James Shepherd Pike

• Native of Calais, Maine • 1811-1882 • Journalist worked for New York Tribune • Pre-war Republican, ardent free-soiler, argued against Kansas-Nebraska

Act (1854) • During Civil War, appointed minister to Netherlands • After war, returned to reporting • 1866-67: supports Radical Reconstruction, but breaks with Republicans

shortly after • Supports Liberal (moderate) Republican faction in 1870s • 1874: articles compiled as The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under

Negro Rule

Southern historian John Hope Franklin on Pike: James S. Pike, the Maine journalist, wrote an account of misrule in South Carolina, appropriately called The Prostrate State, and painted a lurid picture of the conduct of Negro legislators and the general lack of decorum in the management of public affairs. Written so close to the period and first published as a series of newspaper pieces, The Prostrate State should perhaps not be classified as history at all. But for many years the book was regarded as authoritative—contemporary history at its best. Thanks to Robert Franklin Durden, we now know that Pike did not really attempt to tell what he saw or even what happened in South Carolina during Reconstruction. By picking and choosing from his notes those events and incidents that supported his argument, he sought to place responsibility for the failure of Reconstruction on the Grant administration and on the freedmen, whom he despised with equal passion. Durden wrote that the fundamental clue to Pike's hostile position to African Americans in his book The Prostrate State was that "in the 1850s no less than in the 1870s, is to be found in his constant antipathy toward the Negro race."

H.H. Chalmers, “The Effects of Negro Suffrage” (1875) The enfranchisement of so large a mass of new electors, and the instant elevation of so much of ignorance and pauperism to complete equality with wealth and intelligence, was never before, in the history of the world, wrought by a single legislative act. In several of the States it put the representatives of that race who alone knew anything of public affairs, or of private virtue, in a hopeless minority as compared with that race who had ever been barbarians save when they were slaves, and who were destitute alike of property, education, or morality.… When negro domination had by these methods been established, there ensued a scene of incompetence, profligacy, and pillage, the like of which has never disgraced the annals of any English-speaking people. It was wealth plundered by pauperism, intelligence dominated by ignorance, America ruled by Ethiopia. A vivid picture of the disgraceful scenes of this period is set forth in the "Prostrate State," a work written by J. S. Pike, a Northern Republican, and a staff correspondent of the "New York Tribune." If this book could be put into the hands of all our people, it would give them a more truthful idea of the reconstruction era than is likely to be derived from the pages of "A Fool's Errand" and of "Bricks without Straw." Mr. Pike's book fails, however, to afford an adequate conception of one of the notable features of these grotesque caricatures on government, namely, their utter want of power to maintain their own existence.

William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (1907):

Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929) We enter the House, where Moses, the Speaker, looks down upon members mostly black or brown or mahogany, some of the type seldom seen outside the Congo. Some pompous in glossy, threadbare black frock coats, some in the rough, soiled costumes of the fields, others in stub jackets and rough woolen comforters tight-fitting about the neck to conceal the lack of linen. A cozy atmosphere, too, with the members' feet upon their desks, their faces hidden behind their soles. Chuckles, guffaws, the noisy cracking of peanuts, and raucous voices disturb the parliamentary dignity of the scene. Mingling with the negroes we see ferret-faced carpetbaggers, eager for spoils; and, in the rear, ‘Honest' John Patterson, vulture-eyed, calculating the prices of members. Two years hence he will reassure his kind with his classic statement that 'there are five years more of good stealing in South Carolina. Moses is hammering for order, members are shouting to one another, ridiculing the man speaking, asking silly questions.… It is a lark, a camp-meeting. The oily carpetbaggers simulate a share in the hilarity….

Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln (1929) And now a negro orator is speaking, fluently, with many- syllabled words, ludicrously misplaced, flowing mellifluously, and there is cheering, laughing. And then, silence, for the most able and eloquent of the negroes, of whom we have heard in the salon, is on his feet. Men listened to Robert Brown Elliott, idol of the negroes, who did much to inflame their ambition and cupidity with disturbing speeches on social equality. Even the carpet- baggers are obsequious. Moses had barely defeated him for the Speakership, but patience, he will yet preside. Meanwhile, his cunning and eloquence are being converted into money. His domination of the Railroad Committee had stood him in good stead, and rumor bruited it abroad that large bribes from the railroads had found their way into his rapacious pockets.

A Golf Story I took a look at Bowdoin's American history offerings. I am sorry to have to report they are right out of Nussbaum's playbook. There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole. For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is not a comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world through the prism of race, class, and gender. Even a course on the environment (offered in the history department) "examines the links between ecology and race, class, and gender." Do Bowdoin alumni know their alma mater offers not one history course in American political, military, diplomatic, constitutional, or intellectual history, and nothing at all on the American Founding or the Constitution; that the one Civil War course is essentially African-American history (it is offered also in Africana Studies); and that there are more courses on gay and lesbian subjects than on American history? Is it possible this is one reason why some conservatives are disinclined to send their children to Bowdoin? Mr. Mills did not inquire. Thomas D. Klingenstein, Claremont Review of Books

Bowdoin's History Finally, and perhaps most sadly given Bowdoin’s traditional role in training future Maine political leaders, the staffing choices in the U.S. history wing of the department suggest an emphasis on narrowness over breadth, and an intent to exclude significant portions of the American past…. Normally small and mid-size departments—at least in theory—look for scholars with a broad range of interests. In its U.S. history contingent, Bowdoin has taken the opposite approach; outside of the 19th century, the department’s preference has been for narrowness—ensuring that students won’t encounter any specialists in U.S. economic or business history, U.S. constitutional history, U.S. intellectual history, U.S. diplomatic history, and U.S. military history or U.S. political history outside of the 1830-1865 period. Minding the campus