Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General

11. The Gathering of Evil Birds

t the center of any discussion of Reconstruction are the questions posed by Frederick Douglass. Was the enormous war fought so heroically by so many Americans to have no value to liberty or civilization? Would those who fought to preserve slavery in the South be given status in the region’s future as if nothing had happened? In peace, Douglass predicted, “the nation must fall or flourish with the Negro”: Custom, manners, morals, religion, are all on its side everywhere in the South; and when you add the ignorance and servility of the ex-slave to the intelligence and accustomed authority of the master, you have the conditions , not out of which slavery will again grow, but under which it is impossible for the Federal government to wholly destroy it, unless the Federal government be armed with despotic power, to blot out State authority, and to station a Federal officer at every crossroad. This, of course, cannot be done, and ought not even if it could. The true way and the easiest way is to make our government entirely consistent with itself, and give to every loyal citizen the elective franchise a right and power which will be ever-present, and will form a wall of fire for his protection.1 While Douglass was writing of the liberty and civilization of free blacks, others saw Reconstruction as a means of reforming Southern white political and fi-  11 THE GATHERING OF EVIL BIRDS A . Douglass, “Reconstruction,” Atlantic Monthly  (): . nancial customs. Reconstruction began as a political reformation but was expanded by radicals to include a last—and in some ways, desperate—chance to change the social and economic policy of the entire country. The federal government had spent nearly $ billion fighting the war. This spending had completed the mechanization of the industrial North. Reconstruction sought change of Southern social and political institutions, but also change of the nation ’s priorities—from those of imported capital fueling an agrarian society to those of a nation building its own financial resources in order to feed the visions of the new industries of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Cooke, and the thousands of entrepreneurs with their own aspirations in the wake of the super-rich. So long as they could influence government, these entrepreneurs were not about to let America slide back into a system of small shops and farms. Since all change becomes political at some point, the fight over how to regulate capital expansion ushered in a Gilded Age for American entrepreneurs. The Ewings ’ postwar cotton venture was but a small example. But this change also created stark political differences between America’s very rich and very poor. To some congressional leaders, reform of Southern capital formation and American banking dependence on Great Britain had to occur simultaneously even at the risk of despotism. Ewingville would figure significantly in this political debate.2 Within a week of the Grand Review in , Andrew Johnson began his own vision of Reconstruction by granting amnesty to all Southerners except the senior officials, on condition they sign and file a written loyalty oath with the government . When he later ordered that the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina be returned to their white owners and vetoed the Freedmen’s Act, he declared war on Republican radicalism. It was clear that Lincoln no longer was in the White House. Hugh Ewing later wrote that the Freedmen’s veto was a “good” one.3 The radicals were aghast. The blood spilled in Northern regiments during the war was being squandered by that Tennessean in the White House. Stanton was especially unnerved and turned his vitriol on the man in whose cabinet he served. Postwar policies of the defeated Southern states would not be made by slave owners while Stanton had any say in Washington.4 Perhaps the most unusual of Johnson’s allies was Kansas senator Jim Lane. The  . Foner, Reconstruction, –. . Ewing, “Autobiography,” ; contrast the work of the Freedman’s Bureau, O.R. ::, ::, with Johnson’s amnesty policy at O.R. ::. . Curry, Radicalism, iv. THE GATHERING OF EVIL BIRDS  . Lane’s problems from Plummer, Frontier Governor, , . . Ewing, “Autobiography,” ; Plummer, Frontier Governor, ; Davis, Bicentennial History, . THOMAS EWING JR. consummate radical abolitionist saw in the Freedmen’s Act both a loss of federalism and social integration of the races, both concepts he opposed. Lane’s support for Johnson’s veto of the Freedmen’s Act was extremely...