Years later, reflecting on this reign of terror from the ruins of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wrote that gaining genuine freedom in the South would require “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box.” Similarly, the forceful antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote in 1892, “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” Most blacks had come to the same conclusion long before and had begun to fight back. The Reconstruction era is full of examples of black people raising their voices—and brandishing weapons—to express their intention to fight for the rights due them as free citizens. In Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1868, armed black men gathered in front of the county courthouse demanding that Democrats vacate their local offices as required by recently passed Reconstruction Acts. In Macon, Georgia, a group of black men threatened to burn down the city if one more black man was murdered (leading the city council to call a “meeting of conciliation”). In the same city, in response to threats from the Klan, an armed guard of 150 men protected the homes of Jefferson Long, a tailor and political activist who in 1871 would be elected to Congress, and AME bishop Henry McNeal Turner, the first black army chaplain during the Civil War. When the Klan threatened William Harrison, a black assemblyman in Hancock County, Georgia, he replied that there would be “burning” if any harm came to him or other black Republicans in the county. A former slave, Harrison had the reputation of being “troublesome” and was also thought to have been involved in an 1863 slave insurrection.
Most black responses to white terrorism were self-defensive. Warned James Simms, who published a broadside called the Freemen’s Standard: “Let no man or set of men think that the loyal citizens, but more particularly the colored, will tamely submit to being attacked and murdered in Savannah as at Memphis and New Orleans.” Yet although black people refused to let themselves be killed without resisting, most were not looking to engage in armed combat with whites, and most were not planning raids on white communities. Many black leaders were concerned that violent black reprisals would trigger even more violence from white supremacists, who continued to hold many positions in state and local governments in the first years of Reconstruction. Appeals to the federal government seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
It is impossible to precisely determine the effect of armed pushback by blacks in the days of Reconstruction. Nevertheless, even though its impact cannot be quantified, it anticipated armed responses to white terror in the twentieth-century civil rights movement. Many of the adult leaders of mid-twentieth-century civil rights struggle were just two generations away from these events and had heard firsthand the stories of ancestors, family friends, or community leaders who had stood up to white authority and won.
Without a doubt there was something new in the black response to the wave of white terrorism that followed the Civil War. For one thing, at war’s end, the prevailing attitude and posture of black southerners was very different from what it had been before the war. They could move more freely, though not without restriction at the beginning of Reconstruction. But freedmen held mass meetings protected by armed guards; black people acquired dogs, guns, and liquor, all forbidden under slavery; and blacks refused to yield the sidewalks to approaching whites. In legal principle, if not in actual practice, moreover, black people were now citizens. Assisted by the Fourteenth Amendment, they could organize in ways that had been impossible during the era of slavery.
Blacks had some support from the so-called Radical Republicans who took control of the U.S. Congress in 1867, but they were also able to support themselves as never before. Because of the Civil War, there were weapons in black communities, and black men boasted combat experience. Even gun control efforts aimed at taking weapons out of black hands could not damp a new martial spirit that manifested itself in new and sometimes unprecedented ways. In one of three Reconstruction Acts passed in 1867, the more radical Congress created state militias, which were mostly officered by whites but contained a substantial number of black Civil War veterans.
These southern militias had great impact, especially when state governments used them to protect blacks from the resurgent white-supremacist violence following the Civil War. The Ku Klux Klan made its first appearance in Arkansas in April 1868, just one month after blacks voted in state elections for the first time. The Klan initiated a campaign of terror, murdering and beating blacks and attacking black meetings. On October 22, 1868, Republican James M. Hinds, who represented Arkansas in the U.S. House of Representatives, was assassinated by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the first sitting member of Congress to be assassinated. In the three months before November’s general election, the governor’s office received reports of more than two hundred murders by the Klan.
Republican Powell Clayton, a Union general from Pennsylvania who had settled in Arkansas after the Civil War, was elected governor in November. He declared martial law in ten counties he viewed as being in a state of insurrection. “The bullets of the assassin, threats, and every species of intimidation were made use of to prevent the execution of the law, and to rob citizens of the rights and privileges of citizenship,” he said in a November 24 address to the state’s General Assembly. “A reign of terror was being inaugurated in our State which threatened to obliterate all the old landmarks of justice and freedom, and to bear us onward to anarchy and destruction.” Clayton raised a militia of Union sympathizers and former slaves and began an active three-month campaign against white-supremacist violence. The militia fought, arrested, disarmed, and killed Klan members, forcing hundreds of other Klansmen to flee the state. On March 13, 1869, the Arkansas General Assembly made the Klan an illegal organization.
But Clayton’s unusually decisive response to white terror was not typical. Militias made up of ex–Confederate soldiers who opposed the efforts of the Reconstruction governments organized to attack their efforts. Many were in militias established before the federal takeover of southern state governments, and they were highly skilled in hit-and-run tactics. They were dominated by the Ku Klux Klan. After the federal occupation, most of the governors, though Republican, feared to use black militias against the Klan and other white terrorist groups because they thought it would trigger a kind of general racial conflagration. What is more, the militias themselves became the target of highly organized white-supremacist campaigns.
The infamous 1873 massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of armed black resistance to white vigilante groups. Black power was broken there, signaling an oncoming cataclysm that would sink tentative efforts at democracy in not only Louisiana but in the rest of the South as well: the complete destruction of Reconstruction through armed force. Colfax was the seat of Grant Parish. Republican governor Henry Clay Warmouth, who had been a colonel in the Union Army, created Grant Parish on March 9, 1869, from three other parishes in Louisiana’s Red River Valley—Rapides, Natchitoches, and Winn. The Red River Valley was one of the state’s strongest bastions of Confederate sympathy. Rumor had it that Simon Legree, the brutal overseer in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was based on the overseer of the Hidden Hill Plantation near Colfax, which she had once visited. Warmouth’s decision to name this new parish for General Ulysses S. Grant was a deliberate slap in the face to Confederate sympathizers, and a reminder that Louisiana’s Confederate heartland was administered by a state government dominated by Radical Republicans. But the underlying political purpose of Grant Parish was even more horrifying to the state’s white supremacists. It was one of eight new parishes created by the Republican-dominated state government to achieve black majorities in the state, gerrymandering intended to help the state’s black communities achieve a political voice, as well as to make Republicans’ power more secure.
Since the end of the war extreme violence aimed at intimidating blacks had blighted the region from which Grant Parish was created. In 1867, in a tiny settlement calle
d Holloway’s Prairie near the future site of Colfax, armed whites stormed a black church service, shooting and killing any members of the congregation who attempted to escape. Then they randomly selected two men and one woman from the congregation and hanged them. Violence escalated during and after the 1868 presidential election that gained Ulysses S. Grant the presidency. But while white supremacy was growing in strength in Grant Parish, so too was the power of Louisiana’s Republican-dominated state government. For a little while at least, as in Arkansas, the state government was able to shield its black constituents from white terror by investing in the armed power of black veterans.
Black militiamen were secreted in various black households in Grant Parish. Warmouth had approved this; they were part of a 5,000-man state militia composed of black and white units. William Ward, the leader of this secret militia unit in the parish and also a captain in the Louisiana State Militia’s Sixth Infantry Regiment, had fought during the Civil War in the Louisiana Corps d’Afrique and had achieved the rank of sergeant, the highest rank a black soldier could achieve at the time.
Grant Parish’s secret black militia was not shy about flexing its muscles. On March 14, 1871, carrying weapons provided by the state, the militia stormed the Grant Parish courthouse, disrupting the murder trial of a group of white supremacists. At gunpoint and over the objections of the judge, who was thought by Parish blacks to be sympathetic to the men being tried, the militiamen seized the prisoners. “Damn the court,” Ward said, claiming jurisdiction in the name of the U.S. attorney in New Orleans. Ironically, his claim was modeled on the power given to federal officials to create special federal tribunals for investigating the legitimacy of owners seeking the return of slaves, as mandated by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That act required the return of proven runaways and also made assisting runaways a federal crime.
Ward’s action hardly eased white–black tensions in Grant Parish or in the violently white-supremacist parishes around it. To the contrary, his example confirmed the worst fears of whites everywhere in the state about the new forms of black power accompanying Reconstruction. Yet Ward continued to make similar arrests; empowered by the U.S. attorney in New Orleans, he brought mobsters and murderers before federal tribunals there. He remained unbowed—and he derived support from President Ulysses S. Grant, no friend of Confederate nationalism.
Although notoriously corrupt, the Grant administration nonetheless seemed hopeful to radical black Republicans like Ward, and Louisiana’s emerging black power seemed useful to Grant. Traditionally, for instance, crimes like murder by the Ku Klux Klan were considered local cases. Now, under new federal law promulgated by Grant, they could be considered federal crimes. The same law made it illegal for two or more men “to go in disguise upon the public highway” to prevent other people from exercising their constitutional rights, as the Ku Klux Klan did in attacking meetings or the homes of black political leaders. This effectively made the Klan illegal without naming the organization. The law also empowered Ward, a lawman in Louisiana, to make arrests. His Grant Parish militia paraded in old army uniforms.
Meanwhile, white terrorism in Louisiana’s Red River Valley was making Colfax a locus of black power—a center for black refugees—and, commented a New Orleans newspaper, “the Mecca of bad and desperate negroes from everywhere.” Grant Parish had 2,400 blacks and 2,200 whites according to the 1870 census. This roughly 50–50 racial split mirrored the population of the state as a whole. But what gave Colfax and Grant Parish special significance in the violently rough-and-tumble politics of Louisiana was that it was the headquarters of William Ward and his militia. And Ward had the support of William Smith Calhoun, one of the parish’s largest planters.
In the spring of 1873, simmering white–black political antagonism boiled over in the parish. On March 25 Ward and some members of Ward’s militia seized the courthouse in Colfax. Whites in Grant and surrounding parishes began organizing to take it back; the chief organizers were the Knights of the White Camellia and another group calling itself the Old Time Ku Klux Klan.
Ward mobilized his militia to take over and defend the courthouse. His men guarded all the roads leading into town and began drilling with arms in front of the courthouse and stockpiling ammunition, while also preventing unknown whites from entering the town. On April 5, black militiamen drove off a group of whites attempting to reconnoiter the town. Ward expected assistance from the newly elected governor, William Pitt Kellogg, an ally of President Grant, but the governor had his own problems, starting with getting recognized as governor. The 1872 election had been bitterly fought, not only pitting Republicans against Democrats but also including a new “Fusionist” Party, led by John McEnery, a former Confederate battalion commander, and widely supported by white-supremacist Democrats and Republicans distressed with the corruption of the Grant administration. The election may have been stolen. Even Grant acknowledged that Kellogg’s victory “was not altogether certain.” Kellogg and McEnery both claimed the governorship and asked for congressional recognition and federal intervention; both held inaugurations on January 13, 1873. Both appointed a set of local officials for Grant Parish.
Kellogg, still waiting for recognition from Washington, D.C., and insecure without it, decided that he could not come to the aid of Ward. (Grant finally issued an executive order recognizing Kellogg as governor on September 20, 1873.) Trying to win over former opponents, Kellogg declared events in Colfax a local matter and said he would not intervene unless the federal government ordered him to.
On April 13, shortly before noon, hundreds of armed white supremacists approached the courthouse in Colfax. Their leader was Christopher Columbus Nash, a Confederate veteran and former prisoner of war. Nash halted his paramilitary group in battle formation within view of the courthouse. Under a white flag, he went into the black community and found a black man, whom he sent to the courthouse with an offer to negotiate. Out came the commander of the courthouse defense, a man named Benjamin Levin “Lev” Allen. “We want that courthouse,” Nash told him. Allen pointed out that Nash’s group had already killed several black men at random, men who were not involved in the takeover, and that the defenders did not feel safe putting down their arms. Nash and his men could have Allen’s own weapons when he was killed, he added. Both men walked away.
Thirty minutes later, Nash’s forces attacked. They were met with heavy fire from the black militiamen dug in around the building, and for an hour or so Nash’s advance bogged down. Finally, his men brought up a cannon and opened fire. The heavy weapon surprised the defenders. Some retreated inside the courthouse building; others fled, only to be chased down and killed. The attacking white forces torched the courthouse’s cypress-shingled roof, but some of the defenders refused to flee. Those who did were shot down, as were those who attempted to surrender.
The fighting finally stopped around 3 PM. Nash’s forces took prisoners but summarily executed many with a pistol shot to the back of the head. The estimates of the number of blacks killed that day vary widely. A military report identifies 105 victims by name. An unspecified number of bodies were found in the Red River; thirteen prisoners were hanged from an old pecan tree near the courthouse. The aftermath of the Colfax massacre was as shameful as the event itself: although federal troops arrived on April 21 and some of the attackers were tried, none were convicted or punished in any way. Nash went on to serve as parish sheriff for several terms.
The Colfax violence set the pattern that would be used to end Reconstruction: white supremacists employing overwhelming violence to cow local blacks, and a federal government reluctant to contain it. Just five months after the Colfax atrocity, on September 14, 1873, some 2,000 White League members defeated 500 black militiamen and 500 metropolitan police officers in New Orleans. They took possession of the statehouse and the New Orleans Arsenal and installed a white-supremacist government. Although soon ousted by federal troops, the White League became the dominant political force in the state, even refusing to pay
state taxes. They ruled in defiance of state and federal authority, not in conjunction with it. “Practically, so-called Reconstruction in Louisiana was a continuation of the Civil War,” Du Bois would later observe.
The tragedies in Colfax and New Orleans were repeated in other parts of the South. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, at least fifty blacks were killed by white rioters on December 7, 1874. Some accounts put the number of black dead at three hundred or more. Such violence was not random; rather, it was deliberate and political, “an essential component in the counterrevolution that rolled back the tide of Radical Reconstruction and restored command of Southern political institutions to white supremacy.”
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote with pain in 1935, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” He was right, but that is only part of the story. Certainly white supremacy and white power achieved and secured “Redemption,” as this period has come to be called in many quarters of the white South. For their part, blacks learned that, absent federal support, armed resistance to white-supremacist violence was insufficient, even if it sometimes saved the moment. Moreover, they discerned that any support they received from outside their own communities was unlikely to be timely, permanent, or even genuine.
But the tragic and brutal lessons of Reconstruction’s dismemberment did not spell the end of black resistance to white supremacy. The hopes that had animated Reconstruction were never abandoned, and black people nursed the will to resist in the decades to come. Sometimes that will was hidden deeply beneath the surface of black life. And sometimes it erupted suddenly, powerfully, and unexpectedly, as it variously did throughout the entire twentieth century.
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