Daniel Byman is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a scholar of counterterrorism studies at the Brookings Institution. He has an interesting article on Lawfare focused on the failure of counterterrorism operations during Reconstruction. Here are a few excerpts:
Reconstruction (1867–1877) was one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history, replete with astounding political progress for the formerly enslaved, an unprecedented federal government role during peacetime—and horrific violence. The number of people white supremacists killed during Reconstruction is unknown, but it is probably in the high thousands or even tens of thousands. After Reconstruction, Democrats used their control of state governments to cement white power by enacting a mix of poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy requirements and character tests, all while white vigilante groups continued their lynchings and beatings. In South Carolina, there were more than 90,000 Black voters in 1876; by the end of the century, this number had fallen to less than 3,000….
Reconstruction failed in the United States because white Southerners who were opposed to it effectively used violence to undermine Black political power and force uncommitted white Southerners to their side. The Radical Republican-led U.S. government did not deploy enough troops or use them aggressively. Nor did it pursue alternative paths that might have made success more likely, such as arming the Black community. Reconstruction’s failure illustrates the dangers of half measures. The United States sought to reshape the American South at low cost, in terms of both troop levels and time. In addition, the failure indicates the importance of ensuring that democratization includes the rule of law, not just elections. Most important, Reconstruction demonstrates that a common policy recommendation—compromise with the losers after a civil war—is often fraught, with the price of peace being generations of injustice.
Reconstruction efforts, largely implemented at the point of a bayonet in former Confederate states, helped to achieve important initial progress…Despite the many restrictions, threats of violence, and general confusion, initial progress on Black political participation was impressive, even astounding. In Mississippi, almost 80 percent of eligible Black men voted in the summer elections in 1868. Before 1867, no Black American had ever held elected office at the federal level. From 1870 to 1876, there would be two Black U.S. senators, 15 representatives, and more than 600 state legislators—slightly less than 20 percent of Southern political offices in all. Hundreds more Black men held local positions, which were particularly important at a time when government power was highly decentralized. Black representation at the national level peaked in 1875, with eight members of Congress representing six different states…
But the gains achieved by Black Americans in the initial phase of Reconstruction prompted a dangerous backlash from racist extremists in the South. …Throughout this period, violence plagued the South. In Louisiana alone, a congressional report found that white supremacists had killed more than 1,000 people, mostly Black Louisianans, between the April and November 1868 elections, and they killed or wounded 2,000 more in the weeks before the 1871 election. General Philip Sheridan would estimate that white supremacists killed 2,141 Black citizens (the number of white Republicans was not estimated) in Louisiana during Reconstruction. In Arkansas, white supremacists killed more than 2,000 people in connection with the 1868 election alone.
For most of Reconstruction, the United States did not deploy enough troops to ensure the peace, and civilian capacity was weak to nonexistent, giving violent white supremacists far more freedom of action. The U.S. Army was responsible for 9 million people living over 750,000 square miles, with many of the most vulnerable of the people under Army control living in remote rural areas with poor infrastructure. Assessments of modern stabilization operations tend to use a conservative 1:50 troop-to-population ratio to optimize for success; using that metric for the number of troops required for Reconstruction-era stabilization would indicate around 180,000 troops were needed in total. But at peak times, the number of troops deployed to the South was between 10,000 and 15,000 in total, and the number was often far lower. Financial pressure was intense, and Congress cut the size of the Army quickly in the war’s aftermath. In 1877, the entire army, including chaplains and West Point cadets, comprised slightly more than 25,000 men.
Troop deployments were invariably subject to the political winds of the moment, and even when used, the overall numbers remained too small to ensure widespread security. In Mississippi, in the face of white violence, Governor Adelbert Ames asked Grant to send out troops, but Grant did not do so because using force to stop racial violence in the South was increasingly unpopular in the North, and he feared that it would hurt Republican electoral chances in the key state of Ohio. Weariness with the seemingly endless violence, as well as lurking racism, was souring Northern voters on Reconstruction. The inaction led to open violence against Republican rallies and the murder of Black leaders in Mississippi, emboldening white militants in other states. Troop deployment provoked such intense political backlash that the first successful impeachment of a governor in U.S. history occurred in 1871 after North Carolina’s governor deployed federal troops against the Klan, outraging other state officials.
The cost of the military occupation, its unclear endpoint, and the peacetime use of the military raised concerns among congressional leaders and the public as a whole. The priorities of Northern Republicans also shifted during the Panic of 1873, when a stock market crash and subsequent bank failures devastated the U.S. economy and plunged America into a depression, further reducing popular support for the Republican Party and the spending associated with Reconstruction. In the 1876 elections, violence led to disputes about who truly won Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, the last states with Republican governments. Under the Compromise of 1877, Rutherford Hayes, the Republican presidential candidate, was awarded victory in these contests but agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South. Democrats, in turn, promised to respect the civil rights of Black Americans, which they did not. Such empty promises, however, gave Republicans a politically easy out, enabling them to abandon an increasingly unpopular troop presence while claiming they were maintaining support for Black rights.
The ultimate effect of the failure to stop white violence was not lost on Republican leaders, even as it was happening. The governor of Mississippi noted by force of arms “a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery,” and Grant himself admitted that “the results of the war of the rebellion will have been in large part lost.”
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Nowhere are William Faulkner’s words more poignant than in U.S. racial history. The staggering violence that occurred during Reconstruction, the gross suppression of human rights, and the unbending of the arc of the United States’ moral universe get short shrift in U.S. history classes, as does the remarkable, but brief, progress in political representation by the formerly enslaved. Until we teach history properly, we will not understand it.
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