Penguin History of the United States of America (69 page)

This was not a matter of naked self-interest. The planters were still honestly convinced of their superior fitness. Blacks they saw as idle, thieving and stupid: the shock of being deserted, on the day of Jubilo, by their most trusted servants had left a residue of enormous bitterness. They had absolutely no intention of sharing political power with them. ‘This is a white man’s government…’ – the expression runs through thousands of speeches, articles and letters of the time. Everything which challenged this axiom was to be resisted; particularly the policies of the federal government.

Even this was not so purely selfish a calculation as it may seem. The basic principle of American democracy, the principle, indeed, for which the North had fought, was that the majority must rule; and Republican policies after the war seemed set to deny the application of that principle to the former rebel states. White Southerners were not allowed to choose their representatives freely; enormous numbers of them were not even allowed to vote, after the 1867 Act came into operation. The chief instruments of this tyranny (as it was seen) were the blacks. Therefore their leaders must be defeated and they themselves reduced once more to subservience – to serfdom, if not slavery. This programme had the added advantage that it was one round which all Southern whites could unite, thereby overcoming the unhappy class antagonisms which might otherwise have come to threaten planter control.

Finally, there was physical force. Secure in their renewed sense of righteousness, it was too much to expect that the hot-tempered and impetuous white Southerners should wait for power to revert to their hands after 1867 by the slow lapse of time and the mechanics of free elections alone. Four years of war and rebellion had weakened inhibitions and scruples which had never been very strong in Dixie anyway. The South had been a violent region before the Civil War and had a long tradition, going back to the colonial era, of what was known as ‘regulation’:
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of vigilantism; of taking the law into your own hands. This tradition was now savagely reactivated.

The Ku Klux Klan began as one of those jolly secret societies of which so many Americans at all times have been so fond (even the Union League had its ritual of secret signs and passwords). ‘Ku Klux’ is a fanciful corruption of the Greek
kuklos
, or drinking-bowl, which indicates both that the founders were men of some education and that their purposes were not very sinister. Perhaps at first it only seemed a good joke to dress up in white hoods and sheets and ride about the country at night frightening the freedmen. But the Klan changed its spots very rapidly. By 1867 its brutal techniques were well known and were coming into wide use in the South; and its objects were clear. It wanted to restore Democratic control of the Southern states by preventing blacks from voting; it wanted to drive them from such landholdings as they had been able to acquire and occupy; it wanted further to intimidate them so that they would never again make any attempt to assert themselves. The Klan was measurably successful in all three respects.

For five years its members rode out in their robes and masks, whipping, burning, murdering or making lurid threats to do so. The Klan, and similar organizations such as the Knights of the White Camelia which sprang up in its wake, was in some respects rather like a guerrilla movement or the Provisional IRA: not only in its hit-and-run tactics, but in the fact that citizens were unwilling or afraid to collaborate with the authorities in suppressing it; but it knew better than to attack the army of occupation, official buildings or the institutions of government. It left the Northern schoolteachers who had come south to instruct the ex-slaves to the cold shoulders of the Confederate women; unless the teacher happened to be male, in which case he might be beaten up or otherwise made to feel unwelcome: ‘Dear Bro:’ (wrote one of them), ‘We are in trouble. Five men disguised in a Satanic garb, on the night of the 26th inst, dragged me from my bed and bore me roughly in double quick time 1½ miles to a thicket, whipped me unmercifully and left me to die. They demanded of me that I should cease “teaching niggers” and leave in ten days, or be treated worse… I am not able to sit up yet. I shall never recover from all my injuries…’ The black and the scalawag might expect no mercy at all. The Klan also particularly resented the Freedmen’s Bureau, for its officials, at least until 1868, tried to protect the freedmen by supervising labour contracts and
hauling their oppressors into special courts for correction.
¹⁵
For the Klan never lost sight of its objective of driving the freedmen down into peonage, down towards the mudsill, down to be a permanently subordinate rural proletariat. ‘I noticed that just about the time they [the blacks] got done laying by their crops, the Ku-Klux would be brought in and they would be run off so that they [the owners of the land] could take their crops,’ said an observer in Georgia in 1871.

The Klan’s atrocities were in some measure counter-productive. They were heaven-sent propaganda material for the radicals, and kept up the zeal of the North when it would otherwise have flagged. Seeing this, the respectables of the South made haste to disavow the night-riders, though many had been among them (even Robert E. Lee gave the Klan his blessing, though he cautiously refused to be its Imperial Wizard). By 1873 the Klan had ceased to ride: other methods were found for ‘redeeming’ the South from the Republicans and their allies. But its work long survived it. Southern opinion fastened on what it took to be the glamour, the courage, the patriotism of the ‘night hawks’, and thereafter violent extremism was legitimized in Southern politics (as the Fenians legitimized violence in contemporary Ireland). Liberals, moderates and conservatives from then on could always be outflanked if they showed any disposition to co-operate with the blacks: the tradition of the Klan could be invoked, none would dare to denounce it and a few good lynchings would restore the
status quo
. In this way the frontier and Revolutionary tradition of the people’s justice was finally perverted.

The Southern leadership also adopted methods that were slightly more subtle than the Klan’s. It tried to undermine the North’s belief in its cause by filling the air with denunciations of the Freedmen’s Bureau (which succumbed to its enemies in 1872) and the corruption of the Reconstruction governments. In actuality these governments were no worse than any others in one of the most exuberantly dishonest political eras in American history, and much better than some; but they were vulnerable, for example in the matter of state debts, which had soared to unmanageable heights. This was largely because, in their eagerness to rebuild the South, the governments, with the approval of the voters, had done all they could to induce capitalists to renew and extend the railroads:
¹⁶
with such success that by 1877 the total mileage of track in the South had risen from just over 9,000 to nearly 14,000. Still it made good copy for critics. The ‘Redeemers’ also tried, with some
success, to persuade the freedmen that they were better friends to them than the strangers from outside Dixie, and made promises which some of them meant to keep. They organized vigorously and campaigned furiously, with the predictable result. One by one the Southern states were redeemed for the Democrats and white supremacy. By 1876 Republican governments survived only in Louisiana and South Carolina, and there only by virtue of military occupation. Resentment against these relics was rising to a dangerous pitch. Violence was endemic in Louisiana, and in South Carolina former Confederate General Wade Hampton was posing as the state’s Garibaldi, at the head of his own private army of Redshirts.

‘Corruption is the fashion,’ said one Southern Governor. The Redeemers were helped by the fact that the Grant administration, blatantly incompetent and dishonest, split the Republican party. An alliance of Democrats and ‘Liberal Republicans’ fought the election of 1872 on what was in effect a Copperhead platform, and although Grant survived the challenge, the episode proved that two-party politics was back for good, and that in a close race the South might well prove the decisive factor. Then in 1873 came one of the great crashes which punctuated the business cycle every twenty years or so; it was followed by a prolonged depression, for which the administration got the blame. The Democrats, denouncing Republican corruption and overspending, won the Congressional election of 1874 and seemed well placed to win the Presidential election of 1876 on a traditional anti-big-business Jacksonian platform; for the Republicans had been exceedingly lavish in their attentions to the great corporations, especially the railroads. If the Democrats won the Presidency the South could be sure that Reconstruction would be at an end: the last garrisons would be withdrawn, and the last carpetbag governments would fall. In the event it was a close-run thing: votes were stolen on both sides, but if the popular vote had been honestly counted the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden of New York, last surviving member of the Albany Regency, would have been elected President with a majority of about twenty electoral votes.

The Republicans, however, refused to let power slip from their hands so easily. The carpetbag governments in Louisiana and South Carolina announced that Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), the Republican candidate, had carried those states and was therefore elected President by a margin of one electoral vote. It was the most outrageous piece of election-rigging in American history (which is saying something) and for a moment it looked as if it might precipitate a renewal of civil war. The Northern Democrats, after sixteen years in opposition, were ready to use any means to regain the power that was rightfully theirs – or so they threatened.

The Southern Democrats were, uncharacteristically, more cautious. In the first place, Reconstruction was dead. Even if Hayes became President he would have to abandon the carpetbaggers or face the certainty of another rebellion: there was no longer any significant support for them anywhere. Sure of white supremacy, then, the Southerners were free to consider what
they would do with it; and the answer seemed clear. The South was still in a ruinous condition; she needed all the investment she could obtain to restore the economy and enter the industrial age at last; her support would go therefore to the party most likely to satisfy these needs by, for instance, voting money to repair the broken levees of the Mississippi, or by making land grants for building another transcontinental railroad through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona Territory and California – the so-called ‘Southern’ route. The homeland of Andrew Jackson abandoned his creed and turned for salvation to the doctrine of ‘internal improvements of a national character’ and federal assistance originally promulgated by Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. (Many former Southern Whigs were active in this apostasy, and the ruling group in Virginia actually called itself the Conservative party.)

The Northern Democrats were loyal to the ancient faith. The national revulsion against Grantism had been the power behind their renewed political success; they refused to make any concessions to their allies. The Republicans were less restrained. They absolved themselves of their recent sins by deciding that Hayes was to be a reforming President; he and his associates were delighted by the prospect (which proved to be illusory) of reviving the Whigs in the South; they had no ideological objection to internal improvements; and the Presidency was at stake. It would be unsafe to let the country fall into the hands of the vengeful Democrats. So they promised the South home rule, and railroads, and political patronage. In return the Redeemers promised to treat the African-Americans well, and organized to make sure that Congress would not overturn the electoral college’s decision (their agreement was crucial because, though the Republicans controlled the Senate, the Democrats controlled the House). So Hayes was inaugurated as President in March 1877 (jokes about ‘Rutherfraud’ and ‘His Fraudulency’ immediately began to circulate); and soon afterwards the Redeemers took over – not only in the state capitols, for Hayes kept most of his promises, and many a good Republican was dislodged from his postmastership to make way for a Democrat chosen by the new masters of the South.

So the great quarrel of the Civil War and the emancipation crusade finally flickered out in a shabby, undercover bargain of which the best that can be said is that it was legal and averted violence. As such it was welcomed with a universal roar of relief, which showed how deeply ordinary people had dreaded another war – a war which among other things would ha ve made the much-vaunted republic look discreditably like its less successful neighbours south of the border. Now the nation could turn to new things. The old politicians died or retired; the bloody shirt became a less and less effective gimmick; the former rebels vaunted their patriotism. No doubt they did know best, as they claimed, about black-white relations. The once-radical
New York Tribune
editorialized that ‘after ample opportunity to develop their own latent capacities’ the blacks had only proved that ‘as a race they are idle, ignorant, and vicious’.

Necessarily the African-Americans were the losers by this settlement. The planter-merchant class was already back in the saddle economically; the Compromise of 1877 (as some historians call it) guaranteed the restoration of its political power; not surprisingly, the rest of the nineteenth century saw a steady decline in the blacks’ social position. For although the divisions among Southern whites were many and bitter they were always patched over, in the end, in favour of a united attack on the blacks. Thus, the alliance between the Redeemers (that is, the old planter class) and the ordinary farmers, which had won back Southern control of the Southern states, soon broke down, for the Redeemers, perhaps mindful of their promises to President Hayes, showed themselves suspiciously respectful of blacks’ rights, in return getting their votes in elections, and unduly conservative in their approach to public finance and economic problems. Before long a series of revolts broke their power (and with it any hope of an effective Whig or Republican party in most of the South); the rednecks
¹⁷
seized control and, finding that the South’s difficulties were as intractable as ever, blamed them on the blacks. The aristocrats, who dreaded an alliance between poor blacks and poor whites, welcomed this development. Rabblerousing and black-baiting became the standard expedients of all Southern politicians anxious about re-election, and resulted in the notorious Jim Crow laws (nobody knows exactly why they were so-called) by which blacks were rigidly excluded from voting, through such devices as the grandfather clause, the white primary and the poll-tax;
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from all but the poorest and most servile occupations; from the best residential areas of Southern towns; from the schools and universities which white people attended; from white hotels and restaurants. Even trains and (later) motor-buses were segregated. By 1900 white supremacy had developed such a complex and formidable social system that the chief African-American leader of the day, Booker T. Washington, gained his reputation by forcefully advising his people to exploit it by accepting it. He reasoned that African-Americans could make no political progress until they had made economic progress; that they could be said to make economic progress only in so far as they gained control of their own economic lives; and that the only way they could do this was with the help, or at any rate the acquiescence, of the white power
structure. As first head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama from 1881 onwards he manifested apparent lack of interest in civil and political rights and a passionate concern with vocational training for blacks. He flattered the racists (who did not see, or did not believe, that his ultimate goal was integration and equality) and so won their acceptance, respect and aid. Unfortunately the vocational training he purveyed was better adapted to the old, rural America than to the urban America into which the blacks were beginning to move (a tendency he deplored), so it is far from clear to what extent his strategy succeeded, and really assisted African-American economic emancipation.