ABSTRACT
When news of the massacre reached the North, Pomeroy's Democrat, a small Democratic newspaper in Chicago edited by the enigmatic Marcus "Brick" Pomeroy, commented on the tragedy in South Carolina. The transformation the Democratic press went through to take that moderate stance was a gradual one, of course, and most Northern Democrats went kicking and screaming. By 1875, in the wake of Democratic victories in the 1874 midterm elections, Reconstruction held such political baggage in the North for the Republican Party that congressional Republicans refused to pass another Force Bill giving President Grant the necessary authority to continue to enforce Reconstruction in the South. Historians have long recognized that a crucial element in the failure of Reconstruction to secure political, civil, and economic rights for newly freed African Americans in the South was the unwillingness of the Northern public to sustain that effort as Reconstruction carried on.
