Ripper J. American Stories: Living American History. Volume 2: From 1865
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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north shores of Alaska—the domain of one-fifth of the planet’s polar bears.
This book tells the history of the United States through the feelings, experi-
ences, devastations, and triumphs of our ancestors and us.
Years ago my father and I had a conversation about artists, about whether a
writer
, or painter, or musician can be part of a family and write, or paint, or
make music fully and without reservation. I said that surely a person could
be committed to both, could create great literature or compose an epic sym-
phony
and share the duties and responsibilities at the heart of family. He did
not think so. He was more right than I knew.
My wife, Diane, did not write a single word of this book, but she helped
me write it all the same. While I sat hunched over my bone-white iBook day
and night, she fed our children every meal they ate, cleaned up every spill,
read them stories about talking worms and hungry bears, and tucked them
into bed after each long day. Diane encouraged me to take on this project,
and she unfailingly did everything she could to give me the space to research
and write. Thank you, Diane.
My mother has more college degrees than she knows what to do with, so I
tricked her into reading the entire manuscript two or three times over. She cor-
r
ected my spelling, gently nudged me back into line when my sarcasm got the
better of me, and cradled the phone to her ear at least once a day while I rattled
on about the Constitutional Convention or about Star Trek as a perfect metaphor
for peace. Thank you, mother, for donating one more year of your life to me.
At the base of my brain are the conversations I have had with my father
since I was very young. He has always treated me like a son and a friend. We
have talked about writing, about the way words fit together or do not, about
the power of love—to borrow a line from one of his poems, “Love is the power
to resist ruin.” I did not resist as many cups of coffee as I should have, and if I
had really been thinking, I would have resisted a degree in history in favor of
a cushy career in law or banking. But I have always enjoyed people’s stories,
and that is with what I wanted to fill this book. If love is the power to resist
ruin, I think that stories told lovingly may have the same effect.
So I dedicate this book to my children, Phineas and June, in the hopes that you
who read this book take the better parts of the past with you into the future—a
future I hope you and my children will share together in harmony.
This is starting to feel like the Academy Awards. Next I would like to thank
my editor, Steve Drummond, who believed in the ideas I had and helped usher
them through the many desks, hands, and meetings necessary for me, an
abstract dreamer with a paperwork disability, to write a book. Nicole Cirino
at M.E. Sharpe has been upbeat, full of answers, and enjoyable to work with.
Thank you, Steve and Nicole. Henrietta Toth, project editor at Sharpe, ensured
the “project” would become a book. Laurie Lieb, the copyeditor, checked my
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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
spelling, facts, syntax, style, and logic; finding all of it in distress, she thank-
fully came to the rescue.
Three
colleagues from Everett Community College donated summertime
hours to the cause and reviewed a few chapters at the last minute. Thank you
Dr. Tom Gaskin for your good-natured corrections of the chapter on Andrew
Jackson; and thank you Sharon Stultz and Ross Angeledes for pointing out
the simplicities, errors, and strengths you found in my writing.
Second
to last, a caffeinated thank you to the owners, Diana and Luke, and
to the barristas at Caffe Adagio in Bellingham. The lattes, turkey sandwiches,
and kind smiles were a welcome part of my days and kept my head above
the proverbial water.
Finally, my thanks to the people who wrote the diaries, letters, newspaper
stories, and books that made up the best part of the research. I spent a whole
afternoon in the library reading Sally Wister’s diary. She was a sixteen-year-
old Quaker girl from Philadelphia whose family escaped to their country
home when the British occupied the city during 1777. Most days during
her temporary exile, Sally wrote to her friend Deborah, and I sat there, face
inches away from the diary, sucked back in time 250 years. The room around
me disappeared, and I could hear the clatter of horse hooves as Continental
officers arrived at Sally’s house to request rooms and food. I saw her coyly
flirting and teasing, and then running up to her room to laugh about the fun
and mischief she was making. As she said to Deborah, “I have a thousand
things to tell thee. I shall give thee so droll an account of my adventure that
thee will smile.”
W
hatever Deborah’s response may have been I smiled all afternoon
long—especially when I read about a prank some of the officers played. Sally
had purchased a life-size painted wooden model of a British soldier that,
she said, made “a martial appearance.” As the Wister family and the officers
chatted merrily in the evening, some servants snuck outside and placed the
British grenadier by the front door. Then a “Negro” servant apprised the
group that someone outside wanted to have a word. The officers—all but one
named Tilly in on the prank—got up from the table to see who was at the
door. Tilly looked outside, saw the British soldier, and “darted like lightning
out the front door, through the yard, bolted o’er the fence. Swamps, fences,
thorn-hedges, and plough’d fields no way impeded his retreat. He was soon
out of hearing.” Sally and company roared with laughter. Tilly ran over the
snow and into the forest before realizing he had been set up. When he got
back, everybody laughed at him for half an hour and then went to bed.
That is history to me. I hope to have transferred to you the laughter and
pain I read in the letters and journals. If this book works, you will care
about the Sally Wisters, Zora Neale Hurstons, and Elvis Presleys as much
as I did.
American
Stories
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AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
1
After the Civil War
Mary Ames and Emily Bliss (Used with permission of Documenting the American
South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries.)
AMERICAN STORIES
4
The Difficulties of Reconstruction
In the two decades after 1865, the recently reunited United States had to figure
out how to be one nation again at the same time that the challenges of Southern
society took center stage. What would freedom mean for African-Americans?
Who would rule in the Southern states? Would it be the old coalitions of
plantation owners, the same ones who had supported the Confederacy? Could
traitors get pardons and become politicians and leaders of the nation they had
recently abandoned?
From
the vantage of 1865, no one could foresee the South’s future. Few
white Southerners wanted a social revolution, while all African-Americans did.
Presidents and congressmen had to navigate against the racket of competing
voices calling out for mutually exclusive demands. In January 1865, General
William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, giving land to the freed
people on the South Carolinian sea islands—awakening hopes for forty acres
and a mule. The land allocations were subdivided into forty-acre parcels and
the army also distributed worn-out mules. Freed families streamed to the
islands and planted vegetables and rice. The land had been owned by white
people who had deserted it early in the war, but the freed people argued that
200 years of hard labor had certainly earned them a right to some acreage.
Within the year, President Andrew Johnson returned the lands to the former
owners, overruling Sherman’s efforts and appeasing Southern whites.
Following Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson stumbled through three
years as president, facing impeachment along the way for his opposition to
Congress’s efforts to reform the South through constitutional amendments
and civil rights laws. Johnson vetoed more than one law designed to secure
civil rights for blacks. In the House of Representatives, a Radical Republican
named Thaddeus Stevens, looking very dour and stern in his photographs, led
the charge against Johnson’s interference with progressive racial policies in
the conquered South. In the 1866 congressional elections, Republicans took
enough seats to override presidential vetoes. Stevens’s brief popularity, how-
e
ver, could not overcome the blunders of fellow Republicans or the durability
of white supremacy in the South.
U
lysses S. Grant became president in 1868 and miraculously lasted through
two terms that included one scandal after another and a nation-shaking depres-
s
ion in 1873. The depression partly resulted from the Crédit Mobilier scandal:
various congressmen and other public officials had been siphoning off millions
of dollars in public monies originally intended for a transcontinental railroad.
But Grant had entered the White House with volcanic popularity. People liked
his small-town simplicity. Besides, Grant had won the war. He was a hero
who rarely let the attention go to his head. Grant enjoyed racing his carriage
5
AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
through the streets of the capital, and when he got stopped by a police officer
for speeding, Grant insisted on being given the ticket and allowing his carriage
to be impounded. But Reconstruction ate holes in his presidency.
In 1868, Grant ran under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” The sentiment
could not overcome the civil war still raging in the South between African-
Americans bent on gaining civil rights and ex-Confederates bent on maintain-
ing
supremacy. The most notorious group of domestic terrorists, the Ku Klux
Klan (KKK), used every bloody means possible to keep African-Americans
from voting. They lynched; they shot; they burned crosses and threatened.
The white-hooded Klansmen were terrorists, and only one force could stop
them—federal troops. Congress passed a law, the Force Act, enabling Grant,
in 1871, to rush troops into the South where they arrested and imprisoned
hundreds of Klansmen. White Southerners simply took off the white sheets
and kept resisting Reconstruction. Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens
in the House and Charles Sumner in the Senate tried to do right by the freed
African-Americans, but a reluctant, tired North and an intransigent white South
prevented any long-lasting, structural changes to Southern society.
South Carolina briefly enjoyed a state assembly with more black repre-
sentatives than white. Mississippi elected a black U.S. senator
, and African-
Americans filled ballot boxes with votes for Republican candidates throughout
the late 1860s and 1870s. Ultimately, however, Southern whites reestablished
political and economic control. Reinvigorated white racists “redeemed” the
South by passing a host of unsavory laws called black codes, which permitted
sheriffs, for example, to forcibly place the children of African-Americans into
“apprenticeships” on neighboring plantations. Also, African-Americans left
slavery with no money and no land. With freedmen too poor to buy their own
property, sharecropping resulted, a system in which landlords made sure to
keep their tenant farmers in a cycle of debt that prevented them from easily
leaving. African-American sharecroppers continued to till land owned by their
former slave masters. Slavery had ended but slave conditions continued.
In
1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took over the presidency. Hayes was not
popular in the South, but an election debacle in 1876 earned him the neces-
sary
Southern electoral votes. Three Southern states, including Florida, had
had their ballots challenged. The responsibility of choosing the president fell
to a congressional committee, which picked Hayes. Although Hayes was a
Union veteran and a Republican, his ascension to the presidency signaled the
end of federal Reconstruction in the South. Hayes had no political capital to
continue Reconstruction. After sixteen years of strife, most people in the North
wanted to get on with their lives and stop hearing about all the problems in the
South: Ku Klux Klan violence, voting fraud, disgruntled whites anxious over
the loss of their property and workers. The freedmen had lost their allies. Not
AMERICAN STORIES
6
surprisingly, Northern whites allowed their Southern counterparts to resume
lording it over Southern society.
Back in 1862, when the Civil War was still in an early phase, William
Tecumseh Sherman had written to a Southern acquaintance, Thomas Hunton,
with whom Sherman had attended West Point. Miffed at Hunton’s choice to
fight for the Confederacy, Sherman conceded, “We are Enemies, still private
friends.”
1
If Sherman could be “still private friends” with a traitor and a rebel,
was it any wonder that a nation ruled mainly by white supremacists would
return the South to the hands of its old masters when the experiment in Re-
construction seemed too tiring, too dangerous, and too little possible?
Reconstruction: Black and
White
Freedom is choice. Slavery is the lack of choice. When slavery was banned
throughout the United States with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment,
freed men and women made the most of their new circumstances. Some trav-
eled
across the states, looking for children, spouses, parents, and other family
members who had been sold away. Some bought land or took the land of their
former owners and kept on planting the same crops, herding the same cattle,
but on their own terms, on their own time. Most white Southerners could not
abide all this change, all this black freedom.
I
n 1865, a young former Confederate named Edwin McCaleb captured the
exasperation and outrage that fellow whites felt. “We can never,” he exclaimed,
“regard the Negro our equal either intellectually or socially.” McCaleb thought
that if the South could have a “system of gradual emancipation and coloniza-
t
ion our people would universally rejoice and be glad to get rid of slavery.”
Instead, he predicted that “this sudden system of Emancipation, this spasmodic
transformation of the ignorant Negro from a peaceful laborer who has been ac-
c
ustomed to have all needs [provided] to a self reliant citizen will paralyze the
productive resources of the South.” While McCaleb railed against the loss of
unpaid workers and the ensuing “famine” he expected, a deeper fear underlay
his complaints: interracial mixing. McCaleb was certain that the federal govern-
m
ent intended to encourage “miscegenation.” In that case, “if such a detestable
dogma becomes a law we shall soon have a race of mulattoes as fickle and
foolish as the Mongrel population of Mexico never content with their present
condition.”
2
Racism and economic concerns mixed in McCaleb’s mind into a
desire to keep African-Americans subordinate and submissive. The Civil War
had ended slavery, but left the slaverholder’s mind intact.
Southern whites like McCaleb saw few options, all involving intimidation,
coercion, and a resistance to the Reconstruction policies being legislated by
Congress. Abraham Lincoln had wanted to let the rebel states back into the
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AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
Union without fuss or vengeance. Lincoln imagined forgiveness. His succes-
sor, Andrew Johnson, imagined one thing but did another. Johnson was from
Tennessee, a Confederate stronghold. A member of the Democratic Party, he
had been chosen as Lincoln’s running mate solely because the Republicans
wanted to boost their support in the 1864 presidential race: Johnson could
secure votes for Lincoln that Lincoln could not get by himself. Had anyone
known Lincoln was going to be assassinated, greasy-haired Andrew Johnson
would never have been chosen for vice president. As a Southerner and former
slave owner, Johnson’s sympathies lay with the South, even though he detested
the richest planters, whom he blamed for having caused the Civil War in the
first place. By autumn 1865, half a year into his three-year presidency, he had
shifted from promising to punish the South to essentially pardoning every
former Confederate officer and legislator who begged or groveled enough.
Under Johnson, it seemed, the South would not be reconstructed—it would
be returned to the past. With Andrew Johnson in the president’s seat, Southern
racists had only to sit back and wait.
As
always, if African-Americans wanted something, they largely had to
go about getting it for themselves. Granted, the federal government helped
somewhat. In 1865 the Freedmen’s Bureau was established, headed by Gen-
eral
Oliver O. Howard, described by historian W.E.B. DuBois as “an honest
man, with too much faith in human nature.” Howard tried his best to provide
opportunities and fairness for freed people while simultaneously doing what
President Johnson demanded. Congress and the freedmen tugged Howard
one way; the president pulled Howard the other way. The Freedmen’s Bu-
reau
sent teachers (mostly women) into the South, built schools for African-
Americans, adjudicated labor disputes between white landowners and black
workers, and tried to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments to the Constitution, which provided basic civil rights, including
voting rights, to all citizens, regardless of skin color. Although the Freedmen’s
Bureau came under some criticism for doing as much to force black people
back onto plantations as it did to get them wage contracts, the agency was as
true a friend to the freed people as it could be, given the state of affairs in the
nation in 1865. Here was what Howard and the Freedmen’s Bureau workers
faced, in DuBois’s words: “A curious mess he looked upon: little despotisms,
communistic experiments, slavery, peonage, business speculations, organized
charity, unorganized almsgiving,—all reeling on under the guise of helping
the freedmen, and all enshrined in the smoke and blood of the war and the
cursing and silence of angry men.”
3
With only 900 officials assigned to deal
with labor disputes, court cases, and reform throughout eleven Southern es-
tates, the Freedmen’
s Bureau was hamstrung from its start.
What the Freedmen’s Bureau could not do for African-Americans, many did