Negroes and the Gun (19 page)

Williams had been a particular worry for South Carolina Democrats, who depicted him essentially as an outlaw who had to be dealt with. Williams's militia company was armed with efficient Enfield breach-loading rifles and flaunted the weapons in armed pre-election parades.
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After breaking into various black homes and disarming occupants, Klansmen confirmed Williams's location from a black neighbor who reported that Williams had at least twelve guns hidden in his home. The Klan descended on Williams's cabin, seized his guns, and then dragged him away over the screaming tempest of his wife, Ruby. At daybreak, two of Williams's neighbors went searching for him and found his corpse hanging from a tree. Federal prosecution of the men who killed Jim Williams and terrorized his neighbors ended with a single Klansman convicted and sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
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Of all the violence in the campaign to redeem the South from Reconstruction, the bloodiest episode occurred in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in a town called Colfax. Fueling the conflict was a cynical Republican governor who courted black Republicans and attempted to placate unreconstructed white Democrats, all while snookering his more radical Republican rivals. Political scheming resulted in competing claims for county offices. And that sparked a wave of political violence that the region and the country would not soon forget.

Colfax was the brainchild of Willie Calhoun, heir to a fourteen-thousand-acre plantation in the Red River Valley. Willie's father had ruled over more than seven hundred slaves before the war. Raised half his life in Europe and laboring under a physical handicap, Willie fell, philosophically, quite far from the tree. He responded to emancipation and Reconstruction far differently from his neighboring planters. Just the name of the place suggests Willie Calhoun's unusual view of things. On Willie's initiative, the thousands of acres handed down by his father were established as a new parish, named for President Grant. The county seat, previously Calhoun's Landing, was renamed after Grant's vice president, Schuyler Colfax.

When the war was over, Willie handed out plantation livestock to former
Calhoun slaves, helped start a black school, and rented acreage at fair prices to blacks
.
When agents of the Freedman's Bureau arrived to aid the transition from slavery to freedom and mediate conflicts with ex-Confederates, Willie Calhoun welcomed them and their mission.

Like many places, Grant Parish had seen its share of terrorist violence. That prompted Grant Parish blacks, with at least the initial backing of the governor, to form a militia for the security of the population. It was commanded by William Ward, a former slave from South Carolina who had escaped into Union lines, enlisted in the army, and risen to the rank of sergeant. Seventy-five black men filled the ranks of Ward's militia company.

Election season yielded the discord sowed by Governor Henry Warmoth's machinations. The seat of power in Colfax was the courthouse, formally one of Willie Calhoun's stables. Black Republicans secured it first and staked their claims to the offices that it represented. When local whites bragged within earshot of their Negro help about the plans to take the courthouse and oust the Republican team, word soon reached William Ward. Ward raised the alarm with Republicans, who armed for defense of the courthouse. Soon, two dozen black men with guns arrived to guard the courthouse and the Republican administration.
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The first shooting occurred when a scout posse of blacks encountered a force of mounted whites and exchanged shotgun fire. Again, the technology is significant. The shotgun is a devastating weapon at close range. But the forces here were at least two hundred yards apart. At that range, the shotgun load has spent most of its energy. So it is no surprise that no one was hurt in this first exchange.

Other skirmishes followed. On April 5, one of William Ward's men, Benjamin Allen, led a patrol into the countryside to search for a black man who was rumored to have been abducted. They encountered a group of twenty armed whites and exchanged gunfire. With the horses spooked, the two sides dispersed, again with no casualties.

Cooler heads from both sides attempted a parlay, each offering to cease hostilities if the other would surrender its claims to government office. The negotiations broke down when one of Ward's men burst into the meeting, shouting that a band of whites had just killed Jesse McKinney, a freedman who worked a small patch of land at the edge of Colfax. This was the tipping point.

Blacks from around the countryside poured into Colfax, and William Ward's men dug in. On April 6, skirmish squads clashed again. Both sides were mounted, and the blacks had the advantage of surprise. They laid in ambush, sending out a white ally as a decoy. The plan worked, and the blacks fired with effect from cover. The whites fled across a muddy stream, firing back over their shoulders. The worst casualty was one white man getting his thumb shot off. The black patrol returned to Colfax triumphant.
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Black victories and stalemates in sporadic small conflicts led white Democrats to call for reinforcements. By April 13, more than 150 white men had assembled on the outskirts of town. They were led by a man who claimed the office of sheriff under the order of a county judge, whose own authority was rooted in the contested election results. Men answered the call from several adjoining counties, including a contingent from the Knights of the White Camellia and the Old Time Ku Klux Klan. The recruiting effort also yielded a four-pound cannon from a sympathetic riverboat owner.

The blacks at Colfax were superior in number but not in fighting quality. The group of 150 included women and children from the countryside who had set up a little camp around the courthouse. Many of the black men reportedly were not armed, and the guns that they did have were largely shotguns and hunting pieces. About a dozen black men had Union-issue, breach-loading Enfield military rifles. The bigger problem was that they had only enough ammunition for each man to fire a few shots. They also attempted to construct a jerry-rigged cannon from pieces of steam pipe, but the thing blew up when they tried to test-fire it.

On Sunday, April 9, a preconflict parlay began with demands of surrender and refusal. Finally, the white force warned the courthouse defenders that they had thirty minutes to remove the women and children
.
This was the point where the two white men in the courthouse—an ambivalent Republican and a Northern traveling salesman—decided to flee. Except for the hapless Negro the Democrats would force at gunpoint to throw a firebomb onto the courthouse roof, the coming conflict would be purely black against white.

The white force advanced in a skirmish line to clear out preliminary guards and traps. At three hundred yards, they set up the canon and began firing. The Negroes fired their remaining improvised cannon. It blew up just like the first one.
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The groups traded small-arms fire for about two hours. Blacks' hopes rose and then fell on the empty speculation that the whistle of a passing steamboat signaled Republican reinforcements. They were heartened again by a lucky shot that took out one of the white cannon crew. But he was quickly replaced.

Finally, with most of their ammunition spent, the black courthouse force succumbed, and then it was pure slaughter. The whites gave no quarter. Bill Cruickshank, later infamous as a defendant in a historic Supreme Court case stemming from the conflict, made a game of lining up Negroes close together so that he could kill two of them with a single shot. When some objected to the shooting of prisoners, others responded, “we are only shooting the wounded.” In later testimony, one of the surviving blacks summarized the scene this way:

They told us to stack our arms and they wouldn't hurt us and for us to march out; then they set the courthouse on fire; . . . They made me go among the prisoners;
. . . They kept me prisoner until midnight; they took me and another man out to shoot us; one bullet struck me in my neck, stunning and dropping me; the other man was killed; they did not shoot me again; I laid on the ground until morning; fearing to move.

When a riverboat stopped at Colfax toward sundown, travelers witnessed the carnage of a battlefield. Most of the dead were black. The armed white men who still roamed the area explained that blacks had been riled up by radical Republicans to seize the courthouse and provoked a fight. Estimates of the death toll range from 80 to 150 blacks and a handful of whites.
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The alleged leaders of the prevailing whites were prosecuted in litigation that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The prosecutions held powerful lessons for black folk. Ninety-five whites were indicted on various charges. But only a handful of men were ultimately tried, and even they were acquitted on most charges. An editorial in the
New Orleans Republican
cast the lesson this way:

The colored folks will hereafter depend to some extent upon the same weapons for defense that their enemies use for attack. A jury is really no match for a firearm. If it be generally known that in each Negro cabin in the County there is a lively weapon of defense, there will not be such a constant recurrence of homicides as have disgraced the annals of this state for many years. We expect these shotguns to prove famous peacemakers.
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Looking back, this assessment seems unsatisfactory. Armed Negroes at Colfax had been annihilated. Urging blacks to get guns, or more guns, seems like a fruitless recipe for escalating violence. The prescription seems desperate, reflexive, not fully rational. But viewed against the unfolding pattern of state malevolence and diminishing options, it is easier to understand how a fight doomed to failure might actually have been the best among the dreary options.

Political violence aimed at suppressing black advancement was a fact of life almost from the moment the Confederacy lost the war. It was an integral part of a strategy that paid off in 1877 when Democrats resolidified white rule through a political deal that ended the brief experiment of Reconstruction and ceded the Negro issue to Southern home rule.

That deal was born out of the viciously contested presidential election of 1876, between the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, and the Democrat, Samuel Tilden. Violent intimidation and cheating were rife in 1876, and by some accounts Tilden won the election. A more realistic account is that Democrats stole the election through violence, intimidation, and fraud, and Republicans stole it back through a
politically tilted election review commission that overturned the ostensible Tilden victory in three Southern states and handed it to Hayes.

The election commission's decision fueled competing claims to the presidency that some feared might lead again to war. The Democratic slogan of the time was “Tilden or Fight.” Conflict was averted through negotiations in a literally smoke-filled room at the Wormser Hotel, in Washington, DC, where Southern Democrats ceded the presidency to the Republicans in exchange for economic stimulus, the removal of federal troops from the South, and home rule over Negroes. The country was weary of the Negro issue and anxious for reconciliation and a new prosperity. Reconstruction was dead.

The end of Reconstruction opened the period some would call the nadir of the black experience in America. The political outlook was dim. Black political aspirations had been quashed by a program of violence and fraud, and now by federal abdication. Many have chronicled this story, but one of the best summaries comes from a black man of the times. In 1884, black publisher T. Thomas Fortune said this.

It is sufficient to know that anarchy prevailed in every southern state; that a black man's life was not worth the having; that armed bodies of men openly defied the Constitution of the United States and nullified each and every one of its guarantees of citizenship to the colored man. Thousands of black men were shot down like sheep and not one of the assassins was ever hung by the neck until he was dead.
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With the diminishing promises of citizenship came greater personal exposure to violence. This posed a profound dilemma. State and local governments would grow increasingly hostile to Negroes. The notion of relying on the state for personal security or anything else would seem increasingly absurd against the rise of convict labor schemes, state-sponsored Jim Crow rules, and lynch law.

It was an important moment in the black tradition of arms. There were growing reasons to believe that whatever blacks now had in the political arena was all they would get. Black political violence would steadily decline. Individual self-defense would become the predominate theme of the tradition as Negroes came to grips with the fact that the brand of citizenship they enjoyed carried shrinking benefits and increasing risks that the state would care little for their physical security or general welfare. In the dangerous times to come, Negroes pushed to the wall by violent threats would be very much on their own and would have to decide whether to just crumple or to stand and fight.