A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Had nothing unusual occurred, Greeley still would have lost the election convincingly. As it was, his wife’s health deteriorated, and he judged her mentally insane. She died in the last moments of the election, essentially taking Horace with her. He had a mental or emotional breakdown and expired in an asylum three weeks after her demise. Meanwhile, the attacks on him by the Grant forces had been so relentlessly effective that even Greeley quipped he did not know if he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. Portrayed as a crank and a disunionist, and connected by Thomas Nast to the Tweed Ring, Greeley actually accomplished something of a miracle by garnering 44 percent of the vote and 60 electoral votes. Grant smashed him with almost 300 electoral votes and beat him by three quarters of a million in the popular vote. Still, the campaign planted an important seed: Liberals started to redefine the Republican Party as the party of free trade, less government, low taxes, sound money, and the necessity for character in government. Within fifty years, a Republican presidential candidate (Warren Harding) stood for less government, lower taxes, and sound money, and in another half century Ronald Reagan embraced every one of the 1870s Liberal positions.

  Meanwhile, the Radical Reconstruction program was unraveling rapidly. Democrats had not only driven out most of their number who might work for black rights, but they had also embraced former Confederates with open arms. “Virginia for the Virginians” was the campaign slogan of former Confederate general and Gettysburg veteran James L. Kemper in 1873, employing a phrase that clearly implied African Americans were not Virginians. “To save the state,” said one of his lieutenants, “we must make the issue White and Black race against race and the canvass red hot. [italics added]”76 To be sure, not all Southerners tolerated race-baiting, and many of the leading Southern newspapers sharply criticized establishing a color line in elections. But these were pragmatic responses by editors fearful that playing the race card would only lead to more Republican victories, and seldom reflected any genuine concern for blacks or their rights.

  The revival of such attitudes emboldened the Klan, whose activities increased in number and viciousness. Violence by the Klan and other terror organizations prompted a response from Congress, which Grant wholeheartedly supported. In May 1870, under the authority of the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress passed the first Force Act. (Since the object of the legislation was to end intimidation by the Klan, this and similar acts were also called the Ku Klux Acts.) The Force Act provided heavy fines and imprisonment for anyone attempting to hinder citizens from voting. Congress reinforced the act in 1871, and then, in 1872, passed legislation even more specific in its language aimed at the Klan. Threatening or injuring witnesses, interfering with federal officers, or even going about in disguises were all prohibited. The Klansmen and their terrorist allies did not go quietly. They staged massive torchlight parades, shot at Republican offices, lynched blacks, and bullied African Americans into staying home on election day. A few blacks tried to form rifle companies to counteract the Klan, but they had little training with firearms and few weapons. Grant managed to effectively drive the Klan underground for almost a generation, but they skulked in the background, awaiting an administration in Washington less committed to black rights.

  Meanwhile, by 1870, the fusion/loyalist Democrats were strongly opposed by Redeemers or Bourbons. These politicians were planters and former Confederates, like Kemper, who were determined to end Black Reconstruction. Although they also had genuine concerns for the economic collapse of their states under the Radical governments, their three main issues were race, race, and race. Redeemers found a wide audience for disenfranchising blacks. “Give us a convention,” intoned Robert Toombs, “and I will fix it so that the people shall rule, and the negro shall never be heard from.”77 Opposition to the state debts, government support for business, and other Whiggish programs also played a crucial role in the Redeemers’ success. Indeed, when the Bourbons got control, they did not merely reduce the debts and pay them off over time—they repudiated them.

  Whether the Redeemers fully realized they were helping to condemn the South to decades more of poverty is unclear, but that certainly was the result of their policies. Repudiating debts was a sure way to guarantee no one lent Southern governments money again, and guilt by association meant that any Southern-originated bonds by even private companies would be viewed with suspicion. Or as Reconstruction historian Michael Perman observed, “Because it was fiscally untrustworthy and financially dependent, the South had, in effect, surrendered control over its future economic development.”78 Whereas the state-subsidized model of railroad and corporate support often advanced by the Whigs and Republicans proved disadvantageous (if not disastrous) to transportation and industrial progress, the Democrats’ punitive redistributionist policies—little more than financial bulimia and anorexia—were equally dim-witted. The South, already bereft of railroads, banks, and manufacturing, turned to the Redeemers, who offered the region “a politics of balance, inertia, and drift.”79

  The Panic of 1873 provided the final electoral issue allowing the Democratic Redeemers to win back control of most Southern state houses in the 1874 election, and, amazingly, for the first time since 1858, Democrats won the U.S. House of Representatives. Empowered at last, Redeemers had no intention of enforcing federal civil rights laws. Just the opposite, they supported segregation statutes known as Jim Crow laws.

  Interestingly, by the 1870s the free market had already made some inroads toward ending segregation when streetcars were integrated. It was government, not business (which wanted the profits from black ridership) that insisted on segregating streetcars and other public facilities.80 With the combination of a waning federal will to enforce civil rights legislation, the return of the Redeemers, and the revival of the Klan, freedmen saw much of what they had gained in the decade after the Civil War slip away.

  Diversions

  Americans, especially Northern Americans, had grown increasingly weary of defending black rights and their own corrupt Reconstruction governments in the South. Less than a decade after armies marched singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” Northerners wanted to know when the Lord would show up and release them from the burden of policing their white Southern neighbors.

  When the Republicans lost the midterm election in 1874, it indicated support for Reconstruction was waning. Political realities of the 1870s combined to push Republicans further away from their Radical Reconstruction goals of union, emancipation, and equality, until by 1876 three of these had been reduced to two: union and emancipation. Equality had been discarded.

  Events in the frontier West distracted Americans as well. The Indian wars commanded tremendous political and humanitarian energy, once solely reserved for the Negro. Reformers, having “finished” their work in the South, brushed themselves off and turned their attention to another “helpless” group, Native Americans. Indians had suffered a constant string of broken treaties, as discussed in the next chapter. Few episodes, however, shook the nation as much as the news of June 1876, when an alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne—once hated enemies—produced the worst military disaster on the western plains, the destruction of a large portion of Colonel George Custer’s Seventh U.S. Cavalry. If troops were needed in the West, they had to come from the South, weakening enforcement of open polls and control over the Klan.

  Economic disruption also drew attention from the South. The failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house in 1873, brought about in part by his reliance on Union Pacific railroad bonds, touched off the Panic of 1873. That same year the government announced it would redeem the greenbacks in gold beginning in 1879—a policy that was in no way connected with Cooke’s failure—and, at the same time, Washington announced that it would not monetize silver. Consistent with the Liberals’ position of sound money, the government had refused to inflate the currency, instigating yet another howl of protest from western farmers, miners, and others who were caught in the postwar deflation, itself of
international origins.

  With each Union Army regiment redeployed to the West, Republican voters in the South lost a little more security. Blacks and whites alike feared for their lives as they went to the polls, which they did with less and less frequency. As a Mississippi carpetbagger governor wrote to his wife, “The Republicans are paralyzed through fear and will not act. Why should I fight a hopeless battle…when no possible good to the Negro or anybody else would result?”81 A Northern Republican echoed the frustration: “The truth is our people are tired out with the worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!! Hard times and heavy taxes make them wish the ‘ever lasting nigger’ were in hell or Africa.”82 Democrats and Southerners had learned an important lesson about the press: no matter how grievous the charge, deny it; then commit another wanton act, and the first behavior will be forgotten in the storm over the new one. Northern newspapers unwittingly assisted in the unraveling of Reconstruction, portraying black legislators as hopelessly corrupt. “Thieves,” “orgies,” “plunder”—words like these characterized reporting about the Reconstruction governments.

  The first signs of surrender appeared in May 1872, when Congress passed the Amnesty Act, allowing Confederate leaders to vote and hold public office. When Southern Republicans, already disenchanted with the potential for full social equality of blacks, began to desert the party, the Reconstruction government truly became ruled by a foreign power. Democrats, having inflated Confederate currency into worthlessness and acquiesced in a government that essentially imposed a 100 percent tax on its citizens, now skillfully and disingenuously accused the Black Republicans of excessive spending and overtaxation.

  As a last-gasp attempt to show its commitment, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a final bill pushed through the Republican-controlled lame-duck Congress guaranteeing “full and equal treatment” to all persons of every race, and decreeing access to all public facilities, such as hotels, theaters, and railroads. As usual, enforcement relied on troops, and the troops had been pulled out of every Southern state except Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. Elsewhere, Redeemer governments had crept back in, one at a time, beginning with Tennessee in 1869, West Virginia, Missouri, and North Carolina in 1870, Georgia in 1871, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas in 1874, and Mississippi in 1875.

  What the North did, for understandable reasons, was to abandon what it started. What the South did, also for understandable reasons, was to attempt to return to its antebellum social and economic structure sans the legal institution of slavery. For Reconstruction to have worked as many had hoped, it would have required a view of government exactly opposite of the large, central behemoth that had undermined the Confederacy. It needed small, morally impeccable, and utterly efficient state governments. It needed low taxes at the state level, and abolition of those state or local regulations that gave any group advantages over another. It also required a massive infusion of banking capital, which the National Bank acts had failed to provide. Finally, it probably would have required another leader with the genius and compassion of Lincoln to pull it off. Yet even in the greatest Republic on earth, a Lincoln only comes around once a generation at best. Instead of a great leader like Lincoln, the nation’s next president was a good, honest, and competent leader named Rutherford B. Hayes.

  Rutherford B. Hayes: Soldier and Politician

  Like his predecessor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes knew combat well. During the Civil War he had been wounded five times and had four horses shot out from under him. He narrowly missed being kidnapped by Confederate raiders who absconded with Union Generals George Crook and Benjamin Franklin Kelley, then spearheaded the effort to get them back. William McKinley said of Hayes that “his whole nature seemed to change when in battle. [He went from] sunny, agreeable, the kind, generous, the gentle gentleman [to] intense and ferocious.”83 Hayes’s first cousin was utopian John Humphrey Noyes, but Hayes shared none of his eccentric brand of socialism, preferring instead traditional marriage and sound capitalism. When the war ended, he had second thoughts about politics, but was, after all, a veteran and a good speaker, so much so that by the end of October 1866 he could leave his own congressional political campaigning and work to secure the election of John Sherman as an Ohio Senator.

  An ardent champion of securing the rights of the freedmen, Congressman Hayes realized that only the federal government—and, with Andrew Johnson in the White House at the time, only Congress—protected the new citizens. He wrote to his wife, Lucy, about a parade celebrating the end of the war in April 1866 in which “the colored procession” marched in Washington with flags and bands. “Their cheering for the House and Senate as they passed the east front [of the Capitol] was peculiarly enthusiastic.”84 After his short stint in Congress, Hayes, waving the bloody shirt, won the gubernatorial seat in Ohio in 1867, only to find that many issues that once were the domain of state governments had been taken over by Washington. Hayes intended to emphasize black voting rights, but otherwise hoped the legislature would pass few laws. Winning a second term in 1870, Hayes especially worked to curb local taxes, which had risen five times faster in Ohio than state taxes, and sought to further reduce state indebtedness. The legislature still spent more than he requested, but Hayes managed to reduce the rate of growth, at the same time supporting increased spending on the state orphans’ home, education, and penal reform.

  In 1872, thinking he had retired from politics, Hayes moved back to Cincinnati, where he actively criticized Republican corruption. Called out of retirement to unite a deeply divided party, Hayes won the governorship again in mid-1876, despite a bad economy that worked against the party in power, the Republicans. No sooner had Hayes won, however, than Senator John Sherman and General Philip Sheridan both urged him to run for the presidency. Sheridan wrote Hayes endorsing his own preference for a ticket of “Hayes and Wheeler,” to which Hayes remarked to his wife, “I am ashamed to say, but who is Wheeler?”85 Wheeler was Congressman William A. Wheeler of New York, and the Republican convention, as fortune would have it, took place in Cincinnati, where many of the Hayes men had already infiltrated the party apparatus. Even without such inside activity, however, Hayes won support because his opponents, including Roscoe “Boss” Conkling of New York and James G. Blaine of Maine, all had significant flaws. In the general election, GOP nominee Hayes squared off against New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden, who had gained a reputation by crushing the infamous Tweed Ring.

  After seeing early returns showing Tilden carrying Indiana and New York, Hayes went to bed and slept soundly, convinced he had lost the election. But the far West, including Oregon, California, and Nevada, was late to report, and all went for Hayes. In addition, there were troubling results in three Southern states: Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. If Hayes carried all of them, he would win by one electoral vote, even though the final popular vote showed him losing by almost a quarter million votes—a whopping 3 percent Tilden victory in ballots cast. Yet local voting boards retained the authority to determine which ballots were valid and which were fraudulent. Although he was convinced the Democrats had engaged in massive vote manipulation, Hayes nevertheless hesitated to contest the election. What sealed the matter for him was the perception that virtually all of the fraud had been perpetrated against African Americans, whose rights Hayes had fought for (almost to the exclusion of anything else) his entire political career.

  As with Al Gore and George W. Bush under similar circumstances more than a century later, Tilden and Hayes engaged in the game of attempting to look presidential while their subordinates hotly contested the results. Like Gore and Bush, both men were convinced that a legitimate canvass would favor their chances. Hayes appeared to have carried South Carolina by 1,000 votes, despite the rulings from local boards there, but he had also lost Louisiana by six times that many ballots, constituting a significant challenge to his contest claim. In Florida, repeaters, ballot stuffers, and other tricksters—including those who had printed Democratic ballot
s with the Republican symbol on them to deceive illiterate voters—made it all but impossible to determine the true winner. Hayes probably won South Carolina and Florida, but Tilden carried Louisiana, where Republican vote tampering was probably quite high, and that was all he needed. Hayes insisted that “we are not to allow our friends to defeat one outrage and fraud by another,” and demanded, “There must be nothing crooked on our part.”86 Matters had already spun out of his control, however.

  The returning board in Louisiana, which was all Republican and under the supervision of J. Madison Wells, who was clearly engaged in postelection scheming for patronage, tossed out 15,000 total ballots, of which 13,000 were Democratic, giving Hayes the state by 3,000 votes. Florida’s board included a Democrat, but the result was the same: Hayes won the state by 900 votes. Hayes also took the disputed South Carolina votes, giving him ostensibly 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184 and, in turn, giving him the election.

  The affair dragged on into the new year, and as provided for by the Constitution, Congress had to clean up the matter. In the interim, Hayes’s forces received feelers from some Southern congressmen who floated the trial balloon of receiving “consideration” in return for their support of Hayes, meaning federal subsidies for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, an end to military occupation, and plenty of patronage. Congress settled on a fifteen-member commission made up of five senators, five congressmen, and five Supreme Court justices. Each party would have seven members, plus, ostensibly, one independent, Justice David Davis. Everyone recognized that barring a miracle, Davis would determine the election, but it was the only practical solution, and both Hayes and Tilden reluctantly approved of the commission. Then, surprising everyone, Davis refused to serve on the commission. He thought he smelled a bribe, and withdrew. By prior agreement, another Supreme Court justice had to serve, and it fell to Justice Joseph P. Bradley, a Republican, to take his place.