November 5, 1872: Greeley vs. Grant, and Beecher vs. Woodhull

Victoria Claflin Woodhull

November 5, 1872: President Ulysses S. Grant is re-elected, defeating Horace Greeley, with 55 percent of the vote to 43, and 286 Electoral Votes to 66.

This was a weird election. The Republican Party was split over the corruption in the Grant Administration, though Grant himself has never been accused of wrongdoing. A group of "Liberal Republicans" nominated Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, formerly one of the nation's leading voices against slavery, briefly a Congressman in 1848-49, and one of the Party's founders in 1854.

Ulysses S. Grant

Greeley favored Western expansionism, popularizing the slogan, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" But he didn't come up with the words himself: John Babson Lane Soule first used it in the Terre Haute Express in Indiana in 1851.

Greeley had long lambasted the Democratic Party as the party of slavery, but, not wanting to divide the opposition to the Republicans, the Democrats swallowed their pride, and also nominated Greeley. (This is not quite like today's Democratic Party nominating Bernie Sanders. More like if they nominated George Will. Certainly, not Pat Buchanan.) As a result, just 7 1/2 years after the American Civil War ended, and with Reconstruction still in progress, pretty much every attack that Greeley had hurled at the Democrats for a quarter of a century was hurled back at him, including that he supported racist policies, even the nascent Ku Klux Klan.

Horace Greeley

In addition, his wife Mary got sick, and on October 12, he effectively stopped campaigning to be by her side. She died 6 days before the election, and he won only 6 States, all formerly slaveholding States: Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri and Texas.

All this took a terrible toll on his own health, and he died at age 61 on November 29, before the Electoral Votes could be cast -- thus becoming the only person ever entitled to receive Electoral Votes for President, but unable to receive them.

Did I say the election was weird? It was so weird. (How weird was it?) Susan B. Anthony and Victoria Woodhull voted -- Anthony for Grant, Woodhull for herself, the 1st woman known to have gotten on any ballot as a candidate for President.

Susan B. Anthony

Even if the million-to-one shot came in, and she won, she couldn't have served at first, anyway: She didn't reach the minimum age of 35 until September 23, 1873, over 6 months into the term. Her Vice Presidential nominee would have had to serve as President from March 4 to September 23. That was writer and former abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the most famous black person in America at the time.

Frederick Douglass. It's a real photograph, but colorized.

Both Anthony and Woodhull were arrested on Election Day. Voting was then illegal for a woman, and that's what Anthony was arrested for. But that's not what Woodhull was arrested for. She was arrested for obscenity, for printing, in a magazine she and her sister Tennessee Claflin ran, the story of the marital infidelity of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, yet another former abolitionist, and yet another founder of the Republican Party.

The Claflin sisters were the 1st women in America to publish a magazine. They were also the 1st women ever to run a Wall Street brokerage firm.

Ironically, Beecher had supported women's right to vote, but, though apparently a practitioner of free love, he denounced it in public, and denounced Woodhull in particular, from his pulpit. That's why Woodhull was charged with obscenity (the story was sexual in nature), not with libel (the story was true), and Beecher's reputation did not soon improve.

Henry Ward Beecher

Woodhull was held in jail for a month, and released. She ran for President again in 1884 and 1892, with almost no notice. She moved to England with her 3rd husband, and died there in 1927, and was buried there.

Beecher died in 1887. He and Greeley are both buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, along with several early baseball stars. Douglass died in 1895. Tennessee Claflin died in 1923, and Victoria Woodhull in 1927.

Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. In 1979, her face replaced Dwight D. Eisenhower on the $1.00 coin, or the "silver dollar," making her the 1st woman to appear on American coins, other than generic depictions of Lady Liberty. But the "Susie B" dollar coin proved unpopular.

It ran until 1999, and was replaced the next year by the "golden dollar," with a depiction of Sacagawea, the Native American guide of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804 to 1809. That lasted until 2009, and was replaced with the Presidential dollar, with each year presenting the public with 4 previously deceased Presidents.

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November 5, 1872 was a Tuesday. No games were played that day: Baseball season was over, football was in its infancy, hockey barely existed, and basketball hadn't been invented yet.

October 10, 1871: The Murder of Octavius Catto

October 10, 1871: Octavius Valentine Catto is murdered in Philadelphia. He was an abolitionist and educator, and also an early black baseball player.

He was born on February 22, 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina. He and his mother, the former Sarah Isabella Cain, were members of the DeReef family, a prominent mixed-race family that had lived free for decades in that city whose resistance to the abolition of slavery would lead to it hosting the 1860 Democratic National Convention and the first secession convention later that year. His father, William T. Catto, was a slave who had bought his freedom, and been ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He took his family north to Baltimore and then Philadelphia.

In 1853, at age 14, Octavius began attending a previously all-white school, Allentown Academy in Allentown, Monmouth County, New Jersey. (It's about 40 miles northeast of Philadelphia, and 60 miles southwest of New York.) After 1 year there, he attended Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, where he was praised by principal Ebenezer Bassett for "outstanding scholarly work, great energy, and perseverance in school matters." He later taught English and math at the ICY.

During the American Civil War, he joined with Frederick Douglass and the Union League, headquartered in Philadelphia, to form a Recruitment Committee to sign black men to fight for the Union and, with victory, the abolition of slavery. He helped raise 11 regiments that were sent to the front. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army with the rank of Major, but did not see combat himself.

After the Civil War, predating the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 90 years, Catto fought for the desegregation of Philadelphia's trolleys and streetcars. Moved by his action, Representatives Thaddeus Stevens and William D. Kelley, both of Pennsylvania, pushed through Congress a bill desegregating public transit. This would last nationally until the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, but the various vehicles in Philadelphia remained integrated.

Octavius Catto was among the generation of young American men who had begun an athletic career by playing cricket and later switched to its cousin, baseball -- then, usually spelled as two words, "base ball." In 1865, he and fellow ICY graduate Jacob C. White Jr. founded the Pythian Base Ball Club. They were named after the Knights of Pythias, to which several of its members belonged, named for the Greek myth of Damon and Pythias, a legendary story of friendship and dedication.

Initially, the Club was made up of young black professionals from what would later be called the Northeast Corridor, Boston to Washington, but mostly Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. In 1867, the Club played its 1st season, playing home games at Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and went undefeated. They did so again in 1868.

On September 4, 1869, in what is the earliest known recorded game between an all-black team and an all-white team, the Pythians sustained their 1st defeat, to the Olympics of Washington. A few days later, they played another all-white team, the Philadelphia City Items, a team sponsored by a newspaper, and won. Both times, the local newspapers, including the defeated City Item, praised the Pythians for their performance and their class.

These games took place toward the end of the season of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the world's 1st openly professional baseball team; and 2 months before the 1st American football game, played nearby between Rutgers and the school that would later be known as Princeton. The following year, 1870, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting all men age 21 and up the right to vote, regardless of race.

October 10, 1871 was Election Day in Philadelphia. Like most black men at the time, Octavius Catto was a Republican, of the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, and of the current President, who had been the leading Union General, and the leader of the "Reconstruction" of the South along Northern lines, Ulysses S. Grant.

White Protestants were mainly English and Republican. White Catholics were mainly Irish and Democratic. (This was before the great waves of Italian and Slavic immigrants arrived to broaden the ethnic range of Catholic America.) So, with the exception of the question of helping the poor and immigrants, it was then the Republicans who were the liberals, and the Democrats who were the conservatives. This was a long time ago: 150 years. A century and a half.

In previous elections, Catto had been harassed on the way to voting, and, anticipating this, he had a gun on him. So did Frank Kelly, a Democrat who, as far as I can determine, did not previously know Catto, and so his motive, while prejudicial, was probably not personal.

Kelly shot Catto 3 times at the corner of 9th & South Streets, a few steps from Catto's home at 812 South Street. Kelly was acquitted of the murder. Apparently, despite being a Northern city, in Philadelphia, at that time, a white man could get away with murdering a black man.

Catto was just 32 years old. He was buried at Eden Cemetery, the oldest surviving cemetery for black people in America, in suburban Collindale, Pennsylvania.

Also buried there is opera singer Marian Anderson, a Philly native whose concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, for Easter 1939, was canceled by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt not only resigned from the DAR, but she talked her husband, President Franklin D Roosevelt, into allowing her to perform at the Lincoln Memorial, live over the national radio networks. Over 75,000 people attended, the biggest crowd to come to the Memorial until the 1963 March On Washington.

Catto's tombstone is engraved, "THE FORGOTTEN HERO." With the passage of time, he was, indeed, forgotten. Sojourner Truth lived on until 1883, Frederick Douglass to 1895, and Harriet Tubman to 1913, and were able to continue to speak for themselves, in interviews, articles and books. By the time the modern Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s, their names were looked to as inspirations. But Catto, even though he had done his era's equivalent of a bus boycott, and in a city far larger than Montgomery, Alabama, was not cited as an influence.

Despite being a baseball nut, and living close enough to Philadelphia to have visited many times, I had never heard of Octavius Catto until I was in my late 40s.

In 2006, a movement began to get him a statue. In 2018, the statue, named "A Quest for Parity," sculpted by Branly Cadet, was placed on the south side of City Hall, at the geographic center of the City of Philadelphia.

It is that city's 1st statue in honor of a specific black person. Think about that for a moment: Philadelphia is one of America's leading cities in the African-American experience, and yet a fictional white character, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, had a statue before any black person. True, there are statues of Wilt Chamberlain and Julius Erving outside the Wells Fargo Center arena, but those were erected and dedicated by the 76ers, not the City government.

I had hoped that the Catto statue would be on the north side of City Hall, so he could stare down the statue across the street, that of the infamously racist Police Commissioner (1967-71) and Mayor (1972-80) Frank Rizzo. Instead, it faces his old neighborhood. It's academic now: The Rizzo statue was removed in 2020.

October 10, 1871 was a Tuesday. Although the National Association season had not yet concluded, there were no games played on the day.

April 13, 1873: The Colfax Massacre

April 13, 1873: The Colfax Massacre takes place in Colfax, Louisiana. Historian Eric Foner, whose specialty is the post-Civil War era, called it "The bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era."

In 1872, Louisiana was set to elect a new Governor. As part of Reconstruction, William Pitt Kellogg, a Vermont native, had been appointed U.S. Senator for the State, and was the Republican Party's nominee for Governor. The Democratic Party nominated John McEnery, a Confederate officer in the American Civil War. With newly freed black voters acting under the new 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Pitt won 56.9 percent of the vote.

But a rival board of elections certified McEnery as Governor. Both men had someone swear them in on January 13, 1873, and both men had an Inaugural Parades and Inaugural Balls. A U.S. Senate committee reported that the entire Louisiana 1872 election had been unfair, and that both State governments were illegal. It recommended that a new election be held under federal supervision.

President Ulysses S. Grant ignored the Senate committee recommendation, and chose to put the force of the U.S. Army behind Kellogg's machine, perhaps because Grant's own brother-in-law, James Casey, was part of the machine. Casey also held the lucrative post of New Orleans Customs Collector, to which Grant reappointed him in March 1873.

Louisiana calls its Counties "Parishes." After the Civil War, Grant Parish was carved out of Winn Parish. It was named for the President, and its seat was named for his Vice President, Schuyler Colfax. earful that the Democrats might try to control the Parish government, Black people started to create trenches around the courthouse and drilled to keep alert. The Republican officeholders stayed there overnight. They held the town for 3 weeks.

On March 28, White "Fusionists" called for armed whites to retake the courthouse on April 1. Whites were recruited from nearby Winn and surrounding parishes to join their effort. The Republicans began to recruit armed Black men to defend the courthouse.

Black Republicans raided the homes of the opposition leaders. Gunfire erupted between white and Black militias on April 2, and again on April 5, but the shotguns were too inaccurate to do any harm. Another armed conflict on April 6 ended with the white militia fleeing from armed Black militia. With the threat of violence in the community, Black women and children joined the men at the courthouse for protection.

William Ward, the commanding officer of Company A, 6th Infantry Regiment, Louisiana State Militia, headquartered in Grant Parish, had been elected State Representative from the parish on the Republican ticket. He wrote to Governor Kellogg, seeking U.S. troops for reinforcement and gave the letter to William Smith Calhoun for delivery. Calhoun took the steamboat LaBelle down the Red River, but was captured by men who ordered Calhoun to tell the Black community members to leave the courthouse. The Black defenders refused to leave, although threatened by parties of armed whites.

On April 13, Easter Sunday, Christopher Columbus Nash, Sheriff of the Parish, commanding some 300 white men, ordered the defenders of the courthouse to leave. When that failed, Nash gave women and children camped outside the courthouse 30 minutes to leave. After they left, the shooting began. The fighting continued for several hours with few casualties.

When Nash's paramilitary maneuvered the cannon behind the building, some of the defenders panicked and left the courthouse. An estimated 62 to 153 Black militia men were murdered while surrendering. Three white men also died during the confrontation.

Various government forces spent weeks trying to round up members of the White paramilitaries, and a total of 97 men were indicted. In the end, U.S. Attorney James R. Beckwith charged 9 men, and brought them to trial for violations of the Enforcement Act of 1870. But Beckwith was unable to secure a conviction: One man was acquitted, and a mistrial was declared in the cases of the others. In the end, no white militiaman was convicted of murdering a single black person.

In January 1875, even President Grant admitted that Louisiana's 1872 election "was a gigantic fraud, and there are no reliable returns of its result."

In February 1876, Kellogg was impeached by the Louisiana House of Representatives. The Senate did not convict him, however, and he remained in office until 1877, when he was returned to the U.S. Senate. He lived until 1918. McEnery never served in public office again, and died in 1891.

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April 13, 1873 was a Sunday, Easter. The fact that it was a Sunday, and the fact that it was a holiday, did not matter for the only professional sports league in North America: The National Association hadn't yet started its season, anyway.

March 2, 1877: Rutherford B. Hayes Is Certified As President

March 2, 1877: The Electoral Commission, appointed to settle the disputed Presidential election of November 7, 1876, makes its ruling. The vote is no surprise, since the Commission consists of 8 members of the Republican Party and 7 members of the Democratic Party. By a vote of 8 to 7, it certifies the following count of the Electoral College: 185 votes for the Republican nominee for President, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio; and 184 votes for the Democratic nominee, former Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York.

Tilden had won a majority of the popular vote, but, according to the Constitution of the United States, it's the Electoral Vote that matters. He seemed to have won that, too, but the Republicans stole the Electoral Votes of Louisiana (8), South Carolina (7) and Florida (4), plus 1 in Oregon. And the Commission awarded Hayes all of the 20 disputed Electoral Votes, just enough to win.

The Commission's decision comes just 2 days before the end of the 2nd term of outgoing President Ulysses S. Grant -- and it is the end of the great program of Reconstruction, designed to make the Southern States that had been brought back into the Union after the American Civil War conform to the Constitution of the United States and all of its protections for all American citizens, regardless of race.

It is known as the Compromise of 1877: The U.S. House of Representatives, under control of the Democrats, then actively hostile to civil rights, would allow the creation of the Commission, which they knew would certify Hayes as the winner, if the Republican leaders of both houses of Congress would agree to stop Reconstruction, and let the Southern States do as they pleased. The Democrats were willing to cede the Presidency for a principle, though it was an evil one.

Like so many other political movements, before and since, the Republicans of 1876-77 fought for freedom, and settled for power. Hayes himself did not object, but became known as "Rutherfraud," "His Fraudulency" and "Old 8 to 7."

He announced in his Inaugural Address that he would serve only 1 term, and kept his promise. He made no move to run for re-election, and at the 1880 Republican Convention, he received one Delegate on the 10th, the 11th, and the 12th ballot, then "lost" it, and never regained it. The Convention nominated Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio -- who had been a member of the Electoral Commission, but hadn't intended to be a candidate in 1880.

Tilden was convinced he was robbed, but did not run again in 1880 or 1884, due to ill health, and died in 1886.

But was he robbed? The Democrats, then the nation's conservative party, may have engaged in serious intimidation of newly-enfranchised black voters in Southern States. It's possible they tried every bit as hard to steal those States on Election Day as the Republicans did afterward. We may never know who truly deserved to win.

Regardless, there is absolutely no known evidence that either Hayes or Tilden participated in any election fraud on his own behalf.

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March 2, 1877 was a Friday. Baseball season was a few weeks away from beginning. Football was in the off-season. Basketball had not yet been invented, and hockey barely existed. So there were no scores on this historic day.

February 25, 1870: The 1st Black U.S. Senator

Hiram Reynolds

February 25, 1870: Hiram Revels is seated by the U.S. Senate, becoming the 1st black person so honored.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was born on September 27, 1827 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to a free family of color. He became a barber like his brother, and then a minister like their father. He was the principal of an all-black high school in Baltimore, and a chaplain in the Union Army during the American Civil War.

In 1866, he was assigned as the pastor to a church in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1868, as part of the Reconstruction of the South, he was elected an Alderman for Natchez. In 1869, he was elected to the State Senate. Until the 17th Amendment was ratified in 1913, U.S. Senators were elected by each State's legislature. In 1870, with Mississippi having been readmitted to the Union, its Senate seats vacant since its secession in 1861, Revels was elected to one of those seats by an 81-15 vote.

When he arrived in Washington to take his seat, the Democratic Senators argued that, because of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, he was not a U.S. citizen, and could not be seated. The Republican Senators pointed out that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution had ruled that all people born in America were citizens, rendering Dred Scott v. Sandford null and void. On February 25, 1870, the Senators voted on whether to seat him. There were 48 Republicans, and they all voted Yes. There were 8 Democrats, and they all voted No. He was seated.

On December 12, 1870, Joseph H. Rainey, a Republican from South Carolina, became the 1st black person sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives. Previously a member of the State Senate, he led the fight for legislation to stop the original Ku Klux Klan -- so today's Republican Party would never have accepted him. He was re-elected until his defeat in 1878, and lived until 1887.

Joseph Rainey

Revels' term expired on March 4, 1871, and he did not seek another. He accepted an appointment to be President of what is now Alcorn State University in Mississippi, and served there for 11 years. He died on January 16, 1901, at the age of 83. By that point, the other black man who had served in the U.S. Senate, Blanche Bruce of Mississippi (1875-81), and all 20 black men who had served in the U.S. House of Representatives, were out of office.

Not until 1928 would another black Congressman be elected: Oscar De Priest of Illinois. Not until 1966 would a black person be elected to the Senate without Reconstruction: Ed Brooke of Massachusetts. Since then, 38 of the 50 States have elected at least one black person to Congress; and Massachusetts, Illinois, South Carolina, New Jersey, California and Georgia have each had at least one black Senator.

In the 117th Congress, serving in 2021 and 2022, there are 56 Representatives and 3 Senators who are African-American; 40 Representatives and 6 Senators of Hispanic descent; 16 Representatives and 2 Senators of Asian or Pacific Islander descent; 7 Representatives (but no Senators) of Middle Eastern descent; and 5 Representatives (but no Senators) of Native American descent.

Meaning that 124 members of the House, or 28 percent, are nonwhite; and 11 out of 100 Senators are. Counting also those members who, not counting those already named, are female, or Jewish, or gay, and we still have 46 percent of the House and 61 percent of the Senate that are straight white Christian men. We do not yet have a Congress that "looks like America."

And, of course, Barack Obama was the 1st black President, while Kamala Harris, the current Vice President, is both the 1st black and the 1st Asian (Indian) person to hold that office, and both previously served in the Senate.

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February 25, 1870 was a Friday. Baseball was in the off-season. What have become the other major North American sports either didn't exist or barely did. So there were no scores on this historic day.

February 3, 1870: The 15th Amendment Is Ratified

Thomas Mundy Peterson and Perth Amboy City Hall

February 3, 1870: The 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is ratified. It prohibits the federal government, and every State, from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In other words, even if a person had once been a slave, he could still vote.

It was the last of the 3 "Reconstruction Amendments." In 1865, the 13th Amendment prohibited slavery. In 1868, the 14th Amendment guaranteed citizenship to every person born on American soil, regardless of race or whether they had previously been a slave. (No entries for those Amendments: 1869, the year the Cincinnati Red Stockings started, is my cutoff point for this blog.)

On March 31, 1870, Thomas Mundy Peterson became the 1st black person to vote under the protection of the 15th Amendment. He voted at City Hall in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in a referendum election to adopt a revised City Charter. He voted for it, and it passed overwhelmingly. The City later named an elementary school after him.

That City Hall was already historic: Built in 1717, and rebuilt after fires in 1731, 1745 and 1767, it was home to the New Jersey Provincial Assembly until 1775. In 1789, the State Legislature met there, and made New Jersey the 1st State to ratify the 1st 10 Amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights.

Nevertheless, many States, most of them Southern, found ways to get around the Amendment, and keep black people from voting. And, of course, it only guaranteed the right to vote to men. It took until 1920, when the 19th Amendment was ratified, for women to get the right to vote. And it took until 1965, with the passage of the Voting Rights Act, for there to be full enforcement of the 15th Amendment.

In 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then, voting rights have been under attack by various States, not all of them Southern.

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February 3, 1870 was a Thursday. There were no scores on this historic day: It was too early in the year to play baseball, football barely existed, and basketball and hockey didn't yet exist. This was also true of March 31, 1870, the day Thomas Peterson cast his vote.