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 two-part blog post, 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. Part one of the blog post is here; part two is presented below.
“Oppression at the Hands of the Rebels,” Pt. 2: The UVA Post Office Controversy
On April 20, 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant nominated the Black Union veteran James T.S. Taylor, of Charlottesville, for the patronage job of deputy postmaster at the University of Virginia. Taylor surely felt that he had earned the position, having fought to preserve the Union; served in the 1867-68 state constitutional convention that sought to modernize Virginia; and been a staunch supporter of the Republican party. For Taylor, as for other African Americans, federal patronage represented a path to officeholding in Southern localities controlled by unreconstructed whites, where elective office was out of reach.
Almost immediately, Taylor’s appointment sparked vehement opposition both at the local level in Charlottesville and in the national press. The triweekly Charlottesville Chronicle newspaper, representing the state’s dominant Conservative Party, set the tone for the national press coverage in articles published on April 23, 1870. The Chronicle cast Taylor’s appointment as an “outrage” designed to inflame UVa’s “excitable” student body into rioting; the Radical Republicans could then, so the Chronicle charged, use such an “indignant outburst” as a pretext for “quartering soldiers” in Virginia (reimposing Federal military rule over the state). The paper urged its readers not to take the bait, and instead to use political means to get their way: it reported that several hundred of the “prominent citizens of the city" had met and prepared a petition urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm Taylor—and that a similar meeting had taken place at the University itself.
A stream of newspaper editorials and articles poured forth that spring amplifying the Chronicle’s initial take—calling the appointment an “outrage” expressly intended to provoke a violent response. Why would a post office appointment spark such extended controversy? There were partisan political calculations at work, but the essence of the opposition to Taylor was implacable racism.
Postmasterships had long been political plums—the post office department was the largest and most politicized of federal agencies, and whichever party was in power at the federal level had the opportunity, in filling post office positions, to exercise patronage on a grand scale. The president appointed the postmaster general, a cabinet member who headed up the department in Washington, D.C.; he in turn appointed deputy postmasters to fill thousands of local offices around the country. Postmasters could exercise political clout in turn by dispensing patronage at the local level. Postmasterships were often stepping-stones to elective office; the most famous example of a postmaster turned politician is none other than Abraham Lincoln.
President Grant and his postmaster John A. J. Creswell had already generated controversy in some of their picks, by giving Southern Unionists access to post office positions in the former Confederate states. The most high-profile example was that of Elizabeth Van Lew, the Union spy who had led an espionage ring in Confederate Richmond, and was rewarded by the grateful President Grant in 1869 with the coveted postmastership of the former rebel capital; she used that platform to hire Blacks and women in the post office and to support Black voting and women’s suffrage. White Southerners reacted with rage to her appointment, as she represented white Southern loyalism and Radical Republicanism.
This was crucial context for the opposition by Charlottesville whites both to Taylor’s nomination, and to that of Clifford L. Thompson, whom Grant chose to be postmaster in Charlottesville itself. Thompson was, like Van Lew, what ex-rebels derogatorily called a “scalawag”—a white Southerner who sided with the Republican party after the war. During the first phase of Reconstruction, Taylor and Thompson had been elected as Albemarle County’s delegates to the state constitutional convention in 1867-68, where they promoted the Republican party’s agenda of Black voting and interracial governance. Albemarle County’s unreconstructed whites found Thompson to be a highly objectionable choice as postmaster and said so, deriding him as “notoriously incompetent and unreliable.”
Grant’s decision to elevate Thompson and Taylor was cast by hostile white Southerners as a betrayal of Grant’s magnanimous surrender terms at Appomattox, his 1868 campaign motto “Let Us Have Peace,” and his negotiated “compromise” with white Conservatives in Virginia (whereby they approved the state’s new constitution provided its provisions disfranchising Confederates were removed). The Charlottesville post office controversy played out at a time (April to November 1870) when the U.S. Congress was beginning to enact, at Grant’s urging, a series of “Enforcement Acts” that set penalties for interfering with voting rights and that criminalized the Klan and other such terrorist groups. Alleging that Grant had been coopted by the Radical Republicans, Grant’s critics called his Charlottesville post office appointments an act of “petty malice” contravening the “treaty under the apple tree, at Appomattox Courthouse.” Northern Democrats joined this Southern chorus—an Ohio paper sneered that Grant’s appointments were “in exact keeping with his little and depraved soul.”
But it was Taylor, not Thompson or Grant, who was the main target of such wrath. Critics of the appointment deemed it an “an insult and an outrage” to put “a negro as Postmaster at the great seat of learning in the South.” They described Taylor as unqualified and illiterate, although in truth he was an experienced politician and gifted writer who had published a series of eloquent letters in the New York Anglo-African paper during the Civil War. They spewed forth racist caricatures, epithets, stereotypes, and slurs, calling Taylor “ignorant and odiferous” and “degraded” and predicting that his appointment would “intensify the antagonism between the races, and sow seeds of mutual hatred sure to bring forth wretched fruit in coming years.”
Echoing the Charlottesville Chronicle, Taylor’s detractors saw his nomination as a trap laid by the Republicans, to provoke an outburst by “hot-blooded” UVA students. Denigrating Taylor’s participation in the “obnoxious” constitutional convention of 1867-68, Conservatives saw his nomination as an unwanted “admonition” to UVA students to obey the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They charged that the nomination was an insult not only to UVA, “the beloved Alma Mater of so many sons of the South,” but also to Thomas Jefferson himself, as UVA’s founder. Some coverage even claimed the appointment was an insult to Robert E. Lee, wrongly assuming that he was the president of UVA (rather than of Washington College in Lexington).
The repeated use of the word “outrage” (by the Chronicle and other papers) to describe Grant’s nomination of Taylor was itself a calculated effort to turn the tables on the Republicans, who referred to the widespread incidents of white supremacist terrorism in the South as “outrages.” The repeated references to the danger of provoking UVA students acknowledged their longstanding propensity for anti-Black violence and their reputation for unruliness. In warnings that doubled as threats, press commentary explicitly conjured violence against Taylor—the possibility that “the newly appointed officer may be so roughly handled as to manufacture a large amount of ‘Rebel outrage’ for Northern consumption,” as the Virginia Gazette, in Lexington, put it. Such language illustrates how the “threat of lynching” was deployed as a “powerful means of intimidation . . . . reaffirming that white supremacist violence could be deployed at any moment against perceived transgressors,” as the scholar Gianluca De Fazio explains in a recent book on racial terror in Virginia.
A window into the attitudes of UVA students in this era can be found in the reminiscences of R.T.W. Duke, Jr. of Charlottesville, who attended UVA from 1870 to 1874 and whose father R.T.W. Duke, Sr., a former Confederate Colonel, was elected as a Conservative to the General Assembly in 1870. Calling Reconstruction the “the worst crime in the history of civilization,” Duke Jr. cursed the 1868 constitution, and James T.S. Taylor’s role in drafting it. In Duke Jr.’s view, the Conservative ascendance had restored to power “the best white elements in the State” and reimposed Black subordination. Flashes of student violence reinforced that subordination. In a widely publicized example, Duke Jr.’s UVA classmate George Miles Arnold went on a drunken spree and “wantonly shot a colored man” in Charlottesville, “without provocation,” as the press noted, in January of 1871.
As he sought higher office, James T.S. Taylor not only faced threats from his political enemies but also some opposition from fellow Unionists and moderate Republicans. Coveted patronage positions perennially sparked intraparty factionalism, as office-seekers vied for advantage. Among those in Charlottesville who protested Taylor’s appointment was UVA alumnus John Thornley, a white Virginia Unionist who had served in the US Navy during the Civil War and settled in Albemarle County afterwards. When a deputation from Charlottesville headed to Washington D.C. to lobby against Taylor, they suggested that white Republican, John H. Bibb, should be appointed in his place—as Bibb was a “gentleman,” he would not be “obnoxious” to the students.
Some local Albemarle County Republicans did rally to Taylor's side, convening in Charlottesville in early May to reaffirm their support for him and for Thompson. A few Northern newspapers sympathetic to Taylor praised his strong credentials and “unimpeachable character,” and highlighted the powerful symbolism of appointing a Black postmaster at the university “founded by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the declaration that all men are created equal.” Such appeals were ultimately in vain. The Senate committee on postal appointments initially (in July 1870) "reported favorably" on Taylor's nomination, but when Senator Daniel D. Pratt of Indiana submitted a motion for the Senate to "reconsider" the issue, Taylor’s prospects dimmed. In November 1870 press reports hinted that John H. Bibb would be offered the position, and on December 8, 1870, U.S. Grant officially nominated Bibb, who would go on serve as UVA postmaster until his death in 1888.
What precise role the hostile reaction of Virginia whites played in the Senate’s internal deliberations is unclear. But the postmastership controversy was a grim and unwanted vindication of the alarms Taylor had sounded in his January 1870 petition to Congress, warning of Conservatives’ bad faith. Taylor and his fellow memorialists had predicted that Virginia Conservatives—for all their promises of abiding Black voting—would prove utterly averse to Black political aspirations. And in 1870-71, Conservatives did indeed show their true colors: they rejected civil rights legislation and imposed discriminatory measures, such as legislative reapportionment reducing the number of Black-district seats.
Taylor would remain an active and important community leader and mainstay of the local Republican party, but he and his allies could not keep the tide of retrenchment at bay. As national support for Reconstruction waned, Congress pardoned hundreds of former rebels (permitting them to regain office), and the “fundamental condition” of readmission (preventing the reconstructed states from changing their constitutions to effect Black disfranchisement) went unenforced. White supremacists across the South, in the reactionary Democratic party, used propaganda, violence, punitive legislation and constitutional amendments—instating poll taxes, registration hurdles, and disfranchisement penalties for petty offenses--to drive Blacks out of the electoral sphere.
In Virginia, after a brief Republican comeback during the early 1880s Readjuster movement, Jim Crow was ascendant: the all-white Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902 effectively ended state-level Black officeholding—no African American was elected to the Virginia General Assembly between 1890 and 1967. One of the architects of the constitution’s voter suppression measures was Democratic politician John W. Daniel—a UVA law alumnus and a former Confederate officer who had served as a Conservative in the 1869 state legislature.
Virginia’s leading Black newspaper, the Richmond Planet, condemned the 1901-02 convention’s “disregard of the compact entered into with the national government, by which Virginia was readmitted to the Union.” The Planet solemnly observed, “[No] constitution will be lasting which has race prejudice for its foundation stone. . . . It is a sad condition of affairs now prevailing, but the end of this long night of oppression and misrepresentation must be just beyond.” The Planet thus pledged its faith that the veterans and activists of Taylor’s Civil War generation had not battled in vain.
Image: James and Eliza Taylor after the Civil War (courtesy of the Taylor family)
Sources:
On Taylor’s postmaster appointment, see Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of American from March 5, 1869 to March 3, 1871 Inclusive, Vol. XVII (Washington, D.C., 1901), pp. 429-30, 507, 547-48. For the Charlottesville coverage and its regional echoes see Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle, Apr. 23, 26, 1870, Richmond Dispatch, Apr. 25, 1870, Staunton Spectator, Apr. 26, 1870, Rockingham Register, Apr. 28, 1870. On postmasterships and Van Lew, 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. 217-21. On invective aimed at Grant, see Cincinnati Enquirer, Apr. 29, 1870, Daily Columbus Enquirer (Ga.), May 3, 1870, Selma Times-Argus (Ala.), May 5, 1870, and Hancock Courier (Findlay, Oh.), June 2, 1870. On racial animus aimed at Taylor, see for example Lynchburg Daily News, Apr. 23, 1870, Virginia Gazette (Lexington), Apr. 29, 1870, Missouri Republican, Apr. 29, 1870 (St. Louis), Charleston (S.C.) Courier, May 2, 1870, Wheeling Daily Register, Apr. 29, 1870. On references to Jefferson and Lee, see Shelbina Democrat (Mo.), May 5, 1870, Galveston Tri-Weekly News, (Tx.), May 9, 1870. On UVA students’ record of anti-Black violence, see https://slavery.virginia.edu/sample-page-2/pcsu-report-final_july-2018/, pp. 19-24 and Daily State Journal (Richmond), Jan. 26, 1871 and Alexandria Gazette, Jan. 27, 1871 (Arnold incident). On lynching threats in Virginia, see Gianluca de Fazio, Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and Its Legacy (Charlottesville, 2024), pp. 6-9. On the Dukes, see R.T.W. Duke Jr., “Recollections,” Vol. 2, pp. 106-12, Vol. 4, pp. 75-77 https://small.library.virginia.edu/collections/featured/duke-family-papers/recollections/. For defenses of Taylor, see Washington Chronicle (D.C.), Apr. 27, 1879, Cincinnati Gazette in Morning Republican (Little Rock, Ark.), May 11, 1870, and Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle, May 3, 1870 (notice of Republican meeting). On Thompson and Bibb, see Richmond Dispatch, Apr. 26, 1870, Daily Columbus Enquirer (Ga.), Nov. 27, 1870, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 16, 1870, Charlottesville Tri-Weekly Chronicle, Dec. 17, 1870. On the post-Reconstruction period see https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/african-americans-and-politics-in-virginia-1865-1902/; https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/daniel-john-warwick-1842-1910/; and Richmond Planet, July 13, 1901.