Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  According to the historian C. Vann Woodward, Southern Democrats in the Senate had decided not to filibuster (in the modern sense of the word) but to go along with the findings of the federal electoral commission in return for unwritten concessions: that Hayes would remove federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana and in so doing effectively end what the South regarded as the military occupation that had helped hamstring the region’s development. Hayes allegedly also promised to give Southerners more patronage positions, to appoint a Southerner to the cabinet, to shift more appropriations southward, to secure James Garfield the position of Speaker of the House, and to provide the Texas and Pacific Railroad with federal subsidies. In the end, Garfield did not get the job as speaker and the railroad wasn’t built, but apparently Hayes hoped that his other unwritten concessions to white Southerners would generally bolster the fortunes of the Republicans, who had been losing seats in the House to the Democrats, and would further undermine the power of the Radicals left in the party.

  Rumors of a deal notwithstanding, there were more important reasons for Democrats to accede to the electoral commission’s judgment: many Southerners believed it was simply too dangerous not to comply. For what choice did they have? Having just fought a major war, leaders such as Lucius Lamar said he certainly would not take to the streets against Republicans merely to seat Tilden. Southern Democrats had little confidence in their temporizing Northern counterparts, whom they considered too weak and far too devoted to the almighty dollar to stand firmly by them, should they become belligerent. And they were more concerned about home rule and local self-government than about who won the White House. In the North, Hayes supporters such as Carl Schurz had been promising them just that: home rule and federal noninterference. As far as Hayes was concerned, that was no concession; it was the course he preferred.

  The bargain struck became known as the Compromise of 1877, and if it was a compromise at all, it implied, among other things, the abandonment of Southern Republicans and blacks and hence the end of Reconstruction—though Reconstruction had been tottering for a very long time.

  IN SOUTH CAROLINA, during the gubernatorial standoff, Wade Hampton hedged his bets. He wrote identical letters to Hayes and to Tilden. The solicitous Hampton said he wanted the matter of his own contested election—although he assumed himself the winner—to honor “the constitutional safeguards of popular rights.”

  The term “constitutional safeguards” was a euphemism: Hampton wanted the army pulled smack out of his state.

  So did president-elect Hayes. The day before his inauguration, a friend of Hayes wrote to Daniel Chamberlain to suggest that federal troops now leave South Carolina. In other words, he was saying Chamberlain should step aside, hand the state seal to Hampton, and thereby earn the gratitude of the party, the president, and the country. But the Daniel Chamberlain who read that letter was not the Liberal Republican whom even Carl Schurz had wanted to court before the election. He had seen too much violence and too much chicanery in the past months to brook any compromise, so when the friend proposed a settlement of the gubernatorial dispute that didn’t involve federal troops, Chamberlain blew up. “To permit Hampton to reap the fruits of a campaign of murder, and fraud,” he fumed, “so long as there remains power to prevent it, is to sanction such methods.”

  Hayes did not agree. “It is not the duty of the President of the United States to use the military power of the Nation to decide contested elections in the States,” he confided to his diary. That federal troops could go—had gone, would go—west to bully Mormons or rob the Sioux: those were different issues. There was gold in the West. There was nothing but poverty and dissension in the South.

  On April 10 Hayes ordered federal troops out of Columbia. By May all federal troops had left the South.

  “I am confident this is a good work,” he told William Dean Howells. “Time will tell.”

  Time told. A Republican had been installed in the White House, and in the Southern state capitols the Redeemers were in charge. Chamberlain surrendered the state seal to General Hampton, and he soon went north, leaving South Carolina for good. He’d been sold out, he said; the president had made a bargain with the devil.

  HAYES’S ELECTION ULTIMATELY disenfranchised the black voter. Hankering after the palmy days of the antebellum South, as one South Carolinian put it, the white Redeemers could use such legal tactics as poll taxes to prevent blacks from voting, or they could redistrict neighborhoods, or, when all legal measures failed, they could make use of the terror they had wielded so well. Writing in the North American Review, Governor Chamberlain remonstrated against such “violent exclusion and fraudulent suppression of the colored vote.” Few people wanted to listen.

  Yet Hayes and the so-called Compromise of 1877 did not cause the end of Reconstruction. After the death of Thaddeus Stevens in 1868, of Stanton in 1869 (at age fifty-five), just after Grant had appointed him to the Supreme Court, and of Sumner in 1874—and the failure of Ben Wade’s reelection campaign—there were very few men in government of the old Radical guard pushing for equal rights under the law or willing to change the law to protect all citizens, all of them, or to enforce the civil rights laws as they existed. Liberal Republicans, who had been nibbling away at the foundations of Radical Reconstruction, had no heart or stomach left for the freedmen and freedwomen. The bloodshed in the South seemed the propaganda of old troublemakers. Carl Schurz took Hayes aside to remind him that the Republican parties in the South were dishonest (he made no mention of Democrats and their coercive tactics). Like most Liberal Republicans, Schurz was more interested in civil service reform and western wealth than righting Redeemer wrongs. Righteous indignation about slavery had given way to righteous indignation about alleged political corruption, and the complexities of principled compromise—and of principle—had subsided into a largely bombastic politics of conciliation.

  Besides, the Supreme Court had been gutting enforcement legislation. In the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, a New Orleans butchers’ association had sued Louisiana when the state government had relocated its slaughterhouses to the outskirts of the city, and it used the Fourteenth Amendment to claim it was being denied its rights without due process. The Supreme Court decided that the federal government had no jurisdiction over where butchers slaughtered their animals; that was for the state to decide. In other words, the Fourteenth Amendment could protect only the right of citizenship; it couldn’t protect other rights, which were the state’s prerogative. In one of his last acts, Salmon Chase dissented; the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, he said, allowed the federal government to shield individuals from discrimination by the state.

  Then in 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court whittled away even more civil rights legislation. The matter at hand was the Colfax massacre: on Easter Sunday, three years earlier, a white paramilitary group had killed more than eighty black men in Grant Parish, Louisiana, where black men legitimately controlled the local government. Using the Fourteenth Amendment, the Justice Department had charged nine of the white ringleaders with conspiring to deprive the Colfax victims of their civil rights; three of them were convicted. But the Supreme Court decided, as in the case of the Slaughterhouse ruling, that the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Enforcement Act passed to protect it) had no dominion over the actions of private individuals. The men accused of the Colfax murders went free, a legitimate government had been overturned, and the white supremacists in the South knew they’d likely never face prosecution if they murdered black men and women.

  Grant had not wanted to isolate himself further from his party or from the Liberal Republicans hounding him. To be sure, he was willing to fight to keep what he had recently fought and sacrificed so many men for, but he had been burned by Washington, blunted by criticism, and betrayed by a culture of corruption that he could not or did not want to understand and may, in willful ignorance, have fostered. In December 1876, in his annual message to Congress—which he delivered
before the results of the presidential election were finally decided—he again spoke directly, sincerely, and without apology. “It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of the chief executive without any previous political training,” he said. “Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred.”

  Mistakes had been made. Grant used the passive voice, as if he had not been responsible or at least not fully so. That was one of the hallmarks of his presidency and his prose: lucidity, candor, and shimmering opacity with a hint of deep loneliness, all at the same time. Yet clearly Grant suffered the burden—the anguish—of Reconstruction undone. And though he was exonerating himself, he shouldered some of the blame. “History shows that no Administration from the time of Washington to the present has been free from these mistakes,” he continued. “But I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

  In its way, his last annual message was heartbreaking: to see the right and, away from the battlefield, be incapable of achieving it.

  RUTHERFORD B. HAYES tried to conciliate the factions that had placed him in the White House, but in many quarters he wasn’t taken very seriously. Democrats called him “His Fraudulency,” and though the Liberal Republican salonista Clover Adams thought him amiable enough, she didn’t see any force of intellect in his eyes. As to be expected, the Radicals were harsher. Wendell Phillips dubbed Hayes “the gift Northern blundering has made to the South.” Yet to many Republicans, Hayes seemed the solid choice, the inoffensive choice, the choice that spelled continuity, security, hard money and a stable currency, railroads, the safekeeping of beloved Southern institutions, and the protection of civil liberties nationwide. That such a tall order was impossible to fill and had been impossible for Grant, a stronger man despite his weaknesses, did not escape the notice of Phillips. “Half of what Grant gained at Appomattox,” he said, “Hayes surrendered for us on the 5th of March.”

  As of old, William Lloyd Garrison scoffed. Conciliation was but another form of compromise, “meaning thereby,” he said, “a truckling to the South as in the days of yore, and a stolid indifference to the fate of her colored population.” Liberty and the franchise were being delivered back to the planters and that which seeks to “ ‘conciliate,’ ” he cried, “is devoid of all sense of honor, every pulsation of patriotism, every feeling of nationality.” To Garrison, compromise had always been acquiescence. He did not see that men such as Chamberlain, however flawed, Robert Elliott, Governor Adelbert Ames, Frederick Douglass, and Chief Red Cloud had been working toward fair compromise—interracial coalitions, whether of Democrats, Republicans, or both. That those men had failed did not undermine their efforts, though their fallibility may have rendered those efforts futile, even tragic. However, Garrison was quite right about conciliation; that was another word for abased appeasement and the suppression of voters’ and equal rights.

  Yet time and tide flow wide, as Melville had written, though not with much hope. John Greenleaf Whittier ruefully admitted, “I see no better course.” All else had foundered. “The colored people have not been saved from suffering between the upper millstone of ‘White Leagues’ and the nether one of unprincipled ‘carpet-baggers,’ ” he sighed.

  The aging, melancholic Quaker poet had grown tired of the Great Cause—though not as tired as the Liberal Republicans had. “The negro will disappear from the field of national politics,” said The Nation with relief. “Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing to do with him.” The time had come for consolidation, big business, a nation appeased and united in the pursuit of wealth and forgetfulness, secure nonetheless that it had once fought with ecstatic might for freedom and fairness.

  Himself a conciliator, Hayes was the convenient tool of conciliators. That was the shrewd assessment of the newly seated Democratic senator from Mississippi, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II. Sizing Hayes up, Lamar called him “well meaning”—but ignorant about the South. “His ideas of the negro are what he gets from Whittier & Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

  Whittier and Uncle Tom had lost their sting.

  LAMAR WAS KEEN, he was courteous, and he spoke in a low, seductive voice. His brown hair covered his earlobes, but he listened very carefully when anyone talked. His head was large, his shoulders were broad, and he had a certain imposing quality. In the fire-eating days before the war, he had approved when the delegates from Mississippi had walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention. Soon after, he had drafted Mississippi’s ordinance of secession. But in 1874 it was Lamar who delivered the eulogy for Charles Sumner, a man reviled in the South: “Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead, whom we lament today,” he mourned, “speak from the grave to both parties in this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: ‘My countrymen, know one another, and you will love one another!’ ”

  Such astonishing words of conciliation, spoken by a white Southerner as influential and prominent as Lamar, were reprinted in almost every newspaper in the country.

  Henry Adams would call Lamar charming, amiable, and reasonable. Mary Chesnut once said that Lamar was the cleverest man she knew, and his startling eulogy of Sumner was clever indeed. It boosted his political capital and handed him a national forum, both at the same time—and for a very long time. In the future, he would be remembered and praised, even by John F. Kennedy, as having inaugurated an era of reconciliation and peace between North and South, although at the time, and according to Governor Adelbert Ames, Lamar said one thing in the North and another in the South. Nor did Wendell Phillips think himself fooled by Lamar. “Drops of rose-water flung on the mad surface of Southern hate,” Phillips called Lamar’s speeches. W. E. B. DuBois said years later, “Lamar of Mississippi, fraudulently elected to Congress, unctuously praised Sumner with his tongue in his cheek.”

  Lamar was born in Georgia in 1825 to a family admired for its chivalry, its intelligence, and its Huguenot ancestry. The son of a state judge, he was educated at Emory University, founded in 1838, and then practiced law in Georgia, but after his marriage he eventually settled in Oxford, Mississippi, where his father-in-law (who happened to be the uncle of General James Longstreet) had gone from being president of Emory to president of the University of Mississippi. Lamar taught mathematics there, opened a law office, and in 1855 bought a plantation run by twenty slaves. Two years later, he was elected to Congress as a states’ rights advocate come to defend Southern honor, and though he hadn’t been a fire-eater himself, the planter-lawyer forcefully argued that secession was a revolutionary movement not unlike the one that had motivated the founding fathers.

  Lamar enlisted in the army but after suffering a minor stroke, he resigned from active duty and briefly served Jefferson Davis as a foreign diplomat (although the Confederacy was never recognized abroad) and went to Georgia to counter, if he could, the animosity growing there against Davis. In Richmond, he was a judge advocate for a military court, which he later said was one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life.

  After the war he went back to teaching at the University of Mississippi—until he was pardoned. He then returned to Congress as the respected, genteel, wily representative from Mississippi who managed to thwart any passage of legislation that protected blacks’ civil rights. In 1876, once the Republican governor, Ames, was out of office, he was able to take a seat in the U.S. Senate. And there, thanks to his eulogy for Sumner, so great was his reputation as the Great Pacificator that by 1884, Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to be elected president since the war, named Lamar secretary of the interior. Nathan Bedford Forrest could never really have been a Supreme Court justice—but Lamar could; in 1887, Cleveland appointed Lamar to the high court.

  Lamar charmed Northern Liberal Repub
licans bent on rapprochement with the South, particularly during the contested battle for the presidency in 1876. That had been the strategy too of Governor Wade Hampton, who, after the election was decided in Hayes’s favor, sidled up to the newly inaugurated president. The two reconcilers had met in Kentucky during the president’s southern goodwill tour. “The country is again one and united!” Hayes enthused in his diary. For to him and other Liberal Republicans, the Democratic gentry in the South were as devoted to civil rights as they were—that is to say, in the same limited way—and with such reasonable men as Lamar in government, Hayes could remove troops from the South, which is what everyone wanted, with a clear conscience.

  Some of those reasonable men would soon discuss the South’s future in a symposium sponsored by the moderate magazine North American Review. The topic was “Ought the Negro Be Disfranchised? Ought He to Have Been Enfranchised?” Governor Hampton, Senator Lamar, Representative James G. Blaine, James A. Garfield, Alexander Stephens, and Montgomery Blair (Lincoln’s postmaster general, a Tilden supporter) responded sensibly to the subject at hand. Wendell Phillips, also invited to speak, was as usual the odd man out.

  Ought the Negro Be Disfranchised? Ought He to Have Been Enfranchised? The questions, of course, smack of reaction, repression, regression. Yet those men considered themselves to be without prejudice. Wade Hampton, for instance, had no intention of going back to anything like slavery. Keep black male suffrage, by all means, he said. “Whatever may have been the policy of conferring right of voting upon the negro, ignorant and incompetent as he was to comprehend the high responsibility thrust upon him, and whatever may have been the reasons which dictated this dangerous experiment, the deed has been done and it is irrevocable.”