Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)

In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeated and prostrate, it appeared to

many that white Southerners would accept virtually any conditions or terms laid

upon them. This was the initial conclusion of the northern journalist Whitelaw

Reid, who believed that even black suffrage would be “promptly accepted”—

that is, until he observed white Southern defiance revived by President Johnson’s

conciliatory Reconstruction measures. After his Southern tour, Reid left a mixed

warning to policymakers about the disposition of white Southerners in 1866.

“The simple truth is,” Reid concluded, “they stand ready to claim everything,

if permitted, and to accept anything, if required.” Other Northern journalists

observing the South reached similar conclusions. The initial war-bludgeoned

compliance on the part of white Southerners gave way within a year to what

Trowbridge called a “loyalty … of a negative sort: it is simply disloyalty

subdued.” A correspondent for the New York Tribune reported from Raleigh,

North Carolina, that “the spirit of the Rebellion is not broken though its power

is demolished.” And a Northerner who had just returned from six months in

South Carolina and Georgia informed Thaddeus Stevens in February 1866 that

“the spirit which actuated the traitors … during the late rebellion is only sub-

dued and allows itself to be nourished by leniency.”

Against this backdrop, Andrew Johnson offered to the South his rapid

Reconstruction policy. In late May 1865, Johnson announced his plan for the

readmission of Southern states. It included a broad provision for amnesty and

pardon for those participants in the rebellion who would take a loyalty oath to

the Union. High-ranking ex-Confederate government officials were excluded

from pardons for the time being, as were all Southerners who owned $20,000

or more worth of property. The latter group had to apply personally to the

President for a pardon. Johnson ’s plan further required each former Confederate

state to call a convention to revise its antebellum constitution, renounce seces-

sion, and accept the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery; they would then

be promptly restored to the Union.

Johnson’s plan put enormous authority back in the hands of white Souther-

ners, but without any provisions for black civil or political rights. Indeed, Johnson

himself was a thoroughgoing white supremacist and a doctrinaire state rightist. He

openly encouraged the South to draft its notorious Black Codes, laws enacted

across the South by the fall of 1865 that denied the freedmen political liberty

and restricted their economic options and physical mobility. Designed as labor

controls and a means for plantation discipline, such laws were part of the new

constitutions produced by these “Johnson governments,” and they expressed

clearly white Southerners’ refusal to face the deeper meanings of emancipation.

Presidential Reconstruction, as it evolved in 1865, allowed Southerners to recreate

governments of and for white men. Moreover, Johnson was openly hostile to the

Freedmen’s Bureau, the agency created by Congress in the last months of the war

to provide food, medical care, schools, and labor contract adjudication for the

freedpeople. The President overruled military and Freedmen’s Bureau efforts to

redistribute some land from masters to ex-slaves. By the fall of 1865, pardoned

ex-Confederates were reclaiming their lands, and with such presidential encour-

agement, reclaiming political power….

RECONSTRUCTION 473

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Profoundly different memories and expectations collided in 1865-67, as pre-

sidential Reconstruction collapsed and the Republicans in Congress wrested

control of the process away from Johnson. “These people [white Southerners]

are not loyal; they are only conquered,” wrote Union Brigadier General James

S. Brisbin to Thaddeus Stevens in December 1865. “I tell you there is not as

much loyalty in the South today as there was the day Lee surrendered to Grant.

The moment they lost their cause in the field they set about to gain by politics

what they had failed to obtain by force of arms.” Brisbin thought the Black

Codes would “reduce the blacks to a slavery worse than that from which they

just escaped.” Johnson’s leniency seemed only to restore an old order and risk

losing the very triumph that the Union forces had just won with so much

sacrifice….

The radical Republicans had a genuine plan for Reconstruction. Their

ideology was grounded in the notion of an activist federal government, a redefi-

nition of American citizenship that guaranteed equal political rights for black

men, and faith in free labor in a competitive capitalist system. The radicals greatly

expanded federal authority, fixing their vision, as Sumner put it, on “the general

principles” of “a national security and a national faith.” Their cardinal principle

was equality before the law, which in 1866 they enshrined in the Fourteen Amend-

ment, expanding citizenship to all those born in the United States without regard

to race. The same year Congress renewed the Freedmen’s Bureau over Johnson’s

veto and passed the first civil rights act in American history.

Such legislation became reality because most Northerners were not ready to

forget the results, and especially the sacrifices, of the war. The Southern states’ re-

jection of the Fourteenth Amendment and Johnson’srepeatedvetoesofRecon-

struction measures (as well as his repudiation at the polls in the Congressional

elections of 1866) gave the radicals increased control over federal policy. In 1867

Congress divided the ex-Confederate states into five military districts and made

black suffrage a condition of readmission to the Union. By 1870 all ex-

Confederate states had rejoined the Union, and in most, the Republican Party—

built as a coalition of “carpetbaggers” (Northerners who moved South), “scalawags”

(native Southerners who gave allegiance to the new order), and thousands of black

voters—held the reins of state government. Indeed black voters were the core

constituency of Southern Republicanism and the means of power in 1867–68….

As Congress engaged in the fateful debates over national policy in 1866–67,

the floors of the House and Senate became arenas of warring memories. Many

Republicans were clearly driven by a combination of retribution against the

South, a desire to remake the Constitution based on black equality, and a quest

for long-term political hegemony. Stevens left no doubt of his personal attitude

toward ex-slaveholders and ex-Confederates. “The murderers must answer to

the suffering race,” he said on May 8, 1866. “A load of misery must sit heavily

upon their souls.” The public debate in Congress was often sanguinary; it chal-

lenged everyone’s ability to convert primal memory into public policy. ”I know

that there is a morbid sensibility, sometimes called mercy,” declared Stevens,

“which affects a few of all classes, from the priest to the clown, which has

more sympathy for the murderer on the gallows than for his victim.” Yankee

474 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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retribution never had a more vehement voice than Stevens, and no one ever

waved the “bloody shirt” with greater zeal. “I am willing they shall come in

when they are ready,” Stevens pronounced. “Do not, I pray you, admit those

who have slaughtered half a million of our countrymen until their clothes are

dried, and until they are reclad. I do not wish to sit side by side with men whose

garments smell of the blood of my kindred.”

“Bloody shirt” rhetoric lasted a long time in American politics; it was more

than a slogan, and in these early years, it had many uses and diverse practitioners.

As both raw personal memory and partisan raw material, the “bloody shirt” was

a means to establish war guilt and a method through which to express war-

induced hatreds ….

Death and mourning were everywhere in America in 1865; hardly a family

had escaped its pall. In the North, 6 percent of white males aged 13–43 had died

in the war; in the South, 18 percent were dead. Of the 180,000 African Amer-

icans who served in the Union army and navy, 20 percent perished. Diseases

such as typhoid, dysentery, and pneumonia claimed more than twice as many

soldiers as did battle. The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter

and how to remember it.

Death on such a scale demanded meaning. During the war, soldiers in

countless remote arbors, or on awful battlefield landscapes, had gathered to

mourn and bury their comrades, even while thousands remained unburied, their

skeletons lying about on the killing fields of Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia.

Women had begun rituals of burial and remembrance in informal ways well be-

fore the war ended, both in towns on the homefront and sometimes at the bat-

tlefront. Americans carried flowers to graves or to makeshift monuments

representing their dead, and so was born the ritual of “Decoration Day,” known

eventually also as Memorial Day.

In most places, the ritual was initially a spiritual practice. But very soon, re-

membering the dead and what they died for developed partisan fault lines. The

evolution of Memorial Day during its first twenty years or so became a contest

between three divergent, and sometimes overlapping, groups: blacks and their

white former abolitionist allies, white Northerners, and white Southerners With

time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preserva-

tion of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely

Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruc-

tion, coalesced around Memorial Day practice. Decoration Day, and the ways

in which it was observed, shaped Civil War memory as much as any other

cultural ritual. The story of the origins of this important American day of

remembrance is central to understanding how reconciliationist practices overtook

the emancipationist legacies of the Civil War….

The “First Decoration Day,” as this event came to be recognized in some

circles in the North, involved an estimated ten thousand people, most of them

black former slaves. During April, twenty-eight black men from one of the local

churches built a suitable enclosure for the burial ground at the Race Course. In

some ten days, they constructed a fence ten feet high, enclosing the burial

ground, and landscaped the graves into neat rows. The wooden fence was

RECONSTRUCTION 475

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whitewashed and an archway was built over the gate to the enclosure. On the

arch, painted in black letters, the workmen inscribed “Martyrs of the Race

Course.” At nine o’clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this special

cemetery began as three thousand black schoolchildren (newly enrolled in free-

men’s schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of roses

and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by three hun-

dred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to

distribute clothing and other goods among the freedpeople. The women carried

baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual Aid

Society, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence around

the track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and black

citizens….

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, “several slight dis-

turbances” occurred during the ceremonies on the first Decoration Day, as well

as “much harsh talk about the event locally afterward.” But a measure of how

white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their

own creation of the practice a year later came fifty-one years afterward, when

the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an in-

quiry for information about the May 1, 1865, parade. A United Daughters of the

Confederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their white

abolitionist friends had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith

responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information

in answer to this.” In Southern and national memory, the first Decoration Day

was nearly lost in a grand evasion.

As a Northern ritual of commemoration, Memorial Day officially took hold

in May 1868 and 1869, when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of

the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), called on all Union veterans to con-

duct ceremonies and decorate the graves of their dead comrades. In general or-

ders issued each of the two springs, Logan called for a national commemoration

unlike anything in American experience save possibly the Fourth of July. In

“almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land,” charged Logan’s

circular, those who died to “suppress the late rebellion” were to be honored an-

nually “while a survivor of the war remains.” On May 30, 1868, when flowers

were plentiful, funeral ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183

cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns

in thirty-one states (including the South) arranged Decoration Day parades and

orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In 1873, the New York leg-

islature designated May 30 a legal holiday, and by 1890 every other Northern

state had followed its lead….

For white Southerners, Memorial Day was born amidst the despair of defeat

and the need for collective expressions of grief. By 1866, local memorial associa-

tions had formed in many Southern communities, organized largely by women.

Some new cemeteries were founded near battlefields, while existing ones in

towns and cities were expanded enormously to accommodate the dead. In

both sections, but especially in the South, the first monuments erected tended

to be placed in cemeteries—the obvious sites of bereavement. By the 1890s,

476 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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hardly a city square, town green, or even some one-horse crossroads lacked a

Civil War memorial of some kind. But through most of the Reconstruction

years, the cemetery remained the public site of memorialization; obelisks and

stone pyramids appeared as markers of the recent past that so haunted every

community. Often directed by social elites who could fund monuments, the

Southern “memorial movement … helped the South assimilate the fact of

defeat,” as Gaines Foster writes, “without repudiating the defeated.”…

By the early 1870s, a group of ex-Confederate officers in Virginia had

forged a coalition of memorial groups that quickly took over the creation of

the Lost Cause tradition. They did so through print as much as through ritual

commemorations. In 1866, former Confederate general Daniel H. Hill founded

the magazine The Land We Love, a periodical devoted to demonstrating the skill

and prowess of Confederate armies against all odds. By 1869, Hill’s journal had

become Southern Magazine, and most importantly, the Southern Historical So-

ciety (SHS) was founded as the vehicle for presenting the Confederate version

of the war to the world. By 1876, the SHS began publishing its regular Southern

Historical Society Papers, a series that ran for fourteen years under the editorship of

a former Confederate chaplain, John William Jones. The driving ideological and

emotional force behind the SHS was the former Confederate general Jubal Early.

Early had fled to Mexico at the end of the war and vowed never to return to his

native Virginia under the federal flag. Despite such bluster, and because of threa-

tening poverty, Early returned to his hometown of Lynchburg in 1869. He

made himself, as Gaines Foster observes, into the “prototypical unreconstructed

Rebel.” His principle aim was not only to vindicate Southern secession and glor-

ify the Confederate soldier, but also to launch a propaganda assault on popular

history and memory….

In the South, monument unveiling days took on a significance equal to, if

not greater than, Memorial Day. In Richmond, Virginia, on October 26, 1875,

Confederate veterans by the thousands staged their first major coming-out as a

collective force. At the unveiling of the first significant monument to a Confed-

erate hero, a standing statue of Stonewall Jackson sculpted by the British artist

T. H. Foley, nearly fifty thousand people gathered for an unprecedented parade

and a ceremony….

At major intersections on the parade route, veterans, ladies memorial associa-

tions, and “the indefatigable K.K.K.” (Ku Klux Klan) had assembled artisans to

construct arches and towers with elaborate decorations honoring Jackson. The lar-

gest arch, at Grace and Eighth Streets, included huge letters that read: “Warrior,

Christian, Patriot.” Above the inscription was a painting representing a stone wall,

“upon which was resting a bare saber, a Bible, and a Confederate cap.”…

One dispute among the planners of the Jackson statue unveiling nearly de-

railed the event. Governor Kemper was the grand marshal of the ceremonies and

had carefully planned the parade to the Capitol Square in Richmond. Kemper

was nervous that “nothing shall appear on the 26th to hurt the party” (Demo-

crats). He feared that the “least excess” in the Confederate celebration would

give yet another “bloody shirt” to Northern Republicans, and he asked the lea-

ders of the Confederate veterans to restrain their displays of battle flags. Only

RECONSTRUCTION 477

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days before the big event, Jubal Early wrote to Kemper complaining of rumors

that black militia companies and civilians were to be “allowed in the procession.”

“I am inexpressibly shocked at the idea,” said Early. He considered the involve-

ment of blacks “an indignity to the memory of Jackson and an insult to the

Confederates.” Black Richmonders, the total of which Early judged to be

between twenty thousand and thirty thousand, would swarm into the square,

he believed, and whites would be forced to “struggle for place with buck

negroes … anxious to show their consequence.” Believing that blacks would

wave “pictures of Lincoln and Fifteenth Amendment banners,” Early threatened

not to attend, and to take other veterans with him, if Kemper executed the plan.

In ferocious responses, Kemper told Early to mind his own business and

begged him to “stay at home.” Black militia officers and ministers in Richmond

had petitioned Kemper to take part in the procession. For racial “peace” in the

city, the governor accepted the petitioners’ request. The small contingent of

blacks were placed at the extreme rear of a parade several miles long, numbering

many thousands of white marchers…. The position of blacks in this bitter argu-

ment between the ultimate irreconcilable [ Jubal Early] and a redeemer-

reconciliationist governor remained utterly subordinate. One would eliminate

them altogether from Confederate memory; the other would declare them loyal

and dispatch them to the rear of parades. In the long history of Lost Cause tradi-

tion, both got their wish.

As the immense crowd assembled at the state capital grounds where the

Jackson monument was to be unveiled, Kemper welcomed them as the

Democrat-redeemer governor of Virginia. He announced that Jackson was a na-

tional hero, not merely a Southern saint, whose memory was to be a “common

heritage of glory” for both sections. The massive ceremony served as the South’s

reminder to the North of its insistence on “respect.” The unveiling declared, in

effect, that Reconstruction, as Northern Republicans had imagined it, was

over….

In 1874–75, Union and Confederate veterans began to participate in Memorial

Day exercises together in both North and South. In the wake of Memorial Day,

1875, in North Carolina, a black citizen in Raleigh, Osborne Hunter, anxiously

observed in a letter to a newspaper “a noticeable spirit of reconciliation pervading

the political atmosphere of both the Republican and Democratic parties of this

state.” In August 1874, the Democrats had regained power in North Carolina,

and the highly racialized election had hinged, in part, on Southern resistance to

federal enforcement of black civil rights. Until May 1875, blacks in Raleigh had

always played a major role in Decoration Day ceremonies in that city. That year

they were discouraged from participating, as the occasion was declared to be only

a “soldier’s turn-out.” At the mark of a “decade in the history of freedom,” con-

cluded Hunter, Decoration Day seemed to be only an occasion for “ignoring the

colored citizen and the colored voter.

”…

The disputed election of 1876 and the electoral crisis that culminated in the

Compromise of 1877 brought the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the pre-

sidency, as well as the final three remaining Southern states not under Demo-

cratic control into that party ’s fold. Reconciliation seemed to sweep over the

478 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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country’s political spirit, as the Union survived another potential severing by sec-

tional and partisan strife. Although it was hardly the first time that commentators

in both sections had declared the final conclusion to the issues of the war, the

political settlement of 1877 easily took its place as the traditional “end” of Re-

construction (a label it has carried ever since).

On Memorial Day, May 30, 1877, New York City experienced an array of

parades and ceremonies unprecedented since the formal inception of the holiday

nine years earlier. Virtually every orator and editorial writer declared the day one

of forgetting, forgiveness, and equality of the Blue and the Gray veterans….

Decoration Day, 1877 in New York culminated with a special indoor event

at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The planning committee, dominated by

democrats, had invited the prominent ex-Confederate general, lawyer, and then

Brooklyn resident Roger A. Pryor to be orator of the evening. A committee

member, Joseph Neilson, opened the proceedings with an explicit appeal for

reconciliation. Neilson declared all the “causes” of the “late domestic contention”

forgotten. As the voice of “healing,” Pryor took the podium before an audience of

nearly one thousand to deliver his extraordinary address, “The Soldier, the Friend

of Peace and Union.”…

Unlike many Memorial Day orators, Pryor did not hide the issue of race

behind a rhetoric of reunion. The war had nothing directly to do with slavery,

he proclaimed, in what became an article of faith to Southern vindicationists and

their Northern allies. Southerners were comfortably reconciled to the destruction

of slavery because it had only been the “occasion not the cause of secession.”

Slavery was an impersonal force in history, a natural phenomenon subject only

to divine control and beyond all human responsibility. It was good while it

lasted, good once it was gone; no Southerner fought in its defense, and no

Northerner died to end it. It just went away, like a change in the weather….

Following Pryor, former Union general Isaac S. Catlin delivered the final

address of the evening. In full sympathy with the former Confederate ’s speech,

Catlin spoke of military pathos and glory, of the victimhood and heroism of all

soldiers on both sides. “I love the memory of a soldier,” said Catlin. “I love the

very dust that covers his mouldering body.” Catlin called on all to be “exultant”

that slavery was dead. “Is this not enough?” he asked. “Is it not enough that we

are all American citizens, that our country is saved, that our country is one?” In

this doctrine of “enough,” the emancipationist legacy of the war had become

bad taste among gentlemen soldiers. The “divine doctrine of forgiveness and

conciliation” was the order of the day.

Dissent from this Blue-Gray reconciliationist version of the war’smemory,

while now on the margins, was by no means silenced in the larger culture or in

New York. One year later, as though they had decided to invite a direct response

to Pryor and his ilk, the integrated Abraham Lincoln Post of the GAR asked

Frederick Douglass to address them in Madison Square on Decoration Day. As

he did on so many occasions during the last quarter of his life, Douglass rose to

the challenge with fire and indignation, offering an alternative, emancipationist

memory of the war. “There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war,”

insisted Douglass

“that no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.”…

RECONSTRUCTION 479

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The reconciliationists were using memory to send the nation down the wrong

road to reunion, he believed. Douglass had no patience for endless tales of South-

ern woes. “The South has suffered to be sure,” he said, “but she has been the

author of her own suffering.”…

The story of Civil War memory and the ritual of Decoration Days contin-

ued well beyond 1885 with the emancipationist legacy fighting endless rearguard

actions against a Blue-Gray reconciliation that was to sweep through American

culture. Those who remembered the war as the rebirth of the republic in the

name of racial equality would continue to do battle with the growing number

who would remember it as the nation’s test of manhood and the South’s struggle

to sustain white supremacy.

Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)

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