April 13, 2023: Remembering Reconstruction: Massacres

[This week marksthe 150th anniversary of thehorrific Colfax Massacre, one of many such Reconstructionsesquicentennials over the next decade. So this week I’ll AmericanStudyfive Reconstruction histories we need to better remember, leading up to aspecial weekend post on a vital new scholarly book.]

I’ve written agood deal, in this space and elsewhere, about the 1898Wilmington massacre and the 1921Tulsa massacre (both too often described as “race riots”), amongother such acts of racial violence. But just as under-remembered, and perhapseven more historically telling, are the massacres that marred and helpedundermine Reconstruction. Here are three:

1)     New Orleans(1866): In late July, 1866, a group of African Americans (many of them CivilWar veterans) marching to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention were stoppedand attacked by Mayor John Monroe (a longtime Confederate sympathizer and whitesupremacist), New Orleans police forces, and an angry white mob. As happened inWilmington, Tulsa, and so many other massacres, this individual starting pointmorphed into acity-wide rampage against African Americans citizens and communities, onethat ended with hundreds of African Americans (both convention delegates andothers) dead and wounded. This massacre took place early enough inReconstruction that a federal response was both possible and swift—Monroe andmany other officials were moved from office, and Reconstruction efforts in thecity intensified. Yet at the same time, the New Orleans massacre (along withanother 1866 massacre,in Memphis) reveals just how fully white supremacists were prepared to use official and political as well asmob and vigilante violence to oppose both Reconstruction and AfricanAmerican rights.

2)     Colfax(1873): By the early 1870s, such white supremacist racial violence had beencodified into organized groups—most famously the Ku Klux Klan, butalso parallel groups such as Louisiana’s WhiteLeague (which, as that platform reflects, was not only a paramilitaryterrorist group but also a political appendage of the state’s DemocraticParty). Not coincidentally, the League’s first organized action was the ColfaxMassacre, in which members attacked an African American militia; although atfirst shots were exchanged by both sides, the militiamen were outnumbered andquickly surrendered, only to continue being massacred by the League members.All told more than 100 African Americans were killed, and only three WhiteLeague members convicted of murder—and those convictions were overturnedby the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Charles Lane book reviewed atthat last hyperlink argues in its subtitle that both Colfax and the Courtdecision represented “the betrayal of Reconstruction,” and it’s hard not to agreethat by this time, every level of America’s social and political powerstructure seemed allied with the white supremacists.

3)     Hamburg (1876):The ultimate betrayal and abandonment of Reconstruction are usually associatedwith the 1876Presidential election, but racial violence played a significant part inthat culminating year as well. In many ways, the massacre inHamburg (South Carolina) echoes the others I’ve written about here: aseemingly small incident of racial tension (two white farmers had a difficulttime driving their wagon through a July 4th march by AfricanAmerican militiamen) exploded into an orgy of racial violence, as a July 8thattempt to disband the militia was followed by the arrival of a white mob whofirst attacked the militia’s armory and then expandedtheir massacre to much of the city’s African American population. Yet notonly were there no federal or legal responses to the massacre, but instead itbecame part of the Democratic Party’s triumph in the state’s elections, as white supremacist candidate WadeHampton uses a mythologized narrative of the massacre as a “race riot” tohelp gain the governor’s seat and put an end to Reconstruction in SouthCarolina—one more reflection of the central role that these acts of racialviolence played in opposing and undermining Reconstruction throughout theperiod.

LastReconstruction remembrance tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do youthink? Other Reconstruction histories you’d highlight?