The Uncertain Politics of Black Male Suffrage

Northern men did not have to endure the double burden of gender and race, but they were painfully aware that virulent racism persisted among many northern whites. Convinced that the Fifteenth Amendment was as much a statement of an ideal as a concrete addition to their legal rights, Douglass pointed, with genuine alarm, to the escalation of Ku Klux Klan violence and intimidation in the South as well as the substantial control over voter qualifications that the amendment gave the states. He was particularly troubled by the abundant evidence that most white Americans had not forgotten the lessons derived from hundreds of years of slavery. “A bitter contest, I fear, is before us,” he informed Charles Sumner in 1872, for 250 years of slavery had taught most whites to hate the skin color of African Americans, and the Fifteenth Amendment had not taught them to love it.6 Other African Americans shared Douglass’s concerns regarding the long-term viability of the Fifteenth Amendment in a racist society. While James Poindexter was convinced that African Americans would never abuse their political rights, he warned that, “should it appear that we cannot enjoy our liberty without putting theirs in jeopardy,” whites would not hesitate to revoke the amendment.7 His anxiety was not entirely unwarranted, for between 1860 and 1870 whites in only two northern states—Minnesota and Iowa—had actually voted to grant suffrage rights to black males. That the Democratic Party, almost to a man, had rejected every initiative that sought to extend equal rights to blacks was especially ominous. Charles Lenox Remond spoke for virtually all northern blacks when, in 1872, he bitterly charged that the party “is down with the Negro, down with Negro equality, and covered all over it is the blood drawn by the slaveholders’ lash, the teeth of merciless blood hounds, the overseers’ bludgeon during the two hundred and forty years of slavery, the murdered heroes of Fort Pillow, the victims of the New York mob, the barbarous cruelties of the Ku Klux during and since the war.”8

Not surprisingly, following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which northern Democratic state legislators overwhelmingly rejected, Democrats in a number of northern states resorted to delaying tactics, legal challenges, intimidation, and violence to prevent blacks from voting. Many of these incidents involved local party officials who simply denied the legitimacy of the constitutional mandate. For example, in 1870 blacks in Circleville, Ohio, complained in a petition to Republican Senator John Sherman that “Copperhead” election judges had committed “a high-handed outrage” by refusing to receive their votes on the grounds that the Democratic governor had never issued a proclamation announcing the adoption of the amendment. Even after a black Ohioan successfully sued in federal court under the first Enforcement Act when he was denied the right to vote, local election officials in the state continued to deny the ballot to African Americans.9

Similar tactics were employed by Democratic officials in California, New York, Michigan, and New Jersey.10 The Democratic press often encouraged—even applauded—these efforts to suppress the black vote. The New Jersey Daily Journal spoke for many Democrats when it called on whites to combat attempts to give blacks the balance of power in politics or to make them “the rulers over the white race.” Based on its racist assumption that many African Americans were not entitled to vote because they had committed crimes, the paper urged Democrats to intimidate blacks who tried to vote by recording their names and addresses and checking their qualifications. Inspired by such provocative appeals, a white mob in Camden, New Jersey, attacked blacks who had just voted in the 1870 elections. More serious violence occurred in Indianapolis in the 1872 presidential election, when whites shot at blacks’ homes, and in the 1876 mayoral elections, when Irish Democrats killed one black man and wounded several others.11

Philadelphia, which had the largest black population of any northern city, witnessed the worst political intimidation and violence directed toward blacks in the North. Even before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, a committee appointed by a black meeting in the city’s fourth ward had warned Congress that, without legislation protecting their voting rights, “the disorderly element” in the ward would seek to prevent them from exercising their suffrage rights. Indeed, in the 1870 municipal elections, officials in the seventh ward required African Americans to have two white citizens vouch for their eligibility before being allowed to register; at one polling place in the fifth ward, all whites were permitted to vote before any blacks could cast their ballots. Many Philadelphia blacks voted early in the day in this election so as to avoid violent resistance by Democratic toughs; when a disturbance occurred, the Democratic mayor headed off a confrontation by calling in the state militia. Unfortunately, in the 1871 election the militia was unable to prevent a mob from attacking blacks and killing three men, including Octavius Catto, who had played an important role in the equal rights movement since its inception. None of the rioters in this deadly incident was ever prosecuted.12

The vast majority of northern African Americans supported the Republican Party because they knew very well what their interests were and who their friends and enemies were. A black New Jersey resident forcefully expressed the widely held conviction among blacks that generations of oppression had forced them to distinguish carefully between those who wished them harm and those who did not. Self-protection, common sense, and reason, he stated, dictated that blacks would not vote for those who hated them.13 Other blacks were utterly contemptuous of those who assumed that African Americans’ knowledge of political affairs had begun only with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. William Howard Day, editor of Our National Progress, a black newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, bluntly informed white politicians that to assume blacks were naive and uninformed concerning their true interests was “a very grave mistake.” Peter Anderson fully agreed with Day. Giving gratuitous advice to black voters, he wrote, was both unnecessary and demeaning because, having contended against so much prejudice, they were as capable of discerning political realities “as those who pretend to teach them.”14

Northern blacks aligned themselves with the Republican Party for a number of ideological, personal, and practical reasons. The most obvious and powerful ideological connection was the Republican Party’s commitment to the principle of equal rights for all American citizens. Most northern black leaders also had long shared with white Republicans an attachment to temperance, morality, and law and order.15 In addition, blacks often cited the very personal factor of manhood in choosing to cast their lot with the party. In frequently returning to the themes of honor and pride, they asserted that one’s manhood depended, as Benjamin Tanner stated matter-of-factly in the Christian Recorder, on their working within the Republican ranks to ensure the death of the Democratic Party “by the popular gallows.” To shirk this responsibility, John Jones asserted in 1872, would be shameful, for the Republican Party had consistently recognized blacks’ manhood, in contrast to “the whips and chains of the pro-slavery party.”16

There were also eminently practical considerations that motivated northern blacks to vote Republican. They were moved in part by the realization that the party was solely responsible for whatever rights and privileges they enjoyed. Consequently, as a Virginia City, Nevada, activist declared, African Americans were “under a never-to-be-forgotten debt of respect and gratitude” to the party. The other side of this coin, of course, was the prospect of losing these gains if the Democrats returned to power. Douglass articulated this fear most graphically when he warned his New National Era readers in 1871: “The day the rebel Democracy regain possession of the Government, if the calamity should ever again befall the country, every right secured by the colored man by the ten years of struggle we have just passed through will be at an end.”17 A more prosaic—albeit no less practical—consideration, especially for the black leadership, was that the party appeared to be a vehicle for self-esteem, ambition, personal prestige, political consciousness, and even employment for its loyal followers.18

Thus, it is not surprising that most northern blacks were profoundly troubled by the defection of several leading Republicans in 1872 to the Liberal Republicans, who supported civil service reform and a more lenient policy toward the South. They repeatedly condemned the Liberals for seeking to destroy the Republican Party and thus endangering the rights that African Americans had so recently achieved. The Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League denounced the Liberals as “the foes of a righteous government and of liberty,” while Douglass pointedly informed a leading Liberal that “I had better put a pistol to my head and blow my brains out than lend myself in any wise to the destruction or the defeat of the Republican party.”19

Agitation for Sumner’s Bill

Northern blacks were keenly aware that their only hope of retaining and, with any luck, building on their rights as citizens lay with white Republicans, especially Radicals such as Charles Sumner. Thus, Sumner’s decision to join the Liberal revolt was especially shocking to African Americans, for he had long been the leading Senate advocate of civil and political rights for blacks. Yet his decision, which was fueled primarily by his alienation from President Grant, did not lessen either his commitment to equal rights for blacks or their determination to work with him toward that objective. Throughout the first half of the 1870s, they vigorously lobbied for passage of his civil rights bill.20 While they at times delicately implored Sumner to remain true to his principles, they frequently corresponded with him and other leading Republican congressmen and used them as conduits for their petitions and memorials on behalf of the bill. Indeed, the evidence suggests in 1870 John Mercer Langston assisted Sumner in crafting the civil rights legislation, which sought to enshrine in national law the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of legal equality by banning racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation, churches, public amusements, restaurants, juries, cemeteries, and especially public schools.21

The five-year campaign by African Americans for the passage of Sumner’s bill was national in scope. With the creation of the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons in 1869 and the launch of their crusade for sweeping federal legislation, equal rights activists throughout the country experienced a revived sense of being part of a truly national movement. The executive committee, which was headquartered in Washington, played a leading role in coordinating this effort. Led by veteran activists such as George Downing and Langston, it acted as a permanent lobby, meeting periodically with President Grant, congressional Republicans, and other federal officials. The committee also circulated blank petitions for activists to sign and then send to Congress and composed memorials to Congress and addresses to the American public. Perhaps most important, it sponsored national conventions in 1873 and 1875 that brought heightened pressure to bear on congressional Republicans as they debated Sumner’s bill. The National Convention of Colored Persons, which met in Washington in December 1873, included delegates from as far away as Mississippi, Texas, California, and Oregon. At this convention, a delegation headed by Downing met with Grant and numerous congressional Republicans. Unlike the national delegation’s contentious meeting with President Andrew Johnson in 1866, this group received a warm welcome at the White House, where Grant assured them that he would urge Congress to pass the bill. On the eve of the final debate on the civil rights bill in early 1875, another national convention was held in the city primarily for the purpose of pressuring congressional Republicans to retain the school integration clause in Sumner’s bill.22

Yet this campaign was not entirely orchestrated by the National Executive Committee in Washington. The equal rights leagues in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and other states also mobilized their members on behalf of the civil rights bill. For example, at each of its annual meetings from 1870 to 1875 the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, which in 1874 declared that Sumner’s bill was “a measure of paramount importance,” urged its local auxiliaries to rally behind the bill, sent petitions to Congress, and published addresses to the public. In 1873, the PSERL established a central committee to coordinate the state campaign, and it appointed delegates to the 1873 and 1875 national conventions.23

In their letters to the black and white press, petitions, memorials, newspaper editorials, speeches, resolutions at state and national conventions, and personal contacts with Republican politicians, northern blacks sought to counter a number of charges leveled by the bill’s detractors. Many of its opponents believed that the Fifteenth Amendment should signal the end of federal efforts to protect the rights of African Americans. They therefore concluded that it was now time for blacks to stand on their own. Federal enforcement of unfettered access to public facilities, they insisted, would unfairly confer a special status on blacks. These critics also repeatedly charged—as they had done in the debates leading up to the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment—that African Americans in fact sought to achieve an artificial social equality based not on individual worth but on legislation.24

The lightning rod for much of the criticism was the bill’s provision for integrating the nation’s public schools. With some fairness, Democrats charged that northern white Republicans were hypocritical in pushing for federal desegregation of the public schools because most northern states—including some where Republicans were the dominant political force—continued to operate racially separate schools. Moreover, all Democrats and many northern Republicans warned that a mandate for racially mixed schools would destroy the infant school systems in the South because southern whites would refuse to allow their children to associate with African American children. Birdsey Grant Northrup, superintendent of public schools in Connecticut, reflected the thinking of many northern white Republicans when he asserted that the school clause would therefore “prove most disastrous to the colored people themselves.”25

In response to these charges, black equal rights activists went on the offensive by insisting that such legislation was both just and necessary. They were especially adamant in denying the charge that, since African Americans already enjoyed fundamental legal rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, they desired that Congress legislate social equality. Much as they had done in the face of such accusations by the opponents of suffrage rights, blacks scoffed at such talk. Some, such as Philip Bell, contemptuously dismissed this charge as “a bug-bear” to excite ignorant people. “Those whom we would not associate with on any terms,” he charged, “are the ones who most fear the contamination of social equality.” Others chose to respond to this accusation by carefully explaining that blacks consciously drew a clear line between rights and social relations. An 1872 meeting of black leaders held in Washington asserted: “Legal rights and privileges accorded us, we propose to stand upon our worth, satisfied that society will regulate itself according to the instincts, the tastes, the judgment, and interests of mankind.”26

This did not mean that northern black leaders were motivated to agitate for Sumner’s bill more by their belief that gaining unfettered access to public facilities would allow the black elite to achieve individual success in a competitive society and to protect “respectable” African Americans from harassment by working-class whites than by their desire to improve the everyday lives of all blacks.27 Prominent black activists indeed at times sounded elitist. They deeply resented white prejudice directed toward African Americans who were cultured and respectable, for it appeared to confirm their fear that, no matter what they had accomplished or how upstanding they were, whites would never accept them as their equals. Langston informed a black meeting in 1872 that if a black man were well dressed and well behaved and able to afford a train ticket or hotel room, he should receive the same treatment as any white man. In a rather similar vein, Peter Anderson complained bitterly about the “deadly hate” shown by whites when an African American “exhibits the qualities of gentility, or his family exhibits the proper or ordinary degree of refinement.” The implication that blacks who, in James Poindexter’s words, had “more mind, more culture, better morals and better manners” especially deserved better treatment and were particularly sensitive to discrimination was probably not lost on many in the black community.28

In fact, the leading men in the movement were not isolated from the black masses. They often attended the same churches, sent their children to the same schools, and read the same newspapers. Moreover, they mingled with a broad spectrum of the black community at mass public meetings and joined them in signing petitions and boycotting racially separate black schools. Many working-class and middle-class blacks also had reason to use urban transportation, visit amusement parks, or seek a quality education for their children. It was not as if the black masses were immune to the indignities heaped upon them by whites or were without aspirations and dreams. While a class and cultural divide certainly existed within the northern black community, it did not obviate the reality that all African Americans shared a deep-seated resentment of, and instinctive anger toward, racist laws and customs. Even Downing, one of the wealthiest northern blacks, clearly understood that nearly all blacks supported the school integration clause in Sumner’s bill. “The feelings of the most ignorant colored man, in the poorest log cabin,” he wrote in 1874, “is most intensely wrought upon this matter.” A mass meeting of Chicago blacks called to celebrate the third anniversary of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment expressed, in even more forceful language, the widespread sense of indignation in the black community toward racial discrimination when it demanded “a discontinuance of the barbarous practices which refuse them those general accommodations without which they are subject to untold inconveniences and repeated indignities.”29

Middle-class and working-class blacks alike were keenly aware that their enfranchisement did not mean they enjoyed, in the words of Langston, the “usual access to accommodations, facilities, and privileges.” Langston added that, “legally considered,” the black man’s condition was “nondescript.” Delegates to the 1873 National Convention of Colored Persons likewise pointed out that the partial recognition of their rights made the withholding of the rest “even more intolerable” for five million African Americans. This situation, which outraged and insulted African Americans every day, William D. Forten informed the PSERL’s local auxiliaries, could only be rectified by “a real civil rights bill . . . with such penalties as will teach humanity to the imbruted, and compel the tyrant to loose his hold on the poor.”30

Most northern blacks believed that the ubiquitous discrimination they experienced in the public sphere must be eradicated by federal legislation. Given their limited success in persuading state officials to enact equal rights legislation, they quite logically concluded, as the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League asserted in 1873, that “The evil is national; the remedy must also be national.” While some blacks were not entirely convinced that Congress had the requisite authority to protect all legal rights of American citizens, most agreed with the emphatic declaration by the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons that Congress had “supreme and unquestioned control” over the states in prohibiting racial discrimination.31

Because northern blacks agreed with Philip Bell’s conviction that “we meet the greatest barrier when we present our children at the public school and are rejected,” they naturally focused much of their attention on the school integration clause in Sumner’s bill. In concert with their emphasis on an expansive federal authority under the Constitution, they articulated the themes of nationalism, shared purpose, and a common citizenship in asserting the need for a uniform national policy of public school desegregation. In an 1872 speech, Langston forcefully underscored the importance of a common education in the nation. “Being citizens of a common country, interested in the conservation of one government,” he stated, “their feelings and purposes should be the same.” A year later, the National Convention of Colored Persons echoed this sentiment in urging Congress to state unequivocally that all American citizens must be taught in the public schools and that they are a part of one nation, with a common identity and a strict adherence to the principle of equality before the law. Therefore, it added, there should be no barriers to admission to the public schools anywhere in the United States.32

Their relentless lobbying on behalf of Sumner’s bill—especially its school integration clause—met with little success during the early 1870s. Even though Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, many party members opposed such sweeping legislation on constitutional grounds, feared a white backlash, or believed that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments provided sufficient protection for African Americans’ rights. The ability of these Republicans to block passage of a federal civil rights bill led Peter Anderson in 1873 to grumble that, while the South was “thoroughly reconstructed, and is all right on the subject” of equal rights, the “Republican North” was not.33 Yet these setbacks did not deter northern black equal rights activists from pursing their objectives. Indeed, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment had energized them to intensify their pressure on the Republican Party at both the state and national levels. They were inclined above all to connect the Fifteenth Amendment to their demand for unfettered access to the public schools, for they were deeply concerned that their newly-won political rights would have little meaning if African American children were denied equal educational benefits. Unless their children were permitted to acquire an education that would enable them to enjoy these and other rights, the Pacific Appeal editorialized in 1872, the amendment “will be virtually defeated and shorn of all practical or lasting benefit to our race.”34

Northern blacks’ campaign for equal rights bore fruit in several states during the early 1870s. Progress was achieved on the school integration issue in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Illinois. Several cities in New York—including Albany, Geneva, Troy, New York City, Poughkeepsie, Lockport, and Buffalo—either moved toward or adopted school integration. In Poughkeepsie, for example, black parents—especially mothers—forced the issue by taking their children into the white schools. Following several confrontations, the chair of the city’s Board of Education agreed in 1873 to admit black students to the white schools, in part because of the civil rights law but especially because of the financial burden on taxpayers the dual system imposed. The struggle in Lockport was more contentious. Angered by the Board of Education’s resistance to integration, black residents petitioned and held public meetings in the early 1870s. When these tactics failed to produce the desired results, they boycotted the black schools and forced their way into the district’s white schools. Ultimately, in 1876 the combination of the expense of operating a dual system and the effects of the ongoing boycott of the black schools led the board to integrate the school system.35

The struggle for public school integration and inclusion achieved similar breakthroughs in a few other northern states. Perhaps the most noteworthy triumph occurred in Toledo, Ohio, where blacks and their white allies, including the editor of the Toledo Commercial, waged a sustained battle for school desegregation from 1869 to 1871. Working- and middle-class African Americans in the city launched the cause by holding a public meeting in 1869 that condemned the gross inequalities in the city’s public schools as “an injustice to a common humanity.” When additional pressure failed to move the Board of Education to close the separate black school, a wealthy black man sued it for refusing to admit his daughter to a white school. Finally, following two years of black agitation that gradually altered white public opinion in the city and also instilled a growing awareness among whites of the cost of maintaining a dual school system, the board integrated the public schools in 1871.36

During the early and mid-1870s, a few other northern cities, including Pittsburgh and New Haven, followed Toledo’s example by permitting African American students to attend previously all-white schools.37 Moreover, Illinois, which had denied black children a public education in districts where their numbers fell short of the requirement for establishing a separate school, included in its new constitution in 1874 a provision that guaranteed “a thorough and efficient system of free schools, whereby all children of this state may receive a good, common school education.” State Superintendent of Schools Newton Bateman hailed this provision “with unspeakable satisfaction.” Following his lead and confronted with mounting pressure from black activists, the legislature then directed school districts to provide an “equal education,” though not racial integration, in all of the state’s public schools.38

Following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, northern blacks also lobbied legislatures in a number of northern states to strike whites-only suffrage clauses from their constitutions. Although the Amendment established, albeit in rather conditional language, suffrage rights for black males in all elections, they viewed such clauses as powerful symbols of racial prejudice that stigmatized and demeaned them. During the first half of the 1870s, their efforts to repeal these clauses succeeded in a number of states—including California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Iowa, Indiana, and Connecticut.39 Another part of their equal rights agenda was the enactment of state civil rights laws. Even though Congress failed to pass Sumner’s bill during the early 1870s, in 1873 New York blacks drafted legislation modeled on Sumner’s proposal, which they then urged the legislature to enact. African Americans from across the state sent petitions to the legislature, and several prominent blacks lobbied in Albany. While the bill was being debated, the New York Citizens’ Civil Rights Committee, which had been established by a state convention, also sponsored meetings in Buffalo, New York, and other cities across the state. At these meetings speakers demanded a guarantee of full and equal enjoyment of public facilities and services. The bill, which included a key provision that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race or color in the assignment of children to the public schools, was enacted by the legislature in 1873.40

At the Polls

The black vote was partly responsible for these gains on the equal rights front. On the eve of the Fifteenth Amendment’s ratification, Douglass had predicted optimistically, “It will be a bitter pill for the proud democracy to realize that the despised Negro’s vote was the weight thrown to turn the scale and change their past triumphs to defeats.”41 A very high percentage of northern black men voted during the 1870s; in places where elections were closely contested, even a relatively small number of black voters tipped the balance in favor of the Republicans.42

Even though some northern white Republicans reacted to black male suffrage by sitting out elections or defecting to the Democrats, Republican losses were more than offset by the addition of African American votes. These gains occurred where the Republican vote increased after black males were granted suffrage rights, where the black vote was larger than the Republican margin of victory, and where Democratic majorities decreased. A few examples will suffice. In San Francisco, the black vote helped to defeat the Democrats in the 1870 and 1872 municipal elections; in the latter year it was larger than the Republican margin of victory. A similar impact was felt in Harrisburg, where black voters were instrumental in shifting the city from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold during the 1870s. The city’s eighth ward, where the largest number of African Americans lived, moved from a 63 percent Democratic majority in 1869 to a 53 percent majority for the Republican mayoral candidate the following year; the ward continued to contribute significantly to Republican victories in mayoral elections throughout the 1870s.43

The Republican Party in Philadelphia also depended heavily on the black vote. With 5,400 eligible voters in the city in 1871, they contributed mightily to the party’s triumphs in mayoral elections throughout the decade. African American voters also played a crucial role in electing Republican governors in Pennsylvania in 1872 and 1875 as well as a state treasurer in 1873.44 In New Jersey, where the Democrat-controlled legislature rejected the Fifteenth Amendment, the impact of the black vote was felt almost immediately, when the Republicans made sizable gains in the 1870 elections. In seven of the eleven counties where African Americans represented more than the statewide average of 3.4 percent of the population, the Republicans did better than they had in 1868. This pattern also prevailed in Connecticut, where the miniscule black vote enabled the Republicans to win numerous closely contested elections during the 1870s. The black vote was equally critical in Ohio, where closely contested elections were the norm. Because their vote total was often greater than the Republican margin of victory, African Americans were able to play a decisive role in gubernatorial elections from 1873 through 1883. For example, with 15,000 black voters in the state, the Republicans won the governorship by 5,000 votes in 1875; in 1879 the black electorate of approximately 20,000 exceeded the Republican margin of victory of 17,000. Likewise, the Republican margin of 7,516 in Ohio was smaller than the black electorate in the 1876 presidential election. And, though they represented only 1 percent of Cleveland’s population, they often swung elections to the Republicans in that city. Perhaps the most dramatic reversal of political trends that resulted from the black vote occurred in Cairo, Illinois, where three thousand African Americans lived. Whereas the city had generally been controlled by the Democrats prior to 1870, the black vote enabled the Republicans to be the dominant political force there from 1870 until the early twentieth century.45

Inside the Republican Party

Yet because of their small numbers, racial prejudice, and the absence of a viable alternative to the Republican Party, the influence of northern blacks was often limited in party circles, as was their ability to achieve significant gains on the equal rights front. But these obstacles did not deter them from devoting considerable attention to developing strategies to maximize their leverage within the party. One issue that they wrestled with was how and to what degree—and even whether—to occupy an independent position within the party’s organizational structure. The most extensive and contentious debate on this matter occurred shortly before the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified. At its 1869 annual meeting, the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League debated a resolution stating that, because the organization had achieved its primary objective of gaining the franchise, its constitution should be amended so as to dissolve the league and essentially make it an arm of the Republican Party. Opponents of the resolution claimed that retention of a separate organization was necessary in order for blacks to speak with a unified voice and to vote intelligently. Some of these delegates also cautioned that white Republicans viewed black male suffrage above all as a vehicle to serve their own political interests. For their part, those who favored a close formal relationship with the party insisted that changing times dictated the transformation of the league’s character and that the party had already done much to advance blacks’ interests.46

In the end, the delegates appointed a committee to propose amendments to the league’s constitution that would reflect impending changes in its members’ political status. When the committee presented its recommendations shortly after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, William Nesbit, the league’s president, urged that the organization continue to exist in order to ensure that all rights and liberties were protected. Following debate on several resolutions that called for changes in the league’s statement of purpose, a compromise was ultimately adopted that stated that no alteration of the constitution or the character of the organization was necessary “except such as will make the League an efficient instrumentality obtaining for us an equal distribution of the school funds and school privileges.” Thus, it would remain a separate entity but its primary objective would now be to procure equal educational benefits, largely through the desegregation of the state’s public schools. At the same time, however, the league’s members realized that this objective could only be achieved by working with white Republicans. Thus, it remained primarily a political organization throughout the 1870s.47

A few black activists in other northern states were likewise convinced that the time had come to disband their separate equal rights organizations. Following the passage of the New York civil rights act in 1873, a black leader asserted that, at least in his state, the need for such separate groups was “now happily past and gone I trust forever.” Other prominent activists, such as Philip Bell, acknowledged that such separate organizations might well be unrepublican and repugnant to many blacks because they tended to engender caste feelings and foster prejudice. Nevertheless, most northern blacks appear to have endorsed separate black Republican clubs because they believed they would promote a sense of racial pride and identity and would prove an effective means of pressuring white party leaders to enact equal rights legislation. The Ohio Conference of Colored Men articulated this view when it warned in 1871 that, while they were loyal members of the party, they must retain sufficient autonomy to ensure that the party “go forward and not backward.”48 Even Bell feared that the party would never grant full rights to blacks unless they retained their independence within the Republican ranks. As long as African Americans had to contend for fundamental rights and privileges, he wrote, they must have their own organizations and institutions. A New York City activist expressed this thought most succinctly when he wrote: “We think that we can take better care of ourselves by maintaining our own associations.”49

The political arithmetic associated with the black vote and the pressure that African Americans exerted on the party’s leadership to recognize them as an important constituency within the Republican ranks bore fruit in the form of nominations for office and patronage jobs. White Republicans in Ohio, for example, attempted to incorporate blacks into the party by rewarding them for their loyalty. The clearest evidence of this may be seen in Cleveland, where John P. Green, a lawyer, was elected justice of the peace in 1873, thus becoming the first elected black official in the city’s history. Green was reelected several times until 1881, when Republicans elected him to the state legislature. In addition, Peter Clark of Cincinnati showed that assertive blacks could at times win concessions from both parties when his threat of political independence leveraged a Republican nomination of an African American for the state legislature and prompted the Democrats to tone down their racist rhetoric.50

Some Illinois blacks achieved even more impressive gains within the party’s ranks. In Cairo, blacks employed the threat that they would not vote for any ticket unless it included a black man to pressure white Republicans to appoint them as delegates to county conventions and as postmasters, county coroners, election judges, clerks, jailers, and constables. Others ran for elective office, including the Board of Aldermen. Likewise, even though African Americans constituted only 2 percent of Chicago’s population, John Jones was twice elected county commissioner, and another black man was elected to the state legislature. Several other Chicago blacks served as delegates to Republican conventions and were appointed to a variety of government jobs.51

In Detroit, where close elections and a convention system in which party caucuses chose delegates to nominating conventions enabled blacks to be nominated for “balanced” tickets without first having to appeal to the electorate, African Americans were frequently selected to serve as delegates to city, county, and state Republican conventions. Moreover, beginning in 1870 at least one black served as a deputy sheriff in each Republican city administration, while others were appointed as postal clerks and carriers, clerks and inspectors in the customs house, city hall janitors, the city physician, the county coroner, and the deputy city clerk.52 Blacks also held a variety of public offices and government jobs in Philadelphia, Camden, New Jersey, New Haven, and other northern cities.53

Yet, in the final analysis, northern African Americans received relatively few nominations or appointments from the Republican leadership, and most of those that were dispensed at the local, state, and national levels were on the lowest rungs of the patronage system. These limits existed in part because, even in those urban wards where a critical mass of black voters resided, they often represented a small minority of the electorate; in many cities they were also scattered across a number of voting districts. Equally important, by the time northern blacks entered Republican politics in the early 1870s, German, British, Scandinavian, and Irish Protestants were already, or were rapidly becoming, entrenched in the party’s apparatus. While these groups certainly welcomed the black vote as a decisive factor in determining the outcome of various elections, they showed little inclination to share political rewards or decision-making power equitably with African Americans.54

These political realities prompted a growing number of northern blacks to complain that the party took them for granted and exploited their vote while refusing to reward them for their loyalty to the party and their ability to shift the balance of power to the Republicans in key states and cities. Some black spokesmen cautioned against appearing greedy or selfish in protesting too strenuously about inadequate political rewards. The Elevator expressed concern that blacks might become known as “a race of office seekers,” while others were quick to reassure the party faithful that blacks should only be nominated for political offices or appointed to patronage jobs for which they were qualified.55 Yet, much as with southern blacks, the sense of anger and disillusionment was deeply felt by northern African Americans, who believed that the party had reneged on its pledge to treat them in a just and equitable manner. They resented not only that little patronage was forthcoming but also that those jobs that were dispensed tended to be menial and poorly paid. They demanded respect from their white allies, as they had in their earlier struggle for the franchise. In expressing their grievances over the unjust allocation of patronage, delegates to a convention held in Philadelphia in 1870 insisted that they “be handled as men, and not as machines.” In a similar vein, Douglass sought to enlighten white Republicans regarding blacks’ sensitivity to such personal slights by noting that “they are people, and are ready to resent any undue disregard of their just expectations, and any undue partiality toward white candidates.”56

Black Republicans often emphasized that rewards should be based on a group’s loyalty to the government and Republican principles. The Elevator thus found just cause to complain bitterly about former members of the Confederate Army being appointed to positions in the California state bureaucracy while competent, loyal black citizens were ignored. At times their sense of outrage was so deep that they even lashed out at those who suffered similar discrimination at the hands of party leaders. Peter Anderson, for example, groused that, all too often, the freed people—“some ‘Jim Crow Contraband,’” as he derisively termed them—were given preference over “more cultivated and educated” northern blacks in the rewarding of federal patronage, not because they were far more numerous but because they were “more obedient and willing to put up with the whims of the underling who may be oppressive or tyrannical in their commands.”57

A protest meeting held in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1873, which was organized primarily by Peter Clark, presented the sharpest and most wide-ranging criticism of the Republican Party’s record. Clark and one hundred other delegates charged that the virtual absence of blacks in state and local government positions in Ohio was tantamount to a denial of full citizenship and “unjust discrimination.” They were especially angered by the party’s refusal to adequately protect African Americans from “the most flagrant violation of their rights.” The party’s record on these issues produced among the delegates a palpable sense of urgency and insecurity. Clark reminded the convention that they had assembled in order to “ask, and not only ask, but demand of them that they give us our rights,” while the president of the convention warned that blacks must receive their full rights now, for the Republican Party might someday disappear and “leave us in the ditch.”58

The speeches presented at the Chillicothe Convention reflected a growing conviction among northern blacks that the party’s leaders were unwilling to act on their avowed commitment to defend and advance equal rights and privileges for all citizens. They were increasingly disturbed by the federal government’s failure to move aggressively to stem the tide of violence and intimidation directed toward the freed people. During the late 1860s, they had occasionally expressed sympathy and support for southern blacks as they sought to adapt to their newly-won freedom but had largely focused on their own struggle to gain equal rights. Indeed, though northern and southern African Americans had at times come together to lobby the president and Congress on behalf of suffrage rights, some Northerners had been envious that the Reconstruction Act of 1867 paved the way for suffrage rights for the freedmen before northern blacks achieved them. But as they came together in national conventions to lobby for the Fifteenth Amendment and, in the early 1870s, to work for the passage of Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, they found that they had much in common, especially a deep-seated desire to have their rights as citizens fully protected under the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, news of a concerted campaign of violence and intimidation against southern blacks and the unraveling of Reconstruction in the South deeply troubled northern African Americans.

Under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 the southern states had been required to write new constitutions before being readmitted to the Union. The state constitutional conventions established the political parameters and government frameworks of the new Reconstruction order. These constitutions were quite innovative in that they laid the foundations of the southern public school system, provided protection for all citizens’ civil rights, funded railroad construction, and established the basis for a new system of free labor. Yet the new southern Reconstruction governments experienced enormous problems from their very inception. Above all, the Democratic opposition never acknowledged the legitimacy of the Republican Party, especially because it was imposed by a northern Congress and relied largely on the support of the freed people. The Republican Party constantly reached out to southern whites in order to acquire legitimacy, but to little avail. In the late 1860s a resurgence of violence and intimidation that primarily targeted blacks was unleashed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups, with the principal objective the destruction of the Republican Party. These attacks posed a serious problem for the Reconstruction governments: If the loyal black militia units took vigorous action to defend these governments, it risked racial warfare and still more white defections to the Democratic Party. In all of this, the Republican Party was increasingly riven by serious factional strife; by the early 1870s, it was predominantly a black party.59

In the early 1870s, a growing number of southern Democrats adopted a “New Departure” strategy in hopes of minimizing northern military intervention. But their decision to eschew violence, accept the finality of Reconstruction, and acknowledge the reality of black suffrage generally failed to persuade Republicans to fuse with them. Thus, by the mid-1870s the Bourbon Democrats came to power by emphasizing racial polarization and denouncing rising taxes under the Republican governments. This political strategy included organized terror and intimidation by groups such as the KKK, the White League, and the Rifle Clubs, which sought to spread fear among black Republicans. The Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873, in which approximately one hundred blacks were murdered, as well as numerous other assaults on black and white Republicans, demoralized the party and drove most of its few remaining southern members into the Democratic ranks. By the mid-1870s, especially in the Deep South, the rallying cry of white supremacy had defeated Reconstruction.60

As the situation in the South steadily deteriorated during the early 1870s, the federal government generally avoided intervening in southern affairs so long as the state constitutions and labor laws did not infringe on federal statutes. Racial segregation persisted in many areas of southern life, but that was also true in most parts of the North. Although President Grant occasionally acted to restore order, he was increasingly reluctant to intervene in order to save failing Reconstruction governments, which he considered incapable and unworthy of being sustained. Indeed, in many respects he reflected northern whites’ growing unwillingness to remain involved in southern Reconstruction.61

Even though most northern blacks admired President Grant, they wondered why he did not act more forcefully to crush the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilante groups, which they considered a band of murderers who should be hanged. “Too long already,” the Christian Recorder complained as early as 1871, “has the Government allowed its own authority to be despised and made to run riot.” Thus, if Grant did not deal harshly with these criminals, the people should be made aware of this fact. Similarly, a few years later an Indianapolis convention demanded that the president provide protection for the Republican government in Louisiana against “treasonable mob violence” and urged the federal government to intervene militarily on behalf of Mississippi blacks who were threatened by the White League.62 As the level of antiblack violence escalated in the South, the Christian Recorder became so frustrated by the unwillingness of federal officials to take decisive action that it tacitly endorsed a Tennessee black convention’s call for an all-black state to be carved out of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Such a proposal should not be criticized out of hand, the editor asserted, because neither northern nor southern whites really wished to be associated with African Americans. The editor was particularly outraged by white Americans’ “placid” response to the Colfax massacre, charging that the nation “has shown neither pity nor wrath—pity toward the slain, wrath toward the slayer.”63

By the mid-1870s, Benjamin Tanner’s feelings of betrayal and disillusionment had become so intense that his denunciation of northern whites at times took on the tone of the jeremiads delivered by black activists on the eve of the Civil War. “God may be asleep as it were,” he warned northern white preachers and editors, “but in the words of Sojourner Truth, He is not dead. And sooner or later, this nation will be called to judgment, as it was in 1860.” He went so far as to charge that northern Republicans had stood by while southern blacks were murdered and disfranchised during the previous few years because “the North still hates the Negro; at least it does not regard him.” Such “Negro-phobia,” the editor concluded ominously, “will yet prove the death of this government.”64

Applying the Fourteenth Amendment

Although most northern blacks did not share the sense of impending doom articulated by the Christian Recorder’s editor, they were increasingly dismayed by the fact that only New York, Massachusetts and Kansas had passed comprehensive civil rights laws. Moreover, while the slow progress made by equal rights activists in removing whites-only suffrage clauses from state constitutions can be explained in large part by nearly unanimous Democratic opposition as well as cumbersome amendment provisions, some Republican legislators also contributed to delays in bringing state constitutions in line with the Fifteenth Amendment. In addition, the Indiana legislature chose to retain key elements of its Black Laws, which African Americans condemned as “barbarous” and a denial of their rights as citizens.65

Even in New York, the civil rights law had been enacted in 1873 in part because its provisions were watered down sufficiently to attract Democratic support. As some blacks had predicted at the time it was passed, the fifty-dollar fine did little to deter whites from violating the rights of African Americans. Moreover, because the law was not well enforced by Democratic, and some Republican, officials, segregation persisted in many public places, particularly the public schools. In Brooklyn, for example, the Board of Education rejected blacks’ petitions that urged it to close the racially separate schools, while in Newburgh, blacks achieved school integration in 1873 but education officials responded by placing African American children in separate rooms.66

The effort to desegregate the public schools was even less successful in several other northern states. Although Republicans in the Pennsylvania Senate passed a bill in 1874 that would have repealed the 1854 law requiring segregated public schools, several Republicans joined with Democrats in the lower house of the Assembly to kill the bill. Likewise, a bill passed by the Kansas legislature in 1874 exempted the public schools from penalties for segregating students along racial lines. The situation that unfolded during the 1870s in Oregon, which had a tiny black population, was only somewhat more promising. Although the Portland school district decided to end its dual school system for financial reasons, the Pendleton district denied blacks admission to a white school, then opened a subscription school for whites only. When the sole black family moved away a few years later, the district chose to reopen the public school.67 School officials in Elizabeth, New Jersey, pursued a somewhat similar strategy. Boycotts of the black school in the early 1870s that were intended to open neighborhood schools to black children and to force the hiring of competent teachers, irrespective of color, prompted the Board of Education to close the black school. In the ongoing struggle between black parents and the board, it reopened the school in 1872, but low attendance led to its closure the following year. The board then reopened the school in 1874, but poor attendance resulted in its closure in 1877. Consequently, for the next four years no public school education was provided for Elizabeth’s black children.68

Even when a state mandated “equal education” for all students and prohibited districts from excluding black children from the public schools, the laws were often difficult to enforce. This was the case in Illinois, for the 1874 school law provided no penalties to compel compliance. Moreover, while Newton Bateman, the state superintendent of schools, applauded this law, he informed African Americans that racially separate schools should be retained. In California, the situation was even worse, for the black Educational Committee estimated in 1872 that at least four hundred African American children living in districts where they did not meet the numerical requirement received no education. Even where their numbers warranted a separate school, black students were often not allowed beyond the third or fourth grade, and never beyond the primary level. The situation in Indiana was far worse. In his 1874–1875 report, the state superintendent of public instruction stated that many communities continued to provide no education for black children. The school law’s reference to “such other means of education,” he noted with obvious disappointment, in fact meant, especially in rural areas where few African Americans lived, “let the children grow up in ignorance.”69

During the first half of the 1870s, northern blacks increasingly turned to the state courts for redress of their grievances in part because their lobbying of state legislatures had achieved only limited success, even in states such as Pennsylvania and Illinois, where Republicans were generally the dominant political force. They also resorted to legal action because, within the judicial system, they at least theoretically had as much opportunity as larger and more powerful groups to convince judges of the justice of their complaints, and the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to provide a firm legal basis for challenging discriminatory laws and practices.

Although many northern blacks were poor and marginalized, and no organization such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People existed at the time to coordinate the legal struggle against racial discrimination, they actively asserted their civil rights in the state courts. They considered the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality before the law a potentially powerful weapon, especially against segregation within, and exclusion from, the public schools. A convention held in Stockton, California, in 1871 reflected this optimism when it declared that the amendment gave African Americans full educational privileges that could not be obtained in “caste” schools. However, their hopes were dashed: legal historians have shown that, in cases related to racially segregated public schools, northern state courts during the 1870s in fact consistently foreshadowed the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson by forging the doctrine of “separate but equal” in regard to public education.70

The Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling in State ex rel. Garnes v. McCann in 1871 served as an important precedent for other northern state supreme court decisions regarding segregated public education during the 1870s. The case was initiated by William Garnes, who applied to the courts for a writ of mandamus to compel school authorities to admit his three children to the white public schools. Garnes’s attorney argued that the 1864 Ohio law authorizing a classification of students on the basis of color contravened the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, his claim that an equal education was a “fundamental” right was weakened by his heavy reliance on the Fourteenth Amendment as well as the justices’ conviction that he did not satisfactorily prove that the black schools were inferior to the white schools. The justices—all of whom were Republicans—reacted to Garnes’s plea by narrowly defining the privileges and immunities clause. Citing the broad discretionary powers enjoyed by local school boards and state precedents for classifying by race, the court asserted that equality of rights did not require educating blacks and whites in the same school. Thus, it concluded that any classification which preserved “substantially equal school advantages” was not prohibited by either the Ohio constitution or the U.S. Constitution.71

A year later, the New York Supreme Court consciously followed the lead of the Ohio court in its ruling in People ex rel. Dietz v. Easton. In his suit, William A. Dietz sought to force the Albany Board of Public Instruction to admit his children to a white school located near his residence. Much as in the Garnes case, Dietz did not claim that the black school was inferior to the white schools. Indeed, the court held out the prospect of ruling for Dietz’s children if he had been able to prove that the black schools were “materially objectionable.” Dietz’s suit was also rendered problematic by the fact that, since there was only one school district in the city, it was difficult for him to claim that his children were excluded from schools in the district where he lived. In its decision, the court reiterated key sections of the Garnes decision nearly verbatim in rejecting the argument that the case fell within the purview of the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and in ruling that equality of rights did not mean that blacks and whites must be educated together.72

In the same year, the Nevada Supreme Court presented a similar argument in State of Nevada ex rel. Stoutmeyer v. Duffy, though the plaintiff’s contention and the court’s decision differed in some important respects from the Dietz ruling. This case was initiated by Nelson Stoutmeyer, who sued the Carson City Board of Education for excluding his son and other black children from the town’s public schools. Stoutmeyer’s suit claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment rendered unconstitutional the Nevada law that prohibited racially mixed schools because, even if a separate school was equal to the white schools in advantages, they “must differ essentially in their spirit and character.” Unlike the Garnes and Dietz rulings, the Nevada court gave Stoutmeyer a partial victory on the grounds that, since there were few racially separate schools for African Americans, many black children were in fact denied an education. Yet, while the justices conceded that the school law was contrary to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, they refused to cite the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis for their decision, because the state statute was “not obnoxious to the letter.” Thus, the court agreed with the Ohio and New York rulings that local school boards had the authority to establish racially separate schools.73

A similar case came before the California Supreme Court, though the legal process not only was more prolonged but also elicited a more vigorous response from both the black press and community. The Oakland Board of Education provoked sustained protest when it refused to admit black children to its public schools on the grounds that fewer than the required number of school-age blacks resided in the city. Terming this exclusion from schools for which blacks were taxed “unbearable,” the Pacific Appeal called in 1871 for a test case to be brought before the courts. Although the Elevator believed that a remedy should be sought in the state legislature because that approach would be more direct, less time-consuming, and much less expensive, Bell agreed with Anderson that, as taxpayers, blacks deserved a fair share of the educational benefits and that both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments prohibited all degrading distinctions based on color.74

By 1872, black Californians had launched an all-out effort to force the issue before the public. This included the decision to take the question of equal school facilities and admission to all public schools before the state supreme court. They hired a prominent white attorney and raised money throughout the state for legal expenses. The lawyer soon chose the case of Mary Frances Ward as the basis for legal action, claiming that Noah Floyd, a school principal, had violated her rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments when he refused to admit her to a white school. Citing decisions handed down in the Clark and Workman cases in Iowa and Michigan, respectively, in the late 1860s, he argued that boards of education could not require black students to attend separate schools.75

Although the Elevator predicted confidently in 1872 that the California Supreme Court would strike down the discriminatory school law “more from a sense of right and justice than from any political affinities,” the case dragged on without a decision being rendered, and African Americans became increasingly impatient and angry. A convention held in 1873 criticized the court’s temporizing as a tacit acknowledgement that it stood “on the side of unholy class proscription.”76 When the court finally presented its opinion in Ward v. Floyd in 1874, its decision—deeply influenced by the Garnes and Dietz rulings as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1873 ruling in the Slaughterhouse cases, which declared that the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to citizens of a state—asserted that the right to attend California’s public schools was a privilege of state, not national, citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the justices, concurring with the plaintiff’s contention that access to education was a right protected under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, held, much like the Nevada court had argued in the Stoutmeyer ruling, that state authorities could not exclude students from the public schools merely because of their African descent.77

Not surprisingly, black Californians gave the court’s decision a mixed review. The Elevator chose to focus on the justices’ conclusion that all children had the right to an education and that districts that provided inadequate separate schools must admit black children to white schools, while the Pacific Appeal praised the court for acknowledging the importance of the postwar constitutional amendments in decreeing that African Americans were now entitled to attend white schools where no separate schools existed. However, both black San Francisco newspapers found much in the opinion to decry. They were especially critical of the court’s decision to uphold the constitutionality of racially segregated schools, which the Pacific Appeal condemned as a compromise intended to “satiate the prejudice of colorphobia.”78

While black Californians were critical of certain portions of the Ward v. Flood ruling, Indiana blacks were incensed by the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Cory et al. v. Carter in the same year. In one of the many Indiana communities where not enough black school-age children lived to warrant a separate school, Carter sought to enroll his children in a white school, but they were denied admission. The Marion County Superior Court accepted his contention that the 1869 state law mandating separate schools violated both the Indiana Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment. But when the Carter case reached the state supreme court in 1874, the Democratic majority—relying heavily on its own decision in State v. Gibson in 1871, which asserted that the regulation of marriage was exclusively under the control of the state, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in the Slaughterhouse cases—emphatically rejected the contention that the 1869 Indiana school law violated the state constitution, the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments, or the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Underscoring their deep-seated attachment to the states’ rights doctrine, the justices declared that, even if the Fourteenth Amendment required the admission of African Americans to white schools, the courts could not, without legislative authority, confer the right upon them, for the Indiana legislature had not provided for mixed schools. The 4–1 Democratic majority on the court then gratuitously proceeded to warn blacks that, if the 1869 law were held unconstitutional, they would be left with no provision for their education.79

Black Indianans were deeply offended by the tone and substance of what was arguably the most constitutionally extreme northern court decision rendered against equal rights for African Americans during the 1870s. In response to the ruling, they petitioned the U.S. Senate to have a proper legal officer of the government appeal the opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court. They were particularly troubled that the ruling encouraged white school officials to expel black children from racially mixed schools in a number of Indiana communities. Yet, because of a lack of funds and the realization that the Slaughterhouse decision obviated any real hope of success, they ultimately chose not to appeal Cory et al. v. Carter.80

All in all, the record of Republican state judges on the school issue was certainly far more supportive than that of their Democratic counterparts. Nevertheless, many Republican state officials agreed with the Democrats that the Fourteenth Amendment did not mandate the end of racially separate public schools. Even Newton Bateman, a staunch Republican proponent of equal education for African Americans, cited the Garnes decision in his 1874 report on the public schools in Illinois as evidence that separate schools for blacks were “reasonable, practical, and just—tending to secure the best actual results.”81

Break with the Republicans?

This refusal by northern state supreme courts to apply the Fourteenth Amendment to the public school segregation issue was part of a much broader Republican retreat from Reconstruction during the 1870s. This retreat—especially among the moderates in the party—manifested itself in a number of ways: their states’ rights orientation in interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment, their willingness to compromise on crucial issues related to Reconstruction, their fear of losing white support if they seemed overly zealous about protecting blacks’ rights, and what appeared to be an emerging vision of a society and party in which blacks receded ever further into the background.82 While many old white abolitionists and Radical Republicans remained committed to the equal rights cause, a growing number had either died or chosen to retire from public life; and, with the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1870, northern blacks had no organized group of sympathetic whites to align themselves with. Even some staunch Radicals saw fit to urge blacks to curtail their demands for additional rights and legal protection. The Cleveland Leader, which had long endorsed equal rights for all citizens, counseled African Americans in 1873 “to await the gradual work of time in allaying prejudice against their race and raising them to an equal condition of education and intelligence.”83

Such gratuitous advice only served to intensify northern blacks’ concerns regarding the Republican Party’s failure to fully embrace the equal rights agenda at the state level, especially on the school issue, or to enact Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill in Congress. As their level of frustration mounted, some leading African Americans began to question their devotion to the party. Many of these discontented black Republicans showed little inclination to bolt the party, but their anger was palpable. A correspondent to the Pacific Appeal complained bitterly that no other group as politically important as African Americans would have remained loyal to a party that refused to confer upon it equal educational opportunities. Peter Anderson was even harsher in his denunciation of the party for ignoring the interests of its most loyal constituency, asserting that African Americans were “fast becoming subserved and set aside, or conserved in the interests of men and measures to the great detriment of the colored citizens of all the Northern States by proscription or otherwise.”84

Some northern blacks were indeed prepared to entertain the possibility of breaking with the Republican Party. By 1871, Downing had concluded that he would not stand in the way of those who chose to pursue an independent political course. If an African American decided not to support the Republican Party, he informed Charles Sumner, “it would require consideration on my part before I should feel at liberty to condemn him, unmeasurably, for not doing so.” A short time later, Downing was much less circumspect in his criticism of white Republicans, declaring angrily that the party was inclined to treat the black man as “a political slave—a slave to be grateful for such pitiful allowance of privilege as the owner may be pleased to dole out to him.”85

Peter Clark was even more outspoken in his endorsement of an independent political course during the early 1870s. He had long been critical of Republicans for their equivocation on the equal rights issue, and even flirted for a time with the Liberal Republicans before returning to the Republican fold in 1871. By 1873, his peripatetic search for respect and acceptance in a white-dominated society and party led him to propose that dissident Ohio blacks meet for the purpose of declaring independence from the Republicans. Clark and most of his fellow delegates at the Chillicothe Convention were especially angered by the party’s failure to pass a civil rights bill both in Ohio and at the federal level. The depth of his disaffection with the party was such that when the president of the convention referred to “the party to which we belong,” Clark corrected him by suggesting that it was “the party to which we are attached.” In the end, the delegates concurred with Clark’s sentiment, resolving that blacks did not consider themselves “under eternal obligations to a party which favors us as a class, only in proportion as it is driven by its own necessities.” They then urged Ohio blacks to refrain from unconditionally pledging their support for the party’s nominees.86

Other prominent northern blacks shared Downing’s and Clark’s determination to distance themselves from the Republican Party. In 1874, William Still and Robert Purvis, both wealthy and influential Philadelphians long active in the struggle for equal rights, broke with the party and supported an independent candidate—who was also endorsed by the Democratic Party—in the Philadelphia mayoral election. Still and Purvis were denounced by many in the city’s black community as traitors to their race. In response to these attacks, Still vigorously defended his refusal to support the Republican candidate, insisting that African Americans would not advance their cause by simply voting the Republican ticket “as a matter of ‘gratitude,’ nor by waiting for offices from the Republican Party—never.” Instead, he posited that blacks could only advance through their own efforts as well as the independent judgment of black voters who rejected the “political tyranny” of whites.87

Still and Purvis found support among some Philadelphia blacks who believed that their independent course represented a vindication of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. In a speech defending his position, Still pointed to men who insisted that blacks were “at perfect liberty to make such a departure.” Although it is impossible to calculate the percentage of northern blacks who were prepared, or at least threatened, to bolt the Republican Party, it is clear that their ranks extended beyond a few leaders. James Poindexter and Peter Anderson, for example, frequently reminded white Republicans that eight hundred thousand black voters throughout the United States could, if they wished, swing quite a few elections to one party or the other. Poindexter even suggested in the Daily Ohio State Journal in 1873 that disgruntled black voters were prepared to do just that if the party’s leadership did not change its ways, warning ominously that black voters, “preserving the harmlessness of the dove, will not forget the wisdom of the serpent.”88 In a similar vein, delegates to a New Jersey convention vented their anger at “political tricksters” by announcing that they were “unalterably determined not to be guided by party dictation or party tactics in our judgment”; meanwhile, in 1872, a Fort Scott, Kansas, meeting held the Republican Party “responsible for all the embarrassments under which we labor” and hinted at the possibility of sitting out the upcoming presidential election.89

Still other northern blacks went so far as to vote for Democratic candidates. These men were motivated by a complex mix of anger toward the Republican leadership for failing to act on the party’s stated principles and concerted efforts by “New Departure” Democrats—who constituted a minority within the party—in New York, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and other northern states to entice blacks into their ranks. Concerned that the black vote might well shift the balance of power in favor of the Republicans in crucial elections, these Democrats accepted black suffrage as an accomplished fact, appealed to African Americans’ sense of independence, jettisoned some of their most racist rhetoric, occasionally supported civil rights legislation, and selectively dispensed patronage to blacks.90

While relatively few northern blacks defected to the Democratic ranks, the evidence indicates that those who did resided in several northern states and that their numbers grew during the decade. A white New York City Democratic ward leader certainly engaged in hyperbole when he claimed that a large number of black leaders in the city were members of the party and predicted that as many as half of the city’s black voters might support the Democrats in 1873. But several African Americans in the city in fact publicly endorsed the Democratic slate.91 In addition, in Detroit dozens of blacks voted Democratic in the early 1870s, while several Cleveland blacks consented to be nominated for office by the party. A similar movement toward the Democratic ranks also occurred in San Francisco, Rochester, and various communities in Massachusetts, and several prominent northern blacks attended the National Convention of Colored Democrats held in Louisville in 1872.92

Most black Republicans reacted angrily to those who steered an independent course or moved into the Democratic camp. Sometimes they questioned the defectors’ principles or forced them out of the party. More often, they branded them as traitors to their race and actively sought to shun and stigmatize them. For example, the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League insisted in 1873 that black voters make sure that no black man associated himself with “the politically accursed whose hand, red with the blood of the law, was still lifted and ready to assault the temple of liberty.” Occasionally, black Republican stalwarts, fearful that these rebels might well enable the Democrats to come to power once again, threatened violence. In Philadelphia, they not only boycotted William Still’s coal business but even threatened to lynch him; Still was ultimately forced to call upon the police to protect his home from attack.93

Yet the differences that separated the large majority of northern blacks who chose to remain loyal to the Republican Party and the relatively small number who either adopted an independent stance or aligned themselves with the Democratic Party were often nuanced and subject to change. Frederick Douglass’s evolving views on the relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party are a case in point. Soon after the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, he sparked an angry reaction when he asserted that blacks should vote as they saw fit because each person should decide which men and measures were preferable. In making such a suggestion, he exposed a central dilemma for African Americans: Should they remain loyal to the party that had liberated the slaves and granted blacks fundamental legal rights or use the vote to further their own interests? Some black leaders condemned Douglass’s suggestion as reckless. But at the same time, Douglass harshly criticized a black man who voted Democratic as “a social outcast, a fugitive and a vagabond, a Judas Iscariot, and an enemy of his race.”94

Douglass could identify with the pain that Downing and many other blacks experienced in being marginalized within the party. Because of white Republicans’ racial prejudice, he wrote in the New National Era, African Americans were “the ugly child of our political family, and he is put in the back room when company comes to the house; but he does get a peep at the company once in a while and may someday be admitted into society shocking the public taste. Until this good time comes, he will be snubbed, ignored, and slighted.” He also conceded that the Republican Party was “grossly at fault” for not doing more for blacks. Yet he sternly took Downing to task on several counts. He denied that the lack of offices and honors for blacks reflected an absence of principle on the part of white Republicans and even lectured African Americans on the need for “wisdom, nerve, and honesty” to prove that they were worthy of such political rewards. But he was particularly offended by Downing’s assertion that the two parties were quite similar, labeling this charge “repulsive, scandalous, and shocking.”95

The debate between Philip Bell and Peter Anderson regarding blacks’ relationship with the Republican Party was even more complicated, with both men shifting positions on the issue in an effort to locate an elusive balance accommodating pragmatism, principle, and political independence. At an 1873 convention Anderson told the assembled California black delegates that, since black voters had given Grant the margin of victory in the 1872 election, if California Republicans did not soon end school segregation and exclusion it would be proper to inform the party that there would be no more black Republicans. Convinced that Anderson’s speech was both reckless and premature, Bell asked that the address be tabled. Anderson eventually withdrew his speech. But, in fact, in 1871 Bell had thrown his support to a Democrat for San Francisco fire commissioner. Three years later he and a few other California black leaders formed a new organization that proceeded to issue a manifesto of political independence. They would “go for themselves,” they stated, in order to protect blacks’ civil and political rights. For his part, Anderson, seemingly less disenchanted with the party, denounced Bell’s organization in 1876 as an obstacle to moving African Americans into the political mainstream.96

That Downing and Douglass as well as Anderson and Bell—whatever their differences on political strategy and rhetoric—were all increasingly discontented with the Republican Party’s unwillingness to commit itself unequivocally to the cause of equal rights illustrates the depth of disappointment and anger among northern black Republicans.

The Fate of Sumner’s Bill

Perhaps the most devastating setback for the northern black equal rights movement occurred when, after years of relentless lobbying by African Americans on behalf of Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, congressional Republicans decided to remove the crucial school integration clause—which northern blacks had long considered its most essential provision—and a few other clauses from the bill in order to ensure its passage before the Democrats assumed control of the House of Representatives in 1875. Equally disturbing for African Americans was the message from many party leaders that they had grown tired of dealing with issues related to Reconstruction. The Washington National Republican spoke for many white Republicans when it editorialized in 1874 that “the negro question, with all its complications, and the reconstruction of the Southern States, with all its interminable embroilments, have lost much of the power, which they once wielded, to rally the voters of the North to the support of the party.” The prevailing impression was, the paper concluded, that “we have done almost enough.” Such sentiments go far to explain why many moderate Republicans continued to resist any substantial expansion of federal authority, especially if it entailed public school desegregation.97

As it became painfully clear that the House of Representatives planned to omit the school clause from Sumner’s bill, some northern African Americans, though bitterly disappointed, chose to point to substantial gains in what remained of the emasculated bill. James Poindexter, for example, reported that many of his fellow activists hoped the right to travel on public transportation, stay in hotels, and serve on juries on equal terms with whites would secure for blacks far better treatment than was currently available in many parts of the country. Others, such as Peter Anderson, were either reduced to expressing the wan hope that the exclusion of the school clause would not seriously limit the bill’s value or naively suggesting that legal action in the federal courts might force school integration in states such as Pennsylvania, California, and Indiana.98

But many northern blacks were furious. The Christian Recorder condemned the decision as a “monstrous proposition” and conceded that it might be preferable to see the entire bill fail than to have such mischief embedded in law. Charles B. Purvis, Downing, Langston, and other members of the National Executive Committees of Colored Persons concurred, charging that the House’s action “legalizes and tends to perpetuate color and class discrimination as to schools and education.” Indeed, one Massachusetts black went so far as to conclude that it represented the death knell of legal equality for African Americans. “Concede the impropriety of the co-education of the races,” he argued, “and the whole frame-work of equality before the law falls to the ground.”99

When Congress passed the eviscerated Civil Rights Act of 1875 and Grant signed it into law, it is therefore not surprising that northern blacks’ reactions were rather subdued. Downing, who had perhaps invested more time and energy than any other African American in working for the passage of Sumner’s bill, merely informed his sons that it had passed, while the Christian Recorder cautioned against expecting or demanding too much of the law. Because racial prejudice would “continue to show its teeth,” the editor wrote, the measure was important primarily for its moral effects.100 This sentiment was echoed by James Poindexter, who urged African Americans to exercise restraint and discretion in reacting to the legislation. Instead of engaging in “a struggle for abstractions—privileges of no practical value,” he stated in the Daily Ohio State Journal, they should agitate for rights and privileges that involved their property and happiness. Most northern blacks indeed appear to have been torn between feelings of anger and cynicism and a sense of obligation to the Republican Party. Peter Anderson, for example, advised African Americans to regard the party as redeemed, if for no other reason than the Democrats’ unconditional rejection of the final version of the bill. But, at the same time, he acknowledged that few African Americans were pleased with this “defective” law and condemned the duplicity of those “hypocritical colorphobia” Republicans who had long opposed Sumner’s bill but now applauded and defended it.101

As they looked back on the years of intense lobbying for Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, northern blacks were forced once again to address two central questions: Was it possible to sustain a viable equal rights movement? And could they ever again realistically place their trust in white Republicans to protect the fundamental rights of all American citizens?