-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
PART IV
THE AGRARIAN REVOLT
CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION
The Lord is a man of war, and the Lord is his name.
~ Exodus 15:3
THE AGRARIAN REVOLT
CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION
The Lord is a man of war, and the Lord is his name.
~ Exodus 15:3
Reconstruction, Paranoia, and the New Order
The election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, and the overwhelming Republican landslide in the Congressional elections, in 1864 marks the “Republican Ascendency” that I discussed in Chapter 8. With the war over, and a nation to rebuild, a new pressing issue arrived in the halls of Congress: what to do with the Afro-American population of the South. Actions had been taken by President Fremont, under the influence of then-Vice President Lincoln, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Additional actions by Union forces as they crusaded in their righteous zeal to stamp out the evils of slavery and the “plague of secession” led the freeing of hundreds of thousands of Afro-Americans as the Union armies stormed through the south like the hand of God smiting all forces before it.
If the Civil War on the battlefields had ended, another civil war was brewing between the old divisions I also discussed in Chapter 8 concerning the politics of abolition and agrarianism, capitalism and industrialization, the Old South and the New South. The decisive landslide of the Republican Party in 1864 was – by any modern standard – a mandate for the Puritan moralism that hundreds of thousands had died for and hundreds of thousands more were wounded and forever maimed for. As Lincoln said in his inaugural address, “In fire our nation has been reborn.”*
A photo of President Abraham Lincoln at his inaugural address after being elected President. Lincoln is standing at center giving his address.
In many ways, the fight over Reconstruction was a continued struggle of the old Jeffersonian, agrarian, populist, and democratic ideal against the Hamiltonian, industrialist, capitalist, and elitist ideal. The general tone-deafness of Democrats like former New York City mayor Fernando Wood and Ohio congressman George Pendleton is something that modern critics can latch onto with ease, but failure to understand the populist paranoia over the “expansion of centralized power” was a major concern for those champions of Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy.
To this point, the history of Reconstruction and the populist revolt that culminated in the election of William Jennings Bryan was a reactionary rearguard effort by true democrats, that is, those who truly did believe in the rule of the majority irrespective of moral policies and actions of the ruling majority, to stymy the efforts of what they perceived as the politics of big business, the corruption of the virgin country of the American South and West, and the triumph of the international moneyed interests and classes that were primarily rooted in the American upper northeast. One could claim that southern democracy was never majoritarian to begin with and was always rooted in the politics of the “master class” described by John C. Calhoun, but in the eyes of its defenders, democracy was and remains a sacred right of the American project with divine ordination as God’s chosen form of government.
This was, however, moot to the Radical Republicans – many of whom, like Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Wade shared with the Democrats the concern over the possibility of increased executive power and the rise of the capitalist class, but nevertheless remained steadfastly committed to the project of Reconstruction and the passage of the Reconstruction amendments. Thus, one of the ironies of Reconstruction was that Jeffersonian-leaning Republicans, predominately from the rural Midwest, who held similar agrarian, populist, and democratic ideals as the Democratic Party, split with Jeffersonian-leaning Democrats on the issue of Reconstruction precisely because of the moral imperative of the expansion of democracy to include millions of freedmen. This is made all the more ironic given Thomas Jefferson’s historical role as the leading anti-slavery politician and president prior to the Civil War despite all of his other personal failings on the matter.[1]
Democracy, in the eyes of the Radical Republicans who remained ever bit steadfastly loyal to the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal – as Stevens himself professed – envisioned a democracy for all rather than just most. But to men like Pendleton and Wood, the Radical Republicans would poison the wellspring of democracy itself in their embrace of “Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends.” The end result was, in Pendleton’s words, the corruption of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democratic ideal where the yeoman citizenry would grow dependent upon the federal government to advance their cause rather than take control of their destinies for themselves by the work of their own hands. At the same time, the plans of Reconstruction and the hope of the freedmen of the south, was nevertheless still largely agrarian in its visions and ideals – perhaps bust summed up by Sherman’s unfulfilled promise of “40 acres and mule.”
The nature of Reconstruction was, by every account, a political war as contentious as the Civil War itself, and savage in its political rhetoric and implications. Back room deals, threats, and shadowy and unsavory agents of reform, swarmed and consumed Washington in the early months of 1865. The great Republican tidal wave of 1864 had brought the House composition to 64-36 Republican-Democratic, meaning the House of Representatives just needed to procure six Democratic congressmen in order to pass the planned thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments.[2]
Another aspect of the forthcoming war over Reconstruction was the punishment to be dolled down upon the southern states for their secession from the Union. Lincoln and the Republicans were adamant that Reconstruction was not punishment for their actions, though southerners and many of the former Confederate government officials felt different when made aware of the plans for “Radical Reconstruction.” Their paranoia was not assuaged by the siren calls of hundreds of northern newspapers and periodicals calling for the complete transformation of the American south through Reconstruction and the promise of creating a new society in the aftermath of the Civil War. For southerners, the war over Reconstruction was a literal fight to save whatever heritage, toil, and work that the fruit of their hands had produced for the last 200 years.
J.L. Giles engraving and allegory of Reconstruction, “A More Perfect Union?” American politics, despite the constitutional separation of church and state – which was always a Protestant and anti-Catholic invention that was never seen as “secular” – always played on religious imagery in the depiction of its political drama.
From this perspective, Reconstruction was more than just the fight to abolish slavery – though it was, and always was, that. Reconstruction had many contingent effects that would manifest themselves, and many policies for Reconstruction were contingently related to the outcomes of the Civil War. For one, the south was to experience a new industrialization and modernization to rebuild its infrastructure and economy. Old South romantics and agrarians were steadfastly opposed to this. On another hand, Reconstruction promised to make millions of Afro-Americans politically and socially equal to millions of poor Whites, and the poor Whites resented this because it would displace them from their middle-ground status between the vestiges of the southern agrarian upper-class and the underclass Afro-American community held in bondage. At the same, and as described hitherto, there were strong implications for political change and political philosophy that would be ushered in through the enacting of Reconstruction’s planned amendments and new policies to build “a new south.” Not to mention that the coming struggle over Reconstruction was equally seen as the last hurrah of the Confederacy, the final moment that whatever ideals the Confederacy had fought for could somehow be preserved from perceived Yankee lechery and tyranny.
The battlefields of the America may now be silent. The ghosts of the dead given their rest. But a new battle was brewing in political statehouses, Washington, and the American Congress. It would be as brutal as any political struggle not being fought through the price of the blood of young men could be. The Bonnie Blue flag would wave again in the fight over the future of Reconstruction.
*Fictional quote to fit this new timeline.
[1] This, again, is true. Jefferson wrote the articles in the Northwest Ordinances to prevent the expansion of slavery into what became the American Midwest. He also abolished the slave trade while President, which is generally ranked as one of his greatest accomplishments as President. In his private letters, and in Notes on the State of Virginia, he opined the slavery corrupted the moral nature of all parties involved. This is often forgotten concerning debates over Jefferson’s relationship to slavery.
[2] Numbers differ from our timeline to reflect my game’s political reality and additional states (like Quebec).
SUGGESTED READING
Michael Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act
Michael Lanza, Agrarianism and Reconstruction Politics: The Southern Homestead Act
Thaddaeus Stevens is a man I want to know more about ... but also a project likely for a different decade.
But Locke did not make the Constitution. Any constituted grievance must find its precedent in the Constitution, in which ambiguity is the watchword, and not in contradiction to Locke's principles.
This doesn't change the fact that southern states used Locke's principles to justify their position. This is all well-documented. As mentioned in earlier posts, the southern states and their congressional leaders understood that that any territorial changes to the U.S. proper were to go through the Congress (per Article 4, Sec. 3, which is the closest to dealing with 'secession'). But given that this would never work, they argued from Locke and from the implied agreement, stemming from Lockean principles, that they could peacefully leave and form a new (legitimate) government since the violation of the social compact that was the Constitution meant that the government had dissolved itself (per Locke's writings). The pro-Union position didn't take kindly to this view. Which is why secession has always been considered illegal, at least in the manner that it was conducted by in the Confederacy.
It was the Confederacy that willingly disregarded Constitutional procedure, which is what I've wanted to highlight in all the legal statements that one could find through the Civil War section of this AAR.
...Which neatly sets the scene for us to leap into the heady world of Carpetbaggers and Redeemers, of sharecropping and poll taxes, of the "Lost Cause" and the "Solid South," and so on. Hopefully we'll get a good look at each of those as the narrative advances.
I'm also eagerly looking forward to getting into the thick of the cowmen, the railroad barons, and the oil and steel men once the focus turns to the Gilded Age.
Overall, glad to see you bringing this back, volks
I'll be glad to see you continuing to write about Reconstruction.
And William Jennings Bryan, elected? That'll be a change.
And William Jennings Bryan, elected? That'll be a change.
If this was a shoddy 'great man' historiography AAR you would have your wish. Alas, it is not. Though Stevens will drop around as we roll through Reconstruction.
...Which neatly sets the scene for us to leap into the heady world of Carpetbaggers and Redeemers, of sharecropping and poll taxes, of the "Lost Cause" and the "Solid South," and so on. Hopefully we'll get a good look at each of those as the narrative advances.
I'm also eagerly looking forward to getting into the thick of the cowmen, the railroad barons, and the oil and steel men once the focus turns to the Gilded Age.
Overall, glad to see you bringing this back, volks
Let me just say that the chapter title for the series of posts on Reconstruction, "The War for Reconstruction," is not an understatement. And neither is the title for "PART IV: THE AGRARIAN REVOLT!"
Ah yes, finally getting to volksmarschall's treatment of Reconstruction which you, in particular, have long desired. And WJB elected, well, that's been foreshadowed plenty in the past -- which is understandable if you've forgotten given the half-year lag between updates or however long it's been.
CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION
Passing the Thirteenth Amendment
Passing the Thirteenth Amendment
The first task Lincoln set out to accomplish as the officially elected President of the United States was the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which would regard all colored persons in the United States as equal citizens under the law and formally abolish slavery. Lincoln felt that he had a divine mandate from Heaven to heal the moral sickness that was slavery for which the United States was punished by God through the fire and hardship of this terrible civil war. Behind Lincoln stood the Radical Republicans, a faction of pro-abolitionist Republicans led by the likes of Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives and Benjamin Wade in the Senate.
Quietly supporting Lincoln's goal were the “moderate” Republicans, mostly old Whigs who were more interested in political-economy and carrying out the Hamiltonian program of national banking, crediting, and creating a strong industrialized economy which was now badly needed, especially in the war torn south and the economically exhausted north. While all had rallied behind the Union during the war, few were as ardent abolitionist as their populist brethren like Stevens and Wade. As I had discussed previously, part of the battles between the Radical Republicans and the moderate Republicans, so-called, was that that Radicals were populist, agrarian, and democratic, and generally anti-capitalist (that is, suspicious of the big bank and industrialized political economy program of their northeastern party brethren) and that the moderates were pro-capitalist, pro-national bank, elitist (many being descendants of America’s early founding families), and were proponents of “carpet bagging” in the south – to seize southern land and transform it into industrial-capitalist centers; these differences spilled over between the staunch Calvinist moralism of the Radicals and the more benign skepticism of the liberalizing Protestant Mainline leading to radically different views on the issue of abolition and the equality of Blacks.
While the Republicans were, for the time being, showing a united front, they needed at least six Democratic votes without any Republican defections. Matters were made worse that the Democratic Party, even those Democrats in the north and in cities like New York, saw the growth of the Executive Branch as an emerging “Imperial Presidency.” Former New York City mayor, turned Congressional Representative, Fernando Wood – one of the leading opponents of the Thirteenth Amendment – accosted Lincoln as a new tyrant, like Julius Caesar, crossing the Rubicon (the Potomac) as if to “save the beloved republic” but, in reality, bring about its ruination. There were a myriad of complicated issues in this stance against Lincoln, and against Lincoln personally.
For men like Wood, Lincoln represented everything they feared – a nationalistic president with imperial ambitions which would transform the United States political constitution and grant ever greater and growing power to the Presidency and essentially subject the Congress to being subservient to the back and call of the wants of the “imperial presidency.” Lincoln would drive a moral issue, like slavery and abolition, to consolidate executive power. Yes, men like Wood also regarded Blacks as inferior to the White man, but Wood’s opposition was more closely predicated to stopping a man whom he loathed, a man whom he regarded as a tyrant and demagogue, and a man whom everyone knew had secretly been President in all but name from late 1862-1864. Likewise, some Republicans who were publically supporting Lincoln but secretly on the fence were also worried about the implied power that would come to the executive office through Lincoln’s forceful hand in demanding the Thirteenth Amendment and what steps the back woods lawyer might take even if the effort failed. A group of about thirty Republicans, all of them among the moderate faction, were secretly worried that they would just become pawns to the same imperial presidency that worried certain Democrats.
Despite harsh speeches, condemnations, and one fist fight that broke out on the House Floor, back room deals and the tireless work of Radical Republicans ensured that no Republican broke rank and nine Democrats voted in favor of the measure, giving safe passage to the Thirteenth Amendment. According to newspaper reporters in the House Chamber, the Chamber erupted with cheers when the vote was formally counted and the Amendment had passed. Hats were thrown into the air, elated singing broke out, Republicans were hugging and kissing one another, crying even, all the while stone-faced Democrats retired to the back of the chamber to lick their wounds. Wood, outraged by the outcome, though few could hear him, assailed the vote as “A victory for tyranny.”
A Harper’s Weekly print image capturing the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives.
The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was hailed as a “new birth of freedom” for the United States. Defeated Confederates, however, were less than pleased with the news of its passage. Many lower ranked Confederate officers, and even some generals, were all granted pardon and had their rights as citizens restored to them as they integrated back into American life. Many subsequently declared their intent to run for Congress opposing “Republican Tyranny” and defending “our way of life.” Others were more pragmatic and practical, well-knowing that Congress was now a dead horse – the real battle for the implementation of the Reconstruction Amendments was to be fought at the state level. After all, the Thirteenth Amendment now had to be passed by the states; but Republican controlled legislatures, and the non-state status of the former Confederate states, ensured the Thirteenth Amendment’s clear sailing
While the Thirteenth Amendment was the hard fought and polarized Congressional battle, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, providing citizenship and the right to vote, were passed in 1867 and 1868 respectively.[1]
The Rise of States’ Rights and the Birth of “Jim Crow”
It is here that the issue of “states’ rights” really emerged. The modern doctrine of states’ rights never had anything to do with the right to secession as contemporary revisionists claim. The modern doctrine of states’ rights came in two historical waves: Reconstruction and the twentieth century Civil Rights’ Movement. The claim was that states’ rights could be derived from the Tenth Amendment, which was, in its original historical form, vague. The attempt to use state power to curb federal initiative, which is what the modern doctrine of states’ rights is really about, was premised on faux acceptance of federal law while enacting state law to undercut federal law. “Jim Crow” was born of states’ rights.
The southern pushback to the Reconstruction Amendments rested on reconstituted state authority and power. The former Confederate states crafted a series of complex and complicated laws that, on paper, abided the Reconstruction Amendments, but in their material application all but reconstituted slavery in an ever harsher form. Furthermore, segregation was the outcome of the battle over Reconstruction.
While the pre-Civil War era saw Whites and Blacks as unequal and Blacks inferior to Whites, the reality of common practice – especially in the south – was the integrated slave plantation. If Blacks received any education, which was often banned, it was in the form of private tutelage from their White masters and hired tutors. This is terribly romanticized by Southern Partisans to highlight the “benign nature” of slavery and that abolition is what really caused the White-Black divide in race-relations. Now that, by federal law, Blacks were – on paper – equal to Whites and afforded all the same opportunities as Whites, southern states instituted strict policies of segregation.
Black public places, first of all schools, were always underfunded (if funded at all), left to rot and decay, and always given the most inferior of educational resources (if given any at all). The strict segregation of Black-White interactions were also established to preserve the social division that was consciously accepted in pre-Civil War society. This was reality that emerged in the battles over Reconstruction. Prior to the Civil War slavery and Black inferiority and de-humanization may have been both de jure and de facto, but its applied life was more de facto than de jure. Now, in the Reconstruction area, the inferiority and de-humanization of Blacks occurred through the harsher and more concrete manifestation of de jure “equality” called “separate but equal.” While there remained, in a sense, the same de jure and de facto dichotomy as pre-1860, the rise of Jim Crow and states’ rights to circumvent federal law established a much stronger and sinister de jure inferiority which manifested itself in material terms: poor housing, poor schools, poor land, and constantly living in the shadow of the new aristocracy which was the same as the old aristocracy.
A cartoon depicting the alliance of the “White League” and the Ku Klux Klan to ensure White southern domination over the freed Black population, with the caption reading: “The Union as it Was, Worse Than Slavery.”
Whatever praise one wishes to give to the Republicans and Lincoln in Congress, and at the Federal level, their failure to do anything about the emergence of Jim Crow in the southern states in the aftermath of the passage of the Reconstruction amendments should garner the greatest of scorn and animosity. Notwithstanding that many Republicans who had supported the Reconstruction amendments still held that Blacks were lesser than Whites biologically and intellectually, even if their votes reflected a legal equality between races. Some Radical Republicans called for the retention of Federal troops in the southern states to protect Black Americans. Others called for the reorganization of southern state legislatures – which only fed into the hysteria of growing federal tyranny and oppression which met the strongest of opposition stateside and in Washington.
Another aspect of Jim Crow, which is often unexplored, is also the economic side to it. Southerners, ever the agrarians, feared that the Reconstruction amendments not only destroyed their social way of life, but that carpet bagging and the rise of an industrialized and capitalist south would also destroy the agrarian, communitarian, and small town way of life. Many southerners already had deep ambivalence to the “city” way of life such as in Charleston or New Orleans which were lambasted as miniature versions of New York City just along southern coasts.
This was the paradox between the populist agrarianism of the north (which had largely supported abolition and Reconstruction) and the populist agrarianism of the south (which strongly supported slavery, secession, and Jim Crow). Northern agrarian populism was characterized by the conservative vision of rural homesteads, closed and close-knit communities, and uniform culture. This was the agrarianism that they knew, after all. Southern agrarian populism was characterized was the Enlightenment vision of separated races, the superiority of the White landowner, and the constant threat that their way of life was under from Yankee capitalists and a potentially rebellious and revolutionary laboring class.[2] Northern agrarian populism was dominated by the necessity of free work, free labor, and free land. Southern agrarian populism was dominated by forced work, forced labor, and land entrenchment.
But the coming struggle between states' rights and federal initiative would come to a head with "Sherman's Holy War" and the militant efforts to implement the Reconstruction program with the man who thought he was the chosen instrument of God's vengeful punishment against the south.
[1] Different from our timeline.
[2] See Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation.
SUGGESTED READING
Laura Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Douglas Egerton, The Wars for Reconstruction
Laura Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction
Douglas Egerton, The Wars for Reconstruction
Appropriate for @Specialist290 and it's about time to make the main screen truer in the post-war environment than in the war environment! The War for Reconstruction is just getting started!
And as a native Buckeye who will always choose native Buckeyes over any other statelander, Sherman is an Ohio hero!
And as a native Buckeye who will always choose native Buckeyes over any other statelander, Sherman is an Ohio hero!
CHAPTER XII: THE WAR FOR RECONSTRUCTION
40 Acres and a Mule: “Generalissmo” Sherman and His “Holy War”
40 Acres and a Mule: “Generalissmo” Sherman and His “Holy War”
Stalwarts like William Clayton and Ulysses Grant may have outshined William Sherman for much of the war, or the important battles, but Sherman did make a name for himself during his infamous March Down the Coast, and he became all the more famous in the post-war period – much to the scorn of southerners, and much to the alarming dismay of many members of Congress. During Sherman’s march down the Atlantic Coast he proclaimed that all freed slaves would have the reparations of “40 acres and a mule” in the coming “new south.” Sherman’s stature grew as he ventured across the old bastions of plantation slavery, smiting the southerners with the righteous sword of God and being conceived as the new Moses of the Afro-American people.
Sherman was stalwart and devout Presbyterian Calvinist, despite marrying into a Catholic family and receiving Catholic rites of marriage. His fire and brimstone Calvinism, unlike many of his northern brothers, did not wane over the course of the war. If anything it only grew stronger and stronger. As one of his letters to General Hood spelled out, Sherman took great displeasure in reading his “sacrilegious” appeals to God and humanity for mercy. Sherman’s God was the God of the Prophets, of Israel, of Calvin – of stern and just judgment:
In the name of common-sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts that were left in the honorable custody of peaceful ordnance-sergeants, seized and made "prisoners of war" the very garrisons sent to protect your people against negroes and Indians, long before any overt act was committed by the (to you) hated Lincoln Government; tried to force Kentucky and Missouri into rebellion, spite of themselves; falsified the vote of Louisiana; turned loose your privateers to plunder unarmed ships; expelled Union families by the thousands, burned their houses, and declared, by an act of your Congress, the confiscation of all debts due Northern men for goods had and received! Talk thus to the marines, but not to me, who have seen these things, and who will this day make as much sacrifice for the peace and honor of the South as the best-born Southerner among you! If we must be enemies, let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in arch hypocritical appeals to God and humanity. God will judge us in due time, and he will pronounce whether it be more humane to fight with a town full of women and the families of a brave people at our back or to remove them in time to places of safety among their own friends and people. I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
W. T. SHERMAN [1]
To Afro-Americans trapped in the bondage of their Egypt, Sherman entered like the hand of Providence sent as the instrument of their liberation. He was, to many, their Moses who had come to humble Pharaoh and bring about their exodus. To some extent this is precisely what he had achieved. While Sherman refused to employ any of the newly freed Blacks in his army and was panned by the hardline abolitionist press for creating a refugee problem and doing nothing to alleviate it, freed Blacks throughout the south held him in a prophetic and divinized status and strongly identified with the few all-Black regiments that were already part of Sherman’s army. These same freed Blacks continued to see Sherman as their guardian and savior moreover than Lincoln in the Reconstruction period.
A photo of General William Tecumseh Sherman, ca. 1865. General Sherman rose to fame during the latter half of the Civil War, especially during his captivating “march down the coast,” which broke the back of the Confederacy and the cradle of secession. Leaving a path of destruction behind him, Sherman’s deep religiosity made his campaign all the more brutal as he believed the response to sin wasn’t mercy but harsh judgment. As he said in quoting Proverbs, "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
The re-retirement of William Clayton at the end of the war and the promotion of Ulysses Grant as General in Chief of the United States Army meant that William Sherman became “Generalissmo” of Reconstruction. As Military Governor of the American South, and General in Chief of Reconstruction, Sherman had the unpleasant task of carrying out federal directives with the force of his blue-cladded veterans who were already hated by the southern population. If there was hope of an olive branch and peaceful reconciliation, Lincoln made a mistake in keeping Sherman in charge of the “Reconstruction Army” which was, in the minds of many southerners, an occupying force. Sherman wrote that he only sought two things in his post: To do his military duty and to punish the proud, haughty, and rebellious southerners. His stern Calvinism shown through when he personally wrote that in punishing the southerners he was the chosen instrument of God’s wrath and vengeance upon sinful slave owners and rebellious citizens. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10) and in fearing Sherman southerners were coming to fear the Lord once again, “My aim then was, to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’”[2]
When news of the passage of the Reconstruction amendments hit, and following Lincoln’s Executive Order to carry out the promises of 40 acres and mule, Sherman deployed his army with full force as if it was still total war and the peace settlement had not been reached between the former Confederate government and the American government. The stars and stripes of Sherman’s banners stretched across the Atlantic seaboard and inward to the rolling hills and plains of Appalachia and the mighty Mississippi River and began allotting the land to be carved out for the still dispossessed Afro-American population.
One southerner wrote in a diary that on the morning of June 19, 1865, he awoke to the drums and fife of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and saw Old Glory fluttering in the wind – but he did not have a feeling of pride flow through him. Hearing of the news of what was transpiring in some areas throughout the south, he was overwrought with fear and trembling. Exactly what Sherman wanted. “The music sounded the drumbeat of war, ‘He is trampling out the vintage with his terrible swift sword’ indeed! The trumpets of war and the appearance of the Union flag signaled only one thing, Sherman’s demons had come to take our homes and land and hand it over to the negroes.”
By the autumn of 1865 Sherman’s army had displaced about 20,000 White families, confiscated some 500 plantations, and had redistributed around 1.5 million acres of land to freed Blacks throughout the American South. But the process was slow growing. It wasn’t soon that local communities and the southern states began lobbying to Democrats in Congress for aid in what they saw as unlawful acquisition of rightfully owned property which was guaranteed to them in the terms of surrender. Furthermore, the agitation caused by Sherman’s “forceful enaction” of Lincoln’s orders had led many moderate Republicans to join the chorus of Congressional opposition to this redistribution of land and wealth across the South. Not to mention that many moderate Republicans in the north had different plans on the landscape of the American south than see it remain a bastion of agrarian farming – with the only difference being Black landowners than White landowners.
A political cartoon depicting “Sherman’s Holy War” during the height of Reconstruction.
Sherman’s campaign of redistribution had grounded to halt, and the Christmas Massacre brought him further scrutiny when a regiment sent Summerville South Carolina to begin seizing and redistributing land was met by a town militia – many former Confederate veterans – who refused to allow the “Yankee” soldiers to defile and transform their town. Rising tensions led to the commanding officer, Colonel Robert James Howard, to forcibly enter the homes where several militiamen opened fire. Howard retaliated by siccing the hounds, so to speak, on the town and its people. Half of the town was burned and around 30 people killed in the exchanging gunfire and chaos.
Growing southern resistance and Congressional opposition led to Lincoln personally telegramming Sherman at his headquarters in Atlanta to cease carrying out the orders while ensuring protection to the land that had been redistributed. He also ordered Sherman’s army, beginning in the summer of 1866, to begin helping in the manual reconstruction of many of the destroyed and still ruined southern cities, especially Charleston.
As one southern historian noted of Sherman’s so-called Holy War:
Generalissmo Sherman was ready for another war. He craved it. He saw himself as the instrument that Providence had chosen to humble the hearts of southerners. But his political overseers in Washington, seeking compromise and reconciliation, balked first. The South could thank moderate Republicans most of all for this – Sherman would have spared not an inch of the land that needed to be washed clean of the many sins of the southern people, but on the leash of his political masters, he relented because he had no other choice. The fighting spirit of the southern cause had not been totally quenched even after the surrender of the Confederate government. Once again Sherman knew this and was prepared to wage “A War for Reconstruction,” and he really meant war. Black folk, so close to liberation, so close to crossing the River Jordan, were suddenly forced back to Egypt with the stroke of a pen.
And another historian, reflecting on the history of Sherman’s March Down the Coast and his actions during Reconstruction, stated that Sherman’s military campaigns were “unequaled by anything in the annals of Christian armies.”[3]
The War for Reconstruction is aptly named because it was a war. It was a war fought with “vigilante” racial violence. It was a war fought with the force of the American army as the instrument of Reconstruction – at least initially. It was a war that saw southern resolve come close to snapping, but northern political nerve broke first.
But there is no illusion that the American psyche saw the Civil War as just and righteous judgment of God against the American country for slavery. As Lincoln said in his inauguration, “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”[4] It was the American odyssey, the fratricide of Cain and Abel replayed on a grander and more horrid scale. As Sherman wrote of the matter, “God knows that I deplore this fratricidal war as much as any man living, but it is upon us, a physical fact; and there is only one honorable issue from it. We must fight it out, army against army, and man against man; and I know, and you know, and civilians begin to realize the fact, that reconciliation and reconstruction will be easier through and by means of strong, well-equipped, and organized armies than through any species of conventions that can be framed.”[5]
[1] William Sherman, Memoirs, Vol. 4, December 1864-January 1865.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Charles Coulombe, Puritan’s Empire, p. 252.
[4] Historically from Lincoln’s Second Inauguration Address, 1865.
[5] Sherman, Memoirs.
SUGGESTED READING:
James McDonough, William Tecumseh Sherman: In The Service of My Country: A Life
William T. Sherman, Memoirs
*I cannot recommend Sherman’s personal writings enough! Read them. Great insight to the struggles of war and the perspective of Sherman himself.
James McDonough, William Tecumseh Sherman: In The Service of My Country: A Life
William T. Sherman, Memoirs
*I cannot recommend Sherman’s personal writings enough! Read them. Great insight to the struggles of war and the perspective of Sherman himself.
Last edited:
Hurrah, Hurrah! We Bring the Jubilee! Hurrah, Hurrah! The Flag that makes you free!
I've often wondered how different American history would have been had there been a more comprehensive effort to break the Southern aristocracy by confiscating their estates as well as their "contraband." I'm personally convinced that one of the reasons that Reconstruction fell apart in the long term was precisely because the same former slaveowners kept title to their vast plantation tracts, effectively locking the new freedman out of possessing property of their own and thus being able to make an independent livelihood.
On the other hand, such a heavy-handed approach might well have drawn out the war itself over at least another decade, even if the Confederacy as an organized state had already been broken.
On the other hand, such a heavy-handed approach might well have drawn out the war itself over at least another decade, even if the Confederacy as an organized state had already been broken.
A fascinating and traumatising business. As always it is intriguing how strongly personal faith guides actions in American history. I am particularly intrigued at something I had not been aware of previously, that Sherman married a Catholic woman at a time when such marriages between denominations must have been unfathomably rare.
Don't forget "Bombs Away LeMay!", incidentally also from Ohio like Sherman!
War is a cruel and gritty thing.Freedom, Democracy, Liberty, the holy trinity of American political culture: Brought to you with cold serving of an American soldier.
We'll never know. But don't discount the fact that northern businessmen equally didn't want land to simply pass from whites to blacks; they had other intentions too. Which we'll get into. And the economic engines in New England still needed their cheap produce! Hush hush about all that.
Yeah, Sherman's marriage wouldn't have been comfortable in the eyes of many. Anti-Catholicism really wouldn't dissipate until the 1960s historically; and there are still legitimate questions concerning the longstanding residue of anti-Catholicism in America today. While, by all accounts, a good husband, Sherman never considered himself Catholic though he did receive a Catholic funeral at the request of his surviving family members.
But there's no questioning his view of himself, the war, and his role in it. Guilty of romanticizing it for sure; but there's something I find oddly and weirdly appealing about it. The hand of judgment coming down on a people and nation; the fact that Sherman saw himself as that instrument is fascinating.
That's a rather different Sherman. 'Our' Sherman had a conflicted history with Indian relations - he seems to have been respected by the Indian leaders for telling them plain truth, and feared for his unrelenting enforcement of reservation orders. This Sherman seems not just hard but actively vengeful - a thin line but one I think the historical Sherman did not cross. And as you note, Sherman (like just about everyone in the North) had a complicated view of slavery, African-Americans and race relations. I find this Sherman troubling.
I do think our present circumstances would be different if Reconstruction-era congresses had taken a hard line against the 'readmitted' state constitutions. But the North and the Army did take a hard line against the KKK, at least eventually. Had the KKK been permitted to keep growing at its rapid pace (in Northern states as well as Southern) we might have had an earlier encounter with a 'Jim Crow' totalitarianism on a national scale.
I do think our present circumstances would be different if Reconstruction-era congresses had taken a hard line against the 'readmitted' state constitutions. But the North and the Army did take a hard line against the KKK, at least eventually. Had the KKK been permitted to keep growing at its rapid pace (in Northern states as well as Southern) we might have had an earlier encounter with a 'Jim Crow' totalitarianism on a national scale.
Quite. While I'm taking the historicity of Sherman's memoirs where he saw himself something of an instrument of judgment against the rebels, we're going for a much more conflictual Reconstruction at the moment. Plus, as a native Buckeye, and Sherman a native Buckeye, there is nothing but Ohio love to the point of romanticization with me and him!
As such, and with Sherman in control of the Union/American forces in the south, he is the instrument of Reconstruction which, at least partially, had been implemented along the lines of Radical Republican plans before coming to halt as the end of the update concludes. All the more reason now for southerners to dislike Sherman! All the more reason for me to like Sherman! Don't forget, there a few people and moments that I, volksmarschall, have planned just because of my desires. Like a long awaited WJB presidency, if we ever get there.It's great to see and hear from you again Porter. I hope all is well! As you probably remember, my time here at Yale is winding down. If you somehow manage to be up anytime in the next month, do let me know!
But, as promised way back in the preface, I don't want to spend too much time on Reconstruction and the New South as related to Reconstruction. Gets too much time (perhaps rightfully so) in most histories and education in American history. I want to focus on populism, labor, the conflict between agrarianism and labor vs. industrialization and capitalism; what some historians call the agrarian or populist revolt and the "greatest democratic mass movement in American history." Which gets oooohhhh so little attention and is often glossed over as the prelude to the great transformation of America, the engines of progress, and the "men who made America." What rubbish!