Grant’s inauguration felt like the beginning of a new era of reform and revitalization. For nearly four years, Americans had suffered through the tumultuous presidency of Andrew Johnson, who drove the nation to political crisis with his virulent racism, erratic behavior and leniency toward the defeated secessionists.
Grant, by contrast, backed the rights and privileges of freed black Americans. He supported the 15th Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1870) extending voting rights to black men and deployed federal troops against vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan (itself started by a former battlefield foe, Nathan Bedford Forrest).
But the laudable commitment from Grant and the Republican Congress to the political rights of the former slaves was fatally undermined by their indifference to the vast social and economic inequality of the postwar South. Unable to see past an ideology of “free labor” and “free soil,” they also couldn’t grasp how slavery and racial stigma gave black Americans a fundamentally different relationship to economic life. The result was actions that ultimately sowed seeds for new relationships of race hierarchy in the South and the nation at large.
Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist and ardent proponent of white supremacy, had hoped to restore a version of the antebellum status quo, with white planters taking the reins of black labor with as little federal intervention as possible. He quickly brought secessionist states back into the Union and gave ex-Confederates a free hand in directing the South, which they used to impose slavery-like conditions on the formerly enslaved. He vetoed civil rights bills and condoned racist violence against black Americans seeking equal political rights.
His disregard for the sacrifices of the war put him in fierce conflict with the Radical Republicans in Congress. Eventually, the House impeached him, and while he wasn’t removed from office — the Senate fell one vote short — Republicans had neutered him as a political force. Democrats declined to nominate him for re-election, and an openly contemptuous Grant refused to ride with him to the inauguration. He left Washington in disgrace.
Grant’s election both defused the ideological crisis of the Johnson era and weakened the radical movement within the Republican Party, which derived much of its influence from its conflict with the former president. Grant’s principal allies, Columbia historian Eric Foner writes in “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” were the “Stalwarts,” leaders whose power “rested on control of federal patronage.”
They had grown tired of — and impatient with — the “ideological mode of politics that had shaped the party at its birth,” Foner argues. For these political professionals, “the organization itself, not the issues that had once created it, commanded their highest loyalty.”
That the Stalwarts were less ideological did not make them anti-ideological. Many had cut their teeth in the anti-slavery crusade of the 1850s and were still committed to Reconstruction on the basis of “free labor” and “free soil,” where whites and blacks would work for wages as rational individuals responding to market incentives. “The free labor social order,” Foner writes, “ostensibly guaranteed the ambitious worker the opportunity for economic mobility, the ability to move from wage labor to independence through the acquisition of productive property.”
In “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age” (the latest volume in Oxford’s history of the United States), Stanford historian Richard White notes how most Republicans “sincerely embraced free labor and continued to believe in its transformative capacity and egalitarian assumptions.” They believed that Southern whites in particular would embrace the prosperity of free labor, “even at the price of supporting Reconstruction policies that extended economic opportunities to black men.”
But Southern society still rested on ideas of hierarchy and caste that still shaped behavior for former masters, former slaves and poor whites. “To the plantation planters such a wage contract was economic heresy and social revolution,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America.” Many poor whites, likewise, “faced with the dilemma of recognizing the Negroes as equals,” saw them as a “threat” to their “very existence.”
To upend this relationship, Republicans would have to transform the property relations of the South. Without land redistribution and a measure of material equality, political rights for blacks (and whites) would falter under the weight of planter power and racial caste. As Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and an ardent support of black civil rights, argued in the first months after the war, “How can republican institutions, free schools, free churches, free social intercourse, exist in a mingled community of nabobs and serfs?” He continued, “If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her lands be cultivated by the toil of the owners or the free labor of intelligent citizens.”
Deeply entwined as they were with Northern capital and committed to the protection of private property, neither Grant nor the Republican Party was willing to take those steps. Instead, they allowed Northern and Southern employers to extract profit by any means necessary, imposing peonage and sharecropping on landless former slaves. The government would distribute land, but to railroads and Western settlers, not blacks.
Grant entered office committed to the fortunes of the formerly enslaved. But by the end of his administration, he had acquiesced to white racism and financial power, largely withdrawing from the South and leaving its black citizens at the mercy of a reinvigorated class of owners and planters. Reconstruction as an active federal presence was already coming to an end when Republicans cut the 1877 deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes president and withdrew federal troops from the South. With time, the Southern owner and planter class would construct a new system of race hierarchy, affirmed by the mass of poor whites, that would reproduce racial stigma and mire the South in poverty and disadvantage.
Despite scandal and corruption, Ulysses Grant left office with his popularity and stature intact. But Reconstruction would topple in the face of reactionary violence. Without a sustained federal presence, blacks could not secure their political gains. Without land reform — or any effort to extricate the roots of the plantation system from the South — the oppressive logic of slavery would endure. And without a three-pronged assault on racial domination, social exclusion and economic inequality, race hierarchy would survive, as it does now, diminishing the promise of American democracy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.