Grant by Ron Chernow

Author:Ron Chernow
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

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Swing Around the Circle

WHEN THE NEW CONGRESS met in December 1865, it grew crystal-clear to Radical Republicans that Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies were slanted toward the entrenched white South. Southern states sent white representatives to Washington who reflected the old Confederacy, not a newly reconstituted region, leading Radicals to take matters into their own hands. Congress set up a Joint Committee on Reconstruction, cochaired by a moderate Republican senator, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, an ardent abolitionist. Johnson saw this as an attempt by the legislative branch to wrest away prerogatives that properly belonged to the executive. Radicals advanced the argument that Confederate states, by seceding, had relinquished their former rights as sovereign states and should be treated like territories, their terms of readmission defined by Congress. Guided by this perspective, they refused to seat new southern congressmen or admit their states back into the Union. For all their excessive zeal, these militant Republicans would produce some of the most powerful legislation in American history to accord equal rights to African Americans.

Instead of the bromides Grant had doled out about southern harmony, the Joint Committee delved into violence inflicted on two particular groups. One was the so-called carpetbaggers, tens of thousands of young northerners who flocked southward to earn money and aid freed people. They built schools and churches, bought plantations, and often risked their lives to assist blacks. In southern mythology, they would be demonized as corrupt parasites, but many were motivated by idealism and paid a steep price for their courage. Southern whites who supported Reconstruction, called “scalawags,” faced similar antipathy.

Carpetbagger harassment was tame compared with the outright terror inflicted on blacks. One former Louisiana slave testified that whites flogged blacks as if they were still enslaved and that more than two thousand had been killed around Shreveport in 1865 alone. Blacks enjoyed little recourse to local sheriffs, who were often Confederate veterans and seldom acted against whites charged with crimes against blacks. It grew patently obvious that southern blacks could count on protection only from federal troops. As one Mississippi observer pleaded: “Take away garrisons from this Southern Country, and the negroes will be subjected to every outrage.”1 From Georgia came warnings of a new breed of nocturnal terror unleashed against blacks. General Rufus Saxton reported a black man killed “by a band of disguised men at midnight”—a grisly scene reenacted many times in coming years.2 As southern blacks came to rely on the U.S. military for protection, Grant was thrust smack into the middle of the controversy. A man of fixed purpose, he never faltered in his deep concern for the fair treatment of freed people. On January 12, 1866, he took aim at antiblack discrimination when he issued General Orders No. 3, which protected “colored persons from prosecutions” in any southern state “charged with offenses for which white persons are not prosecuted or punished in the same manner and degree.”3

Supplied with copious and quite graphic reports by southern commanders, Grant soon realized that the hopeful tenor of his December report had been a pipe dream.

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