African Americans in the South After Reconstruction 537Harrison believed ardently in protective tariffs. His
approach to fiscal policy was conservative, though he
was freehanded in the matter of veterans’ pensions. No
more flamboyant waver of the bloody shirt existed.
Harrison professed to favor civil service reform, but
fashioned an unimpressive record on the question. He
appointed the vigorous young reformer Theodore
Roosevelt to the Civil Service Commission and then
proceeded to undercut him systematically. Before long
the frustrated Roosevelt was calling the president a
“cold blooded, narrow minded, prejudiced, obstinate,
timid old psalm singing Indianapolis politician.”
Under Harrison, Congress distinguished itself by
expending, for the first time in a period of peace,
more than $1 billion in a single session. It raised the
tariff to an all-time high. The Sherman Antitrust Act
was also passed.
Harrison had little to do with the fate of any of
these measures. The Republicans lost control of
Congress in 1890, and two years later Grover
Cleveland swept back into power, defeating Harrison
by more than 350,000 votes.
Pendleton Civil Service Actat
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Harrison and Morton Campaign Adat
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African Americans in the South After
Reconstruction
Perhaps the most important issue of the last quarter of
the nineteenth century was the fate of the former slaves
after the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
Shortly after his inauguration in 1877, President Hayes
made a goodwill tour of the South and he urged blacks
to trust southern whites. A new Era of Good Feelings
had dawned, he announced. Some southern leaders
made earnest attempts to respect the civil rights of
African Americans. That same year Governor Wade
Hampton of South Carolina proposed to “secure to
every citizen, the lowest as well as the highest, black as
well as white, full and equal protection in the enjoy-
ment of all his rights under the Constitution.”
But the pledge was not kept. By December, Hayes
was sadly disillusioned. “By state legislation, by frauds,
by intimidation, and by violence of the most atrocious
character, colored citizens have been deprived of the
right of suffrage,” he wrote in his diary. However, he
did nothing to remedy the situation. Frederick
Douglass called Hayes’s policy “sickly conciliation.”
Hayes’s successors in the 1880s did no better.
“Time is the only cure,” President Garfield said,
thereby confessing that he had no policy at all.
President Arthur gave federal patronage to antiblack
View theImageReadtheDocumentgroups in an effort to split the Democratic South. In
President Cleveland’s day African Americans had
scarcely a friend in high places, North or South. In
1887 Cleveland explained to a correspondent why he
opposed “mixed [integrated] schools.” Expert opin-
ion, the president said, believed “that separate schools
were of much more benefit for the colored people.”
Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur were Republicans, and
Cleveland a Democrat; party made little difference.
Both parties subscribed to hypocritical statements
about equality and constitutional rights, and neither
did anything to implement them.
For a time blacks were not totally disenfranchised
in the South. Rival white factions tried to manipulate
them, and corruption flourished as widely as in the
machine-dominated wards of the northern cities. In
the 1890s, however, the southern states, led by
Mississippi, began to deprive blacks of the vote
despite the Fifteenth Amendment. Poll taxes raised a
formidable economic barrier, one that also disenfran-
chised many poor whites. Literacy tests completed the
work; a number of states provided a loophole for illit-
erate whites by including an “understanding” clause
whereby an illiterate person could qualify by demon-
strating an ability to explain the meaning of a section
of the state constitution when an election official read
it to him. Blacks who attempted to take the test were
uniformly declared to have failed it.
In Louisiana, 130,000 blacks voted in the election
of 1896. Then the law was changed. In 1900 only
5,000 votes were cast by blacks. “We take away the
Negroes’ votes,” a Louisiana politician explained, “to
protect them just as we would protect a little child and
prevent it from injuring itself with sharp-edged tools.”
Almost every Supreme Court decision after 1877 that
affected blacks somehow nullified or curtailed their
rights. The civil rights cases(1883) declared the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. Blacks who
were refused equal accommodations or privileges by
hotels, theaters, and other privately owned facilities
had no recourse at law, the Court announced. The
Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed their civil rights
against invasion by the states, not by individuals.
Finally, in Plessy v. Ferguson(1896), the Court
ruled that even in places of public accommodation,
such as railroads and, by implication, schools, segre-
gation was legal as long as facilities of equal quality
were provided: “If one race be inferior to the other
socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot
put them upon the same plane.” In a noble dissent in
the Plessy case, Justice John Marshall Harlan
protested this line of argument. “Our Constitution is
color-blind,” he said. “The arbitrary separation of cit-
izens, on the basis of race... is a badge of servitude
wholly inconsistent with civil freedom.... The two