This post will cover the time of the Civil War and Reconstruction. If you haven't seen the post covering the twelve years from the start of the construction in 1848 to 1860, just scroll down to the post titled "Building Begins".
As I've mentioned before, "The Civil War happened!" is the standard answer to the question "Why did it take so long to build the Washington Monument?", but that's at best an incomplete answer that gives the impression that everything stopped in Washington during the war. In fact, there was all kinds of construction taking place in the District of Columbia during the war years. Much of it was because of the war, of course; the ring of fortifications around DC and the expansion of work at the Navy Yard are obvious examples of war-related construction. But there was plenty of other activity as well: Work on the Capitol dome continued throughout the war years, for example, while the unfinished obelisk of the Washington Monument stood a lonely vigil over cattle. It's true!
1861
In May, Dougherty reported to
the Society that Lieutenant Beckwith, US Army, had presented him with an order
from President Lincoln directing him to use the monument grounds for cattle
belonging to the government and that there were now some forty-five head in the
enclosure.
General Winfield Scott, in
command of the Union forces, had ordered Army troops into Washington to protect
it from incursions from Virginia, just across the river. Throughout the war
years, the monument grounds would serve as part of the logistics support
structure for Union troops, and the unfinished obelisk would stand neglected.
Construction efforts would
instead be centered on fortifications for the city, such as Fort Stevens, in
northwest Washington where present-day Georgia Avenue runs through Brightwood.
The fort and its surrounding earthworks displaced the homes and farms of free
blacks who were the landowners. In all, by early 1864 there would be a complete
37-mile ring around the capital, 68 forts and many artillery batteries and
blockhouses, all linked by trenches and rifle nests. This included the southern
shore of the Potomac and the area that is now Alexandria and Arlington; once
the Federal forces arrived in Washington, they occupied that part of Virginia
in defense of the capital.
A Peace Conference of
representatives of seven of the seceded slave states, including the slave state
Maryland which had not seceded, was held in Washington in February, hosted by
the lame duck President James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. General Scott’s
drilling troops, newly arrived in the city, gave the delegates of the
conference something to consider as they walked to the Executive Mansion to
meet President Buchanan, who pleaded with them to find some compromise.
Just before his inauguration,
Lincoln told a group of supporters in Philadelphia: “…I may say in advance that
there will be no bloodshed (with the seceding states) unless it is forced upon
the government. The government will not use force, unless force is used upon
it.”
Later in the spring, when Fort
Sumter lay under siege in South Carolina, Lincoln was hesitant to recognize
this as the starting point of the war. He took care to inform the governor that
the federal troops he dispatched to relieve the men in the fort were only bringing
food, not ammunition. It made little difference: On April 14, after a day or so of bombardment
directed by the newly formed Confederate army, the Federal forces surrendered
the fort.
On April 19, Confederate
sympathizers in Baltimore caused a riot to prevent Union troops from reaching
Washington. In response, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the right
of a person accused of a crime to appear before a judge before being
incarcerated, for persons detained along the transportation route between
Philadelphia and Washington. This allowed Union forces to capture people
working for the Confederacy and hold them indefinitely without trial.
This was controversial then and
continues to be today. It has been argued by some that in doing this, Lincoln violated
the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution (Article I, Section 9) says,
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless
when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”
Lincoln would proclaim, without seeking the
consent of Congress, the writ suspended several times during the war. Whether
this power of suspension is for the Executive Branch to wield, or if it belongs
to the Legislature, is a question the Constitution doesn't specifically address.
If one accepts that the Civil War may have threatened “public safety” and if
responsibility for public safety during wartime is the Commander-in-Chief's,
then it appears that Lincoln was well within his Constitutional bounds.
“Lest there be some uneasiness
as to what is to be the course of government towards the southern states,”
Lincoln said in his July 4th address, “ after the rebellion shall have been
suppressed, the Executive deems it proper to say, it will be his purpose then,
as ever, to be guided by the Constitution and the laws.” Less than three weeks
later, General Scott’s Union forces would be routed by the Confederates in
Manassas, Virginia, also known as Bull Run, less than 50 miles from Washington.
“Suppressing the rebellion” would prove to be easier said than done.
Thomas Casey was transferred to
Portland, Maine, where he was placed in charge of constructing defensive works
on the coast and recruiting engineers to join the Corps of Engineers. He would
remain there until well after the war was over.
1862
For two days in April, Union
and Confederate soldiers battled in a densely wooded area between Pittsburgh
Landing on the Tennessee River and the old Shiloh Church. It was a bloody two
days: nearly 24,000 men had been killed or wounded, with many of the wounded
left to lie unattended on the battlefield to die in the cold, rainy night
between the days’ battles. The leader of the Union forces, U. S. Grant,
realized at the end of the battle that it represented the true character of the
Civil War: the two opposing sides were near equal and no battle would be
completely conclusive; it would be a war of attrition and the victor would be
the side that could bear the brunt of tragedy and the pain of battle. Grant
would take that lesson with him on to the siege of Vicksburg and, at the bitter
end of the war, the taking of Richmond.
Union forces captured New
Orleans soon after the Battle of Shiloh, and Lincoln wrote his view of how
reconstruction of the South might have been in a letter to a Union supporter in
Louisiana: “The army will be withdrawn so soon as such state government can
dispense with its presence; and the people of the state can then upon the old
constitutional terms, govern themselves to their own liking.”
In mid-April, President Lincoln
signed an act abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. He later signed
the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed for the federal government to seize
all real property of anyone taking up arms against the government. This bill
was quite limited in scope and not often enforced in practice; Lincoln felt
that permanent federal seizure of property was unconstitutional, and demanded a
resolution added to the language of the bill that said that any land seized
would be returned to the heirs of the offender after his death.
By late May, Stonewall Jackson
was pushing into northern Virginia again. The Confederates would again defeat
the Union army in Manassas that summer and Robert E. Lee would cross the
Potomac into Maryland in early September.
The Battle of Antietam, later
that same month, was another ambiguous result. It has the infamous distinction
of being the single bloodiest day, with nearly 23,000 casualties (dead,
wounded, missing/captured), in American war history, beating out both D-Day in
Normandy and the Iwo Jima landing.
The casualties were pretty
evenly distributed and there was no clear victory, though General George
McClellan (whom Lincoln would soon fire) tried to claim it as his as Lee
withdrew his much smaller force back across the Potomac. The North's apparent
advantage did serve a political purpose, though. It allowed President Lincoln
to call it a Union victory and to issue his draft Emancipation Proclamation,
which helped to undercut the rebellion in the South, gaining support from
Northern abolitionists as well as European governments who were closely
observing the War Between the States.
The Emancipation Proclamation
seemed to be a significant departure from Lincoln’s earlier stated designs.
Just a few weeks before he issued the draft Proclamation, he had stated, “My
paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to
save or to destroy slavery…What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do
because it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do
not believe it would help the Union.” Lincoln saw the Emancipation Proclamation
as war measure, and wrote it that way. It did not apply everywhere in the
Union, but only in the states in rebellion, and it made no appeal to universal
rights of man, but only to military requirements. In his written address to
Congress in December, Lincoln outlined more completely his plan for gradual
emancipation that would take place over more than thirty years. This protracted
plan, he argued, “spares both races from the evils of sudden derangement; while
most of those whose habitual course of thought will be disturbed by the measure
will have passed away before its consummation. They will never see it.”
Lincoln wrote privately to a
critic of the Proclamation; “You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and
perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think
differently. I think the Constitution invests its Commander-in-Chief with the
law of war. The most that can be said--if so much--is that slaves are property.
Is there--has there ever been--any question that by the law of war, property,
both of friends and enemies, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed
whenever taking it helps us, or hurts the enemy?”
1863
The area around the monument
continued to serve as a cattle yard; a hay barn and a slaughterhouse were
constructed on the site, further emphasizing the ignominy into which the
monument had fallen. It was an eyesore in the city and an embarrassment to the
Union. Late in the year, on December
2nd, the Statue of Freedom would be placed on the top of the Capitol dome,
the construction of which had started just a few years before the war broke
out, and would conclude just at the war's end.
Lincoln issued his formal Emancipation
Proclamation on the first day of the New Year. Perhaps the most significant
event of the entire war, the Proclamation set the stage for the Reconstruction
era and ultimately changed the nation forever. Its issuance was quickly
followed by a Union victory in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and the faltering start
of the campaign to take Vicksburg, Mississippi. Vicksburg was strategically
important due to the town's position on the Mississippi. It was, as Jefferson
Davis put it, “the nail head that holds the South’s two halves together” It
would fall to Grant’s siege in July, concurrently with Meade’s victory in
Gettysburg.
The Battle of Gettysburg served
as the high-water mark for the South’s invasion of the North. Encompassing the
drama and emotion of events like Chamberlain’s 20th Maine defending Little
Round Top, the carnage of Devil’s Den, and Pickett’s disastrous charge into the
waiting Northern artillery on Cemetery Ridge, Gettysburg is the center of many
Americans’ understanding about the Civil War.
Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery, given
on the 19th of November, ends “that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth
of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
shall not perish from the earth.”
In December, Lincoln issued a
proclamation of amnesty to the southern states that required a minimum of ten
per cent of voters to take an oath of allegiance. This group would then be
allowed to organize a state government, which Lincoln would recognize as
valid. This put the president in
conflict with the congress, who later passed the Wade-Davis bill that required
that each rebelling state be run initially by a military governor, who would receive
allegiance oaths from a majority of voters and then allow a state convention to
be elected, which would repudiate that state’s secession and end slavery as
that body’s first official acts.
Lincoln silently refused to
sign the bill, killing it by pocket veto. The two Radical Republicans that
sponsored the bill, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Representative Henry
Winter Davis of Maryland, angrily claimed that “the authority of Congress is
paramount” and the President should “confine himself to his executive
duties…and leave political reorganization to Congress.”
Lincoln ignored the bill in
part because it contained language that would have forced each of the rebelling
states to ban slavery before they could be readmitted to the Union, which made
the bill unconstitutional (the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery,
hadn’t even been drafted at this point) in the view of the administration.
Lincoln’s other objection was
that the bill was based upon the idea that the southern states would have to
“rejoin” the Union. Lincoln’s administration never recognized the South’s right
to secede and took the position that the declarations and bills passed by the
seceding states were null. The Union was not at war with treasonous states,
according to Lincoln, it was merely striving to “compel the obedience of
rebellious individuals.” It seems perhaps a too-subtle point from today’s
perspective, but it was an important distinction as Lincoln contemplated
restoring normalcy and prosperity to the entire nation after completion of the
war. The viewpoint of the Radicals in congress who opposed Lincoln was that the
South was a separate and alien nation; this mindset would color much about how
Reconstruction would play out in the absence of Lincoln’s leadership and
influence.
1864
While no work was done on the
Washington Monument, everywhere else in Washington construction was
transforming the city. The war had brought manufacturing, everything from
artillery shells to steamships, to the District, and the work attracted people.
From the docks of the Navy Yard to the Armory to the still-unfinished dome of
the Capitol to the railroad yards in Georgetown, the bustling city was open for
business.
Owing to the victories at
Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, the Union army’s fortunes appeared to have
turned for the better, as well as the political fortunes of Abraham Lincoln.
The hero of Vicksburg, Ulysses S. Grant, came to Washington in March to meet
President Lincoln, receive his commission to Lieutenant General, and hear his
Commander in Chief’s orders to take command of the Union forces and with them
to take the city of Richmond, the rebel capital.
In April, Grant issued his
secret orders for the Union forces, which included Sherman’s combined Armies of
the Cumberland, the Tennessee and the Ohio in Georgia, and the Army of the
Potomac under Meade in northern Virginia. The two separate federal forces would
advance simultaneously, and Meade’s forces would cross the Rapidan and conquer
the rebel capital.
It would be months before that
deed would be completed, and Washington would suffer an attack by General Early
and his Confederate raiders in the meantime: the Battle of Fort Stevens.
President Lincoln himself, who came out to the fort to witness the battle, came
under fire from Confederate snipers as he stood on the parapet observing the
battle. The grass-covered remains of the fort are now a park in Northwest DC. After the war, Early would say, “We didn’t
take Washington, but we scared hell out of Abe Lincoln!”
Fort Stevens
Through the month of May, Grant
moved his forces south towards Richmond. By the end of the month, he took on
the fortified positions of Lee’s Confederates in Cold Harbor, about thirty
miles east of the Southern capital. While most of the fighting came on June 3,
the battle stretched out over a week and the Union forces took heavy losses,
much to Grant’s lasting regret. The end game was set, however, and Lee was
never able to move away from the area around Richmond again. By the 16th of
June, the Union army was crossing the James River south towards Petersburg, to
begin the long siege that would finally end the fighting.
In Tennessee, a small
Confederate victory in April, the brief retaking of Fort Pillow on the
Mississippi, would become an infamous and controversial scandal, the alleged
massacre of surrendering men of the US Colored Troops at the hands of General
Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate soldiers. Forrest himself, though he later
denied having ordered the killing of defenseless men, wrote, “The river was
dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards…It is hoped these
facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope
with Southerners.”
Farther south, Sherman’s forces
advanced on Atlanta; the city would fall on the 2nd of September.
Running for re-election against
the general he had fired after Antietam, George McClellan, Lincoln garnered 55
percent of the popular vote and 234 to 21 of the Electoral College votes. He
hoped to use this landslide victory to gain the submission of the Radicals in
congress and put forth his plan for Reconstruction, but there was still
fighting to be done before he could focus on rebuilding. One week after Lincoln’s reelection on
November 9th, Sherman began his March to the Sea, to finally crush the morale
of the rebelling states.
Back in Virginia, General
Sheridan was pursuing Early’s Confederate raiders, the same forces that had
assaulted Washington in the spring. Sheridan won a decisive battle at Cedar
Creek, just west of Front Royal, in October, setting Early and his forces on
the defensive; they would not be able to threaten Washington again.
Late December found Sherman
advancing on Savannah, Georgia. The strategic coastal city would fall on the
21st. W.E.B. Du Bois, the historian and founder of the NAACP, wrote in 1901 of
Sherman’s impact in the South:
“Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's
raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in deep and shadowy relief:
the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some see all significance in the
grim front of the destroyer, and some in the bitter sufferers of the lost
cause. But to me neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as
that dark and human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift
columns, swelling at times to half their size, almost engulfing and choking
them. In vain were they ordered back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath
their feet; on they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into
Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.”
The Secretary of War, Edwin
Stanton, traveled to Savannah to meet with black leaders to discuss how the
freedmen would meet their new-found liberty. “The way we can best take care of
ourselves is to have land…till it by our own labor.” It’s difficult to argue
this point, but how to give land to the blacks? Should the former slaveholders
and supporters of secession have their lands seized and turned over to the
blacks? There was the Second Confiscation Act, passed in ’62 that subjected the
property of rebels to seizure, but Lincoln forced the limitation of this act,
which was a war measure, to the lives of the rebels only; the land was to be
returned to their heirs after their deaths. The question of how to provide land
to blacks would not be fully answered for years.
Lincoln continued to develop
and evolve his thinking about the great issue at hand. In a letter to General
Wadsworth, an abolitionist from New York who was serving in the Union army
without pay (and would soon pay the ultimate sacrifice by falling to a fatal
gunshot wound at the Battle of the Wilderness), Lincoln wrote: “How to better
the condition of the colored race has long been a study which has attracted my
serious and careful attention; hence I think I am clear and decided as to what
course I shall pursue in the premises, regarding it a religious duty, as the
nation's guardian of these people, who have so heroically vindicated their
manhood on the battle-field, where, in assisting to save the life of the
Republic, they have demonstrated in blood their right to the ballot, which is
but the humane protection of the flag they have so fearlessly defended.”
1865
On January 31, the Thirteenth
Amendment was passed, abolishing slavery in the United States. The following
day, General Sherman would start moving his Union forces from Savannah to meet
up with the Army of the Potomac and support the siege of Petersburg and
Richmond. Sherman reached Columbia, South Carolina in the middle of February. On
the 17th, after a brief period of artillery fire from the Federals, Columbia,
the birthplace of secession and rebellion, surrendered.
Sherman, who witnessed the
poverty and despair of the blacks that had escaped from the plantations, took
matters into his own hands. His Special Field Order Number 15 set aside the
coastal islands off South Carolina and Georgia and the abandoned lands along
the mouths of the rivers for settlement of the freedmen. The lands were divided
into forty acre plots and nearly 40,000 blacks were settled, though it would
only be a short-lived experiment. After the war, President Johnson had the land
returned to the original owners. Other experiments involving the settlement of
blacks on seized lands were tried as well during this time, but they were all
temporary.
In fact, all plans of the
radicals for giving confiscated property to the freed blacks ultimately failed.
It wasn’t that there was no concern for the economic state of the freed slaves,
or that they wouldn’t have benefited from receiving land from the government,
or not have been industrious enough to make a profit. It was that the entire
idea of redistribution of property from its rightful owner to another,
deserving though that other might be, went totally against the principles upon
which the country had been founded.
As one editorial put it: “A
division of rich men’s lands amongst the landless…would give a shock to our
whole social and political system from which it would hardly recover without
the loss of liberty… [a scheme] in which provision is made for the violation of
a greater number of the principles of good government and for the opening of a
deeper sink of corruption has never been submitted to a legislative body.”
Lincoln’s inauguration was on
the 4th of March, and it appeared that his second term would be spent, not on
war, but on the rebuilding of the nation. “…With malice toward none; with
charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds;
to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his
orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace,
among ourselves, and with all nations.”
His policy of amnesty seemed to
have been effective, at least to a point.
A pro-Union government had been established in Tennessee and a Whig
Unionist governor had been elected. Louisiana and Arkansas also had Union
loyalist groups ready to form new state governments. In Alexandria, there had
been a rump Virginia legislature and a Unionist state government that had been
recognized by the administration and had operated throughout the war.
Congress created the Freedmen’s
Bureau to provide assistance to both former slaves and white refugees with
food, clothing, shelter, and a means of finding work. The Bureau has been a
target for criticism from the time it was created for corruption, incompetence
and fostering segregation and the general mistreatment of Southern blacks.
Some of that criticism is
undoubtedly well-deserved; there were many examples of the Bureau’s being
complicit in injurious behavior by whites towards blacks. But it also did much
to help the condition of the freedmen; it did in fact provide food and medical
care to hundreds of thousands, and did much to improve the condition of the
former slaves, setting up schools, finding work and supporting individuals with
labor disputes and legal issues.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of that
time: “Behind the mists of ruin and rapine waved the calico dresses of women
who dared, and after the hoarse mouthings of the field gangs rang the rhythm of
the alphabet. Rich and poor they were, serious and curious. Bereaved now of a
father, now of a brother, now of more than these, they came seeking a life work
in planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South.
They did their work well. In that first year they taught 100,000 souls, and
more.”
It’s important to remember the
context of the time and the huge social upheaval the end of slavery imposed to
both whites and blacks. Even the most
ardent of supporters of equality for blacks knew that time was needed. Speaking
on the question of voting rights for the freedmen, Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical
abolitionist from Pennsylvania who later led the charge to impeach Johnson,
equivocated: “Whether those who have fought our battles should all be allowed
to vote, or only those of a paler hue, I leave to be discussed in the future
when Congress can take legitimate cognizance of it.”
Lee’s forces retreated from
Petersburg and Richmond in early April and allowed those cities to fall to
Union forces. On April 9th, after a brief skirmish that convinced the
Confederate general that he was finally out-matched, Grant and Lee met in a
house in a town called Appomattox Court House, to discuss terms of General
Lee’s surrender.
On Good Friday just five days
later, John Wilkes Booth, who was part of an extensive conspiracy, shot
President Lincoln in the back of the head as he sat watching a play in Ford’s
Theatre in Washington. The same night, Lewis Powell (who also went by the name
Paine) attacked Secretary of State William Seward and his son Frederick. Seward
survived Powell’s vicious knife attack, though he carried the scars the rest of
his life.
Booth escaped into Virginia,
but was tracked down and shot by Union soldiers in Port Royal less than two
weeks after the assassination of the president. Powell was found at the Surratt
boarding house the day after the attacks, and was tried and hung with the other
conspirators in July.
Jefferson Davis, the former
Confederate president, was taken into custody by Union cavalrymen in Georgia
and spent over three years in prison before being granted amnesty by President
Johnson in 1868.
In the south, state governments
established the “Black Codes” which set very restrictive limits on the meaning
of ‘liberty’ for Freemen. Under the codes, blacks would not be allowed to vote
or to be citizens, nor would they be able to own firearms or move about freely.
Though these Codes would be stricken down the following year, they set the
stage for the segregated, white-dominated south that became the reality after
Lincoln’s vision for healing the country died with him.
The Joint Committee on
Reconstruction was formed on the 13th of December, based upon a resolution
submitted by Thaddeus Stevens. The committee was charged to “inquire into the
condition of the states which formed the Confederate States of America, and
report whether any of them are entitled to be represented in either house of
Congress.”
1866
In February, President Andrew
Johnson presided over the first postwar meeting of the Washington National
Monument Society. “Let us restore the Union, and let us proceed with the
Monument as its symbol…” Despite this support from the highest office in the
land, the Monument would continue to languish in its unfinished state for many
more years.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866,
which was passed over Johnson’s veto to ensure the rights of the emancipated
slaves, anticipated and informed the Fourteenth Amendment by conferring basic
rights of citizenship to all regardless of race, color or former status of
slavery. There was wide-spread
resistance to the Act; groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used terrorism and
violence to oppose it.
In the South, the war’s
aftermath was poverty and a breakdown of civil government and the rule of law.
Some former Confederate soldiers, returning home to desolation and despair,
turned to crime and banditry, and used their military experience to attempt to
reestablish what they saw as the white man’s rightful place in their society’s
order.
Congress also passed a renewed
bill for the Freedmen’s Bureau, again over Johnson’s veto. Opposition to
Reconstruction policies were not limited to the southern states; while many
agreed that slavery was evil, very few held the view that whites and blacks
were equal socially. The anger and turmoil over Reconstruction allowed
politicians a new angle upon which to run for office all over the country:
white supremacy. In the gubernatorial
election in Pennsylvania, a political broadside proclaimed: “The Freedman's
Bureau! An agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white
man. Twice vetoed by the President, and made a law by Congress. Support
Congress & you support the Negro. Sustain the President & you protect
the white man!”
In the congressional elections
that fall, Radical Republicans gained two/thirds majority control of both
houses of the congress; Radical Reconstruction was about to begin in earnest.
1867
The Washington Monument Society
resumed its efforts to raise money, but with very little success. The postwar
years were difficult and people focused their attention on seemingly less
trivial matters.
In January, the Congress called
itself into special session, effectively usurping for the first time a power
reserved for the Executive Branch, in order to vote that the first session of
the new congress start in March of that year, rather than wait until the era's traditional
start time of December. This would prevent President Johnson from acting
without the will of the Republican congress. They also sought to limit the
President’s powers by attaching a clause to the Army Appropriation Act that
stated that the Commander in Chief could only issue orders to the military
through the “General of the Army” (who was still Ulysses Grant at the time)
whose headquarters must be in the District, and who could not be sent elsewhere
without the approval of the Senate. This extra-ordinary session also saw Congress
issue the Tenure of Office Act, a bald attempt to prevent Johnson from
replacing Secretary of War Stanton, the last cabinet member from Lincoln’s
administration that sympathized with the Radical Republican view of the
Reconstruction.
The Reconstruction Act of 1867
split the South into 5 military districts, each with its own military governor
from the North. Each state had to have their state constitution approved and
they were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which made citizens of
all the freed slaves, before they were allowed to rejoin the Union. The
language of the preamble was a stark departure from Lincoln’s vision of
reconciliation: “…no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or
property now exists in the Rebel States… [this act would enforce] peace and
good order…in said States until loyalty and republican State governments can be
legally established.”
Nearly 20,000 U. S. troops were
sent to the south to fulfill this mandate. They made up part of the new fabric
of southern life, along with carpetbaggers, Freedmen Bureau agents, scalawags,
freedmen, and the vanquished southern whites. It was an unstable mix and the
violence and criminality was high. In his “Report of the condition of the
South, investigator Carl Shurz wrote:
“The number of murders and assaults perpetrated upon Negroes is very
great; we can form only an approximative (sic) estimate of what is going on in
those parts of the South which are not closely garrisoned, and from which no
regular reports are received, by what occurs under the very eyes of our
military authorities.”
Frederick Douglass wrote an
open letter to Congress which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, appealing
for the legislature to address the question of black suffrage. In it, he succinctly
described the conditions in the South and clearly laid out what the future
would hold:
“… It is plain that, if the right [to vote] belongs to any,
it belongs to all. The doctrine that some men have no rights that others are
bound to respect, is a doctrine which we must banish as we have banished
slavery, from which it emanated… The work of destruction has already been set
in motion all over the South. Peace to the country has literally meant war to
the loyal men of the South, white and black; and negro suffrage is the measure
to arrest and put an end to that dreadful strife…Statesmen, beware what you do...Will
you repeat the mistake of your fathers, who sinned ignorantly? Or will you
profit by the blood-bought wisdom all round you, and forever expel every
vestige of the old abomination from our national borders?"
Thomas Casey was transferred
from Maine to Washington, D.C. to serve as an assistant in the office of the
Chief of Engineers.
1868
As the nation struggled with
Reconstruction, the Washington Monument continued to be neglected. Mark Twain
wrote that “It (the unfinished shaft of the obelisk) is just the general size
and shape, and possesses about the dignity, of a sugar mill chimney.” The next few years would see almost no
activity on anyone’s part to pursue the resumption of the construction effort.
The forlorn, incomplete stump had ceased to be noticed in the daily life of the
District, and nobody paid it the least of thought or attention.
In an episode of political
drama that underscored the enmity left over from the war, Andrew Johnson was
impeached by the House of Representatives, who characterized his firing of the
War Secretary Edwin Stanton as a “high crime and misdemeanor”. He was acquitted
in the Senate by one vote.
The Fourteenth Amendment, which
gave citizenship to all freedmen, was passed by congress but bitterly opposed
in the South. It would be years before it was fully ratified, even as it became
a requirement for rebel states to re-join the Union.
Du Bois wrote about this time:
“...one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the
later sixties: Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson and Congress
were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, the Fourteenth
pending, and the Fifteenth declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the
ever present flickering afterflame of war, was spending its force against the
Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as from some wild dream to
poverty and social revolution."
Thaddeus Stevens, the influential
Radical, died in this year, the first of many Radicals to leave the public
scene with no one behind them to take up the cause of permanent equality and
suffrage for the freedmen.
1869
Ulysses S. Grant was
inaugurated as President in March. His successful campaign was due in part to
the black voters in the South, and he immediately won favor with the Radicals
by selecting Stanton to stay in his Cabinet position as Secretary of War. His
administration would become infamous for corruption and for the beginning of
the white southern “conservative” push to regain political power from the
Radical governments.
Grant lacked the political
skill that was necessary in this time of immense social upheaval; he was
certainly no Lincoln. He was ineffective in dealing with the scandals in which
members of his cabinet became embroiled and he lacked the zeal of the Radical
Republicans to crush the white landholders that resisted the Reconstruction.
This should not have been a surprise from the man who was so humble in victory
at Appomattox.
Much of the criticism against
Grant came from quarters that didn’t want to see a restored Union so much as an
irresistible Federal power, one with no checks from a politically active South.
Despite the problems of his administration, Grant was effective in solidifying
many of the Reconstruction gains sought by the Radicals. He sought consultation
with black leaders, worked to protect suffrage and equal rights for blacks in
the southern states and practically waged war against the Ku Klux Klan, all but
eliminating them during his time in office. Still, the beginnings of the white
South’s “redemption” and the abandonment of the reconstruction effort which
allowed the segregated South to arise were clearly to be found in the early days
of Grant’s presidency.
1870
The June 1st edition of the
Daily National Republican had an article about an interment for Union soldiers
at the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill, even though Arlington National
Cemetery had opened in 1864. The paper also had a recap of the Nationals’
victory over the Olympics in baseball. The Nationals, not the same franchise as
today's Washington team, of course, wouldn’t officially be a professional team
until two years later.
It continued to be a slow time
for those interested in seeing the Monument completed. Not until the Centennial
Celebration got closer did anyone even consider the monument.
The Justice Department, to
support the Attorney General who up to that time had served as a part-time
assistant to the president, was created.
Georgia, after ratifying the
Fourteenth Amendment, would be the final Confederate state to be readmitted to
the Union.
It appeared that the state of
the freedman continued to improve in the start of the new decade. The final
correction to the foundation of the Republic brought about by the Civil War was
completed in the passing by congress of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed
the right to vote for African-American men. Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican
from Missouri, was the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate.
Not all was well, however, in
the cause of the southern blacks. The waste and corruption of the Freedman’s
Bureau and the Reconstruction effort in general, perpetrated by a small but
notorious minority of northern carpetbaggers and southern scalawags, seemed to
vindicate the southern white conservative “Redeemers”, as they came to be known
in the post-Reconstruction South. Racial prejudice, in both the North and the
South, was also widespread and intractable. An article that appeared in the
Atlantic Monthly, the same periodical that gave a stage for Frederick Douglass,
purported to give an informed view of the states of the blacks by a former
Union Army officer, Nathaniel Shaler. He wrote that they were much the same as
they were under slavery, though “perhaps less merry than before, the careless
laugh of the old slave is now rarely heard, for it belonged to a creature who
had never pondered the question of where his next meal was to come from.”
Shaler insisted that those who pushed for equality and suffrage for the black
simply didn’t understand “how thoroughly exotic the Negro is…one cannot
appreciate the difficulties of making him a part of the social system which
fits us… [with his] passions of a mental organization widely differing from our
own.”
Economic interests also
overcame the desire for radical reconstruction of the South. In order for
northern entrepreneurs and investors to do business in the southern states,
there had to be a halt to the violence and uncertainty, and a restoration of
stable local and state governments. It appeared to those interested in
investing in and taking a financial chance on the South, including Republicans,
that the white southern conservatives were the only ones who could set the stage
for economic growth.
1871
The Washington City Canal, of
which Tiber Creek near the Monument grounds was part, had fallen into disuse
over the last twenty years. Never a very pleasant creek, the Tiber had become
an open sewer during the Civil War years. City planners began a project in this
year that created a tunnel to accommodate the water and covered over Tiber
Creek, leaving a small pond between the Monument and the White House.
The Civil Rights Act of 1871,
more commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, was enacted. It was specifically requested by President
Grant and was aimed at stemming the violence and terrorism against blacks in
the South. It allowed the president to suspend habeas corpus and suppress uprisings
in states as he saw fit.
The sentiment against the
radical reconstruction effort continued to grow. Grant’s Secretary of the
Interior, Jacob Cox of Ohio, recommended that the administration seek to gain
the “intelligent, well-to-do, and controlling class” of white southerners as
their allies, essentially a return to Lincoln’s more reconciliatory policies
towards the rebel states that he had envisioned before his death.
In June, the corporations of
the cities of Washington and Georgetown were abolished and a single
Presidentially-appointed government for the entire District of Columbia was
established by the District of Columbia Organic Act. While this is the
beginning of Washington, D.C. as we know it today, it was much later that the
citizens of the district were allowed to elect their own mayor.
1872
U. S. Grant signed the Amnesty
Act into law which restored voting and office-holding privileges to
secessionists (all but about 500 of the military leadership of the CSA). This
Act impacted about 150,000 former CSA soldiers. Despite the fact that this
essentially established an instant voting bloc against him, Grant was
re-elected to office by a wide margin.
Grant ran against Horace
Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune. Greeley was a staunch
abolitionist but he also believed the rebel states should have been allowed to
secede peacefully; this was only one example of his seemingly
self-contradictory political stances. Perhaps luckily for Greeley, who lost so
emphatically despite having the support of the Democrats and the Liberal Republicans,
he is the only Presidential candidate to die before the Electoral College
ballots were counted.
Liberal Republicans were made
up of one-time radicals who were against the Grant administration and who
thought that the reconstruction effort should be over and the military troops
brought home. They had lost interest in supporting the freedmen, which allowed
their temporary alliance with the Democrats. The Liberal Republican Party
scarcely outlived their candidate, and the membership split and moved (back, in
most cases) into the Democrat and Republican parties.
