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By Root 1206 0

the first years of emancipation will never be known. Nor could any accurate body count or statistical breakdown reveal the barbaric savagery and depravity that so frequently characterized the assaults made on freedmen in the name of restraining their savagery and depravity—the severed ears and entrails, the mutilated sex organs, the burnings at the stake, the forced drownings, the open display of skulls and severed limbs as trophies. “The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin nailed to the barn,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer wrote of a case in Mississippi, as he supplied the names of the murderers and asked for an investigation. Reporting on “outrages” committed in Kentucky, a Bureau officer confined himself to several counties and only to those cases in which he had sworn testimony, the names of the injured, the names of the alleged offenders, and the dates and localities.

I have classified these outrages as follows: Twenty-three cases of severe and inhuman beating and whipping of men; four of beating and shooting; two of robbing and shooting; three of robbing; five men shot and killed; two shot and wounded; four beaten to death; one beaten and roasted; three women assaulted and ravished; four women beaten; two women tied up and whipped until insensible; two men and their families beaten and driven from their homes, and their property destroyed; two instances of burning of dwellings, and one of the inmates shot.

Because of the difficulty in obtaining evidence and testimony, the officer stressed that his report included only a portion of the crimes against freedmen. “White men, however friendly to the freedmen, dislike to make depositions in these cases, for fear of personal violence. The same reason influences the black—he is fearful, timid, and trembling. He knows that since he has been a freedman he has not, up to this time, had the protection of either the federal or State authorities; that there is no way to enforce his rights or redress his wrongs.”119

Neither a freedman’s industriousness nor his deference necessarily protected him from whites if they suspected he harbored dangerous tendencies or if they looked upon him as a “smart-assed nigger” who needed chastisement. “The fact is,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina reported, “it’s the first notion with a great many of these people, if a Negro says anything or does anything that they don’t like, to take a gun and put a bullet into him, or a charge of shot.” In those instances where the reasons for an assault on blacks could be determined, the provocations ranged from disagreements over wages, working conditions, and the quality of work performed to the presence of black troops, black political and religious meetings, resistance to punishment, and suspicion of theft, murder, and rape. What proved even more alarming were the numerous instances of violence in which no reason could be easily ascertained, except perhaps the frustration of military defeat and emotional and recreational deprivation. The ferocity of the attacks on freedmen and the ecstasy with which the mobs meted out their punishment reached a point where it dismayed as many native whites as northern visitors and Freedmen’s Bureau officers. “The American Indian,” wrote a white public official in Georgia, “is not more delighted at the writhings and shrieks of his victim at the stake, than many Georgians are at the agonizing cries of the African negro at the whipping post.”120

The violence inflicted upon freedmen seldom bore any relationship to the gravity of the alleged provocation. Of the countless cases of postwar violence, in fact, the largest proportion related in some way to that broad and vaguely defined charge of conduct unbecoming black people—that is, “putting on airs,” “sassiness,” “impudence,” “insolence,” “disrespect,” “insubordination,” contradicting whites, and violating racial customs. Behavior which many blacks and outside observers deemed relatively inoffensive might be regarded by certain native whites as deserving of a violent censure. “The truth is,” a