American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Only a leadership steeped in compromise and skilled at brokerage could have brought off one of the most fateful transactions in American history, in the wake of a political crisis that some feared might trigger another civil war. When the 1876 presidential election gave Tilden a quarter-million popular majority and a disputed electoral college majority, Ohioans and other political brokers in both parties agreed on setting up an electoral commission that would rule on the disputed election returns from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. When the “swing vote” on the commission, the “independent” Supreme Court Justice David Davis of Illinois, suddenly—and with unexpected alacrity—resigned to accept election to the Senate, his place was taken by a most partisan Republican justice, Joseph Bradley. The commission then proceeded by straight party eight-to-seven votes to decide for Hayes in all the disputed returns.

  Southerners cried foul amid rumors of a march on Washington by Confederate veterans. In fact the hands of the Southerners were tied because the establishment of the electoral commission—and by implication the acceptance of its verdict—was one part of a far-reaching compromise that embraced much more than the presidency. The political crisis of the early weeks of 1877, as Inauguration Day neared, has best been viewed not as a straight power fight but as a mammoth game of poker played by shrewd professionals, in which calculation, chance, bluffing, kibitzing, inside dealing, and miscalculation all had their role. The stakes were enormous—not only selection of a President but control of the national government, distribution of pork and patronage, the alignment of parties, and above all political control of the South.

  Southern Democrats appeared to hold some low cards—the power to delay a final decision through filibustering and other congressional devices; the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives; vague threats of violence; and claim to the moral high ground of having “won the election.” Hayes, House Republican leader Garfield, and the other Northern Republicans held the high cards: the electoral commission decision; control of the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court; and President Grant, who commanded the army and knew how to use it. But the test, as always in political struggles, was not only power resources but political objectives. What did the two sides want? Southern Democrats wanted more federal patronage after sixteen years in the cold. They wanted federal money to shore up their roads and canals and their levees—especially those of the ever-flooding Mississippi—and federal grants for their railroads and particularly for their dream of a southern route to the Pacific. But above all—far above all—they wanted, bitterly and passionately, “home rule,” an end to federal control of their region, the departure of the federal troops of “occupation.”

  The poker game itself was so complex, involving so many players with so many sets of cards, as to challenge historical analysis of precise cause and effect for years to come. But certain aspects stood out even at the time. It was a wide-open game, with legislators, party politicians, and lobbyists taking part by the hundreds. It was a most public game. Lobbyists saw no need to lurk in corridors and crannies; scores of them invaded the floor of the House itself, while the Speaker vainly urged them to be off. It was a most widely observed game. The press followed the key developments astutely, often quite accurately, and kept the public informed as to the key political plays and players.

  And at the end of this marathon game there was a clear winner—the Southern Democrats. Not only did they gain the key patronage position in Hayes’s Cabinet, the postmaster-generalship, and later their own railroad to the West; they also won their supreme goal of home rule, in whatever form this would eventually take. Winning the next biggest pot were the Ohioans and the other Republican party professionals. They saw their man Hayes securely into the White House and they could contemplate the possibility of re-creating the old Whig alliance of Northern and Southern property, as Southern entrepreneurs eagerly anticipated the uses of federal money and Northern investors saw new prospects in the South.

  The losers, too, were painfully obvious. The Northern Democrats had had to stand by almost helplessly as their man Tilden was dealt out of the White House. Radical Republicans also stood by impotently as so much of what they had struggled for, on political and military battlefields for nearly a quarter century, was bargained away. But the main losers were never even close to the big poker game. These were the Southern blacks whose final hope of federal aid and protection for justice and dignity and jobs and land and life itself ebbed with the playing of the game. They had held no cards at all.

  Politics: The Dance of the Ropewalkers

  Radical caricaturists in the press pictured the poker players as in fact the puppets of the masters of industry and finance. It was not that simple. In fighting for home rule Southern Democrats acted more out of cultural heritage, regional pride, and psychological motivation than from narrowly economic considerations, just as Northern abolitionists once had put “conscience” before “cotton.” Still, the force of capital, the subtle influence of class, and above all the pervasive power of ideology increasingly dominated the stakes and the cards in the political game. While politicos declaimed, denounced, debated, and digressed, the economic barons decided investment policy, built railroads and factories, deployed masses of workers, imported immigrants by the tens of thousands, set incomes, financed science and invention. If they could not work their way through government they could turn to direct action. When Huntington was thwarted politically by railroad rivals, the Californian speared his Southern Pacific rails eastward across Arizona, then talked a complaisant President Hayes into endorsing his fait accompli.

  “The statesman and the captain of industry complement each other well,” said Matthew Josephson of this era; “one talks, the other acts.”

  The power of the dominant economic players in the political game, and the impotence of the nonparticipants, were both sharply revealed in the conversion of the Fourteenth Amendment from a bulwark of Negro rights to a bastion of corporate property. Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing Negroes equal rights to public facilities, had represented the legislative high point of Reconstruction, at least after the law’s legitimation by the Fourteenth Amendment. Much depended on judicial interpretation. During the 1870s era of compromise the Supreme Court pinched the Fourteenth into a narrow measure barring overt discrimination by states and not adding, in Chief Justice Waite’s words, “anything to the rights which one citizen has under the Constitution against another.” The Court struck down an anti-Ku Klux Klan act by labeling it an invalid interference in the activities of private individuals. Then in a series of cases the justices invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the same grounds. With no constitutional mandate for federal protection against de facto discrimination, Southern blacks were on their own.

  What was the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment if not to protect black people? Despite universal understanding and categorical evidence that the Fourteenth had been passed to protect the freed slaves, attorneys for business interests argued that the “persons” protected by the amendment were in fact corporations—that the amendment was designed to bar governmental regulation of private enterprise. Roscoe Conkling, hired by Huntington and Stanford to protect their railroads against California regulation, had the cheek to imply that Congress from the start sought to benefit businessmen rather than blacks, thus giving rise to one of the juiciest conspiracy theories in American history. Soon the High Court, spurred by such politically partisan ideologues as Justices Joseph Bradley (that swing man in the electoral commission) and Stephen J. Field, transformed the Court in case after case into a trumpet box for laissez-faire and a mighty weapon for the protection of corporate property.

  At least Negroes had the legal right to vote, some suffragists reflected bitterly; women as a whole were dealt completely out of the political game. Suffragists were indignant that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—granting rights to all “citizens,” that is, “persons” born or naturalized in th
e United States—should be construed to mean “men only.” The ambiguous wording invited a test.

  Through a blinding snowstorm in 1870, the indomitable eighty-year-old abolitionist Sarah Grimké led her sister Angelina and forty other women on foot to the voting booth in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, only to place their ballots in a separate box, where they were left uncounted. On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony and some women friends voted in Rochester, New York. Though her ballot was accepted, Anthony was arrested two weeks later for “voting knowingly without having the lawful right to vote.” She wanted her case to go to the Supreme Court, but the trial court judge allowed it to lapse. When a similar case—that of Virginia Minor—reached the High Court in 1874, Chief Justice Waite found for the Court that if the Framers had wanted women to vole, they would have said so and that the rights of citizenship did not necessarily include suffrage.

  White males North and South, holding the high economic, political, and legal cards, seemed poised by the late 1870s to forge a new conservative coalition uniting men of corporate and landed property in a North-South party alliance rivaling the great Whig coalitions before the Civil War. “It is quite the fashion,” declared the Raleigh Observer, “to talk about reviving the old Whig party, and to make appeals to the old Henry Clay Whigs once more to come to the front.” Men of substance excitedly discussed the possibility of building a new party, of whatever name, that would draw conservative, business-minded elements from both the Democratic and Republican parties in order to protect property against the threats of urban radicals, western populists, and the like.

  But this hope was to fade away, and its demise indicated again the difficulty of translating economic power directly into political, in the complex politics and polyglot culture of 1870s America. The two old parties lived on in the hearts and minds of Americans. Since the early decades of the century they had responded to deep-seated needs and aspirations among the people, had transformed the political landscape as surely as a magnet shapes tracings on a laboratory table. Civil war and reconstruction had left these parties not only broadly intact but in a condition of interlock, unable to extricate each from the other’s embrace. The Republicans, the party of the old Northwest, now had to compete with the Democrats for Ohio, Illinois, Indiana. The Republican “grand coalition” of business, labor, farmers, veterans, and blacks now had to cope with eastern financiers who gave money to the likes of Seymour and Tilden, farmers who shunned both parties, workers who were politically apathetic or alienated, and women and blacks who could not vote.

  Above all the Republicans faced Democrats, and the Democracy had shown remarkable resilience and tenacity. Here was a party that had been on the “wrong side” of the Civil War, that emerged from the struggle with its Southern wing limp and shredded politically, that found no national leadership after Appomattox comparable with the great dynasty that had stretched from Jackson through Van Buren and Polk to Stephen Douglas, that had embraced much that was malodorous in American politics, whether Tammany in New York or lily-white county machines in the South. Yet even at the height of the war its presidential candidate, the somewhat discredited General George B. McClellan, had won 45 percent of the popular vote against Lincoln himself; four years later Horatio Seymour polled more than 47 percent of the popular vote; and in the disputed election of ’76, Tilden won a popular majority. Clearly, a party dominant for at least forty years before Sumter would not die quickly, if ever.

  And so, with blaring trumpets and ferocious war dances, the two great parties confronted each other on almost equal terms; but the result was often a sham battle. Each party stretched across such a wide spectrum of interests and attitudes that clean-cut conflict over policy, program, and ideology was impossible. “The major parties reflected the national policy cleavage on the issues arising from the slavery controversy, and a geographical cleavage between North and South,” in James Sundquist’s overview. “But they could not reflect these cleavages and at the same time express new ones that cut across the electorate in quite a different direction, dividing voters within the North, within the South, within groups supporting Negro suffrage, and within those opposing it.” Inevitably the postwar parties “evaded and straddled and postponed” just as the prewar parties had done, especially on the big issues.

  Instead of reflecting and intensifying a relatively clean-cut split between liberalism and conservatism or between left and right (whatever the actual labels) over the conditions and needs of workers or farmers or blacks or immigrants, each major party itself became the battleground in which such interests and ideologies skirmished. The result, in Keith Polakoff’s words, was a “politics of inertia” in the post-Civil War period. “Not only was factionalism practically the central characteristic of both parties, but the precise balance between the various factions remained remarkably stable; and no wonder: each faction had its own little constituency on which it could always depend.”

  This almost static balance rested on both factions within the parties and interest groups and minor parties outside. Thus in policy or ideology Republicans split into ultra-radicals, “Stevens radicals,” Independent Radicals, moderates, and conservatives, in David Donald’s formulation. Geographically the Republicans were dominant in the northern tier running from most of New England across upstate New York into the “new” Northwest, while fighting close battles in more urban areas and in the “old” Northwest. Doctrinally the grand new party embraced the old abolitionist crowd, liberals preaching civil service and other reforms, and a rapidly expanding array of laissez-faire conservatives.

  Ohio Republicans continued to boast of their leadership, organization, and principles. Older leaders recruited younger ones; in the 1880s Governor Joseph B. Foraker encouraged a blossoming young lawyer named William Howard Taft, who would flower in the next century. Civil War memories still inspirited the Ohio GOP, as its convention orators declaimed that the Grand Old Party would never “break up its battle formations” or “bury its wagon trains,” no matter how deep the “scars of battle.” The leaders still spoke for the black people, and some Negro politicians rose in its ranks. George A. Myers, the chief of barbers at Cleveland’s grand political hotel, became one of the most astute and literate Republican leaders, in part because he was at the hub of a political network. But the great commitment to black rights was slowly waning, giving way to the defense of property rights.

  The Democrats too were highly pluralistic, ranging from old moderate elements still voting the “politics of nostalgia” from the 1850s, through Douglas and McClellan Democrats, to elements of a strange new organization of “Night Hawks” and “Grand Dragons” and “Grand Wizards,” calling itself the Ku Klux Klan and arising out of a Southland bent on “redemption.” Like the GOP, the Democracy was increasingly tending toward its own brand of economic conservatism, especially under the impact of leaders like Grover Cleveland.

  Given the narrow front on which the two major parties contended, it was inevitable that third parties would rise to press for cherished ideas. One of the first of these in the postwar years, the Liberal Republicans, was quite remarkable. Deeply alienated from the Grant Administration because of its corruption, its spoils, its cronyism with big business, its all-round mediocrity, independent-minded Republicans joined with defecting Democrats and others to rout the regulars. The movement attracted a diversity of followers—in the words of John Sproat, “free traders and protectionists, conservative New England patricians and agrarian radicals, civil service reformers and unvarnished spoilsmen, advocates of Negro rights and Southern redeemers,” united only by their hatred of Grantism. The leaders were a diverse lot too—among them the Radical Republican and Missouri senator Carl Schurz, the Massachusetts blueblood and former diplomat Charles Francis Adams, the aged poet William Cullen Bryant, a host of editors, including notably Edwin Godkin of the Nation and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.

  At an 1872 Cincinnati conclave sober in both speech and drink, the Liberal Republicans chose
Greeley himself for President. Many reformers were as aghast as regulars were amused. With his big bald head and neck whiskers, his drooping spectacles and rumpled clothes, his high-pitched voice and awkward ways, the outspoken old editor was the delight of opposition cartoonists; even more, he had embraced so many causes, waxed hot and cold on so many issues, denounced so many leaders including Lincoln himself, that he was bound to antagonize more voters than he attracted. And so he did, dragging down not only the Liberal Republicans but the Democratic party, which, at the nadir of its own leadership, adopted him as its own candidate.

  Still, the Liberal Republicans’ main problem was not Greeley but liberalism itself. Skeptical if not contemptuous of the mass public, conservative in economic policy, compromising on Negro rights; moralistic but not always moral, amateurish and dilettantish in political mechanics, the movement virtually caricatured the liberal tendency toward disunity, as leaders divided over the tariff, Reconstruction, women’s rights, and election strategy. With their narrow definition of liberty as economic and political individualism, their distaste in general for social egalitarianism or economic “leveling,” their antipathy toward centralized government, their half-hidden disdain for the “masses,” the Liberals both reflected and abetted the dominant ideology of Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Badly beaten by Grant in 1872, the Liberal Republicans’ party faded away—though not their causes.

  Other minor parties too were as impotent at the polls as they were vocal in protest. Rising out of wide grass-roots agitation over deflation, lack of capital, and the working conditions of labor, and galvanized by the panic of 1873 and resultant hardships, farm spokesmen, labor reformers, frustrated entrepreneurs, and assorted inflationists established the Greenback (or Greenback Labor) party. Its orators and platforms denounced hard-money policies and demanded that greenbacks be given full legal tender status and be issued freely. The party gained only a scattering of votes in 1876 with its candidate, the New York philanthropist Peter Cooper; won over a million votes in the off-year elections two years later; but fared badly at the polls in 1880 with General James B. Weaver at the head of the ticket, and faded away.