by Philip Dray
Now, with the Democrats set to control the House of Representatives and Butler himself a lame duck, having lost his seat in a close race in Massachusetts, the Republicans were eager to go out on a high note by easing the civil rights legislation through. Not that all were of one mind concerning the bill. Some saw its passage as obligatory—the finishing touch on Reconstruction, or a tribute to Sumner; others feared that by becoming law, it would only further inflame Southern passions, perhaps harming the Republican Party in the upcoming presidential contest in 1876 as it had in the congressional elections of fall 1874.
With the bill before the House, it was Garfield of Ohio who rode to the rescue, reminding his peers that "the measure pending here today is confronted ... by the first argument that was raised against the anti-slavery movement in its first inception—that it is a sentimental abstrac tion rather than a measure of practical legislation." The abolitionists, he noted, had once been "denounced as dreamers, abstractionists, who were looking down to the bottom of society and attempting to see something good ... something that the friend of human rights ought to support in the person of a negro slave. Every step since that first sentimental beginning has been assailed by precisely the same argument." He admitted that the emerging Democratic majority in Congress might "go back and plow up all that has been planted," reversing his and others' efforts to place black Americans safely and securely on the plane of equal rights, yet he urged his own party to act while it still could to usher the civil rights bill into law. He framed his request in a kind of valediction of Reconstruction itself:
During the last twelve years it has often been rung in our ears that by doing justice to the negro we shall pull down the pillars of our political temple and bury ourselves in the ruins ... When we were abolishing slavery by adopting the Thirteenth Amendment we were warned that we were bringing measureless calamity upon the Republic. Did it come? When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed the same wail was heard, the wail of the fearful and unbelieving. Again when it was proposed to elevate the negro to citizenship, to give him the ballot as his weapon of self-defense, we were told the cup of our destruction was filled to its brim. But sir, I have lived long enough to learn that in the long run it is safest for a nation, a political party, or an individual man to dare to do right, and let consequences take care of themselves, for he that loseth his life for the truth's sake shall find it.
The bill, minus its provisions for equal rights in schools, churches, and cemeteries, passed the House on February 5 by a vote of 162 to 99; the Senate accepted the House version by a margin of 38 to 26; and on March 1, 1875, with President Grant's signature, "Sumner's Law" at long last went on the books.
Chapter 9
DIVIDED TIME
WHILE THE DEBATE over the new civil rights bill was testing Reconstruction's limits in Congress, a parallel struggle was taking shape in far-off Mississippi. This verdant agricultural land had, since war's end, experienced periods of relative political stability, enough so that blacks from more troubled states, such as Georgia, regarded it as something of a mainstay of Republican rule. Yet of the three states with black majority populations—Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina—Mississippi would be the first in which whites achieved redemption, or home rule, and the methods by which this was accomplished, known as the Mississippi Plan, would become a regional model for that transformation.
Perhaps the first sign of the coming political convulsion was a deadly riot at Meridian, an east Mississippi railroad town, in spring 1871. A posse of Ku Klux Klansmen from nearby Alabama had entered Mississippi to track down and discipline some black men for allegedly backing out of work contracts. Meridian's Republican leadership—Mayor William Sturges, a carpetbagger, and his scalawag cohort Robert J. Mosely—challenged the incursion on the grounds that the Klan's leader, an Alabama sheriff named Adam Kennard, had violated his jurisdiction by pursuing the missing workers across the state line. Tensions rose when it was alleged that Kennard had himself been assaulted by Daniel Price, a scalawag who taught in a black school. To help calm the fears of Meridian blacks, who were nervous about possible Klan retribution, Mayor Sturges and local Republican authorities staged a well-attended torchlight rally on the steps of Meridian's Lauderdale County Courthouse. The black spokesmen J. Aaron Moore, William Clopton, and Warren Tyler joined Sturges in urging their supporters to remain calm until the crisis had passed.
A few nights later local Democrats held their own gathering, from which a belligerent resolution emerged: the town's "present [Republican] incumbents must be swept away from the face of the earth." The Democrats also drew up affidavits and swore a formal complaint against Moore, Clopton, and the others, alleging that the town's Unionist leaders had, in their meeting on the courthouse steps, made "incendiary" speeches and used "seditious language." "Damn old Meridian!" Clopton was quoted as having declared. "She has given us a lot of trouble; let's burn her all up tonight."
When a judicial hearing was held to examine the complaint a few days later, numerous Republicans and as many as two hundred Democratic "observers" packed the courtroom. At one point, Warren Tyler interrupted a white witness named James Brantley to demand the right to summon other witnesses who would show that Brantley was not being truthful. "I want to introduce two or three witnesses to impeach your veracity," said Tyler. Enraged at the suggestion that he was a liar, Brantley grabbed a billy club from a court officer's hands and charged Tyler, who, according to witnesses, reached into his coat for a revolver. Instantly, weapons were drawn on all sides, and, after a blaze of gunfire, the presiding white judge fell back dead in his chair. The stunned court-room froze; then, as furious whites cried murder, the Republicans fled for their lives. Tyler sprinted to a second-floor veranda, swung over the railing, and jumped to the ground; he then ran off, with several whites in pursuit. William Clopton, who'd fallen wounded, was carried to a balcony by two white men and hurled to the brick pavement below. Rioters meanwhile chased down Aaron Moore and "continued their hellish barbarities," beating him severely and later burning his house to the ground. Tyler, the chief target of the mob's rage, was found hiding in a shack, dragged into the street, and killed. As many as thirty other blacks died in the rampage.
Mayor Sturges evaded the mob by hiding in the garret of a boarding house and emerged only when intermediaries worked out an arrangement whereby he would resign his office and leave town. "I wanted to know the whys and wherefore," Sturges explained in a letter to the New York Tribune that described the day's events, "but they said they came not to argue any question of right: the verdict had been rendered. They treated me respectfully, but said that their ultimatum was that I must take a northern-bound train. I yielded. At about half past twelve o'clock at night perhaps three hundred came and escorted me to the cars."
Sturges's letter was reprinted widely in the North, feeding the debate then under way about the need for the Ku Klux Klan Act's tougher measures. The duly elected Republican mayor of a large Southern town had been "hunted out like a wolf" by "confederated murderers," lamented the New National Era. "It proves the rebel spirit [is] still rampant and murderous." Sturges ended by advising that "martial law be proclaimed through every Southern state. Leniency will not do."
Such a prescription was severe, but the deposed mayor was right that the Meridian riot would not remain an isolated occurrence. Native whites had stumbled upon an almost foolproof tactic for loosening local Republican control: foment some outrage or accusation against black or carpetbagger authorities, then create a physical confrontation. The freedmen, less inclined to engage in a sustained fight, would likely make no effective resistance; the show of massive force would not only paralyze them but also lay bare the tenuousness of the bond between them and their white Republican allies. The Era, which headlined its piece about Sturges "The Peril of the Hour," saw the danger vividly: isolated acts of Klan violence, while troubling, involved solitary victims and terrorists who could potentially be prosecuted; a riot, on the other hand, carried
out by an anonymous mob, inflicted more wholesale damage and could demoralize an entire community.
The Mississippi senator and former military governor Adelbert Ames also understood instantly that something ominous had taken place at Meridian. He had monitored the rise of a home-rule mentality in his state and had come to suspect that native whites, despite their at times conciliatory rhetoric, were at heart driven by a deep-seated contempt for the idea of blacks as citizens or equals. "The South cares for no other question," Ames later noted. "Everything gives way to it. They support or oppose men, advocate or denounce policies, flatter or murder, just as such action will help them as far as possible to recover their old power over the negro."
Ames knew that the rights and security of the freed people, and civil society itself, could not be sustained unless white violence was quelled; the future of Reconstruction itself in Mississippi likely hung in the balance. But what were the appropriate remedies, and how could such policies be enforced in this remote place?
One glance at Adelbert Ames showed that fate had made a curious choice. With his receding hairline, pleasant smile, and neatly trimmed mustache, he resembled a small-town bank manager far more than a professional soldier. Yet the Maine native and West Point graduate had emerged from the war with a distinguished reputation for gallantry, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism at First Bull Run, where, though badly wounded, he had remained with his two-gun battery even after being ordered to the rear, directing fire at the enemy until he collapsed from loss of blood. "Every one who rode with him ... soon discovered that Ames never hesitated to take desperate chances under fire," an aide recalled. "He seemed to have a life that was under some mystic protection. Under the heaviest fire ... he would sit on his horse, apparently unmoved by singing rifle-ball, shrieking shot, or bursting shell, and quietly give his orders." Ames went on to serve at Gettysburg and in numerous other engagements; not yet thirty years old at war's end, he was made a brigadier general and appointed Southern district commander of the Union occupying forces based in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi.
ADELBERT AMES
In 1867 he received his first lesson in the peculiarities of Southern justice when not a single witness could be coaxed to testify before a military court that he convened to prosecute a lynch mob, forcing the case to be abandoned. Then, in 1869, after Ames was appointed military governor of Mississippi, the native spirit struck closer to home. To the position of provisional mayor of Jackson he had appointed Lieutenant Colonel Joseph G. Crane, the tall, likable son of a longtime Ohio congressman. Crane, in the course of his duties in recovering overdue taxes, ordered seized and sold at public auction a piano belonging to Edward M. Yerger, the eccentric scion of a once-prominent Mississippi family. Yerger was away in Memphis when notice of the piano's sale was posted; upon his return he was livid and sent several notes to Crane, demanding satisfaction. A go-between who delivered one of the missives warned Crane that Yerger's "passions were greatly intensified by liquor."
When Yerger finally caught up with the mayor, Crane was at the corner of State and Capitol Streets, one of the town's main intersections, inspecting a sidewalk said to be in need of repair. "Angry words" were heard by several witnesses as Yerger confronted the young Northerner over the "theft" of the piano. When Crane tried to calm his antagonist, Yerger proclaimed him a "God damned cowardly puppy," to which Crane replied, "I do not want to have anything to do with you, except officially," and, making a gesture with his hand, turned to walk away. Yerger, infuriated by the dismissal, struck at Crane's hand; the mayor replied by bringing his cane down on his attacker's neck; Yerger then drew a knife and plunged it into Crane's side, killing him.
The mayor's wife, learning of a commotion involving her husband, rushed to the scene, where a crowd had formed. Pushing others aside, she threw herself on the lifeless body and, hysterical, demanded that he speak, clinging to him for several minutes until her own clothes were soaked with blood. She "was borne from the spot almost a maniac," the next day's paper reported, "amidst the sympathy of the entire gathered population."
At court-martial Yerger's relatives conceded that the killer, whose family nickname was "Prince Edward," was an unbalanced personality, a rabid secessionist who "went into ecstasies" over Lincoln's assassination. They nonetheless challenged the right of a military court to try their kinsman. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court ordered him released to the civil authorities—the first time in Reconstruction that the high court had curbed the powers of the federal government in the South. His lawyer then managed to convince a civilian court that a second trial would constitute double jeopardy, so Edward Yerger, to the dismay of Crane's family, Governor Ames, and many others, went free, eventually leaving the state.
Incidents such as Crane's murder, and reports of abuses of the freedmen, had a radicalizing effect upon Ames, transforming him gradually from a bureaucrat of the federal occupation into an indignant advocate committed to upholding the law and defending black people's rights. In 1869 he oversaw the first free election for governor, in which former-Confederate-turned-Republican James Lusk Alcorn was elected. Alcorn, one of Mississippi's leading men of property, promised his constituents a "harnessed revolution" that would offer blacks opportunity even as it retained white authority. To be safe, however, Ames disqualified other officeholders he thought insufficiently repentant and put solid Republi cans in their places. "The contest [here] is not between two established parties ... but between loyal men and a class of men who are disloyal," Ames explained, when some in Washington questioned the move. "The war still exists in a very important phase here." The following year, as Republicans, including many black representatives, moved into the state legislature, they repaid Ames's devotion by electing him U.S. senator.
As a Northern white official who had seen the mounting Southern resistance firsthand, Ames in Washington became an influential advocate for the freedmen's security. But by 1871 Alcorn had joined him in the Senate, where the two broke over the Ku Klux Klan Act. Ames challenged Alcorn's claims that Mississippi by itself could tamp down the Klan, citing the Meridian riot and the fact that more than two dozen black schools and churches had been torched recently and more than sixty freedmen killed, with no significant action taken by the state to prosecute such crimes. Eventually, in 1873, both Alcorn and Ames re-signed their Senate seats to vie for the Republican nomination for governor of Mississippi, a job they knew would be far more central to the state's future than representing it in the far-off capital.
Back in Mississippi, Alcorn immediately stepped into political quicksand, angering his white constituents by appealing to black voters with promises of equal treatment and seating on the railroads, a vow that, to whites, reeked of "social equality," though for most blacks the promise had little credibility. Because of Alcorn's miscues and a large black voter turnout, Ames won the election easily. Also of help was his developing skill as a political stump speaker. In the nineteenth century perhaps no accomplishment, outside of military valor, was more respected than public oratory, and the buttoned-down officer from Maine took immense pleasure in his newfound ability to hold crowds of Mississippi blacks and whites with his words. As he laid out his appeal for unity and progress, a real depth of feeling for the people of his adopted state seemed to inspire him and to grant his thoughts eloquence.
Blanche Butler was one of Washington's most sought-after belles when Adelbert Ames courted and married her in the early 1870s. Known for her striking appearance as well as her artistic flair and independent nature, she had been the subject of a series of photographs taken by the famous Matthew Brady and exhibited in his Washington gallery. When in 1873 Adelbert Ames decided to abandon the capital to return to Mississippi, she accompanied him, if a bit reluctantly, for she was the daughter of one of the most despised men in the South, the Massachusetts congressman Benjamin F. Butler, known as "Beast Butler" for his infamous stint as the wartime military governor of New Orleans.
The short, wall
eyed General Butler, who had introduced the term contraband to describe fleeing slaves, was dispatched by President Lincoln to oversee New Orleans after the city was taken by Union forces in spring 1862. Finding the place conquered but its people defiant, Butler responded by seizing control of the local press, arresting those openly disloyal to the Union, and using the recently legislated Confiscation Acts to attach the holdings of New Orleans households owned by absent Confederates. He also ordered the public hanging of a youth named Billy Mumford, who had climbed onto the roof of the U.S. mint to remove the American flag as federal troops arrived in the city. For allegedly pilfering silverware and fine china from elite residences, or allowing his officers to do so, Butler earned the nicknames "Silver Spoon" and "Spoon-Thief." But his action that most infuriated Southern whites was General Orders Number 28, the so-called Woman Order, which labeled as a prostitute any female who disrespected occupying Union troops. Local women were said to have insulted federal officers and even spit at their feet; one had been caught mocking the funeral cortege of a fallen Union soldier. Though Butler understood that his occupying forces would be resented, he was outraged that women would act so abominably toward his men. He later claimed that the controversial order had its desired effect, that "these she-adders of New Orleans were at once tamed into propriety of conduct," but so gross an insult to Southern womanhood was not soon forgotten, nor was the martyrdom of young Billy Mumford, who in death became a Confederate hero.