The “Mississippi plan,” said James Redpath, was “nothing more than a reign of terror.”
The “Mississippi plan” had come to South Carolina, with Hamburg its first stop and Matthew Butler calling the “collision” between the races “the culmination of the system of insulting and outraging of white people which the negroes have adopted there for several years.” A Georgia newspaper reported with satisfaction that “Negroes defy the civil power and are whipped into obedience.” But in Congress, South Carolina representative Joseph Rainey, a black man, asked his colleagues if they “expect my race to submit meekly to continual persecution and massacre by these people in the South? In the name of my race and my people, in the name of humanity, in the name of God, I ask you whether we are to be American citizens?”
Some Northerners were overtly disgusted. Thomas Nast published a cartoon in Harper’s in which six black men lie in front of a cluster of inscribed tombstones: “Niggers Reformed at Hamburg, S.C.—All Quiet in Town—A Reform Victory Is Sure, says ‘Gen.’ M. C. Butler.” On another, “Impudent Niggers Daring to Celebrate the 4th.” Still another: “Reform Is Necessary in Nigger Killing.” Thomas Higginson recalled how in Kansas in 1856 squads of border ruffians from Missouri had crossed the border to vote in the Kansas elections; now white men from Georgia were crossing the Savannah River into Hamburg. “Then the contest was to sustain slavery; now it is for white supremacy,” he complained. “Then it was only the armed invasion of a territory; now it is the armed invasion of a state.” John M. Carter of New York City directly petitioned Grant. “We black men in the northern states due [sic] feel most deeply for our people in the southern states . . . will the president of the United States Please for God sake look into this mater [sic] and stop the butchery of our people in the South.”
Grant dodged the question. He had to adhere to the law. He referred the matter to the Senate and the House. But there the debate stalled. Representative Robert Smalls asked that federal troops remain in his state of South Carolina. In reply, Samuel Cox, Democrat of New York, read aloud from James Pike’s Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government—about a government of pickpockets and highwaymen who robbed black and white alike; that was the rotten government of South Carolina. Objecting, Smalls asked where Cox had gotten his idea about history—from the history of Tweed’s New York? Cox sneeringly asked Smalls who had vouched for him. To which Small quickly replied, “Thirteen thousand majority of the voters of my district in my native State of South Carolina.” Flushed, the representative from Mississippi, a man named Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, said, yes, yes, and alas the Hamburg massacre had been a disgrace, there were bad people in the South and in the North, but none of it was legitimate grist for the House mill; let’s just move on.
BY THE TIME Grant did send troops to South Carolina, in the fall of 1876, the damage had already been done. In Ellenton, about twenty miles from Hamburg, the local rifle club had murdered as many as 150 blacks, likely more, during a frenzied week in September when around 800 white men had gone on a rampage. Again joined by vigilantes from Augusta, Georgia, they were shooting blacks by the railroad (in full view of the passengers), in the fields, and in the swamp. Nearby residents were afraid to bury them.
A relatively small contingent of federal troops arrived in South Carolina on Tuesday, September 19. “The Yankees had saved them this time,” a white man said with a shrug, “but we would get them the next time.” The Democratic derringer, said a Republican, will control the coming elections.
But a strapping white man decided to hold out an olive branch to everyone, black and white. General Wade Hampton was back. This gentleman of great property (at least before the war) and great standing, descended from men also of great property and standing, including one who had fought in the American Revolution and another who had fought by Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans, was going to run for governor. And though his family had owned slaves, a good many of them, who had worked on its profitable and elegant plantations, Wade Hampton had not been a fire-eating secessionist. Yet when South Carolina had seceded, he had entered the Confederate army as a skilled cavalry officer (he’d been an outstanding horseman) and, with much of his own money, had put together an aristocratic outfit of young South Carolinians known as Hampton’s Legion. Fearlessly, he had fought at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), where he had been wounded; at Seven Pines, where he had been wounded; at Antietam and Gettysburg, where he had been wounded again. But he had continued to fight, though he couldn’t save Columbia, South Carolina, from Sherman, though Sherman blamed Hampton for ordering the fires that had destroyed that city. Hampton’s own plantations had been torched by Sherman’s men, so it’s no wonder that when General Joseph E. Johnston gave up his arms, Hampton wasn’t quite ready to surrender. His brother had been killed during the war, and his son had died in his arms.
Since Hampton was no longer a major landowner and was unable to afford the taxes on the property he still did own, he had retired from public life. He had invested in an insurance company and was trying to make ends meet. But in 1876, the indomitable, gracious General Hampton was the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who would face down the harried Daniel Chamberlain. For Hampton was a man of capacity and generosity come to rescue his state and to restore the benign, benighted relation between master and slave that he believed to be right, fair, just, and open-minded. The poet Paul Hayne praised Hampton to John Greenleaf Whittier: “If ever a statesman of enlightened views & far-reaching sagacity, of unimpeachable honor existed in this land, that Statesman is Hampton.” Hampton very much supported black male suffrage, he said, if it was based on literacy and property. He was no unwashed, trashy racist capable of shooting a black man on sight just for being black. No, he would protect the freedmen—if only they would join him and the Democrats. His arms were open. He would be a very good master, and he would defend, shield, and educate his black brethren, for he firmly believed that “as the Negro becomes more intelligent, he actually allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.”
That was the view of Carl Schurz as well.
Besides, Chamberlain’s coalition was falling apart. The fact that he’d asked Grant for federal troops had not pleased his allies among moderate Democrats; federal intervention in state affairs was anathema to the sons and daughters of John Calhoun, the man who had fought to his last breath against such a violation of the state’s rights. They also accused Chamberlain of using Hamburg to “prop up the waning fortunes of South Carolina Republicanism.” Francis W. Dawson, the influential Democratic editor of the Charleston News and Courier, once a Chamberlain supporter, slid over into Hampton’s camp. Chamberlain had also lost the confidence of many Republicans. Black Republicans accused him of selling out, and Dr. Martin Delany, the outspoken black abolitionist, also endorsed Hampton, believing that reconciliation with whites would prove economically beneficial to blacks—and that Black Republicans, such as those who had spoken against Hamburg in Charleston, were actually stoking racial tensions. “When my race were in bondage I did not hesitate in using my judgment in aiding to free them,” Delany said. “Now that they are free I shall not hesitate in using that judgment in aiding to preserve that freedom and promote their happiness.” Voting for General Wade Hampton would be the best way to preserve that freedom. Hampton had promised to adhere to the law, “the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteen amendments and keep them in good faith, also pledging that no single right enjoyed by the colored people shall be taken from them,” Delany continued. “They shall be the equals, under the law, of any man in South Carolina.”
Though Hampton aimed to wash the state of Republican and Radical Republican rule, the Democrats had also chosen three black men as nominees for state positions. That was smart. Hampton was smart. At his rallies, he made sure that prominent blacks sat near him on the stage, and he kept his own campaign appearances free of explicit violence; symbolic power worked well enough. You could hear it when the ca
nnon boomed as ex-Confederate horsemen charged into town, and, like a Roman gladiator, Hampton rode in a chariot festooned with roses and laurel. Said one South Carolinian, who watched in disbelief, “Such delirium as they aroused can be paralleled only by itself even in this delirious state.” Ladies and gentlemen turned out in huge numbers to hear the gallant old aristocrat talk in the open air. Brass bands played and the mounted men, rifles ominously dangling from their saddles, sat ramrod straight astride their horses and warily scanned the crowd. They paraded up and down thoroughfares, the meaning of their weaponry very clear. Hampton was also careful to keep his distance from the armed whites who sat in trees, rifles ready, or who crashed several of Chamberlain’s rallies. Chamberlain said that when he opened his mouth to speak, he could hear the click of pistols.
Hampton wanted peace. Shrewdly he welcomed the federal troops ordered to his state with open arms. They were there to protect him, he said, against the black men and women he pretended to fear.
White Republicans who endorsed Hampton, as some of them did, were said to have “crossed Jordan.” They may have been as intimidated as the black population, who often voted for Hampton to save their skins and their jobs and what little land they had. (However, by voting for a Democrat, they faced harassment from the other side—from their Republican neighbors.) On election day, there was little overt violence. Then again there was no need. “We kept away fifty or sixty [Negroes] from voting and got about a dozen to vote with us,” the Stalwarts bragged. “Why, I carried one negro to the polls myself, and saw him put in his ballot all right, and his two brothers stayed at home all day, for I told them if they voted against us I would turn them off.”
Hearing what they wanted to hear, many Northerners remained aloof, having declared a pox on both Republicans and Democrats: Chamberlain’s supporters were sincere, decent reformers, it was said, and also pocket-lining scalawags and scoundrels; Wade Hampton was backed by intelligent, educated, and patriotic men like himself—and also by desperadoes and hooligans happy to slit black throats and blow men’s heads off.
There was some truth in all of that, but mostly the North’s fatalistic attitude became an excuse for ignoring the entire region.
Chamberlain had been abandoned, and he knew it. Republicans preferred political servitude, he said, to the real battle that emancipation entailed—and the very difficult task of reconstructing states poisoned for a century by racism, inequality, hatred, and a pervasive sense of white entitlement. He wasn’t talking about this or that corrupt official or this or that legislative infraction or the cloaked night riders and martial men decked out in red blouses, which indicated their keenness to wave a shirt that was literally covered in blood. He was referring to the way that the Republicans had abandoned Reconstruction.
In November Chamberlain and Hampton both pronounced themselves the winner of the election, and Democrats and Republicans in the legislature lined up behind their respective governor. Federal troops were posted around the statehouse, and in a matter of days, both the Democrats and the Republicans were afraid to leave the hall and lose their places, for unauthorized personnel had been barred from the building and once outside, they could have trouble reentering. Hampton tried to keep the peace. He addressed the mob hanging about the Capitol and took his supporters over to Carolina Hall, where they organized themselves into their own legislative body. Then each group turned to the courts, which came up with conflicting results.
As weeks passed, Chamberlain’s rump government, which had not been able to draw on public funds, fell into arrears. Its main support came from the federal troops, which, as it happened, were not really protecting him at all; they were guarding the political interests of the national Republicans and another contested race—the one for the president of the United States.
DESPITE A TURBULENT second term, Ulysses S. Grant remained hugely popular. Yet he had not run again for president even though his name was seriously and for a brief moment suggested. He was not the darling of the Republicans, certainly not Liberal Republicans in quest of what they considered the best, most genteel men. So he had stepped aside for Rutherford B. Hayes, who became the Republican nominee, and on the night of the election actually went to bed believing that a New York Democrat, Samuel Jones Tilden, was now the nineteenth president of the United States. Tilden had won the popular vote.
The next morning, Republican operatives told Grant that the Republican-appointed election boards in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were contesting the returns. It seemed that blacks had been kept from the polls. White supremacists had ridden through Florida warning men at gunpoint not to vote Republican, and they had policed the roads to polling places to prevent black men from getting there. One Louisiana parish after another reported similar and appalling conditions: men whipped if they said they were Republicans; if they weren’t home, their wives were beaten. There were killing and disemboweling, and one black legislator had been “shot to pieces.” In Augusta, Georgia, across the river from beleaguered Hamburg, white men could vote without proving they’d paid their taxes, but a black man had to show his tax receipt and answer as many as a dozen questions before he could vote. About half of those who showed up were not allowed to cast a ballot. “And this is equal rights!” wrote a Northern journalist who covered the election. “The whole thing looks like a farce.”
Perhaps, then, Rutherford B. Hayes had won the White House after all. A nondescript congressman from Ohio, Hayes had joined the army after Fort Sumter and, promoted to major general for gallantry, had been wounded five times during the war. Afterward, in Washington, he had joined with the Radical Republicans and voted for Johnson’s impeachment even though his major concern was making the Library of Congress into a first-rate institution. In 1868 he had returned to Ohio, and during his four years as governor there, he had worked hard for the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. A loyal Grant supporter in 1872, he had again run for Congress, and when he had lost, he had left public service—until 1875, that is, when he had squeaked back into the governor’s seat.
An honest man, slightly colorless, Hayes was resolute but not stubborn, and that was appealing, as was the character of his running mate, William A. Wheeler, fifty-seven, who had been serving as a congressional representative from New York for five terms. (“Who is Wheeler?” Hayes had asked when he’d heard he’d be running with him.) Nominated mainly because the other contending candidates had canceled one another out—and it looked as though the front runner, Congressman James G. Blaine of Maine, had had some shady dealings with railroads—Hayes was a safe choice. He had even promised he wouldn’t run for a second term to show he was no Caesar and had no thought of personal gain. His son-in-law, the novelist William Dean Howells, produced a campaign biography in which he praised Hayes’s refusal to distinguish himself as a sign of his modesty, his courage, and his heroism—and the fact that when he had served on the committee to purchase items for the Smithsonian Institution, “no vote of his ever favored the purchase of trashy pictures or sculptures.” Hayes, he said, also believed in the “blessings of honest and capable local government.” That meant he was promising the Southern states home and not federal rule.
Samuel Tilden, however, was a formidable New York politician, famous for having taken down the Tweed Ring. But he needed 185 electoral votes to win and so far had gotten only 184. “The result: what is it?” asked the New York Herald. Republicans estimated that if they could secure the electoral votes in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—if those states could be said to have gone for Hayes—a Republican would be the next president. (On the other hand, if the new elector in Oregon, where the previous one had been disqualified for being a government employee, went for Tilden, Tilden would win.) It was a tight spot for both men and both parties. Northerners hurried south to take testimony about the election and tabulate votes. John Sherman rushed to New Orleans. So did James Garfield.
The election was being stolen, Democrats charged. In Louisiana, for ins
tance, the election board threw out a number of votes from parishes where blacks had been kept from the polls, and by December the Republican election boards in the three disputed Southern states were declaring Hayes the winner. Yet Democrats had come up with different results and demanded that the electoral votes be tallied in full view of Congress, as prescribed by the Constitution. But if two sets of returns were submitted, one by Republicans, one by Democrats, which slate of electoral ballots should be counted? Furthermore, the House of Representatives was controlled by Democrats, the Senate by Republicans, and no one could agree on which chamber of Congress should open the returns.
The unprecedented situation was so confused and so tense that people in Washington and throughout the nation began to fear the outbreak of another civil war. Grant certainly did not want anything of the kind, and he did not want to sit, Buchanan-like, on his hands. So in January, with the help of both the Republican and the Democratic leadership, he brokered a solution, an electoral commission charged with counting the electoral votes from the three contested Southern states.
With five senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices, the commission was composed of seven Democrats and seven Republicans plus a political independent who soon disqualified himself because he had been elected to the Senate by Illinois Democrats. His replacement, a Republican, voted with his party not to dispute the official state returns, which meant that the election went to Hayes. In truth, though, the commissioners never really investigated voter fraud or the legality of the disputed states’ returns; instead, they ratified the certificates entrusted to them by the unredeemed states (South Carolina, Louisiana) where Grant had made sure that federal troops protected the Republican legislatures. As a result, in the end, the Republicans did steal the national election; but Southern white Democrats had in fact suppressed the vote, which made them thieves as well.
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