Our Native-American Vice President . . . a Black Slaveowner. . and the Election of 1876

Even though I’m not adding original posts right now, lively articles about history are all around us. Here are summaries of three, with links.

Charles Curtis: Republican, Native-American, and Vice President

Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was part-Native American, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas. With Kamala Harris in the news, the Washington Post tells his interesting story (making the point that Harris will not be the first “person of color” to be an American vice president).

Curtis, whose mother was a Kaw member and whose father was white, grew up on the Kaw reservation in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager he moved sixty miles away to live with his paternal grandparents in Topeka, where he became something of a star horse jockey. When the tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma, Charles wanted to go, too, but his Kaw grandmother urged him to stay in Topeka and get an education. He did, and he was always grateful for her advice. He became an attorney and with his “winning personality,” a Kansas congressman, senator, and eventually vice president.

Here’s where the Post begins to go negative. Curtis was an assimilationist. He wanted Native Americans to become part of white society, not remain isolated on reservations. He supported the Dawes allotment program, which was meant to turn Indians into farmers,  but, according to the Post’s author, Gillian Brockell,  that “further eroded their sovereignty.” Indeed, the program is generally viewed as a failure. Brockell ends by tossing in the claim that Curtis served with Herbert Hoover, “one of the worst presidents in American history.”

But it’s a fascinating story.

Anthony Johnson, African-Virginian Slaveowner

At first, this article looks like revisionist history at its most extreme. Roger D. McGrath writes in Chronicles, “It is one of the ironies of history that a black African, Anthony Johnson, could be called the Father of American Slavery.”

That is going pretty far, but in the 1650s Anthony Johnson, a free black man, sued in a Virginia court to keep another black man whom he claimed was his slave. The supposed slave, John Casor, said that he was an indentured servant.  Johnson won. This case may have helped tip the balance against indentured servitude and toward slavery.

I was skeptical, but Johnson’s story is more thoroughly told in “Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia” by Samll Goldsmyth, James Radford, David Jones, Peter Hawkins, and John H. Russell, in the Journal of Negro History 1, no. 3 (1916): 233-242.

The Election of 1876

In a timely commentary on the election of 2020, Francis Sempa writes about the turmoil surrounding the 1876 election in RealClearHistory. “The Republic survived the 1876 election and it will also survive the 2020 election, whatever the eventual outcome,”  Sempa says encouragingly.

It was a bitterly fought.  Samuel Tilden (D) had 184 electoral votes (one vote less than a majority) and Rutherford B. Hayes (R) had 165. Three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—were “too close to call.” Hayes had to win them all to take the presidency.

“Both Democrats and Republicans alleged massive fraud and irregularities in the voting in all three states,” says Sempa. President Ulysses S. Grant sent troops to the three states to prevent rioting. When the electors met in January  (the inauguration was not until March), the two sides sent competing electoral slates.

The resolution (which came on March 2, 1877) was a secret deal. Hayes won, but, in return, he promised to end Reconstruction in the South and withdraw troops.

Yes, “the Republic survived the 1876 election,” as  Sempa says, but the compromise “enabled southern Democrats to establish one-party rule in the South and to enact Jim Crow laws to re-subjugate black citizens.” I’m not sure the Republic did survive the 1876 election.

The photo of Curtis election buttons,”Kansas 150/150,” from  Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.