America Aflame (73 page)

Wyatt Outlaw was the son of a slave mother and a white father. He owned a small carpentry shop in Graham, North Carolina, and organized a Union League chapter in the town. The league built a black school and an AME Zion church. When Republicans took control in North Carolina in 1868, the governor appointed Outlaw to the post of town commissioner. A Klan-like organization called the White Brotherhood threatened Outlaw and his colleagues. In response, Outlaw organized a police force. One night, one hundred members of the Brotherhood dragged Outlaw from his bed and carried him to the central square in Graham. They hanged him from an oak tree across from the county courthouse and pinned a note to his mutilated body, “Beware you guilty both white and black.”
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Camilla, Georgia, lay in the heart of the Second Congressional District in the southwestern part of the state. Black voters outnumbered whites by a two-to-one margin. The local Union League chapter sponsored a campaign rally on September 19, 1868. Blacks came from the surrounding plantations, some with weapons because of threats from local whites. As they entered the town square, a much larger group of armed whites opened fire, killing nine blacks and wounding dozens more. Despite the Republicans' numerical advantage in voter registration, the district went for the Democrats on election day. White paramilitary groups repeated this scenario in various versions throughout the South as the November 1868 election approached. Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican presidential nominee, campaigned on the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” It was an odd theme considering that the war had ended more than three years earlier. What Grant and the Republicans meant, of course, was that the periodic uprisings in the South must end, and the general was the best man to end them. Just how he would accomplish that remained unclear.
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The Democrats nominated former New York governor Horatio Seymour for president and ran their usual race-baiting campaign in the North, focusing on black suffrage, an overreaching federal government, and the disfranchisement of southern whites. Their platform declared the Reconstruction Acts “a flagrant usurpation of power, unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” For good measure, the Democrats charged that the Republicans' real objective was to impose “negro rule” on the entire country. In a nation of thirty-one million whites and four million blacks, such a coup would have been quite an upset.
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The election season opened with the assassination of a Republican congressman from Arkansas and three Republican members of the South Carolina legislature. The Klan would murder more than one thousand black and white Republicans through the November elections. Undeterred, black southerners threw themselves into the campaigning. The 1868 presidential campaign in the South was America's first interracial campaign. Blacks and whites worked together to stage rallies, register voters, and participate in parades. Black women sported Grant buttons as they toted laundry or cooked for their white employers. In those parts of the South where white Democrats attempted to cajole blacks into voting their ticket, or where white paramilitary organizations were weak, black voter participation exceeded 90 percent. Former U.S. congressman and South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens wrote, “All society stands now like a cone on its Apex,” a feeling most southern whites shared.
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Grant won the election, but his margin of victory was uncomfortably narrow. Reflecting growing ambivalence in the North over issues of race and federal authority, Seymour probably won a majority of the nation's white vote. In the South, intimidation by the Klan and allied groups cut into the Republican vote, returning Democratic majorities in Louisiana and Georgia. In Georgia, eleven counties with a black voting majority recorded not a single vote for Grant. The new president would immediately confront a dilemma. In order to stabilize the South's Republican regimes and protect the party's members, he would need to mobilize federal resources, particularly the army. As the war against the Plains Indians erupted again, and as army strength dropped sharply from wartime levels, this option became less viable.

Republican party leaders in Washington viewed reconstruction policy in the South through the lens of their fortunes in the North. They recognized the changing political climate in the North, and they contemplated shifting their policy emphasis from the “struggle over the negro” to economic issues. The first piece of legislation enacted in the new Grant administration was the Public Credit Act that pledged the payment of the national debt in gold. The act promised to redeem the flood of greenbacks and bonds issued during the war with gold or silver coin over a ten-year period. The legislation boosted the confidence of creditors concerned about too much unsecured paper money triggering inflation. Some economists argue that the act was responsible for initiating a decade of strong growth, despite the economic downturn in 1873. More important for the long run, it established the Republicans as the party of sound money and was much more indicative of the party's direction than the Reconstruction legislation. A Republican leader declared, “I look forward to Grant's administration as the beginning of a real and true conservative era.”
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The Republicans were the heirs of the Whigs. Even their anti-slavery positions related to their desire to develop the West and create a national economy. This is not to say that Republicans did not genuinely abhor slavery on moral grounds. Once the war abolished slavery, however, party members were anxious to use their legislative power to enhance the nation's prosperity. A new era was at hand.

Many northerners agreed. Grant won; the South had voted; Reconstruction was over. Albion Tourgée recalled the feeling. “It was all over—the war, reconstruction, the consideration of the old questions. Now all was peace and harmony. The South must take care of itself now. The nation had done its part: it had freed the slaves, given them the ballot, opened the courts to them, and put them in the way of self-protection and self-assertion.” The old, obstructive South was finally gone. “For three-quarters of a century,” Tourgée explained, “the South had been the ‘old Man of the Sea' to the young Republic; by a simple trick of political legerdemain he was now got rid of for ever.” The result? “Yankee-land could now bend its undivided energies to its industries and commerce.”
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Indeed, it seemed as if the South had found its political equilibrium. The Republican governments turned out to be moderate, not radical. There were no schemes to redistribute land, no legislation that particularly favored African Americans as a class, and no laws passed mandating interracial marriage. As the
New York Times
wrote approvingly, the black lawmakers had been “extremely moderate and modest in their demands,” had “been scrupulous in their respect for all the rights of property,” and had “in all respects given proof of a capacity to take part in the carrying on of a Republican Government, that can but astonish those who know the condition in which they have till lately been kept.” Seven of the former eleven Confederate states had adopted new constitutions and elected Republican legislatures. Congress readmitted those seven states into the Union. By January 1869, the
Times
could note that “a healthy prosperity” was abroad in the South. Now that the election had put to rest the old issues of the war, southerners “are fast emerging from poverty and depression, and are prepared to profit by the lessons of a painful experience.” In May 1869, the first national celebration of Decoration, or Memorial, Day occurred as Union and Confederate veterans exchanged ceremonies and tended the graves of their former enemies. In August, the Gettysburg Memorial Association invited former Union and Confederate soldiers to the battlefield to mark out the lines of battle.
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But former Confederates did not reconcile themselves to the black men in their midst, indicating that a winter truce rather than a genuine peace had taken hold. The Georgia legislature expelled its duly elected black representatives. The
Meridian
(Miss.)
Mercury
issued a warning common across the South: “We must make the negro understand we are the men we were when we held him in abject bondage, and make him feel that when forbearance ceases to be a virtue he has aroused a power that will control him or destroy him.” The
Nashville Republican Banner
was even more explicit in its threat of violence, evoking a chilling memory. “So far as the white native citizens of this State may be compelled to take part in it they will be very careful throughout the sanguinary carnival which would naturally ensue to remember Fort Pillow in act as well as word, and ‘Throughout the bloody conflict / Seek the white man, not the black.'”
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The persistent violence in the South sent congressional Republicans back to reconstruction policy. Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, barring race as a test for voting. The amendment said nothing about a state's right to determine requirements for voting other than race, a loophole that southern states would exploit over the next century to limit black voter participation. The amendment was also silent, once again, about woman suffrage. Elizabeth Cady Stanton charged that the amendment created an “aristocracy of sex.” In an appeal brimming with ethnic and racial animosity, Stanton warned that “if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, African, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters … awake to the danger … and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!”
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The reaction of the northern Republican press to ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870 was positive, though accompanied by the conviction that this was the last salvo in the fight for freedmen's rights. Pronouncing the end of Reconstruction was becoming a latter-day version of “On to Richmond.” The
Chicago Tribune
expressed relief that at last, blacks had “merged politically with the rest of the people.” Now, however, the black man “has to run the race of life, dependent, like all others, upon his own energy, ability, and worth.” The
New York World
, a Democratic newspaper, agreed. The freedman had been “raised as high as he can be put by any action other than his own.”
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Despite such caveats, this was an epochal moment. There are judges who insist the Constitution is color-blind. It is not. Congress placed the three Reconstruction amendments into the Constitution to free and then establish the full rights of citizenship for African Americans. After the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Frederick Douglass exulted, “The black man is free, the black man is a citizen, the black man is enfranchised, and this by the organic law of the land.… Never was revolution more complete.”
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The Ku Klux Klan remained unimpressed and unbowed. Reconstruction would not be over until they redeemed the South from Republican and black rule. Violence escalated as the 1870 elections approached. Democrats registered gains in the North, not unusual in an off-year election cycle, but also made significant inroads in the South, redeeming several southern states after the Klan and similar groups suppressed the black vote. Republican administrations in Texas and Arkansas successfully fought back against the Klan. Governor Edmund J. Davis of Texas, for example, organized a special force of two hundred state policemen to round up Klansmen. Between 1870 and 1872, Davis's force arrested six thousand men and broke the Klan in Texas. But other governors hesitated to enforce laws directed at the Klan, fearing that this would further alienate whites. Democrats regained power in North Carolina after the state's Republican governor enraged white voters by calling out the state militia to counter white violence during the election of 1870.
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Congress, in response to the violence, ventured once again to pass protective legislation, in this case the Enforcement Act of 1870, which authorized the federal government to appoint supervisors in states that failed to protect voting rights. When the attacks continued, Congress followed with a second, more sweeping measure, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 permitting federal authorities, with military assistance if necessary, to arrest and prosecute members of groups that denied a citizen's civil rights if state authorities failed to do so. The act outlawed the Klan, but Klansmen merely reappeared in organizations under different names.

Political violence was not the only obstacle confronting southern blacks. The daily strain of living among neighbors who wished to thwart your ambition, limit your education, and isolate you was enormous. If a black person carved out a modicum of success in this harsh environment, the ill treatment would likely escalate. White southerners turned the American dream on its head as applied to African Americans. Work hard and get hurt. A Republican sheriff in Mississippi explained, “Education amounts to nothing, good behavior counts for nothing, even money cannot buy for a colored man or woman decent treatment and the comforts that white people claim and can obtain.” Charles Sumner attempted to address this problem by introducing a civil rights bill in 1871 to ensure blacks' equal access to juries and public accommodations. Congressmen from both parties and sections, however, believed that there were sufficient protections already in place and the rest was up to blacks themselves. The bill veered too close to mandating a social equality few whites, north or south, were willing to accept.
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Northerners had wanted to put the Civil War to rest as soon as Grant and Lee signed the surrender documents, but white southerners insisted on continuing the conflict by other means. Satisfied that they had honored those who had fallen and the cause for which they fought by surrounding the freedmen with constitutional amendments and protective legislation, northerners left the land of war for the garden of peace. The array of economic opportunities in a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation set northern minds to shaping the future rather than sorting out the past. They hoped the South would now follow a similar course. The
New York Times
wrote the prologue to the new era in the New South. “The bulk of the people in the reconstructed States are realizing the reward of labor; they are fast emerging from poverty and depression, and are prepared to profit by the lessons of a painful experience.” The South would eventually become a version of the North, much as Indians should become versions of western white farmers, and blacks versions of white laborers. All lesser incarnations, but given the racial limitations of the red and the black they were consonant with northern visions of stable and prosperous societies.
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