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Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

David Quigley
David Quigley
Affiliation:
Boston College
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Extract

Congressional enactment of the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 marked an unprecedented federalization of voting rights. The various election laws aimed to make real the promise of the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the constitution. A complex duality characterized this new departure in the constitutional understanding of democratic suffrage. On one hand, Republican leadership looked to secure the rights of freedmen in the Reconstruction-era South. At the same time, from the outset, northern Republicans strategically worked to strengthen the party in all regions with a particular interest in urban America. From the immediate postwar years down to the early 1890s, congressional committees regularly investigated the problematic and deeply partisan politics of enforcement. Often, House and Senate investigators were more concerned with developments in northern cities than with the state of African American voting across the rural South. This urban story of the consequences of constitutional revision illuminates the often-obscured national dimensions of Reconstruction and its aftermath, while also alerting us to shifting visions of the vote across the final third of the nineteenth century. This essay explores this nationalization of Reconstruction in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment's enactment by first documenting the central place of New York City in the emerging postbellum electoral regime and then expanding out from Manhattan to look at broader patterns of urban experience with enforcement.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2008 , pp. 64 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2008

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References

Notes

1. Essential introductions to Gilded Age state formation remain Bensel, Richard, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, and Skowronek, Steven, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

2. See Gillette, , Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979)Google Scholar. The July 1870 Naturalization Act is omitted by some historians of the period, though Eric Foner includes it as one of the four Enforcement Acts. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 454Google Scholar. U.S. Congress, Committee on the Expenditures in the Department of Justice, Expenditures in the Department of Justice: The Secret Service Fund, Report no. 800, 44th Cong., 1st sess., 5 August 1876, 72 [hereafter Caulfield Committee Report].

3. See Beckert, , “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,” Past and Present (2002): 116–157Google Scholar; Valelly, , The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2005).Google Scholar

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5. See National Anti-Slavery Standard, February and March 1870. New York Tribune, New York Herald, New York Times, New York Sun, 9 April 1870.

6. For a history of the right to vote in New York between the American Revolution and Reconstruction, see Gellman, David N. and Quigley, David, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877 (New York, 2003).Google Scholar

7. See “A Memorial of a Committee of the Union League Club of the City of New York,” presented to Congress, 14 December 1868, in Union League Club Library. Also noted in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Alleged New York Election Frauds, Alleged New York Election Frauds, Report No. 31, 40th Cong., 3d sess., 24 February 1869 [hereafter Lawrence Committee Report], 1, 160.

8. Lawrence Committee Report, 1, 7.

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12. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Grant to Metcalf, 19 October 1870. Grant to Cox, 20 October 1870. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman recalled that “in the month of October and perhaps in November, in the year 1870, there were frequent conversations with the President, in which the frauds which were likely to be practiced were very frequently discussed.” Caulfield Committee Report, 65; Journal of Commerce, 29 October 1870, 3; Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 387.

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15. New York World, 30 October 1870. These charges were picked up by Democratic editors around urban America and were cited by opponents of the urban suffrage regime as late as 1881. See Burke, “Federal Regulation …,” 216–21. “The Men Who Are to Give Us Honest Elections,” New York Sun, 31 October 1870.

16. Davenport, New York Election Frauds …, 321–44. See also Police Court Docket Books, October and November 1870, New York City Municipal Archives.

17. New York Evening Post, 1 November 1870, 3. Davenport, The Election and Naturalization Frauds …, 321–22. Journal of Commerce, late October 1870.

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21. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870, 2. George Templeton Strong believed that armed federal officers had prevented civil unrest on a grander scale: “election seems to have gone off peacefully, thanks to the federal bayonets that have been snuggly stowed away out of sight at various points in and around the city.” The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 8 November 1870. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870, 3.

22. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870, 3.

23. Journal of Commerce, 9 November 1870, 3. New York Times, 9 November 1870.

24. New York World, 10 November 1870.

25. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Grant to Davenport, 2 March 1871.

26. Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, chap. 4. Foner, Reconstruction, 455–59.

27. Caulfield Committee Report, ix, 18, 44, 42.

28. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Expenditures for Supervisors and Deputy Marshals at Elections, 1870–84, 48th Cong., 2d. sess., Doc. 247; Burke, “Federal Regulation,” 108.

29. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 257.

30. Burke, “Federal Regulation …,” ii. Caulfield Committee Report, 25, 46.

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33. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 108.

34. Wang, Xi, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (Athens, Ga., 1997).Google Scholar

35. Valelly, Richard M., “Counterfactualizing American Political Development: What We Can Learn from the Federal Elections Bill of 1890,”9–10, paper presented at the Miller Center, University of Virginia,December 2004Google Scholar; see also Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 244.