The missed opportunity. 40 Acres and a Mule.

"The end of the line of one hundred thirty Negro farmers with mule teams who are buying their cotton seed and other supplies cooperatively at Roanoke Farms, North Carolina."  1938.

Every once and a while in  history you can look back on a specific event and know exactly when the opportunity to cause a different historical outcome was lost.  It's rare, but it does occur.

And eschewing Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War is one such example, the tragic consequences of which we are still living with today.

That opinion, which I've held for a very long time, has not been a popular one in American history for the reason, I'd submit, that the compromise of the 1870s followed by the renewed rise of Southern aristocracy and the glorification of the "Lost Cause" worked an inaccurate historical revision on it, or at least upon its attitude.  Suffice it to say, most historians have tended to herald the demise of Radical Reconstruction following the Lincoln assassination and have taken the position instead that Lincoln wouldn't have approved of it, and as the great reuniter, he would have done what Andrew Johnson did . . . reconstruction, but not so radical.

I'm not so sure.  Lincoln was a shrewd man, something often forgotten about him.  A man willing to endure the war that he did may have been willing to thrown in with the radicals in his final term and forced the conclusion of the effort that was started in 1860.  There are, of course, reasons to believe that he would not have taken that path, he was after all acting in a conciliatory way as the war ended, but there are reasons to believe the opposite  He was a shrewd politician, and one of conviction, who had proven unusually willing to endure extreme hardship in order to obtain a goal. Would any other newly elected President have been willing to take the country into a Civil War in 1860 without any effort to placate the states attempting departure?

We'll never know, of course, but we can wonder and truly not know.  We can know, however, that not following through with the goals of the Radical Republicans was a mistake.

A huge mistake.

The Radicals would have taken steps to reform, in the true sense of the word, the South politically, economically and socially (and for all practical purposes in that order, while simultaneously). That would have meant politically disenfranchising the treasonous portion of the white Southern population while enfranchising the blacks, but it would have meant far more than that.  Indeed, the one good bit of evidence that Lincoln would have gone with the Radicals is that politically enfranchising the former slave population in fact did occur during Lincoln's late administration and it continued on during Johnson's.  Blacks were made citizens and given the right to vote, even achieving a majority black government in South Carolina for a time.

But it also would have meant, in some form, putting the black population into the economic shoes formerly owned by the treasonous planter class who dominated the South economically and politically. And that would have meant busting up the plantations and distributing land to the freed slaves.

And that idea was definitely around by the mid point in the Civil War.  Indeed, it was definitely circulating around in the Army, which had occasionally taken a liberating view towards slaves even early in the war.  It was expressed in the sentiment that caused General William T. Sherman to issue Special Field Order Number 15, which read:

Special Field Orders No. 15.

Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, In the Field, Savannah, Ga., January 16, 1865.

I. The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Fla., are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the BLACKS now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.

II. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, Saint Augustine, and Jacksonville the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war and orders of the President of the United States the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. He cannot be subjected to conscription or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the Department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe; domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom and securing their rights as citizens of the United States. Negroes so enlisted will be organized into companies, battalions, and regiments, under the orders of the United States military authorities, and will be paid, fed, and clothed according to law. The bounties paid on enlistment may, with the consent of the recruit, go to assist his family and settlement in procuring agricultural implements, seed, tools, boats, clothing, and other articles necessary for their livelihood.

III. Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island, or a locality clearly defined within the limits above designated, the inspector of settlements and plantations will himself, or by such sub-ordinate officer as he may appoint, give them a license to settle such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement. The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title. The quartermaster may, on the requisition of the inspector of settlements and plantations, place at the disposal of the inspector one or more of the captured steamers to ply between the settlements and one or more of the commercial points, heretofore named in orders, to afford the settlers the opportunity to supply their necessary wants and to sell the products of their land and labor.

IV. Whenever a negro has enlisted in the military service of the United States he may locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure and acquire a homestead and all other rights and privileges of a settler as though present in person. In like manner negroes may settle their families and engage on board the gunboats, or in fishing, or in the navigation of the inland waters, without losing any claim to land or other advantages derived from this system. But no one, unless an actual settler as above defined, or unless absent on Government service, will be entitled to claim any right to land or property in any settlement by virtue of these orders.

V. In order to carry out this system of settlement a general officer will be detailed as inspector of settlements and plantations, whose duty it shall be to visit the settlements, to regulate their police and general management, and who will furnish personally to each head of a family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries, and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory. The same general officer will also be charged with the enlistment and organization of the negro recruits and protecting their interests while absent from their settlements, and will be governed by the rules and regulations prescribed by the War Department for such purpose.

VI. Brig. Gen. R. Saxton is hereby appointed inspector of settlements and plantations and will at once enter on the performance of his duties. No change is intended or desired in the settlement now on Beaufort Island, nor will any rights to property heretofore acquired be affected thereby.

By order of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman:

L. N. DAYTON, Assistant Adjutant-General.

— William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi; 1865 series - Special Field Order 15, January 16, 1865.

What Sherman ordered had a limited application, but others had a broader one in mind. And Sherman had seen something and appreciated it which made his act no only charitable, but political.  His armies had just marched across the American South from west to east and he'd seen nearly all of the Southern heartland.  He well knew that the economic power of the South was completely vested in large plantations and that the plantations and the planters are what had supported, and caused, the war.  Deprive the planters of their slaves and the Southern cause was over.

Indeed, most Southern soldiers were yeomen, which provided in some ways the ultimately irony of the Southern fight.  Yeomen by and large did not own slaves, although a few did. Their lives were marked by fierce independence and they were more or less aligned against everyone but their immediate families and neighbors.  Their stalwart independent frames of mind made them good soldiers in combat but also made them unreliable as well, figuring into both the length of the Southern war against the odds and the high desertion rate of the Southern armies, and even some instances of outright rebellion of various regions, West Virginia being the most notable, against the Confederacy.  In the antebellum period the yeomanry had been hostile to blacks but their hostility was not merely racist (it certainly was in part) but economic, viewing blacks as economic implements used against them by their real class enemies, the planters.

There was real hope in the post war period that enfranchising blacks with land would convert them to yeomanry and even the yeomanry seems to have grasped that in some places, forming tentative alliances in the post Reconstruction period with blacks as the planter class reasserted itself and disenfranchised everyone else.  In the immediate post war period, however, the real opportunity was presented, and lost.

Radical Republicans would have redistributed the planter landholdings to freed slaves. The logic was inescapable to everyone.  Plantations had been built and worked on forced black labor.  They would not have existed but for it. Deprive them of it, and they wouldn't exist.  Moreover, as that labor was forced it could be regarded as stolen, with the reparation of the worked land as compensation for the theft.

Most of the Southern black population had farming skills in an era when most Americans were farmers. What they lacked was land, animals and implements.  Lost to the modern American romantic notion of "homesteading", building up sufficient resources in order to start a farm was very difficult and nobody just simply "did it".  Homesteaders often took years building up sufficient assets in order to strike out on their own even when supported by paying employment or (farming) families.  Freed blacks in the South had, at best, their household possessions at the time they were freed.  They were universally poor.

Hence the "40 acres and a mule" ideal. What that really meant was the vesting of 40 acres, the basic American agricultural unit, and a mule, the most durable farm animal and one that could be used for planting and transportation.  Inherent in that phrase was the provision of basic implements.  All of these were readily available in the South and capable of quick obtainment and distribution.

What was needed in order to do that was a legal vehicle to accomplish and the will to do it.  Both were lacking.

Legally,. the problem was the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution which provide that people's property simply can't be taken.  There are exceptions, of course, such as Eminem domain, but they they still require that the land taken be taken with "just compensation" to the owners.  Therefore if we can imagine a way in which the land would have been taken from planters we still have to imagine one in which the planters would have been compensated for it.

That might not, however, be as difficult to imagine as we might think.  For one thing, while it would have been a huge investment on the part of the United States, the land's value in 1865 wasn't what it was in 1860.  Purchasing plantations at fair market value, all that would have been owed, would have been getting a heck of a deal at the time.  Like Tara in Gone With The Wind, that land was a mess by the end of the war.

But more radical means may have been available as well.

The South would never have attempted to break away from the Union but for slavery. The slave holding class saw slavery as vital to the economy of the South (this turned out not to be true) and thought the elimination of slavery would destroy the Southern economy.  No matter how it was dressed up, that was the underlying basis for it all.  Most Southerners, as noted, were farmers but most weren't slaveholders. Balancing that out, it should be noted, there were a lot of mid sized farmers that owned a small number of slaves but who still worked their own lands. Not all slaveholders, in other words, owned large plantations.  Indeed, there were slaveholders who were not in agriculture at all, although most were.  But production agriculture based upon slave labor was the economic backbone of the South.

Political power in the South was very unbalanced in addition.  Whereas Jefferson, a slaveholder, could imagine in the late 1700s a republic in which most voters were free yeomanry, in reality the slave-holding class held the political reins.  Yeomanry, the most numerous class (outside of South Carolina) did not.  Everywhere, of course, blacks held no political power at all, which made the Southern claim of the Civil War that their departure from the Union represented the will of the people a lie.  The people's will didn't include, rather obviously, the will of the black residents.  In South Carolina, the majority of those residents were black.

This is all noted as there were no Southern states where support for succession wasn't backed by the slaveholding class directly and there were few planters who weren't connected, in some fashion, with the South's war against the nation.  Given that, they were implicated in treason, if we accept that reason not only included fighting in a rebel army against the nation, but serving in a rebel legislature or rebel government, or giving material support to the rebellion.  It would have been few in that class who could have really escaped being implicated in the war against the United States.

Now, a person can't be tried for treason simply because he was on the losing side of a rebellion in terms of his residents or regional residence. But the United States didn't bother attempting to try anyone for treason at all.  Treason, at that time, was a capitol offense.  Executing those who had committed it seriously would have been allowable under the law, but would not have been a wise thing to do.  But trying those, like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, who made war against their country and sentencing them to long prison sentences would have been warranted.  Indeed, Davis was held in anticipation of just such a trial, and a jury pool, half black and half white, raised in anticipation of that, before he was released.  In fairness, part of the reason he was not tried was a fear that succession would be held to be legal, a fear that was relieved in 1869 when the Supreme Court held it was not.

Lee and Davis both lost their plantations in fact, and others did as well. But what did not occur was the mass acquisition of them by the United States for redistribution to the freed slaves.  Freed blacks were well aware that land was economic freedom and none the less pursued it, but given their lack of resources they could never acquire it in the same volume that white southerners could and did.  Starting in the 1910s they began to give up and move out of the South, with the result that changed a situation in which 90% of blacks lived in the South in 1910, a figure that had held steady since 1790, to its current figure of just over 50%, which was reached in the 1970s.

Had blacks been able to acquire farmland in the 1860s, as they hoped to do, this history would undoubtedly have been radically different.  The breakup of the Southern plantation economy would have destroyed the planter class as an economic and political base, and vested it in a black and white yeoman class instead.  This is not to say that black and white yeomanry would have suddenly existed in harmony. Southern whites of all classes were hostile to blacks and steeped in generations of racism.  Northern whites, for that matter, held strong racist views.  But Southern yeomanry had shown an acclimation for appreciating their political position and making alliances accordingly.  It's not impossible to imagine them doing that fairly rapidly in the late 19th Century.

Of course history didn't take this path.  Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and Andrew Johnson, surviving an attempt at impeachment, took the country down the road he thought Lincoln would have wanted to travel. Reconstruction was attempted, but not of the radical variety.

An opportunity was lost.