The Civil War Begins Again

In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, was elected to his second term as President of the United States. That year marked the height of the Radical Reconstruction of the South. The Republican Party controlled state legislatures and statehouses in many of what, for a few years back in the early 1860s, had called itself the Confederate States of America. Black voters were registered in the South in numbers never to be seen again until the 1960s. African Americans there held public office at nearly all levels of government, from City Hall to the Senate of the United States. Here, W. E. B. Du Bois would later maintain in Black Reconstruction (1935), were the first steps toward a radical labor-democracy ever taken in the New World, or, for that matter, anyplace in the world where white folk and people of color lived together. In 1870 in South Carolina, for example, blacks were elected to the statewide posts of lieutenant governor and attorney general; and of 155 seats in the legislature, 96 would now be filled by former slaves, or by men who shared their complexion. Reactionaries, together with the academic historians who lent their views a mantle of respectability, later attributed this to corruption in the Republican “carpetbag” regime of governor Daniel H. Chamberlain, as if there simply could be no other explanation. But sixty-percent of the South Carolina population was African American in 1872 (the majority was larger still in the lowland counties); the Democratic Party had never been any friend of the slave; the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution had enfranchised African American men; and they voted—to fund public schools and redistribute land (among other things hated by the planter class). This was a time and a place when the logic of the following exchange—made during the investigation of Ku Klux Klan terrorism ordered by President Grant—made a certain kind of sense: “Question. Is he a white man? Answer. No, sir. His father is a senator.”