Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

Conclusion 501
Americans on the path to citizenship. The military service that some two hundred
thousand of them rendered during the Civil War gave them and their descendants
an undeniable claim on that citizenship, as Lincoln recognized. “Any different policy
in regard to the colored man,” he continued, “deprives us of his help, and this
is more than we can bear.” With black troops positioned all across the occupied
South, from the outskirts of Richmond to the mouth of the Rio Grande:
We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving as soldiers,
seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one
of physical force. . . . Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and
the Union goes with it. Nor is it possible for any Administration to retain the
service of these people with the express or implied understanding that upon the
first convenient occasion, they are to be re-inslaved. It can not be; and it ought
not to be. 10
Yet within twelve months of Lincoln drafting that letter, a new administration
had set aside his judgment and begun to abet just such a process. This was
not merely the result of Andrew Johnson’s personal views; other matters occupied
the nation’s attention, as well. During the war, the national debt had soared past
$2.5 billion in the dollars of that day, about half of the gross national product.
In the third quarter of 1865, it increased by another $60 million. Restoring the
economy to a peacetime footing and beginning to pay off that debt seemed to be
the most pressing tasks at hand. In Johnson’s first annual message to Congress that
December, he praised “measures of retrenchment in each bureau and branch” of
the War Department that had brought expenditure down by 93 percent, from more
than $516 million the previous year to a projected total of less than $34 million.
These measures, including reduction of the cavalry force, “exhibit[ed] a diligent
economy worthy of commendation,” Johnson said. Meanwhile, Southern night riders
terrorized freedpeople and evaded Union infantry. 11
In the end, the federal government was unwilling to pay the price necessary
to sustain the social revolution that it had begun so hesitantly during the war. In
the summer of 1865, it took steps to dismantle the military structure that it had
painfully, although not always carefully, assembled. Among the first to go were
the mounted regiments, necessary to maintain order among the South’s disaffected
white population but expensive to maintain. In 1866, most of the remaining Civil
War volunteers turned over occupation duties to hastily recruited infantry regiments
of the Regular Army. The year after the last of the veterans mustered out, the
10 Roy P. Basler et al., eds., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1953–1956), 8: 1–2.
11 “Annual Message of the President,” 39th Cong., 1st sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1 (serial 1,244), p. 13;
New York Times, 3 October 1865. For public opinion on the national debt, see New York Times, 28
October 1865; Walter N. K. Nugent, The Money Question During Reconstruction (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1967), pp. 28–30; Robert T. Patterson, Federal Debt-Management Policies, 1865–1879
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), pp. 51–58; Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social
and Political History of American Finance, 1865–1879 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), p. 16.