Skirmisher: The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Weaver

Skirmisher James Baird Weaver library of congress Skirmisher The Life, Times, and Political Career of James B. Wea...

Author: Robert B. Mitchell

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Skirmisher

James Baird Weaver library of congress

Skirmisher The Life, Times, and Political Career of

James B. Weaver

Robert B. Mitchell

edinborough Press • 2009

Edinborough Press P. O. Box 13790 Roseville, Minnesota 55117 1-888-251-6336 www.edinborough.com [email protected] Copyright ©2009 by Robert B. Mitchell. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Material in Chapters 6 and 7 originally appeared in “Untamed Greenbacker: James Baird Weaver,” Iowa Heritage Illustrated 87 (Fall 2006), 106-119. The text is composed in Arno Pro and printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitchell, Robert B., 1958Skirmisher : the life, times, and political career of James B. Weaver / Robert B. Mitchell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-889020-26-6 (hardbound : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-889020-30-3 (softbound : alk. paper) 1. Weaver, James B. (James Baird), 1833-1912. 2. Legislators–United States– Biography. 3. United States. Congress. House–Biography. 4. Generals–United States–Biography. 5. United States. Army–Biography. 6. Presidential candidates–United States–Biography. 7. Greenback Labor Party (U.S.)–Biography. 8. Populist Party (U.S.)–Biography. 9. Presidents–United States–Election–1880. 10. Presidents–United States–Election–1892. I. Title. E664.W36M58 2008 328.73092–dc22 [B] 2008009889

Contents Introduction

3

I: The Hairy Nation

7

II: A New Orbit

21

III: The Most Terrific Storm of Death

35

IV: Supposed to be the Coming Man

49

V: A Gigantic Wrong

63

VI: A Grand Congressional Nuisance

81

VII: To Appeal to the People

95

VIII: The Almost Forgotten Greenback

113

IX: Wondering What He Will Do Next

127

X: A Call to Action

139

XI: Confident That His Cause is Just

157

XII: Commissioned of Heaven

177

XIII: Skirmisher

197

Bibliography

211

Acknowledgments Index

239 241

Skirmisher

Introduction

J

ames Baird Weaver spent much of his life in the headlines, so the Iowan’s death on February 6, 1912, made big news. The Des Moines Register marked the passing of the two-time presidential candidate, threeterm member of Congress, and distinguished Civil War veteran with a story on the front page and an editorial commentary on his career in public service. Amid the accolades, the paper expressed regret that Weaver’s passing prevented him from committing his life story to print. In his final years, Weaver had become a frequent and welcome caller at the newspaper’s offices, and in one of his last visits, he disclosed his intention to write an account of his life and times. “We do not know how much he had done when the end came,” the paper admitted, “but we fear it will be found that he was still unable to disconnect himself with the present and give to the past the time needed for autobiography.”1 That sentiment is understandable. Over the course of his seventy-eight years, Weaver participated in many of the formative episodes of the American experience. It was in the realm of politics, however, that he achieved renown. He joined the Republican Party as a young man in the 1850s and remained in Republican ranks until 1877, when he embraced the doctrines of the insurgent Greenback Party. Soon after winning his first term in Congress, Weaver emerged as the leader of the Greenbacks and guided the party to national prominence. As the Greenback presidential candidate in 1880, he broke with tradition and traveled the country in search of votes, foreshadowing the modern presidential campaign. In 1889, he assumed a prominent role in the congressional battle that opened up the Oklahoma Territory to homesteaders. Weaver gravitated to the Populist movement as it developed in the early 1890s and won that party’s presidential nomination in 1892. Once again, he campaigned energetically across the country, and this time he carried four states to become the first third-party candidate since 1860 to win electoral votes. Four years later, he used his influence as a Populist elder statesman to coax the party toward an alliance with the Democrats—an alliance that determined the course of American politics well into the twentieth century. From Abraham Lincoln’s first campaign for the presidency in 1860 to the rise

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skirmisher • James B. Weaver

of William Jennings Bryan, Weaver played an active and often influential role in national politics. No wonder the editors of the Register lamented Weaver’s failure to produce a memoir. They knew a good story when they saw one. This book is an attempt to tell that story. To a large extent, it is an account of how religious faith animated one man’s lifetime campaign to empower the federal government to renew and extend the promise of American democracy. In the decades after the Civil War, changing economic conditions seemed to jeopardize that promise for millions working on the nation’s farms and in its factories. Impoverished farmers struggled against debt, declining commodity prices, and the predatory business practices of railroads. Industrial workers battled for decent working conditions, an eight-hour day, and the right to organize. As a devout Methodist who believed that the Gospels call Christians to support the poor and oppressed, Weaver denounced the widening gap between rich and poor and sought to rein in the power of big business. He urged changes in the nation’s monetary system to relieve farmers and others crushed by deflationary pressures. He championed a graduated income tax and the establishment of a federal Department of Labor. As the Populist presidential candidate, Weaver ran on a party platform that advocated government ownership of the railroads. Like Bryan, Weaver believed the federal government was uniquely suited to help usher in a more equitable society that put, as he once phrased it, the “precepts of the Galilean in motion among men.” Weaver brought an inclusive approach to politics. He favored extending the right to vote to women. In both of his presidential campaigns, he sought the support of African American voters in the South and denounced the unjust means employed to limit black suffrage. Weaver was an early and earnest advocate of the direct election of senators as an antidote to corruption and undue corporate influence. As a leader of the Greenback and Populist movements, he worked hard to build new political organizations, but when it became clear that the third parties were incapable of advancing reform agendas on their own, he worked just as hard to forge alliances with the Democratic Party. A potent set of personality traits drove and sustained Weaver’s battle for economic and political reform. Along with his strong religious faith, Weaver possessed in abundance the energy, ambition, and pride common to many politicians. But these characteristics did not always serve him well. An accomplished orator, his eloquence occasionally gave way to vainglorious posturing. He was prone to flashes of anger when challenged—especially on matters of

Introduction

5

honor. He avidly pursued victory at the ballot box and was widely regarded by critics as an insatiable office seeker, but Weaver’s election campaigns usually served a larger cause. Throughout his colorful and lengthy career, Weaver typically put principle ahead of party. In spite of his record, Weaver rates little more than a footnote in most accounts of the period. Perhaps this is because by the conventional measure of victory he was not a very successful politician. Not counting local elections, he was victorious at the polls only three times. In his two campaigns for president, he ran credibly against long odds but did not come close to winning. Not only did he lose, but he lost as the leader of third parties that have long since disappeared. Even so, Weaver helped clear the way for likeminded reformers who succeeded him. Bryan, in particular, acknowledged his debt to Weaver’s crusading political career, which helped reshape the American political landscape as the nation emerged from the cynicism and corruption of the Gilded Age into the energetic idealism of the Progressive Era. Another factor contributing to Weaver’s obscurity is the currency controversy that dominated much of his political career. Americans who pay bills over the Internet and take cash-dispensing automated teller machines for granted find the heated debates of the late nineteenth century about greenbacks versus gold, “resumption,” the “Crime of ’73,” and “free silver” maddeningly obscure. At its root, however, the debate over currency concerned the serious problem of deflation, which plagued the American economy in the decades after the Civil War. Weaver, the Greenbacks, and later the Populists advocated a series of schemes to counteract deflationary trends and raise price levels, using either government-issued paper greenbacks or silver coins. While economists may take issue with the remedies favored by Weaver and his allies, they were honest attempts to address a devastating economic condition that wreaked havoc on many farms and ranches and ranked among the dominant political problems of the period. Even if Weaver had not become a prominent figure in national politics, his life story would still be compelling. He was born in Ohio in 1833, at the midpoint of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. He migrated across the Midwest with his family and grew up in the 1840s on the southern Iowa frontier. After venturing west to California in search of gold, Weaver went to law school in Cincinnati. Later, he became a committed abolitionist and Republican. Weaver enlisted in an Iowa infantry regiment after the fall of Fort Sumter

6


in 1861; he fought with distinction at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth. By the time he returned home he had risen to the rank of colonel, and he later received a brevet appointment as brigadier general, in recognition of his war record. He edited newspapers, wrote a book, and used his prodigious talents as a speaker to take his case for political and economic reform across the country. From before the Civil War to the dawn of the Progressive Era, Weaver played a central role in many of the major events of the nineteenth century. His story demands to be told.

chapter one

The Hairy Nation

O

n April 30, 1843, outside Keosauqua in southeastern Iowa, the family of Abram and Susan Weaver prepared to journey west. The couple and their children packed the last items into a family wagon already stuffed with household supplies and Abram’s rifle. A chicken coop hung off the back, and a solitary cow trailed on a leash. When all was ready, the modest caravan departed, with a pair of horses pulling the load and the family dog trotting alongside.1 It was the third time in eight years that the Weavers had moved. In 1835, Susan and Abram left their home near Dayton, Ohio, to carve a farm out of the forests of southwestern Michigan. After seven years, they left Cass County for Iowa. They wintered outside Keosauqua before continuing their journey, but this time their destination was relatively close at hand. The Weavers and thousands of others were headed immediately to the west, territory once reserved for the Sac and Fox Indians. By treaty, the land opened to white settlement at midnight on April 30, but prior to the official opening, Abram and other pioneers had surreptitiously scouted out potential homesteads while pretending to hunt. When the hour struck, soldiers patrolling the border fired guns to signal the start of the west’s first great land rush. Believing that the prairie was only good for grazing cattle, the Weavers and the other families pouring into the newly opened region headed for wooded areas. At about 3 p.m., the Weaver wagon halted. Susan and Abram laid claim to a quarter section along Chequest Creek and began to build a new life.2 One of the children who helped unload the wagon was a blue-eyed nineyear-old boy. Born near Dayton, Ohio, on June 12, 1833, James Baird Weaver was the fifth child in a family that would eventually produce thirteen children.3 When the wagon stopped, the Weavers settled in a place that young James called home for most of his life. At another time, growing up in different circumstances, he might have become a preacher or prospered in business. Instead, reflecting the influences and experiences of his childhood in southern Iowa, Weaver gravitated to politics. Survival in the new territory was the first order of business, and the Weavers immediately addressed the challenges of pioneer life. A bark shanty built on the creek’s edge served as the family’s first shelter. Corn, potatoes, and other

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vegetables soon went into the ground. Eventually, Abram erected a house built from green timber with a clapboard roof, a floor made from split logs, and doors and windows hung on wooden hinges. The family’s kitchen stove was a luxury not enjoyed by many other pioneers, but in other respects, the Weavers’ experiences were similar to those of their neighbors. “Mother’s loom and father’s handicraft had been busy preparing for the approaching winter so by early fall all was ready for any stress of weather that might come,” Weaver recalled in a brief autobiographical account written toward the end of his life. As the homestead developed, Abram supplemented the family income with his skills as a carpenter and cooper. He helped build houses, made furniture and barrels, “and busied himself with an almost endless variety of handicraft for which he was noted throughout the widely scattered neighborhood,” his son remembered. As the pioneer family settled into its homestead, young James attended a log schoolhouse, where Friday afternoon spelling bees “stimulated youthful ambition to blood heat”4 and he discovered a lifelong love for public contests of wit and wordplay. A family heritage of civic and military service came with the possessions Susan and Abram brought along to Iowa. Abram was born in 1804 in Butler County, near Cincinnati, to Henry and Susanna Weaver. In 1824, Abram married Susan Imlay, a New Jersey native. Both claimed descent from Revolutionary War veterans. That heritage was a point of pride with James, who in later years would incorrectly number Betsy Ross, the seamstress credited with creating the Stars and Stripes American flag, among his ancestors. According to family tradition, Abram’s father was active in local political affairs in southwestern Ohio and played a prominent role in the frontier wars against the Indians. Abram immersed himself in the local political scene almost immediately after he settled in the new territory. In April 1844, he was elected to the first board of commissioners for newly created Davis County.5 Thus began an active but often unsuccessful lifelong quest for elective office. Contemporary accounts and family lore indicate that Abram held the offices of district court clerk and postmaster in the 1840s and 1850s, but county election results show that voters frequently spurned his bids for office.6 Despite Abram’s disappointments in politics, James clearly looked up to his father, describing him as a hard-working provider who presided over a warm and loving home. When chores were done, the family gathered in front of “the open cheerful fireplace,” where “there was merry chatter, song, and a thrilling touch of music, father leading with his dear old flute.” Abram was a Democrat,

The Hairy Nation

9

and when the talk around the hearth turned to politics, he passed his partisan leanings on to his son.7 Along with Abram, other members of the extended Weaver family guided and influenced young James. Calvin W. Phelps, who married James’s sister Elizabeth in 1844, practiced medicine in Bloomfield and won a term as the Davis County sealer of weights and measures in 1849.8 Phelps would play a significant role in one of the major events of James’s youth. Rivaling Abram as a political influence and role model was Hosea B. Horn. Born in 1820 in Mercer County, Kentucky, Horn and his family relocated to Indiana in the 1830s, where he learned the printing trade and became active in Whig Party politics. In 1839, Horn became an assistant in the office of the Bartholomew County district court clerk, where, along with his official duties, he studied law. Horn edited a newspaper published in the county seat of Columbus to support the presidential candidacy of Kentucky Whig Henry Clay in 1844, and he continued to carry the Whig banner after moving to Iowa and marrying James’s sister Margaret in 1847.9 One can only guess at the kind of political discussions Abram and Hosea conducted over the dinner table or around the courthouse. If they were loyal adherents of their parties, however, they may well have debated two opposing views of the proper role of government in the American republic. Democrats believed strongly in an egalitarian—though racially exclusive—social order. They feared that a strong federal government, in the hands of wealthy bankers and merchants, would favor the monied classes and restrict freedom. The party stood committed to what one newspaper described in 1854 as “the great principles of equality . . . individual liberty and . . . governments instituted and controlled by the people of the sovereign States.” Whigs, Horace Greeley argued, subscribed to a more expansive view of the role of government, seeing it as “an agency of the community through which vast and beneficent ends may be accomplished.” In the wake of the Panic of 1837, Whigs contended that the government needed to play a direct role in promoting economic recovery. Moreover, many Whigs, particularly in the party’s early days, abhorred the notion of party politics because it required the subordination of the individual conscience to the survival of the party.10 With his father as a loyal Democrat and his brother-in-law as a leading local Whig, young James was exposed to a potent blend of political ideas involving social and economic equality, the role of government, and the relationship of the indi-

10


vidual to political parties—a blend that he would carry with him throughout his adult life. In many ways, the Weavers typified the settlers arriving in the Iowa territory in the 1840s. The archetypal newcomer was a Protestant Democrat born in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, or Wisconsin, with Ohio contributing the greatest number of Iowa’s residents. The mid-Atlantic states of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware also contributed significantly to the population of the territory. While tolerant of religious and political minorities, most newcomers wanted nothing to do with Indians, blacks, or other racial minorities. “The typical Iowan had no love for slavery or for the slave,” historian Joseph F. Wall has written. “This was white man’s country by conquest and occupation, and he intended to keep it that way.” While it is not clear if the Weavers subscribed to the prevailing opinions about race, on another matter, it is more likely that they differed from the typical settlers. Iowans viewed lawyers, bankers, and politicians with suspicion, but the Weavers, whose family was headed by an aspiring politician and included a lawyer by marriage, probably did not share this distrust.11 Like many other settlers, the Weavers gravitated to the church as they settled in the new territory. Before setting off to claim their Davis County homestead, the family lived in an unfinished farmhouse on the Des Moines River. The house, which belonged to James Purdom,12 may well have been the site where an early Iowa Methodist congregation met for about eleven years beginning in 1836.13 After settling in Davis County, the family often hosted the traveling preachers who fanned out across the territory. Methodists in particular made use of such circuit riders, reflecting the denomination’s pragmatic willingness to take the Gospel to where people lived and worked. On their circuits, which often took weeks to complete, itinerant pastors held services, performed marriages, and attended to the spiritual needs of the families living on isolated farms. Their arrival left a lasting impression on Weaver, who recounted the visiting preacher as a typically “jolly fellow” whose services provided inspiration and fellowship. “With good cheer [the preacher] hunted up the remote settlers, through rain and sunshine . . . reminded us of God and duty and invited us all to the big meeting which was always soon to occur at some pioneer home,” Weaver wrote. “All formality was discarded at those religious gatherings. They sang and prayed with unction. Amen and Hallelujah resounded as a matter of course.”14 Faith was stoked at services where preachers roused the spiritual passions

The Hairy Nation

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of the congregation. The story of a camp meeting hosted by the Rev. Francis Carey, a Methodist minister who served in Bloomfield in the early 1850s, illustrates the emphasis on oratory and drama in worship. The featured speaker was the Rev. Henry Clay Dean, a noted Iowa Methodist, who was scheduled to give two sermons on the last day of the meeting. The first, “full of humor and oddities,” was disappointing. When Carey chastised him for his effort, Dean apologized. “ ‘Frank, I was fishing. This morning I was using the hook. Tonight I will use the dragnet.’ ” That night, Dean was far more effective. “The people were completely overcome,” Carey’s grandson wrote. “They wept and sobbed all through the audience. . . . [M]any were converted and professed religion, as the Methodists called it.”15 This was the ardent faith commonly practiced when Weaver was growing up. While his political positions evolved over the years, he remained a devout Christian throughout his life. The status of the territory in which the Weavers settled remained in flux into the mid-1840s. Acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase, by 1834 Iowa was governed as part of the Michigan Territory, and then, when Michigan achieved statehood, the Wisconsin Territory. President Martin Van Buren created a separate Iowa Territory in 1838, but there were many detours in the path to statehood. In 1840, voters defeated an attempt backed by territorial governor Robert Lucas to call a convention to write a state constitution. A conflict regarding the territory’s southern border with Missouri almost erupted into war when the governor of Missouri called up state militia to enforce his state’s claims and Lucas responded by calling up three divisions of Iowa militia. A second bid for statehood in 1845 also ran afoul of border complications. Northern congressmen wanted to modify the territory’s boundaries to permit the creation of new states if, as many anti-slavery Northerners feared, Texas was subdivided into four slave states. Not until 1846 did Iowans and Congress agree on the state’s boundaries and its admission into the Union.16 The contours of the Iowa political landscape also began to take shape during this period. Predominantly Democratic, the new territory nonetheless possessed an active and growing Whig organization, which briefly enjoyed control of the office of territorial governor when William Henry Harrison was elected president. Harrison’s victory mobilized Whigs in the territory, but Democrats remained dominant in Iowa well into the 1850s. The leading figures on the political landscape were a pair of Democratic senators, George Wallace Jones and Augustus Caesar Dodge, whose ties to Iowa dated

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to territorial days. Both Jones and Dodge were unsympathetic to slavery but stopped far short of supporting abolition. Acting on their cautious instincts, they supported the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to settle the question of slavery’s westward expansion. Rather than become preoccupied by the divisive issue, Jones and Dodge advocated low tariffs, sound money, and, perhaps most importantly, railroad construction through Iowa. In so doing, they reflected the priorities of most Iowans.17 Davis County quickly developed a reputation as a rough-and-ready region of the new state. In an account published in the 1860s, Hosea Horn described how inhabitants of the southern end of Davis County—a region known as “The Dispute” because of the border controversy with Missouri—were distinguished not only for their resistance to paying local taxes but also for their shaggy appearance. The settlers’ “unshaven faces” and “wolf-skin caps,” Horn explained, “gave rise to the cognomen ‘Hairy Nation’ by which . . . Davis County is still known.” Horn punctuated his lively account of the early days of the Hairy Nation with numerous references to the prodigious consumption of whiskey at elections, parties, and just about any gathering of consequence that did not take place in a church.18 After five years on the farm, the Weavers moved into Bloomfield in 1848. The move brought a number of changes to the life of the family, not the least of which was an end to the loneliness of the homestead. “Our home life was more varied as we met our neighbors with greater frequency,” Weaver recalled. The increased opportunities for social interaction in town were “a priceless boon.” The 1850 Census recorded Abram and Susan Weaver presiding over a household with seven children in which James, then 17, was the eldest at home. Not long after moving into town, Abram began running a hotel on the south side of the courthouse square. The opportunity to provide lodging and meals to the lawyers and elected officials passing through Bloomfield no doubt proved ideal for an ambitious politician, but one incident suggests gracious hospitality wasn’t always a hallmark of Abram’s establishment. One of the lodgers was Stiles S. Carpenter, a local Democratic elder and one of the first elected officials in the county. Carpenter got into the habit of teasing Abram’s daughter Margaret, who worked at the hotel, about the manner in which she served him his meals. One night, the teasing went too far. “ ‘If you do not like it that way, how do you like this?’ ” Margaret asked, tossing “dish and contents in his face.” Abram nonetheless managed to maintain his stand-

The Hairy Nation

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ing around the county courthouse and in the mid-1850s won the important job of surveying federally owned swampland for the county.19 Not long after the Weavers moved into town, the family’s political connections led to an interruption in James’s schooling. After Whig Zachary Taylor was elected president in 1848, Horn became postmaster of Bloomfield. At about this time, Abram won a government postal contract to deliver mail to Fairfield, the county seat of neighboring Jefferson County. Abram assigned the route to his energetic and ambitious son, who gave up school to attend to his new responsibilities and found himself on horseback every other week “winter and summer” riding to the Fairfield post office.20 In 1851, James quit the mail route and took his first steps toward a career. He began to study law under the tutelage of Samuel G. McAchran, a Bloomfield lawyer and politician comfortably ensconced in the county’s political and legal establishment.21 The practice of law was a well-traveled route to political prominence, and no one exemplified this better than Horn, who quickly emerged as one of the county’s leading lawyers. Horn wrote a manual for Iowa constables and justices of the peace; it was described by one contemporary as “very serviceable.”22 After a year as postmaster in Bloomfield, in 1850 he went west to California with James Shepherd, the former editor of the Iowa Democrat in Keosauqua, and returned via Central America and Cuba to write Horn’s Overland Guide to California, one of many guidebooks for aspiring prospectors published during the period. The pocket-sized guide measured distances along the trail from Council Bluffs to Sacramento and San Francisco and offered detailed notes about water, grazing, and terrain.23 As his horizons broadened, Horn’s political aspirations expanded beyond Bloomfield and Davis County. In February 1852, the state Whig Party met in Iowa City and nominated him for state treasurer. Overshadowing the state and local races in 1852 was the presidential contest pitting Democrat Franklin Pierce against Whig Gen. Winfield Scott—the first presidential election held after the Compromise of 1850. In nearly identical language, both parties, perhaps wishfully, endorsed the compromise as settling “now and forever” the explosive issue of slavery. Even with a Mexican War hero leading the national ticket, Horn and his fellow Whigs proved unable to overcome Iowa’s Democratic leanings. Pierce carried Iowa, Democratic candidates for state office swept to victory by margins of at least 1,000 votes, and the party retained its firm grip on both houses of the state legislature.24 Nevertheless, Horn’s bid

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for state office, conducted as Weaver was beginning his legal studies, provided a powerful example of the possibilities for a career in politics. At the time, however, Weaver was less interested in pursuing Horn’s political path than following his trail to California. Southern Iowa was consumed by gold fever following the discovery of the precious metal in a California creek bed in 1848, and Weaver, poring over turgid legal texts in McAchran’s Bloomfield law office, contracted a powerful case. His parents, however, “repressed its rage to the utmost of their power.” It was one thing for Abram and Susan to let their son haul the mail to Fairfield, quite another to permit him to cross the continent. Any parent can empathize with their reluctance to allow such a journey. Cholera claimed the lives of 5,000 overland travelers, and dysentery took its toll on those who made it across the Plains into the Rockies. Beyond the Rockies lay the alkali deserts of modern-day Nevada and Utah. Travelers fortunate enough to make it across the desert then encountered the treacherous, snowpacked Sierra Nevadas before arriving in the gold camps around Sacramento. Tales of the anguish endured by westward emigrants were well known in Iowa and prompted one newspaper to bemoan the impact of the Gold Rush on the region. “A panoramic view of the sufferings and horrid deaths that our devoted neighbors and kindred have indured [sic] in the last four months on the mountains and plains between here and California could not be exceeded in the imagination,” the Democratic Union of Keosauqua editorialized in 1852. “Yet the ‘fever’ . . . prevails among our inhabitants and thousands are now preparing to commence next Spring and act over the dreadful tragedy. . . . O that some power would endow us with eyes of reason.”25 Nevertheless, Weaver persisted. He won support from Phelps, who had recently returned from an expedition to California with a “snug quantity of gold.” The adventurous doctor planned another westward journey and needed Weaver’s help. Abram and Susan finally relented. On March 21, 1853, “prompted by the love of adventure and lured by the hope of gold,” Weaver joined Phelps and headed out from Bloomfield for the Sacramento Valley of California with fifty-two head of cattle.26 Accompanying Weaver and Phelps on their journey were two hands whom Weaver, in an account of the journey he wrote almost 50 years later, identified only by their first names. Mike hailed from Indiana but traced his family back to North Carolina. “You had only to clap eyes on him to discover that he was indolent, good-natured, and utterly without ambition or courage,” Weaver

The Hairy Nation

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recalled. The party’s fourth member, Jack, came from Missouri and served as cook for the expedition. “Sallow-complexioned” and “vacant-eyed,” Jack brought along an ample supply of the prejudices of the day. “He hated the negro because he was too poor to own him.” He insisted on being allowed to hunt for meat and to kill and scalp any Indians he might encounter along the way, to avenge his grandfather, who had been killed in an Indian raid. Jack’s bigoted bravado would lead to a humorous and humiliating climax well into the journey. Weaver’s role on the trip proved significantly more taxing than those assigned to Mike or Jack. While the party was taking a herd of cattle across the continent, they were doing so without a single horse because Phelps, on his previous expedition, found it difficult to sustain and manage horses on the long trip west. It fell on Weaver to supervise the herd and keep it together. While he rode much of the way atop “Rhinoc,” an amiable beast so named because he was missing a horn, Weaver often had to resort to his own devices. “For knee action, roundups, and endurance, reliance, I soon found, was placed on myself.”27 As they left Bloomfield, Weaver and his comrades likely followed the trail blazed by Brigham Young and his Mormon followers in 1846 as they headed west to seek refuge from the persecution they suffered in Illinois. The Mormon trail extended across southern Iowa, starting at the Mississippi River across from Nauvoo, Illinois, and provided a reliable route to the Missouri River and the plains beyond. Whatever route the party took, it got off to a slow start due to difficulties well known to all westward travelers. “On account of road conditions and swollen streams we did not reach the Missouri River until about the middle of April,” Weaver recalled. “After two days’ rest we pushed across, bade adieu to white settlements, and stretched chains toward the west.”28 The wide-open terrain encountered by westward travelers after crossing at Council Bluffs made a strong impression on the young Weaver. “The first noticeable feature which struck the mind after we passed beyond the white abodes was the vastness of the country,” he wrote. “To a lad who had marked the world’s boundary by the sky touching equidistant around his boyhood home, this proved to be an inspiration.” The novelty quickly wore off, however. Except for the occasional antelope killed for food or the odd encounter with a wolf, “whose shaggy carcass we would leave stretched across the plain,” Weaver recalled the first two weeks of the expedition as “monotonous.”29 One spring morning, as the party made its way across the plains, ennui gave

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way to enchantment and then terror. As the day began, Weaver and his traveling companions were transfixed by the “witchery and blandishments” of the “mystical panorama of floral splendor spread out before us.” At about 10 a.m., however, the cattle came to a halt, looked to the southwest, and sniffed suspiciously at the air. Phelps speculated that the herd detected an old Indian trail. “ ‘Not with their noses in the air,’ ” Weaver replied. The cattle continued to balk as sharp breezes blew, but they reluctantly responded to the whip. The party proceeded on its way, oblivious to what lay in store, but eventually the danger became clear. “Far to the southwest, many miles away, could now be seen slim columns of whirling sand, which, while we gazed, rapidly grew into huge cylinders as they rose tapering in the air. We halted and were watching the evolutions of this aerial cavalcade, which was now certainly whirling in our direction, stamping the earth with ferocity, picking up its own tracks as it leaped forward and hurled them gyrating toward the sky.” Over the din of the advancing twisters, Phelps directed that the rear of the wagon should face the storm, with its cover lowered, while all hands stayed with the cattle.30 All precautions were required as “the storm rushed forward on the wings of the gale,” Weaver wrote. The cyclones moved forward “like grim warriors uncovering the positions of an army. . . . Mobile and tragic was the pageant.” After the columns of wind passed by, the party was subjected to torrential rain, a “straight rushing current” that left Weaver and his party “wholly submerged. Wind, rain, and sand beat pitilessly upon us, as we stood with backs to the flagellation and called to our oxen as they humped and bellowed helplessly in the typhoon.” The storm continued for two hours and forty minutes before subsiding. Then the sun, “as if repentant,” emerged, and the party took heart: “We had survived.” The travelers found that, miraculously, none of the cattle had been lost. After a quick meal and a half hour of preparation, the foursome resumed its travels.31 As Weaver and his company approached the Green River, hopes rose for a respite. Phelps told his hands that they could expect good grazing and peaceable relations with the Indians. The first of his two assurances was immediately confirmed. The river valley provided “fine grass” for the herd and “running brooks, which refreshed our cattle and afforded opportunity for cleanliness,” Weaver remembered. On the other hand, the little party was put on its guard by intermittent Indian sightings. They never saw more than three at a time, but the Indians were always mounted and sometimes armed with hunting rifles. As soon as the party spotted them, the Indians vanished. “We

The Hairy Nation

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did not like their movements, and as there were no other emigrants nearer than half a day’s jaunt, we concluded to keep a sharp lookout.”32 One night, as Phelps and his hands pitched camp, the sound of a rifle cracked over the plains. The quartet then decided to keep watch, with each member of the party taking a different station. Everyone was on edge. The starlit but moonless night dragged on, interrupted by the sounds of chirping insects, howling wolves, rustling leaves, and wind. At about 2 a.m., another rifle shot echoed through the stillness, and Weaver and Mike bolted back to a pre-arranged rendezvous at a cavern formed by fallen rock under a large outcropping. They found hot-blooded Jack cowering in a corner, “shaking with fright.” “ ‘Jack, get up! Where is your gun?’ ” Weaver demanded. “ ‘Somebody took it from me just as that gun cracked down there. Don’t know who it was. ‘Spect it was an Ingin. The sage-brush is full of ‘em!’ ” The rifle report that prompted Jack, Mike, and Weaver to retreat to the cave turned out to be a false alarm. When Phelps returned, he described firing at a large animal as it moved in on him. After spending the night in the enclosure, the little party ate breakfast and then surveyed the scene. Phelps returned to his post and discovered a large cougar lying dead. Then the group convinced Jack to help them look for his gun. Reluctantly, he agreed—and soon the group found the weapon “lying in the sage-brush where it had fallen from [ Jack’s] nerveless hand. No savage had wrested it from him.” The embarrassing discovery produced an immediate change in Jack’s demeanor. “Jack was disconcerted and posed as an Indian killer—never more.” As it turned out, the party enjoyed good relations with the Indians it encountered. “We met their struggling bands, camped near them, spent nights and days within sight of more than a thousand warriors at a time and yet were never rudely disturbed,” Weaver wrote.33 Another ordeal, the desert lying east of the Carson River and the Sierra Nevadas, loomed to the west. Approaching the alkali wasteland late one afternoon, the group decided to rest and wait for sunset to make the crossing. The desert possessed perhaps the most dangerous terrain faced by Weaver and his companions since they left Iowa. Hundreds of would-be prospectors died in the waterless wilderness, and the remains of countless horses and cattle lay strewn along the way. “Man and beast each found an unmarked sepulcher in this repulsive charnal [sic] house where they were forced to sleep upon a

18


common level,” Weaver wrote.34 After waiting about two hours for the sun to go down, they began. The landscape before them challenged their fortitude. As the moon rose in the night sky, Phelps, Weaver, Jack, and Mike could see “an inhospitable waste” extending as far as the horizon. “Bleak, cruel and forbidding, with distant mountains encircling it upon three sides, it stretches away in every direction like a limitless death chamber grimly awaiting its victims.” The bleached bones of luckless horses and cattle lay scattered across the desolate landscape. The desert’s “poisonous dust” left lips parched and throats dry. The cattle lowed “in very agony” as the caravan continued its lonely trek through the night. The exhausted party may have dreaded the sunrise under the circumstances, but dawn brought a welcome sight. As morning broke, the quartet could see that the Carson River, and relief from the agonies of the desert, was ahead. The band allowed the cattle to “stampede to the cool mountain torrent” and pitched camp in a “sequestered vale” for several days to recover from the trials of the crossing. “The unpleasant part of our journey was past, though rugged mountains which challenged our courage rose illimitably between us and the Sacramento Valley.” After crossing the Sierra Nevadas, the party arrived in camp near Sacramento on August 15. The 2,000mile cross-country expedition had taken just under five months to complete. “Tenacity of purpose and superb endurance had landed us safely at our goal,” Weaver wrote with justified pride.35 The four travelers found themselves in a colorful, diverse city populated by gold-seeking adventurers from around the world. Weaver, who had spent most of his life in the environs of Davis County, was amazed by what he saw. “Sacramento proved to be the world in miniature,” he wrote with evident awe years later. “Every nationality was represented in the magical city—not here and there by an isolated individual, but by hundreds, and in many instances by thousands.” He observed that while Americans and British seemed the most numerous, many other nationalities were well represented: “French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swede, people from India, Persia, Japan, China, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia, Greece” and the Pacific islands.36 After months of privation, Weaver might have been expected to throw himself eagerly into the quest for the precious metal that had drawn so many to California. Instead, the opposite occurred. Soon after arriving in Sacramento, Mike and Jack left Weaver and Phelps, who then embarked on a “brief mining venture.” The undertaking quickly proved not to Weaver’s

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liking. The experience left his desire to find gold “entirely dissipated,” and within weeks of arriving in California Weaver was overcome with a desire to return home and continue studying law.37 Although he does not discuss his abrupt change of heart in detail, Weaver offers some clues to explain his decision to return home. While fascinated by the cultural variety he found in Sacramento, he was put off by what he characterized as “the universal greed for gold.” He also disliked “the rough life” of gold prospectors. After enduring the adversity of a cross-country trek, it is likely that he was referring not to the material hardships of the gold camps but instead to the sordid scenes he encountered there. In diggings with names like Whiskey Bar, Poker Flat, Hell’s Delight, and Skunk Gulch, “fortunes were made in a day of grubbing and lost in a night of faro or red dog” and “outlaws and women of easy virtue rubbed shoulders with ministers and sober farmers,” one historian has written. The devoutly Christian young Weaver found the dissolute rough-and-tumble of the gold camps repellant. He and Phelps sold their cattle “at good figures” and headed to San Francisco, then a raw and wide-open boomtown. Weaver described seeing “scores of vessels flying every flag, Christian and Pagan . . . landing daily and disembarking unwieldy throngs of fortune seekers of every nationality, who filled the streets lugging their indescribable outfits as they sought temporary quarters.” After spending a couple of weeks looking up old friends, they booked passage on a sea route back home via Panama.38 Weaver found himself enthralled by the ocean. He stayed up on the first night out of California, standing at the stern to take in the combined vastness of sky and sea. “The bright orbs above moved in majestic cotillons [sic] of glory and the restless ocean cooed its lullaby in low accompaniment.” Weaver spent the first four days of the voyage contentedly contemplating the splendor of the sea and getting to know the “garrulous sailors,” whose strange stories and nautical nomenclature enthralled the passengers.39 On the fifth day, however, the ship’s captain grew alarmed. While conditions seemed tranquil to the uninitiated, the crew spied the approach of a storm from the west. All hands scurried to trim the sails, and passengers were ordered below. But Weaver, “through an urgent appeal” to the ship’s officers, managed to remain on deck to witness the awful drama. “Waves with white curling crests, rising over tremendous breadths of seas, began to lift and play with our ship as a giant would sport with a toy.” The storm pummeled the ship through the night. Sails and pieces of the ship’s rigging gave way in the high

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winds and the cordage was as taut as “the strings of a great harp.” When the storm finally relented at the break of day, “Strong men wept and embraced each other, while others shouted and praised God in fervent song.”40 The ship eventually docked at Panama, then a “quaint little war-scarred” provincial city of Colombia. Phelps and Weaver, each carrying about $2,500 in gold, headed east through the isthmus jungle with a pair of companions they met at sea. As night fell, the little party found lodging in a settlement of three huts that stood about eight feet off the jungle floor, supported by poles. After shaking out the dry cow skins used for bedding “in order to frighten away reptiles, tarantulas, and centipedes,” Weaver and his companions prepared to settle down for the night. A menacing party of jungle bandits then approached the hut. “As soon as they reached the foot of the log ladder we called upon them to halt and demanded to know what they wanted. Their leader replied in plain English: ‘Money!’ ‘Va-mose!’ was the quick and stern reply as four revolvers clicked in unison.” The bandits backed away, and the standoff continued through the night until the outlaws finally gave up and left. Later that morning, long after departing the village, Weaver and his friends tried to fire their revolvers, only to find that the previous day’s rains “had rendered them worthless. Without realizing our peril, we had been completely at the mercy of these . . . brigands and would have been powerless in their hands.”41 The travelers hired natives to take them downriver, where Weaver records that he first encountered a train—“the great servant and haughty master of modern civilization”—which they rode the rest of the way across the isthmus. The party then boarded a ship, which sailed past Cuba and Jamaica before depositing the travelers in New York. “When we walked ashore at the great city and realized that our feet were upon the solid continent once more . . . we were filled with profound thankfulness that our journey, voyage, and perilous episode, though well worth all they had cost, were happily ended.”42 Weaver’s return from California marked a turning point in his life. Growing up in Davis County, he had been exposed to the influences and demonstrated the characteristics that would define him as an adult. The rugged Christianity in which he was raised provided the foundation for a religious faith that inspired and guided him throughout his life. He discovered his talents with language and, in the schoolhouse, the pleasure of utilizing and displaying that talent in public. From his Democratic father and Whig brother-in-law, he was exposed to conflicting views that would sow the seeds for his distinctive political outlook as an adult. The California expedition tested his courage, expanded his horizons, and helped him reach an important decision about the direction of his life. In the gold diggings of California, he concluded that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake was not something he desired. He returned home with a strengthened resolve to pursue a career in the law, the

chapter two

A New Orbit

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e aver returned to Iowa as the settlement of the slavery controversy sought by the authors of the Compromise of 1850 began to fall apart. The rickety accord hailed by Democrats and Whigs as the final resolution of the dispute over slavery was not a single measure, but a series of acts that addressed related questions. California was admitted to the Union as a free state, but Utah and New Mexico were organized as territories where residents would later decide whether to permit slavery. Slavery was permitted to continue in the District of Columbia, but the slave trade was abolished there. The compromise included one measure anti-slavery Northerners found particularly abhorrent. The Fugitive Slave Act empowered federal marshals to hunt down escaped slaves in free states, and it denied jury trials to persons seized under the act. The edifice, erected by Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Stephen A. Douglas, averted an immediate sectional crisis but failed to settle the underlying dispute over the future of slavery. “If a compromise is an agreement between adversaries,” historian David Potter has written, “then it must be said that North and South did not consent to each other’s terms, and that there was really no compromise—a truce perhaps, an armistice, certainly a settlement, but not a true compromise.”1 Ironically, it was one of the architects of the 1850 accord who provoked its collapse four years later. Douglas, an Illinois Democrat, had emerged as one of the leading congressional advocates of a transcontinental railway, to be privately developed with the aid of federal land grants along the route. In pursuit of Southern support for railroad routes extending west from Chicago and St. Louis, Douglas eventually proposed organizing Kansas and Nebraska as territories where slavery would be permitted if the residents so decided. The Douglas plan of “popular sovereignty” repealed the long-established Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state but thereafter barred slavery from any territory north of Missouri’s border with Arkansas. The House and Senate passed the measure after bitter debate, and President Franklin Pierce signed it into law. The resulting controversy, which included civil war between pro- and anti-slavery factions in “Bleeding Kansas,” came as no surprise to Douglas. When the astute Illinoisan agreed

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to overturn the Missouri Compromise, he told a Kentucky senator, “I know it will raise a hell of a storm.”2 Iowa felt the full force of the blast. Both Dodge and Jones supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the resultant furor energized the state’s antislavery Free Soil Party and the probusiness Whig establishment. The Whig candidate for governor was James W. Grimes, a New Hampshire native with a degree from Dartmouth College who settled in Burlington, Iowa, where he was active in business and practiced law. He favored changing state law to allow banks in Iowa, and he supported prohibition, but not avidly enough to antagonize the state’s increasingly important German settlers. Most significantly, Grimes squarely opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “I do not attempt or desire to interfere with slavery in the slave-holding States . . . but, with the blessing of God, I will war and war continually against the abandonment to slavery of a single foot of soil now consecrated to freedom,” he vowed. Grimes courted the Free Soil Party, won its endorsement,3 and went into the campaign against Democrat Curtis Bates in an unusually strong position for an Iowa Whig. As the campaign unfolded, passions ran high in southern Iowa, reflecting the Southern origins of many of the state’s residents. In Davis County, Rufus L. B. Clarke, the Whig candidate for Congress, was denounced as a “low, vulgar, ignorant Yankee” who left many Whigs “disgusted with his nonsense.” The Democratic Union, published in the county seat of Van Buren County, attacked the Whig Party for selling out “body, soul and breeches to the Abolitionists.” The paper had little tolerance for anyone carrying the party’s banner. A candidate for state representative came in for especially intense criticism for apparently trying to hedge his anti-slavery views: “The truth is, there is a small remnant of old whig decency left in this county, and some of the boys think it is a little too much to have a rank abolitionist crammed down their throats.”4 It was in this super-heated environment that Weaver plunged into politics. Before resuming his legal studies, he worked as a store clerk in the Van Buren County town of Bonaparte. Here Weaver embraced his father’s Democratic sympathies and leapt to the defense of the party and popular sovereignty in a series of schoolhouse debates with George W. McCrary, a young Whig who was raised in Van Buren County and taught school there at the age of 18.5 McCrary would later become a lawyer, a Republican congressman from Iowa, and secretary of war under President Rutherford B. Hayes.Weaver recalls that

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on at least one occasion he carried the day by portraying “the danger to the union if slavery was interfered with.” This argument went over well with the largely Democratic audience. When Weaver compelled McCrary to concede that he would accept breakup of the union to purge it of slavery, “I had him then and the debate was decided for me.”6 The Iowa Democratic Party, however, did not fare as well. Grimes narrowly defeated Bates by just more than 2,100 votes and Democrats lost control of the state House of Representatives while retaining control of the Senate. In Van Buren County, despite Weaver’s efforts, the party suffered a similar setback. Grimes carried the county by forty-one votes. Augustus Hall, the Van Buren County resident nominated for Congress by the Democrats, failed to carry his home county against the “ignorant Yankee” Clarke but nonetheless managed to win the election. Struggling to make sense of the results, the Democratic Union of Keosauqua predicted that Iowa voters would eventually come to their senses and return to the Democratic Party once the “wicked, unprincipled, and temporary combinations of isms, legends and hypocracy [sic] that make up the pie-bald rabble now in power” were exposed. In fact, the elections set in motion the transformation of Iowa politics, a process that continued the next year, when the legislature sent James Harlan of Mount Pleasant to the U.S. Senate in place of Dodge.7 The long decline of the Iowa Democrats had begun. Franklin Pierce would be the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry Iowa until Woodrow Wilson in 1912. The 1854 campaign also marked the end of Weaver’s support for the antebellum Democratic Party. In the fall of 1855, he left southern Iowa to study at the Cincinnati Law School. His views on the slavery question soon changed dramatically. In his own account, Weaver offers little explanation for the shift other than to say that he had been reading Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and was “soon converted to the Free Soil idea.”8 Greeley surely played a role in reshaping Weaver’s views about slavery, but the timing of his conversion indicates his sojourn in Cincinnati proved more significant. In virtually all-white Davis County, slavery was a memory for those who had come up from the South and an abstraction for others, whose only knowledge of the institution came from newspapers, political stump speeches, the pulpit, or the occasional trip into Missouri. No matter how heated the rhetoric might become, it was not an issue that directly touched the day-to-day lives of most of the men and women living in Davis County—or the rest of Iowa. The specter of the “peculiar institution” was far more menacing and divisive

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in Cincinnati, home to a combustible mixture of pro- and anti-slavery whites and a large population of free blacks. The slavery question had roiled the city for decades. In 1829, a white mob rioted in Cincinnati’s “Little Africa” neighborhood. In the mid-1830s, abolitionist students at the city’s Lane Theological Seminary broke away from the school and left for Oberlin College. At the same time, the anti-slavery movement gained a strong foothold in the city as the Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Society grew in strength and prominent local attorney Salmon P. Chase became a leader in the abolitionist cause. Rioting sparked by tensions over slavery and related racial animosity broke out in 1836 and 1841, but anti-slavery forces were gaining strength in Cincinnati and throughout Ohio. In 1855, Chase was elected governor of Ohio.9 As Weaver arrived to begin his studies, he found himself in a city where slavery dominated political discourse and its opponents were far more active and numerous than in Davis County. At law school, Weaver fell under the influence of professor Bellamy Storer, a New England native and veteran of Whig politics who moved in the same social and cultural circles as Chase. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1798, Storer attended Bowdoin College and then moved west to Cincinnati, where he began to practice law in 1817. Almost 20 years later, in 1834, he was elected to Congress as a Whig and served one term. In 1844, he ran as a presidential elector for Henry Clay. A favorite speaker at local political and religious gatherings, in his youth Storer organized a group of itinerant evangelists known as the “Flying Artillery,” which traveled from town to town to hold religious revivals. Weaver makes no mention of Storer in his biographical memorandum, perhaps because after a lifetime of defending the interests of the common man he was reluctant to acknowledge the influence of a silkstocking law professor. Nevertheless, Storer’s impact is revealed in a letter Weaver wrote to his wife during the Civil War, after she gave birth to their first son. “Call our boy Bellamy Storer, Stow for short,” Weaver instructed.10 In the end, the child was named James Bellamy to honor both his father and his father’s mentor. Storer advocated a high-minded approach to the practice of law, which he outlined in an address to the law department at the University of Louisville in 1856. Lawyers must put the interests of the country before all else, because their profession shaped the “form” and “spirit” of the three branches of government. The lawyer was obligated to look out for the common good of all citizens, regardless of class or occupation. A good lawyer “must realize . . . that

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humanity has a real existence; that it evolves a living principle, connecting every man with every other man, and in proportion as the one is refined, elevated and socially advanced, the other participates in the common blessing.” Storer emphasized the importance of learning in making a lawyer a reliable servant of the common good, but he argued that a well-educated lawyer’s knowledge extended beyond legal texts. “He will bring himself into direct sympathy with the wants of daily life” by staying “in contact with every condition of man.”11 Underpinning Storer’s view of the elevated role of the lawyer in American society was a firm belief in the centrality of scriptural teaching. Storer advised his listeners to read and study the Bible. “Its pure morality no one has ever reached. Its sanctions are authoritative. We there learn that human law, in its highest developments, is but an emanation from the hallowed flame that illuminates its every page.” Greater fidelity to biblical precepts would prove critical for the future of the country, he argued. “Any other standard of political duty is utterly unstable and fallacious . . . The healthy vigor of no government can be preserved, where the same rule that teaches man to fear his Maker is not equally the controlling motive of the law giver.” Furthermore, he argued, adherence to the values gleaned from scripture would provide the armor needed to protect the integrity of the Union as the sectional crisis escalated. Storer urged his listeners to defend the nation from those forces that would tear it apart. “The true men of all states, the members of our profession, must no longer slumber—they must act as well as think; they must rebuke the treason by clinging more devotedly to the Union of the States,” he declared.12 The principles advanced by Storer made a profound impression on Weaver. In the short term, Storer forced Weaver to question his reflexive support for the Democratic Party, and, by extension, the continued existence of slavery. Coming as it did during the height of the furor over Bleeding Kansas, Storer’s denunciation of reckless sectionalism may have initially applied to both sides in the controversy over slavery. As the decade continued, however, and Southern rhetoric became increasingly shrill, devotion to the Union required opposition to slavery and support for the party committed to blocking its expansion. The professor’s influence extended beyond the sectional crisis of the 1850s. Storer’s argument that lawyers, as guarantors of the American system of self-government, must be ready to defend the welfare and interests of citizens from all walks of life foreshadowed the major themes and issues that

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preoccupied Weaver throughout his political career. In addition, Storer’s emphasis on the importance of grounding moral and political choices in the religious teachings of the Bible resonated powerfully with his devout pupil. Politics became a means by which, as Weaver put it years later, the bounties of “the inheritance prepared . . . by a beneficent Father”13 could be extended to all. Storer’s classroom served as the foundry where the link between religion and politics was forged. Weaver soon acted on his newfound political outlook. After graduating from law school, he returned home to Bloomfield in 1856 and was admitted to the bar. The following year, “after consulting with my parents,” Weaver publicly broke with the Democratic Party. Now convinced that slavery was “wrong and wholly bad” and that the Democratic Party was “hopelessly committed to the institution,” he joined Davis County’s small band of antislavery campaigners. “Of course, this called down upon my youthful head the wrath of every other Democrat in the locality, but being combatitive [sic] and having anticipated the inevitable result, I did not flinch, but prepared to defend myself against all assailants.”14 Weaver enlisted in the cause soon after it had reorganized under a new political banner. In Iowa, the Free Soil Party joined forces with anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats. As violence continued between pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas, the anti-slavery coalition merged with nativists to form the Republican Party. In 1856, the new party nominated western explorer John C. Fremont for president. “The Pathfinder” carried Iowa, but his new party did not fare well in Davis County, where presidential electors for the Democratic ticket of James Buchanan received a comfortable majority. The Hairy Nation overwhelmingly supported Democratic U.S. Rep. Augustus Hall in his bid for reelection against Republican Samuel Curtis—who would later go on to fame in the Civil War as the Union army general who directed the North’s victory at the battle of Pea Ridge—but it wasn’t enough. Curtis carried the district and was elected.15 The promotion of the anti-slavery movement in a predominantly Democratic region of the state required not only a talented public speaker, but someone who reveled in the thrust and parry of debate. This was a task for which the high-spirited, argumentative, and rhetorically gifted Weaver was uniquely qualified. He traveled throughout Davis and adjoining counties to make the case against the Democrats and slavery. “Recruits began to come into our ranks and soon we became aggressive and assailed the defenders of

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slavery in the school houses in every part of the county,” he recalled. One of his initial speeches was witnessed by Edward H. Stiles, who lived in neighboring Wapello County in the years before the war and observed Weaver’s performance at a Republican meeting in Ottumwa in 1858. “This was one of his early efforts, and a good one,” Stiles remembered. “He was a handsome fellow, well and symmetrically shaped, strikingly heroic in appearance and forceful in expression.” One beneficiary of Weaver’s exertions was McCrary. Weaver went back into Van Buren County in 1857 to campaign for his onetime debating rival, who was elected to the state House of Representatives.16 Politics, however, was not the only reason Weaver returned to Van Buren County. While working as a store clerk in Bonaparte, he met Clarissa Vinson, an Ohio native and Keosauqua schoolteacher, and fell in love. Weaver courted Clarissa, known informally as Clara, in earnest after his return from law school—not always an easy thing to do in that period. One winter visit was almost called off because of conditions on the Des Moines River, a “seething torrent” filled with large cakes of ice “grinding and rocking and almost prohibiting passage.” The ardent young suitor was not deterred. He found a long pole and used it to jump “from one cake to another” until he crossed the river, and the courtship continued.17 By March 1858, however, their relationship had reached a crisis. Weaver remained smitten, but Clara would not be rushed and warned that she might reject him. “I begin to feel like this is a serious matter,” she wrote to him, “and that your, or rather our, present position may lead to very unpleasant consequences.” Responding formally to “Miss Vinson” two days later, Weaver protested that “you have treated me with scorn and contempt . . . And why all this? Simply because I have loved you, and was honest enough to tell you so.” Five days later, Weaver urged her to “come to the point, one way or the other” and begged her to “say it is all right, and we will go through life happily together.” Weaver’s desperate plea won the day. Clara responded by agreeing to marry him, while maintaining her right to determine when they would wed. “I think I will have a little my way about that,” she teased him. “You know it spoils a person’s disposition to give way to them always. It makes them selfish, and I am sure I don’t want to be the means of spoiling yours.” A little more than two weeks later, Weaver sent Clara a ring “which I wish you to keep and wear as a pledge of love.”18 It is not difficult to see what drew Weaver to the Keosauqua schoolmarm. Despite a tendency toward self-deprecation, Clarissa was self-reliant and

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independent. “The man has not yet been made that I would be afraid of,” she asserted. Like Weaver, she loved learning, declaring in one letter that she was “determined to learn all I can, even if I cannot show it off to advantage, and those who know me best will appreciate me, and love me the more.” Perhaps most importantly, she shared his deep religious beliefs. “I have been trying to live the life of a Christian too long to give it up now,” she reassured him after he stressed the importance of remaining committed to their faith. For his part, he pledged to respect her independence. “Now, do not think that I am a domestic tyrant, anxiously awaiting to be crowned so that I can exercise my kingly authority, for if you think so of me, you will, I hope, be happily disappointed,” he wrote. “Clara, this is the ‘classic land of civil liberty’ and I am far from wishing that spirit of liberality to be shut out from the marital home.”19 The couple was married in July 1858 and began a lifelong partnership that produced eight children. “Surely never were two souls more perfectly united than ours,” Clara wrote to her husband in May 1862. “An intellectual Christian man was always my ideal, and also a self-made man. . . . No woman on Earth is so supremely blessed as I am.” Soon after their marriage, the young couple set about establishing themselves in Bloomfield. Clara opened a “select school” in the basement of the Methodist church, and Weaver formed a law partnership with Hosea Horn in a second-floor office off the courthouse square. In June 1859, Clara gave birth to their first child, Maud. Even with the increasing demands of politics, career, and family, Weaver needed an outlet for his love of public disputation, as indicated by a note published in the Bloomfield Democratic Clarion in December 1858. The paper announced a “public debate” had been scheduled on the question “Resolved, That the banishment of Napoleon Bonaparte, to the island of St. Helena, was justifiable,” with Weaver taking the affirmative position.20 Meanwhile, the slow work of building a new political movement was paying off. Several of Bloomfield’s most prominent citizens enlisted in the anti-slavery crusade, including a pair of influential former Whigs, Samuel A. Moore and lawyer James Baker. Born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, Moore arrived in Bloomfield in 1853, was elected county judge in 1855, and remained a fixture in Davis County Republican politics into the early twentieth century, when he was elected to the state legislature. Baker, a native of Gallatin County, Kentucky, arrived in Bloomfield in 1852, where he went into practice with his brother-in-law, noted local Democrat Henry H. Trimble. Stout and of medium height, Baker was regarded as an accomplished public speaker and “a

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brilliant and successful lawyer,” according to one account.21 Both Moore and Baker numbered among Weaver’s closest and most important comrades in the dramatic years to come. Weaver brought a crusading zeal to the task of building the new party. Presiding with Grimes and Stiles at an abolitionist meeting in the Wapello County town of Agency City in the late 1850s, Weaver recounted the experience of a Davis County preacher named McKinney, who had traveled to Texas and was whipped by local whites after attempting to preach to a group of slaves. When McKinney returned to Davis County, he brought with him the garment he was wearing when he was attacked. Weaver later recalled that he brought McKinney’s shirt to the meeting, waved it before the crowd and yelled “Under this bloody shirt we propose to march to victory.” Weaver’s peroration appears to be one of the first uses of the phrase that has come to describe the exploitation of inflammatory imagery for political purposes and that characterized Republican appeals to the memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth century. In his autumn years, however, Weaver seemed slightly embarrassed by his rhetorical flourish. “I was a very young man in those days,” he explained sheepishly.22 While Weaver used his speechmaking skills to rouse the passions of his audiences, party leaders whenever possible eschewed potentially controversial positions on slavery and related racial questions. While the 1857 state Republican platform condemned the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which denied freedom to escaped slaves and ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, party leaders edged away from the potentially explosive issue of black suffrage that emerged during deliberations on a new state constitution. To avoid defeat of the new charter by voters, Republicans supported a plan to allow separate votes on the constitution and black suffrage, the latter of which was strongly backed by party radicals. The new constitution was narrowly approved and black suffrage overwhelmingly defeated, but the straddle on the controversial issue placated the radicals while enhancing the party’s moderate image, which party leaders wished to burnish prior to the 1860 presidential campaign.23 As they tacked to the center, Republicans consolidated their hold on power. Grimes went to the Senate in 1859 as the successor to Jones, who fell out of favor with Iowa Democrats and failed to win renomination after voting to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution. With the Democrats struggling to recover their once-dominant position in

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the state and a presidential campaign looming, the gubernatorial election of 1859 emerged as a crucial battle in determining the balance of political power in Iowa. With so much riding on the outcome, the parties turned to a pair of consummate politicians. The Democrats nominated Dodge, who was back from a diplomatic assignment in Spain. Weaver described the grand old man of Iowa politics as a “gentleman of the highest integrity,” whose widespread popularity made him a formidable candidate. The Republicans nominated state Sen. Samuel J. Kirkwood. A businessman, former Democrat, and early convert to the Republican cause with a blunt, down-to-earth speaking style, Kirkwood was an ideal candidate for the Republicans.24 As a young and ambitious political operator, Weaver campaigned for Kirkwood and watched the unfolding contest with great interest. Dodge and Kirkwood engaged in a series of statewide debates, in the manner of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. Each candidate brought distinctly different styles to the contests. “Kirkwood in those days was like a skilled swordsman, adroit, cool, knew his ground [and] was always aggressive,” Weaver wrote. “Dodge was stately, military in bearing,” and a “stickler” for the Dred Scott decision and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.25 Weaver recalled that Kirkwood and Dodge debated in Bloomfield, describing the meeting as a “titanic struggle” in which the key exchange centered on the Fugitive Slave Act. Kirkwood described the hypothetical case of a slave mother fleeing across the Missouri line with a baby in her arms, “her cruel master with his bloodhounds hard after her.” Kirkwood then turned to Dodge and demanded to know if he would favor returning the woman to her master. When Dodge replied, “ ‘I would obey the law,’ ” Kirkwood exclaimed, “ ‘So help me, God, I would suffer my right arm to be torn from its socket before I would do such a monstrous thing.’ ” Kirkwood’s rejoinder electrified the crowd, according to Weaver. “The moral sense of the multitude had been reached and it was vain to attempt to reverse the deep impression that had been made.”26 Despite such dramatic exchanges, the anti-slavery Republican cause faced an uphill battle in Democratic Davis County, where voters demonstrated deep skepticism about the new party and its more radical positions. While Iowa voters soundly rejected the 1857 proposal to allow black suffrage, Davis County was particularly hostile, voting 1,206 to 82 against the measure. When the Republican county convention was convened in 1859, no mention

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of slavery or related issues was made. Instead, the notice announcing the meeting confined itself to platitudes, inviting all who “opposed the present Democratic policy, its extravagance, its corruption and its unscrupulousness” to attend. “We ask all, without respect to party, to turn out, and especially all that are opposed to electing professional office seekers and office holders to office.” Kirkwood may have gotten the better of Dodge in the Bloomfield debate, but the old Democratic warhorse carried Davis County 1,142 to 717. Nevertheless, Kirkwood fared better elsewhere in Iowa and eked out a narrow 3,000-vote victory, which, as Weaver observed, put the “young commonwealth permanently in the anti-slavery column.”27 Weaver’s efforts on behalf of the Republican cause continued into the presidential election year of 1860. He was a delegate to the state Republican convention from Davis County and joined the large contingent of Iowans who traveled to Chicago for the party’s national convention. While not a delegate, Weaver’s attendance at Chicago gave him an extraordinary opportunity to meet and work with the party’s power brokers and to witness firsthand the unusual mixture of frivolity and high principle that attended Lincoln’s nomination.28 Outside the hastily constructed wooden “wigwam” where Republicans met, many delegates indulged themselves in a manner Weaver no doubt scorned. Revelers who stayed up all night playing cards and began their day with cocktails before breakfast packed Chicago’s hotels. “I do not feel competent to state the precise proportions of those who are drunk and those who are sober,” one observer noted with exasperation. “There are a large number of both classes; and the drunken are of course the most conspicuous.” Nevertheless, deliberations on the convention floor were conducted with a seriousness of purpose reflecting the enormity of the occasion. “The members of the Convention and the thousands of spectators assembled in the grand Wigwam presented a grand and inspiring sight,” Carl Schurz would write many years later. “It was a free people met to consult upon their policy and to choose their chief.”29 Many of the delegates initially preferred New York Sen. William Seward, whose prominence as an anti-slavery spokesman gave him widespread appeal. But Lincoln’s convention managers, led by David Davis, shrewdly positioned the Illinoisan as the logical second choice. Iowa’s 33-member delegation was divided between support for Lincoln and Seward, with Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, Chase of Ohio, and others receiving votes as well. The

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pragmatic Kirkwood leaned toward Chase but came to Chicago to support Lincoln. Harlan—like Weaver a Methodist and an early convert to the Free Soil movement—initially backed Seward. William B. Allison, the Dubuque Republican who would go on to a distinguished and lengthy Senate career, supported Chase at first. The Iowa delegation united behind Lincoln only after he emerged as the clear frontrunner.30 Back in Davis County, Democrats and Republicans mobilized for the eventful campaign in the classic Jacksonian traditions of the old Northwest. Democrats formed a “Douglas Guard” marching society, outfitted with a red leather baldric—a strap running from the right shoulder to the left hip— an oilcloth sailor’s cap, and coal oil torches. Young Democrats mobilized as “Hickory Sprouts” and were equipped with Napoleon hats and hickory brooms. Not to be outdone, the Republicans formed a similarly bedecked “Wide Awake” marching society. The parties competed to see which could erect the tallest flagpole in Bloomfield. Democrats held a three-day barbecue in the center of town. Near the end of the campaign, Republicans convened a large rally in Bloomfield, featuring the city’s brass band. The nearby town of Drakesville also sent a band, which marched ahead of a parade float carrying thirty-four young women, each representing a state, with the largest young lady symbolizing Texas and the smallest representing Rhode Island.31 In addition to these time-honored traditions of frontier politics, the two parties dispatched speakers across the county to fight the battle of ideas. Weaver, Baker, and Moore numbered among the leading local orators for the Republican cause. One episode reveals the passions aroused by the campaign. Weaver and Baker were scheduled to speak in the southwestern corner of the county near the Missouri line, a stronghold of Democratic support, and were warned that they would be tarred and feathered if they showed up. “This only served to arouse their fighting blood and on the appointed day they drove up to the place to fill the bill,” according to an account published in the 1920s. Shortly after Weaver and Baker began to speak, a disturbance broke out, and when it looked as if the meeting would descend into chaos, a large stranger stood up and asked to speak “in the interest of order.” He defended the right of Weaver and Baker to make their case and added that he would “mash the head of the first man who tried to disturb the meeting.” Weaver and Baker then declaimed for Lincoln without incident. This triumph for free speech did not, however, translate into victory for Lincoln in Davis County. Electors

A New Orbit

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pledged to Douglas outpolled Lincoln’s slate by 581 votes, but Lincoln carried Iowa and won the presidency.32 Writing many years later about the Kirkwood-Dodge campaign of 1859, Weaver reflected that the “world was changing and searching out a new orbit.”33 That description applied not only to the political scene in Iowa and the United States but to Weaver as well, as he married and started a family. Weaver’s political outlook also changed. In 1854, he had defended the KansasNebraska Act and Iowa Democrats, but after his exposure in Cincinnati to anti-slavery views and the tutelage of a law professor who stressed the religious foundations of law and society, Weaver became a committed opponent of slavery and the Democratic Party. By 1860, as the nation lurched toward civil war, he had emerged as a rising figure in the new Republican Party in Iowa. The trajectory of Weaver’s “new orbit” would soon send him out of Davis County and into the middle of some of the bloodiest battles ever fought on the North American continent.

James Baird Weaver during the Civil War. Before he returned home he rose to the rank of colonel. from james baird weaver (Haynes)

chapter three

The Most Terrific Storm of Death

T

he fall of Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, released a torrent of patriotic sentiment in the North that washed over divisions between Democrats and Republicans. Douglas visited his one-time rival Lincoln in the White House to promote national unity and then declared in a speech in Chicago that “every man must be for the United States or against it. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots—or traitors.” When Lincoln ordered 75,000 militiamen into national service, eager volunteers flocked to the colors. Iowa was required to supply about 800 men but quickly exceeded its quota. Exemplifying the fervor that swept the state, Iowa College sent almost all of its male students to war.1 Many in Davis County reacted with comparable enthusiasm. Within days of Sumter’s fall, “swift-riding horsemen” circulated handbills, signed by Weaver, Baker, Moore, and three others, calling for a meeting on April 20 to organize a volunteer company of troops. “The STARS AND STRIPES must be protected and the Laws ENFORCED,” the notice declared. The response was overwhelming. The day of the meeting, men and women packed the Bloomfield Methodist church. “Only part of the crowd could get in,” according to an account of the meeting published in the Davis County Republican in 1879. Inside the church, Weaver, Baker, and Moore addressed the audience, rousing the assembly to a fever pitch of patriotic feeling. “Every face present,” according to the Republican, “was white with the profound emotions of the hour.” A 101-man infantry company was formed under the command of Baker, who was elected captain. Weaver was voted first lieutenant and Moore chosen as second lieutenant. At the conclusion of the gathering, the newly organized unit, which was eventually designated Company G of the Second Iowa Infantry, marched in formation on a corner of the courthouse square. Caught up in the patriotic passion, the women of Bloomfield stitched a silk flag for the hometown troops.2 About a month later, Davis County gathered at the square to say goodbye to its sons and husbands. After speeches, patriotic songs, and prayers, the soldiers climbed into carriages, wagons, and buggies and departed. Bloomfield’s brass band headed the procession and played “The Girl I Left Behind Me” as the

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troops left town.3 The popular tune no doubt seemed especially poignant to Weaver. Clara was pregnant with the couple’s second child. More troops followed in the months to come. Davis County provided three companies of cavalry, and two leading local Democrats, Cyrus Bussey and Henry Trimble, served as colonel and lieutenant colonel, respectively, in the Third Iowa Cavalry. Samuel McAchran, in whose law office Weaver studied before going off to Cincinnati, led a group of twenty-five men to join the 10th Missouri Infantry. For many—but not all—of Davis County’s residents, the partisan and sectional differences of the 1850s were forgotten. The early days of the war “were stirring times, full of awful earnestness,” the Republican recalled.4 Within a month of Company G’s departure from Bloomfield, the Second Iowa went into action. Commanded by Col. Samuel Curtis, who resigned his seat in Congress to accept Kirkwood’s appointment to lead the regiment, the Second Iowa was dispatched to Missouri, a slave state where Southern sympathies ran strong. When Lincoln called for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, the governor of Missouri vowed that “not one man will the state of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”5 Defeating the Confederate campaign for Missouri would preoccupy Union commanders for much of the next year, until Curtis, by then a brigadier general, led Union forces to victory at the battle of Pea Ridge in northwestern Arkansas in March 1862. In the meantime, Union and Confederate forces maneuvered for advantage. The Second Iowa departed Keokuk on June 13, 1861, for Hannibal, Missouri, after receiving orders to seize control of the Hannibal and St. Joseph and the North Missouri railroads. Encountering scattered resistance, Curtis succeeded in seizing the rail lines within fifty-six hours. Over the course of the next eight months, Weaver and his comrades in Company G zigzagged across Missouri, from Trenton in the north-central region of the state to Jackson and Bird’s Point in the southeast, and briefly across the Mississippi to Elliott’s Mills, Kentucky, and eventually to St. Louis. The postings proved relatively uneventful. “We are all doing very well here,” Weaver wrote to Clara on August 22 from Trenton. “There is no probability of our ever having to fight here. There is not the least probability of such an event.” The relative quiet proved fortunate in one respect. Weaver became ill soon after Company G crossed into Missouri. He told Clara that his condition was “never dangerous” but “I have been so that I could not do anything.” Nevertheless, he


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cheerfully reported that he was on the mend. “My disease is checked and this morning I feel like a new man.”6 While Weaver was dealing with illness on the battlefield, Clara was in the final days of her pregnancy. She gave birth to the couple’s first son on August 19. Sensitive to Clara’s condition, Weaver filled his letters home during this period with reassuring professions of affection. “Like a beautiful fountain over charged with limpid water, my heart sends out to you this morning its purest and most sacred feelings to refresh and invigorate your anxious heart,” he wrote in a typically florid passage. “Falter not in receiving it, for there is not one drop of poison there.” He often invoked God and emphasized the sustaining power of faith to help them through their separation. “Let us pray. I know God will bring us safely together again. I am confident of His love over me and have full faith that we will be permitted to enjoy the great blessing of each other’s society soon again. Bless his holy name.” Sometimes such elevated sentiments intermingled with more affectionate feelings. “I received your letter which you finished on the 6th this morning just as we were starting on our march. It did my soul very good. God love you. How I would bite you were it in my power.”7 As September closed, Weaver grew impatient with the progress of the war. Despite Curtis’s success in securing the rail lines, Confederate forces remained active, mobile, and threatening. On September 21, more than 2,000 Union troops at Lexington, Missouri, surrendered to Confederates commanded by Gen. Sterling Price, prompting Weaver to share his frustrations with Clara a few days later. “I must confess the news of our late defeat at Lexington fills me with most perfect disgust at the manner in which our army is being managed,” he declared, warning that unless the war effort was directed with greater effectiveness, “our cause must seriously suffer.” Borrowing the critical description used by Northern newspapers to describe Gen. Winfield Scott’s grand strategy for defeating the South, Weaver compared the Union forces to “a great torpid anaconda, perfectly helpless and unmovable.” He was not the only Iowan whose morale was flagging. During the winter months of 18611862, the Second Iowa was assigned to guard duty at McDowell College in St. Louis. While the regiment was stationed at the college, where Southern sympathizers were confined, some museum specimens went missing, and the unit was blamed. The disgraced troops marched out of St. Louis in February 1862 “without music and their colors furled.”8 An opportunity to restore the honor of the regiment came later that month

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along the Cumberland River in northern Tennessee. While Union and Confederate forces battled for advantage in Missouri, Brigadier Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was beginning his push south. After Grant and Navy Flag-Officer Andrew Foote seized Fort Henry on the Tennessee River on February 6, they planned to continue with an assault on Fort Donelson, where a large Confederate force lay in wait. Four days later, the Second Iowa departed St. Louis, bound for northern Tennessee. The unit was originally headed for Fort Henry, Weaver wrote, but at Cairo, Illinois, the orders were changed. The Iowans then proceeded to Fort Donelson, arriving on the evening of the 13th four miles below the Confederate position. The following morning, “bright and early,” the Second Iowa “started over the hills in fine spirits” toward the battle but soon came face to face with the sobering ordeal ahead. “The morning of the 15th dawned cold and desolate and everything looked as forbidding to us as the grave,” Weaver reported to Clara.9 The position occupied by the Confederates that has come to be known as Fort Donelson consisted of an expansive stockade enclosing soldiers’ dwellings and large guns facing the Cumberland River to the east. A series of semicircular trenches defended against attack from the land on the west. “Fort Donelson was not really a fort,” historian James McPherson has observed, but Weaver, with characteristic extravagance, called it an “indescribable stronghold of secession.” In any event, the Confederate position proved formidable enough. On the fourteenth, Grant ordered an attack by Foote’s iron-armored river gunboats. The vessels had proven devastating at Fort Henry, but this time they were overmatched and taken out by Confederate gunnery. The sight of the disabled gunboats “dropping down the river entirely out of the control of the men on board” reinvigorated Confederate morale, Grant wrote in his memoirs, and the following day energized Southern troops attempted to break out past Union forces gathered on the western side. Rebels under the command of Gen. Gideon Pillow advanced against Union forces commanded by Gen. John A. McClernand but incurred heavy casualties and stopped to regroup.10 The pause gave Union forces a chance to recover. Surmising that the rebels were demoralized following their desperate assault and sudden halt, Grant ordered Gen. C. F. Smith to counter-attack. Around 2 p.m., Weaver recalled, Smith directed the Iowans—including Company G—to move against a Confederate breastworks about 400 yards ahead, at the top of a steep hill covered with fallen timber.11


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Ordered not to fire until they reached the Confederate position, the Iowans began a methodical advance. When the Union forces came within range, the rebels opened fire to deadly effect. “All around us and amongst us flew the missiles of death and all around and on every side of me men were falling in the agonies of death,” Weaver wrote to Clara. The Union troops continued to move forward, however, and eventually reached the Confederate position, where, as Weaver put it, “our revenge began.” With “an awful yell,” Weaver and his comrades charged into the Confederates. The ensuing close combat became a “holocaust to the demon of battles,” as Weaver described it. “Everywhere could be seen the enemy falling in death while ever and anon some one of our own boys would lay down and give up the ghost.” Despite their losses, the Iowans gained control of the position and continued to advance, joined by other Union troops. Ammunition began to run out, however, and the Iowans fell back to await what they assumed would be a second day of combat. As they settled into their position, Gen. Smith rode up and dramatically declared his intention to advance against the Confederates the next day “or lose every man in my division.”12 Weaver and the Iowans spent a dismal night “without shelter or fire” looking to their dead and wounded. Smith’s vow hung ominously in the night air. Meanwhile, on the other side of the line, the situation seemed even bleaker. Confederate generals assessed their position and concluded their options were limited. Gen. John Floyd, who had been accused of secretly aiding the Southern cause while secretary of war under President Buchanan, snuck out with Pillow during the night to avoid capture and prosecution for treason. On the sixteenth, Grant exchanged notes with Confederate Brigadier Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner and famously declared that “no terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” Buckner grudgingly complied, the North gained a heartening victory, and Grant’s reputation soared.13 In recognition of the bravery displayed in its advance against the Confederate position, the Second Iowa was granted the honor of leading the column that marched into the stockade, where it planted its colors beside the white flag of the enemy. When word of the surrender and this tribute reached the troops, Weaver confessed, “I wept like a child.” A day during which many expected more carnage instead produced victory and honor for the Iowans. In a report on the action at Fort Donelson, Major Gen. Henry Halleck declared that the troops of the Second Iowa “proved themselves the bravest of

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the brave.” Weaver numbered among the officers who “deported themselves nobly” throughout the battle, according to the Second Iowa’s commanding officer, Col. J. M. Tuttle. Weaver survived the battle but endured some close calls. He suffered a wound on his arm, and a musket ball passed through his cap and grazed his head, “but through the providence of God I was saved,” he reassured Clara. For years afterward, Weaver retained the cap as a memento of his part in the battle.14 For Weaver and the troops of Company G, Fort Donelson was just the beginning. On March 19, the Second Iowa arrived at Pittsburg Landing in southwestern Tennessee. Here, on terrain along the Tennessee River that Grant described as “undulating” and “heavily timbered,” Halleck planned to combine 75,000 Union troops and direct an assault against the Confederate position at Corinth, Mississippi, an important railroad junction twenty miles to the south. As Union generals prepared to take Corinth, however, Confederates planned a campaign aimed at reclaiming Tennessee. The ensuing two-day struggle unfolded around a little church known as Shiloh. It proved, in its scope and bloodshed, to be a pivotal point in the war.15 On April 6, the massed rebel troops exploded out of the woods to launch a strong surprise attack against Northern troops including the Second Iowa, now under the command of Weaver’s friend Baker and positioned near the center of the Union line. As Northern troops on the left and right fell back, forces in the center, under the command of Generals Benjamin M. Prentiss of Illinois and W. H. L. Wallace, stubbornly held a position that came in later years to be known as the “hornets’ nest,” against which Confederates concentrated their attack with a furious series of assaults throughout the day. The Union center gave ground grudgingly in the face of the rebel onslaught. “The enemy greatly outnumbered us and the slaughter was of the most horrid character and magnitude on both sides,” Weaver reported to Clara. As the battle continued, Wallace was fatally wounded, and Prentiss and two Iowa regiments were forced to surrender, but the troops of the Second Iowa resisted as they retreated, contesting, in Weaver’s description, “every inch of ground they passed over with a zeal worthy [of] the highest admiration.” The Confederates brought sixty-two field guns to bear against Union forces in the hornets’ nest, and throughout the day, Weaver wrote, “Nothing could be heard but a continuous roar of musketry and artillery.” As the mayhem continued, Weaver’s Bloomfield neighbor Samuel Moore suffered gunshot wounds to both legs.


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In a remarkable display of bravery, Weaver stopped, picked Moore up, and carried him from the battlefield.16 The guns fell silent as the sun set, and, once again, Weaver and his fellow Iowans spent an agonizing night after a day of battle. The fighting had extracted an awful toll. Thousands of soldiers lay dead or wounded in the field. Torrential rain began to fall and “our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter,” remembered Grant. The Union general sought shelter under a tree but was unable to sleep due to pain from an injured ankle suffered when he fell from a horse a few days earlier. Restless, Grant wandered over to a nearby log cabin that had been converted to a field hospital, but the endless parade of wounded men streaming in for treatment “was more unendurable than encountering the enemy’s fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.”17 The battle resumed in the morning, but this time Union forces, reinforced by newly arrived troops under Gen. D.C. Buell, went on the offensive. “Then came on the bitterest contest ever witnessed on this continent,” Weaver wrote. After an initial retreat, the badly depleted Confederates held their ground but “could not stand” before the Union assault. Troops of the Second Iowa fixed bayonets and charged the Confederates, and by four p.m., according to Weaver, Union forces had “completely whipped” the rebels, who were “driven pell mell in perfect rout.” In fact, the battle ended inconclusively. The Confederates retreated, but Union forces were too exhausted to give chase. “Both the blue and the gray,” McPherson observes, “had had enough fighting for a while.”18 The carnage at Shiloh dwarfed anything ever seen before in North America. The 20,000 killed and wounded during the battle exceeded the casualties incurred by both sides at Manassas, Pea Ridge, Wilson’s Creek, and Fort Donelson combined. Perhaps the horrific slaughter explains the relatively understated and telegraphic nature of Weaver’s account of the battle in his letter home. Unlike the detailed narrative he wrote describing events at Fort Donelson, Weaver’s letter to Clara after Shiloh was relatively restrained and began with the reassuring declaration: “Well thank God I am alive and well.” Although at the close of the correspondence he blamed a lack of time for his brevity, it seems likely Weaver was unwilling to relive in any great detail the events that he witnessed. His understandable relief that the battle was over is conveyed in his assertion that there would be “No more fighting in this woods for us of any consequence.”19 Not surprisingly, Clara’s chief concern was the health of her husband.

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Weaver’s struggle against illness apparently continued through the spring. On May 16, Clara told him she had learned that Horn had urged him to resign his commission and come home. She confessed that his return would please her but added, “I dare not counsel you in any way for I do not know. Pray over it, Weaver, and be willing to be guided by Providence.” While worrying about her husband’s health, Clara also kept a close eye on the progress of the war and related political questions. She told Weaver that she approved of Gen. David Hunter’s proclamation freeing slaves in the islands along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts but doubted its constitutionality. Nevertheless, she believed it was a step in the right direction. “The confiscation of the slaves of the rebels would be right, but has he a right to touch or meddle with those of the Union men? I do not believe that he has. But if he has then I am glad of it, for it is crushing the fountain of the rebellion.”20 While the battle at Shiloh may have concluded, more fighting was in store for Weaver and his Iowa comrades to the south. Corinth, Halleck’s goal in the weeks before Shiloh, remained a critical objective as Union forces continued down the Mississippi. Located just below the Tennessee state line in northeastern Mississippi, Corinth was the site of the vital junction of the Memphis & Charleston and the Mobile & Ohio railroads. Union forces moved on the town on April 30 to begin a siege, forcing a skillfully executed evacuation by Confederate forces under Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard at the end of May. The Second Iowa participated in the siege and was stationed at Camp Montgomery near Corinth during the summer. At the same time, however, Halleck redeployed Union troops to the north and east of Corinth, leaving the junction vulnerable to attack from a large rebel force commanded by Price and General Earl Van Dorn. By October 1, Grant concluded that Van Dorn intended to attack. Looking back, Grant described the summer and early fall of 1862 as “the most anxious period of the war to me.”21 Among the troops of the Second Iowa, nerves were especially taut. Baker, in command of the regiment since Shiloh, struck Weaver as a “changed man” who had “been preparing for death” for several months. On October 2, the eve of battle, while Weaver supervised pickets on the front line, Baker rode up to make an astonishing statement. “Lieutenant,” Weaver recalled Baker telling him, “you are placed under arrest.” Stunned, Weaver turned his sword over to Baker and asked, “What does this mean?” Baker then handed Weaver his commission appointing him to the rank of major and explained, “I had this done because I know if anything happened to your superior officers I


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can count on you to take care of the regiment.” Notwithstanding the bizarre manner in which the appointment was made, news of Weaver’s promotion quickly became the topic of conversation among the troops. After the war, John Duffield of Bloomfield, who relieved Weaver on the picket line, recalled returning to camp to find “great dissatisfaction” among line officers because Weaver was promoted over a number of others who outranked him.22 The rebels gave the Iowans little time to brood about the politics of battlefield promotions. The Confederates began their assault on Union forces on October 3. Baker was seriously wounded during the first day’s fighting, and command of the regiment fell to Lt. Col. N. W. Mills, who was incapacitated on the following day. Suddenly, the twenty-nine-year-old Weaver found himself at the head of the regiment in the midst of a desperate battle. He rose to the challenge. “Major Weaver seemed to realize the responsibility that rested upon him, and displayed the greatest courage in directing his men in keeping close to the line of Battle, and encouraging his men to advance upon the enemy,” Duffield wrote. After initial success in driving the Confederates from the field, Duffield recalled, rebel reinforcements arrived. Weaver rallied his troops, and the Iowans stayed on the attack. “Major Weaver rode up and down the line waving his revolver over his head, and calling upon the men to bring the enemy’s colors down,” firing at the rebel flag bearer as he did so. According to Duffield’s account, Weaver’s performance on the battlefield removed any doubts about his fitness for command. Ten days after the battle concluded, Weaver was the overwhelming choice of the regiment’s officers to succeed Baker as colonel.23 The battle of Corinth ended in a Union victory that made it possible for Grant to advance on Vicksburg, but the cost was high for the Second Iowa. The regiment entered the battle with 346 men. At its conclusion, 108 lay dead or wounded, including Baker and Mills, both of whom died from the wounds they suffered. As he was taken from the field on the first day, Baker expressed his relief: “Thank God when I fell my regiment was victoriously charging.” Weaver poured out his pain at the deaths of his friends and neighbors in a letter to Clara written eight days after the battle concluded. Describing Baker’s last days, Weaver grieved that he could not spend much time with his old Davis County colleague because of his new command responsibilities. “O Clara, it is hard to see our old and warm friends fall around us when we are forbidden by stern necessity from even bidding them adieu as they plunge into the river of death,” he confided. Nevertheless, his religious faith remained unshaken.

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In a description of his experience at Corinth, which could apply to his belief about his entire Civil War service, Weaver told his wife that he stayed alive only through divine intervention: “God guided me through the most terrific storm of death.”24 It fell to Weaver, as the regiment’s commanding officer, to write a report on the engagement at Corinth. The document, dated October 5, tells as much about its author as about the battle. This is no dry summary of casualties and maneuvers but a paean to the Union cause, in which Weaver’s flare for the dramatic is on display in virtually every sentence. He characterized the battle as “in many respects the most desperate of the war”—which, given the steep casualty toll suffered by the regiment, is understandable if overstated. The fallen are without exception described as valorous. Typical in this regard is his depiction of four lieutenants who died at their posts “fighting like heroes. They died as becomes patriots; fully as much can be said of the enlisted men who fell. All honor to their memory.” Most revealingly, the report illustrates how Weaver’s faith gave force and meaning to his politics. In a concluding meditation on the losses incurred by the regiment, Weaver wrote that, “While we mourn their loss we can rejoice that they died like true heroes for their beloved country. How precious their memory. How sacred their dust. They died for the cause of Christianity and constitutional liberty.”25 The report’s language shows clearly how the life-anddeath struggles of the battlefield served to reinforce Storer’s influence on his former pupil. For Weaver, the values of his Christian faith and the cause for which he was fighting, the future of the Union, were inextricably linked. After the battle, the Second Iowa gained a reprieve as the exertions of combat gave way to the routine of garrison duty in Corinth. Days began with the sound of mules braying over the martial cacophony of fifes and drums summoning the troops to roll call. As soldiers assembled, they wondered if they were to be assigned to the dreaded tedium of picket duty or to something more interesting. After roll call came “morning ablutions,” followed by breakfast. Officers frequently had black servants who drew water, gathered firewood, and prepared meals. After breakfast, the dreary routine continued. “Generally,” one account of the regiment concludes, “the history of one day was repeated in that following.”26 While many found garrison duty monotonous, Weaver relished his new position, according to a detailed and measured contemporary profile of the regiment’s colonel. Weaver’s dark blue eyes and handsome countenance,


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along with a dignified manner and sense of self-assurance, combined to make a favorable impression. Intellectually “brilliant” and articulate, he was nonetheless given to “affectation in delivery” and obviously savored his stature as unit commander. “‘From his walk,’ said an officer of his regiment, ‘you could tell that he was colonel of the 2nd Iowa.’ ” When it counted, however, he put aside his pretensions and distinguished himself under fire. “He was a good and brave officer, and there were few who were as cool as he in battle.”27 A degree of informality in the relations between enlisted men and officers in the Second Iowa made the regiment unique among Iowa units. Gen. T.W. Sweeney found it too much to take and attempted to end excessive fraternization between officers and enlisted men. He ordered enlisted men to take any business they had with officers to an orderly-sergeant, who would then relay the matter, with his hat off and at attention, to the appropriate officer. Discussions were to conclude with a proper salute by the sergeant, and violations were subject to severe punishment. Weaver embellished this attempt at discipline by requiring penalties for officers whose troops violated the new policy. Announcement of the rules produced groans during a dress parade and may have led to an incident a few days later that indicated not everyone was reconciled to Weaver’s command. “One stormy night not long after” the orders were issued, a shot fired through his quarters missed Weaver by no more than five inches. “For some reason or other, no more was said about the obnoxious order, and the men visited the tents of their company-officers as usual.”28 In addition to struggling against the monotony of garrison duty, officers faced the complex challenge of occupation as Union forces found themselves in the midst of a hostile and destitute population. Advising a Union officer stationed in northern Alabama, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman called the problem “the most difficult business of our army as it advances and occupies the Southern country.” U.S. forces in northern Alabama—and, by implication, anywhere in the South—were entitled to “any and all rights which they choose to enforce in war” because “war is simply power unrestrained by constitution or compact.” Sherman counseled tolerance for those who simply tended to their homes, farms, and businesses, but he urged severe measures for anyone who provided material aid to Confederate forces. “These are wellestablished principles of war, and the people of the South having appealed to war, are barred from appealing to our Constitution, which they have practi-

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cally and publicly defied. They have appealed to war, and must abide its rules and laws.”29 In the summer of 1863, the Second Iowa left Corinth for LaGrange, Tennessee, and in late October redeployed to Pulaski, in Giles County just north of the Alabama line. Weaver appears to have adopted Sherman’s stern posture toward the defeated South while the Second Iowa was based at Pulaski, although the distortions of politics have obfuscated the facts. Almost thirty years later, in the midst of a heated presidential campaign, Weaver’s political foes disseminated affidavits alleging corruption and arrogance toward the citizens of Giles County. One Giles County resident, Jasper Cox, claimed that Weaver seized $2,000 of cotton thread but did so without providing a receipt. When an agent representing Cox made inquiries, Weaver said the material was sent along to Nashville—but no one there knew anything about it. “According to my best information and belief,” Cox declared in an affidavit, “Weaver appropriated my thread to his own individual use.” Others told similar stories. Weaver vigorously denied any wrongdoing, saying that Union forces issued vouchers for supplies collected in Pulaski. Weaver conceded that he imposed a $2,000 levy on the local populace but asserted that he did so at the order of Gen. Grenville Dodge, to pay for supporting and maintaining impoverished refugees flooding into Tennessee from the war zones farther to the south—a claim verified by Dodge. “In no event,” Weaver asserted, “was one cent retained by myself.”30 The charges of corrupt dealings by Weaver can be dismissed as the product of partisan politics and decades of simmering resentment about the loss of the war. The fact that many of the affidavits were in the possession of a local Democratic official suggests that politically inspired character assassination, rather than historical objectivity, drove the collection and distribution of the allegations against Weaver. Even allowing for partisan mudslinging and wounded regional pride, however, it is not hard to imagine that the ardent young Union officer adopted a stern posture toward the citizens of Giles County. The occupation of Pulaski came after the Second Iowa fought in several of the bloodiest battles of the western war. Weaver watched his friends and neighbors die at the hands of Southerners led, as Sherman put it, “into war, anarchy, bloodshed, and the foulest crimes that have disgraced any time or any people.” Given the circumstances, disdain—and even contempt—for the residents of Giles County was, perhaps, understandable.31 Yet while Democrats spread accounts of Weaver’s brutality, his Populist


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supporters told tales of his fairness. The son of the woman in whose home Weaver boarded while stationed in Pulaski recalled that she described him as a “gentleman, and a kind-hearted and brave soldier.” Assessments of Weaver’s record in Pulaski are complicated to a great extent by the claims and counterclaims of late nineteenth-century politics. Nevertheless, given Weaver’s temperament and the attitudes toward the Southern population prevailing among top Union Army officers, it is fair to conclude that he likely conducted himself in a correct but rigid and occasionally harsh manner, although without the corruption alleged decades later by his political foes.32 Weaver’s thoughts continued to drift toward home as he remained in the South. A letter written from Corinth in May 1863 deals largely with debts and other financial matters. In April 1864, writing from Pulaski, Weaver inquired about the state of his library. A second letter from Pulaski suggests that he had begun thinking about politics again. “I wish you would be more specific in what you write and not leave me in the dark as to what you mean by ‘our enemies,’ ” he gently chastised Clara. “I do not know whether you refer to [what] some person has said about me, or whether some one has attacked your character. If it is the former I care nothing about it, and if the latter I want to you to write me and not keep me in such horrid suspense.” The war soon reclaimed Weaver’s full attention, however, as the Second Iowa joined in the push on Atlanta. With Weaver in command, the regiment crossed the Oostanaula River in northern Georgia during the battle of Resaca, a key engagement as Union troops moved south from Dalton. On May 17, Weaver dashed off a brief note to Clara in which he reported that rebel forces were “whipped and in full retreat” and that his regiment suffered no casualties. The Second Iowa continued with Sherman as he proceeded through Georgia and South Carolina and later marched in the grand review in Washington, D.C., but did so without Weaver, whose threeyear stint in the Army ended on May 28.33 Weaver returned to a deeply divided community, where the patriotic unity that flourished in the aftermath of Fort Sumter had long since disappeared. While a majority supported the Union, a sizable faction emerged to oppose the Lincoln administration and its prosecution of the war. Pro-Southern county residents denounced the Emancipation Proclamation, vowed to oppose the “wicked abolition crusade against the South,” “resist to the death” any attempt to impose a draft, and drive free blacks out of the state “or afford them hospitable graves.” Clara alluded to the existence of anti-Union feeling in Davis County in one of her last wartime letters to her husband. “How my

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heart aches for our dear soldiers. But they are not objects of pity as much as the contemptible copperheads are. If the draft comes it will be their time to go, as almost all of the loyal men are gone.” The election returns of 1864 reflected the deep divisions that lingered in the county. Lincoln easily carried Iowa but outpolled Democrat George B. McClellan by a mere 53 votes in the Hairy Nation. Tensions were exacerbated by reports of Confederate guerrilla activity in the back reaches of Iowa’s southern counties. When news of a rebel raiding party disrupted the Davis County fair in October 1864, Weaver headed a company of county militia that pursued the rebels across the Missouri line before returning empty-handed. Reports of possible guerrilla activity, occasionally prompting a response by Weaver’s militia, continued throughout the fall, but the alarms in southern and central Iowa died away as the South’s military position collapsed.34 When Grant accepted the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, the conflict to which Bloomfield’s sons solemnly marched off in 1861 finally ended. The significance of Weaver’s wartime service cannot be overstated. It forged a lifetime bond with a generation of men and women on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. In addition, Weaver’s distinguished record in combat had political implications. In later years, Weaver’s foes alleged that he chased glory to enhance his political prospects, but his war record reflects patriotism rather than political self-interest. Nevertheless, his military service did improve his standing among Iowa Republicans. Three years of bitter fighting also strengthened Weaver’s commitment to the values articulated by Storer. In the years to come, Weaver’s career would be devoted to advancing the principles of Christianity and the Constitution for which he believed his comrades died at Corinth, Shiloh, and Fort Donelson. As he settled back into life as a civilian in Bloomfield with Clara and the family, Weaver had every reason to anticipate a successful political career. But victory in politics would prove much more difficult to earn than triumph on the battlefield.

chapter four

Supposed to be the Coming Man

O

n June 25, 1864, readers of the Weekly Union Guard of Bloomfield learned that the paper had acquired a new editor. Weaver took over while Moore, who had come home to recuperate from his injuries at Shiloh, returned to active duty with co-editor M.H. Jones. In a signed editorial announcing the takeover, described in the headline as a “temporary change,” Weaver admitted to mixed feelings about his return to civilian life. He was reluctant to “quit the field of arms” before the South was defeated, but he was also pleased to be back because “there is no place on this green earth so sweet as home.”1 The typical editor of the nineteenth century made no attempt to report the news of the day with dispassionate objectivity. Instead, editors used editorial and news columns to promote the interests of a particular political party. This was an ideal role for an eloquent and politically ambitious young man, and Weaver embraced his new responsibilities, which he retained until 1866, with characteristic zeal. In his introductory editorial, he vowed to maintain the paper’s stridently pro-Unionist policy—“We hate treason, and shall wage an untiring warfare against it in all its phases and forms”—and foreshadowed some of the themes that would dominate his political career. “This rebellion is against the people. It was not commenced against an administration that had trampled upon the rights of the South and refused all redress; but against the PEOPLE before the executive Chair was filled by the present incumbent, and while it was in the hands of their own supine tool, James Buchanan.”2 Weaver’s unmistakable style was on display in April 1865, following the shooting of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. “Abraham Lincoln was assassinated because he loved the Golden rule . . . and because he was the honored and beloved head of a great Christian Nation,” the paper declared in a black-bordered editorial. Andrew Johnson, the Tennessee Unionist who served as Lincoln’s vice president, was compared to Joshua—“the successor to our Moses”—and citizens were exhorted to remember Johnson in their prayers. “Christians of all classes will . . . ask God to bless this country with an earnestness never felt before.”3 Weaver’s dedication to the Union and the Republican Party was rewarded in early 1866, when a pair of influential Iowa Republicans in Washington

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moved to honor his military service. On January 10, Sen. James Grimes and Rep. James F. Wilson dispatched a note to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that “most respectfully recommended” an honorary brevet appointment to the rank of brigadier general for Weaver. “Col. Weaver . . . commanded for a long time one of the very best regiments Iowa sent to the field” and “was by every body considered a most valuable officer,” the lawmakers wrote. Stanton complied with the request, making Weaver one of more than 1,400 brigadier generals brevetted for Civil War service, and he sent along Weaver’s commission later in the year.4 The appointment, backdated to March 13, 1865, recognized Weaver’s “gallant and meritorious services” on behalf of the United States. Brevet appointments were eagerly sought—by one estimate, more than 8,000 were made on behalf of Union officers of all ranks—and Weaver’s put him on equal footing with a number of other prominent and politically ambitious veterans who were similarly honored.5 The same year Weaver received his brevet appointment, he was elected district attorney for Davis, Appanoose, Wapello, Monroe, Van Buren, and Wayne counties. The victory was a promising start to a career in electoral politics. Weaver received more votes in his home county than Davis County Democrat Henry H. Trimble, who was running for district court judge, and only thirteen fewer votes than the Republicans at the top of the ticket.6 Meanwhile, Weaver continued to benefit from the patronage of the state’s leading Republicans. On February 12, 1867, Kirkwood, Grimes, and Wilson wrote to Johnson’s treasury secretary, Hugh McCulloch, recommending Weaver for the position of assessor of internal revenue in southeastern Iowa. The position provided Weaver with what the New York World described as a “comparatively large income”—$1,500 per year plus a percentage of the taxes collected above $100,000. The position also provided Weaver with some patronage powers of his own. As assessor, he recommended appointment of his assistants to the secretary of the treasury. Weaver held the position until it was abolished in 1873, and he made the most of it. In 1869, Weaver earned $3,600—close to the $4,000 maximum allowed by law. In 1872, Weaver sought reappointment and received the assistance of William Belknap, who served as President Grant’s secretary of war and was later impeached for selling offices. Belknap’s endorsement of Weaver’s reappointment appears ironic in view of the Keokuk lawyer’s subsequent scandal. “There are many reasons for Gen’l Weaver’s retention,” Belknap wrote, “but the best one is his honesty and efficiency.”7


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Weaver’s family grew as his political career advanced. James and Clara added five children to their brood between 1866 and 1877: Susan, Abram, Laura, Ruth, and Esther. A son, Paul Vincent, born in March 1863, died in 1864. To accommodate the growing family, the couple erected a grand dwelling on land bought in the mid-1860s. The two-story brick residence, which remains standing today, testified to their prestige with a gabled roof, five chimneys, and elegant center-pointed sash windows.8 James and Clara took enormous pleasure in their residence. “I remember with great vividness the thorough delight of father and mother in laying out, planning and beautifying the three acres that comprised our home,” eldest son James Bellamy wrote many years later. To a significant degree, family life revolved around the church. James taught Sunday school, where his “good baritone voice” earned him notice as a hymn singer. In 1876, he was a lay delegate at the Methodist Episcopal conference in Baltimore. Clara was active in church affairs as well, serving as president of the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society. As parents, James and Clara took care to encourage their children to work hard and avoid idleness. During the summer, James Bellamy was put to work farming—not to provide food for the family table “but in point of fact . . . to keep me busy,” he later recalled. James and Clara’s oldest son stayed in school through his eighteenth birthday, after which he worked as a store clerk until he earned enough money to study law.9 Meanwhile, as Weaver established himself as one of Bloomfield’s leading citizens, forces were at work reshaping the cultural and political landscape in Iowa—forces that would also have a profound impact on the direction of Weaver’s political career. In the years after the war, the long-dormant movement to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages caught fire in Iowa, with the Methodist church fanning the flames. Methodists and other like-minded Protestants favored government action to purge the state of saloons and alcohol. In 1871, Methodists meeting in Iowa City resolved that “we will not rest short of a thorough prohibitory law that will ultimately sweep from our soil the accursed traffic.” In 1872, the Iowa State Temperance Association dedicated itself to the support of all political candidates—regardless of party— who favored an end to the sale and consumption of alcohol and changes in state law to secure “absolute prohibition.” The Republican-controlled General Assembly attempted to pacify the burgeoning movement between 1868 and

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1872 with legislation that granted local governments limited power to regulate or prohibit alcohol sales and tightened liquor permit requirements.10 Despite these measures, temperance advocates remained militant. In 1874, the movement took on new energy as Iowa women, following the example of their sisters in Ohio, crusaded for prohibition and formed a state chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. A warning to the Republican Party in the Sioux City Journal reflected the uncompromising nature of many prohibition supporters. The paper’s “position on this question is independent, and . . . our convictions with reference to it are beyond the control of any political assemblage. The Republican Party of Iowa has hitherto been the friend of temperance, and we cannot doubt that it will hold its ground against all seeming opportunities to capture votes.”11 James and Clara had long been sympathetic to the prohibition movement. While they were courting, Clara wrote to James of her plans to attend a temperance lecture in Keosauqua and observed that the topic was “[a] subject we need to hear a little more about here.” During the war, Weaver attracted notice as one of the Union Army’s few abstemious officers. The appeal of prohibition for Iowans such as the Weavers, who regarded the consumption of alcohol as a social evil, posed a dilemma for Republican leaders. They knew of the movement’s support among evangelical Protestants but were also aware of its potential to alienate immigrants from Germany and elsewhere in central Europe who regarded a glass of beer as an innocent pleasure, not an instrument of Satan.12 The Republican Party eventually embraced prohibition, but in the early 1870s, party leaders preferred to avoid the issue as much as possible. As the political controversy over temperance escalated, Iowa Republicans became embroiled in factional infighting that would have significant repercussions for Weaver. Distinct fissures in the Republican establishment appeared in 1868, as disenchantment with the administration’s resistance to radical Reconstruction culminated in the attempt to impeach President Johnson. Grimes voted to acquit Johnson in the impeachment trial, and in so doing provoked the wrath of Iowa radicals. “The Republican press and the multitude generally railed upon him throughout the North, and this feeling was nowhere more violent than in his own State,” Weaver wrote many years later in a biographical sketch of Grimes. “The position Senator Grimes had taken was regarded as treasonable, and the press demanded his resignation.”13 With “sincere regret,” Weaver admitted that he had allied himself with those


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who raged at the man who interceded on his behalf in the brevet promotion and the assessor appointment. “Led on by this almost universal frenzy,” Weaver conceded, he aided “those who stoned this faithful and enlightened public servant. The delirium at the time was as infectious as it was uncontrollable, and swept everything into its vortex.” There may have been more than the force of public opinion at work, however. Weaver’s position as a patronage appointee of the Johnson administration made him vulnerable to attack by radicals, and aligning himself with critics of Grimes would have provided some political cover.14 Grimes resigned from the Senate in 1869, citing ill health. One of those who attempted to gain from Grimes’s resignation was Sen. James Harlan. Born in 1820 in Illinois, Harlan, like Weaver, grew up in a home that hosted Methodist circuit riders. He received his education in the log schoolhouses of the frontier prior to studying at Indiana Asbury University under Matthew Simpson, who went on to become a leading Methodist bishop. After settling in Iowa, Harlan ran for state superintendent of public instruction, before taking over the reins at what is now Iowa Wesleyan University in Mount Pleasant.15 Politics had long rivaled—and soon eclipsed—education as Harlan’s primary occupation. A fervent Whig, Harlan later became Iowa’s first Republican U.S. senator. Lincoln, at the beginning of his second term, appointed Harlan to run the Interior Department, a position he held until he broke with Johnson over Reconstruction. Harlan’s ties to Lincoln extended beyond the realm of politics. Lincoln’s son Robert courted and eventually married Harlan’s daughter, Mary. The romance fostered a friendship between the two families, and Harlan escorted Mary Todd Lincoln to the second inaugural in March 1865. In 1866, after leaving the cabinet, Harlan angered many Iowa Republicans when he defeated Kirkwood to return to the Senate for a six-year term; Kirkwood, in turn, was elected to fill out the unexpired term left when Harlan went into the cabinet. Harlan overreached in 1870, when his candidate for the Senate seat left vacant by Grimes’s resignation, George Wright, defeated Allison, then a Republican congressman from Dubuque.16 The consequences of Harlan’s ill-conceived power play echoed throughout the rest of the decade. Weaver held Harlan in the highest regard. In a biographical sketch that borders on hagiography, Weaver compared Harlan’s lifelong friendship with Simpson to Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his mentors in colonial Virginia. Weaver claimed to have often seen Harlan and Simpson walking

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together, oblivious to their surroundings as they earnestly discussed important political and philosophical questions. “So the germs of genius are nurtured and so the Divine image in us is developed by contact of soul with soul,” Weaver wrote. “One grand thought, one noble purpose, planted in the mind of a man like Jefferson or Harlan will ultimately lift a nation to such a plane of advancement that the world will be astonished by the metamorphosis.” Others found Harlan’s bearded visage less awe-inspiring. In late 1871, Harlan faced allegations that as interior secretary he stole money earmarked by Congress to relieve starvation among Cherokee Indians. He denied the charges, but they proved politically damaging. Less than a year later, Harlan numbered among the Iowa politicians implicated in the Credit Mobilier railroad stock scandal. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner saw a tempting target in Harlan’s combination of sanctimony and shadiness and used him as the model for the ethically challenged Methodist Rev. Orson Balaam in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.17 Harlan’s position at the top of Iowa’s Republican Party came under attack from a group known as the “Des Moines Regency.” The group included civil engineer Grenville Dodge of Council Bluffs, who made a fortune in railroads and was elected to a term in Congress in 1866, and Des Moines editor James “Ret” Clarkson, whose influential Iowa State Register published the allegations about Harlan’s misappropriation of the Indian relief funds. William Boyd Allison, the third member of the triumvirate, was a four-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives who by 1870 had his eye on bigger things. An Ohio native born in 1829, Allison practiced law in Dubuque and served as a lieutenant colonel during the Civil War before going to Congress. The art of politics for the genial but shrewd Dubuque Republican involved above all else the accumulation and effective use of political power. He became a recognized master at the art of avoiding controversial positions on issues, prompting Sen. John Ingalls of Kansas to observe that Allison was “so pussyfooted that he could walk from New York to San Francisco on the keys of a piano and never strike a note.”18 The Regency extracted its revenge in 1872, when the Republican-controlled General Assembly chose Allison over Harlan for the Senate. Allison’s victory made him the dominant figure in Iowa Republican politics until his death in 1908. Harlan’s defeat embittered Weaver, who called the Des Moines Regency “one of the most malignant political juntas that ever sought to assassinate a great and good man” and described its campaign against Harlan as


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a “prearranged attack” mounted with “a ferocity which simply has no parallel.”19 Weaver remained a loyal supporter of Harlan but paid a high price for the alliance. In 1874, despite the recent defeat of his ally and hero, Weaver set his sights on Washington. Davis County was part of the sixth congressional district, which included the south-central counties of Appanoose, Keokuk, Mahaska, Marion, Monroe, and Wapello, as well as Jasper County in the state’s center. Weaver wanted the Republican congressional nomination and in this effort had the support of John A.T. Hull, the editor and publisher of the Davis County Republican. Like Weaver, Hull was born in Ohio, fought in the Civil War, and received a degree from the Cincinnati Law School. But here the similarities ended. While Weaver was a crusading, eloquent orator, Hull was a cautious insider. Well connected to the party establishment as secretary of the state Senate, Hull went on to serve three terms as Iowa secretary of state and ten terms in Congress.20 Weaver’s prominence eventually posed a dilemma for Hull, whose newspaper was obligated to support Davis County’s leading Republican while at the same time reflecting the views of the party establishment. In early 1874, however, the Republican offered Weaver its unqualified backing. “General Weaver is a man of superior ability,” the paper declared on April 30. “Taking the entire District into consideration, we know of no one so well qualified, or whose nomination would give such general satisfaction.”21 By this time, however, Weaver had become closely identified with the prohibition movement. In 1873, he gained notice for prosecuting a murder case involving an Ottumwa man described by the Republican as “an active representative” of “saloon keepers” and “abetors [sic] of prostitution.” Weaver’s success in securing a conviction represented “a triumph of right over whiskey,” the paper proclaimed. In April 1874, Weaver appeared at a temperance rally in Ottumwa, where a recent series of well-attended temperance meetings indicated the presence of what the Ottumwa Courier described as “a grand uprising of public sentiment” in favor of prohibition. Weaver was right at home as he appeared before an overflow crowd at the First Methodist Episcopal Church. Speaking in what the paper described as his “usual happy style,” Weaver made “a stirring appeal” in support of prohibition, “for which he received the unanimous thanks of the audience.”22 While teetotaling Christians reacted with enthusiasm to Weaver’s ardent support of prohibition, Republican political operatives were nervous. Prosecuting the associates of sleazy saloonkeepers might have been admirable,

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but stirring up sentiment for prohibition in advance of a congressional election was another matter. As the temperance meeting approached, Weaver recalled in later years, Hull cautioned that an appearance at the rally “would defeat my nomination.”23 As secretary of the state Senate, Hull would have been in a position to pass on to his Bloomfield neighbor the qualms about prohibition that beset many in the party leadership. Nevertheless, Hull and his paper remained in Weaver’s camp as the Republican congressional nominating convention neared. On July 15, Republican delegates from the eight-county district assembled in Ottumwa. The city hummed with political activity. The day before the Republicans met, the Anti-Monopoly Party, the product of a temporary fusion of the state Democratic Party and antirailroad activists, held its congressional nominating convention in the city. As the Republicans gathered, an impressive list of party grandees, including Weaver and U.S. Rep. William Loughridge of Oskaloosa, lodged at the city’s Ballingall House hotel. When the delegates convened at Lewis’s Opera House, an informal ballot taken before the voting began in earnest showed Weaver was tantalizingly close to securing the nomination—thirty-two delegates indicated they would vote for him, two shy of the majority needed to earn victory. His chief rival for the nomination was a man who was neither present in Ottumwa nor a declared candidate, Judge Ezekiel S. Sampson of Keokuk County.24 On the first formal ballot, Weaver clung to his thirty-two votes, while Sampson received twenty-six. A third candidate, John Morrison of Keokuk County, received nine votes. On the second ballot, Weaver picked up one more vote, but Morrison made the stunning announcement that he was withdrawing from the race and that Keokuk County’s eight delegates would vote for Sampson. The Morrison vote of a delegate from Marion County also switched to Sampson, who was then declared the nominee with thirty-four votes, while Weaver had thirty-three. Weaver lost the nomination by a single vote to an absent, undeclared rival.25 Morrison could not help gloating, and his pleasure at the course of events highlighted the hostility of many delegates toward Weaver. “I don’t know that it is in very good taste for a corpse to speak at its own funeral, but I must admit on the present occasion I feel first rate,” Morrison proclaimed. “If my friends have not secured my nomination, they secured at least their next best choice.” The result shocked many observers of Iowa politics. The Muscatine Journal praised Sampson but expressed surprise at the defeat of Weaver,


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“who was supposed to be the coming man.” A report from Jasper County reprinted in the Courier hinted at the underlying reasons for Weaver’s defeat. The county’s delegation at the convention split down the middle, with six votes going for Weaver and five for Sampson. The nomination of the Keokuk County judge, the newspaper report concluded, was seen in Jasper as a “balm in Gilead” for Republican hopes, “dissipating all causes for dissensions and feuds.” While making no direct reference to Weaver’s views on temperance, the report suggested that Republican chances of victory were no longer in doubt because the delegates refrained from “making . . . an injudicious and unpopular nomination.” Anti-temperance delegates voiced their feelings more forthrightly on the convention floor. When he lost, Weaver recalled, his foes exulted that “we have defeated the d—d prohibitionist.”26 While Weaver’s defeat displayed the depth of hostility he engendered among many Republicans, the proceedings paradoxically also illustrated the extent of his support. He received the backing of a majority of delegates from five of the eight counties. Sampson won with overwhelming support from Wapello, Keokuk, and Monroe counties, with minority support from other delegations. Moreover, despite the loss, Weaver remained an important figure in state party circles. Acknowledging his continued appeal, the Iowa State Register noted that “thousands and tens of thousands” of Weaver’s supporters across Iowa were disappointed by the outcome in Ottumwa. Weaver’s hometown papers blamed his defeat on the machinations of a Republican cabal—“a set of men in this District who have long been banded together, whose discipline is perfect” and who “are determined to defeat the will of the people at all hazards,” as the Republican put it. The Bloomfield Democrat, no friend of Weaver’s, agreed that Sampson won the nomination as the result of “the meanest kind of wire pulling.”27 With his defeat shrugged off as a temporary setback and his standing among the rank and file undiminished, Weaver quickly emerged as the leading candidate for an even bigger prize: the Republican nomination for governor. Sticking to his guns on prohibition, Weaver mounted what Clarkson, writing after Weaver’s death, called a “remarkable campaign” to lead the state Republican ticket in 1875. He enlisted the aid of Frank T. Campbell, a Jasper County journalist-politician who supported prohibition and gained fame as the author of the so-called Granger Law, which empowered the state to regulate railroad rates. With Campbell as campaign manager, Weaver energetically

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courted delegates. The vigorous effort succeeded in winning widespread support but also produced a backlash. Stiles recalled that some Republicans opposed Weaver because his “ambition was too vaulting” and that he was “too active in enforcing his aspirations.” More significantly, the campaign failed to mollify party leaders, who dreaded the prospect of Weaver leading the state ticket because of his support of prohibition and his alliance with Harlan. Harlan aspired to return to the Senate in 1876, while Allison wanted a Regency ally beside him in Washington. “This,” as Leland Sage has observed in his account of the gubernatorial battle, “would make it advisable to win the governor’s office in 1875, for all the obvious reasons and especially for its power to influence the legislature’s election of a senator.”28 One of the Republicans who appeared cool to Weaver’s gubernatorial aspirations was the editor of Weaver’s hometown Republican newspaper. Hull enthused about the field of candidates in the pages of the Davis County Republican but conspicuously failed to endorse or even acknowledge Weaver’s candidacy during the winter and spring of 1875. In February, the Republican heralded Davenport businessman Hiram Price in language that less than a year earlier would have been employed to back Weaver. “He is one of the ablest men in Iowa and, in his public life, his purity of character has never been questioned,” Hull wrote in endorsing Price’s gubernatorial candidacy. “If Hiram Price should be nominated, his election would be assured and Iowa would have a governor of great ability.”29 Despite Hull’s enthusiasm, Price did not emerge as a leading candidate for the nomination. Worried Republicans began to search quietly for an alternative to Weaver and settled on Kirkwood, by this time managing a bank and other businesses in Iowa City. In mid-April, the editor and the publisher of the Dubuque Times each wrote to Kirkwood urging him to run for governor. Kirkwood wanted to return to the Senate and was uninterested in the party’s gubernatorial nomination, but Allison’s friends assured him that a campaign for governor would not jeopardize his senatorial prospects. Nevertheless, Kirkwood remained noncommittal as the convention approached.30 The night before the convention opened, elements opposed to Weaver desperately cast about for some way to stop him. “The most active and earnest spirits in this were the liquor or saloon people, all of whom wanted to defeat the General,” Clarkson recalled. With Kirkwood’s availability still in doubt, Grenville Dodge was approached but declined to run. The morning of the convention came, and Weaver’s foes still lacked a credible candidate.31


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Tensions were high as Republicans jammed into Moore’s Opera House in Des Moines. So many delegates and hangers-on filled the hall that some county delegations sat on the stage. “There was much gossip and speculation among the delegates as to what was to be done, and the whole Convention was plainly nervous and expectant of something sensational going to happen,” Clarkson wrote.32 After preliminaries in which Republican orators indulged in self-congratulatory rhetoric about the party’s devotion to principle, the selection of a gubernatorial candidate began. The names of Weaver and three other candidates had been placed in nomination when Dr. S. M. Ballard, a farmer from Audubon County, was recognized. Ballard loudly declared that he wished to nominate Kirkwood. “Immense applause” greeted Ballard’s announcement, but additional theatrics soon followed. When a delegate from Dubuque County inquired about Ballard’s standing to nominate Kirkwood, Ballard proclaimed: “I have the authority of the great Republican Party of Iowa.” Ballard’s declaration produced the desired effect. “This announcement was greeted with tremendous cheering, frequently and uproariously repeated, the Convention giving itself over to a storm of cheers reiterating cheers,” the Iowa State Register reported. Two candidates quickly withdrew from the race, and an informal ballot showed Kirkwood with 268 votes, sixty-eight ahead of Weaver and only thirty-nine shy of the number needed to win the nomination. After the first official ballot, Weaver’s allies surrendered and moved to make Kirkwood’s nomination unanimous.33 Because Kirkwood’s lack of interest in the office of governor was well known, the nomination was something of a gamble, as some Weaver supporters recognized. After one skeptical delegate moved that the secretary of the convention telegraph Kirkwood to see if he actually wanted the gubernatorial nomination, delegates responded with “great cries of ‘no, no.’ ” One delegate asserted that “Kirkwood must accept,” a declaration that triggered additional waves of wild cheering. To make sure that Kirkwood saw things the same way, two of Allison’s associates boarded a train to Iowa City to make the case for the nomination in person. Allison’s emissaries succeeded in persuading Kirkwood to accept, and for the second time in less than a year, last-minute maneuvering denied Weaver his party’s nomination for public office.34 An additional humiliation lay in store later that night, as the party debated its platform. At their convention, Democrats adopted a platform plank that called for the repeal of the state’s prohibition laws and passage of legislation

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that would leave the power to regulate and license the consumption of alcohol in the hands of local communities. Weaver proposed that the Republicans respond with a plank endorsing prohibition, but ran into stiff resistance from delegates who argued that it was politically unwise. One delegate from Scott County, along the Mississippi River, warned that “there are perhaps twenty thousand Republicans in Iowa who would be driven from the party” if it adopted a prohibition plank. Weaver strenuously disagreed. “Gentlemen say prohibition will drive 20,000 men from the Republican party. I say there are 40,000 who will be driven away from the party by its not standing by the prohibitory laws it placed among our statutes. I warn you not to defy the temperance sentiment in the Republican party.” Weaver’s warning, however, went unheeded. The delegates went home after adopting a platform that made no reference to prohibition.35 Historians have long debated the reasons for the dramatic events at Des Moines. Clarkson’s account emphasizes how Weaver’s stand on prohibition made his candidacy unpalatable to the political operatives at the top of the party. Sage, writing forty years later with the benefit of access to the correspondence and diaries of many of the principals involved, dismisses Clarkson’s interpretation, arguing that Weaver’s defeat can be explained by the struggle between Harlan and Allison. The two theories are not mutually exclusive, however. The controversy over prohibition combined with the Harlan-Allison power struggle proved fatal to Weaver’s gubernatorial aspirations. A few days after the convention closed, a Fort Dodge newspaper editor confided to Allison that “the numerous Harlan people” in his community “are not well pleased with Kirkwood’s nomination”—a comment that hints at how the battle between Allison and Harlan affected the course of events in Des Moines. At the same time, one of Kirkwood’s correspondents cited Weaver’s statements on prohibition in expressing relief that he was denied the nomination. “With Weaver . . . as he himself proved . . . in his foolish and intemperate speeches, we would have lost a number of counties which we saved by your nomination,” Kirkwood was assured.36 The defeat in Des Moines proved enormously disappointing, and after limping home to Bloomfield, Weaver penned a letter that illustrated his state of mind. Despairing of his future in electoral politics, Weaver asked Sen. George Wright about the possibility “of urging my name for a foreign appointment that would be worth accepting.” In spite of his plea for patronage, Weaver was never nominated for a diplomatic post.37


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In any event, one more contest loomed. As a consolation prize, Davis County Republicans nominated Weaver for the state Senate. Despite his defeats in Ottumwa and Des Moines, he remained an outspoken and committed advocate of temperance. “Let us by united work secure a triumph in Davis County this fall,” he told Republicans when he accepted the state Senate nomination. “There is one thing, however, which I wish clearly understood—one thing I intend to live and die by—I am a prohibitionist.” The setbacks in Ottumwa and Des Moines, however, had dimmed his luster. Nor did Kirkwood aid his vanquished rival. In a direct slap at Weaver’s unalloyed support for prohibition, Kirkwood endorsed local licensing of saloons during a campaign appearance in Bloomfield in September. When the votes were counted, Weaver had failed again. Davis County returned Democrat H. A. Wonn to the state Senate and dealt Weaver his third defeat in less than two years. T. O. Walker, editor of the Bloomfield Democrat, delighted in the outcome, skewering “Jeems Bragadocio Weaver” and the “old water-logged scow ‘Prohibition.’’’ “The leaky old craft made slow progress, being heavily freighted with obsolete campaign lies and a large cargo of rain-water,” Walker joked.38 It is not hard to imagine how deeply painful this series of failures was to the proud and ambitious Weaver. Defeat at the hands of party operatives in Ottumwa and Des Moines seriously compromised his political viability, as his loss in his home county demonstrated. Once the coming man of Iowa Republican politics, Weaver was now nothing more than a disappointed office seeker whose promising political career seemed suddenly at a dead end. Years later, he offered a glimpse of his bitterness at the course of events. In a biographical sketch of James A. Garfield, Weaver argued that the Ohioan numbered among a breed of Republican giants whose like would never appear again because “the party machine—that all-powerful bludgeon in the hands of designing mediocrity—is jealous of rising men of independent judgment.”39 Written at the beginning of the twentieth century, Weaver’s assessment of Garfield resonates with the disappointment suffered a quarter century earlier. Not long after his defeat in the race for the state Senate, Weaver reexamined his relationship to the party in whose interests he had worked since before the Civil War and found a dramatic way to act on his “independent judgment.”

James Baird Weaver Dissatisfied with Republican monetary policy, Weaver joined the insurgent Greenback Party. State historical society of iowa

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s the 1870s continued, the nation grappled with significant economic changes, which profoundly affected Weaver’s career and the course of American politics for decades to come. While Weaver remained committed to temperance throughout his life, economic issues supplanted prohibition as his primary political focus as important developments in farming, commerce, and finance, as well as the lingering effects of the depression triggered by the Panic of 1873, altered the day-today lives of Americans. The railroads so eagerly courted by Iowans arrived in earnest after the Civil War, bringing the promise of access to distant markets. By the end of the 1870s, Iowa ranked fifth among the states in overall railroad mileage, with a web of five major roads and hundreds of spur lines spread across the state. Many Iowans, including Weaver, initially welcomed the railroads. In his introductory editorial in the Weekly Union Guard, Weaver ranked completion of two railroad lines serving Davis County as next in importance only to winning the war and re-electing Lincoln. “Fellow citizens, these roads must be built! We have been disconnected from the live world long enough! ‘Rip Van Winkle’ must wake up!”1 As the railroads extended across the state, however, anticipation gave way to anger at the enormous economic and political power they brandished. Generous land grants used by Congress and the state to promote construction awarded almost 12 percent of Iowa’s total acreage to the railroads, strengthening their economic muscle and signifying their extraordinary influence. In Des Moines and Washington, clout commingled with corruption through the distribution of free travel passes and more substantial perks. On Capitol Hill in the early 1870s, the revelations of the Credit Mobilier scandal—which disclosed the sale of discounted stock to members of Congress as they debated subsidies for western railroad construction—tainted Harlan, Allison, Grimes, Wilson, and Dodge to varying degrees.2 As public outrage over these abuses escalated, many farmers and business owners seethed at railroad business practices. Farmers objected to “pooling”—the informal division of markets to set rates and minimize competitive pressure to lower costs. “Through rates” made it cheaper for growers to ship

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goods to Chicago than to the river ports along the Mississippi, which angered merchants in Burlington, Davenport, Clinton, and Dubuque. Regional inequities aroused additional ire. In 1877, for example, ton-per-mile charges paid by shippers on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, which served southern Iowa, were almost 40 percent higher than those paid east of Chicago by shippers who used the Pennsylvania Railroad. Railroad directors argued that the higher rates paid for the expense of operating over long distances in sparsely populated areas, but resentful farmers were unconvinced.3 On the homestead and along Main Street, many Iowans began to regard the railroads with fear, suspicion, and contempt. As hostility toward the railroads intensified, farmers in Iowa and elsewhere enlisted in a new organization, the Patrons of Husbandry, better known as the Grange. By 1873, 1,823 local Granges dotted the Iowa landscape, with at least one chapter in ninety-five of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties. The Grange originally promoted itself as a social organization that eschewed politics, but it soon took on a political role. Fed up with inaction by state leaders on freight rates, in 1873 Iowa Grange activists formed the Anti-Monopoly Party, which worked in tandem with the moribund state Democratic Party and shocked Republicans by gaining control of the state House of Representatives in the fall elections. The General Assembly responded in 1874 by passing the “Granger Law,” which empowered legislators to set maximum freight and passenger rates. The law, similar to measures passed in neighboring Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, left many unsatisfied, however.4 Discontent with the railroads remained a staple of Iowa politics for years to come and made farmers receptive to calls for economic and regulatory reform. While its allies earned some victories in state capitals, the Grange made its biggest impact on the political culture of rural America. One contemporary observer believed that the Grange succeeded in promoting a sense of common interest among farmers, transcending partisan differences. The society “broke down in a large measure that mighty wall of political prejudice which adroit politicians had so skillfully built up between republicans and democrats,” Populist journalist James W. Witham wrote. It helped farmers realize “that since they obtained their living from the same source . . . conditions favorable to agriculture would promote the common interests of all, while adverse conditions would have the opposite effect.”5 Nothing proved more adverse to farmers in the decades after the Civil War than the vise-like squeeze caused by declining commodity prices. The

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prolonged fall in prices began as production boomed after the Civil War and became one of the most significant factors in American politics. Between 1866 and 1889, corn production nationwide increased by 214 percent, and wheat production soared 175 percent. Over the same period, wheat prices plummeted 66 percent per bushel and corn prices fell 57 percent. Demographic and technological factors helped push prices down. Between 1860 and 1900, total acreage devoted to farming in the United States doubled as settlers poured into the West. At the same time, significant improvements in equipment allowed farmers to grow more crops on their land. Enhanced designs for plows, threshers, and harvesting machines dramatically reduced the amount of time and money it took to raise crops. The collapse in commodity prices that resulted from these developments cast a shadow of desperation over many farms. Farmers struggled to pay interest on loans taken out to buy land and machinery; they raised and sold more of their crops, only to see prices continue to drop. Adding to the plight of farmers was the Panic of 1873 and resulting depression, from which the nation struggled to recover for the rest of the decade.6 The early 1870s were particularly grim for western farmers. Farm families joined forces through the Grange to make wholesale purchases to make their money go farther, but such attempts at economy failed to ease their plight. Farmers burned corn for fuel rather than sell it at a loss. “Nothing that came from the farm would bring remunerative prices,” Witham recalled, “except possibly near the large cities.” Farmhands suffered, too. Witham hired out as a laborer for fifty cents a day to a farmer in Edgar County, Illinois. Toiling in the hot August sun during the day and poring over Grange literature at night, he “soon connected these low wages with the low prices farmers were receiving for their products.”7 Postwar monetary policy intensified the downward pressure on prices. Farmers and their allies focused their wrath on two measures that they blamed for their plight. In 1873, Congress took silver out of circulation via legislation that agrarians would denounce in later years as the “Crime of ’73.” Two years later, Congress passed the Resumption Act, which restricted the quantity of paper greenback dollars in circulation and made them redeemable at face value in gold. As the 1870s continued, an increasing number of farmers advocated the printing of more greenbacks and the restoration of silver to expand the money supply and inflate prices. They were known as

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advocates of “soft money,” while opponents of paper money and silver were known as supporters of “hard money.” Widespread hostility toward the national banking system, which played a crucial role in creating the nation’s money supply, deepened agrarian fury. Under the scheme established during the Lincoln administration to help finance the war, national banks that bought federal bonds issued currency notes for up to 90 percent of the value of the bonds. The government could redeem the bonds if the banks failed to cover the notes, but otherwise the banks earned interest on the bonds. While envisioned as a way to adjust the nation’s money supply according to economic conditions, the system actually added to deflationary pressures. As the national debt declined after the war, fewer bonds were sold, so fewer bank notes were issued. At the same time, the tendency of banks to sell government bonds in times of economic crisis also drove down the number of notes in circulation. Southern and western farmers believed the system deprived their regions of essential credit and was generally unresponsive to the needs of agriculture. Furthermore, opponents charged, the banking system represented an unconscionable abdication by Congress of its constitutional duty to manage the nation’s currency. The fact that banks profited from this system through the receipt of interest on the bonds further antagonized the system’s critics.8 The operation of the banking system, the return to the gold standard put in motion by the Resumption Act, and the demonetization of silver each contributed, in varying degrees, to the deflationary spiral that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century. When combined with the other factors that pushed farm prices down, the effect was devastating. “A dollar that had bought one bushel of wheat in 1865 paid for two bushels in 1890,” Ray Allen Billington has written. “Even that could have been endured if debts had declined proportionately, but the opposite was true. Every increase in the value of the dollar—each fall in the price level—made repayment more difficult.”9 Agitation for monetary reform powered the agrarian radical movement through the rest of the century, and the currency question became one of the central issues of Weaver’s political career. Americans today give little thought to the bills and coins they carry in their wallets and purses, but in the nineteenth century, the nature of currency emerged as a recurring and bitterly debated political issue. In the 1820s and 1830s, Andrew Jackson fought for a metallic-based hard-money currency on behalf of the farmers and wage

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earners he championed, instead of the paper money system supported by the Second Bank of the United States and its business allies. By the 1870s, the terms of the debate had changed. After more than a decade of greenback circulation, resistance to resumption among farmers flourished, and suspicion of paper money ebbed. While Jacksonian hostility to paper money continued in many quarters, a number of agrarian and labor reformers advocated softmoney solutions to the economic distress that plagued the economy since the Panic of 1873.10 From the days of Jackson’s battle with the Bank until 1896, when William Jennings Bryan made silver the touchstone of his first campaign for the presidency, the currency question was not merely an arcane economic matter but an issue weighted with profound moral and political significance. When the Rev. Lyman Atwater, a hard-money champion of the 1870s, asserted that questions of “economics and ethics interlock,” he was not only voicing his opposition to paper money but highlighting the seriousness with which the currency question was regarded. One promoter of hard money, the Methodist Christian Advocate, charged that “atheism is not worse in religion than an unstable or irredeemable currency in political economy.” Supporters of paper money and, later, free silver, looked upon the issue with equal gravity. Toward the end of the century, one Iowa editor asserted that the rising value of the dollar threatened to reduce “agricultural and manufacturing people to a condition of dependence” and that no people so threatened can long remain free. As a result, the currency controversy “is of as great or greater consequence to the world than the question of slavery,” demanding “of every patriot a bold, fearless and if necessary defiant stand for what he believes to be right and just, and for the greatest good of his nation and the world.”11 Deeply held beliefs about the nature of American democracy animated the often confusing debate over currency that dominated the American political landscape in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Unlike his dramatic embrace of the anti-slavery crusade in the 1850s, which has a road-to-Damascus quality, Weaver’s emergence as a leading champion of the agrarian economic program occurred gradually. In the decade after he returned from the Civil War, there is little evidence that he spoke out with any regularity on economic questions, except, as his editorial debut in the Weekly Union Guard indicated, as a booster of local development. In addition, the soft-money program carried the stain of political and moral apostasy. In the post-war period one of the most prominent champions of the greenback

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dollar was Henry Clay Dean, the former Iowa Methodist preacher who abandoned the pulpit and gained prominence during the war as a Copperhead Democrat.12 In addition, as illustrated by the Christian Advocate, the Methodist hierarchy took a dim view of soft money. Views tainted by their association with Democratic opponents of the war and denounced by leading organs of the church held little attraction for a loyal Republican and devout Methodist like Weaver. Weaver’s move toward economic issues began during his failed bid for the gubernatorial nomination, when he joined forces with Campbell, the Jasper County prohibitionist who wrote Iowa’s “Granger” law regulating railroad rates. With “perfect fearlessness,” Weaver allied himself with supporters of “public control of the railroads and other semi-public corporations” and, in the process, antagonized business interests. Weaver returned to the railroad question in his unsuccessful campaign for the state Senate, charging that his opponent voted for railroad interests in the Senate and asserting that the Granger law saved Iowans $1 million in its first year of operation. Nevertheless, as his foes delighted in pointing out several years later, Weaver stopped well short of embracing soft money. In a speech delivered in Knoxville, Iowa, in September 1875, he defended the national banking system and argued that the supply of paper money could not be increased without violating the Constitution.13 At this stage of Weaver’s career, economic issues remained secondary to prohibition and, above all else, his loyalty to the Republican Party. When he did address economic questions, he advanced conventional Republican positions. Not long after his failed bid for governor, Weaver returned to Iowa’s capital as the state legislature opened a new session in January 1876, with the election of a U.S. senator at the top of its agenda. After four years of nursing the wounds he suffered at Allison’s hands in 1872, Harlan sought to return to Washington, and Weaver managed his campaign in Des Moines. In addition to Harlan, the crowded field of candidates included Kirkwood, just recently elected governor but still eager to return to the Senate, and Hiram Price. Unlike 1872, when Harlan was on the defensive because of corruption charges, in this instance he “entered the arena fully equipped to meet his foes,” Weaver wrote. “None were so bold as to reiterate a single charge preferred against him in the preceding contest.” Nevertheless, the behind-the-scenes maneuvering failed to go Harlan’s way, and he dropped out of the contest when he received a telegram that his son had died. “The Senator’s great heart gave way and he withdrew

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from the struggle without hesitation and rushed to the death chamber of his beloved boy,” Weaver recalled. “It was a most pathetic scene never to be forgotten.”14 Whether the news shocked Harlan into withdrawing or, as Sage theorizes, merely offered a face-saving pretext for quitting a race he was not likely to win,15 Harlan’s departure left the Regency in command of the field. Republicans nominated Kirkwood, who returned to the Senate and remained there until he was appointed secretary of the interior by President Garfield in 1881. As the head of the Regency, Allison effectively controlled both of Iowa’s Senate seats for the rest of the century.16 As Allison tightened his grip on the Iowa Republican Party, Weaver began to look elsewhere. In May 1876, he traveled to Indianapolis to attend the convention of the newly formed Independent, or Greenback, Party. The meeting attracted a noteworthy collection of personalities, including Solon Chase, a Maine Greenback editor, and Adlai E. Stevenson, a prominent Illinois Democrat who later served as Grover Cleveland’s vice president. The convention called for repeal of the Resumption Act, demanded federally backed paper currency, and, almost as an afterthought, endorsed returning the silver dollar to circulation. The Greenbacks also nominated a presidential candidate, eighty-five-year-old New York philanthropist Peter Cooper. While the speeches, platform debates, and nomination of a presidential candidate no doubt looked familiar to a veteran politician like Weaver, the atmosphere contrasted dramatically with the cynical wire pulling that led to his defeats in Des Moines and Ottumwa. “From the beginning, greenbackism had the quality of a transfiguring faith, but its quasi-religious nature had never emerged so clearly as it did in Indianapolis,” historian Irwin Unger has written.17 Here was a movement that appealed to Weaver’s crusading temperament. Weaver returned to Iowa eager to advance the Greenbacks’ soft-money cause but unwilling to break with the Republican Party, which nominated Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio for president and William Wheeler of New York as his running mate. The Democrats chose Samuel J. Tilden of New York and Thomas Hendricks of Indiana, and the two parties squared off for what promised, after the corruption and economic tumult that marred President Grant’s administration, to be the most closely contested presidential election since the Civil War. Weaver knew Hayes from his days in Cincinnati, when the Ohio lawyer signed Weaver’s law school diploma.18 While the outcome of the campaign in Iowa was never in doubt, Republican prospects elsewhere were uncertain at best.

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During the campaign, Weaver rallied once again to the Republican standard while advancing the soft-money views articulated in Indianapolis. When asked by leading citizens of Appanoose County to comment on the Resumption Act, Weaver took care to do so in a partisan context. He noted that Iowa Republicans favored resumption only “at such a time as is consistent with the material and industrial interests of the country” and asserted that he saw nothing in the party’s national platform inconsistent with this position. The Resumption Act, however, represented “a violation of all the natural laws of trade” and is “producing bankruptcy among our people; and public confidence, so vital to business prosperity, is greatly injured and unsettled.” In July, he conceded that Sampson, who defeated him in the race for the Republican congressional nomination in 1874, was entitled to a second term, but he added a significant caveat. Sampson should be renominated, Weaver argued, “if, in his opposition to the repeal of the Resumption Act, and in his opposition to making silver coin a legal tender for all sums, he expresses the will of the Republican voters of this District.” As the campaign continued through the summer, Weaver’s Republican loyalties remained paramount, despite his clear sympathies for the Greenback program. When the new party’s Iowa leadership invited him to run for Congress on its ticket, he declined, declaring that he supported “Hayes and Wheeler, Silver and Greenbacks.”19 Despite failing to win a majority of the popular vote, Hayes took office in 1877 after he was awarded the disputed electoral votes of three southern states. In June 1877, Weaver attended the Republican state convention, at which delegates nominated John Gear of Burlington for governor. Weaver’s ally Campbell was nominated for lieutenant governor. The party adopted platform planks endorsing the state’s prohibition laws, remonetizing silver, and maintaining the existing volume of currency. While Gear was a well-known opponent of prohibition, Weaver urged temperance supporters to unite behind the Republican ticket because Gear “would do nothing to undermine the expressed will of his party” on the issue.20 Weaver might have been expected to rally to the Republican standard with renewed vigor after these developments. At the end of August, however, he abruptly decided to leave the party he had served for virtually his entire adult life. Writing to Gear, Weaver asked to “be released by you from my pledge of personal support . . . I shall act with the Independents.” Weaver cited differences on economic issues as the basis for his decision. “Differing, as I do, so widely with the Republican party upon questions of finance, I find

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it impossible for me to go before the people and advocate a continuance of that policy. Neither do I feel that it would be right for me to remain silent and withhold my protest against what I feel is a gigantic wrong.” In response, Gear advised Weaver “that I release you from your promise but regret—not on personal grounds—that you see it to be your duty to leave the Republican party in which you have done such loyal service to train in other camps.”21 Despite the denials in this courtly exchange of letters, animosity almost certainly played a role in Weaver’s decision to leave the party. Gear was a longtime rival who, in addition to his opposition to prohibition, was backed by railroad interests. Gear played a minor role in blocking Weaver at the state convention in 1875, as one of the lesser candidates for governor who dropped out to clear the way for Kirkwood. Coming as it did after the state Republican establishment spurned Weaver’s bids for Congress and governor, Gear’s nomination must have been especially galling.22 Nevertheless, Weaver’s assertion that he broke with the party over financial questions is credible. Since 1875, he had been gravitating toward a wholehearted embrace of radical economic positions on issues ranging from railroad regulation to currency—taking note, as he wrote years later, of “the encroachments of confederated monopoly and . . . how completely this sinister influence had captured the leadership and machinery of the two great parties.” Despite the Iowa Republican Party’s temporizing on financial questions, at the national level the party stood firmly committed to resumption and hard money. Moreover, Weaver’s decision to leave the party on a matter of high principle recalled the formative political experience of his youth, when he quit the Iowa Democratic Party in the 1850s over the issue of slavery. Indeed, his characterization of the Republican position on finance— “a gigantic wrong”—is reminiscent of the language used by Free Soilers in the 1850s to describe slavery. Weaver’s departure from the ranks of the Iowa Republican Party was wholly consistent with his views, personal history, and personality.23 Republicans reacted with scorn to Weaver’s departure. “Probably the Almighty only intended to show what he could do in the way of making an insatiable office-seeker, when he blew the breath of life into the carcass of Gen. James B. Weaver of Davis County,” the Oskaloosa Herald scoffed in a typical commentary. “A good, clever fellow, of fair ability, but no more stability than a weather-cock.”24 The paper’s characterization of Weaver as an “insatiable office-seeker” typified a view prevalent among Republicans that would

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linger for the rest of the century. Despite the mocking tone of the Herald, Weaver’s defection threatened to cause problems for Republicans. Only four years earlier, the party was thrown on the defensive when farmer discontent with railroad rates powered the success of the Anti-Monopoly coalition with the Democrats. The enlistment of a well-known and popular figure like Weaver in the ranks of the Greenbacks provided the fledgling party with credibility in many quarters, credibility it otherwise might well have lacked. Meanwhile, the economic discontent that powered the Greenback movement took on an ominous quality during the summer of 1877, when a railroad strike protesting pay cuts swept out of Martinsburg, West Virginia, into the rest of the country and quickly degenerated into violence. In Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, protests exploded into riots. The governors of Maryland and Pennsylvania called out the state militia to restore order, and President Hayes dispatched army units to Baltimore to help quell disturbances. In Pittsburgh, mobs took control of the city after rioters burned down the city’s Union railroad depot and destroyed more than 100 engines of the Pennsylvania Railroad—events described by the Herald as “a perfect reign of terror.” Suddenly, the difficulties that plagued the American economy for most of the decade were no longer merely grist for debates about monetary policy but kindling that threatened to fuel violent revolution. Against this backdrop, some Iowa Republicans viewed the Greenback Party and its champions as potentially dangerous allies of rioting railroaders. “Quite a number of greenbackers hereabouts are sympathizing with the mob,” the Herald warned in July. “When a man endorses a mob he endorses a raging fiend that will turn and rend him on first opportunity, without reason and for no cause. A mob is the most dangerous enemy to a Republic.”25 The strikers succeeded in convincing the railroads to drop their plan to cut wages, and by the end of July peace had returned to the big cities and railroad hubs. But Republican newspapers continued to tie the Greenbacks to the disorders. The new party sought to “attribute all the financial ills under which the people suffer directly to contraction,” the Knoxville, Iowa, Voter complained in August. “They tell us that railroad strikes, the destruction of property by lawless and villainous mobs . . . were occasioned by this illegal and rapid contraction of the currency.”26 As Iowans assessed the nation’s economic difficulties, Weaver took up the Greenback cause in a pair of debates with a sarcastic and skillful adversary: M. E. Cutts, the Republican attorney general and a veteran member of

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the state General Assembly. Equipped with a “grating voice,” Cutts proved himself “a natural-born satirist,” who “[i]n sardonic ridicule and irritating invective . . . was without a peer,” recalled Stiles. “And yet, everybody admired him, everybody liked to hear him, except the victim who smiled and writhed and writhed and smiled during the operation.”27 The initial confrontation between the two accomplished orators, scheduled for September 21 in Oskaloosa, promised to be memorable. While the Republican Herald, not surprisingly, offered a highly partisan account of the debate, the paper’s report does offer some insights into Weaver’s state of mind and thinking about politics at the time of his departure from the Republican Party. Goaded by an unflattering story about his political career, published by the Herald prior to the debate, Weaver began not by talking about the issues of finance but by rehashing his failed campaign for the Republican congressional nomination in 1874. “With blood in his eye” and his “beautiful whiskers fairly bristling,” Weaver accused the Herald of smearing him, prompting the paper to comment that “Weaver knows very well that nothing but a sour stomach caused by continuous and everlasting defeat caused him to leave the Republican party.” Seeing an opening, Cutts questioned Weaver’s motives for breaking with the Republicans, noting that Weaver remained a loyal member of the party well after the Republican-controlled Congress demonetized silver and passed the Resumption Act. Weaver “stayed in the party until the last vestige, of the last hope, of the last nomination, for the last office had disappeared in the distance,” Cutts charged.28 Weaver’s sensitivity on the subject not only proved a liability but also indicated that the disappointments he suffered earlier in the decade still gnawed at him. As the debate continued, Weaver and Cutts sparred over financial issues, but, more significantly, Weaver advanced an idea to which he would return repeatedly in the years ahead. The honored veteran of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Corinth argued that it was time for voters to put the dramatic events of the Civil War—and, by implication, reflexive loyalty to the Republican Party— behind them. In a period during which Republicans instinctively “waved the bloody shirt” to rally support—as Weaver said he once did himself—this was a noteworthy call for an end to politics as usual in a state that distinguished itself in its war record and loyal support for the party of Lincoln. The Herald—and, no doubt, many of the Republicans in attendance— were not impressed. “Weaver buried the past, cried out against fighting the war over again, but paraded his own war record before the house as his

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stock in trade,” the newspaper declared. Nevertheless, as the years passed, Weaver’s argument that the sectional and associated partisan animosities of the 1860s were no longer relevant found support in many quarters throughout the United States, even as Republicans continued to invoke the memory of the Civil War for partisan purposes. As for the outcome of the debate, the Herald left no doubt about its view that Cutts had triumphed, but the paper noted with astonishment that Weaver, characteristically, believed otherwise: “Weaver says he skinned Cutts.”29 Unfazed by the attorney general’s instinct for the jugular, Weaver squared off against Cutts in a second debate in Des Moines on October 6. Initially, the two planned to face each other at the opera house, but it turned out that General Tom Thumb, the circus performer, booked it first. The scheduling conflict forced them to move their debate to the county courthouse. This time, Weaver appears to have improved on his showing in Oskaloosa. The house, packed with Greenback supporters, jeered Cutts at every opportunity. The Register, no more likely than the Herald to support the Greenback program, conceded that Weaver was a “most estimable gentleman and an able speaker,” limited only by the “sophistries of his cause.” As Weaver biographer Fred Emory Haynes has observed, the highly partisan nature of surviving accounts of the contests make it impossible to accurately assess how Weaver and Cutts fared on the issues.30 At any rate, the debates succeeded in establishing Weaver as a leading Greenback spokesman in Iowa. As discontent about federal hard-money policies and the general state of the economy simmered on the Iowa prairies, Weaver seemed poised for a comeback. In May 1878, Iowa Greenbacks offered Weaver the party’s nomination for Congress. No longer encumbered by ties to the Republican Party, Weaver accepted, setting the stage for a contest with his old rival, Ezekiel Sampson. The Greenback Party appeared to be prospering in the sixth district, with vote totals rising dramatically from 1876 to 1877. Weaver’s veiled warning to Sampson in 1876 about the dangers of being tied to Republican hard-money policies seemed prescient. Nevertheless, Greenback support by itself would not be enough for Weaver to win. In 1877, the combined votes received by the Democratic and Greenback candidates for governor in the sixth district topped the votes for the Republican candidate by 3,400. To defeat Sampson in the fall, Weaver needed the backing of district Democrats.31 Two obstacles stood in his way. To begin with, a number of Democrats remained loyal to the old Jacksonian faith in hard money and wanted nothing

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to do with visionary Greenback financial policies. In addition, some district Democrats distrusted Weaver’s sincerity. One of Weaver’s Democratic foes came from his hometown: T. O. Walker, the Bloomfield Democrat editor who took such delight in Weaver’s failed bid for the state Senate. Hardened by years of partisan combat in Davis County when Weaver was a prominent Republican, Walker found Weaver impossibly sanctimonious and suspected he retained latent Republican loyalties. Not long after Weaver received the Greenback congressional nomination, Walker persuaded Davis County Democrats to adopt a resolution supporting a straight Democratic ticket and opposing efforts to back “candidates of other parties.”32 While Walker remained an outspoken foe, another prominent Bloomfield resident came to Weaver’s aid. Henry H. Trimble was a well-known and highly regarded soft-money Democrat who had represented Davis County in the state legislature and run two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress. One of the many transplanted Hoosiers who came to prominence in Davis County in the years before the war, Trimble studied law in his native state under Hendricks, the Democrats’ vice presidential candidate in 1876, who had emerged after the Civil War as a leading champion of soft-money policies. While Trimble sympathized with the Greenback monetary program, he was no economic radical; he ended his professional career in Keokuk as an attorney for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. It was shared friendships and personal experiences, as much as similar views on financial issues, that drew Trimble and Weaver together. Trimble was the brother-in-law of Weaver’s late Civil War ally James Baker and had been Baker’s law partner in the 1850s. As one of the county’s “war Democrats,” Trimble, like Weaver, took up arms against the South.33 While prolonged partisan combat with Weaver embittered Walker and turned him into a lifelong enemy, Trimble’s connections to Weaver trumped past partisan differences and permitted the two to forge a critical alliance in the coming campaign for Congress. Trimble’s own political ambitions no doubt also played a role in the alliance. In 1879, he would be the Iowa Democrats’ candidate for governor, and helping Weaver win with Democratic support would strike a blow against the party’s hardmoney faction. Trimble attempted to reassure jittery Democrats about Weaver in a shrewdly composed letter that circulated among the party faithful in the early summer of 1878. In a nod to agrarian suspicions about the covert political power of banking and financial institutions, Trimble declared that Weaver

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had left the Republican Party because “it had sold out to the bond-holding and gold interests” and “abandoned . . . popular interests and rights.” Trimble noted that Weaver had been a Democrat before the Civil War. He promised that Weaver opposed protective tariffs—a sore subject for rural Democrats— and intended to “labor for a reform in finances.” Nevertheless, Trimble added, Weaver was not “an extremist on currency.” On the question of how Weaver would align himself in Washington, Trimble wrote that Weaver “expects to co-operate with the Democrats as against the Republican organization, and will assist the Democrats in the organization of the House.”34 Trimble’s support proved crucial as sixth district Democrats gathered in Ottumwa on August 15 to nominate a candidate for Congress. The night before the convention, Weaver and Trimble met with delegates from Mahaska and Jasper counties, where Weaver repeated many of the pledges made in Trimble’s letter but declined requests to address the convention. When the proceedings opened, Democrats appeared divided on the question of cooperating with the Greenbacks and Weaver. Walker, Weaver’s hometown enemy, argued against working with the new party and its champion. As delegates applauded Walker’s remarks, Trimble took the floor. With voters angry about economic conditions, Trimble declared, Republicans could no longer expect victory by invoking the memory of the Civil War. Democrats stood poised to win, Trimble asserted, if the party aligned itself with the causes of the people. Trimble’s oratory carried the day for Weaver. Democrats adjourned without nominating a candidate for Congress, positioning Weaver to receive the support of most district Democrats.35 One week later, complications arose when Trimble backpedaled from some of the declarations made in his letter to district Democrats. Writing to the proWeaver Ottumwa Democrat, Trimble explained that he hurriedly penned the missive and added, “It is due Gen. Weaver to say, that in his talk with me he used the expression ‘soft money Democrats,’ in his determination to co-operate with the Democrats in the organization of the House.” Trimble’s modification of his earlier assurances infuriated the party’s hard-money faction. In Davis County, Walker succeeded in getting county Democrats to adopt a resolution that denounced “any and all efforts to induce Democrats to vote for James B. Weaver for Congress” as “dishonest and calculated to deceive the voters of the Sixth Congressional District.” Nevertheless, Democratic cooperation with the Greenback Party proceeded apace. In October, the parties announced a statewide “fusion” ticket that included candidates from

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both parties, a development that in effect sanctioned Democratic support for candidates of the insurgent party, including Weaver.36 As Trimble worked among the Democratic rank-and-file, Weaver courted Greenbacks and disaffected Republicans. On June 29, he appeared before an audience of farmers and laborers in Newton and delivered a tour-of-the-horizon address in which he laid out the case for the Greenback platform. Over the years, Weaver’s enemies often denounced him as a reckless demagogue, but the absence of inflammatory rhetoric in this address is striking. “My object in coming before the people now is to get their careful attention—not for the purpose of stirring up party feeling or ambition, but for the purpose of gaining instruction and imparting instruction,” he asserted at the beginning of his speech. In detail, Weaver pedantically declaimed on political economy and recent financial developments. He attacked Treasury Secretary John Sherman for taking greenbacks out of circulation to return the United States to the gold standard. Sherman’s actions, Weaver declared, had “brought poverty and distress and bankruptcy to the people.” Seizing on a congressional speech by Sampson in which the Republican congressman warned that fluctuations in currency volume benefit financiers and speculators but hurt laborers and the poor, Weaver promised to hold Sampson accountable for his remarks.37 He turned his guns on the Republican Party, accusing it of having broken its bond with the nation’s laboring classes because of its financial policies. In its early days, Weaver told his audience, the party upheld “the right of the bronzed race” to work and vote freely, and it was guided by this principle during the Civil War. “It was a great fight for the freedom of the laborer,” Weaver declared. “That was the battle.” In the war’s aftermath, however, “the soul of the republican party has left” as it abandoned its support for the rights of working men and women. The spirit that once motivated Republicans resided “in the Greenback party today. We want fair play in this country.”38 Although marked by indignation, Weaver’s address lacked the angry oratory that came to characterize the speeches of later agrarians and Populists. Weaver also wove a theological theme into his address. He pointed to the Gospels to highlight the contrast between financial speculators who “lay in the shade and smoke their 25 cent havannas” and impoverished families, found “in every neighborhood,” who were unable to afford decent clothes for their children to wear to church or school. Such conditions, Weaver proclaimed, should be an affront to anyone who accepted the teachings of the Christian

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scriptures. “The power of Christ won’t hurt the barefooted. Jesus of Nazareth marched through Palestine to preach the gospel to just such beings,” Weaver declared. Urging his listeners to “do what is right,” Weaver warned against having “one principle for the prayer meeting, and another for the ballot box. Take the honest laboring classes, take that for your cause, and you will be on the Lord’s side.” Weaver added, “Don’t pray to get the Lord on your side, but just get on his side, for he is a friend to the poor and the oppressed under all circumstances, and on all occasions.”39 Weaver’s remarks illustrate that it was his deep-seated religious beliefs, not crass opportunism or a latent instinct toward political radicalism, that drove him to the new party. As the campaign continued, Weaver and Sampson squared off in a number of joint appearances throughout the district. Debating Sampson in Oskaloosa, Weaver denounced bankers and Wall Street speculators and strongly endorsed railroad regulation. “As might be expected, he carried the audience with him, being not only a master debater, but having the essential facts on his side,” Witham, who witnessed the contest, recalled. Republicans saw things far differently. “Congressman Sampson gave Weaver a bad usingup at Oskaloosa yesterday,” the Iowa State Register reported. “The greenback nonsense stands a slim chance before the fire of argument.” As Weaver jousted with Sampson, Chicago-based Greenback journalist and organizer Mark M. “Brick” Pomeroy, a well-known radical on financial questions who coordinated the establishment of Greenback clubs across the country, spoke in Ottumwa on Weaver’s behalf in late September. Pomeroy, whose newspaper columns were given to both stout defenses of the working class and antiSemitic denunciations of the Rothschilds and other leading banking families, personified the strengths and weaknesses of the new party. His appearance at the height of the congressional campaign was too much for the Republican Ottumwa Courier, which asked, “Has Weaver gone stark mad, or worse than mad?”40 Whatever district voters felt about Pomeroy, on election day a majority diagnosed Weaver and his program as decidedly sane. Weaver won a clear victory, receiving 16,366 votes, 2,058 more than Sampson—and Weaver was not the only Iowa Greenback to prosper at the ballot box. In the neighboring congressional district, which included Des Moines, Edwin H. Gillette was elected as a Greenback. Their victories broke the virtual monopoly on the Iowa congressional delegation held by Republicans since 1856. The insurgent wave that propelled Weaver and Gillette into office swept across the rest

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of the country as well. All told, Greenback candidates received more than 1 million votes in the 1878 elections, more than ten times the number they polled in 1876.41 Weaver’s election to Congress represented a dramatic turnaround in his fortunes only three years after his defeats in Des Moines and Davis County. His embrace of the Greenback program was not, as critics charged, the product of a lust for office, but a natural outgrowth of his underlying religious and evolving political beliefs. In reaching out to Democrats, he demonstrated tactical skill not seen in his previous campaigns. On the stump, he advanced the view that the bloody shirt he once waved so passionately had lost its relevance in a nation in which prolonged economic instability threatened the livelihoods of farmers and laborers—a theme he would develop in the years ahead. He became an articulate and effective advocate for the Greenback monetary program without, in Trimble’s phrase, becoming an extremist. Now Weaver headed to Washington, where his oratorical talents and leadership skills would be put to new tests on a national stage.

James Baird Weaver depicted as Bottom the Weaver by artist Thomas Nast. harper’s weekly, march 6, 1880 and april 24, 1880

chapter six

A Grand Congressional Nuisance

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n a Sunday morning in early March 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes’s friend and political confidante Thomas Corwin Donaldson jumped on a Washington, D.C. streetcar headed to the Capitol. On board, he spied Rep. Joseph Blackburn, the influential Kentucky Democrat, talking with the conductor. As Blackburn and the trainman chatted amiably about the political situation and organization of the Forty-sixth Congress, the conversation turned to the Greenback Party. “Are you afraid of the Greenbackers?” the conductor asked Blackburn. “Oh, no; they don’t mean us any harm,” the congressman replied. “I don’t think there will be any Greenbackers next year,” the conductor observed. “No,” Blackburn replied. “We will sit down on them the first chance we get.”1 The conversation neatly summarized the dilemma faced by Weaver and his fellow Greenbacks as they arrived in Washington in the winter of 1879. The aftermath of the closely contested 1876 presidential election embittered Democrats and fueled white-hot partisanship with strong sectional overtones. More than two years later, passions remained intense. But on one point Republicans and Democrats agreed: there was no place for the new party in the political struggles that preoccupied Washington. Weaver and his fellow Greenbacks would have to fight to make their voices heard over the partisan clamor that dominated the city. The Greenbacks elected to Congress in the 1878 elections arrived in Washington at the midpoint of one of the most polarized periods in American political history. In November 1876, Hayes received fewer popular votes than Tilden, but the outcome of the balloting in three southern states with Reconstruction governments—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina— remained uncertain. The electoral votes of the three states were enough to put Hayes in the White House—if he received all of them. In each state, Democrats and Republicans formed rival slates of presidential electors, and in January 1877, Congress appointed a fifteen-member commission—seven Democrats and eight Republicans—to sort out the competing claims.2 The panel awarded the electoral votes of Florida and South Carolina to

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Hayes and then met on February 16 to consider the case of Louisiana. Nerves were taut as Republican Joseph Bradley of New Jersey, an associate Supreme Court justice appointed to the commission at the last minute, launched into a lengthy speech to explain his vote. For the first twenty minutes of his oration, Bradley offered no hint of his position. James A. Garfield of Ohio, the Republican leader in the House, described waiting for Bradley’s decision as the most nerve-wracking experience he had endured since the war. When Bradley finally tipped his hand and indicated he would support the Republicans, Garfield recalled, “there was actual relief to all from the long suspense.” After several votes of eight to seven, the electoral commission awarded Louisiana’s votes to Hayes. In the end, Hayes received 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184.3 The circumstances of Hayes’s paper-thin victory set the stage for four years of extraordinarily bitter partisanship. Republicans and Democrats battled for political supremacy in a city that awkwardly straddled its rural past and urban future. Livestock grazed near the Capitol, and, while Pennsylvania Avenue had recently been paved, many city streets “alternated between dust and mud.” Just south of the White House, the Washington Monument, begun in 1848, remained unfinished. In 1877, Stilson Hutchins, a Democratic editor who had worked in Iowa and St. Louis, opened a new daily newspaper for the capital city, the Washington Post. At the White House, Hayes installed a telephone and bathrooms with running water as part of a general refurbishment of the executive mansion. The first lady, Lucy Hayes, began the custom of hosting an annual children’s Easter Egg hunt on the White House grounds and irritated the city’s sophisticates by banning alcohol from White House social functions. In public policy, the president took the first steps toward the creation of the modern Civil Service by placing limits on the political activities of federal employees while on the job.4 At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress entered a critical transition period. The ranks of the Forty-sixth Congress included the courtly Alexander Stephens of Georgia, a Democrat who interrupted his lengthy congressional career to serve as vice president of the Confederacy, and Republican Thomas Reed of Maine, who was first elected to Congress in 1876. Their contrasting political experiences highlighted the evolution that was occurring on Capitol Hill. Stephens came to Congress as a Whig in 1843, during the Tyler administration. His career on Capitol Hill encompassed debates on the Mexican War, the Wilmot Proviso, the Kansas-Nebraska


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Act, and secession, as well as the disputes of the post-Reconstruction era. Reed, likened by Weaver to a “ponderous tilt-hammer who seldom strikes, but when he does . . . requires a solid body to withstand the impact,” came to Washington just as Congress began to confront the economic and social consequences of industrialization. He would go on to become Speaker in 1889, when his domineering personality and overhaul of parliamentary procedures reshaped the House and earned him the unflattering nickname “Czar Reed.”5 Leading this unusual aggregation was a pair of political professionals hardened by the battles over Reconstruction and Hayes’s controversial election. Democratic leader Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania emerged from the machine politics of Philadelphia and earned a reputation as a committed partisan and skillful parliamentarian. Garfield, the Republican leader from Ohio, was a principled financial conservative. Greenback ally Adlai Stevenson described him as someone “gifted with rare powers of oratory, with an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of information at his command” who “knew no superior in debate.” In private, Garfield priggishly bemoaned the lack of qualities “pleasing to the intellect, or comforting to the hope” in American politics, but among his peers he demonstrated a capacity for shrewd political calculation.6 The fourteen-member Greenback caucus included members from the coalfields of Pennsylvania, the prairies of Illinois, and the hills of northern Alabama. Stevenson, who later returned to the Democratic Party, voted with the insurgent caucus. Rep. William Lowe of Alabama had enlisted as a private in the Confederate army and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel during the war. Hendrick Wright, a lifelong Democrat from the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, joined the Greenbacks and was the party’s candidate for Speaker.7 The geographical diversity of the small Greenback caucus illustrated the movement’s potential national reach and underlined the widespread disaffection with the leading parties. Another member of the caucus, a Methodist minister from Indianapolis, highlighted the party’s potential to appeal to Christians of conscience. From the pulpit of the Grace Methodist Church, the Rev. Gilbert De La Matyr preached a message that combined orthodox Protestant views on theology with strongly held opinions about current events. De La Matyr fulminated against Darwin and Roman Catholicism but spoke out with equal fervor against political corruption and the endemic poverty left by the economic

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tumult of the 1870s. In a notable sermon delivered on April 28, 1878, he warned that “there must be an escape” for the “masses” from the “tyranny of capital, or they will wage war on their oppressors.” These were not phrases that Methodists often heard from the pulpit, and some in Indianapolis denounced De La Matyr as a communist. But the title of the sermon, “Remedy for the Commune,” indicated that his goal was to prevent, rather than incite, revolution. De La Matyr’s sermon caught the attention of Indiana Greenbacks, and the party nominated him for Congress, with the support of district Democrats.8 Like Weaver, De La Matyr was a devout Christian who found the party’s reform message deeply compelling and consistent with biblical teaching. With Democrats holding a tenuous eighteen-vote majority in the House, Weaver and the Greenbacks seemed well positioned to extract concessions and win influence at the beginning of the forty-sixth Congress. But Republican and Democratic leaders shunned the insurgents at first. Support from the Greenbacks and a few disenchanted Democrats could have elected Garfield Speaker, but the Ohioan wanted nothing to do with the new party or its program. “The political pot in the city is boiling fiercely over organization of the House,” Garfield confided in his diary in March 1879. Even so, he instructed his Republican lieutenants “to say to everybody for me that we would make no trade with either Greenbackers or Democrats on the subject of the Speakership.” When the House retained Randall as Speaker, Garfield noted with relief that “the boast of any strength in the New Organization calling itself the Greenback Party amounted to but little.” Randall shared Garfield’s discomfort with the Greenback caucus. When the two leaders met to discuss the composition of House committees, Garfield recalled, Randall expressed his gratitude “for keeping our people aloof from the Greenbackers and is disposed to do whatever I suggest in regard to the Republican cast of the committees.”9 As champions of hard money and the Resumption Act, Republicans opposed the new party on principle. Democratic leaders feared that the Greenback program threatened the unity of their fractious caucus, which included soft-money supporters from the South and West as well as hardmoney backers from the financial centers of the Northeast. Greenback proposals for remedying the nation’s economic distress were as varied as the party’s congressional caucus, but the party rallied around several key points. Greenback lawmakers favored maintaining or expanding


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the supply of government-issued paper in circulation. The Greenbacks also supported the reintroduction of silver into the currency system, which had been the focus of reformers in the last session of Congress. Congress passed the Bland-Allison silver bill in 1878, over Hayes’s veto. But, to the displeasure of soft-money advocates, Allison amended the measure in the Senate to limit the amount of silver circulated as currency.10 In general, the Greenbacks advocated expanded use of government-issued paper money and silver to promote economic growth and counteract the impact of deflation. At the same time, Greenbacks charged that the banking system operated for the benefit of eastern and foreign financiers against the interests of farmers and laborers, and they wanted the government to control and regulate currency. Gillette, Weaver’s Greenback colleague from Iowa, characterized the system of bank-issued currency underwritten by government bonds as “an injustice to the people and favoritism to a class . . . without a rival.” Financial conservatives, on the other hand, believed that banks properly played a vital role in administering the nation’s currency. “The Government should prescribe general laws in reference to the quality and character of our paper money, but should never become the direct manufacturer and issuer of it,” Garfield argued.11 Kept at arm’s length by the Democratic and Republican leadership, there was little left for the Greenbacks to do but promote their agenda in the House through floor debate and oratory. Such a situation was made to order for Weaver, and he seized it with relish. An ideal opportunity quickly presented itself. Congress opened in March with a special session, called by Hayes because bickering by Democrats and Republicans had prevented passage of appropriations bills, one of which would fund the army. To these bills Democrats had attached riders aimed at blocking the deployment of federal troops at polling places to keep the peace, along with the appointment by federal judges of supervisors to monitor congressional elections. The Republican-controlled Senate in the forty-fifth Congress refused to pass the bills with these amendments, setting the stage for a dramatic confrontation between Capitol Hill, where Democrats now controlled the House and Senate, and the White House.12 The House almost immediately fell into a bitter and prolonged debate about the army bill. Garfield warned that refusing to pass appropriations bills amounted to a revolution against the government. Bourbon Democrats responded in equally histrionic tones. Rep. Otho Robards Singleton of

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Mississippi concluded a sullen stem-winder by vowing to work for repeal of the objectionable election laws, “no matter how much time, labor or expense it will involve.” As the showdown vote neared, speculation about the intentions of the Greenbacks increased, fanned by a brief front-page item in the Washington Post. The paper reported that Weaver planned to address the House but noted a surprising twist: Weaver “will not say much on the subject” that consumed Washington, but instead “proposes to take advantage of the opportunity to ‘outline the policy of the Greenback Party.’ ”13 On the afternoon of April 4, Weaver stood to address his colleagues. On the question at hand, he sought middle ground, briefly declaring his opposition both to the intimidation of black voters, which the laws in question aimed to prevent, and the presence of armed troops at the polls, which white southerners found intolerable. The remainder of the speech was devoted to the Greenback program. Speaking in “an easy and earnest style,” Weaver emphasized that the economy had become the most important problem facing the country. The public had moved beyond the issues of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Weaver asserted, and it was time for Congress to do the same. “I assure you that the people of this country have witnessed for many years with painful impatience the continuation of this sectional strife. It has become distasteful to them in every part of the Union where they have the control of their right reason,” Weaver declared. He advised Democrats that their prospects for winning the White House in 1880 depended on abandoning their alliance with Republican supporters of hard money—a policy that threatened to “dry up the fountains of prosperity for the people.” Referring to Garfield’s warning about the peril of revolution, Weaver argued that growing economic inequality, rather than legislative squabbling, posed the greatest threat to social order. “There is where the danger of revolution is to be looked for,” he warned.14 Given the shortsightedness of Democrats and Republicans, Weaver declared, a new party was needed to work for prosperity. Using the biblical imagery with which he was so familiar, he offered the following prediction: It was said of David, after he had collected the material to build the temple that should be dedicated to peace . . . that “David shall not build the temple, for David is a man of blood.” And so it has been said from on high, as I doubt not, that these old parties shall not build anew the temple of liberty in our beloved country, for they are parties of blood. A new organization


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must do it, and the Lord is raising up that party now. The workmen are all at work in the quarries, and every block in the temple shall be peace.15

Over the course of the next several months, Weaver intervened in House debates whenever there was a chance to argue for the Greenback position on monetary questions. In early May, the House debated a proposal, by Democratic Rep. A. J. Warner of Ohio, to authorize unlimited coinage of silver. The measure stood virtually no chance of becoming law, but, as the Republican New York Times noted ruefully, debate “would stimulate the movement for unlimited silver coinage throughout the country.”16 Weaver moved quickly to become one of the bill’s most prominent advocates. With characteristically vigorous oratory, he chastised gold supporters, summarized his support for expanded use of silver and paper money, and sparred with a number of anti-inflationist members of the House. Adopting the tone of a displeased schoolteacher, Weaver lamented the “levity, sarcasm, and abuse” showered on supporters of the Warner bill. “I have not,” Weaver scolded, “been highly impressed with the manner in which gentlemen who oppose this bill have discussed this question.” He then got to the heart of the Greenback case. He predicted that dependence on gold “will lead us into inevitable decline and pauperism.” He blamed the Resumption Act for the nation’s economic difficulties. “I want good money, but cheap money and dear property,” he declared. “We have just the reverse of this today.” Weaver warned darkly that the withdrawal of silver from the nation’s money supply in 1873 was the result of a “great international conspiracy, inaugurated by men who had fixed incomes . . . to the detriment of those who own the great bulk of the property of the world.” Nor was the removal of silver the only element of the conspiracy as described by Weaver. The national banks that issued currency notes benefited from the financial system by earning interest on U.S. Treasury bonds. “Hence you have ingrafted upon this Government as another step in the great conspiracy the system of permanent national banks and permanent national debt, the banks resting upon the debt,” Weaver charged.17 With his advocacy of soft money, invocation of conspiracy theories—although without the anti-Semitic coloration that marred the rhetoric of some of his colleagues—and attacks on the banks, Weaver advanced many of the themes developed by Greenbacks and Populists over the next twenty years. After Weaver concluded, skeptical conservatives peppered him with pointed questions. Republican Rep. John Mitchell of Pennsylvania asked Weaver if he

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had voted for President Grant, who as president supported currency contraction. Weaver allowed that he had, but explained that he had done so prior to his conversion to Greenback principles: “I was in the same condition with Saul of Tarsus when on his way to Damascus.” Rep. William Fletcher Sapp of Iowa demanded that Weaver concede that national bank charters expired after twenty years and that the banks, contrary to Weaver’s claim, were in no way permanent institutions. Weaver would have none of it. “As the law now stands they are about as perpetual as the human family,” Weaver said of the banks. “The Almighty says that the days of a man’s years shall be three score and ten. Was it the intention that at the death of my friend the human family shall cease?” The Congressional Record notes that Weaver’s riposte provoked “great laughter” in the House.18 Such was the effect of Weaver’s performance that Iowa Republican Hiram Price felt compelled several days later to respond. The Davenport banker accused his onetime ally in Iowa’s political wars of churning up dissatisfaction among voters with his rhetoric, and he denied that the currency system produced poverty. “Today a day’s labor will buy more of anything that a man eats or wears than it ever would at any time in the last fifty years of the history of this country,” Price claimed defensively.19 As the Times feared, the debate gave Weaver and like-minded lawmakers a national platform for making their case on monetary policy. Weaver’s oratorical efforts attracted considerable attention during his first months in Congress. His debut speech established him as the leading spokesman for the Greenback bloc. An account of the speech in the usually hostile Iowa State Register noted that “The Rev. De La Matyr, who it was supposed would be the leading orator of the Greenback party, will have to surrender his claims to Weaver, of Iowa, ‘the silver-tongued soft-money man of the Northwest,’ as his friends are fond of calling him.” Weaver made a particularly strong impression in New York, where reaction in the city’s political and journalistic establishment ranged from approval to predictable condemnation. Weaver’s speech caught the eye of New York reform politicians, who invited him to speak at the prestigious Cooper Institute. He also received mixed reviews but considerable publicity in the pages of the city’s newspapers. The New York World noted that it deplored the Greenback position on monetary matters but reported approvingly that Weaver and De La Matyr “surprised the House by the good points they made on the sectional issue.” On the other hand, the New York Times was not impressed. Reflecting the anxieties of Wall


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Street, the Times kept a worried eye on the Greenbacks in Congress, lambasting them at every opportunity in editorial and news columns. Weaver quickly became a favorite target for editorial vitriol. In May, as the House debated the Warner silver bill, the Times complained that “the spirit” of Weaver’s remarks about the measure “was practically as bitter and as uncompromising as that shown by the Socialists of Germany, or the Nihilists of Russia in their respective countries.”20 The often shrill criticism from the Times and other publications, which continued in the months to come, offered one measure of Weaver’s emergence as a national figure. While Weaver jousted on the House floor with Republicans, he maintained a healthy working relationship with his former partisan colleagues and occasionally voted with them on controversial matters. An early demonstration of his independence came in March, when Weaver and many of the Greenbacks sided with Republicans who wanted a disputed congressional election in Florida referred to the Committee on Elections. They were narrowly defeated, but Garfield noted approvingly in his diary that “all the Greenbackers voted with us” on the highly charged question. Apprehensive Democrats back in Iowa also took note, prompting Weaver to assure them that “the idea of my going back to the Republican party is simply silly.”21 In addition, Weaver found a kindred spirit at the top of the Republican leadership. In 1861, as a thirty-one-year-old abolitionist and university president, Garfield had been appointed colonel in an Ohio infantry regiment. He later fought at Shiloh and Chickamagua. Garfield and Weaver shared strong Christian beliefs and chatted about “evidence of the supernatural in individual existence.” Weaver recalled the Ohioan as “gentle, broad of faith, courteous and an interesting conversationalist” whose political principles and skills were fired by the experience of the Civil War.22 Weaver’s rapport with House Republicans protected his room to maneuver and proved crucial in the months ahead. When lawmakers returned to Washington for the second session of the forty-sixth Congress, Weaver pursued a strategy that turned the antagonism of Democrats and Republicans toward the Greenback program to the advantage of the new party and catapulted its agenda to the forefront of national politics. In January 1880, Weaver prepared a two-part non-binding resolution addressing monetary questions. The first section of the resolution aimed at putting the House on record as favoring an end to the banks’ role in monetary policy—by placing the federal government in charge of issuing currency and

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controlling its volume. The second part of the resolution declared that, “in the judgment of this House,” the federal government should repay the federal debt using all currency—including silver and “such other coinage” as may be required—as rapidly as possible. Each section of the resolution embodied basic principles of the Greenback bloc. Parliamentary rules allowed lawmakers to ask for recognition from the Speaker on Mondays to bring bills directly to the floor for action, and Weaver attempted to take advantage of the procedure to get a vote on his resolution.23 This put Randall, the Democratic Speaker of the House, on the spot. He could allow a debate that would call attention to the deep divisions within the Democratic Party on the incendiary monetary question, or he could block consideration of the measure by refusing to recognize Weaver. Randall stumbled into Weaver’s trap by choosing the latter course. “Weaver, the untamed Greenbacker from Iowa, made another effort to get the floor and make his time-honored motion to suspend the rules and pass his financial resolution, but Speaker Randall cut him off as he did last Monday by refusing to recognize him, an action which provoked some little discussion,” the Washington Post reported on February 10. Randall confided to Weaver that he did not want Democrats put on record regarding “mere abstractions” in a presidential election year. But the Speaker had not counted on the Iowan’s stubbornness, which soon began to pay dividends. “After a few weeks of fruitless effort,” Weaver recalled, “the [resolution] got into the papers and began to attract very wide attention. Crowds began to throng the galleries on Mondays” to observe the drama. Even the New York Times objected to the tactics used to block him. Weaver, the paper editorialized in early March, “can . . . enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that the cowardice and evasion” demonstrated by Democratic and Republican leaders will help the Greenback Party more “than a frank and fair disposal of his resolution by a vote of the House.” As the weekly drama continued, pressure on Randall increased. The Speaker was flooded with mail on the matter, Weaver wrote, with the correspondence evenly divided between those “praising him for his firmness and others denouncing him as a tyrant worthy of death.”24 Randall was not the only figure in the drama who was under attack. The Washington Post declared in late February that “Weaver, of Iowa, is rapidly becoming a grand Congressional nuisance.” Sniping from newspapers was nothing new for the proudly principled Weaver, but he was startled by the storm his tenacity provoked elsewhere. In early March, Harper’s Weekly


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published a full-page cartoon by Thomas Nast in which Weaver was portrayed as a toga-wearing donkey braying on the House floor—with “inflation resolutions” tucked under his arm—while the Speaker keeps his back turned. Other lawmakers are shown hiding under their desks or with their heads down and hands over their ears. Nast, whose talent for lampooning politicians had helped end the career of New York’s Boss Tweed, clearly struck a nerve. The sting remained painful when Weaver wrote about it twelve years later. “The imaginative genius of Nast was called upon to swell the volume of misrepresentation and ridicule,” Weaver remembered, complaining that the drawing was a “full page scurrillous [sic] travesty.” Nevertheless, he characteristically found a way to turn the sketch to his advantage by referring to a well-known Old Testament story. When Garfield asked Weaver on the House floor to explain the drawing, Weaver replied: “The large figure with the long ears, of course, represents me. You know that the ass in the Bible saw the angel before Balaam, his rider, saw him.”25 The jovial exchange suggests that Garfield’s initial suspicion of the Greenbacks had begun to lessen and that Weaver’s capacity for working with Republicans was paying off. Weaver’s ability to keep open lines of communication with the Republicans proved crucial in early April, as signs of a break in the standoff multiplied. In a commentary that suggested growing Democratic weariness with the controversy, the Washington Post editorialized on March 26 that if Randall had recognized Weaver, “the wheels of legislation would doubtless have moved on without jar or friction.” At the beginning of April, rumors circulated—apparently with the approval of Randall—that Weaver would be recognized for purposes of bringing up his resolution. But winning recognition was only half the battle, Weaver realized. To get the rollcall vote he wanted, he would need more support than the fourteen-member Greenback caucus could provide. Without additional backing, Weaver recalled, the likelihood of a recorded vote was “exceedingly dark.”26 Weaver then approached Garfield with an audacious proposal. Weaver noted that Republicans had long proclaimed their opposition to the Greenback monetary program. He asserted that many Democrats waffled on the issue, supporting currency expansion at home but backing contraction on Capitol Hill. A recorded vote on the resolutions, Weaver suggested to Garfield, would pin Democrats down and give Republicans an opportunity to go on record against the currency measures favored by the Greenbacks.

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“We asked him,” Weaver recounted, “if he could not, in view of these facts, assist in securing a yea or nay vote?”27 With another competitive and bitter presidential election campaign looming, the appeal to Garfield’s partisan instincts could not have been more perfectly timed or more effective. Only a year earlier, Garfield implacably opposed any dealing with the Greenbacks. Now he found that Weaver’s proposal, which offered the prospect of sowing dissension among Democrats, merited consideration. Garfield “replied that he would consult with his colleagues and give us an answer that afternoon,” Weaver wrote. “In the course of an hour he reported that his side of the House would join in the demand for a record of the vote.”28 On April 5, as Weaver stood to seek recognition from the Speaker of the House, many observers—apparently unaware of the rumored likelihood of recognition or the deal with Garfield—expected the Greenback leader would be shut out once again. The Times, reverting to form, predicted that morning that Weaver would fail once again and that no one would grieve over the unwillingness of the House to take up “the propositions of the Iowa financier.” But the rumors were confirmed when Randall recognized Weaver. As promised, Garfield interceded on Weaver’s behalf when objections were raised to proceeding, and the House, with many members abstaining, voted 81 to 27 to continue. The debate for which Weaver had agitated since the beginning of the year was finally under way.29 Garfield took full advantage of the opportunity to declaim against the Greenbacks and their program. He charged that the terms of the resolution would put undue power in the hands of the government by putting Washington, rather than the banks, in control of regulating currency volume. “This scheme surpasses all the centralism and all the Caesarism that were ever charged upon the republican party in the wildest days of the war or in the events growing out of the war,” Garfield asserted. He dismissed the pledge to pay off government obligations as quickly as possible as an irresponsible formula for inflation. Garfield concluded with an indignant denunciation of the Greenbacks and a challenge to Democrats that must have rung hollow to those aware of his role in bringing the measure to the floor. “This monster is to be let loose on the country as the last spawn of the dying party that thought it had a little life in it a year ago. It is put out at this moment to test the courage of the two political parties; it is offered at this moment when the roar of the presidential contest comes to us from all quarters of the country . . . Let both


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parties show their courage by meeting boldly and putting an end to its power for mischief.”30 Weaver fired back. “Who shall issue the currency and control its volume?” he demanded. “Shall the bankers control it for their own selfish ends, or shall its issue and volume be controlled by the whole people for the benefit of all?” Weaver scoffed at the accusation of dictatorial “centralism,” noting that the Greenbacks favored putting currency under the control of the democratically elected Congress, while Garfield believed “bankers . . . who are not chosen by the people, or elected by them, are to be trusted with this great power involving the happiness and welfare of fifty millions of people.” The Greenbacks stood for financial responsibility, Weaver assured the House. The party “squarely opposed” the repudiation of government debts but instead advocated paying off bonds issued to banks, while financial interests wanted such obligations funded in perpetuity. “In the name of the humble poor who struggle not for office, and who simply want a fair chance in the race of life, I ask you to give one vote for the Republic,” Weaver declared. “Let there be no dodging to-day, no hiding in the cloakroom; you cannot serve two masters. You cannot avoid the issue if you would. It is vital, permeating all classes, and engaging the attention of the people as never before in our history. This is a supreme moment in the history of the men and of parties in this House. Reflect well before you vote.”31 Weaver’s eloquence failed to carry the day. The resolution was defeated, 117 to 84. Most votes in favor of the measure came from Greenbacks and southern and midwestern Democrats, while Republicans supplied most of the opposition. Significantly, ninety-one members, including forty-eight Democrats and forty Republicans, did not vote.32 The large number of abstentions not only suggests that Weaver’s suspicions about Democrats were correct but also indicates that many Republicans were uncomfortable with the resolution as well. Noting that Weaver won recognition but lost the debate, the Washington Post described the proceedings as “Weaver’s Paradoxical Success.” While the House rejected Weaver’s resolution, the episode could hardly be called a defeat for the fledgling Greenback party. As a result of Weaver’s efforts, lawmakers debated the central tenets of the party’s program, despite the resistance of the House leadership. The vote provided an important measure of the support for the Greenback monetary position among rank-and-file Democrats, and it foreshadowed the divisions that would come to dominate American politics before the century ended. Referring to Garfield’s characterization of

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the Greenbacks, the Times observed sourly that “the ‘dying party’ mustered forty-two percent of the entire vote cast. Among these were fifty percent of the Democratic votes in the House, and sixty percent of all the votes from the South. . . . Politically, and with reference to its sectional distribution, the vote was extremely significant.”33 Moreover, the lengthy controversy put the Greenback party, its economic platform, and Weaver at the center of the national political debate on the eve of the presidential election campaign. Weaver’s perseverance, political acumen, and love for the cut and thrust of debate had served the insurgent movement well. Many years later, Weaver reflected on the qualities possessed by successful leaders in Congress. They must possess “breadth of learning,” “fixed convictions,” familiarity with legal and parliamentary rules, and the ability “to skillfully wield this knowledge at a moment’s notice.” They need to be well acquainted with their fellow members and “discern the purposes of an adversary when merely in the germ.” An adroit leader “will never underestimate the strength of an opponent or be taken by surprise. He must be quick, versatile, and able to lay bare the iniquities of a scheme, the duplicity or fallacy of an adversary at a single blow. And above all he must, among those of his school, be the leader in current political thought.” Weaver prospered on Capitol Hill because he possessed many of these qualities. He reveled in the oratorical opportunities of debate. As perhaps the most articulate and energetic member of the Greenback caucus, he quickly became the party’s leading spokesman. In addition, his behind-the-scenes maneuvering on the financial resolutions demonstrated that he was a shrewd legislative tactician. “When a man possesses these qualities he can be trusted to lead,” Weaver wrote. “And, as such characters are rare, it will be readily understood why he should quickly become a national figure.”34 Little more than a year after arriving in Washington, Weaver’s parliamentary and oratorical skills placed him at the head of the Greenback Party—just as the nation braced for another closely fought presidential campaign.

chapter seven

To Appeal to the People “

T

he roar of the presidential contest,” to which Garfield alluded, had been building for some time. With Hayes vowing not to seek reelection, the 1880 campaign appeared on course to be another closely fought contest between the two major parties. Democrats, keen to avenge their narrow defeat in 1876, eagerly anticipated capturing the White House for the first time in twenty-four years, and deep divisions in the Republican Party raised their hopes. “Stalwart” conservative Republicans supported a third term for Ulysses S. Grant, while “half-breed” moderates lined up behind Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine. The battle between Blaine and Grant aggravated a feud between the Maine senator and Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York, a leading Stalwart who backed Grant and controlled a vast federal patronage empire in his home state. Democrats and Republicans were not the only ones thinking about the presidential campaign. As early as May 1879, Iowa Greenbacks were calling for Weaver to run for president.1 In January 1880, as Weaver was beginning his battle in the House for a vote on his financial resolution, Greenback activists gathered in Washington to select a site for a national convention and decide on rules for representation at the gathering. The assembly of the National Greenback-Labor Party featured a wide variety of political personalities and viewpoints. Delegates “with the characteristic American look of the heavy ‘business man’ ” rubbed shoulders with well-groomed dandies sporting fashionable haircuts and waxed mustaches. Also on hand were laborers from farms and factories, men with hands “hard with toil” who regarded “refinements of dress or manner as an abomination of the ‘money power.’” The monetary policy and currency questions that preoccupied committed Greenbacks attracted reformers concerned about a variety of other issues, ranging from the anti-monopolist fear of concentrated economic power to women’s suffrage and working conditions in the nation’s factories. “It was a kaleidescopic [sic] crowd, and argued the existence of a platform as broad as that of the old anti-slavery party, on which every living creature found foothold,” the Washington Post concluded.2 While the comparison to the anti-slavery movement held some superficial validity, there was one important difference. The Free Soil Party evolved into

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the Republican Party under the leadership of politically skilled ex-Whigs and anti-slavery former Democrats, who maintained the loyalty of reformers while guiding the new party to victory at the polls. Managing the combustible combination of visionaries, idealistic reformers, eccentrics, and demagogues gathered under the Greenback banner would prove to be a much tougher challenge. During the first day’s proceedings, delegates heard resolutions calling for a graduated income tax, a federal bureau of labor standards, and support for Charles Stewart Parnell, the leader of the movement for Irish home rule.3 While often spirited, the group’s deliberations on the first day maintained a semblance of order. This would not last long. Signs of volatility appeared in dramatic form the next day. The first sign of trouble concerned Brick Pomeroy, the influential editor and organizer who appeared in Ottumwa as Weaver campaigned for Congress in 1878. Pomeroy stayed away from the Washington meeting in a feud over the organization of the party and its program. He and his followers believed that all federal bonds should immediately be redeemed in paper money—a sweeping proposition that many moderate Greenbacks rejected. Delegates noted and denounced Pomeroy’s absence.4 Not long after delegates finished fulminating against Greenback schismatics, a California firebrand hijacked the proceedings. Denis Kearney, who rose from the anti-Chinese rioting of the Sand Lot Movement in San Francisco to take the leadership of the Workingmen’s Party of California, advocated the Greenback soft-money economic reform while spewing racist anti-Asian rhetoric. As Weaver finished an address in which he reviewed the gains made by Greenbacks and urged the party to embark on “calm and deliberate action and thorough organization,” calls came from the floor to allow Kearney to speak. Weaver pleaded with the gathering to stick to its agenda, but he was overruled. Kearney then launched a tirade in which he charged that the Republican Party had fallen under the control of “bank directors” he denounced as “ironhoofed scoundrels, who were shod in hell.” The Democratic Party, Kearney continued, “is run by the tools of these scoundrels.” Kearney vowed to send bankers “to the lowermost regions of hell” and suggested that if the delegates “had any nerve, they would hang John Sherman for occupying an office he does not fill.” Kearney’s fiery oratory produced applause and cheers; it was reprised at an evening session, at which he assailed Chinese laborers for living on “rice and rats” and wearing “their shirts outside of their pants.”5

To Appeal to the People

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Kearney’s rhetorical excesses typified the proceedings during the final day of the conference, which was conducted in an atmosphere of “continuous discord and confusion.” Although delegates voted on the first day of the conference to include a women’s suffrage advocate on the party’s executive committee, supporters of the cause were shouted down the next day when they attempted to put the meeting on record as endorsing the right of women to vote. Continuing disorder forced the chairman of the conference, Rep. Thompson H. Murch of Maine, to adjourn the meeting. “The breaking up of the conference occurred during a perfect pandemonium of discord, and several speakers, mounted on benches in different portions of the hall, harangued imaginary audiences,” the Washington Post reported.6 The tumult overshadowed a statement of beliefs produced by the party leadership that reached beyond the committed, but relatively small, collection of paper money enthusiasts to a broader audience of reformers. Entitled “The Crisis” and read to the assembly by De La Matyr, the statement declared that the upcoming election would prove to be a crucial turning point in American history. Nothing less than control of the government, which had fallen under the sway of “bankers, stock-jobbers, land-grabbers, and professional politicians to the exclusion of those whose labor produces its wealth and pays its taxes,” was at stake. On the economy, the Greenbacks avoided a detailed discussion of currency issues but offered a dire analysis of economic trends and their implications. Monopolies had seized the “fruits of productive enterprise” and controlled a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth. “The very foundations of popular government are questioned and assailed, and the Republic itself is in imminent peril,” the statement warned. In conclusion, the statement called for holding a presidential nominating convention on June 9 in Chicago.7 While no doubt dismayed by Kearney’s bombast and the general chaos of the conference, Weaver could take heart from one development. During the first day of the proceedings, a New York delegate read a letter from Greenback elder statesman Peter Cooper urging a party leadership role for Sen. Allen Thurman, a Democrat from Ohio. The proposal drew hisses from the delegates, but the mention from the floor of Weaver and Benjamin Butler as alternatives produced applause. Weaver’s standing with the party’s rank and file may have encouraged him to tell the Post in February that, no matter what the Democrats and Republicans did, the Greenbacks “shall nominate a third ticket in any event. We expect nothing from either the Republican

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or Democratic parties. The people demand relief, and we cannot get it from Congress. Now we propose to appeal to the people.”8 The Republicans were the first to select a candidate, gathering at Chicago’s glittering Interstate Industrial Exposition Building, known locally as the “Glass Palace.” Banners and portraits of Republican leaders festooned the interior of the brick and iron structure, along with drawings of the party’s symbol—an elephant, rendered by Nast in Harper’s Weekly, to illustrate the qualities of reliability and solidity. The estimated 50,000 visitors in town for the convention included Susan B. Anthony, there to press the case for women’s suffrage, and Prince Leopold of Belgium. The convention opened with all the color and pomp of a nineteenth-century American political carnival, and it held its first ballot on Monday, June 7. Grant led with 304 delegates, short of the 379 needed to win the nomination. It proved to be the longest nomination battle in Republican history. As delegates slogged through one inconclusive ballot after another, Garfield, the convention’s presiding officer, began to emerge as a dark-horse candidate around whom delegates opposed to Grant’s nomination rallied. On the 36th ballot, Garfield received 399 votes and the nomination. The sudden turn of events produced jubilation and relief on the convention floor but left the Ohioan in shock. In an overture to the Conkling-led New York delegation, the vice presidential nomination was offered to Chester A. Arthur, Conkling’s lieutenant in New York politics. The Democratic convention proved far less dramatic. Meeting in late June in Cincinnati, the party selected Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock on the second ballot and chose former congressman William H. English of Indiana as its vice presidential candidate.9 Discord distracted the Greenbacks in the months leading up to their meeting in Chicago. Followers of Pomeroy, meeting as the Union Greenback Labor Party, convened in St. Louis in March and nominated Stephen D. Dillaye for president and Barzalai J. Chambers for vice president. Showing a flare for political theater, Pomeroy appeared before the gathering carrying an American flag decorated with an image of a greenback dollar pierced by a bayonet. He urged delegates to maintain a separate identity from the National Greenback-Labor organization that met in Washington but recommended that they attend the Chicago convention. He then stunned followers by announcing that he was retiring from Greenback politics. Although motivated chiefly by personal business concerns, Pomeroy’s withdrawal from


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the movement he worked so hard to build in the late 1870s also reflected his disappointment with the dominance of the moderate National Greenback movement. In the end, he reportedly voted for Garfield.10 As the Greenback convention approached, Weaver conducted some behindthe-scenes political reconnaissance. A few days before the Greenbacks assembled in Chicago, Weaver and Gillette met with Illinois Sen. David Davis, the one-time associate of Abraham Lincoln who helped direct Lincoln’s campaign at the 1860 Republican convention in Chicago. Long a hero of independents and left-leaning reformers, the stout former Supreme Court justice had declined the National Labor Reform Party’s presidential nomination in 1872. During a three-hour meeting in a committee room of the Capitol, Weaver and Gillette urged Davis to accept the Greenback nomination. But while Davis made his sympathies for the insurgent party plain, he turned Weaver and Gillette down. Whether Weaver and Gillette met with Davis to encourage his candidacy or simply to ascertain his intentions, the Illinois senator’s refusal meant that the only candidate who rivaled Weaver’s national reputation was Butler, whose record as a Civil War general made him a highly controversial figure in the South. Iowa Greenbacks declared their preferences in May, when the state convention endorsed Weaver as the party’s candidate.11 On June 9, the Greenbacks filed into the Glass Palace in Chicago just vacated by exhausted Republicans. Portraits of Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, and other Republican heroes stared down at the delegates. As in Washington, the convention included a broad spectrum of personalities. Kearney was back, as vocal as he had been earlier in the year. Also present was Anthony, who had failed in her quest to get the Republicans to endorse women’s suffrage. She may have had reason to expect better treatment from the Greenbacks. A speaking tour of Iowa in 1875 included an appearance in Bloomfield, where Anthony may have learned of the Weavers’ strong support for extending the franchise to women. In addition to these disparate personalities, the convention also drew representatives from allied political organizations. Pomeroy’s Union Greenback Labor Party held a perfunctory gathering at Chicago’s Farwell Hall and then dispatched a delegation to the National Greenback convention. The Socialist Labor Party also sent a forty-four-member delegation to the assembly.12 To the surprise of no one who witnessed the party’s meeting in Washington, the National Greenback-Labor convention opened on a disputatious note, as delegates debated what to do about the Republican banners still hanging

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in the hall. An initial attempt by women’s suffrage advocates to press their case met with derision from Kearney, who insisted that the convention not waste time on such matters. “I had to beg money to come here,” he declared, “and I insist upon the convention proceeding to business and referring all the woman suffrage matters to a committee consisting of the daughters of Eve, to report back to a convention that will meet here in fifty years.” Kearney’s effort to silence supporters of women’s suffrage failed, but he remained unreconciled. The following day he told the convention that if he endorsed women’s suffrage, he could expect to be greeted by his wife with a flatiron instead of a kiss when he returned home. Sarah Andrews Spencer of Washington, D.C. retorted that she was gratified to learn who made the decisions in Kearney’s family.13 Despite Kearney’s patronizing hostility, the Greenbacks ultimately proved receptive to women’s suffrage advocates. On the first day of the convention, Anthony made an eloquent plea for votes for women, declaring that she represented half the population denied a voice in the government. “Everything in the form of manhood is respected and honored by having the right to vote, whether he be native or foreigner, black or white, rich or poor, drunk or sober—every man outside the state prison and the lunatic asylum,” she told the Greenback delegates. “I was here before the great Republican Party to get the same right for women, but they only bowed us in politely and bowed us out empty-handed.” Anthony expressed the hope that the Greenbacks would not similarly decide to put off the suffrage issue. In the end, the party platform was silent on the question, but the convention adopted a resolution calling for the full enfranchisement of “every citizen” of legal age and sound mind who was not a felon. Referring to the eroding position of blacks in the postReconstruction South, the party platform denounced “as most dangerous the efforts everywhere manifest to restrict the right of suffrage.”14 The platform took a less enlightened tone on the topic of Chinese immigration. Kearney and his followers won a victory with a plank that denounced “the importation and presence of Chinese serfs” for degrading the position of American labor and called for abrogation of the Burlingame Treaty, which regulated Chinese immigration to the United States. But on other questions, the Greenbacks proved more progressive. The platform opened with the straightforward assertion that “the right to make and issue money is a sovereign power to be maintained by the people for the common benefit.” The monetary planks served as the scaffolding for a far-reaching program that addressed a variety of social, political, and economic issues. The Greenbacks


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called for a graduated income tax and demanded regulation of working conditions in factories and the abolition of child and convict labor. The party also noted that Congress possessed the power to set rules for interstate commerce, declaring that railroad passenger and freight rates should therefore be subject to legislative control.15 Weaver’s commanding position in the battle for the party’s presidential nomination became apparent as the convention dragged on into the morning of June 11 and began the business of selecting a candidate. Rep. Seth Yocum nominated his fellow Pennsylvanian, Hendrick Wright. Thomas Buchanan, the Indianapolis Greenback editor, nominated Benjamin Butler—a move that prompted derisive cries of “spoons” from the floor, in reference to Butler’s alleged habit of pilfering silverware. All told, seven candidates were nominated, but when an informal ballot was taken shortly after 4 a.m., Weaver stood more than 100 votes in front of Wright and 131 ahead of Butler. As the first formal ballot got underway, Weaver’s advantage quickly turned into a stampede. One by one, rival candidates dropped out, and, as the first light of day filtered through the eastern windows of the Glass Palace, Weaver’s nomination as the Greenback-Labor Party’s presidential candidate was made unanimous. As a unity gesture, the convention placed Chambers, the Union Greenback choice for vice president, in the ticket’s No. 2 position.16 Accompanied by a brass band, Weaver arrived in the convention hall at about 6 a.m. “A scene of wild enthusiasm prevailed,” The Chicago Tribune reported. Compared with the verbose but weary delegates, Weaver, his “countenance . . . illumined by smiles,” was well rested and succinct. He thanked the convention for its confidence, accepted the trust placed in him, and promised a fuller statement of acceptance later. The exhausted convention then adjourned.17 Back in Bloomfield, Weaver’s political friends and foes temporarily set aside partisan differences to hold a reception soon after the convention for the hometown figure now running for president. T. O. Walker, editor of the Bloomfield Democrat and Weaver’s bitter foe in the 1870s, and John Hamilton, editor of the Davis County Republican, congratulated their rival on his success at the convention. Henry Trimble, the local Democrat who played a key role in Weaver’s 1878 congressional campaign, noted his long relationship with Weaver and paid tribute to his integrity. “What the future may have in store for him, none of us are wise enough to know; but I am assured that if Gen. Weaver is called to fill any high place he will not . . . yield to the seductive

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temptations of public plunder himself, nor tolerate it in others, and that he will bring to bear to the discharge of duty, unflinching courage, uncompromising integrity and a fair share of push and perseverance.”18 In July, Weaver issued his formal acceptance statement. He congratulated the convention for unifying the disparate Greenback and labor factions under one banner, and he indulged in a bit of forgivable puffery when he referred to “the three great parties”—putting the insurgent Greenbacks on the same level as the Republicans and Democrats. In a brief nod to the xenophobia of Kearney and his followers, Weaver agreed that the “importation of Chinese servile laborers should be prohibited by stringent laws,” but most of his declaration focused on the economic and political aspects of the Greenback program. Reprising the theme of his battle in Congress, he declared that only the government should be empowered to issue currency and echoed the party’s demand that Congress regulate railroads and interstate commerce. “Capital should be the servant of labor, rather than its master,” he declared, but for that to happen the country needed an “adequate circulating medium” to put an end to contraction. Notably, he combined a call for an end to sectional acrimony with an eloquent plea for a “free ballot, a fair count and equal rights for all classes—for the laboring man in Northern manufactories, mines and workshops, and for the struggling poor, both white and black, in the cotton fields of the South.”19 Racial harmony, in Weaver’s view, was an essential ingredient of sectional peace. Weaver concluded with a promise to reach out to voters in a manner considered highly unorthodox at the time. “In consequence of the great avenues to public opinion—the press, the bar and the pulpit—being mainly under the control of the enemies of our movement, your convention thought proper to request its candidates to visit the various sections of the Union, and talk to the people,” Weaver wrote, acknowledging the enormous advantages enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans. “It is my intention to comply with this request to the extent of my ability.”20 Although Horace Greeley campaigned in person in his quixotic 1872 race against Grant, nineteenth-century presidential candidates generally eschewed the active courtship of voters as unseemly. In the 1880 race, Garfield and Hancock adhered to tradition, staying at their homes after winning their nominations. Each relied on an extensive network of party functionaries at the state and national levels, as well as on the highly partisan press of the day, to reach voters. The Greenbacks enjoyed no such luxuries. But Weaver drew


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on two of his greatest strengths—his ample energy and oratorical skills—to take the Greenback case directly to the voters. In the years to come, more presidential candidates would follow Weaver’s example and play an increasingly active role in seeking the support of voters. Weaver’s decision to take his campaign to the people helped smash the taboo against electioneering by presidential candidates and was an important step in the evolution of the modern presidential campaign. Weaver began his ambitious national canvass in early July, with an eye toward the South. On July 7, newspaper reports from New York indicated that he planned stops in Richmond, Virginia and Alabama before concluding in Dallas on July 15. At first, Chambers, Weaver’s vice presidential running mate, aided in the effort. The sixty-three-year-old veteran of the Texas War of Independence against Mexico spoke to a radical meeting in St. Louis, where he applauded communists and socialists as “a body of men battling for human rights.” But less than a week later, he injured himself falling off a railroad station platform in Texas and returned home to recuperate. Chambers sat out the rest of the campaign, waiting until August to formally accept the party’s vice presidential nomination.21 It would be up to Weaver to lead the party’s campaign. The Greenback canvass opened with professions of optimism. “It is a campaign with possibilities,” an unnamed party manager told the New York Graphic in early July, “and we shall use every one of them.” Weaver also indulged in some brave talk about his goals. On a stop in Chattanooga before heading into Alabama, he told a reporter that he expected to carry a wide swath of southern states, including Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Weaver added that he hoped for a strong showing in several Northern states, including Iowa and Minnesota. If none of the candidates received a majority of electoral votes and the race went to the House of Representatives, the Greenbacks would control the balance of power.22 This scenario may have gladdened the hearts of the party faithful, but it is doubtful that Weaver really believed it. He was an optimist by nature, but he was too experienced in practical politics to expect that the Greenbacks stood a chance of capturing the White House. Events would soon compel him to make more candid—and more realistic—pronouncements about the campaign. Weaver’s arrival in Alabama highlighted the Greenback appeal to black voters in the South. African American party activists recruited white and black

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supporters and organized party chapters in communities near Huntsville and Birmingham. When Weaver spokes in Huntsville, “squads of men, white and black” turned out to hear him. It soon became clear, however, that Greenback hopes in Dixie would be dashed by changing political conditions. A taste of things to come occurred in June, when a rally of black Republicans in downtown Montgomery was broken up with pistols and rotten eggs. Over the course of the summer and fall, increasingly bold Democrats perpetrated similar outrages and manipulated vote counts. Toward the end of the campaign, Weaver declared with disgust that “if any man carries a solid south and is elected to the presidency by it he will be elected by ballot-box stuffing and destruction of the ballot.”23 As summer gave way to fall, Greenback hopes for benefiting from a biracial coalition of poor whites and blacks in the South fell victim to the corrupt and often violent reassertion of white dominance by Bourbon Democrats. The southern campaign swing also led to a meeting that set the stage for allegations of double dealing by Weaver and the Greenbacks. While in Birmingham, Weaver conferred with newspaper editor William M. Edwardy, who claimed to be a supporter of the new party and sought financial help from the Greenbacks for his newspaper. Weaver declined to make any commitments before speaking to Lowe and other Alabama Greenbacks. Upon arriving in Montgomery, Weaver was warned by Lowe and other party officials “not to rely on Mr. Edwardy in the least—that he is a small man and wholly unreliable.” The spurned editor retaliated with an article for the Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer at the end of July, in which he charged that Weaver had confessed that the Greenbacks were working with Republicans and planned to divide Alabama’s electoral votes between the two parties. While campaigning in West Virginia, Weaver issued a statement denouncing the allegation as “willfully and unscrupulously false.” At first, Edwardy’s allegations seemed to make little impression on the party faithful, who rallied around their standard bearer. One Arkansas Greenback newspaper characterized Edwardy as “A Political Tramp in the Role of Judas Iscariot.”24 But the incident foreshadowed difficulties Weaver would face as the campaign continued. Weaver’s travels through the South produced one memorable encounter that highlighted his emphasis on sectional rapprochement. At a Greenback rally in Prescott, Arkansas, a Confederate amputee introduced Weaver. Before the meeting began, Weaver learned that his host had lost a leg at Shiloh, where Weaver and the Second Iowa Infantry had fought almost 20 years earlier.


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“He lost a leg in the confederate service, but he was presiding at my meeting,” Weaver marveled several days later, at a Greenback rally in Terre Haute, Indiana. “He got up before the vast audience, displaying his stump of a leg, and said: ‘General Weaver, you were in the service of the United States, fighting under the stars and stripes. I was in the confederate service, fighting for slavery. Here, in the presence of this vast audience, I extend my hand to you, and my heart. The boys in grey are with you in Arkansas, and we are fighting for freedom and the flag in Arkansas.”25 The exchange clearly moved Weaver, who continued throughout the campaign to call for an end to sectional strife. Not long after his Arkansas appearance, Weaver took his campaign north, where he was often greeted with enthusiasm. On August 21, in Terre Haute, a railroad hub that was home to Eugene V. Debs, a band and a torchlight procession welcomed the Greenback presidential candidate, who delivered a wideranging summation of the party’s monetary program. The size and passion of the Terre Haute crowd appears to have thrown Weaver off stride. During the course of his speech, he urged his listeners several times to be more attentive, “for I want to leave some lasting impression on the minds of the people before me.” Six days later, Weaver spoke to a large crowd at Faneuil Hall in Boston, which included Greenback delegations from Worcester, Springfield, Fitchburg, Fall River, and Lawrence. A 750-member Greenback club from Lynn, holding aloft a transparency and led by a brass band, raised spirits “to the highest pitch.” “Every available inch of standing, sitting and lounging room was occupied by an enthusiastic audience, who emphasized every telling point made by the gallant general with demonstrations of appreciation,” the Boston Globe reported.26 By early September, Democrats and their allies in the press were clearly worried about the progress of the Greenback campaign and its potential to drain votes from Hancock. The Washington Post, which supported Hancock, denounced Weaver as “the assistant Republican candidate for the Presidency” who “has satisfactorily proved himself in the last month to be a foul-mouthed demagogue and an unconscionable liar.” Ironically, the Democratic attacks on Weaver intensified as the insurgent party made its first real inroads in the campaign at the expense of Republicans. On September 13 in Maine, Greenback gubernatorial candidate Harris Plaisted was elected with Democratic support over his Republican opponent. Weaver campaigned for Plaisted but, to the irritation of many in his party, opposed the fusion of the Democratic and Greenback presidential elector slates. After

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analyzing developments in Maine, Blaine concluded that Republicans could learn a lesson from the Greenbacks by emphasizing economic issues rather than appealing to the faded bloody shirt. Over the course of the next seven weeks, as Democrats and their sympathizers took aim at Weaver, Republicans adjusted their rhetoric and stressed the party’s support for high tariffs and hard money.27 On the day Maine voters elected Plaisted, Weaver spoke to a Greenback rally at the Cooper Union in New York. A rainy night held down attendance, but a large crowd—estimated by the New York Times at 3,000—nonetheless turned out for the meeting at which Cooper, the party’s 1876 candidate, presided. Before Weaver spoke, the crowd serenaded him to the tune of “America”: God bless our candidates Our noble candidates God bless them both. May blessings e’er pursue Weaver so brave and true Chambers, of Texas, too— God bless them both.28 Weaver’s address presaged Bryan’s argument in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech that the wealth of America’s great cities depends on the prosperity of the farmer. Weaver noted that the city’s millions “receive their bread from the great agricultural districts of this nation” and asserted that the prosperity of New York depends upon “the prosperity of the whole Union.” He equated the power to issue currency with the power to declare war, and he asked why the government did not exercise direct control over the nation’s money supply. He charged that Democrats and Republicans were virtually indistinguishable on the currency question and argued that it is the “high calling” of the Greenbacks to “antagonize both of these old organizations and to expose their errors to the public judgment.”29 Weaver acknowledged the setbacks suffered by the Greenbacks in the South but blamed them squarely on Democratic abuses at the ballot box. If not for fraudulent ballot counting in Alabama’s state elections, he asserted, the Greenbacks would have carried the state by 40,000 votes. He detailed the abuses that kept a Greenback candidate for sheriff in DeSoto County, Mississippi, off the ballot and described how another Greenback candidate in


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the same county had been shot. Such events represented “a terrible cancer on the body politic,” Weaver warned. “I would rather have both hands wither by my side than cover up such a state of affairs as that in this country.” Republicans were equally responsible for conditions in the South, Weaver argued, noting that they had held the presidency since Lincoln’s election in 1860 but had utterly failed to pacify the region. “Pardon me for not looking to you to provide a remedy—a party that has been in power for 20 years.” Weaver claimed that the Greenback Party’s program made it ideally suited to emerge as a national political movement. “Finance, complete suffrage, control of the corporations, restoration of the South to fraternal relations, and a free election and a fair count, all these great questions are with this party—the Greenback party.”30 Despite the stirring rhetoric, a healthy dose of realism colored Weaver’s analysis. No longer was there brave talk about carrying a wide swath of southern states and forcing the election into the House. Weaver made it clear that his goal in this campaign was building the foundations of a strong, new political party. “It may not be in the economy of the present struggle that we shall be successful,” he conceded, “but I am persuaded that when we get through with this contest we will come out of it with a clean party that a reasonable man can get into.”31 Weaver’s New York appearance impressed the usually hostile Times, which described the Iowan as a “courteous and polished gentleman” who made “a comparatively moderate Greenback speech.” Not long after the cheering stopped, however, the charge that Weaver was working on behalf of the Republicans resurfaced. On September 26, Frank Hughes, a leading Pennsylvania Greenback, denounced Weaver for failing to back fusion with Democrats in Maine, asserting that Weaver’s posture meant that Garfield would get the state’s seven electoral votes. Weaver denied the allegation and characterized Hughes as a “slanderer and calumniator.” Five days later, Dyer Lum, a Greenback Party functionary, alleged that Weaver accepted money from the Republican National Committee to campaign in Democraticleaning states and stay out of Republican states. Lum typified the politically eccentric personality that seemed to gravitate to the Greenbacks. An enthusiast for causes and movements of all kinds, over the course of his life he embraced spiritualism, Buddhism, anarchism, and trade unionism. He supported the Socialist Labor Party but late in life appeared to endorse the lynching of southern blacks, before eventually committing suicide.32

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Lum’s accusations, printed in the Democratic New York Star and given wide circulation in other Democratic newspapers, damaged the fragile coalition assembled under the umbrella of the Greenback-Labor Party. Campaigning in Indiana, Weaver angrily denied Lum’s charges, declaring boldly, “I defy all traitors in Christendom to injure me in the least.” Weaver issued a detailed accounting of his expenses to disprove the charge of Republican aid, but found himself on the defensive for the remainder of the campaign. In Connecticut, Greenback editor Alexander Troup concluded that the Lum letter provided “the clearest evidence that could be desired” of treachery by Weaver. Stephen Dillaye, one of the leaders of Pomeroy’s Union Greenback faction who had briefly been its presidential candidate, also piled on, calling Weaver a “traitor” who was secretly working for Garfield. Dillaye later retracted his statements.33 Weaver’s attitude toward fusion was entirely tactical. As demonstrated in his 1878 congressional race in Iowa, he was willing to embrace fusion with Democrats when it suited Greenback purposes, but he steadfastly opposed cooperating with either party to form a joint ticket of presidential electors. In the best scenario, cooperation with Democrats in Maine, or Republicans in West Virginia or Alabama, might indeed have garnered a handful of electoral votes—but it would have put the Greenbacks in a subsidiary position. These were not bargains worth making when the objective was to lay a solid foundation for a new party capable of advancing a reform agenda. “It is impossible for the Greenback Party to overthrow the old parties by forming an alliance with them to place them in power, nor can an honest man have any respect for a party organization that will do so,” Weaver explained.34 The seriousness with which Weaver regarded the charges became apparent at an October 9 Greenback rally at Chicago’s Farwell Hall. As he appeared on stage, a “mysterious looking roll” opened to display a pair of American flags with inscriptions from 2 Corinthians (“What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? What communion hath light with darkness?”), Weaver (“No fusion”), and Maine Greenback Solon Chase (“Stand up and be counted”). After sustained applause and a brief recounting of his campaign, Weaver described the allegations made against him and defended his resistance to fusion of presidential electors. “I supposed that it was my duty to go out and warn the people with all my power and what little ability I have against the influence of these organizations, the Democratic and Republican parties, that are in their principles at war with the people,” he declared. “I have done that, and if that is treason, Greenbackers of the United States, make the most of it.”35


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Weaver’s Chicago speech amounted to a report to the party faithful on the campaign and the direction of the party. He said he had appeared in fifteen states, traveled about 20,000 miles, and shook the hands of as many as 300,000 voters. Many of his campaign appearances took place outdoors to accommodate the large crowds, and he often gave two speeches a day. Nevertheless, as in New York, Weaver conceded that victory was not likely, and he indicated that he was taking a long-term approach toward building the party. “[W]hether we succeed in this contest or not, be it known to the people of the United States, and to the Greenbackers who are yet faithful to our cause, that . . . we will enter upon the campaign of 1884, and carry the battle to the gates of the enemy.”36 Meanwhile, the allegations of covert cooperation with Republicans continued. The final volley was fired in late October, when the New York Star printed a facsimile of a letter the paper claimed had been written by Weaver on congressional stationery. The apparent forgery portrayed Weaver as predicting that Greenback-leaning Republican voters would probably return to the Republican Party and asserting that the insurgent movement must concentrate on retaining the support of Democrats, even at the expense of costing Hancock the election. Once again, Weaver issued a vigorous denial, but the accumulated allegations had clearly taken their toll.37 By the time the campaign concluded in early November, the unity that the Greenbacks displayed at the conclusion of the Chicago convention was a distant memory. Improving economic conditions accentuated the damage caused by the party’s internal fissures. As the 1870s ended, crop failures in Europe created demand for American foodstuffs, pushing wheat prices from 78 cents to $1.11 per bushel. At the same time, the bitter medicine of resumption went down with relatively little disturbance, as the U.S. Treasury accumulated $200 million in gold. As events would prove, resumption did little to improve the long-term prospects of farmers and workers who still faced the debilitating effects of deflation, but the sudden improvement in commodity prices and the smooth return to the gold standard took the wind out of the sails of the Greenback Party, particularly in Northern states.38 As the economy stabilized, Independents, Republicans, and Democrats with soft-money sympathies, and even some Greenbacks found little reason to fall in behind the badly splintered third party. In Minnesota, one-time Republican Ignatius Donnelly, who went on to become a leading midwestern Populist, declined to join the Greenback crusade. Samuel F. Cary of Ohio,

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who ran as the Greenback vice presidential candidate in 1876 with Cooper, enlisted in the service of Hancock. Similar disappointments or defections occurred in Kentucky and Connecticut. All were the result, Weaver claimed, of a “conspiracy, as wide as this continent itself,” to destroy the Greenback Party.39 In fact, they suggest that the young party, undermined by improving economic conditions and internal feuding, had simply failed to impress voters as a credible alternative to the Democrats or Republicans, despite the enthusiasm Weaver generated on the campaign trail. One of the biggest disappointments occurred in Massachusetts, where Butler, Weaver’s rival for the Greenback presidential nomination, backed Hancock. Balding and droopy-eyed, Butler possessed a well-earned reputation for unscrupulousness that dated back to the Civil War and drove him at various times between 1871 and 1882 to run for governor as a Republican, an Independent, and a Democrat. Butler’s unprincipled ambition engendered widespread antipathy that lingered even after his death. When a leading Massachusetts jurist was asked if he would attend Butler’s funeral, the reply was, “No, but I approve of it.”40 Butler was not the kind of politician likely to throw in with the Greenbacks on principle alone; he would need to be enticed, either by position or the prospect of success at the polls. Lacking the former, his decision to support Hancock can be seen as a reflection of Greenback prospects in Massachusetts, and the rest of the nation, in 1880. Given the obstacles faced by the Greenback Party, the disappointing outcome of the campaign was no surprise. Weaver received 305,997 votes, 3.3 percent of the 9.2 million ballots cast, and did not come close to carrying a single state. In the popular vote, Garfield and Hancock ran neck and neck, with Garfield receiving a minuscule plurality of 1,898 votes—hardly a mandate for the economic policies the party proclaimed after its setback in Maine. Despite the narrow margin in the popular vote, the Republican ticket earned a comfortable victory in the electoral college, pulling in 214 electoral votes to Hancock’s 155, with a strong showing in the Midwest and Northeast. The four biggest electoral prizes—New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois—each went to Garfield. In New York, Republicans tapped Wall Street for financial support, and Arthur levied contributions from New York’s enormous federal and state patronage armies. Every dime came in handy, as Garfield carried the state—and received its crucial thirty-five electoral votes—by slightly more than 21,000 votes, or 2 percent of the total number of ballots cast. Thanks to the resurgence of southern Democrats, Hancock carried every state below


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the Mason-Dixon line.41 Partisan and sectional passions remained the dominant factors in presidential politics. For Weaver, the results offered some glimmers of good news. His vote total represented a four-fold increase in the number of votes received by Cooper in 1876. Moreover, in spite of improving economic conditions and Greenback bickering, the party’s message continued to appeal to a notable percentage of voters in diverse areas of the country. Weaver’s strongest showing came in Texas, where he received 11.7 percent of the vote. In his home state of Iowa, he polled 10 percent. He received 9.9 percent of the vote in Michigan and 9.8 percent in Kansas. Weaver also won substantial support in Missouri (8.9 percent) and West Virginia (8 percent).42 His nationwide campaign succeeded in spreading the Greenback gospel of monetary, labor, and political reform, even if it did not win as many converts as he had hoped. With some justification, Weaver professed to be encouraged by the outcome, although the crippling impact of party feuding remained very much on his mind. “Men may disappoint and even betray you, but principle can never fail you,” he advised his supporters. Still, he congratulated the rank and file for demonstrating “your intention to push vigorously in the future the great battle for the exultation of labor and genuine free government. . . . None of the great parties of the past or present ever exhibited such vigor in their infancy, grew so rapidly in popular favor, or overcame such fearful odds in so short a length of time.”43 Weaver’s optimism about the long-term prospects of the Greenback Party and its program won support from an unlikely source: the New York Times. Unremittingly hostile, the paper nevertheless glumly predicted in April 1881 that “Greenbackism as an independent movement has a possible future that cannot safely be ignored.” Discontent with Democratic rule in the South and Republican dominance in the North, combined with the likelihood of continued pressure for currency expansion and widespread hostility toward banks, would prove to be a volatile mix that third party insurgents could exploit, the paper forecast. Presciently cautioning Wall Street and its allies against complacency, the Times warned that “forces are working silently, but steadily and constantly . . . which may have to be reckoned with by the time another great national contest approaches.”44 Weaver’s vigorous and unprecedented campaign for the presidency helped ensure that, when that next contest came, he would be at its forefront. In the meantime, he faced the task of strengthening the fragile party he led.

James Baird Weaver and Susan Weaver from james baird weaver (Haynes)

chapter eight

The Almost Forgotten Greenback

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ess than a year after the dust had settled on the presidential campaign, the New York Times off-handedly rendered a stinging verdict on Weaver’s political prospects. On June 19, 1881, in a short front-page item on Massachusetts politics, the paper reported that “Gen. Weaver, the almost forgotten Greenback candidate for President, has begun a campaign tour in behalf of his party throughout” the Bay State.1 While the newspaper’s snide assessment was unduly harsh, it reflected the quandary Weaver faced in the aftermath of the 1880 campaign. Weaver’s ascent from failure and defeat in Iowa Republican politics to national prominence occurred rapidly and dramatically. He now faced a different challenge as the presidential campaign faded into memory. With Garfield in the White House, and voters apparently indifferent to the monetary programs of the Greenback Party, Weaver sought to strengthen—and remain at the forefront of—the political movement he led. The struggle to nurture the viability of the Greenback Party, advance its reform principles, and keep from being forgotten, or “almost forgotten,” characterized his political career in the years immediately following his bid for the White House. Adjusting to life after the campaign proved difficult. When Weaver returned to Washington to conclude his term in Congress, he allowed Democrats still bitter about the outcome of the presidential campaign to provoke him into an unseemly incident. Four days before Christmas, Weaver fell into a prolonged debate with House Democrats over the party’s support—or lack thereof— for soft money. The dispute involved such high profile Democrats as Richard Bland of Missouri, the co-author of the Bland-Allison silver bill of 1878, and the dapper Fernando Wood of New York, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Debate was spirited, but appeared at first to be nothing more than another one of the arguments about monetary policy in which Weaver loved to engage. Matters took an ugly turn when Rep. William Sparks entered the fray. The previous April, the Illinois Democrat had achieved notoriety for a fistshaking confrontation on the floor with Democratic Rep. Hiester Clymer of Pennsylvania. This time, Sparks charged Weaver with hypocrisy, pointing out that the Iowan had been a loyal Republican when many of the financial

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measures he now objected to had been passed. Weaver attempted to shrug off Sparks’s provocation, but was sufficiently irritated to warn that if Sparks “ever does apply such language to me, and does it within the reach of my arm, I certainly shall personally chastise him.” Sparks was undeterred. “You misunderstood me and said that I was stating that which was not true, and wanting the qualities of a gentleman you failed to remedy it. . . . I think it was developed at the last election that you wanted those qualities.” Nothing was more likely to anger Weaver than an assault on his reputation. Thus provoked, he exploded. “I denounce the gentleman personally as a liar on the floor of this House!” “You are a scoundrel and a villain and a liar!” Sparks replied. The exchange quickly escalated toward violence. Weaver slowly advanced down the aisle toward Sparks, who picked up his chair, apparently to use it in self-defense, and shouted, “If you get within my reach I will hit you.” The speaker banged the gavel in a futile attempt to restore order. As Weaver continued to move on the Illinois Democrat, Greenbacks restrained their leader, aided by Republicans, who up until now had found the proceedings vastly amusing. Weaver “twisted and pulled and kicked and raged to get at Mr. Sparks,” who also “struggled manfully” with colleagues to get free. Not everyone wanted peace, however. Rep. George Washington Jones of Texas, a Greenback ally, “ran down the aisle at his best paces, and, stripping off his coat, exclaimed, ‘if there is going to be a fight I want to be in on it.’” After order was restored, Sparks left the floor and Weaver remained at his seat, surrounded by Greenbacks and Republicans who assured him that he acted properly.2 The next day, Weaver seemed genuinely remorseful. As the House debated whether to investigate the incident, Weaver “frequently hung his head when allusions were made” to the confrontation, and finally “sought refuge in the columns of a newspaper.” When it came time for him to speak, he offered a contrite apology, but stopped short of accepting all responsibility for the episode: “[W]hether I was to blame or someone else, or both to blame, our conduct was wholly unjustifiable as members of this body. I apologize to the House for my part of it, and ask to be excused.” Sparks offered a similarly measured statement of regret, and the House quickly moved on to other business.3 While Weaver was embarrassed by his behavior, his conduct generated


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grudging respect in some quarters. The normally hostile Iowa State Register observed, “We hope . . . the General will oblige his own State . . . as not to do his fist-fighting in the halls of Congress. However, if he cannot avoid it without appearing cowardly, we want him to take care of himself. If it does come to that and he don’t whip the other fellow, he need never come back to this State.” Many other newspaper accounts, however, were far less sympathetic. “Ruffianism in Congress,” blared the headline on Page 1 of the New York Times. The Washington Post described the incident as “Rioting in the House” and went on to label the proceedings “as disgraceful a parliamentary scene as was ever enacted.”4 The ruckus was not the only indication that Weaver was suffering a postcampaign letdown. On New Year’s Eve, a reporter caught up with him in New York and asked about Greenback prospects in the Forty-seventh Congress. In an uncharacteristically laconic manner apparent even as rendered in the article’s paraphrase, Weaver “replied that, as he had not been re-elected, he could only surmise.” Six weeks later, Weaver was forced to deny published reports that he and several other members of Congress planned to abandon the party to which he had staked his political career and form a new political organization. “There is no truth whatsoever in the story,” he promised.5 Weaver’s loyalty was noteworthy, because Greenback prospects appeared bleak in the winter of 1880-1881. Weaver projected that there would be as many as ten House members voting as Greenbacks in the new Congress, but even that optimistic forecast indicated a decline of four in the party’s voting bloc from the Forty-sixth Congress. Furthermore, another outspoken champion of hard-money policies was moving into the White House. On March 4, as he was inaugurated, Garfield heralded the “prosperity . . . without parallel in our history” brought about by the monetary policies of Grant and Hayes. The successful return to the gold standard, and Garfield’s victory, temporarily quieted agitation on financial issues. Greenback monetary doctrines remained popular with party ideologues, and would return in altered form to dominate the political landscape before the century ended. As the new decade began, however, the controversies over resumption, paper money, and silver versus gold receded into the background. As a result, Weaver shifted from monetary questions to related political and economic issues to sustain and broaden the appeal of the Greenback Party.6 That transition began quietly about a month before Garfield took office. With little fanfare, on January 31 Weaver proposed a constitutional amendment

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calling for the election of senators “by vote of the people” rather than state legislatures. The measure was referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it died. Uncharacteristically, Weaver seems to have made no statement regarding the proposed amendment, either on the floor of the House or in the newspapers, but he would eventually become a forceful champion of the idea. Writing more than a decade later, he blamed the Senate for a number of measures viewed as anathema by Greenbacks—including the National Bank Act of 1863, the demonetization of silver in 1873, and the Resumption Act. These measures, Weaver argued, emerged from a legislative body dominated by corporate interests, whose representatives were chosen through corrupt bargaining behind the scenes in state capitals.7 Events would soon validate Weaver and other Senate critics. In the winter and early spring of 1881, legislative business in the narrowly divided Senate languished, as Republicans and Democrats dueled to see which party would control committees and, just as importantly, an assortment of ceremonial and clerical patronage jobs. In March, after Vice President Arthur cast the deciding vote on a measure that put the Republicans in charge of committees and appointments, Democrats responded with a filibuster that held up Senate business for weeks. At the same time, the new president found himself embroiled in a bitter patronage battle with Roscoe Conkling. Attempting to negotiate the labyrinth of New York patronage politics, Garfield nominated an enemy of Conkling as collector for the port of New York, setting off a confrontation that preoccupied Washington for months.8 The unedifying spectacle, Weaver told an audience in Philadelphia on April 23, confirmed what the third party had been saying all along about the Democrats and Republicans. “The present exhibition made in the Senate of the United States by what is supposed to be the wisest deliberative body on earth has greatly disgusted the American people,” Weaver said. “The machinery supposed so necessary for the protection of the people is at an absolute standstill.”9 The tawdry feud between Conkling and Garfield soon produced a tragic and wholly unanticipated result when a deranged gunman, who fancied himself an ally of the New York Stalwart, shot the president at a Washington train station July 2. Garfield lingered, but finally succumbed to his wounds on September 19. The gunman, Charles Guiteau, was hanged the following June. In 1883, President Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act, a measure aimed at preventing some of the abuses that led to the dispute between Garfield and Conkling.


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The battle to reform the election of senators lasted for the next thirty years. In the meantime, as Weaver’s term in Congress concluded, he threw himself with renewed energy into reviving the flagging fortunes of his party. Over the spring and summer of 1881, he embarked on an arduous campaign-like tour of the country to rally the faithful and win new converts. Weaver’s tour began in late March, with appearances scheduled in Flint, Mich., and the smaller industrial towns of eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and upstate New York before he arrived in Elizabeth, N.J. on April 18. Five days later, he spoke in Philadelphia. About a month later, Weaver met with Missouri Greenbacks in St. Louis, then headed back east, appearing in Pottsville, Pa., and the Boston area in June before attending a four-day Greenback camp meeting in Lansing, Mich., that ended on July 4. As the summer continued, Weaver headed down to Kansas for another party camp meeting, held outside of Lawrence, before returning to Iowa to stump for the Greenback ticket in state elections.10 The punishing tour demonstrated that Weaver remained a popular figure among the Greenback faithful. Sheet music for a Greenback anthem, titled “The People Shall Be Free” and produced especially for the Lansing meeting, featured the mustachioed image of Weaver on the cover gazing modestly, but heroically, into the distance.11 Meanwhile, the party itself struggled to expand beyond a committed core of enthusiasts. A meeting of Pennsylvania Greenbacks illustrated how difficult that would prove. Along with De La Matyr, Weaver was invited to appear at the Pennsylvania Greenback convention June 15 in Pottsville. Greenback officials had confidently predicted a “grand display” lasting over several days, with up to 600 delegates and overall attendance of up to 30,000. The assembly welcomed Weaver “with open arms,” but De La Matyr missed the event, and only eighty-seven delegates showed up. Instead of a prolonged mass meeting, the proceedings began at 11:30 a.m. and concluded at 7:30 p.m. Party officials hired a band in a futile attempt to inject some life into the proceedings, the New York Times reported. “The home Greenbackers are very much disappointed over the result.”12 Weaver received a warmer welcome in Boston. Two days after the debacle in Pottsville, a delegation of Greenback supporters greeted Weaver as he stepped off a Boston and Albany train to begin a tour of the Bay State that took him from Boston to Springfield, Lawrence, and many towns in between. A highlight of the Massachusetts trip, certainly from Weaver’s view, was his meeting in Boston with abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, who had

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become an adherent of the Greenback Party. Phillips enthusiastically greeted his one-time anti-slavery ally from Iowa, and reminisced about fellow abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. In an observation that must have been deeply gratifying to Weaver, Phillips compared the Greenback Party favorably with the abolitionists of the 1850s. “You who are engaged in this grand reform have taken your ground as the result of calm deliberation and firm conviction. In the early anti-slavery fight we were pitched into the fight and hardly knew it until we were in the thickest of it.”13 Weaver’s speaking tour coincided with growing public anxiety about the power of railroads and other corporate interests. In March 1881, journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd published an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Story of a Great Monopoly” that documented abuses by the railroads and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. In language that echoed the rhetoric of Weaver and other Greenbacks, Lloyd offered a grim forecast of the nation’s political future if corporate power was not brought under control. “When monopolies succeed, the people fail; when a rich criminal escapes justice the people are punished; when a legislature is bribed, the people are cheated,” Lloyd warned. Lloyd called for full disclosure of freight charges to prevent discriminatory pricing practices favoring shippers such as Standard Oil. “Publicity is the great moral disinfectant,” he declared. Congress, Lloyd observed, possessed the right to regulate monopolies, and must use it to make wrongdoing by the railroads subject to civil and criminal penalty. Anticipating the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, he also called for creation of a “national board” that would investigate citizen complaints about railroad practices, publish the results, and recommend prosecution when needed. “The time has come to face the fact that the forces of capital and industry have outgrown the forces of our government,” Lloyd warned.14 Lloyd’s influential article, an early example of the muckraking journalism that would play such an important role in shaping the politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indicated that concern about the escalating economic and political power of corporations was no longer confined to the Grange halls of the prairies. Northeastern farmers, like their western brethren, found themselves squeezed by economic pressures in the years after the Civil War. As agriculture boomed in the west, wheat, corn, beef, and sheep production fell throughout New England. In upstate New York, the value of farmland fell as farmers lost markets to western farmers. Many


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blamed railroad freight rates that appeared to benefit long-distance shippers at the expense of local producers. Farmers, however, were not the only ones infuriated by railroad pricing practices. In New York City, irate merchants also wanted the railroads brought under control. Outrage from all corners of the state led the New York legislature’s Hepburn Committee to look into railroad business practices in 1879. Two years later, city merchants formed the National Anti-Monopoly League as a counterweight to railroad influence.15 Conditions seemed right for Weaver and the Greenback Party to reach out beyond soft-money ideologues to eastern merchants and farmers disenchanted with the economic and political power of railroads and other powerful business interests. As he toured Massachusetts, Weaver heard Greenback leaders talk about the party’s agenda in broad terms. The currency issues that preoccupied Weaver in Iowa, Congress, and his presidential campaign did not figure prominently among Massachusetts Greenbacks, who reserved their rhetorical broadsides for denunciations of concentrated economic power. When financial questions arose, they did so in the context of anti-monopolistic concern about the power of banks. At a gathering at the Revere House in Boston on June 18, Massachusetts Greenback leader Charles Litchman excoriated the Democratic and Republican parties for supporting the interests of railroads and what one local report of his remarks described as “the greatest of all the nation’s monopolies—that which controls the issue of a nation’s money.” In a prophetic aside, Litchman even raised the prospect that the Greenback Party would not become a permanent political institution, but was merely a means of promoting economic reform. “We are as sure to grow and gain power as truth is eternal,” Litchman predicted. Then he added: “It may not be in our present form, because parties change their name, societies change, but truth and principles are eternal as the hills around us.”16 Picking up on the themes advanced by his Massachusetts hosts, Weaver described the Greenback Party as “pre-eminently the anti-monopoly party” two days later in an interview with the Lawrence, Mass., American. Money, transportation and “the transmission of intelligence by telegraph”—the “great agents of commerce”—had fallen under the control of powerful cartels, he charged. The Constitution granted Congress the power to “regulate these agents of commerce,” and the Greenback Party advocated bringing them under the control of the people. He went on to reassure the business community that the Greenback financial program was not reckless. “We do

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not intend to issue an unlimited amount of paper money, but, on the contrary, will stoutly limit the volume to the business wants of the country.”17 In August, he elaborated on the anti-monopoly theme, but he did so in a way that probably would not have reassured the eastern business community. “The war is between the industrial classes on the one side and the confederated monopolies on the other,” he proclaimed in his hometown party paper, the Legal Tender Greenback. “The latter march under one flag, and the banner of the Greenback party is broad enough to cover every division and sub-division of the Anti-Monopoly movement.”18 Weaver’s political foes in Iowa denounced the shift in his rhetoric. “Gen. Weaver has deserted distinctive Greenback ground and passes as an antiMonopolist,” the Democratic Iowa City Daily Press sneered. “He is a sham reformer, a sort of $25.00 a day reformer, who sticks his finger into the spigot but refuses to investigate the bung.”19 In truth, Weaver was simply highlighting Greenback positions that had been overshadowed by the party’s emphasis on the currency question, but his circuitous evolution from Republican regular to leadership of a reforming third party colored the reaction of his enemies, and left him vulnerable to the charge of opportunistic posturing. As Iowa prepared for off-year elections in 1881, the Greenbacks reached out to voters beyond the party’s base of currency ideologues. On May 31, the party’s convention at Marshalltown took the novel step of nominating a woman, Mary Nash of Des Moines, for state superintendent of public instruction, and crafted a broad platform. The Greenbacks demanded a graduated income tax, and more rigorous regulation of railroad freight rates by the state. The party platform denounced as “most dangerous” restrictions on the right to vote that were spreading through the South and in the District of Columbia, and demanded “equal political rights for all men and women.” At Weaver’s recommendation, the convention added a plank calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and the election of the president, vice president, and the Senate “by direct vote of the people.” The broad base of the platform failed to alter the political status quo, however, and overall support for the Greenback ticket remained well below Republican or Democratic levels.20 Ringing calls for political and economic reform would not, by themselves, lead to success at the polls. That was demonstrated again the following year, when Greenbacks reiterated their endorsement of the previous year’s platform and nominated Weaver for Congress in the sixth district against his old Republican antagonist, M. E.


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Cutts. The opportunity to confront Cutts once again must have been appealing to an old campaigner like Weaver, but the outcome proved disappointing. Unlike in 1878, Greenbacks and Democrats in the sixth district fielded competing candidates for Congress. Democrats remained resentful of what they believed was Weaver’s role in denying Hancock victory in the 1880 presidential race. At the same time, extremists in the Greenback camp disliked Weaver’s flexibility on the fusion question. One declared that he was “tired of Weaverism” and would rather vote Republican than support a fusion ticket. On Election Day, Cutts carried the district, polling 11,250 votes compared to the 8,569 received by Weaver and 8,040 for the Democratic candidate. If sixth district Greenbacks and Democrats had joined forces, as in 1878, they would have succeeded in returning Weaver to Congress. Indeed, the two parties demonstrated the power of fusion to the north, where Greenback Luman H. “Calamity” Weller of Independence was sent to Congress on a fusion ticket with Democratic support.21 Cutts’s death before taking office set in motion a noteworthy initiative by the Republican leadership. As recounted by Weaver many years later, sixth district Republicans offered to let Weaver run unopposed as an independent for Congress, and defend any position he wanted, as long as he agreed to vote with the House Republican caucus in Washington. Weaver rejected this Republican form of fusion. A second overture from “a distinguished army comrade” was also declined. Finally, according to Weaver, Republicans enlisted the aid of former Sen. James Harlan. Weaver and Harlan agreed to a midnight meeting in a Pullman car on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy line at Albia. As the train clattered up the line to Chariton, Harlan upped the ante: party leaders had agreed to offer Weaver “any position I might desire and at the first opportunity offered”—including a seat in the U.S. Senate—if he agreed to rejoin the Republican Party. “I replied that I could not, with the convictions that I then entertained concerning public policy, accept the proposition and maintain my self-respect, and hence was compelled to decline absolutely.”22 Weaver’s break with the Republican Party was permanent. One of the challenges facing the Greenbacks proved to be getting the party’s message across without interference from the Democratic and Republican newspapers of the time. At the Revere House in Boston, Weaver held the partisan press responsible for the Greenback Party’s failure to win over support from the business community. The press has “made business men believe that we were a set of hare-brained fanatics,” he complained. To put

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the Greenback case directly to the voters, Weaver and Gillette took over the reins of the Iowa Tribune, a weekly newspaper published in Des Moines, in late 1882. The publication, which listed Weaver and Gillette as its editors and publishers, included family features and a few columns on farming topics, but devoted most of its space to promoting the interests of the Greenback Party and its program. Weaver, De La Matyr, and other party speakers advertised for speaking engagements on the front page. Editorials denounced monopolies, banks, and hard-money policies in Washington. “The Tribune smiles serenely as it goes out to its many thousand readers,” Weaver and Gillette declared in their first issue. “It goes into many homes that are not what they ought to be, in this rich favored country. It goes into many rough hands that toil from January to January for the comforts of life, and to educate the little ones, but somehow the bread earned is eaten by others, the farm, the home, the fireside, is mortgaged and the toiler is a slave.”23 The Tribune gave Weaver and other Greenbacks an important platform for their reform agenda. In 1883, as Iowans prepared to elect a governor, the Tribune vigorously endorsed an issue from Weaver’s political past: prohibition. Iowa voters in July 1882 approved a constitutional amendment authorizing prohibition, only to have a district court judge throw the vote out on a technicality. When the state Supreme Court upheld the decision of the lower court, the Greenback Party joined prohibition advocates in reacting with fury. In addition to calls for civil service reform, soft money, and voting rights for women, the Iowa Greenback platform of 1883 included a demand to prohibit the “manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors as a beverage.” In an unusual twist, Greenbacks found themselves on the same side of the question as Republicans. Weaver, nominated as the Greenback candidate for governor, eagerly embraced the temperance issue, delivering a strong endorsement of prohibition at the Greenback convention. He also took aim at his old Republican nemesis, Allison, accusing the senator of ignoring the interests of the people in favor of railroads and other corporate interests. The issues stressed by Weaver mattered little in the end. When Iowans went to the polls, he finished a distant third behind Republican Gov. Buren Sherman, who received 164,095 votes, or 50 percent, and Democrat La Vega G. Kinne, who polled 140,032 votes, or 43 percent. Weaver received 7 percent, or 23,089 votes. While the combined vote for Kinne and Weaver almost equaled Sherman’s, support for Weaver in 1883 dropped by more than 5,000 from the vote received by the Greenback gubernatorial candidate two years earlier.24 Weaver’s loss marked the third


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time in four years that he was defeated while running without Democratic support. At the local level, however, the election results demonstrated the continuing power of the fusion formula. Greenbacks and Democrats ran fusion candidates in twenty state House and eight state Senate races, cutting into the GOP majority in the General Assembly and complicating, although not preventing, Allison’s re-election to the U.S. Senate.25 Coming one year after Weller’s victory and Weaver’s defeat in congressional elections, the lesson of the 1883 campaign was clear. Weaver remained a potentially useful ally in the challenge to Republican dominance in Iowa— if Democrats could set aside their bitterness about his role in the 1880 presidential campaign. At the same time, Greenback purists troubled by the prospect of fusion had little choice but to swallow their misgivings and join forces with the Democrats—if the goals they supported had any chance of being realized. After several years of defeat, the approach Weaver utilized in his first campaign for Congress became a strategy for ensuring the survival of the Greenback program. Nothing illustrated the declining fortunes of the party Weaver led more dramatically than the 1884 Greenback presidential nominating convention in Indianapolis. Four years earlier, giddy Greenbacks poured into Chicago and indulged in hours of raucous debate before putting Weaver at the head of their ticket. This time, as Greenbacks assembled at the end of May, the proceedings were far less enthusiastic. With Weaver presiding as the convention’s chairman, the resolutions committee divided on tariffs, women’s suffrage, and prohibition. Ultimately, Greenbacks adopted compromise planks on each issue, calling for referendums on prohibitions and suffrage, and disparaging the tariff issue as a red herring to distract voters from more pressing economic questions. Moreover, despite the misgivings of many party officials, Benjamin Butler emerged as the favorite of the delegates. The man described by the Chicago Tribune as the “Mephistopheles of American politics” won the party’s presidential nomination but, in a telling sign of disaffection, the convention failed to make his selection unanimous. “There can be no doubt that the nomination of Butler is utterly distasteful” to many influential delegates, the New York Times concluded. Adding insult to injury, Butler responded haughtily when the convention sent a telegraph inquiring as to his interest in the party’s nomination. “Is not my record as a Greenbacker for twenty years sufficient without a formal pledge to you which would cause

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me to be pointed to as a man who bids for the nomination?” he demanded of his petitioners. Butler’s contempt was reciprocated by voters. The last presidential candidate nominated by the Greenbacks received 175,096 votes, 1.7 percent of the ballots cast that year, and almost 131,000 fewer than Weaver received in 1880.26 Back in Iowa, resistance to fusion was crumbling. Weaver received the Greenback nomination for Congress from the sixth district, and this time ran with Democratic support. The pact produced some disgruntlement among Greenback ideologues, who met in Cedar Rapids in October with the hope of selecting a candidate to run against Weaver but in the end failed to do so. Weaver’s Republican opponent was his one-time ally, Frank T. Campbell. The Republican ticket received support from an unlikely source: Solon Chase, the Greenback editor from Maine, who was lured back to the Republican fold to stump for the presidential candidacy of the Pine Tree State’s favorite son, James G. Blaine. With the help of Chase and Iowa’s powerful Republican organization, Blaine carried Iowa over New York Democrat Grover Cleveland, but by a mere 5 percent—the closest result in a presidential race in Iowa in decades. The strong showing by Cleveland mirrored nationwide results. Cleveland eked out a victory, crucially aided in his home state by a Blaine supporter’s inflammatory description of the Democratic Party as the champion of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.”27 Weaver’s congressional race reflected the closeness of the presidential contest. Of the seven counties in the sixth district, Campbell carried four, but Weaver rolled up a lopsided majority of 922 in Davis County and lost neighboring Wapello County by only thirty-nine votes. Weaver’s margin of victory in his home county, together with smaller majorities in Monroe and Keokuk counties, barely pushed him over the top, and illustrated the wisdom of the fusion strategy. With a razor-thin margin of victory of sixty-seven, Weaver needed every Greenback and Democratic vote he could get.28 Not everyone accepted the result. After the state declared Weaver the winner, Campbell appealed the result to the House, which has the power under the Constitution to rule on the validity of election results. The matter went to the House Committee on Elections, and in April 1886, the panel issued majority and minority reports with widely varying conclusions. The major question before the panel concerned the validity of 212 votes cast for Weaver in two counties. Campbell alleged that the ballots were cast for Weaver by voters who were not only unregistered but failed to present affidavits affirming that


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they were qualified to vote. Weaver responded by alleging that irregularities inflated Campbell’s vote total by sixty-four. The counter-claims meant that the Democratic-controlled committee had to accept Campbell’s allegations—as well as reject Weaver’s charges—in order to overturn the results of the election.29 The committee predictably chose to do no such thing. In fact, the panel threw out all but fourteen of Campbell’s allegations, accepted some of Weaver’s charges, and raised his margin of victory to 117. This was too much for three Republicans, who chose to “dissent most emphatically” from this finding. In their report, the trio concentrated on 152 votes cast in a Mahaska County township. While the Democratic majority argued that the votes there must be counted because they were cast in good faith, the Republicans disagreed both with the majority’s reading of the evidence and its conclusions. “It is true that the unbiased mind must come reluctantly to a conclusion that would disenfranchise a voter for the single reason that he had failed to comply with the registry law,” the Republicans conceded. “Yet it is our duty to uphold the laws.” The Democrats were unmoved, and the committee voted along party lines that Weaver was entitled to hold his seat.30 Weaver’s return to Washington marked a resurgence in his personal political fortunes. The Greenback Party, however, did not experience a similar revival. Since 1878, Weaver had devoted his political career to expanding the party as a means of advancing causes ranging from soft money to the popular election of the Senate, but by the time he returned to Capitol Hill, it was clear that he had failed. Nevertheless, even as the party collapsed, Weaver remained an astute political tactician and committed advocate of reform principles. Before the decade ended, the “almost forgotten Greenback” would remind the public, the press, and his colleagues on Capitol Hill of his stubborn dedication to the causes in which he believed.

James Baird Weaver Weaver won two terms in Congress in the mid-1880s and advocated reform principles as an author and newspaper editor. frontispiece from a call for action

chapter nine

Wondering What He Will Do Next

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he White House bustled with activity in March 1885, as Cleveland, the rotund former governor of New York, took office. A stream of well-wishers and political operatives crowded the hallways of the executive mansion, eager to meet the new president, extract a favor, or present their views on the issues of the day. March 13 typified the new administration’s hectic start. Foreign diplomats and their wives attended a reception hosted by Cleveland and his sisters. A long line of Democrats, including the vice president and members of the cabinet, met with the new president, who also considered political appointments. Toward the end of the day, Blaine, the Republican “Plumed Knight” from Maine who was defeated the previous fall by Cleveland, quietly paid a call on his rival. Cleveland also found time to meet with a delegation from Iowa, led by the newly elected member from the sixth district.1 Weaver’s access to the highest levels of the new administration was only one sign that the political environment in Washington differed profoundly from the situation he encountered when he arrived on Capitol Hill six years earlier. For the first time since before the Civil War, the Democratic Party dominated the political landscape in Washington. Cleveland was the first Democrat since Buchanan—denounced by Weaver twenty-one years earlier in the pages of the Weekly Union Guard as the “supine tool” of Southern secessionists—to occupy the White House. Republicans remained in control of the Senate, but Democrats held a comfortable forty-one-vote majority in the House. In 1879, Weaver came to Washington with a small band of Greenback lawmakers, but this time there was no Greenback bloc in the House, and Weaver would have to forge alliances with like-minded soft-money and anti-monopoly Democrats from the Midwest and South. Weaver supported Democrat Thomas G. Carlisle of Kentucky for speaker and was rewarded with the chairmanship of the committee on Interior Department expenditures; Weaver’s son Abram served as the committee’s clerk. Democratic collegiality was further demonstrated in the matter of the disputed election. The party-line vote by the Committee on Elections to seat Weaver was the first time the panel had divided along partisan lines in the Forty-ninth Congress.2

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Weaver’s White House visit coincided with a decision by the administration on an issue that he regarded as critically important. Amid the receptions and meetings with visiting dignitaries, Cleveland issued a proclamation aimed at defusing a potentially explosive situation in the Indian Territory between Texas and Kansas. The territory was the scene of a high-risk game of cat-and-mouse, pitting homesteaders against U.S. soldiers charged with keeping the region free of settlement. After a decade of rapid population growth in Kansas and Texas, residents of the two states looked hungrily in the late 1870s and early 1880s at the land that belonged to 22 Indian tribes. Encouraged by propaganda that was probably funded by the railroads, small bands of settlers began to trickle into the Oklahoma District in 1879 to stake homestead claims, only to be evicted by federal troops.3 In 1880, the “Boomer” movement fell under the leadership of an itinerant adventurer named David C. Payne, who organized homesteaders to move into the territory. By 1884, membership in Payne’s Oklahoma Society reached 40,000, and its budget $100,000. That year, another foray organized by Payne nearly produced tragic results, when the unit of black “Buffalo soldiers” deployed to block the settlers were ordered to open fire. Bloodshed was averted only by the composure of the Buffalo soldiers, who delayed firing in order to buy time for the commanding officer to back off. The movement continued after Payne died in 1884 under W. L. Couch, who led another settlement attempt in the winter of 1884-85 that ended when troops blockaded the homesteaders.4 Weaver, whose childhood included his family’s participation in the great southern Iowa land rush of 1843, embraced the Boomers’ cause as his own. Dispatches published in the Iowa Tribune portrayed Oklahoma as another battleground where corporate interests—in this case, rich cattlemen aided by corrupt tribal allies—stood against embattled small farmers. In one account, Couch described the plight of settlers, who were chained to wagons by U.S. troops and “dragged as oxen” to military posts far removed from the courts, where a legal hearing on settlers’ claims could be held. “Little do the masses of American citizens comprehend that their very liberties are trembling in the balance,” Couch warned.5 The specter of embattled pioneers struggling against wealthy cattle barons, aided by the military might of the federal government, provided Weaver with all the incentive he needed to take up the Boomer banner in Washington. As the new administration took office, but long before the Forty-ninth Congress convened, Weaver went to Washington


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and, with former Kansas congressman Sidney Clarke, became a leading advocate of homesteader interests. Cleveland’s March 13 proclamation called for the evacuation of all unauthorized settlement in the Indian Territory, and warned that troops would be deployed to enforce the order. The edict fell far short of what Weaver and Clarke hoped for, but the pair tried to put the pronouncement in the best possible light in a telegraph to Couch back in Arkansas City, Kan. Cleveland’s “proclamation . . . is intended to eject the cattle syndicates, on the one hand, and to suspend, on the other, the settlement of the country pending negotiations” with the tribes, Weaver and Clarke assured Couch. The pair counseled caution: “We deem it best for all parties to await the contemplated action.” The matter remained unresolved as the year continued, and when the new session of Congress opened in December, Weaver moved quickly. On December 21, shortly after the new Congress convened, he introduced legislation calling for the creation of an Oklahoma territorial government in the Indian nation and an adjoining region known as the Public Land Strip.6 The Oklahoma bill was not the only piece of legislation he offered. Weaver reintroduced his constitutional amendment to require the direct election of senators and, attempting to advance a longstanding Greenback proposal, he also proposed the creation of a Department of Labor. As envisioned by Weaver, the department would be led by a cabinet secretary who would be responsible for collecting “useful information” on labor-related topics. More importantly, the department would be charged with finding the causes of— and solutions to—labor-management disputes. Weaver also found time to take up an unusual claim by one of his constituents. In late December 1885, Weaver presented the Treasury with a $70 receipt issued by the Continental Congress in 1779. His constituent wanted the note redeemed—with interest.7 Weaver’s proposal for a Labor Department proved timely, as workermanagement relations emerged as a major preoccupation of Congress and the Cleveland administration. In 1886, Terence Powderly’s Knights of Labor struck against the southwestern railroads owned by Jay Gould, tying up freight and passenger traffic along 6,000 miles of track. The railroad strike unfolded as agitation for an eight-hour working day gained momentum. Membership in unions such as the Cigarmakers and the Carpenters that led the eight-hour campaign grew dramatically. Chicago, where the agricultural-implement manufacturer McCormick locked out its workers in February 1886, became the key battleground. The dispute continued into May, when tensions boiled

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over at a union rally near the McCormick plant. Gunfire broke out, leaving two union workers dead. When a squadron of police attempted to storm a union rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square the next day, a bomb thrown at the advancing phalanx left seven police dead and sixty-seven wounded. In response, the police arrested anarchists and trade unionists. Eight men were tried and convicted in connection with the bombing. Four were hanged.8 Weaver responded to the escalating tensions between labor and management with a demonstration of his preference for reform over radical action. In the early months of 1886, when Congress considered the creation of arbitration boards to settle railroad labor disputes, Weaver was skeptical and fell back on Greenback monetary theories to explain the strikes. “This labor controversy . . . is purely a question of money, and nothing else,” he said. He asserted that workers possessed the right to strike as a “last resort” but urged labor to take its grievances to the ballot box. If political action failed to satisfy labor’s legitimate demands, then workers were entitled to strike. “If this Congress will not protect labor,” Weaver asserted, “it must protect itself.” In March 1887, the House considered whether to accept a donation of land near Chicago for use as a military installation where troops could be deployed to suppress labor-related violence. The idea appalled Weaver. “…I warn this House, in the name of the laboring men of this country, not to pass legislation which looks to overawing the people by military establishments, but to go to work and undo the legislation which has brought about our present discontent. It is the greed of the rich and not the dissensions of the poor that we should dread the world over.” While holding no sympathy for radicals, Weaver made his sympathy for industrial workers plain, and dismissed as “an idle slander” the claim that every member of a labor union was a communist. “Let us show ourselves just, and then we can reasonably demand obedience among the people.”9 On one matter, it appeared as if the nearly extinct Greenbacks were poised to win a major victory. Efforts to pass legislation that would regulate railroad rate-setting practices, a key plank of Greenback and anti-monopoly platforms, took on new momentum as the decade continued. In January 1885, the House passed a bill by Democratic Rep. John H. Reagan of Texas to regulate railroad business practices and allow the courts to enforce the provisions of the act. On the other side of the Capitol, the Senate passed a bill by Republican Shelby Cullom of Illinois that proposed putting enforcement in the hands of a federal commission. In 1886, as both houses squabbled over details, the


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Supreme Court’s ruling in Wabash v. Illinois limited the scope of state authority to regulate interstate railroad rates. The decision put added pressure on Congress to act. Finally, the House and Senate agreed on a compromise that created a five-member regulatory panel, and outlawed pooling and “unreasonable preference” for any shipper. In January 1887, the Senate passed the compromise, and the House followed suit the following week, voting 219 to 41 in favor of the bill. In spite of his long support for railroad regulation, Weaver voted against the bill in its final form.10 By this time, almost all interested parties favored some sort of federal regulation. Many farmers wanted rates controlled by the government— an approach far more radical than anything in the bill passed by Congress. Merchants sought an end to discriminatory charges, and other practices that added to their cost of doing business. Even the railroads had come to see the virtues of regulation as a means of bringing stability to a business that had been plagued by boom-and-bust cycles since the first tracks were laid. “The leading railroad companies,” industry analyst William Shinn wrote in 1886, “are now almost without an exception” in favor of a regulatory commission.11 The presence of the wolves lying among the lambs alarmed Weaver, and on January 19, he denounced the bill that emerged from the conference committee. “Five commissioners can not properly attend to the business of any one of the great trunk lines of this country, much less to all the interstate commerce of America,” he warned. “It is utterly impossible.” Moreover, the measure was so riddled with qualifications that it was virtually useless: Suppose the great Lawgiver had constructed the Ten Commandments with the same uncertainty. Suppose he had said: ‘Thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet—contemporaneously or under substantially similar circumstances and conditions; or suppose, at the conclusion of the Decalogue the following provision had been added: ‘Provided, however, that upon application to the high priest or ecclesiastical commisioner appointed under the provisions of this act persons so designated may be authorized to cheat, steal, bear false witness, or covet, and said commission may from time to time prescribe the extent to which said persons may be relieved from any or all of said commandments.’

“Under such circumstances,” Weaver asked to great laughter in the House,

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“would not the world have been without moral law from Moses to Cullom and from Mount Sinai to Pike’s Peak?” Not everyone was impressed by Weaver’s witticism. Republican David Henderson, Weaver’s fellow Iowan and a future speaker of the House, asked if Weaver was aware “that this city has been swarming with agents of railroad corporate power in order to defeat this bill as it has been reported by the conferees?” Weaver waved off the point. “They, of course, do not want any bill to pass; but if one must pass they want, in my opinion, just such provisions as are in this bill.”12 Weaver endured a pair of personal losses as he became a well-established figure on Capitol Hill. Weaver’s mother, Susan, died in 1886 at the age of seventy-nine, followed the next year by her husband, Abram. The end for Weaver’s peripatetic parents came not in Bloomfield, or elsewhere in Iowa, but in another community where they had settled after one final trek. As their son established himself in Bloomfield, Susan and Abram left Iowa in 1859, “inspired by the Kansas excitement.” They headed to Atchison, along the border with Missouri, and quickly gained a comfortable position in the thriving town. Many of their children joined the couple in Kansas. “Uncle Abram,” as he was known in his new home, enjoyed a degree of political success that he had not known in Iowa, serving as district court clerk for fourteen years. “In office, Mr. Weaver was faithful, honest, exact, painstaking and intelligent,” his obituary noted. Abram died in his bed with his children at his side.13 The lifelong courthouse politician passed away as his son’s political fortunes began to change. In some ways, Weaver’s political prospects had never been better. Through the pages of the Iowa Tribune, Weaver and Gillette presented their views to a statewide audience, without the interference of the rigidly partisan press. At the same time, fusion meant that the Greenback perspective on the issues of the day was finding a wider audience in Iowa. No longer a “motley collection of losers,” the Iowa Democratic Party’s embrace of Greenback economic and political doctrines threatened Republican dominance. To forestall gains by the Democratic-Greenback coalition, Republicans nominated the moderate William Larrabee for governor in 1885. The Democratic-Greenback fusion ticket, which included Gillette as a candidate for lieutenant governor, mounted the most serious challenge Republicans had faced since 1854, and came within 7,000 votes of winning. The following year, Weaver ran for re-election as a fusion Greenback-Democratic candidate for Congress, and defeated Republican John Donnell by 618 votes.14


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Weaver’s reelection, however, overshadowed changing circumstances that ultimately weakened his political position. While cooperation with Democrats had succeeded in advancing policies supported by Greenbacks, the effectiveness of fusion as a survival strategy was diminishing, in part because of the continued disintegration of the insurgent political movement in Iowa. By 1887, the Greenback Party had given way to a new organization, the Union Labor Party, which spurned Weaver’s efforts to forge a coalition with Democrats with predictably depressing results. Running without assistance from Democrats, Union Labor candidate M.J. Cain received 14,570 votes, or 4 percent of the ballots cast, in the election that saw the reelection of Larrabee. Far more influential than the Union Labor Party during the campaign was the non-partisan Iowa Farmers’ Alliance. Working with “Uncle” Henry Wallace, editor of the Iowa Homestead farm journal, the alliance emerged in the latter half of the decade as a new and important factor in Iowa politics. It aggressively promoted lower rail freight and passenger rates, as well as the elimination of free passes. The alliance targeted thirteen Republican and Democratic legislators, succeeded in defeating twelve, and won pledges of support for regulatory reform from many candidates.15 Events then took a stunning turn. Larrabee surprised many—perhaps including Allison—by vigorously supporting stricter railroad regulation through an elected commission with expanded authority. Borrowing a page from Weaver, the governor embarked on a statewide speaking tour to drum up support for his program, charging that the vast power exercised by railroads threatened the public interest. In the end, he got what he wanted: legislation that created an elected railroad commission and imposed stringent rules on freight pricing practices within the state. When Larrabee signed the bill on April 5, 1888, he won a signal victory16—and gave voters angry at the railroads one more reason to abandon the Greenbacks and their successors. Hobbled by a dispirited, disappearing third-party base, and confronting a resurgent Republican organization revitalized by Larrabee’s deft handling of the railroads, Weaver entered the campaign of 1888 with serious disadvantages. Running once more as a fusion candidate with Democratic support, Weaver faced Republican John F. Lacey of Oskaloosa. Lacey offered voters a stark contrast to Weaver’s support for political and economic reform, and matched Weaver’s skills on the stump. In a debate at Newton, Lacey slyly alluded to the controversy that erupted following the disclosure that the British minister to the United States had written a letter urging American citizens of British

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descent to vote for Cleveland’s reelection. When Weaver called attention to a pair of birds fluttering near the podium, declaring floridly, “The very birds in the air bring happy omens of our victory,” Lacey pounced. “Beware of them, General! They are English sparrows.” Besting Weaver in debate was a notable accomplishment that defined the course of the campaign.17 On Election Day, Republicans in the sixth district, and the rest of Iowa, roused from their slumber. Lacey outpolled Weaver by 828 votes to win. Weaver improved slightly on his 1886 showing, receiving 17,181 votes, compared with 16,572 two years earlier, but it was not enough to stop the Republican wave that swept across the district that had once been a bastion of the Greenback-Democratic coalition. In each of the district’s seven counties, Lacey received more votes than Donnell, Weaver’s Republican opponent in 1886. Weaver carried his home county of Davis, but here too Lacey’s strength was on display. Weaver’s support in Davis County had proven to be a key factor in his previous election wins. In 1886, Weaver carried Davis by 1,001 votes, but against Lacey his margin was only 595. Lacey’s success in the sixth district reflected the strong showing by Benjamin Harrison, the Republican presidential candidate. Harrison carried New York, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. In Iowa, Harrison received 52.3 percent of the vote, improving on Blaine’s narrow victory four years earlier. Cleveland received slightly more votes in Iowa than in 1884, but his gains could not keep pace with those made by his Republican opponent. Meanwhile, support in Iowa for the third-party presidential candidate, Alson J. Streeter of the Union Labor Party, plummeted from the meager showing made by Butler in 1884. Triumphant Iowa Republicans also reclaimed the congressional seat to the west of the sixth district, where self-styled independent Republican A.R. Anderson, aided by the Farmers’ Alliance, had capitalized on anti-railroad feelings to win just two years earlier. “Anti-monopoly,” the Washington Post concluded, “must be losing its grip out in Iowa.”18 As Weaver limped back to Washington in December for the lame-duck session of the Fiftieth Congress, there was little he could look on with satisfaction. Fusion had advanced Greenback ideas, but failed to withstand the Republican onslaught. In what should have been a triumph, Congress had passed legislation to regulate railroads, but Weaver regarded the Interstate Commerce Commission as inadequate to the task. Furthermore, the Oklahoma question remained unresolved—but on this issue there remained at least the possibility that something could be accomplished. The House


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continued to agonize over what to do about the territory. “There was sharp sparring in the House yesterday over the Oklahoma bill,” the Washington Post reported on December 14. “The amount of feeling exhibited in the discussion of this purely business matter is not easily accounted [for], as the division is not on party lines.”19 Passions would soon grow considerably more intense. On January 8, Rep. William Springer, the Illinois Democrat who served as chairman of the House Committee on Territories, sought to schedule the Oklahoma bill for a vote on the House floor. The plan—which required the unanimous consent of all members present to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee—failed. In protest, Weaver engaged in a series of parliamentary maneuvers to block any additional business from being transacted, and the House adjourned an hour earlier than normal.20 The brief parliamentary clash came at the end of another prolonged legislative struggle, and attracted little attention. But Weaver had only begun. The next day, shortly after the House chaplain concluded his prayer, Weaver resumed his guerrilla tactics. He blocked the reading of the House journal—a routine item of business—and “then piled up dilatory motions and wasted the whole day’s session.” Irritated members made a halfhearted attempt to overcome Weaver’s stalling tactics by voting quickly on his motions, but soon grew tired of the effort. For the second straight day, Weaver had succeeded in blocking any legislative action in the House.21 “Every reasonable effort has been made by Democrats to induce Mr. Weaver to desist and allow business to take its regular course, but he refuses unless consideration of the Oklahoma bill is conceded,” the Washington Post reported. Democrats warned that Weaver’s tactics were counterproductive and losing support for the Oklahoma bill, but he was unmoved. “I reviewed the situation in the House and counted the cost before commencing,” he told the Post. “This is a battle for the rights of the people against the arrogant assumptions of syndicates and corporations who are now occupying Oklahoma in defiance of law.”22 Weaver resumed his filibuster the following day. As characterized by the New York Times, “Mr. Weaver’s Deadlock” reflected the growing interest in a question that had been debated inconclusively in Congress for the past four years. House Democratic leaders, anxious to avoid further embarrassment, begged Weaver to stop. “But he remains obdurate and declares that, having entered upon the fight and taken the odium which attaches to it . . . he ‘would

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be a fool to back out now’ ” and “intends to fight it out to the end,” the Post told its readers.23 By now, Weaver was in a familiar position. As in 1880, when his struggle to win recognition for a vote on his financial resolution brought him national attention, he became the target of newspaper wags and editorialists who objected to his tactics. “For a man who is on his political death couch, Brother Weaver of Iowa, seems to be causing a great deal of trouble in the House,” the Post gently chided on January 10. Two days later, in a small item listing the day’s events in Washington, the Post reported on the congressional schedule, noting that the Senate was to meet at 11 a.m. and that “Mr. Weaver meets at noon.” Not all the commentary or reporting was so good-natured. The newspaper published a profile of Weaver that recycled old charges of political opportunism, and accused the champion of temperance of surreptitiously sipping whiskey during the Civil War. “Very few of Weaver’s colleagues in the House or his acquaintances in Washington are willing to give him credit for sincerity,” the Post concluded. Other newspapers, while no less critical of Weaver’s tactics, accorded him more respect. “Representative Weaver, of Iowa, is a good fighter and a ‘high kicker’ in defense of what he conceives to be his rights in the House, and Congressmen who want to go on with the public’s business will no doubt find the rugged Iowan a tough nut to crack,” the Philadelphia Record observed. “Yet he ought to be cracked, nevertheless.”24 The standoff ended January 12, when Carlisle and other Democratic leaders agreed to schedule a vote on the Oklahoma bill if Weaver would drop his filibuster. “When the arrangement came to be known it looked as if Mr. Weaver had captured his opponents, and that he had not made his fight for a hearing for Oklahoma without gratifying results,” the New York Times reported. Other observers weren’t so sure. The Washington Post concluded that Weaver had gained only “a shadowy possibility of the passage of the Oklahoma bill,” and that a far more certain result of his efforts would be a move by Republicans in the next Congress to prevent any lawmaker from tying up the House. Indeed, the dispute had exasperated Reed, the Maine lawmaker likened by Weaver to a “ponderous tilt-hammer” who would become the speaker in the next session of Congress. When Republicans took control of the House in the Fifty-first Congress, Reed acted expeditiously to streamline parliamentary practices. Among the changes approved under his leadership was a new rule that allowed the speaker to declare that dilatory motions of the sort employed by Weaver were out of order.25


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For Boomers eager to settle in the Oklahoma territory, the results of Weaver’s filibuster proved successful, but as is often the case on Capitol Hill, the path to victory was not a straight line. On February 1, the House passed the Oklahoma bill 147-102, only to see the measure stall in the Senate. Nevertheless, Weaver and his allies were undeterred, and after the Creeks and Seminoles agreed in January to sell their rights to land in the district for $4.1 million, Congress voted to open the territory to homesteaders. Harrison then decreed the time and date for the opening: noon on April 22.26 Harrison’s announcement set the stage for one of the most memorable scenes in the history of western expansion. As the day approached, from “all the West the homeless, the speculators, the adventurers, flocked toward the still forbidden land. They jammed roads with their wagons, fought for space in towns, and scattered their rude shacks along the southern border of Kansas and the northern boundary of Texas.” A few days before the opening, settlers received permission to move onto Cherokee and Chickasaw land to get closer to the territory. On the morning of April 22, 100,000 settlers braced for the sound of guns that would signal the opening of the territory. In Arkansas City, Kan., fifteen Santa Fe trains packed with passengers awaited the signal to head into the territory. When the guns sounded, “Men whipped up their horses, wagons careened wildly forward, horses freed from overturned vehicles galloped madly about—all was hurrah and excitement.” Within hours, settlers claimed all 1.9 million acres.27 Weaver numbered among the throng rushing to the new territory. He met with Couch in Topeka at the end of March, and initially counseled patience on the part of Boomers eager to settle in those lands not yet sold by the tribes. After the land rush, however, his tenor changed. Speaking at a meeting of “disappointed Boomers” in Guthrie on April 25, he urged the settlement of a piece of tribal land known as the “Cherokee Strip.” “The soldiers will come to drive you out, and when they do you can lay down your shovels and ploughs and say, ‘I bow to the majesty of the law,’ but you must also say before you resign the land of your choice, ‘I will leave the Cherokee Strip when the cattlemen go. They have no right to be there.’ ”28 Speculation abounded that Weaver intended to revive his political career in the new territory. Perhaps with an eye toward building a new political base, he added his name to a circular calling for a “mass convention” in Oklahoma City to select city officers until a formal election could be held. The gathering selected Couch, Weaver’s longtime ally among the Boomers, as mayor. When

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not preoccupied by politics, Weaver turned his attention to property, but in the process succumbed to the frantic scramble for land. Dan Peery, a settler who penned an account of the land rush thirty years later, recalled an incident involving Weaver that illustrated the frenzy. When an older pioneer was assaulted as he was forcibly ejected from an Oklahoma City lot by Couch, Weaver happened on the scene and declared that the victim “had gotten what he deserved, that he was a ‘d— lot jumper.’ ” This unattractive attempt to associate himself with lawful homesteaders may have reflected an awareness of his declining stature among the territory’s new residents. In Peery’s opinion, Weaver had only himself to blame. Despite public professions of distaste for lot jumpers, Weaver was not so scrupulous himself, according to Peery. Weaver squandered his influence and “large following” in the territory by publicly counseling observance of the April 22 deadline but privately affiliating with a group that crossed into the territory prematurely to claim a site near Oklahoma City. “If Weaver had political ambitions,” Peery concluded, “he killed himself with the lawful citizens.”29 Oklahoma may not have worked out as Weaver hoped, but there was still the Iowa Tribune, and he returned to his editorial responsibilities at the newspaper with renewed zeal. Just how serious he was became clear in the autumn of 1890. After spending virtually their entire adult lives in Bloomfield, James and Clara left Davis County and moved to Des Moines, where the Tribune was published. “Their departure is deeply regretted by many Bloomfield citizens with whom the whole history of the General’s life is familiar,” the Bloomfield Democrat wrote. The move to Des Moines appeared to finally answer a question raised by an Iowa newspaper as the Fiftieth Congress concluded and the West awaited the opening of Oklahoma. Weaver’s friends “are wondering what he will do next?” The Burlington Hawk-Eye reported. “So are his enemies.”30

chapter ten

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he Iowa Tribune provided Weaver with a comfortable perch following his Oklahoma adventure. Already well known as a veteran of Iowa’s political battles, Weaver found that his position as the paper’s co-editor and co-publisher enhanced his stature in Iowa and its capital city. A demonstration of his prominence came on December 26, 1890, when the famous British explorer Henry M. Stanley arrived in Des Moines for a lecture. That night, before Stanley enthralled his audience with an account of his recent rescue of Emin Pasha from the Mahdi of Khartoum, the honor of introduction fell to Weaver, who praised the famous explorer for bringing Christianity to previously unexplored reaches of Africa. “By his indomitable will and matchless courage he has lifted up the everlasting doors of a continent and quickened the energies of all civilization,” Weaver proclaimed. Indulging its co-publisher, the Tribune reprinted Weaver’s welcoming speech verbatim, but regretfully informed readers that “Our space will not permit us to give even a synopsis of ” Stanley’s “wonderful lecture,” and instead referred them to his new book.1 Under Weaver’s editorial supervision, the Tribune maintained its ardent support for economic reform and inaugurated a new publication, a quarterly featuring speeches from Weaver, De La Matyr, and allied politicians from across the country, as well as an assortment of fiscal and economic data. For the most part, the Tribune looked much as it did when Weaver and Gillette took over in 1882—a broadsheet weekly whose front page was devoted to political news and commentary, with inside pages on farming and family features—but Weaver’s imprint was visible everywhere. A house ad that ran on the front page, trumpeting a $1-per-year subscription offer, predicted in Weaver’s grand style that new readers would flock to the Tribune. “We Must and Certainly Shall Hear from Thousands,” proclaimed the advertisement appearing over the names of the paper’s co-publishers. “Now for the Battle!”2 After a decade of relative quiescence, the forces that Weaver had attempted to lead into that battle were beginning to stir again. The revival began on the plains of Texas, where small farmers, often cotton growers, revolted against the crop lien system that spread throughout the South after the Civil War. Under this system, farmers mortgaged their crops to buy supplies from local

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merchants. If, at the end of the growing season, the farmer was unable to pay off his debt to the merchant, another mortgage arrangement was made. The system spawned a vicious circle of debt and despair for many farmers. “In ways people outside the South had difficulty perceiving,” one historian has written, “the crop lien system became for millions of Southerners, white and black, little more than slavery.”3 In the late 1870s, as the Greenback Party reached its zenith, growers in Lampasas County formed what would become the Farmers Alliance to stand up for their economic and political interests. But the organization foundered when the third party collapsed. After fits and starts, the movement took off again in the mid-1880s as it began to stress collaborative economic action. Cotton growers and other farmers formed cooperatives, and agreed to deal solely with designated merchants to increase their purchasing power. Just as significantly, the Alliance appointed “lecturers” in farming communities across the state to promote credit cooperatives and a political philosophy that borrowed heavily from Greenback doctrines concerning paper money and the evils of the banking system.4 The movement soon spread to other regions. From Texas, organizers fanned out across the South and up into Kansas. In midwestern states, including Iowa and the Great Plains, farmers rallied around the banner of a separate Farmers Alliance, based in Chicago and known informally as the Northern Alliance to distinguish it from the movement originating in Texas. Midwestern farmers, of course, had their own grievances, but much like their southern brethren, they found the burdens of debt—exacerbated by continuing deflationary pressures—to be among their biggest concerns. When the Tribune published a poem in 1886 titled “The Man-Eater,” it described the anxieties of many of its readers: The weevil and the cut-worm, they went as well as came; The mortgage stayed forever, eating hearty all the same. It nailed up every window, stood guard at every door, And happiness and sunshine made their home with us no more.5 As the decade continued, those anxieties intensified. A combination of drought and depressed prices brought ruin to many farmsteads. The specter of bankruptcy and—in extreme cases—starvation loomed over farms where drought drove wheat production from twenty bushels per acre to four, while

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prices plummeted to 49 cents per bushel from $1.19. The devastation was particularly acute in Kansas. Of the state’s total farm acreage, 60 percent was mortgaged, with the rate as high as 75 percent in some regions of the state. “Contrary to what the smooth-talking land agents had promised,” one historian has observed, “rain did not follow the plow; misery did.”6 In 1889, disparate agrarian and labor leaders gathered in St. Louis for a conference at which delegates agreed on an outline of the movement’s emerging program. The platform recycled familiar Greenback demands for the abolition of national banks and the issuance of government-backed paper money, but it did not stop there. Delegates also endorsed government ownership of transportation and communications systems and the unlimited coinage of silver, which was supplanting paper greenbacks as the preferred remedy for tight money. Most significantly, the convention called for the creation of an elaborate system of government “sub-treasuries,” at which farmers could obtain low-interest loans secured by crops or land. Formulated by agrarian theorist and editor Charles Macune, the sub-treasury program capped a daring platform that broke profoundly with conventional views, by arguing that the government had a legitimate role to play in providing protection from the vagaries of the economy.7 To spread its reform message across the country, the Southern Alliance, rechristened the National Farmers Alliance & Industrial Union, elected North Carolina farmer Leonidas L. Polk as president. A former Whig and supporter of the Union who nevertheless fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, Polk was a wholehearted advocate for the Alliance agenda, and soon began to tour the country to drum up support. The extent to which the efforts of Polk and other activists were succeeding became dramatically apparent after the elections of 1890. In the South, Alliance-backed gubernatorial candidates won victories in four states and seized control of eight state legislatures. Alliance-backed candidates captured forty-four House seats throughout Dixie. In Nebraska, a young Democrat named William Jennings Bryan vigorously courted Alliance voters and won a seat in the House. Kansas sent “Sockless” Jerry Simpson—so named after a newspaper article misinterpreted his refusal to wear the silk stockings favored by a wealthy opponent— to the House of Representatives and William A. Peffer to the Senate.8 A decade after Weaver sought to draw farmers and laborers to support economic and political reform, the grassroots Alliance movement succeeded in reviving the fortunes of the agrarian insurgency. In a report on the voting

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in Kansas that could have applied to a number of other states, the New York Times observed, “farmers have awakened to their power and exercised it.”9 In a December meeting at Ocala, Florida, Alliance members grappled with the meaning of their newfound strength. Western delegates were eager to form a third party and plunge into the presidential election of 1892. Predominantly Democratic southerners were reluctant to do so, preferring instead to endorse or oppose candidates on the basis of an “Alliance yardstick” that measured support for Alliance positions. The eagerness to form a new party was partly tactical. Western Alliance activists feared intense pressure to return to the Republican fold if their southern brethren stayed with the “party of the fathers” and in so doing strengthened the Democratic Party in a presidential election year.10 Despite their differences on political strategy, delegates agreed to expand the program first articulated in St. Louis. Calls for the creation of a subtreasury and government control of railroads and communications were augmented by demands for a graduated income tax and the direct election of senators. The “Ocala Demands” would form the basis for the movement’s program in the years ahead. Delegates also endorsed Polk’s plan to emphasize political education in 1891 by appointing paid lecturers in every congressional district. Early in the new year, Polk continued his Alliance evangelism in Iowa. In March 1891, with Weaver’s blessing, Polk went to Creston in southwestern Iowa to organize a branch of the NFA & IU. The bearded North Carolinian won rave reviews in the Tribune for his “splendid presence” and powerfully “magnetic, intellectual and rhetorical force.” An unsigned column about the meeting, apparently written by Weaver, noted that “the writer” visited Alliance officials “during the off hours of the session,” and found them deeply committed to their work. The piece concluded with Weaver’s highest accolade, declaring that the Southern Alliance and allied organizations “are ushering in an era of brotherly love, a nobler and better civilization, and are setting the precepts of the Galilean in motion among men.”11 Weaver was clearly on board. But where was the NFA & IU headed? Polk preferred to preserve the movement as a grass-roots organization, rather than refashion it as a political party. In a pair of letters to Weaver shortly after he visited Iowa, Polk shared the concerns of his southern allies about the direction of the movement. On April 5, writing from Washington, Polk enthused about the success of the “yardstick” approach. “One more Georgia congressman tumbled into

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our ranks last Saturday,” and the movement’s growing influence was creating panic among members of Congress, Polk confided. “They are praying for ‘a way out’ and unless there be a great change which I cannot now foresee about eight Southern states will come to the front and show them the ‘way out.’ ” Almost one month later, after assuring Weaver of growing influence in the South, Polk urged caution regarding the formation of a third party. In a two-page handwritten letter to Weaver labeled “private,” Polk discussed the May 19 Alliance meeting in Cincinnati, at which the third-party issue would be debated. He recommended that delegates do nothing more than adopt a “pointed, patriotic, manly address to the people stating the evils under which we suffer,” and set in motion the election of delegates to a “National Conference” in July 1892. The minimalist approach would work best for his region, Polk assured Weaver. “I sincerely trust that our North Western brethren will listen to us, who know the peculiar difficulties hanging around the Southern men.”12 Guided by Polk’s counsel, Weaver adopted a cautious posture toward the party question when the “National Union” conference gathered at Cincinnati. As the spirited proceedings unfolded, Weaver found himself at odds with Ignatius Donnelly, the firebrand orator from Minnesota. Donnelly made a proposal regarding committee appointments that was seen as a back-door attempt to organize a third party. The plan produced pandemonium on the convention floor. Amid the uproar, Weaver jumped up. “Striding down the aisle, his white mustache quivering with pugnacity, he pointed his long arm at Donnelly, and denounced the latter’s proposition as an attempt to pledge the convention on the sly to the most vital action without one word of discussion.” Donnelly could be seen sitting “bolt upright,” his “blue eyes flashing while the Iowan stormed.” Weaver and Donnelly continued their battle behind the scenes on the resolutions committee, where Weaver’s moderating influence succeeded in keeping many of Donnelly’s proposals out of the convention’s statement of principles.13 The dispute over the movement’s next step posed a dilemma for Weaver. In addition to Polk’s worries, Weaver had reasons of his own for wanting to proceed with caution. After spending much of the 1880s in a futile attempt to maintain the electoral viability of Greenback Party, he knew firsthand the dangers ahead for the Alliance movement, should it rashly reconstitute itself as a political party. Furthermore, the Iowa Farmers’ Alliance had demonstrated considerable success in the late 1880s promoting railroad regulation

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by maintaining itself as a non-partisan organization. On the other hand, the instincts formed during a lifetime in electoral politics and years of leading a reforming third party proved too much to overcome. When the conference voted to proceed with the formation of a new “People’s Party,” Weaver immediately assumed a prominent role as one of Iowa’s representatives on the party’s national committee.14 Delegates left Cincinnati enthusiastic about the future. On their return home, Kansas delegates decided that “People’s Party” was an unwieldy name and, searching for a pithier alternative, happened on populus, the Latin word for people. They rechristened themselves as “Populists,” but the delegates from the Sunflower State were not only thinking about political nomenclature. They had already begun to speculate about the party’s candidate in the 1892 presidential campaign. Polk, Peffer, and Weaver numbered among the possibilities. In Iowa, the People’s Party held its inaugural convention in June, with Weaver playing an active role at the Des Moines gathering, where a slate of candidates for state office was nominated.15 The emphasis on education continued as the Alliance movement evolved into a political organization. This was nothing new to Weaver, who had been barnstorming throughout the United States on behalf of reform since his presidential campaign. Even in the aftermath of his defeat in 1888 and frustrations in Oklahoma, he remained a popular speaker commanding a nationwide following. In the summer of 1891, he joined Alliance leaders on a sweep through Georgia. Along with Weaver, the movement’s Kansas stars— Simpson, Peffer, and Mary E. Lease—promoted the Ocala Demands in a state where the Alliance seemed poised for a breakthrough. In Americus, one critical account conceded, Weaver’s denunciation of monetary contraction “carried everything before him.”16 Lease’s presence in Georgia signified an important aspect of the Alliance. Nationwide, women accounted for as many as one quarter of the movement’s members. In some places, the number was much higher. Women served as Alliance lecturers, and ranked among the movement’s most impassioned and articulate public personalities. Many Alliance women, especially in the West, viewed the right to vote as an essential reform. “Ours is a grand and holy mission,” Lease would declare in 1892, “to place the mothers of this nation on an equality with the fathers.” As the Alliance gave voice to women’s political concerns, Clara Weaver began to emerge in her own right as a public personality. In July 1891, she spoke at a women’s suffrage meeting in Des Moines on

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“The Preparation of Women for the Ballot.” In her remarks, she called for adding the study of “the duties of citizenship” to the public school curriculum. Such a course of study, Clara argued, would create a strong demand for women’s suffrage, which, according to an account of her remarks, held the potential to guide “the ship of state . . . high above the breakers of intemperance and kindred immoralities.”17 While the Alliance had no trouble enlisting articulate men and women to lecture on behalf of its program, finding newspapers that would report and comment fairly on the movement’s activities proved to be another matter. Virtually all newspapers of the day—from the big-city dailies of Chicago and the East, to the county-seat weeklies of the rural Midwest and South— reported on politics through a partisan prism. As a result, the Alliance movement received little coverage, and far less favorable editorial comment, than the major parties. Alliance leaders realized that the press would have to play a significant role in their political education effort, and undertook to promote and support newspapers that backed their program. The National Reform Press Association, established at Ocala, provided sympathetic editors with cartoons, commentary and pre-printed “boilerplate” to promulgate Alliance positions. Weaver’s Tribune embraced political education and urged the public to do so, too. “The reform press has been and must continue to be the chief instrument in educating the people to a full conception of their rights and the imperative necessity for a united and determined effort at the polls to regain them,” the Tribune commented in an August 1891 editorial. The task faced by reform editors was complicated by their often-precarious economic position, the paper acknowledged. “In this great work,” The Tribune complained, reform newspapers “labor at a great disadvantage, having no ‘fat to fry’ from protected manufacturers, national bankers, bloated bondholders, wealthy corporations or holders of fat offices, and being largely boycotted by city advertisers.” Therefore, it was imperative that “friends of the great cause of industrial emancipation . . . aid the struggling reform press and . . . refuse further ‘sustenance to the enemy.’ ”18 The hint of desperation in the paper’s plea for support foreshadowed a major announcement made toward the end of the year. On December 2, readers learned that the paper would be rechristened as the Iowa Farmer’s Tribune, and would consolidate publication of several Alliance papers. The new publication would be similar in format to agricultural publications already on the market, such as the Iowa Homestead published in Des Moines.

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“The Agriculture Department will of course be a leading feature of the paper and it is the determination to make it equal in reliability, timeliness and interest to any agricultural paper in the west,” the Tribune declared. “It will be the only agricultural newspaper in the west supporting Alliance principles.” In February 1892, the paper disclosed that it was owned by a syndicate of more than 100 of the “most progressive farmers” in Iowa and neighboring states.19 The publication started the new year with a circulation of 11,520, and reflected the pragmatism that governed Weaver’s approach to politics. Just as he recognized that reform principles were doomed without victory at the polls, the changes at the Tribune suggest that Weaver realized that the long-term success of Alliance “political education” efforts required a sound business footing— even if it meant giving politics and commentary less prominence. The weekly broadsheet was replaced by a more compact format, with fewer columns and more illustrations. While front pages initially remained devoted to politics, other topics, such as Des Moines-area colleges, or the latest in cream separators, soon appeared on Page 1. As promised, with Weaver remaining as editor, the new publication stayed firmly committed to the Alliance cause. Gillette, Weaver’s longtime partner at the paper, stayed on the editorial staff.20 Among the more than two dozen contributors listed in the masthead was a native of England named Thomas Meredith. In 1852, Meredith sold the store owned by his late father in the town of Glasbury, near the Welsh border, and left for the United States. After settling in Iowa in 1854, he turned to farming and prospered. By the mid 1870s, Meredith owned more than 2,000 acres and had become one of the region’s most prosperous landowners, but that did not prevent him from supporting the reform politics of the old Union Labor Party or the organ edited by its Iowa leader. Despite its makeover, the new publication left no doubt about its political orientation, with a front-page motto declaring its support for “Equal Rights To All, Special Privileges To None.”21 Weaver soon made another contribution to the Alliance’s political education campaign. In August 1891, the Tribune announced that a book by Weaver, “a work fully abreast of the times,” was ready for publication, and needed agents to handle its sales. Weaver had long contemplated a book-length statement of his political views. As early as 1886, he approached New York publisher G.P. Putnam with a proposal to write about economic questions only to encounter an experience common to aspiring authors—rejection. According to the Tribune, Putnam turned down Weaver’s proposal because it belonged to a group of publishers that agreed not to print anything that opposed return

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to the gold standard. Whether politics or cold-eyed commercial realism was the basis for Putnam’s rejection, it would be another six years before Weaver’s idea for a book came to fruition. During that time, the literary muse proved to be an intermittent visitor. While still living in Bloomfield, Weaver would wander about his property, struggling to work out ideas, according to a newspaper clipping in the family scrapbook. “Then he would write a little and then he would grow weary and neglectful of his literary work, until Mrs. Weaver would encourage and arouse him to further effort.” With Clara’s support, Weaver finally finished the project, and in February 1892, Weaver’s book went on sale.22 At 445 pages, A Call to Action is Weaver’s most detailed statement of his political and economic views. Part memoir, part history lesson, and part manifesto, it offers unique insight into the motivations that led him to enlist in the Greenback and Populist parties. Its style tells much about the temper of its author, and its themes reveal his deepest concerns and loftiest aspirations. A Call to Action begins with chapters devoted to Congress, the Supreme Court, and the legal profession, then attacks the modern corporation, in a chapter titled “Evolution in Crime, or Improved Methods of Piracy.” Weaver trained his guns on the private Pinkerton security forces enlisted by business in its struggles with organized labor, and attacked abuses by railroads, banks, and trusts. He recited the longstanding agrarian critique of federal monetary policies in chapters devoted to “the silver problem,” national debt, and land ownership. Developments in each of these areas, Weaver warned in his preface, endangered the future of the United States. “If the present strained relations between wealth owners and wealth producers continue much longer they will ripen into frightful disaster. This universal discontent must be quickly interpreted and its causes removed.”23 A Call to Action summoned readers to preserve and strengthen American democracy. The economic and regulatory issues close to the heart of Alliance members received a thorough review in A Call to Action. Regarding railroads, Weaver left little doubt where he stood. In a chapter on “the transportation problem” that surveyed abuses by railroads and their financiers, Weaver wrote: The Government must resume control of these highways and operate them in the interest of the people at large. This it can do by building lines of its own or by taking those now in operation, paying a reasonable compensation therefor. It is idle to talk of any other remedy. We have experimented

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skirmisher • James B. Weaver through a lifetime of a whole generation and have demonstrated that avarice is an untrustworthy public servant, and that greed cannot be regulated or made to work in harmony with the public welfare. Like the carnal mind, it is enmity against the Laws of God and man and is not subject to the will of either, neither indeed can be.24

Weaver’s ringing endorsement of government control of the railroads—a central plank in the platforms developed at St. Louis and Ocala—followed vigorous defenses of two other key Alliance demands. After many years of advocating increased use of paper greenbacks to counteract deflationary trends in the economy, by 1892 Weaver had become an energetic supporter of “free silver,” the unlimited coinage of the precious metal. Silver, like the paper currency he championed a decade earlier, offered the prospect of expanding the supply of money in a time of deflation and easing the burden of debt. “The increase of our population, the consequent demands of business and the increased volume of trade imperatively demand an increase in our circulating medium,” Weaver asserted. “The exactions of creditors and usurers are bringing labor deeper and deeper into debt from year to year.” At the heart of Weaver’s arguments on the economy was the view that the existing financial system cheated the men and women who labored on the nation’s farms and in its factories. When money is scarce, Weaver argued, it becomes more valuable than the property and labor it is used to purchase. “Under such circumstances, the profits of labor are shifted from the hands of those who create the wealth to the coffers of those who control the money.” Another key weapon in the Alliance arsenal for fighting the pernicious effects of contraction was the sub-treasury program, which through its plan of crop- or land-guaranteed government loans would “expand the currency when needed and shrink it when demand has passed away.” 25 Whether denouncing corporations or banks, Weaver’s economic critique often betrayed a deep mistrust of modern financial institutions. He lambasted financial speculators for hoarding cash—as if bankers kept piles of money locked away and investment was not a legitimate use of capital. He demonized corporations without conceding their valid role in an increasingly industrial economy. Nevertheless, Weaver correctly concluded that the contracted currency championed by the federal government since the end of the Civil War significantly contributed to the impoverishment of farmers and laborers. After reviewing federal monetary policies adopted after the war, he asked: “Is

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it any wonder that money has become valuable and hard to get—too valuable to be employed in legitimate business and fit only to enable its owner to drive hard and unconscionable bargains?”26 While much of A Call to Action is devoted to economic questions, Weaver also grimly surveyed the state of the nation’s political and legal institutions. Although his book included a chapter warning against the concentration of power in the office of the House Speaker, Weaver’s indictment of Congress focused largely on the Senate. While conceding that it was envisioned as a check on the popular passions given voice in the House of Representatives, he argued that the Senate had evolved into something not contemplated by the Founding Fathers—an “Alsatian den” of reaction and monopoly power. Senators doubled as corporate attorneys representing business interests before the Supreme Court. Many possessed great wealth. Their election by state legislatures often came about because of squalid vote buying and lobbying by interest groups operating outside public view. As a result, “There is not a single great leader in the Senate of to-day” who supports political and economic reform. “The cure for this frightful public affliction cannot be applied too quickly,” Weaver concluded. “It should consist of a plain amendment to the Constitution which shall provide for the election of the United States Senators by the direct vote of the people of the respective States.”27 Weaver was equally dismayed by the Supreme Court. The ruling in Wabash v. Illinois, in which the justices invalidated state laws regulating railroad rates for violating the Constitution’s commerce clause, stood as an example of “judicial arrogance” that had become the trademark of the court. In language that the modern-day right would applaud, Weaver attacked the court for its “constant accretion of power” and denial of state authority. He challenged the landmark decision in Marbury v. Madison that established the court’s prerogative to rule on the constitutionality of legislative action by Congress, and questioned why judges should “be exempted from elective control.” Weaver employed the arguments of strict constructionists to advance, rather than impede, government authority. The court stood in the way of vital regulatory transformation. “Every reform now pressing for recognition before the people and our law making bodies, State and National, is liable to find a foe . . . in our Imperial Supreme Court.” There was a historical precedent for this situation, Weaver warned, and it was not comforting. “We distinctly remember that this same Court and Dred Scott once differed in their conceptions of human rights under our Constitution. But Dred Scott’s

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views are now generally accepted. It is probable that the controversy between the farmers and the Court will end in the same way.”28 Weaver’s contempt for the Supreme Court reflected a broader dismay with the state of the legal profession as the nineteenth century closed. Echoes of Bellamy Storer’s plea for attorneys to remain in touch with, and sympathetic toward, the problems of average citizens reverberate loudly. Drawn by the prospect of “large and seductive rewards to be obtained in the service of monopolies,” the best lawyers of the day gave little thought to the general welfare, Weaver wrote. “The strong men and great lights of the profession are, to a large extent, captured . . . as fast as they rise above the dead level of mediocrity, and thus the public service, the profession and the people are degraded, while corporate influence is exalted.” Allies of monopoly power occupied influential positions in the nation’s law schools and on the judiciary, spreading their influence throughout the profession. In another echo of Storer, Weaver warned that the corrupt state of the legal profession endangered the future of American democracy. “How can we construct a safe building from unsound timber?” Weaver asked. “When we shall most need it as a refuge from the storm, it will prove to be our greatest point of danger, and fall upon and crush us.”29 A Call to Action stops well short of being a political diatribe. Weaver’s trademark pedantry is on display throughout the work. The chapter on the Senate begins with a lengthy discussion of the evolution of parliamentary institutions in Britain going back to the Saxons. Similarly, his examination of the Supreme Court starts with a historical survey of the role of the courts in Rome and the Spanish kingdom of Aragon before turning to a lengthy review of court rulings on a variety of railroad cases. The historical and legal analyses give A Call to Action the flavor of a scholarly investigation, rather than an intemperate screed. The book is suffused with indignation at the existence of widespread urban and rural poverty, the yawning gap between rich and poor, abuses by financiers, and political corruption, but Weaver’s outrage is driven by his religious faith. Righteous indignation, rather than radical fury, is the hallmark of A Call to Action.30 The theological basis for Weaver’s politics is revealed most dramatically in a chapter devoted to the contrast between the opulence and poverty of the age. In harsh tones, he describes lavish dinners given at Delmonico’s in New York—one of which featured a table with a miniature lake and four live swans, “banks of flowers of every hue,” and all “the dishes which ingenuity could

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invent or the history of past extravagances suggest.” In a similar vein, Weaver denounces a banquet held by the American Bankers Association in Kansas City in 1889 as “an impious feast” held in “the very heart of the mortgageridden and debt-cursed West.” After concluding his catalog of plutocratic excess, he detailed the suffering faced by the urban poor. Under the heading “At the Rich Man’s Gate,” Weaver noted that, while the wealthy were indulging themselves, a New York newspaper reported that “one hundred and fifty thousand persons . . . were daily unsuccessfully seeking work within the city limits of New York.” An additional 150,000 made less than sixty cents per day, and thousands of these indigent workers were young girls working daily shifts of eleven to sixteen hours. In 1890, more than 23,000 families were evicted from their homes in New York. Weaver included a lengthy account of tenement house horrors in Boston, Chicago, and, for good measure, London.31 Weaver entitled this chapter of A Call to Action “Dives and Lazarus,” in reference to the parable Jesus tells in the gospel of Luke about the rich man who was content to let a poor man suffer while he basked in luxury. The implication was immediately clear to Bible-reading nineteenth-century Americans. In this parable, the rich man, Dives, finds himself burning in Hell after he dies, while Lazarus, the poor man, was whisked to Heaven by a band of angels. When Dives pleads for help, he is told that it is too late and that he could have avoided his fate had he only adhered to the teachings of scripture and paid more attention to the suffering just outside his door. Just as the contrast between Dives’s greedy opulence and Lazarus’s suffering foretold their fate, Weaver warned that the deep division between rich and poor could only lead to disaster for the United States. “The millionaire and the pauper cannot, in this country, long dwell together in peace, and it is idle to attempt to patch up a truce between them,” he cautioned. “Enlightened self respect and a quickened sense of justice” were driving people to ask basic questions about inequality. “They are calling to know why idleness should dwell in luxury and those who toil in want; and they are inquiring why one-half of God’s children should be deprived of homes upon a planet which is large enough for all.”32 As “Dives and Lazarus” shows, the moral outrage that propelled Weaver into the agrarian reform movement flowed from—and was expressed in terms of—his Christian faith. As his opus went on sale, Weaver traveled to St. Louis, where a conference of reform organizations met on Washington’s birthday to join forces. The conference, which included the NFA & IU, the People’s Party, organized

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labor, women’s suffrage advocates, and supporters of prohibition, lasted two days and was characterized by the sort of procedural fireworks to which Weaver and other veterans of third-party politics had become accustomed. Nevertheless, delegates endorsed government ownership of railroads and, in a separate resolution, urged referral of women’s suffrage to state legislatures for action. Polk was elected chairman of the meeting, and Frances Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was chosen as vice president. As the conference concluded, delegates were brought to their feet by the reading of Ignatius Donnelly’s stirring platform preamble, which warned that the United States has been “brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin” and that “the fruits of toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes.” As the gathering closed, Macune, the editor and agrarian theorist, urged delegates to remain seated for a mass meeting to be led by Weaver, at which they would organize a presidential nominating convention.33 Less than a year after Weaver worked in Cincinnati to tamp down the movement toward formation of a third party, he was now at its head. The prospect of playing a leading role in selection of the party’s presidential candidate—or being the candidate—proved irresistible to the old campaigner. The gathering led by Weaver soon agreed on a plan for selecting delegates and holding a convention in Omaha on July 4—a date that not only carried enormous symbolic importance, but also meant that the party would convene after the Democrats and Republicans. Not surprisingly, Weaver figured prominently in the speculation that soon began regarding who would head the People’s Party ticket, but in public he remained coy. When a reporter asked if he intended to be a candidate for the party’s presidential or vice presidential nomination, the usually loquacious Iowan became uncharacteristically reticent. “Well, as for that, I have nothing to say,” Weaver replied. “I prefer not to talk upon that subject.” Weaver may have been reluctant to speak about his political prospects, but others were not. One report listed Weaver, Donnelly, and Polk at the head of a field of potential presidential candidates that also included Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor, and Alson J. Streeter of Illinois, who headed the Union Labor ticket in 1888. “Sockless” Jerry Simpson of Kansas believed the nomination would go to Weaver. “At any rate,” Simpson noted, “he has up to this time been the man most discussed in that connection.” Rep. Tom Watson, the Populist leader from Georgia, expressed no individual preference, but argued that “the only question should be, is he

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identified with us; is he a man of good standing, and is he a man of broad ability, fitted to lead a campaign as a presidential candidate?” Oklahoma Populists believed Weaver fit the bill. In May, they unanimously endorsed him as the party’s presidential nominee, and backed Powderly as his running mate.34 Watson’s description of the ideal candidate applied to Polk as well as Weaver, but the North Carolinian would not be in the field of contenders at Omaha. On June 11, Polk died of cancer at a Washington hospital. His death proved to be an enormous loss for the People’s Party. Not only was Polk the party’s likely nominee, he was also ideally suited to promote sectional reconciliation and insulate Populists from charges of disloyalty to the South. Polk’s death put Weaver at the head of prospective nominees as Populists began to arrive in Omaha, but a last-minute boomlet for Walter Q. Gresham suggested continued uncertainty among rank-and-file delegates. Gresham was not even a declared Populist, but a federal judge believed to be a supporter of free silver and labor. The comments of one Illinois Populist on the eve of the convention highlighted the fluid situation. J. C. Edwards said the Illinois delegation would enthusiastically back Gresham, but favored Weaver as a second choice if the judge did not receive the nomination. A lifelong Indiana Republican who had sought the party’s presidential nomination in 1888, Gresham was an unlikely standard-bearer for the Populists, and on July 1, he sent a telegram to supporters instructing them not to place his name in nomination.35 Before choosing their presidential candidate, however, the assembled Populists adopted one of the most thoroughgoing reform programs in American history. The Omaha Platform reprised Donnelly’s stirring preamble from St. Louis and then laid out a detailed and ambitious agenda. Warning that “the time has come when the railroad corporations will either own the people or the people will own the railroads,” the platform called for government control of the nation’s freight and passenger lines. The telegraph and telephone systems must also be placed in the hands of the government, the platform declared, and the Post Office should be expanded to include postal savings banks for “the safe deposit and earnings of the people.” The platform demanded “a national currency, safe, sound and flexible, issued by the general government only,” and “free and unlimited coinage of silver” at 16-to-1, referring to the ratio of silver to gold needed to mint a dollar coin. “Sixteen-to-one” would become a rallying cry for free-silver advocates. The People’s Party also endorsed the NFA & IU’s sub-treasury proposal and a graduated income tax.36 Uniting these proposals was an expansive view of the role of government

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made abundantly clear in the platform’s preamble. “We believe that the powers of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal services) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify to the end that oppression, injustice and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.” Additional resolutions reflecting the views of the convention, but not officially included in the platform, called for the direct election of senators and a constitutional amendment limiting the president and vice president to one term. After delegates adopted the platform, a spirited exhibition likened to “descriptions of enthusiastic bastile demonstrations in France” erupted on the convention floor.37 More excitement followed. As the demonstration continued, Herman Taubeneck, the convention chairman, frantically waved a telegram over his head. The communication came from an Indiana Populist who claimed to have been in touch with Gresham. The message, Taubeneck said, was that Gresham would, in fact, accept the party’s nomination—if it were made unanimously. “The effect of this telegram was electrical. Thousands of people sprang instantly to their feet and thousands of voices cheered again and again for Gresham.”38 It looked like the Kirkwood stampede all over again. This time, however, Weaver and his supporters were ready. As the bedlam continued, Mary Lease pushed toward the convention stage. When she got to the podium, she poked fun at Gresham’s demand for unanimity with a reference to the president. “I, too, have received a message. I am authorized to say that if the nomination is tendered unanimously even General Harrison will not decline.” Lease’s jibe produced applause and “derisive laughter.” The gathering adjourned, and when delegates reconvened that night, Gresham himself put a stop to the boom. In a telegram addressed to Weaver, Donnelly, and other leading Populists, Gresham repeated his earlier disavowal of interest in the nomination.39 As the balloting began, it soon became clear that Weaver held a comfortable advantage over his main rival for the nomination, Sen. James H. Kyle of South Dakota. The roll call indicated that support for Weaver was widespread across all regions. Alabama, California, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, and Virginia all went unanimously for Weaver. “The Weaver infection seemed to spread as state after state cast its vote for the Iowa man,” the New York Times reported. There were, however, some signs of weakness. Among Georgia delegates, for example, Kyle

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outpolled Weaver 39-13. In the silver hotbeds of the West, Kyle also scored some surprising victories, taking a majority of the delegates from Colorado and winning the unanimous support of Montana’s 12-member delegation. Nevertheless, Weaver secured a lopsided triumph, winning 922 votes to Kyle’s 255, and a motion from the floor made the nomination unanimous. The Populists then selected James G. Field, a Confederate veteran from Virginia, as Weaver’s running mate. In the early morning hours of July 5, Weaver addressed the convention.40 His thunderous rhetoric rose to the occasion. “This is no longer a country governed by the people, and it is the great duty today devolving upon the party which you represent to rescue the government from the grasp of federal monopolies and restore it to the great common people to whom it belongs,” he said. He vowed to take the Populist campaign to every state “if God spares me,” and further promised delegates that “your standard shall not be trailed in the dust or lowered during the campaign.”41 On the anniversary of American independence, another insurgent third party advancing an ambitious program of economic and political reform had issued its own call to action. For the second time in twelve years, Weaver answered.

The phrase “middle of the road” reflected the Populists’ independence from the major parties rather than their ideological position. rocky mountain news, july 17, 1892

chapter eleven

Confident That His Cause is Just

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ow fifty-nine years old, his once dark-brown hair turned gray, the handsome, mustachioed Weaver presented a familiar sight to many of the delegates in Omaha. Since 1877, he had championed economic and political reform in Congress, on the campaign trail, and in speeches from Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Lawrence, Kansas. His political evangelism lifted him to the top rank of the People’s Party, and illuminated his strengths and weaknesses as a candidate. “He is best seen in action when upon the stump,” the New York World wrote. “It is as a public speaker that he stands out most prominently. He is a fighter. He fears nothing, and he plunges forward in discussion confident that his cause is just and certain that he will win his audience to his side.”1 These characteristics sometimes got the best of him. Weaver’s zest for political pugilism occasionally escalated into anger, particularly when his reputation was involved. At times, his speechmaking revealed a capacity for grandiosity. His rhetorical flourishes—“your standard shall not be trailed in the dust or lowered”—often betrayed the outsized ego of a politician who viewed himself in heroic terms. Yet years of battling for unpopular causes required a well-developed sense of self to withstand the numerous defeats that were part and parcel of a political career dedicated to reform. Indeed, his self-aggrandizing theatricality made him a compelling advocate for the Populist program, according to the World’s vivid, but not altogether flattering, description. “His face beams, the steel glitter of his eye carries argument, his voice is resonant, his gesture gracefully emphatic, his flow of words uninterrupted and quite pure, and his reasoning always cumulative, if not always sound.”2 Weaver’s most striking quality as a candidate, according to the newspaper, was a sunny faith that he could win any political battle in which he was engaged “no matter how hopeless the outlook, how forlorn the situation.” Here the newspaper mistook Weaver’s belief in the ultimate triumph of the causes he supported—a belief that grew out of his deeply held Methodist convictions—for the certainty of short-term political success. To be sure, he projected optimism about his political campaigns, as any good leader would. He may even have begun to draw up lists of potential cabinet officers, as the World reported, but he was also experienced enough to recognize that such

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an exercise amounted to little more than daydreaming. Realism tempered Weaver’s hopeful outlook. “We have unshaken faith in the integrity and final triumph of the people,” he wrote in A Call to Action. “But their march to power will not be unobstructed.”3 As it happened, the task before Weaver in the summer of 1892 required an ample endowment of self-confidence. Many observers reacted to his nomination with dismay or amused indifference. Doubt lingered within a sizable faction of his own party. Disgruntled Populists worried that “the nomination of a long-time Greenbacker upon a free-silver platform will expose the movement to ridicule and contumely.” In addition, many argued that Weaver’s long political career and repeated quests for elective office detracted from his credibility as a reformer. The Democratic Atlanta Journal put it most succinctly: “If the new party people were after an experienced candidate, they got the man they wanted in Weaver. He has been running for something all his life.” Weaver supporters conceded that their candidate’s frequent quests for office were potentially problematic but argued that concerns about his history would soon pass, and that the campaign would focus on the party platform rather than the candidate. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the relief that greeted the news from Omaha signaled a lack of respect for the candidate and the party. “The nomination of Gen. Weaver has lifted a burden from the hearts political of both Democrats and Republicans at the Capitol,” the Washington Post reported. “A common opinion is expressed that the nomination means the struggle will resolve itself into a square contest between the two great parties.”4 The conventional wisdom discounted Weaver and predicted that his second bid for the White House would prove as marginal as the third-party presidential campaigns of the recent past. Above all else, Weaver’s challenge would be to prove the skeptics wrong, and to establish the People’s Party as a force to be reckoned with in presidential politics. The Omaha convention followed the quadrennial gatherings of the major parties that set the stage for a sequel to the 1888 contest between Republican Benjamin Harrison and Democrat Grover Cleveland. The Republicans, who met in Minneapolis in early June, were divided by squabbling between supporters of Harrison and James G. Blaine, the party’s 1884 presidential candidate, who served as Harrison’s secretary of state. As president, Harrison succeeded getting Congress to enact his tariff program and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a measure aimed at responding to the inflationary demands of southern and western agrarians. Like the Bland-Allison silver bill of a decade


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earlier, the measure put some silver into circulation, but with restrictions that limited its inflationary effect. Despite Harrison’s legislative victories, many Republicans were restive, and, as the convention approached, Blaine resigned from the cabinet. Dissidents flocked to the “Plumed Knight,” who allowed his name to be placed before the convention despite ill health and personal uncertainty about whether he wanted the nomination. Harrison staved off the challenge, but emerged as the nominee of a dispirited and divided party.5 Democrats, who gathered in Chicago later that month, turned once again to Cleveland, who in his years out of the White House had become a vociferous opponent of silver as a supplement to the gold-backed monetary system. Cleveland’s condemnation of bimetallism as a “dangerous and reckless experiment” earned him respect among eastern financiers, but alienated embattled farmers crushed by deflationary pressures and declining commodity prices. Still, Cleveland’s stature as the only Democrat to win the White House since the Civil War made the former president the front-runner. He easily turned back a challenge from New York Gov. David B. Hill on the first ballot. The following day, Democrats selected an old Greenback ally—Adlai Stevenson of Illinois—as the party’s vice presidential candidate.6 In the campaign ahead, Weaver faced two experienced and skillful politicians, each of whom had been successful once in running for the White House. Dramatic developments in the battle between labor and management quickly overshadowed the evolving presidential campaign. At the Carnegie Steel plant in the western Pennsylvania town of Homestead, company executive Henry Frick prepared to break the 4,000-member Amalgamated Association of Steel and Iron Workers, whose three-year contract expired on June 30. On June 28, the company locked out 800 workers. Both sides prepared for the worst, and workers established a round-the-clock lookout for strikebreakers. On July 6, an armed force of Pinkerton guards arrived on a flotilla up the Monongahela River. A daylong battle ended with ten union workers and three Pinkertons dead. Tensions escalated when the governor of Pennsylvania called in 8,000 state troops and an anarchist shot Frick in his office on July 23. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, striking silver miners in Idaho provoked by a cut in wages and company lockout took control of the mine and kicked out strikebreakers. The governor declared martial law and pleaded for federal help. U.S. troops arrested union members, imprisoned them in barbed-wire bullpens, and barred mine owners from hiring union workers. The ruthless union-busting counterattack

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by management and its government allies seemed to provide violent validation of the Populists’ warning that the “fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few.”7 Nevertheless, the response of Weaver and the People’s Party to the events in western Pennsylvania foreshadowed populism’s single greatest failing—its inability to make inroads among industrial workers in the urban centers of the East and Midwest. Weaver took note of the battle of Homestead in his first campaign speech—a two-hour marathon on July 20 in Vincennes, Ind.— but also paid tribute to Gresham and discussed transportation and financial questions. Two days later, Weaver and Taubeneck traveled to St. Louis and announced that Weaver would make an extensive campaign swing throughout the West, rather than the industrial heartland to the east. Weaver’s itinerary included Colorado, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington state, and Montana. Pittsburgh and the steel-making environs of western Pennsylvania, a region rife with the very kind of economic pressures denounced by Populists, did not figure in Weaver’s campaign plans. He clearly sympathized with northern industrial workers, and frequently voiced outrage at their treatment, but he did not reach out to them in person. Unlike 1880, when Weaver campaigned extensively throughout New England and in New York City, he stayed entirely out of the industrial Midwest and Northeast in 1892.8 The decision to head west rather than east reflected short-term tactical realities. With Weaver attempting to mount a credible campaign, and party coffers virtually empty, it made sense to concentrate on states where grassroots support for the People’s Party was strongest, rather than squander resources where the party had virtually no foothold. In addition, the changing profile of organized labor left the People’s Party at a disadvantage. For years, the Populists and their Greenback predecessors maintained an alliance with Powderly and the Knights of Labor. In the late 1870s, the Knights claimed membership in excess of a half million, but unsuccessful strikes, and the loss of many members to the rival Federated Trades and Labor Council led by Samuel Gompers, left the Knights severely weakened. Unlike Powderly, Gompers eschewed partisan politics, preferring to concentrate on building the strength of the craft unions in his organization.9 While Gompers stayed on the sidelines, another prominent labor leader entered the fray, but not to aid Weaver or the Populists. Eugene V. Debs, who had been elected as a Democrat to the Indiana legislature in the 1880s, viewed the Harrison administration as a threat to the well-being of workers. Rather


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than turn to Weaver, however, Debs urged labor leaders throughout the country to support Cleveland. Debs’s attitudes toward the Populists evolved during the 1890s, but he had not yet embarked on the ideological odyssey that turned him into a political radical. In 1891, following the Alliance conference in Cincinnati, he voiced skepticism about government ownership of railroads and free silver in the pages of the publication he edited, the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine. His attitude about populism changed as the decade continued. In 1894, Debs’s American Railway Union implicitly backed the People’s Party, when it endorsed the party’s free-silver plank and called for workers to “act on independent political lines.” Two years later, Debs joined with a host of prominent reformers in an unsuccessful attempt to bring organized labor into the third party.10 Debs eventually lost his distaste for government ownership of railroads altogether and ran five times for president as a Socialist, but in 1892, he remained loyal to the Democrats and Cleveland. A more fundamental problem for the Populists than the partisan alignment of labor leaders was programmatic. The party’s free silver plank aimed at ending deflationary pressures, but the prospect of rising prices offered little appeal to urban wage earners. In the 1870s and 1880s, the currency issue’s history as a metaphor for economic and political democracy had some resonance for labor leaders. By the 1890s, it remained deeply significant as an issue in many rural areas, but it meant little to the masses toiling under the smokestacks of the urban North. Industrial workers feared that free silver threatened to cause hardship by raising prices for food and other items.11 Throughout its short life, the People’s Party proved unable to overcome this hurdle. Populism prospered in western and southern states where Alliance cooperatives and allied organizations promoted the political and economic empowerment of farmers. In the industrial North, however, “no means of spreading . . . political consciousness to the huge working class ghettos of the nation’s cities” had developed. Activists attracted to Populist economic doctrines and, later, socialism, constituted a small and politically marginal portion of the labor vote. At the same time, the cultural context from which the People’s Party emerged—its roots in the Protestant traditions and regions of rural America—limited its appeal. Urban Catholic workers tended to vote Democratic and were not likely to respond positively to a political program developed by rural Anglo-Saxon evangelical Protestants. “Reduced to its essentials,” one historian has written, “the organizational problem facing

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the People’s Party in its maiden campaign of 1892 grew out of the cultural limitations of the Alliance movement itself.”12 With little prospect of success toward the east, Weaver and his Populist strategists turned their attention west. In late July, Weaver headed to Colorado to begin the campaign. As in 1880, Weaver, alone among the presidential candidates, actively stumped for the support of voters, but this time, his campaign featured an additional novelty—high-profile roles for two women who often appeared with him when he spoke. At a time when women were still battling for the right to vote, the presence of Clara Weaver and Mary E. Lease in the campaign retinue represented a significant symbolic breakthrough in American presidential politics. An astute student of politics, Clara’s presence offered her husband a valuable source of advice and support. She appeared in public with James, but left the speechmaking to her husband and Lease, one of the most compelling figures to emerge from the Populist movement. Born in 1853 and raised in western Pennsylvania, Lease became a teacher, and moved to Kansas in 1870 after failing in an attempt to organize a union for her colleagues. In Kansas, she resumed her teaching career, and married druggist Charles L. Lease. After two unsuccessful attempts at farming, and the loss of two children in infancy, the Leases moved to Wichita. As Charles returned to his career as a druggist, Mary managed domestic affairs, raised four children and, remarkably, also studied the law. Lease found her calling as a political activist and campaigner after she was admitted to the bar in 1885. She worked for the Union Labor Party in the late 1880s, and joined the Alliance movement soon thereafter.13 Almost six feet tall, with a pasty complexion and a taste for what William Allen White called “the most ungodly hats I ever saw a woman wear,” Lease distinguished herself as one of the Alliance’s most convincing orators. Her speeches, delivered in a voice that White described as a “deep, rich contralto” with “hypnotic qualities,” lasted for hours, and were characterized by an angry energy. Lease “could recite the multiplication table and set a crowd hooting or hurrahing at her will,” he recalled. She did not urge Kansas farmers to “raise less corn and more hell,” as is widely believed, but the tenor of the comment reflected her political outlook. Campaigning with Weaver, she declared that “it is blackest of all black blasphemy to attribute social disorder, financial panic, commercial crisis, starvation, sin and despair to Almighty God, and downright, obstinate ignorance and stupidity to attribute them to the laws of ‘supply and demand.’ ”14


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Lease’s commanding presence and barbed speaking style provided a valuable supplement—and dramatic contrast—to Weaver’s speech-making. She was not a theoretician of populism, White conceded, “but she knew it was an uprising, and she rode the waves.”15 The rhetorical firepower of the Populists, the insurgent party’s greatest asset, was deployed to full effect in Colorado. Populism prospered in the mountainous state, where influential personalities embraced the new movement, and economic pressures gave it relevance. Davis W. Waite, a prominent labor editor, became an early enthusiast, formed a state People’s Party in 1891, and won its nomination for governor in 1892. The new party also received sympathetic coverage in the pages of a mainstream daily newspaper, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. Most significantly, the party’s position on the currency question gave it a strong appeal in a mining state hard hit by declining prices for silver.16 On July 17, the News published a front-page cartoon showing Weaver astride a horse leading a throng of Populist supporters between two-faced representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties. Below the cartoon, a catchy piece of campaign doggerel urged fealty to populism as a “middle of the road” alternative to Democrats and Republicans. The rhythmic verse depicted the sentiment for silver and populism prevailing in Colorado and many other parts of the West: They’ve woven their plots and woven them ill We want a Weaver who’s got more skill And mostly we want a silver bill So we’ll stay in the middle of the road.17 The eight-day tour of Colorado proved to be a dazzling success. Two speeches in Denver were followed by stops in Pueblo, Aspen, Leadville, and Grand Junction. In Denver, Lease concluded her remarks with a unique fundraising plea: she invited the crowd to toss silver dollars at her. “Her invitation was followed by a rain of silver dollars amid much laughter and applause.” Appearing in Pueblo on July 28 before a crowd estimated by the sympathetic News at 9,000, Weaver coupled a vigorous endorsement of free silver with an indignant condemnation of the events in western Pennsylvania. “At every mention of free silver, at every denunciation of the crime against the laborers at Homestead, at every allusion to the cause of the people and the

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impending downfall of plutocracy and oligarchy,” the News reported, Weaver “was compelled to wait for the subsidence of enthusiasm.” The Weavers and Lease also benefited from silver zeal in Nevada. “At Elko, Carlin, Winnemucca and Lovelocks,” according to one account, Weaver “was greeted with bands of music, the roar of cannon and firing of anvils.”18 From Nevada, the campaign headed to California, where Alliance activists had made encouraging strides. By 1891, Alliance membership reached 30,000—six times larger than the Grange. Wheat farmers in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys found themselves battling declining prices and the monopoly power of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose malevolent reach earned it the nickname “Octopus.” As wheat production became increasingly unprofitable, farmers turned to fruit, but success would depend on cooperative action to market the crops, as well as access to reliable and cheap sources of transportation and water—conditions that made the Populist program attractive. Supplementing the ranks of Alliance members were “Nationalist” followers of Edwin Bellamy, whose novel, Looking Backward, foretold a highly centralized twenty-first-century economy directed by a technocratic elite. Bellamyite Nationalists were drawn to the new party by its call for an activist government to regulate the economy. Elsewhere along the Pacific coast, particularly in Washington state, the new party won support from local farmer-laborer coalitions. The insurgent movement also drew strength in the Pacific Northwest from the anti-Asian sentiment first voiced by Denis Kearney and his followers in the late 1870s.19 The Populist messengers received a warm welcome in Los Angeles on August 6. A crowd of 4,000 welcomed the speakers with a three-minute standing ovation, and Weaver responded with a speech of more than ninety minutes in which he served up a straightforward critique of the economy and Congress. “The production and wealth of this country is simply phenomenal,” he stated, but only the rich benefited from this bounty, because Congress failed to exercise its constitutional responsibility to regulate commerce. The national banking system that allowed a handful of financiers to control the nation’s money supply exemplified this failure. “Now, mind you, I am not making war on national bankers, but upon the system. God helping, that damnable system must go,” he declared to loud applause. The ballot box offered the best method of change, he counseled. “The government is with the people. Good government will never come to you from Washington city until you first send it there,” he said. “A reform commences where a pot


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commences to boil—right where the fire is the hottest. The necessities of the people have compelled this reform movement.”20 On August 9, a reporter from the Oakland Daily Evening Tribune caught up with the weary but enthusiastic party as it arrived in the East Bay for a campaign appearance. The newspaper depicted Weaver as “a very pleasant talker” who “speaks very deliberately” but took note of his age—“he is a man well past the meridian of life”—suggesting that the rigors of the campaign were taking a toll. Clara, on the other hand, appeared to be holding up well. The newspaper described her as “a tall and pleasant lady,” dressed tastefully in lavender, who was an “earnest and eloquent” temperance advocate. In discussing the campaign, Weaver predictably projected confidence, telling the newspaper that the “contest today is between the People’s Party and the Democratic Party.” He discounted Republican prospects, citing the party’s losses in nine northern states in the congressional elections of 1890. “The Republican ticket,” Weaver said, “cannot hope for success,” and he asserted that Democrats found themselves in a similar predicament. In the South, Weaver declared, Populist prospects looked good. He professed to be particularly encouraged by the outcome of state elections in Alabama. “The vote in Alabama,” Weaver concluded, “shows clearly the situation in the South.”21 Weaver’s western tour continued after his stop in Oakland with appearances in Oregon, Washington state, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. A “special dispatch” from Weaver to the National Economist, the Washington, D.C.-based weekly organ of the Alliance, reflected the fervent reception he encountered. “The whole group of states west of the Missouri is with us and the tide is sweeping eastward,” Weaver enthused. “The Republican Party is completely disorganized and we shall win.”22 While he was excited about Populist prospects in the West, Weaver’s Oakland interview indicated that he was already thinking ahead to the next phase of the campaign. After a brief stop in Des Moines on August 23, Weaver took the People’s Party campaign into Dixie.23 Cleveland needed to carry the South to return to the White House, while the region’s early enthusiasm for the Alliance and its program highlighted the threat to Democratic dominance posed by the new party. With its large pool of potential Populist voters, and the Democratic Party battling to maintain its hegemony, the South promised great rewards—and great risks—for the People’s Party nominee. With so much at stake, southern Democrats left nothing to chance, as the outcome of the August 1 balloting in Alabama indicated. Alliance activists in

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Alabama had rallied around the gubernatorial candidacy of R. F. Kolb, who ran as a “Jeffersonian Democrat,” rather than a People’s Party candidate, with the support of Populists and Republicans. The combination appeared to jeopardize Bourbon dominance, but the regular Democratic ticket claimed an 11,000-vote victory. Kolb’s supporters cried foul, claiming with justification to have won by between 35,000 and 40,000 votes, but they were unable to contest the results in the Democratic-controlled courts or legislature.24 As a sign of the “situation in the South,” Alabama proved illustrative indeed, but by offering an early indication of both Populist potential and the challenges that lay ahead, it signified more than Weaver acknowledged in Oakland. Democrats relied on more than corruption and the institutional advantages that came with their longstanding dominance in the region. They also stoked racial and regional animosity to rally voters to “the party of the fathers.” Republican efforts to bolster federal support for black suffrage, in growing jeopardy since the end of Reconstruction, provided Democrats with ample kindling to inflame the white electorate. Congressional Republicans had proposed strengthening judicial oversight of congressional elections with a measure that, among other things, authorized appointment of a threemember Board of Canvassers to review election returns, and put the power to resolve disputed elections in the hands of federal judges. Derided as the “force bill” by its opponents, the measure passed the House by six votes in July 1890, but stalled in the Senate. Nevertheless, the prospect of a reinvigorated federal commitment to protecting black voting rights antagonized and energized southern Democrats, who viewed their party as a bulwark of white dominance. “The Democratic party at the South is something more than a mere political organization,” one editorialist wrote. “It is a white man’s party, organized to maintain white supremacy and prevent a repetition of the destructive rule of ignorant negroes and unscrupulous whites.”25 If the People’s Party made major inroads in the Democratic South, that could improve the chances of a Republican victory, and strengthen efforts to involve the federal government in protecting black voting rights. Populists threatened prevailing racial attitudes more directly by reaching out to black voters. The Colored Farmers National Alliance, formed in 1886, had long been part of the agrarian insurgency in the South. In Georgia, Tom Watson, the fireband Populist congressman, appeared publicly with black speakers, and spoke to audiences that included blacks and whites. He urged Populists to make “lynch law odious to the people,” and eloquently outlined the reasons


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white and black small farmers should cooperate. “Now the People’s Party says . . . ‘You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings,” he declared. “You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.”26 Weaver fully endorsed the biracial coalition assembled by southern Populists, and he somewhat naively predicted it would be a key factor in victories for the People’s Party. Putting membership in the Colored Alliance at 1.2 million, Weaver asserted that the “South is in fact solid with us this time,” and that black voters would play a key role in helping the Populists to victory. “They can vote now with perfect freedom and without any fear of the consequences.” Embroiled in his own bitter re-election campaign, Watson was more pessimistic. Race hatred, Watson recognized, posed the biggest impediment to political success for the People’s Party.27 Southern Democrats wasted little time painting Weaver as a threat to the region. Less than a week after Weaver was nominated at Omaha, Rep. Charles Triplett O’Ferrall of Virginia foreshadowed the Democratic strategy. In an interview in Washington, O’Ferrall dismissed the Populist standard-bearer because of his Civil War record and Republican past. “He has exhausted the vocabulary in his denunciation of the Southern people,” O’Ferrall told reporters. “Do you think that self-respecting Southern men can now vote for such a man?” O’Ferrall then moved beyond generalized charges of regional bias to something more specific. Southern voters could never support a man whose candidacy jeopardized white rule, he asserted. “Do you believe that they are willing to throw their votes away upon such a candidate and endanger Democratic success and promote the chances of the passage of the Force bill?” he asked. “As a Southern man, with Southern feelings and with Southern interests at heart, I do not believe it.” In an allusion to allegations about Weaver’s record at Pulaski, Tenn., during the war, O’Ferrall added: “There are many other things that will be presented during the canvass that will make the name Weaver obnoxious in the South.”28 Despite O’Ferrall’s prediction, Weaver’s southern foray got off to a promising start, as he headed into Missouri and then Arkansas. During a rally at Beebe, Ark., Weaver spoke for two hours, vowing unceasing efforts to defeat plutocracy and liberate oppressed farmers and industrial workers. Twelve years earlier, Arkansas Greenbacks put the sectional enmity of the Civil War

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behind them to support Weaver, but in the current environment, the People’s Party took no chances. Joining Weaver at Beebe was Texas Populist James H. “Cyclone” Davis, whose angry oratory lived up to his nickname. The northern and southern Populists proved a powerful draw. More than 5,000 Arkansans, mostly farmers, traveled up to 30 miles to attend the meeting. In Dallas, Weaver attempted to defuse regional acrimony with a straightforward appeal to his former enemies. Appearing before a crowd estimated at 2,000, on a speaker’s stand decorated with the Union and Confederate flags “in close embrace,” he thanked former rebels who were supporting him. “The boys in blue are with you and I feel as Joshua must have felt when the Lord commanded him to go through the hosts, and it is impossible that I should not succeed.”29 But the shadow of sectionalism continued to preoccupy the Populist presidential campaign as Weaver joined up with his vice presidential candidate, James G. Field, in Pensacola, Fla., on September 17. Field had been campaigning for the Populist ticket in the South where, as a Confederate veteran who lost a leg in the war, he provided some protection from the animus generated by Democrats. Following the political customs of the time, Weaver and Field issued a joint statement in Pensacola in which they formally accepted the nomination of the People’s Party. The Populists jointly pledged support for the Omaha Platform, and denounced “heartless monopolists, trusts, pools and money sharks.” At the same time, they addressed the challenges faced by their party in the South. Weaver and Field accused Democrats and Republicans of keeping the sectional passions of the war alive for partisan purposes. Citing the Alabama results, they bemoaned the “widespread loss of confidence” in the integrity of vote counting in the South, but stopped well short of endorsing a “force bill” solution. Instead, they cautioned that the “deplorable condition” of corrupt elections “cannot be remedied from without,” but must be addressed by “the people within these States, supported by a healthy public sentiment everywhere.” Responding directly to the racial fear mongering of Democrats, Weaver and Field asserted that their party enjoyed widespread support among the “majority of white voters . . . in every Southern state.”30 Having attempted to refute the anti-southern accusations made against him, Weaver, along with Clara and Lease, headed for Georgia. In perhaps no other state was the struggle between the People’s Party and Democrats so intense. At the center of the storm stood Watson, a lean redheaded lawyer with an uncanny ability to amplify the frustrations of


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Georgia’s small farmers. Born in 1856, he struggled against poverty as his family’s fortunes declined, but eventually earned a law degree and prospered. Twenty-one tenant families lived on Watson’s 3,000 acres, but his wealth in no way moderated his political views. He angrily denounced railroads, northern financiers, Bourbon Democrats, and anyone else he believed trampled on the interests of the state’s small farmers. He became an avid supporter of the Alliance, and was elected to Congress in 1890. Almost immediately, he alienated many of his allies by demanding that the South’s forty-four newly elected Alliance congressmen withhold their support for any candidate for speaker who did not endorse the Ocala Demands. Few followed his lead, but the proposal marked him as an early advocate of third-party action in the South.31 In later years, Watson’s fury would be tragically redirected at Jews, blacks, and Catholics, but in the early 1890s, he was an eloquent and passionate campaigner for united action to promote economic reform. As Georgia’s leading Populist, and one of the foremost national figures in the new party, Watson found himself under unrelenting attack by Democrats. Voters in Watson’s congressional district were warned that the new party championed the interests of “selfish and designing men” who, like Satan, would rather “rule in hell . . . than serve in Heaven.” Democrats spared no Populist. Georgia Gov. William J. Northen called C. C. Post, executive chairman of the Georgia People’s Party, an “infidel,” “anarchist,” and, for good measure, “an infamous cur.” The name-calling frequently threatened to escalate into something far more serious. Debates between Watson and his Democratic opponent, James C. C. Black, were usually little more than armed rallies. A vicious exchange at one debate led partisans to draw pistols and knives, and bloodshed “was only narrowly averted.” The hotheaded Watson assaulted a Democratic critic on board a train, but he was as much a target as an instigator of violence. Northen reportedly remarked that “Watson ought to be killed,” and Watson confided in his journal that “there were scores of men who have done the deed and thousands would have sanctioned it.” Black Populists were murdered, and Watson organized white farmers to defend a black party worker from being lynched.32 Weaver plunged into the Georgia maelstrom at Waycross on September 20. At noon at the local Opera House, Weaver and Lease spoke to a crowd estimated at 500 that included a large number of blacks. After describing the enthusiasm he encountered in the West for the Populist ticket, he rebutted the charges concerning his conduct at Pulaski, and characterized the sustained

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attack on his war record as a diversionary tactic. “The Democrats know Georgia to be naturally with the People’s Party and they are trying to arouse the old war passions to hold you in the Democratic Party. They want you to vote to continue to have 5-cent cotton. They want you to vote to support the people of the towns by your labors. They want you to forget all your obligations and to vote your families into bondage.” Lease seconded Weaver’s plea to let go of sectional animosities, and told the audience that western Populists were counting on southerners to join them. The audience found Lease’s eloquence impressive, as did a hostile newspaper account. A correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution called her “ugly as a mud hen,” but conceded that “all listened attentively and with admiration of the eloquence of the woman. Her power of word painting is amazing.” Still, the reception was not entirely cordial. Local youths prepared to bombard the Populists with rotten eggs, but were kept out of the Opera House. Weaver said the threat of “personal indignity” was averted only through “the attendance of a large number of our friends,” and the actions of the mayor and the local Populist leader.33 The threat of disruption intensified in Albany. When Weaver addressed a crowd estimated at 500 from the porch of the Mayo Hotel, hecklers began to interrupt him with questions about Pulaski almost immediately after he began speaking. At one point, as the harassment continued, Weaver exclaimed in frustration that “anyone who says I ever oppressed anybody or ever took any money for my own use is an unmitigated liar.” He eventually made his speech, but it was clear that the war issue was becoming a serious distraction. After Weaver concluded, the crowd began to hassle Lease, but the Kansan refused to be intimidated. When one man in the audience repeatedly interjected questions about women’s suffrage, Lease returned fire: “That gentleman who interrupted me has displayed the fact that he is a very long-eared animal.” The Populists held a successful rally in Columbus, but Lease said it was only because “the farmers were in the majority.”34 Animosity overflowed at the next stop. “At Macon, the conduct of the mob, which greeted our advent into that city, was simply disgraceful beyond description,” Weaver wrote. Prior to his speech, the local Young Men’s Democratic Club listened to speakers inveigh against the People’s Party and Republicans. Although some urged a respectful hearing for Weaver, sectional passions were roused to fever pitch as a local band played “Dixie,” “and not less than 1,000 pairs of sound Democratic lungs sent up cheer after cheer,” according to the Atlanta Constitution. At 8:30 p.m., the People’s Party rally began as Weaver,


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standing with Clara and Lease on the balcony of the Lanier Hotel, was introduced by the local Populist candidate for state Senate. The hazing started as soon as Weaver uttered the words “fellow citizens.” It soon became clear that he would not be able to make himself heard over the hecklers. “Several times the presidential candidate tried to get a start, but the crowd drowned him every time and the support of his own followers was too small to cut much of a figure.” Weaver gave up and, as he turned to leave, rowdies hurled rotten eggs at the speakers. They missed Weaver but hit Clara in the head. Local officials seemed unwilling to put a stop to the commotion. “The police stood in with the mob and laughed and encouraged them,” Lease said. The situation in Atlanta, the next stop, proved equally volatile. The day before Weaver arrived, Watson canceled a speech in the city when a mob shouted him down and accused him of communism. If Watson could not get a hearing, the chances that Weaver would be received respectfully were far less. On September 23, Weaver cut short the remainder of his campaign swing through Georgia.35 In a written statement announcing his decision, Weaver recounted the events in Waycross, Albany, and Macon, and predicted “similar treatment awaits us at the points not yet visited.” He noted that “the disorderly conduct does not proceed from the ex-Confederate soldiers, who are manly almost without exception in their conduct, and generally in sympathy with our movement.” The state’s rural residents were also not responsible. Instead, Weaver blamed “young roughs who infest the towns and who are incited to violence by people who keep in the background.” Local police, Weaver charged, “made almost no effort, so far as is known, to preserve good order.” He acknowledged that not everyone opposed to the Populists engaged in disruptive tactics, but those willing to accord him the right to speak “seem powerless to assert themselves.” Lease was characteristically more acerbic. Clara Weaver, Lease said, “was made a regular walking omelet by the Southern chivalry of Georgia.”36 The charges about the war continued to dog Weaver as he campaigned in North Carolina. Copies of affidavits attesting to Weaver’s behavior at Pulaski, paid for by the North Carolina Democratic State Committee, were printed and circulated throughout the state. “This works on the old Confederate soldiers, many of whom are farmers,” according to the New York Times. While North Carolina Democrats demonized Weaver, they urged supporters to avoid the excesses of their Georgia brethren. “Already one sees printed counsel given to the zealous not to yield to the temptation to give Weaver a ‘warm reception,’ the greeting suggested being more boisterous than friendly,” the

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Times reported. Tar Heel voters responded accordingly. In Fayetteville on September 27, an appearance by Weaver and Lease concluded with the crowd giving three cheers for Cleveland. In Greensboro, after Weaver and Lease received a polite reception, the crowd called for a statement by a reporter from the Atlanta Journal who had written about Pulaski. As the reporter produced documents, the assembled Populists shouted him down.37 Events in Georgia and North Carolina demonstrated that the storm over Weaver’s Civil War record had overwhelmed the campaign in the South. He could have cut his losses and moved on, but, after canceling the remainder of his sweep through Georgia, such a prospect would have been unthinkable to the proud and combative Populist. Instead, he settled on another course of action. In a decision driven more by pride than political necessity, Weaver headed to Pulaski, to confront the allegations in person. The specter of violence loomed. Leading residents of Giles County implored Weaver to stay away. “The threat has been openly made that he will be killed if he uses insulting language,” according to the New York Times. “Third party men from all over the country, including many old Confederate soldiers, are arming and preparing to go to Pulaski, swearing that they will protect him in speaking and protect him against assault.” In addition to physical hazards, the trip to Pulaski also raised political dangers. Weaver needed to make an emphatic, but carefully calibrated, refutation. He had to offer a convincing denial while avoiding inflammatory rhetoric that could further alienate southerners. Weaver courted enormous personal and political risks as he headed to Pulaski. “Both sides are determined, and neither will yield to the other,” the Times reported. “A bloody fight will certainly follow the firing of a single gun.”38 Accompanied by Clara and Lease, Weaver arrived on October 8. A throng of 200 farmers in wagons or on horseback met the campaign at the train station. Local Democrats appointed an estimated thrity-five deputies to monitor the situation and maintain the peace. Tensions were high, but despite the fears that Weaver’s appearance would transform Pulaski into an armed camp, no weapons were visible. Escorted by a band, Weaver, Clara, and Lease marched through town to the county fairgrounds. Weaver gave a partisan Populist speech and then addressed the charges. He offered no apologies for “doing my duty as a Union soldier, and want none from you who wore the gray.” He denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and then closed in a spirit that was simultaneously conciliatory and unbowed. “The war is over. I come here on a mission of fraternity,” he told the crowd. “They said I dared not come.


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I know I dared come, and I would have come had the threats been a thousand times stronger.” The bold declaration produced the desired effect: “Gen. Weaver was wildly cheered.” Meeting as Weaver’s speech ended, unrepentant Giles County Democrats adopted resolutions denouncing him as a “military tyrant” and “a scoundrel,” but Weaver waved off the statements as the work of “a small crowd of cowards and defamers.” The speech concluded without violence, but apprehension subsided only when the Weavers and Lease boarded the train to leave town. The tensions affected the visitors as well. Clara admitted that she had not endured “so anxious and awful a day since the war.”39 Pulaski provided an unsatisfactory conclusion to Weaver’s disappointing southern campaign. Even so, the South was not the whole story. The assurances of Weaver and Lease that the new party stood poised to make significant gains in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states represented more than mere campaign hyperbole. On September 26, while Weaver campaigned in North Carolina, Colorado Democrats voted to fuse with the Populists after already endorsing presidential electors pledged to Weaver. In Kansas, long a hotbed of prairie populism, Democrats took similar action. Although their decision reflected a desire to take the state out of the Republican column as much as support for the People’s Party, the two parties appeared to work comfortably together. To the northwest, Idaho Democrats withdrew their presidential electoral slate and endorsed electors pledged to Weaver. In North Dakota, Democrats endorsed the Populist program, as well as a slate of presidential electors that included supporters of Cleveland and Weaver. Support for Weaver in Nevada came from Republicans. The state’s fervor for free silver led Republicans to form a “Silver Party,” with presidential electors pledged to support Weaver.40 Despite Weaver’s disappointments in the South, Populists had reason to be heartened as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks. Meanwhile, Republicans scrambled to heal their internal divisions and unite behind Harrison. The president patched up his feuds with New York Sen. Orville Platt and other party bosses, but never quite reconciled with Blaine. Harrison was also preoccupied by the condition of his ailing wife, who died on October 24. Demoralized and rudderless, Harrison’s reelection campaign never got off the ground. Cleveland, on the other hand, mended fences with Hill and Tammany Hall, relied on local party managers, and dispatched Stevenson to the campaign trail. In the Upper South, the Illinoisan stressed the importance of a Democratic victory to block passage of a force

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bill. Cleveland proved more successful than Harrison in rallying voters to his party’s standard, but neither Democrats nor Republicans produced the kind of enthusiasm that Weaver generated in many of his campaign appearances. Either party, one wag joked, “would have been glad to defeat the other if it could do so without electing its own candidate.”41 As October wore on, and Cleveland’s advantages became apparent, Republicans pleaded with Weaver to drop out of the campaign. In an October 14 letter to Weaver, Grenville Dodge pointed to events in the South and urged his former Union army comrade to take them into account in the campaign’s final days. “It seems to me your experience in the South must change your views,” Dodge wrote, adding: “if you do your duty as a man and as a soldier and as a statesman, you will not allow the South to elect its President.” A second letter to Weaver, penned five days later by A. W. Tourgee, a Union army veteran, Republican journalist, and former state judge in North Carolina, elaborated on this theme. Tourgee argued that if Weaver remained in the race the likelihood of a Cleveland victory “with the ‘solid South’ as his controlling force” became more likely. “That fact at this time, means the permanent establishment and entrenchment in the most impregnable legal forms of that Southern spirit of intolerance and determination to rule or ruin of which you and I have in our own persons more than one exemplification.” Tourgee proposed that Weaver pull out of the race by November 1, but undermined his plea with the improbable claim that Weaver would “make the entire Republican party your friends and defenders” if he dropped out.42 There was no chance that Weaver would quit a presidential campaign with less than a month to go, and he knew better than Tourgee that the Republican establishment was implacably opposed to the programs of the People’s Party. A strong showing at the polls, rather than the unlikely prospect of an eleventh-hour rapprochement with the Grand Old Party, was the best guarantor of the Omaha Platform. Weaver finished the campaign in relatively friendly territory, with a string of appearances that included stops in Indiana, Kansas, and Minnesota. On the last weekend before Election Day, he campaigned in a Nebraska congressional district where the incumbent Democratic congressman had embraced the People’s Party. William Jennings Bryan found himself fighting for his political life after he displeased the state’s conservative Democratic leadership. Seeking reelection in a new district in which Democrats were in the minority, Bryan actively courted Populist support, and endorsed Weaver instead of Cleveland


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for president. On November 2, the Weavers and Lease arrived in Lincoln for a well-attended rally that featured a parade with floats mocking Bryan’s Republican opponent. When Weaver was introduced, the crowd “went wild upon his advancing to the front of the platform.” The rally energized Populists in Bryan’s district as well as the party’s standard-bearer. “You are going to be victorious in this state,” Weaver predicted with characteristic optimism. “The enthusiasm at your meeting shows it.”43 As Election Day dawned, however, it was clear that Cleveland was returning to the White House. The only question remaining was the size of the Democratic victory, and in the end, it proved substantial. Cleveland carried the entire South, along with Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, and Wisconsin. He narrowly defeated Harrison in New York to win the state’s thirty-six electoral votes. Harrison carried the Republican strongholds of Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but fared poorly elsewhere. Needing 223 electoral votes to win, Cleveland received 277 to Harrison’s 145.44 As for Weaver, he guided the Populist ticket to a stunningly successful showing. The People’s Party presidential candidate carried four states—Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, and Idaho. He earned a plurality in North Dakota, receiving 49 percent of the vote, and polled 34 percent in Oregon. In Wyoming, he lost to Harrison by a little more than 700 votes. In Nebraska, Weaver came within 4,000 votes of defeating the president. Bryan won reelection, but by a very narrow margin. After four days of vote counting, he emerged with a 140-vote victory. Weaver’s last-minute appearance in Lincoln may well have put Bryan over the top. Weaver also polled surprisingly well in some southern states, despite the relentlessly negative campaign mounted against him in the old Confederacy. In Texas, Weaver received 96,649 votes—23 percent of the ballots cast. He did even better in Alabama, polling 84,984 votes—36 percent. With the four states he carried, plus additional support from North Dakota and Oregon, Weaver received twenty-two electoral votes. The candidate written off by the pundits in July led the Populist ticket to a historic breakthrough. For the first time since 1860, a third party was represented in the Electoral College. Could he have done better? One sympathetic observer thought so. An analysis published by the National Economist credited Weaver with running a “brilliant campaign” in the West and getting off to a solid start in Texas, only to be tripped up by incompetent party officials who assumed a defensive posture on sectional issues. “The policy of the executive committee of

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the People’s Party was weak, vacillating and inefficient. The people generally endorsed the platform and there never was a greater mistake than to suppose that the people of the South were afraid of the Force bill.”45 Despite the critique, it is difficult to see what else party leaders or Weaver could have done. Populists stood accused of threatening the racial balance of power, and their presidential candidate was vilified as an anti-southern zealot who persecuted and cheated civilians during the war. Weaver tried to make his party’s case for economic and political reform, and attempted to defend his conduct in the war, but he ultimately failed to overcome the hostility skillfully generated by Democrats. O’Ferrall, the Virginia congressman, proved correct. Over the course of the summer and fall of 1892, the Democratic Party succeeded in making the People’s Party and its presidential standard-bearer repugnant to many voters with “Southern sympathies.” While some diehards may have hoped for a better showing, an exultant Weaver hailed the results in a statement issued from Des Moines on November 16. “Unaided by money our grand young party has made an enviable record and achieved surprising success at the polls,” he declared. The Democratic victory would prove hollow, he predicted, because the new administration would resist all attempts at economic and political transformation. “The battle leaders of the triumphant party are without any well-defined policy except that of contemptuous disregard for every element of reform within the ranks of their own party and among people at large,” Weaver warned. “Our party has not made its advent too soon. Its mission is to restore to our government its original and only legitimate function, which has been well-nigh lost by non-use—that of securing to all its citizens, the weak as well as the mighty, the unmolested enjoyment of their inalienable rights.”46 The ramifications of Weaver’s campaign in 1892 were profound. As in 1880, he took his case directly to the people, and, by carrying four states, he demonstrated the rewards available to candidates who hit the campaign trail. In so doing, he further eroded the traditional reluctance of presidential nominees to seek votes in person. More importantly, Weaver played a significant role in altering the landscape of American politics. He established that a presidential candidate who advocated vigorous government action on behalf of average citizens could attract a wide following. The question of what role—if any— the federal government should play to ensure that the economy operates in the interests of all Americans became a fundamental issue in presidential politics, and figures prominently to this day. Weaver fervently believed that government should rein in the power of business and act as a check against concentrated wealth. With equal certainty, he was convinced that a majority of voters shared his belief. In the years to come, that proposition would be tested by another midwestern politician to whom Weaver readily yielded the Populist banner.

chapter twelve

Commissioned of Heaven

I

n late February 1893, as Washington prepared for Cleveland’s second inaugural, Weaver arrived in the nation’s capital for meetings of the American Bimetallic League and the Populist National Reform Press Association. Consulting with political supporters in his room at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, he was in an expansive and optimistic mood. The People’s Party distinguished itself in the last election and “gives promise of developing into a strong, sinewy and symmetrical organization,” he told a reporter from the Washington Post. At the same time, Weaver professed amazement at the anti-silver views of the Cleveland wing of the Democratic Party. In his view, the currency question would form the basis for a grand coalition of reform-minded forces assembled under the Populist banner.1 Weaver’s hotel-room musings charted the course of his political activities in the aftermath of the 1892 campaign. The allure of free silver, he believed, would attract voters from both parties. The outcome of the presidential election seemed to support his expectations. Weaver’s victories came in states, such as Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho, where free silver dominated the political agenda or, as in Kansas and North Dakota, at least proved complementary to the rest of the Populist program. The hard experiences of his years laboring for the Greenback Party taught him that third parties had to build the broadest possible base to survive and advance their ideas. In the 1880s, that meant taking the Greenback Party beyond currency questions to emphasize a variety of related political and economic reforms. In the 1890s, Weaver argued, it meant making the currency question the party’s primary emphasis in the hope of attracting voters to support the other positions advocated by the Populists. Weaver likened the political climate to the 1850s, when the specter of slavery helped spark the momentous partisan realignment that led to the birth of the Republican Party. “Free coinage is a battle cry that will overwhelm all opposition, and it goes hand in hand with the other reforms contained in the Omaha Platform,” Weaver told the Post. “The anti-monopoly men and the free silver men from both the old parties will ally themselves with the Populists. Being of the same faith, they will get together and vote together. This is inevitable.”2

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Weaver elaborated on his expectations for realignment at the Bimetallic League conference the next day. The league was funded by western silvermine interests eager to promote wider use of the precious metal in currency, and its meeting drew Lease, Fields, and allied silver champions such as Sen. William Stewart of Nevada. Before this friendly audience, Weaver described the importance of the currency question in the unfolding political struggle. “We are in the midst of a revolution, a renaissance if you please, on economic questions, and silver stands the keystone of the arch,” he said. Cleveland would be unable to deal with pressing questions of government finance because of his doctrinaire approach to economic questions, Weaver predicted. “There is but one thing for the new administration to do—stand still and perish.”3 He also invoked one of the hoariest charges of soft-money advocates—that Congress surreptitiously demonetized silver in 1873. “Your Congress, like a thief in the night, controlled by a man in this city who held half a million in British gold, struck down the white metal just as our brave boys were marching home with the laurels on their brows, and no one since has dared restore it to parity.” Weaver often warned about conspiracies, but his allusion to the purported role of British financier Ernest Seyd in demonetizing silver added a lurid touch to his speech. Lease elaborated on the conspiracy theme by pointing to a European banking house, whose mention stoked some of populism’s uglier passions. To loud applause she declared: “Our legislators have become hirelings of the money power, the hired agents of the Rothschilds. Patriotism and love of home will no longer allow us to bear the burden of that debt fastened on us by John Bull and John Sherman.”4 Real suffering soon overwhelmed imagined grievances. Economic conditions deteriorated dramatically almost from the moment Cleveland took office. Shortly before he returned to the White House, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad went into bankruptcy. A cascade of bank failures followed, with 128 closing in June alone. The ensuing financial chaos closed factories and flooded the streets of major American cities—including Chicago, site of the grand Columbian Exposition—with the unemployed. Mothers rummaged through garbage cans to find food for their children. In the meantime, investors commenced a run on U.S. gold reserves. Cleveland responded to these developments by calling a special session of Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, further aggravating free-silver supporters.5 The Panic of 1893 and resulting economic upheaval dominated Cleveland’s second term. As expected, Congress assented to Cleveland’s demand for repeal of the


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silver law, but not before a new figure emerged as a spokesman for the freesilver movement. In his first term in the House, Bryan earned national notice for a long speech denouncing the McKinley Tariff, but only later became a free-silver advocate. In 1892, when his endorsement of Weaver and his support from Nebraska Populists helped him to a narrow victory, he offered a disarmingly pragmatic reason for adopting the party’s position on currency: “I don’t know anything about free silver. The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” When he rose to speak in the House on August 16, he was well prepared. Bryan delivered a three-hour discourse linking the cause of free silver to the restoration of prosperity for average Americans. In biblical cadences, he charged opponents of silver with hypocrisy. “The poor man is called a socialist if he believes that the wealth of the rich should be divided among the poor, but the rich man is called a financier if he devises a plan by which the pittance of the poor can be converted to his use,” Bryan observed. “The poor man who takes property by force is called a thief, but the creditor who can by legislation make a debtor pay a dollar twice as large as he borrowed is lauded as a friend of sound currency. The man who wants the people to destroy the Government is an anarchist but the man who wants the Government to destroy the people is a patriot.”6 Free silver, it was clear, had a dynamic new champion. Born in Salem, Illinois, on March 19, 1860, “Will” Bryan grew up in a household suffused with politics and religion. His father, Silas, was a Baptist and a prominent local Democrat who served as a state senator and circuit court judge. In 1872, Silas Bryan ran for Congress on a platform that advocated inflating the currency to ease pressures on farmers and laborers. A devout Christian who knelt in prayer three times a day, Silas fed hungry hobos who came to his house, and he kept a guest room for use by visiting ministers. While Silas was a Baptist, his wife, Mariah, remained a staunch Methodist who involved herself in local temperance activities. She took charge of Will’s early education, using the McGuffey’s Readers and teaching him Bible lessons. Silas’s and Mariah’s son internalized the political and theological lessons taught at home, but charted a slightly independent course when it came to religion. Instead of attending a Baptist or Methodist church, Will joined a local denomination of Cumberland Presbyterians at the age of thirteen, and he remained active in the Presbyterian church for the rest of his life. After graduating from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Bryan journeyed to Chicago. There he studied law

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and worked for Lyman Trumbull, a friend of his father’s and one-time associate of Lincoln, who maintained a deep-seated anger toward monopolies and plutocracy. Bryan returned to Jacksonville after finishing his legal studies but gravitated to the rapidly growing university town of Lincoln, Nebraska. By 1888, Bryan and his wife, Mary, occupied a new home and had established themselves in Lincoln’s professional, political and academic circles.7 As politicians, Bryan and Weaver shared two important qualities. Like Weaver, Bryan made the most of his gift for public speaking—in fact, he easily eclipsed Weaver as an orator. Widely recognized as a captivating force before an audience, Bryan conveyed an attitude of absolute sincerity, and he sprinkled his oratory with historical and biblical allusions, much as Weaver did. Beyond their similarities as public speakers, Weaver and Bryan held in common the belief that Christian teachings required political leaders to stand up for the powerless. In 1878, Weaver told an audience in Newton, Iowa, that “the Lord . . . is a friend to the poor and oppressed under all circumstances, and on all occasions.” More than twenty years later, Bryan defined how his faith shaped his politics and how it should guide public life. In a Chautauqua lecture he delivered hundreds of times across the country, Bryan argued that the life of Jesus, “the highest ideal of human life that this world has ever known,” exemplified democratic values because his ministry was aimed “at the fishermen of his day, and . . . the common people heard Him gladly.”8 Bryan and Weaver each believed deeply that their Christian faith required them to defend—and give voice to—the interests of the average citizen. While Bryan and Weaver shared many stylistic and philosophical qualities, they differed in one important aspect. Throughout his career, Weaver migrated across the partisan landscape, responding to the dictates of his conscience and the evolving contours of nineteenth-century American politics. At various times he was a Democrat, a Republican, a Greenback, and a Populist. Bryan, on the other hand, supported much of the Populist program but never wavered in his loyalty to the Democratic Party. Weaver dedicated his political career to the advocacy of reform principles by working beyond the ambit of the major parties. Bryan directed his energies toward converting the Democratic Party from a bastion of antebellum conservatism into a vigorous advocate for farmers and workers. Bryan’s partisan predispositions would have important consequences for Weaver and the Populist Party in the years ahead. Cleveland’s hope that repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act would


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steady the economy proved illusory. As wages fell and the ranks of the unemployed swelled, workers and the dispossessed became more militant. Railroad hands tired of the conservatism of the industry’s dominant craft unions flocked to the new American Railway Union founded by Debs. After its first local organized in 1893 in Fort Madison, Iowa, the ARU grew rapidly. When a strike precipitated by pay cuts on the Northern Pacific ended in a victory for workers, the ARU took on the Pullman Palace Car Co., where wages in the “model factory town” south of Chicago had been cut by 25 percent and more than 2,000 workers had lost their jobs. The union launched a boycott in late June 1894, in which members refused to work on any trains carrying Pullman cars. The railroads hired strikebreakers, but Debs and his union initially seemed to have the upper hand. The tide turned, however, after Cleveland ordered federal troops into the fray. Their presence provoked massive violence in Chicago. Debs was arrested on conspiracy charges on July 10, along with union members throughout the rest of the country. They were released after two days, only to be arrested again a week later. The army left Chicago on July 19, and soon thereafter the boycott ended in a catastrophic defeat for Debs and his union.9 As railroad workers flocked to Debs’s ARU, legions of the nation’s unemployed coalesced into an “army” under the nominal leadership of wealthy Ohioan Jacob Coxey. “Coxey’s Army” massed from all regions of the country with the aim of marching on Washington to call for an eight-hour day and a government jobs program. Weaver endorsed the marchers’ aims and inclinations, and he cautioned against the use of excessive force by local authorities. “This movement of armies of unemployed should be treated along the line of the Golden Rule,” he said. “Any other course will produce an explosion.” Led by Weaver, a group of prominent Iowans, including Thomas Meredith, joined the Coxeyites in a meeting with Iowa Gov. Frank Jackson in Des Moines. The delegation demanded that Jackson arrange transit by railroad across the state for the army. Jackson explained that he could make no promises but vowed to pursue the matter with state officials and the railroads. “When the governor ceased speaking,” according to one newspaper account, Meredith launched “an impassioned harangue against the railroads, and urged the governor to seize a train by force. Meredith was speedily suppressed by Gen. Weaver, and the delegation withdrew.”10 With anger mounting about economic conditions, Populists had every reason to hope for a strong showing in the congressional elections of 1894.

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Even though he had just concluded an exhausting nationwide campaign for the presidency two years earlier, Weaver could not resist the call of the campaign trail. In April, he declined an invitation from Kansas Populists to move to the Sunflower State and run for Congress, but he later accepted a similar summons from Populists in Iowa’s western ninth district, which included Council Bluffs. On the other side of the Missouri River, Bryan declined to run for reelection to the House but instead ran for the Senate, embracing a broader reform agenda. Among other proposals, Weaver’s Democratic ally from the 1892 presidential campaign called for a graduated income tax and, in the wake of the Pullman debacle, backed the right of workers to join unions and strike. Bryan’s name was on the ballot in a non-binding “preferential” contest; in order to go to Washington, he would need to be chosen by a majority in the state legislature. Already the most influential Democrat in Nebraska, Bryan added to his prominence when he assumed the position of editor-in-chief of the Omaha World-Herald. In the interests of interstate cooperation, he telegrammed Weaver to congratulate him on his nomination.11 Weaver received other expressions of support as well. Samuel Gompers cited Weaver’s “sturdiness in advocating reforms in the interests of labor and the masses generally.” Debs, who supported Cleveland in the presidential campaign two years earlier, called Weaver “the veteran champion of all labor’s hosts.” As in past campaigns, Weaver ran as a fusion candidate with support from district Democrats against the Republican incumbent, A.L. Hager. In accepting Democratic support, Weaver demonstrated his impatience with Populist “middle-of-the-road” zealots, who preferred to maintain the party’s independence, even if it meant defeat. “I am a middle of the road man,” Weaver maintained, “but I don’t propose to lie down across it so no one can get over me. Nothing grows in the middle of the road.”12 Facing a well-known and formidable foe, Republicans left nothing to chance. In early October, a caravan of GOP dignitaries which included Jackson, the Republican governor, Gov. William McKinley of Ohio, Gen. O. O. Howard, and the son of Ulysses S. Grant, campaigned in the district. Even so, as late as mid-October, one outside observer concluded that Weaver stood a strong chance of winning. Instead, Weaver lost, swamped by a Republican tide powered by outrage at the Cleveland administration’s handling of the economy. The wave pushed every GOP congressional candidate in Iowa to victory. On the other side of the Missouri, Bryan won by 73


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percent in the non-binding preferential ballot, but with Republicans retaining control of the legislature he failed to win his bid for the Senate. Across the country, Republicans enjoyed a spectacular turnaround, gaining 121 seats and a comfortable majority in the House.13 Although the balloting proved disastrous for Democrats, the returns were more ambiguous for the Populists. The overall number of votes cast for the party’s candidates rose by 42 percent from 1892, from 1.04 million to 1.47 million. The party also made notable gains in North Carolina, where the election of three Populists to Congress represented a signal triumph. On the other hand, the party lost badly in the western silver states, where Weaver had prospered two years earlier, as voters returned to the Republican Party. “After the election,” one historian has observed, “there was not a state, southern or western, that could be cited as Populist territory.” In Washington, only eight members of Congress, four in the Senate and four in the House, identified themselves as Populists. Others elected with Populist support joined ranks with Democrats or Republicans. The election threw the Democratic Party into disarray and revived the Republicans, but the Populists had suddenly stalled. 14 Always inclined to look on the bright side, Weaver emphasized the positive as he reached out to Bryan in a November 9 letter. Weaver professed implausibly to be relieved by his loss, claiming that he “could have done nothing with that Republican mob” in the House had he won. More significantly, he asked to meet with Bryan and Sen. William V. Allen for “a close talk” on the political situation, which was “full of hope for the future,” in Weaver’s view. Realignment was on his mind. “It is now apparent that the Eastern and Western Democracy can never harmonize on current issues and that they must separate which will precipitate a new order of things. Let us be ready for it and help to shape things properly.”15 Weaver’s overture was well timed. As Bryan’s term in Congress ended in 1895, he began to lay the groundwork for a presidential campaign. In many ways, it was a quixotic venture. Just thirty-five years old, Bryan lacked both the money and stature, even after his free silver speech, to mount a national campaign. Furthermore, as a sworn enemy of the Cleveland administration, he could expect intense opposition from many party leaders. Bryan did possess one asset that compensated for other deficiencies, however, and he used it to full effect. Much as Weaver had done in the 1880s, Bryan crisscrossed the country over the next sixteen months to speak on behalf of free silver. In

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May, he addressed an audience in Memphis. June found him in Springfield, Illinois, before a cheering throng of silver Democrats that included Gov. John P. Altgeld. The speaking tour took Bryan from Pennsylvania to Texas to Oregon and continued through the fall. As he raised his profile, Bryan also quietly approached Populists and allied Silver Republicans to encourage cooperation.16 Among those receiving Bryan’s entreaties was Weaver, and the Iowan was more than ready to help. “Your letter was received this morning,” Weaver wrote to Bryan on December 31, 1895. “I like your plan and will act upon it without delay.” Although the letter does not make clear exactly what Bryan’s “plan” was, the allusion illustrates that Bryan was eager to work in concert with Weaver and the Populists—and that Weaver was ready to reciprocate. In Weaver’s view, the major parties had each run aground on the currency question, “and now is the time for the free silver forces to throw out their lines and hasten to the rescue.” He informed Bryan that the Populist national committee planned to meet in St. Louis in January, and that he and others intended to ensure that the party would take no action “until opportunity is given for consultation with kindred bodies and interests.” Weaver also expressed annoyance with party ideologues who were likely to resist any move toward fusion. “We have had quite enough middle of the road nonsense, and some of us at last think it about time for the exhibition of a little synthetic force if we would accomplish any good purpose.” In a short note to Bryan four days later, Weaver described how he and Taubeneck planned to push the Populists to hold their national convention after the Democrats and Republicans in order to maximize the likelihood of cooperative action.17 The key meetings came in January 1896. On the sixteenth, Democrats decided to hold their nominating convention in Chicago on July 7. The next day, the Populist national committee voted to hold its nominating convention in St. Louis on July 22. The Republicans were meeting first, on June 17. The third party’s late date, Populist leaders hoped, would allow disaffected Democrats and Republicans to join ranks with the People’s Party and ease the way for some kind of fusion arrangement based on the silver question. Most of the party’s national leaders sided with Weaver in support of the later date, but that sentiment was not universally shared. Two widely disparate groups within the party opposed any move toward fusion. Socialists and intellectuals who had congregated around muckraking journalist Henry Demarest Lloyd opposed making free silver the centerpiece of the Populist platform, on the


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grounds that it would distract from their plan to remake the party into an advocate of collectivism. At the other end of the political spectrum, southern Populists opposed fusion because it raised the prospect of reuniting with the very Democrats with whom they had fought so passionately since the beginning of the decade.18 On the eve of the national conventions, Weaver reaffirmed his support for fusion on free silver in a way that showed he wanted to avoid a bruising battle with middle-of-the-road partisans. Writing to Bryan from Portland, Oregon, on May 29, Weaver urged the Nebraskan to work for a platform that covered “the entire money question.” At the same time, Weaver advocated that Democratic free-silver forces make “advisory” nominations of candidates, if possible. “Should your forces be in control, the gold men will doubtless bolt and this will afford ample reason for making your nominations advisory,” Weaver told Bryan. “I am at the head of the Iowa delegation at St. Louis and will do all in my power to bring about a consolidation of forces.”19 Weaver did not explain how, exactly, a national convention could make an “advisory” nomination, but the recommendation indicated a desire to mollify the middle-of-the-road faction by making fusion a free choice rather than a fait accompli forced on the Populists by Democrats. While Weaver reached out privately to Bryan, in public he allied himself with the Populists who had united behind pro-silver Republican Sen. William Teller of Colorado as an ideal fusion candidate. At the Republican convention in June, Teller and other western silver supporters walked out to protest the party’s “sound money” platform plank. Having gone on record as favoring an income tax and related causes, Teller could be acceptable to Democrats, fusionists believed, if free-silver forces emerged in control of the proceedings. As the Democrats gathered in Chicago in early July, Weaver arrived to survey the scene for silver supporters. He told a reporter that he favored Teller for the nomination and then, as a second choice, former Iowa Gov. Horace Boies, a pro-silver Democrat.20 Of course, Teller stood no chance whatsoever of winning the Democratic nomination—a fact he understood, even if his Populist supporters did not. While free-silver advocates soon found themselves in a position to control the proceedings, they had yet to unite behind a candidate. That changed on July 9, when party leaders debated the free-silver platform plank. After a series of speeches that ranged from an angry oration by “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina to dull and barely audible defenses of the gold

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standard by conservatives, it was Bryan’s turn. He bounded up to the 20-foot rostrum overlooking the hall, surveyed the crowd, and delivered one of the most significant speeches in American history. His famous peroration—“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold”—set the convention ablaze. In the euphoria that followed, Bryan went on to capture the party’s nomination, with Maine shipbuilding magnate Arthur J. Sewall added as his running mate in an attempt to placate eastern conservatives.21 The party platform demonstrated Bryan’s influence. Along with boilerplate pledges of fidelity to Jeffersonian principles, states’ rights, and low tariffs were declarations that indicated that the party was headed in a new direction. The document called the currency question “paramount to all others at this time.” In language with roots in the Greenback platforms of the 1880s, Democrats blamed the demonetization of silver for declining prices, increased debt, “the enrichment of the money-lending classes at home and abroad, the prostration of industry and impoverishment of the people.” Democrats called for an income tax, legislation to protect the rights of labor, and expanded powers for the Interstate Commerce Commission. “The control of wealth by the few, the consolidation of our leading railroad systems, and formation of trusts and pools requires a stricter control by the Federal government of those arteries of commerce.”22 While not as sweeping as the Omaha Platform of 1892, the document closely aligned the Democratic Party with the Populists. The victory of the free-silver faction led by Bryan changed the course of the Democratic Party forever. Bryan’s nomination confronted Weaver and the People’s Party with a dilemma. Although Bryan offered the prospect of undreamed-of success for supporters of free silver and its constellation of related issues, his triumph meant that Populists faced an unpalatable choice: Did they want to ratify Bryan’s leadership of the free-silver reform movement, or nominate their own presidential candidate to preserve the party’s independence, and thereby handicap Bryan’s chances in November? Either option presented grave hazards for the insurgent party. With this difficult question looming, pensive Populists poured into St. Louis in late July. The mid-summer midwestern sun beat down as the delegates gathered. Unable to pay railroad fares, many walked to St. Louis and slept in city parks to save money for modest meals. Hunger and heat contributed to the tensions regarding what to do about Bryan. R.F. Kolb, whose defeat


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in the 1892 Alabama gubernatorial race foreshadowed the Populist dilemma in Dixie, vented his exasperation with party ideologues. “I’m a middle-ofthe-road Populist, but I’ve got sense enough to walk round a mud hole.” On the other hand, a middle-of-the-road delegate from Texas, an anti-Bryan stronghold, flatly predicted that the Populists would nominate an independent ticket if his state had anything to say about it: “Texas is going to run this convention and dictate the nominations.” With a view toward compromise, Populist Sen. Marion Butler of North Carolina floated a highly unorthodox proposal. Under Butler’s plan, the People’s Party would endorse Bryan if he dropped Sewall from the ticket and accepted a Populist for vice president. Weaver and Sen. James K. Jones of Arkansas, the Democratic national chairman, balked at the idea, but it drew support from many Populists when the convention opened on July 22.23 Selected as the convention’s temporary chairman and keynote speaker, Butler continued to push for compromise, but tensions remained high when the opening session adjourned. When delegates returned for the evening session, the hall was shrouded in darkness. Amid the gloom, penetrated only by candles at the press table, some delegates attempted to sing. Others traded accusations. Middle-of-the-road delegates shouted that the lack of lighting was a “trick” engineered by Bryan supporters. Pro-Bryan delegates yelled back that such charges were “a disgrace to the party.” In fact, the dark was the result of a power failure caused by a massive summer storm, and Butler was forced to recess the convention until the next day.24 When delegates returned, they presented fusionists with a victory by electing Allen, Bryan’s Nebraska colleague, as permanent chairman. The convention then adopted the platform written by Weaver, which described the currency question as “the great and pressing issue,” putting it ahead of an income tax, a government jobs program and government ownership of railroads. The platform also endorsed fusion, calling for “the co-operation of all organizations and citizens” who recognized the primacy of monetary and financial questions. Middle-of-the-roaders nonetheless won a significant victory when the convention approved a highly unusual plan to nominate a vice presidential candidate before selecting a presidential nominee. In the early-morning hours of July 25, the Populist convention selected Tom Watson as its vice presidential candidate. On a motion by Weaver, the gathering then adjourned.25 The selection of Watson put Weaver and his allies in an awkward position.

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At the urging of Democratic leaders, Bryan had informed Populists by telegram that he did not want the party’s nomination if it rejected Sewall as a vice presidential candidate. Widely reported in the morning newspapers, Bryan’s declaration was well known to delegates as they grumpily reconvened later Saturday morning. When the sergeant-at-arms reported that there would be no music because the convention’s contract with the local vendor had expired, irritable Populists cheered and shouted “good.”26 The short-tempered delegates then proceeded to the main order of business—and Weaver rose to nominate the man who had just spurned his party. In making the nomination, Weaver delivered a candid and personal speech that not only acknowledged the dilemma faced by the Populists but summarized his approach to politics. He conceded that the People’s Party had reached a “critical period,” but asserted that two priorities should guide Populists— the first of which, “incorporated with my life’s work,” was the preservation of “the great principles that we have contended for for the last twenty years.” The preservation of the People’s Party was a secondary consideration.27 Weaver thus alerted his listeners to his view that the causes to which the Populists had dedicated themselves were more important than the party they formed. Weaver referred to Bryan’s refusal to accept the party’s nomination without Sewall, but cast the rebuff as a sign of the Nebraskan’s courage. “No man could have done less and be a man,” Weaver said. “Mr. Bryan’s attitude challenges the respect of every delegate present, and of every man who reads the proceedings of this convention.” Having painted Bryan’s stance as a sign of integrity, Weaver categorically rejected it and simultaneously rebuked the Democrat and Populist middle-of-the-roaders who preferred an independent ticket. “For twenty years we have been pleading with the people to espouse the sacred cause which is at stake in this campaign. We have constantly urged through good and evil report that our principles were more important than party association; were above all considerations of private fortune, or the petty and feverish ambition of men.”28 Now was not the time to let partisan punctilio get in the way of united action. Weaver credited Populists for creating pressures that pushed Democrats to adopt a free-silver platform and nominate Bryan. Reviewing the twentyyear history of Populists and their Greenback predecessors, Weaver complimented delegates on their dedication to reform in spite of repeated rejections by the “multitudes whom we would have liberated.” After years of defeat, Populists and their allies stood on the cusp of a great victory. “This country


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has recently witnessed a new Pentecost and received a new baptism of fire. The recent convention at Chicago sounded a bugle call which cannot be misunderstood nor go unheeded.” Populists should accept and respect sympathetic Democrats and silver Republicans who wished to stay with their parties, Weaver argued. “If our allies can strike sturdier blows at plutocracy than we can; if they can scale the battlements of the gold tower more gallantly than our old veterans, and are able to plant their colors one foot nearer the citadel than we can ourselves, let every Populist cheer and support them in their heroic work.”29 Nominating Bryan, Weaver argued, was a duty Populists must perform in the service of the principles for which they stood. With a distinct lack of fervor, the delegates agreed. The rapturous excitement that marked the conclusion of the Omaha convention was a distant memory. After Bryan was nominated, delegates yelled, whistled, and marched about the convention floor with flags and state guidons, but the demonstration was a half-hearted affair. Support for Bryan was combined with foreboding about the future of the party. “I came here to prevent this convention falling into the hands of the Democratic Party,” a West Virginia delegate angrily declared. Ruled out of order, he sputtered, “I retire,” and marched out of the hall.30 The course advocated by Weaver might have been necessary, but for many committed Populists who recognized that it pushed the party into irreversible decline, it left a bitter aftertaste. The stage was now set for one of the most dramatic presidential campaigns in American history. Facing Bryan was McKinley, the governor of Ohio whose cautious instincts prompted a fellow Republican to joke that he “kept his ears so close to the ground that they got full of grasshoppers.” Following in the traditions of nineteenth-century presidential politics, the plainspoken McKinley stayed home in Canton, Ohio, to greet visiting delegations of supporters, but the Republican campaign was anything but passive. Behind McKinley stood one of the greatest political managers of the age, millionaire businessman Mark Hanna of Cleveland. Hanna hired 1,400 speakers to campaign on McKinley’s behalf and oversaw the production of more than 120 million pamphlets, fliers, and brochures to make the case for the Republican presidential nominee.31 Most of the nation’s newspapers mobilized behind McKinley. Heading into the fall, Republicans possessed enormous advantages in money, media, and tactical skill. In the face of these challenges, Bryan followed Weaver’s example and hit the campaign trail. Beginning in August and continuing until the eve of

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the election, he traveled 18,000 miles and spoke to an estimated 5 million people. As he traversed central Iowa by train in August, Bryan was accompanied by Weaver, who introduced the Democratic presidential candidate at several stops near Des Moines. Speaking at Colfax before a crowd of 1,000 miners wearing their lamplight caps, Bryan paid tribute to Weaver’s history of support for soft money, calling him a “pioneer in this work” who was “talking for free silver long before it had come to the attention of a great many of us.” Elsewhere, Bryan gave far less emphasis to the white metal. Reaching out to labor in the Great Lakes states, he spent much more time attacking corporations and the wealthy.32 By contrast, Bryan’s partisans in the rural Midwest embraced the cause of free silver with no hesitation. In mid-October, Weaver spoke at a campaign rally in Decatur County, Iowa, preceded by a lengthy parade that featured a float with sixteen girls dressed in white and one in yellow—symbolizing the movement’s sixteen-to-one battle cry. Weaver’s two-hour address aimed at the wallets of Decatur County’s farmers by linking the gold standard to depressed farm prices, but also featured some uncharacteristic pandering. “On the side of the gold standard is every corporation in this country, the Rothschilds, the British journalists and Mark Hanna. Do you believe the Rothschilds know what is good for you?” Weaver’s anti-Semitic allusion reflected the deep feelings aroused by the silver issue in southern Iowa. Local Republicans likewise spared no invective in describing their opponents. “Let no honest man be deceived by the free silver shriekers and the long haired, beer guzzling anarchists who have temporarily obtained control of the Democratic Party,” counseled the Republican Decatur County Journal. As the campaign wore on, the paper demonized silver supporters as “an abomination unto the Lord thy God” in an editorial headlined “The Bible on 16-to-1.”33 The currency question inflamed passions on farms and in the market towns and county seats of rural America in a way not seen since the Civil War. Yet Weaver’s belief that free silver represented the “keystone” of reform proved only partially correct. It succeeded in uniting voters in the South, West, and rural Midwest behind Bryan, but was utterly unsuccessful in that regard in the more populous urban North and Midwest. Big-city Democrats offered Bryan only lukewarm support. Worries about the inflationary effect of silver drove many urban voters away from the Democratic nominee. Debs backed Bryan, but Gompers remained neutral. As the campaign continued, corporations pressured workers into voting for McKinley by warning of


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bankruptcy and layoffs if Bryan won. Even so, voters turned out in droves, with more than 79 percent of those eligible casting ballots. Bryan received 6.5 million votes, almost 1 million more than cast for any previous presidential candidate. McKinley, however, did even better, receiving 7.1 million votes. When the results were tallied, McKinley carried twenty-three states and won 271 electoral votes to win the election. Bryan swept the western states Weaver had won four years earlier as well as the South, but he lost every state in the Upper Midwest and Northeast.34 Free silver united Populists, Democrats, and silver Republicans in many areas of the country, but the regional confines of its appeal limited its capacity to produce the political realignment sought by Weaver, Bryan, and its other champions. Despite the disappointing loss, Weaver and Bryan grew closer. Recrimination, the common byproduct of defeat, did not derail their budding friendship. In December, Bryan and his wife, Mary, published an account of the campaign titled The First Battle, which paid homage to Weaver as one of the pioneers of the free-silver movement. At Christmas the following year, Bryan sent Weaver a nine-volume compilation of the works of Thomas Jefferson. Weaver responded with a short note of thanks on December 29 in which he told Bryan “I am honored” by the gift. “May we now cherish the hope that the early years of the approaching century will witness a decisive triumph of Mr. Jefferson’s idea of enlightened free government—a triumph that shall declare to all the world that this great statesman was right when he said, ‘the only art of government is the art of being honest.’ ”35 Bryan’s gestures may have inspired Weaver to make one last bid for office. In 1898, he returned to the sixth district to run for Congress on a fusion ticket against Rep. William F. Lacey, the Republican who had defeated him ten years earlier. For the first time since the 1860s, an election campaign unfolded in the aftermath of war. Congress had authorized hostilities with Spain in late April, after months of escalating tensions resulting from Spanish attempts to crush a rebellion in Cuba and an explosion that sank the USS Maine in the Havana harbor with 250 sailors aboard. Among Populists and allied Democrats, the war produced a complex reaction. Most, including Bryan and Weaver, welcomed the chance to aid Cubans fighting for independence from Spain. Despite his age, Weaver volunteered his services, while Bryan formed a regiment of Nebraska volunteers and served as a colonel during the war, although his unit never left Florida. At the same time, support for Cuban independence was coupled with deep concern about the prospect that the United

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States would seize Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and the Far East and control them as colonies. The brief war formally concluded in December with a peace treaty that ended Spanish control of Cuba and gave the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the United States. The war created heroes—Theodore Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and Commodore Dewey at Manila Bay—and aided incumbents. Lacey defeated Weaver by more than 1,400 votes.36 Bryan wrote to Weaver to console him after his loss, but Weaver professed to be undismayed. If not for the failure of Democratic and Populist voters to turn out, Weaver told Bryan in a November 14 letter, “I would have been triumphantly elected despite the boodle, bribery and intimidation employed by my opponents.” While untroubled by his defeat, Weaver also left no doubt that he regarded Bryan’s leadership as essential and urged him to resign his commission as soon as possible in order to return to politics. “We feel that you are our natural and rightful leader in this great struggle and we need your council and effective influences.”37 Bryan eventually left Florida and prepared to challenge McKinley again in 1900. Democrats nominated Bryan on the first ballot and adopted a platform that once again gave primacy to free silver. The Populists were divided. Weaver attended a convention of fusionists in Sioux Falls, S.D., that nominated Bryan, while the middle-of-the-road faction convened in Cincinnati. McKinley and the Republicans added Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill, to the GOP ticket. For Bryan, the outcome of the campaign proved more disappointing than his loss in 1896. McKinley held onto the midwestern and northeastern states that put him in the White House, picked up states in the West that he had lost to Bryan four years earlier, and widened his margin of victory in the popular vote.38 Now it was Weaver’s turn to cheer his ally. On November 10, Weaver urged “my dear Col. Bryan” to take heart. “To say that I am greatly disappointed by the result of the election and of your heroic battle for liberty and honest government would be putting it but mildly; yet I am neither cast down or discouraged,” Weaver wrote. Then he indicated just how highly he regarded Bryan. “Since 1896 I have believed that you are commissioned of Heaven to lead in the herculean task to which you are devoting your life—that of rescuing the republic from the clutch of the monarchical reactionists, and my conviction is in no wise shaken by recent results.”39 Two unsuccessful bids for the White House had only strengthened Weaver’s admiration for Bryan. Weaver encouraged Bryan to take the long view, advising his friend that “we


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made the mistake of looking for the harvest at seed time. The wheat germinates soon after sowing, but it has to pass through the bleak and dreary winter before it reaches the vernal showers and refining heat which give the glorious harvest. We will shout the harvest home by and by.”40 Weaver found it easier to counsel patience than practice it, however. Over the next several years, his letters to Bryan grew increasingly agitated, particularly by U.S. policy toward the Philippines. In March 1901 he confided to Bryan his extreme disappointment with the Senate’s failure to defeat a proposal by Republican Sen. John Spooner of Wisconsin to give the president broad powers over the government and disposal of public lands in the archipelago. “Millions of patriots expected a great battle over the Spooner amendment which as truly makes President McKinley emperor of the Philippines as [an] act of Parliament made Victoria empress and now Edward VII emperor of India.” Surprisingly for a Populist, Weaver’s wrath also turned on the public. The “people are absolutely blind and stupid concerning the whole matter and it is daily becoming more and more difficult to arouse them,” he complained. That was not the only startling sentiment he expressed. The one-time abolitionist pined for “a few resolute spirits” in the Senate such as Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the leading antebellum defender of slavery. “Our transition from the glorious republic of our fathers to an elective monarchy longed for by Hamilton is, I fear, being made easy by our lack of tenacious leadership in Congress.” A year later, Weaver volunteered to go to the Philippines in order to report firsthand on conditions there. “I think a three-month sojourn there would enable me to set our people on fire when I return.”41 Weaver did not go to the Philippines as Bryan’s envoy, but two years later he found himself playing an equally unlikely role, as a delegate to the Democratic convention and supporter of conservative nominee Alton B. Parker of New York. “Judge Parker’s plutocratic entourage is not pleasing to me,” Weaver conceded in a newspaper interview. “But it is, to say the least, equally as good as the surroundings of President Roosevelt.” Weaver saw many advantages to the Democratic ticket and campaigned for it with surprising enthusiasm. He judged the party’s platform to be sufficiently opposed to imperialism, militarism, and trusts, and approved of its call for the direct election of senators. In spite of his reservations about Parker, Weaver believed the Democratic Party offered reformers the best option in the campaign. “We can accomplish nothing by flying apart into fragments at this juncture of affairs,” he told a reporter

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after the convention. “Neither can we best serve our country and our age by fleeing to the camp and standard of the adversary.”42 Weaver’s presence in St. Louis and support for Parker reflected the extent of Bryan’s influence. Led by the example of the “Great Commoner,” Weaver had returned to the party that he abandoned in the 1850s. Even as he supported Parker, Weaver cherished the hope that Bryan would return to lead Democrats. Four years later, he got his wish. After Roosevelt routed Parker, Bryan mounted one last run for the White House. Campaigning under the slogan “Shall the People Rule?” he faced William Howard Taft in 1908 and as late as mid-October advised one supporter that “it looks to me like our chances are good.”43 In fact, Taft won decisively. Bryan became—and remains to this day—the only person to have lost three campaigns for president as the nominee of a major party. Bryan’s third defeat left many of his supporters angry, bewildered, and looking for someone to blame. Some pointed at Rome. A Kentucky pastor and editor of a Pentecostal newspaper accused “the tremendous combinations of money, and the Catholic Church” of working in concert with Roosevelt and Taft to ensure Bryan’s defeat. Weaver, however, blamed the malevolent influence of another religious conspiracy. In the darkest and angriest analysis he ever penned, Weaver wrote to Bryan on November 13 and accused “every anti-Christ” of uniting behind the Republican nominee, a member of the Unitarian denomination that does not recognize the divinity of Jesus. Weaver cited Bryan’s failure to carry New York City as proof: The “almost solid Jewish vote (now a mighty factor, especially in New York) threw their united strength to Taft, because he, in common with themselves, denies the Divinity of Our Lord; they crucified him afresh.” For good measure, Weaver also directed his wrath at “trust and monopoly magnates,” “liquor forces” and “the corrupt use of money drawn from the predatory classes.”44 He claimed to remain hopeful, but such assurances were belied by his angry tone. In particular, the unmistakable anti-Semitism he voiced testified to a crisis of faith. The religious convictions that drove Weaver to campaign for political and economic reform sustained him through many setbacks. Now that it appeared that those reforms and their greatest champion had been decisively rejected, Weaver’s optimism was badly shaken, and he bitterly lashed out at all foes, real and imagined. Yet several years after Weaver’s despair boiled over, the forces with which he was allied experienced a remarkable recovery. In a tragic twist of fate, his


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death in February 1912 prevented him from witnessing the triumph that this revival produced. Roosevelt quickly grew disillusioned with Taft, and their feud crippled the Republican Party. At the 1912 Democratic convention in Baltimore, Bryan decisively threw his support behind another Democratic progressive, New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson. With Roosevelt running as a third-party “Bull Moose” candidate, Taft and regular Republicans were hopelessly hobbled. Wilson won an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College, and he pledged in his inaugural address to tackle many of the issues Weaver and his allies had been addressing since the 1870s: currency and banking reform, flexible credit for agriculture, and the regulation of working conditions. “The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people,” the new president declared in language Weaver would have applauded. Wilson rallied the country to a new day in which government policy would be guided by “the light that shines from the hearth fire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right.”45 Bryan held a place of honor in the new administration as secretary of state. In the years after his 1892 campaign for the White House, Weaver had looked for ways of keeping the reform movement he had led since the late 1870s alive. He had hoped initially that voters would rally to free silver and related reform issues. As the clarion call of monetary reform faded, he had invested his hopes in Bryan, but the Democrat “commissioned of Heaven” to lead the cause to victory lost three presidential campaigns. Now Bryan occupied a position of influence in a new administration that appeared poised to act in many of the areas that had long concerned Greenbacks and Populists. With Weaver’s death, it would be up to a new generation of political leaders to shout the harvest home.

Portrait of James Baird Weaver, Iowa State Capitol. Before his death in 1912, Weaver was recognized for his dedication to reform.

chapter thirteen

Skirmisher

A

s Bryan ascended to national prominence at the turn of the century, Weaver played a less prominent role in the great political battles of the day. After 1894, the almost perpetual campaigning that had marked Weaver’s career since the 1870s slowed noticeably. The 1898 race against Lacey represented Weaver’s last campaign for Congress, although his name was mentioned periodically thereafter as a potential candidate for high office. In his later years, Weaver remained deeply concerned about politics, as his correspondence with Bryan illustrates. He continued to speak out, not always to acclaim, but projected a lower profile in the political arena. Writing and editing, which Weaver had taken up as an adjunct to his political career, assumed new importance as he retreated from the rough and tumble of elective politics. At the same time, his reputation experienced a slow but steady revival. In April 1896, Weaver was denounced on the Senate floor by his longtime rival in Iowa politics, Republican Sen. John Gear, as a wild-eyed radical who favored government confiscation of private property and the use of worthless paper money to pay for the seizures.1 Over the course of Weaver’s remaining years, that assessment—widely held at the time—underwent a profound evolution. While the reevaluation of Weaver’s political legacy would take years, the consequences of one of his decisions soon became clear. In 1892, to pay for his presidential campaign, Weaver sold his interest in the Farmer’s Tribune to his political ally and business partner, Thomas Meredith. Although the publication had become less political in the final years of Weaver’s stewardship, it retained its political inclinations well into the decade. In 1894, Meredith made his grandson, Edwin Thomas “E. T.” Meredith, general manager of the Tribune. The elder Meredith sold half of his interest in the paper to E. T. Meredith a year and a half later, with the other half going to Iowa Populist Sylvanus Crane. E. T. Meredith eventually bought out Crane and devoted himself to developing Successful Farming magazine, a compendium of practical advice for America’s farmers. By 1908, the new publication achieved a degree of success that Weaver and Gillette could never have imagined. Circulation reached 300,000, and E. T. Meredith’s booming business employed sixtypeople at a new building in downtown Des Moines. E. T. Meredith remained

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interested in public issues even if his publication no longer focused on politics. In 1914, he was defeated in a bid to win the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. Two years later, he ran as the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa but lost. In 1920, at the end of the Wilson administration, Meredith served as secretary of agriculture.2 Successful Farming formed the basis for the business that today includes Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies Home Journal, and fourteen television stations. Nurtured by another hand, one of the seeds planted by Weaver blossomed into what is today one of the leading media and marketing companies in the United States. Although no longer associated with the Tribune or its successor, Weaver continued to write. In the early years of the new century, he focused less on the political questions that preoccupied him in the 1880s and 1890s than on the dramatic events he participated in during his life. In 1901 and 1902, the World Review, a Chicago-based weekly magazine, published Weaver’s account of his California Gold Rush experiences and his recollections of Garfield, Grimes, Harlan, and other figures from the previous century. In 1909, the Des Moines Register published a series of articles by Weaver about Davis and Van Buren counties in the 1840s and 1850s. Above all else, Weaver’s reminiscences reflected his abiding affection for his country and the state he called home. He portrayed the frontier on which he spent his childhood as an Arcadian paradise, where settlers contented themselves with the simple pleasure of home, hearth, and the Bible. He acknowledged hardships but did not dwell on them. A firm belief in the inevitable triumph of American civilization fills his writings about his Iowa youth: “The pioneers of Iowa were men of splendid courage who grasped the possibilities before them and so laid the foundation, deep and broad, of our present splendid civil progress.”3 A similar spirit guided his portrayals of the politicians he knew. Grimes possessed “natural abilities as an orator and a logician” that were “unsurpassed and rendered invincible by cultivation and refinement of manner.” Garfield, in profile, resembled a bald eagle, “and his career was eagle-winged.” Harlan, Weaver’s ally and hero in the bitter battles of Iowa Republican politics in the 1870s, flourished under the inspiration of abolitionists Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. “Garrison and Phillips were the progenitors of a multitude of kingly men born with the rod of empire in their hands, and who, when the trumpet call of duty was heard, gave ample evidence of the lineage and the genuine character of their anointment.”4 Despite his propensity for gaudy prose, Weaver’s reflections on the men

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and events he observed are occasionally self-critical and revealing. He took himself to task for aligning with the forces that drove Grimes from the Senate in the wake of the Johnson impeachment trial. He also fulminated against the power of disciplined party organizations in a way that suggests lasting resentment about his rejection by the Iowa Republican establishment in the 1870s. Even so, his historical recollections, characterized by an anecdotal and florid style, are not the work of a dispassionate chronicler, but instead represent the musings of a sentimental and patriotic witness to history. Weaver’s last historical project reflected an important change in his circumstances. In 1912, an Indianapolis firm published a two-volume history of Jasper County edited by Weaver. A compilation of anecdote, biography, and lore, Past and Present of Jasper County typifies the historical accounts of counties in Iowa and other states being published at the time. It also indicates Weaver’s willingness to contribute to Colfax, the community where he and Clara finally settled after leaving Bloomfield in 1890. That was not the only civic duty Weaver performed in his final years. In 1901, after a lifetime in the political arena that included two campaigns for the presidency and three terms in Congress, Weaver was elected mayor of Colfax.5 At the national level, while Weaver focused his attention on Bryan’s efforts to refashion the Democratic Party into a driving force for reform, another political organization with a more radical agenda was gaining ground. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party ran Debs for president in 1904. Weaver’s one-time ally received 420,000 votes and produced consternation across the political spectrum. When the New York World in April 1906 invited readers to weigh in regarding “Socialism in America—What It Means,” Weaver responded with an indictment of collectivism as well as the conditions that he believed stoked left-wing radicalism. “The Socialists prefer that the multitude shall own and operate everything rather than that a few shall absorb all. It is economic war, and lying within it are economic dislocations fearful to contemplate.” The appeal of socialism, Weaver argued, flowed from the abuses of concentrated corporate power that crushed competitors and corrupted the government. “The Senate of the United States is at this moment creating Socialists faster than they can be organized and equipped,” he warned. “It is a great Socialistic recruiting station, and it is destroying patriotism faster than Abraham Lincoln ever built it up.” Weaver’s diagnosis bore a striking resemblance to the conclusions reached by Roosevelt, who blamed the rising tide of radicalism on the “dull, purblind folly of the very rich men.” To stem socialism’s advance,

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Weaver recommended a six-point program that covered everything from the direct election of senators and the president to local regulation of public utilities. Throughout his career, Weaver had been making the argument that broad political and economic reform was necessary to forestall support for more radical measures. His letter to the World highlighted his continued belief that the economic and political power of trusts and monopolies threatened to produce a violent reaction. Reform aimed at curbing big business offered the best way to prevent the nation from taking what Weaver called “the Cimmerian leap into Socialism.”6 Weaver’s commentary on socialism proved revealing but hardly controversial. The same cannot be said about a speech he made later in the year. In November 1906, he traveled to Shiloh to help dedicate a memorial honoring the Iowa troops who fought in the bloody Civil War battle. At the ceremony, Weaver stunned his audience with an extraordinary discussion of race relations. The man who had supported abolitionism, praised the Republican Party’s heritage of support for “the bronzed race,” and sought the votes of southern blacks in 1880 and 1892 now advocated the voluntary emigration of American blacks to Africa. “These people were brought here in chains in the dismal holds of slave ships. Let them return as freemen in our modern ocean steamers and with the flag of the black republic streaming from the masthead,” he proposed. The astonished audience, which had expected to hear the usual tributes heaped on Iowa’s Civil War veterans, reacted with “some amazement” and “warm applause.” Weaver’s remarks were especially well received by southerners present for the occasion.7 Weaver’s speech conformed to the trajectory of race relations in the early twentieth century. In the aftermath of the controversy over the force bill, one southern state after another disenfranchised black voters. In 1896, the Supreme Court gave legal sanction to the doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson. Two years later, the court endorsed the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Mississippi. Lynchings and racial violence erupted in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. Watson had abandoned the biracial politics he practiced in the early 1890s, and was evolving into an influential hate-spewing demagogue. Following a racial disturbance involving African-American troops with the 25th Infantry in Brownsville, Texas, Roosevelt reacted with draconian severity, ordering the dishonorable discharge of 167 black soldiers without trial. Nor was Weaver out of step with Bryan, whose lack of interest in racial questions was pronounced. Eager to

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retain the support of southern Democrats, Bryan temporized and equivocated on the suffrage restrictions and Jim Crow laws that barred blacks from a full and equal role in public life.8 Weaver’s speech was a peculiar blend of well-intentioned paternalism, pseudo-scientific ethnology, and questionable scriptural interpretation. He took pains to distance himself from southern fire-breathers such as Mississippi Gov. James Vardaman, who argued that blacks were an inferior race. “I deny it,” Weaver responded. “God’s inferior family is found among the brute creation and over them man has complete dominion. But he was never given dominion over his brother.” Weaver then undermined his ringing endorsement of equality by positing that “a race of a lower order of development” should not be allowed to “dominate” a race of supposedly superior development. “While I cherish firmly the notion that all men are created equal, I also hold that this is a white man’s government.” As he was wont to do, Weaver cited biblical authority for his arguments. When Paul addressed the citizens of Athens, the apostle not only proclaimed the equality of all races before God but also noted that their separate habitations were divinely sanctioned, Weaver claimed. “Two distinct races cannot dwell together in happiness,” Weaver argued. “While here, of course, the negro must be secure in his rights before the law and the door of opportunity be opened to him. But he should be prepared for his exodus—not by forcible deportation, but by voluntary intelligent migration.”9 If Weaver expected his speech to win the warm reception back home that it received at Shiloh, he was badly mistaken. “General Weaver’s address at Shiloh is little short of amazing,” the Des Moines Register exclaimed in dismay. Not only was emigration impractical, the concept ignored a fundamental fact: “The colored people were born in this country, and not in Africa. This is their home . . . they are entitled to remain here, just as much so as General Weaver, and have no more intention of leaving than he has.” The speech also earned condemnation from the African-American community of Des Moines. S. Joe Brown, the first black graduate of the University of Iowa law school, indignantly eviscerated Weaver’s speech in an interview with the Register, calling it a “bundle of inconsistent and meaningless declarations.” Brown found Weaver’s warnings of prospective black “domination” over whites absurd, and he rejected the idea that the Bible endorsed racial separation. He also challenged the idea that black Americans somehow had a less legitimate claim to full citizenship than whites. “We are not Africans,

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but Americans, in the truest sense of the term, for when General Weaver’s ancestors were landing at Plymouth in 1620, our ancestors were already here, having landed at Jamestown in 1619.” Despite his obvious displeasure, a sense of stunned sadness permeated Brown’s comments to the Register. Born in Keosauqua and raised in Ottumwa as Weaver emerged as a national leader of the Greenback Party, Brown clearly expected better from the longtime champion of the downtrodden. The speech represented, in Brown’s view, “one of the weakest efforts at straddling on a great question I have ever seen from the pen of a great man like General Weaver.”10 Although Weaver’s foray into racial politics earned condemnation, his stances on other issues with which he had a longer association were regarded more positively. With the dawn of the twentieth century and the Progressive movement, Weaver witnessed advancement toward the realization of two of his long-held goals. In 1903, Congress approved creation of a Department of Commerce and Labor to monitor industrial production and business practices. It was the first step toward creation of the cabinet department dedicated to the oversight of working conditions that Weaver and his Greenback allies had advocated since the 1880s. The battle for a full-fledged Department of Labor concluded shortly after Weaver’s death. The platform of Roosevelt’s Progressive Party endorsed creation of a Labor Department in 1912, and Congress passed legislation, reluctantly signed by Taft, to create the new department in early February 1913.11 At the same time, Weaver’s longstanding call for the direct election of senators, which he initially made in 1881 and became a standard plank in Greenback and Populist platforms, began to gain widespread acceptance. Even his political rivals began to line up behind the idea. “I am very much in favor, and have been for years, of the election of United States senators by the people,” Iowa’s Republican governor, Albert Cummins, wrote to Bryan in 1902. “Our senators know that it is the opinion of a large proportion of the Republicans in Iowa that the method of selection of United States senators should be changed.” Oregon required legislators to choose senators based on popular vote in 1901, setting a precedent followed by many states. Democrats included direct-election planks in their platforms in 1900 and 1904, and in 1908, Republicans joined them. The proposal gained momentum and on June 12, 1911—coincidentally, Weaver’s seventy-eighth birthday—the Senate approved a constitutional amendment to require direct election. The seventeenth amendment was ratified in 1913.12

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As Cummins’s letter suggests, many Iowa Republicans were beginning to reassess their reflexive hostility toward the ideas long advocated by Weaver. Cummins belonged to the Progressive wing of the party, which included Gardner Cowles, a banker, and Harvey Ingham, the liberal editor of the Des Moines Register. When Cowles bought the Register in 1902, Ingham stayed on and became an influential voice for Progressive Republicans. As governor, Cummins achieved a wide range of victories on important regulatory and political matters ranging from railroad taxation and insurance regulation to passage of a direct-primary election law. When he went to the Senate, he and fellow Republican Sen. Jonathan Dolliver emerged as champions of conservation, stricter regulation of railroads, and tariff reform.13 In their support for an activist government accountable to the people that would act as a check on the power of big business, the Progressives took the general approach to public policy questions that guided Weaver’s political career. Honors, both personal and political, came Weaver’s way as the end of the decade neared. In July 1908, James and Clara marked their fiftieth wedding anniversary at their home in Colfax. Six of their children and numerous friends turned out for the event to honor a partnership that began when James was an ambitious lawyer and Clara a schoolteacher. The guests sang “My Country Tis of Thee” and presented the Weavers with $50 in gold to commemorate each year of their marriage.14 In February 1909, Democrats and Republican joined to honor Weaver during a day of speeches and ceremony that culminated with the unveiling of a formal portrait at the State House. Bryan joined Republican Gov. B.F. Carroll and other dignitaries in paying homage to Weaver’s career. Another politician might have been disarmed by the accolades, but the old warrior kept his musket primed. While deeply touched by the honors, Weaver assured those assembled that he was far from finished. “It has been said today that I am nearing the end of life. I want to deny that. If any of you think that I am all in, you are greatly mistaken.”15 In October 1911, he mobilized for one more battle. Angered by an Iowa editor’s assertion that he was nothing more than “a political sorehead” and perpetual loser in the great political battles of the era, Weaver wrote a tour-ofthe-horizon defense of his career that was published in the Register. He found particularly galling the claim that he had been “invariably on the wrong side of the big questions of the day.” Reviewing his opposition to slavery, his support for prohibition, and his hostility to the power of “confederated monopoly,”

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Weaver declared that “You cannot point to one single `big question’—from my first entry into politics down to the present hour—where I have ever been on the wrong side or where I ever flinched or wobbled in my devotion to the public welfare—not one.” With elections coming up the next year, Weaver hinted that, despite his advanced age, he might run for Congress.16 It was not to be. In late January 1912, Weaver left Colfax to visit his daughter, Susan Evans, at her home in Des Moines. During the course of his visit, he suffered from what the Register called “an attack of indigestion, which affected the heart acutely.” Confined to bed, he appeared to rally, but a fainting spell signaled a turn for the worse. On February 6, after a life that included a transcontinental trek to California in search of gold, three years of service in the Civil War, two campaigns for the presidency, and three terms in Congress, Weaver died. Clara and most of their children were at his bedside.17 The funeral service held at the First Methodist Church in Des Moines on February 8 memorialized a life devoted to the service of God and country. An American flag draped Weaver’s coffin. Surviving members of the Second Iowa Infantry marched as honorary pallbearers behind the trio of presiding clergymen. Members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union sat to one side of the family. Old friends and neighbors, from Colfax and Davis County, turned out for the rites, but Bryan, in Texas, was unable to attend. His brother, Charles, sent condolences via telegram. At the conclusion of the service, Weaver’s coffin was carried in the low February sun from the church to Woodland Cemetery in Des Moines.18 Almost immediately, political observers began to ponder his place in history. Two days after Weaver passed away, Ingham’s Register weighed in with an editorial that praised Weaver’s personal qualities, but carefully straddled the question of his impact. Weaver’s repeated failure to win high office, the paper observed, may have indicated his inability to properly assess the needs of the nation—or it could have signified “that he was somewhat ahead of his time, a skirmisher ‘who drove the pickets in.’ ”19 Another assessment appeared in January 1913, when the Annals of Iowa, a journal of the State Historical Society of Iowa, published James Clarkson’s memoir of the Kirkwood “stampede” at the 1875 state Republican convention. At the time of the convention, Clarkson was a member of the Des Moines Regency, which was desperately anxious to keep Weaver from getting the Republican gubernatorial nomination. By 1912, however, Clarkson had become an ardent Progressive Republican, and respect for Weaver had

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replaced scorn. “I felt then, and have felt ever since, that [Weaver] was treated unjustly at that time, and given ample provocation for the course that he afterwards took,” Clarkson claimed, somewhat implausibly. With greater sincerity, he argued that the dramatic events of 1875 had profound consequences for the Republican Party. “I have always believed, too, that the unjust action of that convention caused in the end as much of loss to the Republican Party as it did to General Weaver.”20 Writing more than a decade later from the other side of the political spectrum, Populist journalist James Witham wondered if Weaver lost more than he gained by breaking with the Republicans. Witham called Weaver “a statesman, pure and undefiled” but took issue with his political methodology. Weaver’s eagerness to lead third-party crusades might not have been as effective a strategy for promoting reform as working to “convert the majority of a party to new ideas.”21 Neither Clarkson nor Witham adequately understood Weaver’s role or personality. Even if he had won the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1875, Weaver’s future as a Republican would have been uncertain. Once he adopted the soft-money doctrines of the Greenback Party, he was unlikely to remain comfortable in the same party as William Boyd Allison, John Sherman, or Mark Hanna. At the same time, Weaver lacked the temperament to take the course recommended by Witham. As a leader of insurgent third parties, Weaver had the freedom to follow his conscience and to advocate sweeping economic and political change long before either party was ready to move in that direction. Operating from the outside also enabled Weaver to generate the political pressures that pushed the major parties toward support for a variety of major reforms. Weaver’s long career at the head of third parties enabled him to define issues and to agitate for solutions later taken up by both parties in the Progressive Era. In many ways, Weaver’s attitude toward political parties reflected the Whig influences of his youth. A strain of suspicion toward the notion of party discipline ran throughout the history of the Whigs. Evangelical Christians who gravitated to the Whigs stressed the importance of responding to the dictates of individual conscience, rather than blind adherence to a party platform and support for its candidates.22 When conscience demanded, Weaver resisted the confinements of party discipline. As a young man, he left the Democratic Party over slavery. He broke with the Republican Party in the 1870s largely because of differences over the currency question, and declined an invitation

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to return. As a Greenback, he favored fusion with Democrats as the best means for advancing Greenback principles, even if it eroded the independence of the third party. In 1896, convinced that it represented the best opportunity to advance Populist principles, Weaver urged the People’s Party to nominate William Jennings Bryan for president. Throughout his career, Weaver regarded parties as means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Any assessment of Weaver’s legacy must address the question of his role in the campaign of 1896, which effectively marked the end of Populism’s viability as a third force in American politics. Contemporary critics believed the party could have survived and grown had it maintained its independence. Henry Demarest Lloyd famously dismissed the free-silver doctrines championed by Weaver and Bryan as “the cow-bird of the Reform movement.” Free silver, in Lloyd’s view, “waited until the nest had been built by the sacrifices and labour of others, and then it laid its eggs in it, pushing out the others which lie smashed on the ground.”23 Over the years, two undeniable facts have lent credence to Lloyd’s criticism. As Bryan discovered, a monetary doctrine that essentially proposed inflating prices to solve economic problems had little appeal to wage earners in the big cities of the Upper Midwest and Northeast. Free silver resonated as a political battle cry on the nation’s farms and ranches, but left factory workers unmoved. In addition, the modern consensus that free silver was unsound as a matter of economics has led historians to dismiss free silver’s champions as, at best, misguided, or, at worst, demagogic cranks. Such criticism, however, overlooks the economic and historical context from which free silver emerged. To its adherents, free silver, like the softmoney doctrines of the Greenback Party, offered the promise of breaking the crushing cycle of debt and deflation characteristic of the Gilded Age economy. Tight money and the gold standard were blamed for pauperism and ruin. Free silver, on the other hand, stood for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Moreover, since the days of Andrew Jackson, Americans had grown accustomed to debating fundamental questions of political and economic democracy in the context of monetary policy. Voters who would have been unmoved by abstract calls for stricter government regulation of industry, or alienated by the collectivist aspirations of socialism, were more likely to respond to a program couched in language with deep roots in American political culture. Far from destroying the prospects for reform, free-silver supporters such as Weaver actually sought to improve them. Weaver’s legacy cannot be assessed using conventional measures. His

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name is not attached to any significant pieces of legislation from his years in Congress. Nor would he have likely been pleased by the results of his long campaigns for monetary reform. Passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 satisfied the demands of Bryan and his Democratic allies that “the government alone shall issue money,” but Populist critics were not content. In the early 1920s, maverick Iowa Republican Smith Wildman Brookhart, a Weaver disciple, won election to the U.S. Senate as a vocal critic of the Fed and the banking system over which it presided, and that criticism continues to this day. The author of a recent sympathetic biography of Bryan has concluded that passage of the Federal Reserve Act “ended up giving legitimacy to figures such as Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan, who tended to believe that what was good for Wall Street was good for America.”24 That prospect would have left Weaver deeply dismayed. Similarly, changing the method for electing senators has not worked out as Weaver anticipated. Weaver had hoped that direct election would purge the Senate of corrupting influences. He did not foresee the relentless scramble for special-interest campaign contributions that has become the hallmark of modern congressional politics. Describing the Senate of the early 1890s, Weaver wrote, “The time has come when the people should plat a whip of cords and scourge the promoters of bribery from the temple.”25 He would almost certainly feel the same way today. In his home state, Weaver’s approach to politics helped change the political landscape. Third parties in Iowa never enjoyed the success they experienced in the Great Plains, in part because of the fusion of Greenbacks and Democrats endorsed by Weaver in the mid-1880s. When the Iowa Farmers’ Alliance emerged to demand action on railroads, Republicans responded nimbly, because fusion had transformed the Democratic Party into a credible alternative to the GOP. By the early 1890s, when the People’s Party was born, much of the Alliance leadership had been co-opted into party politics, and many farmers remained in the habit of voting for Democrats to register discontent with the economic status quo. As a result, the Populists never caught on in Iowa as they did in nearby states.26 But Weaver succeeded in creating pressure for change, even if the third parties he supported did not prosper. At the national level, Weaver’s impact was similarly subtle but significant. When he burst onto the national political scene in the late 1870s, the leading parties were locked in a sterile partisan debate that focused on the after-effects

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of the Civil War. Republicans reflexively waved the bloody shirt. Democrats advanced the stale maxims of states’ rights. Economic debates were confined to longstanding differences on tariffs. Neither party was prepared to address the complicated economic and social problems arising on the nation’s farms or in its burgeoning cities. Beginning with his battle in the House to secure a debate on the Greenback financial resolutions in 1880, Weaver helped redirect the national political dialogue. As an advocate of economic and political reform in the 1880s and 1890s, he advanced the idea that the federal government had a significant role to play in protecting the rights and interests of average citizens. He toured the country as a presidential candidate in 1880 and 1892 to make this case to the people, and four years later helped engineer an alliance between Democrats and Populists that forced the party of Jefferson and Jackson to abandon its laissez-faire traditions on economic questions. Since 1892, debate about the proper role of the federal government in ameliorating social and economic problems has been a fundamental feature of American politics. Weaver’s most important legacy in national politics is not what he advocated, or how subsequent reforms worked, but his effect on America’s continuing political conversation. Amid the honors accumulated by Weaver in his final years, a poem by Herbert Quick, the novelist and former mayor of Sioux City, stands out. Alluded to by Ingham in his editorial on Weaver’s life, “The Skirmisher” portrayed Weaver as part of the advance guard of reform whose early clashes made it possible for the forces of “right” to challenge the armies of “vested wrong.” Quick urged against the inclination to overlook the courage of those who led the way. “They fought in the grey dawn, cold and alone/ A hardy few, darting from tree to stone.” Despite their fears: Yet through the fierce of jungle forth they went Felt for the foe, and drove him to his tent. And in the splendid faith that one good blow Is each man’s legal debt to every foe They struck. The sparse fire crackled thro’ the dawn, Grew, greatened, roared—and the great war was on. So let us honor,’mid the battle’s din, The skirmisher who drove their pickets in.27

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The skirmisher finds, identifies, and initially engages the enemy. Empowered by “splendid faith,” he battles his adversary without support, and despite the possibility that help is not forthcoming. Quick captured the essence of Weaver’s life—the long years spent advocating monetary and political reforms in the interests of the nation’s farmers and laborers—and recognized the importance of Weaver’s religious convictions in shaping and sustaining his political career. Long before Bryan, the Roosevelts, or Wilson, Weaver demanded that the federal government must guarantee to “all its citizens, the weak as well as the mighty, the unmolested enjoyment of their inalienable rights.” He was truly the skirmisher for the host that followed.

Notes Introduction 1 Register and Leader, Des Moines, February 8, 1912, p. 4. Chapter One: A Hairy Nation 1 James B. Weaver, “Memoranda with the respect to the life of James Baird Weaver,” State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines, pp. 1-2. Hereafter referred to as WBM. 2 WBM, pp. 1-2; “General Weaver and Pioneer Iowa,” Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, February 21, 1909; Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1974), p. 404. 3 WBM, p. 1. 4 WBM, pp. 2-4; Margaret Weaver Horn, “Recollections of Margaret Weaver Horn, Pioneer of Davis County, Iowa (related by her daughter),” Pioneer History of Davis County, Iowa (Bloomfield, Iowa: Bloomfield Democrat, 1924-1927), p. 100. 5 The date of Susan and Abram’s marriage posted at <www.familysearch.org>; WBM, pp. 1-2. Weaver states that the family traces its relationship to the famous seamstress through his grandmother, Susan Ross Crane, but Betsy Ross did not have any children while married to John Ross; History of Davis County, Iowa (Des Moines: State Historical Company, 1882), p. 445. Hereafter referred to as History of Davis County. 6 History of Davis County, pp. 446-52. While the aforementioned county history records no evidence of Abram Weaver winning local office after 1844, legal notices published in the Keosauqua Democratic Union list Abram Weaver as the county clerk of court; Democratic Union, Keosauqua, Iowa, October 9, 1852. James’s biographical memorandum states that the family farmed for five years and moved into town after Abram was elected district court clerk. A dead letter notice appearing in the Bloomfield Western Gazette, October 14, 1854, is signed “ABRAM WEAVER, P.M.” 7 WBM, pp. 4, 7. 8 Based on Weaver genealogical information posted at <www.familysearch.org>; History of Davis County, p. 448. 9 Edward H. Stiles, Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa Belonging to the First and Second Generations, with Anecdotes and Incidents Illustrative of the Time (Des Moines: The Homestead Publishing Co., 1916), p. 688; Pioneer History, pp. 101. 10 Robert Cook, Baptism of Fire: the Republican Party in Iowa, 1838-1878 (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1994), pp. 20-21; Democratic Union, Keosauqua,

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September 2, 1854, p. 2; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 30-31, 70. 11 Joseph F. Wall, Iowa: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), pp. 54-55. 12 WBM, p. 1. Weaver spells Purdom as “Purdam.” 13 John A. Nye, Between the Rivers: A History of the United Methodist Church in Iowa (Lake Mills, Iowa: The Graphic Publishing Co. Inc., 1986), pp. 12-13. Nye writes that “the Methodist congregation in Keosauqua, organized in November, 1836, met first in the Purdom cabin near the river, just above the present town.” The church continued to meet there for eleven years, according to Nye. 14 Wall, p. 67; Pioneer History, p. 82; WBM, p. 4. 15 Pioneer History, pp. 82-83. According to Nye, Dean was assigned to the Keosauqua conference in 1850 and left the ministry in 1856, so it is probable that the events described by Carey’s grandson occurred sometime in the early 1850s. Nye, p. 177. 16 Wall, pp. 23, 30-45. 17 Cook, pp. 20-21; Wall, pp. 86-87. 18 Hosea B. Horn, “History of Davis County, Iowa,” Annals of Iowa (Iowa City, Iowa) October 1866, pp. 304, 346, 412. 19 WBM, pp. 4-5; Pioneer History, pp. 99-100; History of Davis County, p. 479. 20 Horn, Annals, p. 349. Horn writes that he resigned from the position after a year; WBM, p. 5. 21 History of Davis County, pp. 570, 652. McAchran represented Davis County in the state Senate and served on the board that drew up articles of incorporation for Bloomfield. 22 Stiles, p. 688. 23 Hosea B. Horn, Horn’s Overland Guide, from the U.S. Indian Sub-Agency, Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, to the City of Sacramento, in California (New York: J.H. Colton, 1852). 24 Herbert S. Fairall, ed., The Iowa City Republican Manual of Iowa Politics (Iowa City: Republican Steam Printing House and Bindery, 1881), pp. 32-33; Morton M. Rosenberg, Iowa on the Eve of the Civil War: A Decade of Frontier Politics (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), p. 71; Stiles, p. 688. 25 WBM, p. 6; Democratic Union, Keosauqua, Iowa, December 18, 1852, p. 2; Billington, p. 505. 26 WBM, p. 6; James B. Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode: A Lad’s Experience in the Early 1850s,” World Review, Chicago, January 18, 1902, p. 547. Weaver is somewhat vague about dates in his recollections of his childhood and early adult experiences but specifies the vernal equinox without mentioning the year as the starting date of the expedition in his magazine account. The year 1853 seems the likeliest date for the beginning of his travels. Weaver, who was born in 1833, recounts in his biographical memorandum that he was “about 19 years of age” when he embarked

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on his California trip and notes that his law studies with McAchran began in the “summer and winter” of 1852-53. 27 Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode,” World Review, January 18, 1902, p. 547. 28 Wall, pp. 57-58; Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode,” World Review, January 18, 1902, p. 547. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., p. 548. 31 Ibid., pp. 548-49. 32 Ibid., p. 549. 33 Ibid., pp. 549-50. 34 Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode,” World Review, January 25, 1902, p. 579. 35 Ibid., pp. 579-80. 36 Ibid., p. 580. 37 Ibid. 38 Billington, p. 506; Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode,” World Review, January 25, 1902, p. 580. 39 Weaver, “Journey, Voyage and Episode,” World Review, February 1, 1902, p. 603. 40 Ibid., pp. 603-04. 41 Ibid., pp 605-06. 42 Ibid., p. 606. Chapter Two 1 David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), p. 113. 2 Ibid., pp. 145-67; Douglas quoted in Potter, p. 160. 3 Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons) Vol. IV, p. 631; Leland L. Sage, A History of Iowa (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1974), pp. 126-27. Hereafter referred to as Sage, History; Grimes quoted in Wall, p. 96. 4 Democratic Union, Keosauqua, Iowa, July 15, 1854, p. 2, July 8, 1854, p. 1, July 29, 1854, p. 2. 5 Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. VI, p. 3. 6 Weaver quoted in Fred Emory Haynes, James Baird Weaver (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1919), p. 18. Hereafter cited as Haynes, Weaver. 7 Sage, History, p. 128; Van Buren County election records provided by County Auditor Jon P. Finney; Democratic Union, Keosauqua, Iowa, September 2, 1854, p. 2. 8 Haynes, Weaver, p. 14; WBM, p. 7. According to Haynes, Weaver’s term began in the fall of 1855. 9 Gordon A. Christenson, “A Tale of Two Lawyers in Antebellum Cincinnati: Timothy Walker’s Last Conversation with Salmon P. Chase,” University of Cincinnati Law Review (Vol. 71, No. 2, Winter 2002), pp. 457-91.

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10 Christenson, p. 486; James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888), Vol. 5, p. 706; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, September 16, 1861, State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines, hereafter referred to as SHSI, Des Moines. 11 Bellamy Storer, The Legal Profession: An Address Delivered to the Law Department of the University of Louisville, Kentucky, February 20, 1856, (Cincinnati: C. Clark & Co., Ben Franklin Printing House, 1856), pp. 5-14. 12 Storer, pp. 13-18. 13 James Baird Weaver, A Call to Action (Des Moines, Iowa: Iowa Printing Co., 1892), p. 442. Hereafter cited as Weaver, Call to Action. 14 WBM, p.7. 15 Wall, pp. 94-95; Cook, p. 71; History of Davis County, p. 450. 16 WBM, p. 7; Stiles, p. 144; Haynes, Weaver, p. 19. 17 Haynes, Weaver, p. 25. 18 Clara Vinson to James Baird Weaver, March 22, 1858; James Baird Weaver to Clara Vinson, March 24, 1858; James Baird Waver to Clara Vinson, March 29, 1858; Clara Vinson to James Baird Weaver, March 31, 1858; James Baird Weaver to Clara Vinson, April 18, 1858; SHSI, Des Moines. 19 Clara Vinson to James Baird Weaver, March 22, 1858; Clara Vinson to James Baird Weaver, April 29, 1858; James Baird Weaver to Clara Vinson, May 2, 1858, SHSI, Des Moines. 20 Clara Weaver to James Baird Weaver, May 20, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; Davis County Index, September 4, 1858, p. 2; Ward’s Own Paper, May 6, 1858, p. 1; Democratic Clarion, Bloomfield, Iowa, December 22, 1858. 21 WBM, p. 8; History of Davis County, p. 480; Stiles, pp. 690-91, 681-82. 22 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 24-25. Weaver’s claim is cited by William Safire in Safire’s New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics. Safire, however, points out that the phrase recurs throughout English literature, thereby suggesting that others may have invoked it contemporaneously. William Safire, Safire’s New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 65. 23 Sage, History, pp. 140-41; Cook, pp. 92-93. 24 WBM, p 8; Sage, History, p. 141. 25 Sage, History, p. 142; WBM, p. 8. 26 WBM, pp. 8-9. 27 History of Davis County, pp. 451-52; Pioneer History, p. 106; Sage, History, p. 142; WBM, p. 9. 28 Haynes, Weaver, p. 23; F. I. Herriott, “Iowa and First Nomination of Lincoln,” Annals of Iowa, (Des Moines: Vol. VIII, No. 2, July 1907), p. 93. 29 Herriott, pp. 91-93. 30 Cook, p. 124; Herriott, p. 114; Wall, p. 106. 31 Pioneer History, pp. 117-118.

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32 Pioneer History, pp. 117-118, 151; History of Davis County, p. 452. 33 WBM, p. 8. Chapter Three 1 Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 274. Hereafter cited as McPherson, Battle Cry; Wall, p. 107. 2 Davis County Republican, Bloomfield, Iowa, February 18, 1879, p. 2; Pioneer History, pp. 118-19. 3 Pioneer History of Davis County, p. 119. 4 Davis County Republican, Bloomfield, Iowa, February 18, 1879, p. 2; Pioneer History, p. 119. 5 Quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 276. 6 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, August 22, 1861, SHSI, Des Moines; Gen. William H. Thrift, ed., Roster and Record of Iowa Soldiers in the War of the Rebellion, Together with Historical Sketches of Volunteer Organizations, 1861-1866 ( Des Moines: 1908), pp. 91-92; hereafter referred to as Roster and Record. Weaver described suffering from diarrhea, a common malady during the war, and “flux.” 7 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, August 23, 1861; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, September 25, 1861; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, September 16, 1861, SHSI, Des Moines. 8 W. J. Tenney, The Military and Naval History of the Rebellion in the United States (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003), pp. 87-88; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, September 25, 1861, SHSI, Des Moines; McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 334; Haynes, Weaver, p. 29. 9 Roster and Record, p. 92; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI Des Moines. 10 Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), p. 155; McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 397-400; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines. 11 Grant, p. 157; McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 400; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines. 12 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines. 13 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; Grant, pp. 157-58; McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 400-02. 14 Roster and Record, pp. 92-93; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, February 19, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; New York World, July 10, 1892. 15 Roster and Record, p. 94; McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 406-07; Grant, p. 177. 16 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, April 9, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 408-10; Grant, Memoirs, p. 174; Roster and Record, p. 94; Capt. A. A. Stuart, Iowa Colonels and Regiments: Being a History of Iowa Regiments in the War of the Rebellion; and Containing a Description of the Battles in Which They Have Fought (Des Moines: Mills & Company, 1865) p. 76.

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17 McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 412; Grant, p. 181. 18 Roster and Record, p. 94; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, April 9, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 413. 19 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, April 9, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 413. 20 Clara Weaver to James B. Weaver, May 16, 1862; Clara Weaver to James B. Weaver, May 20, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines. 21 McPherson, Battle Cry, pp. 521-23; Roster and Record, p. 95; Grant, pp. 195-97, 204-05, 215-16. 22 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, October 12, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines; statement of James B. Weaver Jr., Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines. The statement recounts a conversation a week to ten days before Weaver’s death in which the elder Weaver recalled the incident; statement of Captain John M. Duffield, Co. G., Second Iowa Infantry, as to the part taken by Gen. James B. Weaver in the Battle of Corinth, and his promotion from first lieutenant to major, and then his election as colonel, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines. Hereafter cited as Duffield statement. 23 Duffield statement, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines. 24 Grant, p. 218; Roster and Record, p. 95; James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, October 12, 1862, SHSI, Des Moines. 25 Roster and Record, p. 95. By comparison, almost 6,000 died and 17,000 were wounded at the Battle of Antietam, fought September 17. McPherson notes that “the casualties at Antietam numbered four times the total suffered by American soldiers at the Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944.” McPherson, Battle Cry, p. 544. 26 Stuart, p. 72. 27 Ibid., 76. 28 Ibid., p. 73. 29 Sherman quoted in Tenney, pp. 499-500. 30 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 49, 54; New York Times, September 26, 1892, p. 9. 31 Sherman in Tenney, p. 500. 32 New York Times, September 26, 1892, p. 9; Haynes, Weaver, p. 58. 33 James B. Weaver to Clara Weaver, May 8, 1863, April 24, 1864, April 28, 1864, May 17, 1864, SHSI, Des Moines; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 49-50. 34 Pioneer History, p. 150; Clara Weaver to James B. Weaver, May 22, 1864, SHSI, Des Moines; History of Davis County, p. 454; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 59-64. 1 2 3 4

Chapter four Weekly Union Guard, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 25, 1864, p. 2. Ibid.; Pioneer History, p. 241. Weekly Union Guard, April 22, 1865, p. 2. James B. Grimes and James F. Wilson to the Hon. E. M. Stanton, January 10, 1866; Weaver to the Hon. E. M. Stanton, September 6, 1866. Weaver’s letter acknowledges receipt of the brevet commission. Letters on file in the Commissions Branch

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files of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s-1917, National Archives and Record Administration, Washington D.C., hereafter cited as NA; Roger D. Hunt and Jack R. Brown, Brevet Brigadier Generals in Blue (Gaithersburg, Md.: Olde Soldier Books, 1997), p. vi. Hereafter referred to as Brevet Brigadier Generals. 5 Brevet Brigadier Generals, p. viii. Among those getting a brevet appointment to the rank of general was another Republican from southern Iowa, Francis Marion Drake. 6 Haynes, Weaver, p. 68; History of Davis County, pp. 456- 57. 7 James F. Wilson, S. J. Kirkwood, and James W. Grimes to the Secretary of the Treasury, February 12, 1867, Department of the Treasury, Applications for Positions as Internal Revenue Collectors and Assessors, 1863-1910, Box 007, Entry 258, NA, College Park, Md.; New York World, July 10, 1892; Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth September, 1869 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1870), p. 78; Weaver to William Belknap, March 23, 1872; note from William Belknap to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, March 28, 1872; Record Group 56, Department of the Treasury, NA, College Park. 8 <www.familysearch.org>. The date of Paul’s death is unknown; National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service. 9 James B. Weaver Jr. in Pioneer History, pp. 355-56; New York World, July 10, 1892; Davis County Republican, April 8, 1875, p. 3. 10 Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 93; Nye, p. 187; Dan Elbert Clark, “History of Liquor Legislation in Iowa 1861-1878,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics (Vol. VI, No. 3, July, 1908), pp. 346-56. 11 Clark, pp. 356-59; Sioux City Journal, July 1, 1874, p. 2. 12 Clara Vinson to James B. Weaver, April 16, 1858, SHSI, Des Moines; Stuart, p. 76; Jensen, pp. 91-92. 13 James B. Weaver, “Two Iowa Men of Power and Their Contemporaries,” World Review, November 23, 1901, p. 325. 14 Ibid.; Sage, “Weaver in Allison’s Way,” Annals of Iowa (Des Moines: Vol. XXXI, No. 7, January 1953), p. 489. Sage writes, “Weaver had accepted appointment to office by President Andrew Johnson and such consorting with the Conservatives was not tolerated during Reconstruction days by the fierce Radicalism of the Dodgeled faction. (The Harlan faction was also Radical but accepted Weaver’s support in spite of this.)” 15 Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 5, p. 268. 16 Ibid.; Sage, History, pp. 169-70, 182; “Kirkwood, Samuel Jordan,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, ; Wall, pp. 157-58. Kirkwood served from January 1866 until March 1867 to fill out Harlan’s unexpired term.

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17 Weaver, “Two Iowa Men of Power and Their Contemporaries II: James Harlan,” World Review, November 30, 1901, p. 351; Cook, pp. 195, 207. 18 Wall, pp. 158-159; “Allison, William Boyd,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress ; Ingalls quoted in Loren N. Horton, “A Place in the Sun: Iowa Politics at the Turn of the Century,” The Palimpsest (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, Vol. 64, No. 6, November-December, 1983), p. 191. 19 Weaver, “Two Iowa Men of Power and their Contemporaries II: James Harlan,” World Review, November 30, 1901, p. 353. 20 “Hull, John Albert Tiffin,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress ; Iowa Official Register, 1937-1938 (Des Moines: State of Iowa, pp. 391-92. Hull served as secretary of the state Senate from January 1872 through March 1878. 21 Davis County Republican, Bloomfield, April 30, 1874, p. 2. 22 Ibid., October 2, 1873, p. 3; Ottumwa Courier, April 8, 1874, p. 4. 23 Register and Leader, Des Moines, October 30, 1911, p. 4. Hull is not identified by name in this account but described as “a neighbor, who afterwards served in congress from the seventh District for many years.” Writing thirty-seven years after the event, Weaver mistakenly places the congressional nominating convention in Albia instead of Ottumwa and incorrectly identifies Judge E. S. Sampson as the incumbent. 24 Ottumwa Courier, July 16, 1874, p. 4. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., July 21, 1874, p. 1, July 22, 1874, p. 1; Register and Leader, Des Moines, October 30, 1911, p. 4. 27 Ottumwa Courier, July 16, 1874, p. 4; Sage, Annals, p. 492; Iowa State Register, quoted in Haynes, Weaver, pp. 71-72; Davis County Republican, Bloomfield, July 23, 1874, p. 2; Bloomfield Democrat, quoted in Haynes, Weaver, p. 72. 28 James S. Clarkson., “The Stampede from General Weaver in the Republican Convention of 1875,” Annals of Iowa, (Des Moines: Vol. X, No. 8, January, 1913), pp. 564-65; Thomas Burnell Colbert, “Disgruntled ‘Chronic Office Seeker’ or Man of Political Integrity: James Baird Weaver and the Republican Party in Iowa, 18571877,” Annals of Iowa, (Iowa City: Vol. 49, Nos. 3-4, Winter/Spring 1988), pp. 197, 200; Stiles, p. 146; Sage, Annals, pp. 490, 492. 29 Davis County Republican, March 18, 1875, p. 2; February 18, 1875, p. 2. 30 Sage, Annals, pp. 490-92. 31 Clarkson, Annals, p. 565. 32 Ibid., p. 566. 33 Iowa State Register, Des Moines, July 1, 1875, p. 1; Sage, Annals, p. 493. 34 Iowa State Register, Des Moines, July 1, 1875; Sage, Annals, p. 494. 35 Iowa State Register, Des Moines, July 1, 1875, p. 1; Fairall, pp. 98-99. 36 Sage, Annals, pp. 488-97.

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37 Weaver to Sen. George Wright, July 11, 1875, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines; Colbert, Annals, p. 196. 38 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 83-86; Bloomfield Democrat, October 14, 1875, p. 2. 39 James B. Weaver, “Personal Recollections of Garfield,” World Review, January 4, 1902, pp. 493-94. Chapter five 1 Wall, pp. 126-127; Weekly Union Guard, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 25, 1864, p. 2. 2 Sage, History, p. 70; Wall, p. 161; Cook, pp. 206-07, 209. 3 Billington, p. 632; Cook, pp. 209-10; Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation, 18771916 (New York: W.W. Norton Company Inc., 1965), pp. 8-10. 4 Wall, pp. 159-61; Billington, pp. 632, 636. 5 James W. Witham, Fifty Years on the Firing Line: My Part in the Farmers’ Movement (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1924), p. 10. 6 Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), pp. 30-31; Billington, pp. 602-05, p. 631; Ray Ginger, Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1974), p. 63-64. Hereafter cited as Ginger, Age of Excess. 7 Witham, pp. 10-11. 8 Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Anti-Monopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 67, 90-91. Billington, p. 640. 9 Billington, pp. 639-641. 10 Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 293-300. 11 Ibid., p. 121; Lamoni Independent Patriot, Lamoni, Iowa, September 10, 1896, p. 4. 12 Unger, pp. 196-97. 13 Clarkson, Annals, January, 1913, p. 565; Bloomfield Democrat, October 7, 1875, p. 2; Haynes, p. 84; Ottumwa Courier, September 25, 1878, p. 1. 14 Sage, Annals, pp. 500-05; Weaver, “Two Iowa Men of Power and their Contemporaries,” World Review, November 30, 1901, p. 354. 15 Sage, Annals, pp. 503-04. Sage cites a letter written by Harlan in December 1875 that alludes to his son’s sickness to indicate that his condition was not a surprise. “As this letter shows, there was nothing ‘sudden’ about his son’s illness. A better guess is that Harlan stayed with the fight as long as there seemed to be a chance of victory and then availed himself of an excuse for withdrawal.” 16 Ibid., p. 507. 17 Unger, pp. 305-07. 18 Haynes, Weaver, p. 14. 19 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 88-91; clipping from the Bloomfield Farmer, October 4, 1896, Weaver scrapbook, p. 112.

220


20 Haynes, Weaver, p. 92; Colbert, Annals, pp. 199-200. 21 Weaver to John Gear, August 29, 1877, Gear to Weaver, August 31, 1877, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines. 22 Colbert, Annals, p. 201. 23 The Register and Leader, Des Moines, October 30, 1911, p. 4. 24 Oskaloosa Herald, September 27, 1877, p. 1. 25 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 57-59; Oskaloosa Herald, July 26, 1877, p. 1. 26 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 58-59; Oskaloosa Herald, August 16, 1877, p. 1. 27 Stiles, pp. 148-49. 28 Oskaloosa Herald, September 27, 1877, p. 3. 29 Ibid. 30 Iowa State Register, October 5, 1877, p. 4; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 96-97. 31 Colbert, “Political Fusion in Iowa: The Election of James B. Weaver to Congress in 1878,” Arizona and the West, Spring 1978, p. 27. Hereafter cited as Colbert, “Political Fusion.” 32 Ibid., p. 29. 33 Stiles, pp. 680-81; Colbert, “Political Fusion,” p. 28. 34 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 104-05; Colbert, “Political Fusion,” p. 33. Colbert writes that a hard-money Democratic editor in Jasper County cited the letter when he denounced Weaver for behind-the-scenes bargaining in advance of the district nominating convention. 35 Colbert, “Political Fusion,” pp. 33, 36. 36 Ibid., pp. 37-38. 37 Address of Gen. James B. Weaver at Newton, Iowa, delivered June 29, 1878, SHSI, Des Moines. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Witham, p. 20; Iowa State Register, September 24, 1878, p. 2; Richard M. Doolen, “‘Brick’ Pomeroy and the Greenback Clubs,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society LXV, No. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 437-39, hereafter cited as Doolen, “Pomeroy”; Ottumwa Courier, September 25, 1878, p. 2. 41 Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 104. Between 1856 and 1878, Democrat Lucien Lester Ainsworth was the only non-Republican member of Congress elected from Iowa. Chapter six 1 Watt P. Marchman, ed., “The ‘Memoirs’ of Thomas Donaldson,” Hayes Historical Journal (Spiegel Grove, Ohio: Vol. II, Nos. 3-4, Spring-Fall, 1979), pp. 191-92. 2 Ari Hogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1988), pp. 27-28. 3 Ibid., pp. 42-43. 4 Chalmers M. Roberts, In the Shadow of Power: The Story of the Washington Post

Notes

221

(Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press), pp. 3-4, 24; Hans L. Trefousse, Rutherford B. Hayes (Times Books Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2002), pp. 93-94, 99. 5 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, ; James B. Weaver, “Personal Recollections of Garfield,” The World Review, January 4, 1902, p. 493. 6 Ronald M. Peters Jr., The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 57-58; Adlai E. Stevenson, Something of Men I Have Known (Chicago: McClurg & Co., 1909), pp. 21, 31; Harry James Brown, Frederick D. Williams, eds., The Diary of James A. Garfield, Vol. IV, 1878-1881 (Michigan State University Press, 1981), p. 5; Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 106. 7 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, . 8 Richard M. Doolen, “Pastor in Politics: The Congressional Career of the Reverend Gilbert De La Matyr,” Indiana Magazine of History (Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, June 1972), pp. 107-13. 9 Garfield diary, March 6, 1879, p. 194; March 18, 1879. p. 200; March 30, 1879, p. 209. 10 Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 103. 11 U.S., Congress, House, Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 1st session, April 23, 1879, Vol. 9, p. 795, 2nd session, April 5, 1880, Vol. 10, p. 2,140. 12 Hogenboom, pp. 74-75. 13 New York Times, March 31, 1879, p. 1; Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 1st session, April 4, 1879, Vol. 9, p. 225; Washington Post, April 3, 1879, p. 1. 14 Iowa State Register, April 8, 1879, p. 2; Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 1st session, April 4, 1879, Vol. 9, p. 225. 15 Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 1st session, April 4, 1879, Vol. 9, p. 225. 16 New York Times, May 9, 1879, p. 4. 17 Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 1st session, May 9, 1879, Vol. 9, pp. 1,197-1,198. 18 Congressional Record, 1st session, May 9, 1879, Vol. 9, pp. 1,198-1,199. 19 Price quoted in Haynes, Weaver, pp. 123-24. 20 Iowa State Register, Des Moines, April 8, 1879, p. 2; Haynes, Weaver, p. 114; New York World, April 5, 1879, p. 1, April 6, 1879, p. 4; New York Times, May 10, 1879, p. 4. 21 Garfield diary, March 19, 1879, p. 202; Ottumwa Democrat and Times, April 3, 1879, p. 4. 22 Kenneth D. Ackerman, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), pp. 29-30; James B Weaver, “Personal Recollections of Garfield,” World Review, January 4, 1902, pp. 493-94. 23 Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 58; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 133-134. 24 Washington Post, February 10, 1880, p. 1; Weaver, A Call to Action, pp. 58-60; New York Times, March 2, 1880, p. 4. 25 Washington Post, February 28, 1880, p. 2; Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 59; Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2nd session, Vol. 10, March 1, 1880, p. 1,236.

222


26 Washington Post, March 26, 1880, p. 2; Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 60. 27 Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 60. 28 Ibid., pp. 60-61. 29 New York Times, April 5, 1880, p. 4; Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2nd session, Vol. 10, April 5, 1880, p. 2,140. 30 Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2nd session, April 5, 1880, Vol. 10, p. 2,140. 31 Ibid., p. 2,141. 32 Ibid., p. 2,142. 33 Washington Post, April 6, 1880, p. 1; New York Times, April 7, 1880, p. 4. 34 Weaver, “Personal Recollections of Garfield,” World Review, January 4, 1902, p. 491. Chapter seven Iowa State Register, Des Moines, May 29, 1879, p. 3. Washington Post, January 9, 1880, p. 1. Ibid. Doolen, “Pomeroy,” p. 439; Washington Post, January 10, 1880, p. 1. Washington Post, January 10, 1880, p. 1. Ibid. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., January 9, 1880, p. 1; February 28, 1880, p. 2. Ackerman, pp. 78-79, 130; Edward McPherson, A Handbook of Politics for 1880: Being a Record of Important Political Action, National and State, from July 1, 1878, to July 1, 1880 (Washington: James J. Chapman, 1880), pp. 194-95. Hereafter cited as McPherson, Handbook. 10 Doolen, “`Pomeroy,” pp. 445-49; Mark Lause, The Civil War’s Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor Party and the Politics of Race and Section (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001), p. 50. 11 David Herbert Donald, Lincoln ( London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), pp. 146-47, pp. 245-46; Lause, p. 21; Weaver, A Call to Action, pp. 83-84; Haynes, Weaver, p. 159. 12 Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1880, p. 2; Doolen, “Pomeroy,” pp. 445-49; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 159-60. 13 Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1880, p. 2; New York Times, June 11, 1880, p. 5; Lause, p. 75. 14 Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1880, p. 2; Anthony’s remarks quoted in the Chicago Times, June 10, 1880, p. 2; McPherson, Handbook, p. 196. 15 McPherson, Handbook, p. 196. 16 New York Times, June 11, 1880, p. 5. 17 Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1880, p. 6; New York Times, June 12, 1880, p. 5. 18 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 24, 1880, p. 2. 19 McPherson, Handbook, pp. 197-98. 20 Ibid., p. 198. 21 Lause, pp. 50-51, p. 91; Washington Post, July 7, 1880, p. 1; Chicago Tribune, June 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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223

12, 1880, p. 2. Weaver repeatedly—and mistakenly—identified Chambers as a Confederate veteran. 22 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, July 15, 1880, pp. 1, 3. 23 New York Times, June 18, 1880, p. 1; Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, October 21, 1880, p. 2. 24 Lause, pp. 95, 102; Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, August 5, 1880, p. 1; Prescott, Nevada County Ark., Dispatch, August 12, 1880, Weaver scrapbook. 25 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, September 16, 1880, p. 2. 26 Evening Gazette, Terre Haute, Ind., August 23, 1880, p. 1; Boston Globe, August 28, 1880, p. 1. 27 Washington Post, September 8, 1880, p. 2; Ackerman, pp. 197-98; Lause, p. 143. 28 American Sentry, New York, September 18, 1880, clipping from Weaver scrapbook. 29 Ibid. While many contemporary observers took issue with Weaver’s claim, there is little doubt that fraud marred Alabama’s gubernatorial election that year. The Democratic candidate for governor defeated the Greenback nominee by a margin that exceeded the total number of votes cast in state elections in 1879. Lause notes that “some Democratic papers came as close to wincing as ink and paper allowed when they declared the returns simply ‘too much.’ ” Lause, p. 105. 30 American Sentry, New York, September 18, 1880, clipping from Weaver scrapbook. 31 Ibid. 32 New York Times, September 14, 1880, p. 5; Lause, pp. 184-85, 191-92. 33 Washington Post, October 4, 1880, p. 1; Lause, pp. 187, 203. 34 New York Times, September 28, 1880, p. 1. 35 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, October 21, 1880, p. 1. 36 Ibid., p. 1. 37 Haynes, Weaver, p. 171. 38 Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 104. 39 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, October 21, 1880, p. 1. 40 Don Carlos Seitz, The Also Rans: Great Men Who Missed Making the Presidential Goal (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Library Press), pp. 317-19. 41 Presidential Elections (Washington: Congressional Quarterly), 1995, pp. 46, 100; Ackerman, p. 188. 42 Presidential Elections, pp. 46, 100. 43 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, November 11, 1880, p. 2. 44 New York Times, April 30, 1881, p. 4. Chapter eight 1 New York Times, June 19, 1881, p. 1. 2 Congressional Record, 3rd session, December 21, 1880, Vol. 11, p. 311; Washington Post, December 22, 1880, p. 1. 3 Congressional Record, 3rd session, December 22, 1880, Vol. 11, p. 334; Washington Post, December 23, 1880, p. 1.

224


4 New York Times, December 22, 1880, p. 1; Washington Post, December 22, 1880, p. 1; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 195-96. 5 Washington Post, January 1, 1881, p. 1; New York Times, February 15, 1881, p. 1. 6 Washington Post, January 1, 1881, p. 1; James McPherson, ed., To the Best of My Ability: The American Presidents (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2000), p. 377. Hereafter cited as McPherson, American Presidents. 7 Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 3rd session, January 31, 1881, Vol. 11, p. 1,072; Weaver, A Call to Action, pp. 22, 24-25, 47. 8 Ackerman, pp. 283-86, 299-304. 9 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, May 19, 1881, p. 1. 10 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, April 7, 1881, p. 2; May 5, 1881, p. 1; May 19, 1881, p. 1; June 16, 1881, p. 2; July 21, 1881, p. 1; August 18, 1881, p. 2. 11 The People Shall Be Free, words by C.E. Schoff, music by P.W. Hill, sheet music in Weaver scrapbook. 12 New York Times, May 8, 1881, p. 1; June 16, 1881, p. 2. 13 Account of Weaver’s Massachusetts trip in an unidentified newspaper clipping contained in the Weaver scrapbook. Hereafter referred to as Scrapbook, Mass. 14 Henry Demarest Lloyd, “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” Atlantic Monthly, March, 1881, pp. 317-34. 15 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 113-17. 16 Scrapbook, Mass.; Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 30, 1881, p. 1. 17 Scrapbook, Mass. 18 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, August 11, 1881, p. 1. 19 Quoted in Fred Emory Haynes, Third Party Movements Since the Civil War, with Special Reference to Iowa: a Study in Social Politics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 182. Hereafter cited as Haynes, Third Party Movements. 20 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 9, 1881, p. 2, November 3, 1881, p. 2; Haynes, Third Party Movements, pp. 181-82. 21 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 205-07. 22 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 208-09; James B. Weaver letter to the Register and Leader, Des Moines, October 30, 1911, p. 4. In his account of the Republican overtures, Weaver does not identify Harlan by name but notes that he had been initially summoned to Mount Pleasant for a meeting and that the invitation to the midnight rendezvous aboard the Pullman car came from “a very dear friend, an ex-United States senator.” 23 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, June 30, 1881, p. 1; Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, December 8, 1886, p. 1. 24 Sage, pp. 203-04; Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, June 13, 1883, p. 3; September 19, 1883; Jeffrey Ostler, Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agricultural Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, 1880-1892 (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1993), p. 42; Haynes, Third Party Movements, p. 188; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 214-15. 25 Ostler, p. 42.

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26 Haynes, Third Party Movements, pp. 148-49, 150-51; New York Times, May 30, 1884, p. 2; Presidential Elections, p. 101. 27 New York Times, October 5, 1884, p. 4; Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa, November 13, 1884, p. 2; Presidential Elections, p. 101. 28 U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Elections, Campbell v. Weaver, 49th Congress, 1st sess., 1886 (Washington: Government Printing Office), p. 1; hereafter referred to as Campbell v. Weaver. 29 Ibid., pp. 3, 11-12. 30 Ibid., p. 1; “Views of the Minority,” Campbell v. Weaver, p. 6; Washington Post, April 6, 1886, p. 1. Chapter nine 1 Washington Post, March 14, 1885, p. 1. 2 Haynes, Weaver, p. 218; Washington Post, December 8, 1885, p. 1. The Post identifies Brumm as a Greenback. Haynes, without naming the second Greenback, states that there were two in the Forty-ninth Congress. The Congressional Biographical Directory, however, says Brumm was elected as a Republican to the Forty-ninth Congress; Washington Post, January 9, 1886, p. 1; Washington Post, April 6, 1886, p. 1. 3 Billington, pp. 625-26. 4 Ibid., pp. 626--27. 5 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, April 8, 1885, p. 1. 6 New York Times, March 14, 1885, p. 3; Washington Post, March 15, 1885, p. 1; Haynes, Weaver, p. 232. 7 Haynes, Weaver, p. 244; Washington Post, December 13, 1885, p. 4; Washington Post, December 30, 1885, p. 1. 8 Haynes, Weaver, p. 244; Ginger, pp. 59-60. 9 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 246-47; Congressional Record, 2nd session, March 3, 1887, Vol. 18, p. 2,701. 10 Ginger, p. 116; Haynes, Weaver, p. 249. 11 Kolko, pp. 32, 40-41. 12 Kolko, p. 32, pp. 40-41; Congressional Record, 2nd session, January 19, 1887, Vol. 18, pp. 820-22. 13 Abram and Susan Weaver obituaries, clippings in the Weaver scrapbook. 14 Jensen, p. 90; Ostler, pp. 46-47; Sage, p. 205; Wall, pp. 165-66; Haynes, Weaver, p. 258. 15 Ostler, pp. 62-63. 16 Wall, p. 166-67; Sage, p. 207. 17 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 291-92. 18 Iowa Official Register, 1889, pp. 195, 196; Presidential Elections, 1792-1992, pp. 101-02; Ostler, pp. 50-53; Washington Post, November 11, 1888, p. 4. 19 Washington Post, December 14, 1888, p. 2. 20 Ibid., January 9. 1889. p. 2.

226


21 Ibid., January 10, 1889. p. 2. 22 Ibid. 23 New York Times, January 11, 1889, p. 5; Washington Post, January 11, 1889, p. 2. 24 Washington Post, January 10, 1889, p. 4; Washington Post, January 12, 1889, p. 2, p. 4; Philadelphia Record, quoted in the Washington Post, January 12, 1889, p. 4. 25 New York Times, January 13, 1889, p. 2; Washington Post, January 13, 1889, p. 1; Peters, p. 63. 26 Haynes, Weaver, p. 275; Billington, p. 628. 27 Billington, pp. 628-29. 28 Washington Post, March 30, 1889, p. 4; April 26, 1889, p. 1. 29 Dan. W. Peery, “The First Two Years,” Chronicles of Oklahoma (Vol. 7, No. 4, September, 1929), pp. 289, 296, 299; . 30 Washington Post, March 16, 1889, p. 1; March 29, 1889, p. 4; clipping from the Bloomfield Democrat hand-dated November 1890 in the Weaver scrapbook. Chapter ten 1 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, December 31, 1890, p. 1. 2 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, December 31, 1890 p. 1, February 18, 1891, p. 1. 3 Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 20-23. 4 Ibid., pp. 26-27, 31. 5 Goodwyn, p. 58; John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 97; Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York: Hill and Wang), 1993, pp. 46; Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, October 27, 1886. 6 McMath , pp. 46-47, 100. 7 Goodwyn, pp. 109-10; McMath, p. 110. 8 McMath, pp. 114-15, p. 137; Billington, pp. 643-44; Dictionary of American Biography, p. 180. 9 New York Times, November 6, 1890, p. 2. 10 McMath, p. 140. 11 Ibid., p. 141; Ostler, pp. 158-59; Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, March 25, 1891, p. 1. 12 Leonidas Polk to James Baird Weaver, April 5, 1891, May 2, 1891, James Baird Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines. 13 McMath, p. 146; Washington Post, May 20, 1891, p. 1; New York Times, May 21, 1891, p. 1. 14 New York Times, May 21, 1891, p. 1. 15 McMath, p. 146; New York Times, June 4, 1891, p. 1. 16 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, February 18, 1891, p. 1; Chicago Herald, quoted in the Iowa Tribune, August 5, 1891, p. 1; McMath, p. 157.

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17 McMath, pp. 125-26; unidentified newspaper clipping dated July 18, 1891 in the Weaver scrapbook. 18 McMath, pp. 149-50; Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, August 5, 1891, p. 1. 19 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, December 2, 1891, p. 1, February 24, 1892, p. 6. 20 Iowa Farmer’s Tribune, Des Moines, January 6, 1892, pp. 1, 6; January 13, 1892, p. 1. 21 Kathi Ann Brown, Meredith: The First 100 Years (Des Moines: Meredith Publishing, 2002), pp. 10-11; Iowa Farmer’s Tribune, Des Moines, January 20, 1892, p. 1.. 22 Iowa Tribune, Des Moines, August 5, 1891, p. 1, September 11, 1886, p. 1; unidentified newspaper clipping in the Weaver scrapbook; Iowa Farmer’s Tribune, Des Moines, February 17, 1892, p. 11. 23 Weaver, A Call to Action, preface. 24 Ibid., pp. 418-19. 25 Ibid.,, pp. 314, 346, 425. 26 Ibid., pp. 299, 266, 308. 27 Ibid., pp. 11, 20, 31, 32, 33, 47. 28 Ibid., pp. 123, 131, 74-75, 69, 133. 29 Ibid., pp. 81- 82. 30 Ibid., pp. 9, 67, 111-16, 298. 31 Ibid., pp. 363-64, 367, 368, 368-77. Italics in original. 32 Ibid., p. 378. 33 McMath, pp. 160-63; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 308-09. 34 Washington Post, February 26, 1892, p. 1, February 29, 1892, p. 1, May 16, 1892, p. 4; New York Times, February 29, 1892, p. 1. 35 McMath, pp. 166, 169; Washington Post, June 12, 1892, p. 4, June 30, 1892, p. 1; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. IV, p. 608; The New York Times, July 2, 1892, p. 1. Gresham later served as secretary of state in the Cleveland administration. 36 Hicks, pp. 439-44. 37 Hicks, pp. 439-44; Washington Post, July 5, 1892, p. 1. 38 Washington Post, July 5, 1892, p. 1. 39 Ibid. 40 New York Times, July 6, 1892, p. 8. 41 Ibid. Chapter Eleven New York World, July 10, 1892. Ibid. New York World, July 10, 1892; Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 442. Washington Post, July 6, 1892, p. 4; Atlanta Journal, quoted in the New York Times, July 11, 1892, p. 4. 5 H. Wayne Morgan, “Election of 1892,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ed. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers), pp. 1,703-720. 1 2 3 4

228 6 7 8 9


Ibid. Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 128-129; Morgan, “Election of 1892,” p. 1,725. Haynes, Weaver, pp. 318-319; Washington Post, July 23, 1892, p. 3; McMath, p. 178. Ray Ginger, The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949), p. 49. Hereafter cited as Ginger, Debs; Goodwyn, pp. 174-75. 10 Ginger, Debs, pp. 89, 71, 115-16, 162-64. 11 Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 69. Kazin describes a Labor Day campaign appearance by Bryan in Chicago in 1896 in which the nominee of the Democratic and Populist parties makes no mention of bimetallism. “His hope that urban wager earners would unite with his agrarian supporters depended almost entirely on his ability to persuade them to vote their ideals and their consciences rather than their fears and their wallets.” 12 Goodwyn, pp. 176-77. 13 Charles W. Carey Jr., “Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens,” American National Biography (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, Vol. 13), pp. 334-35. 14 William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1946), pp. 218-19; the National Economist, Washington D.C., September 17, 1892. 15 Ibid., p. 219. 16 McMath, p. 163. 17 Rocky Mountain News, Denver, July 17, 1892, p. 1. Clipping in Weaver scrapbook, p. 52. The phrase “middle of the road” was used by Populists to indicate the party’s distinct position as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans, not as an indicator of its position on the ideological spectrum. 18 Washington Post, July 29, 1892, p. 7; clippings from the Rocky Mountain News in the Weaver scrapbook; Haynes, Weaver, p. 319; Los Angeles Herald, August 4, 1892. 19 McMath, pp. 118-21. 20 Los Angeles Herald, August 7, 1892. 21 Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, August 9, 1892; clipping on page 64 of Weaver scrapbook. 22 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 320-22; National Economist, Washington D.C., August 27, 1892. 23 New York Times, August 24, 1892, p. 4. 24 Hicks, p. 250. 25 Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 18601910 (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 232-43; Hicks, pp. 239, 252. 26 McMath, p. 92; Watson quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 220-21. 27 Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, August 9, 1892; clipping on page 64 of Weaver scrapbook; Hicks, pp. 238-39.

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28 Washington Post, July 10, 1892, p. 7; New York Times, July 11, 1892, p. 4. 29 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 322-23; Dallas News, excerpted in the National Economist, Washington D.C., September 17, 1892. 30 Hicks, p. 243; Washington Post, September 18, 1892, p. 7. 31 McMath, pp. 157-58. 32 Woodward, pp. 233, 237-41. 33 Washington Post, September 21, 1892, p. 4; September 24, 1892, p.1; Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1892, p. 1. 34 Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1892, p. 1; National Economist, Washington D.C., October 8, 1892. 35 Woodward, pp. 234-35; Washington Post, September 24, 1892, p. 1; Atlanta Constitution, September 23, 1892, p. 1; National Economist, Washington D.C., October 8, 1892. The correspondent for the Atlanta Constitution reported that the egg missed Clara but struck a wall “unpleasantly near” her. 36 New York Times, September 24, 1892, p. 1; McMath, p. 177. 37 Washington Post, September 28, 1892, p. 2, September 29, 1892, p. 1; New York Times, September 27, 1892, p. 8. 38 New York Times, October 7, 1892, p. 1. 39 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 327-29; Washington Post, October 9, 1892, p. 1. 40 New York Times, September 27, 1892, p. 1, September 30, 1892, p. 8, October 26, 1892, p. 1; Hicks, pp. 256-57. 41 Morgan, “Election of 1892,” pp. 1,724-730. 42 Letter from Gen. Grenville Dodge to J.B. Weaver, October 14, 1892, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines; letter from A. W. Tourgee to Gen. J.B. Weaver, October 19, 1892, Weaver papers, SHSI, Des Moines; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. IX, pp. 603-05. 43 Haynes, Weaver, p. 329; Kazin, p. 36; Omaha World-Herald, November 3, 1892. 44 Presidential Elections, pp. 49, 103. 45 National Economist, Washington D.C., November 19, 1892. 46 Washington Post, November 17, 1892, p. 1. 1 2 3 4

5

Chapter twelve Washington Post, February 22, 1893, p. 4. Ibid.. Ibid., February 23, 1892, p. 2. Washington Post, February 23, 1893, p. 2; Weaver identifies Seyd by name in A Call to Action; Weaver, A Call to Action, pp. 320-21. According to Unger, Seyd aided the Massachusetts Rep. Samuel Hooper in drafting the bill that demonetized silver but was actually a fervent bimetallist. “His advice to Congressman Hooper, it seems, was pro-, not anti-silver, but it was ignored.” Unger, p. 339-40 n. Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 165-67.

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6 Bryan quoted in McMath, pp. 200-01; Kazin, pp. 38-39; Bryan quoted in Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 169. 7 Kazin, pp. 5-9; Cherny, pp. 19-20, 24. 8 Kazin, pp. 48-49, 138-39. 9 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 171-74. 10 New York Times, April 27, 1894, p. 2; Washington Post, May 4, 1894, p. 1. 11 Kazin, pp. 41-43; Washington Post, April 26, 1894, p. 1; August 12, 1894, p. 4. 12 Gompers and Debs quotes in Haynes, Weaver, p. 361; Weaver quoted in Hicks, p. 327. 13 Washington Post, October 6, 1894, p. 1; October 16, 1894, p. 9; Kazin, pp. 42-43. 14 Hicks, pp. 335-39. 15 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, November 9. 1894. Container No. 3, William Jennings Bryan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Hereafter identified as Bryan Papers, LOC. 16 Kazin, pp. 46-47. 17 James Baird Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, December 31, 1895, January 3, 1896. Container No. 3, Bryan Papers, LOC. 18 Robert F. Durden, “The ‘Cow-bird’ Grounded: The Populist Nomination of Bryan and Tom Watson in 1896,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (Vol. 50, No. 3, December 1963), pp. 403-04. 19 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, May 29, 1896. Bryan Papers, LOC. 20 Durden, pp. 405-06; Washington Post, July 7, 1896, p. 6. 21 Kazin, p. 62. 22 Washington Post, July 10, 1896, p. 4. 23 Durden, pp. 409-13. 24 Ibid., pp. 414-15. 25 Ibid., pp. 415-18, 421. 26 Ibid., pp. 421-22; New York Times, July 26, 1896, p. 2. 27 Haynes, Weaver, p. 377; New York Times, July 26, 1896, p. 2. 28 New York Times, July 26, 1896, p. 2. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Cannon quoted by Sidney Hyman in “McKinley’s Been Libeled Far Too Long,” The Washington Post, May 30, 1954, p. B3; Kazin, pp. 65-66; Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 201. 32 Washington Post, August 9, 1896, p. 1; Kazin, pp. 65, 68-69. 33 Leon Reporter, Leon, Iowa, October 15, 1896; Decatur County Journal quoted in “Get Ready for ’96: The Decatur County Press, Partisanship and the Presidential Campaign of 1896,” Robert B. Mitchell, Iowa Heritage Illustrated, Vol. 84, No. 3, Fall 2003, p. 106. 34 Kazin, pp. 65, 69, 70. 35 William J. Bryan., The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (Port Washington,

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N.Y., London: Kennikat Press, 1971); James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, December 29. 1896. Bryan Papers, LOC. 36 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 206-10; Kazin, p. 88-89; Haynes, Weaver, pp. 385-86. 37 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, November 14, 1898. Bryan Papers, LOC. 38 Haynes, Weaver, p. 391; Kazin, pp. 90, 106-07. 39 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, November 10, 1900. Container No. 25, Bryan Papers, LOC; Kazin, pp. 90-91. 40 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, November 10, 1900. Container No. 25, Bryan Papers, LOC. 41 James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, March 15, 1901. Container No. 26, Bryan Papers, LOC; James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, April 4, 1902. Container No. 27, Bryan Papers, LOC. 42 Haynes, Weaver, p. 399. 43 Haynes, Weaver, p. 398-99; Bryan, quoted in Kazin, p. 163. 44 Rev. H.C. Morrison to William Jennings Bryan, November 12, 1908. Container No. 28, Bryan Papers, LOC.; James B. Weaver to William Jennings Bryan, November 13, 1908. Container No. 28, Bryan Papers, LOC. 45 McPherson, ed., American Presidents, p. 402. Chapter thirteen 1 Haynes, Weaver, pp. 400-01. Haynes writes that Weaver “seriously considered” running for Congress in 1904 but chose instead to campaign for Parker. E.H. Gillette encouraged Weaver without success to run for Congress in 1908; Washington Post, April 18, 1896, p. 4. 2 Brown, pp. 14-23. 3 Register and Leader, Des Moines, February 21, 1909. 4 World Review, Chicago, November 23, 1901, p. 324; January 4, 1902, p. 493; November 30, 1901, p. 351. 5 Haynes, Weaver, p. 407. 6 Ginger, Age of Excess, p. 308; New York World, April 24, 1906. Clipping in the Weaver scrapbook. 7 Register and Leader, Des Moines, November 24, 1906, p. 2. 8 Ginger, Age of Excess, pp. 244-46; Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 467; Kazin, pp. 93-94. 9 Register and Leader, Des Moines, November 24, 1906, p. 2. 10 Ibid., November 26, 1906, p. 5; Jack Lufkin, “Sue M. and S. Joe Brown,” The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa (Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2009) pp. 61-63. 11 New York Times, August 8, 1912, p. 2, March 5, 1913, p. 5. 12 Albert B. Cummins to William Jennings Bryan, Feb 20, 1902. Container No. 27,

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William Jennings Bryan Papers, LOC; New York Times, June 13, 1911, p. 1; November 7, 1991, p. A29. 13 Wall, p. 170-72. 14 The Register and Leader, Des Moines, July 14, 1908, p. 1. 15 Ibid., February 16, 1909, pp. 1, 10. 16 Register and Leader, Des Moines, October 20, 1911, p. 6, October 30, 1911, p. 4. 17 Ibid., February 7, 1912, p. 1. 18 Ibid., February 9, 1912; Haynes, Weaver, p. 429. 19 Register and Leader, Des Moines, February 8, 1912, p. 4. 20 Clarkson, Annals, p. 564; Sage, Annals, p. 488. 21 Witham, pp. 21-22. 22 Holt, pp. 30-31. 23 Durden, pp. 397-98. 24 George William McDaniel, “New Era Agrarian Radicalism: Smith W. Brookhart and the Populist Critique,” Annals of Iowa 49, Nos. 3 and 4 (Winter/Spring 1988), pp. 211-13; Kazin, p. 226. 25 Weaver, A Call to Action, p. 46. 26 Ostler, pp. 67-68, p. 134. 27 Register and Leader, Des Moines, February 7, 1912, p. 2. An editor’s note at the top of the poem states that it was written in December 1908.

Bibliography Manuscript and document collections: Des Moines, Iowa State Historical Society of Iowa Address of Gen. James B. Weaver at Newton, Iowa, delivered June 19, 1878. Papers of James Baird Weaver and James Bellamy Weaver. College Park, Md. National Archives and Records Administration Applications for Positions as Internal Revenue Collectors and Assessors, 1863-1910. Records Group 56, Department of the Treasury. Washington D.C. Department of the Interior, National Park Service. National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the residence of James B. Weaver, Bloomfield, Iowa. Library of Congress, Manuscript Division William Jennings Bryan papers. National Archives and Records Administration Civil War pension file for James B. Weaver. Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s-1917. Books, Published Speeches, Periodicals, Reports, and Reference Works Ackerman, Kenneth D. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003. American Council of Learned Societies. Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1964. Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Washington D.C.. http//bioguide. congress.gov. Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1974. Brown, Kathi Ann. Meredith: The First 100 Years. Des Moines: Meredith Publishing, 2002. Brown, Harry James, Williams, Frederick D., eds. The Diary of James A. Garfield, Vol. IV, 1878-1881. Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press. Brown, H.C.; Ford-Leon, Lena; Headrick, Mrs. Clay; Payne, Dillon H., eds. Pioneer History of Davis County, Iowa. Bloomfield Iowa: Bloomfield Democrat, 1924-1927. Bryan, William J. The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896. Port Washington, N.Y., London: Kennikat Press, 1971.

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Carey, Charles W. Jr. “Lease, Mary Elizabeth Clyens,” American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 1999. Cherny, Robert W. A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Christenson, Gordon A. “A Tale of Two Lawyers in Antebellum Cincinnati: Timothy Walker’s Last Conversation with Salmon P. Chase.” Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati Law Review, 71 (Winter 2002). Clark, Dan Elbert. “History of Liquor Legislation in Iowa 1861-1878.” Iowa City, Iowa: Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 6 ( July, 1908). Clarkson, James S. “The Stampede from General Weaver in the Republican Convention of 1875.” Des Moines: Annals of Iowa, 10 ( January, 1913). Colbert, Thomas Burnell. “Disgruntled ‘Chronic Office Seeker’ or Man of Political Integrity: James Baird Weaver and the Republican Party in Iowa, 1857-1877.” Iowa City: Annals of Iowa, 49 (Winter/Spring 1988). ____________________. “Political Fusion in Iowa: The Election of James B. Weaver to Congress in 1878.” Tucson, Ariz.: Arizona and the West, 20 (Spring 1978). Congressional Quarterly. Presidential Elections. Washington D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1995. Cook, Robert. Baptism of Fire: the Republican Party in Iowa, 1838-1878. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1994. Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995. Doolen, Richard M. “`Brick’ Pomeroy and the Greenback Clubs.” Springfield, Ill.: Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 65 (Winter, 1972). ________________. “Pastor in Politics: The Congressional Career of the Reverend Gilbert De La Matyr.” Indianapolis: Indiana Magazine of History, 68 ( June 1972). Durden, Robert F. “The ‘Cow-bird’ Grounded: The Populist Nomination of Bryan and Tom Watson in 1896,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 50 (December 1963). Fairall, Herbert S., ed. The Iowa City Republican Manual of Iowa Politics. Iowa City, Iowa, 1881. Fiske, John; Wilson, James Grant, eds. Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography . New York: Appleton & Co., 1888. Ginger, Ray. Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1975. __________. The Bending Cross. A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs. Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1949. Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Government Printing Office. Congressional Record. Washington D.C.: 46th, 49th, 50th Congress. _______________________. Register of the Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States, on the Thirtieth September, 1869. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870. _______________________. “Campbell v. Weaver,” Report No. 1622, Reports of

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Committees of the House of Representatives for the first session of the 49th Congress, 1885-1885, Twelve Volumes, Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886. Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. New York: Da Capo Press, 1982. Haynes, Fred Emory. James Baird Weaver. Iowa City, Iowa: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1919. _________________. Third Party Movements Since the Civil War, with Special Reference to Iowa: a Study in Social Politics. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. Herriott, F.I. “Iowa and the First Nomination of Lincoln.” Des Moines: Annals of Iowa, 8 ( July 1907). Hicks, John D. The Populist Revolt. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. History of Davis County, Iowa. Des Moines, Iowa: State Historical Company, 1882. Hogenboom, Ari. The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press. Holt, Michael F. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1999. Horn, Hosea B. “History of Davis County, Iowa,” Annals of Iowa, October, 1864. ______________. Horn’s Overland Guide, from the U.S. Indian Sub-Agency, Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, to the City of Sacramento, in California. New York: J.H. Colton, 1852. Horton, Loren. “A Place in the Sun: Iowa Politics at the Turn of the Century.” Iowa City: The Palimpsest 64 (November-December, 1983). Hudson, David, Berman, Marvin, and Horton, Loren, eds. The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Hunt, Roger D., Brown, Jack R. Brevet Brigadier Generals in Blue. Gaithersburg, Md.: Olde Soldier Books, 1997. Hyman, Sidney. “McKinley’s Been Libeled Too Long,” The Washington Post, May 30, 1954, p. B3. Iowa Official Register, 1889. Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Daily Republican Printing and Binding House, 1889. Iowa Official Register, 1937-38. Des Moines: State of Iowa, 1938. Jensen, Richard W. The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Kolko, Gabriel. Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916. New York: W.W. Norton Company Inc., 1965. Lause, Mark. The Civil War’s Last Campaign: James B. Weaver, the Greenback-Labor Party and the Politics of Race and Section. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001. Lloyd, Henry Demarest. “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1881. Marchman, Watt P., ed. “The Memoirs of Thomas Donaldson.” Fremont, Ohio: Hayes Historical Journal, 2 (Spring-Fall 1979). McDaniel, George William. “New Era Agrarian Radicalism: Smith W. Brookhart and the Populist Critique.” Iowa City: Annals of Iowa, 49 (Winter/Spring 1988). McMath, Robert C. Jr. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. McPherson, Edward. A Handbook of Politics for 1880: Being a Record of Important Political

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Action, National and State, from July 1, 1878, to July 1, 1880. Washington D.C.: James J. Chapman, 1880. McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. _______________, ed. To the Best of My Ability: the American Presidents. London: Dorling Kindersley, 2000. Mitchell, Robert B. “Get Ready for ’96: The Decatur County Press, Partisanship and the Presidential Campaign of 1896.” Iowa City: Iowa Heritage Illustrated, 84 (Fall 2003). ______________. “Untamed Greenbacker: James Baird Weaver.” Iowa City: Iowa Heritage Illustrated, 87 (Fall 2006). Morgan, H. Wayne. “Election of 1892,” in History of American Presidential Elections, 17891968, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., editor. Chelsea House Publishers. Morris, Edmund. “Theodore Rex.” New York: Modern Library, 2002. Nye, John A. Between The Rivers: A History f the United Methodist Church in Iowa. Lake Mills, Iowa: The Graphic Publishing Co., 1986. Ostler, Jeffrey. Prairie Populism: The Fate of Agricultural Radicalism in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, 1880-1892. Lawrence, Kan. University of Kansas Press, 1993. Peery, Dan. W. “The First Two Years.” Chronicles of Oklahoma, 7 (September, 1929). http:// digital.library.okstate.edu/chronicles/v007/v007p419.html. Peters, Ronald M. Jr. The American Speakership: The Office in Historical Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Potter, David. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976. Ritter, Gretchen. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Anti-Monopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1996. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Roberts, Chalmers M. In the Shadow of Power: The Story of The Washington Post. Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press. Rosenberg, Morton. Iowa on the Eve of the Civil War: A Decade of Frontier Politics. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972. Safire, William. Safire’s New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics. New York: Random House, 1993. Sage, Leland L. A History of Iowa. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1974. ____________. “Weaver in Allison’s Way.” Des Moines: Annals of Iowa, 31 ( January 1953). Seitz, Don Carlos. The Also-Rans: Great Men Who Missed the Presidential Goal. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Library Press. Stiles, Edward H. Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa Belonging to the First and Second Generations, with Anecdotes and Incidents Illustrative of the Time. Des Moines, Iowa, 1916. Stuart, Capt. A.A. Iowa Colonels and Regiments, being a History of Iowa Regiments in the War of the Rebellion; and Containing a Description of the Battles in Which They Have Fought. Des Moines, Iowa: Mills & Company, 1865. Stevenson, Adlai E. Something of Men I Have Known. Chicago: McClurg & Co., 1909. Storer, Bellamy. The Legal Profession: An Address Delivered to the Law Department of the

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University of Louisville, Kentucky, February 20, 1856. Cincinnati: C. Clark & Co., Ben Franklin Printing House, 1856. Tenney, W.J. The Military and Naval History of the Rebellion in the United States. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003. Thrift, Gen. William H., ed. Roster and Record of Iowa Soldiers in the War of the Rebellion, Together with Historical Sketches of Volunteer Organizations, 1861-1866, Vol. I. Des Moines, Iowa, 1908. Trefousse, Hans L. Rutherford B. Hayes. Times Books Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002. Unger, Irwin. The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 18651879. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964. Wall, Joseph Frazier. Iowa: A History. New York: W. Norton & Co., 1978. Wang, Xi. The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910. Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997. Weaver, James B. A Call to Action. Des Moines, Iowa: Iowa Printing Co., 1892. ______________. “Journey, Voyage and Episode: A Lad’s Experience in the Early 1850s.” The World Review, Chicago, January 18, January 15, February 1, 1902. _______________. “Personal Recollections of Garfield,” The World Review, Chicago, January 4, 1902. _______________. “Two Iowa Men of Power and Their Contemporaries,” The World Review, Chicago, November 23, 1901, November 30, 1901. White, William Allen. The Autobiography of William Allen White. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1946. Witham, James W. Fifty Years on the Firing Line: My Part in the Farmers’ Movement. Chicago, W.B. Conkey Co., 1924. Woodward, C. Vann. Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel. Oxford University Press, 1972. Newspapers: Atlanta Constitution Atlanta Journal, quoted in the New York Times. Bloomfield Democrat, Bloomfield, Iowa. Bloomfield Democratic Clarion, Bloomfield, Iowa. Boston Globe. Chicago Herald, quoted in the Iowa Tribune. Chicago Times. Chicago Tribune. Dallas News, excerpted in the National Economist, Washington D.C. Davis County Index, Bloomfield, Iowa. Davis County Republican, Bloomfield, Iowa. Des Moines Register. Evening Gazette, Terre Haute, Ind. Iowa State Register, Des Moines, Iowa. Iowa Tribune, Des Moines.

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Iowa Farmer’s Tribune. Keosauqua Democratic Union, Keosauqua, Iowa. Lamoni Independent Patriot, Lamoni, Iowa. Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield, Iowa. Leon Reporter, Leon, Iowa. Los Angeles Herald. National Economist, Washington D.C. New York Times. New York World. Omaha World-Herald. Oskaloosa Herald, Oskaloosa, Iowa. Ottumwa Courier, Ottumwa, Iowa. Ottumwa Democrat and Times, Ottumwa, Iowa. Sioux City Journal, Sioux City, Iowa. Ward’s Own Paper, Bloomfield, Iowa. Washington Post. Weekly Union Guard, Bloomfield, Iowa. Western Gazette, Bloomfield, Iowa. The Weaver Scrapbook Some of the citations in this book come from a scrapbook kept by James B. Weaver that was privately held during the course of my research. The scrapbook consists of newspaper clippings and some ephemera, including sheet music. With the kind permission of its owner, I examined the scrapbook on several occasions and was allowed to take digital photographs. I then transcribed material quoted for use in the book. Citations are as complete as possible, but the scrapbook includes some clippings without identifying the publication. Since completion of the book the scrapbook has been donated to the State Historical Society of Iowa. American Sentry, New York, September 18, 1880. Bloomfield Democrat, probably November 1890. Bloomfield Farmer, Bloomfield, Iowa, October 4, 1896. Chicago Times, undated clipping. Indianapolis Sun, June 16, 1880. Obituaries for Abram and Susan Weaver, unidentified clippings. Prescott Nevada County, Ark., Dispatch, August 12, 1880. New York Star, undated. New York World, April 24, 1906. Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, Oakland, Calif., August 9, 1892. Rocky Mountain News, Denver, Colo., July 17, 1892, p. 1; undated clipping from July, 1892. Unidentified newspaper account of Weaver’s Massachusetts trip in the spring and summer of 1881. Unidentified newspaper clipping dated July 18, 1891 in the Weaver scrapbook. “The People Shall Be Free,” sheet music. Words by C. E. Schoff, music by P. W. Hill.

Acknowledgments

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his project has benefited from the encouragement and assistance of many friends, colleagues and family members. If not for their support and guidance, it would never have been completed. It was in the process of reconnecting with my family’s Iowa roots that I first made the acquaintance of Ginalie Swaim and Marvin Bergman of the State Historical Society of Iowa. Over the course of the past several years, as I immersed myself in the life and times of James Baird Weaver, they cheerfully provided advice and pointed me toward useful resources. They have been my mentors on this undertaking, and no words can ever express my gratitude to them. Becki Plunkett, Shari Stelling, Chad Owen, and Sharon Avery of the SHSI library and state archives staff provided valuable assistance in helping me track down obscure newspapers, letters, speeches, and photographs. When stymied by circumstance, I turned to researcher Helen Whannel of West Des Moines, an indefatigable historical detective. The assistance provided by the unfailingly helpful interlibrary loan office of the Prince William County, Va., library system also proved invaluable. Kenneth Lyftogt of the University of Northern Iowa graciously agreed to review my chapter on Weaver’s Civil War years. Any errors in that chapter, or any other part of the book, of course, remain wholly my responsibility. From the earliest days of this endeavor I have been inspired and sustained by my friends and colleagues at the Washington Post. One day, when I was describing my fascination with Weaver, Post copy editor Tony Reid matter-offactly observed: “sounds like a book.” That’s when the idea of writing a fulllength biography of Weaver first occurred to me. In the years that followed, Tony, Kate Carlisle, Tom Lachman, Vince Rinehart, Susan Williams, Greg Mott, Pat Gaston, Ken Manning, and many others listened patiently as I shared my excitement and frustrations. Never once did they roll their eyes or wave me off. That has meant more than I can say. In the course of my research, I made the acquaintance of a Weaver descendant, Susan Dannreuther, a great-granddaughter of the general and faithful steward of her family’s heritage. The discovery helped my research and introduced me to a new friend. Susan and I share a passion for baseball, and when we weren’t chatting about her illustrious ancestor we were discussing the Washington Nationals. Susan, in turn, put me in touch with Rudy Evans,

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a knowledgeable student of Weaver’s life and career. Rudy generously shared his extensive knowledge of Weaver’s life and patiently corrected errors that I had committed due to sloth, haste, or ignorance. His help has been invaluable. There are faithful students of Weaver’s life throughout Iowa, and I have been aided by two in particular. Janice Harbaugh, who is devoted to preserving the memory of Weaver’s distinguished career, provided essential guidance and resources as this project began. The scholarship of Thomas Burnell Colbert, professor of social sciences and humanities at Marshalltown Community College, blazed a trail on key aspects of the general’s life in politics that I gratefully followed. My project also benefited from the prayerful encouragement of my friends and Sunday School classmates at Old Bridge United Methodist Church in Woodbridge, Va. The Rev. Burton Robinson and Rick Zong each offered support as what seemed at first to be the delusional product of a mid-life crisis slowly became a reality. Phredd Evans and Charles Stribula boosted my morale at an early stage when this undertaking seemed too ambitious. Yet the most important source of support has been my family. My wife, Denise, and daughter, Katie, each possess a deep love for the written word. Denise is an editor in her own right and Katie is an avid reader and talented young writer. Over the dinner table, while running errands, or on vacation, they shared my enthusiasm when a new discovery was made or threshold reached. When I hit an impasse at the keyboard, their suggestions led to a solution. As the project neared completion, Denise lent her considerable talents as an editor to the task of polishing the manuscript. I am deeply in her debt and very fortunate to be married to such a wonderful woman. I am also proud to be the son of a retired minister with a passion for history and scholarship. The Rev. James Mitchell talked with me about many of the issues and historical questions raised by Weaver’s life and shared his skills as a wordsmith when he reviewed portions of the book. I profited enormously from his steady and insightful guidance. Daniel J. Hoisington, my editor and publisher in Minnesota, also deserves thanks for taking an interest in the work of a first-time author and patiently offering guidance on everything from substantive questions involving the text to the more arcane issues of style. The experience of writing this book has convinced me that no such undertaking is completed in isolation. While I remain solely responsible for its shortcomings, my friends and family deserve to share in whatever credit it may earn. Robert B. Mitchell, April 2008

Index Albia, Iowa 121 Allen, Sen. William V. 66, 97, 162, 183, 187 Allison, Sen. William B. 32, 53-54, 58-60, 63, 68-9, 85, 113, 122-23, 133, 158, 205 Altgeld, Gov. John P. 184 Amalgamated Association of Steel and Iron Workers 159 American Bankers Association 151 American Bimetallic League 177 American Railway Union 161, 181 Anderson, Rep. A. R. 134 Arthur, Chester A. 98, 110, 116, 186 Atlanta Constitution 170 Atlanta Journal 158, 172 Atlantic Monthly 118 Atwater, Rev. Lyman 67 Audubon County, Iowa 59 Baker, James 28-29, 32, 35, 40, 42-43, 75 Ballard, Dr. S. M. 59 Bartholomew County, Indiana 9 Bates, Curtis 22-23 Belknap, William 50, 217 Bellamy, Edwin 24, 51, 150, 164Better Homes and Gardens 198 Blackburn, Rep. Joseph 81 Blaine, James G. 95, 106, 124, 127, 134, 158-59, 173 Bland-Allison silver bill 85, 113, 158 Bland, Rep. Richard 85, 113, 158

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Bloomfield, Iowa 9-10, 12-15, 26, 28, 3032, 35-36, 40, 43, 48-49, 51, 56- 57, 60-61, 75, 99, 101, 132, 138, 147, 199 Boies, Horace 185 Bonaparte, Iowa 22, 27-28 Bradley, Joseph 82 Brookhart, Sen. Smith Wildman 207 Bryan, William Jennings 4-5, 67, 106, 141, 174-75, 179-80, 182-204, 206-7, 209; childhood and early adult life, 179; elections of 1892, 141; comparison with Weaver, 106, 180; correspondence with Weaver, 183; Democratic convention of 1896, 185-86; dilemma posed to Populists, 186; campaign of 1896, 188-191; campaign of 1900, 192-93; campaign of 1908, 194; appointed secretary of state, 195; support for Wilson in 1912, 194-95 Buckner, Gen. Simon Bolivar 39 Buell, Gen. Don Carlos 41 Burlingame Treaty 100 Burlington Hawk-Eye 138 Burlington, Iowa 22, 64, 70, 75, 121, 138 Bussey, Cyrus 36 Call to Action, A v, 139, 147, 149-151, 158 Cameron, Simon 31 Campbell, Frank T. 57, 68, 70, 124, 125 Carey, Rev. Francis 10-11 Carlisle, Rep. Thomas G. 127, 136, 239 Carnegie Steel 159 Carroll, Gov. F. B. 203

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Cary, Samuel F. 109 Cass County, Michigan 7 Chambers, Barzalai J. 98, 101, 103, 106 Chariton, Iowa 121 Chase, Salmon P. 24, 31, 32, 69, 108, 124 Chautauqua 180 Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad 64, 75 Chickamagua, battle of 89 Christian Advocate 67-68 Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Society 24 Cincinnati Enquirer 104 Cincinnati Law School 23, 55 Civil Service 82, 116 Clarke, Rufus L. B. 22-23 Clarke, Sidney 179 Cleveland, Grover 69, 124, 127-29, 13334, 158-59, 161, 165, 171, 173-75, 177, 178, 180-83, 189; Indian Territory procalamation, 128-29; opposition to free silver, 159; campaign of 1892, 173-175; Clinton, Iowa 64 Clymer, Rep. Hiester 113 Colfax, Iowa 190, 199, 203-4 Colored Farmers National Alliance 166 Columbian Exposition 178 Commerce and Labor, Dept. of 202 Committee on Elections, House 89, 124, 127 Company G, Second Iowa Infantry 35, 36, 38, 40 Conkling, Roscoe 95, 98, 116 Cooper, Peter 69, 88, 97, 106, 110-11 Corinth, battle of 6, 40, 42-45, 47-48, 73 Couch, W. L. 128-29, 137-38 Council Bluffs, Iowa 13, 15, 54, 182

Coxey’s Army 181 Cox, Jasper 46 Crane, Sylvanus 197 Credit Mobilier 54, 63 Creston, Iowa 142 Crime of ’73 5, 65 Cuba 13, 20, 191-92 Cullom, Sen. Shelby 130-31 Cummins, Albert 202-3 Curtis, Gen. Samuel 22, 26, 36-37 Cutts, M. E. 72-74, 121 Dallas, Texas 103, 168 Dartmouth College 22 Davenport, Iowa 58, 64, 88 Davis County, Iowa 8-10, 12-13, 18, 20, 22-24, 26, 28-33, 35-36, 43, 47-48, 50, 55, 58, 61, 63, 71, 75-76, 79, 101, 124, 134, 138, 204 Davis County Republican 28, 35, 55, 58, 101 Dean, Rev. Henry Clay 11, 68, 212 Debs, Eugene V. 105, 160-61, 181-82, 190, 199 Decatur County Journal 190 De La Matyr, Rev. Gilbert 83-84, 88, 97, 117, 122, 139 Democrat, Bloomfield 8-9, 10, 13, 21-22, 26, 28, 30, 48, 50, 57, 61, 68-69, 75, 76, 81-83, 97, 101, 110, 113-14, 122, 124, 127, 135, 138, 141, 158-60, 165, 179, 180, 182, 185, 188, 195 Democratic Clarion 28 Democratic Party 4, 23, 25-26, 33, 56, 64, 71, 83, 90, 96, 124, 127, 132, 142, 165, 169, 176-77, 180, 183, 186, 189, 190, 193, 199, 205, 207 Democratic Union, Keosauqua 14, 22-23

Index Denver, Col. 163 Des Moines Regency 54, 204 DeSoto County, 106 Dillaye, Stephen D. 98, 108 Dives and Lazarus 151 Dodge, Augustus Caesar 11 Dodge, Grenville 46, 54, 58, 174 Donaldson, Thomas Corwin 81 Donnell, John 132, 134 Donnelly, Ignatius 109, 143, 152-54 Douglas, Stephen A. 21, 30 Drakesville, Iowa 32 Dred Scott 29-30, 149 Dubuque Times 58 Duffield, John 43 Edgar County, Iowa 65 Edwards, J. C. 153 Edward VII 193 Edwardy, William M. 104 Emancipation Proclamation 47 Emin Pasha 139 English, William M. 20, 98, 134 Esther 51 Evans 204, 239, 240 Fairfield, Iowa 13, 14 Farmers Alliance 140, 141 Farwell Hall (Chicago) 99, 108 Federal Reserve Act 207 Federated Trades and Labor Council 160 Fernando 113 Field, James G. 155, 168 First Battle, The 191 First Methodist Episcopal Church 55 Floyd, Gen. John 39 Foote, Flag Officer Andrew 38 Force bill 167, 175

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Fort Dodge, Iowa 60 Fort Donelson 6, 38-41, 48, 73 Fort Henry 38 Fort Madison 181 Free silver 179, 191, 206 Free Soil Party 22, 26, 95 Fugitive Slave Act 21, 30 Garfield, James A. 61, 69, 82-86, 89, 91-93, 95, 98-99, 102, 107-8, 110, 113, 115-16, 198 Gear, John 70-71, 197 Glass Palace (see Interstate Industrial Exposition Building 98-99, 101 Gompers, Samuel 160, 182, 190 Grand Junction, Col. 163 Granger Law 57, 64 Grange, The 64, 65, 118, 164 Grant, Ulysses S. 38-43, 48, 50, 69, 88, 95, 98, 102, 115, 182 Greeley, Horace 9, 23, 102 Greenback Party 3, 62, 72, 74, 76, 81, 84, 86, 90, 94, 107-11, 113, 115, 117-19, 121-22, 125, 133, 140, 143, 177, 202, 205-6 Gresham, Walter Q. 153, 154, 160 Grimes, James W. 22-23, 29, 50, 52-53, 63, 198-99 Guiteau, Charles 116 Hager, Rep. A. L. 182 Halleck, Gen. Henry 39-40, 42 Hamilton, John 101, 193 Hancock, Winfield Scott 98, 102, 105, 109-10, 121 Hanna, Mark 189, 190, 205 Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad 36 Harlan, James 23, 32, 53-55, 58, 60, 63, 68-69, 121, 198

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Harper’s Weekly 91, 98 Harrison, Benjamin 11, 134, 137, 154, 158-59, 160, 173, 175 Hayes, Rutherford B. 22, 69-70, 72, 8183, 85, 95, 115 Haymarket Square 130 Haynes, Fred Emory 74 Henderson, Rep. David 132 Hendricks, Thomas 69, 75 Hepburn Committee 119 Hill, David B. 63, 82, 85, 91, 94, 125, 127, 132, 136, 158-59, 173, 192 Homestead, Penna. 133, 145, 159-60, 163, 211 Horn, Hosea B. 9, 12-13, 28, 41 Horn’s Overland Guide to California 13 Hughes, Frank 107 Huntsville, Ala. 103-4 Hutchins, Stilson 82 Illinois College 179 Imlay, Susan 8 Indiana Asbury University 53 Ingalls, John 54, 218 Ingham, Harvey 203-4, 208 Interstate Commerce Commission 118, 134, 186 Interstate Industrial Exposition Building 98 Iowa City Daily Press 120 Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa 35 Iowa Democrat 13 Iowa Farmers’ Alliance 133, 143, 207 Iowa Farmer’s Tribune 145 Iowa Homestead 133, 145 Iowa State Temperance Association 51 Iowa Tribune 122, 128, 132, 138-39 Jackson, Gov. Frank 181-82

Jasper County, Iowa 55, 57, 68, 199 Jesus 78, 151, 180, 194 Johnson, Andrew 49-50, 52-53, 199 Jones, George Wallace 11-12, 22, 29 Jones, George Washington 114 Jones, James K. 187 Jones, M. H. 49 Judiciary Committee, House 116 Kansas City, Mo. 151 Kansas-Nebraska Act 22, 33, 82 Kearney, Denis 96-97, 99-100, 102, 164 Keokuk, Iowa 36, 50, 55-57, 75, 124 Keosauqua, Iowa 7, 13-14, 23, 27, 52, 202 Kinne, La Vega 122 Kirkwood, Samuel J. 30-31, 33, 36, 50, 53, 58-61, 68-69, 71, 154, 204 Knights of Labor 129, 152, 160 Kolb, R. F. 165-66, 186 Kyle, Sen. James H. 154-55 Labor Reform Party 99 Lacey, John F. 133-34, 191-92, 197 Ladies Home Journal 198 Lane Theological Seminary 24 Lanier Hotel 170 Larrabee, William 132-33 Leadville, Col. 163 Lease, Mary E. 144, 154, 162-63, 168-69, 170-73, 178 Legal Tender Greenback, Bloomfield 120 Leopold, Prince of Belgium 98 Lewis’s Opera House 56 Lincoln, Abraham 3, 30-32, 35-36, 4749, 53, 63, 66, 73, 99 Litchman, Charles 119 Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine 161 Looking Backward 164 Loughridge, Rep. William 56

Index Louisville, Ky. 24 Lowe, Rep. William 83, 104 Lucas, Gov. Robert 11 Lum, Dyer 107-8 Macune, Charles 141, 152 Mahdi of Khartoum 139 Manassas, battle of 41 Manila Bay, battle of 192 Marion County, Iowa 56 Marshalltown, Iowa 120 Mayo Hotel 170 McAchran, Samuel G. 13-14, 36 McClernand, Gen. John A. 38 McCrary, George W. 22-23, 27 McDowell College, St. Louis 37 McGuffey’s Readers 179 McKinley Tariff 179 McKinley, William 179, 182, 189-93 McPherson, James 38, 41 Memphis & Charleston Railroad 42 Meredith, Thomas 146, 181, 197 Meredith, Edwin Thomas 197-98 Methodist church 28, 35, 51, 179 Mills, N. W. 36, 43 Mitchell, John 88 Mobile & Ohio railroad 42 Montgomery, Ala. 42, 104 Moore, Samuel A. 28-29, 32, 35, 40, 49, 59 Moore’s Opera House 59 Morrison, John 56, 231 Mount Pleasant, Iowa 23, 53 Murch, Rep. Thompson H. 97 Muscatine Journal 56 Nash, Mary 120 Nast, Thomas 80, 91, 98 National Bank Act (1863) 116

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National Economist 165, 175 National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union 141 National Greenback-Labor Party 95, 101, 108 National Hotel, Washington, D.C. 177 National Reform Press Association 145, 177 Nauvoo, Ill. 15 Newton, Iowa 77, 133, 180 New York City 119, 160, 194 New York Graphic 103 New York Star 108, 109, 238 New York Times 87, 89-90, 106, 111, 113, 115, 117, 123, 135-36, 142, 154, 171-72 Northen, Gov. William J. 169 Northern Alliance 140 Oakland Daily Evening Tribune 165 Oberlin College 24 Ocala Demands 142, 144, 169 O’Ferrall, Rep. Charles Triplett 167, 176 Oklahoma City, Okla. 137, 138 Oklahoma Territory 3, 128, 134-39, 144, 153 Omaha, Neb. 152-53, 157-58, 167-68, 174, 177, 182, 186, 189 Omaha Platform 153, 168, 174, 177, 186 Omaha World-Herald 182 Oostanaula River 47 Oskaloosa Herald 71 Oskaloosa, Iowa 56, 71, 73-74, 78, 133 Ottumwa Courier 55, 78 Ottumwa, Iowa 27, 55-57, 61, 69, 76, 78, 96, 202 Panama 19 Panic of 1873 63, 65, 67 Panic of 1893 178

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Parker, Alton B. 193-94 Parnell, Charles Stewart 96 Past and Present of Jasper County 199 Payne, David C. 128 Pea Ridge, battle of 26, 36, 41 Peery, Dan 137-38 Peffer, Sen. William A. 141, 144 Pendleton Civil Service Act 116 Pennsylvania Avenue 82, 177 Pennsylvania Railroad 64, 72 Pensacola, Fla. 168 People’s Party 144, 151-53, 157-58, 16061, 163, 165-70, 173-77, 184, 186-88, 206-7 Phelps, Calvin 9, 14-19 Philadelphia & Reading Railroad 178 Philadelphia Record 136, 226 Philippines 192-93 Phillips, Wendell 117-18, 198 Pillow, Gen. Gideon 38-39 Pinkertons 159 Pittsburg Landing, Tenn. 40 Plaisted, Harris 105-6 Platt, Sen. Orville 173 Plessy v. Ferguson 200 Polk, Gen. Leonidas 141 Pomeroy, Mark M. “Brick” 78, 96, 9899, 108 Populism 161, 163, 206 Populist Party 5, 77, 87, 144, 153-55, 158, 160, 161, 163, 166-79, 181-89, 191-92, 195, 207-8 Pottsville, Penna. 117 Powderly, Terence 129, 152-53, 160 Prentiss, Gen. Benjamin M. 40 Prescott, Ark. 104 Progressive Party 202

Pullman Palace 181 Purdom, Joseph 10 Putnam, G. P. 146 Quick, Herbert 208-9 Randall, Samuel J. 83-84, 90-92 Reagan, Rep. John H. 130 Reed, Thomas 82-83, 136 Republican National Committee 107 Republican Party 3, 26, 33, 49, 52, 54, 59, 68-69, 71, 73-74, 76-77, 95-96, 100, 109, 121, 165, 177, 183, 195, 200, 205 Resaca, battle of 47 Resumption Act 65-66, 69, 70, 73, 84, 87, 116 Revere House 119, 121 Rockefeller, John D. 118 Rocky Mountain News 163 Roosevelt, Theodore 192-95, 199-200, 202 Sac and Fox Indians 7 Sage, Leland 58, 60, 69 Saint Louis, Mo. 21, 36-38, 72, 82, 98, 103, 117, 141-42, 148, 151, 153, 160, 184-86, 193 Sampson, Judge E. S. 56-57, 70, 74, 77-78 Sand Lot Movement 96 San Francisco, Cal. 13, 19, 54, 96 Sapp, Rep. William Fletcher 88 Schurz, Carl 31 Scott County, Iowa 60 Second Bank of the United States 67 Second Iowa Infantry 35-47, 104, 204 Sewall, Arthur J. 186-88 Seward, William 31-32 Seyd, Ernest 178

Index Shepherd, James 13 Sherman, Buren 122 Sherman, John 77, 96, 178, 205 Sherman, William Tecumseh 45-47 Shiloh, battle of 6, 40-42, 48-49, 73, 89, 104, 200-1 Shinn, William J. 131 Silver Purchase Act 158, 178, 180 Simpson, Rep. Jerry “Sockless” 141, 152 Singleton, Rep. Otho Robards 85 Sioux City Journal 52 Sioux Falls, S.D. 192 Smith, Gen. C. F. 38-39, 207 Socialist Labor Party 99, 107 Socialist Party 199 Southern Alliance 141-42 Southern Pacific Railroad 164 Sparks, Rep. William 113-14 Spencer, Sarah Andrews 100 Spooner, Sen. John 193 Springer, Rep. William 135 Standard Oil 118 Stanley, Henry M. 139 Stanton, Edwin M. 50 Stevenson, Adlai E. 69, 83, 159, 173 Stevens, Thaddeus 99 Stewart, William 178 Stiles, Edward H. 12, 27, 29, 58, 73 Storer, Bellamy 24-26, 44, 48, 150 Streeter, Alson J. 134, 152 Successful Farming 197, 198 Sumner, Charles 118 Supreme Court 29, 82, 99, 122, 130, 147, 149-50, 200 Sweeney, Gen. T. W. 45 Taft, William Howard 194-95, 202 Tammany Hall 173

247

Taubeneck, Herman 154, 160, 184 Teller, Sen. William 185 Terre Haute, Ind. 105 Thurman, Sen. Allen 97 Tilden, Samuel J. 69, 81-82 Tillman, Ben “Pitchfork” 185 Tourgee, A. W. 174, 229 Trimble, Henry M. 28, 36, 50, 75-77, 79, 101 Troup, Alexander 108 Tuttle, Col. J. M. 40 Twain, Mark 54 Unger, Irwin 69 Union Greenback Labor Party 98-99 Union Labor Party 133-34, 146, 162 USS Maine 191 Van Buren County, Iowa 22-23, 27 Van Dorn, Gen. Earl 42 Vardaman, Gov. James 201 Victoria, Queen 193 Wabash v. Illinois 130, 149 Walker, T. O. 61, 75, 76, 101 Wallace, Gen. W. H. L. 11, 40, 133 Wall, Joseph F. 10 Wapello County, Iowa 27, 29, 124 Washington, D.C. 41, 47, 81, 100, 165 Washington Post 82, 86, 90-91, 93, 95, 97, 105, 115, 134-36, 158, 177 Watson, Rep. Tom 152, 153, 166-69, 171, 187, 200 Weaver, Abram 7-9, 12-14, 51, 132 Weaver, Abram ( James’s son) 127 Weaver, Clarissa “Clara” (nee Vinson) 27-28, 36-43, 47-48, 51-52, 69, 124, 127-29, 133-34, 158-59, 161-62, 165, 168, 171-75, 177-78, 180-83, 189, 199, 203-4; A Call to Action and, 147;

248


concern with James’s health of, 36, 41; church activities of, 51; courtship by Weaver of, 27; early years in Bloomfield, 28, 48; emergence as public figure of, 144-45; move with James to Colfax, Iowa, by, 199; personal qualities of, 27, 165; pregnancy as Weaver goes to war of, 36-37; religious faith of, 28; reports on anti-Union sentiment in Davis County by, 47; support for prohibition movement by, 51-52; presidential campaign of 1892 and, 171-75 Weaver, Esther 51 Weaver, Laura 51 Weaver, James Baird: A Call to Action and, v, 139, 147, 149-151, 158; acceptance of 1880 presidential nomination by, 101-2; acceptance of 1892 presidential nomination by, 155; accusations by leading Greenbacks against, 107-8; analysis of 1880 presidential campaign by, 110-11; analysis of 1892 presidential campaign by, 175-76; angry reaction to Bryan defeat in 1908 by, 194; anticipation of 1880 presidential campaign by, 98-99; anti-slavery movement and, 20-22, 24-30, 33; Bellamy Storer and, 24-26, 44, 48; birth of ‘Bloody Shirt’ and, 29, 73, 79; break with Republican Party by, 70-71; brevet appointment as brigadier general of, 6; Bryan nomination speech by, 188; campaign for 1875 Republican gubernatorial nomination by, 56-61; campaign

for 1875 State Senate seat by, 57-61; campaign for Congress in 1878 by, 74-79; campaign for Congress in 1882 by, 120-121; campaign for governor in 1883 by, 122-23; campaign for Congress in 1884 by, 124; campaign in 1892 in Colorado by, 160-63; campaign in 1892 in Georgia by, 168-170; campaign efforts for Bryan in 1896 by, 190-91; campaign appearance in 1892 in Macon, Ga., by, 170; campaign in 1892 in Nevada by, 164; campaign in 1892 in North Carolina by, 171-72; campaign for Congress in 1894 by, 181-83; campaigning in South in 1880 by, 103-5; cartoon by Thomas Nast of, 80, 91, 98; charges by William Edwardy in 1880 against, 104; challenges faced in 1892 campaign by, 258; Chicago convention of 1860 and, 31-32; Christian faith and political views of, 4, 20, 44, 150-51, 180; Cincinnati Law School and, 23, 55; Cincinnati “National Union” conference and, 142-143; conduct as commander of Second Iowa Infantry of, 35-47; conduct at battle of Corinth by, 4048; cooperation with Democrats in 1885 by, 127; correspondence with Bryan by, 183; courtship of Clarissa Vinson by, 27-28; Coxey’s army and, 181; criticism of judges by, 149; Davis County militia and, 48; David W. Davis and, 99; death of, 204; decision to campaign in 1892 in west instead of east by, 160-61;

Index efforts on behalf of Greenback Party in 1881 by, 115-16; election as mayor of Colfax, Iowa, of, 199; election to Congress in 1878 of, 78; emergence as leading contender for Populist presidential nomination by, 153-55; emergence as proponent of Greenback doctrines of, 69-70; farm life of, 11-12; fiftieth wedding anniversary of, 203; fighting at Fort Donelson by, 38-41, 48; fighting at Shiloh by, 40-42, 48-49; filibuster on behalf of Oklahoma legislation by, 135-36; first speech in Congress by, 86; formal acceptance statement issued in Pensacola by, 168; Harlan, James, and, 23, 32, 53-55, 58, 60, 63, 68-69, 121, 198; Indianapolis Greenback convention of 1876 and, 69; Iowa Tribune and, 122, 128, 132, 138-39; legal studies under Samuel G. McAchran by, 13-14; mail route and, 12-13; move to Des Moines by, 138; National Farmers Alliance & Industrial Union and, 141; opposition to Interstate Commerce Act by, 118, 134, 186; organization of Company G by, 35-36; postwar life in Bloomfield of, 49-51; reaction of political observers to nomination by Populists of, 157-58; Republican congressional nomination in 1874 and, 55-56; reelection in 1886 of, 132; relationship to Bryan of, 106, 180; scuffle in House involving, 11315; sale of interest in Iowa Tribune to Thomas Meredith by, 146; showing

249

in 1880 presidential campaign by, 110-11; showing in 1892 presidential campaign by, 175; speech in 1906 at Shiloh monument by, 200-201; support for creation of Department of Labor by, 129, 202; support for direct election of senators by, 129, 142, 154, 193, 200, 202; support for free silver by, 148, 153, 163, 177, 179; support for government ownership of railroads by, 4, 141, 153, 187; support for opening of Oklahoma Territory by, 3, 128, 134-39, 144, 153; support for Populist biracial coalition by, 167, 200; support for prohibition movement by, 22, 51-52, 55-61; travel to California by, 13-20; views on “Christianity and constitutional liberty”, 44; views on socialism of, 199; Washington Greenback conference of 1880 and; Weekly Union Guard and, 49, 63, 67, 127; writings on historical events and personalities by, 199-200. Weaver, Paul Vincent 51 Weaver, Ruth 51 Weaver, Susan 7, 8, 12, 14, 51, 98, 132, 204 Weaver, Susanna 8 Weekly Union Guard, Bloomfield 49, 63, 67, 127 Weller, Luman H. “Calamity” 121, 123 Wheeler, William 69, 70 Whig Party 9, 11-13, 20, 22, 24, 53, 82, 141, 205 Willard, Frances 152 Wilmot Proviso 82

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Wilson, James F. 50, 63 Wilson, Woodrow 23, 195, 198, 209 Wilson’s Creek, battle of 41 Witham, James W. 64-65, 78, 205 Women’s Christian Temperance Union 52, 152, 204 Wonn, H. A. 61 Workingmen’s Party of California 96 World Review, The 198 Wright, Hendrick 53, 60, 83, 101 Yocum, Rep. Seth 101 Young, Brigham 15

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