The Door of Hope: Republican Presidents and the First Southern Strategy, 1877-1933

2. Harrison’s Haggard Haul: The Second Southern Tour, 1891

2 Harrison’s Haggard Haul The Second Southern Tour, 1891 When you have the right sort of black voters you will need no election laws. The battle of my people in the South must be a moral one, not a legal or a physical one. W. E .B. Du Bois, quoted in New York Age editorial, “He is Young Yet,” June 13, 1891, 2. On April 17, 1891, Lucas Clapp of Memphis, Tennessee, stood at a dais to introduce president Benjamin Harrison. The president was in the midst of a nationwide whistle-stop tour. He had already spent three days in the South, stopping quickly in a succession of towns to deliver a speech before moving on. Most of the introductions that Harrison received during these speeches were bland boilerplate material. As a result, the words that Clapp uttered were particularly memorable. He lauded his fellow whitesouthernersas“loversofjusticeandequalrights,”andasserted“that in dealing with the gravest and most perplexing social and political problem that has ever confronted a community or a people, it is our purpose and our habit to be just and law abiding.” But Clapp, a southern Democrat , could not resist the urge to make a passionate partisan plea at the northern Republican’s expense. Speaking on behalf of white Memphians, he noted that they also possessed “a paramount aim . . . to guard our social purity, preserve our civilization and maintain Caucasian prestige and supremacy.”1 Clapp laid down the gauntlet; a southern politician had frankly addressed the color line as a matter of formal inequality. In his remarks, however, Harrison neither admonished the southern mayor nor directly addressed the topic of white supremacy. Instead, he introduced a theme that he would consistently pursue throughout his tour: the supremacy of the law. Harrison claimed that “[t]his government of ours is a compact of 56 / The Door of Hope the people to be governed by a majority, expressing itself by lawful methods .” Continuing in this vein, he asserted that northerners and southerners “must all come at last to this conclusion, that the supremacy of the law is the one supremacy in this country of ours.” The president’s comments were greeted with a roar from the crowd.2 DidtheraciallymixedaudiencewelcomeHarrison’sstatementbecause they believed it was an affirmation of the president’s resolve to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments? Did they share his love of the law? Or did they merely appreciate the verbal exchange that had taken place? The meanings of Harrison’s statement—and his audience’s reaction—make more sense when placed in the context of his journey. Harrison would face similar encounters throughout his national sojourn, though none as direct as his confrontation in Memphis. The entire scene speaks to the precarious relationship between race, region, and Republicanism in 1891. The mix was so volatile that twenty-two-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois, in youthful despair, would actually advocate a position that seemed every bit as conservative as the Hoosier president. It was a fascinating time, indeed.3 Amazingly, fourteen years had passed since Rutherford Hayes had tried his luck in the South. In the interregnum, a president had been assassinated and a Democrat had been elected president for the first time since 1856. Republican partisans probably would have been hard pressed to decide which event was more traumatic. When Benjamin Harrison announced that he would make a tour of the entire country in 1891, he spoke to an America that looked vastly different than it had when Rutherford B. Hayes hit the hustings. Six new western states had entered the union since then. It was also a country with different political priorities. One might not have been able to tell by the content of Harrison’s speeches or the paradesthatwelcomedhim ,butrace,thetariff,andfreesilverdominatedthe prevailing political currents in ways that Rutherford Hayes would have scarcely recognized. Harrison’s journey was important for three major reasons. First, the tour signified a new political tack for the president and the Republican Party as they looked ahead to the election of 1892. Having advocated in 1890 measures widely perceived as hostile to white southerners, Harrison now applied a more conciliatory approach. The Republican Party was ready to court southern voters by addressing themes that would appeal to both northern and southern whites and by dealing with racial issues Harrison’s Haggard Haul: The Second Southern Tour, 1891 / 57 in national terms. Second, the tour demonstrated the...