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The Problem of Klan Violence: the South Carolina Up-Country, 1868–1871
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
The period of Reconstruction in the South was marred by frequent outbreaks of racial violence and South Carolina undoubtedly achieved a certain notoriety in this respect. Yet this phenomenon of recurring violence – even in its best known manifestation, the Ku Klux Klan – has not really received much intensive study from either the ‘revisionist’ school of Reconstruction historians or any local historians of the South. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the questions of why the Ku Klux Klan came into existence in the Southern states, and who organized and participated in its vigilante activities. These questions can be easily posed but, largely because of the lack of source materials which bear directly upon them, they have proved to be extremely difficult to answer satisfactorily.
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References
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3 Predominantly white counties are here defined as counties where Negroes constituted less than 50% of the total population. According to the 1870 census the predominantly white Klan counties – with the percentage of their black populations – were Oconee (20%), Pickens (20%), Greenville (33%), Spartanburg (32%), Anderson (37%), Chesterfield (40%) and Lancaster (42%). Predominantly black counties are those where Negroes constituted over 60% of the population. The predominantly black counties were Abbeville (66%), Newberry (65%), Fairfield (72%), Chester (66%), and Edgefield (62%). Counties where Negroes constituted between 50–60% of the population are defined as having racially bal anced populations. In the up-country, York (50%), Laurens (54%) and Union (52%) counties therefore fit into this classification. The percentage of Negroes in Marlboro, Marion and Horry counties was 54%, 45% and 30% respectively. Admittedly, the 1870 census under estimated the Negro population in the Southern states, but even if the 1880 census is used to calculate the percentage of black and white in the population very few changes would have to be made in the above classification. Of the Klan counties, only Lancaster would have to be reclassified as a county with racially balanced population. Therefore the inadequacy of the 1870 census does not seem to affect one of the main arguments of this essay – that the population of South Carolina's up-country was too variegated to support the assertion that Klan counties were either white counties or counties with even numbers of white and black people. For figures and a discussion of the 1870 census, see Petty, Julian J., The Growth and Distribution of Population in South Carolina (Columbia, 1943), pp. 62, 64, 76, 77, 227, 228.Google Scholar
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9 Ibid., p. 73 and cf. p. 369.
10 The newspapers used were the Charleston Daily Courier, the Anderson Intelligencer, the Edgefield Advertiser, the Carolina Spartan and the Yorkuille Enquirer. The election investiga tions are contained in House Miscellaneous Documents, 41st Congress 1st session, no. 17; 41st Congress 2nd session, no. 17; 42nd Congress 2nd session, no. 48. The state of South Carolina also conducted an investigation of the 1868 Presidential election – see Evidence Taken by the Committee of Investigation of the Third Congressional District (Columbia, 1870)Google Scholar. Election returns for South Carolina between November 1867 and June 1868 are printed in House Executive Documents, 40th Congress 3rd session, The Report of the Secretary of War, pt. 1, pp. 520–2Google Scholar. The existence of scalawags is assumed if the total vote in a county cast for a Reconstruction measure exceeded the registered black vote. Fraud, violence and the absence of accurate registration figures make it impossible to apply a similar analysis to the elections between November 1868 and October 1870.
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45 Joel Williamson has rightly argued that the distribution of the militia companies during the 1870 election accounts for much of the Klan violence in 1870–71. Yet this argument obviously cannot explain the phenomenon of recurring violence in the up-country counties in the years 1868 and 1870–71. The militia was armed in strength in the up-country in 1870 because there had been extensive violence in the same area in 1868, a fact which suggests there were already present in the local situation other factors which had precipitated the rise of the Klan. See Williamson, , pp. 261–2.Google Scholar
46 Post, p. 63.
47 Descriptions of the Klan raids of 1870–71 are provided in most of the secondary literature on the Klan. See Trelease, , pp. 349–80.Google Scholar
48 Ku Klux Report, pp. 388, 520, 540, 585, 1591.Google Scholar
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50 There is evidence to suggest that some Klan leaders organized meetings to attempt to stop the violence. In York county this development appears to have been launched by Dr J. Rufus Bratton, However, Bratton had personally supervized the hangings of militia leaders in York and probably was in no position to force others to stop what he had once encouraged. See Trelease, , p. 367–8.Google Scholar
51 Woodward, C. Vann, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (2nd ed., revised, New York 1966), p. 81.Google Scholar
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