The Reconstruction era was the bloodiest period of American civil violence, as whites acted to reverse their military defeat by multiple acts of civil violence directed against blacks and their allies, the so-called carpetbaggers and scalawags. Almost immediately after Appomattox, violence began. Defeated Confederates engaged in sporadic guerilla activities, lynching, and terrorism, and sometimes in riots. One of the first big riots was in May 1866, when Memphis whites shot, beat, robbed, and raped blacks and burned Negro schools, churches, and homes. At Laurens, South Carolina, in October 1870, thirteen people were killed and several hundred wounded. In Arkansas there was outright rebellion in 1868, as whites closed down the courts, overpowered and assassinated civil authorities, and shot hundreds of blacks. In Texas, according to a United States attorney, a thousand blacks a year were killed from 1868 to 1870, “mostly from political hatred of the race.” In Louisiana, General Philip Sheridan estimated that from 1866 to 1875, thirty-five hundred people, mostly blacks, were killed or wounded. In 1868 alone, 1,884 were killed and wounded. In addition to numerous riots in New Orleans, there were frightful massacres in rural areas. In 1873, in Colfax, at least sixty, possibly as many as two hundred, blacks were butchered. In a “nigger hunt” in Bossier parish in 1868, a hundred and sixty-two blacks died. Twenty-five to thirty were killed in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1871, and eighty were estimated to have been killed in the 1875 riots in and around Yazoo City, Mississippi.
Blacks did not suffer these attacks in silence. At the behest of Reconstruction governors, they formed militia companies in some areas, and in others organized informally to defend themselves. On numerous occasions armed bands of blacks fought whites. Indeed, it was these signs of resistance that stimulated the worst white violence. The Vicksburg riot of 1874 is one instance of black resistance and white retaliation. Trouble began when whites forced the black Republican sheriff, Peter Crosby, to surrender his office at gunpoint. Crosby rallied blacks to his defense, and on Monday, December 7, about 125 armed blacks marched into town. The terrified whites organized themselves into a militia and jailed Crosby. After a period of indecision, the blacks decided to return home, but as they were leaving the whites began chasing and shooting at them. After killing some of the blacks and scattering the rest, whites roamed the countryside lynching or shooting at least thirty blacks.
The following account is taken from a majority report of a Congressional Committee investigation, “Vicksburg Troubles,” House of Representatives Report No. 265, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session, pages vii-ix. See Vernon Lane Wharton: The Negro in Mississippi, 1865–1890 (1947); Joel Williamson: After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (1965); Kenneth M. Stampp: The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (1965); Otis A. Singletary: Negro Militia and Reconstruction (1957); and W. E. B. DuBois: Black Reconstruction (1935).
About 3 o’clock in the morning of Monday, the 7th, the alarm was struck by the watchman on the court-house cupola, but it proved to be a false alarm. Between 7 and 8 the same watchman, E. D. Richardson, struck the alarm again, reporting that a considerably body of men were approaching on the Cherry Street road, information of whose approach was given by Dr. Hunt. In a very short time the court-house square was filled by a large number of excited men, armed with all sorts of weapons.
Dr. O’Leary, the mayor of the city, put the city under martial law, and delegated supreme command over the armed citizens to Horace H. Miller, an officer of some experience on the confederate side in the late war. Why he did not give this command to some of the many State militia officers on the ground, such as Brigadier-General Furlong, Colonel Beaird, Colonel French, and others, it is impossible to say, further than that it is a just inference that it was given to Colonel Miller from his known and declared position in the white line.
On assuming command, Colonel Miller first seized upon Crosby as the probable chief of the movement, and placed him under guard at the court-house. He then detailed parties of mounted men to patrol Vicks-burgh and drive all colored people off the streets—orders which were executed with extreme brutality, as will appear. Having thus secured his rear, this skillful officer moved out with a force of about eighty to one hundred well-armed men on Cherry Street, and soon confronted a body of colored men under Andrew Owens. Miller rode up where they had halted in a deep cut, on the brow of a hill, within the city limits, having first disposed his own force on the slope of the opposite hill, with a ravine and bridge between the two, and having advanced in due form a line of skirmishers to cover the bridge.
Owens, the leader of the blacks, informed Colonel Miller that they were coming in in obedience to an order from Crosby as sheriff. Miller stated that Crosby was captured and the party could do no good, but might receive much harm. Owens then demanded to see Crosby and take orders from him, and stated that he was willing to withdraw if Crosby said so. This request was granted by Miller, and Owens was escorted under guard to the court-house, where he saw Crosby and was told by him to go home.
On returning to his people, he informed Colonel Miller that he should take his men home, and they immediately proceeded to return by the way they came.
The Fleeing Negroes Fired Upon
It is clearly in testimony that they did so, and that no shot was fired by them. They retired, not in any military order, but in a confused and noisy group, about half a mile, when suddenly, and without any orders from any officer, fire was opened upon them by the whites. This fire appears to have commenced from some mounted men, who during the time of the parley had gained the flank of the colored people, but immediately became general, and was followed by a rush of all the whites who had proper arms, upon these unresisting and retreating men, who in good faith were carrying out the agreement.
There could not have been, at the outside, more than one hundred and twenty-five colored men in Owens’s party, and of these, certainly not one-half armed with any weapon but a pistol, and many wholly unarmed, and none of them armed with weapons of effectiveness. It was no battle; it was a simple massacre, unutterably disgraceful to all engaged in it. The attack began without orders; your committee do not believe that Colonel Miller ever would have given such an order, but when it began, his undisciplined mob ran on entirely beyond his control.
In the language of one of the heroes of that day who fought in that bloody field, Mr. Cratcher, “There wasn’t any danger, for we were firing with long-range gun at long range, and they with shot-guns or short-range guns.”
The testimony of Richardson, their own watchman, who saw it all from the cupola of the court-house; the testimony of Franciola and Owens, and of Cratcher, proves that the body of colored people had left the ground with no intention of a fight when the carnage commenced, wholly and unnecessarily on the part of the whites.
To read the reports of the newspapers, or even to take the testimony of some of the participants, the passage of the bridge of Lodi was nothing to the fight on Cherry Street. To lead eighty or one hundred men under heavy fire down an exposed hill, to cross a bridge and storm the opposing height in the presence of a foe superior in numbers, is an exploit worthy of the heroic days of the republic, but the truth of history compels your committee to say that there was no enemy in sight or reach during the wonderful evolution, and, further, that no white man was killed or wounded, or in any danger except from the careless shooting of his own comrades. The black people on being fired upon scattered in all directions, singly or in groups of two or three, and occasionally returned an ineffectual fire.
The killing of these men, thus retiring in good faith, was murder, willful, cowardly, and in violation of all laws of peace or of war.
Eight or nine colored men were killed here, and about twenty rescued by Colonel Miller, and sent as prisoners, under escort, to the court-house.
The Affair at Pemberton Monument
Meanwhile, another alarm of approaching forces had been given. This time they came by the Jackson road. From the best judgment your committee can form, this affair occurred in this way: A portion of the men attacked and driven as before mentioned, on Cherry Street, crossed over to a point near the Pemberton monument. A mounted company of whites, known as Captain Hogin’s, from the Yazoo River country, were coming in to help defend the city. With that curious inconsistency which seems to be part of their nature, they had left their wives, children, and property unprotected in a heavy black settlement, and gone to defend Vicksburgh, which was already armed to the teeth, against an imaginary invasion. This phenomenon can only be understood by the light of actual events as proof that no man believed in any actual danger to wife, children, or property, but was fully determined to use this outbreak as a means to political success, for these men who left their families and property unprotected to go to Vicksburgh were members of the people’s club or white line. In carelessly approaching the city, one man, named Olli Brown, was shot from ambush, probably by some of the men so crully attacked a short time before on the Cherry-Street road. A rush was at once made on the spot, the actual murderers of Brown fled, and the mixed force of whites, part from the city and part of Hogin’s command, fell upon another party, under command of Asberry, fired upon and routed them, killing several in the skirmish, but losing no men except Brown.…
But scenes far worse, far more painful, remain…
It is in evidence that the aids deputed by Colonel Miller ordered every colored man they met off the street, and that in so doing they shot three unresisting and unarmed men. And yet these men, who murdered these American citizens in cold blood on the streets of Vicksburgh, are men who by birth, education, and family relations stand high in society as now constituted in that city. Exaggerated statements of the peril of the city are telegraphed to all parts of the country; the Associated Press receives and distributes these false dispatches; and the whole country is ablaze with excitement over the “insurrection at Vicksburgh.” Offers of aid to the people of the beleaguered city come back from all quarters, and on the same night of the seventh of December, one hundred and sixty armed men from Louisiana pour in to the rescue. We quote one telegram from Texas:
[Telegram dated Trinity, Tex., December 12, 1874. Received at Vicksburgh, December 12, 1874]
To President Board of Supervisors:
Do you want any men? Can raise good crowd within twenty-four hours to kill out your negroes.
J. G. GATES AND
A. H. MASON
No longer law; no longer order. The city filled with men drunken with excitement, or worse; full of violence; full of unrestrained passion; that night of December 7 is a perfect carnival of released rascality. Decent people shut their doors and bar their windows, while the bad and dangerous element which exists in all cities, but especially in river towns, is thoroughly master of the situation.
Unauthorized searches by self-constituted authority into private houses; searches for arms converted, as is unusual, into robbery and thieving; insolent abuse of quiet people—all these wrongs are to be justly apprehended where neither the form nor the substance of law remains.
One poor old man, half crazed, but harmless, sitting quietly in a neighbor’s house, is brutally shot to death in the presence of terrified women and shrieking children. He gained his wretched living by hunting and fishing, and had a shot-gun. No one pretended that Tom Bidderman had anything to do with the fight, but he was black, and had a gun in his house, and so they murdered him for amusement as they were going from the city to restore order in the country.
Patrols of mounted men, members of the people’s clubs, traversed the settlements and executed their own hellish ideas of justice.
On that same Monday, after the sham fight was over, about noon, a party of five mounted men rode down to the house of Robert Banks, about two miles from Vicksburgh and off from the road. They dismounted and bade the old man hold their horses and went into the house. There were Mrs. Banks and five or six other frightened women, and young Robert Banks, a boy of eighteen. They asked the boy if he had any weapons, and he gave them a pistol which was in the house. Then they struck him, and, as he fled, pursued him through the house, and shot him to death. Returning, they came where the father still stood, holding their horses, ordered him to walk out to the front, and, in the presence of his family, deaf to the entreaties of the wife and mother, these cold-blooded assassins of the son, murdered the father also.
A poor old man, Mingo Green, very old and so decrepit that he was compelled to support his steps with a cane, a local exhorter of some note, chanced to meet a party of these patrols, and was put to death, and left lying in the road with the top of his head cut smooth off, or, as the witness expressed it, “the whole inside of his head showed white like a china bowl.”
A man named Buck Worrell, peaceable and unoffending, living some eight miles from Vicksburgh, not accused, even, of any complicity in the difficulty, was on the Tuesday after chased by these patrols from his own house up to the house of Mr. Edwards, a white man for whom he worked, where he prayed protection of the ladies there present. Miss Martha Edwards, to whom he appealed, merely said that she did not want him killed in her yard. They respected the young lady’s wishes, and took him into the road and shot him dead in the presence of his wife. This was done by Hebron’s company, one of the people’s clubs.
Handy Hilliard, in no way connected with the troubles, living quietly at home with his wife and children, near Vicksburgh, was murdered in cold blood.
Buck Ward was murdered on Tuesday, the 8th of December, at Mr. Wallis’s plantation.
In the Yazoo beat, which is patrolled by Captain Hogin’s company, of which Olli Brown is a member, when the funeral-procession was forming at the house, some negroes were seen at the bend of the road. Captain Hogin ordered two of his men to charge them. In so doing, one of the white men, William Vaughn, was killed. In revenge, as the committee suppose, for these two deaths of Brown and Vaughn, but some days after, three negro men, George Shephard, Joe Cook, and Emanuel Toales, were taken from their homes and families; they were shot, their throats cut, and their ears cut off, and their unburied bodies left to rot.
Other cases equally shocking to humanity were told to the committee, for which we must refer to the evidence, and your committee are forced to believe that a large part yet remains untold.
The case of Anthony Mack deserves some notice. This man was charged with commanding the party that killed Vaughn. A warrant was issued for him; he was arrested in Yazoo County, and delivered to two men, one of whom was Hogin, to be brought to Vicksburgh for trial. One the way these worthy officers of the law killed their prisoner, but the place and manner of his death are not known.
The Bodies of Murdered Negroes Neglected, etc.
From all the information before us, the committee find that in the whole affair two white men—Brown and Vaughn—appear to have been killed, and twenty-nine blacks more than half of whom were deliberately put to death in cold blood. How many more are missing and unaccounted for, lying in the cane, it is impossible to ascertain. One of the witnesses stated that we (the committee) never could find out; “but we watch where the buzzards hover, and there we find the dead men.”