Peace Among The Whites

0:04On February 26, 1877, more than a decade after the end of the Civil War, a group of politicians gathered for what today would be called an offsite. The meeting was thrown together quickly, and it took place in a hotel near the White House in Washington, D.C. In a smoke-filled room, probably quite literally, at the Wormley Hotel. As the historian David Blight knows, the Wormley Hotel was exclusive and posh. The kitchen served rare oysters and terrapin turtles. The decor was exquisite. The Wormley's proprietor was one James Wormley, a black man. But the results of this particular gathering in 1877 would not, in the end, benefit Ormley's race.

0:50The politicians retreated to his hotel to hammer out an agreement, one that they couldn't manage to achieve on Capitol Hill. It was later known as the Ormley Compromise, or the Compromise of 1877, and it would fatally weaken progressive efforts for equality.

1:15I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and this is Reconstruction, the unfinished promise. The seeds of this fateful compromise were planted months earlier, after a tumultuous election. That's when Americans went to the polls in the fall of 1876 to pick a successor to President Ulysses Grant. By now, thanks to the 15th Amendment, the American body politic was in many ways brand new. Black men could now vote. And the U.S. was changing in other ways. The economy was no longer driven by slavery and cotton. It was now powered by laborers building things on factory floors. There were far more schools, and more Americans could read.

1:57It had been a period of remarkable progress, but also constant strife. First, President Lincoln had been assassinated, and then his successor, Andrew Johnson, was impeached. And across the South, tens of thousands of people have been murdered in racial violence. The presidential election of 1876 was fraught with intimidation across the South. But also, as we heard in the previous chapter, the U.S. was suffering one of the most punishing economic depressions it had ever seen. Northern elites once championed the idea of free and fair labor for Black workers in the South. Now they face those same demands from workers in the North.

2:42And this changed the way some of them thought about Reconstruction.

2:51Because they start complaining about their labor, you know, and the growing labor movement in the North that is demanding an eight-hour-a-day safety conditions, abolition of child labor and all that. Historian Manisha Sinha, who we've heard from before, told me that this is when the tide really started to turn against Reconstruction. A lot of things are happening in the North that make many Northerners, especially Northern elites, very sympathetic to Southern planters who are complaining about Black labor all the time. So that was the situation in the United States as the country turned out to vote in 1876.

3:30David Blight says that election is still, today, one of the most consequential ever to be held. Well, the two candidates were Tilden and Hayes. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat from New York and a Confederate sympathizer, faced off against Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican from Ohio. It was the first time since the war that both parties faced each other in presidential general election with relative equality of power and representation in all sections. The election was extraordinarily close, but it was disputed in three southern states. Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. It's important again to remember the context here.

4:22Southern Democrats were the party of the former Confederacy. By 1876, they had regained political control of most Southern states, and they accomplished their goal largely by attacking and intimidating Black voters and their allies. But the radical Reconstruction Republicans still controlled the election boards in three states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. These board members had the power to tally the votes in each state and declare a winner. And think about it. These Republicans were people who had witnessed an enormous amount of political violence for years. Maybe they'd even been targeted themselves.

5:04It's a fair guess that by 1876, they'd had enough. They accused Southern Democrats of trying to steal the election through fraud and violence. They threw out many Democratic votes, and the election boards of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina each declared Rutherford B. Hayes the Republican the winner. As you can imagine, chaos ensued. Nationwide, the Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden had won the popular vote, but the tallies from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were totally in dispute. Both sides claimed all three of those states. There was no winner officially declared, and hence there had to be this special commission, called an Electoral Commission.

5:58The commission argued for months, all the way through the winter and into the spring of 1877. And to this day, to be perfectly honest, we don't entirely know who won that election. What came next changed the course of Reconstruction and the country. To break the electoral impasse, a group of men from both parties got together to make a deal. And the deal that was struck is that whatever the vote counts were, the Hayes would get the presidency, but the Democrats were going to get a lot as well. And it did not just involve politicians, it involved railroad presidents. There was going to be a transcontinental railroad with a southern terminus.

6:45Supposedly the Republicans promised the Speaker of the House to the Democrats? They're not going to fulfill that one. All kinds of skullduggery and deals and some involving a lot of money. What matters for our story is that these backroom deals absolutely changed who got to control public life in the South. Home rule for the Southern Democratic Party in the southern states, and Reconstruction could be declared done, gone, and over. The federal troops who were still stationed in the South would finally withdraw, completely. There would be no more federal effort to enforce the rights of Black people, or for anyone else, for that matter.

7:31That compromise was the beginning of a process, a longer process, by which Northerners began to pull away, pull back, slowly, not overnight, slowly abandon the victories of emancipation, the Civil War amendments, and the civil rights legislation of Reconstruction.

8:06Now, it's important to note, though, because in some textbooks or in the way this is portrayed, somehow 1877 is just a firm break. Everything about Reconstruction was over. That's not quite true. I mean, there were still elements of fusion politics, of blacks sustaining here and there locally control of this and control of that, showing that it was possible. for these coalitions to work on the ground in some parts of the South. But white supremacy became, as an ideology, a system, a system of laws, and a system of enforcement that was so powerful and grew ever more powerful in the 80s and into the 90s that it became a kind of an American way.

9:06History has a pattern. A small group of people make a decision, and by the time the rest of us hear about it, if we ever do, the consequences are already in motion. The details change, but the dynamic doesn't. The press has always been part of that story by deciding which facts matter, whose voices get heard, and which versions of events become the ones that stick. That's the kind of thing Ground News was built for. It lines up coverage from across the spectrum so you can see the same story told two completely different ways and decide for yourself who's invoking transparency when it suits them.

9:45And that's the power of it. Ground News has a blind spot feed that surfaces the stories one side is barely covering, the deals and the details being settled while everyone's looking the other way. So go to groundnews.com slash rc, that's G-R-O-U-N-D-N-E-W-S dot com slash rc for 40 % off unlimited access vantage plan. Get it yourself or gift it to someone who'd rather know than not. Use my link, groundnews.com slash rc, so you get the discount and they know I sent you. If you're a fan of learning all sides of history, then Ground News is for you. One more time, groundnews.com slash rc.

10:57Listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app with plans now starting at$8.99. You'll get access to over 1 million audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else. Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month, plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at$8.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating.

11:32We are in uncharted territory. Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world, and I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

12:04When I first heard David Blight explain that whole crazy chain of events, I couldn't believe it. I mean, here's a country that fought a bloody civil war and afterwards made huge changes to its constitution. And now, a few powerful men get to meet up in a smoke-filled room and just decide, who needs conspiracy theories when you've got the Compromise of 1877? But then I thought, maybe the story only sounds wild to us because we've been thinking all wrong about the scope of the Civil War. I tried out my theory on Barack Obama. I wonder, this is going to seem like a trivial suggestion, But part of the problem is that we mark the end of the Civil War with the end of the initial military phase.

12:51Really, the Civil War ends in 1877 with the collapse of Reconstruction. If we thought about the war that way, then we understand it very differently. Because essentially what you have is an armistice. Essentially what you have is in 1877 with the Compromise, that's the real peace treaty between North and South. And the North essentially says, okay, you guys are readmitted and fully redeemed. The union's been saved. That problem's been solved. Technically, slavery no longer exists. And otherwise, we're back to you guys running things how you want down there, and we'll run things how we want up here.

13:42And that was the true peace treaty. And it obviously left black folks in the South extraordinarily vulnerable. What I don't, I mean, the compromise of 1877, I mean, it's such a Pontius Pilate moment. And it makes me wonder about the kind of psychology of the compromisers. I mean, you just went through a dozen years ago, this unbelievably bloody conflict. I mean, you sacrificed hundreds of thousands of your countrymen's lives. You devastated the entire country. And then after 12 years passed, you're like, well, you kind of shrugged. Never mind. But I struggled to kind of understand what's going through the minds of those when they shrug.

14:41we tend to look at all these issues through the lens of race entirely. And the truth is, is that there are all these other factors that in the minds of these politicians at the time are just as important and as relevant and their notions of states' rights, and there are notions of the limits and constraints on federal government power, and there are notions of commerce and money. And so you have elites who have a whole host of interests, and some of them think how black people are being treated and how we restructure our democracy is of the highest priority. And other people are thinking, you know what?

15:50We need to stabilize the economy. And some are thinking, you know, I'm trying to build a railroad here And I need a deal with this other legislator. And some of them are thinking we can't maintain the taxes that are required in order for us to keep federal troops occupying these Confederate states in perpetuity. And so for us, looking back, we're saying to ourselves, what other issue was relevant? But for them at the time, it was one of the issues that was relevant. And I think that part of what also makes the Compromise of 1877 so bitter in some cases, certainly for African Americans when you know that history, is there is an echo across American history of, at some point, even whites who are sympathetic to the cause of equality and human rights,

17:19only being willing to carry out that principle so far.

17:27When you see principles falling short like that, and so quickly, what fills the gap for me, at least, is cynicism. It's easy to feel cynical about all the remarkable things Reconstruction achieved on paper, but not in practice. I asked Barack Obama, was it all just for show? A way to say, okay, at least we tried, and now we can move on? It's understandable to feel cynical because time and time again,

18:00the principles in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, in the post-Civil War amendments were not strong enough to override the realities of a caste society. And so, yeah, it will make you cynical. When laws are not being applied or being applied unevenly, when they seem to be ignored or twisted or distorted to serve certain interests and everybody pretends otherwise, they'll make you pretty cynical about the law in its entirety. But then we started talking again about Frederick Douglass, about his lifelong quest to expand the definition of democracy in our Constitution. And President Obama pointed out something remarkable.

19:05Today we can look back and see all the ways the Reconstruction amendments were mightier than the times that surrounded them. Those three amendments, the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th, changed more things about American life than Frederick Douglass could ever have imagined. I mean, the 14th Amendment, just to take that one along, ends up being the basis for one person, one vote. The Equal Protection Clause, the Due Process Clause, ends up being the basis for protections of privacy. And the idea that the government can't tell you what to do with your body and can't tell you who to marry. And so the expansion of democracy that is attempted in the Reconstruction era is also a promise of expanding democracy for all people and not just black people.

20:12And that compromise in 1877, part of what, of course, happens is that it weakens the possibilities of the white working class to get out of peonage in the South. And it undermines the idea of public investment and things like public education that had been happening as a consequence of Reconstruction. And suddenly now, nobody's going to have a good school. Black folks especially don't have bad schools, but the white schools won't be any better because we just don't make those investments. And so when we betray that core idea that Douglas was championing, everybody's undermined. And when we work on its behalf, it potentially lifts everybody up.

21:07And that's a different formulation, a different idea of what democracy can be that is still contested to this day.

21:22The Compromise of 1877 cleared the way for nearly a century of racial apartheid in the American South. New laws sprung up to enforce a separation of the races and to limit the rights of black people. The new code, often called Jim Crow, was enforced with yet more violence. Along with the segregation and violence came a new story about Reconstruction, that it had been an abject failure. This story, as we will hear, was totally made up, but it got stuck in the American psyche for generations. You might even have heard a version of it. Until the 1970s, or even later, much of what Americans learned about Reconstruction was distorted, or it was simply erased from school textbooks.

22:09Remember that story Barack Obama told us in the beginning? How in fifth grade, he accidentally wrote a paper celebrating the heroism of Confederate General Robert E. Lee? That was no accident. In our next chapter, we learn how history became a weapon in the battle to justify Jim Crow.

22:37Thank you.