Grant.
The Republican National Convention met at Chicago, Ill., May 20th, 1868, and nominated with unanimity, Ulysses S. Grant, of Illinois, for President, and Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, for Vice-President. The Democratic Convention met in New York City, July 4th, and after repeated ballots finally compromised on its presiding officers,[[34]] notwithstanding repeated and apparently decided declarations on his part, Horatio Seymour, of New York, was therefore nominated for President, and Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, for Vice-President.[[35]]
An active canvass followed, in which the brief expression—“let us have peace”—in Grant’s letter of acceptance, was liberally employed by Republican journals and orators to tone down what were regarded as rapidly growing race and sectional differences, and with such effect that Grant carried all of the States save eight, receiving an electoral vote of 214 against 80.
Grant inaugurated, and the Congressional plan of reconstruction was rapidly pushed, with at first very little opposition save that manifested by the Democrats in Congress. The conditions of readmission were the ratification of the thirteenth and fourteenth constitutional amendments.
On the 25th of February, 1869, the fifteenth amendment was added to the list by its adoption in Congress and submission to the States. It conferred the right of suffrage on all citizens, without distinction of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” By the 30th of March, 1870, it was ratified by twenty-nine States, the required three-fourths of all in the Union. There was much local agitation in some of the Northern States on this new advance, and many who had never manifested their hostility to the negroes before did it now, and a portion of these passed over to the Democratic party. The issue, however, was shrewdly handled, and in most instances met Legislatures ready to receive it. Many of the Southern States were specially interested in its passage, since a denial of suffrage would abridge their representation in Congress. This was of course true of all the States, but its force was indisputable in sections containing large colored populations.
The 41st Congress met in extra session March 4th, 1869, with a large Republican majority in both branches. In the Senate there were 58 Republicans, 10 Democrats and 8 vacancies; in the House 149 Republicans, 64 Democrats and 25 vacancies, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Georgia not being represented. James G. Blaine, for several years previous its leading parliamentarian and orator, was Speaker of the House. All of Grant’s nominations for Cabinet places were confirmed, except A. T. Stewart, of New York, nominated for Secretary of the Treasury, and being engaged in foreign commerce he was ineligible under the law, and his name was withdrawn. The names of the Cabinet will be found in the list of all Cabinet officers elsewhere given. Their announcement at first created the impression that the Grant administration was not intended to be partisan, rather personal, but if there ever was such a purpose, a little political experience on the part of the President quickly changed it. A political struggle soon followed in Congress as to the admission of Virginia, Mississippi and Texas, which had not ratified the Fourteenth Amendment or been reconstructed. A bill was passed April 10th, authorizing their people to vote on the constitutions already prepared by the State conventions, to elect members of Congress and State officers, and requiring before readmission to the Union, their Legislatures to ratify both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This work done, and the extra session adjourned.
In all of the Southern States, those who then prided themselves in being “unreconstructed” and “irreconcilable,” bitterly opposed both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and on these issues excited new feelings of hostility to the “carpet baggers” and negroes of the South. With the close of the war thousands of Northern men had settled in the South. All of them were now denounced as political adventurers by the rebels who opposed the amendments, reconstruction and freedman’s bureau acts. Many of these organized themselves first into Ku Klux Klans, secret societies, organized with a view to affright negroes from participancy in the elections, and to warn white men of opposing political views to leave the country. The object of the organization broadened with the troubles which it produced. Efforts to affright were followed by midnight assaults, by horrible whippings, outrages and murders, hardly a fraction of which could be traced to the perpetrators. Doubtless many of the stories current at the time were exaggerated by partisan newspapers, but all of the official reports made then and since go to show the dangerous excesses which political and race hostilities may reach. In Georgia the whites, by these agencies, soon gained absolute political control, and this they used with more wisdom than in most Southern States, for under the advice of men like Stevens and Hill, they passed laws providing for free public schools, etc., but carefully guarded their newly acquired power by also passing tax laws which virtually disfranchised more than half the blacks. Later on, several Southern States imitated this form of political sagacity, and soon those in favor of “a white man’s government,” (the popular battle cry of the period) had undisputed control in Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas—States which the Republicans at one time had reason to believe they could control.