1874

 

Mt. Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota today.

NOTE TO TEACHERS: This description of school in 1874, from the novel Dan of Millbrook: A Story of American Life, by Charles Coffin, might interest your students. I can’t say for sure, because I retired in 2008, and didn’t find this until after I finished my career. 

I think students would be “impressed” by the variety of punishments used by the teacher in this selection, Miss Hyssop. 

They might also notice that in many ways, children haven’t changed. I myself have fond memories of making spitballs in seventh grade math class and shooting them at my more studious peers and bothering Kay, the girl of my dreams. 

That was back in 1962. 

Anyway, from the pen of Mr. Coffin:

 

Chapter V 

White Hair at School 

Upon the oaken seats of the school-house sat White Hair and his mates, – Moses Meek, Job Titicut, Ben Tottle, Miranda May, Linda Fair, Bell Blossom, Daisy Davenport and Mary Fielding. There were a troop besides, fity or more, from little ones just learning the alphabet, up to big boys and girls who are ready to enter the academy. Miss Hyssop was teacher.

 

Although the golden beams of the summer sun streamed through the windows and along the floor, it was nevertheless a chilly place, Caleb thought, for the sharp eyes of Miss Hyssop were on him all the time. … When he thought of the many years during which she had been a teacher, and of the great amount of knowledge she had imparted, when he saw how thin and spare she was, he came to the conclusion that by and by, if she did not stop, she would teach herself all away.

 

It was a dull business for little White Hair to sit through the long forenoons and longer afternoons on a bench so high that his feet did not reach the floor.

 

“Put down your hands and sit up straight, Master Caleb,” said Miss Hyssop, if perchance he put his hands above his head or leaned in any direction. If he did not put them down on the instant, Miss Hyssop rapped his knuckles. Now and then he would shoot paper spit-balls on the sly and snap them at Randa or Linda or Moses, but the chances were that for every spit-ball he had two pinches of his ears. If he rocked to and fro, or twirled his thumbs to make the time fly faster, Miss Hyssop thumped his head against the ceiling. If he was tired and sleepy and thought to take a nap, just as he was nicely fixed he found himself sprawling on the floor, a hooked nose hanging over him and sharp eyes looking him through.

 

“Night is the time to sleep,” said Miss Hyssop picking him up and sitting him down with a bump on the seat. Twice during the forenoon he stood with his toes to a crack in the floor and ducked his head when she said “Attention.”

 

When Miss Hyssop’s back was turned, it was a pleasure to tickle Bell Blossom slyly on the ear with a straw. Caleb liked to look at Bell, she had such dark glossy hair that curled all over her head, and black eyes that had a bright twinkle, and there were smiles always frisking around the dimples on her cheeks. Not for the world would he offend her, but then it was excellent fun to see her hand come up with a slap to brush away the fly when the straw tickled her. Bell was so good-natured, that when she found it was not a fly, instead of getting angry she took it in good part and shook her fist at him, with the smiles running all over her face, and though she did not whisper the words, she made her mouth say, “I’ll pay you, old fellow.” In her good nature she soon forgot all about paying him, and only wished she could help him out of the scrape when Miss Hyssop took him by the ear across the room to the jail under the desk, where she could stow away a culprit and keep him in confinement. Caleb could look out through a crack upon the school, and the school could look in upon him, as if he were a wild animal in a cage.

 

“There’s the monkey!” Moses whispered it to ell on one side and to Ben Tottle on the other. When Miss Hyssop turned round to see what was going on, Moses was studying hard, saying over to himself, “Seven times seven is forty-nine, eight times eight is fifty-six.” Miss Hyssop heard the tittering and giggling behind her, and Bell and Linda had their ears boxed, and Ben caught a half dozen red-hot blows on the palms of his hands, but Moses was studying so hard that nothing happened to him. They became acquainted with all the punishments that Miss Hyssop could devise. She made them sit on nothing, crooking the joints of the knees, and then varied the exercise by seating them on a sharp stone. They stood with their arms raised aloft like the fakirs of India; held sticks in their mouth; had marks innumerable set against their names on a “black list” pinned against the wall behind Miss Hyssop’s seat. Caleb now and then found himself sandwiched between Bell and Linda, which was indeed capital punishment – to say nothing of having his ears pinched and pulled and his head bumped against the ceiling. Moses could get his lessons in a minute or two at any time, and have all the rest of the day to make pictures on his slate, or whittle out whirligigs on the sly. When he had nothing else to do he speared flies with a pin, and laughed to see them kick, and he enjoyed it all the more because Linda and Randa pitied the poor creatures and covered their eyes with their hands when he held them up.

 

Moses had as much candy as he wanted from his father’s store. He almost always had some for Bell and Linda and Daisy, and other girls, and he gave of his treasures to Ben and Job, but not to Caleb.

 

Linda was at the head of the class. Moses was next, then Miranda, Job and Bell, then a long row of boys and girls. Caleb was at the foot, and had stood there so long that he had lost all heart.

 

“It ain’t no use to try,” he said to Job.

 

“You just keep digging away,” was the reply of this great good-natured fellow, with big ears, wide forehead and mild blue eyes. His ears were so large that Moses made fun of them.

 

“Job ought to hear more and know more than the rest of us, he’s got such thundering great ears,” he said, using one of the words he had heard in his father’s store, where the loungers of the village were accustomed to sit in the evening. Although Job had big ears, he was ever ready to give Caleb or anybody else a lift, if he could.

 

“Caleb is the bob to the kite,” said Moses in a whisper to Randa, looking contemptuously down the line. Upon the playground he called him “bobby,” and varied it to “baby” and “booby.” There was a sting in the words, and Caleb informed Job privately that if Moses didn’t mind what he was up to that he would catch it.

 

“I’ll tell you what to do,” said Job.

 

“What?”

 

“Get up above him.”

 

How to do it was the question. He would try. The taunt stimulated him. Job encouraged him. He astonished them all by spelling a word which Moses and all below him had missed. Miss Hyssop was surprised to see him march up the line and take his place next to the head, doing what he had never done before. She wondered what was going to happen. There was a strange fluttering about White Hair’s heart when he took his place beside Linda and saw her smile of welcome; but the pleasure of the victory was turned to pain when he saw the tears starting from Randa’s eyes and rolling down her cheeks.

 

Moses grew red in the face and there was a choking in his throat, but Job nodded his head to Caleb as much as to say, “I am glad of it.” Moses soon got over the uncomfortable feeling, and when Miss Hyssop’s back was turned, gave Caleb a rap with his fist in the hollow of his leg that almost brought him to the floor. Caleb was about to give Moses a chuck under the ear, but Miss Hyssop turned around to see what was going on, and he had no opportunity of paying him in his own coin.

 

It was Caleb’s first victory. It thrilled him. The bright light from Linda’s eyes shone into his soul and gave him a pleasure such as he never before had experienced.

 

“I ain’t a booby. I’ll show them what I can do,” he said to himself, elated by the triumph, but at the next round made a mistake and found Moses stepping above him. The next word sent him down another peg, and before the day was done he was back in his old place at the foot. He was disappointed, chagrined and irritated. He felt like knocking somebody down, Moses in particular.

 

Caleb is sure that Miss Hyssop is playing favorites – and gave him all the hardest words to spell. Then he remembers a story one of the girls had told – that their teacher had once dreamed of being the wife of Caleb’s father. But he came home from a visit “down country” with a “beautiful young wife, taking everybody by surprise.” 

Her dreams squashed, Miss Hyssop had “looked cross enough to bite off a board nail,” people in town said. 

“It was lucky for me,” said Caleb to himself, as he thought upon it. “I guess I’ve escaped a lot of spankings.”

 

But if there were punishments without number at school, there was pleasure unspeakable when school was out, in building dams by the roadside after a shower had filled the ditches; in floating shingles and bits of board downstream, making believe they were rafts on a river. On Saturday afternoons, what joy to play in the barn with Moses, Job, Ben, and a dozen other boys, hiding in out-of-the-way places, under the horse-crib, in the grain-bins, behind the cattle stalls, or covering themselves with hay in nooks and corners, and darting out at the right moment to reach the goal! What fun to jump from the high beams and go down with the swoop like that of a night hawk, landing upon the straw in the mow beneath!

 

Jonathan Jolley put up a swing under the elm, and Linda, Miranda and Bell, and all the other girls came to enjoy it. How nice to have Caleb pushed them, sending them through the air! If his arms ached now and then, he forgot it when he saw the bright glow on Randa’s cheeks. It was a pleasure to do what he could for such a dear girl, so unselfish, so kind, so considerate of the happiness of Linda and Bell and all the rest, saying after she had taken a few turns, “There, Caleb, now let me stop. I have had my share.”

 

Caleb did not know which he liked best, Miranda or Linda. Bell sometimes ran away with his cap, or tossed it over the fence, tickled his ears or put pebbles in his shoes in fun, with laughter bubbling from her lips. Miranda and Linda never played any such pranks; yet they loved to have a good time, and there was no place where they could enjoy themselves any better than at Captain Krinkle’s [Caleb’s father’s home]. No matter if they turned the house topsy turvy now and then. Mrs. Krinkle liked to see them do it. And it was the girl with violet eyes, the one that seemed so quiet, the one who would take only a few turns in the swing, that the others might have a chance, who was their ringleader.

 

“What shall we do next, Randa?” That was the question when they had exhausted the pleasure of a particular romp or a game, and Randa was seldom at a loss to know what it should be.

 

*

Reacting to the massive slaughter of the buffalo herds, Congress moves to ban it on federally controlled lands. President Grant pocket vetoes the bill. (See: 1876.)

Buffalo in Yellowstone today.

 

*

 

 Swarms of locusts descend on farms in Kansas and other Western state and eat everything, leaving “nothing but the mortgage.”

* 

Joseph Glidden invents barbed wire, called by some, “the devil’s hatband.”

*

 

April-October: Edward P. Ellis describes the battle over control of the government in Arkansas, oddly (I think) calling it a fight between “Radical Republicans” and “Liberal Republicans.” The former elected Elisha Baxter governor in 1872; but the latter, led by James Brooks, called fraud.

 

In April, Baxter obtained from the Circuit Court of Pulaski County “a degree of ‘ouster’ against Baxter.”

 

He took possession of the Court-House with nearly two hundred armed men, including several cannon. He proclaimed martial law, entered Little Rock with a strong force, and occupied the State House. Baxter naturally was indignant, but he was warned by the federal troops, who remained neutral, to do nothing that might bring on a conflict. Partisans flocked to both sides, until the capital of Arkansas was a picture of war times.

 

A number of negroes who were applauding an impassioned speech of Baxter were fired into, whether accidentally or not is uncertain. In an instant everyone seemed to be shooting, and a great loss of life must have resulted had not the Federal troops interfered. The situation was very tense and on April 30 a fierce fight took place between the factions, in which fully fifty Brooks men were killed and wounded. The streets of Little Rock were barricaded, and several more sharp skirmishes were accompanied by loss of life. The city – the only one at that time in the state – became an armed camp, with the hatred so bitter on each side that compromise was out of the question.

 

Baxter’s legislature met, May 11, and immediately asked for the protection of the United States. President Grant promptly recognized the Baxter government, and ordered all disorderly persons to disperse. There was a gigantic plot on foot to rob the State of more than $5,000,000 through the issuance of railway bonds. Baxter quarreled with the leaders of his party, and to punish him for his honesty, the State Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice John McClure, popularly known as “Poker Jack,” and which had refused to assume jurisdiction, now did so, on May 7, 1874, and reversing its former denial of jurisdiction, affirmed the decision of the Circuit Court in favor of Brooks.

 

The legislature provided for a constitutional convention on July 14, 1874, and the people at large ratified the act by a decisive majority. The new constitution, adopted by a vote with more than three to one, took away the governor’s enormous patronage and his power to declare martial law. It deprived the returning board of the dangerous authority it had held, and vested the right to compile the election returns, to reject fraudulent votes, and if necessary to order a new election, in a board of three sworn officers. The State Democracy declared these changes wise and just, and were so pleased that they offered the nomination for governor to Baxter, but he declined, and there being no nomination, the Democratic candidate, Augustus H. Garland, was elected governor, October 13, 1874. The Poland Committee of Congress endorsed the Arkansas constitution, declaring it republican in form, and recommended no interference with it by the United States government. The President took the opposite view, expressing his belief that the new constitution was revolutionary, but the House adopted the report, and the internal troubles in Arkansas were at an end.

 

On the recommendation of Governor Garland, March 25, the following year, “was observed as a day of thanksgiving for the happy deliverance from discord and strife.” Unless, of course, you were one of the “negroes,” who now saw your votes denied and then stripped, and the “strife” was replaced by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Editorial comment by the author of this document.

 

South Carolina also suffered much from the carpet-bag rule. Reference has been made to the grotesque scenes in her halls of legislation and to the villainy of her legislators. To illustrate: The railway company was chartered to lay eighty miles of track, for the state was to pay the company $10,000 upon the completion of each section of ten miles. When the first ten miles were finished, the company drew $10,000, took up the tracks just laid, and relaid them over the next ten miles, and then the second bonus was collected. This unique system was carried out to the end, so that the road when done an accepted by the State was just ten miles in length, and it cost the tax-payers $800,000. Any white convict in prison could secure freedom by paying a bribe. The worst criminals were released so as to secure their votes, and the juries were often composed of men who had committed more atrocious crimes than the prisoners under trial. One of the three justices of the Supreme Court was a negro and another a “carpet-bagger.” (1397-1399)

 

Ellis notes that, as in Arkansas, “the plunderers by and by quarrelled [sic] among themselves,” and carpetbag rule was overturned. (I blundered, and failed to keep the next page. Ellis appears to my eye to have never ventured out of his office to check matters on the ground. Totally clueless.)

 

The Ku Klux Klan, the rampant suppression of the vote, and the lynchings are not even mentioned.

Warning to white folks who supported African Americans voting.

 

*

 

South Carolina Congressman Joseph Hayne Rainey is concerned enough for the safety of his family to buy a second home in Windsor, Connecticut. (See also: 1875.)

*

June 14: Lafcadio Hearn, 23, marries Alethea Foley, 20, but soon loses his job, writing about crime for the Cincinnati Enquirer, because Foley was bi-racial. At the time such a marriage was illegal in Ohio, under an anti-miscegenation law. Hearn’s crime stories appeared under the byline: “Dismal Man.” Hearn and his wife divorced three years later, and he moved to New Orleans.

*

 

August 29: the Chicago Inter-Ocean publishes the following story, regarding the discovery of gold in the Black Hills. (From a photostatic copy in the Custer County museum, by way of Dakota Territory Times, Summer 1999, 17)

 

I’m not sure whether John R. Curtis was the author of this report, or the person who dug up the article for the Dakota Territory Times.

 

The “n-word” does appear; but the last sentence truly captures the nature of the discover, as opposed to the treaty rights of the Sioux.

 

____________________

 

“From the grass roots down it was pay dirt.”

 

Chicago Inter-Ocean

____________________

 

 

They call it a Ten Dollar Diggin’s, and all the camp is aglow with the gold fever. In previous dispatches and letters I have told of the discovery, but the place then hadn’t reached the dignified name of a diggin’s and only a few little yellow particles had been washed out of a pan full of sand. This is the first opportunity our miners have had to make a really fair test of the color, and it has yielded them abundantly. They scraped a little along the bed of a brook till they got color, then with a spade and pick began to dig beside it a hole about as long and wide and deep as a human grave. From the grassroots down it was pay dirt, and after a dozen pans or more had been washed out, the two persevering men who will be the pioneers of a new golden state came into camp with a little yellow dust wrapped carefully up in the leaf of an old account book. It was examined with the microscope, was tried with all the tests that the imaginations of fifteen hundred excited campaigners could suggest, and it stood every one. It was washed with acid, mixed with mercury, cut, chewed, and tasted, till everybody was convinced and went to bed dreaming of the wealth of Croesus.

 

At daybreak there was a crowd around the diggin’s with every conceivable accoutrement. Shovels and spades, picks, axes, tent pins, pot hooks, bowie knives, mess pans, kettles, plates, platters, tin cups, and everything within reach that could either lift dirt or hold it was put in service by the worshippers of that God, GOLD.

 

And those were few didn’t get a “showing” – a few yellow particles clinging to a globule of mercury that rolled indifferently in and out of the sand. Officers and privates, mulewhackers and scientists, all met on a common level, and the great equalizer was that insignificant yellow dust.

 

The most excited contestant in this chase after fortune was “Aunt Sally,” the sutter’s colored cook, a huge mountain of dusky flesh, and “The only non-white woman that ever saw the Black Hills,” as she frequently says. She is an old frontiersman, as it were, having been up and down the Missouri ever since its muddy water was broken by a paddlewheel, and having accumulated quite a little property had settled down in Bismarck to ease and luxury.

 

“Mondy didn’t brung dis chile out hyar, now. I tells ye dat; dis hain’t no common nigger, now. I tells ye; now it ain’t,” she says to me one day. “I’se got done workin’ fur money, I have, now hyar me; an’ ye wouldn’t cotch dis gal totin’ chuck out hyar now, I tells ye, if it hadn’t been for seeing dese hyar Black Hills dat Custer fetched us to. I’se here’d ‘bout dese Hills long ‘fore Custer did. Now I’m talkin.’ When I was on de Missouri – cooked on the first boat dat eber run up dat stream, an’ I hadn’t had no hard luck, neither, now, I tells ye folks. But I wanted to see dese Black Hills – an’ day ain’t no blacker dan I am, and I’m no African, now you just bet I ain’t; I’m none of yer common herd; I’ve got white blood in me. I have, an I’ve got the money to back it. Now I have, I tell you.”

 

Aunt Sally’s dreams of gold

 

Aunt Sally expected to find the Black Hills in some indefinite way or other adapted to the colored race, and was terribly disappointed, but the gold discovered compensated for the lack of any distinctive mark of her race, and she joined in the developments with religious fervor. She talked incessantly about them from morning to night, and when she packed her mammoth body into a little wagon that was provided for her and her “traps,” her dreams of gold miners and everything “dats good on dis hyar earth, now I ‘low.” She went to the stream when the strike was made “scratched grabble,” and staked out her claim and she says she’s coming here as soon as anybody “now you hyar me.”

 

The miners traced up the creek some distance finding color at every step, till the lead ran under a huge quartz mountain. Subsequent investigation proved that there was  A BELT, THIRTY MILES WIDE, as near as they could determine, running from the southwest to the northeast, and embracing all these quartz mountains which we have looked at with so much admiration for their exterior beauty. Gold must be under them, the miners say, and the mineralogists add that it is strange if there is not, but in such a shape that we cannot reach it. No facilities for blasting or mining are at hand. We have no powder except what the little brass cartridge shells hold, and the earth will not unbosom itself to any other power; Neither have we time to make the application, for more than half our time is gone and half our rations used, and much of the country to explore yet. But the expedition has solved the mystery of the Black Hills, and will carry back the news that there is gold here, in quantities as rich as we ever dreamed of. The method to reach it is yet to be provided. It is the very heart of the Sioux territory – in their choicest hunting ground – and they hold the land with as wholly reverence as the savage heart can feel. No one can come here with any safety, or with any legal right as long as the treaties that now exist hold good, and the wealth that we have found must be for several years yet be under the ban.

 

John R. Curtis

 

*

 

Sam Booth’s song, The Lips that Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine, is published, composed by George T. Evans. It is dedicated to: “The Women’s Crusade Against Liquor Throughout the World.”

 

The demon of Rum is abroad in the land,

His victims are falling on every hand,

The wise and the simple, the brave, and the fair,

No station too high for his vengeance to spare,

O women, the sorrow and pain is with you,

And so be the joy and victory too;

With this for your motto, and succor divine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.

 

The homes that were happy are ruined and gone,

The hearts that were merry are wretched and lone,

And lives full of promise of good things to come,

Are ruined and wreck’d by the demon of Rum,

Wives, maidens, and mothers, to you it is given,

To rescue the fallen and point them to heav’n.

With God for your guide you shall win by this sign,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.

 

O mothers, whose sons tarry long at the bowl,

Who love their good name as you love your soul,

O maidens with fathers, and brothers, and beaux;

Whose lives you would rescue from infinite woes,

Let war be your watchword, from shore unto shore,

Till Rum, and his legions shall ruin no more,

And write on your banners in letters that shine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,

The lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine.

 

* 

In 1874, there was violence in Louisiana, “when the country was startled by the news of the arrest and deliberate shooting of six Republican officials. As in all such cases the reports were conflicting, one side declaring it a merciless war of whites upon blacks, the other and uprising of the blacks themselves.” (11/155) 

Andrews quotes a writer in Louisiana, who wrote, “There was a nobility in the white skin more sacred and more respected than the one derived from the letters-patent of kings.” (11/152) 

White leaders complained about the wasteful spending of the carpet-baggers’ government. Judge Black considered it “safe to say that a general conflagration, sweeping over all the State from one end to the other and destroying every building and every article of personal property, would have been a visitation of mercy in comparison to the curse of such a government.” (11/155)

 

Andrews calls what happened next a coup-d’état. 

[Governor] Kellogg had a body of Metropolitan Police, mostly colored, paid for by the city of New Orleans put under his personal command which formed a part of his militia. Over and against this was the New Orleans White League, which again is to be distinguished from the White League of the State. On September 14th a mass-meeting was called in New Orleans to protest against the Governor’s seizure of arms shipped to private parties. By 11 a.m. the broad sidewalks were filled for several squares, and there was a general suspension of business. A committee was appointed to wait upon the Governor and request him to abdicate. He had fled from the Executive Office to the Custom-house, a great citadel, garrisoned at the time by United States troops. From his retreat he sent word declining to entertain any communication. Their leaders advised the people to get arms and return to assist the White League in executing plans that would be arranged. A large number formed in a procession and marched up Poydras Street. By 3 p.m. armed men were posted at street-crossings south of Canal Street. Soon a strong position was taken in Poydras Street, the streets between Poydras and Canal being barricaded with [street] cars turned sideways. General Ogden commanded the citizens and superintended these arrangements. Five hundred Metropolitans, with cavalry and artillery, took their station at the head of Canal Street, while General Longstreet, their leader, rode up and down Canal Street calling upon the armed citizens to disperse. About 4 p.m. the Metropolitans assaulted the citizens’ position. A sharp fight ensued. General Ogden’s horse was shot under him, as was General Badger’s, on the Kellogg side. The colored Metropolitans broke at the first fire, deserting their white comrades. The citizens’ victory was soon complete, General Longstreet and others seeking refuge in the Custom-house. Next morning, at seven, the State House was in the citizens’ hands; two hours later the whole Metropolitan force surrendered. The barricades were torn down and streetcars resumed their trips.

 

Lieutenant-Governor Penn hastened to assure the blacks that no harm was meant toward them, their property, or their rights. “We war,” said he, “only against the thieves, plunderers and spoilers of the state.”

 

President Grant responded by sending troops and warships to New Orleans and instructed U.S. forces to refuse to recognize the new government. 

Voter fraud was now alleged against the government of Kellogg. 

Many white citizens clearly entitled to registry were refused arbitrarily, while the colored people were furnished registration papers on which, in many instances, they could vote in different wards; and colored crews of steamboats transiently visiting this port were permitted to swell the number of voters. The White League, which, outside New Orleans, seems not to have been an armed body, was declared a necessary measure of defence against a formidable oath-bound order of blacks.

 

Kellogg explained the roots of the uprising this way. His opponents, he said, “first want the offices, and that is the meaning of this outburst. The Governor of Louisiana wields an enormous amount of patronage.” Those who opposed him had a “hunger” for the spoils of government. (11/159) 

Those who supported the White League responded with a petition. The mention of “shackles,” in a former slave state strikes a modern reader as ironic: 

We, the down-trodden people of once free Louisiana, now call upon the people of the free States of America, if you would yourselves remain free and retain the right of self-government, to demand in tones that cannot be misunderstood or disregarded, that the shackles be stricken from Louisiana, and that the power of the United States army may no longer be used to keep a horde of adventurers in power. (11/160)

 

* 

Beverly Nash, a black man, after he became a state senator in 1874, explained, 

“The reformers complain of taxes being too high. I tell you that they are not high enough. I want them taxed until they put those lands back where they belong, into the hands of those who worked for them. You worked for them; you labored for them and were sold to pay for them, and you ought to have them.” (11/120)

 

Andrews’ unthinking racism shows again when he writes: 

In their days of serfdom the negroes’ besetting sin had been thievery. Now that the opportunities for this were multiplied, the fear of punishment gone, and many a carpet-bagger at hand to encourage it, the prevalence of public and private stealing was not strange. Larceny was nearly universal, burglary painfully common. At night watch had to be kept over property with dogs and guns. It was part, or at least an effect, of carpet-bag policy to aggravate race jealousies and sectional misunderstandings. The duello, still good form all over the South, induced disregard of law and of human life. The readiness of white men to use the pistol kept the colored people respectful to some extent, though they fearfully avenged any grievances from whites by applying the torch to out-buildings, gin-houses, and often dwellings. To white children they were at times extremely insolent and threatening. White ladies had to be very prudent with their tongues, for colored domestics gave back word for word, and even followed up words with blows if reprimanded too cuttingly. It was also, after emancipation, notoriously unsafe for white ladies to venture from home without an escort…If a white man shot a colored man, an excited mob of blacks would try to lynch him. His friends rallied to the rescue, and a riot often resulted. The conditions were reversed if a white man was shot by a Negro. (11/121)

 

“Colored men,” Andrews writes, “were quite too unintelligent to make laws or even to elect those who were to do so.” (11/121) 

Racist stereotype.

The colored legislators of South Carolina furnished the State House with gorgeous clocks at $480 each, mirrors at $750, and chandeliers at $650. Their own apartments were a barbaric display of gewgaws, carpets and upholstery.” They also bought fancy china cuspidors at $8 apiece. 

As for the way the Negroes ran the legislature, a white eyewitness said, “No one is allowed to talk five minutes without interruption.” Lawmakers, he continued, constantly shouted each other down, 

and one interruption is signal for another and another, until the original speaker is smothered under an avalanche of them. … Their struggles to get the floor, their bellowing and physical contortions, baffle description. The Speaker’s hammer plays a perpetual tattoo, all to no purpose. The talking and interruptions from all quarters go on with the utmost license. Everyone esteems himself as good as his neighbor and puts in his oar, apparently as often for love of riot and confusion as for anything else. (11/122)

 

Violence became more and more the rule, as whites tried to beat back any hopes that blacks had of gaining equality. 

Andrews does provide examples: 

It is quite true that where negroes were thought to be politically dangerous or were otherwise obnoxious to the whites they received little consideration. Sixteen were taken from a jail in Tennessee and shot by a band of masked horsemen, their bodies being left in the road. (11/129)

 

In Mississippi, a battle for control of government exploded in violence: 

Before light one morning in the winter of 1874-75, the white citizens of Vicksburg, Miss., were roused by the news that armed negroes were approaching the city. They sprang to arms and organized. Just outside the city limits a detachment of whites met a body of two hundred negroes and soon put them to rout, killing six, wounding several, and taking some prisoners. Almost at the same time a similar engagement was in the progress near the monument where Pemberton surrendered to Grant in 1863. The man who headed the citizens said that the conflict lasted only a few minutes. The negroes fled in wild disorder, leaving behind twenty killed and wounded. At still other points negro bands were charged upon and routed. Three whites were killed and three wounded, while of the colored about seventy-five were killed and wounded and thirty or forty made prisoners. By noon the war was over, and on the following day business was resumed amid quiet and order.

 

The names of the leaders on either side no longer matter. We do know that a Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, 

proclaimed a state of riot and disorder, and invoked the aid of all citizens in upholding the laws. Upon receipt of the Governor’s proclamation the Mayor of Vicksburg issued a counter-manifesto asserting that the mass-meeting, which the Governor had denounced as riotous and as having driven the sheriff from his office, was a quiet and orderly gathering of taxpayers who, without arms or violence, had “requested the resignation of irresponsible officials.” His Honor continued: “Whereas the Governor’s proclamation has excited the citizens of the county, and I have this moment received information that armed bodies of colored men have organized and are now marching to the city, I command such “unlawful assemblages and armed bodies of men to disperse.”

 

Spite of his Honor’s denial, Governor Ames ascribed the troubles to violence and intimidation against blacks by whites, constituting a reign of terror, and convened the legislature in extra session. … But breaches of the peace continued. At a public meeting in Yazoo City one man was killed and three or four wounded. The speaker of the evening, a Republican officeholder, left the county, professing to believe his life in danger. In Clinton, three days later, at a republican barbeque, where there was a discussion between a Republican and a Democrat, a personal quarrel sprang up, during which two negroes were shot. This was the signal for a general attack by blacks upon whites, in the course of which three white men were killed and several wounded. Later in the night seven or eight negroes were killed, when the armed men dispersed and quiet was restored. (11/142-147)