How the South Beat Reconstruction
Part 2

President Ulysses S. Grant (image source: The White House website)

1,797 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Fourteenth Amendment, Foreign Policy, & Commander-in-Chief Grant

With the South under the United States Army’s heel, the Radical Republicans turned the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. This amendment has turned out to be a disaster, mainly due to its birthright citizenship clause, which gives anyone born in the United States citizenship regardless of his parents’ status or his race and national origin.

This dreadful amendment facilitates the Great Replacement through birthright tourism. Russian, Korean, Mexican, and other foreign women routinely fly to America to deliver a baby who automatically becomes a “US citizen.” Furthermore, “Fourteenth Amendment Americans” have caused all sorts of problems. In Occupied Palestine, Jewish thugs who get themselves in a bind while stealing from the Arabs become “Americans” in need of rescue thank to the Fourteenth Amendment. One such “Fourteenth Amendment American,” Anwar al-Awlaki, was a Yemeni who happened to be born in New Mexico, an even attended various universities. He decided that the best way to pay back his host country was to join al-Qaeda, where he helped to organize several deadly terrorist attacks inside the US, including the Fort Hood mass shooting in 2009 and the attempt to blow up an American passenger airliner on Christmas Day in 2010. Al-Awlaki led a life of international terrorism until his career was ended by a drone strike in 2011.

With the chains of the Fourteenth Amendment fully forged and the South politically neutralized, an otherwise ordinary presidential campaign took place in 1868 consisting of the usual viciousness, treachery, and sniping. Ulysses S. Grant was the favorite, and he won with the campaign catchphrase, “Let us have peace.”  This vague statement was meant to assuage the Northern Democrats and moderate Republicans who were not supportive of the Radicals. Reconstruction continued throughout Grant’s subsequent two terms as President.

Grant’s foreign policy was mostly successful, and it included settling accounts pertaining to the CSS Alabama with Great Britain. The Alabama was a warship that had been built for the Confederate Navy by Britain, and it had caused severe problems for American commercial shipping during the Civil War until it was finally sunk by the US Navy in June 1864. This led to a souring of relations between the US and Britain until the British government agreed to pay reparations to the US in 1872. Additionally, the US government tacitly supported the Fenian raids, which were armed attacks on Canada carried out by Irish veterans of the Union Army in the years after the Civil War who believed in the Irish Republican cause. Their aim was to conquer and hold Canada until Ireland was granted independence. Although the US government never officially supported the guerillas, for several years they likewise did nothing to stop them, which led the Canadians to suspect that the US was at least somewhat sympathetic, perhaps seeing the raids as retaliation for British support for the Confederacy. Ultimately, the plan failed, but they indicated a shift in attitudes between Catholics and Protestants in the US that eventually led to cooperation and trust rather than enmity.

Grant also wanted to expand into the West Indies, and he had the opportunity to buy the Dominican Republic. But he ran into trouble with the Congress, where many members did not wish the US to absorb a mixed-race population. The fray over Dominica led to a breach between President Grant and Radical Republican Charles Sumner, who had been beaten with a cane on the Senate floor in 1856 due to his objections to slavery by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. Sumner had almost died from his injuries and did not return to the Senate until 1859.

Corruption was endemic throughout Grant’s administration. Grant was a poor judge of character, and crooks and swindlers caused him no end of trouble. The Transcontinental Railroad, which was a successful project requiring enormous technological ingenuity, was tarnished by a corruption scandal. The Indian Wars raged on the prairie, and labor unrest had spread across the country. Finally, in 1873 the economy collapsed. With so many problems, Reconstruction became a drain on Grant’s presidency.

You can buy Tito Perdue’s novel Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture here.

In the South, the political community then consisted of two factions. The first were the ordinary Anglo-Southerners, many of whom were ex-Confederates. They supported the Democratic Party, although Southerners were not yet able to vote again in 1868. The second was those Southerners who were supported by the Grant administration via the US Army and the Radical Republicans.

There were three types of Grant administration supporters in the South. The first were the “Carpetbaggers.” These were Yankees in government who had moved to the South after the war. The second was the “Scalawags,” or Southerners who were collaborating with Reconstruction. The final faction was the sub-Saharans. As Reconstruction ground on, the Scalawags and sub-Saharans increasingly clashed, which caused the Carpetbaggers to favor sub-Saharans in local government. This came with the price of less competence and more corruption, however.

Southerners resisted via organized violence in some areas. White paramilitary units occasionally fought against sub-Saharan militias, although the incidents of violence instigated by whites were few and far between. Most consisted of sub-Saharan crime, including that committed by black soldiers. There were not many actual “battles,” as claimed by ethnonationalist Jewish groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. But when the “battles” were fought, the Southerners always won.

The most important such battle occurred in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873. A dispute over ballot counting for the state’s gubernatorial election led to a sub-Saharan militia occupying the local courthouse. A white militia formed in response, fighting ensued, and the courthouse was set ablaze. Officially, between 60 and 150 sub-Saharans were said to have been killed, although the whites claimed they’d killed a higher number in order to enhance their reputation. The Grant administration attempted to arrest the whites involved, but that effort was held up by the local courts. Eventually, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was the responsibility of the states to enforce law and order rather than the federal government.

The US Army had not been able to suppress the scattered fighting that took place across the South, in any event. When the Carpetbaggers called in more federal troops, there was stubborn resistance from the Scalawags in the legislatures as well as the Southern public. Meanwhile, the Southern states re-enfranchised the formerly outcast ex-Confederates bit by bit. The North was likewise tiring of Reconstruction. Northern public opinion came to view the South’s vexation with Reconstruction as only part of a constellation of national problems that also included corruption scandals, Indian troubles, and economic woes. The scandals extended even to prominent Radicals such as the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, whose reputation was tarnished as a result of accusations of adultery in 1875 that made national headlines. Grant and the Radical Republicans received the lion’s share of the blame for all of these problems.

The Radical Republicans were also getting to be quite elderly by the end of Grant’s second term. Grim Old Thaddeus Stevens died in 1868, while Charles Sumner passed in 1874. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was effectively retired by then and passed away by the end of the decade. The Republicans who came after them shifted to a more rational position on race. This shift started when a group of racially-aware Northerners formed a political faction called the Liberal Republicans. They failed to win in 1872, but their ideas took hold across the North. The Democrats then won the House in the 1874 midterm elections and held it in 1876.

The Election of 1876

Given the discouragement over corruption and other problems, the Northern public wanted to move on. The opportunity to do so was offered in the election of 1876. The vote-counting that year was every bit as crooked as that of 2020 which put Genocide Joe in the White House. The Republican Rutherford Hayes went to bed on election night thinking he’d lost to Samuel Tilden, the ethnic Yankee Northern Democrat. But Republican partisans in the media moved quickly to steal the election.

The Southern Historian C. Vann Woodward writes:

. . . in the early hours of the . . . morning [after election night] William E. Chandler of New Hampshire and John C. Reid, managing editor of the Republican New York Times, awakened [Chairman of the Republican Party] Zach Chandler at his hotel and got his permission to wire Republican officials in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, asking if they could hold on to their states for Hayes. The scheme rested upon Republican control of the three state returning boards. If these partisan boards could “canvass” the returns and convert every one of the nineteen electoral votes of the three states into a Hayes vote, the Republican candidate would have exactly 185 votes, a majority of one. Later that day Zach Chandler boldly announced his claim that “Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected.”[1]

The New York Times’ editor at the time, John C. Reid, was especially hostile to the Democrats. According to historian Roy Morris, Reid was

a dyed-in-the-wool Republican partisan whose wartime exposure to southern Democrats, in the person of the Confederate cavalrymen who had captured him outside Atlanta, Georgia, in the summer of 1864 and carried him off to Andersonville Prison, had left him with a permanent hatred for all things Democratic. Reid, the Times’s managing editor, was a difficult man to get along with in the best of times. A fellow journalist described him as “not a pleasant or popular person . . . [his] red, bloated features warned of his hot temper, his angry little eyes of a disposition to tyrannize.” When Tilden’s campaign manager, Abram S. Hewitt, had asked him cheekily . . . how many states the Times was willing to concede to Tilden, Reid snapped, “None.”[2]

These shenanigans threw the United States into an uproar. There was considerable fear that a second Civil War might follow, although the calls for war were coming from Northern Democrats rather than ex-Confederates. Eventually, Hayes was declared President after a backroom compromise in which Hayes was said to have promised to pull the remaining federal troops out of the South.

This backroom deal was not the only event the South used to break Reconstruction. The Congressional Democrats also held up funding for the US military in 1877. Not a single soldier, sailor, or marine received a dime, although troops were needed to fight the Indians, continue to suppress the South, and maintain law and order during a wave of strikes. In 1878 President Hayes signed the Posse Comitatus Act, which outlawed the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes. Reconstruction was finally over.

Notes

[1] C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 17.

[2] Roy Morris, Jr., Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), pp. 22 & 23.