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I'm trying to find a map of the land Sherman set aside in Special Field Order No. 15. I wanted to be able to make a transparency to show students what we are talking about before we delve deeper into what took place. I have no problem getting the text of the order, but even my school librarians had difficulty with this.
I have not found a map of it either, but that may be partly because the field order itself was ambiguous about the area as well as about what exactly it authorized.
General William Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 from his temporary headquarters in Savannah on January 16, 1865. It defined an area along the coast north and south of where he had encamped his army: “The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea and the country bordering the St. John River, Florida.” A broad interpretation of this would take it to include a continuous 30-mile-wide swath of land extending along the coast south from Charleston, South Carolina, as far as Jacksonville, Florida, and including all the Sea Islands. I have cropped a section of an 1854 map from Wells’ McNally’s System of Geography and tinted this area light red.
This is the region of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that is known as the “low country.” You can show your students why it is called that by looking at the satellite version of the Google map for the region, which shows that it is a deep shade of green.
It is flat and almost entirely just above sea level. It was an area where large rice plantations flourished. Growing rice was an extremely labor intensive occupation and the plantation owners owned many slaves. The slave population of the area therefore far exceeded the white population, which, of course, constituted the landholders.
From the North’s point of view, it was not only the epicenter of the most egregious form of the unjust slave system, wherein a large number of black slaves labored entirely for the profit of white slave owners, but it was also (not coincidentally) the epicenter of the secession movement that precipitated the beginning of the war at Fort Sumter.
The purpose of Sherman’s order was to set aside a large area within which freed blacks could be settled. The area came to be popularly known as the “Sherman Reservation.”
Sherman had defined a general area, but his wording was somewhat ambiguous. He clearly set aside all the Sea Islands, but within the coastal swath of land, he appears to have been aiming to confiscate—and make available for settlement—only the plantations along the rivers and other “abandoned” lands. Nevertheless, Congress had earlier decided that all land and property of men who were fighting for the Confederacy (or even the property of others who had supported or conducted business with Confederate forces or authorities) had been technically “abandoned,” even if their families were still on the land, making it eligible for confiscation by the Federal government. This would have vastly expanded the land reckoned to be available for settling freed blacks, even if Sherman’s order was originally interpreted to apply only to the islands and the land along the rivers (rather than the entire 30-mile-wide swath of land).
Sherman wrote a letter to President Andrew Johnson on February 2, 1866, explaining the origin of his field order. It was published in The New York Times the following day and was undoubtedly meant for public consumption:
The Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War, came to Savannah soon after its occupation by the forces under my command, and conferred freely with me as to the best methods to provide for the vast number of negroes who had followed the army from the interior of Georgia, as also for those who had already congregated on the islands near Hilton Head, and were still coming into our lines. We agreed perfectly that the young and able-bodied men should be enlisted as soldiers, or employed by the Quartermaster in the necessary work of unloading ships, and for other army purposes. But this left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children, who had necessarily to be fed by the United States. Mr. Stanton summoned a large number of the old negroes mostly preachers with whom he had long conference, of which he took down notes. After the conference he was satisfied the negroes could, with some little aid from the United States, by means of the abandoned plantations on the Sea Islands and along the navigable waters take care of themselves. He requested me to draw up a plan that would be uniform and practicable. I made the rough draft and we went over it very carefully. Mr. Stanton making many changes, and the present Orders No. 15 resulted and were made public.
I know of course we could not convey title to land and merely provided “possessory” titles to be good so long as war and military power lasted. I merely aimed to make provision for the negroes who were absolutely dependent on us, leaving the value of their possessions to be determined by after events or legislation.
At that time, January, 1865, it will be remembered that the tone of the people of the South was very defiant, and no one could foretell when the period of war would cease. Therefore I did not contemplate that event as being so near at hand.
President Johnson was about to begin pardoning ex-Confederates and restoring the property the Federal government had confiscated from them, provided that they took an oath of allegiance to the U.S. The whites who had original title to land in “Sherman’s Reservation” petitioned the President to recognize their titles and give them back full possession. Sherman’s letter emphasized that he had had no authority to give full title to the land covered in his field order, but only a temporary or “possessory” title to it, under his wartime military authority, and he implied that he would not have issued the order if he had known that the war was about to end.
Sherman’s explanation provided justification for Johnson’s order to the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had been liberally setting up black settlements in the area, with each family receiving “forty acres and a (leased army) mule.” Much to the dismay of the Freedmen’s Bureau, of the military officer General Rufus Saxton who Sherman had put in place to implement his order—and of course to the African Americans who had been resettled into the area—Johnson ordered the restoration of the land to the original owners.
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, had traveled to Savannah to meet with Sherman at the time the General had issued his order, and appears to have approved it orally, but not formally, in the sense that he did nothing to countermand it. Stanton’s biographer, Frank Abial Flower, wrote, of the order:
Stanton, on reading it, said to Sherman: “It seems to me, General, that this is contrary to law.” Sherman’s response was: “There is no law here except mine, Mr. Secretary.” Stanton smiled and the order was issued a day or two after he left for the North. General Saxton says Stanton was opposed to the order, but acquiesced in its promulgation in deference to the positive wishes of General Sherman.
On the face of it, Stanton's implied reluctance seems unlikely, because, as Sherman explained, the plan had suggested itself to Stanton and Sherman after they met in Savannah with a group of African American clergy who had asked for relief from the government for the many thousands of ex-slaves who were then in the area, either because they had originally resided there or because they had followed Sherman’s army across the South.
When the notion of establishing them on abandoned or confiscated lands came up for discussion, almost all of these clergy urged that military forces be used to settle them in areas in which all whites would be prohibited from entering, as a way to protect the settlements from white encroachments. Militarily, this could be most efficiently accomplished by designating the Sea Islands and the low lands along the rivers as the places to settle.
Some of the most radical members of Congress were delighted by this. Indeed, several had expressed their desire as the war ended to hang everyone who had been in the Confederate armies, to confiscate all their property, including their land, and to redistribute it all permanently to ex-slaves, recreating the South as a kind of African American preserve from which Southern whites would be barred—a plan that today would be called “ethnic cleansing.”
After the war ended, the contentious results of Sherman’s field order arose as the Federal government sorted out how it would deal permanently with what Sherman had instituted primarily as a military expedient—to free his forces from the burden of caring for refugees as he moved his armies north into the Carolinas. Historian Jacqueline Jones, in Saving Savannah, summed up Sherman’s original goal:
Ultimately, then, Special Field Order No. 15 grew out of the refugee problem, which, in the words of one Union officer, “left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children,” too many hungry mouths to feed in the city of Savannah. … The order made explicit the connection between military service for men and homesteads for their families, and it provided not for fee-simple titles, outright ownership of the land, but rather possessory titles that remained contingent on future political developments. The order itself remained “subject to the approval of the President.” What came to be called the Sherman Reservation, then, was a means of draining Savannah of women, children, and the elderly while providing for enforced service among young men. This initial goal foreshadowed the order’s troubled future.
Down to our own time, the confused and conflicted intentions and authorities that informed the issuance of Field Order No. 15 and its later implementation and revocation, have been the focus of the claim of precedent for government reparations to ex-slaves and then to their descendants.
Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glumph, Julie Saville, et al, The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, Volume 3 of Freedom: a Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Walter L. Fleming, “Forty Acres and a Mule,” North American Review (May 1906): 721-737.
Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
Barton Myers, "Sherman's Field Order No. 15," The New Georgia Encyclopedia, 2005.
Text of Special Field Order No. 15, at the Freedmen & Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland.
William T. Sherman, “Sherman’s Famous Field Order,” New York Times, February 3, 1866.
Frank Abial Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of Rebellion, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Akron: Saalfield Publishing Company, 1904, p. 298.
Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008, p. 222.
J. Wells, “Georgia, Alabama, and Florida,” from Wells’ McNally’s System of Geography. New York: McNally, 1854.
On this electronic field trip, students get the chance to see up close historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Students will also have entry to the entire Independence National Historical Park with 21 historical sites available for fascinating tours.
Why did John Wilkes Booth assassinate Abraham Lincoln? What kind of gun did he use?
On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth became the first person to assassinate an American president when he shot and killed Abraham Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater in Washington. Using a .44 caliber derringer pistol—a small, easily concealed handgun—Booth fired a single shot (timed so that that the audience’s laughter would mask the report) into Lincoln’s brain at point-blank range before jumping to the stage and escaping into the night. After a two-week manhunt, Federal troops cornered Booth in a barn in Maryland, where a Union soldier shot him in the neck. Booth died two hours later.
A member of a famous acting family (many considered Booth’s father, Junius Brutus Booth, the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation, and Booth’s older brother, Edwin is commonly named among the greatest American actors of all time), John Wilkes Booth enjoyed a phenomenally successful stage career during the Civil War: by 1864, he earned $20,000 a year, at a time when the average Northern family earned around $300 annually. A Marylander by birth, Booth was an open Confederate sympathizer during the war. A supporter of slavery, Booth believed that Lincoln was determined to overthrow the Constitution and to destroy his beloved South.
After Lincoln’s reelection in November 1864, Booth devised a plan to kidnap the president and spirit him to Richmond, where he could be ransomed for some of the Confederate prisoners languishing in northern jails. Booth enlisted a group of friends from Washington to aid him in his attempt. That winter, Booth and his conspirators plotted a pair of elaborate plans to kidnap the president; the first involved capturing Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theater and lowering the president to the stage with ropes. Booth ultimately gave up acting to focus on these schemes, and spent more than $10,000 to buy supplies to outfit his band of kidnappers. Neither of the kidnapping plans bore fruit—the second, a ploy on March 17 to capture Lincoln as he traveled in his carriage collapsed when the president changed his itinerary—and several of Booth’s conspirators ultimately left the group.
On the evening of April 11, the president stood on the White House balcony and delivered a speech to a small group gathered on the lawn. Two days earlier, Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, and after four long years of struggle it had become clear that the Union cause would emerge from the war victorious. Lincoln’s speech that evening outlined some of his ideas about reconstructing the nation and bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union. Lincoln also indicated a wish to extend the franchise to some African-Americans—at the very least, those who had fought in the Union ranks during the war—and expressed a desire that the southern states would extend the vote to literate blacks, as well. Booth stood in the audience for the speech, and this notion seems to have amplified his rage at Lincoln. “That means nigger citizenship,” he told Lewis Powell, one of his band of conspirators. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Three days later Booth made good on his promise. Upon learning that Lincoln and his wife intended to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater with commanding general Ulysses S. Grant, Booth used his actor’s connections there to gain access to the president’s box. Finally rejecting the notion of kidnapping, Booth now planned to assassinate the president along with top officials his administration: besides Lincoln and General Grant, Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson were to be killed the same night by other members of Booth’s gang. Booth appears to have plotted the murders in the belief that the simultaneous assassination of four top officials would throw the North and the Republican Party into chaos long enough for the Confederacy to reassemble itself.
The other parts of Booth’s plan did not come to fruition. General Grant declined the invitation to see the play; Union officer Henry Rathbone took his place. While Booth waited for his opportunity to assassinate the president at Ford’s Theater, two of his co-conspirators journeyed to their assigned targets. Lewis Powell gained entry to Secretary of State’s home, where a bedridden Seward lay recuperating from a carriage accident; Powell stabbed him several times, but none of the blows was mortal. At the same time, another conspirator, George Azterodt, made his way to the hotel where Vice President Johnson was lodging. Armed with a gun and a knife, Azterodt detoured to the hotel saloon, where he got drunk and lost his nerve. He left the bar without confronting Johnson and discarded his knife in the streets of Washington.
Only one of the four intended victims of Booth’s plot was killed, but Lincoln was by far the biggest prize. With Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency, and the nation lost the one man that most contemporaries, and most American historians, believed best qualified to “bind up the nation’s wounds” after four brutal years of war.
Roger J. Norton, Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination, 2010.
The Abraham Lincoln Association, 2010.
Abraham Lincoln Papers at the library of Congress.
Michael W. Kauffman. American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies. New York: Random House, 2004.
Lincoln Archives Digital Project
John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper, eds. Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler and William A. Link. The South in the History of the Nation, vol. II: From Reconstruction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Throughout the Ages was created to meet the primary source needs of New York state K-6 history teachers. The site collection includes more than 500 photographs, letters, paintings, advertisements, and maps.
To navigate the site, choose an area of interest and subtopic (for example "leisure" under the heading "community"), and scroll to a source of interest. The source will offer a caption. In some cases, historical context, focus questions, and the correlating New York state standards will also be listed. Be sure to click on each of these section titles, as items such as resources and historical background only display once selected.
One feature to look into is the automatic handout maker. For each image, you can automatically generate a handout by selecting any or all of the following categories: caption, historical background, standards/key ideas, historical challenge, interdisciplinary connections, and resources. For some images, these will already be filled out. For others, you can type anything you want for all, some, or one of those categories. Don't worry about deleting existing text if you don't want it on your handout. It will be back the next time you load your page.
This is the third in a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features. Look for one each month!
When historians of American government and society recall the past decade or two, they are likely to feature economic recession and state intervention, new information and networking technologies, gay rights, the "war on terror," and national elections. Environmental historians may add global climate change to the list, but even more certainly they will add a string of disasters that can only be called "natural" with an asterisk, like the batting record of a juiced ballplayer.
Floods, epidemics, hurricanes, wildfires, mud slides and cave-ins, even famine, invasive species, and toxic releases are hardly new. They are among the normal, albeit irregular and abrupt disruptions that have come and gone since the big bang. The ingredients of recent disasters remain natural, but the consequences have grown ever more colossal with human intervention. With "progress," sources of inconvenience and insecurity in everyday life are corralled and concentrated someplace else. Still, they seem ever in wait on the periphery of sight. States of emergency have become regional rather than local or personal, wholesale rather than retail events. For most people, especially the affluent, experience with disasters is less frequent but also more overwhelming.
The explosion and well breach that began April 20, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico—the BP/Deepwater Horizon spill—is but the latest, headline-grabbing instance. The public seems at least as eager as the perpetrators to get it out of the news. Disaster fatigue is now ubiquitous in America: "Someone, quickly make everything right again (or close enough to it), so we can put it behind us." Public concern has proven hard to sustain for survivors of Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake in Haiti and hard to stir for new, even larger cataclysms, such as for Pakistan after the July 2010 monsoon.
The fact is, certain kinds of disasters, including giant "accidental" spills of nasty stuff ("hazmat incidents," in emergency management lingo), have long been routine. The Oil Spill Intelligence Report, which has been logging major releases since 1978, has counted an average of about 240 per year. In other words, they are predictable, even if avoidable, near daily events. And that is counting only the well-documented, dramatic (over ten thousand-gallon) cases. A full sixth of those spills have been larger than the U.S. standard: the one that is the subject of Black Wave. That spill began soon after midnight, March 24, 1989, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran hard aground in Prince William Sound, near bucolic Cordova, Alaska.
Ever since, reporters have used the size of that one spill (disputed but usually estimated at 11 million gallons) as the measure of all others. Like Watergate in politics, it set the standard for failure in environmental stewardship. For example, observers devoted extraordinary resources to determine whether BP/Deepwater Horizon in 2010 was spilling as much as Exxon in 1989, first in total and then per week, then per day. Now that the latest bp spill (like dozens before it) has proven radically larger than the Exxon Valdez, Americans might wonder if the benchmark will change. I bet not, and by design and example the documentary Black Wave provides a convincing explanation.
The strongest element of the film's persuasion is its exquisite before-spill setting: the breathtaking landscape and seascape, purple mountain's majesty, soaring eagles, grazing moose, and gull-trimmed trawlers. The local men and women look like they were ordered out of an L. L. Bean catalog, less the African or Asian minority. They are hardworking, sensible, clean-living, with a keen eye on the horizon, strong but also soft-spoken and grateful for their majestic, bountiful surroundings. Just about everyone seems inherently attuned to nature, community, and nuclear "family values."
And then, one day, out of the blue for all but a prophetic few (fisherman, of course), disaster strikes. A giant, unfeeling, greedy corporation takes a supertanker-sized [dump] on paradise.
You do not have to know much history or science to be outraged. The jaw-dropping before-and-after imagery of Black Wave makes the "legacy of the Exxon Valdez" (the subtitle of the film) undeniably grim. The spill was horrid—huge, ugly, stinky, sticky, deadly, and, it is essential to add, persistent. Clean-up workers are still suffering and dying. The fish and the fleet that marketed them have not and will probably never fully recover.
The chief legacy of the Exxon Valdez may be as a standard of environmental loss, but it can also be remembered for the human failings that caused and followed it. As the documentary well shows, the damage was and remains very much man-made. There was negligence and intrigue, broken promises (or something close enough to it), abuses of power, and cruelty on the part of government regulators, courts, legislators, and most of all the Exxon Corporation. In their wake lie not only the corpses of tens of thousands of wildlife, but also illness, stress, depression, bankruptcy, divorce, substance abuse, and suicide among the local population. The people whom Exxon put out of work and then on temporary payroll to clean up their mess are still suffering and dying from the spill's effects.
A layer of gooey sludge still taints sediments, while Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) invests hundreds of millions of dollars to limit its liability. Eighteen years passed before Exxon paid a dime of the $5 billion it owed Alaskan and native plaintiffs in punitive damages. The corporation only started paying after successfully reducing the award—thanks to the Supreme Court, with the encouragement of Gov. Sarah Palin—by 99 percent. In a couple of days Exxon Mobil profits covered the loss.
One of the film's most stirring scenes features . . . reporters challenging classaction victims of the spill, just outside the court. One journalist asks, in effect, why are you still whining, what with so much recovery effort, time, and money spent since 1989? A perfect retort comes from a knowledgeable, disciplined, and persistent defender of the environment, Dr. Fredericka "Riki" Ott, Cordova's Erin Brockovich, Lois Gibbs, and Karen Silkwood rolled into one. (Ott is also the author of Sound Truth and Corporate Myth$: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill [2005] and Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill [2008].) With barely contained rage, Ott brandishes a jar, like ones that viewers just saw filled on Alaskan shores. It contains a sample of Exxon crude freshly dug from a vast stratum beneath shorelines that were declared "cleaned" a couple of decades ago. The effects of the spill can only be diminished from points of view that seem dumb, superficial, or warped by corporate and government propaganda.
Given this unapologetically one-sided story, there are plenty of points to contest. For example, the filmmakers themselves provide evidence that victims put words in the perpetrators' mouths. Several of the film's featured claims about conventional wisdom in spillrelated science and medicine would not pass peer review. There are significant gaps, for example, between Ott's assertions about toxins and those vetted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even as a few details are arguably wrong or overstated, they are also short of being crucial to the bottom line.
Two points, though, amount to more than a quibble. The first is the film's treatment of the suicide of Cordova's former mayor Bob Van Brocklin. With a staged serial reading of his suicide note, the film treats him like a martyr to the cause, glorifying an act of self-destruction that may be better considered sad and futile. In a classroom, for sure, the morality and efficacy of suicide or so honoring it deserves careful discussion.
A second point worth discussing is the point of view that the film normalizes. At times, it seems smug, beginning with the assertion that its subject, the Exxon Valdez, was "the worst environmental disaster in North American history." That is more than exaggeration. Limiting attention to oil spills, and discounting the ones North Americans perpetrated overseas, there are at least three that were vastly worse: the Lakeview Gusher of 1910 (278 million gallons in California), the well Ixtoc I in 1979 (140 million gallons in the Gulf of Mexico), and the tanker Odyssey in 1988 (43 million gallons off Nova Scotia).
But these contenders are tougher to frame within the mythology of all-American populism, albeit fostered by a Canadian film crew. Black Wave pumps up the outrage by presuming a chasm between the world that the Exxon Valdez made and the one to which presumptively normal Americans—versus, say, Mexicans (Ixtoc) or Canadians (Odyssey) or for that matter people in Los Angeles—are entitled. Fishermen presumably have a "natural right" to their way of life, to acquire their own boats, and to get a fair return on investments. Everyone, we are told, who works hard should be able to maintain a six-digit salary and purchase a home with a good view, albeit on land stolen from Indians. Government, we are told, should not be cozy with business. . . unless it is mine.
This populist perspective on neglect and desperation of post-spill Cordova is hard to square not only with its own logic but also with some facts, including the infamous flow of federal dollars to Alaska from the lower forty-eight. On average Cordova still has lower unemployment, more home ownership, and higher annual income than the United States as a whole, and a fair share of that success comes from resource exploitation, integrated markets, and the very pipeline that brought the oil to the Valdez in the first place. In the light of recent history (see, for example, Paul Greenberg's Four Fish [2010]), it is hard to think of harvesting wild salmon as more sustainable or ethical than mining oil.
To balance the film, it may be wise to consult supplementary material. There is, for example, a fine list, "Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Resources for Teachers and Students" (March 2009), as well as a huge, free collection of primary and secondary sources online from the Alaska Resources Library and Information Services as well as a broader-gauged collection edited by James K. Mitchell, The Long Road to Recovery (1996). If the perspective must remain narrow, consider privileging native peoples, whose relationship to the Alaskan environment has had more to do with subsistence and stewardship than entitlement to the American dream. Supplementing the film with such sources and points of view may be the best use of the legacy that the Exxon Valdez sadly began and the lessons that its survivors and Black Wave profess.
This review was first published in the Journal of American History, Vol. 97, No. 3, 911-914, 2010. Reprinted with permission from the Organization of American Historians (OAH).
Visit the Black Wave website here.
When was the number of Supreme Court Justices expanded to nine, and what was the reason? Why wasn't there a large public uproar like the one FDR experienced?
On April 10, 1869, Congress passed an act to amend the judicial system in part by increasing the number of Supreme Court justices to nine, to take effect the first Monday in December of that year. That act, which remains in effect to this day, by itself did not provoke a public outcry. A mostly partisan-based controversy did arise, however, when the votes of two new justices nominated by President Ulysses S. Grant in February 1870 and confirmed by the Senate resulted in the overturning of a recent politically divisive court decision.
Grant was accused with packing the court, the same charge leveled against FDR in 1937 when he put forth a plan to reform a Supreme Court that repeatedly had judged key New Deal and state reform legislation to be unconstitutional. Roosevelt proposed giving the President the opportunity to nominate one new justice to the Court whenever a sitting justice who had been on the Court for at least 10 years and had not retired within six months of turning 70 years of age—the average age of the justices at the time was 71—with a maximum total of six such appointments to be allowed. In a fireside chat in March, Roosevelt cited as precedent a bill passed by the House of Representatives in March 1869 that had proposed adding a justice to the Court whenever a sitting justice reached the age of 70 with no upper limit specified for the number of justices the Court could have. Roosevelt's plan was vigorously opposed even by many of the President's supporters.
On six occasions prior to the April 1869 act, Congress had enacted legislation to change the number of Supreme Court justices. The April 1869 legislation—passed without the inclusion of the controversial provision in the March House bill that FDR had cited as a precedent—in effect repealed a July 1866 law stipulating that vacancies for associate justices would not be filled until the total number of justices reached seven. Many scholars of the Court have circulated the view that Radical Republicans in Congress passed the 1866 act—which in turn, in effect, had repealed an 1863 act that had increased the number of justices to 10—to take away President Andrew Johnson's power to appoint conservative justices. Once Grant was elected to the presidency, according to this view, Congress increased the number of justices to nine to give their party more sway over the Court's decisions.
Historian Stanley I. Kutler persuasively has challenged part of this interpretation, arguing that evidence is lacking to support the claim that Republicans "primarily sought to avoid a Johnson appointment." Among other arguments, Kutler points out that Johnson himself approved the 1866 bill and that the 1869 bill was passed by Congress before Johnson left office. Kutler contends that both Congress and Johnson believed that the Court had become unwieldy with too many justices. Still, the main intent of the legislation, which included a reorganization of the judicial circuit system, was to reduce Southern influence on the judiciary, Kutler concludes.
Less than one year after Grant's nominees to the Court assumed office, the Court, by a vote of five to four, overturned the four to three opinion in Hepburn v. Griswold that had ruled three legal tender acts of 1862 and 1863 to be invalid, one of the first times that the Court had judged Congressional legislation to be unconstitutional. The acts, instituted to help pay for the war, had authorized the federal government to issue paper money, colloquially known as "greenbacks" as legal tender that would be irredeemable in specie, i.e. gold or silver coins. Political controversy had arisen after rampant inflation had driven down the value of greenbacks drastically and the question arose as to whether creditors could demand payback for debts in coins or would have to accept paper currency. Those who supported the legal tender acts believed that the Hepburn ruling would result in a contraction of the money supply that would hurt many ordinary Americans in debt. Those in support of Hepburn worried that public debt had risen greatly because in borrowing money, the federal government had been at the mercy of foreign governments that had remained on the gold standard. Defenders of Hepburn also charged that its reversal had been instigated at the behest of big business, as the New York Sun wrote, "so that the great corporations might pay their debts in depreciated paper, instead of coin."
On the day that the Hepburn ruling was announced, February 7, 1870, Grant, who favored upholding the legal tender acts, sent two nominations for new Supreme Court justices to the Senate for confirmation. Previously, one nominee, William Strong, as a judge on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, had ruled to uphold the legal tender acts, and many suspected that the other nominee, Joseph P. Bradley, had vowed he would vote to validate the acts. The ruling to overturn Hepburn and the suspicion that Grant had packed the court caused much adverse comment in the press. The New York Tribune charged, "Powerful corporations, wielding large political and moneyed influence, are deeply involved in the question. . . . The decision, therefore, injures the poor many, and puts immense sums in the pockets of the rich and flourishing few corporations."
Many critics noted Strong's and Bradley's previously ties to railroads. The New York Bulletin bemoaned, "We have now learnt, for the first time, that a President can pack the supreme tribunal of the land, and its Judges can recognize other considerations than those of law and justice. . . . Of all calamities since the foundation of the republic, this is the saddest and the most bitterly wounding to high-minded citizens." The Chicago Tribune similarly lamented, "Nothing has occurred in the history of the country, except, possibly, the Dred Scott decision, so calculated to impair confidence in the stability of the court and the permanency of the republic as this action. . . . The country could survive rebellion, but it cannot outlive the destruction of credit, and the abolishment of the judicial branch of the government."
During the 1872 presidential campaign, Grant's opponents repeated the accusation that he had packed the court with justices who had promised to overturn Hepburn. The controversy was revived periodically until 1935, when Sidney Ratner, later to become a renowned economic historian, presented evidence from the unpublished diary of Grant's Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, that Grant "required no declaration from Judges Strong and Bradley on the constitutionality of the Legal Tender Act." Fish revealed, however, that Grant did know of Strong's previous ruling and "had reason to believe Judge Bradley's opinion tended in the same direction." While Grant had assured Fish that "he would do nothing to exact anything like a pledge or expression of opinion from the parties he might appoint to the Bench," the president "had desired that the Constitutionality [of the Legal Tender Act] should be sustained by the Supreme Court." Ratner argued that because Grant had not explicitly requested his nominees to decide in favor of Hepburn, "it is not just to say that he 'packed the Court', or that the new judges were 'creatures of the President placed upon the Bench to carry out his instructions.'" A New York Times obituary of Ratner indicated that he had been "influential in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's attempt to expand the size of the Supreme Court by discovering a precedent in President Ulysses S. Grant's appointments to the Court."
"The Legal-Tender Decision," Chicago Tribune, 27 April 1871, 29 April 1871 [which reprints New York Tribune and New York Bulletin editorials].
Edward S. Corwin, "Curbing the Court," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 185 (May 1936).
Kenneth W. Dam, "The Legal Tender Cases," Supreme Court Review 1981 (1981).
Charles Fairman, Reconstruction and Reunion, 186488, History of the Supreme Court of the United States. Vol. 6, pt. 1. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Stanley I. Kutler, "Reconstruction and the Supreme Court: The Numbers Game Reconsidered," Journal of Southern History 32 (Feb. 1966).
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Alpheus Thomas Mason, "Politics and the Supreme Court: President Roosevelt's Proposal," University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register 85 (May 1937).
Scholar Specialized in Economic History," New York Times, 17 January 1996.
Sidney Ratner, "Was the Supreme Court Packed by President Grant?" Political Science Quarterly 50 (September 1935).
Sponsored by Norwest Corporation, this is the companion site to the 1997 PBS documentary series Liberty: The American Revolution. The site is divided into four categories. "The Chronicle of the Revolution" provides six descriptions of key events during the Revolutionary era, such as the Boston Tea Party and the Battle of Saratoga. Also offers a timeline of the Revolution and links to descriptions of related topics, a bibliography of 29 scholarly works on the Revolutionary period, and links to 45 other sites of interest. "Perspectives on Liberty" is a creative section that provides images linked to information about related places or objects. For example, a painting of a farmhouse provides information on everyday life in Revolutionary America. "Liberty, the Series" provides episode descriptions, text interviews on the making of the series, and brief, 25-word biographies of the scholars involved in creating the series. Finally, "The Road to Revolution" is an interactive trivia game with audio of specific people, speeches, and events. There are 15 images and 2 maps in this section. This site is ideal particularly for younger students who wish to learn more about America during the Revolution.
This archive contains the transcribed public papers of Albert and Vera Weisbord, American Communists active from the 1920s to the 1970s. As yet, no personal papers have been transcribed. The site contains a 500-word biographical introduction and seven volumes of Class Struggle, 1931-37, a journal that the Weisbords edited and to which Albert was the main contributor. In addition, visitors may read the preface, introduction, and a review of Albert's book, The Conquest of Power. The bulk of the material contains transcriptions of approximately 75 articles by Albert and/or Vera on topics such as "Moscow's Betrayal of the Cuban Revolution," "Feminism and Family Names," "The Struggle for Negro Emancipation," and "Unique Problems of the Spanish Revolution." Material is indexed by title within subject categories, but visitors cannot perform subject searches. This site will be useful for research on American radicalism.
This archive provides material from Harper's Weekly relating to the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson, including 90 editorials by George William Curtis and 47 articles by other writers. There are 27 political cartoons, 17 by Thomas Nast, and 47 additional illustrations of people and events. The site provides biographical essays (300-500 words) and portraits of 28 major figures in the impeachment. John Adler, Harper's publisher, wrote five essays (100-600 words) to introduce visitors to the site and the political issues affecting the impeachment. There are 24 sections on the arguments involved in the hearings. Within each section, there are between five and 100 articles from Harper's discussing issues such as conspiracy, moral judgment, the New Orleans riot, partisanship, statesmanship, and the tenure of office act. Articles and editorials are also arranged chronologically. An "Impeachment Simulation Game" is provided for use in the classroom. This site is easy to navigate and will be a useful resource for anyone researching Johnson's impeachment or late 19th century politics.