Category: Muster

“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

“Let our ballots secure what our bullets have won”: Union Veterans and the Making of Radical Reconstruction?

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of the Detailed: A Semi-Occasional series within Muster. Read the introductory post here. 

The passage and enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments is one of the most remarkable expansions of political rights in world history. Political scientists studying the expansion and contraction of political rights treat Reconstruction as a classic example that illustrates how these changes are driven by the strategic interests of political elites. They argue that electoral competition between rival elites or political parties drives them to expand suffrage when they expect new voters will give them decisive support.[1] From this perspective, recognizing that restored representation to white Southerners would empower the Democrats, the Republican party strategically extended suffrage rights and other protections to African Americans to win elections in the South and retain control of the federal government.[2] Thus, Republican commitments to equal civil and political rights were only as deep as the electoral value of African American ballots.

While true in part, this isn’t the whole story. Rather than rush to give and protect rights for African Americans, Republicans pursued expansions of civil and political rights fitfully, and were deeply concerned that “Radical” Reconstruction policies would alienate Northern voters.[3] Where did popular support for this revolutionary agenda come from? In newly published research, I show that the war turned Union veterans into a pivotal constituency that voted and mobilized for Republicans and their Radical reforms in the critical elections that shaped Reconstruction.

Scholars have underappreciated the important role of veterans in shaping post-war politics .[4] Returning Union veterans comprised at least 20% of the post-war Northern electorate. Veterans’ organizations, including the Grand Army of the Republic, were active participants in political conventions and campaigning—particularly for Republicans—in 1866 and 1868 elections. And the intense experiences of military service may have primed soldiers for political change. Through their sacrifices to defeat the Confederacy and their experiences with slavery and African Americans, Union soldiers may have developed commitments about the meaning of the war, what had been achieved, and how victory should be preserved: what Barbara Gannon calls “The Won Cause.”

Yet, figuring out whether Union soldiers’ views on slavery and racial equality were changed by the war and what the political consequences of that were is bedeviled by two thorny problems:

  1. Measurement: What counts as evidence of soldiers’ political views, as a whole? The diaries and letters of individual soldiers, the commonly used sources, have had differing interpretations. And, since we can’t collect these for all soldiers, it is reasonable to ask: whose diaries and letters are we reading? How representative are they of the Union Army?
  2. Causality: How did Union veterans acquire their political commitments? Even if we accept evidence that soldiers disproportionately supported Republicans (such as, the soldiers’ votes in the 1864 Presidential Election), one might reasonably ask: did veterans already possess these views when they enlisted, or were they transformed in the crucible of war?

I bring some quantitative tools of social science to bear against both of these problems. First, I work to clearly and systematically measure the post-war political support veterans gave to Republicans and Reconstruction policies in elections. Second, I employ rigorous statistical analyses that, with transparent and plausible assumptions, enable us to evaluate whether military service caused a change in soldiers’ political commitments.

Union Veterans Increase Post-War Republican Votes

Casting the widest net, I examine whether higher levels of Union enlistment caused counties to experience greater support for Republicans in elections after the war. I calculate the fraction of votes cast for Republicans using county election returns for federal elections collected by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. I link data compiled by the American Civil War Research Database on the military records of virtually all Union Soldiers with the 1860 US Census to calculate the enlistment rate among military-aged males for counties in eight states where soldiers’ residence was recorded.[5]

A skeptical reader might raise the objection that counties with higher enlistment may have had more votes for Republicans even before the war, and that enlistment did not cause any changes. To address this concern and provide evidence of the causal impact of wartime enlistment, I employ a method called differences-in-differences. In essence, this method compares changes in Republican voting from before to after the war in counties within the same states with higher versus lower enlistment.

After the war, counties with greater enlistment saw much larger increases: compared to 1860, counties in the top 25% of enlistment saw Republicans gain 10 percentage points in 1866, while counties in the bottom 25% gained only 2.

By looking at changes within counties, it cannot be that unchanging attributes of counties (e.g., a history of abolitionist mobilization or pre-war support for Republicans) explain this pattern. To interpret these results as the causal effect of enlistment rates on Republican voting, we need only assume that counties with different levels of enlistment would have had similar trends in Republican votes, had the war not happened. While this is impossible to know, we can see in the provided figure that, prior to the war, counties with different enlistment rates had the same trends in Republican voting. Thus, we can plausibly say that wartime enlistment caused substantial gains for Republicans in key post-war elections.

Yet, we cannot say for sure that these aggregate effects are the result of soldiers themselves changing their votes; it could be that non-veterans in places with greater enlistment became more supportive of Republicans, through, say, the canvassing efforts of veterans.

Union Veterans’ Combat Experiences Affected their Partisanship

To find out whether the war changed veterans, I restrict my focus to soldiers and examine whether different wartime experiences affected their political views after the war: did increased exposure to combat casualties make men more Republican? A simple comparison might lead us astray: Republican and Democratic soldiers may have chosen to join different units and at different times, and Army commanders may have taken unit partisanship into account when issuing battle orders.

To isolate the effect of combat casualties on partisanship, I take advantage of a “natural experiment”: men joining the same regiment enlisted, moved, and fought together during the war. Yet, in battle, different companies were arrayed at different points along a short line, and as a result of the contingencies of battle, some arbitrarily experienced more casualties than others. If we believe these differences were effectively random, like the assignment to treatment and control in a clinical trial, we can attribute differences in partisanship to the causal impact of company casualties.

Biographical directories compiled in nine Indiana counties in 1874 record the partisanship for nearly thirty thousand people. Digitizing and linking this data to the military records of soldiers from those counties, I find that within the same regiments, soldiers serving in companies with more combat deaths become more likely to label themselves as Republican versus Democrat. And consistent with the effectively “random” exposure to casualties, there were no such differences in pre-war demographic traits. This is compelling evidence that one key feature of military service, combat, turned individual soldiers into Republicans.

Union Veterans Backed Radical Policies

Did veterans merely support Republicans without actually backing Radical policies? To answer this, I combine data on enlistment with town-level returns in referenda over Black suffrage in Iowa and Wisconsin.[6] Importantly, these states held referenda beforeand after the war.  Looking at changes in support for suffrage after the war, towns with higher enlistment saw greater increases in support for Black suffrage.

These are aggregate patterns but mathematically it must be that, after the war, support for suffrage increased more among veterans than among those who stayed home. This is another difference-in-differences analysis: if we believe that, absent the war, soldiers and non-soldiers would have had similar trends in support for Black suffrage, this is compelling evidence that military service caused substantial increases in support for suffrage.

Critically, the Wisconsin referendum took place in November 1865. It occurred well before national Republican leaders publicly embraced any of the key policies of Radical Reconstruction. Thus, these results suggest that returning soldiers may have pushed the party toward these positions from below.  This would turn the electoral competition argument on its head: it was veterans and their Radical allies who, as pivotal voters for the Republican party, pushed party leaders to embrace a stronger Reconstruction agenda.

Conclusions

In Congressional elections of 1866, Republicans won a supermajority that empowered them to legislate Radical Reconstruction. They benefited from increased support in places with more enlistment: a ten point increase in enlistment was enough to secure the seats needed to override Johnson’s veto. I show that these effects were the result of war experiences changing both soldiers’ partisanship and their direct support for Black suffrage.

My conclusions about the role of veterans in the Republican party during Reconstruction parallels recent work in political science showing that it was the local-level incorporation of African American voters and mobilization by labor unions that pushed Northern Democrats to embrace civil rights in the 20th century.[7]  More work remains to be done to understand the nature of veterans’ support for Reconstruction and its consequences.  Nevertheless, we can draw important lessons from these cases. Rather than exemplify the strategic logic of elite-led rights expansions, Reconstruction shows that expanding and protecting political rights depends on buy-in from broad grassroots coalitions among those already enfranchised.

[1] Ben Ansell and David Samuels, Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach. (New York: Cambridge University Press 2015); Humberto Llavador and Robert Oxoby, 2005. “Partisan Competition, Growth, and the Franchise.’’ Quarterly Journal of Economics 120(3):1155–1189;  Dawn Teele, 2018. “How the West Was Won: Competition, Mobilization, and Women’s Enfranchisement in the United States.’’ Journal of Politics 80(2):442–461; Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt, 2010. “The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies: A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond.’’ Comparative Political Studies 43(8–9):931–968.

[2] Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[3] Xi Wang, Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

[4] Though, Cf. Mary Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the G.A.R. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952); Brian Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014)

[5] Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

[6] Data from Iowa referenda are available from https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/4284. Data from the Wisconsin referenda were provided by Michael McManus.

[7] Eric Schickler, Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Michael Weaver

Michael Weaver is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at The University of British Columbia. He studies race and American political development, the politics of discursive struggles over the legitimacy of violence, and causes and consequences of ethnic and racial violence, more broadly.

The American Civil War and the Case for a “Long” Age of Revolution

The American Civil War and the Case for a “Long” Age of Revolution

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The term “age of Revolution,” since it was used by Eric Hobsbawm in his trilogy of books on the “long” nineteenth-century in the 1960s, is normally used to describe the period between the American Revolution in the 1770s and the democratic revolutions that swept Europe in the late 1840s. Yet, the interpretation of the American Civil War of 1861-65 as a Second American Revolution suggests that the “age of Revolution” did not die on the barricades in 1848-1849.Historians, consciously or unconsciously, but all too often, consider “revolution” through the lens of Marxist interpretation. Events that have the appearance of being driven by bourgeois or proletarian forces attempting to overthrow the power structures above them are called revolutions, even if they fail. But if we consider a revolution to be something that achieves profound and fundamental change, then the Civil War should be seen as a revolution that was far more successful than any other in its age.

Elder men in suits posed in a group shot with a Black man holding a flag.
Civil War veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic, Cazenovia, New York, circa 1900.

On the face of it, the American Civil War was a rebellion (arguably a failed revolution) of several southern states who seceded, joined the Confederate States of America and waged war against the United States. But it catalysed a more significant northern-driven revolution against the injustices enshrined in the nation’s founding documents. Like other revolutions, it picked up momentum, becoming more radical over time. By the end of the war, its goals had shifted from simply preserving the Union to abolishing slavery and granting the full rights of citizenship to Black Americans throughout the United States. The restored nation was fundamentally different from the one that existed before the war, even if the full ramifications of the change took decades to set in.

Abraham Lincoln was an unlikely revolutionary. Through war as a Commander in Chief, however, Lincoln drove a change that was more radical and profound than any other of the world revolutions that are remembered by that name between the death of Bolivar in 1830 and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The Civil War’s most revolutionary moment was the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1st, 1863, in which Lincoln announced that enslaved people in the states in rebellion would henceforward be free. Prior to this Lincoln had quashed his own generals’ attempts to emancipate slaves in confederate areas under Union control. The Proclamation did not abolish slavery in the border states that did not secede or in southern areas occupied by the Union army. Far more sweeping was Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in 1865, which ended slavery throughout the United States, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified soon after Lincoln’s assassination, in which Blacks gained equality before the law in all parts of the United States.[1]

People saw and understood the Civil War as a revolution at the time and in subsequent generations. The Massachusetts intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1863 that the nation was “in the midst of a great revolution” overthrowing the “old remainders of barbarism” for the advance of “Christianity and humanity.”[2] The historian Andre Fleche has argued that Americans at the time used the term “revolution” to describe what was happening in their country as often as the terms “civil war” or “rebellion.” Many of the “Forty-Eighter” immigrants from Germany to the North (hundreds of whom served in the Civil War) viewed the struggle against slavery as a revolution against aristocracy and tyranny in the United States, with strong parallels to what the European revolutionaries of 1848 had tried to achieve.[3]

In the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, historians including Charles and Mary Beard, James McPherson, Eric Foner, Bruce Levine and others continued to advance the interpretation of the Civil War and the destruction of slavery as a “Second American Revolution.”[4] If we take revolution in its broader meaning as a major and fundamental change in the way a country is governed, the move from a system in which well over half of the population (in some states) were legally enslaved to one in which the same were given full and equal rights of citizenship, including voting rights, is arguably as revolutionary a change as was effected anywhere in the nineteenth century.

While those rights were systematically stripped away from Black citizens after the Reconstruction era ended, they still remained enshrined in federal law and in the constitution. They were invoked during the post-World War II Civil Rights era to dismantle the system of Jim Crow and official segregation in the South, and to challenge segregation which existed – less “officially” but just as certainly – in many parts of the North. America is still a long way from overcoming the legacy of slavery and racism, and that is a valid counterargument to the idea that what Lincoln and the Radical Republicans achieved was a fully completed “revolution.”  I would suggest, however, that the change to the nation’s constitution was more dramatic and more permanent than was the case in any of the other world revolutions between 1830 and 1917.

The Revolutions that rocked Europe in 1830 and 1848 were, for the most part, dismal failures. Where they did achieve change, it was (in most cases) illusory, temporary, or both. The July Revolution of 1830 in France did lead to a regime change, of sorts, but it simply replaced one King for another, albeit one who was more accountable to the people. The Revolutions of 1848 were much bigger, bloodier, and more widespread. But most of the revolutions were crushed immediately or reversed within a short space of time. The ones that succeeded – notably in France and in the Kingdom of Piedmont, Italy – managed to bring about new constitutions. In France’s case a Second Republic was declared in 1848. Enslaved people in France’s overseas colonies were freed. But by 1852, the Republic was dissolved, and Napoleon III subsequently reigned as Emperor. Piedmont’s reformed constitutional monarchy was perhaps the one lasting success, in that the constitution survived and later became the basis upon which the Kingdom of Italy was governed after unification.[5]

More consequential as “revolutions,” though they are not generally known by that name, were the events that coincided with, or took place in the five or six after the American Civil War. The Emancipation of Russia’s Serfs in 1861 was arguably a far larger-scale change than the emancipation of the slaves in the United States. It certainly “freed” a much larger number of people, roughly 23 million, compared to just under 4 million slaves in the United States. It was accompanied by the establishment of the first democratically elected bodies in Russia at a local level, the zemstva. It was perhaps less deserving of the distinction of a revolution that the Civil War though as it did not change the nature of Russian government at a national, or rather imperial, level. Russia was an autocracy before and after the emancipation. Furthermore, Russian serfs weren’t slaves, exactly, before 1861 and neither did they get the full range of rights that the slaves were granted in America in the aftermath of the Civil War.[6]

The Unifications of Italy in the 1860s and of Germany in 1871 were dramatic changes that resulted in millions of Europeans living – many for the first time – under constitutional monarchies, some with newly-gained voting rights. But both were far less democratic in structure than the United States. Later events that appear to fit the revolutionary model more readily, such as the Paris Commune of 1871 and the violence – or failed revolutions – of 1905-7 in Russia were frighteningly radical but achieved relatively little. However, all these events are – like the American Civil War – inextricably linked to the same ideas that drove earlier revolutions dating back to 1776, most of all the desire for a new nation in which all people could live under the rule of law and free from arbitrary or tyrannical authority.

The revolutionary nature of the Civil War suggests that the “age of Revolution” extended well beyond 1848. When Hobsbawm applied the name to that era, he was already extending a shorter period that R.R. Palmer had labelled the “Age of Democratic Revolution” which linked the American and French Revolutions up to 1800. Perhaps the parameters should be widened again, to 1865, or 1871. Or maybe, the age of revolution hasn’t ended at all. Hobsbawm called the period after the “age of Revolution” the “age of capital,” and that has certainly not played itself out yet either. If a century can be “long” then an “age” can be even longer. And until the dream of the revolutionaries of a world free of the worst forms of tyranny has been realized, the idealist may hope that age will continue.

[1] James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 352-8. W.E.B. DuBois made a similar argument in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935), 55-83.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fortune of the Republic,” (1863) in Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson, eds., Emerson’s Antislavery Writings(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 146.

[3] Andre Fleche, The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 5; Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 8, 149-51, 168-70, 217-8, 260-3.

[4] Levine covers this branch of historiography in The Spirit of 1848, 8. Also see idem., “The Second American Revolution,” Jacobin, August 17, 2015; Kevin Gannon, “The Civil War as a Settler-Colonial Revolution,” Age of Revolutions, January 18, 2016.

[5] Derek Beales and Eugenio F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson, 2002), 87-99; R.J.W. Evans and Harmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[6] J.N. Westwood, Endurance and Endeavour: Russian History, 1812-2001, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 72-6, 80-1; Amanda Bellow, American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Daniel Koch

Daniel Koch is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson in Europe: Class, Race and Revolution in the Making of an American Thinker (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012). His next book, Land of the Oneidas, is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He completed a D.Phil. in History at the University of Oxford and is the incoming Headmaster of Loughborough Grammar School.

Previewing the June 2022 JCWE Issue

Previewing the June 2022 JCWE Issue

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This issue exhibits historians’ continuing efforts to grapple with the complexities of the Civil War Era, emphasizing how our collective understanding of the period has been produced, which topics have been neglected or marginalized, and why.

Ryan Hall’s article, “Chaos and Conquest: The Civil War and Indigenous Crisis on the Upper Missouri, 1861–1864,” extends the geography of the Civil War Era to the Upper Missouri River and expands the actors affected by it to include the Native groups who lived along the river’s banks. Drawing our attention to civilian rather than military matters—to federal agents, political patronage, and economic relationships—Hall makes a compelling case that the Civil War had a significant impact on Indigenous people in the northwestern United States because of the corruption and incompetence of the Republican appointees sent there. Seeing the Civil War Era not just from Indian Country but from a lesser-studied vantage helps capture the wide-ranging and significant implications of the war.

In “Rereading the High Private: Restoring Class and Race to Co. Aytch,” Patrick Lewis analyzes a Confederate memoir that was made famous in the twentieth century by historian Bell I. Wiley and filmmaker Ken Burns and that eventually became a staple in public history interpretations of the Civil War, particularly in Tennessee. Lewis shows the ways the memoir’s author, Samuel Rush Watkins, constructed a narrative in the early 1880s that obscured his own elite status (and that of many in his regiment), the significance of slavery and enslaved people, and the white supremacist violence that characterized Middle Tennessee after the war. This piece should change how historians use the famous Watkins quotations, both in teaching and public history settings.

Christina Adkins too explores the production of Civil War memory in the 1880s, taking a close look at Mary Chesnut’s changing descriptions of disease, as both metaphor and historical reality. Combining medical and literary history in “Mary Chesnut’s War Fever: Disease in the Civil War Narrative of a Lost Cause Dissenter,” Adkins examines Chesnut’s revisions of her own work based on changing ideas about illness and contagion, and the relationship between her 1880s vision of a diseased Confederacy and many white Southerners’ growing consolidation of the Lost Cause myth.

Mark Boonshoft’s review essay explores the history of schools and education from the antebellum period to the end of the nineteenth century, representing the Civil War as an “inflection point” in an important, but often overlooked field. Boonshoft demonstrates that the history of schooling and education is not only important in its own right but also offers a revealing window into debates about citizenship, democracy, and the state. The piece makes a strong case that the history of education should occupy a central place in our scholarship and teaching of the era.

Our book review section reflects some of the breadth and diversity of the field, as well as the commitment of our editors and reviewers to historical engagement in an extraordinarily challenging time. We are immensely grateful to the associate editors—Hilary Green, Luke Harlow, and Katy Shively—for their steadfast efforts on behalf of the journal, to the book reviewers and peer reviewers who also make the journal possible, and to you, our readers. 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Sarah

Sarah

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The known facts about Sarah’s life begin with one handwritten line in the 1860 U.S. Census. Even this brief individualization represented an anomaly. More than 99 percent of African Americans in Sumter County, Georgia, appeared without names in this simple government spreadsheet that apportioned power in the form of congressional representatives and electoral votes. Sarah was one of only 48 African Americans in the county named in this document by the local farmer and slaveowner who served as the census enumerator that year.[i]

Sarah’s name harkened back to the wife of Abraham in the Book of Genesis and the start of important genealogies for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Born in Georgia about 1835, Sarah may have worked in a house or a kitchen or the cotton fields. The census worker listed her as unmarried; however, this marital status reveals little about her personal life because Georgia did not recognize enslaved unions. Sarah was pregnant though at the beginning of 1860. While the exact circumstances of her pregnancy went unrecorded, it can be inferred that Sarah did not want to bring a child — or perhaps an additional child if she was already a mother — into this world.[ii]

1860 U.S. Census, Mortality Schedule, Sumter County, Georgia.

Sarah lived in southwest Georgia, a remote place with important links to broader histories. In 1864 and 1865, it became infamous for “Camp Sumter,” more commonly known as Andersonville, where 13,000 U.S. soldiers perished for want of shelter, wholesome food, and clean water. In the twentieth century, an interracial Christian commune launched a partnership housing program that became Habitat for Humanity. Jimmy Carter, born in Sumter County, became the first president born in a hospital and the first president from the deep South since before the Civil War. In 1860, though, Sumter County exemplified the “Black Belt” or what W.E.B. Du Bois later called “the shadow of a dream of slave empire” as he narrated his passage through the region. Slavery was more common than freedom here. The county’s enslaved population grew from 29 percent of the total population in 1840 to 52 percent in 1860. The 1840s and 1850s also saw an increase in large plantations. John B. Lamar, the brother-in-law of Howell Cobb who had large plantations across the state, kept 193 enslaved people in Sumter County alone on the eve of the Civil War.[iii]

The number in each county represents the proportion of people who were enslaved. Detail of Edwin Hergesheimer, “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860,” Library of Congress.

Sarah had few choices and these options reflected an important day-to-day fault line under slavery. Slaveowners wanted enslaved women to produce children. Historian Sharla Fett writes that “soundness,” from the perspective of slaveowners, meant “an enslaved person’s overall state of health and, by extension, his or her worth in the marketplace.”[iv] Soundness equated to strength, a clean medical history, a good outward disposition, and for women it included the likelihood of having children. In January 1850, an overseer on John B. Lamar’s plantation in eastern Sumter County, settled his account with Polly Taylor, a local midwife. He paid her $16.50 “for midwife services to Antoinette, Harriet, Marry Ann, Viniy, Nancy Florida, and Fanny.”[v]

Yet try as they might, slaveholders could never turn human beings into the extensions of their will. Contraception and abortion were methods of asserting control over one’s own body even if that body was legally owned by someone else. It could also mean resisting the dehumanization of slavery, including the threat of sexual violence posed by owners and overseers.[vi]

Contraception and abortion became more visible in nineteenth-century America until the Comstock Law of 1873 forbade “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material in the mail and more and more state legislatures criminalized abortion. Yet before the Comstock Law, physicians specializing in abortions and merchants specializing in abortifacient pills made the practice readily available for women with money. By one estimate, and the trustworthiness of these estimates are debatable, there was one abortion for every five or six live births by the 1840s and 1850s.[vii]

The patent medicines advertised in newspapers to produce abortions would have been difficult for Sarah to procure. She and other women relied on medicine practiced by enslaved midwives, root doctors, and herbalists. Enslaved women used cotton root on plantations before apothecaries began selling it as an abortifacient. In 1860, southern white physicians discussed herbal ways that enslaved women were believed to end pregnancies. The plants included tansy and rue as well as the “roots and seeds of the cotton plant, pennyroyal, cedar berries, and camphor.”[viii]

Patterns of miscarriages caught the attention of slaveowners. In 1855, rumors abounded in eastern Sumter County that the cruelty of overseer Stancil Barwick had resulted in enslaved women losing pregnancies in the field. When John B. Lamar asked his overseer for an explanation, Barwick described two recent miscarriages. A woman named Treaty lost a child, but Barwick said he knew nothing about it. He admitted that Louisine, about five-months pregnant, worked in the cotton fields that July, but he asserted “she was workt as she please[d].” In Barwick’s telling, Louisine came to him and told him she was sick. “I told her to go home,” he said. “She started an[d] on the way she miscarried.” Barwick believed enslaved men had spread these rumors to injure his reputation. He gave no outward indication the women intentionally ended their pregnancies, and the ambiguity of miscarriage provided cover for individual decision making.[ix]

1860 U.S. Census, Mortality Schedule, Sumter County, Georgia.

All methods of ending pregnancy — from physical operations to patent medicines and local plants — came with physical dangers that paralleled the risks of carrying a child to term in the nineteenth century. While we do not know how Sarah decided to end her pregnancy, we do know the outcome. According to information her enslaver gave to the U.S. census worker, Sarah died during an abortion in February 1860.

******

As a teacher of public history, I tell students every year about the power of individualizing and localizing “big” history while at the same time contextualizing the lives of everyday people in the past. Sarah was one of 74 deaths reported in Sumter County in the year ending on June 1, 1860. It was far from the only tragedy or the only death that raised more questions than answers. Moreover, like most of the people on the mortality schedule, Sarah has no known, preserved gravestone.

The greatest challenge in writing about Sarah is not how little is known about her. After all, even a name in the 1860 U.S. census set her apart from the vast majority of enslaved people. The challenge is reconstructing the necessary local, regional, and national context without losing—or worse, obscuring—Sarah’s individuality in the process. The risk, though, is worth it because the knowns and unknowns of Sarah’s life and death offer a portal into difficult pasts that resonate far beyond southwest Georgia today.

[i]. 1860 U.S. Census, Sumter County, Georgia, Mortality Schedules, Sarah, pg. 616; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed May 3, 2022); citing NARA microfilm publication T655, roll 224. In addition to the names of 46 enslaved people, Benjamin Tharp recorded the names of two free people of color, Lucy Wilkinson and Jepthah Sheets, 1860 U.S. Census, 17th and 26th Districts, Sumter County, Georgia, dwellings 49 and 63, families 50 and 64, Lucy Wilkinson and Jepthat Sheets, digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed 16 July 2019); citing NARA microfilm publication 653, roll 136.

[ii]. 1860 U.S. Census, Sumter County, Georgia, Mortality Schedules, Sarah, pg. 616; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://ancestry.com : accessed May 3, 2022); citing NARA microfilm publication T655, roll 224. In marking the religious symbolism in her name, I am drawing from Marcus Rediker’s similar observation in The Slave Ship, A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007), 19–20.

[iii]. Edwin Hergesheimer, “Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860,” (Washington, D.C.: Henry S. Graham, 1861), Library of Congress; W. E. Burghardt Du Bois “The Negro as He Really Is: A Definite study of One Locality in Georgia Showing the Exact Conditions of Every Negro Family—Their Economic Status—Their Ownership of Land—Their Morals—Their Family Life—The Houses They Live in and the Results of the Mortgage System,” The World’s Work 2 (May-October 1901), 852; U.S. Federal Census, 1840, 1850, 1860, Social Explorer; U.S. Census Bureau; Michael R. Haines. Historical, Demographic, Economic, and Social Data: The United States, 1790-2000; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 22-25.

[iv]. Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations(Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 20.

[v]. Plantation Book, Box 1, John B. Lamar Papers, MS 131, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries, Athens.

[vi]. There is extensive literature on enslaved women and everyday resistance. See, for starters, the classics Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985) and Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

[vii]. Janet Farrell Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in 19th Century America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 50. Estimates vary in number and in quality, in part, because of the way they became used as evidence of moral crisis needed greater government regulation in the nineteenth century.

[viii]. Dorothy Sterling, ed., We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton and Norton, 1997), 40.

[ix]. Stancil Barwick to John B. Lamar, July 15, 1855, in Ulrich B. Phillips, ed. Plantation and Frontier Documents: 1649–1863, Illustrative of Industrial History in the Colonial & Ante-Bellum South (3 volumes; Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1909), Vol. 2: 312.

Evan Kutzler

Evan Kutzler is an Associate Professor of U.S. and Public History at Western Michigan University. He is the author of Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and co-author of In Plain Sight: African Americans at Andersonville National Historic Site, A Special History Study (National Park Service, 2020). He worked as a seasonal park ranger at Andersonville in 2015.

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

The Remarkable Story of Mattie J. Jackson

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As a public historian working in St. Louis, Missouri, I am sometimes asked whether enslaved people living here before the Civil War ran away more frequently than enslaved people in the Deep South. Enslaved St. Louisians had the free state of Illinois across the Mississippi River, after all. While an exact response would be hard to quantify, I am fond of highlighting the story of Mattie J. Jackson as a part of my answer. Born and raised in St. Louis, Jackson wrote about her experiences with slavery in a short autobiography at the age of twenty in 1866. The Story of Mattie J. Jackson is unique in that it documents a traumatic, failed attempt by her family to seek freedom in Illinois. Jackson’s narrative highlights the intimate relationship between anti-slavery and anti-Black sentiment in the North and documents the very real dangers enslaved runaways experienced while traveling through free states (or what historian Dwight Pitcaithley more accurately describes as “non-slave states”).[1] For someone in Jackson’s position, the powerful symbolism of the North Star did not represent a path to freedom.

Title page of slave narrative
Figure 1: Front Cover of The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Photo Courtesy of Documenting the South

Slavery’s defenders in St. Louis faced unique challenges that undermined the security of its peculiar institution. The city was home to roughly 1,500 free Black residents leading up to the Civil War, a group that included a small financially elite network that styled themselves “the Colored Aristocracy.” An informal communications system between free and enslaved Blacks also existed to pass along information and promote education. For example, Mary and John Berry Meachum, leaders within St. Louis’s free Black community, operated schools for both free and enslaved people at First African Baptist Church. St. Louis was also a central destination for enslaved people looking to sue for their freedom. Early in Missouri’s statehood, state law established the concept of “once free, always free,” opening a door for African Americans to use the courts to pursue claims of unlawful enslavement. According to historian Kelly Kennington, 287 freedom suits were filed in the St. Louis County Courthouse (today the Old Courthouse at Gateway Arch National Park) between 1810 and 1860. 110 enslaved people (38 percent) earned their freedom through a successful lawsuit during this time. The city also experienced a major demographic change among its white population. By 1860, a surge of northern- and foreign-born residents in St. Louis led to increasing hostility to slavery’s presence within the city. Only two percent of the city’s population was enslaved by the start of the Civil War.[2]

And yet, slavery remained an important component of St. Louis’s economic life and a form of social control enforced through harsh legislation. After pressure from St. Louis slaveholders, the Missouri General Assembly passed a law banning anyone from teaching an African American—whether free or slave—how to read and write in 1847. Enslaved people in Missouri were banned from getting married, riding public transit without permission, and smoking in public. Other “Black Codes” were enforced in St. Louis that prevented all blacks from making “seditions speeches” or meeting in church without a white observer present. Additionally, all African Americans needed to possess passes while moving in public as well.[3] It was with full sincerity that the famous abolitionist and formerly enslaved St. Louisian William Wells Brown recalled that “though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri . . . no part of our slave-holding country, is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants, than St. Louis.”[4]

This was the harsh world that Mattie Jackson’s family hoped to escape. Jackson’s father, Westly Jackson, successfully ran away from St. Louis around 1850 and worked as a preacher in Chicago, but left his wife and two children in the city on a temporary basis. “Two years after my father’s departure, my mother . . . attempted to make her escape” from slavery alongside her children, Jackson recalled. While traveling through Illinois over several days, “we slept in the woods at night. I believe my mother had food to supply us fasted herself.”[5] Trouble loomed in the distance, however.

Jackson noted that the St. Louis newspapers were read by many residents in western Illinois. In publications like the Missouri Republican, advertisements with monetary rewards for capturing enslaved runaways were published on a daily basis. For white Illinoisans who had little regard for African Americans and a desire for cash, the opportunity to serve as a vigilante slave patrol for St. Louis slaveholders was appealing. “The advertisement had reached there before us,” Jackson recalled, “and loafers were already in search of us, and as soon as we were discovered on the brink of the river of the spies made enquiries respecting [our] suspicious appearance.” After their capture, “we were taken back to St. Louis and committed to prison . . . after which they put us in [Bernard] Lynch’s trader’s yard . . . we were then sold to William Lewis.”[6]

Sepia photo of slave pen with men standing outside.
Figure 2: After Jackson and her family were captured in Illinois, they were returned to St. Louis and sold at Bernard Lynch’s “trader’s yard,” which is pictured here during the American Civil War. Ironically, Lynch abandoned St. Louis at the start of the war and his building became a prisoner of war camp for captured Confederates during the war. Photo courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society.

The maintenance of slavery in eastern Missouri was highly dependent on not just a tolerance of slavery among Illinois residents, but active involvement through the capture of enslaved runaways. The state government, with strong support from political leaders in western and southern Illinois, went a step further by banning the settlement of free Blacks within the state’s boundaries in 1853. State legislator and future Civil War general John A. Logan was a leading force in getting this legislation passed. During debates he remarked that opponents of the bill were White “abolitionists” anxious to promote racial equality. “I [cannot] understand how it is that men can become so fanatical in their notions as to forget that they are white . . . it has almost become an offense to be a white man,” Logan remarked without a hint of irony.[7] Such attitudes among White Illinoisans were known among Missouri’s enslaved population and would have undoubtedly prevented many of them from taking the same path Jackson’s mother attempted to follow in running away from St. Louis.

Jackson remained in slavery through much of the Civil War, but went on to recall a remarkable irony following the Camp Jackson Affair within the city limits on May 10, 1861. Facing continued abuse from Lewis and recognizing that the she might be able to seek refuge from an increased presence of U.S. troops in the city, Jackson sought protection at the St. Louis Arsenal. She remained at a boarding house for three weeks, but when Lewis tried to sell Jackson and her mother at Lynch’s trader yard, he was promptly detained by the Army and given “one hundred lashes with the cow-hide, so that [the Army] might identify him by a scarred back, as well as his slaves.” While the beginning of the war were considered “days of sadness” for the Lewis family, Jackson fondly recalled them as “days of joy for us. We shouted and laughed to the top of our voices.” Several years later Jackson, with help from sympathetic Army officers, successfully made her way to Indianapolis to enjoy a new life in freedom.[8]

The publication of Jackson’s book in 1866 represents a final insight into her autobiography. In promoting her narrative after the Civil War’s conclusion and the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson served to remind readers of the horrors of slavery at a time when many Americans were anxious to move on from the past. In appealing to readers for donations to help fund her education, Jackson showed that while freedom had been achieved, the path to prosperity during Reconstruction—literacy, education, capital, land, and rights—still lay far in the future despite the recent ratification of the 13th Amendment. Jackson’s unique and courageous story demonstrates how freedom-seeking was a dangerous process that could break up families and ultimately lead to violent punishment and continued enslavement, even when freedom appeared to be staring across the Mississippi River.

 

 

[1] Mattie J. Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson: Her Parentage—Experience of Eighteen Years in Slavery—Incidents During the War—Her Escape from Slavery. A True Story (Lawrence: Sentinel Office, 1866), available online at https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jacksonm/jackson.html; Dwight T. Pitcaithley, The U.S. Constitution and Secession: A Documentary Anthology of Slavery and White Supremacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018).

[2] Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer, and Antono F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage, Revised Edition (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 25-74; Diane Mutti Burke, On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Kelly Kennington, In the Shadow of Dred Scott: St. Louis Freedom Suits and the Legal Culture of Slavery in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 198.

[3] “An Act Respecting Slaves, Free Negroes and Mulattoes,” 1847, accessed February 8, 2022. https://www.sos.mo.gov/CMSImages/MDH/AnActRespectingSlaves,1847.pdf; Missouri State Archives, “Laws Concerning Slavery in Missouri, Territorial to 1850s,” Missouri State Archives, 2022, accessed February 7, 2022. https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/education/aahi/earlyslavelaws/slavelaws.

[4] William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 27.

[5] Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 4-7.

[6] Ibid, 7.

[7] James Pickett Jones, Black Jack: John A. Logan and Southern Illinois in the Civil War Era, reprint edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 14-19.

[8] Jackson, The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, 8-11.

Nick Sacco

NICK SACCO is a public historian and writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds a master’s degree in History with a concentration in Public History from IUPUI (2014). In the past he has worked for the National Council on Public History, the Indiana State House, the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center, and as a teaching assistant in both middle and high school settings. Nick recently had a journal article about Ulysses S. Grant’s relationship with slavery published in the September 2019 issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He has written several other journal articles, digital essays, and book reviews for a range of publications, including the Indiana Magazine of History, The Confluence, The Civil War Monitor, Emerging Civil War, History@Work, AASLH, and Society for U.S. Intellectual History. He also blogs regularly about history at his personal website, Exploring the Past. You can contact Nick at PastExplore@gmail.com.

Previewing March 2022 JCWE

Previewing March 2022 JCWE

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This issue of the Journal of the Civil War contains three research articles and an historiographic review essay that reflect the field’s increasing geographic and topical breadth. Together they indicate that calls to envision an expansive Civil War Era are being answered in increasingly rich and complex ways, and they suggest that we might turn to analyzing the different ways the Civil War Era is being expanded and the varying implications of those expansions.

Peter Guardino’s “The Constant Recurrence of Such Atrocities: Guerrilla Warfare and Counterinsurgency during the Mexican-American War” analyzes US military responses to guerrilla warfare over the course of the US-Mexico War. Guardino traces how wars against Native Americans shaped early US military actions in northern Mexico and then examines how US commanders made it official policy to attack Mexican civilians as the war moved into central Mexico. This story, important in its own right, also provides a backstory and partial contrast to anti-guerilla campaigns in the US Civil War.

Vanya Eftimova Bellinger looks east to expand our sense of how mid-nineteenth-century Americans understood and changed the laws of war. She argues that the Prussian immigrant Francis Lieber was influenced by Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, first published in the 1830s, but also that Lieber’s time in the United States shaped his thinking about modern war and democracy. What emerged from this mix of European theory and US reality, Bellinger claims, were new and distinctive theories that are best understood when placed in their own historical context.

Heading west, Jonathan Wells’s “Printed Communities: Race, Respectability, and Black Newspapers in the Civil War West,” examines Black editors and journalists in the US West between 1860s and 1880s as they attempted to create a distinct set of western identities for African Americans there, to engage with the complex racial politics of the West, and to construct new models of respectability to fit new spaces.

Cameron Blevins and Christy Hyman’s review essay, “Digital History and the Civil War Era,” assesses the ways that transformations in computational methods, tools, and platforms have reshaped representations and analysis of the Civil War Era. Blevins and Hyman show that scholars have made extraordinary use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) mapping and of less-heralded digital systems, and they encourage us all to think more expansively and critically about digital technologies as they reshape historical practices.

This essay’s book reviews once again demonstrate book review editor Kathryn Shively’s extraordinary commitment under unusually challenging publishing circumstances, and also the professionalism and dedication of our colleagues, as scholars continued to produce sharp, informative reviews during the pandemic. 

 

Kate Masur and Greg Downs

Kate Masur is an associate professor at Northwestern University, specializing in the history of the nineteenth-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery. Greg Downs, who studies U.S. political and cultural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a professor of history at University of California--Davis. Together they edited an essay collection on the Civil War titled The World the Civil War Made (North Carolina, 2015), and they currently co-edit The Journal of the Civil War Era.

Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

Challenging Exceptionalism: The 1876 Presidential Election, Potter Committee, and European Perceptions

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In May 1878, the House of Representatives appointed Representative Clarkson N. Potter (NY-12) to investigate claims of fraud during the 1876 election. The commission, as Adam Fairclough untangles in his new book, uncovered massive wrongdoing on both sides, including so-called bulldozing by Louisiana Democrats, Republican election theft, and attempts to buy off the individuals in charge of the vote count. Designed to embarrass President Rutherford B. Hayes, Democrats’ efforts backfired as neither side emerged unscathed in the final report.[1] However, this was not the first or the last time elections in the United States were fraught with violence, corruption, and bribery.[2]

Europeans were well-aware of how “democracy” worked in the North American republic. Many, even those who favored electoral reforms, were often torn about using the United States as an example because of that well-known stigma. Nevertheless, and despite its transnational turn, the Civil War has retained an exceptionalist character, even among scholars who wish to internationalize the conflict. The notion that the war, in some form, was to safeguard republicanism continues. As one recent scholar terms it: “Were southern secession to succeed, slavery would be preserved, the republican experiment discredited.”[3] As I have shown elsewhere, Europeans were wary invoking the U.S. experiment when calling for electoral reforms at home.[4] The coverage of the 1876 election and Potter Committee investigation certainly did not aid the standing of the republican experiment’s cause among Europeans. Europeans’ views of the contested Election of 1876 and the Potter Committee further challenge the exceptionalism myth of the United States and the American Civil War as safeguarding republicanism.

Henry Ogden, “Washington, D.C. – The Potter Investigation Committee in Session in the Basement of the Old Capitol,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 22, 1878.

European newspapers always paid close attention to the events in North America, especially U.S. presidential elections. With the transatlantic cable in place, news arrived fast. On November 16, 1876, the Neue Freie Presse, an Austrian newspaper, briefly reported that the election was called in favor of President Hayes, but that both parties had sent influential members to Louisiana to check on the vote counting.[5] Die Presse voiced a similar concern and questioned whether additional scrutiny would reveal serious electoral trickery. Reporting some of the initial issues with the vote, the editors worried of a new civil conflict.[6]

As more detailed news of the elections in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina arrived, the newspapers added their editorial spins. By December, Die Presse expressed its disbelief over the lack of a clear winner. The paper highlighted that the election board in Louisiana had thrown out the democratic election results in eight parishes. Die Presse editors blamed the corruption of the outgoing Grant administration for causing some of the fraudulent activities in Louisiana. The newspaper editors worried that the situation was so tense that any misstep could bring about a dramatic escalation.[7]What message about democratic government did such news send to Austrian readers?

Meanwhile, Das Vaterland ran a lengthy article on the contested election in mid-January. The newspaper also worried that the election could easily result in another civil conflict as the U.S. Constitution offered little guidance for resolving a tie in the electoral college. Explaining the complicated presidential electoral system and the issues of 1876 to its readers, Das Vaterland wondered if the two major political parties could find an agreement as to whose electors would be counted. While remaining hopeful that a peaceful transfer of power was possible, there was an undertone in the article that alluded to the unexpected disaster of the 1860 election.[8] The Austrian media expressed disbelief at what transpired in Louisiana.

The French press did not cover the presidential election in great detail but observed pointedly that the election of 1876 in Louisiana involved, in the words of Le Figaro, “gigantic fraud.” The news coverage also highlighted that the election had involved intimidation and other irregularities.[9]

Among the Austrian and French press, the Potter Committee did not receive extensive coverage, but a few brief mentions did occur. The Wiener Zeitung briefly noted the creation of the Potter Committee and its initial focus on John Sherman and other Republicans associated with Hayes and the election in Louisiana and Florida.[10] The committee was likely to find issues as the Neue Freie Presse reported because recently witnesses had stepped forward who had taken part in the manipulations of the votes. The editors assumed Democrats had reopened the question to benefit their political chances in the upcoming mid-term elections.[11] Austrian readers could read into these brief reports what they wished, but the indication of a fundamental flaw in the U.S. election system was obvious.

The British Press also reported on the Potter Committee and the voting fraud of 1876. The testimony of James E. Anderson drew great interest as he illustrated how much fraud and corruption were part of the Louisiana election and how many influential politicians were involved in the efforts to make Hayes president.[12] However, all these reports were minor in their open criticism of the United States to what the Pall Mall Gazette said.

On September 6, 1880, the Pall Mall Gazette fired a devastating broadside against the U.S. electoral system. (Note that this is after the change of ownership at the Gazette and its new editorial policy aligning closer to the Liberal Party.) In the lead up to the election of 1880, the paper revisited the previous presidential contest and observed that Hayes was the “legally elected” president, but that his election was made possible by fraud. The paper dismissed some reports detailing the intimidation and violence directed at Black voters. At the same time, the editors reminded their readers that both sides in the political contest engaged in significant voter fraud and manipulation. The choice between armed military despotism and fraud was an easy one in the United States—fraud was more agreeable. At the same time, the editors contended that most people did not pay attention or care much about politics. Frequent elections were cited as a cause of the disinterest.

However, the paper offered the clearest indictment of the U.S. political and electoral system. Comparing the United States to Napoleon III’s France, the paper wondered how democratic the United States truly was. Worthy of quoting in full, the British newspaper concluded: “Thus there is the most singular toleration of acknowledged foul play by both the players; and this is all the more noteworthy because communities and Governments, far less scrupulous on the whole, have proved extremely intolerant of electoral fraud. If ever there was a Government which might be supposed capable of it, it was that of the Second French Empire. The Ministers and prefects of Napoleon III did not indeed neglect some American precedents; to use the American phrase, they often ‘gerrymandered’ the constituencies by grouping them so as to produce a favorable result; but they never ventured to tamper with the ballot-box.”[13] In other words, even the often vilified Emperor Napoleon III did not engage in activities done by U.S. politicians. Nor did he, as Louisiana politicians in 1876, outright manipulate the vote. How could the United States be an example for democratic elections if it did not respect the voice of the voters?

While some exceptionalist-minded scholars continue to view the victory of the United States and its political system in the American Civil War as one safeguarding democracy and republicanism, the reality was very different. For the surveyed European newspaper editors, the United States contributed to that reality. The many reports of fraud, violence, and corruption of antebellum elections had already made the United States a less than desirable example for those wishing to bring about democratic reforms. The coverage of the 1876 election and Potter Committee, even if limited, drove further home that very point. How much would anybody wish to mimic a system where violence, intimidation, corruption, and the political wishes of a few people could turn the ballot voice of voters around? And as the Pall Mall Gazette observes, if the villain of some U.S. scholarship, Napoleon III, did not even engage in such outright voter fraud as practiced in Louisiana, how much can we truly view the United States as the beacon of republicanism everybody looked up to, especially after the Civil War?

 

[1] Adam Fairclough, Bulldozed and Betrayed: Louisiana and the Stolen Election of 1876 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).

[2] Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

[3] Joseph A. Fry, Lincoln, Seward, and US Foreign Relation in the Civil War Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 188.

[4] Niels Eichhorn, “Democracy: The Civil War and the Transnational Struggle for Electoral Reform,” American Nineteenth Century History 20 (2019): 293-313.

[5] Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), November 16, 1876.

[6] Die Presse (Vienna), November 20, 1876.

[7] Die Presse (Vienna), December 3, 1876.

[8] Das Vaterland (Vienna), January 17, 1877.

[9] Le Figaro (Paris), December 29, 1876.

[10] Wiener Zeitung (Vienna), May 14, 1878.

[11] Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), May 17, 1878.

[12] “The American Election Frauds,” The Freeman’s Journal, June 17, 1878; “The Election Frauds in America,” Birmingham Daily Post, June 11, 1878; “The Alleged Electoral Frauds in America,” Daily News, June 27, 1878. Special thanks to John Legg for helping me locate British newspaper sources for this project.

[13] The Pall Mall Gazette (London), September 6, 1880.

 

Niels Eichhorn

holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Arkansas and has taught history courses at Middle Georgia State University and Central Georgia Technical College. He has published Liberty and Slavery: European Separatists, Southern Secession, and the American Civil War (LSU Press, 2019) and Atlantic History in the Nineteenth Century: Migration, Trade, Conflict, and Ideas (Palgrave, 2019). He is currently working with Duncan Campbell on The Civil War in the Age of Nationalism. He has published articles on Civil War diplomacy in Civil War History and American Nineteenth Century History. You can find more information on his personal website, and he can be contacted at eichhorn.niels@gmail.com.

Hollywood Has Yet to Capture the Relationship that Developed between African Americans and Lincoln

Hollywood Has Yet to Capture the Relationship that Developed between African Americans and Lincoln

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Abraham Lincoln has been featured in movies since the dawn of cinema, but it’s only been in recent years that his connection with African Americans has gained significant attention. Released in 2012, two films highlighted the role of Black men and women in the Lincoln White House. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter included a childhood friend named William Johnson (played by Curtis Harris) who was sold into slavery, escaped, and grew up to serve as one of Lincoln’s closest presidential advisors. Although wholly fictionalized in the film, William H. Johnson was a real figure in Lincoln’s adult life—a valet and barber who served Lincoln in both Springfield, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning Lincoln also featured two important Black figures—William Slade (played by Stephen Henderson) and Elizabeth Keckley (played by Gloria Reuben). As the president’s usher and valet, Slade had great responsibility in the Executive Mansion. He managed the other servants and attended to the president’s needs. (Slade also had the unenviable task of preparing Lincoln’s body to be placed in the coffin in April 1865.) According to Slade’s daughter, the president regularly discussed his speeches and political decisions with Slade. She even claimed that by the time the Emancipation Proclamation was released her father “already knew every word of it.” Slade also had important public roles in wartime Washington. He was active in several Black social and political organizations, was an elder at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and was a leader in the African American community in Washington when it came to military recruitment.[1]

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

Keckley, the most famous African American woman in the Lincoln White House, served as Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and modiste. Born to an enslaved mother and a white planter in Virginia in 1818, Keckley’s life in bondage was one of grit, suffering, and endurance. As a teenager she was sent to North Carolina, where she was severely beaten. For four years she was raped by “a white man” who had “base designs upon me” and “persecuted me . . . and I—I—became a mother.”[2] (Her son would later die as a soldier in the Union army.) Eventually, in 1855, she was able to purchase her own freedom.

Keckley moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a dressmaker for prominent women of the city, including Varina Davis. In 1861 Mary Lincoln hired her and the two developed a close friendship. In fact, Keckley was present for some of the most painful and moving scenes in the Executive Mansion, including the death of Willie Lincoln in February 1862. She was also active in raising funds for former slaves who had been displaced by the friction and abrasion of the war. In the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, Keckley remained a close confidant of the widow. Abolitionist Julia Wilbur wrote in her diary, “Mrs. Slade & Mrs. Keckley have been with Mrs. Lincoln nearly all the time since the murder, not as servants but as friends. Both colored women; & Mrs. Lincoln said she chose them because her husband was appreciated by the colored race; they (the colored people) understood him.”[3] In 1868 Keckly published a now-celebrated memoir, Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. The revelatory nature of the book infuriated Mary Lincoln and created a permanent schism between the two women.

In the Spielberg film, Keckly and Slade make several appearances. In Slade’s most poignant scene, young Tad Lincoln looks at a photograph of a slave who has been beaten severely. Tad asks his father, “Why do some slaves cost more than others?” Tad’s older brother Robert replies that a slave’s value is related to his or her age and health, or whether a woman can conceive. Lincoln tells Tad to put the images back into the box. Tad then turns to Slade and asks innocently, “When you were a slave, Mr. Slade, did they beat you?” Slade replies with a smile, “I was born a free man. Nobody beat me except I beat them right back.” Keckly then enters the room and Slade says to Tad, “Mrs. Keckly was a slave. Ask her if she was beaten.” “Were you?” Tad asks, as his father shakes his head. “I was beaten with a fire shovel when I was younger than you,” she replies.

Title page of Behind The Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley.

In another pivotal scene, Keckley thanks Lincoln for all he is doing to get the 13th Amendment passed in the House of Representatives. “Thank you for your concern over this,” she says. “And I want you to know they’ll approve it. God will see to it.” Lincoln replies with wry humor: “I don’t envy him his task.”

After a few more words pass between them, Lincoln asks the seamstress, “Are you afraid of what lies ahead for your people? If we succeed?”

Keckley replies, “White people don’t want us here.” (This is an allusion to colonization, a scheme supported by many whites—including Lincoln until 1863 or 1864—to send freedpeople to Africa or other parts of the world.)

“Many don’t,” Lincoln concedes.

“What about you?” she asks.

Lincoln pauses. “I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. Any of you. You’re familiar to me, as all people are. Unaccommodated, poor, bare, forked creatures such as we all are. You have a right to expect what I expect, and likely our expectations are not incomprehensible to each other. I assume I’ll get used to you.” Lincoln then continues, “What you are to the nation—what will become of you once slavery’s day is done, I don’t know.”

With dignity in her voice, Keckley replies: “What my people are to be I can’t say. I never heard any ask what freedom would bring. Freedom’s first. As for me, my son died fighting for the Union. Wearing the Union blue. For freedom he died. And I am his mother. That’s what I am to the nation, Mr. Lincoln. What else must I be?”

Spielberg’s inclusion of Keckley and Slade in Lincoln was essential for capturing the White House as it was in Lincoln’s day. But they were far from the only African Americans to enter the White House during the period covered in the film.[4] Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Martin R. Delany visited the White House during the period covered by the film. So did a number of other African Americans whose names have since been lost to history.

In fact, African Americans visited the White House in significant numbers between 1862 and 1865. The filmmakers’ decisions to focus only on White House staff missed a much bigger story. And the line that Spielberg’s Lincoln says to Keckley—“I don’t know you Mrs. Keckley. Any of you.”—ignores the relationship that developed between the sixteenth president and African Americans during the Civil War.

During the Lincoln Administration, hundreds of African Americans boldly walked through the White House doors for private meetings and public receptions—claiming “the People’s House” as their house, and the president as their president. This was a significant shift in American race relations. Prior to the Civil War, African Americans were more likely to be bought and sold by a sitting president than to be welcomed as his guests. But wartime Washington experienced a shock to the norm.

Black men and women came to the White House for a variety of reasons. Some merely wished to see the president, or to thank him. A few even brought him gifts. But others had larger objects in mind. In 1862, for example, Robert Smalls pushed Lincoln to enlist black men into the Union army. In 1863, Frederick Douglass strongly encouraged the president to ensure that U.S. Colored Troops received the same treatment as white soldiers. And in 1864, at least three delegations of Black southerners urged Lincoln to support Black male suffrage. One of these visitors, Rev. Richard H. Parker of Norfolk, Virginia, later recalled: “I knew [as] soon as I heard that man speak, and saw his kind face, that he would be a good friend to my people; and I’ve never had cause to change my mind.” Parker then said that he went “home contented, with a full heart.”[5]

Personal interactions with African Americans changed Lincoln’s views on several important policy matters. Shortly after meeting with Robert Smalls, for example, Lincoln came to support the enlistment of African American soldiers. The southern delegations’ push for voting rights also helped shape Lincoln’s thinking on that matter. Lincoln’s many personal interactions with African Americans in wartime Washington have been largely forgotten, but they are stories that should be better known—and that could be told in compelling ways on the big screen. For three years African Americans and Abraham Lincoln worked together to make strides for equality, to quote First Lady Michelle Obama, “in a house that was built by slaves.”

[1] John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942), 105-117; Natalie Sweet, “A Representative ‘of Our People’: The Agency of William Slade, Leader in the African American Community and Usher to Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 34 (Summer 2013): 21-41.

[2] Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1868), 36-39.

[3]Julia Wilbur, diary entry for April 20, 1865, Haverford College, Quaker and Special Collections (transcriptions by Alexandria Archaeology).

[4] Gary L. Flowers, executive director and CEO of the Black Leadership Forum, also made this point in “‘Lincoln’: What’s Missing from this Movie?” Philadelphia Tribune, November 30, 2012.

[5] H. C. Percy, “Father Parker,” American Missionary 12 (August 1868): 169-72.

Jonathan W. White

Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and author or editor of 13 books, including A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022) and To Address You As My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln (2021). Follow him on Twitter at @CivilWarJon.

Reclaiming Roots for the Next Generation

Reclaiming Roots for the Next Generation

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Sometimes, a new historical study can raise new questions to previously discussed topics while reintroducing classic works with refreshing perspectives. Tyler D. Parry’s Jumping the Broom is one such work. Parry uncovers the complex and interconnected histories of Europeans, Africans, and African Americans’ marital ceremonial practice of jumping the broom as a form of agency in order to have their unions legitimized (at least within their communities). Additionally, Parry traces the rising popularity within the wedding industrial complex, which continues marketing the act as an African ritual confirmed in the 1976 edition of Alex Haley’s Roots miniseries where Kunta Kinte and Belle wed (an act that did not receive as much detail in Haley’s book).[1] By refocusing on the significance of enslaved people’s cultural practices, Parry shows readers how it is possible to uncover the complexity of intimate relations, marital practices, and enslaved people’s agency while living within the oppressive system of slavery. For me, Parry’s analysis and conclusions raised the possibility of structuring an undergraduate course that critically analyzes Haley’s printed and dramatized works and places them in conversation with relevant scholarship might provide current students with Black genealogical histories and cultural practices across multiple generations.

Older Black man in gray hair standing next to a younger black man draped in a blanket and wearing a hat.
Lou Gossett Jr. (left) and LeVar Burton (right) star in the Roots miniseries.

Alex Haley’s Roots, both the book and miniseries, remain relevant and ever-present in American society. It is plausible to connect the material to current conversations regarding social and racial justice, systemic racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically, Roots’ centralized focus on Haley’s family history dating back to the mid-eighteenth century includes several issues, including but not limited to, detailing African culture, depicting the Middle Passage for enslaved people, highlighting how enslaved people repeatedly demonstrated agency against slaveowners, and emphasizing the significance of Black families (in and outside of bondage). Both the literary and visual images invoke, then and now, vivid ways to understand the lives of diverse Black people across hemispheres and generations and their struggles to have their humanity recognized, marital unions legitimized, and families protected.

A compelling aspect of Haley’s work was that he focused on significant historical moments from the perspective of Black people rather than white people. Whether it was the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, the shifted gaze provides a lens that reveals how knowledgeable, resourceful, and intelligent enslaved people were to key events as they continued to adapt for their survival, which previous academic and public discourses downplayed or ignored.

Given that Roots held both the number one spot as a New York Times Best Sellers list and was also one of the most-watched miniseries, it was unsurprising that it received a diverse and wide number of public responses, positive and negative, from audiences in the United States and internationally. Some African Americans, such as James Baldwin, saw Roots as an invaluable contribution to conversations about race and racism by doing pro-Black work that emphasized agency, strength, and familial importance in the face of unending racial discrimination.[2] White audiences, meanwhile, ranged from people stating that Roots uncovered, for them, a historical past that some did not know, while others denounced Haley for promoting (supposed) racialized propaganda. At the same time, President Jimmy Carter minimized the Black experience depicted in work by claiming that they “were one group among many.”[3] Incorporating these varied public opinions into the classroom can potentially stimulate discussions on the complex and differing public responses to the work that analyzed the realities of slavery and racial and gender discrimination from the perspective of Black families at the center of the topics.

Aside from public debates, some critics raised multiple questions about the authenticity and accuracy of Roots. Regarding the book, numerous questions arose over Haley’s research methods, his personal biases, the writing process with his collaborators, and even concerns of potentially plagiarizing the works of Margaret Walker and Harold Courlander.[4] These are important and valid issues to raise when discussing the complex public and scholarly debates surrounding Roots. Adding these points to the classroom presents an opportunity to unpack issues related to authenticity and a project’s originality and how the popularity of Roots continued to this day. Currently, students (at a wide range of institutions) engage in similar debates over the 1619 Project and critically discuss issues of race, gender, religion, class, and other important topics.[5] By placing such issues into a historical context, students gain deeper and more nuanced understandings of how previous generations dealt with historical moments, people, and thought-provoking pop cultural phenomenon.

Meanwhile, Matthew F. Delmont provides insight on the various politics of producing, filming, broadcasting, and viewing the 1976 miniseries. He details the lived and real trauma that Black actresses and actors experienced throughout the filming. For instance, the Middle Passage depictions below the deck on the Lord Ligonier had cast members tightly chained together with simulated vomit and fluids, which led to numerous extras refusing to return after one day of shooting.[6] Understanding the physical, psychological, and emotional distress that cast members experienced is critical for classroom discussions about the unintended consequences of bringing such intense and compelling stories to the screen.

There is a wealth of scholarship that educators could assign, in conjunction with Roots, to provide illuminating dialogues regarding the Black family experience in the various locations and periods that Haley’s work discusses. The work of Jennifer L. Morgan and Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh provide a counternarrative to Haley’s patriarchal emphasis of Black familial and communal dynamics to focus on life, in freedom and bondage, for Black women. Both scholars denote how West African women repeatedly demonstrated agency against slaveowners, including practicing West African tradition throughout the violent “Americanizing” process.[7] Walter Johnson’s work remains one of the best studies that explore both the processes of commodifying and dehumanizing enslaved people in public slave markets.[8] Meanwhile, the collective work of Amy Murrell Taylor, Tera Hunter, and Brandi C. Brimmer provides insight into the personal lives of African American families (including those connected to the United States Colored Troops soldiers) as they navigated the difficulties of freedom during and long after the Civil War.[9] Ultimately, placing these and similar studies in conversation with Roots can yield informative course content that highlights how studies of Black families were, and still are, an important topic that can reframe public and academic discourses on history, race, and gender in informative and lasting ways. At the same time, their work highlights how relevant the content and points of emphasis in Roots remain ever-present today. Hopefully, students (mine and others) will gain a better understanding of Roots, genealogical studies, and Black history in the process.

 

[1] Tyler D. Parry, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[2] James Baldwin, “How One Black Man Came To Be an American: A Review of Roots,” New York Times, September 26, 1976.

[3] Clare Corbould, “Roots, the Legacy of Slavery, and Civil Rights Backlash in 1970s America,” Roots Reconsidered: Race, Politics, and Memory, eds. Erica L. Ball and Kellie Carter Jackson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 33-34.

[4] Arnold H. Lubasch, “ ‘Roots’ Plagiarism Suit is Settled,” New York Times, December 15, 1978.

[5] “The 1619 Project” Critical Race Training in Education, https://criticalrace.org/the-1619-project/, accessed on 1/25/2022.

[6] Matthew F. Delmont, Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016).

[7] Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

[8] Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

[9] Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Brandi C. Brimmer, Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriages in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr.

Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. is an Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. He received his bachelor’s degree (2008) from the University of Central Florida. Later, he earned his master’s degree (2010) and doctoral degree (2017) from the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the military from 1850 through the 1930s. His monograph, The Families’ Civil War, is forthcoming June 2022 with the University of Georgia Press in the UnCivil Wars Series.  You can find him on Twitter at @PHUsct.

Echoes of 1891 in 2022

Echoes of 1891 in 2022

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The New York Times recently deplored the ongoing threats to democratic governance and quoted President Benjamin Harrison’s 1891 Annual Message, where he warned against moves then underfoot to allow state legislatures to select presidential electors in disregard of the popular vote.[1]

Even more recently, Senator Angus King from Maine and his Oregon counterpart, Jeff Merkley, have depicted 1891 as a crucial watershed, when the Senate was stymied by a filibuster and failed to enact voting rights legislation.[2]

These little-remembered episodes from 130 years ago offer important perspective on our current political travail.  The erasure of voting rights in the late nineteenth century is a story that ought not be forgotten.  For more than a decade after 1877, often thought of as the end of Reconstruction, no state dared to enact formal disfranchisement legislation. African Americans still had a precarious right to vote. In much of the Upper South, they exercised that right, with the result that party competition remained close in states such as Virginia and North Carolina. Black voters in the Deep South, however, were routinely subjected to rampant intimidation and violence when they attempted to cast ballots, and the counting process often was fraudulently perverted. The Upper South had its own problems, such as the purging of eligible voter lists, but elections in the Deep South made a mockery of democratic norms.

Formal portrait photograph of Benjamin Harrison.
President Benjamin Harrison (Library of Congress)

Harrison was a Republican. His party had gained narrow margins in both houses of Congress when he was elected in 1888.  Louis T. Michener, the president’s chief political agent in his home state of Indiana, reported in 1889 that he had met with a number of influential Black leaders in Indianapolis. With “great power and earnestness,” they conveyed shocking details about the situation in the South and pleaded for “action on the part of this administration” to give Southern Blacks “some protection in their rights as citizens.” “My blood boiled while I listened,” Michener reported: “the truth of the matter is, that the people of the North do not hear of the one thousandth part of the outrages committed upon the colored people by the white people of the South.”[3]

Black voting had been the cornerstone for Congressional Reconstruction. It had been designed to secure dual objectives—to enable those formerly enslaved to defend their new freedoms, and to provide a mechanism through which pro-Union (and pro-Republican) electorates might take root in the ex-Confederate states. But neither objective had been secured. The “Solid South” had become a Democratic party bastion that carried Grover Cleveland to the presidency in 1884, while Southern Blacks lacked the political leverage to redress their grievances.

Northern Republicans fumed that those who had “nullified and uprooted” Black voting consequently enjoyed increased representation in Congress and additional clout in presidential elections.[4] Harrison had bested Cleveland in 1888 only by assembling wafer-thin margins in several pivotal Northern states, including his own. The new president had ample motive to pay attention to Indiana’s modest cohort of Black voters. Republicans could not hold the state without them.  But any effort to protect Black rights ran headlong into the fatalistic views of many educated white Northerners, who presumed that no law could overcome Southern white resistance to Black voting.[5]

Engraving of two men talking to one another.
Mainstream national publications such as Harper’s Weekly, which opposed the Elections bill, also propagated insulting stereotypes of African Americans. (Vol. 33, October 19, 1889, p. 835)

Harrison and his managers decided to give priority to enacting a Federal Elections bill, but the devil was in the details. The best way to secure “a free vote and a fair count” might have been to remove the electoral process from the tainted hands of Southern state and local officials—and to place the federal government in charge of registration, voting, vote counting, and certification.   Many Blacks and some white Republicans indeed called for thoroughgoing federal control. But an intense behind-the-scenes tussle revealed that proponents of federal control would have to settle for a plan to place federal supervisors at polling places and to empower federal canvassers to certify voting returns. Whatever its limitations, the bill threatened to overturn the ability of Southern state governments to validate election outcomes. “The law proposed is not as strong as it should be, but it is the best in sight,” noted T. Thomas Fortune, the African American editor of the New York Age.[6]

Formal portrait of Henry Cabot Lodge.
Henry Cabot Lodge (Library of Congress)

Massachusetts representative Henry Cabot Lodge, who managed the House bill and whose name became attached to it, shared his party’s frustration about the malign consequences of Democratic cheating in the South, but his defense of the Elections bill transcended narrow partisanship. He warned that “a failure to do what is right brings its own punishment to nations as to men.”  The American people, who had paid a heavy debt because of slavery, ran a renewed risk: “If we permit any citizen, no matter how humble, to be wronged, we shall atone for it to the last jot and tittle.  No great moral question of right and wrong can ever be settled finally except in one way, and the longer the day of reckoning is postponed the larger will be the debt and the heavier the payment.” The United States government, having “made the black man a citizen,” was obligated to protect him in all his rights.  And, Lodge thundered, “it is a cowardly government if it does not do it!”[7]

In early July, the House approved the Lodge bill. Thomas B. (“Czar”) Reed, the Speaker, overcame Democratic obstruction and vituperation about a “force bill” to craft a narrow victory margin, 155 to 149.  Reed ruled out the subterfuge of a “disappearing quorum,” a Democratic party tactic to filibuster the House.  The Speaker’s firm discipline kept Republicans together on the near party-line vote.[8]  But the bill floundered in the Senate. Amid the sweltering heat of a humid Washington summer, long before the arrival of air conditioning, Republican managers found themselves unable to muster a majority to alter the Senate’s rules that permitted unlimited debate.

Republicans then suffered a landslide defeat in November’s congressional elections. Their only remaining chance to enact the Federal Elections bill rested with the lame duck session of the old Congress, which assembled in December 1890. The powerful Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, who headed the Rules Committee, proposed a temporary change in Senate rules to limit debate to thirty minutes per senator on the Elections bill after discussion had proceeded for a “reasonable” length of time. For more than a month, until late January 1891, the Senate wrestled with the Aldrich Resolution, and the fate of the Elections bill hung in the balance.[9]

As the Senate dithered, the state of Mississippi adopted a new constitution, which enacted a poll tax and created a gauntlet through which prospective voters would need to read any section of the state constitution or be able to “understand the same when read to him or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.” Convention delegates candidly acknowledged their goal: “to restrict negro suffrage.” Mississippi’s insidious “understanding clause” set an example that other Southern states soon would follow.[10]

To make a long story short, a Southern-led filibuster in the Senate killed the Elections bill.  Northern Democrats sided with the white South, and several Republican senators refused to support the Aldrich Resolution. This defeat marked the end of any federal effort to stave off disfranchisement. Within the next decade, hardly any Black voters remained in the former Confederate states, while Jim Crow abuses and terror gained wicked momentum.[11]

Albion Tourgée, who had championed equal rights as a carpetbagger in North Carolina, stood out as a lonely Cassandra. Having lobbied tirelessly for a stronger Elections bill, he blasted Mississippi’s flagrant nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment (“a substitute for armed rebellion”) and contemptuously rebuked “Northern doughfaces” who assumed that “only the rich and cultivated are fit to have a voice in government.” Tourgée correctly predicted that the worst would follow. He echoed Frederick Douglass, who mourned the Republican party’s callous disregard of “an oft deceived, betrayed and deeply wronged people.”[12]

 

 

[1] “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now.” New York Times, 2 Jan. 2022, Sunday Review, 8.

[2]  David Rohde, “The Senate’s Dangerous Inability to Protect Democracy,” New Yorker, 19 Jan. 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-senates-dangerous-inability-to-protect-democracy; King and Merkley both addressed the Senate on Wednesday evening, 19 Jan. 2022.

[3] Louis T. Michener to E. W. Halford, 1 and 5 October 1889, Benjamin Harrison Papers, Library of Congress.

[4] John Sherman, Congressional Record, 51st Congress, First Session, 1998-2001.

[5] Harper’s Weekly, 30 Nov. 1889, p. 950.

[6] New York Age, 12 Apr. and 16 Aug. 1890.  The best secondary source on the Federal Elections bill is Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869-1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 226-59.

[7] Congressional Record, 51st Congress, First Session, 6537-44, esp. 6543.

[8] Congressional Record, 51st Congress, First Session, 6940-41.

[9] New York Times, 16, 18, 19, 24 Dec. 1890

[10] Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 206-15.

[11] Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 121-48; Daniel W. Crofts, “The Blair Bill and the Elections Bill, the Congressional Aftermath to Reconstruction” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1968), 312-43.

[12] Chicago Inter-Ocean, 1 and 29 Nov. 1890; Frederick Douglass to George F. Hoar, 2 Sept. 1890, George F. Hoar Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, quoted in Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic, 252.

Daniel W. Crofts

Daniel W. Crofts, Professor Emeritus of History at The College of New Jersey, has written extensively about the North-South political crisis that culminated in secession and Civil War. He was awarded the University of Virginia's Bobbie and John Nau Book Prize for his 2016 volume, Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union (University of North Carolina Press).

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