New Republic Reviews “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction”

To counteract the notion that Reconstruction’s promises were meaningless, Williams highlights the real gains that many freed Black Southerners made under the protection of Reconstruction laws and federal enforcement. Hannah and Samuel Tutson were born into slavery, but two years after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, they were free, legally married, had three young children under their control, and were able to purchase a 160-acre plot of land in northern Florida. The couple used the savings Samuel earned as a newly freed farmer, and Hannah as a self-employed laundress, to purchase that land—land that had, to be sure, been seized from Indigenous Americans, but was now cheaply available to freedpeople thanks to another Reconstruction law, the Southern Homestead Act, which passed Congress in June 1866. “I have worked too much to lose it,” Hannah had told federal authorities in 1871, an indication of how much she valued the property Reconstruction laws entitled them to.

But losing that property is precisely what happened. Like thousands of other recently freed Black Southerners, the Tutson family was sleeping in their home one May night in 1871 when six white vigilantes broke in and brutalized the entire family. The Tutsons were targeted, Williams shows, for no other reason than their white neighbors’ resentment at their financial success. Indeed, a disproportionate number of white vigilantes’ victims were slightly better-off freedpeople like the Tutsons, whose wealth and independence threatened the racial order upon which the South was built. Black voters, almost all of whom voted Republican, were another frequent target. Then there were the thousands of Black Southerners who were tortured, hanged, and burned for in some way or another defying the color line—asking a white employer to be paid on time; accepting lower pay than white workers; flirting with a white woman; for being accused, usually falsely, of attacking or killing a white person.

Williams spends only two early chapters on the night raids themselves, as her real interest is in the long afterlife of these attacks. With great sensitivity and care, she details how such attacks were the start, not the culmination, of the pain and humiliation that Black survivors endured. While the Tutsons decided to report their crimes to federal authorities—who, in another Reconstruction achievement, tried to investigate and prosecute cases of white supremist terrorism—most survivors did not. It was simply too dangerous, and the chances of legal victory slim. The Tutsons, for instance, initially contacted a sympathetic white lawyer who put them in touch with the local county judge. But after taking notes on the case, the judge did nothing. Undeterred, the Tutsons traveled 40 miles to a federal judge, who did do something: He arrested the six vigilantes, one of whom was a local sheriff. But one of the Tutsons’ white neighbors paid their bonds, then turned around and had local authorities arrest Hannah and Samuel for “false reporting.” Now that Hannah and Samuel were broke, a different white neighbor agreed to pay their bonds in exchange for one of their few remaining assets, a prized cow.

This “labyrinthine pursuit of justice,” Williams writes, was typical. The records suggest that the Tutsons’ assailants likely never faced convictions, and like most of the cases that federal authorities brought against white vigilantes, the Tutsons’ case—if there even was one—may have ended in a hung jury or acquittal. Faced with a paucity of documentation, Williams ends her book imagining what the lives of the Tutsons may have been like 14 years after their attack, in 1885, when they reappear in census data. That document shows that they had clearly moved and were living together with two of their three children. Yet we will never know if they sold their original farm or abandoned it, losing a generation of family wealth. And we can only speculate about the private damages they still might have been working through. “Catastrophes, like captivity and sexual assault,” Williams writes, “often strain marriages and break affective bonds.” But the fact that Hannah and Samuel were still married holds another possibility—that, “as broken open as they were by the strike and repeated torment,” they may have “ultimately found refuge in each other.”

Williams casts these racist attacks on Southern Black families as a “war” against Reconstruction, a kind of forgotten “small war” that commenced after white Southerners lost the big one: the Civil War. Her larger point is that these attacks were not spontaneous acts of violence but well-planned and coordinated operations, akin to small military raids. And to a large degree, the martial metaphor works, often brilliantly: In this framing, white vigilantes become a “shadow army” attacking victims in “night-riding zones,” or areas where federal authorities were least present. Blacks who fled become wartime “refugees.” 

But her suggestion that these attacks amount to a kind of genocide—or, in her phrasing were “genocidal-like”—misses an important part of what these terror raids were all about. It’s true that these attacks were, like genocides, attacks by one ethnic or racial group against another. Yet genocide implies a deliberate intent to exterminate an entire group of people, and that was decidedly not the objective of all this racial violence. The goal was to keep Black labor cheap, just as slavery had done for two hundred years. Racial terrorism was intended to intimidate Black people into never asking for more money than white people thought they were worth. As Williams notes, when in 1879–80 nearly 40,000 Black Southerners fled the South for Kansas in what became known as the Exoduster movement, white elites panicked. If the goal was racial extermination, you would think they would have celebrated. But instead they were frightened because they wanted Black people to stay put so they could continue to exploit their labor. Associating racist violence with genocide may offer a certain kind of activist credibility, but it hinders a deeper understanding of the economic interests that anti-Blackness serves.

When Williams describes the economic motives that drove terror raids, she usually draws them from a specific attack, like when Black workers were attacked for complaining about brutal working conditions. But even racist attacks that did not directly transpire from an economic dispute, like a Black man flirting with a white woman, served the broader project of devaluing Black labor. If a Black man thought he was good enough to date a white woman, what was next? Taking a white man’s job? In this system of capitalism—racial capitalism—white elites benefited the most from cheap Black labor. But even middling whites at least got something, like less competition for better-paying jobs and a personal sense of superiority that masked their own affinities with the Black underclass.