“Politics Is Mighty Uncertain”: Charles Hays Goes to Congress

Correction:
This digital version of volume 69, issue no. 1 of the Alabama Review differs from the print edition.

Pages 34, 50, 63, 65, and 67 in this digital version reflect corrections made to the previously-distributed print edition.

Charles Hays led white and black Republicans in Greene County and most of the Black Belt during Reconstruction in Alabama. Born in the county in 1834, Hays was the son of a wealthy planter who had migrated from South Carolina in the late 1820s. Educated at the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia, Hays became a planter in his own right. Nominally a Democrat, Hays was not active in politics, and while not an outright Union man, he was not a secessionist. During the Civil War he married Cornelia Ormand, daughter of a judge of the Alabama Supreme Court. Hays served as a major in the Confederate army. Later he returned to planting and in 1867 confounded his friends by declaring himself a Republican. That fall he was elected and served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In February 1868 Hays was elected to the state senate.¹

Hays directed Republican strategy from his large plantation, Hays Mount, near the Greene County village of Boligee, eight miles west of the county seat at Eutaw. At the constitutional convention and in the state senate Hays attempted to obtain the removal of all political disabilities from former Confederates.

In the fall of 1868 Republican Hays helped carry the state for the national Republican ticket. Adding to his reputation by playing a conservative but forceful role in the state senate, Hays was plainly marked for higher office as a Republican, although the stigma as a scalawag made him an anathema to most Black Belt whites.

The winter elections of 1868, confirmed by the congressional act of June 12, 1868, had determined local and state offices and decided seats in the national House of Representatives. The congressmen elected sat for only a partial term, the remainder of the Fortieth Congress, which ended March 4, 1869. Republican Governor William H. Smith called a special congressional election for Tuesday, August 3, 1869.² Fully identified with the Republican party and already vilified and ostracized, Hays had nothing to lose by entering the congressional race. If nominated and elected he would represent the newly created Fourth District, formed along with five other districts by the legislature in February 1867.³

The Fourth District was a large sprawling area containing a major portion of the Black Belt and a few white counties. Heavy black majorities resided in Greene, Hale, Marengo, Perry, and Sumter counties. Pickens in the northwest, Choctaw in the Southwest, and Autauga in the northeast were slightly more than fifty percent black. Six counties—Baker, Bibb, Fayette, Sanford, Shelby, and Tuscaloosa—had more whites than blacks, but even in these counties blacks constituted sizeable minorities. For that matter, Tuscaloosa strongly resembled and identified with the Black Belt counties. The county’s intransigence was largely due to the presence of Ryland Randolph, native-born descendant of Virginia aristocrats, outspoken critic of congressional Reconstruction, and editor of a leading Democratic newspaper, the Independent Monitor. Tuscaloosa County became the scene of much Ku Klux Klan activity with Randolph the local leader.

The incumbent congressman for the district was the little-known carpetbagger, Charles Wilson Pierce, a native New Yorker and Union veteran who came to Alabama to command the Freedmen’s Bureau subdistrict of Demopolis. In the spring of 1869 he accepted the post of Assessor of Internal Revenue of the First District and so did not seek renomination to congress.⁴

The Fourth District represented a potentially solid Republican bastion. Yet the Conservative Democrats were both resentful and resourceful, and maintaining a Republican majority was more difficult than establishing one. Looking ahead to the August elections, one Republican editor believed they would “be attended by scarcely less important results than any political contest since Lee’s surrender.”⁵ Selecting the right man to replace Pierce would be important.

One possibility was the native-born William...