An American Story

 Some weeks ago I finally got around to reading a book I learned about relatively recently--The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch.  Born a slave in Mississippi in 1847, Lynch had finished the draft of this book shortly before his death in 1939, but it was not published until the great historian John Hope Franklin brought it out in 1970.  It exceeded my expectations.  I expected it to be about slavery and the difficulty of living in the Deep South during Reconstruction.  Those topics came up, but it turns out that Lynch became one of the leading black Republicans in the South during the 1870s and remained so well into the twentieth century.  He knew all the major Republican political figures of that era, including Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley, and he describes conversations with them in great detail.  Again and again he provided perspectives on the history of the era with which I was unfamiliar.

Lynch's father  Patrick Lynch was an Irish immigrant who settled in Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from Mississippi.  His mother, one Catherine White, a relatively light-skinned beauty, was more than half white.  Their marriage was not recognized, and according to their son John, Patrick Lynch decided to normalize their status by buying his wife, a slave, and her children.  He had managed to do when he became gravely ill.  He turned their care over to a friend who promised not to sell them back into slavery with someone else, but eventually reneged in that promise and took title to them himself.  Lynch as a child spent some years as a house servant, in which he tried to navigate between a friendly master and a very sensitive mistress.  The war and emancipation freed  him.  It emerges from some anecdotes later in the book that Lynch himself was often mistaken for a white man--not surprisingly, since the majority of his ancestry was white.  Writing decades after the fact, Lynch insisted that most southern white men who had founded colored families took care of them and tried to make sure that they would inherit property from him, and left behind large numbers of mixed-race property owners.  This would come as quite a shock to those who have now concluded without evidence that every mixed-race child from slavery days was a product of rape with no rights or prospects whatsoever. Eugene Genovese--still probably our greatest historian of slavery--confirmed the genuine affection and care in many mixed-race antebellum relationships in his classic, Roll, Jordan, Roll.

Still a teenager when the war ended, Lynch secured employment as a cook and then as a photographer and printer.  Then he learned to read and write at night school, and became what we would now call a political junkie.  In 1869 the military governor of Reconstruction Mississippi, General Adelbert Ames, appointed him as a justice of the peace, the beginning of a long career in public service under the aegis of the state and later the national Republican Party.  Eventually he educated himself as a lawyer and passed the bar.

I cannot possibly go into all the details of Mississippi Reconstruction politics from this book, which would once again shock a great many people.  Beginning in 1869, when a new constitution was first adopted, the Mississippi Republican Party, Lynch shows, included a great many white men, including former Confederate officers like General James L. Alcorn, and leading businessmen and cotton planters. Alcorn became the first Republican governor in a Republican sweep.  Mississippi, along with Louisiana and South Carolina, were the only southern states with majority black populations, initially giving the Republican party a big edge. Lynch himself, while still in his twenties, was elected to the state house of representatives and became its speaker.  He defends the Reconstruction administration and insists that Mississippi politics appeared to be heading in an excellent direction, until national events changed most white attitudes.

Ulysses S. Grant had been elected--albeit with a relatively narrow popular majority--in 1868, and re-elected by a much larger majority in 1872.  The nation and the state appeared to be embarked on an era of Republican dominance and Lynch explains that an alliance of black voters and white aristocrats dominated Mississippi politics. That alliance in 1872 elected Republicans in all but one of the state's six districts for the US Congress--including Lynch himself.  In 1873, however, a great panic swept the nation, and in the following year the Democratic Party actually regained control of the national House of Representatives, winning 92 seats and emerging with a majority of 180-103, together with a significant victory in the national congressional popular vote.  As it happened, however, Lynch was re-elected to Congress as a Mississippi Republican in the same year.   In early 1875, during a lame duck session of the Republican Congress elected in 1872, some Republicans brought forth a federal elections bill designed to ensure fair balloting in 1876, but it failed, Lynch explains, due to the opposition of James G. Blaine, the Speaker of the House and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 1876.  Blaine replied that the passage of the bill would have led to a great Democratic victory all over the north.  The Democrats seemed certain to win the White House in 1876--as they might have done, but for Republican skullduggery--and white Mississippians, Lynch says, concluded that the future did not belong to them after all.  Helped by terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrats won a majority of the Mississippi legislature in elections in 1875, by which time Lynch was in Washington.

Meeting with President Grant to discuss a patronage matter in November 1875, Lynch mentioned that the incumbent Republican governor, knowing that the violent Democratic campaign would probably carry the day in the state, had asked the federal government for assistance in order to safeguard the election, but that the request had been refused. Grant explained that he initially told the War and Justice Departments to intervene, but that he had reversed himself at the behest of a Republican delegation from Ohio that said that that critical state would be lost to the Democrats in the election taking place there if he went through with intervention.  He had yielded, he said, because of party obligation, and because he was also persuaded that he could not have saved Mississippi from a Democratic victory anyway.  Thus Lynch heard from the only Republican president who had taken Reconstruction and black rights in the south seriously that The attempt to guarantee those rights in the South was on the point of failure.  The compromise of 1876-7 a year later, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor in a hotly disputed election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, guaranteed that result.  Hayes explained that when the proposal to create a 15-menber commission to decide four disputed southern states came before the House, he opposed it, understanding what it would lead to. Meanwhile, the Democrats swept all the House seats in Mississippi. 

James A. Garfield eventually defeated Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock for the presidency in 1880, and the Republicans gained control of Congress. Fraudulent vote counting initially defeated Lynch when he ran for Congress again in 1882, but the Republican House majority seated him based on the fraud.  Unfortunately a Democrat defeated him that fall.   In the most extraordinary incident of his political career, in 1884, on the eve of the Republican convention, two very young and destined to be famous Republicans--Theodore Roosevelt of New York and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts--decided to put Lynch forward as a candidate for temporary chairman of the convention in order to embarrass the favored candidacy of James G. Blaine, which they opposed. Lynch writes that he had mixed feelings about his candidacy, but that two leading Ohio Republicans, Mark Hanna and William McKinley, convinced him to let it go forward.  Lynch was elected temporary chair, but Blaine won the nomination anyway.  He lost the election by the narrowest of margins to Grover Cleveland, who became the first Democrat elected to the White House since the Civil War. Blaine had a real national following, and Lynch recounts how one white Mississippi businessman, a Democrat named Joseph Carpenter, initially agreed to serve as one of his electors in the state.  He changed his mind when he realized that he and his whole family would be socially ostracized for the rest of his life if he went ahead.

Cleveland's election led to a remarkable conversation between Lynch and Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a distinguished Mississippi Democrat and Senator whom Cleveland had just appointed Secretary of the Interior.  Recognizing that the two of them had managed to work together across party lines at times in Mississippi, Lamar offered him a position as special agent of the public lands--not in the South, where "you may have some unpleasant and embarrassing experiences," but in Dakota territory.  Lynch declined on the basis that he must remain a loyal Republican, but asked Lamar to retain some black men for whom he had secured appointments in the Pension Bureau, which was part of his department.  This Lamar agreed to do, but he added that he had a problem with two other men whom Lynch recommended, a black doctor with a white wife, and a white lawyer with a black wife. "Amalgamation" was such a hot-button issue that he could not retain the white lawyer, who was better known, and would also have to let the black doctor go if his case became controversial.  As it turned out, it never did.  Lynch pleaded for both at great length and pointed out that Lamar had defied public opinion on sensitive issues before, most notably when he eulogized the Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.  Lamar acknowledged the strength of his arguments, but declined. 

Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated Cleveland narrowly in 1888, and promptly appointed Lynch an auditor of the Treasury Department.  During that Administration Harrison and young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge tried to pass an early version of the Voting Rights Act, to try to re-enfranchise southern black voters,  It failed because free-silver Republicans from the west, who were working with free-silver Democrats to try to increase silver coinage, would not break with their Democratic allies on this issue. Lynch had to leave the Treasury Department when Cleveland beat Harrison handily in 1892, but not before he had an interesting talk with Cleveland, who said that he wanted to appoint "colored" Democrats to office to promote the equal treatment of all. The new secretary of the Treasury offered Lynch the chance to remain in his job, but he refused out of party loyalty. After six years of Law practice, when he was still only 50 years old, President McKinley chose Lynch to be commissioned an Army major and serve as Paymaster of the Forces during the Spanish-American War.  He held that position for ten years, during which it took him around the country and the world, serving in Cuba, Hawaii, Nebraska, San Francisco, and the Philippines, all of which he describes in great detail.  He eventually retired in 1910 and lived out the remaining 28 years of his life in Chicago, where his second wife came from.

This summary will I hope convince readers that the race question in the United States was never frozen in stone and has in fact been controversial and complex from the beginning of the republic to the present day.  Lynch in his last few pages notes three other twists and turns.  First, when President Taft was inaugurated in 1909, he specifically promised not to appoint any black officials in parts of the country where they would be unwelcome.  (I had already discovered this writing States of the Union.)  Second, when the Democrats returned to power under Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, they not only segregated the federal office buildings in Washington for the first time, but also tried to persuade northern Democrats to institute strict segregation in northern states.  That initiative, I am happy to say, got nowhere. And lastly, he noted that a substantial portion of the black vote had abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.  This meant, he thought, that in the future black voters would be able to vote for the man, not the party, and the race question would fade in American politics.

Lynch on that point, in my opinion, was more right than he knew.  From 1936 until 1964 the black vote was genuinely in play in the North, the West, and the border states. Candidates of either party ignored it at their peril, and it was no accident, I think, that those were the greatest years of progress for black Americans and the civil rights movement.  Unfortunately the successes of the movement remade the politics of many southern states along racial lines once again, and the black vote has been overwhelmingly Democratic from then until now.  Now, however, that may be changing.  Donald Trump made measurable gains among black voters in the last election.  I learned a great deal from Lynch's book.  I think there are many fascinating books waiting to be written on the politics of race from the end of Reconstruction until the Truman administration.  There may already be some, but I am not aware of them, and I hope that some day historians will fill this gap.