• • •
Ulysses and Julia Grant soon left the United States on a trip to London and then on to Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, the Middle East, and Asia. Grant was traveling when the Democrats at home took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in twenty years. Republicans began to pressure him to return and ensure that they did not lose the White House as well. Hayes had always said he would not run for re-election.
Urged on by his wife, Grant agreed to be a candidate when the Republican convention opened in Chicago in June 1879. But Grant’s surrogates, men like Roscoe Conkling, turned out to be tone-deaf in courting delegates. His cause looked lost by the time of the vote, and Grant spurned Julia’s suggestion that he appear at the convention to stampede the hall into nominating him. “I would rather,” Grant told her, “cut off my right arm.”
On its thirty-sixth ballot, by a vote of 399 to 306, the convention turned to James G. Blaine of Maine.
Because former presidents received no pension, the Grants retired to New York, dependent on $250,000 raised from Republicans on Wall Street. Another $100,000 from J. Pierpont Morgan and his friends allowed them to buy a large new house in Manhattan at 3 East Sixty-sixth Street.
Grant’s investments quickly indicated that he would have no better luck in the dawning Gilded Age than in the drab decades that had preceded it. Unscrupulous partners fleeced him of paper profits of $16 million and threatened to leave him destitute.
Grant’s personal distress distracted him from the nation’s problems, including a worrisome resurgence of white supremacy throughout the South. Even if some Radicals had never overcome their misgivings about Grant, he had been a staunch ally in the White House through his first term. Early in his second term, however, an erosion of black rights had been detected.
One portent was the resistance from Salmon Chase’s Supreme Court to further expansions of federal power. In Blyew v. United States, the first challenge to the legality of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a federal court found two white men in Kentucky guilty of murdering a black family. But a six-to-two decision from the Supreme Court reversed that verdict and thwarted further congressional interference in state affairs.
The Court underscored its determination in the Louisiana slaughterhouse rulings of 1873. Four hundred butchers, most of them white, sued, claiming they had been put out of work by a state law intended to keep offal and dung out of the water supply. When their lawyer argued that the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 protected their rights, a majority of justices ruled again for a narrower reading of the amendment that limited federal intervention.
• • •
In replacing Chase, Morrison R. Waite of Ohio may have been Grant’s fifth choice, at best. But in his home state, Waite was being hailed as a hero. The negotiating team he headed had returned from London with a $15.5 million settlement after proving that England had violated its neutrality by outfitting Confederate warships.
A Yale graduate from Lyme, Connecticut, Waite had gone west to study law in Ohio, south of Toledo. He married Amelia Warner of Lyme and they began a family that would include three sons and a daughter. As a politician, however, Waite failed regularly. He ran for Congress as a Whig, lost, then ran unsuccessfully as a Republican. Although he had backed Lincoln, Waite drew a distinction that might have troubled President Grant: Waite was strongly against the institution of slavery, but he felt no particular sympathy for the slaves themselves.
At the time of his appointment, critics noted that Waite had never argued a case before the Court he would now be leading. And Stephen J. Field, Lincoln’s last Supreme Court appointment, saw a more serious shortcoming. “We have a Chief Justice,” Field wrote to a friend, “that would never have been thought of for the position by any person except President Grant.”
But at fifty-eight, Mott Waite came to Washington still basking in the bipartisan acclaim for his British negotiations. He was resolved to impose his will, and usually he carried his associates with him. By the time of United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, Waite was ruling that indictments brought under the Enforcement Law against the eight white defendants were invalid. As a consequence, blacks now found it harder—and often impossible—to secure their right to vote.
Waite’s approach was no more favorable to women. In previous years, he had ruled that since women had never had the right to vote, the recent constitutional amendments did not protect them against infringement of that right.
Those harbingers would be confirmed several times over as Waite ruled regularly against the federal government and in favor of state control. It was in that spirit that his Court would put an end to Charles Sumner’s most cherished legacy.
In a sweeping negation in 1883, Joseph Bradley, the justice whose vote had installed Hayes as president, refuted the specifics of Sumner’s original language. Writing for the Court, Bradley asked, “Can the act of a mere individual, the owner of the inn, the public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing accommodations, be justly regarded as imposing an ordinary civil injury, properly cognizable by the laws of the state, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears?”
Bradley answered his question: “Individual invasion of individual rights” was not the subject of the Equal Protection Clause. For the government to involve itself in private transactions was unconstitutional.
Bradley’s ruling was assailed by advocates of black rights, including Frederick Douglass, who called it “a concession to prejudice.” But the sole dissent from within the Court itself came from fifty-year-old John Marshall Harlan, Rutherford Hayes’s first appointment to the bench.
A rangy and pugnacious redhead, Harlan fought for the Union in the Tenth Kentucky Volunteers, even though he had owned slaves and denounced the Emancipation Proclamation. By the war’s end, however, he had become a Grant Republican.
Harlan’s own political aspirations had come to nothing, but his skillful maneuvering at the 1876 convention helped deliver the nomination for Hayes, and the Court was his reward.
During his thirty-three years as an associate justice, John Harlan would prove his commitment to racial justice and to the spirit of the Reconstruction amendments. In his decisions, he warned that the rights of black citizens were threatened not only by state governments but by “the hostile actions of corporations and individuals.”
Some twenty years after his appointment, Harlan was again in the minority in 1896 when he chastised his colleagues in Plessy v. Ferguson for upholding segregation on railroad trains. He reminded them that the United States had no ruling class or caste system, and he predicted that their majority opinion “will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
• • •
In his first months as president, Rutherford Hayes had no persuasive answer for the flood of angry letters from Southern Republicans about the way he had betrayed them, and he was distracted as well by new accusations from Louisiana that his victory had been fraudulent. Congress put the charges to rest, but only after months of further uncertainty.
In the interim, Hayes pushed forward with a commission to study civil service reform. Its reputation for integrity was enhanced when he named as chairman John Jay, a grandson of the first U.S. Chief Justice. But when the Jay report called for removing all customs-house revenue from political appointees, Roscoe Conkling rose up with other Republican leaders to block the change.
About the same time, Hayes was confronted by the largest labor strike in the nation’s history. Railroad workers were protesting a 10 percent cut in their wages, and miners across the West were also walking off their jobs. With one hundred thousand men on strike, riots raged from Baltimore to Chicago.
Hayes issued proclamations, sent troops, and restored peace with a minimum of bloodshed. But he understood that his actions had provided no lasting remedy. “Can’t something be done,” he wondered, “by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise ge
neral policy, to end or diminish the evil?”
Whatever his problems, Hayes’s sanguine nature prevailed. He was enjoying the presidency because he felt that his election had finally healed ruptures throughout the South. When he toured Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia, respectful audiences did not challenge that view. They could have held up opposition newspapers that were still running Hayes’s photograph with the word “Fraud” printed across it.
Hayes encountered an equally well-mannered response when he assured former slaves in Alabama that by leaving white communities alone, he was serving black interests better than federal intervention had ever done. He buttressed that argument by claiming there had been fewer outrages against blacks during the six months of his presidency than at any other time since the war ended.
As James Garfield complained to fellow Republicans, “It seems to be impossible for the president to see through the atmosphere of praise in which he lives.”
• • •
President Hayes had not been entirely wrong in detecting a new mood throughout the South, but he misjudged its scope and duration. For years, the Southern businessmen who watched the retreat of the Northern carpetbaggers had styled themselves Redeemers, set on redeeming their state governments. What they called Redemption meant a commitment to white supremacy but also to repressing labor—black and white—as the alliance between Northern Democrats and conservative Republicans was shifting the emphasis from race to economics.
The Redeemers’ goal became industrial development with a focus on expanding trade and completing the nation’s rail system. Since the last federal troops had been removed, Northerners could persuade themselves that a truce had been called in the South’s race wars.
But as unreconstructed Democrats asserted themselves in their state legislatures, their means of dealing with the black population varied from border states and the Upper South to the Deep South of Mississippi and Alabama. The result was a patchwork of laws, codes, and constitutional provisions that revived the doctrine of white supremacy and imposed segregation in public and private life.
First, legislators had to resolve the question of who was black. Alabama reverted to its prewar definition of a Negro—anyone with a black great-grandparent. Kentucky’s miscegenation law dealt instead in percentages. Before 1893, no white person could marry anyone who was more than 12 percent black; after that, Kentucky banned mixed marriages altogether.
Florida was among the first states to rule that schools for white children and schools for Negro students should be conducted separately. Georgia segregated restaurants and playing fields.
In 1894, Kentucky fined railway agents up to fifty dollars for allowing black or white travelers to use an inappropriate waiting room.
Louisiana made two races’ sharing a house a misdemeanor, while Mississippi banned the printing of written material that promoted social equality between whites and Negroes; infractions could be punished with a five-hundred-dollar fine, six months in prison, or both.
North Carolina decreed that schoolbooks must not be interchanged between white and black schools. South Carolina banned the adoption of white children by Negroes, and Texas expanded its segregation laws to include “persons of Mexican descent.”
Virginia demanded that “any public hall, theater, opera house”—and later, movie theaters—must separate “the white race and the colored race.”
Northern states had experimented with similar laws. The Washington Territory outlawed miscegenation from 1866 until the law was repealed eleven years later, two years before Washington became a state.
Wyoming expanded its miscegenation law beyond Negroes and mulattoes to include “Mongolians and Malaya,” and from 1889 required potential voters to be able to read its state constitution.
In 1905, Kansas was allowing separate schools by race but outlawed discrimination in the state’s existing high schools. Oklahoma segregated public baths and lockers in 1903 but permitted the facilities for both races to share the same building.
Ohio enacted its miscegenation law in 1877, the year that the state sent Governor Hayes to Washington as president. A school segregation law followed a year later.
• • •
The jumble of legislation that outlawed racial offenses became known as Jim Crow laws. The term was an unwitting legacy from a Yankee actor whose success came long before the Civil War.
Growing up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Thomas Dartmouth Rice had mingled every day with his free black neighbors. It was only when he toured Kentucky in the early 1830s, however, that he hit upon the act that would make him famous.
Looking out at the livery stable next to the Louisville theater where he was performing, Rice was captivated by a lame old slave who passed the time by singing to himself as he did a little dance. Rice studied his routine and wrote comic verses with a livelier tempo.
When Rice returned to New York for a music-hall turn at the Park Theater, he blackened his face and dressed in ragged clothes with a battered hat. As an old black field hand, he sang:
Turn about, and wheel about, and do just so,
And every time I turn about, I jump Jim Crow.
Selling out theaters at home and in London, the entertainer became beloved as “Daddy Rice,” and he wrote several popular plays that featured his creation. A London critic found “something in his chuckle which is not to be described, but which is equally rich, voracious and inimitable.”
Sometimes Rice called the slave “Cuff,” sometimes “Bone Squash.” But he was always recognizable as Jim Crow.
Rice’s portrayal of the illiterate but cunning slave made him rich enough to afford vests with gold guineas as their buttons and a diamond embedded in each coin.
With the passing years, however, the rise of minstrel shows made Rice’s act seem stale. When he died an alcoholic at fifty-two, three months before South Carolina seceded from the Union, a public collection was taken up to bury him. But for many years a carved wooden statue of Rice in his celebrated role survived in front of a bar on Broadway.
• • •
For many poor whites throughout the South, Jim Crow laws alone could not ease their most persistent fear. In regions like northern Louisiana, with little but pine trees rising from its barren soil, white men found themselves competing with emancipated blacks, and during the dozen years of Reconstruction they had not known which race would prevail.
Such men had dropped away from the Ku Klux Klan after President Grant’s crackdown, but their simmering resentments had grown. With control of the South passing again to the Democrats, powerless whites were joining plantation owners to ensure that black workers remained without their basic rights.
• • •
Lucius Lamar’s praise for Charles Sumner at his funeral had helped lull Northerners who wanted to believe that the nation’s most shameful chapter was now closed. A truer sentiment was expressed by the sheriff of Warren County, Georgia, who said that calling a man a Radical who believed in racial equality “was worse than to call a man a horse thief.”
Before Jim Crow took hold, some former slaves might have agreed with the black Virginia legislator who announced in 1877 that he relied for protection of his rights on “the well-raised gentlemen” of the white South rather than on “poor white trash.”
But in South Carolina, those gentlemen had already passed a law requiring voters to put their ballots in a box with their candidate’s name on it. That “Eight-Box Ballot Act” was designed to screen out illiterate voters, and by 1895, white officials had turned to poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the black vote. Those requirements had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as being within the legitimate powers of the states, not the federal government.
• • •
Occasional reminders of violence in the South could penetrate the North’s indifference to Jim Crow, but those brief explosions died away like summer lightning. An exception was the response to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.
/> The director’s technical skill won praise from critics who responded to the film’s “thrills piled upon thrills.” Rare dissenting views came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had been formed in 1906, and from the chairman of the National Board of Censorship, who deplored its effect on “ten million citizens who are degraded by this product.”
The sitting U.S. Chief Justice, seventy-year-old Edward D. White, agreed to attend its Washington premiere—the first motion picture he had ever seen. White confided to Thomas Dixon, author of the novel the film was based on, that he had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan himself and had walked his beat through the ugliest streets of New Orleans with a rifle on his shoulder.
After seeing the film, however, the justice hurried to disassociate himself from its racist message. It was the year that White voted to strike down Southern “grandfather laws” aimed at keeping from the polls poor and illiterate blacks, but not poor and illiterate whites.
At the White House, where Woodrow Wilson was host for a screening, the president seemed unconcerned. Raised in Virginia, Wilson had never objected to the Jim Crow laws in the nation’s capital. In fact, until rioting against the film broke out in Boston, the president seemed to endorse Griffith’s version of history. He was joined by enthusiastic Northern audiences who were identifying with Southern whites and with Wilson’s Democratic Party.
• • •
Griffith’s polemic against Reconstruction also renewed national interest in the Ku Klux Klan, whose leadership had fallen to a heavy-drinking Methodist preacher, William Joseph Simmons of Harpersville, Alabama. The Klan was only one in an era rife with fraternal orders in the nation’s expanding cities—Masons, Odd Fellows, Moose. Laid up for three months by an accident, Joe Simmons got hold of an 1867 Klan document and mapped out his vision for the new century.
His opening came in 1915, when Leo Frank, a Jew from New York, was convicted on false evidence of murdering fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan in Marietta, Georgia. Simmons’s revitalized Klan sprang into action. Twenty-five white men kidnapped Frank from a prison farm and lynched him.
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