Ballots for the Faithful. The Oath and the Emergence of Slave State Republican Congressmen, 1861-1867

BALLOTS FOR THE FAITHFUL. The Oath and the Emergence of Slave State Republican Congressmen, 1861-1867 Philip J. Avillo, Jr. On July 24, 1866, Tennessee Representative William B. Stokes became the first Republican from a seceded slave state to take his seat in the Congress of the United States.1 As Congress restored the former states of the Confederacy to representation in the Union, other slave state Republicans came to Washington, and during the eleven years following Stokes's arrival, over two hundred Republicans from the reconstructed states served in Congress.2 The appearance in Congress of slave state Republicans represented a complete political reversal, for at the beginning of the Civil War the Republican party possessed virtually no strength in the South. Rather than resulting from massive voter realignment, however , this political phenomenon developed from a two-pronged national Republican policy. On the one hand, the party successfully gained thousands of black votes through the enfranchisement of the freedmen in the seceded states. Simultaneously, state and national elements of the Republican party managed to pass legislation, ostensibly only to disfranchise Confederate sympathizers, but which effectively barred many anti-Republicans from the polls. This latter policy proved most effective in the states of the border, the only slave states with Congressional representation as the war ended. Certainly, in these states, as well as those further south, the election returns of 1860, depicted in Table 1, revealed a pathetically weak Republican party.3 When the Thirty-seventh Congress convened in 1861, moreover, a single Missourian constituted the entire 1 Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 1 sess., p. 4166 (July 24, 1866). 2 Two major sources which reveal a Congressman's party affiliation are the vote for Speaker of the House of Representatives at the beginning of each Congress and the memoirs of Republican James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield, I & II (Henry Bell Publishing Company, 1893). Also useful are newspapers, manuscripts, other memoirs, and Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1961 (Government Printing Office, 1961). 3 Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), pp. 250-255. 164 Republican portion of the non-seceding slave state delegation.4 Two years later, however, Missouri sent eight Republicans to Washington ; Maryland sent five; and West Virginia sent an entire Republican delegation after its June 1863 entry into the Union.5 In the Thirty-ninth Congress, twenty-three of the thirty-eight Congressmen from the non-seceding slave states were Republicans.8 TABLE I Non-Seceding Slave State Votes fob 1860 and 1864 Presidential Elections· Constitutional StateYear Republican Democrat BreckenridgeUnionistsTotal DelawareI8603,8221,0667,3393,88816,115 18648,1558,76716,922 Kentucky18601,38525,64153,14666,068146,220 186426,78663,30190,081 MarylandI8602,2945,96642,48241,76092,502 186437,35332,31869,771 MissouriI86017,02058,50231,42758,362165,311 186472,73631,099103,862 WestI860 Virginia186423,15210,43833,590 •Compiled from Burnham, Presidential Ballots. Obviously, many border state voters had changed their attitudes toward the Republican party since the beginning of the war, but disfranchisement proved equally important in the Republican upsurge . Unlike future Republican Congressmen from the seceded slave states, whose election resulted chiefly from the enfranchisement of emancipated slaves within their constituencies, the border state Republican Congressmen won their political offices through the application of loyalty oaths restricting the political privileges of persons accused of Confederate sympathies. State and Federal authorities interpreted these oaths broadly, in many cases plainly equating Republicanism and national loyalty. Charles D. Drake, Missouri's future Republican Senator, who had abandoned the Democratic party soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, illustrated this point in an 1863 speech before a Republican 4 The non-seceding slave states included Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri. West Virginia, admitted to the Union in 1863, became the fifth slave state represented in Congress during the Civil War. Globe, 37 Cong., 1 sess., p. 3 (July 4, 1861). 5 Journal of the House of Representatives, 38 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 9-11 (Dec. 7, 1863); Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, I, 500-501. 8 House Journal, 39 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 7-8 (Dec. 4, 1865); Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, II 118-21; New York Times, Dec. 4, 1865. 165...