Anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi’s history during the 19th century period called “Reconstruction” could not do better than to start with Jere Nash’s new book, “Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1862-1877.”
Nash not only tells the story, but he tells the story about the story. In other words, he compares the events as he has discovered they actually happened with the stories that white politicians and historians later concocted to change the narrative to one that justified white supremacy. Along the way, he provides a comprehensive and descriptive catalogue of other books about Reconstruction. That list in itself is a valuable resource.
Nash begins the history of Reconstruction not with the end of the Civil War, but with the Union victory at Corinth in 1862. The effort was to “reconstruct” a civil society, one in which former slaves exercise the rights of citizenship they had previously been denied. After the victory, slaves left the farms where they had been held captive and flocked to the protection of the Union army. They established a refugee camp outside Corinth that included churches and schools at a time when teaching slaves to read was still illegal in the state.
General Ulysses S. Grant was not sure what to do with the former slaves, but he realized that taking them away from their former owners would cripple his Confederate opponents. So president Abraham Lincoln appointed a chaplain, John Eaton Jr., and gave him authority over refugee camps.
Nash quotes Eaton’s reports back to Washington on the difficult conditions in the camps. Eaton later wrote that, as bad as the conditions were, there was “scarcely a single instance” of a former slave who left the camps to go back to slavery. That seemingly small detail effectively rebuts the later paens of white historians who sought to minimize the horrors of slavery. In that regard, it is interesting that, while a number of slaves who escaped wrote books about the conditions that led them to escape, none who remained slaves until they were freed wrote books about the “good old days” as slaves, even though there surely would have been a large white audience for such a book.
Nash continues the chronology with the Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederate defeat, and then the beginning of the struggle to determine exactly what the rights of former slaves would be.
The Mississippi legislature in 1865 passed what became known as the “Black Code.” It sought to create a system as close to slavery as possible without including the right to purchase and sell human beings. It was a system of contract labor. Freed people were required to hold certificates verifying their contracts with white landowners, and other landowners were forbidden to interfere with those contracts.
But Mississippi was still under Union Army occupation and had not yet been readmitted to the union. Anti-slavery Republicans in control of Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born in the United States” are citizens, and made ratification a requirement for readmission to the Union. When former slaves were allowed to vote, a substantial number of black public officials were elected, including the first statewide elected public official, Secretary of State James Lynch. After his untimely death, the legislature paid for his burial monument in Jackson’s Greenwood cemetery, where it still stands today.
The new legislature also wrote the 1869 Mississippi constitution, which established the first state-wide public school system.Nash, who has worked as a political consultant for several decades, analyzes in detail the ways in which the white minority regained control. He recites the familiar atrocities, including Klan attacks on political gatherings in Meridian, Vicksburg and Clinton that led to dozens of deaths and northern outrage. But, in his analysis, the way the white minority ultimately regained control was not intimidation. Votes for the Republican party the former slaves supported remained relatively constant.
Rather, what happened was simple ballot fraud. At that time, there was no standard ballot. Voters brought their ballots to the polls when they voted. So it remained possible for unscrupulous election managers to switch votes or to simply stuff the ballot box. Nash reports that in the election of 1875, while the Republican votes remained more or less constant, the number of Democratic votes in 35 black-majority counties exceeded the total adult white male population by 10,000. In Yazoo County, it was 239% greater.
In the meantime, northern voters had lost enthusiasm for maintaining troops in the south who might have prevented the frauds. Nash attacks the popular image of Mississippi Senator L.Q.C. Lamar, who some writers, including former President John F. Kennedy, have depicted as a reconciler. What Nash sees when he looks at Lamar’s correspondence and speeches is a clever way of disarming northern critics in order to enable the fraud.
Nash offers an economic analysis to counter the subsequent claim that Mississippi’s government during Reconstruction was incompetent or so corrupt that it needed to be replaced. He admits that times became hard on white landowners. But he offers a different scenario. The price of cotton fell as the result of the rise of foreign competition after the Confederates stopped sending cotton to English manufacturers during the Civil War. After the war, landowners had to pay those who worked the land. And the only state tax, a property tax, was increased to pay for the public schools and aid to disabled Confederates. In 1873, there was a national economic panic. The problem was not bad government. It was economic hardship.
And he points out that the whites who took over in 1875 and their successors did not do such a good job either, because almost 100 years later Mississippi remained the poorest state in the union.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
