The Republican Party abandoned its commitment to the voting rights of black men after their failure to keep the presidency in 1892. The party that former Whigs and abolitionists founded on the slogan “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men” maintained a party plank promising “especially to the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections, and to have that ballot duly counted.” (Republican Party Platform, 1888. Third paragraph.) But in 1896, that language dropped, and the party’s standard-bearer spoke instead of reconciliation, and against sectionalism. In the South, the Lost Cause narrative became the grounds for reunion and reconciliation with the North. (David S. Blight. Race and Reunion. 271.) This shift permitted the nation to move forward, forgetting the grievances that had caused the war, but also entrenched the pre-war social order.
There are two sides to this issue. One, to which Benjamin Harrison belonged, would hold to the old Republican principles, never surrendering the view of Ulysses S. Grant that “The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery.” (U. S. Grant. Memoirs) This side pushed the Federal Elections Bill forward, and after it failed did not surrender the bill’s underlying principles. The other side, which William McKinley supported, began on the same line, and supported the Lodge bill less on principle on more on the hope of resurgent Republicanism in the South. When it failed, their hopes turned away from black enfranchisement and toward a possible Southern white Republican voting bloc.
McKinley and Harrison, in the 1880s, had to counter charges that they were “waving the bloody shirt,” inflaming sectional tensions to gain votes, and both men denied the charge. Nevertheless, each maintained that Southerners were wrong to deny voting rights to black men. Harrison, in a campaign speech to the Marquette Club of Chicago, on March 20th, 1888, responded,
“They say we are trying to revive the strife of the war, to rake over the extinct embers, to kindle the fire again. I want it understood that for one I have no quarrel with the South for what took place between 1861 and 1865. I am willing to forget that they were rebels, at least as soon as they are willing to forget it themselves, and that time does not seem to have come yet to them. But our complaint is against what was done in 1884, not against what was done during the war. Our complaint is against what will be done this year, not what was done between 1861 and 1865. No bloody shirt… (Benjamin Harrison. Speeches, Chicago, March 20th, 1888. ‘Marquette Club Banquet.’ 19-23.)
A few years earlier, McKinley had to make a similar denial. At Ironton, Ohio, on October 1st, 1885, McKinley said that:
“It will not do to say…‘The war is over,’ that is not a sufficient answer; nor will it lessen the force of these facts to reply, ‘You are waving the bloody shirt.’ All such rejoinders are inadequate to quiet public conscience and stifle public discussion. We are not talking of what occurred during the war, or immediately after, but what took place only last year, and what is of official record and can not be denied.” (William McKinley. Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley. ‘A Campaign Speech at Ironton, Ohio.’ October 1st, 1885, 170.)
But thirteen years later, with Harrison out of the White House and McKinley in it, one of these men had changed his rhetoric. McKinley had adjusted his speech to a unionist, conciliatory tone. During the 1896 election, the New York Times declared,
It is safe to say that the era of Force Bills and Federal interference has passed. …the fear of Force Bills [has kept] the South solid…and Major McKinley has given one indication of his sagacity [by] depreciating sectional division and appealing to a common patriotism to protect the Nation’s honor. (New York Times. October 24th, 1896.)
In his Inaugural Address, McKinley promised that “It will be my constant aim to do nothing, and permit nothing to be done, that will arrest or disturb this growing sentiment of unity and cooperation, this revival of esteem and affiliation, which now animates so many thousands in both the old antagonistic sections, but I shall cheerfully do everything possible to promote and increase it.” (William McKinley. Inaugural Address, March 4th, 1897.) McKinley spoke about the Civil War as if the result had been a fully equal society, “the freest government…governed equally by equal citizens everywhere.” (William McKinley. Speeches. ‘Speech at G.A.R. Camp-fire, Delaware Avenue M.E. Church, Buffalo, New York, August 24th, 1897.’ 41-42.)
And though McKinley counted “these brave black men” (Ibid. ‘Speech at Springfield, Illinois, October 15th, 1898.’ 126-127.) among the heroes of the Spanish American War, he did not include voting rights on his agenda. In fact, counting his successes in an October 6th, 1899 speech in Illinois, he listed first the victory in the War, second economic prosperity, and third, “…the triumph we have had over sectionalism. We are no longer a divided people; and he who would stir up animosities between the North and the South is denied a hearing in both sections.” (Ibid. ‘Speech at Canton, Illinois, October 6th, 1899.’ 229.)
This pivot turned on McKinley’s view on the causes of the Civil War. Major McKinley did not relate slavery as the cause of the war. The end to slavery, McKinley opined, was God’s work.
When the war commenced we had no conception of its length, and we had less conception of the great results…. We thought that the Union to be saved was the Union as it was…. Nobody believed, I mean, of the great mass of the people, that with the end of that war would be the end of human slavery. But not from men was our issue; from Him who is a sovereign of land and of sea came our ordeal of battle, that men might be free. (Ibid. ‘Speech at G.A.R. Camp-fire, Delaware Avenue M.E. Church, Buffalo, New York, August 24th, 1897.’ 41-42.)
Harrison had laid out his own thinking on the cause of the Civil War at the Marquette Club in 1888. General Harrison placed the suppression of human liberty first, and the secession issue first:
…the Republican party carried that debate from the hustings to the battle-field and forever established the doctrine that human liberty is of natural right and universal. It clinched the matchless logic of Webster in his celebrated debate against the right of secession by a demonstration of its inability. (Benjamin Harrison. Speeches. ‘Chicago, March 20th, 1888. Marquette Club Banquet.’ 19-23.)
Continuing in picturesque tones, Harrison showed that all the Republican party had accomplished all war aims save one: “to make that constitutional grant of citizenship, the franchise to the colored men of the South, a practical and living reality.” (Ibid.)
Ex-President Harrison continued the assert that the war had been fought over slavery. He returned to the Marquette Club on Lincoln’s birthday, 1898, to honor the slain president’s memory. Lincoln, in Harrison’s view, possessed a principled stand against slavery that extended down to a religious imperative, united to the Declaration of Independence: ‘All men’ included the black man. Liberty is the law of nature. The human enactment can not pass the limits of the state; God’s law embraces creation.” (Benjamin Harrison. Views of an ex-President. ‘“Abraham Lincoln” February 12, 1898 at the Lincoln Day Banquet of the Marquette Club, Chicago.’ 476.)
Like McKinley, Harrison believed emancipation to have been at least semi-divine. But unlike McKinley, Harrison directly tied Lincoln to emancipation and the causes of the war. Harrison’s Lincoln had “faith in time,” and had waited from the war’s beginning until the right moment to free the slaves. That placed slavery at the center of the conflict, and commanded that the issue that originated the conflict still commanded attention.
Although Harrison never ran for office after 1892, he joined the campaign in 1896, supporting McKinley. He delivered two large speeches, one at Carnegie Hall in New York in August, and another in Indianapolis in October. The issues of the 1896 campaign were economic: the silverites versus the gold bugs. Harrison delivered precise critiques of Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s economic proposals, and did not veer off into discussion of voter intimidation in the South. However, two key phrases hint at Harrison’s views at this time, after the Federal Elections bill had lain in its grave for five years. In his New York address, the former president expressed his belief in the limits of Federal authority.
My friends, this division of powers between the general and the local authorities is a plain and easy one. A disturbance which is purely local in a state is a state affair. The president can not send troops or lend any aid unless the legislature calls upon him for help, or the governor, if the legislature is not in session. But when a law of the United States is resisted, it is the sworn duty of the president to execute it… (Ibid, “‘At the Republican Ratification Meeting,” Carnegie Hall, New York, August 27, 1896.’ 432.)
Later, in Indianapolis, Harrison repeated his opposition to voter coercion.
I denounce it; I have always denounced it. I have always proclaimed as American doctrine that every man should vote according to the dictates of his own conscience (applause); that no man should coerce him, and that his vote, when cast, should be honestly counted. (Indianapolis Journal, Indianapolis, Marion County, 25 October 1896, Page 1.)
The implications are clear: Harrison believed that the Federal government did not have the authority to intervene in the South without explicit Congressional approval, and then only with regard to national elections. The sentiments in these two speeches echo a letter that President Harrison had sent to the Virginia State Baptist Convention on May 21st, 1892, on the matter of ongoing lynching:
I have not time to explain to you the limitations of federal power further than to say that under the Constitution and laws, I am, in a large measure, without the power to interfere for the prevention or punishment of these offenses. (Harrison to H. H. Mitchell, quoted in Sinkler, ‘Harrison on the Matter of Race.’)
In 1890, during the hottest debate on the Federal Elections Bill, Republican newspapers turned against the legislation. The Toledo Blade, a Republican paper, asserted that Southern “whites there would divide on the tariff and other questions of the day as they divide in the North, were it not for the incessant agitation of the Force bill bogie and the cry of “No negro domination!” The nation’s politics moved on after the Federal Elections Bill. The Republican Party, beginning in 1896, abandoned support for voting rights in the South in favor of the possibility of a white Republican resurgence in the South.
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