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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 10. The Tradition of Slavery - 3. The Land Problem
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226 An American Dilemma
mental resistance, is usually given in terms of the reluctance of the North
to intrude upon the rights and interests of property ownership. But the
North obviously did not hesitate to expropriate the slave property* and let
it loose on the region without any provision for its economic maintenance.
The owners must have felt this to be a grave injustice inflicted upon them,
and even Northerners must have reflected that this property was acquired
under the law and in a system of rights where it was exchangeable for other
property. The dominating North defended its action by asserting that
slave property was unjust, which is a pretty revolutionary doctrine from the
property point of view. Undoubtedly property in land stood in another
category to the Northerners. But the Union authorities occasionally dealt
rather harshly also with land property in the South during Reconstruction,
even if they did not often give it away to the Negroes.
A more important reason why there was no land reform was, in all
probability, consideration of a narrow financial sort. The Civil War had
left the Union with a great national debt. The North—which refused to
let the federal government assume the war debts of the Confederate states
and to pay for the expropriated slave property—did not feel inclined to
carry the fiscal costs for a land reform on the national budget.
Under these circumstances, the road to the national compromise of the
1870^8 was actually well paved from the beginning. Except for a Republican
party interest in the Negro vote and the general craving for revenge against
the Southern rebels, there seems not to have been much interest among
most Northerners in helping the Negroes.** This was particularly so since
the North now acquired a frame of mind where the puritan social idealism
of ante-bellum days, of which abolitionism had only been one of the
expressions, succumbed for decades to the acceptance of industrialization,
expansion, mechanical progress and considerable political corruption.
The white South was, as has been said, for the most part violently
against any constructive program framed to raise the Negro freedmen to
economic independence.^^ A liberal Southerner of the older generation with
great political experience, Josephus Daniels, tells this story:
When I was eighteen I recall asking an old Confederate, “What was so bad about
the promise to give every Negro head of a family forty acres and a mule? Wouldn’t
that have been better help than to turn the ignorant ex-slave without a dollar over
to the mercy of Republican politicians, white and black, who made political slaves
* Only the slave owners of the District of Columbia were compensated for the price of
their slaves. See William H. Williams, “The Negro in the District of Columbia During
Reconstruction.” Thi Howard Review (June, 1924), p. 102.
**
There were many exceptions, howeverj and the compromise was a gradual development.
Not only was there a small remnant of the Abolition movement, but even a man like James
G. Blaine made a vigorous plea in 1879 Negro be given full rights and oppor-
tunities. (Symposium; “Ought the Negro to be Disfranchised,” North American Review
[March, 1879].)
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