6 - After the Civil War, an uncivil peace
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How Capitalists Rule.../Part 6
The Democrats and Republicans:
After the Civil War, an uncivil peace
By Vince Copeland
Grant and the gold
The super-capitalist orientation of President Ulysses S. Grant, along with the corruption of his administration, cannot be overestimated. It was part and parcel of the hey-day of capitalist expansion over which he presided. By the time of the election of 1872, Grant had disgraced himself with a large number of the white Radicals who had supported him four years earlier.
He was implicated in the biggest gold swindle of the day, in which his brother-in-law, together with financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fiske, brought on the famous Black Friday financial crisis by trying to buy up all the gold in the United States (outside the Treasury).
They had put Grant's wife in for $500,000 and her brother for $1.5 million. Another million was to go to the assistant treasurer of the United States, who was head of the Subtreasury in New York. The plan only fell through because bigger capitalists than Gould and Fiske, plus a number of smaller capitalists, brought pressure on Grant to cool the whole thing and release gold from the Treasury to depress the price.
The Republican soldier-president became a close buddy of the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the two richest families in the United States. They in turn were deeply involved with "Boss Tweed" of New York City, a Democrat--until they found him too expensive and sent him to jail.
A.T. Stewart, a $40-million dry goods king and another former Democrat, convinced a group of capitalists to furnish a mansion for Grant in Philadelphia and to give him $100,000 to pay off the mortgage on his Washington home. The banker August Belmont, still a Democrat, was also in on this deal.
After leaving the presidency, Grant tried his hand as a Wall Street broker. But after fumbling several golden opportunities, Grant appeared before William H. Vanderbilt in 1884 for a loan. He immediately received $150,000. (The Vanderbilts had refused to pay $2 a day to the railroad workers.)
Of course, all these peccadillos of Grant and his intimates pale before the wild debauch of the public Treasury and theft of public lands by the unleashed capitalist class itself.
As for the Democrats, they ran Horatio Seymour, governor of New York State, for president in 1868. Seymour was not only a vicious racist, but a thinly disguised advocate of a return to the slave system. He led a fight to repeal the ratification of the 14th Amendment in the New York State Legislature. But he was the last prominent Democrat to openly advocate slavery, at least in the North.
The Republican split
The election of 1872 found Grant still defending the general policy of Radical Reconstruction, even while Reconstruction was being eroded in some of the Southern states because it was not radical enough.
Right in the middle of Reconstruction, during the Grant administration, there was a split in the Republican Party. It came from an unexpected quarter.
The split faction, which called itself the Liberal Republicans, was led by some of the same Northern whites who had been most radical in the fight against slavery, like Senator Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. However, where they had been militant and intransigent, they now became tepid and compromising. All their militancy was directed against the Money Power instead of the Slave Power.
But this was just at the point when the money power--the biggest capitalists--were coming over, however temporarily and insincerely, to the cause of Black Freedom. While earlier these capitalists went to war out of the need to subjugate the big planters, now they were impelled by their alliance with the radical middle class of the North.
This class, which really had led the revolution, at least among the white masses, was now being superseded politically by the same class that had compromised most with the white rulers of the South before the Civil War. (Naturally, there were many individual holdouts who remained loyal to the Black struggle, but their political power was now being extinguished.)
Sumner, Greeley and their colleagues were outraged by Grant's closeness to the money power in New York. The money merchants in turn were now moving into bigger and bigger fields, including the drive to control the sugar islands in the Caribbean as well as railroad land in the West and steel plants in the eastern and midwestern parts of the United States.
Before the Civil War any incursions into the Caribbean would have benefited the Slave Power rather than the capitalists. But the defeat of the slavocracy unleashed a big Northern drive for expansion in this direction. And by this time the banks were becoming direct investors in sugar plantations on the islands. Modern imperialism was embarking on its first adventures in overseas conquest.
Significantly, Sumner's first break with Grant came when the latter attempted to take over Santo Domingo. But this early opposition to modern imperialism was motivated by the interests of small capital and small farm competition much more than by any proletarian opposition to the power of the big exploiters.
It could be said that the beginnings of monopoly and U.S. imperialism were already showing themselves and hurting the upper middle class of both North and South.
The Liberal Republicans, in order to get support in the South, began to advocate the end of Reconstruction and the removal of Union troops from the South--all with the condition that the Southern bourbons pledge their "honor" not to reimpose oppression and slavery.
The election of 1872
After an enormous amount of research for his book "Black Reconstruction," the great African American scholar W.E.B. Dubois thought that by 1872 the leadership of both the big parties, Republican and Democrat, was chiefly controlled by Wall Street and that the Dixie component was now definitely subordinate to the bankers and industrial bosses.
Wall Street's takeover of the Democrats, and even of the Republicans, was consummated not by a mere infusion of money but was the result of a conflict of social forces and involved the struggles of thousands, even millions, of people, white and Black.
The leaders of the Liberal Republicans, some of them with long and honorable records in the fight against slavery, much predating that of Grant and infinitely longer than Wall Street's, were in one sense being perfectly consistent. Being upper middle class, with no social roots among the still impoverished Black population, they felt the depredations of Wall Street (which they had always fought against before the Civil War) and the oppression of the railroads over the independent farmers and small business of the North and South.
And they felt this more keenly than they felt the still smoldering and rekindling fury of the Ku Klux Klan that was directed against the African American masses.
The same white middle class in the South had joined the Republican Party after the war, because they had their own grievances against the plantation lords. But in a short time this class in the South was even more directly oppressed by the railroads (Northern owned) and bankers (New York centered) and that section of Northern carpet baggers who elbowed them out of business. (And this corresponded closely to the position of the big plantation lords, too.) The economic bond with their Northern cousins became clear.
Net result of Liberal split
Thus the Liberal Republican Party could be called the White Republicans as opposed to the "Black" Republicans (most of whom were white, as we explained earlier). But the real difference was this: the Liberals were a middle class party while the official Republicans were a capitalist party which had suddenly seen the light and was temporarily allied with the Black poor in its drive to shave the old Southern rulers down to a size and power compatible with the big Northern capitalists ruling the country.
The net result of the establishment of the Liberal Republicans in the South was of course to leave the official Republican Party nearly all Black in that area and to leave the Black people more exposed to the cruel vengeance of the Democratic plantation owners.
The Liberal Republicans demanded all kinds of progressive reforms in the national government, including restraints on the Wall Street banks and railroad companies, and so on.
But in keeping with their new alliance in the South, they also demanded amnesty for all Confederate generals, governors and other leaders of the slave holders' rebellion, since those officials came directly from the same class that was leading the new party.
This was done in the name of "good government," of ending the rule of the evil "carpet baggers" and ending corruption in government. Some of these leaders, no doubt, were taken in by the propaganda about "Black supremacy" and Black rule of the Southern legislatures and were frightened away from Reconstruction. In fact, only in South Carolina had Black representation even approached a majority.
The Democratic maneuver
The real essence of the new alliance was made clear by the fact that the Democratic Party decided to support the Liberal Republicans in the presidential election. And this support was accepted. Thus the formerly left Radicals were uniting with their most deadly wartime opponents. It was a bloc with the right against the center.
That is, the anti-Wall Street cries coming out of the South, however genuine and desperate, were then and for a long time afterward orchestrated by the extreme right wing in the Democratic Party.
The Liberal Republican program did ask for equal voting rights for Black people. And probably very few in the Northern wing of the party realized that an end to Reconstruction, which they were really advocating, would be in reality an end to all Black Freedom, falling short only of an actual return to chattel slavery.
They thought they could simultaneously restore all privileges for the defeated masters while still protecting the civil rights of the masters' victims. They consoled themselves with the notion that juridical freedom for the Blacks was real freedom. But on the other hand, they wanted to remove the juridical restraints on the former masters who already had the de facto freedom of landed wealth.
Horace Greeley
The presidential candidate of both the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats in 1872 was none other than Horace Greeley. He had been the most prominent organizer of the Republican Party and had been considered a true Radical.
He had a hundred epithets for the Democrats in his newspaper, the New York Tribune. And after William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, he was probably the most famous anti-slavery agitator. If he had shown his face in any Southern town five years earlier, he would most likely have been lynched.
But now the old Democratic Party, formerly run by the Southern slave masters, backed the Liberal Republicans and supported Greeley for president.
The old Northern Radicals in the Republican split-off gave the new Democratic Party some moral authority. Greeley, unwittingly and almost unwillingly, made this official. This ex-Radical, ex-socialist, ex-high protectionist (for tariffs) and almost "ex-Greeley" was calling for amnesty for the last Confederate holdouts!
The Democratic Party was still considered in many quarters to be the party of slavery, treason and counter-revolution. The Liberals lasted just long enough to wipe off some of this tarnish from the Democrats in the course of the 1872 alliance, but not long enough to acquire any lasting credibility for themselves. (Greeley had a mental breakdown and died a few days after the election, which, of course, he had lost.)
Next: The Great Betrayal of 1876-77
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(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21 St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@cdp!igc.org".)
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