Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  When white congressmen seemed unable to grasp the full import of what had occurred at Hamburg, Rainey used an analogy to issue a powerful demand:

  What would be thought if here in Washington City, when a military company was parading on the Fourth of July, two men should come up in a buggy and demand of the officers that the company should get out of the way, and, if they did not, should at once set to work and murder the men of that military company? I ask you, citizens of the United States, would you stand for it? I ask you, proud Southern men who boast of your gallantry and your intelligence and your superiority to my race, would you stand it? I ask you, men of the North, who sacrificed your blood and treasure, who sacrificed the lives of your sons and your relatives, would you stand it?

  Do you, then, expect Negroes to stand all this? Do you expect my race to submit meekly to continual persecution and massacre by these people in the South? In the name of my race and my people, in the name of humanity, in the name of God, I ask you whether we are to be American citizens ... or whether we are to be vassals and slaves again? I ask you to tell us whether these things are to go on, so that we may understand now and henceforth what we are to expect.

  Robert Smalls also worked to ensure that Hamburg would not be swept under the carpet, producing in Congress the graphic letter he had received from an eyewitness to the Hamburg affair. When he was pestered by Democratic representatives to name the writer of the letter, he replied, "I will say to the gentleman, if he is desirous that the name shall be given in order to have another negro killed, he will not get it from me," and insisted that he himself could vouch for the letter's authenticity. The Ohio Democrat Samuel Cox, known for his sarcasm, then asked Smalls who would vouch for him. "A majority of 13,000," Smalls shot back, referring to his Sea Islands constituents and cutting off the titters Cox's query had prompted. Cox then began reading from The Prostrate State by James'S. Pike, but had not gone far when Smalls, unwilling to hear South Carolina demeaned, inquired, "Have you the book there of the city of New York?"

  The entire House burst into laughter. A New York Republican then chimed in, reminding Cox that "nothing in South Carolina could match his own state's record of extravagance and dishonesty under the Democrats." Cox, fuming, insisted that "South Carolina is today a Republican state and the worst governed state in the Union; it is bad all around, bad at its borders, bad at its heart; bad on the sea-coast ... everywhere rotten to the core. Give South Carolina a democratic government," Cox vowed, "and you will see that every man, black and white, will be cared for under the law."

  Deadpanned Ohio's James Garfield, "As they were at Hamburg?" Smalls managed to tack on an amendment to the troop redeployment bill ensuring that adequate troop levels would be maintained in South Carolina.

  In their correspondence, Chamberlain pointed out to President Grant that what had occurred at Hamburg did not auger well for the coming elections, in that it had terrorized the black population and brought "a feeling of triumph and political elation" to "the minds of many of the white people and Democrats. The fears of the one side correspond with the hopes of the other side." Grant responded that he too feared for the upcoming fall election, when the country's greatest civil right, "an untrammeled ballot," might well be put in jeopardy, and agreed that South Carolina was on the brink of the same violence that had so recently restored Mississippi to the hands of the former slave-owning class. "Mississippi is governed today by officials chosen through fraud and violence, such as would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and Christian people," Grant conceded. "How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the universe only knows."

  When in early September a court convened in Aiken County, South Carolina, to consider charges of murder and conspiracy against Mathew Butler and other whites involved at Hamburg, every lawyer in the county offered to work pro bono to defend the accused. For good measure, a local vigilante leader Benjamin Tillman led a large contingent of men "armed to the teeth," many from his Sweetwater Rifle and Sabre Club, to surround the courthouse and await the court's deliberations. Because in the wake of Hamburg, Republicans like Elliott and Chamberlain had so vehemently "waved the bloody shirt," Tillman had the sympathetic womenfolk of Aiken daub forty shirts with red ink and turpentine, which some of his men wore to mock the traditional Republican complaint, a vivid form of protest that had originated the year before in Mississippi. He also had a huge mask created of a "Negro" with kinky hair, covered it with threatening slogans, and filled it with bullet holes. On one side read the motto AWAKE, ARISE, OR BE FOREVER FALLEN, and on the other, NONE BUT THE GUILTY NEED FEAR.

  Dressed in their "bloody" clothes, carrying the grotesque mask, Tillman's mounted men began galloping back and forth through the streets of Aiken, with the horses' hooves raising an immense cloud of dust. It frightened away any would-be black spectators yet won cheers and applause from some of the federal troops on hand. When the judge hearing the cases announced he was considering waiting until the next morning to begin, the sheriff whispered, "You had better let these men get out of town tonight else they may burn it, and hang you before morning." The court wisely wrapped up its proceedings, saying it would bring no indictments, and the "red shirt" that day became the popular uniform of the Edgefield movement in South Carolina. The state, and the nation, would soon hear much more of Captain Tillman and his men.

  With no legal action pursued against Butler's men, whatever moderate sympathy that had existed in South Carolina for the Hamburg victims quickly melted away, especially as the hotly contested 1876 elections approached. When, during a campaign appearance in rural Abbeville that fall Governor Chamberlain began to speak of the tragedy that had befallen Hamburg, he recognized the unmistakable sound of numerous pistols being cocked—a reliable indication in Reconstruction South Carolina that an audience had wearied of a subject.

  Eighteen seventy-six was a year of well-deserved celebration, as Americans gathered at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to mark the hundredth birthday of the United States. It was a moment to anticipate the future and to survey with pride the tremendous distance the nation had come from its colonial origins a century before.

  PROMOTIONAL ARTWORK FOR THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION OF 1876

  The country was now several times the size of the original thirteen colonies (that year adding Colorado as the thirty-eighth state), with a population that had grown ten times over and now approached forty million. American industry, no longer located at the village forge or clockmaker's, was to be found in sprawling mills and factories. Manufacturing had been transformed by automated lathes and the sewing machine, agriculture by mechanized plows and threshers. Railroads spanned the country coast to coast, and San Francisco to New York was now a six-day run; harbors and rivers teemed with vessels carrying passengers and freight; and from port cities steamships embarked on transoceanic voyages. Chicago, still rebuilding from the great fire of 1871, had taken over from Cincinnati as the nation's meat-packing center, helping to launch a new system of nationalized food production and distribution. The first professional intercity baseball organization, the National League, was recently formed; Alexander Graham Bell had patented a newfangled device he called "the telephone"; and Mark Twain, one of America's leading humorists, had just published a semi-autobiographical novel of simpler times titled The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  The reach of the nation's press had expanded. News of catastrophes such as train wrecks and the massacre of Custer and his troops were sped to readers, and the first sensational kidnapping for ransom riveted the public when four-year-old Charley Ross was abducted from the front yard of his family's home in Germantown, Pennsylvania, held for $20,000, and never seen again. The press coverage of "Little Charley's" vanishing was obsessive enough to compete with that surrounding the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which involved a sexual dalliance between the sanctimonious Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth "Lib" Tilton, wife of the New York editor Theodore Tilt
on. The Beecher-Tilton saga, the decade's longest-running newspaper soap opera, featured free-love advocates, spiritualists, and eastern intellectuals, and it made for irresistible copy while offering proof of the moral turpitude of even America's "best people." Less salacious but equally steadfast were the reports of official wrongdoing, thievery, and crooked financial dealings emanating from Washington and Wall Street, as well as accounts of abusive labor practices in the steel mills and on the railroads. "There has been so much corruption," one observer could only conclude, "the man in the moon has to hold his nose as he passes over the earth."

  Also darkening the centennial mood were lingering economic woes from the Panic of 1873, which had begun in September of that year, with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company, America's leading investment house. Depositors rushed their banks and investors besieged brokerage houses, and for ten days the New York Stock Exchange remained shuttered. Ripples from the collapse in the East coursed across America to the plains and to the cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta. Falling agricultural prices exacerbated tensions related to land and labor in the South; farmers cried out against railroads' price gouging; in Northern cities, hard-pressed workers and the unemployed marched for relief.

  The widely shared anguish caused by the downturn served as another breaking point in the North's interest in the freedmen. CIVIL RIGHTS HAVE PASSED, NOW FOR THE RIGHTS OF WORK, a banner read at a rally in New York's Cooper Union, a blunt expression of a shift in mood as the dilemma of black field hands in the plantation South gave way to the growing concern for industrial labor relations and the plight of the immigrant working classes. The ex-slaves, many Americans felt, had already enjoyed a very long day as the nation's darlings.

  Moreover, public faith in the president had fallen off even more precipitously. By now, the country was nearly a full decade removed from the days of Andrew Johnson's "Swing Around the Circle," when audiences stood in the rain and begged for a glimpse of Grant, the Union's military savior. To the glory of his battlefield successes, unfortunately, were now added years of bruising politics and widespread concern about his probity and competence. In the Whiskey Ring affair that came to public attention in 1875, it was revealed that midwestern businessmen had bribed members of Grant's inner circle to issue an illegal tax abatement on whiskey, causing the United States to forfeit almost $3 million in tax revenues. Later it was discovered that some of the money wound up funding Grant's reelection campaign of 1872 and paying for gifts for him and some of his associates; these included a team of horses given to the president and a $2,400 diamond shirt stud presented to Orville E. Babcock, the president's secretary.

  A more embarrassing scandal involved Secretary of War William Worth Belknap, who was found to have engaged in a number of profitable schemes, including the "sale" of a U.S. military trading post in the West. Belknap was married to one of Washington's most fashionable society women, Amanda "Puss" Tomlinson, the sister of his late wife, Carrie. Before her death from consumption in 1870, Carrie Belknap had made arrangements so that a friend, Caleb P. Marsh, would receive the post tradership at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The sale of these lucrative positions was common, but Marsh's case was complicated in that the present owner of the Fort Sill tradership, John Evans, did not wish to relinquish it. Marsh arranged for Evans to keep the post but pay him $15,000 annually (later reduced to $12,000), half of which—Marsh agreed with Carrie Belknap—would go to maintain a trust for her infant son. When Amanda Tomlinson assumed her deceased sister's place as the new Mrs. Belknap in 1873, she continued with the scheme, even though the child had died in 1871. Puss apparently used money from the "trust" to enhance her wardrobe and to fund her and her husband's active social life. That the secretary of war himself knew of the arrangement was made evident by Marsh's testimony that he had on occasion paid the money to Belknap directly.

  When word of the scandal broke in March 1876, Belknap rushed to the White House and in tears gave the whole story to Grant, who on the spot accepted his resignation, thus allowing him to escape impeachment. Grant did this no doubt out of personal regard for Belknap (they had served together at Shiloh), but perhaps as well because Grant knew that his own brother Orvil and his brother-in-law, John Dent, profited handsomely from similar arrangements with post traders. Belknap also had much to fear from any further scrutiny of his affairs; he was rumored to have pocketed a kickback for awarding a contract to erect headstones in a soldiers' cemetery.

  The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives smelled blood over the quick acceptance of Belknap's resignation. Not willing to miss a political opportunity to rub the nation's face in the affair, the House went ahead and impeached Belknap, although he was acquitted by the Senate amid questions as to whether an impeachment of a man no longer in office was legitimate. Meanwhile, the case packed no end of melodrama. Press accounts feasted on the recurring evidence of the Belknaps' personal collapse—a cabinet officer weeping before his president; the ruin of the once-celebrated Puss, now unable to face her peers; Caleb Marsh's ill-conceived escape attempt to Canada, during which he "showed symptoms of mental agony bordering on insanity." If war heroes and glamorous Washington figures close to the president could be seduced by such petty and cynical greed, what did it say about others entrusted with authority? What did it say about America? "Considering the official rank of Mr. Belknap, and Mrs. Belknap's position in what is called 'Administration society,'" concluded The Nation, "the whole story is revolting."

  The scandal led the periodical to stigmatize Grant as a man lacking in character and inept at statecraft and civic affairs. "Pierce and Buchanan, and Lincoln and Johnson all had their faults as administrators," The Nation said, "but they were men who had grown up in office or in the forum, and who had sat at the feet of teachers in whom the original ideal of the Government was still strong ... The crisis came when an ignorant soldier, coarse in his tastes and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment, and of low company, was put in the Presidential Chair."

  One effect, among many, of Grant's diminished reputation was to stain his party's image further and deny him and his administration some of the moral authority required to make hard decisions to defend his policies in the South. In the months ahead Southern Democrats would continue to exploit these weaknesses, denigrating Republicanism everywhere and portraying themselves as the necessary redeemers of what the Vicksburg Monitor termed "the albatross of Reconstruction."

  If anyone might have managed to stem the tide of Straightoutism in South Carolina it was Daniel Chamberlain, a successful moderate Republican governor with a comparatively honest record, whose efforts at meeting conservatives halfway had been lauded by the state's leading newspapers. He had even impressed many residents recently with his solicitous attention to state pride, seeing to it that South Carolina was well represented at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and arranging for a hallowed local Revolutionary War unit, the Washington Light Infantry, to be honored at centennial events in Boston and at South Carolina's own Fort Moultrie.

  However, the mood for redemption was strong, and Chamberlain's style had never sat well with natives. His precise, elegant manners and well-turned phrases tended to sail over the heads of his listeners; his speeches were "models of style and diction ... suited to cultivated audiences," one contemporary said, but were "delivered to people who ... enjoyed and understood only rant, shrieks, arm waving, foot stomps and funny stories about hogs ... and hound dogs." On a personal level, the sick headaches from which he suffered were just one indicator that Chamberlain was beginning to flag at the strenuous effort he'd been forced to make—a New Englander with a degree from Yale and a penchant for classical verse, attempting to govern the deepest secessionist state of the Confederacy. It was said that his wife, Alice, "a perfect type of high-born, high-bred, Anglo-Saxon loveliness, noble in bearing," was increasingly unhappy in the South. She cared little for her husband's white political allies and had even less interest in receiving socially his black
Republican colleagues. Visiting the legislature one day, Mrs. Chamberlain was spotted by Robert Brown Elliott, who strode down from the speaker's chair in hopes of being introduced. At Elliott's approach, however, she shivered noticeably and stepped back, simply saying the word, "No!" Elliott, understandably offended, never forgave the insult.

  Chamberlain's discomfort stemmed from the mood of the South, which had shifted underneath his feet as he held office. In 1874 a Democratic majority had returned to the U.S. House of Representatives and included several ex-Confederate generals, and by the end of 1875, with Mississippi's redemption and (in early 1876) the forced resignation of its Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, only South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, of all the Southern states, remained in Republican hands. Whites in the region saw clearly that there was no reason to come to terms with the Republicans and Reconstruction governments in their midst; they could chase them out or wait them out; either way, home rule would be restored, and in the new order of things there was no need to make room for even reasonable, conciliatory carpetbaggers like Daniel Chamberlain.

  As recently as June 28, 1876, the governor had been welcomed by the state's rifle clubs at a dinner for Palmetto Day, a holiday honoring South Carolina's triumph over British troops in the Revolutionary War; speeches were given, elaborate toasts exchanged, but this last momentary light of reconciliation soon flickered and died. When the Democrats convened six weeks later to choose candidates for the upcoming election, they imported a campaign "expert" from Mississippi to describe some of the techniques whites had used there the previous fall to restore home rule. This character likely was either James Z. George or Ethelbert Barksdale, the fathers of what had become known as the Mississippi Plan, a skillfully managed campaign of intimidation just strong enough to keep blacks from the polls but subtle enough to avert any real protest from the North. Among other steps, the expert suggested that South Carolinians impress black voters with "a spectacular uniform, and ... the parade of long processions of armed white men through the country."