RISING VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH
Beginning in the winter of 1865 and spring of 1866 the Ku Klux Klan was formed in Tennessee. It claimed to be a Christian organization, and eventually organized against blacks, Catholics and Jews. The KKK believed that America was intended to be a white nation, for white British American Protestants (also called WASPs or white Anglo Saxon Protestants). The Klan tended to view Catholicism as a Satanic cult.* The KKK was dedicated to preserving white supremacy, which meant a white monopoly on rule, power and control.
The Klan terrorized African Americans, and whites who voted Republican. In those days people formed lines in front of the box that they deposited their ballot into, so it was very obvious who you were voting for. In response to the violence, Congress passed three Enforcement Acts. The Enforcement Act of May 1870 placed elections under federal protection and made it a federal crime to engage in conspiracies to injure, oppress, deny, threaten or intimidate any person in the free exercise of any right secured by the Constitution and the laws of the US. The Second Enforcement Act (of February 1871) provided for federal supervision of Southern elections. The Third Enforcement Act (April 1871) strengthened penalties for people who intimidated persons and tried to prevent them from voting. President Grant then suspended habeas corpus and declared nine counties in South Carolina to be in a state of insurrection. He sent the army back into South Carolina and pursued mass prosecutions. In Mississippi 930 men were charged with Klan activity, and 243 were brought to trial and found guilty. But it had been necessary to declare martial law to do this. There were thousands of arrests. But it proved extremely difficult to prove who the Klansmen were*, or to get people to testify against them and identify them, or to get juries to convict them. Whites who were NOT Klansmen were frightened and intimidated too.*
THE COLFAX MASSACRE OF 1873
One example will illustrate how the courts tied the hands of the federal Government. In 1873 there was an election in Louisiana. The outcome was disputed. A group of 100 or so African Americans held a meeting at the courthouse in Colfax. A mob of whites gathered outside the building and set it on fire. As the African Americans attempted to leave the burning building they were shot. More than 70 African Americans died by either being shot or burned to death in the "Colfax Masacre." Some sources say more than 100 were killed. The Federal Government found three men who it said were involved in the massacre. It brought charges against them in federal court. One of these men was named Cruikshank. The federal court found the three accused men guilty. The men appealed the ruling. They argued that the charges should have been handled by authorities in Louisiana, and heard in state court. In the case of US v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously (1876) that indeed the federal government had overstepped its bounds and committed a procedural error. The case should have been tried in state court. The US Supreme Court threw out (vacated) the indictments. The federal government did not prosecute the accused men in state court because it did not believe that a jury in Louisiana would convict white men of any crime that they committed against black men. It might also have been "double jeopardy" to try people twice for the same crime. Cruikshank and company WALKED. This example showed that even when people committed mass murder, and even when the federal government prosecuted them, the perpetrators could get away with it. In the South, the black vote kept the Republicans in power. The Klan violence was designed to intimidate blacks and Republicans from going to the polls, and then the white Democrats won the elections. The Klan functioned as an unofficial arm of the Democratic party in the South. The only protection that African Americans had in the South in 1876 was the presence, in some localities, of the federal army. Without it, they were at the mercy of the KKK.
It was in this atmosphere that the election of November 1876 took place. At that time, the army still patrolled Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana.
In the depths of the Depression of 1873-78, the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in 1874. The Southern Democrats demanded that the army be withdrawn from the last states in the South. In 1876 the House of representatives adjourned without appropriating any money for the army for the following year (appropriations are made this year for next year). In effect, the Democrats held the army appropriation bill "hostage." Now it was the South’s turn, and the Democrats’ turn, to use "political blackmail."
The Republican candidate was Rutherford B. Hayes, of Ohio. The Democratic candidate was Samuel Tilden, governor of New York.
The result was:
Candidate Popular Electoral
Hayes 4,034,311 165
Tilden 4,288,546 184
Disputed 20
In order to win the Electoral College, one must win a MAJORITY of the total number. A majority was 185. Tilden was 1 vote short. Hayes would need ALL TWENTY of the disputed votes in order to win the election.
The disputed votes came from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina—the three states that happened to be occupied by federal troops, who protected the voting rights of African Americans. And there was 1 disputed electoral vote from Oregon.
An electoral commission was set up. It split along party lines, 8 Republicans to 7 Democrats. Under the Constitution, if no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives decides. The Democrats controlled the House. HAYES knew that if the election reached the House, he would lose. Therefore he was desperate to make a deal that would avoid going to the House of Representatives. On Feb. 26, 1877, just a few days before the inauguration in March, a deal was struck (finalized).
Emissaries of leading Southern Democrats (Lucius Lamar of Mississippi, John Gordan of Georgia) met with Hayes’s campaign managers. The deal was:
Hayes would promise to withdraw the troops from the South.
Some Southern Democrats would agree that the electoral votes should be certified for Hayes, giving him the presidency (he "wins").
The South also sought promises of federal money for a harbor at Galvetston, Texas; and money to dredge the Mississippi River at New Orleans (it had silted up); and federal subsidies of $223 million for a Southern trans-continental railroad from Vicksburg, Mississippi and New Orleans to San Francisco. As Republicans controlled the Senate, a Democratic president (Tilden) could not deliver the votes needed to get money bills (spending bills) through the Senate. Only a Republican president could do that (Hayes had more to offer the South than did their own party’s candidate, Tilden).
Hayes also promised to name a white Southerner to the cabinet.
The Southern emissaries also promised to support a Republican for the position of speaker of the House of Representatives (James Garfield).
In 1877 Hayes promptly removed the last troops from patrolling the South. Later that year, Congress approved an appropriation for the army.
Hayes appointed David Key, of Tennessee, as postmaster general, thereby keeping his promise to name a white Southerner to his cabinet. Congress approved money for Galveston harbor and dredging the Mississippi River. But the Democrats could not stomach a Republican speaker of the House, in a House in which the Democrats had a majority. And Hayes could not get the Senate to approve vast sums for a Southern trans-continental railroad.*
BETRAYAL OR POLITICS AS USUAL?
Historian Rayford Logan, an African American writing in the 1960s, termed the "Compromise of 1877" a sell-out. He said that Hayes and the Republicans sold black people down the river and delivered them into the hands of the KKK in order to hold on to the presidency. He called this a "betrayal," and calls the period after Reconstruction the "nadir" (lowest point). Others see it simply as politics as usual (the politics of expedience).
In the aftermath of the election of 1876, the mainstream of the Republican Party began to feel that the "alliance" with blacks had become a political liability. They felt that it hurt the popularity of the Republican party with white voters. After 1876 the mainstream of the Republican Party distanced itself from the blacks. The Republicans felt that they had gotten "burnt," and it had almost cost them their hold on the presidency.
Of course, Hayes was dogged with epithets such as "his illegitimacy" and "Rutherfraud B. Hayes." It was one of the worst electroal scandals since John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay struck a deal to cheat Andrew Jackson out of the presidency in 1824, and the election of 2000 reminds many people of 1876.
In 1877 the North and the South, the Republicans and the Democrats, struck a deal. It was a gentlemen's agreement. From this point forward, the North and the Federal Government would leave the South alone and let it run its own affairs as it saw fit. The North/Federal Government would not interfere. The North would let the South handle the Afro-American issue as it saw fit, and not meddle. The South would have a "free hand." The South would put aside the Confederacy and remain loyal to the American country. The North would not interfere with how the white South handled the black South. It was like respecting the "right" of a man to handle his wife and children and the domestic affairs in his home, as he saw fit, without inteference from "outsiders." After 1877, the North was reluctant to force the South to do anything.
The Democratic Party in the South remained the self avowed party of white supremacy right down to 1964. The national Democratic Party began to become more liberal only in the 1930s, under Franklin Roosevelt. Blacks who were able to vote (mostly in the North) remained loyal to the party of Lincoln and emancipation until 1932. By 1936, blacks switched en masse to the Democrats. But from 1876-1936 African Americans were in a political wilderness, a twilight zone, without a home, with no place to go. Neither party responded to them or cared deeply about them. The Democrats were white supremacists, and the Republicans were afraid of seeming "too black." The Democratic Party became more responsive to African Americans in the 1960s, AFTER 5 million blacks had left the South and moved to the North, and the black vote IN THE NORTH became important to the Democrats.
REIGN OF TERROR
In the South, a reign of terror descended in the form of the KKK and lynching. Soon, all of the achievements of Reconstruction would be wiped away. For African Americans, it was as if an American holocaust was happening in slow motion. Hitler had his Nazis. In America, we had the Klan. Between 1880 and 1930, more than 3,000 African American men, women and children would be hanged, tortured, mutilated, dragged behind cars and burned alive.
After 1877, Republicans changed their interpretation of the Civil War. For the abolitionists and the Radical Republicans, secession had been treason and slavery had been a MORAL EVIL. The war had been a struggle between good and evil, right and wrong. After 1877, as the white North desired to put the war behind "us" and reconcile with the South, the war was portrayed as a difference of opinion between honorable men who were merely fighting for the causes in which they honestly believed. The Southerners were "patriots," and had merely been in error. Today, this is reflected in the debate over the confederate flag. For Africans Americans and liberals it is a symbol of racism, slavery, segregation and white supremacy. For some others, it is a symbol of their "heritage" and "way of life." But in any case, the war and Reconstruction cast a long shadow. Thus, in 2000, the NAACP was still waging a boycott that succeeded in prodding the South Carolina legisltaure to take the Confederate battle flag down off of the state capitol building. And only in 2001 has Georgia changed its flag to make the "stars and bars" less prominent. Mississippi STILL flies the Confederate battle flag.*