Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  There was one group of American reformers, once closely tied to the abolition movement, whose active support for new legislation Charles Sumner could no longer take for granted. Many women's rights leaders had become alienated from the civil rights cause, upset that Congress would again immerse itself in the subject of rights for the freedmen, for whom so much had been done already, when their own demands had received scant attention.

  Women had organized as supporters of the abolition movement as early as the 1840s, not only because it was the morally right thing to do, but because its aims mirrored their own aspirations for equal rights. They had felt slighted, however, by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments' transformation of black men (but not black and white women) into citizens and voters. As for the Supplementary Civil Rights Bill, Susan B. Anthony, president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, would offer no more than qualified praise. "I only long for the hour when you shall turn your constitutional law and logic in the direction of women citizens," she wrote to Sumner, encouraging him to speak "as grandly for Equal Rights to all women as you have to all men" for surely "the majesty of the U.S. Constitution" was meant "to protect all of its citizens." She warned him that because "women are absolutely nothing in Republican minds today, as were the Negroes with Democrats twenty years ago ... I will give no aid or comfort to any pact that fails to recognize the equal rights of women citizens."

  This rift between women's rights advocates and civil rights activists—"one of the saddest divorces in American history," the historian William McFeely has termed it—was painful for both sides. Women were understandably angry to be sidelined in the postwar push for freedmen's rights. But civil rights supporters, facing an uphill battle of their own, came to resent the complaints from those they once considered natural allies. It was an embarrassing quandary for which many abolitionists had no good resolution; philosophically they knew the women were right; however, they could not help but take offense when women expressed indignation that "illiterate black men" would be able to vote before educated white women. Garrison and Sumner, Douglass and Phillips, while supporting women's suffrage in principle, denied its alleged urgency. The nation, they believed, had been conditioned by the war's sacrifice to accept the empowerment of the freedmen but was not prepared to endorse women as voters; Phillips insisted that burdening the one good cause with the other would resemble putting too many bundles in a small boat, sinking all of them together.

  SUSAN B. ANTHONY

  At the end of the Civil War, Anthony and her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton had sought actively to join the two causes. Anthony told audiences that the time was right to remake the government so that it would serve all Americans, white and black, male and female. Her argument went to the heart of the question of what Reconstruction was and should be. Was it to be solely a means of elevating the former slaves to citizenship or a grand retooling of society at large? "We have fairly boosted the Negro over our heads, and now we had better begin to remember that self-preservation is the first law of nature," declared Stanton in May 1866. "Some say, 'Be still, wait, this is the negro's hour.' But I believe this is the hour for everybody to do the best thing for reconstruction. A vote based on intelligence and education for black and white man and woman—this is what we need ... and [we will] press in through the constitutional door the moment it is open for the admission of Sambo." Douglass, flinching at her use of a racial slur, cautioned the women that while the vote was an important goal for all who did not possess it, for blacks it was absolutely essential, a matter of life and death.

  Phillips, in a meeting with Anthony and the editor Theodore Tilton, suggested that the vote for women would likely have to wait another generation. When Tilton concurred with Phillips, Anthony seethed. "I would rather cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the black man and not for women!" Stanton displayed similar obstinacy at a larger gathering in New York City in May 1867, explaining that she did not look forward to having black elected officials who were themselves "degraded [and] oppressed" create the laws for her and other women; if women were not to be enfranchised, the qualification for voting should be made an educational one. Otherwise, all the newly created black voters would be men hardly qualified to have authority in public affairs, resembling instead an "incoming tide of ignorance, poverty, and vice." That same year a campaign in Kansas to amend the state constitution to allow both black and women's suffrage drew Anthony and Stanton to the state, but the crusade stalled, newspapers refused to treat it seriously, and a wealthy but wayward male sympathizer, George Francis Train, unleashed nasty words about black people, which the press, and other feminists, denounced. The result was that neither black nor women's suffrage passed the Kansas referendum, confirming fears back east that the two causes could not be combined.

  Black elected officials such as Robert Brown Elliott, Hiram Revels, and P.B.S. Pinchback—examples of the "inferior" men Stanton complained of, whom Reconstruction had catapulted to political prominence—were of course unfairly maligned by her words. They were hardly ignorant or illiterate, and in fact they had tended to support women's suffrage and expanded rights for women. In South Carolina, the black attorney William Whipper had been a consistent champion for the cause. According to the historian Benjamin Quarles, some black women had actually managed to vote in some South Carolina districts in the election of 1870; two years later, Republicans there had proposed a female suffrage amendment, provoking a debate so contentious that punches were exchanged in the aisles of the state legislature.

  Nationally, Stanton and Anthony had rallied against adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, objecting to the fact that, for the first time, it introduced the word male into the Constitution; they also opposed ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Stanton mocked the Republican Party for "establishing an aristocracy of sex on this continent" and appealed to the nation's most base racial anxieties by suggesting that if "the slaves of yesterday ... in whose eyes woman is simply the being of man's lust" became legislators, the result would be "fearful outrages" on womanhood, especially in the Southern states.

  Think of "Patrick" and "Sambo" and "Hans" and "Yung Tung," who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for ... the daughters of Adams and Jefferson ... women of wealth and education ... Shall American statesmen, claiming to be liberal, so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South?

  Frederick Douglass, one of the first men in America of either race to support women's suffrage, eventually could stand no more of Stanton's crude allusions. "I must say that I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro," he said.

  When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

  In May 1872 Charles Sumner adopted a new strategy for his civil rights bill, linking it with amnesty legislation intended to benefit those remaining Southern whites still legally stigmatized by their actions in the war, with the exception of former high-ranking Confederate officials. Specifically, it offered to give them back the right to hold elective office—it was thus politically momentous, as it would undoubtedly create more viable Democratic candidates in the South and potentially dimin ish Republican control of Congress. Representatives such as Robert Brown Elliott, Joseph Rainey, and Robert De Large had been generous in supporting the restoration of rights to former Confederate
s, although after years of Ku Klux Klan violence and other extreme Southern resistance, they had become more cautious. But they nonetheless concurred with Sumner's approach. "We have open and frank hearts toward those who were our former oppressors and taskmasters," Rainey told Congress. "But ... we would say to those gentlemen on the other side that there is another class of citizens in the country, who have certain rights and immunities which they would like you, sirs, to remember and respect ... I implore you, give support to the Civil Rights Bill, which we have been asking at your hand, lo! these many days."

  It was becoming evident to all that Sumner's health, never good since the physical assault on him in the Senate in 1856, was beginning to fail. This would likely be his last campaign of spirited advocacy for the bill; to carry Sumner's initiative across the goal line, Southern black Congressmen would have to show leadership, alone and in alliance with other Republicans. This was entirely fitting, of course, for Sumner himself had often used their example in his arguments, pointing to the absurd fact that they sat as equals next to white men in the highest body of the land, yet could not sit with ordinary white citizens in a theater or on a train.

  Sumner, staunch in his own beliefs and the righteousness of his cause, apparently neglected to consider what small legislative compromises he might offer to make his bill more acceptable to Congress. He may not have fully appreciated how much the support for Reconstruction's egalitarianism had eroded in recent years, or how much his own standing on Capitol Hill had suffered as a result of his attacks on President Grant. His demand that churches and cemeteries be integrated was particularly troublesome to many, the inclusion of schools was controversial, and without sufficient leeway for adjustment in these areas, his pairing of civil rights for freedmen with amnesty for former rebels seemed to his fellow lawmakers an unattractive bargain.

  The bill was voted on and rejected twice that spring, but days after a second defeat on the joined bill, when Sumner was away from the floor, Senate Republicans used parliamentary tricks to break the attached bills apart and, in an all-night session, rushed through passage of the amnesty provision, while the civil rights bill was sidelined and not even addressed.

  Learning of the treachery, Sumner hurried to the Senate the next morning. "I sound the cry!" he bellowed. "The rights of the colored race have been sacrificed in this chamber where the Republican Party has a large majority—that party by its history, its traditions, and all its professions bound to their vindication. Sir, I sound the cry! Let it go forth that the sacrifice has been perpetrated." Such heated talk was for the most part wasted on his colleagues. Exhausted from being in session all night, having listened, patiently, numerous times to arguments over civil rights, they informed him they were in no mood to be lectured at, especially in tones of indignation and self-righteousness. Sumner had, for the moment, been outfoxed: the amnesty measure had gone through, while civil rights were left behind.

  But civil rights remained for Sumner the ultimate cause—quite literally so. Upon his passing in March 1874 he admonished the faithful gathered at his bedside, "You must take care of the civil rights bill—my bill, the civil rights bill; don't let it fail!"

  By early 1874, even before Sumner's death, it had fallen to Robert Brown Elliott, who had displayed his skills as an orator in the congressional battle for the Ku Klux Klan Act, to be one of the standard-bearers for the civil rights law. Fate could not have chosen a more provocative advocate for the bill, for as a highly intelligent man of "uninterrupted African descent," Elliott was at once unnerving to white antagonists and fascinating to the press. Until Elliott's arrival in Washington in 1871, whites in Congress had for the most part been exposed to black representatives with marked Caucasian features, such as Hiram Revels and Joseph Rainey. Elliott's countenance made him far less reassuring a presence. "His skin is very black," confirmed the Chicago Tribune, "which, with his features, a low, receding forehead, broad, flat nose and thick lips ... indicate that he has no white blood in his veins." Elliott's debut in Congress, like Revels's, had also contained some neat symbolism: Revels had replaced Jefferson Davis; Elliott had the distinction of representing the same South Carolina district that had once sent to Congress the hotheaded Preston Brooks, who had smashed a cane to pieces over the head of Charles Sumner.

  In an age infatuated with pseudoscientific notions about genetic "character," in which subtleties of skin tone were thought to be critical indicators of an individual's worth, the success of men such as Revels or P.B.S. Pinchback was consistently rationalized as stemming from their mixed-blood heritage. Blacks who did possess more thoroughly Negroid features, such as Richard Cain or Robert Elliott, were either mocked outright for their "apelike" appearance (Cain) or suspected of possessing some innate animal-like cunning (Elliott). Broad presumptions about race almost always seemed to come with rather glaring ironies attached—in the case of the congressmen, that they could be deemed simultaneously "ignorant" and "scheming," or that such accomplished individuals might be held up as representing inherent Negro inferiority.

  The seats and galleries were packed on January 5, 1874, as it was known that in that day's session Alexander H. Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy and now a congressman from Georgia, would speak against Sumner's civil rights bill, and that "Robert Brown Elliott, Negro of South Carolina," would answer his speech. The two sides clashed even before the main event, when Elliott's colleague Alonzo Ransier tangled with the Virginia Democrat John Harris, one of the bill's staunchest opponents. Harris alleged that the civil rights bill was flawed because it "is based upon the purpose, the theory, of the absolute equality of the races. It seeks to enforce by law a doctrine which is not accepted by the minds nor received in the hearts of the people of the United States—that the negro in all things is the equal of the white man. And I say there is not one gentleman upon this floor who can honestly say he really believes that the colored man is created his equal."

  "I can," said Ransier.

  "Of course you can," Harris barked in reply, "but I am speaking to the white men of the House; and, Mr. Speaker, I do not wish to be interrupted again by him."

  Harris continued, "Admit that it is prejudice, yet the fact exists, and you, as members of Congress and legislators, are bound to respect that prejudice. It was born in the children of the South; born in our ancestors ... that the colored man was inferior to the white."

  "I deny that," interjected Ransier.

  "I do not allow you to interrupt me!" Harris snapped. "Sit down; I am talking to white men; I am talking to gentlemen!" The gallery hooted at the flustered Harris as the chair used the gavel to restore order.

  When Stephens finally gained the floor, the room became hushed in anticipation to hear the words of the legendary rebel orator and statesman. An authority on the U.S. Constitution (he had helped write the Confederate Constitution, which he deemed an improvement over the original), he became a hero to the dawning Confederacy with an address given in Savannah on March 21, 1861, subsequently known as the "Cornerstone Speech." In it, he blamed the nation's founders for failing to deal honestly with the issue of slavery and for enshrining in the early life of the country the questionable theory that "all men are created equal."

  "The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time," he stated, "were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically." However, he assured his rapt audience, "our new [secessionist] government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea ... its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition ... Our new government," he boasted, "is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

  Never in good health—he suffered from neuralgia and "horrible headaches"—and now at age sixty-three restricted to a wheelchair, Ste
phens was almost apparitionlike in appearance. Only five feet tall and weighing no more than ninety pounds, he dressed all in black, a purple velvet skullcap on his head, beneath which peeked some strands of silver hair. "With a shrunken, consumptive chest, a sallow, mummified face, in which the bony structure stood forth like a death's head ... He was," re-counts one scholar, "little more than a brain."

  Addressing the question of the civil rights bill, Stephens told Congress, "There is a vast difference between civil rights proper and some of those social rights claimed by this bill." A black man who buys a first class railway ticket has the right to a first-class seat, he explained, "but this does not entitle him ... to a seat in the same car with the white man." And Stephens asserted that in his home state of Georgia, blacks, when presented with the choice, preferred to be with their own race. "They have no desire for anything partaking of the character of social rights; and if the people, colored and white ... shall be left to themselves to work out their own destiny under the present system ... without external interference of any sort, it will, in my judgment, be infinitely better for both races."

  He also emphasized that any proposed federal civil rights law would defy the sacred ideal of states' rights. "If there is one truth which stands out prominently above all others," he observed, "it is that the germinal and seminal principle of American constitutional liberty is the absolute unrestricted right of state self-government in all purely internal municipal affairs."

  Stephens had already touched upon two of the key Southern ob jections to the general course of Reconstruction—social equality and states' rights. The latter had, of course, been an emotional factor in congressional debates on slavery as far back as the age of Calhoun, and it was still in many ways an unresolved issue. In the early 1870s, advocates for a civil rights law justified it by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment's clause prohibiting states from denying the "privileges and immunities" of citizens and the Thirteenth Amendment's promise to remove the stigma of slavery from those recently freed from bondage. But in Blyew v. U.S. (1872) the Supreme Court had severely limited the scope of the concept of "badges of slavery," and the following year, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, had dealt the Fourteenth Amendment a wounding blow.