Labor Ideologies and the Freedmen's Bureau

Labor Ideologies and the Freedmen’s Bureau

Written by,Aaron Harmaty

Advised by,Dr. William Carter

Honor’s Thesis

1

Table of Contents

Abstract

3

Introduction: A Union Scarred and Mangled

4

Chapter 1: Antebellum Ideologies

17

Chapter 2: To Build a Nation

43

Afterword: A Union Healed

76

Works Cited

79

2

Abstract:

This thesis uses the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands as a lens to

examine how antebellum ideologies evolved and interacted with each other during

Reconstruction. This thesis will show that the Civil War occurred because of two distinct

ideologies, free labor in the North and proslavery (which would become proslavery in the

abstract after the Civil War) in the South, which could not reconcile their differing ways

of seeing the world. Ideology played a key role in Reconstruction, and the Freedmen’s

Bureau is the best place to look at how the ideologies interacted during that time. The

Reconstruction years that followed were a time of enormous possibilities, but the

constraints of free labor ideology prevented Northerners from appreciating the dynamic

situation in the South, and proslavery in the abstract motivated white Southerners to

successfully resist attempts at reform. Free laborites’ failure to transform the South led

Northerners to re-examine their dearest held assumptions, and slavery in the abstract

believers’ success in staving off free labor taught Southerners that their idea of

civilization, though changed by war, was just.

3

Introduction: A Union Scarred and Mangled

Hundreds of thousands Americans died during the Civil War, but the North

triumphed on the battlefields and ensured that the Union would be maintained. While

President Abraham Lincoln had died and was replaced by the South-sympathetic Andrew

Johnson, the Republicans in Congress had enough power to deny Representatives from

the former Confederacy their seats in Congress. The North appeared to have won a total

victory over the South. The North could have done whatever it wanted, and the

Republicans in Congress wanted to reform the South so that a second Civil War could

never happen. During the years of 1865-1868, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau

Bills, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Klan Acts, and other pieces of legislation that

expanded the scope of the federal government. After Congress passed the responsibility

for Reconstruction to the newly reconstructed state governments, an even more radical

change occurred: biracial rule. Freedmen made enormous portions of the electorate in the

newly reconstructed states, and these state governments passed inventive pieces of

legislation that helped modernize the South.1

These conditions caused Reconstruction to be the most contentious period in the

Republic’s history aside from the Civil War. President Johnson’s attempts to obstruct

Congress provided legitimacy for those who opposed the egalitarian leanings of

Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized Freedmen and Republicans in the South

while Northern Democrats refused to lend the Reconstructed-Southern governments any

support to deal with the changing economic realities of the 1870s. When Reconstruction

officially ended in 1877, Americans at large blamed racial-egalitarianism for all of the

problems that occurred during the fourteen year-long Reconstruction era.

1 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, (New York, New York: The Free Press, 1998), 406-407.

4

Understanding how the Republic got to that point requires a review of the

circumstances that led to one of the great, tragic ironies of American history; the South

won the peace that the North had fought to ensure. Southerners had been humbled and the

North was in a position to create a new world in the South.2 Southerners from most of the

former Confederacy were denied representation in Congress, which left Northerners in

charge of the process. Most importantly, Northerners were committed to Reconstruction.

They had several goals they wanted to accomplish, of the most important of which was

the creation of a unified nation. In essence, they wanted to ensure that the Union they

fought for would be stronger and more stable than the antebellum Union.

In order to achieve that, they had to transform the South into a new North. In

order to bring about that transformation, the North had to impress its free labor ideology

onto the South. Free labor was an ideology centered on the dignity of labor, and its

central tenet was that anyone could improve their lot if they worked hard enough because

God rewards hard work through the market. Even though many white free laborites were

racist, they believed that blacks could learn the lessons of free labor and thus improve

themselves.3

The first objective of Congressional Reconstruction following the Civil War was

to prevent a situation in which the aristocracy that led the South out of the Union would

be in a position to dominate the South after the war. The second aim was to encourage

black ownership of Southern land, in order for black people to remain free and learn the

free labor worldview. This was important because if the Freedmen remained free and

owned property, then the aristocracy would be unable to re-enslave them.

2 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, (New York, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), 17.

3 Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, (New York, NY: Oxford

University Press, 1995), 45-46.

5

Key to those goals was a plan for of land redistribution, which would seize land

from the rebellious plantation owners, and relocate at least some portion of it to the

Freedmen.4 This plan, devised by Thaddeus Stevens, a member of the House of

Representatives from Pennsylvania, was outlined in the first year of the Civil War,

though at the time it did not have widespread support. The idea behind his plan

eventually morphed into a widespread belief among Northerners about the benefits of

land distribution, which would allow the Freedmen to learn what it meant to be free and

gain some economic stability.5

The first Freedmen’s Bureau, established in March of 1865, was created for that

very purpose. The historian Eric Foner articulated the vast responsibilities of the Bureau

in his seminal work, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, when

he wrote, the, “Bureau was to distribute clothing, food, and fuel to destitute Freedmen

and oversee ‘all subjects’ relating to their position in the South.”6 The Bureau would also,

As suggested by its full title – Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands – it was authorized to divide abandoned land into forty-acre plots, for rental to freedmen and loyal refugees and eventual sale with “such title as the United States can convey” (language that reflected the legal ambiguity of the government’s hold on Southern land).7

In short, not only was the Bureau responsible for providing some basic necessities to the

Freedmen, but the Bureau was also responsible for anything related to the position of the

Freedmen in Southern society, which included education, labor, and land ownership.

While it is important to note that the Bureau, in Foner’s words, “despite its unprecedented

responsibilities and powers” was “clearly envisioned as a temporary expedient” –as

evidenced by its limited funding – it cannot be overstated how revolutionary an

4 Claude Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 1-2.

5 Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule, 22.

6 Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 69.


6

organization the Bureau was in American history.8 This was an organization explicitly

designed to help the Freedmen integrate into American society while at the same time

improve their lot economically.

Despite the progressive undertones of the Bureau, its existence should not be seen

as inspired by a sense of racial egalitarianism in the North, even though many of the

people in favor of the Bureau were racial egalitarians. The racial prejudices of the time

convinced Northern whites that the Freedmen, without the benefit of ever having lived in

a free society, would need to learn that in a free society, people would not necessarily

help them.9 To give land to Freedmen would not only teach Freedmen to learn the value

of hard work, but it would also ensure that the Southern aristocrats who started the Civil

War would never be in a position to start another war. Most Northerners who supported

this plan did so because they believed that this would prevent aristocrats from retaking

power, and that the exercise would teach Freedmen what it meant to be free.

Unfortunately for Northerners and the freedmen, the South still had a powerful

champion, in the form of President Johnson, who fought for its interests. Put on the

Unionist ticket in 1864 because the Republicans wanted a pro-union Southerner on the

ticket, no one could have imagined that he would eventually be deemed too soft on the

South. In fact, he became the Southern Unionist in America, in part because he was an

acceptable military governor of Tennessee, but especially because he voiced a very harsh

stance against the rebels.10

Johnson, like Southern society at large, held a proslavery worldview that should

have become invalidated after the Civil War. However, proslavery was actually


9 Ulysses Grant, “Gen Grant’s Report to the Presidency,” published in The Spirit of Democracy (Columbus, OH), December 27, 1865.


7

descended from an older ideology that this paper refers to as slavery in the abstract. The

objective of people who held this ideology was not equality of opportunity. Slavery in the

abstract was hierarchal worldview, and it asserted that freedom came from restricting

other people’s liberties. This people who held this ideology needed a permanent

underclass in it so that poor whites would not try to expunge it, and slaves served as that

underclass during the antebellum period. At the beginning of Reconstruction, when

slavery was abolished, proslavery could not exist as it once did. People who believed in

proslavery had to return to the roots of proslavery ideology, slavery in the abstract, with

some revisions in order for their ideology to survive. If they were unable to do that, then

their perspective would die.

Johnson, after he ascended to the Presidency, decided to ensure that his

Reconstruction plan would be implemented, and the much more Radical Congressional

plan would be averted. On May 9th, 1865, Johnson issued his Amnesty Proclamation, in

which he granted, “to all persons who have, directly or indirectly, participated in the

existing rebellion,” except for certain leaders of the Confederacy, “amnesty and pardon,

with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves,” so long as they took a

loyalty oath.11 He was a firm believer in quickly bringing the Union together, and he

understood that trying to change the South would delay that re-union greatly. His

Amnesty Proclamation had a profound impact on Reconstruction.

When Johnson issued this proclamation, he prevented Congressional Republicans

from executing Reconstruction in the way they initially wanted to. By effectively ending

the land reform debate, Johnson crippled the Reconstruction process.12 The lack of

11 Andrew Johnson, Amnesty Proclamation, May 29, 1865, Andrew Johnson Papers, Library of Congress, 7A.

12 While there were some instances of land sales and other forms of land distribution after the summer of 1865, such efforts did not

compare in scope or in scale to the original mission of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule, 37.

8

available land for Freedmen pushed them into the sharecropping contracts that allowed

for no social or economic mobility. Further, many plantation owners were able to retain

their land and have blacks continue to work for them. Except for the continued presence

Northern soldiers in the former-Confederacy, the South was able to adapt its ideology

comfortably to a world without slavery. Southerners were able to do this because they

understood liberty in a hierarchical context, so as long as there was oppression

somewhere in the society (in their case, the continued oppression of black people) they

could consider themselves free. While there were certainly opportunities for Northerners

to guide Reconstruction closer to what they initially intended, this moment made the goal

of widespread black land ownership in the South almost impossible.

Many Northerners went South for various reasons, but even those Northerners

who moved South in order to profit from the economic chaos of the region still believed

that they would transform the South into a new North.13 Many of them were interested in

money, but others were activists trying to change the world.14 They believed that the only

way to ensure that there would be peace and stability for the Union in the future, the

South would have to adopt free labor for the sake of American civilization. If the South

adopted free labor, then that would mean that the South would never have a reason to

threaten the Union again, and it that adoption would also prove the superiority of

Northern, free labor civilization over Southern, slave-holding decay.15

Secondary Literature

With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and the blame for its failures laid at the

13 Lawrence Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction, (New York, New York: Fordham

University Press, 1998), 1.14

Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction, xiii.15

Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 50.

9

feet of the Freedmen in the South and the Northerners who had empowered them, the

American populace, and academia specifically, wanted to understand how the victory of

the Civil War could be overshadowed by the dread period known as Reconstruction. It is

that motive which inspired the first group of historians who started writing about

Reconstruction, and the body of literature they created would eventually be known as the

Dunning school. The Dunning historians defined the perspective most Americans had

about Reconstruction until the Revisionist school emerged during the 1950s and 1960s.16

The Dunning school was named after Columbia Professor William Archibald

Dunning, who was one of the first historians to write about Reconstruction. Writing in the

late 1890s and early 1900s, he argued that Reconstruction failed because Freedmen were

left in charge of the Southern States. His reasoning, and that of the historians who shared

his perspective, was that freedmen were too inexperienced with politics and that black

politicians were too dim witted to deal with the rapid changes that occurred during the

period of Reconstruction, and that these different incompetent actors led to the rampant

corruption and widespread chaos that doomed Reconstruction. The Dunning school

defended Jim Crow, doubted the intelligence of black people, and generated the historical

frameworks that would rehabilitate the image of slavery and the perception of the

Confederacy in the minds of many Americans. An example of the blatant racism found in

Dunning’s seminal work, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877, occurs his

description of how the freedmen reacted to freedom, “They wandered aimlessly but

happy through the country, found endless delight in hanging about the towns and Union

16 Though in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America provided the groundwork that the Revisionist school would

use to combat the Dunning School. However, Du Bois’s work was an island in the stream of Dunning school literature, and as such it

was prevented from getting proper consideration until the Revisionists began to write in the 1950s.

10

camps, and were fascinated by the pursuit of the white man’s culture.”17 Dunning

infantilized and dehumanized the freedmen at almost every juncture he could, and he uses

his own racism as proof of the incompetency of the freedmen.

While the Dunning school was considered the only legitimate perspective on

Reconstruction until the 1950s and 1960s, the seed of the Revisionist school was laid in

1935, when W.E.B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935. His

work was a problematic work of history, even though it is influential. His stated goal in

writing this book was to decry the Dunning school, and so his book reads more like a

manifesto than a work of history. He also refused to use any archives in his work because

he did not view his work as “original research.”18 That said, his work is still very

important to historical research because he wrote the first book that focused on black

Americans’ positive contributions during Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that the

freedmen in the South were responsible for building the public infrastructure of the

South; it was freedmen who built schools and fought for a more egalitarian South.19 He

also believed that the freedmen in the South did not receive enough support from

Northerners to stave off widespread railroad corruption, the emergence of the Klan, and

the resurgence of the vanquished Aristocracy. Despite all this, he contends that the South

was, with the notable exceptions listed above, actually a very orderly and productive

society. Du Bois’s point was that the South during Reconstruction was a more just

society than the one that came before because of the active role that the freedmen played

during that time period.

17 William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877, (New York, New York: Harper & Brothers

Publishers, 1907), 11.18

It should be noted that he did use “government reports, proceedings of state constitutional conventions, unpublished dissertations, and virtually every relevant monograph. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, x. 19

Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 655-656.

11

The effort to rehabilitate the freedmen’s image was continued in 1965 when

Kenneth Stampp wrote The Era of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. This work, while better

grounded in a wider variety of primary sources, still needs to be assessed in the context of

the time in which it was written. During the 1950s, emerging revisionist historians

combatted the Dunning school by re-evaluating the nature of American slavery. At the

forefront of this Revisionist school was Kenneth Stampp, and his book on Reconstruction

was his attempt to legitimize this Revisionist school of thought because he believed that

if he and his compatriots’ analyses of slavery could not be applied Reconstruction then all

their work might be ignored. Stampp made similar claims as Du Bois, but he spent less

time on discussing the Freedmen and more time on the whites who lived North and

South, because he wanted to disprove the notion that Northerners were not, “evil through

and through, and the helpless, innocent white men of the South were totally noble and

pure.”20 He argued that the North abandoned the project of Reconstruction long before

1877, and that the North’s refusal to provide ongoing support for the Southern states

allowed for the eventual regression of the former Confederacy into a government of

oppression. Stampp placed the onus of the failure of Reconstruction on the White

Southerners who participated in the Klan acts and refused to accept an egalitarian society.

Eric Foner solidified the position of the revisionist school in 1988 with his seminal

work, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution. This powerful book is still the

standard of the field, and it uses an enormous variety of primary sources combined with

Revisionist literature to paint a holistic portrait of Reconstruction. He charted the exercise

of Reconstruction from 1863-1877, and chronologically looked at all of the issues of the

period. He follows Du Bois’ example and argues that the Freedmen had agency and were

20 Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877, (New York, NY: Vintage books, 1965), 5.

12

able to accomplish a great deal, and like Stampp he argued that the North could have

done more to protect the Freedmen from the Southerners who sought to eradicate blacks’

rights. Foner notes that, “perhaps the remarkable thing about Reconstruction was not that

it failed, but that it was attempted at all and survived as long as it dead.”21 He notes that

the North did not have the will nor the “modern bureaucratic machinery to oversee

southern affairs in any permanent way,” and that the “weakening of Northern resolve”

was due to Reconstruction’s undermining of “free labor and egalitarian precepts at the

heart of Reconstruction policy.”22 In essence, Northerners got tired of Reconstruction

because their ideology did not prove to be effective.

Douglas Egerton’s book, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of

America’s most Progressive Era, examines Reconstruction from the perspective of the

freedmen who lived through it. This proves a valuable departure from the rest of

Reconstruction literature because he is better able to describe why Reconstruction failed

in the South after the federal government stopped providing much support for the state

governments. White Southerners, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and local terrorist

bands, sabotaged Reconstruction at every stage by perpetrating atrocities against

Freedmen and Carpetbaggers. As Egerton put it, black activists and reformers knew,

“Reconstruction did not fail; in regions where it collapsed it was violently overthrown by

men who had fought for slavery during the Civil War and continued that battle as guerilla

partisans over the next decade.”23 Reconstruction, in Egerton’s analysis, almost

succeeded in transforming America, yet it was stopped by the extreme violence that



23 Douglas Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s most Progressive Era, (New York, New

York: Bloomsbury Press), 19.

13

Southerners inflicted onto Freedmen and other Southern reformers.

The book that best represents where the field is going in regards to interpretations

of the aftermath of Reconstruction is David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War in

American Memory. Blight examines, “how Americans remembered their most divisive

and tragic experiences during the fifty-year period after the Civil War.”24 He asserts that

American memories of the Civil War could be divided into three basic visions, the first

one being a reconciliationist vision, “which took root in the process of dealing with the

dead,” the second was a white supremacist vision which took many forms such as

terrorism and would eventually join with the reconciliationist perspective, and the third

was an emancipationist vision which saw the war as the agent that remade the republic

and liberated the enslaved black people of the South.25 His interpretation of the South

winning the peace has become very popular in the field, for it explains why the South

was romanticized.

The Structure of the Argument

A lot of work done on topics concerning Reconstruction touches upon the

antebellum thoughts of Americans during Reconstruction, but the innovation of this paper

is that it explores how those ideas evolved over time, and how those ideas directly

impacted the actions of the people who lived during Reconstruction. The ideologies of

the antebellum period, which can be referred to as free labor and slavery in the abstract,

did not die with the Civil War. These two ideologies, which are both descended from

Lockean principles and can be generally referred to as free labor and slavery in the

abstract, evolved into new iterations which still held onto central assumptions of their

24 David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

2001), 1.25

Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, 2.

14

earlier versions, yet developed new features that made them distinct from their previous

forms. These ideologies clashed with each other during Reconstruction, and the

Freedmen’s Bureau played a key role in this struggle of worldviews, because its raison

d’être was to impart the values of free labor on the South, and thus morph the South into

a new North. Free laborites’ failure to transform the South led Northerners to re-examine

their dearest held assumptions, and slavery in the abstract’s success in staving off free

labor taught Southerners that their idea of civilization, though changed by war, was just.

The first chapter examines the antebellum ideologies of free labor and slavery in

the abstract, and what those ideologies meant during the antebellum era. The first section

of this paper will explain what free labor ideology was, and why it mattered during

Reconstruction. This chapter will highlight some implications about the free labor

ideology that have been, at times, glossed over in some of the literature. Specifically, this

chapter will highlight the sense of social responsibility that was found among free

laborites in the antebellum period, which later motivated northerners to create the

Freedmen’s Bureau in the first place. The second section examines slavery in the

abstract, which served as the Southern rival to Northern free labor. This section will show

how free labor as an intellectual tradition was linked to slavery in the abstract, and how

slavery in the abstract found a home in proslavery ideology. It will show how slavery in

the abstract, an ideology that only benefited the aristocracy of the South, found a home in

the heart of poor Southern whites. The section will then explore antebellum history from

the perspective of those people who held the slavery in the abstract mindset.

The second chapter focuses on the Freedmen’s Bureau, because it is through that

organ which one can most nakedly see how these ideologies combatted and influenced

15

each other in the Reconstruction South, thus examining the Bureau allows the historian to

see just how the South would eventually win the peace. The first section will briefly

outline how the two ideologies evolved following the Civil War, and how both ideologies

approached the issue of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The second section will outline the

process of passing the Freedmen’s Bureau extension in late 1865 through July of 1866.

The section will show the chaotic process and how the various ideologies influenced the

actors in the issue of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It will track how the free laborite

Republicans came to their compromises, and it will show how and why slavery in the

abstract believers were able to influence the entire process. The third section will show

how the various ideologies interacted in the South, and how the Freedmen’s Bureau

actually operated in the South. The various challenges faced by the Bureau Agents and

other Northerners who went South will be explored, and it shall examine why the

Freedmen’s Bureau could not succeed given the circumstances it operated in. The section

with an examination of literature, among other sources, to reveal how Northerners

processed and dealt with the difficult situation they found themselves in.

16

Chapter 1: Antebellum Ideologies

It is very hard to understand the antebellum period without understanding the

ideologies that shaped the actions of the people who lived through it. Those two

ideologies, which this paper will refer to as free labor and slavery in the abstract, were

both descended from Lockean philosophy but both drew very different conclusions from

the writings of the famous philosopher. Free labor, which was found in the antebellum

North, was centered on the idea that people should be able to reap the full benefits of

their property, and that is society were organized in such a way as to ensure that, then

things would improve for everyone. Slavery in the abstract, which was found in the

antebellum South, was centered on the idea that oppression was the natural and just state

of mankind, and that a free society required oppression in order for the people in the

society to be free.

Free Labor

The core of free labor ideology was the idea that the economy was merely a

means to achieve a just society, not the result of a just society. Free labor placed, as Foner

once wrote, “Its emphasis on social mobility and economic growth,” and free laborites

believed that economics should be adjusted so that as many people as possible could reap

the benefits of their labor as they could.26 They believed that Northern society, with its

acceptance of capitalist economy and its abundance of natural resources, provided

enough opportunity for anyone to rise above their station, but this did not prevent

Northerners from identifying some of the problems with their society or from coming up

with solutions (many times more limited in scope than required) to those problems.27

26 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 13.


17

The roots of free labor can be found in the philosophical writings of John Locke.

The core of John Locke’s philosophy was that civil societies are created in order to

protect everyone’s property, but the important component of his for the purposes of free

labor is how Locke explained where property came from. According to Locke,

Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his own property.28

In essence, property only exists because people labored on something that was already

present in nature, and because labor is, “the unquestionable property of the labourer, no

man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to.”29 To Locke, it was labor that

created property, and labor that produced any value that a property held. God gave land,

“to the industrious and the rational (and labour was to be his title to it) not to the fancy or

covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.”30 Labor got people property, and

society was created to ensure that people would be able to keep the benefits of their hard

work.

Free labor also drew on the tradition of the protestant work ethic. The protestant

work ethic, according to Max Weber, was predicated on, “earning more and more money,

combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,” in order to live

a life in accordance to God’s design.31 This work ethic satisfied the two key components

of the free labor ideology; first, by encouraging the person to keep earning “more and

more money,” it acknowledged that laboring was a key component to living a virtuous

life –one cannot make money if one is not laboring. Second, by avoiding “all spontaneous

28 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980, digitized by Dave Gowan

for IBook), Sect. 27.29

Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Sect. 27.30

Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Sect. 34.31

Max Weber. The Spirit of Capitalism. 1905. 52.

18

enjoyment of life,” it proscribes people from engaging in debauchery –because money,

without virtue, leads to sin.

The goal of people who followed the Protestant work ethic was, as Franklin

wrote, to “Be industrious and free; be frugal and free.”32 To work hard meant that

someone was moral, but in order to be free and to enjoy God’s blessing one had to also

be frugal. Benjamin Franklin explained that, “The Second Vice is lying, the first is

running in debt.”33 Debt had moral component in the Protestant work ethic, and debt was

seen as chains for free, god-fearing men. This set of beliefs which formed the Protestant

work ethic -- beliefs that were developed in a time when most people were farmers, and

most of the non-elites who were not farmers were craftsmen – would solidify into the free

labor ideology and identity that would dominate the North with industrialization.

Key to understanding the free labor ideology was the belief that labor itself was

dignified. As Benjamin Franklin, wrote in 1758, “There are no Gains, without Pains.”34

Labor was painful and hard, but for Franklin and the free laborites, it was dignified

because it would make people not only achieve financial stability, but also achieve

personal growth.

Finally, free labor drew on the Protestant Work Ethic belief that anyone can

improve their station if they worked hard enough.35 Free laborites agreed with Franklin

when he wrote, “God gives all Things to Industry.”36 In essence, God only gives things to

people who work for them. In essence, God helps those who help themselves. This meant

that anyone who achieved wealth had earned their wealth by working harder than other

32 Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard Improved, 1758.

33 Franklin. Poor Richard Improved, 1758.


35 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, 11-15.


19

people, and that people who were poor could improve their station if the worked hard

enough. However, if a person remained poor, it was because, as Franklin also wrote,

“Laziness travels so slowly, that Poverty soon overtakes him,”37 One’s wealth was

directly proportional to how hard one worked. If you worked harder than everyone else,

you had more money than everyone else. If you worked harder than everyone else, then

you were more moral then everyone else.

In order to understand free labor, one must assess what free labor meant to the

people who embraced it. Free labor meant many different things to many different

Northerners. To the poor man living in squalor, it meant that they had a way to improve

their lot. Free labor civilization was an idealized society in which everyone reaped the

full benefits of their labor. To the banker and the lawyer living in the Northern

metropolises, it meant that God rewarded many types of labor. To the wealthy merchant

and industrialist, it meant that God approved of the work they were doing and that God

wanted them to keep doing what they were doing. To the factory worker and the farmer,

it meant that someday the economy would be aligned to benefit them more for their long

hours. To the abolitionist and the antislavery activist, it meant that God truly despised

slavery because of how it treated the slave. To the women on the farms or in the factories

of the North, it meant that they were justified in working for money, even if the sexism of

their era prevented them from achieving real independence. To the women at home, it

meant that just because they could not make money, it did not prevent them from doing

work that the Lord would smile upon. To the black men and black women of the North, it

provided a justification for why they deserved to be treated as equals in society, or at the

very least why they should not be treated as slaves.


20

Free labor emerged during the industrial revolution as a response to the changes

that swept America during the early to mid-1800s (1820-1850s). The vast majority of

Americans were farmers, so how much they produced directly related to how well they

could live. Most Americans who weren’t farmers were craftsmen, laborers, lawyers,

bankers or some other profession; these people had to sell their services in order to get

paid, so the Protestant work ethic also applied to them. The only people who the

Protestant Work Ethic did not apply to were slaves (because they did not receive

payment) and the affluent (because it was considered unseemly to work if one was rich).

But free labor emerged as an ideology after its central beliefs came under fire; while most

Northerners were still farmers, many of those Americans who were once craftsmen

became wage laborers. Wage labor does not work the way that free labor believes that

labor should work, because a wage laborer does not reap the full benefits of their labor.

Yet, nostalgia among Northerners for the days of Franklin, with the emergence of the

1820 compromise and the Second Great Awakening, turned free labor into a force.38

Everyone had to work, rich and poor, and all should be rewarded for how hard they

worked.

While such beliefs led many to Northerners to be wary of charity or any sort of

governmental help for the poor– after all, they believed God rewards those who worked

hard, and punishes those who do not- it did not compel Northerners to merely accept the

results of the market as signs of divine providence. Some Northerners, such as former

38 Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 29. The exact time of the emergence of free labor as a

coherent worldview is disputed, with some placing its emergence in the 1850s, and others placing it earlier. Usually that difference stems from how the author views the future embrace of antislavery principles for free laborites in terms of its influence on free labor. Those who have free labor’s emergence in the 1820s generally believe that free labor was going to inevitably embrace antislavery at some point in the future, meaning that the only real innovation that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s was the birth of a Northern sectional conscience. Historians who place its emergence in the 1850s thus value the political transformations of the 1850s more than those historians who place the emergence of the free labor ideology in the 1820s. This paper follows the logic of the former interpretation because of the presence of a coherent and distinct worldview among Northern intellectuals and journalists.

21

Pennsylvania Whig Anthony Stewart, “went for levying the highest rates of duty on the

luxuries of the rich and, not of the necessaries of the poor.”39 Such an economic policy

regarding the tariff would, “encourage American manufacturers, and while on the one

hand the poor man finds plenty of employment, and on the other he got his cheap

goods.”40 While Stewart did not suggest a social welfare system, he believed that the

economic policy should be adjusted so that people had an easier time reaping the benefits

of their labor.

Other free laborites, such as Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens, looked towards

education to ensure that everyone had an opportunity to better their lives and reap the

benefits of their labor. Thaddeus Stevens emphasized the moral imperative of this

position when he asked, “How are we to secure for our country [its place in history]?”41

“Not by riches, which some gentlemen so highly value,” Stevens reasoned, but through

education. In order to achieve sufficient education to ensure America’s impact on the

world, the government must, “Extend public aid to,” public schools and universities, to,

“reduce the rate of tuition; In short, render learning cheap and honorable, and he who has

genius, no matter how poor he may be, will find the means of improving it.”42 Stevens

understood that in order for people to best reap the benefits of their labor, they would

have to be educated in which labor best fit the skills they had. While God rewards those

who work hard, those who are able can do their part to ensure that people would have the

best shot at working hard at the things they are best at.

39 Anthony Stewart, “Extracts from the Speech of Hon A. Stewart,” The Somerset Herald. And Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Register

(Somerset, PA), Tuesday, August 18, 1846.40

Stewart, “Extracts from the Speech of Hon A. Stewart,” August 18, 1846.41

Thaddeus Stevens, Speech of Thaddeus Stevens, ESQ, In favor of the bill to establish a school of arts in the city of Philadelphia, and to endow the colleges and academies of Pennsylvania, March 10, 1838, PHAR 093 H. F36 1838, From the State Library of Pennsylvania.42

Stevens, Speech of Thaddeus Stevens, ESQ, In favor of the bill to establish a school of arts in the city of Philadelphia, and to endow the colleges and academies of Pennsylvania, March 10, 1838, PHAR 093 H. F36 1838.

22

Yet free laborites’ social conscience expanded beyond providing tariffs and

education. To free laborites, “Labor is the only real capitol- productive and creative skill

the only real wealth.”43 Labor, and only labor, mattered in terms of determining one’s

station in society. The “dignity of labor,” that value free laborites so praised, “as it is, is

far different from the dignity of labor as it should be,” for, “there is much evil in the

world.”44 This amorphous “evil” prevented men from obtaining the true fruits of their

labor –thus reducing the dignity of men’s labor – and it was caused by people turning

away from God in their society. One way in which people turned away from God,

according to an article in The Grand River Times,

The Almighty created the earth and gave it to man as a dwelling place where he might be happy if he would labor – not to another’s disadvantage by accruing more wealth than is necessary for him, – not for the praise of his fellow men, – not for flimsy pleasures, – not to further some particular creed by denouncing every other, and in short to labor as mankind now labor.45

According to this analysis, people turned away from God by taking more than their fair

share and for profiting off of the sins of others.46 People should reap the benefits that they

need, but the society of the time prevented that from happening. According to the article,

people labored to accrue more stuff, not to be more moral. This sort of labor favored

those who profited on sin and suffering and was immoral as a result. The “white-handed,

finely dressed men” who manipulated the laborer into thinking that this state of fairs was

just would only be thwarted once laborers gained an awareness of their own interests and

demand more for their labor.47 Only when everyone embraced the principles that, “labor

value is the only true capital, and that any medium of exchange is valuable only so far as

43 Carlos Stuart, “Labor; its Wants, Interests, and Duties,” printed in Spirit of the Times (Ironton, OH), March 27, 1857.

44 T.O. Perkins, “Labor,” The Grand River Times (Grand Haven, MI), May 26, 1852.

45 Perkins, “Labor,” May 26, 1852.

46 Perkins, “Labor,” May 26, 1852.

47 Stuart, “Labor; its Wants, Interests, and Duties,” March 27, 1857.

23

it truly represents the amount of labor bestowed upon the articles of commerce,” and

practiced those principles would “prevent in great measure the recurrence of crises like

that which is now convulsing the country.”48 In essence, once free labor civilization was

achieved, all of the problems that afflicted the country would disappear.

In order to truly understand free labor ideology, one needs to look at the historical

circumstances that shaped it. Around the time of the second great awakening –- that time

when free labor emerged as a distinct ideology and identity—also was the genesis of the

two party system that would nurse free labor into a powerful political force.49 Starting

with the 1836 election, there were two parties that would dominate American politics, the

Democratic Party and the Whig Party. These were national parties that dealt with national

issues, and they each contained Northerners and Southerners in their ranks. Democrats

were generally for a lower tariff and against internal improvements. Whigs were

generally for a higher tariff and for internal improvements. Yet both parties heavily

featured Southerners. Eight of the first twelve Presidents, and so was a majority of the

Justices on the Supreme Court by the year 1850. Northerners were annoyed but not

resentful of Southern power in the government until the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which

formalized the death of the Missouri Compromise. Many Northerners saw it as a naked

power grab from the South, and the vehemence was so great between Northerners and

48 P.B. Plumb and R.J. Hinton, “Labor – Capital – Exchange,” The Kanzas News (Emporia, KS), November 28, 1857.

However, it should be noted that even though free laborites believed in all of these things, that did not mean that they all believed that the government should have a role in resolving these evils. In fact, none of the articles cited in the above paragraph suggest that the government should have any role in addressing these evils, with the Stuart article going so far as to claim that the “evil and remedy,” for the problems that America faced, “lie deeper than legislative skill, in the very heart of labor itself – in its disposition, direction and distribution.” Stuart, “Labor; its Wants, Interests, and Duties,” March 27, 185749

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 251-253, 285-287.

24

Southerners that it killed the Whig Party and drained the Democratic Party of much of its

Northern talent.50

The 1856 elections featured the two most prominent parties to emerge from this

chaos, the Republicans and the American “Know-Nothings.” These parties, bolstered by

the former-Democrats who left during the Kansas- Nebraska Act debates, were both

major electoral forces in that election. Unfortunately for the free labor North, the

Republican John C. Fremont and the Know-Nothing Millard Fillmore split the Northern

vote in the presidential election of that year and delivered the prize to Democrat James

Buchanan. The election showed free laborites that if they banded together, they could

combat the influence of the South. In the Republican Party platform, the drafters wrote;

“it is both the right and imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories the twin

relics of barbarism – Polygamy and Slavery.”51 The Republican Party platform also

declared that Federal expenditures for internal improvements, “are authorized by the

Congress, and justified by the obligation of the Government to protect the lives and

property of its citizens.”52 The Know-Nothing platform, while not nearly as eloquent as

the Republican Party platform, also displayed free labor sentiments in its declaration

against the South-favoring Pierce administration and its, “re-opening of sectional

agitation; by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.”53 Despite the vitriol that these two

parties exchanged during the election, many members of the Know-Nothings became

Republicans when the former party went under, because the two parties shared many

50 Richard Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1976), 263.51

“Republican Party Platform of 1856,” Philadelphia, PA, June 18, 1856.52

“Republican Party Platform of 1856,” June 18, 1856.53

“American Party Platform of 1856,” Philadelphia, PA, February 25, 1856.

25

common beliefs that united most of the free laborites of the North, including a newfound

support for antislavery.54

This antislavery impulse did not stem from a belief in racial equality. There were

plenty of free laborites who believed that non-Anglo-Saxons were unintelligent, lazy, or

barbaric.55 The popularity of antislavery among free laborites during the mid to late 1850s

was a result of Northern fears of the South. Free laborites believed that slavery was the,

“great and radical cause or circumstance” that operated, “in all slave states,” that

retarded, “their increase in population and wealth.”56 This lack of access to wealth

prevented people, in the minds of free laborites, from earning all the wealth they should

have been getting. Horace Greeley’s New York Daily-Tribune echoed the sentiments of

many northerners when it published that there was,

Little doubt that Slavery retards the natural increase in population, lowers the average standing or common aggregate of common education, depreciates the value of land or prevents it in increasing in value in the same proportion as land that is wrought by free labor, and operates generally to reduce and waste the property and general resources of the community.57

Because wealth was seen as a measure of the morality of a society, Northerners

determined that slavery reduced the morality of the states in which it operated because it

reduced the amount of wealth available to the people in those states. For the majority of

free laborites, antislavery was not a justification for bettering the lot of slaves.

Antislavery was a means for ensuring that white men received all the wealth they could

get.

54 Not to be confused with abolition. Antislavery was the belief that slavery was morally wrong and would eventually die under the

weight of progress. Abolition, on the other handed, stipulated that only the active efforts of people could eradicate slavery. It is also important to note that antislavery politicians most often referred to themselves and their ideology as free soil so that they could campaign on other issues besides from Antislavery. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860, 292.55

I. Donnelly, “Reform of the Indian System: Speech of Hon. I. Donnelly,” The St Cloud Democrat (St. Cloud, MN), March 9, 1865.56

Horace Greeley, “Free Labor versus Slave Labor,” New York Daily Tribune, (New York, NY), February 26, 1856.57

Greeley, “Free Labor versus Slave Labor,” February 26, 1856.

26

Antislavery fit in well with free labor thought. Many Northerners thought that,

“What is just to one class of men can never be injurious to another class of men, and what

is unjust to any condition of person in a State, is naturally injurious in some degree to the

whole community.”58 Northerners believed that the Congress at the birth of the Republic

had, “intervened in favor of free labor,” when they wrote the Northwest Ordinance, the

suppressed the African slave trade, “stimulated voluntary immigration from Europe,” and

included a process of naturalization.59 In the late 1850s, Northerners connected these

strains of thought and concluded that the Founders intended for slavery to die eventually,

“Slavery tyrannically assumes a power which Heaven denied,” and because civilization

exists as the expression of God’s will, slavery is “barbarism.”60 Slavery was barbaric

because it prevented slaves from reaping the benefit of their own labor; in a free labor

society, the society that God demanded, everyone had to reap what they sowed. While

very few free laborites embraced abolitionism – some even likened it to treason – many

embraced its claims of the destructive and reactionary nature of slavery.61 Slavery had

become, in the minds of a great many Northerners, the “evil” which prevented the ideal

free labor society from taking shape. As future Supreme Court Justice Salmon P. Chase

declared to the people of Ohio that there was a, “contest between Freedom and Slavery,”

and that freedom had to win.62

58 William Seward, “Great Speech of Senator Seward. Delivered in the United States Senate: Wednesday, February 29th, 1860,” The

Cass County Republican (Dowagiac, MI), March 15, 1860.59

William Seward, “Speech of Wm. H. Seward, of New York, on the Lecompton Constitution,” The Kanzas News (Emporia, Kansas), March 27, 1858.60

Charles Sumner, “The Barbarism of Slavery,” June 4, 1860, published in pamphlet form, Washington, D.C: Thaddeus Hyatt, 1860.61

Joseph Bingham, “Articles on the Origin and History of the Differences between the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States which have resulted in a Civil War,” Indiana State Sentinel (Indianapolis, IN), July 17, 1861.62

Salmon Chase, “Speech to the people of Ohio,” 1854, Salmon P. Chase Papers (Collection 0121), The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

27

Slavery in the Abstract

Free labor was not the only ideology that existed in the United States that would

have a major impact on Reconstruction. Slavery in the abstract, a distinct ideology in its

own right, found a home in the slave-holding South. Like any other ideology, it is hard to

determine precisely when it emerged, but one can determine the general contours of its

logic. Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, from whom the term is borrowed,

defined slavery in the abstract as “the doctrine that declared slavery or a kindred system

of personal servitude the best possible condition for all labor regardless of race.”63 This

definition is useful in two different ways. First, it acknowledges the essential class

distinctions that defined the South and were the basis of Southern society before race-

slavery was implemented. Second, it acknowledges why non-slaveholding Southerners

would support an ideology and a slave system that kept them in a society that prevented

social mobility – non-slaveholding whites were provided an assurance that they were free

despite that not actually being the case, and they were provided with the understanding

that if they should ever improve their position, their new station would be protected.

The logic of this ideology was best expressed by David Hackett Fischer, when he

wrote that the, “ideas of hegemonic liberty conceived of freedom mainly as the power to

rule, and not to be overruled by others.”64 Fischer noted that when this logic took root in

the new world, it was during an era in which profound class differences were the norm.

During the time that Fischer wrote, this ideology was most common among the elite of a

society, because they were well-versed in the writings of John Locke.

63 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. Slavery in White and Black, Class and Race in the Southern Slaveholders’ New

World Order. (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 1. 64

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America, (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 411.

28

Locke, who helped inspire free labor, was also an inspiration for the slavery in the

abstract ideology. According to Locke, “men, when they enter into society, give up the

equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature,” in order so that

society can, “secure everyone’s property.”65 Locke only argued that everyone had an

equal right to property, – unless the common good demanded that the property be taken –

he did not argue that everyone should have equal amounts of liberty.66 In Locke’s

formulation, property and liberty are intrinsically linked, and because that relationship

exists, the state’s primary responsibility was to ensure that people’s property would be

maintained, because “the great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into

commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their

property,” because it is property that ensures liberty.67 Preservation is key word in that

quote, because it meant that the existing social order of Locke’s time, the one that

featured vast discrepancies in property ownership, was morally sound. If the preservation

of property is the raison d’être for society’s existence, then that means that the practical

purpose of society was to maintain the class structure that already existed.

But Locke went even further than that, for not only did he write that society

should society defend the elite’s vast property ownership because the purpose of society

is to protect the property of its members, he also wrote that the elites had a right to the

entirety of their land. “Right and conveniency,” according to Locke, “went together; for

as a man had the right to all he could employ his labor upon, so he had no temptation to

labour for more than he could make use of.”68 According to Locke, so long as someone

65 Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Sect. 131.


67 Locke, The Second Treatise of Government,, Sect. 124.


29

could have usage of a property, that person was entitled to that property. If the vast

majority of people did not have a lot of property, then that meant that the vast majority of

people were not clever enough, or willing enough, to acquire and use more property

properly. According to Locke, “this left no room for controversy about the title, nor for

encroachment on the right of others,” because it meant that those who had the property

deserved the property, and those who did not deserve the property did not have it.69

Locke also provided the intellectual justification for slavery that antebellum elites

would base the slave society itself on. According to Locke, “slaves, who being captives

in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary

power of their masters.”70 Because those who became slaves, “forfeited their lives, and

with it all their liberties, and lost all their estates,” they were, “not capable of any

property” and they could not, “be considered as any part of civil society.”71 In essence,

the condition of slavery can only be brought about by violence, and that once someone is

in the condition of slavery, they are considered dead to the civil society that their master

belongs to.

This understanding of slavery, which was used by the Southern elites to justify

slavery, when taken in conjunction with the other Lockean principles described before, is

essential to understanding the character of Southern society. First, because a slave could

only be a produced by a just war, it meant that Southern society itself existed in a

perpetual state of just war, because if Southern society did not exist in a perpetual state of

just war, then slaveholders would not have a right to acquire new slaves. Second, because

a slave could not be considered a part of civil society, and because that civil society is in




30

a perpetual state of just war, that meant that a slave’s children were also slaves, because

those children would naturally be inclined to join the side opposing the civil society that

enslaved their parents, and one can only acquire slaves in a situation of just war. Finally,

because of the hegemonic liberty that Fischer described, and the elites of the South

ascribed to, could only exist in a situation in which there was continual oppression

(freedom from oppression required the freedom to oppress), that meant that slaves, as the

group of people who could forever be oppressed, had to exist in order to maintain the

liberty of owners of the poor whites who could also oppress those slaves.72

These Lockean ideas became the undergirding logic of slavery in the abstract.

Aristocrats became morally superior to non-aristocrat Southerners, because the aristocrats

of Locke’s day passed their lands onto the aristocrats of the antebellum period, and the

ownership of land was directly tied into the intelligence, morality, and willfulness of the

owner. Those who were not aristocrats had the potential to be aristocrats if they were ever

able to acquire land, and thus they were invested in the potential that they too might

eventually be able to oppress the masses. Slavery became race-based, which meant that

even if the vast majority of poor whites would never improve their station, they would

know that they were free because there were always slaves that could be oppressed. It is

at that moment in which proslavery emerged out of slavery in the abstract, but it is nearly

impossible to separate the two from each other once proslavery appeared. The majority of

Southerners considered themselves proslavery, but that also meant that they held onto the

72 This issue of paranoia and American identity/politics is not new to the field, and many historians have contributed valuable insights

to paranoia’s influence on the United States. Richard Hofstadter’s essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” is one of the best examinations of the presence of paranoia in American politics for he argues that paranoia was endemic to American politics since at least the Revolutionary era. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” found in Harper’s Magazine, November, 1964.

31

assumptions of slavery in the abstract because proslavery borrowed heavily from slavery

in the abstract.

Proslavery believers, though they shared some of the Lockean principles that

inspired free labor, took Lockean understandings of labor to different conclusions. The

Edgefield Advertiser showed that people who held the proslavery ideology were like the

free laborites, when it asserted, “Labor is the source of all wealth. It is the mother of all

capitol.”73 However, proslavery did not use that belief to promote an equitable system.

Instead, people who held the proslavery perspective took that notion and said that, “men

desire to have not only all the necessaries,” and luxuries of life, therefore a system is just

if it allows men to, “strive to command the labor of others that they themselves might

exist in comfort, as well as be able to enjoy all the luxuries of this world, without any toil

of their own.”74 This analysis of how a civilization should run is a natural outgrowth of

the idea of freedom from oppression, freedom to oppress – after all, all people strive for

comfort, meaning comfort is a freedom that few can achieve, thus one needs to use other

people’s labor to obtain that comfort. However, one could acquire other people’s labor,

“by superior intellect, by cunning, or by force.”75 In essence, it is morally right to try to

be comfortable, and it is morally justified to forcefully acquire and abuse others in order

to achieve that comfort, because that comfort is evidence of the goodness of the life that a

person leads. The means used to achieve that comfort are not important in determining

the morality of the person trying to achieve that comfort, because having that level of

comfort evidenced the virtue of that individual.

73 William Durisoe, “Revival of the Slave Trade-No. VII,” The Edgefield Advertiser, (Edgefield. SC), March 16, 1859.

74 Durisoe, “Revival of the Slave Trade-No. VII,” March 16, 1859.

75 Durisoe, “Revival of the Slave Trade-No. VII,” March 16, 1859.

32

Belief in these ideas necessitated expansion, because these ideas implied that

there was a scarcity of resources. In order to ensure that poor whites would continue to

support the existing social order in the South, proslavery elites needed to at least seem

like they provided opportunities for poor whites to improve their lot. As articulated by

proslavery President James Polk during the Mexican-American War,

The progress of our country in her career of greatness, not only in the vast expansion of our territorial limits, and the rapid increase in our population, but in resources and wealth, and in the happy condition of our people,”was evidence of the rightness of the United States in its mission against Mexico.76 Polk’s

statement reveals the expansionist tendencies inherent in proslavery ideology because it

directly links different types of increases with improving the “happiness” of Americans.

To proslavery activists like Polk, the United States needed more territory, people, and

money because the nature of their ideology made them understand that there was an

inherent scarcity of resources. It is this understanding of scarcity that would lead

proslavery men and women, such as William Walker, to try and expand the territory of

the United States.77 They believed that if the United States stopped expanding, then the

people would become unhappy with the lack of opportunities available. What the people

did after they stopped having new opportunities provided the urgency of elites to push for

more land and resources.

The proslavery ideology also had religious undertones. Wake Forest’s

Commencement speaker in 1846 spoke of the three types of education essential to all

people: “professional education,” “moral and political education,” and “religious

education.”78 These three types of education dealt with the skills of a chosen profession,

76 James Polk, “President’s Message to Congress,” The Portage Sentinel (Ravenna, OH), December 16, 1846.

77 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2013), 381.78

W.W. Holden, “Mr. Venable’s Address, Delivered before the Education Society at Wake Forest College, at the Commencement in June, 1846,” The North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, NC), September 9, 1846.

33

the duties of being a citizen, and knowledge of the “divine truth” of its teachings.

However, all of these types of education must be taught through the lens of “learning

sanctified by religion,” because, “of all calamities which have fallen upon men or nations

none have been so bitter or destructive as unsanctified learning.”79 In essence, to obtain

knowledge that is not in line with God’s teachings is dangerous because it can push

individuals and societies away from God. If, however, people learn the proper kind of

knowledge, then that means individuals and societies can be brought closer to God’s

design.

Religion in the South, like religion in the North, had an economic and political

component to it. “Learning sanctified by religion” in the Southern context was distinctly

proslavery.80 According to a popular Southern intellectual named Josiah Priest, the

righteousness of slavery can be traced back to the moment when Noah cursed Ham and

his race (which, according to Priest, was black) because, “The appointment of this race of

men, to servitude and slavery was a judicial act of God, or in other words, divine

judgment.” Because race-slavery was ordered by God,81 that meant that Southerner’s as,

“Christian men,” could not, “give up the institution – we dare not resign the trust of

governing that race, who have been assigned to us to preserve from barbarity and

paganism,” and that the continued presence of slavery in Southern society, “will forever

make the South a nation of heroes, and, if need be, of martyrs. Heroic martyrdom had

never been subdued.”82 In the eyes of these intellectuals and other preachers, slavery was

79 Holden, “Mr. Venable’s Address, Delivered before the Education Society at Wake Forest College, at the Commencement in June,

1846,” September 9, 1846.80

Holden, “Mr. Venable’s Address, Delivered before the Education Society at Wake Forest College, at the Commencement in June, 1846,”September 9, 1846.81

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, Slavery in White and Black, 33. Various schools of thought on how this happened permeated Southern theological discourse. Some preachers agreed with Priest that slavery had its root in Noah’s curse on Ham, and others traced it to the Mark of Cain. However, what most Southern theologians could agree on was that race-slavery was justified, and a few Southern theologians also believed that all races could be rightfully enslaved. 82

Peter Torre, “Is Southern Society Worth Preserving?” The Southern Quarterly Review, n.s. 3 (1851), 217.

34

a duty that the South had to maintain. While the rest of the world moved towards

abolition, the South would remember God’s decry and defend slavery.

South Carolina Senator and proslavery spokesman John C. Calhoun, in his

famous speech concerning slavery, best expressed this idea of the divine righteousness of

slavery. Calhoun, holder of the proslavery ideology, believed the South and its peculiar

institution, “where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other

physical difference, as well as intellectual, are brought together,” is, “instead of an evil, a

good – a positive good.”83 Calhoun, one of the intellectual champions of proslavery,

perfectly articulated how most Southerners viewed the society in which they lived.

However, this statement also revealed the slavery in the abstract logic and religious

sentiments that buttressed the proslavery ideal. Calhoun noted in that same speech that,

“there never has existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the

community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other,” but he also declared

that the other in Southern society, also known as slaves, were better treated than the poor

whites of Europe.84 Calhoun’s slavery in the abstract logic is evidences by his belief the

natural and just relationship between human beings is oppression, Calhoun’s religious

point, when he made the comparison between the South and Europe, was that the slave

aristocrats practiced charity in regards to their slaves, and charity is a biblical virtue.

European society, and free labor society by extension, was uncharitable towards the least

of its number, and therefore was sinful. Calhoun went even further than that when he

declared, “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to

83 John C. Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R.

Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States (New D. Appleton, 1853), 625-33.84

Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.

35

the present day, attained a condition so civilized and improved, not only physically, but

morally and intellectually.”85 Slavery made the slave more moral. His speech revealed

apocalyptic undertones when he discussed a South in which the peculiar institution was

removed, for after it was removed “the next step would be to raise the negroes to a social

and political equality with the whites; and that being effected, we would soon find the

present condition of the two races reversed.”86 The implication of his speech is that a

Union in which slavery is eliminated is an immoral Union, because slavery made the

master and the slave both more moral. If that were upset with emancipation, then that

would mean that the society would be pushed away from God and disaster would ensue.

It is this two-pronged idea of Southern civilization – that their civilization is the

righteous civilization and that because other civilizations are not like the South they are

ungodly – leads to the final element key to understanding the slavery in the abstract

mindset, paranoia. Proslavery elites pressured Congress to pass gag rules between 1836-

1844 that stated variations of, “that all petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions or

papers related in any way,” on the subject of slavery would not be, “debated, presented,

heard, or referenced,” inside the U.S. Congress.87 John Calhoun justified this action when

he said, “if we do not defend ourselves then no one else will; if we yield we will be more

and more pressed as we recede,” because, “a large portion of the Northern States consider

slavery to be a sin, and would consider it as an obligation of conscience to abolish it if

they should feel themselves in any degree responsible for its continuance.”88 In Calhoun’s

85 Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle,

ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.86

Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.87

“Gag Rule” Resolution, December 21, 1837.88

Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.

36

and other Southerner’s reckonings, the South was isolated and besieged by Northerners

who sought to destroy their way of life.

But proslavery meant different things to its adherents. To the plantation lord of

the South, it meant that they were the divinely ordained rulers and defenders of true

republicanism. To the poor white men who would form the bulk of the Confederate army

and to the poor white women who would pressure their husbands to fight for the

Confederacy, the ideology provided an irresistible justification for slavery. For the

upcountry folks who would oppose the Confederacy, it served as evidence that they were

considered little better than slaves to the plantation elite. To plantation mistresses, it

meant that they were moral actors in a world that seemed to undervalue them. To the

slave, it was a justification for a reality that few believed would ever fade.

Proslavery alongside free labor, though, only emerged as coherent ideologies

during the Second Great Awakening.89 The stresses of the boom and bust economy, when

mixed with the realization of the differences between North and South by people who

held the proslavery ideology, solidified a unified Southern political raison d’être. The

mission of the people who held the proslavery ideal understood that their primary

political objective, regardless of any other opinions, had to be the defense of the Southern

way of life and its own idea of liberty.

Many historians of the era would question the idea of a unified South before the

Civil War. After all, there were significant differences between upland Southerners and

tidewater Southerners, and there were severe class differences that divided the rich and

poor whites against each other. Even the two party system after the Second Great

Awakening – that moment when proslavery emerged from slavery in the abstract

89 Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848., 477-478.

37

ideology – featured Southerners splitting their votes between the Democrats and the

Whigs. However, looking at the voting patterns of Southerners obscures the deeper trends

that showed Southern unity on the most important issues. They consistently pressured the

country to pursue war and expand its territory, and they situated themselves in a central

position so that they proved essential. They were dominant on the national level. The

South produced half of the Presidents of the United States and majorities of the Justices

of the Supreme Court during the antebellum period.

The fact that abolition was akin to treason in the minds of many Americans, North

and South, is further evidence of the effectiveness of the South’s control of the political

process (which is a necessity under proslavery ideology). Politically minded people were

aware of the dangers that a successful abolition push would pose to the Union, after all,

Calhoun declared that secession was a possible reaction to threats to the slave order as

early as 1837.90 Yet from the late 1830s until the Civil War, there was one other group of

people who also thought that disunion was a potential solution to the slave question, and

those people were abolitionists. It should be noted that not all abolitionists were in favor

of disunion, but the official position of the William Lloyd Garrison’s led American Anti-

Slavery Society towards the Republic was, “to dissolve the union between Northern and

Southern states.”91 Garrison’s Liberator would frequently publish editorials talking about

the evils of continued Union, so in the minds of many Northerners, abolition was

associated with destroying the Union they cared about.

Yet, as the years went on, the South felt more and more isolated. The North’s

population dwarfed the population of the South by 1850, and it was increasingly evident

90Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle,

ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.91

Ronald Waters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolition after 1830, (New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 6.

38

that the South would become the minority partner in the American Republic should

things remain as they were. This context is important to understanding why Southerners

still felt anxious about their condition in the Republic, even when the 1850 acts and the

Kansas-Nebraska act tipped the scales in the favor of the South. Yet, despite all this, the

defining moment of appeasement to the South occurred when Dredd Scott was decided.

Dred Scott concerned whether a slave could be considered free if the slave spent

any time in a free state. The Supreme Court decision, written by proslavery Marylander

Roger Taney, famously declared that black people, “are not included, and were not

intended to be, included under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore

claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures for

citizens of the United States.”92 This line legally made race-based citizenship

constitutional, but the effect of that is momentous to those who hold the proslavery

ideology. If one holds the perspective of liberty that requires that there always has to be

an oppressor and oppressed, then abolition, followed by citizenship, is a dire threat to that

ideology. However, if it is declared that an, “inferior class of beings, who had been

subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not,” only had, “rights and

privileges,” that, “those who held the power and the government might choose to grant

them.”93 This meant that there would forever be an underclass, which meant that there

would always be a class of people for the lowest rung of proslavery society to oppress.

The decision also reflected the imperialist nature of proslavery ideology. Chief

Justice Taney declared that, “Congress cannot do indirectly what the Constitution

92 Dred Scott v Sandford, 60 US 393, (1857).

93 Dred Scott v Sandford, (1857).

39

prohibits directly,” in banning slavery in the territories because, “owners of slave

property,” would be,

Effectually excluded from removing into the Territory of Louisiana north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes, as if the law declared that owners of slaves, as a class, should be excluded, even if their slaves are left behind.94 In essence, if the Union blocked slavery from the territories, then the Union blocked

certain citizens from entering the territories. This prohibition on property was

unconstitutional because it impacts the rights of citizens to move between the states. The

right of someone to move about the country implied that if someone is free to move about

the country, then someone’s property is also free to move about the country. While the

Supreme Court declared this ruling only applied to the territories, one could logically take

this argument and apply it to the states. This post-Dred Scott reality potentially allowed,

as articulated by the supportive editorial found in The Edgefield Advertiser, “negroes

bought and sold in Boston Commons like in days gone by.”95 This was a fantasy for those

who held the proslavery mindset because it would eliminate the only real threat to slavery

in the abstract; free labor. If one could not prevent slavery from entering the states, then

that means that slavery would spread throughout the union and the idea of free labor

would have to adapt to that reality or die. With Dred Scott, the South was in position to

dominate the Republic forever.

The South did not celebrate its victory for very long, for in 1859, John Brown

raided Harper’s Ferry. In the process of his attack, he played on all of the deepest held

fears of proslavery Americans. First, here was a free laborite abolitionist who wanted to

destroy the South and its institutions. When Scottish poet Charles Mackay wrote “A Plain

94 Dred Scott v Sandford, (1857).

95 William Durisoe, “Non-interference the First Remedy,” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), December 14, 1859.

40

Man’s Philosophy” and set it in the first person perspective, he almost perfectly captured

the views of the late John Brown, “I hate selfish knave, and a proud contented slave, and

a lout who’d rather borrow than toil.”96 Mackay outlined the very basics of the free labor

ideology, and John Brown certainly believed them. As he said during his closing

statement at his treason trial, “I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have

always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but

right.”97 It was very easy for Southerners to see how other Northerners could take the

logical conclusions of their ideology and use it to justify abolition, and abolition was

treason in the eyes of Southerners.

His raid on Harper’s Ferry was an attempt to get the slaves of the South to liberate

themselves from their chains. Southern whites were united in keeping slaves in their

place, and this unity provided the cohesion that allowed Southern Society to survive.98

Southerners were apoplectic and terrified at the idea of, “MUTINY and MURDER by

NEGRO SLAVES against and upon their owners,” because non-slaveholding

Southerners dreamed of owning slaves and any slave revolt would put theoretically put

all Southern whites in danger.99 Despite John Brown’s insistence that he had no intention

of exciting, “slaves to revolt, or make any general insurrection,” it was clear that his

actions could have had this effect.100 What were proslavery activists to think, when John

Brown seized an armory with the intention to give slaves the weapons in order for the

slaves to, “defend their freedom but not be incited to insurrection?”101 Not only could

96 Charles Mackay, “A Plain Man’s Philosophy,” 1859.

97 John Brown, “Statement to the Court,” November, 2, 1859. New York Herald (New York, New York), November 3rd, 1859.

98 W.W. Holden, “Ad Volerum Taxation, Speech of Mr. Bledsoe,” The North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, NC), March 16, 1859.

99 Alfred Price and David Fulton, “More and Convincing Proof of Millard Fillmore’s Abolitionism,” Wilmington Journal

(Wilmington, NC), October 30, 1848.100

Brown, “Statement to the Court,” November 3rd, 1859.101

David M. Potter, “The Impending Crisis,” (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishing, 1976), 366.

41

Northerners fall into the extreme of abolition, but also if they did they would be willing

to use the peculiar institution that buttressed Southern Society to tear it down.

The worst aspect for Southerners, perhaps, was that the North showered love upon

John Brown after his execution. As one Southern newspaper put it, “The North has

openly avowed its sympathy with old John Brown – has made a demi-god of the vulgar

vagabond,” and, “has canonized him, in its presses and its pulpits, as a martyr and a saint,

and declared that his conduct was worthy of Christian benison, instead of shameful

death.”102 This was a disturbing moment for Southerners because it showed that

Northerners were willing to sympathize with the violent actors that the South had long

believed would be condemned.103 While it was evident to some proslavery elite that

slavery, legally, would spread from sea to shining sea, it also became evident that the

North was not going to accept this fact quietly. The North had the resources, the

manpower, and the will to potentially reverse the trend of legal slavery expansion. The

proslavery ideal was in jeopardy, and it was the safety of that ideology in the United

States that kept the South in the Union. This compelled the Southerners to leave the

Union following the election of the free laborite Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

The South’s attempt to defend proslavery would send 600,000 Americans to their deaths.

102 Durisoe, “Non-interference the First Remedy,” December 14, 1859.

103 William Durisoe, “The North and old John Brown,” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), December 14, 1859.

42

Chapter 2: To Build a Nation

The war to save the Union did far more than save the Union. In many ways, the

Civil War and Reconstruction redefined the American nation. After the Civil War, there

were very few people who believed that the Union should return to the way it operated in

the antebellum period, because the way it operated helped bring about that cataclysmic

war for Union. The war deeply impacted the two antebellum ideologies of free labor and

proslavery, and the adherents of both ideologies struggled with the implications of their

beliefs. The struggle between these two ideologies can best be examined through the lens

of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and it is that struggle that determined the outcome of

Reconstruction.

From Antebellum to Post-War

The war was over, and the Union was saved. Thousands had died, but the slaves

were now freed. Americans grasped to understand the trauma that the Republic went

through, and in their effort to do so, they had to explore their own thoughts and feelings.

This exploration led to shifts in the two major antebellum ideologies, free labor and

proslavery. The people who held these worldviews determined the course of

Reconstruction, and the choices they made that led to Reconstruction’s conclusion were

shaped by the changes that occurred in their own ideologies.

For free labor, the largest shift the ideology was the belief that land ownership

was important to maintain the peace. While it is true that free labor did not develop a

social welfare conscience akin to the one that would inspire the Great Society in the

1960s, some free laborites developed a belief that the freedmen should be provided with

43

land to ease their transition into being nonslaves.104 The free laborites who held this belief

also believed that if the land of former plantation owners was distributed to the freedmen,

then the former plantation owners would be unable to reestablish their system of

oppression in the South. While the discussion of land reform was effectively ended in the

summer of 1865, the intellectual processes that led free labor to adopt that view would

still impact how free laborites approached Reconstruction.

Following the Civil War, the proslavery perspective that guided the Union into

the war adapted to the fact that there were no longer any slaves. There were no serious

attempts by Southerners to reinstitute slavery as it existed in the antebellum period, but

that truth obscures the fact that the logic of slavery in the abstract was still prevalent

among Southerners. Even though slavery would never return, Southerners scrambled to

maintain as much of the old order as they could. This is the context one needs to

understand in order to see why Southerners organized and implemented the Black Codes

and supported the Ku Klux Klan so soon after the Civil War concluded. Even though a

return to slavery in the antebellum context was impossible, that did not mean that a return

to something resembling slavery in the abstract was equally important, and Southerners

knew it. This new ideology, which was created by merging the racism of proslavery with

the intellectual justifications of slavery in the abstract, will be referred to through the rest

of this paper as proslavery in the abstract.

104 Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 169-235-236. Foner is correct when he asserts that, “only a

handful stressed the land question as persistently and forcefully as Stevens” and the other radicals who pushed for land distribution (236). However, Foner also asserts that, “the idea of remaking Southern society” through, “a plan of national action to overturn the plantation system and provide the former slaves with homesteads,” and that may not have actually been the case. (235) Within section four of An act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees states that the Commissioner, with the President’s approval, “shall have authority to set apart, for the use of loyal refugees and freedmen, such tracts of land within the insurrectionary states as shall have been abandoned or to which the United States shall have acquired title by sale or confiscation,” and that the loyal refugees and freedmen would be able to purchase the land after renting it for three years. U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13 (Boston, Massachusetts, 1866), pp. 507-509. The House and Senate passed the bill, including this clause, and President Lincoln signed it into law on March 3rd, 1865. While there were fierce debates in Congress about the Bureau, the bill was eventually passed, which indicates that the desire to reform the South was not quite as extreme as Foner indicates. Moderates might not have liked it, but that did not mean that its inclusion was prohibitive for them to pass legislation.

44

But evolved forms of antebellum ideologies were not the only forces that shaped

how that Reconstruction would work. Key to the Reconstruction drama was the issue of

memory of the Civil War, and David Blight’s work on the subject is essential to

understanding memory’s effect on Reconstruction. According to Blight, the three visions

of memory that Americans had about the Civil War during Reconstruction were the

emancipationist vision, the white supremacist vision, and the reconciliationist vision.105

The emancipationist vision, as outlined by Blight, found its home among the

Freedmen and the Radical Republicans, who believed that the Civil War was, “the

reinvention of the republic, and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional

equality.”106 Blight traces the popularization of this strain of memory to President

Lincoln’s opening sentence of his Gettysburg address, “Four score and seven years ago,

our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and

dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”107 According to Blight,

Lincoln saw that the great challenge of rebirth from the fires of the war and its aftermath

would be, “the challenge of human equality in a nation, ready or not, governed by and for

all of its people.”108 This vision of what the war meant was only truly held by free

laborites, because at the core of free labor ideology is the belief that anyone could

improve their lot in a truly just society. To those free laborites who followed their own

ideology to its logical conclusion, legal equality was the only conclusion the war could

have because legal equality was the only way to ensure all Americans had an equal

chance of reaping the full benefits of their labor. However, just because this perspective

105 Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, 2.


107 Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, in Basler, ed, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 7, 23,

1953.108

Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, 12-13.

45

was logical did not mean that it was popular, and Blight shows how the emancipationist

vision of history was eventually repressed before the twentieth century.

The white supremacist vision, as outlined by Blight, was more prevalent in the

Union during the Reconstruction era than its emancipationist counterpart, and the white

supremacist vision, “took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms

with reconciliationists of many kinds,” and would eventually articulate, “A segregated

memory of its Civil War on Southern terms.”109 People who embraced the white

supremacist vision of history believed that empowering the Freedmen was a mistake,

because, in the words of Democratic Representative Andrew Rogers of New Jersey, the

federal government, “was made for white men and white women,” and that the attempts

to create, “social equality between the black race and the white race” would never receive

acceptance among Americans.110 This perspective helps explain the emergence of the Ku

Klux Klan and the eventual creation and embrace of the Dunning School of history,

because the white supremacist vision found in many places in the United States following

the Civil War existed because most Americans during Reconstruction were racist.111

While elements of the white supremacist vision was found amongst many free laborites,

the entirety of the white supremacist vision was almost universally embraced by

proslavery in the abstract Americans.

The final vision Blight outlines, known as reconciliation, was an amorphous blob,

“which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields,

prisons, and hospitals” that appeared during the Civil War.112 This vision of history was


110 Index to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 2538 (1866).



46

interested in reunion and “the tangled relationship between two profound ideas – healing

and justice,” and it merged with various emancipationist and white supremacist memories

of what the Civil War meant.113 Reconciliationist tendencies were nearly universal among

Americans, because everyone believed that a new nation should emerge from the ruins of

the Civil War – the disagreement among people who held reconciliationist tendencies

was the character of the nation that would be created.

These different visions were shaped by the realities of post-war circumstances.

The North had won the war, but now it need needed to show that it could win the peace.

“Neither race,” according to Columbia, South Carolina’s The Daily Phoenix, appreciated,

“their new relative positions,” in the post-slavery South.114 Freedmen were considered

uppity and inexperienced; the Southern whites they lived alongside were dumbstruck by

the idea of legal equality of the races, even if very few free laborites actually fought for

that goal. The blame for that shortcoming, in the minds of most white Americans, laid

with the freedmen. As one of the more liberal Northerners put it when he was addressing

a group of freedmen, “You have heard many stories about your condition as freemen.

You do not know what to believe; you are talking too much; waiting too much; asking for

too much.”115 Many Northerners believed that it was the responsibility of the Freedmen to

work out how they would now fit into society, because Northerners assumed that, given

enough time, Southerners would come along to the free labor ideology and everything

would work smoothly.


114 Julian Selby, “Developing our Resources,” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), October 5, 1865.

115 Capt. Charles C. Soule to Maj. Gen'l. O. O. Howard, 12 June 1865, enclosing an address “To the Freed People of Orangeburg

District dated June 1865,” Letters Received, series 15, Washington Headquarters, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives.

47

Northerners assumed that it would take time for the freedmen to get used to the

realities of freedom, but their true divide would emerge in how much time, and how

much effort Northerners should spend on helping the freedmen learn the intricacies of

freed life. As Captain Charles Soule of the Freedmen’s Bureau stated, “You must

remember that your children, your old people, and the cripples, belong to you to support

now, and all that is given to them is so much pay to you for your work,” was common,

and realistic advice given to the freedmen.116 Many Northerners were content with

leaving the situation at that; the Blacks were now free, and the work of the white man in

regards to the Freedman was done.

Other Northerners believed that they had a responsibility to help the Freedmen

integrate into the responsibilities of freedom. According to The Antislavery Standard,

Northerners did not believe, “in an English freedom, that trusts the welfare of the

dependent class to the good will and moral sense of the upper class,” and this is why

Northerners could not trust Southern aristocrats.117 Even if free laborites did not

understand the full extent of the South’s antebellum society, they did understand some of

the logic that undergirded it. To these Americans, just leaving the Freedmen to fend for

themselves would create a situation in which the Freedmen and Southern whites would

attempt to murder each other, as shown in this famous cartoon from Harper’s Weekly,

where an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau is standing between a mob of white

Southerners and a mob of freedmen.118 Northerners had to keep the peace in the South,

and the only way to ensure that peace was to reform the South.


District dated June 1865,” Record Group 105, National Archives. 117

Wendell Phillips, “Editorial.” The Antislavery Standard (Boston, MA), May 20, 1865.118

Alfred Waud, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” Harper’s Weekly (New York, NY), July 25, 1868.

48

These Northerners were aware of the unique challenges that their own ideology

forced on them. If slavery was barbarism, and free labor civilization, then that means the

South would be transformed into a civilized region once slavery was abandoned;

everyone would get what he or she needed, and peace would reign.119 However, if slavery

was abolished and civilization never came, then that would undermine the legitimacy of

Northern guided Reconstruction. Further, if the North failed to transform the South, then

that meant that free labor’s validity itself would be questioned. The Freedmen’s Bureau

was essential to combat that narrative.

119 Greeley, “Free Labor versus Slave Labor,” February 26, 1856.

Alfred Waud, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868. This cartoon reflects the opinion that many Northerners had about the situation in the South during Reconstruction. Figure 1.

49

On the other front, one of the first concerns that many Americans faced was how

to restore cotton production levels to their pre-war levels. There were many Americans

who believed, “The training of the freedmen to be capable of this,” as stated in an article

originally printed in The New York Times and then reprinted in The Daily Phoenix, “will

require far longer time than we can afford to wait.”120 In this case, the article was

advocating the importation of machinery to increase the production of cotton to pre-war

levels, and those who held the slavery in the abstract perspective did not oppose this idea.

However, those individuals did object, “to the radicals in Congress,” “intermeddling with

the people of the Southern States in their dealings with the Freedmen.”121 Like they did

during the age of slavery, people who held the slavery in the abstract perspective were

opposed to anyone who in any way interfered with their black people. It is this fear that

earned the Freedmen’s Bureau the ire of the proslavery in the abstract believers because

that is exactly what the organization sought to do.

Southerners felt besieged. General Oliver Howard, the director of the Freedmen’s

Bureau, wrote in 1865 that, “while it shall be my object to secure as much uniformity as

possible in the matter of employment and instruction of freedmen, I earnestly solicit

cooperation from all officers and agents whose position or duty renders it possible for

them to aid,” the freedmen in their transition from freedmen to functional members of

society.122 This suggestion struck at the core of the slavery in the abstract ideal; the whites

of the North were descending on the South to help improve the lot of those who lived on

the lowest rung of Southern society. If the Freedmen’s Bureau Agents were instructed to

120 Julian Selby, “The Necessity of regaining the old Cotton Crops,” printed in The New York Times (New York, NY), August 3rd,

1865, reprinted in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), August 17, 1865.121

Julian Selby, “President Johnson and General Grant,” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), December 27, 1865.122

Oliver Howard, “Circular Letter,” reprinted in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), June 13, 1865.

50

aid the Freedmen in their development not only as workers but also as members of

society, then that meant that the racial dynamics that ensured that poor whites could not

be considered slaves in the proslavery in the abstract ideology were under threat. In

essence, if the Freedmen’s Bureau were to succeed, then that would mean one of two

things; first, it would mean that under the proslavery in the abstract ideology, all of those

poor Southern whites would now be slaves and second, it would mean that the free labor

ideology that annihilated Southern society was correct, and that the slave society that

existed in the antebellum period was actually the evil that the Northerners claimed it was.

If that was the case, then that meant that all the poor whites who upheld the Southern way

of life were sinners and were acting against God’s plan. To the person who held the

proslavery in the abstract ideology (because their ideology had its roots in the parent

ideologies that were threatened by the Bureau), the Freedmen’s Bureau had to fail in

order for their ideology to remain valid.

To Make a Freedmen’s Bureau

It is this context that one needs to understand in order to grasp the political

dimensions involved with the renewal of Freedmen’s Bureau. When Congress met in

February and March of 1866, the situation was vastly different from the antebellum

period that came before. While the President proved to be a firm holder of the proslavery

in the abstract ideal, yet Congress was almost entirely composed of people who held onto

various free labor ideologies. While there were still people in the Congress who

possessed the slavery in the abstract ideology, free laborites guided and determined the

parameters of debate.

51

It is important, at this juncture, to note that the plans for Reconstruction fell under

two categories, Presidential and Congressional. Presidential reconstruction, as its name

implied, was guided and led by the President. Its objective – and by extension, the

objective of the President – was to readmit the Southern states into the Union as quickly

as possible. It was not interested in improving the lot of the Freedmen, or in any way

educating the Freedmen of the responsibilities and duties of citizenship. Its goal was to

reintroduce a new status quo as quickly as possible, and let the states run themselves now

that the Slave Power ceased to exist.123 The logical result of this plan would be the full

embrace of proslavery in the abstract ideology by the governments of the South, and

Johnson certainly understood that possibility.

The focus of this chapter, though, is on the second Reconstruction strategy known

as Congressional Reconstruction. This thought process asserted that Congress, being

composed of Representatives elected by the people of the United States should guide

Reconstruction. Its various objectives included punishing the rebel states, balancing the

Union debt, improving the lot of the Freedmen, creating a truly national infrastructure,

defining citizenship, and transforming the South into a new North.124 Despite the many

aspects of Congressional Reconstruction, it had one common goal that united all the

premises, and that goal was preventing a second Civil War. The North would be willing

to do almost anything to avoid that possibility, and this motivation is part of the reason

why Reconstruction was as progressive as it was.

Congress wanted the Freedmen’s Bureau to perform infrastructural duties.

Congressmen knew about the oppressive black codes that were passed in the South and



52

wanted to create a Freedmen’s Bureau in part to stop those institutions from undermining

the mission of Reconstruction. To do this, Congress included a clause in the bill that

stated, “That in every State or district where the ordinary course of judicial proceedings

has been interrupted by the rebellion,” there would be military officers to adjudicate all

legal claims and to ensure the rights of all citizens, “without respect to race.”125 This was

an essential portion of the act for numerous reasons. First, it acknowledged that the States

formerly in rebellion were not fully integrated into the Union. Second, it revealed the

desire of the free laborites to expand the rights of Americans to the freedmen. Third, it

placed the responsibility for carrying out the wishes of Congress in the hands of the

military, which meant that the responsibility for its enforcement lay with individuals

whose profession necessitated obedience. Fourth, Congress provided very clear directions

for how the President should act in regards to enforcing the Freedmen’s Bureau, so there

was no opportunity for the President to surprise them with leniency towards the South in

regards to that issue.

One thing many of the free laborite Republicans in Congress wanted was to

distribute the land of the former Confederates to new owners, and their primary

motivation for this was to undermine the aristocracy. President Johnson’s decision to try

to return lands seized from the plantation owners in the South was very unpopular to

many of the Representatives in Congress for two reasons. The first, and more popular,

reason for opposing for opposing the return of seized land to the plantation owners was

articulated by Representative Stevens of Pennsylvania, when he said, “we hold it to be

the duty of the Government to inflict punishment on the rebel belligerents, as so weaken

125 An act to continue in force and to amend “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees,” and for other

Purposes, July 16, 1866 (1865, Ch. 60.) Vol. xiii. P. 507. Section 14.

53

their hands that they can never again endanger the Union” and in so doing, “reform their

municipal institutions as to make them republican in spirit as well as in name.”126 To put

that idea in context of land reform, returning the land seized by the military from the

plantation owners offended Northerners and impeded the North’s mission of turning the

South into a new North.

The second issue concerned the fairness of taking the land allotted to the

Freedmen from the former rebel lands. As representative John Rice of Maine pointed out

when articulating the need for more land to be made available to the poor whites and

Freedmen of the South, “it is impossible for us to give liberty, protection, and justice to

the people,” of the South, “unless we secure them in their homes and their

homesteads.”127 They disliked the idea of kicking the freedmen who had worked the land

during the waning years of the Civil War off it because that action would infringe on

those people’s ability to exercise their rights.128 The concern of these representatives was

that it was unjust to punish those people who were the victims of the aristocracy during

the centuries before the Civil War by returning the land they were working to those same

aristocrats.129 While they could not secure as much land as they would have hoped for the

Freedmen, they were able to secure some lands for the Freedmen to purchase.130

While many Representatives wanted the Bureau to educate the Freedmen and

others in the ways of free labor, there were many people who had a complicated

relationship with the process. As Representative J. W Chanler of New York said about

126 Thaddeus Stevens, “Reconstruction,” printed in the Lancaster Evening Express, (Lancaster, PA), September 8, 1865.





Purposes, Section 6 and Section 7.

54

the Freedmen’s Bureau in February of 1866, “Nothing could prove the utter dependence

of the negro race, as individuals and as a people, more conclusively than this measure and

the history of the Freedmen’s Bureau.”131 Chanler’s point, despite his harsh tone, was

that, “the amelioration of the condition of the negro race is as much my duty and as near

my heart as it can be to any advocate of such a measure of this.”132 Chanler’s perspective

can be best understood as the perspective of most people in the North. People who held

the free labor ideology knew that they had to educate the freedmen in the ways of

citizenship, but they were not spared the racism of their time, nor were they immune to

some other limitations inherent in their ideology.133

Most importantly, Congress wanted the Freedmen’s Bureau to help prevent the

South and its ideology from starting another war. In this way, the Freedmen’s Bureau

shared the same objective as the rest of Congressional Reconstruction. Many

Congressmen, such as Stevens, opposed Presidential Reconstruction because, “the

oppression of the freedmen; the reamendment of their State constitutions, and the

reestablishment of slavery would be the inevitable result.”134 They felt that the President’s

rush to bring the Southern states back into the Union would lead to a situation in which

Southerners, in concert with, “the Democrats that will in the best of times be elected from

the North, will always give them a majority in Congress and in the Electoral College.”135

In essence, they feared that the result of Presidential Reconstruction would be a return to

the antebellum balance of power that threatened free labor and set the stage for the Civil

131 Appendix to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 76 (1866).

132 Appendix to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 76 (1866).


Purposes, Section 8.134

Index to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 74 (1865).135

Index to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 74 (1865).

55

War. This is why Congress took over the Reconstruction process, and this is why

Congressmen overwhelmingly agreed to create a Freedmen’s Bureau that had power even

if they disagreed at how much power it should have.

Part of this disagreement stemmed from the central legal issue of Reconstruction,

whether the Confederacy left the Union. Because Congress was unsure whether to treat

the states of the former Confederacy as just being in a state of rebellion, or in having

actually left the Union, the situation left room for a great deal of hesitation on the part of

Congress.136 This was an important debate, because if the states of the former

Confederacy were merely in a state of rebellion, then that meant that Congress would

have limited say in those state’s re-admittance because those states would not really need

to be re-admitted because those states never really left. If, however, those states actually

left, then Congress would have the power to define the terms of their re-admittance. But

if that were the case, then that meant that the South actually did leave the Union, and the

North was the aggressor in the war.

In the winter of 1865-1866, this issue was not yet decided and that uncertainty

framed the terms of the debate. Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a proslavery in

the abstract holder and the attorney who represented John Sanford in Dred Scott v.

Sanford, articulated confusion with the bill when he stated about the Freedmen’s Bureau

Bill, “I do not exactly understand what would be, if it became law, the extent of its

operation.”137 Senator Johnson did not like the expansive language in the law because he

believed that the law allowed the federal government to trample states’ rights, but other

members of Congress, such as free laborite abolitionist Senator Henry Wilson of



56

Massachusetts looked toward the issues on the ground in the former-Confederacy and

concluded, “I do not think we ought to stand here quibbling over the authority to

interfere.”138 In essence, Wilson and the many other free laborites who would vote in

favor of the bill believed that it was better to ensure the rights of the Freedmen than to

necessarily care about issues of legitimate exercise of authority.139 After all, the law, like

the economy, was the means to a just society, not the result of one.

Many members of Congress wanted an expansive Freedmen’s Bureau, despite

their mewling of over-reach, in order to secure the political and cultural victory that the

military success of the war allowed. However, there was one great obstacle that reduced

the ability of the Freedmen’s Bureau to enforce its enormous purview, and that great

obstacle was best expressed by a resolution introduced by Representative Samuel Randall

of Pennsylvania, which stated,

That the public debt created during the late rebellion was contracted upon the faith and honor of the nation; that it is sacred and inviolate and must and ought to be paid, principal and interest; and that any attempt to repudiate, or in any manner to impair or scale the said debt should be universally discountenanced promptly by the people, and promptly rejected by the Congress.140

162 of the 183 members of the House of Representatives approved that resolution.141 One

of the key elements of free labor ideology was that debt, whether public or private, was

sinful because it would lead to dependence of the debtor to the debt holder. The Union

debt was especially important because the debt could lead to the Union being dependent

on a foreign power, and Northerners were not inclined to let foreigners run their country


139 Senator Wilson argued in that same discussion that the legal authority for protecting the rights of the Freedmen stemmed from the

second clause of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which read that, “Congress shall have the power to enforce” the illegalization of slavery and involuntary servitude, “by appropriate legislation.” U.S. Const. amend XIII, § 2.Yet it is clear that when Wilson mentions this issue, he more concerned with the moral dynamics of the situation rather than the legal ones. Index to the Cong. Globe, 39th Cong, 1st Sess. 40 (1865).140

“Public Debt Resolution,” December 5, 1865.141

“Public Debt Resolution,” December 5, 1865.

57

any more than they were happy about when Southerners guided national policy in the

antebellum era. This fixation on expense would manifest often in debates about the most

essential aspects of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Bill passed in February of 1866 was the result of

compromises between moderates and radicals in Congress, and when it was sent to the

President on February 6th, Congress was expected to keep passing new pieces of

legislation to secure further changes in Southern Society. Few could have anticipated the

Presidential veto that came on February 19th. While it is true that Johnson singlehandedly

crippled the notion of mass freedmen ownership of rebel land, it was also true that many

Congressmen believed that Johnson was still the man who once called for the heads of

traitors.142 President’s Johnson’s veto reflected the perspective and logic of the proslavery

in the abstract mindset.

One of his objections was that in the former Confederacy, “the bill subjects any

white person who may be charged with depriving a freedmen of his,” rights or

immunities, “to imprisonment or fine, or both, without, however, defining the,” rights or

immunities of the victim.143 While this certainly seems like a legitimate claim to invoke

against the act –after all, the act never defined those terms—he later attacked the

underlying logic of the bill when he asserted, “a system for the support of indigent

persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution,”

which meant that the people who received government support during the war were not

supposed to be, “fed, clothed, educated, and sheltered by the United States” during the

peace.144 This perspective comports perfectly with the proslavery in the abstract ideal;

142 Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 43 and 161.

143 Andrew Johnson, “Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill,” February 19, 1866.

144 Johnson, “Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill,” February 19, 1866.

58

those who are at the bottom of the system should not receive any official help during a

time of peace because that would upset the order of the past, which was divinely ordained

and hierarchal.

He also objected to the bill’s ability, “to take away land from its former owners

without any legal proceedings being first had,” which he believed was contrary to the

Constitution.145 This logic denying any form of eminent domain was unacceptable to

Congress. If the President had his way, and the bill remained vetoed, then that would

mean that the aristocrats who led the country to war would get all of their land back. That

had to be avoided, so in response to the veto, Congress got to work passing other pieces

of legislation and preparing a new Freedmen’s Bureau that the President would sign. At

this juncture, Congress still hoped that Andrew Johnson was the man who wanted to

punish the South; though they started to have their doubts about how much he would be

willing to punish traitors.

On February 22, just three days after the President’s veto of the original

Freedmen’s Bureau extension, he declared that Representative Thaddeus Stevens of

Pennsylvania, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, activist Wendell Phillips, and

other free laborites were, “as much opposed to the fundamental principles of this

government” as were, “the men who fought against us,” during the Civil War.146 This

speech removed Johnson’s legitimacy in Congress and in much of the North.147 In fact,

Thaddeus Stevens and other Representatives began making fun of the President on the

floor of Congress, referencing his speech as a contributing cause for their newfound

145 Johnson, “Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill,” February 19, 1866.

146 Andrew Johnson, “Speech in Washington,” February 22, 1866.


59

distrust of him.148 Most importantly, though, was that Congress decided that, “The

President is made to misconceive his duties, and to treat with too little respect the powers

of Congress.”149 In essence, President Johnson was too out of step with what the Nation

needed to in order lead the essential task of Reconstruction. Congressional

Reconstruction was on its way.

But even after the veto, when Congress realized that the President was going to

resist them on everything they did, they still obsessed over its cost. In May of 1866,

Representative Stevens proposed to appropriate $3 million for “sites and buildings for

school-houses and asylums,” and to appropriate almost $2 million for the transportation

of Freedmen and other refugees.150 Stevens numbers were based on General Howard’s,

report to Congress, when the General called for, “$11,500,000 and more,” to be

appropriated to the Freedmen’s Bureau in total in order to keep it functional.151 However,

many free laborites such as Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont thought the

appropriation was a, “very large sum,” for what the Bureau needed, and thus the

proposed appropriation was, “decided in the negative – yeas 27, nays 91, not voting

65.”152 Stevens then suggested reducing the appropriation for school related expenses, but

the Representatives wanted more details about what the General requested.153 Stevens

brought them the requested document, but instead of bolstering Stevens’ argument, the

letter was used to justify massive cuts in the requested appropriations. To, “avoid

shocking the public mind,” in the words of free laborite John Kasson of Iowa, they







60

decided that they could cut the budget to make it more economical.154 The $3 million

original offered for the purchase of lands and building was reduced to $500 thousand, and

money allotted for transportation and salary were similarly cut because they were deemed

to excessive.155

Despite how much the situation had changed, and how the free laborites

understood that the President would almost certainly veto their new bill, they still didn’t

try to get everything they wanted. Even the issue of land reform, which free laborites

believed was essential for securing the freedom of the Freedmen and introducing free

labor to the South, was pushed to the side in favor of ensuring that the Government

would be able to make money to reduce the Union debt.156 Now, it would be unfair to

suggest that the free laborites in Congress stopped caring about the issue of land reform;

after all, their very ideology was rooted in a world in which most of the free people in the

country were farmers. However, what’s important to note is that the country was, “three

to four billions of dollars” in debt by the time Congress was discussing the Freedmen’s

Bureau extension, and a to a free laborite debt was seen as an equal threat the Union as a

resurgent South because debt led to slavery.157 In essence, the free laborites who fought to

free the slaves from their lot and refused to spend more money to preserve their freedom

were the same people and had the same motivations for both instances. While there was

certainly a racial component for many free laborites lack of enthusiasm for spending

money on the project, it is probably more accurate to think of their refusal to spend more

money on the project as defense of Northern whites against the slavery of debt.




157 Stevens, “Reconstruction,” September 8, 1865.

61

However, the debt issue was not the only factor that caused the Bureau and other

Reconstruction projects to be improperly funded. Free laborites had absolute confidence

in the superiority of free labor civilization, and they believed that its righteousness was

self-evident.158 The North had proven that free labor was God’s approved civilization

when it defeated the South during the Civil War, and free laborites assumed that soon

after slavery was abolished, Southerners would see the inherent benefits of free labor

ideology.159 Many free laborites in Congress and the Bureau agents they funded believed

that, “Blacks and whites merely had to abandon attitudes toward labor, and toward each

other, inherited from slavery, and the market would work out the rest.”160 The market,

which was a means to a just society in free labor ideology, would naturally and inevitably

guide all Southerners towards free labor civilization. The weight of history itself would

transform Southern society. All Congress had to do was ensure legal equality for the

Freedmen, and Congress accomplished that objective when it passed the Civil Rights Act

and the Fourteenth Amendment.161 It was very hard for many free laborites to justify

spending even more money on Reconstruction, specifically on programs that improved

the lot of the freedmen, when they believed that the project’s success was pre-ordained.

Inevitably, the President vetoed the bill again, and the logic he used was the same

as the logic he used when he vetoed it the last time. This time, however, Congress

overrode his veto in the same day. Congress was against the President, and it had decided

that it would guide Reconstruction the way it wanted to, and in truth Congress

accomplished a lot. The reason why one should start with the passage of the new


159 Greeley, “Free Labor versus Slave Labor,” February 26, 1856.


161 Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 256-257. The Amendment accomplished this in its first

section, which read, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” U.S. Const, amend XIV, § 1.

62

Freedmen’s Bill when analyzing this change is because it is when one can definitely say

Congressional Reconstruction began. Ironically, the success of the Reconstruction as a

whole would be determined in large part by the organization they refused to fund at the

beginning of Congressional Reconstruction.

To Break a Freedmen’s Bureau

When Congress met to create a Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865-1866, the parameters

of what it could do were drastically different from the intended mission of the original

Freedmen’s Bureau that was created while Lincoln was still alive. However, even though

the scope of the new Freedmen’s Bureau was in some ways reduced, it still served a very

important role in in context of Reconstruction. Here was the federal organization

designed to spread and enforce free labor in the South, and it did so by becoming the

bridge between the Northern military and government and the Southern population.

Despite its theoretical importance, Congress never saw fit to increase the appropriation of

the Bureau, and the Bureau never had the support it needed to truly accomplish its

mission.

Their leader was a true believer. Free laborite General Howard was placed in

charge of the original Bureau in March of 1865 and he was, “deeply committed to using

the agency to protect freed people from violence, accord them equality before the law,

and establish schools in the South.” 162 Even if he did not “envision a massive

redistribution” of plantation owners’ property, he still wanted “land that came into the

Bureau’s possession” to be distributed to the freedmen.163 However, despite his genuine

nature and his sincere demeanor, he was stonewalled everywhere he turned. His funding

162 Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, (New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 76.

163 Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction, 76.

63

requests -- which, truth be told, were not enough to actually combat the monumental

challenges the Bureau faced – fell on deaf ears in Congress, and they gave the Bureau far

less monetary support than would prove necessary. His subordinates would face similar

challenges and more during the rough the few years in which the Bureau operated.

While his agents were also believers in the free labor cause, they were not wholly

free from the prejudices of their time. As with the Northern activists and capitalists who

moved South after the Civil War, they possessed “a shared disdain of black people,” with

Southerners, and agents sometimes complained “about ‘indifferent’ freed people who

expected education,” and other services, “to be free and wholly subsidized by the Bureau,

Northern benevolence, or the state.”164 Agents believed that the Freedmen had to be

educated in the values of free labor, but they still reacted negatively to the perceived

ignorance of freedmen who looked to them for aid. However, the agents understood just

how unable they were to provide comprehensive assistance to the Freedmen. From June

of 1866 through June of 1868, the Bureau spent a total of $5, 617,000, while the

Government spent $7,200,000 in 1868 to purchase Alaska.165 To put that in perspective, it

meant that between the years of 1866 through 1868, the Federal Government spent the

equivalent of $85 million in 2013 U.S. currency on the Freedmen’s Bureau.166 As one

Northern newspaper noted, a “large portion of this sum was devoted to feeding the people

of districts in the South which were devastated by the war, and that a large portion of the

applicants for aid were white persons.”167 How could the Bureau subsidize education for

164 Paul Cimbala, Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870, (Athens,

Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 109.165

J. Harding, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” The Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia, PA), August 4, 1868.166

Dan, DeGrief, “Purchasing Power Calculator”, in measuringworth.com, Accessed April 14, 2015, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php.167

Harding, “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” August 4, 1868.

64

Freedmen if they had to spend most of it on feeding Southern whites? Agents were in an

impossible situation, and they sometimes directed that frustration towards the Freedmen.

Unfortunately for General Howard, egalitarian-minded free laborites, and hopeful

freedmen, the grand designs of the Freedmen’s Bureau were greatly hindered by a severe

lack of funding. When General Howard wrote his report in 1866 that requested $3 million

for the purposes of education, he based that number on reports he received about the state

of schools in the South. One report, which dealt with the condition of schools in

Vicksburg Mississippi, stated that there was, “a grievous lack of facilities for learning to

write, which is true of all rooms used by our schools” and that there was difficulty

finding, “buildings for schools and teachers.”168 This difficulty, along with the oppressive

conditions for freedmen found in Mississippi, led to an enrollment of 210 freedmen, with

only 118 who actually attended school in one school in Vicksburg in 1865.169 This school

according to agent Warren, was, “one of the best schools” to be found in Mississippi.170

Many other states featured similar issues, but Congress did not allot nearly enough

money to the address all these issues, so the issues continued throughout the entirety of

the Bureau’s existence.171 Unfortunately for the Agents and the activists they worked for,

funding was not the only issue that impacted how the Bureau was able to help Freedmen.

The primary concern of the agents was the education of the Freedmen in the ways

of free labor, and even if they could not fulfill their enormous responsibility they might

168 Letter from Joseph Warren to Stuart Eldridge on the Report of Schools in Vicksburg, November 15, 1865. (National Archives

Microfilm Publication M803, Roll 25). General Records, Letters Sent and Received of The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.169

Letter from Joseph Warren to Stuart Eldridge on the Report of Schools in Vicksburg, November 15, 1865. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M803, Roll 25). 170

Letter from Joseph Warren to Stuart Eldridge on the Report of Schools in Vicksburg, November 15, 1868. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M803, Roll 25). 171

While it is true that “nearly all the present Negro universities and colleges like Howard, Fisk, and Atlanta were founded or substantially aided in their earliest days,” by the Bureau, it would take many years before the fruits of their work would manifest. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 226.

65

have been theoretically able to address the education issue, because free labor was both

an intellectual tradition and an ideologically based work ethic. However, one of the

central components of free labor was the idea of choice, and Southern elites were doing

everything in their power to prevent the Freedmen from having any. The elites’ tools

were the black codes, which were laws that appeared all over the South, and they were

perfectly structured not only to thwart free labor, but to also prove the validity of slavery

in the abstract. In the Mississippi black code, the first of the black codes written in the

South, and the model that other black codes would be based on, there was a clause that

said, “All freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes” over the age of eighteen, “with no

lawful employment or business,” or whites associating with them were found “unlawfully

assembling themselves together” were considered vagrants could be imprisoned for it.172

Given the fact that racism was abundant, and the vagueness of the phrase “unlawfully

assembling” allowed for expansive interpretation, it was very easy for states to arrest,

convict, and effectively re-enslave the freedmen.

One of the central features of Southern black codes were apprentice laws.173 These

oppressive statutes could be avoided if the freedman was able to provide proof that he

was employed, and another of the statutes in the black code required that every freedman

was provided with a contract to prove he had employment.174 The freedmen had to work

in order to remain free, and that is not something that negatively impacted the Bureau

agents from performing their jobs. If a child’s parents did not have enough money to pay

for a child, that child could be taken from the parents by the state to become an

172 MS, The Black Code, An act to amend the vagrant laws of the State, 2, 1865.

173 MS, The Black Code, An act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and

mulattoes, 1, 1865.174

MS, The Black Code, An act to confer civil rights on freedmen, and for other purposes, 6, 1865.

66

apprentice to a person who is legally required to be called a master, and to work for that

master until the apprentice was a legal adult. Once the apprentice was a legal adult, the

master might employ the apprentice, or what was most often the case, the apprentice

would be released in order to be arrested for vagrancy and then re-assigned to the master

for no pay. Agents had no answer to this problem; they told freedmen to get jobs in order

to pay expenses, but the Freedmen were often not paid enough to keep their children. If

the freedmen were to leave their low paying jobs, they would be prevented from finding a

new job because if they were ever unemployed they could be effectively re-enslaved.

Even if the agents and activists that worked in the schools saw the detrimental

effects of these laws on the freedmen and of the inadequacy of the share wages contracts

towards meeting the needs of the freedmen, those Northerners still had to recommend

that the freedmen should take those jobs because of the general poverty of the South and

because of the repressive nature of the black codes. However, the labor contracts that the

freedmen were advised to sign did not just underpay the freedmen. Those same contracts

had the potential to significantly curtail the rights of freedmen during their working

hours. In one share-wage contract in Arkansas, the third clause stated that the freedmen

working on a particular plantation could, “enter into no general conversation during

working hours,” the tenth clause stipulated that the Freedmen had to, “render cheerful

and willing labor,” and the eleventh clause of that same contract stipulated that the

freedmen had to, “feed the stock on Sunday.”175 Any one of those clauses, on its own,

would be considered demeaning, but these clauses and others like them were found in

share-wage contracts across the South.

175 Labor Contracts, sec 263. Arkansas Assistant Commissioner. Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned

Lands, National Archives, Washington D.C.; filed as A-2493 in Freedmen and Southern Society project files. University of Maryland, College Park.

67

Southern plantation owners tried to recreate as much of proslavery society as they

could –though the closest they could come was a proslavery in the abstract society, and

they used these contracts and the agents to help accomplish that objective. One agent

recounted his experience with working with planters as such,

Every employer thought it perfectly proper that a Bureau agent, when notified of a freedmans leaving his employment should immediately issue an order for the arrest of the same and have him brought back – in chains if possible.176

Agents served as the law in regards to all issues connected with the labor of Freedmen, so

they were the first people that plantation owners came to when said plantation owners

intended to further abuse their laborers. However, for every agent who expressed distaste

at the actions of plantation owners, there were others who acquiesced to the planter class

in order to survive. Even though siding with the plantation owners in many of these

instances would violate the spirit of the Bureau’s purpose, agents deferred because they,

“viewed the struggle on the plantations as an irrational legacy of slaver that would

disappear as soon as planters and freedmen absorbed free labor principles.”177 In essence,

many agents believed that if they just maintained their position long enough, the weight

of their civilization would solve all of the problems of the South.

Even though the Bureau was used by plantation owners at times to suppress the

rights of the freedmen, many white Southerners still did not want the Bureau in the

South. As one Southerner wrote in 1868,178

Let, then, the planter observe the effect of accepting the terms held out. He binds himself— 1.To find employment for the during the crop year for the freedmen. 2. To find them food and forage for the team used by them. 3. To subject the whole net profits of his

176 Lawanda Cox and John H. Cox. Eds. “Charles Rauschenberg, a Freedmen’s Bureau Agent, Reports from Georgia, 1867,”

Reconstruction, the Negro, and the New South (New York, New York: Harper & Row, 1973) 339-347. 177

Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 169-170. 178

This article was written in response to General Buchanan’s Circular No. 1, which was issued on January 23, 1868. The Circular stipulated that the Government would pay for any tools which the planters could not supply to the Freedmen due to lack of funds, and the article referenced was critical of that decision. “Circular No. 1,” January 23, 1868, printed in The Natchitoches Spectator, February 6, 1868.

68

cotton to the payment of these freedmen’s labor and supplies; and 4. To guarantee their wages and support by acknowledging a tacit mortgage upon his personal property.179

In essence, the planter was forced to follow the rules of a contract that the planter made

with (most likely) his former slaves by the Bureau agents who approved said contracts.

Planters had their freedom restricted by Bureau agents, and this meant that the planter

was oppressed. Someone who was oppressed could not be free under the proslavery in

the abstract worldview. Many Southern Whites were opposed to the presence of the

Freedmen’s Bureau because its agents interfered with the interactions between whites and

blacks, especially in regards to employment. Even though the share wages contracts that

were written during Reconstruction possessed similarities to the old slave system of the

antebellum period, most Freedmen’s Bureau agents actually recommended Freedmen to

take those contracts; the very presence of the Bureau caused apprehension among

Southerners.180

The Bureau’s interference in Southern affairs violated the central tenet of the

slavery in the abstract ideology, because it interfered with a white Southerner’s ability to

oppress the Freedmen, which is the obvious way in which the Freedmen’s Bureau

offended the slavery in the abstract ideology. But the agents of the Bureau, because of

their status as de jure law enforcement in the South, also offended the slavery in the

abstract mindset because in their minds they were also oppressed directly by the agents.

This alleged oppression convinced Southerners that the agents were behind all manner of

disrespect and injury done to Southerners, such as in one instance where, “negroes of

Richmond, at the suggestion, doubtless, of the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau stole the

179 T.B.R. Hatch, “Bureau Lien,” originally printed in The New Orleans Bulletin (New Orleans, LA), February 1, 1868, reprinted in

The Gazette and Comet (Baton Rouge, LA), February 6, 1868.


District dated June 1865,” Record Group 105, National Archives.

69

flowers,” that were laid on the graves of Confederate veterans and, “transferred them to

the graves of the Northern Soldiers.”181 This and other alleged infractions by the Bureau

agents represented everything that Southerners feared and hated about the Bureau agents.

First, it represented Northern disrespect to the Southern way of life and second, it

provided an example of Northerners using blacks to upset Southern sensibility and

society.

The continued presence of the agents in Southern life led to the most vocal

critique that solidified Southern opposition to the Agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and

that critique was that the agents of the Bureau only cared about the freedmen. The idea of

helping freedmen was considered anathema to many Southerners because their slavery in

the abstract ideology equated true equality with universal slavery – after all, if everyone

is equal and no one can oppress anyone else, then that means that everyone is equally

oppressed – but the idea that “Northern Radicals and Southern Renegades” would try to

put the freedmen on a pedestal was worse still because it tacitly accepted the logic of

slavery in the abstract.182 In the paranoid minds of Southerners, any the focus of Bureau

agents to improve the lives of freedmen was actually an attempt to reverse the racial

dynamics of the South and create a world where Northern radicals, through their black

servants, ruled whites, an idea which echoed Calhoun’s warning from almost thirty years

before.183 Southerners decried the “heavy and unjust taxation,” and the oppression of

Southern whites’ “political and civil rights” by the Federal Government, when mixed

with the overwhelmingly Republican voting tendencies of the freedmen, led Southerners

181 Julian Selby, “Honoring our Gallant Dead,” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), May 23, 1866.

182 J.M. Scanland, “Editorial,” The Natchitoches Spectator (Natchitoches, LA), February 6, 1868.

183 Calhoun, "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle,

ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States, 625-33.

70

to feel that this paranoid conspiracy was actually true, and it led them to view the

Freedmen’s Bureau as the primary tool of Northern oppression.184

A separate issue stemmed out of the funding and opposing issues, and that issue

involved the isolated nature of the Bureau and its agents. As one White Southerner wrote

about the Bureau, it was, “a good or bad institution according to the personal character of

the agent who administers it; it varies in every County and changes with every change of

officers.”185 Southerners accused Bureau agents of corruption almost everywhere there

was a Bureau agent in the South, and in some cases those accusations were accurate.186

Yet even though there was corruption, one must remember that there are reasons for it

where it might have existed. The Freedmen’s Bureau received very little funding from the

Federal Government, and what little funding it had was divided between the local

Freedmen’s Bureau organizations in the South. Agents had to work in an environment in

which everyone around them despised them except for freedmen, and even the

relationship between the agents and the freedmen was dependent on the temperament of

the individual agent and the community he dealt with

To understand the feelings of isolation experienced by the Freedmen’s Bureau

agents and by the other Northerners who went down South to work for Reconstruction,

one should turn to Albion W. Tourgeé’s novel, A Fool’s Errand. Based on the author’s

experience of being a Northerner who relocated to North Carolina during Reconstruction

and became a local politician and judge, the book tells the story of a Northern veteran

who moves to North Carolina at the beginning of Reconstruction who would become a

184 Scanland, “Editorial,” February 6, 1868.

185 Julian Selby, “The Bureau in South Carolina,” originally printed in The New York Herald-Tribune (New York, NY), reprinted in

The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), May 23, 1866.186

Alfred Price and David Fulton, “Conduct of the Agents,” The Wilmington Journal (Raleigh, NC), May 17, 1866.

71

local politician who dealt with all the challenges of being a Northerner gone South.

Tourgeé describes the constant struggle of having to live among people who believed,

“The negro is made a voter simply to degrade and disgrace the White people of the

South,” and the dangers of being blamed for the hard conditions of the Southland.187

Worse for these Northerners still was that most Congressmen believed that, “the interests

of the Southern leading classes” would, “compel them to accept and carry out in good

faith” the aims of Reconstruction.188 Bureau agents and other Northerners who moved

South understood that the Southern Aristocrats who held the slavery in the abstract ideal

would try to do everything in their power to retain as much of the antebellum state of

affairs as they possibly could because that is what they understood to be divinely

ordained and what had consistently proved to be beneficial to them.189

Tourgeé gave a voice to those Northerners who moved South, and for all those

agents and activists who moved South during the War, there was one section that they

directed their most virulent scorn towards. Perhaps ironically, that section was not the

South. “I begin seriously to fear that the North lacks virility,” wrote Comfort Servose –

Tourgee’s mouthpiece in the novel – “This cowardly shirking or responsibility, this

pandering to sentimental whimsicalities, this snuffling whine about peace and

conciliation, is sheer weakness.”190 He, and other Northerners who went southward,

believed that, “The North is simply a conqueror; and if the results she fought for are to be

secured, she must rule as a conqueror.”191 As Reconstruction wore on during 1867 and

187 Albion Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand, originally published in New York by Ford’s, Howard & Hulbert, 1867, republished (New

York, New York: Harper’s Torchbooks, 1966), 139.188

Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand, 167.189

Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand, 168 and 87.190

Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand, 171.191

Tourgeé, A Fool’s Errand, 171.

72

1868, it became evident that the federal government was not going to provide them with

relief, and many of the Northerners who moved South began to exhibit, “a certain amount

of sympathy for the white southerners’ determination to keep the South a white man’s

country.”192 If fellow free laborites were not willing to put in the work to make free labor

ideology the weltanschauung of the South, why should the Northerners who moved

South? At the beginning of Reconstruction, Southerners were under the impression that

the Northerners who moved South, “would become certified southerners in all essentials

before too much time elapsed.”193 They might have been right.

Despite these issues and the fact that the Bureau had its funding severely cut in

1868, many Bureau agents still continued to do their job to the best of their ability.

However, that would all change once the Ku-Klux Klan began its reign of terror.

Established “by six Confederates on the day before Christmas in 1865,” by 1867 the

Klan, “had adopted a hierarchical, military style organization” and it wanted to reverse

Reconstruction.194 It was a decentralized organization in which, “Klan members typically

operated in their home counties, which meant they knew which local black activists to

target,” and they would use extreme violence against Republicans living in the South and

the Freedmen.195 Unfortunately for Bureau agents, the Klan had widespread support in the

South because Southerners believed it was,

The result of necessity, the sole object of which is to thwart Radicalism, arrest negro domination in the South, negro equality in the North, perpetuate the Federal Union and preserve the Constitution as the fathers made it.196

192 Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction, 142.

193 Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction, 68.

194 Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s most Progressive Era, 287.

195 Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s most Progressive Era, 289-290.

196 J.C.C. Featherston and James Hoyt, “The Ku-Klux Klan – What is it?” The Anderson Intelligencer (Anderson, SC), April 29,

1868.

73

Worse still, some states became dominated by the Klan to the point that, “in some

counties, the civil officers are all, or a portion them, members of the Klan” and that in

other counties, “where some civil officers will not join the Klan, or some other armed

band, they have been compelled to leave their counties,” or face death.197 Agents were

powerless to do anything about the Klan, and it was hard for Agents to justify helping

Freedmen when some Southerners openly, “blamed the escalating violence on Northern

Republicans who encouraged blacks to vote and run for office.”198 It would take until

1871, when Congress passed the “Ku Klux Klan Act” for Bureau agents, freedmen,

Southern Republicans, and activists to receive any aid against the violence the Klan

implemented. The government finally intervened in the early 1870s with the Enforcement

Acts, which allowed the Attorney General, “to use federal marshals to enforce the

Constitution an investigate assaults on black voting rights.”199

The federal government’s actions against the Klan succeeded in, “restoring order,

reinvigorating the morale of Southern Republicans, and enabling blacks to exercise their

rights as citizens.”200 The Klan was curtailed, and Reconstruction was saved. The Bureau

was not so fortunate. In 1870, during the midst of the Klan crisis, Congress transferred,

“all money and property hitherto entrusted to the Freedmen’s Bureau to the account of

the Bureau of Education,” so that the Bureau of Education could, “exercise the same

powers as those hitherto executed by the Freedmen’s Bureau in reference to

education.”201 The Bureau, without its central purpose, limped along until June 13th, 1872,

197 J.L Boardman, “The Ku-Klux Klan in Texas,” The Highland Weekly News (Hillsboro, OH), December 31, 1868.

198 Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s most Progressive Era, 292.

199 Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction, 298.


201 Associated Press, “The Freedmen’s Bureau Redivivus?” The Charleston Daily News (Charleston, SC), April 6, 1870.

74

when it closed permanently.202 With the former-Confederacy officially returned to the

Union by 1871, free laborites determined that Congressional Reconstruction had ended,

and that Southern Reconstruction should begin. In the minds of the vast majority of free

laborites, the North had done everything it needed to do – it established legal equality

between the races, it encouraged stability in the Southern political system, and through

the Freedmen’s Bureau it taught the freedmen and Southern whites the tenets of free

labor. The South, according to the expectations of Northern free labor ideology, was set

up to follow in the North’s footsteps. As one Southerner put it, “the conditions are

changed; the old plantation system has passed away, and free labor maps onto a new

condition of things.”203 Even though there was still more work to do, free labor had won.

The South, and the nation with it, would invariably move towards a truly just society on

free labor’s terms.

That is how free laborites viewed the situation in the South at the start of 1867,

and in a lot of ways they had reason to be optimistic. Looking back at the situation, one

could see the roots of the depression that would hit the Republic during that year, and the

genesis of the railroad scandals that would plague the South and cause Northerners to

turn away from Reconstruction. Free laborites deluded themselves that Reconstruction

would succeed inevitably, that the justice of their civilization would spread across the

nation.

202 S.L. Brown, “The Close of the Freedmen’s Bureau,” The New Orleans Republican (New Orleans, LA), May 25, 1872.

203 John M. Keating and Matthew Gallaway, “The Great Want of Memphis,” The Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, TN), February

15, 1872.

75

Afterward: A Union Healed

Yet what historians have not fully explored is the impact of the failure of

Reconstruction on Northerners. Sure, Northerners stopped caring about Reconstruction,

and they stopped caring about the condition of the freedmen. But just observing those

facts and calling them the only impacts on Northerners following Reconstruction ignores

the implications of the results of Reconstruction. The North could not transform the

South. Free labor could not eradicate the Southern way of seeing the world. Free labor

could not teach blacks how to be more moral, and as a result Americans North and South,

“placed the blame for Reconstruction’s problems squarely on the alleged inferiority and

incapacity of the South’s black voters.”204 Free labor civilization might not be inevitable.

These were the lessons of Reconstruction, but how did those lessons manifest in the

Northern psyche?

Perhaps the best way to look at the effect that the failure of Reconstruction had on

Northern identity is to examine Dunning’s famous work, Reconstruction, Political and

Economic, 1865-1877. In his famous tome, Dunning wrote, that the south could have had

a “prompt recovery” from the depression that followed the Civil War, “if the whole

population [of the South], black as well as white, could have resumed at once the familiar

methods of production.”205 The “familiar methods of production” he was referring to was

a slave style of system. Northerners during the time of Reconstruction wished that the

South would return to antebellum levels of production, but there is scant evidence of any

Northerner who suggested that a return to the slave system of the South would have been

good for the Southern economy. Dunning’s assortment that a return of some of the

204 Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation & Reconstruction, 191.

205 Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877, 12.

76

coercive techniques of slavery might have actually made the Southern economy stronger

would not have been widely accepted in the North during the time of Reconstruction. In

fact, free laborites believed that slavery was barbaric. Dunning further rejected free labor

when he asserts that the black codes were, “in the main a conscientious and

straightforward attempt to bring some sort of order out of the social and economic

chaos.”206 It is at this moment when one can determine that Dunning has embraced the

principles of slavery in the abstract. He admitted that the black codes restricted the rights

of the freedmen, but he treated that fact as something of a necessity. In essence, Dunning

believed that in order for stability to exist in the South – and stability is necessary for

freedom—the Freedmen had to have their liberties suppressed.

Dunning accepted the logic of the slavery in the abstract mindset, but what is

important about him is that his vision of history became the standard of the field. As

Foner notes, “the views of the Dunning school shaped historical writing for generations,

and achieved wide popularity through D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation” and

continued to have widespread acceptance because of other pro-South media such as The

Tragic Era by Claude G. Bowers and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.207 The

work of Dunning and his cadre of historians were influential over every aspect of

American society, yet the popularity of their work speaks to more than just its influence.

It speaks to a widespread belief among Americans that these historians understood what

Reconstruction was about and why it failed. It proves that not only did the South still

maintain their slavery in the abstract mindset, but that the North lost faith in at least one

of central tenets of free labor ideology: that all people could improve their lot.

206 Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877, 57-58.


77

Perhaps to best understand this reversal one should turn to Walter Johnson’s River

of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. In the concluding

paragraph of that book, he wrote that the “vision of political economy” espoused by

Southerners,

with their foursquare acceptance of the notion that ‘freedom’ was a quantity to be forcibly extracted from the suffering bodies of those who entered its economy from the positions of greatest vulnerability, that ‘freedom’ was a social relation with the vicious stamp of slavery on its underbelly – seems to describe our world better than the notion to which it was opposed: the idea that ‘freedom; is the natural and inevitable condition of mankind.208

It is easy to extrapolate how the world became a plantation, and how the citizenry of the

world became slaves, and that is the essential point of Johnson’s book. However, just

because the world became a plantation does not mean that it had to become a plantation,

and by implication, that does not mean it will always be a plantation. People, like Andrew

Johnson and the Republicans in Congress, made some of the choices that brought the

world to where it is today. Had they made different choices, perhaps the world would be

a more equitable place. But speculation is not the province of historians. Historians deal

with facts, and here are the most important facts of all: choices matter, choices have

impact, and choices are made based on the knowledge of the actor. Johnson might be

correct in asserting that the brand of plantation oppression of the antebellum era evolved

into the globalized oppression that exists today, but that obfuscates the fact that the

plantation oppression is an evolution of feudal oppression. Oppression has always existed

in human societies, but humanity is slowly becoming more aware of that fact. Perhaps

humanity can finally do something about that.

208 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Empire, 420.

78

Works Cited:

Archives Accessed:

Andrew Johnson Papers. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Collection 0121. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.

Freedmen and Southern Society Project, sec 263. National Archives, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

M803 and Letters Received 15, Group 105. National Archives, Washington D.C.

PHAR 093 H. F36 1838. State Library of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, PA.

Speeches Referenced:

Brown, John. “Statement to the Court,” November, 2, 1859. New York Herald (New York, New York), November 3rd, 1859.

Calhoun, John C. "Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, Delivered in the Senate, February 6th, 1837," in Richard R. Cralle, ed., Speeches of John C. Calhoun, Delivered in the House of Representatives and in the Senate of the United States (New D. Appleton, 1853), 625-33.

Capt. Charles C. Soule to Maj. Gen'l. O. O. Howard, 12 June 1865, enclosing an address “To the Freed People of Orangeburg District dated June 1865.” Letters Received, series 15, Washington Headquarters, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, & Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105, National Archives.

Chase, Salmon. Speech to the people of Ohio, 1854. Salmon P. Chase Papers (Collection 0121), The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Johnson, Andrew. “Speech in Washington.” February 22, 1866.

Lincoln, Abraham. “The Gettysburg Address.” November 19, 1863, in Basler, ed, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol 7, 23, 1953.

Stevens, Thaddeus. “Speech in Lancaster Pennsylvania.” September 6, 1865.

Stevens, Thaddeus. “Speech of Thaddeus Stevens, ESQ, In favor of the bill to establish a school of arts in the city of Philadelphia, and to endow the colleges and academies of Pennsylvania.” Harrisburg, PA, 1838.

Sumner, Charles. “The Barbarism of Slavery.” June 4, 1860. Published in pamphlet form, Washington, D.C: Thaddeus Hyatt, 1860.

79

Governmental Documents Referenced:

An act to continue in force and to amend “An Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees,” and for other Purposes. July 16, 1866 (1865, Ch. 60.) Vol. xiii. P. 507.

“An act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees.” published in, U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13 (Boston, Massachusetts, 1866), pp. 507-509.

Appendix to the Congressional Globe

Dred Scott v Sandford, 60 US 393, (1857).

“Gag Rule” Resolution, December 21, 1837.

Index to the Congressional Globe

Johnson, Andrew. Amnesty Proclamation, May 29, 1865. May 29, 1865. Andrew Johnson Papers, Library of Congress, 7A.

Johnson, Andrew. “Veto of the Second Freedmen’s Bureau Bill.” February 19, 1866.

Labor Contracts, sec 263. Arkansas Assistant Commissioner. Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives, Washington D.C.; filed as A-2493 in Freedmen and Southern Society project files. University of Maryland, College Park.

Letter from Joseph Warren to Stuart Eldridge on the Report of Schools in Vicksburg, November 15, 1865. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M803, Roll 25). General Records, Letters Sent and Received of The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

MS, The Black Code. An act to amend the vagrant laws of the State, 1865.

MS, The Black Code. An act to confer civil rights on freedmen, and for other purposes, 1865.

MS, The Black Code. An act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, 1865.

“Public Debt Resolution,” December 5, 1865.

U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIII.

80

U.S. Constitution, Amendment XIV.

Newspapers:

Associated Press. “The Freedmen’s Bureau Redivivus?” The Charleston Daily News (Charleston, SC), April 6, 1870.

Bingham, Joseph. “Articles on the Origin and History of the Differences between the Northern and Southern Sections of the United States which have resulted in a Civil War.” Indiana State Sentinel (Indianapolis, IN), July 17, 1861.

Boardman, J.L. “The Ku-Klux Klan in Texas.” The Highland Weekly News (Hillsboro, OH), December 31, 1868.

Brown, S.L. . “The Close of the Freedmen’s Bureau.” The New Orleans Republican (New Orleans, LA), May 25, 1872.

Donnelly, I. . “Reform of the Indian System: Speech of Hon. I. Donnelly.” The St Cloud Democrat (St. Cloud, MN), March 9, 1865.

Durisoe, William. “Non-interference the First Remedy.” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), December 14, 1859.

Durisoe, William. “Revival of the Slave Trade-No. VII.” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield. SC), March 16, 1859.

Durisoe, William. “The North and old John Brown.” The Edgefield Advertiser (Edgefield, SC), December 14, 1859.

Featherston, J.C.C and James Hoyt. “The Ku-Klux Klan – What is it?” The Anderson Intelligencer (Anderson, SC), April 29, 1868.

Grant, Ulysses. “Gen Grant’s Report to the Presidency.” published in The Spirit of Democracy (Columbus, OH), December 27, 1865.

Greeley, Horace. “Free Labor versus Slave Labor.” New York Daily Tribune (New York, NY), February 26, 1856.

Harding, J. . “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” The Evening Telegraph (Philadelphia, PA), August 4, 1868.

Hatch, T.B.R. . “Bureau Lien.” originally printed in The New Orleans Bulletin (New Orleans, LA), February 1, 1868, reprinted in The Gazette and Comet (Baton Rouge, LA), February 6, 1868.

Holden, W.W. . “Ad Volerum Taxation, Speech of Mr. Bledsoe.” The North Carolina

81

Standard (Raleigh, NC), March 16, 1859.

Holden, W. W. .“Mr. Venable’s Address, Delivered before the Education Society at Wake Forest College, at the Commencement in June, 1846.” The North Carolina Standard (Raleigh, NC), September 9, 1846.

Howard, Oliver. “Circular Letter.” reprinted in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), June 13, 1865.

Keating, John M. and Matthew Gallaway. “The Great Want of Memphis.” The Memphis Daily Appeal (Memphis, TN), February 15, 1872.

Perkins, T.O., “Labor.” The Grand River Times (Grand Haven, MI), May 26, 1852.

Phillips, Wendell. “Editorial.” The Antislavery Standard (Boston, MA), May 20, 1865.

Plumb, P.B. and R.J. Hinton. “Labor – Capital – Exchange.” The Kanzas News (Emporia, KS), November 28, 1857.

Polk, James. “President’s Message to Congress.” The Portage Sentinel (Ravenna, OH), December 16, 1846.

Price, Alfred and David Fulton. “Conduct of the Agents.” The Wilmington Journal (Raleigh, NC), May 17, 1866.

Price, Alfred and David Fulton. “More and Convincing Proof of Millard Fillmore’s Abolitionism.” Wilmington Journal (Wilmington, NC), October 30, 1848.

Scanland, J.M. . “Circular No. 1.” January 23, 1868, printed in The Natchitoches Spectator (Natchitoches, LA), February 6, 1868.

Scanland, J.M. . “Editorial.” The Natchitoches Spectator (Natchitoches, LA), February 6, 1868.

Selby, Julian. “Developing our Resources.” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), October 5, 1865.

Selby, Julian. “Honoring our Gallant Dead.” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), May 23, 1866.

Selby, Julian. “President Johnson and General Grant.” The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), December 27, 1865.

Selby, Julian. “The Bureau in South Carolina.” originally printed in The New York Herald-Tribune (New York, NY), reprinted in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), May 23, 1866.

82

Selby, Julian. “The Necessity of regaining the old Cotton Crops.” printed in The New York Times (New York, NY), August 3rd, 1865, reprinted in The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC), August 17, 1865.

Seward, William. “Great Speech of Senator Seward. Delivered in the United States Senate: Wednesday, February 29th, 1860.” The Cass County Republican (Dowagiac, MI), March 15, 1860.

Seward, William. “Speech of Wm. H. Seward, of New York, on the Lecompton Constitution.” The Kanzas News (Emporia, Kansas), March 27, 1858.

Stevens, Thaddeus. ”Reconstruction.” printed in the Lancaster Evening Express (Lancaster, PA), September 8, 1865.

Stewart, Anthony. “Extracts from the Speech of Hon A. Stewart.” The Somerset Herald. And

Farmers’ and Mechanics’ Register (Somerset, PA), Tuesday, August 18, 1846.

Stuart, Carlos. “Labor; its Wants, Interests, and Duties.” printed in Spirit of the Times (Ironton, OH), March 27, 1857.

Torre, Peter. “Is Southern Society Worth Preserving?” The Southern Quarterly Review, n.s. 3 (1851), 217.

Waud, Alfred. “The Freedmen’s Bureau.” Harper’s Weekly (New York, NY), July 25, 1868.

Other Primary Documents:

“Republican Party Platform of 1856.” Philadelphia, PA, June 18, 1856.

“American Party Platform of 1856.” Philadelphia, PA, February 25, 1856.

Franklin, Benjamin. Poor Richard Improved. 1758.

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980, digitized by Dave Gowan for IBook, originally published, 1689.

Mackay, Charles. “A Plain Man’s Philosophy.” 1859.

Tourgeé, Albion. A Fool’s Errand. Originally published in New York by Ford’s, Howard & Hulbert, 1867, republished New York, New York: Harper’s Torchbooks, 1966.

U.S., Statutes at Large, Treaties and Proclamations of the United States of America, vol. 13. Boston, Massachusetts, 1866, pp. 507-509.

83

Secondary Sources:

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cimbala, Paul. Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Cox, Lwanda and John H. Cox. Eds, Reconstruction, the Negro, and the New South. New York, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Du Bois, W.E.B.. Black Reconstruction in America. New York, New York: The Free Press, 1998.

Dunning, William Archibald. Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877. New York, New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907.

Egerton, Douglas. The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s most Progressive Era. New York, New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York, New York: Vintage Books, 2005.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, republished in 1995.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth and Eugene Genovese. Slavery in White and Black. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Hofstadter, Richard. “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” found in Harper’s Magazine, November, 1964.

Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Oubre, Claude. Forty Acres and a Mule. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.

84

Potter, David M.. “The Impending Crisis.” New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishing, 1976.

Powell, Lawrence. New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction. New York, New York: Fordham University Press, 1998.

Sewell, Richard. Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976.

Stampp, Kenneth. The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877. New York, NY: Vintage books, 1965.

Walker, Daniel Howe. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Weber, Max. The Spirit of Capitalism. 1905.

Web Page:

DeGrief, Dan, “Purchasing Power Calculator”, in measuringworth.com, Accessed April 14, 2015, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php

85

http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/relativevalue.php

Labor Ideologies and the Freedmen's Bureau

Documents

Transcript of Labor Ideologies and the Freedmen's Bureau