Capitol Men (41 page)

As Elliott knew, whites in South Carolina felt that the Republican state government was excessive and wasteful, and this belief was linked to outrage at how the state had shifted the local tax burden. A central
tenet of the constitutional convention of 1868, where the Republicans had laid out their blueprint for reform, was the idea that raising land taxes would drive the state's planters to break off small parcels to sell to blacks and poor whites. But this meant higher taxes for one segment of the population, with the potential rewards reaped by those who paid little or no tax. The higher rate of taxation, coupled with their loss of their slave "property" and other economic reversals associated with the war, had hit many landowners hard. Newspapers were filled with listings of properties that had gone up for sale as a result of unpaid taxes. Since many whites also felt excluded from politics generally, they described this imbalanced situation as taxation without representation.

Elliott was willing to concede that the taxpayers' anger had some justification. "Fellow citizens, rights impose duties," he told his supporters. "The question is ... can the colored people of this state maintain and administer the government of this state upon the basis of self-government and unrestricted suffrage? The power we have will be our condemnation, unless we arouse ourselves to our responsibilities."

Realigning the state's tax burden might be one means of quelling the citizens' outrage, but in Elliott's view, reforming the culture of corruption and "easy takings" was at least as essential. Then, as now, this was a high-minded ambition. So pervasive was official thievery among both black and white officials during the 1870s that even once-decent men became, in the novelist William DeForest's description, "blinded by long confinement in the dark labyrinths of political intrigue as the fishes of the Mammoth Cave are eyeless through the lack of light." In New York City, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed and his ring bilked the public out of millions; Wall Street financiers rigged the markets and tweaked railroad stocks; in Louisiana, elected representatives gave themselves a stipend for "stationery" that was used mainly to buy hams and cases of champagne; in South Carolina the "Robber Governor," Franklin Moses Jr., arranged for the legislature to cover his losses at the horse track while running up an unpaid tab of a thousand dollars at a local cigar stand. Many officials, north and south, would have readily earned the droll estimation Lincoln once offered of Simon Cameron, his own first secretary of war: "The only thing he
wouldn't
steal is a red-hot stove."

But the question of who was corrupt was perhaps the wrong question; more to the point was who was most vulnerable to being exposed as corrupt, and who had the authority to make such accusations stick. A charge of corruption was "somewhat like the charge of communism in more recent times," notes Thomas Holt. "The key issue remained one
not of corruption, but of power." In South Carolina and other locales where blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags commanded what struck natives as an inordinate and undeserved rein on state government, and where resentful Democrats were represented by a vocal press, the charges of theft, perfidy, and abuse all seemed to flow in one direction. Because many whites believed that blacks held elected office by special dispensation, they seemed to consider them less entitled to the usual illicit, opportunistic sweepings that came with political power. Elliott saw that black politicians were being held to a higher standard than whites, and resented it, but he warned nonetheless that inattention to even the appearance of the proper functioning of government could doom the Reconstruction experiment—in part by causing it to lose support in the North. "Misgovernment works its own suicide," he said. "We may shout our party shibboleths, we may repeat our party watchwords, we may discourse ever so eloquently upon the glorious principles of the Republican Party, but all this will not save us from overthrow and defeat, unless we maintain good government in South Carolina."

The home-state press was surprised by Elliott's "remarkable harangue" of his fellow black South Carolinians, and certainly far more pleased by it than by his civil rights oration. "With the courage and good sense which have marked his entire public career, Mr. Elliott condemned the state administration, and declared that the salvation of the Republican Party depended upon its instantly putting an end to the existing abuses," the
Charleston News & Courier
stated with approval. The
New York Times
noted that "Mr. Elliott has rendered a public service of the very highest importance" and encouraged the black men of South Carolina to take heart from New York City's own recent example of political housecleaning: its exposure of Boss Tweed.

Elliott, perhaps in part because he had been passed over by the state legislature for a recent appointment to the U.S. Senate, had decided to leave Congress in order to return to South Carolina. As had Adelbert Ames in Mississippi, he had become convinced that he could do more good at home than away in the distant capital. And in Columbia dramatic political change appeared to be afoot. The various scandals surrounding Governor Moses meant that Moses would almost certainly not win the party's nomination for reelection in 1874, leaving the way open for Daniel Chamberlain, the attorney general, to become governor. Elliott's biographer Peggy Lamson entertains the possibility that Chamberlain, who shared many of Elliott's ideas about reform, had encouraged Elliott to leave Congress and enter the state legislature, with a
promise to appoint him speaker of the state's house of representatives, a perch of considerable influence. "Together, then," Lamson speculates, "the two men would work miracles in cleaning up the state's administrative and legislative stables." She hypothesizes further that Chamberlain, who may have had his long-range sights on one day being chosen by the South Carolina legislature as a U.S. senator, a job that was slated to open in 1876, eyed Elliott as Adelbert Ames of Mississippi did Blanche Bruce—a respected black Republican to whom stewardship of the state party could eventually be handed off.

Chamberlain applied himself with considerably more dexterity than his fellow carpetbagger, Louisiana's Henry Clay Warmoth, to righting his ship of state by appeasing Democrats and creating a solid center; and Elliott at first accepted Chamberlain's inclusive policies, confident in the sheer numerical superiority that Republicans enjoyed. Neither man recognized fully the growing depth of feeling among whites that South Carolina had to be redeemed from Republican rule at any cost, or the possibility that the state's black vote could be reduced to near-invisibility by determined Democrats.

It was Elliott who inadvertently helped push South Carolina in that direction when, in December 1875, in reaction to Chamberlain's handing out of patronage to Democrats, he participated in a black Republican campaign to pack an upcoming round of judicial appointments with men of their choosing, including William J. Whipper and the disgraced former governor, Franklin J. Moses Jr. Both were by now associated in the minds of South Carolinians with the worst kind of Radical arrogance, Whipper more unfairly so. Chamberlain was slow to get wind of Elliott's scheme. He was scheduled to travel to the town of Greenville to deliver a lecture on Thursday, December 16, and award scholarships to students of classical studies. A devotee of Greek and Roman literature and oratory since his youth, he had looked forward to the outing. Aware that the election of the judges in the state senate was slated for that same day, Chamberlain asked Elliott, as speaker of the house, to reschedule the vote. Chamberlain later said he had written Elliott a personal note making this request and that Elliott had visited the governor's office on the morning of December 15 and agreed to do what he could to postpone the election; the next day, however, with Chamberlain away in Greenville, the legislature went ahead and voted. In what came to be known in the annals of South Carolina politics as "Black Thursday," Republicans swept all eight judicial posts, including placements for Whipper and Moses.

The
News & Courier
termed this maneuver "the triumph ... of the worst elements of negro radicalism." Whipper was described as "a full-blood negro ... known to be ignorant and malignant ... believed to be utterly corrupt," while "Moses is known throughout the length and breadth of the land as the Robber Governor, as a man whose rascality is equaled only by his audacity." The election of such purportedly nefarious men to sensitive judgeships could lead the paper to only one conclusion: "
War is declared upon the honest people of South Carolina.
" Across the border in North Carolina, the
Charlotte Observer
worked itself into a purplish lamentation: "South Carolina, noble old mother of learned jurists and pure statesmen, where has thy manhood and chivalry fled? Radicalism found her a garden, they have left her a wilderness. They found her a paradise, they have made her a pandemonium—a hell!" The paper, alluding to rumors of sexual impropriety that had long affixed themselves to the former governor, dismissed Moses as a "moral ulcer and despoiler of female virtue," while Whipper was simply "a stupid negro ... What more can we say?" Even the Republican
Daily Union-Herald
feared the party in which it placed its faith had signed its own "death-warrant" and scolded Elliott and his allies for being oblivious to public opinion. Meanwhile, whites residing in the circuit over which "Judge Moses" would preside vowed to bar him from the court-room by any means necessary, even "with muskets on our shoulders...[to] defend that temple of justice from desecration."

Black Thursday's chief victim, however, was Governor Chamberlain. The surprise election of eight Republicans, including the despised Moses, had so shaken South Carolina that Chamberlain's cautious efforts to build a partnership of conservatives and independent Republicans stood out suddenly as tepid half-measures. It was widely agreed that the affair had been the doing of roguish blacks seeking to demonstrate their independence from the governor and to gain greater judicial control of Charleston and the low country—a plan, according to the
News & Courier
, "to Africanize the state and to put the white man under the splay foot of the negro and hold him there"—and if Chamberlain's administration could permit such a thing, whether by design or ineptitude, it must be rejected, along with the black rascals.

Chamberlain knew that terrible damage had been done. In a letter to President Grant, he compared the absurdity of Moses's election to the improbability that New Yorkers would accept the elevation of Boss Tweed to a judgeship. "One immediate effect," Chamberlain acknowledged to the
News & Courier
, "will obviously be the reorganization of
the Democratic Party within the state, as the only means left, in the judgment of its members, for opposing ... this terrible crevasse of misgovernment and public debauchery."

Considerable sympathy accrued to Chamberlain, who clearly had been ambushed and who in desperation tried to issue an emergency order nullifying the ascent of Moses and Whipper (in the end he blocked them from assuming their judgeships by refusing to sign their commissions). In a bizarre, self-glorifying appraisal of what he perceived to be his own historic role in facing down the abuse of the Elliott forces, whom one paper had dubbed "The Black Band," Chamberlain informed the New England Society of Charleston that

I cannot attend your annual supper tonight; but if there ever was an hour when the spirit of the Puritans, the spirit of undying, unconquerable enmity and defiance to wrong ought to animate their sons, it is the hour, here, in South Carolina. The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, of the Roundhead and the Huguenot, is in peril. Courage, Determination, Union, Victory, must be our watchwords. The grim Puritans never qualified under threat or blow. Let their sons now imitate their example.

The
News & Courier
seemed willing to credit him for the effort, but most of the state's conservatives were having none of it. Black Thursday told whites that a carpetbagger governor could not, would not, keep the lid on black political mischief, and as Chamberlain himself had predicted, it emboldened them to pursue a Straightout approach that sought to drive every vestige of Republicanism from their midst. "A rumpus has begun in South Carolina which will end in the white people getting control of the state," noted the
Cincinnati Commercial
. "For a long time the whites have wanted a sufficient excuse to rise up and overthrow the African government under which they live, and now they have it."

The Fourth of July, 1876, was a momentous day, the century-mark of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. As elsewhere across the United States, the residents of Hamburg, a black South Carolina village located across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, were in an exuberant mood. Hamburg had in antebellum days been an important cotton shipping port and link between train and ferry, but after a bridge was built spanning the Savannah, trains no longer stopped there, and the once-thriv
ing town waned in significance. By the end of the Civil War it was, according to one history, a "ghost city" of about five hundred residents, "inhabited almost exclusively by Negroes and governed completely by Negro officers." The latter included Prince Rivers, a Union army veteran and former state legislator who was now the town's magistrate, and Dock Adams, who captained the Hamburg militia. Rivers, like Robert Smalls, enjoyed a local reputation for a colorful act of "self-emancipation" during the war, stealing his master's horse and fleeing across Confederate lines to join a Union regiment. His commander, the New England abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had once described Rivers as "a man of distinguished appearance ... six feet high, perfectly proportioned, and of apparently inexhaustible strength," adding, "If there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king."

Early on that Independence Day in Hamburg, Dock Adams was parading his militiamen on a city street when two white men, Henry Getzen and Thomas Butler, rode up in a carriage and insisted that the militia break ranks and make way for them. Suspecting that the whites were simply trying to provoke a scene, Adams informed them that the militia had a right to parade and that the carriage should go around; but ultimately he relented and ordered his men to open their ranks and let the buggy through.