Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  As Robert Smalls fought to defend his Sea Islands from the encircling forces of redemption, elsewhere in America "Sumner's Law," the hard-won Supplementary Civil Rights Act of 1875, faced increasing hostility as the idea of equal rights lost favor.

  No one had expected the new law to erase prejudice overnight; the hope had been that by assuring "citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude," the right "to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement," a process of assimilation and mutual acceptance would be encouraged: black and white Americans might learn to exist as equals in their daily lives.

  But any sense of triumph accompanying the law's enactment had proved fleeting. At its birth it was widely denounced as impractical, un-enforceable, and perhaps unconstitutional; it was nearly friendless from the start. Neither President Grant nor any member of Congress spoke out with enthusiasm to support it, and even some of the law's original backers were alienated when Congress cut the provision for school desegregation. While Northern newspapers expressed skepticism as to the law's chances for success, the South declared open defiance. "A thousand federal lawsuits and fines cannot establish ... negro equality" was the opinion heard from Georgia. "We would ride in wagons or walk, live in boarding-houses or starve, live without a laugh or public entertainment, rather than be dictated to, and forced to mingle with an element inferior, ill-bred, ignorant, and forced by law upon us."

  Early attempts to apply the law in real-world situations encountered immediate resistance from local courts, including the stirrings of a philosophy that would, within a generation, come to dominate race relations in America—"separate but equal"—the belief that equal standing in the eyes of the law was sufficient to assume equal treatment.

  Unquestionably, the courts were put off by the ambiguity in this legislation. Federal judges both north and south made numerous requests to the office of the attorney general in Washington, asking questions that needed clarification: Did the civil rights law cover all kinds of steamboats and water conveyances? Did the term inns refer to hotels only or also saloons and restaurants? Could a defendant evade punishment by demonstrating that although a complainant might not be allowed access to "white" accommodations, the accommodation offered was equivalent?

  The New York Times worried that sensation seekers would exploit the law. Blacks living in the North were "quiet, inoffensive people who ... have no desire to intrude where they are not welcome," one editorial assured its readers, but the South held "colored men and women who delight in 'scenes' and cheap notoriety ... Such men as Pinchback of Louisiana...[who] would take no small delight in breakfasting at the Café Brunswick, in attending a fashionable ball, or occupying seats in the dress circle at the opera."

  The paper's confidence in the moderation of Northern blacks was, however, misplaced, and some of the first tests of the new law occurred there. William E. Davis Jr., the business manager of a black newspaper, "a respectable-appearing colored man ... intelligent and well-educated...[who] converses and dresses well," went to the box office at the Booth Theatre on West 23rd Street in New York City and was refused when he attempted to purchase seats for either the orchestra or the parquet. The theater's treasurer, William Tillotson, told Davis that he would have to be content with seats in the "upper circle," an area of the balcony set aside for colored patrons. The next morning Davis filed a complaint with the U.S. attorney, who ordered Tillotson arrested, but a grand jury failed to return an indictment.

  In another incident in New York, a black man complained that a confectioner on Sixth Avenue had refused to sell him ice cream. Authorities declined to order the confectioner's arrest on the grounds that an ice cream peddler's business was not covered by Sumner's legislation. "What good is the civil rights law, "the frustrated complainant asked, "if a colored man cannot get a plate of ice cream the same as a white man?"

  Mrs. Henry Jones of Philadelphia also found the law unhelpful. As she and her family marched in procession with her husband's remains to the Mount Moriah Cemetery, where she had purchased a double plot, the funeral was stopped by a group of men claiming to represent a "cemetery association." They informed her that no black person could be buried there, for, like schools, cemeteries had been excised legislatively from the civil rights act's guarantee of equal access.

  There were, however, a few positive signs. In early June, Henry Greenwall, manager of the Tremont Opera House in Galveston, was convicted under the law for refusing to sell tickets to two black women who wished to sit on the main floor. The judge fined Greenwall $500 but didn't stop there; in addition, he hurled a "contempt" ruling at a local newspaper that had criticized his judgment. In Virginia a hotel clerk named Newcomer refused lodging to a black minister, Fields Cook, telling him there were no rooms available but suggested to the clergyman that, if he wished, he could sit in a room off the lobby all night. While sitting, Cook kept count as Newcomer admitted eighteen white arrivals to the hotel. At one point a white guest, learning of Cook's plight, offered to allow the clergyman to sleep on a spare bed in his room, but the hotel clerk would not allow it. A jury, instructed by a judge about the new law and offended by Newcomer's special cruelty to Cook, found the clerk guilty.

  The case of a black woman named Green, who was put off a steamboat, exemplified how courts would use the emerging doctrine of "separate but equal." Green was on board the City of Bridgeton, traveling between Savannah, Georgia, and various points in Florida, and by her own account, she

  demanded to ride in the same cabin with the white people and on the same deck, and demanded [the] same and equal accommodations which the white people enjoyed...[but] the purser insisted that if I did he would put me ashore at Doboy. He used no abusive language to me, with the exception of the tone of his voice, just as if I was a brute or something. He came to the passengers and collected the fare politely and turned to me and said, "Say, have you a ticket?" and I said "No, but here is the money." And he said, "Go downstairs, or I will put you off at Doboy."...I went ashore because I was afraid, from the way he spoke to me, that he would put me off, and having my nephew I was afraid one or the other of us would fall overboard.

  The master of the steamboat later insisted that Green had been unruly and that when she went ashore at Doboy, she continued to holler at and threaten the purser, "daring him to come out on the wharf, saying what she would do with him." The woman and her nephew ended up waiting six hours for another boat so they could continue their trip.

  When Green's case came before the federal district court judge John Erskine, he criticized any interpretation of the new law that would "put passengers in the same cabin or stateroom, who would be repulsive or disagreeable to each other." Better, he said, to prevent "contacts and collisions arising from natural and well known repugnancies," which might "breed disturbances where white and colored persons are huddled together without their consent." He pointed out that the Civil Rights Act did not forbid steamboat owners from regulating the business of their vessels "in such manner that the accommodations for colored passengers ... may be distinct and separate from those assigned to white passengers" and concluded that "the cabin and state rooms reserved for colored passengers on the City of Bridgeton were substantially equal" to those from which Green and her nephew were excluded.

  The policy of providing "separate but equal" services and accommodations for blacks thus became a handy means of sidestepping the law without directly challenging its constitutionality. Still, the hypocrisy of the policy was evident even in its earliest applications. The "separate" facilities offered to blacks were almost always inferior and rarely "equal"; and although blacks were separated on the grounds that their presence was offensive to whites, loutish, drunken whites were never forcibly separated from well-behaved blacks.

  In Baltimore, Judge William F. Giles articulated an objection to a civil rights case that foresh
adowed the law's ultimate fate. On June 9, 1876, a group of twenty men and women of color were traveling from Rockville, Maryland, to Washington on their way home from a large black political meeting. After the conductor informed them they would have to ride in the smoking car, they brought suit against the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Judge Giles, citing both the Slaughterhouse Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment the federal government could punish only state actions that deprived citizens of certain rights, not the actions of individuals or businesses such as railroads. Congress, he declared, had no right to enforce penalties for violations of rights that belong to a citizen as a citizen of a state, and therefore the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

  This was, in the eyes of many supporters of the new law, a willful misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment, an opinion more expressive of contemporary views than sympathetic to the goal of the amendment's authors, who had intended that it would reach individual, not state, acts of discrimination. As one advocate of the act inquired, "If the states are to be allowed through the corporation ... to trod upon the privileges of the negro, then where is the good from the amendment contemplated by its framers?" The hearings of the Congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which informed the framing process, had showed clearly that most discrimination against blacks originated with individuals or businesses, not state governments or state agencies.

  By 1877, only two years after the law's passage, its judicial history of complaints was already hopelessly scrambled, and the law's application limited. Several representative legal actions that had deadlocked in lower courts, ultimately known as Civil Rights Cases, were bundled and presented to the Supreme Court, where, it had been long believed, the law's many inconsistencies would find resolution.

  Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi seemed to flourish as a living example of the doctrine of equal rights, despite how embattled this concept was in the legal sphere. With his "manners of a Chesterfield" and the remarkable trajectory of his life, from slavery to Capitol Hill, Bruce demonstrated beyond a doubt the potential of allowing equal access and opportunity to all Americans. Little remembered today, in part because his political agenda was modest and his methods conciliatory, Bruce was widely viewed in the late nineteenth century as both a consummate representative of his race and a symbol of the social mobility made possible by Reconstruction.

  Bruce's rotund yet distinguished appearance and his political fame—he was the first black American to be elected to and serve a full six-year term in the Senate—ensured that the public would follow his private life with no little interest. Long one of Washington's most eligible bachelors, he became half of the capital's most elegant couple when, on June 24, 1878, he married Josephine B. Willson, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a prominent family from the crème de la crème of black Cleveland society. Josephine, gifted at languages and music, was almost Caucasian in appearance; as a Washington society page noted, she was "a slender, shapely woman [with] delicate, high-bred features, singularly full of repose."

  The nuptials, held in the Willsons' home as a crowd of the curious assembled outside, represented for Bruce the reversal of a personal misfortune: only four years earlier he had been engaged to another Cleveland woman, Namee Vosburg, who died of an illness only weeks before their wedding date. This tragedy occurred just as Bruce was assuming his job in the Senate, and it encouraged gossip and curiosity. To fend off speculation about his private life, Bruce made a habit of attending social functions with John Roy Lynch, the black congressman from Mississippi, and a Washington schoolteacher named Emma Brown, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a brotherly friendship. Miss Brown later described Bruce as "a great big good natured lump of fat" who was "gentlemanly and very jolly ... just the kind of fellow to go around with."

  After a respectable period of mourning, he courted Miss Willson, whom he had met in 1876. Her family in Cleveland belonged to the Social Circle, an organization founded in 1869 "to promote social intercourse and cultural activities among the better educated people of color." The Willsons were so integrated into the city's elite class that many of Dr. Willson's patients were white, and Josephine's brother, an attorney, practiced at a white law firm. Of course, for Bruce, the marriage signified an enormous leap across social boundaries. For a self-educated man who had been born a slave, who had narrowly survived Quantrill's Raiders, and who had come to political maturity in the rough-and-tumble of the postwar Mississippi Delta, winning a U.S. Senate seat as well as the hand of one of America's leading black society belles was a remarkable attainment.

  Upon their marriage, Bruce and his bride sailed to Europe for a four-month honeymoon. The first black elected American official to ever visit abroad, Bruce was received as something of a phenomenon and made an immensely favorable impression on the Continent, abetted no doubt by his attractive new wife. While in Paris in December 1878, he encountered ex-president Grant and his family, who were also making the grand tour. "General Grant was less reserved in conversation than when he had been President of the United States," Bruce told a reporter. "In Paris he spoke freely and instructively, and seemed in a happier mood than I have ever known him to be at Washington." The normally taciturn Grant, perhaps a tad homesick and glad to see a familiar face, opened up to Bruce on a number of topics, including the future of black America. He informed Bruce that based on his military experience with black soldiers and his observation of the effective work of black elected representatives in Congress, he held high hopes for the race's eventual success. He also let Bruce know he was considering another run for the presidency, and Bruce, although he'd resented Grant for not aiding Pinchback during his fight in the Senate, came away from the European encounter an ardent fan of the general, predicting, a few months later in the Louisianian, that even moderate Republicans "will again march to battle under the banner of 'the Man on Horseback.' There is no denying that Grant is the coming man and [will] receive the Republican nomination."

  Bruce's popularity within his own party led to his serving as temporary chair at the Republican National Convention in 1880. After the first ballot, Grant had the largest number of delegates' votes but not enough to clinch the prize. Over the course of twenty-seven more ballots, the former president deadlocked with the popular James Blaine, once the Speaker of the House but now a U.S. senator. Frustrated by the stalemate, Blaine's supporters rallied around the dark horse candidacy of the respected House Republican James A. Garfield, who became the nominee on the thirty-sixth ballot. Bruce backed Grant's candidacy as he had promised, but he wound up being a lucky catalyst for the convention's ultimate choice by recognizing Garfield from the podium during a chaotic moment when many delegates were simultaneously demanding the floor. Garfield, who went on to secure not only the nomination but the presidency, would not forget Bruce's helpful act.

  Settling back home in Washington, the fashionable Bruces were much talked about and in demand; an invitation to one of Josephine's soirees denoted insider status, at least among Republicans, and the newspapers made this clear. "The most unreasonable disturbance in Washington society at present is Mrs. Senator Bruce, who presides over her capital residence with true womanly grace, making it a fit rendezvous for the distinguished circle of friends with which she and her husband have been so closely identified." Such accounts left no doubt that "Mrs. Bruce is a lady of great personal beauty...[She] wore a magnificent black velvet dress, made for her by [the English couturier Charles] Worth during her recent visit to Paris, and handsome diamonds. As to her toilets, they are simply elegant, and can not be outshone by any in the wardrobes of the white ladies whose husbands are in the Senate."

  When Josephine began receiving callers—Thursday was her "at home" day—the first person to visit was Lucy Hayes, wife of the president. Mrs. Hayes, known as "Lemonade Lucy" for her strict ban on alcohol in the White House, was so charmed by Mrs. Bruce that she soon came a second time. Upon hearing that Lucy Hayes had already called on Mr
s. Bruce twice, the wives of cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and various senators also beat a path to her door.

  Conspicuous by their absence from Josephine's parlor were the wives of Democratic senators. When gossip circulated that Mrs. Allen G. Thurman, wife of the powerful Ohio Democrat and presidential aspirant, had also visited Mrs. Bruce, Thurman's office immediately issued a formal statement to set to rest so damaging a rumor. "I know it would be the political ruin of any Southern Democrat to recognize us socially or have his family do so," Senator Bruce told a reporter. "And I want it understood that while Mrs. Bruce and I are glad to see all our friends at any time at our house, we would feel very badly if any persons compromised themselves by paying us attention." He emphasized that when he had first arrived in Washington, "I made up my mind to let the society question adjust itself without any of my intervention. I have never attempted to force my way into society, and in letting things take their natural course I have never had a particle of trouble. I believe that it is only the one who seeks trouble from the 'color line' that finds it."