In October of 1856, less than five years before the onset of the Civil War, T Thomas Fortune is born into slavery in Florida. After the war, his family is freed. His father, who had learned to read and write during slavery, becomes a shoe maker, a prominent member of his church, and a member of the county board of voter registration. In 1868, he is elected as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. But the rise of this former slave to power is met with violence.  

 

[enter music]

 

Shawn Alexander: Their house is terrorized almost every night by the Klan….

 

This is Shawn Alexander, a civil war and Reconstruction historian at the University of Kansas.

 

Shawn Alexander: The Klan will come and circle the house almost every night to terrorize them to simply say, ‘we are here.’ But you have a 12 year old T Thomas Fortune taught with his brother how to flip up the bed towards the door to act as a barricade and get the rifles that his father has laid under the beds in a small shallow hole, if you will, dug in the floor. 12 years old….

 

[exit music]

 

T Thomas Fortune grows up to become a leading civil rights advocate, a writer, and the author of the poem Bartow Black:

 

[enter music]

 

Bartow Black: 

 

’Twas when the Proclamation came,—

Far in the sixties back,—

He left his lord, and changed his name

To “Mister Bartow Black.”

 

After Bartow Black gets his freedom and an education, he is elected to public office…. 

 

He now was greater than the lord

Who used to call him slave,

For he was on the “County Board,”

With every right to rave.

 

but he too is terrorized by the Klan. 

 

And soon the chivalrous “Ku-Klux”

Rose in the Southern land.

 

Then Bartow got a little note,—

’Twas very queerly signed,—

It simply told him not to vote,

Or be to death resigned.

 

The Klan demands that he give up his seat, but he refuses.

 

Bartow Black: 

 

They numbered fifty Southern sons,

And masked was every face;

And Winfield rifles were their guns,—

You could that plainly trace.

 

They reached his room! He was in bed,—

His wife was by his side!

They struck a match above his head,—

His eyes he opened wide!

 

Poor Bartow could not reach his gun,

Though quick his arm did stretch,

For twenty bullets through him spun,

That stiffly laid the wretch.

 

I’m Nick Fogel, and this is Fireside History 1876 - a podcast about the death of Reconstruction, the rise of the Jim Crow South, and the contested election of Rutherford Hayes.

 

Episode 4 - The Whitelash

 

In the late 1860s, former slaves become citizens, Black men are granted the right to vote, and the federal government begins prosecuting white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

 

But in the background, resistance is growing. A rising shadow of white supremacy is unifying the white south and calling a new generation to battle. The guerrilla war that Abraham Lincoln long feared will soon ignite and when it does, it will push Reconstruction to the brink of collapse. Historian Madeleine Ramsey: 

 

Madeleine Ramsey: There's this rise of violence….the Klan wanted to destroy what the Republican party had accomplished and re-establish control over African-Americans. So it's about politics, but it's of course like everything with reconstruction, it's about reasserting racial control as well.

 

By 1871, the Democratic Party, made up of former Confederates and white supremacists, has been soundly defeated at the polls. Republicans control the White House, both houses of Congress, and the statehouse in every southern state….and a changing electorate suggests hard times for Democrats ahead. 

 

There are 700,000 new Black voters - and most of them are Republicans…..loyal to the party that fought for their freedom. For context, 1.2 million people voted in the south in the 1872 Presidential election. Republicans have made inroads with white southerners as well.

 

[enter music]

 

Imagine you’re a poor white southerner in the wake of the war. You might have supported secession, but you did so reluctantly. You didn’t own slaves, and you resented the wealth and power of those who did.

 

Then you’re drafted into the army along with your friends and family. You watch many of them die. You experience starvation and frostbite. Maybe you lose a leg.

 

Meanwhile, you watch the wealthy planter class, the same ones who beat the drum for secession, pay their way out of the draft. 

 

Then you return from the war to find your home in ruins. 

 

Madeleine Ramsey: So after the war, the South, just the landscape itself is completely destroyed…. The Southern economy will not reach pre civil war levels until world war II. 

 

Cities are heaps of rubble. Farms are ravaged. The economy is bankrupt. One in five southern white men has died. In 1865, 20% of the state budget of Mississippi is spent on prosthetic limbs.

 

[exit music]

 

And now you’ve got the Republican party offering to help. They promise to build hospitals, schools, and railroads. They want to take power from the plantation owners and give it to common folks like you, black and white. 

 

So what do you do? Do you support the rich white planters who sent you to die in battle or do you vote your economic interests, even if it means backing a group of people you’ve been raised to hate?

 

At first blush, the answer might seem obvious. Poor white southerners have battled the wealthy slaveholding elites for decades. Here is their chance to change the hierarchy. And indeed, in the early years of Reconstruction many white southerners join the Republican ranks. But will they stay? 

 

[enter music]

 

Charles Dew: If you think about it….that's inherently a fragile coalition.

 

As historian Charles Dew explains, southern white elites have a powerful, tried and true weapon to lure poor whites back into the fold: race. 

 

Charles Dew: The possession of a white skin elevated you automatically in the south, and that embraced everybody from the richest planter to the poorest yeoman. And there was a sort of style in the south that involved if you had a lot of money and were a rich planter, you didn't act like it. When you came into town on Saturday for court day or whatever, you slap your yeoman fellow on the back and ask him how the meals were and if he had had any good hunting. There was a sort of camaraderie among whites among men - that was really a sort of leveling of class distinction.

 

Georgia Governor Joseph Brown drives home this point in the buildup to the war.

 

Joseph Brown: Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.    

 

With their power slipping, the planter class turns to the old racist language of white supremacy. You’re either with us - you’re one of the good ol’ boys - or you're against us. And if you’re against us, prepare for social isolation and violence. 

 

[exit music]

 

Shawn Alexander again:

 

Shawn Alexander: In the early years of reconstruction violence was mostly local and unorganized. 

 

But, the violence soon becomes a central pillar in a larger strategy to cripple the Republican coalition.

 

[enter music]

 

Shawn Alexander: And the most notorious group that grows out of the unorganized acts of violence is the Ku Klux Klan, which really, you know, as Eric Foner, has said and other historians have said, really serves as a military arm of the Democratic Party.

 

New recruits to the Klan are asked: 

 

Voice actor: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Radical Republican Party? Are you opposed to Negro equality both social and political? Are you in favor of a white man's government in this country?

 

[exit music]

 

The Klan attacks African Americans, especially political leaders and successful farmers and businessmen. But they also launch a campaign of terror against white sympathizers, forcing white southerners to think hard about their allegiances.

 

[enter music]

 

Shawn Alexander: Their purpose and their action is really nothing but terror. They want to terrorize the south, particularly the white republicans or people who are aiding African Americans at the time and African American themselves, they want to dictate what it means to be free, and what it means to live in this post war environment. 

 

Hilary Green: In the newspapers….they have what's called the black list. 

 

Historian Hilary Green explains that much of the strategy rested on publicly identifying rivals to white supremacy, Black and white:

 

Hilary Green: If you're on the list, and it’s predominantly African Americans, it's a calling card that you could fire them, you can treat them poorly, and if you want to go out and kill them, it's okay, we sanctioned this. 

 

[exit music]

​

Black people try to resist the violence, but they are badly out-armed. The white south is full of gun-owning Civil War veterans. And white Republican governors are reluctant to use their state militias to defend Black citizens.

 

Charles Dew: And the federal army was really in many areas simply located with a garrison in the state capitol. Not a whole lot of boots on the ground….So really you're talking about a minimal military presence.

 

But it's not just physical violence and social pressure. To convince white southerners to leave the Republican party, they wage a war of ideas.

 

They cast Black people as the ‘other,’ calling black workers lazy, black politicians corrupt, and black men sexual predators. 

 

They call white southerners who join the Republican party traitors and scalawags. Charles Dew again:

 

Charles Dew: Scalawags were sort of runty undersized cattle that came from God knows what sort of mixed heritage.

 

They call northern leaders oppressors and northern transplants who move south after the war corrupt, money-hungry carpetbaggers. 

 

Charles Dew: The carpetbagger stereotype, they were plunderers, who came to the south with everything they owned in a carpetbag to sort of pick over the bones of the defeated Confederacy. 

 

They also demonize Republicans in Congress, claiming Republicans don’t want racial equality, but... quote ‘Negro supremacy.’ You, the poor white farmer, are not struggling because of bad harvests or an oversupply of cotton or the land monopoly of the elites - they say. You are struggling because of reverse discrimination. 

 

And they don’t just distort the realities of the present, they launch a campaign to rewrite the past. 

 

[enter music]

 

Charles Dew: So there is almost a race wide effort among white Southerners to…. redefine what the Confederacy was fighting for, and to give the soldiers who lost their lives in that cause a sort of nobility.  

 

Before the war, confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis were crystal clear: they were seceeding to protect slavery. In justifying secession, delegates of Davis’ home state of Mississippi wrote:

 

Mississippi convention: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world….a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization….There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union… 

 

But almost immediately after Lee’s surrender, the narrative about the reasons for the war starts to shift. 

 

Charles Dew: So from Davis...on down, white Southerners began rewriting the narrative of the origins of the Civil War...It was all about defending our states against a powerful northern majority and our liberties. And yes, we fought the issue around the slave question, but that really wasn't what was at stake here. Our constitutional rights, our liberties, our independence, that's what was at stake. 

 

[exit music]

 

Over time, these revisionist ideas combine to form a complete, pro-Confederate mythology of the war known as the Lost Cause, which is built around several key tenets. 

 

Madeleine Ramsey: The first is that secession and not slavery caused the civil war.

 

That is...Confederates were not traitorous losers defending slavery but honorable patriots protecting the founding ideal of state’s rights…

 

Madeleine Ramsey: The second is that African Americans were quote unquote faithful slaves, loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and were thus unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.

 

This of course ignores the realities of Black leadership during Reconstruction, but it tells a convenient story. It paints white supremacy as the natural order.

 

Madeleine Ramsey: So the third major assertion of the lost cause is that the Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources….The idea is that then the South was destined to lose from the beginning. And so that also plays into this idea of the lost cause. That's where that wording comes from.

 

Hence, the noble fight continues during Reconstruction.

 

Madeleine Ramsey: Fourth is that Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.

 

This is where we get the worship of Confederate soldiers and the dedication of statues and museums in their honor. 

 

And fifth is that Robert E. Lee is the most heroic of all. His birthday is still a state holiday in Texas known as Confederate Heroes Day - a holiday that was established in reaction to the creation of MLK Day.

 

Madeleine Ramsey: And then finally the last part of the Lost Cause is that southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones. 

 

The need to protect the purity of southern white women will become a rallying cry for lynching mobs and a justification for much of the violence of Reconstruction and beyond. 

 

The Lost Cause is a powerful tool for the planter class. It rewrites history to tell a story of a unified white south struggling against an oppressive north. And it provides a set of so-called facts that allow the working-class whites to justify leaving the Republican coalition. 

 

I didn’t become a Democrat because I was afraid of losing my job or being shunned by my neighbors, they can tell themselves, I became a Democrat because I’m committed to southern values, states rights, and protecting civilization.

 

[enter music]

 

Like any good marketing campaign, The Lost Cause appeals to its target audience on an emotional level. It is a comfort for grieving widows and impoverished veterans. Their suffering is not in vain but tied to a longer and just struggle. 

 

Steve Fein: And the psychological reality that you lost, right….just the fact ‘Oh, we were humiliated.’ And you want to sort of to somehow spin that in a way that you can feel superior again.

 

[exit music]

 

Steve Fein, a psychologist at Williams College, notes that we as humans are quite good at convincing ourselves to believe what we want to believe.

 

Steve Fein: You want to see the world a certain way, you want to see the world not a certain way, and how we can justify all kinds of conclusions that don't seem necessarily very rational in the service of that motivation…. And I think people are just very good at that kind of thing, where their motivation drives their cognition….So they….become much more sophisticated at seeing the problems, the flaws in the research when the research didn't support their agenda….and a little bit more just blindly accepting of the information that's in support of their preferred outcome.

 

And we’re especially motivated to believe revisionist histories when we experience trauma or perceive a threat. In those times, we crave the belonging of our group and become much more willing to accept whatever myths our group believes in.

 

[enter music]

 

Even if you rationally know the Lost Cause is a lie, you want it to be true. Soon you convince yourself that it is true… And you attack anyone who says otherwise.

 

When James Longstreet, one of Lee’s most trusted commanders, insists on saying that slavery was in fact the principle cause of the war, he is labeled a traitor and forced to flee his home. His war record is rewritten to blame him for the entire Confederate defeat.

 

The Lost Cause soon becomes a rallying cry, a call to resist the Reconstruction state governments and “redeem the south.” In 1868, the pro-Confederacy journalist Edward Pollard publishes The Lost Cause Regained, in which he calls white supremacy the “true hope of the South.” Summoning the white south to arms, he states: 

 

Edward Pollard: “The Civil War did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide state rights. … And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim and still assert them in their rights and views…The true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained.’” 

 

In short, you are a white southerner - and you are not defeated, but still fighting.

 

[exit music]

 

While Black leaders are coming to power and Congress is passing laws to establish a more just, multi-racial society, at kitchen tables and taverns across the south, the Lost Cause is gaining traction. The forces of extremism are rekindling their strength; and then, in 1873, those forces get a boost. 

 

Greg Downs: 1873: massive worldwide recession, 

 

Historian Greg Downs:

 

Greg Downs: the Panic of 1873, leading to wide scale unemployment, closures of banks, closing of bond agencies, closing bond issuers, closing of railroads, massive unemployment.

 

And as poor white southerners are thrust further into poverty, Black leaders are assuming more visible leadership positions. Here’s Anne Twitty, a historian at the University of Mississippi:

 

Anne Twitty: And for white Southerners, they most often looked upon these developments with utter shock and horror, this real sense that, you know, truly the bottom rail was on top that this was somehow an inversion of the natural or, or moral order of things. 

 

And so the white south revolts. Impoverished white southerners blame their plight on the easiest target - the other: Black people and northerners. 

 

Charles Dew: I used to tell my students in my old South class and in my new south class, there's one thing that you really can rely on, and that is that race trumps class over and over and over again.

 

The Long War, the extended struggle for white supremacy that continued after Appomattox, reignites fueled by economic despair, centuries of racism, and nearly a decade of Lost Cause propaganda.

 

[enter music]

  

On Easter Sunday 1873, a heavily armed mob of ex-Confederates converges on the Colfax courthouse. African Americans, fearing violence, have set up barricades to protect the building. But they are badly outnumbered. The white mob gives the women and children thirty minutes to leave the area, and then they advance. Several Black men try to flee for the nearby river. They are quickly rounded up and killed. One is captured and ordered to set fire to the Courthouse. Trapped in the burning building, the rest of the Black men raise flags of surrender. As they walk out, a white man is shot. The lone surviving Black man testifies that the shot comes from a member of the white mob. But the mob uses it as a pretext to unleash a massacre.

 

Shawn Alexander: And this indiscriminately begins to go on a killing spree of the African American community on into the night. You're going to have about 150 African Americans who are killed, including about 48 or 50, I think, who were killed during the battle around the courthouse, only three whites are going to be killed and a few are going to be injured in what is largely a one-sided battle.

 

At night, the ex-Confederates get drunk and execute 50 men who have been taken captive. Bodies are thrown in the river and dumped in mass graves. When federal troops finally arrive, they find bodies strewn across the town. 

 

[exit music]

 

In case there’s any dispute about the purpose of the attack, a sign on the grounds of the current courthouse to this day reads: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot, in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event… marked the end of carpetbag [meaning northern] misrule in the South.” Another monument in the Colfax cemetery commemorates the “heroes,” meaning the three white men, who “fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.” 

 

Inspired by Colfax, ex-Confederates form new paramilitary groups across the South, among the most prominent are the White League. In 1874, more than 5,000 White League troops storm New Orleans in an attempt to unseat the Republican Governor. They overpower police and state militia and seize the statehouse and city armory for three days. 

 

In Alabama, White League forces attack Black voters on Election Day 1874, killing as many as 40 people and driving over a thousand away from the polls. They then ride to a nearby town, destroy the ballot box, and declare the democrats victors in the election, despite the county being majority black and 2-to-1 Republican. 

 

As part of an investigation for President Johnson on conditions in the South after Lee’s surrender, future senator Carl Schurz described “a reign of terror.”

 

[enter music]

 

Carl Schurz: “Some planters held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of white men patrolled the country roads to drive back the Negros wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and by-ways. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals—reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated with scourges. A number of such cases, I had occasion to examine myself. 

 

Lincoln feared that the Civil War might devolve into a prolonged guerrilla war. Our history books tell us that we avoided that war, that we patched up the old wounds and emerged as one. But here’s the thing: the United States did have a guerrilla war. 

 

[exit music]

 

Historian Colin McConarty:

 

Colin McConarty: I think that when you look at organizations such as what the KKK was doing in 1868 of literally taking out and murdering black men so that they wouldn't vote. I think that you have to see that as a continuation of the Civil War and as the very guerrilla war that historians sometimes hypothesize about or think about what it would have looked like. I think we can look at history and say this is what it looked like because we really do see a continued violent resistance to the federal government and its policies continuing straight from secession all the way through reconstruction.

 

It's not just klan members or White Leaguers. Newspapers suppress reports of violence, police refuse to open investigations, and district attorneys refuse to prosecute. It’s a culture of violence where people just vanish. In the aftermath of the Colfax Massacre, only nine men out of a mob of hundreds were arrested. Three were found guilty. None went to jail.

 

[enter music]

 

By 1873, instead of dividing white southerners, the violence unifies them. It is justified by the lies of the Lost Cause….the so-called noble struggle to turn back ‘Negro supremacy,’ to repel corrupt northerners, and re-establish home rule. 

 

Steve Fein: So I think that people are able to sort of recalibrate and say, ‘Okay, yeah, this looks like a horrific act of violence, but I'm not the kind of person who would endorse violence. So why am I doing that here? Well, it must be because it's for the greater good. And it's actually an act of moral goodness to kill these people or do whatever... because otherwise, how could I live with myself that I'm supporting this horrible thing and yet I'm a good person….’ 

 

[exit music]

 

As Dr. Fein explains, the more heinous the act, the more you crave a moral story to justify your behavior. And so violence breeds extremism, which breeds more violence. 

 

[enter music]

 

T Thomas Fortune, the 12 year old who was taught to flip up his bed to use as a barricade, eventually starts one of the most influential newspapers of his era and launches the first civil rights advocacy organization - the precursor to the NAACP. 

 

Shawn Alexander: And when he is close to his death in the 1920s, he begins to serialize his own autobiography. 

 

Shawn Alexander.

 

Shawn Alexander: And the only story he tells in his autobiography is the story of reconstruction…And when he's saying what you need to remember about me, at the end of his life, is the terror that he experienced as a child….Because what Fortune is always trying to tell his audience is that the terror that I experienced, that we're experiencing today in 1928, in 1905, and he would probably say in 2020, while the link in the chain may be different, the chain is the same. It is all connected. 

 

[exit music]

 

[enter theme song]

 

Next time on Fireside History...

 

Greg Downs: The nation faces a question in the 1870s: you can have local self government, or you can have rights for freed people. 

 

With much of the white south waging war against Reconstruction, how will the north respond?

 

Greg Downs: There's no ‘just wave a magic wand.’ The only way that voting rights and civil rights will be meaningful in the south is at the point of a gun.

 

Will the northerners maintain the fight in the face of continued violence and an economic depression?

 

The Big Short: I have a feeling that in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people.

 

And if they don’t, what will come next? What will the death of Reconstruction mean for African Americans and the country as a whole?
 

If you’re interested in learning more about the psychology underpinning the history discussed on this podcast, listen to this week’s bonus episode, featuring my full conversation with psychologist Steve Fein. It’s a fascinating look at the science behind how we decide what to believe and how those beliefs can lead to genocide, war, and division.

 

Fireside History is produced by me, Nick Fogel. It is edited by Iris Adler. Scoring and sound engineering by Jason Albert and Hannah Barg. Voice acting from Kilo Martin and Sara Young. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Shawn Alexander, Madeleine Forrest Ramsey, Charles Dew, Hilary Green, Steve Fein, Anne Twitty, Colin McConarty, and Greg Downs.