Flashback, November 1874: GOP Midterm Losses Sound Uncertain Trumpet for Civil Rights

Stunned and staggered by the midterm elections, the Republican Party wrestled 150 years ago this month with what to do after losing control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.

Its solution—failing to enforce civil-rights measures that they themselves had enacted—was the opening note in a retreat from the Reconstruction program that President Ulysses S. Grant (pictured) had championed in the defeated Confederate states.

Their surrender would be formalized in the controversial Compromise of 1877 that enabled them to hold onto the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the South.

The surprising magnitude of the GOP losses—"the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” according to prominent Reconstruction historian Eric Foner—will feel uncannily familiar to Democrats this month: thinner margins of victory in regions they once won going away, and outright losses in other places considered party strongholds.

Dissatisfaction spread rapidly with the so-called Radical Republican faction, just as moderate Democrats have been heaping scorn on the “woke” segment of their party in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss of the Presidency to Donald Trump.

Yet the 1874 Republicans, like the 2024 Democrats, fell victim to larger forces with often interlocking impacts on the electorate.

Midterm elections in Presidents’ second terms have been nicknamed “the six-year itch” because of voters’ unease with the party in power. 

The most significant of such losses have, in the case of 1874 as well as 1918, 1938, and 1966, abruptly curtailed reform eras. These epitomized the down points in what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history.”

The 1874 midterms were particularly consequential, though, because they spelled the premature end of a biracial coalition that redefined the nature of citizenship, expanded voting rights, and sought to increase economic opportunity—with especially significant achievements in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But southern whites rebelled at African-Americans gaining the right to vote and, even more so, winning public office. Despite President Grant’s crackdowns on the Ku Klux Klan, fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism had become openly practiced, even institutionalized.

The midterms—which converted the party’s 110-vote margin in the House into a Democratic majority of sixty seats, while giving the Democrats a net gain of 10 seats in the Senate— concluded an awful year for the Republicans and for the freedmen they had made it a point to protect:

*The Panic of 1873 (which I discussed in this prior post) carried over into the next year, resulting in reduced state budgets and lower tax rates, private contractors who leased convicts (the start of the “chain gang” system), and slashed funding for the public schools that had been a major achievement of biracial legislatures.

*Grant’s veto of an “inflation bill,” which had been passed by Congress to mitigate the impact of the depression, gave the Democrats a wedge among eastern immigrants and western farmers.

*The “Sanborn incident,” involving private collection of taxes and excises, engulfed Treasury Secretary William Richardson in scandal and solidified the Grant cabinet’s reputation for corruption.

*The July 1874 collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, with operations promoted by the federal government but assets not regulated or guaranteed by it, depleted the wealth of thousands of African-Americans, left them distrustful of the private sector in the long term, and fueled specious white racist claims that blacks were too ignorant and financially feckless to be trusted with state fiscal responsibility.

*The 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, precipitated by the contested gubernatorial election the year before, set off a firestorm of fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by Democrats—as well as tensions among competing Republican factions— in southern states in 1874, most notably through the White League paramilitary organization that, in perpetrating violence against black officeholders and their white allies, effectively overthrew the governments of Louisiana and Alabama.

* Before the Civil War, white Northerners who went south to own, build, or manage slave plantations suffered little or no obloquy from their new neighbors. Now, however, because of their political alliance with blacks, they were stigmatized as “carpetbaggers” and, through the “Mississippi Plan”—devised in 1874 and implemented the following year—forced them either to switch from the Republicans to Democrats or leave the state.

When a political party loses its will, it runs the risk of losing its way—and that is exactly the situation in which the Republicans found themselves in the aftermath of the midterms.

The Radical Republicans, the party faction that had most zealously pursued racial equality and sought to enforce it in the South through the use of federal troops, increasingly lost favor with a Northern public that, with its minimal goals for the Civil War achieved (the end of slavery, restoration of the union), had no desire for racial equality.

As Ron Chernow noted in his biography Grant, the stinging setback his party was dealt at the polls meant that the new congressional Democratic majority, flashing its investigative powers, “turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction.” The new House Democratic committee chairs were now also empowered to stall additional pro-civil rights measures by the administration.

With his energy increasingly spent on combating this Congressional mischief and his anxiety rising that the Republicans would be punished further at the polls, President Grant now hesitated to employ federal troops on an indefinite basis against marauding Southern whites lest he be accused of “bayonet rule.”

With this backlash unpunished, Southern Democrats were well-launched on their program of “Redemption” of state governments from Republican rule. They were further aided by a Supreme Court that interpreted the 14^th Amendment broadly in one direction (defining corporations as “persons”) while narrowly construing its civil-rights protections for African-Americans.

It is well-known that, despite losing the popular vote, Republicans retained the White House in the 1876 election with a deal that secured an Electoral College victory in exchange for ending occupation of the Southern states. 

Yet corruption existed on the Democratic side, too, in a campaign of violence that further loosened Republican control of the Southern states.

“Time would reveal that 1874 inaugurated a new era in national politics,” writes Foner, “although one of stalemate rather than Democratic ascendancy.” With control of Congress split between the two parties, little important could get done in the next couple of decades.

As the ancillary rewards of an industrial economy beckoned, Republicans doffed their mantle as the rights-protecting “party of Lincoln” in favor of becoming the electoral home of Gilded Age robber barons.

Lacking the right to vote, blacks also were unable to gain patronage jobs that might have provided a ladder into the middle class, as well as informal welfare to cushion their losses in economic reversals.

The end of Reconstruction marked the dawn of legalized “Jim Crow” segregation—most entrenched politically in the South, but even economically in the North. It also gave rise to a disgraceful school of historiography that greatly exaggerated the failings of the Republican-led Southern governments in Reconstruction.

It would take W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 masterful reassessment of the post-Civil War period, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, and especially the revisionist historians who more assiduously investigated the period beginning 20 years later, before the successes and failures of these governments could be more fairly weighed.

The residue of the failure to achieve genuine racial equality, however, continues to poison American politics, stymieing economic progress and encouraging extremism.

Flashback, June 1866: Trying to Win Justice and Peace Through Reconstruction

The struggle between North and South did not end at Appomattox. Instead, it switched decisively, in June 1866, from massed armies maneuvering around natural boundaries to the halls of Washington, where Congress tried to outflank a Southern-born President in order to defend the rights of recently emancipated slaves.

In mid-1866, like now, the House and Senate were dominated by Republicans, and the meaning of loyalty filled the political discourse. But back then, unlike now, an activist majority tried to ensure and extend the rights of citizenship, as Congress used its not-inconsiderable powers of investigation and legislation to advance its agenda.

But Andrew Johnson proved that a carefully crafted House and Senate strategy can by stymied by an obstructionist President—even a politically maladroit, unpopular one.

This past weekend, I saw The Free State of Jones, a film with most unusual subject matter: not just the “secession within secession” staged by poor whites in the Civil War, but also their abortive alliance with freedmen in the decade after the guns ceased firing. 

Most remarkable is its attempt to address America’s Reconstruction period—an era three times as long, by a conservative estimate, as the war itself, but only covered, to any significant degree, by three major Hollywood releases: Birth of a Nation, Gone With the Wind, and The Outlaw Josey Whales; a now all-but-forgotten feature about the President at the heart of it, Tennessee Johnson; and, on TV, the mini-series Roots II and a 1979 TV movie adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Freedom Road, starring Muhammad Ali, in a rare acting role. It’s a dismal commentary that the first three productions, the most widely seen, are also the most fundamentally inaccurate. (I considered the outsize role of Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind in shaping Americans’ attitudes to this era in this prior post.)

It is less likely that Hollywood has developed a sudden interest in this dimly-understood era than that a star’s box-office clout has carried the day. Matthew McConaghey did not always possess the kind of leverage to launch a historical film: some years ago, I recall one of my instructors at a summer writing program discussing how a screenplay about the early 19^th-century Native American warrior Red Eagle had vanished with McConaghey’s name attached to the project because of the subpar box-office performance of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot. 

All power to the star of Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective, then, for committing his prestige to The Free State of Jones and shining a light on a period that has been all too often distorted—not just in cinemas but, far less understandably, the groves of academe for much of the early 20th century. 

Although the movie sags slightly in the middle and could have recruited an African-American with similar star power as McConaghey, it manages to spotlight, economically, a host of events involving the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Deep South: fierce dissent in pockets of the Confederacy, the education of freedmen, the “Black Codes” in the immediate postwar period that sought to place them in de facto slavery, their rising voting-rights activity, and the domestic terrorism practiced by the Ku Klux Klan. (A full consideration of the film can be found on this post by Prof. Michael Steudeman from the University of Memphis, from the "Rhetoric, Race and Religion" blog.)

By the end of 1865, conditions in the defeated South were every bit as dark and desolate as depicted in the film, probably even more so. An entire economic and social order built on slavery had collapsed. On the one hand, defeated secessionists desired readmission to the Union on essentially the status quo basis that existed before the Civil War. At the same time, unable to vent their anger over losing on the Northern victors, they turned on freedmen and unionist poor whites who were far more vulnerable.

At first, Congressional Republicans had yielded the initiative on Reconstruction to Johnson, certain that, as a Southerner who had, against all odds, sided with the Union, he would deal with former Confederates far more harshly than Abraham Lincoln. To their astonishment, he had far more sympathy with Southern whites, even those who had risen in rebellion, than with freedmen. 

After months of watching the President fail to protect African-Americans or Union loyalists in the South, the House of Representatives and Senate agreed to form the Joint Committee on Reconstruction to "inquire into the condition of the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either house of Congress.” 

Over the next several months, nearly 150 witnesses would be called, including one who would have been familiar to many members from his past service in the House, the former Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens. Unbelievably, he argued that Southerners’ views on “constitutional liberties” had not changed after the war, and that included even the “abstract principle” of secession. They expected that “immediately the states would be brought back into their practical relations with the government as previously constituted,” so that they could “look to the arena of reason and justice for the protection of their rights in the Union.”

“Their” rights meant those of the former Confederates. As for the freedmen, Stephens felt that the South “would be unwilling to do more than they have done for restoration.”

This kind of attitude didn’t sit well with the Joint Committee. The views of its 15 members could not be said to be even remotely bipartisan—only one senator and two congressmen were Democrats—but now, Southern intransigence, combined with abundant testimony about the retribution visited upon freedmen and Unionist whites, propelled more conservative Republicans such as Committee Chairman William Pitt Fessenden to ally with the so-called “Radical Republicans,” led by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (pictured). 

Deeply provoked, the Joint Committee, in its report issued June 20, 1866, warned, in language that Southerners would have found punitive but that Northerners saw as only just, that the federal government “had a perfect right to exact indemnity for the injuries done” in the Civil War, and that, far from being states, the former units of the Confederacy had, by the conflict’s end, been reduced to “disorganized communities” without civil governments, constitutions or “established and recognized rules,” and thus that Congress was not obliged to respect any rights they claimed. 

The former Confederate states could only resume their place in the government, the Joint Committee concluded, by guaranteeing the rights of the freedmen and excluding Confederate officials. For readmission to Congress, they needed to ensure “such constitutional or other guarantees as will tend to secure the civil rights of all citizens of the republic; a just equality of representation; protection against claims founded in rebellion and crime; a temporary restoration of the right of suffrage to those who had not actively participated in the efforts to destroy the Union and overthrow the government, and the exclusion from positions of public trust of, at least, a portion of those whose crimes have proved them to be enemies to the Union, and unworthy of public confidence.” 

None of the above remedies mentioned economic solutions for the freedmen. The one conceived of by the Radical Republicans, land grants, was born of one of their landmark measures passed during the Civil War, the Homestead Act of 1862. But the Southern Homestead Act, passed on June 21, 1866, demonstrated the limits of even relatively well-intentioned legislation.

The legislation opened up 46 million acres of public domain land in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. In an attempt to ensure that freedmen and loyal whites would have a first opportunity at the land, Congress instituted a six-month later starting date for former Confederates. But the legislation missed the goal of real land reform, for several reasons:

*Often, many freedmen could not capitalize on the six-month window because of labor contracts that ran through January 1867.  Additional problems were encountered in Louisiana because of severe flooding and closed land offices.

*Rather than awarding land from subdivided plantations confiscated from their Confederate owners, Congress designated public land that was poor in quality and hard to till.

*Because much of the public land was given over to timber, fraud and racial intimidation were rampant, trespassing and homestead entries by people who did not intend to farm the lands.

*Many freedmen had no means to travel to these newly opened lands, which were not only far away from where the claim were filed but also in either the Deep South or over the Appalachians. Even when ordered to assist them, Army troops were inconsistent in doing so.

*Many freedmen did not even own enough capital to buy equipment for tilling the land.

*Though accused of vengefulness, many Republicans, even a number of Radicals, would not go along with the idea of seizing the only abundant, fertile land: massive plantations of former slaveowners.

*The idea of the federal government granting freedmen additional favors ran against the grain of both mainstream Protestants with their belief in earthly rewards coming through hard work and against the Republican Party base, which believed in a free-soil ideology with as much appeal to racists who feared black labor as to abolitionists.

As a result, Congress repealed the Southern Homestead Act only 10 years after passage.

The Free State of Jones rightly spotlights the shriveled promise of the Fifteenth Amendment to ensure voting rights for African-Americans. But in June 1866, the Radical Republicans managed to pass another so-called “Reconstruction Amendment,” the Fourteenth Amendment. Like the Fifteenth, it did not produce what it originally promised, but it ended up becoming perhaps the most important and controversial of the post-Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution.

The amendment, particularly in the first section, was worded broadly, even vaguely—an intention of its creators, to allow as much flexibility as possible in case of further incursions on the rights of freedmen. The crucial portion of this amendment was Section 1, with such hotly debated clauses as the “privileges and immunities” of citizens, “due process,” and “equal protection of the law.”

The amendment had its drawbacks (e.g., by extending rights explicitly to males, it fractured the coalition of women and African-Americans that had been so important in the abolitionist movement). The ambiguity of its language also allowed judges in the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era to consider corporations as “persons” while bypassing the African-Americans who were the legislation’s intended beneficiaries. 

But beginning in the 1930s, judges began to apply the amendment in more and more civil-rights cases—and, with greater explicitness than before, it defined citizenship as a matter of birthright.
(It was this aspect of the amendment to which Donald Trump took such heinous exception.) Just as important, through the "due process" clause, the "incorporation doctrine" evolved so that rights spelled out by the federal government began to be applied to states as well.

Flashback, March 1865: The Federal Government’s First Failed Try at Helping Blacks

One day before committing himself to “binding up the nation’s wounds” in his second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill creating the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Land. The new agency, called the Freedmen’s Bureau for short, was tasked not merely with helping 4 million former slaves transition to freedom, but also with stanching one of the greatest humanitarian crises to afflict America in its first century of existence: hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced during the four years of the Civil War.

Facing all of this, the Freedmen’s Bureau struggled with inadequate staffing and money, a limited time commitment, and the active hostility of white southerners and Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

Not surprisingly, it failed. But it originated in the noblest of impulses—an attempt to coordinate the efforts of more than 50 Freedmen's Aid Societies, a loose private coalition that sent clothes, money, schoolbooks, and teachers to prepare liberated slaves for freedom. And, though its utopian vision of racial equality was undermined in a wave of reactionary Jim Crow legislation that took place following the removal of Federal troops from the defeated South, it educated a cadre of African-Americans who would carry the reform banner into the 20^th century.

One of the things that I regret most about my seven years of writing this blog is that I have devoted not nearly enough space to the subject of Reconstruction. This post is an initial attempt to redress that balance and discuss one of the most important and controversial--but little-understood--eras on American History..

In the end, two things convinced me that the time was right to deal with the era that Columbia University historian Eric Foner has called “America's Unfinished Revolution”: 1) my visit this past November to Beaufort, S.C., site of a number of individuals and events (including the Freedmen’s Bureau) crucial in this period; and 2) a C-Span special telecast last month, on the burning of Columbia, S.C.—a fire that threw into high relief the tensions arising among former Confederates, their now-emancipated slaves, and Federal forces deeply ambivalent about dealing with both.

The Freedmen’s Bureau had been proposed two years before the bill reached Lincoln’s desk on March 3, 1865, but it had languished for two years while Capitol Hill lawmakers tried to figure out if it should fall under the Treasury Department or the War Department. In the end, it fell to the latter—perhaps in no small part because Federal army commanders had already been dealing with, ad hoc and piecemeal, the heightened hopes but extraordinary challenges facing former slaves—“contraband” seized from their Confederate plantation owners—who had attached themselves to Union camps.

Plantation owners, even those who regarded themselves as lenient, were stunned to find that their former chattel had no wish to work for them again. A typical scene was recorded by Laura M. Towne, a Northern schoolteacher who had come south to teach freedmen on the South Islands off the coast of South Carolina:

“One of the best and most powerful of the old rebels returned awhile ago, and has been living in his old home on sufferance. His people all went to tell him ‘huddy,’ and he was convinced of their toleration. So he told them he should get back his land and wanted to know how many would be willing to work for him for wages. They said none. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘hadn't you as lief work for me as for these Yankees?’ ‘No, sir,’ they answered through their foreman; ‘even if you pay as well, sir, we had rather work for the Yankees who have been our friends.’”

The bureau was created in the expectation that it would cease to exist in a year. In much the same way that British civil servants a generation before had feared that offering relief to peasants starving in the Irish Potato Famine would only increase their dependence on government, even many most sympathetic to the freedmen worried about their long-term reliance on government.

But one major difference existed between Ireland and the former Confederate states: British bureaucrats stuck stubbornly to their beliefs, turning a potato blight into a full-scale famine, while in America lawmakers quickly saw that the law creating the Freedmen’s Bureau needed to be extended and strengthened.

As they sought to re-impose the control they had exerted over African-Americans before the war, the former Confederates found an unexpected ally in Johnson. During the war, as military governor of Tennessee, he had seemed as vengeful as any Northerner toward secessionists for fomenting the war. 

But after assuming the Presidency, he began to make common cause with his wartime enemies—including by vetoing the bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau, which he saw as “unconstitutional," "unnecessary," and "extrajudicial."

Congress, now under Republican control, passed a modified version of the bill over Johnson’s veto. The contention over the bill opened a breach between President and Congress that would result in the President’s impeachment by the House and near-removal from office.

The bureau was fortunate in the man that Andrew Johnson appointed as a commissioner to the agency two months after its establishment: General O.O. Howard. A brave soldier who had fought at Gettysburg and with Sherman’s army, conscientious if unimaginative, he personified a quality that the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson described as “decent not to fail.’

W.E.B. DuBois took the measure of this capable if limited administrator in his groundbreaking history, Black Reconstruction, 1860-1880: “An honest and sincere man, with rather too much faith in human nature, little aptitude for systematic business and intricate detail, he was nevertheless conservative, hard-working, and, above all, acquainted at first-hand with much of the work before him.”

As the war ended and white Southerners confronted dire hunger, they were forced to petition the federal government they had once defied for help. Their suppressed sense of humiliation turned into outright resentment when they learned that blacks as well as whites would benefit from this food aid program.

Their defiance was epitomized by Theodore Stark, the mayor of Columbia, S.C., who employed an inventive if deceitful rationale for denying freedmen access to the city alms house. Only taxpayers were entitled to access to this, he claimed—and, for all practical purposes, that constituted whites.

Ex-slave William Beverly Nash, a former waiter at a local hotel who would go on to become a respected state senator, and the Freedmen’s Bureau pointed out some critical holes in this argument: first, that more than 100 freedmen were already paying taxes and their numbers would only swell with time; and second, that if the alms house were only limited to taxpayers, many whites in tax arrears—a considerable number—would face privation as well as blacks.

Among the powers vested in the bureau was its legal authority. In the early years after the war, local officials were loath to put whites on trial for crimes against blacks. The emancipated slaves looked to the Freedmen’s Bureau to help redress the balance.

Unfortunately, just as the Supreme Court has chipped away Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, so an earlier incarnation of the high court helped to short-circuit hope for permanent racial equality in the South. Ex parte Milligan (1866) suggested that, with victory secure, the court would increasingly find against extraordinary measures such as the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The image accompanying this post, an illustration for Harper's Weekly, captured the way in which administrators from the bureau often found themselves in a near-impossible position as honest brokers between blacks and whites in the defeated former Confederacy. For that reason, all-too-many whites shed no tears over the termination of the bureau in 1872.  

For blacks, it was another story. As the forces of racism and reaction gathered, they saw fewer institutions around that could help them. 

Two years later, another organization signed into law by Abraham Lincoln on the same day as the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Freedmen’s Bank, collapsed, undone by changes in its original charter, the impact of the Panic of 1873, mismanagement and fraud. Together, the loss of these two institutions hamstrung African-Americans’ attempt to gain their rightful place in postwar America.

Despite the overwhelming odds against it, the Freedmen’s Bureau did have some accomplishments, including:

* constructing and staffing more than 1,000 African American schools, and spearheading the rise of the public school system in the South;

* establishing a number of colleges and training schools for blacks, including Howard University (named for General Howard) and Hampton Institute, an institute of industrial education that sought to instill the ideal of economic self-help;

* building hospitals for the freed slaves and giving direct medical aid to more than 1 million of them; and

*distributing food and clothing to freed slaves and Southern white refugees.

In retrospect, with more than 80 years of experience with extensive government programs starting with the New Deal, it’s easy to itemize all the ways in which Reconstruction in general and the Freedmen’s Bureau in particular fell short. But that fails to account for the “unprecedented situation” they faced, as outlined forcefully by historian James M. McPherson in Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction:

“The emancipation of four million slaves and the reconstruction of a society torn apart by civil war were totally new experiences. No model existed to guide those who had to deal with them. There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program. Congress and the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau were groping in the dark. They created the precedents. And, in doing so, they had to overcome the determined opposition of the president and the bitter resistance of many southern whites. No other society in history had liberated so many chattel slaves in so short a time at such a cost in lives and property. No other country had established a Freedmen's Bureau to help the transition from slavery to freedom. No other society had poured so much effort and money into the education of freed slaves. If the result fell short of entire success, the alternative might well have been total failure.”