According to the non-aggression principle, aggressive violence is never justified. But stating the principle is the easy part. Identifying the aggressor is more difficult when the facts are contested and when both sides, in their respective political parties, claim to be “defending” themselves against their aggressive enemies.
In the history of the Reconstruction era, the official narrative is that the Democrats were the aggressors, and Republican violence was “self-defense.” This is often presented as a moral justification for the militarization of race relations under Republican governments. The rationale of the non-aggression principle is then lost, wrongly subverted into its opposite—that violence is justified for those on “the right side of history” fighting against racism.
A closer examination of the facts reveals that the blame for racial violence cannot be assigned superficially along political party lines. Rather, in the aftermath of war, the same propaganda that fueled the war spawned Reconstruction violence.
In the foreword to his book Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, Professor Richard Nelson Current recounts some of these events from the perspective of the “carpetbaggers.” He argues that this history is important, observing that, “Anyone who claims to know anything about American history can tell you who the carpetbaggers were.” He attempts to give an objective analysis, explaining that,
. . .the story is told from the standpoint of these participants in it, not from the usual standpoint, which has been that of their enemies. While trying to see things as the carpetbaggers saw them, the book strives for objectivity in the sense of relying on the critical use of sources and revealing the pertinent facts whether favorable or unfavorable to the subjects.
By focusing on individuals who were influential during Reconstruction, he shows that not all Republicans—and, indeed, not all Democrats—were the same. Some tried to restore peace and prosperity, while others were in politics for selfish reasons. The “good Republican, evil Democrat” narrative is shown to be woefully simplistic.
While most historians focus on the corruption and mismanagement of the era, it is less often observed that the era had a disastrous effect on race relations in the South. Too often the violence of the era is simply blamed on “racism,” with little effort to understand the contested political issues and the role played by the Republican militarization of race relations. The Republicans promoted the belief that only federal troops could prevent a race war in the South.
The fact that black people could not vote in most states in the North belies the claim that giving blacks the vote in the South reflected a principled Republican belief in civil rights. A genuine belief in civil rights would have insisted on the vote for blacks in the North too.
Further, if the Republicans had a principled desire to give land to the freedmen, why not give them federal owned land in the North or West, rather than give them the plantations seized from white Southerners? Expropriation of white planters, promoted in congress by Thaddeus Stevens, was hardly a course of action likely to yield lasting peace and harmony.
The declared need for blacks to vote in the South, which in practice meant voting for the very same carpetbaggers who called for military occupation, created the need for military protection of black voters. The cure—military rule—came first, and the problem—protecting blacks who supported military rule—was then created to justify the desired cure.
Black Southerners were not in danger purely because their skin was black, as the radical Republicans claimed—they were in danger because they were propping up the carpetbaggers. The fact that the Democrats also campaigned in black communities and protected blacks who voted for them shows that the objection was not to the mere thought of blacks voting but to the fact that blacks—who outnumbered whites in many counties—voted for the carpetbaggers.
For example, in South Carolina, at the 1868 constitutional convention, 51delegates were white and 73 were black—and the black delegates were all Republicans. The spectators, who were there to observe proceedings, were nearly all black.
The first Republican Governor of South Carolina, Robert K. Scott, relied on the black vote to sustain Republican control. He wrote that he did not see any way for harmonious life in the South other than by military occupation. He believed his job was to deploy the state militia to keep white and black apart for their own protection:
The Negro predominates in this state about three to two whites and while he holds the balance of power numerically he will refuse to submit to the demands of his former master. And on the other hand this generation of white men will not overcome the education of two centuries, and therefore I regard a compromise as almost hopeless. Hence the two races can only live together by the presence of a sufficient military force to protect both.
Having persuaded the black population that they were under constant threat of extermination by their former masters, much effort and expenditure was directed to military “self-defense.” Republicans then blamed the Democrats for the ensuing hostilities.
Governor Scott singled out a former slave owner, General Francis Preston Blair, a Lincolnite and leading Missouri Republican who fought on the Union side during the war. Blair decamped to the Democratic Party after the war, as he opposed the Radical Republican view of Reconstruction.
Scott blamed the top Democratic leaders, state and national, for the violence. He had in mind, for one, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Frank Blair, whom he had known personally as his superior in Sherman’s army, and who recently had called for the overthrow of the carpetbag governments in the South.
Scott insisted that the best course of action would be to arm the state militia: “To raise an adequate militia, he would have to rely on black recruits and he would have to find the means to arm them.” This was deemed justifiable because use of force by the black militia was deemed “legal,” while retaliation from the white population would be “illegal.”
By the fall of 1870 the militia consisted of fourteen regiments of infantry, each containing nearly a thousand men. . . Except for some of the officers, all the militiamen were black. Scott started to arm a few white companies, but blacks objected so strongly that he soon desisted.
The reason the black militia objected to white companies being armed was that they feared that armed whites would not work with them and would, instead, constitute an armed opponent to contend with—precisely as Scott himself had worked so hard to convince them.
Benjamin Franklin Perry—a Democrat and former governor—wrote to Scott to warn against deploying the state militia to prop himself up in office. Although Perry was a distinguished lawyer and statesman who had campaigned against secession, as a Democrat he was now on the “wrong side of history” so he was ignored. He cautioned that:
There are two things which you can do, and should do, the sooner the better. Disarm your militia and appoint good and intelligent men to office. All the lawlessness and violence which has disgraced the State has been owing to these two sources of mischief. Never was there a more fatal mistake nor a more diabolical wrong committed than when you organized colored troops throughout the State and put arms in their hands with powder and ball, and denied the same to the white people. . .
The colored people of South Carolina behaved well during the war and would have continued to do so but for the unprincipled carpet-bagger, who came among them and stirred up hatred to the white race by the most artful and devilish appeals to their fears. . .
Professor Current is right to observe that this course of action by the Republicans—insisting that whites are a threat to blacks and that militarization was, therefore, necessary—was unwise, and contributed to the deteriorating situation:
All the while, they incited the blacks to such extremes of self-assertion as to destroy the harmonious relations that would otherwise have prevailed between the former masters and the former slaves.
While self-assertion is part of basic human integrity, taken to extremes it blurs the moral boundary between defense and attack, crossing over into unjustified violence. The same type of self-assertion is seen today among black people who believe that using racial slurs is an “attack” that merits a violent response from them in “defense.”
As Murray Rothbard argued, the right to self-defense must never be used to justify aggressive violence. To avoid this danger, those who seek to use force in self-assertion must hold themselves to the highest standard of proof of a violent threat against them, before resorting to violence in purported defense.
