America would travel lighter and faster once it jettisoned Reconstruction from its policy agenda. The South would become for the rest of the nation increasingly distant and more exotic, shrouded in perpetual moonlight, covered with magnolia groves, and unmoved by the winds of time and progress. The ritual of disengagement began with the end of the war, but markedly different perspectives on what the war accomplished kept the South in the public consciousness for more than a decade after the conflict ended. The election of 1876 provided the means for ending the nation’s involvement in its tar baby region for another century.
President Grant toyed with the idea of an unprecedented third term, but very few of his Republican colleagues encouraged him. Scandal had touched close to his administration and its efforts in the South. Certain sectors of the economy continued to limp along, and the Republicans believed a clean slate, both literally and figuratively, would be a more prudent choice. Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, an important state to hold in the fall elections, became the party’s nominee for president. Hayes was a thrice-wounded Civil War general who had been active in anti-slavery politics before the war. His main attribute was that he was offensive to no one. Henry Adams called him, not unfairly, a “third-rate nonentity.” The most interesting qualification of his running mate, lawyer William A. Wheeler of New York, was that public speaking “in the presence of crowds” made him ill. The party platform was notable for the absence of anything substantive concerning the South, though Hayes pledged himself to the principle of “local self government,” which everyone took to mean an end to Republican Reconstruction.45
The Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York, had battled corruption within his own party in New York City. Like many other New York politicians, he had a nickname: “the Great Forecloser,” because of his legal work for bankrupt railroads. Republicans had other names for him, such as “Slippery Sam” and “Tammany Sammy.” An early opponent of Tweed, he became governor on a reform platform vowing to clean up politics throughout the state. His running mate was Governor Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, the first Democratic governor of a northern state after the Civil War.46
The Democrats hammered on the themes of corruption and persistent economic problems, while the Republicans continued to wave the bloody shirt, though they avoided discussion about the rights of African Americans. Grant’s refusal to help the embattled Chamberlain in South Carolina reflected Republican campaign strategy. On election night, it appeared that Tilden had won the presidency. General Daniel Sickles, who had given his leg and nearly his life for the Union cause, limped into Republican headquarters in New York City on his way home on election night. Nearly a decade earlier, Andrew Johnson had fired him from his commander’s post in the Carolinas for insisting on voting rights for African Americans. For Sickles, the Democratic Party was the party of treason. As he dolefully watched the returns come in on the telegraph ticker, he suddenly realized that Hayes had a chance despite Tilden’s lead in the popular vote. If Hayes did not lose any more states, and if he picked up the electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—all three potentially Republican states because of the large black vote—he would become the next president.
Sickles was back at Gettysburg, ordering his men to the charge, only this time it was the telegraph that he commanded, firing off messages to party leaders in the contested southern states over the signature of Republican National Chairman Zachariah Chandler, who was too drunk to function. Republican election boards in each of the three states dutifully followed their commander’s directive and invalidated enough Democratic ballots—typically in those counties prone to Democratic paramilitary violence—to declare Hayes the winner. No doubt the Louisiana election board took a close look at East Feliciana Parish, where, despite a black voting majority, not one Republican vote was cast. The Red Shirts discouraged Republicans from voting in South Carolina, and in Florida, among the ruses engineered by Democrats was to pass out Tilden ballots under the Republican emblem to trick illiterate blacks into voting for the Democrat. Tilden partisans in Florida also stopped a train going through a town and voted all the white passengers as local residents. In New Orleans, Republicans uncovered ten thousand Democratic votes by nonexistent voters. Outraged Democrats, beaten at their own game, challenged the results. Thus the election was taken out of the hands of the voters and into the arms of the dealmakers.
The outcome, known as the Compromise of 1877, was that Hayes would receive the contested electoral votes and become the nineteenth president of the United States, the last of the federal troops would be withdrawn from the South (they did not actually leave, but were confined to their barracks), and the federal government and northern investors would rebuild the southern economy. Democrats and Republicans reached the compromise at the home of James Wormley, one of Washington’s wealthiest black residents. The last element of the bargain, concerning the South’s economic development, was never fulfilled, and the military withdrawal was symbolic. The South’s real victory was a permanent end to any threat of federal meddling in southern affairs. Hayes had assured Louisiana Democrats, “I believe, and I have always believed that the intelligence of any country ought to govern it.” It was a sentiment many northerners shared.47
Grant sighed a great relief as well. His administration would end on a quiet rather than on a contentious note. Looking back on the Reconstruction debacle at the end of his term, he confided to his cabinet that black suffrage was probably a mistake. “It had done the Negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.” Northerners agreed. They were pleased to see the South and, especially, blacks disappear as an issue. E. L. Godkin announced, “The negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Blacks in the South recognized the end of a noble but doomed experiment. Henry Adams, a black leader in Louisiana, despaired, “The whole South—every state in the South had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Redemption at last. Reconstruction did not formally end with the triumph or failure of a particular policy but with a deal. The Republicans got the White House, the North got rid of the South and its fractious population, and the South went its own peculiar way.48
Alexander Stephens, now a congressman from Georgia, summarized the southern point of view. Though a Democrat, Stephens assured Hayes he supported the compromise. “What,” Stephens asked, “do the [southern] people care who governs? All they care for is a good government.” As for blacks, Stephens dismissed them entirely. “[The Negro] is nothing but a machine, an instrument in the hands of the politicians to vote as they want.… He is not to be taken into account in making up the estimate.”49
Most writers have agreed that Reconstruction failed the freedmen. If so, it was a preordained failure. Given the nation’s racial attitudes before, during, and after the Civil War, permanent concessions to black equality were unrealistic. Only the baldest defiance of white southerners brought the Radical program to fruition, and then for only a short while. Northerners wanted to put the war behind them, and the incessant reminders drifting up from the South at first alarmed, then annoyed, and finally bored them. Mary Livermore, who worked during the war for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, found her northern neighbors during the postwar “turn[ing] with relief to the employments of peaceful life, eager to forget the fearful years of battle and carnage.” As long as white southerners could see and feel, however, they could not forget. W. E. B. DuBois summarized the Reconstruction experience for southern blacks. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” DuBois was only partially correct, however. Reconstruction failed the freedman, but it also failed the South and the nation.50
For some blacks, that “moment” lasted longer. By 1870, blacks in the South owned $68,528,200 worth of property, an average estate of only $408 per owner, but an increase of 240 percent over 186
0. By 1880, one in five black farmers in the South owned his farm; in the Upper South, it was one out of three. In Virginia, 43 percent of black farmers owned their farms—more than twice as many African American farm owners than there were in the entire South in 1860. It is true that many of these farms were small, less than half the average acreage of white farms; and it was also true that black farms were worth less per acre than white-owned acreage. It was an impressive showing, however, for a people recently out of bondage.51
More significant gains occurred in education. In 1865, less than 10 percent of southern blacks were literate. Five years later, that figure had climbed to 18.6 percent, but by 1890, 55 percent of southern blacks were literate. American blacks ranked far ahead of former slaves in other post-emancipation societies such as Trinidad, Haiti, and British Guiana. Black literacy rates compared favorably with some European countries as well. In 1900, Spain had a literacy rate of 37 percent, and Italy, 52 percent. When northern missionaries left due to fear or lack of funds, black teachers took over and schools persisted. By the early 1890s, there were 150 black newspapers in the South.52
These figures indicated that freedom itself was enough to hope; that adversity discouraged but did not paralyze the freedmen. Some considered emigration—to Liberia, Central America, or the Caribbean. Roughly twenty-five thousand blacks, “Exodusters,” they were called, emigrated to Kansas. These were small movements, however, born of great frustration. Most blacks stayed in the South, at least until race relations worsened in the 1890s and more opportunities opened in the North after the turn of the twentieth century.53
For all the advances, however, the sense of betrayal prevailed, not only for the lost promise of equal citizenship but also for the memory of Reconstruction. It was not enough that whites succeeded in subjugating blacks in politics and on the job; the prevailing memory of Reconstruction justified those positions. “Yankee oppression and black misrule” summarized the white memory of the era. The constitutional amendments, the presence of federal troops, and the disfranchisement of some whites provided the evidence for oppression. The courts, however, severely restricted the application of the amendments to black civil and voting rights; most federal troops were on the Plains, not in the South—at the time of the Hamburg massacre, Governor Chamberlain could call upon ten federal soldiers in the vicinity; and only a small proportion of the white electorate was affected by suffrage restrictions, which, in any case, were lifted in 1872. Black misrule is even a weaker argument, as African Americans formed a majority in only one state legislature. What whites objected to was black freedom, the right to vote, the right to hold office, to serve on juries, in short, to exercise their rights as citizens. Remembering Reconstruction as a “Tragic Era” had significant policy and social consequences. It froze white thinking on the subject and justified continued restrictions on black suffrage and civil rights. Dissent from the prevailing view was an attack on redemption, and an attack on redemption was an attack against faith and heritage.54
On February 16, 1916, a group of white leaders gathered for a ceremony in North Augusta, South Carolina, formerly known as Hamburg, the site of a deadly confrontation forty years earlier. They had come to dedicate a monument to Thomas McKie Merriweather, the only white man killed during that event. Daniel S. Henderson, a state legislator from the district, addressed the crowd: “We are to Unveil today a Monument, erected by the General Assembly of the State and admiring friends to the memory of one who shed the first blood that started that revolution of 1876, which redeemed the Palmetto State from the yoke of the African and the stranger, and which established beyond a question that this is a white man’s country, to be ruled by white men forever.” By 1916, stone and bronze tributes to the Confederacy and the Redemption covered the southern landscape. Blacks were as absent in these representations as they were in the meaningful participation in southern life.55
There were opposing views. Blacks, Frederick Douglass understood, fought a losing battle of memory, but he urged them to fight with words for what they could not win with arms. “Well the nation may forget,” he noted in 1888, “it may shut its eyes to the past, and frown upon any who may do otherwise, but the colored people of this country are bound to keep the past in lively memory till justice shall be done them.” The compulsion for national reconciliation created a moral equivalency that buried the injustices of Reconstruction and the causes of the war. On Memorial Day 1893, a black newspaper in Kansas asked its readers:
Why should we praise the gray, and blue,
And honor them alike?
The one was false, the other true—
One wrong, the other right.56
John R. Lynch, a black former Mississippi congressman, wrote The Facts of Reconstruction (1913) to counter the prevailing white interpretations. He was, after all, an eyewitness to the era’s events. Congressional Reconstruction, he wrote, was not a crime but a plan that “could have saved to the country the fruits of the victory that had been won on the battlefield.” That it did not succeed was less the fault of the freedmen than of the violent resistance of the South’s white population. Two decades later, W. E. B. DuBois published his extensive study of the period, Black Reconstruction (1935), taking issue especially with the characterization of southern Republican governments as corrupt and incompetent. These works of careful scholarship did not change national public opinion, or the views of white professional historians. Two years after Lynch’s book appeared, D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation thrilled audiences across the country with its story of redemption and reconciliation. One year after the publication of DuBois’s study, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind became an instant bestseller, and three years later, one of the most popular motion pictures of all time. In Mitchell’s defense, she had read thoroughly the works of leading historians of the era, and the book reflected the latest white scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Harper’s recognized, as early as 1873, what would become a chronic frustration for blacks and the interpretation of Reconstruction: “The colored race has never yet been permitted to tell its wrongs.” That was true well into the next century.57
Though most northerners willingly adopted and even enhanced the southern memory of the war and the Reconstruction era, some refused to acquiesce in this alchemy. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who had grown to adulthood during the Reconstruction era, recalled the great optimism in the North in the decade after the war. He decried, however, the tendency of northerners to accept uncritically the southern perspective on the war and Reconstruction. “We should think ill of the Southern people if they did not” cherish their own institutions and patriots, but “that which is most praiseworthy in Southerners is discreditable in a Northerner.”58
Most northerners cherished the manufactured South precisely because it was not the North: a genteel, rural, homogeneous, and harmonious region of languid days and starry nights where people moved as softly as the breeze on a summer evening and where paternalism counted more than profit. It was a docile South, uncompetitive economically and unthreatening politically. If the North represented Reason, the South was Romance. Northerners shared, however, the racial beliefs of southern whites. The immigrants, outspoken women, and discontented workers in their midst provided the flash of recognition of how it was to live among an inferior population.
Travel guides prepared by northerners depicted the South as a stage set, a foreign land with hospitable people and quaint customs. Take a train journey south and see “the negro huts along the way, with a grinning turbaned colored woman standing in each doorway.” Such a scene “apprises the Northerner that he is certainly ‘right smart down South.’” Southern women were more beautiful and comely than their northern counterparts. Cosmopolitan writer Marion Baker criticized “the masculinity and independence of too many Northern women,” finding them “less charming, less womanly” than their southern sisters. Another editor rhapsodized, “The young ladies of the South are, with very few exceptions, beautiful
, and we see no sickly, ugly or consumptive-looking females, such as are to be found in all similar gatherings in the North.” Only when tens of thousands of northerners came south during World War II and when African Americans began to protest for their rights as Americans did America scrape away the fairy-tale veneer to expose an ugly, festering secret of racial bigotry, economic stagnation, political repression, and religious self-righteousness.59
Robert Penn Warren called the memory of the South’s victimization in the war and Reconstruction “the Great Alibi,” an excuse white southerners offered for their poverty, ignorance, and peculiar race relations. The war and the Reconstruction provided the white South with the cover to restore a facsimile of the Old South, and the North obliged. Even New South promoters such as D. A. Tompkins and Richard H. Edmonds acknowledged the seamlessness between Old and New Souths. Edmonds chided those who wondered if “the New South is a new creation altogether different from the Old South.” Such views, Edmonds argued, were completely false. Using the Darwinian rhetoric familiar to his time, he asserted, “The South of today is no novel creation. It is an evolution.” Edmonds’s preferred phrase for the South after the war was the “revived South.”60
Not all white southerners adhered to the redemption myth, though they dissented at their peril. Ellen Glasgow, the noted novelist from Richmond, came of age in the late nineteenth century when the myth attained full bloom. She knew it was a lie. “I hated—I had always hated—the inherent falseness in much Southern tradition.” The South was a society of appearances. If the North represented itself as the paragon of reality, the South was a dream province. No less a southern heroine than Varina Howell Davis, the wife of the former Confederate president, recognized the skewed memories of the war and its aftermath. “Between us,” she confided to Mary Chesnut, “no one is so tired of Confederate history as the Confederates—they do not want to tell the truth or to hear it.”61
America Aflame Page 73
