America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  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.

  There were signs also that the country was coming together, finally. In June 1875, Harper’s predicted that the “Centennial year” would be a year “of increased national harmony.” As evidence, the editor offered “the disuse of the habit of speaking of certain States of the Union as ‘the South,’ as if there were a section of the country separate and peculiar.” Though the death of the South has had significantly more pronouncements than the imminent capture of Richmond, Harper’s was certain the event was at hand. The editor chirped that southerners had abandoned the theory of secession and it was nearly impossible to find anyone “who would resort to war as a remedy for governmental grievances, or who would restore slavery.” And while southerners continued to oppose Reconstruction, they “no longer oppose established results.” Probably not, since the results in most states by the middle of 1875 were the restorations of white leadership and black subjugation.46

  The Confederates finally took Boston. At the Bunker Hill centennial celebration in April 1875, from which visitors could still see the charred remains of the Ursuline convent, two thousand ex-Confederates marched through Boston on some of the same streets where the 54th Massachusetts had stepped proudly. John Quincy Adams II, son of the former president and congressman who railed against southern slaveholders, offered a golden olive branch to the guests. “You are come so
that once more we may pledge ourselves to a new union, not to a union merely of the law, or simply of the lips; not to a union … of the sword, but gentlemen, the only true union, a union of hearts.” Edward Atkinson, a Boston industrialist and a former supporter of John Brown, accepted an honorary membership in the Society of Ex-Confederate Soldiers for his investment in New South industries. The former abolitionist and officer of a black regiment Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke of his high regard for his new southern friends. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet conscience of New England, visited the University of Virginia, where he delivered an address praising the southern people, at least the whites among them.47

  Such testimonials to national fealty in 1875 came mainly from the North. Northerners did not mind the imbalance. They were going off to the future, and the South could come along, or not. The North was America, and that was what counted.

  Northerners would celebrate the centennial year counting the blessings of victory. The war unleashed an economic revolution, unparalleled innovation, and a degree of affluence across a broader segment of society than any Western nation had known to that time. It was a nation primarily of northern European Protestants with an abiding faith in science, imbued with self-reliance and optimism. Historians have agreed that Americans missed a golden opportunity to broaden its definition of “all men are created equal” in the decade after the Civil War. Americans at the time would beg to differ. They had come through a war that threatened to destroy their experiment, and during the succeeding decade they had nurtured a shaky peace into unbounded progress. When the world convened at Philadelphia in 1876 for the centennial exhibition, that was the accomplishment they would see and celebrate.

  The new American nation was obviously not all-inclusive. Workers, African Americans, Native Americans, women, Roman Catholics, and many immigrant groups remained outside the story Americans wove for themselves as they approached the centennial. There were few dissenting voices, for example, when the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Union veterans, barred Irish Americans from membership. It seemed odd that a group that gave lives and blood for their new nation could not find acceptance among their fellow soldiers. Neither, of course, could blacks. Or Native Americans. It was not a matter of racial, gender, class, religious, or ethnic exclusion. It was all of the above. America’s second century would become more inclusive, and it would do so primarily because the Union victory had saved the ideals of the first century.

  CHAPTER 22

  CENTENNIAL

  JULY FOURTH, 1876. America’s one-hundredth birthday. A modest celebration unfolded in Hamburg, South Carolina, a small town in the Edgefield district across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Blacks comprised more than 75 percent of the town’s population. They held most of the political offices, including the head of the state militia, the town marshal, and the judge of the town court. Doc Adams, captain of the militia, read the Declaration of Independence. His men paraded down Market Street in full regalia before a festive crowd to honor America on this blistering hot day.1

  A buggy approached from the opposite direction. The two young white men driving the wagon demanded passage through the procession. After a heated argument, Adams ordered his men to stand aside and allow the wagon to pass. The following day, the father of one of the drivers appeared before the judge, Prince Rivers, demanding the arrest of Doc Adams and other officers for obstructing a public road. Rivers, hearing conflicting versions of the incident, decided to hold a hearing.

  On the day of the hearing, July 8, the town filled up with armed whites. Rivers pressed both parties to reach a settlement. Matthew C. Butler, a prominent attorney and former Confederate general, demanded that Adams disarm the militia. Adams refused. By this time, more than a thousand armed whites were milling in front of the wooden “armory” where one hundred black militiamen had taken refuge. A shot rang out and shattered a second-floor window. Soon a pitched battled was raging. The white attackers fired a cannon that turned most of the building into splinters. As blacks fled, whites tracked them down. Several blacks escaped across the river to Georgia; others hid underneath a railroad trestle and witnessed the massacre. The white men also burned homes and shops and robbed residents of the town. One of the white hunters exclaimed, “God damn it, boys, what better fun do we want than this?”2

  On July 15, Robert Smalls, a black Union war hero and now a congressman from South Carolina, rose in the House to read a letter from a constituent. “The United States Government is not powerless.… In this Centennial year, will she stand idly by and see her soil stained with the blood of defenseless citizens?… God forbid that such an attitude will be assumed toward the colored people of the South by the ‘best Government the world ever saw.’”3

  The northern Republican press called it “the Hamburg Butchery.” Thomas Nast contributed “The ‘Bloody Shirt’ Reformed” in August. The cartoon depicted Justice holding a balance scale, with one scale containing the seven black men who died and the other, one white man. She demands that the scale be balanced with more dead whites. The nation’s two sacred documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, frame her. In the background, posters appear with the names of white terrorist groups: the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the White Liners.4

  “The ‘Bloody Shirt’ Reformed,” August 12, 1876. This Thomas Nast cartoon expresses the outrage of northern public opinion to the Hamburg, South Carolina, massacre of July 1876. The figure of Justice demands the prosecution of the white men responsible for the execution-style murder of six blacks after the riot. The wall posters represent a roll call of the South’s Democratic paramilitary organizations. Despite the outrage, a weary Grant administration did nothing to stem the violence in South Carolina and the white perpetrators not only escaped prosecution, but their exploits were celebrated in subsequent decades. (Harper’s Weekly)

  In an election year, such cold-blooded mayhem was difficult to ignore. Thomas Wentworth Higginson confessed to self-deception in his assessment of white southern public opinion. “I have been trying hard to convince myself,” he wrote, “that the Southern whites had accepted the results of the war, and that other questions might now come uppermost.” Still, there was no groundswell for federal intervention. The prevailing view was to abandon the South and its disorderly population to focus on the “other questions.”5

  South Carolina governor Daniel H. Chamberlain, a Massachusetts native who was instrumental in allowing black students to enroll at the state university at Columbia, informed President Grant, “This affair at Hamburg is only the beginning of a series of similar race and party collisions in our State, the deliberate aim of which is … the political subjugation and control of this State.” Grant responded with sympathy but little else. In a resigned tone, he stated, “How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the universe only knows.” The inscrutable God invoked by Lincoln had clearly triumphed in Washington at least. It was clear, however, that the Great Ruler of the United States was not going to assist his celestial counterpart to achieve a “final remedy.” Grant expressed his confidence in Chamberlain to handle the situation “without aid from the federal government.” In the meantime, confirming Chamberlain’s fears, Matthew C. Butler vowed, “This won’t stop until after November.” He characterized the murders in Hamburg as a worthy effort toward putting the black man in his appropriate place. “This collision was the culmination of the system of insulting and outraging of white people which the negroes had adopted there for several years.” As proof, he offered Doc Adams’s refusal to accept his conditions for a settlement, showing that Adams was “wholly unfit for so important a station.”6

  Butler correctly pinpointed the grievances of whites in the Edgefield district. As a result of their superior numbers, blacks held key positions in the town and county. When southern whites talked of their world turned “bottom-side up,” the situation in Edgefield was a prime example. South Carolina w
hites were well aware of how their friends in Mississippi and Louisiana had redeemed their states from Republican rule, and they sought to follow suit.

  In May 1876, South Carolina Democrats drafted The Plan of the Campaign of 1876, a manual on how to redeem the state. Some of the recommended strategies included: “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine how he may best accomplish it.” The instructions concluded with this chilling reminder: “Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die.”7

  Wade Hampton received the Democratic nomination for governor. He would try to steer a moderate course during the campaign as much because of his patrician sensibilities as because of his fear of federal intervention if more violence erupted in South Carolina. His platform was mild enough. He campaigned on “home rule” and promises to end corruption and cut spending and taxes. Hampton held out an olive branch to blacks, promising to support the Reconstruction amendments. Yet he presided over what one historian has called “one of the bloodiest electoral campaigns in American history.”8

  Hampton’s supporters knew what was at stake in the election, and he articulated it at every turn even while eschewing violence. In his acceptance speech, he energized his supporters, now conspicuous by their red shirts modeled after Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Italian “Redshirts.” “You are struggling for the highest stake for which a people ever contended, for you are striving to bring back to your prostrate State the inestimable blessings which can only follow orderly and regulated liberty under free and good government.” Hampton benefited from more than three hundred gun clubs throughout the state with a membership of over fifteen thousand.9