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The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War

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One of the abiding misconceptions about the American Civil War is that the opposing armies parted with dignity, mutual respect, and even a certain degree of amiability at war's end. Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top, famously writes that he ordered his men to salute the brave Confederate soldiers who laid down their arms at Appomattox. Thus began the myth of a happy ending.

But historians have long recognized that civil wars are especially violent and acrimonious, and even after peace accords are signed, aftershocks of rage and recrimination continue. Given its horrible bloodletting, it would be strange if the American Civil War were an exception to this general rule. Author Stephen Budiansky, in one of the most horrifying books I've ever read, documents the decade following Appomattox and concludes two things: the war didn't really end in 1865, and the North didn't achieve the victory it thought it did.

When the "official" war ended, die-hard Confederates and secessionists seethed with anger and a stubborn refusal to submit. John Richard Dennett, a young "Nation" reporter who traveled through the South for 8 months after the war ended, concluded that nearly every Southerner he encountered was convinced that the emancipation of the slaves had reversed the natural order of things, and would eventually mean that an "inferior" race, bolstered by Republican carpetbaggers, would dominate a "superior" one. Given that a black revolt was one of the antebellum South's worst nightmares, this post-war conviction was a powerful incentive to violence.

The violence grew so rapidly over the next ten years, with some 3,000 black and white elected officials murdered, elections rigged, communities terrorized by Ku Klux and "rifle society" members, and Federal laws regulating local treatment of freedmen contemptuously ignored, that Budiansky doesn't hesitate to refer to the period as one of terrorism. The atrocities he documents are staggering. Over and over I found myself comparing them to recent human rights violations in Bosnia or Africa.

In September 1874, for example, Louisiana fire-eaters revolted. Citizens refused to accept the legally-elected Republican governor. A neo-Confederate puppet state government was set up and fighting broke out in the streets of New Orleans between state militia loyal to the Federal government (commanded by no less a figure than James Longstreet) and members of the infamous White League. Longstreet's militia were trounced. The "Shreveport Times," as well as other regional papers, explicitly advocated killing any Republicans or blacks elected to public office.

Or take the predominantly black town of Hamburg, South Carolina, most of whose elected officials were freedmen. in 1876, white toughs disrupted a July 4th town parade. The commander of the black militia that was marching in the parade protested, and just a few days later a white army, led by two ex-Confederate generals and a thug who would later become a U.S. senator, invaded Hamburg. The town sheriff was murdered and mutilated, nearly 30 members of the black militia were rounded up, and seven of them were singled out and murdered. Then the white thugs vandalized the town.

These and scores of other acts of terrorism went largely unpunished. Southern grand juries refused to indict; indicted defendants were usually acquitted or given laughably light sentences. By 1876, when Federal troops officially withdrew from the South, ex-slaves had been put in their place. As one southerner of the time observed, blacks were better off as slaves than as freedman. As slaves, they were valuable property. As freedmen, they weren't worth the dirt it took to bury them after they were murdered.

Budianksy's book is a sober but essential read, especially for anyone who believes that the Civil War "fixed" the plight of the southern black, that erstwhile blue and gray enemies clasped hands in friendship when the war ended, or that slavery wasn't the real cause of the war. But his book is also inspiring in its documentation of the men and women, black as well as white, who did their best (but for the most part failed) to bring law and order to the violence-torn South. All in all, highly recommended. Readers who find Budianksy's book interesting may also want to read Nicolas Lemann's Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War.
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* Testimony of a 30-year old mulatto man beaten nearly to death by white terrorists who insisted that he hand over his guns. The mulatto repeatedly told his attackers he had no guns. Then, sobbing, he told the court: "I hasn't got anything in the world but myself, for I hasn't got any family, nor any parents, nor any land, nor any money, and I know I is not to be any worse off in the grave than I is now."

Stephen Budiansky has written a popular history of the Reconstruction era. His is no easy task, as Reconstruction falls far behind the Civil War as a subject of popular interest, despite their closeness on the historical timeline, and despite the fact that many of the Civil War's main players (such as James Longstreet, who's featured here) were very active in both. "The Bloody Shirt" is a well-researched and well-written account that focuses on several individuals and events rather than try to examine the period as a whole. The author explores Reconstruction in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--the Deep South states that were the heart of the large plantation economy.

The main problem I had with the book was its emphasis on description rather than analysis. It reads like dispatches from the Reconstruction "front." That's fine, to a point, but at times it is more a string of primary sources than a monograph. Very often, letters and newspaper editorials, frequently printed whole, are left to speak for themselves. Much of this information could've been boiled down--and more importantly, should've been commented upon. For example, at one point, one Southern newspaper makes reference to "Colfax." Those familiar with the Reconstruction period will know this means the "Colfax Massacre" of 1873, which happened in Louisiana (if one wants to read about that, he/she can read the recent book "Redemption" by Nicholas Lemann).

Most importantly, the book lacks sufficient political context. The last portions of the book deal with the infamous Hamburg massacre (or, as Democrats fashioned it, the Hamburg "riot") in South Carolina. Budiansky unfortunately, doesn't give us much context about Reconstruction politics in that state. Despite the violence there, it was one of the last Reconstruction governments to fall and was the only one to have a mostly black legislature. The Republicans survived in South Carolina largely because of the state's majority black population. Budiansky doesn't lay this out, and makes it seem as if African Americans were merely victims of some last-minute white terror. By that point, however, Reconstruction had failed, and it was not because of events in South Carolina alone.

The extent to which Democrats resorted to violence and fraud was inexcusable, but Budiansky doesn't examine some of the faults of the Reconstruction governments. Republican mismanagement and corruption enabled Democrats to build their case for overthrowing Republican rule (on this subject, check out Thomas Holt's "Black Over White" about the Reconstruction government in South Carolina). As overstated or even outright false as many Democrats' claims were, there was mismangement and corruption among Republicans. That does not justify the Democratic backlash, but even the Republican governments' legitimate expenses--for things as seemingly basic as public education and infrastructure projects--were hotly debated by Southerners.

Nevertheless, Budiansky is correct in saying that the real cause for overthrowing Reconstruction was not fiscal conservatism--which he addresses in the case of the Republican Governor Ames of Mississippi--but white anger with "Negro rule." And he is also correct in showing that African Americans were eventually abandoned by Northerners who had grown tired with events in the South. Once the Federal government decided blacks weren't worth defending, the radical Republican governments could not succeed.

If Budiansky's sympathies are with the right people, another problem I had with the book was its fragmented nature. As soon as we are introduced to some figures and events in Reconstruction, we are whisked away to somewhere else. The passages about James Longstreet are well written, but Longstreet feels dropped in from nowhere. No sooner does he appear then he is gone.

In sum, Budiansky's description of the violence of the period is well done, and he certainly is passionate in his defense of the white-black coalition governments. This is a good place to start for someone who is not well versed in the Reconstruction period. If I were to suggest an academic book about terror after Lee's surrender, I would suggest Richard Zuczek's "State of Rebellion," about Reconstruction in South Carolina. As a work of popular history, Budiansky's book illustrates some of the features of Reconstruction, but it doesn't break any new ground in the field of study. And those looking for a more comprehensive study might want to check out Eric Foner's "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution."

This is actually an excellent book. I gave it a 4 instead of a 5 only because it wasn't what I expected, plus it's not the kind of history I typically like.

As others have said, it does seem to be just a series of loosely strung-together vignettes, with very little analysis. On second thought, though, the particular vignettes the author chose are really very telling. And there is a real flow, from the early hopes of reconstruction to its tragic denouement. Similarly, there really isn't that much need for analysis - the facts really do speak for themselves.

In fact, this is the real strength of this book, in my opinion. The behaviour evidenced in this book is so awful (and typically so hidden and swept under the rug) that it really makes me wonder about this country, and how we can ever overcome a past like this.

If you're interested in more books along these lines, try:

The Slave Ship: A Human History

Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Stephen Budiansky has written an interesting account of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. Budiansky reminds us that from 1865 until 1877 the United States essentially fought an insurgency in the American South. And the sad fact is, that the United States lost the insurgency to the Confederacy.

The Bloody Shirt is not a straightforward history of the era but rather follows the lives and careers of several people involved in this insurgency. Through these people's stories we gain an understanding of the wider insurgency and the mistakes made by the Union which allowed the Confederacy to overturn the gains won in the Civil War and continue on their way of life.

The book focuses on people like; Albert Morgan, who was assigned as a soldier to police the Reconstruction South and later became a state senator from Mississippi, Lewis Merrill who commanded troops in reconstruction South Carolina, Adelbert Ames, also a soldier, who became the appointed governor of Mississippi, and Prince Rivers, a former slave who fought for the Union and became a county magistrate in South Carolina. Also making an appearance is General James Longstreet, the brilliant Confederate commander who later became a Republican and advocated the Union cause.

These men confront the enormously difficult challenge of trying to change a hostile culture. This culture, which could not bring itself to admit wrongdoing or guilt in any of its activities, resisted the attempt to enfranchise the black population with the rights of citizenship granted to them under the 14th 15th and 16th amendments to the Constitution.

What is lost to most modern Americans is the fact that this was truly a violent insurgency. Over 3000 people were killed after the United States raised the "Mission Accomplished" banner at Appomattox. Any black who attempted to assert their citizenship or white Republican who sought to enforce the law was a target. Arrayed against them were wide variety of terroristic paramilitary groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, who killed elected legislators, executives, newspaper people and ordinary men and women. They stole elections by the grossest and basest means possible and did not even try to hide the fact. They shot and hung people with abandon, and openly threatened the rest.

The descriptions of the activities of these terror groups shocks the conscience.

All the while, the heroic figures charged with rebuilding the culture had neither enough men, arms or authority to accomplish their mission. After four years of civil war, popular support for the reconstruction effort dwindled precipitously. The people of the United States were tired and they wanted it to be *over.* They wanted things to go back to *normal.*

Does any of this sound familiar?

Tragically instead of doubling down and developing new strategies to enforce cultural change in the American South and allocating the proper amount of resources needed for the task - the Union eventually withdrew, leaving the people left behind, blacks and white Republicans, to their own devices. They did not last long. The long night of despotism continued into the 20th century, up until the 1950s and 60s.

Of particular interest is the fact that Budiansky notes that the Confederacy not only won the insurgency in the South but completely rewrote the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The one thing the Southerners could not accept was that their culture had been fatally flawed. This is a common trait of pre-modern cultures and is well exemplified in a letter written by General Longstreet to the New Orleans Times that got him in hot water with his compatriots and generally considered a traitor to his tribe for 100 years:

He began by saying he was speaking with the plain and honest convictions of a soldier he said that as he thought, the South had fought, and fought well, but had lost; they were a conquered people. It was accordingly their duty to accept the terms of the victor. Even if they were in a position to resist, it would be wrong to do so. He himself had lost his rights of citizenship under the Reconstruction acts, as someone who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the union and then engaged in rebellion, "but that was one of the hazards of revolution, and I have no better cause of complaint and those who have lost their slaves." To claim now that Southerners need not concede anything to the victor was tantamount to claiming they had not known what they were fighting for in the first place. He hoped he might be forgiven the "bluntness of the soldier" to remind his fellow Southerners what had been decided at Appomattox. "The surrender of the Confederate armies in 1865," he wrote, "involved; 1. the surrender of the claim to the right of secession. 2. the surrender of the former political relations of the Negro. 3. the surrender of the Southern Confederacy. These issues expired upon the fields last occupied by the Confederate armies and there tthey should have been buried. The soldier prefers to have the sod that receives him when he falls cover his remains. The political questions of the war should have been buried upon the fields that marked their end."

In this, Longstreet was remarkable man for his time and culture. And it points out an interesting question. Why is it that modern cultures promote the concept of settlement? The feelings prevalent in the Confederate culture are the norm for humanity. All pre-modern cultures do not privilege settlement. Meaning that there is never a settlement to any particular issue - there is only a standing status quo. And the status quo will hold until the correlation of forces shifts and privileges another party. In the pre-modern world, the negotiation is never over. Once a position has been reached, it is merely a stepping off point for the next round of negotiations. But in the modern culture, the Enlightenment-based cultures, high-priority is given to final settlement of contentious issues. How is it that we have evolved this trait?

... give or take, had established a peculiar culture in the ante bellum South, a culture that had become more isolated and insulated because of the steep decline of immigration to the region of white Europeans, in comparison to the North, following American Independence. It was a culture of touchy honor and mastery, of ready violence, of contempt for difference and intolerance of disagreement, of smooth deceit and hypocrisy, of self-righteousness beyond measure, of vituperation and vilification of perceived enemies, above all a culture of lazy entitlement and scorn for effort. How could it have been otherwise, since those were the "virtues" that allowed slaveholders to cow their slaves and non-slaveholders to behold themselves without sensing their picayune status?

Crushing military defeat, widespread destruction of wealth, temporary expulsion from long-held bastions of political power were inflicted upon this culture that had no pyschic means of dealing with shame, admitting guilt, or seeking reconciliation. How could the reaction have been other than it was, a manifold multiplying of all the pre-war viciousness, of violence, ruthless hypocrisy, unimaginable hatred of the victors, inhuman rage against the former victims? If "Reconstruction" of such a culture was truly intended -- and by some heroic few it was -- then prolonged military occupation at sufficient force (a Surge, shall we say?) would have been appropriate, imprisonment and confiscations justified, resettlement of peoples at least worth considering. Short of such measures, it might well have been more humane in the long run to have let the eleven states of the Confederacy go their way and meet their proper fate.

Author Stephen Budiansky portrays vividly what actually happened in the decade of "Reconstruction", ending in what Southern apologists immediately designated as "Redemption." By murder and the constant threat of murder, by terror and intimidation, by lying and cheating at every turn and every accessible level of civil society, the unrepentant secessionists and white supremacists routed the advocates of conciliation, both Southern and Northern, thwarted the purposes of the Reconstruction Amendments, made a mockery of justice and judicial process, crushed the aspirations of the freed slaves, and initiated a full century of the worst racial oppression in world history, the Jim Crow lynch-law apartheid Dixie South.

Budiansky focuses his reportage on the activities of five nobly-intended men -- two officers of the Union Army, a Confederate general, a northern businessman, and a former slave -- as well as the dastardly deeds of a flock of craven scoundrels who were the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and Straight-Aheads, and other conspiracies of Terrorism. Adelbert Ames, Albert Morgan, and Lewis Merril, three of the heroic seekers of human decency that the South has persistently demeaned as 'carpetbaggers,' left ample memoirs and letters, and their careers are central to Budiansky's exposition. However, Budiansky backs up his depictions of the with clippings from local newspapers, court records, letters by the adversaries of equality and voting rights, a massive panoply of primary documentation that truly does speak for itself.

"The Bloody Shirt" is a book of solid scholarship, but it is not intended as a book for scholars. In tone and method, it's closer to one of the Ken Burns TV documentaries. The generous list of scholarly histories that Budiansky posts among his References and Notes will serve to satisfy readers who want more exposition and explication of the events described. This is a book intended to smack the deniers of racist atrocities in the face. It's a book to shame the shameless and to laugh to scorn the myths of the Lost Cause, the Redemption, the gracious old plantation South, and above all to refute the notion that the North simply got tired of spending money on Reconstruction that only a handful of radicals wanted anyway. The North was driven out. The South snatched victory from defeat. The former slaves paid more for their illusion of freedom than it was worth for the next hundred years.

If now, with the election of Barack Obama, it can be claimed that Reconstruction has finally arrived in the CSA, the myths should be vulnerable to reality, no? Personally, I don't yet see or hear the voices of moral/historical redemption quite loudly enough. But I have hopes that demographic change -- the infusion of Northerners, Latinos, and Asians who are not committed to honoring Dixie -- may wash out the cesspools of the Confederacy at last.

Fine book, "The Bloody Shirt"! Read it and mourn!

"The Bloody Shirt" is an excellent book that at least for me, shed new light on a part of the Civil War era that I only read about in high school history classes. People who stubbornly cling to the myths of "the Lost Cause" (that the war was about states rights and not about slavery) would do well to read it...but I have a feeling most won't.

If you read this book, you will have a point driven home violently to you: the Civil War did not end at Appomattox Courthouse, only the Southern states' bid for independence and effort to formally preserve slavery did. In the South of the Reconstruction, the vast majority of whites steadfastly refused to accept the new order of things which allowed black men to vote. Tragically, the US government at the time lacked the will to protect the rights of the freedmen. So through a campaign of intimidation and violence, the whites overthrew the Reconstruction, imposed Jim Crowe law, and hurled the emancipated blacks down to the bottom of the social order where they never complained...because nobody dared.

There is a temptation when you read some of the newspaper articles from Southern papers at the time of the "redemption" (the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction government) to think that those who committed those crimes and the Federal government that stood by while it happened were evil or apathetic to evil. I don't feel that way. Slavery only ended in the South because of force. It would be naive to think that Southern whites would passively accept this. I have no doubt that many members of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups genuinely saw themselves as heroes rescuing their beloved society from a terrible threat. I also think it would be naive to expect that the North, with its own racial problems, would be committed to resisting the "redemption."

What I don't think is excusable is that anyone alive today in the South or any other part of the country apart from people like David Duke could really think that "If the South had won the war, we'd have it made." Far from it, if that had happened, I think what the Confederate States of America would have amounted to would have been a clone of apartheid-era South Africa.

In closing, lest anyone say that I'm just a "yankee," I have been a life-long resident of Virginia and have great affection and admiration for the brave deeds of the Army of Northern Virginia and the South's other legions. I have a Don Troiani painting of the Lone Star Brigade fighting in the cornfield quadrangle at Antietam on my wall, and I see nothing wrong with the display of the Confederate battle flag, provided it isn't used as a sort of "Jolly Rogers" of racists. But I do believe that anyone alive today who really believes that things would have been better had the South won the war is at best a fool and at worst a racist with attitudes that are completely incompatible with the values upon which the United States is built.

I wonder if your high school history classes were like mine, with Reconstruction given a brief mention after the exhaustion of teaching the Civil War.

I came away with a sympathy for the South. "Carpetbaggers." "Scalawags." "Northern Occupiers."

And my high school was in Pennsylvania, not Mississippi.

Last night I finished THE BLOODY SHIRT, about the ten years in the South after the end of the Civil War. It's not an exhaustive, academic history of that period. Instead, the author relates the stories of five men in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. He uses diaries, newspaper articles and letters to weave a fascinating (it will keep you reading past your bedtime) tale of life in those years at those places.

This morning, as it happens, I was enjoying a Leon Redbone CD with the Sunday paper. One of the songs was "Crazy Over Dixie", a pleasant song I'd enjoyed often in the past. Today I couldn't listen to it. The image I now have of the old South -- of murderers, rapists, racists, sadists -- needs to fade away first.

You can't have any idea what I'm talking about until you read the book.

I also wonder if there aren't some parallels to what's happened in Afghanistan the past ten years. The Taliban was defeated, as was the Confederacy, but like the Confederacy have denied defeat on the battlefield to revive their cause through the use of terror. It was many decades until we took down the KKK in America -- some would say we still haven't, but at least 40,000 of them are not marching in our nation's capital anymore -- and I hope it will not take nearly as long to make the Taliban also a footnote in history.

The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox
The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox

How the South Lost the War but Won the Peace

It wasn't secession and rebellion that characterized the South in the Civil War as much as its determined subversion of emancipation. That's the premise of Stephen Budiansky's "The Bloody Shirt: Terror after Appomattox." Southern politicians did everything they could legally - and frequently illegally - to thwart reconstruction. White supremacists used secrecy and intimidation to terrorize newly enfranchised blacks.
They enacted Black Codes that forbade emancipated slaves from owning land, and made them sign employment contracts that simply perpetuated slavery under a different name. They drove blacks from their homes, forced black officeholders out of office, and used intimidation, violence, and death to bring home their message.
In the Platform of the Democratic White Man's Party of Mississippi, delegates wrote:
"Resolved, that the nefarious design of the Republican Party in Congress to place the white men of the Southern States under the governmental control of their late slaves, and degrade the Caucasian race as the inferiors of the African negro, is a crime against the civilization of the age, which needs only top be mentioned to be scorned by all intelligent minds, and we therefore call upon the people of Mississippi to vindicate alike the superiority of their race over the negro, and their political power to maintain constitutional liberty."
No one was more hated in the Reconstruction South than the carpetbagger and the scalawag. The carpetbagger was a transplanted Northerner brought into the South to usurp authority; the scalawag was a Southerner with Unionist sympathies. An example of the hated carpetbagger was Maine-born General Adelbert Ames, who served both as Provisional Governor of Mississippi and one of its Senators. Ames was a contemporary of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who accepted the Confederate flag of surrender at Appomattox. Budiansky follows Ames' career during and following the Civil War; his marriage; and his government service. First appointed Military Governor under the Reconstruction Acts, Ames found himself thwarted at every step by Democratic politicians and white supremacists.
Budiansky's well-researched treatment should be a dose of reality for those who think the War ended in 1865. As he says, "The war still exists."

In The Bloody Shirt Stephen Budiansky takes up a familiar theme to anyone who has done even a little reading on the subject the violence in the Reconstruction South. While this is by no means a new theme and in recent years there have been a number of books come out putting forward the counter-narrative (and more accurate) of the events that occurred this book is notable in that it is written for a wider audience and manages to give the reader a feel for both the scope of the violence while at the same time making it very personal by telling individual stories. He also briefly but effectively touches on the extremely taboo subject of interracial sexual relations during this period and how they led to violence.
The goal of the author as implied by the title is to show how the history of events in the south were rewritten and that the perpetrators of the violence would become the victims of the story struggling to defend themselves and their freedom. While the true victims the freedmen and the white Republicans would become the evil carpetbaggers, scalawags and their Negro lackeys. This myth is not real hard to overturn the numbers themselves and the statements made in papers and by democrats at the time clearly show that the South was not some helpless victim of northern exploitation but instead filled with a bunch of vengeful unrepentant white supremacist determined to accomplish after the war through terroristic means what they could not get done on the battle field. Tragically, as Budiansky shows in his book, they were successful.
Although its use as an academic source is limited, this is a very good book for someone not familiar with the subject and even if you are it there will probably be details in it that you are not familiar with. Overall I recommend this book.

Budiansky's "The Bloody Shirt" is an entertaining and dramatic version of a subject that has been covered by many more in-depth academic studies with a revisionist view of Reconstruction. As stated in other reviews of this book, it covers the stories of four different men who were tasked with dealing with the conversion of the South from military occupation to civil government, with equal rights for the newly-freed slaves of the post-Civil War South.

In the latter part, equal rights for ex-slaves,they failed, as we know all too well, and African-Americans suffered another 100 years+ of discrimination and worse. Budiansky gives detailed accounts of some of the worst examples, through long quotes of letters of the principles involved, and he ends up giving the impression that America in general failed, as white racist reactionaries gained the upper hand by essentially outright terror and murder. Budiansky gives much less explanation of other reasons for their success, especially the co-option of whites who were sitting on the fence about which side to take.

Overall. a good book on the subject, but for a more thorough understanding of reconstruction you would be better off reading the classic "The Era of Reconstruction" by Kenneth Stampp.