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By Root 1182 0

Tennessee farmer explained, “a white man can’t take impudence from ’em. It may be a long ways removed from what you or I would think impudence, but these passionate men call it that, and pitch in.” Near Corinth, Tennessee, for example, “an old nigger” working in a sawmill “got his head split open with an axe” for having “sassed” a white man. Near Fredericksburg, Virginia, a white man shot and wounded a former black soldier after overhearing him “boast” of his service in the Union Army. In South Carolina, a former slave was shot for requesting that a Federal officer examine the contract he had negotiated with his employer, and still other blacks were beaten for no greater offense than refusing to sign a contract. “You must expect such things to happen when the niggers are impudent,” a South Carolinian said of reports of violence in his state, but a white farmer who overheard the remark thought otherwise. “The niggers a’n’t to blame,” he explained. “They’re never impudent, unless they’re trifled with or imposed on. Only two days ago a nigger was walking along this road, as peaceably as any man you ever saw. He met a white man right here, who asked him who he belonged to. ‘I don’t belong to anybody now,’ he says; ‘I’m a free man.’ ‘Sass me? you black devil!’ says the white fellow; and he pitched into him, and cut him in four or five places with his knife. I heard and saw the whole of it, and I say the nigger was respectful, and that the white fellow was the only one to blame.”121

Much of the violence inflicted on the freedmen had been well organized, with bands of white men meting out extralegal “justice” and anticipating the Klan-type groups that would operate so effectively during Radical Reconstruction. The names by which these paramilitary self-styled vigilantes were known varied from place to place—“reformers,” “regulators,” “moderators,” “rangers”—but the tactics of random terrorism and assassination they employed barely differed and they tended to attract men of all social classes. The “justice” they enforced resembled that of the hastily formed mobs who lynched blacks suspected of more serious offenses like rape, murder, and arson. With increasing regularity, however, white terrorists focused their violence on blacks in leadership positions who symbolized to them the excesses of the present and the dangers of the future—teachers, clergymen, soldiers, and political activists. In Opelika, Alabama, four local whites repeatedly beat and stabbed Robert Alexander, a twenty-six-year-old black minister, leaving him close to death. No black schools would be allowed in the community, they warned him, nor would they tolerate the presence of a black preacher who stirred up the people. When Henry M. Turner, an organizer for the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia, met him several days later, the Reverend Alexander resembled “a lump of curdled blood,” and the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent had refused to intervene in the case. “The picture is too sad for me to draw,” Turner wrote. “O God! where is our civilization? Is this Christendom, or is it hell? Pray for us.” If black teachers and clergymen were not themselves mobbed or threatened, their schoolhouses and churches were often burned to the ground, and black pupils were apt to be assaulted or intimidated even when attending separate schools. Some years after the New Orleans race riot of 1866, Douglass Wilson, a former black soldier, could still vividly recall the anxiety with which parents had sent their children to school, not knowing what they might encounter.

We had no idea that we should see them return home alive in the evening. Big white boys and half-grown men used to pelt them with stones and run them down with open knives, both to and from school. Sometimes they came home bruised, stabbed, beaten half to death, and sometimes quite dead. My own son himself was often thus beaten. He has on his forehead to-day a scar over his right eye which sadly tells the story of his trying experience in those days in his efforts to get an education. I was wounded in the war,