Rediscovering the Readjusters: Remembering a Lost Multiracial, Working-Class Movement

Imagine a multiracial populist movement composed of middle- and working-class voters. Now imagine that they sweep into power on a platform of lower taxes, less government debt, and better schools, and once in office, they manage to accomplish this agenda. To many, it sounds like such a movement is too good to be true. The lodestar of so much political organizing today, everyone from labor organizers to “re­alignment” wonks, seems to consider such an event a hopeful “what if,” not a serious “what was.”

But what if such a movement has already occurred? And what if it occurred on the political right? In Virginia? In 1880?

They called themselves the Readjusters.

The Origins of Virginia’s Debt Crisis

The Readjuster movement was born at a nadir in Virginia history. Un­fathomable socioeconomic conditions wrought by the state’s governing elite during, and in the wake of, Reconstruction catalyzed working-class voters—African American and white—to demand something better. The kernel of this unique agitation was the status of Virginia’s pre–Civil War debt, and the failure of those in power to manage the fiscal crisis caused by its enormity.

In the decades before the Civil War, Virginia embarked on a shop­ping spree of internal improvements, borrowing heavily to build a network of canals and railroads. The initial borrowing started as early as 1822, but two-thirds of the debt was accrued in the 1850s. By the eve of the Civil War, Virginia had, over the years, sold bonds worth about $34 million to finance purchases of equity in public companies engaged in infrastructure construction.¹ These bonds generally matured in thirty-four years and paid 6 percent annual inter­est.² Admittedly, it might not seem like much today, when debt is measured in the trillions, but in 1860, the entire debt of the federal government was only twice as much: $64.8 million.³

All the debt-financed infrastructure was destroyed during the Civil War. And while Virginia did not pay interest on the debt between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, after surrender it faced antebellum obligations it no longer had the capacity to pay. The U.S. Army did help rebuild some of Virginia’s railroads, and those railroads quickly became profit­able, but they did not pay dividends to the state.⁴ And neither could Virginia count on dividends from its state-chartered banks; situated on recent battlefields, many had ceased to exist.⁵ To make matters worse for the Old Dominion, the western portion of Virginia had seced­ed from the state to rejoin the Union as the new state of West Virginia in 1863. This cost Virginia even more wealth and population. But not debt. West Virginia accepted no responsibility for the debt racked up by Virginia, and even though the two states attempted to negotiate some settlement of shared sacrifice in 1866 and 1870, the talks failed.⁶

By 1870, Virginia’s debt stood at $45 million. This meant each citizen was responsible for a share of public debt double the national average.⁷ With seemingly no ability to pay and having lost two-thirds of its tax base, Virginia stared into the abyss of bankruptcy.

New Public Schools versus Old Confederates

To appreciate how unusual things were about to get in Virginia, it is necessary to understand the socioeconomic and political landscape of the state. When Francis Pierpont (a Lincoln supporter and Unionist governor of Virginia) called for the election of a new state legislature to convene in December 1865, the group that arrived in Richmond may as well have come from a decade prior. The composition of the new legisla­ture was entirely white and it was not interested in any of Pierpont’s reforms, such as the creation of free schools, financial support to widows and orphans, and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Pretending as if the Civil War had not ended, its members rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, reinstituted de facto slavery masquerading as an anti-vagrancy law, and demanded President Johnson remove Gover­nor Pierpont so that Robert E. Lee could take his place.⁸ The legislature also confidently announced that Virginia would honor its entire debt, even the share (whatever it might be) owed by West Virginia.⁹

Alarmed by the behavior of the Virginia legislature (and similar developments in the other former Confederate states), Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867, carving the South into five military districts. For readmission to the Union, the Act required states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and allow African Americans to vote for delegates to new state constitutional conventions.¹⁰ At the 1868 conven­tion for the new Virginia constitution—called the Underwood constitution after the abolitionist judge who chaired it—twenty-four African Americans joined an overwhelming number of Radical Republicans to draft a new constitution which proposed the first free public school system in the state, expanded black male suffrage, and disenfranchised former Confederates.¹¹ Eventually, Virginia ratified the Underwood constitution, but only after the disenfranchisement language was dropped. Virginia was again part of the United States.

The free schools were particularly popular with regular Virginians. Prior to 1870, school, costing between $125 and $250 a year, was only available to the wealthiest in the state. Even middle-class Virginians could send their children only haphazardly to schools, which provided the most basic of education.¹² African Americans were particularly supportive of the free schools. Almost all were illiterate and saw educa­tion as a reliable path to vindicate their natural, and now constitutional, rights. Booker T. Washington described the transformation simply as “a whole race trying to go to school.”¹³ In Warwick County, a freed slave explained that the black children finally going to school “thought it was so much like the way master’s children used to be treated, that they believed they were getting white.”¹⁴ It was this environment that engen­dered passions about class mobility and racial equality, even as the state’s political elite had other priorities, including the prewar debts.

But by 1870, Virginia’s Confederate ruling class was largely back in power. Although the legislature made good on the constitutional re­quirement to create “a uniform system of free public schools,” the old guard defeated integration efforts and established the new schools as racially separate.¹⁵ The legislature also imposed new taxes to fund the schools.

The Funding Act of 1871: A Failed Effort to Pay the Debt

Although Virginia’s first governor after readmission, Gilbert Walker, was a Yankee banker and carpetbagger, he had more affinity for the Democrats in the legislature than the Radical Republicans. Faced with the prospect of default, Walker called upon the legislature to not just retire the principal of the debt, but for the state to resume payment on its interest, which had effectively ceased since the Civil War began. He declared:

The bond held for the benefit of the poor orphan, and the bond owned by the rich speculator, are of equal dignity, and equally binding on the State. Each is her solemn obligation to pay. . . . But it matters not where or by whom our bonds are held, or at what rates they were obtained, so far as your duty is concerned. That duty is to reinstate our dishonored credit. The people of this Commonwealth will never permit the blighting stain of repudiation to tarnish her escutcheon. A neglect, however, to provide the means for meeting the obligations of the State is as much repudiation as would be an absolute refusal of payment and far less manly.¹⁶

No matter that only roughly a quarter of Virginians held state bonds—the bulk were held by Northern and British investors. According to Governor Walker, to make those interests whole the state would pay any price.¹⁷

To do that, Virginia’s Democrats passed the Funding Act of 1871. First, the law invalidated the medley of existing state bonds so that the debt could be consolidated in a new bond issue. Owners of the old bonds were thrilled; they had effectively received no interest payments on their bonds in nearly ten years. Second, the Act issued new bonds, for which old bonds could be exchanged. These new bonds still matured in thirty-four years and paid 6 percent interest.¹⁸

The law also gave investors a choice between two different types of bonds. “Registered bonds” matured in thirty-four years, at which point the bearer could redeem them for the face value and accrued interest. “Coupon bonds” permitted the collection of interest in six-month inter­vals. Since the life of the bond was thirty-four years, coupon bonds came attached with sixty-eight coupons allowing the bearer to collect 3 percent interest every half year by presenting the bond at the state treasury. And unlike the registered bonds, the owners of which were registered with the state auditor, the ownership of the coupon bonds was not recorded. Popular at the time, coupon bonds could be bought and sold freely with the person in final possession able to redeem for the partial interest, and eventually the full principal.¹⁹

To pay off the principal, the Funding Act imposed a 2 percent tax on property values starting in 1880, and dedicated revenue from the sale of public property to the same purpose. Desperate for cash up front, Virginia then sold off its shares in the state railroad at greatly depressed prices.²⁰ At first it seemed as if the Funding Act of 1871 would do the trick. The Act passed comfortably with all the African American mem­bers of the legislature joining white colleagues to send the bill to Governor Walker’s desk.²¹ But as the ink dried on the Funding Act, things began to go awry. Buried inside was a statutory time bomb, and it had a very short fuse.

“Better to Burn the Schools”: The Elites Go Extreme

Controversially, the Funding Act allowed coupon bonds to be “receiv­able at and after maturity for all taxes, debts, dues, and demands due the state, which shall so be expressed on their face.”²² This meant that bondholders in Virginia could pay their taxes in coupons. And remember, coupon bonds could be bought and sold at will. This created a secondary market where out-of-state bondholders sold coupons to Vir­ginians who then used them to pay taxes. Soon, payment of taxes in coupons poured into the treasury at an annual rate of $1 million.²³ The foolishness of this policy should have been obvious—by collecting cou­pons rather than dollars, the state risked running its coffers dry.

Compounding the problem of shrinking state revenues was Governor Walker’s failure at math. During the debate on the Funding Act, Walker had insisted that Virginia was economically sound. But Walker’s calculations of a $72.5 million tax base proved to be generous by a factor of two, and amid a revenue shortfall, the cost of state services increased to three times Walker’s estimate. Quickly, a small projected surplus of $61,000 morphed into consistent yearly deficits, sometimes as high as $850,000.²⁴ Almost as a cruel joke to the Old Dominion, the Panic of 1873 cratered the national economy, too. Virginia’s economy remained sclerotic with weak growth for years to follow. Wages declined through­out the decade, especially for rural laborers who struggled to find anything better than seasonal employment.²⁵

To its credit, the legislature did quickly realize the catastrophe they had wrought upon Virginia and attempted to undo the worst impacts of the Funding Act. At first, they were thwarted by Governor Walker, who vetoed a measure to suspend the Funding Act.²⁶ But when the legislators overrode a second Walker veto of a bill to strike the provision permitting tax payments with coupons, the state supreme court struck it down. In Antoni v. Wright, the court ruled that the 1872 law nixing the tax receivability of coupons violated the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution.²⁷

But Walker’s weakness with arithmetic shouldn’t have mattered. It was obvious that the state’s strategy for paying the debt was bizarre. At the time of the Funding Act, the principal was nine times larger than the state’s yearly revenue, and still growing since the interest had gone unpaid. By 1872, the debt was ten times as much as revenues.²⁸ One hardly needed to be an accountant to recognize, as one historian did, that

if all the old bonds had been exchanged for new 6 percent bonds, the state would have had to pay more than $1.8 million in interest, more than half the annual revenue. Moreover, every dollar paid into the Treasury in the form of a coupon was a dollar the treasury could not use to pay public salaries, to operate the government, or to buy buildings and books or pay teachers and administrators for the new public schools—or even to pay interest on the debt.²⁹

Finding its most logical courses of action stymied, Virginia’s powers-that-be doubled down on their insistence that the only honorable thing was to pay the debt whatever the costs. Now known as Funders for their fidelity to the 1871 Act, Virginia’s political elite raised taxes. But Virginia’s taxpayers were already stretched to the breaking point. Each year, federal tariffs and excises cost the state’s taxpayers $13 million in total, and state and local taxes imposed millions more. Prior to the Civil War, for each $100 of assessed property value, citizens only paid—at most—40 cents in taxes.³⁰ Ruling Democrats raised it to 50 cents.³¹ And then imposed a series of new business license fees. By 1880, Virginia’s per capita tax load was twice what it had been before the Civil War.

Voters began to get suspicious, and mad. As Funders schemed up new regressive taxes, including levies on liquor and dogs, they left untouched the low taxes on banks, insurance companies, and railroads.³² Railroad taxation was particularly egregious. Virginia allowed each rail­road company to assess its own property values for tax purposes—of course the railroads low-balled. In 1879, these multimillion dollar corporations paid only $46,000 to the state fisc.³³

In a further effort to economize, a new governor—former Confederate general James Kemper—proposed a series of constitutional reforms to undo some of the most democratic elements of the Underwood constitution. Although Kemper had a record of support for African American education, he pressed on with his antidemocratic “solutions” to the debt crisis.³⁴ He proposed shrinking the number of local officials and the size of the legislature, ultimately succeeding in abolishing a third of local offices so as to centralize more power in Richmond.³⁵ And in 1876, the Funder policy program moved beyond regressive austerity measures to reveal the full scope of their elitism and racism. Funders succeeded in denying suffrage to multitudes of voters, especially African Americans, by removing voting rights from anyone punished at the whipping post for a petty crime. They also passed an amendment to restore the poll tax as a source of revenue.³⁶ Anyone who had not paid would be denied the vote on election day.³⁷ Although the population of Virginia increased during the 1870s, the number of voters decreased from 236,989 in 1876 to 212,281 in the election of 1880, roughly 10 percent.³⁸

This overall mismanagement of the debt crisis was largely the result of the insularity of Virginia’s ruling class. Less than a generation re­moved from the aristocracy of the antebellum era, Virginia’s leaders belonged to exclusive clubs and professional societies and rarely mingled with the urban and rural masses struggling under the weight of Funder policies.³⁹ In a particularly detached example, a group of upper-class Virginians—the Women’s Association for the Liquidation of the State Debt—called upon the “Daughters’ of Virginia” to shoulder a twenty percent tax increase to pay the debt and vindicate the state’s honor.⁴⁰ As evidence of their seriousness, the Association’s members declared: “we, the women of Virginia, can greatly aid and encourage [the male leader­ship of the state] in this attempt by our economy, self-denial and sacrifice.”⁴¹ More broadly, a study of the socioeconomic makeup of the Funders found that “the typical Funder politician was a middle-aged lawyer with a good family background, a University of Virginia educa­tion, and a distinguished war record as a Confederate officer.”⁴² Exactly the type obsessed with honor, skeptical of expanded democracy, fer­vently opposed to racial equality, and seriously out of touch with reality.

Which is why, as coupons continued to pour into the treasury—by 1873 almost half of taxpayers paid with them—and raising taxes proved insufficient (the state auditor reported that nothing short of a 75 percent tax increase would close the revenue shortfall, which even Funders agreed was untenable), the Funders decided to cut social services.⁴³ Appropriations were slashed for the state’s mental hospitals and prisons, and—most significantly for the average voters of both races—the public schools.

Funding for public schools was cut from $443,000 in 1876 to $241,000 in 1878. By 1879, the public school system was $1.5 million in the red, and teachers were owed $250,000 in backpay.⁴⁴ The result was that the state’s youth got the boot from the classroom—half the schools in the state closed, with the remaining half beginning to charge tuition. All told, more than a hundred thousand children had to leave school.⁴⁵ John Daniels, a bitter racist, arch-Funder, and state senator, summed up the sentiment of Virginia’s ruling class when he declared that it would be “better to burn the schools” than repudiate any of the debt.⁴⁶

Ultimately, the school cuts were the last straw. For small business owners, working-class whites, and African Americans, the attack on the public schools began to connect, in their minds, the issues of education, suffrage, and the debt. If citizens were not educated, how could they engage effectively to protect (and expand) their right to vote? And if they could not vote, how could the common Virginian ever possibly throw out the fools in Richmond who were plunging the state into fiscal oblivion?

“God’s Decree for Honest Labor”:
An Emerging Alternative

Recognizing the growing biracial discontent with Funder rule, a dissi­dent faction of Virginia Democrats began to argue for something better than heavy taxes and atrophied social services. Noting that “honor” could not “buy breakfast” or “set a leg,” these populists proposed to “readjust” the debt to a level commensurate with the state’s means. As a result, the state could do right by common Virginians, and the bondholders as well. But for these “Readjusters,” Virginians came first. They felt that the Funders—who took the position that the state was helpless to impose terms more favorable to it upon the bondholders—had not been assertive enough.⁴⁷

Blasting the Funders as “fossils” and “fogies,” those favorable to re­adjustment insisted that policymakers should question prevailing ortho­doxies and emphasize real-world results.⁴⁸ Unsurprisingly, dissidents skewed a bit younger than Funders and their ranks were comprised of “ambitious yeom[e]n, impoverished tobacco farmer[s], and rebellious blacks,” according to one scholar.⁴⁹ Avowedly producerist, but hardly agrarian, the movement to readjust the debt had its fair share of city dwellers who came from the edges of the merchant and professional classes.⁵⁰ The common thread then, for both races, was individuals who lacked the oligarchic standing of Virginia’s ruling class, and had been hit hard by the economic crisis. These Virginians feared that a continuation of the crisis would not only destroy any chance they had for personal economic advancement, but the loss of schools would foreclose any advancement for their children as well, all of which would ultimately threaten democracy in the state to boot.⁵¹

By 1877, these sentiments—still inchoate—had begun to coalesce into political action. That year voters across the state declared the debt crisis “a square life and death struggle between the organized Money-ring power, and the productive industry of the people—the brawny arms and manly brows which distill the sweat of obedience to God’s decree for honest Labor!”⁵² In a legislature dominated nearly three to one in favor of Funders, voters sent an unprecedented twenty-two inde­pendents to Richmond in the 1877 election cycle, nearly all endorsing various degrees of readjustment.⁵³

Seizing upon this momentum, the pro-readjustment legislators pro­posed a solution. Called the Barbour bill, after its author James Barbour, the legislation reordered the state’s priorities. First, maintenance of the state government; second, funding for public schools; and last, payment of the debt.⁵⁴ Specifically, the Barbour bill capped property taxes, re­quired those taxes to be paid in lawful legal tender (rather than coupons), and set percentages of how much revenue could be spent on social services, schools, and the debt.⁵⁵ Surprisingly, the state legislature passed the Barbour bill—a clear indication that popular sentiment was turning against the Funders’ policy priorities. Dutifully, Frederick M. W. Holliday, Virginia’s new patrician Funder governor, vetoed the Barbour bill. In rejecting Barbour’s compromise, Holliday argued that debt payment was an ace which trumped all other priorities; the debt “was due when free schools were scarcely, if at all, thought of,” he noted smugly.⁵⁶ He then sniped at the Underwood constitution, which had established the public schools. In a dig to the biracial composition of that constitution’s convention, Holliday reminded audiences that prior to the convention the debt had been a priority of “a legislature composed of men of the old regime—among the ablest, best and truest who ever grew up on Virginia soil.”⁵⁷ The Funders were back on offense.

In what was portrayed as a rebuke of readjustment, Funders swept Virginia in the 1878 congressional midterms, defeating federal candidates critical of Funder rule. Capitalizing on their victory, Funders were quick to reopen channels of communication with the bondholders in New York and London and reach a compromise that would theoretically pay the debt while boxing out a populist resurgence.⁵⁸

Known as the McCulloch bill, after Hugh McCulloch who represented the bondholders, the compromise proposed to save Virginia $26 million by scraping the burdensome 6 percent interest rate for a tiered system of new bonds which would pay 3 percent for the first ten years, 4 percent for the next twenty years, and 5 percent interest for the remaining ten years.⁵⁹ Diminished by the midterms, and with no alternative to offer, the proponents of readjustment were rolled. Writing in early 1879, a friend of readjustment wrote that “it is evident, that a majority of the Legislature are earnestly in favor of readjusting and settling forever the debt question. But it is equally evident that a majority of that majority have no definite plan and no well-arranged system. All is chaos.”⁶⁰

“Without Distinction of Color”:
The Birth of the Readjuster Party

It was at this moment that an unusual individual emerged to give the debt revolt the leadership and organization it would need to be success­ful. His name was William Mahone.

Born in 1826 to slave-holding tavern-keepers and graduating from the Virginia Military Institute thanks to a scholarship, Mahone was as self-made as he was the antipode of the Funder elite. And with his shrill voice, five-foot-five stature, and slight frame, he also seemed the antithe­sis of the decorated veteran that he was. A railroad engineer and educator before the Civil War, Mahone was promoted all the way to major general in the Confederate Army. Virginians knew him best as the dubious victor of the infamous Battle of the Crater, where Confederate troops massacred African American soldiers fighting for the United States.⁶¹

Returning to the railroad industry after war (he earned $25,000 as the president of the Atlantic, Mississippi, and Ohio Railroad), he became known as a gourmand luxuriating with fancy clothes, carriages, quality booze, and his signature Panama hat. And although Mahone lost his railroad during the Panic of 1870, his larger-than-life reputation sur­vived. Respected for his “prodigious energy,” Mahone “elicited a fierce loyalty from his friends and a hatred which bordered on fanaticism from his enemies.”⁶² Originally a foe of Reconstruction, during the 1870s Mahone underwent an unexpected (and still not fully understood) transformation into a man of the New South. Distrustful of high finance, supportive of manufacturing, mining, and industry to complement the state’s agricultural heritage, a perhaps surprisingly genuine believer in multiracial democracy, and committed to local governance, Mahone was derided as a modern Cataline (the ancient demagogue who attempted to overthrow the Roman republic) by Democrats and as Moses by African Americans. Mahone, apparently, preferred neither, instead likening himself to Napoleon.⁶³

In February 1879, Mahone called upon all Virginians concerned about the debt and economy, regardless of their skin color, to join him at a state convention in Richmond.⁶⁴ The purpose was to create a new political party to battle the Funders in the state election in the fall. On February 25, delegates from nearly two-thirds of Virginia’s counties poured into Mozart Hall in the state capital. Encompassing individuals of both races, and all classes, the delegates set about establishing a new political organization. African American delegates were vocal leaders at the convention linking the curtailment of their new rights—especially the reinstituted poll tax—with the debt crisis. William T. Jefferson took the floor to explain that he and other African American attendees (who were mostly Republicans) were glad to share a convention with white Democrats thanks “to the call which convened the people of Virginia without distinction of color.”⁶⁵ Jefferson then went on: “as to the debt, we don’t want to pay a cent of it. We think we paid our share of it, if it ever was justly chargeable upon us, by long years of servitude. And then, as Virginia has been reconstructed in her territory and her govern­ment, we think that her debt should be reconstructed too.”⁶⁶ The crowd roared its approval.

White participants recognized the solidarity they shared with African Americans. Under Funder rule, working- and middle-class whites knew that their economic and civic position was precarious. They too had become disenfranchised by the poll tax, and with the loss of schools saw prospects of betterment for their children, not to mention that of their African American neighbors, dimming. Speaking in the third person, one white attendee said that those favoring readjustment “had been sneered at for seeking the aid of the colored citizens. He desired nothing better than to add all the colored voters to the ranks of those who were fighting the battles of popular rights and interests.” Though Funders had told him that Virginians “should not waste education on the ‘damned n—s,’” he said, “let the colored people stand fast by the Readjusters and the Readjusters will see to it that education shall be provided for the children of all colors.”⁶⁷

Mahone himself articulated the early vision of the Readjuster move­ment. Striking at the Funder jugular, Mahone proclaimed “this twaddle about the honor of the State . . . is sheer nonsense,” compared to the “robbery of the school fund.”⁶⁸ He noted that, for all their pretensions, the Funders had already endorsed de facto readjustment of the debt; the state had long failed to meet its own interest payments on time. Linking the debt, economic collapse, schools, and suffrage—the formulation key to the success of the biracial coalition—Mahone argued against the undemocratic and unconstitutional nature of the Funder agenda. Mahone confessed that he preferred to “let the very wheels of government stand still” than permit “so gross a violation of the will of the people, as the perversion or conversion of the public school fund to any other purpose than that for which it was created.”⁶⁹ The next day—February 26, 1879—the Readjuster Party was officially born.

Unfortunately, it was too late to stop the passage of the McCulloch bill. Twenty-two of the pro-readjustment legislators broke ranks and voted for the bill which became law in March 1879.⁷⁰ But that one month was all Mahone and his followers needed to take back the offen­sive. Rather than stamping out reform sentiment as Funders hoped, passage of the McCulloch bill reinvigorated the cause of readjustment like no other.

Denouncing the legislation as the “Broker’s Bill,” the new Readjuster Party unleashed a persuasive assault on the deal. They argued that the bill ceded sovereignty of the state to financial institutions in New York and London, seeing as it was McCulloch and his colleagues who had been instrumental in developing the proposal. Next, they noted that the Broker’s Bill did not actually restore the state to a sound fiscal footing. Namely, it did nothing to stop the flow of coupons into the treasury, which would continue to deny the state needed revenue. One provision even required the state to borrow new money at usurious rates to ensure interest payments would be met.⁷¹

Declaring the McCulloch bill to be, in the words of one Readjuster Party spokesman, even “more objectionable than the Funding bill of 1871,” the debt insurgency gained steam. As Governor Holliday urged “economic retrenchment, and self-sacrifice” to the struggling masses, the Readjusters canvassed the state preaching “goaheadiveness,” “life,” and “business vim.”²

“You Are the Representative of the People”:
The Readjuster Party on the Path to Power

Come November 1879, the Readjuster Party managed to split the white vote and found themselves just shy of a majority in the state legislature. The balance of power was held by the Republican Party, of which thirteen seats belonged to African Americans.⁷³ Throughout the 1870s, the Republican party had declined in Virginia. Although it still earned the votes of most African Americans, black voters exceedingly lent it only begrudging support. The state party’s white leadership reserved patronage spots for whites and generally took African American support for granted.⁷⁴

Considering this neglect, shortly after the election, the African American Republican legislators began to discuss fusion with their Re­adjuster Party colleagues. Further infuriating bigoted Funders, Mahone negotiat­ed personally with African American leaders and made clear to them that the Readjuster Party was serious about enacting a color-blind, pro-worker agenda. As the legislature convened, the thirteen black Re­publicans caucused with the Readjuster Party to give the latter a majority. No longer was the debt the only glue of Readjustment: support for black education, an end to the whipping post, death to the poll tax, and a share in the spoils of patronage rounded out the agenda.⁷⁵

An early move by the coalition majority was to pass their preferred debt settlement. Known as the Riddleberger bill in honor of Readjuster leader and key architect Harrison Riddleberger, the proposal departed from Funder orthodoxy. First, it straightforwardly repudiated one-third of the debt on the charge that one-third of Virginia’s tax base (including the loss of West Virginia) had been destroyed in the Civil War. Second, it proposed to issue new bonds—fifty years at 3 percent interest—to replace all previous bonds and made clear that these new bonds were not tax receivable. Third, it prospectively levied a property tax of 0.2 percent starting in 1890 to pay off the remaining principal. True to their populist brand, the bill required approval by voters in a referendum to take place in 1880 before enactment.⁷⁶ Speaking for the proposal, Riddleberger outlined the Readjuster Party vision for the state: “Population and capi­tal are attracted. Railroads are built. New industries spring up. Mines are opened. Manufactories are started. Vigor, thrift, and industry are seen everywhere. Virginia is awake and alert.”⁷⁷ Predictably, Governor Hol­liday vetoed the bill. But the Readjuster Party had proven they were more than obstructionists; they could govern.

And govern they did. In Virginia, the governor was not given a role in selecting the leadership of many positions in the state bureaucracy. With free rein over key parts of the civil service, the Readjuster coalition booted Funders from important roles and replaced them with their own people. Soon the positions of state auditor, second auditor, treasurer, secretary, and superintendent of public instruction were all members of the Readjuster Party. In particular, the latter swiftly fired almost all the superintendents at the county and city levels and replaced them with individuals more committed to educational attainment regardless of race. The Readjuster coalition also initiated a constitutional amendment to repeal the poll tax. And they elected William Mahone the next United States Senator from Virginia.⁷⁸ The Readjuster Party had gone national.

Elected to the Senate in December 1879, Mahone would not be sworn in until the next session of Congress in March 1881. In the intervening period, a pivotal presidential election was held that threatened to rend the Readjuster Party. Heading into 1880, both the national Democrat and Republican Parties sensed something unusual was un­folding in Virginia, and the state’s Democrats moved in for the kill. Since the nucleus of Readjusterism was so specific to Virginia, and the movement needed to preserve its partisan independence to survive, pressures developed for the Readjusters to pick a side for president.

Mahone pleaded with his colleagues to field an independent Readjuster party ticket beholden to neither major party. But the little general was unsuccessful. White Readjusters generally preferred Democrat nominee Winfield Scott Hancock for president, just as their black part­ners supported Republican James Garfield. In the end, the party fielded Readjuster candidates for Congress but endorsed Hancock for the White House.⁷⁹

And so without help from African Americans—which represented 40 percent of the electorate—the Readjuster Party underperformed in the presidential election.⁸⁰ Though they managed to elect two Readjusters to the U.S. House, their dismal showing at the polls overall revealed a plain demographic reality that the party’s leadership could not ignore. For the Readjuster movement to be successful, the party needed permanent fusion with African American Republicans. This wasn’t necessarily difficult—the party had already begun to infuse its platform with civil rights issues as part of its coalition with black Republicans in the state legislature—but with Mahone heading to the Senate, these pledges took on new prominence, and the state’s African Americans were looking for results.

And Mahone was looking to deliver. Now a senator from the Readjuster party—effectively an independent—he had leverage. The start of the 47th Congress saw the Senate tied 37–37 between the two major parties. David Davies from Illinois had also been elected as an independent but pledged to caucus with Democrats.⁸¹ This moved all eyes to Mahone. With Garfield in the White House, for Mahone to ally with Republicans would give the GOP the tie-breaking vice-presidential vote in the Senate. Both sides lobbied the Readjuster chieftain, but in the end, it was Virginia’s voters who found Mahone’s ear. Entering the Senate, he wrote of the letters pouring in from his prospective constituents: “They would surprise you. They are all from [Readjuster] Stalwarts with two or three exceptions, and they absolve allegiance to the Demo[cratic] party and ask for a new departure. Some are ready without method to go—others by gentle and progressive steps. All would be glad to have the Rep[ublican] party . . . come to us, and some would go there. . . . There is much in the temper of the sentiment to be Nat[ional] Rep[ublican] and Vir[gini]a Liberal.”⁸² The politics of pat­ronage did not hurt either. “If you can get the federal patronage,” one white Readjuster wrote to Mahone, “and dispense it among readjusters irrespective of past party affiliations, it would make us invulnerable and invincible.”⁸³

After he was sworn in, Mahone ended the speculation. He would caucus with the Republicans. In return he was lavished with committee assignments—he was instantly made chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee—and commanded a deluge of federal patronage for the Readjuster rank and file.⁸⁴ At first Mahone had to share patronage for federal jobs in Virginia with the Republican Party apparatus, but upon the death of James Garfield, he persuaded the newly elevated president Chester A. Arthur to give him full control.⁸⁵ From staff positions in Washington to federal judges to laborers in the Norfolk Navy Yard to lighthouse keepers along the state’s cost, and with hundreds of postal positions in between, Mahone had control over about two thousand jobs.⁸⁶ And he had to work quickly. Given the lack of a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature, the Readjusters realized that nothing short of capturing the governor’s mansion in 1881 would ensure victory over the debt. Showing the party’s seriousness about racial and economic reform through patronage distribution would be vital in energizing the movement ahead of the gubernatorial election.

In distributing patronage, Mahone made clear that every part of Virginia would benefit. Historically, both major parties had favored white Tidewater or urban elites when it came to patronage. But the Readjuster party was looking to do things differently. The Readjusters counted all the jobs and divided them equally across the state’s congressional seats. Mahone then wrote to the party’s local chairmen. He urged them to send him names of any competent Readjusters looking for federal employment. And he stressed: he wanted the names of men and women, black and white, from any walk of life. Mahone was breaking new ground, no politician had ever done something like this before. For many parts of the state, especially African American communities, and the mostly white mountainous regions, Mahone’s request was greeted eagerly. One voter in Carroll County summed up the sentiment best in a letter to Mahone: “Up here in these Backwoods we never thought of a United States Senator sending to the people to recommend some of our Boys and Girls for positions in Washington. . . . Heretofore it has been the Policy to give all positions to some Jackleg lawyer . . . you have proven to us that you are the Representative of the People and for the People.”⁸⁷

Over the course of Mahone’s term he worked to add 347 new post offices in Virginia, further extending the reach of the Readjusters’ patronage power. At its apex, black men made up more than a quarter of Virginia’s employees in the U.S. Treasury, 38 percent in the Postal Service, 28 percent in the Department of the Interior (including two black women), and 38 percent of civilians employed by the Navy. Of those working for the Navy, a quarter were women.⁸⁸ Fair distribution of patronage was just as much about a paycheck as it was about honor—by giving these chances to non-elite Virginians, especially African Americans, the Readjusters showed they believed their followers worthy of the “recognition, responsibility, and authority that accompanied” these jobs.⁸⁹ As voters went to the polls in 1881, they knew it was no longer Funder business as usual in the Old Dominion. Mahone and the Readjuster Party were people of their word and serious about change.

“They Say They Are Fighting Caste”:
The Readjuster Party in Power

With the ballots all counted, the Readjuster party had crushed the Funders with a twelve-thousand-vote majority. Helped by vigorous African American turnout, the Readjuster Party retained both chambers of the legislature and finally captured the governor’s mansion.⁹⁰ The new governor was William Cameron who had been a strong supporter of giving patronage to African Americans.⁹¹ But the Readjusters did not have time to rest on their laurels. With only one legislative session before the next election in 1883, they would have to work frantically to enact their program.

And work frantically they did. They passed a new Riddleberger bill in 1882, which mimicked the 1879 proposal. It repudiated a third of the principal and issued new 3 percent bonds to pay the interest. The Readjusters also overhauled Virginia’s tax code. They cut property taxes by 20 percent, stacked the county assessors with loyalists who assessed land at lower values, and cut other taxes on merchants and small businesses. In their overhaul, they took aim at the “nonproducers” who had benefited under Funder governance.⁹² Readjuster majorities ended the practice of railroads’ self-assessment for taxes and made it very hard to pay taxes with coupons. With their policy of lower taxes in a government less burdened by debt, the Readjusters had reversed the growing deficits of the past decade and bequeathed to the state a $1.5 million surplus by 1883.⁹³

But still there were more promises to keep. In a tsunami of civil rights reforms, which went beyond even what had occurred during Virginia’s Reconstruction, Readjusters abolished the whipping post as a punishment for crimes (a horrifying reminder of slavery), restored the vote to thousands by ending the poll tax, required equal pay for African American and white teachers, and named to courts judges who finally allowed African Americans to serve on juries.⁹⁴ They also established the Virginia Normal and Industrial School (later Virginia State University) as the first public college for African American teachers in the South. And they began the process of creating what later became Longwood University, the first public college in Virginia for the training of women teachers. Readjusters also built the state’s first mental hospital for African Americans.⁹⁵

Hitting their populist stride, the Readjusters struck at “entrenched privilege” and exulted the working man.⁹⁶ They restricted dueling (cul­turally an elite activity), passed laws to protect “the public from exorbitant county fees; another, from unfair tax assessors; a third, from defaulting attorneys.”⁹⁷ They cut salaries for judges and attempted “to deprive the lawyers of a lucrative source of income by calling for the appointment of bonded state officials to handle all judicial land sales.”⁹⁸ They also instituted new medical technologies in state hospitals, re­formed the state’s insane asylum and its school for the disabled, con­structed a new wing for the state women’s prison, and required that prison factories operate on a for-profit footing.⁹⁹ Readjusters authorized free vaccinations and food to the poor during epidemics and famines, curtailed child labor, and instituted a ten-hour workday. They called for admission of “poor whites” to the Funder bastion that was the University of Virginia.¹⁰⁰

As for the atrophied educational system overall, the Readjusters poured money into the public schools and increased their number.¹⁰¹ They reformed state universities by increasing what courses were offered, lowering tuition, and fixing campus structures.¹⁰² One example of Readjuster-driven school reform was what occurred at the University of Virginia. Hearing that Readjusters criticized UVA as an elite swamp and a “sleepy hollow,” Funders worried about the fate of their alma mater as Mahone’s forces took over the school.¹⁰³ They remembered when Governor Cameron, then mayor of Petersburg, had fired the municipal school board and replaced them with Readjusters, who then let go a quarter of the city’s teachers and replaced them with African Americans. But, for now, the Readjusters had too much to do to settle old scores. They kept the existing faculty but hired new professors on merit rather than political ideology. They “renovated its buildings and improved its sewage system,” and “made forward-looking changes to the degree requirements and expanded course offerings to make the school more attractive to potential students.”¹⁰⁴ In the end, UVA’s Readjuster board left the flagship with a budget surplus. And this was hardly an aberration: “similar conditions prevailed at the other state colleges and mental institutions.”¹⁰⁵

With an agenda like this there has been a tendency to think of the Readjusters as (small-p) progressives.¹⁰⁶ But this view seems to stem from the fallacy that any serious efforts for racial equality and support for working people must originate on the left and could not possibly exist on the political right. Given their obsession with debt reduction, sound fiscal footings, and low taxes, it should not be hard to situate the Readjuster Party on the political spectrum. Moreover, for all their concerns about bigness, finance, and privilege, the Readjuster Party was not anti-business. They awarded over one hundred new corporate char­ters while in power, established agricultural stations to help farmers adopt innovative practices, and urged a repeal of federal tobacco taxes to strengthen that industry in Virginia. They also argued for a protective tariff to aid the state’s manufacturers, advocated for the expansion of the U.S. Geological Survey into Virginia to benefit the state’s mines, and authorized armed expeditions (some which Governor Cameron person­ally commanded) against oyster pirates from other states who were illegally harvesting in Virginia’s waters.¹⁰⁷ They improved navigation of the Norfolk-Portsmouth harbor.

Fundamentally, the Readjuster worldview was producerist and popu­list, emphasizing the “glorification of farmers, manufacturers, and others involved in the creation of goods.”¹⁰⁸ They adored the Jeffersonian outlook, but with a Hamiltonian flair for state-incentivized industrialism. In their synthesis of Jacksonian Democracy and Radical Republicanism, the Readjusters drew inspiration from John Taylor of Caroline—the arch-Jeffersonian of the early nineteenth century—who saw history as a conflict of “virtuous producers” and “parasitical middlemen.”¹⁰⁹ This drove the Readjusters to be suspicious of economic privilege and militant about excising “special interest” control from institutions. As the New York Evening Post explained of the Readjuster Party agenda: “They say they are fighting caste. They assert they repre­sent the dignity of labor. Their hero is a man of the people . . . they champion the rights of man against the privileges of an aristocracy of office-holding families.”¹¹⁰

But Readjusters were hardly radicals; despite their frenetic legislative program, they were quite pragmatic moderates. They did not intend to upend the existing social order, but rather sought to work within that system to expand opportunities for individual success. As one Readjuster paper explained, the movement aimed at a social and economic cli­mate for “the men who want money as well as the men who have money.”¹¹¹ In this way, the Readjusters were more like incrementalist, albeit energetic, conservatives, than progressive radicals. Perhaps the best summary of their ideology was the legislature’s vote to bring in from the elements—to a new place of prominence in the capitol’s rotun­da—an old statue of Henry Clay.

No one personified this mixture of sincere ideals and political pragmatism better than Mahone. Building a political party based on a fusion between Democrats and Republicans angry around something as niche (to outsiders in our time, at least) as the state’s debt required Mahone to be a constant broker of the different factions within the Readjuster Party. Mahone, a self-described Jacksonian “barn-burner,” kept his own worldview vague, preferring to be known only for “a sort of rough-and-ready, man-on-the-make producerism.”¹¹² This gave him the flexibility to compromise repeatably in ways that kept the Readjuster movement going. He walked back from his independent ballot pro­posal in 1880 when the party’s rank and file disagreed, and he supported Riddleberger for governor but compromised when Readjusters pressed for Cameron (Riddleberger later joined Mahone in the Senate). Even on the debt itself, Mahone—who was more conservative than his colleagues on the issue—had to compromise on the Riddleberger bill to begin with.¹¹³

Amid this pragmatism, cynicism about Mahone’s sincerity toward civil rights might be easy. But in fact, Mahone—the former Confederate general and son of slaveholders—was a man far out of step with his time. If anything, it was a political liability when Mahone demanded the full integration of the Readjuster movement, making clear to his followers: “I do not approve of meetings and proceedings on the basis of color. The color line is the one thing we are striving to extinguish.”¹¹⁴ Moreover, “he regularly corresponded with African Americans throughout Virginia, some of them poor and barely literate, and treated them with uncommon respect. Most of them, in turn, regarded him as a genuine friend and ally, a sentiment they probably reserved for very few white political leaders.”¹¹⁵

With the legislative session ending, the Readjusters had reason to be proud: they had accomplished everything they proposed to do in their 1881 campaign. Promises had been made, and promises had been kept.

“Whether the White Man Shall Rule”:
The Funders Strike Back

Out of power, the Funders plotted the restoration of their rule in the coming 1883 election. First, they aimed to discredit Readjusters and slow the advance of their program by attempting to impeach key Readjuster officials, such as the attorney general and state superintendent of education.¹¹⁶ This effort unsuccessful, one prominent Funder cynically suggested that the party moderate on issues like the poll tax to attract, or at least neutralize, the African American vote. This would allow Funders to take “Africa . . . politically by the hand,” argued John Daniels of burn-the-schools-down infamy. Daniels noted such a strat­egy would be “painful . . . but it is necessary.”¹¹⁷ But most Funders felt such a dramatic move was not needed. They could see fissures forming in the Readjuster party coalition.

Tensions were high as the legislature met, fears swirling of a smallpox outbreak, to select another U.S. Senator to serve alongside Mahone. The two leading candidates were Harrison Riddleberger and State Auditor “Parson” Massey. When a majority elected Riddleberger to the seat, Massey loyalists walked out of the legislature. In return, the Readjusters booted Massey from his auditor job. Seeking revenge, pro-Massey legislators teamed with Funders to obstruct as much as possible. Between filibusters, quorum calls, and a Funder-initiated debate over county authority to sell liquor, the opposition forces strained the cohesion of the Readjuster Party.¹¹⁸ When the 1882 federal election returns showed only narrow Readjuster victories, the Funders could smell blood in the water.¹¹⁹

Of course, the Funders had tried, and failed, a number of times to beat the Readjusters. They had appealed to voter’s honor and lost. They had appealed to voter’s personal austerity and lost. They even had appealed to white voter’s racial prejudices in hopes this would foster a sense of motivating elitism—and lost. Readjusters had responded to the latter argument by downplaying racial differences and reminding white voters that “the lines of demarcation are as distinct between whites as between whites and colored.”¹²⁰ Surprised to find this Readjuster parry effective, the Funders, led again by John Daniels, decided to tack in the Readjuster’s direction. Aiming to neutralizing their opponent’s popu­lism, these patricians recast themselves as “the friend of the laboring man.” Class, they told voters, was a “false-doctrine” and urged white voters to resist “all the low arts of the demagogue, against the race prejudice of the negro and the class prejudice of the white man, which [had] been incited, fomented, and stimulated” by the Readjuster Party.¹²¹

In July 1883, Funders convened their state convention in Lynchburg and announced a more comprehensive rebranding. To begin, they said their party would no longer be called Conservatives, but rather just simply Democrats.¹²² The name change out of the way, the Funders got crafty. Adopting a rope-a-dope strategy, the Funders conceded that the Readjusters had gotten some things right. The Funders pledged their support for the Riddleberger bill as a fair settlement of the debt issue and endorsed free public schools for both races, and low taxes. But then the punch to the face: full-throated, unmitigated, off-the-charts white supremacy. One Funder newspaper bellowed: “The coming contest is to decide, whether we shall have in Virginia Radical rule, with the Negro holding the balance of power, or whether the white man shall rule. Side issues have no place in this fight.”¹²³ John Daniels barnstormed the state flashing a simple message: “I am a Democrat, because I am a white man and a Virginian.”¹²⁴

Why did this naked racism gain traction where it had previously failed? Part of it was that Funders had neutralized some key planks in the shared-class-interests-trump-race-solidarity platform of the Read­juster Party. But the Funders also drew a distinction between public equality and private equality that had sway with voters. There was nothing wrong in electing African Americans to state and local office, crowed the Richmond Dispatch, but when it came to African American control over public schools, “any white man should raise his voice in defense of such a wrong.”²⁵ For many, the schoolhouse, and what it meant to educate children, marked a kind of transitional space between public and private life. Funders latched on to this, arguing that African American participation on school boards (overseeing predominantly white female teachers), and as teachers of white children, marked a slippery slope to integrated schools and eventually interracial marriages. These messages not only held purchase among white Virginians at the time, but even among voters otherwise supportive of equality for Afri­can Americans in public life.¹²⁶ So in 1883, when Governor Cameron fired Richmond’s all-white school board and selected seven white and two African American Readjusters (Richard Forrester and Robert A. Paul were their names) in their stead—a repeat of his courageous move as mayor of Petersburg—Funders were ready to exploit it as a harbinger of miscegenation.¹²⁷

All throughout the campaign, Funders were disciplined. Helped by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Funders cautioned that nothing stood in the way of Readjusters passing a civil rights bill just for Virginia. Sowing fear about the coming “Negro domination” of the state, Funders hammered their opposition with the header “Miscegenation—Civil Rights—Mahone Legislature.”¹²⁸ As the election drew near, the Lynchburg News reminded voters that a vote for the Readjuster party meant “mixed schools now and mixed marriages in the future” because “Negros control the schools to which your little children go.”¹²⁹

Despite all this, the race for control of the legislature remained neck and neck. But after a sidewalk altercation led to the massacre of African Americans in Danville on the eve of the election, it was all over. A booming industrial town, Danville had done well under Readjuster rule. It elected four African Americans to its city council to join four white Readjusters for a supermajority. While the council continued to attend to the sundry tasks of running a city, the Readjuster majority paid particular attention to improving the lot of the city’s sizeable African American community, which had suffered for years under the old regime. The council finally built a home for the manager of the African American cemetery, paved the streets and constructed sidewalks in African American neighborhoods, expanded public schools for African Americans and whites while reducing spending differences between the segregated schools, and hired African American police officers.¹³⁰ Crime fell under Readjuster governance.¹³¹

If the high-stakes election was not enough, local Funder leaders issued the Danville Circular in October 1883. The Circular purported to describe the awfulness of Danville under Readjuster rule and urged area Virginians to save the whites of the city “from this awful state of humiliation and wretchedness . . . by voting for the Conservative-Democratic candidates for the Legislature, for unless they are elected we are doomed.”¹³² Among the Circular’s “litany of shame” was the hiring of two African American policemen, as well as African Americans as the weighmaster of public scales and as the officer for enforcement of public health ordinances. It further decried the election of an African American judge to the police court, ignoring that the chief complaint against Jus­tice Jones “came from members of the black community who insisted that his judgments against them were more severe than those he issued against whites. Perhaps because of this, postulated another magistrate, white people in Danville preferred to have their cases heard before him” rather than the white judges.¹³³ The Circular also charged that twenty of the twenty-four stalls in the city market were rented to African Americans, and that “squads” of African Americans had been known to “impede the travel of [white] ladies and gentlemen, very frequently forcing them from the sidewalk into the street.”¹³⁴

Local Readjusters fired back with a rally on Friday, November 2, at which the chairman of the Pittsylvania County Readjuster Party, Wil­liam E. Sims, ripped the Circular and impugned its signers as “liars, scoundrels, and cowards.”¹³⁵ In response, the local Funders called for a meeting of every white Democrat at the Danville Opera House the next day so that each man could sign the Circular to confirm its veracity. It was within this environment that an altercation on a Danville street turned deadly, swinging the election toward the Funders.

At midday on Saturday, mere days before the election, and as white Democrats gathered to sign the Circular, Charles D. Noel, a white grocery store worker, tripped over the foot of Hense Lawson, a black waiter, walking down Main Street. Noel turned to Lawson and “asked him what did he do that for?” In Noel’s words, Lawson replied “in a very insolent manner: ‘I was getting out of the way of a lady, and a white lady at that.’” Lawson said that was fine and both men started to walk away, when Noel heard Lawson’s companion, Davis Lewellyn, a black tobacco worker, remark that Lawson didn’t need Noel’s validation of it being “alright” since Lawson had already apologized. Hearing this, Noel whirled and punched Lewellyn, who struck back knocking Noel into the gutter. At this point, both parties walked away.

But things weren’t over. Noel then ambled over to the Opera House where he recounted his experience to his friends George Lea and W. R. Taylor. With validation from his mates, Noel got his courage up to re-confront Lewellyn. It was not long before they spotted Lawson, Lewellyn, and a third black man, James Love, walking down the street. Approaching from behind, Noel grabbed what he figured was Lewellyn’s collar and smashed his fist into the face. It was not Lewellyn. As Noel punched Lawson, Taylor and Lea moved to prevent Lewellyn or Love from intervening. Lea pulled a pistol. A crowd began to form. When someone cried “murder!” R. J. Adams, an African American police officer, arrived on the scene, identified himself as law enforcement, and ordered the men to break it up. Lea resisted, but complied when a white man confirmed that Adams was indeed an officer of the law. Adams separated Noel and Lawson and told each to go wash off the blood.

As the scene quieted, one of the African Americans from the lingering crowd suddenly lunged at Lea trying to disarm him. In failing to do so, he rose and ran away. Lea fired after him. Now a second, larger crowd began to gather, and Officer Adams called for backup. Two officers arrived, Walter Withers, who was African American, and Charles Freeman, who was white. By now more men had come over from the Circular gathering at the Opera House. One demanded Officer Adams break up the growing crowd saying, “damn it, make these n—s get off the street.” To which Officer Freeman noted that the African American crowd was not doing anything, and said “if you all don’t bother them they won’t bother you.” At this time the African American crowd began to clamor for Lea’s arrest for carrying a concealed gun. In response, the white crowd brandished more guns. All three policemen, and a few white civilians, asked the African Americans to disperse, but the black crowd would have none of it, saying that they “intended to have their rights” and “were not willing to move off, on the order of the white men.”

Amid this standoff, a young man, Walter Holland, stepped out from the white crowd and walked toward the police officers and the black crowd. Perhaps Holland intended to join the civilians cajoling the gathered African Americans to leave, but it will never be known for sure. As he reached the other side, the crowd of white men opened fire. Holland was killed instantly. And when the shooting stopped, three African Americans were as well. A fourth man died later of his wounds. As the African American crowd ran for their lives, the white men pursued, and sought out prominent African Americans, in particular. By evening, armed bands of Funders patrolled Danville, as African Ameri­cans and Readjusters hid for their lives.¹³⁶

Funders wasted no time in spreading word of the race war which, they warned, would flow from Danville and engulf the state. Flyers bearing headlines like “War Declared between the Races” or “A Bloody Row in Danville! Democrats! Save the State from a War of Races!” inundated Virginia.¹³⁷

Even though Readjusters earned more votes than they had in the previous election, when the polls closed it was clear that the racist wave was too much to overcome; Funders had reclaimed majorities in the state legislature.¹³⁸ In the aftermath, one Readjuster county chairman wrote to Mahone that the campaign

surpassed anything ever known for unfairness, misrepresentation and meanness. Bulldozing and intimidation was the order. Mixed Schools, Mixed Marriages, Social Equality and Negro rule and Negro supremacy was the cry of [Democratic] precinct leaders, used in the presence of women in every private family. . . . In my precinct [Democratic] chairman rode to the doors, called out the women and after going through the catalogue of ills that would follow if the coalitionists succeed, would wind up by asking the women how they would like calling a most objectionable Negro name to visit and examine their daughters.¹³⁹

The Death of the Readjuster Party and the
Birth of Jim Crow

To those at the time, neither side saw the 1883 Funder victory as conclusive. Despite Funder tactics, and the massacre in Danville, the election was close. Ten African American Readjusters even won seats in the legislature. Even the Funders recognized that a campaign of unmit­igated racism was not a guarantee of future victory against the Readjuster Party and took steps to implement structural changes to protect their power.¹⁴⁰ Known as Jim Crow, these policies were more than the presumed inevitable outgrowths of white supremacy. They were policies intentionally chosen to guard against the appeal and power of multi­racial political movements centered on shared economic interests.

The new Funder legislature did not cut funding to schools, reestablish the whipping post, or challenge the Riddleberger bill as the answer to the debt. But they did play for keeps. In 1884, Democrats overrode Governor Cameron’s veto to pass the Anderson-McCormick Act to reduce ballot access for their opponents. The legislation centralized control of elections by eliminating all county and municipal election officers. In their place were now three-member election boards for each city and county whose members were appointed directly by the legislature. These election officers stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated voters, especially African Americans, Readjusters, and Republicans.¹⁴¹ And with despicable flourish they elected John Daniels to succeed Mahone in the Senate.

Despite the law, in 1885, Democrats only beat the Readjusters by five points. But back-to-back losses expanded the existing fissures in the Readjuster Party, and gave time for Funder policies to kick in. Although enough to destroy the Readjuster Party as a cohesive force in Virginia politics, African Americans and Republicans remained energized. So Democrats passed more laws, culminating in the constitutional convention of 1901–2, which resuscitated the poll tax disenfranchising 90 percent of African Americans and a majority of whites. The election of 1904 saw the lowest turnout since the one of 1852, despite a 25 percent population increase in the intervening fifty years.¹⁴²

With the collapse of the Readjuster Party, African Americans rejoined the Republicans. Most whites returned to the Democrats. Harrison Riddleberger served out his Senate term, rejoined the Democrats, and condemned his old friend Mahone. So did William Cameron, who, despite having been so aggressive for African American civic equality, served as a delegate to the 1901–2 constitutional convention where he voted to strip most Virginians of their suffrage.¹⁴³ Ultimately, of the Readjuster leaders, the only true believer was Mahone. After his single Senate term, he joined the Republican Party, attempted some unsuccessful returns to politics, and died in 1895, all alone, a Readjuster to the end. Even after his death, Democrats continued for decades to campaign against Mahone and his multiracial, pro-worker worldview.

As for the debt, the legislature enacted a series of creative and wildly complicated laws to stem the flow of coupons into the treasury while trying not to run afoul of the courts.¹⁴⁴ And although Virginia had accepted the Riddleberger bill, and the medley of anti-coupon laws, as the final settlement, the bondholders had not. Litigation continued until 1890, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-coupon laws as a violation of the right to contract. In the end, the Supreme Court’s ruling motivated both sides to negotiate a compromise, known as the Olcott settlement after the chief negotiator, New York banker Frederic Olcott. That settlement effectuated what the Riddleberger Act had tried, but not accomplished—the swapping of 1871 and 1879 bonds for new Olcott bonds. By swapping for new bonds that could not be used in lieu of taxes, the problem of tax-receivability could be solved without violat­ing constitutional rights. The state legislature approved the settlement unanimously. Whereas $1 million in taxes had been paid with coupons in 1880, by the early twentieth century the receivability of the few remaining pre-settlement bonds which had not been swapped amounted to only a few hundred dollars a year.¹⁴⁵

In 1936, the Virginia legislature passed the final funding act authorizing money to buy up the remaining Riddleberger and Olcott bonds. And in 1944—roughly a century after the state had borrowed money to build the now long-gone canals and railroads—Virginia paid off the last of the debt.¹⁴⁶ By then, the Readjusters, who had flashed so brilliantly across Virginia’s political scene sixty-some years before, were nothing more than a footnote of history.

Calling All Readjusters

As modern political movements contemplate how to build multiracial, working-class coalitions, they would do well to study the Readjusters. The Readjusters identified a single egregious problem which enjoyed maximum consensus and built a coalition around it. In growing that coalition, they recognized the need to break with policy orthodoxy, and embrace things like support for mining and manufacturing, which had appeal in previously overlooked parts of the state. In forming an alliance, including sharing the party and its leadership, with African Americans, white Readjusters showed humility and a sincere desire to address problems which were not their own. And in governing, the Readjusters recognized the importance of a well-defined, achievable policy program, which allowed them to accomplish a tremendous, and even lasting, amount during their short time in power.

What they did not count on was the vigor of the Funder backlash, or shocks like the Danville massacre. And they did not expect an effective “cancel culture” to marginalize those sympathetic to Readjustment: Funder landlords threatened to raise rents or evict Readjuster tenants, lenders suggested they would cut credit to Readjuster voters, Readjuster workers were fired, and small businesses boycotted. By outing oneself as a Readjuster, a man “could spoil his own or his daughter’s marriage prospects, disrupt his wife’s social life, and splinter his church.”¹⁴⁷ Readjusters were surprised to learn of a Funder “guilty of telling his parents that if they voted the Readjuster ticket he would not visit them when sick.”¹⁴⁸ And, ultimately, they did not count on Funders modifying the basic features of democracy to prevent their resurgence.

Although specific to a particular time and place—a bastion of the Confederacy a generation after emancipation, no less—the mere exist­ence of the Readjusters should inspire. And given the economic conditions in the United States today—high government debt, recent inflation and longer-term rises in the cost for things like education and healthcare, and a well-developed recognition of the need to create high-wage, dignified jobs in America again—all of which impact working people regardless of race, perhaps it’s time to dust off the Readjuster playbook.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 1 (Spring 2024): 141–67.

Notes