Capitol Men (48 page)

"I desire to aid and relieve President Hayes," Chamberlain wrote in reply to Matthews, as he reminded him of the moral responsibility the Republican Party had to the people of South Carolina.

This is a life or death struggle, and I know that I should consign myself to infamy in the eyes of all Republicans here, who know the situation by fearful experience, if I were to accept any terms or do any act which could result in the success of the monstrous conspiracy against law and humanity which the Democracy of this state embody and represent ... Of one thing I am sure, neither you nor any man moved by a sense of justice can understand the situation here and be willing, for any political advantage or freedom from embarrassment, to abandon the Republicans to the fate that awaits them whenever Hampton becomes the undisputed governor of this state.

Since Matthews's attempt to gently nudge Chamberlain aside did not succeed, the South Carolina governor was summoned to Washington by W. K. Rogers, Hayes's personal secretary, who assured Chamberlain of the president's strong desire "to be able to put an end as speedily as possible to all appearances of intervention of the military authority ... In this desire the president cannot doubt he truly represents the patriotic feeling of the great body of the people of the United States." Wade Hampton had received a copy of the same letter and had likewise been asked to come immediately to Washington.

In the capital, Chamberlain argued with Hayes, noting that the president's predecessor, Ulysses'S. Grant, had personally authorized federal protection for the duly elected government of South Carolina, and that he as governor and the people of the state were entitled under the Constitution to be safeguarded from violence. If troops were withdrawn from Columbia before the issue of the "dual house" governments was formally resolved, Chamberlain said, Democrats would seize the statehouse by force. To demonstrate that the Republicans of the state were willing to move expeditiously to settle the matter, Chamberlain, along with Senator John Patterson and Senator-elect David L. Corbin, presented Hayes with a plan by which the South Carolina election results would be submitted to a bipartisan commission, including the Chief Justice of the United States, to be appointed by Hayes. But after this offer was discussed at a cabinet meeting on April 2, Chamberlain received word that since an actual civil disturbance was not then occurring in South Carolina, the federal government was not bound by the Constitution to supply troops, and they would be withdrawn from the statehouse on April 10. Wade Hampton stated that after the exit of federal soldiers, he would attempt to oversee a fair adjudication of the electoral dispute, but Chamberlain waved the offer away, anticipating that any such inquiry would be a sham.

Chamberlain, who had now run out of options, immediately began drafting a letter "to the Republicans of South Carolina." He applauded them for winning the state for Hayes but regretted that in the process "you became the victims of every form of persecution and injury ... You were denied employment, driven from your homes, robbed of the earnings of years of honest industry, hunted for your lives like wild beasts, your families outraged and scattered, for no offense except your peaceful and firm determination to exercise your political rights." Ultimately, he explained,

by the recent decision and action of the President of the United States, I find myself unable longer to maintain my official rights, and I hereby announce to you that I am unwilling to prolong a struggle which can only bring further suffering upon those who engage in it ... I have hitherto been willing to ask you, Republicans, to risk all dangers and endure all hardships until relief should come from the government of the United States. That relief will never come. I cannot ask you to follow me further. In my best judgment I can no longer serve you by further resistance to the impending calamity.

The governor's words, though well meant, could hardly soothe those black South Carolina voters who had risked their lives to cast ballots in the recent election. "To think that Hayes could go back on us now," complained a man from Edgefield, "when we had to wade through blood to help place him where he is." Robert Brown Elliott and other leading South Carolina Republicans, however, wrote to Chamberlain to encourage his decision. They described themselves as "unanimous in the belief that to prolong the contest ... will be to incur the responsibility of keeping alive partisan prejudices which are ... detrimental to the best interests of the people of the state, and perhaps of precipitating a physical conflict that could have but one result to our defenseless constituency. We cannot afford to contribute, however indirectly, to such a catastrophe, even in the advocacy of what we know to be our rights."

April 10 was the day chosen for the formal transfer of power from Chamberlain to Hampton. At Columbia, the federal officer in charge at the statehouse, having calibrated his watch with that of the city hall clock, which was in turn calibrated with a telegraph office in Washington, marked the final minutes of Reconstruction in South Carolina. A reporter, who headlined his account "The Day of Deliverance," saw "a score of the colored special constables ... hanging about the entrance watching our movements with sullen, unfriendly glances," and "a confused crowd of perhaps 150 persons, mostly negroes ... moving about aimlessly, or ... engaged in low and dispirited conversation. Here and there were to be seen one or two smaller groups of white Republicans of the better sort similarly occupied, and all looking badly demoralized." As a nearby church tower began to toll the hour of twelve o'clock, the soldiers barked out the commands—"Attention, guard! Carry arms! Right shoulder arms! Two's right, march!" Before the bell had reached its fifth stroke the troops' heavy boots had tramped all the way down the statehouse corridor and reached the door. "Twelve strokes sounded, and the twelve long, weary wretched years of carpetbag misrule were tolled off one by one." When the last of the troops had gone, a huge bar was dropped into the brackets of the door.

The meticulous protocol with which so epochal a transition had come to pass may have helped render it anticlimatic; the rest of the day was reportedly quiet in the South Carolina capital. When in the afternoon the deposed governor Daniel Chamberlain left his office for the last time, his carriage was surrounded by a throng of citizens—but neither to cheer nor harass him: they were on their way to attend a circus recently arrived in town, and most, in their excitement, barely noticed the passing coach with its solitary occupant sitting behind curtains half-drawn.

T
HE FREEDOM TO PICK UP
and seek better prospects elsewhere is in many ways the story of America, and for its citizens something of a national birthright. It was, however, a privilege largely denied African Americans. Thus, when Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s, the nation could only look on with surprise and no small amount of concern as substantial numbers of Southern blacks began acting on the impulse to emigrate. Reports came from the Carolinas, Louisiana, and Texas of families hoarding their pennies, even canceling long-held plans to purchase small plots of land, in order to travel and begin life anew in distant Liberia or the American West.

This development and the collapse of the Freedman's Bank had a common origin—the loss of economic stability that had helped make Reconstruction viable. In the bank's case, poor management and a lack of oversight had exacerbated the effects of the crisis related to the Panic of 1873; in the rural South, regional financial strains related to the economic depression had lowered the price of cotton, placing greater pressure on the always precarious crop-lien, or sharecropping, system, in which the black sharecropper's profits were marginal even in the best of circumstances. Hard times weren't the only impetus, of course; the advent of home rule and the corresponding decline of civil and political rights, most notably the vote, accompanied by diabolical new forms of white-on-black violence, such as lynching, also led many to the point of despair.

The prospect of large numbers of blacks, particularly laborers, exiting their usual locales naturally created apprehension among whites. From the standpoint of history, the exodus movements of the late 1870s have a fairly distinct beginning and end, but at the time, the contours of the
situation were unknowable. No one—not Congress, nor black leaders such as P.B.S. Pinchback and Blanche K. Bruce, nor the white planters who watched with mounting alarm as their work force decamped—could predict with certainty how vast the movement would prove to be, or where it would end: at times, it appeared the entire black population of the former Confederacy might empty out.

What was most startling about the exodus was the determination of ordinary black citizens to take their fate into their own hands. No longer willing to be supplicants who demanded that things be done for them, they decided, with what meager means were available, to do for themselves. "The Negro," wrote Frederick Douglass, "long deemed to be too indolent and stupid to discover and adopt any rational measure to secure and defend his rights as a man, may now be congratulated...[on] the quiet withdrawal of his valuable bones and muscles from a condition of things which he considers no longer tolerable." By acting on their own initiative, the emigrants defied the myth that they possessed none; and with their newfound confidence they ultimately challenged even those very black spokesmen, including the wise Douglass, who had long presumed to know their interests.

Although the exodus fever of 1878–80 caught the nation largely unawares, the idea of an out-migration of blacks from the South was in fact almost as old as the United States. Robert Finley, the Presbyterian minister from New Jersey who in 1816 founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), envisioned it as a benevolent means of returning free American blacks to their native Africa, and in the process helping to Christianize "the Dark Continent." His associates included Francis Scott Key, the composer of "The Star-Spangled Banner"; the Kentucky senator Henry Clay; and the former president James Monroe of Virginia, an ardent supporter of repatriation who was instrumental in urging Congress to donate $100,000 to the cause. The ACS, in collaboration with the federal government, established in 1822 the Republic of Liberia on the western coast of Africa; the capital of the new nation was named Monrovia in honor of its leading benefactor.

Finley's original objectives for the organization unfortunately became diluted when slaveholders embraced the society as a means of ridding the country of free blacks, who were deemed a threat to slavery after the insurrections led by Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey and the advent of the abolition movement in the 1830s. "Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored," declared Clay at an ACS
meeting in 1827. "Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them, to the slaves and to the whites."

Not surprisingly, abolitionists and blacks themselves came to distrust the ACS as a front for slaveholders' interests. "The fostering agency of Liberian colonization was rotten in moral sentiment and hypocritical in its professions," Frederick Douglass later wrote. "With more than Jesuitical deceit and unscrupulousness, it enlisted on its side negro-haters and negro aspirations for freedom." Douglass, like William Lloyd Garrison and others, had faith that slavery would ultimately be abolished in America and that racial prejudice could be conquered over time; slaves, after all, were Americans, not Africans, and they too would someday become citizens. "We live here—have lived here—have a right to live here, and mean to live here," Douglass vowed. This faith, as well as the logistical and financial difficulty of transporting large numbers of people across the sea and situating them in a foreign land, hindered massive relocation. In its first half-century of existence, the ACS was estimated to have dispatched no more than 12,000 Americans to their new Liberian home, an average of 240 per year. Black interest in emigration increased after 1847, when Liberia became an independent nation, but waned when America began edging toward a decisive civil war that blacks, no less than whites, understood would likely determine the future of slavery.

The shifting and sometimes contradictory beliefs on this subject can be charted in the career of the abolitionist and physician Martin Delany, who after initially opposing emigration was converted by his travels in Africa in the 1850s; he later attempted to found a colony in Niger for black Americans. At a meeting of the National Negro Convention in 1854, he spoke favorably of "establishing the rights and power of the colored race" where such things were attainable (in Africa), rather than continuing to struggle against impossible odds in the United States. The Civil War, however, revived his confidence that blacks might yet attain equality in a reconstructed South, and as one of the few men of color to attain an officer's rank he served the Union cause with distinction. By the mid-1870s, however, he had become a critic of Reconstruction and a black nationalist, so disgusted with the Republican program that he backed the Democrats in the election of 1876 and returned to his earlier emigrationist views.

It seems astonishing, in retrospect, that anyone ever seriously considered the likelihood that America's enormous black population—four million at war's end—could actually be put aboard a steamship and
sent away. On the other hand, few, if any, models of bi- or multiracial democratic societies existed anywhere in the world, and in the early nineteenth century hardly any Americans, with the possible exception of abolitionists, genuinely envisioned a republic in which citizens would accept coexistence as equals with nonwhites. "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites," Thomas Jefferson had warned, "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." This imagined tableau of racial apocalypse brewed in the national imagination. "Do you intend to turn the three millions of slaves you may emancipate ... loose among the free whites of the Southern states where they are now held in bondage?" the Democratic congressman Robert Mallory of Kentucky demanded of his colleagues in 1862. "Do you intend, by a course like this, to inaugurate scenes like those which occurred in Haiti some years ago, a war of extermination between the white and black races? I hope not, for the sake of humanity."