America Aflame (88 page)

Buffalo lying dead in the snow, 1872. The booming market for buffalo hides and the sporting attraction of buffalo hunts diminished herds to the point where Native Americans, who relied on the animal for food, shelter, and clothing, had few options but to settle on reservations or near American forts for sustenance. (National Archives and Records Service)

The Centennial Exhibition reinforced the lesson of American ingenuity. The evidence of hard work and the innovation it spawned among white Americans enthralled the visitors. By the time the exhibition closed on November 10, over eight million people had paid fifty cents apiece to see it. They came not merely to view but to learn. Manufacturing demonstrations were a major part of the exhibition. Visitors learned how to make carpets, bricks, and typewriters, should they care to enter the ranks of manufacturers. One could chat with Thomas Edison as he explained his latest version of the telegraph. The Age of Reason was a practical era. It was in things that America excelled.

Some things visitors did not see. While Indians had a display, African Americans had none, which, considering the nature of the Native American exhibit, may have been a good thing. Two black artists, Edmonia Lewis and Edward Bannister, had their paintings displayed. There was a concession called the “Southern Restaurant,” where, the guidebook breezily informed visitors, “a band of old-time plantation ‘darkies'… sing their quaint melodies and strum the banjo before visitors in every clime.” Philadelphia had one of the largest black populations in the North, yet not one African American worked on the construction of the fair. Once the exhibition opened, blacks found work as entertainers, waiters, and janitors.
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Fairgoers were overwhelmingly middle class. The admission price equaled half a day's work for some, and unemployment was still a problem. Still, the poor and working classes could get a flavor of the exposition at “Centennial City,” a countercultural exhibition outside Fairmount Park. The “City” was a ramshackle collection of wooden structures on a mile-long strip populated with cheap restaurants, cheaper hotels, and seedy bars. Vendors sold peanuts, pies, sausages, and lemonade from stands along the strip, and sideshows promised sights not available inside the fair to gullible passersby, such as “the wild man of Borneo, and the wild children of Australia, the fat woman … heavy enough to entitle her to a place in Machinery Hall, and a collection of ‘Feejees,'” who were “pure and unadulterated man-eaters.” Within a few months of opening, “Centennial City,” was a muddy firetrap that, sure enough, went up in flames. By then fall had arrived, and the city authorities discouraged rebuilding efforts.
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The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition was a snapshot of America in 1876. It was not a summary of the events, ideals, and peoples of the previous century. Yet it offered the visitor a summation of sorts. The fair was a paean to progress. It exalted technology and the making and the inventing of things. It appealed overwhelmingly to the white urban middle class who, though still a minority in the nation, was coming to be synonymous with the national culture. President Grant's simple opening speech implied that the exposition represented both an end and a beginning. The first one hundred years of American life were over, the really hard work of building a nation accomplished. America had gone through a gruesome civil war and then a difficult adjustment to peace. And now, the country could focus on consolidating its continental empire, broadening the opportunities for its ambitious citizens, improving their lives with science and industry, all watched over by the benevolent government of a united republic. A new nation had emerged from the crucible of war, and Americans were trying to make sense of the urban, industrial behemoth arising in their midst, for which the Corliss engine was a fit metaphor.

From the vantage of the twenty-first century, the flaws in this vision are obvious, and one need look no further than the lily-white exposition or the portrayal (or nonportrayal) of minorities, workers, and women. Yet for white visitors to Philadelphia, the only conclusion they could rightfully draw was that America was a wonderful country. Its abundance was not the province of a small minority of wealthy moguls but spread far and wide, there for the taking. The problem with those other groups, if indeed the visitors thought about it, was that they would not or could not avail themselves of those incomparable opportunities. Once they did, they would enjoy the blessings of the first century of American life. The American Revolution was over, its promise and unique ideals secure. As Andrew Carnegie expressed it, America was on the fast track: “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail's pace; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express.”
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America would travel lighter and faster once it jettisoned Reconstruction from its policy agenda. The South would become for the rest of the nation increasingly distant and more exotic, shrouded in perpetual moonlight, covered with magnolia groves, and unmoved by the winds of time and progress. The ritual of disengagement began with the end of the war, but markedly different perspectives on what the war accomplished kept the South in the public consciousness for more than a decade after the conflict ended. The election of 1876 provided the means for ending the nation's involvement in its tar baby region for another century.

President Grant toyed with the idea of an unprecedented third term, but very few of his Republican colleagues encouraged him. Scandal had touched close to his administration and its efforts in the South. Certain sectors of the economy continued to limp along, and the Republicans believed a clean slate, both literally and figuratively, would be a more prudent choice. Rutherford B. Hayes, governor of Ohio, an important state to hold in the fall elections, became the party's nominee for president. Hayes was a thrice-wounded Civil War general who had been active in anti-slavery politics before the war. His main attribute was that he was offensive to no one. Henry Adams called him, not unfairly, a “third-rate nonentity.” The most interesting qualification of his running mate, lawyer William A. Wheeler of New York, was that public speaking “in the presence of crowds” made him ill. The party platform was notable for the absence of anything substantive concerning the South, though Hayes pledged himself to the principle of “local self government,” which everyone took to mean an end to Republican Reconstruction.
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The Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York, had battled corruption within his own party in New York City. Like many other New York politicians, he had a nickname: “the Great Forecloser,” because of his legal work for bankrupt railroads. Republicans had other names for him, such as “Slippery Sam” and “Tammany Sammy.” An early opponent of Tweed, he became governor on a reform platform vowing to clean up politics throughout the state. His running mate was Governor Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana, the first Democratic governor of a northern state after the Civil War.
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The Democrats hammered on the themes of corruption and persistent economic problems, while the Republicans continued to wave the bloody shirt, though they avoided discussion about the rights of African Americans. Grant's refusal to help the embattled Chamberlain in South Carolina reflected Republican campaign strategy. On election night, it appeared that Tilden had won the presidency. General Daniel Sickles, who had given his leg and nearly his life for the Union cause, limped into Republican headquarters in New York City on his way home on election night. Nearly a decade earlier, Andrew Johnson had fired him from his commander's post in the Carolinas for insisting on voting rights for African Americans. For Sickles, the Democratic Party was the party of treason. As he dolefully watched the returns come in on the telegraph ticker, he suddenly realized that Hayes had a chance despite Tilden's lead in the popular vote. If Hayes did not lose any more states, and if he picked up the electoral votes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—all three potentially Republican states because of the large black vote—he would become the next president.

Sickles was back at Gettysburg, ordering his men to the charge, only this time it was the telegraph that he commanded, firing off messages to party leaders in the contested southern states over the signature of Republican National Chairman Zachariah Chandler, who was too drunk to function. Republican election boards in each of the three states dutifully followed their commander's directive and invalidated enough Democratic ballots—typically in those counties prone to Democratic paramilitary violence—to declare Hayes the winner. No doubt the Louisiana election board took a close look at East Feliciana Parish, where, despite a black voting majority, not one Republican vote was cast. The Red Shirts discouraged Republicans from voting in South Carolina, and in Florida, among the ruses engineered by Democrats was to pass out Tilden ballots under the Republican emblem to trick illiterate blacks into voting for the Democrat. Tilden partisans in Florida also stopped a train going through a town and voted all the white passengers as local residents. In New Orleans, Republicans uncovered ten thousand Democratic votes by nonexistent voters. Outraged Democrats, beaten at their own game, challenged the results. Thus the election was taken out of the hands of the voters and into the arms of the dealmakers.

The outcome, known as the Compromise of 1877, was that Hayes would receive the contested electoral votes and become the nineteenth president of the United States, the last of the federal troops would be withdrawn from the South (they did not actually leave, but were confined to their barracks), and the federal government and northern investors would rebuild the southern economy. Democrats and Republicans reached the compromise at the home of James Wormley, one of Washington's wealthiest black residents. The last element of the bargain, concerning the South's economic development, was never fulfilled, and the military withdrawal was symbolic. The South's real victory was a permanent end to any threat of federal meddling in southern affairs. Hayes had assured Louisiana Democrats, “I believe, and I have always believed that the intelligence of any country ought to govern it.” It was a sentiment many northerners shared.
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Grant sighed a great relief as well. His administration would end on a quiet rather than on a contentious note. Looking back on the Reconstruction debacle at the end of his term, he confided to his cabinet that black suffrage was probably a mistake. “It had done the Negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.” Northerners agreed. They were pleased to see the South and, especially, blacks disappear as an issue. E. L. Godkin announced, “The negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.” Blacks in the South recognized the end of a noble but doomed experiment. Henry Adams, a black leader in Louisiana, despaired, “The whole South—every state in the South had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Redemption at last. Reconstruction did not formally end with the triumph or failure of a particular policy but with a deal. The Republicans got the White House, the North got rid of the South and its fractious population, and the South went its own peculiar way.
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Alexander Stephens, now a congressman from Georgia, summarized the southern point of view. Though a Democrat, Stephens assured Hayes he supported the compromise. “What,” Stephens asked, “do the [southern] people care who governs? All they care for is a good government.” As for blacks, Stephens dismissed them entirely. “[The Negro] is nothing but a machine, an instrument in the hands of the politicians to vote as they want.… He is not to be taken into account in making up the estimate.”
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Most writers have agreed that Reconstruction failed the freedmen. If so, it was a preordained failure. Given the nation's racial attitudes before, during, and after the Civil War, permanent concessions to black equality were unrealistic. Only the baldest defiance of white southerners brought the Radical program to fruition, and then for only a short while. Northerners wanted to put the war behind them, and the incessant reminders drifting up from the South at first alarmed, then annoyed, and finally bored them. Mary Livermore, who worked during the war for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, found her northern neighbors during the postwar “turn[ing] with relief to the employments of peaceful life, eager to forget the fearful years of battle and carnage.” As long as white southerners could see and feel, however, they could not forget. W. E. B. DuBois summarized the Reconstruction experience for southern blacks. “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” DuBois was only partially correct, however. Reconstruction failed the freedman, but it also failed the South and the nation.
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