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North Against South


Nearly everyone knows the names of our first few Presidents: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, those dignified and remote figures who took part in the birth of the united States. And the names of our recent Presidents are familiar, too: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. But some of the men who have occupied the White House are anything but vivid to us. It is hard to think of much to say about the Presidents who lived just before the Civil War, for example: Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan. And there is that other group of Chief Executives from the late nineteenth century who tend to blur into vagueness for us: Tilden, Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Garfield—
Tilden?
Of course. Samuel Jones Tilden (1814-1886), the nineteenth President of the United States, elected on November 7, 1876, as the candidate of the Democratic Party to succeed the outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant.
The name seems even less familiar than others of its period. The words "President" and "Tilden" do not go naturally together, as they do for President Arthur, President Garfield, President Harrison, and the rest. And there is a good reason for that. Samuel J. Tilden was never inaugurated. He never resided in the White House or signed a single bill into law. In fact, although he won the election, he never became President, and was forced to stand by helplessly while the man he defeated, Rutherford B. Hayes, took possession of the nation's highest office.
Tilden was the victim of the greatest fraud in American political history. He received a quarter of a million more votes than his opponent. That in itself would not make a man President, for in our double system of voting we choose, not a Presidential candidate, but an Electoral College that meets to select the winner of the election. A man may lead in the popular vote and still not be chosen by the Electoral College. But Tilden also received a clear majority of the Electoral College—at least, when the first votes came in.
Nevertheless, he did not win. On the night of the election, Hayes and the Republicans went to bed thinking they had been beaten; Tilden and the Democrats celebrated their victory. In the morning, though, schemes were hatched and hurried conferences were held, and the process of reversing the decision of the voters got under way. That process dragged on for months, while the leaders of the nation debated and the citizens looked on in dismay and wonder. Election returns were thrown out by special committees. The votes of certain states were taken away from the Democrats and given to the Republicans. Confusion followed upon confusion. Both sides engaged in bribery, lawlessness, and trickery. The clock ticked out the final hours of President Grant's term of office, and still there was no one to take his place. Who would be President? What would happen to the country if Grant's term ended and no new President had been chosen? Would a second Civil War break out? Would there be a dictatorship? Would the Constitution collapse?
At the last moment the crisis was settled. The Republican, Hayes, took the Presidential oath. Some 30,000 Americans cheered the new President at his inauguration on March 5, 1877. Meanwhile other thousands of Americans sent letters and telegrams to Samuel J. Tilden, telling him that they still believed him to be the true President and urging him to seize power in the land. But Tilden accepted the verdict that had been forced on him. He could have fought the decision and perhaps split the nation by civil war, but he did not. Though privately convinced he should have been President, he told his supporters to give their allegiance to Hayes. And so the strangest and most controversial of American elections came to its end. The United States had survived a great crisis; it had shown that even in such a bizarre contest the result could be an orderly and peaceful transfer of power.
How could such an election have come about, though? How could a winner be transformed into a loser, and a loser into a winner? What were the circumstances that produced so unique a situation? And—was it really unique? Could something like the Hayes-Tilden election ever happen here again? Or is the stolen election of 1876 merely a chapter out of our picturesque past, something that now appears quaint and funny, an event from a distant era when it did not matter very much at all who was President of the United States?
Some of these questions can be answered easily. We know the means by which the presidency was taken away from Tilden and awarded to Hayes. We know something about the secret deals that brought this result about. We understand the forces that made the fraud possible.
But we cannot be certain that something like it will never happen again. Many of the angers and hatreds that turned the Election of 1876 into the Compromise of 1877 are still loose in our land—in somewhat different forms, true, but they still exist. Nor has there been any basic change in the way we elect our Presidents—a method which has several dangerous flaws. Most of the time, the system works smoothly and well; but on a few occasions in our past it has broken down, never more disastrously than in 1876. What happened then may one day have an ugly encore and send a shock wave of chaos rippling through the world—although we tell ourselves that it is not very likely.
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Rutherford B. Hayes was a solemn but good-natured man, a hard worker, a loving husband and father, a capable public servant. He had fought and had been wounded in the Civil War; he had been elected to Congress and had been Governor of Ohio three times; he was honest, handsome, and sincere. He was popular among the citizens and he had no enemies among the professional politicians. He was the sort of man of whom it is often said that he was born to be President. Yet the voters did not elect him.
Samuel J. Tilden was an icy, aloof man with a forbidding manner and no fondness for public life. He was a bachelor. He had not taken any part in the Civil War; he was unimpressive physically; his health was poor. He had amassed millions of dollars through his cleverness as a lawyer. His cold, penetrating intellect was so brilliant that he made his own friends uncomfortable. He was a New Yorker, and the rest of the country tends to be suspicious of New Yorkers, especially if they are wealthy and brilliant. (Hayes was from Ohio, the heart of the land.) Tilden did not have the personal magnetism a successful candidate must have to win the support of the people, and professional politicians of both parties hated him because he had exposed their thievery. Yet the voters elected him President.
So it was not a contest of personalities. If it had been, Hayes would have won in a landslide. But in those days before radio and television, the personalities of the candidates did not matter much to the voters. The candidates stayed on their own front porches, making few speeches and never going on a campaign tour. The voters made their decisions on the basis of ideas and issues—not on how a man looked or how warmly he smiled.
The main issue of 1876 was North versus South.
That may sound a little strange. North versus South was the issue of 1860, after all. When Abraham Lincoln won the election that year—the first candidate of the Republican Party to become President—a group of southern states broke away from the Union. The leaders of the South feared that the new President would attempt to put an end to slavery; and so the South declared itself to be an independent nation, the Confederate States of America, where the white man would always have the right to make a slave of the black man. The North refused to allow such a nation to come into being. The bitter war of 1861-65 followed—America's greatest tragedy, with brother fighting against brother on American soil.
The powerful industrial North triumphed over the weak rural South. By the spring of 1865 the war was over. Slavery was abolished in the United States. The South, devastated by invasion and famine, was in ruins. The Confederacy was dead. Now was the time for the healing of the nation's wounds, for the joining of South to North once more. President Lincoln faced the problem of bringing the seceding states back into the Union and making them full partners in America again. It was a difficult task, calling for equal measures of forgiveness and sternness; but the warm, great-hearted Lincoln hoped that he could create harmony and win the allegiance of all Americans, Northerners and Southerners, white men and black.
He never got the chance. An assassin's bullet took his life just at the moment of victory. As the reunited nation faced the terrible challenges of peacetime, it found itself led by a new man, one who had never been meant to be President. And in the mistakes and confusions of the months just after the Civil War were planted the seeds of the conflict of 1876. The Hayes-Tilden election was actually the final act of the tragedy that had begun in 1860. One of the strangest aspects of this strange election is that the wrong man turned out to be the right man: Hayes, who should not have been President, brought the agonizing struggle of North against South to a close, which Tilden probably could not have done.
To understand what happened in 1876, we have to go back to April 14, 1865—less than a week after the end of the Civil War. President Lincoln, that night, went to Ford's Theater in Washington. An unemployed southern actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth, who hated Lincoln for freeing the slaves, stepped into the President's box and fired a single shot. By morning, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was President.
Only weeks before his death, Lincoln had declared, "With malice toward none; with charity for all…let us strive…to bind up the nation's wounds." Now it was Johnson's assignment to bind those wounds, but Johnson was not the great man Lincoln had been. Lincoln had picked him to run for Vice-President in 1864 because he was a rarity, a Southerner who opposed slavery and supported the North in the Civil War. Johnson, a rough, poorly educated man from the Tennessee hills, had been Senator from Tennessee until it seceded from the Union, and later had been its military governor when it was conquered by the North. He did not even belong to the same political party as Lincoln, for Johnson was a Democrat. As a step toward national unity, Lincoln had tried to bring together the Republicans and the anti-slavery Democrats into a new party, the Union Party. This step was not entirely popular with Lincoln's fellow Republicans. When Lincoln said he would like Andrew Johnson to run with him, the fiery Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, the most powerful Republican in Congress, grumbled, "Can't you get a candidate for Vice-President without going down into a damned rebel province for one?"
Now the "damned rebel" Johnson was in the White House. The men of the North, who had fought and won a war to keep the Union free, wondered what the new President's policy toward the defeated South would be. His past record was good. He had been the only senator from a Confederate state to remain loyal to the Union, even though he had been driven into exile when Tennessee seceded. All during the war he had backed the North against his native South. Would he now continue to be tough with the seceders? Or would he try to win favor in the South by showing mercy?
A strong faction of Republicans, headed by Thad Stevens, had no sympathy at all for the defeated South. "Humble the proud traitors," Stevens declared. He wanted the South treated as a conquered province that the North could rule as it saw fit. Divide up the great plantations of the rebels, said Stevens, and sell the land at low prices to ex-slaves. Allow the freed slaves to vote and to run for public office. Take all political power away from the white aristocracy of the South, and hang the leaders of the secession. Those who agreed with the harsh, unforgiving Stevens were known as Radical Republicans. They meant to make sure that the southern whites knew the South had lost the war. The Radical Republicans had another motive, too: they expected that all the new Negro voters in the South would vote Republican, since the Democratic Party was the party of the slaveowners. Thus, bolstered by the votes of hundreds of thousands of former slaves, the Republicans would remain in power indefinitely.
But Andrew Johnson, as President, turned out to be mild in his treatment of the South. He tried to guide himself by Lincoln's words and to show malice toward none, charity for all. Acting in what he thought were the best interests of the entire nation, President Johnson proclaimed a general pardon for most of the Confederate soldiers and refused to execute the rebel leaders. Under his program of "Restoration," he took no action to confiscate rebel property, to take away the citizenship of those who had seceded, or to grant equal rights to the Negroes. He wanted to move gradually on the question of letting ex-slaves vote and hold office, hoping that time would end the bitterness between white and black in the South. He planned to let the eleven Confederate states back into the Union with their old white leaders still in control. In August 1866 President Johnson announced, not very realistically, that "peace, order, tranquality, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States."
He was wrong. In the South, the whites who had been restored to power were quick to take advantage of their unexpected good fortune. They passed "Black Laws" forcing the freed slaves to accept wages and working conditions imposed by their old owners, and forbidding them from exercising the rights of free men. Northerners were horrified. It looked as though President Johnson had canceled the effects of the Civil War overnight, by letting the losers live much as they had lived before. Such newspapers as the Chicago Tribune denounced the Black Laws, declaring, "We tell the white men of Mississippi that the men of the North will convert the State of Mississippi into a frog pond before they will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil in which the bones of our soldiers sleep and over which the flag of freedom waves."
The Radical Republicans in particular were horrified by Johnson's "treason." It shocked them that the white Southerners were not being made to pay a heavy price for their rebellion. And they feared that soon the restored southern states would be sending so many Democratic Representatives and Senators to Washington that Republican power would be broken. The bitter, vindictive Thad Stevens goaded the Radical Republicans into action.
When Congress met late in 1865, the Radicals pushed through a ruling that no Congressmen-elect from the former Confederate states would be allowed to take their seats until there had been a full investigation. A committee of fifteen was appointed to investigate—with Thad Stevens as its chairman. Naturally, none of the Southerners were allowed into Congress. That took care of the immediate threat to Radical control.
Next, Congress forced through two bills granting citizenship and civil rights to Negroes. These measures were designed to cope with the Black Laws of the South. They would not have permitted Negroes to vote—even in the North most Negroes were not allowed to cast ballots then—but otherwise they would serve to protect black men against white abuse. The President vetoed both bills. One was passed over his veto and became law; the other died.
Then the Radicals proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was designed to give Negroes the vote. It prohibited the states from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and established penalties on those states that denied some of their citizens the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment also prevented anyone from holding public office who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and then had "engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." Since nearly every southern official of pre-Civil War days, from state legislators up to members of Congress, had taken oaths to support the Constitution, this clause effectively eliminated all those prewar leaders from an active role in political life. The Amendment specified that the restriction could be removed only by a two-thirds vote of Congress.
The southern states were not allowed to send Representatives or Senators to Congress unless they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Only Tennessee voted to ratify in 1866. The others preferred to withhold civil rights from Negroes even if it meant losing a voice in Congress. But the Radicals were not through punishing the South. In May 1866, southern whites rioted at Memphis, Tennessee, and many Negroes were killed. An even bloodier riot in New Orleans two months later took the lives of more than two hundred black men. Thaddeus Stevens used these riots as evidence that the South would go on oppressing the ex-slaves unless strong measures were taken. He called for voters to elect a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans in November.
President Johnson was not running the office himself in 1866. In September, though, he went on what was called "a swing around the circle"—a campaign tour that took him from Washington to Chicago and back by way of such important cities as Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. Wherever he went, he delivered speeches asking tolerance for the defeated South. But hecklers with Radical beliefs jeered and howled at him. He lost his temper, and shouted back, which only led people to think that the President was a rash and foolish man. In the elections the Radical Republicans kept control of Congress.
Because ten of the eleven southern states had refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, the Radicals claimed that it was necessary for Congress to take swift action to protect the rights of the former slaves. On March 2, 1867, Congress passed the first Reconstruction Act, which stripped the white Southerners of the power Johnson had given them. The state governments created in 1865-66 were abolished and the ten southern states were divided into five military districts, each ruled by a major general of the United States Army. Twenty thousand troops were sent into the South to maintain order. The Black Laws were thrown out and the South was compelled to accept the Fourteenth Amendment. Some 700,000 Negroes, most of them unable to read and write, were allowed to vote in the southern states. Thousands of whites were disqualified from voting because they had supported the Confederacy. By the time the Radicals got through rearranging the voting lists, only about 627,000 whites in the South had the right to vote. They were outnumbered by the votes of their former slaves.
It amounted to a revolution. In one stroke, the Radicals took the South away from the white masters and gave it to the slaves. Gone was the spirit of gradual change; gone was forgiveness, gone was toleration. What the whites had done to the Negroes was serious enough, but Radical Reconstruction in the South was just as severe a misuse of power. Over the objections of the helpless President Johnson, the Radicals set up a military dictatorship in the South and proceeded to mete out vengeance to their foes.
New elections were held there. Hundreds of thousands of ex-slaves, hardly believing that all this could be true, went to the polls and voted. One state, South Carolina, elected a legislature in which Negroes actually had an 87-to-69 majority over whites. In the other nine states there were many new Negro legislators, though they were not in the majority. The whites who were elected were not the old slaveowners, either. They were ambitious, unscrupulous men who were willing to cooperate with the Radical Republicans because they hoped to get rich at public expense. Some of these men were native Southerners, who became known as scalawags because they were regarded as traitors to their homeland. Others were from the North; they had hurriedly packed their bags and rushed South in search of power and money. They were called carpetbaggers. Now the secessionist states were finally permitted to come back into the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the new southern members of Congress were carpetbaggers and scalawags. They were Republicans, and not all of them were white. The old Democratic southern white aristocracy had been frozen out.
In practice the Negroes had very little to say about the way the ten reconstructed states were ruled. Giving people the vote is not the same thing as giving them an understanding of how to govern; and it is hard for people unable to read and write to pass laws. Though there were some Negro leaders of great ability, most of the ex-slaves were content to let the scalawags and carpetbaggers run the show on their behalf. So the South was still dominated by whites, after all. Few Negroes were elected to the highest offices during Reconstruction. None became the governor of a state. Two Negroes from Mississippi served in the United States Senate, and fourteen Negroes were elected to the House of Representatives, six of them from South Carolina. Mississippi had a Negro lieutenant governor, secretary of state, superintendent of public education, and treasurer; South Carolina had five high Negro officials, including an associate justice of the state supreme court. None of this would have been possible before the war. But the real rulers of the South were the Radical Republican white carpetbaggers and scalawags. They told the Negroes which candidates to vote for, and the Negroes generally did as they were told.
Naturally, the Radicals did a great deal for their Negro supporters. South Carolina passed a law making it illegal to call a man a "nigger" in that state. New schools were opened for Negroes; special courts were established to hear their grievances against their white masters. Decades of neglect were atoned for with progressive and important measures. On the other hand, not all the programs of the Reconstructionists were noble ones. The carpetbagger-dominated legislatures imposed heavy taxes against the rich white landowners and pocketed much of the money that was raised. They confiscated land and property, dividing it among themselves. The defeated Confederates were victimized and tyrannized for the profit of their new masters.
Since the southern whites could not fight back legally by voting for men they could support, they fought back illegally. They organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and rode about the countryside at night in white robes and masks, beating and killing Negroes. Through whippings, threats, and murders they forced many frightened blacks to stay "in line," and not to take advantage of the opportunities offered by Reconstruction. The northern Radicals met force with force and sent more troops into the South. It began to look as though the country was entering a prolonged period of strife in which the Union victory in the Civil War could be preserved only by a permanent military occupation of the South.
When President Johnson tried to defy the Radicals, they impeached him—the only time this has happened to an American President. He was brought to trial in 1868 on eleven charges of "high crimes and misdemeanors," and only by a single vote was spared from losing his office. His term was almost over by then, and he knew he had no chance to win the election in November, or even to be nominated. The Republicans nominated the hero of the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant, and he won an easy victory over his Democratic opponent, Horatio Seymour of New York.
Grant was a short, round-shouldered man with a straggly beard and a modest, humble manner. Before the war he had been a failure at everything he attempted: he was unsuccessful in business and won no reputation in the peacetime army, and in the 1850s he was so short of cash that he tried to sell his wife's two Negro slaves to have money to live on. In the war, though, Grant demonstrated unexpected brilliance and courage as a general, and led the Union to triumph. He had never been active in politics—in fact, had never even bothered to vote—but the Republicans saw that he could win the election, and they were right. Without the votes of 700,000 Negroes, though, he might have lost—especially if all the white Democrats of the South had been allowed to vote.
The South remained Republican during Grant's first term, because government troops were there to keep the carpetbaggers and scalawags in power. But the unpopular Reconstructionists had only a weak grip on the southern states, and not even the soldiers could strengthen it indefinitely. The white South talked of "redemption"—meaning the return of the ten states to white Democratic rule. The Ku Klux Klan terrifed many Negroes away from the polls; the greed of the carpetbaggers aroused anger among many neutral citizens; and, one by one, the southern states were "redeemed" through elections. The Democrats won control of Virginia and North Carolina in 1870 and of Georgia in 1871, and they looked forward to the redemption of the other reconstructed states.
The weakness of Grant as President helped their cause. Grant was an innocent, trusting man who depended heavily on friends for advice—and some of his friends were conniving, corrupt politicians. Bribery and graft became common in Washington. Grant's Secretary of the Navy, George M. Robeson, banked $320,000 in four years by taking illegal fees from contractors. Railroad tycoons showered Congressmen and cabinet members with millions of dollars in return for special privileges. Grant knew nothing of what was going on; he surrounded himself with cronies who took good care to shield him from the truth. The Republican Party began to split apart as a result of the general corruption. It broke into two factions—the "Liberal Republicans," who wanted reform, and the "Stalwarts," who were getting rich on graft and wanted things to stay pretty much as they were.
In 1872 the Liberal Republicans decided to oppose the re-election of Grant. They did not blame him personally for the atmosphere of scandal in the government, nor did they accuse him of taking part in the frauds and thefts. But they felt that a new man should have the presidency and sweep away the grafters. To run on a special Liberal Republican ticket they nominated Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune—an elderly, tenderhearted man who disliked the Radicals and favored reconciliation with the South. The Democrats also nominated Greeley. The Stalwart Republicans, though, put Grant up for office again.
Despite all the evidence of crookedness in his administration, Grant was re-elected, but it was far from an honorable victory. The campaign against Greeley was so vicious and insulting that his health broke under the cruel ridicule. He was accusing of wanting to give the South back to the slaveowners, and that was enough to let Grant carry all of the northern states. Grant carried most of the carpetbag South, too, because government troops were standing by to make sure that the people voted Republican. The troops, veterans of the Civil War, were loyal to Grant and the Republicans, and kept many white Democrats away from the polls while letting black Republicans vote. In Texas and Georgia, where the troops had been withdrawn, Greeley was the winner. He also carried the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee.
The voting in Louisiana was marked by the worst frauds of all. Louisiana had not yet been "redeemed" and was occupied by United States troops, but a complicated political situation had developed there in 1872. Henry C. Warmoth, the carpetbagger Republican governor elected four years earlier, had quarreled with his own party and had changed sides. Now he was supporting the Democratic candidate to succeed him, John McEnery. The Republicans had named a radical, William P. Kellogg, to run for governor as the only white man on a ticket that included six Negroes. In the voting, Louisiana's large Negro population naturally chose the Kellogg ticket, while the whites voted for the Democrat McEnery. It is hard to say which side really won; but Governor Warmoth had his own appointees count the votes, and they announced that the Democrats had triumphed. According to Warmoth, the Democrats had captured the governorship and the legislature of Louisiana and they had given the state's presidential vote to Greeley.
The Republicans took the issue to court. They got a Federal judge, who had been appointed to office by Grant, to order a new count of the votes. The judge prohibited the Democratic-controlled legislature from meeting, and appointed a Republican-controlled board to check the ballots. Naturally, the recount showed that the Republicans had carried Louisiana. But the Democrats refused to accept this decision. While Kellogg was installed as Governor of Louisiana with the help of Federal soldiers' bayonets, the Democrats set up a rival government under McEnery. There were two governors and two legislatures—one carpetbagger-run, one Democrat-run. And each side's election board sent its own set of returns in the Presidential voting to Washington.
Congress was called upon to decide which set of Louisiana returns to accept. It solved the puzzle in the simplest way, by throwing out both. That year it did not matter, since the national election had not been close. But the double returns from Louisiana were an ominous sign for the future. When the same thing happened four years later, no easy solution was available.
Greeley, who had lost the election, his sick wife, and his newspaper all within one month, sank into a final and fatal illness soon afterward. "We have been terribly beaten," he said. "I was assailed so bitterly that I hardly knew whether I was running for the presidency or the penitentiary." Four weeks after the election he was dead, and the Liberal Republican movement died with him.
The reformers had accomplished at least one thing, though. They had helped to weaken the carpetbaggers by giving the South back its prewar leadership. In May 1872, Congress had passed a law under Liberal Republican pressure that restored the right of office-holding to most of those who had been disqualified by the Fourteenth Amendment. Only a few hundred old Confederates, out of thousands, were not pardoned at this time. The others now were free to run for state and local offices and for Congress. The South's most distinguished white citizens emerged from forced retirement, and redemption seemed closer than ever for those states still under the domination of the carpetbaggers.
There was more trouble for the Stalwarts early in 1873. Grant's second term had just begun when the banking firm of Jay Cooke & Company went bankrupt. Cooke was the nation's most important banker, and a close friend of President Grant. Cooke's huge fortune had been freely at the disposal of the Republican Party. But he overextended himself in trying to promote the Northern Pacific Railroad, and when his bank failed it was a mighty embarrassment for the Republicans. More than that: his collapse led to the bankruptcy of others, and as the crisis grew thousands of businesses had to shut up shop in the summer of 1873. By September, the nation was plunged into full-scale financial panic. Hard times had come; millions were out of work and hungry. Now the reformers could say that Republican chicanery and graft had brought a disaster upon the country.
The Grant Administration was tremendously unpopular in 1874. In the North, the Republicans were disliked because of the financial panic; in the South, they were hated as always for the sins of the carpetbaggers. Those southern states that were still held down by garrisons of Federal troops began to stir restlessly and dream of redemption. A state election in Texas in December of 1873 resulted in overwhelming defeat for the Republican candidates. In Arkansas, a Republican governor, Baxter, had been elected with military help in 1872. In the spring of 1874, his defeated rival, Brooks, persuaded a state court to reverse the 1872 election. Brooks ejected Baxter by force from the state capitol. Both sides took up arms, and for a month Arkansas seemed ready to break into battle. Then the Federal government ordered the Republican, Baxter, returned to office. Brooks yielded, but the Arkansas Democrats were more eager than ever now to free themselves from Republican rule.
In Louisiana, two governments had been ruling since the beginning of 1873. The carpetbagger Kellogg was the official governor, but the white citizens ignored him and recognized the Democrat, McEnery, as governor. They organized a secret group called the White League, similar to the Ku Klux Klan, and plotted a revolution in Louisiana. On September 14, 1874, the White League rose in rebellion and overthrew the Kellogg government, after a battle in the streets of New Orleans in which sixteen whites and eleven Negroes were killed. Kellogg fled and McEnery moved into the state capitol.
The national government could hardly tolerate this. Whether or not Kellogg's election had been legitimate, he was now the legal governor, and to overthrow him by force was anarchy—the breakdown of all law. Grant ordered Federal troops to crush the White League and restore Kellogg to office. At gunpoint, the Democrats yielded. But only the presence of troops kept matters from turning into open war. Louisiana tottered on the brink of chaos. Leaders on both sides were kidnapped and murdered. Gangs clashed in the streets. Finally the violence grew so serious that a compromise was reached: the Democrats agreed to accept Kellogg as governor, provided the Democratic-controlled legislature was recognized as official. That calmed things down, although with a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature it was almost impossible for the state government of Louisiana to get anything done.
The situation was grim for the Grant Administration as the 1874 Congressional elections approached. Rightly or wrongly, the Republicans were blamed for the Panic of 1873 and for the unrest in the South, and they suffered for it in the voting. In the national elections, the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives with a majority of about 70. This was the first time that either house of Congress had been in Democratic power since the secession of the South in 1861. On the local level, the Democrats were also successful, defeating Republican governors and legislators everywhere, both in North and South. The Democrats redeemed the states of Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas in 1874, and went beyond that to capture control of such normally Republican northern states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Massachusetts. Even the United States Senate, thought to be a safe Republican stronghold, nearly went to the Democrats. At that time the Senate was not elected by direct vote of the people; senators were chosen by the state legislatures. A state with a Democratic majority in its legislature would elect a Democratic senator, and so the newly installed Democratic legislators around the nation quickly replaced Republicans with Democrats in the Senate. Although the new Senate still had a Republican majority, it no longer had the two-thirds majority that was vital to complete control. With the House of Representatives now run by Democrats and the Senate only barely Republican, great changes were in store.
The chief loser in the 1874 election, it quickly appeared, was the American Negro. The Republicans were the party of Reconstruction, and had fought hard for Negro rights. Some Republicans were genuine idealists who believed in helping the long-exploited Negro. Others, more cynical, knew that showing sympathy for the ex-slaves would bring them Negro votes. The Democrats regarded every Negro as a potential Republican, and thus a political enemy. Both in the North and, of course, the South, Democrats worked to deprive the Negroes of their newly won votes. A typical Democratic attitude was expressed by Senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana:
"I say that we are not of the same race; we are so different that we ought not to compose one political community.…I say…this is a white man's Government, made by the white man for the white man.…I am not in favor of giving the colored man a vote, because I think we should remain a political community of white people. I do not think it is for the good of either race that we should attempt to make the Government a mixed government of white and black.…"
The Republicans had made a campaign issue out of racial prejudice since 1866. They pointed to southern abuses of the Negro and appealed to honorable white men to vote Republican. This tactic was known as "waving the bloody shirt." Republicans waved the bloody shirt every time a Negro was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, claiming that such crimes proved that the Democrats of the South were unfit to rule.
This approach had worked well in 1866, when the North had just finished fighting a dreadful and costly war for the sake of liberating the Negro. But accusations of southern bigotry no longer could help the Republicans in 1874. The white voters were tired of seeing the bloody shirt waved, tired of hearing about the downtrodden Negroes. The mood that year, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, was one of letting the Negroes shift for themselves; just then it seemed important to vote against the Republicans regardless of the race issue. And so the great Democratic victories of 1874 came about.
The day of the Radical Republicans was nearly over. The South was starting to escape from the torments of Reconstruction; the Democrats were emerging once again as a major national power; the decade of unchallenged Republican rule was closing. So long as the North voted Republican and Federal troops throttled the Democrats of the South, Grant and his cronies were safe. But now the North had gone Democratic and the South was nearly rid of the corrupt, incompetent carpetbaggers who had plundered it so long. As 1874 drew to its close, the future looked melancholy for the Republicans. The following March, the new Congress would come to Washington to meet for the first time—a Congress with a host of unfamiliar Democratic faces. Surely there would be trouble from them. And nearly two years ahead lay a more serious crisis: the presidential election of 1876, when the entire Republican Party would be called to account by the nation for the way it had governed since the close of the Civil War.

Copyright © 1968, 1996 by Agberg, Ltd.