Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,139

This is the grave of Wager Swayne.

Born in 1834 in Columbus, Ohio, Swayne grew up very wealthy. His father was Noah Swayne, who Abraham Lincoln would later appoint to the Supreme Court. The Swayne family were abolitionists. In fact, Noah had to flee his home of Virginia because he was a committed Quaker who hated slavery. Wager thus went to Yale and graduated in 1856. He moved back to Ohio, passed the bar, and practiced there.

In 1861, Swayne signed up for the Union Army. He was named major of the 43rd Ohio Volunteers, an office decided by the governor since this was the age of the political officers, the bane of the Union Army existence for most of the war. He was active in battle, participating at Iuka and Corinth in the campaign under Grant most famous for Shiloh. At Corinth, his superior officer was killed and Swayne took command. For that and because he did a good job, he was promoted to colonel. He managed to stay unscathed until shortly before the end of the war. At the Battle of Rivers’ Bridge, part of the Carolinas campaign under Sherman, Swayne took a bullet to the leg and it was amputated. Lincoln, who of course knew the family now that pop was on the Supreme Court, named Swayne a brigadier general of volunteers in March 1865 for all this.

Now, the war was over but Swayne’s war wasn’t really over. For one, unlike most volunteers, Swayne remained in the Army. In fact, Andrew Johnson promoted him to major general in 1866 and he moved to the regular Army in 1867. But much more importantly, Swayne was named head of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Alabama in 1865. This put him a position of real power. Now, the Freedmen’s Bureau was a good idea that had all the problems of 19th century American governance. Congress never did like to fund anything and so putting actual money behind the agency was always sketchy. It was massively understaffed. You could have a good agent and maybe they would be able to deal with white violence toward ex-slaves if it was 10 miles away, but there might not be another agent for 100 miles. Because patronage ruled the day throughout the government, some Bureau officers might be committed to black rights and others were open white supremacists who at best thought it was good slavery was over but otherwise freed slaves should be forced to labor on plantations for whites.

Swayne was one of the better Bureau agents. He controlled real power in Alabama and did what he could to enforce black rights. When O.O. Howard named Swayne to run the Alabama Bureau, it was a mess. Now, at first, he was like a lot of abolitionists, who have too much in common with contemporary liberal politicians in that they believed that you there were reasonable whites out there who secretly wanted to do the right thing. So he appointed local whites, supported the idea of just getting freed laborers to sign contracts (abolitionists loved contracts as a law of nature), and believed that now that they were defeated, Alabama whites would go along with Republican policies. As such, he supported Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction. He also convinced the governor to veto the worst of the Black Codes that the legislature puked up.

And then he woke up and realized these were all lies and he had been totally wrong. All the local whites he appointed as local agents were openly of other local whites. The naivete of the postwar abolitionist class is astonishing really. So he began to welcome conflict with the white political elite of Alabama. He started appealing to the social networks he knew in the North, especially around the liberal churches, to provide what the state’s whites never would. He lobbied for donations to build black schools and for white teachers to come down as work in them. In fact, the Freedmen’s Bureau was barred from spending its money on schools, but Swayne did it anyway, with Howard happy to look the other way.

When the Alabama legislature then did not pass the 14th Amendment, Swayne went full-on in support of black male suffrage to counter the revanchist whites. He stated that Alabama was “not very fit for a free government at all.” This is 1866, not 2026, but you know, it still pretty much is true.

So when Congress took over Reconstruction from Johnson in 1867, Swayne was all in. He banned the chain gang, now used to recreate slavery for state-supported private profit. He actively encouraged blacks to vote and involved himself in creating the Republican Party in Alabama. He used martial law when whites got out of hand. He worked to get William Smith, his superintendent of voter registration, elected as the first Republican governor of the state with black support.

Unfortunately, Andrew Johnson still had the power to fire Freedmen’s Bureau officers and in December, he fired Swayne and named Julius Hayden to replace him, a far more racially conservative general, who proceeded to disconnect the Bureau from doing anything to build black political power. It’s a bit hard to speak too highly of Swayne because he screwed up so bad at the beginning of his work in Alabama, even if he did change course and tried to do the right thing. But then how different is he than Chuck Schumer, who constantly tells us that lots of Republicans tell him they don’t really believe this shit and then it turns out they always do the wrong thing?

Swayne stayed in the Army until 1870. He retired and took up a law practice in Toledo. He stayed there until 1881, when he moved to New York and continued practicing there. By this time, we are in the peak of the Gilded Age and so there was a lot of work for pro-corporate Republican stalwarts like Swayne. He was a railroad lawyer primarily, which meant representing the worst people in America. I’m sure he did it well. He was also deeply involved in the North American Trust Company, one of the big banking trusts that created the monopoly era of American history, which we are moving toward repeating today. He died in New York in 1902, at the age of 68.

Wager Swayne is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with the Freedmen’s Bureau, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Samuel Armstrong, the general who was behind the creation of Hampton University, is in Hampton, Virginia. Thomas Osborn, assistant commissioner of the Bureau for Florida who then became a senator from that state before black voting was violently suppressed, is in North Adams, Massachusetts. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.