefully followed public opinion and worked to adjust differences, this is true. But Abraham Lincoln himself could not have settled the question of Emancipation, Negro citizenship and the vote, without tremendous difficulty.”
1. Lincoln was “bitterly hated by the overwhelming mass of Southerners.”
2. There was a lack of leadership in the South that
(P.165-p.5,6; P.166, p. 1-3. DuBois’ great summary of the utter lack of leadership and the contradictions of the South. This is amazing writing, worth reading aloud as a group.)
Page 167 to the end of Chapter 6 can almost be treated like a section on the Black Codes and the codification of post-slavery indentured servitude, caste and wage slavery fascism faced by post Civil War Blacks in the south.
I think it could be a session in and of itself where people should strive to relate it to the present laws, such as L.A.’s 41.18 ordinance against the unhoused (mostly African American).
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