In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe gave a vivid picture of the Underground Railway through which slaves escaped to Canada. Among her characters were abolitionists who aided them and agents hired to recapture them. The historical aspects of slavery and emancipation were treated more fully, however, by Albion W. Tourgée. A Fool’s Errand (1879) tells the story of a man with the improbable name of Comfort Servosse. A lawyer and ex-Union officer like Tourgée, he had moved to the South after the war, as did the author. Referred to by Tourgée as “The Fool,” Servosse attempts the difficult task of integrating himself and his family into the life of a Southern community while supporting the rights of the Negroes. His experience, extending from 1866 until his death in the late seventies, is one of progressive disillusionment. Thorough analyses of events support the conclusions he draws. Early in the book one reads a detailed account of President Johnson’s plan for Negro suffrage and also a statement of the supplementary Howard Amendment. Having discussed the role of the secret, pro-North “Union League” in the South during the war, Tourgée goes on to detail the rise of the Ku-Klux Klan. Later he analyzes the acts of amnesty passed by some Southern states to protect from prosecution members of secret organizations such as the Klan. By 1877 the South is in political control of its land again. Its policy of suppression has succeeded. This was the fault, Tourgée tells the reader, of stupid and foolish Federal policies:
Reconstruction was never asserted as a right, at least not formally and authoritatively. Some did so affirm; but they were accounted visionaries. The act of reconstruction was excused as a necessary sequence of the failure of the attempted secession: it was never defended or promulgated as a right of the nation, even to secure its own safety.
In 1880 Tourgée published Bricks Without Straw, which spanned a short period before the war as well as that after it. The book follows the career of a Negro named Nimbus from chattel to landowner. But the novel is no more a dispenser of sweetness and light than was its predecessor. Nimbus is driven from his farm by the same forces which had made a Southern home untenable for Comfort Servosse. The romance between Northern Mollie Ainslie and Southern Hesden LeMoyne is redolent of tears, misunderstandings, and pining hearts finally united. In spite of its melodrama and other nineteenth-century trappings, the book is valuable. The purpose and function of the Freedmen’s Bureau are examined as well as the Black Codes which counterbalanced it. Tourgée also discusses at length the township system installed in the South during the Reconstruction era and its gradual destruction by totalitarian appointee government on the county level. Near the novel’s end the reader sees the pitiful plight of Nimbus’ friends victimized by the Landlord and Tenant Act which strengthened the sharecropper system and reduced many Negroes to serfdom.
John W. De Forest: Post-War Corruption
In Honest John Vane (1875) and Playing the Mischief (1876) John W. De Forest built his stories around corruption in post-war Congress. John Vane goes to Washington with a reputation for honesty. When he succumbs to his wife’s pressure for money to finance social climbing, he is more circumspect but just as greedy as his colleagues. His tempter and mentor is Darius Dorman, called by the author “Satan’s messenger” and apparently actually meant to be one, complete with smoldering sparks and the smell of sulphur. He tells Vane not to
go into the war memories and the nigger worshipping; all those sentimental dodges are played out. Go into finance. The great national questions to be attended to now are the questions of finance. Spread yourself on the tariff, the treasury, the ways and means, internal improvements, subsidy bills, and relief bills. Dive into those things, and stick there. It’s the only way to cut a figure in politics and to make politics worth your while.
The main character in Playing the Mischief is Josephine Murray, a young widow who uses her attractiveness to secure passage of a bill which awards her $60,000 compensation for a barn burned in the War of 1812. In the process of dealing with lobbyists and corrupting Senators she loses the love of Edgar Bradford, a stalwart young Congressman who has tried to dissuade her from her scheme. Rising in the House, he denounces the lobbying and bribery he sees, declaring that “Congressional legislation will soon become a synonym for corruption, not only throughout this country, but throughout the world.”
Hamlin Garland: Enter the Farmer
Set in Iowa in the 1870s, Hamlin Garland’s A Spoil of Office (1897) deals with the role of farmers’ organizations in politics. Bradley Talcott, silent and clumsy but obviously a dark horse who will pay off handsomely, enters politics because it attracts him and because he wants to better himself “for her,” as Garland insists on referring to Ida Wilbur. Before they are married in a haze of romance and comradely devotion to the farmers’ interests, they work with the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance. Free trade, national banks, and woman’s suffrage are discussed frequently, as well as the depredations of corporations. A sentimental and somewhat superficial book which substitutes clichés and catch-phrases for exploration in depth of causes and effects, A Spoil of Office is valuable for its recital of the farmer’s early role in politics—if one can bear the surfeit of bucolic virtues and inarticulate devotion to a fair and exalted lady.
Winston Churchill and David Phillips: Bosses and Lobbies