“They intend to kill you.”
“I don’t know why they have anything against me,” Alfred Richardson said.
“They say that you can control all the colored votes; that you are making too much money; that they do not allow any nigger to rise that way,” James Thrasher said.
“I’ve always kept the peace between the colored and white people.”
“I tell you, you had better keep your eyes open. For they are after you.”
“They tried before.”
“They intend to break you up, and then they can rule the balance of the niggers when they get you off.”
“Seems you’re taking a might big risk coming to see me.”
“They said they wanted me to join their party, but I told them I did not want to do it. I never knew you to do anything wrong, and these are a parcel of low-down men, and I don’t want to join any such business.”
“I’ve told some in town that some men are coming to kill me or run me off. I don’t know whether I can stay safely. They told me, ‘No, don’t move away. They are just talking that way to scare you.’”
For three or four hours, Alfred Richardson listened to James Thrasher speak of the Ku Klux Klan and their plans. At nine o’clock he went to bed, but not before reinforcing his door with long scantlings across the width and fasteners down the sides.
That night, Alfred Richardson did not sleep long nor sleep well. He reckoned it must have been just after midnight when the distant pounding of hooves drew closer, and closer. Then, when the braying and breathing of horses stopped, the battering of shoulders against his front door began. He stood behind it.
“Who’s there?”
“Never mind. God damn you, we’ll show you who it is. We’ll have you tonight!”
From the other side of the door came the thwack! thwack! of an ax. Splinters flew. Through a widening gap, the cold air of that January night rushed in, and along with it the sight of a torch and the barrels of long guns. The door would not hold against the onslaught. Alf raced upstairs, to a garret, where he’d stashed some guns. The swarm of men barreled inside.
From an opened upstairs window, he heard the bloodcurdling screams. “Help!” His wife screamed again, “Help!” Her screams were answered with a hail of bullets from the outside, luckily all missing their mark. Alf could hear the cacophony of voices from a crowd outside. A voice called out.
“He’s jumped out the window. Shoot on top of the roof!”
Hurriedly, all the Klansmen, except one, clattered outside.
Alf now squeezed into the garret, the cramped crawl space, just under his roof. He looked out into the darkness of his home and tried to hold his breath. Hoped the one man left behind would not come his way.
Suddenly, a hooded masked face appeared in the garret and a voice shouted with glee, “God damn you, I got you!”
Three shots rang out. One ball tore through Alf’s right arm. Two balls lodged into his side. The man danced with joy. “I found him! I found him!”
The shooter whooped and hollered. He charged downstairs to meet the others.
“Come back up here! I’ve got ’im! And I’ve shot ’im! But he ain’t quite dead. So, let’s go up and finish ’im!”
His strength draining rapidly, Alf pulled himself from the garret to the head of the stairs just as the men began clambering their way up, one holding a light behind the others. As they reached the top step, a blast rang out. Only this time from Alf’s double-barrel shotgun. A man crumpled, dead, into a mass of blood, robes, and a mask. The other Klansmen grabbed him by the legs, turned, and ran fast downstairs and outside to mount their horses. They rode back into the darkness. Alf had survived the Klan’s second attack.1
Alfred Richardson left Watkinsville, Georgia, near Athens with his family for the relative safety of the remote Black community in Lickskillet, Georgia, just south of the Tennessee line. A few weeks later his home in Watkinsville, and all the structures around it, were burned to the ground.2
Ex-slave Alfred Richardson, an elected member of the Georgia legislature, was extremely fearless, and also extremely fortunate to have survived not one but two Ku Klux Klan attacks. Estimates range as high as forty thousand people (mostly Black men, women, and children) murdered by the Klan during Reconstruction.3 Southern Watchman, the local newspaper out of Athens, blamed Richardson for the attack based on “facts, which were furnished us by respectable citizens of Watkinsville . . .”4 Richardson later appeared before a joint committee of Congress investigating Ku Klux Klan violence against Blacks. He described Klan intimidation, whippings, and extrajudicial murders of Black men and women over voting, education, and labor issues, and how members of the Klan committed such acts with impunity.
John H. Cristy, publisher of the Southern Watchman, followed Richardson, in front of the committee, where he testified under oath that the attack against Richardson was the victim’s fault. Later, Cristy added, “I have no idea that there ever has been an organization in the State of Georgia known as Ku-Klux, or any other sort of secret organization, except the Loyal League, since the surrender.”5
It’s hard to read of the killings of Black people by the Klan and similar paramilitary groups during Reconstruction without going back to that 1672 law, enacted in colonial Virginia, which granted immunity from prosecution for any person who committed murder in pursuit of a runaway slave. An entitlement to violence and extrajudicial killings of Blacks feels woven into the very fabric of this nation, including its great founding documents.
Violence undermined Reconstruction and ultimately forced its undoing; forced Blacks and southern society to retreat back toward slavery. Though many mark the end of Reconstruction with the 1876 presidential election, in truth, Restoration, or Redemption (as the era after Reconstruction is called), began as soon as the Civil War drew to its conclusion. In fact, the Civil War really never did end in the south, for this violence against Black citizens, who were originally the cause of the war, picked up in the months and years after the surrender at Appomattox. However, it would be irresponsible to say this violence was confined to small, isolated vigilante groups peppered throughout the south, when, in fact, the north was deeply involved. And if by violence we also mean the political violence that prepares the ground for physical violence, and vice versa, then the north was not only deeply involved but directly implicated. Reconstruction and Redemption were unfolding simultaneously. The question was which one would win.
Violence is an extreme exercise of power. Black men and women, in the decade following the Civil War, tested the bounds of American democracy. They labored to bring forth new institutions of power and wealth which finally realized the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights—the ultimate expression of freedom dues. Yet, instead, their labors gave rise to new institutions of power and wealth based on extrajudicial murder and intimidation. The terrible effect, the awful legacy, of Reconstruction in America is that the exercise of democracy by citizens is now too often met with the exercise of violence by the state. It was certainly this way for Black folks during and after Reconstruction. And, there is a similar exercise of political violence in laws to suppress the votes of Blacks, and other Americans of color, today.
* * *
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in Tennessee in 1866 by Confederate general Nathan Bedford. For much of its early days, the organization was referred to as simply the Ku-Klux, derived from the Greek word kyklos, meaning “circle.” It defined not only a circle of brotherhood among its members, but also a more general circle of who was meant to be in, and who was not, in southern White society—Black people and their allies, such as carpetbaggers (northern transplants) and scalawags (southern Reconstruction sympathizers), were targeted for exclusion. The KKK and similar groups were essentially the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party in the south, charged with carrying out a campaign of intimidation and murder for a party whose slogan in the 1868 presidential election was “This Is a White Man’s Country; Let White Men Rule.”
Many southern newspapers praised the work of the Klan. The Moulton Advertiser published the following verse in support of the KKK, which read, in part:
Thadika Stevika radical plan
Must yield to the coming of Ku Klux Klan,
Niggers and leaguers get out of the way,
We’re born of the night, and we vanish by day;
No rations have we but the flesh of man,
And love niggers best—the Ku Klux Klan
We catch ’em alive, and roast ’em whole,
Then hand them around with a sharpened pole;
Whole leagues have we eaten, not leaving a man,
And went away hungry, the Ku Klux Klan6
Thadika Stevika is, of course, a reference to Thaddeus Stevens, and leaguers is a reference to members of the Union League, also known as the Loyal League. In fact, supporters of the Klan, and later their apologists, claim the KKK was necessary as a counterbalance to the league. When John H. Cristy, owner of the Athens Southern Watchman, told a joint committee in Washington, cited above, that he knew of no secret organization in Georgia, except the Loyal League, he was referring to a group based in New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston that sent workers to the south to help educate and organize ex-slaves, teaching them how to read and write, and most important, teaching them how to vote. Blacks, and the league, were overwhelmingly Republican, which incensed southern White Democrats, who threatened them through the Klan.
Many White southerners viewed it as an abomination that Blacks stepped into elected roles of leadership, and they were determined to reclaim the south. In fact, if Reconstruction is called “the Second American Revolution,” then Redemption should be called “the Second Civil War.” In all respects, it was a war against Black citizens, principally in the south, though in the terms of modern warfare it would be called a guerrilla war or low-intensity conflict.
Black voters were threatened or killed, Black schools were bombed or burned, Black elected officials, and their allies, were intimidated or assassinated. Black people were hunted, whipped, lynched, and murdered, sometimes because they asserted their freedom, and at other times simply because Whites wanted, or needed, to demonstrate their control, authority, and impunity. Principally, the Klan and similar paramilitary groups were behind this violence, often with local, state, and federal authorities looking the other way. Sometimes members of local and state governments were also members of the Klan. The goal of the violence was clear: change political power in the south so Blacks, and their Republican allies, were no longer in office and Whites, and Democrats, could restore the south to its former glory. Few spoke of bringing back slavery, but many longed for a day when only Whites ruled all affairs in the south.
In November 1871, Edward (Ned) Crosby, an ex-slave from Columbus, Mississippi, appeared before the same joint committee of Congress, investigating violence against Blacks in the south, that Alfred Richardson had appeared before several months earlier.
When asked if he had ever been visited by the Ku-Klux, he said that he had, then told the story:
They came to my house, and came into my house. I went out to get my little child a drink of water and saw them coming. My wife asked me what they were. I said I reckoned they were what we called Ku-Klux. It looked like there were thirty odd of them, and I didn’t know but what they might interfere with me, and I just stepped aside, out in the yard to the smokehouse. They came up there, and three of them got down and came in the house and called for me, and she told them I had gone over to Mr. Crosby’s. They asked her if I didn’t have right smart business there, and she said she didn’t know; that I had gone over there to see my sister, she reckoned. She didn’t know but they might want something to do to me, and interfere with me, and they knocked around a while and off they went.7
Luke P. Poland of Vermont, chairman of the joint committee, asked Crosby, “Have you been attempting to get up a free school in your neighborhood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Colored school?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know whether their visit to you had reference to this effort?”
“I had spoken for a school, and I had heard a little chat of that, and I didn’t know but what they heard it, and that was the thing they were after.”
Later in the testimony, Chairman Poland asked, “Who told you that unless the colored people voted the Democratic ticket it would be worse for them?”
“Several [Whites] in the neighborhood,” Crosby answered.
Democrat Francis P. Blair, Jr. next took his turn to question Crosby. “Whose land were you living on, Ned?”
“Mr. Crosby’s [his former owner].”
“You say Mr. Crosby asked you to vote the Democratic ticket?”
“He asked me would I do it, and I told him I would. He told my neighbor right there if Ned would vote the Democratic ticket Ned could stay where he was, but whenever Ned voted against him Ned was off.”
“You told him you were going to vote the Democratic ticket?”
“Yes, sir, for fear. But my intention was the whole time to vote the radical ticket . . . All of our colored population since the Ku-Klux have been visiting about, have all been in fear of trouble. There has been nights I didn’t sleep more than an hour, and if there had been a stick cracked very light, I would have sprung up in the bed.”8
Lewis E. Parsons also testified before Poland’s joint committee on the Klan. Parsons was an interesting mix. A lawyer from upstate New York, he’d come south to Talladega, Alabama, in 1840 to practice law. He served as a Confederate lieutenant during the Civil War, but was appointed provisional governor of the state by President Andrew Johnson. Parsons served as a US district attorney for northern Alabama, and began life as a Democrat, though ultimately became a Republican. He’d been asked by the governor of Alabama to prosecute members of the Klan involved in the murders of a White schoolteacher and four Black men. Though his professional and political careers were diverse, his testimony before the Poland committee was clear and direct.
When asked about whether Klan violence was directed at the Black vote, Parsons replied, “That is the conclusion I have formed, from what I have seen and heard . . . that it was intended to control the voting of the negroes . . . and also to control his labor.”9
Questioning Parsons was John Pool, a Republican senator from North Carolina. Pool seemed surprised. “To control his labor?” Pool asked.
“Yes, sir; and I intended to state so before, if I did not.”
“Without wages?” Pool asked.
“They [the Klan] meant that he should work only for such persons and upon such terms as they sanctioned.”
“You then look upon it as simply a resistance to the free enjoyment of equal rights on the part of the colored people?”
“I can come to no other conclusion than that . . . The great body of the white people, I cannot state the exact number, but the great body of the white people, nine-tenths of them certainly, I reckon, were utterly opposed to making the negro a voter.”
And that opposition to voting, education, and employment was the basis for White violence.
* * *
The testimony of ex-slaves like Alfred Richardson and Ned Crosby, and White men like Lewis Parsons and many others, before this congressional joint committee contributed to the passing, in March 1871, of “An Act to enforce the Provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment,” otherwise known as the Civil Rights Act of 1871, or the Ku Klux Klan Act.10 The act made it a federal crime to deprive US citizens of their civil rights through violence, empowering the federal government to send in troops to enforce it, and trying those arrested in federal rather than state court, where trials were more likely to have Black jurors.
In October 1871, President Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, sending in federal troops to quell violence in areas overrun by the KKK. Killing and intimidation are part of war, but in this second Civil War, many in the south may have reached for their guns too soon. By the end of that year, federal grand juries returned more than three thousand indictments. Mostly light sentences were handed down to the six hundred men convicted, though sixty-five were imprisoned for up to five years at the Albany Penitentiary, a federal facility in New York.11 This was the first time, and the last, that such a drastic measure as the suspension of habeas corpus, combined with federal troops, was used to protect the rights of Black Americans.12 Grant’s swift and decisive actions were credited with decimating the Ku Klux Klan, and bringing to an end its first reign of terror across the south. Of course, the night riders in hoods would ride again.13
War is not always about counting bodies, sometimes it’s about winning hearts and minds. With the latter as the battlefield objective, words, not guns, are the weapons of choice. Sustained political will is something Americans are not easily accused of, especially with regard to matters of freedom or civil rights. Although news cycles were longer in the mid-nineteenth century they certainly existed then. President Grant would soon say, “the whole public is tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.”14 But it was not only Grant holding a finger to the wind of public opinion. Newspapers and reporters in the north and south now stepped into the void left by a crippled Klan with a new weapon—a campaign of misinformation. As the 1870s headed full steam into a new century, there were other pressing matters on the minds of many Americans—new western lands to acquire, new native nations to dominate, new industrial technologies to master, and most of all, new money to make. They’d moved on from “the eternal nigger,” as the New York Herald put it.15 And many southern conservatives were more than glad to contribute to Americans moving on, and leaving them in control of the spoils.
Africanization became a code word for Blacks finally stepping into positions of equality and power, and for newspapers instilling fear in their White readers. “When we come to reflect that these people . . . number over four millions in this country, the majority just intelligent enough to become the readier dupes of wicked and designing men . . . who can call the Africanization danger ‘a spectre’?” said the Memphis Daily Appeal.16
“The men of this country will not consent that any portion of it shall be Africanized, in order that it may be permanently Radicalized,”17 stated the Southern Home, a newspaper from Charlotte, North Carolina, reprinting an article from the Savannah News of Georgia.
“Who Are Africanizing Louisiana?” asked the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.18
Northern newspapers spread the fear of Africanization as well. An article in the New York Herald, titled “Sambo in Excelsis,” lavished praise on reporter James Shepherd Pike, lamenting, “With the sad prescience of fallen greatness the gentleman predicted the approaching ‘Africanization’ of South Carolina.”19 In an editorial, The Perry County Democrat, in Ohio, defined its position: “That the balance of power between political parties shall be placed in the hands of ignorant negroes, is preposterous and will not be long tolerated by a majority of the white voters in any commonwealth in the Union.” The paper went on to claim that Republicans had once protested “against the Africanization of the ‘People’s Party’” and that the Republican Party would lament “the day when it was compelled to swallow Sambo.”20 A special correspondent for The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on events in New Orleans: “There is a move on foot among the colored Radicals of this city and State to turn over the government of both to the exclusive rule of the negroes . . . In order to bring about the thorough Africanization of the State, a deep scheme is now being hatched.”21
One lone voice against this propaganda was the New National Era, Frederick Douglass’s newspaper in the nation’s capital. In a letter to the editor the alarm was sounded over a bill in the House of Representatives providing that no one who cannot read or write English shall serve on a federal jury. “The judgement of the negro is that African ignorance at the polls and in the jury-box is safer than pro-slavery rebellism and Kuklux scoundrelism . . . Leading journalists are already chuckling over it [the proposed bill] as evidence that their hue-and-cry against ‘Africanization’ is having its effect.”22
Articles, editorials, and letters printed by the press have effects that follow the news cycle. But books offer a subject that can be studied and referred to over and over again. James Shepherd Pike, quoted above, stood out among the authors, most of whom were also reporters, advocating for the interests of the White south. But joining Pike were a handful of other authors including Edward King, Robert Somers, and Charles Nordhoff.
Robert Somers, in particular, was a well-known, prominent writer. Somers, a Scottish economics journalist, traveled to the US south to investigate the effects of the Civil War on the southern economy. His book The Southern States Since the War, 1870–123 was praised as recently as 1965 by Malcolm C. McMillan, a southern historian, who wrote, “Robert Somers, a Scottish journalist, was a keen and objective observer and gives a fair, detached, and balanced appraisal of economic life, politics, and race relations in the South between 1870 and 1871.”24 Yet Somers, a foreigner, still suffered from the same “White supremacism” of other writers who could not see Black people as human but merely as “darkeys”25 possessing “wool-clad brains.”26 He celebrated the ascendancy of Democrats in Alabama. “The triumph of Democrats in this and other States has been won by hard battles against the ignorance and corruption, and marks the return of the white people of the South to a rightful and much-needed influence in the management of their affairs.”27
As Somers alluded to, it was not just the specter of “Africanization” but perhaps more important, the idea of corruption that newspapers and writers pinned on Black folks in this propaganda campaign. The logic went something like this: The Republican Party is corrupt. The Republican Party supports Black people in the south. Therefore, Black people in the south are corrupt. It didn’t matter that the logic was faulty, or the underlying premise of Republican corruption was more fiction than fact. What mattered was that corruption became a proxy for talking about race. Who’s not for getting corruption out of state and local politics? In other words, who’s not for getting Blacks out of office?
In terms reminiscent of Hitler’s Endspiel, his Final Solution for the Jews, Pike supported “a satisfactory solution”28 put forward by southern Whites, to which he added they “must rely mainly upon themselves, and mainly upon action quite outside and independent of politics, to redeem the State, if it is to be redeemed. This is the real serious work they should set about.”29 If that’s not a call to insurrection, it would be hard to know what is.
Major General Adelbert Ames, then Union commanding officer of the western portion of South Carolina, knew it, and said as much in a letter to the adjutant-general of Union forces in Charleston.
My reports as to the condition of the freed people contain all I would say in the subject. The outrages upon them which have been reported speak more effectually than anything else possibly can. As with my soldiers who have been killed and wounded no effort is made by citizens to protect the freedman or punish those who trespass upon his rights or assist us in punishing them. The condition of the freedman is simply this, so long as he is subordinate after the manner of a slave and not of a freedman, and does as well he is safe from violence; but when he attempts to depart from his old discipline and assert a single privilege he meets opposition, and in localities is punished with death. This results from the fact that many especially the ignorant can see in the negro only the slave.30
By 1874, conservative southern Whites were smarter; saddled with a hooded but now hobbled Klan, they brought racial violence and intimidation into the light of day through public groups like the White League or the White Line, establishing a line based on race that southern Blacks crossed only at their peril. White hoods and robes may have come off, but the goals had changed little.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an appeal to White men:
Disregarding all minor questions of principle or policy, and having solely in view the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization, we appeal to the men of our race, of whatever language or nationality, to unite with us against that supreme danger. A league of the whites is the inevitable result of that formidable, oath-bound and blindly obedient league of the blacks.31
In Mississippi, the White League went under the name of the Red Shirts or Bloody Shirt, a reference to General Benjamin Butler, who’d since become a congressman in Massachusetts, rising in a fiery speech in support of the Ku Klux Klan Act, while waving a bloody shirt from a northern educator beat within a hair’s breath of his life by hooded night riders in March 1871. Allen P. Huggins, the educator, was beaten by the Klan, and Butler did rain down his wrath on the night riders, but no bloody shirt was ever held aloft during Butler’s speech. Truth, however, did not matter. In modern terms, “waving the bloody shirt” went viral as a meme expressing southern contempt for northerners invoking their sacrifices in the Civil War as the basis for attempts to control the south. These leagues drew members from numerous “rifle clubs” around the south where, like the Confederate flag, the red shirt became a symbol of deep reverence for southerners lamenting their loss, and longing for return to days of southern yore.
As 1874 counted down, Adelbert Ames occupied the governor’s mansion in Jackson, Mississippi, as bloody shirts waved around the state. Ames had gotten there through an 1873 election in which Republicans had overwhelmingly secured the Black vote, giving them a victory in what had long been a Democratic stronghold. Hopping mad, Democrats devised the Mississippi Plan, in hopes of retaking the state in elections to be held in 1875.
Whites were ready and ruthless, their guns were locked and loaded. And Vicksburg, a river town in the western portion of the state, became the flash point. There, ex-slave and elected sheriff Peter Crosby sought to keep the peace, and regain his office after being ousted by White citizens on trumped-up charges. On December 7, 1874, a large group of Black citizens of Vicksburg had gathered around Crosby in a show of force to help him regain his office. Red Shirts would have none of it. With the help of 160 White Leaguers, who’d crossed the Mississippi from Louisiana, they slaughtered several hundred Blacks in what is known as the “Vicksburg Massacre.” Southern Whites were ecstatic.
“Raise the banner of white supremacy,” said the Mobile Register.32 “‘Citizens’ have killed off as many ‘niggers’ as they are ready to dispose of at present,” was the opinion of the Louisville Courier-Journal. “When they get more ammunition they will renew the diversion. Meantime, as the telegraph informs us ‘the whites are in possession of everything.’”33
News traveled quickly throughout the south. After the massacre, Red Shirts and White Leaguers from all over the south poured into Vicksburg, ransacking Black homes, terrorizing Black men and women, killing them.34 Ex-slave Isaac Moseley testified that next month in front of a congressional committee visiting Vicksburg to report on the massacre. Moseley, a gravedigger, dug many burial plots for Black citizens of the Vicksburg Massacre. But he also dug a grave for one of the Red Shirts, which, he said, kept him alive. While digging that grave, Moseley heard one of the White men say, “Let us kill until we get our satisfaction.”35
A telegram came to George W. Walton, president of the board of supervisors in Vicksburg:
TRINITY TEXAS, DECEMBER 12, 1874
To the President of the Board of Supervisors:
Do you want any men? Can raise good crowd within twenty-four hours to kill out your negroes.
J. G. GATES
A. H. MASON36
Ultimately, President Grant sent federal troops to broker the conflict, which resulted in Crosby regaining his office, and that was like pouring fuel on the flames of White discontent. On June 7, 1875, Crosby and Jonathan P. Gilmer were drinking together at Fred Bowman’s saloon in Vicksburg. Gilmer, the former White sheriff, who was now Crosby’s deputy, pulled a pistol and shot Crosby in the head. Crosby miraculously survived to see Gilmer arrested but never tried. Eventually Crosby succumbed to his wounds.37
Charles E. Furlong, Republican state senator from Vicksburg’s Warren County, gave a floor speech titled “Origin of the Outrages at Vicksburg” eleven days after the massacre. Similar events were soon to happen around the state, Furlong said, and they would “require a stronger hand than that of Governor Ames.”38
But the governor’s attention lay somewhere faraway.
JACKSON, MISS., AUGUST 22, 1875
Dear Blanche:
. . . Need I tell you I miss you and the babies a great deal? And yet, while I would like to have you with me now I know it is best you should be where you are—and I would be the more content to be with you away from here than to have you here with me . . . I send love to you and the babies.39
With storm clouds on the horizon, Ames penned letters to his beautiful wife, Blanche Butler, General Benjamin Butler’s daughter, who spent most of the year away from Jackson at the family home in Lowell, Massachusetts. But this was not the time for contemplating nuptial bliss.
The elections were coming and the Mississippi Plan was in full swing. Red Shirts, White Leagues, and rifle clubs roamed the countryside unchecked. The killings of Black people rose. Newspapers around the country ran with the story of Red Shirts chasing unarmed Blacks “for mile and miles, killing them as a sportsman would kill the scattered birds of a covey.”40 Requests flooded into Jackson, imploring the governor to undertake firm action in response to the mayhem and murder engulfing the state.
That’s when Ames wrote to President Grant requesting federal troops. That’s when Grant wrote back, through his attorney general, that the country was moving on, “tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks.”41 No troops were sent to Mississippi. Ames tried raising a militia of his own to protect Black citizens, under the leadership of a Black man, Charles Caldwell. A band of Red Shirts and White Leaguers organized under the command of former governor James Alcorn. Black men and White men, Republicans and Democrats, were headed at each other with drawn weapons.
With Mississippi about to blow up, Ames simply gave in. He brokered and signed a peace deal between the parties that required him to disband the state’s militia, handing over the keys of the state to Democrats and their paramilitary thugs.
JACKSON, MISS., OCTOBER 12, 1875
Dear Blanche:
We began too late to organize and have too little means to accomplish much with the militia . . . Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disfanchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery. It is their fault (not mine, personally) that this fate is before them. They refused to prepare for war when in time of peace, when they could have done so. Now it is too late . . . The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation from the weariness of such “political outbreaks.” . . .
Last night I made up my mind to resign after the election when this revolution shall have been completed. Why should I fight on a hopeless battle for two years more, when no possible good to the Negro or anybody else would result? Why?
After all this I turn from myself to you, Beautiful—the bright, happy dwelling place of my thoughts, and send forth to you a world of love without end.42
“Refused to prepare for war in time of peace”? Had not the war already been settled at Appomattox? Had not the Red Shirts systematically disarmed Black people under Ames’s watch? “It is their fault”? In a sad denial of responsibility, Ames blamed the victims of the violence and murder. He plotted an exit for himself, knowing full well that Black folks in Mississippi would have to live with the consequences of his indecision.
By Election Day, November 2, 1875, hundreds of Black men had been killed, thousands injured, and many that remained slept in the cane fields and woods to avoid harm. In Meridian, White Leagues had taken control of the polling stations early in the morning, even though Blacks were a majority there. Looking back across Johnson Street at the voting, a group of Black men barred from casting ballots stood “sullen and morose,” watching democracy slip away.43 Though fires had burned, and Black men were murdered the night before Election Day, when asked whether he’d seen any voter intimidation in his city, Joseph P. Billings, the mayor of Columbus, Mississippi, told a Senate panel it was “quiet as a funeral” on Election Day.44 Quiet on the day democracy died.
Democrats routed Republicans. In some regions Black men either voted Democratic, or they did not vote at all. Grant wrung his hands, lamenting, “Mississippi is governed to-day by officials chosen through fraud and violence, such as would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and Christian people.”45 The US Senate investigated, but abdicated its duty to nullify the election, calling it “one of the darkest chapters in American history.”46 And, six months later, Adelbert Ames stepped down to rejoin his beloved Blanche in Massachusetts.
The success of the plan in Mississippi set off a chain reaction, with South Carolina not far behind. Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leader of the Red Shirts in South Carolina, in the elections of 1876 eventually rose to become the state’s governor, then US senator. Speaking more than thirty years later at a Red Shirt reunion in 1909, Tillman fondly recalled his Red Shirt days: “Altogether in 1874 and 1876, I was a participant in four race riots. All of these were most potent influences in shaping the conflict between the whites and blacks and producing the gratifying result which brought the white man again into control of his inheritance.”47
At least two of these race riots were outright massacres. In Hamburg, South Carolina, on July 5, 1876, and in Ellenton that September, Red Shirts, with Tillman’s rifle club participating, murdered more than one hundred Blacks. Tillman and ninety-three other Whites were indicted and prosecuted but never convicted. Really, it was a rolling riot of violence against Black people extending until Election Day. In October 1876, South Carolina governor Daniel Chamberlain issued orders disbanding rifle clubs (from which the Red Shirts drew their members). He also asked President Grant for federal forces to assist him.
Like it had in Mississippi, violence against Blacks spiraled out of control. Red Shirts forced Blacks to vote Democratic at gunpoint, then forced them to turn on other Blacks to follow suit.48 Rape of Black women was an unwritten part of the Mississippi Plan.49 But Black women were encouraged to fight back by women like Lottie Rollin and men like Robert Smalls.
Rollin argued for universal women’s suffrage on the floor of the South Carolina House of Representatives in March 1869, thus becoming the first Black woman to formally speak to a state government in the south. She organized the Women’s Rights Convention that met in Columbia the following year, declaring, “We ask suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the grounds that we are human beings and as such entitled to all human rights.”50 Black women electioneered at polling stations51 and five were arrested for attempting to vote in the 1870 election.52
Robert Smalls went to the Parris Island, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands, ahead of the 1876 election, and suggested a Reconstruction-era version of Lysistrata53 to the island’s Black women, urging, “if their husbands voted the Democratic ticket to throw them out of the house.” According to testimony before the House of Representatives, Smalls continued by saying,
When John went to Massa Hampton and pledged his word to vote for him and returned back home his wife told him “She would not give him any of that thing if you vote for Hampton.” John gone back to Massa Hampton and said, “Massa Hampton, I can’t vote for you, for woman is too sweet, and my wife says if I vote for you she won’t give me any.” And, ladies, I think, if you all do that, we won’t have a Democratic ticket polled on Paris Island.54
In South Carolina, David T. Corbin, US district attorney for South Carolina, wrote to Governor Chamberlain about Red Shirt violence,
These clubs have created and are causing a perfect reign of terror. The colored men are, many of them, lying out of doors and away from their homes at night. Many of them have been killed, and many have been taken from their beds at night and mercilessly whipped, and others have been hunted with threats of murder and whipping, who thus far, by contrast watchfulness and activity, have escaped. The white men of these clubs are riding day and night, and the colored men are informed that their only safety from death or whipping lies in their signing an agreement pledging themselves to vote the democratic ticket at the coming election.55
Grant did send troops, but in his reply to Chamberlain’s request, one senses a timidity of purpose, a hesitation of decision, and a lack of resolve to act, uncharacteristic of the great general.
How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the universe only knows; but I have an abiding faith that the remedy will come, and come speedily, and I earnestly hope that it will come peacefully . . . Expressing the hope that the better judgment and co-operation of citizens of the State over which you have presided so ably may enable you to secure a fair trial and punishment of all offenders, without distinction of race or color or previous condition of servitude, and without aid from the Federal Government.56
The situation actually called for more than Grant’s “abiding faith” or his “expressions of hope.” At any rate, the troops he sent were too little, too late. When voting counting finished on November 7, 1876, only 1,100 votes separated Wade Hampton and Chamberlain—1,100 more votes for a Democratic candidate that had come through voter intimidation and murder. South Carolina’s election results were thrown into chaos, and Chamberlain clung to power with the support of Grant’s federal troops.
But that year also saw votes cast for a new president, with Grant not seeking a third term. The election was first called for Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, and White southerners took to the streets in wild pandemonium—firecrackers burst, guns blazed, brass bands blared. The south had risen at last! Or had it?
Tilden with 184 electoral votes was one short of an outright victory, and Republicans, backing Rutherford B. Hayes, claimed irregularities in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, which happened to still have Blacks on boards of elections, still in positions of authority. Electoral boards in these states certified Hayes’s electors. White southerners, having fought so hard and killed so many Blacks to suppress the vote, would not stand for it. So, for several months there were two governors, two legislatures, and two sets of electors in South Carolina and Louisiana. That meant there were also two presidents-elect. Then, Democrats mounted a filibuster in the Senate, preventing the House from counting the Electoral College votes, throwing the country into a constitutional crisis with the inauguration pending.
With the threat of another civil war looming, the country’s desire to get on with business was stronger than its desire to get on with justice. “The members of the Congress are of the impression,” said Lucien B. Caswell, representative from Wisconsin, “that the people wish to revive business at any political sacrifice.”57 That sacrifice? The promise of liberty and justice for all Americans, particularly for all Black Americans.
With no appetite on the part of Republicans to fight, the end came soon. In March 1877, a few days before the inauguration, the Compromise of 1877 was reached, handing the presidency to Hayes and the Republicans, but handing the south back to the former Confederate states. Within weeks of assuming office, Hayes pulled all federal troops from the south. Without support, Chamberlain fell in South Carolina, and soon a round of new constitutions in southern states would obliterate the last decade, wiping clean and turning back any strides made toward equality and freedom for “We the People” in America.
In his role as a North Carolina judge, Albion Tourgée was a fierce advocate for the civil rights of people, regardless of color. Some credit him with the phrase “color-blind justice.” He stood up to White Leagues and Red Shirts and the Klan. He fined lawyers for using the word nigger in his courtroom. On September 3, 1879, at the end of a distinguished fourteen-year judicial career, not realizing he would go on to yet more fame as the lead attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, still twenty years away, Tourgée had a front-page interview appear in the New-York Tribune. One senses his weariness and frustration as he pays tribute to an enemy he’d long fought.
In all except the actual result of the physical struggle, I consider the South to have been the real victors in the war. I am filled with admiration and amazement at the masterly way in which they have brought about these results. The way in which they have neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox is the grandest thing in American politics.58
With malice aforethought, White bloodlust savagely dismantled a decade of post-war progress made by newly freed Blacks toward creating a more perfect American union. White desires for power and wealth brutally erased new institutions of power and wealth erected from Black desires for democracy and equality. Freedom dues, first paid, were then revoked. Freedom gains, first realized, were then reversed. Black lives, which first mattered, were then cast aside. W.E.B. Du Bois summarized the post–Civil War fate of Black lives succinctly: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”59
And still the question lingers: Will that sun ever rise again?