Fraternal societies and the organized black church played a major but rarely-explored role in the ongoing rebellion against slavery. A secret society, barely remembered today, formed when twelve black men from Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Tennessee gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 11, 1846, and began planning a massive armed assault against slavery. They had been brought together by “Father” Moses Dickson, a Prince Hall Mason and later an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister. Dickson had been born free in Cincinnati, but during three years of moving about the South as a barber, he saw slavery in all its horrors. While traveling he had begun discussions about organizing an armed attack against slavery with some of the young men he had met and come to trust. At the St. Louis gathering they named themselves the Twelve Knights of Liberty, and they sought other men who would dedicate themselves to the overthrow of slavery. They were sworn to secrecy; part of their oath was “I can die but I cannot reveal the name of any member until the slaves are free.”
Building slowly, they began to drill in secret and to stockpile arms and ammunition. By 1856 their numbers may have been in the thousands and they had changed their name to the Order of Twelve to honor their founders. Undoubtedly the name change also helped cover their activities. Publicly, they were now also a Masonic order named the Knights of Tabor. Their history is murky, for because of the secrecy their plans required, little was written down. And one cannot help but wonder how, given their large number, they managed to maintain secrecy. Nonetheless, buried in the convoluted language of Dickson’s Manual of the Knights of Tabor and Daughters of the Tabernacle, there are hints of the scale of their underground organization: “In the Darkest hours just before the breaking out of the Civil War, our lives were fixed at all the news centers so that in a few hours, in every hamlet, and in every town, city, and plantation, the members of our Order kept the people posted on that which interested us most.”
On Dickson’s command, an army organized by the Knights was to converge on Atlanta to begin their assault on slavery. This would have been the largest armed attack against slavery in U.S. history. Dickson made the call in July 1857 but then suddenly called off the planned attack. It is not clear why. There had been an upsurge in insurrectionary actions by blacks in many parts of the South that year. Whites were on high alert, and Dickson had planned a direct attack on Atlanta rather than guerrilla warfare. The chance of keeping the attack a surprise was reduced—and perhaps Dickson could also read the writing on the wall signaling the approaching demise of slavery. By 1857 a man like Dickson, carefully observing political currents, was likely to have foreseen that the increasingly bitter and violent political arguments over slavery’s place and legitimacy in the United States would soon tear the nation apart and spark a decisive war over the issue. A Union Army that included black soldiers had to seem more likely to end slavery than any homegrown insurrection, no matter how expansive. And when they were finally permitted, blacks joined the Union Army by the tens of thousands. True to their spirit, most of the Knights of Liberty enlisted.
The Civil War was a watershed. In battle after battle, black soldiers demonstrated their courage, refuting by heroic actions the commonplace notion that they were cowards of dubious worth on the battlefield. After the 1863 Battle of Nashville, Union General George Thomas, seeing the many black bodies, some of them pressed right up against Confederate fortifications, declared, “Gentlemen, the question is settled; Negroes will fight.” Years later, W. E. B. Du Bois dryly noted, “The slave pleaded; he was humble … and the world ignored him. The slave killed white men; and behold he was a man!”
By the end of the Civil War, about one-fifth of adult black males had joined the Union Army and had engaged in thirty-nine major battles and hundreds of smaller engagements. With this service a new political consciousness burgeoned, fertilized by the black blood that was spilled in combat. In the April 12, 1864, battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, 292 black and 285 white soldiers defended the fort. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, led 2,500 men against them. Although at first Forrest said he would give the garrison an opportunity to surrender, he soon sent his men pouring into the fort, driving the heavily outnumbered Union soldiers down a bluff of the Mississippi River and into a murderous cross fire. Only sixty-two of the black troops survived. A congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War found that Forrest and his Confederates had shot and bayoneted the garrison’s soldiers after it had surrendered; the battle cry for black soldiers fighting with the Union Army became “Remember Fort Pillow!”
The war expanded opportunities for blacks in combat in ways other than picking up a gun to shoot white men. Although black women could not formally join the army, they served as nurses, spies, and scouts. Furthermore, education of slaves had been illegal in the antebellum South, so the Union Army became in part an educational institution for unlettered blacks. For instance, Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, a former Massachusetts governor, assigned members of the American Missionary Society as lieutenants to some of the black regiments for the express purpose of teaching the soldiers to read and write. By war’s end thousands of black soldiers were literate, and their newfound abilities to read and write helped foster and deepen their political consciousness, with consequences for the Reconstruction that followed the war. “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, quoting his erstwhile owner, who had quarreled with his wife because she was teaching Douglass to read and write.
The era known as Reconstruction that followed the war would remain lodged in black memory in the 1960s. It contained a crucial lesson: no matter what federal law said, the power affecting the day-to-day lives of black people was local, and it was hostile to their efforts to secure civil rights. Black people would have to fight for their rights locally, and unless they protected themselves from reprisal, no one would. So throughout the Reconstruction era, guns guarded many lives and many communities. This lesson, too, would be remembered a century after the end of the Civil War. And though guns could not in the end defeat the resurgent white supremacists once the federal government and its troops abandoned the South, the stories of pushing back against white supremacy—the successes and the failures—were an important part of the legacy handed to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.
During Reconstruction, blacks, joined by white sympathizers, made serious efforts to develop a genuine nonracial democracy in the South, yet today, outside of the black community, this important period is barely remembered. Little of Reconstruction history has made its way into school-books; nor is it much studied in colleges and universities. Indeed, until so-called revisionist historians began to emerge in the 1960s, with the exception of such black scholars as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Rayford Logan, and John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction was typically portrayed as a time of corrupt and incompetent black politicians who were being manipulated by arrogant, mostly white, power-hungry northern carpetbaggers and greedy southern scalawags betraying their native land and their people. This image of Reconstruction burrowed deep into the national psyche of the United States, reinforcing the antiblack prejudices already there. In addition, with no basis in fact at all, the southern rebellion became mythicized as a noble Lost Cause, embraced sympathetically not only in the South but nationally as well. The films The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, which stigmatized blacks and celebrated white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, powerfully tapped into this sympathy.
Reconstruction actually began during the war as southern cities and towns fell into Union Army hands and the army established new governments. Then, at war’s end, Congress basically reinstated the old governments of strong Confederate sympathizers. This is generally called the “first Reconstruction.” A “second Reconstruction” began when “Radical Republicans” took control of Congress after the 1866 e
lections and established new governments in the defeated South that were much more sympathetic—though not wholly committed—to civil rights and black empowerment. In the end, however, Reconstruction was unsuccessful.
But to say that Reconstruction failed does not adequately describe what actually happened in the South after the Civil War. Reconstruction did not fail; it was destroyed, crushed by more than a decade of savage campaigns of violence carried out both by the local governments that had largely remained intact and by vigilante terrorists. Lynchings and other forms of mob violence were the instruments of Reconstruction’s brutal death. The overwhelming violence against blacks during this period goes a long way toward explaining why, even though guns were common in twentieth-century black southern communities, there were few black paramilitary units and they rarely attacked or fought back with arms against white-supremacist authority, even in areas like the Mississippi Delta, central Alabama, or southwest Georgia, where blacks were an overwhelming majority of the population. The memories of Reconstruction and its violent demise dictated caution. Overt displays of force, organization, and resistance by the black community might once again trigger an instantaneous and overwhelming reaction from white-supremacist power and its foot soldiers—who were everywhere in the South—with little prospect of federal intervention. This history was very much alive in collective memory, and consequently, in the aftermath of Reconstruction and the restoration of white power, black southerners carefully calculated when and how best to use their weapons.
During the first Reconstruction, white resistance took the form of new “black codes”; they were similar to the slave codes of the antebellum era, designed to deny full citizenship to blacks and to force them into continuing to live in slave-like servitude. These codes were not simply a manifestation of racial prejudice, but were also aimed at blunting the thrust toward black power by former slaves. The southern plantocracy was just as terrified of the remarkably energetic and effective black political organizing that followed the Civil War as they were of the slave revolts that preceded it. “You never saw a people more excited on the subject of politics than are the Negroes of the south,” said one plantation manager.
Playing a crucial role in this black surge toward political power were the Union Leagues. They were modeled on the northern Loyal Leagues, which were organized during the war and were mostly made up of white middle-class patriots who supported the Union Army. In the postwar South, however, Union Leagues became the voice and instrument of newly freed slaves. They spread rapidly, holding meetings in black churches, homes, schools, and even in the woods and fields. The southern leagues were semi-secret; members took an initiation oath and pledged to support the Republican Party. Armed men guarded many meetings.
In some places, self-defense organizations were an outgrowth of the leagues, and these organizations took on a militaristic structure, with drilling, armaments, and occasionally even military titles for the commanding “officers.” As would be true in the 1960s civil rights movement, many of the Union Leagues’ leaders were men with a degree of independence: owners of small farms, preachers, and blacksmiths, carpenters, and other craftsmen. Some came from the North. The December 17, 1867, New York Times reported the arrest of an “incendiary negro,” George Shorter, thought to be from Illinois, who was calling on blacks in Bullock County, Alabama, to organize a separate black government with its own laws, courts, and sheriff. The leagues also engaged in political education. Members explained the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to their fellows or read aloud from Republican newspapers.
Not surprisingly, the South’s former white rulers hated the leagues and the push for black political enfranchisement that they represented. Newspapers kept up a drumbeat of hostile criticism of the leagues and the Republican Party, which the leagues overwhelmingly backed. (The Democratic Party at the time was considered the party of secession, segregation, and the old Confederacy.) Violence was very much a part of whites’ attacks, as well. Supposedly upstanding white citizens aided terrorists in burning down black schools, instigating riots, and assassinating black leaders.
Black veterans returning home were considered dangerous, and disarming them was a priority for the white supremacists of the defeated Confederacy. They made systematic efforts to prevent blacks from bearing arms. Among other things, white southerners demanded that black federal troops be disbanded or moved out of the south. A Mississippi law passed in 1865 said in part, “No freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition … and it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed to trial.” There is an ironic similarity between the claims made by southern whites then and the argument made by gun control proponents today. Sheriffs and white posses raided black homes to seize “illegal” guns and declared that such seizures were not an infringement of blacks’ Second Amendment right to possess guns as part of a militia. Blacks faced strong disincentives to own their guns legally, however, because applying for a license effectively informed local authorities—usually sheriffs—that the applicant had weapons. Blacks were prudent enough not to do this, so most black-held arms were, therefore, illegal.
Although they continued to face violence and repression in the South, blacks did at least enjoy some limited protections under federal law. The 1866 Civil Rights Act outlawed black codes and signaled that black suffrage was the price former Confederate states would have to pay for readmission into the Union. Both the Fourteenth Amendment and the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson (for removing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton from office) reflect the beginning of this more determined and more radical approach to Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment as it was adopted is best known for its equal protection, due process, and citizenship clauses. But those advocating for it also wanted to nullify state laws prohibiting blacks from possessing guns. To the old plantocracy seeking a return to power in the postwar era, the idea of blacks having those rights was every bit as frightening as it was during the days of plantation slavery. Unsurprisingly, the South resisted the amendment, and the only state of the old Confederacy to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment was Tennessee.
Violent white fury quickly coalesced around a determination to restore white supremacy. Vigilante violence found a comfortable place beside political argument in postwar southern legislatures, as groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, the Red Shirts, the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Pale Face Brotherhood, and other white-supremacist organizations began campaigns of terror.
A typical example of this early wave of antiblack terrorism and of black peoples’ response to it occurred in New Orleans on July 30, 1866, when a white mob attacked a constitutional convention that was gathering at the Mechanics Institute to establish a new state government that would grant voting rights for blacks. About two hundred blacks—many of them war veterans and members of the Republican Party—had marched to the institute in support of the meeting. This was partly a protest march, for the people participating in it were angry at the state’s passage of black codes that “virtually re-enacted slavery.”
Suddenly, a white man along the route pushed one of the marchers, who punched him back. A shot rang out; it is unclear from where. The marchers quickly took defensive positions outside the institute, armed and ready to protect themselves and the convention delegates from a growing white mob. For more than two hours a battle raged between the mob and the black marchers. Finally the defenders, outnumbered and outgunned, retreated, and the mob began pushing its way inside the institute. Delegates pleaded with police for assistance and were ignored. One delegate, Reverend Jotham W. Horton, stood in the doorway waving a white handkerchief while crying out to police, “I beseech you to stop firing. We are noncombatants. If
you want to arrest us, make any arrest you please, but we are not prepared to defend ourselves.” A policeman shouted back, “We don’t want any prisoners; you have all got to die.” Horton was then shot and killed.
Delegates in the convention hall beat back police and members of the mob and blocked the doors with chairs. Some delegates attempted escape by jumping through windows. Whites fired at the escapees, killing some and chasing others through the streets of New Orleans. In the end, 34 black people were killed, and 119 were wounded. Unofficial estimates of the dead and wounded were even higher.
The bloodshed in New Orleans was not the only manifestation of white rage, fear, and hysteria in the face of what seemed to be the collapse of a way of life they had thought would last forever. Black war veterans were not inclined to be submissive. Two months earlier in Memphis, Tennessee, shooting had broken out between white policemen and black soldiers recently mustered out of the Union Army. The veterans had intervened in the arrest of a black man. Rumors of a black rebellion quickly spread through the white community, and for two days white mobs made up of civilians and policemen rampaged through Memphis’s black neighborhoods. On the third day federal troops were finally sent to put down the violence, and an uneasy, insecure peace was restored. By then forty-five blacks had been killed. The scale of the fear and anger over what most southern whites accurately recognized as an attack aimed at destroying their way of life is reflected in the words of the former Confederate chief justice of Texas, Oran Roberts, who in 1868 warned of a pending race war: “Nothing short of the disenfranchisement of the negro race can stop it.”
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