The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  Perhaps the culture of politics in Louisiana—what Gibson called the “pepper + salt atmosphere,” the petty jealousies, the “flatterers + schemers + political wreckers,” the cash exchanging hands—made it impossible for any elected official to feel loved. Gibson’s votes in Congress, the positions he took in local politics, and the patronage appointments he secured seemed to create loyalty and loathing in equal measure. For everyone who benefited from his work, others—from scattered individuals to entire factions of the Democratic Party—felt shut out. Gibson earned their undying enmity, the declaration of a “relentless war” in which he was routinely accused of corruption. People he had worked with in 1877 to end Reconstruction now minimized his contribution. “I have received any number of letters,” Gibson wrote, “some threatening my life + others warning me of assassination.”5

  When Gibson’s positions did not inspire hatred, they were simply alien to what life in Louisiana had become. As Louisiana’s Democrats consolidated their rule after Reconstruction, the structure of state government was molded around three goals: keeping power, enriching the powerful, and maintaining white supremacy. Reconstruction-era policies that benefited whites and blacks alike, such as public education, were scrapped. More white Louisianans were illiterate in 1892 than when Gibson first took office. When Gibson voted in the Senate for federal education funds to be equally divided between blacks and whites, for a modern civil service to replace patronage, and for direct election of senators, it was hard to know what constituency in Louisiana he represented. He was spending more time in Washington, in Westchester, on the New England shore, and in European spas than in New Orleans. In the spring of 1892, as Gibson stood for reelection to another term in the Senate, he faced a strong slate of challengers. The legislature deadlocked and decided to postpone the vote. Gibson was denounced as the senator from New York.6

  In Washington Gibson was among friends, but there too he was alone, left to hobble around an empty home. His wife, Mary, only forty-one, died in 1887. She had been sick for two years, but the end was sudden. Their three boys were gone, sent away to boarding school and college. The youngest, Preston, now spent days worrying about his father’s health, wishing in vain for a letter from him. “I sincerely hope that you will allow me to come home Easter,” the twelve-year-old wrote in 1892. “Please write and tell me so if I have good marks and am a good boy I can go and I will be a good boy if I have to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning to study.”7

  Gibson was surrounded by admirers in Washington, but the politics of North and South remained an embarrassment to him. In 1888, more than a decade after the compromise that had ended Reconstruction, Gibson was elected to a second term in the Senate. The Republican majority held up his credentials and threatened a meticulous investigation into electionrelated violence and fraud in Louisiana. For nearly a year Gibson sat through speeches detailing his state’s failings: ballot-box stuffing, homes of blacks and sympathetic whites riddled with bullets or burned to the ground, and the weekly “political murders of negroes,” by noose and shotgun blast and throats cut ear to ear.8

  Worst of all were the allegations of “terrorism attempted in Terre Bonne Parish,” which included multiple references to violence instigated by Randall’s younger brother Tobe, now an attorney living on a family plantation. Tobe reportedly had said that he was leading mobs of night riders to help his brother win reelection to the Senate. After years of floating above the nastiness and corruption, Gibson was mired in the moral swamp of Louisiana politics. The Republicans were forcing upon him a hard realization: that he directly benefited from Louisiana’s political terrorists and was no different from them.9

  As he had in years past, Gibson assured his fellow senators that white Southerners shared the same values as Northerners. “The great body of the population reposes solidly upon those sentiments of religion and charity,” he declared, “of good-will and patriotic endeavor, that constitute the basis upon which the structure of every enlightened government must rest.” The South, according to Gibson, was “rallying around the great central ideas of constitutional government, building railroads, starting furnaces, building up great institutions of learning ... reducing governmental expenses, inviting foreign immigration and immigration from our countrymen in the North.” He said that blacks and whites “live in relations of kindness and amity so far as I know everywhere in the State of Louisiana” and that Louisiana’s Democrats aimed only to “obliterate the color line in politics and consolidate the people on the basis of equal rights and common interests.” Finally, Gibson reminded the Senate that blacks were “a race marked as distinct from the white race, and which has not yet the capacity because perhaps it has not had the opportunity to fit itself for the responsibilities of self-government.” Most white Northerners agreed, and Gibson sounded eminently reasonable in urging patience as “the experiment of universal suffrage in the South” would yield equality in time.10

  Such words had been seductive in 1877, but throughout 1888 and into 1889 Senate Republicans kept up the drumbeat of accusations of atrocities and irregularities. Gibson shifted his response, attacking the Republicans’ evidence as unreliable. The allegations concerning his brother, he said, were made by “a single man in the parish, of whom I never heard, and I doubt if the man ever lived there.” New Hampshire senator William Chandler promptly produced a letter from a Terrebonne Parish newspaper editor suggesting that Gibson knew the man well and accused the senator of “untruth, in whole and in every part.”11

  Again, Gibson changed tactics. “I did not know, until informed by the Senator from New Hampshire, that I had an enemy in my old parish or that there was any person in it who would characterize any statement I might make as untrue,” he said. “Nor did I believe there was a Senator in this body who would so far forget decorum and good manners, which always mark the relations of gentlemen and which we have the right to expect from American Senators, as to read a letter, with the view to wound the sensibilities of an associate, from one of his political correspondents.” 12

  Gibson turned the issue of racial violence and fair elections into broad questions of senatorial etiquette and, ultimately, federalism: how much courtesy and deference senators owed to one another and whether the Senate should regulate its own membership by investigating a state’s internal affairs. A dozen years after the 1877 compromise, Gibson, with a lawyer’s skill, could still turn unacceptable facts into palatable abstract principles. At the same time he personalized the matter. Senator Chandler’s accusations had hurt his feelings. Gibson himself hardly ever went to Terrebonne Parish, and to his mind, the blacks there had trampled on his rights. He described the plantation that he still owned. “For many years past, with the exception of the main house and yard, the entire property has been in the possession and use of the former negro slaves ... without paying a sou of rent or of the taxes,” Gibson told his colleagues. “So much for my contribution to the reign of terror in Terre Bonne Parish; so much for my oppression and denial of rights and privileges to my former negro slaves.” Without ever responding directly to the charges of political terror, Gibson had found the vulnerabilities in the Republican position and declared himself a victim, not a victimizer. For Republicans and Democrats alike, the relationships that senators had with one another, the personal dynamics that kept their small community running, mattered more than the workings of democracy in Louisiana.13

  Gibson was quickly seated in the new Senate, but the effort had exhausted him. He had spent fifteen years selling the idea that the New South’s leaders and their values were indistinguishable from those of the North, that together they formed a single national elite. He had put himself forward as a leader whom Northerners could trust and accept as one of their own. Now he knew that he would always be different, always suspect, always tainted. Gibson wore the South—its sickening past, its vicious present—like an indelible mark on his skin.

  IN THE WOODS RINGING Hot Springs, the chill air of late fall was heavily perfumed
. The smell mingled different notes: tree bark and mud, pine needles green on the branch and decaying on the forest floor, resin oozing down limbs and dripping off branches. It was thick, inescapable, almost tarry as a person inhaled, but somehow it lightened the air, creating an illusion of purity, like the smell of salt and seaweed by the shore.14

  Randall Gibson sat in an open carriage bumping and flickering through the shadows. Sitting next to him was a man in a well-cut suit, stark bald with a full white beard, tall and wiry, eyes undimmed. William Preston Johnston had accompanied Gibson from New Orleans. Over several days they had been taking walks around the resort and rides through the hills together.15

  On their way back to the luxurious Park Hotel, which styled itself as Hot Springs’s “palace of purification,” Gibson and Johnston passed through town. Even in the short days leading to winter, Hot Springs had, according to the writer Stephen Crane, “the same quality as the gaiety of the Atlantic Coast resorts in the dead of summer.” The resort could have been anywhere. The tidy paved streets, Crane wrote, “mingled an accent from the South, a hat and pair of boots from the West, a hurry and important engagement from the North, and a fine gown from the East.”16

  In many ways it was the South Gibson had worked to create. It was uncurious, “purely cosmopolitan,” with its local accent—its local prejudices—erased. As with the Mississippi River levees, the government had helped open Hot Springs for business, diverting mountain streams underground and piping water from the springs into the resort. It was a manufactured town with, Crane wrote, “a wide sympathy, not tender, but tolerant.” It was a place where a visitor “may assure himself that there are men of his kind present.”17

  Sitting in his carriage, Gibson needed no such assurance. Few people understood him as well as Will Johnston. They had known each other the entirety of their remarkably similar lives. Johnston was Gibson’s age almost exactly. Cousins on their mothers’ side, they had been raised among the Kentucky aristocracy, with their fathers frequently absent, down the Mississippi River on business in Louisiana and East Texas. Gibson and Johnston had gone to Yale together, read law at the same time, and become officers in the rebel army. After the war they both had sought solid ground by practicing law. When Gibson established himself in New Orleans, he had asked Johnston to leave Louisville and become his partner. Instead Johnston became a college professor and wrote a mammoth biography of his father, the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston. As Gibson worked in Congress to restore former rebels to power, Johnston was shaping how Southerners and Northerners alike would remember the rebellion.18

  In 1883 Gibson finally succeeded in bringing his cousin to New Orleans. Two years earlier Paul Tulane had summoned Gibson to the vast estate where he lived alone in Princeton, New Jersey. The eighty-year-old bachelor offered him control of property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to support education in New Orleans, where Tulane had made millions as a young man in the cotton trade. Gibson’s father-in-law had been his best friend. Gibson organized a board to run the Tulane Education Fund, which decided to create a university with Will Johnston as its president.19

  From Washington and Westchester, spas in Virginia and European resorts, through arthritis and gout and his wife’s death, Gibson spent years in constant correspondence with Will Johnston, Paul Tulane, and Tulane’s personal attorney James McConnell. Creating the university required all Gibson’s skills as a lawyer and politician. In 1883 the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that income from the Tulane Education Fund’s properties was not tax exempt, potentially exposing the fund to pressure from whatever political faction had the power to set the rates. Working around the decision, Gibson pushed the legislature to give the Tulane Education Fund full control over the University of Louisiana’s New Orleans campus. Although the board would run the university as a private institution—it would now be the Tulane University of Louisiana—arguably this new hybrid was public and therefore tax exempt. Gibson’s enemies fought him on tax status and circulated rumors about mismanagement of the bequest, rumors that frequently reached Tulane himself. Still, in 1886 the Louisiana Supreme Court decided that the university and the fund would be tax exempt. It did not matter how the institution actually functioned; a bare classification, Gibson’s legal fiction, saved the school from the poison touch of state politics.20

  Beyond his work as the board’s chair, Gibson worked closely with Johnston to shape what kind of university Tulane would become. They were creating an institution in their own image. It would be devoted to practical subjects and science, as Paul Tulane had insisted, but also literature, history, and philosophy. Its teachers would be unmarried recent graduates of Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, grounded in the best traditional knowledge and the latest advances, devoted without distraction to educating their charges. Tulane’s graduates would be well-rounded people, not “mere cog[s] in the great wheel of society,” as Johnston once said, but adults equipped to make independent critical judgments about themselves and their worlds.21

  As Paul Tulane continued to give gifts and promised more at his death, his bequest was becoming Gibson’s legacy too. The new university—cosmopolitan, idea-driven—would create a new South, led by a rising generation of people trained to think like Gibson and Johnston. In a nod to modernity—and the possibility of attracting additional large donations—Gibson urged Tulane, above strenuous objections from others, to revise his bequest to serve not just the “young men in the City of New Orleans” but “young persons,” opening up the possibility of educating women. Gibson also suggested that Tulane insert one more word between “young” and “persons”—“white”—in order to “confine [the bequest] to white persons.” After much “consultation and consideration,” Gibson wrote, “he did so finally.” It was just one word, but it meant so much. For Gibson, limiting the gift to whites was arguably the key to making the bequest effective, removing it from the scorched-earth politics of white supremacy. At the same time the limitation insulated him from another round of attacks from his political enemies.22

  On the cusp of realizing their vision, Gibson and Johnston had to watch it founder. The crippling of their dream was remarkably quick, in a succession of events worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. When Tulane died in March 1887, his lawyer McConnell searched the Princeton mansion for the will that he had drafted for the old man, a will giving a large final endowment to the university. He found nothing. McConnell searched every safe-deposit box where Tulane could have kept it—nothing. No will was ever found. Tulane’s millions were divided among his nieces and nephews. In the Princeton Cemetery, the heirs erected an elaborate monument crowned with a sculpture of their uncle. But the university that carried his name—the university that was supposed to be Gibson’s monument—would always be strapped for money. It would never stand at full height.23

  THE SOFT SHOCK OF damp cloth, cool air on wet skin, interrupted Gibson’s exhausted drift from day to night to day. It gave the man a moment of relief, but the slow tide of pain always rose again. Gibson opened his eyes. The room would never be familiar. He was still at the Park Hotel, just two weeks after fleeing New Orleans for his life. But he recognized the woman leaning over him. His older sister Sarah was taking care of him.

  For several days the strolls and carriage rides with Will Johnston had had a tonic effect on the ailing senator. But after collapsing in the baths—from dehydration, perhaps, or heatstroke, or even a heart attack—Gibson could not leave his bed. He could barely tolerate spoonfuls of warm milk. Warned by wire that her brother was failing, Sarah Gibson Humphreys had come down from Kentucky to nurse him back to health.24

  Randall’s sister had been a widow for almost thirty years. As her brother prospered and advanced in American politics, she suffered through decades of financial and personal hardship—mortgaging and leasing out her land, scrimping and economizing, scheming to grow tobacco and sell timber rights, doing anything to keep her family afloat, to hold on to her Louisiana and Kentucky estates, and en
sure that her children would remain the equals of her brothers’ children. The challenges were severe in the decades after the war, as the country reeled from financial panic to financial panic. Often she found that she could not conduct routine business or secure loans because she was a woman. Although she had the legal capacity to enter into contracts—most states by the 1870s allowed even married women to conduct business and own property independent of their husbands—the law did not affect day-to-day business customs, which continued to treat women as “being infants in reality as well as in law.”25

  For a time Randall and Sarah had jointly owned their father’s plantation, Live Oak, an experience that convinced her that Randall was out to take her shares and reduce her to one of his dependents, like a child, or a slave. After years of mistrust Randall and Sarah settled their financial differences in 1883, when Randall traded another plantation and muchneeded cash for his sister’s share of Live Oak. Sarah and her family became regular visitors in Washington. Her children married well, and she began to feel a measure of security.26

  Still, Sarah found herself arguing repeatedly with her brother about the rights of women in an advanced society. Although their discussions may have swayed Randall to include women in the Tulane bequest, the senator insisted that the status of women was fixed by nature. “I talked and talked down his foolish ideas of women being infants in reality as well as in law,” Sarah wrote. “He couldn’t understand how a woman, a ‘female thing,’ a ‘chattel’ in the common law could feel the same human necessities, to eat, to sleep, to be clothed and sheltered and get ahead in the world, that he did. He couldn’t realize that a woman felt human aspirations and were open to human convictions and that they didn’t all propose to give their lives up to replenishing the earth just to please men.” While Randall told her that “the mistake of my life had been that I had always been trying to do something, when ... I should have sat down and been simply a lady,” Sarah resolved that “we can’t give up if we are ladies.”27