How the end of slavery led to starvation and death for millions of black Americans

[FarCenter]

In the brutal chaos that followed the civil war, life after emancipation was harsh and often short, new book argues

Hundreds of thousands of slaves freed during the American civil war died from disease and hunger after being liberated, according to a new book.

The analysis, by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College, casts a shadow over one of the most celebrated narratives of American history, which sees the freeing of the slaves as a triumphant righting of the wrongs of a southern plantation system that kept millions of black Americans in chains.

But, as Downs shows in his book, Sick From Freedom, the reality of emancipation during the chaos of war and its bloody aftermath often fell brutally short of that positive image. Instead, freed slaves were often neglected by union soldiers or faced rampant disease, including horrific outbreaks of smallpox and cholera. Many of them simply starved to death.

After combing through obscure records, newspapers and journals Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870. He writes in the book that it can be considered "the largest biological crisis of the 19th century" and yet it is one that has been little investigated by contemporary historians.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/16/slavery-starvation-civil-war

[dionysus]

1. and then fled to northern industrial cities looking for work, where they were exploited further,

and thus the beginning of the American ghettos...

[Zalatix]

2. Oh great, right wingers will use this as justification for saying slavery was better.

[Major Nikon]

7. They have already been doing that for decades, if not hundreds of years

Their argument, if you can call it that, is the slaves were better off in the US than from where they came from.

[coalition_unwilling]

9. Their argument, back in the 1840s and 50s, was that slaves were better off as slaves than

as emancipated laborers in the industrialized north subject to 'wage slavery'.

I think the slaves themselves made it quite clear where their preferences lay.

[Zalatix]

10. The same bunch that said "give me freedom or give me death"?

[Major Nikon]

11. Modern version...

[Judi Lynn]

13. Thanks for making the point. It was my immediate thought as soon as I saw it, too. Hideous. n/t

[Scootaloo]

3. All because the Union wasn't willing to grant the slaves the rights to THEIR PROPERTY

Seriously, they were the ones farming the land. They were the ones building the towns. They were the ones hammering the horseshoes - and for that matter caring for the horses. By any rights, every scrap of property fashioned by the hands of slaves should have passed to the hands of emancipated men and women, and the slaveowners - the thieves - should have been treated accordingly.

[HiPointDem]

4. Slaves should have owned New York City. They built a lot of it.

New York...was also, paradoxically, for more than two centuries, the capital of American slavery. As many as 20% of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. First Dutch and then English merchants built the city's local economy largely around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced - sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, chocolate, and ultimately, cotton. New York ship captains and merchants bought and sold slaves along the coast of Africa and in the taverns of their own city. Almost every businessman in 18th-century New York had a stake, at one time or another, in the traffic in human beings.

During the colonial period, 41% of the city's households had slaves, compared to 6% in Philadelphia and 2% in Boston... Slaves slept in the cellars and attics of town houses or above farmhouse kitchens in the countryside. They did virtually all of the work of many households - bringing in the firewood, the water, and the food; cleaning the house and the clothing; removing the wastes. They were vital to the work of early craftsmen and manufacturers, and many became skilled artisans themselves.

And they performed almost all the heavy labor of building New York's infrastructure. Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city - the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital.

The city's Common Council passed one restrictive law after another: forbidding blacks from owning property or bequeathing it to their children; forbidding them to congregate at night or in groups larger than three; requiring them to carry lanterns after dark and to remain south of what is now Worth Street; threatening the most severe punishments, even death, for theft, arson, or conspiracy to revolt - and carrying out these punishments brutally and publicly time and again. Finally, slavery lasted a long time in New York, for fully 200 years, until it was abolished in 1827...

http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/about_exhibit.htm

[dkf]

8. I guess the Chinese should have owned the railroads then.

[HiPointDem]

12. maybe. why not?

[Zalatix]

18. +1,000!

[Honeycombe8]

45. And the Irish should've owned all the houses?

Since they were the maids and house workers?

And the streets of New York....since the Irish, as cops, walked the streets of New York constantly, keeping the peace.

[hfojvt]

34. that may have been true in 1865

but even then, I doubt it.

The population of NYC in 1830 was 202,589. The population by 1860 was 813, 669 and by 1870 942,292 with 396,099 people in Brooklyn. Given the 300%+ increase in population, I am guessing that much of NYC was built after 1830.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_the_United_States_by_population_by_decade

[HiPointDem]

35. so what? slaves cleared built a lot of pre-colonial and colonial NY. they laid the foundations

of the city. without them, it wouldn't be there -- there simply wasn't enough free labor at the time.

[hfojvt]

40. my house has a foundation

but if you build just the foundation, it is not accurate to say you built the house. Without them, it might not be so big, but since it is currently an abomination that causes desolation http://journals.democraticunderground.com/hfojvt/64, being smaller might not be so bad. Why does a city need free labor to be built?

[HiPointDem]

41. a city needs *labor* to be built. without slaves there would not have been enough *labor*

willing to do the building. which is why slavery is a typical economic strategy in sparsely populated areas, new colonization, etc.

[Honeycombe8]

46. But people built New York before then. And of course people have built most of it after that time.nt

[HiPointDem]

48. people built ny before the pre-colonial period? slaves were in NY from its foundation & did most

of the heavy lifting. Slaves literally built the place.


Chattel slavery in... New York began in 1626, when a shipment of 11 Africans was unloaded into New Amsterdam harbor by a ship that belonged to the Dutch West India Company.

Before this time, the company had attempted to encourage Dutch agricultural laborers to immigrate to and populate New Netherlands. This experiment was unsuccessful, as most immigrants wanted to accrue a sizable income in the fur trade and return to their home country in luxury.

The company turned to slavery, which was already well established in the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa. For more than two decades after the first shipment, the Dutch West India Company was dominant in the importation of slaves...a number of slaves were imported directly from the company's stations in Angola to New Netherlands to clear the forests, lay the roads, and provide other public services to the colony.

The lack of private settlers in the colony led to the company's over-dependence on slaves. While the slaves laid the foundations of the future New York, they were described by the Dutch as "proud and treacherous", a stereotype for African-born slaves.

The English took over New Amsterdam and the colony in 1664. They continued to import slaves to support the work needed. Enslaved Africans performed a wide variety of skilled and unskilled jobs, mostly in the burgeoning port city and surrounding agricultural areas. In 1703 more than 42% of New York City's households held slaves, a percentage higher than in the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, and second only to Charleston in the South.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_York

And they performed almost all the heavy labor of building New York's infrastructure. Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city - the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital.

http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/about_exhibit.htm

The slaves cleared land, grew crops and built roads, buildings and defenses. Wall Street, where the New York Stock Exchange is located, runs along what was once the wall of a fort built by slaves. Slaves built Fort Amsterdam, where Battery Park is now located. And they cut the road famous today for its theaters: Broadway....New Amsterdam did not have enough colonists to do the work needed to create a major port city... efforts to get more Dutch people to move there largely failed. So did efforts to put Native Americans from nearby villages to work... "Bringing the captured African seamen to New Amsterdam seemed to solve these problems. The Africans could be forced to work, and they could not escape and go home." ... Historians say that without slave labor, New Amsterdam might not have survived...

"Almost anything that people bought in New York – cheese, tobacco, cloth, rum, sugar, butter – was grown or made by enslaved labor," the historical society says....The local economy was built on a large, unpaid labor force that kept stores well-supplied and prices reasonable.

http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/a-23-2006-02-19-voa2-83131317/126646.html

In 1991, contractors unearthed an African burial site in Lower Manhattan. The story pathologists found in those bones is related here. The early slaves had spinal fractures and severe deformations from hauling stones and other heavy loads over many years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100801298.html

Slaves literally built the wall in Wall Street, not to mention the street itself. Not to mention that it was $$$ from the slave trade that helped make NYC a financial center in the first place.

Not to mention that many prominent NY families first got rich on the backs of their slaves. The Roosevelts (who first made their $$ in the sugar industry) spring immediately to mind. The Stuyvesant family (ancestors of a number of our present-day big-name politicians) is another.

http://www.brooklynron.com/bedstuystreet_stuyvesant.html

And even after the abolition of slavery in NY state, NYC financiers continued to be heavily involved in financing the slave trade & the sale of slave-produced goods -- NYC was probably more involved in this finance/brokering aspect than any other part of the country. This isn't any obscure history:

"New York's whole economy was built on the cotton industry," said Richard Rabinowitz, who curated the 9,000-square foot exhibition. "New York was in every sense a slave city."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100801298.html

Slaves & slavery *made* NY. I don't know why people seem to want to minimize these facts.

[Honeycombe8]

56. So did the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the English, you name it. nt

[HiPointDem]

58. Not anywhere near the role that slavery played in building NYC, both through direct slave labor &

through the profits amassed in trading slaves & trading slave-produced goods.

NYC finance = built on the slave trade. Every major financial house.

And nobody was building NYC before the pre-colonial period.

[HiPointDem]

49. a big chunk of the money that built it "after that time" came from financing the slave trade and

slave-produced goods.

just because ny outlawed slavery in 1826 doesn't mean new yorkers stopped being involved in slavery. they were involved up to their ears, and by "they," i mean the big shots.

[MrSlayer]

5. Somehow, I think it would have been different had Lincoln lived.

His assassination is a black mark on this country for many reasons. So much would be different.

[bhikkhu]

6. Absolutely. Andrew Johnson was one of the worst presidents

...and the only reason he was on the ticket to begin with was for "balance" - to gain some of the asshat vote (which Johnson represented well) from groups who basically hated or distrusted Lincoln and his policies.

[LuvNewcastle]

14. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough will in the North

to handle the situation properly. Each property where slaves were owned should have been given, at least in part, to the slaves who lived there. The bigger plantations which were cared for by a larger number of slaves should have been given completely to the former slaves. However, the people with the slaves were the people who had the most power and taking away their land would have taken more effort than most people in the North were willing to apply. It would have been like fighting another war for the Army to seize the various properties and divide them as they should have been and the country was far too weary by then to do what needed to be done. They all just wanted to go home.

[jwirr]

28. And as the descendant of one of those northern soldiers I am not foolish enough to think that most

of us did not realize that this war would go on until the present day in the form of racism. No doubt we wanted the war ended like most of us today and expected that the black former slaves would just find their place in the American system like we did when we came from Europe. Unfortunately racism did not allow that.

[Christopher44]

15. Spam deleted by Violet_Crumble (MIR Team)

[REP]

16. I think I would prefer to die on my feet than live on my knees

That is not to say that this country's treatment of the former enslaved was not shameful, of course; merely that enslavement was not "better."

[macrolly]

17. slaves

yes it bad work doing american soldiers and ithink always bad make problems not only diseases so many i here to tell a site [url= http://www.ezdia.com/epad/tutorial-jquery-struts-2-framework/319/] struts 2jquery [/url]

[GCP]

19. Is this in English?

[UnrepentantLiberal]

20. Say what?

[alphafemale]

22. wut?

Random word something something HERESY something something another random word or three.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

23. Well, doing American soldiers really isn't great work.

yes it bad work doing american soldiers

[PavePusher]

31. Opinions vary... n/t

[spanone]

36. who could argue with those fine words?

[deutsey]

53. lol

[EvolveOrConvolve]

37. "site struts 2jquery"

Intriguing, please continue

[surrealAmerican]

21. Undoubtedly true, yet ...

... the Civil War would have resulted in famine and disease in the South whether the slaves had been freed or not.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

24. I believe they were more capable at handling famine and food shortages than their former owners.

Their former owners had been spoiled by slavery and being catered to. The slaves were given scraps of food and had to grow their own food in small plats where they could. They also, I'm assuming, knew how to hunt game. I'd say they'd learned enough to take care of themselves and their families and were able to thrive on very little and passed that on to their children. I think it made them stronger people than the asshats who had owned them and gave them an advantage. And this just pissed off the white farmers in the south. Anyone who tells you slavery ended with Emancipation has no idea what they are talking about. Slavery didn't end until the civil rights movement in the 60s. I'm hesitant to say it's completely gone in the south since there are still people living in such poverty and squalor in the south still working for the families who owned their ancestors before the war. And given the attitude of the woman mentioned in the OP, I'm thinking it might take 5 or 6 more generations to fully get rid of the racism in that area, if it ever goes away.

[Zalatix]

51. 5 or 6 more generations? Seriously?

We can't make it go away in the New York Police Department. That's a bit north of the Mason-Dixon line. Racism will NEVER go away in America, much less in the South.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

52. I also said if at all...

The way I said it can be taken as: It will either take a really long time or it will never go away.

[Honeycombe8]

25. I didn't read the study, but saying lots of freed slaves died 1862-1870 is meaningless...

unless you compare it to the # of white people who died during that time.

From 1862-1865 we were in a Civil War. Thousands upon thousands of white people died during that war, both in the war, or from starvation, or in the prison camps. Esp. those in the south.

So it stands to reason that freed slaves would have fared at least that poorly, and probably worse, just as anyone who was poor and without resources would've faced a harsher situation than someone with money.

I have no trouble believing that freed slaves were hit the hardest, since they would not have been able to get hired and paid decently for regular jobs, after teh war, esp if they stayed in the south. And altho they could get jobs in the north, they were probably underpaid, and there probably weren't enough jobs, since this was a time of war, and there was a sudden rush of fugitives from the south.

Lincoln himself thought that freed slaves should be sent to Africa, because their future in America would have been doubtful, given the history of slavery in the country.

[Igel]

32. It's always a good idea to state the obvious. So few do, and are surprised by it when it's uttered.

This was according to a literature professor I once studied with. He was right.

In this case, you say, "Oh, the writer's just stating the obvious." The writer's point is that nobody's said the obvious because they wanted to focus on a morality tale.

The morality tale shifted over the years: From the valiant Northern whites rescuing the poor, indigent blacks from the hateful Southern whites; to having blacks participate in their own emancipation; to simply fighting against the "human wrong" of slavery. The rationale has shifted from religion to economics to human rights. The fighters went from just whites to include black soldiers, so that African-Americans "owned" their liberation; to recognizing that black owners of black slaves were also present in the South, so that no one race held all the moral trump cards.

It's been a messy morality tale, but it's still one of right over wrong, and right never does wrong. There was no downside to the virtuous victims, but horrors properly inflicted on the unjust oppressors.

Heck, if Sherman did today what he did then he'd be indicted for war crimes. Destruction of infrastructure and food supplies in order to demoralize the civilian population and undermine the Southern economy. But it's a good thing because it served a higher purpose, and only the wicked suffered.

Downs rewrites this history. The Northerners on the whole didn't care about black suffering. (Undermine morality tale.) Southerners couldn't. (The evil aside, they, too, suffered.) And the suffering wasn't just the same as under slavery, but resulting from the horrors of war and the consequences of a vindictive "reconstruction." We argue now that sanctions against Iran and Zimbabwe hurt the poor; imagine destroying the country and then imposing sanctions--morality is now blurred.

Sometimes stating the obvious is painful. Just waving your hands and saying, "Eh, he's just stating the obvious--it's meaningless so let's ignore it" is a way of masking the obvious and making it go away so we can support the dominant narrative. "We good, they bad."

"We bad, they worse" is hard for a lot of people to stomach.

[frogmarch]

43. Many of the blacks who owned

slaves were freed slaves who had bought their slave family members in order to provide for them and keep them close. I'd do the same for my still-enslaved family members if I'd been a freed slave.

[Honeycombe8]

44. I think those who did that, then freed the relatives they had bought.

That's what I've read. Although I'm not intimately familiar with how that all worked, and I'm sure different people did things differently, for different reasons.

[frogmarch]

47. On an episode of

"Who Do You Think You Are," the celebrity whose genealogy was being explored (I can't think of his name. He's a well-known black actor) was dismayed to learn that some of his ancestors who were free owned slaves. Further research showed that the slaves were family members of the free ancestor who owned them. The historian explained that free blacks often bought their slave relatives to give them good homes and to keep them from being sold to other people.

I don't fully understand the laws pertaining to the freeing of slaves before the abolition of slavery. I'll look up manumission.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manumission

snip:

After invention of the cotton gin in 1793, which enabled the development of extensive new areas for new types of cotton cultivation, manumissions decreased due to increased demand for slave labor. In the nineteenth century, slave revolts such as the Haitian Revolution and especially the 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner increased slaveholder fears, and most southern states passed laws making manumission nearly impossible. Before the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery after the American Civil War in 1866, manumission was sometimes accomplished at the death of the owner, under conditions in his will.

[bemildred]

26. Reconstruction failed, and we are still paying for that failure.

However, it was not the end of slavery that caused it, it was political incompetence that caused it.

[jwirr]

27. So this author assumes there weren't deaths related to being a slave. And his assumption that

freeing slave led to death by deseases like smallpox and cholera is idiotic. Those deseases existed prior to emancipation. He may have been correct that many died of starvation for two reasons: they had a hard time getting work because pro-slavery southerners refused to hire them and two they were never provided with the 40 acres and a mule they were promised.

[Igel]

29. The 40-acres-and-a-mule "promise" was limited in area and in duration.

It was based on a special field order by Sherman to address a very real problem: After he went through an area and destroyed the civilian infrastructure (crops, railroads, roads, towns) the slaves followed him and his army. They needed protection. And they needed food.

Armies in hostile territory have a supply problem to begin with, esp. when they have a policy of destroying rail lines behind them. The Army lived off the land, meaning by confiscating food from civilians whose lands they occupied--and having to worry about thousands of black families trailing behind them just made "living off the land" harder. Of course, the problem was also largely self-created: By confiscating or destroying foodstocks in areas they'd gone through, Sherman's Army inevitably destroyed the foodstocks and crops that the slaves in the area would have relied on, as well. (You can call this a "righteous war crime," if you'd like--if we did it to anybody else it would be a war crime and Sherman would be equivalent to Hitler.)

So in the three states in the extreme SE of the US, Sherman instituted a policy of confiscating white-owned land and giving it to blacks, 40 acres per family. Some got mules, as well. That would tie the former slaves to the land, and they'd have to choose between staying on land that might not feed them for months and following Sherman, who didn't want to have to feed them.

The "policy" was just where Sherman had conquered, and was revoked in less than a year by his Commander in Chief.

In the hundred years that followed, the special field order concerning land morphed in the public's mind to include the mythical mule, was taken to have been official US/federal policy or law, and was extended to include the entire territory of the former Confederacy (and allied territories).

[alphafemale]

42. Dufuskee. the Geechee Gullah culture.

It's in danger of dying out know because the Island is being crowed out by resort.

[HiPointDem]

50. +1

[Tsiyu]

54. How do you think native Americans were defeated?

Their crops were stolen even by the first colonists.

Fields burned, crops slashed, peach trees chopped down, their villages torched, buffalo
killed and left to rot.

It's how the plantation owner was able to have the land in the first place.

Somehow it was not a war crime when done to dark people? When done to white people,
destroying all their food is a war crime?

The Union was merely repeating the successful strategy they'd learned worked - to steal
land and then give it to wholesome white people to plant. So they used it on fellow white people.

The strategy worked in both situations.

[Phhhtttt]

30. KICK NT

[malaise]

33. that so-called English 'gentleman' Thomas Carlyle wanted us to starve as welll -

but in the tropics pumpkins were plentiful and he was disgusted. Check the title of his famous paper.
http://www.thephora.net/forum/archive/index.php/t-6572.html
<snip>

Sunk in deep froth oceans of “Benevolence,” “Fraternity,” “Emancipa- tion-principle,” “Christian Philanthropy,” and other amiable-looking, but most baseless, and in the end baleful and all-bewildering jargon, sad pro- duct of a sceptical eighteenth century, and of poor human hearts left destitute of any earnest guidance, and dis- believing that there ever was any, Christian or Heathen, and reduced to believe in rose-pink Sentimentalism alone, and to cultivate the same under its Christian, Antichristian, Broad- brimmed, Brutus-braded, and other forms, has not the human species gone strange roads during that period? And poor Exeter Hall, cultivating the Broad-brimmed form of Christian Sentimentalisin, and long talking and bleating and braying in that strain, has it not worked out results? Our West Indian legislatings, with their spoutings, anti-spoutings, and interminable jangle and babble; our twenty millions down on the nail for blacks of our own; thirty gradual millions [p.241] more, and many brave British lives to boot, in watching blacks of other people's; and now at last our ruined sugar-estates, differential sugar-duties, “immigration loan,” and beautiful blacks sitting there up to the ears in pumpkins, and doleful whites sitting here without potatoes to eat: never till now, I think, did the sun look down on such a jumble of human nonsenses. God grant that the measure may now at last be full! But no, it is not yet full; we have a long way to travel back, and terrible flounderings to make, and in fact an immense load of nonsense to dislodge from our poor heads, and manifold cobwebs to rend from our poor eyes, before we get into the road again, and can begin to act as serious men that have work to do in this universe, and no longer as windy sentimentalists that merely have speeches to deliver and despatches to write. O, Heaven, in West Indian matters, and in all manner of matters, it is so with us: the more is the sorrow!

The West Indies, it appears, are short of labor, as indeed is very conceivable in those circumstances. Where a black man, by working about half an hour a day (such is the calculation), can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! Supply and demand, which science says should be brought to bear on him, have an uphill task of it with such a man. Strong sun supplies itself gratis, rich soil in those unpeopled, or half-peopled regions almost gratis; these are his “supply,” and half an hour a day, directed upon these, will produce pumpkin, which is his “demand.” The fortunate black man, very swiftly does he settle his account with supply and demand ; not so swiftly the less fortunate white man of those tropical localities. A bad case his, just now. He himself cannot work; and his black neighbor, rich in pumpkin, is in no haste to help him. Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at his ease in the creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man’s “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane-crop cannot wait; still higher, till no conceivable opulence of cane-crop will cover such wages. In Demerara, as I read in the blue book of last year, the cane-crop, far and wide, stands rotting; the fortunate black gentlemen, strong in their pumpkins, having all struck till the “demand” rise a little. Sweet, blighted lilies, now getting up their heads again!

[Tsiyu]

55. "He himself cannot work."

Why the hell not?

Too hot? His hands too dainty? No bootstraps?

We could take a lesson from those pumpking-inbibing people.

The less you want, the less you are beholden to assholes.

Thanks for this telling tidbit...

[ZombieHorde]

38. I would not have judged the freed slaves poorly if they had taken their back pay by force. nt

[maggiesfarmer]

39. a more correct title: "Poor transition plan led to starvation and death for millions of black..."

[kwassa]

57. Millions of black slaves didn't die; this is a bullshit thesis. OP title is false.

Downs believes that about a quarter of the four million freed slaves either died or suffered from illness between 1862 and 1870.

The OP title ignores the quote in his own post.

So, one million died or got sick. What does this mean, exactly, and where did he come by these numbers? I would point out that half the casualties in the northern and southern armies were from disease, rather than warfare.

Just because somebody put something in a book doesn't make it true. This is a contrarian historical point of view, and considering how intensely covered the Civil War has been by hundreds of historians, the idea that this thesis will stand up is very unlikely.

[HiPointDem]

59. I think in addition that one can't minimize the role that actual murder played once reconstruction

was abandoned.

i'm reading a bio of jesse james right now & it talks about the terror campaigns conducted against blacks & radical republicans:

"white supremacist violence became increasingly systematic as the 1870s progressed...white paramilitaries attacked the tiny village of colfax...a force of black men held the town for three weeks before they were forced to surrender...the attackers executed at least 50 of them...in warren county mississippi a force of whites ambushed the sheriff and his supporters....killing as many as 300 africans americans in the days that followed...."

etc. this kind of violence was happening all over the former slave states in the period.

jesse james, last rebel of the civil war