The Reconstruction of White Supremacy in Post-Civil War America

Racial violence undergirds and enables other forms of discrimination and oppression, forcing scholars and activists alike to expand the very definition of what is violent. The question of what makes racial violence modern is a bit less thorny.

The American Civil War was a watershed moment for racial violence in the United States, and for good reason. Historian Richard Hofstadter, in a prescient essay on American violence, argued that the resolutions of the nation's major wars have influenced the scope and character of the domestic violence that followed in their respective wakes. He contrasts the American Revolution, which settled the question of independence and ushered in several decades of ‘relative social peace', with a far bloodier Civil War that ‘left an extraordinary inheritance of bitterness and lethal passion that has not yet ended'. Any serious student of racial violence could poke holes in Hofstadter's characterisation of the early nineteenth century as ‘one of the least violent periods in our domestic history'. Nevertheless, his characterisation ^{^[133]} of the Civil War as a cataclysmic clash driven by questions of freedom and equality largely left unresolved helps to explain why a war to end slavery unleashed a century and a half of persistent racial violence.^{^[134]}

To be sure, the imperative to maintain white domination, fuelled by the pervasive fear of black insurgency, predated the Civil War.^{^[135]} However, expressions of violence that had plagued America in the antebellum era, such as urban rioting and vigilantism, took on an increasingly racial character in the post-Civil War era. Forerunners of post-Civil War lynch mobs had tarred and feathered loyalists in the Revolutionary era, and nativist rioters had torched Catholic churches and schools in northern cities, but ‘modern' mob violence focused increasingly on perceived threats to the racial status quo.

While this violence transcended any particular region and targeted a variety of racial groups, the white supremacist counter-revolution that swept the South after the Civil War captured national attention and transformed the political landscape of modern America. White supremacists in the post-Civil War South inherited the fears of black insurrection from predecessors who responded to the threat of slave revolts with draconian measures. Having lived through a war that precipitated the emancipation of enslaved blacks, and faced with the proposition of a postwar Reconstruction, white supremacists lamented a society turned on its head and utilised counter-revolutionary methods to take power back. That these men, and millions more across the nation, had lived through a civil war that spurred a domestic arms race and familiarised a generation with military tactics only heightened the destructive potential of modern racial violence.

Reconstruction historians have increasingly emphasised the fundamental role of violence in quashing interracial democracy in the South. Early studies of the era, many written under the tutelage of Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning, characterised white supremacist violence as an unfortunate yet inexorable response to venal and inept interracial regimes. Depictions of a ‘tragic era' ofYankee carpetbaggers, traitorous scallywags and ‘Negro domination' reached popular audiences via films, novels and textbooks that celebrated the overthrow of Reconstruction as a noble crusade. Later ‘revisionist' histories, which emphasised the accomplishments of Republican governments across the South, largely placed the blame for this ‘unfinished revolution' - to quote from the title of Eric Foner's peerless history of Reconstruction - at the feet of an increasingly ambivalent northern public and its representatives in Washington. Yet unrelenting white supremacist violence not only sapped northern political will but also eviscerated shaky Republican coalitions through an increasingly organised reign of terror.

This counter-revolution gained steam as white supremacist Democrats, working in close coordination with their paramilitary auxiliaries, ‘redeemed' state governments from Republican control. The campaign peaked in Mississippi in 1875, when a coordinated campaign by the White Line and other pro-Democrat groups attacked black political rallies, assassinated Republican officials and terrorised polling places. The brutal campaign, vividly documented in a two- volume, 2,000-page congressional report, fatally crippled the Republican coalition in the state with the largest black majority in the South. The following year, ‘Red Shirt' militias in South Carolina followed the ‘Mississippi Plan' and toppled one of the last pro-Reconstruction regimes in the region.^{^[136]}

By neutralising the threat of black politics, the Redeemers claimed to have settled the question of white supremacy - their sine qua non for racial peace. Yet just as the end of the Civil War failed to pacify the South, the fall of Reconstruction failed to quell racial violence or stamp out the volatile anxieties that fuelled it. Sexual violence against black women, and fear of black attacks on white women, undergirded the politics of white supremacy from Reconstruction onward. As Hannah Rosen has argued, ‘a discourse of rape and criminality' justified attacks on black men even as white supremacists continued patterns of abuse and exploitation that reached back to slavery. In the post-Reconstruction era, white supremacist regimes sanctioned ‘gendered racial terror', as historian Sarah Haley argues, as a tool of punishment and domination. Many white women rallied behind white supremacists precisely because of the protection from the mythical ‘black rapist' they offered. Yet the hypocrisy of this gendered culture of violence, which simultaneously idealised and degraded womanhood along racial lines, also propelled resistance from anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.^{^[137]}

The overthrow of Reconstruction and the institutionalisation of disfranchisement and segregation in the South proceeded apace with a broader campaign for white supremacy that spanned the continent.

While the racial brutality that pervaded American life in the late nineteenth century is often compartmentalised into tidy regional, racial and ethnic categories, perceptive scholars have focused on when and where these narratives of violence intersect. Particularly compelling is the convergence of the white supremacist counter-revolution in the post-Civil War South with the brutal subjugation of Indigenous peoples in the American West. As the nation neared its hundredth birthday in 1876, and Reconstruction teetered on the brink of collapse, news reached the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that several thousand Plains Indians had routed cavalrymen under the command of George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn. While the nation reeled from this bloody yet temporary setback to continental consolidation, white supremacists in Hamburg, South Carolina, massacred black militiamen and townspeople who had gathered for a Fourth of July parade. Fifteen years later, and just a few weeks after Mississippi delegates gathered for a constitutional convention that effectively disfranchised black citizens by erecting the gauntlet of voting restrictions, the massacre of scores of men, women and children at Wounded Knee - perpetrated by the same cavalry regiment routed at Little Big Horn - punctuated a decades-long campaign to stamp out Indian resistance. Throughout the latter stages of the Indian Wars, many of the Union veterans who had fought to crush the Confederacy and worked to protect the rights of freed people during Reconstruction sensed no contradiction between their prior missions and their crusade to subdue the American West.

Rather than view the retreat from the promise of Reconstruction and the conquest of the Plains Indians as contradictory, historian Daniel Sharfstein outlines a broader trajectory - a ‘pivot from emancipation to Jim Crow and empire' - for racialised violence in modern America. The rapid industrialisation of post-Civil War America, spurred by the bloody consolidation of the frontier and fuelled by immigrant labour, unleashed a wave of violence aimed at those deemed unassimilable in a whitening West.

From the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, anti-Chinese violence ranged from arson and murder to armed expulsions. As in the Reconstruction-era South, officials out West euphemistically characterised the larger-scale outbreaks as riots. Yet when white miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, destroyed

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 187; Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2010). a neighbouring Chinese mining camp in a rampage that left at least twentyeight dead, and when mobs in Seattle and Tacoma expelled hundreds of Chinese residents - all within a span of twelve months in 1885-6 - the violence more closely resembled an ethnic cleansing. This bloody campaign of harassment and intimidation, which extended to other Asian immigrant groups in subsequent decades, reflected the interplay between racial violence and racist policy. Occurring just a few years after the United States Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the mob violence in Wyoming and Washington dramatised how legislation grounded in racial hostility sanctioned ongoing persecution. Moreover, the anti-Chinese campaign provides yet another example of the national reach and brutal logic of white supremacist politics. The bipartisan support for the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant restriction on immigration in American history, reflected a growing national consensus regarding race, civilisation and civic fitness.^{^[138]}

<< | >>

↑

Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

The Reconstruction of White Supremacy in Post-Civil War America

More on the topic The Reconstruction of White Supremacy in Post-Civil War America: