Capitol Men (36 page)

On the evening of September 1, 1875, in Yazoo City, fifty miles north of Jackson on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, Sheriff Albert Morgan, a white carpetbagger from Wisconsin and an influential state senator, was heckled by Democrats while addressing a Republican rally. Yazoo was a Republican town with a majority black population, and Sheriff Morgan was roundly disliked by the area's whites. Not only had he effectively held together a biracial Republican government and promoted racial equality, but he had also acted personally on the latter ideal by marrying a black teacher and temperance reformer, Carrie Highgate. Moreover, Morgan's résumé was stained with what many whites considered a political "murder." When he had won the election and became sheriff, the losing Democratic incumbent, Francis P. Hilliard, had refused to vacate the sheriff's office, prompting Morgan and his supporters to storm the premises in a predawn raid. Hilliard and his own men then attempted to retake the office, and in the ensuing fight Hilliard had been shot dead.

The rally, which gathered on the second floor of Wilson Hall, had drawn perhaps one hundred blacks and a small number of whites. It began peacefully, but soon a well-known Democratic antagonist, Henry M. Dixon, whose vigilantism had won him the ominous nickname "The Rope Bearer," arrived in the company of several other White Liners, Mississippi's less regimented version of Louisiana's White League. Dixon soon left the hall and, as an act of provocation, returned with a black man named Robinson, a local barber known for his eccentric outbursts.
As expected, Robinson took to haranguing the meeting and would not be silenced. Some of Morgan's friends suggested adjournment, but the sheriff replied that "if we should adjourn the meeting under such pressure, we could not attempt to hold Republican meetings in the county afterward." He had been warned that Dixon was out to cause trouble and had heard that he and some other whites had earlier that day terrorized blacks by knocking dry goods boxes and other objects into their path as they walked down the street. Still, as Morgan later recalled, "I did not believe that they intended to break up the meeting by force, but to intimidate us, if possible, and I did not propose to be intimidated."

Once Robinson finished ranting and sat down, Morgan resumed the meeting by praising some recent efforts by the local Republican board of supervisors as honest and conscientious. Dixon loudly protested. In a response aimed at defusing the tension in the room, Morgan pointed out a member of the board, a Captain Bedwell, who happened to be in the audience and whose reputation was unsullied. "You can have no objection to him," Morgan offered, attempting to placate Dixon.

"Bedwell is a thief!" Dixon exclaimed. "They are all thieves!"

A voice nearby declared, "That's a lie!"

"Show me the man who said that," Dixon demanded, rising to his feet.

A chair was overturned and shots were fired as the lights in the hall were doused. Morgan, swarmed by Democrats, fought his way to a window, climbed out, and dropped to the ground. Other men spilled from the building, through the windows and out the front door. On the street, the town fire bell began to clang, bringing more armed whites from their homes. As Republicans fled, White Liners calling themselves "the Dixon Scouts" roamed the city in pursuit, spreading word of a Negro insurrection. At morning's light it was found that a white deputy who worked for Morgan had been killed, along with several black men; few blacks remained in Yazoo, and the followers of "the Rope Bearer" occupied the town.

From a hiding place, Morgan smuggled a letter to Governor Ames:

My friend, I fought four years, was wounded several times, suffered in hospitals, and as a prisoner, was in 27 different engagements to free the slaves and save our glorious Union ... I know how you are situated. I do not blame you. I would not give you more pain than you already feel at your inability to help; but can't you get an officer to come
here? Is there no protection for me? I am ready to die, if it is necessary ... but to be butchered here by this mob after all I have done is too cruel.

Ames, who was receiving a steady flow of bad news from Yazoo, wrote to his wife on September 2. "These white liners will do anything to carry the state ... So far has this intimidation gone that I cannot organize a single company of militia ... The old rebel armies are too much for our party, and the colored men dare not organize even though they know their liberty is at stake ... Our only hope is through the U.S. enforcement laws." Ames had met recently with President Grant and was under the impression that federal troops were available if needed, although he knew the administration had little desire to intervene.

Blanche Butler Ames frequently left Jackson, preferring to spend time with her family in the North. Her husband, although glad his wife and children were not exposed to the difficulties of living in a place hostile to them, suffered in their absence, and the two corresponded almost daily. Having come to share some of her misgivings about Mississippi, he admitted, "This house does not seem a natural place for you and the children ... It seems more like a hotel where we stayed, but for a day. This is not home and never can be. Slavery blighted [the white] people," he wrote, "then the war—then reconstruction—all piled upon such a basis destroyed [their] minds—at least impaired their judgment and consciousness to that extent that we cannot live among them."

The conclusion that Ames shared with his wife would be reinforced two days later, on September 4, at a Republican rally and barbecue in Clinton, west of Jackson. Nearly two thousand exuberant blacks entered the town, along with about one hundred white Republicans, their numbers swollen by a rumor that Governor Ames would speak. The party faithful paraded in celebration, their mules and horses "trimmed fantastically and patriotically in red, white and blue ribbon," a witness recorded, "in some instances there being more ribbon than horse." From the town square they marched triumphantly a quarter-mile to the site of a former plantation known as Moss Hill, where a rousing band welcomed the audience. As at Yazoo, however, a group of white men had come as agents provocateurs. "There is no doubt [the riot] had its origin with some young white men carrying whiskey, who, as all accounts agree, seemed likely to raise a row from the start, if they were not there for that express purpose," recorded the
Cincinnati Commercial.

The program included divided-time speeches. The second speaker of
the day, a Republican named Captain Fisher, had just taken the podium and was congratulating the first speaker, a Democrat, Judge Johnston, for the orderly and peaceful nature of his remarks. Then one of the white troublemakers shouted, "Well, we would have peace if you would stop telling your damn lies!" The band momentarily began to play, in order to calm the disturbance, while a few blacks tried to hush the whites. "Efforts, it appears, were made several times to quiet them, until at last they were approached by one of the negro policemen." When the police officer asked the whites why they could not show the same courtesy to Captain Fisher as had been shown Judge Johnston, the whites mobbed him, grabbing the collar of his uniform and dragging him along the ground. The local black leaders Charles Caldwell, who was a state senator, and Green Tapley swiftly intervened, freeing the policeman and urging onlookers to return to the rally, but suddenly a shot was heard. Lewis Hargraves, a black man, fell to the earth dead, shot through the forehead.

"The thing opened just like lightning, and the shot rained in there just like rain from heaven," said one witness of the sudden violence. Amid shouts and gunshots, hundreds of blacks fled, most on foot, leaving behind their horses and buggies. "[Whites]...chased [the blacks] for miles and miles, killing them as a sportsman would kill the scattered birds of a covey," reported the
Commercial.
One black later testified that he ran in horror from the gathering, pursued by men with "long guns," took to the woods, and barely stopped running until he'd reached the streets of Jackson, ten miles distant. "What can we do?" he implored of an acquaintance there. "It looks like Judgment."

At the scene of the riot, abandoned mules, horses, and carriages stood unclaimed for days afterward; some of the latter were set afire by marauding whites. The death toll included three white men and four blacks, including a woman, her child, and an aged man nearly a hundred years old; many others were wounded. Two of the whites killed were among those who had initiated the disturbance; there were reports that their corpses had been hacked at and otherwise mutilated. A diamond ring was taken from the finger of one of them.

When word of the melee spread, especially the ghoulish details about the dead white men, vigilantes quickly organized. White Liner units similar to the Dixon Scouts and bearing names such as the Southerns, the Flanagan Guards, and the Jackson Road Modocs, took the train from Vicksburg to Clinton, there to embark on a second and more deadly phase of violence: they roamed the countryside, seeking prominent Republicans. "One fellow, bearing a gun ... said the train got there late and the darkies were hard to find," stated a news account, "that they killed only four or five last night, but that this morning they popped over eight." It was later estimated that as many as thirty blacks—including clergy, political leaders, and teachers—were murdered in vengeance killings in the wake of the Clinton affair.

"Oh, we didn't do much," one of the shooters from Vicksburg confided to a Northern reporter. "A few negroes committed suicide, damn 'em, that's all."

As Margaret Ann Caldwell, wife of the state senator Charles Caldwell, remembered, "They went to a house where there was an old black man named Bob Beasly, and they shot him all to pieces. And they went to Mr. Willis's and took out a man named Gamahel Brown, and shot him all to pieces. It was early in the morning; and they goes out to Sam Jackson's ... and they shot him all to pieces. He hadn't even time to put on his clothes. And they went out to Alfred Hastings; Alfred saw them coming ... and they shot Alfred Hastings all to pieces."

When Mrs. Caldwell asked a white acquaintance why whites had disrupted a peaceful event at Moss Hill and were hunting down black people, he replied indignantly, "You all had a big dinner yesterday, and paraded around with your drums and flags. That was impudence to the white people. You have no right to do it. You have got to leave these damned negroes; leave them and come on our side. You have got to join the democratic party. We are going to kill all the negroes. The negro men shall not live."

It had been a dreadful week for Mississippi and for the Ames administration. Within shouting distance of the state capital, a Republican meeting at Yazoo and an outdoor pageant at Clinton had become murderous riots, and once again the governor had been unable to protect the state's most vulnerable citizens from devastation and deadly reprisals. The state economy was at a standstill, harvests were in jeopardy, and many blacks were afraid to go into the fields to pick cotton. Wrote a citizen of Yazoo City to the governor, "I beg you most fulley [sic] to send the United soldiers here ... they have hung six more men since the hanging of Mr. Fawn; they won't let the Republicans have no ticket ... send help, help, troops...." A pitiable plea arrived from Warren County: "The rebles turbulent; are arming themselves here now today to go to Sartaria to murder more poor negroes. Gov[ernor], aint [there] no pertiction?"

Ames was running out of options. He feared that black militias wouldonly incite a greater reaction from the disaffected whites, as borne out by the Vicksburg debacle of late 1874, and he suspected that militias made up of whites would hesitate to confront White Liner forces. A proposal he made to the legislature to create special police units was defeated, while his public appeal to the vigilantes to stop harassing black people and return peacefully to their homes was greeted with derision.

After informing President Grant by telegram that "domestic violence prevails in various parts of this State, beyond the power of the State authorities to suppress," Ames on September 10 received a response from Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, who asked for more details about the troubles in Mississippi and inquired as to why Ames could not handle them. Ames replied that he understood the official reluctance to intervene but assured Pierrepont that the crisis was all too real and offered to assume responsibility for calling in federal troops. "As the Governor of a State, I made a demand which cannot well be refused," he reminded the attorney general, an allusion to Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, which allows a state's chief executive to request federal support when a state's republican form of government is threatened by either foreign invasion or domestic unrest. "Let the odium, in all its magnitude, descend upon me," Ames declared. "I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty toward a class of American citizens whose only offense consists in their color, and whom I am powerless to protect."

To help plead his case in Washington, Ames turned for support to Blanche K. Bruce, a U.S. senator from Mississippi. A Republican land-owner in the Delta region's Bolivar County, Bruce was a large man whose girth made him one of the state's more recognizable black politicians. As sheriff, tax collector, and school superintendent in Bolivar, as well as a newspaper publisher, his low-key style had earned him the esteem of both races in western Mississippi. Ames so admired Bruce he had originally wanted him for his lieutenant governor, but Bruce, with the help of the state's leading black Republicans, had in early 1875 won appointment to national office.