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In many ways the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last hurrah of Republican Radicals. Individual Radicals would remain active; there would be occasional attempts to enact “force bills” to implement the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction and secure freedmen their rights, but the splintering of the old Radicals into liberal Republicans, Stalwarts, and antimonopolists signaled that other issues had taken precedence and that new alliances were emerging.
the loss of Stalwart Republican hegemony did not mean the ascent of liberal reformers. Liberals learned their lesson in 1872: they were not competitive in national elections. Their surprising influence over Grant and their successful defense of hard money in 1874 only underlined their electoral weakness when voters repudiated the Republicans in that year’s election.
Antimonopolism was a rising force, but reform proved neither easy nor pretty. For the rest of the century, antimonopolists put railroads on the defensive.
Treaty making ended because of the backlash to James Joy’s attempts to use the Osage Indian treaty to transfer Indian land directly to his railroad. Joy had inadvertently united popular grievance with existing congressional rivalries. The Constitution reserved to the Senate the power of advice and consent on treaties, and the House had long resented being shut out. Since the House had to appropriate money for Indian Affairs and land purchases, it used its power of the purse to tack an amendment onto an appropriations bill in 1871 declaring that there would be no new treaties, although tribes
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but agreements that were virtually identical to treaties and approved by both the House and Senate continued to be negotiated.
By 1872 the peace policy was in full flower. Churches controlled seventy Indian agencies containing a quarter of a million people. Churchmen proved no more honest, vigorous, or competent than the old Indian agents. The widespread corruption of the Interior Department continued.
To train Indians for contract freedom, the government would confine them and subject them to a regimen of industrial education and labor until they could demonstrate sufficient “civilization.” If they tried to escape, they would be arrested and returned to reservations. Their education in freedom and civilization had devolved into coercion, whose rationale sounded much like the slaveholders’ justifications for the slavery just ended in the South: the care and feeding of an inferior people who needed to be forced to labor and adopt Christian civilization. Some of that coercion would ironically
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Grant abandoned efforts to enforce the Fort Laramie Treaty. With Secretary of the Interior Chandler, both corrupt and incompetent, and with the press falsely reporting the region already occupied by miners, the government ordered the army to ease up on efforts to evict intruders, and Grant acquiesced. He sent the Allison Commission to demand the cession of the Black Hills. The Lakotas refused.
early December 1875, Chandler demanded all Indians leave the Yellowstone River Valley, where they had a perfect right to be, and return to their agencies. If they did not, they would be declared hostile.
In February the secretary of war ordered troops to force to them to return to their agencies.
In the spring of 1876 the Americans had a general Indian war on their hands. The Lakotas and their allies stymied and beat back American troops invading their country.
The Lakotas, after defeating General Crook’s column on the Rosebud, formed a large encampment on the river they called the Greasy Grass and the Americans the Little Bighorn.
There were probably about twelve hundred lodges in six separate tribal circles that extended three miles along the river. Together they numbered around two thousand warriors,
On June 25, 1876, Custer struck the village on the Greasy Grass.
Every man in the five companies with Custer died, and Reno’s command barely escaped the same fate.
The Little Bighorn was a minor battle compared not only to the Civil War but to the losses American armies suffered against Indians in the wars of the early republic, but shocking because of its timing. Such defeats were, as the commissioner had claimed, the things of the past. Indians were supposedly no match for the army of a modern industrial nation. When news of the battle came during the Exposition, Americans greeted it with incredulity and outrage.
The denouement of Custer’s defeat played out over the next year. If summer belonged to warriors, winter still belonged to the army.
By the end of winter, the Lakotas and their Cheyenne allies had either surrendered or, like Sitting Bull, fled into Canada.
The American press turned warfare on the Great Plains into “Savage War,” a trope they would use for the rest of the century to describe a country in the midst of bitter and bloody conflict. “Savage War” could be put to work to turn selected social conflicts—between workers and capital, immigrants and the native born, blacks and whites—into equivalents of the Indian wars, which were understood as conflicts between “savagery” and “civilization.”
Over the longer run Custer’s defeat, like the Alamo, became an iconic American battle. On the surface, this seems quite odd. Why celebrate defeat, particularly catastrophic defeat, at the hands of what by any measure was a weaker foe? The answer was that such defeats provided justification for conquest. An invasion of Lakota lands became the noble defense of outnumbered white men against savage warriors. Americans, by this logic, did not invade Indian lands; they simply defended themselves against ruthless enemies. Their ultimate victory was not the work of invasion, conquest, and empire. It
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For the government, however, the war against the Lakotas changed little. In his report, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Q. Smith in 1876 still spoke of Indian policy as a largely administrative problem, one in which Indians would have little say. It was not, he thought, in the best interests of either Indians or the United States to observe the treaties strictly. The United States would give Indians a “secure home” and “just and equitable laws,” but this was a matter for the government, and not Indians, to decide. Public necessity was the supreme law.
Mississippi, with its large black population, was a state that the Republicans should have been able to retain in fair elections, but since 1870 “White Men’s Clubs” had dedicated themselves to the restoration of white supremacy. They believed black suffrage was “wrong in principle and disastrous in effect.” Members vowed not to hire any black man who voted Republican, but their most effective tactic was violence. Whites created “dead books” that contained the names of black Republicans. By 1875 the murder of black people, particularly political leaders, had become routine. White militia
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Grant acknowledged federal responsibility, but his attorney general told Ames that the government was “tired of the[se] autumnal outbursts in the South.” He would act only after Mississippi raised a militia to suppress the violence. Such an answer ignored the political realities in Mississippi, where well-armed whites threatened to wipe a black militia “from the face of the earth.”
According to John R. Lynch, the only Mississippi Republican congressman to gain reelection in 1875, Grant told him that he decided not to send troops to Mississippi after Ohio Republicans warned him that doing so would cost the Republicans Ohio in 1876. Without Ohio, the Republicans’ chances of retaining the presidency were nil. Action in Mississippi would also hurt Grant’s chances to woo back the Liberal Republicans It was a straightforward political calculation.
In the 1870s Grant and the Republicans increasingly focused on Catholicism as a danger that could unite both liberals and Stalwarts. Henry Ward Beecher regarded the Catholic Church as unsuited for the age and for a democratic United States.
During the Civil War, the Republican press had paired popery and slavery as “incompatible with the spirit of the age” and doomed to extinction. With the defeat of the slaveholding elite in the South, the Catholic Church was the country’s only explicitly conservative institution;
The Civil War had led some evangelicals and many Calvinists, some of whom blamed the early defeats of Union troops during the Civil War on God’s displeasure with Northern sins, to demand the country specifically identify itself as a Protestant republic. They denounced the North’s toleration of slavery as a collective sin, but they also pointed to the absence of any mention of God in the Constitution. Because the Constitution failed to acknowledge that all political authority derived from God, said the theologian Horace Bushnell, it created “no feeling of authority, or even respect among the
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Catholic immigrants further threatened the country’s identity as God’s chosen nation for spreading Protestantism across the world.
The result was the Christian Amendment of 1863. It proposed to change the Preamble of the Constitution to read (with changes in italics): “We, the People of the United States, recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus, the Messiah, the Savior and Lord of all, in order to form a more perfect union…
Among all but the Calvinists of the National Reform Association, the push for the amendment lost steam with Union victories,
After the war, the goal of the amendment’s proponents was to arouse the “Christian people of America” into a movement “to carry out the religious idea of government in all its practical applications.” The program included Sabbath laws, the Bible in public schools, marriage and divorce laws that “conformed to the law of Christ,” a purge of “immoral and irreligious men” from office, and confining voting to “moral men” and “fearers of God.”
The pope’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors had condemned the separation of church and state and attacked education outside the control of the Catholic Church. Although not all Catholics concurred, American bishops and church publications denounced the public schools as either godless or sectarian and denied the state had any role in education. Removing the Bible from the public schools would not appease them, because they opposed secular schools as fully as Protestant schools.
Rutherford B. Hayes offered the Republicans a way of distracting voters from the Specie Payment Resumption Act by giving the Democrats a gaudy Roman albatross of their own. He had used anti-Catholicism to trump the gold standard in Ohio when he ran for governor in 1875; the same tactic could work in the presidential election.
The Democrats also created avoidable problems for themselves after taking control of Congress in 1875. They dismissed congressional employees, many of whom were disabled Union veterans, and replaced them with disabled Confederate veterans.
Election Day 1876 was the first attempt in American history to create a single day during which all the nation’s voters would cast their ballots: the Tuesday after the first Monday in November in even numbered years. Because of some state constitutional provisions, the effort did not completely succeed, but it came close.
He framed civil service reform, too, as a matter of principle and morality, but there were also practical interests at stake. The power of appointment vested in the president under the Constitution had drifted into Congress, creating a patronage system that made office holding a reward “for services to party leaders.” This, although he did not say so, buttressed the power of state machines such as Roscoe Conkling’s in New York.
For the next week, Hayes continued to think that he had been beaten, but his operatives remained at work. They recognized that the election would come down to the disputed votes in the Southern states still under Republican rule: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida.
The Democrats had relied on fraud, violence, and coercion to suppress the black vote, and the Republicans marshaled fraud of their own and their control of the returning boards to count out the Democrats.
In Florida, first the courts and then the new Democratic legislature had intervened, resulting in three different counts, one for Hayes and two for Tilden.
When Hayes carried Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, he seemingly had snatched the victory from Tilden, but the Democrats challenged and invalidated one of the electors in Oregon, leaving the candidates stalemated at 184 Electoral College votes apiece.
After the College met on December 6 to cast its votes, Congress still had to convene and count them. At this point the dispute became impossibly arcane because of the nebulous wording of the Twelfth Amendment. It provided for the counting of electoral votes, and the legal and constitutional status of congressional joint rules, which allowed challenges to the electoral votes. Were the rules constitutional? Were they even in force if, as was the case, the Senate had repealed them but the House had not? Would the election be decided by having the president of the Senate, Rep. Thomas Ferry of
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as the two parties, realizing that the Republican Senate could stalemate the Democratic House and vice versa, struggled to create a Federal Electoral Commission drawn from the Supreme Court, Senate, and House to resolve the crisis. Each side bargained and bet, and the bet came down to a single man: Joseph Bradley, an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
Justice Bradley voted with the Republicans on every single issue in dispute. Hayes had 185 electoral votes.
now the December compromise returned without the Texas and Pacific. Hayes would not enforce the civil rights laws in the South; he would not deploy federal troops; he would abandon the freedmen to the promises of Southern Democrats that they would recognize their political and civil equality.
Hayes made only symbolic concessions to the black Republicans whom he abandoned. He nominated Douglass as marshal of the District of Columbia, essentially the chief federal law enforcement officer in the capital, reporting directly to the attorney general.
Reconstruction took a long time to die. Its deathwatch had begun when the Democrats captured the House in 1873, but death did not immediately ensue. With Democrats in control of the House, it became much harder to enforce existing civil rights legislation and impossible to pass new legislation, but sporadic attempts to resuscitate the patient would continue into the 1880s.
After 1877 federal troops would for the rest of the nineteenth century never be deployed to protect the constitutional rights of black citizens.30
When the Republicans acted forcibly against terror, they prevailed. The decision not to do so killed their party figuratively and literally.
Above all the new industrial republic erupted in conflict, disorder, fear, and anger. Workers—largely immigrants—demonstrated their power to disrupt the nation; their targets in this case were often railroad corporations,
Using troops in a strike represented a more radical extension of federal power than using them to protect voters in the South, where there was specific legislation that sanctioned their use. The loudest demands for troops came from railroad executives such as Garrett and Scott. They controlled so many state officials that they sometimes seemed to forget they were not elected officials themselves and could not ask the president for soldiers. Governors had to do that.
