Flashback, November 1874: GOP Midterm Losses Sound Uncertain Trumpet for Civil Rights

Stunned and staggered by the midterm elections, the Republican Party wrestled 150 years ago this month with what to do after losing control of the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.

Its solution—failing to enforce civil-rights measures that they themselves had enacted—was the opening note in a retreat from the Reconstruction program that President Ulysses S. Grant (pictured) had championed in the defeated Confederate states.

Their surrender would be formalized in the controversial Compromise of 1877 that enabled them to hold onto the White House for Rutherford B. Hayes at the price of withdrawing federal troops from the South.

The surprising magnitude of the GOP losses—"the greatest reversal of partisan alignments in the entire nineteenth century,” according to prominent Reconstruction historian Eric Foner—will feel uncannily familiar to Democrats this month: thinner margins of victory in regions they once won going away, and outright losses in other places considered party strongholds.

Dissatisfaction spread rapidly with the so-called Radical Republican faction, just as moderate Democrats have been heaping scorn on the “woke” segment of their party in the wake of Kamala Harris’ loss of the Presidency to Donald Trump.

Yet the 1874 Republicans, like the 2024 Democrats, fell victim to larger forces with often interlocking impacts on the electorate.

Midterm elections in Presidents’ second terms have been nicknamed “the six-year itch” because of voters’ unease with the party in power. 

The most significant of such losses have, in the case of 1874 as well as 1918, 1938, and 1966, abruptly curtailed reform eras. These epitomized the down points in what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the cycles of American history.”

The 1874 midterms were particularly consequential, though, because they spelled the premature end of a biracial coalition that redefined the nature of citizenship, expanded voting rights, and sought to increase economic opportunity—with especially significant achievements in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

But southern whites rebelled at African-Americans gaining the right to vote and, even more so, winning public office. Despite President Grant’s crackdowns on the Ku Klux Klan, fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism had become openly practiced, even institutionalized.

The midterms—which converted the party’s 110-vote margin in the House into a Democratic majority of sixty seats, while giving the Democrats a net gain of 10 seats in the Senate— concluded an awful year for the Republicans and for the freedmen they had made it a point to protect:

*The Panic of 1873 (which I discussed in this prior post) carried over into the next year, resulting in reduced state budgets and lower tax rates, private contractors who leased convicts (the start of the “chain gang” system), and slashed funding for the public schools that had been a major achievement of biracial legislatures.

*Grant’s veto of an “inflation bill,” which had been passed by Congress to mitigate the impact of the depression, gave the Democrats a wedge among eastern immigrants and western farmers.

*The “Sanborn incident,” involving private collection of taxes and excises, engulfed Treasury Secretary William Richardson in scandal and solidified the Grant cabinet’s reputation for corruption.

*The July 1874 collapse of the Freedman’s Bank, with operations promoted by the federal government but assets not regulated or guaranteed by it, depleted the wealth of thousands of African-Americans, left them distrustful of the private sector in the long term, and fueled specious white racist claims that blacks were too ignorant and financially feckless to be trusted with state fiscal responsibility.

*The 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, precipitated by the contested gubernatorial election the year before, set off a firestorm of fraud, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by Democrats—as well as tensions among competing Republican factions— in southern states in 1874, most notably through the White League paramilitary organization that, in perpetrating violence against black officeholders and their white allies, effectively overthrew the governments of Louisiana and Alabama.

* Before the Civil War, white Northerners who went south to own, build, or manage slave plantations suffered little or no obloquy from their new neighbors. Now, however, because of their political alliance with blacks, they were stigmatized as “carpetbaggers” and, through the “Mississippi Plan”—devised in 1874 and implemented the following year—forced them either to switch from the Republicans to Democrats or leave the state.

When a political party loses its will, it runs the risk of losing its way—and that is exactly the situation in which the Republicans found themselves in the aftermath of the midterms.

The Radical Republicans, the party faction that had most zealously pursued racial equality and sought to enforce it in the South through the use of federal troops, increasingly lost favor with a Northern public that, with its minimal goals for the Civil War achieved (the end of slavery, restoration of the union), had no desire for racial equality.

As Ron Chernow noted in his biography Grant, the stinging setback his party was dealt at the polls meant that the new congressional Democratic majority, flashing its investigative powers, “turned a glaring searchlight on executive departments to ferret out corruption, a tactic used to discredit the administration on Reconstruction.” The new House Democratic committee chairs were now also empowered to stall additional pro-civil rights measures by the administration.

With his energy increasingly spent on combating this Congressional mischief and his anxiety rising that the Republicans would be punished further at the polls, President Grant now hesitated to employ federal troops on an indefinite basis against marauding Southern whites lest he be accused of “bayonet rule.”

With this backlash unpunished, Southern Democrats were well-launched on their program of “Redemption” of state governments from Republican rule. They were further aided by a Supreme Court that interpreted the 14^th Amendment broadly in one direction (defining corporations as “persons”) while narrowly construing its civil-rights protections for African-Americans.

It is well-known that, despite losing the popular vote, Republicans retained the White House in the 1876 election with a deal that secured an Electoral College victory in exchange for ending occupation of the Southern states. 

Yet corruption existed on the Democratic side, too, in a campaign of violence that further loosened Republican control of the Southern states.

“Time would reveal that 1874 inaugurated a new era in national politics,” writes Foner, “although one of stalemate rather than Democratic ascendancy.” With control of Congress split between the two parties, little important could get done in the next couple of decades.

As the ancillary rewards of an industrial economy beckoned, Republicans doffed their mantle as the rights-protecting “party of Lincoln” in favor of becoming the electoral home of Gilded Age robber barons.

Lacking the right to vote, blacks also were unable to gain patronage jobs that might have provided a ladder into the middle class, as well as informal welfare to cushion their losses in economic reversals.

The end of Reconstruction marked the dawn of legalized “Jim Crow” segregation—most entrenched politically in the South, but even economically in the North. It also gave rise to a disgraceful school of historiography that greatly exaggerated the failings of the Republican-led Southern governments in Reconstruction.

It would take W.E.B. DuBois’ 1935 masterful reassessment of the post-Civil War period, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, and especially the revisionist historians who more assiduously investigated the period beginning 20 years later, before the successes and failures of these governments could be more fairly weighed.

The residue of the failure to achieve genuine racial equality, however, continues to poison American politics, stymieing economic progress and encouraging extremism.

Flashback, April 1871: President Grant Strikes at KKK

With violence aimed at suppressing African-American voting rights rising alarmingly in the South, Ulysses Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, giving the President a weapon to stamp out the first major domestic terrorist organization after the Civil War.

The Federal oversight and intervention called for in the Ku Klux Klan Act (or, as it was formerly called, the Third Enforcement Act) was unprecedented, but so was the threat posed to American citizens in the former Confederacy during Reconstruction. 

If the issues surrounding this threat in the postbellum South—access to voting rights, a white-dominant party seeking to retain its entrenched privilege, and extremists resorting to new violent methods to check the rising power of African-Americans—sound familiar to contemporary readers, they should.

The remnants of the defeated slave states didn’t waste time trying to reconfigure their old social, political and economic order through new means of subjugating African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), founded in 1866 by Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, had evolved two years later from a fraternal order into a violent, secret one that, under white robes, hoods and the cover of night, sought to:

*whip freedmen who violated the code of white superiority (e.g., refusing to take off one’s hat in the presence of whites, interracial couples);

*kill African-Americans who exercised the right to vote, or their white Republican allies; and

*intimidate other members of these groups into silent compliance.

Passage of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments, ensuring “due process of law” and voting rights for all citizens, respectively, only increased the tempo of the violence, which reached highs especially before elections.

Two prior Enforcement Acts, adopted in 1870 and early 1871, authorized the appointment of election supervisors to counteract electoral fraud, bribery and intimidation of voters, and conspiracies to prevent the exercise of constitutional rights, and strengthened enforcement powers in large cities.

Initially, President Grant hoped this would be enough to curb the terror. Yet, as Congressional testimony revealed, violence continued, with witnesses reluctant to testify for fear of retaliation, Klansmen unwilling to inform on each other, and juries refusing to convict in those cases brought. 

Nor were politicians in the South able or often even willing to intervene: Democratic officeholders, if not KKK members, were often sympathetic to it, and Republican governors feared that using African-American troops would only start a race war.

Initial postwar legislation had left the prosecution of private criminal acts to local law enforcement. But with the new legislation, the federal government was stepping in.

To Democrats, the new legislation came to be nicknamed “The Force Acts”. In particular, they complained that the Ku Klux Klan Act authorized the suspension of habeas corpus—i.e., suspects would be arrested and held without bail—declarations of martial law, and the use of federal troops to arrest violators of the act and to break up “bands of disguised marauders.”

This portion of the legislation was the most legally and politically problematic. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, arguing the move was necessary to quell the rebellion. 

Although the Supreme Court had been reluctant to deal with the issue while the war was raging, it ruled a year after its conclusion, in Ex parte Milligan, that the President did not have the authority to apply military tribunals to citizens when civil courts still operated. How much it would ignore the Grant Administration’s treatment of habeas corpus was uncertain.

Even members of Grant’s own party were not all behind the legislation. So-called “moderate Republicans” such as Lyman Trumbull expressed grave doubts about its constitutionality, and members of the President’s own Cabinet privately complained about listening to Attorney General Amos Akerman report frequently on KKK depredations in the South.

But those directly facing the terror argued that these were legal niceties and action must be taken. Grant was particularly careful to use his powers concerning habeas corpus sparingly, in only nine South Carolina counties. Yet, under Akerman’s aggressive and inspired leadership, other provisions in the legislation were used to the hilt, with federal grand juries bringing approximately 3,400 indictments against the KKK, resulting in more than 1,100 convictions.

Although Southerners saw Grant as doing too much in the South, Radical Republicans such as Sen. Charles Sumner believed that he had done too little, and very late even at that. But within the sphere the President had determined, he had moved decisively.

As historian James M. McPherson observed in Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction: “The government’s vigorous action in 1871-1872 did bring at least temporary peace and order to large parts of the former Confederacy. As a consequence, the 1872 election was the fairest and most democratic presidential election in the South until 1968.”

With adverse Supreme Court decisions and the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South after the 1876 election, Southern whites were able increasingly to roll back the political and economic gains of freedmen.  

As for the KKK, it has reemerged three different times since then: in the decade after the 1916 film Birth of a Nation, when it broadened its terror campaigns to encompass Roman Catholics and Jews as well as blacks; in the midcentury civil-rights era, when it concentrated again largely on African-Americans; and in the last four years, as part of a larger nationalist movement that has grown 55%, according to a 2020 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Ku Klux Klan Act, while little enforced for much of the 20^th century, now forms Section 1983 of the United States Code and is the basis for federal civil rights lawsuits across the country, according to Nicholas Mosvick's blog post for the National Constitutional Center.

It has become even more relevant as the basis of a lawsuit against former President Donald Trump and ally Rudy Giuliani for allegedly conspiring with a pair of hate groups to storm the U.S. Capitol and block the Electoral College count in January.

Quote of the Day (Bill McKibben, on Threats Made Over Social Media)

"Threatening to kill or rape someone shouldn’t be banal. It should shock everyone who comes across such a threat. And that should go without saying, except that increasingly it doesn’t, not in a world where the president has said that he longed for the days when disruptive protesters were carried away from the scene ‘on a stretcher.’ It’s perversely heartening to see that the apparent murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi seems to have temporarily interrupted business as usual. Such shock and outrage is crucial, because in a world where dissenters are dismembered, there’s no hope for change. The prospect that you’ll be killed for what you say makes discussion essentially impossible. A society in which critics fear death is a society with fewer critics, and hence with fewer chances for change.”—Environmental activist Bill McKibben, after online posting of his home address with death threats made against him, in “Let’s Agree Not to Kill One Another,” The New York Times, Oct. 21, 2018