During the last days of the Civil War,
Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment. This amendment freed all
the slaves in perpetuity, including those not yet freed by the
Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870)
Amendments followed within a short while.
The Constitution was not strong enough
by itself to protect the newly minted rights of freedmen. The
government posted federal troops in the states of the former
Confederacy to enforce the law. Freedmen--former slaves--voted in elections for the
first time. African-Americans were elected to state offices, helped
by laws that made former Confederate office holders ineligible to
run.
The freedom and justice promised by the
Fourteenth Amendment was short-lived. The Ku Klux Klan began
intimidating and murdering Republicans and African-Americans in 1868.
The Klan murdered Republican organizer George Ashburn in Columbus,
Georgia, on March 28, 1868. The Klan published a pamphlet intended to
slander Ashburn and intimidate anyone who might try to take his place
as an organizer. The pamphlet charged that Ashburn was living with an
African-American woman and described the place of assassination as a
brothel.1
Nine men, described as prominent
citizens, were arrested and brought to trial before a military
tribunal. Before they could be tried, the Georgia legislature
accepted the Fourteenth Amendment, which was the condition set for reentering the union. The military government
was dissolved and the prisoners released. No one was ever tried for
Ashburn's murder.
A group of African-American Republicans
marched from Albany to Camilla to attend a political rally in
September, 1868. White southerners ambushed them in Camilla's
Courthouse Square, killing 12 and wounding many others. The white men
kept on attacking the group as they retreated along the road back to
Albany. Other similar massacres occurred in South Carolina and
Alabama.
Some political leaders were intimidated
or imprisoned. T. G. Campbell described how he argued before the
Georgia Legislature that he and other freedmen should be allowed to
speak. While he was speaking, the white legislators put their hands
on the butts of their pistols and made threatening gestures at him.
Campbell gave up after eight days of argument. Later he took office
as justice of the peace and organized a group of 300 African-American
horsemen to protect himself from the Klan.
Campbell could perhaps protect himself
from violence within the enclave of freedmen he organized along the
Georgia coast, but he could not protect himself from miscarriage of
justice perpetrated by his white enemies. Campbell was charged with
malfeasance in office and brought before a local judge. He was
convicted and immediately jailed. Campbell spent the next year and a
half being shuffled from jail to jail. His wife tirelessly worked to
free him, but nothing she did was of any use. Judges avoided him. New
trials were arranged, but with each new trial came demands for new
documentation that had to be found and delivered to the court.
Finally, Campbell's wife secured an
order from the U.S. Attorney General that the case be moved to a
federal court. Campbell believed that he was about to be cleared, but
his lawyer failed to file the proper papers and his case was
dismissed. After the dismissal in federal court, Campbell was sent to
a prison camp where the prisoners were worked from dawn to dusk and
beaten if they fell behind the other workers. This system of forced
convict labor replaced slavery to a certain degree. Campbell's wife
interceded for him with the camp overseer and succeeded in getting
him a job more suited to his age. He was sixty-three when he entered
the camp in 1876.2
Following the passage of the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments, Congress passed several Civil Rights Bills
to protect the civil rights created in the amendments. The Supreme
Court set about methodically destroying these rights in a series of
decisions that ran counter to the spirit and the letter of the
amendments.
In Blyew v. United States (1871), the
Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act (1866) did not affect the
witnesses in a case. The Bill specifically states that all persons
born in the United States are citizens and that citizens have a right
to give evidence in court cases. In Blyew, two African-Americans were
denied the right to testify by Kentucky state law. The Court
construed the Civil Rights Act to apply only to principals in court
cases, not witnesses, despite the clear intent of the law, and
affirmed the ruling of the Appellate Court. In this case, the
principal, a blind, 75-year-old African-American woman, was the
murder victim. Since she was dead, the Court ruled, the federal court
had no jurisdiction in the case.
In United States v. Cruikshank (1876),
the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act of 1870 was only
binding on state actions, not individuals. Using this logic, the
Court overturned the convictions of two white men who had joined the
Colfax Massacre in Louisiana, when over 100 blacks were murdered by a
white militia. The Congress had intended this Act specifically to
address the actions of the Ku Klux Klan, so the Court ruled exactly
counter to the purpose of the Act. The Court's action left the
freedmen in the south at the mercy of the Klan and numerous other
private militias. Their action returned African-Americans to their
pre-War status, when an African-American could be raped, murdered, or
tortured by a white with impunity.
In the Civil Rights Cases (1880), the
Supreme Court ruled likewise that the Fourteenth Amendment did not
apply to private citizens, like railroads, hotels, and the operators
of public amusements. These individuals, said the Court, had the
right to choose the people they wanted to associate with, regardless
of what the Fourteenth Amendment said. Justice Harlan, the sole
dissenting voice in these five decisions, reminded the Court that
private railroads were by law public highways, that innkeepers had
long been held to be public servants of a sort, and that public
amusements are maintained under a license coming from the public. No
state, said Harlan, nor any corporation or individual acting under
state authority for the public good, can discriminate against freemen
or citizens. These rulings put an end to efforts by Congress to
ensure civil rights for African-Americans and ushered in an era of
segregation and second-class citizenships.
In U.S. v. Harris (1883), the Supreme
Court once again ruled that federal courts had no jurisdiction in
cases of murder or assault. These cases were matters for the states.
It did not matter that the persons assaulted were African-Americans
and the assailants were a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. In Harris,
the Klansmen dragged four African-Americans from their jail cells and
beat them, one of them to death. Although Federal Law intended to
stop such violations of African-American civil rights, as authorized
under the Fourteenth Amendment, the law was unconstitutional because
it usurped the rights of the states. Harris also ruled that
the sheriff who had custody of the African-Americans who were beaten
could not be held liable under federal law because he was liable only
for his actions, not his inactions. Under this ruling, depriving a
person of his life is not the same thing as depriving him of his
Constitutional rights, and inaction is not a form of action.
Not until the 1960s did the Supreme
Court repudiate the extreme racism inherent in all these rulings (and
others besides). The Constitution failed to protect individuals from
crimes committed against them, even when Congress explicitly created
laws saying that it should.
___________
1
Radical rule : military outrage in Georgia: Arrest of Columbus
prisoners (Louisville, Ky., 1868),
http://books.google.com/books?id=QEwTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=george+ashburn+murder&source=bl&ots=u4jYy1SKzI&sig=csGygOILiQ6j5e-RfFFGKQ-9Ha0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_Hh9UcibCpTG4APiooDgCg&ved=0CHoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=george%20ashburn%20murder&f=false.
Since this pamphlet declares in its preface that its intent is to
convey the proper impression of military despotism to the northern
mind, its content must be treated as completely unreliable.
2Campbell,
T.G., Sufferings of the Rev. T. G. Campbell and his family, in
Georgia (Washington, 1877),
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL22894692M.
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