Opinion

THEY DIDN’T GIVE A DAMN

Few eras in American history have lent them themselves to as much myth-making as Reconstruction – the period immediately following the Civil War, from 1865 to 1877, when the defeated South was re-admitted, state by state, into the Union.

The hope was that, with the end of slavery, a new South would be created in which African-Americans were treated as fully equal. Despite the noble efforts of many, some of whom are chronicled in this book by historian Stephen Budiansky, it never happened.

Instead, there arose a legend that persists to this day – of how venal Northern carpetbaggers and treacherous Southern scalawags conspired to oppress the South, forcing the onetime Confederacy to accept shiftless, illiterate black man as their lawmakers. It was a myth popularized in such movies as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind” – and it shaped the political attitudes of Southern whites for decades.

“Generations would hear how the South suffered ‘tyranny’ under Reconstruction,” writes Budiansky. “Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all.”

Indeed, the 1868 South Carolina Democratic Central Committee declared that “the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule.”

The reality of Reconstruction’s tyranny, writes Budiansky, is that “more than 3,000 freedmen [former slaves] and their white Republican allies were murdered in the campaign of terrorist violence that overthrew the only representatively elected governments the Southern states would know for 100 years to come.”

By 1879, Albion Tourgee – a North Carolina judge who defied the original Ku Klux Klan by empanelling black jurors and fining lawyers who used the n-word – would admit sadly that “the South [has] been the real victors in the war” having successfully “neutralized the results of the war and reversed the verdict of Appomattox.”

Budiansky chronicles the efforts of five people, black and white, who tried to forge a South based on racial equality, and were attacked for it. His book is important because it does not focus primarily on the reign of terror by the KKK, but on equally well-organized campaigns of violence by local whites that eventually broke even the most stubborn resister.

There are heroes like Adelbert Ames, who as governor of Mississippi fought to give rights to freed slaves, Mississippi State Sen. Albert Morgan and U.S. Army officer Lewis Merrill, who successfully fought the KKK. And there are villains like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, future governor of South Carolina and U.S. senator, whose reputation was made at the horrendous massacre of free blacks at Hamburg, S.C.

So warped was the South’s hatred that one of the greatest of Confederate generals, James Longstreet, was vilified for making the simple argument that the South, having lost the war, was obligated to obey the laws of Congress.

When he went even further and embraced the hated Republican Party, he was socially ostracized – and a new, widely accepted myth arose, falsely claiming that Longstreet had bungled at Gettysburg and lost the war for the South.

The book’s title comes from the famous episode in which Massachusetts Rep. Benjamin Butler, while making a speech in Congress denouncing KKK outrages, is said to have waved the blood-spattered shirt of federal tax-collector Albert Huggins, who had been brutally beaten by Kluxers in Mississippi. In fact, as Budiansky demonstrates, it now appears that – accepted history notwithstanding – Butler did no such thing.

But “waving the bloody shirt” became a synonym for rabble-rousing demagoguery – even though, as he writes, in this case “it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim.”

Budiansky tells a horrifying and shameful tale – but a critically important one. His book puts the lie to the still-venerated Southern notion that the Confederacy was simply a noble effort to defend the principle of states’ rights. It was about the murderous repression of an entire race of people – and it would continue for another century, long after even the events in this book were a distant memory.

The Bloody Shirt

Terror After Appomattox

by Stephen Budiansky

Viking