Never Been a Time (4 page)

From the uncertain early months of the Civil War until its scorched-earth conclusion, as Northern armies drove into Southern states, thousands of slaves fled North behind the protection of Union lines. Although more than 90 percent of the freed slaves ended up staying in the South after the war was over, at least a hundred thousand Southern blacks migrated to the North in the 1860s.
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Thousands more headed for the cities of the South, where whites resisted the arrival of the African American immigrants as fiercely as Northerners had decades earlier. One reason for white antagonism was simple fear, based on a persistent and terrifying rumor that blacks—who outnumbered whites in many areas, including the states of Mississippi and South Carolina—were plotting a vengeful uprising, a mass slaughter, and political and economic takeover of the South. In the anarchic early period of Reconstruction during the weak administration of the Democrat Andrew Johnson—a period of so-called white home rule—Southern states passed Black Codes limiting areas where blacks could live, establishing large fines or jail terms for blacks who attempted to quit their jobs, and denying blacks the right to testify against whites in court. Because the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery had left open the issue of black suffrage, Southern states were able to pass laws barring blacks from voting.

Throughout the South, from major cities to the most remote pine barrens and bayous, white mobs physically assaulted blacks trying to exercise their civil rights. The attacks sometimes escalated into race riots. The worst were in Memphis and New Orleans.

The black population of Memphis more than quadrupled from the beginning of the Civil War to 1866. Some of the newcomers found jobs or made work for themselves and were doing relatively well, as were some African Americans who had been in Memphis before the war, but the streets swarmed with impoverished unemployed blacks. Some of them were looking for work. Others gave up and became beggars or thieves, stealing from blacks as well as whites, and some neighborhoods became infested with crime. In late April 1866, the
Memphis Argus
declared of the newcomers, “Would to God they were back in Africa or some other seaport town … anywhere but here.” Whites began attacking blacks almost indiscriminately, and as usual the victims were often respectable, hardworking citizens who were as horrified by the crime wave as their white neighbors.
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On May 1, a horse-drawn hack driven by a white man collided with one driven by a black. Crowds of both races gathered. Police arrived and arrested only the black driver. A group of black Civil War veterans tried to intervene. Fights broke out between whites and blacks, who were badly outnumbered, and escalated into three days of mayhem as white rioters, many of them Irish policemen and firemen, invaded black neighborhoods in South Memphis, including a shantytown that housed the families of black soldiers stationed nearby. The federal Freedman's Bureau, established to aid former slaves, was impotent to stop the attacks, and the area's military commander refused to send in troops of either race, even to help the families of the black soldiers. The rioters burned and looted, viciously assaulting blacks, battering and shooting them. At least forty-six blacks were killed, five black women were raped, and hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools were destroyed.

Three months later, in the swelter of late July in New Orleans, the Radical Republican governor of Louisiana convened a constitutional convention to enfranchise blacks—and at the same time to prohibit former Confederate soldiers from voting. On the day of the convention, fighting between blacks and whites broke out on the streets outside the convention hall. Police—mostly former Rebel soldiers—arrived en masse and joined the white rioters, wielding billy clubs and firing guns. The melee turned into a massacre. Outnumbered blacks and their supporters were shot down when they tried to flee, despite white flags of surrender. By the time federal troops arrived and intervened, thirty-four blacks and three white Radical Republicans had been killed. One veteran of the Civil War said later that “the wholesale slaughter
and the little regard paid to human life” surpassed anything he had seen in battle.

In his pioneering, myth-dispelling 1935 book,
Black Reconstruction
, W. E. B. Du Bois agonized over the mass racial violence he had studied so extensively and reached strikingly humanistic conclusions about its causes, causes that could as easily have been ascribed to other racial massacres throughout our history, from the Philadelphia and Cincinnati riots long before the Civil War to the New York Draft Riots during it, to the terrible urban slaughters of the period of World War I:

Total depravity, human hate and
Schadenfreude
, do not explain fully the mob spirit in America. Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed, degraded or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all of this, most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.

It is its nucleus of ordinary men that continually gives the mob its initial and awful impetus. Around this nucleus, to be sure, gather snowball-wise all manner of flotsam, filth and human garbage, and every lewdness of alcohol and current fashion. But all this is the horrible covering of this inner nucleus of fear.
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There was much to fear for both blacks and whites in the physically devastated Reconstruction South. Its agriculture and slave-based economic system lay in ruins while the rapidly industrializing and expanding North was booming. And nature added its toll. Heavy floods in 1866 and 1867 on the Mississippi and its tributaries and infestations of army worms caused massive losses of cotton, corn, and other grains, ruining the few blacks who had set up small independent farms and battering large planters. In the Deep South, sugar and rice fields lay ruined by war and weather. Many thousands of blacks were evicted from plantations and found themselves homeless and destitute. They
crowded the growing black ghettos of the cities of the South, or roamed the countryside, desperately searching for food and shelter.
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“Armed bands of white men patrolled the county roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about,” said social reformer Carl Schurz, a former Union general, in his lengthy 1866 testimony at congressional hearings on Reconstruction. “Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and byways. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated with scourges. A number of such cases, I had occasion to examine myself. A veritable reign of terror prevailed in many parts of the South.”
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The massacres at Memphis and New Orleans and the violence against blacks throughout the South horrified many Americans, and Republicans seized the mood to put forward a series of new Reconstruction acts. Passed in 1866 and 1867 over the veto of Andrew Johnson, the new laws put the South under military control, and ensured black males the right to vote while disenfranchising many former Confederates—thus helping Republican Ulysses S. Grant carry much of the South in the election of 1868. The period of Radical Reconstruction had begun, and soon hundreds of blacks were serving in the state legislatures and other governing bodies of the South, and more than twenty reached the Congress of the United States.

As Southern whites ceaselessly pointed out at the time and would continue to point out for decades to come, blacks had their share of crooked or incompetent politicians during Reconstruction. But so did whites. Reconstruction was a time of almost unprecedented political corruption in both the North and the South. Blacks did not invent public plunder or legislative idiocy in states like Louisiana and Mississippi. Cities in both the South and the North were ruled by breathtakingly corrupt political machines like that of Boss Tweed in New York. And the president of the United States had managed to so surround himself with wealthy crooks that the term “Grantism” became synonymous with audacious thievery of millions in public funds by political cronies.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted blacks equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, made it illegal to deny voting rights on the basis of race. Southern whites fought back against the new status of African Americans. Their tactics ranged from
legal and political maneuvering and sheer fraud and trickery—such as requiring blacks to read the Declaration of Independence aloud, in German—to physical intimidation, lynching, and riot. As Du Bois observed, “A lawlessness which in 1865-1868 was still spasmodic and episodic now became organized … [U]sing a technique of mass and midnight murder, the South began widely organized aggression upon the Negroes.”
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The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were the most powerful of dozens of vigilante groups with genteel-sounding names that terrorized the countryside. In the last thirty-five years of the nineteenth century, racist vigilante groups killed thousands of African Americans in the South and often justified the murders by accusing the victims of raping white women. An 1871 investigative report to a congressional committee considering anti-Klan legislation pinpoints in microcosm the regionwide terror, and the reality behind the fantasies of rape: “In the nine counties [of South Carolina] covered by the investigation for a period of approximately six months, the Ku Klux Klan lynched and murdered 35 men, whipped 262 men and women, otherwise outraged, shot, mutilated, burned out, etc., 101 persons. It committed two cases of sex offenses against Negro women. During this time, the Negroes killed four men, beat one man, committed sixteen other outrages, but no case of torture. No case is found of a white woman seduced or raped by a Negro.”
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In the late 1860s and early 1870s, in addition to the vigilante campaigns of terror, deadly race riots erupted in Meridian, Mississippi, again in New Orleans, and in other Southern cities and towns. On Easter Sunday, 1872, in the parish (county) seat of black-governed Colfax, Louisiana, hundreds of blacks and a few white supporters barricaded themselves inside the parish courthouse for protection from an advancing white militia, heavily armed and made up mainly of former Confederate soldiers. The mob rushed the courthouse and burned it to the ground and at least seventy-one blacks were killed, many of them executed in the roads and fields after they had marched out of the burning courthouse under a white flag of surrender. The event came to be called the Colfax Massacre.
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Two years later, another horrific riot hit Vicksburg, Mississippi, after an election in August. By then, the right to vote and participate in the political process had been restored to virtually all former Confederates in a federal amnesty. Thugs from the so-called People's Party—also known as the White
Man's Party—patrolled the streets and physically intimidated blacks from voting, with the result that the city's Republican administration was voted out of office and white supremacists took power. In December, when the new administration physically evicted a black sheriff from his office and literally chased him out of town, a posse of rural blacks, some of them carrying shotguns and pistols, marched to Vicksburg, where they were met by a white mob armed with military and hunting rifles. The blacks were both outnumbered and outgunned, and at least seventy-five were killed in the resulting melee. For days armed white gangs terrorized the area, killing hundreds more.
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The unrelenting and often violent resistance from Southern whites—and a deepening economic depression that began with the financial panic of 1873—weakened the resolve of the North to enforce the Reconstruction statutes, and President Grant became less and less willing to send in federal troops to protect blacks against what many white Southerners referred to as “Redemption”: the eradication of black and Northern political power. African Americans were attacked and killed at political gatherings across the Deep South. In the name of Redemption, whites waged a paramilitary campaign in Mississippi to intimidate blacks physically from voting in the elections of 1875. Aided by flagrant ballot stuffing on a grand scale, Democrats gained control of the state, winning overwhelming majorities in many places that had been strongly Republican in the previous election.

Violence did not end with the election. Dozens of black and Republican officeholders were given a stark choice: resign or be assassinated. In the midst of the campaign, Republican governor Adelbert Ames, a former Union general, wrote, “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.”
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For all practical purposes, Reconstruction ended with the disputed presidential election of 1876. To break a deadlock, Republicans in Congress finally agreed to a deal in which their candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, was handed the presidency in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. White home rule was reestablished; blacks were shut out of the electoral process in state after state by threats, trickery, fraud, and racist legislation; segregation was imposed by law in schools, public accommodations, public transportation, and many other aspects of daily life; blacks' legal, property, and employment rights were severely curtailed; inequitable,
debt-accruing sharecropping and tenant-farming arrangements turned black agricultural workers into virtual serfs; and Jim Crow ruled the South.