America Aflame (84 page)

Frederick Douglass despaired. What began as a promising experiment in racial equality was quickly deteriorating into anarchy and murder. The Grant administration and Republican leaders resisted further interventions in the South. After the Democrats battered them in 1874, Republicans listened more carefully to their northern constituents. Reconstruction, as much as the economic downturn, caused the broad rejection of Republican candidates throughout the North. Douglass saw only one alternative for southern blacks: “My own impression is that when the Government will not or can not protect the black man, he ought to and will finally try to protect himself.” That he did; up to the point of reason. Whites commanded the firepower, and many of the attackers had military experience in the Confederate armies. Rarely did black defenders succeed in overwhelming white assaults in these last years of Reconstruction. Nor could blacks turn to federal troops stationed in the South. By 1874, there were fewer than three thousand federal troops in the region, barely enough to contain even a minor insurgency. The rest of the troops were in the West fighting the Indians.
35

The
Methodist Advocate
, a northern missionary publication located in Atlanta, shared Douglass's concern about the safety of the freedmen in an era of laissez-faire government. It stated in April 1875, “To leave the States to manage their own affairs without restriction or interference from the central power is simply to put them mostly into the hands of those who were and now are bitter and persistent enemies of the government, of national union, and of universal freedom and education.” While not refuting the
Advocate
's characterization of southern white attitudes,
Harper
'
s
challenged its solution. The editor claimed that “incessant and direct national control of the States has so alarmed the republican instinct of the most intelligent part of the country that the chances of Democratic success have been visibly increased.” Republican leaders in the North supported the freedman as long as that support did not interfere with the party's standing among the northern electorate. Now it did.
Harper's
concluded in a condescending tone, “It is certainly not the least pressing duty of all sincere friends of the colored race to teach them self-dependence and the essential character of the government under which they are citizens and voters.” It was incumbent on southern whites themselves to dispose of the bullies in their midst as “New York disposed of Tweed and his Ring.” Self-determination for southern whites was now the vogue; the same for blacks was not.
36

Grant's inaction was political, not personal. In the early days of Congressional Reconstruction, he intervened in several southern states to protect African Americans and the electoral process. He sent troops to North Carolina in 1870 to assist Republican governor William Holden's fight against the Klan. In 1872, he dispatched soldiers to Alabama to prevent violence after a disputed election in that state. Grant's most extensive military operation occurred during the fall of 1871 when he rounded up South Carolina Klansmen. Declaring nine upcountry counties to be “in a state of rebellion,” he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered federal military authorities to arrest suspected Klansmen. The effort netted nearly six hundred Klansmen, though the leaders escaped to northern states or to Canada. The intervention broke the Klan in South Carolina. By July 1872, however, reports from the state indicated “the K.K.'s are becoming very much emboldened and their organizations are coming together again.” Out of 1,300 Klan cases, 1,200 never went to trial. Juries convicted twenty Klansmen, and seventy others pleaded guilty. Grant's actions yielded sparse results and managed to serve as an excellent recruiting tool for white paramilitarists.
37

Louisiana was an especially difficult case for the Grant administration, given the level of violence and the precarious position of Governor William P. Kellogg, who held office from 1872 to 1876. The president's periodic intrusions into Louisiana saved the Republican government, but Kellogg failed to mend political fences in his own party or hold off opponents sufficiently to strengthen his position within the state. The more Grant intervened, the less legitimacy the Kellogg administration could claim to govern the state.

From 1874 until the end of his administration, Grant resolved to draw back from federal intervention in the South. Members of his party, especially the Liberal branch, opposed further involvement both on philosophical and practical grounds. In the midst of a recession, government involvement could only worsen the situation everywhere. E. L. Godkin stated the case for northern public opinion: “The government must get out of the ‘protective' business and the ‘subsidy' business and the ‘improvement' and ‘development' business.” When Mississippi Republicans requested federal intervention to protect their state government in January 1874, Grant had had enough. “This nursing of monstrosities has nearly exhausted the life of the party. I am done with them, and they will have to take care of themselves.” Everyone was on his own now.
38

The Democrats' victories in 1874 were the final arguments against intervention. Northerners had never really endorsed the extent of the Radical program to begin with. Except for a brief period of collective anger in 1866–67 when white southerners threatened to reverse the verdict of the war, northerners were keen to let the South go on its way as long as it did not interfere with the nation's progress. Unlike in the era before the Civil War, southerners no longer wielded power nationally. White southerners simply wanted to rule at home.

Events in Louisiana provided a good gauge of northern public opinion on the issue of federal intervention in the South. For months after the November 1874 elections in the state, Democratic and Republican legislators battled, each contending that the other's election resulted from fraud. Two rival governments set themselves up. The standoff ended in January 1875 when a contingent of federal troops under the command of Colonel Philippe R. de Trobriand entered the legislative chamber and expelled five Democrats. General Philip Sheridan, overall commander of federal troops in Louisiana and recently returned from the Plains, recycled his old rhetoric for the new venue. He commended the action, adding that some southerners deserved to be “exterminated.” Sheridan's comment and de Trobriand's intrusion outraged northerners already disgusted with the continued chaos in the South. New York politicians and merchants “without distinction of party,” held an “Indignation Meeting” in the city to oppose the maneuver and any further involvement of the government in Reconstruction generally. Even citizens of Boston, the erstwhile hotbed of abolitionism, called for a federal withdrawal from the South. The Republican Party could no longer associate itself with southern Republican governments. It no longer needed to. As the
New York Times
explained, the abolitionists “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison … represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party have outgrown.”
39

The Republican Party had descended mainly from the Whigs, who were economic nationalists and well connected to merchants, prosperous farmers, shopkeepers, and nascent manufacturing interests. The abolitionist wing of the party was always small, even during the war. The Republican Party was not changing in the 1870s as much as it was reverting to its roots as an organization committed to promoting commerce, manufacturing, and sound money policies. Northerners were unwilling to continue fighting the Civil War. If white southerners wished to do so, they could carry on the battle with their black neighbors, not with the Yankees. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago and a pioneer in social work, recalled growing up in Freeport, Illinois, during the Reconstruction era. Her father, John, was a banker and a founding member of the local Republican Party. She told of his desire to put the war behind him and of his growing discomfort with the party's southern policies. Addams remembered her father's thinking, “We freed the slaves by war & had now to free them all over again individually, & pay the costs of the war & reckon with the added bitterness of the Southerner beside.” One crusade a century was enough.
40

White southerners knew their northern Republican adversaries well. Rather than emphasize white supremacy in their appeals for greater home rule, they railed against excessive taxes, waste, and corruption. A white South Carolinian declared, “Taxation is robbery, when imposed for private gain, or to build up monopolies for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.” These words resonated among northerners who experienced similar problems in their cities. The source of these difficulties lay with the undue power of an unfit electorate. Northerners were ignorant of conditions in the South, and particularly of the black men and women struggling for full citizenship and the right to earn a living. They were more than willing to concede the argument that white southerners knew best how to deal with African Americans.
41

White northerners scarcely knew the relatively few blacks in their midst, let alone the millions of freedmen in the South. The Rev. Alexander Crummell, a prominent black minister, lamented in 1875, “We are living in this country, a part of its population, and yet, in diverse respects, we are as foreign to its inhabitants as though we were living in the Sandwich Islands.” Northerners' knowledge of the lives of blacks came from a northern press that grew increasingly critical of their political efforts and attempts to attain social equality. The press consistently understated the degree of violence against blacks in the South, the extent of white control over black labor, and the daily indignities freedmen suffered, especially in southern towns and cities. When whites murdered thirty blacks in Jackson, Mississippi, in September 1875, the northern press scarcely noted the episode. A despairing southern Republican editor wrote, “There was little use in even calling attention to these outrages, for almost no one seemed to care.” Future president James A. Garfield agreed. “I have for some time had the impression that there is a general apathy among the people concerning the War and the Negro. The public seems to have tired of the subject.”
42

On the other hand, the reports of James Pike and Charles Nordhoff attained wide circulation and credence in the North. Northerners came to see southern white violence as heavy-handed but understandable amid the frustrating circumstances. Readers of the
New York Tribune
, the largest circulating daily in the country, received a persistent education on conditions in the South. Sources were almost exclusively white leaders. In one article, “Political Problems in South Carolina,” the correspondent wrote of “the great mass of the negroes … the plantation ‘field-hands,'” who were not only indolent but also “given to petty thieving to great extent.” Holding “absolute political supremacy,” they elevated their own leaders and reduced white people to “thralldom” as they enacted their own legislative program. Regardless of party, the northern press was equally eager to print conciliatory remarks and speeches by white southerners as proof of goodwill both toward the North and the freedmen.
43

The northern reaction to the 1875 Civil Rights Act provided another benchmark from which to measure public opinion. Among other provisions, the act guaranteed blacks equal access to public accommodations. The act was a parting gift to the recently deceased Charles Sumner, who had introduced a much stronger version four years earlier. The Republican
New York Times
, a strong supporter of Sumner since the 1850s, lectured, “Respect for the dead is incumbent on us all—but legislation should be based on a careful and wise regard for the welfare of the living, not upon ‘mandates,' real or fictitious, of the dead.” The U.S. Supreme Court would rule it unconstitutional in 1883, but in its few years of existence, the act created more problems for Republicans in the North than for whites in the South.
44

The white consensus was that the legislation singled out blacks for preferential treatment that other minorities, particularly Jewish and Irish American citizens, did not possess. Government should be blind to distinctions of race, religion, and ethnicity. The
Chicago Tribune
asked the question: “Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing baby?” In a nation that prized individual initiative and self-reliance, and that now possessed the scientific affirmation of such traits, the entire array of Reconstruction legislation smacked of unnatural privilege. The belief was so widespread that when Justice Joseph P. Bradley spoke for the Court in the 1883 case, few whites contested the logic: “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen are protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected.” There is no quarreling with such egalitarian logic, except it did not take into account the context in which black Americans lived their lives, especially in the South. In an age that prided itself on realism, the reality of black life in late nineteenth-century America eluded white consciousness.
45

By mid-1875, Americans looked forward to the centennial celebration of their independence. After commemorations at Lexington and Concord, thoughts turned to plans for the festivities in Philadelphia the following year. Such a momentous birthday also generated considerable reflection on the American experiment. The lingering effects of economic depression, the discontent of a seemingly permanent labor population, the ongoing Indian war on the Plains, and the persistent unrest in the South did not dampen the mood of optimism. The strength of the economy shone through the gloom of depression, new inventions appeared almost monthly, it seemed, and middle-class Americans enjoyed an incomparable lifestyle of new things, new houses, and new opportunities.