Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

and political order of the old Confederacy. Much of the new political leadership of Reconstruction came from white Southern Unionists and from Northern activists and soldiers who had settled in the South after the war. For almost a century after Reconstruction, the conventional view of these Northern reconstructors portrayed them as political vultures, a pack of opportunists and adventurers who hurriedly packed their belongings into cheap carpetbags for the trip South (hence the name “carpetbaggers”) and proceeded to pick the bones of the defeated South clean, while Southern white Unionists were dismissed as “scalawags” who betrayed the South in return for the corrupt spoils of Reconstruction government.

But the carpetbaggers were a much more diverse lot than the stereotype allowed: some, such as the Gideonites at Port Royal, South Carolina, were idealists and educators who wanted to improve the lives of the freedpeople and turn them into productive models of small-scale Republican farmers; some, such as Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, saw economic opportunities in the South, and for $500 bought a Florida orange grove that was soon producing an annual crop worth more than $2,500; others, like the New Yorker and general George Eliphaz Spencer, were simply following a pattern already established by prewar Northern investors, buying up Southern cotton and brokering its sale to a cotton-starved Europe for a whopping annual profit of $40,000; and still others, such as Captain John Emory Bryant of the 8th Maine, joined the Freedmen’s Bureau and moved from there into Georgia politics as one of the founders of the infant Georgia Republican Party.80

Many of the carpetbaggers, in fact, were actually welcomed by Southerners for the investment capital they brought into the war-scorched South. They came largely from the ranks of the same middle-class business and professionals who filled the ranks of the Republican Party. The carpetbaggers struck up political alliances with the disgruntled Southern scalawags who, like William Brownlow, blamed the South’s destruction on the planters, and were happy to engineer a new Republican political order in the South. Like the carpetbaggers, the scalawags were neither angels nor devils: many of them had been Southern Whigs in the 1840s and ’50s, while some had been born in the North but came South before the war to seek their fortunes, and still others had been anti-war dissidents.81

The carpetbaggers struck up an even more critical alliance with the freedmen of the South and with the tiny cadre of free Southern blacks who at first formed the core of black political leadership in the South. Once congressional Reconstruction torpedoed the Black Codes and secured the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, black voters entered into Southern political life in substantial numbers. More than 2,000 black men held political office, ranging from Hiram Revels, who took over Jefferson Davis’s old Mississippi Senate seat in 1870, and P. B. S. Pinch-back, the governor pro tem of Louisiana in 1872, all the way down the scale of office to sheriffs, registrars, and justices of the peace. Later critics of Reconstruction would ridicule these black officeholders as barefoot illiterates fresh from the cotton fields. In its “qualities of ignorance, corruption and depravity,” complained ex-Confederate congressman Ethelbert Barksdale in 1890, Mississippi’s Reconstruction constitutional convention “was … a fool’s paradise for the negroes,” and even the sympathetic New Yorker George Templeton Strong could not suppress a smirk over reports about “the enfranchised field hand, a phrase or two about the honorable member from Congo, and the intelligent boot-black who represents the county of Tackahoosho, and some stories of black voters putting their ballots into the post office.” What neither Barksdale nor Strong noticed, or wanted to notice, was that almost half of the black officeholders had been born free, and the sprinkling of college graduates, lawyers, and Union army veterans among the black officeholders holds up at least as well (given the paucity of opportunities for education and advancement for African Americans in the Confederate South) by comparison with the prewar patterns of white officeholding. Nor did they constitute some universal blight on Southern government; in only one state legislature—South Carolina—were freedmen actually a majority.82

The new civil governments that this three-way alliance of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen created under the eye of the Federal military district commanders were far from perfect. True to at least one aspect of the legend of the carpetbaggers, the new Reconstruction governments spent money on an unprecedented scale, and raised Southern taxes to extraordinary levels to finance that spending, all of which later led to accusations that the money had been squandered on shady contracts and corrupt deals. In South Carolina, the tax rates doubled even though the war had wiped out property values; and while the state debt jumped from $5 million in 1868 to over $16 million in 1871, legislators voted themselves a free bar, and even a bonus of $1,000 to the Speaker of the House, Franklin J. Moses, to cover his losses at the racetrack.83

But much of this political vulgarity stemmed from the sheer confusion and dislocation of the postwar years, and from the costs of building the free-labor Jerusalem in the South’s brown and devastated land. The infrastructure of roads, rail lines, and harbors had been devastated by the war, and transforming the Southern landscape into a replica of schoolhouses, shops, and whitewashed churches left little alternative to vastly increased taxation and spending. Whatever the degree of corruption plaguing the congressional Reconstruction governments, they did bring vast numbers of new voters, both newly free blacks and Southern yeomen, into a more broadly based democratic process than had ever before prevailed in the South.84 By the end of 1868, this new alliance of Southern blacks and Southern and Northern whites had completely restructured the constitutions of six of the Southern states and incorporated the Fourteenth Amendment into the political heartland of the old Confederacy.

In despair, some of the most ardent old secessionists counseled accommodation or even outright capitulation. Robert E. Lee’s old lieutenant James Longstreet accepted the lucrative federal post of customs surveyor in Republican