the war, developed a constituency among Black voters eager to assert themselves, and relied on the occupying Union army to suppress opposition. The Democratic Party aligned itself with disenfranchised Confederate veterans, deposed planters, former slave-owners, and the other reactionary remnants of the status quo ante, including many poor White people ideologically attached to the old order.2 The coercive force of the Democratic Party was embodied in secret terrorist societies and vigilante groups including the Black Cavalry, the Men of Justice, the Young Mens’ Democratic Clubs, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan.3 As the Klan gained a prominence in 1868, it concentrated on discouraging Black voters, intimidating Republican candidates, and defeating proposed radical constitutions.4 But the Klan’s defense of White supremacy quickly expanded beyond such narrow political goals.
Reconstruction and Redemption: Who Won the War?
During Reconstruction, vigilante actions and policing were often indistinguishable. The Klan—which saw itself as a force for order, especially against Black criminality5—took up night-riding, at times in regular patrols. Its members stopped Black people on the roads, searched their homes, seized weapons and valuables, interrogated them about their voting plans, and often brutalized them.6 In many places, the Klan totally regulated the social lives of the Black population, breaking up worship services, opposing the creation of Black schools (often with success), and establishing and enforcing a system of passes for Black workers.7
In less routine actions, White mobs sometimes attacked individual Black people, Black political assemblies, and White Republicans. These attacks often involved the police as participants, or even leaders. For example, in April 1866, after a crowd of African American Union Army veterans prevented the Memphis police from arresting two of their comrades, the cops led White mobs through the streets attacking Black people at random. Mounted squads headed by police rode through Black neighborhoods, beating anyone they found on the streets and setting fire to schools, churches, and homes. The attack lasted four days, until martial law was declared. Forty-six Black and two White people died; ninety-one houses, twelve schools, and four churches were burned.8
That July in New Orleans, the police led a military-style attack against a majority-Black convention of Union loyalists. On July 30, as the delegates gathered at the Mechanics Institute, crowds of White men collected on the streets, many cops and firefighters among them. As a procession of a hundred or so Black delegates approached the Mechanics Institute, a fight broke out. It is disputed what, precisely, led to the fight, but it is generally agreed that a White policeman fired the first shot. The delegates returned fire and hurried into the building. The mob, more than a thousand White people, surged in after them, breaking down doors, firing into the assembly hall, and clubbing those inside.9
A New Orleans Times reporter described the scene following the massacre:
Out of the Senate Chamber, once more in the cross passage, pass through the hall, here is the last step of the main stairway. Blood is on it. The white wall is smeared with blood in the track of what had been a live man’s shoulder leaning up against it. Blood on the next step. Blood marks higher up on the walls, blood and marks of sanguinary struggle from the top to the bottom.… A door opens outward on the stairway leading down into the vaults. The first thing noticed is a bloody handmark, blood-spots line the white walls on the side, and blood spots the steps.… It is with a sensation of sickening horror that you leave all the scenes and respectfully picking your way through cast off hats and shoes that are all over every floor of the building, find yourself in the open street, the sidewalk of which ran with blood.10
With the convention in ruins, the police led bands of White vigilantes around the city, beating any Black people they encountered and shooting at those who fled. The majority of the victims had no connection to the convention. At least thirty-eight people were killed, and many times that number wounded. Overwhelmingly, the victims were Black.11
That afternoon, bodies were piled into baggage cars. Many of the wounded were loaded in with the dead, and witnesses later swore to seeing police systematically shooting those who stirred.12 No one was prosecuted for the massacre, though a Congressional committee concluded that it had been planned by a group of police—mostly Confederate veterans.13 They were assisted by a Know-Nothing group called (appropriately) “the Thugs” and a vigilante regiment named “Hays’ Brigade,” acting under the leadership of police Sergeant Lucien Adams and Sheriff Harry T. Hays, respectively.14
These two examples, especially the Mechanics Institute massacre, illustrate the character of such attacks. As historian Melinda Hennessey explains,
The actions of whites in many of the Reconstruction riots … had less in common with mob rule than with the organized character of paramilitary units.… Antebellum militias and slave patrols gave southern whites experience in local military organization, and this trend continued in the locally based Confederate military units.15
White people adhered not only to the values of the slave system, but to its methods as well.
The central role of the police in these two disturbances was unfortunately typical of the period. In her comprehensive study of Reconstruction-era unrest, Hennessey finds, “In only three riots, including Mobile in 1867, Vicksburg in 1875, and Charleston in 1867, did the police or sheriff try to quell the disturbance, and in a third of the riots, the police or sheriff’s posse led the violence.”16 Examples of police-led violence include the election riots in Savannah in 1868, Baton Rouge in 1870, and Barbour County, Alabama, in 1874.17 Perhaps the starkest case occurred in Camilla, Georgia, where in 1868 Sheriff Munford J. Poore deputized the town’s entire adult White male population to prevent a Black political procession;18 a military investigation found that the sheriff made no effort to control the posse and “was a party to the wanton and unnecessary destruction of life which subsequently ensued.”19
Where legal authorities were not themselves complicit with the terrorists, they found themselves among the terrorized; they were powerless to stop Klan activity, prosecute offenders, protect their own constituents, or, in some cases, defend themselves. For officers sincere in their duties, the situation was desperate. In Warren County, Georgia, Sheriff John C. Norris faced constant harassment for his efforts to enforce the law; eventually he was crippled in a Klan ambush. The weakness of his position might be indicated by the fact that, though he could identify his attackers, he did not press charges.20 The impotence of local authorities was particularly felt in areas where they were dependent on the national government for their power. As the federal authorities became increasingly reluctant to insert themselves—especially militarily—into local affairs, city and county officials were left vulnerable. Sheriff Joseph P. Doyle of Madison County, Alabama, worried, “I have nobody to protect me.”21
When Klan-type violence occurred, arrests were unusual, prosecutions rare, and convictions almost unknown. The attitudes (and sometimes, involvement) of police officers and sheriffs certainly impeded the enforcement of the law, but this was only one of many obstacles standing in the way of convictions. Prosecutors were unwilling to press such cases, and magistrates were often glad to dismiss them. Klansmen frequently dominated juries—including grand juries and coroners’ juries. Witnesses and victims, like Sheriff Norris, were intimidated and refused to testify, while Klan members were eager to swear false alibis on one another’s behalf.22
The law, when it did oppose Klan activity, did so in times and places where the Klan was politically weak. As Allen Trelease notes:
Wherever Union men were numerous and sufficiently well organized to sustain the local authorities … [Arkansas Governor Powell] Clayton encouraged sheriffs to mobilize them as posses, and they were used to good effect. Thus the sheriff of Carroll County managed to quell the small-scale terror there, even if he failed to catch the criminals. In Fulton County, where the governor had to send in reinforcements from other counties and make use of Monk’s Missouri volunteers, the policy contributed to a mutual escalation but was ultimately successful.23
Even
