Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [822]
FAREWELL TO RECONSTRUCTION
As the metropolitan bourgeoisie worked to wrest power from the urban masses, they grew ever more understanding of, and sympathetic to, the efforts by southern elites to recapture power from Reconstruction governments. New York Democrats hoping to restore their prewar southern allies to power had long sought to topple Radical Republican regimes, routinely denouncing them (in the World’s words) as “Semi-Barbarians Led into Horrible Excesses by the Very Scum of Northern Carpetbaggism.” Now many Republicans, alarmed by their own urban barbarians, had come to agree. George Templeton Strong, who had long backed Grant’s policies, now excoriated southern governments as “nests of corrupt carpetbaggers upheld by a brute nigger constituency”—the equivalent of New York City’s “celtocracy.” The Tribune, the Nation, Scribner’s, Harper’s—all began to depict Reconstruction as a monstrous inversion of the natural order, in which the men of “intelligence and culture” had been sidelined by the lower orders.
Many white Republicans also thought it was time to stop courting electoral disaster by supporting blacks. In 1869 their party had backed black suffrage and been trounced at the polls. In 1873 African-American Republicans led by Henry Highland Garnet got Albany legislators to pass a statewide Civil Rights Act, which outlawed the exclusion of blacks from “full and equal enjoyment of any accommodation, advantage, facility, or privilege furnished” by public conveyances, innkeepers, theaters, public schools, or places of public amusement and expunged the word “white” from previous statutes. In 1874 their party was again crushed at the polls. The remnants of support for Reconstruction collapsed. It was time, said the Best Men of the North, to come to an understanding with the Best Men of the South, end misguided reform efforts, and unite in defense of property.
The presidential election of 1876 became the vehicle for arranging this detente. Samuel Tilden, the Democratic nominee, was not a personally popular figure. “Silk Stocking Sammy,” even his associates agreed, was vain, ambitious, cold, and aloof. But Tilden had won credit for his part in breaking Tweed. He was also a rich man—having made his fortune reorganizing bankrupt railroad lines and representing the likes of Gould and Fisk—and he was backed by rich Swallowtails like August Belmont and Abram Hewitt.
Tilden’s opponent, Rutherford B. Hayes, had his own wealthy backers in New York City, but Tilden was a Democrat and a favorite son, and by the closing minutes of November 7, after having spent the evening at Everett House on Union Square tallying votes, it seemed clear he had carried city, state, and country. Tilden returned to his Gramercy Park home, where a crowd gathered at his doorstep acclaimed him as the next president. In the early morning hours of November 8, however, someone at Republican headquarters discerned a possibility of reversing the popular victory in the Electoral College, if Republicans in three southern states took appropriate action. Telegraphs were dispatched from New York to this effect, starting a chain of events that led, in March 1877, to Hayes’s selection as the next chief executive and the swift abandonment of Reconstruction.
THE GREAT STRIKE
For the New York bourgeoisie, the president’s pulling of federal troops out of southern politics and back to their barracks came not a moment too soon, as it meant that ample firepower would now be available to deal with the nationwide rail strike that broke out four months after Hayes was inaugurated.
The depression had exacerbated cutthroat competition between those railroads that had survived the crash.