America Aflame (83 page)

On Easter Sunday 1873, the bloodiest peacetime massacre in nineteenth-century America occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. Colfax, a small town in the state's fertile Red River Valley, was named after Schuyler Colfax, Grant's vice president. It was the seat of a new parish, created by the Republican state government and called Grant Parish. The choice of names did not generate great support among the area's white inhabitants. The state's Republican governor, Henry Clay Warmoth, recognizing the shifting political winds, attempted to attract more whites to the party by joining with conservatives to form a fusion party. Many black Republicans objected to these overtures. One of them, William Ward, an ex-slave from Virginia, commanded the state militia unit in Grant Parish. The November 1872 election had seen widespread fraud and intimidation. Both the Warmoth fusionists and the regular Republicans claimed victory. The Grant administration recognized the regular Republican ticket, and Ward took possession of the Grant Parish courthouse on behalf of that group.
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White leaders in Grant Parish retaliated by unleashing a reign of terror in rural districts, forcing blacks to flee into Colfax for protection. Four hundred black refugees, only about eighty of whom were armed, erected defenses around the courthouse. Klansmen from surrounding parishes rushed to Colfax to dislodge Ward and the black refugees. Ward slipped away to New Orleans to recruit reinforcements. Before he returned, the white “army” attacked the courthouse, taking forty prisoners, who were shot that night in a cotton field outside of town. An additional one hundred blacks lay dead from the assault.

Federal authorities arrested nine of the white attackers, and a jury convicted three of violating the Enforcement Act of 1871. The Democratic Party hired top attorneys for the defendants and appealed the convictions. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court as
U.S. v. Cruikshank
(1876). The Court found for the defendants, holding that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments created no national rights except the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of race. The Court ruled that the government had not offered proof of a racially discriminatory purpose. It was an election dispute, not a racial confrontation. For the protection of all other rights, including voting rights, citizens had standing only with their states, not with the federal government. The postwar amendments empowered the federal government to prohibit violations of blacks' rights by
states
, not by
individuals
. For the latter violations, plaintiffs must seek redress from the state. The
Cruikshank
decision, coming in the midst of escalating political violence in the South, amounted to a judicial endorsement of that violence. The decision made it virtually impossible for the federal government to prosecute crimes against blacks unless they were perpetrated by a state and unless it could prove a racial motive unequivocally.
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It was the second time in three years that the High Court had eviscerated a key measure of Congressional Reconstruction. The aversion to further accrual of federal authority appeared most tellingly in a case having nothing to do with Reconstruction or African American rights. The
Slaughter-House Cases
(1873) involved the issue of whether the state of Louisiana could require New Orleans butchers to ply their trade in a central, state-franchised facility. The state cited health and safety issues for its monopoly (though revenue probably played a more important role). The butchers claimed that the state, by forcing them to operate in a state facility rather than independently, had violated the Fourteenth Amendment, depriving them of “liberty and property without due process of law.”
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In a five-to-four decision, the Court upheld the right of Louisiana to create a monopoly for health and safety reasons. Justice Samuel F. Miller in his majority opinion went beyond the specific case to remark more generally that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to those “privileges and immunities” already protected by the federal government. These included access to ports and navigable waterways, the right to run for federal office, the ability to travel to Washington, D.C., and the right to protection on the high seas and in foreign countries. None of these federal rights interested most blacks. In other words, the amendments did not protect individuals from
states
abridging a broader list of rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The butchers, as citizens of Louisiana, could not invoke federal citizenship in this case to seek their remedy.

Miller used the specific case to ruminate more generally on the nature of federal relations emerging from the war and on the intent of the amendments' framers. Miller argued that the Reconstruction amendments applied only to African Americans, not to white Louisiana butchers. These were not the views of the amendments' proponents, however. House Judiciary Chairman James F. Wilson, an Iowa Republican, and Ohio Republican John A. Bingham, who authored portions of the Fourteenth Amendment, clearly stated their intent to provide federal protection to
all
citizens when states violated their civil rights. The amendments, its framers contended, did not augment federal power as much as they provided enforcement for Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution that required states to uphold the Bill of Rights.

Justice Miller, an anti-slavery Republican, worried that the power tilt toward the federal government during and after the war threatened the balance of power between state and federal authority and the balance between the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches. His decision to go well beyond the facts of the case before him reflected this concern. In early 1868, as Congressional Reconstruction was in full swing in the South, Miller wrote, “In the threatened collision between the Legislative branch of the government and the Executive and Judicial branches I see consequences from which the cause of free government may never recover in my day. The worst feature I now see is the passion which governs the hours in all parties and all persons who have controlling influence.” In his opinion, Justice Miller hoped to restore “the balance between State and Federal power.”

The passions Miller cited, a perpetual concern of Americans since the burning of the Ursuline convent in 1834 and the subsequent violent outbursts eventually leading to civil war, had the potential of veering toward despotism. Lincoln had articulated these fears in the late 1830s, and the failed revolutions in Europe in 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 provided warning memories of popular excess. Justice David Davis, Lincoln's campaign manager during the 1860 presidential election race, in joining Miller's majority opinion, worried in 1868 that “both parties have run into extremes,” leaving him with “great alarm at the tendency to consolidated Government.… This alarms me more than all other things.”

Justice Stephen J. Field, another Lincoln appointee, dissented, expressing the view that the amendments rendered national citizenship paramount to state citizenship: “A citizen of a State is now only a citizen of the United States residing in the State.” Therefore, the federal government could hold states accountable for enforcing the Reconstruction amendments and the Bill of Rights. Justice Noah H. Swayne, a Virginian, went further, hailing the Reconstruction amendments as “a new departure” and “an important epoch” in constitutional history. These amendments “trench directly upon the power of the States.” Swayne noted that before the war, there was “ample” protection against national “oppression” and “little … against wrong and oppression by the states.” The Reconstruction amendments resolved this imbalance.

Swayne's opinion reflected a minority view among northern Republicans by 1873. The disillusionment with Reconstruction and the concern over corruption and disorder made federal power suspect. The Civil War created a unified nation, but the debate over the balance between state and federal authority would continue to rage. The result, as Justice Joseph P. Bradley noted in his dissent, was that the Court had relegated the “rights, privileges, and immunities of the greatest importance to the state's protection alone.” The decision left African Americans in particular at the mercies of redeemed southern states with little or no recourse to federal redress.

The cumulative impact of these decisions and the prevailing social and economic contexts of the era encouraged bolder attacks against the remaining Republican governments. White paramilitary groups closely tied to the Democratic Party now operated openly in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Leaders announced a “white line” policy, inviting all white men, regardless of party affiliation, to “unite” and redeem the states. Black Republicans feared not only for their political future but also for their lives.
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The boldest assault occurred in New Orleans in September 1874 when leading citizens and Confederate veterans, organized as the White League, led eighty-five hundred men in an attempted coup to oust Republican governor William P. Kellogg and members of his administration. The league's manifesto, promulgated in July 1874, offered a clear indication of its intentions: “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 … to unite with us against that supreme danger … in an earnest effort to re-establish a white man's government in this city and the State.” These were no mincing words or veiled threats.
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The New Orleans Leaguers overwhelmed the city's racially mixed Metropolitan Police Force under the command of former Confederate general James B. Longstreet. Only the timely arrival of federal troops, ordered to the scene by President Grant, prevented the takeover attempt. The aftermath of the “Battle of Liberty Place” was not good for either Longstreet or President Grant. When Confederate-leaning historians wrote about the Civil War in future decades, the turncoat Longstreet appeared as the cause of every major defeat. In the more immediate future, northerners denounced the use of military force to prop up a government many felt was illegitimate. The league was more successful in the Louisiana countryside in the weeks preceding the Democratic victory in November 1874. League troops overthrew or murdered Republican officials in eight parishes.
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The Democratic victory in Louisiana encouraged white paramilitarists in Mississippi. Blacks dominated the Warren County government headquartered in Vicksburg. The White Liners, as they called themselves, demanded the resignations of all black officials including the sheriff, Peter Crosby, a black Union veteran. Republican governor Adelbert Ames, a native of Maine, ordered the Liners to disperse and granted Crosby's request to raise a protective militia to respond to future threats. Ames, a hero at Gettysburg, settled in Mississippi because of a deep commitment to the freedman. As part of that desire, he hoped to remake Mississippi as a modern state, much in the image of his native Maine. Almost from the beginning of his administration, however, internal disputes among the state's Republicans and political pressure and violence from Democrats undermined his progressive agenda. Ames ran one of the most honest administrations in the South, yet Democrats constantly charged him and his colleagues with corruption. No charges were ever filed, but the Democrats understood that mere accusations played sympathetically in the North.
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Peter Crosby's efforts to gather a militia force were too successful. An army of several hundred armed African Americans marched in three columns from the surrounding countryside to Vicksburg. Whites responded to the challenge, firing on the militia and terrorizing blacks in the city and county over the next ten days. Among the victims were a black Presbyterian minister and several of his congregants kneeling in prayer. Liners killed at least twenty-nine blacks and wounded countless more. Democrats gained control of the county government.

The Vicksburg incident was a rehearsal for Democratic victories in statewide elections in 1875. The
Birmingham News
cheered on the Mississippi White Liners in the popular Darwinian rhetoric of the time: “We intend to beat the negro in the battle of life, and defeat means one thing—EXTERMINATION.” Liners focused on the state's majority black counties and vowed to “overawe the negroes and exhibit to them the ocular proof of our power.” In September, Governor Ames wrote to his wife, whom he had sent out of state, recounting a Republican barbecue attended by fifteen hundred African Americans in Clinton, Mississippi. White Liners opened fire on the gathering, killing two women and two children, then marauded through the countryside and killed three more blacks, including a man nearly one hundred years old, “defenseless and helpless.” Blacks fought back and killed four of the Liners, but they were no match for the superior numbers and firepower of the whites. “It is cold-blooded murder on the part of the ‘white liners,'” Ames wrote. “You ask what are we to do. That is a question I find it difficult to answer.” Ames requested troops from Grant, but, as he informed his wife, “it will be a difficult thing [for Grant] to do.”
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Such intimidation worked, and the Democrats swept to victory in Mississippi. They would not allow Governor Ames to finish his term, threatening him with impeachment. Fearing for his safety, Ames resigned and fled the state. A federal grand jury convened several months later and concluded that the “fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetuated” in the 1875 state elections were “without a parallel in the annals of history.” The South's second war of independence was reaching its climax.
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The southern white evangelical churches, which had roundly condemned the political activities of northern missionaries and the Republican governments, praised the restoration of Democratic rule. The means justified the ends. The editor of the
Christian Index
of Georgia hailed the outcomes of the 1874 elections throughout the South, proclaiming that “every Christian in the southern States should devoutly thank God for His mercies bestowed in the political victories of last week.” The “trials” and “oppressions” of the past decade had been so great that “many of our people—otherwise good citizens—have been led to doubt the overruling Providence of God.” Admitting that churchmen ought to devote themselves to “
Religion
and not to
Politics
,” the editor excused himself, noting that the “political revolution” was “a Christian triumph,” wrought “by the hands of an All-wise and merciful Providence.”
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