The Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment ‘took from the states control of their suffrage by bestowing the ballot on the Negro’.
The burning sense of grievance implanted during Reconstruction and magnified in its later retellings had distinct implications for both the rule of law and the idea that the races should be equal under it. The Southern view that parts of the Constitution had been imposed by force, and were therefore illegitimate, had a consequence: decent people could reasonably see the law as something that need not always be obeyed, or as an instrument to be manipulated. Occasionally, even acts of terrible violence that were patently illegal might be justified.
No less a figure than Columbus’s one-time Georgia Supreme Court Justice, Sterling Price Gilbert, expresses these thoughts in his memoir A Georgia Lawyer. Echoing Telfair, he describes Reconstruction as ‘cruel and oppressive’, and continues with a eulogy to the Klan, which he compares to the French Resistance:
These [Reconstruction] measures were often administered in a vindictive manner by incompetent and dishonest adventurers. This situation brought into existence the Ku Klux Klan which operated much like the ‘underground’ in World War Two … it is credited with doing much to restore order and protection to persons and property. The Ku Klux Klan of that day resembled the Vigilantes who operated in the formative days of our Western states and territories. The methods of both were often primitive, but many of the results were good.
Those Klan methods had been described over twelve volumes of testimony to a joint select committee of the two houses of Congress in 1871–72. Established in response to a mass of reports that the Klan had brought large tracts of the South close to anarchy, the committee’s mission was to gather evidence and investigate The Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. In Georgia, a subcommittee of the parent body sat in Atlanta for several months, unearthing a pattern of rape, intimidation and murder, perpetrated not by freed slaves and Yankees but against them. By 1871, the subcommittee heard, the Klan’s secret and hierarchical terrorist brigades were committing an average of two murders in Georgia each month.
In the city of Columbus, the defining moment of Reconstruction came in March 1868, a period of intense political ferment. Since December 1867, the Georgia Constitutional Convention, the state’s first elected body to include African-Americans, had been sitting in Atlanta. While it deliberated, Georgia remained under federal military rule, a state of affairs expected to last indefinitely, unless and until the state ratified the ‘equal rights’ Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Columbus Daily Sun, the delegates to this ‘black and tan’ Convention consisted of ‘New England outlaws; Sing-Sing convicts; penitentiary felons; and cornfield negroes’.
On 21 March 1868 the Sun reported the founding of the Columbus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. According to some of the witnesses who testified before the Congressional select committee, the Klan was fostered by the presence in the city of no less a figure than the former Confederate cavalry’s General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had become the Klan’s ‘Grand Wizard’ the previous year. As a military leader, Forrest was renowned for his tactical flair and aggression. He was also an alleged war criminal, accused of the massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, an event that prompted one survivor to describe him in a letter to a US Senator as a ‘foul fiend in human shape’, a perpetrator of ‘butchery and barbarity’.
As in other towns across the South, the Klan’s arrival in Columbus was heralded by strange placards couched in bizarre, Kabbalistic language, printed on yellow paper in clear black type, and posted on doors and walls throughout the city. Their text read:
K.K.K.
Horrible Sepulchre – Bloody Moon –
Cloudy Moon – Last Hour.
Division No. 71
The Great High Giant commands you. The dark and dismal hour will be soon. Some live today, tomorrow die. Be ye ready. The whetted sword, the bullet red, and the rights are ours. Dare not wear the holy garb of our mystic brotherhood, save in quest of blood. Let the guilty beware!! In the dark caves, in the mountain recesses, everywhere our brotherhood appears. Traitors beware!
By order of
Great Grand Cyclops, G.C.T.
Samivel, G.S.
Over the next few days the Sun named several prominent Republicans and warned: ‘The Ku Klux Klan has arrived, and woe to the degenerate … Something terrible floats on the breeze, and in the dim silences are heard solemn whispers, dire imprecations against the false ones who have proved recreant to their faith and country. Strange mocking anomalies [sic] now fill the air. Look out!’ In its editorial on 27 March, the paper warned ‘scalawags’ and ‘radicals’ to expect ‘terrible doom’.
To General Forrest, the Sun and their local followers, there was no ‘traitor’ hated more than Columbus’s most famous scalawag, George W. Ashburn. Among post-war Southern Republicans, he was as close as any to becoming a national figure. Born in Bertie County, North Carolina, in 1814, he spent part of the 1830s working as an overseer of slaves. When Georgia seceded from the Union in January 1861, Ashburn raised a company of Southerners loyal to the Union and fought with the Northern army, attaining the rank of colonel. After the war he settled in Columbus, and in 1867 ran for election to the Georgia Convention, where he played a large part in drafting the proposed new state constitution, including its bill of rights. Ashburn was also planning to stand for the US Senate, and his speeches were reported on several occasions by the New York Times. According to Worsley, he was ‘a notorious influence among the innocent and ignorant Negroes’, and even before the Convention, had been ‘most offensive to the whites of Columbus’.
Having travelled back to Columbus after the Convention broke up on 17 March, Ashburn took lodgings at the Perry House, a boarding establishment where he had stayed before, but when the owner forced him to leave he moved to a humble shotgun house on the corner of Thirteenth Street and First Avenue. Its other occupants included the Columbus head of the pro-Republican Loyal League, and the house’s owner, a black woman named Hannah Flournoy.
The most detailed contemporary account of what happened next was written up in a dispatch for the New York Tribune on 1 April by the Reverend John H. Caldwell, the presiding Elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in LaGrange, forty miles to the north. Caldwell was a leading ‘Christian scalawag’, an early white prophet of racial tolerance who worked hard after the war to create a bi-racial church in Georgia. He had even organised special religious camps for freedmen in LaGrange, attended by up to six thousand former slaves. A frequent visitor to Columbus, he was present in the city during the events he described.
A political as well as a religious scalawag, Caldwell addressed a mass meeting of Republicans in the courthouse square on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 March. He pieced together his account of what happened after the meeting by talking with members of the Columbus coroner’s jury:
Between twelve and one o’clock last night a crowd of persons, estimated at from thirty to forty in number, went to the house where Mr Ashburn lodged, surrounded the building, broke open the rear and front doors, and murdered him in his room. He received three fatal shots, one in the head between the eyes, one just below and to the rear of the hip, and another one in the mouth, which ranged upward. His clothing had from ten to fourteen bullet holes in them [sic]. Five persons entered his room and did the murderous deed; the rest were in other parts of the house and yard. The crowd remained from ten to fifteen minutes, during which time no policeman made his appearance. As the murderous crew were dispersing, however, some policemen made their appearance on the opposite side of the street. They could give no account of the affair when examined. This deed was perpetrated on one of the principal streets, in the most public part of the city … all the assassins wore masks, and were well-dressed.
Ashburn’s body was barely cold before those who thought his murder justified began to assail his memory. The Sun’s report the following day was the beginning of a series of claims that would be made in many subsequent accounts, none of which, according to Caldwell, was true. Far from being a cold-blooded political assassination by the Klan or its supporters, the paper said, Ashburn’s