by Max Boot
The war was prefigured by violence in Kansas Territory, which in the 1850s became a battleground between antislavery Jayhawkers and proslavery Border Ruffians. The former were determined to take Kansas into the Union as a free state, the latter as a slave state. Both sides knew that the outcome could swing the delicate balance of power in Congress. Thus was born “Bloody Kansas”—a name now firmly entrenched in the historical lexicon but one that conveys an exaggerated image. One scholar estimates that just 157 violent deaths occurred in Kansas between 1854 and 1861 and only 56 of them were definitely political in nature.7 That hardly seems like a huge toll compared with other irregular conflicts (in post-2003 Iraq more people were often killed in a single attack), but it loomed large at the time because the fighting inflamed passions on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, convincing Southerners and Northerners alike that their differences could be settled only at gunpoint. By the time Kansas was finally admitted into the Union as a free state, at the end of January 1861, full-blown war was merely months away. John Brown did as much as anyone to trigger the conflict.
He arrived in Kansas in 1855 along with one of his sons and a son-in-law, their wagon full of provisions and concealed weapons. Three of his sons were already there—a small part of the twenty children he had fathered with two different wives. Gaunt, grizzled, and stooped but still vigorous, he had behind him a lifetime of failure. He had tried his hand at surveying, farming, tanning, horse breeding, cattle trading, lumber dealing, and wool distributing, and he had wound up broke and bankrupt. He simply had no head for business. What he did have were deeply held Congregationalist beliefs and a fierce devotion to African-American rights. He had first become aware of the slaves’ plight when he was just twelve years old and along with his father stayed at a home where a young slave of the same age lived. Brown recalled that the master of the house had made a “great pet” of him, “while the negro boy (who was fully if not more than his equal) was badly clothed, poorly fed; & lodged in cold weather: & beaten before his eyes with iron shovels or any other thing that came first to hand.”8 He would call slavery “the sum of all villainies”9 and dedicate his life to its eradication.
Initially his work was peaceful. He helped slaves to escape via the Underground Railroad and ran an experimental community in upstate New York where whites and blacks could live as “brothers and equals.”10 But gradually he came to believe that force would have to be used to lead blacks out of bondage. Brown became “wild and frenzied” after proslavery militants rampaged through the antislavery town of Lawrence on May 21, 1856. The next day a proslavery congressman, Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina, viciously beat an antislavery senator, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, with a metal-tipped cane on the very floor of the U.S. Senate. Brown “said it became necessary to make an example, and so strike terror, and put an end to that sort of thing”—“to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights.”11 On May 24 he and seven followers, including four of his sons and a son-in-law, set out for the proslavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek, where they committed the five murders that quickly became a nationwide sensation.
A week later Brown rounded up twenty-six impoverished, bedraggled volunteers (“we had come to wearing ideas, suspicion, and memories of what had once been coats, pants, and hats,” one of his men wrote) and led them against a camp of proslavery militiamen. Four of the militiamen were killed, and the other twenty-four surrendered in the grandly named Battle of Black Jack.12 The Border Ruffians got their revenge in August 1856 when they razed the Free State settlement at Osawatomie, killing one of John Brown’s sons and four other defenders. Brown and the rest of his small band were badly outnumbered and forced to retreat. Nevertheless “Old Brown of Osawatomie” became even more celebrated for his willingness to fight in accordance with the instructions he gave his men: “Take more care to end life well than to live long.”13
Most abolitionists were pacifists. They did not condone murder and considered the Pottawatomie killings “terribly damaging” to their cause. Even a member of John Brown’s gang thought “the transaction was terrible.” But he changed his mind when he saw the disproportionate impact of the murders: “The pro-slavery men were dreadfully terrified and large numbers of them soon left the territory.”14 This and subsequent killings did not decide the outcome in Kansas, but they did make the balance of terror less one-sided than before. The repercussions of these acts spread far beyond Kansas’s borders by giving rise to the erroneous impression in the South that John Brown, “the notorious assassin,”15 was representative of Northern sentiment and that extreme methods were necessary to safeguard their “peculiar institution.” Brown was in fact highly atypical, but he managed to find growing numbers of supporters in the North who were impressed by his actions and his forceful defense of them. (As Brown himself noted, he had an “unusual ‘gift of utterance.’ ”)16
His preeminent backers, a wealthy and influential group known as the Secret Six, included Samuel Gridley Howe, an idealistic Boston physician who had earlier served with the Greek rebels.17 They provided him with the financial wherewithal to carry out an audacious plot he had been hatching for two decades. Brown had been reading “all the books upon insurrectionary warfare he could lay his hands upon.” He was deeply impressed by the “Spanish chieftains” who had resisted Roman rule as well as by “Schamyl, the Circassian chief” and by Toussaint Louverture in “Hayti.” Inspired by their example, he came to believe that if he invaded the South with twenty-five to fifty men he could rouse a slave insurrection. The rebels could then establish a stronghold in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia (“admirably adapted to carrying on a guerilla warfare”) and from there strike plantations on the plains. An English soldier of fortune who was a veteran of Garibaldi’s campaigns tried to dissuade him, telling him that no “preparatory notice” had been given to slaves to make them respond positively to an invitation to rebel. But Brown, with his “iron will and unbending purpose,” had too much confidence in African-Americans—and his self-assigned role as their Moses—to give up.18
Brown decided to launch his insurgency by seizing the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia to provide arms for soon-to-be-freed slaves. Pretending to be a gold prospector, he rented a nearby house, where his men gathered with weapons and supplies. The arsenal fell to his twenty-two raiders, including five blacks, on Sunday night, October 16, 1859. Brown and his men seized thirty-five hostages from among the armory workers and nearby farmers, including a distant descendant of George Washington. But, as warned, no slaves rallied to their cause. Instead the armory was surrounded, in the words of a contemporary journalist, by “a bristling cordon of men with every variety of arms, costume, accouterment, and of all ages and conditions.” On a “drizzly” Monday night the ragtag militiamen gave way to ninety U.S. Marines rushed from Washington in crisp, bright-blue uniforms under the command of an army colonel named Robert E. Lee.
Brown made no attempt to break out. He craved a heroic if hopeless last stand. He and his men barricaded themselves with their hostages in a stone fire-engine house and prepared for the inevitable end. On Tuesday morning, October 18, Lee’s aide, Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, appeared to demand that Brown surrender. He refused. A dozen marines then splintered the front door with a ladder that they used as a battering ram. They stormed inside “like tigers.” “A storming assault is not a play-day sport,” wrote Marine First Lieutenant Israel Green, who led the attack. “They bayoneted one man skulking under the [fire] engine, and pinned another up against the rear wall, both being instantly killed.” Green himself used his saber to strike Brown twice “with all my strength.” In just three minutes the hostage crisis was over.
Ten of the raiders had been killed, including two of John Brown’s sons. Brown himself had been badly wounded; he escaped death only because Green struck him with a flimsy ceremonial sword rather than his usual sturdy blade. He was “a gory spectacle,” with “a severe bayonet wound in his side, and his face and
hair were clotted with blood.” Even in that condition, however, he calmly and fluently answered questions for three hours from an assembled crowd of reporters and politicians.
Brown survived long enough to be proudly hanged on December 2, 1859 (he professed to be “quite cheerful” about the outcome), but not before he had turned his “mockery of a trial” into a national forum for his views—a strategy employed since then by countless political prisoners who have taken advantage of the mass media to communicate their message far beyond the courtroom. His stirring courtroom oration, delivered by a man with a long beard that made him look like a biblical prophet, won him countless admirers in the North. He concluded with a flourish: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.”19 Let it be done. Even those who were not yet abolitionists began to think that only a good cause could have inspired such stoical self-sacrifice.
John Brown was not much of a guerrilla. He never had enough men to pose the slightest military threat to the South. But he was a first-rate terrorist whose exploits and utterances received front-page publicity—as intended. His legend only grew after his death. The philosopher Henry David Thoreau compared him to Jesus,20 and Union soldiers on the march sang “John Brown’s Body,” a ditty that inspired Julia Ward Howe, Samuel Gridley Howe’s wife, to compose “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The African-American leader Frederick Douglass summed up his impact: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery.”21 If so, that would make this zealous Puritan one of the more consequential terrorists in history—almost as important as the Bosnian students who ignited World War I.
Unfortunately for the African-American cause, segregationists would soon show they were even more adept at terrorism than their opponents.
31.
THE DESTRUCTION OF RECONSTRUCTION
Ku Kluxers and the War against
Civil Rights, 1866–1876
ELIAS HILL WAS awakened after midnight on May 5, 1871. Lying in his tiny cabin in rural York County, South Carolina, he could hear the dogs barking and the men moving rapidly in the dark. They came first to his brother’s house next door, where they whipped his brother’s wife. “Where’s Elias?” they kept demanding. When she told him, they barged into Hill’s house. “Here he is! Here he is!” one of the men shouted triumphantly. They threw off his bedclothes and dragged him into the yard.
He could not resist because Elias Hill, now fifty years old, had been crippled since the age of seven. A dreadful disease, possibly muscular dystrophy, had shriveled his legs. They were no bigger than the size of a man’s wrist. His arms, too, were withered and his jaw was strangely deformed. Overcoming his physical limitations, Hill had emerged as an unlikely leader in the “colored community.” His father had purchased freedom for himself, his wife, and their son thirty years before, and Elias had learned to read from some white children. As he grew into adulthood, he had become a schoolteacher and a well-respected Baptist preacher who made a little extra money by writing letters on behalf of illiterate freedmen. He was also the local president of the Union League, a fraternal organization closely aligned with the Republican Party.
The Republicans advocated enforcing the newly enacted Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments granting civil rights to former slaves, something that was intolerable to the former slave owners who could not imagine a “superior race” (themselves) granting any opportunities to an “inferior race.”22 The South may have lost the Civil War, but that did not mean that whites were prepared to cede power to blacks or their allies, who were vilified as “carpetbaggers” if they came from the North and “scalawags” if from the South.
Most whites were terrified of the horrors that supposedly would be visited upon them if those they had oppressed for so long were to take power. (The Haitian Revolution, with its savage violence, was an oft-cited example.)23 White sentiment was summed up by one South Carolina newspaper that urged its readers, in a characteristically hysterical register, to fight against
the hell-born policy which has trampled the fairest and noblest States of our great sisterhood beneath the unholy hoofs of African savages and shoulder-strapped brigands [U.S. Army officers]—the policy which has given up millions of our free-born, high-souled brethren and sisters—to the rule of gibbering, louse-eating, devil-worshipping, barbarians, from the jungles of Dahomey [west Africa], and peripatetic buccaneers from Cape Cod, Memphremagog [Vermont], Hell, and Boston.24
The Ku Klux Klan stood ready to fight the “hell-born policy” of racial equality. Founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 by a half dozen Confederate veterans for “diversion and amusement,” it originally resembled a college fraternity complete with “meaningless and mysterious” initiation rituals and secret signs. (The name derived from the Greek word for circle or band, kuklos.) But before long it had become a full-fledged terrorist organization that spread like a kudzu vine across an unrepentant South. A grand wizard was in nominal command: the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. But the “Invisible Empire” operated with little or no central direction. As the historian Steven Hahn notes, “the Klan was less a formal organization than a rubric embracing a variety of secret vigilante and paramilitary outfits showing the marks of their local settings.” KKK “dens” (i.e., terrorist cells) sprang up spontaneously, as did similar organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the Pale Faces, and the White Brotherhood. “Ku Klux” became a generic label for paramilitary organizations whose goal was to expel Republicans from office and to replace them with Democrats who would institute white-supremacist policies. The KKK was, in effect, the military arm of the Democratic Party, just as the Irish Republican Army would be the military arm of Sinn Féin. In many communities virtually all of the white men enrolled in the Klan, just as, before the Civil War, they had enrolled in militia companies and patrols designed to prevent slave uprisings. Total membership in the Klan and similar groups across the eleven states of the Confederacy was said to number half a million men. Because the bulk of its membership was made up of Confederate veterans, Hahn argues, it “may be regarded as a guerilla movement bent on continuing the struggle or avenging the consequences of the official surrender.”25 But unlike true guerrilla groups, the Klan did not target soldiers—only civilians like Elias Hill.
Their objectives and neuroses were apparent in the questioning of Hill, which was conducted by six masked “ghouls,” as rank-and-file Klansmen were designated. Although the popular image has the Klan exclusively wearing white sheets, their disguises were more diverse. Hill recalled, “Some had a kind of check disguise on their heads. One had black oil-cloth over his head, and something like gloves covering his hands and wrists.” They spoke in an “outlandish and unnatural tone” to disguise their voices and to inspire “awe and terror” in the supposedly “ignorant and superstitious . . . darkies” by pretending to be ghosts and goblins—a masquerade that would not have fooled a child, much less an educated preacher like Elias Hill.
The first question they asked Hill was “Who burned our houses?” Blacks were widely suspected of committing arson as a form of protest because they were too afraid to openly confront white supremacists.
“I told them it was not me,” Hill recalled. “I could not burn houses; it was unreasonable to ask me.”
The masked men did not like that answer. They hit him with their fists and extracted a phony confession. Next they wanted to know if Hill had told “the black men to ravish all the white women.”
He said no and they struck him again. They asked him if he was president of the Union League—a particular bugbear for the Klan because it sought to organize freedmen. He admitted it. More blows.
“Didn’t you preach against the Ku-Klux?” the
y demanded. In response to his denials, a strap was attached to his neck and he was dragged around the yard. Then a horsewhip was produced and he was hit eight times on the hip bone—“almost the only place he could hit my body,” he later testified, “my legs were so short.”
Finally, after more than an hour of torture in the chill night air, they left. But not before they had issued a series of demands. They wanted him to stop preaching. To stop subscribing to a Republican newspaper from Charleston. And to place an advertisement in the local newspaper renouncing “republicanism” and promising never to vote. If he did all those things, he could live. If not, he would be killed the following week.