Echoes of Reconstruction: The Mississippi Plan For White Domination

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog

The Mississippi Plan was a covert effort to install a white Democratic government in Mississippi even though most of the state’s citizens were Black and Republican. The white minority ideology of supremacy in Mississippi was clear even before the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi gave his farewell address to the Senate on January 20, 1861 explaining why his state left the Union. He said:

“We are to be deprived…of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us…[We have] heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack on her social institutions and the Sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the equality of the races.”

Benjamin Humphreys was elected by the white minority in Mississippi in October 1865 to be the governor of the state. During the Civil War he was elected colonel of the 21st Mississippi. When William Barksdale was killed at Gettysburg, he took command of Barksdale’s brigade and was promoted to brigadier general. In his inauguration address given just two weeks after he was elected governor he reassured his white listeners: “that sectional aggression will meet with sectional resistance and that the price of political perfidy is blood and carnage.”

Humphreys then spent a third of his address discussing the need for white control of the Black population. He said that:

“The state of Mississippi has already…abolished slavery. It would be hypocritical…to attempt to persuade the world that she had done so willingly…Several hundred thousand of the negro race, unfitted for political equality with the white race, have been turned loose upon society…The highest degree of elevation in the scale of civilization to which they are capable…must be assured to them…but they cannot be admitted to political or social equality with the white race. It is due to ourselves-…and it should never be forgotten-to maintain the fact that ours is and shall ever be a government of white men. The purity and progress of both races require that caste must be maintained and intermarriage between the races be forbidden. Miscegenation must be the work and taste of other climes and other people.”

“To work is the law of God…The negro is peculiarly adapted to the cultivation of the great staple of the South…He should be required to choose some employment that will insure the maintenance of himself and his family. The Employer must be assured that the labor contracted for will be specifically performed.”

“The cultivation of the great staples of the South require continuous labor from January to January. The planter cannot venture upon their cultivation unless the laborer be compelled to comply with his contract, remaining and performing his proper amount of labor day after day and week after week, through the whole year…and if he attempts to escape he should be returned to his employment and forced to work until the time for which he has contracted has expired.”

The governor’s reconstituted slave catcher patrols were not popular with the state’s Black majority. This may have meant little in 1865 where the whites were the only people who could vote, but with increasing enfranchisement, by 1868 the Black citizens held a clear majority.

Resistance to the Black majority was continued in the 1868 Mississippi Ku Klux Klan’s platform which said its first principle was the maintenance of: “A government of white men for white men, and no political miscegenation.”

Before the war there were 353,000 white people in Mississippi. In 1860, there were enslaved Blacks numbering 436,000 and there were Free Colored numbering 773. In the 1870 census there were 382,000 whites and 444,000 Blacks. By the end of Reconstruction in 1880, there were 479,000 whites and 650,000 Blacks. When Blacks were extended the franchise, they would not vote for white control over their lives, and many elections saw the Republicans emerge victorious.

The Mississippi Plan was arrived at by white leaders in the mid-1870s to crush Black voting, subordinate Black labor rights, and restore control of the government to the white minority.

The Mississippi Plan, even before it had that name, was tested in Vicksburg. After July 4, 1863 every Fourth of July was celebrated in Vicksburg both as the Birthday of Our Country and as the day of liberation when Grant took the city. In the 1870 Census 5,600 residents were white, and they, by and large, kept their businesses open on the 4th of July, but for the town’s 6,800 Black majority this was a celebration of their and their country’s freedom.

Black patriots gathered every July Fourth to pray, to give thanks to God, to barbeque, and to sing spiritual and patriotic songs. An armed white mob tried to break up the 1874 celebration and fired into the crowd. Sheriff Peter Crosby wrote a report after that said that “several has been killed upon the streets of Vicksburg today.”

By the fall of 1874, Governor Adelbert Ames asked President Grant to send troops to restore order to Vicksburg as violence rose in anticipation of the Congressional elections. At that time there were fewer than one hundred Federal troops in Vicksburg, one of the most volatile cities in the South. Grant’s administration did not respond.

Sheriff Peter Crosby, the first Black man to head the Warren County sheriff’s office where Vicksburg lies, was a frequent target of harassment. On December 2, 1874 600 armed white men cornered the sheriff and forced him to resign his office.

December 7 saw the Vicksburg Massacre targeting leaders and politically active African Americans resisting the call by the White Liners for all the Black officeholders to resign. The attacks continued for three weeks with at least 29 Blacks killed, although some estimates claim that as many as 300 Blacks were murdered. On January 5, 1875 a company of Federal troops sent by Phil Sheridan restored order in Vicksburg, but the dam had been broken.

For nearly a month the white minority had shown it could intimidate the Black majority, the police force, and the governor. Sheriff Crosby was restored to his office, but in June 1875 a white deputy sheriff put a bullet in the Black man’s head.

The Democratic leadership saw this example as their path to victory. Democratic partisans began to wear Red Shirts as their uniform. The increasing white violence provided men like Democratic Congressman Lucius Quintus Lamar an opportunity for political advancement, He had helped draft the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession and he helped raise the 19th Mississippi. During the war he served on Longstreet’s staff. He made opposition to Black voting the major theme of his speeches. It did not hurt him. He later became secretary of the interior under Grover Cleveland, he served in the United States Senate, and he concluded his career as a member of the United States Supreme Court. He was held up as a hero in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.

In 1875, the Red Shirts and the White Leagues used intimidation and assassination to stifle Black voting. They used their new majority in Mississippi’s legislature to impeach Governor Adelbert Ames. Men behind the effort included Ethelbert Barksdale. He was the brother of Gen. William Barksdale, and Ethelbert served in the Confederate Congress between 1861 and 1865. He was rewarded by being named head of the state’s Democratic Party and after Black voting was squashed, he was elected to the United States Congress in 1882.

Rather than give my impression of what went on in Mississippi during the two years that led to the end of Reconstruction, here is what one of the managers of the Mississippi Plan wrote in 1881 in the North American Review. H. H. Chalmers said that the real cause for the Mississippi Plan was:

“The enfranchisement of so large a mass of new electors, and the instant elevation of so much of ignorance and pauperism to complete equality with wealth and intelligence…[which] was…wrought by a single legislative act [voting rights for Blacks].” This put white representatives “in a hopeless minority as compared with that race who had ever been barbarous, save when they were slaves, and who were destitute alike of property, education, or morality.”

Chalmers said that “the white race, who had made America what it is, and who are regarded by foreign nations as constituting the American people, have twice, if not thrice, been by Negro suffrage, denied the rulers of their choice.”

Chalmers says that “at no time…have the Caucasian race ever consented to live with the inferior ones save as rulers.” The Founding Fathers “have abundantly demonstrated that the white man will not be governed by the Black man…statesmen must recognize this as a fixed and irreversible fact.”

Chalmers said that “it is the assurance of white supremacy that permits the soil and climate of these [Southern] states to exert their natural attractions….The Anglo Saxon race will not be governed by the African…The African shall be justly, and fairly governed by the Anglo Saxon.”

You may wonder why the North American Review, one of the great journals of the 19th Century would publish this. Who was Chalmers? A White Liner, A Red Shirt, A Grand Dragon? No, he was a Confederate officer, a lawyer, and he was a member of Mississippi’s Supreme Court. This was a justice whom Black people would have to plead their cases if they were discriminated against in voting. He died in the 1880s, but the system that raised him to Mississippi’s highest levels would remain in place for nearly a century.

Sources:
Note: This article was adapted from Pat Young’s talk at the Emerging Civil War Symposium.

• “Mississippi in 1875.” Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875 by United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875
• “Origin of the Outrages at Vicksburg.” Speech of Hon. Chas. E. Furlong, Senator from Warren County, in the Senate of Mississippi, December 18, 1874  Vicksburg Herald Printer, 1874 
• “The Effects of Negro Suffrage” by H. H. Chalmers, The North American Review Vol. 132, No. 292 (Mar., 1881), pp. 239–248
• The Great Parliamentary Battle and Farewell Addresses of the Southern Senators on the Eve of the Civil War by Thomas Ricaud Martin, 1905
• The Political History of the United States of America During the Period of Reconstruction by Edward McPherson, 1871
• THE VICKSBURG TROUBLES.; THE REPORTED BURNING OF GIN-HOUSES CONTRADICTED, New York Times, December 11, 1874
• Inaugural Address of Gov. Benjamin G. Humphreys, New York Times, October 28, 1865
• The Grenada Sentinel (Mississippi), March 28, 1868