Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Lamar agreed. Those two courteous gentlemen—though Lamar was the craftier—would never think of disenfranchising black men. But Lamar did rue the day Republicans had taken office. “By a system, not one whit less a system of force or of fraud than that alleged to exist now, he [the Negro] was taken away from his natural leaders at the South”—such as himself—“and held to a compact Republican vote.” Yet, alluding to the recent election of Hayes, he observed with a certain satisfaction that at least the Radical Republican misrule was a thing of the past. In the future, “whenever political issues arise which divide the white men of the South, the negro will divide too,” he predicted. “The use of his vote will then be the exercise of his individual intelligence, and he will find friends on all sides willing and anxious to enlighten and influence him, and to sustain him in his decisions.” He did not mention the many ways the black man had been prevented from casting that vote.

  Wendell Phillips would. At sixty-six, he was slightly stooped, but his arguments were straight and strong. The success of black men and women was what the South had most feared, he said. “The negro wielded his vote so bravely and intelligently as to make the enemies of the Union tremble,” he declared. No matter what race-baiting Republicans such as James Pike or Charles Nordhoff had written, or what Governor Hampton or Senators Lamar and Schurz might claim, the Fifteenth Amendment had once and for all “scattered the fogs about negro inferiority.”

  The failure of Reconstruction—if it could be said to have failed—had ironically been its achievement, he continued. Failed? he asked. If so, it had failed only because the Northern Republicans had sold out the Southern Republicans and abandoned the entire black population. “We have believed every lie against them; fraternized with unrepentant rebels; and on the Senate floor clasped hands dripping with the negro’s blood,” he declared. “While squabbling over the loaves and fishes of office,” he continued, “we have allowed our only friends and allies to face the fearful dangers of their situation—into which we called them in order to save the Union—without the protection of public opinion, or the arm of Government itself.”

  To Phillips, equal rights for all (even women) was a principle important enough and large enough to contain multitudes, black, white, immigrant, laborer, rich, poor, Native Americans. Each could and should possess a part of a more perfect union. But he was still dismissed as a fanatic, and this was no time for fanatics.

  Yet if the crusade seemed to have ended, a few of the crusaders were as fervent and as fit as ever, and they staunchly looked forward to the future. Congressman Robert Smalls was facing charges of corruption, likely bogus, not long after he had mocked Samuel Cox on the House floor. He had endured slavery, he had endured military action, and he would endure the U.S. Congress. Battling white supremacists years later, in the 1890s, he announced, with characteristic courage, “I stand here the equal of any man.”

  In 1876, on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Douglass again had something to say. He who had once asked “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” pointedly reminded his audience that black people are but the stepchildren—not the children—of Abraham Lincoln. He said that at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument at Lincoln Park in Washington, D.C.; he didn’t much like the sculpture, a supplicant black man kneeling before the benevolent president. It was at that unveiling, also, that he called Lincoln tardy, cold, and dull—when, that is, “viewed from the genuine abolition ground.” Yet this was not the only way to view Lincoln, he astutely added. “Measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult,” Douglass said, “he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Lincoln knew how to straddle, how to wait, how to win, how to work within the law; for all that, he was tardy and swift, cold and zealous, like Douglass himself.

  “Though justice moves slowly,” Harriet Jacobs, once a slave, had told the longtime abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, “it will come at last.” It had not come easily or quickly or fully. Child, who had written An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans back in 1833, knew that. But to the reasonable men in power—from those who had met in a paper symposium about whether black men should have been enfranchised to those gathered in the halls of Congress—justice had been served. The slaves were free and black men might vote, and there were two amendments to the Constitution to prove it. That was that. No longer wielding the absolutist rhetoric of higher laws or the outmoded rhetoric of compromise, which was in any case tainted, these men clasped hands. The time had come for forgetting and healing, erasing and conciliating.

  “The past is never dead,” the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner would write. “It’s not even past.” Wendell Phillips would have agreed. He was not going to conciliate, shake hands, or silently walk away. Maybe the white South would never again leave the Union or take up arms against it, but it would rule from within, he said, and preserve as much of its past for as long as it could. His was another warning, milder than that of John Quincy Adams, but a warning nonetheless about the future of freedom and civil rights in America.

  Phillips continued to write and lecture. He spoke of labor reform, Native Americans, the persistent depredations in the South, the wars in the West, bottomless greed, and, more recently and to come, the struggle between capital and labor in factories and coal mines. For the gadfly held on to what Emerson so many years before had called the party of hope, composed of those who boldly believed the impossible to be possible. That’s why, to Phillips, despite some of his corkscrew logic, Reconstruction had been a success. In subsequent years, of course, it would be dismissed derisively as an abysmal failure—and the fault of the Phillipses and Douglasses, the Radical Republicans and inept blacks, and especially those in government who had bullied and cruelly occupied the South with military force and unforgiving venality. But, anticipating a view that wouldn’t surface until the late twentieth century, Phillips understood that, regardless of Reconstruction’s failures—and there were many—freedom and the ballot were no trivial achievements.

  To him, or to a Robert Smalls, Reconstruction was ongoing. It had to be. They had seen too much and had lived too long to believe that, after all the country had suffered, this was the best it could do.

  On a crisp October day in 1880, Phillips rode out from Boston to Wayland, Massachusetts, to the small home of Lydia Maria Child, who had just died. He told her friends what she, this stouthearted woman, wanted carved on her tombstone.

  “You think us dead,” she would say to future generations. “We are not dead; we are the living.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A very long time in the making, this book would not have existed in the very first place without Sean Wilentz and James Atlas, who in the winter of 2005 encouraged me to take on the formidable task of writing it and the over the next eight years consistently and generously provided encouragement and support.

  During those years, I also accumulated unpayable debts, firstly to the many librarians and archivists who unfailingly assist scholars and writers. Among them, I’m grateful for their permission to quote from various archival material: In particular, thanks to Richard Lindemann, curator, and Daniel Hope, assistant, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College; Dr. Isaac Gewirtz, curator, and Rebecca Filner, librarian, at the Berg Collection of American and English Literature at the New York Public Library; Susan Glover, keeper of special collections, Kimberly Reynolds, curator of manuscripts, and Sean Casey, reference librarian, at the Boston Public Library, Susan Severtson at HarpWeek; Tal Nadan, reference archivist, and David Rosado, at the Manuscript and Archives Division, the New York Public Library; Nancy Kandoian, map cataloguer at the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, the New York Public Library; Colonel Diane Jacob, head of Archives and Records Management, and Mary Laura Kludy, Archives and Records management assistant, at the Virginia Military Institute; and Christine Weideman, head of the Manuscripts
and Archives Division, as well as Diane E. Kaplan, head of Public Services, Cynthia Ostroff, manager of Public Services, Judith Ann Schiff, chief research archivist, and Steve Ross at Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. I also thank Manuscripts and Archives, the Boston Public Library; the Library of Congress; the New York Public Library; the Virginia Military Institute; and the Sterling Library, Yale University, for permission to publish materials from their archives, as indicated in the notes.

  I am also grateful to the Hertog Fellows Program at Columbia University, ably administered by Patricia O’Toole, and the excellent work of Elizabeth Redden, my fine former student at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. I’ve also been superbly assisted in research by Columbia graduate students Abigail Rabinowitz, Kim Tingley, and Montana Wojczuk, as well as the distinguished Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, Cambridge Ridley Lynch. Many thanks to my friend Dan Max, who introduced me to the wonders of Jonah Furman, an early and perspicacious copy editor of my manuscript. Thanks, too, to Fran Kiernan and Benjamin Taylor, who highly recommended Patrick Callihan, a model of diligence, conscientiousness, and calm, particularly when it came time to correcting notes and running down permissions.

  While at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where for two years I served as Distinguished writer-in-residence and Director, I had the privilege to work with the remarkable Shelby White, trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, as well as with Judith Dobrzynski and Jon Bernstein of the Foundation; ditto, at the Graduate Center, President William Kelly and Professor David Nasaw. Most of all, it was a pleasure to know and learn from the fine fellows at the Center.

  I am also very proud to teach in the Writing Division of the New School University and even prouder to have worked alongside my colleague and friend, Robert Polito, the program’s director. I’m also grateful for the collegiality and kindness of Lori Lynn Turner. At Columbia, my fine colleagues include Binnie Kirshenbaum, Ben Marcus, Lis Harris, Richard Locke, and Phillip Lopate, to whom I’m indebted in a variety of ways, and at Union College, I’m deeply obliged to Dean Therese McCarty, whom I’ve admired and respected for many years, and to the recent chair of the English department, Kara Doyle, as well as its former chair, Jordan Smith.

  Early and very generous readers of this book on whom I’ve imposed include Christopher Bram, who, with his acute eye and copious knowledge of American history, again offered both suggestions and succor. Rochelle Gurstein kindly insisted on reading an early draft and brought her fine-tuned sensitivity to language. And the generous Sean Wilentz, as mentioned, not only meticulously scoured the manuscript with vigor and typical brilliance, he also improved it; again, I’m grateful for his encouragement—and for his acute historical imagination. Then, too, I profited beyond price from the estimable Robert Gottlieb’s meticulous and justly famous editing, the scrupulousness with which he reads, the clarity of his thinking, and the passion with which he discusses both restrictive commas and Henry Adams. I am honored, and this book, like so many others, is far the better for him.

  Of course I could not have written this book without relying on the deep research and stunning insights of novelists, poets, historians, critics, and autobiographers—and, years ago, I was also fortunate enough to be introduced to their work by two unusual teachers: Sacvan Bercovitch and George L. Mosse. Each in a different way demonstrated how literature, culture, politics, and people intersect in what was once called the history of ideas, and each of these special teachers committed himself to work that continues to inspire, and from which I continue to learn.

  To friends not already mentioned, I owe much more than a simple acknowledgment; but, in brief, I salute the outstanding poet and translator Richard Howard for decades of priceless loyalty, intelligent charm, copious reading, and wit; Larry Ziff for his many kindnesses; the late John Patrick Diggins, whom I often bombarded with questions; and the incomparable Ina and Robert A. Caro for their thoughtfulness—and their dedication to making history come alive. I’m also grateful beyond words to those other friends and acquaintances who have sustained me with cheer and sympathy, patience and advice, recently and over the years: David Alexander, Alida Becker, Rachel Cohen, David Ebershoff, Benita Eisler, Ellen Feldman, Michele Fron, Wendy Gimbel, Brad Gooch, Molly Haskell, Rick Hamlin, Peter and Rosemarie Heinegg, Virginia Jonas, Wendy Lesser, Paul Levy, Doug Liebhofsky, Michael Massing, Daphne Merkin, Honor Moore, Geoffrey O’Brien, John Palattella, Jed Perl, Robert D. Richardson, Deborah Rosenthal, Helen Schulman, Kurt Silverman, Ileene Smith, Domna Stanton, Catharine R. Stimpson, Paul Underwood, Robert Weil, Robert Wilson, and the very special Victoria Wilson.

  Lynn Nesbit, my agent, deserves her own paragraph, to thank her for consistent good sense, her reliability, her marvelous honesty and confidence, and her terrific charm.

  Tim Duggan, my talented editor at HarperCollins, has been unfailingly kind, unfailingly efficient, unfailingly good-humored, and preternaturally sharp. With polish and patience, he too improved the manuscript by his careful editing and with his infallible advice. His wonderful associate editor, Emily Cunningham, is similarly a person of grace and reassuring proficiency. Thanks, too, to Lynn Anderson, copy editor; to David Koral in production; to Leah Carlson-Stanisic, who designed the book’s interiors; and to Richard Ljoenes, who designed the jacket.

  My ceaselessly amazing mother is a woman of rare resourcefulness, rare bravery, and incredible imagination, and I am sure that this book has been influenced by her in countless ways, as is so very much in my life. My father, a veteran of the Second World War and a career military (USNR) officer, with whom I affably argued over the years about military and political affairs, and from whom I learned a great deal, and from whom I continue to learn, unfortunately did not live to read this book. The acute suffering of his last months was relieved somewhat by my extraordinary husband, the composer Michael Dellaira, to whom I dedicate this book. A man of many wondrous and brilliant parts, he read every word of it countless times; discussed with me every phrase, sentence, and concept; stood by me every step of the way. He has brought light into my life, and this book is his as much as mine.

  Brenda Wineapple, New York City, 2013

  NOTES

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

  COMMONLY USED ABBREVIATIONS

  BPL: Rare Books and Manuscripts Department, Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.

  CG: Congressional Globe: Debates and Proceedings, 1833–1873. Washington, D.C.: Blaire and Rives, 1834–1873.

  LC: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  OR: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.

  NYPL: The New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division (unless otherwise noted). Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, New York, New York.

  Yale: Archives and Manuscripts, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

  PROLOGUE: THE END OF EARTH

  2 “Public buildings that need”: See Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Penguin, 2000), 125.

  4 “This is the end of earth”: Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1956), 536.

  4 The passionate antislavery representative: Quoted in Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, vol. 1, Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 20.

  5 “What’s the use”: Quoted in John Wentworth, Congressional Reminiscences (Chicago: Fergus, 1882), 14.

  5 “a stout heart”: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, vol. 2, 531.

  5 “We cannot find”: Robert C. Winthrop, in Token of a Nation’s Sorrow: Addresses in the Congress of the United States, and Funeral Solemnities on the Death of John Quincy Adams (Washington, D.C.:
J. and G. S. Gideon, 1848), 8; see also Lynn Hudson Parsons, “The ‘Splendid Pageant’: Observations on the Death of John Quincy Adams,” The New England Quarterly 53 (December 1980), 464–82.

  5 “There have been”: See Robert C. Winthrop, A Memoir of Robert C. Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1897), 81.

  6 “battled for a common cause”: Token of a Nation’s Sorrow, 11.

  6 “unapproachable by all others:” Ibid., 14.

  8 “The last relic”: “Ex-President Adams,” New-York Tribune, Feb. 25, 1848, 2.

  9 “Good-bye, Old Man!”: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, vol. 2, 544.

  9 “knew that the only danger”: William Henry Seward, The Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby, Miller and Company, 1849), 392.

  10 “all idealism is compromised”: David Brion Davis, “Slavery and the American Mind,” in Perspectives on American Slavery: Essays, ed. John Blassingame et al. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1971), 52.

  10 “America is the country”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 217.

  CHAPTER 1: HIGHER LAWS

  15 It is the third of August: This paragraph depends on Louis Schlesinger, “Personal Narrative of Louis Schlesinger, of Adventures in Cuba and Ceuta,” The United States Democratic Review 31 (September 1852), esp. 212–14.