I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams

I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams Bloomsbury Publishing (2023) 371 pages $25.00

Imagine that someone was writing a history  of the United States’s war in Iraq  and it ended with the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue on April 9, 2003. Sure, by then the conventional forces opposed to the United States military would have been defeated, but the history would have skipped the next two decades of conflict that really reshaped to the region. Well, that is how most histories of the Civil War end. Handshakes after the surrender at Appomattox without the messy guerrilla warfare that helped restore the old Confederate hierarchy to power.

Two new books have arrived this year to tell the story of that war on the concept of the United States, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams and Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction by Fergus M. Bordewich. These can be read as companions to each other, but both stand alone. Today, let us talk about I Saw Death Coming.

“The War Against Reconstruction,” as Kidada Williams names this second phase of the armed Confederate struggle against the United States, was focused less of pitched battles with United States soldiers than on a week-by-week war on the freedpeople whose emancipation had been declared by the 13th Amendment in 1865. Black people had always been the targets of violence before the amendment, but  after freedom, came retribution and restoration. As Kidada Williams writes, “But this was not merely a continuation; emancipation and Black people’s fight for legal equality changed everything, incentivizing the all-out war white southerners waged on freedom during the Reconstruction period.” White Southerners were not just fighting to keep control of the region’s primary labor force, they also wanted to deny to Blacks the ability to go to school, to worship freely, to vote, to hold office, to go to court, to enforce the laws. This was a period when slavery was ended, but an even greater threat was Black Reconstruction which saw African Americans as standing at the same height as whites.

While many people who study this period believe that there are few African American records to consult to tell the freedpeople’s account, There are actually thousands of pages of testimony taken by a committee sent to hear what was going on in the South in 1871. This Congressional Joint to Inquire Into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States looked into scores of cases of attacks on Black men, women, and children and had witnesses testify with cross examination supplied by Democratic Congressmen. This testimony was published by Congress as were the Republican and Democratic reports from the members of the committee. These primary sources for the basic  research for I Saw Death Coming. Kidada Williams says in her book that “Targeted people’s testimonies provide a counternarrative to the stories we’re told about Reconstruction’s supposed “failure.” Speaking with one voice, they said white southerners were not attacking Black people impulsively or defending themselves from Black violence, as former Confederates and their apologists claimed. They were purposefully waging war on Black people’s freedom.”

The book brings readers the immediacy of seeing the Klan raids through the eyes of their victims. Raids typically took place at night at the cabins housing Black families. After surrounding a home without warning, white men disguised in Klan guises burst in on the sleeping family. As children cowered in fear and babies cried, the mother and father tried to grasp what was happening. Should they fight, which might lead to  the whole family being killed, or should they try to remain passive in which the man would suffer beatings or death, but in which the other members would survive?

While the terrorists were in disguise, the victims would often come to realize that they knew some of the attackers. Some discovered that a Klansman was a long-time acquaintance, or an overseer from slave days. Others  were merchants they bought from, or coworkers on a large project.  Not only were their bodies abused, the victims also found their sense of belonging to the same community as these white men was ill-founded.

While murder was carried out most often against Black men, rape was one of the ultimate punishments against Black women and girls. Rape had been employed for decades against Black women held as slaves before the Civil War. With freedom, Black women claimed bodily autonomy and the right to refuse rape. During the Civil War, the Lieber Code had been published by the War Department that established that Black women had the same rights as white women to object to forcible sexual intercourse. After the war, Southern men tried to override this Federal interference with the traditional right of white men to take a Black woman without her consent. But this was not just a matter of the Klansman’s desire for gratification.  Rape was also used as a weapon of war against Black families and the Black community. Rape, as per Williams, “broadcast the sexual violability of Black women and girls in the white war on Black freedom, which could undermine family and communal unity.”

The women suffered, their male kin were humiliated by not being able to protect their women, and communal feelings were broken when babies were born out of these violent sexual violations.

I Saw Death Coming is a dangerous trip back to a time when a nascent free Black community was for the first time beginning to challenge white supremacy in its most enshrined region. Kidada Williams lets you see what African Americans saw back then and, through their words, lets you know what they suffered.

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