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Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire During Reconstruction
In some places, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a social fraternity whose members enjoyed sophomoric hijinks and homemade liquor. In other areas, the KKK was a paramilitary group intent on keeping former slaves away from white women and Republicans away from ballot boxes. South Carolina saw the worst Klan violence and, in 1871, President Grant sent federal troops under the command of Major Lewis Merrill to restore law and order. Merrill did not eradicate the Klan, but they arguably did more than any other person or entity to expose the identity of the Invisible Empire as a group of hooded, brutish, homegrown terrorists. In compiling evidence to prosecute the leading Klansmen and by restoring at least a semblance of order to South Carolina, Merrill and his men demonstrated that the portrayal of the KKK as a chivalric organization was at best a myth, and at worst a lie. This is the story of the rise and fall of the Reconstruction-era Klan, focusing especially on Major Merrill and the Seventh Cavalry's efforts to expose the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan to the light of day.
- GenresAmerican History
286 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2007
2 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
J. Michael Martinez
13 books26 followersA Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project, J. Michael Martinez received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, "Heredities." "In the Garden of the Bridehouse," is available from the University of Arizona Press.
His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press.
J. Michael's next work, “Tarta Americana” will be published by Penguin September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose.
About his work, Herrera wrote, it "breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."
His third collection, "Museum of the Americas," was selected for the National Poetry Series by Cornelius Eady and is published by Penguin Press.
J. Michael's next work, “Tarta Americana” will be published by Penguin September of 2023. An Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University, he teaches in their MFA program and lives in San Jose.
About his work, Herrera wrote, it "breaks away from four decades of inquiry into cultural identity. Martinez's exhilarating descent into the unspoken—lit by metaphysical investigations, physiological charts, and meta-translations of Hernán Cortés's accounts of his conquests—gives voice to a dismembered continental body buried long ago. This body, though flayed and fractured, rises and sings."
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March 24, 2022
This is an excellent account of the post Civil War/Reconstruction period in the Piedmont area of South Carolina that saw the rise of the KKK, and how a determined team of military lawyers attempted to break the terror organization, arresting hundreds of members or sympathizers and attempting to get convictions, and jail time for the worst offenders, so as to crush the organization and send a message to the Whites that violence against Black freedmen, carpetbaggers, scalawags (Southern sympathizers of the Union/abolition cause) would not be tolerated. They succeeded to some extent but unfortunately, as the years of Federal military occupation dragged on, Northern interest in Reconstruction waned, and priority was given to unifying the country, even at the expense of upholding Black rights, as set forth in Constitutional amendments. By approximately ten years after the end of the Civil War, the last of the Federal troops were withdrawn from the final Southern states that still had troops stationed at state houses, and then the Whites were able to regain control of the political life of each of the former Confederate states, set up a system that was similar to what had existed before the war, except with no slavery but debt peonage under sharecropping instead, and no need to enforce White domination of the political sphere (the goal of the KKK in the immediate postwar period) because of their capture of the statehouses through legislation which blocked voting rights for Blacks, and also implemented segregation - a system of apartheid that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a number of infamous decisions (despite the Civil War and the Civil War amendments to the contrary). And so the KKK died out once the Whites regained power in the South, since there was no need for it anymore; however, a new version appeared in the early 20th Century in response to the hundreds of thousands of newly-arrived European immigrants, many of them Catholic or Jewish. A new anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Semitic KKK was revived throughout the USA in response to the perceived ¨threat¨ of the new immigrants to the traditions of the native-born often Protestant White Americans. This iteration of the terror group also died out, and since then there has thank God not been a major outbreak of the Klan although there are still Klan organizations around, but tiny compared to the past, and under surveillance etc.
This is a well-written book which traces the reason why the Klan was organized in the post Civil War era - strangely enough, the original Klan group which consisted of half-dozen men, wasn´t organized to terrorize Blacks. That group was organized by a group of aimless and foppish White youths who thought to play pranks on others. They happened to hit upon preying on Blacks, and it was a later group that actually turned the original ¨gentleman´s club¨ into a secret terror group. There were many parallel similar groups throughout the former Confederacy, and the author states that these represented the response of disaffected Whites who were effectively shut out of political power in the postwar period by the Federal occupation troops, carpetbaggers, freedmen, and scalawags. The only social ¨effective¨ space they could claim was that of lawlessness and terror - and perhaps in this way they could feel they were protecting their way of life and especially ¨feminine honor¨ from the mythologized ¨depredations¨ of the newly powerful groups, especially Blacks. This was of course a complete myth perpetrated to ¨justify¨ or ¨explain¨ deliberate attacks on politically active Blacks, any socially active Blacks, Black leaders, with the idea that terrorizing a high-profile Black individual would send a message to all the Blacks in the area to stay away from politics, social leadership, and the polls. The ultimately depressing thing is that these Whites who did not want to share power at all, succeeded in virtually ¨reconquering¨ the South for themselves - for almost another hundred years of injustice, until the new Civil Rights movement began again in the 1950s which finally resulted in another iteration of the same Civil Rights Acts/legislation/amendments that had already been passed in the Civil war era, again being signed into law, and once again the cycle began of enforcing the anti-discrimination laws and so forth. The process reached a peak in the middle portion of the last century but this racially-based struggle never completely ended, although there has been an enormous amount of progress since the 1960s, with numerous Black mayors, and other elected officials, Black policemen, and so forth. However, the tendency is still to find ways to suppress the Black vote - using, as before, legislation - in an attempt to keep politics under White control in mostly Southern states although even in those states there have been some Black governors elected, although not that many. Meanwhile, in the century and a half since the Civil War, waves of Blacks migrated North to find better paying industrial jobs, although as those jobs in turn migrated to Asia, many Blacks have actually migrated back to the South, where their renewed presence has added life to many cities, such as Atlanta. The tendency of various groups to blame other groups for their problems continues however, with Latino immigrants currently being the latest object of fear, especially by workers displaced by industrial jobs having ¨migrated¨ to China and what jobs remain being taken by Latino immigrants who may take jobs at subpar wages, no benefits, and willing to work in dangerous jobs without recourse to OSHA because of their illegal immigration status. The struggle is always over resources that is jobs, and power that is, political power - and unfortunately, despite the US being a melting-pot, the divisions seem to recur and tear apart the fabric of society with a vengeance again and again, exacerbated by such spectacles of cruelty and horror as the George Floyd or Eric Garner killings. The book under discussion is an account of one of the original attempts to set things right with respect to equal access to political power in the immediate post Civil War era; it shows the obstacles in getting convictions since the judges in South Carolina were often sympathetic to the Klan if not secret Klansmen themselves, likewise juries. But these Federal military lawyers and the Attorney General of the US persisted and did make some progress. What progress they made, unfortunately, however, was relatively ephemeral - as noted above, since once the Federal troops left, the system of Jim Crow re-subjugation of Blacks through legislation arrived at the same result as the previous reign of Klan terror: Suppression of freedmen, their exclusion from opportunities, and the eventual migration of thousands of them North. This unfortunately is the truth about the outcome of the Civil War; although it did of course outlaw slavery, the dominion, that is sociopolitical domination, of Whites over Blacks and later freedmen, did not end - and so the Whites, who wanted it all - money and power - could then feel they had somehow ¨succeeded¨ in reinstating their former unjust system. Sadly, this in effect was true - as discrimination and segregation was upheld in a number of unjust decisions by the Supreme Court. The only thing society can do - even today - is ensure that all groups of citizens enjoy equal voting rights, and do not suffer discrimination in employment, housing, education, on account of their race, ethnic origin, or religion. Sadly, despite the 1960s legislation, there is still de facto segregation in education as many White families put their children into private schools, so that public school systems become filled with mostly minority-member students. In housing, the process is similar: The sorting takes place according to income level, so that expensive suburbs may have only a few well-off Blacks, while rundown inner-city areas are mostly inhabited by minority group members. The cycle is perpetrated seemingly indefinitely by urban educational system that cannot match those of the wealthier suburbs. If a student is ill-prepared educationally, they will not be employed at the higher-paying positions, which will inevitably then go to the candidates from the wealthier, whiter, suburbs. And so generation after generation, despite Civil Rights legislation, wealth is inevitably built up by Whites in general, while staying depressed within the minority groups. This is a pattern that can only be broken by pouring money into the inner city school system so that their educational preparation can somehow match that of the students from the wealthier suburbs. Unfortunately, the tax base of some of the rundown post industrial cities does not allow for that to happen, especially if money has to be spent on social services in general. And so from year to year, the same social trap is sprung on the next generation of unfortunate minority group members, unable to break out of the cycle of powerlessness because they are unable to secure high-paying jobs, economic power, etc. And when that happens, they often -- perhaps logically -- give up on political participation, which explains why they often do not go to the polls, even without suppressive legislation in place. And how can anyone blame them.
Here are the quotes from the book: ¨[Klan]...targets included blacks, especially ¨freedmen¨ .... emancipated from slavery, Northern ¨carpetbaggers" who came to the South to interfere in Southern affairs, and Southern Unionists derisively labeled ¨scalawags.¨ The original...Klan died ....before Reconstruction ended in the 1870s.¨ ¨[Rather than] ...improving their condition as individuals, Klansmen look to the past and think of themselves collectively. ....yearn for halcyon days when white men were masters of their domain and no one...questioned their unbridled authority.¨ ¨...Major Lewis Merrill, the ...solider who led the federal government´s Reconstruction-era investigation into the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan.¨ ¨[Once] ... Grant´s attorney general, Amos T. Akerman, left he administration at the end of 1871 and [Grant] ... was re-elected the following year, the federal government retreated from its commitment to protecting the freedmen. By 1877, [after] ...Rutherford B. Hayes [was elected]...president...[in]...the contested 1876 election and ...ordered... federal troops to stop guarding the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, Reconstruction ended.¨ ¨[President Andrew] Johnson...issued a proclamation of amnesty on May 29, 1865. Except for the Confederate leadership, the president ...[pardoned] all Southerners for their roles in the rebellion.¨ ¨..the Radical [Republicans] were ...astonished when [Johnson]...vetoed both the bill extending the Freedmen´s Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.¨ ¨Benjamin F. Wade, a ....Radical Republican [from Ohio, was elected]... to the U.S. Senate in 1851, [and] ...emerged as a fierce critic of slavery....Many of his ...statements criticizing American capitalism were so...radical they echoed the arguments of European Socialists. In his view, an economic system ¨which degrades the poor man and elevates the rich, which makes the rich richer ad the poor poorer, which drags the very soul out of a poor man for a pitiful existence is wrong.¨ ¨With assistance from...¨carpetbaggers¨an allusion to their supposed propensity to call all they owned in cheap carpetbags--freedmen struggled to find a place in their new world. Southern Unionists who dared lend a hand were deemed ¨scalawags,¨ an epithet [referencing] ...the ...town of Scalloway in the Shetland Islands, infamous for its poor quality ... cattle.¨ ¨In [Attorney General] Akerman´s view, admonitions to obey the law and threats of legal prosecution absent a credible show of armed force were useless...¨ ¨Lincoln´s promise of ¨malice toward none, charity for all¨ [was] also ...ineffective. Klansmen viewed kindness...as timidity...¨ ¨As the cradle of the ... Confederacy ...a state filled with unreconstructed Rebels, South Carolina...[became] a crucial battleground in the fight to reconstruct the Union.¨ ¨...[President Johnson] allowed ...Southern states to undermine federal requirements and adopt black codes that would end slavery in name only.¨ ¨[Although] The South was required to obey edicts ...from Northern leaders...that did not stop the white ruling class from imposing harsh conditions on freedmen...such ...that conditions of near servitude existed.¨ ¨...poor crops in 1866 and 1867...forced [planters] to seek creative means of compensating former slaves for their work. ...sharecropping was...born of necessity, but....persisted because it was an effective means of keeping blacks ...mired in debt and tied to the land. [Planters] ...borrowed money from a bank using....land and crops as collateral. Blacks owend no land .. had no collateral; all they owned was their labor. [So] the planter [would] ... furnish a small shack, food and clothing, farm animals, and feed and seed to blacks in exchange for heir tlabor. Some....even established a company store [where]...blacks could buy...on credit until the crop was harvested. ...credit acted as a lien on a tenant farmer´s meager physical possessions, ensuring that he and his family would remain ...until harvesting time. When the crop came in and the money was repaid to remove the lien, the tenant had [no money] ... left. He ...asked for more credit...ensuring that he would remain on the land...¨ ¨To maximize return on investment [in order to] ...pay the bank note, purchase supplies for [the] ... laborers, ... realize a profit, a planter [had to] ...grow high-yield crops, mostly cotton. But [over time] ... cotton overproduction forced the price of cotton lower and...the soil was not replenished of ...nutrients. ...the planter [grew] ...more cotton [to] ...compensate in volume for what he lost in revenue. ...the destructive cycle [lead] ... to a depression of the Southern economy ...well into the twentieth century. It ... linked white planters to black laborers in a mutually enervating, embittering relationship of near-poverty and ....desperation.¨ ¨...white South Carolinians resisted Reconstruction throughout the 1860s and 1870s [so as to preserve the traditional social hierarchy].¨ ¨Most whites who joined the Klan had never owned slaves... [but] Without assurances that whites would ...again control the mechanisms of government and enjoy a superior social status...freed blacks represented a threat to the Southern way of life.¨ ¨[As the] ...1870 elections [approached], conservative whites [were determined to] ... wrest control from carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, all....seen as sources of widespread corruption.¨ ¨...the York district ...suffered the highest [Civil War] casualty rate [in]... South Carolina]...¨ ¨Even [if] ...a farmer could [retain]...his land, he knew little of farming techniques or strategies for replenishing nutrients in the soil. ...the average farmer [therefore] worked fewer acres [compared with] ...the antebellum years, and each acre produced smaller and smaller yields as the years passed.¨ ¨...Grant...was reluctant to antagonize Southerners any more than was necessary.¨ ¨[Although Grant] ...knew Democrats and pro-Southern whites would regard his action [sending the Army to South Carolina to prevent KKK outrages] as a first step toward a military dictatorship, ...he [thought] ...he had little choice if he hoped to stop the Klan.¨ ¨[Acknowledging] ...that a state of rebellion existed in South Carolina...the president, acting as commander-in-chief of the armed forces pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, suspended habeas corpus in the nine Upstate counties ¨during the continuance of [the] ...rebellion,¨ the first time in American history a president [took] ...such drastic measures [in] ...peacetime.¨ ¨[President Andrew Johnson believed] ...that the U.S. Constitution was a document limiting federal authority in favor of the states...¨ ¨[Attorney General Akerman]...warned Justice Department officials and prosecutors that, ¨as long as ...bad men believe you are unable to protect yourselves, they will cherish the purpose of injuring you as soon as the hand of the Government shall be withdrawn.¨ ¨...on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line [citizens] yearned to look ahead, not behind.¨ ¨...president [Grant] offered amnesty to former Klansmen in 1876.¨ ¨...Thomas Dixon Jr.´s 1905 novel, ¨The Clansman,¨ ...glorified the KKK and [became] ...a model for the resurrection of he group in 1915. ... D.W. Griffith´s film ¨The Birth of a Nation¨ ....[was loosely based on ¨The Clansman¨]. ¨In December 1871...Akerman...[resigned]. It was [unclear] ...whether he quit to protest the Grant administration´s refusal to pursue future Klan prosecutions with vigor or was forced out for political considerations apart from the Ku Klux Klan.¨ ¨...it soon became clear that...his successor...would no longer actively prosecute the KKK.¨ ¨Northern whites [had grown] ...weary of the North-South schism. Apathy set in. ...commerce and industry beckoned. [Most political leaders were uninterested in]...policing the South.¨ ¨[After] ...the Radical Republicans [passed on] in the 1860s and 1870s...new...congressional leaders...had no interest in stirring up the divisive, intractable issues of race and social relations raised by the Civil War.¨ ¨...the party of Lincoln became, by [1900] ...the party of big business and unfettered free enterprise.¨ ¨The nation [had entered] ...a new age. A quarter of a million factories employed 2.5 million workers in 1876... Steel production...increased from 19,643 tons in 1867 to 533,191 tons in 1876, an astonishing 2,700 percent increase.¨ ¨[Per] The ...Constitution...electoral votes should be counted in the presence of both houses of Congress, [but] ...the ...parties represented in each chamber could not agree on which electors should be recognized and which votes should be counted.¨ ¨Reconstruction ...[became] less a ...[way] of reincorporating the ...former [Confederate states] into the Union than a [way] ...of punishing a way of life and attitudes unpopular north of the Mason-Dixon Line.¨
This is a well-written book which traces the reason why the Klan was organized in the post Civil War era - strangely enough, the original Klan group which consisted of half-dozen men, wasn´t organized to terrorize Blacks. That group was organized by a group of aimless and foppish White youths who thought to play pranks on others. They happened to hit upon preying on Blacks, and it was a later group that actually turned the original ¨gentleman´s club¨ into a secret terror group. There were many parallel similar groups throughout the former Confederacy, and the author states that these represented the response of disaffected Whites who were effectively shut out of political power in the postwar period by the Federal occupation troops, carpetbaggers, freedmen, and scalawags. The only social ¨effective¨ space they could claim was that of lawlessness and terror - and perhaps in this way they could feel they were protecting their way of life and especially ¨feminine honor¨ from the mythologized ¨depredations¨ of the newly powerful groups, especially Blacks. This was of course a complete myth perpetrated to ¨justify¨ or ¨explain¨ deliberate attacks on politically active Blacks, any socially active Blacks, Black leaders, with the idea that terrorizing a high-profile Black individual would send a message to all the Blacks in the area to stay away from politics, social leadership, and the polls. The ultimately depressing thing is that these Whites who did not want to share power at all, succeeded in virtually ¨reconquering¨ the South for themselves - for almost another hundred years of injustice, until the new Civil Rights movement began again in the 1950s which finally resulted in another iteration of the same Civil Rights Acts/legislation/amendments that had already been passed in the Civil war era, again being signed into law, and once again the cycle began of enforcing the anti-discrimination laws and so forth. The process reached a peak in the middle portion of the last century but this racially-based struggle never completely ended, although there has been an enormous amount of progress since the 1960s, with numerous Black mayors, and other elected officials, Black policemen, and so forth. However, the tendency is still to find ways to suppress the Black vote - using, as before, legislation - in an attempt to keep politics under White control in mostly Southern states although even in those states there have been some Black governors elected, although not that many. Meanwhile, in the century and a half since the Civil War, waves of Blacks migrated North to find better paying industrial jobs, although as those jobs in turn migrated to Asia, many Blacks have actually migrated back to the South, where their renewed presence has added life to many cities, such as Atlanta. The tendency of various groups to blame other groups for their problems continues however, with Latino immigrants currently being the latest object of fear, especially by workers displaced by industrial jobs having ¨migrated¨ to China and what jobs remain being taken by Latino immigrants who may take jobs at subpar wages, no benefits, and willing to work in dangerous jobs without recourse to OSHA because of their illegal immigration status. The struggle is always over resources that is jobs, and power that is, political power - and unfortunately, despite the US being a melting-pot, the divisions seem to recur and tear apart the fabric of society with a vengeance again and again, exacerbated by such spectacles of cruelty and horror as the George Floyd or Eric Garner killings. The book under discussion is an account of one of the original attempts to set things right with respect to equal access to political power in the immediate post Civil War era; it shows the obstacles in getting convictions since the judges in South Carolina were often sympathetic to the Klan if not secret Klansmen themselves, likewise juries. But these Federal military lawyers and the Attorney General of the US persisted and did make some progress. What progress they made, unfortunately, however, was relatively ephemeral - as noted above, since once the Federal troops left, the system of Jim Crow re-subjugation of Blacks through legislation arrived at the same result as the previous reign of Klan terror: Suppression of freedmen, their exclusion from opportunities, and the eventual migration of thousands of them North. This unfortunately is the truth about the outcome of the Civil War; although it did of course outlaw slavery, the dominion, that is sociopolitical domination, of Whites over Blacks and later freedmen, did not end - and so the Whites, who wanted it all - money and power - could then feel they had somehow ¨succeeded¨ in reinstating their former unjust system. Sadly, this in effect was true - as discrimination and segregation was upheld in a number of unjust decisions by the Supreme Court. The only thing society can do - even today - is ensure that all groups of citizens enjoy equal voting rights, and do not suffer discrimination in employment, housing, education, on account of their race, ethnic origin, or religion. Sadly, despite the 1960s legislation, there is still de facto segregation in education as many White families put their children into private schools, so that public school systems become filled with mostly minority-member students. In housing, the process is similar: The sorting takes place according to income level, so that expensive suburbs may have only a few well-off Blacks, while rundown inner-city areas are mostly inhabited by minority group members. The cycle is perpetrated seemingly indefinitely by urban educational system that cannot match those of the wealthier suburbs. If a student is ill-prepared educationally, they will not be employed at the higher-paying positions, which will inevitably then go to the candidates from the wealthier, whiter, suburbs. And so generation after generation, despite Civil Rights legislation, wealth is inevitably built up by Whites in general, while staying depressed within the minority groups. This is a pattern that can only be broken by pouring money into the inner city school system so that their educational preparation can somehow match that of the students from the wealthier suburbs. Unfortunately, the tax base of some of the rundown post industrial cities does not allow for that to happen, especially if money has to be spent on social services in general. And so from year to year, the same social trap is sprung on the next generation of unfortunate minority group members, unable to break out of the cycle of powerlessness because they are unable to secure high-paying jobs, economic power, etc. And when that happens, they often -- perhaps logically -- give up on political participation, which explains why they often do not go to the polls, even without suppressive legislation in place. And how can anyone blame them.
Here are the quotes from the book: ¨[Klan]...targets included blacks, especially ¨freedmen¨ .... emancipated from slavery, Northern ¨carpetbaggers" who came to the South to interfere in Southern affairs, and Southern Unionists derisively labeled ¨scalawags.¨ The original...Klan died ....before Reconstruction ended in the 1870s.¨ ¨[Rather than] ...improving their condition as individuals, Klansmen look to the past and think of themselves collectively. ....yearn for halcyon days when white men were masters of their domain and no one...questioned their unbridled authority.¨ ¨...Major Lewis Merrill, the ...solider who led the federal government´s Reconstruction-era investigation into the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan.¨ ¨[Once] ... Grant´s attorney general, Amos T. Akerman, left he administration at the end of 1871 and [Grant] ... was re-elected the following year, the federal government retreated from its commitment to protecting the freedmen. By 1877, [after] ...Rutherford B. Hayes [was elected]...president...[in]...the contested 1876 election and ...ordered... federal troops to stop guarding the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses, Reconstruction ended.¨ ¨[President Andrew] Johnson...issued a proclamation of amnesty on May 29, 1865. Except for the Confederate leadership, the president ...[pardoned] all Southerners for their roles in the rebellion.¨ ¨..the Radical [Republicans] were ...astonished when [Johnson]...vetoed both the bill extending the Freedmen´s Bureau and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866.¨ ¨Benjamin F. Wade, a ....Radical Republican [from Ohio, was elected]... to the U.S. Senate in 1851, [and] ...emerged as a fierce critic of slavery....Many of his ...statements criticizing American capitalism were so...radical they echoed the arguments of European Socialists. In his view, an economic system ¨which degrades the poor man and elevates the rich, which makes the rich richer ad the poor poorer, which drags the very soul out of a poor man for a pitiful existence is wrong.¨ ¨With assistance from...¨carpetbaggers¨an allusion to their supposed propensity to call all they owned in cheap carpetbags--freedmen struggled to find a place in their new world. Southern Unionists who dared lend a hand were deemed ¨scalawags,¨ an epithet [referencing] ...the ...town of Scalloway in the Shetland Islands, infamous for its poor quality ... cattle.¨ ¨In [Attorney General] Akerman´s view, admonitions to obey the law and threats of legal prosecution absent a credible show of armed force were useless...¨ ¨Lincoln´s promise of ¨malice toward none, charity for all¨ [was] also ...ineffective. Klansmen viewed kindness...as timidity...¨ ¨As the cradle of the ... Confederacy ...a state filled with unreconstructed Rebels, South Carolina...[became] a crucial battleground in the fight to reconstruct the Union.¨ ¨...[President Johnson] allowed ...Southern states to undermine federal requirements and adopt black codes that would end slavery in name only.¨ ¨[Although] The South was required to obey edicts ...from Northern leaders...that did not stop the white ruling class from imposing harsh conditions on freedmen...such ...that conditions of near servitude existed.¨ ¨...poor crops in 1866 and 1867...forced [planters] to seek creative means of compensating former slaves for their work. ...sharecropping was...born of necessity, but....persisted because it was an effective means of keeping blacks ...mired in debt and tied to the land. [Planters] ...borrowed money from a bank using....land and crops as collateral. Blacks owend no land .. had no collateral; all they owned was their labor. [So] the planter [would] ... furnish a small shack, food and clothing, farm animals, and feed and seed to blacks in exchange for heir tlabor. Some....even established a company store [where]...blacks could buy...on credit until the crop was harvested. ...credit acted as a lien on a tenant farmer´s meager physical possessions, ensuring that he and his family would remain ...until harvesting time. When the crop came in and the money was repaid to remove the lien, the tenant had [no money] ... left. He ...asked for more credit...ensuring that he would remain on the land...¨ ¨To maximize return on investment [in order to] ...pay the bank note, purchase supplies for [the] ... laborers, ... realize a profit, a planter [had to] ...grow high-yield crops, mostly cotton. But [over time] ... cotton overproduction forced the price of cotton lower and...the soil was not replenished of ...nutrients. ...the planter [grew] ...more cotton [to] ...compensate in volume for what he lost in revenue. ...the destructive cycle [lead] ... to a depression of the Southern economy ...well into the twentieth century. It ... linked white planters to black laborers in a mutually enervating, embittering relationship of near-poverty and ....desperation.¨ ¨...white South Carolinians resisted Reconstruction throughout the 1860s and 1870s [so as to preserve the traditional social hierarchy].¨ ¨Most whites who joined the Klan had never owned slaves... [but] Without assurances that whites would ...again control the mechanisms of government and enjoy a superior social status...freed blacks represented a threat to the Southern way of life.¨ ¨[As the] ...1870 elections [approached], conservative whites [were determined to] ... wrest control from carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen, all....seen as sources of widespread corruption.¨ ¨...the York district ...suffered the highest [Civil War] casualty rate [in]... South Carolina]...¨ ¨Even [if] ...a farmer could [retain]...his land, he knew little of farming techniques or strategies for replenishing nutrients in the soil. ...the average farmer [therefore] worked fewer acres [compared with] ...the antebellum years, and each acre produced smaller and smaller yields as the years passed.¨ ¨...Grant...was reluctant to antagonize Southerners any more than was necessary.¨ ¨[Although Grant] ...knew Democrats and pro-Southern whites would regard his action [sending the Army to South Carolina to prevent KKK outrages] as a first step toward a military dictatorship, ...he [thought] ...he had little choice if he hoped to stop the Klan.¨ ¨[Acknowledging] ...that a state of rebellion existed in South Carolina...the president, acting as commander-in-chief of the armed forces pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, suspended habeas corpus in the nine Upstate counties ¨during the continuance of [the] ...rebellion,¨ the first time in American history a president [took] ...such drastic measures [in] ...peacetime.¨ ¨[President Andrew Johnson believed] ...that the U.S. Constitution was a document limiting federal authority in favor of the states...¨ ¨[Attorney General Akerman]...warned Justice Department officials and prosecutors that, ¨as long as ...bad men believe you are unable to protect yourselves, they will cherish the purpose of injuring you as soon as the hand of the Government shall be withdrawn.¨ ¨...on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line [citizens] yearned to look ahead, not behind.¨ ¨...president [Grant] offered amnesty to former Klansmen in 1876.¨ ¨...Thomas Dixon Jr.´s 1905 novel, ¨The Clansman,¨ ...glorified the KKK and [became] ...a model for the resurrection of he group in 1915. ... D.W. Griffith´s film ¨The Birth of a Nation¨ ....[was loosely based on ¨The Clansman¨]. ¨In December 1871...Akerman...[resigned]. It was [unclear] ...whether he quit to protest the Grant administration´s refusal to pursue future Klan prosecutions with vigor or was forced out for political considerations apart from the Ku Klux Klan.¨ ¨...it soon became clear that...his successor...would no longer actively prosecute the KKK.¨ ¨Northern whites [had grown] ...weary of the North-South schism. Apathy set in. ...commerce and industry beckoned. [Most political leaders were uninterested in]...policing the South.¨ ¨[After] ...the Radical Republicans [passed on] in the 1860s and 1870s...new...congressional leaders...had no interest in stirring up the divisive, intractable issues of race and social relations raised by the Civil War.¨ ¨...the party of Lincoln became, by [1900] ...the party of big business and unfettered free enterprise.¨ ¨The nation [had entered] ...a new age. A quarter of a million factories employed 2.5 million workers in 1876... Steel production...increased from 19,643 tons in 1867 to 533,191 tons in 1876, an astonishing 2,700 percent increase.¨ ¨[Per] The ...Constitution...electoral votes should be counted in the presence of both houses of Congress, [but] ...the ...parties represented in each chamber could not agree on which electors should be recognized and which votes should be counted.¨ ¨Reconstruction ...[became] less a ...[way] of reincorporating the ...former [Confederate states] into the Union than a [way] ...of punishing a way of life and attitudes unpopular north of the Mason-Dixon Line.¨
May 12, 2021
It was required reading for a class. The book is written by a lawyer with ties to South Carolina. It is a great example of a historical monograph but probably not for an average reader. There’s a lot of information in the book and can set you in many different directions after you get done. I gave it a four because there are times it is difficult to get through.
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