Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Pinchback in turn defended his loyalty to the Republican Party, even citing his willingness to attempt, at the suggestion of the party's chairman, the ill-fated "railroad race" from New York to New Orleans. "I demand simple justice, I am not here as a beggar" he told the House. "I do not care so far as I am personally concerned whether you give me my seat or not. I will go back to my people and come here again; but I tell you to preserve your own consistency. Do not make fish of me while you have made flesh of everybody else."

  There was, however, a technical problem: if Pinchback was accepted by the House, he would have to drop his bid to be a senator, the latter obviously the more prestigious position. Characteristically, he decided to go for broke, renewing his efforts to gain the Senate seat. On January 12, 1875, though the House still had not resolved the claims of Sheridan and Pinchback, the Kellogg legislature reelected Pinchback as U.S. senator, and on February 8 the Senate's Committee on Privileges and Elections at last advised the full body that Louisiana had given him a right to his seat. Morton told his colleagues that with this new certification, Pinchback had a "prima facie title to admission."

  The full Senate, however, continued to stall, citing the fact that the Committee on Privileges and Elections was not functioning at full strength. Pinchback, understandably exasperated, petitioned the Senate to act speedily on his claim. Prompting his demand was the fact that Nina had tired of Washington. No doubt in part because her husband's political status was ambiguous, she had never found her legs socially in the city, and despite support from some of the local black elite, she informed her husband that she preferred to wait out his ongoing Senate challenge at home in New Orleans.

  On February 15,1875, Morton once again called on the Senate to resolve the issue. It was a month after the national outrage concerning the federal bayonet entry into the Louisiana legislature, and the fall 1874 congressional election results had brought a Democratic majority to the U.S. House; therefore, for the Republicans, Pinchback's admission to the Senate had higher stakes than before. With a newfound party fervor arising from defeat, they were more eager than ever to seat him and help legitimize the Kellogg government, thus also granting legitimacy to the president's handling of the recent crisis in Louisiana. But the Democrats, recognizing this game, were uncooperative. The matter remained unresolved by mid-March, when the Senate agreed to table the issue until December. In the meantime, since Pinchback had largely abandoned his quest for seating in the House, that position was awarded to Sheridan, who was sworn in on March 3,1875.

  In December 1875, nearly two years since Pinchback had first arrived triumphantly in Washington to claim the Senate seat, W. L. McMillen, who had long been his competitor for it, abruptly removed his application and acknowledged the Kellogg government in Louisiana. But so determined were some Southern senators to halt Pinchback that they first tried to block McMillen's withdrawal; then, when that failed, they dug up minor procedural obstructions to slow Pinchback's appeal. The following month, January 1876, brought another surprise: the Louisiana Republican Party, frustrated with Pinchback's inability to win confirmation, had gone ahead and elected another man, J. B. Eustis, to the seat. The Senate reacted unkindly to Eustis's claim; the body was already consumed with resolving Pinchback's.

  This latest delay proved too much for the usually subdued Senator Bruce. Pinchback's appointment, Bruce stated, was the only action taken by the Kellogg legislature that had been challenged by Washington, and to disregard Pinchback was to disavow all federal support for Republicanism in Louisiana. He pointed out that since Louisiana had a majority of almost fifty thousand black people, the charge that Pinchback did not represent the state's population was meritless. "Under these circumstances," Bruce concluded, "holding the question in abeyance is, in my judgment, an unconstitutional deprivation of the right of a state, and a provocation to popular disquietude; and in the interest of good-will and good government, the most judicious and consistent course is to admit the claimant to his seat."

  In an executive session of the Senate, Bruce used more forceful language. Louisiana's white Republican senator, Joseph R. West, had just told the Senate that the confirmation of a U.S. judge, E. C. Billings, was a matter of urgent importance to the Republican Party in his state. Bruce blew up, indignant that Louisiana's white senator could demand urgent attention to a judicial appointment when Pinchback's case had lingered for so long. Citing the unconscionable delay, Bruce accused the Senate Republicans of abusing the trust of black Americans, waving the bloody shirt when convenient to help keep themselves in power, but behaving disingenuously when it came time to allow a deserving Southern black man the Senate seat to which he'd been elected. Blacks might no longer be slaves, Bruce complained, but politically they were still in bondage to the Northern wing of the Republican Party—good enough to help elect white men to office, but not hold office with them. He vowed to depart the Senate and return to the Mississippi Delta. "I can make $15,000 a year on my plantations, and the $5,000 I receive here is of no importance ... Nor am I particularly anxious to remain here with a lot of old-time abolitionists."

  Bruce then stunned his fellow Republicans by turning on the president. "General Grant has deceived us long enough. He is untruthful, treacherous, and insincere. My people will make terms with the whites who owned the country. They are honest and truthful and will protect the negroes in their rights." When a colleague tried to remind Bruce that Grant had been a loyal friend to the freedmen, Bruce would have none of it, insisting that he and other Southern blacks understood the dynamic of Republican hypocrisy; and he vowed to repeat his criticism of Grant in the open Senate. "You have upheld the Kellogg government in one breath," he scolded, "yet have refused a seat in this body to the Senator elected by the legislature, which you have solemnly declared to be lawful. I do not want to belong to a body which stultifies itself in this manner, and if when the Louisiana case is again called, it be not settled, I will resign my seat in a body which presents this spectacle of asinine conduct."

  On March 8, 1876, Bruce got what he demanded: a final vote on Pinchback's appointment. By a close tally of 32-29, Pinchback was rejected. His own and his allies' lobbying efforts had failed to overcome partisan resistance, the persistent doubts about his character, and the simple fatigue many senators felt by now with his presence and the byzantine details of his struggle. In recognition of the three years he had spent in Washington lobbying for his own cause, the Senate awarded him $16,000 in compensation, about what he would have earned, had he held the job.

  Thus the remarkable ascent of one of the country's most enigmatic black politicians ended. "[I]n the country the tides were changing," his biographer James Haskins writes, "and now Pinchback had been swept back just as he had been swept forward over a decade earlier. Then, the changing of the tides had heralded a warm season of political power for the black man and of political equality ... But it had been for America an artificial season."

  His last hand played, Pinchback did not dally in Washington but went home straightaway to Nina and New Orleans.

  Chapter 11

  BLACK THURSDAY

  OF THE EX-CONFEDERATE STATES that the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 sought to reform, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida held on to their Reconstruction governments the longest. The others had, by the mid-187os, already been restored to "home rule" or were in the process of caving in to the forces of redemption. Strenuous efforts to undo Reconstruction were nothing new; the difference now was that the resistance had grown ever more savvy, patient, and sophisticated in its ability to humiliate the occupying foe. In South Carolina, the state's black political leaders, including Robert Brown Elliott, recognized that purposeful measures were needed if the state's Republicans were to ride out the wave of white reaction.

  Elliott returned home in February 1874, fresh from his triumphant civil rights speech in Washington, during which he'd gotten the better of former Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens and blazed a name for him
self as a Republican orator of note. But when he took the podium at a homecoming gathering in Columbia on February 16, he did not, as some expected, commence a recitation of his now-famous address to Congress. In Washington he had eloquently defended black Americans' claims to Reconstruction's advances; now, at home in South Carolina, he wanted to speak about their responsibility. Deserved or not, the state's politics had become a national subject of ridicule, its Republican leadership deemed incompetent and corrupt. Though the characterizations were obviously exaggerated and inflamed by racial enmity, leaving them unaddressed entailed great risk.

  As Elliott knew, whites in South Carolina felt that the Republican state government was excessive and wasteful, and this belief was linked to outrage at how the state had shifted the local tax burden. A central tenet of the constitutional convention of 1868, where the Republicans had laid out their blueprint for reform, was the idea that raising land taxes would drive the state's planters to break off small parcels to sell to blacks and poor whites. But this meant higher taxes for one segment of the population, with the potential rewards reaped by those who paid little or no tax. The higher rate of taxation, coupled with their loss of their slave "property" and other economic reversals associated with the war, had hit many landowners hard. Newspapers were filled with listings of properties that had gone up for sale as a result of unpaid taxes. Since many whites also felt excluded from politics generally, they described this imbalanced situation as taxation without representation.

  Elliott was willing to concede that the taxpayers' anger had some justification. "Fellow citizens, rights impose duties," he told his supporters. "The question is ... can the colored people of this state maintain and administer the government of this state upon the basis of self-government and unrestricted suffrage? The power we have will be our condemnation, unless we arouse ourselves to our responsibilities."

  Realigning the state's tax burden might be one means of quelling the citizens' outrage, but in Elliott's view, reforming the culture of corruption and "easy takings" was at least as essential. Then, as now, this was a high-minded ambition. So pervasive was official thievery among both black and white officials during the 1870s that even once-decent men became, in the novelist William DeForest's description, "blinded by long confinement in the dark labyrinths of political intrigue as the fishes of the Mammoth Cave are eyeless through the lack of light." In New York City, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and his ring bilked the public out of millions; Wall Street financiers rigged the markets and tweaked railroad stocks; in Louisiana, elected representatives gave themselves a stipend for "stationery" that was used mainly to buy hams and cases of champagne; in South Carolina the "Robber Governor," Franklin Moses Jr., arranged for the legislature to cover his losses at the horse track while running up an unpaid tab of a thousand dollars at a local cigar stand. Many officials, north and south, would have readily earned the droll estimation Lincoln once offered of Simon Cameron, his own first secretary of war: "The only thing he wouldn't steal is a red-hot stove."

  But the question of who was corrupt was perhaps the wrong question; more to the point was who was most vulnerable to being exposed as corrupt, and who had the authority to make such accusations stick. A charge of corruption was "somewhat like the charge of communism in more recent times," notes Thomas Holt. "The key issue remained one not of corruption, but of power." In South Carolina and other locales where blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags commanded what struck natives as an inordinate and undeserved rein on state government, and where resentful Democrats were represented by a vocal press, the charges of theft, perfidy, and abuse all seemed to flow in one direction. Because many whites believed that blacks held elected office by special dispensation, they seemed to consider them less entitled to the usual illicit, opportunistic sweepings that came with political power. Elliott saw that black politicians were being held to a higher standard than whites, and resented it, but he warned nonetheless that inattention to even the appearance of the proper functioning of government could doom the Reconstruction experiment—in part by causing it to lose support in the North. "Misgovernment works its own suicide," he said. "We may shout our party shibboleths, we may repeat our party watchwords, we may discourse ever so eloquently upon the glorious principles of the Republican Party, but all this will not save us from overthrow and defeat, unless we maintain good government in South Carolina."

  The home-state press was surprised by Elliott's "remarkable harangue" of his fellow black South Carolinians, and certainly far more pleased by it than by his civil rights oration. "With the courage and good sense which have marked his entire public career, Mr. Elliott condemned the state administration, and declared that the salvation of the Republican Party depended upon its instantly putting an end to the existing abuses," the Charleston News & Courier stated with approval. The New York Times noted that "Mr. Elliott has rendered a public service of the very highest importance" and encouraged the black men of South Carolina to take heart from New York City's own recent example of political housecleaning: its exposure of Boss Tweed.

  Elliott, perhaps in part because he had been passed over by the state legislature for a recent appointment to the U.S. Senate, had decided to leave Congress in order to return to South Carolina. As had Adelbert Ames in Mississippi, he had become convinced that he could do more good at home than away in the distant capital. And in Columbia dramatic political change appeared to be afoot. The various scandals surrounding Governor Moses meant that Moses would almost certainly not win the party's nomination for reelection in 1874, leaving the way open for Daniel Chamberlain, the attorney general, to become governor. Elliott's biographer Peggy Lamson entertains the possibility that Chamberlain, who shared many of Elliott's ideas about reform, had encouraged Elliott to leave Congress and enter the state legislature, with a promise to appoint him speaker of the state's house of representatives, a perch of considerable influence. "Together, then," Lamson speculates, "the two men would work miracles in cleaning up the state's administrative and legislative stables." She hypothesizes further that Chamberlain, who may have had his long-range sights on one day being chosen by the South Carolina legislature as a U.S. senator, a job that was slated to open in 1876, eyed Elliott as Adelbert Ames of Mississippi did Blanche Bruce—a respected black Republican to whom stewardship of the state party could eventually be handed off.

  Chamberlain applied himself with considerably more dexterity than his fellow carpetbagger, Louisiana's Henry Clay Warmoth, to righting his ship of state by appeasing Democrats and creating a solid center; and Elliott at first accepted Chamberlain's inclusive policies, confident in the sheer numerical superiority that Republicans enjoyed. Neither man recognized fully the growing depth of feeling among whites that South Carolina had to be redeemed from Republican rule at any cost, or the possibility that the state's black vote could be reduced to near-invisibility by determined Democrats.

  It was Elliott who inadvertently helped push South Carolina in that direction when, in December 1875, in reaction to Chamberlain's handing out of patronage to Democrats, he participated in a black Republican campaign to pack an upcoming round of judicial appointments with men of their choosing, including William J. Whipper and the disgraced former governor, Franklin J. Moses Jr. Both were by now associated in the minds of South Carolinians with the worst kind of Radical arrogance, Whipper more unfairly so. Chamberlain was slow to get wind of Elliott's scheme. He was scheduled to travel to the town of Greenville to deliver a lecture on Thursday, December 16, and award scholarships to students of classical studies. A devotee of Greek and Roman literature and oratory since his youth, he had looked forward to the outing. Aware that the election of the judges in the state senate was slated for that same day, Chamberlain asked Elliott, as speaker of the house, to reschedule the vote. Chamberlain later said he had written Elliott a personal note making this request and that Elliott had visited the governor's office on the morning of December 15 and agreed to do what he could to postpone the election; the next
day, however, with Chamberlain away in Greenville, the legislature went ahead and voted. In what came to be known in the annals of South Carolina politics as "Black Thursday," Republicans swept all eight judicial posts, including placements for Whipper and Moses.

  The News & Courier termed this maneuver "the triumph ... of the worst elements of negro radicalism." Whipper was described as "a full-blood negro ... known to be ignorant and malignant ... believed to be utterly corrupt," while "Moses is known throughout the length and breadth of the land as the Robber Governor, as a man whose rascality is equaled only by his audacity." The election of such purportedly nefarious men to sensitive judgeships could lead the paper to only one conclusion: "War is declared upon the honest people of South Carolina." Across the border in North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer worked itself into a purplish lamentation: "South Carolina, noble old mother of learned jurists and pure statesmen, where has thy manhood and chivalry fled? Radicalism found her a garden, they have left her a wilderness. They found her a paradise, they have made her a pandemonium—a hell!" The paper, alluding to rumors of sexual impropriety that had long affixed themselves to the former governor, dismissed Moses as a "moral ulcer and despoiler of female virtue," while Whipper was simply "a stupid negro ... What more can we say?" Even the Republican Daily Union-Herald feared the party in which it placed its faith had signed its own "death-warrant" and scolded Elliott and his allies for being oblivious to public opinion. Meanwhile, whites residing in the circuit over which "Judge Moses" would preside vowed to bar him from the court-room by any means necessary, even "with muskets on our shoulders...[to] defend that temple of justice from desecration."