White Rage Read online

  To cast the war as something else, as Lincoln did, to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of “preserving the Union” would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to a failure of humanity. Frederick Douglass later charged that in “the hurry and confusion of the hour, and the eagerness to have the Union restored, there was more care for the sublime superstructure of the republic than for the solid foundation upon which it alone could be upheld”—the full rights of the formerly enslaved people.18

  Millions of enslaved people and their ancestors had built the enormous wealth of the United States; indeed, in 1860, 80 percent of the nation’s gross national product was tied to slavery.19 Yet, in return for nearly 250 years of toil, African Americans had received nothing but rape, whippings, murder, the dismemberment of families, and forced subjugation, illiteracy, and abject poverty. The quest to break the chains was clear. As black residents in Tennessee explained in January 1865:

  We claim freedom, as our natural right, and ask that in harmony and co-operation with the nation at large, you should cut up by the roots the system of slavery, which is not only a wrong to us, but the source of all the evil which at present afflicts the State. For slavery, corrupt itself, corrupted nearly all, also, around it, so that it has influenced nearly all the slave States to rebel against the Federal Government, in order to set up a government of pirates under which slavery might be perpetrated.20

  The drive to be free meant that 179,000 soldiers, 10 percent of the Union Army, (and an additional 19,000 in the Navy) were African Americans. Humanity, therefore, cried out to honor the sacrifice and heroism of tens of thousands of black men who had gallantly fought the nation’s enemy. That military service had to carry with it, they believed, citizenship rights and the dignity that comes from no longer being defined as property or legally inferior.21

  To be truly reborn this way, the United States would have had to overcome not just a Southern but also a national disdain for African Americans. In New York City, for example, during the 1863 Draft Riots:

  Black men and black women were attacked, but the rioters singled out the men for special violence. On the waterfront, they hanged William Jones and then burned his body. White dock workers also beat and nearly drowned Charles Jackson, and they beat Jeremiah Robinson to death and threw his body in the river. Rioters also made a sport of mutilating the black men’s bodies, sometimes sexually. A group of white men and boys mortally attacked black sailor William Williams—jumping on his chest, plunging a knife into him, smashing his body with stones—while a crowd of men, women, and children watched. None intervened, and when the mob was done with Williams, they cheered, pledging “vengeance on every nigger in New York.”22

  This violence was simply the most overt, virulent expression of a stream of anti-black sentiment that conscribed the lives of both the free and the enslaved. Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote. In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries; and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white.23

  The glint of promise that had come as the war ended required an absolute resolve to do what it would take to recognize four million newly emancipated people as people, as citizens. A key element was ensuring that the rebels would not and could not assume power in the newly reconstructed United States of America. Yet, as the Confederacy’s defeat loomed near, Lincoln had already signaled he would go easy on the rebel leaders. His plan for rebuilding the nation required only that the secessionist states adopt the Thirteenth Amendment and have 10 percent of eligible voters (white propertied males) swear loyalty to the United States. That was it. Under Lincoln’s plan, 90 percent of the power in a state could still openly dream of full-blown insurrection and consider themselves anything but loyal to the United States of America.

  As one South Carolinian explained in 1865, the Yankees had left him “one inestimable privilege … and that was to hate ’em.” “I get up at half past four in the morning,” he said, “and sit up till twelve midnight, to hate ’em.”24 The Liberator reported that in South Carolina, “there are very many who … do not disguise the … undiminished hatred of the Union.”25 The visceral contempt, however, extended far beyond the Yankees to encompass the formerly enslaved. One official stationed in the now-defeated South noted, “Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, 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.” He further explained how murder, rape, and robbery, in this Kafkaesque world, were not seen as crimes at all so long as whites were the perpetrators and blacks the victims. Given this poisonous atmosphere, he warned, “The people boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their own hands, to use their own classic expression, ‘the niggers will catch hell.’ ”26

  To stop this descent into the cauldrons of racial hate, African Americans had to have access to the ballot box. The reasoning was simple. As long as blacks were disfranchised, white politicians could continue to ignore or, even worse, trample on African Americans and suffer absolutely no electoral consequences for doing so. The moment that blacks had the vote, however, elected officials risked being ousted for spewing anti-black rhetoric and promoting racially discriminatory policies.27 But, in 1865, that was not to be. Suffrage was a glaring, fatal omission in the president’s vision for Reconstruction—although one that was consistent with the position Lincoln had taken early in his political career when he “insist[ed] that he did not favor Negroes voting, or,” for that matter, “Negroes serving on juries, or holding public office, or intermarrying with whites.”28

  “I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”29

  The situation only worsened with the presidency of the man who stepped in after Lincoln’s assassination.30 To be sure, during the war, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat, had blasted the Confederate leadership and plantation owners as “traitors” who “must be punished and impoverished.”31 But his resentment was rooted in the class envy of an embittered man who had grown up achingly poor, hardscrabble, and illiterate, utterly unlike the Southern gentry who had challenged the Union. Johnson’s antipathy, however, did not translate into support for black equality or the abolitionists, whom he disdained.32 Indeed, the contempt this sometime slave owner felt for black people was palpable. Addressing a regiment of African American soldiers who had just returned from a tour of duty in October 1865, the president lectured them. “Freedom is not simply the principle to live in idleness,” he chided the men. “Liberty does not mean merely to resort to the low saloons and other places of disreputable character.”33 Never mind that these were men in uniform, men who had honorably served the United States. In this president’s estimation, blacks—despite years of service to the nation and a willingness to put their lives on the line (forty thousand had died during the war)—were just immoral, drunken sluggards. How, then, could the epic violence that had consumed the United States have been about the nation recognizing the very humanity and citizenship of these beings? The new president, just like Lincoln, had convinced himself instead that the Civil War was only about preserving the Union. No more. No less. And therefore, he set about stitching the rebel South back into the fabric of the nation.

  First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress’s 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called “guerrillas and cut-throats” and “traitors … [who] ought to be hung.” Beneficiaries of his largesse included the head of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, and even CSA vice president Alexand
er Stephens.34 Even more shocking, given Johnson’s decades-long resentment against and vilification of the “damnable aristocracy,” his generosity and forgiveness extended to the plantation owners themselves.35

  Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38

  Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act, which would give, not lease, 160 acres in the West to citizens who were “without money”—meaning poor whites. The intended beneficiaries were clear because from 1843 through 1862, when the law was finally passed, most African Americans were not citizens and therefore, regardless of how impoverished, were ineligible.40 Doggedly pushing back on those who argued that a land giveaway program was unfair to those who had actually saved their hard-earned dollars and purchased their plots, he made no apologies for “standing by the poor man in getting him a home that he could call his.”41 Nor was it just acreage out West that Johnson eyed. In 1864, two years after the Homestead Act passed, he advocated taking the plantation owners’ land as well and distributing it to “free, industrious, and honest farmers,” which again was Johnson’s way of helping poor whites, whose opportunities, he felt, had been denied and whose chances had been thwarted by the enslaved and masters alike.42 In fact, he reveled in the charge that he was “too much of the poor man’s friend.”43 But even his core constituency, first impoverished under the old plantocracy and then treated as cannon fodder, became readily expendable when it seemed that the only way to keep blacks as labor without rights was to reinstate the leadership of the old Confederacy.

  Johnson’s rash of pardons had the desired effect. The new congressional delegations looked hauntingly like those from the Old South: CSA vice president Stephens and cabinet officers, as well as ten Confederate generals, a number of colonels, and nearly sixty Confederate Congress representatives, were ready to be ensconced, once again, in the nation’s capital.44 The reigning leaders of the Confederacy, who had rightfully expected to be tried and hung as traitors, now were not only poised to sail back into power in the federal government but also, given Johnson’s amnesty, allowed to regain control of their states and, as a consequence, of the millions of newly emancipated and landless black people there. As he welcomed one “niggers will catch hell” state after the next back into the Union with no mention whatsoever of black voting rights and, thus, no political protection, he effectively laid the groundwork for mass murder.45

  One of the president’s emissaries, Carl Schurz, recoiled as he traveled throughout the South and gathered reports of African American women who had been “scalped,” had their “ears cut off,” or had been thrown into a river and drowned amid chants for them to swim to the “damned Yankees.” Young black boys and men were routinely stabbed, clubbed, and shot. Some were even “chained to a tree and burned to death.” In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.46 White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached “staggering proportions.” Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.47 Johnson refused, choosing instead, to “preside over … this slow-motioned genocide.”48 The lack of a vigorous—or, for that matter, any—response only further encouraged white Southerners, who recognized that they now had a friend in the White House.49 One former cabinet member in the Confederacy “later admitted that … the white South was so devastated and demoralized it would have accepted almost any of the North’s terms. But … once Johnson ‘held up before us the hope of a white man’s government,’ it led ‘[us] to set aside negro suffrage’ and to resist Northern plans to improve the condition of the freedmen.”50 Thus emboldened, Virginia’s rebellion-tainted leaders planned to “accomplish … with votes what they have failed to accomplish with bayonets.”51

  Like a hydra, white supremacist regimes sprang out of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the other states of a newly resurgent South. As they drafted their new constitutions, the delegates were defiant, dismissive of any supposed federal authority, and ready to reassert and reimpose white supremacy as if the abolition of slavery and the Civil War had never happened.52 They praised their newfound ally on Pennsylvania Avenue, who saw things, it seemed, much as they did. The delegates at Louisiana’s Constitutional Conference in October 1865 were so confident in the president’s support and their reclaimed power that they resolved, “We hold this to be a Government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race; and in accordance with the constant adjudication of the United States Supreme Court”—specifically, the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had stated explicitly that black people have “no rights which the white man is bound to respect.” The Louisiana delegates concluded “that people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.”53

  In this reconstruction of the Reconstruction, with the reassertion of Dred Scott, the exclusion of blacks from the ballot box, and the rescission of forty acres and a mule, African Americans now had neither citizenship, the vote, nor land. Johnson, who saw black empowerment as a nightmare, insisted, “This is … a country for white men, and by God, as long as I’m President, it shall be a government for white men.”54 Therefore, Louisiana’s declaration that “people of African descent cannot be considered citizens of the United States” aligned perfectly with Johnson’s. One Georgia plantation owner agreed as he asserted that white Southerners now had “the right and power to govern our population in our own way.” And, as Louisiana emphasized, that meant “getting things back as near to slavery as possible.”55

  Mississippi showed the way. In the fall of 1865, the state passed a series of laws targeted and applicable only to African Americans (free and newly emancipated) that undercut any chance or hope for civil rights, economic independence, or even the reestablishment of families that had been ripped apart by slavery. As noted by Du Bois, the notorious Black Codes “were an astonishing affront to emancipation” and made “plain and indisputable” the “attempt on the part of the Southern states to make Negroes slaves in everything but name.”56 The codes required that blacks sign annual labor contracts with plantation, mill, or
mine owners. If African Americans refused or could show no proof of gainful employment, they would be charged with vagrancy and put on the auction block, with their labor sold to the highest bidder. The supposed contract was beyond binding; it was more like a shackle, for African Americans were forbidden to seek better wages and working conditions with another employer. No matter how intolerable the working conditions, if they left the plantation, lumber camp, or mine, they would be jailed and auctioned off. They were trapped. Self-sufficiency itself was illegal, as blacks couldn’t hold any other employment besides laborer or domestic (unless they had the written consent of the mayor or judge) and were also banned from hunting and fishing, and thus denied the means even to stave off hunger. More galling yet was a provision whereby black children who had been sold before the war and hadn’t yet reunited with their parents were to be apprenticed off, with the former masters having the first right to their labor. Finally, the penalty for defiance, insulting gestures, and inappropriate behavior, the Black Codes made clear, was a no-holds-barred whipping.57

  Mississippi’s success in reinscribing slavery by another name was undeniable. Nine of the other former Confederate States quickly copied the Black Codes, sometimes verbatim. These laws, despite their draconian nature, were not the work of extreme secessionists. Some of the South’s most respected judges, attorneys, and planters crafted the Black Codes. From the cool marble halls of the statehouses, white opposition had done its job with the mere stroke of a pen. “If you call this Freedom,” wrote one black veteran, “what do you call Slavery?”58

  Not even Union general (and future president) Ulysses S. Grant saw anything wrong. Under Florida’s Black Codes, disobedience or impudence was a “form of vagrancy and a vagrant could be whipped.” In Louisiana black adults had to sign labor contracts within “the first ten days of each year that committed them and their children to work on a plantation.” In North Carolina “orphans were sent to work for the former masters of their families rather than allowing them to live with grandparents or other relatives.” But Grant, despite all brutal evidence to the contrary, was convinced that white Southerners had adjusted well to losing the Civil War. If African Americans resisted and complained bitterly about the Black Codes, this meant only that the Freedmen’s Bureau was “encouraging unrealistic expectations among the former slaves.” Grant did not attribute the turmoil in the South to the incredible levels of violence unleashed on the newly freed or to the barbaric Black Codes to which they were now subject; General Howard’s staff, he felt, must be the source of the problem. Bureau and federal oversight were, in Grant’s mind, “unnecessary, even harmful.”59