Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 29: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (3)

John Roy Lynch did a follow-up to the article from which I quoted yesterday. The second piece is called, More About the Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History (3:2 Apr 1918). It's mostly devoted to defending his previous piece on several specific factual points on which he certainly looks to have the better of the particular critic to whom he's responding.

There are two points that I'll emphasize here. One is his discussion of the antidemocratic turn in the Supreme Court, embodied in particular by their overturning of anti-discrimination and voting rights protections in the federal Civil Rights Act approved during Reconstruction that effectively gutted those laws (not unlike the Roberts Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in more recent years!):

I think would have been, different. The unfortunate thing about those decisions is the wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words, they amount to a judicial re-cognition of the dangerous doctrine of States Rights - a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed. Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be, prose cuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

He also mentions the obvious absurdity of the Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which he does not name specifically:

The court has also decided that a State law providing separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution, provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which can be very easily done. Equal separate accommodations are both a physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment, but in some cases, an absolute denial of such accommodations. The ultimate nullification of such unfair, unjust and unreasonable laws must necessarily follow. [my emphasis in bold]

The other point is Lynch's further defense of the quality of the Reconstruction government's in Mississippi. The critic to whom he is responding, to whom he refers as "the expert," had claimed that the alleged mismanagement in Reconstruction was more prominent in local governments than the state:

In other words [as Lynch reads the claims of "the expert"], there was nothing wrong with the State administration; it was the local county and municipal governments that were bad. And yet, a fair and impartial investigation will reveal the fact that there is no more foundation for this allegation than for those about the State government. It is admitted that during the early part of Reconstruction the local tax rate was high, the reasons for which are fully explained in [Lynch's 1913 book] The Facts of Reconstruction. Such an investigation would show that the charges of extravagance, recklessness and maladministration so generally made about the administration of county and municipal affairs were grossly exaggerated and nearly, if not all of them wholly untrue. In fact, the expert flatly contradicts himself on this point, because he admits that the evidence does not support the charge of dishonesty in the case of the Negro sheriffs, and yet the sheriff is the principal officer in the administration of the county government. [my emphasis in bold]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 28: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (2)

John Roy Lynch, who I've been quoting in recent posts and who served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi during Reconstruction, wrote a defense of Reconstruction in Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History 2:4 (Oct 1917). He was responding to the account of Reconstruction in the multi-volume History of the United States by James Rhodes, which he describes as "the most biased, partisan and prejudiced historical work I have ever read."

He objects to Rhodes' description of the "Redemption" (end of Reconstruction) as the restoration of "home rule" to the former Confederate states. Lynch in responding gives an accurate picture of the nature of the Redemption governments:

If home rule were finally restored to the South in 1877, the natural and necessary inference to be drawn is that prior to that time those States were subjected to some other kind of rule, presumably that of foreigners and strangers, an inference which is wholly at variance with the truth. Another inference to be drawn is that those States had enjoyed home rule until the same was revolutionized or set aside by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress and that it was finally restored in 1877. If this is the inference which the writer meant to have the reader make, it is conclusive evidence of the fact that he was unpardonably and inexcusably ignorant of the subject matter about which he wrote.

As he indicates in his argument, the "home rule" trope was a propaganda label meant to disguise the dirty and undemocratic nature of the Redemption governments.

As that term is usually and generally understood, there never was a time when those States did not have home rule, unless we except the brief period when they were under military control, and even then the military commanders utilized home material in making appointments to office. Since the officers, however, were not elected by the people, it may be plausibly claimed that they did not have home rule. But the State governments that were organized and brought into existence under the Reconstruction Acts of Congress were the first and only governments that were genuinely republican in form. [my emphasis]

He is arguing here that even the antebellum governments which were "republican" in the understanding of the Constitution of that time were not genuinely so.

The form of government which existed in ante-bellum days was that of an aristocracy. That which has existed since what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term the restoration of home rule is simply that of a local despotic oligarchy. The former was not, and the present is not, based upon the will and choice of the masses; but the former was by far the better of the two, for whatever may be truthfully said in condemnation and in derogation of the southern aristocracy of ante-bellum days, it can not be denied that they represented the wealth, the intelligence, the decency and the respectability of their respective States. While the State governments that were dominated by the aristocrats were not based upon the will of the people, as a whole, yet from an administrative point of view they were not necessarily bad. Such can not be said of those who are now the representatives of what Mr. Rhodes is pleased to term home rule. [my emphasis]

That is a straightforward and accurate description of both the antebellum and Redemption governments. But it was very much outside the mainstream of academic and popular interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in 1917, which had come to be dominated by the Lost Cause perspective.

Lynch also gives an account of how some Southern whites eventually became attracted to the Republican Party during Reconstruction. He offers a bit of worldly wisdom in that regard:

It is true there are some men whose party affiliations are based upon principle and convictions regardless of consequences personal to themselves. Occasionally there are found some who are even willing to be martyrs, but they are exceptions to the general rule. The average man is politically ambitious. He desires political distinction and official recognition. In determining his party affiliations, therefore, he is more than apt to cast his lot with the party through which he believes that ambition may be gratified.

And he points out that just after the Civil War, Southern whites tended to think it was safer to adhere to the Democratic Party:

The Civil War had just come to a close; sectional animosity was bitter and intense. The Republican party was looked upon as the party of the North and, therefore, the bitter enemy of the South. The southern white men who joined the Republican party were accused of being traitors to their section and false to their own race and blood; they were called Scalawags. Through a process of intimidation, chiefly by means of social ostracism, independent thought and action on the part of southern whites, during the early period of Reconstruction, were pretty effectually prevented. Through such methods, they were quite successfully held under the subjection and control of those whose leadership they had been accustomed to follow.

But with Grant's election in 1868 which put a President in the White House that was in broad agreement with the policies of Congressional Reconstruction, the political atmosphere in the South, and he is writing with particular reference to Mississippi, began to shift:

After the election of Grant, however, in 1868 the feeling of intolerance somewhat subsided, resulting in a large number of accessions to the Republican party from the ranks of the best and most substantial white men of that section. But it was not until the reelection of Grant in 1872 that the feeling of political proscription, social ostracism and intolerance among the whites seemingly disappeared. It was then that white men came into, took charge of and assumed the leadership of the Republican party, in large numbers. They then had nothing to fear and nothing to lose by being identified with the Republican party when social distinctions growing out of politics ceased to be effective. [my emphasis]

I assume in the directly following passage, he was speaking in terms of potential as well as experienced reality, which is never quite so pleasant as this passage might suggest:

The South then entered upon a new era which was destined to bring to that section wealth and prosperity with happiness and contentment among its people of both races, all living under local governments successfully controlled by the better element of native whites with the cooperation and participation to some extent of the newly enfranchised blacks.

Lynch leans to the extravagant in his praise of Mississippi whites who became Republicans: "In fact, the southern white men that came into the Republican party were typical representatives of the best blood and the finest manhood of the South, than whom no better men ever lived."

He attributed to discrediting of Reconstruction among Southern whites to three events:

The true reason why so many white men at the South left the Republican party may be stated under three heads: first, the Democratic victories of 1874 which were accepted by southern Democrats as a national repudiation of the congressional plan of Reconstruction; second, the closeness of the Presidential election of 1876 together with the supposed bargain entered into between the Hayes managers and southern Democratic members of Congress, by which the South was to be turned over to the Democrats of that section in consideration of which the said southern Democrats gave their consent to the peaceable inauguration of Hayes; third, the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States [in the Civil Rights cases] by which the doctrine of States' Rights was given new life and strength. [my emphasis]

Lynch noted in a later article that I quoted in a previous post that, in reality, the 1874 election were largely driven by the national repercussions of the Panic of 1873 and Reconstruction was such was not a major theme. But here he's talking about how Southern Democrats interpreted that result at the time.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 27: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (1)

Reconstruction-era Congress John Roy Lynch (1847-1939), who I've discussed in the last two days' posts, is an example of someone who kept a more realistic, democratic understanding of Reconstruction alive when the Lost Cause version was predominant in professional history and popular culture.

In an essay appearing under the title Communications in its published form (The Journal of Negro History 16:1 Jan 1931; Lynch's communication itself is dated 07/17/1930), Lynch addressed distortions in a book by Claude Bowers called The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929). He declares in the first paragraph that Bowers' book is "is a composition of errors, misstatements, misrepresentations, and false assertions." He sees Bowers as distorting by omission: "In spite of its extreme prolixity and verbosity the book is remarkable, more for what is concealed than for what is revealed - for what is unrecorded than for what is recorded."

Lynch challenged the Lost Cause narrative on several points. For instance, on Presidential Reconstruction, he writes:

President Andrew Johnson inaugurated a policy of reconstruction of his own, which did not meet with popular approval. He belonged to that group of public men who contended that the rebel states had never been legally out of the Union. His policy, therefore, was the oath of allegiance to the Union and the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. No other conditions were deemed necessary to complete restoration. But it so transpired that the state governments which he thus brought into existence made the ratification of the thirteenth amendment practically worthless, for the "black laws" passed by the different legislatures practically re-established the institution of slavery. [my emphasis]

It was in the struggle with Johnson over Reconstruction policy that led to the Reconstruction Acts and what became known as Congressional Reconstruction or Radical Reconstruction: "Congressional leaders were confronted with the fact that it would be impossible to bring about restoration on any other basis than that proposed by President Johnson without conferring suffrage upon the colored man."

The elections of 1868, in which Ulysses Grant was elected President focused on the issue of Reconstruction:

The first test of strength [between supporters and opponents Congressional Reconstruction measures] took place in the state and congressional elections of 1866, when the republicans were successful. Still, hope of ultimate success on the part of the democrats was not abandoned. The crucial test was to take place in the presidential and congressional elections of 1868. The national democratic convention of that year, which nominated Seymour and Blair for president and vice president, incorporated in the party platform a clause which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void. The republican national convention which nominated Grant and Colfax for president and vice-president, warmly endorsed, and boldly sanctioned the reconstruction acts. This, then was the chief, and it may be said, the sole issue before the country at that time. The result was a victory for the republicans; and yet it was a sore disappointment for the leaders of that party, for the reason that the democrats carried the empire state of New York, and if the southern states, which in the meantime had been readmitted had been lost to the republicans, the hero of Appomattox [Grant] would have been defeated. In other words, it was the southern states that participated in that election that brought success to the republican party. In consequence of this fact southern democrats did not abandon hope of ultimate success in defeating, partially at least, the congressional plan of reconstruction, especially in view of the fact that they had the vigorous cooperation and support of the democratic party throughout the country.

This is significant. The country was faced with a clear choice. And because of the male suffrage that included black men being able to vote in the South, the Republicans won a solid mandate for Congressional Reconstruction.

Lynch also adds some interesting observations about Reconstruction-era Mississippi politics. He describes an African-American leader, also named Lynch but he does not comment on whether he was related to him:

In reading the paragraph above [from Bowers' book from which he had just quoted] the reader would necessarily infer that on the Alcorn ticket [the Republican ticket for Governor in 1868] there were two or more colored men, whereas in point of fact there was only one, in the person of the Rev. James Lynch, a Methodist preacher of marked ability and of superior intelligence, who was the candidate for the office of Secretary of State. As a pulpit orator and stump speaker it is not an exaggeration to say that James Lynch had few equals and no superiors. In fact, it can be truthfully said of him that he was the Henry Ward Beecher of the colored race. He was not only intelligent and well educated, but his command of the English language was such that he could hold a congregation or audience spellbound for at least two hours at a time with his powerful and convincing eloquence. Democratic orators would rather meet any man in joint debate than James Lynch, for the reason that Lynch would be sure to come out in triumph, and yet he typified, in a large measure, the colored men who were brought into political prominence under the administration of James L. Alcorn.

He also defends the Reconstruction governments of Mississippi against Lost Cause calumnies. He cites Bowers as indicating that most African-Americans elected to the legislature in 1868 "had to make their mark," by which he meant they were too illiterate to even sign their names. Lynch responds:

The assertion that most of the colored members had to make their mark is a cruel slander. They were not college graduates, it is true, but most of them were preachers and leaders of more than ordinary intelligence. In this connection it may not be out of place to call attention to the fact that nearly all of the democratic members of the legislature at that time came from what was known in the state as the Piney-woods or Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by poor whites, many of whom were illiterate. The white people of wealth and intelligence lived in the wealth-producing counties, in which there were more colored than white people. Those were the counties that sent republicans to the legislature, while the Cow Counties, inhabited chiefly by plebians, or poor whites, were the counties that sent democrats to the legislature. These democrats did not represent the wealth and intelligence of the white people of the state. It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the colored members were superior in every respect to most of the democrats who were then members of the legislature. At any rate a comparison would not be unfavorable to the colored members.

I grew up in the section of Mississippi known as the Piney Woods, so I got a smile out of reading that. But I was a little surprised that the area was a Democratic stronghold right after the Civil War. The slaveowning counties were more heavily along the Mississippi River shore and the Delta in the northwest part of the state. The Piney Woods are in the south-central and south-eastern section of Mississippi. There were plantations with slaves there, but not that many. Western Mississippi was less enthusiastic for secession - there was a vote - than the eastern section of the state where slaveowners were more dominant.

Also, the Free State of Jones, the county where a band of pro-Union Southern white guerrilla fighters were based, is smack in the middle of the Piney Woods. The Free State of Jones is coming to your local theater next year, with Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight and Keri Russel of The Americans as Serena Knight, Knight's first wife.

I'm curious to look more closely at the voting patterns there during Reconstruction. One factor to keep in mind is that "pro-Union" did not translate into "tolerant toward blacks." Most African-Americans in Mississippi prior to the war were slaves. And, as historian has pointed out in some detail, since black people were identified with slavery, hostility toward slavery was often combined with hostility to the presence of black people, slave or free.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 26: Historical transitions in Reconstruction

Every year, I wonder if I'm going to be able to come up with stuff to post every day for a month on the Civil War. Even though it's never happened yet, and people are writing stuff all the time about the Civil War to which I can refer.

This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's end, so if anything, it's even easier than usual. The New York Times has a Disunion blog, which features substantial posts like Gregaory Downs' The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox 04/11/2015. The theme of the column is that severing the memory of the Civil War from that of Reconstruction and its overthrow is problematic. He's referring specifically to the image of the surrender at Appomattox as the effective end of the war. As Downs notes, that's misleading even in the narrow sense, since "fighting continue[d] in pockets for weeks."

Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.

To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

This is also a reminder not to make too drastic a distinction between Reconstruction and Redemption. Militant and violent white resistance occurred during Reconstruction, and pockets of democracy and maintenance of elements of African-American rights during Redemption.

But for that matter, even segregation at its worst did not mean the complete disfranchisement of every single black voter in every former Confederate state.

But none of that should become an excuse for rejecting important distinctions in describing historical developments. Reconstruction was an important democratic moment, in both its "Presidential" and "Congressional" versions, the latter also known as Radical Reconstruction. There was a turning point usefully dated to 1876 in which antidemocratic former Confederates went on the offense, with both "nonviolent" coercion and murderous Klan-style terrorism, and effectively suppressed African-American suffrage.

And sometime around 1890, the new system of segregation and white supremacy was well enough established that Jim Crow laws forcing various forms of public performances of racial division proliferated in the South, a condition that endured well into the 1960s.

Downs describes the new white narrative on the Civil War that became dominant for decades this way:

After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).

While it's true that Northern whites, including the Supreme Court, didn't keep faith with African-American citizens and pro-democracy whites in the former Confederacy, that wasn't all that was going on in American politics.

John Roy Lynch (1847-1939)

Former Reconstruction African-American Congressman John Lynch, who I discussed in the previous post in this series, reminded readers of the Journal of Negro History that economics affected politics, too (Communications 16:1 Jan 1931). Writing about the decline in popularity of the Grant Administration, he writes:

But the one thing that caused a revulsion in popular sentiment was the disastrous financial panic of 1873. It was one of the worst financial panics with which the country had ever been afflicted. Beginning with the failure of J. Cook & Co. in Washington, bank failures were universal throughout the country, which resulted in thousands of people being reduced to poverty. Of course, the party in power gets the credit for prosperity, when we have it, and is blamed for whatever disaster may overtake the country whether it be merited or not. Consequently in the state and congressional elections of 1874 the whole country went as overwhelmingly democratic as it had gone republican two years prior. The democratic party not only carried the national house of representatives, but elected more than two thirds of the members of that body and came very near wiping out the large republican majority in the senate. [my emphasis]

Lynch goes on to describe the practical result in the South:

The probabilities are that the reconstruction policy of the government had very little, if any thing, to do with bringing about this result. The voters simply regarded reconstruction as having been settled and that they could give their attention to other matters; hence, those who voted the republican ticket in 1872 and the democratic ticket in 1874 did so, not as an endorsement of what the democratic party stood for, but as a protest against and a vote of dissatisfaction with, what had transpired under the Grant administration. But let the reasons be what they may, southern democrats accepted the result of that election as a national condemnation and repudiation of the congressional plan of reconstruction and an endorsement by the nation of the declaration contained in the national democratic platform of 1868, which declared the reconstruction acts of congress to be unconstitutional, revolutionary and void. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 25: Early decades of "Redemption"

The end of Reconstruction is conventionally dated to the deal after the 1876 Presidential election that allowed Republican Rutherford Hayes to become President despite losing the popular vote. The Republican concession was to abandon the Reconstruction program in the former Confederate states. The opponents of democracy who overthrew the Reconstruction governments with force, violence and fraud styled themselves as "Redeemers." And the post-Reconstruction disfranchisement of African-American citizens and the establishment of segregation is known as "Redemption."

But major historical transitions are very rarely able to date so cleanly. Reconstruction is no exception. There had been resistance from white elites and many ordinary whites to the black franchise before 1876. But federal discouragement with enforcing the Constitution and Democratic attempts to undermine the elected governments achieved a new success with the campaign of violence against Mississippi Gov. Adelbert Ames, culminating in his impeachment and resignation in 1876. This method of what we now call "regime change" was even called the Mississippi Plan after the state where it was so successful in 1875-6.

The former slave and African-American politician John Roy Lynch (1847–1939) served three terms as a Republican Congressman from Mississippi (1873-1877, 1882-1883). While the end of his first stint in Congress corresponds to the turn of the political tide in favor of the Redeemers, the second came after the general victory of Redemption. That doesn't mean that the Redeemers were happy to have an African-American Congressman. It represents the efforts of black voters in the Congressional district around Natchez to hold on to their rights even in the face of federal abandonment and Democratic power in Mississippi.

Lynch published a collection of essays title The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913, which was republished in 1970 in an edition featuring an introduction by historian William Harris. Harris writes:

When Lynch was selected for Congress by Negro delegates to the Sixth Congressional District convention, the struggle between the black and white factions in Natchez was brought into the open, and its reverberations threatened to disrupt the Republican party throughout the river counties. The factions assumed the names of "Warm Spring Indians" (blacks) and "Modocs" (whites), but such colorful appellations had no effect on the outcome of the dispute. Complete victory for the Warm Spring Indians came when Senator Ames, who naively envisioned himself in the role of mediator, placed the influence of his patronage at the disposal of Congressman-elect Lynch. The growth of black authority in the river counties, however, was checked in 1875 with the so-called redemption of Mississippi from Radical rule. But in Natchez Lynch and his followers remained until the 1890's a political influence to be reckoned with by the Democratic Conservatives. [my emphasis]

The use by both factions of Indian nicknames is also an interesting twist on race relations in Mississippi at the time.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) also explains:

Too often the period of Redemption (1876-1903) has been misunderstood as a return to absolute white control; instead, historians have come to view these years as a contentious time when Republicans continued to share power and a variety of political parties challenged the Bourbons, as the Democratic elite became known, for control of state and local government. Intertwined with the political conflict, a racially segregated society emerged with customs designed to remind black Mississippians daily of their status as an inferior caste. (p. 217)

And he continues to describe how the neo-Confederate myth of the Lost Cause as well as the white racist version of the Christian religion functioned as part of that process:

White Mississippians bolstered their new political and social system with a civic religion that held the "War Between the States" to have been a holy crusade fought by saintly men defending a righteous cause. J. William Jones, Virginian prophet of the creed, routinely invoked the secular saints Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson along with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in his public prayers. By the end of this period, white Mississippians had incorporated segregation into their worldview based on evangelical religion and deemed a violation of the informal segregation code a sin. On the other hand, maintaining white control justified lying, theft of ballot boxes, stuffing them if necessary, or violence against political opponents when required. The political conflict and growth of a new social system took place in a declining cotton economy in which furnishing merchants used legislature-provided lien laws to exploit and essentially enslave a growing sharecropping population whose economic desperation grew with the fall of cotton prices. [my emphasis]

It's fascinating to me to think that someone who turned 19 the year the the Civil War ended lived to see the second Administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Harris quotes from an essay that Lynch wrote in 1929, "The Republican Party South," in which he warns the new President Herbert Hoover that he should "not flatter himself with the belief that because he carried several southern states that he can keep those states in the republican column by making a trade with southern democrats at the expense of the fundamental principles and doctrines for which the republican party has heretofore stood."