THEODORE ROOSEVELT
October 18, 1905

Black and white Richmonders alike greeted Republican President Teddy Roosevelt with fervor on his swing through the Southern States in 1905. Richmond’s African Americans had served as a core constituency of the “Party of Lincoln” since they gained the right to vote. With the disenfranchisement of blacks after Reconstruction, Republican leaders like TR began to romance white Southerners into the Republican Party to replace the crucial black electorate. “In short gentlemen,” Roosevelt stated, “I claim to be neither Northerner nor Southerner…nothing but a good American, pure and simple.” Lauding the character and the power of the former capital of the Confederacy, TR hoped to usher in a new movement of white Southerners into the Republican Party.

Northern commentators lampooned TR’s Southern tour as an ill-conceived effort to court white Southern democrats. In one cartoon, the President was figured as Don Quixote, tumbling into the South riding the Democratic Party’s mascot.

Underwood & Underwood, President Roosevelt praising the courage of the South, Richmond, Va., 1905, Courtesy of the Library of Congress; Puck magazine, Marse Theodore, “Way Down South in the Land of Cotton,” October 18, 1905, Courtesy of the Library of Congress