The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Pike was right about two things, and wrong about most everything else. First, reflecting the population of the state, more than half the men elected to state and public office in South Carolina between 1867 and 1876 were black, although being black made various shades of skin color a disguise for a quite diverse and factionalized group of people. Second, the government was corrupt, but it was not particularly corrupt when measured against other governments of the era. He was wrong in seeing black politicians as the pliant tools of whites, wrong in failing to recognize the considerable democratic accomplishments of the South Carolina legislature, and wrong about the source of violence in the state. As historian Thomas Holt has argued, it sprang from “an almost religious crusade to restore white supremacy.