South advocated in General Cobb's letter. General Carl Schurz, President Johnson's special commissioner to the South to study political and social conditions there, reported (December, 1865): "Treason does, under existing circumstances, not appear odious in the South. The people are not impressed with any sense of its criminality. . . . There is as yet among the Southern people an utter lack of national feeling." " The committee of fifteen appointed by Congress (December, 1865), "to inquire into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they or any of them are entitled to be represented in either House of Congress," reported in June, 1866, that it would be "folly and madness" to permit "conquered enemies... at their own pleasure and on their own terms, to participate in making laws for their conquerors. . . . That before allowing such representation, adequate security for future peace and safety should be required; that this can be found only in such changes in the organic law as shall 1 Senate Executive Documents, 39th Congress, 1st session, Vol. I, No. 2, p. 13. A good example of the defiant submission of the Southern leaders is found in a letter of the gallant General Wade Hampton of South Carolina to President Johnson (1866). "The South unequivocally accepts the situation in which she is placed. . . . She intends to abide by the laws of the land honestly . . . and to keep her word sacredly, and I assert that the North has no right to demand more of her. You have no right to ask or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of her best blood and all her treasure. Nor can you believe her to be so unutterably hypocritical, so base, as to declare that the flag of the Union has already usurped in her heart the place which has so long been sacred to the Southern Cross.' The men at the South who make such professions are renegades and traitors, and they will surely betray you if you trust them. But the brave men who fought to the last in a cause which they believed and still believe to have been a just one ... will prove true to their obligations." - Quoted by W. L. Fleming: Documentary History of Reconstruction, Vol. I, p. 66. determine the civil rights and privileges of all citizens in all parts of the republic, . . . shall fix a stigma upon treason, and protect the loyal people against future claims for the expenses incurred in support of rebellion and for manumitted slaves."1 Relying on these reports and exasperated by President Johnson's coarse attacks on them in public speeches for their interference with his policy toward the South, the leaders of the thirty-ninth Congress took the matter of reconstruction wholly into their own hands and undid the entire work of the "Johnson governments" by the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. AN ACT TO PROVIDE FOR THE MORE EFFICIENT Whereas no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas; and whereas it is necessary that peace and good order should be enforced in said States, until loyal republican State governments can be legally established: Therefore Be it enacted. . . . That said rebel States shall be divided into military districts and made subject to the military authority of the United States as hereinafter prescribed, and for that purpose Virginia shall constitute the first district; North Carolina and South Carolina the second district; Georgia, Alabama, and Florida the third district; Mississippi and Arkansas the fourth district; and Louisiana and Texas the fifth district; Sec. 2. . . . That it shall be the duty of the President to assign to the command of each of said districts an officer of the army, not below the rank of brigadier-general, and to detail a sufficient military force to enable such officer to perform his duties and enforce his authority within the district to which he is assigned. 1 House Reports, 39th Congress, 1st session, Vol. II, No. 30, Pp. xx-xxi. ... Sec. 3. That it shall be the duty of each officer assigned as aforesaid, to protect all persons in their right of person and property; to suppress insurrection, disorder, and violence, and to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the public peace and criminals; and to this end he may allow local civil tribunals to take jurisdiction of and to try offenders, or, when in his judgment it may be necessary for the trial of offenders, he shall have power to organize military commissions or tribunals for that purpose, and all interference under color of State authority with the exercise of military authority under this act, shall be null and void. Sec. 4. . . . That all persons put under military arrest by virtue of this act shall be tried without unnecessary delay, and no cruel or unusual punishment shall be inflicted, and no sentence ... affecting the life or liberty of any person shall be executed until it is approved by the officer in command of the district, and ... no sentence of death under the provisions of this act shall be carried into effect without the approval of the President. Sec. 5. . . . That when the people of any one of said rebel States shall have formed a constitution of government in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects, framed by a convention of delegates elected by the male citizens of said State, twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in said State for one year previous to the day of such election, except such as may be disfranchised for participation in the rebellion, or for felony at common law, and when such Constitution shall provide that the elective franchise shall be enjoyed by all such persons as have the qualifications herein stated for electors of delegates, and when such constitutions shall be ratified by a majority of the persons voting on the question of ratification who are qualified as electors for delegates, and when such constitution shall have been submitted to Congress for examination and approval, and Congress shall have approved the same, and when said State, by a vote of its legislature elected under said constitution, shall have adapted the amendment to the Constitution of the United States, proposed by the thirtyninth Congress, and known as article fourteen, and when said article shall have become part of the Constitution of the United States, said State shall be declared entitled to representation in Congress, and senators and representatives shall be admitted therefrom on their taking the oath prescribed by law, and then and thereafter the preceding sections of this act shall be inoperative in said State: Provided, That no person excluded from the privilege of holding office by said proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States,1 shall be eligible to election as a member of the convention to frame a constitution for any of said rebel States, nor shall any such person rate for members of such convention. . . Klux testi [487] Disqualified for office-holding by the Fourteenth Amend- 102. Kument, disfranchised and subjected to the rule of the negro mony, 1871 by the Reconstruction Act, the whites of the South resorted to extra-legal methods for maintaining their supremacy. Secret societies under various names (Ku-Klux Klans, Knights of the White Camelia, Pale Faces, Councils of Safety, White Leagues, etc.) were founded in all the states of the South to thwart the execution of the Reconstruction Acts by terrorizing the negroes who had political ambitions, and harrying the scalawag and the carpetbagger out of Dixie. At the request of President Grant, Congress, on April 20, 1871, passed the "Ku Klux Act," to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment; and a joint committee, composed of fourteen representatives and seven senators, was appointed "to inquire into the condition of the late insurrectionary States, so far as regards the execution of the laws and the safety of the lives and property of the citizens of the United States (see Amendment XIV, Sect. I). The report of the committee (February 19, 1872), with the testimony of witnesses 1 The classes of persons disqualified are enumerated in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. examined both in Washington and by a subcommittee in the South, fills thirteen closely printed volumes, published by the Government Printing Office. The following extracts are from the testimony of General John B. Gordon 1 and a negro, Scipio Eager, two of the one hundred and fortyeight witnesses from the state of Georgia. Washington D.C. July 27, 1871 JOHN B. GORDON, sworn and examined. Question. The object we had in calling you as a witness was to get from you if possible a general view of the condition of the State of Georgia, to ascertain whether property and life are protected there, whether any crimes have been committed by disguised men. From your general knowledge of affairs in that State, we desire you to tell us whatever will enable the committee to understand fully the condition of affairs in Georgia. . . . Answer. . . . I want to say very distinctly that our people have not entertained animosity and bitterness toward the troops; our feelings are directed toward these camp-followers and men who have come in our midst since the war men without character and without intelligence, except a certain sort of shrewdness by which they have been enabled to impose themselves upon the negro and acquire gain, some of them very much gain, out of the pittances they have been able to get out of the negro one way and another. Some of them have gotten into office from counties where they never were but once or twice during the whole canvass. . . . I know of one or two members of the legislature who never resided at all in the counties from which they were sent, except a few days before the election. My own impression, from what I have seen in Georgia, is that the 1 Gordon was candidate for Governor of Georgia in 1868. He had been a valuable officer in Lee's army, and was "in at the death" at Appomattox. It was his reply to Lee's messenger on the morning of April 9, 1865, "Tell General Lee that I have fought my corps to a frazzle," that determined the Southern commander to surrender. Quoted by J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. V, p. 125. |