Redeemers
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The Redeemers were a
During Reconstruction, the South was under occupation by federal forces, and Southern
Numerous educated blacks moved to the South to work for Reconstruction. Some were elected to office in the Southern states, or were appointed to positions. The Reconstruction governments were unpopular with many White Southerners, who were not willing to accept defeat and continued to try to prevent black political activity by any means. While the elite planter class often supported insurgencies, violence against freedmen and other Republicans was usually carried out by non-elite Whites.[citation needed] The secret Ku Klux Klan chapters developed in the first years after the war as one form of insurgency.
In the 1870s,
History
In the 1870s, Democrats began to muster more political power, as former Confederate Whites began to vote again. It was a movement that gathered energy up until the Compromise of 1877, in the process known as the Redemption. White Democratic Southerners saw themselves as redeeming the South by regaining power.
More importantly, in a second wave of violence following the suppression of the
In the aftermath of the disputed gubernatorial election of 1872 in
In 1874 remnants of White militia formed the White League, a Democratic paramilitary group originating in Grant Parish of the Red River area of Louisiana, with chapters arising across the state, especially in rural areas. In August the White League turned out six Republican office holders in Coushatta, Louisiana, and told them to leave the state. Before they could make their way, they and five to twenty black witnesses were assassinated by White paramilitary. In September, thousands of armed White militia, supporters of the Democratic gubernatorial candidate John McEnery, fought against New Orleans police and state militia in what was called the Battle of Liberty Place. They took over the state government offices in New Orleans and occupied the capitol and armory. They turned Republican governor William Pitt Kellogg out of office, and retreated only in the face of the arrival of Federal troops sent by President Ulysses S. Grant.
Similarly, in Mississippi, the
The Redeemers' program emphasized opposition to the Republican governments, which they considered to be corrupt and a violation of true republican principles. The crippling national economic problems and reliance on cotton meant that the South was struggling financially. Redeemers denounced taxes higher than what they had known before the war. At that time, however, the states had few functions, and planters maintained private institutions only. Redeemers wanted to reduce state debts. Once in power, they typically cut government spending; shortened legislative sessions; lowered politicians' salaries; scaled back public aid to railroads and corporations; and reduced support for the new systems of public education and some welfare institutions.
As Democrats took over state legislatures, they worked to change voter registration rules to strip most blacks (and many poor Whites) of their ability to vote.
In the 1890s,
Disenfranchising
Democrats worked hard to prevent populist coalitions. In the former Confederate South, from 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi, legislatures of ten of the eleven states passed
In Alabama, for instance, in 1900 fourteen Black Belt counties had a total of 79,311 voters on the rolls; by June 1, 1903, after the new constitution was passed, registration had dropped to just 1,081. Statewide Alabama in 1900 had 181,315 blacks eligible to vote, but by 1903 only 2,980 were registered, although at least 74,000 were literate. From 1900 to 1903, the number of White registered voters fell by more than 40,000, although the White population grew overall.
By 1941, more poor Whites than blacks had been disenfranchised in Alabama, mostly due to effects of the cumulative poll tax; estimates were that 600,000 Whites and 500,000 blacks had been disenfranchised.[3]
In addition to being disenfranchised, African Americans and poor Whites were shut out of the political process as Southern legislatures passed Jim Crow laws imposing segregation in public facilities and places. The discrimination, segregation, and disenfranchisement lasted well into the later decades of the 20th century. Those who could not vote were also ineligible to run for office or serve on juries, so they were shut out of all offices at the local and state as well as federal levels.
While Congress had actively intervened for more than 20 years in elections in the South which the House Elections Committee judged to be flawed, after 1896, it backed off from intervening. Many Northern legislators were outraged about the disenfranchisement of blacks and some proposed reducing Southern representation in Congress, but they never managed to accomplish this, as Southern representatives formed a strong one-party voting bloc for decades.[4]
Although educated African Americans mounted legal challenges (with many secretly funded by educator Booker T. Washington and his northern allies), the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's and Alabama's provisions in its rulings in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) and Giles v. Harris (1903).[5]
Religious dimension
People in the movement chose the term Redemption from Christian theology. Historian Daniel W. Stowell[6] concludes that White Southerners appropriated the term to describe the political transformation they desired, that is, the end of Reconstruction. This term helped unify numerous White voters, and encompassed efforts to purge southern society of its sins and to remove Republican political leaders.
It also represented the birth of a new Southern society, rather than a return to its prewar predecessor. Historian Gaines M. Foster explains how the South became known as the "Bible Belt" by connecting this characterization with changing attitudes caused by slavery's demise. Freed from preoccupation with federal intervention over slavery, and even citing it as precedent, White Southerners joined Northerners in the national crusade to legislate morality. Viewed by some as a "bulwark of morality", the largely Protestant South took on a Bible Belt identity long before H. L. Mencken coined the term.[6]
The "redeemed" South
When
"The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery", wrote W. E. B. Du Bois. The black community in the South was brought back under the yoke of the Southern Democrats, who had been politically undermined during Reconstruction. Whites in the South were committed to reestablish its own sociopolitical structure with the goal of a new social order enforcing racial subordination and labor control. While the Republicans succeeded in maintaining some power in part of the Upper South, such as Tennessee and East Kentucky, in the Deep South there was a return to "home rule".[7] Nowhere was this more true than Georgia, where an unbroken line of Democrats occupied the governor's office for 131 years, a period of dominance that only came to an end in 2003.[8]
In the aftermath of the
Also, historian Edward L. Ayers argues that after 1877 the Redeemers were sharply divided and fought for control of the Democratic Party:
- For the next few years the Democrats seemed in control of the South, but even then deep challenges were building beneath the surface. Behind their show of unity, the Democratic Redeemers suffered deep divisions. Conflicts between upcountry and Black Belt, between town and country, and between former Democrats and former Whigs divided the Redeemers. The Democratic party proved too small to contain the ambitions of all the White men who sought its rewards, too large and unwieldy to move decisively.[10]
Historiography
In the years immediately following Reconstruction, most blacks and former abolitionists held that Reconstruction lost the struggle for
By the turn of the 20th century, White historians, led by the
Beginning in the 1930s, historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Howard K. Beale attacked the "redemptionist" interpretation of Reconstruction, calling themselves "revisionists" and claiming that the real issues were economic. The Northern Radicals were tools of the railroads, and the Republicans in the South were manipulated to do their bidding. The Redeemers, furthermore, were also tools of the railroads and were themselves corrupt.
In 1935,
By the 1960s,
Supreme Court challenges
Although African Americans mounted legal challenges, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's and Alabama's provisions in its rulings in Williams v. Mississippi (1898), Giles v. Harris (1903), and Giles v. Teasley (1904). Booker T. Washington secretly helped fund and arrange representation for such legal challenges, raising money from northern patrons who helped support Tuskegee University.[17]
When
However, Georgia, among other Southern states, passed new legislation (1958) to once again repress black voter registration.[
See also
- Jim Crow laws
- Disenfranchisement after the Reconstruction Era
- Nadir of American race relations
- Phoenix Election Riot, in South Carolina
- White backlash
References
Notes
- St. Petersburg Times, November 17, 2000.
- ^ Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died, Henry Holt & Co., 2009, pp. 18–19.
- ^ Glenn Feldman, The Disfranchisement Myth: Poor Whites and Suffrage Restriction in Alabama, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004, p. 136.
- ^ "Committee at Odds on Reapportionment" (abstract), The New York Times, December 21, 1900. P. 5 via TimesMachine (full story; subscription). Accessed April 23, 2017.
- ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000, pp. 12 and 21, accessed March 10, 2008.
- ^ a b Blum and Poole (2005).
- ^ Eric Foner, "A Short History of Reconstruction: 1863–1877", New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1990, p. 249
- ^ Hild, Matthew (October 29, 2009). "Redemption". New Georgia Encyclopedia. Retrieved April 30, 2019.
- ^ Foner, "A Short History of Reconstruction" (1990), p. 250.
- ^ Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992) p. 35
- ^ Bernard A. Weisberger, "The dark and bloody ground of Reconstruction historiography." Journal of Southern History 25.4 (1959): 427-447.
- ^ Claire Parfait, "Reconstruction Reconsidered: A Historiography of Reconstruction, From the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1960s." Études anglaises 62.4 (2009): 440-454 online.
- ^ Eric Foner, The Dunning School: Historians, Race, and the Meaning of Reconstruction (University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
- ^ Thomas C. Holt, ""A Story of Ordinary Human Beings": The Sources of Du Bois's Historical Imagination in Black Reconstruction." South Atlantic Quarterly 112.3 (2013): 419-435.
- ^ "Reader's Companion to American History - -REDEEMERS". Archived from the original on 17 November 2002.
- ^ Thomas J. Brown, ed. Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (Oxford UP, 2006).
- ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon," Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000, pp. 12 and 21], accessed March 10, 2008.
- ^ Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 70.
Bibliography
- Secondary sources
- Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1993).
- Baggett, James Alex. The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (2003), a statistical study of 732 Scalawags and 666 Redeemers.
- Blum, Edward J., and W. Scott Poole, eds. Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. ISBN 0-86554-987-7.
- Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), explores the role of African Americans during Reconstruction
- Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (2002).
- Garner, James Wilford. Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901), a classic Dunning School text.
- Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (1979).
- Going, Allen J. "Alabama Bourbonism and Populism Revisited." ISSN 0002-4341.
- Hart, Roger L. Redeemers, Bourbons, and Populists: Tennessee, 1870–1896. LSU Press, 1975.
- Jones, Robert R. "James L. Kemper and the Virginia Redeemers Face the Race Question: A Reconsideration". ISSN 0022-4642.
- King, Ronald F. "A Most Corrupt Election: Louisiana in 1876." ISSN 0898-588X.
- King, Ronald F. "Counting the Votes: South Carolina's Stolen Election of 1876." ISSN 0022-1953.
- Moore, James Tice. "Redeemers Reconsidered: Change and Continuity in the Democratic South, 1870–1900" in the Journal of Southern History, Vol. 44, No. 3 (August 1978), pp. 357–378.
- Moore, James Tice. "Origins of the Solid South: Redeemer Democrats and the Popular Will, 1870–1900." Southern Studies, 1983 22 (3): 285–301. ISSN 0735-8342.
- Perman, Michael. The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8078-4141-2.
- Perman, Michael. "Counter Reconstruction: The Role of Violence in Southern Redemption", in Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr, eds. The Facts of Reconstruction (1991) pp. 121–140.
- Pildes, Richard H. "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, 17, (2000).
- Polakoff, Keith I. The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (1973).
- Rabonowitz, Howard K. Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (1977).
- Richardon, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction (2001).
- Wallenstein, Peter. From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (1987).
- Wiggins; Sarah Woolfolk. The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865—1881 (1991).
- Williamson, Edward C. Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 1877–1893 (1976).
- Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951); emphasizes economic conflict between rich and poor.
- Primary sources
- Fleming, Walter L. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational, and Industrial (1906), several hundred primary documents from all viewpoints
- Hyman, Harold M., ed. The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870 (1967), collection of longer speeches by Radical leaders
- Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction(1913). Online text by African American member of the United States Congress during Reconstruction era.