A few events in history are so emblematic of their times that we rightly call them keys to understanding something larger. The Clinton Massacre of 1875 is one such event.
Clinton was a small town in Mississippi in 1875. In September of that year, Republican supporters organized a large rally in support of their candidates in Mississippi’s fall elections. This rally began peacefully but soon turned deadly. We now call it the Clinton Massacre.
The Clinton Massacre is important for the lives lost, certainly. But it has far greater significance as well. In some ways, we still feel its importance today.
Clinton, Mississippi Massacre Facts
A riot certainly took place in Clinton in 1875. But it grew into much more. Here are some details.
The planned Republican rally drew roughly 2,000 spectators to a former plantation known as Moss Hill. Most were African American. Perhaps 75 to 100 were white. At this time, nearly all former slaves gave their allegiance to the Republican Party. It was, after all, the party of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.
A quick note here. Some may find it difficult to believe that the Republican Party, with its open embrace of racism today, was once the party of civil rights in the U.S. But it was. Likewise, African Americans massively favor the Democratic Party in their voting preferences today. But that wasn’t always true, either.
The story of why these things changed is immensely important to understanding American history. But that story is far too complex to explain here. Suffice it to say that things were different from today in 1875, and it’s worth learning what caused the parties to change their behavior. Maybe that’s a blog for the future.
The rally at Clinton featured speakers from both parties in a gesture of fairness. The organizers also banned liquor to keep things calm. Democratic state senate candidate Amos Johnston spoke for an hour. No trouble resulted. (Yes, he spoke for an hour. During the 1800s candidates didn’t so much give speeches as they gave orations. People expected it.)
Please Click Here to Subscribe to Rob’s History Blog!
Why It Was More Than the Clinton Riot
Captain Fisher next spoke for the Republicans. He’d been a Union officer in the Civil War and now edited a Republican newspaper. (Another difference peculiar to that time—many newspapers did not pretend to be fair and balanced in the 1800s. They supported a party and made no secret of the fact.) Before long, white hecklers interrupted Fisher’s speech. According to witnesses, they shouted out “We would have peace if you would stop telling your damned lies.”
The event organizers appealed for calm at this point. But evidence indicates that this interruption was a prearranged signal on behalf of local whites. These men moved into military formation, drew weapons, and opened up on the crowd.
At least eight people died during the Clinton Riot—at least five black and three white. Two of the fatalities were black children. Event attendees scattered into the woods to escape the barrage of bullets.
Please Click Here to Get Your Free Ebook of Rob’s First Novel!
The Clinton Riot Becomes the Clinton Massacre
Despite the fact it was whites who had opened fire, rumors immediately circulated claiming that blacks planned to storm Clinton. The mayor called for protection from a local group of white vigilantes called the White Liners. (Such groups were numerous at the time. Nearly all of them were a military force in the service of local Democratic politicians.)
By the next day (September 5), hundreds of White Liners patrolled the area, killing black people indiscriminately. One witness said, “They just hunted the whole country clean out, just every man they could see they were shooting at him just the same as birds.” Another witness, a teacher from Ohio who taught black children, said, “You hear a great deal about the massacre at Clinton, but you do not hear the worst. It cannot be told.”
No one knows how many African Americans perished in the slaughter that followed the riot. Estimates claim thirty to fifty, but no one really knows.
Congress Investigates – The Boutwell Report
This massacre was national news. Of course, local whites portrayed the massacre as a planned uprising of blacks, foiled at the last moment by patriotic whites.
The Boutwell Report refuted this nonsense. Worse, testimony gathered for the report showed that some African Americans had been targeted for murder by their neighbors. These people helped the White Liners and other vigilantes to find people and kill them.
People who wanted to maintain order in Mississippi called for intervention by the federal government. This included the governor, Adelbert Ames, but regular citizens as well.
The response of the president, Ulysses Grant, was tragic. He made his famous statement that “the whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government.” In other words, the national government would refuse to enforce the laws protecting the lives of U.S. citizens. Blacks in Mississippi were on their own.
A Harbinger
This is why I claimed the Clinton Massacre was a key to understanding something larger at the beginning of this post. After 1875, the national government spent less and less effort upholding the law where the rights of African Americans were concerned. This meant they were at the mercy of local officials, most of whom hated them.
Other southern states soon copied the so-called “Mississippi Plan” to take rights away from African Americans and dominate politics by force and terror. Unlike the early 1870s, when the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black people in disguise, murderers didn’t even need disguises after 1875. They paraded in broad daylight. Murders and lynchings proliferated, as did efforts to take away the legal rights of African Americans. Collectively, these efforts are known as the Jim Crow laws.
That is one reason the Clinton Massacre remains significant today. It helped inaugurate an era of repression during which the U.S. became less democratic and less true to its ideals. This repression blighted the lives of millions of African Americans, relegating them to poverty and political invisibility. Mixed with concepts like Providential Design, the resulting brew was toxic for African Americans. (Read my post on Providential Design here if you aren’t familiar with this racist concept.)
Not Quite All
It would be bad enough if that was all the harm done by the Clinton Massacre and all the other massacres of the 1870s. But it isn’t.
They also served another purpose, both historically and now—to delegitimize Reconstruction. Most people believe the era after the Civil War, known as Reconstruction, was a failure. That’s what it became by the end of the 1870s. But that wasn’t true when the decade began.
Before Jim Crow, the Mississippi Plan, sharecropping, and everything else, Reconstruction was working. The former slaves were becoming citizens, taking part in government, and so forth. Reconstruction brought things like public schools and hospitals to the South that had never had them before. Rebuilding after the Civil War was painful and sometimes slow. What could Southerners expect after being defeated in armed rebellion?
But this progress came at the cost of seeing former slaves free and able to determine their own fates. Southern whites could not accept this. So, they had to find ways to remove the legitimacy of Reconstruction. Thus grew the legend of Reconstruction state governments as wasteful, expensive, corrupt, and unruly failures.
This, mixed with constant violence to put African Americans in a subordinate place, proved the magic combination for southern racists. Blacks didn’t deserve full rights. Only whites were responsible enough to run state government. Intervention by the national government was ineffective and futile. States’ rights were paramount. The nonsense went on and on, but people believed it.
That’s why events such as the Clinton Massacre mattered in 1875 and still matter now.
Please Subscribe!
If you enjoyed this blog, please sign up to follow it by scrolling down or clicking here, and recommending it to your friends. I’d love to have you aboard! You can also join the more than 1,000 members of my Readers Club for Rob Bauer Books by clicking here or like me on Facebook and Instagram. Please check out my historical fiction novels, too. If you find this information valuable, supporting me helps keep this blog going.
As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!