Contrary to most historical and popular accounts, America's horrific Civil War did not end with Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA. There were proposals to continue armed Southern resistance to the overwhelming power of federal forces by undertaking unconventional guerrilla tactics. Lee protested such notions that would draw the divided country into an increasingly protracted, murderous, and chaotic conflict. He would not have it, and formally surrendered on April 9, 1865.
But even at the site of surrender, one Confederate general, Martin Witherspoon Gary, displayed an intransigence that was a harbinger of things to come: "Gary had always been an unruly man. At Appomattox he refused to surrender, and galloped off the field instead."
Stephen Budiansky, a journalist and military historian, has written The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, a devastating chronicle of the ultimate failure of the decade of Reconstruction proceeding the Civil War. Outraged that the federal government would forcibly impose regulations allowing the enfranchisement and equality of Black persons, numerous white southerners mounted what Budiansky plainly calls a "brutal war of terrorist violence." The outcome of this persistent and widespread opposition to the tenets of Reconstruction would be the era of Jim Crow. With his readable narrative supplemented by letters and extracts from various newspapers of the day, Budiansky presents a disturbing account of a dream ferociously deferred.
Though they were not necessarily happy with the situation, not all southern whites vehemently opposed Reconstruction. There were those who saw it as the outcome of a lost cause, and they would abide lawfully by the new order. Their fellow whites who were not so inclined quickly demonstrated the extent to which they were willing to go to smash Reconstruction to bits. And this they did frequently and with astonishing impunity.
Consider this first vignette offered by Budiansky, describing the experience of one Allen P. Huggins, a white northerner who was superintendent of schools for Monroe County, Mississippi, who had the audacity to open public schooling to Blacks. On the night of March 9, 1871, Huggins was visited by "a band of 120 men on horseback, disguised, heavily armed, even their horses cloaked in white sheets to conceal any identifiable markings."
He was given 10 days to leave the state or be killed. "Huggins replied that he would go when he was good and ready to go." His response was not well received by his uninvited visitors. He was summarily marched down the dark road and suddenly one of the hooded gang holding a stirrup leather "began beating Huggins with the stirrup, with all his might." Others joined in the attack leaving Huggins "senseless, more dead than alive."
"When he came to, the men trained their pistols on him and repeated their warning, that if any of them laid eyes upon him in ten days' time, he was a dead man." Budiansky's book is replete with such outrages.
Consider the harrowing experience of Elias Hill, a former slave, "with legs so shriveled they were no bigger than a child's, an arm drawn up and perpetually frozen in rheumatic pain." Hill had become literate. He was a preacher and a teacher. At the age of 52, Hill was set upon one night. His home was invaded. Hill was lifted from his bed, thrown to the ground outside, and mercilessly pummeled with fists and the butt of a pistol. This was followed by whipping and a threat to drown him in the river. His home was ransacked. Before departing, Hill's attackers told him that his life would be spared if he publicly renounced "all Republicanism and wouldn't ever vote, and if he stopped taking the Republican newspaper from Charleston, and if he left off preaching."
Long after the formal dispersing of Confederate forces, violence of a virulently racist and politically reactionary sort droned on throughout the American South. It continued on in the murderous activity of the Ku Klux Klan, in the killing and intimidation of idealistic individuals, Black and white, who strove in sincerity and hope to build a new and just society upon the ashes of war's devastation. Budiansky's work is a wrenching portrait of collective political failure, of a national disgrace, echoes of which reverberate in our own time.