The Election of 1868
After the Gold Rush - a novelized history of California
“History doesn’t repeat itself. But it often rhymes.” - Mark Twain
It hardly seems that this election could be more existentially tense or consequential But it’s important to remember to look back into history and realize that things could be worse. That’s why we need to VOTE and work like hell - or they will be worse.
This was the state of the US during the election of 1868, told from civil rights activist Mary Ellen Pleasant’s California perspective.
Some of it will be chillingly familiar. We can’t go back.
#WeWontGoBack
—Alexandra Sokoloff
AFTER THE GOLD RUSH, Chapter 175
September-November 1868, San Francisco, California
Mary Ellen Pleasant:
In late September, the “Grant Invincibles” paraded for Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax, marching from Montgomery to Clay carrying octagon-shaped transparencies, wearing military caps and rubber coats of different colors, and every other man carrying a Chinese lantern.
It was a scene of wild exultation and brilliancy. Ladies on the balconies, and in the windows of Lick House, Occidental House, and Russ House waved flags and handkerchiefs, while the men cheered for the candidates.
Meanwhile the organizing amongst freed people was relentless. The presidential race was neck-in-neck, and the prospect of Horatio Seymour leading the country was horrific. His campaign motto said it all:
“This is a white man’s country. Let white men rule.”
South Carolina and seven other Southern states had been readmitted to the Union in time for the election, meaning in those states Black Americans could vote for the first time. And all over the South, churches and activists called political meetings to educate our people on the candidates and the issues. Black newspapers all over the country were writing on the election and publicizing local meetings. On Sundays, freed people would travel a dozen miles to attend. We knew what it meant for us.
The Democratic ticket was the most anti-Black, anti-Chinese, anti-Indian Democratic slate imaginable.
On the Republican ticket, Colfax’s abolitionist record was equally clear. During his first term as Speaker of the House, Colfax led the effort to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, and deliberately stepped away from the Speaker’s podium to vote in favor of the final amendment in January of 1865. His name was also attached to theFourteenth Amendment, granting our people naturalized United States citizenship.
Grant had his problems. There was the drinking, of course. There was his 1862 General Order Number 11: aimed at cotton speculators, but in actual wording it commanded that all Jewish people leave towns in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. A horrified Lincoln had intervened and revoked the order. Now it came back to haunt Grant.
But we couldn’t let him lose.
White supremacists responded to our organizing by conducting a reign of terror throughout the South, in outright defiance of the federal government. White Southerners from all classes of society were flocking to the Klan and other terror groups: The Knights of the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Knights of the Rising Sun in Texas, the Knights of the Red Hand, the Pale Faces, the White Brotherhood, the Constitutional Union Guards.
They whipped the teachers of freedmen's schools and burned our schoolhouses. Black citizens were tortured and killed for "impudence" toward whites. And the violence was especially concentrated on keeping us from voting.
In October in Texas, a band of Klan vigilantes killed the leader of the local Republicans and a number of his Black allies. For the next two months Klan bands rode through the countryside burning houses and crops and beating and intimidating our people. Republicans in Louisiana and in Georgia had to abandon campaigning altogether due to the violence.
But we were making Election Day plans of our own.
The nearer the election came, the more tense we all were. Our people still couldn’t vote in California. But we knew that Black freedmen in the South would be voting for all of us. Voting Republican.
The Klan had rampaged through the Southern states all summer. Two thousand election-related murders of Black citizens and Republicans in Arkansas alone, and over a thousand in Louisiana.
In those states and in Georgia, where the beatings and threats were so frequent that Republicans had shut down campaigning entirely, the Democrats won. In those three states.
But throughout the South, despite mortal danger, huge numbers of freed people went to vote.
They camped out in groups in the woods close to the polls and sent scouts to see when the fewest whites were at the polling places. Some armed themselves. They had to go in large numbers just to cast their ballots. But vote they did.
On Tuesday, November 3, Ulysses S. Grant was overwhelmingly elected in the electoral college, along with dozens of Black men who would be headed to Congress.
In San Francisco, a huge Union torchlight procession trooped the city bearing cards:
We go for Seymour as we go for Lee!
God - Grant - Victory!
Deeds, not words
It’s all over!
Grant has smoked his cigar
And Seymour has taken the
Stump!
At our AME church in San Francisco, there was exhilaration. All in all, half a million freedmen had voted for Grant, and Grant had won by 300,000. We had decided the election.
We read Grant’s words as he thanked God for the nation’s benefits:
“A territory unsurpassed in fertility, of an area equal to the abundant support of 500,000,000 people, and abounding in every variety of useful mineral in quantity sufficient to supply the world for generations; with exuberant crops; with a variety of climate adapted to the production of every species of earth’s riches and suited to the habits, tastes, and requirements of every living thing…. Harmony is being rapidly restored within our own borders. Manufactures hitherto unknown in our country are springing up in all sections, producing a degree of national independence unequaled by that of any other power.’’
And Frederick Douglass’s triumphant proclamation:
“The black man is a citizen. The black man is enfranchised. We live in a new world. At last, the black man has a future.”
After the celebration, I had my own private realization, and it shook me. Grant had won the popular vote—but barely.
An editorial by Legh Freeman was a pretty good summation of the Secesh reaction:
What We Expect — Prepare for the Worst
Grant, the whisky bloated, squaw ravishing adulterer, monkey ridden, nigger worshipping mogul is rejoicing over his election to the Presidency. On the fourth of March next, the hellborn satrap will (if he be alive) assume the honors (?) and robe of a DICTATOR . . . The road to the White House which Grant has traveled over during our last campaign is paved with the skeletons of many thousand soldiers whom he slaughtered uselessly during his western and southern military career. A blindly infatuated people seem to have rejoiced over the actual murder of their friends and kindred — Eastern mothers must tremble for the safety of their daughters' virtue, knowing that the gaudy military uniform of their President and ruler covers the filthy, lecherous carcass of a libertine, seducer and polygamic squaw keeper. . . . Time only will tell how this "elevation of one of the mob" will end, and in the meantime we advise our friends to be prepared for the worst. Booth still lives. Sic semper tyrannis.
You only had to look at the margins, how close Seymour came to winning Northern states like Indiana, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania—and the narrow victories for Republicans in Southern states despite the half million new Black votes—to see that a majority of white men had voted for Seymour.
We’d come that close to Southern rule over the North, just three years after the end of the war.
But at the same time, with all our own people voted into office for the very first time, there was a sense of endless possibility.
I decided I’d let it be a victory. And hope that Grant would prove the man we needed him to be.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning:
After the Gold Rush is a reader-supported publication. Please consider supporting this work with a free or paid subscription:
Likes, Comments and Shares are really helpful and much appreciated!