James Garfield in Congress: public support for Black suffrage, private prejudice

In Congress, James A. Garfield faced the war and the Reconstruction that followed. A park ranger at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, writing in 2013, describes a man whose public record on Black rights was firm and whose private views were not always admirable.

A Radical Republican, up to a point

Garfield's goals for the freedmen were closely in step with the Radical Republican program, above all the constitutional amendments meant to raise the status of Black Americans under the law. He backed extending the Freedmen's Bureau and the Civil Rights acts of the late 1860s, and, with initial misgivings, the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. In time he grew disillusioned with radicalism, telling a friend he was trying to be a radical without being a fool, which was no small difficulty.

Even before the war ended he favored confiscating rebel property. He believed the South had to be beaten to its knees and that both slavery and large estates had to go, because the power of slavery rested on the big plantations and, if slaveholders kept their power, they would use it against the freed people and make a mockery of the war's cost.

Still, Garfield did not want Black Americans to receive "special treatment." He disagreed with Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who wanted equal pay for white and Black soldiers, apparently thinking Stevens was playing for political points at home. He praised Black troops for their loyalty and service but said he would not make a fuss over a man merely because of his race.

Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens was a fierce abolitionist with whom Garfield disagreed over equal pay for Black soldiers. Library of Congress.

Private prejudice, public stance

The ranger does not hide the uglier side. In July 1865 Garfield wrote a friend that favoring Black suffrage went against the grain of his feelings, in words that by today's standards are demeaning. Earlier, as a younger man, he had remarked after a lecture on slavery that the speaker had some funny and witty things to say, using a period slur that is not repeated here; the ranger asks whether that was condescension or a genuine compliment. The writer calls the 1865 remark private and condescending, and suggests that his discomfort with unrestricted Black voting came partly from his era's racial prejudice and partly from his own experience: a man from a background with no advantages who had educated himself in history, religion, philosophy, literature, science and theater, and who felt qualified to take part in public life, may have doubted that every newly freed person was.

In public, though, he was consistent. At Ravenna, Ohio on July 4, 1865, he rejected the "senseless and absurd dogma" that skin color should decide who may vote. He reminded his audience that in the nation's extremity it had called on Black soldiers and made a covenant, "sealed both with his blood and with ours," that when the nation was redeemed they would be free and share its blessings. Freedom, he asked, could not be merely not being chained or sold: if that was all, it was a bitter mockery.

Why he backed the vote

His support tied genuine concern for Black welfare to a nationalist outlook: the economic unity of the country and a wish to broaden the Republican Party's appeal in the South. Without the ballot, he feared, the freedpeople would be unable to control their own destinies and would be at the mercy of pardoned rebels, with no voice in the conditions under which they lived and worked. Like many Republicans, he saw voting as an economic right as well as a political one.

The three-fifths clause

Those goals shaped the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, which abolished slavery, made the freed people citizens and guaranteed the vote to adult Black men. During the debate over the 14th Amendment, the three-fifths clause had to go. Under it every enslaved person counted as three-fifths of a person, inflating Southern power in the House. Garfield warned that if Black citizens were denied the vote while the House stayed the same size, the former rebel states would gain fifteen additional seats, putting the destiny of 412,000 Black men in the hands of 20,000 white men.

Losing the peace

Through the 1870s white Southern racists attacked African Americans and their Radical allies politically, physically and psychologically. Violence in Louisiana and Mississippi in the middle of the decade was especially galling, yet it seemed to push Northerners to withdraw from the South's problems. Supreme Court decisions nullified civil rights protections and allowed limits on voting. Garfield urged more civil rights legislation, arguing that the fate of white Americans was bound to that of Black Americans, and in January 1875 he wrote to a friend that the public had grown tired of appeals to do justice.

In a partisan speech, "The Democratic Party and Government," he lamented that Southern states had reenacted laws limiting Black liberty, including vagrancy and peonage laws under which people were sold at auction to pay a small tax or fine. He called the experiment of leaving political control to Southern whites a failure and condemned the Ku Klux violence as shocking barbarities. The ranger sees in this the start of what historian Douglas Blackmon later called the re-enslavement of African Americans through forced labor for supposed crimes, and concludes that, as Garfield feared, the freedom won by war was lost in peace.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "“The Most Important Political Change We Have Known”: James A. Garfield, Slavery, and Justice in the Civil War Era, Part II" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-the-most-important-political-change-we-have-known-james-a-garfield-slavery-and-justice-in-the-civil-war-era-part-ii.htm), by Alan Gephardt, park ranger, written in February 2013 for the Garfield Observer; two illustrations credited to other websites and a portrait whose subject is uncertain are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.