Constitutional Revision and the City: The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 64-75

  Quigley, David ^a  

^a BOSTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77349097747     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jph.0.0001     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. Essential introductions to Gilded Age state formation remain Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (New York, 1991), and
2. Steven Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982).
3. See Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge, La. 1979). The July 1870 Naturalization Act is omitted by some historians of the period, though Eric Foner includes it as one of the four Enforcement Acts.
4. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: AmErica's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), 454.
5. U.S. Congress, Committee on the Expenditures in the Department of Justice, Expenditures in the Department of Justice: The Secret Service Fund, Report no. 800, 44th Cong. 1st sess. 5 August 1876, 72 [hereafter Caulfield Committee Report].
6. See Beckert, “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York,” Past and Present (2002): 116–57
7. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago, 2005).
8. Robert M. Fogelson, America's Armories: Architecture, Society, and Public Order (Cambridge, Mass. 1989).
9. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 49.
10. See National Anti-Slavery Standard, February and March 1870. New York Tribune, New York Herald, New York Times, New York Sun, 9 April 1870.
11. For a history of the right to vote in New York between the American Revolution and Reconstruction, see David N. Gellman and David Quigley, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777–1877 (New York, 2003).
12. See “A Memorial of a Committee of the Union League Club of the City of New York,” presented to Congress, 14 December 1868, in Union League Club Library. Also noted in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Committee on Alleged New York Election Frauds, Alleged New York Election Frauds, Report No. 31, 40th Cong. 3d sess. 24 February 1869 [hereafter Lawrence Committee Report], 1, 160.
13. Lawrence Committee Report, 1, 7.
14. U.S. Statutes at Large, vol. 16, 140.
15. John I. Davenport, The Election and Naturalization Frauds in New York City, 1860-1870, vol. 1 (New York, 1881), 71.
16. United States, Congressional Globe, 41st Cong. 2d sess. 1870, 3663, 3664
17. Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice, and Civil Rights, 1866-1876 (New York, 1985), 79.
18. Conkling in Congressional Globe, 41st Cong. 2d sess. 1870, 5149
19. quoted in Albie Burke, “Federal Regulation of Congressional Elections in Northern Cities, 1871-1894” (Ph.D. diss. University of Chicago, 1968), 66, 3
20. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 25.
21. Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 387.
22. National Archives, Record Group 60, Department of Justice, Attorney General Papers, Letters Received from the Southern District of New York, Sharpe to Attorney General Akerman, 10 October 1870. Burke, “Federal Regulation.” 77. Journal of Commerce, 29 October 1870.
23. “An Unfortunate Precedent,” Journal of Commerce, 31 October 1870, 2.
24. “The Congressional Election Law,” New York Evening Post, 29 October 1870, 4.
25. “The Election Law,” Post, 31 October 1870, 3.
26. “The Federal Inspection of the Election,” Journal of Commerce, 1 November 1870, 2.
27. New York World, 30 October 1870. These charges were picked up by Democratic editors around urban America and were cited by opponents of the urban suffrage regime as late as 1881. See Burke, “Federal Regulation.” 216-21.
28. “The Men Who Are to Give Us Honest Elections,” New York Sun, 31 October 1870.
29. Davenport, New York Election Frauds. 321–44.
30. See also Police Court Docket Books, October and November 1870, New York City Municipal Archives.
31. New York Evening Post, 1 November 1870, 3.
32. Davenport, The Election and Naturalization Frauds. 321–22.
33. Journal of Commerce, late October 1870.
34. “Federal Preparations,” New York Times, 8 November 1870, 1.
35. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 27 October 1870.
36. Matthew P. Breen, Thirty Years of New York Politics, Up to Date (New York: The Author, 1899), 329.
37. “An Unfortunate Precedent,” Journal of Commerce, 31 October 1870
38. “Election Day,” Journal of Commerce, 8 November 1870, 2.
39. “The Federal Invasion of New York,” Journal of Commerce, 26 October 1870
40. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 7 November 1870, 4.
41. Journal of Commerce, 8 November 1870.
42. New York Times, 9 November 1870, 1.
43. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870
44. George Templeton Strong believed that armed federal officers had prevented civil unrest on a grander scale: “election seems to have gone off peacefully, thanks to the federal bayonets that have been snuggly stowed away out of sight at various points in and around the city.” The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 8 November 1870. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870, 3.
45. “The Election,” New York Evening Post, 8 November 1870, 3.
46. Journal of Commerce, 9 November 1870, 3.
47. New York Times, 9 November 1870.
48. New York World, 10 November 1870.
49. Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation, chap. 4. Foner, Reconstruction, 455–59.
50. Caulfield Committee Report, ix, 18, 44, 42.
51. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Expenditures for Supervisors and Deputy Marshals at Elections, 1870-84, 48th Cong. 2d. sess. Doc. 247
52. Burke, “Federal Regulation,” 108.
53. Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 257.
54. Burke, “Federal Regulation.” ii.
55. Caulfield Committee Report, 25, 46.
56. James and Lawson, “The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America's Gilded Age: Electoral College Competition, Partisan Commitment, and the Federal Election Law,” American Political Science Review (March 1999): 120.
57. Quoted in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 108.
58. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, 108.
59. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910 (Athens, Ga. 1997).
60. Richard M. Valelly, “Counterfactualizing American Political Development: What We Can Learn from the Federal Elections Bill of 1890,” 9–10, paper presented at the Miller Center, University of Virginia, December 2004; see also Valelly, The Two Reconstructions, 244.