“It can hardly be expected that any Negro would regret the death of Benjamin Tillman…”
In 1872, Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, was elected to his second term as President of the United States. That year marked, perhaps, the height of what came to be called the Radical Reconstruction of the South: the Republican Party controlled state legislatures and statehouses in many of what, for a few years back in the early 1860s, had been the Confederate States of America. Black voters were registered in the South in numbers never to be seen again until 1965. African-Americans there held public office at nearly all levels of government, from City Hall to the Senate of the United States.
President Ulysses S. Grant
Here, W.E.B. DuBois would later maintain in his great book Black Reconstruction, were the first steps toward radical democracy ever taken in the New World, or, for that matter, any place in the world where whites and people of color lived side by side. In 1872 in South Carolina, for example, blacks were elected to the statewide posts of Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General; and of 155 seats in the legislature, 96 would now be filled by former slaves, or by men who shared their complexion. Reactionaries, together with the academic historians who lent their views a mantle of respectability—men like William Dunning—later attributed this to corruption in the Republican “carpet-bag” regime, as if there simply could be no other explanation. But sixty-percent of the South Carolina population was African-American in 1872 (the majority was larger still in some of the lowland counties); the Democratic Party had never been any friend of theirs; the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution had enfranchised them; and they voted. (South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman—soon to be discussed at greater length—admitted as much on the Senate floor in 1900: “In my State there were 135,000 Negro voters, or Negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters. Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000?”)
Resistance to Reconstruction had always been bitter in South Carolina, and often violent. By the mid-1870s, white South Carolinians, and the state Democratic Party, were prepared to “redeem” the state from Republican rule, as they liked to say—by any means necessary. The opportunity came in July 1876, as the nation celebrated one hundred years of difficult history. On the 4th, a detachment of state militia, under the command of a black veteran of the Union Army and Republican Party activist named Dock Adams, assembled for a Centennial celebration in the little town of Hamburg, South Carolina, a largely black settlement just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. (Hamburg is now known as North Augusta, South Carolina, though in fact the latter stands slightly to the north of the older site.) Two young white men, Henry Getzen and Thomas Butler, found their way blocked—or supposed themselves blocked—by the assembly. Insults were exchanged (details of the confrontation vary, according to whether the historian giving them is kindly disposed toward the soi-disant “Redeemers”); and the two white men—being “honourable men,” as Mark Antony might say—took the needful measure of retaining an attorney to press charges against Adams for “blocking the public way.”
Gen. Matthew C. Butler (1836-1909)
The attorney was former Confederate General Matthew C. Butler, a native of those parts, and a Democratic Party agitator. Butler set out for the courthouse in Hamburg on July 8, accompanied by a band of heavily armed whites. By the day’s end, seven blacks had been murdered (the bodies were left in public sight, to point the moral) some thirty more had been summarily imprisoned, and homes and shops belonging to Hamburg’s black citizens lay in ruin. The “Redemption” of South Carolina was underway.
The Hamburg Massacre of 1876 is an episode representative, in too many ways, of what came to be called the “Redemption” of the South from Reconstruction. Two months after the Massacre, in September, a band of armed white men gathered in Edgefield, South Carolina, twenty odd miles northeast of Hamburg. At their head was Nathaniel Butler, a one-armed Confederate veteran and the brother of the attorney who, in July, brought charges against Dock Adams—the black Union Army veteran who headed up the local militia in Hamburg.
"Pitchfork" Ben Tillman
And, having gathered, Butler’s mob (calling itself the “Sweetwater Sabre Club”) went looking for one Simon Coker, a black man who was, at the time, a Republican State Senator from nearby Barnwell County, and who had embarked on an investigation of white militancy in that part of South Carolina. Butler and his men seized Coker (he was already in the custody of local whites); they led him into the brush along a country road, and, after permitting him to pray, and agreeing to return the key to his corn-crib to his wife, they shot him dead where he knelt. Party to the business was a young white farmer named Benjamin Tillman (he had also played a role in the Hamburg riots). Afterward, the record shows, Tillman enjoyed a meal of barbecued pig, corn pone, and coffee, and got himself home to Edgefield. The bloody summer of 1876 marked Tillman’s debut in South Carolina politics. He would eventually become Governor, and, later still, would sit for several terms in the Senate of the United States.
When Tillman died in 1918, W.E.B. DuBois wrote an obituary and published it in The Crisis, which he then edited for the NAACP.
Title Page, "The Crisis" (Vol. 1:5)
We can see in it the influence of Marx, a figure increasingly important, in those days, to DuBois. “It can hardly be expected that any Negro would regret the death of Benjamin Tillman,” DuBois wrote. “And yet it is our duty to understand this man in relation to his time. He represented the rebound of the unlettered white proletariat of the South from the oppression of slavery to new industrial and political freedom. The visible sign of their former degradation was the Negro. They kicked him because he was kickable and stood for what they hated; but they must as they grow in knowledge and power come to realize that the Negro far from being the cause of their former suffering was their co-sufferer with them. Some day a greater than Tillman,” DuBois continued, “will rise in the South to lead the white laborers and small farmer, and he will greet the Negro as a friend and helper and build with him and not on him. This leader is not yet come, but the death of Tillman foretells his coming and the real enfranchisement of the Negro will herald his birth.”
From "The Crisis"
The “unlettered white proletariat of the South,” the very men Ben Tillman represented, had themselves been “oppressed” by slavery: the insight is characteristic of DuBois, as is also the promise he holds out of a real “redemption”—this vision of a revolutionary class solidarity that would, at the end of the day, resolve the problem of the color line not only where it scarred the county of Edgefield, South Carolina, and not only where it divided the United States, but where it had, by generations of Europeans, been etched across what we now call the Third World. It may be that only a man burdened by “double-consciousness” (as DuBois famously called it) could have achieved just this insight, and entertained just this promise, in the last year of the First World War between the great colonial powers, and the first year of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is certainly the case that DuBois was writing, as he penned his oddly inspiring obituary of a damned “Redeemer,” about the troubled “souls” of white folk.
On 29 March 1900, Ben Tillman had stood in the Senate Chamber to deliver a speech. In it he acknowledged—DuBois would hardly have objected—that the “race question” had “been the cause of more sorrow, more misery, more loss of life, more expenditure of treasure than any and all questions which have confronted the American people from the foundation of the Government to the present day. Out of it grew the war, and after the war came the results of the war, and those results are with us now. The South has this question always with it. It cannot get rid of it. It is there. It is,” he affirmed, unforgettably, “like Banquo’s ghost, and will not down.”
Had he read this, DuBois might have said: Give the unlettered old boy enough rope and he will lynch even himself. For here, to be sure, is an example of a man astonishingly unaware of what his words imply. Here is dramatic irony of a very high order. But it may be better to imagine (again, as DuBois might have) that Tillman is, in fact, somehow aware that his allusion to Macbeth constitutes the inadvertent confession of a ruthless politician—a politician who was accessory to the murder of another politician, Simon Coker, in 1876, in order to get his start. Surely it is fitting that Tillman, and the post-Reconstruction South he helped create, should be haunted, as Macbeth was, by the specter of a good man slaughtered along the king’s highway in a drive for absolute power; and fitting, as well, that he (and it) should have been made sleepless by the fear that that good man’s sons—like the sons of Fleance—must someday inherit the kingdom.
But however that may be, a shrewder, because more deliberate, evocation of the same unquiet banquet in Shakespeare’s tragedy comes in The Souls of Black Folk, three years after Tillman strutted and fretted his hour upon the Senate stage with Banquo’s ghost. It is as good a passage as any with which to conclude this entry. “And yet,” DuBois says, thinking of Banquo’s apparition, and quoting Macbeth’s horrible importunity,—“And yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed place at the Nation’s feast. In vain do we cry out to this our vastest social problem:
The Ghost of Banquo, Confronting Macbeth
`Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves / Shall never tremble!’
The Nation has not yet found peace in its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.” That Tillman and DuBois should alike have been enthralled by Macbeth—that they should both, in fact, have re-imagined our America as Macbeth’s bloody Scotland;—this is a telling irony of American literary history, and one not even the “weird sisters” could have arranged. It makes one wonder what William Dean Howells could possibly have had in mind when he famously said, in 1886, ten years after the sorry collapse of the Reconstruction, that “the more smiling aspects of life” are “the more American,” that “the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life” is “peculiarly American,” and that the human race, in America, “has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.”
McVeigh (the mugshot plate obscures the face of Lincoln)
Honest work and unselfish behavior hadn’t gotten the freedmen anywhere; the lynchings rolled on by the day. Howell’s ability to ignore this fact is a characteristic American talent, and in it he is perfectly sincere. But terror, as DuBois would have understood, was nothing new on our soil when, with Timothy McVeigh, it came to Oklahoma City in a rented van in 1995. Nor should we, in 1995, have been at all surprised—and this, too, DuBois would have understood—that the terrorist carried in his pocket a copy of The Turner Diaries, a novel by a white supremacist devotee of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nor should we fail to see the significance of the fact that McVeigh wore on his T-shirt a picture of Abraham Lincoln above the legend—they were the white supremacist John Wilkes Booth’s words in Ford’s Theater—Sic Semper Tyrannis. In America, the problem of the twentieth century was, all the way down to 1995, all the way down to Oklahoma City, the problem of the color line.
N.B.: For Jeffery Miller’s essay about the “redemption” of the South by violence, cf. the first “comment” below, where I have reprinted it in part; in that essay, Miller retells the story of Dock Adams and the Hamburg Massacre. For Ben Tillman’s now infamous speech on the Senate floor defending lynching, click here. A brief extract follows: “We [South Carolinians] did not disfranchise the Negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the Negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his ‘rights’—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.” Ben Tillman is still honored by a statue (dedicated in 1940) on the South Carolina State House Grounds (though legislation has been introduced either to remove it, or to add a plaque that tells his story truly). For a good, brief history of the “redemption,” cf. Stephen Budiansky’s book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox (Viking, 2008). The story of the Hamburg Massacre, of the murder of Simon Coker, and of Tillman’s accessory role in both, is retold yet again there in chapter five, titled, after the newspaper cant of the day, “The Passion-Stirring Event at Hamburg.” Finally, for a transcript of testimony taken by the U.S. House of Representatives pertaining to these “passion-stirring events,” cf. “comment” two, below.
Miller, Jeffrey W. “Redemption through violence: White mobs and black citizenship in Albion Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand.” Southern Literary Journal. Chapel Hill: Fall 2002. Vol. 35:1.
“The modern prince … can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has already been recognized and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form.”
––Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (circa 1929-1935)
“Although Gramsci here discusses how the Communist Party must go about organizing its base of power, his analysis serves as an apt description of how the “modern prince” of white mob violence expressed a collective will in the South after Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century. Gramsci provides an appropriate epigraph, because I find no better example of hegemony, defined by Gramsci as “the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group,” than the coercive power of white vigilante violence in the post-Reconstruction South. The hegemonic power of white culture combined vigilante justice with legalized prejudice and segregation in order to dictate local qualifications for citizenship that superseded the federal constitution.
Historians have long noted the persistence and power of the white mob in the post-Reconstruction South. David Godshalk claims that the mob formed a collective will that had specific methods and goals: “In addition to its symbolic function in reaffirming the power and dominance of white men, mob violence played a powerful role in intimidating blacks, controlling black behavior, discouraging open black resistance against racial injustice, and preventing black economic competition”). Certainly, the southern landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was riddled with racially-motivated violence, manifested by numerous riots and lynchings. In this article I will analyze one particular racial conflict that occurred in Hamburg, South Carolina in 1876, then compare it to Albion Tourgee’s fictionalized version of race and mob violence in his 1879 novel, A Fool’s Errand.
My analysis of the Hamburg riot and A Fool’s Errand demonstrates that violence is used as a weapon by whites in order to restrict or discourage elements of black citizenship. Furthermore, the events of Hamburg delineate the beginnings of the southern ideology of redemption through violence, and A Fool’s Errand operates as a response to that ideology. We can view redemption through violence as something akin to the “regeneration through violence” posited by Richard Slotkin in his seminal study of the American frontier. Slotkin claims that the first Europeans in America regenerated “their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation” through violent conquest of native peoples.
Slotkin details how that process was couched explicitly in religious terms: the explorers and settlers of the Americas were endowed with “a sense of shared mission-a belief that their presence in the New World was decreed from above with definite ends in view and that deviation from those ends was equivalent to mortal sin.” That sense of shared mission evolved into the Christian evangelism so prevalent in the southern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the Civil War, many southerners were swept by a furious religious revivalism (cf. Drew Gilpin Faust). After the political cause of the Confederacy was lost, that revivalism was transformed into what Charles Reagan Wilson calls the “southern civil religion,” a culture steeped in ritual that saw the southern way of life as a Christian imperative for virtue and order.
Amy Kaplan has theorized that the “reassuring order of the domestic color line” provided a comfortable touchstone for soldiers fighting in the Spanish-American War in 1898. She contends that the Rough Riders “have been understood as a unifying cultural symbol” that healed the conflicts of the Civil War and Reconstruction). I would suggest that the southern civil religion operated as a method for unifying the culture of the American South after Reconstruction. It offered a regeneration brought about by the oppression and suppression of the Others who lived amongst them-Unionists, carpetbaggers, and Negroes.
After the Reconstruction Acts allowed for the readmission of the Confederate States to the Union under fairly stringent requirements, such as universal male suffrage, the South began to speak and act in opposition to the new laws. Francis P. Blair, running on the Democratic ticket in 1868, declared that the Acts were “usurpations and unconstitutional, revolutionary and void.” At this point, the connection between the political cause of white southerners and religion became more overt. Stained-glass windows that combined Biblical iconography with images of the Confederacy went up in churches across the South. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and others were placed in scenes from the Old Testament and installed next to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. As the southern sense of “manifest destiny” grew, so did the intensity with which they defended their civil religion. When that defense became violent, and that violence was successful, southern Democrats viewed the results as a kind of salvation for the race, so they aptly referred to the process of regaining power as “redemption.”
I contend that the redemption of southern politics was a dominant cultural ideology in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century South, and that this redemption was enforced by mob violence. In this essay, I will look at how Tourgee’s A Fool’s Errand formed part of the counter-redemption, not because it inverted the power structure or reversed redemption, but because it performed ideological work that agitated against it. I take the notion of “ideological work” from Mary Poovey, who indicates in Uneven Developments that cultural ideologies are “both contested and always under construction,” and that fiction takes part in formulating and constructing those ideologies.
On July 4, 1876, a black militia unit led by Dock Adams, a Republican politician from Georgia, was marching through the streets of Hamburg, South Carolina, when it encountered a buggy containing two white planters. Both groups claimed right of way, and after a brief but heated exchange the militia yielded to the buggy. The issue was turned over to the local courts and began to arouse local interest. Fearing for their safety, the militia chose not to attend the hearing four days later when a number of armed whites organized a protest. When the militia did not appear, the mob became upset because it expected an apology. Soon, the mob took matters into its own hands and hunted down the militia members at their barracks and executed at least seven of them, shooting at others as they fled.
At the heart of this violence was what Stephen Kantrowitz has termed the “underlying conflict over race and citizenship” in the Reconstruction South. In other words, the white citizens were outraged by the independence and authority the United States government granted to black men in its Reconstruction policies. In the case of Hamburg, the local whites did not recognize the authority of the militia. Matthew Butler, the lawyer for the whites (and a future U.S. Senator), demanded that the black militia members surrender their guns as part of an apology. The New York Times account of the massacre summarizes local white attitudes towards blacks and the Second Amendment: “The whites have always assumed that the blacks had no right to bear arms; have persisted in regarding the colored militia as a standing menace to themselves and their families, and have never failed to disarm them when a favorable opportunity presented itself.” The militia, and black gun ownership in general, did not pose any actual threat to the white citizens, but the symbolism of power and independence wrought by the marching militia needed to be countered with the ritual of submission and compliance in the act of surrendering their arms to the white citizenry-in effect, surrendering their rights as citizens.
Despite its censure of the massacre itself, the New York Times account perpetuates the myth of elite virtuousness: “the killing of the prisoners is severely condemned by the better class of the community.” Although the idea that white-on-black violence was perpetrated by lower-class whites and condemned by the “better sort” was a common perception well into the twentieth century, it is not an accurate description. In the case of Hamburg, not only did the upper classes participate in the mob, but some of its most prominent citizens led it. Henry Getzen, one of the original buggy riders and a prominent local citizen, handpicked the men who were executed, and Ben Tillman, another prominent leader and future U.S. Senator, was a proud member of the mob. Such men viewed their active participation as a badge of honor because, as Edward Crowther has indicated, a mixture of “evangelical and martial traditions” often justified and promoted violence in the South through a code of “holy honor.”
The following summer, Albion Tourgee, a North Carolina carpetbagger from Ohio, began to write a fictionalized account of his sojourn in the South called A Fool’s Errand. The novel, published in 1879, recounts the trials of Comfort Servosse (also known as the Fool), a Michigan attorney and veteran of the Union Army, after he returns from the war. Since his clients have found other attorneys and his doctor recommends a genial climate for his war wounds, Servosse moves his wife, Metta, and his child, Lily, to North Carolina, where he purchases an estate named Warrington. Servosse’s radical views engender a good deal of hostility amongst his neighbors, who view him as a carpetbagger and a “fanatical abolitionist.”
Previous scholarship on A Fool’s Errand can be divided into two categories-that which explores the novel’s autobiographical elements and reads Tourgee primarily as historian, and that which reads Tourgee as literary antecedent of later novelists. In the early to mid-1960s, there was a brief flurry of critical activity with the intention to carve out a space for Tourgee in the historiography of Reconstruction. Ted Weissbuch, Monte Olenick, and Theodore Gross wrote articles that spoke of Tour& as a “propagandist,” “reporter,” and “spokesman” for the southern unionists during this period, who served to “modify” the picture of the period written by Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Dixon. In his excellent biography of Tourgee, Otto Olsen reads the novel for its autobiographical import and its historical accuracy but also fails to account for Tourgee’s literary techniques. More recently, Richard Lewis and Peter Caccavari have investigated Tourgee’s influence on Charles Chesnutt. In both cases, discussion of Tourgee’s work is not examined in depth, and neither article delves into the nature of Tourgee’s fiction. What is missing from all this scholarship, I think, is an analysis of the novel that suggests Tourgee carefully employed conventions of the novel form in order to express his point of view. Although these critics bring Tourgee’s work some needed attention, none of them attempts to read A Fool’s Errand as a literary document.
Tourgee’s first novel was highly successful. Sales of A Fool’s Errand ultimately approached 200,000, almost half of which came in the first year. The reviews of the novel were generally positive, both in northern and southern journals, and A Fool’s Errand quickly became the “best-seller of the day” and led to a followup novel, Bricks Without Strain. Assuming four or five readers per copy, A Fool’s Errand reached almost one million readers and probably accounted for informing more readers about Reconstruction than any other source, at least until Thomas Dixon came along.
The Hamburg massacre does not serve as an exact parallel to the violent events in Tourgee’s novel. A Fool’s Errand focuses instead on Klan violence that took place in the early days of Reconstruction. Although it is possible that the conflict in Hamburg and its aftermath contributed to his motivation in writing the novel, Tourgee did not make an explicit connection between the two. The Hamburg massacre does, however, carry symbolic significance important for an informed reading of Tourgee. The underlying issues that caused the events of Hamburg are significant themes in the novel. Tourgee underscores the unwillingness of whites to attribute elements of citizenship to blacks and emphasizes aristocratic complicity in mob violence. Furthermore, Tourgee crafts these issues into a narrative that was compelling enough to sell 200,000 copies, no small feat in the late nineteenth century. Four elements of the novel combine to provide this outcome: the explicit description of threats and violent mob activities, the appeal to the power of logic and reasoning, the symbolic linkage of violence to government and redemption, and the example of Lily Servosse as a model daughter and citizen.
The period between Appomattox and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 was marked by widespread racial violence, but the nature of that violence shifted upon the passing of the Act. Eric Foner contends that most of this pre-Act violence “stemmed from disputes arising from black efforts to assert their freedom from control by their former masters.” Since the Act contained requirements to institute Negro suffrage, the violence began to focus on citizenship issues. Thus, Servosse’s actions seem to condone educating freedmen, such as socializing with Negro teachers, and are somewhat displeasing to whites, but once they recognize his efforts are making citizens out of slaves, the white response escalates.
Immediately upon Servosse’s arrival in North Carolina, he is ostracized and threatened because of his beliefs. At first, his association with the Negro school teachers merely keeps his family out of the best society. Although he is deemed not “of much account” and a “fanatical abolitionist,” he suffers no serious consequences due to his beliefs. After he endorses Negro suffrage at a public meeting, however, things get more serious. On his way home from the meeting, he is given a cryptic warning from a local:
I don’t want tu ‘larm ye; but it’s my notion it would be jest as well fer ye not to go home by the direct road, arter makin’ that speech ye did to-day. . . . there was a crowd of rough fellers that that was powerful mad at what ye said . . . an’ that’s a parcel of towns-folks hez been eggin’ ‘em on tu stop ye, somewhar on the road home, an’ they by make ye trouble.
While the black school teachers are looked down upon, they are seen as relatively harmless. Endorsing Negro suffrage, however, promotes black citizenship, and this offense was not taken lightly in the days of Reconstruction. Eric Foner claims that after the war, “southerners who publicly advocated any form of black voting found themselves subject to tremendous abuse.” Voting rights are the most basic building blocks in the foundation of citizenship, and the white planters want no part of granting such privileges to freedmen. This night Servosse outsmarts his attackers with the help of some specific intelligence from Uncle Jerry, but he remains under suspicion for the rest of the novel.
Despite the threats against him, Servosse begins to match his actions with his words. When these humanitarian efforts begin to have salutary effects upon the quality of black life and citizenship, the white “mob” takes notice: “Little attention had been paid to the manner in which he had chosen to build houses and sell lands to the colored people, [but when] the crops were harvested, and some of these men became owners of horses and houses in their own right, it seemed all at once to awaken general attention” (98). The key distinction is that between sharecropping and land ownership. The roles of freed-people in sharecropping were virtually identical to the roles of slaves on a plantation. When they began to own land, however, they crossed the line into an area previously dominated by the white aristocracy, and thus into a privilege closely associated with citizenship. In consequence, when freed-people climb the ladder of capitalism and begin to assert their rights as free citizens, the white mob strikes back: a “gang of disguised ruffians” attacks a black settlement, beats a few men, steals a few horses, and mutilates a few others. Since Servosse is seen as the instigator of black ownership, he finds a warning note from the “Regulators,” warning him to “git away” from the area and return North, or he’ll have to “size a coffin.”
The election of 1866 provided another bone of contention for southern Democrats. The Republican Party gained enough congressional seats in this election to gain a two-thirds majority in both houses, thanks in part to Andrew Johnson’s infamous “swing around the circle” speaking tour, in which he attempted to persuade northern audiences that southern whites should be able to govern themselves. His tour proved to be very unpopular in the North, and it provoked voters into sending more radical Republicans to Washington. The additional seats allowed Congress to override Andrew Johnson’s constant vetoes, and marked the transition from Presidential Reconstruction to Congressional Reconstruction. Congress now had no trouble passing the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Act, both of which were criticized by Johnson.
The Reconstruction Act provided for the readmission of Confederate states to the Union under the stipulation that they write new state constitutions and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite the protests of white southern leaders, black suffrage was, as Comfort Servosse claimed, written “in the book of fate.” Tourgee describes the ramifications of the Act as follows:
It seems impossible that the wise men of that day should have been so blind as not to have seen that they were doing the utmost possible injury to the colored race, the country, and themselves, by propounding a plan of re-organization which depended for its success upon the effective and prosperous administration of state governments by this class [of blacks], in connection with the few of the dominant race, who, from whatever motives, might be willing to put themselves on the same level with them in the estimation of their white neighbors.
Despite Servosse’s endorsement of black suffrage, he recognizes that enforcing such a condition upon the South would lead to “intense bitterness” amongst the whites. In his report to President Johnson upon visiting the South in 1865, Carl Schurz claimed, “The masses are strongly opposed to colored suffrage; anybody that dares to advocate it is stigmatized as a dangerous fanatic.” It did not help that by 1868 only half of the sixteen northern states allowed blacks to vote; despite this fact, Congress required manhood suffrage as a condition for re-admittance to the Union.
Servosse continues to agitate in a calm and reasoned manner because he believes that his plain-spoken logic will win out over the somewhat hysterical southern ideology of redemption. This subtext of enlightenment weaves throughout the book. Servosse, true to his Gallic ancestry, always believes in the power of logic and reasoning. Tourgee constructs a dialogue in his novel that compares his cool, educated reason to the scattered ignorance of the South. He does so in part with the inclusion of a number of textual documents, ranging from warning notes to newspaper editorials. The warning note he receives from the “Regulators” indicates that its writer is barely literate, while Servosse’s response to the local paper contains a “short, sturdy answer” that claims he was “minding his own business, and expected other people to mind theirs.” In a fictional world where words have the power to transform the political landscape, those who are not literate are doomed to fail.
Servosse and his liberal books have quite an effect on his neighbor’s son, Jesse Hyman, who becomes a Republican in his own right after reading the persuasive arguments contained within them. As a result, he is beaten for being a “nigger-loving Radical.” This is a case of guilt by association, as Hyman’s father tells Servosse that Hyman is being punished for being friendly with him as much as for his own radical beliefs. Ultimately, though, the Ku Klux Klan sees the radical worldview as completely at odds with Democratic redemption, and anyone who gets in the way of that redemption will suffer the consequences. More important, this incident indicates that language carries immense power to alter the world. Although the nature of Servosse’s library is only hinted at, clearly it has the ability to enlighten and transform as well as inform. Perhaps Servosse’s library is indicative of what Tourgee wished his novel would accomplish.
The second edition of A Fool’s Errand was published in tandem with The Invisible Empire, a non-fictional account of the Klan’s activities while Tourgee was in North Carolina. In this added material, Tourgee claims that “the best and highest classes of the South did participate in, aid, and abet the [Ku Klux Klan].” His depiction of the movement in A Fool’s Errand supports this assertion, putting planters, lawmen, ministers, and other folk into the movement, including Melville Gurney and John Burleson. The Fool, though, is distressed at the revelation: “He could not understand how men of the highest Christian character, of the most exalted probity, and of the keenest sense of honor, could be the perpetrators, encouragers, or excusers of such acts.” Another man is surprised to find out that a Klan member was “a very active member of the church, and was a superintendent of a sabbath school.” Their elite status, rather than being an unexplained anomaly, is exactly the point. The irony here is that it is precisely their sense of honor and Christian character that provides for the entirety of their existence. The religion of the Lost Cause has been transformed into an evangelical religion of death which justifies such acts in the name of the redemption of the South.
When nominated for the state Constitutional convention, Servosse calls for “equal civil and political rights to all men.” The convention coincides with the development of a “new institution,” the Ku Klux Klan. One of the first victims of the Klan is Bob Martin, a blacksmith known for his economic success and political outspokenness. His contention that Negroes were free, and should vote any way they like, was, according to Bob, “bad doctrine up in our country. De white folks don’t like ter hear it, and ‘specially don’t like ter hear a nigger say it.” About thirty Klansmen break into his house, tie him to a tree and whip him, abuse his wife and daughter, and inadvertently kill his baby. Tourgee recounts various other lynchings and attacks wrought by the Klan. Although some seem without cause, most are in response to black independence or political strivings. One man is whipped for acquiring property; another is hanged because his literacy was “troublesome on election-day.”
The novel culminates in the murder of John Walters and the lynching of Uncle Jerry, events which play upon the conscience of Klan members until a few confessions bring about the downfall of the entire order. John Walters is hated and feared by other whites because he is, as one account labels him, the “infamous scalawag leader of the nigger Radicals.” Southern white Republicans were labeled “scalawags” by the populace, and were generally regarded with more disgust than blacks. One former governor of North Carolina claimed, “We can appreciate a man who lived north, and . . . even fought against us, but a traitor to his own home cannot be trusted or respected.” These “race traitors” were often victims of violence before blacks. Obviously, ideology rather than skin color was the prime concern of the agitators. At a time when southern whites wished to regain control of government, any Republican overture, particularly one which organized the black populace, was viewed with a great deal of offense.
In his history of the Klan, White Terror, John Trelease contends that political motivation was the primary impetus for Klan violence in its early days: “The Klan movement reached its fullest dimensions only with the advent of Negro suffrage. . . . Moreover, the testimony of its victims points to the intimidation and punishment of Republican voters and officeholders as its central purpose.” The Klan also made a “special target” of Republican leaders, both black and white. Walters is murdered in the courthouse, a location that suggests the symbolic death of black representation in government. After an initial uproar, there is little backlash to his murder. Tourgee comments that Walters “had met the doom which he might reasonably have expected when he presumed to organize the colored voters of that county in opposition to the wish and desire of its white inhabitants.” It is appropriate that Walters is murdered and entombed in the courthouse, since he has become the embodiment of black citizenship. Part of the impetus for Hamburg was also symbolic. The idea that freedmen were asserting their right to bear arms on Independence Day was unconscionable to most whites, so they took action to assure such a display would not happen again.
The disposal of Walters also had the desired effect upon the political machinations of freed.people:
After. . . John Walters was so mysteriously but effectually disposed of, the hearts of these innocent and misguided Africans underwent a marvelous change. They still continued to vote, as appeared from the poll-books and returns of election, with the most persistent regularity; but they ceased to vote for those to whom they had once been so warmly attached, and ceased to demand and elect persons of their own color or formerly universal sentiment for places of trust and emolument. It was a very strange coincidence; and there were not wanting those who pointed to it as undeniable evidence of fraud, or, as it was sometimes termed, “intimidation.” Some of the Wise Men who dwelt at a distance tried to raise a clamor over it; but they were easily put to rout by silver-tongued orators who painted wonderful pictures of the millennial life and Edenic peace which had prevailed in Rockford since the hour when the pestiferous Walters departed from its coasts.
Such circumstances are precisely what the forces of redemption envisioned-freedmen removed from the political milieu. Even though they vote, they do so mechanically and without a personal investment in the outcome. Tourgee employs language invocative of the Bible: “wise men, “Edenic,” and “pestiferous” are words calculated to undermine the missionary zeal of the redeemers through ironic hyperbole.
Uncle Jerry, as well, is a victim of the Klan because of his political ideas: “For once, Uncle Jerry forgot his accustomed prudence, and moved by a very unreasonable anger at the impotence of the law, which could not punish those who could not be clearly identified, he openly and boldly declared the monstrous doctrine that the colored people ought to defend themselves and each other. That he should entertain such ideas was in itself a misfortune; that he should give expression to such incendiary notions was a fatal error.” Jerry is lynched just outside the courthouse in the culmination of the Klan’s activities in the novel. As it turns out, some of the Klansmen are not able to stomach the murders of Walters and Jerry, and their confessions lead to the eventual downfall of the Klan.
Though critics have often overlooked the romantic moments in the plot of the book in favor of its political discussion, Tourgee achieves a clever victory in his portrait of Lily, Servosse’s courageous and principled daughter. Though she is not overtly radical, her actions in the novel symbolically oppose her to the men of the elite South. She trumps the Holy Honor of the South with her own version of romantic and secular virtue. Once she comes of age, she takes over the novel in an exciting ride to save her father’s life. She learns of a plot against her father’s life while he is out of town, and she rides to beat her father’s train to his destination and warn him of the danger. By this action, Lily demonstrates what one motivated and courageous individual can do, and stands in contrast to the cowardly group of Klansmen who await her father in darkness.
Later, Gurney goes to Servosse to ask permission to court Lily, despite his parent’s objections, and the Colonel agrees. Unfortunately, Lily recognizes Gurney’s horse as the horse which carried the messenger who warned her of her father’s predicament, and thus deduces that Gurney’s father gave the warning. Because she feels the elder Gurney saved her father’s life, she denies the younger Gurney’s suit as long as his father is against it, but she declines to explain this to him. Thus Tourgee deconstructs the notion of southern honor as it is manifested in the actions of the redeemers. Here he gives two models of real honor: that of the elder Gurney, who valued life above principle and sent the warning, and that of Lily, who risks her own life to save that of her father.
It is interesting that Tourgee felt the need to attach a “real” version of events, via The Invisible Empire, to the second edition of his novel. Otto Olsen indicates that Tourgee was inspired by the key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that proved to be so popular after the publication of that novel. Regardless of his intentions, The Invisible Empire is not nearly as compelling as A Fool’s Errand. It reads more like a catalogue of offenses than a continuous narrative, while Tourgee shapes his novel into a political counterattack to the cultural ideology of redemption.”
N.B.: For full documentation of the materials quoted in this article, cf. the original. I have eliminated them here for the sake of concision and simplicity. –Mark Richardson
From testimony taken by the United States House of Representatives, inquiring into irregularities in the months leading up to the elections of 1876 in South Carolina:
RECENT ELECTION IN SOUTH CAROLINA (1876): THE HAMBURGH SLAUGHTER.
It appears that the purpose was formed on the part of the democracy of South Carolina, notably in Aiken, Edgefield, and Barnwell Counties first, in the early summer of 1876, to use intimidation, force, and violence as means of carrying the election. In May and June threats were freely made by the democrats in these counties, and circulated among the republicans, to the effect that all those who voted the republican ticket would be driven off the lands of the democrats, and be refused employment, and that all leading republicans would be killed. These threat’s were at first rather quietly and covertly made, but as time passed on they were more openly and boldly uttered, care being taken to express them to those who would circulate them, and that they should reach those most desired to be affected. These threats, at first, had little or no effect to frighten or to change the political sentiments of the colored republicans of those counties, and it therefore became necessary for the democracy to enter actively upon the programme of violence. This was inaugurated at Hamburgh, a small town in Aiken County, on the bank of the Savannah River, opposite the city of Augusta, Ga., on the 8th day of July, 1876.There was a colored militia company in that town, organized under the laws of the State, containing about eighty-four men with guns furnished by the State, among the officers and men of which were intelligent and leading colored men. The destruction of this company was manifestly of the first importance, as its existence gave a sense of security to the colored republicans of that vicinity, and counteracted the effect of the democratic threats of violence. This company paraded on the 4th day of July, 1876, under the command of its officers, and went through various military maneuvers in the streets of Hamburgh. Among the observers of this parade were two white democrats, (as yet unknown to fame, but forever after to be,) by the names of Henry Getsen and Thomas Butler. They for a while sat in their buggy on one side of the street, observed the maneuvers of the company, and then, when the company was marching in open order down the street, and near the center of it, started their course up the street with the view to drive through the midst of the company. Capt. D. L. Adams, colored, commanding the company, baited his men and expostulated with Getsen and Butler against their attempt to drive through the ranks of his company. They, Getsen and Butler, persisted in their purpose, although there was sufficient room to pass on one side, and Captain Adams, to prevent trouble, opened a passage through the company for them, and they passed through. The detention was but for a few moments, and was not, save perhaps in the matter of feeling, of the slightest consequence to Getsen and Butler, or to the militia company. But, as the destruction of the militia company was desired by democrats, it was determined to take advantage of the occurrence for that purpose. Accordingly, two or three days afterward a verbal complaint was made, not by said Getsen or Butler, but by R. J. Butler, father of Thomas Butler, and father-in-law of Getsen, to Prince Rivers, colored, trial justice at Hamburgh, against the officers of the militia company for obstructing the street on the above occasion. The trial justice issued a summons, not a warrant calling the officers before him to answer the charge. On the day of the proposed trial and final hearing, (the case having been on a former day partially inquired into and postponed,) appeared in Hamburgh, General M. O. Butler, of Edgefield County. At or about the same time there came into the village about one hundred white men, thoroughly armed with guns and pistols. This body of white men immediately gathered about General M. C.Butler, and submitted to his direction and control. General Butler first assumed to appear as the attorney of R. J. Butler, to prosecute the inquiry before Trial-Justice Rivers against the officers of the militia company. But the officers of the militia company, hearing of the threats against their lives, made by the white armed men surrounding General Butler, refused to appear before Trial-Justice Rivers for the purpose of further examination. At this stage of the proceedings, the farce begun before the trial-justice was abandoned, and Gen. M. O. Butler sent a demand to Capt. D. L. Adams to surrender to him the arms of his company. This demand was refused by Captain Adams, as General M. C. Butler had not in law a shadow of right to make the demand, and not a shadow of right to receive the guns if they bad been surrendered. Finally General Butler notified Captain Adams “that he was going to have the arms in fifteen minutes.” Captain Adams replied, ”Then he (Butler) would have to take them by force.” Thereupon General M. C. Butler commenced posting his men, now increased to several hundred, so as to command the brick building used as a drill-room and an armory by Captain Adams’s company. Captain Adams and twenty-five members of his company had retired to this building. After General Butler had stationed his men he again sent word to Captain Adams that the time was up, and inquired if he was going to give the guns up: to which Captain Adams replied that he could not give them up ; that he did not desire any fuss, and that he and his men bad gone out of the streets and into their hall for safety, and there they could remain.” After this answer had been returned to General Butler, and sufficient time for its reception by him had transpired, his men, who were stationed behind the abutment of the South Carolina Railroad bridge, near by, opened fire on the building occupied by Captain Adams and his company. They fired rapidly for about half an hour, and broke out nearly all the glass in the four windows in the front of the building.
In the meantime Captain Adams’s men kept under cover, were not injured, and did not return the fire. About this time General Butler’s men began apparently to close in about the brick armory, and Captain Adams gave orders to his men to fire on them. The firing on the part of Captain Adams was kept up irregularly for a short time, and till about dark. About midnight Captain Adams quietly withdrew his men from the brick building, with the intention of getting out of town and escaping. He succeeded in getting his men out of the building, and a part of them out of town, but part of them scattered off and hid themselves in various places in and about their houses. The escape from the brick building of Captain Adams’s men was soon discovered by General Butler, and then a vigorous search was made for them, and for colored men generally. Some one or two were killed as they were found, but most that were captured were brought in and put under a strong guard. About two o’clock in the morning some twenty-five or thirty colored men, some of whom were members of the militia company and some not, had been found and brought in, and so placed under guard. The search being over, now came the slaughter. One by one they were taken out and deliberately shot to death. First, A. T. Attaway, lieutenant in Captain Adams’s company, was so taken out and murdered. Then Dave Phillips was taken out and murdered. Next followed Pompey Curry, who, on being let loose, precipitately fled, was fired upon, and badly wounded, but escaped with his life. NextHamp Stevens was taken out and murdered; and, following him, Alfred Minyard, or Minyon was killed. No more were killed out of these prisoners, though some were badly wounded. During the night two others were killed, namely, James Cook, town-marshal, and Moses Parkes . These brutal and causeless murders were clearly committed, as the testimony shows, to effect political ends, and as a part of the plan of the political campaign adopted by the democrats. The relation which General M. C. Butler, one of the most distinguished political leaders of the democratic party, sustained to these was made the subject of much evidence, and a reference to that is all that is deemed necessary now. Comment is unnecessary.
THE ELLENTON MASSACRE.
Silverton, in which is Ellenton, is a township in Aiken County, South Carolina, being about twenty-five miles from Hamburgh and about twenty-four miles from Aiken Court-House, and near the Savannah River. It is a fertile region and quite densely populated, the colored population being largely in the majority. During the spring and summer of 1876 nearly all the white democrats in the county were thoroughly armed and organized into bodies known commonly as “rifle-clubs.” There were in this portion of the county a considerable number of quite intelligent colored republicans, and several republican clubs formed. The policy of intimidation, force, and violence to control the political action of republicans was announced by the white democrats in all this section in June, July, and August, and in substantially the same manner as was done prior to the Hamburgh massacre. About the middle of September ” the rifle-clubs” from different portions of the county of Aiken, and also from the adjoining counties of Edgefield and Barnwell, suddenly and evidently by concerted action, began to march toward and assemble at Silverton.
The number of white democrats armed and mounted thus assembled during September 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20 was probably about eight or nine hundred. Colonel A. P. Butler, of Hamburgh, S. C, appears to have been in general command. Under him, and commanding “rifle-clubs” and irregular bodies, were Angus P. Brown, Geo. W. Croft, Wallace Miller, Augustus White, Frank Green, O. N. Butler of Augusta, Ga., Alonzo Ashley, Warren Keenan, and many others.
The absurd pretext for this assemblage of armed men, as put forth by parties interested, was the reported assault on Mrs. Harley by one or two colored men, who are said to have entered the house of Alonzo Harley for the purpose of stealing. It was charged by Mrs. Harley that she was knocked down by one of these men, who fled on her rising and seizing a gun. The two colored men charged with this assault and attempt to steal were not recognized by Mrs. Harley or any one else at the time, although it occurred in broad daylight, in the forenoon of Friday, September 15, 1876. Suspicion fell upon a young colored man by the name of Peter Williams and another man named Frederick Pope. Three white men immediately started in search of Williams, found him in the house of Addison Hollywonger, (colored,) where he had been confined by sickness for several days with chills and fever, and, although so informed, they arrested him without warrant, and started for Alonzo Harley’s house. On the way, and near there, they were met by Alonzo Harley, who commenced to curse and beat Williams, who, finding himself free and unprotected by his captors, started to run. Thereupon he was fired upon and badly wounded, from which wound he subsequently died. While yet alive he was taken in a cart to Harley’s house to ascertain whether Mrs. Harley identified him as the man who had assaulted her. She, on seeing him, at once said he was not the man. The shooting of Peter Williams occurred about noon, or a little before, on Friday, September 15, 1876. On the evening of the same day a warrant was sworn out ”on information and belief by one Taville, before Trial-Justice Griffin, for the arrest of the said Peter Williams and Pope for the said assault on Mrs. Harley.”
The “rifle-clubs” assembled in considerable force that afternoon at Matlock Church, near said Alonzo Harley’s house, and were largely increased in numbers during the following day. Toward evening of Saturday, three of the companies of “rifle-clubs,” thoroughly armed and mounted, moved down to Chevis’s store, some three-fourths of a mile distant, where a republican colored club had, as usual on that day of the week, assembled, and for the purpose of breaking it up. The members of this club, hearing of the purpose of the rifle-clubs to attack and break them up, hastily adjourned before their arrival, though a few of them were still at Chevis’s store when the rifle-clubs arrived. Those that still remained there were, with curses, notified to meet no more by Captain Angus Brown, who commanded the rifle-club in the advance. There was much cursing, and many threats of violence were made on the part of members of the “rifle-clubs ” toward the republicans in case they should meet again, and it was promised on the part of the members present that they would not meet again. Some effort was made by members of the rifle-club to then and there attack the few colored men found, but it was finally said by the whites. There were not enough of them for a riot. These three companies passed down the road by the store, and during the evening returned and went into camp at Matlock Church.
On the following (Sunday) morning the rifle-clubs, under the command of A. P. Butler, marched to Rouse’s Bridge, a point some four miles distant from Matlock Church. Here they found a considerable number of colored people assembled, some to attend church, and others for mutual consultation on account of the rumored purpose of the “rifle-clubs” to attack them. The “rifle-clubs” halted on the high ground, about half a mile from the bridge, and sent messengers to the colored people at the bridge, under the pretense of desiring a “compromise” with them. While the parley was being held several members of the rifle-clubs fired upon colored men who happened near them, mortally wounding one, Henry Campbell, and severely wounding several others.The colored men thus shot were all republicans. After much delay there, and upon the repeated assurance of the colored people that they desired no disturbance, and that they were seeking only safety in the swamp near the bridge, the “rifle-clubs,” toward evening, fell back and marched toward Union Bridge, a point some six miles distant. Here a detachment of some twenty or twenty-five men, under the command of Capt. Robert Dunbar, fired upon a small party of colored men, killing one, Basil Bryant, alias Basil Bush, and wounding several others. On the following morning, one of those wounded, Wilkins Hamilton, was found in his cabin and deliberately shot to death by some of the members of the rifle-clubs. Early on Monday morning, and during the day, the “rifle-clubs” were moving in various directions, murdering colored republicans. Kit Finnissee was shot in the morning and killed by a company or detachment under Capt. Angelo P. Brown, near the Station, on the Port Royal Railroad. Col. A. P. Butler was at the time present with this detachment, and ordered him shot. The colored men were there fired upon but escaped. Another detachment came upon five colored men in the cabin of Judah Kelsey, who had come in out of the swamp for their dinners, and murdered three of them, and tried to kill all of them, but the other two escaped by running. Here were killed David Bush, Sam Brown, and Warren Kelsey. Another detachment, numbering several hundred, with which at the time, near evening, was Col. A. P. Butler, near Ellenton Station, on the Port Royal Railroad, shot and killed John Kelsey. Many other colored men were here seen and fired upon, but escaped with their lives, also several colored men were taken prisoners and threatened with death, but were not murdered on their promising not to vote the republican ticket. During Monday night, September 18, Col. A. P. Butler with a large portion of his command, about five hundred men, suddenly turned back from Ellenton Station upon Rouse’s Bridge, some seven miles distant, and was there ready to attack the republicans on the morning of Tuesday, September 19, 1876. In consequence of the movement of the rifle-clubs, about seventy-five or one hundred colored republicans had been driven into this part of the swamp, where they were practically surrounded. In the councils of the rifle-clubs it had been determined that all these colored men in the swamp should be killed. For this purpose Colonel Butler’s forces were put in line of battle, with a skirmish-line thrown out, and the order to advance into the swamp had been given, and his command was in motion, and firing by the skirmishers on the republicans had commenced, when a detachment of United States troops, under command of Captain Lloyd and Lieutenant Hinton, arrived on the scene from Aiken Court-House and prevented the massacre. These colored men in the swamp and thus surrounded were nearly all without any weapons of defense at all, though a few, fifteen or twenty, had shotguns, but were without ammunition, and hence were wholly at the mercy of the rifle-clubs. The members of the rifle-clubs openly declared in the presence of the United States troops that it was their intention to have killed the last one of them, and they expressed the greatest disgust at the interference of the United States troops. There is no doubt that a fearful slaughter would have taken place but for the timely interference of the troops. Upon a parley held between Captain Lloyd and Col. A. P. Butler and his officers it was agreed that the rifle-clubs should disperse and return quietly to their homes, and that the colored men would go peaceably to theirs. This arrangement was most thankfully received by the colored people, who were wild with joy at their unexpected deliverance. Pursuant to the arrangement made by Captain Lloyd, the rifle-clubs began to disperse, but continued their murderous work upon the colored men on their way home. One party, after it left House’s Bridge, shot and killed Abram Hammond, alias Abram Blake, an old colored man past eighty years of age, who was quietly and innocently standing near the road when they passed. His body was riddled with bullets. Another party, consisting of two or three hundred, at Ellenton Station, having captured Simon Coker, a leading republican and member of the State legislature, deliberately took him out and shot him to death. Capt. O. N. Butler, (so-called,) of Augusta, Ga., commanded the firing-party, and he himself shot him with his revolver. Subsequently, on the same day, the rifle-clubs, about two miles below Ellenton Station, captured two other colored republicans, William Gooden and George Turner, and deliberately shot them to death. In the day following (Wednesday) Alonzo Ashley’s company, under his command, in the edge of Barnwell County, captured a leading colored republican named Edward W. Bush, finding him in his own house, and took him out a few rods from his door, and there, in full view of his family and friends, shot him to death. Many other colored republicans were killed in Barnwell, Edgefield, and Laurens Counties about this time by the rifle-clubs, or members of those organizations, and under similar circumstances to those above narrated. The whole number killed in Aiken and Barnwell Counties alone, at this time, is estimated at between thirty and forty, and about the same number were wounded. There is no evidence that a single white man was injured by a colored man throughout the whole affair. Two white men were killed; one in a quarrel with his fellow, the other shot and killed in the dark near his own home by an unknown person. The bare statement of the foregoing facts is sufficient. They shock every sentiment of humanity and justice, and call for the interposition of the strong arm of the Government to protect the rights and lives of our recently enfranchised fellow citizens.”