by Philip Dray
President Grant was reelected by a wide margin that fall, carrying Louisiana, although because of alleged voting irregularities, the state's ballot results in the presidential race were ultimately discarded. In the state gubernatorial election, between the Republican William Pitt Kellogg and the Democrat John McEnery, both Republicans and Democrats claimed victory, with the Warmoth-appointed returning board—a nominally bipartisan panel that threw out fraudulent votes and issued an official statement certifying election results—splitting initially into two rival factions, then three.
Ironically, shortly after the 1872 vote, Warmoth signed into law the very reform bills that had motivated the train race between him and Pinchback; this allowed the governor to abolish the divided returning boards and appoint a single new one. To no one's surprise, the new board announced that the Liberal Republican-Democratic ticket had won the gubernatorial contest, making McEnery the new governor. The Republicans, however, refused to go quietly and remained adamant that Kellogg was the winner. In response, Warmoth, who backed McEnery, called an extra session of the legislature, but before his representatives could certify the election results, Marshal Stephen Packard got federal officers to take possession of the Mechanics Institute where the legislature was to meet. Under this protection, the Republicans gathered and heard Lieutenant Governor Pinchback report that Warmoth, apparently with the backing of certain Democrats as well as Republicans, "had visited him the night before and offered him $50,000 and the appointment of any number of offices if he would organize the legislature according to [Warmoth's] direction." Pinchback said he had replied negatively to the offer, for he was "determined to do my duty to my state, party, and race." Warmoth denied the accusation, contending that the best proof of his innocence was the fact that Pinchback was "not in the habit of resisting such temptations."
Warmoth soon had other problems, however, for with the election still unresolved, the house convened and immediately voted by a wide majority to impeach him. The senate would have to conduct a trial to determine his guilt, but by law the filing of an impeachment brief suspended the governor from office, thus making Pinchback the acting governor of Louisiana—the first African American governor of a state in the country's history.
The ouster of the hated Warmoth was cause for celebration, and Pinchback's supporters were ecstatic. A crowd instantly surrounded him, shouting and offering congratulations, and escorted him to the office of the secretary of state to take the oath of office. Once this formality was complete, the mob swept him along to the governor's office itself, which inconveniently was found to be locked. Someone had to climb in through an unlocked window in order to open the door from the inside. Pinchback, followed by dozens of friends and backers, then marched into the office and, to further cheers, made himself comfortable in Warmoth's chair. In the midst of the revelry, it occurred to Pinchback's aides that they needed at once to send a telegram to inform Washington of what had occurred in Louisiana; several minutes were required to clear the room of well-wishers.
The Democrats immediately denounced Pinchback as a usurper, and an infuriated Warmoth launched various legal and not-so-legal strategies to unseat the "wrong-doer and trespasser" who occupied the executive office. On December 12, however, the telegram that Pinchback had been nervously awaiting arrived. George H. Williams, the attorney general of the United States, informed him
LET IT BE UNDERSTOOD THAT YOU ARE RECOGNIZED BY THE PRESIDENT AS THE LAWFUL EXECUTIVE OF LOUISIANA, AND THAT THE BODY ASSEMBLED AT MECHANICS' INSTITUTE IS THE LAWFUL LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE...
Of course, with Warmoth under the cloud of impeachment and Pinchback able to serve as governor only until the results of the McEnery-Kellogg contest were decided, the two former allies were now simply stalking horses for the actual candidates, each fighting to hold the Louisiana statehouse for their own faction. It was an important struggle, likely to determine the future of Reconstruction in the state, and Washington and the nation watched it closely.
In Pinchback's brief tenure as governor of Louisiana—he served from December 9, 1872, until January 13, 1873—he took on an increasingly urgent task: the stabilization of law and order in the outlying parishes. As a first step, he sought to neutralize the state's white militia, which was hostile to him, by replacing its leadership with the former Confederate general James Longstreet, whom Warmoth had earlier appointed to head the Metropolitan Police. Unfortunately, though Pinchback hoped the general's credentials would help bring the militia into line, the opposite occurred, for its members widely spurned Longstreet as a scalawag and a traitor. Longstreet was despised because of his political apostasy, but his reputation had also come under assault from fellow ex-Confederates for his wartime action. He had once been friend and confidant to General Robert E. Lee, and he had initially emerged from the Civil War with a reputation for gallantry. Following Lee's death in 1870, however, other members of Lee's staff, most notably Jubal A. Early and William N. Pendleton, began an effort to enshrine Lee as an American hero. This entailed blaming someone else for Lee's worst strategic decision of the war, the deadly headlong rush toward the Union lines at the Battle of Gettysburg known as Pickett's Charge, named after George E. Pickett, the Confederate general who led it. Longstreet, who had differed with Lee over strategy at Gettysburg (and now, as a scalawag, made a likely fall guy), was accused of procrastination in getting his troops ready for battle, thus subverting Lee's plans. Since Gettysburg was seen retrospectively as a pivotal loss for the Confederacy, Longstreet's alleged misdeeds there, and his perceived backstabbing of Lee, had earned him, in the eyes of his critics, excommunication from the Southern cause.
Pinchback encountered another reversal when he sought federal help in disarming hostile whites who opposed Republican authority in rural Louisiana. President Grant informed Pinchback that federal troops could not possibly take part in such a potentially warlike and incendiary campaign. Frustrated that his best efforts were being stymied, Pinchback unleashed a severe denunciation of the McEnery forces' election tactics and their claims to power, accusing them of having "disenfranchised thousands of voters by a denial of registration and thousands more by concealing the places at which the votes were to be cast ... substituting boxes full of Democratic votes for boxes that were full of Republican votes, [and]...through the Governor [Warmoth] attempting to make a purely partisan board of canvassers to count the same and manipulate the final returns." He attacked their efforts to construct a parallel state authority, characterizing them as "foiled and defeated leaders of a minority" who "now propose, through a man pretending to be Governor-elect [McEnery], and a Legislature pretending to be elected, to organize and operate a government in direct conflict with and in violation of the dignity and peace of the existing government of the State of Louisiana and of the United States."
McEnery loyalists were furious to be scolded publicly by a man they respected as little as Pinchback, but the acting governor was not going to be around much longer to deal with the consequences. On January 13, 1873, in dual ceremonies, both John McEnery and William Pitt Kellogg were inaugurated as "governor" of Louisiana. The next day the Kellogg legislature, the one whose existence was sanctioned by President Grant, elected Pinchback to the U.S. Senate.
Somewhere the gods of chance were smiling, for this time Pinch had played his hand expertly. Having eschewed his relationship with Warmoth in the nick of time, he'd managed to ally with and effectively support the ascendant faction in the state, one that was willing to repay his loyalty with an extremely prestigious prize. Seventy-two hours later, his credentials personally signed by Governor Kellogg, U.S. senator-elect P.B.S. Pinchback—in a supremely exultant moment—boarded a train for Washington.
Chapter 7
THE COLFAX MASSACRE
HORACE GREELEY MADE an interesting protest candidate in the presidential race of 1872, but he lacked both the requisite stature and vigor to pose a serious challenge to the incumbent. Indeed, his exertions in the campaign proved not only fut
ile but final. Exhausted, haunted by the recent death of his wife, plagued by insomnia, "nervous prostration," and "inflammation of the brain," unable even to resume his editorial duties, he passed away on November 29, only weeks after the election. Greeley's friends claimed it had been Thomas Nast's incessant ridicule that killed him, pointing out that Harper's had cruelly published the cartoon depicting the candidate being carted off on a stretcher the very day Greeley's wife had expired.
The Greeley campaign, like many a third-party effort, however, did succeed even as it failed, for it revealed numerous cracks in the edifice of Northern opinion regarding Reconstruction and an eagerness for sectional reconciliation. Greeley's admonishment to his fellow citizens, North and South, to "Clasp Hands over the Bloody Chasm," had, despite Nast's mockery, captured the growing mood, even as the candidate himself had been spurned as the agent for that reunion. The result was that not only Democrats, but also Republicans, now felt freer to openly disapprove of continued federal interference in the South. With the war won, the building-block protections of Reconstruction in place, crowned by the Fifteenth Amendment, it was time, as Greeley had advised, for the former slaves to "Root, hog, or die!"
Impatience with the freedmen's problems found their outlet in one of the era's seminal books, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, by James Shepherd Pike. Although not published until 1874, it was based on a lengthy article by the author, "A State in Ruins," that ran in Greeley's New York Tribune in March 1872, and on several subsequent articles Pike filed with the paper after he traveled to the South in January 1873. "Without going into details, it is enough to say that the men who lead and manage the legislature and the state government are thieves and miscreants," Pike announced in the 1872 piece, well before visiting South Carolina. When, ten months later, Pike had a chance to observe the legislature in Columbia at work, his worst fears were confirmed. "Here, then, is the outcome, the ripe, perfected fruit of the boasted civilization of the South, after two hundred years of experience. It lies prostrate in the dust, ruled over by this strange conglomerate, gathered from the ranks of its own servile population. It is the spectacle of a society suddenly turned bottom-side up." That former slaves now held positions of authority over whites struck the author as preposterous. "Seven years ago these men were raising corn and cotton under the whip of the overseer," he complained. "Today they are raising points of order and questions of privilege." He had little trouble explaining the allegations of corruption in South Carolina's government. "Sambo takes naturally to steal, for he is used to it. It was his notorious weakness in slavery ... The only way he ever had to possess himself of anything, was to steal it from somebody else." One could feel some sympathy for the impulse behind the Ku Klux Klan, insisted Pike; Northerners would no doubt react similarly if forced to share South Carolina's dilemma.
Pike's publishers made much of the fact that the writer had once been aligned with the antislavery cause and had served President Lincoln as minister to the Netherlands. Here was a credentialed Republican whose eyes had at last opened to reality. "Years ago, when abolition was a forlorn hope and its open advocates under the ban, Mr. Pike was one of their leaders," ran a typical comment in the Savannah Republican. "He shared in their struggles, he enjoyed their triumphs, and has had no cause, either of interest or ambition, to feel sympathetic toward the Southern people. But he is a man of convictions, and an outspoken one, and the unutterable horror and loathing, surprise and indignation, with which the actual condition of misgovernment and oppression at the South have inspired him, cannot be silenced."
Pike's book, widely lauded as a clear-eyed appraisal, was, however, not all it seemed; both political and personal motives lay behind the author's much-noted change of heart. As a Liberal Republican of the Greeley camp, his criticism of South Carolina was, in a sense, a colorfully written indictment of the Reconstruction policies associated with President Grant; and one of his key sources for information about the state was Senator William Sprague, a Rhode Island millionaire who had been severely disappointed by some financial investments in South Carolina and blamed the state's political culture for his losses. Sprague's financial reversals became, in the author's hands, a larger story of disillusionment about Southern whites trapped in the North's Reconstruction dream-gone-bad, making the "inept" black and white Republicans the easy scapegoats. The book's journalistic credibility was even further compromised by its repetition of many of the points the author had published in the Tribune before he had even visited the South, and his sources appear to be almost exclusively people with conservative views of the situation.
That a book so lacking in objectivity could become popular and even well regarded probably had less to do with Pike's gifts as a writer than with the country's shifting mood. The Literary World hailed the author's lack of racial prejudice, while The Nation, in citing the book's importance, echoed Pike's conclusion that the intelligence of most blacks was "slightly above the level of animals." (When Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the New Englander who had led black South Carolina troops, wrote a letter of protest to The Nation, the editor, E. L. Godkin, admitted that his "animals" characterization had been too broad but insisted it still applied to the blacks of the Sea Islands.) Even the judicious Atlantic Monthly leapt eagerly into Pike's corner, praising the book and lamenting the fact that its publication had been made necessary by "the ignorant negro rulers" of South Carolina's "sable despotism," who had "carried into their legislation and administration the spirit of the servile raid on the plantation hen-roost and smoke house." Henry Ward Beecher, who knew better, nonetheless accepted at face value Pike's claims that criminals ran South Carolina and that "the ignorant and unprincipled classes," meaning black people, kept them in office. Beecher went so far as to suggest that South Carolina's mulatto population was alarmed because "unmixed Africans" were gaining too much authority—perhaps a dig at Congressman Robert Brown Elliott, but in any case a disappointing loss of perspective by an antislavery man of Beecher's experience.
Pike's success at crystallizing the feelings and fears of so many in the postwar era has led one commentator to term his book "the 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' of the Southern Redemption." Perhaps the real tragedy was that The Prostrate State not only was influential during its own time but also became a respected source for many early historians of Reconstruction, helping perpetuate Americans' misunderstanding of the period. Other writers laboring under Pike's sway would offer similar deprecatory views of Southern state governments, hearing "chuckles, guffaws, [and] the noisy crackling of peanuts" among South Carolina's state representatives while noting that sheer bedlam reigned in the "monkey house" that passed for the Republican-dominated legislature of Louisiana, where "amendments [are] offered that are too obscene to print, followed by shouts of glee." Black legislators were accused of buying expensive cuspidors and chandeliers, abusing their railroad passes, even of stealing office furniture. At restaurants near Southern statehouses, it was alleged, they supped and drank at the people's expense, then departed, their pockets loaded with mints.
Did black politicians really behave this way, or was something else disturbing their white observers? Perhaps it was simple resentment of the changes Reconstruction had imposed, an inchoate rage at the spectacle of Governor Moses of South Carolina, for example, besmirching the glory of his antebellum mansion by opening the doors to "a ring-streaked, striped and speckled" crowd that "rolled up gaily to [the] ancient gateways," wherein the governor deigned to mix with "negroes and low whites puffing cigarettes." Perhaps it was indignation at the fact that Robert Brown Elliott dared reside in a fashionable cottage with "a pretty, rose-tinted light mulatto" (who happened to be his wife) and that black legislators dined in once-exclusive clubs or stood in groups, chatting and bantering on public sidewalks. To many whites such scenes were not just intimidating but also profoundly disturbing; certainly they looked so to the New York Herald correspondent who described South Carolina's capital city of Columbia, with its gatherin
gs of black politicians, as "an out-of-door penitentiary ... where the members browse voluntarily, like the animals in the Zoological Garden."
A particular source of irritation were scenes, no doubt generously enlarged by the imagination, of black women—former "serving-maids"—sitting and taking tea "under the venerable trees" of fine Southern estates, putting on airs, seemingly rubbing their former white mistresses' noses in their new status. In Columbia, the aristocratic sisters of the Rollin family—the eldest, Frances, was married to the politician William Whipper—were so obvious in their enjoyment of the good life that they attracted attention and raised concern. These "colored courtesans swept into furniture emporiums, silk trains rustling in their wake, and gave orders for 'committee rooms.'" They "rode in fine carriages through the streets" and maintained a stylish salon, which its detractors dubbed "Republican Headquarters." There, it was alleged, "mingling white and dusky statesmen wove the destinies of the old Commonwealth."
Gilbert Haven, writing in the Independent, was one of the few who took issue with Pike's impressions of South Carolina. He acknowledged that political corruption existed but pointed to several optimistic results of Republican governance—new schools and new road construction (of major significance in a rural state), while noting that whites had worked to suppress the black vote in an effort "to win at the ballot box what was lost with the cannon." Haven advised that Northerners continue to support the South Carolina experiment, warning that "if she is assailed and deserted by her friends, and left to the mercy of her malignant and steadfast foes, she may succumb, and then comes chaos and black night again to all this Southern land." He conceded, however, that "we have only half swallowed this pill of Reconstruction, and we shall spit it up as soon as possible."
