Legislating Racism

The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow

Thomas Adams Upchurch

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813123110
• eBook ISBN: 9780813184807
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Civil War and Reconstruction were characterized by two lasting legacies—the failure to bring racial harmony to the South and the failure to foster reconciliation between the North and South. The nation was left with a festering race problem, as a white-dominated society and political structure debated the +proper role for blacks. At the national level, both sides harbored bitter feelings toward the other, which often resulted in clashes among congressmen that inflamed, rather than solved, the race problem. No Congress expended more energy debating this issue than the Fifty-First, or "Billion Dollar," Congress of 1889-1891. The Congress debated several controversial solutions, provoking discussion far beyond the halls of government and shaping the course of race relations for twentieth-century America.

Legislating Racism proposes that these congressional debates actually created a climate for the first truly frank national discussion of racial issues in the United States. In an historic moment of unusual honesty and openness, a majority of congressmen, newspaper editors, magazine contributors, and the American public came to admit their racial prejudice against not only blacks, but all minority races. If the majority of white Americans—not just those in the South—harbored racist sentiments, many wondered whether Americans should simply accept racism as the American way. Thomas Adams Upchurch contends that the Fifty-First Congress, in trying to solve the race problem, in fact began the process of making racism socially and politically acceptable for a whole generation, inadvertently giving birth to the Jim Crow era of American history.

Chapter 1

TO EMPTY A RUNNING STREAM

The U.S. Senate Considers the Butler Emigration Bill

The South would be a great deal better off if it could get rid of a large part of its negro population.

—Savannah Morning News

The Negroes will never migrate. They are a race of strong local attachments. They are parasitic in all their tendencies. . . . I have not the slightest confidence in the idea of deportation.

—Senator George Vest of Missouri

Fully aware of Republican intentions to push a federal elections bill through Congress, Democrats sought to forestall that plan and, if possible, eliminate the need for it by introducing their own bill to deal with the southern race problem. Realizing that the Republicans would need a few days to organize and prioritize their legislative agenda, the Democrats hoped to take initial control of the business of the Senate and spark a debate that might catch fire in the American public as well as in Congress. Their plan was to introduce a bill that would make it possible for those black southerners who wanted to leave the South to do so at taxpayers’ expense. The idea was neither new nor unique. The belief that Congress should appropriate funds for such a mass exodus of African Americans had a long history. Various schemes for removing blacks from the South had been attempted from time to time, as early as the colonial era and as late as 1879, with paltry results in each case.¹ Such attempts had failed each time because of the exorbitant expense involved and a general lack of interest among blacks in emigrating.² Although these early measures had most often been called “colonization” plans, the Democrats of 1890 called theirs an “emigration” bill because they wanted to stress the fact that they would not be forcing the removal of blacks from the South but would merely be giving them the option and the ways and means to leave voluntarily.

Since all previous attempts at colonization had failed, why did many Democrats believe that their new plan would be any different? The answer is complex, but it shows that the plan was not as foolish as it might appear on the surface. First, there had always been a large contingent of black southerners who wanted the option of leaving the South and were thus intrigued by such proposals. As black educator William H. Crogman explained it, “For the first ten or twelve years after the [Civil] war. . . . Every little politician, every crank, constituted himself a Moses to lead the Negro somewhere; and various were their cries. One cried, ‘On to Arkansas!’ and another ‘On to Texas!’ and another ‘On to Africa!’ and each had a following more or less.”³ Thus, many blacks expressed interest in leaving their current homes throughout the 1880s, if only someone would lead them and if somehow their move could be funded. By 1890, nothing had changed to diminish this interest, but several important developments had occurred to increase it. For one thing, the same economic hard times that caused the white agrarian revolt in the late 1880s had hit the black farmer as well, causing many, for the first time, to consider moving to greener pastures, whether Africa or somewhere else. For another thing, the gains blacks had made during Reconstruction had been almost totally lost in the 1880s because of various discriminatory practices in the South. Among these practices were: violence against blacks, which inexplicably escalated in 1889, particularly in the form of lynchings; disfranchisement, which had already robbed them of most of their political power in the South by 1890, even before Mississippi’s new constitution started a wave of state usurpations of the Fifteenth Amendment; and forced segregation, which had become commonplace by this time. For a third thing, some blacks complained of taxation without representation, the old tried and true protest mantra of the American Revolution generation. They argued that without enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment they could not be represented in proportion to their population in the federal and state governments, yet their tax dollars helped pay the governments’ bills. Moreover, the state governments did not distribute government services, such as public education, equally among the races. Why should they remain in a nation which did not give them a fair return on their tax dollars? Finally, a sudden wave of propaganda promoting the idea of emigration swept over the United States in early 1890, convincing many blacks and whites alike that the best solution to the race problem lay in total physical separation of the races.⁴

This wave of propaganda, more than any other factor, caused Congress to take up the issue of federal aid to emigration in early 1890. The story of how it happened begins in Liberia. This small American-made nation on the malaria-infested coast of western Africa had suffered from poverty and government instability since its founding in 1817. The American Colonization Society (ACS) and various other colonization organizations had settled only a few thousand black Americans in Liberia in all those years. No one representing the ACS ever advertised Liberia as an inviting paradise. Most emigrants moving there could expect to trade one type of hard life in the United States for a different type of hard life in Liberia, which included fighting diseases without adequate medicines and medical facilities; making friendships, alliances, and trade partnerships with natives who did not always welcome new neighbors, suffering through poverty that would likely be even more abject than the worst sharecropping arrangement in the American South; and living under an unstable and sometimes oppressive government. Few black Americans wanted to make this trade, and, from a purely financial perspective, even fewer could afford to. The year 1889, however, brought a ray of hope to Liberia for the first time in many years, when European companies began exploiting the nation’s lucrative, indigenous rubber plant. It seemed to Liberians and the ACS that the upstart rubber industry would be the panacea bringing economic development and the ways of civilization to the vast jungle hinterland. With signs of life in the Liberian economy, therefore, the ACS could begin anew its previously flagging efforts at recruiting potential emigrants.⁵

Leading this recruiting drive was Edward Blyden, a West Indies–born Liberian who spent much of his time in London. He toured the United States in late 1889 and early 1890, speaking and making acquaintances with Americans of wealth and means. His visit would not have caused nearly as much interest as it actually did without a connection that he established by chance with some influential white South Carolinians who favored emigration as the solution to the South’s race problem. Blyden’s visit to the United States just happened to coincide with the publication of a book called An Appeal to Pharoah [sic], written by an anonymous author, later revealed to be Carlyle McKinley, assistant editor of the Charleston News and Courier. Although McKinley and Blyden had apparently never met or corresponded before, they spoke essentially the same message—that the solution to America’s race problem lay in black emigration. In December 1889, James C. Hemphill, McKinley’s boss and chief editor of the Charleston News and Courier, invited Blyden to South Carolina for an interview. Blyden accepted, the interview went to press, and papers all over the country soon began broadcasting his startling views on emigration to a fascinated public. As a Liberian, Blyden’s words seemed to validate the idea of emigration expressed in An Appeal to Pharoah [sic], which probably would not have generated much enthusiasm otherwise.⁶

As it turned out, its influence reached even to Africa itself, where British-American adventurer Henry M. Stanley, who had long been employed in mapping the Congo region, building roads and describing the natives of inner Africa for King Leopold of Belgium, read it with great approval. Stanley, who had caused quite a stir with the publication of his own books about the previously isolated inner reaches of Africa,⁷ wrote the publishers of the book in early 1890 to thank them for its message. He favored emigration as the solution to America’s race problem. He believed that if An Appeal to Pharoah [sic] could be widely distributed throughout the United States, it would spark a mass emigration movement within five years. But he predicted that it would never happen because “American capitalists . . . are more engaged in decorating their wives with diamonds” than with contemplating difficult racial issues.⁸

A few American capitalists, however, did prefer emigration for blacks to diamonds for their wives. Among them were some southern members of the U. S. Senate. Matthew Butler, the senior senator of South Carolina, took the lead in drawing up the emigration proposal, which called for a modest appropriation of $5 million per year to begin the enterprise. Butler, whose friends and family called him by his middle name, “Calbraith,” had been a Confederate general who lost a leg in the Civil War. He became a Redeemer thereafter, and the South Carolina legislature sent him to the U.S. Senate in 1876. He was an archetypal Palmetto State hotspur who seemed to carry a perpetual chip on his shoulder when speaking about either the North, the Republicans, the war and Reconstruction, or the race problem. In the Senate, he generally avoided making long, impassioned speeches, but he would never allow his state, his section, his party, or his race to be disparaged without a fiery retort. Unlike some of his former Confederate colleagues, he never rose to the highest level of leadership among southern Democrats in the Senate.⁹ Although he wrote the bill and introduced it to the Senate, he did not begin the discussion of it, nor did he ever advocate it as seriously and forcefully as another proponent of emigration did. Those distinctions belong instead to John Tyler Morgan of Alabama.

Morgan, a relative of former U. S. President John Tyler of Virginia, had represented the Camellia State in the Senate since 1876, when, during the “redemption” of Alabama, he won a close and contested race. Republican colleague and senior Alabama Senator George F. Spencer, who believed Morgan’s election to have been fraudulent, accepted his seating only begrudgingly. In his younger days, Morgan had served as chief lieutenant of one of the most ardent fire-eaters of the Civil War generation, William L. Yancey. He had also risen to the rank of general in the Confederate army. To say that he loved the South—particularly the Old South—and that he believed in the old prewar state rights view would be understatements. While most of his colleagues focused on current Gilded Age concerns or looked ahead toward Progressive Era issues, Morgan favored retrenchment, regression, and restoration of the prewar status quo. Indeed, he must be counted among the most conservative men on Capitol Hill in 1890, and he could be arguably called the most outspoken racist ideologue of his generation. He was widely acclaimed to possess, as his biographer put it, “a wider range of information” on public issues than any other man of his generation. He was certainly among the most talkative men in national politics and was reputed to be the foremost “long-distance talker” or “jawsmith” in the U.S. Senate. One Alabama newspaper remarked of Morgan that “his fervid eloquence” could be compared to a “mountain torrent . . . dashing against the opposition,” and that when he believed in something passionately, his beliefs were like “lightning . . . coursing through his veins.”¹⁰

On January 7, 1890, Morgan called up the Butler bill for consideration. Sensing that Republicans would likely consider the bill a divisive, partisan, and sectional measure, Morgan tried from the start to prove otherwise. The bill did not propagate a radical new idea, he said, but an idea that had been around in various forms for more than a century. Summarizing his argument, many of the most respected leaders in American government throughout the nation’s history had believed that the solution to the race problem lay in deporting or scattering the black population. Even some of the staunchest and most revered Republicans and Whigs of earlier generations favored this approach, including Abraham Lincoln, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. The current Secretary of the Treasury in the Harrison administration, William Windom of Minnesota, whose credentials as a partisan Republican and a genuine humanitarian no one questioned, also advocated emigration. Why should the idea not be taken seriously then? If the main source of the race problem came from the concentration of blacks in one region, what could possibly be wrong with diffusing the population? If the federal government simply shuffled blacks around in the United States, it would spread their voting strength thin enough that there would be no danger of them controlling any state government. The specter of black control of state and local governments was, after all, what white southerners feared so much, causing them to disfranchise blacks and otherwise to try to keep them down socially and economically. Eliminating that threat by scattering blacks in America would be an improvement over existing conditions, but removing them from the United States altogether would be even better.¹¹

Morgan believed that the technological advancements of the industrial revolution in Gilded Age America had made the logistics of mass emigration possible for the first time. He claimed that more blacks could now be shipped abroad in one year than had been shipped in the first twenty years of the American Colonization Society’s existence. Even though the population of blacks had reached almost eight million by 1890, through a long-range, federally funded program, every one could conceivably be helped to return to his or her ancestral homeland. Morgan then changed the thrust of his argument, asking, if there never had been any Africans in America and suddenly eight million of them wanted to immigrate to America, would the federal government allow it? “No! Never!” he exclaimed. Why, then, should they be allowed to stay now?¹²

Morgan next invoked the old pre–Civil War southern argument of white paternalism toward blacks, claiming that he and his fellow supporters of the Butler bill all cared deeply for the welfare of their black friends and neighbors, even to the point of considering many of them as family members. And while it would be difficult to break their long-term bonds of affection, these Americans of African ancestry would ultimately be better off in the land of their forefathers than in the United States. They were now, for the first time, psychologically and intellectually prepared for the move en masse because they had gained education, political experience, Christianity, and social civility from having enjoyed a generation of freedom in the United States. If anyone seriously thought that by moving to Africa, black Americans would lose these attributes of civilization, white southerners would never try to encourage them to leave. But the opposite would surely happen—black Americans would help lift the whole African continent out of barbarism and backwardness. If Africa could be so converted, it would only happen through the work of blacks themselves, because most native Africans had “a marked aversion to the white race.” Certain parts of Africa were among the only places on earth where the white Catholic church, which for centuries had built its reputation upon dogged determination to proselytize reluctant peoples, had given up its missionary efforts. Therefore, black Americans must become the missionaries, a privileged elite in Africa who would do what white men could never do. But, to be successful, they would have to learn to “be as kind and patient and generous towards their own kindred as we [white southerners] have been to them.” Morgan read from the publications of the British Zoological Society and the journal of Henry M. Stanley to prove just how badly Africa needed this civilizing influence and to prove that the interior of the dark continent, particularly the Congo region, would make a suitable habitation for the emigrants.¹³

Morgan reasoned that a mass expatriation to Africa would affect blacks the same as the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: The Grand Old Party Faces the Grand Old Problem
• Chapter 1. To Empty a Running Stream: The U. S. Senate Considers the Butler Emigration Bill
• Chapter 2. To Drain the Infinite Oceans: The Swan Song of the Once-Great Blair Education Bill
• Chapter 3. Charting New Waters: The Race Problem and the “Reed Rules” in the House of Representatives
• Chapter 4. The Very Insanity of Democracy: The Federal Elections Bill and the Return to Reconstruction in the House of Representatives
• Chapter 5. Judging the Insanity: Public Reactions to the Inflammatory “Force Bill” and the Tyranny of the Majority
• Chapter 6. The Stormy and Turbulent Sea of Democratic Freedom: The Senate’s Epic Struggle for Control of the Nation’s Racial Destiny
• Chapter 7. Showdown on Capitol Hill: The Filibuster, the Cloture Rule, and the Defeat of the Federal Elections Bill
• Chapter 8. Silver, Sectionalism, Sioux Indians, and Sinophobia: Why Many Westerners Opposed the Federal Elections Bill
• Chapter 9. The “Peculiar Situation” of African Americans and Ethnic Minorities in the United States: How Racism Became Fashionable in the 1890s
• Conclusion: Assessing the Billion Dollar Congress and Its Effects on American History and Race Relations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index