The Struggle for Equality by McPherson James M. McPherson James M

Author:McPherson, James M., McPherson, James M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Education and the ballot for the Negro were two of the most important abolitionist requirements for a sound reconstruction of the South. But many abolitionists realized that political equality and education would mean little to the freed slave without a solid foundation of economic independence. The freedmen must “be made proprietors of the soil in fee simple, as speedily as possible,” wrote a correspondent of the Liberator in 1864. Otherwise the white planter would keep the Negro in a state of semi-serfdom by paying him low wages and making him economically dependent on the old master class. “It is going to make a mighty difference to the ‘landless and homeless,’ whether they are to get only the poor pittance of twenty-five or thirty cents per day, and be thus kept dependent, or whether they shall receive four or five times this amount by planting on their own land,” asserted the Liberator correspondent. “The conflict between capital and labor is as old as the world; but in this case the contest could never be more unequal.”26

This was not a new idea to abolitionists. From the outset of the war many of them had desired the breakup of large southern plantations and their redistribution among landless farmers, black and white. Such action would accomplish two important objectives: it would promote democracy in the South by destroying the economic basis of the “landed aristocracy”; and it would promote the economic independence of the freedmen. Less than a month after the firing on Fort Sumter, William Goodell called for the confiscation of land belonging to rebels and its redistribution among freed slaves.27 In subsequent months many other abolitionists repeated and endorsed this proposal. When Congress opened its special session in July 1861, several drastic confiscation bills were introduced. But the bill that finally passed was a very mild measure confiscating only property (including slaves) used in direct support of the Confederate military effort.28

Abolitionists continued to press for full-scale expropriation. “By all the laws and usages of civilized nations,” declared Charles K. Whipple in the Liberator in June 1862, “rebels against a government forfeit their property, as well as their other rights and privileges, under it.” He urged the administration to confiscate rebel lands and allot a portion of them to the landless laborers who had worked them under compulsion for generations and had thus earned a clear title to the land. This act of simple justice to the freedmen would build the new South on a foundation of small landowners thoroughly loyal to the government. It would expiate the sin incurred by the nation in allowing men to be kept in slavery for so many generations.29

The Confiscation Act of July 1862, as originally passed by Congress, met many of the abolitionists’ demands. It provided for the permanent confiscation of all property belonging to traitors. Lincoln objected, however, that this provision violated the constitutional ban on bills of attainder that worked forfeiture of property beyond the life of offenders. Under presidential pressure Congress passed a

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