Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (39 page)

None of the four
Slaughterhouse
dissenters objected to the most far-reaching part of Justice Miller’s majority opinion: “We doubt very much whether any action of a state not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever come within the purview of this provision.” To this day, the Supreme Court still uses Miller’s doctrine to shield private and race-veiled discriminators, those who veil policies intended to discriminate against Black people by not using racial language.
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Neither ex-Confederates voting again nor the
Slaughterhouse
ruling could compare to the destructive force of the Panic of 1873. It was the first major economic depression of American industrial capitalism and lasted the rest of the decade. Southern Democrats declared their ability to restore order, just as the oil man John D. Rockefeller and the steel man Andrew Carnegie declared their ability to monitor their industries. By the end of the century, the Rockefeller and Carnegie monopolies reflected the White political monopolies steering the South.

As the poorest of the poor, southern Blacks were the most devastated of the devastated by the Panic of 1873. The Panic halted the modest postwar ascent of Black landowners, snatching their land and
their freedom. When legions of small White landowners lost their land, too, they felt as if they were losing their Whiteness and freedom. Whites “must have small plots of land,” one planter complained, “and prefer tending them, poor as may be the return, to lowering themselves, as they think it, by hiring to another.”
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Holding out hope for redistributed land as long as they could, rural southern Blacks walked backward into sharecropping, meaning they handed the landowner a share of the crop as payment for the ability to farm there. Crooked landowners maneuvered sharecroppers into debt, and laws prevented sharecroppers from leaving landowners to whom they owed money. Blacks who were able to leave a bad situation took to the road, looking endlessly for ethical landowners. Landowners called this annual movement a sign of Black shiftlessness. Stuck between racist policies and ideas, sharecroppers could not win. Staying often meant servitude, but leaving meant shiftlessness.
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Nothing seemed to dent racist ideas, not even upwardly mobile urban Blacks. In 1874, Nashville’s White-owned
Republican Banner
praised the “thrifty and cleanly” Blacks. But they could not “be taken as the representative of the indolent and shiftless hundreds of thousands,” the
Banner
opined. They were extraordinary.
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BY THE EARLY
1870s, given the snatching away from Blacks’ civil rights, William Lloyd Garrison had no choice but to make his voice heard once again. He ridiculed the abandonment of Reconstruction in essay after essay in
The Independent
, and in open letter after open letter in the
Boston Journal
. Vice President Henry Wilson complained to Garrison of a “Counter-Revolution” overtaking Reconstruction. “Our Anti-slavery veterans must again speak out,” Wilson urged. Some failed to speak out because they were too busy blaming Black people for the failures of Reconstruction. And how could they not? Northern press reports regularly depicted Black voters and politicians as self-destructively stupid and corrupt. The Associated Press relied on anti-Black, anti-Reconstruction southern papers for daily dispatches.
New York Tribune
reporter James S. Pike blanketed northerners with racist fairytales
of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black politicians who conquered and deprived White South Carolinians during the “tragedy” of Reconstruction. These claims were published in his widely circulated newspaper articles in 1873, republished as
The Prostrate State, South Carolina Under Negro Government
in 1874. Pike’s Democratic sources were happy to blame the southern corruption on Black people, as it diverted attention from their principal role in the corruption. Pike’s well-written novel passed as eyewitness journalism. “In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw,” Pike wrote. “It is barbarism overwhelming civilization” and “the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet.”
¹⁵

The Prostrate State
caused pro-Reconstruction periodicals—
Scribner’s, Harper’s, The Nation
, and
The Atlantic Monthly
—to pummel Black legislators even more and demand a national reunion of White rule. A New York Democrat read from
The Prostrate State
on the House floor. Where’s your book on New York corruption? asked Black South Carolina congressman Robert Small. Though the bribers and the bribed knew corruption was a national affair, primarily among White politicians, racist ideas never did quite subscribe to the magazine of reality. Black corruption was a ready-made excuse to abandon the increasingly difficult, expensive, disordering, and divisive Reconstruction policies. Every time Grant’s administration intervened to protect Black lives, he alienated northern and southern Whites from the Republican Party. During the 1874 midterm elections, Democrats knocked Republicans out of control of the House of Representatives and out of power in every southern state except Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. White terrorist organizations warred with armed and unarmed Black voters across the South. President Grant had to send troops to prevent an army of 3,500 Democrats from forcing out elected Republicans in New Orleans in September 1874. Wendell Phillips was jeered off a Boston stage for trying to defend Grant. The
New York Times
reported that “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct from American politics, but they represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party have outgrown.”
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The final bill of Radical Reconstruction was pushed through Congress in early 1875 before the new Democrats took office. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 was a legislative memorial to Senator Charles Sumner, who died in 1874 after decades in the antislavery and civil rights trenches. The bill outlawed racial discrimination in jury selection, public transportation, and public accommodations, but it required Blacks to seek redress in the expensive and hostile courts. The bill hardly stopped the terror campaign against Mississippi’s Black voters that allowed Democrats to gain state control in the fall 1875 election. Mississippi’s embattled Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, declared that “a revolution is taking place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.” A southern newspaper declared that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments “may stand forever; but we intend . . . to make them dead letters.”
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With Reconstruction of southern democracy on life support, the United States celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. From May to November 1876, roughly one-fifth of the US population attended the first of the official “world fairs,” Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. “A band of old-time plantation ‘darkies’” singing songs at the Southern Restaurant was the only display depicting Black people. In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison gave an Independence Day address for the ages. The shift in public opinion away from Reconstruction was the consequence of emancipating Black people as a military necessity rather than as “an act of general repentance,” he said. In his last major public speech, Garrison recognized racist ideas as the core of the problem. “We must give up the spirit of complexional caste,” Garrison declared, “or give up Christianity.”
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In Hamburg, South Carolina, the local Black militia celebrated the July 4 centennial with a parade. Area racists hated the militia for maintaining Blacks’ ability to control the majority Black town. During the parade, harsh words were exchanged when a local White farmer ordered militia members to move aside for his carriage. The farmer appealed to former Confederate general Matthew C. Butler, the area’s most powerful Democrat. On July 8, Butler and a small posse ordered
the militia head, Union Army veteran Dock Adams, to disarm the Hamburg militia. Adams refused, and fighting broke out. The militiamen retreated to their armory. Butler dashed off for nearby Augusta, but returned with hundreds of reinforcements and cannon. Butler’s contingent executed five militiamen and looted and destroyed the undefended homes and shops of Hamburg.

When southerners complained of their lost cause, an appalled President Grant realized they were complaining of their lost freedom “to kill negroes and Republicans without fear of punishment and without loss of caste or reputations.” General Butler made a mockery of the congressional investigation, capitalizing on the attention by being elected to the US Senate in 1877. He blamed the massacre on innate Black criminality. Blacks, he said, possessed “little regard for human life.”
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General Butler was invoking Blacks’ natural proclivity for violence and criminality to avoid punishment for the massacre he had carried out. But hardly any congressional investigators questioned his motive for expressing these racist ideas, which at the time were being codified by a prison doctor in Italy. Cesare Lombroso “proved” in 1876 that non-White men loved to kill, “mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh and drink its blood.” His
Criminal Man
gave birth to the discipline of criminology in 1876. Criminals were born, not bred, Lombroso said. He believed that born criminals emitted physical signs that could be studied, measured, and quantified, and that the “inability to blush”—and therefore, dark skin—had “always been considered the accompaniment of crime.” Black women, in their close “degree of differentiation from the male,” he claimed in
The Female Offender
in 1895, were the prototypical female criminals. As White terrorists brutalized, raped, and killed people in communities around the Black world, the first crop of Western criminologists were intent on giving criminals a Black face and the well-behaved citizen a White face. Lombroso’s student, Italian law professor Raffaele Garofalo, invented the term “criminology” (
criminologia
) in 1885. British physician Havelock Ellis popularized Lombroso in the English-speaking world, publishing a compendium of his writings in 1890.
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The Hamburg perpetrators kept shouting: “This is the beginning of the redemption of South!” Indeed, it was. When the election of 1876 came in November, it was war at the polls, and Democrats stuffed ballot boxes across the South. By the morning of November 8, 1876, Democratic New York governor Samuel J. Tilden and Republican Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes were virtually tied in the electoral college. The presidential election’s outcome rested in the contested election returns of Louisiana and South Carolina. When a fifteen-member electoral commission handed Republicans the presidency, Democrats were outraged. In early 1877, both parties, and both regions, began planning for another Civil War.

The parties and regions remained united on one issue. Blacks must quell their “new kindled ambition” and recognize their lack of Whites’ “hereditary faculty of self government,” said former Ohio governor Jacob D. Cox. Outgoing president Grant privately told his cabinet that giving Black men the ballot had been a mistake, and so did Republican presidential hopeful Rutherford B. Hayes. While a consensus formed on who should govern the South, division intensified over who should govern in Washington, DC.

The nation on the brink, Hayes’s representatives met with Democrats at the Wormly House, a hotel owned by the capital’s richest African American. No one ever revealed the exact terms of the “Bargain of 1877.” But Democrats handed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency, while Hayes ended Reconstruction for the Democrats. Hayes recognized the stolen Democratic governments in Louisiana and South Carolina. He withdrew federal troops from the South and used those troops to crush the Great Strike of 1877. (As capital regained control of labor, the Knights of Labor materialized as the principal national labor organization. Knights head Terence V. Powderly demanded unions’ desegregation to control the competition. He considered Blacks a “lazy” reservoir of “cheap labor” that could easily be used against White labor.)
²¹

The Nation
made the Bargain of 1877 plain. The time had come for “the negro to disappear from the field of national politics,” said the
newsmagazine. “Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more do with him.” Meanwhile, William Lloyd Garrison labeled the Bargain “an abomination” amounting to the old “covenant with death.” When troops departed Shreveport, Louisiana, a Black man grieved about his people being back in “the hands of the very men that held [them] as slaves,” so that “there was no way on earth they could better [their] condition.”
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“Not one single right enjoyed by the colored people shall be taken from them,” pledged the new Democratic South Carolina governor, Wade Hampton. “As the negro becomes more intelligent,” Hampton added, “he naturally allies himself with the more conservative whites, for his observation and experience both show him that his interests are identified with those of the white race here.” Hampton opened two doors for Blacks in post-Reconstruction South Carolina: naturally submissive intelligence, or naturally rebellious stupidity.
²³

The Reconstruction era—the dozen or so years following the end of the Civil War in 1865—had been a horrific time for southern White men like Wade Hampton who were used to ruling
their
Black people and
their
women. They faced and beat back with violence and violent ideas a withering civil rights and Black empowerment movement—as well as a powerful women’s movement that failed to grab as many headlines. But their supposed underlings did not stop rebelling after the fall of Reconstruction. To intimidate and reassert their control over rebellious Blacks and White women, White male redeemers took up lynching in the 1880s. Someone was lynched, on average, every four days from 1889 to 1929. Often justifying the ritualistic slaughters on a false rumor that the victim had raped a White woman, White men, women, and children gathered to watch the torture, killing, and dismemberment of human beings—all the while calling the victims savages. Hate fueled the lynching era. But behind this hatred lay racist ideas that had evolved to question Black freedoms at every stage. And behind these racist ideas were powerful White men, striving by word and deed to regain absolute political, economic, and cultural control of the South.
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