Charleston Voice: BENJAMIN H. HILL: Patriot, Constitutionalist, Southerner… American

THE TRAGIC ERA

by Claude Bowers

Pgs 205-215

BENJAMIN H. HILL: Patriot, Constitutionalist, Southerner… American

With most of the negroes now enlisted in clubs, and drilled to believe their freedom depended on Republican or Radical rule, the organization of the party went on apace. Long before, under the sway of Parson Brownlow, this had been effected in Tennessee, where Johnson’s portrait in the House of Representatives had been removed to the Library, ‘among the curiosities,’ as a carpetbag paper phrased it.

In Alabama, where there had been much fraternization of the races and talk of breaking bread at the same table, a merger of the negro clubs and the Radical Party was arranged in Montgomery, where a joint committee from the Radical Convention and the clubs determined the personnel of the ticket.

The first Republican Convention in South Carolina, overwhelmingly black, had but fifteen white members, eight of whom were carpetbag adventurers, and here a demand was made for representation of the negroes on the national ticket, with an agent of the National Committee looking on as an unofficial observer.

In North Carolina the negroes, carpetbaggers, and scalawags had arranged in the spring for the conversion of the various organizations into a central machine. All the blacks were ordered to enroll in the Leagues or the ‘Heroes of America,’ and Holden emerged as leader with a battle cry that carried a threat of confiscation and death to ‘traitors.’ Henry Wilson and ‘Pig Iron’ Kelley were stumping the State, and, in the fall, the first party convention, wildly Radical and predominantly black, was held at Raleigh.

In Mississippi, the Radical Convention met at Jackson, with a third of the delegates negroes, and most of the others Bureau agents and carpetbaggers.

In Arkansas, the party organization was perfected under the rigid discipline of the resourceful and unscrupulous Powell Clayton, with the negroes subordinated to a handful of Northern adventurers, and with the scalawags relegated, too.’ This convention denounced the granting of the franchise to any one who had served in the Confederate army, and refused to pledge itself against the confiscation of property. Having arranged for the launching of a party organ at Little Rock and papers in each district, the convention adjourned to witness the enormous mass meeting arranged for the negroes in the State House grounds as a conciliatory gesture — ~or only three had sat in the convention.

In Texas the convention found former Governor E. M. Pease on the mourners’ bench, having repented his original hostility to immediate negro suffrage, and made his peace with Thad Stevens, and he was restored to favor, made chairman, and promised the place of Governor Throckmorton. The bargain was carried out. The negro organizations flooded military headquarters with false, bizarre charges against the Governor, and General Sheridan, acting on orders from Radicals in Washington, speedily decapitated Throckmorton, and Pease went in. With carpetbaggers, scalawags, Bureau agents, and negroes swarming the streets of Austin in a festival of fraternity, the party in Texas entered the arena with a bang.

In Louisiana, the Radicals had long been organized under the leadership of the able, eloquent, but saturnine Thomas J. Durant, with 57,300 negroes enrolled in ninety-four clubs, under the strictest discipline.7 General Longstreet had gone over to the Republicans, bag and baggage, on the theory that ‘we are a conquered people’ and ‘the terms of the conqueror’ were unescapable.

His letter was published with éclat by all the carpetbag papers of the South, and with his own people denouncing his desertion, he was soon importuning Lee for a blessing on his apostasy. ‘I cannot think that the course pursued by the dominant party is best,’ wrote Lee, from his retirement, where he was abstaining from political activity, ‘and therefore cannot say so, or give it my approval.’ I Denied Lee’s blessing, Longstreet consoled himself with the surveyorship of customs, and the new party, booted and spurred, was ready to mount and ride.

In Virginia there was much groaning of spirit under the lash of the intolerable Hunnicutt, and conservative Republicans were turning hopefully to the brilliant John Minor Botts, a former Whig, and the ‘New York Tribune’ was urging the negroes to follow him. The national leaders had been alarmed by the inflammatory speeches in a Hunnicutt convention in the spring, in which three fourths of the members were black. A year before, the party had been launched under Botts’s leadership with a demand for the disfranchisement of all Confederates, but it had refused to recommend unqualified negro suffrage, and Hunnicutt had swept ahead. When his incendiary convention aroused the wrath of conservatives, who called another convention, the Union League Clubs of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, fearing a disruption, hurried conciliators to Richmond to reconcile the factions. Thus fifty men sat down one day in the Governor’s Mansion, with henry Wilson representing the congressional end of the party, and John Jay, the Union League Clubs, and a compromise was proposed — a new convention at Richmond in the late summer. Botts hesitated. Richmond was the hotbed of radicalism, and Hunnicutt had no scruples, but Jay and Wilson insisted, and Botts reluctantly agreed.

The convention day arrived, the negroes on their toes, and with Hunnicutt’s men jammed against the door of the African Church four hours before it was opened. With the opening of the doors, Hunnicutt’s negroes rushed in and took possession, leaving Botts, his followers, and two thousand negroes outside.

Within was Hunnicutt, raving and ranting. The excluded moved to Capital Square to organize under the leadership of Botts. Very well — the two thousand negroes were on hand to elect a Hunnicutt man for chairman. Let Botts speak? ‘No,’ thundered the mob. Many were alarmed at the portent, the ‘Richmond Enquirer’ describing the scene as ‘a seditious Radical carnival,’ and many old-line Whigs passed sadly over to the Democrats, but Botts remained regular, a pitiful trailer to the Hunnicutt train.’

In Florida, the factions under Osborne, Saunders, and Stearns were disproving the theory that there is honor among thieves, but the party was in absolute control.

And in Georgia? There, with the negroes organized, the Republicans had found a leader in the most consummate of politicians, Joseph E. Brown, Confederate War Governor, whose spectacular rise from poverty and obscurity had made him a popular figure. That which his admirers called sagacity, his enemies denounced as trickery. Among the poor whites, he had an impressive following. Physically frail, his chest thin, his voice weak, his throat bad, the clearness of his enunciation and the smoothness of his tone gave him an eloquence having nothing to do with volume. Self-possessed, dignified, earnest, he inspired confidence and made friends strongly devoted to his fortunes. His extreme State Rights views during the war had made him a thorn in the side of Jefferson Davis, but he returned from his imprisonment in Washington completely metamorphosed, urging absolute surrender to the rabid policies of the conqueror.

Why continue the fight? he asked. The Jeffersonian idea of the State was dead; State Rights were buried beyond hope of resurrection. Soon he was responding to the toast ‘Reconstruction — Let it proceed under the Sherman Bill without appealing to the Supreme Court, the arbiter of our civil rights and not of political issues.’ Such complete apostasy caused a sensation. When Robert Toombs was told of Brown’s attitude, he denounced the story as a lie, and when verification reached him, took to his bed. Soon Brown was rivaling Thad Stevens in his denunciations of the Northern Democracy, and eliciting rapturous applause from the Republican National Convention of 1868. Horace Greeley was delighted. ‘Governor Brown deserves the thanks of all his neighbors,’ he wrote. ‘That this gentleman is by no means lacking in intelligence is proved by the fact that he has found out the Democrats and avows that he wants nothing more to do with them.’’ Thus the Republicans in Georgia, with the negroes thoroughly consolidated, entered the field, shouting for Joe Brown.

The action of Brown had this effect — it led Georgia first into the field aggressively against the reconstruction policy. Most of the Southern leaders, utterly depressed, were in retirement. Lee, eschewing politics, was spending the summer quietly at a Virginia watering place, and riding ‘Traveller’ over the surrounding bills. Lamar, teaching at Oxford, was in hopeless mood. Only the Southern press seemed articulate, and it was bitterly denouncing the Military Bill.

‘It consigns three fourths of tile Southern population to political Siberia,’ said the ‘New Orleans Crescent.’ ‘The people of the South, if wise and prudent, can live for a time under such damnable tyranny as this, but if they consent, they deserve it,’ said the ‘Louisville Journal.’ ‘There is no more American Union. It died with the Constitution which was the life of its body. Yancey is triumphant,’ said the ‘Mobile Advertiser and Register.’ ‘No nation has ever yet given itself up body and soul to vindictive legislation that it has not eventually been punished by God most terribly for its scarlet sins,’ said the ‘Richmond Times.’ ‘It is the funeral oration of the Republic,’ thought the ‘Richmond Examiner,’ of the Johnson veto.

And then, from Georgia, a voice reverberating over the South and throughout the North — the voice of Benjamin H. Hill. At Liberty Hall, Alexander H. Stephens sat in silent despair. Toombs was in exile. Howell Cobb was refusing the responsibility of advising, and Joe Brown was toasting the oppressors of his people and denouncing their supporters in the North. It was at this juncture that Ben Hill closeted himself with a copy of the Military Bill, after promising to address the people of Atlanta on July 10, 1867.

Through all the years of the ‘bloody shirt,’ Hill’s name was to be anathema to the ignorant and a byword and a hissing among the ‘patriots. His character and career deserve a better understanding, for he was an extraordinary man. Born of Irish-Welsh parentage, he had all the emotionalism that that implies. Held up to obloquy in the North as a disunionist, he had been a consistent champion of the Union in Legislature an(l Congress until the bugle called his people to the held.

Fighting for the Union to the end, when he lost his battle, he cast his lot with his own people, and in the Confederate Senate, its youngest member, he was the spokesman of the Administration. His was time last speech for the Union; the last speech for the continuance of the war: and with the close of the struggle, he had retired to his estate at LaGrange to await events. Not one of his slaves deserted; not one betrayed. Taken at length, he was soon paroled, and for two years he devoted himself to his personal affairs.

In 1867, he was forty-four, and in the full fruition of his power. It was at this time in the great Corinthian-columned house, in the midst of beautiful grounds reached by granite walks from a massive iron gate. that a youth. Henry W. Grady, visited, and came to love, the master of LaGrange for his genial playfulness and affectionate nature.’ He was a man of magnificent presence, six and a half feet in height and perfectly proportioned. His great head was covered with light brown hair, tine and straight, his complexion was clear, his forehead was high and broad, and his gray eyes dominated. Voorhees, who saw him about this time, was impressed by the ‘intensity of his pale strong face and his firm determined features.’ In speech marvelously persuasive, he could be immeasurably bitter when occasion called. The brilliant Vest of Missouri compared him to Vergniaud; the eloquent Voorhees thought some of his speeches ‘as sublime as the words that fell from the lips of Paul on Mars lull’; and John J. Ingalls was charmed by ‘his diction, his confident and imperturbable sell-control.’ He was a giant in mind, as in body.

VII

Such the Tribune of the South who rose in a crowded hall, tense with excitement, with bayonets all about him, with the spies of the tyrannical General John Pope present to report his words to the Radicals in Washington. One who heard him thought his ‘soul and intellect were both aflame,’ and knew he ‘lifted the people to their feet’ and became ‘a Great heart to whom the new pilgrim turned' - this man who ‘had set himself up to the task of revolutionizing revolution.’ The hall was but dimly lighted when Hill stepped forth in full-dress suit, his face pale, his eyes burning, and defiantly swept with his glance the army officers in full-dress uniform in the front rows.

'Tinkers may work, quacks may prescribe, and demagogues may deceive, but I declare to you that there is no remedy for us … but in adhering to the Constitution’; and thus he threw this treason to the front rows. With a contemptuous thrust at the apostasy of Brown, he lunged at Thad Stevens, and hurried on. ‘A great many Southerners,’ he said, ‘flippantly say the Constitution is dead. Then your rights and hopes for the future, and the hopes of your children are dead they say the Constitution does not apply to us? Then don't swear to support it. They say again that we are not in the Union — then why swear to support the Union of these States? What Union does that mean? When you took the oath, was it the Union of the Northern States alone that you swore to support?’

With a scornful look at the Bureau agents and carpetbaggers with the army officers, he went on. Oh, I pity the colored people who have never been taught what an oath is, or what the Constitution means. They are drawn up by a selfish conclave of traitors to inflict a death-blow on the Republic by swearing them into a falsehood. They are to begin their political life with perjury to accomplish treason they are neither legally nor immorally responsible it is you, educated, designing white men, who thus devote yourselves to the unholy work, who are the guilty parties. You prate about your loyalty. I look you in the eye and denounce you . . . morally and legally perjured traitors. . . . Ye hypocrites! Ye whited sepulchers! Ye mean in your hearts to deceive him, and buy up the negro vote for your own benefit.’

And then, to the Radicals: ‘Go on confiscating; arrest without warrant or probable cause; destroy habeas corpus; deny trial by jury; abrogate State Governments; defile your own race. . . On, on with your work of ruin, ye hell-born rioters in sacred things —but remember that for all these things the people will call you to judgment. Ah, what an issue you have made for yourselves. Succeed, and you destroy the Constitution; fail, and you have covered the land with mourning.

Succeed, and you bring ruin on yourselves and all the country; fail, and you bring infamy upon yourselves and all your followers. Succeed, and you are the perjured assassins of liberty; fail, and you are defeated, despised traitors forever. Ye aspire to be Radical Governors and judges.... I paint before you this day your destiny. You are but cowards and knaves, and the time will come when you will call upon the rocks and mountains to fall on you and the darkness to hide you from an outraged people.’

And then, to the negroes: ‘They tell you they are your friends —it is false. They tell you they set you free — it is false. These vile creatures never went with the army except to steal spoons, jewelry, and gold watches. They are too low to be brave. They are dirty spawn, cast out from decent society, who come down here to seek to use you to further their own base purposes. . . . Improve yourselves; learn to read and write; be industrious; lay up your means; acquire homes; live in peace with your neighbors; drive off as you would a serpent the miserable dirty adventurers who come among you. . . and seek to foment among you hatred of the decent portion of the white race.’

And what should the people do about registration and the Convention? Register, run up the registration, and do not vote on the Constitution, thus defeating the scheme, which fails unless fifty per cent of the registered, vote for a Convention.

As these bitter, burning words went sizzling over the South and fell like bombs in Northern cities, General Pope was writing Grant urging that the orator be banished from the State.

VIII

But they were not through with Hill. Having dynamitized the people with his oratory, he sat down to the writing of the Federalist of Southern rights, his brilliant, powerful ‘Notes on the Situation, ’ which Henry Grady was to pronounce ‘the profoundest and most eloquent political essays ever penned by an American.’ Beginning, artfully, in a minor strain, as one mourning over departed freedom, he argued that the Military Bill led to ‘the ultimate but complete change of all American government from the principle of consent to the rule of force’ and to ‘a war of races.’ Pouncing savagely on Stevens’ admission that the Constitution was ignored, he denounced the hypocrisy of giving the semblance of consent ‘by disfranchising intelligence, by military rule, by threats and. . . bribery.’

Yes, ‘the negro race, duped by emissaries and aided by deserters. . . is to give consent for the white race.’ More: all the guarantees of liberty wrung through the centuries from the hands of despotism ‘are abrogated and withdrawn from ten million people of all colors, sexes, and classes, who live in ten unheard and excluded States; and that, too, by men who do not live in these States. . . who never think of them but to hate.. never enter them but to insult.’ Do they say the South cannot help herself? Then, why bother about consent? But the South can fight with the Constitution in her hands. ‘Better to brook the courts’ delay for ten years than accept anarchy and slavery for a century.’ Danger of confiscation? Admitted. ‘Those who outlaw patriotism and intelligence would not scruple to rob.’ And yet bow absurd, proposing to confiscate the property of people when bread is sent them that they may live! ‘The same train brings the bread to feed, the officer to oppress, the emissary to breed strife and to rob.’

And the conquered, subject to the will of the conqueror? ‘None but a very barbarous people, Northern radicals and Southern renegades, ever said so. A conquered people are subject to the terms of the conquest, made known and demanded before, or at the time the conquest is admitted, and to no other terms or will whatever; and none but a treacherous conqueror would demand more.’

Every demand in the Military Bill originated after the war; ‘not one of them was demanded during the war or made a condition of surrender. There is not a respectable publicist or law-writer, ancient or modern, heathen or Christian, who can be quoted to sustain them.’

And universal negro suffrage? ‘Ignorance is more easily duped than intelligence, and... knaves have always been advocates of conferring power on fools; and so fools have generally thought knaves their best friends.’ Yes, they go like the fattened ox with pretty ribbons streaming from their horns, frisking to the slaughter.’ Do Radicals say they wish to elevate the black race? ‘These Radical traitors amid their Southern tools alone desire to degrade the white race.’

And the purpose? ‘To secure these ten States to keep the Radical Party in power in the approaching presidential election, . . . to retain by force and fraud the power they are losing in the detection of their treason in the North. Thus ‘they annul the Constitution in the name of loyalty; exterminate the black race in the name of philanthropy: disfranchise the white race in the name of equality; pull down all the defenses of life and prosperity in the name of liberty, amid with blasphemous hosannas to the Union, they are rushing all sections and all races into wild chaotic anarchy; and all, that traitors may hold the power they desecrate, and riot in the wreck of the prosperity they destroy.’

And how combat it? First through the President, and then through the courts. Yes, ‘sue in damages for every injury; indict for every crime,’ and ‘be sure and include the thieving Treasury agents who were lately stealing your cotton.’ No money for lawyers? ‘Whenever you see me at court, understand I will aid you without fee or reward, for ‘the written Constitution is my client, and the preservation of its protection the only fee I ask.’ Then, for three numbers followed an excoriation of Brown, with logic that bites like acid. And the concluding papers were appeals to Grant in whom the Military Bill then vested power. ‘There are many now who insist that General Grant is not really a great man,’ he wrote. ‘The question of his greatness will soon be settled.

If he has the wisdom to perceive, and the courage to perform his duty now, neither Caesar nor Wellington nor Washington can be remembered longer or honored more.’

In these remarkable papers, Hill reached the height of the controversial discussions of the ten-year period. There was art in the eloquence, erudition in the references, truth in the assert ions, power in the logic. But there was more significance in the militant note they sounded. The desponding raised themselves on their elbows to listen, and something of pride and the fighting spirit returned.

All over the South men were reading them with renewed hope and determination; in the Radical circles there was gnashing of teeth. ‘The Voice of the South uttering her protest,’ says Henry Grady; and it was discussed on the streets of London amid the Boulevards of Paris.’

Here was a man ready to give blow for blow, epithet for epithet. The stricken South was thrilled.’

The Tragic Era:

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