Episode 5: The Reconstruction Retreat
It’s a few minutes before midnight on Election Night 1876 when Daniel Sickles closes the door of his Fifth Avenue Manhattan townhouse.
The rain, which has been falling most of the day, has started to let up, but neither the unseasonably warm air nor the Broadway play he has just returned from - are improving Sickles’ mood.
The democrats, the party of the confederacy, the same confederacy that cost Sickles his leg in the battle of Gettysburg, are about to take control of the Presidency for the first time in two decades.
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Sickles is a man with a checkered past. Once upon a time, he was a congressman and a DC A-lister, but in 1859, at the height of his political career, he discovered that his much-younger wife Teresa was having an affair. Though Sickles was a known womanizer himself, the news of his wife’s betrayal hit him hard. A few days after learning of the affair, he spotted his wife’s lover walking in a park near his apartment. He approached the man, pulled out a gun, and shot him to death. Sickles’ was able to beat a murder charge by claiming temporary insanity and even resumed his role in Congress, but his dreams of a long-term political career were ruined.
A few years later, to repair his image, Sickles joined the Union army where his performance was questionable at best. At Gettysburg, he disobeyed orders and led his troops into an exposed position. The mistake nearly cost the Union the battle; it cost Sickles his leg. Ever the showman, he donated the bones to the Army Medical Museum, visiting them annually on the anniversary of the battle.
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After the war, Sickles returned to politics, eventually becoming the ambassador to Spain under President Grant. While overseas, he reportedly engaged in an affair with the Spanish Queen, earning the nickname “the Yankee King of Spain.”
But those days are behind him now.
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After seven years abroad, he returned to the States in the fall of 1876 to try to prevent the White House from falling into the hands of Democrats, the ex-Confederates.
As Sickles limps along the quiet, gaslit streets on Election Night, he makes his way to the Republican party headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Four blocks away, the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, a wealthy lawyer turned Governor of New York, is falling asleep convinced that he has just been elected the 19th President of the United States.
Tilden has won several key battleground states, and by early evening, he has secured 184 electoral votes - just one short of the 185 needed to win the Presidency. With many states still to come in, including three in the democratic-leaning south, hope for a Republican miracle has run out. The Republican nominee, Rutherford Hayes fell asleep a few hours earlier, resigned to his fate.
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In the now-quiet lobby, Sickles finds a single clerk packing up the remnants of the campaign. After asking to see the returns, Sickles is led into the office of the Republican party chairman who went to bed an hour earlier with a bottle of whiskey in tow. Sickles begins examining the returns and soon comes to a startling conclusion. Hope is not lost. South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida, and Oregon are too close to call. If all four break for Hayes, he will win.
Sickles drafts telegrams to Republican leaders in each state: “With your state sure for Hayes, he is elected. Hold your state.” The next morning when the newspapers hit the streets, most proclaim Tilden’s victory, but the Republican-leaning New York Times offers a more cautious headline: “A Doubtful Election.” No words could have been more true.
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I’m Nick Fogel and this is Fireside History 1876 - a podcast about the death of Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, and the contested election of Rutherford Hayes.
Episode 5 - The Reconstruction Retreat
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The popular narrative of the fall of Reconstruction is one of cloak and dagger corruption. There’s a hotly contested election that pushes the country to the brink of a second civil war - and then at the eleventh hour, shadowy power brokers strike a deal: in exchange for the Presidency, Hayes will cede control of the south to old Confederates, abandoning Reconstruction and the rights and liberties of 4 million Black people.
Maybe you heard this story in high school. Or maybe you caught it in the speeches that Ted Cruz, Dick Durbin, and other congressmen gave the night of the January 6th Capitol attack:
Ted Cruz: For that I look to history to the precedent of the 1876 election - the Hayes - Tilden election…
Dick Durbin: And it really draws its parallel to 1876: Hayes and Tilden. Don’t forget what that commission, that so-called political compromise achieved... It was a commission that killed Reconstruction, that established Jim Crow, that even after a Civil War which tore this nation apart, it re-enslaved African Americans, and it was a commission that invited the voter suppression we’re still fighting today in America.
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We often tell history as a story of big events - seminal moments where everything changed. A backroom deal to decide a contested election fits that formula. One dramatic moment where the hope of Reconstruction fell apart. If only Hayes’ men hadn’t made the deal, maybe we could have saved Reconstruction and avoided the worst of Jim Crow.
But there are problems with this view of history. It casts a group of mostly old, white men as the only characters influencing events. It tells us that our hopes for a different, better future rest with these select changemakers. It absolves the broader community of responsibility - both for the wrongs of the past and the possibilities for the future.
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We can blame Reconstruction’s demise on a handful of flawed men in a hotel room, or we can look at the larger forces at work - forces that enabled and constrained the actions of political leaders; that allowed self-interest to defeat communal sacrifice and segregation and terror to defeat liberty and justice. We can claim that Reconstruction fell in a single moment, but its death was years in the making.
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In the years leading up to the 1876 election, throughout the south, Reconstruction is on the retreat. White southerners have unified under the banner of white supremacy and are using violence to reclaim control.
The violence is forcing the federal government and the northern public to make a decision: do they crackdown on renewed terrorism and redouble their efforts on Reconstruction or do they abandon the project?
Greg Downs: There's no ‘just wave a magic wand.’ The only way that voting rights and civil rights will be meaningful in the south is at the point of a gun.
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Here’s historian Greg Downs:
Greg Downs: And are Americans willing to build a government that will send guns to where people live in a way that makes those rights meaningful? Sometimes there's a sort of belief in the literature that if they just wrote the law better, everything would have worked out. And I think this belief is profoundly naive about how government works and how 19th century government works.
By this point, much of the white south is in open rebellion, fighting to overthrow Reconstruction governments and in their words, ‘redeem’ the South. They are openly defying the laws and daring the federal government to act.
Greg Downs: The nation faces a question in the 1870s: you can have local self government, or you can have rights for freed people. To have rights for freed people you have to forcibly override self government through a mechanism that in the late 19th century is only the army…. There's no ideal Republic to be made with parchment on paper. Black rights, to be meaningful, require force.
And of course, this tension is exactly what the white south is hoping for. How bad do you really want rights for Black Americans? Historian Kate Masur says that many in the North are worn out:
Kate Masur: Part of the reason they got so tired was because white Southerners made it so hard, not part of the reason - the entire reason. Continuing to take off violently against black voters, refusing to allow them to vote, running them off properties, taking away their land, resorting to all kinds of terrorism and murder they forced white northerners into this situation of having to make a decision about how long to enforce.
By the early 1870s, cracks are surfacing in the Republican coalition.
For their part, white northerners worry that the Klan Act, the 1871 law that empowered the President to unilaterally imprison suspected Klan members, has gone too far. What sort of democracy uses the military against its own people or allows the President to throw citizens in jail without a trial? Isn’t that what the founding fathers rebelled against? They see an enlarged federal government as inherently corrupt, and a string of scandals under the Grant administration only solidify that belief.
In 1872, a splinter group of Republicans, including many former abolitionists, form a third party and nominate Horace Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor for President. Greeley calls for an end to Reconstruction and a host of reforms to root out rampant government corruption:
Horace Greeley: “The party was going to the dogs. Like all parties that have undisturbed power for a long time, it has become corrupt, and I believe that it is today the most corrupt and debauched political party that has ever existed.”
President Ulysses Grant wins reelection in 1872, but he knows support for Reconstruction is beginning to wane.
Desperate to maintain his coalition, Grant tries to appease his critics with several reforms, including reinstating political rights to former Confederate leaders and lowering taxes, but it only sort of works. And then 1873 hits.
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Within a year, 1 million workers lose their jobs. Unemployment spikes to as high as 14%, but it’s worse in cities. A quarter of the workers in New York City are put out of work. Many are forced into homelessness, sleeping on park benches or in police stations.
Kate Masur: That leads to huge employers going bankrupt, banks going bankrupt. People losing their savings, people losing their jobs and fingers get pointed at republicans in power and their economic policies.
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At the end of The Big Short, the hit movie about the 2008 Great Recession, one of the main characters tries to forecast what will come next now that the financial system is collapsing:
The Big Short: I don’t know, I don’t know. I have a feeling that in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people.
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As the depression of 1873 sets in, white northerners are struggling. They’re hungry, out of work, and in debt. The true causes of the economic crisis are complex. It’s far easier to blame familiar targets: Black people, Reconstruction, and a corrupt federal government.
And Democrats make that case: you’re hurting because your tax dollars are funding a forever war in the south - a war that is suppressing democracy and empowering corrupt Black leaders and lazy Black workers. Magazines, newspapers, and cartoons flood the country with a false narrative that says that without benevolent white masters to organize and inspire them, Black people are incapable of hard work. They attack the Freedmen’s Bureau and other Reconstruction reforms as handouts that discourage work and as reverse discrimination that allows Black people to live in leisure off the labor of hardworking whites. These stories and images not only embed damaging stereotypes in the country, they help solidify the idea of a white race identity - you, the hardworking white person and them, the lazy Black people.
Black southerners try to counter that narrative. Black writers point out the absurdity of former slaveholders complaining about the laziness of people who broke their backs in fields for centuries. Black newspapers cover lynchings and voter suppression. Black leaders speak out in Congress. Ordinary Black citizens risk their lives to testify in court.
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Charles Dew: They were fighting the fight, but it was an uphill struggle, and I don't think that their voices were getting very much of a hearing.
Historian Charles Dew:
Charles Dew: White supremacy was a tough rock to crack.
In 1874, Democrats, the party of white supremacists and ex-Confederates, flip 94 seats in the House of Representatives to seize control for the first time since before the war. This is a massive shift. If you adjust for the size of the House today, this is the equivalent of a 140-member swing. For context, the “Tea Party Revolution” in 2010 was less than half the size. You can see the 1874 midterms as a response to hard times, but it’s hard not to also see it as an all-too-familiar reaction to racial progress:
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Van Jones: This was many things.
This is CNN correspondent Van Jones on election night 2016 reacting to Donald Trump’s victory. He could just as easily be describing 1874.
Van Jones: It was a rebellion against the elites - true. It was a complete reinvention of politics - true. But it was also something else… This was a whitelash. This was a whitelash against a changing country. It was a whitelash against a Black President in part.
If the Tea Party in 2010 and Trump in 2016 were in part reactions to the country’s first Black President, 1874 was a reaction to the country’s first Black congressmen.
Charles Dew: The phrase I heard over and over again, in the south growing up there was we're not we're not ready for that yet. Which meant never. You were never going to be ready for any tangible gain in black equality.
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Before the 1874 midterms, the Senate passed a Civil Rights Bill as comprehensive as the one that Lyndon Johnson would eventually sign into law 90 years later. It banned segregation in schools, juries, hotels, and restaurants. But after the midterms, in the lame duck session of Congress, Republican leaders back away from the bill. A watered down version passes, but it’s never enforced and it’s soon overturned by the supreme court.
Reflecting on the election defeat, The New York Herald writes:
NY Herald: “Reconstruction…. is dead weight, a millstone, that if not speedily disengaged will carry republicanism to the bottom.”
Grant recognizes the severity of the moment. With Republican control of Washington about to expire, he pushes for a last-minute bill to reinstate martial law and give him power to suppress white violence without Congressional approval. But the bill never gets a vote.
James Blaine, the leading Republican in Congress and the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 1876 explains:
James Blaine: “If that bill had become law the defeat of the Republican party throughout the country is a foregone conclusion. We could not have saved the south even if the bill had passed, but its passage would have lost us the North.”
When democrats are sworn into the House in 1875, the prospects for renewed intervention are bleak.
Charles Dew: And, of course, since all of your financial bills originate in the house, democratic control in the House of Representatives meant that funding for the reconstruction military operations the federal government had been carrying out in the South was going to be impossible to come by.
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Sensing their opportunity to regain control, white paramilitary groups ramp up their attacks. But Grant, who is now focused on the 1876 election, becomes increasingly reluctant to use federal troops. When paramilitary groups launch a statewide campaign of terror known as the Mississippi Plan in 1875, Grant denies a request from the Republican Governor to send in federal forces, saying:
Ulysses Grant: “the whole public is tired out with annual autumnal outbreaks in the south. There is so much unwholesome lying done by the press….that the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”
In other words, the propaganda of the white south has worked. Northerners believe the real problem is not the violence of white southerners, but the response of an oppressive military.
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And so a country dealing with a nationwide economic crisis and a southern guerrilla war turns to the election of 1876 with a mix of hope and dread. Historian Michael Beschloss:
Michael Beschloss: Many Americans hoped one way or the other, it would resolve the very deep cleavage in American society between those who felt that reconstruction should go on and the South should be taught a lesson and those who felt that there was more than enough of that, and the south should go back to normal business as it had been before 1860.
Frederick Douglass emphasizes the election’s importance to African Americans in a speech at the 1876 Republican convention:
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Frederick Douglass: “You say you have emancipated us. You have: and I thank you for it. You say you have enfranchised us. You have: and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? What is your enfranchisement? What does it all amount to, if the black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law, is unable to exercise that freedom, and, having been freed from the slaveholder’s lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder’s shotgun?”
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Though he’s a decorated Union General and the two-time Governor of Ohio, Rutherford Hayes is in many ways an afterthought. In episode 1, I compared Hayes to Tim Kaine, the longtime, and long overlooked, Virginia senator who served as Hilary Clinton’s VP candidate in 2016. Hayes emerges at the eleventh hour of the convention as a compromise candidate to help unify a divided Republican party.
Democrats nominate Sam Tilden, a wealthy lawyer and Governor of New York. I think of Tilden like Mitt Romney - a rich fiscal conservative in a party focused on culture wars. Where other democrats talk about ‘Negro supremacy’, Tilden talks about taxes and good government - though he’s still convinced of the need to end Reconstruction. Tilden’s a long-time powerbroker and has risen to national fame for his role in taking down Boss Tweed in New York City. With the country up in arms about corruption, Tilden is the obvious choice.
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While the two parties hate each other, the candidates themselves largely agree on big policy areas. On the economy, both favor a pro-Wall Street strategy. Both agree on the need for government reform. And while they differ on Reconstruction, both are reluctant to discuss it. Tilden is afraid that appearing too close to former Confederates will turn off northern voters, and Hayes is afraid that appearing too close to former slaves will do the same thing.
Greg Downs: Hayes is walking a sort of narrow line in this contest, trying to keep enough support from African Americans to get turnout in the south which he needs, but also to attract support of relatively moderate white Northerners who don't support or who are weary of ongoing intervention…. What Hayes well knew and Republicans well knew is that if they took a stand for principle and lost in 1876, it was the complete end of reconstruction - that without the White House, there was no hope for sustaining reconstruction in the south.
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In the absence of real policy disputes, the campaign devolves into personal attacks and old school tribalism. The Hayes team talking points emphasize one question: “Are you for the rebellion or are you for the union?” Writer Robert Ingersoll stresses this point in an address a few weeks before the election:
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Robert Ingersoll: I am opposed to the Democratic party, and I will tell you why…. Every man that tried to destroy this nation was a Democrat….Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat. The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Every man that sympathized with the assassin….was a Democrat. Every man that wanted the privilege of whipping another man to make him work for him for nothing and pay him with lashes on his naked back, was a Democrat.
You get the idea.
Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat….
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On Election Day, oddsmakers favor Tilden to win comfortably. And indeed, until Daniel Sickles’ late-night rendezvous at the Republican campaign headquarters, things seem to be headed Tilden’s way. Turnout is through the roof - two million more people show up at the polls than the election four years earlier. The turnout rate of 82% is still the largest in American history - almost 15 percentage-points higher than turnout in 2020. By early evening Tilden is up big in the popular vote, and he’s secured victories in key battleground states.
Roy Morris Jr.: In Columbus, Hayes issued a statement saying that he was at peace with the results….
This is Roy Morris Jr., a historian and the author of Fraud of the Century, a book about the 1876 election.
Roy Morris Jr.: Meanwhile, in New York City, Samuel Tilden, usually the most reluctant of campaigners, spent the day greeting voters shaking hands and then hosting a lavish victory celebration at his mansion in Gramercy Park. He went to bed that night in the minds of many people, including himself, as president elect of the United States.
But, Hayes doesn’t concede. And though he personally doubts his chances, his associates are springing to action.
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They depart for the state capitals with pockets full of cash and secret codes to communicate with their headquarters.
To get a picture of the ensuing few weeks, think of the chaos of the Florida recount in the Bush vs. Gore 2000 election… Now remember that many of these people just fought a war against each other.
In South Carolina, Hayes has a relatively comfortable lead, but Democrats have formed a breakaway government and are threatening to overturn the result.
In Florida, the official tally lists Tilden as the winner by 91 votes, but there are widespread reports of fraud and voter suppression, including rumors that a train carrying ballots from the western part of the state had been ‘ku-kluxed.’
In Louisiana, Tilden is up by nearly 8,000 votes, but will it be enough?
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The task of certifying the results falls to each state’s returning board. All three boards are controlled by Republicans and, all three have a...shall we say, open approach to accepting outside influence. In Florida, there are reports that the Chairman of the returning board is ‘available’ for $200,000. Similar figures are discussed in Louisiana. After the election, an investigation will uncover messages about bribes between Tilden’s nephew and Florida operatives, though nothing will directly tie back to either candidate.
In addition to the three southern states, there is debate over Oregon. While Hayes has won the state, the Democratic Governor is trying to replace one of the electors with a Tilden loyalist.
Remember, all of the votes in question need to go to Hayes. One defection, and Tilden will become President.
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In short, it’s a shitshow. In the end, the canvassing board in Louisiana throws out more than 13,000 Tilden votes to deliver the state to Hayes. The Florida canvassing board also reverses the Tilden lead. And South Carolina and Oregon come through for Hayes. But will the results hold?
Roy Morris Jr.: When Congress met on December 4, to formally open the electoral ballots from the 38 states, there was a problem.
Each of the four states in question has submitted multiple returns to Congress - one for Tilden, and one for Hayes - with the conflicting returns signed by different high-ranking state officials.
Roy Morris Jr.: No one knew exactly what to do.
The twelfth amendment states that the President of the Senate shall “open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” But if there are multiple returns, which votes should the President of the Senate count?
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Republicans argue that the President of the Senate, a man who just so happens to be a Republican himself, is empowered to rule on the states in question and declare Hayes the winner. Democrats, of course, disagree.
Michael Beschloss: In American history, oftentimes where there's a problem that the two sides are deadlocked and can't find any way of dealing with it, you appoint a commission ... Well, they did it in January of 1877. This 15 person commission, which was to resolve the status of these 20 contested electoral votes. And so the commission was essentially asked to go behind closed doors, find some way of resolving this, recommend a verdict, and to some extent taking the political heat for what followed.
In principle, a commission to study the facts makes sense. But who will serve on it? When the Presidency is on the line, is anyone really impartial?
In all of Washington, there’s only one person who both sides agree is maybe impartial: David Davis, a Supreme Court justice who was appointed by Lincoln but is a self-described independent who hadn’t even voted in the election. Everyone agrees there will be 7 Republicans, 7 Democrats, and Davis - the lone independent who will essentially have the tie breaking vote. But at the last minute, in an attempt to get on Davis’s good side, Democrats in the Illinois state legislature elect him to the Senate. Davis, who still harbors Presidential aspirations of his own, decides to resign from the commission rather than become the enemy of half the country.
Roy Morris Jr.: He was replaced by New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Joseph Bradley, a comparatively moderate republican with long standing ties to the railroad lobby.
As the chaos surrounding the commission plays out, the two candidates are taking two very different paths. Hayes is reaching out to Southern democrats. He’s signaling openness to moderating some of his stances on Reconstruction, including the use of troops in the south. Tilden, meanwhile, is spending his days holed up in New York City toiling away on a book about Congress’s role in prior elections. Tilden’s advisors urge him to rally his supporters, to bring them together to prevent the election from being stolen.
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Greg Downs: An important democratic official Henry Watterson goes to New York to convince Tilden that what the party needs is for him to exert pressure, that in the absence of anything else, that forces looking to negotiate an outcome will end with a deal where Hayes is the president and Southern Democrats get some of what they want, and the heck with the National Party. And instead Watterson says to Tilden, if you go, and you determine that you'll do an inauguration no matter what, you may be arrested, but you'll end up President, the republicans will back down. But if you stay in New York, and you just issue press statements, they're gonna take it from you.
For their part, southern whites are largely sitting back. While northern democrats begin organizing militia under the banner of ‘Tilden or Blood,’ the southerners wait on the sidelines. As the managing editor of the New Orleans Times explains, “we have got to see that, whatever horse loses, our horse wins.” Their horse...is the death of Reconstruction.
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The first state to go before the commission is Florida. After five days of testimony and deliberation, the deciding vote, as predicted, comes down to Joseph Bradley. 10 minutes into Bradley’s rambling speech it becomes clear that he is siding with Hayes.
Almost immediately, rumors spring up around Bradley’s pivotal vote. The New York Post reports that 17 carriages visited Bradley the night before the vote. Tilden himself was told that Bradley’s vote was available for $200,000. He allegedly responded: “that seems to be the standard figure.” A secret history written by Tilden’s campaign manager and discovered after his death, describes how a friend visited Bradley the night before the vote and received assurances that Bradley was voting for Tilden.
The other contested states continue in a similar fashion - with Hayes winning 8-7 votes for Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon.
As Inauguration Day approaches, the threat of violence increases. House members start wearing pistols for protection.
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Greg Downs: A number of democratic state militias activate and there are discussions among governors of trying to create a unified front of democratic militias that will surround DC, largely outnumber the army, and be prepared to intervene if Tilden is arrested or prevented from taking inauguration.
Former Union general George McClellan is enlisted and there are plans to raise an army as large as 100,000 men. As the plans take shape, a democratic operative visits Tilden to convince him to lead the fight.
Greg Downs: But as he meets with Tilden with McClellan just around the corner, preparing potentially to mass an army of state militias to install him, he sees in Tilden, a person totally unprepared to take the risks that he's asking him to take on behalf of the Democratic Party. Tilden, somebody who lives in incredible luxury - his house is now the National Arts club; He has multiple massages a day and Waterson writes to a friend, no man who needs a massage. I'm not gonna get the quote exactly right. But no man who needs a massage before and after lunch, is going to be willing to risk going to jail just to be president.
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And so Tilden refuses to call for violence. Instead, he declares:
Samuel Tilden: “We have just emerged from one Civil War. It will never do to engage in another; it would end in the destruction of free government.”
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With just a week left before the Inauguration, Democrats threaten to filibuster to prevent the votes from getting certified.
To remove that threat, Hayes’ advisors meet with a handful of southern congressmen in the Wormley Hotel across the street from the White House. Under the cover of night, they discuss plans that have been in motion for weeks. Hayes will recognize Democrats as the winners of the contested gubernatorial elections and remove federal troops from day-to-day life in the south. In exchange, the southerners will clear Hayes’ path to the presidency.
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Roy Morris Jr.: One of the southerners… got up on the floor of Congress the next day and gave a speech in which he said that southerners had been given solemn, earnest and truthful assurances that Hayes as president would pursue a policy of conciliation toward the southern states. In other words, he would leave them alone and reconstruction would be over.
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Two days later, nearly four months after Election Day, at 4 in the morning, the President of the Senate declares Rutherford Hayes the 19th President of the United States.
Roy Morris Jr.: There was a chorus of boos from the crowd. The Cincinnati Enquirer said the next day that the monster fraud of the century has been consummated. In New York, Tilden received the news calmly. “It's about what I expected,” he said.
Less than a month later, Hayes orders troops in South Carolina and Louisiana back to their bases. Ex-Confederates have regained control of the south.
Former slave, Henry Adams of Louisiana writes: “The whole South-every state in the South-had got back into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.” Amos Akerman, the US attorney general under Grant who prosecuted hundreds of Klan members, adds: “it’s a peculiar logic of curing lawlessness by letting the lawless have their own way.”
Frederick Douglass offers a more charitable take for Hayes - and a more damning one for the country - saying: “what is called the President’s policy might rather be considered the President’s necessity. Statesmen often are compelled to act upon facts as they are, and not as they would like to have them.”
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Textbooks tell us that the 1876 election causes the death of Reconstruction.
But instead of seeing this election or the meeting at the Wormley Hotel as the one moment when everything irrevocably changed, I see it as the moment where what was already changing was formalized.
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If the Long War began on the fields of Appomattox with the North allied with the Black south, the Wormley Hotel meeting is an admission that that alliance no longer holds. The retreat that began years earlier, and was in full effect after the 1874 midterms, is now official.
The north has worked with the Black south to abolish slavery, redefine citizenship, and expand suffrage. But it’s now walking away from protecting those rights.
A Southern newspaper describes the implications of this shift in clear terms, saying: “while the 14th and 15th amendments may stand forever, we intend to make them dead letters on the statute-book.”
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Or as historians often say: “the north won the war, but the south won the peace.”
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Next time on Fireside History...
Charles Dew: When I was growing up in the south, I can remember every adult member of my family sort of shaking their head whenever the subject of reconstruction came up, and being told reconstruction was worse than the war.
With ex-Confederates back in charge, they pass laws to restrict voting and re-segregate society.
Charles Dew: And one of the things that justified the Jim Crow laws was this distorted myth encrusted picture of reconstruction. We can't go back to that, because it was so horrible, worse than the war for God's sake.
Over a century later, how does the white south’s effort to solidify power continue to shape the country?
Fireside History is produced by me, Nick Fogel. It is edited by Iris Adler. Scoring and sound engineering by Jason Albert and Hannah Barg. Voice acting from Kilo Martin and Sara Young. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions. Audio from The Flagler Museum. Special thanks to Greg Downs, Kate Masur, Charles Dew, and Michael Beschloss.