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This post continues to detail the measures the
Republican Congress took, starting in 1866, to mold the recalcitrant Southern
states into ones supportive of an agenda that was upside down and backwards to
everything their taxpayers believed in—state rights and free market. The course
was in violation of the Constitution, for the transformation of our Founders’
Federal Republic into that of a democratic republic was absolutely imperative
for the triumph of The American System. Not only were the changes proposed to
the Constitution unconstitutional, so ultimately was the legislative process by
which the egregious Fourteenth Amendment was “declared” part of the
Constitution. Being a life-long Whig, Alcorn accepted this perversion of the
Founders Republic as the result of military defeat not that of treason enacted
by a military supported congressional coup. The result of said defeat would be more palatable to this Southerner
if the victors had acknowledged it for what it was, but even today—or even more
so today—one has to listen to the glorification of the poetic lines of the
Gettysburg address
...that
we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
as gospel, knowing full well that they did die in vain, at least when
it came to that part about government of the people, by the people, for the
people. Indeed, the glorified dead Lincoln honored played the most significant
role in enabling its demise. Lincoln’s words were more appropriate for the
other side.
Let me now jump off my soapbox and return to the fall of
1866 following the South’s rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment and look at
some of the measures Congress took to “correct” Southern obstinacy.
Before approving the civil governments set up by the
rebellious states, President Johnson asked for the input of three individuals
who crisscrossed the entire South to ascertain conditions within the occupied
states and recommend to him whether the war-torn states were ready to govern
themselves.
General U. S. Grant advised that the people were ready to
return to loyalty within the Union and get on with restructuring their daily
lives. He advised that white troops needed to be moved into the area since the
black troops there encouraged vagrancy by advising the freedman not to go back
to the plantation to find work. He further stated that if the North truly
desired reconciliation, the Southerner should not be humiliated.
German-born Brigadier General Carl Schurz reported that the
Southern people had reorganized their governments and were yielding to the laws
and the Constitution. [The South never...oh, never mind.] They were repairing
the devastation from the war, and they were trying to move on with their lives.
There was some disorder, but this disappeared with the spread of civil law.
Mr. Charles Truman, a civilian, presented the most positive
picture stating he believed the disbanded Confederate regiments would prove the
South’s primary base for recovery and reconstruction. I’m not sure if I should
read between the lines here and assume Mr. Truman is implying the South should
just write the freedman off, or what. He did say that the freedman was well
treated—and I’d maintain that on the whole he not only was, but always had
been. Mr. Truman also stated that, contrary to reports, Northerners were not
being abused.
So there was not much ground in President Johnson’s
committee report for overturning those civil governments that had been
operating effectively for a year or more. But from that point on, Congress no
longer needed grounds to interfere in the workings of a state, but it did feel
compelled to legitimize its destruction of federalism in the United States.
Legitimization lay in the Fourteenth Amendment.
The South had already provided the likes of Massachusetts
representative George S. Boutwell with the Black Code—a vagrancy law intended
to gain some kind of control over a vagrant population in excess of 100,000
men, women, and children (see my 29 December post). The Black Code looked too
much like the old slave code to satisfy the abolitionists. Actually, I think
Mississippi probably copied that Black Code from Illinois, or another of
several Northern state codes. [Okay, perhaps I’m being unfair. Those Northern
states had probably based their Black
Codes on the old slave codes, too, so the source is all the same, and in
defense of those Northern states they did repeal theirs when forced to by
ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Still again, the South had a
legitimate vagrancy problem, the North’s double standard resulted from a
determination it never would.]
But back to Congress. To get the Fourteenth Amendment
passed, it didn’t need Illinois, Indiana, or Michigan per se. It had all it needed
right there in the South. All it had to do was replace the recalcitrant
legislatures with more amenable ones—much easier there than in the victorious North. That would be accomplished by the
Reconstruction Acts spearheaded by the Honorable Mr. Boutwell. Actually, he
spearheaded more that that, but that’s for later posts.
Criticizing the reports provided by President Johnson’s
commissioners [He found particular fault with the findings of General Grant—the
same man who would shortly make Boutwell his Secretary of the Treasury.],
Boutwell set up a national inquest under authority of investigating violations
of the Thirteenth Amendment. Boutwell did not give any reasons for rejecting
the President’s report, except that he didn’t like it.
The Congressional committee was composed of five men, only
one of whom was a democrat. Boutwell summoned the witnesses he wanted to
Washington. No member of the committee visited Mississippi and no member of the
Southern party (that would be Democratic, I assume—but not necessarily a
Southern democrat) was allowed to cross examine the chosen witnesses.
Additionally, no democrats were questioned, and only two citizens of
Mississippi were interviewed, ex-provisional governor Sharkey and Judge R. A.
Hill from Tishomingo County, a respected jurist and pre-war Whig much on the
order of governor Sharkey. Other witnesses included three major generals of the
United States army, one brigadier, one captain of colored troops, one Treasury
agent, one revenue agent, and one representative of a New England cotton
manufacturing company, a Mr. Warren Kelsey.
The committee stated to the “interviewees” that it was looking
for signs of returning loyalty on the part of the people of Mississippi—after
all, their rejection of the unconstitutional Fourteenth Amendment certainly was
not indicative of what the Radicals, waiting to welcome the South back with
open arms, had been expecting. [And please tell me what loyalty had to do with
violations of the Thirteenth Amendment?] General Edward Hatch told the
committee that except for the northeast part of the state [For all y’all who do
not know, that’s where Tishomingo County is.], there was little loyalty to be
found and few manifestations of good feeling toward the government. General
B.H. Grierson, famous for his raid through Mississippi during the Vicksburg
campaign, thought there was an organization in the South planning to renew the
rebellion. He based this on the formation of historical societies designed to
consolidate everything that could be found documenting the rise and fall of the
Confederacy and the service of its soldiers. Grierson's and
the committee’s real fault with such societies was that the recording (and
remembering) of Yankee depredations in the state was not conducive to “loyalty.”
Another of these individuals expressed the belief that “Mississippi was the
least loyal of any state in the South.” [Are we to assume he’d visited all the
states and was, therefore, qualified to discuss them all?]
J. H. Matthews and Warren Kelsey stated the freedman was
worse off than in the days of slavery. No kidding, Sherlock, and who, given that the South was occupied
by the United States army, the vast majority of whom were black, and the
freedman refused to find work despite the effort being supervised by the “benevolent”
Federal Freedman’s Bureau, was to blame for that? This group also said that
Northern men were not well received in the South and surmised if not for the
presence of Federal troops they could possibly meet with violence. Well, I
could surmise that might be deservedly true, but there’s not much a legislature
can do to force a ravaged people to like self-righteous, plunder-seeking
interlopers who should have kept their butts at home, nor is that reasonable
dislike a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment.
General Fisk expressed “shock” that the only regrets he’d
heard the defeated Confederates confess was that they had, indeed, been
defeated, and A. P. Dillingham reported speaking to a rebel general who
preferred Jeff Davis to Lincoln. Now that’s pretty strong dislike of Lincoln, because
Davis wasn’t popular at the time—yes, I’m poking fun, but Davis really wasn’t popular at the time, but
he hadn’t made a mockery of our Founders’ Constitution to destroy
anyone—remember, he just wanted to be left alone.
The people of the state of Mississippi, who these individuals
maligned, had taken the oath to uphold the Constitution which they had, in
truth, never violated. That was the real problem—by their rejection of the
Fourteenth Amendment, they continued to uphold the Constitution, which the
Radicals wished put asunder. But that wasn’t enough. On top of that, they were
expected to spit on their flag and the graves of their sons, fathers, and their
innocents, dead as a direct result of unwarranted aggression. This was shown in
the disdain that Boutwell’s committee displayed for Mississippi’s voters electing
Confederate General Humphreys to the governorship. A man who had fought a
hateful enemy as opposed to one who had turned his head as the enemy ravaged
the state.
Boutwell’s committee reported that the states lately in
secession were in a state of anarchy without government or constitution. In
fact, they had both. Even when the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered more
than a year earlier, they had a civil government. On top of that, both the new
civil governments and their validating constitutions had been blessed by President Johnson just
that past December.
The committee further reported that Congress could not
recognize as valid the elections which took place under those conditions. Funny
they were recognized well enough when that hot bed of tyranny forwarded the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to them for ratification. [In both cases, passage by the Senate was in clear violation of Article V of the Constitution.] Bet there
wouldn’t have been a peep made had the states done what Congress “directed.”
And lastly, Congress couldn’t recognize the representatives
of communities without said communities providing constitutional guarantees of
the civil rights of all citizens of the Republic. Really? There was no
legislation then in existence defining what a citizen was. The black man was free,
but he wasn’t a citizen in the South and most other places. And, in my opinion
that is not a determination Congress should ever constitutionally be allowed to
make. That right belongs with the states, but even though today Congress has
been allowed to get away with that usurpation via the Fourteenth Amendment, the
Fourteenth Amendment had not been ratified in the summer of 1866, nor could
Mississippi and the rest of the South be held punitively liable for it had they passed it
that summer in conflict with the new constitutions they’d passed in the fall of
1865—it would have been an ex post facto law—another unconstitutional fact
shadowing Boutwell’s “kangaroo” proceedings.
There was, according to the committee, no protection from
claims founded in the rebellion (the Confederate debts had been repudiated) nor
had those who’d participated in the rebellion been excluded from positions of
public trust—another article in the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Southern
legislatures had not ratified and would have been an ex post facto requirement
even if they had.
I will break this post here before delving into the Southern
states’ attempts to force a judicial review of what Boutwell’s committee would
shortly thereafter instigate as the Reconstruction Acts. This post is getting too long,
and I don’t want to lose you. Suffice it to say that Boutwell’s report was
accepted by Congress as “an absolutely truthful picture of the Southern states”
at the time and proved the basis for Congressional Reconstruction.
Thanks once again for reading,
Charlsie