Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Senator Windom's request for congressional involvement in, or at least scrutiny of, the westward migration, received backing from an unexpected source in December 1879, when the Democrat Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana, concerned about a stream of black immigrants from North Carolina entering his state, joined the call for an inquiry. This was a step Windom had requested eleven months earlier, and he welcomed it even as he questioned Voorhees's motives, for he knew the Indianan viewed the exodus negatively and suspected him of setting up a Democratic whitewash. Windom demanded that any investigation not look at the movement solely as a problem but also search for possible remedies, a suggestion Voorhees accepted so long as the inquiry would examine closely whether malignant forces were involved.

  The "Exodus Committee," as it was dubbed by the press, made up of five senators including Voorhees and Windom, interviewed 159 witnesses between January and April 1880. Democrats held the majority on the committee, and it proceeded to do as Windom feared, denying that blacks had any reason to be upset with conditions in the South and ascribing the migration to baleful Northern influences. So-called relief societies, stated the committee's official conclusions, were in fact operatives for the Republican Party, seeking to tip the balance of political might in the North and the West. The committee used the pejorative term "outside agitators" to describe those fanning the flames of discontent from afar (likely one of the first times this infamous phrase appeared in discourse on Southern race relations) and overall painted a rosy picture of life for blacks in the Southern states. Reports of racial violence, claimed the study, tended to be retold years after their occurrence "by zealous witnesses," and most were "all hearsay, and nothing but hearsay, with rare exceptions." The committee noted that "many of the witnesses before us were colored politicians, men who make their living by politics, and whose business it was to stir up feeling between whites and blacks, [to] keep alive the embers of political hatred." These leaders' "inflammatory appeals," combined with the "misdirected philanthropy" of some fawning whites, had led Southern blacks to abandon their homes.

  Windom protested the findings. It was apparent that Voorhees and the other Democrats had reached their "conclusions" long before any actual testimony had been heard; indeed, most of the testimony made it clear that the exodus was no act of conspiracy but the more or less spontaneous result of pent-up frustrations among blacks. Windom dismissed as "an utter absurdity" the notion that the movement was an effort "on the part of Northern leaders of the Republican Party to colonize [Kansas] with Negroes for political purposes" and scolded Voorhees and his brethren for wasting the taxpayers' money. Congress had refused to aid the migrants themselves but had spent $30,000 to fund Democratic propaganda, or, as it struck the black educator Booker T. Washington, "thousands of dollars to find out what was already known to every intelligent person, and almost every schoolboy in the country ... thousands of dollars to ascertain the cause of the poor Negroes' distress, but not one cent to relieve it."

  It was, however, in the end Voorhees who had most accurately gauged the public mood. The lack of interest in Washington and elsewhere for black political rights generally defeated the possibility of federal involvement in the exodus. Windom's efforts were made to appear quixotic at best, and, as the committee report had implied, evidence of unworthy political manipulations at worst. In any case, the westward flow of emigrants soon slowed; the frenzied activity of 1879 and early 1880 seemed to substantially exhaust the number of Southern blacks willing to act on the migration urge. Reports that steamboats plying the Mississippi had ceased picking up black migrants under threats from planters and intimidation from white vigilantes no doubt also helped curtail the movement.

  Probably somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 blacks departed the South altogether for western lands during the late 1870s. For 25,000 or so who made the journey to Kansas(during 1870–80 the black population of Kansas more than doubled, from 17,108 to 43,107) their new life was hardly without difficulty. Black farmers experienced at working the rich alluvial lands of the Deep South were challenged by clearing and cultivating less cooperative ground, and white immigrants to the state brought unanticipated competition and sometimes outright hostility.

  But although Kansas was not the agricultural paradise its boosters had claimed, the exodus was in numerous ways a success. Many blacks did thrive there, often by throwing themselves with superhuman effort into their labors, mindful that they had come too far to countenance failure. The Tennessean Henry Carter and his wife walked the sixty-five miles from Topeka to the town of Dunlap, Kansas; within a year they had cleared forty acres, built a small stone cottage, and purchased a horse and two cows. In Graham County, a determined black farmer was said to have turned five acres of "raw prairie" with a hand spade. One emigrant wrote to his family in Louisiana, "They do not kill negroes here for voting. I am living here as a lark. You can buy land at from a dollar and a half to two dollars an acre." Fortunately for the new arrivals, many of whom lacked necessary supplies, the winter of 1879–80 was one of the mildest in the state's history. "God seed dat de darkies had thin clo's," according to one grateful witness, "an' he done kep'd de cole off."

  In retrospect, the western migration of black Americans from the South at Reconstruction's end appears more a deliberative—and decidedly prescient—act of collective survival than an impulse borne of momentary uncertainty. The Exodusters had, in fact, read accurately the drift of history and of recent events: a long night of national disregard for their rights and humanity was indeed at hand, and the Deep South was to prove an ever more unfortunate habitat. "The exodus presented proof that Afro-Americans did not quietly resign themselves to the political or economic order of the Redeemed South," concludes Nell Painter. "Exodusters on their way to Free Kansas said no, we do not acquiesce in Redemption; we do not believe that this is the way of American democracy."

  In contrast, established black spokesmen such as Blanche Bruce and Frederick Douglass had a harder time accepting that "the Reconstruction dream of black assimilation into white American society had died." They had believed fervently in that dream and had fought ably for civil rights, Enforcement Acts, and Constitutional reforms. But when those attainments were reneged upon, it was the ordinary black citizen who knew what to do.

  Chapter 14

  A ROPE OF SAND

  "SOME MEN ARE BORN GREAT, some achieve greatness, and others lived during the Reconstruction period," wrote the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Even by the standards of that unforgiving era, however, the decline of South Carolina's "savior," Wade Hampton, came with astonishing swiftness. The candidate who had served as the moderate face of redemption soon found himself undermined and made to appear superfluous by the potent conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

  The Straightouts had overthrown the reform governor Daniel Chamberlain by talking a great deal about "reforms" of their own, although it became increasingly apparent that they were obsessed chiefly with one—the eradication of black Americans from elected office and from the balloting place. As Martin Gary proclaimed within two years of the election that had brought Hampton to power, "We regard the issues between the white and colored people of this state, and of the entire South, as an antagonism of race, not a difference of political parties ... white supremacy is essential to our continued existence as a people."

  Despite the triumph of home rule, the will to violence that had characterized the 1876 campaign had in no way abated; if anything, it intensified as a younger generation of Edgefield men emerged, who, in the words of their one-eyed leader, Benjamin Tillman, "rode hard and delivered strong licks." Tillman, a founding member of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, which had been involved in the massacre at Hamburg, was at heart "a dairy farmer and cotton planter," reported the New York World, but also "a rough, fierce, masterful leader ... powerfully built, with a square head, heavy jaws and powerful mouth—the sort of man who can lead mobs. His one gleaming eye gives an expression of fierceness to his countenance...
[it] burns in his head, a menace to his enemies and an inspiration to his friends."

  BENJAMIN TILLMAN

  His larger-than-life personality and embrace of popular reactionary sentiments—his distrust of cities, Yankees, big business, and wealthy planters; his advocacy for farmers (he had been instrumental in founding Clemson University, an agricultural school for the state's native sons); and his personal heroic connection to the hallowed days of Red Shirt activism—made him an irresistible figure to many white South Carolinians. Supremely confident, Tillman's style was to ride into and over potential hindrances. One night, while delivering a talk from the steps of Charleston's city hall, his words were suddenly drowned out by the tolling bells of a nearby cathedral; another speaker might have been thrown off, but Tillman shrewdly met the distraction. Pointing to the tower he cried, "They ring out the false and ring in the true!"

  It might be argued that the powerful white-supremacist attitudes, which opened into full flower across the South in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, first took shape with the Tillman movement in South Carolina. Certainly they were nowhere better articulated or successfully promoted, with Tillman himself a prototype for the familiar modern demagogues of the American South, who combined adherence to "the Southern way of life" with open defiance of the federal government. But unlike some of his successors, the public Tillman was not particularly lovable or even lampoonable. He appeared to savor his role as the supreme bad man of redemption, even goading audiences and the press:

  You of the north shoved the Negro into our mouths, but you couldn't make us swallow him, and by the holy God you never will.

  We have ten million Negroes and only one Booker Washington, and even he's half white.

  All we of the South want is for you to ... keep your long Yankee noses out of the Negro question.

  We have done our level best [to disenfranchise blacks]. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.

  "Pitchfork Ben," as he would come to be known (for offering to stick the said implement in the "fat old ribs" of President Grover Cleveland), was to have an outsized impact on not only state but national politics, holding several high offices, including governor and U.S. senator, as the Edgefield spirit morphed into a creed known as "Tillmanism." Its guiding principle was simple: the "control" of white people's lives by black men like Robert Smalls, Richard Cain, and Robert Brown Elliott was the nemesis of civilization, and such a state of affairs, once all too real during Reconstruction, could never, ever recur; the only logical response was to choke the possibility at its source—the ballot box. And because South Carolina contained more blacks than whites, the fear of black domination could be manipulated to make it seem that the biological survival of the white population was at stake, licensing all manner of outlandish interventions. The emotional touchstone of this crusade was always and forever 1876, the year of redemption. "That we have good government now," boasted Tillman, "is due entirely to the fact that the Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes."

  In the interim between the rise of the rifle clubs of 1876 and the legislated disenfranchisement that would arrive under Tillman's guidance in the 1890s, a number of devious means were employed to thwart black and Republican South Carolina voters and still their voices. One well-known deception instituted in the early 1880s was the "eight box law." It turned the ballot box into a maze of interchangeable slots labeled with the names of various offices, such as governor, lieutenant governor, and congressional representatives, making it impossible for illiterate voters to know which box should receive a particular ballot. To defeat those who tried to memorize the location of the appropriate slots, the signs denoting them were frequently rearranged. Illiterate people whose votes were desired could be directed by poll workers to vote properly; others would be disqualified for having been placed in "the wrong box." When the Republican state convention met in 1882, delegates agreed that the trickery of the eight box likely disenfranchised as many as 80 percent of the state's Republican voters.

  Poll managers, registrars, and vote tabulators appointed by the sitting governor had many other discretionary means available to tamper with voting and the vote count. For one, the registrars could, in reviewing the credentials and identification of blacks aspiring to vote, object to any minor irregularity, even in so minute a question as the applicant's middle initial; at times poll workers might simply hide out, or close the polling place, forcing black voters to wait or return home in frustration. In another act of deceit, poll managers stuffed the ballot box with more ballots than there were voters registered; the law then allowed them to shake the box and "randomly" withdraw ballots until the number inside matched that of the number registered; in the process, of course, large numbers of Republican ballots could be discarded. Or the manager might create an opening in the ballot box that was too small; in this way, many of the ballots placed inside could be declared to be "mutilated" and thrown out.

  Congressman Joseph Rainey, who provided a journalist with other examples of Democratic ballot box "rascality," explained how at one precinct, Democratic poll managers were hired who were not properly qualified for the job. When Republicans demanded to know if this state of affairs would invalidate the ballot count, they were assured it would not, but after Republican candidates carried the district, the total vote was vacated on the grounds that one of the poll managers had not been qualified, in direct violation of state law. Rainey pointed out that few if any such irregularities occurred in districts where the black vote, even honestly tallied, did not threaten a Democratic victory.

  With time, the Democrats refined their methods so that disenfranchisement needn't wait until official balloting. Joel W. Bowman, an examiner with the Justice Department who visited South Carolina in fall 1882, was told by Democrats "that it is much easier and looks better to adopt means to prevent the registration of negroes ... than to be compelled to intimidate and sometimes kill them on election day." When registrars went into a predominantly black precinct to register voters, they would form two lines of applicants, one black, one white, and take the whites first. As much time as possible would be consumed registering the whites, and when black registration started, Bowman reported, the process would slow even further, as the supervisors challenged blacks with all sorts of "nonsensical and frivolous questions, with evidently no other object in view than to ... register as few colored voters as possible, till the time expired for registration in that precinct."

  Blacks who did not manage to register would be told to try doing so at the county seat, but there, similar delaying tactics would be used, including the demand that the black aspirant present a white person who could vouch for his identity (although such was not required by law). "Thereby the time would be frittered away to the disgust and despair of the large mass of applicants, who would finally be forced to return to their homes without their certificates of registration, and were therefore disenfranchised." When, however, Democrats failed to obtain the required certificate, registrars found ways to add them to the list of eligible voters on election day, a courtesy rarely extended to blacks. These kinds of election law violations became so standard after 1876, with few if any prosecutions of the abuses ever sought, that black people understandably became demoralized about voting.

  Such developments did not sit altogether well with Governor Hampton, who gradually came to resent the extremists' efforts to nullify moderate aspects of his agenda, particularly the idea that the black electorate, though humbled under Democratic authority, would nonetheless retain its power of the franchise and would have a voice in state affairs. By 1878 he had come to distrust Martin Gary's wing of the party, though he had joined Gary in achieving redemption and feared his own efforts were being set aside at the peril of the state's future. "If you are to go back upon all pledges tha
t I have made to the people," stated Hampton, "if you are to say that the colored men that have sustained us are no longer to be citizens of South Carolina—if you require me to go up and give my allegiance to a platform of that sort, then, my friends, much as I would do for you and South Carolina, much as I desire to spend or be spent in her service, willing as I am to give even my life for my state, I should have to decline. I would give my life for South Carolina, but I cannot sacrifice my honor, not even for her." That summer he warned explicitly against ballot-box fraud in the upcoming election, pointing out that it would demean all that had been struggled for. "If you once countenance fraud, before many years pass over your heads you will not be worth saving, and will not be worthy of the state you live in. Fraud cannot be successful, because the chosen sons of South Carolina form the returning board now. The men placed there as representing the truth and honor of South Carolina would die before they would perjure themselves by placing men wrongfully in office." Perhaps Hampton wished for too much; the program of voter bulldozing and Red Shirt intimidation that had helped boost him to high office was not easily abandoned by those who'd mastered it.