Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  Conflicts between Negroes and ex-Confederates holding badges as police or claiming membership in some militia were predictable. One conflict between a black veteran and a white policeman left one of the combatants cut and the other nursing a bullet wound. Another fight between a black soldier of the occupying force and a Confederate veteran repurposed as a Wilmington, North Carolina, policeman lead to protests, gunfire and death. The black soldier was reprimanded for his part in the initial fight. Angered by the perceived mistreatment of the black trooper, his friends in uniform and a crowd of black civilians surrounded city hall in protest. They were attacked by a group of whites and quickly dispersed. But during the night, they reconstituted into small, armed bands and attacked Confederate veterans on the police force, killing at least one man.

  The reaction here exemplifies the worry about escalating cycles of violence. After the black show of force, the city administration recruited more policemen and requested guns from the governor, “with which to arm the police and other [white] citizens.” Confederate General Robert Ransom, with a cadre of handpicked Confederate veterans, was installed as the new police chief, and he moved aggressively to disarm Wilmington’s Negroes. He was aided by the policy of Union Army officers who gave him “carte blanche” in dealing with black soldiers.

  Ransom’s new police force was a continuing terror for blacks. One officer of the Freedman’s Bureau reported they “are the hardest and most brutal looking and acting set of civil or municipal officers I ever saw.” A Freedman’s Bureau agent reported how two of these stout men apprehended a scrawny black woman for public intoxication. They laughed and goaded her for nearly half an hour, and when they tired of her antics, one of them knocked her cold with his baton.

  Election season in Wilmington brought fiery spectacles and thundering midnight Klan rides that tested the black resolve to vote. The black response was defiance. Demonstrating that earlier disarmament attempts had failed, Wilmington blacks divided themselves into armed patrols. They rode throughout the night, firing randomly in their own show of force and confirmation that the Klan did not rule.64

  In the run-up to the fall elections of 1868, the Wilmington Daily Journal decried that “there are many Negroes in this city who . . . almost constantly go armed.” Black state senator Abraham Galloway, now standing for the office of presidential elector, wore a pistol, conspicuously displayed, wherever he went. He traveled with a squad of armed black men who later formed a dedicated black militia for community defense. The well-armed community again rebuffed the attempts at intimidation. On Election Day, Galloway became North Carolina’s first black elector and delivered the district’s votes to the Republican, Ulysses Grant.65

  Fig. 3.7. Abraham Galloway. (Courtesy of the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.)

  The 1868 elections in Tennessee were also shadowed by threats and intimidation. As Election Day approached, Klansmen made countless attempts to disarm blacks, resulting in shootouts with Negroes who resisted. One man recounted how a Klansmen attempted to drag him from his home, but, “I prevented him by my pistol, which I cocked, and he jumped back. I told them I would hurt them before they got away. They did not burn nor steal anything, nor hurt me.” Another Tennessee freedman faced down terrorists who apparently believed his warning that “the first man who broke my door open I would shoot.”66

  The hazard of Klan violence was exacerbated by the sometimes-close connection and shared personnel between the terrorist organizations and the agents of government. At many points during the black freedom struggle, folk would claim that law enforcement and other officials were sympathetic to the Klan. But several incidents during the Reconstruction era provide vivid confirmation.

  A report to Congress in 1871 tells of an elderly freedman in rural Tennessee who shot his way out of a Klan attack on his home. After he killed one of the group, the others fled. When he unmasked the dead man, it turned out to be the local constable. Subsequent investigation revealed that the county sheriff was also among the attackers. A jury deemed the shooting to be legitimate self-defense.

  In another Tennessee incident, a gang of Klansmen fired into the home of a black family, wounding a female occupant. Black men in the house responded with gunfire, hitting the leader of the gang, who fell dead on their porch and was abandoned by his friends. At sunrise, the Negroes ventured out to find that the dead man on their steps was a deputy sheriff.

  To Republican congressmen aimed at curbing the wave of Klan violence, this Tennessee shooting was an entirely salutary result. Representative Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts, proclaimed from the House floor, “I thank God for the courage of that Negro, who, in defending his own roof-tree and hearthstone, shot down the Sheriff and Constable who, as leader of the Ku Klux Klan invaded both!” Butler’s Republican colleague Job Stevenson of Ohio lamented the violence and threats that kept Republican voters from the polls but celebrated the cases of armed self-defense reported during congressional investigations. Stevenson applauded the fact that many freedmen were armed and had defended themselves. It was evident, in his view, that Negroes with guns were an important deterrent to racist violence as, “seldom do they attack a man until they have him disarmed.”

  An episode from Georgia reported to a congressional committee in 1871 supports Stevenson’s assessment. There a freedman was shot three times by Klansmen but managed to return fire. When he hit one of them, the entire group retreated, dragging away the wounded man.67

  In 1875, in Independence, Texas, armed white men interrupted an interracial group of Republican political activists. Two black men in the group, one of them reportedly a Baptist preacher, fought off the intruders with shotguns. Later, in the little town of Graball, Texas, black men, fearing that Democrats would steal or stuff ballot boxes, posted armed guards around the tally houses and voting sites. In one predominantly black precinct, a Negro named Polk Hill shot it out with a band of hooded men who broke into the polling place to steal ballots. He killed one of them, who turned out to be the son of the Democratic candidate for county commissioner.68

  In Charleston, South Carolina, where white rifle clubs attempted to intimidate blacks from voting in the 1876 election, clashes with armed blacks ended in standoffs. And in one case, a few weeks before Election Day, blacks sent white Democrats fleeing, with a show of force that left five whites and one black dead. At a rally of at least one thousand blacks, following the killing of a black rifleman, the community adopted a resolution calling for retaliation against the terror, declaring, “We tell you that it will not do to go too far in this thing. Remember that there are 80,000 black men in this state who can bear Winchester rifles and know how to use them.”69

  The political violence of the era was not just a Southern phenomenon. In Philadelphia, in 1871, Republicans wielding the black voting bloc challenged the Democratic political machine and swept to power on Negro support. But four blacks died in a spate of election eve violence. The Philadelphia police, controlled by the Democrats, let the violence proceed unchecked. Details of the black resistance are thinly recorded, but one observer described the conflict as an “eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth in every instance.”

  A conflict commensurate with modern intuitions occurred in Mississippi in 1875, where a Negro militia confronted a white volunteer force organized by Democrats in anticipation of the 1876 election. For weeks before the voting, both groups paraded with arms and executed jarring artillery salutes demonstrating their preparedness.70

  At the center of the conflict, and a particular target, was black sheriff Peter Crosby. Faced down by a group of several hundred armed white men who challenged his claim to office, Crosby fled to the state capital. His plea for help was rebuffed by the governor, who told him to stand up and fight. White men had faced bullets to free blacks, said the governor, and blacks must fight to maintain that freedom.

  Crosby returned to Vicksburg and organized a body of men to retake the sheriff’s office by force. The white opposition was dug in on
high ground. Accounts conflict about who fired first, but scores of men, the majority of them Negroes, died in the shooting. In the days following, whites ransacked black homes, searching out and confiscating firearms. Peter Crosby would survive the violence, and, with the aid of federal troops, was reinstated to his office. But he would soon resign under a wave of continuing threats and declining political fortunes.71

  The places where blacks were a clear majority of the population raise pointed questions about the risks and opportunities of armed resistance against the forces of Southern Redemption. In Mississippi, for example, violence and the threat of it suppressed the black vote in 1875 and gave Democrats control in counties where blacks constituted two thirds (Oktibbeha and Amite Counties) to three fourths (Lowndes County) of the population.

  From what we can tell today, whites were better organized, better armed, and potentially more desperate in the fight against Negro rule, which to them represented a world gone mad. A crucial aspect of the Democrat’s victory was disarmament of black Republicans. The full details of how a white minority managed to disarm and overcome the black majority in these counties are lost. But the assessment of Albert Morgan, formerly Republican sheriff of Yazoo County and ally of carpetbag governor A’Delbert Ames, is instructive. Both Morgan and Ames fled Mississippi in the wake of the Democratic ascent. Morgan lamented his potential role in that rise, explaining, “when the general arming of the whites first became known to me . . . I counseled the colored man against irregular arming, advising all to rely upon the law and its officers. I hoped by steadfastly pursuing this course, by offering no pretext for violence, we might pass the ordeal I saw approaching.” Acknowledging the tactical error, Morgan conceded, “I was unused to guerrilla warfare.”

  Blacks were also a majority in regions of South Carolina. Riding the wave of Reconstruction, these black majorities gained powerful Republican friends in the legislature and the governor’s office. In the shadow of Negro rule, white Democrats formed private rifle clubs and looked for opportunities to provoke conflict with the black majority. With the advantage of numbers, and at least nominal official support, blacks in this region sometimes prevailed against white political violence. A conflict in 1876 known as the Ned Tennent Riot is instructive.

  Ned Tennent was the flamboyant commander of a black militia company in Meriwether Township, Edgefield County. Tennent relished the pomp of military drill and inflamed whites with his arrogant demeanor and commander’s hat adorned with an ostrich plume. After members of a white rifle club fired shots into his home, Tennent summoned two hundred black militiamen and fueled rumors of a coming wave of black vengeance. The white rifle clubs girded for battle.

  The next incident was in the predominantly black town of Hamburg in July 1876. The avowed strategy of the rifle clubs was to suppress black voting by killing “a certain number of niggers’ leading men.” The plan was “if they could be successful in killing those they wanted to kill in Hamburg, they [Democrats] would carry the county.”72

  The black community of Hamburg was relatively well organized under the leadership of a man named Prince Rivers, who had served in the Union Army and as a South Carolina legislator. Hamburg had also just revitalized its militia, which was led by black veteran Dock Adams. Adams was less flamboyant than Ned Tennent, but he was a meticulous and demanding commander.

  As part of Independence Day celebrations, Adams was parading his militia on Main Street when he encountered two young white men in a buggy who demanded that he yield the street. The young men were from the planter class and expected a deference that Adams refused. They subsequently filed a complaint with Prince Rivers, who was also the trial justice in Hamburg. Dock Adams filed a counterclaim, and Rivers set a hearing date to resolve the matter.

  News of the case spread widely, and on the day of the hearing, the white plaintiffs arrived accompanied by armed men from various white rifle clubs, including the unit led by future United States senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman. Tillman flatly rejected Rivers’s authority and demanded that Adams’s militiamen turn over their weapons and apologize to the white plaintiffs. Adams refused and deployed to a building that he had appropriated as an armory.73

  Throughout the afternoon, more white rifle companies trickled into Hamburg, and the lawyer for the white plaintiffs went to secure reinforcements and artillery. By nightfall, the gunfire started, and it continued for nearly five hours. Facing continuing white reinforcements, Dock Adams’s militia was outnumbered, outgunned, and by daybreak was clearly defeated. A black marshal and a militia lieutenant were killed, many were wounded, and thirty of Adams’s militia were captured. Some captives were executed with bullets to the head, and others were fired upon after the order to run. Dock Adams somehow managed to escape.

  While blacks lost this conflict in South Carolina, they did not lose every battle. In the village of Cainhoy, just outside Charleston, black militia with superior numbers and firepower confronted whites who attempted to break up a Republican political meeting. When the shooting stopped, five whites lay dead and fifty more were wounded.

  While large black populations were a political threat, that did not always lead directly to interracial violence. Sometimes black voting power could be co-opted. And that generated interesting secondary turns of political violence. In 1875, before the effort to suppress black voting fully took hold, Democrats tried the carrot in addition to the stick, enticing selected Negroes into the party with various blandishments. One of these men, disgruntled Republican Martin Delaney, a former Union Army officer, campaigned in earnest for South Carolina Democrats in the fall of 1876. Democratic governor Wade Hampton also made overtures to Negroes. He was even accompanied by a mounted armed guard of five hundred men led by ex-slave Richard Mack during the 1876 campaign. On Election Day, Hampton managed to garner roughly five thousand black votes. For their part, black Republicans played very rough with fellow Negroes who were rumored to support the Democrats. These early contrarians were threatened, beaten, and even shot at for their apostasy.

  In heavily black districts of South Carolina, the “shotgun politics” of the rifle clubs alone was insufficient to secure victory for the Democrats. Ultimately, it took massive ballot fraud to wrest control from the Republicans. In many places, blacks still managed to vote in large numbers, and the ballot fraud was evidenced by returns in some white precincts that exceeded the voting population.74 Perched in the United States Senate, commenting on the violence, Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman reflected, “We have done our level best. We have scratched our head to figure out how we can eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them [Negroes]. We are not ashamed.”75

  For a brief period during the Reconstruction era, the federal government attempted to quell the Klan-style terrorism. In 1871, for example, federal prosecutors indicted Klansmen from York County, South Carolina, for violating the rights of blacks to assemble, vote, keep and bear arms, and be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. This prosecution was rooted in a spree of Klan violence including assaults and disarmament of blacks and threats that they would be killed if they tried to vote. It culminated in the murder of black militia captain Jim Williams.

  Williams had been a particular worry for South Carolina Democrats, who depicted him essentially as an outlaw who had to be dealt with. Williams’s militia company was armed with efficient Enfield breach-loading rifles and flaunted the weapons in armed pre-election parades.76

  After breaking into various black homes and disarming occupants, Klansmen confirmed Williams’s location from a black neighbor who reported that Williams had at least twelve guns hidden in his home. The Klan descended on Williams’s cabin, seized his guns, and then dragged him away over the screaming tempest of his wife, Ruby. At daybreak, two of Williams’s neighbors went searching for him and found his corpse hanging from a tree. Federal prosecution of the men who killed Jim Williams and terrorized his neighbors ended with a single Klansman convicted and sentenced to eighteen months
in prison.77

  Of all the violence in the campaign to redeem the South from Reconstruction, the bloodiest episode occurred in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in a town called Colfax. Fueling the conflict was a cynical Republican governor who courted black Republicans and attempted to placate unreconstructed white Democrats, all while snookering his more radical Republican rivals. Political scheming resulted in competing claims for county offices. And that sparked a wave of political violence that the region and the country would not soon forget.

  Colfax was the brainchild of Willie Calhoun, heir to a fourteen-thousand-acre plantation in the Red River Valley. Willie’s father had ruled over more than seven hundred slaves before the war. Raised half his life in Europe and laboring under a physical handicap, Willie fell, philosophically, quite far from the tree. He responded to emancipation and Reconstruction far differently from his neighboring planters. Just the name of the place suggests Willie Calhoun’s unusual view of things. On Willie’s initiative, the thousands of acres handed down by his father were established as a new parish, named for President Grant. The county seat, previously Calhoun’s Landing, was renamed after Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax.

  When the war was over, Willie handed out plantation livestock to former Calhoun slaves, helped start a black school, and rented acreage at fair prices to blacks. When agents of the Freedman’s Bureau arrived to aid the transition from slavery to freedom and mediate conflicts with ex-Confederates, Willie Calhoun welcomed them and their mission.

  Like many places, Grant Parish had seen its share of terrorist violence. That prompted Grant Parish blacks, with at least the initial backing of the governor, to form a militia for the security of the population. It was commanded by William Ward, a former slave from South Carolina who had escaped into Union lines, enlisted in the army, and risen to the rank of sergeant. Seventy-five black men filled the ranks of Ward’s militia company.