How the Southern whites escaped from Negro domination has often been told and may here be sketched only in outline.The first States regained from radicalism were those in which the Negro population was small and the black vote large enough to irritate but not to dominate.Although Northern sentiment, excited by the stories of "Southern outrage," was then unfavorable, the conservatives of the South, by organizing a "white man's party" and by the use of Ku Klux methods, made a fight for social safety which they won nearly everywhere, and, in addition, they gained political control of several States--Tennessee in 1869, Virginia in 1869-1870, and North Carolina and Georgia in 1870.They almost won Louisiana in 1868 and Alabama in 1870, but the alarmed radicals came to the rescue of the situation with the Fifteenth Amendment and the Enforcement Laws of 1870-1871.With more troops and a larger number of deputy marshals, it seemed that the radicals might securely hold the remaining states.Arrests of conservatives were numerous, plundering was at its height, the Federal Government was interested and was friendly to the new Southern rulers, and the carpetbaggers and scalawags feasted, troubled only by the disposition of their Negro supporters to demand a share of the spoils.
Although the whites made little gain from 1870 to 1874, the states already rescued became more firmly conservative; white counties here and there in the black states voted out the radicals; a few more representatives of the whites got into Congress; and the Border States ranged themselves more solidly with the conservatives.
But while the Southern whites were becoming desperate under oppression, public opinion in the North was at last beginning to affect politics.The elections of 1874 resulted in a Democratic landslide of which the Administration was obliged to take notice.Grant now grew more responsive to criticism.In 1875he replied to a request for troops to hold down Mississippi: "The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the Government." As soon as conditions in the South were better understood in the North, ready sympathy and political aid were offered by many who had hitherto acted with the radicals.The Ku Klux report as well as the newspaper writings and the books of J.S.Pike and Charles Nordhoff, both former opponents of slavery, opened the eyes of many to the evil results of Negro suffrage.Some who had been considered friends of the Negro, now believing that he had proven to be a political failure, coldly abandoned him and turned their altruistic interests to other objects more likely to succeed.Many real friends of the Negro were alarmed at the evils of the reconstruction and were anxious to see the corrupt political leaders deprived of further influence over the race.To others the constantly recurring Southern problem was growing stale, and they desired to hear less of it.Within the Republican party in each Southern State, there were serious divisions over the spoils.First it was carpetbagger and Negro against the scalawag; later, when the black leaders insisted that those who furnished the votes must have the larger share of the rewards, the fight became triangular.As a result, by 1874 the Republican party in the South was split into factions and was deserted by a large proportion of its white membership.
The conservative whites, fiercely resentful after their experiences under the enforcement laws and hopeful of Northern sympathy, now planned a supreme effort to regain their former power.Race lines were more strictly drawn;ostracism of all that was radical became the rule; the Republican party in the South, it was apparent, was doomed to be only a Negro party weighed down by the scandal of bad government; the state treasuries were bankrupt, and there was little further opportunity for plunder.These considerations had much to do with the return of scalawags to the "white man's party" and the retirement of carpetbaggers from Southern politics.There was no longer anything in it, they said; let the Negro have it!
It was under these conditions that the "white man's party" carried the elections in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas in 1874, and Mississippi in 1875.
