Elections in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri and Maryland

Chapter 10 Greeley’s Ghost: Elections in Arkansas, Texas, Missouri and Maryland

1 Arkansas

Arkansas Democrats rejected the call for a White League-style racial cam- paign. They relied on arithmetic. The state was white. Victory was assured if white men voted. There was no need for violence. Violence would benefit only Republicans, allowing them to contest and overturn the results. Arkan- sas Democrats walked softly and carried a twig. Some even gave civil rights a friendly nod. Should Congress in its wisdom enjoin Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill upon them, they raised no objection. One man primarily was responsible for this situation, and he was not a Democrat: Hon. Powell Clayton, Republican, once governor, currently United States senator, perhaps the most forceful “carpetbagger” to dominate a southern state. In 1871 he had relinquished the governorship to take his seat in the Senate. He left his place in the friendly hands of a Republican, Ozra Hadley. Events upset his plans. The election of 1872 commenced the destruction of the Republican Party in Arkansas, a downfall for which Sen. Clayton was honest enough to blame himself. The Liberal Republican movement tore the party’s vote apart. Democrats emerged the only ones to gain. In that year’s election for governor the genuinely radical candidate, Joseph Brooks, ran as a Liberal Republican. Brooks, an Abolitionist before the war, a chaplain of the Colored Infantry during the war, owned radical beliefs, but he had developed a contentious dislike of Powell Clayton. The senator hand- picked a rival. Elisha Baxter had been a Whig. Now he professed Republican allegiance. He could, Clayton hoped, attract Democratic votes. It was a monu- mental miscalculation.1 In an election rife with fraud, Baxter emerged a much-disputed winner. He turned at once to bite the hand that fed him. “I discovered,” Clayton recalled, in a considerable understatement, “that we had made a bad political deal.”2 Baxter reached out to Democrats. A referendum ended the disfranchisement

1 Powell Clayton, The Aftermath of the Civil War in Arkansas (New York: 1969), 346–347. 2 Clayton, Aftermath, 347; see also Thomas A. DeBlack, With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1871–1874 (Fayetteville: 2003).

400 Chapter 10 of the white masses. Special elections swept Democrats into the legislature. Another referendum authorized a convention to rewrite the Reconstruction constitution of 1868, effectively to undo Republican control of Arkansas. Clayton reconciled with Brooks. Brooks seized the governor’s mansion. Baxter mobilized to take it back. In the spring of 1874 the Brooks-Baxter War became a shooting affair. Earth- works surrounded the capital. Baxter forces won a pitched battle at New Gascony. Brooks’ men killed a score of the enemy in the ambush of the steam- boat Hallie. After a month of chaos, President Grant ordered federal troops to intervene. He decided in favor of the officially-elected Governor Baxter. Demo- crats recognized Baxter’s victory as their own. They also acknowledged that that victory had occurred courtesy of the indulgence of the Republican admin- istration in Washington. They must do nothing to jeopardize that indulgence: no violence against black people; no agitation against civil rights bills. All that could wait for another day. The immediate result of the Brooks-Baxter War was the creation of a new state constitution. Baxter’s victory ensured its consummation. A constitutional convention assembled. Voters ratified its handiwork in October. A new election for governor commenced. Democrats offered Baxter the honor. He declined. They nominated Augustus Garland, one of their own. His election would signal Arkansas’ redemption. For Republicans salvation could come only one way: federal intervention.3 If they could show that Democratic success was tainted by violence, Congress might reverse the course of events. As the election approached Clayton fine- tuned his antennae, searching for Democratic “outrages.” He organized the Southern Republican Convention to dramatize the situation. Arkansas Demo- crats understood. They must commit no misdeed. The elections of 1874 found them on their best behavior. Extend the hand of friendship to Republicans equally and to black people. Thus Arkansas Democrats, alone among their southern kin, gave the Civil Rights Bill not merely kind treatment but practical endorsement. What they confessed in their hearts nobody knows. What they professed on the stump we know. Politics obliged. Democrats obeyed. Arkansas’ Republicans, faced with opponents who refused to fight, were reduced to taunting. They denied the validity of the new constitution. They refused to participate in the gubernatorial election. They assembled in state convention at Little Rock on September 15. By then Baxter rested safely in the governorship. The constitutional convention had met. The constitution lay

3 DeBlack, With Fire and Sword, 224–225.