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When Republicans were elected to state offices, they attempted to reform local militias requiring all males to serve, regardless of race, but few Anglo-Americans would serve with Freedmen. Freedmen did serve in the state militias, but they also developed their own local volunteer militia groups. Former slavers spread rumors that Freedmen were forming insurrectionary armies to kill white people. White elites formed agricultural cooperatives to maintain economic dominance over Freedmen, a goal one group made clear: “a united and systematic plan with respect to the regulation of our colored population.”19 They also created their own forces to intimidate other Anglo-American farmers and merchants who attempted to trade with Black farmers, often putting white merchants out of business.
Most ominously, elite white Southerners formed volunteer militias under the guise of private rifle clubs. By 1876, South Carolina had more than 240 such clubs. This allowed thousands of Confederate combat veterans, along with former Confederate guerrillas, to mobilize quickly. Of course, the KKK was the most ominous terrorist organization to emerge from these efforts, its purpose being to subdue the Freedmen and control black labor when slavery ended. But the KKK was not alone. Either by their absence in many places or their actions in others, some of the U.S. Army officers in charge made these developments possible. One that stands out is U.S. General E.R.S. Canby, a Kentuckian who was occupation commander of the Carolinas. Canby refused to make use of his own soldiers, and instead relied on white Southern law enforcement to maintain order. He had to have known what would happen. Like many U.S. Civil War commanders assigned to the occupation army of the former Confederacy, in 1872 he soon reassigned to the Army of the West, where he commanded troops to round up several dozen Modoc families in Northern California who refused to be forced into an Oregon reservation. The Modocs waged a year-long resistance to the Army’s counterinsurgency, finally killing General Canby.20 One of the reasons troops were pulled out of the South prematurely was to fight in the dozens of wars the United States was initiating against Indigenous Nations in the Northern Plains, the Southwest, and the West.21
As Hadden points out, Southern settlers had long relied on “self-help” measures to enforce slavery leading up to the formalized slave patrols, which had continued where possible during the Civil War. What was different after the abolition of slavery was the tons of technologically advanced guns and ammunition, and the tens of thousands of militarily seasoned and violent men who made ideal candidates for the Klan. Particularly, when the Confederate war hero Nathan Bedford Forrest joined the Klan, it gained a chivalric image that attracted other war heroes. Congress enacted laws forbidding secret groups, but the laws were rarely enforced.22
In fact, the United States never broke with the slaveocracy, as exemplified in the career of Nathan Bedford Forrest. He lost his parents and economic security at seventeen, but became a slave trader, land speculator, and finally a wealthy slaver with his own large plantation. He was the epitome of the “self-made” man that was the vaunted ideal of white supremacy. In the Civil War, Forrest was a cavalry officer for the Confederate Army, infamous for having led the massacre of hundreds of Black Union soldiers in 1864, a war crime. Yet President Andrew Johnson granted Forrest a presidential pardon in 1868.23
The Klan, illegal as it was, operated like a huge slave patrol, requiring Freedmen to have written permission to travel from the plantations where many continued to work. The Klan established curfews for gatherings of African Americans, as well as limits on the number who could gather. The Klan burned homes, confiscated the guns of Freedmen, and, of course, inflicted punishment similar to slave patrols’ beatings, but also had far more freedom to torture and murder, since the Black body no longer carried monetary value that the murderer would have to compensate for. Of course, Black people resisted, as they had resisted the slave patrols. However, the Klan was a private terrorist organization, not a public force, and had no legal status or accountability. Some Klansmen were put on trial, but none was ever convicted. Occasionally, the U.S. Army would declare martial law, but as one army commander said in 1871, “The entire United States Army would be insufficient to give protection throughout the South to everyone in possible danger from the Klan.”24
From the perspective of African Americans who survived the organized violence, there was no distinction between patrollers, Klan, and white policemen, whether rural, in towns, or in the cities. In nineteenth-century criminal digests, arrests made by slave patrollers before the Civil War continued to be used as legal precedents in the 1880s.
Hadden notes that the language of slave patrols is still employed in police work in the twenty-first century, “patrol” being the most obvious, but also “beat.” More disturbingly, techniques were folded into police practices, such as surveillance methods like the stakeout. And until the 1960s pushback, police had little supervision and routinely brutalized and confined suspects without consequences; even in the twenty-first century, when police torture or murder Black people, juries rarely find the involved officers guilty of any crime.25
In the first four decades of the twentieth century, around 6 million African Americans left the South. With World War II, 1.5 million more left the South between 1940 and 1950, many to work in the war industry in California. More than 300,000 Black Southerners migrated to the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas during that decade. And, during the Depression and droughts of the 1930s, a wave of some 400,000 mostly Anglo Oklahomans, Texans, Arkansans, and Missourians poured into California, followed by another wave to work in the war industry in the 1940s.
In 1950, William Parker became chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for the following decade and a half, ending after the 1965 Watts Uprising. The LAPD was already virtually all white and solidly racist, with mainly Mexicans making up the oppressed and controlled target community. With the goal of controlling the increasing African American blue-collar population in South Central Los Angeles, Parker began recruiting Anglo veterans from the South and Southwest who had settled in Southern California after the Dust Bowl migrations or military service. The new technology of television brought the series Dragnet to homes all over the country, extolling the LAPD and attracting recruits, as well as influencing other urban police forces all over the country. During this time, the LAPD became the most notorious racist police operation (“police culture”) in the country, with nearly every aspect of the Southern tradition of slave patrols woven into the system.26 A similar police force was formed in Oakland, where many Black veterans and war-industry workers had settled. At the same time, the Civil Rights movement was making widespread gains, with school integration mandated by law and growing Black resistance to police violence in the South, in Northern cities, and in Los Angeles and Oakland.
In an article for The Atlantic, liberal writers Saul Cornell and Eric M. Ruben make a strong argument for the slave-state origins of modern gun rights. Certainly, any inquiry into the institutionalization of slave patrols in those colonies/states reveals the connection with the Second Amendment.27 However, this does not explain why the N.R.A. and gun rights are so popular in other parts of the country. Armed slave patrols comprise half the story in the Second Amendment; the whole story implicates more than the slave states. While the “savage wars” against Native Nations instituted brutal modes of violence for the U.S. military, and slave patrols seamlessly evolved into modern police forces, both have normalized racialized violence and affinity for firearms in U.S. society.
FOUR
CONFEDERATE GUERRILLAS TO OUTLAW ICONS
I grew up in rural Oklahoma. Both my parents were born in western Missouri. My father, besides being a tenant farmer and rodeo man, was an actual proletarian cowboy who worked on a large cattle ranch in Oklahoma mending fences and herding cattle long distances before he married my mother. In this world, stories of “Robin Hood” outlaw heroes were pervasive. These included the James Gang, Jesse and Frank; the Younger Brothers, Cole, Jim, John, and Bob; and Belle Starr—dubbed the �
��Bandit Queen”—my female role model. I was, thanks to my mother, a devout Southern Baptist, yet it didn’t seem contradictory that these bandits broke nearly all the Ten Commandments, because they stole from the rich and gave to the poor, or so it was said. Not until I moved to San Francisco when I was twenty-one and took a college course in U.S. West History did I learn that all my heroes had been Confederate guerrillas associated with William Quantrill’s Rangers. They all came from middle-class families who bought, sold, and worked enslaved Africans, and who were devoted to the Confederacy, that is, the preservation of chattel slavery. This came as a shock, because I had for the previous four years taken sides in favor of the Civil Rights movement and despised racism, the main reason I left Oklahoma as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to figure out this disconnect ever since. But I do know that border-outlaw narratives have played a role in gun fetishism and a culture of violence in the United States.
I was not alone in buying into the myths about these outlaws. Even in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond, during the folk music revival of the late 1950s, Woody Guthrie’s 1939 recording of the 1882 traditional song extolling Jesse James was revived and made the pop charts:1
Oh, they laid poor Jesse in his grave, yes, Lord
They laid Jesse James in his grave
Oh, he took from the rich and he gave to the poor
But they laid Jesse James in his grave
Pete Seeger recorded the song in 1957, followed by Eddy Arnold in 1959, the Kingston Trio in 1961, and in the 1970s it made the charts again, recorded by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as well as by Bob Seger; even The Pogues and Bruce Springsteen got into the act in the mid-1980s. It was recorded by dozens of other lesser-known folk, pop, and country musicians.
And there was a larger theme of sympathy for the slave South’s “Lost Cause” in the 1960s counterculture. The Band first recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” with lyrics by Robbie Robertson,2 in 1969, when they were closely associated with Bob Dylan, topping the charts in several categories; Joan Baez recorded it in 1971, with the same result, as did Johnny Cash in 1975. Liberal San Francisco music critic Ralph J. Gleason waxed eloquent on The Band’s recording: “Nothing I have read … has brought home the overwhelming human sense of history that this song does… . It’s a remarkable song, the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon [Helms] and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn’t some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity.”3
Virgil Kane is the name …
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely alive
By May the tenth, Richmond had fell, it’s a time I remember, oh so well
The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing …
Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest,
But they should never have taken the very best …
Like my father before me, I will work the land
Like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand
He was just eighteen, proud and brave, but a Yankee laid him in his grave
This was a post−World War II composition mourning the Confederate defeat in the Civil War, written by Robbie Robertson, also a member of The Band and one of the most celebrated of the many musicians, writers, and producers coming out of the 1960s. He is also Mohawk, his mother from the Six Nations Reserve outside Toronto, Canada, his father Jewish. Not having grown up in the United States, Robertson likely had very little knowledge of the Civil War, but Joan Baez did and was a pacifist and an icon of the African American Civil Rights movement of the time. It seems that the sanitized lore that views bloody, murdering, Confederate guerrillas as righteous outlaws continues to be deeply engrained in United States culture.4
It wasn’t just the music counterculture, but also mainstream pop culture. True Grit, a best-selling 1968 novel by Charles Portis, also serialized in the popular mass-distributed magazine The Saturday Evening Post, was made into a blockbuster movie in 1969, featuring John Wayne as the fictional Rooster Cogburn, former Confederate guerrilla with Quantrill. John Wayne won the Academy Award for best acting in the role of the good-hearted drunken anti-hero who proves himself a true hero. Ethan and Joel Coen did a 2010 remake of the film for the new generation starring Jeff Bridges in the John Wayne role, accompanied by a new edition of the novel with an afterword by best-selling author Donna Tartt, which reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list.
The 1976 film The Outlaw Josey Wales, directed by Clint Eastwood and scripted by Forrest Carter, adapting his 1972 novel The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales, featured a Missouri Confederate guerrilla played by Clint Eastwood and was based on the true story of Bill Wilson, a folk hero in the Ozarks. After Union troops murder his wife and child, Wales refuses to surrender at the end of the war, seeks revenge, and guns down the Union man who murdered his family. He then flees to Texas with a bounty on his head. In the film, Josey Wales expresses his worldview: “Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. Cause if you lose your head and give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”5
Forrest Carter, who wrote the script for The Outlaw Josey Wales, is the pen name of Asa Earl Carter (1925–1979) who was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and a speechwriter for the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1960s. He changed his name and successfully turned to writing, first the Josey Wales book, then in 1976 what claimed to be a memoir, The Education of Little Tree.6 The story is told by an orphaned boy of five years old, being raised by Cherokee grandparents who called him “Little Tree,” with stereotypical noble savage actions and settings, perfect for the growing “New Age” appropriation and distortion of Native ways. At the book’s release, The New York Times published an article outing Forrest Carter as Asa Carter, former Klansman. It was not a big secret, as Carter had run for governor of Alabama in 1970. The article reported, “Beyond denying that he is Asa Carter, the author has declined to be interviewed on the subject.”7
Carter died at age 53 in 1979, beaten to death in a fight with his son. His literary fame faded. There had been no questioning of Carter’s claim of Cherokee identity until the University of New Mexico Press bought the rights to The Education of Little Tree in 1985, and published it as nonfiction in 1991. The book took off and became the number one best seller on the New York Times best-seller list, won the American Booksellers Book of the Year award, and became a much loved book. The Cherokee Nation denied that Carter was Cherokee, and Carter’s Ku Klux Klan background was once again revealed, leading the Times to shift the book to its fiction list. Despite calls from the Native American academic community and the Cherokee Nation that the University of New Mexico Press withdraw the book from publication, instead they changed the cover, removing the “True Story” subtitle, and reclassified it as fiction, but the biographical profile did not change to include Carter’s Klan activities and the lack of evidence of his being Cherokee; it remains one of their best-selling books. Oprah Winfrey had endorsed the book when it was published, but removed it from her recommendations in 1994.
Clint Eastwood, directing The Outlaw Josey Wales, featured several stereotypical Native American characters, written by Carter and performed by excellent Native American actors, Geraldine Keams as a love interest, the elderly Chief Dan George as the protagonist’s spirit guide, and Will Sampson as a protector. In the script, there is no mention of slavery, even though Wales was a Confederate guerrilla who rejected the Confederate defeat.
Two other widely viewed films—Bonnie and Clyde and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid—glorified the gun violence of real-life outlaws who were not Confederate guerrillas, but have contributed to those narratives being folded into ones of the Wild West, even though Bonnie and Clyde were band
its in the Great Depression era and Billie the Kid’s short life ended in 1882. With Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn broke through to mainstream box-office triumph and was embraced by the counterculture of 1967 at the same time. The film was noted for the bloodiest scenes in film history, and starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garret and Billy the Kid featured the popular musician and songwriter Kris Kristofferson as the Kid and a memorable soundtrack by Bob Dylan, who also played a cameo role.
How did it happen that popular culture transformed Confederate guerrillas into celebrity Western gunfighters, merging them with actual Western gunfighters, and what has this phenomenon contributed to the culture of violence and gun-love in the United States?
As explored in the previous two chapters, Euro American settlers had a long tradition of organized violence against unarmed civilian populations, their habitats, and their food supplies, beginning with the first early seventeenth-century incursions into Indigenous communities that reached global proportions in the “French and Indian War” (the North American theater of the 1754–1763 Seven Years’ War between England and France), which was fought over colonialist domination of Native territories, followed soon after by the Anglo settlers’ violent eight-year war for independence from Britain. In the first half of the nineteenth century, U.S. Americans’ counterinsurgent operations and wars continued against resistant Natives, Mexicans, Mormons, and, in the Missouri-Kansas border conflict over slavery of the 1850s, each other, continuing through the Civil War itself. In dealing with the Civil War specifically, historians often divide guerrilla combatants into a top-down hierarchy, distinguishing between cavalry raiders, partisan rangers, and bushwhackers, the latter low category reserved for the Missouri-Kansas guerrillas. Guerrillas of these three types were part of the total war strategies of both the Union and Confederate armies, but in the case of the Missouri-border bushwhackers, they were outside any command structure and lacking actual battlefields in Missouri. These were small volunteer units under a leader the most famous being William Clarke Quantrill and “Bloody” Bill Anderson that attacked any sign of Union presence or suspected sympathies with the Union. This included an early morning assault on pro-Union Lawrence, Kansas, in which more than two hundred residents were massacred. During the Civil War, these bands were continuing a decade of irregular war when they had raided Kansas’s abolitionist households and institutions, and in turn were attacked by their counterparts, such as John Brown and his sons; when the Civil War broke out, the opposing forces were Kansas anti-slavery guerrillas, called “Jayhawkers.” Not only young men were combatants, but whole extended families and communities were involved, young women often as couriers, such as teenage Belle Starr.8