1.4.1 Freedmen, Yankees, and Yeomen

African Americans made up the majority of southern Republicans. After gaining voting rights in 1867, nearly all eligible black men registered to vote as Republicans, grateful to the party that had freed them and granted them the franchise. “It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a negro away from the polls,” observed an Alabama white man. Black women, like white women, remained disfranchised, but they mobilized along with black men. In the 1868 presidential election, they bravely wore buttons supporting the Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant. Southern blacks did not all have identical political priorities, but they united in their desire for education and equal treatment before the law.

A Southern Legislature in the Carpet-Bagger Days This late-nineteenth-century wood engraving reveals the southern Democratic view of Republican state governments during Reconstruction. It drips with prejudice and misinformation. Contrary to fact, the legislators are depicted as overwhelmingly black. Rather than serious men, they are lazy, drunk, and disorderly. While some lie about on cushions, others have literally drunk themselves under the table, which is spread with food rather than legislative documents. The white man in the foreground who calmly observes the circus is probably meant to be a manipulative carpetbagger, while the white man in the rear with the hat, pipe, and rifle slung over his shoulder is probably a treasonous scalawag.

The Granger Collection, NYC.

Northern whites who made the South their home after the war were a second element of the South’s Republican Party. Conservative white Southerners called them carpetbaggers, men so poor that they could stuff all their earthly belongings in a single carpet-sided suitcase and swoop southward like buzzards to “fatten on our misfortunes.” But most Northerners who moved south were young men who looked upon the South as they did the West — as a promising place to make a living. Northerners in the southern Republican Party consistently supported programs that encouraged vigorous economic development along the lines of the northern free-labor model.

Southern whites made up the third element of the South’s Republican Party. Approximately one out of four white Southerners voted Republican. The other three condemned the one who did as a traitor to his region and his race and called him a scalawag, a term for runty horses and low-down, good-for-nothing rascals. Yeoman farmers accounted for the majority of southern white Republicans. Some were Unionists who emerged from the war with bitter memories of Confederate persecution. Others were small farmers who wanted to end state governments’ favoritism toward plantation owners. Yeomen supported initiatives for public schools and for expanding economic opportunity in the South.

The South’s Republican Party, then, was made up of freedmen, Yankees, and yeomen — an improbable coalition. The mix of races, regions, and classes inevitably meant friction as each group maneuvered to define the party. But Reconstruction represents an extraordinary moment in American politics: Blacks and whites joined together in the Republican Party to pursue political change. Formally, of course, only men participated in politics — casting ballots and holding offices — but white and black women also played a part in the political struggle by joining in parades and rallies, attending stump speeches, and even campaigning.

Reconstruction politics was not for cowards. Most whites in the South condemned southern Republicans as illegitimate and felt justified in doing whatever they could to stamp them out. Violence against blacks — the “white terror” — took brutal institutional form in 1866 with the formation in Tennessee of the Ku Klux Klan, a social club of Confederate veterans that quickly developed into a paramilitary organization supporting Democrats. The Klan went on a rampage of whipping, hanging, shooting, burning, and throat-cutting to defeat Republicans and restore white supremacy. (See “Historical Question.”) Rapid demobilization of the Union army after the war left only twenty thousand troops to patrol the entire South. Without effective military protection, southern Republicans had to take care of themselves.