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

by Kidada E. Williams

According to white conservatives, if anyone was being harmed or treated unjustly, it was Confederates, who were being menaced by despotic progressive white northerners’ meddling. Lost Cause partisans placed the blame for Reconstruction’s shortcomings—any corruption, mismanagement, and spoils—squarely on supposedly ignorant Black voters and officeholders, as if they alone were responsible, as if these political problems did not predate their enfranchisement, and as if these issues would magically disappear if Black people stopped voting and serving in office. The South’s new public school systems, asylums, parks, orphanages, and homes for the elderly—behind which Black voters and officeholders were a driving force—were a favorite target of charges of “Negro misrule” and “wasteful mismanagement,” even as white southerners hoarded these new public goods for themselves. The brave men of the Klan, right-wingers argued, had risen only to relieve the white South of the ruinous burden of illegitimate Radical policies and profligate spending that encouraged Black people’s ambitions. Any violence white men used along the way, Lost Cause inventors and enthusiasts insisted, was a legitimate response to Black people’s lechery, incompetence, and criminality. Lost