Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Blanche Butler Ames frequently left Jackson, preferring to spend time with her family in the North. Her husband, although glad his wife and children were not exposed to the difficulties of living in a place hostile to them, suffered in their absence, and the two corresponded almost daily. Having come to share some of her misgivings about Mississippi, he admitted, "This house does not seem a natural place for you and the children ... It seems more like a hotel where we stayed, but for a day. This is not home and never can be. Slavery blighted [the white] people," he wrote, "then the war—then reconstruction—all piled upon such a basis destroyed [their] minds—at least impaired their judgment and consciousness to that extent that we cannot live among them."

  The conclusion that Ames shared with his wife would be reinforced two days later, on September 4, at a Republican rally and barbecue in Clinton, west of Jackson. Nearly two thousand exuberant blacks entered the town, along with about one hundred white Republicans, their numbers swollen by a rumor that Governor Ames would speak. The party faithful paraded in celebration, their mules and horses "trimmed fantastically and patriotically in red, white and blue ribbon," a witness recorded, "in some instances there being more ribbon than horse." From the town square they marched triumphantly a quarter-mile to the site of a former plantation known as Moss Hill, where a rousing band welcomed the audience. As at Yazoo, however, a group of white men had come as agents provocateurs. "There is no doubt [the riot] had its origin with some young white men carrying whiskey, who, as all accounts agree, seemed likely to raise a row from the start, if they were not there for that express purpose," recorded the Cincinnati Commercial.

  The program included divided-time speeches. The second speaker of the day, a Republican named Captain Fisher, had just taken the podium and was congratulating the first speaker, a Democrat, Judge Johnston, for the orderly and peaceful nature of his remarks. Then one of the white troublemakers shouted, "Well, we would have peace if you would stop telling your damn lies!" The band momentarily began to play, in order to calm the disturbance, while a few blacks tried to hush the whites. "Efforts, it appears, were made several times to quiet them, until at last they were approached by one of the negro policemen." When the police officer asked the whites why they could not show the same courtesy to Captain Fisher as had been shown Judge Johnston, the whites mobbed him, grabbing the collar of his uniform and dragging him along the ground. The local black leaders Charles Caldwell, who was a state senator, and Green Tapley swiftly intervened, freeing the policeman and urging onlookers to return to the rally, but suddenly a shot was heard. Lewis Hargraves, a black man, fell to the earth dead, shot through the forehead.

  "The thing opened just like lightning, and the shot rained in there just like rain from heaven," said one witness of the sudden violence. Amid shouts and gunshots, hundreds of blacks fled, most on foot, leaving behind their horses and buggies. "[Whites]...chased [the blacks] for miles and miles, killing them as a sportsman would kill the scattered birds of a covey," reported the Commercial. One black later testified that he ran in horror from the gathering, pursued by men with "long guns," took to the woods, and barely stopped running until he'd reached the streets of Jackson, ten miles distant. "What can we do?" he implored of an acquaintance there. "It looks like Judgment."

  At the scene of the riot, abandoned mules, horses, and carriages stood unclaimed for days afterward; some of the latter were set afire by marauding whites. The death toll included three white men and four blacks, including a woman, her child, and an aged man nearly a hundred years old; many others were wounded. Two of the whites killed were among those who had initiated the disturbance; there were reports that their corpses had been hacked at and otherwise mutilated. A diamond ring was taken from the finger of one of them.

  When word of the melee spread, especially the ghoulish details about the dead white men, vigilantes quickly organized. White Liner units similar to the Dixon Scouts and bearing names such as the Southerns, the Flanagan Guards, and the Jackson Road Modocs, took the train from Vicksburg to Clinton, there to embark on a second and more deadly phase of violence: they roamed the countryside, seeking prominent Republicans. "One fellow, bearing a gun ... said the train got there late and the darkies were hard to find," stated a news account, "that they killed only four or five last night, but that this morning they popped over eight." It was later estimated that as many as thirty blacks—including clergy, political leaders, and teachers—were murdered in vengeance killings in the wake of the Clinton affair.

  "Oh, we didn't do much," one of the shooters from Vicksburg confided to a Northern reporter. "A few negroes committed suicide, damn 'em, that's all."

  As Margaret Ann Caldwell, wife of the state senator Charles Caldwell, remembered, "They went to a house where there was an old black man named Bob Beasly, and they shot him all to pieces. And they went to Mr. Willis's and took out a man named Gamahel Brown, and shot him all to pieces. It was early in the morning; and they goes out to Sam Jackson's ... and they shot him all to pieces. He hadn't even time to put on his clothes. And they went out to Alfred Hastings; Alfred saw them coming ... and they shot Alfred Hastings all to pieces."

  When Mrs. Caldwell asked a white acquaintance why whites had disrupted a peaceful event at Moss Hill and were hunting down black people, he replied indignantly, "You all had a big dinner yesterday, and paraded around with your drums and flags. That was impudence to the white people. You have no right to do it. You have got to leave these damned negroes; leave them and come on our side. You have got to join the democratic party. We are going to kill all the negroes. The negro men shall not live."

  It had been a dreadful week for Mississippi and for the Ames administration. Within shouting distance of the state capital, a Republican meeting at Yazoo and an outdoor pageant at Clinton had become murderous riots, and once again the governor had been unable to protect the state's most vulnerable citizens from devastation and deadly reprisals. The state economy was at a standstill, harvests were in jeopardy, and many blacks were afraid to go into the fields to pick cotton. Wrote a citizen of Yazoo City to the governor, "I beg you most fulley [sic] to send the United soldiers here ... they have hung six more men since the hanging of Mr. Fawn; they won't let the Republicans have no ticket ... send help, help, troops...." A pitiable plea arrived from Warren County: "The rebles turbulent; are arming themselves here now today to go to Sartaria to murder more poor negroes. Gov[ernor], aint [there] no pertiction?"

  Ames was running out of options. He feared that black militias wouldonly incite a greater reaction from the disaffected whites, as borne out by the Vicksburg debacle of late 1874, and he suspected that militias made up of whites would hesitate to confront White Liner forces. A proposal he made to the legislature to create special police units was defeated, while his public appeal to the vigilantes to stop harassing black people and return peacefully to their homes was greeted with derision.

  After informing President Grant by telegram that "domestic violence prevails in various parts of this State, beyond the power of the State authorities to suppress," Ames on September 10 received a response from Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont, who asked for more details about the troubles in Mississippi and inquired as to why Ames could not handle them. Ames replied that he understood the official reluctance to intervene but assured Pierrepont that the crisis was all too real and offered to assume responsibility for calling in federal troops. "As the Governor of a State, I made a demand which cannot well be refused," he reminded the attorney general, an allusion to Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, which allows a state's chief executive to request federal support when a state's republican form of government is threatened by either foreign invasion or domestic unrest. "Let the odium, in all its magnitude, descend upon me," Ames declared. "I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty toward a class of American citizens whose only offense consists in their color, and whom I am powerless to protect."

  To help plead his case in Washington, Ames turned for su
pport to Blanche K. Bruce, a U.S. senator from Mississippi. A Republican land-owner in the Delta region's Bolivar County, Bruce was a large man whose girth made him one of the state's more recognizable black politicians. As sheriff, tax collector, and school superintendent in Bolivar, as well as a newspaper publisher, his low-key style had earned him the esteem of both races in western Mississippi. Ames so admired Bruce he had originally wanted him for his lieutenant governor, but Bruce, with the help of the state's leading black Republicans, had in early 1875 won appointment to national office.

  BLANCHE K. BRUCE

  Born in 1841 in Farmville, Virginia, to a slave mother and her white master, Bruce, like South Carolina's Robert Smalls, enjoyed a relatively favorable upbringing for a child who was by birth a slave. He became the servant to one of his owner's "legitimate" sons and was educated alongside him. However, "the white boy gave little heed to lessons, while the colored boy seized and held every scrap of knowledge that came his way," according to one account. The family had relocated to Missouri by the time war came in 1861, and Bruce's young master hastened to enlist in the Confederate army. Bruce, having different aspirations, headed to neighboring Kansas, a non-slave state. He took up residence in Lawrence, a hub of abolitionist sentiment, where he found work as a teacher. But the great conflict that had seized the nation found him even there. It was his misfortune to be present on the morning of August 21, 1863, when the notorious anti-Unionist bushwhacker William Clarke Quantrill, furious over the previous month's Confederate reversals at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, sacked the town. The populace, roused from sleep by the dawn raid, fled for their lives as Quantrill led his desperadoes on horseback through the streets, shouting, "Kill! Kill, and you will make no mistake!" The mounted raiders, needing little encouragement, smashed windows and storefronts, set fires, and shot or bludgeoned anyone in their path. As many as two hundred people were killed or maimed, and numerous buildings left in ruins.

  "Quantrill's band certainly would not have spared a colored man," Bruce later recalled.

  The night before the raid I had been watching and nursing a sick friend, and when the day broke I heard firing ... Looking out of the window I saw armed men riding by firing pistols, and immediately realized that the enemy was upon us. To remain with my sick friend would have been to invite certain death, so I bade him adieu and with no clothing on my person but shirt and drawers, watched for my opportunity, got out of the house and hid in the brushes behind a fence.

  After watching from his hiding place for some time, Bruce, still in his underclothes, perceived a lull in the action and made a break toward the Kaw River. He was seen, however, by some of Quantrill's men, who charged him on horseback as he dove into the water. "Fortunately, keeping my head under water, I managed to hide beneath a hedge of vines and roots close to the shore. The troopers rode to the river and searched everywhere without discovering my retreat, although they came within a few feet of me a dozen times. Finally they rode away, and I remained concealed in the river all day and did not venture to emerge ... until after nightfall."

  After the war Bruce briefly attended Oberlin, the abolitionist-founded school in Ohio, although he soon left for lack of tuition money. He was working as a porter on a Mississippi River steamboat when he began to hear of the public role blacks were starting to play in the postwar South. He was especially curious about Oscar Dunn, Louisiana's black lieutenant governor, and the urbane state senator P.B.S. Pinchback, both of whom he'd read about and who had, like him, worked the riverboats. "In the midst of their vassalage," Bruce was convinced, "my race had still preserved in full force and vigor, their original love of liberty."

  The man who had narrowly escaped Quantrill's raiders was savvy enough to know Reconstruction's idealism might not last long, and he was eager to make something of it, and of himself, while good prospects remained. Visiting Mississippi in 1868, Bruce heard a speech given by James Lusk Alcorn and was impressed by the extent to which the former Confederate general was reconciled to the dawning of a new era in the South. Alcorn termed the citizenship rights granted by the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment "the logical sequence to the freedom of the negro," and he characterized resistance to Reconstruction as "a childish display of spite," which would only weaken the "influence of our friends and of the moderate men in the Republican party." Bruce liked what he heard, was introduced to Alcorn, and on the spot decided to remain in the state. He settled in solidly Republican Bolivar County in the fertile plantation-rich Delta, with its 2,084 black and 590 white voters, and immediately befriended H. T. Florey, the white carpetbagger who held sway there. "[Florey] had a big drum at his office which could be heard for miles around," a memoirist of the period writes, "and when this drum beat, like the great war drum of the Aztecs, it summoned the faithful, and they came from far and near."

  Bruce quickly won the attention of state Republicans. Even though his weight hovered somewhat below three hundred pounds, he was always neatly groomed and carried himself with a certain regal deportment. He had a large man's knack for taking the world in stride and was known for his sense of humor, even when the subject was his own physique. "He stands very straight and is very dignified," the Washington Bee noted, when Bruce later lived in the nation's capital. "His face is round and very full about the jaws, which are clean shaven. His eyes are black, with a sparkle of fun in them ... A small dark mustache curls in at the corners of his full-lipped mouth ... He dresses quiet, always wears a high hat, and raises it French fashion to everyone when he bows."

  Bruce's talent, honed perhaps by the dual nature of his upbringing, was an ability to interact confidently with both whites and blacks; thus began his political ascent in Boliva. In a debate during the election for sheriff, Bruce's white opponent allowed that Bruce was "a decent man" but unqualified as a leader of men because he had once been a slave and done menial labor. Bruce replied coolly that he had indeed once been a slave, but whereas he "had outgrown the degradation and ignorance of slavery and was a free man and a good citizen ... the difference between my adversary and myself [is that] had he been a slave...[he] would be performing menial offices even now."

  The Delta's white planters grew satisfied with Bruce's basic decency and, more important, with the evidence that he was not a wild-eyed Radical. His success as superintendent of education bore that out. Many whites had rebelled against the idea of supporting black schools with their tax dollars, but Bruce assured them the schools were to be segregated and would not be forums for political resentment; furthermore, Northern white missionary teachers (often derided as potential agitators) would be phased out as qualified black instructors became available. Bruce also emphasized that educating blacks in basic reading and arithmetic would make them more adaptable laborers and perhaps less inclined to malingering or drunkenness. So effectively did he sell the need for education that some planters contributed to build schools in places where none had ever existed. By late 1872 Bruce had twenty-one schools up and running in Bolivar County, teaching a thousand pupils.

  When exactly Bruce learned of Governor Ames's plan to make him lieutenant governor is unclear, but he had reason to regard the offer with caution. He had closely watched affairs in neighboring Louisiana and had corresponded with P.B.S. Pinchback, who had become Louisiana's lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn. The incessant political infighting there was a very poor advertisement for engaging in politics at the state level in the postwar South. To Bruce, the U.S. Senate, with its Republican majority and its prestige as a federal legislature, seemed a far friendlier destination.

  As Governor Ames had requested, Senator Bruce visited Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont in summer 1875 to encourage him to heed Mississippi's plea for federal intervention. Pierrepont held distinctly negative views on Reconstruction, once characterizing it as a "false doctrine of despotic sovereignty," and had joined the administration in the wake of the public relations disaster caused by the federal intrusion into the Louisiana legislature.
His skepticism was by now hardly unique. Bruce told Pierrepont that Ames's warnings about the present political turmoil in Mississippi were accurate and that without federal help, the growing crisis would mean the end of the Republican Party in the state, as well as the final snuffing out of the freedmen's voting and political rights. A show of commitment from President Grant, the black senator explained, in the form of federal troops and other technical assistance, might possibly stem the rise of White Liner outrages, which threatened to destabilize the outlying Mississippi counties.

  Pierrepont received Bruce politely, heard him out, yet promised nothing, in part because at that very moment a number of Mississippi conservatives were paying him visits and writing him letters, offering exactly the opposite advice. They included Bruce's own senatorial colleague, James Lusk Alcorn. They criticized Governor Ames, suggesting he had not explored all possible options for controlling the situation, including the arming of white militias to be led by "the most responsible citizens in Mississippi." Even Hiram Revels, Mississippi's original black senator, whom Ames had removed from the presidency of Alcorn College after Revels defected to the Democratic Party, wrote Grant a public letter predicting that white Mississippians, if Washington would only leave them alone, would ultimately do right by the state's black citizens.

  It did not help that considerable bad blood existed between Alcorn and Bruce. After inspiring Bruce's move to Mississippi, Alcorn had felt hurt when Bruce abandoned him in the gubernatorial race of 1873 to shift his allegiance to Adelbert Ames. So poor were their relations that on March 4, 1875, when Bruce was sworn in as U.S. senator, Alcorn showed him the ultimate disrespect by refusing to honor the Senate tradition of escorting his state's new member to the podium.