“Rise Now and Fly to Arms!” That was Henry Highland Garnet’s exhortation to young black men when Abraham Lincoln finally opened the Union Army to Negro soldiers. Garnet devoted his life to the freedom struggle, and for a time during the mid-nineteenth century, was a better bet than Frederick Douglass to become titular leader of the race. A militant Presbyterian minister, Garnet had implored Negroes to fight slavery to the death. And when the opportunity came, he urged young black men to fight for the Union, despite the slights of unequal pay and a long delay before they were deemed worthy to serve.1

As a war hawk, Garnet advocated the ultimate form of political violence. But he also had a keen appreciation for the utility of private violence. A gun likely saved his life as a young man when he was beset by mobbers. It was 1835, and Garnet was student at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire. Noyes was established the previous year by New England abolitionists on the principle of admitting “colored youth of good character” on equal terms with whites. But Canaan was not universally welcoming.2

A group of local men, agitated by talk of amalgamation, and spurred on by visiting Southern slave owners, vowed to stamp out the hazard in their midst. They did, however, go through the form of democracy, holding two town meetings and voting to remove the Noyes Academy from Canaan. They took the removal mandate literally, and in August 1835, hitched up “ninety yoke of oxen” and pulled the school building off its foundation, into a swamp half a mile away. They warned the Negroes to be gone within the month or die. Some thought the one-month deadline too lenient, and a contingent of them descended late that night on the house where the black boys were boarding. Garnet’s housemate Alexander Crummell describes the scene.

Under Garnet as our leader, the boys in our boardinghouse were moulding bullets, expecting an attack upon our dwelling. About eleven o’clock at night the tramp of horses was heard approaching, and as one rapid rider passed the house and fired at it, Garnet quickly replied by a discharge from a double barreled shotgun which blazed away through the window. . . . That musket shot by Garnet doubtless saved our lives. Notice, however, was sent to us to quit the State within a fortnight.3

Garnet was a fugitive from Southern justice. Born into slavery in Kent County, Maryland, in 1815, he escaped north with his family around age nine. Passing into free territory, they sheltered in Wilmington, Delaware, with a Quaker abolitionist named Thomas Garrett. It is likely that the family, in the fashion of many escaped slaves, adopted the name Garnet (sometimes Garnett) as a loose tribute to Thomas Garrett, who aided their escape.4

Garnet was a dark black man with deep-set eyes and a strong jaw. Racists of the day said he was a “pure negro” and thus doubly suspect on all the prevailing stereotypes. But Garnet wore the label proudly, tracing his lineage to the warrior class of the Mandingo tribe. And his militancy reflected that temperament. He calculated that once black soldiers were armed and trained, America would be unable to deny their freedom, at least “not without a good fight.”5

Roughly two hundred thousand Negroes served in the Union Army. Many said that Negroes did not have the temperament for soldiering. But after black men fought and died bravely at Port Hudson and Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner in South Carolina, the assessment changed dramatically. After the battle of Port Hudson, the New York Times said, “they were comparatively raw troops and were yet subjected to the most awful ordeal. . . . They charged upon fortifications through the crash of belching batteries. The man, white or black, who will not flinch from that will flinch from nothing. It is no longer possible to doubt the bravery and steadiness of the colored race.” A reporter on the ground wrote, “it is useless to talk anymore about Negro courage. The men fought like tigers.” Charles Dana, reporting to Secretary of War Stanton, affirmed the assessment, writing, “The sentiment in regard to the employment of Negro troops has been revolutionized by the bravery of the blacks in the recent battle of Milliken’s Bend. Prominent officers, who used to in private sneer at the idea, are now heartily in favor of it.”6

Commentators looking back argue that some black soldiers were so intent on proving themselves that they exhibited courage bordering on recklessness. This was evident not just in the fighting but also in their reactions to battlefield wounds. One black soldier with his leg blown off below the knee dismissed efforts to take him to the rear for attention. Instead, he perched against a log “sat with his leg a swaying and bleeding” and continued fire on the enemy. Two days later, he was dead. Another resilient soul from the 30th US Colored Infantry was shot in the head, leg, shoulder, and wrist in four separate battles. He declared confidently to his commander, “I don’t reckon I’se gwine to get killed in dis wah.” And he didn’t.7

Fig. 3.1. Depiction of black Union troops in combat. (“A Negro Regiment in Action,” wood engraving by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly magazine, New York, March 14, 1863.)

Negro soldiers would distinguish themselves in uniform. But the Civil War started and progressed without expectation of black military service or commitment to emancipation. Early in the war, General George McClellan, projecting the stance of his commander and the calculations of strategists both north and south, promised Unionist slaveholders in Virginia that he would not confiscate their human property. As answer to the hopes of Negroes that the war meant greater opportunity for escape or resistance, McClellan committed “with an iron hand, [to] crush any attempt at insurrection.”

Not all Union officers agreed with McClellan. General Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, commander of the Union stronghold at Fortress Munroe in Hampton, Virginia, treated fleeing slaves as contraband of war rather than returning them to their masters. Butler’s aggressiveness on this point extended to recruiting blacks as spies and scouts.

The man reputed to be the first black armed for service in the war, a fugitive slave named George Scott, was deployed under General Butler. Although Scott was a new and novel addition to the Union force, he was thoroughly familiar with firearms. He had been on the run and hiding in the South for more than a year, carrying a pistol and a bowie knife taken in a fight with his master on the eve of his escape.8

Knowledge of the local terrain made Scott a valuable scout in hostile territory. More than a year before President Abraham Lincoln decided to deploy black troops, Scott was assigned to accompany a Union force into the Battle of Big Bethel in York County, Virginia. In violation of policy and defying the bias of many white soldiers, General Butler commanded the squad, “George Scott is to have a revolver.”

George Scott’s unsanctioned service was not unique. The war emboldened a whole class of daring and defiant Negroes. Some of them fled bondage on the news or rumor of the Union advance. Many left their plantations but stayed local, subsisting off of the land, stealing and poaching food. Some of them organized into bands of maroons forging, stealing, and fighting where they must.

The knowledge and skills these men brought to the fight were acknowledged in the compliment of a Union officer that, “Nowhere in the swamps of North Carolina, can you find a path where a dog can go that a Negro does not understand.” One observer in New Bern, North Carolina, commented in 1862 that more than fifty volunteers from this class of men were serving as spies, scouts, and guides, even though they were denied the status of soldiers. These black men ventured into hostile territory without the protection of the laws of war and spent weeks in the swamps and marshes with only meager provisions “and a good revolver.”9

When war policy changed and escaping Negroes were officially accepted, if not welcomed, behind Union lines, many of them settled in contraband camps that posed their own hazards. Recent escapees and their free black brethren built communities with all of the undertakings one would expect, including provisions for their personal security. Along with schools and burial societies, the shanty communities that grew up around Union strongholds also established private militias and vigilance squads. There was no formal program for arming these groups, and we can only speculate about the ease or difficulty with which they obtained firearms.

These communities could quickly turn hazardous with the shifting tides of battle. The possibility of Confederates retaking the field and raids by Confederate guerrillas posed deadly threats. This hazard to civilians was acute in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Union and Confederate forces fighting along the Tennessee border captured and recaptured Holly Springs fifty-nine times. Confederate forces showed little sympathy for Negro noncombatants. In December 1862, Confederates raided Holly Springs, carrying off and burning Union supplies stored there under a light guard. In the midst of flames and gunfire, were “negroes and abolitionists begging for mercy.”10 In Plymouth, North Carolina, fighting again degraded into the killing of black civilians settled behind shifting Union lines. In the aftermath of battle, Confederate troops, led by Colonel James Deering, executed twenty-five black prisoners in uniform and killed at least eighty more blacks, including women and children who were fleeing into a nearby swamp.11

But Negroes were not always victims in these contests. When Confederate defenders lost Vicksburg in July 1863, blacks celebrated by raiding the homes of their former masters. In one case, a white planter shot at a group of black women who were rummaging through what was left of his property. A week earlier, this would have been an unremarkable response to black criminality. This time, however, the planter faced the wrath of armed black men who whipped him and then put a gun to his head and demanded that he call them master. These men are not recorded as soldiers, and we can only guess the sources of their guns.12

Even after they were given a uniform and a government rifle, Negroes were still dogged by the racial attitudes of the day. Rank was no shield from this blight. Witness the trials of Lieutenant John V. DeGrasse, a black doctor from Boston who traveled to North Carolina to enlist black recruits. He was accosted by white Union sailors who demanded to know on what authority he was there “recruiting niggers.” When they moved in close, DeGrasse drew his revolver and faced them down. As friends ran to his aid, the situation defused without gunfire. Some said that DeGrasse’s armed stand helped establish the credibility of Negro recruiters and black officers generally.

A unique hazard to black Union soldiers was the refusal of Confederates to recognize them as legitimate combatants. Confederate murders and abuse of captured Negroes was a terror that continued throughout the war. There were reports of Confederate massacres of black soldiers in Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Virginia, and Florida.

A report from the Charlotte Observer reflects the attitude that fueled these massacres. “Ransom’s brigade,” said an enlisted man, “never takes any Negro prisoners.” Major John Graham of Ransom’s outfit wrote to his father about passing through Suffolk, Virginia, where the ladies of the town implored them to “kill the Negroes.” This plea was unnecessary, he said, because “it is understood amongst us that we take no Negro prisoners.”

One of the few white officers to effectively combat atrocities against black prisoners, General Edward Wild, was court-martialed for the attempt to protect his black troops. His sin was taking hostages from the families of Confederate guerrillas and publicizing that his captives would get the same treatment as his black soldiers in Confederate hands.13

As word spread about Confederate abuse of black prisoners, Negro soldiers themselves resolved to retaliate. Following the murder of black troops captured at the Battle at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Negro soldiers adopted the battle cry “Remember Fort Pillow,” and retaliated by executing Confederate prisoners in Louisiana and South Carolina. One eyewitness, a cavalryman from Maine, wrote home, “we had 200 niggers soldiers with us it did not make eny difference to them about the Rebs surrendering. They would shoot them down. the officers had hard work to stop them from killing All the prisoners. when one of them would beg for his life the niggers would say rember Fort Pillow.”14

Fig. 3.2. Coverage of the New York draft riots. (“The Riots at New York—the rioters burning and sacking the colored orphan asylum,” wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly magazine, August 1, 1863, p. 493.)

As the war chewed up resources and Union fortunes flagged, Congress enacted conscription that sparked draft riots in the North, and this riot rage was naturally channeled at blacks. In the summer of 1863, draft riots in New York City left 120 Negroes dead, thousands more injured, and a black orphanage in ashes.15

The gruesome details of these riots are well chronicled. Accounts like that of the hapless man hoisted up a tree while chunks of his flesh were carved out and thrown to the quivering mob fuel the intuition that blacks fled and cowered under a wave of unhinged violence. But some of them plainly fought back. Although the end result was tragic, Augustus Stuart was one who fought.

Stuart was armed with a pistol when he was set upon by a roving gang. He managed to escape the immediate attack, but in the fading light, he mistakenly perceived a company of soldiers as the mob back in pursuit. Stuart fired at them, and one of the mounted soldiers, appreciating only that he had been shot at, charged Stuart with his sword and ran him through.

Guns rendered a better result for a group of black laborers who were attacked by a mob of “two or three hundred vagabond Irishmen.” They fought off the attack with revolver fire until police arrived. The mob actually attacked the police in an attempt to get at the blacks but was repelled.16

We do not know whether or how often other versions of these scenarios repeated during the draft riots. Nor do we know how many blacks retreated to some dark, quiet place and rode out the riots, quietly clutching guns. But in a related context, the calculations of Northern blacks illustrate a discernible culture of armed self-defense.

In 1864, 144 delegates met at the National Convention of Colored Men, in Syracuse, New York. This meeting was the genesis of the National Equal Rights League, one of the earliest national civil-rights organizations. Notable in attendance were Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet.17

Not everyone in Syracuse was friendly to the Convention of Colored Men. Before the proceedings even began, a group of Irish immigrants accosted Garnet, one of them kicking him from the behind and another sending him to the dirt with blow to the head. When Garnet’s friends learned of the assault, they grabbed their revolvers and went searching for the attackers, who now had scattered into the night. While it is unclear whether Garnet was armed at the time of the attack, the report of his friends’ armed response suggests the habits of the group.

One of the other men at the meeting, Abraham Galloway of North Carolina, was widely known to travel armed, and researchers report that this was typical of convention delegates, several of whom were fugitives from slavery. These men were painfully aware of the draft riots in New York City only a year earlier. Plus they had lived and fought through the full range of hazards that plagued Negroes through the middle of the nineteenth century. It would be surprising if they were not armed.18

The end of the Civil War left an army of occupation in the South. The natural tensions of military occupation were exacerbated by black troops. When the 46th US Colored Infantry entered Union-occupied territory in Mississippi, white planter John Bobb could not abide the insult of black soldiers on his property, picking his flowers. He attacked one of them with a brick. The soldier, Sergeant William Anderson, responded with superior force, shooting Bobb dead.19

These sorts of conflicts became more common with the changing complexion of the federal army. Only a fraction of Union troops occupied the South after the war, and the balance mustered out according to length of service. Because blacks were not admitted into ranks until the middle of the war, they were retained at a higher rate, making the occupying force “blacker” than the one that won the war. Estimates put black soldiers at about 10 percent of fighting forces. But by the last quarter of 1865, blacks made up about one third of the occupation army. Many Southerners took this as a deliberate Union insult.20

The recorded violence is surely only a fraction of the total, but it confirms that Negroes with guns and the authority of uniforms grated hard on defeated Confederates. One cryptic report of the killing of a black soldier explains the outcome as a predictable result of the soldier taking “rather more liberty than an Anglo-Saxon likes to submit to.” Considering that prewar legal standards had justified white-on-black violence for offenses like “insolence,” it is easy to understand how Negroes in uniform, behaving like soldiers, inflamed many whites.21

Fig. 3.3. Henry Hyland Garnet. (Albumen silver print by James U. Stead, ca. 1881.)

The spectacle of Negroes with guns actually sent one old man into hysterics. As a column of Negro soldiers passed by to the cheers of a boisterous entourage of freedmen, the old Southern gentleman threw up his hands in horror and pleaded, “Blow Gabriel blow, for God’s sake blow”—an evident plea for the world to end.22

The racial tensions within ranks that afflicted black troops during the war extended into the period of uneasy peace. In Wilmington, North Carolina, Sargent John Benson of the 6th United States Colored Troops came to an armed standoff with white Union officers after attempting to arrest a white woman who had pointed a pistol at one of his soldiers. Although they wore the same uniform, Benson’s superiors had less allegiance to him than to the Southern belle. After being driven off at gunpoint, Benson published a letter in the Wilmington Herald, protesting the episode. This got him arrested, stripped of his sergeant’s stripes, and imprisoned on the charge of insolence to commissioned officers.23

Black civilians experienced similar treatment as Union soldiers found race a more compelling bond than politics. Union commander Quincy Gilmore noted numerous clashes between white Union soldiers and black civilians in Charleston, South Carolina. Gilmore records that “street quarrels have taken place, in some instances, arising from insolence and brutality of soldiers toward the Negroes” and sometimes where blacks were reported as the aggressors.

The interracial tinderbox progressed into shots fired when a fight between white soldiers and black civilians was joined by black soldiers who waded in to aid the freedmen. Union soldiers traded gunfire along racial lines for more than twenty minutes, and brief firefights broke out around Charleston over the next several days, with disputed reports of casualties.

There is good evidence that black soldiers did not treat the returning Confederates delicately. Members of the 35th US Colored Troops were disciplined for entering the homes of white Charlestonians and confiscating guns. In other cases, black soldiers duplicated the looting and ravaging of their white counterparts.24

In North Carolina, black soldiers exploited the threat value of their firearms to seek vengeance on a white ferry captain who could not abide the change wrought by Northern victory. Whites and blacks had always ridden the New Bern–Roanoke ferry. But blacks were barred from the upper deck. When black troops ventured into that prohibited space, the captain responded with a barrage of racial insults.

The soldiers did not leave the upper deck, and they did not forget the insults. A few days later, in the fog of dawn, they rowed out to the ferry with guns drawn. They captured the captain and his clerk and, back ashore, tied them to a sticky yellow pine and beat them bare-assed with government-issue belts.25

In April 1865, soldiers from the 52nd US Colored Infantry descended on the Vicksburg, Mississippi, plantation of Jared and Minerva Cook. Some of them evidently had been slaves of Cook before the war. Brandishing revolvers, they demanded that Cook turn over his guns and ransacked the house. Then they demanded the silver. Before it was over, they had shot and killed Minerva Cook and wounded Jared. When their crimes were detected, the men were court-martialed, and several of them were hanged.26

In Victoria, Texas, black troops did their own hanging, dragging a white man accused of murdering a freedman from his jail cell and stringing him up. And again in South Carolina, black troops formed a lynch party to avenge the fatal stabbing of a black sergeant who had fought with a Confederate veteran after refusing to leave a white railway car. The black troopers tried the rebel by “drum-head court-martial” and then shot him down.27

Almost as soon as the shooting war stopped, the Southern governments moved to reinstitute slavery through a variety of state and local laws, restricting every aspect of Negro life, from work to travel, to property rights. Gun prohibition was a common theme of these “Black Codes.”

White anxiety about free Negroes with guns was fueled by episodes like the scene Thomas Pickney encountered when he returned to his plantation on the Santee River in South Carolina. Already warned that his Negroes had looted the place, Pickney called them around to explain that he wanted to pay them wages and restore the plantation to profitability.

Pickney chose his words carefully because most of the newly minted freemen had come to the assembly armed. Their reaction to his proposal was chastening. Now unafraid to look him in the eye, Pickney’s boys said they planned to work for themselves and refused to work for any white man. If they refused to work for a white man, Pickney asked, where did they propose to go? The answer brought him up short. “We ain gwine nowhar.” Their plan was to stay where they were and work the land “whar we wuz bo’n an’whar belongs tuh us.”

Although these men were surely unfamiliar with the legal principle of restitution, where without any formal agreement, assets are reallocated to prevent unjust enrichment, their instincts were consistent with that theme. And in the spirit of the common law, they were intent on enforcing their claim through self-help if necessary. One black man wearing a Union Army coat made the point dramatically. Standing in the doorway of his cabin, his hand clutched around a rifle, he slammed the butt of the gun to the floor and declared that he would work the land under his feet. And he challenged any man to “put me outer dis house!”28

Other armed Negroes were similarly provocative. One clear-eyed veteran from Louisiana embraced the war’s lessons about force, incentives, and cooperation and advised “every colored soldier, bring your gun home.” Another Negro veteran showed clear appreciation for these themes, recounting in 1865 how, “When de war ended, I goes back to my mastah and he treated me like his brother.” He was under no illusions about this evident change of heart, concluding, “Guess he was scared of me ’cause I had so much ammunition on me.”

Mississippi minister Samuel Agnew exhibited the worry of many Southerners, writing in late 1865 that “our Negroes certainly have guns and are frequently shooting about.” It signaled conflicts to come that local freedmen were in “high dudgeon” over recent efforts by roving gangs of “regulators” to disarm them. The blacks, according to Agnew, were now demanding that they had “equal rights with a white man to bear arms.”

A Freedman’s Bureau agent from Florida lamented the wide practice among freedmen of traveling armed. And a Bureau agent operating in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina reported that the Negroes under his charge were widely armed and “these guns they prize as their most valued possessions next to their land.”

In North Carolina, appeals to the governor’s office displayed a simmering fear among defeated rebels about Negroes with guns. One correspondent wrote candidly of his worry that “the design is to organize for a general massacre of the white population. Nearly every Negro is armed not only with a gun [long gun], but a revolver. . . . The meeting of a thousand or two of Negroes every other Sunday, with Officers and Drilling, I think a serious matter.” In October 1865, Mississippi planter E. G. Baker similarly complained in a letter to the state legislature, “it is well known here that our Negroes through the country are well equipped with firearms, muskets, double barrel shotguns and pistols.”29

These sorts of fears fueled overtly racist gun laws like Mississippi’s Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice Relative to Freedmen, which prohibited blacks from owning firearms, ammunition, dirks, or bowie knives.30 Alabama prohibited “any freedman, mulatto or free person of color in this state, to own fire-arms, or carry about this person a pistol or other deadly weapon.”31 An 1865 Florida law similarly prohibited “Negroes mulattos or other persons of color from possessing guns, ammunition or blade weapons” without obtaining a license issued by a judge on the recommendation of two respectable citizens, presumably white. Violators were punished by public whipping up to “39 stripes.”

The federal government, with an occupying army still in place, countermanded much of the discriminatory arms legislation. In January 1866, General Daniel Sickles, commander of federal occupation troops, issued a general order that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.”32

Black Code drafters also faced the problem that has always afflicted weapons embargoes. Even for ruthless postwar lawmakers, saying that guns were banned to blacks was different from actually prying them away. The assessment of a black trooper assigned to the Freedman’s Bureau in Mississippi is instructive here. In a letter to a Bureau commissioner, Private Calvin Holly described an incident in Vicksburg involving armed black men. He noted, “they was forbidden [by the Black Code] not to have any [guns] but did not heed.”

Attempts to disarm the freedmen appeared not only in state statutes, but also in local ordinances and private contracts. In a report to President Andrew Johnson, General Charles Schurz described a series of local ordinances in Louisiana that prohibited blacks from owning any type of weapon without permission from their employer and separate approval by the mayor. In other cases, petty plantation tyrants put conditions in long-term labor contracts prohibiting blacks from possessing firearms.33

The Black Code and labor contract restrictions were a piece with violent attempts to disarm blacks perpetrated by local police, white state militias, and Klan-type organizations that rose during Reconstruction to wage a war of Southern redemption. The formal Ku Klux Klan emerged out of Tennessee in 1866. But across the South, similar organizations cropped up under names like the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Innocents, and the Knights of the Black Cross. Black disarmament was part of their common agenda.34

Many black veterans left military service with their issue weapons or war prizes and probably were better armed than the general black population. But the public conversation shows that arms for self-defense were a particular concern of the broad swath of black civilians. This is evident in the reaction to occupation-army commands affirming freedmen’s right to keep and bear arms. These orders were widely reprinted in black newspapers along with commentary that spoke to the community’s concerns. A good example appears in the Christian Recorder published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which editorialized:

We have several times alluded to the fact that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. Gen. Tilson, assistant Commissioner, for Georgia, has issued a circular in which he clearly defines the right as follows: . . . “The Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms and states that this right shall not be infringed. Any person, white or black, may be disarmed, if convicted of making an improper and dangerous use of weapons; but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without the distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.” We are glad to learn that Gen. Scott, Commissioner for this state, has given freedmen to understand that they have as good a right to keep firearms as any other citizens. The Constitution of the United States is the . . . law of the land, and we will be governed by that at present.35

The black newspaper the Loyal Georgian reprinted General Sickles’s Order No. 1, followed by an editorial explaining that that blacks were now citizens who had a right to have guns for self-protection.

Have colored citizens a right to own and carry firearms? . . . Almost every day we are asked questions similar to the above. We answer certainly you have the same right to own and carry arms that other citizens have. You are not only free but citizens of the United States and, as such, entitled to the same privileges granted to other citizens by the Constitution of the United States. . . .

Article II of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms and states that this right shall not be infringed. Any person, white or black may be disarmed if convicted of making an improper or dangerous use of weapons, but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without distinction of color have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.36

Negroes claiming their constitutional right to arms also sent petitions to Congress, protesting racist state gun-control laws. One typical petition implored Congress, “We ask that, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States explicitly declares that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and the Constitution is the supreme law of the land—that the late efforts of the legislature of the state to pass an act to deprive us or [sic] arms be forbidden, as a plain violation of the Constitution.” The Joint House and Senate Committee of Fifteen of the 39th Congress, which eventually drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, heard many such complaints about Black Code and private terrorist attacks on freedmen’s right to arms.37

Congress received many other reports and complaints about schemes to disarm blacks. A report of the commissioner of the Kentucky Freedman’s Bureau confirms black complaints that “the civil law prohibits the colored man from bearing arms. Their arms are taken from them by the civil authorities. . . . Thus the right of the people to keep and bear arms as provided in the Constitution is infringed.” The congressional testimony of General Rufus Saxon, formerly a commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in South Carolina, adds texture. In February 1866, Saxon described to a congressional committee how white planters tried to use peonage contracts backed with threats of violence to deprive freedmen of their firearms. “They desired me to sanction a form of contract which would deprive the colored men of their arms, which I refused to do. The subject was so important, as I thought, to the welfare of the freedmen that I issued a circular on this subject.”38

Saxon also reported the attempt by private terrorists to disarm Negroes, recounting how “in some parts of the state, armed parties are, without proper authority, engaging in seizing all firearms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such conduct is plain and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.” Another Freedman’s Bureau commissioner, General Wager Sayne, reported to Congress how militias in Alabama attempted to disarm freedmen and that his force blocked those attempts.39

Reports to the Reconstruction Congress verify the importance of defensive firearms to freedmen. A Freedman’s Bureau report from Tennessee describes an incident where a band of Klansman attacked a group of eight freedmen. Several of the black men were armed with pistols and drove off their attackers. Freedman’s Bureau commissioner Howard confirmed the widespread possession of arms by the rising black political class, noting, “no Union man or Negro who attempts to take any active part in politics, or the improvement of his race is safe a single day; and nearly all sleep upon their arms at night, and carry concealed weapons during the day.”40

By the end of February 1866, the House of Representatives began debating what became the Fourteenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights—which would declare that blacks were full citizens entitled to equal protection and due process under the law.41 This debate is some of our best evidence about the scope of the constitutional right to arms. In a revealing discussion of the Civil Rights Act, whose language prefigured the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a representative from New York explained the aim to “make the colored man a citizen of the United States and he has every right which you and I have. . . . He has a defined status; he has a country and a home; a right to defend himself and his wife and children; a right to bear arms.”

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Second Freedman’s Bureau Act, and ultimately the Fourteenth Amendment, is a rich and complex story that implicates far more than the freedmen’s right to arms. But that right was integral to the debate, and was discussed widely outside the halls of Congress. When Congress voted to override President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill, the New York Evening Post editorialized about the evils that the bill sought to remedy. Prominent here was the attempt across the South to deprive freedmen from “keeping firearms.”

By the end of April 1866, the full Congress began debate on the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. Senator Howard introduced the proposal, explaining that the “great object” of the amendment is to “restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees. . . . Secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.” Concurrent with this debate, Congress also passed legislation abolishing the Southern state militias. This was necessary, explained one of the sponsors, because the state militias had been used to disarm the freedmen.42

Initially the rebel states unanimously rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. But, chafing under federal military rule and the stipulation that they could not reenter the Union unless they approved the amendment, they eventually capitulated. (This coercion would fuel twentieth-century segregationists’ claims that the Fourteenth Amendment was illegitimate and that the Constitution still sanctioned racial apartheid.) By 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was the law of the land and laid a broad foundation for the protection of a range of liberties essential to the rise of the freedmen, including the right to keep and bear arms.

The grand constitutional efforts to affirm the freedmen’s right to arms carried an important symbolism—free men had a right to arms, slaves did not. But for Negroes navigating a multitude of threats after the war, it is hard to overestimate the practical importance of firearms. This is demonstrated dramatically in episodes of gunfire but more prosaically in the accounts of freedmen who never fired their guns—men like Cato Carter, who spent most his life in slavery and then endured what passed for freedom in postwar Texas. So far as we know, Carter never fired a gun in self-defense. And it is just by happenstance, in a set of regional slave narratives, that we learn about his practice of arms.

Carter confirmed that in some ways freedom was more hazardous than slavery. As a valuable piece of white man’s property, he actually enjoyed a measure of legal protection that disappeared after emancipation. So when white terrorists launched into high gear, Carter was happy to have an effective self-defense tool. Bands of whites, said Carter, “was allus skullduggering ’round at night.” He does not tell where he got it, but Carter calculated that the wise response was to keep and carry a gun to protect his home and family.43

Cato Carter was no aberration. A report from the Texas legislature describes a series of conflicts in the postwar period where freedmen were “generally as well armed as the whites,” and this sort of small-scale parity fueled intermittent black victories. In Washington County, Texas, white men rode out to break up a black political meeting. The whites were armed, but not really prepared for a shootout. When they fired into the crowd of Negroes, the freedmen shot back, scattering their attackers. Later, a white man broke into the home of one of the black organizers and threatened her with a gun. Armed black men tracked him down, arrested him, and turned him over to military authorities.44

The ability and decision to acquire a gun for self-defense surely varied according to individual circumstances, disposition, and calculations about surrounding hazards. Some hazards were public, some were private, and some were hybrids—private threats backed by a badge of office and flavored by the racism of the day.

The case of Al McRoberts is one of the latter. McRoberts started carrying a gun after W. A. Harris, a Danville, Kentucky, police officer, threatened to kill him. A Christmas Eve street encounter culminated with McRoberts firing three shots from his revolver at Harris. McRoberts was arrested, but later that evening, a mob seized him, took him to the edge of town, and hanged him from a sturdy oak. The inquest report concluded that “McRoberts came to his death by hanging by some parties unknown.”45

Many of the reports of Negroes with guns during this period lack texture. One longs for detail on the specific worries and fears that caused these folk to acquire and carry guns. What comfort did they draw, amidst news of the latest terrorist attack, from a revolver, rifle, or shotgun close to hand? And what about the harms avoided, incidents where Negroes brandished guns and chased off some threat? Modern surveys tell us that this type of scenario, vastly underacknowledged even now, is by far the most common category of armed self-defense.

Narratives from the increasingly literate class of freedmen are suggestive here. The little-noticed autobiography of Reverend Elijah Marrs is one of these. Born into slavery in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1840, Marrs ran off to join the Union Army in September 1864. Entering service toward the end of the war, he was among the latecomers who made the Union Army a proportionally “blacker” force than before.

In early 1866, Elijah Marrs was on furlough, visiting his family in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He was welcomed by black folk as a returning hero. But many whites took the opposite view of his service. Marrs had just arrived at his parents’ home when a fire broke out on Main Street. Instinctively, he dropped his gun belt and ran to help. But his good deed drew unwanted attention. With the fire still smoldering, three white men wielding knives charged Marrs, one of them fulminating about “niggers in uniforms.”

Marrs picked up a stick and fought his way home. Then he “wheeled and ran into the gate, around the house, and into the back door . . . seized pistols, threw open the front door, and opened fire on them.” Under a hail of lead, Marrs’s attackers ran for cover and then escaped. Accommodating his family’s fears that the men might return during the night with reinforcements, Marrs sat up until dawn, with revolvers ready. The night passed without violence, and Marrs managed to survive his three-week furlough with only one further incident that he defused by drawing his revolver and taking steady aim at a menacing young man who scurried off in search of a softer target.46

When Elijah Marrs finally mustered out of the army in late 1866, he returned to Shelby County. With an established reputation as a literate black man, he was persuaded to start a school in nearby Simpsonville. Black schools and teachers were targets of terrorist violence, and Marrs’s school was no exception. One night, hooded men rode into his yard and threatened to flog everyone in the house. Marrs reports, “I stole downstairs, and, armed with my old pistol, stationed myself in a chimney corner, prepared to fight my way through should occasion demand it.” The terrorists ultimately did not break in and Marrs did not venture out. But that did not stop the other occupants of the house celebrating him as their savior.

By 1869, Marrs had become politically active and was elected president of the county Republican Club. He was visiting with a group of political friends at the home of Elder Lewis in Lagrange, Kentucky, when breaking glass signaled the arrival of local terrorists. One of Marrs’s cohorts, a man named Roberts, grabbed a pistol and brandished it to full effect, staunching the attack.

But the evening was young and with the lessons of similar attacks behind them, Marrs, Roberts, and Lewis sat up, clutching guns, anticipating a renewed assault. “About midnight,” Marrs reports, “they came again, and as they got near me I called to them to halt and then fired.” The gunfire was effective in dissuading at least this band of Klansmen from Lagrange.

By 1870, Marrs had moved to Henry County, Kentucky, to run a school in New Castle. Henry County was thick with KKK, and “a colored man in public business dared not go five miles outside of the city for fear of assassination.” After a close call with belligerent Klansmen, Marrs organized the black men of the town into “a society for self protection, [called] the Loyal League.”

Marrs then describes something that leaves us wondering what similar episodes have gone unrecorded. While there are no surviving minutes of his Loyal League, Marrs details his own preparation as part of the group and opens the speculation that he was not unique. “For three years,” says Marrs, “I slept with a pistol under my head, an Enfield rifle at my side, and a corn knife at the door, but I never had occasion to use them.”47

We can only guess how many other members of Marrs’s Loyal League made similar preparations. And what about their friends and neighbors? Given the times, what was the reasoning of Negroes who decided against owning a gun? Were they convinced that some government agent would protect them, or did they just pray and hope for the best?

Some of the inputs on decisions to keep and bear arms are demonstrated in the records of the United States Senate Committee on Southern Reconstruction. A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

In other testimony, a music teacher from Virginia described attacks on Union men who “drew their revolvers and held their assailants at bay.” This affiant then volunteered that he also was constantly armed.48 A Freedman’s Bureau commissioner from Richmond, Virginia, described how common folk were widely armed and resisted the various efforts to take their guns. To the committee’s question, “Are there many arms among the blacks,” he responded “Yes sir; attempts have been made in many instances to disarm them; it has not been allowed; they [citizens patrols] would disarm the Negroes at once if they could.”

Fig. 3.4. Depiction of Negro Soldiers and the Klan. (Still taken from The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, 1915.)

A reporter from Texas noted that communities of freedmen had successfully resisted attempts to take their guns and celebrated their victories with ostentatious displays. “Negroes are seldom molested now in carrying the firearms of which they make such a vain display. In one way or another, they have procured great numbers of old army muskets and revolvers, particularly in Texas, and I have in a few instances, been amused at the vigor and audacity with which they have employed them to protect themselves against the robbers and murderers that infest that state.”49

Although we cannot track it through the kind of empirical assessments that are common today, black firearms ownership also generated plenty of intragroup violence in the postwar era. This included a component of domestic violence of the type illustrated in the 1866 prosecution in Mississippi of W. D. Chase. Chase lived in the Negro quarters of Vicksburg, with his wife, Phyllis. Neighbors reported that they quarreled about money, about his drinking, and about apparent visits of a white soldier to the home when Chase was gone. Witnesses heard the couple fighting about a pistol, and one neighbor reports Chase yelling, “I will shoot any woman who will take a white man and leave me.” That oath was followed by a gunshot, and neighbors gathered to find a despondent Chase crying, “Oh ma if you die I want to die too.”

Even during the war, there were indications that the contraband camps that grew up behind Union lines suffered from prosaic black criminality involving firearms. Reporting on the camp towns around Vicksburg, Mississippi, describes frequent gunfire, theft, and other crime. One editorial, from an admittedly unsympathetic white newspaper, chided that there was money to be made by anyone who could fashion a bulletproof covering for the meager structures of the Vicksburg camp.50

For the immediate postwar period, we are left to surmise from surrogate evidence that a significant part of the violence that affected blacks was intraracial. An unusual postslavery experiment is instructive. The venue was the imagined slave utopia of Mississippi planter Joseph Davis, brother of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Spurred by the theories of English social reformers, Joseph Davis sought to establish a model slave community. He built sturdy cottages with plaster walls and fireplaces to quarter his 350 slaves and established a court where slave juries decided complaints about misbehavior and whether a slave should be punished. Before whipping a slave, overseers were required to get a conviction against the culprit by a jury of his peers. In April 1862, Joseph Davis fled his plantation, leaving his slaves behind as Union forces advanced.51

Sometime around the end of the war, Davis transferred ownership of the plantation to one of his favored slaves, Benjamin Montgomery, who appropriated Davis’s vision and reconfigured the place as the town of Davis Bend. Montgomery sat as judge in a variety of disputes between the free blacks of Davis Bend. Perhaps reflecting the broader trend, roughly one third of the cases involved crimes of violence.

A broader assessment in Warren County, Mississippi, between 1865 and 1867 confirms the hazards that blacks faced during that period from both whites and other blacks, and it helps us understand why they might seek out guns for self-defense. While court records do not always specify race, one observer claimed that not a day passed without news of some robbery or murder of a black victim.52

The program of congressional Reconstruction initiated by radical Republicans, over the objections and vetoes of President Andrew Johnson, exacerbated simmering fears about rising black political power and looming retribution. Rumors spread of armed blacks drilling in nightly conclaves, waiting for some signal to unleash a massacre. Those fears often centered on black rifle companies that were common in the postwar era.53

The fears and rumors provoked by the black rifle companies are easy to understand. And it is also worth pausing to consider just the existence of these groups. One longs for some detailed record of the membership, activities, sources of guns, and agenda of such groups. But, like many chapters in the black experience, the details here are thin. Still, there is enough evidence to demonstrate that many blacks during this period owned guns, knew how to use them, and saw firearms as important personal-security tools.

Black veterans played a significant role in rifle companies like David Cooper’s group in Cape Fear, North Carolina, and John Eagles’s Wilmington Rifle Guard. The Wilmington Rifle Guard drilled every week and was a central feature in the annual Emancipation Day parade. This and other celebrations by black Wilmington were often followed by Creedmoor-style target-shooting competitions that drew hundreds of participants and spectators.54

In the fall of 1867, two independent black militias drilled publicly in Washington, DC, displaying arms that they had purchased from the federal government. President Andrew Johnson’s order to disband sparked controversy, and the military commander of the district responded that absent a declaration of martial law, he had no authority to enforce the president’s order. The mayor of the district confirmed that the black militia had not broken any local laws. The Negroes finally did stop parading, but they kept their arms and did not disband.55

The activities of the rifle clubs and militias were not the exclusive province of veterans. Organized practice and competition with firearms drew participation from the broader community at open public events. In 1866, for example, roughly four hundred blacks gathered at a Pitt County, North Carolina, plantation for a Fourth of July celebration that included “target practice with Springfield rifles.”56

George Washington Albright of Mississippi further demonstrates that black rifle companies were not dependent on leadership from veterans. Albright was a carpenter and a teacher, who organized a black volunteer militia aimed “to keep the common people on top and fight off the attacks of the landlords and former slave owners.”57

Much of the public practice of arms by Negroes in the postwar era was connected to the burgeoning political development of the freedmen. Channeling this political ambition, black chapters of the Union League formed throughout the South. Their secrecy, ritual, late-night meetings, and posting of armed sentinels fueled rumors of armed black men intent on mayhem. Despite the often-innocuous content and consequence of Union League meetings, they were, in fact, a venue where Negroes with guns assembled. And sometimes this was more than just for show.

Fig. 3.5. “The Colored Creedmoor,” a comic depiction of postwar black gun culture. (“The Colored Creedmoor,” wood engraving by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly magazine, New York, August 28, 1875.)

In Harnett County, North Carolina, a league chapter threatened violence to secure release of colored orphans bound out to white planters. A league chapter in Brazos, Texas, under the leadership of Reverend George Brooks, battled a party of the hooded night riders in 1868, and the episode spurred blacks to acquire more guns and step up public military-style drills. Demonstrating again that arms are no guarantee of safety, league leader George Brooks was subsequently murdered.

In Morgan County, Georgia, George Flemister reorganized a league chapter that had dissolved under Klan pressure. The reconstituted Morgan County League was instrumental in Republican electoral gains and then attempted to expand its influence to community protection. When a black man named Charles Clark was arrested on a specious rape charge, a squad of armed Union League members rallied to guard him from lynching. Believing the threat had passed, they dispersed. Later, a group of white men in “long gowns . . . and some great sharp things upon their heads” broke into the jail and killed Clark. They then ransacked Flemister’s little shoe-repair business and ran him out of town.

In Grant, North Carolina, Union League leader Wyatt Outlaw, son of a slave mother and a white Unionist, organized league members to establish a school, a church, and a vigilance committee that patrolled the community. He actually urged blacks to rely on his patrols and avoid individual violence. Ultimately, Outlaw was unable to keep a lid on the violence. Incensed by his political activism, members of the White Brotherhood seized Wyatt Outlaw and hanged him in the town square.

In Maury County, Tennessee, league members stood by their promise of mutual defense when night riders threatened their leader, Pleasant Hill. They rushed to the scene with “muskets and revolvers [and] in this way kept them off and defended ourselves . . . until daylight.” In Darlington County, South Carolina, a league chapter redoubled its preparations on the rumor of an impending Klan attack, and with weapons displayed, they took control of the town.

Similar episodes were recorded in Macon, Mississippi, and Granville County, North Carolina. The show of force by the Granville County League was enough to prompt a democratic leader to offer terms. He proposed that if the blacks would stand down, “he would stop the Ku Klux.” In Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, an entire league chapter marched with arms to the county seat, spurred by lynch rumors following the arrest of one of their members.58

In South Carolina and Alabama, league chapters rejected the authority of the state and county courts, setting up their own judicial system and selecting a community sheriff. This led to charges of insurrection, and the Alabama movement leader was arrested.

An 1867 conflict involving Union League activists in Hale County, Alabama, triggered an escalating cycle of violence. It started with a fight in the town of Greensboro, between a white merchant and Alex Webb, a black Union League activist who served as registrar of voters. The merchant ended up shooting Webb, who died a short while later. Suspecting some larger plot, and fearing that the murderer had been aided by townsfolk, armed Negroes flooded into town. Then they scoured the countryside in search of suspected conspirators and dragged one half-naked man back into town as evidence of their effort.

The familiar worry about escalation was soon fulfilled. The black show of force spurred the formation of a new Klan organization in Hale County. Over the next several years, Hale County Negroes would battle the Klan in repeating cycles of violence. In one episode, Klansmen rode into Greensboro to depose a partisan Republican judge. Unable to locate him, they attacked the jail and freed one of their cohorts. Blacks responded by torching the livery stable of an apparent Klan sympathizer. Later, Klansmen fired into a Negro prayer meeting. Blacks responded with a failed retaliatory attack, resulting in another Negro dead.59

In August 1868, in Camilla, Georgia, the threat of black electoral success triggered a violent scene reported as the “Camilla Riot.” At the heart of the controversy was the contest over who would represent the state’s Second Congressional District, where blacks outnumbered whites by almost two to one. Under Reconstruction policies, Republicans controlled the governor’s office and the legislature. Whites had already demonstrated their opposition to the Republican candidate, William Pierce, at a rally in nearby Americus, where Pierce was lucky to make it out alive.

When Pierce scheduled a rally in Camilla, where whites were a slim majority, he was warned, “this is our Country and we intend to protect it or die.” Local blacks, still agitated about a racially motivated shooting in Camilla four months earlier, had already resolved that they would never go to Camilla unarmed.

The political rally for Pierce started in the countryside and gathered momentum and participants as it moved toward town. By the time they reached the village of China Grove, just outside Camilla, the noisy parade, led by a wagonload of musicians, numbered perhaps three hundred. About half of the men were carrying some sort of firearm. The procession was fully in the style of the Union League and Republican clubs of the period, who often paraded this way to draw out community support on election days. But many whites viewed these processions as threatening mobs. In Camilla, the news quickly spread that an armed body of Negroes was approaching.

Before the group reached town, the sheriff, backed by a freshly appointed citizens committee, rode out and warned them not to enter town carrying guns. The Negroes said they intended to have a peaceful rally at the courthouse. After some debate and a failed attempt to secure an alternative site, they marched into Camilla. By this time, the sheriff had deputized most of the white men in town, and they were girded for conflict.

The Negroes marched toward the courthouse to music of drums and fifes. The sheriff later reported that they marched in military fashion, four deep, surrounded by outriders on horseback. Squads of armed whites assembled adjacent to the courthouse square. The shooting started when a drunk white man wielding a shotgun ran out and demanded that the drummers cease their racket. They refused, he fired, and the battle was on.

As is common in these encounters, the blacks were armed with the guns of poor folk, often single-shot shotguns loaded with cheap birdshot. They were also at a tactical disadvantage, assembled in the middle of the street, while their opponents stalked the perimeter. The blacks fired and fled for cover. The whites fired with effect and pursued fleeing Negroes into the swamps. Nine blacks were killed and many others were wounded. Whites proceeded through the countryside over the next two weeks, beating and warning Negroes that they would be killed if they tried to vote in the coming election.

Back in Albany, Negroes agitated for retaliation. Reverend Robert Crumley, pastor of the African Methodist Church, complained that the Camilla group failed to heed his advice. He had warned that them not go to Camilla with less than 150 armed men. Then he urged Albany blacks to ride to Camilla the next day and “burn the earth about the place.”

The Albany Freedman’s Bureau agent managed to dampen the rage with the promise to send for federal troops. By Election Day, tempers had cooled, but the climate of violence had cowed many weaker souls. Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.60

Fig. 3.6. A Freedman’s Bureau agent stands between rebels and freedmen. (“The Freedmen’s Bureau,” drawn by A. R. Waud, Harper’s Weekly magazine, New York, July 25, 1868, p. 473.)

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations. State militias were distinct from the private militias and rifle companies, and they posed a different set of concerns. Immediately after the war, Southern state militias were an enforcement arm of the Black Codes, the muscle behind the attempt to reinstitute slavery in a different form. Membership in these militias often overlapped with budding private terrorist groups like the Klan. Congress attacked the problem by disbanding the state militias of the former Confederacy through a rider to the 1867 Reconstruction Act.61

As Reconstruction progressed and radical Republicans took control of Southern state governments, they asked Congress to reauthorize the state militias. In 1869, Congress reauthorized state militias for North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia were excluded on worries that Republicans were not sufficiently established there. As Republican tools, the reauthorized militias were disdained by most whites. Blacks, on the other hand, were more than willing to serve.

The work of the Negro militias varied substantially, oscillating with Republican fortunes. In several states, they were barely worth mentioning. Alabama never deployed its Negro militia, even at the height of Klan violence in the state. In Florida, Republican governor Harrison Reed went through the motions of organizing a Negro militia but avoided using them for fear of white backlash. In other states, Negro militias marched mainly as a political show.62 But in some places, Negro militias fought in significant episodes of political violence, supporting the programs of Republican governors to ends that were sometimes detached from the immediate interests of black folk.

In Texas, Governor Edmund Davis deployed Negro militia in an attempt to retain his office after being defeated by rival Richard Coke. In Louisiana, Negro militias were deployed for threat value by competing Republican factions. And in Arkansas, Negro militias fought in a full-scale military conflict, dubbed the Brooks-Baxter War.

The Brooks-Baxter War grew out of a schism between regular Republicans (the Minstrels) and a liberal Republican faction (known as Brindle-Tails). This split fueled a contest for the governorship in 1872. Elisha Baxter was the nominal winner, but Joseph Brooks contested the results. Fifteen months after Baxter took office, a county judge ruled that Brooks actually won the election. Both sides appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, who cautiously refused to weigh in.

Insistent that he was the rightful governor, Brooks gathered three hundred Negro militia and set up a parallel administration. Baxter, who had nominally prevailed in the election, declared martial law also enforced by Negro militia. In the ensuing weeks, both sides vied for reinforcements and built up stores of arms. With all the trappings of war, they fought three separate engagements. About twenty men were killed and scores were wounded. President Grant finally ended the conflict with a proclamation that Baxter was the rightful governor and with a grant of immunity to all combatants. The broader consequences for Negroes were more worrisome. The conflict weakened the Republican Party in Arkansas and contributed to the ascension of Democrats.

White backlash against rising black political power and the specter of armed Negroes was multilayered. Confederates had lost the war of secession but now were battling for the soul of the South. Fear of Negro rule unified whites and fueled political violence in ways that nothing else could. Occupation by black troops, black suffrage, and the rise of Negroes to office generated resentment and resistance. Through rough politics, trickery, and violence, the white South would soon “redeem” its institutions and culture from the revolutionary social inversion of Reconstruction. This Southern “Redemption,” solidified by federal abdication on Reconstruction, resubordinated blacks and carried deadly lessons about the risks of political violence and the importance of private self-defense.

Whether as police forces, private militias, or terrorist night riders, ex-Confederates pursued a ruthless campaign of political violence to disarm and disenfranchise blacks. Even in places where blacks might make a rational postwar decision to disdain political violence, in many cases, violence was unavoidable.

Operating under the loose imprimatur of law, bands of white militia raided Negro homes, searching and seizing firearms. For blacks, the distinction between these official militias and terrorist organizations like the KKK was often thin. Sometimes there was not even a pretense of distinction. Witness Colonel Roger Moore, commander of the New Hanover County, North Carolina, militia, who also headed the Wilmington KKK.63

Conflicts between Negroes and ex-Confederates holding badges as police or claiming membership in some militia were predictable. One conflict between a black veteran and a white policeman left one of the combatants cut and the other nursing a bullet wound. Another fight between a black soldier of the occupying force and a Confederate veteran repurposed as a Wilmington, North Carolina, policeman lead to protests, gunfire and death. The black soldier was reprimanded for his part in the initial fight. Angered by the perceived mistreatment of the black trooper, his friends in uniform and a crowd of black civilians surrounded city hall in protest. They were attacked by a group of whites and quickly dispersed. But during the night, they reconstituted into small, armed bands and attacked Confederate veterans on the police force, killing at least one man.

The reaction here exemplifies the worry about escalating cycles of violence. After the black show of force, the city administration recruited more policemen and requested guns from the governor, “with which to arm the police and other [white] citizens.” Confederate General Robert Ransom, with a cadre of handpicked Confederate veterans, was installed as the new police chief, and he moved aggressively to disarm Wilmington’s Negroes. He was aided by the policy of Union Army officers who gave him “carte blanche” in dealing with black soldiers.

Ransom’s new police force was a continuing terror for blacks. One officer of the Freedman’s Bureau reported they “are the hardest and most brutal looking and acting set of civil or municipal officers I ever saw.” A Freedman’s Bureau agent reported how two of these stout men apprehended a scrawny black woman for public intoxication. They laughed and goaded her for nearly half an hour, and when they tired of her antics, one of them knocked her cold with his baton.

Election season in Wilmington brought fiery spectacles and thundering midnight Klan rides that tested the black resolve to vote. The black response was defiance. Demonstrating that earlier disarmament attempts had failed, Wilmington blacks divided themselves into armed patrols. They rode throughout the night, firing randomly in their own show of force and confirmation that the Klan did not rule.64

In the run-up to the fall elections of 1868, the Wilmington Daily Journal decried that “there are many Negroes in this city who . . . almost constantly go armed.” Black state senator Abraham Galloway, now standing for the office of presidential elector, wore a pistol, conspicuously displayed, wherever he went. He traveled with a squad of armed black men who later formed a dedicated black militia for community defense. The well-armed community again rebuffed the attempts at intimidation. On Election Day, Galloway became North Carolina’s first black elector and delivered the district’s votes to the Republican, Ulysses Grant.65

Fig. 3.7. Abraham Galloway. (Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

The 1868 elections in Tennessee were also shadowed by threats and intimidation. As Election Day approached, Klansmen made countless attempts to disarm blacks, resulting in shootouts with Negroes who resisted. One man recounted how a Klansmen attempted to drag him from his home, but, “I prevented him by my pistol, which I cocked, and he jumped back. I told them I would hurt them before they got away. They did not burn nor steal anything, nor hurt me.” Another Tennessee freedman faced down terrorists who apparently believed his warning that “the first man who broke my door open I would shoot.”66

The hazard of Klan violence was exacerbated by the sometimes-close connection and shared personnel between the terrorist organizations and the agents of government. At many points during the black freedom struggle, folk would claim that law enforcement and other officials were sympathetic to the Klan. But several incidents during the Reconstruction era provide vivid confirmation.

A report to Congress in 1871 tells of an elderly freedman in rural Tennessee who shot his way out of a Klan attack on his home. After he killed one of the group, the others fled. When he unmasked the dead man, it turned out to be the local constable. Subsequent investigation revealed that the county sheriff was also among the attackers. A jury deemed the shooting to be legitimate self-defense.

In another Tennessee incident, a gang of Klansmen fired into the home of a black family, wounding a female occupant. Black men in the house responded with gunfire, hitting the leader of the gang, who fell dead on their porch and was abandoned by his friends. At sunrise, the Negroes ventured out to find that the dead man on their steps was a deputy sheriff.

To Republican congressmen aimed at curbing the wave of Klan violence, this Tennessee shooting was an entirely salutary result. Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, proclaimed from the House floor, “I thank God for the courage of that Negro, who, in defending his own roof-tree and hearthstone, shot down the Sheriff and Constable who, as leader of the Ku Klux Klan invaded both!” Butler’s Republican colleague Job Stevenson of Ohio lamented the violence and threats that kept Republican voters from the polls but celebrated the cases of armed self-defense reported during congressional investigations. Stevenson applauded the fact that many freedmen were armed and had defended themselves. It was evident, in his view, that Negroes with guns were an important deterrent to racist violence as, “seldom do they attack a man until they have him disarmed.”

An episode from Georgia reported to a congressional committee in 1871 supports Stevenson’s assessment. There a freedman was shot three times by Klansmen but managed to return fire. When he hit one of them, the entire group retreated, dragging away the wounded man.67

In 1875, in Independence, Texas, armed white men interrupted an interracial group of Republican political activists. Two black men in the group, one of them reportedly a Baptist preacher, fought off the intruders with shotguns. Later, in the little town of Graball, Texas, black men, fearing that Democrats would steal or stuff ballot boxes, posted armed guards around the tally houses and voting sites. In one predominantly black precinct, a Negro named Polk Hill shot it out with a band of hooded men who broke into the polling place to steal ballots. He killed one of them, who turned out to be the son of the Democratic candidate for county commissioner.68

In Charleston, South Carolina, where white rifle clubs attempted to intimidate blacks from voting in the 1876 election, clashes with armed blacks ended in standoffs. And in one case, a few weeks before Election Day, blacks sent white Democrats fleeing, with a show of force that left five whites and one black dead. At a rally of at least one thousand blacks, following the killing of a black rifleman, the community adopted a resolution calling for retaliation against the terror, declaring, “We tell you that it will not do to go too far in this thing. Remember that there are 80,000 black men in this state who can bear Winchester rifles and know how to use them.”69

The political violence of the era was not just a Southern phenomenon. In Philadelphia, in 1871, Republicans wielding the black voting bloc challenged the Democratic political machine and swept to power on Negro support. But four blacks died in a spate of election eve violence. The Philadelphia police, controlled by the Democrats, let the violence proceed unchecked. Details of the black resistance are thinly recorded, but one observer described the conflict as an “eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth in every instance.”

A conflict commensurate with modern intuitions occurred in Mississippi in 1875, where a Negro militia confronted a white volunteer force organized by Democrats in anticipation of the 1876 election. For weeks before the voting, both groups paraded with arms and executed jarring artillery salutes demonstrating their preparedness.70

At the center of the conflict, and a particular target, was black sheriff Peter Crosby. Faced down by a group of several hundred armed white men who challenged his claim to office, Crosby fled to the state capital. His plea for help was rebuffed by the governor, who told him to stand up and fight. White men had faced bullets to free blacks, said the governor, and blacks must fight to maintain that freedom.

Crosby returned to Vicksburg and organized a body of men to retake the sheriff’s office by force. The white opposition was dug in on high ground. Accounts conflict about who fired first, but scores of men, the majority of them Negroes, died in the shooting. In the days following, whites ransacked black homes, searching out and confiscating firearms. Peter Crosby would survive the violence, and, with the aid of federal troops, was reinstated to his office. But he would soon resign under a wave of continuing threats and declining political fortunes.71

The places where blacks were a clear majority of the population raise pointed questions about the risks and opportunities of armed resistance against the forces of Southern Redemption. In Mississippi, for example, violence and the threat of it suppressed the black vote in 1875 and gave Democrats control in counties where blacks constituted two thirds (Oktibbeha and Amite Counties) to three fourths (Lowndes County) of the population.

From what we can tell today, whites were better organized, better armed, and potentially more desperate in the fight against Negro rule, which to them represented a world gone mad. A crucial aspect of the Democrat’s victory was disarmament of black Republicans. The full details of how a white minority managed to disarm and overcome the black majority in these counties are lost. But the assessment of Albert Morgan, formerly Republican sheriff of Yazoo County and ally of carpetbag governor A’Delbert Ames, is instructive. Both Morgan and Ames fled Mississippi in the wake of the Democratic ascent. Morgan lamented his potential role in that rise, explaining, “when the general arming of the whites first became known to me . . . I counseled the colored man against irregular arming, advising all to rely upon the law and its officers. I hoped by steadfastly pursuing this course, by offering no pretext for violence, we might pass the ordeal I saw approaching.” Acknowledging the tactical error, Morgan conceded, “I was unused to guerrilla warfare.”

Blacks were also a majority in regions of South Carolina. Riding the wave of Reconstruction, these black majorities gained powerful Republican friends in the legislature and the governor’s office. In the shadow of Negro rule, white Democrats formed private rifle clubs and looked for opportunities to provoke conflict with the black majority. With the advantage of numbers, and at least nominal official support, blacks in this region sometimes prevailed against white political violence. A conflict in 1876 known as the Ned Tennent Riot is instructive.

Ned Tennent was the flamboyant commander of a black militia company in Meriwether Township, Edgefield County. Tennent relished the pomp of military drill and inflamed whites with his arrogant demeanor and commander’s hat adorned with an ostrich plume. After members of a white rifle club fired shots into his home, Tennent summoned two hundred black militiamen and fueled rumors of a coming wave of black vengeance. The white rifle clubs girded for battle.

The next incident was in the predominantly black town of Hamburg in July 1876. The avowed strategy of the rifle clubs was to suppress black voting by killing “a certain number of niggers’ leading men.” The plan was “if they could be successful in killing those they wanted to kill in Hamburg, they [Democrats] would carry the county.”72

The black community of Hamburg was relatively well organized under the leadership of a man named Prince Rivers, who had served in the Union Army and as a South Carolina legislator. Hamburg had also just revitalized its militia, which was led by black veteran Dock Adams. Adams was less flamboyant than Ned Tennent, but he was a meticulous and demanding commander.

As part of Independence Day celebrations, Adams was parading his militia on Main Street when he encountered two young white men in a buggy who demanded that he yield the street. The young men were from the planter class and expected a deference that Adams refused. They subsequently filed a complaint with Prince Rivers, who was also the trial justice in Hamburg. Dock Adams filed a counterclaim, and Rivers set a hearing date to resolve the matter.

News of the case spread widely, and on the day of the hearing, the white plaintiffs arrived accompanied by armed men from various white rifle clubs, including the unit led by future United States senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman. Tillman flatly rejected Rivers’s authority and demanded that Adams’s militiamen turn over their weapons and apologize to the white plaintiffs. Adams refused and deployed to a building that he had appropriated as an armory.73

Throughout the afternoon, more white rifle companies trickled into Hamburg, and the lawyer for the white plaintiffs went to secure reinforcements and artillery. By nightfall, the gunfire started, and it continued for nearly five hours. Facing continuing white reinforcements, Dock Adams’s militia was outnumbered, outgunned, and by daybreak was clearly defeated. A black marshal and a militia lieutenant were killed, many were wounded, and thirty of Adams’s militia were captured. Some captives were executed with bullets to the head, and others were fired upon after the order to run. Dock Adams somehow managed to escape.

While blacks lost this conflict in South Carolina, they did not lose every battle. In the village of Cainhoy, just outside Charleston, black militia with superior numbers and firepower confronted whites who attempted to break up a Republican political meeting. When the shooting stopped, five whites lay dead and fifty more were wounded.

While large black populations were a political threat, that did not always lead directly to interracial violence. Sometimes black voting power could be co-opted. And that generated interesting secondary turns of political violence. In 1875, before the effort to suppress black voting fully took hold, Democrats tried the carrot in addition to the stick, enticing selected Negroes into the party with various blandishments. One of these men, disgruntled Republican Martin Delaney, a former Union Army officer, campaigned in earnest for South Carolina Democrats in the fall of 1876. Democratic governor Wade Hampton also made overtures to Negroes. He was even accompanied by a mounted armed guard of five hundred men led by ex-slave Richard Mack during the 1876 campaign. On Election Day, Hampton managed to garner roughly five thousand black votes. For their part, black Republicans played very rough with fellow Negroes who were rumored to support the Democrats. These early contrarians were threatened, beaten, and even shot at for their apostasy.

In heavily black districts of South Carolina, the “shotgun politics” of the rifle clubs alone was insufficient to secure victory for the Democrats. Ultimately, it took massive ballot fraud to wrest control from the Republicans. In many places, blacks still managed to vote in large numbers, and the ballot fraud was evidenced by returns in some white precincts that exceeded the voting population.74 Perched in the United States Senate, commenting on the violence, Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman reflected, “We have done our level best. We have scratched our head to figure out how we can eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them [Negroes]. We are not ashamed.”75

For a brief period during the Reconstruction era, the federal government attempted to quell the Klan-style terrorism. In 1871, for example, federal prosecutors indicted Klansmen from York County, South Carolina, for violating the rights of blacks to assemble, vote, keep and bear arms, and be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This prosecution was rooted in a spree of Klan violence including assaults and disarmament of blacks and threats that they would be killed if they tried to vote. It culminated in the murder of black militia captain Jim Williams.

Williams had been a particular worry for South Carolina Democrats, who depicted him essentially as an outlaw who had to be dealt with. Williams’s militia company was armed with efficient Enfield breach-loading rifles and flaunted the weapons in armed pre-election parades.76

After breaking into various black homes and disarming occupants, Klansmen confirmed Williams’s location from a black neighbor who reported that Williams had at least twelve guns hidden in his home. The Klan descended on Williams’s cabin, seized his guns, and then dragged him away over the screaming tempest of his wife, Ruby. At daybreak, two of Williams’s neighbors went searching for him and found his corpse hanging from a tree. Federal prosecution of the men who killed Jim Williams and terrorized his neighbors ended with a single Klansman convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.77

Of all the violence in the campaign to redeem the South from Reconstruction, the bloodiest episode occurred in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in a town called Colfax. Fueling the conflict was a cynical Republican governor who courted black Republicans and attempted to placate unreconstructed white Democrats, all while snookering his more radical Republican rivals. Political scheming resulted in competing claims for county offices. And that sparked a wave of political violence that the region and the country would not soon forget.

Colfax was the brainchild of Willie Calhoun, heir to a fourteen-thousand-acre plantation in the Red River Valley. Willie’s father had ruled over more than seven hundred slaves before the war. Raised half his life in Europe and laboring under a physical handicap, Willie fell, philosophically, quite far from the tree. He responded to emancipation and Reconstruction far differently from his neighboring planters. Just the name of the place suggests Willie Calhoun’s unusual view of things. On Willie’s initiative, the thousands of acres handed down by his father were established as a new parish, named for President Grant. The county seat, previously Calhoun’s Landing, was renamed after Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax.

When the war was over, Willie handed out plantation livestock to former Calhoun slaves, helped start a black school, and rented acreage at fair prices to blacks. When agents of the Freedman’s Bureau arrived to aid the transition from slavery to freedom and mediate conflicts with ex-Confederates, Willie Calhoun welcomed them and their mission.

Like many places, Grant Parish had seen its share of terrorist violence. That prompted Grant Parish blacks, with at least the initial backing of the governor, to form a militia for the security of the population. It was commanded by William Ward, a former slave from South Carolina who had escaped into Union lines, enlisted in the army, and risen to the rank of sergeant. Seventy-five black men filled the ranks of Ward’s militia company.

Election season yielded the discord sowed by Governor Henry Warmoth’s machinations. The seat of power in Colfax was the courthouse, formally one of Willie Calhoun’s stables. Black Republicans secured it first and staked their claims to the offices that it represented. When local whites bragged within earshot of their Negro help about the plans to take the courthouse and oust the Republican team, word soon reached William Ward. Ward raised the alarm with Republicans, who armed for defense of the courthouse. Soon, two dozen black men with guns arrived to guard the courthouse and the Republican administration.78

The first shooting occurred when a scout posse of blacks encountered a force of mounted whites and exchanged shotgun fire. Again, the technology is significant. The shotgun is a devastating weapon at close range. But the forces here were at least two hundred yards apart. At that range, the shotgun load has spent most of its energy. So it is no surprise that no one was hurt in this first exchange.

Other skirmishes followed. On April 5, one of William Ward’s men, Benjamin Allen, led a patrol into the countryside to search for a black man who was rumored to have been abducted. They encountered a group of twenty armed whites and exchanged gunfire. With the horses spooked, the two sides dispersed, again with no casualties.

Cooler heads from both sides attempted a parlay, each offering to cease hostilities if the other would surrender its claims to government office. The negotiations broke down when one of Ward’s men burst into the meeting, shouting that a band of whites had just killed Jesse McKinney, a freedman who worked a small patch of land at the edge of Colfax. This was the tipping point.

Blacks from around the countryside poured into Colfax, and William Ward’s men dug in. On April 6, skirmish squads clashed again. Both sides were mounted, and the blacks had the advantage of surprise. They laid in ambush, sending out a white ally as a decoy. The plan worked, and the blacks fired with effect from cover. The whites fled across a muddy stream, firing back over their shoulders. The worst casualty was one white man getting his thumb shot off. The black patrol returned to Colfax triumphant.79

Black victories and stalemates in sporadic small conflicts led white Democrats to call for reinforcements. By April 13, more than 150 white men had assembled on the outskirts of town. They were led by a man who claimed the office of sheriff under the order of a county judge, whose own authority was rooted in the contested election results. Men answered the call from several adjoining counties, including a contingent from the Knights of the White Camellia and the Old Time Ku Klux Klan. The recruiting effort also yielded a four-pound cannon from a sympathetic riverboat owner.

The blacks at Colfax were superior in number but not in fighting quality. The group of 150 included women and children from the countryside who had set up a little camp around the courthouse. Many of the black men reportedly were not armed, and the guns that they did have were largely shotguns and hunting pieces. About a dozen black men had Union-issue, breach-loading Enfield military rifles. The bigger problem was that they had only enough ammunition for each man to fire a few shots. They also attempted to construct a jerry-rigged cannon from pieces of steam pipe, but the thing blew up when they tried to test-fire it.

On Sunday, April 9, a preconflict parlay began with demands of surrender and refusal. Finally, the white force warned the courthouse defenders that they had thirty minutes to remove the women and children. This was the point where the two white men in the courthouse—an ambivalent Republican and a Northern traveling salesman—decided to flee. Except for the hapless Negro the Democrats would force at gunpoint to throw a firebomb onto the courthouse roof, the coming conflict would be purely black against white.

The white force advanced in a skirmish line to clear out preliminary guards and traps. At three hundred yards, they set up the canon and began firing. The Negroes fired their remaining improvised cannon. It blew up just like the first one.80

The groups traded small-arms fire for about two hours. Blacks’ hopes rose and then fell on the empty speculation that the whistle of a passing steamboat signaled Republican reinforcements. They were heartened again by a lucky shot that took out one of the white cannon crew. But he was quickly replaced.

Finally, with most of their ammunition spent, the black courthouse force succumbed, and then it was pure slaughter. The whites gave no quarter. Bill Cruickshank, later infamous as a defendant in a historic Supreme Court case stemming from the conflict, made a game of lining up Negroes close together so that he could kill two of them with a single shot. When some objected to the shooting of prisoners, others responded, “we are only shooting the wounded.” In later testimony, one of the surviving blacks summarized the scene this way:

They told us to stack our arms and they wouldn’t hurt us and for us to march out; then they set the courthouse on fire; . . . They made me go among the prisoners; . . . They kept me prisoner until midnight; they took me and another man out to shoot us; one bullet struck me in my neck, stunning and dropping me; the other man was killed; they did not shoot me again; I laid on the ground until morning; fearing to move.

When a riverboat stopped at Colfax toward sundown, travelers witnessed the carnage of a battlefield. Most of the dead were black. The armed white men who still roamed the area explained that blacks had been riled up by radical Republicans to seize the courthouse and provoked a fight. Estimates of the death toll range from 80 to 150 blacks and a handful of whites.81

The alleged leaders of the prevailing whites were prosecuted in litigation that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The prosecutions held powerful lessons for black folk. Ninety-five whites were indicted on various charges. But only a handful of men were ultimately tried, and even they were acquitted on most charges. An editorial in the New Orleans Republican cast the lesson this way:

The colored folks will hereafter depend to some extent upon the same weapons for defense that their enemies use for attack. A jury is really no match for a firearm. If it be generally known that in each Negro cabin in the County there is a lively weapon of defense, there will not be such a constant recurrence of homicides as have disgraced the annals of this state for many years. We expect these shotguns to prove famous peacemakers.82

Looking back, this assessment seems unsatisfactory. Armed Negroes at Colfax had been annihilated. Urging blacks to get guns, or more guns, seems like a fruitless recipe for escalating violence. The prescription seems desperate, reflexive, not fully rational. But viewed against the unfolding pattern of state malevolence and diminishing options, it is easier to understand how a fight doomed to failure might actually have been the best among the dreary options.

Political violence aimed at suppressing black advancement was a fact of life almost from the moment the Confederacy lost the war. It was an integral part of a strategy that paid off in 1877 when Democrats resolidified white rule through a political deal that ended the brief experiment of Reconstruction and ceded the Negro issue to Southern home rule.

That deal was born out of the viciously contested presidential election of 1876, between the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Democrat, Samuel Tilden. Violent intimidation and cheating were rife in 1876, and by some accounts Tilden won the election. A more realistic account is that Democrats stole the election through violence, intimidation, and fraud, and Republicans stole it back through a politically tilted election review commission that overturned the ostensible Tilden victory in three Southern states and handed it to Hayes.

The election commission’s decision fueled competing claims to the presidency that some feared might lead again to war. The Democratic slogan of the time was “Tilden or Fight.” Conflict was averted through negotiations in a literally smoke-filled room at the Wormser Hotel, in Washington, DC, where Southern Democrats ceded the presidency to the Republicans in exchange for economic stimulus, the removal of federal troops from the South, and home rule over Negroes. The country was weary of the Negro issue and anxious for reconciliation and a new prosperity. Reconstruction was dead.

The end of Reconstruction opened the period some would call the nadir of the black experience in America. The political outlook was dim. Black political aspirations had been quashed by a program of violence and fraud, and now by federal abdication. Many have chronicled this story, but one of the best summaries comes from a black man of the times. In 1884, black publisher T. Thomas Fortune said this.

It is sufficient to know that anarchy prevailed in every southern state; that a black man’s life was not worth the having; that armed bodies of men openly defied the Constitution of the United States and nullified each and every one of its guarantees of citizenship to the colored man. Thousands of black men were shot down like sheep and not one of the assassins was ever hung by the neck until he was dead.83

With the diminishing promises of citizenship came greater personal exposure to violence. This posed a profound dilemma. State and local governments would grow increasingly hostile to Negroes. The notion of relying on the state for personal security or anything else would seem increasingly absurd against the rise of convict labor schemes, state-sponsored Jim Crow rules, and lynch law.

It was an important moment in the black tradition of arms. There were growing reasons to believe that whatever blacks now had in the political arena was all they would get. Black political violence would steadily decline. Individual self-defense would become the predominate theme of the tradition as Negroes came to grips with the fact that the brand of citizenship they enjoyed carried shrinking benefits and increasing risks that the state would care little for their physical security or general welfare. In the dangerous times to come, Negroes pushed to the wall by violent threats would be very much on their own and would have to decide whether to just crumple or to stand and fight.