The slaughters in Memphis and New Orleans shocked the North both because of the carnage and because of their snarling challenge to federal authority. These were not attacks by nightriders; police led the crowds. Southern governments created under Presidential Reconstruction seemed little more than progeny of the Confederacy and children even more brutal than their parent. The Radicals used the violence to persuade the Northern electorate of the need for occupation of the South and the necessity for the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black civil rights.
