by Keith Boykin
By the time Lincoln wins the 1860 election, the nation is on the brink of civil war. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas quickly secede from the union in the four-month period between Lincoln’s election in November and his first day in office in March. South Carolina’s declaration of secession in December 1860 complains that Northern states have “united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” Then, just a month after Lincoln’s inauguration, Confederate forces fire on federal troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and America’s deadliest war is launched.
Abraham Lincoln would prove to be more complicated than his Southern detractors suggested. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he maintained in his first inaugural address. Even as seven Southern states had already withdrawn from the union, he appealed to the “bonds of affection,” the “mystic chords of memory,” and the “better angels of our nature” to convince the departed to return. They did not, and Lincoln prosecuted the war against them while still maintaining white supremacist views. “There must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race,” he wrote. Even as he commanded soldiers into battle, he expressed his “paramount object” was to save the Union, not to save or destroy slavery. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he wrote to New-York Tribune newspaper editor Horace Greeley in August 1862.
Lincoln’s successor, Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson, raised troubling new concerns for Black people. He vetoed civil rights legislation to protect African Americans and became the first president in American history to be impeached—avoiding Senate conviction and removal from office by only one vote. In his last months as president, three years after the Civil War ended, Johnson announced “a full pardon and amnesty” for Confederate soldiers and gave them “restoration of all rights, privileges, and immunities” under the law. Echoing a theme that white politicians of various parties would repeat for centuries, Johnson described his Christmas Day amnesty proclamation as a step to “secure permanent peace” and “restore confidence and fraternal feeling.” It was one of many examples in American history in which the country would choose peace for white people over justice for Black people.
Despite Johnson’s resistance, Reconstruction-era Republicans pushed through sweeping new federal civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (giving Blacks citizenship), the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1870 and 1871 (placing elections under federal control), and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (banning discrimination in public places). In a dramatic update of the nation’s founding documents, Republicans also pushed through three new historic civil rights amendments between 1865 and 1870, the first changes to the US Constitution in more than sixty years. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, passed the House by a vote of 119–56, with Republicans voting 86–0 in favor and Democrats voting overwhelmingly against it.
Black voters flocked to the Grand Old Party as soon as they were allowed to vote. Millions of Black men registered as Republicans, thousands were elected to public office, dozens were elected to state legislatures, a few made their way to the United States Congress, two were elected US senators, and one became the nation’s first Black governor. In a stunning reversal of fortune, voters in South Carolina—the first state that had seceded from the union—elected a Black majority to the state legislature just three years after the conclusion of the Civil War.
It was a moment when even white Republicans boldly demanded racial equality, no matter the consequences. “From the beginning of our history, the country has been afflicted with compromise,” Charles Sumner complained to his Senate colleagues in 1866. “It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned,” he argued. “I insist that this shall cease.”
Sumner was right. Since the founding of the republic, America had repeatedly chosen compromise over conscience. As the new nation formed in 1776, the founders deleted a paragraph from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that described slavery as an “execrable commerce” and condemned Great Britain for its determination “to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold.” Jefferson knew very well that the institution of slavery was evil. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever,” he wrote. “Commerce between master and slave is despotism,” he said. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” Jefferson predicted. Yet Jefferson maintained the ownership of Black human beings as slaves and compromised his personal business affairs and the nation’s. It was compromise that caused the language of freedom to be removed from the document that would serve as the nation’s own birth certificate.
A decade after declaring the nation’s independence, the framers expunged any mention of the word “slave” or “slavery” from the Constitution that they approved in 1787, even as they brokered a compromise to reduce slaves to three-fifths of a person for the purpose of counting residents of the various states. They also approved another compromise that expressly prohibited Congress from outlawing the slave trade until 1808. After debating the issue of slavery at the Constitutional Convention, many of the attendees knew the institution was indefensible, but they allowed the slave trade to continue for another two decades.
In order to preserve the fragile coalition of Northern and Southern states that formed the union, America’s leaders made more compromises to appease the various factions. The Compromise of 1790—the famous “room where it happened” deal chronicled in the musical Hamilton—sought to bridge the chasm between North and South by locating the nation’s capital on the Potomac River in exchange for allowing the federal government to assume states’ debt.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 sought to maintain the balance between North and South by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state and prohibiting slavery in the northern parts of the new Louisiana Territory.
The Compromise of 1850 also sought to avoid the inevitable conflict. In return for admitting California as a free state and abolishing the slave trade in Washington, DC, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which required former slaves to be returned back to the brutality of bondage, even if they had escaped into free territory.
Next, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the boundaries of the 1820 Missouri Compromise and allowed new territories to determine the question of slavery based on popular sovereignty.
Time after time, the white men in power continued to prioritize peace between the states over justice for Black people, and by 1861, when the union finally collapsed under the weight of these untenable compromises, the nation had neither.
It would take the deaths of more than six hundred thousand Americans to settle the issue of slavery, but the country would never attempt to eliminate the systemic racism and white supremacy that undergirded the institution. Those dangerous ideologies would remain. Even after the nation’s bloodiest war, a number of lawmakers returned to the language of compromise, insisting on unity to heal the wounds and bring the republic back together. Sumner called the nation to equality instead. “It is not enough to show me that a measure is expedient,” the Massachusetts senator said. “You must show me also that it is right.”
Sumner was correct, and his passionate critique of compromise in the face of injustice is the core argument of this book. Yet Sumner, too, would become a perpetrator of the very evil he condemned. Despite his lofty language, he backtracked over time, along with several other white Republicans who had been champions of the cause of abolition.
Just seven years after the Civil War, Sumner bolted from Lincoln’s Republican Part
y to join the newly created Liberal Republican Party. Despite the new party’s name and its progressive government reform agenda, there was nothing liberal for Black people in its call for reconciliation with the former Confederate states. Instead, it was another example of how allegedly supportive politicians would betray Black people when doing so served their political agenda.
Among those aligned with Sumner in the new breakaway political party was a prominent St. Louisan named Carl Schurz, an abolitionist and former Civil War general who served as a US senator from Missouri from 1869 to 1875. I had never heard of Schurz during the years I lived in St. Louis and first came across his name while on a bike ride in New York City. There, along the East River, I found a fifteen-acre park named after him, sitting next to Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence. I hadn’t given much thought to Schurz until I started teaching at Columbia University and took a stroll one day to the faculty house across from Morningside Park. A huge bronze statue of Schurz stood guard over the park. The adjoining inscription declared him “a defender of liberty and a friend of human rights.” This time, I googled him and quickly found an article in The New Yorker by Columbia professor Nicholas Lemann.
Schurz had joined the Liberal Republican Party and argued for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in an 1875 speech to the US Senate. “I declare I shall hail the day as a most auspicious one for the colored race in the South,” Schurz told the Senate, “when they begin to see the identity of their own true interests with the interests of the white people among whom they have to live.”
Despite the widespread documentation of white violence and intimidation that Black citizens faced in the South, Schurz told the Senate that “the only act of terrorism and intimidation” he had ever witnessed “was the cruel clubbing and stoning of a colored man” in North Carolina “by men of his own race.” It was a stunningly disingenuous argument, made just ten years after the abolition of slavery in America, that shifted the blame of racial division away from the white people who had owned Black human beings as property from 1619 to 1865—that is, 246 of the preceding 256 years in American history.
Why, I asked myself, did Schurz deserve this statue high above a park that overlooked the Black community of Harlem? And why, for that matter, had Charles Sumner’s shift not disqualified him from hero worship, as well? When Sumner passed away in March of 1874, Carl Schurz was asked to deliver a eulogy in the Boston Music Hall the following month. Schurz told the audience: “He belongs to all of us in the North and in the South—to the Blacks he helped to make free, and to the whites he strove to make brothers again.” This was precisely the problem. After belatedly but appropriately abolishing slavery, far too many white elected officials became more concerned with repairing the friendships between white people in North and South than repairing the breach between Black and white.
Step by step, compromise by compromise, the promise of Reconstruction began to wither away before it could even bloom. Soon, it would vanish altogether. In 1877, Republicans abandoned their commitment to Black Southerners as part of a deal to resolve a disputed presidential election. Although New York Democrat Samuel Tilden defeated Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote in 1876, Democrats allowed Hayes, the Republican, to become president in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South and the return of control over the former Confederate states to the very white Southerners who had led the rebellion against the union. It was barely a dozen years since the end of the Civil War, and the old South had already won back the right to resume its oppression of its Black residents. Final details of the notorious 1877 deal, which effectively ended Reconstruction, were determined at Washington’s Wormley’s Hotel, owned by a Black businessman named James Wormley.
Over the next several decades, the federal government lurched away from Black concerns. Violent voter suppression campaigns diminished Black political power and drove Black elected officials out of office, leaving the two main political parties free to realign themselves to compete for white voters. Democrats largely ignored the concerns of Black voters, while Republicans continued to send mixed signals to them. Republican president James Garfield spoke of racial inclusion and appointed several African Americans to government posts, including former US senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi as Register of the Treasury, a position that made him the first Black man whose signature appeared on US currency. (Ironically, Bruce’s signature appeared next to an image of Charles Sumner on the five hundred-dollar bill.) But the dream died when the forty-nine-year-old president was struck by an assassin’s bullet in a Washington, DC, train station.
Two years later, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, in a blatantly racist decision written by Justice Joseph Bradley. “When a man has emerged from slavery,” Bradley wrote, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” The special favorite of the laws? Eight of the nine Supreme Court justices—all appointed by Republican presidents—struck down a law that protected former slaves from discrimination because they thought it gave Black people special rights. The sitting Republican president, Chester Arthur, asked lawmakers to correct the Supreme Court’s error in the Civil Rights Cases, but Congress never did. It would take another eighty years of waiting and a virtual role reversal of the political parties before the federal government finally passed another civil rights bill commensurate to the law that the Supreme Court struck down in 1883.
As racist Democrats took back control of the post-Reconstruction South, anti-Black violence soared, and yet the federal government, under the leadership of ten different Republican presidents from 1877 to 1933, failed to enact any new major civil rights laws to protect Black citizens from lynching or discrimination. After years of white Southern voter intimidation, literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, ballot-box stuffing, violent threats and reprisals, the number of Black elected officials dwindled. In contrast to the popular and inaccurate narrative of steady racial progress, post-Reconstruction America set Black people backward. In 1877, in the waning days of Reconstruction, there were eight Black members of the United States Congress. By 1901, when Republican George Henry White of North Carolina left office, there were none. After Representative White, no Black person would serve in Congress for another twenty-eight years.
The same was true in state legislatures. In the 1870s, there were more than three hundred Black state legislators in office in the South, according to data from the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, but by the turn of the century, there were none. They had become victims of the politics of a darkening America. Three decades of Southern Democratic resistance, and the failure of the Republican Party to respond to the threat, took its toll. The hope that was constructed in the 1870s for a new Black political power was almost completely demolished by the early twentieth century.
Though Republicans continued to win Black votes around the turn of the century, Black voters grew increasingly disappointed by the party’s failure to stop white violence against African Americans. After Republican president William McKinley appointed a Black man named Frazier Baker as the postmaster for the predominantly white town of Lake City, South Carolina, an angry lynch mob set fire to Baker’s home office in February 1898 and shot and killed him and his two-year-old daughter as they tried to flee the burning building.
That same year, just 150 miles away, an angry mob of hundreds of white people in Wilmington, North Carolina, destroyed the offices of the local newspaper, burned Black businesses, and lynched Black residents just two days after a biracial fusion government had been elected. The violent mob deposed the elected government and installed their own white supremacist leaders to replace them. “It was the only coup d’état ever to take place on American soil,” Adrienne LaFrance and Vann R. Newkirk II wrote in The Atlantic in 2017. It also set a precedent for what angry white Americans would attempt again
123 years later at the United States Capitol.
In response to the violence, journalist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote to President McKinley, “During the past fifteen years, more than 2500 men, women and children have been put to death through lynchings, hanging, shooting, drowning and burning alive.” She continued, “Our government has not taken the first step to stop the slaughter.”
Wells-Barnett met with McKinley, and he assured her that the federal government would “prosecute the lynchers of the Black postmaster,” she wrote in her autobiography. But when a trial was held in federal court, an all-white jury in Charleston, South Carolina, refused to convict any of the eleven defendants accused of murdering a federal employee and burning down a federal building. As archivist Trichita Chestnut wrote for the US Archives, the jury deadlocked on charges for eight of the defendants, and the Justice Department did not seek further prosecution.
Just a few years later, when a white bartender was killed in Brownsville, Texas, local residents blamed Black soldiers stationed in the city for the murder. Without even holding a military trial, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt dishonorably discharged 167 Black soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry in Brownsville. It would take another six decades, after the 1970 publication of The Brownsville Raid by John D. Weaver, before the army investigated and disproved the charges and the federal government finally reversed Roosevelt’s 1906 order.
By the mid 1920s, African Americans had been voting Republican for nearly sixty years, and although the GOP membership included many champions of Black civil rights, the party had failed to enact any new major civil rights legislation in five decades. It had failed to renew the civil rights law struck down by the high court. It had failed to enact an elections bill to protect Black voters. And it had failed to enact an antilynching bill to protect Black bodies. The inability to protect Black lives from white terrorism, along with the rise of the “lily-white movement” within the Republican Party and the collapse of the economy with the Great Depression, would create an unexpected opening for Democrats to win Black voters for the first time in that party’s history. A few weeks before the 1928 election, The Chicago Defender, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the country, endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith over Republican nominee Herbert Hoover, according to an account by Ethan Michaeli in his book, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America. As cited in the book, an editorial in The Defender read: “If 50 years of support to the Republican Party doesn’t get us justice, then we must of necessity shift our allegiance to new quarters.”