Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement

3. Making and Blocking Republican Power

3 Making and Blocking Republican Power Even as the localist-oriented North Carolina Democratic party was successfully organizing and mobilizing its largely white constituency, it was facing strong challenges to its rule in the 1870s and especially the 1880s.These threats were directed not merely to the party’s control of state and local government but to the very form of political organization by which that control had been achieved. The Democrats had regained power at state and local levels by rebuilding and capitalizing on existing vertical strings of social relations constructed around the economic resources of political elites,kinship,neighborhood , and local patronage. The challenges to this vertical organization were twofold. First,political opponents,initially black Republicans and later Populists , were experimenting with and succeeding at developing alternative, horizontal forms of political mobilization. That is, they were attempting to organize political support through the creation of certain kinds of political identities associated with categorical interests—that of race (in the case of blacks) or of farmers (in the case of Populists). White leaders in the Democratic party, of course, also attempted race-based mobilization but did so in rather inconsistent and sometimes ineffective ways. Second, economic changes, especially the commercialization of agriculture, were increasingly pitting whites against each other: farmer against merchant, small farmer against large, farm tenant against landlord. Particularly in the central Piedmont region, where these changes were occurring most rapidly, they created conflicts that undermined the vertical relationships that had knit together white social networks and interests, relationships that were central to Democratic political organization. Making and Blocking Republican Power 59 This chapter focuses on the first challenge to Democratic rule: the relatively successful matching of black efforts at self-mobilization to partisan Republican interests in incorporating blacks as the basis for gaining a strong political presence in the postwar South.1 The second challenge,the economic changes that undermined white solidarity and created political opportunities for the Populists, will be taken up in chapter 4. Republican Party-Building Efforts Whereas the Democratic party could rely on established relational networks to rebuild and organize party power in the 1870s and 1880s,southern Republicans faced the inherent difficulties of constructing a party essentially from scratch.In this effort,the party had to choose from numerous potential strategies for gaining popular support,and they faced a myriad of obstacles along the way. The initial obstacles were formidable. The new party had few organizational roots.Its organization,government,and black constituency lacked legitimacy to many citizens, and opponents were quick to use violence and intimidation to undercut Republican party-building efforts. Moreover, the party faced the prospect of organizing a large constituency that had been entirely shut out of conventional democratic politics and lacked significant economic and organizational resources. In the abstract, building a party requires developing at least two factors: policies that attract and hold together an electoral base and an organization that builds and maintains relatively cohesive social relations within that base from election to election.2 At best, the Republican party in North Carolina was only marginally successful at developing these policies and organizations among whites outside the western mountainous area of the state. The party ’s striking early successes during Reconstruction were a product of an extraordinary outpouring of political activity by blacks immediately after the war and the interests and efforts of Republicans to facilitate and channel that activity in a partisan direction. Traditional mechanisms of party building in the South (as well as much of the North) had involved appeals to influential elites who, in turn, built up the party through their local networks of support.3 This was a very significant factor, among others,that helped enable the Democratic party to recapture state government in the 1870s and maintain its rule in the 1880s.A powerful contingent of Republicans hoped to be able to mimic the Democrats, using these same vertically oriented mechanisms as a springboard to party success. The party was unable, however, to attract and retain large numbers 60 making race, making power of elite Democratic defectors or former Whigs into its fold and thus to enlarge its support among whites in this way.4 This failure is attributable to a number of factors.As others have suggested , race likely played a significant role in the unwillingness of a larger number of influential former Whigs to join the new party. Further...