An 1872 illustration from Harper’s Weekly showing Horace Greeley, the former abolitionist and the Liberal Republican Party’s presidential candidate, being greeted by Southern whites over the bodies of African-Americans.Collections of the Division of Political History, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
When Anger Trumped Progress
The Reconstruction era had an oddly familiar mix of racial struggle and populist outrage that left blacks the losers.
JOHN YOUNG was born into slavery, on July 4, 1855. By 15 he was a free man and an electrifying orator, recruiting black voters around his native South Carolina to the Republican Party with “pyrotechnical” rhetoric and mustache-waggling jokes. In the late 1860s, it looked as if he might help his party make real change in the post-Civil War South.
But soon Young noticed white Northerners losing interest, more concerned with corruption in Washington than freedom in Charleston. His former allies, distracted by scandals, “just sat back” and let the South “skin us out of our rights,” he later said. By the late 1870s, anger at government had helped kill Reconstruction, punishing the most vulnerable for the crimes of the most crooked. We should be wary of this today, as we grapple with race and populist rage yet again.
Just as in the 1870s, America is struggling against racial inequity andseething at our political establishment. The two issues appear unrelated, but they have a perverse connection: Anger makes Americans dismiss government and politics altogether — and that dismissal makes it harder to tackle racial injustice.
This was certainly the case, on a far larger scale, in the 1870s, when sentiment against politicians eclipsed black political rights. Reconstruction was a moment of racial promise such as this country had never seen: A generation of former slaves became landowners, teachers, voters and elected officeholders. From 1865 to the early 1870s, the country passed constitutional amendments promising them liberty, citizenship and voting rights. Federal agents helped build schools and banks, and even crushed the Ku Klux Klan.
But reforms in the South depended on the political will of the two-thirds of Americans living outside the region to enforce them. Ohio was typical. It furnished the generals who won the war, and the politicians who made the peace. Yet Ohio was 98.8 percent white. Each reform required persuading voters in Ohio to care about John Young in South Carolina.
For a time, a majority of white Northerners supported Reconstruction. Especially in the dominant Republican Party, many let their rage at the former Confederacy push them to back greater racial equality. They were especially proud of their government: The Union that had crushed secession might genuinely improve Americans’ lives, in the South and elsewhere.
Political cartoons capture this triumphant faith. In the late 1860s, artists drew black characters in Union Army uniforms — icons of the powerful nation that had won the war. Instead of using petty politicians to represent the government, cartoonists sketched the proud, classically robedColumbia (whose name endures but whose role as an avatar of strong government has disappeared).
Then came the scandals. In the early 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant’s buddies were caught stealing and bribing, speculating on gold and dodging whiskey taxes. The New York Times exposed Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed for stealing as much as $45 million. Tweed was a Democrat, but his thefts made the entire establishment look worse.
The avalanche of corruption left Americans blaming what the reformerLydia Maria Child called the “general cussedness of governments.” The fiery Minnesota stump speaker Ignatius Donnelly went further, condemning politicians as “a genus of shysters and scalawags — small, mean, tricky little wire-pullers.”
Who was blamed for white politicians’ dirty tricks? Black leaders. A new type of racist cartoon emerged in the 1870s, depicting black officeholders in gaudy jewelry. Journalists sent accounts north from majority-black regions, mocking “savage” African-American leaders, comparing them to Tammany Hall bosses.
Northern whites began to give up on the idea that the federal government could or should improve race relations. Horace Greeley, once America’s most influential abolitionist editor, ran against Grant in 1872, combining anger at politicians with hostility toward Reconstruction. He lost, terribly, but not before claiming that blacks “assume that they need more help from outside than they actually do.”
This was how the elephant came to symbolize the Republican Party, as a criticism of an organization that looked bloated and bullying. Former slaves pictured a different beast: Their Republican Party was a war elephant, protecting them from the guerrilla campaign terrorizing black voters. The dispute questioned the fundamental role of parties in American democracy: Were they alliances, protecting the rights of constituents, or “rings,” conspiring to loot the public?
Angry at politicians, and spurred by the crushing depression of 1873, voters gave the Democrats control of Congress in 1874. It was one of the largest landslide shifts in party control in American history. Reconstruction, on the ground, was mostly finished after that. Federal soldiers and agents largely withdrew from the South, and political support for black politicians dried up. The abandonment, wrote a slave-turned-politician in Mississippi, felt “pathetic in the extreme.”
No generation of Americans had more reason to go after the crooks in government, and no generation misplaced its rage so devastatingly. But anger at politicians did not stop with Reconstruction. In the Gilded Age, faith in leadership dimmed even further. Gone was the triumphant Columbia, replaced by caricatures of thieving officeseekers stuffing their pockets with public money. Government stepped back from protecting those rights it had promised after the war.
We’ve got nothing on the 1870s today. That era saw the largest terrorist conspiracy in our history, suppressing black voters and killing hundreds if not thousands, while corrupt officials stole millions of dollars. But themes from that era — suspicion of government, struggles over race — run through American history. And sometimes, one issue blares so loudly that it drowns out the rest.
In 2016, political outrage again threatens to overwhelm calls for racial change. If we’re serious about addressing ingrained inequality, from schools to prisons to workplaces, Americans will need to trust government to make reforms, and support the kind of leadership we’ve come to view so cynically. Otherwise, our tendency toward vague, angry rhetoric will discourage risk-taking, and ultimately maintain the racial status quo.
Yet our era, like the years after the Civil War, also presents a rare moment of possibility. If we keep both issues in focus, Americans might bring unprecedented racial change and clean up government. We could use the momentum of one to affect the other, joining the new crop of black activists with older white voters mobilized against business as usual. We might achieve what John Young had been working for all along.
Disunion: The Civil War
America’s most perilous period, revisited through essays, diaries and archival images.
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