Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Once the Morgan affair had died down, Pinchback proved himself a fairly effective legislator in the state senate, helping push through two significant measures. The first one legally sanctioned marriage between a man and a woman who had previously cohabited, regardless of race, a measure that must have held personal resonance for Pinchback, whose parents' marriage had been easily challenged by his father's family upon his father's death. The second, a civil rights bill, imposed a $100 fine on any steamboat master, hotelkeeper, or other owner of a public business who refused equal accommodations because of a person's race. Some legislators complained that the bill's intent was to force whites to mix with blacks socially, which Pinchback vehemently denied. "I consider myself just as far above coming into company that does not want me," he said, "as they are above my coming into an elevation with them."

  The civil rights bill passed both houses of the legislature, although Warmoth, in a sop to the state's conservatives, vetoed it—the first indication of a shift in the governor's sympathies that would ultimately alienate him from his black allies. Warmoth's defection—he had hoped the bill would be killed in the legislature, sparing him the trouble of the veto—was emblematic of the growing dissatisfaction that many whites felt about the political ascension of blacks like Dunn and Pinchback. These citizens, set on their heels at first by defeat in the war and then the continuing occupation by federal troops, had begun to chafe under "black Radical rule." Local rivalries intensified during the summer and fall of 1868; street fights and confrontations between politically affiliated gangs, sometimes called "marching clubs," became common; assaults on prominent freedmen and white Republicans increased. Brutal atrocities occurred in the state's outlying parishes, where blacks and even Republican lawmen were attacked and often killed. Warmoth estimated that during one six-week period, 150 people had been slain in the state, a figure that was likely half the actual total; more would come in October, when whites rampaged in the Shreveport area, murdering as many as 200 freedmen. During the final week preceding the election, according to historian Ted Tunnell, "New Orleans resembled a major European city in the throes of violent revolution." White mobs disrupted Republican gatherings while police huddled for safety in their station houses; at least 60 people perished in these assaults. Grant won the national election for president but failed to carry Louisiana; in New Orleans and throughout the state, the Republican turnout stood as evidence that voters had been intimidated; tallies dropped far below those of the April election, which had swept into office Pinchback, Warmoth, and Dunn.

  Pinchback took this setback seriously. The violent white backlash was not unanticipated; he knew enough of the racial background of Southern politics to expect that whites, to protect their interests or simply express their frustration, would do everything in their power to diminish black political clout. For this reason he and others were eager to make as much progress as possible while blacks remained a viable political force. Pinchback surely had this in mind when in January 1869 he again urged the passage of his civil rights bill. "We are told, do not legislate on this subject; time will bring it about. Give the people time to get over their prejudices," he warned. "If left to time, the time will never come. Unless this matter is regulated by law, we will not only fail to have these privileges, but we may look to have all our rights, one by one or in a fell swoop, taken away from us. As for me, if I am denied any single right pertaining to American citizenship, I care not how soon I lose them all."

  The bill was adopted by his colleagues in the legislature, and although Governor Warmoth signed it, the legislation was, due to a technicality, never enforced. Pinchback and other Republicans were coming to see the governor as an impediment to truly fundamental objectives: the adoption and enforcement of effective civil rights legislation and the appointment of black men to key offices. Warmoth's enthusiasm for these causes had clearly diminished. When, after considerable delay, he vetoed another major civil rights measure in 1870, Republicans who had felt concern about the governor now expressed open resentment, and Lieutenant Governor Dunn initiated an effort to deprive Warmoth of the leadership of the state Republican Party. This move caught Pinchback flat-footed, for he was politically beholden to the governor and hesitated to desert him, despite Warmoth's growing apostasy.

  Dunn may have been emboldened because he enjoyed the support of President Grant's brother-in-law, James F. Casey, the collector of customs at the port of New Orleans. Furthermore, Grant was known to dislike Warmoth because of an incident that took place during the war. After returning from a leave of absence taken to convalesce from a wound received during the siege of Vicksburg in May 1863, Warmoth was dishonorably discharged by Grant for malingering and disseminating false accounts of Union casualties. Warmoth pleaded innocent and traveled to Washington to appeal the discharge personally to President Lincoln. The nation's chief executive, taking a liking to his fellow Illinoisan (who somewhat resembled Lincoln in height and build), reinstated the young officer, but Grant never forgave Warmoth for going over his head to win Lincoln's favor.

  To resolve his dilemma, Pinchback did not join Dunn in the revolt against the governor but simply shifted his aspirations as a politician. The term of the first Republican senator from Louisiana, John'S. Harris, was set to expire in 1871, and Pinchback began to eye the appointment, even cajoling some support from the local press. "Senator Pinchback ... possesses tact and boldness, and generally succeeds in making himself heard and felt," said the New Orleans Republican, favoring his advancement to Washington. Oscar Dunn also aspired to the job. In January 1871, when Louisiana Republicans gathered to select Harris's replacement, Pinchback beat Dunn in the caucus vote but nonetheless lost to Warmoth's choice, a white former Union soldier named Joseph R. West. Warmoth managed to offend multiple factions during this epi sode. In promoting West he not only turned away the bid by Pinchback, who had remained loyal to him, but once again irritated President Grant, who wished the appointment to go to his relation, James Casey. Warmoth perhaps did himself the most harm by thwarting the ambition of his own increasingly popular lieutenant governor, Oscar Dunn.

  In Louisiana politics, Oscar Dunn was a rarity—a popular official, native to New Orleans, whose life story exhibited wholesome elements of integrity and hard work. While he and Pinchback were never far apart politically and shared cordial, if not close, relations, Dunn's untarnished reputation—like that of a more perfect, more adored sibling—was a continual source of aggravation to his colleague; indeed, Pinch was to be haunted by the other's example throughout his political life.

  Dunn's trajectory was representative of the black political experience during Reconstruction—the seemingly implausible ascent from obscurity to public authority that only so cataclysmic an event as the Civil War could have made possible. Born in New Orleans in the mid-1820s, Dunn was the son of a free woman of color who managed a boarding house frequented by entertainers. According to one account of his early years, the boarders, in partial exchange for a roof over their heads, tutored Oscar in the dramatic and musical arts. He evidently possessed talent as a singer and guitarist, and in 1841, seeking to better his lot, he fled his job as a painter's and plasterer's apprentice to find work on the Mississippi River steamboats, prompting his employer to run an ad in a local newspaper offering a five-dollar reward for the return of "the negro boy Oscar Dunn," who was described as five feet ten inches in height and "of a griffe color."

  Griffe, meaning "a person born to a Negro, or pure-blooded African parent, and a mulatto parent," was a familiar term in Louisiana's multilayered caste system. Those of mixed race, sometimes known as gens de couleur, in 1860 comprised a full half of the local black population and were known by a variety of designations—griffes, briques, mulattoes, creoles, quadroons, or octoroons, each category specifying a narrowly defined quality of white tincture. Other terms, especially after the war, distinguished free blacks —those like Oscar Dunn and P.B.S. Pinchback who had never been slaves—from freedmen, slaves who had purch
ased their own freedom, been manumitted by their owners, or been emancipated by the war.

  For the youthful Oscar Dunn, as for Pinchback, work aboard the steamboats plying the Mississippi River provided a kind of entrée into the wider world. Steamboats offered one of the more cosmopolitan experiences available in mid-nineteenth-century America; these floating empires gave travelers a chance to mingle in society beyond their usual means, and perhaps even a whiff of risqué adventure. Dunn was a steamboat barber and later a shipboard entertainer, performing on guitar and violin. After the war, working with the Freedmen's Bureau, he managed an employment service that arranged labor contracts between former slaves and their former masters and placed domestic workers in white homes. Holding this position of trust with hundreds of black laborers, he became a skilled organizer and built his first political constituency. He was known for possessing an attribute in short supply in Reconstruction Louisiana: honesty. It was said that he refused a bribe with the remark "Sir, my conscience is not for sale."

  Dunn's probity was all the more remarkable because paying for legislative votes, expecting kickbacks from corporations or utilities, padding expense accounts, running up phony printers' bills, cutting insider deals on land sales, and running huge, often nepotistic patronage systems were all common abuses at the time. Dunn also managed to remain fairly insulated from the city's more infamous crises—the Mechanics Institute riot of 1866, the white-on-black terrorism of the 1868 election, and the everyday canings, stabbings, and street brawls that were re-counted each morning in the police blotters of the local press.

  As lieutenant governor, Dunn kept largely above the fray until 1870, when Governor Warmoth began appointing Democrats to important positions in his administration, including even some former rebels such as Penn Mason, a member of General Robert E. Lee's staff, and General James Longstreet, whom he made head of the Metropolitan Police Force, which served as a kind of private army for the Republican authorities. Dunn and his colleagues worried that Warmoth's penchant for the political center would open the way for Democrats to extinguish Republican power in Louisiana and strip blacks of their newly gained suffrage. "Warmoth," Dunn complained in a published letter to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, "has shown an itching desire to ... secure the personal support of the Democracy at the expense of his own party, and an equally manifest craving to obtain a cheap and ignoble white respectability by the sacrifice of the support of colored Republicans. We cannot and will not support him."

  When Warmoth left New Orleans in early 1871 to recuperate from a foot injury, Dunn in his absence assumed the duties of the governor. The Democrats had a field day; their newspapers boasted that they "preferred a 'nigger' governor to a carpet-bagger." Warmoth, it seemed, was being double-crossed; not only did some Republicans distrust him as an appeaser of Democrats, but also many Democrats showed him disrespect by playing the popularity of Warmoth's own lieutenant governor against him.

  Dunn and his Republican faction aimed to take control of the state party at its convention, scheduled for August, and the governor was well aware of this. Warmoth suspected that Dunn would not locate the meeting at the Mechanics Institute, which still served as the statehouse, in order to undermine Warmoth's ability to call upon Longstreet's police; the governor tried to counter Dunn's likely efforts by reserving all the suitable meeting halls in town. In response, Dunn's colleagues enjoined Stephen Packard, the chair of the party's state committee, to withhold, until the last moment, the announcement of the site of the meeting—the federal customhouse. Holding a state political conclave in a federal building was unusual, but it was where Packard, who was a federal marshal, could most effectively wield authority. For good measure Packard arranged for fifty additional marshals to be on hand, as well as a detachment of federal troops. President Grant's brother-in-law, Casey, who had just returned from a visit with the president, fully cooperated in this plan. Moreover, during his visit with Grant, Casey reported on Warmoth's misbehavior in pandering to disaffected Southerners and also broached the idea of elevating Dunn to vice presidential candidate on the national Republican ticket the following year. Grant, confident of a second term, was said to be at least agreeable to considering Dunn.

  When the gathering convened, the delegates expressed their resentment of Warmoth by taking the unprecedented step of electing Dunn, not the governor, to preside over the Republican convention. Warmoth, who had showed up on crutches in the company of Pinchback, furiously pulled out his supporters and created a rump convention in a nearby building, Turner Hall, and staged a fake "celebration" down the length of Canal Street with his followers to mark his "revolution." But the Dunn faction, in a rapid exchange of telegrams with Washington, won a guarantee from the president that they were indeed the legitimate leaders of Louisiana's Republican Party.

  Grant's willingness to recognize Dunn in preference to Warmoth boxed in the governor. Chastened by being abandoned by the national head of the Republican Party, he found himself denounced anew by Louisiana Democrats, who voiced their contempt at his weakness and lack of discipline in failing to contain the breakaway Dunn element. Exasperated, Warmoth lashed out, accusing Dunn of wanting to "Africanize" Louisiana and railing at the libels printed against Warmoth himself in Democratic newspapers. "I have been called a carpetbagger, a czar, a Caesar ... a Political Leper, the Pest in the Executive Chair, a traitor to my political party, a robber of the state, and the oppressor of the people," he cried. "I have been accused of having made a fortune out of the office of governor."

  Pinchback, siding with Warmoth, agreed to join a committee to travel north and explain the governor's predicament directly to the president. Pinchback and the others found Grant at his summer cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey, where they related the Dunn forces' recent shenanigans; Pinchback at one point dared suggest to the president that Grant's brother-in-law be removed from office (Pinchback would later tell a reporter that Casey "hasn't a handful of brains"). Grant listened to Pinchback but did nothing, refusing to extricate the federal troops who were protecting Dunn and what was now being called the Customhouse faction. This breakaway group had by now elected Dunn as their president, adopted an article expelling Warmoth from the Republican Party, and passed a resolution calling for the governor's impeachment. The charges against him were technical, citing "official misconduct" and "high crimes and misdemeanors in office," but stemmed essentially from his abandonment of the party's aims. The now-flailing governor, agreed the New Orleans Picayune, was a "War-moth" who needed to be "exterminated" as soon as possible.

  In the midst of the crisis, in November 1871, Oscar Dunn came down with a nagging, debilitating cough, a condition he and his friends assumed had resulted from his strenuous duties. For about a month he had been suffering from what his doctor called "pulmonary catarrh," a respiratory inflammation, and had been taking Cherry Pectoral, a popular cure-all "recommended for weak hearts." The product, however, had been ineffectual in curing his weariness and hoarseness. On Saturday, November 20, Dunn gave a talk at the Third Ward Radical Club and was in good form. Sunday morning he ate a hearty breakfast and spent part of the day with his cohort Marshal Packard. After dinner, however, Dunn had a severe attack of vomiting, and on Monday, E. D. Beach, the family doctor, was called in. Beach diagnosed pneumonia, noting that the lieutenant governor's brain was "evidently much affected," and put him to bed, in the care of a nurse. During the night Dunn slipped into unconsciousness, and Packard was summoned. Seeing his friend's desperate situation, he called in another physician, Dr. Scott, who declared that Dunn was suffering from congestion of the brain and lungs brought about by excessive vomiting.

  Other leading physicians of New Orleans arrived, including Dr. Warren Stone, a local medical pioneer, and Dr. Louis Roudanez, a Paris-educated Creole physician, but they ventured no new diagnosis and expressed puzzlement at Dunn's rapid deterioration. Consulting in hushed tones, they cast pitying looks at the patient's wife, who, along with other family members, had convened a
deathwatch by the bed, where Dunn lay emitting "a regular gurgling sob that occasionally changed to a harsh rattle." Mrs. Dunn, alternately clutching a handkerchief and lowering her face into her hands, came and went, unable to remain for long in the presence of a scene so unbearable. Dunn's nurse, "an intelligent quadroon woman," observed that she had "never seen pneumonia like that." Gently wiping the drops of blood and mucus from Dunn's lips, she assured her patient that "Jesus is coming—Jesus will soon be here to take you away." At the sound of her voice, Dunn opened his eyes and appeared to scrutinize the woman's face, "his blank stare mirror[ing] the baffied confusion of his soul." "They've given poison to the Governor," another servant said quietly. "They've poisoned the Governor." Late Tuesday night, November 23, he slipped from consciousness for the last time, and soon one of the physicians signaled that the struggle had ended.

  When the local coroner, Dr. Creagh, arrived, he encountered a police physician, Dr. Avila, who was preparing to depart; Avila said that Dunn's family had turned him away. At Creagh's urging, Avila returned with him to the house, where Creagh explained to Dunn's survivors that a rumor of the lieutenant governor's poisoning was already abroad on the streets, and it was Creagh's duty under law to conduct a postmortem to ascertain the true cause of death. The family, supported by Beach and the other attending physicians, refused Creagh as they had Avila, insisting that Dunn had died of natural causes. They also rebuffed Creagh's request to examine a sample of Dunn's bodily waste, which might have helped confirm or dispel the suspicion of poisoning.

  Creagh persisted because a week earlier he had handled a similar case involving a black prostitute who had arrived at a New Orleans charity hospital. Complaining of "break bone fever"—aches in her side, back, and head—she soon died. Creagh's autopsy found substantial amounts of arsenic in her stomach. His interest in Dunn's case may have been piqued even more by the fact that two of the white doctors in attendance, Beach and Stone, had disagreed initially about the cause of death.