Capitol Men (15 page)

When in spring 1865 the armies of the Confederacy faced imminent defeat, some of their officers and soldiers suggested resisting the inevitable federal occupation of their homeland by forming guerrilla fighting units, which could disperse into the South's rugged mountains and pine forests and harass the invader from these impenetrable areas. General Robert E. Lee vehemently condemned the idea. But as Southerners became frustrated over equal rights for blacks and other conditions imposed by the national government in the late 1860s, this very strategy had, in a sense, been reborn. "Masterly inactivity," the whites' deliberate nonparticipation in Reconstruction, had not accomplished much. Blacks would not stop voting and engaging in political activity of their own accord. And although white South Carolinians might have enjoyed the racial caricatures and insults that appeared in the pages of the
Charleston Mercury,
those who were honest would admit that the most disturbing element of the 1868 convention and the new biracial state legislature was not black ineptitude, but the very opposite. African Americans, even former slaves,
could
function as aldermen and state legislators, as lieutenant governors and U.S. congressmen, and serve convincingly in parliamentary settings with whites. This performance, together with eager black participation at the polls, exploded the cher
ished notion that the ex-slaves would be lost without the guiding paternalism of their former masters. As the
Marion Star
conceded, the South's singular dilemma was not how to deal with a chaotic mass of ignorant, unwashed Negroes, but rather with an empowered race. "The enslaved have not been merely emancipated, but invested with every political right of the ruling race. Thus suddenly elevated, [they] outnumber the whites by an overwhelming majority, and have all the power." Statistics supported the
Star
's fears. In 1870 the black population of South Carolina was 416,000 and that of whites, 290,000; blacks formed a majority in twenty of the state's thirty-one counties.

The new state constitution, completed in spring 1868, seemed to create a kind of tipping point, for by the fall elections of that year, South Carolinian whites were experiencing a political reawakening, staging large, noisy outdoor pageants of racial solidarity in support of the national Democratic ticket headed by Horatio Seymour. Confederate veterans marched to affectionate ovations; the crowds enjoyed fireworks, long tables of barbecued meats, whiskey, lemonade, coffee, banners declaring patriotic themes, and crude depictions of the region's antagonists—General Grant, smoking a filthy cigar butt while squatting on a dead horse or a barefoot freedman looking through a spyglass at the moon under the label
FORTY ACRES OF LAND!
All of this transpired to the noise of brass bands, the booming of guns, and cheering so fervent, it was said the very "heavens were rent with the sounds of acclamation."

An effort to address the state's political imbalance through more conciliatory means arose two years later, with the founding of the Union Reform Party—Democrats and Republican moderates attracted by the idea of a home state coalition. The Union Reformers reached out to the huge black electorate by acknowledging the legitimacy of the universal franchise but had little success in drawing substantial numbers of freedmen, who remained fiercely loyal to the party of emancipation. The failure of the Union Reformers was particularly hard felt: their candidate for lieutenant governor in 1870, the proud ex-Confederate general Matthew C. Butler, who'd lost a leg in combat, was soundly defeated at the polls by Alonzo Ransier, the black politician who had formerly been a shipping clerk. "This vile, rotten, wicked, corrupt and degrading regime must be reformed or overthrown," the
Winnsboro News
concluded, voicing the anger of many whites toward the entrenched Republicans. "We see no practical method of accomplishing it except by some form of revolution."

A hint of what form that revolution might take had appeared in the
deadly night-rider violence that accompanied the election of 1868. Armed vigilantes rode through black settlements at night, shooting into cabins; coffins with Klan markings and other dire warnings were left on doorsteps; and blacks were warned to vote the Seymour ticket or face dire consequences. The Klan's activity was concentrated in the upcountry, most likely because it held a greater number of poor whites, who more readily viewed blacks as political and economic competitors.

Although those who romanticized the movement liked to pretend otherwise, the Klan was not entirely born from a spontaneous urge to redeem the region's honor, nor was it ever a social fraternity. It had roots not only in local regulator movements dating to the Revolutionary era but also in the antebellum Southern patroller system, the "courts on horseback" that policed slaves and free blacks, a method so well established that its organized areas of patrol, sometimes known as "beats," remained as jurisdictional boundaries in some parts of the South well into the twentieth century. Of course, the patroller system represented the privilege every Southern white man took for granted—the right to control black people's movements, judge them when they offended, and mete out penalties. Institutions like the patrollers vanished with emancipation, but not the urge to regulate blacks' behavior. The Klan's "mysteriousness," its system of appellations such as Exalted Cyclops and Imperial Wizard, its disguises and eerie warnings played on the age-old assumption that simple, superstitious slaves could be easily frightened; it also reflected the need for anonymity in the postwar political climate, which, at least officially, disallowed patroller-style vigilantism.

Southerners had long loved gallantry, and a forceful response to insult was part of this tradition. This sense of derring-do was shared across social classes. "The passing of high words and blows, canings, cowhidings, and so on, all terminated by the drawing of knives or pistols, together with hostile correspondences and duels, became everyday occurrences ... especially in South Carolina and perhaps Mississippi," noted the
Atlantic Monthly
in 1877. Virtually every man (and some women) went about with a gun—on trains, on steamboats, at church; it was not uncommon to see young boys of nine or ten with a bowie knife or a black revolver tucked into the band of their trousers. "Honor is the sentiment by which a high estimate is placed upon individual rights, social repute and personal self-respect," declared "The Code of Honor," a pamphlet written by Robert Barnwell Rhett, a diehard Southern conservative, and published in Charleston in 1878. "These are not always adequately protected by the laws and tribunals of the civil organization.
There are cases of insults grievous and degrading for which there is no action at law." The idea that laws are inadequate and that "determined men" will make and enforce their own is dangerous to any society. In the postwar South this line of thinking served to legitimize all sorts of extra-legal mayhem, from shots fired under cover of night into sharecroppers' cabins to cold-blooded assassinations, race riots, and lynchings.

The spiritual home of the state's opposition to unwanted social and governmental change was upcountry Edgefield County, perhaps the most independent and fiercely "Southern" parts of South Carolina. Edgefield was the abode of no fewer than ten South Carolina governors as well as the Confederate generals Matthew C. Butler and Martin W. Gary, and it wore proudly its reputation as the "region where Liberty finds her constant home." Governor Francis Pickens, an Edgefield native and one of the area's wealthiest landowners, had helped guide the state toward secession in the years leading to the Civil War. So thoroughly identified was he with the cause that an image of his wife, Lucy Holcombe Pickens, a noted beauty, adorned the Confederate one-dollar and hundred-dollar bills.

Edgefield's distinctive character—its farmers' traditional hostility to the gentry of Charleston and the coastal low country, its proud resistance to seated power—was well developed by the late eighteenth century, when the area had been the site of pervasive anti-Tory violence. Its isolation from and suspicion toward the outside world was formalized in the early nineteenth century when a native son, Vice President John C. Calhoun, became the outspoken leader of the nascent states' rights movement by opposing an 1828 federal tariff that he believed was unfair to the agricultural South. Congress responded by revising the conditions of the tariff somewhat, but the rates remained so high that in 1832 South Carolina approved the Ordinance of Nullification, which declared the tariffs of both 1828 and 1832 unconstitutional and forbade the collection of the relevant duties in the state. The Compromise Tariff of 1833 resolved the heated dispute, but the nullification crisis, and Calhoun's ardent defense of South Carolina's rights, remained an important touchstone. His heroism was enhanced when he resigned from President Andrew Jackson's administration over the matter. Settling for a bully pulpit as U.S. senator from South Carolina, he spent the rest of his days eloquently defending slavery and states' rights and inspiring future generations of Southern "fire-eaters." So persistent was Calhoun's influence over the South that when the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Henry Ward Beecher visited Charleston at war's end, they
made a special pilgrimage to the great man's tomb in order to satisfy themselves that he was extinct. Placing his hand firmly on the monument, Garrison intoned, "Down in a deeper grave than this slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection."

Thus, the secessionist strain in South Carolina as well as white resistance to postwar Reconstruction belonged to a proud tradition, reaching all the way back to the state's greatest Revolutionary War hero, Francis Marion, a lethal guerrilla fighter known as "the Swamp Fox," whose stealth famously confounded the British command; it would be hard to invent a more suitable archetype. It was a natural progression from the Swamp Fox to Calhoun, to Congressman Preston Brooks who in 1856 savagely attacked Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor to defend the honor of an Edgefield relative, to the rebel general Martin W. Gary and to the Red Shirt leader "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman. Rarely did upcountry South Carolina lack some colorful, bellicose character to act out its anti-authoritarian bent.

This template of regional defiance and individual bravado fit the Klan rather easily, and hundreds of incidents of night-rider violence were reported in upcountry counties beginning in the late 1860s. At Newberry Courthouse, Klansmen surrounded the home of a black man named Simeon Young, hurled "turpentine balls" into his house to illuminate the interior, then opened fire, wounding Simeon's wife and child. They visited Charles Johnson, who lived twelve miles north of Edgefield, "for the purpose of inflicting punishment on him for his Republican principles" and "for selling bad whiskey." On a moonlit night, Slap Jeffries, "a colored man of some prominence among his race, was taken from his house and brutally murdered by armed men in disguise, who shot him dead near his own door, and in sight of his family." At Spartanburg, the blacksmith John Good was slain when Klan members learned of his ability to identify local Ku Klux by their horses' hoof prints.

"These vile retches [sic], the white man, are bushwhacking my people," wrote Pastor Hardy D. Edwards of Abbeville. "They are also beating them, whipping them, running them off, in short, they are moving heaven and Earth to subdue my people ... the retches have killed one man at Cokesbury, one in the Whitehall settlement, one near Lowndesville. They burn the houses of the colored people; they whip them & beat them worse than they did as slaves for then the people had some protection."

From 1868 to 1871, York County, in northwest South Carolina, saw more than a dozen murders, as many as six hundred incidents of whipping or beating, and the burning of several churches and homes. A particularly infamous attack involved Elias Hill, a fifty-year-old black Baptist preacher who was a dwarf. The Klan, accusing Hill of agitating the local blacks to demand equal rights, pulled him from his bed in the middle of the night, dragged him into the yard, and enjoyed an hour of sport as they lashed him with a buggy whip, the whole time warning him to quit the Republican Party and cancel his subscription to a Republican newspaper. Hill was so rattled by the incident he and most of his congregation emigrated to Liberia.

DISGUISED KLANSMEN

"The effect of these numerous threats and outrages upon the negroes is very great," noted a
New York Evening Post
correspondent. "In the most disturbed sections of the state, for months together, hardly a negro man dared to sleep in his home at night. Many of the women and children would leave their homes on the approach of evening. Working in the fields all day, even there frequently harassed by fears of assassination, they sought at night the woods or fields, and there hid until morning."

One of the worst incidents of Klan violence—arguably the largest mass lynching in Reconstruction history—took place in Union County, South Carolina, in early 1871, when black militiamen were arrested for shooting to death Matt Stevens, a local white moonshiner who had donned a Klan costume in an attempt to rob a "contraband whiskey wagon." (His wife, upon learning of his demise, exclaimed, "I told him to stay at home—I knew what he would get when he went Ku-Kluxing!") A posse of white townsmen calling themselves the Black Panther Klan stormed the county jail and lynched two blacks accused of Stevens's murder. Soon after, fifty members of another vigilante group, the Council of Safety, raided the same jail, demanding that several other blacks, who were also being held under suspicion in the case, be turned over to them. These prisoners, however, had surrendered voluntarily on the sheriff's promise of protection; when that officer refused to collaborate with the lynch mob, he was held hostage as the intruders used an ax to break into a cell and abduct five men. Two, including Ellick Walker, the local militia captain, were found dead on the road the next morning; the other three, gravely injured, were promptly re-arrested by the sheriff. When word spread that the three survivors and seven additional suspects were to be moved to Columbia for safekeeping, an army of three hundred Klansmen descended on the jail. After posting guards on the roads leading in and out of town, they roughed up the uncooperative sheriff and his deputy, tied them to a hitching post, and then departed into the night with ten abducted men. The remains of eight were found the next morning; two had been hanged and six shot to death; the other two were never heard of again.