peech declaring his belief in white superiority.9The Democratic Party had a specific political agenda. Their goal was to neutralize the Fourteenth Amendment and restore white Democratic leadership to the southern states while finding a legal means to subordinate the African race. In order to accomplish this, the Democrats used a strategy that was a combination of exaggerated loyalty to states rights and a disingenuous denial of the social realities of discrimination and segregation. This was the basic stance of the Democratic Party in both the 1874 and 1876 elections.10At that time, the nation was suffering from one of the deepest depression in its history. Only the Great Depression of the 1930s would exceed it. Due to this factor and the general corruption and ineptitude of the Grant administration, the public was ready to repudiate the Republican Party. Sumners proposed Civil Rights bill was a central issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that the election of 1874 was the equivalent of a nationwide referendum on whether or not the nation would continue its commitment to civil rights.11The election of 1874 was a landslide victory for the Democratic Party. Republicans were reduced to just 17 seats in the House of Representatives. The lame duck Congress still controlled by the Republicans passed a watered-down version of the civil rights bill just one month before the Democratic majority took over. A review of the Congressional Record at this time reveals that even the Republicans were beginning to shift their focus away from civil rights and towards economic issues.12 The whole mood of the country had changed. The carpetbagger governments of the Reconstruction era were viewed as utterly corrupt, and the public linked this corruption with the ignorance of black voters and those blacks in office.13 The term Carpetbagger refers to unscrupulous Northerners who came South after the Civil War with all of their worldly possessions in cheap ...
