Confederate Heritage Month: Hamburg and Reconstruction's End

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

"We intend to beat the negro in the battle of life, and defeat means one thing: EXTERMINATION."

-- editorial on the 'Vicksburg riots,' Birmingham News, 1875

By 1874, the defeated Confederates had a strategy for retaking political control of the South. They called it "the Mississippi Plan":

part of the white insurgency during the Reconstruction era in the Southern United States. It was devised by the Democratic Party in that state to overthrow the Republican Party in Mississippi by means of organized threats of violence and suppression or purchase of the black vote. Democrats wanted to regain political control of the legislature and governor's office. Their success led to similar plans being adopted by white Democrats in South Carolina and other majority-black states.

The name came from a series of violent skirmishes that broke out in Vicksburg, Miss., that resulted in the deaths of several hundred freed black citizens:

In 1874 whites in the city of Vicksburg were determined to suppress black voting in that year's election. White armed patrols prevented blacks from voting and succeeded in defeating all Republican city officials in the August election. By December the emboldened party forced the black sheriff, Crosby, to flee to the state capital. Blacks who rallied to the city to aid the sheriff also had to flee in the face of superior white forces, as armed whites flooded the city. Over the next few days, armed white gangs may have murdered up to 300 blacks in the city and its vicinity, in what became known as the Vicksburg riots.

The plan quickly spread throughout the South, particularly in South Carolina, where two years later another massacre, similar to the Colfax Massacre in scale and outrageousness, occurred in the now-nonexistent town of Hamburg, just across the Savannah River from Savannah, Georgia. It began with an intentional provocation, as these things always seemed to:

On July 4, 1876, Independence Day, two white planters drove in a carriage down Hamburg's wide Market Street, where they encountered the local company of the National Guard for South Carolina, which was drilling (or parading) under command of Captain D. L. "Doc" Adams. The men in the Hamburg company were mostly freedmen. According to a late 19th-century version of the events, the militia company purposely deployed to block the street and deny passage to the white men.(Allen 1888, 314) In another, the white men in the carriage intentionally drove up against the head of the column. In any case, after an exchange of words, the white planters passed through the ranks of the black parade (Haworth 1906, 131 and Allen 1888, 314).

The planters went to the local court where, at a hearing on July 6, they charged the militia with obstruction of a public road before Trial Justice Prince Rivers. The case was continued until the afternoon of July 8. More than 100 whites from Edgefield and Aiken counties arrived at court, armed with "shotguns, revolvers, hoes, axes and pitchforks." At that time Matthew Calbraith Butler, an attorney from Edgefield, appeared as the planters' counsel. (Of the many men surnamed Butler involved in this incident, he was referred to as 'General' Butler based on his service in the Confederate Army.) Despite the lack of any official standing, M. C. Butler demanded that the Hamburg company disband and turn their guns over to him personally (Allen 1888, 314-315).

As armed white men gathered in the vicinity, the militia company refused to disarm. They took refuge in the armory in the Sibley building near the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad bridge. The white militia surrounded the building. Perhaps 25 black militia and 15 other freedmen were in the building when firing began. In the exchange of gunfire, McKie Meriwether, a local white farmer, was killed.

Location map for Hamburg in 1872

Outnumbered, running out of ammunition, and learning the whites had brought a small cannon to the city from Augusta, the militiamen in the armory slipped away into the night. James Cook, Hamburg's Town Marshal, was shot and killed in the street (Budiansky 2008 233-234).

The white militia rounded up around two dozen freedmen, some from the militia, and about 2 a.m. took them to a spot near the South Carolina Railroad and bridge. There the whites formed what was later called the "Dead Ring", and debated the fate of the black men. The whites picked out four men and, going around the ring, murdered them one at a time: Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens, and Albert Myniart. Several other freedmen were wounded either in escape or in a general fusillade as the ring broke up. According to the state attorney general's report, freedman Moses Parks was also killed here (Allen 1888 316); the US Senate investigation said he had been killed earlier near Cook (Budiansky 2008 233-234). The white militia looted the town and damaged homes and businesses (Budiansky 2008 226-237, Allen 1888 314-317).

Stephen Budiansky, in The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomatox, describes what happened next:

 By about eleven o'clock the rifle club men had rounded up twenty-seven of the colored militiamen and marched them a ways down Market Street just between the last house and the South Carolina Rail Road and surrounded them with a ring of men with guns, pistols, axes, hatchets, and grubbing hoes to keep them there. They were there for some time.

Ben Tillman and his squad had been in on the shooting of [Town Marshal Jim] Cook on the street north of the Sibley Building, and two of McKie Meriweather's cousins were in his company, and they had come up and said it was a damned poor piece of work to have lost one of their best men and have only two dead Negroes to show for it. So they made their way up to the ring where the prisoners were being held. It was now two in the morning. Henry Getzen lived close enough to Hamburg to know some of the colored men, and he was accordingly given the task of designating the "meanest characters" among them.

Allan Attaway was a county commissioner and a lieutenant of the militia, and when he saw Getzen approach the ring, he called out to him. "Mr. Getzen, do what you can for me."

"God damn you, I will do what I can for you directly. I know you."

And a dozen or so of the rifle club men grabbed Attaway and marched him across the railroad tracks down to the field. "Turn around you yellow son of a bitch," a voice yelled, and then there was the sound of gunshots, and then the white men returned, without Attaway.

Then Getzen called out another man, David Phillips, and then Pompey Curry, and then Albert Myniart, and then Hampton Stephens, and each one was marched off across the railroad, and each time the sound of shooting came back across the night.

Pompey Curry managed to break away and run when his name was called and he was hit in the leg below the know and fell to the ground and pleayed dead and managed to crawl away and hide in the bushes when the men had gone back for their next prisoner. (When Curry survived to give depositions against the white men, they were furious that they had been so careless.)

And when they finished with the men Getzen had picked out, the rifle club men started arguing about what to do with the rest. One voice suggested they take them to the jail in Augusta, and another said turn them loose, and one of the Georgia men who had come over to help answered, "By God, if you do that you need never call in the assistance of Georgia any more." But one of the men who had led most of the executions, John Swearingen, Ben Tillman's brother-in-law, said they had lynched enough of them, and he said, "All you niggers hold up your right hands and swear you will never raise arms against the white man ever again and never give any evidence against them in court." And then he told them to go, and then the rifle club men fired some volleys after them, as they were fifty yards down the road, inflicting a few parting injuries.

There was a coroner's jury held afterward headed up by the African American Judge Prince, and it indicted 94 white men in the attack, including Matthew C. Butler, Ben R. Tillman, A. P. Butler, and others of the most prominent men in Aiken and Edgefield Counties, South Carolina, and Richmond County, Georgia. As we will see, not only were they never prosecuted, but some of these men became some of the most prominent national politicians from South Carolina in history.

The official report by the Attorney General of South Carolina ends with this statement:

... the facts show the demand on the militia to give up their arms was made by persons without lawful authority to enforce such demand or to receive the arms had they been surrendered; that the attack on the militia to compel a compliance with this demand was without lawful excuse or justification; and that after there had been some twenty or twenty-five prisoners captured and completely in the power of their captors, five of them were deliberately shot to death and three more severely wounded. It further appears that not content with thus satisfying their vengeance, many of the crowd added to their guilt the crime of robbery of defenceless people, and were only prevented from arson by the efforts of their own leaders. (Allen 1888, 317)

What's also undeniable is that the Hamburg Massacre was the final capstone of the violent campaign to overturn Reconstruction. Within a year the valiant attempt to enforce the verdict of the war would end.

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals

'The River Was Dyed'  

War By Other Means

Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

Crying 'Bloody Shirt' 

Massacre at Colfax
 
 

Confederate Heritage Month: Massacre at Colfax

A contemporary magazine illustration of the siege of the Colfax courthouse

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

The violence against the newly freed black populace and their white defenders had been slowly ratcheted up by a series of increasingly horrifying acts of individual violence -- school burnings, lynchings, floggings, assassinations -- that began to reach a fever pitch that finally exploded in the spring of 1872.

There can only be one inevitable outcome to that much unrestrained and unrequited hate: an act of near-genocide like the Colfax Massacre.

It grew out of the realization that Democrats in the South, particularly Louisiana, were beginning to seize back political control not through the ballot box but by force -- literally sending in armed militias to take control of local government officers. One of the places where this was particularly acute was in Grant Parish, Louisiana. Wikipedia:

Fearful that the Democrats might try to take over the local parish government, blacks started to create trenches around the courthouse and drilled to keep alert. The Republican officeholders stayed there overnight. They held the town for three weeks.

On March 28, Nash, Cazabat, Hadnot and other white Fusionists called for armed whites to retake the courthouse on April 1. Whites were recruited from nearby Winn and surrounding parishes to join their effort. The Republicans Shaw, Register and Flowers and others began to collect a posse of armed blacks to defend the courthouse.

Black Republicans Lewis Meekins and state militia captain William Ward, a black Union veteran, raided the homes of the opposition leaders: Judge William R. Rutland, Bill Cruikshank and Jim Hadnot. Gunfire erupted between whites and blacks on April 2 and again on April 5, but the shotguns were too inaccurate to do any harm. The two sides arranged for peace negotiations. Peace ended when a white man shot and killed a black man named Jesse McKinney, described as a bystander.

In his excellent reconstruction of the tragedy, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, Charles Lane describes how McKinney, who had just returned to his home from the courthouse, was killed:

McKinney was repairing his fence, no more than twenty-four paces from his front door. As he worked, a group of about a dozen white riders suddenly galloped up. Some of them jumped their mounts over the fence. A man in a white shirt and black vest raised a pistol and fired it at McKinney's head. McKinney let out a ghastly scream, like the wail of a slaughtered pig, and sank to the ground. "I got him, he's dead as hell!" his attacker cried. The group whooped and capered around his body. It had all happened in an instant -- right in front of Laurinda McKinney, who was standing on the front porch, with her six-year-old son, Butler. She hugged Butler to her knees and waited for their turn to die. 

Lane explains that though "the whites rode off," the murder "was the end of the peace conference. The whites had drawn first blood." Soon, the number of blacks at the courthouse increased to 500,  including women and children seeking refuge from the violence breaking out all across the countryside.

Wikipedia again:

Another armed conflict on April 6 ended with whites' fleeing from armed blacks. With all the unrest in the community, black women and children joined the men at the courthouse for protection. William Ward, the commanding officer of Company A, 6th Infantry Regiment, Louisiana State Militia, headquartered in Grant Parish, had been elected state representative from the parish on the Republican ticket.

He wrote to Governor Kellogg seeking U.S. troops for reinforcement and gave the letter to William Smith Calhoun for delivery. Calhoun took the steamboat LaBelle down the Red River but was captured by Paul Hooe, Hadnot and Cruikshank. They ordered Calhoun to tell blacks to leave the courthouse.

The black defenders refused to leave although threatened by parties of armed whites commanded by Nash. To recruit men during the rising political tensions, Nash had contributed to lurid rumors that blacks were preparing to kill all the white men and take the white women as their own.

On April 8 the anti-Republican Daily Picayune newspaper of New Orleans distorted events by the following headline: “ THE RIOT IN GRANT PARISH. FEARFUL ATROCITIES BY THE NEGROES. NO RESPECT SHOWN TO THE DEAD. ”

Such news attracted more whites from the region to Grant Parish to join Nash; all were experienced Confederate veterans. They acquired a four-pound cannon that could fire iron slugs. As the Klansman Dave Paul said, "Boys, this is a struggle for white supremacy."
 Cazabat had directed Nash as sheriff to put down what he called a riot. Nash gathered an armed white paramilitary group and veteran officers from Rapides, Winn and Catahoula parishes. He did not move his forces toward the courthouse until noon on Easter Sunday, April 13. Nash led more than 300 armed white men, most on horseback and armed with rifles.

Nash reportedly ordered the defenders of the courthouse to leave. When that failed, Nash gave women and children camped outside the courthouse thirty minutes to clear out. After they left, the shooting began. The fighting continued for several hours with few casualties. When Nash's paramilitary maneuvered the cannon behind the building, some of the defenders panicked and left the courthouse. About 60 defenders ran into nearby woods and jumped into the river. Nash sent men on horseback after the fleeing black Republicans, and his paramilitary group killed most of them on the spot.

Soon Nash's forces directed a black captive to set the courthouse roof on fire. The defenders displayed white flags for surrender: one made from a shirt, the other from a page of a book. The shooting stopped. Nash's group approached and called for those surrendering to throw down their weapons and come outside.

What happened next is in dispute. According to the reports of some whites, James Hadnot was shot and wounded by someone from the courthouse. "In the Negro version, the men in the courthouse were stacking their guns when the white men approached, and Hadnot was shot from behind by an overexcited member of his own force." Hadnot died later, after being taken downstream by a passing steamboat. In the aftermath of Hadnot's shooting, the white paramilitary group reacted with mass killing of the black men. 

Henry Louis Gates, in his review of Lane's book, describes the melee that ensued, leading up to the final bloodletting:

Sensing trouble, the few remaining whites inside the courthouse fled, leaving approximately 150 black men to fight for the Republican cause.

At high noon, literally, the white riders galloped through town, with former sheriff Nash shouting at the women whose husbands had gone up to the courthouse: "You see these damned sons of bitches have run off and left you to take care of yourself. Now you women get out of here, and not a damn one of you will get hurt."

Once at the courthouse, Nash and the other members of the white mob set up their cannon and fired it and their guns. The blacks in and around the courthouse met their volley and tried using their own cannon, but in the heat of battle, it simply exploded. For two hours, the fighting continued without either side claiming the advantage until the whites relocated their cannon to an unguarded levee around the blacks' left flank. One black defender, Adam Kimball, was struck in the abdomen, and "[w]hen he looked down," Lane writes, "he saw his intestines falling out."

Outgunned, the black defenders inside the trenches retreated to the courthouse. Others fled, many of them captured or killed by the whites. The quickest way to smoke the rest of them out, ex-sheriff Nash decided, was to set the two sides' long-fought-over prize on fire, which his men did by hoisting kerosene-soaked cotton wads to the end of a bamboo fishing pole and forcing one of their black prisoners at gunpoint to take it inside. "You're a good old nigger," his former boss, William "Bill" Cruikshank, proclaimed.

Christopher Lemann, in his book Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, describes the horrifying denoument inside the courthouse:

Inside the building they pried up floorboards and tried, unsuccessfully, to hide beneath them. They were all killed, unarmed, at close range, while begging for mercy....What was happening now was not a hard military fight but a killing frenzy after the battle was over, after the outcome had been clearly settled, and with [the whites'] opponents unarmed.

The aftermath, from Wikipedia:

 As more than 40 times as many blacks died as did whites, historians describe the event as a massacre. The white paramilitary group killed unarmed men trying to hide in the courthouse. They rode down and killed those attempting to flee. They dumped some bodies in the Red River. About 50 blacks survived the afternoon and were taken prisoner. Later that night they were summarily killed by their captors, who had been drinking. Only one black from the group, Levi Nelson, survived. He was shot by Cruikshank but managed to crawl away unnoticed. He later served as one of the Federal government's chief witnesses against those who were indicted for the attacks.[14]

... The officers filed a military report in which they identified by name three whites and 105 blacks who had died, plus noted they had recovered 15-20 unidentified blacks from the river. They also noted the savage nature of many of the killings, suggesting an out-of-control situation.

The exact number of dead was never established.: two U.S. Marshals, who visited the site on April 15 and buried dead, reported 62 fatalities; a military report to Congress in 1875 identified 81 black men by name who had been killed, and also estimated that between 15 and 20 bodies had been thrown into the Red River, and another 18 were secretly buried, for a grand total of "at least 105"; a state historical marker from 1950 noted fatalities as three whites and 150 blacks. 

The historian Eric Foner, a specialist in the Civil War and Reconstruction, wrote about the event:

The bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era, the Colfax massacre taught many lessons, including the lengths to which some opponents of Reconstruction would go to regain their accustomed authority. Among blacks in Louisiana, the incident was long remembered as proof that in any large confrontation, they stood at a fatal disadvantage. "The organization against them is too strong. ..." Louisiana black teacher and Reconstruction legislator John G. Lewis later remarked. "They attempted [armed self-defense] in Colfax. The result was that on Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes."

The case did not end with the smoldering wreckage of the courthouse. Federal authorities attempted to prosecute the main perpetrators, and the case wound up going all the way to the Supreme Court -- where the cause of the Reconstruction itself was dealt a deadly legal blow. From Wikipedia:

When the federal government appealed the case, it was heard by the US Supreme Court as United States v. Cruikshank (1875). The Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 (which was based on the Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment) applied only to actions committed by the state, and that it did not apply to actions committed by individuals or private conspiracies. ... The Federal government could not prosecute cases such as the Colfax killings. The court said plaintiffs who believed their rights were abridged had to seek protection from the state. Louisiana did not prosecute any of the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre; most southern states would not prosecute white men for attacks against freedmen.

The publicity about the Colfax Massacre and subsequent Supreme Court ruling encouraged the growth of white paramilitary organizations. In May 1874, Nash formed the first chapter of the White League from his paramilitary group, and chapters soon were formed in other areas of Louisiana, as well as the southern parts of nearby states. Unlike the former KKK, they operated openly and often curried publicity. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." Other paramilitary groups such as the Red Shirts also arose, especially in South Carolina and Mississippi, which also had black majorities of population.

The Washington Post noted:

As Lane points out, nowhere in Chief Justice Morrison Waite's 5,000-word opinion did he mention the fact that dozens of black men had been murdered in cold blood at Colfax. Cruikshank hammered the final nail into the coffin of federal efforts to protect the basic rights of black citizens in the South. Reconstruction effectively ended a year later, and the Jim Crow era began. 

If you travel to Colfax, Louisiana, today, there isn't much left to remind people of these events, except for this sign, erected by the state in 1950:

"On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South."

That would be one way of putting it.

Another can be found down at the old Colfax cemetery, where the following memorial can be found:

"Erected to the memory of the heroes, Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy. April 13, 1873"

 As Richard Rubin observed in The Atlantic: "It is the frankest monument I have ever seen."

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals

'The River Was Dyed'  

War By Other Means

Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

Crying Bloody Shirt 

Confederate Heritage Month: Crying 'Bloody Shirt'

A cover of the Democrat-leaning satirical magazine Puck, from 1887,
depicting Rep. John Sherman still waving a 'bloody shirt'

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

There's another well-used phrase that has its origins in the Reconstruction period, like "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" -- and like them, devised for the purpose of obfuscating the campaign of eliminationist violence that white Southerners unleashed on freed blacks and the whites who sought to help them. 

"Waving the bloody shirt":

"the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism."

... In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.

Stephen Budiansky, as we noted in the previous installment, described in his amazing book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War the fate that befell a white "carpetbagger" -- that is, an educator who had the temerity to attempt to organize schools for black children -- named Allen Huggins was brutally whipped within an inch of his life by the Ku Klux Klan.

But that was only the beginning of the story (excerpted in the New York Times):

The sequel was this—or at least this was the story everyone in Monroe County believed, and in time everyone in Mississippi and the whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered the bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, and he carried it to Washington, D.C., and there he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, and in a fiery speech on the floor of the United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Southern outrages and called for passage of a bill to give the federal government the power to break the Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Northern man’s suffering at the hand of the Ku Klux. And so was born the memorable phrase, “waving the bloody shirt.”

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.

That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

Most astonishing of all was the fact that the whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington and waved on the House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.

The story about Huggins being whipped by the Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress and then returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge and a determination to arrest every man he could lay his hands on who had been a part of the reign of Ku Klux murder and terror in those parts. And Benjamin Butler—“Beast Butler,” as he was invariably called in the Southern press, the man who had committed the unpardonable insult against Southern womanhood as the Union occupation commander in New Orleans during the war with his order that the next Southern woman who insulted his troops on the street would be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”— this nemesis of the South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about the Ku Klux outrages on the House floor that April, and did tell the story of Huggins’s brutal beating in the course of it.

But nowhere in the Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on the House floor is there any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in the press accounts of the leading papers of the time is there any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on the floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s appearances before Congress does such a story appear. That part never happened.

What was more, this was not the first time that Southerners had invented the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of blood-stained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands. The same story had cropped up fifteen years earlier in connection with another Massachusetts politician equally reviled in the South, Senator Charles Sumner.

Once again the beating was a fact, the alleged Northern reaction to it a fantasy. Furious at the insult to Southern honor Sumner had committed in a speech attacking slavery and the morality of the slave owner, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks had approached Sumner in the Senate chamber, stood over his desk, and beat him on the head thirty times with his gold-headed cane until Sumner crumpled to the floor in a pool of his own blood.

And sure enough, Southerners were soon saying that Sumner’s bloody coat had become a revered “holy relic” in Yankee and abolitionist circles. Sumner, they said, had carried his own blood-encrusted garment to England to show the Duchess of Argyle, when she invited him to dinner; had placed it in the hands of an awe-struck John Brown, before his fateful raid on Harper’s Ferry; had put it on public display in Exeter Hall. “All the abject whines of Mr. Sumner, for being well whipped,” wrote one Southerner in 1856, a few months after the event, “all the exhibitions of his bloody shirt to stale Boston virgins who, in vexation of having failed to secure a man, would now wed a Sumner, have proved futile.” Years later, years after the Civil War, scornful stories about Northerners exhibiting Sumner’s bloody shirt were still being circulated in the South. Not a scrap of it was true.

A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

It's also important to realize that education was one of the critical points of attack for defenders of the Confederacy, precisely because schooling black children threatened to overturn one of the core myths of white supremacists -- namely, that blacks were naturally too ignorant and stupid to be teachable, which is why they need to be under the control of their white masters. If black children could read and write and do maths, they knew their claims of innate superiority would be revealed for the sham they were.

So teachers were flogged and lynched, and schoolhouses burned to the ground, as the first wave of terrorism struck the newly freed ex-slave community and their helpers. Douglas R. Egerton, in The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era, describes in detail the key role played in what ensued by the attacks on black education [pp.154-156]:

A handful of former Confederates, either because of their own religious beliefs or due to practical considerations, endorsed the education of black children. ... But those dissenting voices found their way into newspapers precisely because they were atypical. R.D. Harper, the superintendent of education in Alabama, marveled at the progress the [Freedmen's] Bureau had made despite "the prejudice against and the opposition to the education of the freedmen." An educator in Mobile noted that local whites were "displeased that negroes should desire to improve their intellectual condition, and yet more displeased that any white person should be found, perverse enough to encourage these improper aspirations."

The moment they quit their classrooms each day, northern teachers faced a steady barrage of criticism from those raised to believe that black inferiority justified and even necessitated their enslavement. "I do assure you," a white woman snapped at one teach, "you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read, as to teach these niggers. They can't learn." Just as the Confederate leadership understood that the potential recruitment of black soldiers negated their carefully constructed pro-slavery ideas, the notion that educated blacks might prove to be as clever as whites challenged long-held assumptions. The "country niggers are like monkeys," the woman added. "You can't learn them to come in when it rains."

When it came to dealing with female teachers, southern whites invariably resorted to social ostracism, hoping to make the young women so miserable that they would abandon their crusade. "The teachers are mostly a tabooed class," sighed Bureau agent H.H. Moore. As they walked down the street or shopped for goods, Harriet Greeley wrote, schoolmarms were insulted, told to "go to the devil" and they watched as locals "pass by on the other side because we are associated with the Colored people." Housing was a consistent problem. Single teachers rarely wished to reside with black families, who in any case had little room to spare, and even those white women who desperately needed additional income refused to rent rooms to northern women. When Maria Waterbury of Saratoga, N.Y., took a position in Tennessee, she and three other young teachers were turned away from a nearly empty boardinghouse. "No you can't come into the house," the proprietress snarled. "Nigger teachers, indeed. As though we would disgrace ourselves having them come into the house." ...

Male teachers faced far worse. Reports from around the South told of endless attacks on men employed by Bureau schools. "When a teacher goes to some [Louisiana] village and opens a school for colored children," Tribune editor Lous Charles Roudanez charged, "he is turned out and not seldom beaten, stabbed or killed." Black Republicans in Texas complained that in many cases "violence has been used against both teacher and buildings." ... In Granada, Mississippi, Lieutenant J. B. Blanding, a twenty-five-year-old Bureau agent, was shot three times in the head while out for an evening stroll. The next morning, a "committee of citizens" paid a call on the dying Blanding's captain, warning him that "the teachers must leave, and that if he himself did not leave he would be killed next." 

What followed was a true reign of terror at the hands of the most conscienceless population of thugs in American history. And in classic Confederate fashion, reality was inverted on its head -- just as the bloody shirt became a symbol not of the violent outrages committed by Southerners but of the horrible audacity of Northerners to make an issue of them, so to was a postwar regime designed to spread democracy to the impoverished working people of all classes in the South and end slavery somehow transformed into the essence of tyranny itself.

Budiansky again:

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

“No free people, ever,” declared a speaker at a convention of the state’s white establishment a few years later, had been subjected to the “domination of their own slaves,” and the applause was thunderous. “This is a white man’s government,” was the phrase echoed over and over in the prints of the Democratic press and the orations of politicians denouncing the “tyranny” to which the “oppressed” South was being subjected.

A bald fact: more than three thousand freedmen and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for a hundred years to come. Among the dead were more than sixty state senators, judges, legislators, sheriffs, constables, mayors, county commissioners, and other officeholders whose only crime was to have been elected. They were lynched by bands of disguised men who dragged them from cabins by night, or fired on from ambushes on lonely roadsides, or lured into a barroom by a false friend and on a prearranged signal shot so many times that the corpse was nothing but shreds, or pulled off a train in broad daylight by a body of heavily-armed men resembling nothing so much as a Confederate cavalry company and forced to kneel in the stubble of an October field and shot in the head over and over again, at point blank.

So saturated is our collective memory with Gone With the Wind stock characters of thieving carpetbaggers, ignorant Negroes, and low scalawags, that it comes as a shock not so much to discover that there were men and women of courage, idealism, rectitude, and vision who risked everything to try to build a new society of equality and justice on the ruins of the Civil War, who fought to give lasting meaning to the sacrifices of that terrible struggle, who gave their fortunes, careers, happiness, and lives to make real the simple and long-delayed American promise that all men were created equal—it comes as a shock not so much to be confronted by their idealism and courage and uprightness as by the realization that they were convinced, up to the very last, that they would succeed. Confident in the rightness of their cause, backed by the military might of the United States government, secure in the ringing declarations, now the supreme law of the land embodied in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution, that slavery was not only dead but that equality and the right to vote were the patrimony now of all Americans, they could not imagine that their nation could win such a terrible war and lose the ensuing peace.

Indeed, it's common to hear neo-Confederate agitators -- those folks who are still pushing for modern secession by the South -- describe Lincoln to this day as a "tyrant."

The idea of being governed by a black president? To many of these people even today, that is itself the essence of tyranny. Indeed, the bloody shirt survives even today, more than 150 years later, as a rhetorical ruse deployed by conservatives as an aggressive form of defense by people like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump.

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals

'The River Was Dyed'  

War By Other Means

Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

Confederate Heritage Month: Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

The 'scalawag' Jonas Wilkerson and his unnamed accomplice
in 'Gone With the Wind'

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

The Confederacy and its murderous offspring, the Civil War, produced a lot of phrases that remain with us even today. Terms like "carpetbagger" -- which today is the dismissive phrase for any opportunistic outsider who exploits local misfortunes for the personal benefit -- and "scalawag" (which we think of as just a nogoodnik) came out of the South during Reconstruction. And they were both used to disguise the ill intent of the violent racial terrorists who seized control of the South during this period.

From Wikipedia:

"Carpetbagger" was a pejorative term referring to the carpet bags (a form of cheap luggage at the time) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. The term is still used today to refer to a parachute candidate, an outsider who runs for public office in an area where he or she does not have deep community ties, or has lived only for a short time.

 And again ...

The word "scalawag", originally referring to low-grade farm animals, was adopted by their opponents to refer to Southern whites who formed a Republican coalition with black freedmen and Northern newcomers (called carpetbaggers) to take control of their state and local governments. Among the earliest uses in this new meaning were references in Alabama and Georgia newspapers in the summer of 1867, first referring to all southern Republicans, then later restricting it to only White ones.

The problem is that these were Southern terms for the people who came to institute postwar reform in their territories -- that is, they descriptors of the very people they hated perhaps even more than freed black people themselves. The terms were specifically eliminationist in nature -- that is, intended to so deeply dehumanize their targets as to render them objects fit mainly for elimination. They became precursors to the unholy violence and viciousness that then descended upon postwar white reformers, mainly by way of creating permission for it.

An anti-Freedmen's Bureau cartoon

In reality, most "carpetbaggers" were schoolteachers who dared to provide literacy programs for young freed black slaves; politicians who attempted to support the work of the Freedmen's Bureau (which was under constant assault from Southern Democrats) and promote civil-rights legislation in the South; and Northern businessmen who came South to invest in Southern plantations operating with paid labor, in hopes they could help the South's economy revive and turn a penny of profit in the process.

As Eric Foner explains:

... Most carpetbaggers probably combine the desire for personal gain with a commitment to taking part in an effort "to substitute the civilization of freedom for that of slavery". ... Carpetbaggers generally supported measures aimed at democratizing and modernizing the South – civil rights legislation, aid to economic development, the establishment of public school systems.

Additionally, as Wikipedia explains:

... Many carpetbaggers were businessmen who purchased or leased plantations and became wealthy landowners, hiring freedmen to do the labor. Most were former Union soldiers eager to invest their savings in this promising new frontier, and civilians lured south by press reports of "the fabulous sums of money to be made in the South in raising cotton." Foner notes that "joined with the quest for profit, however, was a reforming spirit, a vision of themselves as agents of sectional reconciliation and the South's "economic regeneration." Accustomed to viewing Southerners—black and white—as devoid of economic initiative and self-discipline, they believed that only "Northern capital and energy" could bring "the blessings of a free labor system to the region."

In addition to being hopelessly naive about the nature of the deep loathing to which they had unwittingly exposed themselves, there was indeed some corruption -- particularly when it came to handing out federal dollars, which was a problem throughout the Grant administration: 

Gen. Milton S. Littlefield, was dubbed the "Prince of Carpetbaggers," and bought votes in the legislature "to support grandiose and fraudulent railroad schemes." Escott concludes that some Democrats were involved, but Republicans "bore the main responsibility for the issue of $28 million in state bonds for railroads and the accompanying corruption. This sum, enormous for the time, aroused great concern." Foner says Littlefield disbursed $200,000 (bribes) to win support in the legislature for state money for his railroads, and Democrats as well as Republicans were guilty of taking the bribes and making the decisions on the railroad.

In the end, their greatest flaw was simply a naivete about the depth of the federal government's commitment to the ideals of Reconstruction, which it turned out were not very deep. Especially not in the face of the campaign of terrorist violence that soon struck, targeting black voters, carpetbaggers, and scalawags alike. What followed was a fairly typical pattern: Local hostility would eventually drive the new plantation or other business owners into poverty and receivership, at which point the families that had originally operated the farms and businesses often wound up owning them again, plus the investments made by the Northerners.

And if they were educators or politicians, there was a pattern too: The carpetbaggers would meet serious physical threats to their well-beings or that of their families, or the schools in which they taught would be burned to the ground. If they organized black voters or taught freed slaves how to read but were white, they would usually be beaten and warned to leave. Repeat offenses resulted in lynching -- which was often the fate of any black man caught engaged in these activities.

Allen P. Huggin was a typical carpetbagger -- an educator whose mission was to organize schools for rural black children and freed slaves. Stephen Budiansky describes what happened to him in his great book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomatox:

 The terror began almost as soon as the Civil War ended in 1865; it lasted until 1876, when the last of the governments of the Southern states freely elected through universal manhood suffrage was toppled in a well-orchestrated campaign of violence, fraud, and intimidation—thereby putting an end to Reconstruction, erasing the freedmen’s newly won political rights, and securing white conservative home rule to the South for a hundred years to come.

In some ways the small incident in question was no different from thousands of others like it that took place in those years. At ten o’clock on the night of March 9, 1871, a band of one hundred and twenty men on horseback, disguised, heavily armed, even their horses cloaked in white sheets to conceal any identifiable markings, surrounded the house of one George R. Ross deep in the river-cut country southeast of the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County, Mississippi. Allen P. Huggins, a Northern man who had settled in Mississippi after the war, was staying the night there, and he was awakened by a loud voice calling upon Ross to bring out “the man who was in the house.”

Huggins looked out the window and, by the bright moonlight, saw the porch crowded with men in white hoods and robes. They told him that, unless he came out to receive their “warning,” they would burn the place down.

Ross—“a good, respectable Democrat”—pleaded with Huggins to do as they asked and spare his frightened wife and children. So after securing a promise that “not a hair of your head shall be injured,” Huggins agreed to go down to the gate to hear what the men had come to tell him. It was just this. The men—whom Huggins would later describe as “gentlemanly fellows, men of cultivation, well educated, a much different class of men than I ever supposed I would meet in a Ku-Klux gang”—did not like his “radical ways,” they said. As superintendent of schools for the county, Huggins had instituted public schooling, was trying to “educate the negroes,” they said. They had stood it just as long as they were going to. Now he had ten days to leave—leave the county, leave the state altogether—or be killed.

Huggins replied that he would go when he was good and ready to go.

So the men marched him down the road, and when they reached a small hill a quarter of a mile away, one of them came toward him from where the horses were being held, and in his hand was a stout stirrup leather. And without any further ceremony, he began beating Huggins with the stirrup, with all his might.

Then the men took turns, each eager to get their licks in. “They said they all wanted to get a chance at me,” Huggins recalled afterward, “that I was stubborn, and just such a man as they liked to pound.” Counting aloud each stroke, they stopped after twenty-five and again asked him if he would leave and again he refused; and so after fifty, and so after seventy-five, until he was left senseless, more dead than alive. When he came to, the men trained their pistols on him and repeated their warning that if any of them laid eyes upon him in ten days’ time, he was a dead man.

Most people fled such circumstances, and indeed Huggins did. But the legacy of that night would live on -- in classically twisted Confederate fashion.

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals

'The River Was Dyed'  

War By Other Means

Confederate Heritage Month: War By Other Means

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

Officially, the Civil War is considered to have ended on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House. However, the truth is that it really only ceased being a war of battlefields and armies, and in short order shifted into another phase -- one of war waged by terrorist violence.

That war -- call it the War of Reconstruction -- was won decisively by the South.

Lee's was only the largest of the Confederacy's scattered armies, and it was several more weeks, and at least one more battle (Palmito Ranch), before the rest of the armies joined in the surrender and the fighting ceased. Even then, the bloodshed was slow to stop, as marauders and other violence-prone remnants of the war committed random acts of murder and robbery around the countryside.

But it was the Ku Klux Klan -- whose name, ostensibly, was an adaptation of the Greek word Kuklos, for "circle," suggesting a closed family by adding "clan" -- that came to represent the new war that Southerners intended to wage, now that their "gallant" army had failed to defend the institutions of slavery and white supremacism, as promised. It was a war by other means -- assassination, lynching, targeted violence, mass terrorism -- and it proved to be very effective indeed.

An important precursor of the Klan was the antebellum slave patrols that began in the 1700s and continued up to the opening of the Civil War itself. Every able-bodied male under the age of 45 was liable to serve in these patrols, and they played a significant role in shaping the mindset of poor, non-slave-holding whites against black slaves.

Wikipedia:

Slave patrols began in South Carolina in 1704 and spread throughout the colonies and lasted well beyond the American Revolution. As the population of black slaves boomed, especially with the invention of the cotton gin, so did the fear of slave resistance and uprisings. Its development began when other means of slave control failed to instill slave control and obedience. ...

Slave owners feared slave gatherings would allow them to trade or steal goods and the potential for a rebellion. South Carolina and Virginia selected patrols from state militias. Slave patrols were often equipped with guns and whips and would exert brutal and racially motivated control.

The Klan picked right up, after the war, where these slave patrols (which remained in place up through the war, until near its very end) had left off. Via Infoplease:

The original Ku Klux Klan was organized by ex-Confederate elements to oppose the Reconstruction policies of the radical Republican Congress and to maintain "white supremacy." After the Civil War, when local government in the South was weak or nonexistent and there were fears of black outrages and even of an insurrection, informal vigilante organizations or armed patrols were formed in almost all communities. These were linked together in societies, such as the Men of Justice, the Pale Faces, the Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, and the Order of the White Rose. The Ku Klux Klan was the best known of these, and in time it absorbed many of the smaller organizations.

It was organized at Pulaski, Tenn., in May, 1866. Its strange disguises, its silent parades, its midnight rides, its mysterious language and commands, were found to be most effective in playing upon fears and superstitions. The riders muffled their horses' feet and covered the horses with white robes. They themselves, dressed in flowing white sheets, their faces covered with white masks, and with skulls at their saddle horns, posed as spirits of the Confederate dead returned from the battlefields. Although the Klan was often able to achieve its aims by terror alone, whippings and lynchings were also used, not only against blacks but also against the so-called carpetbaggers and scalawags.

A general organization of the local Klans was effected in Apr., 1867, at Nashville, Tenn. Gen. N. B. Forrest, the famous Confederate cavalry leader, was made Grand Wizard of the Empire and was assisted by ten Genii. Each state constituted a Realm under a Grand Dragon with eight Hydras as a staff; several counties formed a Dominion controlled by a Grand Titan and six Furies; a county was a Province ruled by a Grand Giant and four Night Hawks; the local Den was governed by a Grand Cyclops with two Night Hawks as aides. The individual members were called Ghouls.

Control over local Dens was not as complete as this organization would seem to indicate, and reckless and even lawless local leaders sometimes committed acts that the leaders could not countenance. General Forrest, in Jan., 1869, seemingly under some apprehension as to the use of its power, ordered the disbandment of the Klan and resigned as Grand Wizard. Local organizations continued, some of them for many years.

It's worth noting that while the devotees of this original incarnation of the Klan wore masks of varying kinds while committing their various atrocities, they never wore the peaked caps and white robes or deployed the flaming crosses that became the icons of their later mythology. That was all the product of a movie, much later on.

However, there is no question it became a real political power in the South in very short time:

By 1870, the Ku Klux Klan had branches in nearly every southern state. Even at its height, the Klan did not boast a well-organized structure or clear leadership. Local Klan members–often wearing masks and dressed in the organization’s signature long white robes and hoods–usually carried out their attacks at night, acting on their own but in support of the common goals of defeating Radical Reconstruction and restoring white supremacy in the South. Klan activity flourished particularly in the regions of the South where blacks were a minority or a small majority of the population, and was relatively limited in others. Among the most notorious zones of Klan activity was South Carolina, where in January 1871 500 masked men attacked the Union county jail and lynched eight black prisoners.

The policies of Reconstruction -- aiming to extend the rights of Southern blacks -- had the unintended effect of pushing hundreds of resentful and anxious veterans into the Klan, which soon began instituting a systematic policy of violence in opposition to the new social order. Former slaves were the obvious target of this terrorism, but the Klan also harassed, intimidated and even killed Northern teachers, judges, politicians and "carpetbaggers" of all ilk. By late 1867, the movement had spread throughout the small towns of the South, though it did not take hold in urban areas, perhaps because at that time the cities were not suffering the economic hardships of rural regions. Klansmen began waging guerilla warfare against what they perceived as a corrupt system depriving them of rights. This feeling of grievance, which began during the time of the first Klan, would characterize Klan sensibility and ideology throughout the 20th century.

Mostly, the Klan became renowned for its frightening violence:

Klan members adopted masks and robes that hid their identities and added to the drama of their night rides, their chosen time for attacks. Many of them operated in small towns and rural areas where people otherwise knew each other's faces, and sometimes still recognized the attackers by voice and mannerisms. "The kind of thing that men are afraid or ashamed to do openly, and by day, they accomplish secretly, masked, and at night."

The KKK night riders "sometimes claimed to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers so, as they claimed, to frighten superstitious blacks. Few freedmen took such nonsense seriously."

The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen's Bureau workers. When they killed black political leaders, they also took heads of families, along with the leaders of churches and community groups, because these people had many roles in society. Agents of the Freedmen's Bureau reported weekly assaults and murders of blacks.

"Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites." Masked men shot into houses and burned them, sometimes with the occupants still inside. They drove successful black farmers off their land. "Generally, it can be reported that in North and South Carolina, in 18 months ending in June 1867, there were 197 murders and 548 cases of aggravated assault."

Klan violence worked to suppress black voting, and campaign seasons were deadly. More than 2,000 persons were killed, wounded and otherwise injured in Louisiana within a few weeks prior to the Presidential election of November 1868. Although St. Landry Parish had a registered Republican majority of 1,071, after the murders, no Republicans voted in the fall elections. White Democrats cast the full vote of the parish for President Grant's opponent. The KKK killed and wounded more than 200 black Republicans, hunting and chasing them through the woods. Thirteen captives were taken from jail and shot; a half-buried pile of 25 bodies was found in the woods. The KKK made people vote Democratic and gave them certificates of the fact. By 1869, internal strife led Klansmen to fight against Klansmen as competing factions struggled for control. The Klan's increasing reputation for violence led the more prominent citizens to drop out and criminals and the dispossessed began to fill the ranks. Local chapters proved difficult, if not impossible, to monitor and direct. In disgust, Forrest officially disbanded the organization and the vast majority of local groups followed his lead. Some number of local units continued to operate but were eventually disbanded or sent into hiding by federal troops.

In the end, the Klan's own propensity for violence became its undoing, and the loose collection of local organizations fell apart after Forrest disavowed them and the Congress began passing legislation to counter them.

National sentiment gathered to crack down on the Klan, even though some Democrats at the national level questioned whether the Klan really existed, or believed that it was a creation of nervous Southern Republican governors. Many southern states began to pass anti-Klan legislation.

In January 1871, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Scott convened a Congressional committee which took testimony from 52 witnesses about Klan atrocities. They accumulated 12 volumes of horrifying testimony. In February, former Union General and Congressman Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (Ku Klux Klan Act). This added to the enmity that southern white Democrats bore toward him. While the bill was being considered, further violence in the South swung support for its passage. The Governor of South Carolina appealed for federal troops to assist his efforts in keeping control of the state. A riot and massacre in a Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse were reported, from which a black state representative escaped only by taking to the woods.

The 1871 Civil Rights Act allowed President Ulysses S. Grant to suspend habeas corpus. In 1871, Grant signed Butler's legislation. The Ku Klux Klan Act was used by the Federal government, together with the Enforcement Act of 1870, to enforce the civil rights provisions for individuals under the constitution. Under the 1871 Klan Act, after the Klan refused to voluntarily dissolve, Grant issued a suspension of Habeas Corpus, and stationed Federal troops in nine South Carolina counties. The Klansmen were apprehended and prosecuted in federal court. Judges Hugh Lennox Bond and George S. Bryan presided over the trial of KKK members in Columbia, South Carolina during December 1871. The defendants were sentenced to five years to three months incarceration with fines. More African Americans served on juries in Federal court than were selected for local or state juries, so they had a chance to participate in the process. In the crackdown, hundreds of Klan members were fined or imprisoned.

Everyone thought that was that. But in reality, the violent vigilantes of the South were just getting started.

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals

'The River Was Dyed' 

Confederate Heritage Month: 'The River Was Dyed'

Artist's rendition of the 'Fort Pillow Massacre'

[That's right, it's April, which means that it's Confederate Heritage Month. We continue our coverage. Previous installments at the bottom.]

One of the cornerstones of Confederate mythology is the notion that Southerners were more "gallant" than their crude Yankee enemies, and thus more honorable fighters. Of course, we have already seen the limits of that gallantry in the horrifying mass war crime that was Andersonville.

Those limits were also on display at a notorious incident that in fact was an important precursor to Andersonville -- namely, the Battle of Fort Pillow. The most observable limit there was that if the Confederates indeed had any reserves of human decency and gallantry, they simply did not exist at all in their treatment of black people.

Because the Confederates -- led by none other than Nathan Bedford Forrest himself, the later founder of the Ku Klux Klan -- simply ignored the ordinary laws of war by massacring nearly every black soldier they found in the garrison.

History Channel has the background:

In March 1864, Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-77) launched a cavalry raid in western Tennessee and Kentucky that was aimed at destroying Union supply lines and capturing federal prisoners. In early April, he determined to move on Fort Pillow, located 40 miles north of Memphis. At the time, Fort Pillow was being held by a garrison of around 600 men, approximately half of whom were black soldiers.

On April 12, Forrest’s force, estimated at 1,500 to 2,500 troops, quickly overran the fort, suffering only moderate casualties. Though most of the Union garrison surrendered, and thus should have been taken as prisoners of war, some 300 soldiers were killed, the majority of them black. The Confederate refusal to treat these soldiers as traditional POWs infuriated the North, and led to the Union’s refusal to participate in prisoner exchanges.

Encyclopedia Britannica:

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Forrest’s men quickly gained the upper hand. The situation within the fort’s walls degenerated into chaos, and command and control on both sides vanished. Some Union soldiers doggedly continued to resist; others threw down their arms in an attempt to surrender; and others—including Major Bradford—fled toward the Mississippi River.

The actual final assault on the fort’s walls and the subsequent fighting lasted less than half an hour. By that time Forrest and his staff had arrived in the fort to restore some semblance of order. Both Confederate and Union witnesses claimed that an unknown number of Federal soldiers—most of whom were African American—were gunned down after attempting to surrender. Many more were shot as they fled, while others drowned in the Mississippi River. While it is impossible to determine how many were killed in the battle as opposed to the massacre, between 277 and 295 Union troops—the majority of whom were African American—were killed in total. Only 14 Confederates were killed.

Wikipedia:

Historians and official reports emphasize a delibertae massacre took place. Confederate sources say they kept firing in self defense. Survivors claimed that even though the Union troops surrendered, Forrest's men massacred them in cold blood. Surviving members of the garrison said that most of their men surrendered and threw down their arms, only to be shot or bayoneted by the attackers, who repeatedly shouted, "No quarter! No quarter!"^[15] The Joint Committee On the Conduct of the War immediately investigated the incident and concluded that the Confederates shot most of the garrison after it had surrendered. A 2002 study by Albert Castel concluded that the Union forces were indiscriminately massacred after Fort Pillow "had ceased resisting or was incapable of resistance."^[16] Historian Andrew Ward in 2005 reached the conclusion that an atrocity in the modern sense occurred at Fort Pillow, including the murders of fleeing black civilians, but that the event was not premeditated nor officially sanctioned by Confederate commanders.^[17]

Recent histories generally concur that a massacre occurred. Historian Richard Fuchs, the author of An Unerring Fire, concludes, "The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct—intentional murder—for the vilest of reasons—racism and personal enmity."^[18] Ward states, "Whether the massacre was premeditated or spontaneous does not address the more fundamental question of whether a massacre took place... it certainly did, in every dictionary sense of the word."^[19] John Cimprich states, "The new paradigm in social attitudes and the fuller use of available evidence has favored a massacre interpretation.... Debate over the memory of this incident formed a part of sectional and racial conflicts for many years after the war, but the reinterpretation of the event during the last thirty years offers some hope that society can move beyond past intolerance."^[20]

Lieutenant Daniel Van Horn of the 6th U.S. Heavy Artillery (Colored) stated in his official report, "There never was a surrender of the fort, both officers and men declaring they never would surrender or ask for quarter."^[21] Another officer of the unit, however, and the only surviving officers of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry attested to the characterization that unarmed soldiers were killed in the act of surrendering. A Confederate sergeant, in a letter written home shortly after the battle, said that "the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hand scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and then shot down."^[22] This account is consistent with the relatively high comparative casualties sustained by race of the defenders.

 Ulysses Grant mentions Fort Pillow in his memoirs, though he was not there; rather, he cites Forrest's dispatches:

"The river was dyed," he [Forrest] says, "with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners."

Grant himself, as Wikipedia explains, immediately took action after the massacre to try to prevent it from occurring again:

On April 17, 1864, in the aftermath of Fort Pillow, General Grant ordered General Benjamin F. Butler, who was negotiating prisoner exchanges with the Confederacy, to demand that black prisoners had to be treated identically to whites in the exchange and treatment of prisoners. He directed that a failure to do so would "be regarded as a refusal on their part to agree to the further exchange of prisoners, and [would] be so treated by us."^[34]

This demand was refused; Confederate Secretary of War Seddon in June 1864 wrote:

I doubt, however, whether the exchange of negroes at all for our soldiers would be tolerated. As to the white officers serving with negro troops, we ought never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners.^[35]

The resulting breakdown in prisoner exchanges in turn produced the atrocity of Andersonville, where the numbers for the stockade swelled to three times their intended capacity because the exchanges ceased.

All for one root cause: White Southerners' hatred of black people.

Confederate Heritage Month:

Day 1: Strange Fruit

It Was About Slavery

That Peculiar Institution

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

 The First American War Criminals