Dixie After the War

CHAPTER XVIII

The Freedmen’s Bureau

Federal authorities had a terrific problem to deal with in four millions of slaves suddenly let loose. Military commanders found themselves between the devil and the deep sea.

Varied instructions were given to bring order out of chaos. “Freedmen that will use any disrespectful language to their former masters will be severely punished,” is part of a ukase issued by Captain Nunan, at Milledgeville, in fervent if distracted effort for the general weal. By action if not by order, some others settled the matter this way: “Former masters that will use any disrespectful language to their former slaves will be severely punished”; as witness the case where a venerable lady, bearing in her own and that of her husband two of the proudest names in her State, was marched through the streets to answer before a military tribunal the charge of having used offensive language to her cook.

With hordes of negroes pilfering and pillaging, new rulers had an elephant on their hands. No vagrant laws enacted by Southern Legislatures in 1865-6 surpassed in severity many of the early military mandates with penalties for infraction. The strongest argument in palliation of the reconstruction acts is found in these laws which were construed into an attempt to re-enslave the negro. The South had no vagrant class before the war and was provided with no laws to meet conditions of vagrancy which followed emancipation with overwhelming force.

Comparing these laws with New England’s, we find that in many respects the former were modelled on the latter, from which the words “ball and chain,” “master and mistress” and the apprentice system, which Mr. Blaine declared so heinous, might well have been borrowed, though New England never faced so grave a vagrancy problem as that which confronted the South.

Negroes flocked to cities, thick as blackbirds. Federal commanders issued orders: “Keep negroes from the cities.” “The Government is feeding too many idlers.” “Make them stay on the plantations.” “Impress upon them the necessity of making a crop, or famine is imminent throughout the South.” “Do not let the young and able-bodied desert their children, sick, and aged.” As well call to order the wild things of the woods! In various places something like the old “patter-roller” system of slavery was adopted by the Federals, wandering negroes being required to show passes from employers, saying why they were abroad.

General Schofield’s Code for the Government of Freedmen in North Carolina (May, 1865) says: “Former masters are constituted guardians of minors in the absence of parents or other near relatives capable of supporting them.” The Radicals made great capital out of a similar provision in Southern vagrancy laws.

Accounts of confusion worse confounded wrung this from the “New York Times” (May 17, 1865): “The horse-stealing, lemonade and cake-vending phase of freedom is destined to brief existence. The negro misunderstands the motives which made the most laborious, hard-working people on the face of the globe clamour for his emancipation. You are free, Sambo, but you must work. Be virtuous, too, O Dinah! ‘Whew! Gor Almighty! bress my soul!’”

The “Chicago Times” (July 7, 1865) gives a Western view: “There is chance in this country for philanthropy, a good opening for abolitionists. It is to relieve twenty-eight millions of whites held in cruel bondage by four million blacks, a bondage which retards our growth, distracts our thoughts, absorbs our efforts, drives us to war, ruptures our government, disturbs our tranquillity, and threatens direfully our future. There never was such a race of slaves as we; there never was another people ground so completely in the dust as this nation. Our negro masters crack their whips over our legislators and our religion.”

The Freedmen’s Bureau was created March 3, 1865, for the care and supervision of negroes in Federal lines. Branches were rapidly established throughout the South and invested with almost unlimited powers in matters concerning freedmen. An agency’s efficiency depended upon the agent’s personality. If he were discreet and self-respecting, its influence was wholesome; if he were the reverse, it was a curse. If he were inclined to peculate, the agency gave opportunity; if he were cruel – well, negroes who were hung up by the thumbs, or well annointed with molasses and tied out where flies could find them had opinions.

I recall two stories which show how wide a divergence there might be between the operations of two stations. A planter went to the agent in his vicinity and said: “Captain, I don’t know what to do with the darkeys on my place. They will not work, and are committing depredations on myself and neighbours.” The agent went out and addressed the negroes: “Men, what makes you think you can live without work? The Government is not going to support any people in idleness on account of their complexions. I shall not issue food to another of you. I have charged this planter to bring before me any case of stealing. If you stay on this plantation, you are to work for the owner.”

In a week, the planter reported that they still refused to labour or to leave; property was disappearing, wanton damage was being done; but it was impossible to spot thieves and vandals. The agent, a man of war, went up in a hurry, and his language made the air blue! “If I come again,” was his parting salutation, “I’ll bring my cannon, and if you don’t hoe, plow, or do whatever is required, I’ll blow you all to pieces!” They went to work.

A gentleman of Fauquier tells me: “When I got home from prison, July, 1865, I found good feelings existing between whites and their former slaves; everything was going on as before the war except that negroes were free and received wages. After a while there came down a Bureau Agent who declared all contracts null and void and that no negro should work for a white except under contract written and approved by him. This demoralised the negroes and engendered distrust of whites.”

“If a large planter was making contracts,” I heard Mr. Martin, of the Tennessee Legislature, relate, “the agent would intermeddle. I had to make all mine in the presence of one. These agents had to be bribed to do a white man justice. A negro would not readily get into trouble with a gentleman of means and position when he would make short work of shooting a poor white. Yet the former had owned slaves and the latter had not.”

Planters, making contracts, might have to journey from remote points (sometimes a distance of fifty miles over bad roads), wherever a Bureau was located, whites and blacks suffering expense, and loss of time. Both had to fee the agent. A contract binding on the white was not binding on the negro, who was irresponsible. If the Bureau wrought much mischief, it also wrought good, for there were some whites ready to take advantage of the negro’s ignorance in driving hard bargains with him; sorrowfully be it said, if able to tip the agent, they would usually be able to drive the hard bargain.

After examination for the Government into Bureau operations, Generals Fullerton and Steedman reported, May, 1866: “Negroes regard the Bureau as an indication that people of the North look upon the whites here as their natural enemies, which is calculated to excite suspicion and bad feeling. Only the worthless and idle ask interference, the industrious do not apply. The effect produced by a certain class of agents, is bitterness and antagonism between whites and freedmen, a growing prejudice on the part of planters to the Government and expectations on the part of freedmen that can never be realised. Where there has been no such interference or bad advice given, there is a growing feeling of kindness between races and good order and harmony prevail.” They condemned the “arbitrary, unnecessary and offensive interference by the agents with the relations of the Southern planters and their freedmen.”

General Grant had reported (Dec. 18, 1865) to President Johnson, after a Southern tour: “The belief widely spread among freedmen that the lands of former owners will, at least in part, be divided among them, has come through agents of this Bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts.”

Whether agents originated or simply winked at the red, white and blue stick enterprise, I am unable to say. Into a neighborhood would come strangers from the North, seeking private interviews with negroes possessing a little cash or having access to somebody else’s cash; to these would be shown, with pledges of secrecy, packages of red, white and blue sticks, four to each package. “Get up before light on such a date, plant a stick at the four corners of any piece of land not over a mile square, and the land is yours. Be wary, or the rebels will get ahead of you.”

Packages were five dollars each. One gentleman found a set for which he had lent part of the purchase money planted on his land. If a negro had not the whole sum, the seller would “trust” him for the balance till he “should come into possession of the land.”

Generals Fullerton and Steedman advised discontinuance of the Bureau in Virginia; and some similar recommendation must have accompanied the report for Florida and the Carolinas which contained such revelations as this about the Trent River Settlement, where 4,000 blacks lived in “deplorable condition” under the superintendency of Rev. Mr. Fitz, formerly U. S. A. Chaplain. “Four intelligent Northern ladies,” teaching school in the Settlement, witnessed the harsh treatment of negroes by Mr. Fitz, such as suspension by the thumbs for hours; imprisonment of children for playing on the Sabbath; making negroes pay for huts; taxing them; turning them out on the streets. Interesting statements were given in regard to the “planting officials” who impressed negroes to work lands under such overseers as few Southern masters (outside of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”) would have permitted to drive negroes they owned, the officials reaping profits.

The Bureau had ways of making whites know their place. One could gather a book of stories like this, told me recently by an aged lady, whose name I can give to any one entitled to ask: “Captain B., of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a very hard man. He took up farms around and put negroes on them. We had a large place; he held that over a year and everything was destroyed. Saturdays, Captain B. would send many negroes out there – and it was pandemonium! My husband was in prison. My father was eighty; he would not complain, but I would. We went to the Bureau repeatedly about the outrages. Captain B. was obsequious, offered father wine; but he did not stop the outrages. Once he asked: ‘Have you not had any remuneration for your place?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘and we are not asking it. We only beg you to make the negroes you send out there behave decently.’ He said he would do anything for us, but did nothing; at last, I went direct to General Stoneman, and he helped us.”

Not long after Generals Grant’s, Fullerton’s, and Steedman’s reports, Congress enlarged the powers of the Bureau. Coincident with this, the negro became a voter, the Bureau a political machine, the agent a candidate. The Bureau had been active in securing negro enfranchisement. It was natural that ambitious agents should send hair-raising stories North of the Southerner’s guile, cruelty and injustice, and touching ones of the negro’s heavenly-mindedness in general and of his fitness to be an elector and law-maker in particular; all proving the propriety and necessity of his possession of the ballot for self-protection and defense.

In signal instances, the Bureau became the negro’s protector in crime, as when its officials demanded at one time of Governor Throckmorton, of Texas, pardon and release of two hundred and twenty-seven negroes from the penitentiary, some of whom had been confined for burglary, arson, rape, murder.

The Bureau did not in the end escape condemnation from those for whom it was created, and who, on acquisition of the ballot, became its “spoiled darlings.” “De ossifers eat up all de niggers’ rations, steal all dey money, w’ar all dey Sunday clo’se,” said Hodges, of Princess Anne, in Virginia’s Black and Tan Convention. The failure of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank was a scandal costing pain and humiliation to all honest Northerners connected with the institution, and many a negro his little hoard and his disposition to accumulate.

It is not fair to overlook benefits conferred by the Bureau because it failed to perform the one great and fine task it might have accomplished, as the freedman’s first monitor, in teaching him that freedom enlarges responsibility and brings no exemption from toil. If much harm, great good was also done in distribution of Government rations, in which whites sometimes received share with blacks. In numbers of places, both races found the agent a sturdy friend and wise counsellor.17

No one who knows General O. O. Howard, who was Commissioner, can, I think, doubt the sincerity and purity of purpose which animated him and scores of his subordinates. From the start, the Bureau must have been a difficult organization to handle; once the negro entered into count as a possible or actual political factor, the combined wisdom of Solomon and Moses could not have made its administration a success nor fulfilled the Government’s benign intention in creating it.

CHAPTER XIX

The Prisoner of Fortress Monroe

An extract from a letter by Mrs. Robert E. Lee to Miss Mason, from Derwent, September 10, 1865, may interest my readers: “I have just received, dear Miss Em, a long letter from Mrs. Davis in reply to one of mine. She was in Augusta, Ga.; says she is confined to that State. She has sent her children to kindred in Canada. Says she knows nothing whatever of her husband, except what she has seen in the papers. Says any letter sent her under care of Mr. Schley will reach her safely. She writes very sadly, as she well may, for I know of no one so much to be pitied… She represents a most uncomfortable state of affairs in Augusta. No one, white or black, can be out after ten o’clock at night without a pass… We must wait God’s time to raise us up again. That will be the best time.” In a later letter, Mrs. Lee said: “I cannot help feeling uneasy about Mr. Davis. May God protect him, and grant him deliverance!”

The whole South was anxious about Mr. Davis. Those who had come in close touch with him felt a peculiar sympathy for him inspired by a side of his character not generally recognized, as his manner often conveyed an impression of coldness and sternness. Under his reserve, was an almost feminine tenderness revealed in many stories his close friends tell. Thus: One night, Judge Minor, to see the President on business of state, sat with him in the room of the “White House” where the telegraph wire came in at the window (now, Alabama Room in the Confederate Museum), when in stumbles little Joe, in night-gown, saying: “Papa, I want to say my prayers.” The President, caressing his child, despatched a message, answered Judge Minor’s immediate question, and saying, “Excuse me a moment,” led his little one’s devotions. He was of wide reading and wonderful memory, yet was ignorant of “Mother Goose” until he heard his children babbling the jingles. Mrs. Davis brought “Babes in the Wood” to his notice. He suffered from insomnia after visits to the hospitals; his wife would try to read him to sleep. One night she picked up the “Babes” as the one thing at hand, and was astonished to find the poem unknown to him; at the children’s desertion he rose, exclaiming: “Was there no one to help those poor tender babies? The thought is agonizing!” A part of his childhood was spent in a Kentucky monastery, where the good monks did not bethink themselves to teach him nursery rhymes.

There was the story of the soldier’s widow, to answer whose call the President left his breakfast unfinished. Mrs. Davis found him trying to comfort and to induce her to partake of a tray of delicacies sent in by his order. She was trying to find her husband’s body, and feared that as he was a poor private due aid might not be given her; she had been certain that she would receive scant attention from the Chief Magistrate. But he was telling her that the country’s strength and protection lay in her private soldier. “My father, Madam, was a private in the Revolution, and I am more proud of what he did for his country than if he had been an officer expecting the world’s praise. Tell your sorrows to my wife. She will take you in her carriage wherever you wish to go, and aid you all she can.”

Dr. Craven, Mr. Davis’ Federal physician at Fortress Monroe, testifies in his book to his patient’s unusual depth and quickness of sympathy: “Despite a certain exterior cynicism of manner, no patient ever crossed my path who, suffering so much himself, appeared to feel so warmly and tenderly for others.” In Confederate hospitals, he had not limited pity to wearers of the gray. A “White House” guest told me of his robbing his scant table more than once for a sick Federal who had served with him in Mexico. Another laughingly remarked: “I don’t see how he managed to rob his table of a delicacy. When I sat down to it, it had none to spare. Yet certainly he might have kept a bountiful board, for Government stores were accessible to Government officials, and the President might have had first choice in purchasing blockade goods. But the simplicity of our White House regime was an object-lesson. I recall seeing Mr. Davis in home-spun, home-made clothes at State receptions. That required very positive patriotism if one could do better! ‘Do look at Mr. Davis!’ Mrs. Davis whispered, ‘He will wear those clothes, and they look lop-sided!’ Their deficiencies were more noticeable because he was so polished and elegant.”

One of the faithful shows me in her scrap-book a dispatch, of May 25, 1865, in the “Philadelphia Inquirer”: “Jeff does not pine in solitude. An officer and two soldiers remain continually in the cell with him.” And then points to these words from the pen of Hugh McCulloch, Mr. Davis’ visitor from Washington: “He had the bearing of a brave and high-born gentleman, who, knowing he would have been highly honoured if the Southern States had achieved their independence, would not and could not demean himself as a criminal because they had not.” She tells how men who had served under Mr. Davis in Mexico were among his guards at Fortress Monroe and showed him respect and kindness; and how almost everybody there grew to like him, he was so kind and courteous, and to the common soldier as to the strapped and starred officer.

Our ladies sent articles for his comfort to Mr. Davis, but knew not if he received them. Dr. Minnegerode’s efforts to see him were for a weary while without success. It seemed that his pastor, at least, might have had this privilege without question, especially such as Dr. Minnegerode, a man of signal peace and piety who had carried the consolations of religion and such comforts as he could collect in an almost famine-stricken city to Federals in prison. His first endeavour, a letter of request to President Johnson, met no response. Finally, appeal was made through Rev. Dr. Hall, Mr. Stanton’s pastor; to the committee of ladies waiting on him, Dr. Hall said he did not wish to read the petition, wished to have nothing to do with the matter; they besought, he read, and secured privilege of intercourse between pastor and prisoner.

For months, Mr. Davis was not allowed to correspond with his wife; was allowed no book but the Bible; June 8, 1865, Stanton reproved General Miles for permitting the prison chaplain to visit him. He was unprepared for his pastor’s coming, when Dr. Minnegerode, conducted by General Miles, entered his cell. In a sermon in St. Paul’s after Mr. Davis’ death, Dr. Minnegerode described this meeting. Mr. Davis had been removed (on medical insistence) from the casemate, and was “in an end room on the second floor of Carroll Hall, with a passage and windows on each side of the room, and an anteroom in front, separated by an open grated door – a sentinel on each passage and before the grated door of the anteroom; six eyes always upon him, day and night.” With these eyes looking on, the long-parted friends, the pastor and the prisoner, met.

When the question of Holy Communion was broached, Mr. Davis hesitated. “He was a pure and pious man, and felt the need and value of the means of grace. But could he take the Sacrament in the proper spirit – in a forgiving mind? He was too upright and conscientious to eat and drink unworthily – that is, not at peace with God and man, as far as in him lay.” In the afternoon, General Miles took the pastor to the prisoner again. Mr. Davis was ready to pray, “Father, forgive them!” “Then came the Communion. It was night. The fortress was so still that you could hear a pin fall. General Miles, with his back to us, leaned against the fire-place in the anteroom, his head on his hands – not moving; sentinels stood like statues.”

Of Mr. Davis’ treatment, Dr. Minnegerode said: “The officers were polite and sympathetic; the common soldiers – not one adopted the practice of high dignitaries who spoke sneeringly of him as ‘Jeff.’ Not one but spoke of him in a subdued and kindly tone as ‘Mr. Davis.’ I went whenever I could,” he adds, “to see my friend, and precious were the hours spent with that lowly, patient, God-fearing soul. It was in these private interviews that I learned to appreciate his noble, Christian character – ‘pure in heart,’ unselfish, without guile, and loyal unto death to his conscience and convictions.” The prisoner’s health failed fast. Officers thought it would be wise and humane to allow him more liberty; they knew that he not only had no desire to escape, but could not be induced to do so. He was begging for trial. The pastor, encouraged by Dr. Hall, called on Mr. Stanton. He had hoped to find the man of iron softened by sorrow; Mr. Stanton had lost a son; his remaining child was on his knees. His greeting was like ice – a bow and nothing more. The pastor expressed thanks for permit to visit the prisoner, and respectfully broaching the subject of Mr. Davis’ health, suggested that, as he neither would nor could escape, he be allowed the liberty of the fort. Mr. Stanton broke his silence: “It makes no difference what the state of Jeff Davis’ health is. His trial will come on, no doubt. Time enough till that settles it.” “It settled it in my leaving the presence of that man,” said the pastor. “I realise,” Dr. Craven protested, “the painful responsibilities of my position. If Mr. Davis were to die in prison, without trial, subject to such indignities as have been visited upon his attenuated frame, the world would form unjust conclusions, but conclusions with enough colour to pass them into history.” Arguments breathing similar appreciation of the situation began to appear in the Northern press, while men of prominence, advocating the application of the great principles of justice and humanity to his case, called for his release or trial; such lawyers as William B. Reed, of Philadelphia, and Charles O’Conor, of New York, tendered him free services. Strong friends were gathering around his wife. The Northern heart was waking. General Grant was one of those who used his influence to mitigate the severity of Mr. Davis’ imprisonment.