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By Root 1495 0

years by a coterie of black leaders, many of whom would subsequently play a significant role in the political life of their respective states. Revealing at times a fine grasp of political strategy, they viewed the various proposals regarding amnesty for former Confederates as inseparable from their own claims to be admitted to all political privileges. That is, white men who had committed treason (as defined by the Constitution) by waging war against the United States could obviously not be trusted again with political power, unless they shared that power with blacks who had proven their loyalty to republican principles and to the sanctity of the Union. Nor could such power be safely reposed in the exclusive hands of southern Unionists, as President Lincoln envisioned, for their love of the Union reflected a desire to return to the past and their forced acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation indicated no real concern for the condition or future of the ex-slave.44

Whatever might be done with the “political criminals” who had led the South out of the Union, the New Orleans Tribune, voicing the usually more radical position of the city’s mulatto community, insisted that any magnanimity be within well-defined limits and acknowledge the need for a different organization of southern society.

We are not enemies of amnesty, and we do not ask to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that have Union and freedom. We are strong and generous enough to disdain retaliation, and let the assassins of Fort Pillow expiate their crime by a long and miserable existence. Although wronged to the last and deprived of our best blood by this unholy rebellion, we do not ask for the lives of the bloodthirsty foes. An amnesty sparing the lives of the culprits will be something magnanimous, and worthy of our great and generous Republic. But at the same time that we spare the lives of our vanquished foes, let their property be forfeited.

Considering the punishments usually meted out to a people defeated in war, the editor’s amnesty proposal seemed eminently fair. Rather than execute or imprison the men who had betrayed the country, he suggested only that the wealthy among them be reduced to poverty—that is, to a condition already shared by millions of people who had stood by their government and had fought and sacrificed their lives to preserve it. If many whites who knew little of labor were thereby forced to work, that would also be a most constructive form of rehabilitation.

Let them go to work; let them handle the spade or the hoe, for their own benefit, as free laborers—we mean really free;—give them a chance for retrieving their fallen fortune. To work is holy, honorable and noble. Let them have a taste of it.… It is enough for the republic to spare the life of the rebels,—without restoring to them their plantations and palaces. The whole world will applaud the wisdom of the principle: amnesty for the persons, no amnesty for the property.45

Although large numbers of blacks—both the politically articulate and the masses—might have sympathized with such “radicar” notions of amnesty and reconstruction, few black spokesmen publicly embraced a position they deemed politically untenable. In subsequent years, in fact, black leadership, although united in the determination to preserve the gains of Reconstruction, sharply divided over the wisdom of removing disfranchisement from ex-Confederate leaders. To permit them to return to active political participation seemed like the best way to win their approval of the work of black reconstructionists. But the democratic propensities of black leaders in this respect would also prove to be their undoing. The New Orleans Tribune clearly anticipated as much more than two years before the advent of Radical Reconstruction. Neither the Civil War nor emancipation, that newspaper argued, had really altered the mentality of the old slaveholding class, nor should blacks expect any genuine conversion to racial egalitarianism and democratic principles.