The Invisible Line (24 page)

Tammany Hall was filled to capacity, five thousand men. As the convention went through twenty-one ballots to nominate its presidential candidate, it was nearly impossible to hear the speakers on the dais. When Susan B. Anthony took the stage on the first day, her appeal for women's suffrage was lost in a roar of laughter and jeers. Nominating their first presidential candidate since the war's end, the Democrats were a motley assembly—Easterners and Westerners and Southerners, reformers and big-city bosses, Copperheads who had opposed the war and War Democrats who had toed Lincoln's line, advocates for financial interests who favored repaying government bonds with hard money and “greenbackers” who sought to aid farmers and other debtors by printing paper money to inflate the currency. In the upstairs gallery, dozens of “seasoned Wigwam shouters” and Tammany hacks were cheering for the machine's favored candidates.
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Amid the noise, press of people, and soggy heat, Randall Lee Gibson was experiencing what felt more like an intimate family reunion or gathering of veterans than a political convention. Inside Tammany Hall the Kentucky and Louisiana delegates were seated next to each other on long wooden benches. Randall, who was representing the Louisiana Democratic Party that he had helped organize earlier in the year, could walk over and shake his brother's hand—Hart, now serving in the Kentucky House of Representatives, was a delegate, as was their cousin William Preston. The Louisiana and Kentucky contingents, along with associated “campfollowers, political bummers, skirmishers, alternates and ‘guards,' ” were staying down Broadway at the New York Hotel, a meeting place during the war for Confederate spies. Randall and Hart were joined there by their cousins Billy Breckinridge, a Kentucky lawyer, and William Preston Johnston, a Yale classmate and dear friend of Randall's who was teaching history and English literature at Washington College in Lexington, Virginia. Everywhere they went, they saw old friends and comrades—“everybody I know almost,” Johnston marveled in a letter home to his wife. “I might have traveled a month without meeting so many people of use to me.” Many of the people they saw had been Confederate generals, among them Nathan Bedford Forrest, still notorious for massacring black Union soldiers at the 1864 Battle of Fort Pillow and just elected the first grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan; Wade Hampton, now leading South Carolina's Democratic Party; Jefferson Davis's nephew Joe, practicing law in Mississippi; Alfred Colquitt, a lawyer in Georgia; and Simon Bolivar Buckner, preparing to return to Kentucky after exile in New Orleans.
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Although Johnston wrote that “everybody is very hot about politics,” Gibson was uncharacteristically at ease. He entertained little hope that the party of secession would win the first presidential election after the war. “I do not believe it makes much difference whether the South be represented or not,” he wrote. “The moral effect will be wholesome but I fear inadequate to beneficial purposes.” Nor was he much encouraged by the Senate's recent acquittal of President Johnson on impeachment charges, or for that matter the amnesty proclamation that the president had timed for the convention's first day, clearing every high-ranking Confederate official except Jefferson Davis. Such measures did little to change everyday circumstances in Louisiana: crop failures, economic ruin, and, worst of all, “the installation of the Negro in power
over
the white Race,” which Gibson believed would “lead ultimately and inevitably, to the banishment and destruction of the White Race or a war of Races.”
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INSTEAD OF WORRYING ABOUT bleak days ahead, Gibson enjoyed the company of his friends and comrades. Just seeing them was pleasure enough, but the gathering was even sweeter for being in New York. While Republican newspapers huffed at the attendance of former rebels who, “until now, have not ventured to show their once familiar faces” in the North, Randall Lee Gibson had spent a good deal of the previous year in the city. With his law practice on solid footing, he had allowed himself to do something that he could not before the war—fall in love. In January 1868 he married Mary Montgomery, the daughter of a New Orleans belle and a New England-born banker who had taken fortune and family north before 1860. Gibson had cousins living near the Montgomerys in New York. Mary was twenty-two, “rather small—nearer a blonde than a brunette,” a “very ardent Catholic,” just home from years of schooling in Europe. She could speak fluently with her family's French and German maids. Risking a display of “overweening vanity,” Randall wrote a cousin that she was “in every way I think entirely too good for me.”
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Walking to the convention, Randall could look up Fifth Avenue, knowing that ten blocks away, at Madison Square, his wife's family owned a large lot. A couple of miles farther north, Mary was staying with her mother at the Montgomerys' hilltop mansion in Westchester County, High Bridge, where she could gaze across the Harlem River at Manhattan's northern heights. Marrying into New York money meant immediate financial security for Randall as well as considerable amounts of future legal work—he found himself managing the estate of his father-in-law, who had died three months before the wedding. The Montgomerys' support for the Union during the war gave Randall no pause. Mary had idyllic memories of her childhood in New Orleans and was eager to move there and assume the duties of a society hostess. Their marriage did not force Randall to rethink any of his beliefs about the future course of the South and the nation. At the same time their union of North and South carried a symbolic power that was not lost on their friends. “She rendered him inestimable service,” a cousin would remember, “in the exceedingly difficult undertaking . . . to knit anew the social ties, public confidence, and personal relations that had been severed by civil war.”
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For the rebel veterans who had gathered for the convention, the sectional reunion embodied by Randall and Mary Gibson was accompanied by an “exultant” and unapologetic refusal to compromise on Reconstruction. As Fourth of July fireworks flashed over New York like a bombardment that they had never managed to wage, Southern delegates continued to believe that secession had been legal and constitutional and that the United States was a republic of independent states and “not a consolidation of the whole people into a nation.” Any preconditions to readmitting Southern states to the Union were illegal, and extending the vote to blacks endangered the nation and the purity of the white race. While they may have realized that they were nominating onetime New York governor Horatio Seymour for the privilege of losing to Ulysses S. Grant in the November election, the Southern delegates insisted on shaping a party platform that demanded immediate restoration of all states to the Union, amnesty for all past political offenses, full power to the states to regulate who could vote, and “the abolition of the Freedmen's Bureau and all political instrumentalities designed to secure negro supremacy.”
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Southern delegates also secured the vice-presidential nomination of Francis P. Blair, a former Union army officer from Missouri who, days before the convention, had expressed his desire to void the Reconstruction Acts, “compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpetbag State governments, [and] allow the white people to reorganize their own governments and elect senators and representatives.” Under the cloak of the Democratic Party, it had become acceptable to advocate restoring Confederates to power. “It was a rather wild boast of the rebel leader four years ago that he would water his horses in the Delaware,” wrote one of many newspapers that commented on the conspicuous Southern presence at the convention, “but he has more than made good his promise, by sending his men to New York to nominate a President for 1868. It matters not who the Democratic candidate may be, he is the candidate of the rebellion.”
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After a week of “hurrahing and hat-swinging and standing on benches,” the former rebels retreated south. While their vice-presidential candidate gave speeches describing the Reconstruction governments as “semibarbarous . . . worshippers of fetishes and poligamists” who would “subject the white women to their unbridled lust,” Democrats threatened blacks with firing, loss of credit, and eviction if they voted Republican. Throughout the South whites spent the summer organizing Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary orders, assassinating opponents, rioting through cities like New Orleans, and beating and massacring dozens, even hundreds, of blacks in rural areas.
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Randall and Mary remained in New York, avoiding the heat, cholera, yellow fever, and assorted man-made pathologies of the Louisiana summer. Randall had little need to return home—the courts had closed on July 1 and would not reconvene until the first week of November. New York was almost pleasant after nearly 100,000 visitors cleared out. Ambling along Broadway, shaded by the brim of his boater, Gibson could feel a light wind, as if the streets were sighing. It had grown increasingly rare to enjoy a moment of ease and anonymity and pleasant drift. His days were now crowded with business, political, and social obligations. Gibson did not even have time to read for pleasure. “This city life keeps one always on the run,” he reflected. “You glance only at everything.”
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As Gibson slowly walked, a man coming toward him stopped short and blocked his path. Gibson looked dully for a moment at the slight man with a dark full beard and severe part in his wavy hair. The man grabbed Gibson's hand, triggering a glimmer of recognition. It was Andrew Dickson White, one of Gibson's college classmates. More than a decade had passed, he exclaimed, but “Randall looked not a day older” than when they had worked together on the
Yale Literary Magazine
and wandered around Paris's Left Bank after graduation. Just a year before, he had founded Cornell University and was serving as its first president.
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White insisted that they dine together. Over lunch he asked if Gibson had come north to attend Yale's commencement, scheduled for the end of the month. “No,” Gibson said, “I have not expected to go; there will be hardly anybody there who will care to see me.” The response jolted Gibson. “You are just the man they would wish to see,” White said.
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THE MOMENT GIBSON STEPPED off the train, he knew that the city of his college days was gone. The station no longer resembled a lovely Tuscan villa—after twenty years of hard use, it was well known as “the Black Hole at New Haven.” The enormous elms lining the recently paved streets stared down astonished at what they were shading. New Haven was in full throttle, two and a half times bigger than when Gibson had been a Yalie, well on its way to doubling in size yet again. The war had made the city rich, crisscrossed every few minutes by horse trolleys carrying workers to factories, a never-ending industrial parade.
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Although some of its buildings were new, Yale remained recognizable, an island of tradition, continuity, and brotherhood. The students, still spending their idle hours sitting on the fence at College and Chapel, could easily have been mistaken for some of Gibson's old chums. As it happened, his graying classmates were wandering the campus, imagining their younger selves. Just two weeks after the Democratic Convention, Gibson faced another assembly of friends. The events could not have been more different. While the Democrats had been singing anthems like the Seymour and Blair campaign song “The White Man's Banner” (“Let, then, all free-born patriots join, with a brave intent / To vindicate our Father's choice ‘A white-man's Government' ”), Yale's ceremonies began and ended with Mendelssohn's Overture from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Instead of tirades about Reconstruction, college seniors delivered orations on “Henry IV of France” and “Civil Service in the United States.”
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At the alumni dinner one of Gibson's classmates asked if he would give a speech. Surrounded by Northerners, he appeared to one observer “shy and rather overwhelmed.” Standing before people he had written off as “the enemy,” Gibson “pledg[ed] his best efforts in the future for the union and harmony of the whole country under the old . . . flag.” He then echoed his college valedictory address about the responsibilities of a national elite, declaring that “every educated man in the country ought to consider himself a missionary to spread abroad knowledge.” To his audience, the former Confederate general seemed to be giving “a strong and earnest Union speech,” showing that he was “wholly, and without one cloud or doubt, back in his old and natural connections.” The reaction was emotional, the applause enthusiastic.
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Gibson never had to explain that he viewed the end of Reconstruction and the continuation of white rule as essential to the “union and harmony of the whole country”—that the “old national flag” should not wave over everyone. Two years of law practice had taught him that any position could be abstracted out to a principle that had universal support. As a Yalie, he had symbolized the Southern aristocracy. Now he embodied the South's gracious reconciliation with the North. “He spoke and spoke like a man,” wrote one classmate of Gibson's address. Specifically, Gibson spoke like a Yale man. He was realizing that his classmates had also lost something in the war. Even if they were not facing immediate poverty or black rule, the modern world—cities teeming with immigrants, an economy dominated by corporations and industry, a social scene flooded with new people—posed a future rife with uncertainty. As long as he resembled one of them, Northerners of his class would look to Gibson as a partner in rebuilding the Republic. “His reception,” the classmate wrote, “was just what it should be.”
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