Making “Hell for a Country”
The Civil War and Post-Civil War Era
The Civil War, even in the beginning, was at its heart about blacks in America and the institution of slavery, making the issue of a war between the races more relevant than ever before. South Carolina was the first southern state to secede from the Union, and two of its reasons for withdrawing from the Union stand out: hostility to the institution of slavery expressed by nonslaveholding states and the federal government’s waning commitment to protecting the South from a servile war. These two significant causes of the Civil War, resting under the umbrella of states’ rights, centered on what had historically given substance to the ideas of race war and black or white extermination, namely, the issue of slavery, as well as the freedom of African Americans. This was true for the Union side as well. It was politically more beneficial for the Union to dissemble what caused the fracture between the states rather than admit that everything the South claimed about northern hostility and dwindling support was true. Many black Americans distrusted Abraham Lincoln’s lack of commitment to the abolition of slavery and his proposals to colonize former slaves. Yet Lincoln admitted to a group of African American clergy who met with him in the White House in August 1862: “But for your race among us there could not be a war. . . . [W]ithout the institution of slavery, and the colored race as a basis, the war would not have an existence.”1 Indeed, as Frederick Douglass pointed out, in the federal government an “attempt is made to conceal . . . the real cause of the rebellion.”2 Unfortunately, the Lincoln administration’s unwillingness to honestly confront the issue of slavery as the cause of the war and the consistency of federal efforts to reunify with the southern states allowed for greater violence and uncontested assertions that with emancipation would come the extermination of African American people.
The ramifications of the outbreak of hostilities between the North and South were not lost on those enslaved in the South. They saw the war as the opportunity they had been waiting for. Now that the federal government supported the abolition of slavery and was willing to send in northern troops on their behalf, African Americans were ready and willing to fight for their right to be free. The enslaved were hopeful and optimistic that this was their moment, when their dream of liberation from centuries of oppression would finally materialize. Thousands of enslaved people fled to Union lines seeking protection in the first months after the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, and by the war’s end, over five hundred thousand African Americans had freed themselves across the South.3 But their active participation in their own liberation did not come without cost. Confederate soldiers deliberately sought to intimidate the noncombatant populations of the black community in their attempt to stem the flow of what Union soldiers termed “contraband of war,” a term used for property. Renewing a strategy used for centuries, Confederate soldiers brutally killed many African Americans under the policy of no quarter for black soldiers, and they also killed women and children with equal fervor. This sort of violence did not end after the Civil War. The continued exhibitions of racially motivated and inchoate acts of brutality traumatized many black Americans and made them fearful that white southerners intended to carry out what they had threatened to do for centuries. They had only to look around the nation, to the West, and, indeed, to their own communities to determine that the threats were real, threats that greatly concerned the black community well into the next century.
Once the Civil War commenced, aside from both sides being consumed about who would ultimately win the war, white Americans intensely engaged in discussions about what was to be done with the enslaved if they were freed and whether there would be a race war ending in black extermination. The same triangulation of choices that emerged during the Virginia Debates for African Americans emerged during the Civil War: remain enslaved, be colonized, or face extermination. But now another option was included, which was slavery by another name. For African Americans, freedom remained at the forefront of why they invested in the war by walking away from their masters and by their willingness to fight and die if necessary for what they knew was their inalienable right, to be free. At the beginning of the war, former slave Henry Wright remembered, “All the slaves grew hopeful and glad of the prospect of being set free.”4 According to another former slave from Tennessee, “They just expected [their] freedom” to be the result of the Civil War.5 White southerners responded to the emancipation of those enslaved and their subsequent service as soldiers, however, with acts of brutality that they rationalized not only as a tactic of war but also as a means of retaining control over what they still viewed as their servile population.
According to Frederick Douglass, the first option discussed in the North and South by whites during the Civil War to resolve the “Negro problem” was that slavery would remain a fixed institution in America. Only now the nation would “reduce the whole colored population to slavery.” This idea, however, lacked plausibility in the climate of the free-labor discourse among whites that was so pervasive during the middle of the nineteenth century. As Douglass stated, it would have meant that “the slaveholder would then be the only really freeman of the country. All the rest would be either slaves, or be poor white trash,” whose liberty would never be safe from a “class of tyrants.”6
In the second and newest scenario of the future of newly freed blacks in America, southerners envisioned a labor system where they would “retain them as slaves in fact.” As Douglass saw it, they would be free in name only, they would be made “a degraded caste” by not “conferring equal rights” upon them. This vision was particularly dangerous to the black community, argued Douglass, because “it would . . . lacerate and depress the spirit of the negro, and make him a scourge and a curse to the country. Do anything else with us, but plunge us not into this hopeless pit.”7
Colonization continued to be seriously entertained as another possible solution to the “Negro problem” during the Civil War, “a singularly pleasing dream” to white Americans. Douglass noted, however, that “even if we could consent to the folly of sending away the only efficient producers” in America, it would not occur, because of the costliness of the present war.8 Yet for Suzie King Taylor, an enslaved woman from Savannah, Georgia, who ran behind Union lines, the first year of war “was a gloomy time for us all” because of this very issue. As contraband in a camp on Saint Simons Island in Georgia, Taylor, her uncle, and her seven siblings were told that “there was going to be a settlement of the war. Those who were on the Union side would remain free, and those in bondage were to work three days for their masters and three days for themselves. . . . [W]e [the contraband] were to be sent to Liberia.” Taylor stated that when asked whether she would prefer to go back to Savannah or go to Liberia, she stated that she hoped to go back to Savannah “by all means.” Nevertheless, Taylor remained concerned that she would be sent to Liberia: “We did not know when this would be, but were prepared in case this settlement should be reached. However, the Confederates would not agree to the arrangement, or else it was one of the many rumors flying about at the time.”9
They were not merely rumors, as Abraham Lincoln made several propositions to resettle contraband outside of the nation as part of his proposal for reunification with the South.10 Lincoln vigorously asserted as early as 1861 and throughout the war that it was necessary for the good of the nation to remove blacks from the American South, as Lincoln believed that the two races, blacks and whites, could never live together peaceably.11 African Americans overwhelmingly rejected these assertions, and Lincoln’s position on colonization brought about a serious level of concern about and even distrust of his administration.12 These ideas also fueled the administration’s reticence to enlist black regiments. In black abolitionist Alfred M. Green’s opinion, “The longer the government shirks the responsibility of such a measure the longer time she gives the rebel government to tamper with the free colored people of the South, and prompt and prepare their slaves for shifting the horrors of Saint Domingo from the South to the North.”13 Historian and college president Bishop Daniel A. Payne, after meeting with Lincoln and other black leaders, wrote that to him there was a “crisis upon us” because “the opinions of the government are based upon the ideas, that white men and colored men cannot live together as equals in the same country; and that unless a voluntary and peaceable separation is effected now, the time must come when there will be a war of extermination between the races.”14 If the president as head of the federal government thought that blacks and whites could not live together, where would support for the African American community’s right to full citizenship come from once slavery was abolished?
The final solution of a race war, which clearly concerned Lincoln, was also Douglass’s greatest concern. The New York Times noted that newspapers in border states like Maryland were prognosticating that “emancipation . . . would be no philanthropy to the negro: his fate was extermination.”15 Another article in the Times expressed concern that if emancipation was “carried into effect, the blacks remaining intermixed with the whites . . . will induce a war of extermination.” Thus, “enfranchised blacks,” that is, free blacks, had to be moved “west of the Mississippi river; in the States of Arkansas, Louisiana (West) and Texas,” while all the rebels would be “driven from the Slave states west of the Mississippi into those of the east of it.” By gathering all the blacks in the nation into one region, “it will place the blacks where their future deportation—in part or in whole—will be the most convenient” and prevent their extermination. To do nothing would “cause an animosity on the part of the South . . . that five generations would not see obliterated, and which would be placed in the category of the deeds of Cawnpore,” a particularly brutal altercation of internecine warfare that occurred between British and Indian rebels in 1857, ending in the slaughter of hundreds of women and children.16 Commenting directly on these ideas, Douglass was emphatic about what many blacks continued to fear and what Americans talked about incessantly during the Civil War: “The white people of the country may trump up some cause of war against the colored people, and wage that terrible war of races which some men even now venture to predict, if not desire, and exterminate the black race entirely. They would spare neither age nor sex.” But Douglass was quick to denounce such prospects: “But is there not some chosen curse, some secret thunder in the stores of heaven red with uncommon wrath to blast the men who harbor this bloody solution? . . . Such a war would indeed remove the colored race from the country. It would fill the land with violence and crime, and make the very name of America a stench in the nostrils of mankind. It would give you hell for a country.”17
The prevailing threat of a war between the races did not deter slaves who emancipated themselves and African American soldiers, who knew that they faced serious danger. Some northern Democrats, according to free black George E. Stephens of Massachusetts, attempted to scare him from enlisting in the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment by sharing what they knew to be true: “Every one of them that the rebels catch will be hanged, or sent into the Indigo mines, or cut up into mincemeat, or quartered and pickled, or spitted. . . . [W]hat good is it going to do the colored people to go fight and lose their lives?” Yet Stephens called upon African American men not to be discouraged from enlisting in the Union army by such dire warnings or by their understandable skepticism about the sincerity of Lincoln’s commitment to African Americans. Stephens argued that these “copperheads” had no idea of how powerful the call from “Heaven, as with a voice of thunder, calls on you to arise from the dust, and smite with an avenging hand the obdurate, cruel, and relentless enemy and traitor . . . whose life and sacred honor are pledged to wage an interminable war against your race.”18 When Union general Benjamin Butler asked some colored officers in New Orleans if they thought their men would fight, they responded by saying, “General, we come of a fighting race. Our fathers were brought here slaves because they were captured in war, and in hand to hand fights, too. We are willing to fight.” Within one day in August 1862, two thousand black men were ready to enlist in the “first regiment of colored troops ever mustered into the services of the United States during the War of the Rebellion.” Yet they too did not take their enlistment lightly or without calculation, as indicated by their response to Butler’s query as to why they had not already “struck a good blow somewhere for their freedom.” One man responded by asking the general: “If we colored men had risen to make war on our masters, would not it have been our duty to ourselves, they being our enemies, to kill the enemy wherever we could find them? And all the white men would have been our enemies to be killed?” General Butler answered, “I don’t know but what you are right. . . . I think that would be a logical necessity of insurrection.” To which this former slave replied, “If the colored men had begun such a war as that, General, which general of the United States army should we have called on to help us fight our battles?” To which Butler wrote, “That was unanswerable.” What was clear to Butler, however, was that “in a very short time three regiments of infantry and two batteries of artillery were equipped, drilled, and ready for service. Better soldiers never shouldered a musket. They were intelligent, obedient, highly appreciative of their position, and fully maintained its dignity. They easily learned the school of the soldier.”19 This training would come in handy, as African American men, formerly enslaved and free, faced considerable peril in fighting against the Confederates, who viewed their participation as an act of servile war.
Indeed, white southerners were emboldened during the Civil War to act upon the ideas of black extermination in their establishment of the policy of the black flag, or no quarter on the battlefield. This policy did not acknowledge the surrender of black soldiers and the white officers who led them. It also allowed for the murder of newly freed slaves or contraband of war found among them. According to a letter addressed to a Union officer, Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis, by a Confederate officer, Maj. Gen. Thomas H. Holmes, “Ordinarily when civilized and Christian nations are belligerents no special settlements of any rules of warfare would seem requisite,” but Lincoln arming the slaves had changed all that. Slaves with arms, in the white southerner’s mind, put white women and children at risk, and “it cannot in such a situation be expected that we will remain passive, quietly acquiescing in a war of extermination against us, without waging a similar war in return.”20 From the perspective of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all those enslaved in the Confederate states, removed any possibility of a “reconstruction of the old Union.” Rather, it “has established a state of things which can lead to but one of three possible consequences—the extermination of the slaves, the exile of the whole white population from the Confederacy, or absolute and total separation of these states from the United States.” Indeed, in Davis’s opinion, which was republished in Douglass’Monthly, the slaves were “doomed to extermination.’21 Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation may have stoked white fear that a race war and servile insurrection were imminent, but there is no evidence of blacks harming white women and children during the Civil War. There is evidence, however, that southern whites ruthlessly murdered not only countless African American soldiers but also black women and children.
The Confederacy used the Emancipation Proclamation to rationalize its military strategy of extermination, of brutally murdering black Americans across the South. Southerners hoped that waging exterminatory warfare would intimidate those enslaved and free from joining with or seeking protection from the Union army. For example, according to one escaped slave, several blacks were hanged without trial under the suspicion that they were organizing those enslaved to insurrect. Proof of their intent was that copies of the published Emancipation Proclamation “were found in their possession.” According to the report, the knowledge that “such a proclamation has been made is well-known among all the negroes, and it produced the most startling effect. The terror of the whites is beyond description. Apprehensions of a re-enactment of the Nat Turner horrors are felt to an alarming extent.” In response to the unfounded fears that blacks were set upon massacring whites and to repudiate the possibility of black freedom, “seventeen negroes were promptly taken out . . . and hung. It is said that the negroes of the different counties . . . are all engaged in the conspiracy for a general insurrection.”22 Allen Parker, a former slave who served with the United States Navy, heard a slave owner warn another slave that “if the south were successful they would kill all the negroes that ran away.”23 Although Allen and his friend Joe were not deterred by this prophecy, as they chose to believe that the South would not win, many runaway slaves were killed to send the same message of intimidation. The Liberator reported in 1863 that twenty unarmed Negro teamsters were shot and killed because they were wagoneers for the Union forces. Eighteen black men and boys serving as cooks and cabin boys on the captured Union steamer Harpeth Shoals were “tied and taken to an open field . . . and deliberately shot down in cold blood.”24 Then there is the example of troops from Texas under Col. William Henry Parson murdering the refugees attached to the federal supply train in northeastern Arkansas. According to a Wisconsin soldier, William De Loss Love, “The rebels, now that resistance had ceased, took possession of the Camp, and with the most fiendish barbarity murdered many negroes, both men and women.”25 Similar actions against unarmed runaway slaves took place in April 1864 during the Battle of Marks Mills, Arkansas, where, according to Lieutenant Pearson, Rebel soldiers admitted to him that “they had killed eighty odd negroes men women & children.”26
The most highly publicized example of Rebel atrocities during the Civil War, however, took place at Fort Pillow in the western part of Tennessee. Fort Pillow, overlooking the Mississippi River sixty miles north of Memphis, had been nearly empty until the arrival of over six hundred troops, some traders, two hundred contraband, and the families of the soldiers. Two hundred and forty-six of those soldiers were African Americans sent by Gen. Stephen A. Hurlburt to secure the fort for trading purposes and to ensure that the federal forces were free to navigate the Mississippi without obstruction. Unfortunately, the soldiers and their leaders were ill prepared for a Confederate siege upon the fort on April 12, 1864. Hurlburt would later claim that he never received the orders from Union general William Tecumseh Sherman to abandon the fort in January 1864.27
When the rumor spread like wildfire that Confederate lieutenant general Nathan Bedford Forrest was on his way to attack the fort, many women, children, and some sick blacks were put on board a barge pulled by the gunboat the New Era to seek shelter at a place named Coal Creek. The more than two hundred women and children who were at Fort Pillow as contraband of war did not make it onto the barge, however, and they ran into the brush along the river’s edge, hiding in the massive tangle of driftwood.28
Once the battle commenced, Forrest, with over fifteen hundred Confederate troops, took illegal advantage of a cease-fire, and his men leaped over the fort’s garrison wall in a solid mass, crying, “No quarter!” The stunned Union troops, recognizing that the battle was now over, threw down their weapons and made a mad dash down the steep and slippery side of the bluff, all the while hearing the Rebels yelling again and again, “No quarter!” and “Kill the damned niggers; shoot them down!”29 The Confederates had placed a regiment of cavalry to block off the escape of the Union soldiers, and all of them who could either raised their arms in surrender or continued running toward the Mississippi River.30
Almost all of the Union troops, black and white, who had made it to the water’s edge ended up dead or nearly so. According to Acting Master William Ferguson of the U.S. steamer Silver Cloud, there were “unmistakable evidences” that a “massacre” had occurred. Bodies were left with gaping holes, some soldiers were “bayoneted through the eyes,” some had their “skulls beaten through,” other bodies were found with “hideous wounds as if their bowels had been ripped open with bowie-knives.” With cold-blooded barbarity, the Rebels continued to shoot and kill those who surrendered, as well as those who attempted to hide “behind logs and under the brush” for protection, showing how “persistent was the slaughter of our unfortunate troops.”31 Union soldier Daniel Stamps certified that the next morning he saw “negroes who were wounded, and had survived the night, shot and killed as fast as they could be found.”32
Black women and children were not exempt from slaughter. According to Union soldier William J. Mays, “2 negro women and 3 little children” were murdered after a “rebel stepped up to them and said, ‘yes, God damn you, you thought you were free, did you?’ And shot them all. They all fell but i child, when he knocked it in the head with the breach of his gun. They then disappeared in the direction of the landing, following up the fugitives, firing at them wherever seen.”33 Two other formerly enslaved women were shot down, and “their bodies were thrown into the river after the place was taken.”34 Union surgeon Horace Wardner received a “young negro boy, probably sixteen years old, who was in the hospital there sick with fever, and unable to get away. The rebels entered the hospital, and with a saber hacked his head, no doubt with the intention of splitting it open. . . . He was brought here insensible, and died yesterday.”35 Elias Falls, cook and private in the “colored” infantry, testified that there were others and that he was informed that the Rebels killed “two women and two children” who were also sick in the hospital at Fort Pillow.36 Another African American soldier, Thomas Adison, testified that Confederate soldiers shot two “little children not more than that high (holding his hand off about four feet from the floor)” whose names he recalled as “Dave” and “Anderson.”37 Colored infantryman Manuel Nichols also witnessed a “little boy belonging to company D” being “shot . . . down.”38 Three young boys who helped with the breastwork were also murdered, “lying in the water, with their heads out; they could not swim. They begged them as long as they could, but they shot them right in the forehead.” George Shaw, a former slave who had enlisted in the Union army at Fort Pillow, was perturbed by the fact that from hardly ten feet away he could see that the “boys” were “not more than fifteen or sixteen years old. They were not soldiers.”39
The Rebels also set houses, the hospital, and the commissary located at the bottom of the bluff on fire, deliberately burning alive the many injured Union soldiers placed inside them. Ransom Anderson, a former slave from Mississippi who enlisted in the army when the city of Corinth fell into Union hands, testified that he heard the Union soldiers’ “hallooing” screams, but they could not escape, because the doors were “barred with one of those wide bolts.”40 Contraband Jacob Thompson stated that he also saw the Rebels nail “black sergeants to the logs and set the logs on fire. . . . [They] drove the nails right through their hands.”41
Out of six hundred men, three to four hundred men lost their lives. The Confederates gathered up the remaining black troops as prisoners and made them “pull the artillery, whipping them at the same time in the most shameful manner” as if they were beasts.42 According to the congressional report, “At least three hundred were murdered in cold blood.”43 In the end, approximately 62 black prisoners, most of them severely wounded, were all that was left of the 246 combatants in Companies A through D of the Sixth United States Colored Heavy Artillery division and Company D of the Second United States Colored Light Artillery division.44 It is not possible to assess how many black women and children lost their lives, but clearly many were killed. The Confederacy praised Forrest for his actions, calling it a “brilliant campaign . . . a campaign which has conferred upon its authors fame as enduring as the records of the struggle which they have so brilliantly illustrated/45
In commenting on Fort Pillow, African Americans noted, “We know that, when we enlisted, threats had been made, and we expected them to be fulfilled; and this butchery is not a new thing to us—we have had experiences before to-day. With slaveholders this is only an act on a grander scale.”46 For many black soldiers, the phrase “remember Fort Pillow” would be their rallying cry for the remainder of the war.47 Rev. Henry McNeal Turner, serving as chaplain to the First U.S. Colored Troops, recalled that at the Battle of Petersburg in Virginia, African American soldiers “and the rebels were both crying out—’Fort Pillow!’ This seems to be the battle-cry on both sides. . . . [O]nward they went, waxing stronger and mightier every time Fort Pillow was mentioned.” When the Rebels attempted to surrender, “some few held up their hands and pleaded for mercy, but our boys . . . with few exceptions” killed them.48 For Turner, while he understood why the black soldiers showed their adversaries no mercy, he still opposed behavior that he recognized was
highly endorsed by an immense number of both white and colored people . . . that is the killing of all the rebel soldiers taken by our soldiers. True, the rebels have set the example, particularly in killing the colored soldiers; but it is a cruel one. . . . Such a course of warfare is an outrage upon civilization and nominal Christianity. And in as much as it was presumed that we would carry out a brutal warfare, let us disappoint our malicious anticipators, by showing the world that higher sentiments not only prevail, but actually predominate.49
It is important to point out, however, that indiscriminate acts of violence against people of color during the Civil War were pervasive across America and not just in the South. Certainly, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 helped to encourage ideas that African Americans were disposable and could never be part of the fabric of American life.50 Thus the exclusion of blacks as citizens in America left them relatively unprotected by law when violence ensued, regardless of their status as free people.
In the North, the Democratic Party, led by elite white southerners, the northern aristocracy who profited from slavery, and those determined to sustain white supremacy in America operated to ensure the subordinate status of African Americans through the indoctrination of a burgeoning immigrant population. Democratic newspapers and presidential candidates, like Stephen A. Douglass, used the race card to stoke fears of black emancipation among white workers. In Democratic political clubs, they used pamphlets, poems, and songs to effectively galvanize an antiblack sentiment that would eventually turn deadly. For example, in 1863 a collection of poems and songs was published in minstrel style to be used in Democratic club meetings. Democrats warned that if African Americans were to become free through Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, white Americans, especially white women and children, would be in danger. One poem called “De Serenade” harks back to the Haitian Revolution as a touchstone to rouse white fear of black freedom:
Oh de Sangomingo darkeys had a standard which dey bore;
Twas a pretty little baby’s head, all dripping in its gore!
And if we undastand aright de President’s Proclaim,
He tells de Dixxie niggers dey may go and do de same!. . .
Oh, de Sangomingo darkies, dare old Massa took and tied.
And den dey got de handsaw and sawed ’em till they died!
And after dey had sawed ’em till dey sawed away dare lives,
You may bet dey had a good time a kissin ob dare wives!
And if we understand him,
Mass Linking makes proclaim,
Dat de niggers down in Dixie
Have a right to do de same!51
Another song entitled “Fight for the Nigger” has a particularly effective stanza:
Moreover, if you’re drafted, do not refuse to go,
You are equal to a nigger and can make as good a show;
And when you are in battle to the Union be true,
But don’t forget the darkey is as good a man as you!
Fight for the nigger.
The sweet-scented nigger,
The wooly-headed nigger,
And the Abolition Crew.52
This sort of rallying of the forces was no doubt quite effective, especially among the Irish. Upon arrival in America, Irish immigrants faced significant discrimination due to the rise in nativism, a sociopolitical movement that opposed foreigners who nativists believed would not assimilate into American society for religious or cultural reasons. Ethnic bigotry placed the Irish at the bottom of the social hierarchy, hardly above African Americans, whom the Irish were in competition with for jobs. Northerners stoked white fear to nurture and maintain ideas of white supremacy and to incite racial violence against black Americans during the Civil War. And the idea of a war between the races, which played out on the battlefields of the South, was played out in northern cities where African American communities prospered.
For example, during the Detroit riot, which began on March 6, 1863, many race-based acts of violence were perpetrated against black men, women, and children. Instigated by Lincoln’s call for new recruits to the Union army and after the trial of a fair-skinned black man named William Faulkner, who was wrongfully convicted of raping two girls, one white and one black, hundreds of immigrants, young men and boys, some “apparently not over ten years of age,” many of them Irish and some German, swept into black neighborhoods and terrorized the community.53
According to several African American sources, the organized mob went down Beaubien Street “yelling . . . and crying kill all the d------d niggers.” Free black Thomas Buckner heard another “ruffian” claim, “If we are got to be killed up for niggers then we will kill every nigger in this town.” Even white females “were heard crying, kill them.” Eventually the mob came upon a black-owned cooper shop, and “they made a rush upon the house in which were . . . [three] women and [four] children. . . . The [five] men in the shop [which was attached to the house] seeing this, rushed out of the shop into the house to protect the women and children. . . . The women and children were dodging from one room to another to escape the stones.” Two African American men, Louis and Solomon Houston, remembered that “then the mob set the shop on fire . . . and soon it was in flames! The mob then surrounded the house in every direction, as if determined to burn up the property and all the men, women, and children that were therein.”54
William Jones, an African American who was visiting Detroit from Canada, remembered the “women crying for mercy’s sake to let them out, for already a part of the roof of the house had fallen; but no entreaty, no appeal for sympathy moved the mob . . . determined to burn them all up. . . . We then made an attempt to force our way out of the house . . . but was met by United States soldiers and others, with stones, bricks and billets of wood.” In making their escape, “a helpless babe was torn from the arms of its unprotected mother, and in her presence kicked and buffed until life was almost extinct.” Old people were subject to violence as well, as seventy-nine-year-old Richard Evans was shot in the head, and eighty-year-old “Father” Ephraim Clark, sexton at the local African Methodist Episcopal church, was badly beaten.55
Former slave William Webb, who was working in Detroit at the time, recalled, “A great many colored people were fleeing out in the country where I was, and some came to the house where I was stopping to get shelter, both men and women. . . . We put a guard around the place, so that if they saw any people coming, to give the alarm. We sat up and watched all night. . . . I came into the city next day to see what damage they had done. The colored people were very scarce. . . . I found that some had run over into Canada, and some of them had run into the woods.”56
The black community knew that the mob action was “in harmony with Democratic feelings” and that the refusal of Detroit politicians to compensate them for their losses, “estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand dollars,” was due to the fact that “Detroit is a Democratic city.” An anonymous author noted that there was “but one thing the colored man knows, that the class of men of the same politics as those South are doing the mobbing North; so they are not only ready to suffer, but to die in the cause that promises over three millions of their race liberty. Whatever . . . the rage of the enemies of freedom may be!” Yet for one eyewitness named Mr. Dale, it was “most revolting, to see innocent men, women and children, all without respect to age or sex, being pounded in the most brutal manner.”57 In a sermon given to his church congregation, Rev. S. S. Hunting elaborated on what was perhaps the emerging spirit of African Americans, as well as that of white Americans, across the nation:
The threat is made, that “if the course of things” . . . the elevation of the negro in moral, intellectual and social endowments, “shall not be arrested,” the recent riot “is but premonitory of an uprising which will leave no resting place for the negro in the States of the Northwest.” Now, let it be distinctly understood, that the attempt to exterminate the negro will bring extermination to certain classes of their enemies. . . . This negro hatred is what blinded the eyes of the nation, and threatens future calamity if it is not checked and overcome.58
Four months later, African Americans were traumatized by similar yet heightened acts of racial violence in the New York draft riot on July 11, 1863.59 Although attempts were at first made to “stand and resist the attack . . . being overpowered by superior numbers, they broke ranks and scattered” as best they could.60 Indeed, according to African American sources, “All were slain, either while in the peaceful pursuit of their honest, though humble vocations, providing for their families, or while endeavoring to escape from the hands of their destroyers.” One African American wondered, “Why should they hurt me or my colored brethren? We are poor men like them.” This man, over sixty-three years old and a whitewasher by trade, was left to die on the railroad tracks with a broken arm and a battered face. According to one woman, “Not less than one hundred colored people fled” from her neighborhood of Sullivan Street.61 And they did so for good reason. According to another African American woman, Mrs. Statts,
At 3 o’clock . . . the mob arrived and immediately commenced an attack with terrific yells. . . . In the next room to where I was sitting was a poor woman, who had been confined with a child on Sunday, three days previous. Some of the rioters broke through the front door with pick axes, and came rushing into the room where this poor woman lay, and commenced to pull the clothes from off her. Knowing that their rage was chiefly directed against men, I hid my son behind me and ran with him through the back door, down to the basement. In a little while I saw the innocent babe, of three days old, come crashing down into the yard; some of the rioters had dashed it out of the back window, killing it instantly. . . . Fearing we should be drowned in the cellar, (there were ten of us, mostly women and children, there) I took my boy and flew past the dead body of the babe, out to the rear of the yard, hoping to escape with him . . . but here, to our horror and dismay, we met the mob again; I, with my son, had climbed the fence, but the sight of those maddened demons so affected me that I fell back, fainting, into the yard; my son jumped down . . . to pick me up. . . . As they surrounded us my son exclaimed “save my mother, gentlemen, if you kill me.” “Well, we will kill you,” they answered . . . and armed with a crowbar . . . deliberately struck him a heavy blow over the head, felling him like a bullock to the ground. (He died in the N. Y. hospital two days later.) I believe if I were to live a hundred years I would never forget that scene.62
As Mrs. Statts ran for her life, she was caught by another mob, which “beat me severely.”63
Attempts to kill African American children seem to have been pervasive in the New York draft riot. Although the matron and superintendent of the Colored Orphan Asylum managed to save all “230 children between the ages of 4 and 12 years in the home at the time of the riot” by removing them to the police station, the mob deliberately went there to seek them out. Subsequently, “the main buildings were burned . . . the shrubs uprooted. . . . All was destroyed.”64 Former slave James Lindsay Smith recalled, however, that “a sweet babe was brained while holding up his little arms, and smiling upon his murderers. Many little children were killed in this manner.”65 Frederick Douglass also claimed that during that same “bloody uprising” in New York, the mob “spared neither age nor sex; it hanged negroes simply because they were negroes, it murdered women in their homes, and . . . it dashed out the brains of young children against the lamp posts.”66
Douglass noted that the “mobs at Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York” were evidence of “the unconquerable aversion of the Irish towards the colored race . . . that the Irish people are among our bitterest persecutors.” It was “in one sense . . . strange[,] passing strange, that they should be such.” Douglass, quoting the Irish activist Daniel O’Connell, knew that the “history of Ireland might be traced like a wounded man through a crowd—by the blood. The Irishman has been persecuted for his religion about as vigorously as the black man has been for his color.” Knowing this to be the case, Douglass was perturbed by the violence of Irishmen upon black Americans, stating that “there is something quite revolting in the idea of a people lately oppressed suddenly becoming oppressors, that the persecuted can so suddenly become the persecutors.”67
Racialized and gendered warfare also occurred out west in 1864 in a region of the Colorado Territory during what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. According to an interpreter and special Indian agent to the military, John S. Smith, one hundred families of Cheyennes and six or eight lodges of Arapahos who were known to be “friendly Indians” were massacred on November 29, 1864, by U.S. troops under the leadership of Col. John M. Chivington. Of the 500 Native Americans, based on Smith’s calculation of “five to a lodge,” approximately 250 were killed, and more than half of the dead were women and children. According to Smith, women and children were slaughtered “indiscriminately,” and “I saw the bodies of those lying there cut all to pieces, worse mutilated than any I ever saw before; the women cut all to pieces . . . scalped; their brains knocked out; children two or three months old; all ages lying there, from sucking infants up to warriors.”68 A soldier who protested the attack of Cheyenne chief Black Kettle’s village to no avail and was still ashamed that he “was in it with my Co. Col. Chivington” acknowledged that what Smith testified to was true, that he saw “a squaw ripped open and a child taken from her, little children shot while begging for their lives.”69 The massacre lasted for six to eight hours. Years later, a veteran, Dr. T. P. Bell, recounted the events of that day, and when he was asked, “But how about the children, doctor?” Bell “smiled grimly” and stated that he and the other soldiers were told just before the charge began, “Boys, remember that nits make lice.” Bell went on to state that “we all seemed to feel the same way.”70
Significantly, the Liberator aligned the Sand Creek Massacre with the massacre of African Americans in the South by juxtaposing the paper’s exposé of “The Chivington Massacre” above an article entitled “Awful State of Affairs in Alabama,” which described the murder of black men, women, and children.71 Only people of color experienced exterminatory warfare during the Civil War. Although over 750,000 soldiers, white and black, died in this war, the deliberate killing of noncombatants, namely, women and children, was unique to African American and Native American communities. Concerned at the war’s end that now many black men were both armed and trained, Lincoln stated, “I fear a race war,” ignoring the fact that there had already been a war between the races going on, a war of extermination that would continue to be waged against the black community.72
Race-based acts of violence continued for many years, long after the Civil War ended. Whites in the North and the South continued to talk about black extermination and a war between the races as inevitable. Black people found themselves caught relatively unprotected in the subsequent undeclared war that southerners waged against people of color residing within their communities. In an attempt to restore the supremacy of the white race, black people were treated as if they were disposable and not essential to the South or the nation. These ideas fostered the continuation of exterminatory practices toward African American men, women, and children during Reconstruction that lasted well into the twentieth century.
Emancipation destroyed the rituals of domination and subordination between southern blacks and whites. The newly freed men and women possessed a pervasive attitude of defiance, and this worried plantation owners, who complained to federal officials about their fears of black freedom.73 African Americans, no longer intimidated by their former masters, demanded new economic and social relationships. Their assertive actions negated all of the earlier proslavery rhetoric that those enslaved were docile children incapable of taking care of themselves and their communities. Freed men and women engaged in the formerly unlawful act of educating themselves and their children with such intensity that it was widely regarded as phenomenal when it outpaced poor whites. Additionally, blacks fully immersed themselves in the political process throughout the South. Prior to the Civil War, registration had not been necessary in order to vote, but blacks soon mastered what was required of them as free citizens.74 They reclaimed their families, became property owners, and built their own churches, schools, hospitals, political organizations, and businesses with a fervor that was unprecedented.
Thus, for most southerners, it was the elevation of African Americans to an equal or, as many feared, superior status to whites that would cause a race war to ensue after the Civil War ended. In Georgian writer Eliza Frances Andrews’s view, unless labor and race relations returned to their former conditions, “the fanatics who have caused the trouble” will “force the negro in their rash experiments to justify themselves for his emancipation,” making direct confrontation inevitable. Andrews believed that because of this pressure on southern whites, “eventually the negro race will be either exterminated or reduced to some system of apprenticeship embodying the best features of slavery.”75 Mary Jones, the wife of Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones, also believed that circumstances in the South were dire for African Americans. In her religious prophesizing, Jones predicted that “with their emancipation must come extermination. . . . I feel if ever we gain our independence there will be radical reforms in the system of slavery as it now exists. When once delivered from the interference of Northern abolitionism, we shall be free to make and enforce such rules and reformations as are just and right.”76 These women were writing privately in their diaries, but they were also perhaps echoing public sentiment.
This idea that a “war between the whites and blacks of the South is probable” was reported in several newspapers by the end of the Civil War. According to one paper, the view “widely prevails throughout the South. It was an universally accepted axiom there, long before the rebellion, that emancipation would result in one of two things—either amalgamation or extermination.”77 Another paper noted that “already we hear from many quarters the prophecy that the whole black race in this country is doomed to extermination.”78 In Alabama, a newspaper reported that “some planters even boast that they could manure their lands with the dead carcasses of negroes.” Commenting on the lack of federal intervention, the article went on to say that “if negroes can be shot down daily in garrisoned towns where the authorities are unable to stop this state of things, it is very reasonable to suppose that this brutal work is carried on more extensively where the blacks have no protection. This wholesale murdering of human being[s] is, we fear, the practical working of the conspiracy to exterminate the colored race.”79 According to the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, another southern newspaper warned that although it had “a great solicitude for the welfare of the colored men . . . in the event of the negroes securing the elective franchise a war of races will ensue which will result in the extermination of the race.”80 It was this kind of talk that concerned American author and diplomat C. Edwards Lester of New York, apparent in his open letter to Governor James Lawrence Orr of South Carolina:
When men talk so idly of a war of races which would end in the annihilation of the negro in the South . . . they are using language far more dangerous . . . than they did when they declared that if Slavery or the Union were to perish the Union should be the victim. . . . What then shall the South do to make the best of her position? She can neither get rid of these four millions of people nor exterminate them: both are impossibilities. The nineteenth century is not going to allow four million of people, who have committed no crime to be swept from the face of the earth.81
African Americans were not so confident, as they believed that southern whites were determined to show that they meant what they said, that they would exterminate African Americans in order to reaffirm white supremacy. According to Robert Hamilton, Thomas Hamilton’s brother, also a black abolitionist and now editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, because African Americans had fought on the side of the Union, “the scheme is now . . . to exterminate the negro.” He also noted that the “virus of negro hate” had always been conjoined with the “mania of eternal negro slavery.” Southerners had not reconciled with the outcome of the Civil War and the subsequent destruction of the institution of slavery, and now the “rebel hates the negro because he has thrown off his yoke and become free” and because “he defeated the object and the aim of the rebellion.” Indeed, Hamilton argued, the hatred was so severe and “their jealousy of their former slaves is such that they would rather see everyone of them blotted out of existence, than to see them free.” What concerned Hamilton was that “this feeling is shared by thousands at the South who have not been slaveholders. The shocking barbarities now suffered by the colored people at the South affords a solemn lesson for the Government.” Hamilton called on Congress not just to take his word for it but to do something to protect blacks in the South from white vengeance: “We trust that Congress will ventilate when it meets, and let the country and the world know if there is a conspiracy to institute a massacre, or to reestablish slavery at all hazards.”82
The conspiracy to massacre African Americans of which Hamilton warned seemed to begin almost immediately after the Civil War. For example, there were reports from Clark County, Alabama, in 1865 that “men are hanged for saying they are free, and tied hog-fashion, and thrown over in the river and drowned. Women are shut up in chicken-coops, and thrown in the river. All these things are done, and no person to protect them.” According to a teacher from the Northwest Freedman’s Aid Commission in Mobile, Alabama, “One hundred and thirty three dead bodies were counted in the woods, five bodies were seen floating in the river. . . . Women and children killed, and then boxed up and thrown into the river.” One black man, who had his ears cut off by former Rebel soldiers, was told by them that “five thousand of them had formed a clan to kill every negro that they could without detection; that if the negro was to be free, he should not live in this country; that the tariff that the government has established for wages was too small for a man to live on; therefore, in order to obtain more, the negroes must be banished, so that they could get higher wages.”83 According to Inspector General Col. Charles F. Johnson, during the riots in Memphis, Tennessee, the city recorder, John C. Creighton, called for the “whole sale slaughter of blacks.” In a speech he delivered on May 1, 1866, Creighton urged the “crowd of police and citizens” to continue to “prepare and clean out every damned son of a bitch of a nigger out of town. . . . Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill every damned one of the nigger race and burn up the cradle.”84 The fact that a city official urged violence gave the white crowd a license to kill: “During the night the Negroes were hunted down by police, firemen and other white citizens, shot, assaulted, robbed, and in many instances their houses searched under the pretense of hunting for concealed arms, plundered, and then set on fire, during which no resistance so far as we can learn was offered by the Negroes. . . . All crimes imaginable were committed from simple larceny to rape and murder. Several women and children were shot in bed. One woman (Rachel Johnson) was shot and then thrown into the flames of a burning house and consumed.”85
African Americans were well aware not only of the danger that freedom engendered but also that the desire to drive the “whole negro race out [of] the country” was at the heart of white violence against them during the post—Civil War years.86 Martin R. Delany, fearing that talk of colonization would fuel southern ideas of black extermination, wrote a letter on July 21, 1866, to James Lynch, editor of the Christian Recorder, entitled “Letter on President Warner of Liberia.” In his letter, Delany chastised President Daniel Bashiel Warner, the third African American president of Liberia, for his public comments suggesting the removal of southern blacks from America. For Delany, there was real danger in even discussing the idea: “Does President Warner know, that the commencement of such an act of national injustice is itself a barbarity that might lead to extermination, a much cheaper and by far easier method of ridding the nation of this people!”87
Over time, as ideas about a race war continued to preclude absolute freedom in the South, Delany became concerned about the possibility of national support for a war between the races and black extermination. In a letter to Douglass in 1876, Delany reveals that his fears of extermination were real: “The eye of the whole North and West being already turned in this direction, and their minds made up, and the first occasion of a murmur of a conflict of races, and the whole country will rise up and rush to arms with such force and power. . . . Extermination will be their theme. Their watch-word, ‘Every Negro in the grave!’ . . . When our race, shall only be remembered among the things of the past!”88 Delany’s inclusion of the “West” no doubt reflected the fact that the U.S. military was now in the western part of America executing a doctrine of destruction and extermination on Native American people. President Ulysses S. Grant issued a sharp yet heartfelt warning to Native Americans in the West, stating that they had only one choice in 1873: either allow themselves to be brought “under the benign influences of education and civilization,” or face a “war of extermination.89
Aside from federal policy and the Sand Creek Massacre, Delany might have also been referring to the Camp Grant Massacre in 1871. Out of the 125 Arivaipa Apaches killed by a large party of Anglo-American merchants, Mexican American ranchers, and Tohono O’odham from the San Xavier del Bac Mission, only 8 were men. The camp, Lt. Royal Whitman recalled, was found “burning and the ground strewn with their mutilated women and children.” These Apaches were not the instigators of anti-American aggression or uncivilized members of society, as President Grant portrayed all Native people in his proclamation. Instead, Whitman believed that Americans would “drive them into a hopeless war of extermination.”90 Moreover, the national outrage at Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s death during his confrontation with the Sioux Indians at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, incited many Americans across the country to call for unrelenting warfare against Native Americans and for their complete extermination91 Delany seems to imply that black Americans might be next. Given the racial strife that existed in the South, his implications were certainly justified.
During Reconstruction, black men organized themselves across the South into trained military units to fight against rising white forces like the Ku Klux Klan. For many former slaves during the postwar years, “things were mighty tough for us.”92 From 1865 to 1869, fifteen hundred African Americans were lynched in the South.93 According to Richard Taylor, the son of President Zachary Taylor and the brother-in-law of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, between the assassination of President Lincoln in 1865 and 1869, “The entire white race of the south devoted itself to the killing of negroes. . . . Thousands upon thousands were slain. . . . [S]uch was the ferocity of the slavedrivers, that unborn infants were ripped from their mothers wombs. Individual effort could not suffice the rage for slaughter. . . . Thus ‘Ku-Klux’ originated, and covered the land with a network of crime.”94 Many blacks, like those in Bennettsville, South Carolina, carried weapons with them at all times and patrolled the streets to prevent attacks from the Klan. The problem was most pervasive in counties where many blacks owned farms and where the population was racially mixed. Thousands of blacks left their homes every night and took to the forest, as, according to the testimony of former slave Essic Harris, they feared for their lives once darkness fell. Yet Harris went back into his house “because I could not leave my children there to be killed.” Harris knew what the Klan was capable of, as the family of another black man, named Anthony Davis, had been nearly killed when “they whipped him and shot at his children.” The children and their father survived, but the Ku Klux Klan had “wounded them.”95 African American Republican congressman Richard Cain of South Carolina surrounded his house with armed men, as he and his family lived under the constant threat of violence.96 Republican officials attempted to calm the tension between blacks and whites by urging black militias to cease their defensive counterviolence, but times had changed, and black men were no longer willing to be victims at the hands of whites. According to former slave William Henry Rooks, the violence that groups like the KKK and others exhibited against the black community was “about equalization after the freedom.”97 Indeed, according to Eli Coleman, they were determined “not [to] let the negro exert his freedom.” In this old ex-slave’s view, “the white man he thought we ought to still work for them like we did during slavery time. . . . It is still that way, son, to this day with some white people.”98 While recognizing the very legitimate reasons for the state of unrest existing in the South, for Delany the problem was that if “this great divergence and extraordinary estrangement . . . [f ]rom whichever side it comes . . . [is] not permanently checked, my race can have but one terminal destiny, political nonentity and race extermination.”99
By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many Republicans in Congress believed that the “Negro question” had been resolved with the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment, and they no longer wished to pursue national involvement in southern affairs. Northerners in both parties felt that, as was the case with newly arriving immigrants, it was up to blacks to create their own future in the American marketplace. Congress’s laissez-faire approach to the freedmen hurt Reconstruction efforts, giving space for racial violence to continue.
Many black leaders confirmed that the possibility of extermination or reenslavement remained a considerable threat to the black community for the rest of the century, especially after the civil rights cases brought to the Supreme Court in 1883 nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which argued that Congress did not have the constitutional authority to regulate acts of discrimination committed by individuals or organizations.100 For example, Dr. Henry McNeal Turner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and an emigrationist, wrote in 1883, “That decision [the nullification] will either put the Negro back into national politics, where his status will be either fought over again, or drive him out of the country, or result in his extermination.” Turner also referred to the period of time between 1873 and 1883 as “the reign of blood and slaughter.”101 T. Thomas Fortune, a journalist and editor of the New York Age and New York World, wrote in 1884 that the Republican Party had “betrayed its trust in permitting thousands of innocent men to be slaughtered without declaring the South in rebellion. . . . No: it is time that the coloured voter learned to leave his powerless ‘protectors’ and take care of himself.” Fortune also made it clear that from his perspective, “a people in whom the love of Liberty is in-born cannot be enslaved, though they may be exterminated by superior force.”102 Frederick Douglass stated in 1886, “Sometimes I have feared that, in some wild paroxysm of rage, the white race, forgetful of the claims of humanity and the precepts of the Christian religion, will proceed to slaughter the Negro in wholesale, as some of that race have attempted to slaughter chinamen, and as it has been done in detail in some districts of the Southern States.” Apprehensively optimistic, Douglass concluded, “The future of the Negro therefore is, that he will not be expatriated nor annihilated.”103 Newspapers like the Weekly Age-Herald prophesied, however, that the education and uplift of the African American population had made things worse between the “two races.” And because “there seems to be ever increasing signs of a race war in the South,” blacks should be removed in order to avoid the inevitable conflict.104 W. E. B. Du Bois reflected, however, that it was only due to the efforts of those Americans who helped the freedmen to improve their condition through education that blacks were not “reenslaved or exterminated in an unequal and cowardly renewal of war.”105
Activist and journalist Ida B. Wells also noted the racial animosity embodied in the increased violence toward blacks in 1895, as there had been more than “a thousand lynchings in ten years.” Wells called it an “unprecedented slaughter of human beings.”106 Another leading activist, Mary Church Terrell, argued that black women feared being lynched just as much as black men. For Terrell, it was not white fears of social equality or immorality among blacks that caused the “hanging, shooting, and burning [of] black men, women and children in the United States.” It was “race hatred . . . and lawlessness.” “Lynching,” Terrell stated, “must still be regarded as the legitimate offspring of slavery,” as is the “actual enslavement of negroes . . . under the peonage system of Alabama and Mississippi, and the unspeakable cruelties to which men, women, and children are alike subjected.”107
The inaccurately named “race riots” that took place in Wilmington and Atlanta also affirm that mass violence threatened the black community. The appellation of “race riot” is inappropriate because it ignores how these events were tied to a history of one-sided mass violence that was not episodic but rather continuous and entrenched.108 Although classified as race riots, these events signified a shift from the petite guerre strategy, whereby two sides fight each other, to blacks merely fighting back in self-defense against an organized effort to exterminate them in their communities. And much as it had during the pre—Civil War days of slavery, the federal government weighed in on the side of the oppressors of black people.109
According to Rev. J. Allen Kirk, one of the ministers forced to flee the city, the purpose of the “bloody Riot in Wilmington, North Carolina,” in 1898 was “to remove all . . . able leaders of the colored race.” To that end, an organized mob of white citizens “went from house to house looking for Negroes that they considered offensive; took their arms they had hidden and killed them for the least expression of manhood.” Black lawyers, physicians, clergymen, merchants, businessmen, and property holders were the citizens most at risk. Kirk and other ministers in Wilmington were forced by the mob to “go around the city with them and ask the colored people to be obedient to the white people and go in their homes and keep quiet. This was a great humiliation to us and a shame upon our denominations.”110
But Kirk also noted the death and trauma in the ensuing chaos, during which “thousands of women, children and men rushed to the swamps and there lay upon the earth in the cold to freeze and starve. The woods were filled with colored people. The streets were dotted with their dead bodies. A white gentleman said that he saw ten bodies lying in the undertakers office at one time. Some of their bodies were left lying in the streets until the next day. . . . [S]ome were found by the stench and miasma that came forth from their decaying bodies under their houses.”111 Letters from blacks living in Wilmington were sent to President William McKinley’s office, begging the government to intervene and provide the black community with federal protection. In a letter that began “Please send relief as soon as possible or we perish,” one woman outlined how “the Companies from every town came in to kill the negro. There was not any Rioting Simply the strong slaying the weak. . . . Oh, to see how we are Slaughtered, when our husbands go to work we do not look for their return. . . . [T]hey tried to slay us all. To day we are mourners in a strange land with no protection. . . . I cannot sign my name and live. But every word of this is true.”112
Blacks all across the country, outraged by what happened in Wilmington, organized massive protest meetings. At one of the largest meetings, held in New York City under the leadership of T. Thomas Fortune, there was a call for an amendment to the Constitution that would allow the federal government to intervene when states failed to protect citizens threatened by mob violence. Unfortunately, President William McKinley was not motivated politically to interfere with states’ rights issues, since he sought to solidify a renewed sense of national unity between the North and South resulting from the Spanish-American War. McKinley’s reluctance to call for federal troops to intervene in a timely manner established a precedent that future presidents would follow.113 As a result, men like Fortune told the black community to be ready to fight back, as he sensed that “the negro is on the verge of a greater crisis than any of former times.” Fortune stated that he believed “in the law, but if the law can afford us no protection then we should protect ourselves, and if need be die in the defense of our rights as citizens.”114 Other black men, like the Honorable George H. White, argued in the North Carolina House of Representatives, “Should not a nation be just to all of her citizens, protect them alike in all their rights, on every foot of her soil? . . . [D]uring the last thirtyfive years . . . fully 50,000 of my race have been ignominiously murdered by mobs, not 1 percent of whom have been made to answer for their crimes in the court of justice.” White held up as an example “the miserable butchery of men, women, and children in Wilmington N.C. . . . who had committed no crime, nor were they even charged with crime,” in the hope that Congress would act.115 Allen Kirk, however, counseled “the Negro race to refrain from threats and highhanded talking. . . . [T]ry by all means to keep the peace that is necessary to our existence in this country.”116 These differing approaches had little effect on the lives of the black community in North Carolina, and subsequently over one thousand black residents left Wilmington that year rather than live in fear. Those who remained in North Carolina chose survival as their form of resistance.
African Americans in the Atlanta massacre—a better description than race riot—also had concerns about the possibility of their extermination in 1906. According to educator and activist William Pickens, “White politicians talked race-war; Georgia white newspapers urged and inspired race war” to avenge the purported rape of southern white women.117 Pickens noted that the editor of the Atlanta News claimed that it was these “vicious blacks” who were “sounding the doom of their race. . . . [W]hat else can white men do except to make war to the bitter end against the black devils who continue to attack defenseless white women? . . . The men of this community will stand it no longer. They will begin a warfare on the black race. . . . The blacks will be destroyed, annihilated, completely vanquished if they do not stop these crimes.” But J. Max Barber, editor of the Voice of the Negro, refuted these claims: “The only Reign of Terror . . . in the South is the menace of . . . lawless white men.” Indeed, Barber argued, “The black woman is the woman who is in real danger and is really left without protection in the South.” Barber also believed that the Atlanta massacre was led by an “organized mob . . . [a]s the mob chased and killed all the colored people it could in the heart of town. Then it attacked the street cars, the cabs and even the Pullman cars in search of Negroes.” As was the case in the Wilmington massacre, Barber noted that “no soldiers could be had on the scene until the mob had done all the damage it cared and that for quite a while even the police did not intervene.”118 The coroner’s office refused to hold an inquest. Ten thousand black men were arrested in 1906, and one-half of all black males in Atlanta were forced into convict labor. Over one thousand men, women, and children left Atlanta permanently, feeling absolutely terrorized about what had taken place.119 The Atlanta Constitution reported that the massacre would only end if blacks stopped causing “TROUBLE” and only if they were able to stop other blacks from bothering white women; otherwise, whites would “BRING ON A WAR OF EXTERMINATION.”120 Another letter to the Atlanta Georgian editor proclaimed, “Let the war of extermination begin.”121
Fears about black extermination remained rife within the black community, and the two thousand African Americans who were lynched from 1890 to 1909 testifies to the fact that the threats of deadly violence were real.122 In 1893 former slave Rev. Peter Randolph wrote regarding the plight of his people in America: “Will extermination satisfy? No, it will add insult to injury. . . . There is but one rule, and one only, that can solve the ‘Race Problem,’ and all difficult problems. . . . It is called the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ On this rests the joy or sorrow of America.”123 But as one white southerner put it, white supremacy remained more important than any ethical obligation to the nation: “Before we submit we will kill every Negro in the south. This is not idle boasting or fire-eating, but the cold hard facts stated.”124 In reminiscing about the African American experience during the Civil War many years later, another formerly enslaved woman reflected that ideas about black extermination remained as salient as ever: “You all ain’t seen no hard times, and if another war comes they are going to kill the nits and the old ones. So you all try to be happy. It is nice to live.”125
During the Civil War and post—Civil War years, African Americans were well aware of what they were up against, for the ideas linking race and freedom with black extermination developed nearly two hundred years earlier did not just disappear. In the case of African American soldiers, it was used unsuccessfully to intimidate black recruits from joining the war effort. A renewed sense of hope between blacks in the North and South due to the federal government’s stand against enslavement made it possible for them to endure the terrorism of undeclared warfare. The subsequent murder of large numbers of men, women, and children, however, reveals the brutality and trauma experienced by black Americans not only during the Civil War years but also throughout the nineteenth century. It is because of their unflagging determination to survive that more massacres like those perpetrated upon Native Americans did not occur against blacks before and after the Civil War. Yet the massacre of innocent Native Americans demonstrates how these racialized tactics of war continued in America. If we are ever to reconcile our national memory with our national past, then we must acknowledge what African Americans faced every day, enslaved and free, namely, the supposed inevitability of a war between the races and black extermination, the resurgence of the old philosophy that “nits make lice” and the gendered violence against black women and children that this philosophy gave rise to, and finally, the historical trauma and deadly events that these culturally driven ideas fostered. Whom the nation was willing to sacrifice and whom the nation was willing to save was always informed by race and strategies of war used in the past to conquer, to colonize, to oppress—and African Americans navigated their way through this world they did not make during and after enslavement by ultimately making survival their greatest form of resistance.