Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

New Orleans and campaigned for Grant in 1868. Former Georgia governor Joseph Brown and former South Carolina representative (and Speaker of the U.S. House) James Lawrence Orr, also joined the Republicans and advocated cooperation with the Radicals. J. D. B. DeBow revived the old DeBow’s Review and called upon Southerners to encourage the immigration of Northern workers and Northern industry. In 1869, when Congress adopted the Fifteenth Amendment, which specifically prohibited any abridgement of voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the new Southern governments ratified the amendment in less than a year. By 1870 all of the former Confederate states had been satisfactorily reconstructed and readmitted to the Union.85 The Civil War, at least in the sense that secession had made it, now seemed complete.

Yet, despite the apparent successes of congressional Reconstruction, the health of the Reconstruction governments remained critically dependent on two restraints. One was the continued exclusion of the most dangerous ex-Confederates from political power in the South, and the other was continued support and encouragement from Washington, especially in the form of soldiers who would be available to enforce the civil rights statutes. During Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms as president, from 1869 until 1877, both of those restraints gradually melted away.

Some of the slow erosion of federal support for Reconstruction occurred simply from attrition. Thaddeus Stevens died in August 1868, asking to be buried in a segregated cemetery for African American paupers so that “I might illustrate in death the principles which I advocated through a long life, Equality of man before his Creator.” The next year, Ben Wade lost his powerful Senate seat when the Ohio legislature was captured by Democrats; Edwin Stanton died on Christmas Eve, 1869, only four days after Grant nominated him to sit on the Supreme Court; Henry Wilson left the Senate in 1872 to run as Grant’s vice president, and died in 1875; James Ashley accepted the territorial governorship of Montana from Grant and left Congress; Salmon P. Chase drifted back to his old Democratic friends and died in the spring of 1873; Charles Sumner followed him the next year, having pleaded with Congress to pass a newer and more stringent civil rights bill (which it did in 1875).86

Also gone was the Republican majority in the House, which was replaced in 1874 by the first Democratic majority since the beginning of the Civil War, and the Republican majority in the Senate, which was lost in the elections of 1878. Without the cutting edge provided by Stevens, Wade, and Sumner, the surviving Radicals lost their taste for bold interventions in state affairs. Not until 1888 would Republicans regain sufficient numbers in Congress to renew their efforts to impose federal supervision of Southern voting with a fresh “Force Bill,” drafted by Henry Cabot Lodge. The bill passed the House, only to die a lingering death in the Senate. It had all been, in the memorable title of Judge Albion Tourgee’s 1879 memoir, “a fool’s errand, by one of the fools.”87

As it was, they got little enough encouragement from President Grant. Although Grant’s administration has frequently been portrayed as a miasma of corruption, presided over by a military genius who turned out to be a political nincompoop, his administration was probably no more spotted than most of the prewar administrations—James Buchanan, for instance, presided over one of the most corrupt cabinets in the nineteenth century—and not much worse, in fact, than the graft and bribery that went on under the table of Lincoln’s wartime administration. Grant was also more politically skilled than his critics estimated, as his adroit sidestepping of Andrew Johnson demonstrated. And he demonstrated considerable determination to smash anti-black civil violence from the Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, it was also true that Grant was not a political risk taker. His slogan—“Let us have peace”— guaranteed that he would take equal offense at the prodding of both Radicals and Democrats, unless it was skillfully handled, and as the Radicals lost the services of Wade, Ashley, Stevens, and Sumner, the prodding became progressively more flaccid. By that time, even the Republican faithful had lost heart in the fight. The cries for help from Southern blacks for government intervention increasingly came to sound in Republican ears like the demands of populist farmers for currency inflation or unionized workers for economic regulation. “Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing the baby,” asked the Chicago Tribune irritably in 1875.88

In disgust, many of the surviving Radicals staged a back-door rebellion in 1872 in an effort to dump Grant from the party ticket, and they eventually ran Horace Greeley as the joint presidential nominee of what was briefly called the Liberal Republicans, as well as the Democrats. Greeley was crushed in the election (he failed to win even a single electoral vote), but the divisions made in the Republican Party’s ranks only further weakened their resolve to enforce the Reconstruction legislation their party had created. In the fall of 1875, when gun-toting whites in Mississippi attacked Republican political rallies in Yazoo City and Jackson, the Republican governor, a former Union army general named Adelbert Ames, appealed to Grant for troops to put down the rioters. So did Daniel H. Chamberlain, the Republican governor of South Carolina, after six blacks were shot to death in Hamburg, South Carolina, as whites attempted to disarm a “colored militia.” Officially, Grant promised Reconstruction governors “every aid for which I can find law or constitutional power. Government that cannot give protection to then life, property, and all guaranteed civil rights … to the citizen … is in so far a failure.” Unofficially, Grant and his attorney general informed Adelbert Ames that “the whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government.” No troops were sent; the federal forces already stationed in Mississippi remained in their barracks. The following spring