"For the Destruction of Radicalism": A Reconstruction Case Study

“For the Destruction of Radicalism”: A Reconstruction Case Study A GROUP OF MEN MET AT THE SMALL VILLAGE OF SHILOH in Marengo County on March 27, 1869, to protest a recent law passed by state legislators . Several months earlier, in December l868, the state assembly had approved legislation removing the seat of Marengo County government from Linden to Demopolis. That action began a prolonged struggle for the county seat that offers classic examples of logrolling and influence, and a view of grassroots politics. More distinctively, framed by the vicissitudes of Reconstruction, the confrontation accounted for an incongruous coalition of black Republicans and white Democrats. The county seat settlement, parsimoniously considered, determined a courthouse’s location. In a larger view, the campaign tested the ability of white Democrats to use economic coercion and other means to influence African American voters, and to affect the dynamics of Reconstruction politics. Enfranchising the black man had quickly become central to the radical Republican makeover of the South. Measured in any terms, the freedmen’s advancement was contingent upon possession of the ballot. Democrats based their dissent partly on tenets of federalism, reserving the prerogative of regulating suffrage to the states. It was also their conviction that freedmen could not cast intelligent ballots and that their inclusion in the electorate would corrupt the political process. Although Confederate states seeking readmission carried out the mandates of the First Reconstruction Act (March 1867) requiring enfranchising the freedmen, the issue remained divisive. W I L L I A M W A R R E N R O G E R S J R . William Warren Rogers Jr. holds a doctorate in history from Auburn University. He teaches at Gainesville State College in Athens, Georgia. He would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Peter Krafft, cartographer at Florida State University, and Jim Baggett, head archivist at the Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library. J U L Y 2 0 0 9 191 Democrats appealed to freedmen on behalf of Democratic nominee Horatio Seymour in the presidential election of 1868, but the party platform did not affirm black voting rights and most members of the party took strong exception to African American suffrage. In the Democrats’ view, the excesses attending Congressional or radical Reconstruction warranted their worst fears. To them, the venal carpetbagger and the equally self-serving scalawag, elevated to office by ignorant and credulous black voters, had seized political control of each southern state. Following that, according to Democrats, was corruption , excessive taxation, and financial mismanagement, all making for abominable radical rule. Reconstruction and Republican political domination caused unprecedented bitterness and passionate resistance among white southerners, accounting for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other night-riding orders. The perception of the Republicans’ nefarious behavior, and the resulting political violence, emblematically played out in Alabama.1 Yet by 1869–1870, with Ulysses S. Grant elected president and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments ratified, a certain ideological sedimentation was underway. In the South, those referred to as New Departure Democrats pledged their support for the political changes made on account of race and associated with Reconstruction. In his book The Road to Redemption, Michael Perman has written that the New Departure represented a “dramatic move” that envisioned the restoration of Democratic power in the South. What best signified that accommodation was acceptance of the Fifteenth Amendment (proposed in 1869 and ratified in March 1870), which prevented denying the franchise on racial grounds to otherwise qualified voters. New Departure spokesmen maintained that appealing to ex-slaves served party interests and expedited Democrats regaining political ascendancy in Raleigh, Jackson, Baton Rouge, and other southern capitals. The list certainly included Montgomery, Alabama. To New Departure Democrats, continued defiance was counterproductive, 1 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 221–22, 230–31, 239–43, 251, 273–77, 293–94, 297, 383–87, 340–44; Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 22, 80–81; Demopolis Southern Republican, April 7, 1869. T H E A L A B A M A R E...