Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel

      After Grant’s election to the presidency in 1868, a new leader became the target of Southern antagonism. The former commanding general of the victorious army was a former slaveholder and a recent convert to black rights. Unafraid of risking the lives of his troops in the cause of preserving the Union, he had presided over an army that had lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers to combat and disease. How many lives would he now risk to preserve black rights? The answer is none.

      A variety of legislative efforts sought to outline the civil and political rights of freedmen during the Radical Republican ascendancy. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868), through its famous due process clause, broadly ensured that rights could not be taken away; the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed the right to vote; the Civil Rights Act of 1875 provided for equal treatment in public accommodations and prevented the exclusion of citizens from jury duty “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

      Grant’s rhetorical and legislative advocacy of black issues was solid. He applied pressure to secure passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and was ebullient in his message that announced ratification:

      A measure which makes . . . 4,000,000 people who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land not citizens . . . is indeed a measure of grander importance than any of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.

      Later, as with other events, Grant would express second thoughts about the Fifteenth Amendment. At the close of his frustrating second term, he announced to his Cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment “had done the Negro no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a political advantage to the North.”

      During Grant’s presidency the federal government confronted repeated acts of violence and intimidation against freedmen in the South. Congressional hearings on the activities of the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacy organizations led to the Enforcement Acts, which gave the president power to intervene militarily on behalf of the freedmen. Grant occasionally authorized military force to curtail “lawlessness, turbulence, and bloodshed,” but he failed to intervene in the pivotal 1875 Mississippi election that effectively ended Reconstruction in the state. In the end, Grant gave the freedmen no foundation for future security. Most federal expenditures under the Enforcement Acts were spent in the North, not the South. In effect, the Republican Party used federal money to gain political advantage in the Democratic cities of the North.

      In order to combat the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, Grant warned the South that he would “not hesitate to exhaust the [presidential] powers . . . whenever it should be necessary to protect the rights of citizens.” In 1871 he suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina, sent troops, and made hundreds of arrests. In North Carolina and Mississippi there were also hundreds of arrests but no convictions. In 1872 Grant ordered troops into New Orleans to protect the Republican regime; in 1873 he ordered troops to Louisiana in response to the massacre of blacks in Colfax.

      But suppressing resistance in the South was ultimately ineffective. Troop reductions, as noted earlier, had left the army understaffed. Southerners persisted in vigorously challenging federal authority and reestablishing white rule. The white South was not deterred. In a nod to priorities, the federal government actually expended vastly more time, money, and men in subduing and placing Indians on reservations in the West than it did in enforcing laws to protect freedmen in the South.

      The actions of white America, rather than the words of a very few Republicans, demonstrated that black equality was not a priority in a country obsessed with land expansion and railroads, rife with racial animosity, and devastated in 1873 by financial panic and depression. The political and economic opportunists who ventured south were resented by the defeated region. In Mississippi, a state where blacks constituted a significant and in some places a majority of the population, the restoration of white rule was tantamount to a “racial-political” war.

      A close look at the Mississippi election of 1875 reveals the predictable lack of white Northern commitment. In that state contest, white Mississippians violently intervened to prevent blacks from voting. In addition, the Mississippi Democratic congressman L. Q. C. Lamar worked assiduously to rid the state of Republican political control. Henceforth white Mississippians would control the state government without black participation.

      Grant refused a request by the Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, for federal troops to supervise elections in Vicksburg. The president famously responded through his attorney general, Edwards Pierrepont: “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the majority are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the [federal] government.” Translation: White Northerners did not care about black rights in Mississippi.

      Governor Ames provides a useful example of the lack of dedication by Northern Republican officials. He was forced to curtail his summer holiday in cool New England to tend to the volatile situation in 1875. A Maine native, Ames was a political opportunist whose main objective in Mississippi was to gain a seat in the US Senate. He supported the civil rights of his constituency, the black population, but he had no long-term commitment to remain in Mississippi to fight for the rights of freedmen. While Lamar was energetically campaigning for the Democrats during the summer and fall of 1875, Ames was ensconced in the governor’s mansion in Jackson. There he whiled away his time reading Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now (about a ruthless, corrupt financier who promotes a fraudulent railroad investment in the United States). In August a frustrated Ames confided to his wife that he had given up: “I am fully determined not to accept the Senatorship if I can get it. I do not like anything in the life I lead here.”

      Reconstruction was thus effectively overthrown in Mississippi. Governor Ames retreated to the private sector in Minnesota and New England, where there were few blacks. Grant’s defeat in the 1875 battles of Vicksburg, Yazoo City, and other Mississippi venues was arguably as significant as his victory in the Battle of Vicksburg during the Civil War.

      According to John R. Lynch, the able black congressman from Mississippi, Grant admitted that political expediency had impelled his inaction. Congressman Lynch, during an audience with Grant in November 1875, asked the president why he had not intervened in the Mississippi election, “a sanguinary struggle” that was practically an insurrection against the state government. Lynch suggested that prominent Ohio Republicans had warned Grant about sending troops to Mississippi because such an action would jeopardize their own prospects in October elections. Grant confessed that he had taken the expedient path. The bold general, in this instance, had become a political hack.

      The most significant of the initial Southern acts of reconciliation between the North and the South featured Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar’s eulogy for the abolitionist Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, author of the Civil Rights Act. Lamar had written the secessionist document for the state of Mississippi. Yet after Sumner died on March 11, 1874, the Massachusetts congressional delegation asked Lamar to “deliver a memorial address” to Congress. Lamar’s oration resonated within the Senate and across the North. He had genuine respect for Sumner and used the opportunity to promote reconciliation. He praised Sumner, a man universally disliked in the South. As he finished, his tribute gave way to a deafening silence and then to thunderous ovation. “Democrats and Republicans alike, melted in tears,” one observer noted. “Those who listened sometimes forgot to respect Sumner in respecting Lamar.” The secessionist supporter of slavery had become the reconciliatory and rhetorical supporter of black suffrage. The Northern press was rapturous.