America Aflame (85 page)

There were signs also that the country was coming together, finally. In June 1875,
Harper's
predicted that the “Centennial year” would be a year “of increased national harmony.” As evidence, the editor offered “the disuse of the habit of speaking of certain States of the Union as ‘the South,' as if there were a section of the country separate and peculiar.” Though the death of the South has had significantly more pronouncements than the imminent capture of Richmond,
Harper's
was certain the event was at hand. The editor chirped that southerners had abandoned the theory of secession and it was nearly impossible to find anyone “who would resort to war as a remedy for governmental grievances, or who would restore slavery.” And while southerners continued to oppose Reconstruction, they “no longer oppose established results.” Probably not, since the results in most states by the middle of 1875 were the restorations of white leadership and black subjugation.
46

The Confederates finally took Boston. At the Bunker Hill centennial celebration in April 1875, from which visitors could still see the charred remains of the Ursuline convent, two thousand ex-Confederates marched through Boston on some of the same streets where the 54th Massachusetts had stepped proudly. John Quincy Adams II, son of the former president and congressman who railed against southern slaveholders, offered a golden olive branch to the guests. “You are come so that once more we may pledge ourselves to a new union, not to a union merely of the law, or simply of the lips; not to a union … of the sword, but gentlemen, the only true union, a union of hearts.” Edward Atkinson, a Boston industrialist and a former supporter of John Brown, accepted an honorary membership in the Society of Ex-Confederate Soldiers for his investment in New South industries. The former abolitionist and officer of a black regiment Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke of his high regard for his new southern friends. And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet conscience of New England, visited the University of Virginia, where he delivered an address praising the southern people, at least the whites among them.
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Such testimonials to national fealty in 1875 came mainly from the North. Northerners did not mind the imbalance. They were going off to the future, and the South could come along, or not. The North was America, and that was what counted.

Northerners would celebrate the centennial year counting the blessings of victory. The war unleashed an economic revolution, unparalleled innovation, and a degree of affluence across a broader segment of society than any Western nation had known to that time. It was a nation primarily of northern European Protestants with an abiding faith in science, imbued with self-reliance and optimism. Historians have agreed that Americans missed a golden opportunity to broaden its definition of “all men are created equal” in the decade after the Civil War. Americans at the time would beg to differ. They had come through a war that threatened to destroy their experiment, and during the succeeding decade they had nurtured a shaky peace into unbounded progress. When the world convened at Philadelphia in 1876 for the centennial exhibition, that was the accomplishment they would see and celebrate.

The new American nation was obviously not all-inclusive. Workers, African Americans, Native Americans, women, Roman Catholics, and many immigrant groups remained outside the story Americans wove for themselves as they approached the centennial. There were few dissenting voices, for example, when the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Union veterans, barred Irish Americans from membership. It seemed odd that a group that gave lives and blood for their new nation could not find acceptance among their fellow soldiers. Neither, of course, could blacks. Or Native Americans. It was not a matter of racial, gender, class, religious, or ethnic exclusion. It was all of the above. America's second century would become more inclusive, and it would do so primarily because the Union victory had saved the ideals of the first century.

CHAPTER 22

CENTENNIAL

JULY FOURTH
, 1876. America's one-hundredth birthday. A modest celebration unfolded in Hamburg, South Carolina, a small town in the Edgefield district across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Blacks comprised more than 75 percent of the town's population. They held most of the political offices, including the head of the state militia, the town marshal, and the judge of the town court. Doc Adams, captain of the militia, read the Declaration of Independence. His men paraded down Market Street in full regalia before a festive crowd to honor America on this blistering hot day.
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A buggy approached from the opposite direction. The two young white men driving the wagon demanded passage through the procession. After a heated argument, Adams ordered his men to stand aside and allow the wagon to pass. The following day, the father of one of the drivers appeared before the judge, Prince Rivers, demanding the arrest of Doc Adams and other officers for obstructing a public road. Rivers, hearing conflicting versions of the incident, decided to hold a hearing.

On the day of the hearing, July 8, the town filled up with armed whites. Rivers pressed both parties to reach a settlement. Matthew C. Butler, a prominent attorney and former Confederate general, demanded that Adams disarm the militia. Adams refused. By this time, more than a thousand armed whites were milling in front of the wooden “armory” where one hundred black militiamen had taken refuge. A shot rang out and shattered a second-floor window. Soon a pitched battled was raging. The white attackers fired a cannon that turned most of the building into splinters. As blacks fled, whites tracked them down. Several blacks escaped across the river to Georgia; others hid underneath a railroad trestle and witnessed the massacre. The white men also burned homes and shops and robbed residents of the town. One of the white hunters exclaimed, “God damn it, boys, what better fun do we want than this?”
2

On July 15, Robert Smalls, a black Union war hero and now a congressman from South Carolina, rose in the House to read a letter from a constituent. “The United States Government is not powerless.… In this Centennial year, will she stand idly by and see her soil stained with the blood of defenseless citizens?… God forbid that such an attitude will be assumed toward the colored people of the South by the ‘best Government the world ever saw.'”
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The northern Republican press called it “the Hamburg Butchery.” Thomas Nast contributed “The ‘Bloody Shirt' Reformed” in August. The cartoon depicted Justice holding a balance scale, with one scale containing the seven black men who died and the other, one white man. She demands that the scale be balanced with more dead whites. The nation's two sacred documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, frame her. In the background, posters appear with the names of white terrorist groups: the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the White Liners.
4

“The ‘Bloody Shirt' Reformed,” August 12, 1876. This Thomas Nast cartoon expresses the outrage of northern public opinion to the Hamburg, South Carolina, massacre of July 1876. The figure of Justice demands the prosecution of the white men responsible for the execution-style murder of six blacks after the riot. The wall posters represent a roll call of the South's Democratic paramilitary organizations. Despite the outrage, a weary Grant administration did nothing to stem the violence in South Carolina and the white perpetrators not only escaped prosecution, but their exploits were celebrated in subsequent decades. (
Harper's Weekly
)

In an election year, such cold-blooded mayhem was difficult to ignore. Thomas Wentworth Higginson confessed to self-deception in his assessment of white southern public opinion. “I have been trying hard to convince myself,” he wrote, “that the Southern whites had accepted the results of the war, and that other questions might now come uppermost.” Still, there was no groundswell for federal intervention. The prevailing view was to abandon the South and its disorderly population to focus on the “other questions.”
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South Carolina governor Daniel H. Chamberlain, a Massachusetts native who was instrumental in allowing black students to enroll at the state university at Columbia, informed President Grant, “This affair at Hamburg is only the beginning of a series of similar race and party collisions in our State, the deliberate aim of which is … the political subjugation and control of this State.” Grant responded with sympathy but little else. In a resigned tone, he stated, “How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the universe only knows.” The inscrutable God invoked by Lincoln had clearly triumphed in Washington at least. It was clear, however, that the Great Ruler of the United States was not going to assist his celestial counterpart to achieve a “final remedy.” Grant expressed his confidence in Chamberlain to handle the situation “without aid from the federal government.” In the meantime, confirming Chamberlain's fears, Matthew C. Butler vowed, “This won't stop until after November.” He characterized the murders in Hamburg as a worthy effort toward putting the black man in his appropriate place. “This collision was the culmination of the system of insulting and outraging of white people which the negroes had adopted there for several years.” As proof, he offered Doc Adams's refusal to accept his conditions for a settlement, showing that Adams was “wholly unfit for so important a station.”
6

Butler correctly pinpointed the grievances of whites in the Edgefield district. As a result of their superior numbers, blacks held key positions in the town and county. When southern whites talked of their world turned “bottom-side up,” the situation in Edgefield was a prime example. South Carolina whites were well aware of how their friends in Mississippi and Louisiana had redeemed their states from Republican rule, and they sought to follow suit.

In May 1876, South Carolina Democrats drafted
The Plan of the Campaign of 1876
, a manual on how to redeem the state. Some of the recommended strategies included: “Every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine how he may best accomplish it.” The instructions concluded with this chilling reminder: “Never threaten a man individually. If he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die.”
7

Wade Hampton received the Democratic nomination for governor. He would try to steer a moderate course during the campaign as much because of his patrician sensibilities as because of his fear of federal intervention if more violence erupted in South Carolina. His platform was mild enough. He campaigned on “home rule” and promises to end corruption and cut spending and taxes. Hampton held out an olive branch to blacks, promising to support the Reconstruction amendments. Yet he presided over what one historian has called “one of the bloodiest electoral campaigns in American history.”
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Hampton's supporters knew what was at stake in the election, and he articulated it at every turn even while eschewing violence. In his acceptance speech, he energized his supporters, now conspicuous by their red shirts modeled after Giuseppe Garibaldi's Italian “Redshirts.” “You are struggling for the highest stake for which a people ever contended, for you are striving to bring back to your prostrate State the inestimable blessings which can only follow orderly and regulated liberty under free and good government.” Hampton benefited from more than three hundred gun clubs throughout the state with a membership of over fifteen thousand.
9

Hampton was a master at transforming political rallies into cultural spectacles. He entered on a flower-bedecked chariot to the cheers of his supporters. On the stage a young white woman sat, head bowed, draped in black, and chained. Hampton descended from the chariot and mounted the platform to martial music. The young woman arose, cast off her mourning clothes, and appeared white, radiant, and free, with a tiara emblazoned “South Carolina.” Reporters confirmed that men wept openly when the young woman transformed herself. Hampton presented himself as a selfless medieval knight rescuing his state from evil forces. The correspondent painted Hampton for his audience: “simple, unaffected gentleman, dauntless warrior of South Carolina, loving and reverencing his God, his cause and his commonwealth to the last recess of his clean soul.” Governor Chamberlain witnessed a Hampton event and exclaimed, “Never since the passage of the Ordinance of Secession has [
sic
] there been such scenes in this state.” He became the Redeemer incarnate to his followers. As one supporter recalled, “Wade Hampton was the Moses of his people, the God-given instrument to help them free themselves from their enemies.”
10

It was not unusual to see black Red Shirts at Hampton's rallies. He often reserved the front rows for these supporters. A few of the blacks may have been coerced, but most had good economic or political reasons to support Hampton. Their presence enabled Hampton to rebut northern critics and claim that the election was about home rule, not about reestablishing white supremacy. Hampton often displayed a large poster at his rallies showing a prostrate palmetto tree being raised by white and black men over the caption “While There's Life, There's Hope.” Democrats urged white Republicans to “cross Jordan” and join the effort to save South Carolina, reserving places of honor on the reviewing stand for those who had “come over to the Lord's side.” Religious imagery figured large at Hampton rallies. Ministers offered prayers both before and after the events and urged voters to consider themselves “Confederate Christians.” They prayed for God to deliver South Carolina from her “more than Egyptian bondage.” The election, they informed the crowd, was a contest between “Hampton” and “Hell.” A choir closed the rally singing both southern patriotic and sacred songs.
11

The rifle clubs delivered a more forceful message. They disrupted Republican rallies, often firing guns in the air. Armed members made personal visits to white and black Republicans to deliver threats. That these warnings were serious was evidenced by a wave of political murders across the state during the campaign.

The November election went off in relative calm. The Red Shirts had prepared well. In Edgefield District, out of 7,000 potential voters, 9,200 ballots were cast. Similar fraud occurred throughout the state. Had fraudulent ballots been tossed out, Chamberlain would have won the governor's race outright. Still, the result was a dead heat. Both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory and set up rival governments. The following April, after a deal brokered in Washington between the parties, federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and the Hampton government installed in Columbia. The victorious Democrats expelled twenty-four Republicans from the state legislature and elected Matthew C. Butler to the U.S. Senate. South Carolina was redeemed.
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Redemption of another sort occurred elsewhere. Dwight L. Moody had replaced the tarnished Henry Ward Beecher as America's favorite evangelist. He was an unlikely crowd favorite. A former shoe salesman who found God in Chicago, Moody worked for the Young Men's Christian Association and became a Union chaplain during the Civil War. Before Lincoln went off to the White House, he visited Moody's “Y” Bible class and gave his first and last Sunday school lecture. Short in stature and progressively chubbier through the years, he murdered syntax in his sermons and was not half the spellbinding orator that Beecher was. Yet a ticket to one of his revivals became more prized than Standard Oil stock. Even President Grant sat on Moody's platform, though, truth be told, he looked confused most of the evening.
13

Moody's stature grew after the war as a YMCA fund-raiser. Following Chicago's disastrous 1871 fire, he persuaded Philip Armour, the meatpacking king, and Cyrus McCormick to invest in building the largest lending library in the city. A Chicago newspaper called Moody “an up and comer.” The business analogy was appropriate. Moody prepared the groundwork for his traveling revivals by launching massive advertising campaigns, wooing the local press, and ensuring area dignitaries attended and were accorded due recognition. He placed the leaders on his stage, and at the climactic moment in his sermon he turned and asked if they were ready to meet their Maker. “Are you ready?” he shouted at each man, lingering until he received an affirmative response. His friend John Wanamaker reportedly replied, “Yes, ready-made,” repeating his department store's advertising slogan.
14

Critics charged Moody with purveying “salvation of the slop-shop character.” Others noted the overwhelmingly middle- and upper-class nature of the audience. Few workers and fewer blacks attended the revivals. To those who complained that his ministry resembled more a commercial than a religious enterprise, he replied, “This is the age of advertisement and you have to take your chance.” Though his revivals seemed spontaneous, he planned them carefully, the placement of leading citizens, the musical selections, the design and copy for the programs, the spacing of the seating, and the decoration of the venue. The revivals ran like clockwork and permitted no deviation from the script. At his Philadelphia revival on New Year's Eve 1875, he notified the press that the door would close promptly at 7:30 P.M. “and if the President of the United States comes after that he can't get in.” If an audience member was moved by the spirit and shouted “Hallelujah!” ushers would escort the offender out of the auditorium. A rival preacher marveled, “His expertise and management of men was worthy of a field general.”
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