Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel
refuge like Santo Domingo his worth here would be soon discovered and he would soon receive such recognition as to induce him to stay: or if Providence designed that the two races should not live together, he would find a home in . . . [Santo Domingo].
Douglass favored the idea of annexation as a safety valve for black Americans. In his final message to Congress on December 5, 1876, Grant maintained his support of Santo Domingo as a home for blacks. According to the president, it would be a “congenial home” for the freedmen, “where their civil rights would not be disputed and their labor much sought after.” As early as 1871, racial separation was Grant’s stated preference; Santo Domingo was yet another variation of schemes to remove or resettle black people. Implicit was the understanding that they would not move to Northern states. The black alternative was Santo Domingo, not New York, Massachusetts, or Ohio. Grant’s scheme led a tortured existence before it died at the hands of the Senate.
During his entire postwar life, Frederick Douglass clung to his hope that white and black Americans could live together peacefully. His keynote speech at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington’s Lincoln Park in 1876 was the highlight of a life whose crowning moment was the abolition of slavery. The statue shows a slave in chains on his knees in front of Lincoln—hardly an introduction to freedom. At the celebration, Douglass referred to Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, as the “white man’s president.”
The champion of emancipation did have a role model: the Jews. He advised blacks to imitate the Jews, who were “worst situated than you are” but “have fought their way up.” He rejected the exodus metaphor by citing Jewish example:
A Hebrew may even now be rudely repulsed from the door of a hotel, but he will not on account get up another exodus as he did three thousand years ago, but will quietly “put money in his purse” and bide his time, knowing that the rising tide of civilization will eventually float him.
A bronze statue of Frederick Douglass stands on the steps at the side entrance of the New York Historical Society; Abraham Lincoln is around the corner, adorning the front entrance of the museum. A block away, Theodore Roosevelt sits astride a horse with an American Indian below him on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History. Roosevelt wrote that universal suffrage was a farce; if enacted, the South would resemble the dysfunctional Haiti. Douglass would not have been pleased.
The only major attempt at mass black migration to the North after the Civil War was the “Exoduster” movement of the late 1870s, in which Southern blacks were enticed to go to the promised land of Kansas. Most conventional discussions of the Exodusters focus on the oppression and destitution of Southern blacks, in the midst of a depressed cotton market, as impetus for the first black-initiated domestic migration of freedmen. In 1854 “Bleeding Kansas” had suffered a conflict to determine whether it would be admitted as a free or a slave state. By 1870 the Kansas population had grown to more than a million and continued to grow, but at no time did blacks account for more than 5 percent of the population. By the spring of 1879, thousands of Southern blacks were pouring into Kansas.
Kansas prided itself on being anti-slavery before the war, and for John Brown’s stand there against slavery. But the state’s anti-black sentiment was as strong as its anti-slavery feeling. The door was shut very quickly on the poor black migrants. The Lawrence city council raised money to “send these undesirables to some other city.” Humanitarian efforts stalled. A few of the Exodusters eventually enjoyed better lives than they had had in the South, but Kansas was no promised land and certainly no haven for large numbers of blacks.
In May 1879 Frederick Douglass famously recommended to a black group that freedmen stay in the South. He viewed Kansas as yet another false Canaan, along with Haiti and Liberia. The “dumping” of thousands of impoverished blacks, he cautioned, would reinforce the image of “that detestable class from whom we are not so free—tramps.”
The overworked and misleading allusion to the biblical exodus would ring hollow except in song. When the Israelites left Egypt for the promised land, they created their own country where assimilation issues were irrelevant. The Exodusters, however, remained in an America where they were not wanted. Even the South did not want them, but no alternative cotton workers could be found. Mississippi cotton farmers tried diligently but unsuccessfully to recruit Europeans, particularly Italians, and Chinese to labor in the cotton fields.
Kansas, like many Northern states, experienced a huge demand for white immigrants. From 1861 to 1890, 11.3 million white immigrants—primarily from the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia—arrived in America. Most of them were destined for the North and the West, precisely those areas where few blacks lived. Between 1879 and 1881, while a few thousand blacks made their way to Kansas, more than a half-million Germans immigrated to the Midwest. From 1800 to 1920, 18.2 million people arrived mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe. When white immigrants were available, states could find no refuge for blacks.
The Kansas slave-versus-free dichotomy is best illustrated by its anti-slavery Republican senator, John J. Ingalls. On May 28, 1893, Senator Ingalls was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as advocating physical separation and repatriation to Africa to solve the race dilemma. (Sixty-one years later the Supreme Court upended legal segregation in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. For Kansas it was closure of a kind.)
The impressive extent of civil rights legislation passed during Reconstruction was no match for reality. The legislation was ignored, circumvented, and violated in the South and the North, and sometimes did not survive the tests of the judicial process. Former slaves soon found themselves devoid of rights and at the mercy of the states. White Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices decimated national legislation and constitutional amendments that had been passed during Reconstruction.
Grant’s appointments to the Supreme Court played a key role in the nullification of Reconstruction legislation. After the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) restricted the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, United States v. Cruikshank (1876) demolished the Enforcement Acts. Grant’s appointee, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, issued the Cruikshank opinion. Waite, a strong defender of states’ rights and a former Ohio corporate lawyer, consistently voted against black rights in his fourteen years on the bench.
In 1883 the Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which stated that “all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations” in “restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railroads.” Lawsuits alleging that black citizens were denied “equal enjoyment” arose in Kansas (1875), California (1876), Missouri (1877), and Tennessee (1879). These cases, joined as the Civil Rights Cases, reached the Supreme Court in 1883. In the San Francisco case, a black man named George M. Tyler was denied entry to Maguire’s Theatre after he had purchased a ticket because he was “of the African or negro race, being what is commonly called a colored man, and not a white man.”
Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote the opinion in the civil rights cases. Bradley was a railroad lawyer who had arrived on the bench with a record of hostility toward equal rights for blacks. In his opinion he reasoned that depriving “white people of the right of choosing their own company would introduce another form of slavery.” The court, eight to one, ruled that the black plaintiffs in these situations were not protected under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Justice Bradley’s opinion amounted to a lecture to blacks, whom he said were no longer “to be a special favorite of the law.” The Radical Republican senator George Hoar of Massachusetts, in his memoir, described Justice Bradley as a “most admirable appointment.” But John R. Lynch attributed the failure of Reconstruction to President Grant’s Court appointments of Joseph Bradley and Morrison Waite, whose votes condemned civil rights legislation.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the civil rights cases was applauded by the establishment Northern press. Harper’s Weekly called it “an illustration of the singular wisdom of our constitutional