Sumner sat by, saying little. He wanted the annexation question defeated far more, apparently, than he wanted to refute Schurz, whose argument flouted Sumner’s long-standing commitment to equality.
Grant had set up a commission of inquiry and sent several men, including Frederick Douglass, to Santo Domingo to continue to study the island. Though they made a favorable report to Congress in the spring of 1871, with Sumner and Schurz blocking Grant in the Senate, and with public opinion turning against the plan, the annexation question was dead. Sumner had won, though not entirely. With Grant’s covert assistance, Secretary of State Fish engineered the senator’s removal from his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As a consequence, the Washington Treaty, which resolved the Alabama dispute, did not give him what he wanted. England acknowledged its culpability, and the matter of reparations was directed to an international tribunal in Geneva, which eventually ordered Britain to pay the United States $15.5 million, but there would be no annexation of Canada then or ever.
THE COUNTRY WAS soaked in sleaze. “Here are the believers in brazen mediocrity,” The Galaxy magazine protested, “the admirers of smart rascality, the disciples of the creed that the test of merit is success, the fanatics in the faith that success in life means simply to make money, the preachers of the doctrine, ‘Every man his price!’ ” P. T. Barnum had recently opened his “Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Circus,” and gamblers and impostors and confidence men preyed on the gullible, the needy, and the men and women yearning to get rich quick. But the Cardiff giant, a petrified mummy in upstate New York, was a ten-foot hoax, and in New York City, after years and years of bilking the state and the city of about $30 million, Boss Tweed and his “ring” were, in 1871, finally on the ropes. Thomas Nast was partly responsible, what with more than 150 caricatures in Harper’s Weekly: the Boss as a vulture, the Boss as a fat man with a moneybag for a head.
Readers across the country were more interested in the precipitate, if long-awaited, fall of Tweed than news of the impoverished and unstable South. Yet Southern black congressmen had come to Washington. The first black member of the Senate, the thickset Hiram Rhodes Revels, a minister, had been representing Mississippi since the state had accepted the terms of Reconstruction and after Charles Sumner had defeated the opposition to his being seated. Revels, Sumner, and other Republicans were receiving letter after letter about the Ku Klux Klan. Robert Brown Elliott, a black congressman from South Carolina, alleged that former Confederates, now considered respectable men, were encouraging and applauding the murderous Klan and its whippings, maimings, bombings, and executions of black men and women, Republicans, and former Union soldiers. Those former Confederates used anything at their disposal: their influence, their money, their open disdain of the federal government. Elliott went so far as to accuse Tammany Hall of circulating cash in the South to keep up the violence and get the Democrats back into power.
Elliott took his grievances to the public in a letter that Horace Greeley printed in the Tribune in March 1871. However, though Greeley publicized Elliott’s position, he dismissed it by saying that Klansmen were nothing but rowdy youngsters (boys will be boys) not to be taken too seriously. What the South needed—what would help conditions—was amnesty for the planter class.
“Those loyal men who dwell among the scenes of violence now being enacted in South Carolina, in momentary expectation of murder, exile, or the lash,” Elliott drily replied, “will deem amnesty an untimely grace.”
Northern Republicans such as Greeley wanted to be left alone, or so it seemed, and resented the expenditure of more money in the South. But Grant, who had failed to find a solution to the problem of violence there with his pipe dream about Santo Domingo, was working with his new attorney general, Amos Akerman, on the passage of a Third Enforcement Act, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which would implement more vigorously the equal rights provisions of two earlier enforcement acts. The two earlier acts had been designed to protect the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments: the first levied federal penalties against anyone or any group who prevented the exercise of civil rights, such as the right to vote, and provided federal supervisors to monitor elections; the second act strengthened the provisions of the first, particularly in large cities. For the situation had been deteriorating, the violence escalating, and Grant would not let the South win the war after the fact. Securing Northern victory meant securing black suffrage. The third enforcement bill therefore authorized the president to dispatch federal troops wherever he thought necessary in order to protect the right to vote, and it allowed him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus wherever the equal rights protections of citizens had been obstructed. Such obstructions were considered rebellions against the government of the United States.
Southern Democrats sneered at the bill as a cynical attempt to bolster Republicans in the South, nullify states’ rights, and establish martial law. But it wasn’t just Southern Democrats, or Democrats in general, who chafed at the vigorous Ku Klux Klan Act. Republican representative James Garfield, a rising power, barely concealed his conservative impulses when he asked a host of questions about the act’s constitutionality. Did it usurp the state’s authority? Surely he would not want to do that. Still the head of the Judiciary Committee, Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull (one of the seven Republicans who had voted to acquit Johnson) also expressed his doubts about government intervention in affairs of the South. What was the role of state governments? he wanted to know. Could the federal government punish murder, for example? Carl Schurz thought the act “insane.” Leave the citizen alone; leave the state alone. To interfere is to tyrannize.
Yet Grant took another unprecedented step, appearing in person before Congress to urge the bill’s passage. And it did pass, in April 1871. To execute the law, Attorney General Akerman, a New Hampshire Yankee transplanted years earlier to Georgia, organized a team of lawyers and federal marshals in the newly founded Justice Department. There were arrests, trials, and prison sentences. In Mississippi, for example, the Justice Department indicted about seven hundred persons—and although the sentences were not harsh, it did obtain convictions in more than half of them. Federal troops and U.S. marshals hit areas of South Carolina hard. In October Grant had suspended the writ of habeas corpus in nine counties of South Carolina, and by the end of November Justice Department officials had made about six hundred arrests in South Carolina alone.
The Ku Klux Klan’s power was effectively shattered, which was an enormous accomplishment. Akerman credited Grant with having brought such effective federal force to bear on these outlaws. But Akerman knew what he was facing. “Though rejoiced at the suppression of KuKluxery, even in one neighborhood,” he told a friend, “I feel greatly saddened by the business. It has revealed a perversion of moral sentiment among the Southern whites which bodes ill to that part of the country for a generation.”
Perhaps Akerman had an inkling of his future. He had been in office only eighteen months, when, two weeks before Christmas, Grant abruptly asked for his resignation. Grant seemed sorry. Evidently, Akerman had angered such railroad magnates as Collis Huntington and Jay Gould when he had insisted that railroads pay interest on the subsidies granted them by the government, and they were angry that he wanted to regulate their access to western lands. Hamilton Fish hated the way Akerman insisted on recounting Klan atrocities at cabinet meetings. And though Akerman had successfully prosecuted the Klan, railroad men were powerful, as was Fish. More and more men in Grant’s own party were sick of all the Southern fuss.
“The Northern mind,” Akerman ruefully concluded, “being full of what is called progress runs away from the past.”
CHEATS AND TRICKSTERS: they needed to be eliminated. How? Leapfrog the immediate past, the war, the hardship, and the often difficult violent peace, and get back to a golden era populated by farmers, artisans, and merchants virtuously working together in a Jeffersonian democracy. Ignore the railroads, the corporations, ev
en the centralizing power of government. Reconcile North and South, wipe out old animosities, bury bloody shirts. Clasp hands. Bring together intellectuals such as the Adams brothers and dispossessed politicians ignored or humiliated by Grant with laissez-faire capitalists. Reconcile former Radicals with former rebels.
That was the reform movement spearheaded by Carl Schurz and Missouri governor Benjamin Gratz Brown, a Kentucky native, who had been elected to office by a coalition of Democrats and disaffected Republicans. Both men approved of a general amnesty for the Southern leaders who had been excluded from holding office under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment; both men called for civil service reform, tariff reduction, universal amnesty, and the protection of states’ rights. They shied away from federal interference in local affairs—and they shrank from further Reconstruction legislation, which, they claimed, had spawned such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan in the first place.
Although those Liberal Republicans had battled slavery and fought for passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, they concluded that they’d done what they could for black men and women. Black people were now on their own. Northern Democrats—and more and more Republicans—portrayed blacks as crooked, inept opportunists manipulated by greedy, power-hungry, whining whites. As early as 1871, Greeley’s Tribune had complained of Southern Republicans running through the halls of the Capitol with their “same old, old story of murder, intimidation, and proscriptive oppression.” To him, their grievances against secret organizations, miscounted votes, intimidated voters, and former Confederates unfairly unseated in government were just tired tales, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Rather, the black men in the South Carolina legislature, for example, were at fault; they were a “mass of ignorance and barbarism” who, despite the existence of a “few intelligent colored people,” were basically thieves and ignoramuses who would sell their vote as easily as a mule or a chicken. Yet black men held no more than 20 percent of the offices in the South, and only in South Carolina were they proportionally elected.
More to the point, the time had come for the Southern white to take control of his homeland, which, as Carl Schurz insisted, he would manage with intelligence and vision. Samuel Bowles, the powerful editor of the Springfield Republican, agreed. “Of all the mistakes,” Bowles wrote, “of General Grant’s administration, the grand, cardinal mistake, so far as the future of the country is concerned, has been his neglect to do anything important for the restoration of good feelings and loyalty at the South.” Bowles meant, of course, the white South. Franklin Sanborn, formerly one of the uncompromising Secret Six, joined the Liberal Republicans. So did Congressman James Ashley, the man who had steered the Thirteenth Amendment through the House and had introduced articles of impeachment against President Johnson. (Ashley harbored a grudge against Grant, who had not renewed his term as Montana’s territorial governor.) Theodore Tilton joined. So did Whitelaw Reid, who worked for Horace Greeley, and Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial, and even old William Cullen Bryant of the New-York Evening Post. Grant’s former secretary of the interior, Jacob D. Cox of Ohio, along with Lyman Trumbull, and Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, joined the Liberals. After much waffling, Anna Dickinson too enlisted. Speaking at Cooper Union in a crowded hall whose audience included Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she wondered why, if the war had in fact ended, the government insisted on its military occupation of the South. The war was over, the freedmen were citizens. “Before the law they stand on a level with the whitest man here. [Applause.] That being the case there is no need and there should be no excuse for special legislation for any special class of people, since there is none such in the Republic.” Applause, again.
Wendell Phillips would have none of it. “Liberal Republicanism is nothing but Ku-Klux-Klanism disguised,” he declared.
With the support of so many journalists and editors, the call for reform echoed through major newspapers. And if only the kindly, benevolent Democrats, who meant well, would unite with these (uncorrupt) Liberal Republicans, they might forge a new relationship based on reconciliation. “What the South wants now is not military commanders, and carpet-bag Congressmen, and stump orators, and collectors of internal revenue, but missionaries,” the Tribune helpfully suggested. Those missionaries would be the Liberal Republicans linked with the Democrats.
Objections to the rising Southern debt and accusations that money had been stolen further smeared the Republican state governments in the South. With property taxes plummeting throughout the Southern states, the tax base had shrunk. (And of course the state governments could no longer depend on revenue from a tax on the number of owned slaves.) “The increase in the debts in the Southern States under carpet-bag rule has been simply appalling,” scolded the Chicago Tribune, which believed that the abuses of “carpet-bag rule,” not economic reality, must be the sole cause of depleted coffers. Take South Carolina, it argued: of the 155 legislators, 80 paid no taxes. Instead, Brussels carpets, mirrors, “plush sofas,” and porcelain spittoons were handed out to those legislators to furnish their private apartments. “A year’s legislation of such a nest of thieves has proved not less destructive to the State,” concluded the paper, “than the march through it of Sherman’s legions, burning as they went.”
This was a jaundiced view of Reconstruction that took little account of such improvements as rebuilt bridges and roads, the reorganization of judicial systems, and the ambitious establishing of schools. Nor did it take into account Grant’s suppression of the Klan. But the South was in debt, ravaged, and distraught, and its conditions were laid at the feet of the Republicans. Allegations of corruption were taken as fact, particularly because the political ascent of blacks in state after Southern state worried Democrats, the planters, and the white yeomen. Still, corruption did exist: bribes, kickbacks, inflated bills, huge expense accounts, and, yes, votes for sale. “I don’t pretend to be honest,” said Henry Clay Warmoth, the Republican governor of Louisiana since 1868. “I only pretend to be as honest as anybody in politics.”
“Why, damn it, everybody is demoralized down here,” Warmoth continued. “Corruption is the fashion.” Louisiana was no different from the rest of the country except perhaps louder. Republicans had turned against Republicans. The handsome governor Warmoth, originally from Illinois, was a centrist who had been cooperating with Democrats—as well as reneging on his Republican commitments, or so it was said, to build a strong Republican Party. Allegations flew thick and fast. Look what Warmoth had done: he’d vetoed the law forbidding discrimination against black men and women in hotels; he’d alienated Creole and black leaders in his stupid attempt to win over white businessmen and supremacists, which he could never hope to do. He’d appointed Confederate general James Longstreet to command the state militia. So what that it was a biracial militia, and so what that the job had cost Longstreet his stature among former Confederates, who were idolizing the recently deceased Lee and calling Longstreet, born in South Carolina and raised in Georgia, a scalawag?
Warmoth was not fit for the Republican Party, that was clear. Or at least it was clear to Oscar J. Dunn, Louisiana’s black lieutenant governor, who was calling for Warmoth’s impeachment. Dunn had formed a coalition of disgruntled Republicans, called the Custom-House group because they were backed by Grant’s brother-in-law James F. Casey, the untrustworthy collector of customs. But Dunn, though Republican, was hardly Casey’s tool. The son of a free woman and stepson of a black stage carpenter, Dunn had been apprenticed to a plasterer, run away, and then worked as a barber on Mississippi steamboats. During the war, he’d enlisted with the Union army but was disgusted by the army’s racial discrimination; his promotion went to a white man. Employed by the Freedmen’s Bureau after the New Orleans riot of 1866, Dunn was appointed by General Philip Sheridan to head the metropolitan police board and in 1868 became lieutenant governor, the first black man in U.S. history to hold that post. Known for his own irreproachable integrity, Dunn was said to ha
ve been considered by Grant as a possible running mate in 1872, which is likely not true although the rumor speaks its own kind of truth.
Dunn broke with Warmoth when the governor vetoed a civil rights bill. Accusing Warmoth of wanting to build a white man’s party, Dunn denounced Warmoth’s appointing several white Democrats to office. Warmoth argued that he was trying to protect black suffrage by bringing whites into an integrated government; perhaps he could protect black suffrage by keeping whites happy, which they wouldn’t be if too many blacks received government appointments. The result was that everyone was unhappy. In the summer of 1871, anti-Warmoth delegates went to the state nominating convention in New Orleans, which was held in the U.S. Circuit Court room of the Customs House—and which was protected by federal troops carrying Gatling guns. Dunn and the Custom-House group wanted to impeach Warmoth, who had been denied entrance to the meeting. Warmoth took his men to another hall.
In November Dunn suddenly became ill. He complained of a cough, then of muscle spasms, then he vomited until he lost consciousness. In a matter of days, he was dead. Likely Dunn had been poisoned with arsenic, or so it was rumored. The matter had been hushed up, it was said, and the perpetrators allowed to go free. Nothing was proved, much was alleged, and Warmoth replaced Dunn as lieutenant governor with his ally P. B. S. Pinchback, a dapper black man known as a political operative with an abiding passion for political and civil rights.
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