America Aflame (80 page)

Politics must adhere to scientific truths, and the distinction among races was self-evident. This was not racism but incontrovertible political science. The frequent appearance of such words as “extinction” and “extermination” in writings and discussions of other races was not a crude reference to genocide but an acknowledgment of the inevitability of science. In
The Descent of Man
(1871), Darwin predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.” Those species that could not adapt to new environments ultimately become extinct. Evolution was impersonal and inexorable.
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These ideas did not posit a laissez-faire policy toward inferior races. Interventions grounded in scientific research were appropriate to protect the lesser races for their own survival and for the order of the greater society. Both racial segregation and disfranchisement were examples of suitable policies toward the African. Legislation promoting black suffrage and officeholding and land ownership was not appropriate given the inherent limitations of the race. The new discipline of social science, employing empirical research to discover the natural laws through which society operated, could calibrate what policies would benefit the races' different capabilities.

Legislation based on sentiment or religious ideals was doomed to fail. Thomas Huxley, an English biologist and Darwin disciple, argued, “It is simply incredible that, when all [the black's] disabilities are removed … he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a context which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.” Huxley had been an abolitionist. He believed that whites did not need slavery to maintain their superiority over the African. Nature had already accomplished that. And while “the highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins,… it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest.” Once the African attained a “stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring [him], all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore.” When northerners turned away from Radical Reconstruction, they could justify it on scientific principles and take comfort in the assurances of southern whites that they knew the blacks in their midst best and would protect them with policies in concert with nature.
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John William DeForest was a Freedmen's Bureau agent sympathetic to the former slave. Like many other educated Americans in the late 1860s, he had read Darwin and had seen the world in a new way as a result. In an article in the
Atlantic
in May 1868, DeForest wrote, “I am convinced that the Negro as he is, no matter how educated, is not the mental equal of the European,” but it would be a cruel mistake not to educate blacks “mentally and morally,” to enable some of the more conscientious and talented of the race to survive. For those blacks, their survival depended on isolation from whites, perhaps in “those lowlands where the white race cannot or will not labor.” In direct competition, DeForest feared, the freedman was doomed. Similar logic guided the reservation policy for Native Americans.
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Herbert Spencer applied Darwin's theory to society, coining the phrase “survival of the fittest” in
Principles of Biology
(1864). Peoples who are best adapted to society will flourish; those who are not will fail. Any attempt to short-circuit the process by intervening with natural selection was futile and counterproductive to society at large. Darwin, in
The Descent of Man
, agreed with Spencer, up to a point. It was injurious, he argued, for “the weak members of civilized societies [to] propagate their kind.” Yet man cannot help himself because, through the process of evolution, he has developed the instinct of sympathy. It was correct, in this view, to make Indians wards of the state and teach them the basics of a sedentary civilization. It was correct to offer the African freedom, but he would thrive only if placed under the close supervision of whites, preferably in agricultural labor. The problem with Reconstruction policy was that it installed Africans in positions of power beyond their natural capacities and allowed them to be manipulated by members of the superior race. As for workers' antagonistic attitude toward capital, the market, like the organism, would set the wages and working conditions.
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Spencer insisted that society must grow and develop without artificial interference, which he equated with government policy. Otherwise, he believed, there would be a severe erosion of liberty. He already saw that happening in “the late catastrophes on the continent,” referring to the Paris Commune, and in the political corruption in postwar America. Spencer was a champion of abolition for the same reason as Huxley: slavery was an unnecessary imposition.
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America's embrace of Darwin reflected and accelerated the decline of religious faith as a force in public policy. Charles Hodge, a leading northern evangelical theologian, complained that “in using the expression Natural Selection, Mr. Darwin intends to exclude design, or final causes.” Other divines attempted to reconcile religion and science, but most were clearly troubled about the implications of Darwin's theory for their faith. The universities, close allies of the religious establishment and often founded as seminaries, followed Harvard's lead and reinvented themselves as research institutions predicated on the scientific method. They did not abandon their divinity schools, if they had them, but by the 1870s theology was subordinate to higher education's new mission.
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There were dissenters from this new pedagogy, such as Frederic Henry Hedge, a New England Unitarian minister who warned, “An education which looks only at the practical, may help to fill the purse, but it can never enrich the mind. It can never impart that dignity of character, that respect for our intellectual nature, that veneration for the beautiful and the good, that zeal for improvement, that longing after the infinite, to impart which, is the true object of all education.” This was precisely what America's Age of Reason wanted to leave behind: the sentimental longing for grace that characterized the antebellum evangelical crusade and that led to a bloody civil war. The attractiveness of Darwin was that, in a nation of laws, he offered the ultimate law, the law of nature from which there could be no escape or modification.
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At the newly formed Social Science Association in 1879, William Graham Sumner, a disciple of Spencer, noted, “The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest.” To Sumner, harsh as it was, this was realism deduced from science. For a nation that prized the rugged individual and had grown increasingly wary of government institutions, Darwin and Spencer resonated well with postwar culture. The answer to Tweed and the southern Republican governments was not to limit the ambition of those who sought public service, but rather to limit the access of those whom nature had designated as unfit to participate in a democratic political process.
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Trust in science was such that it eclipsed faith as a missionary force.
Scientific American
argued that new technology “in obscure quarters of the globe where the mind of the heathen is as dark as his skin” performed the “great mission of lifting up and restoring to the world regions and men lost to it.” As examples, the editor noted the impact of technology on manufacturing enterprises in China and India that were modernizing both societies. Soon they would be harvesting “Acres of Diamonds.” “As the ax of the woodman lets sunlight into the forest, so the advent of machinery breaks down the prejudices of the uncultivated; where sloth was, industry is, and where only force had sway, reason enters.”
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The faith in science arrived just in time to save America. A group calling themselves Liberal Republicans gathered in late 1871 to introduce scientific principles into American government. Corruption, in their view, was the new slavery, just as unnatural, and just as threatening to the body politic. Carl Schurz, a founder of the movement, pronounced civil service reform the great crusade of the postwar era, just as abolition stirred a nation before the war. Reform would turn government over to experts who could apply the scientific method to the political process. Henry Ward Beecher insisted, “The government must be conducted by men who study government—men who are not amateurs, but who make it the business of life.”
Harper's
, referring to the Tweed scandals, advised, “The peace and prosperity of the country are now to be perpetuated, as they were a few years ago to be secured, only by prostrating the Tammany tyranny and corruption as effectually and finally as those of slavery were prostrated.”
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Corruption gave government a bad name. Less government meant less corruption. More safeguards such as suffrage restrictions, civil service reform, and shifting power away from legislatures provided the cure, or so the reformers assumed. Limit the access of those less fit to govern, and increase the numbers of experts and professionals to run government scientifically. As the scandals mounted, so did agitation for major reforms. The 1872 presidential election provided a forum for those issues.

The Liberal Republicans distanced themselves from the party organization tied to the now-tainted Grant administration. They advocated civil service reform to reduce reliance on patronage and the abuses that accompanied office seeking. To constrain government and remove temptation, they supported an end to federal grants to railroads and a reduction in the tariff to reduce government revenues. For the South, addressing the issue of legitimacy, they recommended restoring the voting rights of high-ranking Confederates and a return to “local self-government” by men of “property and enterprise.” The Liberals depicted themselves as modernists. They also hoped for a restructuring of the American party system, to create a new party from a coalition of bright young men, both northern and southern, who would pursue power for the good of the nation, not of themselves.
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Schurz believed that a conciliatory policy toward the South would enable these intelligent men to emerge and join forces with like-minded northern colleagues. “A very large number of Southerners, especially young men who have become disgusted with their old leaders … are sincerely willing to uphold the new order of things
in every direction
, if they are generously treated.… This will be a power fit to absorb the best elements of both parties.” This was a delusion other Republicans held as well.
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The Liberals sought to capture the Republican Party, toss out Grant, and select a reformist presidential candidate. They failed. Other Republicans were unwilling to cashier a war hero whose personal integrity was unquestioned. Democrats, sensing an opportunity to split the Republicans and win the White House, forged an alliance with the Liberals. Together they nominated Horace Greeley to challenge Grant.

Having made the
New York Tribune
one of the nation's most widely read Republican organs before the Civil War, Greeley reduced his involvement with the paper after 1860. He pursued an erratic course during the war, pressing Lincoln on one hand to abolish slavery, and on the other meeting with Peace Democrats to arrange a compromise with the Confederacy to end the war. After the war, he sided with the Radicals against Andrew Johnson, but he also joined a group that posted bond for the release of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Greeley first entered electoral politics in 1869 as the losing Republican candidate for New York State comptroller. When he became the presidential nominee for both the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats in 1872, opponents had a treasure trove of contradictory editorials, speeches, and actions to hurl against him and his supporters.
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The irony was inescapable. Greeley's
New York Tribune
had spent most of its career attacking the Democratic Party. Now he was its standard-bearer. Voters may have been angry about the political scandals and the purported elevation of unqualified and unethical officeholders, but the conversion of convenience perpetrated by Greeley and the Democrats seemed to be the greater fraud.

Northerners were amenable to appeals for national reconciliation. They were not receptive, however, to Horace Greeley, whose contortions to make himself fit into the Democratic Party mold were both comic and sad. As
Harper's
noted, “Greeley's career for nearly forty years has been one of uncompromising hostility to every cardinal principle and measure of the Democratic party.” This former abolitionist confessed, “I was, in the days of slavery, an enemy of slavery.… That might have been a mistake.” Greeley mimicked the white southerners' indictment of the freedmen, declaring, “Had [blacks] saved the money they have since 1865 spent in drink, tobacco, balls, gambling, and other dissipations, they might have bought therewith at least Ten Million acres of soil in their respective states.” Greeley made no mention of statutes that prohibited land sales to blacks or of the opprobrium faced by whites who rented land to black families.
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Voters also wondered whether the Liberals' commitment to clean government was a genuine conviction or a campaign ploy. The Democrat-controlled legislature of Georgia changed the election date from November to October, passed a poll tax, reduced the number of polling places, and patrolled the roads leading to the polls with armed “sabre clubs.” Democratic “poll watchers” disposed of ballot boxes in Republican precincts and returned large Democratic majorities in districts that were overwhelmingly Republican. Yet the Greeley campaign hailed the results from Georgia as an early indication of an electoral tide favoring their candidate.
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