Territorial politics and the party system in spain 1st edition caroline gray book PDF download compl
Territorial Politics And The Party System In Spain 1st Edition
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From Party Politics to Personalized Politics?: Party Change and Political Personalization in Democracies
Fromthe firstpost-Francodemocraticelectionsin1977untilthepolitical upheavalofthe2015elections,scholarshavedividedtheevolutionofSpain’ s partysystemandtypesofgovernanceintothreemainstages:atransitional
Field, B.N. and Gray, C. (2019) ‘The Spanish Parliament in Context’ , in Fernandes, J. M.andLeston-Bandeira,C.(eds.), IberianLegislaturesinComparativePerspective, AbingdonandNewYork:Routledge,pp.25–46.
Thischapteraimstoprovideanoverviewoftheshiftfromtwo-partydominancetoamulti-partysystemandthereasonsforit,drawingupontheliterature todateonthissubject,inordertobegintoassesswheretheterritorialdimension fitswithinthewidersetoffactorsdrivingpartysystemcontinuityandchange. The firstsectionsituatesSpainwithinthewidercontextofpartysystemchange inWesternandSouthernEuropeinthewakeofthe2008 financialcrisis,outliningsomeofthemain findingsofthecomparativeandtheoreticalliteraturein
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color shall be competent witnesses.”[199]
In its day and since, this legislation has been roundly denounced. Those in control of Federal politics saw in it a peaceful settlement of great questions which threatened their supremacy, and bitterly and unreservedly reprobated it, stirring up public opinion in that section, which yet flushed with its conquest, was unwilling to permit any interference with its great mission of “putting the bottom rail on top.”
The conquerors had preserved the Union and abolished slavery. Those were two immense achievements, even if ruthlessly attained.
As terrible as was the price which the South paid for the abolition of slavery, it was not too great, taking all things into consideration; and the manner of the abolition was such, also, that in time it must have given rise to as it did eventually produce, that mutual respect between the sections which had not before existed.
While Emancipation, being confiscation of property without due process of law, can never be legally justified, and only can be excused as a war measure, yet, if the Southern people, white and black, could only be made to see conditions as they are now in the South and to realize that posterity does fairly demand some consideration from those who bring it into being, one hundred years will not have passed before it will have been incontrovertibly demonstrated that Emancipation was more beneficial to the South than to the North. This statement is made with a full appreciation of the fact that the War, Emancipation and Reconstruction so reduced the South and checked its industrial development, that thirty years were required from the inception of the War to bring that section again up to the position it had reached in 1860, in point of wealth and industry.
War and Emancipation can therefore be excused, but Reconstruction will ever remain an ineffaceable stain upon the conquerors. Yet, as an emetic sometimes produces good which nothing else can bring about, so Reconstruction may in time be shown to have been not without its good.
Just what might have been the effects of the attempt made by the Southern States to readjust the Negroes to the changed conditions of 1865 must now always remain a matter of surmise; for the differentiations of color, race and condition, which they attempted then to establish, were ruthlessly swept out of existence by military control and universal suffrage followed by the Civil Rights Bill.
But before considering that era of frantic sentimentality concerning the African people in the United States, the period of Congressional Reconstruction, a little more light should be thrown upon the struggle made by the surviving soldiery of the Confederacy, led by Wade Hampton of South Carolina and others less well remembered, as Wright of Georgia, to support the policy of Seward and President Johnson. Not unnaturally in so doing attention will be concentrated to a very great degree upon the Scape Goat, The Hot Bed of Secession, The Prostrate State, although it was from without, if upon her borders, the record was preserved by one of her sons, an almost forgotten soldier and scholar of the Old South, in his tireless, patriotic and absolutely sincere and highly intelligent effort to mentally avert the overthrow of the remnants of Southern civilization, threatened in the advance of the black horde of freedmen marching to plunder, under the leadership of Sumner, Stevens and Wilson and the half averted countenance of Grant.
This description by a Southern man may seem possibly too comprehensive and severe, until we read the declaration of that American Negro most generally esteemed in the North in his day, the leader of the Negro race in America:
“I felt that the Reconstruction policy, so far as it related to my race was in a large measure on a false foundation, was artificial and forced In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of Southern whites.”[200]
How can the characterization be doubted when we remember Senator Wilson’s speech in Charleston and the fact that with such a
record as he had and such a field to choose from, he was made Grant’s running mate, the Aaron for that Moses.
The Southerner who preserved this record of the aspirations of the Old South was so identified with the political thought of the great State of North Carolina, that, like Andrew Jackson, whom he knew and asserted to be a South Carolinian, he also, though such, was thought to be a North Carolinian. But Daniel Harvey Hill was, on July 12, 1821, born in South Carolina, at Hill’s Iron Works, an iron manufacturing establishment founded in the New Acquisition (later York District), by his grandfather, prior to the Revolutionary War, where cannon were forged for the American army. A graduate of West Point and a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War, in which he rose to the brevet of Major, he resigned from the United States army to embrace the highest avocation a man may follow and became in 1849 a professor of mathematics at Washington College, Lexington, “the Athens” of Virginia, and later, was put in control of the Military Institute of North Carolina; whence he entered the Confederate Army, served through the war with distinction, rising to the rank of lieutenant general, and issuing from Charlotte, May, 1866, the first number of the monthly magazine, The Land We Love, published by him from that place until April, 1869, through which he voiced the aspirations, hopes and resolves, in the main, of the disbanded forces of the Confederacy, probably, at that date constituting seventy per cent or more of the white manhood of the South. If the magazine was modeled upon an English rather than an American type, it was the more representative of the South Atlantic States at that time. If forty per cent or more of its contents bore upon the recent war, considering the times and the conditions of the section upon which it was dependent for support, that was most natural.
In it can be found not infrequent contributions from that Georgian said by Professor Trent to have been the one poet the War produced from the South; also some papers from that novelist of South Carolina whom Lewisohn has mentioned in his article on South Carolina, in The Nation in 1922; and one from that Northern adopted son of South Carolina, to whom the State owes the great institution,
Clemson College, for the aims of which General Hill strove so hard in his opening article on “Education.” Space will not admit of more than three extracts; the discussion by General Hill of education; an allusion to E. G. Lee’s “Maximilian and His Empire,” and a still briefer allusion to and endorsement of Wade Hampton and his policy concerning the freedmen. The first is the most important. After discussing the number of presidents from the South, including Lincoln and Johnson, eleven out of the seventeen, up to that time elected, coming from the South and an even greater proportion of secretaries of state and attorney generals, General Hill indicates, that when business ability was desired, as in the offices of secretary of the treasury and postmaster general, the situation was at once reversed, and thus proceeds:
“The facts and figures above have been given in warning, not in boastfulness The pride which we might have felt in the glories of the past is rebuked by the thought that they were purchased at the expense of the material prosperity of the country; for men of wealth and talents did not combine their fortunes, their energies and their intellects to develop the immense resources of the land of their nativity. What factories did they erect? What mines did they dig? What foundries did they establish? What machine shops did they build? What ships did they put afloat? Their minds and their hearts were engrossed in the struggle for national position and national honors. The yearning desire was for political supremacy and never for domestic thrift and economy. Hence we became dependent upon the North for everything from a lucifer match to a columbiad, from a pin to a railroad engine A state of war found us without the machinery to make a single percussion cap for a soldier’s rifle, or a single button for his jacket The system of labor which erected a class covetous of political distinction has been forever abolished; but the system of education based upon it is still unchanged and unmodified The old method of instruction was never wise; it is now worse than folly—’tis absolute madness. Is not attention to our fields and firesides of infinitely more importance to us than attention to national affairs? Is not a practical acquaintance with the ax, the plane, the saw, the anvil, the loom, the plow and the mattock vastly more useful to an impoverished people, than familiarity with the laws of nations and the science of government?... All unconscious of it though most of us may be, a kind providence is working in the right way for the land we love. As a people we specially needed two things. We needed the cutting
off the temptation to seek political supremacy, in order that our common school, academic and collegiate training should be directed to practical ends The state of probation, pupilage, vassalage, or whatever it may be called in which we have been placed by the dominant party in Congress is we believe intended by the Giver of every good and perfect gift to give us higher and nobler ideas of education and the duties of educated men Again we needed to have manual labor made honorable And here a kind Providence has brought good out of evil God is now honoring manual labor with us, as he has never done with any other nation. It is the high born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our minds with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.... Now that labor has been dignified and cherished we want it to be recognized in our schools and colleges.... The peasant who would confine the teachings of his son to Machiavelli’s Discourse ‘On the Prince’ or Fenelon’s ‘instruction to his royal pupils,’ would be no more ignoring his rank and station than are our teachers ignoring the condition of the country Is the law of nations important to us who constitute nor state, nor colony, nor territory? Is the science of mind useful to us just now, when our highest duty is to mind our own business? Will logic help us in our reasoning whether we are in or out of the Union? Will the flowers of rhetoric plant any roses in our burnt districts? We want on the contrary a comprehensive plan of instruction, which will embrace the useful rather than the profound, the practical rather than the theoretic; a system which will take up the ignorant in his degredation, enlighten his mind, cultivate his heart, and fit him for the solemn duties of an immortal being; a system which will come to the poor in his poverty and instruct him in the best method of procuring food, raiment and the necessaries of life; a system which will give happiness to the many, and not aggrandizement to the few, a system which will foster and develop mechanical ingenuity and relieve labor of its burden; which will entwine its laurel wreath around the brow of honest industry and frown with contempt upon the idle and worthless ”[201]
Is it surprising that a man who thus exhorted the South in that day and hour should have been condemned by both Sumner of Massachusetts and Pollard of Virginia?
For three years, the worst in the history of the South, he kept his magazine before the people of South with a circulation of 12,000 copies and agents in every Southern State and in addition in New
York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. He never gave up the fight and in the year of his death saw his dream come true, but he did not get that support his cause would have entitled him to particularly expect from the then leading port of the South Atlantic. For even a devoted citizen of Charleston must admit, that Charleston, by such evidences as exist, was rather cold to this voice of the South. For a few months Burke and Boinest were the agents in that city, then no names appear as representatives in the greatest city of the South, with the exception of New Orleans; while, at little places in South Carolina, Mayesville, Edgefield, Society Hill and Kingstree, the agents held on to the end, faithful unto death. But in Charleston, within one month from the suspension of The Land We Love, a new Southern magazine was launched, The XIX Century, edited by F. G. DeFontaine, distinctly lighter, and, as events indicated, with less lasting power.
Returning to General Hill’s magazine, if manual and industrial training was a hobby and if his criticism of the former political training and lack of industrial enterprise was too sweeping; yet in his columns was afforded space for the most interesting illustration of what that political training could flower into, which can be found anywhere in the printed page in the United States. This is a sweeping statement itself; but if the highest type of cultivated diplomat, thoroughly conversant with the haute politique will read and ponder “Maximilian and His Empire” contributed by Gen. E. G. Lee, Feb. 1867, he would be curious to know who this Gen. E. G. Lee was and what were his opportunities for gathering the political knowledge which appears most interestingly spread with something of the assurance of a political seer, as time has shown.
E. G. Lee was a Virginian, only a brigadier. Born at Leeland, May 25, 1835, a graduate of William and Mary College, he served under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley campaign. Forced by ill health to withdraw from military service between 1863 and 1864, he was, in the latter part of the last mentioned year, sent to Canada on secret service for the Confederate Government, just about the time at which Blair approached the officials of the Confederacy, according to Alex.
H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, aiming to bring about—
“a secret military convention between the belligerents with a view of preventing the establishment of a French Empire in Mexico by the joint operation of the Federal and Confederate armies in maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine In this way (writes Mr Stephens) Mr Blair thought, as Mr Davis stated to me, a fraternization would take place between the two armies and peace be ultimately obtained by a restoration of the Union without the subjugation of the Southern States ”[202]
In his Lincoln, Mr. Stephenson says:
“While the amendment (abolishing slavery) was taking its way through Congress, a shrewd old politician who thought he knew the world better than most men, that Montgomery Blair, Senior, who was father to the Postmaster General, had been trying on his own responsibility to open negotiations between Washington and Richmond His visionary ideas, which were wholly without the results he intended have no place here And yet this fanciful episode had a significance of its own Had it not occurred, the Confederate Government probably would not have appointed commissioners charged with the hopeless task of approaching the Federal Government for the purpose of negotiating peace between ‘the two countries ’”
Just what was really happening in the world of politics in these dying days of the Confederacy may possibly never be known with any degree of exactness. The play of politics, not only in the United States; but around the world was quick and varied but very obscure. Mr Stephenson, the most interesting and thoughtful observer of Lincoln’s career attaches very slight importance to Blair’s negotiations with the Confederacy; but more to the prior negotiations of Gilmore and Jacquess, even going so far as to assert, on the authority of Nicolay and Hay, that Davis had said in his interview with them:
“You have already emancipated nearly two millions of our slaves; and if you will take care of them, you may emancipate the rest. I had a few when the war began. I was of some use to them; they never were of any to me.”[203]
Nicolay and Hay do assert that Jacquess asserted that Davis so stated; but they also give Davis’s account of the incident which he published in his “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.” In this we find no such assertion by Davis and on the contrary the following:
“Mr. Gilmore addressed me and in a few minutes conveyed the information that the two gentlemen had come to Richmond impressed with the idea that the Confederate Government would accept a peace on the basis of a reconstruction of the Union, the abolition of slavery and the grant of an amnesty to the people of the States as repentant criminals.... The impudence of the remarks could only be extenuated because of the ignorance displayed and the profuse avowal of the kindest motives and intentions ”[204]
From this Mr. Davis proceeds to discuss the appointment of commissioners to Canada about the middle of 1864, their failure and the mission of Mr. Blair in December. Gen. E. G. Lee’s name is not among the commissioners, as stated, nor is there any reference to his mission in The Rise and Fall. But his article in The Land We Love[205] appearing in 1867 shows a knowledge and understanding of politics enveloping “Maximilian and His Empire,” viewed from the standpoint of the Confederate States, Louis Napoleon, and Wm. H. Seward, most interesting. This forgotten and youthful Virginian graduate of the oldest college in the United States, in the discussion of a matter in which he does not mention himself, must have had sources of information, which he does not reveal. His admiration for an opponent, Seward, is unrestrained. His contempt for Louis Napoleon is expressed with a refinement that imparts to it a greater force; and altogether as he passes from the stage an unreconstructed “Rebel,” dying even before Virginia shook off the grip of the blacks, he carries with him to the grave some history, which if more fully revealed might have added interest to Blair’s mission. At all events, if General Hill asked—
“Is not attention to our fields and firesides of infinitely more importance to us than attention to national affairs?”[206] he yielded space and advanced to the front page of his magazine one best fitted to illustrate—“Audi alteram partem.”
A little later in an editorial praising Generals Hampton and Wright, Hill says:
“So far as we have been able to ascertain every Southern newspaper edited by a Confederate soldier, has followed the lead of these distinguished officers. The prominent idea held out by Generals Hampton and Wright, is that the freedman is to be trained to feel that he is a Southern man, identified with the South in its interests, its trials and its suffering He is to be taught to feel that he is no alien upon the soil, but that this is his country and his home ”[207]
In the elections of 1868, however, Congressional Reconstruction was overwhelmingly triumphant throughout the South and, with a fringe of whites, a black pall was thrown over the region.
So determined were the ruling political leaders of that day, to enforce their will upon a crushed and impoverished people, that in South Carolina in 1870, to enforce the provisions of legislation for social equality, these alien law makers did not hesitate to abrogate the elementary rule of the criminal law, which provides that the accused shall be deemed innocent until proven guilty, and so shaped the legislation, of the Civil Rights Act, that any one accused of violating its strict and far reaching provisions, on failure to prove his innocence of the charge, became liable to a fine of one thousand dollars and also imprisonment in the State penitentiary for five years at hard labor, which was increased to six years upon failure to pay the fine. Any one aiding or abetting in the infraction of the law was liable to a term of three years in the State penitentiary, with the loss of the right to vote or hold office.[208]
Now, it was while men’s minds in South Carolina were intensely agitated by the immense sweep of this act, that the whites of one of the religious denominations of this State found presented for their consideration, what was deemed by many of the various denominations as the entering wedge for the removal of distinctions between the races in the establishment of religious equality.
With regard to equality between men, it has been declared that there are at least four clearly distinguished connotations attached to the word, and a great variety of shades in each. These four connotations of equality are:
“1. Social equality, the tests of which are that we can invite each other to meet our friends in our homes without any thought of condescension or patronage and that our sons and daughters may freely intermarry
2. Political equality, which is confined to the common possession of a vote....
3 Religious equality, which consists in common access to religious privileges on the fulfilment of the conditions prescribed by the church or the religious bodies
4. Equality before the law, where the law courts are open to all alike for the protection of person and property.”[209]
The South Carolina law of 1865 gave to all the Negroes the right to sue and be sued, and to receive protection under the law in their persons and property, and therefore apparently the law courts were opened to all alike; but whether the Negroes thereby obtained a right to trial by a jury of their peers is a question.
As to those members of the colored race possessing seveneighths or more of Caucasian blood, as far as law could make them, they were white.
Reconstruction attempted to extend to all of the colored race what had been extended to this portion; and now a portion were applying for religious equality.
The question was whether there was any distinction between religious and social equality?
That depends upon the estimate of each individual as to what “The Church” is.
If it is in truth and fact a divine institution, then the necessity of subjecting it to those regulations which experience has proven most expedient, for the proper adjustment of civil relations, is not very clearly apparent.
If it is not a divine institution, then it is a social organization, no matter how high the plane upon which it is operated, and religious equality brings in its train social equality.
The attempt of British divines, face to face with the color question in South Africa, to readjust the religious views of the fifties, directed at people mainly outside their own doors and to justify the refusal to extend religious equality to the blacks in the Dominions, on the professed ground that there is not complete spiritual equality among men and that the final award for the use cannot be made a basis for the adjustment of earthly relations, moves somewhat limpingly, and, in lucidity, falls far below the utterance of that profound Negro, who has so clearly set forth the rights of his race in America, in the following declaration:
“The Negro has a God ordained right to protest against his exclusion from means of self support. He has equal right to protest when deprived of legal and civil justice, or when the opportunity of knowledge or sober living is denied him. He has no just cause of complaint, however, when excluded from social intercourse with the white race, for the obvious reason that mankind does not mingle on terms of social equality a fact as true of black men as of white. Nor is Negro exclusion from membership in white churches a trespass on Negro rights, for after all, a church is neither more nor less than a social family ”[210]
Of the Negro who made this sane well balanced pronouncement it is fitting that a white South Carolinian should have something to say, although he has been absolutely ignored by the most cultivated members of his race.
As we shall later note DuBois, who today comes nearer being recognized as the leading Negro of America than any who can be mentioned, has claimed that:
“the greatest stigma on the white South is ... that when it saw the reform movement growing and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black voters learning to vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a Reign of Terror to a campaign of education, and disfranchised Negroes instead of punishing rascals.”[211]
In 1874 in South Carolina, Judge John T. Green, a Republican, was a candidate for governor against D. H. Chamberlain. Green was a South Carolina Unionist, a lawyer of ability against whom it was impossible to find anything to hang a charge on. Chamberlain was
the most brilliant of all the carpet-baggers and after he defeated Green and became governor of South Carolina he did turn to a great extent against the rottening thieves who had raised him to that position. His opposition to black Whipper most dramatically expressed, flashed all over the United States, when that Northern born Negro was a candidate for judicial honors, in the piquant phrase —“The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier is in danger”— made this Union soldier from Massachusetts almost a type of the fighting reformer, and there was need of such, although, as DuBois claims:
“ it is certainly highly instructive to remember that the mark of the thief which dragged its slime across nearly every great Northern State and almost up to the presidential chair could not certainly in those cases be charged against the vote of black men.”[212]
But when Chamberlain found, two years later, that in spite of his attack on those of his supporters of whom he was certainly entitled to declare that they were worse than he was, he nevertheless could not be the leader of what was best, he went back to the rotten element where, as the best of whites and blacks claimed in 1874, he always could be found when it suited his purpose; for the great mental gifts of the man made him prefer to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The fight against him was in 1874 led by Comptroller General Dunn, a Republican from Massachusetts. The candidates named by the Independent Republicans were Judge Green, a white South Carolinian, and Martin R. Delany, a Negro from the North, for governor and lieutenant governor Allusion has been made to Delany before. He was born in Charleston, Virginia, in 1812, the child of a free Negro mother by a slave father. He was the recipient of an education which enabled him to support himself and achieve some distinction. He had resided in Pittsburgh for some time; had been in partnership with Fred Douglass; had founded the first colored total abstinence society; had moved to Canada and from there led a party of black explorers through a part of Africa, for which he had been noticed by the Royal Geographical Society of Britain about the year 1859; and, returning to America, had served in the Northern army with a commission.
By General J. B. Kershaw of South Carolina, who with Wade Hampton and General McGowan all supported the nominees, his absolute honesty was testified to.
Every effort was made by the bulk of the whites to support this attempt of the most honest of the Negroes and Republican whites to put honest men in office, Hampton going so far as to declare in the public prints over his signature:
“I look upon it as the imperative duty of every good citizen whatever may have been his own previous predilection to sustain heartily the action of that convention (of the whites); for our only hope is in unity. The delegates to that convention set a noble example of patriotism when they sacrificed all political aspirations, all personal consideration, and all former prejudice for the single purpose and in the sole hope of redeeming the State.”[213]
Most of the notorious Negro leaders supported Chamberlain, R. B. Elliott being made chairman of Chamberlain’s Executive Committee; but a great number under Congressman R. H. Cain, Ransier and others, less notorious than Elliott and Whipper and not as gifted, stood staunchly for honest government. Cain went so far as to state that Green, who lacked very little of selection in the Republican convention which nominated Chamberlain, could have easily obtained the few votes necessary for such, as they had been offered his supporters at a comparatively small price; but that he and his friends had refused to purchase them. He also called to the attention of an audience of some thousands in Charleston that the white judge he had voted for as mayor in 1865 was presiding over a meeting supporting this effort of black Republicans to secure good government. But the most striking fact that the meeting developed was the entrance into politics of the profoundest thinker the Negro race has ever produced, William Hannibal Thomas, author a quarter of a century later of that remarkable book—“The American Negro— What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become.” Thomas had just reached his 31st year. At the close of the War between the States, while the harpies black and white in 1865 were winging their way Southward, a wounded United States soldier, he was lying in a hospital, with his right arm amputated above the elbow, having volunteered at the outset and rising to the rank of sergeant. Upon his
discharge, after five months treatment, for three years he was a student of theology, going to Georgia in 1871 to teach. He moved to Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873 and was admitted to the bar in January, 1874. As a delegate from Newberry he supported the movement for reform. During the absence of the committee on credentials, he was invited to address the convention. It was reported:
“He made a stirring address in which the Bond Ring was effectually shown up It was time that a stop should be put to crime and fraud in the State It was time that the country should understand that the citizens of the South demanded peace and good government It was a fallacy to say that in this movement, the Republicans of the State were abandoning their party principles The plain truth was that the people in their might intended to rise and shake off the shackles of slavery and political bondage The colored people had given evidence of their earnestness by asking their white fellow citizens to join them in this effort. Intelligence and respectability must rule in the future and the colored race must see to it that they were educated up to the standard. By harmonizing it was not meant that either race should give up its party principles. It meant only that both the majority and the minority should have fair representation in the government and there could be no permanent peace and prosperity until this was established. Ninety-nine years ago the American people had rebelled against the British Government because they were taxed without representation. How could they expect a large minority to submit to this now? Our white friends must help us heartily They must not approach us with gloves on They must convince us that they are in earnest and will join us in the effort to reform the government and purify the State I believe they are in earnest in their professions this time and it remains for us to receive their proffered help in the same spirit in which it is tendered Beyond a doubt in four or six years the white race will be in a majority in this State. It is bound to come to this and if we show now that we are willing to share the government with them, we will get the same from them when the white majority shall have reached and passed the colored vote. It is common sense to do this nothing more. He heartily urged upon his race the necessity of working for Reform. He said he had been in the Union army in the late war but he for one was ready to shake hands across the bloody chasm and forget the past and unite with the Conservatives in securing wealth and prosperity for the State.”[214]
This utterance seems to have won for him a position upon the committee on platform of five white and six colored members, one of the latter Cain, a congressman; yet Thomas was selected to submit it to the convention. Except in minor particulars it was the same as that which the convention nominating Chamberlain had framed, a not unreasonable platform for a Negro to support in 1874 in South Carolina, although scarcely acceptable in all its planks to the whites. In a total vote cast of 149,221, Judge Green was defeated by a majority against him of 11,585. Yet the strength of the vote cast against him was not without its effect upon the brilliant Chamberlain, who, from that time, shed his former skin and became a reformer.
How far a question which just about this time arose in the Episcopal Church may have affected political conditions is not to be asserted positively; but that it did affect the minds of whites and blacks can hardly be doubted, for, to not a few it was, above all, a religious question. And a religious question, to not a few, calls for sacrifice.
In the year 1875 there was presented in the Diocesan Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church of South Carolina the application of a colored congregation for admission into union with the Convention, which application was referred to a committee to be appointed by the bishop to examine into and report upon in the following year.
In the minds of many men in the Southern States the admission of Negro delegates involved consequences which might be far reaching and this was very plainly presented in one of the two reports presented in 1876. This report opposing admission presented the matter in these words in part:
“The members of this congregation with very few exceptions are mulattoes, many of whom were free before the war and were known as a peculiar class in our community, owning slaves themselves and generally avoiding intercourse with those who were entirely black Some of this class had established with their former masters and among our white people generally reputations for integrity and civility.... The females of this class sometimes held relations with white men which they seemed to consider and respect, very much like, if not
truly marriage. The results of such associations are numerous in our streets. It is this class in which miscegenation is seen and which tempts to miscegenation If miscegenation should be encouraged among us, then this class should be cherished and advanced ”[215]
The mover of this report might have gone further. He might have shown the evidences of interests in the record office, upon the part of white men by deed and will from time to time, in the recognition, to some extent, of the claims on paternity. How powerful this appeal could become to some is evidenced most strikingly in a will made as far back as 1814,[216] and the value, therefore, of this presentation at the Convention lay in the fact that it turned attention full upon that phase of this question which Southern white men are most apt to ignore.
The imagination of the average Southern white man does become intensely excited over any intimation of that form of intercourse between the races which is most distasteful and repugnant to the whites, but from which there is the least likelihood of miscegenation to any perceptible degree. The imagination of the Southern white man is not, however, keenly alive to the steady, continuous progress, almost inevitably resulting from the presence side by side in one section of great numbers of the two races. Yet if miscegenation is a danger, it is not less so while proceeding in the way in which it is most insidious and least shocking to the whites.
To the educated moral mulatto this determined opposition by those who sought or were willing to accept joint political action, must have created distrust. When to that, violence grew sufficiently to bring from Jefferson Davis denunciation, it is not surprising that a man of the brilliancy and political astuteness of Chamberlain should have made himself an immense power in South Carolina and drawn to himself a following which it took every effort of the whites to overthrow.
Indeed, without Wade Hampton, it could not have been effected. In a convention of 1876, of 165 members, the leader of the Straightout faction could not gather more than 42 votes.[217] But in August of the same year when Hampton[218] threw the weight of his personality in
its favor, by 82 to 65, the policy was adopted. It is an interesting fact that while the colored men W. J. Whipper and R. B. Elliott, Cardozo, Gleaves and H. E. Haynes are all mentioned, the name of W. H. Thomas appears in no history of Reconstruction that the writer has read.
Cardozo, the Treasurer, was warmly championed by Chamberlain, who declared of this colored official:
“Let me tell you that if I knew that your suffrages would sink me so deep that no bubble would rise to tell where I went down, I would stand by F. L. Cardozo.”[219]
Chamberlain knew and R. B. Elliott, the brainiest of all his colored opponents, knew that it was useless to try to array Negroes against such a friend of the colored brother as that; and Smalls, Chamberlain’s friend, a good natured, bold mulatto, defeated Swails for the chairmanship, by a vote which indicated what was to be thrown for Chamberlain as the gubernatorial nominee. Elliott therefore made terms and was named for attorney general.
Yet during the exciting days of 1876 when both houses of representatives were meeting, it was W. H. Thomas upon whom the Republicans depended for brain work. He was made a member of the committee on credentials and, as chairman, reported in favor of the seating of the Republican contestants carrying the majority of the committee with him, although opposed by T. E. Miller, an octaroon or quadroon of considerable intelligence, who asked for fifteen minutes to reply to Thomas.
Miller later stated that he had refused to sign the report, because he thought that the Democratic contestees ought to have been heard. When he was beaten, he declared he had changed his mind, stating that it was their own fault, if they were not present, and announcing he was ready to sign the report. It was reported that Thomas had, upon this second utterance, made an inflammatory speech; but no part of it was published by the paper so declaring, which, upon the next day’s report, announced that in the midst of the stormy session, Thomas offered a prayer.[220]
Thomas was on the committee of Ways and Means and the Judiciary, and, until the collapse of the Republicans, seems to have been the individual most relied upon by the Speaker for all the serious work of the session.
Contemporaneously with the overthrow of the Negro governments of South Carolina and Louisiana, the report opposing admission of colored delegates to the Diocesan Convention was sustained.
In 1879 the question came up again in a shape harder to resist and resting upon the example of the diocese of Virginia. The lawmaking power of South Carolina had, however, meanwhile enacted a statute making it—
“Unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any Negro, mulatto, Indian or mestizo; or for any white woman to intermarry with any other than a white man ”[221]
Accordingly the lay delegates firmly opposed any union whatever, whether of clerical or lay members, with regard to the two races in the South.
Now if it is borne in mind that not only Calhoun, whose influence upon political thought in South Carolina had for many years been all pervasive; but also the profoundest student who has ever studied America, de Tocqueville, had condemned “all intermediate measures” and declared that unless the whites remained isolated from the colored race in the South, there must come either miscegenation or extirpation, at no time could the forecast of the future of that section have been as gloomy as that which appeared in the Census figures of 1880.
The white population of Louisiana, which even the war and its losses had only dropped a thousand or two below the colored, had increased by an addition of 92,189; but, in the same time, with Reconstruction, the colored had been swelled 119,445, giving a colored majority of something approximating 30,000. In Mississippi, where the ante bellum Negro majority of 84,000 had, by 1870, been reduced to 62,000, it had now risen to 206,090. But in South Carolina, with a smaller area and white population, the Negro majority had risen to 212,000. In the five Southern States, South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the gain of the white population of only one, Alabama, had been greater than that of the blacks. Under such conditions discussion of that which was upon the minds of all was almost unavoidable, especially as Southern thought, freed from the shackles in which slavery had bound it, was free to move in whatever direction it saw fit and, from the pen of George W. Cable of New Orleans, there appeared “The Grandissimes,” published in 1880 and “Madam Delphine,” in 1881, of which the color question constitutes what might be called the motif.
The literary excellence of these works won the author a place in art and they were followed by other works of merit; but so strongly was the writer finally impressed with that which had first moved him to write, that in 1885 he dropped for a time the garb of fiction and voiced his belief in the necessity of a recognition of what he deemed a great wrong, through a brochure entitled “The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” To Cable, the portion of the race which was represented by the mulattoes and the quadroons made the strongest appeal; but he was not alone in the critical attitude he assumed toward the South. In the work of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a Northern soldier, who had staked his all on Reconstruction, with criticism, was voiced, in “A Fool’s Errand” by “One of the Fools,” something very much like despair. Later brooding, however, drew from this author a more critical and decidedly pretentious study, entitled “An Appeal to Caesar,” a study of the Census of 1880, from which, with some reason, he prophesied a speedy Africanization of the South, and in which he called upon the inhabitants of that section to bring forth fruits meet for repentance while there was still time.
Certainly there was basis for the claim. At no time had the rate of increase of the blacks been so high as the Census disclosed in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1880. Yet the first named set herself resolutely against any relaxation of the rule of rigid separation of the races, and in 1888 brought to a conclusion the discussion concerning the admission of clerical delegates to the Protestant Episcopal Convention, by a resolution reciting the “absolute necessity for the separation of the races in the
diocese,”[222] effected upon a basis, putting all subsequent decisions within the control of the lay delegates.[223]
In the years in which it had been maintained in the South Negro supremacy had done more to destroy the belief of the bulk of the Northern public, as to the capacity of the race to assume the full duties of citizenship, than any argument of whites could have achieved. The following extracts from a letter of George W. Curtis at this date is interesting. Referring to conditions in the fifties, he writes:
“I was mobbed in Philadelphia and the halter was made ready for me and I was only protected by the entire police force merely because I spoke against slavery ”[224]
With freedom of discussion assured, he now, in December, 1888, wrote:
“I am very much obliged by your letter of Nov., I do not think the feeling of this part of the country is precisely understood in your part. It is in a word this, that admitting the force of all that is said about Negro supremacy, the colored vote ought not to be suppressed and the advantages based upon it retained Of course I do not say it should be suppressed I am assuming that there is great reason in the remark that under the same conditions the people in the Northern States would do likewise, and I ask whether, under that assumption, the people of those States ought to expect to retain what they are not entitled to? It is unreasonable to ask acquiescence in the suppression of legal votes, which makes the white vote in Mississippi count more than the white vote in Massachusetts or New York. An educational test would be of no avail in a community where color is the disqualification according to Mr. Grady and Mr. Watterson. I shall be very glad to hear from you and I should like to know the reply to the statement, that it is not fair to suppress the vote and retain the advantages based upon it.”[225]
The reply of the individual to whom this letter was addressed may well be omitted, in the light of what follows.
In 1889 two publications appeared from Southern sources most powerfully portraying the advantages of freedom of discussion and the inestimable value of that which Mr. Curtis had described as “the fundamental condition of human progress,”—“the right of the individual to express his opinion on any and every subject.” The first
