American Violence by Richard Hofstadter

Author:Richard Hofstadter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307814005
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-07T21:00:00+00:00

Smoke was curling languidly from the old pipe Gunner Jessie Blake puffed upon as he reclined in an easy chair in the dimly lit drawing room of his mansion amid the pines, “Woodley-on-the-Sound,” where the aged Confederate veteran, survivor of both bombardments of nearby Fort Fisher in the North-South war, was entertaining two young veterans of the late World War.…

“You boys were too young to remember much about the Wilmington Rebellion, November 10, 1898,” began Mr. Blake, an unreconstructed Rebel who to this day holds that the South fought for Independence, not Slavery, and who continues to use the ante- and post-bellum by-word, damnedyank, as a single word without even dignifying the appellation with a capital “D.”

“So, I am going to give you the inside story of this insurrection,” he proceeded, “wherein the white people of Wilmington overthrew the constituted municipal authority overnight and substituted a reform rule, doing all this legally and with some needless bloodshed, to be sure, but at the same time they eliminated the Negroes from the political life of the city and the state. This Rebellion was the very beginning of Negro disfranchisement in the South and an important step in the establishment of ‘White Supremacy’ in the Southland.…

“The Rebellion was an organized resistance,” Mr. Blake said, “on the part of the white citizens of this community to the established government, which had long irked them because it was dominated by ‘Carpet Baggers’ and Negroes, and also because the better element here wished to establish ‘White Supremacy’ in the city, the state and throughout the South, and thereby remove the then stupid and ignorant Negroes from their numerically dominating position in the government.…

“The older generation of Southern born men were at their wits’ end. They had passed through the rigors of the North-South war and through the tyrannies of Reconstruction when Confiscation (the latter the most hated word in the conquered Confederacy next to damnedyankee) of properties without due process of law, was the rule rather than the exception. They had seen ‘Forty Acres and a Mule’ buy many a Negro’s vote.

“Black rapists were attacking Southern girls and women, those pure and lovely creatures who graced the homes in Dixie Land, and the brutes were committing this dastardly crime with more frequency while the majority of them were escaping punishment through the influence of the powers that be.

“These old Southern gentlemen had calculated that time and time only would remove the terrors of Reconstruction, a condition that was imposed upon the conquered Southerners by the victorious Northerners, but they were not willing to sit supinely by and see their girls and women assaulted by beastly brutes.

“The better element among the Northerners in the North could not want them and their little friends to grow up amid such conditions.…

“ ‘I do not want Southern girls growing into womanhood in fear of the Negro rapist.’ ”

“A group of nine citizens met at the home of Mr. Hugh MacRae and there decided that the attitude and actions of

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