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U.S. Grant History Chat, Episode 7: Stephen West
Transcript
- Okay, hello, everybody, this is Nick Sacco, park ranger at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri. And this is Episode Seven of the U.S. Grant History Chat. It's my pleasure today to be speaking with Dr. Stephen West, professor of history at Catholic University in Washington, DC. And Dr. West specializes in the Reconstruction era. In an earlier interview, I learned that you had studied with Dr. Barbara Fields and Dr. Eric Foner, some pretty heavy hitters in the Reconstruction world. And in a few years you'll be working on and we'll have a book about the 15th Amendment coming up in the future. So, with the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment coming this year in 2020, I wanted to have Dr. West, come on to the program here and tell us a little bit about the Amendment and Grants relationship with it. So thank you, Dr. West, for being with us. And to kick off the conversation, I wanted to talk a little bit about the 15th Amendment and this concept of a universal right to vote. The 15th Amendment, it reads, info or says, "The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude." So it states that the states and the federal government can't ban voting or a voter from registering their ballot based on their race, but it doesn't necessarily give a universal right to vote. So I'm kind of curious to hear about, was that a part of the conversation in Congress, and how did the 15th Amendment kind of end up being sort of this compromise amendment in the end?
- Yeah, well, thanks for the opportunity to talk about this, and you're exactly right. So just to remind your viewers, the 15th Amendment is the third of the Reconstruction amendment. So the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, ratified in 1865, the 14th Amendment, which addresses birthright citizenship and civil rights passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in 1868. In the debates over the 14th Amendment, there are questions about whether to enfranchise black men, whether to ban racial restrictions on the suffrage then, and most Republicans in Congress are not willing to do it. And so the 14th Amendment has a section two which we hardly ever think about these days, because it's never been enforced, which doesn't require the enfranchisement of anybody, but does provide a mechanism for reducing a state's representation in the electoral college and in Congress, if they don't extend the suffrage. So this was obviously not to sort of the pleasure of radical abolitionists, Radical Republicans and abolitionists, Frederick Douglass calls section two of the 14th Amendment, "Compromising and worthless." And so the idea of enfranchising a black man, and extending the suffrage and banning racial discrimination and suffrage had been around before these debates over the 15th Amendment opened in late 1868, early 1869. And so exactly as you say, there's sort of various versions of the Amendment in circulation. The most expansive ones would assert a right to vote, would sort of guarantee that as an affirmative right, what we have and you read the text of the Amendment there, what we have is sort of a negatively phrased 15th Amendment. The States and the United States government can't ban suffrage on these certain grounds. In the course of the debates over the 15th Amendment, there are debates as well, or proposals as well, to use a negative formulation, but to ban more things. So there are proposals to ban literacy tests, education, property, intivity religion, that one version of the 15th Amendment would ban discrimination on the basis of sex. So it would have been franchised or extended the suffrage to women as well. All of those other things are trimmed out of the Amendment, over the course of the debates in Congress in early 1869. And so this is happening before Grant becomes president. But it's done to sort of get both consensus in Congress the 2/3 majority that Republicans need in each house of Congress, to get the amendment out of Congress and then to get it ratified by the 3/4 of the states that they need.
- So it's sort of a compromise measure, in the sense that to get that 2/3 majority, sort of sacrifice other elements like banning voter discrimination based on sex, so just trying to go with what's gonna to get the most appeal in Congress so eventually, the 3/4 of the states as well.
- Exactly, that's right.
- Okay, very interesting. And, along the line to talking about Grant, you're right there that it starts in Congress before Grant takes the office of the presidency. He mentioned support for ratification the 15th Amendment in his inaugural address when he takes office in 1869. But I'd love to hear a little bit more about Grant's own role in the 15th amendment and how he viewed the amendment.
- Yeah, and so, again, to remind your viewers, the president doesn't have any formal role to play in the amending of the constitution. the way that we've always amended the constitution is for Congress to propose an amendment and then for the states to ratify it. The President doesn't have to do anything. But, there's a a lot President can do, right? I mean, he's the leader of his party, he can try to bring people into line, he can bring pressure to bear on members of Congress to get their votes, he can bring pressure on governors and state legislatures. And so Grant, as you say, is inaugurated just shortly after the Amendment is passed by Congress. And so he signals in his inaugural address his support for ratification of the 15th Amendment, and he works behind the scenes to support it. And so for example, he pressures the governor of Nebraska, to call their legislature into session early to get it ratified, because he's eager to get this done. And so he's using those kind of powers, those informal powers that our president has behind the scenes.
- Interesting, interesting. And another element behind all of this here, too, is that we do see other pieces of congressional legislation like the Military Reconstruction Act that was passed in 1867, that basically mandated that the former Confederate States and franchise their black male population. And so in some ways, the 15th Amendment is in a way, it's kind of addressing the northern states. A lot of northern states put black suffrage on their state referendums or what have you. And in most cases, it failed. And in some ways, the North was sort of the last part of the country to enfranchise black males in the north. So kind of what was sort of the role of trying to get northern states on board with the 15th Amendment, if you kind of speak to how the relationship between the amendment and the northern states as well.
- Yeah, and so that's one of the issues here. And as of the end of the Civil War In 1865, there were only five states that enfranchised black men on an equal basis with white men. And so, and then there are a number of referendums as you suggested in the late 1860s. And they're almost always defeated, a couple of them passed, but they're almost all defeated. Black men in the former Confederate States, the one subject to military reconstruction had been enfranchised in 1868, effectively. And so, while we rightly think that Grant helps put the 15th amendment in the Constitution, it's also the case that black men helped put Ulysses S Grant in the White House. But the 1868 election also showed a number of challenges, there's sort of uncertainties about the kind of future fate both of blacks average in the north, but especially in the south. There's widespread election violence by the Ku Klux Klan, and other groups. Grant loses Louisiana and Georgia, two states that had been readmitted to the union because of the scale in part of terrorist violence against black voters and white Republicans as well. The 1868 presidential campaign is one of the most openly racist in American history. And, so Frank Blair from Missouri-
- St. Louis, yeah.
- Yeah, the vice presidential candidate is the most explicit about this. I mean, Frank Blair, essentially says, "Put democrats back in the White House, we will undo Reconstruction, we will withdraw military protection from the south, and the things that have been done will be undone." And so this is a signal to Republicans that if you wanna protect black voting rights in the south, you're going to need to write it into the Federal Constitution, and give the federal government enforcement powers and not merely leave it to state constitutions and the enforcement powers of the state. So that's one of the uncertainties and one of the problems. And then the other issue is, there's always been African American Republicans, radical white Republicans who supported enfranchising black men in the north as well. And so you've got this sort of confluence of circumstances that are pushing Republicans to adopting the 15th Amendment. And putting it in that guarantee, or that ban on racial discrimination in the Federal Constitution.
- Right, so the amendment process just sort of guarantees that a future Congress isn't gonna come around and just undo all of this work or a new addition ministration like a see more Blair administration exactly?
- Exactly, exactly.
- And then finally, just to wrap up our conversation here, we chat a little bit ahead of time about just the sort of the general state of scholarship on Reconstruction. And I noticed that with the 15th Amendment, I think one of the last really book length treatments of the 15th Amendment came from William Gillette, about 50 years ago in his book on the 15th Amendment. And we're seeing a lot more scholarship on reconstruction, but then a lot of us who've watched that documentary, The History Channel's documentary on Grant, there's only about 30 minutes dedicated to Grants presidency in these larger issues of Reconstruction. And I know part of your scholarship kind of focuses on the ways Reconstruction has been remembered, and how it's been interpreted over time. And we'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on sort of what we need to do to better understand Reconstruction in the present.
- Mm hmm, yeah.
- And so I think you're exactly right. I mean, the Grant miniseries, there were a lot of good things about it. But as somebody who focuses more on Reconstruction, like you, I couldn't help but note, what kind of short shrift Reconstruction gets there. And Grant plays a role both general in chief and then as president. So his role in reconstruction lasts longer than his role as as General in the Civil War. So I was disappointed in that. And I mean, I think there are a number of reasons for it in popular memory, there's a kind of fascination with military history that I think, we historians of Reconstruction, have a hard time competing with. I mean, that we just went through the 115th anniversary of the Civil War, we're now in the middle of the 150th anniversary of Reconstruction, but we're not seeing the same attention to it. I think part of it as well is that we're still sort of fighting against some of the pro-Southern lost cause views of Reconstruction that really took root in the dominant mind of white Americans, but also in the scholarship and in popular culture in the early 20th century. So, we think of things like "Birth of a Nation," but also "Gone with the Wind," which has been controversial recently. And so, historians, I think, are still very much sort of fighting that in the popular mind. For those who would like to celebrate or commemorate Reconstruction in a more positive way, we still have to sort of contend with the fact that, I wouldn't say it fails, I'd say it's overthrown, its defeated effectively by military force and fraud. And Grant himself, in the wake of his presidency, in the late 1870s, he's sort of trying to rethink some of these issues, as well. So as many of your viewers may know, Grant goes on a tour around the world for several years after he leaves the presidency. And out of that world tour comes a two volume book around the world with General Grant, which tells the story of his world travels, but also has interspersed with it his memories of the Civil War, and a good bit on reconstruction. When what's fascinating to me there is the memoirs are sort of rightly celebrated, Grant's memoirs, but there's almost nothing about Reconstruction in there, it effectively ends with the grand review in the spring of 1865. But in around the world, Grant reflects on reconstruction. And he says that he thinks a mistake was made with enfranchising black men, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. He's retreating in his own way from Reconstruction, but he's not abandoning it, because it's important to sort of read in context fully what he says. Grant's concern was with putting the union back together on sort of a stable and lasting basis. He had not been a Republican before the Civil War, but he talks about the goals of the Civil War and the purpose of the Civil War, the way that Republicans had talked about the threat of the so called slave power, to the sort of integrity of Republican government in the United States. And Grant in the aftermath of Reconstruction is still genuinely worried about that. He's worried that not only have white Southerners established home rule in the south, he's worried about what that means for the rights of African Americans. But he's also worried about what that means for sort of the fate of American democracy. It's unfair, he says, to give the southern states all of this extra voting power in Congress and in the Electoral College, which they've gained on the basis of a black population, whose suffrage they are increasingly denying. So he sees wrong to African Americans, he sees wrong to white Northerners, and he sees a kind of apparel to the republic, and to the sort of results of Civil War in Reconstruction. And white Southerners would dismiss this as quote unquote bloody shirt, rhetoric trying to sort of re-live or revive sectional animosities for political purposes. But Grant is, I think, a really genuine way worried about what the results of the war have been, and what happens in the United States and to the sort of Republican experiment if these rights are denied.
- Fascinating, and maybe in a way, it's sort of a warning sign of what could happen with a with an empowered white South, that is essentially disenfranchises black population, and really sort of thrown out the 15th Amendment as constitutional law. And what might happen is sort of a precursor to what will happen later on in the rise of the Jim Crow era, in a way.
- Yeah, yeah, very much, though. And, the other thing to remember, Grant is, these reminiscences of Grant's come out in a book that's published in 1879, 1880. Grant would like to be or won't say that he doesn't wanna be president again. Under the Republican convention, so I think we can sort of both take these as his sincere views, but he's also sort of pitching this to an important part of the Republican faithful in 1880. So it's both a reminiscence, if not quite as told to memoir, but also a kind of campaign document.
- Absolutely. And I tell people to when we talk about "Around the world with General Grant", he knows what he's saying there. And it was in the written record for several years before he died. So you'd have to think he was pretty reflective of how he felt about things. Because, it was out there in the world, so to speak, and Grant didn't criticize the book, so pretty reflective of where he his thinking was at that time.
- Yeah, yeah. And Grant, in that book, although he says, enfranchisement of black men had not worked out as he and the framers of the policy wanted, he's also quite clear that the bad guys in the stories that he's telling are the ex Confederates. He says, "Look, I've done everything I can do to conciliate them, I was willing to meet them halfway. They won't move, they won't do what we expect them to do, which is to accept in good faith. The results of the war is written into the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. They talk conciliation, but they don't really meet it."
- Right, and fascinating stuff. And it's a wonderful summarization of Grant's, where he's thinking at the end, after his presidency concludes. So this has been really fantastic, Dr. Stephen West, thank you so much for being with us today. If we wanna learn more about your scholarship, where can we find you?
- Well, I'm on Twitter, @StephenAWest, that's my handle. I've also got an article coming out talking about some of these issues about the sort of memory of Reconstruction in the 1880s, in "The Journal of the Civil War Era," in December of this year.
- Fantastic, well, that's great. We look forward to reading that. And thank you to Dr. Stephen West for being for being with us today, thank you.
- Yeah, my pleasure, thanks so much.
- All right.
Description
Ranger Nick interviews Dr. Stephen West, Professor of History at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Dr. West is working on a book about the 15th Amendment and the memory of Reconstruction.
Duration
18 minutes, 11 seconds
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