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Overview
Drawing on extensive research in unpublished manuscripts, party records, and newspapers, and using sophisticated quantitative analysis of electoral and legislative behavior, Professor McCrary suggests a significant revision of earlier interpretations of Lincoln's reconstruction policies. He finds that the real architect of the gradualist approach with which the President was publicly identified was his commanding general in Louisiana, Nathaniel P. Banks, who was less open to the idea of Negro suffrage than was Lincoln himself.
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691634289 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1407 |
| Pages: | 444 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.30(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.20(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction
The Louisiana Experiment
By Peyton McCrary
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04660-0
CHAPTER 1
The Old Regime: Society and Politics in Antebellum Louisiana
No revolution can be understood without an examination of the social order that preceded it. Louisiana's was the most dramatic embodiment of the slaveholding society of the deep South. Every curious Northern or European traveler sought out the "Creole" metropolis of New Orleans and the rich alluvial hinterlands supplied with unwilling labor by the city's slavetraders. Merchants dominated the urban economy and played a key role in its politics. In rural parishes (counties) the great planters controlled a disproportionate share of the wealth. The planter elite's hegemony in local politics was rarely questioned, and the apportionment system enabled it to exercise complete sway over the state government. Fear of slave revolt, racist feelings about black people, and xenophobic distrust of outsiders made the majority of Louisiana whites amenable to the proslavery views articulated by the planter class — and institutionalized in the ideology of the Democratic Party. Their control of the majority party enabled Louisiana planters to win a popular mandate for secession in 1861: it is a measure of their political skill that even in New Orleans the ballot box yielded a majority for the cause of disunion.
The city that was to be the center of reconstruction politics during the 1860s was the oldest and largest in the South. By the time of the Civil War, New Orleans boasted a history of one and a half centuries, and travelers remarked the Old World flavor of its romantic French Quarter. Semitropical weather added an artificial patina of age to its Latin architecture, observed the city's first great novelist, George Washington Cable: "in that climate every year of a building's age counts for ten." To the ballrooms of the St. Charles and St. Louis hotels the planter elite of the lower South came to purchase Virginia and Kentucky Negroes at auction, for New Orleans was the clearinghouse of the domestic slave trade. Its bankers and commission merchants were the chief financiers of the plantation regime and marketed southern staples in the North and Europe. The enormous volume of trade that passed through New Orleans, including the corn, wheat, and livestock of the upper Mississippi Valley, as well as the sugar and cotton of the Southwest, made the "Crescent City" the nation's leader in the value of its exports in 1840. Americans increasingly dominated its business circles by this time, but their frequent intermarriage with the daughters of French Creole merchants reflected the increasing vagueness of the line between the two cultures.
New Orleans was also a city of poverty: the Irish and German immigrants who settled in the city in the three decades before the war — 38 percent of the 1860 population — did not enjoy the studied luxury of the planters and merchants. The lack of adequate sanitation facilities and the proximity of acres of swamplands exposed the unseasoned arrivals to yellow fever each summer. The mortality rate was high; for Irishmen employed in building new canals and railroads in nearby marshlands, the threat of disease was even greater. The levee was the scene of much labor violence, reflecting the bitter competition of native white, immigrant, and black stevedores. The rough Irish sections of the city were not always safe places to walk at night, particularly for members of the "inferior" Negro race. The immigrants themselves were the victims of systematic violence during the 1850s, when the nativist Know-Nothing Party dominated city politics through gangs of "plug-uglies." A city of immense wealth and appalling poverty, intimately tied to the plantation system despite being the largest urban conglomerate in the South, New Orleans was a society of contradictions in which violence, and even death, lay close to the surface of affairs.
Yet some elements in this urban wilderness offered at least the potential for meaningful social change. The black community nourished the most deeply subversive tendencies. The poor black neighborhoods scattered throughout the city were a haven for runaway slaves: the anonymity of urban life was useful in escaping detection. In Congo Square free blacks and slaves assembled for periodic dance fests of a distinctly African character, and the mysterious cult of Voodoo gave further evidence that the separate slave culture of plantation areas found its parallel in the city. New Orleans also boasted the largest, most prosperous, and best educated free Negro middle class in the South. Many blacks worked as domestic servants, stevedores, or in other "menial" occupations, but a significant proportion were artisans and shopkeepers above the poverty line.
The elite of the "free people of color," as they were called, were professional men or owned prosperous businesses and investments. There were several private schools for Negro children, and the wealthiest men sent their sons and daughters to the North or to France for an education. Protestant members of the black community patronized their own separate Methodist and Baptist churches, but Negro Catholics attended services along with whites: within the great St. Louis Cathedral there was no racial separation at all. New Orleans did not have a pattern of residential segregation, and it tolerated lapses in white supremacy etiquette that shocked rural Southerners. Some wealthy free blacks had Irish servants, and the white elite on occasion hired Negro tutors and music teachers for their daughters; the annual banquet of veterans of the Battle of New Orleans was integrated, and some wealthy white men even enrolled the children by their octaroon mistresses in public schools. To some degree, class differences separated the light-skinned elite from the black artisans and stevedores, but when the federal army occupied the city and presented an opportunity for self-assertion, the unity of race was to prove stronger for the free people of color than that of class.
The city's white middle class like, the merchant elite, contained many individuals of "Yankee" origin, but unlike the business community, it was not identified with the planter regime. This urban bourgeoisie was the moving force behind the city's thriving public school system in the 1850s. Its lawyers and doctors, small businessmen and clerks, newspapermen and schoolteachers were active in the opposition to secession in 1861. Although many of the urban middle class subsequently supported the Confederacy during the war, others remained staunch Unionists. The leadership of the free state movement (both radical and moderate wings) was to be drawn overwhelmingly from the middle-class professionals of New Orleans. The presence of an articulate and prosperous black community in the city may have made the idea of Negro suffrage more palatable for such men than was generally true of nineteenth-century Americans.
Because New Orleans provides the setting for much of the story presented in the following pages, it is helpful to visualize the layout of this unusual city. At the time of the Civil War, New Orleans huddled on a narrow belt of land between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi some 120 miles north of where the river enters the Gulf of Mexico. At that point the meandering river flows from west to east in a series of crescent loops. The eighteenth-century French settlement lay on the north bank at the top of one of these loops; beyond the walls of the old city marshlands stretched for several miles north to the lake. In the nineteenth century the arrival of the "Americans" expanded the city "uptown" (which is actually west). The Creole population "downtown" in the French Quarter spilled across Esplanade Avenue to the east and southeast (away from the Americans), and the newly arriving European immigrants often settled even further downtown on the eastern bank of the river.
The pattern of municipal organization that prevailed at the time of the war reflected the ethnic antagonisms of the city. The first district (containing wards one to three) was predominantly Protestant in composition, although there were several Irish Catholic enclaves down near the levee and many German Catholics scattered throughout the district. It contained much of the city's business community, the famed St. Charles Hotel, most of the public halls in which wartime political meetings were to be held, and a substantial American residential section. The first district was predominantly Whig in political affiliation until 1854, and Know-Nothing for the remainder of the antebellum period. Canal Street formed the boundary between the first district and the French Quarter all the way from the river to the swamps.
The Democratic second district (containing wards four to six) was heavily Catholic in population, with Irish and German families scattered among the old Creole residences that gave the French Quarter its distinctive character. This district also claimed a portion of the New Orleans business community, and a surprisingly large proportion of American merchants lived in Creole neighborhoods. Many of the city's leading banks were located along St. Louis Street near Royal. The St. Louis Hotel was the Creole's answer to the St. Charles, and the famed U.S. Customhouse was under construction on the French side of Canal. Of the many landmarks in the Vieux Carre, few were so redolent of Latin influences as the St. Louis Cathedral and the Spanish Cabildo (or city hall) on Jackson Square, unless it was the earthy French market, where black vendors hawked the staples of Creole cooking to shrewd domestics, and where the city's elite often sought an early morning coffee with chicory.
Across Esplanade Avenue from the French Quarter was the third district (wards seven to nine). The seventh ward contained the overflow of Creole residences from the old city, but Irish and German immigrants were dominant further out. This was by far the poorest district of the city: little business was established there other than a few large cotton presses, and the working-class citizenry possessed little taxable income. Like the Creole second district, the third was traditionally Democratic in affiliation, although the Know-Nothing violence distorted that pattern during the 1850s by keeping potentially Democratic voters from the polls.
The fourth district (ward ten), only annexed to the city in 1852, was the former city of Lafayette, far uptown above the American section on the western edge of New Orleans. It contained much of the Garden District, that expansive residential suburb where the Protestant business elite built its stately mansions, but like most areas of New Orleans, it also contained immigrant areas down near the river. Although regarded as chiefly Whig and Know-Nothing, the fourth was actually a swing district, control of which could tip the balance in favor of either party.
Merchants dominated the economy of the city, but by the mid-1850s the labor movement had acquired considerable clout in municipal politics. The Know-Nothing Party, the successor to the Whig organization after 1853, used the native American working class as its shock troops in the violent campaign tactics that kept immigrant Democrats from the polls. Initially, the leadership of the secret organization seems to have been the merchant elite of the American district, and the officeholders it placed in power were drawn from the city's leading lawyers and businessmen. The continued reliance on political mobs, however, alienated some of the business leaders and gave a greater influence to those who commanded the street forces.
In 1858 the Democratic opposition and disenchanted businessmen mounted an independent reform movement with Pierre Beauregard as its mayoral candidate; just before election day the independents seized the state arsenal in the Cabildo and barricaded a large section of the French Quarter, declaring that they would ensure a fair election for the first time since Know-Nothing plug-uglies took over the city. The Know-Nothing forces proved stronger and elected virtually their entire ticket; after the election the independent "vigilance committee" quietly disbanded in frustration. The new mayor, Gerard Stith, was foreman of the composing room at the Daily Picayune and a leader in the city's powerful lithographer's union. His successor in 1860 was John Monroe of the stevedore's union. Monroe was reelected in 1862 as Confederate mayor, just before the city's capture by the Union navy, and was again chosen mayor in the first postwar elections under conservative control.
The city's unique image of romance and evil was highly visible to the Northern public. Travel accounts and antislavery pamphlets, shipping news and popular novels like Uncle Torris Cabin kept "Old New Orleans" before the reader's eye. Representatives of the great New York and Philadelphia merchant houses visited the city regularly, and some stayed to make their fortunes in the booming economy of the lower Mississippi as factor, banker, cotton planter, or sugar baron. In a more humble capacity countless thousands of Western farmboys tried their hand at a flatboat voyage downriver to the Crescent City, disposed of their cargoes, broke up their boats to sell for lumber, and returned home in the opulence of a Mississippi steamboat. Abraham Lincoln's only personal exposure to plantation society came in just this fashion, on two voyages in 1828 and 1831 as a hired hand on Indiana flatboats. In New Orleans the future president witnessed a public slave auction, which may have given him a vague sense of what it meant for slaves to be sold "down the river," as one of his companions recalled: "slavery ran the iron into him then and there." Despite its cosmopolitan air, the city's reputation was inevitably linked to the plantation system that generated so much of its business activity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction by Peyton McCrary. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Tables, pg. ix
- Preface, pg. xi
- Abbreviations, pg. xvii
- Prologue "Mr. Lincoln's Model Of Reconstruction", pg. 1
- I. The Old Regime: Society And Politics In Antebellum Louisiana, pg. 19
- II. War And Social Change: Benjamin F. Butler And The Assertion Of Federal Power, pg. 66
- III. The Failure Of Conciliation: Nathaniel P. Banks And The Planters, pg. 110
- IV. Between Slavery And Freedom: The Labor System Of General Banks, pg. 135
- V. Reconstruction As A Problem In Party Building: Thomas J. Durant And The Free State Movement, pg. 159
- VI. The Suffrage Issue: General Banks Takes Command, pg. 186
- VII. Radicals Vs. Moderates: The Ideological Dimension Of Unionist Politics, pg. 212
- VIII. The Moderates In Power: The Constitutional Convention Of 1864, pg. 237
- IX. Lincoln Vs. Sumner: The Louisiana Question In National Politics, pg. 271
- X. Counterrevolution: The Return Of The Confederates, pg. 305
- Epilogue. The Politics Of Revolution, pg. 342
- Appendix A. Regression Analysis Of Electoral Behavior In Antebellum Louisiana, 1840-1861, pg. 357
- Appendix B. The Occupational Background Of Delegates To The Louisiana Constitutional Convention Of 1864, pg. 370
- Appendix C. A Scale Analysis Of Voting Behavior In The Louisiana Constitutional Convention, 1864, pg. 373
- Bibliographical Essay, pg. 381
- Index, pg. 401