----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>But what allowed the violence to go unpunished?
>As the paper documents, what changed was that the
>US Supreme Court struck down the Reconstruction Enforcement laws as
>unconstitutional. In Colfax, Louisiana in 1873, 100 blacks were
>murdered as they defended their right to vote. The Supreme Court
>declared that the ringleaders for this violence could not be
>prosecuted under federal law. This meant that white supremacists
>could launch terrorist murder across the South and the federal
>government could do nothing to stop it.
-It wasn't the Constitution and the Supreme Court that destroyed Black -Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln didn't let the Constitution or the -Supreme Court or anything else stop him from waging the war as he -wanted. Had the North had the political will to do so, it would have -refused to demobilize the Union Army -placed the South under the Union Army's military dictatorship for a -decade or so, confiscated all land of the big Confederate land -owners, and redistributed it to Blacks and poorer whites in the South -to break the economic base of white terror that would later culminate -in the Colfax massacre and other atrocities.
Yoshie, this is typical analysis by you. Unless the government does the maximalist possible, they did nothing. But the reality is that what was done after the Civil War-- passing Reconstruction, requiring each readmitted state to allow blacks to vote in new constitutional conventions, passing the 1866, 1870 and 1871 Civil Rights Acts -- had killed terrorism in the South leading up to the 1872 elections.
Frankly, one of the realities is that leftwing critics of Reconstruction have been collaborators with the racists in the South in denigrating the historic achievements and values of the leaders who enacted Reconstruction. It makes the crime of its end seem minor if it's achievements are pictured as so minimal. But Reconstruction was a shining accomplishment-- a whole population moved from the status of slaves to voters and even the dominant political force within a matter of a couple of years. The tragedy was that the Supreme Court made the federal power used for this change illegal, stripped federal prosecutors of the power to enforce voting rights in the south, and made the existence of the military in the South large irrelevant, since they couldn't prosecute anyone.
But don't mistake what was done before the Supreme Court gutted that federal action. Again to quote from my paper:
"Between 1870 and 1872, Congress passed five Enforcement Acts to protect civil rights. Congress created a positive right to vote in state and local elections and prescribed criminal penalties for anyone preventing a person from registering to vote or voting. With an eye squarely on the Klan, Congress made it a crime for "two or more persons [to] band or conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway, or upon the premises of another, with the intent to violate any provision of this act" or "to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen with intent to prevent his free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United
States." It was these provisions that fell in Cruikshank following the Colfax Massacre.
The Enforcement Acts echoed the despised Fugitive Slave Acts. All of the agents of the new Department of Justice could arrest, imprison, set bail for, and prosecute violators - powers enjoyed by federal commissioners under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Congress prohibited individuals from hindering federal officials in enforcing the new laws. The President could use the military to assist in enforcement, recalling the Fugitive Slave Act's posse comitatus provision. Grant used his new authority to crack down on Klan terrorism in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 and essentially destroyed the Klan there. Similar efforts significantly reduced violence across the South. Federal courts convicted hundreds of Klansmen between 1870 and 1873 for violating freedmen's rights of property, speech, assembly, and voting, as well as the rights to keep and bear arms and to enjoy equal protection of the laws. Recognizing the need to take on the Klan if blacks' rights were to mean anything in practice, Grant rejected the argument that the New Birth Amendments allowed Congress to regulate only state action, calling it a "great mistake" that betrayed the intent of their drafters.
Federal prosecutors reported in 1872 - the year before the Colfax Massacre - that the Justice Department was winning its war against the Klan. The Department 's determination to prosecute violations of the Enforcement Acts was "demoralizing and carrying terror to these lawless K.K. Klans," the United States attorney reported from Alabama. "We have broken up Ku Klux in North Carolina," federal judge Hugh L. Bond gleefully wrote to his wife. "Everybody now wants to confess & we are picking out the top puppies only for trial." Bond would eventually sentence more than 100 Klan conspirators to prison. The government's success created the conditions for the most peaceful election of Reconstruction in 1872 and the reelection of Ulysses S. Grant."
Exactly what you advocate was being done by the federal government up until 1873 when the courts stepped in and stopped the prosecutions of Klan and other supremacist terrorists.
In the early part of this century, so-called "Progressive" historians attacked the Reconstruction leaders as being tools of northern capital, an interpretation that southern racists happily embraced. It was an analysis that helped justify Confederate and Klan resistance to Reconstruction, so that rightwing and leftwing writers of history happily collaborated in denigrated that period of massive civil rights advances. Only when W.E.B. Dubois finally wrote his BLACK RECONSTRUCTION in the 1930s was a comprehensive view of the daring and gains from the period really documented. As W.E.B. DuBois noted,"[n]ot a single great leader of the nation during the Civil War and Reconstruction has escaped attack and libel."
Yoshie, you are just one more person in that long line slandering those who fought hard for radical change in society and actually succeeded for a number of years in bringing a real degree of justice to the South.
Your theories can't make room for that fact, so you have to deny that the federal government in the executive branch was committed to those civil rights -- as shown by the laws passed by Congress and the prosecutions initiated by the executive branch-- and it was only the Supreme Court that killed off those laws and allowed Klan violence to overwhelm the new democratic rights in the South.
-- Nathan Newman