E. Benjamin Andrews on the Evils of Reconstruction

The war left the South in indescribable desolation. Great numbers of Confederates came home to find their farms sold for unpaid taxes, perhaps mortgaged to ex-slaves. The best Southern land, after the war, was worth but a trifle of its old value. Their ruin rendered many insane; in multitudes more it broke down all energy. The braver spirits—men to whom till now all toil had been strange—set to work as clerks, depot-masters and agents of various business enterprises. High-born ladies, widowed by Northern bullets, became teachers or governesses. In the comparatively few cases where families retained their estates, their efforts to keep up appearances was pathetic. One by one domestics were dismissed; dinner parties grew rare; stately coaches lost their paint and became rickety; carriage and saddle-horses were worn out at the plow and replaced by mules. At last the master learned to open his own gates, the mistress to do her own cooking.

In a majority of the Southern cities owners of real estate found it for years after hostilities closed a source of poverty instead of profit. In the heart of Charleston charred ruins of huge blocks or stately churches long lingered as reminders of the horrid past. Many mansions were vacant, vainly flaunting each its placard "for rent." Most of the smaller towns, like Beaufort, threatened permanent decay, their streets silent and empty save for negro policemen here and there in shiny blue uniforms. The cotton plantations were at first largely abandoned owing to the severe foreign competition in cotton-growing occasioned by the war. It was difficult to get help on the plantation, so immersed in politics and so lazy had the field-hands become.

Causes were at work which soon lessened Sambo’s respect for "Old Massa," and "Old Massa’s" for Sambo. Republicans from the North flocked to the South, whom the blacks, viewing them as representing the emancipation party, naturally welcomed and followed. These "carpet-baggers," as they were called, were made up, in the main, of military officers still or formerly in service, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, old Union soldiers who had bought Southern farms, and peoplewho had settled at the South for purposes of trade.

There were, no doubt, many perfectly honest carpet-baggers, and the fullest justice should be done to such. They considered themselves as true missionaries in partibus, commissioned by the great Republican party to complete the regime of righteousness which the war and the emancipation proclamation had begun. A prominent Democratic politician, describing a reconstruction governor of his State, whom he had done his best to overthrow, said: "I regard him as a thoroughly honest man and opposed to corruption and extravagance in office. I think his desire was to make a good Executive and to administer the affairs of the State in the interest of the people, but the want of sympathy between him and the white people of the State, and his failure to appreciate the relations and prejudices of the two races, made it next to impossible for him to succeed." . . .

The good carpet-baggers and the bad alike somehow exerted an influence which had the effect of morbidly inflaming the negro’s sense of independence and of engaging him in politics. His former wrongs were dwelt upon and the ballot held up as a providential means of righting them. The negro was too apt a pupil, not in the higher politics of principle, but in the politics of office and "swag." In 1872 the National Colored Republican Convention adopted a resolution "earnestly praying that the colored Republicans of States where no Federal positions were given to colored men might no longer be ignored, but be stimulated by some recognition of Federal patron-age." The average negro exprest his views on public affairs by the South Carolina catch: "De bottom rail am on de top, and we’s gwineter keep it dar." "The reformers complain of taxes being too high," said Beverly Nash in 1874, after he had become State Senator; "I tell you that they are not high enough. I want them taxed until they put those lands back where they belong, into the hands of those who worked for them. You worked for them; you labored for them and were sold to pay for them, and you ought to have them."

The tendency of such exhortation was most vicious. In their days of serfdom the negroes’ besetting sin had been thievery. Now that the opportunities for this were multiplied, the fear of punishment gone, and many a carpet-bagger at hand to encourage it, the prevalence of public and private stealing was not strange. Larceny was nearly universal, burglary painfully common. At night watch had to be kept over property with dogs and guns. It was part, or at least an effect, of the carpet-bag policy to aggravate race jealousies and sectional misunderstandings. The duello, still good form all over the South, induced disregard of law and of human life….

Colored men were quite too unintelligent to make laws or even to elect those who were to do so. At one time dozens of engrossed bills were passed back and forth between the two Houses of the Alabama Legislature that errors in them might be corrected….

The colored legislators of South Carolina furnished the State House with gorgeous clocks at $480 each, mirrors at $750, and chandeliers at 650. Their own apartments were a barbaric display ofgewgaws, carpets and upholstery. The minority of a congressional committee recited that "these ebony statesmen" purchased a lot of imported china cuspidors at $8 apiece, while Senators and Representatives "at the glorious capital of the nation" had to be "content with a plain earthenware article of domestic manufacture." . . .

There were said to be in South Carolina alone, in November, 1874, two hundred negro trial justices who could neither read nor write, also negro school commissioners equally ignorant, receiving a thousand a year each, while negro juries, deciding delicate points of legal evidence, settled questions involving lives and property. Property, which had to bear the burden of taxation, had no voice, for the colored man had no property. Taxes were levied ruinously, and money was appropriated with a lavish hand.