Guildencrantz
Scioto Region STATEPLAN Committee, Vice Chair
- Location
- Cowtown, Ohio, U.S.A.
So if I understand correctly, there were more Exodusters ITTL than IOTL, right @Sabot Cat?
Saving Reconstruction
- Thread starter Sabot Cat
- Start date
- Timeline 19th Century
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
There are more Exodusters than there were at this point in time OTL, but not more than at this point c. 1879. That is to say, about 20,000 people sought refuge in Kansas.
- Pronouns
- Their/Them
Hey Sabot, nice timeline you got there
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Interesting TL. Here's hoping the Klan gets taken down once Reconstruction gets encated once more.
Chapter 3: The Cross of Gold
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Chapter 3: The Cross of Gold
Two consecutive presidential losses and going from a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress to becoming the minority party, all with nothing to show for it, left the Radical Democracy party in disarray. Were white Americans simply not ready to embrace the prospect of multi-racial democracy? Was the leap from slave to fellow voter too much for most white people to grasp? James G. Blaine stepped down as leader of the caucus, succeeded by James A. Garfield. Although Garfield had supported black suffrage, he believed that readmission of the Southern states had been unjustly politicized by the Radicals. He further thought that the Radicals had taken the wrong side on the tariff issue, and the party could seek to become the party of business by favoring free trade as well as the gold standard.
Representative James A. Garfield and Speaker Michael C. Kerr
Unionist Speaker Michael C. Kerr of Indiana was also in favor of hard money despite his rural constituency being largely opposed. He helped to secure the passage of the Coinage Act of 1873, which was signed into law by President Hancock on April 2, 1873. The bill ended the coining of silver, and functionally adopted a monometallic gold standard for the nation. Most Radicals voted against the legislation out of nearly contrarian opposition to any of the new President's proposals despite being sound money men themselves. However, the Coinage Act would have some unforeseen consequences. As the money supply of the nation had been reduced by the adoption of the gold standard, interest rates soared. Banks, who needed capital to invest in enterprises like railroads, started to fail in the face of a retracting monetary supply. One of the largest banks, Jay Cooke & Company, folded in October 1873, setting off a wave of mass layoffs and bank failures. Wages and grain prices were slashed in half, over one hundred railroads went bankrupt, and unemployment reached unprecedented levels in what was recognized to be the worst economic crisis in the nations' history.
A bank run in New York during the Panic of 1873
As net debtors, farmers were also negatively impacted by the deflation accompanying the resumption of the gold standard. The Unionists in Southern state governments were caught flat-footed by the economic crisis. As the chief ally of the affluent planter class, the Unionists stressed the importance of low debt and low taxes. Thus, after the devastation visited upon the South in the wake of the Civil War, the Unionist administrations of the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia declined to raise the taxes needed to make more than minimal investments in infrastructure and education. As the South fell into depression, this critical lack of industry or support caused many farmers to be subject to absolute poverty.
In Alabama, a coalition of laborers and farmers of all races began to form chapters of the Greenback-Labor Party. Jefferson County was the center of this new movement, especially among the coal miners of Birmingham. They opposed the convict-lease system because the practically slave conditions for African-American workers depressed wages for white workers. They were joined by the farmers in the largely rural Tennessee Valley who sought an end to the monetary policies that had devastated their business. James Madison Pickens, a Disciples of Christ preacher and former Confederate soldier, became a leading figure in this burgeoning movement with his pro-laborer newsletter, the South Christian Monthly.
Robert Meacham
Florida's African-American leaders agitated for improved conditions and civil rights against Unionist opposition. Robert Meacham, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for rewriting the state constitution. George W. Witherspoon urged African-Americans working in agriculture to demand wages, instead of laboring under the systems of sharecropping or tenant farming. The AME Church's ministers also led the charge in Georgia, where Henry McNeal Turner traveled throughout the state to recruit congregants as he had recruited soldiers to the First Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. Tunis Campbell was an African-American Georgian who had long participated in politics from leading an anti-colonization society to establishing schools and attending the meetings of the Colored Conventions Movement. After the war, he became a land supervisor for the Freedman's Bureau in Georgia and pressed the government for black suffrage.
Henry McNeal Turner
Mississippi farmers were devastated by the depression, as the overproduction of cotton had already depreciated the value of their assets. The average value of a farm in Mississippi went from $5,169 to $1,203, or a 77% decline, from 1860 to 1870. The Mississippi Greenback Party was founded in 1874, calling for honest elections, fewer state employees, a graduated income tax, and inflation. Their platform dovetailed with that of the Radicals as it had in Alabama as they called for an end to the convict-lease system on the grounds that it hurt already low wages in the state. Criminal lawyer turned Confederate brigadier general Reuben Davis became the key organizing figure of the new Greenback movement in Mississippi.
In North Carolina, state representative and journalist Leonidas L. Polk used his newspaper The Ansonian to call for reforms beneficial for farmers. He wrote, "Our farmers buy everything to raise cotton, and raise cotton to buy everything, and, after going through this treadmill business for years, they lie down and die and leave their families penniless." Mountainous anti-Confederate whites, urban professionals, and manufacturers who supported higher tariffs began to form an uneasy coalition with poor white and black farmers from the east in calling for an end to the present Unionist administration on both a state and federal level. Among the increasingly standard planks of inflationary monetary police, the newly ascendant North Carolina Greenback Party hoped to raise taxes for public education and other internal improvements.
South Carolina was particularly hard hit by the lack of improvements following the Civil War. One-third of the male population ages eighteen to fifty-five had died during the Civil War, and the state endured over a decade of squalor. The Unionist administration made little to no investments in public education, infrastructure, prisons, or charitable institutions. The Black Codes of the state were among some of the most repressive in the nation, reducing African-Americans to slavery in all but name. However, the lower prices that this slave labor enabled actually made the financial crisis worse, as farm prices were in freefall all across the nation to the point of unprofitability.
William Mahone
In June 1874, William Mahone, a former Confederate general and a railroad executive, as well as newspaper editor and lawyer Harrison H. Riddleberger, led the Readjuster Convention in Richmond, Virginia. The first Readjuster State Convention was notable for having black attendees, and for adopting a platform committed to investments in infrastructure and education, which would be paid for through the readjustment of state debts to the North throughout the South. The Readjusters spoke out against the Southern planters and the Northern bankers, elites that profited off of the misery of the working poor regardless of their race. The Farmers' Alliance in central Texas was founded around the same time by ranchers on the basis of the same issues. However, unlike the Readjusters, they were an exclusively white organization. In the North, a similar movement of laborers and farmers assembled in Indianapolis to establish the national Greenback Party in August 1874. Their central concern was the adoption of paper currency to relieve debts and bring an end to the depression, while maintaining the Radical line on civil rights issues. Both the Greenbackers and the Farmers were founded with or developed ties to the Granger movement, a nonpartisan group that advanced the interests of farmers, as well as temperance and women's rights.
The Radicals were able to seize upon the issue of currency, if not decisively. During the midterm Radical Republican Convention in September, a plank for the re-adoption of the bimetallic standard was sponsored by the Western delegates, who represented States with a stake in the silver mining industry. A more radical proposal for the exclusive use of greenbacks as a means to ease deflation was rejected. The Radicals' economic plan was moderate inflation via the issuance of greenbacks, and directing the U.S. Treasury to make regular purchases of silver to be minted. The party also echoed calls from the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union Army veteran fraternal organization with hundreds of thousands of members, to secure pensions for those in service in the Civil War. Finally, echoing arguments the Republicans made in the antebellum period regarding Slave Power, the Radicals made an economic case for black suffrage. They argued that slave labor conditions for African-American workers in the South depressed wages and agricultural prices. In order to secure economic freedom for themselves, African-Americans needed their right to vote established by a constitutional amendment.
In the 1874 Congressional elections, the Radicals defeated 102 Unionist incumbents in the House and two Unionists in the Senate. This gave the Radicals over seventy percent of the seats in the House, 208-84, and a tie in the Senate, 37-37. The Unionists did not lose any seats in the South aside from Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia. This was not because of any stubborn feeling on part of the voters, however. For over a decade, the Unionists had been running on antipathy for the north and racial grievances. The infamous Pike County Unionist Party platform in Alabama stated: "Nothing is left to the white man's party but social ostracism of all those who act, sympathize or side with the negro party." The Unionists spoke to the fears and prejudices of the electorate, but they failed to address the most pressing issue of the day: currency. The Unionists ardently stood by the gold standard at a time when Southern white farmers were reeling from its deflationary effects. To disenfranchise these poor voters, many Southern state governments passed poll taxes and literacy tests. For all of the elections where even this did not prove to be enough, the Democrats committed voter fraud to maintain power.
During the Congressional recess, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case Adams v. Louisiana on February 9, 1875, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was unconstitutional. It was a 7-3 decision, with Chief Justice Melville Fuller writing the majority opinion joined by Associate Justices Nathan Clifford, John Cadwalader, Matthew Deady, Wilson McCandless, Thomas Howard DuVal, and Rensselaer Nelson, with a dissent by Associate Justices Samuel Freeman Miller, David Davis, and Noah Swayne. Fuller held that, pursuant to Dred Scott v. Sanford, any one of African descent cannot become a citizen of the United States by statute and thus the African-American plaintiff Joseph Adams had no standing to sue the state of Louisiana for discrimination. The opinion also implicitly recognized the administration of purported Governor John McEnery, established by a coup against the elected government during the Battle of Liberty Place, as legitimate. Public opinion against the court's ruling was overwhelmingly and immediately negative. The state legislature of California ratified the Reconstruction Amendment in response, which would constitutionally enshrine the citizenship of all Americans regardless of race or color, but the amendment was still two states short of ratification.
Chief Justice Melville Fuller
Dissatisfaction with the government would only grow as Congress was called into session. Unionist Speaker Kerr had lost his seat in Indiana, giving way to the speakership of Radical James A. Garfield, who resisted calls from his party not to seat the Southern Unionist delegations. Garfield instead sought to bolster the Radicals' appeal through tactically submitting popular measures like pensions for Civil War veterans, only for them to be voted down in the Senate by the Unionists. With the Supreme Court's ruling in Adams v. Louisiana,and the current legislative deadlock in the Senate, agitation to fundamentally change the constitution began to spread. Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana urged for a new constitutional convention to "resolve sectional disputes", while the state legislatures of Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Vermont passed resolutions calling for a general Article V Convention to propose new amendments.
Garfield opposed fundamental changes to the government, and despite wielding the Speakership, he did not have a clear path to the presidential nomination. Radicals viewed him as too moderate for the current political climate, and many in the Radical caucus opposed his anti-tariff stance. Senator Morton campaigned to Garfield's left, supporting hard Reconstruction and soft money. Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York eventually emerged as a compromise candidate, a staunch advocate of both civil rights and the resumption of specie. Conkling had also ultimately won over the Radicals through his opposition to civil service reform, something Garfield and his supporters had favored. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts was selected as Conkling's running mate as a concession to Garfield's faction. Meanwhile, despite the disarray the country was in, President Winfield Scott Hancock was easily re-nominated by the National Union Party for a second term. He was aided by the fact that former President Andrew Johnson had established the party as a personality vehicle, and thus the nomination process was designed to be incredibly favorable to an incumbent president. Hancock campaigned on the slightly rebounding economy and presided over a grand centennial on July 4, 1876. Unionist newspapers contrasted the valorous Hancock with the lecherous Conkling, who was widely rumored to be a womanizer.
The inflationists were also displeased with Conklin's anti-inflationist stance, as the Greenback Party began to stand candidates for election. In St. Louis, Missouri, the Greenback National Convention of 1876 was held. They nominated Associate Justice David Davis and former Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania, the former of which saw a surge in popularity in the wake of his dissent in Adams v. Louisiana. The Farmers and the Readjusters did not nominate their own candidate, and instead endorsed the Davis/Curtin ticket in their respective States. The Greenback platform was brief, calling primarily for the end to the gold standard and civil service reform. They also called for universal citizenship, suffrage and civil rights for African-Americans, as well as the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendment to help to secure these. There were pragmatic reasons for calling for these, as Greenback voters in the South were prevented from voting Unionist state governments out of power, in part because of the disenfranchising measures that were originally targeted at African-Americans. Radicals were afraid that the Greenback Party could split the anti-Unionist vote as had happened in the 1868 elections with the Straight-Out Republican Party. The Radicals thus took advantage of their control of most of the state legislatures to pass electoral fusion laws in most states being contested, although Greenbackers were divided in whether or not they should fuse with a major party in most races.
The fusion effort ultimately did not prove to be necessary, as Senator Conkling won in a landslide victory over President Hancock, carrying Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The Greenback ticket successfully carried California, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Nevada, while also securing 39 seats in the House and four seats overall in the Senate. The Unionists lost another five seats in the House and a net loss of three seats in the Senate, while the Radicals lost 34 seats in the House and had a net gain of zero in the Senate. Thus, the Radicals controlled the White House, and with the Greenback Party, the Congress. The Radicals also took full control of the state legislative chambers in Delaware and Kentucky, where they ratified the Reconstruction Amendment – thereby making it the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Whether or not the conservative Speaker Garfield or a vocal Unionist minority utilizing the filibuster in Congress would prevail over the Reconstruction vision of newly inaugurated President Roscoe Conkling remained an open question.
Two consecutive presidential losses and going from a two-thirds majority in both chambers of Congress to becoming the minority party, all with nothing to show for it, left the Radical Democracy party in disarray. Were white Americans simply not ready to embrace the prospect of multi-racial democracy? Was the leap from slave to fellow voter too much for most white people to grasp? James G. Blaine stepped down as leader of the caucus, succeeded by James A. Garfield. Although Garfield had supported black suffrage, he believed that readmission of the Southern states had been unjustly politicized by the Radicals. He further thought that the Radicals had taken the wrong side on the tariff issue, and the party could seek to become the party of business by favoring free trade as well as the gold standard.
Representative James A. Garfield and Speaker Michael C. Kerr
A bank run in New York during the Panic of 1873
As net debtors, farmers were also negatively impacted by the deflation accompanying the resumption of the gold standard. The Unionists in Southern state governments were caught flat-footed by the economic crisis. As the chief ally of the affluent planter class, the Unionists stressed the importance of low debt and low taxes. Thus, after the devastation visited upon the South in the wake of the Civil War, the Unionist administrations of the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia declined to raise the taxes needed to make more than minimal investments in infrastructure and education. As the South fell into depression, this critical lack of industry or support caused many farmers to be subject to absolute poverty.
In Alabama, a coalition of laborers and farmers of all races began to form chapters of the Greenback-Labor Party. Jefferson County was the center of this new movement, especially among the coal miners of Birmingham. They opposed the convict-lease system because the practically slave conditions for African-American workers depressed wages for white workers. They were joined by the farmers in the largely rural Tennessee Valley who sought an end to the monetary policies that had devastated their business. James Madison Pickens, a Disciples of Christ preacher and former Confederate soldier, became a leading figure in this burgeoning movement with his pro-laborer newsletter, the South Christian Monthly.
Robert Meacham
Florida's African-American leaders agitated for improved conditions and civil rights against Unionist opposition. Robert Meacham, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for rewriting the state constitution. George W. Witherspoon urged African-Americans working in agriculture to demand wages, instead of laboring under the systems of sharecropping or tenant farming. The AME Church's ministers also led the charge in Georgia, where Henry McNeal Turner traveled throughout the state to recruit congregants as he had recruited soldiers to the First Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War. Tunis Campbell was an African-American Georgian who had long participated in politics from leading an anti-colonization society to establishing schools and attending the meetings of the Colored Conventions Movement. After the war, he became a land supervisor for the Freedman's Bureau in Georgia and pressed the government for black suffrage.
Henry McNeal Turner
Mississippi farmers were devastated by the depression, as the overproduction of cotton had already depreciated the value of their assets. The average value of a farm in Mississippi went from $5,169 to $1,203, or a 77% decline, from 1860 to 1870. The Mississippi Greenback Party was founded in 1874, calling for honest elections, fewer state employees, a graduated income tax, and inflation. Their platform dovetailed with that of the Radicals as it had in Alabama as they called for an end to the convict-lease system on the grounds that it hurt already low wages in the state. Criminal lawyer turned Confederate brigadier general Reuben Davis became the key organizing figure of the new Greenback movement in Mississippi.
In North Carolina, state representative and journalist Leonidas L. Polk used his newspaper The Ansonian to call for reforms beneficial for farmers. He wrote, "Our farmers buy everything to raise cotton, and raise cotton to buy everything, and, after going through this treadmill business for years, they lie down and die and leave their families penniless." Mountainous anti-Confederate whites, urban professionals, and manufacturers who supported higher tariffs began to form an uneasy coalition with poor white and black farmers from the east in calling for an end to the present Unionist administration on both a state and federal level. Among the increasingly standard planks of inflationary monetary police, the newly ascendant North Carolina Greenback Party hoped to raise taxes for public education and other internal improvements.
South Carolina was particularly hard hit by the lack of improvements following the Civil War. One-third of the male population ages eighteen to fifty-five had died during the Civil War, and the state endured over a decade of squalor. The Unionist administration made little to no investments in public education, infrastructure, prisons, or charitable institutions. The Black Codes of the state were among some of the most repressive in the nation, reducing African-Americans to slavery in all but name. However, the lower prices that this slave labor enabled actually made the financial crisis worse, as farm prices were in freefall all across the nation to the point of unprofitability.
William Mahone
In June 1874, William Mahone, a former Confederate general and a railroad executive, as well as newspaper editor and lawyer Harrison H. Riddleberger, led the Readjuster Convention in Richmond, Virginia. The first Readjuster State Convention was notable for having black attendees, and for adopting a platform committed to investments in infrastructure and education, which would be paid for through the readjustment of state debts to the North throughout the South. The Readjusters spoke out against the Southern planters and the Northern bankers, elites that profited off of the misery of the working poor regardless of their race. The Farmers' Alliance in central Texas was founded around the same time by ranchers on the basis of the same issues. However, unlike the Readjusters, they were an exclusively white organization. In the North, a similar movement of laborers and farmers assembled in Indianapolis to establish the national Greenback Party in August 1874. Their central concern was the adoption of paper currency to relieve debts and bring an end to the depression, while maintaining the Radical line on civil rights issues. Both the Greenbackers and the Farmers were founded with or developed ties to the Granger movement, a nonpartisan group that advanced the interests of farmers, as well as temperance and women's rights.
The Radicals were able to seize upon the issue of currency, if not decisively. During the midterm Radical Republican Convention in September, a plank for the re-adoption of the bimetallic standard was sponsored by the Western delegates, who represented States with a stake in the silver mining industry. A more radical proposal for the exclusive use of greenbacks as a means to ease deflation was rejected. The Radicals' economic plan was moderate inflation via the issuance of greenbacks, and directing the U.S. Treasury to make regular purchases of silver to be minted. The party also echoed calls from the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union Army veteran fraternal organization with hundreds of thousands of members, to secure pensions for those in service in the Civil War. Finally, echoing arguments the Republicans made in the antebellum period regarding Slave Power, the Radicals made an economic case for black suffrage. They argued that slave labor conditions for African-American workers in the South depressed wages and agricultural prices. In order to secure economic freedom for themselves, African-Americans needed their right to vote established by a constitutional amendment.
In the 1874 Congressional elections, the Radicals defeated 102 Unionist incumbents in the House and two Unionists in the Senate. This gave the Radicals over seventy percent of the seats in the House, 208-84, and a tie in the Senate, 37-37. The Unionists did not lose any seats in the South aside from Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia. This was not because of any stubborn feeling on part of the voters, however. For over a decade, the Unionists had been running on antipathy for the north and racial grievances. The infamous Pike County Unionist Party platform in Alabama stated: "Nothing is left to the white man's party but social ostracism of all those who act, sympathize or side with the negro party." The Unionists spoke to the fears and prejudices of the electorate, but they failed to address the most pressing issue of the day: currency. The Unionists ardently stood by the gold standard at a time when Southern white farmers were reeling from its deflationary effects. To disenfranchise these poor voters, many Southern state governments passed poll taxes and literacy tests. For all of the elections where even this did not prove to be enough, the Democrats committed voter fraud to maintain power.
During the Congressional recess, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case Adams v. Louisiana on February 9, 1875, ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was unconstitutional. It was a 7-3 decision, with Chief Justice Melville Fuller writing the majority opinion joined by Associate Justices Nathan Clifford, John Cadwalader, Matthew Deady, Wilson McCandless, Thomas Howard DuVal, and Rensselaer Nelson, with a dissent by Associate Justices Samuel Freeman Miller, David Davis, and Noah Swayne. Fuller held that, pursuant to Dred Scott v. Sanford, any one of African descent cannot become a citizen of the United States by statute and thus the African-American plaintiff Joseph Adams had no standing to sue the state of Louisiana for discrimination. The opinion also implicitly recognized the administration of purported Governor John McEnery, established by a coup against the elected government during the Battle of Liberty Place, as legitimate. Public opinion against the court's ruling was overwhelmingly and immediately negative. The state legislature of California ratified the Reconstruction Amendment in response, which would constitutionally enshrine the citizenship of all Americans regardless of race or color, but the amendment was still two states short of ratification.
Chief Justice Melville Fuller
Dissatisfaction with the government would only grow as Congress was called into session. Unionist Speaker Kerr had lost his seat in Indiana, giving way to the speakership of Radical James A. Garfield, who resisted calls from his party not to seat the Southern Unionist delegations. Garfield instead sought to bolster the Radicals' appeal through tactically submitting popular measures like pensions for Civil War veterans, only for them to be voted down in the Senate by the Unionists. With the Supreme Court's ruling in Adams v. Louisiana,and the current legislative deadlock in the Senate, agitation to fundamentally change the constitution began to spread. Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana urged for a new constitutional convention to "resolve sectional disputes", while the state legislatures of Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Vermont passed resolutions calling for a general Article V Convention to propose new amendments.
Garfield opposed fundamental changes to the government, and despite wielding the Speakership, he did not have a clear path to the presidential nomination. Radicals viewed him as too moderate for the current political climate, and many in the Radical caucus opposed his anti-tariff stance. Senator Morton campaigned to Garfield's left, supporting hard Reconstruction and soft money. Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York eventually emerged as a compromise candidate, a staunch advocate of both civil rights and the resumption of specie. Conkling had also ultimately won over the Radicals through his opposition to civil service reform, something Garfield and his supporters had favored. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts was selected as Conkling's running mate as a concession to Garfield's faction. Meanwhile, despite the disarray the country was in, President Winfield Scott Hancock was easily re-nominated by the National Union Party for a second term. He was aided by the fact that former President Andrew Johnson had established the party as a personality vehicle, and thus the nomination process was designed to be incredibly favorable to an incumbent president. Hancock campaigned on the slightly rebounding economy and presided over a grand centennial on July 4, 1876. Unionist newspapers contrasted the valorous Hancock with the lecherous Conkling, who was widely rumored to be a womanizer.
The inflationists were also displeased with Conklin's anti-inflationist stance, as the Greenback Party began to stand candidates for election. In St. Louis, Missouri, the Greenback National Convention of 1876 was held. They nominated Associate Justice David Davis and former Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin of Pennsylvania, the former of which saw a surge in popularity in the wake of his dissent in Adams v. Louisiana. The Farmers and the Readjusters did not nominate their own candidate, and instead endorsed the Davis/Curtin ticket in their respective States. The Greenback platform was brief, calling primarily for the end to the gold standard and civil service reform. They also called for universal citizenship, suffrage and civil rights for African-Americans, as well as the ratification of the Reconstruction Amendment to help to secure these. There were pragmatic reasons for calling for these, as Greenback voters in the South were prevented from voting Unionist state governments out of power, in part because of the disenfranchising measures that were originally targeted at African-Americans. Radicals were afraid that the Greenback Party could split the anti-Unionist vote as had happened in the 1868 elections with the Straight-Out Republican Party. The Radicals thus took advantage of their control of most of the state legislatures to pass electoral fusion laws in most states being contested, although Greenbackers were divided in whether or not they should fuse with a major party in most races.
The fusion effort ultimately did not prove to be necessary, as Senator Conkling won in a landslide victory over President Hancock, carrying Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Kentucky, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia. The Greenback ticket successfully carried California, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Nevada, while also securing 39 seats in the House and four seats overall in the Senate. The Unionists lost another five seats in the House and a net loss of three seats in the Senate, while the Radicals lost 34 seats in the House and had a net gain of zero in the Senate. Thus, the Radicals controlled the White House, and with the Greenback Party, the Congress. The Radicals also took full control of the state legislative chambers in Delaware and Kentucky, where they ratified the Reconstruction Amendment – thereby making it the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Whether or not the conservative Speaker Garfield or a vocal Unionist minority utilizing the filibuster in Congress would prevail over the Reconstruction vision of newly inaugurated President Roscoe Conkling remained an open question.
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Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
At least there's some good news.
Even if the Unionists aren't all being thrown out en masse, and Johnson's not busy running for the Mexican border....
Even if the Unionists aren't all being thrown out en masse, and Johnson's not busy running for the Mexican border....
KingoftheUzbeks
Call me Uzbeks
- Location
- Not-Tashkent (sadly)
*readjusting intensifies*
Speaking of Mexico I'm presuming poor Maximillian still got the ax?
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- Him/He
A good chapter so far, tough I am skeptic its enough to save Reconstruction at this point.
The idea that economic factors determined his faillure is pretty much debunked history at this point (they're was so many other factors) so simply turning the table on that won't be enough.
At the end of the day the real challenge with Reconstruction is not necessarely to have it go farther OTL but to not be rolled back. For that you need to maintain a coalition who depend (appart from the four states where the freedmens where a majority or close enough) on white Southerners who where mainly on board because they disliked the planter aristocracy, not because they where truly in favour of Civil Rights, after said planter class go the way of the dodo's little by little and you also need to have the North willing to keep the heath on indefinitely. Individually those are already hard sell so toguether it is allot to ask for.
Having Dred Scott, of all things, used as a precedent is a good beginning to fire up the North enough tough.
The idea that economic factors determined his faillure is pretty much debunked history at this point (they're was so many other factors) so simply turning the table on that won't be enough.
At the end of the day the real challenge with Reconstruction is not necessarely to have it go farther OTL but to not be rolled back. For that you need to maintain a coalition who depend (appart from the four states where the freedmens where a majority or close enough) on white Southerners who where mainly on board because they disliked the planter aristocracy, not because they where truly in favour of Civil Rights, after said planter class go the way of the dodo's little by little and you also need to have the North willing to keep the heath on indefinitely. Individually those are already hard sell so toguether it is allot to ask for.
Having Dred Scott, of all things, used as a precedent is a good beginning to fire up the North enough tough.
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- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
People in this century never seem to grasp just how big an issue coinage and metallic standards were back in the 1800s.
Zachanassian
Putting the "trans" in Transleithania
- Location
- Crabtown USA
I like how you are still blending both real and alternate history; the Readjusters and the Greenback Party were real political parties, and had varying levels of success (the Greenback ticket got over 3% of the vote in the 1880 Presidential election), though they're both obviously much more successful here. It almost gives the feeling that I'm reading an in-universe work of history, looking back at the period. In that, even though we're a decade out from the POD, history is still roughly the same so a lot of the same events are occurring as OTL, but different events are getting more focus due to what happens later. Things like the Readjusters or the Exodusters (something I didn't know about until reading this TL) don't get much attention in our own overview of history as we tend to focus on how Reconstruction failed, and don't look at the few glimmers of hope. Meanwhile, ITTL—if Reconstruction does indeed get saved and "Saving Reconstruction" is not a question—there would be much more focus on the factors that allowed Reconstruction to eventually succeed.
It'll be interesting to see how the three main political parties develop, as they are still fairly close to their OTL counterparts: the Radical Democrats are the Republicans (minus the Lily-white faction), the NUP is the Democrats through and through, and the Greenbacks are the various populist groups, but given much more power. This earlier outgrowth of populism and pseduo-socialism in particular will be interesting to see how it develops.
It'll be interesting to see how the three main political parties develop, as they are still fairly close to their OTL counterparts: the Radical Democrats are the Republicans (minus the Lily-white faction), the NUP is the Democrats through and through, and the Greenbacks are the various populist groups, but given much more power. This earlier outgrowth of populism and pseduo-socialism in particular will be interesting to see how it develops.
Minor quibble, but shouldn't this be the centennial celebrations, rather than the bicentennial (which shouldn't happen until 1976)?
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Seleucus
Queer Chinese-American trans woman scientist
- Location
- Hiding from the world
Not sure that Davis serves as a plausible Greenback Party candidate ITTL. Although he did receive the Labor Reform Party nomination IOTL's 1872, he did so primarily out of his ambition of receiving the liberal Republican anti-Grant nomination as well, and does not appear to have had great sympathies specifically for the greenback agenda - he explicitly declined the nomination after the convention after failing to receive the Liberal Republican nod.
Maybe Thomas Ewing Jr. would serve your needs better?
Maybe Thomas Ewing Jr. would serve your needs better?
Article: What the labor reformers did not recognize was that Davis had little use for their financial program. An old friend and political associate of Lincoln, his loyalty to the Lincoln Administration, and not his love of paper money, had led him to uphold the Legal Tender Act. At this point his interest in the labor greenbackers, whose existence he barely knew of, was purely political.
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Thanks for the constructive critique! However, Davis was picked by the Greenback Party here too for political expediency, as he was a high-profile figure that became even more prominent in the wake of his dissent in the Supreme Court decision, and they were hoping to co-opt some of the outrage surrounding that case to build up the Greenback party in the North while not selecting someone who was too disagreeable in the Border States.
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Thanks for this insightful commentary, and I agree that where this TL puts the emphasis on the events is shaped by the historical narratives that resonate in this reality.
You are absolutely correct, and that has been fixed!
Chapter 4: Liberty is the Right of All
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Chapter 4: Liberty is the Right of All
Shortly after the inauguration of Roscoe Conkling as President of the United States and George Frisbie Hoar as Vice President, fourteen Senators[1] had their credentials rejected pursuant to third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited those who engaged in insurrection or aided in such to hold public office in the United States unless two-thirds of both chambers of Congress allowed them. Senator George S. Houston of Alabama, Charles W. Jones of Florida, and John W. Johnston of Virginia were the only three Unionist Senators from the recently readmitted South that were seated. In the House of Representatives, 52 of the 75 Unionists elected had their credentials denied because they had all served in either the Confederate army or government. That figure also does not include the Democratic Representatives whose credentials were rejected in favor of Greenbackers due to alleged voter fraud. The 44th United States Congress thus consisted of 178 Radicals, 39 Greenbackers, and 23 Unionists in the House, and 36 Radicals, 20 Unionists, and 4 Greenbackers in the Senate. After Colorado was admitted as a state later on in the year, one Representative and two Senators were added to the Greenback caucus.
President Roscoe Conkling
In addition to its effects on the composition of Congress, the newly implemented Fourteenth Amendment also prompted immediate legislative action in regards to citizenship, immigration, and voting rights. The Naturalization Act of 1877 established a federal system of naturalization, standardizing the process and placing adjudication of matters related to it in the hands of federal courts. It also extended naturalization to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent", with the understanding that few would take up that offer. It further designated forced laborers and sex workers from Asia as "undesirable", prohibiting their entry into the United States with a penalty up to a year in prison or a $2,000 fine for those found guilty of trafficking them. However, the enforcement of this provision inhibited immigration from Asia more generally. These restrictions had been proposed by Representative Horace F. Page of California, who warned of the allegedly deleterious effects that "cheap Chinese labor" had on the American economy.
However, the Naturalization Act went beyond naturalization and immigration through establishing oversight mechanisms in federal elections. The bill also authorized federal circuit or district judges to appoint deputies who would supervise voter registration as well as the casting and counting of ballots in precincts with towns and cities of more than 20,000 people. These deputies would be empowered to reject voters or votes they deemed to be fraudulent. The bill provided for federal marshals to be appointed to keep the peace and arrest those breaching it within their view. President Conkling requested such a provision, and it was favored by many nativist Radicals as they hoped to undermine the power of Unionists by challenging the naturalization of foreign-born voters in urban areas like New York City. However, it earned broader support from the Radicals because it could mitigate voter fraud and suppression in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1877 more directly targeted the Black Codes and other coercive labor that the Radicals had campaigned against in the previous elections. It also prohibited racial discrimination in jury service, public accommodations and transportation.
The Radicals then passed the first Suffrage Amendment to enfranchise freedmen. The amendment stated, "Male citizens of the United States of African descent shall have the same right to vote and to hold office in the State and Territories as other electors." The amendment was so written at the suggestion of Conkling to exclude the possibility of enfranchising women as well as Chinese immigrants, a particular concern of the Congressional delegations from the Western states and a potential obstacle for getting the amendment ratified in California. The Greenbacker Senators, however, refused to provide the requisite two-thirds majority necessary to pass it without banning the literacy tests and poll taxes which has disenfranchised their poorer white constituents. Northern nativists seeking to disenfranchise immigrants opposed such prohibitions. Eventually, the second section of the Fifteenth Amendment was produced, which contained no prohibition of literacy tests: "No State shall require more than a $250 property qualification to exercise the right to vote."
Congress debated other measures to enforce black suffrage and ensure fair elections in the South. One proposed in the Senate would have made it a federal crime to use bribery, force, or terror in an attempt to violate the rights of those exercising their rights and suffrage. Speaker Garfield said he had "never been more perplexed by a piece of legislation." Another was the Guarantee bill, which defined what constituted a "republican form of government", in which no more than thirty percent of its male citizens over twenty-one years or older which had not engaged in insurrection were unable to be registered to vote and cast a ballot. In states that failed this definition of republican form of government, the bill obliged the United States government, pursuant to the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution, to supervise the creation of new state constitutions that would enfranchise its citizens. However, the Guarantee Bill was vetoed by President Conkling. Conkling said, "After we have crowned these states again with the sovereignty of statehood, can we again dictate to them the action of their Legislatures and expel their representatives unless they attend to our behests? And can the argument be doubted this will prove to show that Maine or Missouri can be made to lie down upon the bed which we prescribe, and be stretched if they are too short, or shortened if they overmatch in length?" An override effort failed, as Garfield sided with the administration.
The relatively hands-off approach of the Radicals towards the South may have been due in part to fatigue and the Long Depression continuing into its fourth year. President Roscoe Conkling and Speaker James A. Garfield were both in favor of a strong dollar backed by the gold standard. Garfield allowed an inflation bill meant to inject $100,000,000 into the monetary supply to be passed due to the Radicals' promise to do so during the 1874 midterms, but it was vetoed by President Conkling on the basis of the long term damage he believed it would do to the economy. Hard-money Radicals agreed, and an attempt at an override failed. The Allison bill, sponsored by Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, required the U.S. Treasury to make a monthly, $2-4 million dollar purchase of silver for coinage. After the bill was vetoed by Conkling, Garfield successfully whipped Radical votes to cause an override effort to fail. Unionist minority leader Samuel J. Randall voted for the Allison bill, and joined the Greenbackers in alleging the Radicals had reneged on their midterm monetary promises.
Speaker James A. Garfield
The Radical Congress did attempt to tackle the ongoing financial crisis with the Pension Act of 1877. The Pension Act permitted veterans of the Union army with service-related disabilities to reapply for pensions and secure back payments, even if they had already applied before. Pension expenditures would thus increase dramatically after the act's passage. The Pensions Act had largely already been written before the Radicals took both chambers of Congress, as the Unionist Senate's defeat of the proposal only served to further tarnish their image during the 1876 elections. Thus, it proved to be a unifying issue for the Radicals who were more divided on the issues of currency, which would only become more prominent as wages continued to contract. Workers began to organize to protest for better pay and conditions through labor unions such as the Knights of Labor, a largely Catholic organization led by Terence V. Powderly. The Workingmen's Party of the United States was also formed in this period in Philadelphia, led by Albert R. Parsons. The members of the party advocated for socialism, with the Lassallean faction that called for incremental progress through reforms and the Marxist faction calling for a revolution to overthrow capitalism.
In East St. Louis, Illinois, in response to dramatic wage cuts, the Knights of Labor and the Workingmen's Party organized a strike on April 22, 1878. Nearly 1,500 workers went on strike calling for an end to child labor and an eight-hour work day, as the entire city's transportation industry was taken over by its workers. More workers, from bakers to workers in the packing industry, joined in and made it become a St. Louis Commune. This was the second such commune to be organized after the Paris Commune, formed by workers in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The workers in St. Louis inspired railroad workers to begin striking in Chicago for better wages. Their demands were mirrored by those instigating strikes in Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Governors attempted to quell the striking with state militias, but when those proved to be insufficient, they called on President Conkling to send in federal troops. Thousands of troops marched to disestablish the St. Louis Commune, with over seventy lead strikers arrested over a week after the strike had been initiated. Over one hundred people were killed during the bloody quelling of the unrest.
National Guardsmen firing upon striking workers in Maryland
The Greenback Party rallied in the face of the strike, arguing that the use of federal troops against striking workers was unjustified. The words of Greenback House leader Hendrick Bradley Wright of Pennsylvania said on the occasion, "Troops were introduced into my district at the solicitation of the men who controlled the mines and the manufacturing establishment. There was no necessity or occasion for it. It only stirred up the labor element. And now, since that has been done, that element has shown its power and its strength, a power and strength that cannot be resisted, that will work its way out. You cannot suppress a volcano."
The Conkling administration meanwhile struggled with the ongoing depression that had triggered the strike. Nonetheless, as the economy entered over sixty months of contraction with plummeting wages and profits, the Unionists were not springing forward for a comeback.
The Radical Democracy Party had all but seized the center on every economic issue the Unionists had run against them on. Conkling and Garfield supported the gold standard, while the Radical Congress had no so much as even proposed a tariff. After devastating losses in the 1874 and 1876 elections, many Unionists simply abandoned the party for the Radicals. The National Union Party had been effectively reduced to its Southern element, which were largely unseated and referred to themselves as Democrats. Unionist House leader Samuel J. Randall attempted to foster support for tariffs and the coinage of silver, neither of which were popular with the Democrats.
During the 1878 National Union midterm convention, delegates were thus divided on the issues of the tariff, currency, railroad subsidies, and civil service reform. The platform thus focused on common points of agreement, and condemned the failure to seat the Unionist Congressmen pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, argued against black suffrage, and identified the pension bill as an expensive boondoggle. The document proved to be incredibly odious to Northern sensibilities, with many newspapers roundly criticizing it, and even those with a Unionist slant questioned the pragmatism of failing to offer any solution to the ongoing economic crisis while attacking pensions for veterans. Their only hope remained in the South, but their hold over the region appeared to be cracking as the enfranchisement of African-American men was soon at hand.
Upon the ratification of the Suffrage Amendment as the Fifteenth Amendment the Constitution by the requisite number of states on May 19, 1878, Fredrick Douglass declared, "Color is no longer to be a calamity, race is to be no longer a crime, and liberty is to be the right of all."
[1] Senators John Tyler Morgan of Alabama (Confederate brigadier general), Wilkinson Call of Florida (Confederate adjutant general), Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia (former Confederate Vice President), James B. Eustis of Louisiana (former Confederate judge advocate), Benjamin F. Jonas of Louisiana (Confederate officer), James Z. George of Mississippi (Confederate colonel), Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II of Mississippi (Confederate colonel), Matt Whitaker Ransom of North Carolina (Confederate general), Augustus Summerfield Merrimon of North Carolina (Confederate soldier), Wade Hampton III of South Carolina (Confederate lieutenant general), Matthew Butler of South Carolina (Confederate major general), Samuel B. Maxey of Texas (former Confederate brigadier general), Oran Milo Roberts of Texas (former Confederate colonel), and Robert E. Withers of Virginia (Confederate colonel).
Shortly after the inauguration of Roscoe Conkling as President of the United States and George Frisbie Hoar as Vice President, fourteen Senators[1] had their credentials rejected pursuant to third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibited those who engaged in insurrection or aided in such to hold public office in the United States unless two-thirds of both chambers of Congress allowed them. Senator George S. Houston of Alabama, Charles W. Jones of Florida, and John W. Johnston of Virginia were the only three Unionist Senators from the recently readmitted South that were seated. In the House of Representatives, 52 of the 75 Unionists elected had their credentials denied because they had all served in either the Confederate army or government. That figure also does not include the Democratic Representatives whose credentials were rejected in favor of Greenbackers due to alleged voter fraud. The 44th United States Congress thus consisted of 178 Radicals, 39 Greenbackers, and 23 Unionists in the House, and 36 Radicals, 20 Unionists, and 4 Greenbackers in the Senate. After Colorado was admitted as a state later on in the year, one Representative and two Senators were added to the Greenback caucus.
President Roscoe Conkling
In addition to its effects on the composition of Congress, the newly implemented Fourteenth Amendment also prompted immediate legislative action in regards to citizenship, immigration, and voting rights. The Naturalization Act of 1877 established a federal system of naturalization, standardizing the process and placing adjudication of matters related to it in the hands of federal courts. It also extended naturalization to "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent", with the understanding that few would take up that offer. It further designated forced laborers and sex workers from Asia as "undesirable", prohibiting their entry into the United States with a penalty up to a year in prison or a $2,000 fine for those found guilty of trafficking them. However, the enforcement of this provision inhibited immigration from Asia more generally. These restrictions had been proposed by Representative Horace F. Page of California, who warned of the allegedly deleterious effects that "cheap Chinese labor" had on the American economy.
However, the Naturalization Act went beyond naturalization and immigration through establishing oversight mechanisms in federal elections. The bill also authorized federal circuit or district judges to appoint deputies who would supervise voter registration as well as the casting and counting of ballots in precincts with towns and cities of more than 20,000 people. These deputies would be empowered to reject voters or votes they deemed to be fraudulent. The bill provided for federal marshals to be appointed to keep the peace and arrest those breaching it within their view. President Conkling requested such a provision, and it was favored by many nativist Radicals as they hoped to undermine the power of Unionists by challenging the naturalization of foreign-born voters in urban areas like New York City. However, it earned broader support from the Radicals because it could mitigate voter fraud and suppression in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1877 more directly targeted the Black Codes and other coercive labor that the Radicals had campaigned against in the previous elections. It also prohibited racial discrimination in jury service, public accommodations and transportation.
The Radicals then passed the first Suffrage Amendment to enfranchise freedmen. The amendment stated, "Male citizens of the United States of African descent shall have the same right to vote and to hold office in the State and Territories as other electors." The amendment was so written at the suggestion of Conkling to exclude the possibility of enfranchising women as well as Chinese immigrants, a particular concern of the Congressional delegations from the Western states and a potential obstacle for getting the amendment ratified in California. The Greenbacker Senators, however, refused to provide the requisite two-thirds majority necessary to pass it without banning the literacy tests and poll taxes which has disenfranchised their poorer white constituents. Northern nativists seeking to disenfranchise immigrants opposed such prohibitions. Eventually, the second section of the Fifteenth Amendment was produced, which contained no prohibition of literacy tests: "No State shall require more than a $250 property qualification to exercise the right to vote."
Congress debated other measures to enforce black suffrage and ensure fair elections in the South. One proposed in the Senate would have made it a federal crime to use bribery, force, or terror in an attempt to violate the rights of those exercising their rights and suffrage. Speaker Garfield said he had "never been more perplexed by a piece of legislation." Another was the Guarantee bill, which defined what constituted a "republican form of government", in which no more than thirty percent of its male citizens over twenty-one years or older which had not engaged in insurrection were unable to be registered to vote and cast a ballot. In states that failed this definition of republican form of government, the bill obliged the United States government, pursuant to the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution, to supervise the creation of new state constitutions that would enfranchise its citizens. However, the Guarantee Bill was vetoed by President Conkling. Conkling said, "After we have crowned these states again with the sovereignty of statehood, can we again dictate to them the action of their Legislatures and expel their representatives unless they attend to our behests? And can the argument be doubted this will prove to show that Maine or Missouri can be made to lie down upon the bed which we prescribe, and be stretched if they are too short, or shortened if they overmatch in length?" An override effort failed, as Garfield sided with the administration.
The relatively hands-off approach of the Radicals towards the South may have been due in part to fatigue and the Long Depression continuing into its fourth year. President Roscoe Conkling and Speaker James A. Garfield were both in favor of a strong dollar backed by the gold standard. Garfield allowed an inflation bill meant to inject $100,000,000 into the monetary supply to be passed due to the Radicals' promise to do so during the 1874 midterms, but it was vetoed by President Conkling on the basis of the long term damage he believed it would do to the economy. Hard-money Radicals agreed, and an attempt at an override failed. The Allison bill, sponsored by Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, required the U.S. Treasury to make a monthly, $2-4 million dollar purchase of silver for coinage. After the bill was vetoed by Conkling, Garfield successfully whipped Radical votes to cause an override effort to fail. Unionist minority leader Samuel J. Randall voted for the Allison bill, and joined the Greenbackers in alleging the Radicals had reneged on their midterm monetary promises.
Speaker James A. Garfield
The Radical Congress did attempt to tackle the ongoing financial crisis with the Pension Act of 1877. The Pension Act permitted veterans of the Union army with service-related disabilities to reapply for pensions and secure back payments, even if they had already applied before. Pension expenditures would thus increase dramatically after the act's passage. The Pensions Act had largely already been written before the Radicals took both chambers of Congress, as the Unionist Senate's defeat of the proposal only served to further tarnish their image during the 1876 elections. Thus, it proved to be a unifying issue for the Radicals who were more divided on the issues of currency, which would only become more prominent as wages continued to contract. Workers began to organize to protest for better pay and conditions through labor unions such as the Knights of Labor, a largely Catholic organization led by Terence V. Powderly. The Workingmen's Party of the United States was also formed in this period in Philadelphia, led by Albert R. Parsons. The members of the party advocated for socialism, with the Lassallean faction that called for incremental progress through reforms and the Marxist faction calling for a revolution to overthrow capitalism.
In East St. Louis, Illinois, in response to dramatic wage cuts, the Knights of Labor and the Workingmen's Party organized a strike on April 22, 1878. Nearly 1,500 workers went on strike calling for an end to child labor and an eight-hour work day, as the entire city's transportation industry was taken over by its workers. More workers, from bakers to workers in the packing industry, joined in and made it become a St. Louis Commune. This was the second such commune to be organized after the Paris Commune, formed by workers in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The workers in St. Louis inspired railroad workers to begin striking in Chicago for better wages. Their demands were mirrored by those instigating strikes in Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Governors attempted to quell the striking with state militias, but when those proved to be insufficient, they called on President Conkling to send in federal troops. Thousands of troops marched to disestablish the St. Louis Commune, with over seventy lead strikers arrested over a week after the strike had been initiated. Over one hundred people were killed during the bloody quelling of the unrest.
National Guardsmen firing upon striking workers in Maryland
The Greenback Party rallied in the face of the strike, arguing that the use of federal troops against striking workers was unjustified. The words of Greenback House leader Hendrick Bradley Wright of Pennsylvania said on the occasion, "Troops were introduced into my district at the solicitation of the men who controlled the mines and the manufacturing establishment. There was no necessity or occasion for it. It only stirred up the labor element. And now, since that has been done, that element has shown its power and its strength, a power and strength that cannot be resisted, that will work its way out. You cannot suppress a volcano."
The Conkling administration meanwhile struggled with the ongoing depression that had triggered the strike. Nonetheless, as the economy entered over sixty months of contraction with plummeting wages and profits, the Unionists were not springing forward for a comeback.
The Radical Democracy Party had all but seized the center on every economic issue the Unionists had run against them on. Conkling and Garfield supported the gold standard, while the Radical Congress had no so much as even proposed a tariff. After devastating losses in the 1874 and 1876 elections, many Unionists simply abandoned the party for the Radicals. The National Union Party had been effectively reduced to its Southern element, which were largely unseated and referred to themselves as Democrats. Unionist House leader Samuel J. Randall attempted to foster support for tariffs and the coinage of silver, neither of which were popular with the Democrats.
During the 1878 National Union midterm convention, delegates were thus divided on the issues of the tariff, currency, railroad subsidies, and civil service reform. The platform thus focused on common points of agreement, and condemned the failure to seat the Unionist Congressmen pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, argued against black suffrage, and identified the pension bill as an expensive boondoggle. The document proved to be incredibly odious to Northern sensibilities, with many newspapers roundly criticizing it, and even those with a Unionist slant questioned the pragmatism of failing to offer any solution to the ongoing economic crisis while attacking pensions for veterans. Their only hope remained in the South, but their hold over the region appeared to be cracking as the enfranchisement of African-American men was soon at hand.
Upon the ratification of the Suffrage Amendment as the Fifteenth Amendment the Constitution by the requisite number of states on May 19, 1878, Fredrick Douglass declared, "Color is no longer to be a calamity, race is to be no longer a crime, and liberty is to be the right of all."
[1] Senators John Tyler Morgan of Alabama (Confederate brigadier general), Wilkinson Call of Florida (Confederate adjutant general), Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia (former Confederate Vice President), James B. Eustis of Louisiana (former Confederate judge advocate), Benjamin F. Jonas of Louisiana (Confederate officer), James Z. George of Mississippi (Confederate colonel), Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II of Mississippi (Confederate colonel), Matt Whitaker Ransom of North Carolina (Confederate general), Augustus Summerfield Merrimon of North Carolina (Confederate soldier), Wade Hampton III of South Carolina (Confederate lieutenant general), Matthew Butler of South Carolina (Confederate major general), Samuel B. Maxey of Texas (former Confederate brigadier general), Oran Milo Roberts of Texas (former Confederate colonel), and Robert E. Withers of Virginia (Confederate colonel).
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Guildencrantz
Scioto Region STATEPLAN Committee, Vice Chair
- Location
- Cowtown, Ohio, U.S.A.
Fantastic update! Is the Greenback Party heading towards a European style labor party, or are they going to co-opt the labor movement like the Democrats IOTL?
I'm a little confused here-did you mean St. Louis Missouri, or East St. Louis?
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given the political attitude at the time period, I'd say the farthest left they will get is New Deal Democrats until the Great Depression, if it still happens, which could see them shift left into a European-Style Labor Party, but that assumes that they aren't in power and therefore blamed if/when the Great Depression or it's analog hits.
Indicus
<insert title here>
- Location
- TORONTVM, ONTARIVM INFERIOR, IMPERIVM ROMANVM
I'd say more European-style. They were much more populist than the Democrats, after all. So, I guess they'd be something like the SPD - a substantial force deeply influencing the policies of other parties. I do like the idea of some other party passing Bismarckian State Socialism in order to eat at Greenback support.
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Fantastic stuff, Sabot! I don't really have much else to say, other than I'm really enjoying this!
(also I hope you cover the Mormons briefly when you get to the 1880s.
Thank you all! =)
I won't say one way or another, as I'm enjoying the speculation.
East St. Louis, I'll edit for clarity.
- Location
- Great Khanate of Scotland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah, so it's a foundering economy that leads to a populist movement which unites poor blacks and whites that saves Reconstruction.
I approve!
Also I absolutely love the short-lived St. Louis Commune, RIP.
I approve!
Also I absolutely love the short-lived St. Louis Commune, RIP.
Chapter 5: Onward
Sabot Cat
Proud Trans Girl
- Location
- Indianapolis
Chapter 5: Onward
The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment was surrounded by jubilation and, among some Radical officials, relief that the issue of suffrage for African-Americans had been successfully resolved. Upon its ratification by the requisite number of states on May 19, 1878, Garfield stated, "this amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortune in their own hands." However, the fight for securing voting rights for African-Americans proved to be harder than many Radicals in Congress publicly anticipated. Pursuant to the Naturalization Act, circuit court appointed electoral observers and marshals only monitored the polling places themselves and did not pursue violent conspirators operating elsewhere. This gave the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations free reign to disenfranchise African-American voters in the most violent electoral season since 1868. Even the federal marshals appointed by the courts were successfully intimidated by armed members of white supremacist terrorist groups.
Absent effective measures to end the violence from the federal government, African-Americans and their allies mounted an informal resistance against this campaign of terror. In the mountains of Blount County, Alabama, Union veterans led by Isaac Marion Berry founded the Anti-Ku Klux Klan. During the Civil War, Berry deserted the Confederate army during the Civil War and became a spy for the Union. Over ten years later, Berry recruited over 100 men in the county to travel throughout the county and threaten members of the KKK with reprisal if they continued their campaign of terror. In Bennettsville, South Carolina, African-Americans armed themselves and patrolled the town against threats to their community. Black veterans also independently acted to protect their voting rights in a few Arkansas and Louisiana precincts, although such an effort was neither statewide nor systemic. Despite all of these efforts, the KKK was ultimately successful in preventing most African-Americans from voting and ensuring that no Radicals or Greenbackers were elected in the affected Southern states in what contemporaries called "outrages". Thus, despite the moribund Northern section of the National Union Party, their candidates under the Democratic banner in the South saw net gains in members elected to the House and lost no seats in the Senate.
In January 1879, Congress launched an official inquiry into the "outrages" committed by the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups. The Senate saw testimony from over fifty witnesses to the terror, informing an official report which estimated that white supremacists were responsible for nearly 8,000 deaths during the midterm elections. Secretary of War Ulysses S. Grant recommended to President Roscoe Conkling that a sustained effort by the federal government to destroy the KKK would be necessary to ensure that civil rights would be protected. Senators Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, George F. Edmunds of Vermont, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana sponsored the Enforcement bill, which provided the President to power to use federal marshals to persecute conspiracies to disenfranchise voters, intimidate public officials, commit electoral fraud, or deny equal protection under the law. Speaker James A. Garfield, despite being an opponent to such a proposal previously, yielded to considerable pressure and whipped votes for a slightly less sweeping substitute for the Enforcement bill to narrowly pass in the House a month after the Congressional inquiry.
Pursuant to the Enforcement Act, President Conkling dispatched federal troops to counties throughout the South to make arrests and pursue suspected members of the Ku Klux Klan. This had an immediate chilling effect on the KKK, as members began to desert it in fear that they would be imprisoned. The organization began to disintegrate from the bottom to the top, as its leaders and primary organizers were identified and tried throughout the region. The KKK even lost credibility with the some prominent Democratic legislators, who argued that their members provoked military intervention in the South of a scale unseen since the end of the Civil War. The KKK would eventually cease to exist as an organization by late 1880 to early 1881, although racial violence on a smaller and more interpersonal scale would continue to persist. During that period, federal grand juries issued over 1,000 indictments against KKK members and other violent white supremacists. The United States Department of Justice was established to assist in the massive undertaking to persecute them, which began to clog the justice system.
Federal judges already had a substantial backlog from the circuit level to the Supreme Court, and the possibility that not all of those who had been indicted for 1878 outrages would stand trial. This was only compounded by legislation passed by the Radicals which expanded the number of cases that federal courts could take or have referred to them. The reason for this was twofold: the first was that the state judiciary was often incapable of providing justice in a racially neutral way in many Southern states. The second was that the Radicals believed the federal judiciary to be more receptive to the desires of the ascendant industrialist class, as state judges often had respect for local customs and regulations that Radicals characterized as "antibusiness". In contrast, many federal judges owed their appointments to corporate backers and viewed financial matters or labor disputes from a national lens.
The Radical Congress thus passed the Judiciary Act of 1879, which primarily sought to mitigate the backlog problem by expanding the number of judges. Senator George F. Edmunds, a Radical from Vermont and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, extensively involved himself in the drafting process, something reflected in how the law addressed the circuit riding responsibilities of the Supreme Court. Since the framing of the Constitution, each Supreme Court justice was tasked with going outside of Washington D.C. and acting as a judge in a lower circuit court. The Supreme Court opposed this practice because it added to their already numerous responsibilities, and the journey across the country could prove to be perilous. However, supporters of circuit riding believed it helped prevent the Supreme Court from being cloistered from the rest of the country. Senator Edmunds went so far as to say "the judges of the Supreme Court have been, from the first, judges of the circuit courts." Consequently, the Judiciary Act of 1879 expanded the Supreme Court with nine additional members, one for each circuit. At any given time, half of the justices would remain in the capital while the other half would go to the circuit assigned to them by the Court.
Senator David Davis, a Greenbacker from Illinois and a former Supreme Court justice, had opposed the Judiciary Act of 1879. He advocated for a substantial reform of the federal judicial system by abolishing federal circuit riding and establishing an intermediate court of appeals to reduce the Supreme Court's workload. National Unionists accused the Radicals of packing the Supreme Court as a result of Adams v. Louisiana. It is true that the Judiciary Act of 1879 dramatically expanded the number of Radical federal judicial appointees for President Roscoe Conkling after over a decade of Unionist appointments from Presidents Andrew Johnson and Winfield Scott Hancock. However, legal scholars point to contemporary evidence which suggests that this was a good faith effort to remedy a legitimate problem, reinforced by the fact that Radical Congressmen who were particularly inflamed by Adams v. Louisiana openly proposed abolishing the Supreme Court or at least substantially limiting its authority. Regardless of the potential partisan and corporate motivations, the Radicals' judicial reform would prove to be pivotal in upcoming battles for civil rights.
Surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1877 was a burgeoning movement by people of color against segregation in public transportation was emerging. In 1878, a grocer and undertaker named Robert Fox in Louisville, Kentucky sat in the white section of a trolley car along with his brother Samuel Fox and Horace Pearce, their boss. When the driver asked him to leave, he refused, until they were forced out by a group of white drivers. Fox accused the trolley company of assault and battery, and a federal court found in his favor because the racial segregation of the streetcars was unlawful. When the company still refused to recognize the ruling, civil rights leaders in Louisville began to organize "ride-ins". African-Americans would fill entire white-only sections of the streetcars, causing some drivers to vacate the trolley as the riders would then it themselves. Eventually, the company capitulated to the overwhelming pressure, and announced a policy of racially integrated seating. Similar cases against segregation in public transportation were also litigated in San Francisco by African-American entrepreneur Mary Ellen Pleasant, in Memphis by investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, and in Mayfield, Kentucky by Baptist minister Elisha Winfield Green.
Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist and civil rights leader
As African-Americans began to organize for and defend their civil rights, they also began to exercise their voting rights. The 1879 state legislative elections were a crucial turning point in American democracy for this reason. Numerous black legislators took office for the first time in history, with one being the founder of the South Carolina Radical Party, Robert Smalls. During the Civil War, Smalls escaped slavery when he commandeered the CSS Planter to the Union blockade before he became a pilot for the Union Navy. Afterwards, he returned home and bought his former master's house, and became a railroad company director. As a state legislator, Smalls championed the cause of public education, sponsoring a bill to establish a system of schools that were universal, compulsory, and free. In Virginia, the biracial coalition that constituted the Readjuster Party also made public education a winning issue when it secured a majority in the Virginia General Assembly. The new Radical, Greenbacker, and Readjuster state governments of the South earned broad support for these investments in education and infrastructure.
As the 1880 elections approached, the National Union Party embarked on the 'New Departure' strategy. During the 1879 state convention, the Ohioan Union Party embraced "universal political rights and equality among both the white and the colored people of the United States" while condemning the Enforcement Act and the burgeoning power of the federal government. Other northern National Unionists also embraced racial equality in theory while opposing its practical means of enforcement as a violation of constitutional liberties, and focused primarily on less sectional issues overall such as the economy and civil service reform. The 1880 National Union platform declared, "We recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of the Government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color or persuasion, religion or politics. We pledge ourselves to maintain the union of these States, emancipation and enfranchisement; and to oppose any reopening of the questions settled by the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution." The platform called for state governments to oversee the enfranchisement of freedmen, and condemned the "bayonet rule" imposed by the Conkling administration onto the South. However, most planks related to the corruption and cronyism of the Radicals, and called for a substantial reform of the system.
Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, who had sponsored civil service reform while in the Senate, was the party's nominee. Bayard was a staunch conservative who has long been popular with the party for his support of the gold standard and for authoring the minority report on the Ku Klux Klan outrages, alleging that they were outright fabrications. He vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1877, as well as the federal electoral supervision established by the Naturalization Act. Former U.S. Representative George H. Pendleton of Ohio was selected as his running mate, a fellow champion of civil reform known for the "Ohio idea". The Ohio idea was that federal war bonds should be redeemed by Greenbacks, something long opposed by Bayard and the Eastern section of the party. Both Bayard and Pendleton were antiwar Democrats, with the former specifically calling for the Union to peacefully accept Southern secession. The "Goldbug Copperhead" ticket was widely ridiculed in all corners, especially as the economy had been in steady recovery since mid-1879.
The Greenbackers were divided on whether or not they should pursue anti-Radical voters, or if they should appeal to anti-Unionist voters via electoral fusion with the Radical Democracy Party. U.S. Representative Marcus M. Pomeroy of Wisconsin, a Copperhead during the Civil War, organized the Union Greenback Labor Convention in St. Louis with intent of targeting Unionist voters. Delegates nominated Texas Land Commissioner Barzillai J. Chambers for President and Confederate veteran Absolom Madden West of Mississippi as his running mate. The platform lambasted the federal government for deploying federal troops against strikers and called for an end to Chinese immigration as well as harsh measures to curb corruption. The National Greenback Party met in Indianapolis and nominated the stridently pro-suffrage Senator Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts with Congressman Edward H. Gillette of Iowa as his running mate. The platform called for soft money, a progressive income tax, the abolition of child and convict labor, and voting rights for every citizen. The Socialist Labor Party had participated in the Indianapolis Greenback convention, and Greenbackers were denounced as socialists in Radical and Unionist newspapers. This was a theme echoed by President Roscoe Conkling. Conkling campaigned on his own behalf, something that had become increasingly common ever since the success of Andrew Johnson's tour during the 1866 midterms. A master of oratory ever since his days as a lawyer, Conkling painted his opponents as terrorist sympathizers who threatened the status quo.
U.S. Representative Josiah T. Walls of Florida
With a thriving economy, a divided Greenback Party, a lackluster National Unionist ticket, and newly enfranchised African-American voters showing their support for the Radicals, President Conkling sailed to re-election with 338 Electoral College votes. Senator Bayard only managed to carry four states worth 31 EVs: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Texas. This was the worst showing for a major party since Winfield Scott's candidacy for the Whig Party in the 1852 presidential election. The 1880 elections were also historic in another way: the election of the first African-American Congressmen and Senators in history. They included U.S. Representatives Jeremiah Haralson, James T. Rapier and Benjamin S. Turner of Alabama, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, Jefferson F. Long of Georgia, John Willis Menard and Charles E. Nash of Louisiana, John R. Lynch of Mississippi, Henry P. Cheatham, John Adams Hyman, and James E. O'Hara of North Carolina, George W. Murray, Thomas E. Miller, Joseph Rainey, Robert B. Elliot, Richard H. Cain, and Alonzo J. Ransier of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, as well as U.S. Senators P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana and Blanche Bruce and Hiram Rhodes Revels, both of Mississippi. At long last, African-Americans were fully able to exercise their right to vote and have the representation in government that they had long fought for.
Booker T. Washington, philanthropist and educator.
During the 1880s, laws prohibiting interracial marriage were repealed all throughout the North in Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Wyoming, building upon the momentum by earlier repeal efforts to the same effect in Iowa (1851), Kansas (1859), Massachusetts (1843), New Mexico (1866), Pennsylvania (1780), and Washington (1868). In the South, interracial marriage was legalized in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By 1890, interracial marriage was legal in most states in the Union. During this period, the Radical Congress and Conkling also made new investments in infrastructure and education. The latter included the creation of colleges for African-Americans, an effort spearheaded by black philanthropist and national leader Booker T. Washington, and later, by civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard and a major political theorist who fought for the freedoms of black people not just in the United States, but throughout the world. The American civil rights movement and the African-American officials elected in federal and state governments would contribute to the efforts for self-rule and independence among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment was surrounded by jubilation and, among some Radical officials, relief that the issue of suffrage for African-Americans had been successfully resolved. Upon its ratification by the requisite number of states on May 19, 1878, Garfield stated, "this amendment confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortune in their own hands." However, the fight for securing voting rights for African-Americans proved to be harder than many Radicals in Congress publicly anticipated. Pursuant to the Naturalization Act, circuit court appointed electoral observers and marshals only monitored the polling places themselves and did not pursue violent conspirators operating elsewhere. This gave the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations free reign to disenfranchise African-American voters in the most violent electoral season since 1868. Even the federal marshals appointed by the courts were successfully intimidated by armed members of white supremacist terrorist groups.
Absent effective measures to end the violence from the federal government, African-Americans and their allies mounted an informal resistance against this campaign of terror. In the mountains of Blount County, Alabama, Union veterans led by Isaac Marion Berry founded the Anti-Ku Klux Klan. During the Civil War, Berry deserted the Confederate army during the Civil War and became a spy for the Union. Over ten years later, Berry recruited over 100 men in the county to travel throughout the county and threaten members of the KKK with reprisal if they continued their campaign of terror. In Bennettsville, South Carolina, African-Americans armed themselves and patrolled the town against threats to their community. Black veterans also independently acted to protect their voting rights in a few Arkansas and Louisiana precincts, although such an effort was neither statewide nor systemic. Despite all of these efforts, the KKK was ultimately successful in preventing most African-Americans from voting and ensuring that no Radicals or Greenbackers were elected in the affected Southern states in what contemporaries called "outrages". Thus, despite the moribund Northern section of the National Union Party, their candidates under the Democratic banner in the South saw net gains in members elected to the House and lost no seats in the Senate.
In January 1879, Congress launched an official inquiry into the "outrages" committed by the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups. The Senate saw testimony from over fifty witnesses to the terror, informing an official report which estimated that white supremacists were responsible for nearly 8,000 deaths during the midterm elections. Secretary of War Ulysses S. Grant recommended to President Roscoe Conkling that a sustained effort by the federal government to destroy the KKK would be necessary to ensure that civil rights would be protected. Senators Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, George F. Edmunds of Vermont, and Oliver P. Morton of Indiana sponsored the Enforcement bill, which provided the President to power to use federal marshals to persecute conspiracies to disenfranchise voters, intimidate public officials, commit electoral fraud, or deny equal protection under the law. Speaker James A. Garfield, despite being an opponent to such a proposal previously, yielded to considerable pressure and whipped votes for a slightly less sweeping substitute for the Enforcement bill to narrowly pass in the House a month after the Congressional inquiry.
Pursuant to the Enforcement Act, President Conkling dispatched federal troops to counties throughout the South to make arrests and pursue suspected members of the Ku Klux Klan. This had an immediate chilling effect on the KKK, as members began to desert it in fear that they would be imprisoned. The organization began to disintegrate from the bottom to the top, as its leaders and primary organizers were identified and tried throughout the region. The KKK even lost credibility with the some prominent Democratic legislators, who argued that their members provoked military intervention in the South of a scale unseen since the end of the Civil War. The KKK would eventually cease to exist as an organization by late 1880 to early 1881, although racial violence on a smaller and more interpersonal scale would continue to persist. During that period, federal grand juries issued over 1,000 indictments against KKK members and other violent white supremacists. The United States Department of Justice was established to assist in the massive undertaking to persecute them, which began to clog the justice system.
Federal judges already had a substantial backlog from the circuit level to the Supreme Court, and the possibility that not all of those who had been indicted for 1878 outrages would stand trial. This was only compounded by legislation passed by the Radicals which expanded the number of cases that federal courts could take or have referred to them. The reason for this was twofold: the first was that the state judiciary was often incapable of providing justice in a racially neutral way in many Southern states. The second was that the Radicals believed the federal judiciary to be more receptive to the desires of the ascendant industrialist class, as state judges often had respect for local customs and regulations that Radicals characterized as "antibusiness". In contrast, many federal judges owed their appointments to corporate backers and viewed financial matters or labor disputes from a national lens.
The Radical Congress thus passed the Judiciary Act of 1879, which primarily sought to mitigate the backlog problem by expanding the number of judges. Senator George F. Edmunds, a Radical from Vermont and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, extensively involved himself in the drafting process, something reflected in how the law addressed the circuit riding responsibilities of the Supreme Court. Since the framing of the Constitution, each Supreme Court justice was tasked with going outside of Washington D.C. and acting as a judge in a lower circuit court. The Supreme Court opposed this practice because it added to their already numerous responsibilities, and the journey across the country could prove to be perilous. However, supporters of circuit riding believed it helped prevent the Supreme Court from being cloistered from the rest of the country. Senator Edmunds went so far as to say "the judges of the Supreme Court have been, from the first, judges of the circuit courts." Consequently, the Judiciary Act of 1879 expanded the Supreme Court with nine additional members, one for each circuit. At any given time, half of the justices would remain in the capital while the other half would go to the circuit assigned to them by the Court.
Senator David Davis, a Greenbacker from Illinois and a former Supreme Court justice, had opposed the Judiciary Act of 1879. He advocated for a substantial reform of the federal judicial system by abolishing federal circuit riding and establishing an intermediate court of appeals to reduce the Supreme Court's workload. National Unionists accused the Radicals of packing the Supreme Court as a result of Adams v. Louisiana. It is true that the Judiciary Act of 1879 dramatically expanded the number of Radical federal judicial appointees for President Roscoe Conkling after over a decade of Unionist appointments from Presidents Andrew Johnson and Winfield Scott Hancock. However, legal scholars point to contemporary evidence which suggests that this was a good faith effort to remedy a legitimate problem, reinforced by the fact that Radical Congressmen who were particularly inflamed by Adams v. Louisiana openly proposed abolishing the Supreme Court or at least substantially limiting its authority. Regardless of the potential partisan and corporate motivations, the Radicals' judicial reform would prove to be pivotal in upcoming battles for civil rights.
Surrounding the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1877 was a burgeoning movement by people of color against segregation in public transportation was emerging. In 1878, a grocer and undertaker named Robert Fox in Louisville, Kentucky sat in the white section of a trolley car along with his brother Samuel Fox and Horace Pearce, their boss. When the driver asked him to leave, he refused, until they were forced out by a group of white drivers. Fox accused the trolley company of assault and battery, and a federal court found in his favor because the racial segregation of the streetcars was unlawful. When the company still refused to recognize the ruling, civil rights leaders in Louisville began to organize "ride-ins". African-Americans would fill entire white-only sections of the streetcars, causing some drivers to vacate the trolley as the riders would then it themselves. Eventually, the company capitulated to the overwhelming pressure, and announced a policy of racially integrated seating. Similar cases against segregation in public transportation were also litigated in San Francisco by African-American entrepreneur Mary Ellen Pleasant, in Memphis by investigative journalist Ida B. Wells, and in Mayfield, Kentucky by Baptist minister Elisha Winfield Green.
Ida B. Wells, investigative journalist and civil rights leader
As African-Americans began to organize for and defend their civil rights, they also began to exercise their voting rights. The 1879 state legislative elections were a crucial turning point in American democracy for this reason. Numerous black legislators took office for the first time in history, with one being the founder of the South Carolina Radical Party, Robert Smalls. During the Civil War, Smalls escaped slavery when he commandeered the CSS Planter to the Union blockade before he became a pilot for the Union Navy. Afterwards, he returned home and bought his former master's house, and became a railroad company director. As a state legislator, Smalls championed the cause of public education, sponsoring a bill to establish a system of schools that were universal, compulsory, and free. In Virginia, the biracial coalition that constituted the Readjuster Party also made public education a winning issue when it secured a majority in the Virginia General Assembly. The new Radical, Greenbacker, and Readjuster state governments of the South earned broad support for these investments in education and infrastructure.
As the 1880 elections approached, the National Union Party embarked on the 'New Departure' strategy. During the 1879 state convention, the Ohioan Union Party embraced "universal political rights and equality among both the white and the colored people of the United States" while condemning the Enforcement Act and the burgeoning power of the federal government. Other northern National Unionists also embraced racial equality in theory while opposing its practical means of enforcement as a violation of constitutional liberties, and focused primarily on less sectional issues overall such as the economy and civil service reform. The 1880 National Union platform declared, "We recognize the equality of all men before the law, and hold that it is the duty of the Government in its dealings with the people to mete out equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color or persuasion, religion or politics. We pledge ourselves to maintain the union of these States, emancipation and enfranchisement; and to oppose any reopening of the questions settled by the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution." The platform called for state governments to oversee the enfranchisement of freedmen, and condemned the "bayonet rule" imposed by the Conkling administration onto the South. However, most planks related to the corruption and cronyism of the Radicals, and called for a substantial reform of the system.
Senator Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware, who had sponsored civil service reform while in the Senate, was the party's nominee. Bayard was a staunch conservative who has long been popular with the party for his support of the gold standard and for authoring the minority report on the Ku Klux Klan outrages, alleging that they were outright fabrications. He vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1877, as well as the federal electoral supervision established by the Naturalization Act. Former U.S. Representative George H. Pendleton of Ohio was selected as his running mate, a fellow champion of civil reform known for the "Ohio idea". The Ohio idea was that federal war bonds should be redeemed by Greenbacks, something long opposed by Bayard and the Eastern section of the party. Both Bayard and Pendleton were antiwar Democrats, with the former specifically calling for the Union to peacefully accept Southern secession. The "Goldbug Copperhead" ticket was widely ridiculed in all corners, especially as the economy had been in steady recovery since mid-1879.
The Greenbackers were divided on whether or not they should pursue anti-Radical voters, or if they should appeal to anti-Unionist voters via electoral fusion with the Radical Democracy Party. U.S. Representative Marcus M. Pomeroy of Wisconsin, a Copperhead during the Civil War, organized the Union Greenback Labor Convention in St. Louis with intent of targeting Unionist voters. Delegates nominated Texas Land Commissioner Barzillai J. Chambers for President and Confederate veteran Absolom Madden West of Mississippi as his running mate. The platform lambasted the federal government for deploying federal troops against strikers and called for an end to Chinese immigration as well as harsh measures to curb corruption. The National Greenback Party met in Indianapolis and nominated the stridently pro-suffrage Senator Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts with Congressman Edward H. Gillette of Iowa as his running mate. The platform called for soft money, a progressive income tax, the abolition of child and convict labor, and voting rights for every citizen. The Socialist Labor Party had participated in the Indianapolis Greenback convention, and Greenbackers were denounced as socialists in Radical and Unionist newspapers. This was a theme echoed by President Roscoe Conkling. Conkling campaigned on his own behalf, something that had become increasingly common ever since the success of Andrew Johnson's tour during the 1866 midterms. A master of oratory ever since his days as a lawyer, Conkling painted his opponents as terrorist sympathizers who threatened the status quo.
U.S. Representative Josiah T. Walls of Florida
With a thriving economy, a divided Greenback Party, a lackluster National Unionist ticket, and newly enfranchised African-American voters showing their support for the Radicals, President Conkling sailed to re-election with 338 Electoral College votes. Senator Bayard only managed to carry four states worth 31 EVs: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Texas. This was the worst showing for a major party since Winfield Scott's candidacy for the Whig Party in the 1852 presidential election. The 1880 elections were also historic in another way: the election of the first African-American Congressmen and Senators in history. They included U.S. Representatives Jeremiah Haralson, James T. Rapier and Benjamin S. Turner of Alabama, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, Jefferson F. Long of Georgia, John Willis Menard and Charles E. Nash of Louisiana, John R. Lynch of Mississippi, Henry P. Cheatham, John Adams Hyman, and James E. O'Hara of North Carolina, George W. Murray, Thomas E. Miller, Joseph Rainey, Robert B. Elliot, Richard H. Cain, and Alonzo J. Ransier of South Carolina, John Mercer Langston of Virginia, as well as U.S. Senators P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana and Blanche Bruce and Hiram Rhodes Revels, both of Mississippi. At long last, African-Americans were fully able to exercise their right to vote and have the representation in government that they had long fought for.
Booker T. Washington, philanthropist and educator.
During the 1880s, laws prohibiting interracial marriage were repealed all throughout the North in Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Rhode Island, Wyoming, building upon the momentum by earlier repeal efforts to the same effect in Iowa (1851), Kansas (1859), Massachusetts (1843), New Mexico (1866), Pennsylvania (1780), and Washington (1868). In the South, interracial marriage was legalized in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. By 1890, interracial marriage was legal in most states in the Union. During this period, the Radical Congress and Conkling also made new investments in infrastructure and education. The latter included the creation of colleges for African-Americans, an effort spearheaded by black philanthropist and national leader Booker T. Washington, and later, by civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African-American to graduate from Harvard and a major political theorist who fought for the freedoms of black people not just in the United States, but throughout the world. The American civil rights movement and the African-American officials elected in federal and state governments would contribute to the efforts for self-rule and independence among the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.
The road to freedom for other marginalized groups, such as women and Asian-Americans to name just two alluded to in the previous pages, would prove to be longer in the coming decades. The United States was not, and is not, yet one that lived up to its promises of liberty and justice for all. However, the cause of equality, fought for by the Union soldiers in Civil War and the activists in the trolley cars of Kentucky, was secured and confirmed in a way few would have thought possible just a decade or two prior. Reconstruction was saved. To preserve its gains from the forces of bigotry and white supremacy would be an inter-generational struggle that goes on today, and can and must include all of us.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
What a fantastic and concise look into an alternate reality scenario of one of the most interesting possibilities in roads not taken; a reconstruction that did not end in failure and erasure of the hopes and dreams of African Americans and their allies after the civil war. It is especially nice to see a scenario that knows exactly when and how to end; not to drag on unnecessarily like some slinking zombie animated only by the consistent online fear of endings, but to tie up in only six updates a detailed but short account of the triumph of Reconstruction in a world perhaps a little better than ours.
Kind of like an Alternate History short story of sorts!
Kind of like an Alternate History short story of sorts!