Shifting Republican Focus
Black Members of Congress remained loyal Republicans, but their allies at home and in Congress were quickly disappearing. As Democrats reasserted their power, southern politics in the post-Reconstruction years witnessed the rapid collapse of Radical Republican state governments, which had drawn from the ranks of newly freed African-American men. Over just a short time, a cadre of local, state, and national politicians—composed of many former Confederates and Democrats—undermined the Republican regimes and ended the regional experiment in multiracial democracy. In the “redeemed” South, the Democratic Party eventually became synonymous with the codification and formalization of racial segregation.
Though the Republican Party’s ideological makeup remained complicated in the late 1880s, two primary factions emerged—the “reformers” and the “money men.” Reformers clung to the idealistic plans of postwar Radical Republicans to extend full civil rights to African Americans. Yet they began to lose support in the face of popular demands to lay the unfulfilled egalitarian promises of Reconstruction America to rest. A growing interest in American commercial power—the stance of the “money men”—led Congress to deprioritize civil rights legislation.12

Rapid industrialization brought major changes to America’s economy and, consequently, to American society. Race reforms, however, just as quickly disappeared from the political agenda and out of the public eye. Between 1869 and 1899, the population of the United States nearly tripled. Railroads extending to the Pacific Ocean allowed goods to travel around the country cheaply; the invention of the telephone in 1876 improved communication; entrepreneurs such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie amassed fortunes in manufacturing. In 1890, for the first time in American history, industrial workers outnumbered farmers.16 Emigration from southern Europe had begun to increase, just as the American frontier was declared closed. Taking stock of the previous century of American development, the journalist and historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the nation had entered a new, uncertain era. “Movement has been . . . [America’s] dominant fact,” he told an audience at the American Historical Association, gathered for the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. “But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. . . . The frontier is gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”17

Footnotes
12Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2004): 9–12, 74– 84; Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006): 7–32.
13Congressional Record, House, 56th Congress, 2nd sess. (7 January 1901): 74.
14Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001): 229.
15Congressional Record, House, 51st Cong., 2nd sess. (14 February 1891): 2694.
16Upchurch, Legislating Racism: 12; Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (1957; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 7–24.
17Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin Historian of the Frontier, ed. Martin Ridge (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986): 26–47.
18Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967): 11–12.
19Robert D. Marcus, Grand Old Party: Political Structure in the Gilded Age: 1880–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971): 10–11, 19.
20Marcus, Grand Old Party: 20, 90–91, 93.