The Invisible Line (30 page)

Gibson's genial first year in Congress ended with the chaotic election of 1876. The presidential race between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was unresolved for months, as the parties threatened a new civil war over disputed returns in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Although election night vote totals suggested that Tilden had won, Republican-controlled election boards in the three states certified Hayes victories, invalidating returns from counties where overwhelming fraud and violence by white paramilitaries had tainted the vote. In Louisiana and South Carolina, the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor both claimed victory and established rival statehouses. When an independent commission established by Congress gave the election to Hayes on an 8-7 party-line vote, House Democrats threatened to delay the final recording of the Electoral College results beyond the March 4 inauguration.
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Ever the strategist, Gibson saw the crisis as an opportunity to secure the withdrawal of federal troops and end Reconstruction in Louisiana. He was closely allied with the state's Democratic claimant for governor, Francis Tillou Nicholls, a fellow lawyer and Confederate brigadier—one of Gibson's first successes in Congress had been a resolution to restore Nicholls's civil rights. In Nicholls's service, Gibson put his social and political connections to work. Every day Gibson met with prominent Republicans—at their homes, at Gibson's office at the Capitol, and at the Wormley House, a hotel favored by the politically powerful and owned by one of Washington's wealthiest blacks.
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Gibson approached Grant's secretary of war, Don Cameron, a Princeton man whom Gibson had known since their college days. Gibson pressed the case for recognizing the Democratic claimant for Louisiana governor, recounting the horrors of a decade of Republican rule in Louisiana. According to one observer at the time, after meeting with Gibson, Cameron became “fully impressed with the conviction that the Nicholls government should prevail in Louisiana.” Through Cameron and William Tecumseh Sherman, Gibson gained access to the president on January 2, 1877. It was the first time the two had met since Gibson accompanied a prisoner exchange in Kentucky fifteen years earlier. While Gibson had written then of his visceral disgust for the Yankee officers, now he laughed, reminisced, and spoke easily with the president.
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Through Gibson, the Louisiana congressional delegation began channeling any information that it wanted the president to hear. When Grant objected that armed mobs had thrown the Louisiana election, Gibson played his trump card: he assured Grant that the White Leagues were perfectly respectable organizations that counted among their members the president's own relatives. It was the argument that Gibson had perfected in a year of social engagement in Washington. By appearing cultured, thoughtful, and modern—as someone whose company Northerners enjoyed—Gibson was convincing people that Southern whites could be trusted to govern again. Gibson embodied an easy solution to what appeared to be an intractable problem. With Gibson at his side, Grant composed “with the greatest ease” a crucial memorandum denying the Republican claimant for the Louisiana statehouse the protection of federal troops. While initially “morose [and] non-committal” about the election, Grant told Gibson, “I mean to stand by you. I mean to stand by my kinfolk in Louisiana.”
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Gibson also pushed the kinship of North and South as a theme in his public remarks on the floor of the House of Representatives. “The city of New Orleans is no stranger to New England,” Gibson intoned at the height of the crisis. “You can hardly mention a name dear to New England that has not its representative in the great southern metropolis, or within our borders, upon the banks of the Father of Waters.” He expressed the hope that the descendants of “Adams and Winthrop and Palfrey and Eustis on the soil of Louisiana, may not plead in vain before an American Congress for simple justice. These are the people you would stigmatize as barbarians!” He urged Congress to aid “the people of property, of intelligence, the law-abiding and Christian elements in society.”
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Gibson cemented his position by extending the literal kinship of North and South to a figurative kinship of Northern and Southern values. He declared that under Democratic rule in Louisiana “the colored man” would not “be deprived of one jot or tittle of his political rights and privileges.” For a secret meeting at Wormley's on February 26, 1877, between Louisiana Democrats and agents for Rutherford B. Hayes, Gibson helped craft a memorandum in which the Nicholls government promised “not to attempt to deprive the colored people of any political or civil right, privilege, or immunity enjoyed by any other class of men,” guaranteed equal educational opportunities for blacks, and assured the “promotion of kindly relations between white and black citizens of the State, upon a basis of justice and mutual confidence.” Moreover, the Democrats spoke of following the law “rigidly and impartially,” with prompt punishment for political violence but without “persecut[ing]” Republicans “for past political conduct.” Assured by these and other statements of a formal commitment to equality and the rule of law, Hayes promised a new Southern policy, a withdrawal of federal troops, and recognition of the Nicholls government. The House Democrats, for their part, allowed the electoral vote to be counted.
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What exactly “equality” or “rule of law” meant was never spelled out. All the Republicans needed was to hear the words. Just as he had as a lawyer, Gibson had looked beyond the particulars to a set of abstract principles on which everyone could agree. On the floor of the House, the powerful Republican congressman James A. Garfield, who would be elected president in four years, approached Gibson and told him, “On our side of the house we looked coldly on the members on your side . . . but as time passed on . . . we have ascertained at last that you and we are fellow countrymen, that you have the same aspirations, the same interests, the same sentiments in a large measure, on the questions that relate to the government that we ourselves cherish.” Garfield had fought Gibson at Shiloh and Chickamauga, but on the fate of Reconstruction, he was handing the Southerner his sword.
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Days before the inauguration, Gibson was invited to John Sherman's house next door for supper. Rutherford B. Hayes was sitting at the table, and Sherman and Hayes asked Gibson if he would serve in the new Cabinet. Gibson declined, but he continued to meet with Hayes regularly in the months that followed, establishing a personal relationship of “marked consideration.” “The President . . . is extremely friendly,” Gibson wrote. “I have been out driving with him on his invitation + went with him to New York + he is very confidential, in part because I have declined + not sought favors.” Fewer than two years after arriving in Washington, Gibson was the confidant of two presidents, subtly steering Southern policy, savior of what he called “the White Man's Government” in Louisiana, and touted as a future senator.
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UNDER THE REPORTER'S EXPECTANT gaze, Gibson picked up the newspaper and began reading. The article consisted of a long letter written to the
Times
by James Madison Wells. Gibson knew Mad Wells, and Mad Wells knew him. Standing five feet tall with a mane of white hair, Wells was a foul-mouthed, pistol-packing legend of Louisiana politics, either the embodiment of principle and courage or the worst kind of corrupt, opportunistic scalawag. The cotton planter from central Louisiana chaired the state's returning board, which certified election results, and had signed off on Gibson's two congressional victories. As governor at war's end and the start of Reconstruction, Wells had invited erstwhile Confederates back into power and worked with Gibson's father, Tobias, on efforts to finance levee construction—only to declare Radical allegiances and advocate for ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, giving blacks the vote, and stripping the franchise from former rebels. In 1876 Wells and the returning board gained national notoriety—death threats, congressional investigations, and widespread accusations of fraud and bribery—for certifying the presidential and gubernatorial elections for the Republicans.
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When the Democrats finally took the Louisiana statehouse after months of standoff, they indicted Wells and the rest of the board on charges of perjury, forgery, and altering elections returns. In early February 1878 the first board member to face trial was convicted. When Republicans in Congress howled that prosecuting the returning board constituted “the greatest outrage that has ever occurred in American political history,” Gibson took to the House floor on February 14 and defended the case as a commendable example of the new regime's “rigid enforcement and execution of the laws.” With cool contempt for the opposition, Gibson declared that “men accused of offenses of an extraordinary character should . . . be held amenable to justice.”
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Free on bail while awaiting trial, Wells wrote the
Times
that the prosecution of the returning board was a conspiracy of “inveterate traitors to the Union” who “had undertaken a contract with the Democratic Party to do their dirty work” by attempting “a renewal in insidious guise of the tremendous conflict of 1876, perhaps of 1861.” With efficient dispatch, Wells accused the judge, prosecutors, and a key government witness of embezzling public funds, “beastly . . . intoxication,” jury rigging, murder, livestock theft, and “denounc[ing] the female teachers of the [New Orleans] public schools as prostitutes.”
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Reaching the end of the first column, Gibson saw that Wells had reserved his harshest words for him. Wells wrote that Gibson had stuffed ballot boxes to win his seat in 1874 “and would have been indicted . . . , and in all probability sent to the Penitentiary but for my leniency and forbearance.” The smear hit Gibson on a point of particular pride—his commitment to abide by the letter of the law, a pillar of his strategy to convince Northerners that white Southerners could govern peacefully and honorably. All the same, stuffing ballot boxes was of a piece with the rest of Wells's letter, the kind of insult that everyone in Louisiana politics had to face at one point or another. What jumped off the page was an accusation of an entirely different order.
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“R. L. Gibson has seen fit, on the floor of Congress, to calumniate the Returning Board, and has attempted a justification of their persecution,” Wells wrote. “This colored Democratic Representative seems to claim a right to assail the white race because he feels boastingly proud of the commingling of the African with the Caucasian blood in his veins.” What was this? For a man who relished a good insult, Wells had never resorted to this one. Instead of referring to Gibson by name, Wells again called him “this colored Representative of Louisiana in the Congress of the nation.” “The lineage of this Representative without a nationality,” Wells wrote, “can be fully established by many of the old inhabitants of Adams County, Miss., as well as by many of his neighbors in the Parish of Terrebonne.”
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Gibson glanced up from the paper. The reporter was studying his reaction. So this was why he had come—to see Gibson lose his temper. The newsman would be disappointed. Sitting comfortably, surrounded by his books, the congressman smiled and gave a “look of astonishment and amusement.” Asked for comment, Gibson was “serene as a May day.” “I think Mr. Wells is crazy,” he said, “clearly demented.”
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The reporter read Wells's words aloud, and again Gibson “serenely and graciously” brushed him off. “My family,” he said, “is of an old Virginia stock. My grandfather settled in Port Gibson, and my mother's family is well known in the country. A great many people, of course, know us well.”
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For a third time the reporter asked Gibson for his opinion of Wells. The congressman's veneer began to crack. “I think he is certainly crazy,” Gibson replied. “I cannot, of course, take any notice of the ravings of an imbecile old man, idiotic through senility, and perhaps inheriting constitutional tendencies to insanity. I must request of
The Post
not to notice anything which this undoubted madman has said in reference to me.” With those words—
imbecile, idiotic, senility, insanity, madman
—the interview was over. The reporter walked out onto Franklin Park with his item for the next day's paper, leaving Gibson alone in his library.
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ALTHOUGH GIBSON WAS AT the height of his influence, he felt as often as not “a good deal broken + shattered.” Crippling bouts of gout and arthritis in his feet, knees, and hands were only partly responsible. He felt beset by loss. In 1872 he suffered the “staggering blow” of his father's sudden death. “He had been my life long confidential friend + companion,” Gibson wrote. “I seldom passed a day without writing to him when apart.” Two years later his young son Randall Lee Gibson Jr., “the picture of health + beauty—just walking + talking,” died of a winter flu, a loss from which Gibson found it difficult to “compose myself.” At the moment he was advocating for the Nicholls government, his younger sister Louly was dying in childbirth.
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On top of his congressional work, Gibson had to tend to a law practice that had grown to overwhelming proportions since his election. The family properties that he shared with his brothers and sisters were heavily mortgaged. His brother and trusted law partner McKinley was “rickety” with consumption. After two years in the Kentucky legislature and another six as the founder and editor of Lexington's first daily newspaper, Hart Gibson was bankrupt—“crushed,” “morbid,” forever on the brink of “go[ing] to the dogs.” Their younger brother Tobe was living extravagantly in New Orleans—on Randall's tab. “I must get him somewhere else or move away myself,” he wrote. Their sister Sarah was nearly destitute, about to lose control of her late husband's land, and holed up with her children on an isolated and overgrown Terrebonne plantation. Randall offered Sarah legal help and money and begged her to move with her children back to Kentucky. “They have nothing in L[ouisiana],” he railed, “free negroes, low whites, a wrecked, debased + corrupt + bankrupt disorganized society—my Lord what a life! for your precious children.” Sarah refused all overtures, convinced that Randall was scheming to steal her share of the family property. People in Terrebonne blamed him for Sarah's troubles—whenever he returned to the old plantations, they would pass him “coldly + often without speaking.” Randall despaired at the thought of “them sacrificed to the level of free negroes and to a
barbarous
condition of society. I have felt that any day I might hear that she and her Daughters have been murdered out there. They might as well be in the depths of Africa.”
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