The Invisible Line (31 page)

Worst of all, the struggle over who would control Louisiana never seemed to end. Gibson might have hoped that the Democrats' guarantees of equality for all and their stated policy of not persecuting Republicans would turn the page on Reconstruction. To his distress, neither side would look forward. While the Democrats in Louisiana were prosecuting Wells and the returning board, Republicans in Washington were continually denouncing and investigating violence and corruption in Louisiana.

In public Gibson defended the way things were in his state—at least in the abstract. On the House floor, he answered the allegations about Democratic rule in Louisiana, not by delving into the particulars of any case, but by taking the discussion to a higher level. As purely internal state matters, Gibson argued, they should not be subject to federal scrutiny. Time and again he presented himself—his character, his honor—as a reason for easing scrutiny on Louisiana. “I have sought during my brief political life to contribute all I could to a good understanding between the people of the North and South,” he said as a way to end discussion on uncomfortable subjects, “and I have been gratified to observe a better feeling, a kindlier intercourse, a more generous disposition springing up.”
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The allegations of violence, corruption, and unfairness weighed heavily on Gibson, all the more because he knew they had a basis in truth. While Gibson had appealed to black voters with high-minded speeches on the campaign trail, other Democrats won elections in Louisiana with the rifle, the lash, and sacks of dollars. When Gibson first entered politics, he wrote with astonishment of the “power
of money . . .
I never wanted a million as much in my life.” He was touched when supporters “spent their own hard earnings on some votes . . . and desired that nobody should tell me.” Gibson won his seat in 1874 against a Republican incumbent just two months after the Crescent City White League had smashed the Republican-controlled state militia in pitched battles on the streets of New Orleans. Fifteen hundred strong with two artillery batteries, the White League was one of many armed groups across the state that “bulldozed” blacks and sympathetic whites into submission, and terrorized blacks were leaving Louisiana by the thousands. Gibson knew the bulldozers well—the Crescent City group consisted of men who had served under him during the war, members of social clubs that he belonged to, and Democratic Party activists who were among his strongest political supporters. The distance between Gibson's image—law, order, and honor—and the reality of Louisiana politics was wearying. “The fact is,” Gibson wrote a friend, “between you and me—our L[ouisiana] politics are disgusting—I mean our Democratic politics. A set of jobbing, half educated, reckless men have the lead + the men of substance do nothing.”
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THE
POST
REPORTED GIBSON'S reaction to Wells on the front page, alongside stories about horse races and prizefights, a double suicide by thwarted lovers in St. Louis, and tensions between Serbia and Russia. The newspaper sided with Gibson, criticizing Wells's letter as having entirely “too much muchness” to be believed. Still, the paper noted that Gibson had “refused to consider” Wells's charges “long enough to deny them” and was convinced that Gibson had opened himself to a libel suit for calling Wells crazy. The same might have been said of Wells for writing that Gibson was black. The law books in Gibson's library would have told him as much. For nearly a century people had gone to Southern courts seeking damages for being called “Negroes,” “mulattoes,” “colored people,” “mixed blood,” “yellow,” and “not white.” These libel and slander cases became occasions for courts to measure the relative status of the races—the disadvantage of being black, the value of being white. Before the Civil War the courts' calculations had begun and ended with slavery and the possibility of being mistaken for a slave. After the war—and particularly after the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution promised equality under the law regardless of race or color—it was less clear that being called black had any tangible consequences. Only one case had gone to court since war's end, and the defendant—a carriage driver in New Orleans who had blackballed the plaintiff from the Hackmen's Benevolent Association—had won at trial and on appeal.
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In assessing the truth of an accusation, courts had to consider how the law defined the categories of black and white. Most Southern states classified people as legally black if they had one-fourth or one-eighth “Negro blood”—a black grandparent or great-grandparent. Just before and just after the Civil War, Virginia and Tennessee considered enacting laws that changed the definition of
Negro
to include anyone with any African ancestry. In 1857 a bill was introduced in the Louisiana Senate for the “prevention of marriages where one of the parties has a taint of African blood.” Although the bill never passed, it reflected the logical extreme of the proslavery position—that slavery was necessary because black inferiority was permanent, set in the blood, and passed along to future generations. The survival of American civilization depended on keeping “the blood of the Caucasian . . . pure and undefiled.” This new way of defining race—the “one-drop rule”—was driven less by slavery than by the prospect of freedom. Only in a world where blacks had the potential to compete with whites for power and privilege was it necessary to articulate reasons for keeping blacks in a permanently inferior status.
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In Louisiana the existence of a large, traditionally free mixed-race class meant that whites had long competed with people of color for jobs, land, and status. By 1878, as Gibson had insisted, blacks technically had the right to vote and otherwise participate in civic life. By law, blacks and whites could marry each other, and blacks had a right of equal access to hotels, railroad cars, and other public accommodations. On the streets of New Orleans, it was famously difficult to distinguish one race from the other at a glance—many whites were dark, and many blacks were light. Every day people witnessed the color line bending and breaking. The result was that whites believed all the more deeply in their racial supremacy. They organized their entire political life around it. Racial identity was so important that the
Daily Picayune
omitted the allegations as to Gibson's race when it printed an identical letter that Wells had sent to it. Believing in racial difference—enough to kill for it—was what kept whites separate from blacks. For white Louisianans, knowing that blacks could look like them did not discount the importance of blood purity. Rather, they were as likely as anyone in the South to consider a person with traceable African ancestry, no matter how remote, to be black. The porous nature of the color line required eternal vigilance.

At root, libel and slander cases involving accusations of blackness forced courts to decide how zealously the color line should be policed. Awarding large damages acknowledged a sizable gap between white and black status but also deterred people from asking the kinds of questions and making the kinds of statements that kept blacks from passing for white. Conversely, if courts made it difficult for plaintiffs to collect damages, such decisions minimized the disadvantages of blackness, yet encouraged whites to err on the side of accusing people of being black. In Louisiana the courts required that plaintiffs prove not only that the accusation was false and defamatory but also that the accuser acted with malice. This additional showing of malice was hard to make, so most accusers—even ones who spoke falsely—could defeat a lawsuit. Where whites and blacks looked alike, perhaps there was little point in punishing mistakes that were bound to happen. Or perhaps maintaining white racial purity was a task of such paramount importance—and practical difficulty—that it outweighed almost any damage done to those who stood falsely accused.

 

 

GIBSON FOUND IT HARD to hold his pen. Rheumatism had turned his hand into an old man's scratch, uncontrolled, vulnerable even on the stationery of the House Committee on Ways and Means. But he would not have a secretary copy the letter. He wrote through his pain. The subject was private.
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When asked about Wells's letter, Gibson had responded with cool confidence that his family was from “old Virginia stock.” Given their tone and the desperate circumstances under which they were made, Wells's remarks would have met any standard of malice, if they had been false. But Gibson did not sue Wells for libel. The truth was, Gibson knew very little about his father's family.

In the weeks after the
Times
article ran, instead of demanding satisfaction of Wells—legal or otherwise—Gibson and his brother McKinley began corresponding with two men in Mississippi, one in Natchez and one forty miles upriver in Port Gibson. Both were in their seventies. The Reverend John Griffing Jones had already published his
Concise History of the Introduction of Protestantism into Mississippi and the Southwest
and had just finished the
Complete History
. John Francis Hamtramck Claiborne had been a planter, journalist, and congressman. After years of collecting papers, he was writing a massive history of Mississippi and its best families.

Both men had known Gibson's father's parents, better than Gibson had. “I never saw my Grandfather for whom I was named nor my Grandmother,” he wrote Claiborne, explaining that he had been born in Kentucky and raised among “the Harts, Shelbys, Prestons, Breckinridges.” McKinley asked Jones for help constructing a family tree. While Claiborne did not know anything about the Gibson family origins, he fondly described his days living in the “Gibson neighborhood” just below Vicksburg, where Gibson's father and uncle—“handsome, dressy, of refined manners and exceedingly popular”—had been his particular friends. The Gibsons, Claiborne assured his correspondent, “were numerous—intelligent, generally esteemed, wealthy—and most of them members of the church.” Jones too spoke of his fondness for the Gibsons. “I hope to meet many of the Gibsons in that bright world where the living never die and friendship never parts,” he wrote. He offered more specifics about the family history: names and birth and death dates, their settlement on the Great Pee Dee River in South Carolina, and a theory about what had come before. From the Gibsons' “elevated intellectuality, morality, religion and enterprise,” Jones supposed that they descended from “Portuguese Huguenots” who had settled in South Carolina—a gentle suggestion that along with elite status, the family also had a tradition of dark skin. “I do not remember ever to have heard but one of the connexion refer to this as a tradition of the family,” Jones wrote. “I wish we now had the means of demonstrating this theory.”
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CLAIBORNE AND JONES DID NOT COMPLETELY resolve the question of family origins, but the Gibsons were satisfied. If they could not account for every drop of blood in their veins, they could establish that the family had lived for generations with, in Jones's words, “an elevated position in society, on account of their intelligence, morality, refinement and high toned and honorable bearing in all relations of life.” Such status could not mean anything but whiteness.
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While newspapers around the country had run wire stories about Wells's letter, few treated the accusation as having any merit. Rather than discussing the accusation, papers in Vicksburg and New Orleans recounted Gibson's lofty lineage. When a Mississippi congressman incidentally mentioned Gibson on the House floor a week after the
Times
had printed Wells's letter, he added a statement about his colleague's “illustrious ancestors” on both sides of the family. As much as racial purity mattered to white Southerners, they had to circle the wagons around Randall Gibson. If someone of his position could not be secure in his race, then no one was safe.
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If the issue ever had life, it receded when the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in March 1878 that all charges against the returning board members had to be dropped. Wells quietly retracted the charges in his letter soon afterward. Nevertheless the Gibsons could not forget the allegation. When family members published the funeral sermons that had been delivered in the 1830s over their paternal grandparents, they appended the letters from Claiborne and Jones that described the Mississippi Gibsons' sterling reputation. Hart Gibson and Sarah Gibson Humphreys took up genealogy as a hobby, eventually tracing the family line back to a prosperous landowner in colonial South Carolina who played an illustrious role in the Regulator Movement of 1768—a man named Gideon Gibson. Without specifically addressing the charges against Randall, the family was answering them.
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Randall Gibson and his family never lost their social position. He was heading toward an easy reelection in the fall. In Washington the Gibsons enjoyed the “pleasant company” of former Confederate generals Joseph Johnston, John Smith Preston, Jubal Early, and Custis Lee. More than ever Gibson found himself reminiscing about the great battles in which he had fought, striving for what he called the “
truth exactly
” about Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Atlanta, Nashville, and Spanish Fort. Privately, he mourned the loss of close friends from a vicious yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans, including his first law partner and a young man who had risen from office janitor to an associate in his practice. Despite the universal respect and esteem accorded to him every day, Gibson started dreaming of a different life: more time with his children and perhaps a return to fulltime law practice, in partnership with McKinley and Hart—in Kentucky. “If you + Hart will go to work at the Law + find a place that would suit me, I will sell my House in N.O. + join you,” Randall wrote his brother. “I long to get out of the South—away from a Country of Negroes, outlaws + yellow fever. This is confidential but I mean every word of it.”
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