On October 13, the German "Association of United Workingmen" held a mass meeting at Cooper Institute, where it endorsed the principles of the National Labor Union in Washington, D.C., including the eight-hour day and the repeal of state conspiracy laws designed to break up unions. The meeting also denounced both major political parties as "corrupt, serving capital instead of labor."69
German and Irish working-class discontent had won C. Godfrey Gunther the mayors race in 1863 and brought forth independent labor candidates campaigning for the eight-hour day the following year. That ferment now came to a head: Whereas the labor movement had been divided in the 1850s between those who favored political action and those who wanted to focus on regulating the workplace, in 1869 the two sides came together. English-speaking and German trade unionists formed a "Joint-Committee" which made workplace concerns—enforcement of the state's eight-hour law and repeal of the conspiracy law—the labor candidates' top priorities.70
Soon the German labor paper Die Arbeiter Union came out in favor of the Fifteenth Amendment, arguing that the abolition of chattel slavery in 1865 and the progress of African Americans should be regarded as a hopeful sign that white workers could someday liberate themselves from wage slavery. New York's German workers, sympathetic to abolition in the 1830s and alienated from the Republican party in the 1850s and 1860s, were taking the first steps to distance themselves from the racial violence of the draft riots and to accept blacks as fellow workers and citizens.71
The black vote in New York would be extremely small, in any case, Sweeny reasoned. "We ought to get rid of the negro question," he declared. "It hurts us more than the negro vote could injure us." By giving blacks the vote and removing their grievance from the political arena, Sweeny argued, the country could move on to more important things.72At the top of Tammany's agenda was the Democratic party's quest for the White House.
In October during his reelection campaign for the state senate, Tweed addressed an enormous nighttime rally in New York City, telling the party faithful that they—"the true democracy"—must take back the national government from the Republicans. Parades from several wards featuring horse-drawn fire engines, including Tweed's "Big Six" Engine Company, had converged at the torchlight gathering, along with a volunteer artillery unit complete with cannon, a contingent dressed as Indians, and various other displays of Tammany hoopla. "The Red Men of the Wigwam on the War Path," the Herald reported.
The erudite Mayor Hall gave a lengthy speech, as did Congressman Fernando Wood, elected in 1866 and again in 1868 after regaining his Irish base and with it the leverage to attract Tammany's support. "THE TAMMANY REGENCY," blared the Herald's headline, suggesting that the power within the Democracy had shifted from the effete elders in Albany to the "fierce democracy" of New York City.73
After the Tammany victories in November 1869, Sweeny declared, "It gives us a great opportunity for a long lease of power in the State, and to lay a substantial foundation for the democratic party of the country."74
*The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by every northern state legislature except New Jersey within a few months of its approval by Congress in January 1865. Three border states— Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri—also ratified the amendment, along with Louisiana and Tennessee, ex-Confederate states with new legislatures dominated by Unionists. The remaining southern states followed suit in the final months of 1865 under the terms of President Johnson's plan for restoring them to the Union. Two border states—Delaware and Kentucky— joined New Jersey in rejecting the amendment. These were the three states where McClellan won in 1864.
*Stephen Mallory, the Confederate secretary of the navy.
*The chamberlain was in charge of depositing the city's funds into bank accounts.
*The late nineteenth century was dubbed the Gilded Age after the title of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel, in which they satirized American materialism.
CHAPTER 22
Strange Bedfellows: Greeley and the
Liberal Republicans
lysses S. Grant was inaugurated in March 1869, having campaigned on the slogan "Let Us Have Peace." As commander of the army under Johnson, Grant had simply carried out the president's orders and assigned troops to trouble spots across the South, but he took no personal initiative and avoided the sphere of politics. As president, Grant continued to use the army conservatively, letting Congress and his cabinet shape policy, and confining himself to the narrowest interpretation of his powers as chief executive. Not only was Grant a neophyte in politics, but as a commanding general assuming the helm of a free nation, he was determined not to be labeled a military despot—a Caesar, Cromwell, or Napoleon—and to preserve the supremacy of civilian authority.l
Grant's administration did supply the state militias of North and South Carolina with arms and ammunition, but on the whole, as Klan violence continued in 1868 and 1869, state governors in the South found themselves hampered by a lack of cavalry, while the end of federally imposed martial law meant the six thousand troops still in the region could intervene only when local authorities called on them. Moreover, the reopening of civil courts made army commanders reluctant to set up military tribunals. Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee were the exceptions: Their governors declared martial law and fought back aggressively, disrupting Klan activity, making arrests, and even executing some terrorists by firing squad. In most of the South, however, the presence of federal troops merely propped up the Republican governments and prevented some rioting but could do little more to curb the Klan.2
By March 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, purportedly guaranteeing black suffrage throughout the country, including the North. In Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia, where Reconstruction had been delayed by violence or flagrant political maneuvering against black legislators, Congress required ratification of both the Fifteenth and Fourteenth Amendments before readmission to the Union. With a total of thirty-seven states, these four, combined with twenty-five others, where Republicans controlled the legislature, produced the three-fourths majority required for ratification.3
Manton Marble's World encouraged the southern states to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment—and the penalty of losing some of their congressional seats, as stipulated in the Fourteenth Amendment—by using nonracial criteria such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and property requirements to deny blacks the vote. Many followed this advice to "accomplish nearly all they desire without raising any question under the XIVth or XVth amendment."4
The loopholes in the amendments allowing for such hurdles reflected the glaring hypocrisy of northern Republicans, who had long been excluding Chinese immigrants and poor whites, especially Germans and Irish Catholics, from the polls. Ironically, Republican determination to keep these exclusions against the Chinese and certain whites in the North had compromised the advancement of voting rights for blacks in the Fourteenth Amendment and led to a weakened Fifteenth Amendment as well.5
Despite the defects of the Fifteenth Amendment, with all states readmitted to the Union, many Republicans felt Reconstruction was complete and former slaves should no longer be supported as "wards of the nation." Congressman and future president James Garfield asserted that the amendment "confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands." A newspaper in Illinois declared that "the negro is now a voter and a citizen. Let him hereafter take his chances in the battle of life."6
However, hundreds of murders were still being committed by Klansmen intent on toppling the carpetbagger governments in the South and driving blacks from the polls. Moderate Republicans in Congress found themselves in a dilemma not unlike Lincoln's in the wake of the draft riots when he chose not to impose martial law and bring the rioters before military tribunals. Joseph Choate had complained in 1863 that New York City's civil courts were in the hands of corrupt Democratic judges; in 1870, southern Republicans also wanted an alternative to the local courts, where blacks were kept off jurie
s and many jurors were Klansmen. However, the prosecution of crimes committed by individuals—like assault, murder, and arson—had traditionally been left to the states, and some congressional leaders worried that more federal innovations and intervention would threaten the very fabric of the nation's constitutional system.
Looking for some constitutional justification for intervention, Congress found it in the clauses of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that allowed lawmakers to create legislation for the enforcement of the amendments. With the passage of the first enforcement act on May 31, 1870, any assault on a person's civil and political rights, including voting rights, became a felony. Klansmen became vulnerable to prosecution in federal courts, and the president could use the army to capture them.
Nonetheless, Klan violence increased during the next twelve months, leading Grant to abandon some of his political caution. Aided by two new enforcement laws, Grant and his attorney general, Amos Akerman, took tougher steps against the terrorists. The law of February 1871 set up federal oversight for registration and voting, while another bill in April, dubbed the Ku Klux Act, gave the president more power, just short of complete martial law, to go after the Klan. The president could dispatch federal troops to troublesome counties and, declaring them to be in a state of insurrection, suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Trials would continue to take place in civil courts, but jurors would have to swear under oath that they were not Klansmen and face severe legal consequences if caught perjuring themselves.7
Angry Democrats in Congress branded the Republican bill a "crowning act of centralization and consolidation." Fernando Wood and other Democrats in Congress denounced the law as a usurpation of states' rights and a tool of military dictatorship. Fellow New York congressman S. S. Cox even praised the Klansmen as freedom fighters, like those of Italy, France, and Ireland. The Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion decried the "unconstitutional and hideously despotic" law, intended "to supercede State authority with the government of the bayonet and of marshal law." In North Carolina, Raleigh's Sentinel called the Ku Klux Act an attempt by Grant to "declare the State in insurrection and, by military terror, carry the [1872] election."8
In the Tribune, Horace Greeley continued to lobby for "Universal Amnesty" for ex-Confederates, which he felt would help in "disarming and dissolving the Ku-Klux," but he defended the new enforcement act as "a very different thing from proclaiming martial law, which is the supremacy of the will of the military commander to all civil law. The Ku-Klux act simply provides for the arrest, legal trial, and punishment of the masquerading villains."9
A few prominent Republicans in Congress, including Lyman Trumbull and Carl Schurz, joined the Democrats in blasting the Ku Klux Act's expansion of federal authority and calling for reconciliation with the South. Thus, despite the surge in public support for federal action against the Klan, the new law clearly had the potential to become a political liability for the administration.
Ulysses S. Grant
In May 1871, after much hesitation, the War and Justice Departments, with Grant's reluctant approval, started gathering evidence against the Klan and launching prosecutions in the South. At the same time, Congress began holding hearings in what became an exhaustive investigation of the Klan lasting some nine months.10Republicans seemed poised to bring the Klan to justice— with precisely the means Lincoln had refrained from using against the draft rioters and New York's Democratic machine.
In 1871 and 1872, federal marshals and troops arrested thousands of Klansmen in the Carolinas and Mississippi, as well as in other states. However, acutely sensitive to charges of despotism, the Grant administration focused primarily on breaking up the Klan and pacifying the South—not on locking up thousands of prisoners. Reluctant to further inflame Democratic resentment against bayonet rule, Grant used the military only in the most afflicted areas and later dispensed numerous pardons to convicted Klansmen.11 Like Lincoln in 1863, Grant evidently calculated that overplaying the hand of federal power would be counterproductive.
The results, therefore, were similar to those at the end of the draft riots. In 1871-72, federal grand juries indicted more than 3,000 Klansmen, but plea bargaining won suspended sentences for hundreds of them. The government dismissed about 2,000 cases in order to home in on the ringleaders. Some 350 of them were convicted, but most served little or no jail time. The harshest sentences, given to 65 Klansmen, were for five years or less. Not surprisingly, the respite from racial and political violence in the South that followed Grant's crackdown did not last for long.12
The New York lynch mobs of July 1863 and the Klan were both elements of an ongoing counterrevolution against Reconstruction. The extreme alternative to Lincoln's and Grant's measured response to these threats was presented to Americans by the gruesome events unfolding in Paris during the spring and summer of 1871. After the Paris Commune, a failed communist uprising, French authorities executed many of the revolutionaries by firing squad, stacking their corpses like so much cordwood, hundreds side by side and three layers deep in the public squares of the city. Between the violent insurrection and its aftermath, some twenty thousand French citizens were killed.13
The New York Times compared the Paris Commune to the draft riots, grudgingly admitting that America, though a free country, was not free from the same elements of class conflict that plagued autocratic European regimes. An editorial in June 1871 declared that
only once in the history of the city did this terrible proletaire class show its revolutionary head. For a few days in 1863, New York seemed like Paris, under the Reds . . . The cruelties inflicted by our "Reds" on the unhappy Negroes quite equaled in atrocity anything that the French Reds perpetrated on their priests. Our "communists" had already begun to move toward the houses of the rich, and the cry of war to property was already heard, when the spirited assistance of the United States soldiery enabled the better classes to put down the disturbance. But had the rioters been able to hold their own a week longer, had they plundered the banks and begun to enjoy the luxuries of the rich, and been permitted to arm and organize themselves, we should have seen a communistic explosion in New York which would probably have left the city in ashes and blood. Every great city has within it the communistic elements of a revolution.
The Times revealed the heightened middle- and upper-class fear of mob rule, along with the hardening of class divisions, that were important legacies of the draft riots. The feeling that only the "United States soldiery" stood between the propertied classes and the volcanic forces of proletarian discontent became a constant of the Gilded Age, when American cities were growing rapidly and the gap between rich and poor became even wider than it had been in 1863.
The Times struck an optimistic note by commending "the industrial school and the children's charity" along with individual effort as the best routes out of poverty. Nonetheless, Republican, free-labor ideology with its vision of every worker as a potential capitalist was beginning to wear thin against a backdrop of revived union-building and simmering labor unrest in the early 1870s.14
Right after the draft riots, and in the nearly eight years since then, Tweed's Tammany Hall, unlike the Republican party, seemed to have found a formula that defused class conflict and maintained urban harmony without resorting to the gallows, the firing squad, or coercive legislation to punish the underclass and the demagogues who provoked it to violence.15
Named the grand sachem of Tammany Hall after his handpicked candidate, Hoffman, became governor, and reelected to the state senate in 1869, Tweed had amassed enough power to encompass both New York City and Albany, where in 1870 he pushed through the state legislature a new charter for the city that simplified the municipal bureaucracy and strengthened the mayor. These changes promised to create more efficient, effective governance of the growing metropolis and to reduce taxes while overturning the state-imposed, Republican-dominated commissions of 1857 and restoring local control, or "home rule." Wealthy property owners hailed Tweed's plans with little scrutiny of hi
s motives or of the city's finances..16
Ever since a law allowing assessment bonds was passed in 1852, New York's aldermen had been fueling the city's growth with the same financing methods used by the big railroad corporations in Wall Street's thriving securities market. By issuing municipal bonds, the city was able to pay contractors for public works before revenue came in from increased tax assessments in improved areas of Manhattan. Since contractors did not have to wait long periods for payment, more companies, including those without cash cushions, were able to work for the city. By providing the infrastructure—streets, sewers, transportation—for new upscale neighborhoods and commercial districts and increasing the pace of northward expansion on Manhattan, politicians kept wealthy developers, investors, and real estate owners happy while providing hundreds of jobs for constituents in the building trades and on public works.17
August Belmont, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and American agent for the Rothschild family, had taken the whole process a step farther by attracting European investors and creating a transatlantic market for the city's bonds in the late 1860s and 1870s. In a similar way, nationally he had helped provide European capital for American railroad expansion in the 1850s and early 1860s. During the Civil War, New York's aldermen had first used debt financing in the heady months after Fort Sumter fell to raise money for soldiers' bounties. Two years later, the New York County Board of Supervisors, dominated by Tweed, issued its first bonds to pay damage claims after the draft riots. Next came the supervisors' three-million-dollar bond issue to pay for exemptions under the draft's three-hundred-dollar clause. Thus, by the time Tweed had reached the full height of his power in 1869-71, debt financing had become the currency of his political machine, both its fuel and the lubricant that kept its constituent parts from clashing and throwing off sparks.18
The Devil's Own Work Page 44