John Thesis #7

by John Page

The main way that was pursed to make this change was Reconstruction. The best way to look at how Reconstruction impacted people is to look at how it worked within a particular state, such as Arkansas. Looking at the whole South or nation will give an impression of what was going on overall, while looking more local will demonstrate what was happening that may not be part of the larger trend.  This allows for both the rule and the exception to that rule. One of the biggest controversies during this time was the election of African-American officials into political office. This would be a huge step from not being counted as fully human in elections to having to power to make laws. If this change could be kept it would shift how the nation would be run. Yet the opposition to this was very strong. An example of this can be found in how

“The Arkansas Gazette, the leading Conservative paper in the state, was not pleased by their [African American legislators ] presence. It compared the session to the recent constitutional convention that had included eight black delegates [beastly scavengers picking over a corpse]. The Tebbetts corner…was well crowded yesterday with a collection of individuals from various parts of the state, who propose to organize themselves into a legislature ‘today,” the paper reported. ‘We notice that nearly all the radical members of the late menagerie have returned to our city, and the petty officers of the piebald assemblage are also here. They seem to congregate like buzzards about carrion.”[1]

 

This distrust reflects their fears and resentments of ex-confederates living in the South during the 1860s. They saw themselves as conquered and being ruled over by those they felt were opportunists and unworthy.[2] The description of the state as a dead body illustrates graphically how those who felt like the paper saw the situation as not one of hope for a better world but one of despair for a lost society. There were two wildly different narratives of what was happening in the post war South, one that was optimistic and one that was despairing. This disconnection in how what was going on was part of why there needed to be African-American legislators in office so that they could shape policy and counter act the scavenger narrative.

This was part of a policy of ensuring that African Americans could be part of the political processes and also keep ex-confederates out of office. [3] This state was similar to others throughout the South as the African-American population was not evenly distributed through the state. In some areas they made up the overwhelming majority and in others were not.

“Overall, the thirty-two African Americans sent to Little Rock during Reconstruction came from the legislative districts where many black voters lived. Most of these districts were composed of Arkansas Delta counties: Chicot, whose population was 74 percent black, according to the 1870 Census; Phillips (68 percent black); Desha (64 percent); Arkansas (51 percent); and Drew (38 percent). Others were elected from scattered pockets of the state with large African-American populations, such as Jefferson County in the southeast (65 percent), Hempstead County in the southwest (46 percent), and Pulaski County in the center (43 percent). [4]”

 

The fact that so many officials were elected from regions where African Americans were in the minority indicates either how many people were disbarred from elections or that there was a greater trust in them then what has been assumed by historians. This would indicate that policies to bring greater racial equability were working at this time. It was not impossible for a more just society to happen, it was simply very hard to do so.

Trying to achieve a better life for themselves and all African-Americans was the goal of the African-American legislators.  They tried to pass laws that would end discrimination and advanced education so the social inequality would go away.[5] There was a fear of being connected with too radical laws by the majority of the white legislators so support was ether secret or not present.[6] Division on what was the best policy for advancing civil rights caused segregationist policies to be introduced.[7] This reluctance for open support foreshadows the problems Grant would deal with on a nationwide level.  It is hard to reform if the majority is unwilling to help.  Either way this process was shows that there was a revolution in politics during this time that was mostly stopped or even reversed within twenty years. Perhaps Grant could have harnessed this potential to enact change but was ultimately unable to do so in light of strong white opposition.

During his time in office, Grant was constricted in his actions on issues that affected minorities by other people’s ideas on what must be done to ether protect the minorities’ rights or to keep them away from the larger white population. Attempts to do something different encountered arguments and delays that caused legislators to give up and promote policies that seemed moderate at the time but were in fact extremely unjust to the group that the law was designed to help. Instead of letting people be able to be free and gain the full benefits of American society, African-Americans and Native Americans were isolated from the rest of the country and lost many of the rights in practice even if it was not stated in a law. This legal discrimination was part of a larger attempt to undo the changes brought about by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

Another issue that affected how Grant was viewed was his actions in the Caribbean islands. His actions in this sphere showed a more aggressive Grant. He was more willing to act in ways that went against what was expected of him. This difference in attitude came from his relative freedom as president to dictate foreign policy. Yet America’s own internal conflicts did influence America’s attitudes toward the outside world. While his Reconstruction and the Indian policy plans were part of the domestic concerns of the nation as a whole and this concern bleed into foreign policy.[8]

Grant had the possibility of pursing polices that went against what most people expected or wanted from the American government. This gives a hint of what he would have been able to do in the faith of less opposition. One policy that took many people off guard was Grant’s willingness to use diplomacy to address a crisis in Cuba.[9] The source of the trouble was over Spain’s mismanagement of the island, the same reasons that would lead to the Spanish American war only a few decades later. Grant was able to defuse the tensions between the two nations by using a diplomatic solution to the crisis.[10] This also allowed Grant to show what he hoped to do as a peace loving president and not a bloody general,

“The method of achieving them—inviting six European powers to join the United States in an ‘intervention’—certainly was. Indeed, many observers on both sides of the Atlantic noted the irony of this policy coming from a nation that had long sought to block European involvement in the Western Hemisphere. ‘What has become of the Monroe Doctrine?’ the London Times asked. ‘The right of the leading European Powers to interfere in the politics of the American Continent [has] been recognized, and in some sense invited, by the Department of State.’ [11] ”

Grant followed his ideal of delegating power to lesser officials for the Cuba crisis, in this case successfully. While the nation was going through a crisis of self-identity during this time, the Civil War and its aftermath had forced Americans to really look at their nation’s destiny, the government hat to consider its role as a world power. Despite some debate over what to in certain situations there was a clear idea of what the country needed from the state department

:…[Hamilton] Fish’s [Grant’s sectary of state] estimation, adherence to international law and appropriate cooperation with European powers, particularly Britain, could prove the best means of maximizing benefits while minimizing costs”.[12]

 

In the Cuban case, like within the South, the government had to deal with a chaotic situation with multiple actors with conflicting goals and interests.[13] Trying to find a solution to these complex situations would require great cunning and patience to get warring parties to work together for the common good. Failure would lead to the loss of all the republic had sought to achieve during the previous decade.

His actions in this crisis are generally not a factor when historians are trying to determine how successful or not Grant was as a president. Instead most of the attention of modern day historians is focused on how Grant acted purely with the domestic debates. This may might be the cause as most of the criticism about Grant was focused on domestic concerns and not foreign policy. This would divert historian’s attentions to the issues that had the most attention from contemporaries of Grant. This is ignoring the fact that one of the crises that Grant was dealing with was one that was very much tied to American political struggles over slavery.[14] This was the role of slavery for a society that was founded on the idea of equality.

Now that slavery was illegal within the nation should America allow this practice to exist anywhere else in the world? Cuba was one such place. This was especially true for the nation as Cuba was right next to American and economically tied to it.[15] This connection of geography and economics made many American’s feel that Cuba’s problems were their problems.

The Civil War had caused a shift in American policy, as the Grant administration was much more hostile to slavery than the antebellum predecessors.[16] Instead of ignoring or openly supporting slavery throughout the Americas, the United States was now committed to abolishing slavery as it had been committed to stopping the slave trade. Any hint of a slave holding society would instantly cause great anger within the northern half of the nation and abolitionist throughout the whole country. They would remember the horrors of the American Civil war and want to ensure that the sacrifices made by Union soldiers would not be in vain.

While there was a strong desire to help the Cuban people, Grant and his advisers decided that trying to free them from Spain would cost too much and would result in American having to occupy Cuba. This was an outcome to be avoided for its downsides of bringing the U.S. into a violent region where the success of the war may have further unbalanced American racial relations. [17] This would also become a problem as the irony of recognizing the rights of rebels so soon after the American Civil War would be politically embarrassing.[18]  It could have been that many African Americas would want to know why the United States seem more interested in helping Afro-Cubans then helping them. Instead there a sense that by helping Cubans, African Americans could help themselves.

“This remarkable transformation of American policy regarding race and slavery had significant political and diplomatic implications. For one, it functioned as a rallying call for newly politically empowered African Americans. Led by Frederick Douglass, many African Americans demanded an active foreign policy aimed at emancipation and, if practicable, the annexation of Caribbean islands populated by blacks. African American leaders such as Douglass, Hiram Revels, and Joseph Rainey advocated Grant’s scheme to annex Santo Domingo in 1870–1871 on the grounds that it would improve the lives of the oppressed inhabitants of the island. Such thinking shaped African American responses to the Cuban rebellion, an issue on which blacks spoke with greater unanimity than they did on Santo Domingo. To side with the rebels, after all, would be to side with emancipation. As Douglass put it, ‘The first gleam of the sword of freedom and independence in Cuba secured my sympathy with the revolutionary cause.’ 17 African American pressure for intervention also emanated from the bottom up. A public meeting of African Americans at the Cooper Institute in New York in 1872 passed a resolution demanding intervention in Cuba, arguing that the Declaration of Independence applied not only to Americans, but to ‘all men.’”[19]

 

This attitude of many African-Americas shows that they were more than ready to use their new political influence to push the United States into working to fight for the rights of any people that were being oppressed. This was done in part to ensure that America would keep true to the promises that it made in proclaiming the equality of all mankind. For African-American leaders, Grant’s foreign policy was really more of an extension of their own battles for freedom within the U.S.  A victory in one would lead to a victory in the other. Grant as the hero of the Civil War would have felt and known of this pressure to keep up the work of the Union for the entire world.

There was also the possibility of a more racially equal society within Cuba if the rebellion went in a certain direction. There may have been a sense of a nationalism that was color blind and focused on the common struggle against Spain instead of what divided the Cubans. If the Cubans could see themselves as one people, then racial equality would have had a strong example to the world of how a society could overcome racial tensions and become one people.

“Ambiguity and paradox characterized the Cuban rebellion. Begun as a bid for independence by the elite slaveholder Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, it soon transformed into a revolutionary struggle for abolition, if not the construction of a new racial order. At times the insurgency—composed of white landowners and their former slaves, free blacks, and indentured Chinese laborers—pointed toward a new Cuban identity based on ‘a revolutionary cross-racial alliance’.[20] ”

 

If instead the Cubans used older racial attitudes stemming from slavery then this could lead to in fighting and repression of minorities. This example of tolerance or division would impact the United States as well for good or for ill. [21] What happened in Cuba would be used as evidence ether for the possibility of racial harmony or the impossibility of that.

This added mixture of racial tension would also dictate how America could act in this situation. What Grant did in this situation was just as much about America’s self-image as it was the rights of Cubans. [22]

“Prior to 1861 the United States had functioned as the greatest obstacle to the international antislavery movement. Leading American statesmen, many of whom were southern Democrats, blunted agreements aimed at curtailing the international slave trade and, more ominously, threatened to export and entrench the ‘peculiar institution’ in Central America and the Caribbean.  In the years after the war, however, the abolition of slavery in the Western Hemisphere became a stated objective of American diplomacy. Having ‘gone through a war to remove the disgrace of African slavery,’ Republican Congressman Clinton Cobb declared, ‘we will not let an opportunity pass of completing the noble work already now so nearly accomplished on this continent.’ Some went even further. Toward the end of his tenure as secretary of state, William Seward applied the principles of the still to be ratified Fourteenth Amendment to the nation’s foreign policy. [23] “

 

Taking a strong stand on the rights of Cubans was a position that was more complex than it may seem. American’s recent past made strong declarations about rights of minorities and rebels a touchy subject for many Americans, Cuba in many ways reflected American society and this was not lost on Americans at the time. [24]

Grant also wanted to pursue a policy that would avoid those pitfalls and also ensure that America would avoid war. [25] The policy does however show how the country could how addressed such complex and sensitive issues. While the more diplomatic policy failed in this example, it did show how Grant could have run the country using different methods to bring people together within the country and to achieve a multi-racial society.[26]

“The lack of a sustained opposition … should also serve as a reminder that nineteenth-century American statesmen were not placed in a straightjacket by a nationalistic public opinion, nor by foreign-policy traditions such as the Monroe Doctrine and unilateralism. ‘In the history of American diplomacy,’ Walter LaFeber argues, ‘unilateralism has always been a tactic, not an immutable principle.’ Multilateralism, to put it differently, could also be a tactic in nineteenth-century diplomacy, even in relation to events on an island ninety miles away that American leaders had long considered essential to national security. It is revealing that both Banks and Fish—politicians on opposite ends of the foreign-policy spectrum—advocated, though at different times, a multilateral approach to the Cuban problem. The multilateral initiative that the Grant administration.[27] “

 

This plan was also one that was popular among other policy makers and analysts. This indicates that the people who specialized in foreign policy felt that this was a good position to take. This also demonstrates that Grant was able to think along the same lines that a political figure would think. Grant was aware of what political plans could work in a given situation. Though the plan did run into trouble as it clashed with older standard policy. This the avoidance of European involvement in the Americas as much as was possible. [28]

This is also indicative of Grant’s skill as general knowing when to attack and when to retreat. When he was a general he also had to deal with debates over the U.S.’s role in the rights of people of African descent and fight in the Civil War. Both wars, the American Civil War and the Cuban rebellion, were cause was in part slave holders trying to maintain their hold on their slaves.[29] This made the struggle a more complex issues as not only was the war a military one it was also a social and economic struggle. Ideas could have as strong an effect on these type of wars as bullets and bombs.

Thus, Cuba was very similar in many wars to America only a few years previously so Grant knew how the Cubans felt about a foreign power interfering in their internal affairs.[30] The struggle was in part between those would wanted to keep slavery and those who wanted a more equal society. This tension was part of the reason why Grant would want to avoid getting to caught up in Cuba as he knew how much struggle would be part of trying to reform Cuban society even if the Spanish are made to leave. Grant was able to benefit from his role as a general while he was president. This incident shows just as much about Grant’s personality as it did the contemporary situation in American and Cuba.

[1]Baram, 236

[2] Ibid, 237

[3] Ibid, 233

[4] Ibid, 234-235

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid, 238

[7] Ibid, 237-239

[8]  Jay, Sexton, The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875. (Diplomatic History 30 no.3 2006).340

[9] Ibid, 335

[10] Idid

[11] Idid

[12] Sexton, 336

[13] Ibid 338

[14] Ibid, 339

[15] Ibid, 355

[16] Ibid, 339

[17] An intervention in Cuba would have also brought up the awkward question of why was it that African-Americans were being mistreated with little complaint from most White Americas while the similar treatment of Afro-Cubans by the Spanish is causing an uproar within America.

[18] This would be because the Union did it all it could to keep other nations from saying that the South was another nation as then a civil war would become a regular war with the possibility of another nation joining in, so Spain could claim that the U.S. would be hypocritical to say a rebellion in Cuba would make it independent from Spain and that the U.S. wanted to intervene. Ibid, 346

[19] Ibid, 340

[20] Ibid, 338

[21] Ibid

[22] Ibid

[23] Ibid, 339

[24] Ibid, 338

[25] Ibid, 336

[26] Ibid, 342

[27] Ibid, 363-364

[28] Ibid, 335

[29] Ibid, 338

[30] Ibid, 336