Category: Aftermath: Racial Conundrums

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

The notorious “Union League” organization, working in concert with the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a postwar enforcement arm of northern Radicals which shepherded enfranchised freedmen to the polls to vote Republican and also discourage Southern white voters. Grant depended on 500,000 black votes to gain the presidency in 1868 – and thus began the tradition of a solid black Republican voting bloc of voters through the end of the century.

In 1867, arms were secured for League members in military companies “which became a menace to peace and good order in North Carolina communities. The most common of the graver outrages committed by the Negroes was barn-burning, which for a white farmer meant complete ruin and absolute want of food.” (Hamilton, pg. 339).

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

“The postwar North Carolina Convention met in October of 1865; and was composed, for the most part of men who had already been prominent in public life in North Carolina, and of others who were destined to become so. The Convention provided for an election to be held for Governor and members of the legislature. To fill the former position Jonathan Worth was duly elected; and a legislature composed of the best element of the State was chosen.

This legislature met on 12 December, when Worth was inaugurated, and all the machinery of a full State government at once put in operation. An able judiciary was also chosen, and Wm. A. Graham, the most illustrious of her many distinguished sons, was sent at the head of the North Carolina delegation to Washington to take the State back to her place in the Union.

But alas! the wild fanaticism of the North, which had driven the State from the Federal government was not sufficiently appeased, nor had the State and her people been sufficiently humiliated. Till that was done, there was no place for her around the old hearthstone. Her people must yet go through the “hell” of Congressional reconstruction, and drink deep of its fiery broth, before her Senators and Representatives could be admitted to their seats.

This legislature recognized the changed status of the Negro, and enacted laws appropriate to his new condition, giving him such civil rights and duties as that condition justified. County, town and city governments were reorganized, courts were regularly held and presided over by able and just men; the law was once more asserting itself and its invigorating influences were seen in the more hopeful demeanor of all classes of people. Had this state of affairs been allowed to continue, the dark pages of the Reconstruction regime might have never been written, and the name of the Ku-Klux Klans might never have appeared in the pages of National or State history.

But this was not to be. A prominent Northern politician had declared that the States which had been guilty of the crime of rebellion should be kept within the grasp of war for thirty years. The dark valley and shadow of death lay once more before the people of North Carolina.

The State was again put under military rule and the conquerors were not only to plant their heels upon the necks of the men who had been overcome in war, but were urged to press with all the vigor of their conquering power.

Though President Andrew Johnson asserted that the States had never having been separated from the Union, and had lost their Constitutional rights only while engaged in rebellion, and that on the laying down of arms and the renewal of allegiance to the United States Government, they had resumed their ante-bellum attitude and condition and should at once be recognized as a part of the Union. This policy aroused a frenzy at the North, scarcely less savage than the abolition craze, and it found fierce utterance in the Congress assembled at Washington. A controversy of intense partisan bitterness was then inaugurated between Johnson and the Radicals.

The vindictive House of Representatives affirmed, with redoubled emphasis, that, by the act of secession, the States recently engaged in war, had forfeited all their rights under the Constitution – and not having acknowledged their rebellion until they were forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, they should be relegated to the condition of territorial possessions, to be governed by Congress till the latter should deem them sufficiently humbled; and until new Constitutions should be framed and adopted by a vote of all the people, including the recently freed Negro. Most of the seceding States were formed into military districts, subject to the will of a Major General, and to be ruled by tyros and neophytes in government; —the standard of loyalty being the color of the skin, or an acknowledged membership in the Union League.”

(The Conditions That Led to the Ku Klux Klans, Mrs. T.J. Jarvis. North Carolina Booklet, May, 1901, No. 1, pp 13-14) (Reconstruction in North Carolina, J.G. Hamilton, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, pp. 337)

Preserving Peace and Good Order

It should be kept in mind that the so-called 14th Amendment was never ratified by the requisite number of States in 1868 and merely declared in force. In that year there were 37 States in the union – a three-fourths vote needed for amendment passage would require 28 States to the positive. Only 22 States had actually ratified the amendment when it was declared passed. Since irregularities were so obvious, Congress then passed a concurrent resolution declaring the amendment to be a part of the Constitution. It was passed in haste, not referred to any committee and discussion was restricted.

Preserving Peace and Good Order

“In 1883 the Supreme Court declared the conspiracy clause of the Congressional Ku Klux Act of 1871 unconstitutional and restricted the application of the law to acts of a State through its officers and not to private citizens. In the same year it declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as invalid.

The act made it criminal for any person to deny to any citizen on account of race or color the full and equal enjoyment of inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places of amusement. The act finally reached the Supreme Court as a result of a hotel hotel-manager in the South having refused accommodations to Negroes, and the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to laws enforcing the amendment, but not the power to regulate internal domestic affairs.

The decision contained the principle upon which the [Southern States have] rested their right to set up social barriers between themselves and Negroes. The principle was that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited State governments from discriminating between whites and blacks in its general legislation, but that this by no means prevented a hotel keeper from or theater-manager from making such a discrimination, nor did the amendment give to Congress any power to regulate theaters or hotels. This power, the Court insisted, still remained in the control of the States.

The Court opinions thus far reveal that the tribunal considered that the Fourteenth Amendment merely aimed to protect the Negro’s civil and political rights, but that it dii not give him a social status, equal, superior or otherwise. The matter of giving him whatever status he may have, therefore, has been left to the individuals in the States . . .

The Court summed up its whole attitude on the subject in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. The State of Louisiana had required that railway companies in the State provide equal but separate accommodations for white and Negro passengers. Plessy was ejected from a white compartment and arrested for violating State law.

He protested and finally got his protest before the Supreme Court, but the Court held that law was constitutional since it did not interfere with the civil or political equality of the races but was intended rather to preserve peace and good order. The law, the Court said, did not stamp the colored race with any badge of inferiority unless the race chose to put that construction upon it, and equal rights could not be secured to the Negro by an enforced comingling of the two races.”

(The Changing South. William J. Robertson. Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1927, pp. 82-84)

Better to Emulate the Wise Romans

British stateman Benjamin Disraeli viewed the United States as a “territorial democracy,” divided into a personal democracy in the South, and a socialistic and humanitarian democracy in the North. The latter was represented mainly by the abolitionists who saw their cause as transcending all laws or constitutions of state and had its counterpart in European Jacobinism or red republicanism.

At the end of the Civil War, Brownson emphasized that the general government “cannot itself reorganize a State; it has no authority to purge the electoral people and to say who may or may not vote, for the whole question of suffrage and qualifications is left to each State and can be settled neither by an act of Congress nor executive proclamation.”

Better to Emulate the Wise Romans

“[Brownson] maintained that neither the [Lincoln] administration nor Congress ever took, distinctly and decisively, a ground on which the war was defensible . . . for neither party understood where, under our system, the sovereign power is lodged.

But whatever the inner superior merit of the American Constitution, its interpretation is quite another thing altogether. If the [Southern] States had not held the States to be severally sovereign and maintained that the United States are only an agreement or compact, they would not have seceded; and had not the [Northern] States confounded the Union with the general government and manifested a tendency to make it the whole national government, the South would have had no occasion or excuse for secession.

[Brownson] expressed deep regrets over President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of May 29, 1865, disenfranchising the pars sanior of the whole white Southern society. Of that he wrote:

It exceeded anything ever issued in any age by the most barbarous chieftain. It virtually disenfranchised and outlawed nearly the whole Southern people, certainly every man who could render any efficient service in reorganizing Southern society, and in repairing the disasters of the war.”

This he proscribed as a wholly calamitous policy. What was most needed was to bring about a speedy restoration of the Southern people to citizenship and thus bring the North and South together in friendly and loyal cooperation in binding up the nation’s wounds. To inflict upon the Southern people unnecessary and ill-timed pains and penalties would only be to disgrace the whole American character . . .

“The wise Romans,” he reminded the Northern victors, “never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.”

(Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Thomas R. Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, p. 647; 649-650; 654; 659)

 

Reconstruction Days in Washington

On March 2, 1875, President Grant signed the Civil Rights Bill for which Charles Sumner had labored so many years, and which was a tribute to his memory. Southerners and Democrats in Congress had bitterly contested the Bill, which imposed a $500 fine, upon owners of restaurants, theaters and hotels which refused to accommodate all persons regardless of color. The Bill did not apply to churches nor to schools – and in the South, was held to be an unwarrantable interference with the rights of the individual States, and after a number of test cases in the lower courts, this opinion was sustained by the US Supreme Court.

Reconstruction Days in Washington

“During the Reconstruction period the colored people of Washington were able briefly to enjoy some of those advantages and privileges for which they and their Radical friends had so long struggled. The leaders of the Republican party, well-aware that only the solid support of the colored voters of the South had regained the two-thirds majority of their party in Congress and therefore anxious to preserve their loyalty, treated the colored representatives with a healthy respect.

The largest contingent of Negro congressmen had come from South Carolina, which had been under Republican control since the new state constitution of 1869. The white “Scalawag” members who had been returned to the 41st Congress had reflected little credit on their state or their party. One of them, B.F. Whittemore, had resigned after his sale of West Point cadetships was revealed. Another, C.C. Bowen, the representative for the Charleston district, was jailed for bigamy after a long and sensational trial in the District courts. Convicted by a mixed jury, Bowen was freed after two weeks in prison; he was not, however, renominated for his congressional seat.

Joseph H. Rainey was a mulatto native of Georgetown, SC and a barber. His scanty formal education had been improved by travel in the West Indies. In an interview, Rainey stated it was hard to find rooms in Washington and that colored congressmen were charged more than white men. At Falf’s Bar, across from the Post Office, he had been obliged to pay fifty cents for a glass of beer, the water freely admitting that the extra charge was account of his color.”

(The Uncivil War: Washington During the Reconstruction: 1865-1878. James H. Whyte, Twayne Publishers, 1958, pp. 237-238; 242)

Florida’s Reconstruction

By order of the Sixth District’s Federal military occupation commander, Major-General John Pope, the election of Florida’s constitutional convention members was to be held on November 14, 15 and 16, 1867. Those chosen to register voter names were noted as “pronounced and bitter Republican partisans,” and holding positions as election officers and poll judges.

The struggles over Reconstruction issues in Florida noted below would revive the State’s prewar Democratic party, as conservative citizens became aware of the Republican scheme to form a “ring” to monopolize the State’s railways with New York funding.

Florida’s Reconstruction

“The native whites were not exhibiting interest in registering [under Reconstruction rule]. From Walton County, West Florida, came the report: “I fear this class (negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags) will control the county unless a greater interest can be awakened.” What is true of Walton is true of most of the counties in the State,” announced the Floridian.

The mass of the whites had refrained from voting, with only 1,220 white votes cast, of which 203 were against assembling the convention. The Conservative party [of native whites] had succeeded neither in making Conservative voters of the negroes nor in preventing them from voting the Republican ticket.

Forty-six delegates were actually returned in this election: eighteen were negroes, and three of the latter were citizens of other States. Of the twenty-seven whites, one or two were Conservatives, fifteen or sixteen were Radical carpetbaggers from the North, and ten or twelve Southern loyalist or “scalawags.”

What were the obvious characteristics of these delegates chosen by the newly enfranchised? Several of the negro members were unlettered – unable to read or write. Two or three of the blacks had evil reputations and would have done better in jail than in legislative halls. Of the whites, the native Union or loyalist element was made up of men of no particular reputation – good or bad – and of mediocre enlightenment.

The carpetbag or Northern element – composing about one-third of the delegates – contained some men of considerable intelligence and passable education. The most cultured member of the convention, probably, was Jonathan Gibbs, a tall and slightly- built man of color indicating mulatto origin. Born in Philadelphia, educated at Dartmouth College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was a fairly successful type of an intelligent black subjected to New England culture.

Sent into Florida for philanthropic work among the negroes. He soon entered politics and was ere long in rubbing shoulders with cantankerous and thieving ignorance. He died before the end of Republican rule, ostensibly from eating too heavy a dinner. It was rumored that he was poisoned by fellow Republicans.”

(The Civil War & Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis, Columbia University, 1913, pp. 491-495)

 

The Great American Misfortune

The Northern States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. The North’s industrial production exploded and made agriculture prosper, while the flood of European immigration more than replaced the men in blue lost by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. The South was in shambles and soon the North would send its carpetbaggers and Union League organizers to loot anything of value that remained.

The Great American Misfortune

“On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. With him, thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French in Mexico; the others congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the State. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior and most camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the State with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by.

Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as “right.” They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texans were stubborn and prideful people. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The State was placed under military rule and army tribunals replaced the civil courts . . . Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. More galling than the actual atrocities [by Union soldiers], however, was the fact that most Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville.

This had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full and lasting effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texas soul.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, 1968, pp. 394-395)

 

State’s Rights and Civil Rights

“States’ Rights are easy enough to define. The Tenth Amendment does it succinctly: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people [of the States]”

Civil rights should be no harder. In fact, however – thanks to extravagant and shameless misuse by people who ought to know better – it is one of the most badly understood concepts in modern political usage.  Civil rights [are] frequently used synonymously with “human rights” – or with “natural rights.”

As often as not, it is simply a name for describing an activity that someone deems politically or socially desirable.  A sociologist writes a paper proposing to abolish some inequity, or a politician makes a speech about it – and, behold, a new “civil right” is born!  The Supreme Court has displayed the same creative powers.

A civil right is a right that is asserted and is therefore protected by some valid law. It may be asserted by the common law, or by local or federal statutes, or by the Constitution; but unless a right is incorporated in the law, it is not a civil right and is not enforceable by the instruments of the civil law.

There may be some rights – “natural,” “human,” or otherwise – that should also by civil rights.  But if we desire to give such rights the protection of the law, our recourse is to a legislature or to the amendment procedures of the Constitution.  We must not look to politicians, or sociologists – or the courts – to correct the deficiency.

[The] federal Constitution does not require the States to maintain racially mixed schools. Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am firmly convinced – not only that integrated schools are not required – but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education.

It may be wise or expedient for Negro children to attend the same schools as white children, but they do not have a civil right to do so which is protected by the federal Constitution, or which is enforceable by the federal government.  The intentions of the founding fathers in this matter are beyond any doubt: no powers regarding education were given to the federal government.”

(The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater, Victor Publishing Company, 1960, pp. 31-34)

Seddon’s View of Black Southern Troops

By 1856 the new Republican party had acquired control of most northern State governments, while being denounced as the chief “disunionists” of the country for reintroducing slavery agitation as a party tactic.

Its party platform in 1860 was very clear on the territories, favoring subsidies for immigrant homesteaders, and a transcontinental railroad crossing Indian lands in the way of rail lines carrying Northern goods westward. Once Southern members departed Congress in early 1861, Republicans created a Federal corporation, the Union Pacific, which extinguished Indian titles and any defense of their land when driven off by military force.  The Indian tribes were to be progressively eliminated as obstacles to settlement and industrial expansion, and before the Civil War ended this policy was in full force.

As the South’s colored population fell into their hands as plantations were overrun, they were designated “contrabands” and utilized as hard labor battalions. As US Colored Troops, they were used as prison guards or cannon fodder in futile assaults and rightly assumed they would suffer the same fate as the Indians under northern rule.

Seddon’s View of Black Confederate Troops

“Hon. James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, in his report, supplemented Mr. Davis’s message with some still stronger recommendations of his own. The slaves, he said, had an even stronger interest in the victory of the Confederacy than did the white people. The latter risked their political independence, but the former their very existence as a race.

If the eternal enemies of the South should triumph, they would extinguish the negroes in a few years, as they had already extinguished the Indians. He recommended that the States which had absolute and exclusive control of the matter, should legislate at once with a view to the contingency of negro enlistments.

On the 15th [of March 1865] the subject of enlistments came up in the Virginia legislature . . . and on the 27th instructed its Senators to vote for the [negro] enlistment measure in the Confederate Congress. [About this time] a letter of General Lee’s was published looking to approval, considering it “not only expedient but necessary.” If the Confederates did not make use of the slaves, the Federals would.

The vote in the Senate on the final passage of the bill, March 7, 1865, the President was authorized to ask for and accept from slave owners the services of as many able-bodied slaves as he thinks expedient; to the same to organized by the commander-in-chief under instructions from the War Department, and to receive the same rations and compensation as other troops.

Mr. Lincoln did not think much of the impressment and enlisting of slaves. He said, in a speech made at Washington on the 17th of March, that the negro could not stay at home and make bread and fight at the same time, and he did not care much for which duty was allotted to him by the Confederate government. “We must now see the bottom of the rebels; resources.”

(Confederate Negro Enlistments. Edward Spencer. Annals of the War, Written by the Leading Participants, North and South. 1879, pp. 547-552)

A New Swarm of Carpetbaggers

In the early 1940s the Republican party in Virginia, and nationally, was largely moribund. But due to the increasing communist-infiltration of FDR’s administration and organized labor, Republican power increased as did open fissures in the Democratic party. In the mid-1940s, FDR courted support from Sidney Hillman’s communist-dominated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which delivered Democratic votes.

A Virginia Democrat openly-hostile to organized labor and who denounced public employee unions was William Tuck, who served as governor 1946 -1950. When Virginia Electric & Power employees threatened a strike in early 1946, Tuck responded with a state of emergency, mobilized State militia and threatened to induct 1600 of the utility’s employees. The following year he secured passage of a law outlawing compulsory union membership and establishing Virginia as a “right to work” State. Tuck also voiced support for Virginia’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board ruling of 1954, fearing that his State’s schools would become like the District of Columbia’s “blackboard jungles” of juvenile crime, drugs and pregnancies.

A New Swarm of Carpetbaggers

“Virginia’s Eight District Congressman Howard W. Smith, comprising Alexandria, Arlington and Falls Church, assailed the CIO’s Political Action Committee as a “new swarm of carpetbaggers who are invading the Southern States [and] are impregnated with communism.”

Like most of his Southern colleagues, Virginia Senator Robert Byrd initially greeted Truman’s ascension to the Presidency in 1945 with favor. After all, Truman was the son of a Confederate soldier, and his Missouri accent fueled the feeling among Southerners that one of their own finally was in charge. In fact, Truman owed his spot on the national ticket in 1944 to Southern Democrat leaders who had insisted that Roosevelt jettison liberal Vice President Henry Wallace as the price for continued support. Though Byrd and his colleagues expected Truman’s leadership to move their party back to center, they did not get it.

Instead, Truman presented Congress with “civil rights” initiatives and home rule for the District of Columbia, which received a sharp and swift denunciation from Virginia’s senior senator. “Taken in their entirety,” declared Byrd, “[the Truman civil rights proposals] constitute a mass invasion of State’s rights never before even suggested, much less recommended, by any previous President.”

At the Democratic National Convention, Truman was re-nominated, and Virginia’s votes went in protest to conservative Senator Richard Russell of Georgia. A few days later, Southern Democrats met in Birmingham, Alabama, and under a “State’s Rights Party” banner nominated their own ticket headed by then-Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Though Virginia’s Democratic leadership did not attend the event in Birmingham, Governor Tuck unmistakably signaled his preference for the South Carolina governor and introduced him at a Richmond rally.

The black-owned Norfolk Journal and Guide aired its distrust of Truman. “When and if it becomes expedient,” the newspaper commented, “Mr. Truman could just as ruthlessly trade away the interests of the Negro for the support of some other group which he felt more important.” Though Truman probably garnered a slim majority of the black vote in the State, many black Virginians backed Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, whose moderate record as New York’s governor appealed to them.”

(The Dynamic Dominion: Realignment and Rise of Virginia’s Republican Party Since 1945. Frank B. Atkinson. George Mason University Press. 1992, pp. 20-22; 24-25)

 

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)