Skip to main content

150+ years later, a look back at the aftermath of the Civil War (which took place 78 years after the US Constitution was written)

{ The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments crumbled to dust in the face of armed white resistance, intimidation and terror perpetrated against blacks in elections in various Southern states.

In August 1874, resurgent Democrats in Alabama used an array of coercion, targeted assassination, and in one instance in Eufaula in Barbour County, the murder of seven blacks and the wounding of some seventy more on Election Day to defeat an already divided Republican interracial coalition.
In Mobile, blacks were driven from polls by white mobs, and in other places ballot boxes were burned. In September 1874 in New Orleans, in the "Battle of Liberty Place," a throng of thirty-five hundred "White Leaguers," composed largely of Confederate veterans, drove black militiamen and Metropolitan Police away from official buildings and took over city hall, the statehouse, and an arsenal.
Mississippi produced the worst violence of all. Municipal and county elections in and around Vicksburg in August-September 1874 pitted "White League Clubs" (Democrats) against a weakening Republican Party, led by the Northern-bred governor Adelbert Ames.
Grant refused for too long to intervene in Mississippi, and by fall some three hundred blacks had been killed in political terror throughout the countryside.
In 1875 statewide election campaigns white vigilante mobs attacked and shot people with impunity in broad daylight.
The Democrats' "Mississippi Plan" used intimidation as well as murder to keep blacks from the polls in several key black belt counties.
Grant's inaction left Ames' government on its own to face the crisis; Ames was forced to resign and leave the state in what amounted to a violent coup d'état.
The one surviving black Republican from Mississippi in Congress, John Roy Lynch, said that the results of the armed white-supremacist revolt in his state meant that "the war was fought in vain."
Ames called it a "revolution ... by the force of arms- and a race ... disfranchised [and] returned to ... an era of second slavery."
- Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, David W. Blight, 2019 Pulitzer Prize Winning biography. (Chaper: "What Will Peace Among The Whites Bring?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1876 Redestruction: Supreme Court puts the final nail in the coffin of Reconstruction

  From the winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize:  Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom  by David W. Blight As the election neared in 1876, all knew the last vestiges of Reconstruction policies and regimes were at stake in the remaining "unredeemed" Southern states. In 1876 the project of Reconstruction, and perhaps the United States itself, were like a huge battleship slowly turning around as it lost power; once turning, it could hardly be stopped, even if the same group of officers remained at the helm.  That year the Supreme Court weakened the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments by emasculating the enforcement clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and revealing deficiencies in the Fifteenth Amendment.  In US v. Cruikshank, based on prosecutions for the horrible Colfax massacre of  1873, the Court overruled the conviction of Louisiana whites who had attacked a political meeting of blacks and conspired to deprive them of their rights.  The justices ru...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bugs in the American Legal System

As an immigrant from India, I have always been very impressed with the American legal system. In over 17 years, I have not encountered grassroots corruption, have been treated courteously by those in power, and have seen the system work overall in favor of the individual. In particular, I've always seen the punitive damages system as a counter-balancing force that puts the "fear of God" in the minds of the rich & powerful corporations that would otherwise tend to trample the average citizen. I'm not so sure any more after I heard this program on NPR's Fresh Air today:  Reporter Explores America's Unique Take on Justice It discusses the news series in New York Times, by Adam Liptak, called  American Exceptions . The highlights of the series so far are: Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’ The U.S. has less than 5 percent of the world’s population but almost a quarter of its prisoners. Foreign Courts Wary of U.S. Punitive Damages For ...
Post a Comment
Read more

BP and US Government Regulators were Accomplices

The following are excerpts from  a news story that details a laundry list of facts  that show BP and US Government Regulators acting as accomplices in a series of safety violations that combined to reach a tipping point, leading to the worst oil spill in history and a thoroughly incompetent response to it: [Originally posted on my personal blog at muralikd.blogspot.com, June 06, 2010]
Post a Comment
Read more