Four powerful related forces prevented Grant from realizing his progressive agenda. Conservatives in Congress and the Supreme Court eventually gutted all of his proposed reforms. Allied with these conservative politicians were increasingly powerful business corporations. From the beginning his administration harbored people who betrayed the trust of the president and the nation. Finally, there were the flaws in Grant’s own character—he was too unquestioningly loyal to his friends and family, too fawning before powerful business magnates, and too easily susceptible to the get-rich-quick schemes of shysters.
The Senate approved most of Grant’s initial cabinet picks, including John Schofield as secretary of war, Ebenezer Hoar as attorney general, Jacob Cox as interior secretary, Adolph Borie as navy secretary, and John Cresswell as postmaster general. For various political reasons, the senators turned down Elihu Washburne and Alexander Stewart as the respective secretaries of state and treasury, although they did eventually approve Hamilton Fish and George Boutwell for these posts. Ely Parker, a Seneca, became the Indian affairs commissioner. Grant tapped Orville Babcock, Horace Porter, and Frederick Dent, a brother-in-law, to be his secretaries. Only Fish stayed with Grant throughout his eight years in the White House, while twenty-three men served as other department secretaries. Each resignation had its own unique reasons, but many left either under the stench of scandal or after accepting a golden parachute from one of the corporations that their department was supposedly overseeing.
Meanwhile liberal attempts to impose a sweeping political, economic, social, and cultural revolution on the South never took root.3 The progressives overreached and thus provoked the racist counterrevolution that they hoped to forestall. Southerners hated the “Yankees” who arrived in their midst to enact reforms or make money. They dismissed them all as “carpetbaggers” and condemned all southerners who worked with them as “scalawags” or “white negroes.”
Southern conservatives were dead set to undermine and eventually crush the liberal revolution imposed upon them. Increasingly systematic and violent terror was the key means whereby they did so. Mobs rampaged against “uppity” blacks in the cities, while night riders bullied and murdered blacks in the countryside. Terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, White Camellias, Red Shirts, and White League became the Democratic Party’s military wing. Conservatives understood how to manipulate the minds of blacks. For instance, the Klan wore white robes both to assert their racial supremacy and to terrorize superstitious blacks who believed that they were the ghosts of Confederate soldiers. Those who fought to turn back the clock called themselves “redeemers” who sought the “redemption” or restoration of their political, economic, and social rule. They eventually succeeded in retaking power.4
White supremacist violence during Reconstruction was nothing new. It differed only in scale from that of the antebellum era. Across the South, violence was a time-honored means whereby conservatives retained their dominance. Masters not only whipped defiant slaves mercilessly, they could literally get away with murder. Militia patrolled the roads at night to intimidate slaves against leaving their quarters. After the war, southerners simply resumed their old habits. They justified their terrorism as self-defense.
Southern whites everywhere felt ever more besieged, especially in the cities. The war was over, their cause had lost, and they were overrun by Yankee troops, bureaucrats, businessmen, do-gooders, and thousands of blacks scrounging for food, shelter, and jobs. Prices and crime rates soared. Atop all that, the Yankees imposed measures of “Negro Rule” that “Africanized” the South politically, economically, and culturally. Desperate whites looked for any excuse to reassert their control.
The first mass violence erupted in Memphis in May 1866, when forty-six blacks and two whites died. The death toll—thirty-four blacks and three whites—was only slightly less horrific in New Orleans in July 1866. Of the latter bloodbath, Gen. Phil Sheridan reported that “it was no riot, it was an absolute massacre by the police without the shadow of a necessity.”5 The worst mass murder of all took place in Colfax, Louisiana, in April 1873, when whites slaughtered perhaps 280 blacks. In New Orleans in September 1874, thirty-five hundred White Leaguers routed black militia and white police in the battle of Liberty Place and captured the city hall, statehouse, and arsenal. They relinquished these positions and dispersed only when President Grant ordered federal troops to retake the city. All four massacres came from white mobs reacting to Reconstruction policies by venting rage on blacks and white officials.
While white supremacist mobs in cities and towns inflicted the worst massacres on blacks, night riders in the countryside murdered far more. Conservatives did not just target politicians but cross-haired officials, relief workers, ministers, teachers, and businessmen as well. Indeed, they considered as fair game anyone who helped alleviate the plight of blacks and tried to fulfill America’s ideals. Black political leaders were prime targets. One of ten black delegates who attended the state constitutional conventions of 1867 and 1868 was a victim of white supremacist violence. The White League murdered six Republican officials in Red River Parish, Louisiana, in August 1874, just months before that year’s election. In all, white supremacists shot, hanged, burned, or tortured to death over a thousand blacks and a score of whites from 1865 to 1868 alone. During those three years in Texas, whites murdered 372 blacks while blacks murdered 10 whites.6 These statistics reveal numbers, not motives. Just how many were politically driven will never be known. One thing is certain. The intimidation or outright murder of “uppity” blacks was the most effective means whereby conservatives eventually regained power.
For years, Washington did nothing to quell the worsening terrorism. Instead the federal government unwittingly encouraged the violence by steadily reducing the number of troops deployed across the South and stationing many regiments far from where the worst crimes took place. The demobilization was rapid, with the number of occupation troops plummeting from 1 million in April 1865 to 152,000 by December 1865 and a mere 6,000 by December 1871. The latter number remained fairly constant until the newly elected president Rutherford Hayes ordered them withdrawn within days after entering the White House in March 1877. Yet federal policies were legally hamstrung by the constitutional constraint that made law and order a state rather than federal duty.
Liberal governors like Robert Scott of South Carolina, Powell Clayton of Arkansas, and Edmund Davis of Texas eventually suppressed the Klan and other terrorist groups. They did so by declaring martial law, organizing blacks into militia companies, forming state police forces, planting informers in hate group ranks, and making mass arrests. In Texas alone, officials rounded up six thousand Klan suspects. Although few terrorists were prosecuted, most groups decided to disperse and lay low.7
This strategy did not work everywhere. North Carolina governor William Holden tried it but backed off when conservatives mobilized opposition in the state assembly and newspapers. Democrats won back control of North Carolina in the 1870 election. This same year for similar reasons conservatives recaptured the governments of Alabama and Georgia.
The worsening violence, demise of liberalism, and reassertion of conservative rule across the South finally provoked a reaction among liberal and conservative Republicans alike. General Sherman expressed the consensus that “I am willing to . . . again appeal to the power of the nation to crush, as we have done before, this organized civil war.”8 But Washington lacked the full legal authority to do so.
With the Fifteenth Amendment, liberals sought to cut the Gordian knot of nefarious southern techniques to disenfranchise blacks. The wording was straightforward: “Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Two-thirds majorities in Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment on February 26, 1869, and three-fourths of the s
tates ratified it by March 30, 1870. But, as always, enforcement was immeasurably more difficult than passage.
President Grant sought new powers to counter the white supremacist terrorism spreading across the South. On May 31, 1870, he signed the Enforcement Act, the first of three versions that empowered the federal government to crack down on certain categories of crime, including terrorism and civil rights violations. Thereafter Washington could intervene through the federal court system if state and local officials failed to uphold the law. The headquarters for this war against racism and terrorism was the newly established Department of Justice, headed by the attorney general and including an Office of Solicitor General. Armed with the power not just to issue indictments but to declare a state of insurrection in a county or an entire state and to suspend habeas corpus, the Justice Department issued over three thousand indictments in 1871, with six hundred ending in convictions. This broke the power of the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups.9
This victory, however, was fleeting. Tragically, Washington intervened too late. The Confederacy was not the era’s only “lost cause.” Reconstruction lasted just a few years before white supremacists killed it. While the Justice Department could defeat terrorist groups, it could not transform the white supremacist culture that nourished them. The federal government simply lacked enough courts, prosecutors, officials, and troops to begin to confront the South’s pervasive racism and violence. Atop this, conservatives steadily retook governor’s mansions, statehouses, city halls, and state and local courts and did all they could to thwart federal initiatives. They did so largely by stuffing ballot boxes and beating or murdering liberals.
Then, while they could not restore slavery, they could nullify the liberal reforms, impose an apartheid system, and solidify their rule by gerrymandering electoral districts to render their power impregnable. Ironically, slavery’s abolition actually helped boost conservative rule. After the 1870 census, the South got more congressional representatives because each black was counted as one person rather than three-fifths of a person.
Faced with constant harassment and violence, progressive politicians and social workers increasingly gave up and left. Northern humanitarian groups cut their losses. The turning point came in 1874, when the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society disbanded itself and the American Missionary Association stopped sending liberal ministers to the South. The same year, Democrats recaptured Congress and reversed or ended virtually all Reconstruction programs. This conservative counterrevolution was perhaps best symbolized when Congress rescinded the 1866 Southern Homestead Act and opened southern public lands to railroad, lumber, and mining corporations.
With liberals rousted, one by one the southern states enacted black codes that curtailed both civil and labor rights. Laws made it all but impossible for blacks to vote, usually by imposing literacy and tax requirements. Laws forced blacks to sign work contracts binding them to white employers, and they could be jailed and fined up to $500 if they broke their contract or worked for someone else. Laws forbade blacks from migrating to cities and confined those already living there to certain “colored” districts. Laws either segregated or outright barred blacks from schools, transportation, lodging, restaurants, hospitals, parks, and orphanages. Laws forbade marriage between blacks and whites. Laws either forbade blacks from owning firearms or limited the number and type. Laws barred blacks from juries. Laws let banks discriminate against giving loans to blacks. Laws let officials issue business licenses to blacks that effectively limited them to certain occupations in certain districts. The result of this conservative counterrevolution was to lock most southern blacks into peonage, debt, illiteracy, poverty, and humiliation. W. E. B. Dubois captured the essence of what happened: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”10
Reconstruction was not confined to the South. Most northerners were just as racist. The Cincinnati Enquirer bluntly expressed the feelings of countless whites when an editorial declared, “Slavery is dead. The negro is not, there is the misfortune.”11 Before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified only eight northern states permitted blacks to vote and nearly all discriminated against blacks in other ways. Although one by one the northeastern states abolished slavery after the United States won independence, most of them, along with new northern states that forbade slavery, enacted black codes that, to varying degrees, imposed limits on blacks for lodging, transport, schooling, dining, marriage, property ownership, employment, service on juries or in the military, voting, and running for public office, to cite the more prominent. The North’s antebellum black codes inspired the South to emulate them after the war.
The 1866 Civil Rights Law forced northern and southern states alike to rewrite their constitutions and legal systems. Northern states largely complied while southern states resisted. Thereafter northern blacks could vote, serve on juries, and testify against whites; relatively few southern blacks enjoyed those fundamental rights. Yet social and economic racism across the North remained pervasive. City and state ordinances continued to limit where blacks could live, work, go to school, dine, and lodge and whom they could marry.
President Grant unwittingly aided the conservative counterrevolution by his Supreme Court. appointments. In doing so he reversed a shift from conservatism to liberalism that began after President Lincoln appointed progressive Salmon Chase to replace slavocrat Roger Taney as the chief justice in 1864. Chase’s court issued two notable liberal decisions. In the 1866 Ex Parte Milligan decision the Supreme Court ruled that military courts could not replace civilian courts as long as civilian courts continued to operate. In the 1869 Texas v. White decision a majority upheld the constitutionality of Washington’s reconstruction policies and asserted that the Constitution had established “an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States,” and thus there was no legal foundation for secession and the governments of those states that had seceded were illegal. Under the “Guarantee Clause,” Congress was empowered to restore “republican” forms of government to the rebel states.
Grant was torn between a genuine liberal belief in justice and opportunity for all and a conservative Social Darwinian belief that might makes right. The conservative side of his nature was ascendant when he appointed four corporate lawyers as justices, including Morton Waite as the chief justice after Salmon Chase died on May 7, 1873. The result was a nearly unbroken succession of decisions that bolstered the power of corporations’ and states’ rights over civil rights and the public good.12
The Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 were the first major Supreme Court rulings against the federal government’s ability to promote republican governments and civil rights in the states. The plaintiffs were white butchers in Louisiana who challenged a monopoly granted by Republican Party officeholders to a slaughtering company partly owned by blacks. They argued that the monopoly violated their Fourteenth Amendment due process right. In a five to four decision, the Supreme Court rejected the butchers’ suit with the dubious claim that the Fourteenth Amendment distinguished state and national citizenship.
The Supreme Court hammered two of the last nails into Reconstruction’s coffin with key decisions in 1876. In United States v. Reese the justices struck down the 1870 Enforcement Act that empowered the federal government to uphold civil rights in the states. In United States v. Cruikshank they ruled that solely the states and not the federal government nor individuals were required and empowered to uphold the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Cruikshank decision was especially egregious because it threw out the convictions of three men found guilty of participating in the Colfax, Louisiana, massacre of 280 blacks by a white mob.
Yet this same year the Supreme Court bucked its own conservative trend and issued two surprisingly progressive decisions that bolstered Hamiltonism. Indeed, the nation’s first treasury secretary could have ghostwritten Chief Justice Waite’s key argument in Munn v. Illinois: “When private property is devoted to a public use, it
is subject to public regulation.” In Welton v. Missouri a majority ruled that “interstate commerce shall be free and untrammeled,” thus overturning a Missouri law that violated this constitutional principle.
White supremacism was hardly the only problem afflicting the United States during the Reconstruction era. Corruption is endemic in American politics. It does, however, vary in scale and brazenness from one era to the next. Corruption soared with the industrial revolution as corporate leaders diverted portions of their soaring fortunes to buy off politicians and bureaucrats. The subsequent favors helped concentrate the profits from economic growth in fewer hands as increasingly larger corporations asserted monopolies or oligopolies over more industries. The result was what Mark Twain dubbed the Gilded Age, characterized by the elite’s accumulation of unprecedented wealth while the middle class and poor got poorer. The power of the “robber barons” to corrupt politicians steadily morphed the Republican Party from liberalism and populism into conservatism and corporatism. Plutocracy or government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich trumped Lincoln’s championing of American democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people.13
At the federal level, the potential for corruption expanded with the size of the government’s budget and the number of government personnel. The more complex a department’s budget, the more opportunities for officials to engage in creative bookkeeping to reward supplicants for kickbacks. Presidents could potentially fill as many as a hundred thousand federal government positions. This is a lot of political payback.
Ulysses S. Grant presided over one of the more corrupt administrations in America history. High-ranking officials forced to resign under corruption charges included George Robeson, the navy secretary; William Belknap, the war secretary; George Williams, the attorney general; Columbus Delano, the interior secretary; and William Richardson and George Williams, successive assistant treasury secretaries. Congressional investigations forced their resignations. While Grant himself was not venal, he turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the blatant pillaging of public resources for private gain not just by many of his subordinates but by family members including his brother-in law John Dent, his brother Orville, and his wife, Julia. When allegations arose against any of them, Grant reacted with angry denials and defenses of the accused. With time, confronted by overwhelming evidence of guilt, he realized that some members of his inner circle had hoodwinked him as well as the nation. He felt deep sorrow at being betrayed by those whom he trusted. In his last speech to Congress, in December 1876, he admitted, “Failures have been made resulting from errors of judgment, but not of intent.”14
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 29