There is a statue of Samuel Sullivan Cox in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park. The statue originally was near Cox’s home on East 12th Street but in 1924 it was moved.
A plaque accompanying the statue reads “Samuel Sullivan Cox, the Letter Carrier’s Friend, Erected in Grateful and Loving Memory of his Services in Congress by the Letter Carriers of New York, his Home, and of the United States, his Country.”
While researching a project on slave patrols and the Ku Klux Klan, I came across a quote attributed to S.S. Cox. “When laws become lawless contrivances to defeat the ends of justice, it is not surprising that the people resort to lawless expedients for securing their rights.”
I traced the quote to a book published by Samuel Sullivan Cox in 1885 while a member of Congress representing a district in New York City.
In Union-Disunion-Reunion: Three Decades Of Federal Legislation 1855 To 1885 (Tecumseh, MI: A. W. Mills), Cox argued that post-Civil War Reconstruction was an “unconstitutional exercise of the military power” and the end of Reconstruction “was one good result of the compromises which grew out of the Great Fraud perpetrated by means of the Electoral Commission.”
Cox recognized there were “outrages perpetrated upon the negroes,” but attributed this to the “partial disfranchisement of the whites” and the elevation of “ignorant and brutal negroes” to positions of power in Southern states.
Cox argued “No people, least of all such a proud and intolerant people as that of the South, could see their local governments transferred from their own hands into the hands of their former slaves without being goaded into violent resistance.”
He labeled Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress in the 1860s and 1870s the “chief provocation to Ku-Klux atrocities.”
These were not the first outrageous statements made by Cox. In February 1864, while a Representative from Ohio, Cox warned in a speech to the House of Representatives against emancipation that “millions unfit for freedom are yet to become free” and with freedom “the black will perish.”
Cox believed that in the event of racial mixing, long a practice under slavery in the South as white masters raped enslaved Black women, “the mulatto does not live; he does not recreate his kind; he is a monster. Such hybrid races, by a law of Providence, scarcely survive beyond one generation.”
While in Congress, Cox voted against the 13th Amendment ending slavery and all three major Reconstruction-era enforcement laws written to protect rights granted to African Americans by the 14th Amendment. Cox was not in office when the 14th and 15th Amendments came up for votes.
The Cox statue was erected on July 4, 1891. It should be removed by July 4, 2026.
Editor’s Note
According to a recent study 99% of statues in American have NOT been removed. Fifty percent of the top 50 most memorialized people in the United States enslaved other people.
In contrast, just 0.5% of recorded monuments nationwide represent enslaved peoples and abolition efforts. Some of these are highlighted in a new book that documents the small number of monuments to Black Americans in New York City.
Photo: The Samuel S. Cox statue in Tompkins Square Park.
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