The Nau Center’s “Black Virginians in Blue” project is an ongoing effort to recover the lives of USCT veterans with roots in Albemarle County. Recent discoveries have filled in the postwar life story of the Charlottesville Black community leader James T.S. Taylor (for an overview of Taylor’s Civil War experiences, click here). In a pair of new blog posts, Professor Elizabeth Varon illuminates a protest petition Taylor and his fellow Virginia Unionists sent to Congress in 1870, and a bitter controversy over Taylor’s appointment as postmaster at the University of Virginia later that year. Both are revealing windows, Varon argues, into Black politics and constitutionalism in the Reconstruction era.
“Oppression At the Hands of the Rebels,” Part One: Virginia Unionists Petition Congress
Why should men who tried to destroy the nation be permitted to rule it? This question was at the heart of an impassioned petition, submitted to Congress in January 1870, during debates over Virginia’s reconstruction after the Civil War. The two dozen signatories to the petition—including James T.S. Taylor of Albemarle County, one of the Union veterans featured in the Nau Center’s “Black Virginians in Blue” project--issued a stern warning to Congress.
Speaking on behalf of the state’s Unionists, Taylor and his allies cautioned that Virginia’s Conservative party, which had recently won control of the state’s General Assembly, was trying to undo the verdict of Appomattox. Conservatives promised to abide by Virginia’s new state constitution, which enfranchised Black men—but in truth they regarded that constitution with contempt and had no intention of obeying its letter or spirit.
Taylor hailed from a free Black family in Charlottesville, Virginia; he had enlisted in the 2nd USCT Infantry Regiment in Washington, D.C. in 1863 and returned after the war to his native Albemarle County, where he became a prominent community leader. As the 1870 petition dramatizes, Taylor represents not only a tradition of Black military service but also a tradition of Black constitutionalism, focused on fulfilling America’s unrealized ideals.
The backdrop for the 1870 appeal was the contentious process for readmitting the seceded states to representation in the U.S. Congress and thus restoring their “proper practical relation” with the Union. In the Civil War’s immediate aftermath, President Andrew Johnson’s permissive reunion terms—most notably his pardons of 13,000 former Confederate officials--had allowed ex-rebels to return to power in the Southern states and to impose punitive “Black Codes” on freedpeople, denying them civil rights. Dismayed at the Confederate resurgence, Congress had stepped in, with its 1867 Reconstruction Acts: Congress required Southern states to draft new constitutions that guaranteed Black men’s voting rights, and to ratify the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship and civil rights protections to Blacks.
In the first election in the state’s history in which Black men were permitted to vote, Virginia chose delegates to its constitutional convention of 1867-68; that convention, dominated by Unionists in the Republican party, included 24 Black delegates, among them James T.S. Taylor. The new constitution sought to modernize the state, through measures such as the establishment of a statewide system of public schools. It enfranchised Black men; disfranchised prewar military or civil officials who had broken their oaths of allegiance by supporting the rebellion; and required a “test oath” of past loyalty to the Union for office-holders (such requirements could be removed by the General Assembly on a case-by-case basis).
As the historian Timothy S. Huebner has explained, Virginia’s new constitution, like those of the other reconstructing states, embodied “the spirit of Black constitutionalism”—the new charters “explicitly affirmed the principle of human equality, usually by quoting or paraphrasing the ‘all men are created equal’ language of the Declaration of Independence,” and sought to merge “the power of the national government with the aspirations enunciated in the Declaration.” Black constitutionalists “claimed all the rights they believed their essential dignity as human beings afforded them.” They believed that Black freedom should remove the barriers to Black politics—not only to voting, but also to officeholding, which was the “pinnacle of Black constitutionalism.”
In the summer of 1868, as Virginia’s constitution awaited ratification by popular vote, a half dozen other Southern states were readmitted to the Union by Congress (meaning their representatives were seated in Congress). These states’ congressional readmission acts stipulated, as a “fundamental condition,” that the states would not subsequently amend their new constitutions in ways that deprived Black men of the right to vote. Such an explicit condition was necessary, Radical Republicans such as Senator Charles Daniel Drake of Missouri argued, to “plant barriers against the future robbery of the civil and political rights of the colored citizens.”
The question of Virginia’s readmission, considered by Congress in the winter of 1869-70, was the first to come up after the batch of 1868 cases. Congressional opponents of Reconstruction argued against imposing any strict conditions on Virginia, claiming that its case was distinct. In 1869, a group of self-styled compromisers (Democrats, former Whigs, and moderate Republicans calling themselves the “Conservative Party”) had come forward in Virginia, proposing a unique “universal suffrage and universal amnesty” bargain: white voters would ratify the 1868 constitution if they could vote down, in a separate referendum, the clauses that disfranchised former Confederates and that required a test oath of office holders.
Under such “compromise” provisions, in July of 1869 a majority of voters approved the constitution, rejected the disfranchisement and test oath clauses, and elected a governor, Gilbert Walker, who was endorsed by the Conservative party; Conservatives gained majorities in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly (they won 127 of 181 total seats). These developments left the small group of twenty-seven Black legislators substantially outnumbered, and thus effectively neutralized the Radical Republican faction in the state. James T.S. Taylor himself lost his election bid to the General Assembly; Albemarle County elected to the Virginia House of Delegates three white Conservatives who had supported the rebellion (two were Confederate veterans).
Conservatives lobbied in Washington, D.C. for Virginia’s readmission by pledging their honor that they would abide by the “very letter and spirit” of the new constitution. But Radical Republicans, like James T.S. Taylor and his fellow petitioners, sounded the alarm, warning that Conservatives were just wolves in sheep’s clothing, who were plotting to disfranchise Blacks through electoral fraud and violence. The so-called compromise reflected the Conservatives’ cynical calculation: as the demographic majority in Virginia, whites could feign compliance with Congress while at the same time steadily eroding Blacks’ political presence. Determined to alert Congress to the impending dangers, the petitioners conjured the vast scope of white Southern disloyalty. “The right of secession has never been renounced, but is now as firmly and universally believed in by the white people of Virginia as at any period during the war,” they intoned. “[M]urders and all sorts of outrages [were] perpetrated by rebels upon loyalists,” undermining any semblance of the rule of law; indeed the Conservative legislature that took power in 1869 was “elected by intimidation, fraud, violence, and prevention of free speech.”
In highlighting the toll that Conservative coercion had already taken, the petitioners were echoing Unionists from across Virginia, who alerted the federal authorities and the Republican press that voter suppression had run rampant in the July 1869 election. For example, Anna Gardner--a Freedmen’s Bureau teacher in Taylor’s hometown of Charlottesville--reported in the National Anti-slavery Standard on July 5, 1869, that a “spirit of lawlessness and cruel persecution” prevailed in that city and that the previous week had witnessed the murder of a white Radical Republican who was trying to protect a Black voter from harassment. (Coverage in the Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle reveals that the perpetrator, a Conservative “private watchman” in the town, was acquitted of any wrong-doing.) One of the most publicized political murders of the Reconstruction era took place in central Virginia in May 1869, when white vigilantes shot the Black Radical Republican Joseph R. Holmes—who had served with Taylor in the 1867-68 constitutional convention—outside the Charlotte County Court House. Again, the perpetrators were never held to account.
The 1870 petition noted that some of the more voluble Conservatives had made no secret of their future intentions—they “publicly stated” during the election campaign that they “merely supported the expurgated constitution for the purpose of securing the admission of the State.” Conservative leaders such as John R. Edmunds (a former Confederate legislator) spoke out of both sides of their mouths, claiming to accept Black voting as a “fixed fact” while also assuring white voters “negro suffrage will be powerless” under Conservative rule (as Edmunds put it). Such use of double-speak was nothing less, the petitioners warned, than a plot to “hoodwink” the Congress of the United States.
In light of the mounting backlash against Reconstruction, the Virginia petitioners wanted more than pledges of honor, more than the “fundamental condition,” and more even than the 14th Amendment’s Section Three clause, disqualifying men who had broken previous oaths of office. The petitioners proposed that every single member of the “present rebel Legislature” in Virginia be required to take the “iron-clad” test-oath, swearing their past, present, and future loyalty to the Union—and that every legislator who could not swear such an oath be replaced by the next highest eligible vote-getter, in Virginia’s recent 1869 election tallies, who could.
This was a provocative demand. The iron-clad oath was a wartime measure requiring federal military and civil officers to affirm that they had never ever engaged in any disloyal conduct. By the time of the 1870 petition, the idea of applying the iron-clad oath to the state legislature had been repeatedly rejected—in Virginia’s 1869 ratification vote, in Congressional debates over Reconstruction, and in rulings by President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration; the consensus was that there were not enough eligible loyal men in Virginia to staff the state government.
So why would the petitioners try to revive the iron-clad oath? The answer is clear: Taylor and his allies dreaded the repetition of a scenario that was already transpiring in the states that had been readmitted to the Union back in 1868 (North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida). All of these states exploded into anti-Black violence, making a mockery of their readmission terms. The thousands of documented “murders and outrages” that white supremacists, through groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, were perpetrating in the South included mass executions and rampant sexual violence. The state of Georgia was especially blatant in its defiance—the Klan ran roughshod there and Georgia whites expelled from office duly-elected Black state legislators, forcing Congress to reimpose military rule. Former Confederates would go to any lengths to cripple the fragile Republican interracial coalition governments.
The signatories to the Virginia petition represented the various elements of that interracial coalition. They included recently elected state legislators Ballard T. Edwards, a free black skilled artisan from Richmond who opened a school there, and Robert Norton, who was born into slavery in Williamsburg, Virginia, escaped to the North in the mid-1850s, and returned to Virginia after the war. The white signatories included loyalists such as Burham Wardwell, a pre-war ice dealer in Richmond who became part of the spy Elizabeth Van Lew’s Union underground.
The 1870 memorial was decried by moderates and conservatives in Congress as too radical and impractical. Only a handful of Radical Republicans in the Senate and House rose to the petitioners’ defense and endorsed applying the test oath. The fiery abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who formally presented the petition in the Senate, led the way. After hearing his colleagues credulously express their trust in the “plighted faith” of Virginia Conservatives, Sumner thundered, “I stand firm by the plighted faith of this great Republic. It is nothing less than this: to secure the rights of all without distinction of color in the State of Virginia.”
After two weeks of debate, Virginia’s readmission bill was passed on January 26, 1870; the terms did include the “fundamental condition,” but did not require the stringent iron-clad test oath for the state legislators. James T.S. Taylor’s worst fears were soon borne out. Conservatives would show, in a bitter clash over the postmastership at the University of Virginia, that their intolerance for Black voting was exceeded only by their intolerance for Black office-holding.
Image: Nast, Thomas, Artist. Pardon. Franchise Columbia. -- "Shall I trust these men, and not this man?" / / Th. Nast. Confederate States of America United States, 1865. [New York: Harper's Magazine Co., August 5] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2010644408/.
Sources:
For the petition itself, see Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., Jan. 12, 1870, p. 390 (Senate) and Jan. 13, pp. 440-41 (House), and National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), Jan. 22, 1870. On Black constitutionalism see Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (Kansas, 2016), pp. 53, 368, 374-75, 424-25. On the “fundamental condition,” see the Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 2nd Sess., June 1, 2736, 2738 (Drake quote). On the 1868 Virginia Constitution and its ratification see and John G. Deal, Marianne E. Julienne, and Brent Tarter, Justice for Ourselves: Black Virginians Claim Their Freedom after Slavery (Charlottesville, 2024), pp. 113-27; on the Conservative movement and its political posture see Daily Morning Chronicle (Washington, D.C.) Dec. 10, 1869 and Louis Moore, “The Elusive Center: Virginia Politics and the General Assembly, 1869-1871,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (Apr. 1995), pp. 207-36. On the results of the 1869 election in Albemarle County, Richmond Dispatch, July 13, 1869, Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle, July 10, 1869. On the 1862 test oath and 14th Amendment’s Section Three, see Harold Hyman, Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests During the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1954,) pp. 126-27, 137-38, and on the Grant administration’s rejection of the iron-clad oath for the Virginia legislature, see New York Herald, Sept. 4, 1869. On the extent of white supremacist violence in Virginia, see The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 2021), pp. 38-40; Jeff R. Kerr-Ritchie, “Black Republicans in the Virginia Tobacco Fields, 1867-70,” The Journal of Negro History (Winter 2001), pp. 22-24. On violence in Charlottesville see National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), July 17, 1869 (Gardner letter) and Dec. 4, 1869, and Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle, June 29, July 1, 1869. On the Holmes lynching, see https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/valynchings/VA1869050301/. For Conservative double-speak see Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Express, May 1, 1869 (Edmunds). On the petitioners, see https://community.village.virginia.edu/usct/node/97 (Taylor); https://mlkcommission.dls.virginia.gov/lincoln/african_americans.html (Edwards) ; https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/norton-robert-d-by-october-17-1898/ (Norton); Elizabeth R. Varon, Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy (New York, 2003), pp. 110, 145, 183, 203 (Wardwell). On Congressional debates over Virginia readmission, see Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., Jan. 12, 1870, pp. 385-394 (Sumner quote on p. 393) and https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/an-act-to-admit-the-state-of-virginia-to-representation-in-the-congress-of-the-united-states-january-26-1870/#:~:text=Following%20Virginia's%20ratification%20of%20the,ended%20Congressional%20Reconstruction%20in%20Virginia