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urged the state’s eleven thousand eligible black electors to vote Republican to ensure the “defeat and ruin of the so-called Democratic party, our most inveterate enemy.”
Nevertheless, African Americans would overwhelmingly identify with—and be identified with—the Republican Party, to such a degree that it would be called by its enemies the “Black Republican” Party.
In a far more satisfying response to rioters, Republicans gave blacks not alms but guns. At one point during the upheaval, when Union League members huddled impotently in their barricaded headquarters, they vowed that if they escaped alive they would send a regiment of black troops to the front, first marching them through the very streets then ruled by the rioters. Now they made good their pledge.
