Remembering Reconstruction
at Carolina

The University of North Carolina in
Peace, War, and Reconstruction

A lecture prepared for Remembering Reconstruction at Carolina
October 1-2, 2004

James Leloudis
Department of History
October 2, 2004
© 2004 James Leloudis

When Harry Watson contacted me last spring, he asked if I’d be willing to offer some reflections on Carolina’s 19th-century history, from the years preceding the Civil War through the tumultuous time of Reconstruction. That seemed easy enough. But then I began to wonder, what would I say? How would I summarize the story of that era? How would I distill it into simple historical lessons? The problem is that this university’s history is anything but simple. It has been bound up with some of the most important questions in American life—not the least of which are questions about the meaning of citizenship, freedom, and equality in a democratic society. That, then, is the history that I want to recount, contested and contentious, still full of significance for our own time.

We should begin, I think, by recognizing that on the eve of the Civil War North Carolina was less a democracy than an oligarchy. That meant that political and economic power rested in the hands of a network of wealthy slaveholding families rather than in those of the citizenry at large.

The principles of oligarchy were written into the state's constitution. The proportioning of seats in the state legislature favored the slaveholding east over the Piedmont and western mountains. Until the late 1850s, there were property restrictions on the right to vote in some elections, and through the time of the Civil War, similar restrictions applied to the right to hold high government office.

The same pattern also held at the county level, where the state constitution permitted voters to elect only two local officials—the sheriff and the clerk of court. The rest of county government was controlled by justices of the peace who were appointed by the governor and the legislature. And as you might suspect, those state officials tended to choose men who shared their social and economic views. From the county courthouse to the state capitol, the slaveholding gentry formed a tightly knit ruling class.

This University stood at the head of that hierarchical social system. Leaders of the antebellum University had no doubt about their mission: it was to make young men into masters, in all of the varied meanings of that word. Sons of a slaveholding elite ventured to Chapel Hill from every corner of the South. By the 1850s, nearly forty percent of the student body came from out-of-state, and with an enrollment approaching 500, this college ranked second only to Yale in size. As defenders of human inequality in an age of natural rights, the University’s patrons felt uneasy with the ideas of reform that were spreading throughout much of the western world. Parents sought for their sons an education that affirmed the fixity of human relations and instilled a habit of command. Young men came to Chapel Hill to confirm their place in society, not to discover a prescription for remaking their world.

That purpose was reflected in the routines of the classroom. Faculty at the antebellum University viewed knowledge as a body of established truths, rather than as methods of inquiry and investigation. The course of study was fixed, and recitation—that is, memory work—was the favored method of instruction. By the time of graduation, college men had stored away the poetry of Horace, the orations of Cicero and Demosthenes, and the epic tales of Homer and Virgil. They had learned to seek knowledge in authoritative texts before their own interrogation of the world. And most important of all, in a society in which power was exercised primarily by means of the spoken word—in the pulpit, at the bar, in the legislative hall—graduates of the University had acquired the ability, as one alumnus put it, to "speak and act as a man."

Such learning served the University and its alumni well during the years before the Civil War. By the late 1850s, Carolina could claim among its graduates a President and Vice-President of the United States, twenty governors, eight United States Senators, forty-one members of the House of Representatives, and innumerable local judges and state legislators. But the Civil War and emancipation changed everything.

When fighting began in 1861, Carolina’s president, David Lowry Swain, committed himself to keeping the institution open. He succeeded, for instance, in winning from the Confederate government a draft exemption for many of the school’s students. Even so, faculty and student ranks dwindled. The Union strategy was to throttle the Confederacy by blockading it major ports on the Atlantic coast, taking control of the vital Mississippi River, and then marching steadily northward to conquer the remaining inland territory. North Carolina was one of the last sections of the Confederacy to fall, and as a result, it bore a brutally disproportionate share of the war’s burden. Nearly one-fifth of the men drafted into the Confederate army came from this state alone.

In 1865, after the Confederate government’s evacuation of Richmond and Union victory over Joseph Johnston’s army at Bentonville, Sherman’s troops began a final march toward Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Both were spared the fate of other cities in the Union army’s path when President Swain and Carolina alumnus William Alexander Graham surrendered the state capitol and the university to Sherman.

President Swain and North Carolina’s old guard managed to cling to power during the years Presidential Reconstruction immediately after the Civil War. But in 1867, Republicans in Congress, angered by the continuing defiance of ex-Confederates, took matters into their own hands. With passage of the Military Reconstruction Acts in March of 1867, they set the stage for political upheaval in North Carolina. The acts called for continued military occupation of the South and instructed army commanders in the region to organize elections for constitutional conventions that would return the rebel states to the Union. A special provision in the act gave black men—who would not be granted general suffrage rights until passage of the 15th amendment—a one-time right to vote for convention delegates.

The seemingly impossible now became imaginable. A new state Republican party, organized in 1867, brought together former slaves and roughly one-fifth of the white electorate—the largest percentage of white voters in any southern state to cross the color line. Those white Republicans recognized a complementarity of interest with newly freed blacks. They had long resented the slaveholding elite’s hold on power, and by the war’s end, many had concluded that the battle was not theirs so much as it was a “rich man’s fight.” Their alliance with former slaves did not erase racial animosity, which had been deeply engrained by two hundred years of experience with racial slavery. But it did hold out for both groups the promise of an enlarged political voice and greater economic opportunity—those things that gave ‘freedom’ substance and meaning in day-to-day life.

When voters went to the polls in late 1867, the results were astounding. Republicans won 107 of 120 seats in the constitutional convention. Fifteen of those delegates were black. In January 1868, the convention met in Raleigh and drafted a document that reflected the aspirations of former slaves and their white allies. The new constitution gave all adult men the right to vote, regardless of skin color or previous condition of servitude. It also established a school system that, while it remained racially segregated, promised for the first time in the state’s history to educate all children, black and white alike. (How many of you in the audience attended public school in North Carolina? In a very direct sense, you owe your education to the constitutional convention of 1868 and to the desire for learning that fired the hearts of former slaves after the Civil War.) And last, but certainly not least, the new constitution revolutionized state and county government. It removed the property qualifications for state office-holding. And at the local level, it abolished the offices of the justices-of-the-peace and replaced them with elected, five-member boards of county commissioners who were responsible to voters rather than to political cronies in the legislature and the governor's mansion.

With a few deft strokes, political power in North Carolina had been radically restructured. Additional proof came in the election of April 1868. Republican candidates took more than two-thirds of the legislative seats in Raleigh. Twenty of those legislators were black, and at the local level, scores of black men became county commissioners, judges, and school committeemen. Republican William Woods Holden also won the governor’s office. Prior to the Civil War, Holden had been an outspoken advocate of secession, but as the fighting ground on and took a heavier and heavier toll on white yeoman families of the Piedmont and the western mountains, he switched sides. He had run for election as a peace candidate in 1864, and for a brief period during Presidential Reconstruction, he had served by presidential appointment as the state’s provisional governor.

The Constitution of 1868 brought change to the University as well. It stripped legislators of their authority to appoint the University’s trustees and gave that responsibility to the state Board of Education, which was controlled by the governor. This move was designed to wrest control of the campus from its ex-Confederate alumni and, in the words of Governor Holden, to broaden and democratize the University—to remake it, he declared, as a “people’s university,” open to all and no longer reserved “for the few.” The executive committee of the University’s new Board of Trustees declared their support for the coeducation of men and women and endorsed plans for establishing in Raleigh a college for the freedmen, which was to be operated as a branch of the University. “Education,” Governor Holden proclaimed, “knows no color or condition of mankind.” What might have come of such commitments remains an open question. The trustees’ educational experiment came under fierce attack as soon as it was announced, and within two years collapsed completely.

In June 1868, the trustees took the first step in reforming the University by dismissing President Swain and his faculty. From there, the story takes a tragic and ironic twist. Two months after being removed from office, Swain died from injuries he suffered when the horse pulling his buggy bolted and threw him to the ground. The horse had a been a gift from General Sherman, given to Swain to celebrate the marriage of Swain’s daughter to a Union brigadier general.

To replace Swain, the trustees chose Solomon Pool, an 1853 graduate and former adjunct professor of mathematics. Pool was from Elizabeth City, the son of a Methodist minister and a man of strong Republican sympathies. During the constitutional convention of 1868, he had denounced the University as an institution governed by “aristocracy and family influence.” “Better to close it,” he had exclaimed, than to leave it in the hands of ex-Confederates as “a nursery of treason.” Pool’s new faculty colleagues were also men of decided political views. For instance, Fisk Brewer, Professor of Greek, had graduated from Yale in 1852 and was the brother of U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer. At the end of the Civil War, he had come south to serve as the principal of a freedmen’s school in Raleigh. There and in Chapel Hill, he shocked local whites with his unequivocal endorsement of racial equality and by inviting blacks to dine at his home.

When Pool, Fisk, and their colleagues opened the university for classes in January 1869, they joined a larger battle over the shape of the South’s future and the very meaning of American democracy. They came under withering fire from their critics, not the least of whom was Cornelia Philips Spencer. Spencer was the daughter of UNC mathematics professor James Phillips and sister of Samuel F. Phillips, Solicitor General in the Grant administration and counsel for Homer Plessy. In the landmark 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, he argued against racial segregation. Cornelia and Samuel—sister and brother—revealed within the bounds of a single family the alternative paths available to the post-Confederate South and the very different choices that individuals could make.

Cornelia loosed her attack on Solomon Pool and the Republican university in a series of regular columns in the North Carolina Presbyterian and the Raleigh Daily Sentinel, an organ of the Democratic party. She frequently wrote under a pseudonym or without a by-line and used such blunt language that many readers assumed that her words had been penned by a man. She described Pool as an “arrogant prig” and renounced his faculty as a motley collection of “ex-negro teachers and scalawags.” In her view, Chapel Hill had been “given up to pigs and pigmies who try to fill the seats of the almighty,” referring in the last instance to Swain and his antebellum predecessors. Such charges were purely partisan. The new faculty were no less scholars than those of the old university. President Swain, for instance, had not held a college degree. He was an ex-governor, and his appointment in 1835 had been designed more to strengthen the University’s ties to the state’s political leadership than to enhance its academic reputation.

Pool and his allies shot back, reminding North Carolinians that “the old university [had been] under the control of oligarchs.” They promised that under its new administration, “[the University] would have a brilliant career.” But bad press was in many respects the least of their worries. The University was bankrupt. The funds that its trustees it had invested in state bonds during the Civil War were lost when the legislature repudiated North Carolina’s Confederate war debt. Repudiation was a powerful class issue. It angered men of wealth who had invested their fortunes in the Confederate war effort and now saw that wealth disappear. By the same token, it brought relief to middling white yeomen who had assurance that they would not be taxed to pay for a war that had already taken a heavy toll through the destruction of their farms and the lost lives of their loved ones. The legislature might have made up the University’s shortfall, but it refused to do so. Old-guard Democrats were determined to starve Pool and his faculty out of office, while many Republican lawmakers, whose agenda Pool shared, remained deeply suspicious of an institution that historically had never been their own.

Pool’s university also failed to attract sufficient numbers of students. The college’s Democratic alumni boycotted the institution, and only a handful of Republicans sent their sons to study in Chapel Hill. Many preferred the denominational colleges, which were more closely attached to local communities, and even more feared for their children’s safety. Chapel Hill stood near the center of a violent insurgency that was determined to unseat by force of arms and intimidation North Carolina’s biracial Republican government. That insurgency was led by the Ku Klux Klan, whose campaign of terror was focused here in the central Piedmont, where so many white voters had, in the Klan’s view, defected to the Republican cause and marked themselves as traitors to their race. By late 1869, Klansmen were riding openly through Chapel Hill, as one newspaper reported, “enquiring the whereabouts of the negroes and white radicals.”

Governor Holden launched a counter-attack against the Klan. In 1870, he declared martial law in several Piedmont counties, mobilized the state militia to hunt down the insurgents, and refused to release captured Klansmen, even on writs of habeas corpus. But when Holden requested federal assistance, he was refused by President Grant, now weary of the unyielding turmoil in the South. That abandonment gave conservative Democrats the opening they needed. In the August mid-term elections, they rallied to defeat the Republicans and to send a Democratic majority to the state legislature. That majority then promptly adopted articles of impeachment against Holden, tried him, and on March 22, 1871, removed him from office. It was the first successful impeachment of a governor in the history of the United States.

Democrats heralded Holden’s impeachment as an act of “redemption” that had saved the state from what one partisan would later characterize as the “unwise doctrine of universal equality.” The University was one of the chief casualties of that victory. In February 1871, with Holden’s impeachment underway, with no funds and few students, the trustees voted to suspend classes and close the institution’s doors. Pool and his faculty slowly moved away from Chapel Hill, and in the years that followed they were—and continue to be—actively forgotten in popular recollections of the University and Reconstruction. As memory of them faded—or, more to the point, as that memory was erased—so, too, was awareness that Reconstruction in Chapel Hill might have ended in any other way.

After its closing, the University’s fortunes tracked those of a resurgent Democratic party. In 1871, lawmakers approved an amendment to the state constitution that would take the power to appoint University trustees out of the hands of the State Board of Education, which was still controlled by Republican governor Tod Caldwell, and return it to the legislature. The amendment was ratified in a public election in 1873, and in 1874, lawmakers appointed a board of sixty-four new trustees, drawn primarily from the ranks of the Democratic leadership.

In 1875, Carolina’s new trustees re-opened the University according to a plan that—in its broad outlines—defined the institution that we know today. They divided the University into six colleges, each made up of several departments offering a variety of courses in history, literature, politics, modern languages, and the sciences. They replaced a fixed course of study with a new program of electives and new forms of instruction infused with what one observer described as the “critical spirit of modern science and . . . original investigation.” The trustees adopted this plan to keep pace with what they described as the late 19th century's "march of knowledge, invention, and discovery." Their new university was no longer a warehouse for eternal truths but, as they described it, "a great metropolis of thought whose ships would sail the oceans of life and explore unknown seas." Just as the world's seaports sustained the flow of commerce, the University would create a marketplace of ideas. By gathering, creating, and distributing knowledge it would become a great stimulus to industrial advancement and economic development—it would become a powerful dynamo of change.

This New University was charged with creating a decidedly New South and integrating the region back into the life of the nation. But that New South bore many of the hallmarks of the old—particularly in the ways that it was built upon racial and class inequality. During the 1890s, the architects of this new order were, like their fathers before them, confronted with the challenge of a biracial political alliance. In this instance, it was white Populists and black Republicans brought together in a fragile partnership—they called it Fusion—by shared suffering in the system of sharecropping and tenantry that had taken hold of the countryside. The Fusionists gained control of the legislature in 1894, and in 1896 won the governor’s office as well. Only in North Carolina did such an alliance seize the reins of both the legislative and executive branches of government. As in Reconstruction, if biracial politics stood a chance in the South, its best chance was here in North Carolina. (We have heard the suggestion several times today that the actions of Cornelia Phillips Spencer and others can be explained by the fact that “everyone was racist” in the late 19th century. As the stories of biracial politics during Reconstruction and Fusion make clear, that was not the case. It is perhaps the white supremacists’ greatest victory that one hundred years later, we still assume that their ideas about race were universally held among white North Carolinians.)

Again, the challenge was met with intimidation and a violent campaign for white supremacy. Two of the New University’s graduates—Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and Charles Brantley Aycock, elected governor in 1900—were key actors in that effort. They championed an amendment to the state constitution, ratified in 1900, that stripped one of the fundamental rights of citizenship—the right to vote—from black men, and in doing so, constrained the lives of black and white citizens alike. There would be no biracial politics once half of any potential alliance could no longer cast a ballot.

Disfranchisement marked the final victory in a counter-revolution that had begun as soon as the Civil War ended, and for the first half of the 20th century, it saddled North Carolina with one-party government. One-party government in which there were few outlets for dissent, for debate over the course of the state's future. One-party government in which the meanings of democracy and citizenship as the Republicans of the 1870s had imagined them, or as you and I would understand them today, were hardly recognizable. One-party government in which there were limited options for challenging the ills that came to define the South as a region apart: poverty, low wages, racial violence and injustice, illiteracy, and ill health. For those who dared to see, this era of white supremacy offered living evidence of the truthfulness of an old adage: no people are fully free in a society in which some remain unfree.

That is the legacy with which the University wrestled for much of the 20th century. At times, it distinguished itself as a citadel of free inquiry and a champion of justice—no more so than in the work of sociologists Howard Odum, Arthur Raper, and Guy Johnson; playwright Paul Green; and university president Frank Porter Graham. They and others here spoke forthrightly about the evils of sharecropping, lynching, chain gangs, and the segregated regime of Jim Crow. They challenged fellow whites to what Howard Odum called “a frank, honest . . . stock-taking of ourselves.” At other times, though, the University could be slow to change, preferring the comfortable indeterminacy of gradualism over more active advocacy. During the Civil Rights movement, Paul Green observed with considerable frustration that Carolina was like a great lighthouse: its beacon illuminated the territory all around, but its own foundation stood shrouded in darkness.

This is our history—good and ignoble, contested and fraught with contradiction. It is a history that demands that we be clear-eyed and unflinching in our moral judgment. It also warns against self-satisfaction in the exercise of that judgment, lest we lose sight what is most valuable in these tales of the past: that is, their power to illuminate our own propensity for sin. This is a history that calls us to self-examination. It is a history with which we must come to terms, for only by doing so can we free ourselves to make our own history in our own way.