Negroes and the Gun (17 page)

The familiar worry about escalation was soon fulfilled. The black show of force spurred the formation of a new Klan organization in Hale County. Over the next several years, Hale County Negroes would battle the Klan in repeating cycles of violence. In one episode, Klansmen rode into Greensboro to depose a partisan Republican judge. Unable to locate him, they attacked the jail and freed one of their cohorts. Blacks responded by torching the livery stable of an apparent Klan sympathizer. Later, Klansmen fired into a Negro prayer meeting. Blacks responded with a failed retaliatory attack, resulting in another Negro dead.
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In August 1868, in Camilla, Georgia, the threat of black electoral success triggered a violent scene reported as the “Camilla Riot.” At the heart of the controversy was the contest over who would represent the state's Second Congressional District, where blacks outnumbered whites by almost two to one. Under Reconstruction
policies, Republicans controlled the governor's office and the legislature. Whites had already demonstrated their opposition to the Republican candidate, William Pierce, at a rally in nearby Americus, where Pierce was lucky to make it out alive.

When Pierce scheduled a rally in Camilla, where whites were a slim majority, he was warned, “this is our Country and we intend to protect it or die.” Local blacks, still agitated about a racially motivated shooting in Camilla four months earlier, had already resolved that they would never go to Camilla unarmed.

The political rally for Pierce started in the countryside and gathered momentum and participants as it moved toward town. By the time they reached the village of China Grove, just outside Camilla, the noisy parade, led by a wagonload of musicians, numbered perhaps three hundred. About half of the men were carrying some sort of firearm. The procession was fully in the style of the Union League and Republican clubs of the period, who often paraded this way to draw out community support on election days. But many whites viewed these processions as threatening mobs. In Camilla, the news quickly spread that an armed body of Negroes was approaching.

Before the group reached town, the sheriff, backed by a freshly appointed citizens committee, rode out and warned them not to enter town carrying guns. The Negroes said they intended to have a peaceful rally at the courthouse. After some debate and a failed attempt to secure an alternative site, they marched into Camilla. By this time, the sheriff had deputized most of the white men in town, and they were girded for conflict.

The Negroes marched toward the courthouse to music of drums and fifes. The sheriff later reported that they marched in military fashion, four deep, surrounded by outriders on horseback. Squads of armed whites assembled adjacent to the courthouse square. The shooting started when a drunk white man wielding a shotgun ran out and demanded that the drummers cease their racket. They refused, he fired, and the battle was on.

As is common in these encounters, the blacks were armed with the guns of poor folk, often single-shot shotguns loaded with cheap birdshot. They were also at a tactical disadvantage, assembled in the middle of the street, while their opponents stalked the perimeter. The blacks fired and fled for cover. The whites fired with effect and pursued fleeing Negroes into the swamps. Nine blacks were killed and many others were wounded. Whites proceeded through the countryside over the next two weeks, beating and warning Negroes that they would be killed if they tried to vote in the coming election.

Back in Albany, Negroes agitated for retaliation. Reverend Robert Crumley, pastor of the African Methodist Church, complained that the Camilla group failed to heed his advice. He had warned that them not go to Camilla with less than 150
armed men. Then he urged Albany blacks to ride to Camilla the next day and “burn the earth about the place.”

The Albany Freedman's Bureau agent managed to dampen the rage with the promise to send for federal troops. By Election Day, tempers had cooled, but the climate of violence had cowed many weaker souls. Low black turnout resulted in a Democratic victory in the majority black Republican congressional district.
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Fig. 3.6. A Freedman's Bureau agent stands between rebels and freedmen. (“The Freedmen's Bureau,” drawn by A. R. Waud,
Harper's Weekly
magazine, New York, July 25, 1868, p. 473.)

Other political violence of the Reconstruction era centered on official Negro state militias operating under radical Republican administrations. State militias were distinct from the private militias and rifle companies, and they posed a different set of concerns. Immediately after the war, Southern state militias were an enforcement arm of the Black Codes, the muscle behind the attempt to reinstitute slavery in a different form. Membership in these militias often overlapped with budding private terrorist groups like the Klan. Congress attacked the problem by disbanding the state militias of the former Confederacy through a rider to the 1867 Reconstruction Act.
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As Reconstruction progressed and radical Republicans took control of Southern state governments, they asked Congress to reauthorize the state militias. In 1869, Congress reauthorized state militias for North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and
Georgia were excluded on worries that Republicans were not sufficiently established there. As Republican tools, the reauthorized militias were disdained by most whites. Blacks, on the other hand, were more than willing to serve.

The work of the Negro militias varied substantially, oscillating with Republican fortunes. In several states, they were barely worth mentioning. Alabama never deployed its Negro militia, even at the height of Klan violence in the state. In Florida, Republican governor Harrison Reed went through the motions of organizing a Negro militia but avoided using them for fear of white backlash. In other states, Negro militias marched mainly as a political show.
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But in some places, Negro militias fought in significant episodes of political violence, supporting the programs of Republican governors to ends that were sometimes detached from the immediate interests of black folk.

In Texas, Governor Edmund Davis deployed Negro militia in an attempt to retain his office after being defeated by rival Richard Coke. In Louisiana, Negro militias were deployed for threat value by competing Republican factions. And in Arkansas, Negro militias fought in a full-scale military conflict, dubbed the Brooks-Baxter War.

The Brooks-Baxter War grew out of a schism between regular Republicans (the Minstrels) and a liberal Republican faction (known as Brindle-Tails). This split fueled a contest for the governorship in 1872. Elisha Baxter was the nominal winner, but Joseph Brooks contested the results. Fifteen months after Baxter took office, a county judge ruled that Brooks actually won the election. Both sides appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, who cautiously refused to weigh in.

Insistent that he was the rightful governor, Brooks gathered three hundred Negro militia and set up a parallel administration. Baxter, who had nominally prevailed in the election, declared martial law also enforced by Negro militia. In the ensuing weeks, both sides vied for reinforcements and built up stores of arms. With all the trappings of war, they fought three separate engagements. About twenty men were killed and scores were wounded. President Grant finally ended the conflict with a proclamation that Baxter was the rightful governor and with a grant of immunity to all combatants. The broader consequences for Negroes were more worrisome. The conflict weakened the Republican Party in Arkansas and contributed to the ascension of Democrats.

White backlash against rising black political power and the specter of armed Negroes was multilayered. Confederates had lost the war of secession but now were battling for the soul of the South. Fear of Negro rule unified whites and fueled political
violence in ways that nothing else could. Occupation by black troops, black suffrage, and the rise of Negroes to office generated resentment and resistance. Through rough politics, trickery, and violence, the white South would soon “redeem” its institutions and culture from the revolutionary social inversion of Reconstruction. This Southern “Redemption,” solidified by federal abdication on Reconstruction, resubordinated blacks and carried deadly lessons about the risks of political violence and the importance of private self-defense.

Whether as police forces, private militias, or terrorist night riders, ex-Confederates pursued a ruthless campaign of political violence to disarm and disenfranchise blacks. Even in places where blacks might make a rational postwar decision to disdain political violence, in many cases, violence was unavoidable.

Operating under the loose imprimatur of law, bands of white militia raided Negro homes, searching and seizing firearms. For blacks, the distinction between these official militias and terrorist organizations like the KKK was often thin. Sometimes there was not even a pretense of distinction. Witness Colonel Roger Moore, commander of the New Hanover County, North Carolina, militia, who also headed the Wilmington KKK.
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Conflicts between Negroes and ex-Confederates holding badges as police or claiming membership in some militia were predictable. One conflict between a black veteran and a white policeman left one of the combatants cut and the other nursing a bullet wound. Another fight between a black soldier of the occupying force and a Confederate veteran repurposed as a Wilmington, North Carolina, policeman lead to protests, gunfire and death. The black soldier was reprimanded for his part in the initial fight. Angered by the perceived mistreatment of the black trooper, his friends in uniform and a crowd of black civilians surrounded city hall in protest. They were attacked by a group of whites and quickly dispersed. But during the night, they reconstituted into small, armed bands and attacked Confederate veterans on the police force, killing at least one man.

The reaction here exemplifies the worry about escalating cycles of violence. After the black show of force, the city administration recruited more policemen and requested guns from the governor, “with which to arm the police and other [white] citizens.” Confederate General Robert Ransom, with a cadre of handpicked Confederate veterans, was installed as the new police chief, and he moved aggressively to disarm Wilmington's Negroes. He was aided by the policy of Union Army officers who gave him “carte blanche” in dealing with black soldiers.

Ransom's new police force was a continuing terror for blacks. One officer of the Freedman's Bureau reported they “are the hardest and most brutal looking and acting set of civil or municipal officers I ever saw.” A Freedman's Bureau agent reported how two of these stout men apprehended a scrawny black woman for
public intoxication. They laughed and goaded her for nearly half an hour, and when they tired of her antics, one of them knocked her cold with his baton.

Election season in Wilmington brought fiery spectacles and thundering midnight Klan rides that tested the black resolve to vote. The black response was defiance. Demonstrating that earlier disarmament attempts had failed, Wilmington blacks divided themselves into armed patrols. They rode throughout the night, firing randomly in their own show of force and confirmation that the Klan did not rule.
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In the run-up to the fall elections of 1868, the
Wilmington Daily Journal
decried that “there are many Negroes in this city who . . . almost constantly go armed.” Black state senator Abraham Galloway, now standing for the office of presidential elector, wore a pistol, conspicuously displayed, wherever he went. He traveled with a squad of armed black men who later formed a dedicated black militia for community defense. The well-armed community again rebuffed the attempts at intimidation. On Election Day, Galloway became North Carolina's first black elector and delivered the district's votes to the Republican, Ulysses Grant.
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