The Wars of Reconstruction by Douglas R. Egerton

Author:Douglas R. Egerton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

The presidential contest of 1868 pitted General Ulysses S. Grant and running mate Schuyler Colfax against Horatio Seymour, the former governor of New York, and Francis P. Blair Jr., a onetime free-soiler and Republican turned Democrat. The Democrats ran an unabashedly racist campaign, and Blair’s denunciations of Congressional Reconstruction were so rancorous that the party’s national committee urged him to confine his campaigning to Illinois and his adopted state of Missouri for fear that he would sink the ticket. Where African Americans could vote, they cast their ballots for Grant, and their roughly seven hundred thousand votes gave Grant his victory; most likely, Grant became the first president to win with a minority of the white vote. Courtesy Library of Congress.

On many occasions, landlords and employers resorted to economic coercion against Republicans, an effective tactic in a time when voting was open and public. Voters had to obtain a large “ticket” from a party functionary, and then on Election Day deposit that in an enormous bowl or crate marked with a party preference. John Roberts, a Georgia planter, evicted the similarly named James Roberts “from his plantation, telling him that no Radical negro could stay on his place.” The editor of a Georgia Republican paper reported that landlords “threaten to turn colored men away from their employment if they did not vote as the employer dictates.” Despite such coercion, southern blacks proudly carried, waved, and even pinned to their clothing campaign badges emblazoned with Grant’s image. In Mississippi, one new voter “defiantly” wore two badges on his lapels, and so his white neighbors could better see them, he marched down the sidewalk, rather than in “the middle of the street, where other niggers go.” When one freedman was reluctant to pin his on, his wife grabbed it and “bravely” wore it “upon her own breast.”44

More commonly, Democrats employed violence. In New Orleans, whites fired at Republican marchers, “killing men and women, one with a baby in her arms.” One month before the election, “three disguised men” dragged the Reverend Psalm Porter from his home and “shot him through the right thigh.” Benjamin Jackson was driven out of Baker County, Georgia, after “professing to be a Radical in politics,” and James Miller was “killed for expressing radical sentiments at a church” rally. Another “body of men” called on Basil Weaver, a thirty-year-old former slave, dragged him into the woods, and “gave him thirty or forty lashes,” pausing between whippings to ask “what he was politically—a Republican or a Democrat.” Despite the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment, Bureau agent Charles Rauschenberg lamented, court remedies were difficult to achieve, as “the prosecutors were being either killed or driven away,” while “frightened negroes” were reluctant to testify “for fear of meeting the same fate” and all-white juries were “imbibed with the same spirit of hatred and prejudice as the criminals.”45

Terrorists especially targeted Republican functionaries, who were critical to disseminating party information, setting up political rallies at churches, and handing out ballots. When

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