The Legacy of the American Civil War

Battle over the historical record is still being waged

General Robert E. Lee signing the papers of surrender at Appomattox, ending the American Civil War, but not the battle over its legacy. This is taken from part of a painting by Thomas Lowell.

   The historical record begins as the latest news, with the Five W’s of journalism employed: who, what, when, where, and why. There’s also the significance given to the report as to how important it is, what’s highlighted or left out, the part this news plays in the context of the times or larger picture, its role in the overall narrative of events, and after a while its legacy.

   History is told by people—trained in the art or not—and so has a subjective quality, including the serving of partisan or national interests or a particular cause or viewpoint. Winston Churchill reportedly said that “History is written by the victors,” although I’d add “Usually, but not always.”

   A case in point to my caveat has been the legacy of the American Civil War, with its shifting vantage points.

  The War between the States effectively ended on April 9, 1865 when General Robert E. Lee, head of the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Union commander General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. In keeping with President Abraham Lincoln’s policy “of letting them up easy,” best reflected with those words in his second inaugural address “With malice toward none, with charity for all”— Grant’s terms were lenient. 

    But while the fighting had ended after four bloody years and a half-million deaths, not to mention thousands more wounded or maimed, the conflict moved into a different set of battlefields.

    Perhaps one reason so many Americans have been and are still fascinated by the war is because the purported causes, rationales, reactions immediately afterward and in the decades since have seen a continued debate and dispute. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this aspect of the Civil War—the aftershocks and tremors—have continued to be felt.

   So here are a few historical notes, randomly selected, from the Chronicle of America—a book which reports the assorted events in American history as if they were breaking news, but as journalists do, also attempts to put these episodes in a larger context of what’s happening. Of course, unlike reporters, historians have the advantage of hindsight and know what has been considered significant

    --A year after Lee’s surrender the Ku Klux Klan is spreading across the South. Started shortly after the end of the fighting by former General Nathan B. Forrest, one of Lee’s cavalrymen, federal government officials believe the group’s purpose is to deny the newly freed slaves their rights. Forrest, on the other hand, claims the Klan “is nothing more than a congenial club of former Confederate veterans.”  

    --The Republican majority in Congress passes the Civil Rights Act in April of 1866 which grants citizenship to “all persons born in the U.S. and not subject to any foreign powers, excluding Indians not taxed.” The Act is mainly aimed at helping blacks, recently freed from slavery, and gives them the ability to make contracts, hold property, and testify in courts” and counters efforts to deny them these rights. The Act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, but overridden by the Senate.

    --That same year white mobs in Memphis rioted, reportedly in reaction to government measures, but with blacks as targets. Before order is restored, 46 people are dead and many black churches and schools burned.

   --In 1867 two schools of higher learning were founded—Morehouse College in Augusta, Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C.—the latter by General Oliver Otis Howard, a Civil War hero. Morehouse has three teachers and 37 students, with all of them being former slaves. Howard, meanwhile, held some of its classes in abandoned railroad cars due to a space shortage. “Both of the schools offer degrees in education and divinity to help make teachers and preachers out of former slaves,” the Chronicle noted.

    ---Lincoln’s hope for a more congenial Reconstruction ends when Republican majorities in Congress push aside President Andrew Johnson’s policies and institute stricter measures. Among the reasons for the harsher attitude by the Northern officials is that the newly-formed state governments in the South, many of them with whites back in power, have passed Black Codes which severely restrict the rights of the freedmen and refuse as well to pass the 14^th Amendment which would protect those rights. The riot in Memphis and an equally deadly one in New Orleans that saw many blacks killed lent support for this change in policy.

    --The 14^th Amendment is ratified on July 28, 1868. There are several facets to it, including a provision that bans the holding of national office by anyone who took the constitutional oath but fought against the union, but at it core is the proposition “Blacks are full citizens.” However, it only indirectly gives them the right to vote and take part in government. Needing passage of three-fourths of the states to be ratified and many Southern states refusing to do so, Congress issued those recalcitrant states an ultimatum: Ratify or the state wouldn’t be readmitted to the Union and the state’s Congressional delegation wouldn’t be seated.

    --A month earlier the Congressional Committee on Lawlessness and Violence released a survey that indicated 373 freed slaves have been killed by whites and that 10 whites had been killed by the freemen during the past two years.

    Apart from these figures, the Chronicle noted, it is widely believed that since the Civil War ended four years earlier many hundreds of others, besides this number, have been murdered—both blacks as well pro-abolition white Republicans—the latter referred to as carpetbaggers (those coming from the North) and scalawags (those from the South). The Ku Klux Klan is suspected of being the culprit in many of these killings. 

   --The Georgia legislature expels 28 black lawmakers on the grounds that blacks may have a right to vote under its new state constitution, passed as a provision for the state being readmitted to the Union, but they are not entitled to hold public office.   

    --The 15^th Amendment is passed by Congress on Feb. 27, 1869, the key provision being that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied… on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The reason for needing this addition to the U.S. Constitution, it was stated, was that the 14^th Amendment had only inferred the right to vote and Southern governmental officials had found ways to circumvent it.

     Supporters of women’s suffrage are upset that the word ‘sex’ was deleted. Backers of the proposed amendment, it seems, felt the cause of guaranteeing blacks the right to vote would be lost if women were added.

     --In December of 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first black member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He had been preceded in Congress by the Rev. Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi who had been seated in the Senate in February, having been appointed to the office by the legislature. Revels was selected to complete the term of former Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis who had left Congress to assumed the presidency of the Confederate States of American.

    --Congress passes legislation in 1871, aimed at counteracting efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups to prevent the registration, voting, and jury service by black citizens. Under the terms of the new law, the president would be authorized to use federal troops to enforce the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment. Lest it be lost on anyone, the sponsoring lawmakers called their bills the ‘Ku Klux Klan Acts.’ President U.S. Grant would make use of this power.

    --The shift in attitude and policy is evident when Congress allows the Freemen’s Bureau to die. Established in 1865, the federal agency had provided abandoned tracts of land or leased lots to the emancipated slaves for low rent. It also founded schools to teach the children and provided food and clothing as well as medical care. The agency also gave some protection to blacks threatened with eviction.

    On a side note, owners of the large plantations, no longer having slave labor to work their fields, were able over time to institute sharecropping which provided them a share of the profits—almost always under favorable terms—while the farmers—blacks and whites—did the hard work, took the risks, and usually were tied to the land with little opportunity to ‘get ahead’.

    --In May of 1877, newly-elected President Rutherford Hayes withdraw federal troops from the South, signaling the end of Reconstruction. Hayes, a Republican, had gained office over New York Gov. Samuel Tilden in a disputed election that was decided by an electoral commission. Tilden was within one electoral vote of being elected and also had won the popular vote; however, 20 electoral votes—all of them in Southern states—were in dispute. With an 8-7 majority on the commission and having promised Southern lawmakers he’d pull out the troops, Hayes won.

     The Chronicle, assessing the situation as if it were in real time, noted that “Just what effect the troop withdrawal will have on the ravaged South is uncertain, though it may ease tensions that have built up steadily since the war’s end. While called Reconstruction, the era was marked by destruction of the South as it had been. With the slaves freed, old plantations were all but destroyed. Northern ‘carpetbaggers’ teamed up with Southern ‘scalawags’ to run the states, sometimes corruptly. Taxes rose and property values feel.”

    Reconstruction also saw the violence perpetrated by groups like the Klan, the latter dressed in their white hooded outfits who, in the name of preserving the Southern way-of-life, frightened and on some occasion lynched the freed blacks and sought to scare off what they saw as Yankee intruders and those Southerners they viewed as traitors. The killings and destruction by mobs, resentful of what was happening and seeing blacks holding property or governmental office, was another hallmark of these post-war era.

   On a larger note, the region—no longer having the plantation-based wealth gained from slave labor and King Cotton—struggled to regain an economic foothold.

* * *

     Well, that’s one look at the historical record. Not complete to be sure. Certainly not reflective of the “Lost Cause” narrative that took hold later in the 19th century, including the mythologizing of the plantation way-of-life, the reverence that’s been paid to such Southern military leaders as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and even Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the demonization of Radical Congressional Republicans and the Northern governmental officials who oversaw the Reconstruction in the South.  Nor does it address the struggles of the white Southerners who’d seen their property destroyed during the war by Union armies and were under the occupation of those federal troops.

    Part of the attempted re-writing of history that has occurred was the claim that slavery was not the root cause of the war, but rather state rights (the South championing the cause of individual liberty against an overweening federal government). As we saw recently with Republican presidential candidate Nikki Hailey’s statement regarding this dueling version, the issue is still being debated.

     Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and commentator.