Volume 18 , Issue 4

Walking With Sweet Silly Sadie Dawg

Woof! Woof! My human co-editor had me checking out a political party that was formed in Virginia around 1879. It was the "Readjuster Party." There was another organized political group of Highland County, Virginia that went by the name of the "Bourbon Democracy of Highland County, Virginia (known as "Bourbonism)." The term "Bourbon" was once used to describe Democratic leaders who succeeded Republican Radicals and Carpetbaggers in Southern State governments in the years following the Civil War.

Readjuster Party (1879-1882)
The Readjuster Party was the shortest lived, most radical reforming political party in Virginia's history. It was founded in February 1879, winning majorities in both houses of the General Assembly in the legislative election that autumn, and its candidates won all the statewide offices in 1881.

Because of the debt controversy, which involved disagreements about how to pay almost $45 million in state debt accrued before the Civil War (1861-1865) on internal improvement projects, the Readjuster party rose to power.

There was another political faction called "Funders," which resisted any reduction on the state debt lest it hurt Virginia's standing with creditors, while the Readjusters, seeing the debt as threatening important state programs such as public schools, sought to "readjust," for reduce the amount of the principal and the rate of interest.

A coalition of white farmers, working men, Democrats, Republicans and African Americans, under the leadership of the railroad executive and former Confederate general William Mahone, the party passed the "Riddleberger Act of 1882," which reduced the principal of the debt and the interest owed. The next year the Readjuster Party's candidates lost their legislative majorities, and its candidates for statewide office all lost in 1885, after which the party ceased to function.

The State's dominant Conservative Party was founded in 1867 in opposition to Congressional Reconstruction, splitting into two factions. White men who identified themselves as Democrats and as Republicans also split into Funders and Readjusters. By the end of the 1870s, it was likely that most African Americans in Virginia, who by then were nearly all Republicans, sympathized with the Readjusters.

It was William Mahone, of Petersburg, who emerged as leader of the Readjusters. He was a short man with a long beard and inexhaustible energy who had commanded Confederate forces at the "Battle of the Crater (1864)" and created what became the Norfolk and Western Railroad. He was originally a leader in the Conservative Party and an opponent of the radical reforms of Congressional Reconstruction. Mahone forged a coalition of politicians from both parties and both races who opposed the reduction of school appropriations and wished to refinance the debt. Readjusters appealed to white and black families on the grounds that the Funders had failed to support the public schools, and specifically to African Americans on the additional grounds that the Conservatives had imposed a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting that made it more difficult for black men to vote.

In February 1879, Mahone and like-minded men called for a state convention to found the Readjuster Party. They invited all supporters of readjustment irrespective of race, and from then until the party ceased to exist, African Americans held party offices and won election to the General Assembly and to local offices as Readjusters. The new party also won strong support from white voters in some of the cities and rural areas, particularly in the mountains and valleys of western Virginia where the number and percentage of African Americans was smaller than elsewhere in the state.

Bourbon Democracy (Bourbonism)
What was the "Bourbon Democracy" of Virginia? The bourbon Democrats, from 1876-1904, were conservative or classical liberal members of the U. S. Democratic Party who supported President Grover Cleveland in 1884-1896 and Alton B. Parker in 1904. After 1904, the Bourbons faded away. Woodrow Wilson had been a Bourbon, had came to terms with William Jennings Bryan in 1912.

Bourbon Democrats represented business interests, supported banking and railroad goals, promoted laissez-faire capitalism, opposed imperialism and U.S. overseas expansion, fought for the gold standard, and opposed silver. The bourbon Democracy strongly supported reform movements such as civil service reform and opposed corruption of city bosses, leading the fight against the Tweed Ring. The Bourbonism fight against corruption earned the votes of many Republican "Mugwumps" who in 1884 denounced the Republican candidate James G. Blaine as tainted by multiple scandals.

The panic of 1893 damaged the Bourbons because Cleveland as President at the time and was blamed for the consequent economics losses.

The Bourbons' great opponent was William Jennings Bryan, who harnessed the energy of an agrarian insurgency with his "Cross of Gold" speech and defeated the Bourbons at the decisive 1896 Democratic National Convention.

The term "Bourbon Democracy" was occasionally used in the 1860s and 1870s to refer to conservative Democrats (both North and South), and in the 1870s to refer to the regimes set up in the South by Redeemers as a conservative reaction against Reconstruction.

This fails to do justice to the flexibility of West Virginia Bourbons. The West Virginia Democrats who followed the Republican founders of the state included Governors Mathews, Jackson, Wilson, Fleming, and MacCorkle. These men were ready to adjust to changing political conditions and to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the federal Constitution, which conferred freedom, citizenship, and the right to vote and hold office upon former slaves. West Virginia Bourbons also came to terms with the new industrial character of the nation. In short, Bourbonism in West Virginia had aflixibility that stood for the retention of Southern values while coupling them with acceptance of the new industrial goals and necessities. After 1871, there came an increasing accommodation between political parties, which shared common goals, and also between races, so that "Jim Crow" racial discrimination in West Virginia was of a milder form than in the Deep South.

Congressional Control by Special Interests
If you look back in history to one William L. Wilson, Cleveland's postmaster general, as he confided in his diary that he opposed William Jennings Bryan on moral and ideological as well as party grounds. Wilson had begun his public service convinced that "Congress was too much controlled by special interests," and his unsuccessful tariff fight had burned this conviction deeper. He feared the triumph of free silver would bring class legislation, paternalism, and selfishness feeding upon national bounty as surely as did protection. Moreover, free silver at 16 to 1 was morally wrong, "involving as it does the attempt to call 50 cents a dollar and make it legal tender for dollar debts." Populism, he said, was "the product of protection founded on the idea that Government can and therefore Government ought to make people prosperous."

Woof! Woof! I have a dream! That all peoples have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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