In Defense of Radical Reconstruction: Part II – the Uniqueness of Virginia

My last post dealt with the general history of Reconstruction; this one will deal specifically with Virginia, whose very unusual Reconstruction history has, I believe, led many native to the Commonwealth to take an unbalanced (in factual terms, not mental health terms) view of the entire era – a view best summed up by Jim Bowden here: “Reconstruction delayed integration and better race relations by ninety years.”

Jim appears to be of the opinion that had the North let well enough alone, the South made have moved forward on racial issues by itself.  Conventional wisdom holds that argument to be utterly ridiculous, and I myself think it to be flawed.  However, there is a very good reason Jim holds that view, one not very well known: in Virginia – it almost happened.  In fact, Virginia’s entire history in the last third of the nineteenth century separates it from South and North, in a way that frankly should do her sons and daughters proud.  To see how it happened, we have to go back to the end of the Civil War.

For starters, Virginia was unusual in that it had a functioning Unionist government throughout the War.  In mid-1861, Unionist Virginians met in Wheeling and restored the government of Virginia.  Lincoln recognized it quickly, and several Virginians represented the western counties in Congress.  After 1863, when the Unionist Virginia government allowed West Virginia to be formed, most Virginia Unionists (who basically gave themselves permission to form the new state) moved over to West Virginia politics.  Pierpoint, however, chose to remain Governor of Virginia, and thus when the war ended, he went to Richmond.  While he himself was hardly a Radical, he did push for a rewrite of the state constitution in 1867.  Large numbers of white Virginians refused to vote (in protest of black Virginians being given the right to do in the assembly elections), which assured a Radical Republican majority.

The resulting constitution, like many other Reconstruction southern constitutions, called for universal manhood suffrage except for ex-Confederates, and it is here that Virginia departed dramatically from the rest of the South.  In the other ten ex-rebel states, white Democrats, following their national party and President Johnson, focused most of their rage on black suffrage.  In Virginia, the leaders of the states non-Republicans did two very different things.  First, they refused to even call themselves Democrats, preferring instead the Conservative label.  Secondly, and most importantly, they did not oppose black voting rights.  Instead, they pleaded with the military commander in Virginia (which was under military control since the Reconstruction Act) to delay the vote on the constitution for one year and drop only the clause that disenfranchised rebel soldiers.

Caught off guard by the conciliatory tone of the Virginia leaders (known to history as the Committee of Nine), Washington assented, allowing the disenfranchisement clause to be voted separately from the rest of the constitution – in 1869.  That gave the Committee and their supporters enough time to pull off another unique political coup, the division of the state’s Republican Party.

Radicals and moderates had uneasy alliances in much of the nation’s GOP.  In Virginia, however, the “moderates” were led by New York-born Gilbert C. Walker, who could be best described as the first RINO in American history.  The Conservatives (i.e., Democrats) courted him heavily, and by 1869, Walker was leading something called the “Only True Republican” Party, made up largely of fellow RINOs.  Once again, Virginia’s ex-rebel leaders departed from the normal script, refused to run anyone for Governor in 1869, and threw their support to Walker.  He waxed the Radical Henry Wells in the 1869 election, took office, and easily won the withdrawal of federal troops from the state.

In every other state in the former Confederacy, the Radicals were in power and ascendancy, but in Virginia, the Radicals lost power before the state was readmitted into the Union.  Nowhere else did this happen.  That’s the first major Virginian difference.

The second involves Walker’s tenure as Governor.  During and before the War, Virginia had accumulated a hefty public works debt.  Despite the fact that 1/3 of the state was now gone (West Virginia), Walker chose to honor and recapitalize the entire debt.  When he took the added step of selling much of the state’s railway network for the proceeds to pay it, folks started wondering if the whole thing was designed to enrich his friends in New York.  Much like the rest of the “corruption” that surrounds Reconstruction, it’s hard to say where real misdeeds ended and hype began (as I recall, John S. Wise, son of Henry A., hinted that Walker’s brother was also a major bondholder in his semi-autobiographical The Lion’s Skin).  However, two things that made Virginia unique was (1) the involvement of massive, crippling debt that had been incurred before Reconstruction began, and (2) the corruption, or appearance of it, occurred when the Radicals were out of power, but before the perceived end of Reconstruction (Walker’s term as Governor ended in 1874).

So, while Virginia had its carpetbagger Governor with strong hints of corruption, the Radicals were his opposition, not the former Confederates.  This lead to the unique confluence of events that became the Readjuster Movement in Virginia.  More to the point, the fact that it was the so-called Redeemers that had the dirt on their hands was not only unique to Virginia, but also largely lost to the cursory review of history.

Most importantly, it is the Readjuster Movement that is the best evidence for Bowden’s assertion that the North “screwed up” Reconstruction.  In 1879, nearly ten years after the Radicals were turfed in Virginia, and two years after the last American soldier left all parts of the ex-Confederacy, a Confederate Major General (William Mahone) founded the Readjuster party, and built the first biracial coalition in the history of the South (and arguably, the first in American history).

It began as an argument over the Walker debt.  Many Virginians, including Mahone believe West Virginia should have to cover 1/3 of the obligation.  Walker supporters disagreed.  The arguments came to a head in 1879, when Mahone launched a Readjuster Democratic ticket for the state legislature.  Both the Readjusters and the Conservatives (they still called themselves that) ignored black voters (who were almost all Republicans anyway) – until they noticed the white vote was so closely divided that African-Americans could pick the winner.

Mahone made a deal with the Republicans – support the Readjusters and we’ll make it worth your while.  The result was Readjuster-Republican control of the legislature in the 1879 and 1881 elections, and the election of William Cameron on the Readjuster-Republican ticket for Governor in the latter year.  The movement did readjust the debt, but they also abolished the poll-tax and the whipping-post, equalized funding for the separate racial school systems, and included blacks in the state patronage network (Civil War Memory).  For two years, a functioning bi-racial coalition controlled Virginia at a time when the other ten ex-rebel states were marginalizing blacks as quickly as possible and even northern states (which had few African-Americans anyway) largely shunned them politically.

Sadly, it was not to last, as the Democrats (they called themselves this again, now) won the legislature in 1883 and the governorship in 1885, by which time the Readjusters had renamed themselves the Republican Party of Virginia (hence “RPV”).  Mahone’s Republicans would never win the state, but they did elect of majority of the state’s Congressmen in 1886, and nearly won the state for President Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

It is the failure of the Readjuster-Republican movement to last that, in the end, disproves Jim’s thesis.  Virginia was the state least affected by Reconstruction, yet racial equality was still thwarted.  In fact, the white supremacists in Virginia did everything they could to blacken the names of the Readjusters (pun intended).  I’m guessing several Virginians reading this post are seeing this information for the very first time.

Still, regardless of the argument between Jim and me, Virginians should be proud of their unique history.  This was arguably the only state in the Union that came even close to political equality in the nineteenth century – and that legacy lived on.  John S. Wise (The Lion’s Skin author) went on to represent black voters who sued the state over their disenfranchisement in the Constitution of 1902, making the Virginia-born Confederate veteran the first civil-rights lawyer of the twentieth century.  I would also humbly submit that the Readjuster impact (and the survival of its Republican descendant in the Shenandoah and New River Valleys) kept the Byrd organization from the more egregious racism of states further south, and thus made integration and civil rights here go a bit more smoothly (to say nothing of paving the way for the first African-American elected Governor in the nation’s history being here).  Virginia has its “sinful stain,” as Jim put it, but she also has a part of this era upon which her sons and daughters can look back with pride, if they only knew of it.