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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 1872 United States presidential election was the 22nd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1872. Despite a split in the Republican Party, incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant defeated Democratic-endorsed Liberal Republican nominee Horace Greeley.
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history and Southern United States history that followed the American Civil War and was dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant citizenship and equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. To circumvent these legal achievements, the former Confederate states imposed poll taxes and literacy tests and engaged in terrorism to intimidate and control black people and to discourage or prevent them from voting.
The Radical Republicans were a political 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. The Radical faction also included, though, very strong currents of Nativism, anti-Catholicism, and in favor of the Prohibition of alcoholic beverages. These policy goals and the rhetoric in their favor often made it extremely difficult for the Republican Party as a whole to avoid alienating large numbers of American voters from Irish Catholic, German, and other White ethnic backgrounds. In fact, even German-American Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters who, like Hermann Raster, otherwise sympathized with the Radical Republicans' aims, fought them tooth and nail over prohibition. They later became known as "Stalwarts".
In United States history, scalawag was a pejorative slur referred to white Southerners who supported Reconstruction policies and efforts after the conclusion of the American Civil War.
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, 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 often was 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 Liberal Republican Party was an American political party that was organized in May 1872 to oppose the reelection of President Ulysses S. Grant and his Radical Republican supporters in the presidential election of 1872. The party emerged in Missouri under the leadership of Senator Carl Schurz and soon attracted other opponents of Grant; Liberal Republicans decried the scandals of the Grant administration and sought civil service reform. The party opposed Grant's Reconstruction policies, particularly the Enforcement Acts that destroyed the Ku Klux Klan. It lost in a landslide, and disappeared from the national stage after the 1872 election.
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.
Benjamin Harvey Hill was a politician whose "flamboyant opposition" to Congressional Reconstruction is credited with helping inaugurate Georgia's Ku Klux Klan. His famous "brush arbor speech" in Atlanta on July 23, 1868, called for the use of violence against the governor, the legislature, and freed people. His career spanned state and national politics, and the Civil War. He served in the Georgia legislature in both houses. Although he initially opposed secession and was elected as a Unionist in 1860, he nonetheless voted to secede in that year, and represented Georgia as a Confederate senator during the conflict.
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.
Stephen Alfestus Corker was an American, lawyer, and Civil War veteran on the Confederate side who served briefly as a U.S. Representative from Georgia in early 1871. He was a plantation owner and slaveholder.
Alfred Eliab Buck was a U.S. Representative from Alabama.
The presidency of Andrew Johnson began on April 15, 1865, when Andrew Johnson became President of the United States upon the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and ended on March 4, 1869. He had been Vice President of the United States for only six weeks when he succeeded to the presidency. The 17th president, Johnson was a member of the Democratic Party before the Civil War and had been Lincoln's 1864 running mate on the National Union ticket, which was supported by Republicans and War Democrats. Johnson took office as the Civil War came to a close, and his presidency was dominated by the aftermath of the war. As president, Johnson attempted to build his own party of Southerners and conservative Northerners, but he was unable to unite his supporters into a new party. Republican Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson as president.
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.
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.
Joseph Crews was a Reconstruction militia leader who served as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1874 until his assassination in 1875. He was the state's highest-ranking military official in the 1870s and was put in charge of the state militia whose main purpose was to protect African-American voters. African-Americans were 58.9% of the population of South Carolina in 1870. He was reportedly murdered by Democrats in the run-up to the 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election.
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.
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.
- 1 2 3 Williams, Kidada E. I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2023.
- ↑ "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.