Coercion or Conciliation? Abolitionists Debate President Hayes's Southern Policy

Abstract

,WENDELL Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct forces in American politics, declared the New York Times on June 1, 1876, they represent ideas in regard to the South which the great majority of the Republican Party have outgrown. The Times thus epitomized both the attitude of the northern public toward Reconstruction and the resulting dilemma of those old-line abolitionists still alive in 1876. Following the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, most abolitionists had actively supported a program of education, economic assistance, and equal civil and political rights for the freedmen.' The constitutional amendments and Reconstruction legislation pushed through Congress by the Republican party had accomplished, on paper at least, a large part of this program. But by 1876 public opinion in the North had become tired of Reconstruction, with its seemingly constant refrain of violence, disorder, and corruption in the South. When President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew the last federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana in April 1877, thus ending national efforts to enforce Reconstruction, a majority of the old abolitionists denounced his action as an abandonment of the Negro. But most of the northern people (including even a sizable minority of former abolitionists) approved of the President's efforts to pacify the South. The abolitionists who protested that the withdrawal of federal power from the South foreshadowed the reduction of the Negro to second-class citizenship were proved right by the subsequent course of history, but in 1877 they were voices crying in the wilderness. The country wanted no more Reconstruction.2