forward with its policy of reconstruction. Before the end of February,
1869 (February 25th), it proposed to the States a Fifteenth Amendment
intended to lay in the constitution itself the foundations of negro
suffrage which had as yet only the support of the Reconstruction Acts
of 1867, mere statutes. “The right of citizens of the United States
to vote,” so ran its terms, “shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude.” New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky,
California, and Oregon rejected it; Tennessee did not act upon it; but
thirty of the thirty-seven States accepted it, and it became part of
the constitution. Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas had not
yet been reconstructed to the satisfaction of Congress; the acceptance
of this new Amendment, accordingly, the enactment in perpetuity of the
principle of the Reconstruction Act, was made a condition precedent
to their readmission to Congress, as the acceptance of the Thirteenth
Amendment, which gave the negroes their freedom, and of the Fourteenth,
which made them citizens of the United States and of the States of their
residence, had been. This, too, was to be part of the hard-driven bargain
of reconstruction before the Republican leaders would be satisfied. The
dominance of the negroes in the South was to be made a principle of the
very constitution of the Union. A long year went by before three fourths
of the States had ratified the radical Amendment, but the necessary votes
came in at last, and on the 30th of March, 1870, the new article was
officially declared in force.
The price of the policy to which it gave the final touch of permanence
was the temporary disintegration of southern society and the utter,
apparently the irretrievable, alienation of the South from the political
party whose mastery it had been Mr. Stevens’s chief aim to perpetuate.
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of
self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the
intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant
negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose
incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose
increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets
of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no place of open
action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction,
for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities. Its
restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage
even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as
a force outside the government, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of
whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with
defiance. Sober men kept their heads; prudent men saw how sad an increase
of passion would come out of hasty counsels of strife, an open grapple
between those outlawed and those appointed to govern. Men whom experience
had chastened saw that only the slow processes of opinion could mend
the unutterable errors of a time like that. But there were men to whom
counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were unpalatable, men
who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them. It was
folly for them to give rein to their impulses; it was impossible for them
to do nothing.
They took the law into their own hands, and began to attempt by
intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by
any ordered course of public action. They began to do by secret concert
and association what they could not do in avowed parties. Almost by
accident a way was found to succeed which led insensibly farther and
farther afield into the ways of violence and outlawry. In May, 1866, a
little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding
time hang heavy on their hands after the excitements of the field,
so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of
association, for private amusement,—for anything that might promise to
break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work
upon the matter, and one of their number suggested that they call
themselves the _Kuklos_, the Circle. Secrecy and mystery were at the
heart of the pranks they planned: secrecy with regard to the membership
of their Circle, secrecy with regard to the place and the objects of
its meetings; and the mystery of disguise and of silent parade when the
comrades rode abroad at night when the moon was up: a white mask, a
tall cardboard hat, the figures of man and horse sheeted like a ghost,
and the horses’ feet muffled to move without sound of their approach. It
was the delightful discovery of the thrill of awesome fear, the woeful
looking for of calamity that swept through the country-sides as they
moved from place to place upon their silent visitations, coming no man
could say whence, going upon no man knew what errand, that put thought of
mischief into the minds of the frolicking comrades. It threw the negroes
into a very ecstasy of panic to see these sheeted “Ku Klux” move near
them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who
excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummery. No one knew or could
discover who the masked players were; no one could say whether they meant
serious or only innocent mischief; and the zest of the business lay in
keeping the secret close.
Here was a very tempting and dangerous instrument of power for days of
disorder and social upheaval, when law seemed set aside by the very
government itself, and outsiders, adventurers, were in the seats of
authority, the poor negroes, and white men without honor, their only
partisans. Year by year the organization spread, from county to county,
from State to State. Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux,
founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother “Den” at Pulaski, until
at last there had sprung into existence a great _Ku Klux Klan_, an
“Invisible Empire of the South,” bound together in loose organization
to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of
a time of revolution. The objects of the mysterious brotherhood grew
serious fast enough. It passed from jest to earnest. Men took hold
of it who rejoiced to find in it a new instrument of political power:
men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the
courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt. “They
were to protect their people from indignities and wrongs; to succor the
suffering, particularly the families of dead confederate soldiers”; to
enforce what they conceived to be the real laws of their States “and
defend the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in
conformity thereto; to aid in executing all constitutional laws and
protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than
by jury.” Similar secret orders grew up alongside the great Klan, or in
States where its “dens” had not been established: Knights of the White
Camellia, Pale Faces, Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood,
to serve the same ends by the same means. The Knights of the White
Camellia, founded in New Orleans in the winter of 1867-1868, spread their
organization abroad more widely even than the Ku Klux Klan.
[Illustration: TWO MEMBERS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN]
It was impossible to keep such a power in hand. Sober men governed the
counsels and moderated the plans of these roving knights errant; but
it was lawless work at best. They had set themselves, after the first
year or two of mere mischievous frolic had passed, to right a disordered
society through the power of fear. Men of hot passions who could not
always be restrained carried their plans into effect. Reckless men not
of their order, malicious fellows of the baser sort who did not feel the
compulsions of honor and who had private grudges to satisfy, imitated
their disguises and borrowed their methods. What was done passed beyond
mere mummery, mere visiting the glimpses of the moon and making night
hideous, that they might cause mere “fools of nature horridly to shake
their disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of their souls.” It
became the chief object of the night-riding comrades to silence or drive
from the country the principal mischief-makers of the reconstruction
régime, whether white or black. The negroes were generally easy enough
to deal with: a thorough fright usually disposed them to make utter
submission, resign their parts in affairs, leave the country,—do anything
their ghostly visitors demanded. But white men were less tractable; and
here and there even a negro ignored or defied them. The regulators would
not always threaten and never execute their threats. They backed their
commands, when need arose, with violence. Houses were surrounded in the
night and burned, and the inmates shot as they fled, as in the dreadful
days of border warfare. Men were dragged from their houses and tarred and
feathered. Some who defied the vigilant visitors came mysteriously to
some sudden death.
The more ardent regulators made no nice discriminations. All northern
white men or women who came into the South to work among the negroes,
though they were but school teachers, were in danger of their enmity
and silent onset. Many of the teachers who worked among the negroes did
in fact do mischief as deep as any political adventurer. The lessons
taught in their schools seemed to be lessons of self-assertion against
the whites: they seemed too often to train their pupils to be aggressive
Republican politicians and mischief-makers between the races. The
innocent and enlightened among them suffered in the general opinion from
the errors of those who deliberately sowed discord; and the regulators
too often failed to discriminate between those who made trouble and those
who fulfilled their gentle errand in peace and good temper.
The ranks of those who flocked into the South to take part in the
reconstruction of the States and the habilitation of the negro for his
life of freedom were strangely mixed of good and bad. The teachers
came upon an errand of mercy and humanity, but came too many of them
with bitter thoughts and intolerant purpose against the white people
of the South, upon whom, as they did not reflect, the fortunes of the
negro in any case depended. The politicians came for the most part like
a predatory horde; but here and there emerged a man of integrity, of
principle, of wise and moderate counsel, who in the long run won the
confidence even of those who hated with an ineradicable hatred the party
and the practice of federal control which he represented. The Ku Klux
and those who masqueraded in their guise struck at first only at those
who made palpable mischief between the races or set just law aside to
make themselves masters; but their work grew under their hands, and their
zest for it. Brutal crimes were committed; the innocent suffered with the
guilty; a reign of terror was brought on, and society was infinitely more
disturbed than defended. Law seemed oftentimes given over. The right to
the writ of _habeas corpus_ was again and again suspended to check the
lawless work. At least one governor of the reconstruction period sent
to his adjutant general lists of leading citizens proscribed, with the
suggestion that those whose names were specially marked should be tried
by court martial and executed at once before the use of the writ should
be restored. One lawless force seemed in contest with another.
[Illustration: CHARLES SUMNER]
[Illustration: SCENE IN THE GOLD ROOM, NEW YORK CITY, ON “BLACK FRIDAY”]
Such was the disturbing subject matter of the news which crept north
during the first year of General Grant’s administration as President. It
found business as well as politics moved by its own uneasy excitements.
The year 1869 witnessed an attempt on the part of a small group of
brokers to corner the gold market, singularly audacious, singularly
fatal in its consequences to the business of the country. Their
operations culminated on a certain “Black Friday,” the 24th of September,
1869. All foreign trade balances, all payments of customs duties at the
ports, required gold, and the Wall Street firm of Smith, Gould, Martin
& Co., in association with a few others, undertook nothing less than to
get control of all the gold in the country that was available for such
purposes, outside the Treasury of the United States. They sought to keep
the gold in the Treasury out of their way in the market by interesting
friends of the President to ply him with arguments based upon public
policy to which they thought he would be amenable, and hurried their
operations to a crisis while the arguments told; bought gold on every
hand, at any figures; and forced its price up, up, until the end came
on that Friday which the Street was never to forget. On that day they
had the prices and the stock of gold almost at their disposal when the
news came that the President had ordered the sub-treasury of the United
States at New York to sell gold from the vaults of the government for
the relief of the market and it was known that the hundred million which
the government held had begun to be released. Then the crash came, and
the ruin the operators had wrought, for themselves and others, was laid
bare. Trade at home as well as abroad depended upon the available stores
of gold. That desperate speculation had upset credit. The movement of
the crops halted; foreign trade came to a standstill; the West would
not deal with the East; the East could not deal over sea. No man who
handled money knew just where he stood. The business of the continent was
racked to its centre; and every man who knew the money market knew that
it would be many a weary month, it might be many a weary year, before
the demoralizing effects of that day would pass away. The operators who
had brought the panic on shielded themselves in the courts, and even the
immediate ruin they had wrought upon their victims could not be repaired.
There were abundant crops, and business lacked nothing to make it
prosperous but a steady money market. The census taken in 1870 showed
the population of the country increased by more than seven millions
since 1860, for all it had been a decade filled with death and war.
Even the South had added some eight hundred thousand to her reckoning.
Industry went forward at a quiet pace, and the wealth of the country
grew in the very season of financial panic. It was the unquiet spirit
of adventure that upset affairs. The war had thrown business from its
ordinary courses. The huge purchases of the War Department, the unusual
peril of the seas so long as the confederate privateers were abroad, the
necessary hazards of business while war filled every transaction with
conjecture had bred the speculative temper and quickened the instinct for
adventurous operations on the grand scale; had made men apt at managing
“corners” and reckless what risks they added to the legitimate hazards of
trade.
Embarrassments alike of business and of feeling, created by the war and
all that had come in its train, cleared very slowly away. Local storm
though it was, the war had not failed to send its airs abroad and create
international disturbances as well as domestic. It had particularly
threatened to bring about serious misunderstandings between England
and the United States. Most of the confederate privateers and swift
cruisers that had played havoc with the sea-going trade of the United
States during the earlier years of the war had been built in English ship
yards and had come from English ports. Their arms and equipment had been
bought in England. Their officers had waited for them in England, drawing
their pay, the while, through English banks. The English government
acknowledged itself bound to prevent all overt attempts of its subjects
to aid or arm the enemies of a nation with which it was at peace, and
to prevent the use of its ports and waters as a base of naval operations
against her; but it did not consider itself bound, as the government of
the United States contended that it should, to canvass every case of
suspicion in such matters and detain vessels merely upon reasonable
ground of belief that they were intended for uses inconsistent with
its neutrality. Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the minister of the United
States, had brought every case promptly to the attention of her Majesty’s
ministers and in more than one case had laid convincing evidence before
them of the character and destination of vessels being fitted out in
English ship yards for the service of the Confederacy; and the government
at Washington could not but connect their slow and indifferent action
in the cases submitted, their apparent unwillingness to examine the
evidence, their slackness in taking steps to seize the suspected vessels
with their manifest friendliness, or at least benevolent neutrality,
towards the Confederate States, their recognition of their belligerent
rights, their half inclination to accord them full recognition as an
independent power. It soon became evident that entire cordiality of
feeling between the two governments could not be restored until the
matter had been brought to a definite reckoning and final adjustment.
[Illustration: CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS]
[Illustration: THE BURNING OF THE JACOB BELL BY THE ALABAMA]
The reckoning came at the very outset of General Grant’s administration.
Mr. Seward had tried to bring it about while Mr. Johnson was President,
but the Senate had rejected the method of settlement he had been willing
to adopt, and an arrangement agreeable to both governments was not
arrived at until the spring of 1871. In May of that year, a Joint High
Commission appointed by the President and the ministers in London and
sitting in Washington, agreed upon a treaty, acceptable to the Senate,
which referred the claims of the United States against Great Britain
on account of the damage inflicted by the _Alabama_, the _Florida_,
the _Shenandoah_, and all other confederate vessels alleged to have
been fitted out in British ports, “generically known as the Alabama
claims,” to the arbitration of a tribunal of five persons to be named
by the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the King
of Italy, the President of the Swiss Confederation, and the Emperor of
Brazil respectively, and to sit at Geneva, in Switzerland. The treaty
of Washington,—so it was called,—provided also for the settlement of
other matters in dispute between the two governments which touched their
permanent interests: the right of American fishermen to catch fish upon
the Canadian coasts and of Canadian fishermen to make their catches upon
the northern coasts of the United States, and the exact line of boundary
between the United States and British North America within the streams
which separated them and within the channel between Vancouver’s Island
and the continent; but the Alabama claims for the moment seemed to all
eyes to stand at the front of the matter. On the 14th of September, 1872,
after a three months’ hearing, the Geneva tribunal rendered a decision
in favor of the United States, only the English member of the court
dissenting. It awarded to the United States $15,500,000 in damages. But
the strain of the matter had been taken off by the treaty; the decision
of the tribunal ended, not a controversy, but a judicial process at the
end of controversy.
[Illustration: HÔTEL BEAU-RIVAGE, GENEVA, HEADQUARTERS OF THE AMERICAN
ARBITRATORS]
The strain of domestic politics was enough to withdraw heat from
such matters when once they had become mere matters of business. The
reconstruction even of those southern States in which the establishment
of negro majorities had miscarried and the white voters had mustered
strong and stubborn enough to reject the laws Congress tried to thrust
upon them (Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas) was complete
by midsummer, 1870. But the mere completion of the formal process of
reconstruction, as planned in Congress, did not mean order or the quiet
settlement of affairs in the South. The white men, with whom effective
initiative and the real weight of predominance rested in any case, had
had their wits quickened and their temper hardened by what the Republican
leaders had done. They were shut out from the use of the ballot and from
every open and legitimate part in affairs, but they had come at their
power in another way. Those who loved mastery and adventure directed the
work of the Ku Klux. Those whose tastes and principles made such means
unpalatable brought their influence to bear along every line of counsel
or of management that promised to thrust the carpet bagger out of office
and discourage the negro in the use of his vote. Congress saw where they
meant to regain their mastery, at the polls, and by what means, the
intimidation and control of the negroes without regard to law,—the law
thrust upon them, not their own; and hastened to set up a new barrier of
statute against them.
[Illustration: THE FINAL AWARD. THE LAST SITTING OF THE GENEVA CONFERENCE]
In May, 1870, it had passed an Act which put southern elections and the
registration of voters in the southern States under the superintendence
and virtual control of federal supervisors and marshals, who were
empowered to protect all voters in the exercise of their right of
suffrage, and whose complaints were to be heard, not by the courts of
the States, but by the circuit courts of the United States alone. At its
next session it still further strengthened the Act. The forty-second
Congress met on the 4th of March, 1871, in extraordinary session, to
continue legislation to the same end. Not merely the acts of registration
and voting needed to be guarded; every privilege conferred upon the
negro as an incident of his new freedom seemed in need of protection:
the Republican leaders were determined that the Fourteenth as well as
the Fifteenth Amendment should be buttressed about by penal legislation
and the whole force of the government, if necessary, brought to bear
to put them into effectual execution. A committee of seven senators
and fourteen representatives was appointed to inquire into the actual
condition of the South and ascertain the facts with regard to the alleged
outrages there, and a drastic Act was passed (April 20, 1871) which
was meant to crush the Ku Klux Klan and all lawless bands acting after
its fashion. Its provisions made such acts, whether of violence or of
mere intimidation, as the secret societies of the South had committed
conspiracy against the government of the United States, punishable by
heavy fines or by imprisonment, or by both fine and imprisonment, and
authorized the President, whenever the state authorities were unable or
unwilling to prevent or check them, to use the land and naval forces of
the federal government for their suppression, as against an insurrection.
It authorized him, also, until the close of the next regular session
of Congress, to suspend at his pleasure the writ of _habeas corpus_
“during the continuance of such rebellion against the United States,”
in such portions of the southern country as seemed to him most touched
by the disorders of the time or most under the control of the secret
associations. The Act gave to the federal courts which were empowered
to enforce it the right to exclude from their juries persons suspected
of sympathizing with those who violated its provisions. It was meant
to destroy root and branch the organizations which had set themselves
to annul the rights of the negroes. The Act of May, 1870, had made it
a criminal offence “to go in disguise upon the highway, or upon the
premises of another” by way of conspiracy “to deprive any citizen of his
constitutional rights,” striking directly at the secret orders and their
more lawless imitators.
General Grant used the powers conferred upon him with the energy and
directness of a soldier, as Congress had expected. On the 12th of
October, 1871, singling out nine counties of South Carolina in which such
acts as Congress had aimed its blow at were most frequent, he called
upon the members of all illegal associations within them to surrender
their arms and disguises within five days. Five days afterwards, his
proclamation not having been heeded, he suspended the privilege of the
writ of _habeas corpus_ in the counties named, and two hundred arrests,
followed promptly enough by prosecution and conviction, were immediately
made. It was easy, with the powers bestowed by the Act upon the federal
judges, to push trials to a quick consummation, and to eliminate all
reasonable chance of escaping conviction. And the action of the President
in South Carolina was but a beginning of his action throughout the South.
Everywhere that the secret orders or the reckless fellows who plied their
means of intimidation without scruple or principle or public object had
been most active arrests and prosecutions came thick and fast; and within
but a little more than a year an end was made of the business.
But, though the Act had worked its drastic remedy, peace, accommodation,
the rational relationships between race and race upon which alone a
reasonable order of life could rest, were, it might be, further off
than ever. The joint committee of Senate and House which Congress had
appointed to accompany the execution of the Act with a thorough-going
inquiry into the actual condition of the South filled thirteen volumes
with the reports of their investigations. They found no justification
for what the white men of the South, desperate to free themselves from
the rule of negroes and adventurers, had done; they drew forth from
their witnesses little but what was dark and of evil omen; they made
no serious attempt to understand the causes which underlay conspiracy
and chronic disorder; they only laid before the country a mass of
undigested testimony, crude, unverifiable, and uttered their expected
condemnation of a people at bay. But the country began to see for itself
the real philosophy of the painful story. Significant rifts began to
show themselves in opinion. It began to be plainly evident to all who
were willing to look facts in the face what Mr. Stevens and his radical
colleagues had really accomplished by their policy of Thorough. They
had made the white men of the South implacable enemies, not of the
Union, but of the party that had saved the Union and which now carried
its affairs in its hands. Their reconstruction, whose object had been,
not the rehabilitation of the southern governments, but the political
enfranchisement of the negroes, had wrought a work of bitterness
incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo, than the
mere effects of war and a virtual conquest of arms. They had made the
ascendency of the party of the Union seem to the men of the South nothing
less than the corruption and destruction of their society, a reign of
ignorance, a régime of power basely used; and this revolt, these secret
orders with their ugly work of violence and terror, these infinite,
desperate shifts to be rid of the burden and nightmare of what had been
put upon them, were the consequence.
[Illustration: ROBERT TOOMBS]
The reactions of opinion were slow. The country, though it grew uneasy,
was not yet ready to put itself in the hands of the Democratic party,
which had opposed the war, and which still suffered in the thought of
the voters the discredit of its old alliance with the slave owners.
The presidential election of 1872 came and went without disturbing the
supremacy of the majority. But it brought to light many things that
gravely disquieted the Republican leaders. Thoughtful and influential
men whose support they could ill afford to lose, were, they perceived,
being alienated from them. It was a serious matter that their plans
in the South had so miscarried and required even yet the policing of
whole districts by armed men. Evidently nothing but force sustained
them, or could sustain them; and no humane or thoughtful man could look
with complaisance upon a perpetual subjection of the South to federal
arms. The administration of southern affairs from Washington wore,
moreover, from another angle an unhandsome appearance. Its objects seemed
to be, not so much the enforcement of constitutional rights as the
aggrandizement of personal adherents of the President and of the close
partisans of the Republican leaders who were most in his confidence.
The troublesome, unwholesome matter of official patronage played too
prominent a part in the motives of the government, and made the treatment
of southern affairs seem only a phase of the general “spoils system” of
appointment to office which seemed to have fastened itself upon the party
organization of the country.
It was bad enough that the federal offices should be emptied wholesale
upon a change of parties in the administration, to make room for the
partisans of the successful leaders, as they had been when Mr. Lincoln
came to the presidency,—as they had been at every change of parties since
General Jackson’s day; but that had at least given political solidarity
to the administration and made the President in some sort master in the
counsels of his party. Now a new and sinister sign was added that the
official patronage of the government was to be used, not to strengthen
and solidify the administration, but to give secure political power to
local managers who were to be permitted to dictate to the President whom
he should appoint to office. In one State after another there emerged
some one man,—a senator, a representative, a federal official of high
office,—who was recognized as the President’s only adviser with regard
to all appointments within his State; and all federal office holders
within that State became by natural consequence his sycophants. In the
South these petty masters were too often the political adventurers who
had been drawn to their places of preferment by the temptations of the
process of reconstruction, when the negroes waited to be used, or men
who were themselves the subservient tools of politicians in Washington.
General Grant himself felt the demoralization of the system very keenly
and desired its radical reformation, but was easily imposed upon by men
whom he trusted, and trusted men without discrimination. He had great
simplicity of character. He judged men shrewdly enough when he saw them
in action, but had little insight into their real motives and character
when associated with them in counsel. It seemed to him unnatural,
unfaithful, as it had seemed to General Jackson, to doubt or distrust
his friends,—not so much because he was a soldier and ready to stand by
his comrades with stout allegiance as because, like most men of simple
nature, he deemed others as honest as himself, and suspicion a thing for
rogues to harbor.
The President had alienated, moreover, certain men whose support he could
not afford to dispense with. He had set his heart upon the annexation
of Santo Domingo to the United States, and had come to an open breach
with Mr. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign
Affairs upon the matter. That and many other things, great and small, had
driven Mr. Horace Greeley also into opposition, the erratic, trenchant
editor of the New York _Tribune_. Mr. Sumner seemed to a great many men
in the country to stand for the older, better, more elevated traditions
of the Republican party, which General Grant seemed to be fast drawing
to the lower levels of self-aggrandizement and power. Mr. Greeley wrote
editorials every day which told like sharp blows upon the consciousness
of all the thousands of plain men the country-sides through who looked
to the _Tribune_ for guidance as to an oracle. It was no light matter to
have such men set against the administration.
[Illustration: HORACE GREELEY]
It was the more embarrassing because there were large matters of policy,
as well as scattered items of mistaken action and vague fears for the
civil service, upon which an opposition could concentrate. At the heart
of these was the disfranchisement of the white men of the South. It
was plain to see that the troubles in the southern States arose out of
the exclusion of the better whites from the electoral suffrage no less
than from the admission of the most ignorant blacks. It was no doubt in
part because the South could not use its real leaders in open political
contest that impatient men and radicals had been driven to use secret
combination and all the ugly weapons of intimidation. The processes of
reconstruction were made by those who managed them to depend as much upon
withholding the suffrage from all who had participated with any touch of
leadership in secession as upon the use of the negroes as voters and the
radical amendment of the southern constitutions; and it presently became
evident that there was a rapidly growing number of thoughtful men in the
Republican ranks who thought it high time to grant a general amnesty
and bring affairs to a normal condition again in southern society. Mr.
Greeley was strongly of that opinion, and it took form and bred concert
of action rapidly enough to play a determining part in the presidential
campaign of 1872. In 1870 the question had taken very definite form
among the Republicans of Missouri, and the party had split asunder
there into a radical and a liberal faction. The radicals wished for the
present to maintain the disqualifications imposed by the constitution
of the State upon those who had identified themselves with secession
during the war; the liberals demanded “universal amnesty and universal
enfranchisement,” and won in the state elections. The leaders of the
successful revolt were Mr. Benjamin Gratz Brown and Mr. Carl Schurz. Mr.
Brown had been politician, editor, soldier, senator these twenty years,
and with the success of his party became governor of the State. Mr.
Schurz was a member of the Senate, a man but just turned of forty but
bred since a lad to the rôle of aggressive liberal in politics,—an exile
from his German home because of his participation in the revolutionary
movements of 1849. He was an orator whom opponents not prepared to join
frank issue found it prudent to avoid in open contest. Mr. Lincoln had
named him minister to Spain in 1861, but he had preferred the field
and entered the army; and at the close of the war had been sent by the
legislature of Missouri to the Senate of the United States.
[Illustration: CARL SCHURZ]
The “Liberal Republicans” of Missouri, thus led, called upon men of like
views everywhere to join them, and their ranks for a little seemed to
fill upon a scale which threatened to make them a formidable national
faction. The form the presidential campaign of 1872 was to take was
determined by their initiative. In May, 1872, a national convention of
their partisans came together at Cincinnati, at the call of the Missouri
leaders, and nominated Mr. Greeley for the presidency, Mr. Benjamin
Gratz Brown for the vice presidency. These were nominations which the
country found it hard to take seriously. Mr. Greeley’s irregular genius,
useful as it was in the trenchant statement of issues and the sharp
challenge of opinion, was not of the kind prudent men were willing to
see tried in the conduct of the government. He was too much a man of
impulse, without poise or calculable lines of action. Mr. Brown the
country did not know, except as a picturesque Missouri soldier and
politician. The names of much more statesmanlike men had been proposed in
the convention, but it had acted like a great mass meeting rather than
like the organ of a party, upon impulse and hastily considered policy
rather than with prudent forecast or real knowledge of the true grounds
of expediency. Its platform exhibited the same characteristics of
half-formed opinion and a hurried compromise of interests. It condemned
the existing administration as corrupt in its use of the patronage and
absolutely disregardful of constitutional limitations in its use of power
in the States, and demanded the “immediate and absolute removal of all
disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion,” in the belief that
universal amnesty would “result in complete pacification in all parts of
the country”; but its formulations of policy were vague and evasive. It
was framed to please all elements of a mixed opposition, and to make as
acceptable as possible its closing invitation to “all patriotic citizens,
without regard to previous political affiliations,” to join with its
framers in purifying the government.
[Illustration: BENJAMIN GRATZ BROWN]
The Democratic convention, which met in Baltimore early in July, accepted
both the platform and the candidates of the Cincinnati convention,
though the Democratic leaders liked neither. The platform spoke no
recognizable Democratic doctrine, except, indeed, in its advocacy of the
maintenance of the public credit by a speedy return to specie payments,
and the candidates were men whom no experienced politician could hope
to see elected. But the split in the Republican ranks evidenced by
the Cincinnati convention was the only sign anywhere visible to the
Democratic leaders of a change in public sentiment likely to weaken the
party in power. Without the coalition they knew themselves helpless; with
it they hoped to make at least a show of strength. Such allies might be
worth the weak candidates and the inconclusive declaration of principles
that went with them. The “Liberal Republicans” had given form to the
whole campaign, as they had expected.
The result was what every one who had the least sagacity in reading the
signs of political weather perceived from the first it must be. The
Democrats added but one hundred and thirty thousand to their popular
vote of four years before, though the number of voters in the country
had greatly increased and for the first time in the history of the
government every State chose its electors by the direct suffrage of the
people. The Republicans added six hundred thousand to their vote, and
General Grant was elected for a second term by an overwhelming majority
in the electoral college (286-63). The congressional elections which
accompanied the choice of President gave the Republicans again, moreover,
their accustomed two-thirds majority in both houses. All things stood as
before; the opposition were yet a long way off from power. Mr. Greeley
survived the elections but a few weeks. He had not seen how hopeless his
candidacy was. He was turned of sixty and had been broken in health. All
his years had been full of such keen and unremitting labor as robs a man
at last of his elasticity. The sudden stroke of utter defeat, touched
almost with farce, so that men laughed to see how complete it was, was
more than he could bear. On the 29th of November, 1872, before the
electors had voted, he died. The few votes that would have gone to him
were given as the electors pleased to men who had been his allies in the
novel coalition he had led.
And yet, though the coalition had failed, the Democrats were nearer
their day of success than they dreamed. Within two years the Republican
majority of nearly one hundred in the House of Representatives had been
supplanted by a Democratic majority almost as large, and the men who
had led the party of reconstruction found their season of mastery gone
by. The country had begun to see with how radical a demoralization the
war party it had trusted was beginning to be touched, and how impotent
the amiable soldier they had put at the head of the government was to
guide or better it. General Grant had found that the appointment of men
to political office upon the recommendation of politicians and personal
friends, though the friends were his own and the politicians men whom the
country honored and whom he would have deemed it a reproach upon himself
to distrust, was a very different matter from promoting officers tested
under his own eye in camp and field. The leaders of Congress perceived
plainly enough the movement of opinion out-of-doors, saw the service of
the government steadily sinking to a lower level of efficiency, knew what
influences were at work to debase it and what condemnation must come upon
them should the use made of the patronage come fully to light. On the
3d of March, 1871, accordingly, they put through Congress an Act which
authorized the President to frame and administer, through a commission,
such rules as he thought best for the regulation of admissions to the
civil service. The President accepted the Act with cordial approval,
with an obvious sense of relief, indeed; and with complete indifference
to the distress of the politicians proceeded to establish and enforce a
system of competitive examinations for office. But the politicians were
stronger in Congress than the President, and after two years of painful
exclusion from the use of the patronage induced the houses to withhold
the appropriation necessary for the administration of the President’s new
system of appointment. They had not yet learned how hard a master public
opinion was to be in that matter.
Possibly the mere demoralization of the civil service would not by
itself have brought upon them the bitter discipline of defeat which they
presently underwent. Other things went along with it which stirred the
country more deeply; which made Congress itself seem corrupt and the
party which controlled it without a watchful sense of honor. The year
1869, in which General Grant became President, had been marked by the
completion of both the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railways,
the two lines begun in 1863, the one eastward from the Pacific, the other
westward from the Missouri River, which when completed at their point
of junction at last bound East and West together across the long plains
and the high passes of the Rockies upon which so many a slow caravan had
lost its way and its precious freight of human lives. In 1867 the company
which had undertaken the construction of the Union Pacific had acquired
by purchase the charter of a corporation organized in Pennsylvania in
1863 upon the model of the great French _Société Générale du Crédit
Mobilier_, for the placing of loans, the handling of all marketable
stocks, and the transaction of a general banking business. The French
company had come very near to getting into its hands the whole brokerage
business and mercantile credit of France; the promoters of the Union
Pacific Railway bought out the Pennsylvania company in order to obtain
a suitable instrument for conducting the financial operations connected
with their undertaking. Congress had made immense grants in aid of the
Pacific railway, regarding its construction as of no less importance
to the government than to the commerce and material development of the
country, became it would bind the two coasts of the continent which had
hitherto been almost like separated countries together by a great highway
along which authority and the influences of opinion could travel as well
as trade. Its subsidies had taken the form of six _per cent._ gold bonds:
$16,000 for every mile of rails upon the prairies or the coast plains
beyond the mountains, from $32,000 to $48,000 for every mile through
the passes of the mountains or the difficult country between range and
range,—besides twenty-five million acres of public land along the line of
the road.
Here was a perilously close connection between a great financial
undertaking and legislation by Congress; and in the presidential campaign
of 1872 it was openly charged by the Democrats that Mr. Colfax, the Vice
President, Mr. Henry Wilson, the Vice President elect, the Speaker of the
House of Representatives, and a number of senators and representatives
had accepted gifts of Crédit Mobilier stock in consideration of
legislative and other services to be rendered the company. Both houses
appointed committees of investigation. The revelations which ensued
filled the country with uneasiness and disgust. Against the more
prominent officials accused no proof of conscious wrongdoing was found.
Only two members of the House and a single member of the Senate were
found to have deliberately engaged in transactions which touched their
integrity and honor. But many a detail came to light which showed that
members carried very easy-going consciences in such matters, accepted
favors without looking too curiously into their motive or significance,
thought more often of their personal interests than of the public honor,
and felt very slightly the responsibility of their posts of trust. It
was open to any one who chose to believe that less had been told than
had been covered up; that, with but a little more probing, it might have
been possible to unearth many an unsavory intrigue. The discredit of the
ruling party in the houses was steadily deepening.
[Illustration: SCHUYLER COLFAX]
The painful impressions left by the investigation were heightened by
the deliberate action of the houses during the very session which saw
it instituted and concluded. They did not scruple to pass an Act which
increased the compensation of senators and representatives and which was
made to apply retroactively to the sessions of the past two years,—an Act
which the country very bluntly dubbed a “salary grab” and deemed quite in
keeping with the reputation of a Congress which had censured but did not
expel the members whom its own investigation had shown to be guilty of
corrupt connection with the Crédit Mobilier.
Other impressions, well or ill founded, supervened which confirmed the
country in its distrust of the men who were in control of affairs. In
September, 1873, financial panic once more came upon the country with a
rush, amidst abundant trade, amidst every sign of prosperity, when wages
were good, employment readily found, factories busy, prices normal, money
easy. Railways had been built too fast in the West. Within five years
no less than $1,700,000,000 had been spent in railway construction. A
Northern Pacific Railway was in course of construction, to be pushed
forward through a new section of the country; and not a new Pacific
railway only but shorter lines also by the score in regions where as
yet there were no people, in order that parts of the country otherwise
inaccessible might be opened up to quick settlement and profitable use.
Such roads could not reasonably look to make a profit for twenty years
to come. They were built with borrowed money. Their bonds filled every
market, at home and abroad. Some new roads there were which were only
extensions of older lines of established earning capacity; but the
older portions could not earn enough to pay for the new. Certain as the
prospects of profit were, when the country should grow and settlers
come to dot the lines of rail with towns, flank them with farms, and
put factories at every point of vantage, their construction was for the
present purely speculative, and the processes of growth upon which they
depended to keep them from bankruptcy could not be sufficiently hurried
to save their credit. Early in September, 1873, the break began to come.
One by one banking and brokerage firms in New York which had advanced
money to western and Canadian railways began to announce their inability
to meet their obligations. On the morning of the 18th Mr. Jay Cooke, the
agent of the federal government, with $4,000,000 of deposits from all
parts of the country and $15,000,000 of the paper of the Northern Pacific
company, declared himself unable to meet his debts, and the “Street” knew
that the end had come. Firm after firm, company after company, went to
the wall, some of them reputed the strongest in the country, and a long,
slow winter of panic ensued whose effects the business of the country was
to feel for years to come.
[Illustration: JAY COOKE]
Men who did not know how to reason upon such matters or how to
distinguish the real forces that governed the credit of the country
were inclined to attribute this sudden sweep of calamity across a money
market apparently prosperous and at peace to the financial legislation of
Congress. On the 12th of February, 1873, an Act had become law which, it
was said, had “demonetized” silver and upset values. The Act had dropped
from the list of authorized coins the silver dollar of 412½ grains,
which had hitherto been the standard silver dollar of the coinage, and
had authorized, in partial substitution, a “trade dollar” of 420 grains.
No silver dollars of 412½ grains had been coined since 1808; since 1853
there had been no silver dollars in circulation; the Act simply made
what was fact also law, and had passed without objection. But when
the financial crisis of the autumn of 1873 came many persons recalled
the “demonetization” of silver effected at the opening of the year,
and made shrewd theories about the causes of a panic whose explanation
was obvious and upon its face. The Republicans in Congress had had the
ill fortune to alter the law of the currency upon the very eve of a
financial disturbance, and those who did not like their conduct of the
government and suspected them of more corruption than had been proved
were at liberty to add this to the list of things they had done amiss,
to the damage of the country. The congressional elections of the autumn
of 1874 went heavily against them; the House was lost to the Democrats;
their majority in the Senate was retained only because the Senate was
guarded by its constitution against sudden change. The impressions of
that autumn and the events of the next year lost them also the local
elections in many of the northern States which had so far seemed their
safe strongholds. Even Massachusetts chose a Democratic governor.
[Illustration: WILLIAM WORTH BELKNAP]
The country could not overlook the evidences of demoralization at
Washington. In 1875 it was discovered that there was concerted action
in the West between distillers and federal officials to defraud the
government of large amounts in respect of the internal revenue tax on
distilled spirits, a “whiskey ring,” as the newspapers called it, which
did not hesitate to use a portion of its fraudulent profits to make good
its opportunity and its immunity by political corruption. Mr. Belknap,
the Secretary of War, was accused of accepting bribes in dispensing
the patronage of his Department, and, upon impeachment on that charge,
resigned his office as if in confession, to escape punishment. Venality
and fraud began on all hands to be suspected, even where they did not
exist, and mere inefficiency began to irritate the country as if it were
but a part of the general decadence of official honor. The President
himself saw how ill, how discreditably, and with how incorrigible a
tendency towards serious and even criminal misconduct, the administrative
branches of the public service operated under his hand, and with
the simplicity and frankness which were characteristic of him,—the
simplicity and frankness which unscrupulous politicians played upon to
betray him,—acknowledged his failure and longed for release from duties
in the performance of which he knew that he had blundered. His eight
years of power had cost his party its predominance.
[Illustration: PHYSICAL FEATURES OF THE UNITED STATES.
BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
It was not the condition of the civil service alone, however, or the
mere alarm of the country at the too frequent disclosures of malfeasance
in office which brought the ascendency of the Republicans to an end.
Congress did its part to make it plain that nothing but blunders were to
be expected from the political legislation of the men who had devised and
forced to their execution the measures of reconstruction. On Christmas
day, 1868, President Johnson had proclaimed full pardon and amnesty for
all who had participated in secession, without reserve or exception, and
by an Act of the 2d of May, 1872, Congress had removed the political
disabilities imposed by the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment
from all who had served the Confederate States, except only those who
had left the Congress of the United States or the judicial, military, or
naval service of the federal government, the headship of an executive
Department or the post of minister at a foreign court to take part with
the seceding States. But, though they thus cleared away the more abnormal
obstructions to the return of settled peace and a natural order of life
at the South, the congressional leaders could not keep their hands from
the race question. Mr. Sumner, in particular, was insistent that the
negroes should be given imperative federal law for their support in the
assertion of their social no less than of their political rights; and in
February, 1875, at last had his way, though he did not live to see it. A
bill passed which gave the federal courts the authority, by appropriate
process and penalty, to enforce the right of negroes to accommodation in
public inns, theatres, railway carriages, and schools, and to service
upon all juries, upon the same footing as white persons. The Act became
law on the 1st of March, three days before the expiration of the term
of the last House of Representatives the Republicans were effectually
to control for fifteen years. It was the older leaders’ last Act for
creating friction at the South. For eight years it was to fail utterly of
accomplishing its object and yet to work its work of irritation, to be
set aside at last by the Supreme Court (1883) as an invasion of the legal
field of the States which no portion of the constitution, new or old,
could be made to sustain.
The reconstruction of the southern States had been the undoing of the
Republican party. The course of carpet bag rule did not run smooth. Every
election fixed the attention of the country upon some serious question
of fraud or violence in the States where northern adventurers and negro
majorities were in control. Congress could not remove the political
disabilities of the southern white men without increasing their power at
the polls and cutting at the foundations of Republican rule in the South;
and yet, though the white voters were disfranchised, in at least three
of the southern States Republican rule was maintained only by direct aid
from Washington,—and sometimes at the point of the bayonet. General Grant
had grown infinitely impatient that there should come every year, from
State after State, calls for troops to keep the Republican governments
at the South in their place of power. “The whole public are tired out
with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” he said, in refusing
troops to the governor of Mississippi, “and the great majority are
ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government. I
heartily wish that peace and good order may be restored without issuing
the proclamation. But, if it is issued, I shall instruct the commanders
of the forces to have no child’s play.” Here was the right feeling of
the man and the grim firmness of the soldier. He was not mistaken as to
the feeling of the country; and though he withheld his hand where he
could, there was military interference enough to exasperate that opinion
to the utmost. Before his term was out the white voters of the South had
rallied strong enough in every State except South Carolina, Florida, and
Louisiana to take their governments out of the hands of the men who were
preying upon them. That they had done it by methods which only an almost
revolutionary state of society justified no one doubted: by keeping the
negroes away from the polls by every form of intimidation, by forceable
interference with their rights when necessary, by every expedient,
whether of law or of subtile management, that promised them mastery; but
they had triumphed, and there was at least an end of chronic revolution.
But in Louisiana, in Florida, and in South Carolina, though desperately
beset, the Republicans had, by desperate means, kept their hold upon
the governments they had made. The troops of the United States were
first used to adjust the contest in Louisiana. The revised constitution
of Louisiana, revised in the interest of the congressional plan of
reconstruction, provided, as most of the new southern constitutions did,
for the determination of the results of all elections by a returning
board so constituted as to be always under the control of the existing
administration of the State. That board had the right to reject, without
judicial process and upon its own mere opinion, the votes of all counties
or precincts where force or fraud had been employed; and it used
that power to check the rising Democratic vote wherever it seriously
threatened the supremacy of those in authority. Its surveillance went
smoothly enough so long as the Republicans were themselves united; but
the Republicans of Louisiana had fallen apart into factions, vacancies
upon the returning board had been made and filled by removals and
appointments, amidst disputes and contests of legal right, until there
were at last two boards instead of one, and before the matter was quieted
three, each of which claimed to be the legal returning board of the
State. The result of the election of the autumn of 1872 turned upon their
rival claims. Over one the Democrats had got control by coalition with
the “liberal” wing of the Republicans; another declared the Republican
state officers and the Republican candidates for the state legislature
elected, and federal aid was asked to carry its judgment into effect.
A committee of Congress, sent down to investigate the matter, found it
impossible to disentangle the hopeless quarrel; Congress failed to pass
the only measure of relief its leaders were able to think of, a bill
providing for a new election; and the President recognized and installed
the Republican governor.
[Illustration: SITTING BULL]
It was not an affair which either party could look back upon with
complacency, but the Republicans took the greater discredit from it, and
the country grew very restive. A committee of the Senate reported that
the district judge of the United States for the District of Louisiana had
undoubtedly gone far beyond the scope of his power and acted in “flagrant
disregard of his duty” in his use of writs of injunction issued in aid
of the faction which the President sustained. Some unsavory intrigue had
been uncovered at almost every step of the investigation. Moreover, the
action of the President was no settlement of the difficulty. It left the
State in a heightened temper of revolution. Riots accompanied the efforts
of the questionable government he set up to enforce its authority. In
September, 1874, the partisans of Mr. McEnery, the leader of the combined
Democrats and “liberal” Republicans, rose in arms, put every officer of
his opponent’s administration from his place, and assumed control of the
government. Again federal troops intervened, and the ousted officers were
reinstated. Nice compromises, difficult to maintain and satisfactory to
nobody, had to be devised to keep the peace until there should be another
trial of strength in the election of a governor at the polls.
The summer of 1876 was darkened by a tragic war with the Indians of the
far West. In 1874 gold had been discovered in the Black Hills which lay
upon the border line of Wyoming and Dakota, and the rush of settlers and
miners thither had exasperated the Sioux tribes to take the war path.
Their chief was Sitting Bull, whom the troops of the United States were
to find an opponent to put them on their mettle. Gathering his forces
within the secluded valley of the Little Big Horn by the upper waters of
the Yellowstone, where he could best mask his strength, he struck first
at one and then at another of the three small bodies of soldiers sent to
converge upon him. One he forced back; another he effectually checked;
part of the third he trapped and utterly destroyed. General Terry, coming
against him from Bismarck, sent General Custer forward with the seventh
cavalry to go round about and attack him at the rear; and on the 25th of
June, riding with five companies hard upon the camp, Custer rode into
a death trap. The Indians swarmed around him in numbers which utterly
overwhelmed and completely cut him off from retreat, and not a man came
away to tell the tale. The other seven companies of the regiment were not
at hand to fight with them or to give them succor, and found themselves
obliged, when at last they came up, to fortify a bluff near at hand as
a place of safety and retreat until they should themselves be succored
and relieved. The forces of the government gathered at last to complete
the work so ill begun, and the Indians retired to the mountains; but it
took much painful fighting, and many toilsome marches, prosecuted through
all the long autumn and the winter itself, to bring them to terms; and
Sitting Bull slipped through their hands across the northern border at
last.
[Illustration: GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER]
Meanwhile the presidential election of 1876 had come and the full harvest
of the mischief done in the reconstruction of the South was being reaped.
The Democrats nominated Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, a man who had shown his
quality as governor of the State of New York and won the respect of
all thoughtful men, alike for his integrity and for his ability. The
Republicans nominated Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes, who had won his place in
the public confidence as an officer of volunteers in the war for the
Union, as a member of the House of Representatives, and as governor of
Ohio. Both men stood removed from the passionate contests of the period
of reconstruction. Their candidacy put the emphasis of party contest as
much as might be upon the issues of the new day rather than of the old.
But the immediate past was a weight upon the fortunes of the Republicans;
the country had turned with evident distrust from the work of confusion
they had wrought. Again, as in 1874, Democratic majorities seemed to
sweep the country. Only the confusion the Republicans themselves had
brought about saved them from utter defeat. State elections had been
held, as usual, in most of the States at the same time that presidential
electors were chosen, and once again the result of the elections in
Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina was in dispute. The electoral
votes of all of these States were necessary for the election of Mr.
Hayes. Mr. Tilden had carried Connecticut, New York, New Jersey,
Delaware, Maryland, Indiana, and Missouri, as well as the ten southern
States whose votes were not in dispute; one hundred and eighty-four
electoral votes were secured for him beyond a doubt, and one hundred and
eighty-five constituted a majority. A single additional electoral vote
would bring him into the presidency, and it seemed possible that at least
one might be added to his reckoning by Oregon. There three Republican
electors had undoubtedly been chosen, but one of them was thought to have
been ineligible under the law, and the Democratic governor had appointed
in his stead the next candidate on the poll, a Democrat, and given him
his certificate.
[Illustration: RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD HAYES]
In the South nineteen electoral votes were in dispute. In Louisiana
there had, apparently, been a clear majority of Democratic votes cast
at the polls, alike for presidential electors and for governor and
state legislators; but once again the returning board, which was in
the hands of Republicans, had turned a Democratic into a Republican
majority by rejecting the votes of precincts in which it declared fraud
or intimidation to have been used. Certificates had been given to the
Republican presidential electors, accordingly, and again a Republican
state government had been set up by force of authority. But again the
Democrats had refused to yield. They had set up, on their own part,
a Democratic administration, and Mr. Nicholls, whom they claimed to
have elected governor, gave certificates to the Democratic electors.
In Florida the vote had been very close indeed, and turned upon the
votes of a single county. The returning board of the State had but a
single Democratic member, the Attorney General, and the majority of the
board had given the vote of the State to the Republicans. The Attorney
General had issued certificates over his own signature to the Democratic
electors. In South Carolina federal troops had in many places guarded
the polls, and federal troops had assisted the Republican leaders of the
State to put the governor and state legislators whom they claimed to have
elected into office; but the Democrats claimed that their candidates had
in fact been chosen, notwithstanding the obstructions to free voting
created by the presence of troops and the interference of federal
supervisors acting under the “Force Bills” of 1870 and 1871; inaugurated
their own governor, General Wade Hampton, a distinguished cavalry
commander of the Confederacy; and set up their own legislature. General
Hampton issued certificates of election to the Democratic presidential
electors.
[Illustration: SAMUEL JONES TILDEN]
All the country saw, with an instant thrill of misgiving, how perilous a
situation was thus created. Here were double returns from three States
in a presidential election, and the decision which should be chosen
must determine the election. One vote out of the twenty in dispute,
though it were only the single questionable vote of Oregon, would give
the presidency to the Democrats. The control of the government turned
upon the action of the houses when they should come to count the votes
in joint session. The House of Representatives was Democratic, the
Senate Republican; there was no hope that they could agree. No one could
confidently say, though he put partisanship aside and held his judgment
at the nicest poise, upon which side the right lay in the disputed
southern elections. It was plain enough that in any case the returning
boards would have given the vote to the Republicans, whatever the face of
the returns, so long as the men for whom they acted felt that they could
count upon the support of the Executive at Washington in the maintenance
of their authority. It was equally clear, on the other hand, that there
were all but indisputable evidences of fraud or at the least irregularity
in the votes upon which the Democrats relied. In South Carolina serious
riots had occurred whose avowed object had been the intimidation of the
negroes. The country had grown very impatient, as General Grant said, of
seeing governments maintained at the South by federal arms, and wished
very heartily to see the hand of the federal Executive withdrawn, come
what come might; and yet it was not as clear as could be wished that this
was the occasion for their legitimate overthrow.
[Illustration: WADE HAMPTON]
What the country had really to fear was, not the difficulty of the
problem as a question of justice, but the passion of parties, the
danger that those who stood at the front of party counsels would seek
the success of their party by some intrigue, even by some stroke of
violence. Foreseeing a certain deadlock of the houses when it should come
to a counting of the votes, there was talk among the more headlong and
reckless partisans of each side of taking the law into their own hands.
There were signs almost of civil war in the air for a few troubled weeks
of that anxious autumn.
But it was never really likely it would come to that. Men trained in
the temper of American institutions had never thought to settle a
constitutional difficulty after that fashion. Congress listened very
willingly to counsels of compromise and moderation. It was agreed that
an electoral commission should be constituted, which should consist
of five members of the House, three Democrats and two Republicans,
five members of the Senate, three Republicans and two Democrats, two
Democrats and two Republicans from the supreme bench of the United
States, and an additional Justice from the same court selected by the
four Justices named in the bill; and that to that commission should be
referred every question in dispute. Such a commission was undoubtedly an
extra-constitutional body, and its decisions disappointed the country of
any display of judicial impartiality it may have hoped for from it. Mr.
Justice Bradley, who was chosen by his fellow Justices of the commission
to be the fifteenth member of the tribunal, voted in every instance
in favor of the Republican claims, as did every other member of the
commission, whether judge, senator, or representative, whose affiliations
were with the Republican party. Every Democrat of the commission voted
in favor of the claims of the Democratic managers. Every question
submitted was settled by a vote of eight to seven. But there was at least
a settlement, which no one dreamed of disputing or attempting to annul.
General Grant gave way to Mr. Hayes, and the government remained in the
hands of the Republicans.
[Illustration: JOSEPH P. BRADLEY]
To Mr. Hayes the tacit obligations of the situation were plain. He
withdrew the federal troops from the South. The Republican governments
of Louisiana and South Carolina were dissolved, and the Democratic
governments which had claimed the election quietly took their place.
The supreme court of Florida obliged the returning board of the State
to accept the returns which had come to them from the disputed county,
and a Democratic government came there also into power. The era of
reconstruction was at an end.
The quiet figure of the retiring President began to seem almost at once
like a figure lingering out of an age gone by. The honest, simple-hearted
soldier had not added prestige to the presidential office. He himself
knew that he had failed, that the administrative scandals, the stain of
corruption, of intrigue, of malversation, the appearance as if of a group
of personal allies bent upon their own aggrandizement rather than of a
body of public servants devoted to the honest conduct of the nation’s
business, which had marked his management of the executive office must
always stand as proof that he ought never to have been made President.
But the corruption had not touched him. He was unstained. Every one
who thought justly of the matter attributed his failure rather to his
very honesty and simplicity of nature than to any fault of will. His
trustfulness had betrayed him; his desire to be faithful to his friends
had led him to shield knaves. He had thought other men as honest, as
straightforward as himself. He had come to a great office untrained in
affairs. Men’s eyes followed his retreating figure with respect, with
veneration, with deep affection, and forgot that he had been duped by
politicians; remembered only that he had been the successful leader of
the armies of the republic.
_Authorities._ All the larger and more systematic histories of
the country stop short of times so recent as those covered by
this chapter. Neither is it any longer feasible to distinguish
general authorities from contemporary accounts. All accounts of
a time so recent are contemporary. We have for general guidance
Judson S. Landon’s _Constitutional History and Government of
the United States_, Alexander Johnston’s _American Politics_,
the same author’s admirable articles on the several topics
here treated of, such as _Reconstruction_, the _Ku Klux_,
_Crédit Mobilier_, etc., in Lalor’s _Cyclopaedia of Political
Science, Political Economy, and United States History_, John
Clark Ridpath’s popular _History of the United States_, John
W. Burgess’s _Reconstruction and the Constitution_, Edward
Channing’s _Student’s History of the United States_, Edward
Stanwood’s _History of the Presidency_, Appleton’s _Annual
Cyclopaedia_, Edward McPherson’s _Handbook of Politics_,
issued in biennial volumes, except in 1870, from 1868 to
1894, Scribner’s _Statistical Atlas of the United States_,
to 1880, William A. Dunning’s _Essays on the Civil War and
Reconstruction_, G. W. Williams’s _History of the Negro Race
in America_, W. H. Barnes’s _History of the Thirty-ninth
Congress_, Albert Bushnell Hart’s _Foundations of American
Foreign Policy_, and many valuable articles scattered through
the volumes of the _Atlantic Monthly_ (especially a series on
Reconstruction which appeared in 1901), the _North American
Review_, _The Forum_, _The Nation_, and the _Political Science
Quarterly_.
Among the more important _memoirs_ are James G. Blaine’s
_Twenty Years of Congress_, S. S. Cox’s _Three Decades of
Federal Legislation, 1855 to 1885_, Hugh McCulloch’s _Men and
Measures of Half a Century_, John Sherman’s _Recollections of
Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet_, Dabney Herndon
Maury’s _Recollections of a Virginian_, Bishop R. H. Wilmer’s
_Recent Past from a Southern Standpoint_, Reuben Davis’s
_Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians_, and G. W.
Julian’s _Political Recollections_.
Adam Badeau’s _Grant in Peace_, A. R. Conkling’s _Life and
Letters of Roscoe Conkling_, John Bigelow’s _Life of Samuel
J. Tilden_, Albert Bushnell Hart’s _Salmon P. Chase_ in the
_American Statesmen Series_, and Moorfield Storey’s _Charles
Sumner_, in the same _Series_, cover parts of the period from
the point of view of the several men of whom they treat.
Mr. Hilary A. Herbert’s _Why the Solid South?_ and Mr. William
Garrott Brown’s _The Lower South in American History_ throw
a great deal of light upon the time in regard to the affairs
and the sentiment of the South; Mr. J. Lawrence Laughlin’s
_History of Bimetallism in the United States_ and Professor
F. W. Taussig’s _Silver Situation in the United States_ and
_Tariff History of the United States_, and Mr. A. S. Bolles’s
_Financial History of the United States_, furnish excellent
summaries of financial and fiscal conditions; Mr. Carroll
D. Wright’s _Industrial Evolution of the United States_
sketches the development of industry and invention, and
Mr. David A. Wells’s _Recent Economic Changes_ the altered
economic conditions; Mr. Lauros G. McConachie’s _Congressional
Committees_ and Miss M. P. Follett’s _The Speaker of the House
of Representatives_ discuss the transformations of Congress and
its relations to public business; and Mr. Henry Jones Ford’s
_Rise and Growth of American Politics_ affords one of the best
philosophical analyses of the general history of parties, party
organization, and party control, anywhere to be found.
The _sources_ are in the _Journals_ of Congress, the
_Congressional Record_, the House and Senate _Documents_, the
_Messages and Papers of the Presidents_, and the periodical
press of the time.