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Supremacy
Nicholas Lemann’s new book, Redemption:
The Last Battle of the Civil War, presents one story from the
Reconstruction era, and allows readers unfamiliar with that time to
understand what happened, and to reflect on what it means for us today. Through
his focus on the state of Mississippi
and one individual, Adelbert Ames, the post war
provisional governor. Lemann explains the struggles
of the time in both North and South in the aftermath of war. White supremacy
rears its head with force in Redemption,
which is quite an ironic title referring to the ways in which Southern whites
redeemed their communities from carpetbaggers. The violence and hatred Lemann explores will highlight for all readers what a difficult
time this was in America’s
history. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 3, “The Peace
Conference,” pp. 100-103:
Adelbert Ames certainly was a
carpetbagger, and whites in Mississippi
certainly resented him, but he did not precisely conform to their very
detailed conception of carpetbagger attitudes and behavior. Even his enemies
did not think of him as cynical. He was possibly a political opportunist, but
he was not opportunistic across the broad spectrum of motives that whites ascribed
to carpetbaggers; in particular, he had no evident interest in money
(extracted from whites) or sex (extracted from Negroes). Ames, therefore, was not truly hated. But
if one wanted to find someone who appeared to Mississippi
whites to be a carpetbagger through and through, a true representative of the
type, probably the leading candidate in the state would be Albert T. Morgan,
sheriff of Yazoo
County. Hated he most
definitely was.
A Union Army veteran from Wisconsin who had studied at Oberlin
College in Ohio,
a hotbed of abolitionism, Morgan moved to Mississippi after the war explicitly to
seek his fortune. He arrived in Vicksburg, and
then decided to settle in Yazoo
City, a drowsy town
fifty miles upriver that sat perched on the edge of the rich,
cotton-producing land of the Mississippi Delta. Along with his brother and
another partner, Morgan rented a large cotton plantation there and also
opened a lumber business. Since he was an enthusiastic Radical Republican,
it was unlikely that local whites would welcome him. But any chance that they
might at least have accepted him evaporated when, first, he opened a school
for colored children on the plantation, at a time when there were no schools
for Negroes in all of Yazoo County, though nearly three-quarters of its
people were black, and then, not long afterward, he married Miss Carrie V. Highgate, originally of Syracuse, New York, a Negro
schoolmistress, churchwoman, and temperance worker. (Whites nicknamed Morgan
“Highgate Morgan,” which showed how defining a
trait an interracial marriage was to them.) The 1873 sheriff’s election in Yazoo County had been a miniature version of
the governor’s race that same year. Morgan, who’d been up to a series of
unsuccessful business ventures since he arrived in Mississippi,
ran as the equivalent of Ames—the
Radical Republican and tribune of the Negro. His opponent, and the incumbent
sheriff, was the local version of James Lusk Alcorn, a former moderate
Republican named Francis P. Hilliard who had become an ally of the local
whites. In what was the only Mississippi
election in the century following emancipation in which there was truly free
Negro voting, Morgan won 2,365 to
431.
County
sheriffs in Mississippi
exercised their law-enforcement and tax-collecting authority in a direct,
personal way. When it came time for Morgan to take office as sheriff of Yazoo
County, Hilliard refused to vacate—meaning that he and a group of his friends
literally remained, in rotation, in the sheriff’s office, and kept its only
key. But in a town as small as Yazoo City, one could monitor this situation
quite closely; several weeks later, in the early morning of January 8, 1874,
Morgan learned that Hilliard had gone home, that most of his close associates
had gone out for breakfast at a local café, and that Hilliard’s nephew, who
was on the sheriff’s office payroll, was alone in the office. Morgan and a
group of his Negro supporters entered the sheriff’s office, pulled guns,
ordered the terrified nephew to leave, and took over. It was in this
inglorious manner that Albert Morgan assumed office.
Hilliard’s nephew ran to
his house and told him what had happened, and soon word reached Morgan that
Hilliard and a group of his friends, well armed, were gathering in the street
to retake the sheriff’s office. Morgan instructed his supporters to lock
themselves in the office while he walked outside to investigate. He had a
brief confrontation with Hilliard, but whatever Morgan said had no effect,
and Hilliard and crew rushed past him, began pounding on the locked door, and
even tried to knock it down. Somebody inside fired back at the door; the
bullet struck Hilliard, and soon he lay dead in the street.
Very quickly a version of
the event spread among the whites in town that had Morgan himself shooting
Hilliard and the Negroes in the countryside planning an uprising—with the
familiar rumor (as yet never fulfilled) of plans for general rape and
pillage. Morgan turned himself in. From a “damp and
cold” cell in the county jail, he sent Governor Ames a detailed account of
Hilliard’s death and asked for his help in securing a fair trial. Ames complied—the trial was conducted in Jackson, by a judge Ames
had appointed—and before long Morgan was back in Yazoo,
functioning as sheriff.
“Morgan was the idol of the
Yazoo negroes,” a white citizen of the
county later wrote. “They superstitiously looked upon him as the chosen and
anointed of the Lord, sent to lead them to the land of freedom, where they
were to receive forty acres, with a house on it, and a mule.” What in fact
Morgan undertook was to create a public education system in Yazoo County
where none had existed before. This was triply upsetting to the white
planters: it meant that their taxes were raised to benefit their former
slaves and give them the means to cease being field hands. Like other
Republican county governments in Mississippi,
and the idea of Republican governance generally, Albert Morgan’s
administration became absolutely intolerable to the county’s whites. As the
white account put it, “Reason, facts, and figures made no more impression on
the Negro mind than the singing of Psalms would have made on the ear of a
dead horse . . . the white
citizens of Yazoo county realized that their
future would be fraught with ruin if they could not overthrow Radicalism.
The property owners knew that they would be stripped to the skin, and with
their wives and families become houseless and homeless in the future, unless
these marauders were defeated.”
During
July and August 1874, with violence breaking out in Vicksburg, Morgan began
hearing that in the part of Yazoo County that was closest to it, secret white
militia companies were forming; and as the election year of 1875 began, he
heard that these groups were still in business and were being joined by
similar organizations all over the county. In the summer of 1875 he went to Jackson and told
Governor Ames what he’d been hearing. Ames—who this summer had decided to
leave the state only for a month, and was back by July, having spent time
with the Butlers in Massachusetts and then had a private, friendly audience
with President Grant in Long Branch—said he was getting similar reports from
all over the state. Some of these came from Republican officeholders, some
from Negro farmers, and some from boastful, defiant white vigilantes. An
anonymous letter received in June from “the White Leaguers” of Claiborne
County, south of Yazoo and Warren counties, said, menacingly, “Our brothers
in your section will look after you—Send out your negro troops & Gatlin
Guns and we will wipe them from the face of The Earth which they disgrace—We
have the best rifles and eager for an opportunity to use them.” In August a letter arrived from Vicksburg
telling Ames that his life was in danger—that
the White Liners were planning to foment a “riot” in Jackson in which he would be shot and
killed.
In July a Yazoo County newspaper published a
supposedly genuine letter sent by two Negroes to a friend which somehow had
fallen into the hands of whites elsewhere in the state. “The colored people
are buyin ammonition in Yazoo City,” the letter said. “The colored
folks have got 1600 Army guns All prepared for Bussiness.”
Morgan checked around and could not find anybody in Yazoo County
by the names of the letter writers, and he couldn’t find evidence of any
Negroes arming themselves, either. What the letter
reported would have been logistically impossible anyway, because, as he later
wrote, “four-fifths of the colored population were living constantly, day and
night, under the eyes of white employers, or white overseers.” He read the
letter, accurately, as an indication that more trouble was on the way.
No matter how
much you know or don’t know about the period following the Civil War, reading
Redemption
will teach you new things and get you thinking about how hard it can be to
recover from division, and how the savagery of war may not always end with
the last battle.
Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2007
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