Reconciliation
Horace Greeley just wanted to be friends, again. That’s all. The problem was that he was a Northern anti-slavery, liberal co-founder of Lincoln’s Republican Party, and the friendships he wanted to rekindle were with Southern ex-Confederates.
This was the 1870s. The Civil War had recently ended. Reconstruction was underway. Black men now had the right to vote. Formerly enslaved people across the South were buying property and starting businesses. But they were also still fighting brutal battles against the Ku Klux Klan and various other white supremacist domestic-terror groups.
Southern Black people weren’t on their own in these battles. They were aided by the U.S. military, still occupying the South. But Greeley, a newspaper magnate and former congressman, just wanted to be friends, again, with Southern racists. And he was betting that a lot of other Northerners felt the same way.
Greeley put his money where his mouth was and ran for president in 1872. He accepted the nomination from the brand-new Liberal Republican Party, “in the confident trust that the masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them, forgetting that they have been enemies in the joyful consciousness that they are and must henceforth remain brethren.”
The masses of his countrymen hated this.
Political cartoons of the era depict him reaching across an endless field of Union graves and stepping over dead Black people to shake hands with Confederates. He was crushed in the election by incumbent Ulysses S. Grant, of what was then known as the Radical Republican Party. The Liberal Republican Party dissolved, and that should’ve been the end of the Reconciliationist movement. But it was just the beginning.
It didn’t matter that the people had rejected Reconciliationism, because Liberal Republican leadership loved it. When the next election came around, they didn’t give voters a choice. The racist Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, was open about wanting to end Reconstruction. The Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, also wanted to end Reconstruction, but used that “moderate” Reconciliationist messaging, offering to bring “the blessings of honest and capable self-government” to the South.
Once again, the masses of countrymen hated this. Tilden toppled Hayes by more than 260,000 ballots in the popular vote. But, before the Electoral College results were in, what became known as “The Corrupt Bargain” was struck. Hayes offered to follow through on his promise to pull the troops out of the South if Democrats would give him the presidency.
Hayes was sworn in, thus ending Reconstruction almost immediately and ushering in 80 years of the apartheid terror campaign we call Jim Crow. Thousands of Black people were lynched. Black elected officials were purged from government. Black businesses were burned. Black property was stolen. Southern states wrote laws criminalizing Black life, incarcerating many formerly enslaved people and forcing them back into servitude.
Reconciliationists took control of the national narrative and soon the Civil War wasn’t about slavery anymore, but the valor of soldiers on both sides. Before long, the common ground was no longer our shared humanity, but an amorphous patriotism or nationalist economics or some other thing founded in the exploitation of the people they were trying to forget.
Politicians and political organizers began to believe the Reconciliationist vision was the way forward. Even the women’s suffrage movement pushed Black women out in favor of white supremacy. The 19th Amendment is celebrated for giving women the right to vote, but the reality is that women weren’t given the right to vote so much as white women were allowed to support the interests of white men.
The Jim Crow laws that President Hayes allowed to metastasize kept most Black women from the polls, and male politicians kept women’s issues off the ballot. The Ku Klux Klan, however, embraced white women’s new freedoms, and the Women’s Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) was founded in 1923.
This hate group, independent from the original, preached all the same hatred of all the same people while also working toward progressive policies for themselves. This allowed the WKKK to normalize their brand and seize control of our education system. Their influence was so enduring that we still debate topics like whether or not the South seceded to preserve slavery, even though Confederate states openly declared as much in their letters of secession.
Meanwhile, women still exist as political minorities despite being the majority of the population with voting rights in a democracy.
Reconciliationism has never been a winning strategy, as evidenced by the way unions weakened their bargaining power by segregating their membership, or the fact Lyndon Johnson was the last Democratic presidential nominee to win the white vote. But even our most left-leaning politicians disregard this obvious truth. For example, Graham Platner recently told GQ Magazine that Maine Trump voters “aren’t racists,” and said, “We need to be there with open arms to welcome them back.”
And ’round and ’round we go.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
