Capitol Men
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One representative had been described as a "ringtail roarer": Charleston News & Courier, Dec. 4, 1876.
The threat of physical confrontation: Avary, p. 368.
[>] "I don't care for myself.. . but I do care for the poor colored men": Williams, Charles Richard, Life of Rutherford B. Hayes, vol. 1, pp. 488–89, 496; Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, p. 26, and Logan, Betrayal of the Negro, p. 15.
"An arrangement could not be arrived at": Stanley Matthews to Daniel Chamberlain, Mar. 4, 1877, quoted in Allen, pp. 469–70; New York Times, Dec. 10, 1876.
[>] "I desire to aid and relieve President Hayes": Daniel Chamberlain to Stanley Matthews, Mar. 7, 1877, quoted in Allen, pp. 470–71.
"To be able to put an end as speedily as possible": W. K. Rogers to Daniel Chamberlain, Mar. 23, 1877, quoted in Allen, pp. 472–73.
[>] "You became the victims of every form of persecution": Daniel Chamberlain, "To the Republicans of South Carolina," Apr. 1877; quoted in Allen, pp. 480–82.
"To think that Hayes could go back on us now": W. F. Rodenbach to Daniel Chamberlain, Apr, 4 1877, cited in Burton, "Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina."
"Unanimous in the belief that to prolong the contest": Robert B. Elliot et al. to Daniel Chamberlain, Apr. 10, 1877; quoted in Allen, pp. 482–83.
April 10 was the day chosen: Charleston News & Courier, Apr. 11, 1877.
13. Exodusting
[>] "The Negro ... long deemed to be too indolent and stupid": Douglass, "Negro Exodus from the Gulf States," Sept. 12, 1879, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress.
Robert Finley, the Presbyterian minister: Finley was inspired by the example of Paul Cuffee, a black New England shipowner who a few years earlier had sailed successfully to Sierra Leone with thirty-eight black American emigrationists. The ACS, in collaboration: Moses, p. 42. American interests directly controlled Liberia until 1847 when, in order to keep it from becoming a British colony, it was made a free and independent republic.
"Of all classes ofour population": The ACS Tenth Annual Report, published in 1827, is quoted in Streifford, "The American Colonization Society," Journal of Southern History.
[>] "The fostering agency ofLiberian colonization": New National Era, Feb. 17, 1870.
"We live here—have lived here": Douglass, "Colonization," North Star, Jan. 26, 1849; see Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, pp. 125–26.
In its first half-century of existence, the ACS: New National Era, Dec. 19, 1872.
The shifting and sometimes contradictory beliefs: Delany, "Political Destiny of the Colored Race," quoted in Rollin, p. 337; see also Hahn, p. 122.
[>] "Deep rooted prejudices": Jefferson, pp. 189–90.
"Do you intend to turn the three millions of slaves": Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd sess.
"A moral fitness in the idea": Eulogy on Henry Clay, July 16, 1852, quoted in Wesley, "Lincoln's Plan for Colonizing the Emancipated Negroes," Journal of Negro History. During a debate with Stephen Douglas in 1854: Lincoln-Douglas Debates, Oct. 16, 1854; ibid.
"The enterprise is a difficult one": Lincoln speech, June 26, 1857; ibid.
[>] "There is an unwillingness on the part of our people": Lincoln, quoted in Foner, Forever Free, p. 48.
An "attempt to roll back Niagara to its source": Goodwin, p. 469.
On December 31, 1862, the federal government contracted: Wesley, "Lincoln's Plan for Colonizing the Emancipated Negroes," Journal of Negro History.
[>] "Fifty families in Granville County": G. Rogers to American Colonization Society, Mar. 9, 1879, ACS Papers, Library of Congress.
And though the interested parties: Painter, Exodusters, p. 140.
[>] Patterson's speech on November 26, 1877: New York Times, Nov. 27, 1877.
One of Butler's initial efforts: Congressional Record, 51st Cong., 1st sess., p. 972.
[>] It will not do to shut our eyes: Quoted in Charleston News & Courier, Jan. 9, 1882; see Tindall, pp. 177–78.
The Columbia Daily Register denounced: Columbia Daily Register, August 19, 1877; quoted in Tindall, p. 159.
The Liberian relocation project did have a millenarian aspect: Charleston News & Courier, Aug. 21, 1877, quoted in Tindall, p. 157.
Bruce explained that he had begun to see: Blanche K. Bruce to Cincinnati Commercial, Feb. 19, 1878; quoted in St. Clair, pp. 273–80.
[>] In Congress, Bruce was consistently humane: Bruce's 1879 bill to create a permanent Mississippi River Improvement Commission was one of the first attempts to bring federal oversight to the issue of flood control on the lower Mississippi. Several damaging floods had occurred between the end of the Civil War and 1874, and during that period more than one hundred miles of levees had collapsed. Bruce proposed a commission to coordinate efforts to protect the alluvial lands adjoining the river as well as a plan for the "correction and deepening" of channels for navigation. He, like many others, believed federal involvement was necessary because the river was an interstate waterway, and local fixes had always been piecemeal. As the Ohio congressman James A. Garfield had said, "The statesmanship of America must grapple with the problem of this mighty stream; it is too vast for any state to handle; too much for any authority less than that of the nation itself to manage" (Garfield, quoted in Humphreys, p. 40). Congress failed to support Bruce's proposal. Federal coordination of flood control along the Mississippi would not begin in earnest until after the devastating flood of 1927. See "An Act to Provide for the Organization of the Mississippi River Improvement Commission," H.R. Bill 4318, U.S. Senate, 45th Cong., 3rd sess., Feb. 6, 1879.
But his vision of a coming racial enlightenment: Blanche K. Bruce to Cincinnati Commercial, Feb. 19, 1878, quoted in St. Clair, pp. 273–80.
[>] The Azor tacked out of Charleston Harbor: Williams, Alfred, The Liberian Exodus, pp.1–6.
Forty-two days out from Charleston: Tindall, pp. 162–65.
[>] The so-called Exoduster Movement: The idea of black westward migration had been in the air since the 1860s, when debates over land distribution to the freedmen in the South dovetailed with enthusiasm for western lands made available under the Homestead Act of 1862. The reformer Sojourner Truth, working among freed people in the Washington area immediately after the war, envisioned a system of land distribution in the West similar to that of Indian reservations, where blacks could become educated, work for a living, and be safe from hostile whites.
"The government of every Southern state": Douglass, "Negro Exodus from the Gulf States."
As one migrant told a reporter: New York Daily Herald, Apr. 17, 1879.
"Voting is widely regarded at the North": Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1879.
"Live as happy as a big sunflower": New York Tribune, Dec. 19, 1878.
[>] "The Negro's necessities have developed an offensive race": Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1879.
"I know, within the last three years": St. Louis Globe Democrat, Mar. 12, 1879, quoted in Athearn, p. 10.
But President Grant, on December 6, 1876, sent to Congress: Executive Documents, 44th Cong., 2nd sess., no. 30; Senate Reports, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., part 1; quoted in Van Deusen, "The Exodus of 1879," Journal of Negro History.
[>] "The Southern white man is inconvertibly fixed in the belief": New York Times, Apr. 7, 1879.
"Political tricksters, land speculators": Douglass, "Negro Exodus from the Gulf States."
The magazine Puck neatly captured: Cartoon by Joseph Keppler, Puck, Apr. 16, 1879, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; Foner, Forever Free, p. 184.
"It is not surprising that the Negro looks": Windom and Blair, "The Proceedings of a Migration Convention and Congressional Action Respecting the Exodus of 1879," Journal of Negro History.
"Where John Brown's soul": Missouri Republican, Apr. 17, 1879; Athearn, p. 32.
"The humiliating fact": Douglass, "Negro Exodus from the Gulf States."
The New Orleans Times in April 1879 urged planters: New Orleans Times, Apr. 22, 1879;
Painter, Exodusters, p. 241.
[>] "You may ... judge of my surprise": Louisianian, Mar. 15, 1879; Painter, Exodusters, p. 181.
He also heard a number of completely groundless reports: Athearn, p. 245.
"There is no doubt in my mind": Louisianian, Mar. 15, 1879.
[>] "Look into affairs and see the true condition ofour race": Hahn, p. 319.
"You can't find out anything till you get amongst them": Windom and Blair, "The Proceedings of a Migration Convention and Congressional Action Respecting the Exodus of 1879," Journal of Negro History.
Adams and his council wrote letters of appeal: Ibid.
[>] "The weather and roads here enable you": Ibid.
Educated blacks he derided as "tonguey men": St. Louis Post Dispatch, undated clipping from 1879, in Singleton Scrapbook, Kansas State Historical Society; quoted in Fleming, "'Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus," American Journal of Sociology.
"Those who had been leading the colored people": Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers, pp. 156–57.
[>] "Where peas would not sprout": Fleming, "'Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus," American Journal of Sociology.
"I had studied it all out": Senate Report No. 693, Part 3, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 379; quoted in Fleming, "'Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus," American Journal of Sociology.
[>] "We have Mr. Singleton": Singleton Scrapbook, Kansas State Historical Society; quoted in Painter, Exodusters, p. 129.
[>] The Vicksburg Commercial Daily Advertiser complained: Vicksburg Commercial Advertiser, May 6, 1879.
[>] If such a policy [offederally aided black migration]: New York Times, Feb. 17, 1879. Windom believed that blacks had the right to depart: Congressional Record, 45th Cong., 3rd sess., p. 483.
"If the advice of leading colored men": St. Clair, p. 137.
[>] They pointed to the example: Salisbury, p. 191; New York Times, Jan. 23, 1879.
To request half a million dollars from Congress: St. Clair, pp. 143–44; also see Tindall, pp. 169–70.
"The wretched dupes of Mr. Windom's windy rhetoric": Washington Post, Dec. 18, 1879.
"Outrages never before practiced upon any free people": Salisbury, p. 192.
[>] Hayes quickly disavowed any "endorsement": Athearn, pp. 145–46.
"Fluttering in rags and wretchedness": Douglass, "Negro Exodus from the Gulf States."
[>] "It is computed that up to date about 5,000 colored persons": New York Times, Apr. 3, 1879.
One emigrant from Mississippi: Athearn, p. 26.
"There was an offer of $80 a month": St. Louis Republican, quoted in the New York Herald, Apr. 3, 1879.
"It is a matter of sincere regret": Louisianian, Mar. 29, 1879.
[>] "Until this matter is at least better understood": Louisianian, Mar. 29, 1879.
Bruce was concerned that the exodus: Louisianian, Apr. 26, 1879.
"The sun is the colored man's friend": Missouri Republican, July 18, 1879, quoted in Athearn, p. 149.
"The freedman may lack education": New York Herald, Apr. 11, 1879.
"Bad as it is": Douglass, "The Negro as a Man" (speech), Frederick Douglass Papers.
[>] "Some say 'stay and fight it out'": Brown, William Wells, My Southern Home, pp. 247–48.
"I doubt very much if I had found in the Constitution": New York Herald, May 13, 1879; see also Painter, Exodusters, p. 213.
[>] The "Exodus Committee," as it was dubbed: Windom and Blair, "The Proceedings of a Migration Convention and Congressional Action Respecting the Exodus of 1879," Journal of Negro History. The Voorhees committee concluded that "on the whole, [we] express the positive opinion that the condition of the colored people of the South is not only as good as could have been reasonably expected, but is better than if large communities were transferred to a colder and more inhospitable climate ... When we come to consider the method in which the people were freed ... and that for purposes of party politics these incompetent, ignorant, landless, homeless people, without any qualifications of citizenship ... were suddenly thrown into political power, and the effort was made not only to place them upon an equality with their late masters, but to absolutely place them in front and hold them there by legislation, by military violence ... when we consider these things no philosophical mind can behold their present condition ... without wonder that their condition is as good as it is."
Windom protested the findings: Salisbury, pp. 193–95.
[>] "Thousands of dollars to find out": Washington, A New Negro, p. 290; Wood, p. 267; Athearn, p. 225.
During 1870–80 the black population of Kansas: Reports of the U.S. Census, 1860, 1870, 1880.
Their new life was hardly without difficulty: By the mid-1880s Pap Singleton had soured on Kansas. He founded a new organization, the United Transatlantic Society (UTS), to promote an exodus to Liberia or Ethiopia. The reputation of "Old Pap" attracted numerous members, but the UTS never sailed anywhere. See Fleming, "'Pap' Singleton, the Moses of the Colored Exodus."
"They do not kill negroes here for voting": Windom and Blair, "The Proceedings of a Migration Convention and Congressional Action Respecting the Exodus of 1879"; see also Athearn, p. 205.
Fortunately for the new arrivals: Wood, pp. 274–76.
[>] "The exodus presented proof": Painter, Exodusters, pp. 260–61.
"The Reconstruction dream of black assimilation": Harris, "Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi," in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, Howard Rabinowitz, ed.
14. A Rope of Sand
[>] "Some men are born great": Reuter, p. 249.
As Martin Gary proclaimed: Charleston News & Courier, June 4, 1878; Tindall, p. 26.
Tillman ... was at heart: New York World, Sept. 30, 1895.
[>] He had been instrumental in founding Clemson: Thomas G. Clemson was a wealthy widower (he'd married a daughter of John C. Calhoun) and owned a vast estate, formerly owned by Calhoun, named Fort Hill, in western South Carolina. Clemson ceded the site to the state for a public college at his death in 1888, stipulating in a codicil that it would be privately managed, a means of restricting enrollment to whites.
"They ring out the false": W. W. Ball, "An Episode in South Carolina Politics," Reconstruction pamphlet collection, Charleston Historical Society.
"You of the north": Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 2242–45, quoted in Logan, p. 91; see also Press Clippings File, Benjamin Tillman Papers, Clemson University Library.
[>] "That we have good government now": Tillman, "The Struggles of '76": An Address Delivered at the Red Shirt Reunion, Anderson, South Carolina, Aug. 25, 1909, Reconstruction pamphlet collection, Charleston Historical Society.
[>] Rainey pointed out: New York Tribune, Dec. 19, 1878.
[>] "Thereby the time would be frittered away": Joel W. Bowman to Benjamin H. Brewster, Nov. 2, 1882, South Carolina files, National Archives RG 60 (Justice Department).
"If you are to go back upon all pledges": Columbia Daily Register, July 7, 1878; Tindall, p. 29.
"If you once countenance fraud": Wade Hampton, quoted in Testimony of E.W.M. Mackay, "South Carolina in 1878," Senate Report Serial 1840, GPO, Washington, 1879.
[>] Long known as "the Negro's Paradise": Simkins, p. 153.
"Shook their heads significantly": The Nation, Nov. 7, 1878.
The New York Times wrote disapprovingly: New York Times, Jan. 14, 1878.
[>] With the situation deadlocked: Hahn, pp. 347–49.
"Eight hundred red-shirt men": Towne, pp. 289–91.
[>] Smalls was again in his element: Louisianian, Jan. 10, 1880; New York Times, Jan. 10, 1880.
[>] In a speech delivered to Congress: "An Honest Ballot Is the Safeguard of the Republic," speech of Hon. Robert Smalls, House of Representatives, Feb. 24, 1877, Congressional Record, 44th Cong., 2nd sess., appendix, pp. 123–36.
[>] Loyalty among blacks to the Party of Lincoln: Uya, pp. 111–12.
So pervasive was the Democrats' dom
inance: New York Times, Jan. 13, 1878.
"Like a rope of sand": Charleston News & Courier, Sept. 3, 1880.
[>] "Polls were opened at unusual places": New York Times, Dec. 15, 1880.
When the committee found Democratic fraud: Smalls v. Tillman, Congressional Record, 47th Cong., appendix, in Uya, pp. 113–15. This reversal involving Tillman fed the determination of the state's Democrats to move beyond polling-place fraud to more permanent methods of choking off black suffrage.
[>] "Less than a quarter of a century ago": Congressional Record, 49th Cong., 1st sess., appendix, pp. 319–20, in Uya, pp. 123–25.
As a one-man bastion of power: Ibid., pp. 127–30.
No one had expected the new law: Persons violating the law would have to pay the aggrieved party $500 and could also be fined by the court or imprisoned for up to a year. Another clause ensured that "no citizen possessing all other qualifications ... shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror" in any federal or state court "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
[>] "A thousand federal lawsuits and fines": Quoted in New York Times, Mar. 6, 1875.
The New York Times worried: New York Times, Mar. 6, 1875.
[>] "A respectable-appearing colored man": New York Times, Apr. 22 and 27, 1875; also Nov. 25, 1879.
"What good is the civil rights law": New York Times, June 12, 1875.
Mrs. Henry Jones of Philadelphia also found: New York Times, Sept. 29, 1875.
The judge fined Greenwall: New York Times, June 8 and 9, 1875.
In Virginia a hotel clerk named Newcomer: U.S. v. Newcomer, Feb. 29, 1876, Federal Cases, vol. 27, pp. 127–28.
[>] "Demanded to ride in the same cabin": Ibid., vol. 10, pp. 1090–93.
The "separate" facilities offered to blacks: Franklin, p. 127.
[>] On June 9, 1876, a group: New York Times, Mar. 23, 1877.
"If the states are to be allowed": John M. Harlan to John Harlan (son), Oct. 21, 1883, quoted in Yarbrough, p. 144.
[>] Little remembered today: Bruce's ascent from obscurity was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in a story he loved to tell that had its origin in the streets of prewar St. Louis. One day, when he was twelve or thirteen years old, he was commanded by a well-dressed white man to carry a heavy suitcase to the docks, where the man said he was hurrying to catch a steamboat. Bruce obediently hefted the suitcase onto his shoulder and carried it to the wharf, but once there, the white man grabbed his luggage and raced aboard his boat, rudely neglecting to pay the boy. Years later in the Senate, when Senator Lewis Vital Bogy from Missouri approached Bruce to ask for his vote on a measure important to his home state, Bruce studied Bogy carefully and then introduced himself as the young man he had long ago failed to compensate on the St. Louis waterfront. After recovering from his shock, the embarrassed Bogy offered at once to compound the original amount owed. The two men were said to have become friends. See Smith, pp. 25–26.