Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  According to Oken Edet Uya, a biographer of Robert Smalls, "the charge of corruption and extravagance" in South Carolina was "just a cloak" for whites' real agenda—the restoration of white rule. Smalls himself noted, with irony, that often the very blacks who rose above power's easy temptations were most likely to be targeted by resentful whites. And whatever corruption existed in the Republican leadership, it surely paled in comparison to the far more gross illegalities—voter fraud, intimidation, and violence—practiced by those opposing Reconstruction's reforms.

  General Rufus Saxton, recalling the optimism that had attended the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Port Royal, wrote a warm letter to Smalls in December 1871 to say that while he believed that the often-heard charges of Republican corruption in South Carolina were overstated, he knew that "where there is so much smoke there must be some fire." He warned his old friend that "the Republicans of South Carolina must see to it that the state is redeemed by the election of only true and honest men to office in the future." Alluding to Smalls's wartime heroism, Saxton wrote,

  When you brought the Planter out from Charleston ... you knew where lay the torpedo on the right, and the shoals and rocks on the left, you knew where the channel was deep and sailed in it; you did not tarry long before the guns of Fort Moultrie or Sumter, but straight to your purpose, to the beacon of liberty ahead...

  The ship of state of South Carolina is now in stormy waters. The rocks and shoals, torpedoes and hostile guns are ignorance, immorality, dishonesty, and corruption in high places. The beacon lights ahead are honesty, intelligence, the school house and the church.

  Keep the helm of the ship of state "steady toward these," Saxton suggested, "and soon the ship shall glide gently by the breakers into the peaceful waters of freedom."

  Smalls, much moved by Saxton's words, had the letter published and read it himself before a gathering in Beaufort. He also read to the audience his reply to Saxton, which echoed the general's imagery. "As well as I knew the beacon lights in the time of the Planter, I know the beacon lights now, and the channel that leads to honesty, virtue, purity and intelligence, and I trust that I may ever be found working with those who are anxious to guide the ship of state [from] dark and troubled waters." He then asked for and received three cheers for General Saxton, and he vowed before his listeners to safeguard honest government in South Carolina.

  In part, Smalls did this by campaigning vigorously in 1874 for the election of Daniel Chamberlain as governor. If one of the early ideals of Reconstruction had ever gained traction—that Northerners would help the postwar South develop a "New England model" of town-meeting democracy—Dan Chamberlain, a native New Englander, Yale man, classics scholar, and onetime follower of Wendell Phillips, would have been the person to implement it. Once in office he impressed even the state's conservatives with his sincerity and dedication to reform. When Smalls challenged the views of James'S. Pike and his brethren, he could cite the good example of Chamberlain, mentioning that even the conservative Charleston News & Courier consistently praised the governor's performance.

  It was perhaps inevitable, however, given his prominence and the lingering contempt for his wartime accomplishments, that Smalls himself would face charges of wrongdoing. Sent to Congress in December 1874 (with his seventeen-year-old daughter Elizabeth, a recent graduate of a New England finishing school, as his secretary), "the Boat Thief" lost no time in becoming an outspoken advocate for his constituency in the Sea Islands, obtaining funds to develop the harbor and waterfront at Port Royal. His celebrity as a war hero, his efforts in the state's constitutional convention, his much-publicized work to enhance life in his beloved Beaufort, and his control of patronage had won him a devoted following in the low country. But the popularity among black Sea Islanders of a man whom many whites still vehemently resented fueled the effort to destroy him. In 1877, after the Democrats seized control of the South Carolina statehouse, he was accused of having received, earlier in the decade, $5,000 as a beneficiary of a bogus printing-expense claim filed with the state legislature. The charges relied on the testimony of Josephus Woodruff, who as public printer of the state had allegedly robbed South Carolina of $250,000, fled to Pennsylvania, then been extradited and offered leniency in exchange for "information" against Smalls and other officials. The question of Woodruff's credibility hardly troubled the Democrats as they savored what one Northern headline termed "The Downfall of Smalls." There was some hand-wringing among Northern papers, which lamented that a man so recently cheered for nobly throwing off the bonds of slavery had fallen into corrupt ways; the Hartford Times speculated that the federal government had erred in praising and rewarding Smalls for stealing the Planter, since it had clearly given him the idea that crime paid.

  The real objective of the prosecution became clear, however, when a man named Cochrane, the head of an investigating committee appointed by the legislature, visited the black congressman. "Smalls, you had better resign," Cochrane warned, according to an account Smalls later provided.

  "Resign what?" Smalls demanded.

  "Resign your seat in Congress."

  "What," Smalls asked, "the seat the people elected me to?"

  "Yes, you had better resign, because if you don't they are going to convict you."

  "I don't believe that, sir," Smalls insisted. "I am innocent and they cannot do it."

  "Well," said Cochrane, "bear in mind that these men have got the Court, they have got the jury, and an indictment is a conviction."

  A prominent newspaper editor from Aiken County, a Mr. Drayton, also urged Smalls to comply. "Smalls, we don't want to harm you. We know you were kind to our people just after the surrender ... We want this government, and we must have it. If you will vacate your office we will pay you $10,000 for your two years' salary."

  Smalls, always at his best when pinned down by enemy fire, told Drayton defiantly, "Sir, if you want me to resign my position, you must call meetings all over the Congressional District and get the people who elected me to pass resolutions requiring me to resign, and then you can have the office without a penny. Otherwise I would suffer myself to go to the penitentiary and rot before I resign an office that I was elected to on a trumped-up charge against me for the purpose of making me resign."

  As Cochrane had threatened, Smalls was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but he spent only three days in jail because, on the advice of some fellow congressmen, he had appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the meantime, the Democrats, unable to win Smalls's resignation, found a way to make something of his predicament. A deal was struck between the state of South Carolina and Washington: the case against Smalls would be dropped in return for the federal government's abandonment of several cases pending against whites for election fraud and Ku Kluxing. Smalls was furious when he learned of the arrangement but was pardoned in full.

  The positive response to both Horace Greeley's urgings for reconciliation and the writings of James Pike were indicators of a shifting national mood regarding Reconstruction and the South's growing desperation to be free of the policy's constraints. When P.B.S. Pinchback returned to Louisiana from President Grant's second inaugural in March 1873, he was grieved to find his state still paralyzed by dual claims to control of the statehouse, a conflict that had led the Senate in Washington to postpone a ruling on his own status as senator-elect. Although Grant had authorized the administration of William Pitt Kellogg, the Democratic followers of John McEnery had formed a shadow government and had begun commissioning their own public officials.

  This impossible predicament soon turned deadly. In April 1873 it triggered the Reconstruction period's most lethal violence, which took place at a remote hamlet in central Louisiana known as Colfax Courthouse. One of the many tragic results of this bloodletting would be a seminal Supreme Court decision to reverse a constitutional guarantee to protect the freedmen.

  Colfax lay in Grant Parish on the banks of the Red River, about 350 miles north of
New Orleans. The parish, with a racially mixed population of several thousand, had in 1869 been cut out of Rapides and Winn Parishes by the legislature as part of an effort to diminish Democratic authority in the Louisiana countryside; the parish was named for the U.S. president. Similarly, the name of the courthouse village, a former sugar plantation with a handful of buildings and about seventy residents, honored Vice President Colfax. The two-story courthouse itself was a converted stable.

  The Democrats C. C. Nash and Alphonse Cazabat had been "certified" as the parish's sheriff and judge by the McEnery forces. However, on March 23, 1873, several Kellogg loyalists, led by William Ward and R. C. Register, who were black, and Daniel Shaw, who was white, took over the courthouse and ejected the McEnery men. Shaw, the new sheriff, instructed local black residents to defend the building from Democratic reprisals. Ward and two other black army veterans—Levi Allen and a Pennsylvanian named E. H. Flowers—began drilling men from the neighborhood in an impromptu militia, although most were armed only with antiquated weapons and some were forced to parade with a hoe or pitchfork in lieu of a rifle. They also busied themselves in constructing earthworks, anticipating that Nash and Cazabat would attempt to retake the courthouse.

  Half-hearted efforts were made at some sort of negotiated settlement, but rumor-mongering and fears of a widespread Republican-led black insurrection were rampant. Some freedmen allegedly warned a white settler that "they intended to go into the country, and kill from the cradle up to old age"; another white reported that blacks planned to massacre all the white men in the neighborhood and then "seduce" all the white women, in order to create a "new race" of people. Whites particularly distrusted Ward, a state legislator whose deeply scarred face made him resemble an outlaw; it was widely believed he had been involved in the unsolved murder of a white farmer named Jeff Yawn in 1871. Even the Kellogg legislature had once admonished Ward for "ruffianism," perhaps because he had falsely promised his black constituents that the governor intended to give them their former masters' lands.

  One of the worst accusations, however, was made against Ward's friend, E. H. Flowers. The "little sleek black negro," it was told, had broken into the home of the prominent local Democrat Judge William R. Rutland, ransacked the place, then pried the lid off a coffin holding the corpse of one of the judge's children, a little girl who had drowned years earlier and whose remains Rutland was planning to re-inter, and dumped it face-down on the ground. Then, with two jugs of Rutland's wine under his arm, he had departed to spend "the night in riot and debauch."

  The story of Flowers's invasion of Rutland's home and his ghoulish act was probably exaggerated. As at lynchings, where lurid descriptions of alleged sexual outrage against virginal Southern maidens stoked mobs to fury, here the rumors of murderous black depravity fed anxiety among white parish residents, helping to drum up the sizable citizens' army that eventually challenged Republican control of the courthouse. "To get up a body of men for the unwarrantable attack on the peaceable and inoffensive citizens of Colfax and vicinity," the New York Times noted, "it was necessary to resort to perfidy, and every conceivable and infamous lie was industriously circulated through the pine woods to accomplish the purpose."

  Any hope of a peaceful resolution likely ended when Judge Rutland himself traveled to New Orleans to apply for help from federal troops or state militia but was rebuffed by Governor Kellogg and General Longstreet. Kellogg apparently shared Rutland's request with the federal commander William H. Emory, but like Kellogg and Longstreet, Emory was not convinced the standoff in Grant Parish merited a military response. He knew that because the parish was in a fairly remote part of Louisiana, it would be difficult (as well as politically unpopular) to send and maintain troops there. It's also likely that Kellogg and the others wanted to believe that the contingent of blacks now guarding the courthouse would be up to the job of defending it; black self-sufficiency in such matters was almost always viewed as preferable to outside intervention. In the meantime, troubling news arrived. Jesse McKinney, a black farmer and father of several children, had been murdered by a group of mounted whites near Bayou Darro, three miles east of Colfax, as he was at work building a fence on his property. What provocation, if any, he had committed was unknown. Not long afterward, gunshots were exchanged near a place called Boggy Bayou, and a white man named Jack O'Quinn, "of Kuklux notoriety," was shot out of the saddle and killed.

  By Easter Sunday, April 13, the deposed sheriff, C. C. Nash, had gathered from Grant and neighboring parishes about 150 armed whites who assured him that they were "not afraid to die for white supremacy." He then requested and obtained a parley with Levi Allen, the black man left in command of the courthouse by Ward, Register, and Flowers, who had themselves gone to New Orleans to meet with the Kellogg government.

  "What do you depend upon doing in there?" Nash asked Allen.

  "We are doing nothing more than we were before, standing still as we've been standing," Allen replied.

  Insisted Nash, "We want that courthouse."

  "We're going to stand where we are until we get United States troops, or some assistance."

  "Then go in there and say to your people that I advise them to get out of there."

  When Allen again said that his force would hold their ground, Nash extended a thirty-minute truce so that the blacks could send women and children away from the line of fire.

  Then Nash brought his men closer to the courthouse, and the two sides began a general exchange of shotgun and rifle fire, which continued with little effect for almost three hours. The blacks had prepared well, building solid defensive breastworks, but their shotguns lacked enough range to hurt the whites. Combat was at first so leisurely that the black defenders had to step up onto their works, showing themselves, in order to draw any white fire; with equal nonchalance, several whites at one point broke off the siege for a meal and a few hands of cards.

  During the days leading up to the battle, the blacks had improvised two cannon out of old stovepipes by stopping up the ends, drilling touchholes in each, and mounting them on carriages. These homemade weapons used makeshift ammunition such as pieces of chain, bolts, and nails. The blacks had fired these randomly in the preceding days, frightening nearby residents, although it's not entirely certain whether they were functioning on Easter Sunday. The whites, however, knowing of their existence, countered the opposing "artillery" by appropriating a small cannon from the steamboat John'T. Moore, which was tied up at a nearby landing.

  A breakthrough in the siege came when Ezekiel B. Powell, one of the whites, scouted the blacks' position and suggested to his comrades that they flank the courthouse by having a party quietly maneuver down the river and climb up to an opening in the breastworks. As Powell was new to the area, some were unsure whether to act on his idea, but C. A. Duplissey spoke on his behalf, saying, "This man is an old Confederate soldier, and he has been down examining things, and [he] says if we can take them trenches we can drive them out."

  Powell's party carried the small steamboat cannon with them, and seizing a vantage point where the defenders' lines opened, they began pouring steady fire at the enemy and the courthouse itself. As some blacks retreated, the courthouse suddenly burst into flames. Isaiah Atkins, a black survivor of the attack, later said that Nash's men had captured a handful of black defenders and coerced one, a man named Pinckney Chambers, to hold a pine torch to the end of the building; others would claim that the whites ignited the structure; it was also alleged that blacks set the courthouse ablaze to spite those trying to recapture it. Amid the smoke, two white flags of surrender appeared at the windows. "Don't shoot, we are whipped!" cried someone inside. But shots continued to come from the courthouse, and two whites fell. James Hadnot, a Democratic politician, was wounded, shot through the lower abdomen, and another white, Sidney Harris, was also hit. The attackers, infuriated by the false surrender and seeing Hadnot fall (blacks disputed this version, claiming there had been no trick surrender and that Hadnot was shot by h
is own men), swarmed the black defenders as they fled the burning courthouse and tried to escape toward the river; several blacks were killed. Many "were ridden down in the open fields and shot... [and] those lying wounded on the court house square were pinned to the ground by bayonets." Others tried to get away through a cypress pond; while wading through water up to the waist, they were shot from behind. One witness recalled that "by the time the job was finished it looked to me like any one could have walked on dead negroes almost an acre big."

  The wound to Jim Hadnot, which proved mortal, evidently at least partly inspired the atrocities committed by the whites. After many blacks were slaughtered in the initial assault, an even less defensible act took place: black prisoners held in a nearby cotton field were led away in pairs under the ruse that they were being to be taken to a nearby town, but then instead they were summarily executed. "I heard Luke Hadnot [the brother of the white man expected to die] say, 'I can take five,' and five men stepped out. Luke lined them up and his old gun went off, and he killed all five of them with two shots. Then it was like popcorn in a skillet. They killed those forty-eight."

  "It is our opinion," stated an account by a deputy U.S. marshal who arrived soon afterward, "that when forced by the fire to leave the courthouse [the blacks] were shot down without mercy. The position and condition of many of the bodies go far to prove this." According to the official,

  under the warehouse, between the courthouse and the river, were the dead bodies of six colored men, who had evidently gone under for concealment, and were there shot like dogs. Many were shot in the back of the head and neck. One man still lay with his hands clasped in supplication; the face of another was completely flattened by blows from a broken stock of a double-barreled gun, lying on the ground near him ... Many of them had their brains literally blown out.

  When passengers aboard the steamboat Southwestern, happening to pass Colfax the next day, learned that it was possible to tour a "battle ground" with dozens of dead bodies still on it, many disembarked and ascended the bluff to the courthouse area. R. G. Hill, one such passenger, later explained that a young, heavily armed white man had come aboard to ask that the Southwestern convey the two wounded whites, Hadnot and Harris, downriver to Alexandria, at the same time telling the passengers