REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENTS IN THE SOUTH

 

 

The Fifteenth Amendment.  Celebrated May 19^th, 1870.  Colored lithograph (New York: Thomas Kelly, 1870).

The last of the freedom amendments guaranteed black men the right to vote.  Already established in several southern states’ Reconstruction constitutions, the amendment eliminated remaining black disfranchisement in several northern states.

 

 

The First Colored Senator and Representatives, In the 41^st and 42^nd Congress of the United States.  Lithograph (New York: Currier & Ives, 1872).

The promise of emancipation seemed fulfilled as southern blacks began to send their own to Washington.  Shown are (left to right) back row, Representatives Robert C. De Large of South Carolina and Jefferson H. Lang of Georgia; front, Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi, and Representatives Benjamin S. Turner of Alabama, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, and Joseph H. Rainy and Robert B. Elliot of South Carolina.

 

 

Practical Illustration of the Virginia Constitution.  Lithograph (n. p., 1868).

White racist thought as expressed in this cartoon was a zero-sum game.  If slavery meant white domination of blacks; then freedom must mean black domination of whites.

 

 

Extract from the Reconstructed Constitution of the State of Louisiana.  With Portraits of the Distinguished Members of the Convention & Assembly.  A. D. 1868.  Lithograph (n. p., 1868).

Shown are the black delegates to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention who were later elected to the state legislature, with text from the Constitution outlawing discrimination is schools and public accommodations.  At the bottom is a fiery statement from one of their number, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, threatening black violence in the face of unremitting white violence.  It was added in type some months after this lithograph was published, and following an assassination attempt on Pinchback.      

 

 

The Constitution of South Carolina, Adopted April 16, 1868, And the Acts and Joint Resolutions of the General Assembly, Passed at the Special Session of 1868, Together with the Military Orders Therein Re-Enacted (Columbia: John W. Denny, 1868).

Despite South Carolina’s later reputation for corruption and incompetent “Negro rule,” the state’s Reconstruction constitution, written by a racially integrated convention in 1868, was one of the most democratic in the nation. It guaranteed equal rights to all citizens, reformed the previous autocratic government, equalized the tax burden, and created the state’s first system of public education.

 

 

John W. Alvord, Letters From the South, Relating to the Condition of the Freedmen, Addressed to Major General O. O. Howard (Washington: Howard University Press, 1870).

Alvord, the General Superintendent of Education for the Freedmens’ Bureau, reported on the improving conditions for freedpeople. He observed some blacks acquiring land, attending and helping to finance many of their own schools, and beginning to save through the government-sponsored Freedmen’s Savings Bank of which Frederick Douglass was titular head.

 

 

Second Grand Fair of the Mechanics’ and Agricultural Fair Association of Louisiana (New Orleans: New Orleans Times, 1867).

Freedmen and pro-Union whites promoted rebuilding the southern economy along “Yankee” lines. At this fair they celebrated trends toward industrialization and diversification of agriculture.

 

 

Andrew J. Fletcher, Speech of Hon. A. J. Fletcher, Secretary of State, On the Issues of the Canvass.  The State Government Vindicated.  Delivered at Cleveland, Tennessee, June 3, 1867 (Nashville: Press & Times Office, 1867).

Fletcher defended the record of Tennessee’s Reconstruction government under Governor “Parson” Brownlow from assaults by “the rebel candidate for Governor.” He lauded the end of slavery and defended the enfranchisement of blacks. “It may be true that many of them are as yet unfitted for the exercise of political rights, but I know of no better way to teach them the use of these rights than to let them exercise them;” This speech provided a detailed review of Reconstruction in Tennessee, the first of the former Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union and form a Republican government.

 

 

“Electioneering at the South,” in Harper’s Weekly, July 25, 1868.

 

 

United States Congress, House of Representatives, Election in Alabama.  Affidavits of Discharge from Employment in Alabama for Voting (Washington, 1868).

Conservative white southerners used several strategies to repress black political participation. One of the most effective was economic intimidation. As these reports demonstrate, politically motivated firings of black Republicans were widespread in Alabama, as elsewhere in the Reconstruction South.

 

 

Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Circular, No. 1.  Vicksburg, Miss., January 25th, 1868.

Although some freedpeople were making progress, this circular underscores the harsh reality for most blacks in the postwar South. They would receive no land from the government, and they would work for their former owners. Although the planting of more food crops was urged, it was clear white landowners were to be in charge and blacks were subject to their will.

 

 

Message of Governor Swann, to the General Assembly of Maryland, At its Regular Session, January, 1868 (Annapolis: Wm. Thompson, 1868).

Maryland was not subject to Reconstruction, but its governor complained that it had been subjected to an expansion of black rights and power to which it never agreed and would not consent. Swann spoke for conservative whites across the nation in rejecting any black claims to political equality: “The picture is too revolting to be viewed without emotion by any true lover of free institutions.”

 

 

Lyman Trumbull, Admission of Georgia.  Speech . . . In the Senate of the United States, April 19, 1870 (Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1870).

In 1870 Trumbull and congressional Republicans were faced with allowing rigged elections in Georgia that would result in white Democratic rule or with violating the state constitution through federal intervention to protect black rights. Reluctantly, Trumbull sided with respecting a legal but unjust state action rather than protecting biracial Republican rule.

 

 

Edward H. Dixon, The Terrible Mysteries of the Ku-Klux-Klan, A Full

Expose of the Forms, Objects, and “Dens” of the Secret Order; With a Complete Description of Their Initiation, From the Confession of a Member  (New York, 1868).

 

 

United States Circuit Court, The Great Ku Klux Trials.  Official Report of the Proceedings Before U. S. Circuit Court . . . Held at Columbia, S. C. November Term, 1871 (Columbia: Columbia Union, 1872).

Violence was the South’s most effective strategy for suppressing the black vote and unseating Republican governments, and the “Klan” was its  most infamous and widespread terrorist organization. Republicans tried to discover the inner workings of the Klan through official investigations, while the popular press offered its own lurid details, as in this pamphlet, which purports to be the confessions of a “reformed” Klansman: “The imagination of man portrays nothing in all fiction darker or more horrible than the real experience of this wretched man.” In an attempt to save black voting and Republican government, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Acts of 1871-1872. Federal prosecution of the Klan in several states led to its demise, but not before it had undermined Republican rule in the South.