Professor David Blight:
So what is the engine of
history?
I beg your attention.
There's a simple question for
you, what is the engine of
history?
Don't you like unanswerable
questions?
Is the engine of history
politics, the inherent,
natural, eternal quest of
people to bend other people's
wills and take power?
Or is the engine of history
economics, the grinding,
on-the-ground process by which
people carve out livelihoods
over against other people's
competition for the same
livelihoods?
It doesn't seem to matter what
history you study,
or where you look,
history always somehow comes
around to this nexus,
this collision,
between forces of political
power and forces of economics,
and our job is always somehow
to discern between them and how
they mix.
Now often, of course,
the answer is that it's all one
and the same thing.
Listen to this passage by a
freedman in the South named
Bailey Wyatt.
He got up and made a speech at
a freedmen's political meeting.
This was actually an early
Union League meeting,
in 1866.
It was about political
organizing in the South.
But know what Bailey gets up
and says, as it was recorded.
It was a meeting in Yorktown,
Virginia.
Bailey Wyatt,
former slave,
he's sort of announcing the
freed people's grievances at a
political gathering.
He says: "We now as a people
desires to be elevated,
and we desires to do all we can
to be educated,
and we hope our friends will
aid us all they can.
I may state to all our friends
and to all our enemies that we
has a right to the land where we
are located.
Why?
I'll tell you.
Our wives, our children,
our husbands,
has been sold over and over
again to purchase the lands we
now locates upon.
For that reason we have a
divine right to the land.
And then didn't we clear the
lands and raise the crops of
corn and of cotton and of
tobacco and of rice and of sugar
and of everything?
And then didn't them large
cities in the North grow up on
the cotton and the sugars and
the rice that we made?
Yes, I appeal to the South and
to the North,
if I hasn't spoken the words of
the truth.
I say they have grown rich,
and my people are poor."
At a political rally,
he makes an aggressive economic
speech about the labor theory of
value.
He didn't need to read to John
Locke.
He'd never read Second
Treatise on Government.
He hadn't had a political
philosophy course,
but he absolutely understood.
He called it the divine
right--the labor theory of
value.
If I labor to improve that
land, it's mine.
In that, in the simplicity,
in the agony and the beauty of
Bailey Wyatt's statement,
you have a lot of what was at
stake in Reconstruction,
and you have a lot about what
the political dilemma was,
in delivering on Bailey Wyatt's
claim to a divine right to the
land.
All right, back to Washington,
back to the politics,
at least for a few minutes,
and then I want to shift us
south to this story of the
on-the-ground economics of
Reconstruction,
especially this massive
transformation of a slave labor
economy into some kind of free
labor economy that quickly
evolves,
of course--and you know this,
at least the contours of it,
from reading Foner--it evolves
eventually,
rather quickly,
into a system of tenant farming
and a system of sharecropping
and a system ultimately of a
kind of debt peonage.
But in Washington,
the political triumph of the
Radical Republicans comes in
that veto-proof Congress they
produced in the fall elections
of 1866.
And in 1867 they passed the
First Reconstruction Act,
followed after that,
in '67 and early '68,
by three more Reconstruction
Acts, simply called the Second,
Third, and Fourth
Reconstruction Acts.
And it was this system by which
the southern states,
the ex-Confederate states,
were actually readmitted to the
Union.
The great possibilities--Foner
addresses over and over--in this
experiment in racial democracy,
this experiment in increasing
democratic forms of government
and institutions in the South,
through the transplanting of
the Republican Party into those
ex-Confederate states,
is rooted in this document.
Those are the five--I don't
know if you can read it in the
back, can read that in the back?
Yeah, all right,
I love this machine,
it makes me look good.
But those are the five--I'm not
going to, well,
maybe I will.
The first part of the First
Reconstruction Act divided the
South into five military
districts.
The Second said that each
district would be commanded by a
General, not below the rank of
Brigadier-General,
and an adequate military force.
That part will never really
come off, and it wasn't even
begun.
The Third, the Commanding
General would supervise--a
General would supervise election
of delegates to state
conventions,
and those new state conventions
would write these new state
constitutions for the Southern
states.
Note the process now.
This is not Lincoln's Ten
Percent Plan,
and it sure as hell isn't
Andrew Johnson's "that portion
who are loyal" plan.
All adult males,
regardless of color,
who were not disfranchised for
participation in the war,
were eligible to vote,
and the constitutions had to
provide for male Negro suffrage,
in the South.
You'll note,
the Republicans,
as I've said before,
are stepping clear of black
suffrage in the North,
and they're going to do it
again in the Fifteenth
Amendment;
we'll come back to that
Thursday.
And finally,
when a majority of the voters
ratified a constitution,
and when Congress approved
it--the President has virtually
no role in this,
this is Congressional
Reconstruction;
when a state had ratified the
Fourteenth Amendment,
no choice, the equal protection
clause,
the citizenship amendment--you
must accept, then and only then,
a state would be readmitted to
the Union.
If you put it all in one large
pill, it's a very big pill for
the ex-Confederate states to
swallow,
and at least politically,
on the surface,
it is exactly what they had to
swallow in order to be
readmitted to the Union.
And between 1866--actually
Tennessee was readmitted before
this act even passed,
in a shifty,
strange manner;
it had to be readmitted again
after that--but between '66 and
1870, the eleven former
Confederate states were
readmitted to the Union under
the Radical Reconstruction Plan
of the Congressional
Republicans.
Now, those three subsequent
Reconstruction Acts are very
important.
And by the way,
every one of these acts,
including the renewal each year
of the Freedmen's Bureau,
the renewal--I mean,
the first Civil Rights
Act--fifteen different bills
developing a Reconstruction
plan,
passed by Congress,
were all vetoed between 1866
and '68 by Andrew Johnson.
I may have said this before,
more vetoes by a president of
the United States than all
previous American presidents put
together.
You could call this a
constitutional crisis;
it was.
You could call it a breakdown
in federalism.
You could call it whatever you
want.
But it's government by veto and
override of veto.
Every time A.J.
vetoed a Reconstruction Act,
Congress, in its two-thirds
majority, Republicans in both
houses, overrode his veto.
We've never had a government
operate like this,
with this many vetoes,
an override of vetoes,
in such a concentrated period
of time.
That's how Reconstruction was
actually put in place
politically.
The Second Reconstruction Act
gave details for how those
military commanders were
supposed to conduct their
districts.
The Third Reconstruction Act,
passed summer of '67,
set up what were called
registration boards,
which were empowered to deny
voting rights to anyone they
felt were not taking loyalty
oaths in good faith;
they're still trying to enforce
this loyalty oath.
And the Fourth Reconstruction
Act, not passed until spring of
'68, simply said that a majority
of votes cast would be
sufficient to put a new
constitution into effect,
not a majority of those
Southerners who had voted in
1860.
You'll note some erosion there,
in the radicalism of the
radical plan.
There are a lot of reasons for
that, not the least of which is
they were in the midst,
at that point,
of trying to impeach Andrew
Johnson.
Now, I wish I had an entire
lecture--well I do have an
entire lecture--to give you on
the impeachment of Andrew
Johnson,
but I'm going to do it quickly,
and I'd be more than happy in
our review session in a couple
of weeks,
or any other time,
to come back to it.
It's the first great model we
have of the impeachment of a
President, of course,
in our history.
We've had another one, since.
We used to think it would
never, ever, ever happen again
after the Nixon debacle.
Here I go, I'm straying into my
tangent.
Believe it or not I was--I'm
giving away my age here--but I
was a high school teacher the
year Richard Nixon was almost
impeached,
and I had prepared for months
to teach my students about
impeachment, and then the SOB
resigned.
[Laughter]
And it just took all the fun
out of the early 1970s.
[Laughter]
But it was a great civics
lesson.
We got that civics lesson over
again because of Bill Clinton's
affair with a White House
intern,
and because of what "is" or
"was" or whatever the hell it
was he said to the Grand Jury.
You need to know a couple of
things though about the
Constitution,
if you don't already know it.
There actually are four,
well five, provisions about
impeachment in the Constitution.
It's the most awesome power in
the Constitution,
in some ways,
and it isn't wielded very
often.
The authority to impeach,
of course, rests with the House
of Representatives.
It is the House of
Representatives,
through its judiciary
committee, that investigates
grounds for impeachment of a
president or a cabinet official
or a Supreme Court justice.
It is the House of
Representatives that then brings
articles of impeachment,
which in effect are like an
indictment, although they are a
political indictment and never
intended to be a legal
indictment.
The third part of the
Constitution,
Article 1, Section 3,
Clause 6, gives the U.S.
Senate the power to sit as the
jury, the judicial function of
trying a person under
impeachment charges.
The House charges,
the Senate judges.
Only the Senate,
in its collective vote,
can determine guilt or
innocence, and it takes--they
kept this an awesome power and
difficult to use--it takes a
two-thirds vote of the U.S.
Senate to impeach and remove a
president or other official.
And then comes the punishment
clause, Article 1,
Section 3, Clause 7 of the
Constitution:
judgment in cases of
impeachment shall not extend
further than to removal from
office,
and disqualification to hold
and enjoy any other office of
honor, trust,
or profit,
under the United States,
but the party convicted shall
nevertheless be liable and
subject to indictment,
trial, judgment and punishment
according to law.
You could still be tried in a
criminal court after you're
impeached, although we've never
gotten that far.
But the only power the Senate
has is removal.
And that is exactly what the
Radical Republicans are trying
to do to Andrew Johnson,
and that he provokes them to
do, over and over,
in 1867 and early 1868.
There is one other feature in
the Constitution,
and that is of course the
President's pardon power:
the President shall have the
power to pardon in all cases,
except impeachment.
Now, I don't--you don't
remember Gerald Ford's pardon of
Richard Nixon.
I do.
Probably cost Gerald Ford
election.
All right, in brief,
what happened in the Johnson
impeachment--and he was
impeached,
he simply wasn't removed from
office--is what you had is a
process, through four and five
different--depends on how you
count them--stages in the
political development of this
crisis of authority and power
over who's going to run
Reconstruction.
Now there are numerous
theories, historical
interpretations,
about why Johnson was finally
impeached by the Republicans.
It never would have happened if
Andrew Johnson would've,
in any way, just backed off and
admitted that he was probably
going to be a lame duck
president.
One theory is Johnson's
personal behavior,
as an explanation for his
impeachment.
His personal habits were hardly
fetching.
His Swing Around the Circle in
the fall of 1866 was an utter
embarrassment to the presidency.
His likening himself to Jesus;
his constant ranting on the
Radical Republicans as traitors,
calling them Judas.
He is called in the press a
"presidential ass," at various
times during that tour.
That's one part of it,
the sort of personal
provocations of his style.
But a second explanation,
that I think holds much more
weight, is that Johnson and the
Radical Republicans simply had
fundamentally different
constitutional conceptions of
the meaning of the war and the
meaning and the nature of
Reconstruction policy.
Johnson, you'll remember,
wanted a rapid,
quick, presidential,
executive Reconstruction,
with virtually no alteration of
the Constitution and utterly no
changes in black civil and
political rights.
His fifteen vetoes and the
overrides of those vetoes--in
that process of veto and
override,
you really have the origins,
the roots, the essence of why
the Radicals finally decided the
best thing in their political
interest to do with Andrew
Johnson was to remove him.
A third theory is--and there's
something to this,
although I don't think it
explains it all by any means--is
what one historian has called
the radical plot thesis,
just sheer partisan politics,
just sheer partisan hatreds.
This guy was an old Jacksonian
Democrat, he was a southern
Democrat, as the president,
and the Republicans not only
wanted him out of the way of
their Reconstruction plans,
they wanted the Democratic
Party ruined,
if they could do it.
Some of them did want that.
Some of the leaders of the
impeachment movement in the
House--James Ashley,
Benjamin Butler,
George Boutwell and
others--were sometimes referred
to, even in their friendly
press,
as one Republican paper put it,
"as baleful a trio of buzzards
as ever perched in the House of
Representatives."
And they were accused,
as sometimes politicians are
accused today,
of a witch-hunt.
They investigated everything
about Johnson,
his bank accounts,
allegations that he had tried
to betray Tennessee during the
Civil War--which were
nonsense--and even that he had
somehow participated in the
Booth conspiracy to kill
Lincoln--utter nonsense.
The real explanation here,
if there's smoke--I mean if
there's fire,
where the smoke comes from on
this radical plot thesis against
Johnson,
is this idea that there were
some Radical Republicans here
who saw a big opening,
not only to remake the South,
to Yankeeize the South--and
they are interested in doing
that,
and not always of bad motives;
the South needed schools,
desperately;
it needed some kind of economic
revival, desperately;
it needed its harbors dredged
desperately.
It needed an activist
government to do all of this.
But there were some Radical
Republicans who saw a chance
here to rearrange constitutional
powers,
to use the feeling abroad
against Andrew Johnson,
to tip the balance of power
toward the Congress,
as never before,
in the nature of the federal
government.
Removing Johnson would be
removing an obstacle to
congressional hegemony over the
federal government.
And now there's some element
here too, of the fact that you
need to remember who actually
would've replaced Andrew Johnson
if he had been removed from
office.
There is no vice-president.
He had been Lincoln's
vice-president.
There is no vice-president.
We didn't have the amendment,
which comes later,
in the twentieth century,
which allows a new president
who takes over to appoint his
vice-president.
So in the absence of any
vice-president,
who would've become president?
Come on, that's a great trivia
question, use this one out at
the bar.
No one will know it.
Louder, I can't hear you.
Students: Speaker of the
House.
Professor David Blight:
No.
President Pro Tem of the
Senate--bingo--who was Benjamin
Wade, a Radical Republican from
Ohio, and one of the leaders of
the impeachment movement;
a little unsavory.
You're organizing to impeach
the president;
oh by the way,
I'll be the next president.
And fourth and last,
but not least,
what's at stake in the
impeachment of Andrew
Johnson--and I'm going to spare
you all the sordid,
wonderful, tasty,
lovely details of the
corruption and skullduggery and
scandal and payments that went
on,
in the final vote in the
Senate, that moved seven
Republicans over to acquittal
and saved A.J.'s hide.
I'm going to spare you all that
wonderful, lovely,
corruption.
It's really beautiful,
awful, ugly stuff.
Money, offices.
If you read John Kennedy's
Profiles in Courage.
We all love to love Jack
Kennedy, and Ted Sorenson,
who was his speech writer,
was one of the greatest speech
writers ever,
and Ted Sorenson wrote that
book,
Profiles in Courage,
then they put Jack Kennedy's
name on it.
And one of his chapters is,
of course, about Andrew Johnson
being persecuted by the Radical
Republicans in Reconstruction.
Blah, God they got that wrong.
But last, but not least,
Andrew Johnson was impeached
and the Radicals kept going
after him because A.J.
wouldn't quit;
he kept provoking them,
provoking them,
provoking them and provoking
them, and not just with words.
They would appoint a General in
one of the five districts in the
South, he'd fire him.
Congress would appoint a whole
new series of Freedman's Bureau
agents for Texas,
he'd fire them.
You can't run a government like
that.
He would veto the Freedmen's
Bureau, they'd override the
Freedmen's Bureau and they'd put
the budget in place,
and he'd say,
"Just go and try to enforce
it."
Now what do you do with a
president, if you're running the
Congress and you're trying to
put a policy in place?
But at the heart here was a
struggle between a group of
politicians capable of serious
corruption in their own way,
but nevertheless who were
actually trying to defeat white
supremacy.
They were actually really
trying to create some kind of
black civil and political rights
in the South.
Sure, they wanted those blacks
to be Republican voters;
what else is new?
But Andrew Johnson stood fast
against them at every turn to
try to preserve his own
particular vision of white
supremacy.
Note just one passage.
In his State of the Union
Message, December 1867--this is
after three attempts;
three investigations of him
have already been done by the
House Judiciary Committee,
and the House Judiciary
Committee has brought possible
impeachment articles to a vote
and yet voted it down because
they didn't quite have any
smoking guns yet.
And what does he do in his
State of the Union,
December 1867,
among other things?
He says: "In the progress of
nations,"--I quote--"Negroes
have shown less capacity for
government than any other race
of people.
No independent government of
any form has ever been
successful in their hands.
Wherever they have been left to
their own devices,
they have shown a constant
tendency to relapse into
barbarism."
And it got worse from there.
Stephens, Sumner,
Wade and the host of the
Republicans in Congress kept
hearing this over and over and
over, and finally they went
after him.
The House finally voted in
February 1868,
by a vote of about 140 to
50-something,
to impeach him.
The trouble was they
actually--they wrote eleven
articles of impeachment but in
essence the first nine were all
about the technical violation of
two laws that Congress had
passed that ultimately will be,
and should have been,
declared unconstitutional.
They are called the Tenure of
Office Act and the Command of
the Army Act.
The Tenure of Office Act was a
law passed in essence saying the
President of the United States
could not fire members of his
own cabinet [laughs].
The Commander of the Army,
the Act said,
the president of the United
States as Commander-in-Chief,
cannot issue orders to the
armies without passing those
orders through the General of
the Army;
which was the nineteenth
century version of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
They were literally trying to
strip constitutional powers away
from--not the presidency--but
from Andrew Johnson.
He violated the Tenure of
Office Act, he violated the
Command of the Army Act,
he willfully did it,
and that's the grounds on which
they actually impeached him and
put him on trial.
Now, in the end he was
acquitted, not just because of
skullduggery,
corruption, and payments;
not entirely because of that at
all.
He was acquitted,
in part, because it was the
spring of 1868.
The Republican Party was about
to hold its nominating
convention for the 1868
election,
and they were about to
nominate, everybody knew it,
if they could just convince him
to do it,
Ulysses Grant as the next
presidential candidate.
Grant had been Johnson's
General of the Army and Johnson
kept embarrassing Grant,
over and over and over,
until Grant resigned.
And the Republicans were
suddenly frightened politically
in the spring of 1868,
if they really removed Johnson
and put Ben Wade in the
presidency and just literally
took over the government,
that it might really hurt them
at the polls,
in the fall.
And that Democratic Party was
doing everything under the sun,
including using the Ku Klux
Klan to a tremendous extent,
as we'll see in the next two
weeks, to revive itself and
oppose the Republicans in
election after election;
and will they ever in that '68
election.
In the spring of '68 good old
A.J.
promised better behavior too.
He said he'd cool it,
he'd back off,
he'd get out of the way,
and he would never run again;
which wasn't quite true.
He was acquitted,
he served out his term.
He went home to East Tennessee
and did as old Andy Johnson
always had, he got back on the
stump and he got himself
re-elected to the U.S.
Senate.
He will die in 1875.
He's buried in Greenville,
Tennessee, to this day,
and we're told he was buried
with a copy of the Constitution
on his chest,
held down by his hands.
He used to say he stood on the
Constitution;
he's buried with the
Constitution I guess standing on
him.
Goodbye Andrew Johnson,
it's been so good to know you.
Now, that fall the American
people had a pivotal
presidential election.
I know we say that about all
great elections,
but let me give you the quick
and dirty, on 1868.
Foner covers this nicely.
Grant was a war hero, of course.
He was going to be now the
candidate of harmony.
We've had a lot of generals in
our history run for president as
candidates of harmony.
When informed of his
nomination, which was only a few
weeks after the acquittal trial,
in the Senate,
of Andrew Johnson,
when informed on May 20,1868 of
his--excuse me,
in early June,
1868 of his nomination,
he issued a public statement
which read: "I shall have no
policy of my own to interfere
against the will of the people."
And I'm going to repeat that,
you tell me what it means.
"I shall have no policy of my
own to interfere against the
will of the people."
I will not take a stand,
he said, in effect.
He didn't exactly mean that,
but the slogan--and he ended
that statement with the famous
slogan that would become the
slogan of his election campaign,
"Let us have peace."
This splendidly ambiguous
slogan, "Let us have peace."
And God knows the whole
country's yearning for peace,
but what they would have in
1868 is by far the most racist,
white supremacist election in
American history,
and by far, to that date,
the most violent.
Grant had committed to
congressional control of
Reconstruction and to the
Reconstruction Acts.
But the party platform in '68
now retrenched into being a
political persuasion of order
and stability and no longer of
revolution and experiment.
They would now be protectors of
the status quo they had created,
rather than the innovators and
the experimenters.
They were now pilloried by
their opponents,
the Democrats,
as radicals,
as amalgamationists,
as miscegenationists.
Black suffrage,
the right to vote for black men
became the issue of the 1868
election.
If you think the Democratic
Party in the 1960s under LBJ,
which passes the '64 and '65
Civil Rights Act,
put itself on a course of near
destruction in the South because
of its liberal racial
views--which it did--the
Republicans of 1868 are now
running as the party of the
black man's right to vote.
Now they did say that they were
going to leave the right to vote
to the whims of the states,
in the North,
but in the South,
in that Reconstruction Act,
and by swallowing the
Fourteenth Amendment,
the black man's right to vote
was supposed to be sacrosanct.
The Democratic Party had its
convention in July of '68.
It nominated Horatio Seymour of
New York, its former governor.
Now Seymour had,
among other things--the
Democrat's candidate for
president--the vice-presidential
candidate gets worse--but the
Democrat's presidential
candidate in '68,
Seymour, had openly supported
the draft rioters in 1863 in New
York City, who were out
slaughtering people in the
streets.
He was on record for having
opposed the Civil War,
for having been a Peace
Democrat,
a McClellan supporter,
a man who would've sued for
peace with the South,
and he chose as his running
mate Francis "Frank" Blair,
for vice-president,
from Missouri,
who was not only an open white
supremacist,
but he declared that the
Democrats would,
if elected, announce the
Reconstruction Acts null and
void,
they would repeal them,
and they would return the South
as immediately as possible to
home rule.
In other words,
if the Democrats were elected
in '68 they would crush the
Reconstruction plans.
And Blair, in his blustery
ways, even threatened a second
civil war;
a little stupid there.
There were rhetoric and reality
in '68, but what was at stake in
'68 were the results of the
Civil War.
It was a memory-laden peace
that was at stake.
The Democrats wanted to take
the Constitution backward.
The New York Herald,
a Democratic paper,
asked, quote,
"Was it the Constitution as it
was or the Constitution as it
is?"
That's Andrew Johnson's slogan.
Now I want to just give you an
example or two of just how
racist this campaign was in
1868.
There were bloody shirts waving
everywhere.
"Your people killed my people."
"The blood on your hands is the
blood of my son."
There were Southern bloody
shirts, Northern bloody shirts,
Democratic Party bloody shirts,
Republican Party bloody shirts,
and African-American bloody
shirts;
symbolically,
and in some cases literally,
people would hold them up.
Here's Blair,
the vice-president,
the attack dog,
on the campaign trail.
Republicans had oppressed the
South, claimed Blair in one
speech, by subjecting it to the
rule of a,
quote, "semi-barbarous race of
blacks who are polygamist and
destined to subject white women
to their unbridled lust."
"Let White Men Rule America,"
screamed a headline in a
Louisville newspaper,
arguing that Republicans
preferred, quote,
"native negroes to native
whites."
And everywhere Democrats
labeled the Republican Party as
the party of,
quote,
"the amalgamation of the races,
the monstrous negro equality
doctrine," and on and on it
went.
A Georgia Democrat,
who got himself elected to the
U.S.
Senate, named Benjamin Hill,
said the South was now under
the rule of a foreign power,
driven by hate and determined
to dishonor an unarmed people.
And in language understood
across, you might say,
all the white class lines in
the South,
he announced that if the
Radicals controlled
Reconstruction,
southern whites would become
America's new slaves.
They were, said Benjamin Hill,
quote, "becoming the new
negroes."
And on and on it went.
Now, the Republicans gave it
back, not quite in kind,
but they certainly waved their
bloody shirts.
Here's Wendell Phillips,
the old abolitionist in Boston,
who said, quote,
in this election,
"We have just finished a war
between two ideas.
We sent our armies into South
Carolina to carry our ideas.
If we had no right to carry our
ideas, we had no right to send
our armies.
If the Democrats"--no,
he said, "If Seymour wins this
election it is as if Lee
triumphs at Appomattox."
And that makes it pretty clear.
Or take this example of a kind
of a black bloody shirt.
This is Benjamin Tanner,
the editor of The Christian
Recorder,
the largest circulation black
newspaper in the United States.
It was the weekly newspaper of
the African Methodist Episcopal
Church.
And he put it into a kind of
little parable.
And he says what's at stake in
the '68 election--this is very
gendered of course--when you
think about the power and
significance of black male
suffrage you know exactly what
he's aiming at.
He says Negro manhood is what
is at stake in '68.
Here's the way he put it.
"Negro manhood says 'I am an
American citizen.'
Modern Democracy," meaning the
Democratic Party,
"says 'you are not.'
Negro manhood says 'I demand
all my rights,
civil and political.'
Modern Democracy says 'you have
no rights, except what I choose
to give you.'
Negro manhood says 'I must
build churches for myself and
schoolhouses for my children.'
Modern Democracy says 'if you
do, I will burn them down.'
Negro manhood says 'I will
exercise the rights vouchsafed.'
Modern Democracy says 'if you
do I will mob and murder you.'"
Now, you think our political
campaigns get ugly.
God, we are so tame,
compared to this.
As someone once said,
politics, it's just war by
other means, and there's never a
time when that is more true than
1868.
The Ku Klux Klan came into its
own in 1868.
I'm going to lecture in full
about violence and the Klan come
next Thursday and next week.
But 1868 was their first real
coming out.
There was a reign of terror in
five or six southern states in
this election,
especially in Louisiana,
Georgia, Arkansas,
and Tennessee.
All across the South,
in '67 and especially that
election year of '68,
as blacks are beginning to
evolve into this process of
tenant farming and
sharecropping,
and trying somehow to eke out
livings, they went to the polls
in extraordinary numbers and
risked their lives,
and many of them died doing it.
There were all kinds of
auxiliaries of the Democratic
Party that really were the Ku
Klux Klan or its imitators.
There were more than 200
political murders in the State
of Arkansas alone,
in this election.
The death toll in Georgia was
lower, but intimidation at the
polls was very effective.
In twenty-two Georgia counties,
with a total of 9,300 black men
listed on the voting rolls,
Grant tallied only eighty-seven
votes.
Student: Professor
Blight, the students of Civil
War have suffered long enough.
Let my people go!
Professor David Blight:
You're free to leave.
[Laughter] Nice hair.
I hope he doesn't have a gun.
[Laughter]
At least he could've sung the
lyric.
Seriously, has that guy left?
And the suffering continues.
[Laughter]
In Louisiana,
more than 1000 people died in
political violence,
in this one election year,
almost all of them black,
all between April and November
1868.
In Louisiana,
twenty-one parishes that had
previously had a Republican vote
in 1867, totaling some 28,000
black voters,
only 501 black votes got cast.
And these are just some
examples of how intimidation
worked.
Grant carried all of the North
in '68, except three states,
if you count Oregon as a
northern state.
The only northern states that
Seymour and the Democrats
carried were New Jersey and New
York.
Seymour won three border
states, Delaware,
Maryland and Kentucky,
and he won only two of the nine
reconstructed,
ex-Confederate states--eight,
excuse me--that were already
readmitted by 1868.
Grant won in the electoral
college 214 to 80.
The important thing is--two
things--the Republicans
sustained in the fall elections
of 1868 a clear veto-proof
Congress;
two-thirds in the House and
four-fifths in the Senate.
And without the approximately
half million African-American
men who voted for Grant in those
ex-Confederate states,
Grant would never have been
elected.
It was the first time in
American history when the black
vote mattered,
it counted;
and so many of them voted in
the face of threats to their
lives.
Now, on the ground in the
South, in the midst of all this
politics and violence,
which we'll hear more about in
time, a new level of--did he say
suffering?--went in place.
There was a speech made by a
former Confederate General at
the American Cotton Planters
Association meeting in late
1865;
December '65 to be exact.
And at that meeting--
ironically it isn't exactly
clear what he intended-- but at
this meeting the former
Confederate General,
whose name was Robert
Richardson, said,
quote, "The emancipated slaves
own nothing because nothing but
freedom has been given to them."
They own nothing because
nothing but freedom was given to
them.
In the absence of slavery what
did the freedmen--now think with
me--what did the freedmen
actually own?
They owned their bodies and
they owned their labor.
The freed people,
as a mass of people,
at the end of the Civil War
now--the jubilee has come but
what do they actually have?
They lacked physical
capital--money,
land, to some extent tools--and
they lacked to a certain degree
human capital,
which means education,
literacy, and certain kinds of
skills.
Now a lot of slaves came out of
slavery, of course,
with enormous skills.
Blacks' economic freedom
though, like their political
freedom, was largely at the
mercy of the regime of white
society,
or of white supremacy itself,
however it would survive.
And the primary goal of white
Southerners, from day one of
Reconstruction,
all the way through,
was to try to sustain what they
most needed, what whites most
needed, which was a landless,
dependent, agricultural labor
force that would stay put.
They wanted black people to
remain, if not slaves in status,
landless, dependent and
stationary, as agricultural
workers.
Put another way,
American freedom for American
slaves brought no freedom dues.
If you learned about indentured
servitude in the past,
in the eighteenth century,
in all the colonies there were
always something called freedom
dues.
When an indenture ended,
a former indentured servant got
a suit of clothing,
a piece of cash,
and usually a piece of land.
It didn't happen.
There were attempts at this;
we'll see more about this in
the coming two weeks.
There was the Freedmen's Bureau
efforts to redistribute land,
to some extent.
There was Thaddeus Stephens'
bill in 1867 which would've--it
didn't pass--but it would've
called for forty acres and fifty
dollars;
there was no mention of a
mule--forty acres and fifty
dollars be given to each
freedmen family by the federal
government across the South;
forty acres.
It actually is sometimes
referred to as the first
reparations bill;
didn't pass.
There was Frederick Douglass's
idea, a little bit later,
of a national freedmen's loan
agency,
a federal loan agency
subsidized by the federal
government, by taxpayer money,
to which freedmen would apply
for loans, perhaps three-year
loans, five-year loans,
low interest loans, to buy land.
It's the simplest idea in
banking.
Didn't happen.
What did happen was a fourth
effort that became known as the
Freedmen's Bank.
The Freedmen's Bank was
chartered in late 1865.
It lasted eight, nine years.
It died in 1874 with
obligations to approximately
61,000 depositors,
all former slaves,
or virtually all former slaves,
and the bank died on Frederick
Douglass's watch as its
president,
because it could not make good
on its payments.
It was a good idea,
that really wasn't tried.
The Freedmen's Bank,
by the way, did have some
Congressional support,
it did have some federal
subsidies,
but never enough to make a go
or make it work.
Today we bail out Bear Stearns.
In 1874, the federal government
and the politics of 1874,
as we'll see,
just let the Freedmen's Bank
die.
Now, let me leave you with this.
I have I think a minute or so.
We've learned a great deal,
I think, from the First and the
Second Reconstructions in
American history--if we can
refer to the Civil Rights
Movement as the Second
Reconstruction--we've learned a
great deal about how political
liberty can be achieved:
the right to vote,
right to hold office,
serve on a jury,
engage in the political
culture, in spite of the
hostility and the violence and
intimidation.
We've learned a great deal
about what can be achieved with
political liberty,
but we've also learned a lot
about what is often not achieved
in any kind of concomitant
economic power.
What happens now in the South
is a rapid process from slave
labor to a whole new set of
economic arrangements in the
contract realm.
What blacks most wanted to get
away from, to kill off if they
could, was any old system of
gang labor.
They wanted control over the
labor and lives of their women.
They wanted out of gang labor.
They wanted plots of land of
their own.
But they faced essentially
these three great obstacles.
And I'll leave you with this.
One is that they had inherited
almost nothing from slavery with
which to buy land.
Two, they lived in an almost
non-existent credit market.
Long-term loans were simply not
available anywhere;
and show me a farmer anywhere,
in a capitalist economy,
who can survive without his
bank loans.
And three, they face an
enormously hostile regime of
white supremacy that does not
believe black people should have
economic independence.
And initially what we see
happening is that tenant
farming, and then working on
halves,
or thirds and then halves,
and working in a sharecropping
system, becomes a compromise.
It becomes a compromise because
paying wages to former slaves
doesn't work in an economy that
is so cash poor.
There's no cash to pay anybody
with.
So blacks actually begin to
embrace this idea of being a
tenant farmer,
because you get your own plot
of land,
you have some control over your
own labor, you plant your seeds,
you own your own tools,
or you think you do.
At the end of the crop season
you're going to share half of
that crop with the owner of the
land and then with the
furnishing merchant,
this new institution that
evolves.
But you get to keep half,
and you can at least hope that
in that half comes something
like cash that you can keep.
What it really is going to
become, however,
for most, not all,
is a dead end,
to some extent a dead end kind
of debt peonage.
What we do know is this:
over the next twenty to thirty
years, by about 1890 and
certainly by 1900,
about fifteen to percent
percent of American freedmen,
and their sons and daughters,
will own their own land.
It means about eight percent to
eight-five percent did not.
I'll leave you there;
and suffer on.