Too big to save
By Henry CK Liu
The post-Civil War Populist movement
The Civil War was not followed by a union of mutual fraternal forgiveness and reconciliation, as Lincoln had hoped by his speech: "With malice toward none; and charity for all." The victorious North treated the defeated South as a conquered territory more harshly than the victorious US treated defeated Germany and Japan after World War II. Rather than reconstructing the war damaged South, Northerners were bent on reconstructing Southern institutions to keep the South from ever again considering rebellion.
The North was undeniably the aggressor, a role clearly evidenced by the fact that all of the fighting was on Southern territory. As a result, the Southern economy was destroyed by war while the Northern economy industrialized and prospered from war production. War debts issued by the Confederacy became worthless after the war. Not a single bank in the South was solvent as Southern savings had been spent on financing the war. After the conflict, the Federal Treasury ordered the confiscation of Confederate government property but refused to assume its war debts. Corrupt Northern agents looted the South indiscriminately. In contrast, Northern war debts were honored by taxing the whole economy, including the South.
Two years into the Civil War, Congress passed the National Banking Act in 1863. While its immediate purpose was to sell war bonds to finance military costs for the North, it served also to create a national paper currency. Banks that bought war bonds equaling up to one third of their capital were invited to apply for federal charter. Since the Jacksonian period, bank supervision was the province of the states. In 1860, more than 1,500 banks issued bank notes, many of which were accepted only with high discounts.
The new banking regime was far from perfect. The currency it provided was insufficiently elastic for the needs of the expanding economy. As the federal government redeemed it war bonds after the war, the quantity of money in circulation decreased, causing deflation that created hardship for debtors, such as Southern and Western farmers. Also, money capital tended to be concentrated in the Northeast. The farming regions in the South and the West continued to suffer from a chronic scarcity of cash and credit. This situation continued until the establishment of a central bank in 1913, in the form of the Federal Reserve.
The one remaining asset the South still possessed was the fertility of its soil. There was hope that economic recovery could begin with the first harvest of the cotton crop. But large-scale cotton production was not possible until the financial system was restored and the liberated former slaves return to work as paid labor. Hundred of thousands of former slaves had joined the Northern army and were informed that they were freed by the Civil War. They now wandered aimlessly in the North and the new territories in the West. They had interpreted the new freedom to mean they no longer had to work for their former masters. Many were disappointed that their expectation that the Union government would grant them free land to farm for themselves was mere fantasy. Illiterate and totally unprepared for survival as independent workers, many died of starvation and homeless exposure in the cold early spring of 1865 in the North.
In March, the Federal government set up the Freedmen's Bureau to provide food, shelter and medical attention to the indigent, but did not provide job opportunities for workers. White workers in the North did not want competition from Southern blacks who were willing to work for low wages. Southern attempts to put the former slaves back to work were interpreted by Northern radicals as schemes to restore slavery.
The North was divided on policy towards the South, whether to grant the South its full constitutional state rights or to take measures to prevent the recurrence of sectional conflict and future attempts of secession. The Northern radicals wanted to subdue the South permanently by destroying the traditional power structure of the plantation and by establishing racial equality. Yet while the constitutional States Rights issue was the cause of the secession, it was not the cause for the Civil War. In practice, minority sections in the Northeast, such as New England during the War of 1812, had used state rights arguments to limit federal power.
The reason for the Southern secession was distinctly different from the reason the North had for launching the Civil War. The South by its own statement seceded to maintain the institution of slavery, which was vital to its socioeconomic structure. Official Southern statements placed secession as a legitimate response to the North's violation of the rights of Southerners by excluding them from the new territories, refusing to restore fugitive slaves and threatening the institution of slavery itself.
The North resorted to prevent secession by force to preserve the Union for political and economic reasons, not to abolish slavery, even though its abolition might be the result of the war. Lincoln himself repeatedly made the distinction, and he personally was not an abolitionist. To Northern industrial interests, an independent Confederacy closely linked to Britain would deprive the North of a big part of its protected domestic market.
Congress did not meet until December 1865, nine months after the fighting ended. Until then, reconstruction was under the exclusive control of the executive branch. Andrew Johnson succeeded the assassinated Lincoln in April and continued Lincoln's conciliatory reconstruction program, which was opposed by the Republican Radicals.
Some radicals were ideologues who saw the Civil War as a war to abolish slavery. Other radicals were merely using abolition as a pretext to hold on to Republican political dominance and to strengthen the North's control of the economy. If the South were to be permitted to return to the Union on Lincoln's terms, then the pre-war dominance of the Democratic Party would be restored to win the next election to dislodge Republican control of the federal government.
Northern industries and banks were concerned that the tariff would then be lowered to allow foreign competition. Free trade would allow the South to sell more cotton to Britain and form an economic alliance with British capital to oppose the North. Northerners feared that the national debt held by Northern banks might be repudiated by a Democratic congress controlled by Southern politicians the same way Confederate debt was repudiated by the Republican congress controlled by Northerners. Congress would then be controlled again by the agrarian South and strip the North of all economic benefits of having won the war. Electoral politics required Republican support for enfranchising former slaves in order to win votes in Southern states with large black population.
Still, despite less than pure moral incentives, the Republican radicals pushed through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution on July 9, 1868, a year after the Civil War ended. The amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, vacating the Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v Sandford (1857), which had excluded slaves and their descendants from possessing constitutional rights. The relevant question before the court was whether, at the time the constitution was ratified, former slave Scott could have been considered a citizen of any state within the meaning of Article III of the constitution.
According to the court, the authors of the constitution had viewed the "Negro" race as:
beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Thus strict view of the constitution held by Southern Democrats would deny blacks all constitutional and civil rights despite changing conditions. Later, Richard Nixon, as Republican president, co-opted the term and concept to described conservative Republican politics and judicial philosophy.
The amendment's "Due Process Clause" has been used to apply most of the Bill of Rights to the states. This clause has also been used to recognize substantive due process rights, such as parental and marriage rights, and procedural due process rights, which require specific legal steps before a person's right to life, liberty, or property can be infringed.
The amendment's "Equal Protection Clause" requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all people within their jurisdictions. This clause later became the basis for Brown v Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision that precipitated the dismantling of racial segregation in the United States and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964.
"Hundred of thousands of former slaves had joined the Northern army and were informed that they were freed by the Civil War." Is this correct?
Mr. Liu expressed the same view in his earlier series on populism.
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