The Good Man: The Civil War's "Christian General" and His Fight for Racial Equality

By Gordon L. Weil

Gen.O.O. Howard, the white man from Maine for whom Howard University, the leading university for African-Americans, was named, was W.T. Sherman's principal deputy in the march across the South and later took charge of the federal government's Reconstruction efforts. Though Reconstruction failed, Howard successfully fostered the creation of academi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur McAllister Publishers
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781935496076

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The most fortunate thing that Lincoln gave the [Freedmen’s] Bureau was its head, Oliver Howard. Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man, but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.

W.E.B. DuBois

Black Reconstruction

in America 1860-1880

But, suppose we should rise up tomorrow and emancipate, who would educate these millions and teach them how to use their freedom?

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The Good Man:

The Civil War’s Christian General and

His Fight for Racial Equality

Gordon L. Weil

PUBLISHED BY

Arthur McAllister Publishers, Inc.

97 Firehouse Road

Harpswell, Maine 04079

Copyright © 2013 by Gordon L. Weil

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-10: 1-9354960-7-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-935496-07-6

Dedicated to the memory of

Athern P. Daggett

Ernst C. Helmreich

William B. Whiteside

Outstanding members of the Bowdoin College faculty

Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1. The Making of the Christian General

Chapter 2. The War

Chapter 3. Hercules’ Task

Chapter 4. What shall we do with the Negro?

Chapter 5. Howard and Johnson

Chapter 6. Education and The Howard University

Chapter 7. The Target

Chapter 8. Howard and History

Illustrations following Chapter 5

Chronology

Documents

Bibliographic Note

Notes

Acknowledgements

Foreword

In the 1950s, when I attended Bowdoin, the college from which Oliver Otis Howard had graduated, I heard him spoken of with pride as having been the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, though nobody explained what it was. But the tenor of the remarks led me to believe that Howard had done something worthy.

Though Bowdoin was proud of Howard and of John Brown Russwurm, its earliest African-American graduate and the third black college graduate in the country, there were less than a half-dozen African Americans among the 800 students on campus. At that time, almost all Bowdoin students, all young men, belonged to one of twelve fraternities, and only two fraternities had admitted African Americans. Howard’s alma mater, almost a hundred years after he headed the Freedmen’s Bureau, had not yet caught up with his thought, advocacy, and action.

This is less a criticism of Bowdoin, which conformed to the standards of the time, than a tribute to Howard, a man who was far ahead of his time. Like all people, he had his weaknesses and failings, but he was exceptional in the frank, public expression of his beliefs and his actions to promote racial equality in America.

He will always be known as the white man for whom Howard University, a leading academic institution associated with the education of African Americans, is named, but there is much more to the story of General O.O. Howard.

Like Generals Grant and Sherman, Howard wrote an extensive autobiography. Like theirs, his provides first-hand accounts of his role in the Civil War. Though Howard used the work in part to justify actions that had been criticized, and it gave only brief attention to the adversity he faced, the Autobiography is a valuable resource.

John A. Carpenter’s biography, Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard, is a thorough and well-researched work, the standard resource on Howard. Perhaps its principal shortcoming is that it did not fully realize how unusual and unprecedented were his efforts on behalf of African Americans and, by virtue of those efforts, for the country as a whole. Carpenter worried, incorrectly as it turned out, that the investigations to which Howard was repeatedly subjected permanently tarnished his reputation, even though he was completely absolved of any wrongdoing. These inquiries can easily now be understood as being part of an effort to discredit his work for racial equality and Reconstruction itself.

I have not attempted to revise or supplant Carpenter’s work, and I acknowledge that it was an essential support to my own analysis. Carpenter should remain the standard reference. Instead, I have tried, more than have previous writers, to focus on Howard the man, not the Freedmen’s Bureau, and to provide new analytical perspectives on his life.

In this, I have been inspired by the statement of intent written by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for the American Presidents series. That series, he wrote, is composed of volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. So, I hope, does this one.

I add a note on terminology with respect to the terms used for African Americans in this book. The term freedmen – the approximately four million newly freed slaves – of course includes women. I have used the term African American, though it was not used during Howard’s lifetime. The usual non-pejorative term in the Nineteenth and much of the Twentieth Century was Negro, and it is used here, and in lower-case when it was used that way in the original. The term black when contrasted with white to describe the two races is also used. The term colored, though frequently used during the period covered, especially in the Army, is used here only in quotations.

As for the military, the terms Army or Regular Army refer to the United States Army, composed of professional soldiers, in contrast to the volunteer forces that constituted the vast majority of the Northern forces in the Civil War. Thus, Howard rose to being Major General in the Regular Army, while Bowdoin’s other illustrious Civil War officer, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, was Major General of Volunteers. In the military organization during the war, the following units, from lowest to highest, are mentioned: regiment, brigade, division, corps, army.

Gordon L. Weil

Harpswell, Maine

Chapter 1

The Making of the Christian General

Maine was white. In 1830, the year Oliver Otis Howard was born, African Americans made up less than three-tenths of one percent of Maine’s population, tying it with neighboring New Hampshire as the most nearly pure white state in the country. In the 1830 census, 1,169 free colored persons and two slaves were reported in Maine out of a total population of about 400,000.¹ The presence of two slaves suggested the effect of federal law allowing slaves to be kept in bondage even when in a free state.

Six years later, Edward Johnson, a young boy, would become one of the free colored people in Maine. He had met Rowland Howard, the young Maine boy’s father, in Troy, New York, and went home with him to Leeds, a town of less than a thousand people. Edward was the only negro in town. He would live with the Howard family and help with the farm’s chores.

Otis, as he was usually called, could not help but stare at a person unlike any he had seen before, with large eyes, white teeth, wooly head, and dark skin.² He listened as his father explained his benevolent reason for his having brought Edward into his household.

Otis and Edward, who was probably older than the Maine boy was, got along well. They played together at the boyhood games, including sledding and skating. They did their farm chores, and they competed for success and finish. Howard would remember that the boys had never quarreled, that Edward was never cringing or slavish, and that he was always kind to me, and helpful. His four years with Edward Johnson seemed to have had a lasting effect on Otis. I have always believed it a providential circumstance that I had that early experience with a negro lad, he wrote in his Autobiography, for it relieved me from that feeling of prejudice which would have hindered me from doing the work for freedmen which, years afterwards, was committed to my charge.³

Howard’s ready willingness to work alongside his new friend was the product of both his father’s benevolence and the atmosphere in Maine. In 1780, as a remote district of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Maine had seen slavery outlawed. Just as Massachusetts had led the country into rebellion against the British king, it would seek to lead the country into abolition.

Maine would not have been fertile ground for slavery anyway. With most of its trees having been stripped from the land, its terrain, climate, and demographics all promoted small-scale farming, not far removed from subsistence level, and in stark contrast with the large, Southern plantation. Farming was the leading occupation in the state, and when Maine was created in 1820, the Legislature placed a husbandman leaning on a scythe on the busy state seal alongside the inevitable fisherman of a seafaring state. Rowland Howard was a typical small farmer.

Though seemingly distant from the fate of the slaves, Maine became a state as a direct result of the national conflict over the future of slavery. In adopting the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Congress made Maine a state, allowing the country to keep a balance between free and slave states. Because slavery had already been outlawed there, Maine was a reliably free state to match Missouri where slavery was permitted.

Maine’s departure pleased many in Boston. Separated from the rest of the state by the narrow New Hampshire Seacoast, Maine was sparsely settled. Its loss would only slightly reduce Massachusetts’ political influence. Maine lacked the aristocracy of Massachusetts, and its voters were mostly small farmers, fishermen, and storekeepers. It was moving away from the Federalist Party of John Adams to the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. In 1828, it split its vote between John Quincy Adams, a choice influenced by tradition and proximity, and Jackson. By 1832, Maine voted for Jackson, while Massachusetts supported Henry Clay of Kentucky, the Whig candidate.

As a Democratic state during the years of Howard’s youth, Maine supported the policies of the national Democratic Party, which were designed to placate the South, its political stronghold. Yet as an almost totally white and free state, it gradually moved away from the Democrats’ compromise with slavery. Hannibal Hamlin, almost continuously a Democratic congressman and senator from 1843, reflected the growing Maine sentiment against the extension of slavery to the territories. In 1856, he would quit the Democrats and became a Republican, causing a national sensation.

While this was the atmosphere in which Otis Howard matured, he was still too young to understand its influence on him. Otis was more concerned with his own development than with the events around him, as was usual for a boy his age. In 1840, his father died. Widows, especially those with young children, could not afford to live independently. Edward Johnson had to leave the household for places unrecorded. The next year Otis’s mother made a fortunate marriage to a prosperous farmer from the other side of town. Colonel John Gilmore liked his new stepson and would ensure that he received a good education and preparation to go on to college.

Otis spent increasing amounts of time away from home, returning only during school breaks to work on the farm. He lived two years with John Otis, his mother’s affluent brother, whose home was in nearby Hallowell, Maine. While there, his grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War who lived with the family in Leeds, passed away. Grandfather Otis, to whom Howard was attached, and his Uncle John imparted to the boy a valuable sense of his country’s history and politics. Gilmore, an avid reader of the news about the Mexican War, whose course was the greatest issue of the day, also broadened the boy’s views.

As he grew, Howard found that he craved leadership in any activity from farm work like plowing to sports like wrestling. When bested in schoolboy combat, Otis used the experience to learn patience and self-control, so that he could know when to pick his own fights.

Colonel Gilmore had specific plans for his stepson. In March 1846, when Otis was still 15, Gilmore took him to North Yarmouth Academy so that he could spend the next few months preparing for the Bowdoin College entrance examinations that fall. As they rode on a typical Maine sleigh called a pung, consisting of little more than a box with a bench on runners, Gilmore shared his views with Howard. He was a frugal and hardworking New Englander. In politics, the Colonel was a Whig and would eventually become a member of the Republican Party, the direct descendent of the Whigs. Howard later wrote that the talk on the way to school strengthened me in my budding conviction of political duty….⁴

Almost the youngest college preparatory student at the Academy, Howard was weak in some subjects and put himself under great pressure to prepare for the September entrance examinations. He knew that his stepfather had given him an unusual opportunity, and that he must succeed on his first try.

In September, he traveled to Brunswick, passed the examinations, and immediately became a Bowdoin student, a member of the class of 1850. He embarked on a course of general or liberal arts studies in the belief that he would be prepared for any kind of work.

Just as his Maine youth, his father’s example, stepfather’s guidance and his relationship with Johnson had shaped him without his fully realizing it, his Bowdoin experience would have a similar influence. He was on his own for the first time, attending a special institution with distinguished and challenging professors.

Bowdoin College, named after a Massachusetts Revolutionary War governor, had been created in 1794 to allow students, particularly those in the District of Maine, an alternative to Harvard. One of only three colleges in Maine when Howard was a student there, it was the leading academic institution in the state. And Bowdoin seemed to provide an atmosphere that was unusually favorable to the cause of the slaves.

In 1826, John Brown Russwurm had become the first African-American graduate of Bowdoin and the third of any American academic institution. An abolitionist and supporter of Liberia as a home for free African Americans, Russwurm would remain attached to Maine, decades later sending his two sons to North Yarmouth Academy. Though Bowdoin would not graduate another African American until 1910, even then the College would be early in the acceptance of even a handful of colored people among predominantly white academic institutions.

Calvin Ellis Stowe had graduated from Bowdoin two years before Russwurm and returned as a theology professor in 1850. During his three years on the faculty, his wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote her historic Uncle Tom’s Cabin in their home on Federal Street in Brunswick within sight of the College.

Howard’s years at Bowdoin overlapped those of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a member of the class of 1851, who would also become a Union general, a hero at Gettysburg and, some said,⁵ the officer designated by General U.S. Grant to accept the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Court House. Bowdoin would claim that a greater portion of its graduates served in the Civil War than from any other college.

The three most distinguished graduates of the College were Franklin Pierce, Calvin Stowe’s classmate and a future Democratic president of the United States, Pierce’s closest classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne, and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. All were members of the Class of 1824. Pierce tolerated slavery to preserve his party’s weakening hold on federal power, while Hawthorne, loyal to Pierce, believed that slavery would gradually die on its own. Longfellow became the close friend of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts abolitionist who became a U.S. Senator, and the poet shared his militant views. He dedicated poems to condemning slavery, concluding one called The Warning:

There is a poor, blind Samson on this land,

Shorn of his strength and bound in bonds of steel,

Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,

And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,

Till the vast Temple of our liberties

A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.

Among Bowdoin graduates who would become tied to the Civil War and its aftermath was John A. Andrew of the Class of 1837, the governor of Massachusetts, who would create the 54th Massachusetts regiment, the famed black unit memorialized by a Saint-Gaudens sculpture at the Boston Common and the film Glory. And William Pitt Fessenden of the Class of 1823 would serve briefly as Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary and be one of the seven Republican Senators who refused to convict impeached President Andrew Johnson. A controversial honorary graduate in 1858 was Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s Secretary of War and soon to be president of the Confederate States of America.

The academic community, in which Howard was immersed, like Maine itself, could readily influence its students to become abolitionists and to understand that African Americans were entitled to the same rights as whites. Even more important, it might motivate them to active participation in the struggle that would end slavery. Given the roles of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Joshua Chamberlain, locals said with unwarranted pride that the Civil War had begun and ended in Brunswick.

Howard was a normal college boy, more interested in his studies and his girlfriend, his roommate’s cousin, than in the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, which revised the Missouri Compromise, or the future of slavery. He seemed to accept slavery as the South’s peculiar institution, while probably not favoring its extension. Many Whigs favored this position in the 1848 election, and Howard leaned toward his stepfather’s party. He kept his mind on his studies, and he graduated with a good record, though not among the leaders in his class.

During his college years, Howard had spent part of each winter teaching school in Kennebec County, near his home. Not only did teaching provide funds to pay for college, but also it allowed him to try out a possible profession. Still, as he neared the end of his four years at Bowdoin, he had not yet decided his future course.

While he encountered all of the normal stresses of an adolescent, Howard battled with his own ambition. He understood the need for the humility expected of a Christian, but he longed for fame and success. This internal struggle would never quite be resolved and would be his throughout life.

Almost by luck and without realizing it, he found what would be his lifetime occupation. Uncle John Otis was now a member of Congress and wrote to tell him that his own son would probably not pass the physical examination for West Point. He offered Howard the appointment. Young Howard had never contemplated a military career. Still, he had no plans as his Bowdoin years ended, though he had thought of getting a job, saving money and following his uncle into the law. Now, that same uncle was offering him a different opportunity.

Howard wanted more education, and here was a way to get it at no cost. At the end of the West Point experience, he need not make the military a career, but he would be better equipped to get a good paying job, which would relieve me from the anxiety of toiling too much for a support.⁶ The prospect of such employment, probably outside the Army, made the choice easy. The appointment could provide him with a life of relative ease in peacetime and economic