American Experiment (157 page)

Cornered, General Lee slipped out of Petersburg and Richmond toward the west, with 35,000 men, in a desperate effort to link up with Johnston’s forces to the south. Grant’s 80,000 men followed in hot pursuit, with General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry and mobile infantry corps racing on Lee’s left to prevent him from turning south. In a sharp engagement Lee lost 7,000 men captured, with minimal Federal casualties. “My God, has the Army dissolved?” Lee exclaimed as he watched the action. By now his hopes had, and his supply lines were cut. On April 9, he met Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

It was a poignant encounter between the two adversaries, Lee with dress sword and red sash, Grant in faded campaign blouse and muddy boots—two old soldiers who had met during the Mexican War but not seen each other since. Because Grant would offer only terms of surrender and Lee knew he had no choice, the parley went smoothly, except when Lee asked that his cavalrymen and artillerists be permitted to keep their horses, which they owned. Grant demurred; only officers, he said, were allowed to keep their “private property” under the terms. Then he relented, reflecting that most of the men in the ranks were small farmers who would need their horses to put their spring crops in.

News of the meeting sped through both armies. Some on both sides disbelieved that Lee had actually surrendered. Said a Union colonel who had fought in Virginia for three years, “I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives.”

Grant telegraphed Lincoln: “General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this morning.” The President and Stanton threw their arms around each other; the austere Secretary of War, someone reported, “was trotting about in exhilarated joy.” The booming of guns aroused Washingtonians in the morning. Newspapers appeared with huge headlines. Welles wrote in his diary, “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering, all, all are jubilant.” Lincoln had a few days of celebration as he spoke to hundreds gathered around the White
House, turned his thoughts to reconstruction, granted some pardons and reprieves, joyously greeted General Grant, and had him meet with the Cabinet. The President had never seemed more cheerful than on that day of the Cabinet meeting. His son Robert was back after serving on Grant’s staff; the President and First Lady planned to attend the theater in the evening. It was Good Friday, April 14.

The next day telegraph lines clacked out the dread news—the President in the rear of the box, the audience intent on
Our American Cousin,
the shot ringing out in the dark, the wild-looking man in black felt hat and high boots leaping from the box and catching his spurs on a regimental flag, the tumult in the theater, the President breathing laboriously, carried across the street to the house of a tailor, the room crowded with spectators, the slow death. And then the legend—of the Great Emancipator, of Father Abraham, of the ungainly fellow who told crude stories to relieve the tension within him, of the practical politician who had come to believe in union
and
liberty, of the men who hated him, including a man named Booth, of the unerring course of the assassin’s bullet, of a threnody by Whitman, and the grief of a people.

Guns were still booming as Lincoln’s funeral train set out for the north and west, but soon Johnston and the other Confederate generals surrendered. The Confederacy was dead, and with it an experiment that few in the South had time to mourn and few in the North wanted to. It had been an experiment in extreme decentralization, in radical states’ rights, in a confederation in which each state was sovereign. The central government could not impose tariffs or make internal improvements or of course interfere with slavery, except perhaps in wartime. Other powers, such as levying export duties or making appropriations not requested by the executive board, it could not exercise without a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. It was the great misfortune of the confederationists that they had to run such a dispersed system under the pressing conditions of war, which on the one hand tended to compel central direction and control and on the other aroused, temporarily at least, feelings of state rather than Confederate solidarity. President Davis was chronically in despair over the refusal of sovereign states to cooperate in the war effort, and South Carolina, living up to the heritage of John Calhoun, virtually nullified an act of the Confederate Congress authorizing Richmond to impress goods and services.

The North was ending an experiment too—in stepped-up national power. Upon the secession of the South and the departure of Southern Democratic members of Congress, Republicans and War Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Thus they were able to put through
the Homestead Act and other great measures including, early in 1865, the vital Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. Could Northern Republicans and antislavery Democrats sustain their power through the harsh trials of reconstruction that seemed almost certain to lie ahead? In his second Inaugural, Lincoln had said in his compelling peroration: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right.... let us strive ... to bind up the nation’s wounds” to achieve “a just, and a lasting peace.” Could the national government, however, keep a creative balance between firmness and compassion? Could it extend the fruits of liberty and equality to millions of freed men and women?

But as Lincoln’s funeral train wove its way through Manhattan and up along the Hudson and across New York State to Cleveland, to Indianapolis and Chicago, and then at last to Springfield, Americans were not asking these questions. They were simply pouring out their grief, none more so than Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring….

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.

D
OWN BY THE BUSH
spring on a Virginia plantation a young black woman jumped up from the ground, crying out, “Glory, glory, hallelujah to Jesus! I’s free! I’s free!” She looked around fearfully, then rolled on the ground and kissed it, calling out her love and thanks to “Masser Jesus.” A few minutes before, in the mansion, she had found the white family in tears over a rumor that Jefferson Davis had been captured. After getting permission for another black servant to wait on table while she fetched water from the bush spring, she had walked tight-lipped, then run all the way to the spring, flung herself to the ground, and indulged in a paroxysm of rejoicing. To her, freedom meant one overwhelming hope—that she could rejoin her husband and four children, sold several years earlier to a slave dealer.

Other jubilees were more public. When reports of Lee’s surrender reached Athens, Georgia, blacks danced around a liberty pole in the center of town, until whites cut it down in the evening. In Charleston, several thousand black people paraded through the streets, while other thousands of blacks cheered. A mule pulled a cart carrying two women, beside whom a mock slave auctioneer shouted, “How much am I offered?” Then came sixty men tied together like a slave gang, followed by another cart carrying a black-draped coffin with letters proclaiming
SLAVERY IS DEAD.
Blacks from many trades—carpenters, tailors, butchers, masons, wheelwrights—along with Union soldiers and religious leaders, made up the long procession that slowly wound its way through town.

Many years later, freed people would often recall “just like yistiday” the moment they heard that freedom had come. For most, however, the day of jubilee was more a day of confusion, worry, and uncertainty. How and where they heard the news of final Southern defeat, who told them and when, not only varied widely but carried omens of future frustration and tragedy.

Often blacks heard the news from Union soldiers passing through the neighborhood. “We’s diggin’ potatoes,” remembered a Louisiana ex-slave, “when de Yankees come up with two big wagons and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration ’bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ’cide what to do.” Sometimes a black who was
“a good reader” would report the news from a newspaper. Most often slaves were assembled and told of their new freedom by their masters. Some masters in more remote areas waited weeks, even months, before informing their blacks, meantime using them to bring in the crops. Some planters accompanied their announcement with threats and warnings, demanding in some cases that the blacks stay and work and in others that they clear out at once. Occasionally a Union officer arrived to proclaim liberty; one such Yank had hardly left a Louisiana plantation when the planter’s wife emerged from the house to tell the newly freed blacks, “Ten years from now I’ll have you all back again.”

Nor did the freed people always greet the news with jubilation. After the dashed hopes of recent years, they were above all wary and uncertain. Talking gravely among themselves in their quarters, they discussed rumors—that the federal government would not back up their newly found freedom, that the Yankees might sell them to Cuba in order to pay for war costs, that the whole thing was a giant piece of deception. “You’re joking me,” Tom Robinson told the master who said he was now a free man. He spoke with some slave neighbors to see if they were free too. “I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all free alike.” But above all the blacks felt confused and disoriented. “We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits,” an Alabama woman remembered about hearing the news, “but after we knowed what he means, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where to of went.” Some blacks stayed on to help their former master or mistress, out of a feeling of compassion, affection, or obligation. Few exacted any real vengeance, but many were hostile. A story came down through generations of one black family about their great-grandmother Caddy, who had been badly treated.

“When General Lee surrendered,” so the story went, “that meant that all the colored people were free! Caddy threw down that hoe, she marched herself up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress. She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress and told the white woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said:
Kiss my ass!”

The attitudes and actions of the newly freed were closely affected by those of the planters, who were variously angry, heartsick, resigned, vengeful, helpless, and helpful. Many were already grieving over sons, plantations, and fortunes taken by war; losing their blacks was the final heartbreak. Some masters whipped and even shot and hanged blacks who asserted their freedom. “Papa Day,” a Texas planter, told his hands, after reading the official proclamation, that the government did not need to tell them they were free because they had been free all along, that they could
leave or slay, but if they left, most “white folks would not treat them as well as he had.”

Myrta Lockett Avary, daughter of a Virginia slaveholder, could never forget how her father had assembled his people one evening in the backyard. “You do not belong to me any more,” her father said in a trembling voice. “You are free. You have been like my own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account to Him of how I raised you.” Looking out at a sea of uplifted black faces, illuminated by flaring pine torches, the master reminded them how he had fed them, clothed them, housed them, nursed them, taken care of their babies and laid away their dead. He wanted to keep them on by paying wages, but he hadn’t finished thinking things out. He wanted to know how they felt. “Ben! Dick! Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell me if you plan to stay….” All indicated they would remain. “Law, Marster!” said Uncle Andrew the patriarch, “I ain’ got nowhar tug go ef I was gwine!”

Other slaveholders were glad to be rid of at least some of their slaves so that they need
not
take care of them; they would keep the good workers and turn out the very old and the very young, the ill and the inefficient— just like the Yankee capitalists!—to “root, pig, or die.”

Many planters hardly knew how to liberate; many slaves hardly knew how to be liberated. Master and slave had lived in mutual dependency too long. Some planters almost felt relieved—they felt that their slaves had owned
them
—but others seemed to sicken and die. Mistresses in particular felt helpless when their servants disappeared. It was even harder for the blacks. “Folks dat ain’t never been free don’ rightly know de
feel
of bein’ free,” said James Lucas, a former slave of Jefferson Davis. “Dey don’t know de meanin’ of it….” An old slave rejected the idea of a wage: “Missis belonged to him, & he belonged to Missis.” Blacks knew how to work hard, said one of them, “but dey didn’t know nothing ’bout how to ’pend on demselves for de livin’.” Parke Johnston, a former slave in Virginia, recalled “how wild and upset and
dreadful
everything was in them times. It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left the plantation before, turned aloose all at once, with nothing in the world, but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men, women and children that had left their homes when they found out they were free, walking along the road with no where to go.”

Still, it was far more a time of hope than fear. “That the day I shouted,” a former slave in Texas remembered. “Everybody went wild,” a Texas
cowpuncher recalled. “We all felt like horses….WE was free. Just like that, we was free.”

Out in Bexar County a cowpuncher heard blacks singing:

Abe Lincoln freed the nigger

With the gun and the trigger;

And I ain’t goin’ to get whipped any more.

I got my ticket,

Leavin’ the thicket,

And I’m a-headin’ for the Golden Shore!