Re: Loyal State Militia or Iraqi Freikorps? (#34735)
by Ben H. Severance on May 11, 2004 at 8:56 AM

A better approach would have been to compare the Freikorps directly to the Klan. Both are really generic terms for numerous outfits of self-appointed defenders of either the Fatherland or of White Supremacy and the Lost Cause. Neither had centralized leadership nor did they have an official or even coherent message. Both greatly disliked the consequences of defeat. The Freikorps attacked Bolsheviks the way the Klan attacked blacks, and the former undermined the new Weimar Republic the same way the latter undermined the new Southern Republican Party. As angry vigilantes, they posed a threat to stability but lacked the organization for governance.

The Red Shirts (and White League) are more akin to the SA and the Nazis. And the Red Shirts were indeed paramilitary--14,000 white men organized into 290 Rifle Clubs under a strict ex-Confederate chain of command all the way up to General Wade Hampton. The Red Shirts eliminated a black militia unit at Hamburg in early 1876 (murdering seven blacks) and later killed at least thirty more blacks during the Ellenton Riot, an incident provoked by the whites. Throughout the political campaign of 1876, the Red Shirts marched armed alongside Democratic candidates, forcibly "divided time" with Republican speakers, and flagrantly intimidated blacks on election day. During the electoral dispute that followed, the Red Shirts were prepared for civil war (and many hoped violence would ensue). Basically, like the SA, the Red Shirts were a Party Army that busted heads while their leader (Hitler or Hampton) garnered "respectability" as the only person who could leash the dogs. My study of Reconstruction leads me to conclude that in most southern states, Reconstruction came to an end at the point of a gun, albeit a measured use of violence under the later white paramilitaries.

I am also among those scholars who think Reconstruction could have succeeded had either the Federal government played a more interventionist role or had southern Republicans developed more effective biracial state militias. President Grant was well-intentioned and could be bold, but he was too erratic and inconsistent in his use of the Army (he was also a bit unwilling for the sake of legitimacy, he hoped the Reconstruction governments would eventually stand on their own). Unfortunately, southern Republican governors lacked the resolve to overcome armed white opposition. To be sure, several governors (e.g., Brownlow in Tennessee and Clayton in Arkansas, among others) used state militias aggressively and successfully, but only for short durations. Financial constraints and fears of race war handcuffed long-term law enforcement by state authorities. In the end, ex-Confederates realized better than the Republicans or Northerners that the politics of Reconstruction was the politics of force.