Capitol Men Read online

  Capitol Men

  The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen

  Philip Dray

  * * *

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  2008

  * * *

  Copyright © 2008 by Philip Dray

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections

  from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dray, Philip.

  Capitol men : the epic story of Reconstruction through the lives of the first

  Black congressmen / Philip Dray.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-618-56370-8

  1. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865–1877) 2. African American legislators—

  Biography. 3. United States. Congress. House—Biography. 4. Social justice—

  United States—History—19th century. 5. United States—Race relations—

  Political aspects—History—19th century. 6. Southern States—Race relations

  —Political aspects—History—19th century. 7. United States—Politics and

  government—1865–1900. 8. Southern States—Politics and government—

  1865–1950. I. Title.

  E668.D76 2008

  973.8'1—dc22 2008011292

  Book design by Melissa Lotfy

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The photographs, lithographs, and Thomas Nast cartoons on pages 9, 20, 38,

  54, 60, 62, 69, 83, 95, 105, 120, 126, 152, 164, 183, 194, 244, 256, 296, 301, 308, 328,

  335, 360, and 370 appear courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

  Division Online Catalog. The Nast cartoon on page 27 was provided

  by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at

  the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The portrait of

  Blanche K. Bruce on page 206 is from the Blanche K. Bruce Papers, Moorland-Spingarn

  Research Center, Howard University. The illustrations on pages 41

  and 218 are from Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising, by William J.

  Simmons, published by George M. Rewell (Publisher) Cleveland, 1887, and

  those on pages 4, 7, 21, 50, 156, 187, 250, and 293 are from the Picture Collection

  of the New York Public Library. Posters reproduced on pages 239 and 290 are

  in the author's collection.

  * * *

  One of the surprising results of the Reconstruction period was that there should spring from among the members of a race that had been held so long in slavery, so large a number of shrewd, resolute, resourceful, and even brilliant men, who became, during this brief period of storms and stress, the political leaders of the newly enfranchised race.

  —BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

  Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others lived during the Reconstruction period.

  —PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Preface ix [>]

  1 BOAT THIEF [>]

  2 A NEW KIND OF NATION [>]

  3 DADDY CAIN [>]

  4 "THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME" [>]

  5 KUKLUXERY [>]

  6 PINCH [>]

  7 THE COLFAX MASSACRE [>]

  8 CAPSTONE OF THE RECONSTRUCTED REPUBLIC [>]

  9 DIVIDED TIME [>]

  10 THE ETERNAL FITNESS OF THINGS [>]

  11 BLACK THURSDAY [>]

  12 A DUAL HOUSE [>]

  13 EXODUSTING [>]

  14 A ROPE OF SAND [>]

  15 "THE NEGROES' FAREWELL" 333

  EPILOGUE [>]

  Acknowledgments [>]

  Notes [>]

  Bibliography [>]

  Index [>]

  * * *

  PREFACE

  OF ALL THE IMAGES of long-ago America, perhaps few are as poignant as the Currier & Ives lithograph from 1872 depicting the first seven black members of the U.S. Congress. From the midst of Reconstruction, one of the most precarious times in our nation's history, they gaze out confidently in their neatly trimmed beards, vested suits, and ties, indistinguishable, except for their color, from their white counterparts. The portrait, showing Hiram Revels of Mississippi; Benjamin Turner of Alabama; Jefferson Long of Georgia; Robert De Large, Robert Brown Elliott, and Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina; and Josiah Walls of Florida was a proud symbol of the liberation of America's newest citizens, proof of the tremendous social revolution the Civil War had wrought.

  The picture was considered an object of scorn among many Southern whites, however, who refused to countenance the sudden transformation of slaves into holders of public office. Emancipation, and then the appearance of black federal troops in the conquered South, had been offense enough; when, under the terms of congressional Reconstruction, men of color began to vote, win elections, and wield political authority, the patience of Southerners was pushed to its limit. "The North thinks the Southern people are especially angry because of the loss of slave property," wrote the North Carolina Unionist Albion Tourgee. "In truth, they are a thousand times more exasperated by the elevation of the free negro to equal political power." As the Virginian George Mason railed, "The noble Caucasian, in whose very look and gait the God of creation has stamped a blazing superiority, [must] bow down to and be governed by the sable African, upon whom the same God has put the ineffaceable mark of inferiority! A more flagrant desecration of the representative principle ... is not to be found in the annals of the human race."

  Faded prints of the engraving still hung in modest sharecroppers' cabins when researchers from the Works Project Administration visited the Southern Black Belt in the 1930s. The men in the picture were by that time largely forgotten, and the image, and others like it, had become historical curiosities. In the 1870s, the states that had sent the "colored representatives" to Congress were themselves roiled by violent factionalism, undermining what legitimacy these men had in Washington, as the nation backed away from the ideals of Reconstruction. In 1901, resolutions of thanksgiving would be passed in the North Carolina legislature when George H. White, the sole remaining black member of the U.S. House of Representatives, finished his term in office. By then black Southerners had been virtually expunged from politics, even as voters; the greater part of a century would pass before another elected representative of color from a Southern state arrived on Capitol Hill.

  Reconstruction was initially a hopeful time. America, emerging from civil war, attempted to reinvent itself. A broadened concept of citizenship was introduced, as were new guarantees of equal treatment under law, commitment to public education and public welfare, efforts to redistribute land, and more equitable methods of taxation. Laws and constitutional amendments were forged to improve upon the vision of the country's founders; new government agencies were formed, such as the Freedmen's Bureau, which assisted the recently freed slaves, and the Justice Department, which helped enforce their new rights. This effort rode on the leadership of resolute national legislators and the actions of countless individuals, organizations, and missionaries, but also on the determination of the freed slaves themselves, four million strong, who grasped the long-awaited chance to steer their own destiny.

  But despite this earnest struggle, Reconstruction in the end could overcome neither the resistance of the South, where its innovations had their most meaningful impact, nor the North's mounting apathy and desire for section
al reconciliation. Redemption, or home rule, as it was often called, came to the South, and Reconstruction was denounced as a fatal example of governmental hubris and overreaching. History and popular culture for decades characterized it as an atrocious failure.

  The South, it was held, had been punished too cruelly for seccession—its attempted act of self-determination. Its leaders had been humiliated and its people victimized in a grotesque experiment that elevated former slaves to citizenship, placing whites "under the splay foot of the Negro." Vindictive Northerners had been not only hypocrites, in trying to script how others might coexist with a restive, dangerous black minority, but also fools to think they understood the racial dynamics of Southern life. The myth of the Southland redeemed from Reconstruction's errant policies would become a fixture of American memory, retold in countless memoirs, articles, and works of history, from the 1874 appearance of The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under Negro Government, by James Shepherd Pike, to the early-twentieth-century Klan-glorifying novels of Thomas Dixon. It provided the backdrop for two of the most commercially successful films of the twentieth century, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939); it resurfaced in 1956 in John F. Kennedy's award-winning book of political biography, Profiles in Courage; and it remained for years a staple of high school and college textbooks.

  Yet beyond the distortions and the myths lie Reconstruction's considerable achievements—strides in universal education, the forging of black political know-how and leadership, broad national efforts to solve problems of racial prejudice and injustice, and the creation of laws that, although largely nullified by the Supreme Court, stayed on the books, a valuable heirloom in the nation's attic trunk, available for use at an appropriate future time. They would be crucial to the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century.

  Reconstruction's echoes resonate still. When Florida election officials in the year 2000 forced voters in heavily minority districts to wait for hours in line before casting a ballot, and when Ohio Republicans, four years later, stationed poll monitors at voting places to intimidate black voters, they were reviving methods that had proved effective nearly a century and a half before, in the Reconstruction South. The debates heard today over affirmative action, police profiling, school integration, economic parity, and reparations for slavery would be largely familiar to Americans of the 1870s and 1880s, when newspapers carried, almost daily, stories of black citizens denied their rights, when black congressmen pleaded with their white colleagues to treat seriously the terror tactics of Southern vigilantism, and when a justice of the Supreme Court inquired, in an infamous ruling, how long those recently emerged from slavery would continue to be "the special favorite of the laws." Current efforts to safeguard civil rights and the rights of the accused, in an age of terrorism and illegal immigration, have their antecedents in the post-Civil War struggle for national standards of citizenship and personal freedom as well as guarantees of due process.

  The black representatives to Congress, the subjects of this book, emerged from diverse backgrounds. Many were of mixed racial ancestry and had the social advantages of white parentage, such as access to education; some were free before the war, whereas others had been slaves; several were professionals—lawyers, teachers, or ministers—while others had worked as skilled artisans or tradesmen; a few had won distinction in the military. As black men who competed successfully to attain elective office in a society dominated by whites, they tended to be exceptional individuals—as resilient as they were resourceful. South Carolina's Robert Smalls had hijacked a Confederate steamer and delivered it to the Union blockade off Charleston. P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana started out as an accomplished riverboat gambler. Robert Brown Elliott outdid the former vice president of the Confederacy in a debate on the floor of the House, and his colleague from South Carolina, Richard Cain, when he could not secure government help to make land available to the freedmen, formed his own corporation to do so. The portly, goateed senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, born a slave, once hid for his life from a Confederate raiding party yet rose to become a prosperous Delta planter who traveled as a dignitary to European courts, where it was said he displayed "the manners of a Chesterfield."

  Looking at the congressmen's picture and knowing the expectations it once inspired, it's hard not to wonder how things went so wrong, or how events might have turned out differently. Why did white Southerners find these seemingly decent, conscientious black officeholders, and the newly enfranchised African Americans they represented, so unacceptable? Was it simple race-hatred, a refusal that those low enough to have been slaves should rise to citizenship, let alone positions of authority? Was there truth to the accusations of corruption and incompetence made against them? Were their demands too great for a nation recovering from a devastating war? And how did the black elected officials themselves view their own efforts, those of their white Republican allies, and Reconstruction's prospects for success?

  For the sake of narrative I have focused on some of the most prominent black congressional officials of the era, while also attempting to sketch in the background of the challenging world in which they lived and the stories of the men and women of both races whose actions affected their role. These include the presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses'S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield; Frederick Douglass, the editor, author, and ex-slave who was perhaps the black congressmen's greatest champion and who chronicled their endeavors in his aptly named weekly, the New National Era; the abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison; Charles Sumner, the willful Massachusetts senator devoted to civil rights, and his Radical colleague, Thaddeus Stevens; the black nationalist Martin Delany; the women's rights advocates Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; General Benjamin F. Butler, who raised the spirits of slaves crossing Union lines by dubbing them "contrabands," and his daughter Blanche and son-in-law Adelbert Ames, the besieged Reconstruction governor of Mississippi. Other important figures include the carpetbagger governors Daniel Chamberlain of South Carolina and Henry Clay Warmoth of Louisiana; the Union generals William T. Sherman, Rufus Saxton, and Otis Oliver Howard; the Confederate general James Longstreet; and the Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan, "the Great Dissenter," who tried valiantly to stem the tide that wiped away Reconstruction's accomplishments and made segregation the law of the land.

  The "glorious failure," as Reconstruction is sometimes termed—politically turbulent, riven by corruption, often exceedingly violent—can be a disquieting saga to get to know: a lost opportunity, certainly, and in many ways a shameful time in our nation's history. Yet it is also a powerful story of idealism and moral conflict that belongs only to us and whose arc is as beautiful as it is tragic. At its core is something of undeniable value—the courage of black and white Americans who together aspired to right the country's greatest wrong. That this coalition has always been tentative in our history, or that the grand experiment of Reconstruction failed or was premature, cannot diminish the effort's genius or inherent nobility.

  Chapter 1

  BOAT THIEF

  A PERSON GAZING OUT across Charleston Harbor in the predawn quiet of May 13, 1862, would probably have found it hard to believe that the Civil War had begun at this very spot only a year before, with the thunderous shelling of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter. Certainly the signs of war remained, most noticeably the rebel cannon that guarded the harbor and pointed seaward from numerous shore ramparts, their sights fixed on the ships of the Union blockade positioned three miles offshore. But all was now perfectly still, and the only discernible movement took place aboard the Planter, a small Confederate transport that appeared to be preparing to depart.

  Hours before, the Planters white captain, C. J. Relyea, and his officers had gone ashore for the night, leaving the vessel in the hands of its mulatto pilot, Robert Smalls, and creating the very opportunity that Smalls and his fellow slave crewmen had been waiting for. Having discussed in detail their plan to u
se the boat to make a break for the Union blockade, they stealthily began their chores between 1 and 3 A.M., maneuvering the Planter to a nearby pier to pick up Smalls's wife and two children as well as four other black women, a child, and three other men. Because the punishment for what they were about to do would surely be death, Smalls had told the others that if caught, they would not surrender but would destroy the boat, along with themselves and all the Confederate guns and ammunition it carried. Two of the crewmen had heard Smalls's warning and elected to stay behind, disembarking as the new passengers came aboard. At about 3 A.M. final farewells were whispered and the Planter eased back from the pier.

  Despite the hour and the darkness, the city defenses were on alert against Union raiding or reconnaissance parties. Charleston, known for its cultured antebellum society and its leadership in the Southern secessionist movement, formed the emotional and political heart of the Confederacy; it was also a strategic Atlantic port, and its defenders knew that the federals, having been driven from Fort Sumter in the war's first action, dreamed of recapturing it. To escape the harbor, the Planter would have to pass directly under the guns of several formidable batteries, including those of Fort Sumter itself, which was now in Confederate hands. The fort, set strategically in the middle of the harbor's entrance, was a manmade island, a pentagon-shaped fortress with walls sixty feet high and six feet thick and guns protruding from all sides, emanating "an aura of doom and menace."

  As the Planter moved toward the gauntlet, some on board suggested racing past the rebel installations, but Smalls reminded them that such a panicky move would likely be fatal: their best and only hope was to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary. He was banking on the likelihood that sleepy rebel watchmen would not be suspicious of a work ship nosing its way out of the harbor before dawn, nor would they be inclined to imagine that slaves were stealing it.