The elections of 1867-68 showed that the Negroes were well organized under the control of the radical Republican leaders and that their former masters had none of the influence over the blacks in political matters which had been feared by some Northern friends of the Negro and had been hoped for by such Southern leaders as Governor Patton and General Hampton.Before 1865 the discipline of slavery, the influence of the master's family, and of the Southern church had sufficed to control the blacks.But after emancipation they looked to the Federal soldiers and Union officials as the givers of freedom and the guardians of the future.
From the Union soldiers, especially the Negro troops, from the Northern teachers, the missionaries and the organizers of Negro churches, from the Northern officials and traveling politicians, the Negroes learned that their interests were not those of the whites.The attitude of the average white in the South often confirmed this growing estrangement.It was difficult even for the white leaders to explain the riots at Memphis and New Orleans.And those who sincerely wished well for the Negro and who desired to control him for the good of both races could not possibly assure him that he was fit for the suffrage.For even Patton and Hampton must tell him that they knew better than he and that he should follow their advice.
The appeal made to freedmen by the Northern leaders was in every way more forceful, because it bad behind it the prestige of victory in war and for the future it could promise anything.Until 1867, the principal agency in bringing about the separation of the races had been the Freedmen's Bureau which, with its authority, its courts, its rations, clothes, and its "forty acres and a mule," did effective work in breaking down the influence of the master.But to understand fully the almost absolute control exercised over the blacks in 1867-68 by alien adventurers, one must examine the workings of an oath-bound society known as the Union or Loyal League.It was this order, dominated by a few radical whites, which organized, disciplined, and controlled the ignorant Negro masses and paralyzed the influence of the conservative whites.
The Union League of America had its origin in Ohio in the fall of 1862, when the outlook for the Union cause was gloomy.The moderate policies of the Lincoln Administration had alienated those in favor of extreme measures; the Confederates had won military successes in the field; the Democrats had made some gains in the elections; the Copperheads* were actively opposed to the Washington Government; the Knights of the Golden Circle were organizing to resist the continuance of the war; and the Emancipation Proclamation had chilled the loyalty of many Union men, which was everywhere at a low ebb, especially in the Northern cities.It was to counteract these depressing influences that the Union League movement was begun among those who were associated in the work of the United States Sanitary Commission.Observing the threatening state of public opinion, members of this organization proposed that "loyalty be organized, consolidated and made effective."* See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W.Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America"), pp.156-7, 234-5.
The first organization was made by eleven men in Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1862.The Philadelphia Union League was organized a month later, and in January 1863, the New York Union League followed.The members were pledged to uncompromising and unconditional loyalty to the Union, to complete subordination of political views to this loyalty, and to the repudiation of any belief in state rights.The other large cities followed the example of Philadelphia and New York, and soon Leagues, connected in a loose federation, were formed all through the North.They were social as well as political in their character and assumed as their task the stimulation and direction of loyal Union opinion.
As the Union armies proceeded to occupy the South, the Union League sent its agents among the disaffected Southern people.Its agents cared for Negro refugees in the contraband camps and in the North.In such work the League cooperated with the various Freedmen's Aid Societies, the Department of Negro Affairs, and later with the Freedmen's Bureau.Part of the work of the League was to distribute campaign literature, and many of the radical pamphlets on reconstruction and the Negro problem bore the Union League imprint.The New York League sent out about seventy thousand copies of various publications, while the Philadelphia League far surpassed this record, circulating within eight years four million five hundred thousand copies of 144 different pamphlets.The literature consisted largely of accounts of "Southern outrages"taken from the reports of Bureau agents and similar sources.
With the close of the Civil War the League did not cease its active interest in things political.It was one of the first organizations to declare for Negro suffrage and the disfranchisement of Confederates; it held steadily to this declaration during the four years following the war; and it continued as a sort of bureau in the radical Republican party for the purpose of controlling the Negro vote in the South.Its representatives were found in the lobbies of Congress demanding extreme measures, endorsing the reconstruction policies of Congress, and condemning the course of the President.After the first year or two of reconstruction, the Leagues in the larger Northern cities began to grow away from the strictly political Union League of America and tended to become mere social clubs for members of the same political belief.
The eminently respectable Philadelphia and New York clubs had little in common with the leagues of the Southern and Border States except a general adherence to the radical program.
