Negroes in the First and Second Reconstructions of the South

NEGROES IN THE FIRST AND SECOND RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE SOUTH August Meier "Revolutions never go backwards": so declared the editors of the first Negro daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, late in 1864.1 Northern troops had occupied the city and much of Louisiana as early as 1862, and the Tribune insisted that the logical second step, after crushing the slaveholders' rebellion, was that the national government divide their plantations among the freedmen. Washington failed to act upon this proposal, and seventy years later W. E. B. DuBois, in assessing the reconstruction experience, perceived it as a revolution that had indeed gone backwards. It had gone backwards, he held, mainly because Congress had failed to press forward to the logical corollary of its reconstruction program; the distribution of the former slaveowners' lands among the Negroes.2 More recently, Willie Lee Rose, though starting from a different philosophy of history, arrived at rather similar conclusions. In her volume on the South Carolina Sea Island Negroes during the Civil War she describes how the military authorities divided many of the Sea Island plantations among the freedmen. President Andrew Johnson, however, returned the lands to the former owners, and Congress failed to intervene. Mrs. Rose pithily sums up this sequence of events by entitling the last chapter of her book "Revolutions May Go Backwards."3 Nevertheless, in the face of such distinguished scholarly opinion, I would like to suggest that what occurred during reconstruction was really not a genuine revolution, not even an abortive one. Consider the following example. In Georgia, in April, 1868, slightly a year after the passage of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, a constitution drawn up under the procedures required by Congress was ratified by the voters, and new officials were elected. The process of reconstruction was supposedly completed when, in July, the legis1 New Orleans Tribune, Nov. 29, 1864. This paper was one of a series read at Roosevelt University in the fall of 1965, marking the centennial of reconstruction. 2 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935). 3 Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964). 114 lature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and mihtary authority was withdrawn. The new state government, however, was no genuinely "radical" regime. Just six weeks later the legislature expelled its Negro members, on the grounds that Negroes, though guaranteed the right to vote, had not been specifically made eligible for office.4 Before they departed, one of the Negro representatives, Henry M. Turner, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and formerly a Civil War chaplain and Freedmen's Bureau agent, delivered a ringing, sarcastic speech, defiantly expressing his vision of a democratic America. He would not, he said, behave as some of his thirty-one colored colleagues had, and attempt to retain his seat by appealing to the magnanimity of the white legislators. He would not, "fawn or cringe before any party nor stoop to beg them for my rights," like "slaves begging under the lash. I am here to defend my rights, and to hurl thunderbolts at the men who would dare to cross the threshold of my manhood. ... I was not aware that there was in the character of the [Anglo-Saxon] race so much cowardice, . . . pusillanimity . . . [and] treachery." It was the Negroes who had "set the ball of loyalty rolling in the State of Georgia . . . and [yet] there are persons in this legislature, today, who are ready to spit their poison in my face, while they themselves . . . opposed the ratification of the Constitution. They question my right to a seat in this body." Then, in rhetoric typical of the era, Turner stated the Negro's claims. The great question is this. Am I a man? If I am such, I claim the rights of a man. Am I not a man because I happen to be of darker hue than honorable gentlemen around me? . . . Why, sir, though we are not white, we have accomplished much. We have pioneered civilization here; we have built up your country; we have worked in your fields, and garnered your harvest, for two hundred and fifty years. And what do we ask of you in return...