Capitol Men (32 page)

The national recognition of Elliott as an orator of genius, an heir to Charles Sumner himself, was a particularly meaningful affirmation, granting Elliott the kind of intellectual prominence only Frederick Douglass and a few other black Americans enjoyed. Newspapers began taking an interest in all aspects of his life, even his and Grace's plans to renovate their house in Columbia, and gave significant coverage to his visit to Boston's Faneuil Hall, where he'd been invited to offer the chief eulogy at a memorial gathering for Sumner. In response to the new curiosity about Elliott, an unconfirmed story emerged from a town in upstate New York where, it was said, the teenage Robert Elliott had once bested a local physician in a debate over slavery. The older man was arguing for the gradual emancipation of the slaves when Elliott inquired if, in amputating someone's arm, the good doctor would also do so one finger at a time. "The victory for the colored boy was complete," it was reported, "and the excitement of the audience knew no bounds ... That boy's name was Robert B. Elliott ... whose recent speech on the Supplementary Civil Rights Bill has electrified the nation."

Back in the galleries overlooking Congress, Elliott's treatment of Stephens had whetted appetites for more of the sport of black congressmen skewering pompous former Confederates. The next victim was Democrat William Robbins of North Carolina, who, after boasting of his service in the rebel army and his role in several famous battles, argued against the civil rights bill on the grounds that although whites had tried "to bring these barbarians up to civilization," black people were simply not capable of the ascent. The civil rights bill, Robbins declared, would therefore bring the whites of the South down to the level of the ex-slaves. Richard Cain of South Carolina replied that the "civilizing instruments" used by Robbins and his fellow whites "to bring these barbarians up to civilization" had been the lash and the whipping post, but that, despite such abysmal treatment, he and Robbins today stood on the same floor of Congress and that he had come to assert his rights. To Robbins's humiliation, even many white members joined the gallery in chuckling at his efforts and at Cain's wit and eloquence in the exchange. "In the ratio of their numbers," a Republican told a reporter, "it
must be conceded that the colored representatives in Congress are better parliamentary speakers than the whites."

The knock-down success of Elliott's address helped gain some momentum, at long last, for Sumner's civil rights bill, which in May 1874 was passed by the Senate. Many saw the vote as a kind of memorial tribute to Sumner, or an homage to the idealism of early Reconstruction, which amounted to basically the same thing. In the House, the bill came up for a vote in early 1875 with the strong backing of Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts and James Garfield of Ohio.

By now, the Republicans had experienced a setback in the November 1874 elections, losing 170 seats in the House of Representatives and control of that body for the first time since 1860. In part this expressed the nation's weariness with Reconstruction but more specifically its unease with the Senate's approving vote, which made passage of Sumner's civil rights law appear imminent. As William Gillette points out, a looming new civil rights law "mandating social equality" was a peril that any Southern voter could understand. Questions such as "Do you wish to be buried in a nigger grave-yard?" or "Do you wish your daughter to marry a nigger?" summed up why many felt that the Republicans could no longer be trusted with the management of Congress, the Southern statehouses, or the nation's racial dynamics. Putting the "nigger into our tea and coffee" was how one Kentucky editor denigrated Sumner's bill. President Grant had spoken supportively of civil rights legislation in his second inaugural address, but even he acknowledged that this issue had turned the tide against the Republicans in the South and border states, a view seconded by the journalist Charles Nordhoff, who saw former white Republican voters desert the party in droves.

Now, with the Democrats set to control the House of Representatives and Butler himself a lame duck, having lost his seat in a close race in Massachusetts, the Republicans were eager to go out on a high note by easing the civil rights legislation through. Not that all were of one mind concerning the bill. Some saw its passage as obligatory—the finishing touch on Reconstruction, or a tribute to Sumner; others feared that by becoming law, it would only further inflame Southern passions, perhaps harming the Republican Party in the upcoming presidential contest in 1876 as it had in the congressional elections of fall 1874.

With the bill before the House, it was Garfield of Ohio who rode to the rescue, reminding his peers that "the measure pending here today is confronted ... by the first argument that was raised against the anti-slavery movement in its first inception—that it is a sentimental abstrac
tion rather than a measure of practical legislation." The abolitionists, he noted, had once been "denounced as dreamers, abstractionists, who were looking down to the bottom of society and attempting to see something good ... something that the friend of human rights ought to support in the person of a negro slave. Every step since that first sentimental beginning has been assailed by precisely the same argument." He admitted that the emerging Democratic majority in Congress might "go back and plow up all that has been planted," reversing his and others' efforts to place black Americans safely and securely on the plane of equal rights, yet he urged his own party to act while it still could to usher the civil rights bill into law. He framed his request in a kind of valediction of Reconstruction itself:

During the last twelve years it has often been rung in our ears that by doing justice to the negro we shall pull down the pillars of our political temple and bury ourselves in the ruins ... When we were abolishing slavery by adopting the Thirteenth Amendment we were warned that we were bringing measureless calamity upon the Republic. Did it come? When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed the same wail was heard, the wail of the fearful and unbelieving. Again when it was proposed to elevate the negro to citizenship, to give him the ballot as his weapon of self-defense, we were told the cup of our destruction was filled to its brim. But sir, I have lived long enough to learn that in the long run it is safest for a nation, a political party, or an individual man to dare to do right, and let consequences take care of themselves, for he that loseth his life for the truth's sake shall find it.

The bill, minus its provisions for equal rights in schools, churches, and cemeteries, passed the House on February 5 by a vote of 162 to 99; the Senate accepted the House version by a margin of 38 to 26; and on March 1, 1875, with President Grant's signature, "Sumner's Law" at long last went on the books.

W
HILE THE DEBATE
over the new civil rights bill was testing Reconstruction's limits in Congress, a parallel struggle was taking shape in far-off Mississippi. This verdant agricultural land had, since war's end, experienced periods of relative political stability, enough so that blacks from more troubled states, such as Georgia, regarded it as something of a mainstay of Republican rule. Yet of the three states with black majority populations—Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina—Mississippi would be the first in which whites achieved redemption, or home rule, and the methods by which this was accomplished, known as the Mississippi Plan, would become a regional model for that transformation.

Perhaps the first sign of the coming political convulsion was a deadly riot at Meridian, an east Mississippi railroad town, in spring 1871. A posse of Ku Klux Klansmen from nearby Alabama had entered Mississippi to track down and discipline some black men for allegedly backing out of work contracts. Meridian's Republican leadership—Mayor William Sturges, a carpetbagger, and his scalawag cohort Robert J. Mosely—challenged the incursion on the grounds that the Klan's leader, an Alabama sheriff named Adam Kennard, had violated his jurisdiction by pursuing the missing workers across the state line. Tensions rose when it was alleged that Kennard had himself been assaulted by Daniel Price, a scalawag who taught in a black school. To help calm the fears of Meridian blacks, who were nervous about possible Klan retribution, Mayor Sturges and local Republican authorities staged a well-attended torchlight rally on the steps of Meridian's Lauderdale County Courthouse. The black spokesmen J. Aaron Moore, William Clopton, and Warren Tyler joined Sturges in urging their supporters to remain calm until the crisis had passed.

A few nights later local Democrats held their own gathering, from which a belligerent resolution emerged: the town's "present [Republican] incumbents must be swept away from the face of the earth." The Democrats also drew up affidavits and swore a formal complaint against Moore, Clopton, and the others, alleging that the town's Unionist leaders had, in their meeting on the courthouse steps, made "incendiary" speeches and used "seditious language." "Damn old Meridian!" Clopton was quoted as having declared. "She has given us a lot of trouble; let's burn her all up tonight."

When a judicial hearing was held to examine the complaint a few days later, numerous Republicans and as many as two hundred Democratic "observers" packed the courtroom. At one point, Warren Tyler interrupted a white witness named James Brantley to demand the right to summon other witnesses who would show that Brantley was not being truthful. "I want to introduce two or three witnesses to impeach your veracity," said Tyler. Enraged at the suggestion that he was a liar, Brantley grabbed a billy club from a court officer's hands and charged Tyler, who, according to witnesses, reached into his coat for a revolver. Instantly, weapons were drawn on all sides, and, after a blaze of gunfire, the presiding white judge fell back dead in his chair. The stunned court-room froze; then, as furious whites cried murder, the Republicans fled for their lives. Tyler sprinted to a second-floor veranda, swung over the railing, and jumped to the ground; he then ran off, with several whites in pursuit. William Clopton, who'd fallen wounded, was carried to a balcony by two white men and hurled to the brick pavement below. Rioters meanwhile chased down Aaron Moore and "continued their hellish barbarities," beating him severely and later burning his house to the ground. Tyler, the chief target of the mob's rage, was found hiding in a shack, dragged into the street, and killed. As many as thirty other blacks died in the rampage.

Mayor Sturges evaded the mob by hiding in the garret of a boarding house and emerged only when intermediaries worked out an arrangement whereby he would resign his office and leave town. "I wanted to know the whys and wherefore," Sturges explained in a letter to the
New York Tribune
that described the day's events, "but they said they came not to argue any question of right: the verdict had been rendered. They treated me respectfully, but said that their ultimatum was that I must take a northern-bound train. I yielded. At about half past twelve o'clock at night perhaps three hundred came and escorted me to the cars."

Sturges's letter was reprinted widely in the North, feeding the debate
then under way about the need for the Ku Klux Klan Act's tougher measures. The duly elected Republican mayor of a large Southern town had been "hunted out like a wolf" by "confederated murderers," lamented the
New National Era
. "It proves the rebel spirit [is] still rampant and murderous." Sturges ended by advising that "martial law be proclaimed through every Southern state. Leniency will not do."

Such a prescription was severe, but the deposed mayor was right that the Meridian riot would not remain an isolated occurrence. Native whites had stumbled upon an almost foolproof tactic for loosening local Republican control: foment some outrage or accusation against black or carpetbagger authorities, then create a physical confrontation. The freedmen, less inclined to engage in a sustained fight, would likely make no effective resistance; the show of massive force would not only paralyze them but also lay bare the tenuousness of the bond between them and their white Republican allies. The
Era,
which headlined its piece about Sturges "The Peril of the Hour," saw the danger vividly: isolated acts of Klan violence, while troubling, involved solitary victims and terrorists who could potentially be prosecuted; a riot, on the other hand, carried out by an anonymous mob, inflicted more wholesale damage and could demoralize an entire community.

The Mississippi senator and former military governor Adelbert Ames also understood instantly that something ominous had taken place at Meridian. He had monitored the rise of a home-rule mentality in his state and had come to suspect that native whites, despite their at times conciliatory rhetoric, were at heart driven by a deep-seated contempt for the idea of blacks as citizens or equals. "The South cares for no other question," Ames later noted. "Everything gives way to it. They support or oppose men, advocate or denounce policies, flatter or murder, just as such action will help them as far as possible to recover their old power over the negro."

Ames knew that the rights and security of the freed people, and civil society itself, could not be sustained unless white violence was quelled; the future of Reconstruction itself in Mississippi likely hung in the balance. But what were the appropriate remedies, and how could such policies be enforced in this remote place?

One glance at Adelbert Ames showed that fate had made a curious choice. With his receding hairline, pleasant smile, and neatly trimmed mustache, he resembled a small-town bank manager far more than a
professional soldier. Yet the Maine native and West Point graduate had emerged from the war with a distinguished reputation for gallantry, winning the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroism at First Bull Run, where, though badly wounded, he had remained with his two-gun battery even after being ordered to the rear, directing fire at the enemy until he collapsed from loss of blood. "Every one who rode with him ... soon discovered that Ames never hesitated to take desperate chances under fire," an aide recalled. "He seemed to have a life that was under some mystic protection. Under the heaviest fire ... he would sit on his horse, apparently unmoved by singing rifle-ball, shrieking shot, or bursting shell, and quietly give his orders." Ames went on to serve at Gettysburg and in numerous other engagements; not yet thirty years old at war's end, he was made a brigadier general and appointed Southern district commander of the Union occupying forces based in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi.