Capitol Men

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.

E
668
.D
76 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

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
[>]

O
F 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 sectional 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.