The Devil's Own Work

by Barnet Schecter

  Abolitionists were outraged and denounced this portion of the amendment as a "swindle," a "wanton betrayal of justice and humanity" that protected "the North and the white race, while it leaves the Negro to his fate."19Congressional Republicans had stopped short of imposing black suffrage on the South; they also softened the blow in the section of the amendment that disqualified ex-Confederates from voting or holding office, scrapping a provision that affected all who had willingly rebelled for the next four years and narrowing its scope considerably. From the perspective of the Republicans who framed it, the amendment was lenient, but if southern states were sensible and ratified it, they deserved to be readmitted to the Union.20

  Despite its shortcomings, moderate and radical Republicans rallied around the Fourteenth Amendment during the congressional elections in the fall of 1866, while President Johnson, along with a coalition of Democrats and conservative Republicans, campaigned against it and called for an immediate restoration of the southern states to the Union. The Republicans were victorious throughout the North, as well as in West Virginia, Missouri, and Tennessee, largely because the Democratic party still bore the stigma of having sided with rebellion during the war.21

  Republicans exploited this association in voters' minds by "waving the bloody shirt," which included referring to the draft riots as the ultimate badge of dishonor. A speech in 1866 by Indiana's Republican governor, Oliver Morton, was a prime example.

  Every bounty jumper, every deserter, every sneak who ran away from the draft calls himself a Democrat . . . Every man who labored for the rebellion in the field, who murdered Union prisoners by cruelty and starvation, who conspired to bring about civil war in the loyal states . . . calls himself a Democrat. Every New York rioter in 1863 who burned up little children in colored asylums, who robbed, ravished and murdered indiscriminately . . . called himself a Democrat. In short, the Democratic party may be described as a common sewer and loathsome receptacle, into which is emptied every element of treason North and South, every element of inhumanity and barbarism which has dishonored the age.22

  Despite Republican electoral victories and the inevitability of harsher measures if they rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, southern states, encouraged by President Johnson, refused to ratify it. Provoked by southern stubbornness over what they viewed as lenient terms, in February and March 1867 congressional Republicans shifted to a more aggressive program of Reconstruction. Tennessee having been readmitted to the Union after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress treated the remaining ten states of the Confederacy as territories, dividing them into five military districts under martial law. These former Confederate states' civil governments were accorded only temporary status: They had to create new constitutions and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to regain their place in the Union, including their seats in Congress.23

  Many southern legislators and voters declared that they would rather remain outside the Union and refused to form new state constitutions with black voters. Republicans in Washington then passed a second Reconstruction act by which federal occupation troops were to register voters in the South and set in motion the process of forming new state governments. Blacks registered to vote, as did northern transplants to the South, derided as "carpetbaggers," and their southern allies, despised as "scalawags" by resentful ex-Confederates. Together, these three groups formed the southern Republican party.24

  After the war, the Union League clubs of the North had spread their operations to the South to organize blacks politically, and the clubs played a prominent role in forming the new constitutions and Reconstruction governments. Having been thwarted in their attempt to dismantle Democratic power in New York City by Lincoln's decision not to investigate the draft riots, Union League members seized the opportunity in the South. Blacks were attracted to the party of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the black vote would give Republicans a majority in at least half of the southern states.25

  Greeley, who presided at the birth of the Republican party in the 1850s and pushed relentlessly for emancipation, had cast off from his moorings into treacherous waters. Once again reveling in the role of the maverick, he was prepared to sacrifice the rights of African Americans on the altar of national reunification. Greeley had warned that as long as high-ranking Confederates remained barred from political life in the South, they would be resentful and would try to prevent blacks from voting. Jefferson Davis should be released, Greeley argued, since he had been imprisoned since 1865 and putting him on trial for treason at this late date would "rekindle passions that have nearly burned out" and "arrest the progress of reconciliation."

  Ideally, clemency for all rebels should go hand in hand with black suffrage, Greeley argued, but if black suffrage had to be deferred, so be it. Even if "the North were able to force Impartial Suffrage on the South it would prove of little value while resisted by a strong majority of the dominant caste there," Greeley wrote in the Tribune. "But let the North and South strike hands on the basis of Universal Amnesty with Impartial Suffrage, and the resulting peace will be perfect, all-embracing, and enduring."26

  In May 1867, Greeley even went to Richmond and posted part of the one-hundred-thousand-dollar bail for Jefferson Davis, and the U.S. Circuit Court there released him from prison. "So long as any man was seeking to overthrow our government, he was my enemy," Greeley explained, but "from the hour in which he laid down his arms, he was my formerly erring countryman." A storm of controversy greeted Greeley in New York, where thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions to the Tribune, and the officers of the Union League Club prepared to expel him but summoned him to a special meeting first.

  In a long letter, Greeley wrote back that he would not attend and blasted the Union League men for their vindictiveness toward the South.

  You evidently regard me as a weak sentimentalist, misled by a maudlin philanthropy. I arraign you as narrow-minded blockheads, who would like to be useful to a great and good cause, but don't know how. Your attempt to base a great, enduring party on the hate and wrath necessarily engendered by a bloody Civil War, is as though you should plant a colony on an iceberg which had somehow drifted into a tropical ocean. I tell you here that, out of a life earnestly devoted to the good of human kind, your children will select my going to Richmond and signing that bail-bond as the wisest act, and will feel that it did more for Freedom and FIumanity than all of you were competent to do, though you had lived to the age of Methusaleh.27

  In fact, the Republican experiment in the South showed more promise of advancing "Freedom and Humanity" than Greeley's vision of amnesty for the ex-Confederate elite, which claimed to move the country forward but instead harkened back to the prewar hierarchy in the South, ruled by wealthy white planters.

  Congressional Republicans went ahead with their plans, and by September, voter registration was complete in the ten southern states in question; during the winter of 1867-68, conventions composed of both black and white delegates drew up new state constitutions establishing the right to vote for all men in these states. Denounced by whites who had chosen not to attend, the conventions were unprecedented both because of black participation and because of the constitutions that were created, enfranchising blacks, expanding social services, reforming the states' penal systems, and creating public schools for both races. In 1868 the first blacks were elected to local and statewide office, as high as lieutenant governor, and to the U.S. House and Senate.28

  The new constitutions were more progressive than those of most northern states, where black suffrage was still restricted or nonexistent. The hypocrisy and the political calculation behind the Fourteenth Amendment were made all the more glaring by this spectacle of black political participation in the South, imposed more for the benefit of the Republican party than for the blacks themselves, by northerners who were loath to accept the same developments in their own states.29

  The same leading New York Democrats who had raised the banner of white supremacy in reaction to
the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and helped precipitate the draft riots, used strikingly similar language to oppose the Republican governments in the South—and fueled the new wave of racial violence that began in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. Manton Marble and Samuel Tilden had used racism and the draft to unite War and Peace Democrats across the North in 1863; five years later, they made New York City the pulpit of white supremacy in a bid to reunite the northern and southern wings of the Democratic party.30

  Fernando Wood, who had encouraged Confederate intransigence with his talk of New York City seceding on the eve of the war in 1861, and with calls for an armistice in 1863, again took the stage to endorse the South's culture of racism. Having lost his House seat in 1864, Wood was reelected two years later with Irish support in New York's Ninth District—where the draft riots began. Wood, a pariah after the riots, regained the Irish vote when he loudly defended the Fenian Brotherhood after its ill-conceived attempt to invade Canada—and thereby force the British out of Ireland—collapsed in February 1866. Tammany supported him in exchange for bringing in the Irish vote.31

  In a speech on the House floor in January 1868, Wood denounced the imposition of martial law in the South, warning that "the cord which binds this people together under one fundamental form of government has been strained to its utmost tension. But a little more pressure would be required to break that tie and involve us in anarchy, revolution, and annihilation." He flayed a Reconstruction bill under consideration as "a monstrosity, a measure the most infamous of the many infamous acts of this infamous Congress." At that point, Wood was silenced by the Speaker of the House and formally censured.

  In the suppressed speech, which Wood soon published as a pamphlet, he declared that the Civil War ruined the South and "destroyed the distinctions which culture, refinement, and virtue necessarily create, by elevating the degraded and ignorant to its social and political level" and "obliterated for a time the differences which the Almighty has established between the races . . . Are not these results a sufficient punishment?" The Republicans wanted to go farther, Wood charged, and "place over them a permanent negro government for all time to come, and to force that degradation upon them by military authority."

  The Republicans were doing this not only to punish the South, Wood asserted, but for partisan advantage. "By creating negro State governments it is also supposed negro representation to Congress and to the electoral colleges for the election of the next President will be secured. Thus we have a combination of motives and influences which may be properly summed up as fanatical, devilish, and dishonest, and which must result in anarchy and national disruption."

  Near the end of the speech, Wood warned of impending violence—the righteous wrath of the people—in language reminiscent of Daily News editorials on the eve of the draft riots; the blame for the violence would rest on the Republicans because their elevation of blacks betrayed the natural order: "Is it not infamous to erect a military despotism over them . . . to take advantage of the wrong thus committed to make that people the serfs and dependents of a degraded and barbarous race, who disregard any restraint in the indulgence of its brutal instincts? And is it not doubly infamous to perpetrate all these outrages for no other motive than to obtain partisan power and to continue it indefinitely in their own hands as against the coming popular retribution now threatening to overwhelm them?"

  Having accused the Republicans of "devilish" motives, Wood concluded that "if these acts, already partly performed and the remainder provided for in this bill, are not 'infamous' and do not consign their authors to eternal infamy there is no hell and no punishment, either here or elsewhere, for the crimes of men."32

  In the World, Manton Marble quoted Samuel Tilden as saying that in government, as in the family, Americans had always refused to "enter into partnership . . . with inferior or mixed races." Marble pointed to the exclusion of blacks from the earliest days of the Republic, citing the first constitution framed by Massachusetts patriots in 1780. "The children of the Pilgrims who had mercilessly exterminated the race of red men had no intention of contaminating their stock with the blacks."

  Marble labeled Greeley's Tribune the "organ of the hybridizing Radicals" and denounced "the miscegenation which the Tribune upholds and which the American people by a righteous instinct of self-preservation abhor." Marble concluded his editorial with a challenge to Greeley: "March up to the issue, Mr. Tribune, and meet us . . . Go before the country like a man with your flag. Proclaim your purpose to bring the negro into the State and into the Family, and let the American people pass upon you in the daylight, not in the dark!"33

  During the vote to ratify the new state constitutions in the South, whites who felt threatened by black suffrage labeled it "negro rule" and either stayed away from the polls or tried to keep blacks away by violent means. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret order of mounted terrorists founded by former Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, had existed for two years but now emerged and became active, striking at night against blacks and white Republicans. A Tribune article described how the Klansmen dressed up as devils to frighten their victims.

  The costume consists of red flannel trowsers, black blouse, trimmed with red and gathered at the waist, and a black cowl covering the face and falling down to the breast, with a cape behind. The holes cut for the eyes are bordered with white, and from the mouth protrudes a piece of red flannel representing a long tongue. For a headpiece real horns are sometimes worn . . . It is easy to imagine with what terror they inspire the poor, ignorant negroes on the plantations, who know that their errand is always violence, and often murder.

  According to the Tribune, "The real leaders of the Ku-Klux are the Court-House and tavern politicians, and the rank and file is composed of the idle, ignorant and worthless poor white element." The paper noted that "in addition to the political animosity entertained toward the Negroes," there was "a desire among the poor whites to drive them away, so that they shall not come into competition with them as laborers."34

  While Greeley's Tribune regularly reported on the "outrages" perpetrated by the Klan, Marble's World claimed to "know nothing of this society except from the wild stories put afloat in the newspapers." If the Klan did exist, its acts were the responsibility of the Republicans, the World asserted; such violence was "the natural fruit of the policy pursued towards the South."35

  For the moment, with twenty thousand federal troops occupying the South, Klan attacks, while intimidating, were not enough to derail the process of approving new state constitutions. Ten states did so by May 1868 and elected Republicans to state offices and legislatures, which quickly led to ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing citizenship for blacks.

  In June, seven states that had taken these steps—North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas—were readmitted to the Union, despite the fears of many Republicans in Washington that Democrats would regain control in the South if the process of Reconstruction proceeded too quickly and federal troops were withdrawn. Republicans were under political pressure from northern constituents not to carry on "bayonet rule" indefinitely; with the 1868 presidential election approaching, Republicans felt constrained to reestablish civil law and follow through with restoration of the southern states as promised.

  Problems persisted in Texas, Virginia, and Mississippi, and they were not readmitted to the Union for another six months. In Mississippi, two thousand federal troops could not prevent whites from defeating the new constitution by threats and assaults that drove twenty thousand Republicans away from the polls.36

  "I have forwarded to you the call of the Democratic National Committee for the holding of the next National Convention in the City of New York on the 4th of July next," DNC chairman August Belmont had written in an open letter to committee members. The choice of Tammany Hall's clubhouse on Fourteenth Street as the site for the convention in the 1868 presidential race signaled that William Tweed's powerful local organization would
be the engine behind a revival of the Democratic party nationally.

  Belmont instructed party leaders to target "the conservative element throughout the Union which has not heretofore acted with the Democratic party," and he urged every voter, "Unite with us in our efforts to save our free institutions from the lawless despotism which now threatens the very foundation of our Government." The radical Republicans had to be driven from power, Belmont wrote. The World, which reprinted the letter, summed up the Democratic position as "Opposition to Congressional usurpation," "Opposition to negro supremacy," and "Immediate restoration of the unity and peace of the nation."37

  The resurgence of the Democratic party was to be based on a platform of fierce opposition to the advancement of African Americans, along with the restoration of "home rule," meaning white supremacy, in the South. The reunion of northern and southern Democrats was crucial to restoring the party's lock on the White House.38

  Opposition to Republican policies had drawn the Irish deeply into Democratic politics, which in turn became a route to power in the postwar years.39Nowhere was this truer than in New York. There, the presidential election of 1868—pitting Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant against Horatio Seymour—solidified Irish support for Tammany and increased Tweed's power, while continuing the process of assimilation which the Irish had begun through politics and with their battlefield sacrifices during the war. The antagonisms of the war were still fresh in the campaign, the racial issues unresolved and still threatening to the Democrats.40