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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
32
black political participation represented a “base conspiracy against human nature.” 1865–1877
Even as many white southerners withdrew from the system, they immediately initi-
ated a counterrevolution that would restore white rule and sought what they called
“redemption” through the all-white Democratic Party.
White opposition movements proceeded differently in each state, but by the late
1860s, they had begun to succeed. As soon as they gained sufficient leverage, southern
whites ousted blacks from political office in an effort to bring back what they called
“home rule” under the reinvigorated ideology of states’ rights. Home rule and states’
rights served as euphemisms for white domination of land, black labor, and state and
local government. Under the guise of restoring fiscal conservatism — trimming taxes
and cutting state government functions and budgets — southern Democrats scaled
back and ended programs that assisted freedpeople, including, for instance, ending
South Carolina’s land reform commission.
An essential element of white “redemption” was the intimidation of blacks
through terror, violence, and even murder. White supremacist and vigilante organi-
zations formed throughout the South. While the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), organized in
Tennessee in 1865, was the most notable group, others were the ’76 Association, the
Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, and the Pale Faces. Members
of the KKK, called night riders because they conducted their raids at night, wore white
robes and hoods to hide their identities. People from all sectors of southern white
society joined these groups.
The targets of white attacks were often successful and economically independent
black landowners, storeowners, and small entrepreneurs. Black schools, churches,
homes, lodges, business buildings, livestock, barns, and fences were destroyed. Blacks
were beaten, raped, murdered, and lynched. So widespread were these vicious attacks
in the late 1860s and early 1870s that Congress held hearings to investigate the causes
of this widespread lawlessness. “The object of it is to kill out the leading men of the
republican party . . . men who have taken a prominent stand,” testified Emanuel
Fortune, a delegate to Florida’s constitutional convention and member of the state
house of representatives who had been forced from his home and county by the KKK.
In other testimony, Congress learned that Jack Dupree of Monroe County, Mississippi,
the strong-willed president of a local Republican club, had been lynched by the KKK
in front of his wife and newborn twins. 33
To restore order, Congress passed two Force Acts, in 1870 and 1871, to protect the
civil rights of blacks as defined in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Federal
troops rather than state militias were authorized to put down the widespread lawless-
ness, and those who conspired to deprive black people of their civil rights were to be
tried in federal rather than state or local courts.
Nevertheless, the violence continued. In Colfax, Louisiana, a disputed election in
1873 prompted whites to use cannon and rifle fire to disband a group of armed freed-
men, commanded by black militia and veterans, who were attempting to maintain
Republican control of the town. On Easter Sunday, in the bloodiest racial massacre

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