To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville

3. The Mob-Public

3 the mob-Public After the military moved out of Jacksonville in the winter of 1869, black men already inserted themselves into the Reconstruction Era public sphere. Under the guidance and cooperation of Northern white Republicans , blacks engaged civic life. Although the exit of the military signaled an end to Reconstruction, it did not immediately translate into the exclusion of black men from the public sphere. Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, the native white effort to push blacks out of the public sphere slowly evolved over time. Buttressed between the factionalism of both the Republican and Democratic parties, black voters and their local leaders could maneuver around the vulgar attempts by white reactionaries to reform electoral politics along the precepts of white supremacy and black exclusion. However, this détente would not last. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s blacks could participate in the public sphere as long as their participation did not threaten white political supremacy and did not implicitly or explicitly suggest inherent racial equality between blacks and whites. As such, conservative whites recast black 40 \ To Render Invisible participation, even in integrated political settings, as a “mob-public” who enjoyed illegitimate access to the franchise and the public sphere itself. State and municipal elections became events interpreted by conservative whites almost as festival atmospheres where high political culture (white male voters) and low political culture (black male voters) joined together, the result of which was the vulgarization of the public sphere.1 Conservative white politicians targeted white splinter candidates and factions who organized black voters in successful blocs as supporters. In these cases conservative white pols recast black voters as part of a mindless mob that was a cancer on the exalted system of representative democracy.2 Republicans and Democrats ran in local elections and at times vied for black votes throughout the 1870s. In the 1873 election a conservative Republican, J. C. Greeley, was elected through support in a coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats. This factionalism was more pronounced during the 1876 municipal election, locally referred to as the return of “home rule.” A conservative Republican named J. Ramsay Dey ran under the “Bolting Republican” ticket, as the Florida Union derisively called it. The Republicans did not have a monopoly on factionalism as the Democratic Party too was split between two candidates. Former mayor Edward Hopkins ran as a Democrat, presumably a native-born conservative Democrat and Luther McConihe ran as a Reform candidate and was regarded locally as a “good Boston Yankee.” Edward C. Williamson referred to this split within the Democratic Party of Florida during this time as the rise of “independentism.”3 McConihe garnered 448 votes, while only 92 went to Hopkins. The totals for both Peter Jones, the Republican candidate, and Dey did not surpass McConihe alone. The election demonstrated that conservative Republicans probably crossed over to the Reform ticket, while Reformers held on to a majority of Democratic voters. Reform Democrats were elected down ticket except for the election of two conservative Republicans as aldermen. The Reform coalition held during the following election in 1877.4 Rather than being indicative of home rule, the 1876 election was the start of an era of fusion tickets. Conservative Republicans were not the only voting bloc up for grabs. It also represented the first evidence of black voters crossing political lines and voting for “reform Democrats.” The Daily Florida Union reported that during the 1876 election, groups of “young Reformers” split from conservative or Bourbon Democrats. Local Bourbons pointed out that Reformers were meeting with a “negro The Mob-Public \ 41 club”—presumably a black Republican organization. One Bourbon observer stated that “a negro club and its delegate [were] received with open arms” by “Radicals, who were laughing at us in their sleeves.” From this meeting the black club agreed to organize votes for the Reform candidate with a black Republican selected as alderman on the same ticket. Bourbons interpreted this event as the subversion of Democratic Party principles and a threat to democracy itself. Bourbons pointed out that the state and national Democratic parties rigidly promoted white supremacy and the exclusion of blacks from party membership. Black delegates were referred to repeatedly as the “enemy” and black politicians as “objectionable .” Bourbons argued that “no one owes allegiance to a heterogeneous mass, although styled a ‘reform meeting,’ with ‘Democratic principles’ as its basis.” In the minds of local Bourbons...