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

The failure of Radical Republican nerve after 1870 is linked, as Grant’s telegram to Ames indicated, to a larger loss of interest in Reconstruction across the North. As the Civil War and its burning issues receded from memory, as a new generation and a new decade turned its energies westward, as a new flood of immigrants (for whom the Civil War was a topic of only incidental interest, and for whom African Americans represented only an unwelcome source of competition for jobs) poured into the ports of the East Coast and California, Reconstruction became simply an uninteresting holdover from a political era that was rapidly closing. As early as 1867, Illinois Radical Elihu Washburne was warned by former Philadelphia congressman Henry D. Moore that, even though “the Republican Party have done a great work for the Negro … we should be satisfied for the present with what we have done, and protect him in the rights we have given him in those States where he was formerly a Slave and had no rights at all, but here we should stop.” 90 It was easy, after five more years of political infighting, to believe that with congressional Reconstruction and the Fifteenth Amendment, everything had been done for the African American that ought to be done.

In fact, some of the most important aspects of a complete Reconstruction remained ominously incomplete. The freedpeople now had citizenship and political rights, but those rights might have a short life span if unaccompanied by economic leverage. The Freedmen’s Bureau struggled for the few years of its life to serve as a national employment bureau for black laborers, and even paid to transfer 30,000 freemen to jobs in Texas, Mississippi, Illinois, and Massachusetts. But comparatively few of the freedpeople wanted to work if it meant working in the South, and many of the employers in the North wanted little more than a handy pool of strikebreakers to draw from. Johnson’s pardon schemes overturned any possibility of a massive redistribution of land from the hands of Southern whites to those of Southern blacks, and few even of the Radicals were prepared to make much of a point about promoting black land ownership.

Republican ideas of political economy praised the free wage laborer and independent property owner as the foundation of liberty—which, ironically, was the very conviction that restrained the Radicals from the wholesale appropriation of someone else’s property (even rebel property) to make property owners out of the freedpeople. In large measure, the Radicals’ willingness to use military force and army generals to ensure black voting rights was simply an effort to substitute armed federal force for the more unappetizing alternative of land redistribution. But political rights divorced from economic realities, and from economic clout, can easily turn weightless, and once the political will to enforce black voting rights began to dissipate, the entire structure of African Americans’ hard-won civil equality began to come apart.91

And then, by the end of Grant’s second administration, it started to disappear entirely. In 1873, a massive economic depression, triggered in the United States by the financial collapse of Jay Cooke, turned Northern attention away from the political survival of Reconstruction to the economic survival of the Northern economy. At the same time, the Supreme Court, ever the stronghold of Democratic disgruntlement since Dred Scott, handed down a critical civil rights decision on an 1873 appeal by New Orleans butchers against a Louisiana state charter that monopolized meatpacking in New Orleans. In the Slaughterhouse Cases, the butchers sued under the equal protection provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Supreme Court replied that the amendment applied only to equal protection under federal law, not state law. “There is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of the State, which are distinct from each other”—hence, the “privileges and immunities” attached to federal citizenship had no application to state governments.92

The second blow came in U.S. v. Cruikshank in 1875. A disputed election in Colfax, Louisiana, led to the deaths of more than 100 black people and the indictment of 98 white people on federal charges of violating the rights of black citizens. Only nine of the arrested whites were actually brought to trial, and three, including William Cruikshank, were convicted. But on appeal, the Supreme Court declared that the federal government had no jurisdiction over state voting practices, except when the states were acting as states. Violations by individuals were matters beyond the reach of the Constitution. “The Constitution of the United States has not conferred the right of suffrage upon any one, and … the United States have no voters of their own creation in the States.”93

In an effort to circumvent Slaughterhouse Cases and Cruikshank, Congress passed the last of the great Reconstruction legislation in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The bill, enacted in homage to the recently deceased Charles Sumner, mandated that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement,” regardless of “race and color,” and gave jurisdiction over the bill to “the district and circuit courts of the United States,” rather than the states.94

But the bill survived as a federal statute only until 1883, when the Supreme Court overturned it in the Civil Rights Cases. The federal courts had thus slowly removed the federal protections that Reconstruction had placed around black civil rights at every level. “We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in the house of our friends,” declared the aging Frederick Douglass. “I look upon it as one more shocking development of that moral weakness in high places which has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery from the beginning. The whole essence of the thing is a studied purpose to degrade and stamp out the liberties of a race. It is the old