The Republicans were the heirs of the Whigs. Even their anti-slavery positions related to their desire to develop the West and create a national economy. This is not to say that Republicans did not genuinely abhor slavery on moral grounds. Once the war abolished slavery, however, party members were anxious to use their legislative power to enhance the nation’s prosperity. A new era was at hand.
Many northerners agreed. Grant won; the South had voted; Reconstruction was over. Albion Tourgée recalled the feeling. “It was all over—the war, reconstruction, the consideration of the old questions. Now all was peace and harmony. The South must take care of itself now. The nation had done its part: it had freed the slaves, given them the ballot, opened the courts to them, and put them in the way of self-protection and self-assertion.” The old, obstructive South was finally gone. “For three-quarters of a century,” Tourgée explained, “the South had been the ‘old Man of the Sea’ to the young Republic; by a simple trick of political legerdemain he was now got rid of for ever.” The result? “Yankee-land could now bend its undivided energies to its industries and commerce.”39
Indeed, it seemed as if the South had found its political equilibrium. The Republican governments turned out to be moderate, not radical. There were no schemes to redistribute land, no legislation that particularly favored African Americans as a class, and no laws passed mandating interracial marriage. As the New York Times wrote approvingly, the black lawmakers had been “extremely moderate and modest in their demands,” had “been scrupulous in their respect for all the rights of property,” and had “in all respects given proof of a capacity to take part in the carrying on of a Republican Government, that can but astonish those who know the condition in which they have till lately been kept.” Seven of the former eleven Confederate states had adopted new constitutions and elected Republican legislatures. Congress readmitted those seven states into the Union. By January 1869, the Times could note that “a healthy prosperity” was abroad in the South. Now that the election had put to rest the old issues of the war, southerners “are fast emerging from poverty and depression, and are prepared to profit by the lessons of a painful experience.” In May 1869, the first national celebration of Decoration, or Memorial, Day occurred as Union and Confederate veterans exchanged ceremonies and tended the graves of their former enemies. In August, the Gettysburg Memorial Association invited former Union and Confederate soldiers to the battlefield to mark out the lines of battle.40
But former Confederates did not reconcile themselves to the black men in their midst, indicating that a winter truce rather than a genuine peace had taken hold. The Georgia legislature expelled its duly elected black representatives. The Meridian (Miss.) Mercury issued a warning common across the South: “We must make the negro understand we are the men we were when we held him in abject bondage, and make him feel that when forbearance ceases to be a virtue he has aroused a power that will control him or destroy him.” The Nashville Republican Banner was even more explicit in its threat of violence, evoking a chilling memory. “So far as the white native citizens of this State may be compelled to take part in it they will be very careful throughout the sanguinary carnival which would naturally ensue to remember Fort Pillow in act as well as word, and ‘Throughout the bloody conflict / Seek the white man, not the black.’”41
The persistent violence in the South sent congressional Republicans back to reconstruction policy. Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, barring race as a test for voting. The amendment said nothing about a state’s right to determine requirements for voting other than race, a loophole that southern states would exploit over the next century to limit black voter participation. The amendment was also silent, once again, about woman suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton charged that the amendment created an “aristocracy of sex.” In an appeal brimming with ethnic and racial animosity, Stanton warned that “if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, African, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters … awake to the danger … and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”42
The reaction of the northern Republican press to ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870 was positive, though accompanied by the conviction that this was the last salvo in the fight for freedmen’s rights. Pronouncing the end of Reconstruction was becoming a latter-day version of “On to Richmond.” The Chicago Tribune expressed relief that at last, blacks had “merged politically with the rest of the people.” Now, however, the black man “has to run the race of life, dependent, like all others, upon his own energy, ability, and worth.” The New York World, a Democratic newspaper, agreed. The freedman had been “raised as high as he can be put by any action other than his own.”43
Despite such caveats, this was an epochal moment. There are judges who insist the Constitution is color-blind. It is not. Congress placed the three Reconstruction amendments into the Constitution to free and then establish the full rights of citizenship for African Americans. After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Frederick Douglass exulted, “The black man is free, the black man is a citizen, the black man is enfranchised, and this by the organic law of the land.… Never was revolution more complete.”44
The Ku Klux Klan remained unimpressed and unbowed. Reconstruction would not be over until they redeemed the South from Republican and black rule. Violence escalated as the 1870 elections approached. Democrats registered gains in the North, not unusual in an off-year election cycle, but also made significant inroads in the South, redeeming several southern states after the Klan and similar groups suppressed the black vote. Republican administrations in Texas and Arkansas successfully fought back against the Klan. Governor Edmund J. Davis of Texas, for example, organized a special force of two hundred state policemen to round up Klansmen. Between 1870 and 1872, Davis’s force arrested six thousand men and broke the Klan in Texas. But other governors hesitated to enforce laws directed at the Klan, fearing that this would further alienate whites. Democrats regained power in North Carolina after the state’s Republican governor enraged white voters by calling out the state militia to counter white violence during the election of 1870.45
Congress, in response to the violence, ventured once again to pass protective legislation, in this case the Enforcement Act of 1870, which authorized the federal government to appoint supervisors in states that failed to protect voting rights. When the attacks continued, Congress followed with a second, more sweeping measure, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 permitting federal authorities, with military assistance if necessary, to arrest and prosecute members of groups that denied a citizen’s civil rights if state authorities failed to do so. The act outlawed the Klan, but Klansmen merely reappeared in organizations under different names.
Political violence was not the only obstacle confronting southern blacks. The daily strain of living among neighbors who wished to thwart your ambition, limit your education, and isolate you was enormous. If a black person carved out a modicum of success in this harsh environment, the ill treatment would likely escalate. White southerners turned the American dream on its head as applied to African Americans. Work hard and get hurt. A Republican sheriff in Mississippi explained, “Education amounts to nothing, good behavior counts for nothing, even money cannot buy for a colored man or woman decent treatment and the comforts that white people claim and can obtain.” Charles Sumner attempted to address this problem by introducing a civil rights bill in 1871 to ensure blacks’ equal access to juries and public accommodations. Congressmen from both parties and sections, however, believed that there were sufficient protections already in place and the rest was up to blacks themselves. The bill veered too close to mandating a social equality few whites, north or south, were willing to accept.46
Northerners had wanted to put the Civil War to rest as soon as Grant and Lee signed the surrender documents, but white southerners insisted on continuing the conflict by other means. Satisfied that they
had honored those who had fallen and the cause for which they fought by surrounding the freedmen with constitutional amendments and protective legislation, northerners left the land of war for the garden of peace. The array of economic opportunities in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation set northern minds to shaping the future rather than sorting out the past. They hoped the South would now follow a similar course. The New York Times wrote the prologue to the new era in the New South. “The bulk of the people in the reconstructed States are realizing the reward of labor; they are fast emerging from poverty and depression, and are prepared to profit by the lessons of a painful experience.” The South would eventually become a version of the North, much as Indians should become versions of western white farmers, and blacks versions of white laborers. All lesser incarnations, but given the racial limitations of the red and the black they were consonant with northern visions of stable and prosperous societies.47
The Republican governments elected under the new southern state constitutions seemed to herald the fulfillment of such prophecy. The new regimes promoted an activist government that raised taxes, built infrastructure, established charitable institutions, funded public school systems for both races, and reduced the power of local elites by transferring appointment responsibilities to the state. This last policy tilted the local law enforcement system to a more evenhanded dispensation of justice. Republican governments in the South also embarked on extensive programs of economic development. Between 1868 and 1872, Republicans rebuilt the South’s railroads and constructed an additional thirty-three hundred miles of track.
There were many smaller, symbolic moments that did not escape the attention of blacks or whites. There was the scene in the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina, where black lawmakers sat at the very desks of those who had passed the secession ordinance in November 1860. There was Robert Smalls, who had commandeered a Confederate vessel and delivered it to Union troops, and who now took his oath of office as a United States congressman from South Carolina. And there was Hiram Revels, born a free black in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who became a minister, then a Union army chaplain, and, after the war, a pastor at a church in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1870, he became the first black person to become a U.S. senator, taking the seat once occupied by Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the South had turned upside down.
For many blacks, the new regimes were almost a second emancipation. A Freedmen’s Bureau official in the Virginia Piedmont noted in late 1868 that three years earlier, the freedmen were “abject and fearful in the presence of the master class.” Now they were “much less abject and more settled, ambitious and industrious.” They will “generally resist if attacked.” It was, as W. E. B. DuBois would note at a later time, “a Golden Moment,” for African Americans, and for America generally.48
It would only be a moment. The South could not long remain a region teetering on its “Apex.” White and black southerners would not follow the northern script. The transforming national economy held increasing public attention, not only for its promise but also soon for its excesses. Immigrants and urban workers in the North did not share either the profits or the buoyant optimism of the middle and entrepreneurial classes. New scientific theories reinforced racial prejudices and questioned the role of an activist government. Northerners did not become indifferent about the South or about the freedmen. They came to feel that disengagement was best for both and for the nation. It was more important to follow one’s own dreams than to protect those of others. A new era was at hand. The war was over, and so was Reconstruction. Stephen Douglas finally got his railroad built, a sure sign that the old issues no longer mattered. Only the Indians now remained in the way, the last obstacle to fulfilling the destiny of the indivisible nation.
CHAPTER 19
THE GOLDEN SPIKE
THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD seemed to live a charmed, if precarious, life. After surviving blizzards, subzero temperatures, deadly Indian raids, financing fiascos, and attacks by grizzlies and cougars, workers readied the last rails. Dignitaries were converging on Promontory Point, Utah, for a grand celebration uniting East and West. As the appointed day grew closer, however, luck seemed to have run dry. The Central Pacific Railroad steamed out of Sacramento on May 5, 1869, with California governor Leland Stanford aboard. He planned to link up with a Union Pacific train heading west from Omaha. The trip from Sacramento to Promontory Point would take two days and allow Governor Stanford to preside over the celebration scheduled for Saturday, May 8.1
The locomotive carrying Stanford’s party from Sacramento carefully climbed to the crest of the Sierra Nevada, providing magnificent vistas over canyons and pine forests. The notables enjoyed a lavish lunch at Donner Lake, near where more than two decades earlier, less appealing fare had been on the menu. Their appetites sated, the group resumed their travel. In the Truckee Valley ahead, Chinese lumbermen felled trees along the tracks. They had not been informed about the unscheduled train about to disrupt their work. A gigantic felled pine lay across the tracks, and though the engineer was able to slow the locomotive sufficiently to avoid injuring his passengers, the log disabled the engine.
Stanford and his party waited for another locomotive, which arrived in due course, and the journey continued. As they crossed the forty-mile desert between the Truckee River and the Sink of the Humboldt, the old forty-niners among the group pointed out the places where their livestock had died and the numerous poisonous streams that killed man and beast. Thus enlightened, the dignitaries retired to their comfortable beds as the train lumbered across Nevada.
Things were not so peaceful at Promontory Point. While the inbound VIPs slept, the Chinese laborers rioted, not against management but against each other. The workers belonged to one of two companies that had brought them from China to work on America’s railroads. A dispute erupted over the purported default of a fifteen-dollar payment from one company to another. The partisans of each group, “armed with every conceivable weapon,” went at each other, threatening to turn the impending celebration into a civil war.
The warring Chinese laborers belonged to different companies representing distinctive dialects and districts. These groups first appeared in San Francisco in 1851. Like European immigrant mutual benefit societies, the companies provided an array of services for their members such as job placement, housing, welfare and burial services, and facilitated connections with homeland families. Relations were often frosty between the companies. The immigrants exhibited fierce loyalties to their associations. The Central Pacific Railroad hired more than ten thousand Chinese laborers, who brought their affiliations to the construction site. The laborers generally worked out differences peacefully, even banding together in a successful strike for higher wages. But the stress of finishing the road in time for the celebration frayed tempers and now jeopardized the party.
Things were also not peaceful for the Union Pacific heading west. Thomas C. Durant, vice president of the road, had an uneventful journey from Omaha until he reached Piedmont, Wyoming. Hundreds of workers surrounded his railroad car demanding their wages. They had not received their pay in months and, accordingly, were holding Durant and other executives hostage. The disgruntled laborers detached the locomotive, which went on to Utah, leaving Durant stationary in southwestern Wyoming. The strikers told the telegrapher they would hang him if he wired for assistance. They ordered Durant to telegraph for their wages.
As the delayed Central Pacific party rolled into Promontory Point early on May 8 ready to stage the ceremony, their counterparts remained under siege in Wyoming. San Francisco and Sacramento had planned mammoth celebrations on May 8, complete with brass bands, steam whistles, fire bells, and a grand parade. In San Francisco, soldiers would fire cannon from Alcatraz, presumably not in the direction of the city. Not wishing to spoil the party, the two cities carried off the celebrations on May 8 for an event that had not yet occurred, if it would occur at all.
It was a frustrating lead-in to an event that woul
d, Americans believed, reverberate around the world. The project was a tribute to the engineering skills and creativity of the railroad builders who organized the construction of the road, coordinating supplies and labor over a thousand miles of continent, often under hostile conditions. And it came in ahead of schedule, at least until now.
Building a transcontinental railroad had become an obsession in the North during the Civil War. With the future of the Union in doubt, the Pacific railroad symbolized hope for a reunited nation. As much as the war’s outcome, the railroad would render the nation indivisible, binding Americans together. The transcontinental railroad would hasten the settlement of the West by northerners. Their hard work, skills, and ingenuity would transform the western wilderness into a region dotted with productive towns and farms to make America “the greatest nation of the earth.” The future of the nation depended on sealing the relationship between East and West. “Unless the relations between the East and the West shall be the most perfect and most intimate which can be established,” the nation would “break on the crest of the Rocky Mountains.”2
More accurately, the railroad would connect the West to the North. This was a pact for the future, for economic development and settlement. The South’s rebellion, and the insistence of its majority white population to reestablish a past the rest of the nation had discredited, would fix the region as the American outlier for nearly a century: poor in a nation of plenty; ignorant in an enlightened country; and mired in a one-party political system and a biracial society in a diverse, competitive America. The South became the nation’s place to leave. After the turn of the twentieth century, the greatest internal migration in American history occurred as more than twenty-eight million southerners donated their ambitions and their children to the rest of the nation.3
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