American Experience (1988) s16e03 Episode Script

1
NARRATOR: April 11th, 1865.
Two days after the end of the Civil War.
In the White House,
President Abraham Lincoln agonized over his first speech
since the defeat of the South.
The jubilant crowd outside
expected a celebration of the Union victory.
Instead, Lincoln delivered a sobering message.
The task that lay ahead, he warned,
would be "fraught with great difficulty."
He called it Reconstruction.
Six hundred thousand had died.
Bitter enemies,
North and South, had to be reconciled.
And four million former slaves
had to be brought into the life of a nation
that had excluded them for centuries.
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
Nobody had scripted this moment.
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
It was a greater challenge
DAVID BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
than the challenge of winning the war.
NARRATOR: In the turmoil that followed,
Americans North and South
would write their own scripts for the future.
In a wild corner of Louisiana,
a Northerner and his family rose to political power,
with violent consequences.
JAMES G. MARSTON, III, DESCENDANT OF PLANTER:
Once they were arrested,
JAMES G. MARSTON, III, DESCENDANT OF PLANTER:
they were going to die.
JAMES G. MARSTON, III, DESCENDANT OF PLANTER:
Because, we are at war now.
NARRATOR: In Georgia,
a daring former minister
staked out an independent colony for blacks,
and found himself locked in a struggle
with a determined young woman
who came back to reclaim her family's plantation.
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
As black people showed
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
that they were capable
CLARENCE WALKER, HISTORIAN:
of controlling and guiding their own lives,
this only created greater anxiety
and white hostility.
NARRATOR: In Congress,
a former slave challenged whites' deepest beliefs
about race and class.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
It's one of those very rare historical moments
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
when everything is up for grabs.
An old order, and old society
has been pretty much destroyed.
NARRATOR: Some saw Reconstruction
as a chance to build a new nation
out of the ashes of war and slavery.
Others vowed to resist.
They would wage a new war
to protect their way of life
and a racial order they believed
ordained by God.
NARRATOR: In March 1867,
two years after the end of the Civil War,
the United States Congress decided
to bring racial equality to the South.
For the last all-white legislature in North Carolina,
it was the beginning of the end.
They threw a wild party in the State Capitol.
We had "the very best liquor,
and ice,
lemons and sugar,"
wrote one state senator.
"The whole capital was in an uproar."
Under Congress' new Radical Reconstruction plan,
military rule would be imposed on the South.
White state lawmakers would be swept from their seats.
And the unthinkable:
black men, many of them former slaves,
would have the right to vote and run for office.
"We have lost all hope of escaping
the vengeance of the Northern people,"
a senator wrote
"and are preparing for the worst."
That fall, southern blacks embraced Congress' plan.
In Louisiana,
about a hundred black men approached the town
of Natchitoches,
ready to defend their new rights with sticks and guns.
They had come to cast their ballots.
Scores of Union soldiers, many of them black,
stood guard at the polls.
It was a scene repeated throughout the South.
ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN:
This really was a remarkable leap in the dark
for world history.
It's the first large-scale experiment
in interracial democracy
that had existed anywhere.
EDWARD AYERS, HISTORIAN:
This may be the most radical
single change that emerges out of this entire era,
to go from being
an enslaved person,
to not merely a citizen,
but to being a voter and a holder of office.
NARRATOR: In Georgia,
Tunis Campbell was among the first blacks
to run for political office.
Right after the war,
he had set up an independent black colony
in the Sea Islands of Georgia
- and declared it off-limits to whites.
RUSSELL DUNCAN, HISTORIAN:
Tunis Campbell was impressive in appearance.
He was 6 feet tall,
habitually dressed in a 3-piece suit with a bow tie,
carried an umbrella,
a top hat.
The planter class is in awe of him.
But African Americans are also in awe of him.
And he uses that to great advantage.
NARRATOR: Trained as a minister,
he could reach into the heart of a community.
DUNCAN:
He often stood behind the pulpits in black churches
on Sundays, and said,
"Under the new acts of Congress,
we're going to be allowed
to vote.
You're going to be protected in that vote.
We have a great black majority in this district.
We are going to elect black judges.
We are going to elect
black sheriffs.
We are going to elect black
senators."
DAVID W.BLIGHT, HISTORIAN:
The right to vote for black people
was an almost spiritual experience.
It was a physical
manifestation of their freedom.
It meant that somebody was actually recognizing them
as a political human being.
The right to vote was like
breathing life into them.
NARRATOR: Many white Southerners boycotted the elections.
AYERS:
They say
AYERS:
the government that's created by Thomas Jefferson
and George Washington
for proud, independent, enlightened men,
is now going to be occupied by former slaves
who cannot read.
This must be an injustice, they say.
This must be a farce.
FONER:
At this time
FONER:
only five northern states
FONER:
- all of them in New England,
with very small black populations -
give African Americans the right to vote.
Ohio doesn't.
New York only gives a tiny number the right to vote.
Pennsylvania doesn't.
Illinois doesn't.
AYERS:
And white southerners feel that this is
just one more example
of the hypocrisy of Reconstruction,
that white northerners are willing to inflict
upon white southerners
things they would not tolerate
in their own home states.
NARRATOR: When the votes were counted,
Tunis Campbell
had won a seat in the Georgia State Senate
with an overwhelming majority.
CLARENCE E. WALKER, HISTORIAN:
Black voting carried with it an enormous meaning.
It meant that political power
was going to be shared between blacks and whites.
This is a very frightening thing
for many white southerners
because they have, in effect,
lost control
over what they had deemed to be
their birthright,
which is the right
to run these governments.
NARRATOR: One white southerner uttered words of warning:
"Let not your pride
flatter you into the belief
that you ever can or ever will
govern the white men of the South."
READING, FAN BUTLER:
"The day was cloudless,
the air soft and balmy;
the wild vegetation that edged the river
beautiful beyond description
Not a sound broke the stillness
but the dip of our oars
and the wild minor chant of the Negro boatmen."
NARRATOR: Anxious to reclaim their land,
28-year-old Fan Butler
and her father, Pierce,
were nearing their plantation on St. Simon's Island
in Georgia.
Rice, not cotton,
had been king here before the war.
And Pierce Butler had been one of the richest
of the rice aristocracy.
Fan Butler's mother,
the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble,
had made headlines around the world,
when she publicly declared
that she could not live with a slaveholder.
After her parents divorced,
Fan Butler had to make a choice.
DUNCAN:
She was involved in not a brothers' war,
but a family war.
When her parents were divorced,
she took sides,
and she sided with the South
and with her father.
NARRATOR: From the safety of Philadelphia,
the Butlers heard that their land was being confiscated
by victorious Union troops.
DANA D. NELSON, HISTORIAN:
Pierce saw it
not only as the possible ending
of his family's plantations in Georgia,
but he saw it as the end of the way of life
that he treasured.
And so they headed back South as soon as they could.
NARRATOR: They found the Butler plantation in ruins.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
My bed stood under a hole in the roof,
through which the rains came.
The whole country was absolutely swept.
Not a chicken, not an egg was left.
For weeks
I lived on nothing but hominy, rice, and fish.
NARRATOR: Fan and Pierce got one piece of good news:
a federal decree
returned the plantations to their original owners.
But their claim on the land
was fiercely resisted by freedmen.
AYERS:
White southerners said,
"the South is mine, too.
I helped make this place.
I remember when this plantation
was nothin' other than woods.
And we cleared it.
And it's ours.
And I'm not leaving. This is rich land."
READING, FAN BUTLER:
We found the Negroes on St. Simon's Island
in a very different frame of mind.
They had been brought under the influence of Northerners,
some of whom had filled the poor people's minds
with all sorts of vain hopes and ideas,
among others
that their former masters would not be allowed to return,
and the land was theirs.
NARRATOR: In this charged atmosphere,
the Butlers had to negotiate with their former slaves.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
My father told the Negroes
they might have their corn and cotton,
but that they must put in twenty acres for him,
for which he would give them food and clothing,
and another year,
when he hoped to put in several hundred acres,
they should share the crop.
They consented
without any show of either pleasure
or the reverse."
NARRATOR: The new system
came to be called sharecropping,
but many landowners
wanted something more than their share.
NELSON:
Pierce's plan was to evolve
his relationship with his former slaves
back into something that would probably look
and work a lot like slavery.
And as Fan would later say,
when it was her land,
"You have the freedom to leave,
but I have freedom too.
And what's more, I own this land.
And if you're going to stay here,
you have to do what I say."
Fan Butler was not as confident as she sounded.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
We are, I am afraid,
going to have terrible troublewith the Negroes,
and I see nothing but gloomy prospects for us ahead."
NARRATOR: New Orleans in the fall of 1867
was a bankrupt city
with just four paved roads.
The war had left the whole state of Louisiana,
one official lamented,
"dirty, impoverished, and hopeless."
But in Mechanics Hall,
there was excitement about the future.
Under the new Reconstruction law,
delegates had gathered
to draw up a new constitution for the State.
TED TUNNELL, HISTORIAN:
The majority of the delegates to this convention
are black.
They were well spoken,
they were well dressed,
and they play a dynamic role in this convention.
The constitution that results from this assembly
will, in large part, be their work.
NARRATOR: Among the white delegates
was Marshall Twitchell,
a battle-scarred former Union soldier from Vermont.
Right after the war,
he'd come up the Red River
and settled in the northwest part of the state.
It was a wide-open frontier.
My ancestor, Henry Marston,
in the 1840s bought land up here.
It was land speculation.
And it was rich fertile land
to be cleared into cotton land.
And so I imagine Mr. Twitchell
was very excited
about what he was going to do.
NARRATOR: The thrifty Twitchell
had saved enough to buy 420 acres
of cotton land.
He married Adele Coleman,
the daughter of a local planter,
and got to know his neighbors,
both black and white.
BLIGHT:
The vast majority of northerners who moved south
moved there because the South was now,
uh, the new pioneer society.
FONER:
They came as business people.
They came to buy land.
They came to set up businesses.
They came to invest.
At first they were welcomed.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1867
Twitchell made a fateful decision.
He agreed to represent his district
at the state convention.
He'd commanded black troops in the war,
but this was a new world.
TUNNELL:
For the next few months,
Twitchell was going to have to work with black men
as equals in a way that he has never done before.
NARRATOR: Twitchell supported
most of the provisions in the new constitution,
including a controversial one
that would take voting rights away
from white men
associated with the old Confederate government.
He had crossed a line:
many white southerners
resented watching northerners like Twitchell
making crucial political decisions.
TUNNELL:
Midway through the conventions,
you can see the
conservative newspapers covering the conventions
sort of searching
for some new language to describe these people.
And then they hit upon the word
"carpetbagger."
It conjures up the image of a lowlife Yankee.
He packs his scanty belongings in a carpetbag
and takes
the first steamship south,
to profit upon the misery of a defeated people.
NARRATOR: Twitchell came to be viewed with suspicion
by some of his white neighbors.
MARSTON:
He's a villain.
The carpetbaggers are always thought of as a danger.
You had the boll weevils; they were a danger.
Of course low prices, and the carpetbagger.
NARRATOR: The Yankee from Vermont
was starting to make powerful enemies
in Louisiana.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1868,
Tunis Campbell entered the Georgia state legislature
in Atlanta.
With him came thirty-one other black members
of the Republican party.
The work of re-making the southern states
had begun.
FONER:
Suddenly you get hundreds of men
elected to every office from
member of Congress,
the Senate, House of Representatives,
member of state legislature,
state positions, down to
sheriff,
justice of the peace,
school board official,
you name it.
NARRATOR: For Democrats,
who had bitterly resisted
the Republican Reconstruction plan,
the very idea of blacks in political office
was an aberration.
"The Negro is unfit to rule the State,"
The Atlanta Constitution declared.
"The Democratic party will protect him
in every civil right.
It is unwilling, however,
to make him Congressman,
Governor,
and Judge.
It will not consent to degrade its own race
by elevating an inferior above it."
In the Georgia legislature,
blacks were outnumbered four to one.
As soon as Tunis Campbell took his seat,
he came under attack
from whites on both sides of the aisle.
WALKER:
What you have here is a very volatile moment
in which alliances politically
are shifting very rapidly,
and from one day to the next, you don't know
really what's going to happen.
NARRATOR: The few white Republicans
who did support black legislators
were branded as traitors to their race.
Blacks "should quit dabbling in politics,"
argued one newspaper,
"and go to work
to earn an honest subsistence."
Most whites in the legislature
maintained that the new Georgia Constitution
only gave blacks the right to vote,
not the right to hold office.
DUNCAN:
The Georgia constitution
did not specifically
allow office-holding by black Americans.
Of course it didn't specifically
authorize office holding by white Americans either.
NARRATOR: One legislator, Henry McNeal Turner,
expressed the outrage of his black colleagues.
He was entitled to his seat, he said
and would not cringe or beg for it.
Tunis Campbell also refused to be intimidated.
READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL:
"On behalf of nearly
five hundred thousand loyal citizens of this State,
we do enter our solemn protest
against the illegal,
unconstitutional
and oppressive action of this body."
NARRATOR: White legislators made it clear
that Campbell was not welcome in the chamber.
DUNCAN:
Many of them put their hands
on the butts of the pistols of the guns
they wore into the chamber.
They shuffled their feet.
They banged on the desk.
They, they, uh, talked about the
"Congo senator's insolent harangue."
NARRATOR: Just two months after it had first convened,
the Georgia legislature
voted to expel its black members.
"You may drive us out,"
Turner warned,
"but you will light a torch
never to be put out."
NARRATOR: Tunis Campbell immediately left for Washington
to ask the federal government
to intercede in Georgia.
The capital
was in the midst of the first presidential election
since the Civil War.
The campaign of 1868
came down to a battle over Reconstruction.
The Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour
and Frank Blair.
Their views were shared
by many in populous northern states
like New York and New Jersey.
BLIGHT:
The Democratic Party
ran arguably the most openly white supremacist
election campaign in American history.
They painted the Republicans as,
quote, "nigger lovers."
FONER:
The Democrats absolutely repudiate Reconstruction.
They basically say,
"If we get in, forget about Reconstruction.
We're going to repeal all this
and put the South back under the
control of-of white leaders."
Narrator: Though the views of the Democrats
had wide support,
many voters gravitated to the Republican candidate,
Ulysses S. Grant.
They found comfort in the Union general
who had won the war.
Grant's slogan
was "Let us have peace."
The general understood that the northern heart
cared deeply
about reuniting North and South.
He promised to support Reconstruction
but wrap it up quickly.
BLIGHT:
There was a kind of new politics
of reconciliation,
a need to bring South and North together
because it would be good for the economy;
it would be good for the federal government;
it would be good for expansion and growth.
NARRATOR: The North was booming.
To many voters there,
Grant represented a chance
to solve the southern problem;
they could then
turn their attention to the future.
In the South,
blacks saw him differently.
Almost half a million turned out
to vote for Grant
because they believed
that at last they would have an ally
in the White House.
The new President seemed to prove them right.
Grant and Congress ordered the Georgia governor
to readmit the expelled legislators.
Tunis Campbell
and his thirty-one black colleagues
took back their seats.
NARRATOR: While Tunis Campbell
fought aggressively for black rights,
John Roy Lynch
moved more cautiously.
Lynch had been a house slave
in Natchez, Mississippi.
After the war,
he had learned to read,
taught himself photography,
and worked his way up in the business.
NELL IRNING PAINTER, HISTORIAN:
I think he only had about four months
of formal schooling.
But he's a very bright young man,
and a fast learner.
He listened,
and he was also in the photography business,
so he heard a lot of people who could
afford to have their pictures taken.
NARRATOR: Lynch's customers talked politics,
and he soaked it up,
even teaching himself parliamentary law.
By 1870,
he was a newly elected State legislator
walking up the steps of the Mississippi Capitol.
He was 22-years-old.
FONER:
John R. Lynch is one of those guys who is
created by the Reconstruction situation.
Opportunities open to him,
which could have been,
in which would have been inconceivable
before this moment.
READING, JOHN LYNCH:
This legislature
READING, JOHN LYNCH:
had some very important work before it
The entire government had to be reconstructed
so as to place it in perfect harmony
with the new order of things.
AYERS:
Black legislators are not
asking for really radical changes.
They're asking for deeply American things:
equality in the courthouse;
the right to be on juries;
the right to testify in your own behalf.
FONER:
A lot of what these black lawmakers
and white Republicans are trying to do,
you might almost say,
is bring the South into the nineteenth century.
Public school systems, for example.
South didn't have that.
Large numbers of southern whites were illiterate.
Reconstruction
establishes the first public school systems
in the South.
NARRATOR: Within a year,
Mississippi opened 230 new schools for blacks,
and 252 for whites.
There were plans for new hospitals,
railroads;
but who would pay the bill?
Before the Civil War,
slaveowners had paid most of the taxes.
Now, the burden shifted to anyone who owned land,
small farmers
as well as rich planters.
AYERS:
White southern landowners said,
"If you think for a minute
that I'm going to give up my hard-earned money
to build up the government
to take care of colored people,
you're crazy."
NARRATOR: Lynch had some sympathy for the white opposition.
READING, JOHN LYNCH:
The war had just come to a close,
leaving most of the people
in an impoverished condition
Their property was in a state of decay
To have the rate of taxation increased
was to them a very serious matter.
NARRATOR: After fierce debate,
Lynch and the Republicans
managed to pass the tax increase.
In statehouses and small towns across the South,
black officials were transforming daily life
for former slaves.
DUNCAN:
As African Americans encountered local government,
for the first time in their lives
they were encountering black faces
behind the desk,
faces that were accepting,
faces that knew who they were,
what they had been through.
AYERS:
There was one thing
that white southerners feared more than anything else.
They used one word
for lots of different kinds of things.
They called it "Negro rule."
Well,
when you have a black sheriff with a gun,
that's Negro rule.
Sometimes even if you have a black postmaster,
who makes white women stand in line
to get stamps
- that could be Negro rule.
It all looks like Negro rule,
and it's hard for white southerners
to get a sense of proportion about all this,
because they consider all of it
a violation of the natural order,
a violation of the way that things should be.
NARRATOR: A shadowland of secret clubs and societies
began to take shape:
in Mississippi, the White Liners;
in Louisiana, the Knights of the White Camellia,
and across the South, the Ku Klux Klan.
If you grow up in a society
in where, for centuries, you have been taught
that other people are your racial inferiors,
it's very hard to accept
the enormous social change
involved in their emancipation.
Any benefit that accrued to blackness
was interpreted as a loss of whiteness.
Education,
the acquisition of property,
was viewed as somehow unnatural.
AYERS:
Ku Klux Klan
does not see itself as Lawlessness,
but as the Law.
Because they do not believe that
black men deserve political power
or know what to do with it
once they have it,
they think that it's their right,
maybe even their Christian responsibility,
to destroy black political power
before it has a chance to become too entrenched.
NARRATOR: Abram Colby
had been elected to the Georgia legislature,
along with Tunis Campbell.
The Democrats wanted to curb his power
in the county.
They tried bribes,
but Colby turned them away.
In October of 1869,
the Klan set out to teach him a lesson.
NELL PAINTER, HISTORIAN:
They were the mercenary forces
of the Democrats,
who were trying to regain power.
They were not simply using the ballot,
because they felt they would lose
at the ballot box.
They were using violent coercion.
They were eliminating their competitors.
NARRATOR: Colby's attackers
could not hide behind their hoods.
READING, ABRAM COLBY:
Some of them
READING, ABRAM COLBY:
were the first-class men in our town.
One is a lawyer,
one a doctor,
and some are farmers.
I knew the voices of those men
as well as I know my own.
BLIGHT:
They would take people out of their houses
or their cabins in the dark of the night,
strip them out in a road,
make them run down the road,
make them sometimes lie on a rock
where they would be whipped,
where men would line up to whip them.
Sometimes they would burn parts of their bodies.
These were, these were sadistic tortures.
READING,ABRAM COLBY:
They said to me,
READING,ABRAM COLBY:
'Do you think you will ever vote
another damned Radical ticket?'
I said,
'If there was an election tomorrow,
I would vote the Radical ticket.'
They set in and whipped me
a thousand licks more.
WALKER:
This was a war of terror.
The Ku Klux Klan,
organized in 1867,
is an original American terrorist organization.
NARRATOR: By 1870,
30-year-old Marshall Twitchell
had bought another plantation,
and was starting to make money.
He brought down from Vermont
his three sisters and their husbands,
his brother, Homer,
and their mother.
And he decided to run for the state senate.
In a district that was seventy percent black,
Twitchell had an advantage.
TUNNELL:
One of the things black people most want,
they want to be treated with dignity and respect.
Marshall Twitchell does
treat black people with dignity and respect.
He does want to see them get an education.
That doesn't mean
he invites his black lieutenants over
for Sunday dinner.
NARRATOR: Senator Twitchell
appointed some blacks to positions in the local government,
and he made real improvements in the district,
building levees,
schools,
a courthouse,
churches.
But the better jobs in the government
went to the Twitchell men,
and some of his white neighbors
resented his family's growing power.
They were the clerk of court, the tax assessor,
the sheriff,
the state senator.
And he used those positions then
to enrich himself and his family.
And that's how he was viewed
by
the people that lived here with him.
NARRATOR: From his nearby plantation,
Confederate veteran B.W. Marston
kept a wary eye on his neighbor.
MARSTON:
My great-grandfather
had a military background,
and and a violent background.
His regiment overran General Sherman
right at Shiloh Church,
so he had known violence,
and he had known leadership.
And this was a frontier area.
And he did what it took.
TUNNELL:
This is the most violent place in Louisiana
and probably the most violent place in the South.
Even without the Civil War
and Reconstruction, it's a violent area.
The Civil War and Reconstruction add a
thick layer of social and political violence.
NARRATOR: The affairs of the parish were being
"extravagantly managed,"
B.W. Marston said of Twitchell,
"managed in the interests of a ring for spoils
I consider him a tyrant."
READING, FAN BUTLER:
The next morning,
READING, FAN BUTLER:
I had the bell rung
to summon the people here to sign the contract,
and then my work began in earnest"
NARRATOR: Fan Butler
was trying to run
two Georgia plantations by herself.
Her father, Pierce,
had died of malaria the year before.
Fan had three hundred laborers working for her,
many doing backbreaking,
dangerous work in the rice fields.
By law,
she now had to negotiate
annual contracts
with each of them.
NELSON:
She understood that if she made the concessions
that these newly freed people wanted,
she wouldn't turn a profit.
So she basically needs to make enough from them
to cover their most minimal demands,
and then to make a profit for the plantation.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
For six mortal hours
I sat in the office without once leaving my chair,
while the people poured in and poured out
One wanted this altered in the contract,
another that.
One was willing to work in the mill
but not in the field.
And so it went on all day,
each one 'making me sensible,'
as he called it.
WALKER:
Neither she nor the other members of her class
know how to handle free labor.
What they want is a docile,
disciplined labor force.
They don't want people asking
to be guaranteed their wages.
They don't want people
asking
for time off,
because this is just completely unacceptable.
NARRATOR: Organizing Fan Butler's workers,
making sure their demands were heard,
was a formidable adversary:
Tunis Campbell felt that he could have more impact
working directly with his constituents
at the grassroots level.
He urged Butler's workers to assert their rights.
DUNCAN:
Tunis Campbell told them
"If they can get you cheaper,
they will.
If they can take part of your crop,
they will.
And Fan Butler is one of the worst abusers
of the system
So, be tough with her
Say, Okay, Ms. Butler, but
I've been told that laborers have rights too."
NARRATOR: Sometimes
Campbell called meetings on the spur of the moment,
in the middle of the day.
Fan Butler was furious.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
There seemed to be no remedy for this evil,
the Negroes throwing all our authority to the wind,
and following Campbell wherever he chose to lead them
We had no proper authorities to appeal to,
should our Negroes misbehave themselves."
AYERS:
No matter where you are in the South,
it's white and black
trying to forge some kind of workable economy
out of all this.
Everywhere you go in the South,
it's former slaves trying to find a way
to make something out of nothing.
Everywhere you go in the South,
it's people who had had ownership
of other human beings,
trying to figure out now,
"How do I live without that?"
READING, COURT OFFICER:
State your age, where you were born,
READING, COURT OFFICER:
and where you now live.
READING, ABRAM COLBY'S TESTIMONY:
I am fifty-two years old.
I was born in Greene County
and it is my home now
when I can live there.
NARRATOR: In October 1871,
two years after the attack
that nearly cost him his life,
Abram Colby
testified before a Congressional committee.
His back had been badly injured,
and he had lost the use of his left hand.
But he'd gone back to the Georgia legislature.
And he continued to campaign
against Klan violence.
READING, ABRAM COLBY'S TESTIMONY:
No man can make a free speech in my county.
I do not believe it can be done
anywhere in Georgia
If you go there
you will be killed,
or shot at,
or whipped,
or run off.
NARRATOR: The growing number of attacks
like the one on Colby
had finally prompted a federal investigation.
Hundreds of witnesses risked their lives
to tell their stories.
Northerners who cared little
about the fate of blacks in the South
were horrified by the accounts in the newspapers.
FONER:
It really reveals to the country
the extent of these kinds of atrocities
and terrorism in the South.
AYERS:
Grant realizes
"We've got to stop this.
We can't just allow
everything that we're trying to accomplish
to be destroyed
by the flagrant acts
of these white vigilantes
in the South."
NARRATOR: Grant understood
that the memories of war,
North and South,
were still raw,
and felt he couldn't risk
full-scale intervention.
He could, however, set an example in one State,
South Carolina,
where Klan terror was at its bloodiest.
In the fall of 1871,
he declared martial law.
Scores of suspected Klan leaders
were rounded up and tried in federal courts.
AYERS:
It's infuriating to white southerners
that they would come in,
impose this national power
in their own homes,
doubt their word,
solicit the testimony of former slaves.
This is something that would just
insult white southerners
more than anything that had been done
up to this point.
NARRATOR: By the end of the trials,
federal prosecutors had destroyed the Klan
in South Carolina.
Grant's crackdown
had brought a measure of peace
- for the time being.
NARRATOR: In March 1873,
on one of the coldest evenings in Washington history,
Ulysses S. Grant
celebrated a landslide victory.
His crackdown on the Klan
had been popular with many Northerners
and helped him win a second term.
"The States lately at war with the General Government,"
he announced confidently,
"are now rehabilitated."
For the first time in American history,
blacks had been invited to the inaugural ball.
BLIGHT:
It's an extraordinary moment in Congress
for black Congressmen.
There were seven black Congressmen
from southern states, serving
in the US House of Representatives
- one of whom was John Roy Lynch.
NARRATOR: After two years in the Mississippi legislature,
Lynch was elected to Congress.
Just twenty-five,
he was the youngest member of the U.S. House.
Only ten years before,
Lynch had been a slave.
Now he was a Congressman,
part of a generation of Republican legislators
trying to build a new South.
AYERS:
The Republicans say,
"We're not just trying to do things for black people.
We're trying to improve the entire economy
and fairness for all people."
These railroads aren't just going to help black people.
And somebody is going to have to take care
of ill people who can't take care of themselves.
And you poorer white families
would also like to have schools for your children,
wouldn't you?"
NARRATOR: In Georgia,
Tunis Campbell had moved beyond organizing laborers.
He was now rewriting the codes of behavior
for freedmen.
DUNCAN:
Tunis Campbell was determined not to let whites
overcome blacks in areas that he could control.
Couldn't control what was going on
at the state level any more.
Couldn't control what was going on
at the national level.
But on the local level,
uh, through his office,
he could
make decisions that affected people's lives
on a daily basis.
NARRATOR: Campbell told freedmen
they did not have to yield to whites
when they passed on the sidewalk,
and they no longer had to address them
as master and mistress.
In Campbell's district,
some blacks were even seen carrying hunting rifles.
NELSON:
I do believe that Tunis Campbell
aimed to be at least a little provocative.
He was very idealistic about the possibilities
for African American citizenship.
But at the same time
very savvy about the nature of power relations.
NARRATOR: Whites in the county
were significantly outnumbered,
and feared a black uprising.
Fan Butler was terrified.
READING, FAN BUTLER:
The Negroes seemed to reach
the climax of lawless independence.
I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed.
DUNCAN:
Democrats were relentless
in their efforts to depose him.
He's too famous to kill.
They can't kill him.
They're afraid of that.
They're afraid of what might happen
in the local community.
So they kept him involved in a myriad of lawsuits,
charging him with abusing his office.
NARRATOR: Whatever the charges,
Campbell's real offense,
according to court documents,
was seeking to "give the Negro supremacy
over the white man."
Campbell was incensed.
READING, TUNIS CAMPBELL:
Just before every election
they commence trying to intimidate
by arresting all prominent colored men.
As usual they have arrested me again
The intention was to keep me out of my seat
in the senate."
DUNCAN:
When Campbell's called to trial,
his lieutenants send out word,
and
African Americans come off the plantations.
They stop work,
they go home and get their shotguns,
and they arrive at the courthouse.
Wives come and children come as well,
and they clog the streets with black bodies,
saying
emphatically to the white community,
"Don't touch our man."
NARRATOR: In one tense hearing,
the courtroom was packed with Campbell supporters.
The judge released him.
"If they had put him in jail,"
a white witness would later comment,
"the niggers would have put the jail
in the river."
NARRATOR: In early 1873,
a series of articles began to appear
in the New York Tribune.
Black lawmakers in South Carolina,
the newspaper declared,
were plundering the treasury.
All through that winter,
fresh accusations surfaced.
The charges were highly exaggerated,
but they contained an element of truth.
FONER:
What is happening is that
a lot more money is flowing
through these state governments;
they're doing a lot more things
than the governments had in the past.
And also, a lot of the Republican legislators
are not people with any significant livelihood,
other than being an office holder.
And so there begins to develop this sense of,
"Well, make some money while you can."
NARRATOR: In the North,
corruption was just as widespread
- but South Carolina,
the only state with a black majority legislature,
was an easy target.
The accusations fueled anti-black feeling
in the North,
and added to a growing sense
that Reconstruction
had been a terrible mistake.
That fall,
frightening news from Wall Street
gripped the North,
and eclipsed the troubled conversation
about Reconstruction.
The nation's biggest banking house
declared bankruptcy,
and the North's overheated economy
crashed.
Thousands of businesses failed;
a million people were thrown out of work.
In the terrible depression that followed,
Northerners had little patience
for the plight of Southern blacks.
Increasingly,
they were falling under the spell
of a more romantic idea of the South
- a growing legend of a lost civilization.
AYERS:
White northerners begin to sympathize
with the ideals of the white South.
Yes, there was a time
in the United States
when life was not all about money.
Yes, there was a time
when there was an aristocracy.
And you find that white northerners
as well as white southerners
love these ideas,
deep into the twentieth century.
NARRATOR: It came to be called
the Lost Cause.
The white South's own version of its history
became a kind of civic religion.
White southerners began to build memorials,
consecrate battlefields
- it was their way of dealing with loss.
DREW GILPIN FAUST, HISTORIAN:
Eighteen percent
of white southern men of military age
are killed in the war.
Eighty thousand widows in Alabama,
applying for support and aid.
One of the things they want to do is,
simply on an emotional level,
cope with all that death
and somehow reclaim the meaning of those deaths.
But to honor the dead
you have to enhance the cause.
So this wasn't simply about the loved ones,
it was also about the cause for which they died.
AYERS:
The Lost Cause is a celebration
of what white southerners see
as the best of the Confederacy:
its nobility,
its Christian virtues,
its leadership,
the loyalty of its men.
BLIGHT:
They basically began to forge
the Confederate Lost Cause
as not a story about loss
but a story about victory.
They might have lost the war,
but they were now winning the ultimate victory,
over control of their own society
and against Reconstruction.
NARRATOR: Democrats took back power in Virginia,
North Carolina,
Tennessee,
Georgia,
Alabama,
Arkansas,
Texas.
White Southerners called it
"Redemption".
Many of the elections were won
through violence and intimidation.
White Northerners did nothing to stop it.
FAUST:
I think a key part of it is race,
and the
basic agreement,
North and South, among white Americans,
about the need for subordination
of African Americans.
NARRATOR: Lured by the myth of the old South,
Northern tourists began to flock
to the moss-covered plantations of Georgia,
Virginia,
Florida.
Travel guides suggested that whites and freedmen
had learned to live together in harmony.
"Nothing can be more beautiful
than a cotton field,"
one travel writer declared,
"when the snowy globes of wool are ready for picking,
and the swart laborers,
with sacks suspended from their shoulders,
wander between the rows."
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1874,
Marshall Twitchell went to New Orleans
for the Republican state convention.
His brother-in-law, Frank Edgerton,
the sheriff of Coushatta,
wrote him a letter warning
that some of the leading men in town
had formed a chapter of the White League.
"The purpose of the White League,"
Edgerton wrote,
"is the extermination of the carpetbag element."
"Nothing more nor less."
Twitchell's reply was intercepted by the League
and published in the local paper.
He wanted to call in federal troops,
he had written.
But they would only come
if some "overt act" were committed.
MARSTON:
He needed an incident
so he could bring federal troops to Coushatta.
And he got an incident,
but I don't think it was what he was counting on.
NARRATOR: The White League
was also looking for an incident.
Members staged random attacks on blacks,
and when a white man was wounded in one confrontation,
they had what they needed.
Claiming the Twitchell clan was behind a black rebellion,
they seized Twitchell's brother, Homer,
his three brothers-in-law
Clark Holland,
Henry Scott,
and Sheriff Edgerton,
and twenty of their black allies.
They were forced to sign a document
promising to resign
and to leave Louisiana forever.
TUNNELL:
The majority would like to see
these people out of town,
safely.
After all,
they have broken bread with these men.
They have entertained one another.
They've gone to church with one another.
NARRATOR: Escorted by guards,
the white Republicans left Coushatta,
carrying all their money and valuables.
They headed for Texas.
TUNNELL:
They haven't gone far
when they look back
and see a large body
of thirty or forty men riding hard,
closing in upon them.
Out front is a heavily bearded man,
sweat just streaming from his body,
and as he approaches the rear guard
he screams out
"Get out of the way
or share the prisoners' fate".
The guards get out of the way;
they offer no resistance.
At the head of the column,
the six Republicans
suddenly see these men
coming down upon them,
and one of them screams out,
"Mount and ride for your lives."
And almost immediately,
three of them are shot from the saddle.
Homer Twitchell
supposedly cried out,
"Somebody give me a gun.
I don't want to die like a dog."
And a bullet hits him in the face a moment later.
NARRATOR: Homer and two others
were killed instantly.
The other three
were captured
and shot.
All were buried in shallow graves.
MARSTON:
Once they were arrested,
they were going to die.
They had to.
Because these men would have come back
with a military force
the likes of which Red River Parish had never seen,
and there would be military tribunals for all
of the people involved
in this uprising.
NARRATOR: The following morning,
Twitchell got the terrible news.
TUNNELL:
I imagine
Twitchell reading that telegram,
and reading it again,
and reading it, reading it again,
thinking there's got to be some mistake.
They can't all be dead.
Surely some of them were simply wounded.
NARRATOR: The Coushatta massacre made headlines
across the country.
Many people were shocked
that the violence in the South
was now targeting whites.
TUNNELL:
All these people who were killed were office-holders.
So you've taken
the public officials of Red River Parish
and simply executed them.
And if it can happen in Red River,
it can happen every-anywhere.
And for freedmen,
if the White League can take
white Republican officials
and execute them in cold blood,
what can they do to us?
Nobody is safe.
NARRATOR: For weeks following the massacre,
local black leaders slept in the woods at night.
The massacre was part of a larger push
to take back Louisiana from the Republicans.
On September 14th,
the White Leaguers struck in New Orleans,
seizing the Republican-run legislature.
in a bloody battle.
President Grant was alarmed.
He had been reluctant
to send more troops to the South.
But he could not allow this armed insurrection
to go unchallenged.
The next day,
Grant ordered the army to occupy New Orleans.
Federal troops entered the State House
and forcibly removed
the White League representatives,
reinstating the Republican government.
Twitchell went back to Coushatta
escorted by soldiers from the Third U.S. Infantry.
He carried with him a long list of suspects.
MARSTON:
My great-grandfather, Captain Marston,
was rounded up in this.
He writes about it.
He felt as if he were dragged before
a carpetbagger court,
a Yankee judge, as he called him.
He said
he would rather take death here
than be hanged
in a for-, by a foreign court in New Orleans.
TUNNELL:
In all, twenty-five people
are arrested for complicity in the Coushatta massacre.
These people are housed in the Coushatta courthouse.
But they will never be brought to trial.
Twitchell can never get the evidence
that will permit him to bring these people to trial
- although he will keep trying,
Ah with perhaps disastrous results.
NARRATOR: Grant's intervention in New Orleans backfired.
The spectacle of federal soldiers
marching into a state legislature
was a shock
- not only in the South,
but all across the North.
Many felt that Grant had gone too far
- overstepped his constitutional powers.
"If this can be done in Louisiana,"
said one senator,
"how long before it can be done in Massachusetts
and in Ohio?"
READING, JOHN ROY LYNCH:
When I leave my home to come to Washington
I am treated, not as an American citizen,
but as a brute.
Forced to occupy a filthy railroad car
with gamblers and drunkards.
And for what?
Not that I am unable
or unwilling to pay my way;
but simply because I happen to be
of a darker complexion.
NARRATOR: By early 1875,
John Roy Lynch was pushing for a new law
protecting the right of blacks
to be treated as equals in public facilities:
in restaurants,
on trains,
in hotels and theaters.
With the North fast losing interest in the South
and the economy unraveling,
Lynch faced an uphill fight.
Worse,
the Democrats had taken back control
of the U.S.House
in the fall elections.
Lynch and his Republican allies
had only a short lame duck session
to win support
for the controversial Civil Rights bill.
It was a remarkable bill
because it had such-such a modern ring to it.
At least it would to us.
These were the kinds of public access issues
that would later become so much a part
of the modern civil rights movement
of the twentieth century.
NARRATOR: The Civil Rights bill
was taking on the unwritten social codes
of everyday life.
WALKER:
The social code is
that "You are free,
but you're not as free as I am free,"
which is to say that black people
will only rise to a certain level,
and there they will remain.
Whites saw the Civil Rights bill
as the opening wedge
into the bugbear of nineteenth century society,
and that was a belief that if you opened up
these places to black people,
it would open the door to racial mixing.
This is the great anxiety and fear
that haunts all of the discussion about civil rights
during the Reconstruction period.
And this fear is not only a fear in the South;
it's a fear in the North also.
NARRATOR: Lynch refused to give up.
READING, JOHN ROY LYNCH:
If this discrimination is to be tolerated,
then I can only say
that our social system is a disgrace;
and our religion a complete hypocrisy.
NARRATOR: The Republicans managed to push the bill through.
But it was never widely enforced.
Within a decade,
the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
FONER:
Most of Reconstruction legislation
is far ahead of its time.
It took another century for this country
to try to live up to the ideals
that were implemented
temporarily
in Reconstruction.
NARRATOR: A few weeks after the Civil Rights bill passed,
John Roy Lynch went back to Mississippi
to campaign for re-election.
He found a state in chaos.
Democratic vigilantes shot at blacks in broad daylight
to keep them away from the polls.
Newspapers openly called for assassination.
It was a full-scale, open assault
on Reconstruction.
WALKER:
What you have here now
is the overturning of a democratic process
by illegitimate means.
NARRATOR: The governor of Mississippi pleaded for help,
but President Grant had learned a hard lesson
in Louisiana.
AYERS:
Grant refuses to help.
And it's a political calculation.
"No, I'm sorry.
You're going to have to face this on your own."
And the result of it, of course,
is that Republicans are driven from power.
NARRATOR: John Roy Lynch
managed to hang on to his seat
- the only Republican,
black or white,
elected to Congress from Mississippi.
Back in Washington,
he called on the President.
"It surprises me that you yielded,"
Lynch said to Grant.
It is the first time I have ever known you
to show the white feather."
Grant told him
that if he had sent troops to Mississippi
the Republicans would have lost the White House.
The General who had won the Civil War,
was now close to losing the war
over Reconstruction.
He told Lynch:
"I am very much concerned about the future of our country.
What you have just passed through in Mississippi
is only the beginning
of what is sure to follow."
NARRATOR: In the spring of 1876,
Marshall Twitchell risked a brief visit to Coushatta
to tend to some business.
TUNNELL:
On May 1st, he goes into Coushatta
and finds an unusual number
of prominent Democrats in town.
Some kind of pow-wow is clearly going on.
He asks one of them -it's late in the day-
"What's everybody doing around here so late in the day?
It's almost dark."
And he's informed that
an issue of long standing is being decided.
And only afterwards
will the meaning of that reply become apparent to him.
MARSTON:
Twitchell has to be done away with.
And-and maybe that will end it.
Because we're at war now.
NARRATOR: The following day,
Twitchell left his plantation for a meeting in town.
With him was his only surviving brother-in-law,
George King.
They took the ferry across the river to Coushatta.
TUNNELL:
Early that morning,
a strangely clad man had ridden into Coushatta.
He was wearing a long oilcloth coat,
green eye goggles,
a hat pulled down low over his face,
and possibly false whiskers.
He goes to the blacksmith's shop,
and there he waits.
NARRATOR: As the ferry approached,
the man made his way to the riverbank
in full view of townspeople.
TUNNELL:
Twitchell was sitting in the ferry,
reading a newspaper.
He looks up,
sees this man pull the rifle
from underneath his coat.
And he screams out,
"Down in the boat."
Twitchell moves fast.
He gets hit in the leg
before he can get over the side of the boat.
His brother-in-law, George King,
pulls a pistol and gets off a shot,
and the rifleman above shoots him in the head
and he pitches back in the boat, dead.
Twitchell's got
one arm up over the gunwale of the boat.
The rifleman above is a good shot.
He puts two bullets in that arm.
Twitchell uses his other arm.
The rifleman puts two bullets in that arm.
The rifleman above empties the rifle,
throws it aside,
pulls out a big pistol,
and blazes away with that.
Twitchell, he's been shot six times,
he whispers to the ferryman,
"Tell him I am dead."
And he turns
and floats face down in the water,
drifting with the current.
A black servant woman
approaches the rifleman.
She asks him
if he was shooting at an alligator.
And he says,
"Yes, a damned black alligator."
NARRATOR: The assassin's identity was never revealed.
MARSTON:
There's some speculation as to,
uh, it being my great-grandfather.
He was the kind of man that could have done it.
If it had to be done, he would have done it.
NARRATOR: Amazingly, Twitchell survived the shooting.
He was taken to a house a few miles from Coushatta,
where both his arms were amputated.
READING, MARSHALL TWITCHELL:
I turned my face to the window,
watching the sun as it disappeared behind the trees,
reviewing my past life,
and trying to imagine what would be my future
in the world.
NARRATOR: A delegation of local black ministers
came to pay their respects.
The concern of these ministers was not simply
for Twitchell himself,
but for all he represented.
He represented
this dream of a truly biracial society
in which black people would be treated
with respect and dignity.
And he's almost a corpse now,
and he becomes a metaphor for their own broken dreams.
NARRATOR: The White League in Coushatta
had a very different reaction.
"Our people rejoiced at it,"
B.W. Marston recalled,
"as much as they would
at the killing of any tyrant in the world."
MARSTON:
Everyone was very happy
that Twitchell was gone.
We're still happy today that he's gone.
NARRATOR: After ten tumultuous years
Reconstruction died in 1877
in a back-room deal in Washington.
The outcome of the presidential election the year before
had been bitterly disputed.
The two parties came to a secret compromise.
Southern Democrats agreed to accept a Republican
in the White House.
In return,
the Republicans agreed to abandon Reconstruction.
WALKER:
The whole Civil War
and Reconstruction process
had been characterized by a deep ambivalence
on the part of the North.
And that ambivalence
by 1870's, by the late 1870's,
has crystallized into,
"Let's cut our losses and get out.
And the best thing
is to leave this to the people
who know best how to handle it."
NARRATOR: B.W. Marston
took Marshall Twitchell's seat
as state senator.
MARSTON:
The North won the war.
In northwest Louisiana,
we won Reconstruction.
NARRATOR: On April 24th, 1877,
a crowd lined the streets of New Orleans,
as the last of the federal troops stationed there
marched towards the steamship
that would take them away.
The cheers were deafening.
Someone let out a rebel yell.
The retreat of the North
left blacks across the South
feeling betrayed and deeply in danger.
WALKER:
You fight a bloody war,
and you set people on the road to freedom,
and then
when they make an effort to establish themselves,
that road is pulled out from under them
and they are left to
the people who are their enemies.
NARRATOR: Marshall Twitchell moved back to Vermont.
Fitted with artificial arms,
he was made a consul to Canada in 1878.
After Louisiana, he found his quiet lifeunnerving.
Fan Butler married an Englishman.
She tried to keep the plantations afloat,
but eventually gave up and moved to Britain in 1877.
John Roy Lynch
managed to stay in politics for another twenty years
and wrote an impassioned defense of Reconstruction.
He died in Chicago in 1939.
Tunis Campbell's enemies finally caught up with him.
He was sent to a convict labor camp for a year,
then fled Georgia.
He died in Boston in 1891.
NARRATOR: In July 1913,
more than fifty thousand Civil War veterans
gathered on the battlefield at Gettysburg.
Gray-bearded soldiers,
North and South,
joined to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the battle.
AYERS:
Veterans felt a kind of bond
that came from being soldiers in the war,
regardless of which side they had been on.
They're celebrating their youth.
They're celebrating their glory, uh, bravery.
They're celebrating the fact that the American nation
had come back together.
NARRATOR: The poetry of the moment was irresistible;
bitter enemies reconciled,
a nation made whole once more.
No one there seemed to notice
that there were no black veterans in the crowd.
WALKER:
That reunion comes at the cost
of black liberty and black freedom.
It also comes
through a very clever process
of rewriting history.
NARRATOR: The Southern legend of the Lost Cause
had prevailed.
FONER:
By the turn of the century,
an image of Reconstruction
has been fixed in the American consciousness,
both North and South,
as a terrible mistake, a travesty of democracy.
According to this image,
African Americans were given these rights
they were unprepared for.
Therefore there was this period of terrible mis-government.
BLIGHT:
Great changes take time,
and this is a great experiment
in biracial democracy.
But, one of the tragedies of Reconstruction
is that it only lasted such a short period of time.
NARRATOR: By 1913,
many of the rights won by African Americans
during Reconstruction
had been taken away.
Segregation was the norm
and lynching epidemic.
But some of what they had built
amid the turmoil of Reconstruction had survived
- communities, schools, and churches.
AYERS:
Over the next several generations,
black Americans never let up
in their desire to be full American citizens.
WALKER:
The idea
of being a black Congressman did not die.
The idea of being a black justice of the peace,
or superintendent of the schools, did not die.
AYERS:
That ideal of America where there was equality,
of a South where there was opportunity,
never died.
And all across the twentieth century,
and emerging in this great Civil Rights Movement,
we see the legacy of Reconstruction.
Took generations to play out,
but it never died.