THE SOLID SOUTH 1880-1912
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[Within the shaded area every electoral vote was cast for the Democratic presidential candidate between 1880 and 1892; since 1892 the heavily shaded area has continued solidly Democratic, while the border States have occasionally cast Republican votes.]
Force and fraud played a large part in the restoration of white control, but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted. Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order which needed the constant support of troops lost the confidence of political independents. These, as the presidential campaign of 1872 drew near, openly expressed their hostility to reconstruction as carried out by Grant, and threatened to prevent his reëlection.
The first term of Grant ended unsatisfactorily. His appointments to office were marked by favoritism and incapacity. He appointed the only really inferior man who has ever represented the United States in London,—one who thought it not incompatible with his high office to publish a treatise on draw-poker, and to appear as bellwether in a mining prospectus. Grant's personal intimates included shifty financiers. Corruption and misgovernment at the South were held against him, though Congress was properly to blame for them. Only in his stand for honest finance, his effort to improve the Indian service, and his conclusion of the disputes with Great Britain, could his supporters take great pride.
The settlement with England was his greatest achievement. Since the summer of 1862, when the Alabama had evaded the British officials and had gone to sea, the American Minister in London had continued to press for damages. The Alabama claims were based on the assertion that the law of neutrals required Great Britain to prevent any hostile vessel from starting, in her waters, upon a cruise against the United States. In the face of official rebuff and popular sneers Charles Francis Adams formulated the claims. His successor, Reverdy Johnson, reached a sort of settlement which the Senate declined to ratify, and which Sumner denounced. It was Sumner's contention that the Civil War was prolonged by British aid and that a demand for national damages (perhaps $2,000,000,000, or Canada, by way of substitute) ought to be advanced. So tense did the international situation become in 1869 and 1870 that friends of peace were frightened. Boundaries, fisheries, and general claims aggravated the situation, which was given into the hands of a Joint High Commission, hastily summoned to meet in Washington in 1870. The resulting Treaty of Washington, and the successful arbitrations which followed it, eliminated Sumner's extreme contention but vindicated the main American claims and founded Anglo-American relations on a more secure basis than they had ever known. It was Grant's great triumph, but it was a political danger as well, for the negotiator in charge, Charles Francis Adams, loomed up as the possible presidential candidate of the Republican dissenters.
The Liberal Republicans included the enemies of Grant as well as dissatisfied reformers of all sorts. Carl Schurz, the great German-American independent, was their leader. Horace Greeley, whose Tribune had done much to make the Republican party possible, gave them his support. Charles Francis Adams was not indifferent to them. Salmon P. Chase wanted their nomination. Young newspaper men, like Whitelaw Reid and Henry Watterson, tried to control them. And the new group of civil service reformers, disappointed in Grant, hoped that the new party would take a step toward better government. At Cincinnati, in May, 1872, they met in mass convention, and nominated Horace Greeley and Gratz Brown. Their platform denounced Republican reconstruction, urged the return to self-government in the South, and advocated civil service reform, specie payments, and maintenance of public credit. The schism became more threatening when the Democrats saw a chance through fusion, and nominated the same candidates at Baltimore in July.
No quainter political figure has appeared in America than Horace Greeley, thus transferred from his editorial office to the stump. Long used to the freedom of the press, he had advocated many things in his lifetime, had examined and exploited unpopular social reforms, had contradicted himself and retraced his tracks repeatedly. The biting cartoons of Nast exploited all these; but no contrast was so absurd as that which brought to the great denouncer of slavery and the South the support of the party of the South.
The Republican Convention renominated Grant at Philadelphia without opposition, refused Colfax a second term, and picked Henry Wilson for Vice-President. Its platform, as in 1868, was retrospective, taking pride in its great achievements and assuming full credit for the war, reconstruction, and financial honor. It offered its ticket to all the States for the first time since 1860, and elected Grant with ease. The inharmonious Democrat-Liberal-Republican alliance increased the Republican majority, but the returns from the South confirmed the suspicion that home rule was in sight.
Restored completely to themselves, four years later, the Southern Governments ceased to play much part in national affairs and continued the economic rebuilding of their region. It was thirty years after the war before the South, in population and business, had recovered from its devastation, and even then it was far from subordinating its local politics to national issues.