Edward Frantz

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Edward Frantz | A March of Triumph? | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.4 | The History Cooperative

A March of Triumph?

Benjamin Harrison's Southern Tour and the Limits of Racial and Regional Reconciliation

On April 17, 1891, Mayor Lucas Clapp of Memphis, Tennessee, stood at a dais to introduce President Benjamin Harrison. The president was in the midst of a nationwide whistlestop tour. He had already spent three days in the South, stopping quickly in a succession of towns to deliver a speech before moving on. Most of the introductions that Harrison received during these speeches were bland boilerplate material. As a result, the words that Clapp uttered were particularly memorable. He lauded his fellow white southerners as "lovers of justice and equal rights," and asserted "that in dealing with the gravest and most perplexing social and political problem that has ever confronted a community or a people, it is our purpose and our habit to be just and lawabiding." But Clapp, a southern Democrat, could not resist the urge to make a passionate partisan plea at the northern Republican's expense. Speaking on behalf of white Memphians, he noted that there was "a paramount aim and purpose with us to guard our social purity, preserve our civilization and maintain Caucasian prestige and supremacy."¹	1
Clapp laid down the gauntlet; a Southern politician had frankly addressed the color line as a matter of formal inequality. In his remarks, however, Harrison neither admonished the southern mayor nor directly addressed the topic of white supremacy. Instead, he introduced a theme that he would consistently pursue throughout his tour: the supremacy of the law. Harrison claimed that "[t]his government of ours is a compact of the people to be governed by a majority, expressing itself by lawful methods." Continuing in this vein, he asserted that Americans "must all come at last to this conclusion, that the supremacy of the law is the one supremacy in this country of ours." The president's comments were greeted with a roar from the crowd.²	2
It is hard to determine what in particular the audience found so compelling about Harrison's response. Did they welcome a statement of aggressive intervention from a northern president? Did they endorse his love of law? Or did they merely appreciate the verbal exchange that had taken place? The meanings of Harrison's statement become clearer when placed in the context of the journey that he had undertaken. Harrison would face similar encounters throughout his national sojourn, though none as direct as his confrontation with Mayor Clapp. The entire scene speaks to the precarious relationship between race, region, and Republicanism in 1891 that lies at the heart of this article.³	3
The second major tour through southern states by a Republican president since the Civil War, Harrison's journey was important for three major reasons. First, the tour signified a new political tack for the president and the Republican Party as they looked ahead to the election of 1892. Having advocated in 1890 measures widely perceived as hostile to white southerners, Harrison now applied a more conciliatory approach. The Republican Party was ready to court southern voters by addressing themes that would appeal to both northern and southern whites and by dealing with racial issues in national terms. Second, the tour demonstrated the limitations of that approach, in particular the party's evasiveness on issues of racial justice. Throughout his southern swing, Harrison used oblique attacks, including appeals to the law, and he and his party paid the price for that strategy. Finally, the journey highlighted the ways in which white southerners, blacks, and the Republican Party continued to contest the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Although the long-term implications of the president's journey were not evident to many of his contemporaries, with hindsight it is clear that Harrison and the Republicans sacrificed the basic interests of black Americans.	. . .

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