Something that has always struck me as odd was that following the civil war there were several African American congressmembers and senators, and then there were none until the mid 1900s.
There is a LOT of history involving this but I was curious what the social situation was basically, I would have assumed following the end of the civil war that racial tensions would have been high and electing an African American to office difficult. As the articles show following the withdrawal of federal troops it didn’t take long for Jim Crow legislation to disenfranchise black voters in southern states.
I’m curious why the years after the civil war seemed to be a magical time of tolerance, was it simply the large number of black voters gaining the right to vote?
It’s because of Reconstruction, which was a set of federal programs and policies after the Civil War that, among other things, protected the rights of former slaves and severely curtailed the political power of former members of the Confederate government. The Reconstruction Era lasted from the end of the war in 1865 through about 1877 (“about” because it didn’t end all at once). It didn’t take long after that for the rights of southern blacks to come under attack.
They gained the right to vote, and it hadn’t been taken away yet. It was as simple as that.
Keep in mind that the percentage of black population in the South (especially in the Deep South) was higher then than it is now. Black voters formed a majority of the electorate in South Carolina, and it was just about 50-50 in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
So in any fair election it stood to reason that significant numbers of African Americans would win.
And, the earliest Reconstruction-era elections were fair. Federal troops patrolled the polling places, and black candidates harassed by whites could appeal for protection. After 1870, as the new biracial state governments were established, the federal government became gradually less responsive to appeals for protection. They expected the state governments to be able to defend themselves. But they couldn’t. No state government could stand up to the paramilitary terror unleashed by white “regulators” and Klansmen. The rights which had been won, were taken away–first by brute force, and then by law (literacy tests and white primaries).
Also, a lot of southern whites were disenfranchised during the Reconstruction, as former Confederacy supporters. As these restrictions were eased white voters increased.
But what was it like for black congressmen in Washington? Did they attend the same parties as everyone else? What kinds of discrimination did they personally face as elected officials?
This is mostly untrue. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which governed the first round of Reconstruction elections, disenfranchised Confederate “oath violators”–that is, persons, who had taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States (usually as a requirement to hold state office) and then supported the Confederacy. Oath violators were a small percentage of all Confederate supporters.
After 1868 Southern elections reverted to state control, and no state (even when dominated by Republicans) continued disenfranchisement of any kind.
Nobody at the time knew that Reconstruction would fail. The Republican establishment looked forward to having black voters and office holders as part of their governing coalition for a long time to come. So, their establishment was reasonably welcoming and “inclusive” (to use the modern word).
Outside the establishment, white Southerners sometimes gave the cold shoulder to black colleagues, sometimes not. James Lusk Alcorn refused to escort his black colleague Blanche K. Bruce to his seat, a courtesy otherwise universal for new senators. Exchanges on the floor could get nasty. But then, exchanges among white politicians get nasty too.
Outside of the halls of Congress, it was catch as catch can. It’s hard to generalize about Jim Crow in the 1870’s and 1880’s. It wasn’t yet required by law, and it was far from universal, but it was also far from unknown. Black Representative Joseph Rainey complained in 1874:
So your assertion that it was about prior officeholder who had subsequently supported the confederacy (obviously a very small group of people) is incorrect and it was about anyone who had supported the confederacy, a much larger group.
Further:
So while it wasn’t anything near a majority of white voters, it was enough to have an impact, as I wrote.
Your claim that after 1868 there was no disefranchisement of any kind is also contradicted by the Wiki article.
The “ironclad oath” wasn’t the oath that was required to register to vote under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867. Said oath was specified in the acts themselves:
This is a much easier oath. The only persons disenfranchised by this were the relatively small group who had held state or federal office before the war. Many ordinary Confederate soldiers, who had not been officeholders, participated in the 1867-68 elections.
Eric Foner has estimated the total number of people throughout the South affected by the Fourteenth Amendment DQ clause (equivalent to those disfranchised by the RA oath) at 10,000 to 15,000. This out of a prewar white voting population of almost a million. Yes, I overspoke by saying that no state maintained any form of disenfranchisement after 1868–I had forgotten that some maintained the crossover ban from the DQ clause–but even then there werw wiggle clauses allowing the persons so affected to vote if they swore to support “the civil equality of all men” or words to that effect. The lapse of white franchise restrictions was not a major factor in the decline of black electoral success after the 1870’s.
Thank you that was the context I was missing, it makes sense now. I missed that the black population of many southern states was higher at the time of the fifteenth amendment passing.
It is kind of stunning that after the enormous cost in lives and cash the civil war required the federal government basically allowed former confederate states to nullify the fifteenth amendment through Jim Crow laws, you would think at the first hint of it they would come down hard to avoid fighting another “war” a few decades down the line(or as it turned out almost a century).
The presidential election of 1876 had a lot to do with this. The outcome in three states (Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina) was in dispute, and one elector in Oregon was disqualified and had to be replaced. There were 20 votes in the electoral college in doubt. Tilden, the Democratic Party candidate, would have won if even one of these votes had gone his way. In the Compromise of 1877, the Republican Party agreed to end Reconstruction (including withdrawing federal troops from the former Confederate states) in exchange for all the electoral votes going to their candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes.
If someone wants to claim that the Civil War had more than one cause, that’s a defensible position (although I wouldn’t agree). However, claiming that slavery was not a cause for the Civil War is utter nonsense. Pick up a history book before spreading this ignorance.
Oh, and before you think about responding, go read all the declarations of secessions for the states that seceded. More than one of them explicitly state that slavery forms at least part (if not all) of the reason for secession.
Oh, and before you think about responding, go read all the declarations of secessions for the states that seceded. More than one of them explicitly state that slavery forms at least part (if not all) of the reason for secession.