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

by Kidada E. Williams

safety. Raiders’ and their allies’ ability to monitor the mail, like they did with Henry Lowther, reveals how wide the net of white southerners’ complicity in the war against freedom was.

Whites in the community had taken advantage of his absence to continue menacing his family and help themselves to their property. “They just took everything,” Henry said. “They took a cow and calf from me, and my corn and my meat I had there,” he said. Instead of stealing in the thick of night, the brazen plunderers came in the light of day. “They had no fear,” Henry said, “because they had run me off and they took it as they pleased.”

Simon Elder fled his Clarke County, Georgia, homestead right after his captors left. “I kept traveling from one place to another all that night,” he said. Simon made his way to his landlord’s home, hoping to get shelter and assistance, only to discover that the couple’s son might have participated in the strike on his wife, Mary, and him.51

Home was the place where their attackers were still roaming freely, either prowling around under the cloak of night or strutting proudly, boasting of their power, in the light of day.

These families had “picked themselves up” after slavery. They had done what federal officials and free people insisted they do—work hard, save their money, and acquire land of their own so they could be independent and self-sufficient. Their itemizations of their losses put a dollar value on the crucial wealth the night-riding strikes robbed from African American families. Indeed, the fact that these families had achieved a degree of wealth most likely was a critical factor in their being chosen by vigilantes as targets.

Among whites who had only accepted universal slave emancipation purely as a device to end the war, resentment over Black people’s subsequent insistence on—and acquisition of—civil rights was high. This thinking could have led some whites to believe uppity Black people were only getting what they deserved. And even if some whites were paying close enough attention to see that this was not just one random massacre or mass killing, but many, these distant observers might absolve themselves of their duty to act: the more deaths that registered in their minds, the more impersonal they might become.

violence. Witnesses made their way to centers of local government—the imposing structures of state capitol buildings, courthouses, and meeting places. Some of the buildings might have been damaged in the war. Others were brand new thanks to rebuilding efforts. Their cladding ranged from simple weatherboard siding, to commanding brick, to Greek Revival finery. Many were two stories high and had common rooms with lofty ceilings, large windows, and rows and rows of benches that accommodated large crowds. Black people were usually denied access to these spaces unless they had been elected to office, were parties to civil or criminal proceedings, or they were there to service them. Survivors entered rooms full of skeptical white strangers—members of Congress, local officials, state legislators, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, law enforcement officials, night riders and their defenders, the press, and the curious public. The records indicate witnesses did not hear all the proceedings. Many of them only entered the room to give their testimonies and respond to questions. In those rooms across the South, survivors answered intimate questions about the unthinkable horrors they had endured, spelling out in graphic detail what had happened to them and people they knew. The testimonies reveal that survivors wanted to show lawmakers and their fellow citizens the sinews of violence, the human toll, in flesh and blood, from the loss of kin, life, home, livelihood, community, instead of anonymi...

Floridians’ futile appeals to Governor Harrison Reed. The governor acknowledged Black citizens’ complaints about vigilantism in Jackson County, but Pearce said Reed claimed his “arms are paralyzed; there was not power enough in the government to protect the loyal people of the counties where outrages existed.”21 Black

George Roper was one of several witnesses at the hearings who voluntarily put their bodies into evidence, verifying their claims of physical injury and pain.50 George, who had been struck several times by armed men, told investigators in Huntsville, “I have the pistol-ball now,” pointing to the knot underneath his clothed skin. George had paid a doctor ten dollars to remove one of the balls, and he removed his coat to show investigators the scar. “You can feel the bullet here above the elbow,” he said of the remaining ball.51 Of their own initiative and at the behest of examiners, witnesses displayed fresh stripes from whippings, scars from bullet wounds and stabbings, and burns from being hanged or dragged, revealing their familiarity with cultural practices demanding the display of bodily pain.52 Witnesses like George understood they could not simply tell investigators, so they let their bodies talk, avowing the truth of what they endured.53 Neither Leanna Garrison nor Charlotte Fowler had visible physical wounds, and their slain husbands had been buried. But in case investigators in Atlanta doubted her account of Jerry’s killing by massive gunfire, Leanna brought the bullet-ridden coat he had been wearing to show “he was willfully murdered,” she said.54 At a hearing in Spartanburg, Charlotte Fowler stated that one of her husband’s killers had dropped a chip from a fire on Wallace’s chest as he lay dying after being shot in the head; when lawmakers pressed her on the poi...

Extremists, and their abettors in the form of people like Congressman Cox, never backed down from their belief in the justness of their cause of perpetual white supremacy and Black subjugation. They had no reason to, as they reaped the political rewards of the assassinations, the economic rewards of stolen property and land, and the social rewards of broken families, sabotaged institutions, and corroded communities. Confederates and their allies continued to resort to episodic violence, especially during the run-ups to elections or during uprisings of Black workers. One example of election violence occurred in Eutaw, Alabama, on October 25, 1870. White conservatives, including Klansmen, attacked a political rally of Black citizens on the courthouse square. They killed at least four and wounded dozens. To avoid being slaughtered, Black voters remained home on election day, November 8.6

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

White moderates’ and progressives’ “feelings” would not have been an issue for Douglass and others, had it not been for the fact that, under whiteness as a political project, Black people’s very lives—from torture to manslaughter through planned mass killings—so often hinged on white people’s feelings. White northerners and westerners felt Confederates were good, misunderstood people in their heart of hearts, who understandably felt aggrieved by losing their cause and chattel slavery, and who openly sustained the war’s fighting by directing their fire primarily at Black people. By accepting the lie that no white southerners were doing anything wrong in the war after the war, and by not holding anyone who did wrong responsible, most white Americans happily and quickly exonerated their southern counterparts for the atrocities and absolved themselves of doing enough to stop or punish them. Many white people felt an imaginary return to normal, and as a result, Black people continued to be targeted and to die. Short memories are the privilege of oppressors and their enablers.

The liars and those lacking a conscience became so proficient that their deceptions lived long after they did, perverting the truth while serving future generations’ objectives of hoarding privilege and freedom. Alexander

The following spring, afraid that right-wingers in Grant Parish would use the White League to seize control over their evenly divided community, an all-Black militia took control of the local courthouse in Colfax, the parish seat. The men had reason to be concerned. Vigilante bands had returned. On April 5, 1873, one went to the home of Jesse M. Kinney and shot him in the head, in what one congressional report would describe as “an unprovoked, wanton, and deliberate murder.”18 Indications of future violence and white rumors about Black men run amok inspired Black residents of Grant Parish to brace for attack. A white mob of almost two hundred—composed of Confederate soldiers, Klansmen, and White Leaguers and whites not affiliated with any group—set upon the courthouse, firing a cannon inside. After a brief exchange of gunfire, the white men set fire to the roof. Hoping to escape the fire but not wanting to be slaughtered as they fled, the Black men surrendered. The white men did not bother trying to keep up the pretense of law and order. They executed the Black men. The congressional report described the Colfax massacre as “without palliation or justification; it was deliberate, barbarous, cold-blooded murder.” It saw between sixty and 150 fatalities, which lawmakers described as “a foul blot on the page of history.”19 Authorities arrested ninety-seven members of the mob, but only nine were charged, and only with violating the Enforcement Acts. The defendants appealed thei...

The killings and lies flowing into and out from Colfax showed, again, there was no bottom to the belligerents’ vengeance. Extremists’ attacks on Black ministers and churches in the summer of 1874 illustrate again how widespread atrocities were. In August, armed men surrounded a Black church in Lee County, Alabama, during a religious service and fired a volley inside, killing four worshipping people. Armed and mounted white men in Lafayette County, Arkansas, grabbed a preacher from his church after he performed the Sunday service and shot him dead in front of his stunned congregation.

In Texas, eight men snatched a Black minister from his home and put a rope around his neck, planning to kill him. But the minister called out to his neighbors, who rallied to his defense and scared the gang away. Whites also lynched by hanging another Texas a minister because he intervened in attacks on two Black schoolteachers.21

The election year of 1876 brought more calculated atrocities, and more conservative wins in overthrowing Reconstruction. One of the largest mass killing events of that season took place in South Carolina. Historically, South Carolina had one of the largest Black populations in the South. To regain control of the state ex-Confederates had to overcome a significant Black voting bloc that cast their ballots largely, but not exclusively, for Republicans. Democrats turned increasingly to election fraud and violence.35 In July, the Republican governor raised a state militia to corral disorder. The militia included an eighty-four-member all-Black regiment, which was stationed in Hamburg, a hamlet in Aiken County. When members of the Black regiment attempted to conduct military exercises on a local road, two white farmers insisted on driving their carriage through the mostly Black town. The Black militiamen objected to the interruption and what they might have perceived as whites harassing the Black community. After some back-and-forth, they let the white men pass through. Infuriated by the squad’s initial refusal to halt the exercise, the farmers sued. Their lawyer attempted to use the altercation to have the militia disbanded. The Black militiamen’s very presence in Aiken County (to curb white election violence) and their refusal to follow the farmers’ commands to halt their maneuvers maddened whites who were determined to regain political power. Four days after the clash on the...