1.5 The Failure of Reconstruction, 1870–1877

Former large slave owners were the bitterest opponents of the Republican program in the South. The Republican effort to expand political and economic opportunities for African Americans threatened their vested interest in controlling agricultural labor and their power and status in southern society. In response, they staged a massive counterrevolution to “redeem” the South by regaining control of southern state governments.

In making their case against Republican rule, the Redeemers tapped into values that had deep roots in American political culture. They claimed that the Republican Party favored centralized power and special privilege rather than local rule and individual rights. “The principle of the Union is no longer justice, but force,” declared a prominent white southerner. Most of all, however, the Redeemer appeal rested on the South’s social and cultural foundation of racism and white supremacy. Mississippi Democrats condemned the black members of the state’s Radical constitutional convention as “destitute alike of the moral and intellectual qualifications required of electors in all civilized communities.” Alabama’s State Conservative Committee abhorred “the horrors of negro domination.”

For Democrats, playing “the race card” lured poor whites away from the Republicans and prevented the formation of a biracial, class-based coalition. Declared one disgruntled scalawag, “That I am poor is not as important as that I am a white man; and no Negro is ever going to forget that he is not a white man.” Such statements also frightened blacks and Republican whites into avoiding voting and other political action. Throughout the Deep South, planters and their supporters organized secret societies to terrorize blacks and Republicans. The Ku Klux Klan emerged as the most powerful of the new terrorist groups. In 1865 a social circle of young men in Pulaski, Tennessee, organized themselves as the “Invisible Empire of the South.” New chapters of the secret lodge quickly formed in other states. Klan members, who included poor farmers as well as middle-class professionals, donned ghostly white robes and indulged in ghoulish rituals. Their intention was to frighten their victims into thinking they were the avenging ghosts of the Confederate dead.

After 1870 the Ku Klux Klan fought an ongoing terrorist campaign against Reconstruction governments and local leaders. Acting as a guerrilla army for those who sought the restoration of white supremacy, Klansmen whipped and killed Republican politicians, burned black schools and churches, and attacked Republican Party gatherings. In some communities, Klan members paraded through the streets carrying coffins bearing the names of prominent Radicals and labeled “Dead, damned and delivered.” In the bloodiest episode, Klan members murdered nearly a hundred African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, on Easter Sunday 1873 (see Figure 1.7).

In response to the racial terrorism, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871. The first prohibited state officials from interfering with a citizen’s right to vote. A second act created federal election marshals to oversee congressional elections. In April 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which outlawed the Klan and any other conspiratorial group that sought to deprive individuals of their Constitutional rights. It also empowered the president to suspend habeas corpus and to use federal troops to suppress “armed combinations.”

The legislation restricted Klan activities, but it could not stem the Democratic resurgence in the South. Democrats redeemed Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia from Radical rule between 1869 and 1871; Texas followed in 1873, and Arkansas in 1874. In 1875 a notorious campaign of terror and intimidation against black voters allowed the Democrats to seize control of Mississippi. The Democratic slogan became “Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.” Republicans fearful of violence stayed away from the polls. “The Republicans are paralyzed through fear and will not act,” the anguished carpetbag governor of Mississippi wrote to his wife. “Why should I fight a hopeless battle . . . when no possible good to the Negro or anybody else would result?”

At the national level, too, a number of forces were pushing the Republican Party to abandon its Reconstruction experiment. First, the idealism that had once informed Republican efforts had long since faded. Republicans now sought reconciliation, not confrontation, with the South. In May 1872 Congress passed a General Amnesty Act that, with some exceptions, allowed Confederate leaders to vote and to hold public office.

Second, Republicans realized that they were paying a heavy political price for their southern policies and receiving little benefit from them. Divided among themselves, Republicans watched their congressional majorities dwindle in the wake of a dramatic Democratic resurgence. In 1874 the Democrats gained a majority in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1856. “The election is not merely a victory but a revolution,” declared a New York newspaper.

The Panic of 1873 outweighed Reconstruction as a factor in the Republican defeat, but the election’s implications for Reconstruction policy were clear. Northern voters were tired of dealing with the “southern question” and the “Negro question.” “The truth is our people are tired out with the worn out cry of ‘Southern outrages’!!” a weary Republican cried. “Hard times and heavy taxes make them wish the ‘ever lasting nigger’ were in hell or Africa.”

Third, while many northerners had opposed slavery they never abandoned their racist views of African Americans. As evidence of corruption in the South mounted, and as many blacks migrated to northern cities in search of jobs, northerners openly embraced the notion that African Americans were intellectually and morally inferior, requiring the paternal protection of the superior white race. Negative stereotypes in northern newspapers depicted blacks as ignorant, lazy, and dishonest, incapable of exercising the same rights as whites. “They [blacks] plunder, and glory in it,” one northern journalist summed up; “they steal, and defy you to prove it.” Even loyal administration supporters were convinced that Reconstruction was organized theft. The New York Times called the South Carolina legislature “a gang of thieves,” its government “a sort of grand orgie.”

Fourth, serious strains emerged within Republican ranks in the South. Race played a central role in fracturing the always fragile southern Republican Party. Poor whites were never willing to concede political equality to blacks. Republicans found it difficult to satisfy their black constituents’ demands for equality without alienating whites. White Republicans were also divided among themselves. Scalawags resented carpetbaggers, who they believed had seized offices that should have gone to native whites. Meanwhile, in state after state, Democrats skillfully exploited deepening fiscal problems by blaming Republicans for excessive spending and sharp tax increases.

These pressures proved too much for most Republicans. With support for Reconstruction unraveling, Radical pleas for new measures to protect the political and civil rights of African Americans fell on deaf ears. The one exception was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, passed in the closing hours of the Republican-controlled Congress. The law guaranteed persons of every race “the full and equal treatment” of all public facilities such as hotels, theaters, and railroads.

However, several Supreme Court decisions involving the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments undermined protection of black rights. In the so-called Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873, the Court offered a narrow definition of the Fourteenth Amendment by distinguishing between national and state citizenship. By giving the states primary authority over citizens’ rights, the courts weakened civil rights enforcement. For example, in 1876 the Court decided, in United States v. Cruikshank, that a mob attack on blacks trying to vote did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Republican leaders approached the 1876 presidential campaign with foreboding. “My God, it is ruin!” exclaimed Republican James G. Blaine. In an effort to distance themselves from the scandals of the Grant administration, party leaders turned to Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes. Not only did Hayes hail from an electoral vote–rich state, but he had also earned a reputation for honesty, possessed an honorable Civil War record, and supported civil service reform. He had articulated a moderate stance on Reconstruction, which Republicans hoped would appeal to conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats.

Signaling that they planned to exploit the Grant scandals, the Democrats nominated Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, a well-known corruption fighter. At their June convention in St. Louis, Democrats passed a platform promising to save the nation from “a corrupt centralism which has honeycombed the offices of the Federal government itself with incapacity, waste, and fraud.”

On election night, it appeared that the Democrats had regained the White House for the first time since before the Civil War. Tilden received 51 percent of the popular vote (4,284,020) to Hayes’s 48 percent (4,036,572). But Republicans charged that Democrats won the elections in three southern states—Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida—by fraud and intimidation. Both sides claimed the electoral votes in those states (see Figure 1.8).

When Congress reconvened in January it confronted an unprecedented situation: three states with two different sets of electoral votes. If Congress accepted all the Republican votes, Hayes would have a one-vote electoral majority. The Constitution did not cover such a scenario, and as weeks passed without a solution, people feared that the impasse could escalate into a major national crisis.

On January 29, 1877, Congress set up a fifteen-member Joint Electoral Commission to resolve the dispute. The committee was made up of seven Democrats and seven Republicans, with the swing vote going to an independent member of the Supreme Court, Justice David Davis. But Davis withdrew from the Court and the commission. With no Democrats or any other independents on the Court, a Republican named Joseph P. Bradley took Davis’s seat on the commission. Not surprisingly, the commission voted eight to seven along straight partisan lines and gave the election to Hayes.

Congress still had to approve the results, and the Democrats were threatening to filibuster. On February 26, 1877, prominent Ohio Republicans and powerful southern Democrats met at the Wormley House hotel in Washington, where they reached an informal agreement, later called the Compromise of 1877. The Republicans promised that Hayes would withdraw the last federal troops from Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina; include at least one southerner in his cabinet; provide federal subsidies for southern internal improvements; and give conservatives control of political patronage. In return, the Democrats promised to support Hayes’s election and to accept the Reconstruction amendments. On March 2, 1877, only two days before the scheduled inauguration, the House voted to accept the commission’s report and declared Hayes elected by an electoral vote of 185 to 184.

Hayes’s election signaled the formal end of the Reconstruction era. In a speech in Atlanta in the fall of 1877 Hayes told former slaves that their “rights and interests would be safer” if southern whites were “let alone by the general government.”