Southern Historical Association The Journal of Southern History

Southern Historical Association
The Republican Party Press in Reconstruction Georgia, 1867-1874

Author(s): Richard H. Abbott
Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 725-760
Published by: Southern Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2211432
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The Republican Party Press
in Reconstruction Georgia, 1867-1874
By RICHARD H. ABBOTT
WHEN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY EMERGED IN GEORGIA DURING

Reconstruction, one of its most urgent needs was to establish a party
press. In the nineteenth century, newspaper editors played an impor-
tant role in American politics; they helped define party policy, kept
voters informed about the issues, and rallied support for their party at
the polls. In Georgia, as in most of the other states of the former Con-
federacy, the fortunes of the Republican press were closely tied to the
success of the party as a whole. In 1868, when the party gained con-
trol of the state government, Georgia had three Republican daily
newspapers and three weeklies. By 1873, just over a year after the par-
ty had lost the state, there were only two Republican weeklies; by
1876 the number was down to one.1
The history of the Georgia Republican press during Reconstruction
provides insights into the fate of the party during those years. Repub-
lican editors differed widely among themselves on policy and strategy,
contributing to the factionalism that beset the party. In their competi-
tion for government printing contracts they exacerbated these divi-
sions. Several white editors were lukewarm Republicans at best and
turned away from the party when they failed to obtain its patronage.
The most significant weakness of the Republican press in Georgia was
revealed when the editors fell victim to the same racial divisions that
ultimately destroyed the prospects for the Republican party in the
state. Although some of the white editors attempted to appeal to
blacks, their own racial biases undermined these efforts. Other editors,
1 In 1869 Georgia had fifty-three Democratic newspapers, including ten dailies and thirty-
five weeklies; three years later these numbers had risen slightly, to a total of fifty-six papers, in-
cluding nine dailies and forty-two weeklies. Information on the number of state newspapers and
their party affiliation can be gained from the annual editions of Rowell's American Newspaper
Directory, published in New York City by George P. Rowell and Company. The first edition ap-
peared in 1869. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of a travel grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities to gather information for this article.
MR. ABBOTT is a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University.
THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Volume LXI, No. 4, November 1995
726 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY
despite assuming positions that bordered on the advocacy of white su-

premacy, failed to win support among Georgia's whites. Undermined
by factionalism, racism, and uncertain financial support, the Republi-
can newspapers in Georgia survived only through governmental pa-
tronage, and when that was withdrawn, the papers collapsed, much as
the Republican party in the South collapsed when the U.S. govern-
ment withdrew its support.
The first paper in Georgia to lend at least a qualified endorsement
to the Republican party appeared in Savannah in December 1864,
when the Union army seized the Savannah Republican and put it un-
der the control of John E. Hayes, a journalist from Massachusetts who
was covering the war for the New York Tribune. Hayes, who issued
his paper as a daily, obtained patronage from a few Savannah mer-
chants, but in 1865 most of his advertising came from the U.S. War
Department. During the first year of his editorship, Hayes avoided po-
litical controversies, stating that he wished to discourage sectionalism
and encourage the economic development of his newly adopted state.
Gradually he gained more local advertising and claimed that the Re-
publican had the largest circulation of any paper in southeastern Geor-
gia.2
As political activity resumed in postwar Georgia, Hayes identified
with what he called the Union party, in which he included northern
Republicans, Democrats who had supported the Union war effort, and
southern loyalists. He said that its rival, the so-called Democratic par-
ty, was full of antiwar northerners and southern secessionists. If
Unionists could gain control of Georgia, repudiate secession and the
rebel debt, acknowledge the end of slavery, and grant civil rights and
education to the freedpeople, Hayes predicted, the state could quickly
return to the Union and regain its prosperity. The Republican editor of
the Washington Chronicle, who kept a close eye on the southern press,
lauded Hayes's efforts, but Georgia editors denounced his paper as a
radical sheet.3
2 Savannah Republican, April 25, October 21, December 29, 1865; John Hayes to John An-
drew, May 24, 1865, John Andrew Papers (Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston); Louis
Turner Griffith and John Erwin Talmadge, Georgia Journalism, 1763-1950 (Athens, Ga., 1951),
83; and Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South,
1865-1867 (Baton Rouge and London, 1985), 11 ln27. For a few months Hayes's paper bore the
title Savannah National Republican; I have chosen to identify it consistently as the Republican.
3 Savannah Republican, September 21, October 4, November 13 and 20, 1865; and Wash-
ington Daily Morning Chronicle, March 27, 1866. Another Savannah newspaper established at
the same time under the auspices of the Union army, the Daily Herald, was also edited by a
northerner, S. W. Mason. Mason, who had earlier published a newspaper for the Union army in
the Sea Islands of South Carolina, joined Hayes in supporting Georgia's Unionists. Quickly,
REPUBLICAN PRESS IN RECONSTRUCTION GEORGIA 727
A little over a year after Hayes took control of the Savannah Re-
publican, blacks in Augusta laid the foundations for the first avowed-
ly Republican paper in the state. Augusta had a large black population
and an active African Methodist Episcopal church. In October 1865,
with the assistance of James D. Lynch, an AME missionary from Bal-
timore, a young black Augusta resident, John T. Shuften, established
the Colored American. Thomas P. Beard, who owned a grocery store
in Augusta, became the paper's business manager. Shuften hoped to
use his paper to promote harmony between the races, but he did not
hesitate to call for equal rights for the freedmen, including access to
jury duty and the ballot box. With his encouragement, a delegation of
blacks from Augusta and several nearby counties met in Augusta in
January 1866 and established the Georgia Equal Rights Association,
which took up Shuften's crusade for equal civil and political rights.
The new association bought out the Colored American, which, during
a period of financial distress, had been sold to the Union League, and
issued it as the Loyal Georgian. The only white man present at the
convention was John Emory Bryant, a former Freedmen's Bureau
agent from Maine, and the delegates named him the association's
president and the editor of its newspaper. Beard became the business
manager of the Loyal Georgian.4
Unlike Hayes, Bryant used his paper to address matters of concern
to blacks, and he was much more open about promoting the Republi-
can party. He carried news of local black meetings and other activities.
The Loyal Georgian, a weekly, was read aloud in black churches.
Bryant hoped that Augusta merchants who wanted black business
would advertise in his paper, but he was soon disappointed; like
Hayes, he had to depend on military notices and advertisements in-
stead. Realizing that black subscribers alone could not sustain his pa-
however, Mason took a conservative course, criticizing Hayes for his condemnations of Geor-
gia's Confederate leaders and expressing sympathy for the Democratic party. See Adelaide Wil-
son, Historic and Picturesque Savannah (Boston, 1889), 182-83; and Savannah Daily Herald,
January 24, April 5, May 30, August 21, September 6, 8, 9, 18, 1866.
4 Ruth Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience: A Biography of John Emory Bryant
(Athens, Ga., and London, 1987), 56-65; John R. DeTreville, "Reconstruction in Augusta, Geor-
gia, 1865-1868" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1979), 29, 43, and 50;
Augusta Colored American, December 30, 1865, January 13, 1866; I. Garland Penn, The Afro-
American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, Mass., 1891; rpt., New York, 1969), 100-104; and
Martin E. Dann, ed., The Black Press, 1827-1890: The Quest for National Identity (New York,
1971), 29, 90, and 140-46. There is no evidence of Shuften's antebellum status. After the Re-
publican party was organized in Georgia he urged blacks to join it. See Edmund L. Drago, Black
Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Baton Rouge and London,
1982), 33. James Lynch went on to play an important role in the Mississippi Republican party.
per, Bryant sought to raise money from sympathetic Republicans in

the North, but his efforts met with limited success.5
Hayes and Bryant both complained that they faced constant threats
and harassment from native southerners because of the views they ex-
pressed in their papers. "Nothing is left untried to intimidate me,"
Hayes told a northern congressman. He had been "assaulted, shot at,
insulted, and threatened." Whites in Georgia shunned Bryant and his
wife, and one clubbed him. Although Hayes and Bryant were both tar-
gets of abuse at the hands of southern whites, they did not take the
same position on Reconstruction issues. In 1866 Bryant urged Con-
gress to enfranchise the freedmen, but Hayes did not believe they
should vote until they had been educated. He referred to Radical Re-
publicans such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens as fanatics
for advocating black suffrage and contended that they were motivated
by vindictiveness against the South. The Republican party, he insisted,
must not "exchange the 'insolent rule of three hundred thousand
Southern slaveholders for the rule of five hundred thousand Southern
negroes who but yesterday were slaves .... 6
Hayes was doomed to disappointment. In March 1867 Congress
passed a Reconstruction act putting southern states under military rule
until they reorganized their civil governments on the basis of black
suffrage. Hayes told his fellow Georgians that, "appalling and revolt-
ing as seem the provisions of this bill," they had no choice but to obey
it. On the other hand Bryant firmly endorsed the measure as did
Alexander G. Murray, the editor of the Griffin American Union. Mur-
ray, the first southern-born Georgia editor to become a Republican,
had been a Whig and during the war had taken such a strongly Union-
ist position that authorities had suppressed his newspaper. After the
war he had resumed publication, condemning the rebels and calling
for support of the national government.7
In August 1867 Murray relinquished control of his paper to Jason
Clarke Swayze, who was originally from New York and had learned
the newspaper trade while working for the New York Tribune. In 1859
I Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 65.

6 Hayes to Nathaniel P. Banks, February 5, 1867, (first two quotations), Nathaniel Prentice
Banks Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington); John Bryant to J. F.
Long, [1868], (draft), John E. Bryant Papers (William R. Perkins Library, Duke University,
Durham, N. C.); Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 67; Savannah Republican, Sep-
tember 13, 19, October 1, 4, 1866; and Carter, When the War Was Over, 239-40, 245 (Hayes's
quotation on the Republican party).
7 Savannah Republican, March 13, 1867; and A. G. Murray to Edward McPherson, March 2,
1867, Edward McPherson Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress). There are no ex-
tant issues of the American Union prior to August 1867.
he had moved to Griffin to enter the publishing business. During the

Civil War, after he refused to take an oath renouncing his loyalty to
the United States government, authorities arrested him and forced him
into the Confederate Army. He eventually escaped and found his way
to General William T. Sherman's Union army in Georgia, serving as a
spy and a scout. At the end of the war he returned to Griffin and in
1866 became an officer in the Freedmen's Bureau, where he worked
diligently to protect the interests of the former slaves. Because
Swayze antagonized local planters, his commander persuaded him to
resign.8
By the time Swayze took over the American Union he had made a
number of enemies in Griffin, and it was difficult for him to find local
support for his paper. It survived due largely to the efforts of General
John Pope, who commanded the military district that included Geor-
gia. In August 1867 Pope issued an order directing that state and local
governmental agencies place all official advertisements and notices in
papers that did not oppose the congressional plan of reconstruction.
Swayze's columns soon filled with notices from sheriffs, ordinaries,
bailiffs, county clerks, and bankruptcy officers. Democratic papers
made a great outcry over Pope's action.9 The dispute, while it clearly
raised issues of freedom of speech and press, revealed as well the im-
portance of government patronage to sustain or encourage newspa-
pers, particularly those of a Republican bent. Georgia's economy was
suffering severely from the effects of the Civil War, and recovery was
nowhere in sight. In these extremely difficult financial circumstances,
the lure of government patronage affected all editors, even conserva-
tive ones. Throughout Reconstruction, Republican editors contested
bitterly for government advertising and printing contracts, and when
they failed to get such patronage, or it was withdrawn, their papers in-
variably closed.
In March 1867, when Republicans in Congress enacted the first Re-
construction act, they passed a law directing Edward McPherson, the
clerk of the House of Representatives and a reliable Republican, to
designate two "loyal" newspapers in each southern state to publish the
8 Information on Swayze's career may be found in the finding aid to the Oscar K. Swayze
manuscript collection in the Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas. See also William
E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans ... (5 vols. paged consecutively;
Chicago and New York, 1918), IV, 1800-1801; and Griffin American Union, January 10, 1868.
9 Griffin American Union, August 16, October 4, November 1, 15, 1867; James E. Sefton,
The United States Army and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1967), 148-50; and C. Mildred
Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political, 1865-1872 (New York,
1915), 177 and 347.
U.S. laws. Recognizing that this measure was intended to subsidize

Republican newspapers, Hayes, Murray, and Bryant submitted re-
quests for the government printing jobs, and the lure of patronage al-
so brought requests from other editors.10 It was not easy for McPher-
son to choose among these petitioners because southern editors were
often reluctant to avow their support for the Republican party. How-
ever, in order to get the patronage, they had to convince McPherson
they were politically reliable. Editors in several southern states formed
the short-lived Southern Republican Press Association, which appar-
ently existed primarily to lobby for printing patronage for its mem-
bers. Its secretary was John Bryant. The association's president,
Charles Whittlesey of the Virginia State Journal, endorsed the papers
edited by Bryant, Hayes, and Murray, as did George W. Ashburn,
chairman of the executive committee of the newly organized Georgia
Republican party. But Ashburn also recommended another editor,
William Lindsay Scruggs of the Atlanta Daily Opinion. Scruggs had
been born on his father's plantation in Tennessee; he had moved to
Knoxville and there had absorbed the Unionist sentiments prominent
in the area. In 1861 he had gone to Atlanta and in 1866 had become
editor of the Opinion. According to Scruggs, his was the first daily in
the state to support openly the congressional Reconstruction program.
He insisted that his paper was committed to the Republican party and
claimed that it had a wide circulation.11
At the end of March, McPherson selected Bryant's Augusta Loyal
Georgian and Hayes's Savannah Republican to publish the laws. His
decision, however, did not still the advocates of other newspapers in
Georgia. In May a group of Republicans in Atlanta led by William
Markham, one of the city's most prominent businessmen, bought con-
trol of Scruggs's paper and renewed his request for government print-
ing. One of Markham's associates assured McPherson that the Opin-
ion would be a "straight out radical paper."'2 A group of Republicans
in Augusta headed by Rufus B. Bullock, a New Yorker who had
moved to Georgia in the 1850s, also wrote to McPherson urging as-
10 Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877: The First Southern
Strategy (Chapel Hill and London, 1986), 92 and 133-34.
1l Great Republic, I (January 10, 1867); Charles Whittlesey to Edward McPherson, March
4, 1867, G. W. Ashburn to McPherson, March 14, 1867, W. L. Scruggs to Horace Maynard,
March 22, 1867, and to McPherson, October 18, 1867, all in McPherson Papers. Information on
Scruggs can be found in an unpublished manuscript by Theodore A. Jervey, "William Lindsay
Scruggs: A Forgotten Diplomat," in the William L. Scruggs file (Georgia Department of
Archives and History, Atlanta). There are no extant issues of the Opinion prior to September
1867.
12 William Dunn to Edward McPherson, May 27, 1867, and William Markham to McPher-
son, July 30, 1867, McPherson Papers.
sistance for yet another paper, the Augusta Daily Press, edited by E.
H. Pughe, an Englishman who had resided in the South during the
war. Pughe had entered the newspaper business in Augusta in 1865
and was having a hard time finding a place for himself because, in ad-
dition to Bryant's paper, the city had two prominent Democratic
dailies. Pughe's supporters claimed that they wanted Pughe's paper
added to McPherson's list but did not wish that Bryant's be removed.
Pughe himself, however, sought preference for his own paper and in a
letter to McPherson observed that "the White people should have a
chance to see the laws . ...13
Pughe's concern about racial matters and patronage reflected the is-
sues that would contribute to the demise of the Georgia Republican
party and its press. Pughe's own political and racial views were al-
ready on record. For the previous year and a half he had violently de-
nounced the Republicans in Congress, claiming that the "tendency of
Republicanism is to anarchy and finally to despotism." He had backed
President Andrew Johnson's lenient Reconstruction program and op-
posed even the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The
columns of the Daily Press were full of denunciations of the freed-
people, whom he referred to as "niggers" and "Sambos." He pledged
himself to sustain "a white man's government" and vehemently op-
posed black suffrage. When the first Reconstruction act passed in
March, he predicted that it would destroy the South; however, he also
stated that Georgians must acquiesce in the legislation and at the same
time keep the government from falling into "the hands of Loyal Lea-
guers and agitators" who would organize blacks against whites. Even
as he sought patronage from McPherson, he insisted in his newspaper
that those who called for acceptance of Reconstruction should not be
considered Republicans, as "that party is so justly odious at the
South."'4
John Bryant quickly challenged Pughe's right to federal patronage,
pointing out that until very recently the Daily Press had been a "con-
temptible Rebel sheet" and publishing excerpts from Pughe's editori-
als to prove it. Bryant's anger at Pughe demonstrated the competition
between the two papers not only for printing patronage but also for lo-
13 DeTreville, "Reconstruction in Augusta," 39; Washington Daily Morning Chronicle,

March 20, 1867; Rufus Bullock to Freeman Clarke, March 19, 1867, Foster Blodgett to McPher-
son, April 2, 6, 1867, and E. M. Pughe to McPherson, March 20, April 6, 1867 (quotation), all
in McPherson Papers.
14 Augusta Daily Press, March 4, 11, 20 (second quotation), April 4, May 3, December 8,
1866 (first quotation), January 1, 22, March 10, 30 (third quotation), April 4, May 17 (fourth quo-
tation), 1867.
cal support in Augusta. Bryant's paper was in danger of failing, and in

April he asked the publishing firm of Harper and Brothers in New
York for a loan of $3,000 to be secured by a mortgage on his printing
establishment. He claimed that his paper had a circulation of between
one and two thousand, figures that were greatly exaggerated. He also
asserted that the newspaper's federal patronage was worth at least
$50,000 a year.'5 Actually, annual federal payments to southern news-
papers averaged around $1,000 for the period of the Thirty-ninth Con-
gress; in 1867 Bryant received only $78 for publishing advertise-
ments. 16
During the summer of 1867 McPherson received letters urging him
to direct patronage to the Atlanta Daily New Era, edited by Samuel
Bard. Born in New York, Bard had spent a number of years prior to
the war in Louisiana, where he had been active in Democratic politics,
and during the war he had served in the Confederate army. In October
1866 he had arrived in Atlanta to take charge of the Era. For the next
several months his editorial course was similar to Pughe's. A strong
believer in states' rights, Bard had used his journal to defend Andrew
Johnson for resisting the "diabolical plans" of congressional Radicals,
whom Bard charged with attempting to humiliate the South. He too
had urged the Georgia legislature not to ratify the Fourteenth Amend-
ment. However, after northern Republicans had crushed Johnson's
supporters in the 1866 congressional elections, Bard had become more
conciliatory. He declared that the war had settled the questions of slav-
ery and the permanence of the Union and that he hoped the country
could abandon its divisive debates over Reconstruction and devote its
attention to the economy. In keeping with those sentiments, he used
most of the space in his newspaper to promote Georgia's agricultural
and industrial development.17
On February 26, 1867, Bard had published a letter from one of
Georgia's most popular politicians, former Confederate governor
Joseph E. Brown, who had just returned from Washington convinced
that Congress had the power to dictate terms to the South. He advised
Georgians to accept the proposed military Reconstruction act rather
15 Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, June 7, 1867; Augusta Daily Press, June 14, 1866; and
John Bryant to Harper and Brothers, April 1, 1867, Bryant Papers. Bryant promised Harper's that
in return for the loan he would lobby schools to order the firm's textbooks. Apparently he got the
loan; see Bryant to Harper and Brothers, June 15, 1867, Bryant Papers.
16 Amounts paid to newspapers to print U.S. laws for each session of Congress, from 1867
through 1873, may be found in Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The Amer-
ican Government's Use of Newspapers, 1789-1875 (Athens, Ga., 1977), 255. See also The Bi-
ennial Register of All Officers and Agents ... 1867 (Washington, D. C., 1868), 270.
17 Atlanta 'Daily New Era, October 12, 19, 20, November 3, 6 (quoted phrase), 9, 17, 20,
1866, February 2, 5, 1867, December 1, 1868.
than to oppose it and risk even more stringent measures. Most Geor-
gians were outraged with Brown, but Bard endorsed the former gov-
ernor's views, as did Pughe and Hayes. Bard was convinced that
Georgia's economy would not recover until the state was restored to
the Union. The quickest way to achieve recovery was to cooperate
with Congress, no matter how distasteful such cooperation seemed.
He condemned states' rights Democrats who were determined to resist
Congress to the last. It was foolish to stand on "metaphysical abstrac-
tions"; Georgians needed to be practical.8
Jason Clarke Swayze of the Griffin American Union claimed that
Bard supported Reconstruction only in order to be able to print U.S.
laws in the New Era, a charge that Swayze made also about Scruggs
and the Opinion. According to General John Pope, neither the New Era
nor the Opinion qualified as a "pronounced Republican paper ...."
Nonetheless, since they strongly advocated compliance with congres-
sional Reconstruction, he urged McPherson to support both, and he
specifically endorsed Bard's paper. Bard also gained backing from
Joseph Brown. During his visit to Washington, Brown had made con-
tacts with influential Republicans and had solicited their support for
Bard. He admitted to Congressman William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania
that Bard was reluctant to be identified with the Republicans but as-
sured him that the editor would "lay aside the obsolete ideas and the
political dogmas which produced the war" in order to "act with the
party of progress and advocate its principles." Brown also told Senator
John Sherman of Ohio that the Augusta Loyal Georgian, which had
been awarded federal printing, "has nothing of the confidence of the
people that the Era has." McPherson, however, refused to shift patron-
age to Bard, contending that the Era was "a Reconstruction paper but
not a Republican [one] .... " 19
Of the six editors contending for U.S. printing patronage, only
Swayze and Bryant participated in the state Republican convention
held in Atlanta on July 4, 1867, which formally organized the party in
Georgia and adopted its platform. Bryant was secretary of the conven-
18 Joseph H. Parks, Joseph E. Brown of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977), 371-72; Savannah
Republican, March 4, 1867; Augusta Daily Press, May 9, 1867; and Atlanta Daily New Era,
February 26, March 5, 12, 26, April 2 (quoted phrase), 1867.
19 Griffin American Union, October 11, 1867; John Pope to Robert Schenck, May 20, 1867,
in Robert Schenck Papers (Hayes Historical Society, Fremont, Ohio); Joseph Brown to John
Sherman, April 6, 1867, John Sherman Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress)
(Brown to Sherman quotation); Brown to Sherman, March 22, 1867, and to W. D. Kelley, March
2, May 20 (both Brown to Kelley quotations), July 1, 9, 1867, Joseph Brown Papers (Universi-
ty of Georgia Library, Athens); Washington Daily Morning Chronicle, November 30, 1867; and
T. P. Robb to John D. Strong, October 2, 1867, John D. Strong Papers (Illinois State Historical
Society, Springfield) (McPherson quotation).
tion, and he and Swayze were both elected to the party's state central
committee.20 The party's first task was to prepare for the fall elections
for delegates to a constitutional convention mandated by the Recon-
struction acts. Republican editors sought to define a program that
would enable their party to control the convention and later the state
government. They understood that, although blacks would certainly
vote for their party, whites were a majority in the state. Therefore, Re-
publicans could either attempt to disfranchise enough whites to put
their party in power or try to divide the white vote and unite enough
of it with black ballots to achieve the same end. Of the editors, only
northerners Bryant and Swayze seriously advocated disfranchise-
ment.21 The other editors believed that such a step would irreparably
alienate whites and destroy any chance the Republicans had of be-
coming a serious political factor in the state. Because of the lack of
stronger support for disfranchisement, the Republican journalists, and
most party leaders as well, turned instead to the possibility of dividing
the white vote and attracting a substantial element of it into their par-
ty. They proposed two different methods of achieving this goal.
One way to attract white voters to the Republican party was to seek
support from the small farmers and workingmen of Georgia by identi-
fying the planter class and its spokesmen as opponents. This was the
approach taken by the platform writers at the Republican convention
in July. They were aware that northern Georgia, a land of rough terrain
that had had few plantations or slaves before the war, was inhabited by
yeomen farmers with strongly independent attitudes that often con-
flicted with the interests of the planters who dominated the state.
Many of these farmers had opposed secession; some had remained
Unionists throughout the war; and others who had initially supported
the Confederacy had deserted the army and hoped for peace. After the
war ended, Union Leagues, seeking to turn wartime loyalty to the
Union into support for the Republican party, had spread in the Geor-
gia upcountry. By stressing issues such as debtor relief measures,
homestead laws, and public schools, the Republicans hoped to attract
yeomen whites into their party.22
20 Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 80; and Griffin American Union, March

20, 1868.
21 Griffin American Union, August 23, November 15, 1867; and Augusta Daily Loyal Geor-
gian, June 15, 1867.
22 Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation
of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York and Oxford, 1983), Chap. 3; Elizabeth Stud-
ley Nathans, Losing the Peace: Georgia Republicans and Reconstruction, 1865-1871 (Baton
Rouge, 1968), 29-31; and Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in
Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Chapel Hill and London, 1987), 12-17.
Although all of the Republican editors made gestures toward the

whites of north Georgia, Bryant and Swayze made the strongest bid
for their support, playing on the wartime antagonisms that had divid-
ed the classes there. Both men smarted from the ostracism inflicted on
them by the white leaders of their respective communities. Both men
sneered at southern "chivalry" and urged their readers to spurn the fol-
lowers of that ideal. Bryant proposed that leading Georgia rebels such
as Robert Toombs be arrested, tried for treason, and banished. At the
very least, the two editors wanted such men barred from public office.
In speech and in editorial Bryant emphasized that the landed aristoc-
racy was the enemy of white workingmen. The blows that the slave-
owning aristocrat had delivered to the backs of his slaves, Bryant told
whites, "were aimed at all actual producers of wealth ... ." Slavery
had made the rich man richer and the poor man poorer; the slavehold-
er despised white laborers, feared democracy, and had precipitated a
disastrous war in defense of his own interests. The question presently
before Georgia, Bryant said, was not "what shall we do with the Ne-
gro"; rather, it was "what shall we do with the laborer?" The Republi-
can party, he claimed, offered white workers a clear choice: to vote
Republican was to vote for free labor over slave, liberty over class
power, and democracy over aristocracy.23 These same themes found
an echo in Swayze's columns. He feared, however, that the common
whites had deferred to the "self-constituted 'respectability"' for so
long that it would be difficult for them to break free of their depen-
dence and vote for the Republicans. He pleaded with his readers, men
whom he said had "been led blindly by these slaveocrats to the very
brink of destruction," not to "aid them in establishing a system that
will always keep you in their power."24
Bard, Scruggs, Pughe, and Hayes adopted a different approach to-
ward courting white support, one closely identified with the views of
ex-governor Joseph Brown. Although these men were not blind to the
potential of appealing to latent class sensibilities among the poorer
23 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 41-43; and Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, June 6, 12, 15, 22
(quotations), July 25, 1867. Republicans in Augusta hoped to build their party there by appeal-
ing to both working-class whites and blacks. See DeTreville, "Reconstruction in Augusta," 61
and 118. Although some southern conservatives worried about the appearance of a coalition of
poor whites and blacks after Appomattox, Dan Carter finds "no widespread evidence that either
the elite or the yeoman class manipulated class differences on a substantial scale" from 1865
through 1867. See Carter, When the War Was Over, 130-45 (quotation on p. 145). Steven Hahn
discusses the efforts of Republicans to exploit regional and class differences among whites in
Georgia but contends that conditions were not ripe for rural radicalism until Populists appeared
later in the century. See Hahn, Roots of Southern Populism.
24 Griffin American Union, August 16, 23, November 15, December 27, 1867, February 14
(second and third quotations) and April 17 (first quotation), 1868.
whites, they made such appeals less often than did Swayze and
Bryant. Instead, they downplayed class divisions in the state and em-
phasized economic programs that would promote not merely a revival
but also a reconstruction of Georgia's economy, making it more diver-
sified and less reliant on agriculture than was its antebellum predeces-
sor. They also supported amnesty for ex-Confederates because they
believed that a policy of generosity, coupled with an all-inclusive eco-
nomic program, would increase their support among white Geor-
gians.25 Swazye was suspicious of such an accommodating approach.
At first he applauded Brown's conversion to support of Reconstruc-
tion, but by the fall of 1867 he was warning that the ex-governor rep-
resented the interests of the landed class in Georgia and was not to be
trusted. "The 'bone and sinew"' of black and white laborers, he said,
would save the state from Brown and the interests that he represent-
ed.26
The race issue most clearly separated Bryant and Swayze from the
other Republican editors. The former two gave more space in their
newspapers to matters of concern to the freedpeople than the latter,
who, when they did mention the former slaves, usually urged them to
return to work and to avoid any social or political activity that would
irritate whites.27 Whereas editors like Hayes and Pughe were likely to
point to evidence of black criminality, Bryant and Swayze complained
that, while whites were quick to arrest, try, and convict a black for
criminal behavior, repeated white violence against blacks went unpun-
ished.28 Both men openly supported, as a matter of principle, educa-
tion for blacks and equal civil and political rights. On the other hand,
Bard, Hayes, and Scruggs, while agreeing on the importance of
schools and civil rights for the freedpeople, accepted black suffrage
25 Parks, Joseph E. Brown, 368-88 and 408-9; Nathans, Losing the Peace, 37-40 and 44; Sa-
vannah Republican, October 31, 1866, February 28, May 13, 17, 27, 1867; and Atlanta Daily
New Era, November 9, 17, 29, 1866, January 31, February 2, 5, 26, March 3, May 22, June 12,
13, 1867. For an insightful discussion of Republicans such as Brown and Bard who wanted to
"modernize" the South, see Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of
Prosperity: Aid Under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton, 1984). I do not wish to
exaggerate the differences between Swayze and Bryant on the one hand and Bard and Brown on
the other, on economic policy, since both camps borrowed ideas and policies from the other. I do
believe, however, that there was a significant difference between them on questions of black
rights and on the wisdom of seeking support from working-class whites.
26 Griffin American Union, August 16, 1867, January 10 (quotation), 1868.
27 See, e.g., Savannah Republican, October 6, December 12, 1865, June 14, 1867; Atlanta
Daily New Era, November 2, 1866, February 27, April 25, 1868; and Atlanta Daily Opinion,
March 3, 1868.
28 Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, June 6, 18, July 27, 1867; and Griffin American Union,
November 22, 1867, January 10, 1868.
only out of necessity. The best way to protect the interests of whites,
they argued, was to hasten the return of Georgia to the Union. Once
that was accomplished, the white voting majority would control the
state and would limit expansion of black rights. They even suggested
that, after Georgia was back in the Union, it could reconsider its con-
stitutional provisions granting universal suffrage.29
The failure of Georgia Republicans to bridge the racial gap in the
state doomed their party, and the editorial policy of Republican news-
papers contributed to that failure. Even Swayze and Bryant, although
they were sympathetic to the concerns of blacks, were more eager for
support from whites; few blacks in Georgia could read, and, of those
who could, few could afford to subscribe to a newspaper. The editors
needed advertising and subscriptions from whites if their newspapers
were to survive. Since there were no black newspapers in the state in
1867, freedpeople had no journalistic advocates other than these two
white editors, and they would prove to be inadequate spokesmen for
black interests. Apparently believing that the freedmen would in-
evitably vote Republican, Swayze and Bryant focused their editorial
policy on whites and spent most of their time trying to coax white vot-
ers into the Republican party.
The conservative racial views of Pughe, Hayes, Bard, and Scruggs
placed them in a political dilemma. They were relieved that slavery
had been destroyed and wanted to rescue their state from the grip of a
decadent aristocracy, which they identified with the Democratic party.
They were reluctant, however, to be publicly identified with the Re-
publicans and hoped to steer between the extremes represented by the
two parties. Scruggs counted not two, but three parties in the United
States. One represented the old "pro-slavery, sore-headed Democra-
cy"; the second he defined as "the extreme, fanatical, purblind, im-
practicable, canting, hypocritical Radicals"; and the third, with whom
he identified, he called the "Impartial Suffrage and Amnesty party."
John Bryant also believed that there were three parties in the state: the
Union Republican party, which he championed; the "Rebel-Copper-
head Party," representing all those who opposed Reconstruction and
wished to maintain the old order; and "the Bread-and-Butter or 'Union
Reconstruction' party," made up of those who were willing to recon-
struct the state while at the same time denying control of it to either of
29 Savannah Republican, May 13, September 6, 1867; Atlanta Daily Opinion, October 24, 25,
November 23, 1867, March 3, 1868; Atlanta Weekly Opinion, December 3, 1867; and Atlanta
Daily New Era, January 4, 1868.
the other parties. Members of this last group, Bryant believed, were
untrustworthy opportunists, and he included E. H. Pughe of the Au-
gusta Daily Press in this category.30 Each of the Republican editors,
then, was attempting to define the Republican party and its principles,
and, unable to agree on what those principles and priorities were, they
branded one another as apostates. Instead of uniting against their com-
mon foe, the Democratic party, they devoted much of their newspa-
pers' space to jousting with each other.
In the summer of 1867 some of that editorial sparring ended when
Bryant, faced with the imminent collapse of his Loyal Georgian,
joined forces with his bitter journalistic rival Pughe, who was losing
advertising and subscriptions because of his acceptance of the Recon-
struction acts. Both their newspapers were purchased by a group of
Augusta Republicans led by Rufus Bullock. Under the terms of the
arrangement, Bryant continued to publish the Loyal Georgian as a
weekly, while Pughe became business manager of a daily paper, re-
named the Augusta National Republican. The two publications shared
federal patronage, and Bryant claimed that the proprietors had assured
him that Pughe's new paper would be an uncompromisingly Republi-
can sheet. Its new editor, David G. Cotting, was originally from Mass-
achusetts. He had lived in Georgia for over forty years and had op-
posed the state's secession. In 1868 the Republican party named him
Georgia's Secretary of State.3'
Despite this merger, competition for state and federal printing pa-
tronage continued to exacerbate divisions among the Republican edi-
tors. During the summer T. P. Robb, a Union army veteran from Illi-
nois who had been appointed postmaster in Savannah, purchased an
interest in the New Era "for the purpose of changing [its] political
complexion . . . ." He admitted that Bard remained reluctant to an-
nounce his partisan affiliation but claimed that the paper "was Repub-
lican to the backbone ... ." Robb urged McPherson to transfer feder-
al patronage from John Hayes's Savannah Republican to Bard's paper,
30 Atlanta Daily Opinion, February 15, 1868; and Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, June 7,
1867.
31 John E. Bryant to Edward McPherson, August 1, 1867, McPherson Papers; DeTreville,
"Reconstruction in Augusta," 64-65; Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, July 28, 1867; and Wash-
ington Daily Morning Chronicle, July 29, 1867. On Cotting see E. Merton Coulter, Negro Leg-
islators in Georgia During the Reconstruction Period (Athens, Ga., 1968), 59, and Olive Hall
Shadgett, The Republican Party in Georgia: From Reconstruction through 1900 (Athens, Ga.,
1964), 25. Although Pughe had no voice in the new paper's editorial policy, to his dismay this
failed to protect him from the wrath of a Democratic newspaper editor who took affront at an ed-
itorial in the National Republican and assaulted Pughe with a whip. See Earl L. Bell and Ken-
neth C. Crabbe, The Augusta Chronicle: Indomitable Voice of Dixie, 1785-1960 (Athens, Ga.,
1960), 74-75.
arguing that Hayes was "an unprincipled egotist and traitor to his par-
ty."32
Hayes was the first Republican editor whose racial views led him to
desert the party. In 1867 he proclaimed himself a Republican and con-
tended that his was the only party capable of building up the South
and restoring its prosperity, but he warned that the state organization
was falling under the control of "itinerant corruptionists" who catered
to blacks and sought the disfranchisement of ex-Confederates. Ac-
cording to Hayes, Union League organizers in Savannah were holding
secret meetings and "trolling for negro votes" by promising to the
freedmen political office and the confiscation and redistribution of
white people's property. He worried that the "uneducated and ignorant
Negroes" would be easy prey for such men, who were creating a
"black man's party" and threatening race war. These comments led
one Savannah Republican to conclude that Hayes "was as bad afflict-
ed with colorphobia as any ex-Confederate."33 By the end of the year,
enough Georgia Republicans had protested to McPherson about Hayes
that the clerk of the House transferred printing rights from the Savan-
nah Republican to Bard's Atlanta New Era. The action drew an an-
guished outcry from William Scruggs, who noted that Bard was a
"very recent convert to the cause" and wondered why McPherson had
snubbed his Atlanta Opinion.34
While Republican editors fought these intramural battles, the Re-
construction process in Georgia moved ahead. During the summer of
1867 federal authorities registered almost 190,000 voters. Although
whites outnumbered blacks in the state by more than 90,000, only
4,000 more whites than blacks got their names on the voting rolls. In
elections held that fall, many whites refused to vote, and advocates of
32 T. P. Robb to John D. Strong, May 20 (first quotation), October 2 (second and third quo-
tations), 1867, Strong Papers; Robb to Richard Yates, March 22, 1867, and Yates to Edward
McPherson, August 31, 1867, McPherson Papers.
33 Savannah Republican, July 3 (second quotation), 4 (third quotation), 12 (fourth quotation),
22 (first quotation), 30, August 21, October 1, 29, 1867; and Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, Ju-
ly 27, 1867. Hayes feared that blacks would be elected to Congress, infesting its halls "with a
looming, breathing, thing, tangible, visible, odiferous." Savannah Republican, August 31, 1867.
Hayes's critics charged that his rejection of the Republican party stemmed from a term he had
served in a Savannah jail after being found guilty of libel. While in jail, he got sympathetic cov-
erage from Democratic editors, who even volunteered to pay his fine. See Savannah Republican,
March 30, May 13, 1867. Hayes continued to edit the paper until he died on September 16, 1868,
of what Jason Clark Swayze said was "an overdose of Democracy and bad whiskey." Macon
American Union, September 25, 1868.
34 John Pope to Edward McPherson, August 17, 1867, Richard Yates to McPherson, August
31, 1867, William L. Scruggs to McPherson, November 26, 1867, January 14, 1868 (quotation),
Foster Blodgett to McPherson, November 30, 1867, all in McPherson Papers; and Samuel Bard
to Richard Yates, November 24, December 9, 1867, Richard Yates Papers (Illinois State Histor-
ical Society).
holding a constitutional convention carried the day; the Republicans

easily controlled counties with large black populations and also gained
some white support in north Georgia. Nonetheless, the convention's
Republican advocates barely won a majority of registered voters,
pointing to the importance of enlarging their electoral base if their par-
ty was to gain and keep control of the state.35
When the convention met in December, Republicans were present-
ed with their first opportunity to subsidize their own papers. With
Hayes repudiated by his party, the Republican papers numbered five:
the Griffin American Union, the two Augusta papers (the Loyal Geor-
gian and the National Republican), and two in Atlanta (the Opinion
and the New Era). In January 1868 delegates voted to publish their
daily proceedings in both Atlanta papers, to furnish themselves with
copies of both, and to divide the convention's printing between them.
They also authorized nine papers, including the Republican sheets, to
publish the newly written constitution "one time each week until the
election" was held on its ratification.36
Republicans had wide differences of opinion over which provisions
should go into the new constitution, and these differences were re-
flected in the party press. One group, led by Augusta Republicans Ru-
fus Bullock, Foster Blodgett, and Bryant of the Loyal Georgian, sup-
ported guarantees of suffrage and officeholding for blacks and hoped
to attract yeomen whites as well by proposing homestead exemptions,
free schools, and relief from debts. This position coincided with the
party platform drawn up in July 1867, and Swayze supported it. The
more moderate Republicans, led by Brown and Bard of the New Era,
had reservations about this approach. They resisted disfranchisement
of ex-Confederates and opposed guaranteeing to blacks the right to
hold office. Cotting of the National Republican and Scruggs of the At-
lanta Opinion were also critical of the relief and homestead provi-
sions. Scruggs warned that relief from private debts, carried to an ex-
treme, could "break down the barriers to anarchy." He emphasized
that the Republican party in Georgia "is not a revolutionary party....
it is not an agrarian party.... not a 'social equality' party."37 These di-
35 Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (2 parts; Washington,
D.C., 1975), I, 26; and Nathans, Losing the Peace, 34 and 54-55.
36 Allen D. Candler, ed., The Confederate Records of the State of Georgia, Vol. VI (Atlanta,
1911), 409-10, 475-76, and 863-67 (quotation on p. 863).
37 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 58-59; Atlanta Georgia Weekly Opinion, October 1 (second
quotation), December 10 (first quotation), 1867; and Augusta National Republican, February 5,
8, 1868. Joseph P. Reidy has noted the difficulty of determining just how the relief issue influ-
enced planters and yeomen; see Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plan-
tation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill and London, 1992), 164.
visions did not bode well for the future of the Republican party in
Georgia. Ultimately the convention voted against disfranchisement,
pleasing the Brown-Bard faction. Moderates failed, however, to keep
a relief provision out of the constitution, and they were unable to re-
duce the amounts of real and personal property protected by home-
stead clauses approved by the delegates. On the issue that proved to
have the most fatal consequences for the Republicans in Georgia,
moderates were able to defeat an explicit statement of the right of
blacks to hold office.38
Despite these differences in the convention, Republicans rallied be-
hind the completed constitution. Even Brown and Bard realized that
its provisions for public schools, and especially the debt relief clause,
were likely to solidify support for the party among whites in north
Georgia. When Democrats criticized these provisions, Republican ed-
itors leaped to the attack. Swayze urged his white readers not to let "a
few demagogues, now that they have ruined you, turn you out of
house" and home. When a local grand jury in Spalding County pro-
posed that there be no assessment of taxes for education, Swayze
seized on the action as evidence of the determination of the "gentry"
to tyrannize the working classes. The editor asserted that, unless they
voted for the new constitution, "the poor white and the 'nigger"' faced
a common fate-subjugation to the "political dictators." 39
In March 1868 the Democratic leader Benjamin Hill addressed a
Democratic crowd in Atlanta and, in his address, defended the inter-
ests of propertied Georgians and criticized the policy of state-support-
ed public education. Republican editors responded to Hill's address
with class-oriented appeals. In the Weekly Opinion, Scruggs con-
demned Hill and his "aristocratic" supporters for opposing public
schools and insisted that the state should educate children of "the me-
chanic, the day laborer, [and] the poor man." Bard claimed in the New
Era that the opposition of Hill and his wealthy supporters to home-
stead and school provisions revealed their determination "to depress
the poor man for the benefit of the rich." He appealed to "the me-
chanic, the day-laborer, the hod-carrier, the workingmen of all class-
es" to oppose Hill's party. D. G. Cotting identified the opponents of
the Republican party as "high toned chivalry" who had "never-
never-made one step to elevate the mechanic or working man in so-
38 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 59-69.

39 Atlanta Georgia Weekly Opinion, March 24, 1868; Atlanta Daily New Era, January 7, Feb-
ruary 22, 23, 29, March 6, 22, 1868; and Griffin American Union, September 6, 27, 1867, Feb-
ruary 14 (first two quotations), and February 21, 1868 (last two quotations).
ciety." He urged white workers "to cast off your shackles and assert
your manhood" by voting for the Republicans.40
In April 1868 Georgia voters were not only to vote on the constitu-
tion but also to elect officials to govern the state and to serve in Con-
gress. This circumstance forced Scruggs to abandon any pretense of
being Republican. Initially he was complimentary of the party's lead-
ership in the constitutional convention, but increasingly he expressed
concern that the assemblage was falling under a clique led by Augus-
ta Republicans Bullock and Bryant, whom he called "men without
character, without respectable talents, and without a home or local
habitation." When Republicans nominated Bullock for governor,
Scruggs refused to endorse him and backed instead the Democratic
candidate, General John B. Gordon. He justified his action by claim-
ing that the Republicans had fallen under the "extreme proscription
wing," which would elevate ignorant blacks to political power. "Not
even the bloodiest leaders of the French Revolution," he fulminated,
could equal the party's leaders "in ignorance, villainy, and low trick-
ery," and he characterized Georgia whites who were willing to vote
for them as "contemptible, low, dirty, mongrel excrescences of hu-
manity . . . ." Soon after this tirade appeared in its columnns, the At-
lanta Daily Opinion, lacking white support and prospects of govern-
ment patronage, ceased publication.41
Samuel Bard shared many of Scruggs's concerns about the Repub-
lican party, but, instead of abandoning it, he joined it, arguing that rad-
icalism was at an ebb among Republicans and that moderate elements
could control the organization. Even before the party was organized in
the state, he had endorsed General Ulysses S. Grant for president and
asserted that Grant held conservative views and could unite men of all
parties. He advised the Georgia Republicans to seek the support of all
who were willing to forsake the past and work to develop the materi-
al resources of the state, build industry, and organize "a liberal system
of education . . . ." He contended that the constitution included those
goals and eventually endorsed the Republican state ticket, though he
did not openly avow himself a Republican until after the party had
won the April elections. Despite Bard's announcement, Swayze and
Cotting continued to question his commitment to the party. Cotting ac-
40 Atlanta Georgia Weekly Opinion, March 24, 1868; Atlanta Daily New Era, March 20, 21,
1868; and Augusta National Republican, April 17 (third Cotting quotation), 19 (first and second
Cotting quotations), 1868.
41 Atlanta Daily Opinion, November 15, December 19, 27, 1867, January 22, March 24 (first
quotation), April 14 (all other quotations), 28, 1868.
cused Bard of following a "bungling course" and not firmly backing

the state party's leadership. Swayze had always believed Bard's con-
version to the Republicans was brought about by his desire for print-
ing patronage, a charge echoed by Scruggs, who accused Bard of "ob-
sequiously . . . sucking the rear teat of the public cow."42
In addition to endorsements by Swayze and Bard, Bullock was also
endorsed by the editors of the two Augusta papers, the National Re-
publican and the Loyal Georgian, and they were joined by a new Re-
publican newspaper, the Savannah Freemen's Standard. The editor of
this paper, which first appeared in February 1868, was James M.
Simms, a former slave who had become a Baptist minister. Simms
was also a Union League organizer who had helped mobilize the black
vote in southeastern Georgia and had become a member of the Re-
publican state central committee. In 1868 he was a candidate for the
state legislature. Simms used his paper to address freedpeople's con-
cerns, but he also hoped for a white audience and urged whites who
did business with blacks to advertise in his columns. Like Swayze and
Bryant, he emphasized that the Republican party was the friend of
working men and poor people.43
In the April elections, Republicans won a narrow victory. The con-
stitution carried by 18,000 votes, but Bullock's majority was only 7,171,
at a time when the Democrats were divided and disorganized. Repub-
lican editors put the best face they could on these results, claiming that
their party had won at least 30,000 white votes, proving, as D. G. Cot-
ting wrote in the National Republican, that white farmers of northern
Georgia would ignore the Democrat's "eternal cry of 'nigger, nigger"'
to vote with black Republicans. James Simms heralded Bullock's vic-
tory as a signal that "the Jerichoian wall of prejudice" in Georgia
against blacks was crumbling.44 There were many signs, however, that
42 Atlanta Daily New Era, June 21, 1867, January 23 (first quotation), February 12, 15,
March 10, 12, April 4 (Scruggs's characterization of Bard), 29, May 1, October 20, 1868; Grif-
fin American Union, March 6, 1868; Macon American Union, December 4, 1868; Augusta Na-
tional Republican, October 22, 1868 (Cotting quotation); and Atlanta Georgia Weekly Opinion,
Apri 1 7, 1868.
43 Eric Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Recon-
struction (New York and Oxford, 1993), 196; and Freemen's Standard, February 15, March 7,
April 4, 11, 1868. There are only four issues of Simms's paper extant.
44 Augusta National Republican, May 2, 1868; Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction
in Georgia, 48 (Simms quotation); and Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism, 200. Re-
publican editors were virtually unanimous on the figure of 30,000 white Republican votes. See
Atlanta Daily New Era, April 23, 1868; J. E. Bryant to William Claflin, July 4, 1868, in William
Eaton Chandler Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress); Macon American Union,
June 12, 1868; and Atlanta Georgia Weekly Opinion, November 12, 1867. The Republicans car-
ried nine counties in northern Georgia. Thompson, Reconstruction in Georgia, 204.
the Republican party's future was very much in doubt. The black vote
was not as large as Republicans had hoped, resulting in Bullock's very
narrow margin of victory. Although Republicans gained a clear major-
ity in the upper house of the state legislature, their hold on the lower
house was extremely tenuous, and they carried only three of the six
congressional districts. The new administration's distribution of state
patronage threatened to exacerbate the division in party ranks already
developing. Even before the state election, Joseph E. Brown com-
plained that Bullock was backing carpetbagger candidates for Con-
gress and ignoring "leading Southern men who know our people and
sympathize with them." As if in response to this complaint, after he
was elected Bullock proposed that Brown receive one of Georgia's
two U.S. Senate seats. The other he promised to Foster Blodgett, one
of his allies in Augusta. Bryant, who had been elected to the legisla-
ture, accused the governor of using his patronage power to reward for-
mer rebels and decided to oppose Blodgett, arguing that he was an ex-
Confederate who had perjured himself by taking a loyalty oath.45
Bryant was also unhappy because he had failed to obtain the post of
state printer. On August 6 the Georgia legislature, in a close vote,
named Samuel Bard the state printer to replace John Burke, a Demo-
crat who held that appointment at the time. Bryant, who thought he
had Bullock's backing, received only one vote in the legislature and so
decided to back Bard. E. M. Pughe, who had also sought the state's
patronage, contended that the two men had arranged for Bryant to get
a kickback from Bard's printing revenues, a charge that remained un-
proven. Bryant did obtain passage of a loosely worded bill permitting
the governor to authorize newspapers to publish executive pronounce-
ments, and eventually Bullock expended more state money under its
provisions than for regularly authorized state printing.46
Bard admitted that he wanted to be state printer "not . . . for any
honor" but for the "emoluments" and said that with such patronage he
would make the New Era "a live Conservative Republican paper...."
Bard's editorial course after the spring election illustrated what he
meant. The Republicans could not build up their party by vilifying
their opponents, he warned; the time had come "to unite with all con-
45 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 101-2; Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 88-89;

and Joseph Brown to W. D. Kelley, March 18, 1868, Brown Papers.
46 Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 90-91 and 100; Georgia House of Repre-
sentatives, Journal, 1868 (Atlanta, 1869), 148; and Augusta Daily Press, February 9, 19, 1869.
servatives" for the benefit of the state. As for the freedpeople, Bard be-
lieved that they should receive all rights guaranteed by law and
promised to use his "paper to improve and elevate our colored friends
as far as can be." But he expressed "great disgust" in seeing black
politicians seek public office and urged them to leave the state's affairs
in the hands of men who "know something about the condition and
wants of the country." He assured his Democratic critics that "this is,
and always will be . . . a white man's government" and warned Re-
publicans not to let their party fall under the control of radicals who
were "all pandering to the lowest passions and prejudices of the col-
ored race . . . ." Such radicalism, he insisted, would "not do. It will
drive men away from the party who wish to affiliate with it."47
By the late summer of 1868 such attitudes were threatening the fu-
ture of the already unstable Republican coalition. Black leaders com-
plained that whites were monopolizing nominations for office. James
Simms had used the columns of his newspaper to insist that blacks be
candidates for at least half the elective positions that were available.
Jason Clarke Swayze had immediately denounced Simms for making
such a suggestion. According to Swayze, blacks owed their freedom to
white Republicans and should not insist on such a share of offices. To
ease the racial concerns of the white voters in northern Georgia, Re-
publican candidates had suggested during the state campaign that en-
franchising blacks did not guarantee them the right to hold office; dur-
ing the same campaign they implied the opposite to the freedmen. In
September this deception was laid bare when a number of Republican
assemblymen joined with their Democratic colleagues to expel the
handful of blacks who had been elected to the state legislature. This
action infuriated black leaders, including Henry M. Turner and James
Simms, both of whom had held seats in the legislature. In October,
African American leaders, including Turner, an AME minister with a
large following among Georgia freedpeople, held a convention in Ma-
con to denounce white Republicans who had voted to expel the black
legislators. This resulting disillusionment of blacks with the Republi-
can party contributed to an easy Democratic victory in the fall presi-
dential election in Georgia. The appearance in the state of the Ku Klux
Klan, a white vigilante group that terrorized blacks, also reduced Re-
47 Atlanta Daily New Era, April 25, May 27 (sixth and seventh quotations), July 14 (fifth,
eighth, and ninth quotations), August 4 (tenth quotation), 5 (first three quotations), 7 (fourth quo-
tation), 22, and September 12, 1868.
publican voter turnout, and the majority that the party had won in
April melted away.48
The debate within Republican ranks over how to respond to these
events hardened the divisions within the party. For Bullock and his
black supporters, the only recourse was to seek outside help; he asked
Congress to return Georgia to military control and to reorganize the
state legislature by unseating whites ineligible for office under the
Fourteenth Amendment and reseating the ousted blacks. Bullock's
proposal was abhorrent to most white Republicans, including Joseph
Brown, who believed that the only hope for the party was to redouble
efforts to win support within Georgia from moderate Democrats who
were opposed to their party's hard-line resistance to Reconstruction.
Such men, he argued, "possess most of the intelligence and wealth of
the state which will always control tenants and laborers." Any attempt
to start the reconstruction process all over again, Brown warned,
would permanently alienate whites and lead to a Republican over-
throw in the next state election. Bard, of course, endorsed Brown's
views, and they found an ally in John Bryant, who was already un-
happy with the governor. Because Bryant opposed Bullock's plans to
reconstruct the state, he lost support among African American Repub-
licans, and the governor managed to remove him as chairman of the
Republican state executive committee.49
Governor Bullock was rapidly losing newspaper support for his ad-
ministration. By the end of 1868, three of the five papers that had en-
dorsed him in April no longer existed. Simms's Savannah Freemen's
Standard had disappeared earlier in the year, and a Democratic victo-
ry in Augusta's city elections in December 1868 paved the way for the
demise of both Bryant's Loyal Georgian and Cotting's National Re-
publican; the latter had backed the governor's proposal to submit
Georgia to a new Reconstruction. Much to the surprise of Bullock and
his Augusta backers, E. H. Pughe abruptly ended his business associ-
ation with them and announced that he was assuming full control of
the National Republican and would publish it under its former name,
the Augusta Daily Press. Pughe used his revived paper to condemn the
governor's Reconstruction plan; consequently, Bullock deprived
Pughe of printing patronage. The frustrated editor, unable to recover
48 Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia, 48-53, 59, and 60-61; and
Nathans, Losing the Peace, 90-91, 108-11, and 121-46.
49 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 147-49 and 157-59; Parks, Joseph E. Brown, 431-32; Joseph
E. Brown to Rufus Bullock, December 3, 1868, Brown Papers; Atlanta Daily New Era, January
3, 6, 1869; and Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 98-101.
local advertising support that had been driven away by his earlier sup-
port of the Republican administration, ceased publication of his paper
in April 1869.50 Swayze's American Union and Bard's Daily New Era
were the only Republican papers left in the state. Of the two, Swayze's
paper, a weekly with limited circulation, was in a weaker financial
condition. In May 1868 Swayze had moved his paper from Griffin to
Macon, hoping a fresh start in a new town would improve his for-
tunes. His reception in Macon, however, was not encouraging; a mob
chased him from his office, and he was able to return only after ob-
taining a military guard. Such experiences convinced him that the fed-
eral government must intervene in state affairs, leading him to support
Bullock's plan to submit Georgia to a new Reconstruction.51
The major Republican paper that remained was the Daily New Era,
which Bard proudly asserted was "read by the white people of the
State." By 1869 he claimed that the circulation of the New Era was
over 1,500 and was the largest of any daily paper in Atlanta.52 Bard's
cautious political course no doubt helps explain his ability to maintain
some local support. He made quite a point of emphasizing that he sep-
arated politics and business, and he devoted most of his newspaper
text to noncontroversial social and economic matters. He obtained a
substantial amount of government printing patronage; Atlanta's city
and county governments awarded him the publication of their official
announcements and advertisements. He published the U.S. laws, and
the state named him its official printer. Bullock also gave him all the
printing for the state-owned Western and Atlantic Railroad, an ex-
ceedingly lucrative arrangement.53
Although Bard opposed Bullock's plan to turn to Congress for sup-
port, he hesitated to attack Bullock personally, probably because he
50 Augusta National Republican, November 14, 15, 26, December 31, 1868; DeTreville,
"Reconstruction in Augusta," 130-31; and Augusta Daily Press, April 18, 1869.
51 Macon American Union, May 29, September 4, 1868; and Jason Clark Swayze to Rufus
Bullock, August 9, 1868, Executive Correspondence (Georgia Department of Archives and His-
tory, Atlanta).
52 Atlanta Daily New Era, September 20, October 20 (quotation), 1868. Circulation claims
for nineteenth-century newspapers are highly suspect. In 1869 Bard told George Rowell, who
collected circulation figures for advertisers to consult, that the New Era had a weekly circulation
of 1,000 and a daily circulation of 700. See Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, 1870 (New
York, 1870), 628. Even these statistics are not reliable, since Rowell did not require publishers
to submit documentation for their circulation claims until 1879. See Carolyn Stewart Dyer,
"Census Manuscripts and Circulation Data for Mid-19th Century Newspapers," Journalism His-
tory, VII (Summer 1980), 47.
53 Atlanta Daily New Era, January 21, 1868. In 1870 Bard received an average of at least
$1,000 a month for doing the printing for the Western and Atlantic Railroad. See his printer's job
book for 1870, in Business Records, 1783-1930 (Georgia Department of Archives and History).
feared the loss of printing patronage. His conservative views on race,

however, were well advertised, and angry black Republicans took him
to task. Henry M. Turner denounced Bard for wanting "the black man
to be a mere ass, upon whose back any white man may ride into of-
fice, and then sink him to eternal infamy by their votes and diabolical
legislation." In February 1869 a group of white Republicans including
Bard gathered in Atlanta, hoping to appeal to "the progressive and rea-
sonable men of all former parties" to resist Bullock's plans. A number
of blacks, including some of those who had been denied their seats in
the legislature, disrupted the meeting, forced Bard and the others out
of the hall, and passed resolutions endorsing Bullock. They also con-
sidered and then tabled a proposal that since there was "no Republican
paper in Atlanta" one ought to be established. Furious, Bard de-
nounced "the low, the vulgar and the vicious of both colors" who have
sought to exclude from the party all "who have claims to gentility and
decency in social life, or to prudence and sagacity in politics ....
The time had come, he warned, to purge the party of "the miserable
whining hypocrites and sycophants that have heretofore been a re-
proach to it ...." When Bullock moved to block ratification by the
state legislature of the Fifteenth Amendment for fear that its passage
would undermine his case for federal intervention in Georgia, Bard
condemned him in strong terms.54
Bullock moved to punish Bard. He could not undo the legislature's
appointment of the Atlanta editor to be the state printer, and so Bard
continued to be paid for publishing state documents. But he vetoed a
bill authorizing an advance of $5,000 to Bard for printing expenses,
claiming that the editor was "an individual who has lately exercised
the privileges of his office simply to promote his own contrary views
in utter disregard of his duties." Bullock also took the state-owned
railroad's printing from Bard and removed the New Era from the list
of newspapers authorized to publish executive pronouncements. He
then added to the list the names of ten other newspapers, headed by
the Atlanta Intelligencer.55 The Intelligencer was a Democratic news-
paper, and hence Bard was not the only Republican shocked by its se-
lection. The governor faced a dilemma, for there was only one Re-
54 Atlanta Daily New Era, January 6, February 17 (third quotation), 18 (second, fourth, fifth,
and sixth quotations), 19, 20, March 13, 23, 25, 1869; Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruc-
tion in Georgia, 55 (first quotation); John M. Matthews, "Negro Republicans in the Reconstruc-
tion of Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LX (Summer 1976), 156; and Nathans, Losing
the Peace, 158.
55 Georgia House of Representives, Journal, 1869, pp. 587-89 (Governor Bullock's veto
message); Atlanta Daily New Era, March 2, 5, June 8, 1869; and Augusta Daily Press, March 3,
1869.
publican paper that supported him left in the state, Swayze's American
Union. Since the governor was under some obligation to see that his
proclamations and other state documents were published throughout
Georgia, he had no choice but to authorize Democratic newspapers to
do the work. Over the next two years, the Intelligencer, which was
one of the more moderate Democratic journals, received over $9,200
in revenue from the state. Although Bullock made the move from ne-
cessity, he no doubt hoped to buy support from these papers because
Democrats were accusing him of misusing state funds and otherwise
abusing his powers as governor. Some papers were already calling for
his impeachment, and it was probably no coincidence that the editor
of the Intelligencer defended him against these charges.56
In the meantime Bard and Swayze spent as much time attacking
each other as they did the Democratic opposition. Swayze continued
to condemn the efforts of Bard and Brown to coax Democrats into the
Republican ranks. Such additions, he said, weakened rather than
strengthened the party; he "would rather be surrounded by a corporal's
guard of honest men, with crusts and water on which to subsist, than
revel amid luxuries in a den of thieves." Contemptuously he dismissed
Bard as "an unprincipled hermaphrodite bastard. .. ." The Atlanta ed-
itor, not to be outdone, declared that "J. Skunk Swayze" was "a man
without character, without talents and so entirely ignorant of the pro-
prieties of life as to make his presence disgusting and offensive to all
gentlemen where he is best known."57 In April 1869, when Bullock
took a delegation of Georgia Republicans to Washington to seek fed-
eral intervention in the state, Bard declared that "we loathe these mon-
sters in human shape, and hope they may perish by the wayside, and
the State may never again be cursed by their presence." Swayze then
accused Bard of calling for the assassination of the Republican lead-
ers, a charge that was picked up by newspapers in the North and that
Bard repeatedly had to deny. During the same month the hotheaded
Swayze published comments that caused Bard to chastise him in print.
56 Augusta Daily Press, February 27, 1869; State of Georgia, Comptroller General's Report,
1869 (Atlanta, 1870), 86-93; and Atlanta Daily New Era, July 4, 1869.
57 Macon American Union, April 30 (second quotation), August 20, 1869 (first quotation);
and Atlanta Daily New Era, February 28 (fourth quotation), March 28 (third quotation), 1869.
This continuing dispute between Swayze and Bard is illustrative of Michael Perman's division
of the southern Republican party into two wings. One wing used an "expressive" approach to
politics, seeking to maximize support from the party's initial constituency by sticking closely to
its original principles. Swayze fits in this camp, while Bard typifies the "competitive" approach
that sought a flexible party program to increase support for it outside its existing constituency.
See Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill and London,
1984), 23-26. Bard's critics often complained that he was too easy on the Democrats. See At-
lanta Daily New Era, October 10, 1868, July 22, August 7, 1869.
Angry at the failure of both federal and state governments to protect

black Republicans against the Ku Klux Klan, Swayze called on them
to defend themselves. He told his readers that, if the Klan murdered
someone, they should "lay every house in ashes within five miles of
the spot where such blood is spilled . .. shoot down every rebel who
opposes you . . . ." Samuel Bard claimed that "we have never seen
anything so evil in its nature" as Swayze's remarks and called the Ma-
con editor "this child of the devil .. .s58
In July 1869 Bard obtained a journalistic ally when John Bryant be-
gan publishing a new paper in Augusta, the Georgia Republican. Two
months earlier, Bryant had been appointed postmaster of Augusta, and
with the income from his position he started the new publication,
which initially was printed on Bard's press in Atlanta. Eventually
Bryant arranged for a New York publisher to print half of it in return
for free advertisements and found a printer in Augusta to produce the
rest. Swayze ridiculed the new paper as "a mongrel edition of the New
Era" and charged that Bryant had "turned traitor to his party and gone
over to the Rebels .... hoping to be pampered by the 'respectabili-
ty'." He accused Bryant of appropriating campaign funds for his own
use and dismissed him as "an unprincipled speculating carpetbag-
ger."59
Bryant denied that he was a turncoat to his party. He said that be-
cause of the Loyal Georgian's unsavory reputation among whites, he
had decided not to revive its name for his new publication. Nonethe-
less, he announced that it would be a "radical Republican paper" ad-
vocating public education, the elevation of labor, and "the protection
of the toiling masses in their rights." Bryant also endorsed state aid for
internal improvements, one of Bard's favorite issues, and worked hard
to settle the feud between the Atlanta editor and Bullock. In Septem-
ber, Bullock relented and once again authorized the New Era to pub-
lish his proclamations, a conciliatory action for which Bryant claimed
credit. "Now let the Governor stop Swayze's infernal slang," Bryant
proclaimed, "and we shall present an unbroken front."60
58 Macon American Union, April 16 (Swayze quotation), 30, May 14, 1869; and Atlanta Dai-
ly New Era, April 6 (first Bard quotation), 24 (second Bard quotation), 28 (third Bard quotation),
30, May 5, 6, 22, 25, 28, 1869.
59 Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 103-5; and Macon American Union, De-
cember 18, 1868 (second quotation), January 1, 8 (third quotation), July 30, September 17 (first
quotation), 1869, June 15, 1871.
60 See drafts of letters from Bryant to General Horace Porter, July 22, 1869, to Alexander
Ramsey, December 11, 13, 1869, to J. E. Creswell (with clipping from Georgia Republican), Oc-
After Bullock restored his printing patronage, Bard's editorial

course changed dramatically. He defended the governor against De-
mocratic criticisms and declared that he would accept congressional
intervention in Georgia to restore order and seat the black state legis-
lators. Ultimately he received $21,000 from the state in 1869 for print-
ing. Bullock also rewarded Swayze for his support by steering over
$2,700 in printing payments to him for 1869 and the first six months
of 1870. In addition, Edward McPherson designated the American
Union as one of the Georgia papers entitled to print the U.S. laws,
yielding Swayze $1,752 over the next four sessions of Congress.6'
Late in 1869, President Grant rewarded Bard for his editorial sup-
port by appointing him territorial governor of Idaho, and in January
1870 Bullock and his followers, desperate for a daily paper in Atlanta
that was firmly on their side, bought Bard's newspaper. Two Atlanta
businessmen, Hannibal I. Kimball and John Rice, helped raise the
money to purchase the paper, but the owner or owners of the paper
were never made public. The new proprietors then hired the former
editor of the Atlanta Opinion, W. L. Scruggs, to edit the paper, which
retained the name Daily New Era. Under its new ownership, the paper
continued to receive printing patronage; during the next two years it
received over $28,000 from the state. Democrats also charged that
workers on the state-owned railroad, the Western and Atlantic, were
required to subscribe to the Era, but this charge was never proven.62
In December 1869 Bullock won a signal victory when Congress in-
structed him to summon the state legislature, seat the expelled black
members, and administer a test oath to the whites. After these steps
were taken and the reconstituted legislature had ratified the Fifteenth
Amendment, Georgia would be readmitted to the Union. However, the
intervention of Congress did not heal the breach in the Georgia Re-
publican party; Brown, Bryant, and their followers remained alienated
tober 6, 1869 (quotations), and letter from B. H. Bigham to Bryant, August 5, 1870, all in Bryant
Papers. There is only one extant issue of the Georgia Republican, that of February 5, 1870.
61 Atlanta Daily New Era, August 17, 24, November 24, 27, December 3, 10, 1869; State of
Georgia Comptroller General's Report, 1869, pp. 87-109, 1870, pp. 102 and 104; J. Clark
Swayze to Edward McPherson, March 8, 1869, McPherson Papers; for federal payments, see Bi-
ennial Register ... for 1869 and 1871.
62 Georgia General Assembly, Report of Committee to Investigate the Official Conduct of Ru-
fus B. Bullock (Atlanta, 1872), 89-93; Willard Range, "Hannibal I. Kimball," Georgia Histori-
cal Quarterly, XXIX (June 1945), 54; Wallace P. Reed, ed., History of Atlanta, Georgia . . .
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1889), 410; and State of Georgia, Comptroller General's Report, 1871 and
1872. Just a year before Scruggs took over the editorship of the Era, he had petitioned for bank-
ruptcy; see warrant of bankruptcy, dated April 1, 1869, in Henry P. Farrow Papers (University of
Georgia Library).
from Bullock and refused to defend him against Democratic charges

of corruption. Bryant accepted Democratic support in a losing bid to
become speaker of the Georgia house. Governor Bullock drove the
wedges of division even deeper into the party by attempting to delay
for two years elections for the state legislature scheduled for the fall of
1870, hoping thereby to prolong his tenure. Scruggs used the columns
of the New Era to defend Bullock's proposal, but Swayze opposed it
and was relieved when the legislature voted to schedule elections for
December 1870.63
In the spring of 1870 three new Republican newspapers emerged to
take sides in party debates. In May a group of moderate Republican
supporters of Joseph Brown met in Atlanta to found a new paper, the
True Georgian, to support Grant but to oppose Bullock. They pre-
vailed upon Samuel Bard to resign his Idaho territorial governorship
and become its editor. In his first issue, published on June 28, Bard
identified himself as a Grant Republican and called for a union of "all
patriotic men" on a platform to deliver the state from Bullock's cor-
rupt administration. Bryant, who helped found the paper, contended
that if the Grant administration sustained the Brown-Bard Republicans
with federal patronage, they could wrest control of the state party
from Bullock and gain the confidence of the state's white voters. The
other two papers, both weeklies, were the Atlanta Deutsche Zeitung
and the Southwest Georgian of Fort Valley in Houston County. Bul-
lock apparently found the latter two papers to his liking, for he direct-
ed printing patronage to them both.64
The editor of the Southwest Georgian was Joel R. Griffin, a
wealthy landholder and former Confederate officer who had braved
the disapproval of his white neighbors by becoming a Republican. Af-
ter the war Griffin had taken up the cause of freedpeople; he had do-
nated land for a schoolhouse and had urged Governor Bullock and
other state officials to curb the rampant violence against blacks. Grif-
fin knew Swayze, who published the Southwest Georgian on his press
63 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 167-91; Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience,

108-12; Atlanta Daily New Era, March 12, April 29, May 7, 1870; and Macon American Union,
September 8, 1870.
64 Ronald H. Limbaugh, Rocky Mountain Carpetbaggers: Idaho's Territorial Governors,
1863-1890 (Moscow, Idaho, 1982), 90; drafts of letters from John E. Bryant to General Horace
Porter, May 21, 28, 1870, Bryant Papers; Atlanta Daily True Georgian, June 28, 1870; Carl Witt-
ke, The German-Language Press in America (Lexington, Ky., 1957), 205; Macon American
Union, April 15, 1870; and State of Georgia, Comptroller General's Report, 1870. There are no
extant issues of either the Deutsche Zeitung or the Southwest Georgian.
in Macon, and took an editorial stance similar to Swayze's. He re-

minded his white readers that the Republicans opposed poll taxes and
favored free public schools, homestead exemptions, and laws giving
mechanics and laborers a lien on the property of their employers. "Oh!
What benefits to the poor white men of Georgia," Griffin observed.
And yet they voted against the Republicans in 1868 because "rich
aristocrats" told them that these were radical ideas designed for blacks
and not poor whites. "Why in the name of common sense," Griffin
asked, "[would you] follow them further ... .?"65 Although Swayze
denied that he wished to array the poor against the rich, in the last
weeks before the election he devoted every issue of his paper to unit-
ing "the poor man, white and colored, throughout the state" behind the
Republicans. Again and again he identified the Democrats with slav-
ery, slaveholders, excessive wealth, and hostility to laboring men.
Nonetheless, he noted, they had gained the votes of poor whites by
exciting their prejudices against blacks. "But any man of common
sense knows," Swayze insisted, "that the interests of poor men are the
same, whether their skin be white or black."66
By 1870 the Republican editors all contended that the Reconstruc-
tion amendments had settled the question of civil and political rights
for the freedpeople, and they concentrated on gaining white support
for the Republican party. Echoing Swayze, William Scruggs of the
New Era denounced the "privileged classes," claiming they had con-
trolled the state for years by appealing to the sectional and racial loy-
alties of the mass of white voters and using social ostracism and "the
shrewd and tyrannical use of business patronage" to destroy those
who disagreed with them. As a result, he claimed, Georgia had a
"white peasantry" whose members were "as much slaves to the
caprices and whims of the governing class as were the negroes them-
selves." Scruggs sounded more like Bard and Bryant, however, in
calling for state aid to railroads and a protective tariff to stimulate lo-
cal industry. Scruggs was convinced that these programs would appeal
to ex-Whigs, who had espoused such ideas before the Civil War. The
65 Alexander St. Clair Abrams, Manual and Biographical Register of the State of Georgia for
1871-2 (Atlanta, 1872), 55-56; The First Hundred and Ten Years of Houston County, Georgia,
1822-1932 (Chelsea, Mich., 1983), 125, 164, 215, and 218; Augusta Daily Loyal Georgian, June
20, 1867; Joel R. Griffin to Rufus Bullock, August 24, 30, 1868, Executive Correspondence
(Georgia Department of Archives and History); Atlanta Daily New Era, February 24, 1870;
Southwest Georgian quoted in Macon American Union, April 22, October 27 (quotations), 1870.
66 Macon American Union, September 29, October 13 (first quotation), November 3 and 10
(second quotation), 1870.
Democrats, he reminded his readers, opposed all these programs.

However, he did offer an olive branch to the Democrats by supporting
amnesty for ex-Confederates.67
Scruggs's New Era, the mouthpiece of the Bullock administration,
espoused views held by Brown, Bard, and their followers, which indi-
cates that the governor was moderating his views. Following the re-
constitution of the Georgia legislature and the ratification of the Fif-
teenth Amendment, Bullock said little more about the rights of black
people. Instead he called for amnesty for ex-Confederates and recom-
mended that the Republicans seek support from all who would accept
Reconstruction. Although he had launched his political career by pro-
moting himself as a champion of working-class debtors, Bullock was
a businessman who hoped to appeal to other business-oriented voters
for support. With his enthusiastic approval, the state backed a number
of railroad projects designed to benefit various regions in the state.
The legislature also established a statewide system of public education
for both races. In a last-minute act of desperation to save his adminis-
tration by broadening its base of support, Bullock arranged to lease
the state-owned railroad to a group including Joseph Brown and state
Democratic leader Benjamin H. Hill.68
In an apparent bid for editorial support, Bullock also released a
flood of money to the state's newspapers, a policy he had initiated the
previous year. After Bullock took over the governorship in the middle
of 1868, the state spent about $15,000 on printing costs for the re-
mainder of the year, an amount not much larger than that expended
under Democratic rule. In 1869, however, impelled by money Bullock
had distributed to newspapers for publishing his proclamations, ex-
penditures rose to almost $50,000. In 1870 the amounts expended ap-
proached $70,000. Of this latter figure, Scruggs, who was still the
state's printer, received $14,646; $2,181 went to Swayze and almost
$1,000 to Griffin's Southwest Georgian. Bard and Bryant, who op-
posed Bullock, got nothing. Instead the governor spread the rest to
Democratic newspapers around the state. The Atlanta Intelligencer re-
67 Atlanta Daily New Era, January 19 (first quotation), March 3 (third and fourth quotations),
4, 16, 18, 19 (second quotation), May 13, 15, September 13, 14, October 25, November 18,
1870.
68 Ibid., March 4, September 13, 1870; James R. Duncan Jr., "Rufus Brown Bullock, Recon-
struction, and the 'New South', 1834-1907: An Exploration into Race, Class, Party, and the Cor-
ruption of the American Creed" (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1988), 76-77,
167-84, and 209-12; Nathans, Losing the Peace, 197-98 and 206-12. Duncan's biography of
Bullock has been published; see Russell Duncan, Entrepreneur for Equality: Governor Rufus
Bullock, Commerce, and Race in Post-Civil War Georgia (Athens and London, 1994).
ceived the largest of these amounts, $7,710. Later, when Bullock was
attacked for the large increase in state spending, he argued that in-
creased Ku Klux Klan activity had forced him to issue frequent
proclamations. He defended placing them in Democratic newspapers
by saying that he was obligated to ensure that his orders reached all
parts of the state and that the few extant Republican papers had limit-
ed circulations. It seems clear, however, that he hoped to use govern-
ment patronage to attract Democratic support for his administration.69
This Republican concentration on courting white voters increased
racial tension within the party and left blacks feeling more and more
alienated. Bullock had tried to appease his black critics, making
Simms a Superior Court judge and nominating Turner for the post-
mastership in Macon. These appointments had infuriated Jason Clarke
Swayze, who coveted the postmastership himself and, in a tirade
against Turner, referred to him as "the Reverend blackguard, whore-
master, forger, and passer of counterfeit money." Despite Bullock's
stratagems, and perhaps because of them, the Republicans were
doomed in the December elections. They lacked a state militia to
maintain order at the polls, for white Republicans in the legislature
had refused to organize one. They lacked a strong party press, and the
editors of the Republican newspapers that remained were divided on
patronage and racial issues. Bullock's regime was tainted with charges
of graft and corruption. Republicans had ignored blacks in their bid
for white support, but white sentiment did not swing in their direction
and the black vote declined. When the ballots were counted at the end
of December, Democrats won four of the state's seven seats in the
U.S. House of Representatives and overwhelming control of both
69 The figures on printing expenditures are drawn from the yearly reports of Georgia's com
troller general. They include not only funds that Bullock expended from the regular legislative
appropriations for printing (which doubled from 1869 to 1870, rising from $28,000 to over
$57,000), but also monies expended under contingency funds and special appropriations. In
1869 and again in 1870 the legislature inquired into Bullock's printing expenditures but brought
no charges against him, probably because much of the money went to Democratic newspapers.
See Alan Conway, The Reconstruction of Georgia (Minneapolis, Minn., 1966), 185, and Georgia
General Assembly, Report of the Joint Committee to Investigate Charges Against Governor Bul-
lock (Atlanta, 1870). After Bullock left the state in 1871, another investigating committee con-
trolled by Democrats charged him with spending a total of $140,397 to publish executive procla-
mations, but no action was taken on the charges, again probably because so many Democratic
newspapers received the state's money. See Georgia General Assembly, Report of Committee to
Investigate the Official Conduct of Rufus B. Bullock, 18-19 and 188-89. My estimate is some-
what lower, around $ 110,000; but that is still a very large amount of money, all of which was ex-
pended in addition to regular printing costs of the state government. I estimate that in total, Bul-
lock's administration spent slightly over $184,000 in printing costs during its tenure. In retro-
spect, these expenditures did not save his party's press; all they did was increase the state debt,
anger white taxpayers, and create intraparty competition for the largesse.
houses of the state legislature. Since there had not been an election for
governor, Bullock remained in the post.70
In the wake of the elections, Republican editors were left to mull
over the evidence of their party's impotence. Samuel Bard, reading the
political winds with his accustomed acumen, announced that he was
going to "oppose Radicalism from within the Democratic party," leav-
ing his Republican colleagues to consider their own future. After five
years of struggling, none of them had been able to establish a strong
local base. As Amos T. Akerman, a Georgia Republican whom Grant
had recently appointed U.S. Attorney General, observed, "unless a pa-
per has local support, it is not worth much." Lacking that support, the
Republican press could be sustained only by government patronage.
The federal government continued to pay Scruggs's New Era and
Swayze's American Union to publish U.S. laws, but this yielded each
of them only $442 for the congressional session from December 1870
through March 1871. Georgia government patronage remained the
chief source of income for Georgia's Republican papers; but in 1871
expenditures fell to around $25,000. Of this amount, $13,890 went to
the New Era. The Atlanta Deutsche Zeitung got about $1,000; Swayze
and Joel Griffin each received $596 from the state that year and billed
it for an additional $969. The Atlanta Intelligencer got $2,570. In his
pursuit of editorial support, Bullock even sent a trickle of state money
to Bryant's paper; and in July 1871 he joined with Brown and Kimball
to lend money to Bard's True Georgian and, in addition, promised the
Atlanta editor that he could again do printing for the Western and At-
lantic Railroad.?
Some of these potential newspaper allies soon disappeared. Despite
Bullock's efforts, Bard's paper expired midway through 1871, leaving
the loan unpaid; the Atlanta Deutsche Zeitung quickly followed, and
Bryant's paper teetered on the edge of extinction. Sustained by gov-
ernment patronage, Scruggs's New Era continued as the only Repub-
lican daily in the state. Despite the overwhelming defeat of the Re-
publican party in 1870, Scruggs had not abandoned his hopes for it.
70 Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia, 60 and 94; Coulter, Negro Legis-
lators in Georgia, 17-26; Macon American Union, August 20, 1869 (quotation); and Nathans,
Losing the Peace, 198-205.
71 Atlanta True Georgian, December 24, 1870; Amos Akerman to H. M. Turner, November
16, 1871, Amos Akerman Letterbooks (Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Char-
lottesville); William L. Scruggs to Columbus Delano, January 8, 1871, Delano Family Papers
(Manuscript Division, Library of Congress); and Parks, Joseph E. Brown, 459. Figures on print-
ing expenditures are drawn from the Biennial Register, ... 1871 and from the Georgia Comp-
troller General's report for the same year.
Encouraged by the appearance in Georgia and elsewhere of "New De-

parture" Democrats who declared their willingness to accept the civil
and political equality of blacks and put the Reconstruction struggle
behind them, Scruggs redoubled his efforts to enlarge white support
for the state Republican party. When renewed Ku Klux Klan violence
in the South led Congress to consider legislation authorizing President
Grant to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and institute martial law in
areas of the greatest unrest, Scruggs and Governor Bullock both
strongly advised against its passage. They contended that state laws
were sufficient to handle any Klan violence and warned that further
federal interference in the South would harm the Republican party.
The time had come, Scruggs declared, for Republicans, old-line
Whigs, and New Departure Democrats to join together, possibly in a
new party, to oppose radical Democrats who still resorted to violence
to control the state and radical Republicans who would use martial
law for the same end.72
Continued Republican disasters in Georgia were disheartening to
the editor of the longest-lived Republican paper, Jason Clarke Swayze
of the American Union. Once a strong advocate of congressional leg-
islation to deal with the Klan, he too, like Scruggs and Bullock, came
to oppose further federal intervention in the South, claiming it would
be halfhearted and ineffective. "After a sad experience of six years,"9
he concluded, he was "about ready to join hands with our opponents
in the matter of domestic differences ... " Although Swayze had been
a champion of black civil and political rights, he had grown disillu-
sioned with the freedmen and no longer counted on them as reliable
Republican voters. He was especially bitter about black leaders who
complained that their race was not receiving its fair share of offices,
snorting that they would "send a cornfield negro to the United States
Senate simply because he was black." If blacks chose not to support
the party that had set them free, he warned, "the Republican party ...
can do without them."73 Swayze also bore a grudge against President
Grant for not appointing him to federal office and was furious when
Bryant received a federal appointment. Although they were both from
the North, Swayze claimed that Bryant and other "foreign bummers"
controlled federal patronage in the state, which permitted them to
72 Atlanta Daily New Era, March 2, April 6, 11, 20, May 25, June 22, 25, July 6, 9, 12, Au-
gust 13, 16, 17, 22, and September 30, 1871. Bard then took over a newspaper in Tennessee; see
Bard to E. D. Morgan, July 10, 1872, in William E. Chandler Papers.
73 Macon American Union, March 2, April 20 (first quotation), August 10 (second quotation),
September 7, 14 (third quotation), 1871.
dominate the Georgia Republican party. Rather than "get down on our
knees to these hungry, never-satisfied carpetbaggers," Swayze would
oppose Grant's reelection. By mid-summer of 1871 Swayze's editori-
als were so cool towards Grant that a northern Republican touring the
South recommended to McPherson that Swayze be denied further fed-
eral printing patronage.74
In October Governor Bullock, realizing that the newly elected state
legislature would probably impeach him, resigned and left the state.
Benjamin Conley, the president of the state senate who became acting
governor, could do little to sustain the administration's mouthpiece,
the New Era. The legislature repealed the loosely worded law autho-
rizing the governor to publish proclamations and appointed a Democ-
rat to be state printer for 1872. The legislature also arranged for a spe-
cial election for governor, which was held in December 1871. Dis-
heartened Republicans made no nomination, and the Democratic
candidate won in a very light turnout. Deprived of state patronage, the
New Era closed a few months later. McPherson transferred its federal
patronage to John Bryant, who had moved his struggling Georgia Re-
publican to Savannah and renamed it the Savannah Journal.75
Bryant hoped that the Republican party, rid of Bullock, could re-
deem itself with the voters of Georgia. He assured Republicans in
Washington that he stood with the national party, and he did support
legislation to suppress the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He also contend-
ed that he was still an advocate of rights for freed blacks, but that
claim was undermined when he endeavored to wrest a patronage post
from a black appointee. Jason Clarke Swayze, the state's remaining
Republican editor, was so alienated from Grant that he attended the
Liberal Republican convention in Cincinnati in the summer of 1872
and supported their nomination of Horace Greeley to run against the
president that fall. When the Democrats also endorsed Greeley,
Swayze rejoiced, claiming that he now stood ready "to make friends
of former rebels-Ku Klux, if you please." When Georgia Republi-
cans held their state convention in August, they refused to designate
74 Ibid., August 10, December 14 (first quotation), 1871, March 28, 1872; Swayze to Ben-
jamin F. Conley, March 8, 1872 (second quotation), Benjamin F. Conley Papers (Atlanta Histor-
ical Society); and R. J. Hinton to Edward McPherson, July 18, 1871, McPherson Papers.
75 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 219-21; John Bryant to Edward McPherson, December 1,
1871, January 5, 1872, and James Atkins to John Bigley, March 15, 1872, all in McPherson Pa-
pers; and Duncan, "Rufus B. Bullock," 206 and 270. In 1872 Scruggs obtained a position in the
federal internal revenue office in Atlanta; eventually he went on to a distinguished career in the
U. S. diplomatic service. See W. L. Scruggs to Col. L. E. Dudley, August 31, 1872, in William
E. Chandler Papers; and Jervey, "William Lindsay Scruggs," 3-4.
Swayze's paper as an official party organ, naming instead Bryant's Sa-

vannah Journal, Griffin's Southwest Georgian, and a newcomer, the
Atlanta Whig.76
In the fall election, Greeley easily carried Georgia. The following
January an embittered Swayze, outraged at a race riot that had broken
out in Macon during the voting, put his paper up for sale and left for
Kansas.77 The Savannah Journal and Atlanta Whig also closed, leav-
ing only Griffin's Southwest Georgian to represent the Republican
party in the state. In September 1873 the irrepressible Samuel Bard re-
vived the New Era, and at the same time Republican Congressman
Richard Whiteley bought control of the Bainbridge Weekly Sun; both
received printing patronage from McPherson. Unfortunately for the
Republicans, Congress voted that same year to terminate the 1867 law
authorizing such printing awards. Within two years Whiteley's,
Bard's, and Griffin's papers were gone, leaving only one newspaper,
the Atlanta Republican, a weekly founded in 1874, to carry the Re-
publican banner.78
In 1867, after Jason Clarke Swayze had taken over the American
Union, he had asked the dean of Republican editors, Horace Greeley,
for advice. Greeley told Swayze that his paper could not be sustained
from without-he must create a market for it in Georgia.79 Greeley
was right. Unable to gain local subscriptions and advertising, Repub-
lican editors competed for federal and state patronage, thereby con-
tributing to party factionalism. They fought each other as much as
they fought the Democrats. The absence of a prosperous Republican
press forced Bullock to search for journalistic support among the De-
mocrats by handing their editors a share of patronage. Not only did
this tactic fail; it angered Republican editors and contributed to the
state's growing debt, a point that Democrats probably would have em-
phasized even more had not some of their own papers been recipients
of the state's largesse.
76 W. Kryzanowski to McPherson, September 11, 1872, McPherson Papers; Macon Ameri-

can Union, September 12, 1872 (quotation); and Shadgett, Republican Party in Georgia, 46.
There are no extant issues of the Savannah Journal and only one for the Atlanta Whig. Bryant's
biographer claims that he remained a consistent advocate of the rights of African Americans. For
a more critical assessment of him, see Thomas C. Holt, "Georgia Carpetbaggers: Politicians
without Politics," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXII (Spring 1988), 72-79.
77 Macon American Union, January 2, 1873
78 See Rowell's American Newspaper Directory for the years from 1873 through 1875; Bain-
bridge Weekly Sun, September 24, 1873; and Samuel Bard to Edward McPherson, July 30, Sep-
tember 27, 1873, Richard Whiteley to McPherson, September 19, 28, 1873, Andrew Sloan to
McPherson, September 20, 1873, all in McPherson Papers. In 1874 President Grant appointed
Bard postmaster in Atlanta. See Bainbridge Weekly Sun, April 1, and December 24, 1874.
79 Macon American Union, April 17, 1872.
Greeley's observation about the prospects for the Republican press

in Georgia applied to the party as well. Both press and party failed to
obtain local support because they were unable to bridge the racial gap
in the state. The two black Republican papers were short-lived, leav-
ing the party press in the hands of white editors. Of this group, only
Swayze and Bryant paid much attention to the freedpeople. The other
Republican editors were conservatives on race, and their policies
alienated black politicians. Swayze eventually became disillusioned
with blacks and succumbed to the same racial prejudices that he had
earlier sought to overcome among working-class whites. Bryant
claimed to remain consistent in his advocacy of rights for freed
blacks, but his tortured political course cost him their support. On the
other hand, despite considerable effort the Republican editors failed to
build a constituency among whites. Neither Swayze's appeal to poor-
er whites nor Bard's solicitation of business-minded Georgians
brought the Republican party many white votes-or its newspapers
many white advertisements and subscriptions. For years to come,
Georgia was destined to be a one-press and a one-party state.

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Southern Historical Association

The Republican Party Press in Reconstruction Georgia, 1867-1874

WHEN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY EMERGED IN GEORGIA DURING

MR. ABBOTT is a professor of history at Eastern Michigan University.

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

despite assuming positions that bordered on the advocacy of white su-

per, Bryant sought to raise money from sympathetic Republicans in

I Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 65.

he had moved to Griffin to enter the publishing business. During the

U.S. laws. Recognizing that this measure was intended to subsidize

13 DeTreville, "Reconstruction in Augusta," 39; Washington Daily Morning Chronicle,

cal support in Augusta. Bryant's paper was in danger of failing, and in

20 Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 80; and Griffin American Union, March

Although all of the Republican editors made gestures toward the

holding a constitutional convention carried the day; the Republicans

38 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 59-69.

cused Bard of following a "bungling course" and not firmly backing

45 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 101-2; Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience, 88-89;

feared the loss of printing patronage. His conservative views on race,

Angry at the failure of both federal and state governments to protect

After Bullock restored his printing patronage, Bard's editorial

from Bullock and refused to defend him against Democratic charges

63 Nathans, Losing the Peace, 167-91; Currie-McDaniel, Carpetbagger of Conscience,

in Macon, and took an editorial stance similar to Swayze's. He re-

Democrats, he reminded his readers, opposed all these programs.

Encouraged by the appearance in Georgia and elsewhere of "New De-

Swayze's paper as an official party organ, naming instead Bryant's Sa-

76 W. Kryzanowski to McPherson, September 11, 1872, McPherson Papers; Macon Ameri-

Greeley's observation about the prospects for the Republican press

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