With Democrats holding firm as the white man’s party, the black candidates who won offices throughout the former Confederacy were always Republicans. In South Carolina, Jonathan Jasper Wright was elected to the state’s supreme court. Another black South Carolinian, Joseph H. Rainey, won his seat when Representative Benjamin F. Whittemore, a white Republican, was forced to resign for selling appointments to the military academies.
Rainey achieved what John Menard had been denied. On December 12, 1870, he became the first black member of the House. A month later, Jefferson Long of Georgia followed him, and Robert Brown Elliott, also from South Carolina, was seated in that Forty-first Congress.
In the next House, their number increased by three: Robert Carlos DeLarge from South Carolina; Benjamin S. Turner from Alabama; and Josiah T. Walls from Florida.
And in 1870, Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels to the U.S. Senate as its first black member. An elated Charles Sumner welcomed him warmly: “Today,” he said, “we make the Declaration a reality.”
Hiram Revels had never been a slave. His parents, a free couple in Fayetteville, North Carolina, had managed to evade the state’s law against educating black children before they shipped their adolescent son north to seminaries in Indiana and Ohio.
In his early twenties, Hiram married Phoeba Bass, a free black Ohio woman; they would have six daughters. He followed his father into the pulpit as a Baptist preacher and tried to avoid incendiary topics. Yet Revels was arrested in St. Louis for his mild sermons to a black congregation.
To support his family, Revels cut hair in a barbershop while he continued his academic studies at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
When war came, Revels volunteered as a chaplain to Maryland’s first black regiment.
With the peace, he went to Kansas to organize black schools for the Freedmen’s Bureau and then to Mississippi and a new role in politics. In 1868, Revels was a compromise selection for the state senate. When Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment the following year, Mississippi was eligible to send its two senators back to Washington, and Revels became a popular choice. Although he would be taking the second seat, not the one held by Jefferson Davis, the symbolism reverberated throughout the nation.
The political cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed Jeff Davis exiting a theater stage as Iago and muttering, “For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leap’d into my seat, the thought whereof doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my innards.”
• • •
To the state’s Republicans, Revels was a godsend. A free man without the resentments or ingrained deference of a former slave, he was devoted to his family and had been exposed to higher education. Heavy-set, light-skinned, well-dressed, Revels greeted the world with a ready smile.
But he had entered politics sharing his party’s distrust of the Democrats. If they have the chance, Revels assured audiences, they would rescind black rights “as certainly as the sun shines in the heavens.”
• • •
Despite strong support from Sumner and his fellow Radicals, Democratic cartoonists were drawing Revels as a wild-eyed Zulu, and opponents quibbled over seating him on the grounds of Chief Justice Taney’s ruling that he could not be a citizen.
That mention of the Dred Scott decision stoked Sumner’s oratorical fire. He called the decision “a putrid corpse . . . a stench in the nostrils and a scandal to the Court itself.”
Sumner predicted that seating Hiram Revels would have repercussions far beyond the Capitol. “Doors will open, exclusions will give way, intolerance will cease, and the great truth will manifest in a thousand examples: Liberty and Equality are the two express promises of our fathers. Both are now assured.”
When Revels was confirmed by a comfortable margin, he rose unflustered from his place on a sofa behind Sumner’s desk and at 4:40 p.m. on Friday, February 25, 1870, took the oath of office.
From Philadelphia, the Inquirer mocked the prevailing hysteria among the Democrats. “The colored United States Senator from Mississippi has been awarded his seat, and we have not had an earthquake, our free institutions have not been shaken to their foundations, nor have the streets of our large cities been converted to blood.”
Revels was canny in choosing the subject of his maiden speech. The state of Georgia had been devising inventive subterfuges for refusing to send elected black delegates to Congress. White Democrats endorsed the strategy, which they called “masterly inactivity.” One approach admitted that Georgia’s new state constitution gave black citizens the right to vote but not the right to hold office.
The Senate galleries were packed with black faces eager to hear Revels make history. He began hesitantly. Then, shifting into his pulpit cadences, he reminded the chamber that when the Confederate army conscripted white soldiers, their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters had been left at home to be protected by their black slaves.
“And now, sir, I ask how did that race act? Did they evince the malignity of which we hear so much? They waited, and they waited patiently. In the absence of their masters, they protected the virtue and chastity of defenseless women.
“Mr. President, I maintain that the past record of my race is a true index of the feelings which today animate them.”
• • •
Revels built upon the acclaim for that speech with an appeal for a general amnesty for his state’s former Confederates. Like other Republicans, he wanted to disprove the accusation that they favored continuing the ban against whites voting in order to perpetuate themselves in office. In fact, white Republicans were courting Democrats across the nation as Warmoth had done, usually at the expense of their black constituents.
Given that development, Revels could assure the Senate that “the people now are getting along as quietly, pleasantly, harmoniously, and prosperously as the people are in any of the formerly free states.”
He concluded, “I am in favor of amnesty in Mississippi. The state is fit for it.”
• • •
As Republicans formed alliances with Democrats, the former rebels made accommodation easier for them by avoiding their rabid oratory. Less than a month after Lincoln had been elected in 1860, Mississippi’s governor had called for secession to avoid the menace of “Black Republican politics and free negro morals.” A colleague from his state had argued that “our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political or social equality.”
These days, Democrats preferred to frame their motive in seceding not as racism but entirely as a defense of states’ rights. Everywhere but in the Klan, their language had been toned and polished, much in the way that the vitriol against Lincoln had abated. Rather than denounce the martyred president, Democrats now assailed his successor.
Republican leaders themselves granted that their white candidates in the South seldom reflected the business or professional background of their constituents. Coming from the North made them vulnerable to the charge of being carpetbaggers.
Since few of them, black or white, had an independent political base like Pinchback’s, they depended on federal patronage, and to survive, they sometimes alienated voters by inflating their government salaries.
• • •
But Pinchback’s temporary perch in the governor’s chair was not translating into either money or new powers. His chief duty that year was to preside over Mardi Gras, which had been declared a legal holiday for the first time. Pinchback looked on as white men impersonating the mythic Comus and Circe used the celebration to mock Warmoth and the other leading carpetbaggers.
Reporting to the governor, Pinchback boasted about the size of the bribes he was turning down. He could not be bought, he said, for a hundred thousand dollars these days.
• • •
Throughout the presidential campaign, Pinchback stood aloof from the Liberal Repu
blicans and assured reporters that his “relations with President Grant are at present most friendly” and that he knew “that the leading colored men” felt the same.
To satisfy himself that Grant remained committed to black equality, Pinchback went twice to Washington for interviews with the president. Once more, Grant’s vague assurances disappointed him; Pinchback was already impatient with the slow progress that was still forcing Louisiana Negroes to eat in separate restaurants and attend segregated theaters.
To hurry the pace, Pinchback joined with other prominent blacks—including Antoine—in inviting black officeholders from across the country to Louisville, Kentucky, for a National Colored Convention. The event was guaranteed national attention when Frederick Douglass agreed to serve as its chairman.
As delegates arrived from as far away as Ohio and Massachusetts, conservative newspapers took alarm and charged organizers with trying to recruit “a negro party,” an accusation the convention immediately voted to deny.
And sharp divisions within the black ranks were soon on public display. When a firebrand from Kansas invoked the spirit of Nat Turner, he was rebuked by an Alabaman, who warned that such rash talk could lead to his death at the hands of white supremacists.
Pinchback was contemptuous of that timidity, and Douglass won unanimous passage of a platform calling for “just rights and privileges” in public places and on public transport.
Pinchback chose the convention for announcing that if Charles Sumner were running for president, he would support him “even if there were forty thousand Grants.” Instead, he was backing the Republican nominee.
General Grant “has done a good deal for me,” Pinchback said. “He has, by the iron hand, stayed bloodshed in this Southern country. He has kept thousands of my race from being assassinated. He has in every way showed his appreciation.”
Pinchback concluded lightly that Grant “may be a little crotchety, but many of those crochets are influenced by his wife, Mrs. Grant.”
With Warmoth committed to the Liberals, Pinchback could congratulate himself on choosing the winning side. The future seemed to present no obstacle to his becoming governor in his own right. Or a member of the House of Representatives. Or a U.S. senator. Or, given his talent, nerve, and connections, all of them.
Morrison Waite
CHAPTER 18
GRANT’S SECOND TERM (1873–1876)
ULYSSES GRANT HAD FOUND HIS first term as president less onerous than he feared and expected the second to unroll as smoothly. Before it ended, however, the next four years of peace would test him as harshly as war had done. Grant would learn that a military commander’s steadfast loyalty to his officers became less admired in a civilian president.
The travail began the day before Grant’s second inaugural when Ben Butler succeeded in passing a bill to repair long-standing inequities in the federal payroll. Butler’s proposal doubled the size of the president’s salary from the annual $25,000 that dated from George Washington’s day. His bill would also raise the pay of cabinet officers and Supreme Court justices.
Even the increase for congressmen from $5,000 to $7,500 might have provoked no outcry; their salary had not gone up since 1852.
But the bill made the raise retroactive for the two years from the start of the current Congress. Members might call that extra $5,000 a “bonus.” An infuriated public labeled it a “salary grab.”
The bill included the same back pay for Grant. Either he signed it or the government would be left without funding until Congress met again at the end of the year. Grant signed, and then watched anger build until the first business taken up by the Forty-third Congress in December was repealing the pay raise for the Forty-second.
• • •
Only a fluke linked Grant’s administration to the name of the next crisis. Republicans had dropped his first vice president, Schuyler Colfax, from their ticket because of the Crédit Mobilier investigation and replaced him with Henry Wilson, even though Wilson was also tainted by scandal. And he was still trailed by suspicions that, early in the war, he had inadvertently revealed military secrets about the pending Battle of Bull Run to a Washington hostess who turned out to be a Southern spy. But in facing the Greeley challenge, Wilson was a dependable Massachusetts Radical.
Vice President Colfax, so genial that colleagues called him “Smiley,” had been popular among Louisiana Republicans, who named a new voting district in his honor. Three hundred and fifty miles north of New Orleans, bordered by the Red River and composed of only a few hundred white and black voters, Colfax was one more nondescript Southern hamlet. Until Easter Sunday, 1873, when Colfax became notorious.
The Grant administration had recently certified the election of a Republican governor, William Kellogg. Democrats in Colfax refused to recognize him, and both parties claimed control of the town’s two-story courthouse.
William Ward, along with another black Republican and a white friend named Daniel Shaw, occupied the building and underscored their determination by marching their small number of recruits through the town square. As weapons, the men shouldered antiquated rifles or, lacking those, pitchforks and hoes.
The confrontation seemed headed toward a meaningless standoff until rumors spread among the white community that this black militia intended to seize the entire town. Ward’s face had been badly scarred during the war, which lent menace to his past threats to confiscate the neighboring white plantations.
The stories grew wilder. A black ally of Ward’s from Pennsylvania was accused of breaking into the house of a white Democratic judge and defiling the coffin of his young daughter.
When the judge rode to New Orleans to demand protection, Republicans accused his fellow white Democrats of inventing the charge to whip up resentment against blacks, and Governor Kellogg refused to send troops.
By Easter Sunday, Christopher Columbus Nash, the Democratic sheriff, had brought together 150 white men from neighboring hamlets. After shouting threats in front of the courthouse, Nash called for a thirty-minute truce to allow black women and children to withdraw to safety.
When they had scattered, Nash’s men opened fire. The black men under siege returned the barrage with their shotguns. After three hours of bloodless volleying, the white attackers took time off for dinner and a game of cards.
During that time, Ward and his defenders had concocted two jerrybuilt cannon by drilling holes in stovepipe that would let them fire a hail of bolts and nails. At the first shot from that improvised artillery, Nash’s men dragged up an old cannon and launched a cannonball.
The courthouse caught fire. Overcome by smoke, black men appeared at the upstairs windows, waving scraps of white cloth and yelling, “Don’t shoot! We are whipped!”
A few stray shots from the courthouse wounded two white leaders on the street, however, and convinced Nash that the surrender had been a trick. His men surrounded the burning building and shot or bayoneted the blacks as they fled. Some who tried to escape through a cypress pond were shot in the back.
A witness reported that “one could have walked on dead Negroes almost an acre big.”
White revenge then moved to a cotton field where black prisoners were working. Told that they were being moved to a neighboring town, they were led two by two out of sight of the others and shot. A witness said that the gunfire “was like popcorn in a skillet,” as forty-eight blacks were executed.
As reports of the massacre reached New Orleans, Governor Kellogg was stymied in sending federal troops because white steamboat owners refused to ferry them. They said that cooperating with Kellogg would destroy their business.
New Orleans police reached Colfax within days, however, and federal forces a week later. Because some victims had sunk in the river, no accurate count of the dead was possible, but more than a hundred men had been gunned down. Even compared with Nathan Forrest’s wartime bloodbath at Fort Pillow, Colfax became known as the worst atrocity of Reconstruction.
• • •
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sp; With midterm elections approaching, racial violence spread across Louisiana. Although Grant’s crackdown had disbanded the Klan, its spirit survived in a network called the White Leagues. Armed members began rampaging through black parishes, seizing power by murdering black Republican officeholders.
In New Orleans, Grant’s old friend James Longstreet led a rally of local police and black militia to repel the thirty-five hundred White Leaguers who were determined to take over the hotel that was serving as the statehouse.
The league lost twenty-five dead and nineteen wounded, but members occupied the building and seated their own Democratic state officials. News of their coup set off widespread white rejoicing across the state, and the conciliatory Democrat they named as governor promised peace and protection for the state’s blacks.
The next midterm elections reflected a historic shift in the national mood. For the first time since 1856, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives nationally and picked up ten seats in the Senate.
To end the Democrats’ revolt in Louisiana, Grant sent General Sheridan to the scene with three gunboats and five thousand troops. When they surrounded the statehouse, white resistance evaporated.
Sheridan asked Grant for authorization to arrest leaders of the White League and try them by courts-martial. When his proposal was leaked to the press, not only did the South erupt in fury, but Northerners joined in protesting the infringement on the Constitution. Grant sent Sheridan back an encouraging telegram but did not issue the proclamation.
Instead, he released a report deploring that “the spirit of hatred and violence is stronger than law” in Louisiana. But with Sheridan’s threat still hanging over them, White League members stayed at home, and Sheridan could exult to Washington that “the dog is dead.”
The opposition press was unforgiving. The New York Tribune called the president’s actions outrageous: “General Grant has vanquished the people of Louisiana again.” But at a memorial for the dead in New Orleans, Pinckney Pinchback spoke for grateful Republicans as he mourned the black victims by quoting from Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Give me no help in lamentation.”
After Lincoln Page 32