Reconstruction
By
Eric Foner
Page 26:
“The rise of political antislavery in the 1840s and 1850s
was accompanied by the emergence of white supremacy as a central tenant of the
Northern Democratic party..
Page 29:
“Sanctified by the North’s triumph, the free labor ideology
would emerge from the war further strengthened as a definition of the good
society, an underpinning of Republican Party policy,...”
Page 30:,
“Generally, however, the Democratic Party, the preeminent
Conservative institution of the era reaped the political harvest of opposition
to the changes wrought by the war. Tainted with disloyalty in Republican eyes,
unable to develop a coherent alternatives to the policies of the Lincoln
administration (it remained throughout the period, as one historian puts it, a
“Party of negations”)....
Page 31:
“The potent cry of white supremacy provided the final
ideological glue in the Democratic coalition”
Page 32:
“The Emancipation Proclamation provoked lurid Democratic
descriptions of an impending black inundation of the Midwest. In Indiana, one
group of Democratic women paraded before an election with banners emblazoned:
“Fathers save us from nigger husbands”. As Georges Clemenceau, reporting, on
Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after war “Any Democrat who did
not manage to hint that the Negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered
lacking in enthusiasm “
“Beginning with an attack on a , factories and docks (some,
the scene of recent strikes), the opulent homes as the Colored conscription
office, the riot quickly developed into a wholesale assault upon all the symbols
of the new order being created by the Republican party and the Civil War. Its
targets included government officials, factories and docks (Some, the scene of
recent strikes), opulent homes of the city’s Republicans elite, and such
symbols of reform spirit as the Colored Orphans Asylum, which was burned to the
ground. Above all, the riot degenerated into a virtual racial pogrom, with
unaccounted numbers of blacks murdered on the streets or driven to take refuge
in Central Park or across the river in New Jersey. Mattie Griffith, a white abolitionist,
watched from her window as the immigrant working class – or, in her way of
putting it, “ the strange wretched, abandoned creatures that flocked out from
their dens and lair’s – took tot eh streets to comity acts of unimaginable
cruelty upon the city’s black population: “A child of 3 years of age was thrown
from a 4th story window and instantly killed. A woman one hour after
her confinement was set upon and beaten with her tender babe in her
arms…Children were torn from their mothers’ embrace and their brains blown out
in the very face of the afflicted month. Men were burnt by slow fires”
Page 215:
“The “undisputed history” of these years, black Congressman
Josiah Walls later observed, explained why Southern blacks refused to cast
Democratic ballots and stood as a warning “as to what they will do if they
should again obtain control of this Government.” Most of all, Presidential
Reconstruction reinforced blacks’ identification with federal authority. Only outside
intervention could assure freedmen s modicum of justice”
Page 217:
“Throughout the north, support for the President [Johnson]
and opposition to enfranchising blacks became the Democrat’s rallying
cries…..and party speakers described Republicans as “nigger adorers” ….”
Page 218:
“The Blair family had long been obsessed with the specter of
racial “amalgamation,” and as with Johnson, prejudice led them down the path of
illogic in which blacks and advocates of black suffrage were somehow equated
with slavery and Slave Power”
Page 231:
“Equality in civil rights – equal treatment by the courts
and civil and criminal laws – most Republicans now deemed nearly as essential,
for an individual’s natural right could not be secured without it”
Page 291:
“And the Republican party – the party of emancipation and
black voting rights – become an institution as central to the black community
as the church and school”
Page 313:
“In Ohio, where a measure enfranchising blacks was on the
fall ballot, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Allan G. Thurman pledged to
save the state from “the thralldom of nigerrism” on the West coast , Democrats
added anti -Chinese appeals, arguing that Republican doctrine of “universal
equality for all races in all things “ would lead to an Asiatic influx and
control of the state by an alliance of the “Mongolian and Indian and African”
Page 340:
From Frank Blair, Democrat VP candidate:
“In blatantly racist language, he excoriated Republicans for
placing the South under the rule of “a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are
worshippers of fetishes and polygamists” and longer to: subject the white women
to their unbridled lust”….Reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species had
reinforced Franks’ long-standing fear of racial intermixing, which, he now
asserted, would reverse evolution, produce a less-advanced species incapable of
reproducing itself, and destroy “the accumulated improvement of the centuries”
These were the convictions of the Democratic candidate for the Vice Presidency
of the United States.”
Page 342:
“Founded in 1866 as a Tennessee social club, the Ku Klux
Klan now spread in nearly every southern state, launching a “reign of terror”
against Republicans leaders black and white” …..
Blacks had no doubt who was behind the violence. “We don’t
call them democrats,” a local leader commented of the assailants, “we call them
southern murderers”
Page 422:
“Tennessee Democrats repealed the Republican law penalizing
railroads for discriminating against blacks and drafted a new constitution
requiring racial separation in the public schools”
…in 1873 made payment of a poll tax a requirement for
voting, effectively disentrancing the bulk of the black population and ensuring
over twenty years of uninterrupted Democratic ascendency in the state.
Page 425:
“In effect, the Klan was a military force serving the
interests of the Democratic party, the planter class and all those who desired
the restoration of white supremacy”
Page 426:
“Jack Dupree, the victim of a particularly brutal murder in
Monroe county, Mississippi—assailants cut his throat and disemboweled him, all
within sight of his wife, who had just given birth to twins- was “president of
a republican club” and know as a man who would speak his mind”
Page 427:
“In October 1870, a group of armed whites broke up a
Republican campaign rally at Eutaw, the county seat of Greene county, Alabama,
killing four blacks and wounding fifty-four. In the same month, on the day
after Republicans carried Laurens county, in South Carolina’s Piedmont cotton
belt, a racial altercation at Laurensville degenerated into a “negro chase”
which bands of whites scoured the countryside, driving 150 freedmen from their
homes and committing 13 murders”
Page 431:
Possibly the most massive Klan action anywhere in the South
was the January 1871 assault on the Union county jail by 500 masked men, which
resulted in the lynching of eight black prisoners. Hundreds of Republicans were
whipped and saw their farm property destroyed in Spartanburg, a largely white
county with a Democratic majority”
Page 560:
“…. Democrats assaulted a republican barbecue in Clinton,
only 15 miles from the state capital. A few individuals on each side were
killed, and armed whites went onto to scour the countryside, shooting down
blacks “just the same as birds: They claimed perhaps thirty victims, among them
schoolteachers, church leaders, and local Republican organizers.”