History Wars

BACKGROUND. As Union soldiers advanced through the South, tens of thousands of freed slaves left their plantations to follow Union general William Tecumseh Sherman's army. To solve problems caused by the mass of refugees, Sherman issued Special Field Orders, No. 15, a temporary plan granting each freed family forty acres of tillable land on islands and the coast of Georgia. The army had a number of unneeded mules which were also granted to settlers. News of "forty acres and a mule" spread quickly; freed slaves welcomed it as proof that emancipation would finally give them a stake in the land they had worked as slaves for so long. The orders were in effect for only one year.

ASSIGNMENT. Your assignment is to write a speech as a Senator in 1870. You represent a State with mixed urban/industrial and rural/agricultural activities. A bill has been introduced providing for the confiscation of plantation land owned by confederates and the redistribution of that land to the former slaves who once worked it. How you would vote? Would you oppose such a measure? Would you support it? Write a speech explaining why you are voting the way you are. Put yourself in the place of this imaginary Senator. Not only must you vote, you must explain your vote in a speech on the Senate floor, and in your speech try to persuade others to join you. To be effective, your speech must combine moral arguments with solid factual evidence.

Develop both a positive and negative (where this view is off the mark) argument based on the wide range of views and opinions listed here. As you work, cut and paste material you think relevant to your argument. Use this material, in quotes or in paraphrase, to support the argument you make in your speech.

George Clemenceu, "The Power of Avenging Justice"
In the following excerpt George Clemenceau, a journalist from France, discusses the Radical Republicans and their policy of reconstruction. He argues that is it vital that freedmen have access to land and land ownership:

The real misfortune of the negro race is in owning no land of his [sic] own. There cannot be real emancipation for men who do not possess at least a small portion of the soil. We have had an example in Russia. In spite of the war, and the confiscation bills, which remain dead letters, every inch of land in the Southern states belongs to the former rebels. The population of free negroes has become a nomad population, congregated in the towns and suffering wretchedly there, destined to be driven back eventually by poverty into the country, where they will be forced to submit to the harshest terms imposed by their former masters. It would be too much to expect those masters of their own accord to conciliate the negroes by conceding them a little land in order to secure their cooperation. They are still too blinded by passion to see their own best interests.

Source: Excerpted from American Reconstruction 1865-1870 and the Impeachment of President Johnson by George Clemenceau. New York: The Dial Press, 1928.

Letter from Melton Linton—Freedman
Freedmen resented giving up the land they had been granted in the Sea Islands. They argued that they had earned a right to the land over the 200 years of slavery and that they were entitled to the land through their own hard work. In protest of being asked to leave the contested Sea Islands land Linton wrote the following letter. Source: South Carolina Leader, March 31, 1866

I hope soon to be called a citizen of the U.S. and have the rights of a citizen. I am opposed myself to working under a contract. I am as much at liberty to hire a white man to work as he to hire me. I expect to stay in the South after I am mustered out of service, but not to hire myself to a planter.

I have seen some men hired who were turned off without being paid. They try to pull us down faster than we can climb up. They have no reason to say that we will not work, for we raised them and sent them to school and bought their land. Now it is as little as they can do to give us some of their land--be it little or much.

The Freedmen's Bureau. The following excerpt is from an editorial in Harpers Weekly. In it the editor notes that plans to disband the Freedmen's Bureau would be morally wrong. Source: Harper's Weekly, March, 10, 1866.

We are sincerely glad that this is the truth. The national disgrace of an abandonment of the freedmen in their present condition to those who lately held them a slaves would be overwhelming. They are our wards and we have no moral right to relinquish their hands until we leave them as fully secure in every civil right as every other citizen. Upon this point there is no difference of opinion among Union men. It is the "Democracy" only which would abandon them. The President, in his conversation with Governor Cox, of Ohio, speaks of his resolution to see justice done with a distinctness which we should been been glad to find in his Message. The case is unprecedented, and we must treat it accordingly.

Debow's Review "Designs of Radicalism"
In this excerpt the editor of Debow's Review attacks the Radical Republicans' idea that the races can live together peacefully. He argues that the Northerners would not be so eager to advocate equal rights if African-Americans were more numerous in the North. Source: Debow's Review, November 1867, p. 536.

It is absurd to say that two races so dissimilar as the whites and blacks, when their numbers are equal, can live in peace where they enjoy equal political privileges, where they sit on the same juries, serve in the same legislature and hold similar offices. It is an impossibility. One race or the other must be subordinate. So it has always been and so it will always be. Does any one believe that the white people of Massachusetts or any Northern State would give the negroes the same political rights with the whites if they were equal or nearly equal in numbers? Where there are only a few negroes it makes but little difference, for then the white race will be the dominant and governing race. But it is not so in the Gulf States. If the negroes enjoy equal political privileges with the whites, one race or the other must leave the country.

The conduct of the New England radicals shows that it is their design to place the country in such a condition that not only will there be no immigration to the South, but even the whites that are now here will be under the necessity of leaving.

The Southern whites, as a general rule, are disposed to treat the blacks with kindness and liberality, and to protect them in the enjoyment of civil and personal rights. The white men of Mississippi and Alabama are giving the blacks one-fourth or one-third of the gross products of their farms. Are any Northern manufacturers giving their operatives one-fourth or one-third of the gross proceeds of their factories? It is to the interest of the land owner, when labor is high, to protect his laborers, so as to win their confidence and secure their services.

New York Times editorial: Confiscation of Property

The following editorial appeared in the New York Times in 1867. In it a reader named Carl Bensen presents what he feels is the real cause of the South's stagnation--the threat of the confiscation of property, as posed by Radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens. Source: The New York Times, March 10, 1867, page, 5.

Allow one who has read with much interest and general assent your various articles on the conquered Territories, (formerly regarded as the United States,) to suggest that there is an impoverishing element at work, the full force of which you have not quite appreciated.

The great cause which prevents Northern capital from being attracted to the South is not the unsettled condition of labor, or the prevalence of military rule, or any other of the reasons assigned by you, though all these contribute; it is the fear of confiscation. A lender wants security; a purchaser wants title; how can the borrower or seller give them with confiscation hanging over his head? Money here commands eighteen per cent per annum on first class city property, although the laws respecting foreclosure, &c, are more advantageous to the lender than in New York. On plantation property money, even the smallest sum, cannot be raised on any terms. The not unnatural reply to the applicant, "How can you give security against THADDEUS STEVENS?"

Now, I am not green enough to suppose that this statement will have any particular influence. When LOUIS NAPOLEON wants to go to war he tells his subjects that he will not allow vulgar interests to stand in his way; and our Congress has shown pretty conclusively, on diverse occasions, that it does not care for any interests so vulgar as commercial or financial prosperity. Still it is as well that the fact should be known.

George Clemenceu, "The Power of Avenging Justice" In the following excerpt George Clemenceau, a journalist from France, discusses the Radical Republicans and their policy of reconstruction. He argues that is it vital that freedmen have access to land and land ownership:

The Freedmen's Bureau. The following excerpt is from an editorial in Harpers Weekly. In it the editor notes that plans to disband the Freedmen's Bureau would be morally wrong. Source: Harper's Weekly, March, 10, 1866.

New York Times editorial: Confiscation of Property

George Clemenceu, "The Power of Avenging Justice"
In the following excerpt George Clemenceau, a journalist from France, discusses the Radical Republicans and their policy of reconstruction. He argues that is it vital that freedmen have access to land and land ownership: