White Rage

In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways.46 White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached “staggering proportions.” Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South.47 Johnson refused, choosing instead, to “preside over … this slow-motioned genocide.”48 The lack of a vigorous—or, for that matter, any—response only further encouraged white Southerners, who recognized that they now had a friend in the White House.49

Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”

1864, two years after the Homestead Act passed, he advocated taking the plantation owners’ land as well and distributing it to “free, industrious, and honest farmers,” which again was Johnson’s way of helping poor whites, whose opportunities, he felt, had been denied and whose chances had been thwarted by the enslaved and masters alike.

Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.

The new president, just like Lincoln, had convinced himself instead that the Civil War was only about preserving the Union.

“I am not,” Lincoln had said, “nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

To cast the war as something else, as Lincoln did, to shroud that hard, cold reality under the cloak of “preserving the Union” would not and could not address the root causes of the war and the toll that centuries of slavery had wrought. And that failure of clarity led to a failure of humanity.

This was a war about slavery. About a region’s determination to keep millions of black people in bondage from generation to generation. Mississippi’s Articles of Secession stated unequivocally, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery … Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

His framing of the issue not only absolved plantation owners and their political allies of responsibility for launching this war, but it also signaled the power of racism over patriotism. Lincoln’s anger in 1862 was directed at blacks who fully supported the Union and did not want to leave the United States of America.

Lincoln soon laid out his own resettlement plans. He had selected Chiriquí, a resource-poor area in what is now Panama, to be the new home for millions of African Americans. Lincoln just had to convince them to leave. In August 1862, he lectured five black leaders whom he had summoned to the White House that it was their duty, given what their people had done to the United States, to accept the exodus to South America, telling them, “But for your race among us there could not be war.”