Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  That very same night in the very same small South Carolina community, the Klan paid a visit to a number of other black households. As Hill later told Congress, “They went and whipped J. P. Hill’s wife the same night they were at my house . . . Julia, Miles Barron’s wife: Rumor says they committed a rape on her . . . Samuel Simrell’s house was burned down that night.”26

  At least they survived. Many did not. Jim Williams had grown up a slave in York County before escaping and enlisting in the Union Army. After the war he returned to become captain of a black militia company. On March 7, 1871—two months before the assault on Elias Hill—a group of forty or fifty masked men came to his house at 2 a.m. He was hiding under the floorboards, but the Klansmen, led by Dr. J. Rufus Bratton, a local physician, discovered his hiding place. They dragged him outside, tied a rope around a tree limb, and hung him. Not even elected officials were safe. Both state Senator Solomon Washington Dill, a white Republican, and state Senator Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a black Republican, were gunned down. So was a white poll manager who had the temerity to make whites wait in line to vote just like the Negroes.27

  SOUTHERN GOVERNMENTS, EVEN when under Republican control, were virtually helpless to fight the “Invisible Empire.” White lawmen could not be counted upon to combat the Klan, nor white juries to convict them. Black militiamen were effective in some places, for instance Arkansas and Texas, but on the whole they were poorly trained and not well armed; as the historian Eric Foner noted, “blacks with military experience were far outnumbered in a region where virtually every white male had been trained to bear arms.”28 Moreover, in most places white Republican officeholders were afraid to employ black militia for fear of alienating moderate whites and harming their own chances of winning reelection. “Even in Republican areas . . . ,” Foner wrote, “the law was paralyzed.”29

  That left the job of enforcing Reconstruction to an army of occupation that was pathetically inadequate to the task. The number of federal troops stationed in the South dropped from 87,000 in 1866 to 20,000 in 1867 and 6,000 in 1876. The Freedmen’s Bureau in the War Department was supposed to help former slaves, but at its peak it had just 900 agents scattered across the South.30 In short, there were far too few federal representatives to enforce upon 9.4 million Southerners (5.5 million of them white) the social revolution known as Radical Reconstruction, which was launched in 1867 after white Southerners had made plain their determination to resist granting ex-slaves any social or political rights.31

  NO ARMY OFFICER tried harder than Major Lewis M. Merrill to realize the ideals of Reconstruction and to expose “the villainies” perpetrated by the Klan, but his experience showed just how futile the struggle was. He arrived in South Carolina in March 1871 with three companies from the Seventh Cavalry—troops temporarily diverted from fighting Indians to fighting the Ku Klux Klan. Even with this influx, there were fewer than 1,000 soldiers in a state of 705,606 people (including 289,667 whites).

  A West Point graduate, Merrill was described as having “the head, face and spectacles of a German professor, and the frame of an athlete.” An officer of “unusual talent,” he had fought Border Ruffians in “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s and bushwhackers in Missouri in the 1860s, so he knew how to conduct a counterinsurgency. Although not a lawyer himself, he came from a family of lawyers and had previously served as a judge advocate general, so he knew how to utilize the law to achieve his objectives. He was, in the words of U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, “resolute, collected, bold, and prudent, with a good legal head, very discriminating between truth and falsehood; very indignant at wrong, and yet master of his indignation.” In short, “just the man for the work.”

  He set up headquarters in Rose’s Hotel in Yorkville, the York County seat (population: 1,500), and set out about collecting intelligence amid what a visitor from New York called “a general air of dirty dreariness.” When he first arrived, he was “kindly and courteously received . . . by the principal citizens of the town,” as befitting the usual Southern custom. He was under the impression that he would have to deal with nothing more than “sporadic instances of mob violence.” But before long he “became convinced that the Ku-Klux organization was not only a very large one and exceedingly well organized but a very dangerous one.” “I never conceived of such a state of social disorganization being possible in any civilized community as exists in this county now . . . ,” he later told Congress. “There appears to me to be a diseased state of public sentiment in regard to the administration of justice.”

  Employing informers (“pukers” in local parlance), Merrill eventually gathered evidence on eleven murders and six hundred cases of “whipping, beating, and personal violence, excluding numerous minor cases of threats, intimidation, abuse, and small personal violence, as knocking down with a pistol or gun.” But although he could investigate, he could not prosecute. Because of “dishonest or intimidated juries and perjured testimony,” he knew that “the local civil authorities were powerless to cope with the strength of the Ku-Klux conspiracy, even if willing to make the attempt, and I have been compelled to believe that the desire to make the attempt was entirely wanting.” Such reluctance was hardly surprising given that “the conspiracy may be stated to have practically included the whole white community.”

  Alarmed by the evidence gathered by Major Merrill and other investigators, Congress in April 1871 passed the Ku Klux Klan Act. It created a new federal crime—“deprivation of any rights, privileges, and immunities secured by the Constitution”—and authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to enforce it. Six months later, President Ulysses S. Grant lifted habeas corpus protections in nine South Carolina counties, including York—the first and last time this provision was invoked. Within two days Merrill’s cavalrymen had arrested eighty-two suspects for crimes of “revolting wickedness.” Hundreds more surrendered voluntarily, overflowing the Yorkville jail. Merrill said the Klansmen were “bewildered and demoralized” and “recognized . . . that the game was up.”

  In fact, the game was just beginning. There was no provision in the KKK Act for military tribunals, so the suspects were remanded to federal court in Columbia, South Carolina. Klan leaders raised $10,000 to hire two of the greatest defense lawyers in America, both of them former U.S. attorneys general. Out of 1,355 Ku Klux indictments, just 102 resulted in convictions and the longest sentence was five years. Those released outright included the leader of the Jim Williams lynch mob, Dr. Bratton, who had fled Merrill’s roundup. He was kidnapped by Secret Service agents in Canada, chloroformed, and smuggled back to American soil in an early, if ultimately futile, version of what is now called rendition.

  In the spring of 1873 the U.S. attorney general suspended the prosecution of all pending cases. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South,” President Grant conceded, “and the great majority are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the Government.” Whatever energy the federal government may have displayed in enforcing Reconstruction was dissipated by the congressional elections of 1874, which returned a Democratic majority for the first time since the Civil War. The army, for its part, was eager to end a distasteful mission and get back to “real” soldiering against the Indians; many officers were alarmed by reports, such as the one that Major Merrill submitted on September 23, 1872, noting that the “instruction” of his men in cavalry skills was falling “far short of even a respectable standard” because of the “circumstances of duty.” The last troops of the Seventh Cavalry pulled out of South Carolina in March 1873.

  MERRILL BELIEVED THAT by this time “in York County the Ku Klux organization as such is completely crushed.”32 It was true that by 1873 the Klan had gone out of business, not to be revived for another half century. But by that point it was well on its way to achieving its objective: the disenfranchisement of the freedmen. The new constitutional amendments designed to guarantee equality under the law existed in name only. Even its founde
rs felt that the Klan had “committed excesses”33 and that keeping it in existence risked a counterproductive backlash from the federal government. But that does not mean that Klansmen were prepared to make even the most minimal concessions regarding Negro rights. Many of the same men who had once been Ku Kluxers joined new paramilitary organizations such as rifle and saber clubs that sprang up across the South, including some known as “Red Shirts” in a backhanded tribute to Garibaldi. By now the irredentist forces were so strong that they felt no need to wear disguises. They could perpetrate their outrages in public, confident that no one would stop them.

  By 1877 there were no federal troops and hardly any Republican officials left in the South. The soldiers had been pulled out as part of what was widely alleged to be a sordid political deal to seat Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, as the winner of the closely contested 1876 presidential election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. New Democratic state governments began to enact the discriminatory codes that would become known as Jim Crow.34

  With eleven years of terrorism that killed an estimated 3,000 freedmen, white Southerners achieved more than their armies had accomplished in four years of total war that left 650,000 to 850,000 dead.35 Terrorism is usually seen as an urban phenomenon, but the KKK was a rural group, and it was one of the largest and most successful terrorist organizations in history. Because of its ruthless campaign of murder and intimidation, the promise of Reconstruction would not be realized for another century.

  Segregationists succeeded in dismantling Reconstruction in no small part because they won what a later generation would call “the battle of the narrative.” They did so by spreading the myth that it was the former slave owners, not the former slaves, who were the real victims of the post–Civil War era. The vilification of Reconstruction eventually came to be embodied in well-known books and films such as Birth of a Nation (based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan), and Gone With the Wind, but already by the 1870s it was the dominant narrative not only in the South but also in the North.

  If the Ku Klux Klan or its successors had been determined to overthrow the federal government or even to secede from the United States, they never could have succeeded. But they were careful to strive for more modest goals and to avoid fighting federal troops. That made it easy, in the end, for the white-run federal government to concede their demands. Northerners were willing to fight to the death against secession but not against segregation.

  Few terrorist groups were to enjoy the success of the KKK. The anarchists were more typical in their violent failure.

  32.

  PROPAGANDA BY THE DEED

  Anarchists, ca. 1880–ca. 1939

  THE PALE, SLIGHTLY built young man in his “shabby black pants, vest, boots, and a white shirt with a black tie”—the typical uniform of a down-at-the-heels intellectual—would have attracted little attention as he wandered through the frigid night air of fin de siècle Paris. Unless, that is, someone had looked more closely at his overcoat and wondered what could have made that bulge in his coat pocket.

  From his modest rented room in Belleville, a working-class district within sight of the newly completed Eiffel Tower, he walked down the elegant Avenue de l’Opéra. He stopped by a couple of fashionable boîtes—the Restaurant Bignon and the Café de la Paix—but they were too empty for his purposes. At 8 p.m. he reached the Hotel Terminus, next to a bustling railroad station. There were a substantial number of patrons in its café and more arriving, so he took a table, ordered a beer, and lit a cigar. By 9 p.m. more than 350 people were drinking aperitifs, smoking, and conversing, as if in a scene from La Bohème, while an “indifferent orchestra” played in the background.

  But then any resemblance to the Puccini opera stopped. The man in black calmly opened the door, took the package out of his pocket, lit it with his cigar, and tossed it inside just as he was stepping onto the sidewalk. The homemade bomb weighed just four pounds. It was nothing more than a metal lunch pail filled with dynamite and buckshot along with a mercury fulminate fuse. Simple, but destructive. The explosion on February 12, 1894, shattered marble tables and metal chairs, “blew to atoms the windows and mirrors,” and left holes in both the floor and the ceiling. Twenty people were injured, five badly. One of them would later die. It was hardly the sort of decadent scene that we have come to identify with the Belle Époque.

  As smoke and screams emanated from the café, the bomber tried to get away. But he had been observed by a waiter who screamed, “Stop him!” A small crowd of passersby joined the chase in the gloaming darkness. As he ran, the bomber pulled out a pistol and fired several shots at his pursuers before a policeman finally grabbed him. The bomber tried to shoot him too, but after a short struggle he was arrested. Even when he was in custody, he continued to resist, screaming, “Pigs! I would kill you all!”

  At first he gave his name as Leon Breton, then as Leon Martin. Within days it emerged that his real name was Émile Henry and this was not his first act of terrorism. More than two years earlier, on November 8, 1892, he had left a bomb outside the Paris offices of a mining company that had just broken a strike by its employees. The police had discovered the device and carried it back to their station house, where it detonated, killing five officers. At his trial Henry expressed only one regret—that he had not killed more people. He had hoped at least fifteen would die in the Café Terminus.

  His brazenness was no surprise to the crowd of spectators because the twenty-one-year-old was already a dedicated anarchist—someone who believed that the state would have to be destroyed to bring about a nirvana where private property ceased to exist and people lived in perfect liberty and harmony. The only surprise was that he was not himself an impoverished worker or, as a London magazine put it, “of the loafer and low criminal type”—the stereotypes that polite society liked to project onto the anarchists. He was, the prosecutor noted, “a perfect little petty bourgeois.” His father was a published author; an uncle was a marquis. Henry had been a brilliant student who had gone to work for another uncle who was a civil engineer. But he abandoned thoughts of a career to pursue his anarchist beliefs—inspired, no doubt, by the example of his father, who had been a leading member of the Commune, which took over Paris for seventy-two days in 1871. In one bloody week in May 1871, the communards had been routed, with 20,000 killed and 40,000 arrested.36 Henry’s father was forced into exile in Spain. That created an enduring grievance for anarchists such as Henry and his older brother, Fortuné, both of whom became associated with anarchist groups in the French capital.

  They were also embittered by the terrible poverty that they saw around them, with the proletariat living in miserable slums while wealthy Parisians cavorted in opulent restaurants and music halls. As Émile Henry was to explain at his trial, “The factory owner amassing a huge fortune on the back of the labor of his workers. . . . The deputy, the minister whose hands were forever outstretched for bribes. . . . Everything I could see turned my stomach and my mind fastened upon criticism of social organization. . . . I turned into an enemy of a society which I held to be criminal.”

  Thus was Henry motivated to become a pioneer in urban terrorism, a phenomenon distinct from, even if it had some overlap with, the sort of rural terrorism practiced by the Ku Klux Klan or John Brown. By striking in the midst of heavily populated urban areas such as Paris, where their actions would instantly be sensationalized in the emerging mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, Henry and other anarchists showed how even a tiny terrorist organization (in his case, a band of one) could have a disproportionate impact on popular opinion.37

  IN FORMULATING HIS critique of society, which, he admitted, “has been voiced too often to need rehearsing by me,” Henry had been influenced by three philosophers above all—the anarchist trinity.

  First came the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), a gifted sloganeer who claimed “property is theft” and “god is evil.” Then there wa
s Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), a lumbering Russian nobleman with an unruly beard who spent a decade in tsarist prisons and ended his days in Swiss exile. He was Karl Marx’s bitter rival in the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) at a time when communism and anarchism were jostling for influence in revolutionary circles. With the Russian Nihilist Sergei Nechaev, Bakunin cooperated on a famous pamphlet, Principles of Revolution, which stated, “We recognize no other activity but the work of extermination, but we admit that the forms in which the activity will show itself will be extremely varied—poison, the knife, the rope, etc. In this struggle, revolution sanctifies everything alike.” They also worked together on Catechism of a Revolutionary, which claimed, “Everything is moral that contributes to the triumph of the revolution; everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal.” Although Bakunin subsequently broke with Nechaev, who became notorious for murdering a young fellow revolutionary in Russia (an incident that inspired Dostoevsky’s novel Demons), he never repudiated his endorsement of violence.

  The third great apostle of anarchism, Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), was less given to inflammatory and even bloodthirsty pronouncements. A Russian prince who had turned against the old regime, he spent time in prison before escaping and settling, as had Marx, in England. Eventually he tried to dissociate himself from the doctrine of “propaganda by the deed”—the euphemism for terrorism coined by the Frenchman Paul Brousse in 187738—but he refused to reject violence as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. would later do. “Personally I hate these explosions, but I cannot stand as a judge to condemn those who are driven to despair,” Kropotkin said in a statement echoed by countless terrorist apologists through the ages.39

  Most adherents of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin were not violent, but some were. The police identified more than five thousand anarchists in France; one thousand were considered dangerous.40 Anarchists were also concentrated in Italy, Russia, and Spain. Immigrants from those countries promulgated their doctrines as far away as North and South America. In the late nineteenth century, the world was transformed by “globalization,” with the spread of railroads, steamships, and the telegraph, and, just as they would do a hundred years later with the Internet, airlines, satellite television, and cell phones, terrorists took advantage of this phenomenon.