“Let the Empire Come”: Imperialism and Its Critics in the Reconstruction South

In June 1869, four years after Confederates’ dreams of establishing an independent slaveholding republic had perished on the battlefield, a correspondent for the New York World, traveling through the heart of the Deep South, reported a surprising tendency among prominent conservatives. Their current “political conversation,” he noted, was no longer devoted exclusively to “secession, or the rightfulness of secession,” but the prospect of what he called “the Empire.” “So general, indeed, have I found the interest in this Imperialism business,” he concluded, “that I have sometimes thought the coming man, when ready for his coup d’etat, could make a very successful bid for Southern support.”¹

The curiosity he encountered had been piqued by the appearance of a new publication in the North: the nation’s first avowedly monarchist newspaper. The Imperialist, bearing a crown on its masthead and proclaiming democracy “in its practical workings . . . totally inadequate to the wants of the American people,” had made its bow in Manhattan that April, and the one man definitely associated with it, the humorist William L. Alden, remembered it as a prank that had got out of hand.² Hoping to exploit what a century later Richard Hofstadter called American politics’ “paranoid style,” Alden reckoned that Republican and Democratic editors would blame one another for coveting the crown, generating vast amounts of free advertising for the publication in the process. To bait the trap, the publishers concocted a fanciful monarchist secret society, the TCIO, and printed coded orders to the “Pro-consuls” of the “Empire of the West’s” “Civil and Military” colonies in their columns, but they interspersed what skeptical readers recognized as playful satire with seemingly sincere reflections on history and politics.³ While the precise form of government they recommended for the United States changed from week to week, their paper advocated imperialism in the sense contemporaries understood it: not in terms of the acquisition of overseas colonies, but rather as the centralization of power in one institution, or more likely, in one man.⁴ Here, the Imperialist commended features of very different models—the Caesarism of military dictatorship, the Bonapartism of highly consolidated Second Empire France, and the limited monarchy of the United Kingdom—but its readers recognized that the publication proposed a dramatic realignment of power away from states and voters and toward a stronger central government, capped by either an armed strongman or a figurehead emperor. The mixture of conspiracy and criticism, which drew upon fears of wartime centralization and anxiety about the future of American democracy, proved potent, and

The first issue of the Imperialist, which Charles Sumner donated to Harvard University. Melville C. Landon, in all likelihood one of the “conspirators,” sent Sumner the copy. Landon probably hoped to embarrass him by revealing that the senator had acquired an issue of the paper. Widener Library, Newspaper Microfilm Reading Room Film NB810, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

when the first issue quickly sold out the investors decided to persist with the operation. By mid-May, the Dallas Weekly Herald could say of the Imperialist that “not even the assassination of a President on American soil created so decided a sensation as this.”⁵

The Herald was exaggerating, but from Maine to California rumors of an imperial plot captured Americans’ attention between the spring and autumn of 1869. Nowhere did the prospect of a crowned head seizing power attract more interest, indignation, and sometimes—as the World journalist suggested—eager anticipation than in the South.⁶ Over the preceding years, white southerners had grappled with the question of how to rebuild civil authority after military defeat and the destruction of slavery. Under the indulgent administration of Andrew Johnson, they were left to redraw the boundaries of their political communities with minimal interference from the federal government, but the triumph of congressional Republicans in the 1866 midterm elections brought presidential Reconstruction to a halt. In the following months, legislators forged anew what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, bringing the vote to...