Capitol Men (64 page)

Bruce spent the rest of his public life in the government's employ and, due to his easy comportment and level-headedness, became a key distributor of jobs and favors; powerful whites often consulted him about the advancement of other blacks to various positions, a deference also given to Booker T. Washington. Bruce took patronage very seriously, convinced that he helped his race each time he boosted a talented black man into a government job. "It is of supreme importance to us as a class that our best and not our worst men be put forward for official recognition, for by them will the public judge as to our worthiness and capacity," he once said. While still a senator, Bruce had managed to work out an arrangement with the Mississippi congressman L.Q.C. Lamar whereby Bruce agreed to no longer defend white Republicans who held patronage jobs in the state in exchange for being allowed to appoint respectable blacks. But he remained loyal to Mississippians of both races, once procuring a government clerkship for a white woman from his state who had washed up in the nation's capital, bereft of funds or friends, after her husband was sent to prison on a murder conviction. She initially demurred at the idea of asking any favor of Bruce, a man who might well once have been her slave, but thankfully took the position he offered. Characteristically, Bruce spent the last morning of his working life, in spring 1898, shoring up another black man's promotion in a government agency. After lunch he took ill and died a few weeks later of complications from Bright's disease and diabetes.

In the claustrophobic racial atmosphere of the late 1890s Bruce's restrained character, his courtly and undemanding ways, rendered him an appealing figure, a man from an earlier and better time, and his loss was sharply felt. "He was one of the apostles of kindness," noted the
Washington Post
, "one of the prophets of love and mutual forgiveness who stemmed the tide of rancor and misunderstanding...[and] taught by the example of his own daily life the gospel of a rational evolution."

Robert Brown Elliott's views of the potential of Southern race relations were somewhat less sanguine than those of some of his colleagues, but even he did not anticipate how completely the advances they had won would stall in the years following Reconstruction. It was especially disconcerting to him that the Democrats of South Carolina wanted more than to simply consolidate their gains after the election of 1876, but, with the "Report on Public Frauds," were intent on rewriting and distorting the story of one of the state's most productive eras. On a personal level, the atmosphere in redeemed South Carolina became so unwelcoming that Elliott could no longer earn a living as an attorney, partly because even blacks had come to understand that having black representation could diminish one's chances before a judge or jury.

Facing financial hardship, he was rescued by John Sherman, secretary of the treasury in the Hayes administration, who found the former congressman a patronage job as a customs inspector in the port of Charleston. It was a significant step down for a man whose ringing words on the House floor had once commanded the nation's headlines and inspired a popular lithograph, but Elliott took his new duties seriously and even appeared to enjoy the work. He returned the favor by campaigning ardently to secure Sherman's nomination for president at the 1880 Republican convention in Chicago. Elliott was allowed to address the convention, probably his last time on the national political stage, and although Sherman didn't get near the nomination, Elliott was gratified to see James Garfield, an admired colleague from the House, become the party's choice.

In May 1881 Elliott was forced to leave South Carolina when the customs service ordered him to New Orleans. Although disguised as a promotion, the transfer was not something Elliott wanted; he owed money, however; his wife Grace was in poor health, and he had little choice but to go where he was sent. His own strength had also become precarious. The previous summer, just after his appearance at the Chicago convention, Elliott had contracted malaria while on a customs inspection tour of the coastal areas of the Florida Panhandle, and the illness lingered. With the debilitation, his mood seemed to darken as well, and his enthusiasm for the job rapidly ebbed. After complaining to Washington about the conditions and personnel in the New Orleans Customs Office, he was released from the service and returned to work as a lawyer in private practice. For two years he and Grace struggled to stay afloat, living in apartments and boarding houses in New Orleans as he fought both his creditors and recurring bouts of tropical disease. He died at
age forty-two, on August 9, 1884, virtually unknown in the city, a black gentleman-pauper. Word of his passing reached Charleston, where the
News & Courier
headlined its obituary "Another of the South Carolina Thieves Gone to his Account."

P.B.S. Pinchback was known to keep a photograph of Elliott, among other black congressmen, on display in his home, although the two men apparently had a falling out once Elliott came to New Orleans, probably over patronage issues. Pinchback himself, after being dismissed by Congress in spring 1876, had remained the loyal Republican soldier, marching off to Indiana to campaign on behalf of his Senate sponsor, Oliver Morton. Partly this was to repay Morton's kindness, possibly to obligate future acts of patronage, or perhaps to simply avoid local election-year politics in Louisiana during the summer of 1876. Those elections devolved into their by-now-familiar chaos: Stephen Packard and C. C. Antoine were "elected" on the Republican ticket, while Francis T. Nicholls and Louis A. Wiltz "won" for the Democrats; as in South Carolina, dual inaugurations took place, with the state government, and the last local vestiges of Reconstruction, falling to the Democrats in spring 1877.

Pinchback, however, remained a political figure with considerable clout, describing himself in an 1879 letter to Blanche Bruce as "the liveliest corpse in the dead South." That year he attended the new Louisiana Constitutional Convention, which, dominated by the Democrats and the spirit of redemption, set out to undo much of the progress of the late 1860s. Although the convention was inimical to blacks, Pinchback retained enough influence to win a provision authorizing the legislature to create a state college for black Louisianians. Ex-president Grant visited New Orleans in 1880 to curry support for his quest for the Republican presidential nomination and a third term, and he made a point of seeking out Pinchback for an extended chat.

Like many others of his generation, Pinchback understood that the end of Reconstruction represented an end, also, to the old biracial abolitionist coalition that had guided racial progress in America since the 1830s, and he became active in efforts to create national civil rights organizations that would shift the responsibility for leadership onto blacks themselves. The Exoduster movement of 1878–80 had not pleased everyone in the national community of black leadership, but it had surely proved that black Americans were capable of shaping their own destiny. Led by T. Thomas Fortune and others, blacks organized themselves to tackle vital issues by founding the American Citizens Equal Rights Association in February 1890; the organization was dedicated to securing civil rights for all citizens and improving their moral, intellectual, and material interests. Pinchback was a high-ranking spokesman and took charge of organizing Louisiana. The association ultimately foundered, chiefly because the sensibility it embraced—defending and building on the rights gained in Reconstruction—had widely given way to the more gradualist doctrines of Booker T. Washington. At about the same time, black suffrage in the South virtually became a dead letter, as the number of black voters registered in Louisiana fell within the decade of the 1890s from 130,000 to 5,000. For Pinchback, one last tenet of a cherished era collapsed in 1902, when the New Orleans streetcars he had helped make available for all citizens were forcibly resegregated.

Increasingly finding himself an artifact of a time few knew or understood, his influence and health waning and his brand of political activism eclipsed, Pinchback left New Orleans and settled in Washington, where he and Nina lived out the rest of their days. Their son Bismarck, who had attended Yale to study medicine, and their daughter Nina died, and the two remaining children, Walter and Pinckney, were by now long gone from the house, Pinckney a pharmacist in Philadelphia, Walter an attorney. Nina's son, the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer, reflected later that Pinchback, conscious of his own unpolished background, may have too forcefully demanded that his children attain conventional academic distinction; all four Pinchback children spent time at Northern universities or finishing schools. "In doing all this, my grandfather had the very best intentions, without doubt. But ... though part of his nature was affectionate and sincerely good-wishing, another part was egotistical, domineering, and headstrong. With too little wisdom he cut his children's patterns, particularly the boys', and then tried to force them to fit in." Toomer recalled that Pinchback never relinquished his love of entertaining and fine things, of attending banquets and stag parties, and that even in Washington, many years and miles removed from the heady days of Reconstruction New Orleans, friends and family unfailingly addressed him as "Governor."

There was the occasional monument unveiling or testimonial dinner to attend, and he still corresponded and advised where he could, but for the most part he was the historically interesting black gentleman in coat and top hat who, it was said, had once been the governor of Louisiana. With his dignified bearing and handsomely trimmed Vandyke beard, he bore a strong resemblance in old age to the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, for whom, much to his amusement, he was occasionally mistaken in his perambulations around the capital. After Pinchback's death in 1921, when Toomer brought his grandfather's body back by train from Washington, barely a quorum of his gray-haired former associates gathered at the New Orleans depot. The local press took scant notice; the
Daily Picayune
headlined its short obituary "Negro Who Held State Office Dies" and inexcusably referred to Henry Clay Warmoth as "Womack."

While surviving black Reconstruction figures grew accustomed to such slights, John Roy Lynch of Mississippi chose to make a corrective response. Never relinquishing his egalitarian vision of American race relations, he became an active memoirist of the Reconstruction period because he was concerned that most historians and other commentators were distorting it. He would produce two informative books,
The Facts of Reconstruction
(1913) and an autobiography,
Reminiscences of an Active Life
(not published until 1970), but his most daring literary exploit was to challenge two of America's most prominent early historians of Reconstruction, James Ford Rhodes and Claude G. Bowers. Rhodes's multivolume history dealing with the war and Reconstruction,
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877,
appeared in 1906, although a decade passed before Lynch saw it. He then informed his friend George A. Myers, a black Ohioan who managed the barbershop in the lobby of Cleveland's Hollenden Hotel and who knew Rhodes, of his displeasure with the work's inaccuracy. Rhodes replied through Myers that Lynch's objections did not surprise him since he (Lynch) "was a severely partisan actor at the time while I, an earnest seeker after truth, am trying to hold a judicial balance and to tell the story without fear, favor, or prejudice." Myers offered to introduce the two men, but Rhodes declined, instead saying, "Why does not Mr. Lynch write a magazine article and show up my mistakes and inaccuracies and injustice?"

Taking Rhodes's suggestion, Lynch produced a lengthy two-part article titled "Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes," which appeared in the
Journal of Negro History
in October 1917 and April 1918 (both sections were published together in book form in 1922). Lynch began with a shot directly across the bow, writing of Rhodes's work, "I regret to say that, so far as the Reconstruction period is concerned, it is not only inaccurate and unreliable but it is the most biased, partisan, and prejudiced historical work I have ever read." He took issue with the very title of Rhodes's book, pointing out that in terms of the region's demographics, the South had actually enjoyed home rule, if that
phrase meant democratic rule by the broadest number of residents, only under the Reconstruction governments of the late 1860s and early 1870s. Lynch parodied Rhodes's contentions that it had been wrong to enfranchise blacks after the war, that those who entered politics were incompetent, or that they ever dominated Southern politics. He argued that blacks in elected offices were no more incompetent or corrupt than whites and that the Reconstruction governments achieved many significant breakthroughs; indeed, Lynch ventured that "the Southern reconstructed governments were the best governments those states ever had before or have ever had since." Myers sent Lynch's lawyerly article on to Rhodes with his own scribbled admonishment: "I think one of your mistakes was made in not seeing and talking with the prominent Negro participants that I could have put you in touch with."

Years later Lynch also laid siege to one of the most popular books ever written about Reconstruction, Claude G. Bowers's
The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln,
published in 1929. Bowers's entertaining work drew ruthless caricatures of Republicans, blacks, and carpetbaggers and offered a vivid purplish-prose account of the era's drama, while suggesting that the nation had erred in not accepting President Andrew Johnson's version of Reconstruction. To Bowers, a veteran author of popular nonfiction in the 1920s, the complete marginalization of blacks in American society was so much the entrenched status quo that congressional Reconstruction could perhaps only appear as a sad, painful burlesque; but Lynch was merciless in taking the white author to task for numerous inaccuracies.

His high-society marriage to Ella Somerville having ended in a bitter divorce, Lynch ultimately married a woman much younger than him and lived out the rest of his ninety-two years in Chicago, dying there in 1939.