The Demise of Reconstruction

The 1874 elections signaled a turning point in the history of Reconstruction. Robert Elliott anticipated that an impending struggle for control of state governments was going to determine the future of the South. In early 1874, he turned his attention away from Capitol Hill, resigning his seat in the U.S. House to pursue a state house seat back in his home state of South Carolina. He became speaker of the state house later that year and worked to establish a solid Republican government in South Carolina, aided by a majority-Black state legislature still held by Republicans.⁹²

Across the South in the summer and fall of 1874, Black and Republican voters faced unending physical violence and intimidation from Democrats intent on reasserting their control of the region’s state and local governments, no matter the means. Black Members from the South, along with their Republican colleagues, also encountered dangerous conditions. In his unsuccessful re-election bid that fall, James Rapier and his backers faced stolen and destroyed ballot boxes, bribery, fraudulent vote counts, armed intimidation, and violence in his southeastern Alabama district.⁹³

A congressional investigation into the 1874 elections in Alabama, coupled with other investigations into White violence in the South, had led Republican Members to push for federal legislation designed to ensure the integrity of elections across the region. As a result, in 1875 a proposed federal elections bill was drafted to preserve access to the polls in the South. Opponents quickly criticized the proposal as federal overreach. Speaker Blaine took the extraordinary step of opposing the measure during debate on the floor. According to John Lynch, who supported the bill and thought federal action was necessary, Blaine claimed that the bill endangered Republican chances in the 1876 election. Ultimately, the bill passed the House after a contentious debate but was abandoned in the Senate.⁹⁴

Lynch defied the odds and won re-election to the 44th Congress even as Mississippi Democrats swept most other offices. Lynch described local Democratic clubs as having been converted into “armed military companies” that raided Republican meetings. Despite Bruce’s appointment to the Senate, Mississippi reverted to Democratic control. Former Mississippi Senator Hiram Revels accused Republicans of corruption in administering the state government and cited these actions as the reason for the party’s losses at the polls. In testimony before a Senate committee, he was one of the few witnesses to state that in his home county, Mississippi’s Election Day was free of violence and controversy. Senator Bruce, meanwhile, told his colleagues on the Senate Floor that Mississippi’s elections had been plagued by “flagrant wrongs,” orchestrated by White Democrats who embraced “a violent method for political supremacy.” He warned that election violence was “dangerous to the integrity of our free institutions.”⁹⁵

The 1876 elections also featured a presidential contest, but when an inconclusive count in the Electoral College produced no candidate with a majority, Congress created a special commission to resolve the crisis. Disputed state elections in South Carolina and Louisiana produced rival state governments, while Florida’s previously certified election results were altered by the new Democratic administration elected in 1876. In Oregon, a dispute over an elector’s qualifications put one Electoral College vote in question. The commission’s slim Republican majority allocated the disputed electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. During his one term in office, however, Hayes turned the attention of the federal government away from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction by reducing the number of federal troops in the region and doing little to protect the civil and political rights of African Americans.⁹⁶

“Freedom as a Mere Name and Sham”

During the 1870s, the Democratic Party recaptured local and state governments across the South, largely through the use of violence and other means to stop African Americans from voting and undermine the Republican Party. White supremacists referred to this process as the “redemption” of the former Confederate states.

By 1879, as conditions worsened in the South, many African Americans sought a way out of the region. Rainey and other former Black Members were vocal in their support for emigration. In an interview with a reporter from the New-York Tribune, Rainey outlined the political and economic obstacles confronting Black communities across the former Confederacy. Speaking four months after he left office in March 1879, Rainey still carried a satchel full of letters he had received from South Carolina residents that described these conditions in stark terms. Rainey noted that Black Americans’ concentration in the South gave the region more seats in Congress, but their needs were rarely addressed on Capitol Hill. To Rainey, southern states were “defrauding the other parts of the country” by refusing to work on behalf of all their citizens. Under these circumstances, Rainey added, African Americans considered “freedom as a mere name and sham.”⁹⁷

At the time, Rainey’s views were embraced by many Black Americans who had departed the region for Kansas and other midwestern areas. The U.S. Senate was sufficiently interested in these developments to form a select panel to investigate. A three-part Senate report compiled the results of hearings held in 1879 and 1880. Questions pursued the extent to which Black Americans were being driven out of the South, with Senators of both parties inquiring about wages, land ownership, political violence, and increasing discrimination faced by Black Americans in southern states.⁹⁸

In March 1880, former Representative James Rapier appeared before the committee to comment on the social, economic, and political conditions in Alabama at the time. Rapier’s family had significant financial resources before the Civil War, and he had returned to Lowndes County, Alabama, to invest his money in agriculture and to serve as a collector of internal revenue. He offered the Senate panel an extensive description of the exploitative system of sharecropping that trapped many in poverty and went on to outline his own process for providing opportunities to Black farmers. Rapier claimed that he rented land and offered more reasonable rates of interest on securing food and supplies to farmers. Rapier urged African Americans to flee the region, as he knew that most sharecroppers could not find such favorable terms.⁹⁹

The 47th Congress began with no Black Members serving in the House or Senate. Several House candidates were prepared to contest election losses, however. John Lynch and Robert Smalls were eventually able to use the contested election process to wrest seats from Democrats who claimed victory at the polls. Their good fortune was not entirely the result of partisan goodwill, however, as two other Black candidates were unsuccessful in contesting their election losses. In addition to Lynch and Smalls, the only other Black Members to serve in Congress during the 1880s were two North Carolina Representatives, James O’Hara, who served from 1883 to 1887, and Henry Plummer Cheatham, who was elected to the first of two terms in in the House in 1888.¹⁰⁰

Congress continued to collect information regarding the widespread efforts to limit Black voting rights and destroy the Republican Party in the South during the 1880s. The Senate held occasional investigations into violence and discrimination, particularly in relation to elections in the South. The House Committee on Elections, meanwhile, compiled evidence of violence and intimidation in reports on contested elections.¹⁰¹

A series of Supreme Court decisions from 1873 to 1883 also steadily eroded the legal gains of Reconstruction. The civil rights legislation and the constitutional amendments that formed the foundation for Radical Reconstruction were repeatedly challenged in court. In 10 years, the Supreme Court negated the effectiveness of civil rights legislation and circumscribed the power of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This began with the 1873 decision in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Louisiana butchers challenged a state law that combined the state’s slaughterhouses into one private company for public health reasons. The butchers claimed protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, viewing this as a violation of their constitutional rights. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the issue would need to be resolved at the state level because the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to rights protected by national, not state, citizenship—a significant precedent that prevented an expansive reading of federal power to protect the rights of African Americans.¹⁰²

The 1876 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Cruikshank further limited the power of the federal government by overturning the convictions of the perpetrators of the 1873 Colfax, Louisiana, massacre, in which dozens of Black residents were murdered at a local courthouse. The court ruled that the charges of murder and conspiracy were under the jurisdiction of the states, rather than the federal government, leaving Black Americans and others targeted for political violence to seek redress from southern state governments and local law enforcement.¹⁰³

The weakened Civil Rights Act of 1875 had also proved difficult to enforce. Although the law broadened federal power to enforce equal treatment, the government lacked the power to initiate civil rights lawsuits on its own. This required the aggrieved party to take the initial step of filing a lawsuit—a legal and financial hurdle for many African Americans. The constant threat of violence, intimidation, and job loss in the South deterred many from ever taking legal action under the law. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the provisions in the law prohibiting discrimination by private businesses in the Civil Rights Cases, again emphasizing that the federal courts only had jurisdiction over discriminatory practices by the states.¹⁰⁴

These Supreme Court decisions severely curtailed the federal government’s efforts to guarantee the rights of the millions of formerly enslaved men and women. As a result, White Democrats in the South applied the states’ rights doctrine with impunity. Black communities found redress extremely unlikely in this context.

A Crossroads on Capitol Hill

The two Black Representatives serving in the 48th and 49th Congresses (1883–1887), James O’Hara and Robert Smalls, attempted to reassert the federal government’s power to enforce civil rights laws. When a proposed bill to establish an interstate commerce board came to the House Floor in December 1884, O’Hara introduced an amendment designed to prohibit discrimination on railroad cars. He noted that Congress enjoyed significant regulatory power over interstate commerce, including the use of freight cars, and that it therefore “must certainly follow that it unqualifiedly has the same right to regulate the use of passenger cars.”¹⁰⁵

Charles F. Crisp of Georgia, a future Speaker of the House then in his first term, was a vocal opponent of the measure. Crisp objected to O’Hara’s amendment, claiming it extended the reach of the federal government into personal affairs and read from a Georgia state law that, on paper, guaranteed equal access to transportation for all. Most objectionable to Crisp was O’Hara’s decision to stipulate that access must be provided “without discrimination.” Crisp insisted that railroads should be able to offer separate and equal accommodations.¹⁰⁶

Smalls joined the fray to back O’Hara’s effort, citing his personal experience while traveling in the region. In describing a train trip south from Washington, DC, Smalls made one of the first references to “Jim Crow” cars in railroad travel in the Congressional Record. He recalled that when entering the state of Georgia, all of the Black passengers were forced to change cars.¹⁰⁷

Ultimately, the bill passed the House without O’Hara’s amendment, only to stall in the Senate. But this battle between the two Black lawmakers and Crisp of Georgia starkly outlined the divergent fortunes of Democrats in the South and Black Americans in Congress in the mid-1880s. Crisp, a former Confederate officer, would be elected Speaker within a decade, benefiting from the rising number of Democrats in the House. O’Hara and Smalls represented North Carolina and South Carolina, respectively—the only two states that elected Black Members of Congress in the 1890s. They were both defeated in 1886 and left office at the conclusion of the 49th Congress (1885−1887). On December 5, 1887, Congress convened without a Black Member in either chamber. “All the men who stood up in awkward squads to be sworn in on Monday had white faces,” noted a Philadelphia Record correspondent who witnessed 317 Members of the 50th Congress (1887–1889) take the oath of office on the House Floor. “The negro is not only out of Congress, he is practically out of politics.”¹⁰⁸

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