Still the Arena of Civil War: Violence and Turmoil in Reconstruction Texas, 1865-1874 by Kenneth W. Howell

Author:Kenneth W. Howell [Howell, Kenneth W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Published: 2012-10-01T07:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The Insurgents and Their Allies: Texas Terrorists, Politicians, and Newspaper Editors

CHAPTER 7

When the Klan Rode: Terrorism in Reconstruction Texas

by

James M. Smallwood

In Texas during Reconstruction terrorist groups and outlaw gangs were legion, and they kept the state bathed in blood from 1865 to the mid-1870s. They wrapped themselves in the Confederate flag, bespoke the “Lost Cause,” and claimed to be taking the field against Texas’s enemies: native white Unionists, who were willing to cooperate with federal authorities; the ex-slaves whose leaders demanded true freedom and wanted all the rights whites enjoyed; and the “Yankee” forces of occupation, including regulars and officers on detached duty as agents for the Freedmen’s Bureau. Indeed, for former Confederates in Texas, the war did not end in 1865; rather the “Second Civil War,” also called the “War of Reconstruction” was really a holocaust fought in a new guise. Generally in the first phase of Civil War (1861–1865), professional armies fought each other until 1865 when the Northern forces prevailed on the fields of battle. In the second phase (1865–1877), former Confederates, including those living in Texas, were victorious and by 1877 the second phase ended in the South with the region returned to the white supremacist Democratic Party. In the Texas effort, terrorist groups formed in more than sixty counties, and at least a dozen large bands of outlaw guerrilla raiders flourished, all the while claiming to represent the continued fighting spirit of old Dixie. Together the Klan and the outlaw guerrillas (often one in the same) destabilized the Reconstruction process, insuring that the reformist policies of the Republicans would fail. In Northeast Texas alone, Klansmen and outlaws overwhelmed the authorities by using violence extensively in the interest of obtaining plunder. But the groups were discriminate in their attacks. Generally, they left alone Texans who supported the old Confederacy in return for their help. Over time, the violent groups evolved into the paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party: the party of slavery, the party of secession, the party of Civil War. Yes, the Southerners, including ex-Confederate Texans, won the War of Reconstruction and set back their region by at least one hundred years. They turned the South, again Texas included, into a dark and bloody ground.1 Perhaps a correspondent writing to the Cincinnati Commercial said it best:

You cannot pick up a paper in East Texas without reading of murder, assassinations, and robbery . . . and yet not the fourth part of the truth has been told; not one act in ten is reported. Go where you will, and you will hear of fresh murder and violence . . . The civil authority is powerless—the military insufficient in number, while Hell has transferred its capital from pandemonium to Jefferson, and the devil is holding high carnival in Gilmer, Tyler, Canton, Quitman, Boston, Marshall and other places in Texas.2

Not as gifted with words, General Philip Sheridan, who commanded the Fifth Military District (Louisiana and Texas) in 1867, was heard to mutter that if he “owned both Texas and Hell he would rent out Texas and move to Hell.

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