With the convention in ruins, the police led bands of White vigilantes around the city, beating any Black people they encountered and shooting at those who fled. The majority of the victims had no connection to the convention. At least thirty-eight people were killed, and many times that number wounded. Overwhelmingly, the victims were Black.11
That afternoon, bodies were piled into baggage cars. Many of the wounded were loaded in with the dead, and witnesses later swore to seeing police systematically shooting those who stirred.12 No one was prosecuted for the massacre, though a Congressional committee concluded that it had been planned by a group of police—mostly Confederate veterans.13 They were assisted by a Know-Nothing group called (appropriately) “the Thugs” and a vigilante regiment named “Hays’ Brigade,” acting under the leadership of police Sergeant Lucien Adams and Sheriff Harry T. Hays, respectively.14
These two examples, especially the Mechanics Institute massacre, illustrate the character of such attacks. As historian Melinda Hennessey explains,
The actions of whites in many of the Reconstruction riots … had less in common with mob rule than with the organized character of paramilitary units.… Antebellum militias and slave patrols gave southern whites experience in local military organization, and this trend continued in the locally based Confederate military units.15
White people adhered not only to the values of the slave system, but to its methods as well.
The central role of the police in these two disturbances was unfortunately typical of the period. In her comprehensive study of Reconstruction-era unrest, Hennessey finds, “In only three riots, including Mobile in 1867, Vicksburg in 1875, and Charleston in 1867, did the police or sheriff try to quell the disturbance, and in a third of the riots, the police or sheriff’s posse led the violence.”16 Examples of police-led violence include the election riots in Savannah in 1868, Baton Rouge in 1870, and Barbour County, Alabama, in 1874.17 Perhaps the starkest case occurred in Camilla, Georgia, where in 1868 Sheriff Munford J. Poore deputized the town’s entire adult White male population to prevent a Black political procession;18 a military investigation found that the sheriff made no effort to control the posse and “was a party to the wanton and unnecessary destruction of life which subsequently ensued.”19
Where legal authorities were not themselves complicit with the terrorists, they found themselves among the terrorized; they were powerless to stop Klan activity, prosecute offenders, protect their own constituents, or, in some cases, defend themselves. For officers sincere in their duties, the situation was desperate. In Warren County, Georgia, Sheriff John C. Norris faced constant harassment for his efforts to enforce the law; eventually he was crippled in a Klan ambush. The weakness of his position might be indicated by the fact that, though he could identify his attackers, he did not press charges.20 The impotence of local authorities was particularly felt in areas where they were dependent on the national government for their power. As the federal authorities became increasingly reluctant to insert themselves—especially militarily—into local affairs, city and county officials were left vulnerable. Sheriff Joseph P. Doyle of Madison County, Alabama, worried, “I have nobody to protect me.”21
When Klan-type violence occurred, arrests were unusual, prosecutions rare, and convictions almost unknown. The attitudes (and sometimes, involvement) of police officers and sheriffs certainly impeded the enforcement of the law, but this was only one of many obstacles standing in the way of convictions. Prosecutors were unwilling to press such cases, and magistrates were often glad to dismiss them. Klansmen frequently dominated juries—including grand juries and coroners’ juries. Witnesses and victims, like Sheriff Norris, were intimidated and refused to testify, while Klan members were eager to swear false alibis on one another’s behalf.22
The law, when it did oppose Klan activity, did so in times and places where the Klan was politically weak. As Allen Trelease notes:
Wherever Union men were numerous and sufficiently well organized to sustain the local authorities … [Arkansas Governor Powell] Clayton encouraged sheriffs to mobilize them as posses, and they were used to good effect. Thus the sheriff of Carroll County managed to quell the small-scale terror there, even if he failed to catch the criminals. In Fulton County, where the governor had to send in reinforcements from other counties and make use of Monk’s Missouri volunteers, the policy contributed to a mutual escalation but was ultimately successful.23
Even then, the usual form of conflict was not open warfare or even vigorous enforcement of the law, but a kind of rivalry or dual power. The police and the Klan became counterbalancing forces rather than outright antagonists. Under such conditions, police may have limited the Klan’s worst atrocities, but they did little to protect Black people from routine abuse and intimidation.24 Likewise, the Klan, while not usually driving the sheriff out of town or making good on their threats against him, limited the scope of his authority and greatly restricted his agenda (especially where the sheriff was a Republican). In Homer, Louisiana, the sheriff gave up policing whole areas of the parish where the Klan was strongest.25 One Texas sheriff found it impossible to raise a posse against Klan activity; White citizens told him derisively to “Call on your nigger friends.”26
But usually, law enforcement agents were unwilling to move against the Klan, even when they were backed by federal military force.27 And they were almost never willing to avail themselves of the one source of power that may have been most readily mobilized against Klan activity—the Black population. Even when faced with widespread lawlessness, White officials proved unwilling to arm and rally their Black constituency.28 It may be that they worried such a move would create a panic among Whites and provoke further violence, or it may be that they feared creating a Black resistance that they could not then control.29 Whatever the reasons, the result was disastrous for African Americans.
As renegade states were reincorporated into the Union and the federal commitment to Reconstruction waned, Black people were returned to something very much like their previous status. When Democrats attained control of state legislatures and local governments, they passed a series of “Black Codes” designed to regulate the former slaves and reconstitute the system of White supremacy—based not on the private institution of slavery, but on publicly established segregation.30 Black people were, whether by law, custom, or Klan intimidation, commonly forbidden to own land, run businesses, work on railroads, change employers, travel, or vote.31 Those convicted of crimes, even nominal offenses such as “vagrancy,”32 could be imprisoned and returned to involuntary servitude, leased to wealthy Whites to work in their fields, factories, or mines.33 This was termed, in the parlance of Southern Whites, “Redemption.” For Black people, it was more like damnation.
Slave Patrols Revisited
During the Reconstruction period, the line between legal and extra-legal authority became extremely hazy. The Klan took on criminal violence in the defense of an archaic view of law and order, and the local authorities were either incapable or unwilling to challenge them. In many cases, the police were actually complicit with Klan violence, and it seemed that the two organizations pursued the same ends, sometimes using the same means. These common features were not arrived at by chance. Both the police and the Klan were adaptations of an earlier and deeply entrenched Southern institution—the slave patrols.34 As Sally Hadden recounts:
In the new regime of Reconstruction, Southern whites were forced to adopt laws and policing methods that appeared racially unbiased, but they relied upon practices derived from slave patrols and their old laws that had traditionally targeted blacks for violence. To resolve this apparent contradiction, the more random and ruthless aspects of slave patrolling passed into the hands of vigilante groups like the Klan.… Meanwhile, policemen in Southern towns continued to carry out those aspects of urban slave patrolling that seemed race-neutral but that in reality were applied selectively. Police saw that nightly curfews and vagrancy laws kept blacks off city streets, just as patrollers had done in the colonial and antebellum eras.35
The