More than three hundred surviving Confederates attained positions of authority and influence in the U.S.
Quoting James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, pages 158–160
Today’s textbooks show African Americans striving to better themselves. But authors still soft‐pedal the key problem during Reconstruction, white violence. The figures are astounding. The victors of the Civil War executed but one Confederate officeholder, Henry Wirz, notorious commandant of Andersonville prison, while the losers murdered hundreds of officeholders and other Unionists, white and black.^65^
In Hinds County, Mississippi, alone, whites killed an average of one African American a day, many of them servicemen, during Confederate Reconstruction—the period from 1865 to 1867 when ex‐Confederates ran the governments of most Southern states. In Louisiana in the summer and fall of 1868, white Democrats killed 1,081 persons, mostly African Americans and white Republicans.^66^
In one judicial district in North Carolina, a Republican judge counted 700 beatings and 12 murders.^67^ Moreover, violence was only the most visible component of a broader pattern of white resistance to black progress.
As good as Loewen’s book is, he didn’t say nearly enough about Imperial America’s failure to exclude the surviving Confederates from positions of power, but I still have to give him credit for introducing me to this topic:
From 1868 to 1872, state courts and Congress both enforced Section 3. The North Carolina Supreme Court barred ex‐Confederates from serving as county sheriff and state solicitor; the Louisiana Supreme Court removed a state judge. The U.S. Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, a former congressman, wartime North Carolina governor and Confederate colonel. Congress passed a law authorizing federal prosecutors to go to court to remove oath‐breaking ex‐Confederates from public offices.
Most of this came to an end in 1872, when Congress passed the Amnesty Act. Acting on Section 3’s last line — “Congress may by a vote of two‐thirds of each House, remove such disability” — it lifted the ban on office‐holding for most ex‐Confederates. Some amnesty supporters argued that it would promote reunion and reconciliation.
It didn’t. Instead, White Southerners used fraud and violence against Black voters to win mid‐1870s elections in several states. Ex‐Confederates, elected as governors and legislators, were among those who presided over the end of Reconstruction, passed Jim Crow laws and suppressed Black Southerners’ right to vote.
Among the first ex‐Confederates elected to Congress, in 1873, was Alexander Stephens himself. The next year, he spoke out against a civil rights bill, claiming that Black Southerners did not want “social rights” — an argument that Robert Brown Elliott, a Black congressman from South Carolina, rebutted the next day. The bill become the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which promised equal access to inns, trains and theaters. Southern governors mostly ignored it until the Supreme Court struck it down in 1883.
One particular author, Stephen M. Hood (the descendant of a Confederate), put a more positive spin on this in his book Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War. While he offers some notable conclusions, I suspect that his friendly and easily forgiving stance towards these surviving Confederates is going to unsettle many (but it isn’t vastly different from how easily generic anticommunists overlook the deeply serious flaws in their upper‐class heroes like George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and others either). From the book’s description:
The long and bloody American Civil War claimed the lives of more than 700,000 men. When it ended, former opponents worked to rebuild their reunified nation and moved into the future together. Many people will find that hard to believe—especially in an era witnessing the destruction or removal of Confederate monuments and the desecration of Confederate cemeteries.
[…] Stephen M. Hood identifies more than three hundred former Confederate soldiers, sailors, and government officials who reintegrated into American society and attained positions of authority and influence in the federal government, the United States military, academia, science, commerce, and industry. Their contributions had a long‐lasting and positive influence on the country we have today.
Many of the facts in Patriots Twice will surprise modern Americans. For example, ten postwar presidents appointed former Confederates to serve the reunited nation as Supreme Court justices, secretaries of the U.S. Navy, attorneys general, and a secretary of the interior. Dozens of former Southern soldiers were named U.S. ambassadors and consuls, and eight were appointed generals who commanded U.S. Army troops during the Spanish‐American War.
Former Confederates were elected mayors of such unlikely cities as Los Angeles, CA, Minneapolis, MN, Ogden, UT, and Santa Fe, NM, and served as governors of the non‐Confederate states and territories of Colorado, West Virginia, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Alaska, and the Panama Canal Zone.
Ex‐Southern soldiers became presidents of national professional societies including the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society, to name only a few. Others paved the way in science and engineering by leading the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Geological Society of America. One former Confederate co‐founded the environmental and preservation advocacy group Sierra Club, and another intellectual and scholar was president of the Society for Classical Studies.
Former soldiers in gray founded or co‐founded many of our nation’s colleges and universities—some exclusively for women and newly freed African‐Americans. Other former Rebels served as presidents of prominent institutions, including the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at universities outside the South including Harvard, Yale, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Johns Hopkins, the University of San Francisco, and Amherst College. Several others served on the governing boards of the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
As somebody who studies fascism regularly, I could not help but be reminded of the Western Allies’ failure to effectively defascistize the states that they occupied.