The Difference Ten Miles Makes

Before the break, we saw how Washington DC served as a laboratory for reconstruction. Our next story takes us into the rural South to see how the story unfolded. Before we really understand that, we need to pull the camera back and look at all the monumental changes that transformed the entire South in just a matter of years.

Congress took two big steps toward reconstruction even before the war ended. In 1865, they passed the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in America once and for all. They also established the Freedmen’s Bureau which brought food, supplies, and legal protection to newly freed people across the South. And here’s something that’s hard for us to understand, because we see that right out of the gate, African-Americans in Nashville and in Washington know what they want and need to be a full part of the American nation.

But it takes the United States years to put all those pieces in place. Ultimately, what they say is, here’s the deal. You southern states that rose up in rebellion against the United States, you’re going to have to write new constitutions acknowledging the end of slavery. And black men will be able to vote, and they will be able to serve as delegates to the conventions that will write those constitutions.

And when that constitution comes out and says, not only do we acknowledge the end of slavery, but we also acknowledge this new 14th Amendment that says that if you are born in this country, you have all the rights of a citizen. When you’ve done that, then you can apply to come back in the United States. That takes five years from the end of the Civil War for that process to be complete. Five years after those petitioners from Nashville had said that is what was going to be necessary.

NATHAN: So I get all the politics, and it’s important to spell that out. But I have to imagine there’s something holding this all together.

ED: That would be the United States Army. The army is mobilized and brought back down south to enforce all of this two years after the war. That’s why it’s called the Military Reconstruction Act. Here’s the paradox. If you don’t have the army there, there’s nothing in place to make these things happen. But the army even being there is not strong enough to really drive all this home.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: I would say that their coverage is incredibly spotty.

ED: This is historian Kidada Williams. She told the story of a man named Cuff Canara. Canara was a newly freed man in rural Louisiana. And in the summer of 1866, he set out to report a crime.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: He had tried to stop his employer from sexually assaulting his wife. As an enslaved man, Cuff would have had to endure this violence. He would have had very little social or legal recourse to stop the rapes. But he understood that with slavery’s end that– and as a citizen– that he could now take action against his employer. So he has a clear understanding that the world has shifted, and in this new world, he can take action to provide some protection for his wife.

ED: Cuff Canara’s employer was a white man named Dan Docking. Now, Kidada Williams says we don’t know exactly what happened when Canara confronted his boss, but it didn’t go well. On August 1, 1866, Canara ran to the nearest office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was 10 miles away in Sparta, Louisiana.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Docking joined forces with two white allies to try to stop Canara from reporting the violence. And I think that when he runs, they have a sense that that’s where he’s going.

ED: The three white men chase Canara most of the way to the Bureau office.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: They not only fire their weapons at him, they also use dogs tracking him.

ED: Wow.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Very much like the bloodhounds that would have been used to track runaway slaves. They’re doing whatever they can to stop him from arriving at the Bureau office. And so he arrives in the Bureau office bloodied from a gunshot wound and attacks by the dogs.

ED: While fleeing, Canara had managed to kill three of those dogs.

NATHAN: Oh. Oh

JOANNE: Wow

ED: Cuff Canara reported everything to the Bureau agent– the assault on his wife, his confrontation with Dan Docking, and the chase itself.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: And the Bureau did what the Bureau was supposed to do. The agent collects the information, and then passes it on to local law enforcement officers.

ED: Wait a minute. Now, we can imagine that the local law enforcement officers are bound to be much more in alignment with the men trying to kill him than they are with Canara, right?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Exactly, but it’s enough to actually get a trial in this case. And so there is a trial. But here’s– to your point about law enforcement and maybe even other people in the community being on Dan Docking’s side. Docking and his accomplices are tried, but the jury declares that the greater crime– so they find them not guilty– and they say that the greater crime was Canara’s killing of the dogs.

ED: Oh no.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: More important than the rapes on Cuff Canara’s wife. More important than the threat to kill or the attempt to kill Cuff Canara. The dogs mattered more.

ED: So it’s amazing, as you say, that Canara knows where he needs to go. It’s 10 miles away, and he’s walking and running all this distance, right?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Exactly.

ED: And he knows that the federal government might be an ally. He’s risking his life really on the belief that they might be. And yet, that’s still kind of nested within this old boys’ network in which people are sort of kin and deeply sympathetic to each other just because they all have white skin. Is that fair to say too?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: That’s fair to say. But again, in Cuff Canara’s mind, the world has still changed. He doesn’t know that there’s going to be a trial. He doesn’t know what the outcome is going to be. What he knows is that the world has changed, and that he should be able to have justice, and he should be able to protect his wife in a way that he wouldn’t have been able to do 18 months, 24 months earlier.

ED: After the court case, do we know what happens to Cuff Canara?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: We do not. He disappears from the records.

ED: So Joanne and Nathan, we’re not really surprised anymore to hear about violence against black men and maybe especially in the South and maybe especially in Reconstruction. But I wonder if you think there are other lessons that we might draw from this other than it was a very hard place to try to be a new American citizen?

NATHAN: Well, sure. The first thing I would see is that the dangers that are facing black women are also equally striking. I mean the fact that Canara is trying to get justice for his wife who was sexually assaulted, and what is her range of options other than to have her husband serve as her proxy at the Freedmen’s Bureau? I mean it’s such a striking example too of yet, again, these laws that are existing on the books have to be made real in kind of flesh and blood terms. So it’s a pretty jarring example on several levels.

JOANNE: We tend to focus, I think, just when we think about history on the making of laws, the creation of laws, putting laws on the books. But the transformation of laws into habits of understanding and assumptions about proceedings, that’s the moment when things really change. And so this story is such a striking example of, on the one hand, people being aware that they’re in a moment of change.

NATHAN: Absolutely. And the amount of courage it takes to be part of that early generation of people who are pursuing their rights. I mean this is one of the most striking things about this period in American history is that these are people who are not at all acculturated to believe in the next election cycle somehow solving their problems.

We tend to hang a lot on our ability to vote for our president or even our local politicians, but this is all being hashed out as they went. And to believe– going back to your point, Joanne– just in the basic habits of effective politics, of above ground process. All of this is uncertain at this period.

JOANNE: And you have to have such faith in the possibility of change to be that courageous to step into the void and do what these people are doing without the assurance that there’s some kind of system that’s going to step up and lay everything out.

ED: I think about this period for a living, and every time I read something like that petition from the Nashville citizens or read about stories like Cuff Canara who risks his life to make it to a court of law. You have to be struck by, once again, this faith in American justice among African-American people that you just wonder where could it have come from.

NATHAN: In spite of the evidence.

ED: Exactly. They’ve seen no indication in their entire history in this country that justice will be theirs, and yet they continue to strive for it. And over the long haul, by striving for it, tend to make it actually happen sometimes.

NATHAN: And that faith was happening in spite of the fact that violence was commonplace, not just immediately after the war, but really for decades thereafter.

ED: Yes, and here’s Kidada Williams again.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: What you have is a lot of everyday violence as former master, former slave are working out the new realities of their post-slavery world. And so violence had been critical to maintain slavery. And what you see is that the former masters are going to have a very difficult time giving that up. The difference is that African-Americans know that slavery has ended, and they believe and understand that enduring the same kind of violence they had to do while they were held in bondage is no longer required of them.

ED: And as sobering as it might be to think about, Cuff Canara’s story is not the worst that could have happened in such a context, right?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Absolutely. And what we see is that when African-American men gain the franchise that the intensity of the violence grows. Because what you start to see are armed raids on African-American political actors, especially men who want to vote or who want to hold office. And they are often attacked in their homes.

They’re held hostage. They and their families are tortured, raped, killed, and no one is spared. Not women, not children, not the elderly, not even people with disabilities.

ED: And so things get steadily worse under Reconstruction. So we can see the story of Cuff Canara, but we don’t know the story of his wife. We don’t know the story of his household. Can you help us understand what it would mean to live in a time and place where that kind of vulnerability to violence was so prevalent?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Well, what you see is that as night riding or these campaigns of terror where armed white men attacked African-Americans in their homes, often in the middle of the night, while family members are asleep, thinking that they’re safe and secure. They hear a knock at the door. They hear the horses galloping through the yard.

Sometimes it’s clear attackers are often stalking their targets. They wait for them to go to sleep. Wait for them to be comfortable in bed at night. And what they testify about is just their inability to escape. They are trapped in this situation, trapped in their homes, the place that’s supposed to be safe.

ED: So many people can imagine the Ku Klux Klan, the images that we have. But night riding was a lot broader than just the Klan. Can you give us a sense of who these men were and what kind of strategies they would have used to inflict this terror?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Well, a lot of the men are, a lot of the people who participate in night riding are ordinary people from the community. They’re from all walks of life, and oftentimes they organize to put African-Americans in their place if they feel as though they are stepping beyond their station. Many of the people who are attacked have a sense of who their attackers are.

ED: They can recognize them by their boots and things like that I’ve read. And as you said, they’re their neighbors, and so they can, maybe somebody’s posture or they recognize their voice. So that’s one reason the Klan would dress up is that their victims would have a good idea of who they were.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: And what we know is that a lot of the victims still know who they are even if they are masked. But what victims often testify about is having had a previous encounter or a dispute or an argument with someone.

ED: And anything where African-American people are sort of where they are just insisting to be paid a fair wage or to be given what they were promised is seen as a great affront to white people. There’s almost nothing that black people can say that’s not seen as a good enough excuse to call out the guns.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Exactly. And a lot of times people say, well, I won’t worry about it because I’m not doing anything that’s going to bring this violence down on me.

ED: Yeah.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: And what they realize, what people come to realize is that the very things they think are going about their normal business as newly freed people represent a threat to the white power structure and can generate an attack. No one is safe. No one is safe.

ED: So how could the white Southerners doing this, many of whom would have prided themselves on their Christian beliefs and on their upstanding characters as citizens, what story could they tell themselves that could justify this kind of violence?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Well, they would tell themselves that they’re protecting their interests. They would say that their needs as white Southerners whose lives have been compromised by the war and emancipation, their rights, their wishes, their needs trump the rights and wishes and needs of a newly freed people.

ED: It doesn’t seem enough to me. It just seems like, do they blame black people for their terrible losses in the war they brought on themselves?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Well, they absolutely blame black people for those losses. And they’re also frustrated because what they see is that outside of slavery, there are people who are able to thrive. They’re starting to buy land. They’re starting to establish their own businesses.

Now, you think about Cuff Canara. Less than a year after slavery is abolished, and think about him had he not had to endure that violence. Give him two or three years. So 1868, 1869. He might have been trying to vote. He might have had a couple of acres of land.

And even the very prospect of African-American men voting and owning their land one, two, three years after slavery has been abolished is an affront. It challenges all of the ideas, all of the lies that slaveholders and wannabe slave holders had told themselves about whiteness, about slavery, about black people.

ED: Yeah. When you’ve lost so much as a white Southerner to watch the people you told yourself for generations were incapable of living on their own now being political leaders and being more successful economically than you, it really does sort of make a lie of everything you think about yourself. Right?

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Exactly. And it’s even, I think, sometimes it’s even worse for those who had not yet become slaveholders.

ED: Yeah.

KIDADA WILLIAMS: Because they had held out hope that if slavery, if the Confederacy had won, that slavery would continue. They would become, they would sort of join the master class. And slavery’s emancipation ends that possibility for them. And for newly freed people to suddenly be able to have land, to have property, and to be running for and holding office is an absolute affront to working class white Southerners who had held out for the promise of becoming slaveholders and land owners themselves.

JOANNE: So Ed, Nathan, it sounds like what we really have here are two tales of Reconstruction. On the one hand, we have the hopeful case of Kate Brown in Washington DC. And then on the other hand, we have the harrowing story of Cuff Canara and the terror of the night riders in the South.

ED: Yeah. And I’m sorry to say that these two stories weren’t as distinct as we might hope. Washington DC does see Reconstruction end. It doesn’t do it with the violence that we see in Louisiana. Instead, white voters across the North just judge that we’ve been focused on Reconstruction and the rights of freed people long enough. It’s time for the nation to turn to some other purpose.

NATHAN: Thanks to Kidada Williams, a historian at Wayne State University and author of They Left Great Marks On Me: African-American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I.

JOANNE: We also heard from Kate Masur, a historian at Northwestern University. She’s the author of An Example For All the Land: Emancipation and The Struggle Over Equality in Washington DC.

ED: Coming up, what lessons we can draw from Reconstruction .