Testimony before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Atrocities in the South against Blacks

Impact

After hearing the testimony, the Joint Committee issued a lengthy report and made recommendations to Congress. The report consists of three parts: the majority report, the minority report, and the testimony. The testimony is divided into three parts. Part I contains the testimony from Tennessee; Part II contains that from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; and Part III contains testimony from Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. In the majority report, Republican members of the committee made their case against President Johnson’s quick restoration of the southern states and called for tougher measures, including continued use of federal troops, the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing testimony given to the committee regarding former Confederates’ abuse of freedpeople and white Unionists, the report argued that the southern states remained in a state of open rebellion. The minority report, signed by Reverdy Johnson, Henry Grider, and Andrew Rogers, the Democrats on the committee, countered the majority’s conclusions by accusing them of stacking the witness pool in their favor and ignoring evidence presented that proved the South was peaceable and that any violence committed was the work of outside agitators or freedmen themselves. The minority report supported President Johnson’s lenient policy toward the South. The testimony consists of transcripts of the interviews conducted during the committee’s investigation, mostly with white witnesses.

The majority report placed the blame for southern violence squarely on President Johnson’s shoulders. At the end of the war, the southern states, according to the report, “were in a state of utter exhaustion,” but Johnson had missed a golden opportunity to remake southern society for the better. The report charged Johnson with neglecting his obligation to preserve the life and property of loyal citizens: As “commander-in-chief of a victorious army it was his duty, under the law of nations … to restore order, to preserve property, and to protect the people against violence from any quarter until provision should be made by law for their government.” The report argued that Johnson had violated his duty by withdrawing military authority and reinstating disloyal leaders. He had ignored evidence of continued disloyalty, hostility to the government, and violence against freedpeople and loyal whites. Furthermore, he had acted unconstitutionally by assuming unilateral power to reorganize the governments of the southern states, a task the report claimed belonged not to the president but to Congress. By portraying Johnson as not simply inept but criminally negligent, the majority report laid the foundations for his future impeachment.

The report’s aggressive tone reflected not only the level of animosity that existed between Radical Republicans and President Johnson but also the importance of controlling the war’s meaning for the Republican Party. Radical Republicans remained committed to the emancipationist vision of the war. The report rejected the legality of secession and labeled the Confederate war effort as treasonous as well as murderous.

The minority report claimed that once the war ceased, so too did Congress’s war power. Therefore, Johnson’s policy of restoration was both expedient and constitutional. They believed that Radical Republicans were driven by greed and revenge. Yet an additional concern animated the minority’s opposition to Radical Reconstruction: economics. Not only would it be very expensive to oversee such an expansive Reconstruction effort, it also might delay the South’s reemergence as the world’s primary producer of cotton.

Whatever the minority objections, the testimony of the seven black men compelled Congress to act on behalf of freedpeople. The Joint Committee’s report helped persuade moderate Republicans, who were skeptical of increasing federal intervention, to take a more vigorous path to southern Reconstruction. This shift enabled Radical Republicans to wrest control from President Johnson and eventually led to his impeachment for efforts to circumvent Congress. As a result of the Joint Committee’s investigation, Congress extended the Freedmen’s Bureau and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The report introduced the Fourteenth Amendment and paved the way for the Fifteenth Amendment, granting universal suffrage to all men regardless of color.

The Joint Committee’s report was one of a flurry of such reports and other documents that were issued in 1866. Among them was Carl Schurz’s book The Condition of the South: Extracts from the Report of Major-General Carl Schurz, on the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: Addressed to the President. Schurz’s conclusion was that in his travels throughout the South (at the request of President Johnson), he saw little in the way of national feeling; instead, the war was seen as the result of the perfidy of the Yankees. He noted, too, that while the South fought against the Union, blacks did all they could to aid the Union.

Also in 1866, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote Murder of Union Soldiers in North Carolina, a report issued to the U.S. House of Representatives detailing atrocities committed against Union loyalists and any persons or organizations that aided blacks. Stanton noted that churches and schools were favorite targets and that the South was relying on Johnson and a Democratic Congress to keep blacks in subordinate positions. On July 25, 1866, Elihu Benjamin Washburne, a congressional representative from Illinois and a member of the Select Committee on the Memphis Riots, issued a report, Memphis Riots and Massacres, to Congress. The riot had taken place in May of that year and was one of the events that prompted Congress to assume control of Reconstruction. During the riot, white mobs attacked a black shantytown in Memphis and killed nearly fifty people in an early show of white southern rejection of emancipation. Meanwhile, after the First Convention of Colored Men of Kentucky, held in Lexington, Kentucky, in March 1866, the group issued its proceedings, asserting the place of African Americans in the body politic. Later that year, in October, the Freedmen held a convention in Raleigh, North Carolina, and through published minutes continued to agitate for equal rights and the vote. These documents, together with the Joint Committee report, gave the president, Congress, and the American public a vivid portrait of southern intransigence in the months following the Civil War.