Originally published in Synapse on February 26, 2009.
For anyone possessing a shred of fairness, reading about Reconstruction, America’s attempt to deliver racial justice after the Civil War, is a depressing exercise. The years of Reconstruction, 1865-76, saw African Americans briefly ascend from slavery to the corridors of power, then lose all when the white South re-asserted its dominance, plunging blacks into a long, dark period that would last for decades.
Capitol Men, the fine new book by Philip Dray, tells the story of the men who became the first black Congressmen in the nation’s history. They are a varied group, united only by their accomplishments. They faced appalling racism during every step of their careers and were ultimately overwhelmed by it.
Their stories are compelling. Dray begins his book with Robert Smalls, who first gained fame in the Civil War with his daring escape from Charleston, leading his fellow slaves in stealing a Confederate supply boat and sailing it out to join the Union vessels blockading the harbor. Smalls was prominent in Reconstruction politics in South Carolina, one of two Southern states where African Americans actually were in the majority (Mississippi was the other).
He participated in the 1868 state convention in which a post-slavery constitution was written for the state. This integrated convention met with savage opposition from the Charleston press, which labeled it “the Congo Convention” or the “Crow Congress.”
Smalls was joined at the convention by another future congressman, the Rev. Richard “Daddy” Cain, who had grown up as a free black in Ohio but had come South after the war to start a church. His fiery eloquence would stir the convention, which produced a progressive constitution for South Carolina.
Smalls was instrumental in getting the state to adopt public education for both races, as well as state colleges. Other fights were not as successful. Cain urged his fellow delegates to provide land for the freed slaves, the vision of “40 acres and a mule” that African Americans believed they had been promised during the Civil War.
But all attempts at meaningful land reform in the South failed, largely due to a notable lack of enthusiasm in Washington, and blacks were largely excluded from land ownership. It was to prove a crucial weakness.
The first African American to sit in the United States Congress was Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who, ironically, was sent to Washington in 1870 to fill the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis. Revels had grown up a free man in North Carolina and had wandered over the North in his early adulthood. His election to the Senate stirred pride among all African Americans.
A newspaper started in Washington by legendary African American leader Frederick Douglass offered its readers a lithograph of Revels that “would do no discredit to the walls of any parlor in America.” But the white South would not stand for the new era. A brutal white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, led by former Confederate officers, unleashed a reign of terror on Southern blacks. In addition, the sheer intransigence of Southern whites gradually wore down Northern support for the freed slaves.
Georgia, for example, had a new constitution that allowed blacks to vote. But when newly elected black legislators arrived at the state capitol, they were denied seats because the new constitution did not explicitly allow black officeholders. This kind of petty and not-so-petty racial harassment was repeated on a wide scale throughout the South.
Massacres of blacks in New Orleans and Colfax, Tennessee, underlined the refusal of the white South to accept the freed slaves as equals. Despite federal efforts such as the Freedman’s Bureau and the peacekeeping role of the U.S. Army, which occupied large stretches of the South after the war, African Americans were unable to overcome the almost unanimous opposition of white Southerners.
Despite the best efforts of charismatic African American politicians such as P.B.S. Pinchback, governor of Louisiana, and others profiled in this book, Reconstruction weakened as Northern voters grew tired of trying to help blacks in the face of the brutal race war the white South was waging. The North was weary of fighting after losing hundreds of thousands of men in the Civil War.
Eventually, white government slipped back into the saddle in state after state in the South. To the white South, these states were “redeemed.” Finally, in 1876, a disputed presidential election ended Reconstruction. In return for Southern support for Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes, who had almost certainly lost the election to Democrat Samuel Tilden, the Republicans pulled federal troops out of the South and ended the effort to assist the freed blacks.
One by one, Southern black congressmen were replaced by whites. Although some districts would send blacks to Congress until the end of the 19th century, Reconstruction was dead.
The races, typically, reacted differently to this. Benjamin Tillman, the white governor of South Carolina, celebrated his race’s victory in his inaugural address of 1890: “Democracy (referring to the Democratic Party) has won a great victory unparalleled,” he cried. “The triumph of Democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy is most complete.”
A few years later, the last black Southerner to serve in the United States Congress, the ironically named George White, lamented his departure from the House with an eloquence that would ring through the generations: “This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress, but let me say Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are in behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding but God-fearing people, faithful, industrious, loyal people, rising people, full of potential force ... The only apology I have for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness and manhood suffrage for one eighth of the entire population of the United States.”
White’s prediction would come true, but not until another generation of blacks would take on the white power structure in the South, during the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement, which would largely succeed where Reconstruction had so largely failed.
