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The 1868 United States presidential election was the 21st quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 1868. In the first election of the Reconstruction Era, Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Horatio Seymour of the Democratic Party. It was the first presidential election to take place after the conclusion of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It was the first election in which African Americans could vote in the reconstructed Southern states, in accordance with the First Reconstruction Act.
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history following the American Civil War, dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of abolishing slavery and reintegrating the former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. Despite this, former Confederate states often used poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation to control people of color.
Hancock County is a county located in the U.S. state of Georgia. As of the 2020 census, the population was 8,735. The county seat is Sparta. The county was created on December 17, 1793, and named for John Hancock, a Founding Father of the American Revolution.
The Radical Republicans were a faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States. They were opposed during the war by the Moderate Republicans, and by the Democratic Party. Radicals led efforts after the war to establish civil rights for former slaves and fully implement emancipation. After unsuccessful measures in 1866 resulted in violence against former slaves in the rebel states, Radicals pushed the Fourteenth Amendment for statutory protections through Congress. They opposed allowing ex-Confederate officers to retake political power in the Southern U.S., and emphasized equality, civil rights and voting rights for the "freedmen", i.e., former slaves who had been freed during or after the Civil War by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War, and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, and/or social gain. The term broadly included both individuals who sought to promote Republican politics, and individuals who saw business and political opportunities because of the chaotic state of the local economies following the war. In practice, the term carpetbagger was often applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The word is closely associated with "scalawag", a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.
The Solid South or the Southern bloc was the electoral voting bloc of the states of the Southern United States for issues that were regarded as particularly important to the interests of Democrats in those states. The Southern bloc existed between the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877 and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During this period, the Democratic Party overwhelmingly controlled southern state legislatures, and most local, state and federal officeholders in the South were Democrats. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Southern Democrats disenfranchised blacks in all Southern states, along with a few non-Southern states doing the same as well. This resulted essentially in a one-party system, in which a candidate's victory in Democratic primary elections was tantamount to election to the office itself. White primaries were another means that the Democrats used to consolidate their political power, excluding blacks from voting in primaries.
Henry Horatio Wells, a Michigan lawyer and Union Army officer in the American Civil War, succeeded Francis Harrison Pierpont as the appointed provisional governor of Virginia from 1868 to 1869 during Reconstruction. A Radical Republican labeled a carpetbagger, Wells was defeated for election in 1869 by Gilbert C. Walker, who also became his appointed successor. Wells then served as U.S. Attorney for Virginia and later for the District of Columbia.
The Georgia Republican Party is the affiliate of the Republican Party in the U.S. state of Georgia and one of the two major political parties and the current favored party in the state and is currently chaired by Joshua McKoon.
The National Union Party was the name used by the Republican Party and elements of other parties for the national ticket in the 1864 presidential election during the Civil War. Most state Republican parties did not change their name. The name was used to attract War Democrats, border state voters, and Unconditional Unionist, and Unionist Party members who might otherwise have not voted for Republicans. The National Union Party nominated incumbent Republican President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Democrat Andrew Johnson of Tennessee for Vice President. They won the Electoral College 212–21.
The 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 7, 1876, to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. The election campaign was a referendum on the Radical Republican-led state government and their Reconstruction policies. Opponents disputed the challenger Wade Hampton III's victory, gained by a margin of little more than 1100 votes statewide. But he took office in April 1877, after President Hayes withdrew federal troops as a result of a national Democratic compromise, and the incumbent Daniel Henry Chamberlain left the state.
At the end of the American Civil War, the devastation and disruption in the state of Georgia were dramatic. Wartime damage, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager. The state government subsidized construction of numerous new railroad lines. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned. The coastal rice plantations never recovered from the war.
Alfred Eliab Buck was a U.S. Representative from Alabama.
How Curious a Land is a history of a Georgia plantation community from 1855 to 1885. The book looks at the political, economic and the role of the law and society passing through the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was written by Dr. Jonathan M. Bryant of Georgia Southern University. It was published in 1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. It was republished in 2004 as a paperback.
The Eutaw riot was an episode of white racial violence in Eutaw, Alabama, the county seat of Greene County, on October 25, 1870, during the Reconstruction Era in the United States. It was related to an extended period of campaign violence before the fall gubernatorial election, as white Democrats in the state used racial terrorism to suppress black Republican voting. White Klan members attacked a Republican rally of 2,000 black citizens in the courthouse square, killing as many as four and wounding 54.
The 1928 United States presidential election in Georgia took place on November 6, 1928, as part of the wider United States presidential election. Voters chose 14 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
Thomas Payce Beard was a leader in the African American community, a Republican Party organizer, and part of a contested election in Georgia during the post-American Civil War Reconstruction Era. He contested the election of his Democratic Party opponent Stephen A. Corker to the U.S. House of Representatives citing voter intimidation including violent attacks, local police and election official interference, vote rigging, and voter fraud. Beard helped organize African American voters in the Republican Party after the American Civil War.
The "Original 33" were the first 33 African-American members of the Georgia General Assembly. They were elected to office in 1868, during the Reconstruction era. They were among the first African-American state legislators in the United States. Twenty-four of the members were ministers. Upon taking office, white Democrats, then a minority in the Assembly, conspired with enough white Republicans to expel the African-American legislators from the Assembly in September 1868. The next year, the Supreme Court of Georgia ruled that African Americans had the right to hold office in Georgia. The expelled legislators were reinstated and took office in January 1870.
Robert Ligon McWhorter was an American planter and politician who served in the Georgia House of Representatives as a Democrat from 1847 to 1861, and then switched to serving as a Republican in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly from 1868 to 1884. He was the first Republican to hold the seat of Speaker of the Georgia House.
Noah Graham was an A.M.E. minister and state legislator in Florida. The Florida Archives have a copy of his 1867 voter registration. He is identified as "Colored". He represented Leon County, Florida in the Florida House of Representatives from 1868 to 1872. In 1868 he was also a Leon County Commissioner when Lieutenant Governor William Henry Gleason assumed the governor's office made various appointments and a dispute ensued. Graham resigned as commissioner when order was restored. A leader in the Republican Party, he tried to mediate an 1870 state senate election campaign dispute between Republican Party rivals James Page's Baptist and conservative supporters and Charles H. Pearce's A.M.E. and Radical Republican faction. Pearce prevailed.
Giles Cotton, also known as Silas Cotton, was an emancipated enslaved man, farmer, and state legislator in Texas. A Radical Republican, he served in the Texas House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era from 1870 to 1873. He married and had seven children.
References
- ↑ Freedom's Lawmakers by Eric Foner Louisiana State University Press 1996 page 47
- ↑ "Greene County Blacks". Archived from the original on 8 June 2010. Retrieved 2 February 2013.
- 1 2 3 4 5 John C. Inscoe (1 November 2009). Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950. University of Georgia Press. pp. 24–32. ISBN 978-0-8203-3505-6.
- ↑ "American Experience – Reconstruction: The Second Civil War – White Men Unite". PBS . Retrieved 1 February 2013.
- ↑ Corbett, Scott (2016). U.S. History. Online: Openstacks. p. 480.