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The Negroes’ Temporary Farewell

Jim Crow and the Exclusion of African Americans from Congress, 1887–1929

Shifting Republican Focus

<em>Harper&rsquo;s Weekly</em> published &ldquo;Death at the polls, and free from federal interference&rdquo; in 1879. The cartoon depicted the violence that characterized elections in the post-Reconstruction South.Harper’s Weekly published “Death at the polls, and free from federal interference” in 1879. The cartoon depicted the violence that characterized elections in the post-Reconstruction South.Image courtesy of Library of Congress

Black Members of Congress remained loyal Republicans, but their allies at home and in Congress were quickly disappearing. Southern politics in the post-Reconstruction years witnessed the rapid collapse of the states’ Radical Republican governments, which had drawn from the ranks of newly freed African-American men. Over time, a cadre of local, state, and national politicians—composed of many former Confederates and Democrats—replaced the Republican regimes and they were determined to end the experiment in multiracialism. In the “redeemed” South, the Democratic Party eventually became synonymous with the codification and formalization of racial segregation.

Though the Republican Party’s ideological makeup remained complicated in the late 1880s, two primary factions, dubbed “reformers” and “money men,” emerged. Reformers clung to the idealistic plans of postwar Radical Republicans to extend full civil rights to African Americans. Yet they began to lose support in the face of popular demand to lay the problems of the post–Civil War Reconstruction to rest, as well as a growing interest in American commercial power—the stance of the “money men.” Consequently, Congress deprioritized racial legislation.13 Control of the chamber seesawed between unsympathetic Democrats and increasingly ambivalent Republicans in the 1880s and early 1890s. Though one reformer implored Republican colleagues to “never surrender the great principles of human liberty of which [the party] was the born champion,” party leaders sensed little opportunity in pushing for black voting rights in the South.14 One historian explains that the Republicans “harbored some hope that if race was no longer salient in southern politics, other issues might rise to the surface and become the catalyst for a realignment of the parties…if the Republican Party in the South was no longer identified with and supported by black voters, it might have the opportunity to redefine itself and become accepted as a legitimate political entity.”15 Black Representatives admonished their party for abandoning the freedmen. “A veritable set of fools a few of our party leaders have been,” Thomas Miller said on the House Floor in February 1891. “They will listen to all the cheap sentimentality sounded under the name of negro domination and business prostration, be swerved from a plighted duty to a faithful constituency the country over.”16

In a difficult campaign for the House in 1888, <a href="/member-profiles/profile.html?intID=18">John M. Langston</a> lost to his opponent Edward Venable by 641 votes. However, Langston was seated in the Republican-controlled House after contesting the election results in his Virginia district. This sketch depicts Langston taking the oath of office in the well of the House. Empty seats in the foreground belong to Democrats who left the chamber in protest.In a difficult campaign for the House in 1888, John M. Langston lost to his opponent Edward Venable by 641 votes. However, Langston was seated in the Republican-controlled House after contesting the election results in his Virginia district. This sketch depicts Langston taking the oath of office in the well of the House. Empty seats in the foreground belong to Democrats who left the chamber in protest.John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1894).

Rapid industrialization brought economic and social changes that displaced race reform on the political agenda and moved it out of the public eye. Between 1869 and 1899, the population of the United States nearly tripled. Railroads extending to the Pacific Ocean allowed cheap transportation of goods around the country; the invention of the telephone in 1876 improved communication; entrepreneurs such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie amassed fortunes in manufacturing. In 1890, for the first time in American history, industrial workers outnumbered farmers.17 Emigration from southern Europe had begun to increase, just as the American frontier was declared closed. Journalist and historian Frederick Jackson Turner aptly expressed the belief that the nation was poised at the beginning of a new, uncertain era. “Movement has been…[America’s] dominant fact,” he told an audience at the American Historical Association, gathered for the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. “But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves… The frontier is gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”18

Such tectonic social shifts created cultural uncertainty. Historian Robert Wiebe describes late-19th-century America as a “distended society.&rduo; Industrialization and expansion swept away the familiar rhythms and guideposts of local community life, leaving “a society without a core” and widespread “dislocation and bewilderment.”19 Even long familiar political landmarks were in flux. According to historian Robert Marcus, the issues of race and sectionalism during the Civil War and Reconstruction “[stabilized] political loyalties by keeping eyes focused on a past full of familiar friends and enemies,” and “fulfilled some of the need for order.” By the 1880s and 1890s, “politicians could only guess at the direction in which the electorate was moving and wonder if the party system they knew was capable of containing the new populations, new pressures, and the new demands that all parts of an increasingly interconnected society made on the political system.”20 The Republican Party recast itself around commercial issues, expressing caution at “waving the bloody shirt” and finding unprecedented success with its new strategy by the mid-1890s.21

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Footnotes

  1. Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004): 9–12, 74–84; Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006): 7–32.
  2. Congressional Record, House, 56th Congress, 2nd sess. (7 January 1901): 74.
  3. Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001): 229.
  4. Congressional Record, House, 51st Cong., 2nd sess. (14 February 1891): 2694.
  5. Upchurch, Legislating Racism: 12; Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; reprint, 1995): 7–24.
  6. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Martin Ridge, ed., Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin Historian of the Frontier (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986): 26–47.
  7. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967): 11–12.
  8. Robert D. Marcus, Grand Old Party: Political Structure in the Gilded Age: 1880–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971): 10–11, 19.
  9. Marcus, Grand Old Party: 20, 90–91, 93.