Mark and Lincoln: And Unfinished Revolution

checked by the defeat of their attempt to impeach Johnson, with 
the appearance of moderates who refused to back the measure. Th
 e 
Republican Party recovered in 1868 by endorsing General Ulysses 
S. Grant, the hugely popular Union commander, as its candidate in 
the presidential election. Th
  ough this ensured a Republican victory, 
it gave the White House to a man who lacked political experience 
and judgment, surrounded himself with mediocrities, and failed to 
include a single Southern Republican in his cabinet. However, as a 
military commander Grant had at least learned how fi ckle, short-
sighted, and cowardly was the “public opinion” manufactured by the 
newspapers. 
President Grant lent his backing to a Republican strategy of 
restoring some of the sanctions on former Confederate offi
  cials 
and obliging the reconstructed states to give freedmen the vote 
as the price of reentry into the Union. For a while the Radical 
Republicans could still infl uence Grant, but they failed to register 
that the revolution in the South was generating its own counterrev-
olution and could only be sustained by strong and constant support 
from Washington, and by a far-reaching mobilization of those who 
supported the new order in the South. 
Reconstruction set out to make freedom and equality more 
tangible, and for a while it succeeded in curbing white terror 
and promoting black representation and equality. Congressional 
Reconstruction had given the vote to the freedmen, and the result 
was to be Republican majorities in the occupied states and the 
election of some 600 black legislators and offi
  cials  throughout 
the occupied South. By itself this was an extraordinary develop-
ment. African Americans now sat in the Senate and House of 
Representatives in Washington as well as in the state assemblies.
97
In Louisiana attempts had been made to segregate public space 
and means of transport. Th
  e state’s 1868 Constitutional Convention 
asserted the novel concept of “public rights,” which would give equal 
access to public space. Th
  e Constitution’s Bill of Rights declared 
that all citizens of the state should enjoy “the same civil, political, 
and public rights and privileges, and be subject to the same pains 
and penalties.” Th
  e concept of public rights was clarifi ed by a pro-
97 Foner, 
Reconstruction, pp. 351–63.
64  an unfinished revolution

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hibition of racial discrimination on public transport and in places of 
public resort or accommodation. Rebecca Scott, quoting the docu-
ment, contrasts this clear requirement with the “oblique language” 
of the Fourteenth Amendment.
98
Many abolitionists and Radical Republicans believed that the 
suppression of slavery was not enough and that the freedmen 
deserved at least free education, and preferably land and the vote 
as well. In this situation it was important that some Union Leagues 
were responsive to abolitionist appeals and that a convention of 
150 colored men from 17 states met in Syracuse, New York, in 
October 1864. Th
  e Syracuse convention and subsequent gather-
ings in Charleston and New Orleans framed a broad program for 
equal civic and political rights. Many of the participants in these 
events were already free before the war. Th
  ey articulated the aspira-
tions of colored communities in Louisiana, South Carolina, and 
Tennessee—areas occupied by Unionist forces long before the fi nal 
collapse. Th
  eir leaders argued that black soldiers had earned citizen-
ship by helping to save the Union. Th
  ey also paid their taxes, and 
therefore deserved representation. At Syracuse, Charleston, and 
elsewhere the call was not simply for rights in the abstract but for 
tangible expressions of a new status—the right to vote and serve on 
juries—and a Homestead Act for the South that would give land to 
the freedmen. A “Declaration of Rights and Wrongs,” adopted at 
both Syracuse and Charleston, warned that passing measures favo-
rable to the freedmen would be a hollow mockery if planters were 
still free to intimidate and dragoon them.
99
 
Th
  e Reconstruction administrations were elected by precarious 
majorities, achieved by the votes of black men, and also by reach-
ing out to whites who had never owned slaves or supported the 
Secession, or who had found the Confederacy a nightmare. Th
 e 
Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, was wound up in 1870. 
Radical Republicans and abolitionists were too inclined to believe 
that once slavery had been struck down a new regime of wages 
98 Rebecca 
Scott, 
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery, 
Cambridge, MA, 2005, pp. 43–5.
99 Steven 
Hahn, 
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the 
Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 
pp. 103–5.
introduction  65

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and “free labor” would automatically follow. Many freedmen and 
women devoted more time to cultivating tiny plots that they rented 
or claimed as squatters. Th
  ough some entered into agreements with 
the planters, who still owned the best land, their new employers 
complained that the freed people thought that they could withdraw 
their labor whenever convenient or demand higher pay just when 
the harvest had to be brought in. An early recovery of the Southern 
economy was not sustained because of a credit famine. Merchants 
were only willing to advance credit for staple production, leading 
to shortfalls in the production of subsistence crops. Th
 e plantation 
economy went into decline, with many landowners in the cotton 
belt off ering sharecropping arrangements to the freedmen. In some 
cases the sharecropper would be the tenant of a piece of land, some 
of which could be used for subsistence production. But to begin 
with it was more common for the sharecropper to work on a plant-
er’s land for a modest wage and the promise of further pay once the 
crop was sold. Th
  us the sharecropper bore the risk of a poor market 
on his own shoulders, and this was not the end of his problems. 
Tenants and sharecroppers often needed to borrow money, and they 
became indebted to store owners, who would charge them high 
rates of interest on loans as well as high prices for merchandise. 
Th
  ese arrangements narrowed the scope of the Southern market, 
fostered stagnation and decline, and caused economic pain to white 
farmers as well as black laborers and tenants.
100
 
With Union soldiers on call, the freedmen voted in new offi
  cials 
and sent black representatives and senators to Washington. Th
 e 
Reconstruction administrations also fostered a variety of social pro-
grams. Th
  ese regimes, lasting from four to ten years, were innovative. 
As Eric Foner explains, they sought to introduce social institutions 
that the old slave-state authorities had neglected: “Public schools, 
hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane 
were established for the fi rst time or received increased funding. 
South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama 
100 Th
  e postbellum miseries of the freed people are trenchantly explored 
by Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch in One Kind of Freedom: the Economic 
Consequences of Emancipation, second ed., Cambridge 2001, especially 
pp. 244–53. 
66  an unfinished revolution

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