Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874

By William Warren Rogers

Recounts in detail the volatile political period in Alabama following the end of the Civil War
 
Following the end of the Civil War, white Southerners were forced to concede equal rights to those who had been enslaved, ushering in a new and ruthless brand of politics. Suddenly, the status and place of some four million former slaves dominated the national and regional political dialogue. In Alabama, the Republican Party established itself quickly and powerfully with the participation of a newly freed constituency, firmly aligned against the Democratic Party that had long dictated the governance of the state. Well-heeled planters, merchants, and bankers, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution by gravitating strongly to the Democratic Party and its unabashedly white supremacist measures. The ensuing power struggle in the birthplace of the Confederacy is at the heart of Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

What emerges in William Warren Rogers Jr.’s comprehensive study of the era is a detailed examination of Reconstruction politics, particularly in Alabama. This book explores an explosive and unpredictable political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. A vivid picture emerges of courthouse rallies and bitter infighting in legislative circles. Rogers’s narrative ventures into darker places as well: to the Tennessee Valley and the Black Belt regions of Alabama, where Klan nightriders used violence against an enemy and ideology they could not abide.

The attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape created by the extraordinary circumstances of Reconstruction constitutes this study’s most central contribution. Rogers often quotes black and white citizens, Democrats and Republicans. Drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, these firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and filled with conviction. They offer a startling immediacy and illustrate the temper—or distemper—of the times. Readers are treated to a panoramic unveiling of Reconstruction Alabama politics that provides a sense of what was truly at stake: the values by which a region and the nation as a whole would chart its future for the century to come.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780817393311

Book preview

Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State

Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State

ALABAMA, 1865–1874

WILLIAM WARREN ROGERS JR.

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon and Goudy Bookletter 1911

Cover image: Members of the Alabama Reconstruction Legislature on the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama; courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives & History.

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2074-4

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9331-1

For William Warren Rogers Sr.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. There Is No Longer a Slave in Alabama

2. The March of Events

3. In Sight of Land at Last

4. We Are Living in an Age of Railroads

5. Radicalism in Our State Is Dead

6. We Are Doing Tolibell in This State but We As Colored People Woint Some Help Yet

7. The Beginning of a New History of Alabama

8. To Cross the Radical Gulf, I Am Ready to Use Any Bridge

9. The Vital Question

10. Letting the Other Side Have All the Turkey and He Be Put Off With Buzzard

11. We Will Never Submit to Social Equality

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Alabama counties and geographic regions

2. Wager Swayne, Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau

3. Freedmen gathering at political meeting

4. James Holt Clanton, chairman of Democratic Executive Committee

5. William Hugh Smith, Republican governor (1868–1870)

6. Alfred Worthy, Democratic legislator

7. Benjamin Sterling Turner, Alabama’s first black congressman (1871–1873)

8. Two Alabama freedwomen

9. Robert Burns Lindsay, Democratic governor (1870–1872)

10. Alabama rivers and railroads

11. David Peter Lewis, Republican governor (1872–1874)

12. The capitol legislature (1872)

13. Alexander Curtis, Republican legislator

14. George Smith Houston, Democratic governor (1874–1878)

Acknowledgments

Many friends, archivists, and colleagues helped make this book possible, and I am very grateful to them. By way of disclaimer, I am surely omitting some people and I apologize for doing so. Considerable debt has been accrued at the University of North Georgia, where I am a faculty member, beginning with Charles Karcher, formerly head of the history department, and his successor, Jeff Pardue. Both helped finance research trips. Jeff is also a great friend who took a genuine interest in the study’s publication. Without the efforts of the interlibrary loan staff at the university library, I could not have written the book. The department’s head Chris Andrews went well beyond the line of duty. Thanks also go to John Williams, with the university’s information technology department, for his help with preparing the manuscript.

At my request, two scholars read what would become Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874 at the early stages of its creation. Terry Seip, a Reconstruction historian of high merit, offered instructive suggestions. Even more importantly, Seip provided encouragement and interest over the years and I cannot thank him enough. Accomplished scholar Sam Webb also took on the lengthy manuscript, providing advice that much improved the book. Other historians provided encouragement and interest, among them Mike Denham, Mike Fitzgerald, Wayne Flynt, Sally Hadden, John Inscoe, Clay Outz, Paul Pruitt, Bawa Singh, Sarah Wiggins, and two deceased scholars, Jim Lorence and Robert David Ward.

Archivists and librarians were unfailingly helpful. Joyce Ledbetter provided critical support at the Auburn University library by keeping the antiquated Kodak microfilm reader (the only one this not-so-technical researcher could operate) in working order. I extend my gratitude also to the Special Collections and Archives staff at Auburn and especially thank Tommy Brown and Dwayne Cox (the retired head archivist) for the warm reception they provided. Also at Auburn, Fran Judkins inestimably facilitated the research via that university’s interlibrary loan services. Patricia Wilson made possible my access to reels of microfilm from the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. I owe a deep debt to others on that institution’s staff, who are a credit to the oldest state archives in the country: Ken Barr, Nancy Dupree, John Hardin, Dianne Jackson, Norwood Kerr, Scotty Kirkland, and the late Rikki Brunner. The archivists at the Special Collections Library at Duke University and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina were also extremely cooperative. The staff at the University of Georgia Library provided unfailing help. Representative of their professional and knowledgeable staff are Charles Connolly, Valerie Glenn, and Susan Tuggle. Thanks to the efforts of Clark Center and Kevin Ray, among others, my time at the University of Alabama’s Special Collections Archives proved profitable. Numerous dedicated archivists at the National Archives and the Library of Congress have my thanks.

Many other individuals contributed to the completion of this manuscript. They include Peggy Galis, who never failed to ask about the manuscript when I ran into her at the Athens YMCA. Tom Tuggle, a retired English professor and much valued friend, saved me from misplacing possessives. Nimrod Frazer volunteered his home in Montgomery as a research base. My sister, Katie, and her husband, Jim Berry, much appreciate history and inquired about the study’s progress (no matter how slow). So did my mother, Miriam Rogers. Rick and Beth Farr, fine in-laws, also had faith in the book. My wife, Lee, and our two sons, Warren and Benjamin, often provided much appreciated company on research trips. Some measure of how long this book took to complete is provided by the fact that I began the research when our sons were little boys. Warren is now a freshman in college and Benjamin a high school junior.

In the latter stages of the process, various readers for the University of Alabama Press examined the manuscript. I incorporated many suggested changes and the obvious time and effort these anonymous individuals devoted to their appraisals made for a much better book. I wish to thank Acquisitions Editor Donna Baker for shepherding the manuscript forward. And at the end, Dan Waterman, long associated with the press, was absolutely invaluable. The keen eye of Irina du Quenoy, copy editor, rescued me from various transgressions.

I much regret that my father did not live to see this book published. William Warren Rogers Sr. died in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight. Daddy was a historian. He impressed upon me the value (and joy) of doing research at off-the-beaten path county courthouses, an appreciation for using the correct word and attention to style, and the importance of writing with a sense of history and place. More than anything, he demonstrated by example the relationship between hard work and scholarly productivity. William Warren Rogers was a native of Alabama and felt a deep attachment to the state, and he would be proud of this study. I dedicate this book to him.

Introduction

This study concerns developments of a political nature driven by the Civil War’s outcome in a single Southern state, namely, Alabama. The most notable of these were the establishment of the state’s Republican Party and the participation of freedmen in a refashioned political world. What transpired in Alabama was both similar to and different from the Reconstruction experiences of other Southern states, sometimes representative of overall regional trends and at other times peculiarly anomalous. Republicanism challenged sacrosanct underpinnings of society, as the party’s ethos countered some two hundred and fifty years of Southern experience and the attempt to alter orthodox ideas concerning race provoked fierce resistance. The attendant unfolding events, most often here delineated on a political stage, fundamentally shape this book and account for the title, Reconstruction Politics in a Deep South State: Alabama, 1865–1874.

The immediate consequences of the Civil War resulted in the repudiation of eleven Southern states’ violent reach for independence and the emancipation of the slave population. These were followed by a new struggle, waged not by flanking armies or booming cannons but by opposing visions of the freedpeople’s place in a nation at a historical crossroads. As with the war, questions regarding state sovereignty were involved, but the underlying, relentlessly driving explanation for the conflict was that of race. The question of establishing the status of some four million ex-slaves dominated the national political dialogue in the interregnum between the war’s conclusion and the assumption by Congress of Reconstruction’s direction. A defeated South embraced Andrew Johnson, a native son who had rejected secession and the Confederacy but returned to the region’s good graces by battling against those who would overnight make citizens out of yesterday’s slaves. Despite this, the attempt to deny freedmen full rights failed. The First Military Reconstruction Act and advocacy of the Fourteenth Amendment placed the Republican imprimatur on Reconstruction between 1866–1867. By 1868, ex-slaves were voting, holding public office, testifying in courts of law, and in many respects had gained legal parity with white Americans

Alabama offers an appropriate setting for examining the reaction to the ideological blueprint enforced by a dominant Republican Party. If there is such a thing, measured in terms of outlook and demographics, Alabama was a representative Southern state. On the eve of the war, cotton production defined the economy of the decidedly rural state, which counted the fourth highest number of slaves in the South. The seemingly holy regard the peculiar institution was held in is also indicative. White Alabamians did not question the inferiority of black people or, by way of corollary, their natural caste as slaves. By 1860 a distinct majority considered secession a better alternative than cooperating with a national administration perceived as determined to abolish involuntary servitude. A significant Unionist minority could not halt the rush to secession and Alabama became the fourth state to leave the Union. Subsequent military defeat and the war’s verdict forcing the emancipation of nearly half a million slaves altered the script. The Confederacy’s demise did not, however, reshape notions regarding the black race. The former slave, now a free person, remained categorically and immutably inferior. Such was conventional thinking among white people in Alabama as the Civil War ended.

That was hardly the outlook of ex-slaves. For black Alabamians, almost half the population of the state, Reconstruction presented a historical opportunity. Escaping slavery’s bonds and acclimating to a status the race had only dreamed of—freedom—constituted an incredible transformative experience. Black residents of Alabama had not been the docile and accommodating supplicants of slave lore, and emancipation only whetted aspirations. Freedpeople would forge a collective identity in the years ahead.

While the course of Reconstruction took different paths in every Southern state that had left the Union, its direction followed a general pattern. The process unfolded in stages. Surrender begat military supervision, then yielded to provisional government; readmission to the Union followed once compliance with the First Military Reconstruction Act was achieved. A new two-party system in the South emerged from the crucible of war, as a coalition of black and white voters formed the Republican Party in the former Confederacy. Freedmen comprised the party’s rank and file. They understood that freedom and citizenship were promoted and safeguarded by Republicanism just as surely as they would be compromised by Democrats. Meanwhile, various considerations accounted for the choice of some white Southerners, demonized as scalawags, to affiliate with the party of Abraham Lincoln. These involved a mix of Unionist sentiment, aspirations for the region’s economic regeneration, and empathy for the ex-slaves. An overriding preoccupation with egalitarianism was often more pronounced among white Northerners (derided as carpetbaggers) who came south and augmented local Republican ranks.

For their part, Southern Democrats, burdened with blame for the war, struggled initially for direction. In time, however, opposition to Republican racial tenets became the party’s most identifiable trait. Indeed, most Southern protests against what was denounced as Radical Republicanism were channeled through the conduits of the Democratic Party. Although not as uniformly as black voters would act with the Republican Party, white Southerners gravitated strongly to the Democrats, with the party’s unabashedly white supremacist message accounting most frequently for their choice.

Newly minted state Republican parties won control of government throughout the South, a phenomenon made possible by freedmen converting to the party en masse. Black people composed a majority of the population in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and a large minority in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia, and the ballots of black men lifted Republicans to power. While differences over the freedpeople’s status provided an early and enduring point of departure for political conflict, the poor performance of state governments soon contributed to polarizing partisanship. Financial missteps took a variety of forms, as Republicans irresponsibly endorsed railroad bonds, levied taxes, and created imposing state debts. Questionable ethics and outright corruption further undermined Republican administration. The first course of the late nineteenth century’s Great Barbecue was seemingly served in Southern capitols.¹ This malfeasance obscures the admirable initiatives of economic development, public education, and an ethos of opportunity for freedpeople that simultaneously characterized the region during this time period. Unable to overcome internal problems, the fractious Republican coalition weakened, and the Democratic Party, augmented often by former Whigs, gained strength. Well-heeled planters, merchants, bankers, and the like, joined by yeoman farmers, staged a counterrevolution. Where Republican power had risen dramatically, it now abated. By the mid-1970s, the curtain had fallen on Republicans in the South.²

Reconstruction shook Alabama to its core. By 1867 the intersection of state and national events gave rise to a political environment that a few years earlier would have been inconceivable. Former slaves provided the voting brawn of a party that did not exist in the state before the war. Freedmen casting Republican ballots accounted for the party taking total control of Alabama by the election year 1868. The day of the carpetbagger and scalawag had arrived. The ensuing partisan collision imbued the practice of politics with an unprecedented visceral quality. Whigs and Democrats used to abuse each other very fiercely in speeches and newspapers but such things scarcely ever affected our social relations, one Alabamian wrote, further complaining, I notice what I never noticed before, that the estimate of a man is more controlled by his politics than by anything else. A distinct brand of politics emerged, characterized by an elemental fury and waged with ferocity. Largely accounting for the escalation was the introduction of race into the public debate, which raised the stakes by framing politics in a new social and cultural context. Proposed statutes allowing black people to travel on first class railroad cars, for example, elicited persistent attention in the state legislature between 1868 and 1874. Efforts to spare freedmen the indignities of second-class smoker cars reflected a new day just as surely as determined opposition spoke to past and present racial convictions. The seeming overnight transformation of former slaves to full citizens provoked resentment, anger, and certainly fear among a large cross section of white Alabamians. There would be unmistakable consequences. The politics of vilification set in. In its worst form, in Alabama and elsewhere, the milieu accounted for nightriders.³

At no time was partisanship so bitterly displayed as during that most quintessential exercise of American democracy—election campaigns. In Alabama, Democratic and Republican spokesmen traveled down the same rural dirt roads to their destination. Once there, however, they delivered a highly different message, to widely dissimilar audiences. Accepting a new order imposed by the war’s verdict, generally considered, framed the Republican approach. Democrats countered with a message that varied between necessary compliance (a grudging concession to the law) and outright defiance. In places like Decatur, Livingston, or Eufaula, often remote and undistinguished, the essence of Reconstruction politics comes into primal focus. It is for this reason that Alabamians’ participation in state and national elections between 1867 and 1874 receives much attention in the following pages.

In a similar sense, Republican/Democratic conflict came sharply to the foreground when the legislature met. Before the Civil War, legislative seats had been occupied exclusively by white men whose roots almost always lay in Alabama or the South more broadly. Men whose experiences had been welded in the North now joined them. At the same time, former slaves, their frame of reference forged by the acrid memory of bondage, dramatically altered the mix at the Montgomery capitol. Alabama’s legislature passed in and out of the control of both parties during the time period under consideration here but the deliberations, often combustible, provide a telling flashpoint of conflict. An attempt to capture and account for the unforgiving political landscape displayed during elections and carrying over to the legislative deliberations in Reconstruction Alabama constitutes the most original contribution of this study.

Crucial to the evolution of the political landscape was the initiation of freedmen into politics. An understanding of the past and a determination to fashion a far better future accounted for the Republican loyalties of the former slaves. Black people joined the Union League, attended political rallies, and often personally delivered a message of racial inclusion. I say the Republican Party freed me, Sumter County’s George Houston declared, vowing, I will die on top of it. Houston did not forfeit his life because of his political convictions but a significant number of his fellow freedmen did. In the face of violence emanating from white supremacists, freedmen now had a weapon of their own—the ballot. From the outlying plantations in the state’s outback, often on the night prior to election day, groups of black men set out to vote at the county seat, sometimes accompanied by a former slave blowing a tin trumpet. Considered symbolically, the notes he played resonated inspirationally with black residents of the state while representing a discordant cacophony for white Alabamians. In keeping with the enveloping theme of partisanship, the following narrative addresses how and why previously powerless slaves became the critical component in a briefly triumphant Republican coalition.⁴

The words of Democrats and Republicans, black and white, are often quoted in the following pages. The firsthand voices are passionate, unvarnished, and compelling. If the advantaged newspaper editor was more erudite, the uneducated yeoman farmer might be a more authentic witness. Freedmen sometimes come across most poignantly. For example, ten years after emancipation a former slave reflected that Alabama was the last place in the world for a colored man. Even so, the words of freedpeople were recorded all too infrequently, and the surviving record is unfortunately even far fainter for freedwomen. What remains is a catalogue of voices drawn from newspapers, correspondence, and various federal investigations, offering a startling immediacy and illustrating the temper (and often distemper) of the times.⁵

A brief historical primer delineating the timeline of Reconstruction in Alabama seems appropriate. From the war’s end to the summer of 1868, the state remained outside of the Union, led first by Provisional Governor Lewis Parsons and then Governor Robert Patton. Readmission in 1868 and the elevation to the governorship of William Hugh Smith ended that period of limbo and was followed by two years of Republican domination. Smith’s administration concluded in the disputed election of 1870, as a result of which Robert Burns Lindsay, a Democrat, was elected governor. Recriminations over railroad policy made for an ultimately stultifying tenure and Republicans reclaimed control in the person of David Lewis in 1872, a victory that was to prove rather hollow. Considerable financial problems threatened the most basic functions of government and the national Panic of 1873 exacerbated local economic conditions. Democrats returned to power in 1874 and redeemed the state by electing George Smith Houston and a Democratic legislature. Following the electoral rout, the force of Republicanism was spent, and chances of that party implementing policy vanished as it entered a long period of free-falling collapse.

With the exception of chapter 6, the narrative proceeds in chronological sequence. The acclimation of former slaves to freedom, the general population’s struggles with economic regeneration, and the state Republican Party’s organization are featured in chapters 1 and 2. Alabama’s return to the Union, the course of a Republican legislature and the state’s participation in the presidential election of 1868 (distinguished by the first black Alabamians casting a presidential ballot) are chronicled in chapter 3. The next chapter concerns Governor William Hugh Smith’s administration and the political warfare occasioned by the congressional elections of 1869. Chapter 5 details the general election of 1870 and Smith’s dramatic attempt to hold on to power by barricading himself in the governor’s office. The experiences of freedpeople compose a running and intermittent theme throughout but gain exclusive treatment in chapter 6. Returning to the calendar progression of developments, chapter 7 recounts the Democratic administration of Robert Burns Lindsay (1870–1872). In the succeeding chapter, Republicans regain control of the state government and carry Alabama for Ulysses S. Grant as Liberal Republicanism signally failed. Partisanship on a different level comprises chapter 9, which describes a classic power struggle between the courthouse legislature (organized by Republicans) and capitol legislature (filled by Democrats) and the conflicting efforts to reelect or defeat Republican Senator George Spencer. David Lewis’s troubled administration (1872–1874) occupies chapter 10. The transcending question of race, framed by pending civil rights legislation in Congress, dominates the general election of 1874 and sweeps Democrats back into power in the concluding chapter. That juncture ended the period of viable competition between Alabama Republicans and Democrats and marks an appropriate place to conclude this book.

Reconstruction has been and remains the subject of intensive scholarly investigation. Comprehensive studies of the South during the period and narrower monographs focusing on aspects of the era—race, labor, class, gender—have and continue to improve our understanding of the forces shaping the time. Tracing the historiographical trail begins with William A. Dunning and his apostles’ portrayal of a benighted era replete with grasping carpetbaggers, scalawags, and ignorant freedmen, held collectively responsible for misgovernment on a grand scale, righted and redeemed by white Democrats in the 1870s. The Dunning school of thought cast the image of Reconstruction. For example, growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, the writer Thomas Wolfe (who would become known for his novels Look Homeward Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again) thoroughly internalized this version of the era’s misdeeds. In the late 1920s Wolfe wrote O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (the precursor draft for Look Homeward Angel), which included characteristic language: Oliver Gant rode into a cadaverous South, picked to the bone and rancorous with the memories of black parliaments, military governments, and plundering carpetbaggers, whose departing footfalls had scarcely echoed away. The scars of war had healed more quickly than the scars of peace.

In the 1930s a few scholars challenged standard Reconstruction literature and by the 1950s revisionist historians were arguing for a full-scale reinterpretation. Scholars criticized and replaced the Dunning school with a more favorable appraisal emphasizing both the egalitarianism that most centrally defined Republicanism and the achievements of the period. Additional evidence of the evolving historiography is provided by the postrevisionists who have focused on the limitations of Reconstruction. A more recent trend toward a preoccupation with the social aspects of Reconstruction—best illustrated by an examination of the freedpeople’s experience—has provided a more textured but hardly uncritical approach. Even accounting for a more favorable and broader chronicling of the period, the consensus is that Reconstruction ultimately failed. The inability to provide freedpeople in the long term an opportunity to advance economically or guarantee the rights of a Constitution invigorated by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments largely accounts for that judgment.⁶

The trajectory of historical scholarship on Reconstruction-era Alabama begins with the 1905 publication of Walter Lynwood Fleming’s Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. Inspired by William Dunning, Fleming’s book is much compromised by its stark racist bias and heavy anti-Republican slant but remained largely unchallenged until the 1960s, when Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins began to provide a far more balanced and accurate view. Her 1977 study The Scalawag in Alabama Reconstruction, 1865–1871 offered new directions and represented a resounding corrective to past assumptions. Other historians have since added piecemeal to an understanding of the era in Alabama. Even so, until the second decade of the twenty-first century, Alabama stood as one of the few states that had not benefitted from a comprehensive scholarly reassessment of the period. In 2017, Michael W. Fitzgerald filled that void with Reconstruction in Alabama: From Civil War to Redemption in the Cotton South. Fitzgerald’s book incorporates a synthesis of sources, comprehensive research, as well as offering his own original conclusions. Wiggins’s 1977 book offered something of a scholarly watershed. So did Fitzgerald’s forty years later.

Reconstruction Politics: In a Deep South State Alabama, 1865–1874 makes no pretense to be a comprehensive history of the period. Rather, the book is preoccupied with the clashing ideological forces that defined Alabama Reconstruction. The rapid and dramatic reconfiguration of the political world created a wide chasm and resulted in a pyrotechnic partisan display. What does the vituperation spawned by a Republican-inspired crusade that threatened the underpinnings of society reveal about Alabama, and by way of extension, the South? An increased understanding of the period requires a grassroots approach to the time and place. An examination of how politics played out in various venues, small towns and bigger municipalities, the legislature, even the University of Alabama, guides this study. Although delineating the bitter differences separating Republicans and Democrats is the primary concern, inherent conflict within each party also emerges. Democrats did not march lockstep with each other and neither did a common foe make for unison among Republicans. Philosophical and personal differences inflicted great harm on the Republican cause. For the Democrats, an initial total loss of control was followed in the state by a gradual reassertion of power. By the mid-1870s the table was set for Democratic control and the era of Bourbon hegemony. As for Republicanism, the perils of raising a party from scratch are addressed, as are the challenges of building one largely composed of freedmen. The fact of political violence looms throughout. Why did a powerful state Republican Party decline almost as fast as it rose? The weave of Reconstruction, writ small in one Southern state, and the experiment with expanding democracy and establishing a more egalitarian society, lie at the heart of what follows.⁷

1

There Is No Longer a Slave in Alabama

Family and friends welcomed home W. W. Powers to his home in or near Greensboro, Alabama, in the summer of 1865. The Eighth Alabama Cavalry soldier, formerly imprisoned at Johnson’s Island in Ohio, counted himself more fortunate than many fellow Confederates. Some thirty-five to forty thousand Alabama soldiers died during the war, and between ten and fifteen thousand men were disabled. Buildings and residences lay in ruins and uprooted railroads and collapsed bridges further offered the scars of war. In north Alabama, Athens, Decatur, and Tuscumbia were partly destroyed, and Union troops left the University of Alabama a mass of ruins.¹ Witnessing the devastation wrought by federal soldiers at Selma, one traveler stated, Here, for the first time, I began to fully realize what is included in that brief word, WAR.² When the conflict ended, not a single bridge on the Montgomery and West Point Railroad could be crossed, and a railroad official noted all the locomotives were as nearly destroyed as fire and a liberal use of the sledge hammer could accomplish it. That severe damage had been done by Union troops was revealed by the most cursory examination of the Brierfield Ironworks in Bibb County. Mobile, the state’s largest city, surrendered peacefully, but an accidental munitions warehouse explosion on May 25 destroyed commercial buildings and residences, killing over two hundred people. The prospect of the slaves’ freedom dominated all else. John J. Seibels, a prominent Montgomerian, addressed that subject in one of the last letters directed to Abraham Lincoln. Writing to the president on April 14, Seibels posed the possibility of a gradual emancipation. John Wilkes Booth shot the president on that day and Lincoln died on April 15. Later in the year, Richard Busteed, who figures prominently in this book, would come south to assume his duties as US district judge. As he approached the port city by steamer, Busteed would have seen disabled floating batteries and other Confederate obstructions placed in the harbor to protect Mobile from Union gunboats. They too served as markers for a thoroughly failed cause. Alabama was broken.³

Between the April surrender of the capital in Montgomery and the establishment of a provisional government in July, authority devolved to the United States Army. Alabama had by the summer become part of the Division of Tennessee, which also included several other states; it was headed by General George H. Thomas, who established headquarters in Nashville. A commander answered to him and directed operations in each state. General Charles R. Woods, whose military experience included commanding the Star of the West, became the ranking figure in Alabama, headquartered in Mobile. Federal troops had entered the Tennessee Valley early in 1862, and intermittently occupied parts of north Alabama thereafter. Isolated raids struck elsewhere in the state but the large majority of Alabamians’ knowledge of the enemy had been limited to what they had read and heard. Closer contact with Billy Yank began in the spring and summer of 1865. United States Army soldiers established their presence in Montgomery, Mobile, Huntsville, and smaller towns and more obscure outposts. Various military officials embodied authority and issued guidelines representing a de facto law. The military filled a void in an infrastructure that had been crumbling well before the war ended. Soldiers converted the Bibb County courthouse at Centre into barracks. Troops settled into communities with varying degrees of ease. Soldiers began spending money freely in Huntsville that summer. The Huntsville Advocate conceded good order is preserved, the police is rigid day and night, and the city is kept clean.⁴

Inevitably, though, conflicts arose, for the troops cast an unnatural shadow. In a Deep South state formerly aligned with the Confederacy, the blue-coated soldier became a natural target for muted and sometimes open resentment. Neither did the soldiers’ deportment always command respect. Tuscaloosa residents drafted a petition alleging acts of thievery and assaults on local townsmen and pleaded for the garrison’s removal; reports of soldiers’ stealing from gardens at Jacksonville provoked promises of severe punishment from the post commandant. A special animus was reserved there and elsewhere for black soldiers. In Stevenson, when the proprietor of an eatery refused to serve members of the Fortieth United States Colored Infantry, the military temporarily shut down the establishment. It was a fluid situation, with priorities changing and officers and troops mustering out. Still, resentment did not diminish the paramount authority of the military. Captain William Stanley served as the provost marshal at Montevallo post in Shelby County. When William P. Browne, a prominent local man, and a black man named Jerry became involved in a disagreement, Stanley summoned Browne to the provost marshal’s office and ordered him to bring with you the contract and Jerry.⁵

On a different level Alabamians could only speculate about when and on what terms readmission to the Union could be achieved. The fear of punishment for raising arms against the United States weighed heavily. Some congressional Republicans demanded that land be appropriated from white Southerners and redistributed among the freedmen. That a large swath of ex-Confederates would indefinitely lose political privileges was also possible. The Republican Party, one Alabamian posed, was out for blood and confiscation.⁶ Gaining some semblance of economic stability was a more immediate and pressing problem. Alabama’s heritage as a state heavily dependent upon agriculture offered at once both hope and reason for despair. Although slave labor was no more, the land remained an undying resource. That cotton would reclaim its suzerain status was possible. Yet, returning soldiers arrived too late for spring planting. Fences were down, stock depleted, and a summer drought exacerbated already difficult circumstances. Little money circulated. Devastating impoverishment was ubiquitous. When a Union colonel at the Black Belt outpost of Gainesville ordered the arrest of anyone wearing clothing connected to Confederate service, a local resident protested that in some cases that was all individuals had. James Mallory, a Talladega County farmer, faithfully chronicled local developments. The general scarcity of food and money, the loss of life, the want of order and security, he recorded in his diary, combine to cast a leaden gloom over the country. The families of deceased soldiers suffered disproportionately. From the northern reaches of the state in Cherokee County, where a confluence of circumstances accounted for extraordinary misery, petitioners envisioned a famine.⁷

At the same time, as elsewhere in the South, the Confederacy’s fall brought more relief than traumatization to Alabama. A month after Appomattox, General Christopher C. Andrews observed from Selma that people are glad to have peace on almost any terms.⁸ In the Tennessee Valley, where Unionist sentiment had been strongest, public meetings resulted in resolutions lamenting Abraham Lincoln’s death and pledging loyalty. In Athens, county seat of Limestone County, residents met on the first day of June and passed resolutions labeling Lincoln’s death a National calamity.⁹ From his vantage point in Decatur, a former Unionist assured President Andrew Johnson that the people there and in nearby counties are fast returning to their allegiance to the United States government.¹⁰ On May 13 residents of nearby Somerville passed resolutions of loyalty at a public meeting attended by several hundred ex-Confederate soldiers. At a Walker County public forum on June 10 over five hundred men and women expressed regret over the president’s passing and proclaimed their desire to return to the old flag (figure 1).¹¹

The future, whatever it held, would be most different for the freedpeople. Over 430,000 slaves gained emancipation in Alabama alone. As the extended siege of Mobile continued in 1865, local black people had prayed for the Federal Army’s success and many had crossed into Union lines. Women and men in Huntsville, reveling in their new status, likened their race’s narrative to the Israelites’ travails and triumph. Moses is their ideal, a chaplain in an Iowa regiment wrote, of all that is high, and noble, and perfect, in man.¹² Having returned to Alabama following service as chief of ordnance for the Confederacy, Josiah Gorgas would soon assume the task of resurrecting the Brierfield Ironworks. He continued a wartime practice of keeping a journal, in which he noted the former slaves excitement & jubilee. Yet, reality tempered the elixir of freedom. Although individual circumstances varied, the experiences that black people could draw upon as slaves left them singularly unprepared for emancipation. The slave, blinded by bondage, could hardly be familiar with notions of law or conversant with a form of government. Another legacy of slavery, mass illiteracy, also posed a strong impediment to establishing a solid footing for advancement.¹³

Image: Figure 1. Alabama counties and geographic regions.

Figure 1. Alabama counties and geographic regions.

For all that, ex-slaves began to forge identities as free persons. Above all, in different ways, they distanced themselves from slavery. That often meant abandoning agricultural drudgery and setting out for a nearby town, or—if their destination was Montgomery, Mobile, or Huntsville—a small city. The lure of camaraderie and frivolity in a more exciting and sociable setting enticed some. Former slaves often deferred employment because they expected to receive land from the government in the near future. Henry Hays Forwood, having recently exited Camp Morton prison in Indiana, had returned to his south Alabama home in Gosport. Upon his return, he informed his brother that the negroes have run off to Mobile.¹⁴ In Montgomery, a New York Herald correspondent observed newly arrived freedpeople tast[ing] the sweets of freedom. Rejecting the past constraints of slavery took different forms. Black people sought out authorities (often probate judges) to legalize de facto marriages. Cutting ties with white churches and worshipping among themselves represented a rite of passage. A sense of community began to form. Freedpeople met in Livingston, the Sumter County seat, and created the Freedmen’s Benevolent Association, which extended aid to needy black mothers and proposed an unwritten behavior code involving work and general deportment. Individuals emerged to provide leadership and make a difference. For instance, Lucy Gee, a recently emancipated black woman, started teaching freedpeople in Selma. Allen A. Williams, a former slave in Tuscaloosa, started instructing black children during the autumn of 1865.¹⁵

Affairs relating to the ex-slaves throughout the South became the domain of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Freedmen’s Bureau had been established by Congress during the war and after the conflict extended its dominion throughout the South. An assistant commissioner directed affairs in each state and former Union soldiers often assumed positions with the organization. Under the leadership of General Oliver O. Howard, distributing food and clothes to black and white Southerners became an early bureau priority, as did overseeing labor agreements between landless black tenants and their white landlords.¹⁶

In Alabama, precise direction of the Freedmen’s Bureau dated from the designation of Wager T. Swayne as assistant commissioner in July, but the bureau had become active earlier in the spring. Bureau offices, spokes-like, branched out from the Montgomery headquarters, with the resolution of disagreements between black tenants and white landlords taking up much of their business. White Alabamians were convinced that ex-slaves would not work without compulsion; their exodus to towns and cities did nothing to dispel that notion. Freedpeople crowding Montgomery and elsewhere caused a multitude of problems, in response to which the bureau established home colonies, areas to which the unemployed were temporarily consigned. The bureau also provided labor regulations that set procedural requirements for landlords and tenants entering into contractual agreement. The general outlines required the landlord to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and wages or a share of the crop. Freedmen who broke a contract forfeited their compensation. Initial bureau operations in the state were directed by Thomas Conway. Among those acting with him was Charles W. Buckley, former chaplain with a New York regiment. Six weeks after the fall of the Confederacy, Conway directed Buckley to assemble freedmen in Montgomery and explain the labor regulations. He added an admonition for Buckley to maintain with unswerving firmness the freedom and the rights of the freedmen.¹⁷ On Sunday, May 28, Buckley spoke to several hundred black people regarding what they could expect in the way of treatment and also what was expected of them. In the following weeks, white landholders in Montgomery and surrounding counties visited Buckley’s office, and he answered thousands of questions.¹⁸ About fifteen hundred people lived in Greensboro, most of them freedpeople, and from that Black Belt town the Alabama Beacon observed that the local bureau office appears to have business a plenty to attend to. When the bureau’s Captain Henry T. Crydenwise spoke to freedpeople in Greensboro on June 18, he advised seeking suitable arrangements with former owners and warned that the government would not indefinitely provide for their material needs. Establishing a labor system that both races honored proved easier in theory than practice.¹⁹

The present required steady toil. At the same time, many ex-slaves understood that a better future required becoming educated. They pursued that goal initially at schools set up by Northern philanthropic organizations and staffed by teachers who came south. The American Missionary Association (AMA), based in Cincinnati, dispatched hundreds of male and female teachers to the South. Under the AMA’s aegis, the Reverend John J. Silsby instructed black people in Montgomery, soon reporting decided success. It was the Freedmen’s Bureau, however, that figured most prominently in fostering education. Charles Buckley became the bureau’s superintendent of schools in Alabama that first fall following the war. Under his direction the bureau constructed schools, hired teachers, and provided oversight. Black children began learning in newly raised schoolhouses or existing buildings converted for that use in Opelika, Tuskegee, Stevenson, Mobile, and Montgomery. By the middle of 1866, some 3,300 black children were attending thirty-five schools under the umbrella of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The situation boded well in Hayneville. Thirty-four students took their seats when the Lowndes County school first opened on October 15, 1866. An additional six children came the next morning, more students enrolled the next day, and by the week’s close fifty-five students were attending. Tempering progress, however, were inadequate numbers of schools and teachers, desperate poverty among the freedpeople, and a white mindset sometimes opposed to black education.²⁰

In the meantime, President Andrew Johnson attempted to provide direction and order by establishing a format for the region’s restoration to the Union. The groundwork for civil government in every state would be laid by the appointment of a provisional governor. Johnson anticipated the states’ rapid return and attempted to facilitate reunion by offering a lenient and forgiving settlement. The president’s terms required that voters in each state elect delegates to a convention that would abolish slavery, repudiate the war debt, and repeal the ordinances of secession. The terms of a May 29, 1865, proclamation granted amnesty to the vast majority of ex-Confederates if they took a loyalty oath to the Union. Amnesty was withheld from fourteen classes of Southerners—high ranking Confederate officers and individuals owning twenty thousand dollars of taxable property comprised the most numerous exceptions—who were forced to appeal for pardon in writing to the president. Implementation of Johnson’s plan presupposed placing control of the Southern states in Unionist hands.

The scope of the May proclamation greatly disappointed national Republicans. Men connected to the party of Lincoln anticipated (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) making black men full citizens. In the last half of 1865, Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, among others, made the case for wholesale changes in the South. The most fundamental involved providing full civil rights to former slaves. Neither citizenship nor enfranchising the freedmen was anticipated by Andrew Johnson’s prescription. The outline for the struggle that defined Reconstruction was emerging within weeks of Lincoln’s death.²¹

The president’s approach recommended him to the Southern white population. Conventional thinking among the latter held that the institution of slavery had provided necessary regimentation and its end seemed incomprehensible; according to that wordview, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race was no more disputable than the inferiority of the African. The slave was allegedly ignorant, of limited aptitude, and genetically predisposed to indolence. Emancipation had not altered those defining racial traits. A lieutenant with the federal army wrote to an army official that whites in the South are Born and Educated to look upon the Negro as a connecting link between the White Man and Baboon or Orang-out-tang—a people who are educated and taught to consider the Black Man an inferior being—equal only to a mule or an ox.²² David C. Humphreys, a Huntsville Unionist, wrote to a Freedmen Bureau official that a life time of rule on our part made it virtually impossible for Southerners to acknowledge the new place of freedmen, and we must have time to accustom our minds to the change.²³ Slavery was dead but the conviction that those of African descent must be directed by white Southerners remained very much alive. Southerners envisioned exercising stewardship over ex-slaves, an outcome that they believed served the interests of both races. That a finite number of black people might at some juncture be capable of exercising citizenship privileges represented the most optimistic projection. Such was the prevailing orthodoxy across the South, and not incidentally, among many white Americans throughout the rest of the country. Most significantly at this juncture, white Alabamians realized they had an ally in the White House, with one observer writing that most of the former consider Andrew Johnson a particular friend who was standing as a wall of fire between them and the radicals at the north. If their friend was clear, so was the foe. The Republican vision was regarded with trepidation.²⁴

In Alabama, as elsewhere, Unionists were best positioned to wield political influence. That circumstance contributed to Johnson selecting Lewis Eliphalet Parsons as the provisional governor of the state in June. Parsons was a former Whig who had practiced law in Talladega since 1841. Even though he served in the state legislature during the war, he had previously been a Stephen Douglas supporter and opposed secession. Parsons’s Unionism recommended him to Johnson. This was the man, at fifty-eight years of age, somewhat stout with black hair and possessed of a sharp mind, who began his duties as provisional governor on July 20, 1865. The length of his administration was open ended, but distilled to its most fundamental purpose, involved preparing Alabama for readmission under the presidential guidelines. On his first day in office, addressing state residents for the first time in a broad proclamation, Parsons stated that the appeal to arms has been made and decided against us. He continued, there is no longer a slave in Alabama.²⁵

Until a presumed restoration to the Union, the provisional government shared authority, however unnaturally, with the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Parsons immediately confirmed the civil and criminal laws that had governed Alabamians in 1861 (except those relating to slavery). The governor also took under advisement the question of which civil and judicial officials would enforce and interpret those laws. Widely different opinions on the subject existed. Jeremiah Clemens, a former United States senator and resident of Huntsville, had philosophically opposed secession as a Cooperationist. He outlined the argument of men like himself who had resisted the Confederacy. Prevailing on Andrew Johnson a week after Lincoln’s death, Clemens advised against allowing presently serving public officials to continue in office. These men had aided the rebellion by every means and oppressed us when treason was in the ascendant.²⁶ Huntsville lawyer Joseph E. Bradley concurred. He had, in 1860, publicly called on fellow residents to accept Lincoln’s election and warned that secession would result in calamity. He feared the reappointment of present officers would deliver political control to former secessionists and urged the executive to put in their place new men or friends of the government. However, the perceived imperative of stability guided Parsons’s decision to extend the tenure of those serving when the war ended.²⁷ In the months ahead, as circumstances required, he appointed new circuit court judges, justices of the peace, sheriffs, probate judges, and other officers, with Unionists receiving preferential consideration. There was no shortage of applicants. In explaining why the governor should extend the incumbent’s tenure as probate judge of Bibb County, supporters assured the new powers that be that he never was a secessionist.²⁸ Neither apparently was Houston L. Griffin of Opelika. Appealing for office, Griffin declared to Parsons that I for one shall never forget or forgive those secession leaders and fools.²⁹

Unionists also assumed positions with the treasury, attorney general’s office, post office, and other federal departments. Applicants had to take the test oath established by Congress in 1862, which required those seeking federal offices to swear they had never aided the Confederacy. Also known as the ironclad oath, the pledge excluded much of the South’s adult white male population from eligibility for federal positions. It was under these circumstances that William J. Bibb, a longtime Montgomerian described as radically Union to the core, became the local postmaster.³⁰ John Hardy undertook the duties of federal marshal for Alabama’s Southern District. His former newspaper, the State Sentinel, had been shut down in Selma as the war began because of Hardy’s Unionist views. Another wartime dissenter, James Q. Smith, who had been arrested by Confederate law enforcement for treason and vividly recalled being sent in chains to Mobile for incarceration, became the United States attorney for the Northern District.³¹ In addition to these local appointments, some of those taking office were Northerners who had recently moved to the state. New York resident Richard Busteed had been appointed United States district judge by President Lincoln in 1863, although he did not assume his duties in Mobile until late 1865. In another case, William B. Woods, a brigadier general originally from Ohio, decided to remain in Alabama once mustered out of the service. He pursued the collector of customs position in Mobile, soliciting the influence of Ohio senator John Sherman, informing him that I consider myself a citizen of Alabama.³²

A modest but perceptible influx of Northerners had and would continue to relocate to the state. Some of these men pursued agricultural or business interests and a number became affiliated with the Freedmen’s Bureau or joined the effort to educate black Alabamians. In the summer of 1865, an observer in Huntsville noted the presence of the Massachusetts Yankee.³³ Writing to Governor Parsons that fall, a New York resident pointed to the inclination of some to move to Alabama given the state’s mild winters and potential field of enterprise and inquired, What kind of a reception they would receive from the citizens of your state? Alfred E. Buck, leaving Wisconsin for south Alabama, invested in pine lands and the turpentine business. Mustered out of the Union Army in Montgomery, Benjamin W. Norris chose not to return to Maine. He purchased land in Elmore County and became a planter. Luther Smith had relocated from Michigan to Choctaw County late in 1865 and began raising cotton.³⁴ An Iowan and former Union officer, George E. Spencer was by the summer of 1865 anticipating a money-making junket to Tuscaloosa. Writing to Grenville M. Dodge, Spencer declared that prospects for buying cotton were outstanding. I ought to make at least fifty thousand dollars, he informed the Union general, but shall be satisfied with half that amount. What appealed to John Keffer, a lawyer in Philadelphia, was a climate that promoted his wife’s health. Each of these men, with others of a similar mindset, eventually joined an organization that did not exist in Alabama in 1865—the Republican Party.³⁵

In the meantime, individuals had begun taking the loyalty oath offered by Andrew Johnson. A military officer usually administered the pledge. Near Mobile, in Washington County, a resident felt that fellow citizens accepted the president’s May pardon proclamation with general acquiescence.³⁶ Henry Hays Forwood attested from Choctaw County, I have not taken the oath yet but expect to do so as soon as opportunity allows me.³⁷ Not all did so sincerely. One observer expressed the opinion of many that the act amounted to a mockery, openly professed.³⁸ Swearing allegiance absolved the vast majority of Southerners of any possible punishment; others, falling outside the general pardon, appealed in writing and sometimes personally to Johnson. Numerous Alabamians made the pilgrimage to the nation’s capital to plead in person. Washington Smith, a Selma banker and planter, belonged to the proscribed caste of former Confederate loyalists; he traveled to Washington where he received Johnson’s pardon. Great crowds are here, Smith wrote to his wife, the proud chivalry, noble men by nature, stand from day to day for six hours. All seemed humbled, waiting in the lobby of the White House for a nod from its Occupant.³⁹

In July, Wager Swayne assumed his duties as the assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Yale-educated son of a US Supreme Court justice had lost a leg in the war, during which he rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army. Barely thirty years old but tempered by war, Swayne became a man of enormous influence. Well aware of the necessity of establishing relations with those not sharing his convictions, the committed Republican also made little pretense of playing a politically neutral and detached role (figure 2).⁴⁰

Within a day or so of his arrival, Swayne entered the crowded office of Governor Parsons. Their handshake began a respectful and cooperative relationship. From his Market Street headquarters in Montgomery, Swayne assumed indirect responsibility of over 430,000 former slaves and an undetermined number of refugees. That he would protect the rights of the freedpeople and indeed extend rights to them immediately became clear. Within days of assuming office, Swayne issued General Order No. 7, which allowed freedmen to provide court testimony in cases involving either only black people or both black and white people (though still never in cases involving only white people). The directive challenged both precedent and prevailing notions that black people could not be credible witnesses. When Mobile mayor Robert H. Slough refused to allow freedmen to testify in mayor’s court, Swayne immediately demonstrated his resolve. Even worse, Slough had also deprived black residents of the right to assemble and restricted where they could live. I can stop this and I will, Swayne pledged to Governor Parsons. He traveled in August to Mobile and was instrumental in Slough’s removal from office.⁴¹ Reacting to the mistreatment of freedpeople elsewhere, Swayne dispatched soldiers to several southwestern counties that summer. The guilty parties shall learn, he declared, that the Govt which has given to four million of slaves the right of freedom is abundantly able to protect them in the enjoyment of that freedom.⁴² Determined to protect what he referred to as the ex-slaves’ new-found freedom, Swayne would influence Reconstruction in Alabama more than any other single individual for the next two-and-a-half years.⁴³

Image: Figure 2. Wager Swayne, prominent Republican and assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Alabama Department of Archives & History.

Figure 2. Wager Swayne, prominent Republican and assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Alabama Department of Archives & History.

Representatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau cast that organization’s net wide and established outposts from the southeastern sandy pine forest lands to counties well to the north, on the Tennessee River. Throughout the state, overseeing labor relations between white landlords and black tenants required constant diligence. Slavery had become identified so thoroughly with work, Swayne observed, that freedmen were not uncommon who believed that work was no part of freedom.⁴⁴ Landlords or planters often ignored the bureau’s Labor Regulations, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the undermanned agency and soldiers frequently could not provide oversight. White Alabamians resented a federal office that they considered biased in favor of black men. A Dallas County planter defiantly questioned the consequences of refusing to make contracts with freedmen or submit them for inspection. He states the feeling of all, a bureau agent explained, for those who want nothing to do with the bureau unless he is compelled to recognize it.⁴⁵ Writing from Columbiana that fall, an army captain noted how former owners engaged in contractual relations that obligated freedpeople to labor indefinitely, effectively for no more than board and clothes. He described the practice as blinding the Negroes and noted it allowed landlords to turn them over starving and naked as soon as the hirer’s crop is in. In the person of the bureau agent, the ex-slaves found a rare commodity, an ally who possessed power.⁴⁶

Black Alabamians also depended on soldiers for protection. In the fall of 1865 there were about eight thousand troops spread out across the state. The simple monetary or chattel value of a slave had provided insulation that emancipation stripped away. In the months after the war, white Alabamians beat, whipped, and shot an appalling number of freedmen for any number of reasons but fundamentally out of a disrespect for their humanity. Samuel Houston reflected on the poor negro—formerly so valued[,] but now merely a damned nigger as freedman. The Washington County magistrate’s concern contributed to his eventual association with the Republican Party. For now Houston noted that all is quiet and the people seem satisfied and then again in a day news will come that so and so killed a negro[,] served him right say they all. What was true in Washington County was so elsewhere, to varying degree. One Freedmen Bureau representative posited in early 1866 that any thoughts of removing the troops would be highly ill-advised given the prevailing lawlessness.⁴⁷

Justice for black people remained as capricious as the integrity of a judiciary system relying on the even handedness of judges, lawyers, and jurors. The judicial structure in place was largely carried over from the war years. Assistant Commissioner Swayne acknowledged the legitimacy of the existing judicial and civil officials whom Parsons had recognized at the outset of his administration. Maintaining the incumbent justices required making them official agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The