The Road to Redemption

Southern Politics, 1869-1879

Michael Perman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780807841419, 9780807815267
• eBook ISBN: 9780807864043
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the most dramatic episodes in American history was the attempt to establish a two-party political system in the South during Reconstruction. Historians, however, have never systematically analyzed the region’s political process during that era. Michael Perman undertakes this task, arguing that the key to understanding Reconstruction politics can be found in the factions that developed inside the two parties. Not only did these factions play a crucial role in determining each party’s policies and electoral strategies, but they also shaped the course of the South’s overall political development during this critical period.

In the first section of Road to Redemption, Perman offers a provocative and original analysis of the characteristics and priorities of the two parties, explaining how the South’s untried and volatile party system operated during Reconstruction. By the mid-1870s this system had begun to collapse. The book’s concluding section explains how and why the Republican party and Reconstruction were overthrown and describes the Democratic ascendancy that replaced them.

Perman’s innovative study integrates the history of Reconstruction and Redemption and challenges the prevailing interpretation of who the Redeemers were and how they rose to power.

Part I
The Politics of Convergence: Reconstruction, 1869–1873

1. The Contest for the Political Center, 1869–1870

It will require a few years longer to wear away all the bitter memories of the great war of the Rebellion. But since the election of Grant a happy change has come over the spirit of their dreams. They are feeling better; they are looking forward to a bright and glorious future, and, indeed, evincing a little too much impatience for an overload of Northern men, with money and skill.

—Joseph Medill, reporting from the South, in Chicago Tribune, 9 April 1869

In the presidential election of 1868, the Republicans campaigned as the party of stability, peace, and sectional concord. By contrast, their Democratic opponents were identified with turmoil and disruption, even revolution. This was a surprising and sudden reversal of the roles assumed by the major parties, for during the previous few years, and even before the war as well, the voters had come to regard the new Republican party as the advocate and agent of change and the Democrats as a force for conservatism and continuity.

These public perceptions were not incorrect. The parties had not changed; it was just that the set of issues over which they had battled since the war were now placed in a different context. The changes that Republicans had been proposing for the South were no longer impending. Instead, the electorate was being asked to ratify them, and they constituted a postwar settlement in the South which was already in operation. The reconstruction of the southern states had preoccupied the Republicans since the final years of the war, and upon its successful formulation and execution the future both of the party and of the nation had depended. To withhold approval now that the Republicans’ difficult and dangerous task had been completed would not only endanger the party itself but it would undermine the political and legal edifice that had been erected in the South, and this would constitute a repudiation of the status quo.

If in 1868, the Democrats had nominated Salmon R Chase, the chief justice of the United States and Lincoln’s opponent for the Union party presidential nomination in 1864, the Reconstruction settlement would not have been contested. But the selection of Horatio Seymour and Francis R Blair, Jr., meant that the party was not acquiescent and would continue its opposition. Even though all the southern states—except Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia—had been reorganized and readmitted to the Union under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, the party evidently regarded Reconstruction as still an open question. Evidence for this was abundant in the Democratic campaign whose keynote was provided by Blair’s pronouncement that the Reconstruction laws were “usurpations and unconstitutional, revolutionary and void.” Furthermore, if they were not resisted, Blair had added, “The peace to which Grant invites us is the peace of despotism and death.”¹

In the South, these avowals were perceived as offering a last desperate hope that Reconstruction might still be averted. So the opponents of the Republicans and of Reconstruction threw off their strategy of “masterly inactivity” and plunged feverishly into the campaign for a Democratic victory. Benjamin Hill’s denunciation of Reconstruction as an “infamy” was followed by the violent eruption of the Ku Klux Klan.² Yet the effect on the Democrats’ prospects of the South’s active involvement and of the Klan’s violence was catastrophic. To their image as disturbers of stability were added both a sectional identification with the South and complicity in political violence. The outcome was that, except in the South where the terrorism helped Seymour to win in Georgia and Louisiana and to come close in Alabama and Arkansas, the Democrats carried only Oregon and New Jersey, the border states of Kentucky and Maryland, and Seymour’s own state of New York.

Besides confirming and securing the Reconstruction settlement, the Republican victory in 1868 established the party’s political credentials. In the first place, the Republicans were no longer a sectional party. They had a political base that was national in scope. Although they did not sweep the reconstructed South in the presidential vote, they did control state government and congressional delegations throughout the region, a significant contrast with 1860 when Lincoln had not even been a candidate there. A second gain from the 1868 election was the recognition that the party could win the presidency under normal peacetime circumstances. The Republicans had thus achieved legitimacy. This outcome had been achieved, in large measure, through the party’s selection of General Grant, a nonpartisan national hero, who had then campaigned on the slogan of “Let Us Have Peace.” If the Republicans could now turn the country away from sectional questions toward pressing and long-term issues of finance and economic development, not only would they outflank the Democrats who were still clinging to outworn sectional issues, but they would demonstrate their own fitness and ability to govern.

While the election of 1868 had bestowed legitimacy and nationalism on the Republicans, it had, at the same time, confirmed the Democrats in both their association with treason and irresponsibility and their status as the minority party. This outcome was alarming to southerners who had pinned their hopes for deliverance on a returning conservatism in the northern electorate, “the sober second thought” as they called it, which was expected to manifest itself politically through the Democratic party. Consequently, the 1868 election returns forced them to reassess their own strategic thinking. They had backed the wrong horse. Because of this, they had failed to prevent Reconstruction and now faced four years of Republican control of the national government as well as Republican domination of the southern states.³ Consequently, their political assumptions and the calculations they based on them needed immediate reappraisal.

The southern search for an alternative strategy was initiated in the wake of the election, almost before Ulysses Grant had been inaugurated, and the focus of this search was the general himself. Ironically, it was those very qualities of national recognition and nonpartisanship that had been so significant to the Republicans when they nominated Grant which now suggested themselves as potential assets to the party’s southern opponents as they sought release from their political quandary. The broadened appeal and diminished partisanship that his nomination had given the Republicans could be of advantage to the southern Democratic-Conservatives too.* Grant had, after all, no close identification with the Republican party; in fact he had usually voted Democratic before the war. Moreover, he had been sufficiently cautious and conservative in his political attitudes that the more radical members of the party had preferred Benjamin Wade over Grant in 1868. In fact, the general’s availability as well as his obvious electoral assets and his past political record had even made him an attractive candidate for the Democrats to consider seriously.

The upshot of all this was that Grant was not beholden to the party’s radical wing and even his ties with the Republican party as a whole were meager. This flexibility was evident in his letter to the Republican convention accepting its nomination. Impervious to party dogma and aware of the fluidity in the political situation, he announced that “in times like the present it is impossible, or at least eminently improper to lay down a policy to be adhered to, right or wrong, through an administration of four years.”⁴ With Grant’s future course not fixed or clear and his past record and inclinations open to interpretation, there was reasonable hope that he might be receptive to southern overtures.

The first person to take the initiative was Augustus H. Garland, a distinguished Arkansas politician who had been a Confederate senator and in 1874 would be governor of his state. Anxious that “something must be done quickly,” he proposed that a delegation be assembled from the South to meet with the president-elect in the new year, in order to bring “some kind and considerate” influence to bear on him. The group could also inform him that those in the South “of social, pecuniary, and moral responsibility, desire peace earnestly, and are ready and willing to conform to rules under any one, if they can be protected in their rights as given them even in the general terms of the Constitution.” Whether this protection would be provided depended ultimately on the president. He could either follow “the programme and the wishes of the party whose candidate he was,” in which case “ruin, red ruin” would be the consequence. Or he could follow “his own judgement” and “administer the government according to the Constitution, and in justice to all.” If he did the latter, he would “rescue us from destruction, and lay broad, deep, and permanent, the foundation for our future well being.”⁵

The delegation, Garland suggested, should be composed of “representative men of the true conservatism,” who were “neither active Democrats or republicans in the late contest,” nor men “who stirred up strife and bitter feelings.” In this category, Garland had in mind himself; his correspondent, Alexander Stephens, who had been vice-president of the Confederacy; William A. Graham of North Carolina who had been Winfield Scott’s vice-presidential running-mate in 1852; James L. Orr, the outgoing governor of South Carolina; and Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston. Regarded as possessing moderate and national views, both in the secession crisis and since the war, these southern statesmen and soldiers could demonstrate to Grant the evidence for southern conservatism and acquiescence and, in so doing, encourage him to adopt a conciliatory course toward the former Confederate states. In this way, the extremism of both section and party, which had erupted in the election campaign and been so disastrous, could be countered, and a conservative tone arise in its place. As Garland described the predicament: “During the last three months, ground in between the nether and upper mill-rocks, conservatism proper has been strangled, and bad men on both sides desiring trouble and commotion, have kept the country on fire, just as the late hell-born war originated in 1860–61.”⁶

Garland was not alone in discerning the pivotal role that Grant might play in national politics now that Reconstruction was completed and the decisive presidential election of 1868 settled. Alexander Stephens himself, who, unlike Garland, had met Grant before when they had both been at the City Point peace negotiations during the war, announced publicly that he admired the general and expected him to resist pressures within his party to pursue a hostile southern policy. He was, Stephens wrote, “one of the most remarkable men I have ever met . . . a man of great generosity and magnanimity, neither selfish nor ambitious; and I believe he meant all that the words impart when he said: ‘Let us have Peace.’”⁷ This was an estimate of Grant that Stephens never relinquished; in 1873 and 1874, it would be the basis of his efforts to swing the southern Democrats behind a move to reelect the general to a third term. The strength of character and the conservatism that Stephens detected in Grant would lead, he hoped, to a split between the president and the more radical wing of the Republican party.

An even more dramatic transformation of American party politics was envisaged by Joseph E. Brown. A former secessionist who had turned against the Confederacy while he was wartime governor of Georgia, Brown, unlike the others, was currently affiliating with the Republicans, from whom he had received appointment as the state’s chief justice. Despite his differing partisan associations, Brown shared the others’ belief that existing party organizations were ephemeral and that, once the sectional issue was settled, the parties would undergo some kind of realignment. He explained his predictions to Alexander Stephens in December 1868. “When you counsel moderation and a generous confidence in Genl Grant I firmly believe he will deserve it,” he wrote, “and that in a few months the extreme radicals of the North will join Toombs, Hill and others of the South in disowning him.” In the presidential election, Robert Toombs and Benjamin Hill, both of Georgia, had been stridently sectional and anti-Republican. In view of this, Brown assumed that, with the southern and northern extremists joined in opposition to Grant, “the moderate conservative men of the Country will then rally to him without regard to past party associations and will sustain him.” In the coalition that would thus occupy the middle of the political spectrum, even sectional loyalties would no longer be a major consideration, for Brown concluded with a quite remarkable suggestion. After congratulating the vice-president of the Confederacy on his “almost neutral” stance in 1868, he proposed: “I trust you will be looked to as the great southern leader of the party.”⁸

Coming from Joseph Brown, one of the South’s more hard-headed, even Machiavellian politicians, a man who could not be accused of political naivete or fanciful speculation, this was a most revealing comment. It suggested the extent to which a party realignment was anticipated and the lengths to which it was expected to proceed. The notion that a realignment of the parties was imminent and that the president would be the catalyst was not a new one for southern politicians to entertain. They had been convinced earlier that Andrew Johnson would split with the radical Republicans and, through the National Union movement that he launched in 1866, bring about a coalition of the conservative forces within the two major parties, thereby creating a new intersectional party of the center.⁹ With Reconstruction seemingly completed, the prospects for party reorganization after 1868 appeared even stronger, giving rise to speculations as extreme as Brown’s. Parties could no longer be aligned on the basis of irreconcilable stances toward Reconstruction as well as of mutually exclusive sectional identifications. The fateful cleavage in American party politics, evident since the late 1850s, had to be ended, and Grant’s election brought resolution much closer.

Although there was extensive discussion of changes in the composition of the parties in the North after 1868, the major political breakthrough occurred in the southern states. This initiative was engineered, not by Grant’s party, but by its Democratic-Conservative opponents, and it took place in Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia. The latter two states had been denied readmission to Congress in July 1868 because they had not ratified their new constitutions which had provided for, among other things, the black suffrage mandated by the Reconstruction Acts. So, in 1869, these constitutions had to be resubmitted. Simultaneously, new elections for state officials were to be held, because the refusal to adopt a constitution had invalidated the earlier election of 1868. Since Tennessee was also electing a successor to its Republican governor, William Brownlow, who had just resigned to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, there were four southern states holding elections in 1869, and these four inaugurated what was to be called the “new movement.”

This initiative involved a major shift in political strategy on the part of the Democratic-Conservatives because it rejected confrontation and aimed instead at defusing the issues of Reconstruction and undermining the Republican party. The plan was that, in the ratification vote on the constitutions, the Democratic-Conservatives should approve them, thus acknowledging the provisions for black suffrage which they contained. Furthermore, in the accompanying state elections, the party was to back the more conservative group of Republicans whenever there was a split and the possibility of a separate and rival ticket. As a result of this tactical maneuver, it was hoped that the Republicans would not only be disarmed by their opponents’ sudden conciliatory attitude but also be demoralized and further divided by it.

A change of this magnitude did not take place, however, without vigorous debate beforehand. In Texas, the argument for the “new movement” was presented most forcefully by former Confederate Postmaster-General John H. Reagan, and, in this, he was joined by Colonel W. M. Walton, the party chairman, and John Hancock, a leading moderate among the Democratic-Conservatives. Reagan argued that the proposed constitution containing universal suffrage should be adopted because it was “more liberal than any other we can expect will be submitted to us if we reject this.” In fact, “Negro suffrage is now inevitable in any contingency. It cannot be averted without a change of national sentiment and of the federal government.” Furthermore, ratification was not so disadvantageous after all because the constitution’s imposition of black suffrage was offset by its provision of amnesty. Thus, numerous former Confederates who would most likely vote Democratic-Conservative would be re-enfranchised. Ratification would, therefore, “secure permanent civil government, in a few years at most, under our own laws to be made and administered by agents of our own choice.”¹⁰

Cooperation with Republicans was not limited to the constitution. It was to be accompanied by a similar approach regarding party organization in the upcoming state election. Reagan advised, therefore, that party should be put “in abeyance” for the time being. The basis for this advice was that “our most grievous political sin, the greatest impediment to our being allowed civil government and political rights now, therefore, is that we are democrats and conservatives.” To avoid this trap, he suggested that “moderate democrats and moderate republicans . . . unite in the common object, for the common good.” To this end, Reagan urged the leadership to “put forward candidates partly of both parties, but all eligi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Politics of Convergence: Reconstruction, 1869–1873
• Part II: The Politics of Divergence: Redemption, 1874–1879
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index