PART TWO
CHAPTER 7
No story in the Gilded Age is more harrowing than the tragedy of American Reconstruction. It proceeded inevitably from a skein of historical contradictions. The American Revolution was achieved by radicals in the name of liberty but the institution of slavery was preserved. Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves, but to save the Union he would have freed none. The victory of the Union army over the Confederacy dispossessed the very people it had emancipated. African-American leader Frederick Douglass described the plight of freedmen. The African-American
was free from the individual master but a slave of society. He had neither money, property, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter. He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.
Yet the courage, resilience, and lack of vindictiveness of the new African-American citizens under extreme provocation somewhat redeems the bitter tragedy that unfolded in the South.
The victory of the North had retied the knot of Union, but the rope itself was in shreds. The South had been devastated. Major cities, such as Charleston and Richmond, had been badly damaged by bombardment and fire. Banking had collapsed; agriculture was stagnant; and the entire region lay prostrate. The South was, however, conquered rather than subdued. Because its army had been defeated in the field did not mean that the former Confederates accepted the politics of the North. They were determined that when the South rose from the ashes of defeat it would be on the basis of southern, not northern ideas. They recognized that the South’s lack of industry was one of the prime reasons it had lost the war. They therefore sought capital to build a New South with industrial muscle. Northern businessmen began to invest in southern plantations, railroads, and mills. However, they too wanted to shape Reconstruction to their own economic ends.
There were three distinct phases of Reconstruction: presidential restoration in the mid-1860s; radical Reconstruction of the late 1860s and early 1870s; and southern redemption thereafter. Reconstruction engendered a legacy of bitterness in the South greater than the hatred caused by the Civil War. It was perhaps the most controversial event during the Gilded Age and provoked passionate historical disputes for a century afterward. This ensured that though the subject was black, the books were read. Yet the final outcome of Reconstruction was a compromise, economic and political on the part of the South, social and racist on the part of the North. The achievements of the war—preservation of the Union and abolition of slavery—were not made the foundation for political and economic progress in the New South.
Presidential Restoration
Abraham Lincoln announced his general plan for restoration in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction on December 8, 1863. He offered a pardon to former Confederates who took an oath to support the Union and the Constitution. When the number who did so in any state had reached a tenth of the votes cast in the presidential election of 1860 and when they had established a state government, he would recognize it. He excluded African-Americans from taking the oath, voting, and holding office. Lincoln intended to put his plan into practice in successive stages as the army recovered more and more land. The most outspoken critics of presidential restoration were radicals in the Republican party, led by Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. They were determined to safeguard the rights of African-Americans in the South, to ensure the supremacy of Congress in government, and to assert the ascendancy of the Republican party in politics.
They put forward their alternative plan of Reconstruction. Proposed by Senator Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, it passed Congress in July 1864. It required a majority of enrolled white citizens to take an oath to support the Constitution before state conventions could be called to reconstitute the state government. Prospective delegates and electors had to swear an “ironclad” test oath that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States. However, Lincoln vetoed the bill as impractical and unchristian, whereupon his rivals issued a scathing manifesto complaining that he had exceeded his prerogative. Lincoln was not deterred and went on to recognize reconstituted civil governments in Virginia, Louisiana, and Arkansas in 1864, and in Tennessee in February 1865. He also began to widen the categories of former Confederates who could take the oath. Congress, however, refused to seat representatives from the “Lincoln states” and denounced his policies as too lenient.
Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was sworn in as president a few hours after Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865. Johnson had served Tennessee as assemblyman, governor, and senator. His subsequent success as military governor of Tennessee for the Union and the fact that he was a Democratic southerner of unquestioned loyalty convinced Republican elders that he would make an ideal running mate for Lincoln on a ticket of National Union in the election of 1864. In the great emergency of the war it did not seem important that Johnson’s political roots were quite different from those of the Republican party. However, his critics made much of the fact that he was undoubtedly drunk during the inauguration in 1865. (He was not used to spirits and had taken whiskey for medicinal purposes after an attack of typhoid fever.)
Johnson was now the titular leader of a party of national union that had died with Lincoln. Radicals inferred from his vehement condemnation of Confederates that he agreed with their aims. He told Benjamin Wade, “Treason is a crime and crime must be punished. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.” But radicals were soon to be disabused of their misunderstanding. Johnson, like Lincoln, believed that it was his duty to secure the prompt restoration of the South to its proper place in Union affairs. But whereas Lincoln was flexible, Johnson was obstinate. Hypersensitive to criticism, he regarded compromise as a sign of weakness.
On May 9, 1865, Johnson recognized the government of Francis H. Pierpont in Virginia. On May 29, he issued his own proclamation of amnesty. It simply required an oath of allegiance from those seeking pardon, but also increased the categories of excluded persons by forbidding people with property valued at more than $20,000 to take the oath. This exclusion was more apparent than real. Johnson wanted to humiliate rather than punish wealthy planters, who had to seek a special personal pardon from the president. On May 29 Johnson also announced his plan for the reconstruction of North Carolina. He appointed William H. Holden provisional governor, empowered to call a convention of loyal citizens who would frame a new state constitution. No one could serve as elector or delegate unless he had been qualified to vote in 1860 and now took the oath of allegiance, but the convention could prescribe its own qualifications for electors and officeholders. Within six weeks Johnson issued the same proclamation to the six remaining states of the Confederacy.
The South was optimistic about the chances of regaining control of its own destiny. But it had several complaints about northern mismanagement of its affairs. It was especially critical of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands had been established by Congress on March 3, 1865, under a commissioner, Gen. Oliver O. Howard, to provide material assistance to African-Americans and refugees. It was also to establish schools, supervise labor contracts between employers and freedmen, and manage confiscated or derelict land. By 1869 it had distributed 21 million rations, established 40 hospitals, treated 450,000 patients, and helped settle 30,000 refugees. Most abandoned lands were restored to pardoned rebels. But its greatest achievement was in the field of education. By 1870 it had placed 250,000 African-American children in 4,300 schools. Another hated symbol of northern interference were Treasury agents assigned by Congress to appropriate any abandoned land and collect taxes levied on cotton. In payment they were allowed to retain 25 percent of their returns. The more unscrupulous took advantage of the system to line their own pockets.
German immigrant cartoonist Thomas Nast (1840–1902) sided with the political opponents of President Andrew Johnson in the controversies over Reconstruction. “Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction and How It Works” depicts the president as Shakespeare’s scheming Iago, undermining an American Othello attired as a Union soldier. The upper tableaux suggest that Johnson’s policies are causing havoc in the South and resulting in deaths of African-Americans. This woodcut from a drawing by Nast was first published in Harper’s Weekly of September 1, 1865. (Library of Congress.)
The six unrestored states held conventions in late 1865 and accepted Johnson’s implicit preconditions for readmission by repudiating slavery, secession, and the Confederate debt. However, southerners were so ready to anticipate any revolution in race relations that they overlooked the political need to satisfy northern scruples about the former slaves. On the eve of the Civil War there were 3,953,760 slaves, most of whom worked as field hands or domestics. Their collective value, estimated at $2 billion, had evaporated with emancipation. Moreover, many African-Americans were on the move. Thousands had run away from their former masters to the Union army; thousands had fled with their masters from the army; thousands were moving about to test their new freedom. Their migration reawakened traditional white fears of an African-American insurrection.
Republicans who wanted to penetrate the South and build up their party there planned to give African-Americans the vote on the assumption that they would cast it for the party that had freed them. But they were less disposed to enfranchise African-Americans in the North, and they recognized that the Constitution guaranteed the states the right to regulate their own suffrage. Johnson did not think that African-Americans were equipped for political equality and believed that African-American suffrage would become yet another instrument in the hands of the aristocratic planters he hated so much.
The congressional elections in the former Confederate states were a victory for the Old South. Elected to the Thirty-ninth Congress, meeting in December 1865, were the vice-president, four generals, five colonels, six cabinet officers, and fifty-eight congressmen of the defeated Confederacy. The pattern was much the same in the state elections. To add insult to injury, the new assemblymen flaunted their Confederate connections. For example, in Louisiana former officers wore their Confederate uniforms in the legislature. Such behavior turned a difficult situation into an impossible one and denied Johnson’s policies any chance of immediate success.
The so-called Black Codes, laws that defined African-Americans’ new rights and status, were the most widely publicized part of southern Reconstruction. They recognized African-Americans’ rights to own property, to sue and be sued, and to marry and bear legitimate children. But they forbade them to marry whites and allowed them to give evidence only in court cases involving other African-Americans. More important to the South and more controversial in the North were laws governing labor contracts, such as laws against enticing African-Americans to leave their employers before their contracts had expired. The Black Codes were most severe in those states where African-Americans outnumbered whites—in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Mississippi decreed that all persons not lawfully employed on January 1, 1866, were to be arrested as vagrants. If they could not pay a statutory fine of $50, they would be hired out to anyone who paid the fine in exchange for the shortest period of labor.
Radical Reconstruction
Congress disliked Johnson’s scheme for Reconstruction. It seemed that his policy was to restore defeated and discredited Confederates to power in the South. What northerners wanted was a harsher policy; what Republicans wanted was to strengthen their party. The infamous Black Codes were taken as proof of southern arrogance and a determination to reverse the result of the Civil War. As abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared, “Now is the critical time. The rebellion has not ceased, it has only changed its weapons. Once it fought; now it intrigues; once it followed Lee in arms, now it follows President Johnson in guile and chicanery.”
Outraged by the tide of events, Congress refused to seat the southern representatives. It thus served notice on Johnson that it would not accept presidential restoration. Instead, it established a Joint Committee of Fifteen “to inquire into the conditions of the States which formed the socalled Confederate States of America.” The committee was not controlled by radicals, but its most influential member was Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Republicans in the House. At seventy-four he was an embittered enemy of the old southern aristocracy, which he blamed for the destruction of his Pennsylvania ironworks during the Gettysburg campaign. When it seemed that Johnson was shielding the South, Stevens transferred his implacable hostility to him. Stevens made his position crystal-clear: “I am for Negro suffrage in every rebel State. If it be just it should not be denied; if it be necessary it should be adopted; if it be punishment to traitors, they deserve it.”
The committee interviewed 144 witnesses and gave special attention to the problems of race relations and the Freedmen’s Bureau. It set a precedent for, and became the prototype of, wide-ranging congressional investigations in the Gilded Age. Its final report of 700 pages was a disturbing testimony of man’s inhumanity to man. The joint committee concluded that the states were intact but that their governments were a shambles. Before the rebel states could be allowed to return to the Union it would be necessary to shape them politically and socially so as to ensure the protection of African-Americans and the survival of the Republican party in the South. To that end, radicals secured the Civil Rights Act, passed over Johnson’s veto on April 10, 1866. It conferred full citizenship on all persons born within the United States whatever their color or race, giving them equal rights in contracts, property, and personal security. Buoyed up with their success, the radicals then persuaded Congress to pass a new Freedmen’s Bureau bill and to sustain it over Johnson’s veto in July 1866.
To ensure the survival of their policies against presidential veto, congressional repeal, or judicial reversal, the radicals and their allies incorporated their policies straightforwardly into the Fourteenth Amendment. The first section of the Amendment defined citizens as those born or naturalized in the United States and enjoined states from abridging their rights to life, liberty, property, and due process of law. The second section threatened to reduce proportionately the representation in Congress of any state denying the suffrage to adult males. The third excluded from Congress, the electoral college, and federal office anyone who had served the federal government under oath and then taken part in rebellion. The fourth upheld the validity of the federal debt but repudiated the Confederate debt and any claims of compensation for emancipated slaves. When it passed Congress on June 13, 1866, there was an underlying consensus of congressional opinion that the rebel states must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before they could be readmitted to the Union. Tennessee did so promptly and was readmitted on July 24, 1866.
But the process was far from peaceful. Public resentment in Memphis burst in a terrible riot on April 30 and lasted three days. Forty-six African-Americans were killed, and more than 80 were wounded. Twelve schools for African-Americans and four of their churches were burned. In New Orleans an attempt by radicals to take away the vote from Confederate veterans and give it to African-Americans led to another riot on July 30 in which 34 African-Americans and 4 whites died and more than 200 people were injured. The federal commander, Gen. Philip Sheridan, described it not just as a riot but “an absolute massacre by the police . . . a murder which the mayor and police . . . perpetrated without the shadow of necessity.” Northern reaction was instantaneous and unanimous. The New York Tribune spoke for half the country in its condemnation: “The hands of the rebel are again red with loyal blood.”
Johnson was trying to bring moderate Republicans and Democrats into a new National Union party. But there was no true common interest, and the convention at Philadelphia in 1866 was a fiasco. Northern delegates feared that they would be overwhelmed by the South; and when the huge governor of South Carolina, James Lawrence Orr, walked down the aisle arm in arm with the slight governor of Massachusetts, Darius Couch, they feared it might be both metaphor and portent. Johnson then made a whistle-stop tour of the North indulging in vehement exchanges with hecklers and condemning the radicals and their policies. The radicals made small but significant gains in the November elections. The ten remaining southern states chose to defy them by rejecting the Fourteenth Amendment, and this provoked the northern states—albeit reluctantly in some cases—to ratify it.
Congress was now clearly in the ascendant, and the president’s many personal enemies were prepared to destroy both him and his power. They could and did override his veto of Charles Sumner’s bill enfranchising African-Americans in the District of Columbia. More significant was the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. It divided the rebel states into five military districts. Each was to be commanded by a high-ranking officer. His task was to supervise the election of delegates to state conventions. They would then write constitutions and establish new governments. The electorate would comprise all adult males not barred for taking part in the rebellion. After a majority of registered voters had ratified the state constitution, after Congress had approved it, and after the state had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the state could then be readmitted to the Union.
The Tenure of Office Act, also passed on March 2, 1867, was devised by Thaddeus Stevens to humiliate Johnson. Congress forbade him from dismissing cabinet members (such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton) who sympathized with congressional Reconstruction. It also reduced his considerable power of patronage. Another limitation imposed on the president was the Command of the Army Act, passed on the same day, which required him to issue all military orders through the general of the army. A Second Reconstruction Act of March 23 explained the details by which military commanders were to reconstruct the recalcitrant states, including a provision whereby prospective voters were to take an “ironclad oath.” A third Reconstruction Act of July 19 empowered registration boards to refuse registration to applicants who were not taking the oath in good faith.
Some of the southern states retaliated by trying to get the Supreme Court to repudiate the legislation. The Supreme Court found some of the Reconstruction measures unconstitutional in the Test Oaths cases of January 1867, Cummings v. Missouri and Ex parte Garland. However, it would not defy Congress and, in the McCardle case of 1869, upheld a recent congressional decision to withdraw appellate jurisdiction over habeas corpus, thus evading its responsibility to give judgment. The justices believed that, despite northern opinion on the need for rigorous Reconstruction, the national interest would be best served by judicial restraint on controversial issues on which the Constitution said little.
Johnson’s protracted disagreements with his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, his subsequent dismissal of Stanton, and successive failures to replace him first with Lorenzo Thomas and then with Thomas Ewing, gave the radicals an opportunity to be rid of the president once and for all. They accused him of violating the Tenure of Office Act. On February 24, 1868, Thaddeus Stevens requested the House to remove the “great political malefactor” in order to restore democratic government to a “free and untrammeled people.” Accordingly, a committee drew up a list of eleven articles of impeachment, nine about the removal of Stanton, one condemning his speeches, and one an omnibus denunciation. Having been impeached by the House, Johnson was tried in the Senate. Had he been found guilty and removed from office, he would have been replaced by the radical president pro tern of the Senate, Benjamin Wade.
The excitement that a stirring speech could generate in the theater of politics during Reconstruction is captured in this wood engraving of a crowd surging to the public galleries of the Senate on February 25, 1868, to hear Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868) call for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875). An illustration from the Illustrated London News. (Library of Congress.)
Stevens’s vindictive indictment set the tone for the impeachment proceedings and produced profound public unease about the whole process. The New York Herald said the radical leader had the “boldness of Danton, the bitterness and hatred of Marat, and the unscrupulousness of Robespierre.” Stevens was terminally ill, and the case against Johnson was led in the Senate trial by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts. He was the general who had taken New Orleans for the Union in 1862 and was known as “Spoons” for having looted southern houses of their silverware. He argued that the president was trying to overthrow Congress and establish an absolute dictatorship. Butler’s most picturesque gesture was to produce a nightshirt supposedly stained with the blood of an Ohio carpetbagger flogged within an inch of his life by hoodlums in Mississippi. This gesture of outraged patriotism lived on in the politics of the Gilded Age and became known as “waving the bloody shirt.” But on this occasion the radicals had gone too far. Johnson’s able counsel, including William M. Evarts and Benjamin R. Curtis, demolished the case against him. The Tenure of Office Act merely restrained a president from removing a member of the cabinet he had appointed—but Stanton had been appointed not by Johnson, but by Lincoln.
The Senate voted first on the final article on May 16, 1868: 35 for conviction and 19 against. This was 1 vote short of the necessary twothirds majority. Seven Republican senators voted for acquittal. They would not permit the process of impeachment to be debased in the interests of party politics. A major crisis had passed.
Party politics now concentrated on the presidential election of 1868. As their presidential nominee the Republicans chose General Ulysses S. Grant, the victor at Appomattox. He was associated neither with the radicals nor with Johnson, and he appealed to all sections of the party as a symbol of reconciliation. The substance of the Republican campaign was that their party had won the war and saved the Union, and that a Democratic victory would undo the peace. They were supported financially by such bankers as Henry and Jay Cooke, and their propaganda owed much to the inventive cartoons of Thomas Nast in Harper’s. Determined to repudiate the blame for secession, the Democrats chose as their candidate Horatio Seymour, wartime governor of New York. They condemned congressional Reconstruction as Republican dictatorship and affirmed states’ rights on the troublesome question of African-American suffrage. In the election Grant took 3,013,427 popular votes and twenty-six states; Seymour, 2,706,829 votes and eight states.
The rival processes of Reconstruction continued without pause. During Christmas of 1868 Johnson issued his fourth and final proclamation of amnesty, extending pardon to the very few remaining Confederates not included in the previous two amnesties of September 1867 and July 4, 1868. Congress, meanwhile, aimed to protect African-American suffrage in the South by the Fifteenth Amendment, which passed on February 26, 1869. The right to vote was not to be denied “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It also allowed Congress to tax incomes and was ratified on February 2, 1870. Congressional Reconstruction was a monumental undertaking and had momentous consequences. It gave the vote to 703,400 African-American citizens in the South, most of whom were illiterate and almost none of whom had voted before. About 660,000 whites were enfranchised, some for the first time, and about 3 5 percent of them were also illiterate. Perhaps the most singular failure of the federal government during Reconstruction was to withhold the promise of forty acres and a mule from African-Americans, although the government owned enough public land in the South to provide each and every African-American family with a farm.
After the inauguration of Grant, American politics became more diverse. There was much less emphasis on Reconstruction than in the previous four years. The North and West became preoccupied with the currency and political corruption. Grant had the most appropriate name of any president of the United States. During his two administrations (1869–77) he gave away more than any president before or since. Corruption in government reached new heights. In his personal and professional values Grant was a typical representative of the age. He had little understanding of the new industrial and economic forces. Yet it was precisely because he lacked political vision that he came to symbolize the age. He was elected president in 1868 for the same sort of reasons that another successful general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, would be in 1952. The sort of qualities Eisenhower paraded in public Grant really did have in private. He was modest, kind, and open. But this unassuming man had crippling limitations even as a conservative president. Unlike Eisenhower, he was a poor judge of character and trusted only those who made a show of loyalty to him. Thus his inner cabinet, led by the vain and daring Colonel Orville Babcock, whom he made his private secretary, manipulated his fears and prejudices to their own ends.
His critics attacked him for his general slovenliness and bouts of hard drinking. The most vicious condemnation came from Lord Lytton, viceroy of India, who hosted the Grants after they retired from Washington and said that Grant’s wife Julia was so ugly and Grant so drunk that he could not make love to her without being sick. It was true that depression in his first years in the army had first led Grant to drown his sorrows. Abraham Lincoln, however, was not disconcerted by the hard drinking of his best commander. After Grant’s successful campaign of 1862 Lincoln was supposed to have offered to send a sample of Grant’s favorite whiskey to his other generals.
Grant’s choices of cabinet officers were bizarre. In his eight years as president he appointed no fewer than twenty-five men to seven cabinet posts. Six were men of integrity. Yet Grant contrived to dispense with them all except Secretary of State Hamilton Fish. Fish was not retained for his honesty, tact, and intelligence. Grant needed him and his wife for their social cachet.
Like Eisenhower, Grant aspired to an affluent, not to say opulent lifestyle. This he could enjoy when he accepted the hospitality of wealthy people. They cultivated his friendship and expected him to lend presidential prestige to private projects such as Jay Gould and Jim Fisk’s gold corner of 1869. Yet Grant remained quite insensitive to the impact his associates had on his reputation even though he knew full well that Jim Fisk had no morals. Press exposure of corruption did not, at first, harm Grant’s reputation with the public. As the historian Allan Nevins explains, “The plain man had not elected Grant; he had elected an indestructible legend, a folk-hero.” But politicians were now on their guard. Their doubts about Grant were to grow. Senator James Grimes of Iowa wrote to Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois in July 1870 about the decline of the Republican party: “Like all parties that have an undisturbed power for a long time, it has become corrupt, and I believe it is to-day the most corrupt and debauched political party that has ever existed.”
It seemed that what was happening in Washington set the tone for Reconstruction in the South. The old aristocracy began to present themselves as the abused victims of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and African-Americans. The term “carpetbagger” was first used in 1846 to describe any suspicious stranger in town. During Reconstruction, so-called carpetbaggers included all types of people from the North—soldiers, businessmen, lawyers, teachers, and ministers—as well as adventurers. Very few were transient. The success of their business ventures depended on the maintenance of law and order and cooperation between government and industry. They believed that only through a strong Republican party in the South could they achieve their aims. Thus, they regarded African-American suffrage as an essential political foundation without which nothing could be accomplished. But they were not interested in social equality. They also sought help from loyal southerners. To former Confederates these loyalists were “scalawags.” The term probably originated in the district of Scalloway in the Shetland Islands where the cattle were especially small. These southerners who had actively opposed secession were largely from the lower classes who resented the planter aristocracy.
The Republicans lost no opportunity to equate the Democrats with slavery, secession, and southern rule, especially when the Democrats’ own words could so easily be turned against them to inflame Republicans and sentiment in the North. This cartoon by Thomas Nast (1840-1902) for Harper’s Weekly during the campaign of 1868 depicts an unholy trio of Confederate diehards trampling on an African-American citizen in defiance of the beneficent federal legislation of the Radicals: “This is a white man’s government. We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so-called) of Congress as usurpations and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” (Library of Congress.)
The traditional oligarchy reserved its most bitter censure for African-American delegates to the state conventions. North Carolina’s had only 15 African-Americans amid 118 delegates, yet it was denounced as “Ethiopian minstrelsy, Ham radicalism in all its glory” with “baboons, monkeys, mules, Tourgée [a white northerner], and other jackasses.” However, those who took an active political part in southern Reconstruction were not only African-Americans, carpetbaggers, and scalawags. Native whites dominated the conventions of Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina, and appeared in force in others.
The interaction of divergent groups shaped Reconstruction in a very different way from that intended by the radicals in Congress. The new state constitutions were a considerable improvement on the old. South Carolina, for example, instituted universal manhood suffrage, abolished property qualifications for office-holders, reapportioned representation in the state assembly, reformed the courts and local government, removed “all distinctions on account of color,” ended imprisonment for debt, protected homesteads from mortgage foreclosure, expanded women’s rights, and provided a system of universal public education.
Universal public education was, in fact, a crucial corollary to universal suffrage. There was intense interest in education among African-Americans who, as slaves, had been forbidden to learn to read and write. Poor whites also realized that it was an essential preparation for professional and political activity. All the state constitutions resolved on free education for children between the ages of five and twenty-one. African-American delegates realized that separate schools would result in inferior education. But, despite their arguments, only Louisiana and South Carolina accepted the principle of integrated education, maintaining mixed schools until the mid-1870s.
When conservatives tried to defeat the new constitutions in one way or another, Congress retaliated by changing the rules of the game. Alabama voters simply stayed away from the polls. Thus, radicals in Congress passed a Fourth Reconstruction Act requiring not a majority of registered voters, but a simple majority of votes cast to ratify the constitution. When Mississippi actually defeated the constitution, Congress determined that the state could not be readmitted until it had ratified the constitution and the Fifteenth Amendment as well.
By the summer of 1868 seven states had written constitutions, organized governments, and recognized the Fourteenth Amendment, and they would be readmitted on condition they maintained black suffrage. Three—Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas—delayed but were readmitted on the same terms in 1870. Thereafter, conservatives, under many titles, began to undermine the new governments. In the case of Georgia the attack was openly and blatantly racist. By August 1868 the state assembly had succeeded in expelling all three African-American senators and twenty-five (of twenty-nine) African-American representatives and, in September, passed a law declaring all African-Americans ineligible to serve there. Henry McNeal Turner, a most articulate African-American member, made a plangent speech in protest: “It is very strange if a white man can occupy on this floor a seat created by colored votes, and a black man cannot do it.” The displaced members appealed to Governor Rufus B. Bullock, who applied for redress from Congress. When Georgia rejected the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1869, Congress reimposed military rule, making its ratification a condition of final readmission. On the grounds that they were disenfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment, Gen. Alfred H. Terry expelled twenty-four Democrats from the state assembly and replaced them with Republicans. He also reinstated the African-American members. Georgia then complied with the requirements of Congress and was readmitted on January 10, 1870.
In the reconstructed states revenues were quite insufficient to meet the additional demands imposed on them by programs of education, public works, and railroad construction. State indebtedness became a serious political problem in the South. Between 1868 and 1872 the deficits of Louisiana and South Carolina almost doubled, and between 1868 and 1874 that of Alabama trebled. The states increased property and poll taxes to meet the costs of education and welfare, and they issued bonds to finance railroad construction. But in the end, Reconstruction administrations could not raise sufficient funds to discharge their responsibilities. It was all too easy for conservative critics to deplore the extravagance and corruption of public officials that had become part of American society in the Gilded Age. The most outrageous graft in both the South and the North was in railroad construction. The manager of a Georgia railroad was asked how he could make above $20,000 a year on a salary of $2,000. He replied, “By the exercise of the most rigid economy.”
The so-called Negro rule was the most controversial aspect of radical Reconstruction. Only in South Carolina in the very first assembly did African-Americans have numerical superiority, and that state had the greatest number of prominent African-American leaders throughout the 1870s. They included two lieutenant governors, Alonzo B. Ransier and Richard H. Gleaves, and two speakers, Samuel J. Lee and Robert B. Elliott. The longest-serving were Francis L. Cardozo, who was secretary of state from 1868 to 1872 and state treasurer from 1872 to 1876, and Jonathan J. Wright, who sat on the state supreme court for seven years.
Southern “Redemption”
Diehard Confederates had no single strategy for subverting Reconstruction. As John Hope Franklin explained, they used political tactics, economic sanctions, and mob violence to undermine it. Time was on their side and they knew it. Tennessee was never subject to radical Reconstruction, and in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi the conservatives’ delaying tactics over readmission weakened radical Reconstruction almost before it had begun. Moreover, radical Reconstruction was brief, either because the states were readmitted as reconstituted states, or after Democratic or conservative victories at the polls. Thus it was truly over for Virginia and Tennessee in 1869, North Carolina in 1870, Georgia in 1871, Texas in 1873, Alabama and Arkansas in 1874, and Mississippi in 1875. Only three states were “unredeemed” at the end of 1876 and still had garrisons of federal troops: Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
Violence was endemic throughout the South. White hoodlums had repeatedly attacked African-American citizens and institutions since the end of the war. Now they included white radicals among their victims. They were especially vindictive to those who took part in organizations that showed African-Americans their political and civil rights, such as the Union League. In 1865 a social circle, or kuklos, of young men in Pulaski, Tennessee, organized themselves as the “Invisible Empire of the South.” It began terrorizing African-Americans before they were accounted a political factor of any significance. New chapters of the secret lodge were formed in other states. In 1867 they sent delegates to a convention at Nashville that made General Nathan B. Forrest head of the “Ku Klux Klan.” Its members donned ghostly white shirts and indulged in ghoulish rituals. The idea was to frighten their victims into thinking they were the avenging ghosts of the Confederate dead. Other subversive organizations were formed elsewhere: in Louisiana, the Knights of the White Camelia; in Texas, the Knights of the Rising Sun; and in Mississippi, the White Line.
So great was the popular appeal of General Ulysses Grant (1822-1885), victor at Appo-mattox, that the Republicans hoped his campaign for the presidency in 1868 would unite all factions within the party. But his actual term of office (1869–1877) was a nadir of presidential probity, as his old cronies took advantage of their high office for commercial gain. (Library of Congress.)
The supposed wrongs of radical Reconstruction conferred on the Klan and its associate groups a political dignity they could not otherwise have commanded. It counted African-Americans voting, holding office, and being insolent as part of their determination to assume political power. It deemed white participation in radical Reconstruction and social association with African-Americans as equally heinous offenses. It met both with murder and mayhem. It was said that in North Carolina the Klan committed 260 outrages, including 7 murders and the whipping of 72 whites and 141 African-Americans. A special target was the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Klan would persuade officials to leave town and catch and flog those who did not heed its advice. John Hope Franklin quotes a source explaining how, in some communities, coffins “were paraded through the streets marked with the names of prominent radicals and labeled ‘Dead, damned and delivered.’”
Congress responded to the Klan by passing a law on May 31, 1870, by which any interference with qualified citizens casting their votes was deemed a felony. Even this law was ineffective. Witnesses were afraid to testify against the Klan; juries declined to convict. Emboldened, the Klan continued its activities. During elections of August 1870 in Alabama, Klansmen paraded openly in full costume and regalia. The Senate established a committee of seven to investigate the situation. The five Republicans submitted a majority report that the Klan was perpetrating “a carnival of murders, intimidation, and violence of all kinds.” Congress resolved to strengthen its enforcement law. The amended act of January 28, 1871, provided for the federal jurisdiction of elections. Federal courts were to appoint election supervisors. Interference with their duties became a federal offense. A more stringent measure was the Third Enforcement Act, passed on April 20, 1871, after acrimonious debate. Usually referred to as the Ku Klux Act, it allowed the president to act against “unlawful combinations” by proclaiming martial law and suspending habeas corpus. Accessories to conspiracies who remained silent were deemed responsible for injuries. The act was invoked against Klans-men in the Carolinas and Mississippi in 1871 and 1872, but there were very few convictions.
Congress did not rest content and next established a Joint Committee of Twenty-one under Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania to inquire into “the condition of the late insurrectionary states.” Its four subcommittees held hearings in Washington and six states in the South. The final report extended to thirteen volumes in which the Republican majority urged the continued protection of African-Americans under federal laws. Nevertheless, in the face of white racist violence and intimidation, neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment provided African-Americans with any real civil protection. In the absence of federal action, the Klan ensured the steady decline of the African-American electorate.
During the twilight of Reconstruction the Supreme Court was more confident about repudiating radical Reconstruction. Each of the three postwar amendments contained a novel provision: “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Yet the very provision intended to ensure the letter of the law was declared unconstitutional by the Court and used to render the amendment null and void. In 1873 it found that the Fourteenth Amendment had been framed to protect African-Americans, but since civil rights were a matter of citizenship of the states and not of the nation, the amendment could afford little protection to individuals aggrieved by state laws. In 1876 in United States v. Cruikshank, a case arising out of riots in Louisiana, it found that the Fifteenth Amendment did not allow “the passage of laws for the supression of ordinary crimes within the states.”
With one exception, Congress was now practically inactive as far as Reconstruction was concerned. That was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, first proposed by the late Senator Charles Sumner. Its most important provision about desegregation of public schools was excised before it was passed. However, the act guaranteed African-Americans full and equal rights in places of public accommodation, such as theaters and restaurants, and forbade their exclusion from jury service. But it provided for no measures of enforcement. In 1883 the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in seven cases known as the Civil Rights cases. Only two originated in the South. Justice Joseph P. Bradley declared that the Fourteenth Amendment did not authorize general legislation for civil rights. United States v. Harris (1882) was a case arising from an incident when a Tennessee mob lynched four African-American prisoners. The Court repeated that the federal government could protect African-Americans only against acts by the state. It could not protect them against violence by individuals. In such cases, the victim should seek redress from the state authorities. Reconstruction had fallen apart. In eight states there was no longer any pretense of it.
Republicans and Liberals
Opposition to Grant and what he represented was mounting in the Republican party both inside and outside Congress. The midterm elections of 1870 suggested widespread dissatisfaction among the rank and file. Although the Democrats gained only six seats in the Senate, they took forty-one in the House. In the Missouri contests the success of the dissidents was spectacular. With the aid of Democratic votes they succeeded in electing B. Gratz Brown as governor and Carl Schurz as senator.
Schurz, a German immigrant, was to become more completely identified with reform movements in the 1870s and 1880s than any other politician. Born near Cologne, he had taken part in the unsuccessful German revolutionary movement of 1848 while a student in Bonn, and in 1852 immigrated to the United States. A founding member of the Republican party, a staunch opponent of slavery, and a supporter of Lincoln, he led troops in the Civil War, and thereafter made a survey of the postwar South for Andrew Johnson in 1865, recommending that voting rights be extended to African-Americans. He was joint editor of the St. Louis Westliche Post (1867–1869) and continued as senator for Missouri from 1869 to 1875.
By 1872 there was open division in the Republican party. The rebels, who called themselves Liberal Republicans, organized a mass meeting at the Cooper Institute in New York on April 12, 1872. Four powerful newspaper editors committed themselves on the side of the Liberal Republicans and were soon known as the Quadrilateral: Samuel Bowles of Massachusetts, editor of the Springfield Republican; Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial; Horace White of the Chicago Tribune; and Colonel Henry (“Marse”) Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal. The support of the Quadrilateral gave the Liberals sufficient confidence to plan an independent national campaign. They were now a splinter group adrift from their party.
At a national convention held in Cincinnati in May 1872 they chose as their presidential candidate Horace Greeley, historian and editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley was lukewarm about one of the Liberals’ two main platforms (civil service reform) and actually hostile to another (lower tariff). He was better known for his personal idiosyncrasies than for his political opinions. In crumpled white coat, its pockets stuffed with newspapers, he was a familiar figure on the sidewalks of New York. His whiskered face was crowned with a white stovepipe hat. He reminded passersby of Mr. Pickwick or the Mad Hatter.
Democrats realized that they could only profit from the dissatisfaction of Liberal Republicans with Grant if they refrained from dividing them. At their convention in Baltimore on July 9 the Democrats reluctantly nominated Greeley and accepted the Liberals’ platform. Thus, Greeley stood as a Democratic Liberal. But Greeley had spent thirty years as an editor in opposition to the Democrats. His opinion that although not every Democrat was a horse thief, every horse thief was a Democrat, was widely reported by his enemies.
Greeley campaigned for a “New Departure.” His administration would provide equal rights for African-Americans and whites, offer universal amnesty to Confederate officers, and establish thrift and honesty in government. It was only too easy for Republicans to vilify “Old Chappaquack,” as Greeley was known. His proposed withdrawal of troops from the South was misrepresented as a sort of complaisance to old Confederate values. Frederick Douglass, in the New National Era, the leading African-American newspaper, even said that Greeley had never been genuinely opposed to slavery. Cartoonist Thomas Nast showed Greeley as both tool and victim of “Liberal conspirators who you all know are honorable men.” In one cartoon Nast portrayed Greeley as an assassin, shaking hands with John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln’s grave.
In the election Greeley took only six states—Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas—and 2,843,446 popular votes to Grant’s 3,596,745. Grant had 286 votes in the electoral college, Greeley just 42. Exhausted by the campaign and overwhelmed by his wife’s fatal illness, Greeley was in no state to cope with additional financial and professional difficulties. As he said, he hardly knew whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. He died on November 29, 1872, and the Liberals’ hopes of routing Grant passed away with him. In spite of their failure, the Liberals’ challenge unsettled leading Republicans. The campaign had revealed renewed Democratic strength. In the South the Republicans took only 50.1 percent of the vote. Thus, rather than retain a rigorous form of Reconstruction, Republicans now resolved to attempt some reconciliation with the South. Congress passed a General Amnesty Act in May 1872 that, with some exceptions, made Confederate leaders eligible to vote and to hold public office once again.
No sooner was the election settled than Congress was rocked by the biggest scandal of the decade. It involved the first transcontinental railroad. From California the Central Pacific had moved eastward and from Chicago the Union Pacific had moved westward to meet at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. The Union Pacific Railroad had cost at least $50 million to build. But $23 million of that was not spent on construction. The promoters of the railroad diverted the money to themselves. To cover their tracks they organized a separate construction company, Credit Mobilier of America, to which, as directors of Union Pacific, they awarded fantastically profitable contracts. As a result of their duplicity, the Union Pacific was forced to the verge of bankruptcy, while Credit Mobilier paid dividends of 348 percent.
During the election campaign of 1872 no fewer than fifteen leading politicians had been smeared for their association with Credit Mobilier. The accounts were garbled and easily dismissed as malicious. When Congress convened in December, two of the most prominent members, James G. Blaine of Maine and James Garfield of Ohio, moved a formal investigation. Both knew full well they could refute the charges against them. The investigating committees discovered that recipients of Union Pacific stock included both Grant’s retiring vice president, Schuyler Colfax, and the vice president-elect, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. James Garfield swore he had received no money, but he was credited in the memorandum book of Union Pacific director Oakes Ames as having received $1,376. He appealed to his constituents, who continued to support him and he survived the ordeal. Colfax also denied that he had taken money—not for nothing was Colfax known as “Smiler”—but Ames’s book showed otherwise. The committee also discovered that previously, as chairman of the Post Office Committee in the House, he had accepted a bribe of $4,000 from G. F. Nesbitt of New York. Nesbitt manufactured stationery, and Colfax had made sure that large contracts for government envelopes were awarded to his firm. On March 4, 1873, Colfax left Washington, his career in ruins and, presumably, the smile wiped off his face.
In 1872, Horace Greeley (1811–1872), eccentric editor of the New York Tribune, became the presidential candidate of reformers in both parties opposed to Grant. But Greeley was tarred for his generous support of former Confederate leader Jefferson Davis during his trial, and was also accused of never having opposed slavery. His many detractors ridiculed him as the Mad Hatter or Mr. Pickwick. (Library of Congress.)
The day before Colfax retired from the political scene, March 3, Congress exposed itself to more charges of venality when it passed the so-called Salary Grab Act. This act raised the president’s salary from $25,000 to $50,000. Other public officers, including the vice president, members of the cabinet and Supreme Court, and the speaker of the House, also had their salaries increased. So, too, did senators and representatives, from $5,000 to $7,500. The public was incensed. Congress was, therefore, obliged to repeal all the increases except for those of president and Supreme Court. It was fortunate for Congress that these scandals were dead issues by the time of the panic and depression of 1873.
The root cause of the depression of 1873 was railroad collapse. Not only the railroads but also their supply industries and thus the industrial community at large were hard hit for six years. Whereas conservatives argued that the proper policy in depression was for the government to economize and leave recovery to natural forces, those with special interests at stake argued for a change in fiscal policy.
During the war, the government had increased the money supply with the issue of paper notes. These greenbacks were not based on gold but on faith, hope, and charity. After the war was over there were still $433.16 million in circulation. Their presence was an endless source of confusion. People who had bought government bonds in the war had done so with a depreciated currency. It was in their interest to insist that the bonds should be redeemed in gold. Thus they would make a profit. In addition, greenbacks were not legal tender for all purposes. No one knew if the government would eventually redeem them for gold. They circulated at a discount that varied from month to month. Farmers were also affected by these fluctuations. They had bought land according to the terms of the Homestead Act of 1862 and borrowed money to do so. But in the war paper money was worth only about 40 percent of gold money. If the value of the currency were to be raised by the withdrawal of greenbacks, they would have to repay interest at a higher rate than when they took out the loan.
Most businessmen wanted a stable currency and favored resumption, a return to the gold standard—hard money, as it was called. To confirm business confidence the Republican party agreed with them. However, in 1870 Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase announced that greenbacks were not legal tender for obligations entered into before they were first issued. And in Hepburn v. Griswold, the first Legal Tender decision, also in 1870, he went further. In his opinion they were completely invalid. Ironically enough it was Chase who, as Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, had approved the issuing of greenbacks in the first place. The government moved for a rehearing, and in the second Legal Tender decision, Knox v. Lee and Parker v. Davis of 1871, the Court sustained them.
The controversy over hard and soft money became a burning issue and scorched any politician who tried to handle it. Thus began the conflict between gold and silver that gives the Gilded Age much of its political character. Most politicians did not even understand the issues and deeply resented the fact that the controversy disturbed traditional electoral loyalties. Grant’s third secretary of the treasury, Benjamin H. Bristow, was both a westerner and a hard money man. At his prompting Congress passed John Sherman’s Resumption of Specie Payment Act on January 7, 1875. Specie payments were to be resumed by January 2, 1879. For every $100 issued in new national bank notes the Treasury would withdraw $80 in greenbacks. Sherman’s act did not retire greenbacks. But it represented a moral commitment to a metal currency.
The general public had been indifferent to well-founded criticisms of political corruption when times were good. But in hard times it was different. Public opinion was in no mood to tolerate new scandals. It seemed that no fewer than five cabinet members were guilty of gross malpractice. Secretary of War W. W. Belknap was impeached in the House for the sale of trading posts in Indian Territory to men who made fortunes by selling substandard goods. Secretary of the Treasury William A. Richardson was also obliged to resign before the House could censure him for extortion of tax evaders. Attorney General George H. Williams resigned under suspicion of gross corruption and laxity. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano resigned after charges of corruption in Indian affairs were leveled at him. Secretary of the Navy George M. Robeson was suspected of negligence in the matter of contracts for navy supplies.
Worst of all, Grant’s private secretary, Orville E. Babcock, was tried with other members of the “St. Louis Whiskey Ring.” With the connivance of Treasury officials, the ring had defrauded the Internal Revenue Service of $4 million in taxes to 1874. Babcock and his associates had been paid about $1.5 million in bribes to accept fraudulent returns of the amount of liquor produced by distillers and from which tax assessments were made. On learning about the ring Grant was supposed to have said, “Let no guilty man escape.” Nevertheless, he ensured that Babcock did so. At the subsequent trial he swore to Babcock’s integrity. The jury accepted the president’s word and acquitted his secretary on February 24, 1876. All the other defendants were found guilty.
The Compromise of 1876
The election of 1876, the dispute that followed it, and the way both were resolved demonstrated Republican recognition that Reconstruction had to come to an end. Less obviously, but equally important, the election illustrated the insidious influence of big business on high-powered politics.
Grant was coy about running for a third term. By 1876 few Republicans wanted him to. The other preeminent Republican was James G. Blaine of Maine, congressman since 1863, and now acknowledged leader of the group opposed to Reconstruction, the “Half Breeds.” It included John Sherman, James Garfield, George Hoar, William B. Allison, and George Edmunds. Although his followers had three-quarters of the necessary votes, Blaine was denied nomination at the Republican National Convention held in Cincinnati from June 14, 1876. Both reactionary and reform Republicans were bound together in their opposition to him. Thus Rutherford B. Hayes, former Union officer and three-time governor of Ohio, was nominated on the seventh ballot.
In early July the Democrats nominated Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York. A liberal who favored reform of tariffs and civil service, he was also a hard money man. Widely known for his part in breaking the Tweed Ring before he became governor and for breaking the Erie Canal Ring during his term of office, he was identified as a fearless foe of political corruption. Yet Tilden had perpetrated a rigging of the stock market years earlier and obtained a court order to confiscate an entire edition of James Parton’s exposure of his methods, a Manual for the Instruction of “Rings,” Railroad and Political (1866). Tilden had also amassed a great fortune as a lawyer for railroad corporations. It was for his dealings with such manipulators as Jay Gould and Jim Fisk that he won the dubious title of the “Great Forecloser.”
The actual campaign was about Grant’s administration. The Republicans could make no convincing reply to Democratic accusations. On November 8, after the election, the Democrats claimed victory and the Republicans conceded defeat. According to later tallies, Tilden had taken 4,284,020 popular votes, to Hayes’s 4,036,572. But at the time four states—Oregon, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—were still in doubt. Without these states Tilden had 184 electoral votes—1 less than a majority.
In all three southern states the election had been fraudulent. Republicans controlled the returning boards and discounted Democratic votes—at least 1,000 votes in Florida and more than 13,000 in Louisiana. Both parties had been guilty of malpractice, however. On December 6 Republican electors in all four states met and cast their official votes–19 in all—for Hayes. Thus he had 185 votes, a majority of 1. However in the same states, Democratic electors appointed by Democratic state authorities also met and cast their 19 votes for Tilden. Both sets of returns were sent to Congress. The impasse was resolved by a compromise that was to lead to the withdrawal of the last remaining federal troops from the South and the official end of Reconstruction.
On January 29, 1877, Congress set up a Joint Electoral Commission to settle the election by adjudicating on the returns of the four disputed states. It would comprise three Republicans and two Democrats from the Senate, two Republicans and three Democrats from the House, two Republicans and two Democrats from the Supreme Court, and a fifth justice of either party to be chosen by the Court itself. It was assumed in Congress that the fifth justice would be the independent, Judge David Davis. But he was suddenly elected senator from Illinois. He then withdrew from the Court and declared himself ineligible for the commission. The fifth justice chosen by the Court was Joseph P. Bradley, a Republican. By a majority of i the commission gave the election to Hayes. The Democrats resolved to retaliate by filibuster. They did not account for business interests.
A cabal of businessmen was intent on constructing a railroad in the Southwest. It comprised three press barons (William Henry Smith of the Western Associated Press, Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, and Andrew J. Kellar of the Memphis Daily Avalanche) and two railroad entrepreneurs (Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad and Grenville Dodge, once of the Union Pacific). They elicited support from southern industrialists who were anxious to develop manufacturing and industry in the South and who appreciated the need for a railroad. If Hayes were elected, ran Scott’s argument to the South, he would use federal funds to advance social and economic recovery throughout the South. This, of course, would include the construction of the proposed railroad. As pledge of his good intentions Hayes promised to appoint a southern Democrat to the most lucrative spoils office of postmaster general. Most important, federal troops would be recalled from the South.
The Democrats’ final acquiescence is usually credited to the “Worm-ley House Bargain” of February 26, 1877, in Washington. Southern congressmen met with influential Republicans including Sherman, Gar-field, Charles Foster, and Stanley Matthews. Owing to their arguments, thirty-two southern Democrats were prevailed upon to abandon the filibuster, and they were also joined by a few influential northern Democrats. The electoral count was concluded at 4:00 A.M. on March 2, 1877, and Hayes was declared president-elect.
It was perfectly clear that the Republican victory had been secured in violation of popular will. Yet subsequent revelations about election malpractice damaged Democrats more than Republicans. When the Potter committee of the House investigated the disputed election, it discovered that the returning boards of South Carolina and Florida would have thrown the election to Tilden if they had been compensated. A wit observed that the Democrats stole the election in the first place and then the Republicans stole it back. There was another factor in this controversial episode. In 1876 the predominantly Democratic House had confidently voted the admission of Colorado to the Union on the expectation that it would give the Democratic party its allegiance. But in elections Colorado proved overwhelmingly Republican. The Democrats’ miscalculation cost Tilden the presidency.
By withdrawing troops from the South and bringing Reconstruction to an end, Hayes identified the presidency with public opinion, which wanted to stop punishing the South. But, as Senator Roscoe Conkling pointed out, the removal of federal troops from the crucial states that had accomplished Hayes’s election also served to remove the very legal argument that had achieved it. Not until the Little Rock riots of 1957 would federal troops intervene in southern affairs on terms precluded by the compromise of 1877. The history of the New South that now unfolded was the history of a separate region removed from the central issues of national politics.
The New South
The southern leaders who had emerged by 1877 claimed that they had redeemed the South from carpetbag rule and were generally known as Redeemers. More precisely, they were Democratic Conservatives. They included not only the scions of the old planter class but also the new entrepreneurs in business and industry. This self-perpetuating oligarchy ensured its position by limiting the power of state legislatures. They reacted against the social revolution brought about by Reconstruction with an economic policy of “retrenchment”—reducing public services and cutting taxes. The principal beneficiaries were corporations, especially utilities and railroads; the principal victims were public schools.
Beneath the surface of solidarity southern politics teemed with discontent. Independents, Greenbackers, and Populists stood for office, occasionally won, and unsettled the confidence of the ruling elite. A most divisive issue was the repudiation or “readjustment” of state debts, which in 1877 amounted to something like $275 million for all the reconstructed states. Nine states devised legal means of repudiating their debts. In the process, they outraged otherwise loyal creditors. In Tennessee their protest led to the reelection of the Republicans and in Virginia to victory for a third party, the Readjusters.
Economically the South had still not recovered from the war by the end of the 1870s. Journalist Whitelaw Reid declared in the New York Tribune of October 3, 1879, “Fifteen years have gone over the South and she still sits crushed, wretched, busy displaying and bemoaning her wounds.” The estimated value of property in the United States in 1880 was $47.64 billion, of which the South had only $5.72 billion. The average per capita wealth of the South was $376, whereas it was $1,086 in the other states. No southern state was within $300 of the national average.
Those who argued that expanded industry in the region would improve material progress described their goal as a New South in which King Coal would succeed Old King Cotton. Henry Grady spoke on the New South to the annual dinner of the New England Society in New York on December 22, 1886. He said nothing new. The ideas had been reiterated by various apologists since Benjamin H. Hill (later senator from Georgia) spoke to the Young Men’s Democratic Union of New York in 1868. But Grady was more gracious than his predecessors and his timing was better.
By the 1880s brutal memories of the Civil War had become blurred in American minds. It was at last possible to distinguish between political and personal conviction and pay tribute to the courage and dedication of the fallen in plazas, memorials, and monuments, such as those to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in New York’s Madison Square Park, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1881), and to Robert E. Lee in Richmond, by Jean A. Mercié (1890). Hence, southern investment held no conflicts of loyalty for northern businessmen.
Moreover, the end of the depression in 1879 released northern capital for southern investment. Redeemers promised investors tax exemptions and a plentiful supply of cheap labor if they would only put their money in the South. William H. Harrison, Jr., in How to Get Rich in the South; Telling What to Do, How to Do it, and the Profits to be Realized (1888), maintained there was no foreign country “that offers such tempting inducements to the capitalist for profitable investments” as did the New South.
The South’s greatest asset was its land. In 1877 five southern states repealed laws reserving federal land for homesteaders in order that they might entice investors to exploit the coal, iron, and timber. They disposed of 5.69 million acres of federal lands between 1877 and 1888. Most were acquired by northern speculators anxious to exploit their investment to the full by devastating forests and laying waste precious natural resources.
Railroad expansion encouraged investors to penetrate the hinterlands. Between 1880 and 1890 railroad tracks increased from 16,605 miles to 39,108 miles. This was a growth of 135.5 percent, 50 percent more than the national average in a period of dramatic expansion. Railroad consolidation was as much a feature of the New South as of the North. The Richmond and West Point Terminal Company determined to combine competing roads and acquired the Richmond and Danville in 1886; the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia in 1887; and the Central Railroad and Banking Company of Georgia in 1888. The entire terminal system now comprised 8,558 miles of rail and water lines and became the basis of the railroad empire of John Pierpont Morgan in 1894, when it was reorganized as the Southern Railway.
King Cotton was still alive. The leading producers of cotton were Georgia and the Carolinas. The number of cotton mills in the South rose from 161 in 1880 to 239 in 1890 and to 400 in 1900. Capital investment in cotton rose from $17.37 million in 1880 to $124.59 million in 1900. In 1880 there were 45 mills in the United States producing 7 million gallons of cottonseed oil for export. In 1890 there were 119 mills; in 1900, 357. All but four of them were in the South. The American Cotton Oil Trust, founded in 1884 and modeled on Standard Oil, controlled 88 percent of production of cottonseed oil in the country and dictated the policies and prices of the whole industry.
The New South did acquire new industries. By the late 1880s the South was producing more pig iron than was produced in the entire country before the war. Between 1876 and 1901 the production of pig iron increased seventeen times in the South compared with eight times in the country as a whole. Among southern investors in coal and iron was Henry Fairchild De Bardleben. In 1889 he consolidated his holdings in the De Bardleben Coal and Iron Company, capitalized at $10 million. He controlled 7 blast furnaces, 7 coal mines, 7 ore mines, and 900 coke ovens. “I was the eagle,” he boasted, “and I wanted to eat up all the craw-fish I could,—swallow up all the little fellows, and I did it.” In time his empire, too, became forfeit to Morgan.
Despite their well-laid plans to revive the South’s fortunes by introducing modern industry, the ruling elite found that old economic habits died hard. In the North people thought the old plantations had been broken up by the war and that, consequently, there was now a more equitable distribution of land in the South than in the old days. The census of 1880 did disclose an astonishing increase in the number of farms compared with 1860, and also that the new farms were, on average, less than half the size of the old. What had happened was that the land had been subdivided. Planters were short of cash. Instead of paying their workers wages, they devised a system of dividing produce between tenants and landlords according to contracts. Thus the system of sharecropping came into existence. It revived the culture of tobacco and cotton and allowed African-Americans to make their own independent family lives. But it also confined poor farmers, first black and soon white, to a life of penury. An Act for Encouraging Agriculture, passed by Mississippi on February 18, 1867, introduced the lien system, which was soon adopted in other states. Merchants advanced supplies for the year ahead in exchange for a lien, a mortgage on the future crop. The plaintive lament of sharecroppers was “It’s owed before it’s growed.” The injustices of the crop lien system were to become a most important base of Southern Populism.
The legend that attached itself to this stagnant agrarian economy was that the South was a place forgotten by time, its people marooned by ignorance. Contemporary stories about southern apathy are legion. One tells how a southern farmer, too lazy to gather his cotton crop, excused himself to his wife by pointing up to clouds in the sky that seemed to form the letters GPC. He said this meant, “Go Preach Christ.” But his wife was quicker than he: “Dose letters don’ mean, Go Preach Christ. Dey mean, Go Pick Cotton.” It was also charged in the North that southerners were degenerate. In another tale a district attorney in North Carolina was unable to persuade a witness to give evidence in a court case against the defendant. It was well known that the accused was a loafer and a lush, that he had beaten up his wife and his father, that he was a horse thief, and that he had killed farm animals out of malice toward their owners. How then could the witness swear that the defendant’s reputation was good in the community? “Why, Mister, a man has to do a heap wuss things than that to lose his character in our neighborhood.” In a third story the paterfamilias of a landed family in Louisiana persuaded his son to court the daughter of the only other wealthy family in town. At first all went well, but then the son turned on his father–“Shucks, Dad, I can’t marry her. She’s a virgin.” His father agreed. “That’s right, son, ain’t good enough for her own folk, ain’t good enough for us.”
Race Relations
Whatever deals were agreed to by politicians of North and South could not obscure the fact that race relations were a central and potentially explosive problem. When President Rutherford B. Hayes visited Atlanta in the autumn of 1877 he advised African-Americans that their rights and interests would be safer in the hands of southern whites if they were “let alone” by the federal government. Whites received this opinion with immense enthusiasm. “Let alone” became as much the government password in race relations as had “laissez-faire” in economics. African-Americans still voted after 1877, but in decreasing numbers, and in other respects they ceased to fulfill their duties as citizens. They remained unskilled, a ready source of cheap labor, whether as hired hands, sharecroppers, or even convicts. By 1880 there were 6,580,793 African-Americans in the United States, and their expanding numbers increased their problems.
Many migrated from place to place, and some moved permanently to the North and West. Benjamin (“Pap”) Singleton was among those farmers who led an exodus of African-Americans from the South to Kansas in 1879. More than 40,000 sharecroppers left Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas for “the freedom lands.” At first Kansas welcomed the migrants. The Topeka Commonwealth of April 7, 1879, recalling the fight to make Kansas a free state, said that African-American migration to Kansas was a fitting sequel to it. But when the state realized the scale of the migration and the destitute state of the newcomers, it sent special agents to the South to dissuade more African-Americans from leaving. The old Freedmen’s Relief Association raised $25,000 in cash and clothing, and also household goods worth $100,000 to relieve distressed African-Americans. In time, African-Americans found work in mines and railroads, and some acquired land.
The gulf between the races in the South was so great that at first legal segregation was superfluous. In such diverse public institutions as schools, hospitals, and asylums, custom made it routine. This was, however, better than absolute exclusion. Moreover, in places of public accommodation, such as parks, theaters, and streetcars, race relations were not fixed. By 1890 a new generation of African-Americans had grown up who had never experienced slavery. They were less likely to accept white racism. Thus in the 1890s variety and fluidity were abandoned as state after state adopted rigid segregation in a series of so-called Jim Crow laws. “Jim Crow” was the title of a minstrel song of 1830 that presented African-Americans as childlike and inferior.
In 1890 Congress considered two bills to revive African-American suffrage in the South. The Blair Federal Aid to Education bill was intended to improve public schools so as to enable more African-Americans to qualify in literacy tests. The Lodge Federal Elections bill, supported by President Benjamin Harrison, authorized federal supervision of elections to prevent frauds against African-American voters. It passed the House by the close vote of 155 to 149. But it was never reported out of committee in the Senate. Senator Don Cameron of Pennsylvania explained why:
Whatever form it may assume I am opposed to [the bill] in principle and in its details. The South is now resuming a quiet condition. Northern capital has been flowing into the South in great quantities, manufacturing establishments have been created and are in full operation, and a community of commercial interests is fast obliterating sectional lines. . . . The election law would disturb this desirable condition, and produce ill-feeling between the North and the South.
The South reacted against the new tide of African-American resentment with more repression. Mississippi was the first state to disenfranchise African-Americans by a constitutional convention in 1890. It was followed by South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina (by an amendment) in 1900, Alabama in 1901, Virginia in 1901 and 1902, Georgia (by amendment) in 1908, and the new state of Oklahoma in 1910. Four more states achieved the same ends without revising their constitutions: Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas. Three pernicious and sophistical arguments were advanced by the proponents of African-American disenfranchisement. The removal of the African-American vote, they said, would end corruption at elections. It would prevent African-Americans from holding the balance of power in contests between rival factions of whites. And it would oblige African-Americans to abandon their false hopes of betterment and instead make them accept their true social place. As a result, race relations would steadily improve.
The Mississippi constitution of 1890 set the pattern. It required a poll tax of $2 from prospective voters at registration. Those who intended to vote at elections had to present their receipt at the polls. Anyone who mislaid his receipt forfeited his vote. More insidious was the requirement that in order to register, prospective voters had to be “able to read the Constitution, or to understand the Constitution when read.” Racist officials used these ordinances to discriminate in favor of poor illiterate whites and against African-Americans.
The trees bore strange fruit at least once a generation in many southern towns in the late nineteenth century. For those who took part, lynching was an event to await, to attend, and finally to record as this bizarre photo of a lynch party of 1882 and its unfortunate victim, MacManus, suggests. However, in time perhaps the participants felt some shame and wanted to obscure their part in the outrage; the Library of Congress has no record of the supposed crime of the victim or the place of the execution. (Library of Congress.)
The ruling elites in other states approved of the new Mississippi plan. But they proceeded cautiously. The Lodge bill of 1890 indicated a flickering northern interest in African-American suffrage that they did not intend to fan into a flame. Moreover, Democrats were now in competition with Populists for votes, and they did not want to excite agrarian radicals into preserving African-American suffrage by incorporating a specific measure to ensure its survival in a new constitution. The various states borrowed from one another. In doing so they improved on previous attempts to disenfranchise African-Americans. For example, Louisiana believed that the “understanding clause” was so obviously suspect that it could be invalidated in a court case. Therefore it hit on the “grandfather clause” as being more secure legally. Only those who had had a grandfather on the electoral roll of 1867 could vote.
These devices were nothing if not effective. In Louisiana 130,000 African-Americans were registered to vote in 1890; in 1900 there were 5,000; in 1904 there were only 1,342. In Alabama there were 181,000 African-American voters in 1890; in 1900 there were 3,000. In the South as a whole participation by African-Americans fell by 62 percent. In 1900 Ben (“Pitchfork”) Tillman of South Carolina boasted on the floor of the Senate, “We have done our best. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.” Despite concessions to poor whites, white participation in elections also declined—by 26 percent. Thus, while on average 73 percent of men voted in the 1890s, only 30 percent did so in the early 1900s. Opposition parties dwindled away, and the Democrats were left undisputed champions of the South.
Social segregation was also upheld by the Supreme Court. Its most notorious decision came in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Louisiana state law required “separate but equal” accommodations for African-Americans and whites on public carriers and provided a penalty for passengers sitting on the wrong car. Homer Plessy was an octoroon so pale that he usually passed for white, but when he sat in a white car he was arrested. He argued that the state law of Louisiana violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Justice John Harlan of Kentucky agreed with him, maintaining, “Our constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Moreover, “what can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which in fact proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?” But he was overruled by the other eight justices who approved the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Justice Henry B. Brown of Michigan, speaking for the majority on May 18, 1896, ruled with corrosive racist candor, “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.” Not until 1954 in the celebrated case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka did the Court repudiate the heinous doctrine of “separate but equal.” In the meantime, in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) the Court went further and approved the Mississippi plan for disenfranchising African-Americans.
Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), principal of the Tuskegee Institute and prominent spokesman on African-American affairs at the turn of the century. His so-called Atlanta Compromise of 1895 was interpreted by African-American activists as a capitulation to white racism, but Washington moved with consummate skill by playing interest, sentiment, and concession in order to win essential white financial support for the institutions he recommended. (Library of Congress.)
Not satisfied with depriving African-Americans of their civil rights, vicious whites also sought their lives. It was said the trees of all southern towns bore strange fruit at least once in a generation. White mobs took the law into their own hands and lynched African-American scapegoats, especially dissidents, as examples to others. Lynching peaked in popularity between 1889 and 1898 when, on average, there were 187 lynchings a year in the United States, four-fifths of which were in the South. A common charge against African-American victims of lynch law was that they had raped white women. The research of African-American journalist Ida Wells showed otherwise. Yet newspapers such as the Enquirer emphasized the supposed crime and gave detailed accounts of the atrocious punishment in order to titillate the public and improve circulation. On February 2, 1893, for example, it disclosed how an African-American accused of raping and murdering a four-year-old girl in Paris, Texas, was burned to death. First his eyes were gouged out with a red hot poker. The Enquirer described this atrocity as “unparalleled punishment” for “unparalleled crime.”
African-Americans were displaced from their traditional trades and confined to menial jobs in the towns. Those who did succeed in entering the worlds of business and the professions were obliged by white society to adopt its attitudes in order to retain their hard-won position. Their undeclared leader was Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Industrial Institute, Alabama. Washington was invited to speak at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta on September 18, 1895, by businessmen who recognized his remarkable powers of expression. His address was one of the most effective political speeches of the age, a model fusion of substance and style.
In what was later called the Atlanta Compromise he abandoned the postwar ideal of racial equality in favor of increased economic opportunity for African-Americans. He preached patience, proposed submission, and emphasized material progress. Those African-Americans who rejected the Atlanta Compromise, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, considered it a capitulation to blatant racism. But Washington was in fact telling white society that African-Americans accepted the Protestant work ethic. His most widely reported remark was a subtle metaphor about racial harmony: “In all things social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Washington’s emphasis on racial pride, economic progress, and industrial education encouraged white politicians and businessmen to subsidize the African-American institutions he recommended. Through his close connections with business he was able to raise the funds necessary to create the National Negro Business League in 1900. Moreover, he used money, not to advance acquiescence, but to fight segregation. Others sought a more open insistence on racial pride. In 1890 T. Thomas Fortune, an African-American journalist of New York, persuaded forty African-American protection leagues in cities across the country to join in a national body, the Afro-American League. Its aim was to reverse restrictions on African-Americans. It was, however, difficult to maintain cohesion among contributing groups, and the league declined until it was revived in 1898 as the Afro-American Council.
For those who sought improvement the struggle seemed interminable, as another southern anecdote makes clear. St. Peter would admit good men to heaven only if they could pose him a question he was unable to answer. Thus he refused otherwise eminently well qualified cardinals and rabbis who asked obscure and pedantic theological questions. But when an African-American Baptist minister wanted to know “When’s us black folks gonna get together?” he was stumped for an answer and let him in through the pearly gates.