Grant, the victorious general who promised the country peace, had been nominated unanimously by the Republican convention. Seymour was also nominated unanimously, at Tammany Hall—but on the twenty-second ballot. Emphasizing his lack of desire for the nomination, Seymour had become a delegate and was then elected permanent chairman of the convention, a post he assumed would take him out of the running, since candidates were expected to absent themselves from the proceedings. He opened the convention by denouncing Grant as a "military chieftain" and a threat to the values of the founding fathers, who insisted "the military should ever be subordinate to the civil authority." Under the Republicans, Seymour charged, dissenters were "tried and punished by military tribunal" and "dragged to prison."41
The convention also listened to two petitions, the first from the National Labor Union, a coalition formed in 1866 to lobby for the eight-hour day without wage reductions. The message to the convention also stressed that public lands should be given to "actual settlers," not corporations. The oppressive hours and wages for "working girls and women" were a "standing reproach to civilization," the petition declared, as it attempted to win promises of concrete action from candidates.42
The second petition, from the Women's Suffrage Association of America, was signed by a central committee consisting of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Greeley (Horace's wife), Susan B. Anthony, and Abby Hopper Gibbons. The women condemned the Republicans for ignoring their "innumerable petitions"—for enfranchising two million black men and leaving fifteen million white women "dethroned." They urged the Democrats to move with the "tide of progress" and support "universal suffrage."43
The balloting began on July 7 and soon became deadlocked, as eastern and midwestern, radical and conservative candidates canceled each other out; President Andrew Johnson, nominated for vice president by the Republicans in 1864, had returned to his Democratic roots but garnered little support. Two days later, after the twenty-first round, the Ohio delegation suddenly threw its support behind Seymour, setting off a stampede in his favor.
Seymour gave a speech refusing the nomination, which only bolstered his popularity among the cheering delegates. As Seymour "fled from the platform in dismay" and left the building, Clement Vallandigham took the floor to declare that "the safety of the people is the supreme law, and the safety of the American Republic demands the nomination of Horatio Seymour, of New York." Tilden courteously allowed the other thirty-six states to precede him and then cast New York's ballots for Seymour. Francis Blair of Missouri, a Union general, was unanimously nominated as Seymour's running mate.
An extreme conservative, Blair had declared that the "real and only issue in this contest is the overthrow of reconstruction."44The Democrats denounced the Reconstruction Acts and called for white supremacy—for the dismantling of the "carpet-bag State Governments," as Blair called them, and for "the white people to reorganize their own governments." Republicans "waved the bloody shirt"—reminding voters of the carnage of the Civil War and Democratic sympathy for the rebels—and made the draft riots of 1863 a prominent motif in the campaign.45
William Cullen Bryant's accusation in the Evening Post five years earlier that Seymour addressed the mob at City Hall as "My friends" had sparked a furor, which Republicans revived as grist for their propaganda mill. Cartoons in various newspapers contrasted Grant demanding the surrender of Vicksburg with Seymour appeasing the rioters. Seymour appeared unfazed by the Tribunes shrill attacks, remarking blandly to a friend that "Mr. Greeley is mad."46
A Republican pamphlet titled Seymour, Vallandigham, and the Riots of 1863 declared that the riots were a conspiracy, and quoted as evidence Seymour's Fourth of July speech at the Academy of Music in 1863, in which he had warned the Lincoln administration that "PUBLIC NECESSITY CAN BE PROCLAIMED BY A MOB AS WELL AS BY A GOVERNMENT." The pamphlet continued:
Little did the Loyal people of our country know what this short, yet pregnant sentence meant; little did they think that the Governor of a Loyal State could be in league with the enemies of the Government . . . could be familiar with the plans of the Rebels . . . to INAUGURATE CIVIL WAR AT THE NORTH . . . TO CAUSE RIOTS IN ALL THE NORTHERN CITIES, and yet it is beyond a doubt that HORATIO SEYMOUR DID KNOW ALL OF THIS, AND HELPED TO INCITE THE GREAT JULY RIOTS, in 1863, by the speech from which we have quoted.
The pamphlet then reprinted an affidavit from a ship captain who claimed to have transported Vallandigham and some thirty Confederate officers from Bermuda to Halifax at the end of June 1863, enabling them to evade the Union blockade and reach Boston and New York to start the riots. The captain, Francis Johns, testified that the Confederate agent who hired his vessel, Major Norman S. Walker,
stated definitely and positively that it was a secret mission organized at Richmond, which Vallandigham was the head of; that they were TO HAVE MOB MEETINGS IN THE CITIES OF BOSTON AND NEW YORK, TO CREATE A DIVERSION IN FAVOR OF GEN. LEE AND THE SOUTHERN ARMY, THEN ABOUT TO INVADE THE NORTH. I was expressly directed by Major Walker to proceed without a moment's delay, as Mr. Vallandigham and others were bound to be in Boston and New York before the Fourth of July, THE DAY ON WHICH THE MOB MEETINGS WERE TO TAKE PLACE IN THOSE CITIES.
The captain swore further that in "several private chats" Vallandigham not only confirmed what Walker had told him about the mission, but showed him the "letter of authority under which he was acting . . . signed by Mr. Mallory."* However, according to the captain, when a Union frigate stopped the ship, he hid the conspirators belowdecks and, at Vallandigham's request, burned all of his documents, including the instructions from Richmond, in the ship's furnace.
The captain's deposition was the only evidence of a conspiracy the Republicans could muster. Nonetheless, the pamphlet proclaimed that Seymour was in contact with Vallandigham, knew of his movements, and was part of the plot. The pamphlet also accused Seymour of influencing "the merciful Lincoln (afterward murdered by one of Vallandigham's friends)" to commute Vallandigham's death sentence to banishment in May 1863. "CAN SUCH MEN BE TRUSTED WITH THE AFFAIRS OF THE NATION!"47
Thomas Nast's political cartoons likened the torching of schools for free blacks by the Ku Klux Klan in the South to the New York rioters' burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum. In one such drawing in Harper's Weekly, Nast placed a black Union veteran atop a tall granite monument with the Emancipation Proclamation in his lap, yet helpless to protect the slain figures at the base of the monument, including a black woman and two children. The Colored Orphan Asylum burns in the background, a rioter threatens the veteran with a club, and a Klansman aims a pistol at the veteran while a schoolhouse for freedmen is consumed by flames. Contrasting the heroism of black soldiers and the horrors of the draft riots, as Harpers and other Republican papers had done since the assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, Nast updated this theme by adding the Klan to the equation. He inscribed the monument with a chronological list of African American suffering at the hands of whites, including slavery, riots, and other massacres. The last items included Klan violence and discriminatory laws in the South depriving blacks of civil rights. Summing up these 250 years of oppression, Nast included a quote attributed to Manton Marble's New York World: "WE DESPISE THE NEGRO."48
In a cartoon with a similar background—the burning orphan asylum and freedmen's school—Nast took aim at the Democratic party platform, which declared the Reconstruction Acts "unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void." Proclaiming "THIS IS A WHITE MAN'S GOVERNMENT," an Irishman from New York's Five Points slum joins hands with former Confederate cavalry commander and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest and Democratic financier August Belmont. The trio steps on a fallen black veteran. Displaying his long-standing nativism and bigotry against Irish Catholics, Nast evinced the Republicans' newly kindled fear of a Democratic party reunited across the North-South divide.49
Nast's prejudices aside, these cartoons reflected an alarming reality in the South, where the Klan and similar groups had become an unofficial military arm of the Democrat
ic party, carrying out a terrorist onslaught between April and November of 1868 that killed hundreds of people. In the seven states readmitted to the Union in June, federally imposed martial law had ceased, and the national armed forces could only be deployed at the request of local authorities. One thousand Republicans, mostly blacks, died in Klan attacks and riots in Louisiana, while more than two hundred potential Grant supporters were killed in Arkansas and in Georgia, where assaults and intimidation had a similar effect. Across the South, tens of thousands of Republicans stayed away from the polls.50
Thomas Nast cartoon drawing a parallel between the draft riots and Ku Klux Klan violence
Congressional Republicans who had warned against restoring southern states prematurely and tying the hands of federal troops saw their worst fears realized during the 1868 election. With federal military rule replaced by civil self-government, the state governors had to scrape together regiments of inexperienced militiamen, who were no match for the ex-Confederate horsemen of the Klan.51
Nast's cartoons suggested that Klan attacks echoed the pattern of the draft riots, when the mobs targeted white Republican leaders and institutions that assisted blacks, as well as blacks themselves. Indeed, in 1868, New York's Democratic press justified Klan violence in terms analogous to those used to defend the rioters five years earlier: The Union League was organizing black voters in the South—elevating and integrating them in white society—which left whites no choice but to strike back. Klansmen were cast as defenders of the social order, resisting the military despotism of the federal government.52 Marble wrote that Congress was trying to put the South "into the hands of the most ignorant and incapable part of their population, and to conduct that section through negro insolence into anarchy."53
"Our position must be condemnation and reversal of negro suffrage in the states," Samuel Tilden told party leaders in 1868. This political strategy, Tilden explained, would galvanize party loyalists and swing voters while hurting the Republicans. It would also be attractive "to the adopted citizens— whether Irish or German; to all the workingmen; to the young men just becoming voters." Tilden had no qualms about exploiting the same racial and class divisions that had erupted in New York City only five years earlier. Marble's World and other Democratic newspapers echoed Tilden and denounced Republican hypocrisy in not enfranchising northern blacks.54
Campaigning for Grant, Republicans labeled the Democrats "Rebels" and "Copperheads" who were attempting, through violence and intimidation, to roll back the nation's progress won through four years of war. The Klan attacks gave the Democrats gains in some areas of the South, but generally bolstered Republican accusations, and Grant beat Seymour nationally by a substantial margin. Seymour amassed only eighty electoral votes—from Oregon, New Jersey, and New York in the North, three border states, and two southern states. Without Tammany's corrupt inflation of the Democratic vote in New York City, Seymour might well have lost his home state too.55
Nonetheless, Tammany Democrats had plenty to celebrate at the end of 1868. Seymour had carried New York State, where the Democrats defeated the radical Republican governor, Reuben Fenton. William Tweed had been elected a state senator the previous year, and his power in New York—both city and state—was growing rapidly as his pawns moved into high office. John Hoffman, the magistrate who had overseen the prosecution of the draft rioters and was elected mayor in 1867, now became the governor. The district attorney, A. Oakey Hall, who had also become popular in the wake of the draft riots, was elected in December to fill out the remaining year of Hoffman's term as mayor.56
Thomas Nast cartoon denouncing the Democratic platform of 1868: "This Is A White Man's Government"
In addition to Hoffman and Hall, Tweed counted on his two Irish American lieutenants, Richard Connolly, who had become the city's comptroller, and Peter Sweeny, now the city chamberlain, another key financial post.*
As the dominant power broker in the city, county, and state of New York, Tweed was well positioned to control the revival of the Democratic party nationally. With Seymour, the Albany Regency's candidate, out of the picture, Tweed believed he had a fair chance of putting Hoffman in the White House in the next election.57By defeating Fenton, New York's Democrats had used their formidable party organization to deliver "New York from the thralldom of Radical tyranny," Tammany's house organ, the Leader, declared, and advised the rest of the northern Democracy to follow this example in regaining its former strength. By championing home rule against Republican "tyranny" in New York City, Tammany Democrats implicitly denounced Reconstruction and reached out to the southern wing of the party.58
Thus, five years after the draft riots, many of the same Tammany officials who had established an atmosphere of resistance to the federal conscription had since reaped the full benefit of Lincoln's forbearance in the aftermath of that bloody week. Having been allowed to remain in office and advance their careers, they conciliated the rioters, prosecuted them halfheartedly, and provided three million dollars in public relief for them while ignoring the suffering of the black community. These officials had become instrumental in the entrenchment and expansion of Democratic power, which would ultimately have a decisive impact on the fate of Reconstruction.
While not part of the Tammany organization, Manton Marble had also emerged unscathed from the draft riots, and in 1868 he was riding high on the same racist message he had formulated in July 1863. Black businesses and churches had been destroyed and continued to falter while the city's black population declined, but Marble enjoyed his most profitable year at the World. He was happily married, with two children and a four-story brown-stone mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. Marble's neighbors were financiers and industrialists, the Gilded Age "robber barons," and he vacationed with them in Newport, Rhode Island. At the age of thirty-four, the once-struggling editor had truly arrived.59*
Even the Republicans' exposure of Tammany's voter registration fraud right after the 1868 election did not hamper the Democratic resurgence. Judge Barnard and Judge McCunn, who had played conspicuous roles in the draft riots—negotiating with the rioters in the street and declaring the draft unconstitutional—were found to be at the center of the scandal, having turned their courtrooms into naturalization mills where some sixty thousand new immigrants were briskly turned into citizens. A. Oakey Hall, as district attorney, played a crucial role in the fraud by directing party operatives in how to count votes and to honor the naturalization papers at the polls.
Unable to get Lincoln to declare martial law in 1863, this time the Union League Club prevailed on Congress to launch an investigation into the naturalization scheme, resulting one year later in laws that provided for extensive federal supervision of elections in northern cities, especially New York. During the federal inquiry, Tammany struck back with all its muscle, and the Irish-American denounced Republican investigators as nativists.60
Horace Greeley had written an open letter to Samuel Tilden in the wake of the naturalization frauds in 1868, charging him as equally guilty as Tweed or Mayor Hall in the workings of the Democratic machine and challenging him to stop the corruption.61 Instead, the years of reform activity at the state level, spearheaded by Governor Fenton and by Greeley, came to a halt. Their effort in 1867 to amend the state constitution and enfranchise black men without a property requirement had provoked the backlash that helped Hoffman beat Fenton in 1868 and gave Democrats control of the state legislature in 1869. That same year, the constitutional amendment on black suffrage was voted down in a statewide referendum.62
In February 1869, Congress took the first step toward overriding that referendum by approving the Fifteenth Amendment. Whereas the Thirteenth had ended slavery and the Fourteenth granted citizenship to blacks, the Fifteenth was aimed at securing their right to vote. The Fifteenth would be ratified the following year, resulting in the first election in New York State under universal male suffrage. The amendment did nothing to enfranchise women and drove a wedge between the feminist and abolitionist movemen
ts, which had until then worked in tandem.63
In the year between approval and ratification, New York's Democrats furiously denounced the Fifteenth Amendment. Tilden's keynote address at the state convention in Syracuse in September 1869 was full of race-baiting— warnings that the transfer of control over suffrage from the states to Congress would allow hordes of Chinese and blacks to flood the state and vote there.64 Governor Hoffman also devoted considerable energy to opposing the amendment.65
However, more farsighted Democrats, strategists like Manton Marble of the Swallowtails, and Tammany's Peter Sweeny, realized that Democratic opposition to universal male suffrage would alienate immigrants, particularly the many working-class German voters who were wary of nativist attempts, successful in some states, to disfranchise them using residency, literacy, and property requirements. Indeed, Tammany viewed with growing alarm the independent labor candidates running in the fall elections of 1869 and the large number of Germans supporting them.66
Debt financing had created growth and jobs, but the unbridled pace of the city's expansion had degraded conditions for workers in the building trades and on public works, forcing them to work long hours and live in squalid conditions near job sites at the fringes of town. Richard Matthews, who helped lead a bricklayers' strike in 1868, denounced the idea that "William M. Tweed had a right to choose politicians to represent the cause of the workingmen."67
While Congress had passed an eight-hour law for federal employees in 1868, state laws, regulating hours in the private sector, contained loopholes that made them unenforceable. In New York, Governor Hoffman, Tweed's pawn in Albany, had signed an eight-hour 1 aw, but as elsewhere, freedom-of-contract clauses left employers at liberty to set longer hours.68
The Devil's Own Work Page 43