I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction

by Kidada E. Williams

people. Although the Confederate army surrendered the battlefield to U.S. forces, these vigilantes made clear that the southern white man’s war for domination over Black people was still on. Having failed in their fight to leave the United States, insurrectionists sought instead to remake the republic in their image.4 Their most significant tactic was violence. Some of this was reflexive outbursts. But the war on Black people’s freedom during Reconstruction could not be sustained by rage alone; it required organization and extensive planning. In much of the American imagination, “visits” like the ones Edward Crosby, Caroline Benson, and James Alston experienced were spontaneous reprisals—or even harmless antics. This misconception arose because Confederates and white conservative apologists deliberately crafted a mythology about Reconstruction violence, then kept that myth alive over the century and a half since. One component of this tale was to deny that any atrocities took place during “visits.” Another was for perpetrators and bystanders to downplay the acts of savagery—as one resentful Freedmen’s Bureau agent did when he described an attempted killing as a “rough frolic.”5 Dismissing white southerners’ murderous assaults on Black people as random, or merely as the result of Confederates’ understandable hurt feelings at defeat, perpetrators and their defenders legitimized a war on freedom and normalized atrocities. White disbelief encouraged what became the genocidal-l...