Capitol Men (59 page)

Not that there was much surprise in that. Even the state's onetime Republican white knight, Daniel Chamberlain, had long since given up on the cause of the black ballot. Resentful of his own mistreatment at the hands of the Republican Party, which had brought Reconstruction into being and then abandoned it, and bothered by poor health, Chamberlain had succumbed to a deepening cynicism on race relations and the South. "The only course for reasonable and patriotic men is to recognize the facts as they exist, and to deal with the situation according to its nature and causes," he wrote in the
Yale Review,
counseling that a patient process of education was necessary to draw black Americans fully into society's current. "The foremost fact is the ignorance and inexperience of the colored race. From that single, indisputable fact has come the determination of the white race at the South to suppress the vote of the colored race ... To change this situation ... requires the removal of its causes." He asked, rhetorically, who deserved blame for the South's rejection of equal rights and its embrace of the Ku Klux Klan. "The answer must be, to those who devised and put in operation the Congressional scheme of reconstruction, to their unspeakable folly, their blind party greed, their insensate attempt to reverse the laws which control human society."

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

By calling for "understanding" of the Southern situation and an end to the demand that Congress intervene there, Chamberlain anticipated the ideas soon expressed by Booker T. Washington, the ex-slave who had become the head of Tuskegee Institute and a leading spokesman for his race. In a famous address at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, Washington emphasized that black Americans should focus on practical goals, suspending their agitation for new laws and protections. Blacks should accept their role as laborers and resolve to make their way up society's ladder slowly, winning the respect of whites through hard work and the attainment of useful skills. He also advocated that they remain in their Southern homeland. "Cast down your bucket where you are," Washington exhorted; the South was hospitable to black people if they would only relinquish their constant grievances for rights for which they were unprepared. "No race," he said, "can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem ... The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now, is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house." He expressed to whites the wish that they in turn would rely on the labor of those they knew so well, who had long been loyal to the region, and eschew that of foreigners, who could potentially be disruptive. As for the coexistence of the two races side by side, Washington offered a compelling analogy: "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." His speech, known as "The Atlanta Compromise," was hugely popular and immediately enhanced the educator's national status. With its seamless solution to the nation's vexing racial issues, it became, in its time, the best-known public address given by an African American.

Washington's suggestion that blacks abandon their agitation for re-form likely found a receptive hearer in Ben Tillman, but Tillman meant
to meet the educator's idea more than halfway; he intended to fix the "problem" of Negro voting once and for all. The Tillmanites perhaps sensed some new urgency in this project, for with the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress again for the first time since the end of Reconstruction. Such a majority could mean a revived threat of federal intervention, and indeed, beginning in early 1890, the Republicans came close to passing two pieces of legislation that were anathema to the South.

The first, introduced by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire, was an education bill that would provide money to upgrade the region's schools. Many Southerners recognized the need for such help, but the bill also provoked anxieties of federal meddling in school curricula, teacher qualifications, and, far worse, the desegregation of its schools and pupils. It suffered a narrow defeat when Senate Republicans, confronting a bloc of Democratic opposition, failed to hold their own majority. An even sharper concern for Southerners was the legislation crafted by Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, which would establish federal supervision of elections. The merit of Lodge's proposal was obvious: dire statistics clearly showed how blacks were being disenfranchised. But the bill resembled the infamous Enforcement Acts and other intrusive laws and thus ran into a shatterproof wall of Southern resistance, with the assistance of some feckless Republicans.

Although the bills that Blair and Lodge proposed were turned back, the extended debates they generated in Congress and in the press hardened Southerners' determination to further marginalize the black electorate. In 1865 Mississippi had been the first state to write and enforce a series of Black Codes, which other states then emulated; in 1875 it had again shown the way, bringing about home rule with its Mississippi Plan; now it achieved another first, convening a state constitutional convention in late summer 1890 that aimed, among other reforms, to devise more permanent means of disenfranchising the state's black majority.

For white Mississippians, as later for Ben Tillman, key legal and constitutional issues stood at stake. Any steps to relegate the black voter to the sidelines could not directly violate the Fifteenth Amendment, which stated, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In addition, each state of the former Confederacy readmitted to the Union during Reconstruction did so under the condition that its constitution would never "be
amended or changed as to deprive any citizen, or class of citizens of the United States, of the right to vote." The renovation of the state constitution in Mississippi had to cleverly void or nullify these federal restrictions without openly defying them. If federal law could prohibit states from denying blacks access to the ballot, state law might establish criteria for the exercise of suffrage that would erect insurmountable hurdles and permit wide discretion on the part of official registrars, effectively accomplishing the same result.

The most ingenious of these was put forward in 1890: the "understanding clause" was the brainchild of James Z. George, one of the architects of the Mississippi Plan. By requiring that every voter "be able to read any section of the Constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof," the clause provided registrars not only with a rigorous means of challenging would-be voters but also with enormous latitude in judging who had failed or succeeded in qualifying.

At first, the state's press and public were taken aback by the prospect of enshrining so ignoble and blatant a fraud in a section of the new constitution. One delegate termed it diabolical, noting that "the mephitic vapor that arises from the section actually stinks in the nostrils of an honest man." As a small-town editor cautioned, if the legendary minds of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun could not agree about what the U.S. Constitution meant, then surely in Mississippi there would be "honest differences of opinion between a corn-field nigger and inspectors of election."

The outcry gradually subsided though, because even the critics of the proposed clause came to agree that it was a kind of silver bullet—an indestructible means of attaining the objective of black disenfranchisement while maintaining the voting privileges of ignorant, even illiterate whites. Its cleverness and potential efficacy simply could not be denied. Leading newspapers from Jackson and Vicksburg began to tout the clause, and at the convention even the sole black delegate, Isaiah T. Montgomery of the all-black town of Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta, acquiesced to it, apparently recognizing that resistance was futile. On November 1, 1890, the new Mississippi constitution, including the "understanding clause," was successfully adopted.

Thus with rather dismal expectations the South Carolina blacks saw their own state constitution opened for adjustment and repair. "The convention which met [in Columbia] in 1895 was very different both in
intent and personnel from that of 1868," notes the historian Okon Edet Uya. "The latter had been called for the special purpose of giving the blacks political rights consonant with their status as citizens; that of 1895 met for the expressed purpose of taking those rights away." John Gary Evans, the new governor and convention president (Ben Tillman had become a U.S. senator but essentially controlled the convention), opened the proceedings by urging delegates to "do our duty in this matter boldly and fearlessly, without regard to the censure of foreigners and aliens. We have experienced the cost and hardship of the rule of the ignorant, and know what it means."

The six African American delegates, sent by districts so overwhelmingly black that even Tillman had not managed to expunge these men, would be allowed their say, for the Tillmanites were keen on dressing the convention in as much propriety as possible. Held in a building with the marks of General Sherman's cannonballs still visible outside and the original ordinance of secession hanging inside, the gathering had from the start a self-willed sense of historic importance and inevitability, a "momentous" event, averred the
Charleston News & Courier
, "for millions of people now living and for millions more yet unborn."

For Robert Smalls, the gathering seemed more likely a "momentous" nightmare, a topsy-turvy world in which everything he had accomplished was to be mocked or destroyed. Listening to Pitchfork Ben, a man Smalls considered a degenerate and a criminal, arraign Reconstruction and the state's black leadership, would have been especially painful. Equally disturbing were the idiotic remarks offered by delegates in defense of white supremacy, such as Robert Aldrich's characterization of the federal mandate for the 1868 convention as "the greatest crime of the nineteenth century," or worse, Henry C. Burns's view that "slavery to the negro was a blessing in disguise," for "when [they] landed at Jamestown they were ... barbarians, idolaters, they ran about like turkeys, catching grasshoppers and lizards and eating them with the highest relish."

If there was anything encouraging about the situation, it was the extent to which men like Smalls, and the other black delegates including William J. Whipper, had evolved as politicians. (Whipper, the former state legislator who had figured unfavorably in the Black Thursday fiasco under Chamberlain, had become a judge in the Sea Islands.) Long mistreated as upstarts or "aliens," it was they who possessed the status of political veterans and carried the institutional memory of the state's government, they who spoke most knowledgably about the past three
decades of its political history. Yet if their battle with the Tillmanites was one of wisdom versus cleverness, cleverness unfortunately had the greater numbers, as well as the podium and the gavel.

Tillman's own speech to the convention coarsely summed up the evolution of state politics since the war. He began by linking the arrival of the carpetbaggers to the national agitation over the Black Codes. "[The Codes] gave the black Republicans, Thad Stevens and his gang, excuse for their Reconstruction deviltry," Tillman said, "and caused these hellhounds, actuated by hate for the Southern people, to determine upon degrading us to the lowest level possible, and they had at hand an instrument which the most fertile imagination, if it had been given a thousand years to concoct a scheme of villainy, could not have surpassed. It was the presence among us of our slaves set free by the results of the war.

"How did it come about and who must bear the blame [for Reconstruction]?" he asked.

We are told the negroes didn't do it. "Oh, we didn't do it," they say [mimicking the blacks seated in the hall]. You blindly followed and obeyed the orders of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union League and ignored the appeals of your former masters, who treated you with kindness and furnished you with your daily bread. I myself can testify that appeal after appeal was made by me, and by almost every white man in the state ... But every one of you, almost up to 1876, blindly followed wherever these white thieves ordered.

The negroes furnished the ballots ... The negroes put the little pieces of paper in the box that gave the commission to these white scoundrels ... and this must be our justification, our vindication and our excuse to the world that we are met in convention openly, boldly, without any pretense or secrecy, to announce that it is our purpose, as far as we may, without coming in conflict with the United States Constitution, to put such safeguards around this ballot in future, to so restrict the suffrage and circumscribe it, that this infamy can never come about again.

Tillman read aloud some of the evidence from that hallmark of innuendo, the 1877 "Report on Public Frauds," which alleged that the black members of the Reconstruction state legislature had indulged in expensive and needless articles, such as 40$ spittoons, 25$ hat pegs, $4 looking glasses, $200 crimson plush sofas, Havana cigars, champagne, and $600 mirrors, in addition to defrauding the people with extravagant printing
costs. Tillman assailed the name of the former state senator Charles P. Leslie, disgraced as the inept head of Richard Cain's state land commission in the early 1870s, who had once said, according to Tillman, "The state had no right to be a state unless she could pay and take care of her statesmen." But Leslie was an easy target. Corrupt, slipshod in his administrative methods at the land commission, he had provided conservatives for many years with a ready illustration of Republican and carpetbag excess. When a black delegate, James E. Wigg, interrupted Tillman to remind him that Leslie was a white man, Tillman shushed him, warning, "I will find you a plenty of nigs after a while."