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.

Bonus Quote of the Day (General Grant, on Lee at Appomattox)

“What General [Robert E.] Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”— Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885–86)

Because of the deep, shared humanity of the commanding officers who met at Appomattox, the Civil War ended, certainly better than it began, 150 years ago today.

Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had been bled white, arguably, since Gettysburg, but his situation was imperiled immeasurably, in the 10 days before Appomattox, by a subordinate who played a crucial role in the earlier battle. This prior post of mine discusses how the foolhardy conduct of General George Pickett at the Battle of Five Forks made inevitable Lee’s subsequent surrender.

Photo of the Day: Brothers Divided by War, United in Death

It’s often been said that the Civil War was fought between brother and brother. I had regarded that statement as more metaphor than fact until last fall, when I came across and photographed the two headstones here at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

This landmark is the final resting place for some of New York’s most illustrious citizens, but, with 4,800 veterans of the Civil War identified on its grounds, it is especially rich in the history of that transformative conflict.

The best place to start this post—and the reason why I’m talking about this ground now—is with the date on the headstone of Clifton Kennedy Prentiss: April 2, 1865, when he was mortally wounded at Petersburg, VA. It also happened to be the date that, after a summer and fall of slugging it out with Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant finally succeeded in smashing the Confederate lines, moving unimpeded toward Richmond, and bringing to an end a four-year war that, at its start, nobody dreamed could last so long.

But the death of Clifton Prentiss assumed even more tragic interest for me when I saw the name on the stone near him: William Scollay Prentiss. The surname and the year of birth on the headstone indicated that he was a younger brother. But three initials on the stone—CSA, or Confederate States of America—strongly implied a far more complicated relationship between the two.

A female guide at the cemetery, after I pressed her for details, related the following:

Though refusing a commission he could easily have gotten early on, 25-year-old Clifton had joined the Union army as a private among the New York volunteers. After it mustered out, he was able, as a Maryland native, to join  an infantry unit in the state early in 1862.

In a war that offered remarkable opportunities for promotion, few had risen as high as Clifton from so low a start by the end of the war: brevet colonel. His rise owed in no small part to his conspicuous gallantry, evidenced by the six horses shot from under him.

Maryland, a slave border state, had barely stayed in the Union and was rife with secessionist sentiment, so it was no surprise that William chose an opposite course from his brother, joining the Second Maryland regiment of the Confederacy, where he rose to become a lieutenant. He was among the defenders when Grant, sensing victory finally in his hands, ordered an all-out assault on the rebel entrenchments at Petersburg.

Clifton's Maryland regiment was instrumental in breaking the months-long siege at Petersburg, but, as one of the first officers in the charge, his luck ran out when he was shot in the lung. While he was taken to the side, he was told that some subordinates had just received word that his brother had also been wounded, in the knee, and that he desired to see him.

At first, Clifton refused any contact with his brother with a curt, “I want to see no man who fired on my country’s flag.” Another colonel pleaded with him, but, even after William’s cot was laid beside his, Clifton initially just glared at him.

Williams’ smile finally battered down Clifton’s defenses. Before long, the brothers had reached out their hands to each other and were crying. For about a month, they were kept in the same field medical unit, a tent associated with the Fiftieth New York Engineer’s camp, and it appeared that they would both be on the road to recovery. But their condition began to deteriorate after a transfer a month later to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Besides the camp where the brothers struggled for life, there was another New York connection involving the brothers: their male nurse, Walt Whitman. Specimen Days, the poet’s fragmentary, quasi-autobiography, includes a late May 1865 diary entry describing William, “very intelligent and well bred—very affectionate—held on to my hand, and put it by his face, not willing to let me leave.” Even copious amounts of morphine could not really ease the pain of the “young Baltimorean” (Whitman underestimated his age by five years). An amputation of William’s right leg had left him debilitated so that he “can’t sleep hardly at all.”

William died a little less than a month after Whitman’s diary entry and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery. By summer’s end, Clifton joined him in death.

The Prentiss brothers ended their lives in poignant reconciliation. Not all American families were so fortunate. After the war, the Confederate sisters of the underrated, enormously brave Union general, the Virginian George H. Thomas, turned his portrait to the wall to indicate he was dead to them. The painful divisions extended all the way to the White House, where First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln faced constant embarrassment from the press over her relationship with her Confederate half-sisters.

Photo of the Day: General Thomas Bust, Grant’s Tomb, NYC

The Battle of Nashville, concluded 150 years ago today, also ended, for all intents and purposes, any significant opposition to the Union cause in the Western theater of operations. Within a week, William Tecumseh Sherman would finish his legendary “March to the Sea” in Savannah, and by the following spring Robert E. Lee would be surrendering at Appomattox.

I wrote about this decisive battle five years ago, so I direct your attention to this prior post about this campaign. But I find that there’s still more to be said about the victorious general at Nashville, George H. Thomas.

In a way, this bust of the general, which I photographed while visiting Grant’s Tomb last spring, is symptomatic of the fate of this neglected Union commander in the Civil War. Had he chosen to cast his lot with his native Virginia, you would undoubtedly see beautifully preserved equestrian statues all over the South erected in his memory, as friend and fellow Virginian Robert E. Lee has at Washington and Lee University and on Monument Avenue in Richmond.

Instead, Thomas languishes largely as an afterthought in the North. Sure, there is an equestrian statue—some say, the finest—in Washington, D.C., erected in his memory, in 1879. But the thousands of daily motorists in Thomas Circle are too busy to think about the hero commemorated by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward.

Aside from that, what do you have? In Grant’s Tomb, this bust, one of five in the dark crypt surrounding the sarcophagi of Ulysses S. Grant and wife Julia carved by two artists employed by the New Deal's Works Progress Administration, Jeno Juszko and William Mues. These figures were the commander in chief’s key lieutenants in the war: Thomas, Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan, James B. McPherson, and Edward Ord. Over the years, the federal government has been so unmindful of the man who helped make sure that there even remained a federal government that they had to be shamed into preserving his tomb. Why should subsidiary figures such as Thomas deserve better?

In Thomas’ case, because he risked even more than his life to save the Union: he put on the line his posthumous reputation. In its zeal for the Lost Cause, the postwar South honored men far less able than this Virginian, all because they could not forgive him. Even his sisters broke off ties with him, from the outbreak of the war and even until his death in 1870.

Thomas was treated even more shabbily in the North. While acknowledging the stubborn courage that gave him the nickname “The Rock of Chickamauga,” Grant and Sherman left him with an undeserved reputation as strictly a superior defensive commander. In fact, as Ernest B. Furgurson related in a March 2007 article for Smithsonian Magazine, Thomas was a master of logistics and organization.

From the American Revolution to the War on Terror, American soldiers have paid the price for vainglorious commanders who squandered their men’s blood too easily. Thomas was a conspicuous exception. As the sesquicentennial remembrance of the Civil War winds down, the accomplishments of this intelligent, loyal and brave general should be celebrated far more often.

This Day in Irish-American History (Peace Jubilee Conducted by Civil War Composer)

June 19, 1869— Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, an emigrant from the Irish Potato Famine who achieved renown in the Civil War as an army bandleader and composer of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” concluded a five-day music festival in Boston that he himself had organized to celebrate the return of peace to the nation and to benefit the widows and orphans of the conflict.

Gilmore is not so well remembered today, but it was another story in his time. Musicologist Frank J. Cipolla has written of the bandleader’s “quick wit, flamboyant personality and grandiose musical projects.” It is hard to conceive of musicians such as John Philip Sousa, Arthur Fiedler or Guy Lombardo without thinking of how Gilmore paved the way for them. Moreover, in a time still rife with anti-Catholic sentiment, Gilmore’s ebullience and patriotism enabled many to see his ethnic group as potential contributors to American life.

The Great National Peace Jubilee was built on an epic scale, complete with a band and orchestra of about 1,000 musicians plus soloists and members from 103 choral groups totaling over 10,000 singers. It was, in a way, a kind of hammock event swinging between past and present, illustrative of the manner in which Gilmore sought not just to equal or even surpass a past event, but go 100% beyond it—and use it as the baseline for his next monster moment.

It was also the kind of event made to order for Ulysses S. Grant, who had made the centerpiece of his successful campaign for President the prior year the slogan, “Let us have peace.” The Union hero’s musical tastes were not unlike his writing style: utterly straightforward. Asked about his favorite music, Grant responded: “The cannons!”

Gilmore knew the President (who came for the opening ceremonies only) was onto something. In his prior major public musical event, the March 1864 inauguration of Louisiana's new governor, Gilmore had used cannons in a performance for the first time. Now, for the Boston show, he proposed to use cannons even more prominently throughout the performance, along with double the number of musicians and singers used in his New Orleans gala.

Today, people who pass through Boston’s Back Bay and notice the Copley Plaza Hotel and Hancock Towers never realize than 145 years ago, Gilmore had constructed on the site the the largest structure of its kind in the city. The building was cavernous. It had to be, in order to hold all those musicians and singers, along with seating for seating for 30,000 audience members, not to mention 100 Boston firemen striking anvils, a battery of cannon, chimes, church bells, a bass drum 8 feet in diameter, and a gigantic organ built for the occasion.

Six years before, after the Battle of Gettysburg, Gilmore had adapted “Johnnie, I Hardly Knew Ye,” a mordant Irish ballad, into the rousing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” During the war, he would train, equip and dispatch 20 bands from his state to accompany troops on their missions. Now, he proposed to play music not to rouse men’s martial spirits but to foster reconciliation and understanding—and he was not done yet.

In 1872, Gilmore organized a World Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival to celebrate the end of the Franco-Prussian War. The pattern he set was familiar: twice the number of musicians and singers than had appeared at the National Jubilee, and a festival lasting more than three times longer. Gilmore wasn’t even fazed by the collapse of the new coliseum meant to house all of this—he had another built and opened just in time, for a program featuring the likes of Johann Strauss and his orchestra from Austria, the Grenadier Guards Band of England, the Garde Republicaine of France, and the Prussian band of Kaiser Franz Grenadiers.

A more important contribution by Gilmore on this occasion was introducing American audiences to emerging talent from a completely unexpected source. The Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed only the year before to raise urgently needed funds for that new African-American college, received major national exposure for one of the first times on this occasion. So did the Hyers Sisters, two African-American musical prodigies from California, who impressed Gilmore greatly at a private audition in Boston with their rendition of opera arias. Seldom if ever had African-Americans been featured in such a large-scale American musical extravaganza.

Annual Fourth of July concerts that Gilmore offered on the Boston Common predated, by more than half a century, the similar Independence Day musical extravaganza that Arthur Fiedler began offering on the banks of the Charles River, a tradition that the Boston Pops orchestra continues to this day.

When he was done with Boston after two decades, Gilmore moved to New York, where he began the tradition of ringing in the new year in Times Square. The rather tame doings of Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, however, paled next to the highlight of Gilmore’s show: the bandleader firing two pistols into the air at the stroke of midnight. (How times have changed: nowadays, those sounds, of course, would precipitate a massive police action.)

Throughout his career, Gilmore never forgot where he came from. It started with charity work, for such causes as Famine Relief, Clan na Gael, the Annual Emerald Ball for Orphans and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. But he also endorsed the work of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt and promoted Home Rule and the value of the boycott as a means of economic redress for the Irish people.

Gilmore’s death from a heart ailment in 1892 brought about a kind of passing of the musical torch. On the night of his funeral, 37-year-old John Philip Sousa, not yet the lionized creator of the “Washington Post March” and “Stars and Stripes Forever,” dedicated his performance in memory of the County Galway native he rightly termed “The Father Of the American Band.” In fact, 19 musicians from Gilmore's troupe would shortly provide the backbone of Sousa's newly formed "Sousa's New Marine Band."