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Professor David Blight: In his little novel The
Hamlet, William Faulkner has a line he puts in the mouth of
one of his characters. It's one of the Snopes'.
There's lots of Snopes' in Faulkner's novels,
especially that novel. It comes from the deep,
dark heart, as only Faulkner really wrote it,
of the burden of the past, of memory of slavery,
the Civil War, and Reconstruction on the
South, but he's really referring to all of us,
he's referring to humanity. It's one of the best single
sentence descriptive explanations of what happened to
the legacy and memory of all these events I've ever read.
He has his character say, "Only thank God men have done
learned how to forget quick what they ain't brave enough to try
to cure." I'll do it once more.
"Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what
they ain't brave enough to cure."
Can't solve that problem, weighed down too heavily by
that problem, don't have the solutions for
all the world's ills, it's an ancient problem,
it's a natural problem, forget it, try to forget it.
Structure ways to forget it. Americans weren't forgetting by
1876, at least in a host of ways.
They were about to have the magnificent centennial of their
independence. Now that year will bring,
as we'll see in a moment, a pivotal election,
to say the least. It'll end in a disputed--the
first--not the first, really the second--great
disputed election in American history,
and a sordid political compromise that most of us in
textbooks and in teaching still call the end of Reconstruction.
But I'm going to leave that question of when Reconstruction
ended to all the great forthcoming books of my various
graduate students who are going to solve that issue,
and I'm going to probably suggest before we finish that
it's never quite ended. But listen to just a couple of
the public commentaries, that year, of America's
centennial of independence and what they were thinking about.
The New York Evening Post announced:
"The great work of the century,"
it said, "is finished, and the year which is about to
dawn will be the very first one wholly free from the duty of
dealing with the old and dangerous subject.
Slavery died in this country ten years ago,
but not until now have we finished the work of readjusting
our national life to the new order of things.
Not until now have the questions which grew out of
slavery been fully and finally settled.
Not until now have the echoes of the war died out of our
politics and our lives." Just listen to how conclusive
that is--it's over folks. Or the Springfield
Republican, a Republican Party paper,
an old abolitionist paper, 1876: "We must get rid of the
Southern question. There is no chance or hope of
healthy politics until we do get rid of it.
So long as the war issues are capable of being warmed over,
from year to year, and election to election,
so long as a large section of the country is disturbed by
violence and paralyzed by misgovernment,
so long as white is arrayed against black,
so long will our politics be feverish with this disease."
Multiple choice question: what's the disease?
You can make up the answers and you can pick.
Or the New York Times, not a liberal paper in these
years: "Ten years ago the North was nearly united in a feeling
of sympathy for the freedmen and in a determination to defend
their rights. Now, not a few believe that the
rights of the whites are those which have been infringed upon."
Historical memory is always a contest, it's always a struggle,
it's always a battle, a debate over who gets to own
it, control it, narrate it, organize it,
declare it. And everybody was trying.
But in Philadelphia they put on the biggest show the United
States had ever put on, the biggest show the United
States had ever attempted. The United States Centennial
Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, throughout that,
from spring all the way through the fall, was attended by--it's
really almost hard to believe--but it was attended by
ten million people. That was close to one-fourth of
the entire U.S. population.
Imagine today an exposition, an event, attended--physically
now, not on the Internet and television--attended by
one-quarter of us. They had a wax replica of
Cleopatra there, a huge thing.
What the hell that had to do with the U.S.
Centennial, God only knows. But you know,
when you want to be a great country you got to reach over
history and back to classical times.
The great theme of the exposition, of course,
though, was machines. It was the Machine Age.
It was the excitement of technology.
They had a telephone there, a typewriter,
an electric light, a new floor-cloth called
linoleum. They celebrated packaged yeast
and something called--are you ready?--the internal combustion
engine. The Corliss steam engine.
A gigantic thing, it's now today in the
Smithsonian, in Washington--you can see this,
it's an amazing thing. It was 700 tons and forty-feet
high, and people looked at it in awe.
This thing was going to make energy, for the future.
Machines and technology, it was said,
over and over and over and over, were remaking American
society, would remake its future,
and would make the United States the greatest
manufacturing, industrial producing nation on
earth. True.
All of this national self-congratulation ignored or
masked some of the less admiral features of American life.
And of course it would. You don't have a national
centennial celebration and then say, "Oh by the way,
you can buy your ticket here to celebrate and you can buy your
ticket here to look at all of our tragedies."
We don't do that, do we? But it doesn't mean that
history's not happening. The Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts exhibitions--every state had one--made no mention
of the great labor strikes that had just hit their states,
even though twenty-seven of the very textile mills that had just
been struck in Fall River, Massachusetts,
exhibited their wares at the exposition.
There was no mention whatsoever of the enduring economic
depression, which was still going on in 1876.
There was a Women's Pavilion, added as an afterthought at the
last minute. It housed collections of
needlework and weaving and demonstrations of power looms.
There were no mentions whatsoever of women's political
subordination or activism, the crusade for women's
suffrage which was going on everywhere.
Women suffragists tried to be recognized and to protest,
in fact, at the exhibition; weren't allowed to.
Women's place in this was essentially apolitical.
For African Americans there were no exhibits at all about
them. They were even excluded from
the construction crews that built all the halls.
There was something called a Southern Restaurant,
which according to the guidebook featured,
quote, "a band of old-time plantation darkies performing
songs." There was a bale of Benjamin
Montgomery's cotton, from Davis Bend,
Mississippi, which won an agricultural medal
at the exposition, beating out cotton from all
over the South and from Brazil and from Egypt and the Fiji
Islands and other places, but no mention whatsoever made
of the recent violent overthrow of reconstruction in
Mississippi. American Indians were
represented at the exposition but almost exclusively depicted
as a people of the past, or as harmless and primitive
noble savages. They were either a vanishing
Indian or an Indian of a kind of cultural mystique,
a deeply American mystique. And then came the news right
after the 4^(th) of July where some real Indians rudely
interrupted all the celebrations.
The news arrived that General George Armstrong Custer had been
defeated, indeed wiped out, all his men killed--well almost
all--by the Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse, at a place called Little
Bighorn. Custer's Last Stand,
images of which would end up behind the bar in every saloon
west of the Mississippi, and a hell of a lot of them
east of the Mississippi, for the rest of that century.
That victory for the Indians, of course, would be a pyrrhic
victory in their struggle to hold onto land,
culture, place. What was also occurring here,
by 1876, of course, the subtext of this great
national celebration, if not its central theme,
was the sectional North/South reunion, the great
reconciliation from the Civil War.
Now one might say that's inevitable, it had to happen.
I said this at the beginning of our whole unit on
Reconstruction, the North and the South had to
come back together. The South wasn't going to go
somewhere, you couldn't exile them all to Brazil.
But in that reconciliation, as Faulkner said in that
passage, there is a tremendous amount of forgetting going on
about that which people cannot or will not cure.
And what is going on in great part is that peace among the
whites that Frederick Douglass had worried about the year
before, in 1875. Back up with me now though to
1874, at least quickly. We're going to look at two
elections today, which kind of move us toward
what we can at least call some vestige of an end of
Reconstruction. The 1874 congressional
elections took on a significance that off-year congressional
elections don't always have; although we've had some of
these kinds of off-year congressional elections in our
own lifetime, in recent years.
Like 1994, which you may or not remember, when the Gingrich
Republican movement took over the Congress and after 40 years
of Democratic rule they were gone.
And then in '06, the Democrats take back both
houses of Congress, etcetera.
In essence, the '74 congressional elections were a
referendum on Reconstruction. You'll remember the
Slaughterhouse case had come out in '73.
The Depression had set in surely by 1874,
deeply, and certainly by the fall elections of 1874.
This became the great takeover of Congress by the Democratic
Party, so under duress since the Civil War,
since they had been the party, in many ways,
that had not favored the war for the Union or the war to free
the slaves. And its coverage in the press
after this tells it all. The Buffalo Advertiser
says, in the wake of it, its headline:
"Republican Party Struck by Lightening," it said.
Or another newspaper, the Louisville Courier
Journal, a Democratic paper, said, headline:
"Busted, the Radical Machine Gone to Smash."
But what happened was this. The Democrats captured the
House of Representatives. It went from a Republican
majority of 110--that's how many more Republicans there were than
Democrats on the eve of this election.
This is the Republican Party now that has run Congress,
since Abraham Lincoln's election.
For the whole Civil War and Reconstruction it's been a
Republican Congress. They went from a Republican
majority of 110 overnight to a Democratic Party majority of
sixty. In the wake of the election
there were 109 Republicans left and there were 169 Democrats.
And it upset patterns, the election did,
in state after state after state, that were two,
at least two decades old, in American political culture.
Democrats took back a small majority of the Senate.
But at the state and local level it was just as important.
Democrats won the Governor's Office in New York and
Massachusetts; in fact, they won the
Governor's Office in something like twenty-three states.
Of thirty-five states holding elections, twenty-three state
legislatures went to Democrats. Southerners now,
with their party, the Democratic Party,
which was now a national party, no longer have to feel like
aliens in their native land. And this is what newspapers all
over the place kept writing, over and over,
in celebration. Listen to this one.
This was a Tennessee paper, a Nashville paper,
which said, I quote: "The recent election was not an
election," said the Tennessee paper.
"It was a country coming to a halt and changing front.
The whole scheme of Reconstruction stands before the
country today a naked, confessed, stupendous failure;
at once the most remarkable and the most inexcusable failure in
all of history." A little hyperbole,
but making their case. The cause is,
of course, relatively obvious, but it was still a shock,
certainly to Republicans. There was tremendous fatigue
with the reformist--in the political culture,
including the North, or especially the North--there
was tremendous political fatigue with the reformist spirit of the
Republican Party. The economic depression was
absolutely central to this election and why the Dems came
back. The scandals and mismanagement
of the Grant years already setting in.
It was a big deal by '74; it's going to be an even bigger
deal by 1876. The Democrats are going to
portray themselves now as the Reform Party,
the party of civil service reform, the party of clean
government.
Most of all, I'd say, the Republican Party
by 1874--and how many times have you seen this in American
political history?--the Republican Party of 1874 paid a
high price for its recent history of support of black
rights and the idea of racial equality.
Just exactly as the Democratic Party would do in the wake of
LBJ's Great Society, the '64 and '65 Civil Rights
Acts, the famous moment when Bill Moyers tells us--or was it
Bill Moyers who said to LBJ; was it LBJ that said to Bill
Moyers, after they passed the '65 Civil Rights Act;
which way was it? It's LBJ to Bill Moyers,
as only LBJ could. He probably said
something--well I'll clean it up.
"Well Bill, we've done lost the South for a generation,
because of what we just passed."
And LBJ will only live to 1971, of course;
he won't live to quite see it, but he was absolutely right.
Southern redemption kept happening, although seven of the
eleven Southern ex-Confederate states were already back under
the control of the Southern Democratic Party,
even before this. Now in the wake of this
election--one more will come more the next year,
and only three will be left, by the '76 presidential
contest; South Carolina,
Mississippi and Louisiana unredeemed, as the South put it.
This was an election also all about this emerging reunion,
or reconciliation, of some kind.
Let me give you a couple of illustrations of what happened
in the wake of this election. In Vicksburg,
Mississippi, the following summer--and
there's actually, there's a bit about this in
Nick Lemann's book, which you're reading,
and I'm sparing you any lecturing about what happened in
Mississippi in 1875 because that's what Lemann's book is all
about, the so-called Shotgun Policy,
the violent overthrow of Reconstruction by the white
Democratic Party in Mississippi. But in Vicksburg,
Vicksburg of all places, blacks held a very public
4^(th) of July celebration in 1875, and that took courage,
it was bold. Their own politicians spoke.
A black Republican circuit judge gave a speech.
The black secretary of state in Mississippi gave a remarkable
speech, a somewhat challenging speech to the Democrats.
And just as he was ending his speech a mob of about fifty
white people invaded the big hall they were having it in,
and a shot was fired as a signal, and they opened up,
and they just started firing. They killed two on the spot,
wounded about ten, that died later.
It was a 4^(th) of July celebration, stopped by
cold-blooded ***. There was an observer,
at this event, an African-American,
who wrote an account of it, under the pseudonym Veni Vidi,
which means I came, I saw, and it was published in
the New York Herald Tribune,
as well as the Christian Recorder and some other
places. He laid the blame for this not
on that white mob. I mean, they were tired of
blaming white rednecks in the South for killing them.
Veni Vidi blamed it on national reconciliation.
He said the killings on the 4^(th) of July in Vicksburg were
because, quote, "Boston and Ohio were
holding the coats for Georgia and Mississippi while they slay
the common victim of northern prejudice and southern hate."
That's a very clear, on the ground,
eyewitness description of where responsibility now for this may
lie; not just with the mob but with
the folk who are allowing the mob to do its business.
All right, between 1874 and 1876 arguably what the country
is assessing--and you can see who's winning--what the country
is assessing is the question, which revolution is actually
going to win? If this is a second American
Revolution, which is a construction historians have put
onto this over time, with different meanings;
Charles Beard had a different meaning than Eric Foner,
and others of us have used it. But which revolution would
prevail? Is it the revolution of 1863 to
'65? Is it the revolution that
Abraham Lincoln finally named, and then said would be
enforced, very bluntly, in his Second Inaugural?
"With every drop of blood shed by the lash it shall be paid in
blood shed by the sword." Or is it the other revolution,
the counter-revolution, the white Southern Democratic
revolution against Reconstruction,
against the changes of the Civil War, against the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments?
Which revolution? The revolution of black freedom
or the redemption of white supremacy?
Those are the stakes. Those are very,
very high stakes.
In fact, just let me use a picture or two for the heck of
it. This may go without saying,
but not really. Which image did Americans,
white Americans, which image,
in their minds, in their brains,
when they went to the polls--what image when we go to
the polls now do most white Americans want of black people?
Is it him? Is it that genius in his
perfect white shirts who could speak and write like Goethe,
and would remind you of it, and would explain things in
language that might make you quiver in your seat?
Is it black genius they wanted to see?
Or--I don't know if you can see that--did they want to see Chloe
and Sam? It's a painting by Thomas
Hovenden, a wonderful painter. He's the same painter who
painted that colossal painting of John Brown with the rifle in
one hand and the Bible in the other and hair on fire;
it's at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, go see it.
Anyway, Hovenden's painting here, a beautiful,
a sentimental--I'm not sure how carefully you can see this or
how well you can see this with the lighting in here.
It's Chloe and Sam, it's two old freedmen.
Sam seems to be cooling down the teapot maybe.
Chloe's ironing. They got their own house.
He hunts. They're peaceful,
they're settled. They're the old slaves.
There's Aunt Chloe and Uncle Sam, and they're not going to
threaten anybody.
Well forgive this image, this is--I don't know who drew
this, it just comes from the Library of Congress.
Or is this an image now that a lot of Americans,
they may not prefer it, but are certainly willing to
accept about the sons and daughters of Chloe and Sam,
who got really assertive, who wanted to vote,
who were holding office, who were walking in their
perfect white shirts and their suits in the halls of Congress
and the halls of state legislatures,
who insisted on education and property ownership and all those
crazy rights of citizenship?
Where should black people be in that imagination?
All right, the election of 1876 comes.
If the election of 1874 was a referendum on Reconstruction,
the election of 1876 was a referendum, if you like,
on reunion. How indeed would this reunion
actually occur? Would there really truly be a
reunion? Now this was an election,
of course, where both parties now, for the first time since
the Civil--well for the first time really since before the
Civil War. In fact you certainly could
argue that it's the first time since really 1856 that two
parties in an American presidential election have faced
each other as truly national and virtually equal in power,
authority, membership to some degree, and so on.
It's the Centennial year. It comes in the wake of these
tremendous scandals of the second Grant Administration.
The Whiskey Ring wasn't blown open until the second term.
Crédit Mobilier wasn't blown open 'till the second
term; the Belknap Scandal not 'till
the second term. The Democrats now,
in '76, they're going to portray themselves again--as
they had in '74 but now it's a presidential election--as the
party of reform, the party of clean government
and, thank you very much, the party of white supremacy
that'll finally put Reconstruction to death in those
three states in the South where it still exists in some form.
The election was a test of either reunion or redemption and
on whose terms. The Democrats ran for president
Samuel J. Tilden.
He was the governor of New York. Governors of New York have
often been candidates for president for a whole variety of
good reasons. He was one of the richest men
in the United States. He was a very wealthy trial
lawyer. He had a reputation for reform
based largely on the fact that he had gone--as the governor of
New York--he had gone after Boss Tweed,
who ran the boss system of New York City, and as the press
always put it, he bagged him,
he got him. He found him--he got him on
charges. They were able to prosecute
against Boss Tweed. So Tilden cleaned up New York,
they said, to some degree. Now the Republicans,
on the other hand, now needed a new face,
somebody untainted by the Grant Administration,
and somebody who had some distance from Reconstruction.
But it was still terribly important to run a veteran.
And this is going to be the case for years in American
history. In the South,
you couldn't get elected a governor or a senator from a
southern state for the next 25 years if you weren't a
Confederate veteran. And it surely helped you in the
North if you were a Union veteran.
So they went to Ohio, that seedbed of presidents--no
more jokes about Ohio--and they found Rutherford B.
Hayes. Now Hayes had many things going
for him. He had indeed been a Civil
War--he was a Civil War veteran. He'd been wounded about six
times in the war. He was a serious combat
survivor. He'd also been elected Governor
of Ohio three times. He was known to be a
conservative, not terribly engaged in
Reconstruction issues. Oh, he supported black rights
in some sort of general way. He will promise something for
almost everyone, depending on where he went,
in the vaguest possible terms, and he will inspire,
once again, that cynical SOB, Henry Adams,
for one of the best descriptions I've ever read of
Rutherford Hayes. A little unfair,
as Adams always was as a satirist.
Henry Adams said Rutherford Hayes was a, quote,
"third-rate, non-entity whose only
recommendation is that he is obnoxious to no one."
You know, how many times have we done this in our politics
though? Find somebody that nobody quite
knows, doesn't have a lot of enemies, got elected,
no strong views, and run him;
yes, and provided you don't have a year and a half bloody
primary to put him through.
Now, this would be a brutal, brutal election,
in its rhetoric. Just an example or two.
Republicans now, facing this frankly virulently,
openly white supremacist campaign on the part of the
Democrats, but also facing the charges of
scandal and corruption, which are very real,
they want to misdirect people's, their attention.
They don't want people to think about those scandals,
and if they can help it they don't even want people to have
to think about Reconstruction for awhile.
So what do they do? They wave the bloody shirt.
When in doubt in the nineteenth century, for the Republican--and
they're going to keep doing it right on up through the 1896
election, against William Jennings Bryan;
that's getting ahead of ourselves.
But man, they're going to trot out every living,
surviving, sentient Civil War general,
by as late as 1896, put them on trains and
barnstorm them all over the country,
and paint William Jennings Bryan as a secessionist,
because he was a populist. At any rate,
here's one example of the kind of bloody shirt rhetoric that
the Republican Party trotted out against the Democrats in 1876.
This came from Colonel Robert Ingersoll, a famous agnostic;
a very popular orator, especially at Grand Army of the
Republic reunions and political gatherings.
He said this in September of '76.
Quote--classic bloody shirt: "Every state that seceded from
the United States was a Democratic state.
Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat.
Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a
Democrat. The man that assassinated
Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Every man that raised
bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat.
Soldiers, every scar you have got on your heroic bodies was
given to you by a Democrat." And those Union veterans would
get up and cheer, "Yay, scars,
Democrat scars." [Laughter]
It worked, it worked in a lot of places.
The war is only ten years ago, and there are hundreds of
thousands of Union veterans. They are the base of the
Republican Party, a deep, broad base,
especially across the Midwest, which is where they're all
moving, and in the far West; Civil War veterans are moving
west. In the election again the
rhetoric got terrible and when the election was held it was a
very violent election. We'll never know,
no one will ever know, how many thousands of
African-American voters, especially in the three states
of Mississippi, Louisiana and South
Carolina--excuse me, Mississippi,
South Carolina and Louisiana as well, but also Florida--we'll
never know how many were intimidated and kept from the
polls. We know it was thousands,
hundreds of thousands in all likelihood.
One Republican official in Mississippi, observing the
election, said in his view the white population was essentially
one vast mob. Now what happened,
of course, is that Tilden carried all of--a map here may
be useful--Tilden--I don't know how well you can see that but at
least you see the contours of it--Tilden,
the Democrat, carried all of the solid South
except--now solid Democratic South--except three states,
the three states remaining under teetering Republican
regimes, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida.
Tilden also carried four northern states:
his own, New York; New Jersey;
Connecticut; and Indiana.
Hayes carried all the rest of the North and much of the West.
But without the three southern states counted,
Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina,
the electoral count--and when the returns came in,
that night and the next day; and it took longer in those
years, it took at least twenty-four hours after an
election ended, and sometimes forty-eight hours
before they even had real, official counts.
In the Electoral College--now first of all there's no question
that at least in the votes cast, Tilden won the popular vote.
If you like, in terms of numbers,
he's the Al Gore of the 1876 election, he won the popular
vote, of the votes cast. Now how many hundreds of
thousands, particularly of black Republicans who didn't vote,
for fear for their lives, we don't know.
In the Electoral College, before you count the three
disputed states, the number was 184 to 166,
Tilden to Hayes. It took 185 to be elected.
The handwriting on the wall initially was that--well,
even in the official Republican Party offices in Washington DC,
as the returns were coming in the next day,
they were about to hold news conferences,
send out messages and say, "Well guys, guess we lost."
And then quickly, quickly, inside their offices,
they realized that there were nineteen electoral votes in the
three disputed states, and they said,
"No news conferences, we're going to win those
three." How?
Well that remains to be seen. The disputed election of 1876
was disputed over the three states, that still had
Republican regimes, that had widespread fraud,
violence and intimidation practice in their elections.
No one will ever know, as long as we live,
exactly who won where, although we do have some good
guesses now from scholarship. But what ensued was the longest
disputed election we've ever had.
The Gore/Bush affair of 2000 lasted, what,
thirty-five days before the Supreme Court chose our
president. It isn't going to be a lot
different here, although the Supreme Court will
have only a very limited role. The official popular vote count
in 1876 was four million, two-hundred and eighty-four
thousand-some odd votes for Tilden and four million,
thirty-six thousand and some odd votes for Hayes.
That was an official popular vote.
One of the best ways to think about this election is that
frankly the Democrats stole it and then the Republicans stole
it back. I hate to sound so cynical but
frankly folks that's essentially what happened.
Under the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, of course, if there's a
disputed election and no one gets a majority of the Electoral
College--we ignored this one in 2000;
I just thought I'd point that out--it is supposed to go to the
House of Representatives, and the House of
Representatives, in its good councils,
shall choose the President, says the U.S. Constitution.
They followed the Constitution in 1876, they actually did;
well, to a degree they did. With the country waiting,
with all kinds of rumors flying in the press--I went back and
studied the press in these disputed months for this earlier
book I did on memory, and it's amazing the rumors.
You've got southern papers like the Atlanta Constitution
printing long stories about local militias in upstate New
York that are drilling, calling themselves the Sons of
Liberty, readying themselves to march into the South.
And you've got northern papers like the Chicago Tribune
printing article after article about Confederate mobs and
militias, they're drilling all over the
South and preparing themselves to march into the North;
most of which were completely false.
But it became long, tense, winter months of fear.
And now, of course, when fear sets in,
blood memory sets in. The United States House of
Representatives decided to establish an Electoral
Commission. It would have 15 members.
There would be five Republicans, five Democrats,
and five Supreme Court Justices--fifteen people.
Sounds relatively fair. Not quite.
Three of the Supreme Court Justices were Republicans,
two of them were Democrats. That means there eight
Republicans and seven Democrats on this Electoral Commission.
The job of this Electoral Commission was to investigate
the voting returns of the three disputed states of Louisiana,
Florida and South Carolina. They were to study the returns.
The Democrats in Congress initiated a long filibuster,
and they held it. They started a filibuster in
December of '76 and they're still doing it.
They're reading city directories and whatever other
garbage--they didn't have phone books yet.
They were just reading newspaper articles,
day in and day out, until the third week--fourth
week of February of '77. Nothing went on in the U.S.
Congress. There were threats of disunion.
Hot-headed Democrats would announce the slogan 'Tilden or
fight.' President Ulysses Grant,
lame duck, can't wait to get out of office;
already has his ship booked for his grand tour around the world.
He'll leave on May 17^(th) for the greatest tour any American
ever made of Planet Earth--that's another story.
But Grant quietly began to rebuild and re-garrison some of
the forts around Washington DC. And lo and behold,
the commission met, and lo and behold they voted.
Guess what? It's a suspense.
They voted eight to seven that the Republican,
Hayes, had won in Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina,
based on the theory of widespread fraud and violence.
Now there's a lot to that. They never really knew what
those voting counts were, to be honest.
But the way in which the disputed election of 1876 was
settled, of course, was ultimately not even by that
Electoral Commission. It was settled in the Wormley
Hotel, on February 26th and 27^(th) of 1877,
in a forty-eight hour meeting between five Ohio Republicans,
representing Hayes, and four Southern Democrats,
representing Tilden. The Compromise of 1877,
as it is called, was a deal.
It was a deal based on interests, not on votes.
The Democrats were willing to give up the presidency if they
could get in return what they most needed.
They wanted federal subsidies for a Western Pacific Railroad,
at least one, with a southern terminus.
They wanted their harbors dredged.
They wanted federal subsidies to rebuild the infrastructure of
the South. Lo and behold,
they wanted federal money; all these states' rights
southern Democrats, thank you very much,
they wanted federal money to rebuild their society.
"Bring us your investments," they'd been saying for a long
time to carpetbaggers, "just don't come here and try
to get elected."
Here was the deal. And by the way,
one of the chief brokers, there were several chief
brokers. One was James Garfield,
of Ohio, a close personal friend and associate of
Rutherford B. Hayes;
later succeeded him as President of the United States,
and to be assassinated. But the other great broker at
the '77 Compromise was Tom Scott, the president of the
Texas Pacific Railroad. He'd been one of the great
American railroad kings for years and he brokered really
especially the economic/financial parts of this
deal. Here was the deal.
Home rule, the Republicans said, would be returned to
Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida.
The Republicans agreed to let the southern Democrats take over
those three states, abandoning their own party
leaders, abandoning a lot of black elected officials who are
still running those governments, and the Republicans promised
they would help get Democrats elected governors of those
states. They agreed to remove all final
federal troops from the South. And this has always been a big
symbolic thing; well, which is exactly what it
is, it's a big symbolic thing. There were very few troops left
anywhere in the South and those few thousand that were still
there are located in forts along the coast.
And quietly Ulysses Grant signed a bill in the third week
of February, just before the deal at the Wormley Hotel,
that repealed the law placing those troops in the South.
One, and possibly two, cabinet positions in Hayes'
cabinet were promised to Southern Democrats.
They particularly promised the Postmaster Generalship,
because of its patronage powers.
The Democrats agreed to help James Garfield become Speaker of
the House. It's a deal folks;
quid pro quo, *** for tat. The Democrats agreed to
enforce--well, I can almost not say this
one--the Democrats agreed to enforce the Civil War amendments
and black civil rights--uh huh--and the Democrats agreed to
stop their filibuster, accept the official count,
and allow Hayes to be peacefully inaugurated three
days later or four days later. On March 3^(rd),
Rutherford B. Hayes was privately
inaugurated. No outdoor inauguration on the
steps of the capitol, as they are always done.
They feared violence, interruptions.
They didn't know what was going to happen.
He was privately inaugurated, quietly in the East Room of the
White House. Catastrophe had been averted,
but at what a price. C.
Vann Woodward once accurately called this compromise a treaty,
as much as a compromise. And if the Compromise of 1850,
you'll remember, is so often referred to as an
armistice, rather than a compromise,
this Compromise of 1877 was, in some ways,
a treaty. And, oh by the way,
Hayes made it very clear, in private communications,
what he'd been really saying publicly,
and that is that his southern policy would be essentially--his
own phrase--a let-alone policy. The South would be allowed to
control its own social institutions,
its political culture, its lives.
Even Grant himself had said that Reconstruction was dead and
maybe we made mistakes and shouldn't have even tried.
Grant himself said to his cabinet that the Fifteenth
Amendment, he said, had, quote, "done the *** no
good." Oh Ulysses.
And right after the inauguration an editorial in
Nation Magazine--now a fuming, reformist magazine;
they want to clean up American corruption--E.L.
Godkin, its great editor at the Nation,
said--he rejoiced in fact at this compromise,
this settling of this dispute--and he announced,
his words: "The ***," he said,
"will disappear now from the field of national politics.
Henceforth the nation as a nation will have nothing more to
do with him." Now there are many meanings,
legacies, implications of this compromise.
There are many long-lasting implications and legacies of
this compromise, in this particular end of
Reconstruction. And it does seem like a sort of
dead end, a lights-going-out kind of moment to all that
idealism, or whatever we wish to call it,
that emerged from the war. It would leave a person like
Frederick Douglass in a certain degree of despair.
He would begin to make speeches, and he will the rest
of his life, about trying to hold onto an emancipationist,
abolitionist, memory of the Civil War and
Reconstruction. He makes a speech a few years
later where he's lamenting what has now been betrayed and lost
and is eroding out of their fingers.
He says Reconstruction is only--was only perhaps a rope of
sand. But, he drew upon,
at the end of that speech, he drew upon one of the most
revolutionary moments in the Bible,
to try to keep a certain degree of hope alive about what had at
least been started. He went to the Lazarus story,
the story of Jesus raising Lazarus literally from the dead.
And Douglass said, "The assumption that the cause
of the *** is a dead issue now is delusion, utter delusion.
For the moment he may be buried under the dust and rubbish of
endless discussion concerning civil service reform,
tariff and free trade, labor and capital,
but our Lazarus is not dead, he only sleeps."
See you next week.