After the Civil War, the United States entered Reconstruction, a period from roughly 1865 to 1877 in which the federal government worked to protect the rights of Black Americans in former Confederate states. For the first time in U.S. history, Black men were voting and winning elections in the south; and almost immediately, white southerners attempted to roll back these victories with targeted violence.
Paramilitary groups intimidated, attacked and murdered Black male voters, elected officials and their family members, as well as their white allies. In an effort to legitimize this violence, the all-white coalition called themselves “the Redeemers.”
“It’s not a term I particularly like to use,” says Eric Foner, a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University and author of several books on Reconstruction, including Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. “It has a religious overtone to it—redemption—and it carries the implication that the South during Reconstruction was somehow under the heel of oppression or tyranny, and these redeemers rescued it.” In reality, he says, the only thing they were “rescuing” the south from “was equality for Black people.”
In addition to paramilitary violence, the federal government’s abandonment of Reconstruction in 1877 helped white supremacists reestablish control of local governments, prevent Black men from voting and pass Jim Crow laws. White northerners became increasingly sympathetic to white southern propaganda during this period, even as Black men and women in the south called attention to and fought back against injustices.
The Colfax Massacre
In 1872, Louisiana declared Republican William Pitt Kellogg the winner of a governor’s race against John McEnery, a Democrat and former Confederate general. Members of the “redeemer's” coalition, believing Black men’s votes to be illegitimate, disputed the results of the election, prompting Republican President Ulysses S. Grant to send federal troops to the state to enforce the election results. In April 1873, the month before Kellogg took office, Black state troops began to guard the courthouse in the town of Colfax, fearing that white supremacists would attempt to overtake it.
On April 13, Easter Sunday, the insurrection began. A paramilitary mob of former Confederate soldiers attacked the Black troops who were guarding the Colfax courthouse, taking it over and killing between 60 and 150 Black men. The Colfax massacre, as its known, was the bloodiest instance of white supremacist violence during Reconstruction. Yet white supremacists argued that the violent insurrection was a necessary takeover of an illegitimate government (in 2021, officials removed a commemorative plaque in Colfax that repeated this false claim).
Though the Ku Klux Klan may be the most-well known paramilitary group from the Reconstruction era, it was not the only one. It was joined by groups like the White League, which began in Louisiana and included many of the insurrectionists from the Colfax massacre, and the Red Shirts, which originated in Mississippi.
Enforcement Acts of 1870, 1871
On July 8, 1876, men affiliated with the Red Shirts attacked Black troops and civilians in Hamburg, South Carolina, killing six Black men. Foner says that part of the Red Shirts’ objective in South Carolina that year was to intimidate Black men into not voting in the 1876 governor’s race so that Democrat Wade Hampton III, a former Confederate general, could “win”—which he did.
The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, often known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts, were designed to help the government break up and prosecute these paramilitary groups—and the acts did do that, for a while. Of the 97 white men indicted in the Colfax massacre, only nine were charged with violating the Enforcement Acts. But when their appeal reached the Supreme Court in United States v. Cruikshank, the justices overturned their convictions, arguing that these acts applied to actions of the state, not individuals—a ruling that dealt a huge legal blow to the fight against white supremacist attacks.
U.S. Abandons Reconstruction
Federal Reconstruction largely came to an end with the Compromise of 1877. In this secret deal, Democrats agreed not to block Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes’ victory in the disputed election of 1876 on the condition that Republicans withdraw all federal troops from South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana. The deal effectively ended Reconstruction in those states, although the reform efforts continued in some form in other states.
After 1877, white supremacists were able to more easily overtake local governments in the south without repercussions, such as in the 1898 massacre and coup in Wilmington, North Carolina. As they reasserted control, they also passed specific laws that prevented Black men from voting.
The relaxed federal oversight after 1877 coincided with a growing sympathy of white northerners for white southerners, as Lost Cause propaganda that Reconstruction was unjust proliferated.
“They bought into the idea that Reconstruction had been a mistake, and that what was necessary now was reconciliation among whites,” Foner says. This is when many white northerners began to think of the Civil War as “a brothers’ fight, a family fight among white Americans, with Black people really having nothing much to do with it. The service of 180,000 Black soldiers are kind of wiped away from the memory.”
Even so, “Black political actors do not let Reconstruction die quietly,” says historian Alexander Manevitz. “They point to the ways in which the federal government is relinquishing its duties, and point to the work still to be done.”
Among those political leaders was Frederick Douglass, who in 1875 asked, “If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?”
