Lynching in America [2.]

Fighting for Freedom: The Civil War and its Aftermath

When 11 Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America and sparked the Civil War in 1861, they made no secret of their ultimate aim:  to preserve the institution of slavery. In the words of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, the ideological “cornerstone” of the new nation they sought to form was that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “slavery and subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”¹⁰

Congress officially authorized the Union army to accept black soldiers on July 17, 1862. But national leaders largely considered the Civil War “a white man’s war” and the Union was reluctant to use black soldiers in combat. Northern military personnel, politicians, and President Abraham Lincoln himself expressed fear that armed black soldiers would ruin white soldiers’ morale, be harmful to the war effort, or as one Ohio Congressman warned, prove so essential that victory would weaken white supremacy. “If you make [the black man] the instrument by which your battles are fought, the means by which your victories are won,” the congressman argued in his plea against black soldiers in combat, “you must treat him as a victor is entitled to be treated, with all decent and becoming respect.”¹¹

As the war dragged on and the Union incurred more casualties,¹² objections to black combat troops faded. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which applied only to those enslaved in the Confederate states, provided that black soldiers would be accepted into all military positions.¹³
The navy gained 19,000 black sailors and 179,000 black men joined the army, making up 10 percent of its troops. Some 40,000 were killed fighting for the United States.¹⁴

Black Union soldiers included men who had been free in the North before the war, black men who had lived free in the South in the midst of slavery, and some who escaped slavery after the war began and joined the fight in hopes of guaranteeing their freedom and winning that of others. But acceptance into the military did not mean equal treatment. As the war against the Confederacy raged, black soldiers also had to fight for equal pay and rations that the War Department promised during recruitment. A black soldier from Pennsylvania reported that his unit was overcome with despair upon learning they would be paid less than white soldiers, and many protested by refusing to accept any payment. Despite protests and pleas from leaders including Frederick Douglass, Congress refused to pass legislation equalizing black and white soldiers’ pay until 1864.¹⁵

Black participation was far less common, more complicated, and more staunchly resisted on the other side of the conflict. The Confederacy was based on a belief in white supremacy and black inferiority and a commitment to continue slavery. The Confederate army refused to enlist or arm black soldiers even as the turning tide of the war led some Confederates to urge that enslaved black people should be ordered to fight just as they were ordered to work. Some enslaved black men were taken to the battlefield as servants for Confederate officers, but formal black enlistment in the Confederate army was prohibited until a desperate and largely inconsequential act of the Confederate Congress authorized black Confederate military service on March 13, 1865, just weeks before the Confederacy surrendered. As historian Leon Litwack wrote:

Few slaves were ever enlisted [in the Confederate Army], and none of them apparently had the opportunity to fight. Had the Confederacy managed to raise a black army, it would seem unlikely, particularly after 1863, that it could have fought with the same sense of commitment and self-pride that propelled the black troops in the Union Army. When he first heard of the act to recruit blacks for the Confederate Army, a Virginia freedman recalled, he had suddenly found himself unable to restrain his emotions. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’”¹⁶

The Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s surrender in the spring of 1865. The formal, nationwide end of slavery came in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits slavery “except as punishment for crime.” The legal instruments that ended racialized chattel slavery in America nonetheless did nothing to address the myth of racial hierarchy that sustained slavery. Black people were free under the law, but that did not mean whites recognized them as fully human. Nationwide but particularly in the South, white identity was grounded in the belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans.

After the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor. In numerous recorded incidents, plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom.¹⁷ Many surviving black veterans returned to the South, where they had lived — many in the status of slave — before the war. Carrying hopes of starting farms and finding loved ones lost for years or even decades, these veterans frequently faced grave danger from violent attacks and racist laws designed to restore the racial hierarchy. The success of African Americans as trained soldiers challenged the idea that black people were fit only for servitude and undermined a central tenet of white supremacy. With their military training, black soldiers “represented both a viable alternative source of community leadership and a direct physical threat to white supremacy when they came home.”¹⁸

After a brief period, the victorious federal government gave up on Reconstruction and withdrew from the South in 1877, abandoning its duty to protect newly freed black people and enforce the citizenship rights they now held. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping impeded economic progress and returned many black people to a status very similar to slavery. President Andrew Johnson took office following President Lincoln’s assassination and adopted policies that opposed black voting rights, restored Confederates’ citizenship, and allowed Southern former rebels to reestablish white supremacy and dominate black people with impunity.¹⁹

The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, established that all persons born in the United States, regardless of race, are full citizens of the United States and the of the states in which they reside, and are entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, including due process. Though a hopeful development, the Supreme Court quickly dismantled the amendment’s promise in The Slaughterhouse Cases and U.S. v. Cruikshank.²⁰ As a result, African Americans accused of violating the racial order were met with violence and terror; they received little protection from local officials, and they had no claim to federal assistance.

Black veterans were seen as a particularly strong threat to racial hierarchy and were an early target of discriminatory state laws. To eliminate black gun ownership, which had reached unprecedented levels during the war due to black military service, states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi passed laws that made it a crime for an African American to possess a firearm.²¹

Florida’s Black Code of 1866 prohibited black people from possessing “any Bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms or ammunition of any kind” and made violations punishable by public whipping.²² Mississippi’s statute declared “that no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her country, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” Whites were free to own and carry firearms, but law enforcement officials were stationed at train stations to seize black veterans’ guns when they arrived; veterans who did not comply were beaten and some were even shot by police.²³

Southern newspapers fueled whites’ fears of black veterans by publishing sensational accounts of so-called “race wars”: conflicts between supposedly innocent white police and drunk and armed former black soldiers intent on starting trouble. In May 1866, after whites attacked the black community in Memphis in what became known as the Memphis Massacre, the white-owned Memphis Argus published an editorial blaming the massacre on black gun ownership. The editorial board wrote:

Again the irrepressible conflict of races has broken out in our midst, and again our streets are stained with blood. And this time, there can be no mistake about it; the whole blame of this most tragical [sic] and bloody riot lies, as usual, with the poor, ignorant, deluded blacks. . . . [W]e cannot suffer the occasion to pass without again calling the attention of the authorities to the indispensable necessity of disarming these poor creatures, who have so often shown themselves utterly unfit to be trusted with firearms. On this occasion the facts all go to show that but for this much-abused privilege accorded to them by misguided and misjudging friends, there would have been no riot . . . The universal questions asked on all corners of the streets is, “Why are not the negroes disarmed?”²⁴

The violence in Memphis is now widely acknowledged as a racially-motivated massacre. Dozens of black people were raped, injured, or killed, and many black homes, churches, and schools were destroyed by fire. The two white casualties were killed by white rioters.²⁵

As the white Southern press decried their access to weapons and state legislatures strived to disarm them, black veterans were in dire need of protection.26 In 1868, the Secretary of War reported to Congress that black soldiers in Kentucky, “[h]aving served in the Union Army, were the special objects of persecution, and in hundreds of instances have been driven from their homes.”27 Peter Branford, a United States Colored Troops veteran, was shot and killed “without cause or provocation” in Mercer County, Kentucky, while numerous other veterans were threatened, beaten, and whipped merely for attempting to locate their families and rebuild their lives after the war.

At Bardstown in Nelson County, Kentucky, a mob brutally lynched a United States Colored Troops veteran. The mob stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and then cut off his sexual organs. He was then forced to run half a mile to a bridge outside of town, where he was shot and killed. The terror inflicted upon black veterans by Southern whites served to perpetuate the racial caste system and maintain power in the hands of whites after the defeat of the Confederacy.29

[to be continued] 

Colored soldiers. The 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, 1863.

Learn More: Houston Riot of 1917