[Marxism] The Colfax massacre

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Washington Post, Sunday, March 23, 2008; BW04
A Massacre and a Travesty
Two books illuminate the bloody episode that effectively ended Reconstruction.

Reviewed by Eric Foner

THE DAY FREEDOM DIED

The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

By Charles Lane | Henry Holt. 326 pp. $27

THE COLFAX MASSACRE

The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction

By LeeAnna Keith | Oxford Univ. 219 pp. $24.95

Unbeknownst to most Americans, our nation's history includes 
home-grown terrorism as well as attacks from abroad. Scholars 
estimate that during Reconstruction, the turbulent period that 
followed the Civil War, upwards of 3,000 persons were murdered by the 
Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups. That's roughly the same number of 
Americans who have died at the hands of Osama bin Laden.

In the last generation, no part of the American past has undergone a 
more complete scholarly reinterpretation than Reconstruction. Once 
portrayed as a tragic era of rampant misgovernment presided over by 
unscrupulous carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves, Reconstruction 
is today seen as a noble, if flawed, experiment in interracial 
democracy, an effort to provide free blacks with land, education and 
political rights. The tragedy is not that Reconstruction was 
attempted, but that it failed.

The work of historians, however, has largely failed to penetrate 
popular consciousness. Partly because of the persistence of old 
misconceptions, Reconstruction remains widely misunderstood. Popular 
views still owe more to such films as "Birth of a Nation" (which 
glorified the Klan as the savior of white civilization) and "Gone 
With the Wind" (which romanticized slavery and the Confederacy) than 
to modern scholarship.

Thus, the new books by LeeAnna Keith and Charles Lane are doubly 
welcome. Not only do they tell the story of the single most egregious 
act of terrorism during Reconstruction (a piece of "lost history," as 
Keith puts it), but they do so in vivid, compelling prose. Keith, who 
teaches at the Collegiate School in New York, and Lane, a journalist 
who covered the Supreme Court for The Washington Post, have immersed 
themselves in the relevant sources and current historical writing. 
Both accomplish a goal often aspired to but rarely achieved, 
producing works of serious scholarship accessible to a non-academic readership.

The Colfax massacre took place on Easter Sunday 1873, when a force of 
about 150 heavily armed whites assaulted an equal number of blacks, 
many of them militia members, holed up in the courthouse at Colfax, 
La. After chivalrously allowing women and children to leave, they 
overran the outgunned defenders. Some blacks were killed trying to 
escape; 40 or so were taken prisoner and then executed. The final 
death toll remains unknown -- Lane estimates between 62 and 81, Keith 
thinks it may have reached 150. Three whites also died.

Both authors offer a gripping account of the assault and subsequent 
atrocities. But overall, their books complement rather than repeat 
each other. While shorter, Keith's is more comprehensive, devoting 
more space to the history of slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction 
in west-central Louisiana. She explores the brutal nature of slavery 
on the sugar and cotton plantations of local magnate Meredith 
Calhoun, one of the richest men in the United States. Calhoun seems 
to have been the model for Simon Legree, the cruel master in Harriet 
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Ironically, after the war, his son 
William became a leading proponent of blacks' rights. He lived openly 
with a black woman, rented land to black farmers, established a 
school for their children and aligned himself with the Republican party.

In his bestselling book, April 1865: The Month that Saved America 
(2001), the journalist Jay Winik commended defeated Confederates for 
returning to peaceful pursuits after Appomattox, thus "saving" the 
United States from the agony of a long guerrilla war. Would that this 
were so. Organized violence emerged around Colfax almost as soon as 
the Civil War ended, targeting black leaders, school teachers, 
freedmen who tried to acquire land, and, once blacks won the right to 
vote, local officeholders. Not all the victims were black -- Delos 
White, a Freedman's Bureau agent, was assassinated in 1871. What 
happened in Colfax was not atypical. "Murder," Keith writes 
laconically, "played a central role in Louisiana and throughout the 
region" during Reconstruction.

While Keith illuminates the massacre's historical context, Lane 
offers a far more detailed account of the ensuing court cases. If his 
story has a hero, it is J. R. Beckwith, the U.S. attorney in New 
Orleans, who became obsessed with bringing the perpetrators to 
justice. He received little assistance from his superior, Attorney 
General George H. Williams, who thought it would be better if the 
murderers simply fled the state. Beckwith persuaded a federal grand 
jury to indict nearly 100 men under the recently passed Enforcement 
Acts, which made it a federal crime to deprive citizens of 
constitutionally guaranteed rights. But because of local white 
resistance, only a handful of those charged could be arrested.

Eventually, nine men went on trial before a biracial jury. Dozens of 
witnesses, almost all of them black, related what had happened at 
Colfax. The initial trial resulted in a hung jury; a second produced 
the conviction of three defendants. But Supreme Court Justice Joseph 
P. Bradley, acting while on circuit court duties, voided the 
indictment because, he insisted, most of the rights that had 
allegedly been violated were matters of state, not federal, authority.

Because the presiding judge courageously refused to go along with 
Bradley, his judicial superior, the case went to the Supreme Court. 
In 1876, in U.S. v. Cruikshank, the justices unanimously threw out 
the convictions. As Lane points out, nowhere in Chief Justice 
Morrison Waite's 5,000-word opinion did he mention the fact that 
dozens of black men had been murdered in cold blood at Colfax. 
Cruikshank hammered the final nail into the coffin of federal efforts 
to protect the basic rights of black citizens in the South. 
Reconstruction effectively ended a year later, and the Jim Crow era began.

This tragic story is more than ancient history. Into the 20th 
century, bones turned up in Colfax when the foundations for buildings 
were being laid. There still stands in the town a plaque, erected in 
1951, commemorating the Colfax "riot" -- not massacre -- and "the end 
of carpetbag misrule in the South." As recently as eight years ago, 
Chief Justice William Rehnquist cited Cruikshank as a precedent in 
overturning a conviction under the Violence Against Women Act. The 
Constitution, he declared, gives the states, not the federal 
government, the power to punish rape. Whether we realize it or not, 
Reconstruction and its overthrow remain part of our lives today. *

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia 
University, is the author, most recently, of "Forever Free: The Story 
of Emancipation and Reconstruction."


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism