Negroes and the Gun Read online

  The federal government, with an occupying army still in place, countermanded much of the discriminatory arms legislation. In January 1866, General Daniel Sickles, commander of federal occupation troops, issued a general order that “the constitutional rights of all loyal and well disposed inhabitants to bear arms will not be infringed.”32

  Black Code drafters also faced the problem that has always afflicted weapons embargoes. Even for ruthless postwar lawmakers, saying that guns were banned to blacks was different from actually prying them away. The assessment of a black trooper assigned to the Freedman’s Bureau in Mississippi is instructive here. In a letter to a Bureau commissioner, Private Calvin Holly described an incident in Vicksburg involving armed black men. He noted, “they was forbidden [by the Black Code] not to have any [guns] but did not heed.”

  Attempts to disarm the freedmen appeared not only in state statutes, but also in local ordinances and private contracts. In a report to President Andrew Johnson, General Charles Schurz described a series of local ordinances in Louisiana that prohibited blacks from owning any type of weapon without permission from their employer and separate approval by the mayor. In other cases, petty plantation tyrants put conditions in long-term labor contracts prohibiting blacks from possessing firearms.33

  The Black Code and labor contract restrictions were a piece with violent attempts to disarm blacks perpetrated by local police, white state militias, and Klan-type organizations that rose during Reconstruction to wage a war of Southern redemption. The formal Ku Klux Klan emerged out of Tennessee in 1866. But across the South, similar organizations cropped up under names like the White Brotherhood, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Innocents, and the Knights of the Black Cross. Black disarmament was part of their common agenda.34

  Many black veterans left military service with their issue weapons or war prizes and probably were better armed than the general black population. But the public conversation shows that arms for self-defense were a particular concern of the broad swath of black civilians. This is evident in the reaction to occupation-army commands affirming freedmen’s right to keep and bear arms. These orders were widely reprinted in black newspapers along with commentary that spoke to the community’s concerns. A good example appears in the Christian Recorder published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which editorialized:

  We have several times alluded to the fact that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. Gen. Tilson, assistant Commissioner, for Georgia, has issued a circular in which he clearly defines the right as follows: . . . “The Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms and states that this right shall not be infringed. Any person, white or black, may be disarmed, if convicted of making an improper and dangerous use of weapons; but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without the distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.” We are glad to learn that Gen. Scott, Commissioner for this state, has given freedmen to understand that they have as good a right to keep firearms as any other citizens. The Constitution of the United States is the . . . law of the land, and we will be governed by that at present.35

  The black newspaper the Loyal Georgian reprinted General Sickles’s Order No. 1, followed by an editorial explaining that that blacks were now citizens who had a right to have guns for self-protection.

  Have colored citizens a right to own and carry firearms? . . . Almost every day we are asked questions similar to the above. We answer certainly you have the same right to own and carry arms that other citizens have. You are not only free but citizens of the United States and, as such, entitled to the same privileges granted to other citizens by the Constitution of the United States. . . .

  Article II of the Amendments to the Constitution of the United States gives the people the right to bear arms and states that this right shall not be infringed. Any person, white or black may be disarmed if convicted of making an improper or dangerous use of weapons, but no military or civil officer has the right or authority to disarm any class of people, thereby placing them at the mercy of others. All men, without distinction of color have the right to keep and bear arms to defend their homes, families or themselves.36

  Negroes claiming their constitutional right to arms also sent petitions to Congress, protesting racist state gun-control laws. One typical petition implored Congress, “We ask that, inasmuch as the Constitution of the United States explicitly declares that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed and the Constitution is the supreme law of the land—that the late efforts of the legislature of the state to pass an act to deprive us or [sic] arms be forbidden, as a plain violation of the Constitution.” The Joint House and Senate Committee of Fifteen of the 39th Congress, which eventually drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, heard many such complaints about Black Code and private terrorist attacks on freedmen’s right to arms.37

  Congress received many other reports and complaints about schemes to disarm blacks. A report of the commissioner of the Kentucky Freedman’s Bureau confirms black complaints that “the civil law prohibits the colored man from bearing arms. Their arms are taken from them by the civil authorities. . . . Thus the right of the people to keep and bear arms as provided in the Constitution is infringed.” The congressional testimony of General Rufus Saxon, formerly a commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau in South Carolina, adds texture. In February 1866, Saxon described to a congressional committee how white planters tried to use peonage contracts backed with threats of violence to deprive freedmen of their firearms. “They desired me to sanction a form of contract which would deprive the colored men of their arms, which I refused to do. The subject was so important, as I thought, to the welfare of the freedmen that I issued a circular on this subject.”38

  Saxon also reported the attempt by private terrorists to disarm Negroes, recounting how “in some parts of the state, armed parties are, without proper authority, engaging in seizing all firearms found in the hands of the freedmen. Such conduct is plain and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.” Another Freedman’s Bureau commissioner, General Wager Sayne, reported to Congress how militias in Alabama attempted to disarm freedmen and that his force blocked those attempts.39

  Reports to the Reconstruction Congress verify the importance of defensive firearms to freedmen. A Freedman’s Bureau report from Tennessee describes an incident where a band of Klansman attacked a group of eight freedmen. Several of the black men were armed with pistols and drove off their attackers. Freedman’s Bureau commissioner Howard confirmed the widespread possession of arms by the rising black political class, noting, “no Union man or Negro who attempts to take any active part in politics, or the improvement of his race is safe a single day; and nearly all sleep upon their arms at night, and carry concealed weapons during the day.”40

  By the end of February 1866, the House of Representatives began debating what became the Fourteenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights—which would declare that blacks were full citizens entitled to equal protection and due process under the law.41 This debate is some of our best evidence about the scope of the constitutional right to arms. In a revealing discussion of the Civil Rights Act, whose language prefigured the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a representative from New York explained the aim to “make the colored man a citizen of the United States and he has every right which you and I have. . . . He has a defined status; he has a country and a home; a right to defend himself and his wife and children; a right to bear arms.”

  The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Second Freedman’s Bureau Act, and ultimately the Fourteenth Amendment, is a rich and complex story that implicates far more than the freedmen’s right to arms. But that right was integral to the debate, and was discussed widely outside the halls of Congress.
When Congress voted to override President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Bill, the New York Evening Post editorialized about the evils that the bill sought to remedy. Prominent here was the attempt across the South to deprive freedmen from “keeping firearms.”

  By the end of April 1866, the full Congress began debate on the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. Senator Howard introduced the proposal, explaining that the “great object” of the amendment is to “restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees. . . . Secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.” Concurrent with this debate, Congress also passed legislation abolishing the Southern state militias. This was necessary, explained one of the sponsors, because the state militias had been used to disarm the freedmen.42

  Initially the rebel states unanimously rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. But, chafing under federal military rule and the stipulation that they could not reenter the Union unless they approved the amendment, they eventually capitulated. (This coercion would fuel twentieth-century segregationists’ claims that the Fourteenth Amendment was illegitimate and that the Constitution still sanctioned racial apartheid.) By 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was the law of the land and laid a broad foundation for the protection of a range of liberties essential to the rise of the freedmen, including the right to keep and bear arms.

  The grand constitutional efforts to affirm the freedmen’s right to arms carried an important symbolism—free men had a right to arms, slaves did not. But for Negroes navigating a multitude of threats after the war, it is hard to overestimate the practical importance of firearms. This is demonstrated dramatically in episodes of gunfire but more prosaically in the accounts of freedmen who never fired their guns—men like Cato Carter, who spent most his life in slavery and then endured what passed for freedom in postwar Texas. So far as we know, Carter never fired a gun in self-defense. And it is just by happenstance, in a set of regional slave narratives, that we learn about his practice of arms.

  Carter confirmed that in some ways freedom was more hazardous than slavery. As a valuable piece of white man’s property, he actually enjoyed a measure of legal protection that disappeared after emancipation. So when white terrorists launched into high gear, Carter was happy to have an effective self-defense tool. Bands of whites, said Carter, “was allus skullduggering ’round at night.” He does not tell where he got it, but Carter calculated that the wise response was to keep and carry a gun to protect his home and family.43

  Cato Carter was no aberration. A report from the Texas legislature describes a series of conflicts in the postwar period where freedmen were “generally as well armed as the whites,” and this sort of small-scale parity fueled intermittent black victories. In Washington County, Texas, white men rode out to break up a black political meeting. The whites were armed, but not really prepared for a shootout. When they fired into the crowd of Negroes, the freedmen shot back, scattering their attackers. Later, a white man broke into the home of one of the black organizers and threatened her with a gun. Armed black men tracked him down, arrested him, and turned him over to military authorities.44

  The ability and decision to acquire a gun for self-defense surely varied according to individual circumstances, disposition, and calculations about surrounding hazards. Some hazards were public, some were private, and some were hybrids—private threats backed by a badge of office and flavored by the racism of the day.

  The case of Al McRoberts is one of the latter. McRoberts started carrying a gun after W. A. Harris, a Danville, Kentucky, police officer, threatened to kill him. A Christmas Eve street encounter culminated with McRoberts firing three shots from his revolver at Harris. McRoberts was arrested, but later that evening, a mob seized him, took him to the edge of town, and hanged him from a sturdy oak. The inquest report concluded that “McRoberts came to his death by hanging by some parties unknown.”45

  Many of the reports of Negroes with guns during this period lack texture. One longs for detail on the specific worries and fears that caused these folk to acquire and carry guns. What comfort did they draw, amidst news of the latest terrorist attack, from a revolver, rifle, or shotgun close to hand? And what about the harms avoided, incidents where Negroes brandished guns and chased off some threat? Modern surveys tell us that this type of scenario, vastly underacknowledged even now, is by far the most common category of armed self-defense.

  Narratives from the increasingly literate class of freedmen are suggestive here. The little-noticed autobiography of Reverend Elijah Marrs is one of these. Born into slavery in Shelby County, Kentucky, in 1840, Marrs ran off to join the Union Army in September 1864. Entering service toward the end of the war, he was among the latecomers who made the Union Army a proportionally “blacker” force than before.

  In early 1866, Elijah Marrs was on furlough, visiting his family in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He was welcomed by black folk as a returning hero. But many whites took the opposite view of his service. Marrs had just arrived at his parents’ home when a fire broke out on Main Street. Instinctively, he dropped his gun belt and ran to help. But his good deed drew unwanted attention. With the fire still smoldering, three white men wielding knives charged Marrs, one of them fulminating about “niggers in uniforms.”

  Marrs picked up a stick and fought his way home. Then he “wheeled and ran into the gate, around the house, and into the back door . . . seized pistols, threw open the front door, and opened fire on them.” Under a hail of lead, Marrs’s attackers ran for cover and then escaped. Accommodating his family’s fears that the men might return during the night with reinforcements, Marrs sat up until dawn, with revolvers ready. The night passed without violence, and Marrs managed to survive his three-week furlough with only one further incident that he defused by drawing his revolver and taking steady aim at a menacing young man who scurried off in search of a softer target.46

  When Elijah Marrs finally mustered out of the army in late 1866, he returned to Shelby County. With an established reputation as a literate black man, he was persuaded to start a school in nearby Simpsonville. Black schools and teachers were targets of terrorist violence, and Marrs’s school was no exception. One night, hooded men rode into his yard and threatened to flog everyone in the house. Marrs reports, “I stole downstairs, and, armed with my old pistol, stationed myself in a chimney corner, prepared to fight my way through should occasion demand it.” The terrorists ultimately did not break in and Marrs did not venture out. But that did not stop the other occupants of the house celebrating him as their savior.

  By 1869, Marrs had become politically active and was elected president of the county Republican Club. He was visiting with a group of political friends at the home of Elder Lewis in Lagrange, Kentucky, when breaking glass signaled the arrival of local terrorists. One of Marrs’s cohorts, a man named Roberts, grabbed a pistol and brandished it to full effect, staunching the attack.

  But the evening was young and with the lessons of similar attacks behind them, Marrs, Roberts, and Lewis sat up, clutching guns, anticipating a renewed assault. “About midnight,” Marrs reports, “they came again, and as they got near me I called to them to halt and then fired.” The gunfire was effective in dissuading at least this band of Klansmen from Lagrange.

  By 1870, Marrs had moved to Henry County, Kentucky, to run a school in New Castle. Henry County was thick with KKK, and “a colored man in public business dared not go five miles outside of the city for fear of assassination.” After a close call with belligerent Klansmen, Marrs organized the black men of the town into “a society for self protection, [called] the Loyal League.”

  Marrs then describes something that leaves us wondering what similar episodes have gone unrecorded. While there are no surviving minutes of his Loyal League, Marrs details his own preparation as part of the group and opens the speculation that he was not unique. “For three years,” says Marrs, “I slept with a pistol under my head, an En
field rifle at my side, and a corn knife at the door, but I never had occasion to use them.”47

  We can only guess how many other members of Marrs’s Loyal League made similar preparations. And what about their friends and neighbors? Given the times, what was the reasoning of Negroes who decided against owning a gun? Were they convinced that some government agent would protect them, or did they just pray and hope for the best?

  Some of the inputs on decisions to keep and bear arms are demonstrated in the records of the United States Senate Committee on Southern Reconstruction. A letter from a teacher at a freedmen’s school in Maryland demonstrates one set of concerns. The letter contains the standard complaints about racist attacks on the school and then describes one strand of the local response. “Both the Mayor and the sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do) [and] the superintendent of schools came down and brought me a revolver.”

  In other testimony, a music teacher from Virginia described attacks on Union men who “drew their revolvers and held their assailants at bay.” This affiant then volunteered that he also was constantly armed.48 A Freedman’s Bureau commissioner from Richmond, Virginia, described how common folk were widely armed and resisted the various efforts to take their guns. To the committee’s question, “Are there many arms among the blacks,” he responded “Yes sir; attempts have been made in many instances to disarm them; it has not been allowed; they [citizens patrols] would disarm the Negroes at once if they could.”

  Fig. 3.4. Depiction of Negro Soldiers and the Klan. (Still taken from The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith, 1915.)

  A reporter from Texas noted that communities of freedmen had successfully resisted attempts to take their guns and celebrated their victories with ostentatious displays. “Negroes are seldom molested now in carrying the firearms of which they make such a vain display. In one way or another, they have procured great numbers of old army muskets and revolvers, particularly in Texas, and I have in a few instances, been amused at the vigor and audacity with which they have employed them to protect themselves against the robbers and murderers that infest that state.”49