Andrew Johnson opposed the Fourteenth Amendment and carried his case to the people in a swing around key northern states beginning in August 1866. It was an unprecedented campaign for a president. While many of his listeners opposed black suffrage and favored his message of reconciliation, his tone and manner dismayed many more as unbecoming for the chief executive. The off-year elections in November 1866, which generally would favor the party out of power, resulted in embarrassing defeats for the Democrats in the North, giving Republicans a veto-proof two-thirds majority in the House and Senate. Republicans interpreted the results as a mandate to sweep away the president’s reconstruction policy and begin anew.
The new Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Acts in March 1867 over another presidential veto. With the exception of Tennessee, the only southern state that had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and had been readmitted to the Union, Congress divided the former Confederate states into five military districts, enfranchised one million former slaves, and barred ex-Confederate leaders from voting or holding office. The acts charged military commanders to conduct voter-registration campaigns to enroll blacks. The eligible voters would then elect delegates to a state convention to write a new constitution that guaranteed universal male suffrage. Once a majority of eligible voters ratified the document, the state could apply for readmission to the Union.
The Reconstruction Acts fulfilled the Radicals’ three major objectives. They secured the freedmen’s right to vote. They made it likely that southern states would be run by Republican regimes that would enforce the new constitutions, protect former slaves’ rights, and maintain the Republican majority in Congress. Finally, they set standards for readmission that required the South to accept the preeminence of the federal government and the end of slavery. Moderate Republicans agreed with these principles. They did not see them as vindictive but rather as ratifying the results of the war and ending the rebellion once and for all.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of these measures. Carl Schurz asserted that the program represented “a great political and social revolution.” The new legislation placed the power of the federal government behind African Americans’ civil and political rights. The government acknowledged that freedom was meaningless without the right and security to exercise that freedom. The Reconstruction Acts, coupled with the Fourteenth Amendment, changed federal-state relations for all time. They ensured all minorities basic rights that individual states could not abrogate or modify. Though court decisions, the actions of white southerners, and the disengagement of white northerners limited the intended impact of these changes for nearly a century after the war, they served as a standard by which America could eventually live up to its promise as a beacon of democracy to the world.26
Black suffrage was a key element of the new program. The ballot would not only provide protection for African Americans, but it would also enhance Republican Party fortunes in the South. Given the strong opposition to black suffrage in the South, it would also become a flashpoint for violence. While Congress was considering this issue, it received a petition from white Alabamians: “Do not, we implore you, abdicate your own rule over us, by transferring us to the blighting, brutalizing and unnatural dominion of an alien and inferior race.” Other whites viewed suffrage as the beginning of a slippery slope leading, somehow, to interracial sex. A white man in North Carolina reported, “The common white people of the country are at times very much enraged against the negro population. They think that this universal political and civil equality will finally bring about social equality.… There are already instances … in which poor white girls are having negro children.”27
Albion W. Tourgée, who left his native Ohio at the age of twenty-three to fight for the Union, moved to North Carolina after the war to open a nursery business. He followed the path of many so-called carpetbaggers—northerners who stayed or ventured south after the war to make their fortune, not necessarily to participate in a social revolution. Seeing injustice in the treatment of the freedmen, Tourgée threw himself into reform politics at considerable personal peril. The new reconstruction policy troubled him, however, and he shared his reservations with Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner, one of the architects of the Reconstruction Acts. His concern focused on the issue of legitimacy. Could any government in the South predicated on black suffrage and the disfranchisement of white leaders earn the support of the larger population? Tourgée warned Sumner, “A party builded upon ignorance, inexperience, and poverty, and mainly composed of a race of pariahs, who are marked and distinguished by their color, can not stand against intelligence, wealth, the pride of a conquered nation, and race prejudice.” That party, even if initially successful, would generate such violent opposition that its reign would be short and bloody.28
The warning was well taken, though the southern Republican Party was more than a party of freedmen. Northerners like Tourgée who had come to the South to make money and white southerners, the handful of prewar Unionists, small farmers, and town merchants—“scalawags” was the epithet other whites used to identify them—joined the party as its political prospects brightened under the new legislation. The lure of office and its financial rewards undoubtedly motivated some of these whites, but some also had a deep commitment to Americanizing the South. Tourgée’s emphasis on black Republicans, however, reflected his experience in North Carolina. To most whites in the state, the upstart Republicans were not an interracial coalition but rather a party of and for blacks. On this basis, the new Reconstruction governments could never be legitimate in the minds of white southerners.
Blacks nevertheless grabbed the opportunity the new suffrage provisions offered. Republican political organizations called Union Leagues popped up all over the South. The league organized black voters, provided voter education, helped to select candidates, conducted registration drives, and collected funds for school buildings and churches. Of greater concern to whites, the league organized self-defense corps that openly drilled with weapons and uniforms. The military commanders generally remained aloof from these activities, with the notable exception of General Philip H. Sheridan, who, as commander of the district that included Texas and Louisiana, vigorously encouraged the formation of Union Leagues and removed ex-Confederates from office. His zealotry on behalf of the Republican Party in general and the black electorate in particular raised the ire of President Johnson, who removed him. Sheridan went west to fight the Indians instead of the Johnson administration.
Legitimacy remained a problem for southern Republican governments. Even some moderate northern Republicans wondered about the contradiction between the advocacy for universal manhood suffrage and the provisions that barred ex-Confederates from exercising their franchise. Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio unsuccessfully urged his colleagues to “reconstruct society in the rebel States upon the broad basis of universal suffrage.” He then voiced a sentiment that would become more general in the coming years: “Is it not enough that they are humiliated, conquered, their pride broken, their property lost, hundreds and thousands of their best and bravest buried under their soil, their institutions gone, they themselves deprived of the right to hold office, and placed in political power on the same footing with their former slaves? Is not that enough?”29
Thousands of white voters were ineligible because of their roles in the Confederacy, and an untold number of whites refused to register to vote in protest of black suffrage and the disfranchisement of their neighbors. The acts barred as many as ten thousand Confederate officials from elective office. Of the 1,363,000 registered voters in the South by the end of 1867, more than half of them—703,000—were black, and they formed the majority of the electorate in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. These figures presented a significant opportunity for the incorporation of the freedmen, only recently property, into both the southern and the national bodies politic.
The mere existence of these governments was a rebuke to
the aspirations of white southerners to redeem their region. Even before the states held their first elections under the new constitutions, opponents pronounced the governments-to-be abominations, “the most galling tyranny and most stupendous system of organized robbery that is to be met with in history.” The great fear was that these governments would be successful and perpetuate themselves. As W. E. B. DuBois noted correctly, “There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.”30
By late 1867, more northern whites had joined Senator Sherman in their concerns about the new Reconstruction. The Republicans had misread their stunning victories in the 1866 elections. Congress had rightly tossed out the old governments but added a new class of disfranchised whites. It rendered null and void the legal strictures against African Americans but also enfranchised the freedmen. Northerners wanted the Republicans to ensure that the same issues that caused the war would not enjoy a new life. They did not give Republicans a mandate to engineer an egalitarian society in the South, a society to which most northerners would have objected. While Republicans triumphed across the South in the November 1867 elections, the Democrats gained numerous state and local offices from Republicans in the North. Black suffrage, on the ballot in Minnesota, Ohio, and Kansas, went down to defeat in all three states. Republicans in Congress had applied a different standard to the South from the one they supported in their own jurisdictions. Blacks could vote in only eight of the twenty-two northern states, and between 1865 and 1869 voters rejected equal suffrage referendums in eight of eleven northern states. The reason for these electoral setbacks was clear to the Nation, a Republican magazine: “It would be vain to deny, the fidelity of the Republican party to the cause of equal rights … has been one of the chief causes of its heavy losses.”31
Although southern whites would rail about “black rule” for generations, African Americans never held office in proportion to their numbers in the electorate. Except for the lower house in South Carolina, blacks never attained a majority in any southern state legislature. Nor was there a black governor, and there were only two black U.S. senators, both from Mississippi. The African Americans who held these positions were, on the whole, educated, able men, a number of whom had come to the South after the Civil War, and several from the South who were free before the war.
Black suffrage represented the ultimate loss of control for whites in the South. A legislature elected with black votes could pass laws regulating contracts between blacks and whites, authorize public funds to educate blacks, and make judicial appointments to ensure the fair application of justice regardless of race. In the late fall of 1866, the state court of North Carolina met in Raleigh. Every day for nearly a month, a crowd of five hundred people gathered outside the courthouse to witness the public whipping of black men convicted of various crimes. Whites convicted of similar crimes did not receive this sentence. General Daniel E. Sickles, the Union military commander for the Carolinas, put a stop to the practice. The governor immediately petitioned the president for a restoration of the punishment, stating that such laws had “existed with us and our ancestors for many hundred years.” Despite the unintended irony of that statement, Johnson granted the request and fired Sickles, though Congress would reinstate him. With the new state constitution and a black electorate in place the following year, the spectacle at the state courthouse in Raleigh ceased.32
Despite threats and intimidation, blacks thronged to the polls to ratify new state constitutions providing for universal manhood suffrage in Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Arkansas. The successful voting drives, the Union Leagues, and the growing confidence of freedmen across the South provoked predictable responses from southern whites. Before the spring of 1868, white attacks on freedmen were, at best, loosely organized. During and after this time, the assaults were organized and included a broad spectrum of social classes. The Ku Klux Klan emerged as the great enforcer of white supremacy in the South, though similar organizations appeared under different names. Its official creed cloaked a violent mission in Old South rhetoric. “This is an institution of chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal.” The Klan revealed more of its true purpose in its membership requirements, proscribing membership in “the Radical Republican Party,” opposing “Negro equality both social and political,” and favoring “a white man’s government, the reenfranchisement and emancipation of the white men of the South, and the restitution of the Southern people to all their rights.” This was the agenda of Redemption, and it manifested itself most often and most violently during and after election campaigns.33
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.”34
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.35
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.36
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.37
Grant won th
e 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.”38
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