May 31, 1870- The First Reinforcement Act

A cartoon threatening that the KKK will lynch scalawags (left) and carpetbaggers (right) on March 4, 1869. Tuscaloosa, Alabama Independent Monitor, Sept. 1, 1868. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kkk-carpetbagger-cartoon.jpg

In the South after the Civil War, the Union’s victory was followed by terrorism.

The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 in Tennessee by Confederate Veterans. It was only one of many secret terrorist groups that formed immediately after the end of the war. While many groups had chapters in different states, none of them exercised much central control. The groups formed and were directed by local members resisting Republican political domination and suppressing the political, social, and economic freedom of newly freed Black people in their towns and cities. The Klan became infamous as “midnight riders,” raiding homes, burning property, and often murdering Black and White people who challenged the old White Supremacist Democratic Party order.

The original klansmen wore hoods and disguises while conducting attacks, but they were not very uniform. The white hoods and burning crosses associated with the KKK were part of the revival movement in the 1910s and 20s.

Mississippi Ku-Klux members in the disguises in which they were captured. Artist Unknown. Harper's Weekly January 27, 1872. Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mississippi_ku_klux.jpg

This political violence surged throughout the 1860s, leading to the First and Second Enforcement Acts (1870, 1871), and the Ku Klux Klan Act (1871). These acts authorized the President and Congress to use military powers to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (The Reconstruction Amendments) passed between 1865-70. These amendments codified the citizenship and political rights of Black Americans. In reality, US troops were needed to ensure Black voters could participate in elections or hold offices they’d been elected to. Where there was no military presence, vigilantes like the Klan were largely successful in suppressing the rights of Blacks and the authority of Republican politicians and their allies.

Even after the Klan was effectively suppressed in the 1870s, political violence against Black voters, office holders, and jurors was endemic to the Southern United States and much of the North. Groups such as the White League, the Red Shirts, and others used terrorism to intimidate voters and oust Black and Republican politicians and sheriffs.

Ultimately, most United States’ leaders were uncomfortable using their political and military power to defend Black people from White southerners and eventually withdrew from enforcing the Constitution in the South by the end of the 1870s. It would not be until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the US government, goaded by hundreds of thousand of activists risking their lives, would again attempt to use its power to secure Americans’ constitutional rights in the South, and to dismantle the systems of segregation throughout the North and the West.

Sources:

The Enforcement Act of 1870- Blackpast

The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871- US Senate

Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871- National Constitution Center

Documenting Reconstruction Violence- Equal Justice Initiative

The United States' Thanksgiving

Thanksgivings were originally English Puritan religious festivals that would be declared for various reasons. New England pilgrims declared them after their arrival in the Americas, the end of a brutal drought, and other major events. Oddly, it’s not certain if the feast declared by governor William Bradford to celebrate Plymouth Colony’s first successful corn harvest was among these recurring Thanksgiving celebrations. However, this feast in which the colonists invited their Native allies, the Wampanoags, led by “Chief“ Massasoit, provided the basis of the story of the United States’ “first” Thanksgiving.

George Washington made the first proclamation of a national day of Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789 to celebrate the successful revolution, particularly the enacting of the Constitution which gave the nation of disparate states a solid political foundation. Several of the following presidents made similar Thanksgiving proclamations, but the tradition faded out after James Madison. 

Sarah Josepha Hale

The writer Sarah Josepha Hale and others petitioned for a national Thanksgiving holiday repeatedly starting in 1827. The holiday these White Protestant writers had in mind was more national than religious, and it sought to focus the holiday around the “Woman’s sphere” (cooking, homemaking, crafting, etc.) Many have criticized that it was also a scheme to institutionalize Protestant Anglo-Saxons as the cultural hegemons in the face of rising Catholic immigration, Black emancipation, etc. It didn’t happen until 1863. 

During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November as a national day of Thanksgiving. The year began with the Emancipation Proclamation and that July the Battle of Gettysburg dealt both sides enormous losses. The proclamation was actually penned by Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward.

(Partial quote)

“…Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

Right Hand and Life Mask of Abe Lincoln- Leonard Wells Volk, Augustus Saint-Gaudins

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.

And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.” 

Right Hand and Life Mask of Abe Lincoln- Leonard Wells Volk, Augustus Saint-Gaudins

Sources:

Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation- Olivia Waxman, Time.com

Lincoln and Thanksgiving- National Park Service 

Thanksgiving 2022- The History Channel

Wills, Anne Blue. Pilgrims and Progress: How Magazines made Thanksgiving. Church History. March 2003 Vol. 72, no. 1. Pp. 138-158. Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4146807