I was recently in Thailand for a seminar on Transitional Justice. Most of the focus was on international human rights law and the courts in Cambodia, East Timor, Rwanda, etc. However, there was also a lot of talk about mechanisms that create economic and educational opportunities for the disenfranchised, get food on the table, and build peace between the groups that have done so much ill to one another. I was far more interested in the latter than I was in the actual legal structures.
After the seminar, I traveled around Thailand a bit. During long periods on the bus south, I was listening to Confederates in the Attic , which I find to be a fascinating book, having grown up in “the cradle of secession.”
One comment caught my attention, having just spent two weeks at the seminar. I think it was a quote from Shelby Foote in which he says something along the lines of
This is not a direct quote, but it captures the essence of what I understood him to be saying.
What I want to know is, is this the case? Were there programs on the local, state, or national level to educate former slaves? If so, how long after the war was over? I know, for instance, there was a school in Charleston, The Avery Institute, but it wasn’t even finished until several years after the war.
Remember, Lincoln technically never freed a single slave. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederacy and had as much practical legal force down there as the German beer laws apply to American brewers. On a practical basis, nothing at all changed for slaves in the South (until the Northern army got there, at least).
Lincoln also wasn’t concerned about what the freed slaves would do after freedom. He was against slavery, but wanted primarily to make ity an issue of the war, since that would mean Britain would stay out of it (the British were fiercely antislavery, so much so that workers in the textile mills, who lost their jobs because of a lack of Southern cotton, fully supported the Union once the Emancipation Proclamation was announced).
However, as my Russian history said about the US and Russian cases, “It was a piss-poor emancipation.”) The slaves got freedom and nothing else.
Foote’s criticism would be better directed toward Andrew Johnson. Lincoln supported efforts to educate and grant lands to the former slaves, subject to the limitation that he had a very expensive war to fight and win. He supported General Sherman and his Field Order #15, which settled black families on abandoned Confederate land along the Atlantic seacoast, and the Port Royal Experiment in which former slaves established an autonomous community in South Carolina.
As the war wound down, Lincoln signed into law the bill to create the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was expected to coordinate black education and resettlement after the war. The full title of the Bureau was the “Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands”, and it was to have broken the plantations which had been seized for nonpayment of taxes into small parcels and rented them to freedpeople, with options to buy on credit after a period of time. The Bureau was also to coordinate the work of Northern philanthropists who were establishing schools for black children throughout the South.
It was not to be. Andrew Johnson became President in April 1865, and he hated the Freedmen’s Bureau. He issued wholesale pardons to former Confederates and insisted that their land be returned at once, which deprived the Bureau of rental income. He harassed and transferred its agents, and vetoed a bill to extend the life of the Bureau in 1866. Worst of all, he insisted that political power in the South be returned immediately to native whites, who passed draconian Black Codes that forbade black Southerners to buy or even rent land and offered no state support to black education. By 1868 sharecropping had emerged as the “least bad alternative” for the majority of the formerly enslaved.
But it meant that Southern slaves who escaped North would not under any circumstances be returned to their owners, even after the war was over. Don’t forget that. Slavery was still legal in 1863 and there was no guarantee at the time that it would actually be abolished after the war, so that was important.