Emperor Pedro was triumphant. Yet the war had exposed inefficiency, injustice and corruption; in particular, the bravery of black regiments had highlighted the infamy of slavery. Pedro was an unhurried abolitionist who lacked the constitutional power to overrule his slave-owning elite.* But in the wake of his victory, in September 1871, he orchestrated the Law of Free Birth: the babies of slaves were born free. Brazil, with its 1.6 million slaves, was now the last slave society in America. As Pedro was hosted in Washington by a new president, America’s ex-slaves were in danger of losing their liberty all over again.
As Johnson’s presidency was disintegrating, General Grant had resigned from the government. Johnson, widely despised, had dismissed his secretary of war whose tenure was protected by congressional legislation, leading to the first impeachment. Johnson survived his Senate trial but was too damaged to run for the presidency a second time.
Diffident and reticent, but at the height of his prestige, Grant was ambivalent. ‘I didn’t want the presidency,’ he said. ‘But it couldn’t be helped …’ In November 1868, Grant, backed by Douglass, won the election – the youngest president so far, and one determined to defend the 3.5 million freed African-Americans of the south at any cost.
At his inauguration, Grant promised that black suffrage would be protected in a Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, inviting the first African-American senator, Hiram Revels, an Episcopal minister who had helped arrange black regiments during the war, to the White House. In February 1870, he ordered the firing of a hundred cannon to celebrate the Fifteenth Amendment – ‘the most important event,’ said Grant, ‘since the nation came to life.’ While only three black officials had ever been elected in America, sixteen were now elected to Congress, over 1,000 others elected to other positions; black churches and schools were created across the south; and black families – divided by the anti-family mechanism of slavery – were reunited and consolidated in a quest for lost relatives.
Great gains had been made, yet the former slave masters of the south were determined to claw back their power, and they would ultimately be supported by the leaders of the north in pulling off an astonishing reversal of the victory of the war.
All freed slaves were promised forty acres and a mule, but former slave masters refused to deliver – even though their ancestors had received free land by headright. The freed slaves’ poverty made them vulnerable. ‘When you turned us loose,’ Frederick Douglass declared ten years later, ‘you gave us no acres: you turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst of all, you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.’ Across the south, the KKK assassinated and intimidated freed slaves and white campaigners for black rights. The KKK’s Invisible Empire of racist paramilitaries threatened a new conflict and a new oppression. Two thousand African-Americans were killed in lynchings – extrajudicial murders of African-Americans, supposedly guilty of crimes, often celebrated by whites as part of ‘southern’ culture.
The violence was just the vanguard of a deeper counter-attack. The ex-Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens and many of his racist cohort had been elected to Congress. When the African-American Senator Revels took his seat, southern Democrats tried to stop him. They gradually reimposed supremacy over their ex-slaves but, above all, they wished to prevent black people, 36 per cent of the southern votes, from exercising their rights. Even in the north, only parts of New England gave African-Americans the vote. Connecticut, Wisconsin and Minnesota refused; most southern states now passed ‘Black Codes’. Murder sprees by the KKK and its allies, the Knights of the White Camellia, escalated, and the racists seized power in some counties.
Grant denounced the ‘force and terror’ designed to ‘reduce colored people to a condition akin to slavery’, oversaw the passing of the KKK Act and three Enforcement Acts and dispatched federal troops plus Justice Department marshals and the new Secret Service to destroy these domestic terrorists. In South Carolina, 2,000 Klansmen were arrested. In 1873, the KKK and another paramilitary group, the White Man’s League, rampaged through Colfax, Louisiana, killing around 300; in 1876 in Ellenton, South Carolina, 150 black people were massacred. In both cases, Grant sent in the army, crushing the KKK, but the struggle was just beginning.
