7 - The great betrayal of 1876-77
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How Capitalists Rule/ Part 7
The Democrats and Republicans:
The great betrayal of 1876-77
By Vince Copeland
The new political lineup
After the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, some of the party's leaders became leaders of the Southern Democrats. A larger number went back to the official Republican Party and became prominent "reformers" of national government. But generally the Liberal Democrats sank without leaving much trace.
The Democrats nationally then became a polyglot union of Southern centrists, Southern reactionaries and some anti-Wall Street Northern progressives, with the Northern sympathizers of slavery still hanging around for a while.
After General Ulysses S. Grant won a second term for the Republicans in 1872, the all-out drive to bourgeoisify the country continued at still greater speed. Reconstruction began to falter and several Southern states suppressed Black Freedom, even including the right to vote.
It should go without saying that as soon as it had been possible to vote, the freed slaves all voted Republican. They became, in fact, a very powerful voting machine for a few years. But the Republican connection was at best a temporary class alliance rather than any kind of class partnership.
The official Republican Party kept the loyalty of the lower middle class in the North--particularly of those white farmers who, except for the most devoted Abolitionists and the slaves themselves, had been the most vigorous opponents of slavery and given the most lives to eradicate it.
Several factors contributed to Grant's second victory. First, he had an even bigger slush fund than in 1868. But also he benefited from the continued anti-slavery idealism of the Northern voters, the fact that the Western voters had gotten land, and the swing by a large number of Southern voters, mostly Black, into what had now become Wall Street's new camp. Grant won half the old Southern states in 1872.
Wall Street had finally joined the revolution, so now the ebbing forces of the revolution were joining Wall Street. They had nowhere else to go without repudiating the Civil War itself. The Liberal Republicans were in the process of actually doing that, while the Democrats had already done so. Of course, many Democrats never supported the Civil War in the first place.
Thus the same Wall Street bankers who had earlier supported slavery, and then grew immensely richer out of the struggle against it, now received the votes to rule the country in the name of anti-slavery. But by 1872 they were already beginning to re-establish their economic ties with the white rulers of the South.
They had quietly allowed reactionary, white-supremacist "home rule" to be restored in several of the Southern states, despite their oblique support of Grant's Radicalism and their coolness to the Liberal Republicans. They kept to a more Radical course in the remaining Southern states, but probably in order to keep intimidating the overthrown rulers in both areas.
Reconstruction and Wall Street
Reconstruction (1865-77) was the most revolutionary period this country has ever experienced. And by that token it was also the most democratic--with a small d. It was not just the institution of slavery that was abolished. The notion of human inferiority was also beginning to be abolished. Black and white shared the governments of Southern states; Blacks were elected to both houses of Congress. (Today, over 100 years later, there is not one Black senator!)
W.E.B. Dubois, who emphasized the legislative abilities and participation of ex-slaves in the Southern governments, proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the freed people were at least the equal of the former masters in this respect.
Reconstruction took place entirely under the aegis of the Republican Party. Where the Republicans retreated, the Democrats advanced and re-established lynch law.
However, Wall Street and the majority of the Republican leaders were against dividing the great estates, even during Wall Street's Radical period. This was partly because of Northern finance capital's pre-war ties to the slave-owning South and partly because they were frightened at the idea of dividing up property--because that could lead to communism.
But by keeping their plantations, albeit without slaves, the former slave masters were able to get somewhat stronger than the North--and certainly most of the Republicans--wanted them to be.
The election of 1876
By 1876 all the Southern states except for Republican-controlled Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina had virtually eliminated the Reconstruction governments and were restricting the rights of African Americans.
The erosion of the Black vote contributed to a narrow victory for the Democratic candidate, Samuel S. Tilden, over his Republican rival, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the election of 1876. The official vote after the Republican-dominated electoral commission had finished a recount was 4,300,590 to 4,036,298. However, presidents are elected not by popular vote but by the Electoral College. After several months of maneuvering and almost unbearable tensions throughout the country, the Electoral College announced on March 2, 1877, that the Republican Hayes would be the new president. What had happened?
The Wall Street bankers, who rigged and then re-rigged the election, had encountered an obstacle. It was not because they had destroyed the original Republican Radicalism, but because they still hadn't quite done so. It was they who gave a dubious victory to Hayes and the "Radicals" who really had been absorbed and supplanted in the Republican Party. But by doing so, they inflicted a final defeat on Radicalism.
If the South had been completely separate from the North during Reconstruction, the Black people might well have succeeded in a revolution like that led by Toussaint L'Ouverture in the Haiti of the 1790s. Or if the white working class of the North had been more mature and had not exhausted its potential in the Civil War, an equally powerful revolution could have ensued.
Dubois felt that Black Reconstruction was indeed the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This may well have been so. But if so, it was all the more fated to come into conflict with the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and its hidden cannons up North.
The Great Betrayal of 1876-1877
As part of the election steal by Hayes, a deal was made between the new rulers of the North and the old rulers of the South. The last of the Union troops were removed from the South and the old rulers were put back in charge, with the understanding that they had to confine themselves to their own section and not interfere with the capitalist expansion of the North.
This agreement was not written down anywhere. It was an understanding. Those few bourgeois historians who are the most perceptive and honest--like C. Vann Woodward--have exposed it for what it was. It would have come about inevitably, given the nature of the two ruling classes, but what brought it to life was the election of 1876.
Before the recount of the votes, it appeared that the Democrats had won the electoral college vote by 200 to 184, as well as the popular vote.
But the Republican Party controlled the governments of Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina, which had 15 electoral college votes between them. They also found one Democratic elector from Oregon ineligible. The result was 185 electoral votes for Tilden to 184 for Hayes.
This raised a storm of protest throughout the country. So Congress appointed a special commission composed of the Supreme Court judges and a number of U.S. senators and representatives from both parties.
At first the commission was divided evenly between the two parties. Later, seemingly by accident, the Republicans got a majority of one. It was by this majority that the Republican Hayes was decided the winner.
There was talk of a new revolt of the South, a new Civil War and so on. But the defeated Tilden, deep in the councils of the New York financial world, gave the word to his followers to cool it.
Hayes' platform, like Tilden's, was a "return to normalcy"--a signal for the definitive end of Reconstruction. The Democratic leadership could have continued to protest the loss of the presidency but, based as they were in the South, they took a different course. The prize of "home rule," the retention of the great estates by the old rulers, and of course a concomitant dictatorship over the freed Black people were now firmly in their hands.
His Fraudulency
As a matter of fact, Hayes was far more strongly attacked in his own party than by the Democrats. Roscoe Conkling, the New York State Republican leader, coined the term "His Fraudulency" for Hayes. And it stuck.
Unfortunately, the new unbridled terror in the South against the Black population also stuck. While the devilish deal between Republicans and Democrats put the domination of the South in the hands of one class, the capitalists, it still reflected the interests of two predatory classes. One of them was the class of former slave masters, who now had to adapt themselves much more to the capitalist system and to accept the national leadership of the biggest capitalists. The other was that of the big industrialists and bankers, who were already changing their character in the direction of monopoly capitalism.
Tilden the Democrat, for example, was a lawyer for the big railroads. He had put together many combinations of roads, as J.P. Morgan was just beginning to do. Tilden was not nearly so bold as Morgan and had amassed "only" $5 million-$6 million in commissions for this work--still a colossal sum in those days, however. He was privy to the new drive of capital for expansion on a different front. (Hayes, by the way, who had been a Civil War general and governor of Ohio, was also a railroad lawyer.)
Tilden had captured many voters because of his cry for "reform" in government. The Republicans were robbing the Treasury, plundering government lands and purchasing high offices, setting up syndicates on Wall Street with government complicity. The people had their fill of this.
But Tilden's "reformism" was limited to "honest government," cleaning up civil service and the like. It had nothing to do with social reform, with helping the working class, the poor and unemployed. And as a supporter of McClellan's program for "the Union as it was" in the election of 1864, Tilden had shown he certainly was no friend of the African American.
Even if Tilden had won the election and been given the presidential crown, it would have made little difference. Of course, many more Radical Republicans would have been steamed up by the more obvious drive to social reaction. The freed people of the South might have risen up or at least been harder to govern. But the two parties were now in the same class camp.
It is safe to say that among the ranks of the white Democrats and Republicans in the North, the whole reactionary deal was only vaguely understood. The superficial idea that "Lincoln's party freed the slaves" crowded out any appreciation of just what this freedom really consisted of, once Reconstruction was ended.
The Black people of the South continued to vote Republican for generations after the Civil War--in those areas where they were able to vote at all.
It was not until 1936 that African Americans in the North began to vote Democratic after Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats initiated the New Deal. This was during the great capitalist Depression, which in turn spurred the greatest upsurge yet by Black and white labor.
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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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