Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Reconstruction, 1865–1867 485
lesser soldiers and civilians, in person and by letter. Among those testifying were
recently discharged officers who had served with black regiments in most parts
of the South. Some were still serving there as agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. 64
Committee members wanted to know how the withdrawal of federal troops
would affect public order in the South. Two former officers of the 101st USCI
expressed their views. Robert W. Barnard, the regiment’s colonel, said that an old
Unionist resident had told him, “If you take away the military from Tennessee,
the buzzards can’t eat up the niggers as fast as we’ll kill ’em.” John H. Cochrane,
the lieutenant colonel, agreed that in parts of the state, freedmen, northerners, and
southern Unionists would be in danger if federal troops left. George O. Sanderson,
who had served with the 1st USCI as a lieutenant in North Carolina, said that
without supervision, planters would reduce farmworkers’ wages to less than thirtyeight
cents a day, “to make it worse for them . . . than before they were freed.” Poor
whites, Sanderson said, “feel bitter towards the free class. . . . They say that they
will drive them out of the country; they will not . . . live side by side with them.”
From Mississippi, Capt. James H. Mathews, of the 66th USCI, serving as a Bureau
agent, contributed a letter that told how one soldier from his regiment had been
assaulted and run out of town during a visit to his home. The commanding officer
of the 113th USCI wrote from Arkansas that “if the troops should be withdrawn,
. . . civil government would be too weak to protect society, and terror and confusion
would be the result.” 65
For the most part, the statements of these and other witnesses divided sharply
along lines drawn during the war, with Unionists demanding further military occupation
and former secessionists denying the need for it. The division was the same
as the one the committee noted in the recent state elections, which “had resulted,
almost universally, in the defeat of candidates who had been true to the Union, and
in the election of notorious and unpardoned rebels, men who could not take the
prescribed oath of office and who made no secret of their hostility to the government
and the people of the United States.” The committee found that the conventions
summoned by provisional governors had made only the most superficial attempts
to reconstitute state government before calling elections. “Hardly is the war
closed,” the committee reported, “before the people of these insurrectionary States
come forward and haughtily claim, as a right, the privilege of participating at once
in that government which they had for four years been fighting to overthrow.” 66
While the committee heard testimony and wrote its report, Congress became
increasingly estranged from the president. In February, Johnson vetoed a bill that
would have extended the existence of the Freedmen’s Bureau for another year,
until early 1867. An effort to override that veto failed, but the president’s conduct
continued to alienate moderate Republicans, who made up the bulk of the
party’s membership in Congress. In April, they contributed to the majority necessary
to override Johnson’s veto of a civil rights bill that guaranteed freedpeople
64 Lee’s testimony is in Report of the Joint Committee, pt. 2, pp. 129–36; Stephens’, in pt. 3, pp.
158–66; Saxton’s, in pt. 2, pp. 216–31, and pt. 3, pp. 100–102; Thomas’, in pt. 4, pp. 140–44. House
and Senate votes on Stevens’ motion are in Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 6, 30.
65 Report of the Joint Committee, pt. 1, p. 121 (“If you”); pt. 2, pp. 175 (“to make it”), 176 (“feel
bitter”); pt. 3, pp. 146–47, 170 (“if the troops”).
66 Report of the Joint Committee, pp. x (quotation), xvi (“Hardly is”).