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Reconstruction Debate
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Spoden's Documents
Reconstruction Debate
Biographies
Charles Sumner
Sumner was born in Boston in 1811, educated as a lawyer, and entered politics. After
holding several minor offices in Boston, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1851. He
served in the senate until his death, 24 years later.
In the senate he waged an uncompromising war on slavery. His first important speech
attacked slavery. This was followed in 1856 by another on “The Crime Against Kansas,” in
which he reflected severely upon Senator Butler of South Carolina. This speech led to an assault
in the senate chamber upon Sumner by Preston Brooks, a southern representative and relative of
Butler. Sumner was so badly injured that he was incapacitated for nearly four years. This attack
led to the disease which ended his life.
In 1861 he became chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. For ten years
of this critical period, Sumner held this chairmanship. At the close of the Civil War, he secured
the enactment of a civil rights law to secure the equality of treatment of Negroes.
He could never forgive the south for the institution of slavery. He was almost fanatical in
his desire to punish the south after the war.
Jefferson Davis
He was raised in Mississippi, the on of a planter. He became a soldier and graduated from
west point. He fought in the Mexican war, where he was wounded and decorated for bravery. He
later served as United States Senator and as a Cabinet member before the Civil War.
Davis opposed the idea of secession for the Union as a means of maintaining the
principles of the south. After secession, he was elected President of the Confederate States. He is
responsible for the raising of the formidable army and the Appointment of Robert E. Lee as
commander. His seal, energy, and faith in the cause of the south were a source of much of the
tenacity with which the confederacy fought.
On the 10th of May 1865, federal troops captured him in Irwinsville, Georgia. From 1865
to 1867, he was imprisoned. In 1868 charges were dropped against him. He lived to be 81. He
died in 1889, 24 years after the war ended. To the end he believed the cause of the South was
just.
William Tecumseh Sherman
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After his father died, his eleven brothers and sisters were split up among friends and
relatives. Sherman was a tough, red headed kid named after Chief Tecumseh. He secured a West
Point appointment, and graduated 6th in his class. Then he married the daughter of his foster
parents after a long courtship. He served in Florida, South Carolina, and Georgia; later he served
in the Mexican war under Kearny.
Sherman hated to see war come. He loved the south and her people but he regarded the
preservation of the union with almost religious necessity. The war must be brought to a
conclusion as swiftly as possible and the south returned to the union. If this meant total war, let it
be. Sherman was 80 years ahead of his time in military thinking. He took the war deep into
enemy territory, outraced his own supplies and communications; and lived off the enemy’s food.
He destroyed everything he could not use or carry with him. He saw the object of his
attack as not only the enemy army, but also the enemy civilian population that supplied that
army. By fighting thus, he destroyed not only the enemy food supplies and transportation but
enemy civilian morale as well. Sherman’s name is still hated in the south, even today.
“War means fighting and fighting means dying, and you cannot refine it,” he said, “War is
all hell.”
Fredrick Douglass
He was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland in 1817. He was the son of the negro slave Harriet
Bailey and a white man; and he was largely self-educated. Cruel treatment instilled in him a
hatred of slavery; he failed in an attempt to escape in 1836, but two years later he succeeded and
reached New Bedford, Mass., where he assumed the name Douglass. As “a recent graduate from
the institution of slavery with his diploma on his back,” he was engaged as an agent of the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
In 1845, Douglass, at the urging of his friends, went to England to escape the danger of
seizure under the fugitive slave laws. After returning to the United States in 1847, he became the
“stationmaster and conductor” on the Underground Railroad in Rochester, N.Y., where he also
published an Abolitionist newspaper. During these years he became friendly with John Brown.
After the raid by John Brown on Harpers Ferry, fearing reprisals by the government, Douglass
fled to Europe, where he stayed for six months. Following the outbreak of the Civil War, he
helped raise a regiment of Negro soldiers. After the war, Douglass was a recognized leader of,
and spokesman for, the former Negro slaves. He fought for the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and
15th Amendments. He became U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia and later U.S. Minister
to Haiti.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth President of the United States, was born to a povertystricken immigrant family in Tennessee. He had no early formal education and grew to manhood
illiterate. He was apprenticed to a tailor when he was ten years of age, and eventually acquired
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his own tailor shop.
He married young. She was a remarkably fine girl, congressmen who opposed the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and this made him unpopular with the Southern slave interests. When the
border states left the Union after Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the secession
move, Johnson, now a senator, refused to secede, but stayed in the Union and continued
representing a state that had left the Union. When Tennessee was secured by the Union armies
Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor.
The election of 1864 came and the Republican Party wanted to present a picture of
national unity even though the Civil War still raged. They dropped the name Republican and
called the party the Nation Union Party. They wanted a loyal southern Democrat to run as
Lincoln’s Vice President. Johnson was a logical almost necessary choice. So the man who was in
the right place at the right time, due to an unusual set of circumstances, became President with
Lincoln’s assassination.
The awesome responsibility of the President’s role in reconstruction fell to Johnson. He
attempted to follow Lincoln’s plans. He was in constant conflict with the “radicals” in Congress
who wanted a harsher southern policy. This conflict led congress to impeach him. He was
acquitted by one vote, but his power was diminished.
Speeches
Charles Sumner
We have just ended a long Civil War. It was frightfully costly in both natural and human
resources. Literally hundreds of thousands of our brave men bled and died to preserve the Union
and abolish slavery. Now at the ending of this terrible ordeal are we calmly to let the same men
representing their same dastardly ideas reappear in our Congress and let them again gain control
in their venom at us here in the halls of Congress? Is the black man – only just recently released
from slavery—to be given back again to his oppressors? I say, “No!” We must never allow the
old southern aristocracy to again control the governmental machinery in the South or gain
positions of authority in the United States Congress. They made a fatal error by striking us first,
and by god we are going to strike them so hard they will never recover to achieve their sordid
ends. Their ideas and ways of life should and will be gone with the wind. We should not accept
the rebel states back into the Union until they, like the Phoenix shall have been reborn. When
they left the Union, they lost their rights as states. They are but dead corpses lying within the
Union. They must have new state constitutions and new governmental officials acceptable to us
in the Congress. No rebellious scoundrel who served the Confederacy will, or should, have a
place in these new governments. They must, in these new state constitutions, guarantee to former
slaves political as well as social equality. Black men must have the right to vote and hold
political office or the war will have been fought in vain.
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Until these conditions are met, we should keep military forces within the rebel territories.
Only when these rebellious areas have proven themselves worthy will we allow them to come
again into our sacred Union.
Jefferson Davis
I have come before you to plead the cause of the South. Our cities lie in ruins, our fields
everywhere lie untilled. The aged, the widowed and the orphaned beg to survive. Starvation and
disease are everywhere. The props that once held our society up are all broken. We have no
currency, no law save the primitive code that might makes right. No civil authority exists in out
states. Much of the South lies in ruin and desolation – ashes and cinders mark the grave of this
once noble civilization.
Gangs of freed Negroes now ravage our cities. In many areas Negroes are planning large
scale uprising in which they will take vengeance in the whites and dispossess them of their
property. These blacks will not work, for they expect the federal government to provide food,
clothing, and housing. Many of them are armed and feel they have a right to take what they want.
Honorable Congressman, the vast majority of people in the South are sick of war. Their
country is so devastated, there is so much want and suffering among the people, that they have no
desire to resist any longer. The South realizes, whatever may be said about the right of secession,
the thing itself may be laid aside, for it is certainly not practical and probably never will be. All
parties in the South agree that it is for the best interest of the nation that they perform all the
duties of citizens of the United States. They also agree to accept the free status of the Negro.
In exchange the South expects the return of their civil and political rights as promised by
President Lincoln and the restoration of the states to their original status under the Constitution.
To restore order in the South, I look to the disbanded regiments of the rebel army, not the
conquering army of the North. The rank and file of the disbanded Southern army are the
backbone and sinew of the South. They are the best and altogether most hopeful elements of the
South, and the real basis of reconstruction. Allow these men to reorganize ad they will bring
order to the South.
Because of the Negro’s inferiority, it is necessary that they should not be left to
themselves without a guardian; in many sections the Negro should be discouraged from leaving
his old master. A very large majority of Southerners have genuine concern for the problems of
the freedom. It is this concern that will guide and elevate the Negro to a new level of freedom.
The sentiment prevailing among the planters is that it is for the interest of the employer to teach
the Negro, to educate his children, to provide a preacher for him and to attend to his physical
wants. I think there is a willingness to give them every right except the right to vote. At the
present time they are unfit to exercise that privilege.
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The solution to the problems of the Negro in the South is simply a matter of time. The
South, if left to its own devices, will certainly help the freedom to adjust to his new found way of
life. My plea, gentlemen, is a simply one; allow your defeated brothers to return to the Union. As
sovereign states they and their people will rebuild the South. Leave our people to themselves and
they will manage well.
William T. Sherman
Gentleman, you asked me here to give you my report oh the South today. First let me
relate to you my actual knowledge of a land ravaged and despoiled by war. A trail of destruction
has been left. Railroads have been destroyed; tracks are torn and twisted. Bridges, burned or
dynamited, streams, and rivers blocked and made useless. Wharves and warehouses burned.
Cities put to the torch: Jackson, Atlanta, Columbia, Richmond, and Savannah, to mention a few.
Gentleman, what the Union armies missed, the retreating Confederate armies took or
burned; then the confederate guerillas took care of anything overlooked.
Returning Confederate veterans now find impoverished and exhausted communities with
no employment to offer – these become aimless young men in tattered grey uniforms.
The war has turned time back for the South. It is once more a primitive society, a frontier
region; and the violence that was characteristic of the earlier frontiers has become a familiar
pattern today.
But treason is not dead in the South, gentleman. The Southern press still seeks to arouse
disaffection. Some Southern governments will not fly the national flag. The voters have elected
men to Congress who were leaders of the defeated Confederacy; the former Vice President of the
Confederacy, five Confederate generals and six members of the secessionist government will
now serve in Washington, D.C.
The Southern states have no intention of accepting the black freedom as a member of
Southern society. Blacks in large numbers wander aimlessly from place to place looking for the
riches of freedom. All the states of the deep south have passed “Black Codes” to thwart
emancipation by restricting voting, movement, and occupation. The Negro has exchanged slavery
for serfdom.
Law and order have been broken down in the South. Local government is weak and
frustrated. Local vigilante groups usurp the power of government. Groups of ex-Confederates
form secret organizations to terrorize freedmen and whites alike. Fear walks the roads and
anarchy fills the seats of government.
What I propose to you gentleman is that the only existing and possible government bet set
up and given full authority in the South. Sirs, I mean the Union Armies down there. Divide the
South into sections, each under a Union general. He will be able to keep law and order and
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augment government through his military command. Martial law, gentleman, that is the only
answer, martial law.
Frederick Douglass
Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called to speak here today? What
have I, or those I represent, to do of national justice, embodied in the Declaration of
Independence, truly extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble
offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the
blessings resulting from your fight victory in abolishing slavery?
If such be your purpose in inviting me here, you are to be sorely disappointed. Such is not
the case. The victory, in which you this day rejoice, is not enjoyed in common. The rich
inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers to you is
shared by you, not by me.
I perceive that you are unaware of the conditions of which I speak. Permit me to enlighten
you. True, you have graciously given us the right to own property, to marry within our own race,
and secure the protection of existing laws. But are you aware that one of the rights held most
sacred to all, the right to have a part in picking the nation’s leaders, the right to vote, is still
denied? And we have not yet the right and privilege to serve o a jury?
Friends, this is but a small part of the injustices now inflicted upon my “free” people.
Many parts of the south have begun to adopt certain “black codes”, which often have an effect
worse than slavery ever did. Under these codes it is law that a Negro must make a long-term
engagement with an employer, thus denying him the right of self-betterment. Many Negroes
unable to find employment due to prejudices upon the part of the employer have been arrested as
vagrants, and their labor of sold to the highest bidder.
Surely you must realize that this is slavery, the very thing you have fought to destroy,
hidden under a different name- peonage! And consequently, your proclamation has succeeded
only in changing the name of slavery, not the inhumanity, the cruelty, the vileness of slavery
itself.
You may wonder what you can do about the vile situation of my people. These laws will
not be changed unless you change them. New laws will not be enforced unless your army stays in
the South and enforces them. Justice and freedom do not rain like manna from heaven on
outstretched hands.
You claim to have set us free, but have you?
Give my people land, provide for their education, guarantee their freedom under just
laws, give them equal opportunity. When you have done these things, you will have truly set
them free.
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Andrew Johnson
Gentlemen of the committee, I come before you in what you and I both realize to be a
very unusual Presidential appearance.
You have heard or will soon hear other plans and opinions on how the South should be
dealt with. I ask your support for the policy of our late President, Abraham Lincoln. He promised
the “olive branch of forgiveness” to those recently seceded states. “We will show malice toward
none and charity for all in order to achieve a lasting and just peace,” he said.
We fought a terrible war to save the Union; let us not say that the Union does not exist.
This is what some here are saying in asking policies that would put some states outside the
Union; to declare and impose martial law, to control the elections of a state legislature and its
members to congress, to dismiss state officers and arbitrarily appoint the others without regard to
the state law, to regulate their domestic affairs according to the mere will of strange and
irresponsible agents sent among them for that purpose—these powers granted top the Federal
government by the Constitution. By assuming these powers not given, we blatantly violate the
Constitution.
Again, gentlemen of the committee, let us not destroy the country we fought to save; rather, let us
put into workable policy the generosity of our late and beloved President and readmit these rebel states
after ten per cent of their voters have signed loyalty oaths. True, I would favor stripping the power from
the Southern aristocracy for this small group of wealthy planters have been the architects of this tragic
conflict. I would willingly work with this committee to draft this policy. The wounds of war may be
healed by the balm of human kindness, but will only be aggravated by the salt of human viciousness. We
must not allow the Federal government to violate rights granted to the several states by the Constitution.
Should such things come to pass, those dead would have truly died in vain.