Happy Dreams of Liberty by R. Isabela Morales

Author:R. Isabela Morales
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The men on horseback wore disguises: black and red gowns that brushed their toes, conical paper hats eighteen inches tall, and cloth masks with holes for the eyes.83 Some of them displayed black devils’ horns on their foreheads; others spoke through mouthpieces that distorted their voices. “They said they came from hell,” one witness reported, “that they died at Shiloh fight and Bull Run.”84 Looking diabolical in their robes and masks, the lost souls usually visited around midnight, circling their victims’ houses and whistling for them to come out or, if that failed, firing a pistol through the window. In Madison County, they raided Black families’ homes for weapons and cash, taking “old blunderbusses,” revolvers, and whatever money the freedpeople had managed to save.85 They often targeted Black soldiers, men who had fought on the Union side and “talked too much.”86 Other times, the victims simply had something they wanted—like Joseph Gill, a farm laborer with a horse they considered too good for a former slave. “They said they wanted him for a charger to ride to hell,” Gill said, but he knew better than that.87 This was no host of damned Confederate martyrs. This was Madison County’s Ku Klux Klan, and when they left Gill with two hundred lashes on his back and a bullet in his dog one night in 1868, they didn’t ride to the underworld. They took the old Fayetteville road to Parks Townsend’s farm in Hazel Green.

Men like Edmund and Samuel Townsend had once ruled northern Alabama, their wealth and influence placing them at the top of the social order—and granting them power to brutalize the enslaved population with impunity. Parks Townsend’s father had been present the day in 1848 when Edmund led a posse to a neighboring plantation and ordered an enslaved man whipped to the bone.88 Two decades later, “Young Park,” as the locals called him, rode at the head of mob of his own, twenty-odd masked men terrorizing the former slaves who had made his family’s fortune. Joseph Gill, born a slave, had labored on Parks and his mother’s farm just the year before.89 A new form of the old slave patrols, Klansmen across the South broke up freedpeople’s election meetings and attacked Black schools and churches. They threatened, beat, and murdered—anything to disrupt the mobilization or empowerment of Black communities. They targeted Union veterans, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Republican officeholders, farmers, teachers, tenants, or any African American with a modicum of self-sufficiency. Like Parks, they were the sons of once-great slaveholders, soured by the planter aristocracy’s fall; they were bankrupted white farmers, resentful of competition from a free Black labor force; they were ex-Confederate soldiers, enraged by the sight of Black men at the polls. In central Alabama’s Black Belt and other regions where freedpeople made up large majorities and could better defend themselves, vigilante attacks were less common. But in northern Alabama, with its smaller, more dispersed Black population, the Ku Klux Klan waged a war of violence and terror without restraint.

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