Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
plan was approved in some Northern locales where there were few blacks, but it was unattractive in the South with its large black populations.
An aggressive young politician and master parliamentarian, Lynch managed to be selected speaker of the Mississippi House over the opposition of white Radical Republicans. He delivered on his promise to be fair to all men “who are alike entitled to equal rights and privileges.” He was noticed by a New York Times reporter, who admiringly wrote of the “astonishing . . . coolness and sagacity with which he disposed of all points.” A white Mississippi newspaper went so far as to declare its support of white candidates only if they were equal to Lynch in “intelligence, moral worth and integrity, which virtues we give [him] credit.” Elected to Congress in 1872, Lynch was defeated in 1876.
Lynch retreated to Natchez to establish a law practice, purchase farm land, and pursue an influential role in Republican politics. He would ally with Lamar’s supporters as some black Republicans and some Democrats formed a so-called fusion political movement. This fragile alliance was based on political jockeying by whites and blacks, and the implicit recognition by blacks of their increasingly weak position. It was hardly biracial cooperation, but it did allow Lynch to be reelected to Congress. Defeated after one term, he would never run for public office again.
The Reconstruction world of Mississippi threw together black senator Blanche K. Bruce, black congressman John R. Lynch, and white congressman and senator L. Q. C. Lamar. They often disagreed but enjoyed an amicable relationship and sometimes worked together. In 1885 Lynch visited Lamar, who was secretary of the interior in Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet. Lynch had come to “pay him my respects and tender him my congratulations upon his appointment.” Lamar greeted Lynch and introduced him to his other visitor, Mayor William Russell Grace of New York.
After the mayor left, an extraordinary conversation ensued between the two Mississippians. As disclosed in Lynch’s memoirs, it provides a rare glimpse of behind-the-scenes racial politics. Lamar’s position allowed him to dispense patronage jobs. The Democrat Lamar offered to the Republican Lynch a job that paid a generous annual salary of $2,250. Lynch had not solicited any form of employment for himself. He declined the offer but added his respect for the secretary of the interior.
Lynch had come to submit a list of “colored” department of interior employees whom he hoped Lamar would retain. Lamar agreed upon seeing the names. As the dialogue continued, Lynch mentioned two sensitive cases, “[one] a colored man, a physician; the other a white man, a lawyer.” The “colored man” was married to a white woman, the “white man” was married to a black woman. Lamar rejected the white man married to the black woman because the case had drawn public attention and was highly charged; the black physician’s case was not well known, and Lamar accepted it. He was not concerned about intermarriage but did not wish to “antagonize public opinion.”
Lynch then asserted that “opposition to [racial] amalgamation is both hypocritical and insincere.” Lamar agreed but offered a candid qualification:
My sympathies are with your friend and it is my desire to retain him. . . . But when you ask me to openly defy the well-known sentiment of the white people of my State on the question of amalgamation, I fear you make a request of me which I cannot safely grant, however anxious I may be to serve you . . . although in the main, I recognize the force and admit the truth of what you have said on that subject.
Lamar regretted that he could not act on the proposition that Lynch had “so forcibly and eloquently suggested.” The “white man” with the black wife was not retained: the “colored physician” continued in his position. Such was the convoluted world of racial norms practiced in the South and in the North.
Reconstruction officially ended with the compromise that followed the disputed presidential election of 1876, in which the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to withdraw remaining federal troops from Southern states. The Democratic and anti-black candidate, Samuel J. Tilden from New York, had won the popular vote, but the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana remained in doubt. Hayes’s bargain allegedly called for removal of troops from the South and government support for a transcontinental railroad through the region in return for the contested electoral votes. Often not mentioned is the fact that had Tilden been elected, the situation of blacks would have worsened.
The racial attitudes of Rutherford B. Hayes, the anti-slavery Ohio congressman, governor, Union Army general, and US president from 1876 to 1880, vividly illustrate the transition from Reconstruction to reconciliation. After the Civil War, Hayes supported black suffrage with platitudes: “Our government has been called the white man’s government. Not so. It is not the government of any class, sect, or nationality or race.” Education, Hayes thought, was the only long-term solution to the acceptance of blacks in American society. After his presidency, as chairman of the Slater Fund, he underwrote programs “to assist the education of young able blacks.” Hayes’s agenda incorporated a heavy dose of white control and paternalism; in essence he and like-minded Americans sought to “civilize” the freedmen.
Expediency was an integral part of Hayes’s politics. He understood that a black vote was a Republican vote, hence his support of the Fourteenth Amendment was based not on equal protection but on the clause that denied representation where black voting was restricted. When Cincinnati blacks voted for the first time, Hayes gleefully announced, “They vote Republican solid.” But his actions contradicted his rhetoric.
Despite the bargain that secured his presidency in 1876, Hayes had made his decision about troop withdrawal from the South and reconciliation well before the election. By 1876 he had moved away from Radical Reconstruction. In 1875 he had replied to a Kenyon College classmate, “As to Southern affairs, the let-alone policy seems to be the true course. . . . The future depends on [the] moderation and good sense of [white] Southern men.” Hayes was aware that a removal of the remnant of federal troops would leave freedmen at the mercy of white Southerners. Nevertheless, after he received the Republican nomination for president, he confided to his friend Guy Bryan, a Texan, “You will be almost if not quite satisfied with my letter of acceptance—especially on the Southern question.” On the use of federal troops in the South, the candidate wrote to Republican senator Carl Schurz, “There is to be an end of all that.” In February 1877 he was ready to do away with the North’s “injudicious meddling.” In September that year, as president, Hayes spoke to a Georgia group that included blacks. “[N]ow my colored friends, . . . After thinking it over, I believe your rights and interests would be safer if this great mass of intelligent white men were left alone by the general government.”
In 1880 Hayes anticipated Booker T. Washington’s famous social metaphor at the Atlanta Exposition of 1895. The occasion was the twelfth anniversary of the all-black Hampton Institute. Hayes, now the former president, spoke:
We would not undertake to violate the laws of nature. . . . We are willing to have these elements of our population separate as the fingers are, but we require to see them united for every good work, for national defense, one as the hand.
To his nineteenth-century audience, the meaning was unmistakable: social separation and inequality. In 1878 he had recorded in his diary that “the blacks, poor, ignorant and timid, can’t stand alone against the whites.” Hayes knew that the black man would lose any struggle in a white America that adhered firmly to racial separation and racial hatred.
Where was Frederick Douglass during the postwar period? Douglass was indisputably the most prominent black leader of the antebellum and Civil War periods. His abolitionist writings and lectures were widely known, powerfully expressed, and highly effective. He edited and published the influential North Star (1847–1851), which later became Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In a precedent-setting event, Abraham Lincoln hosted Douglass in the White House in 1862. Despite Lincoln’s attention, Douglass knew that Lincoln was “the white man’s president”; blacks “were only his stepchildren.”
The drama and violence of Douglass’s