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387 Chapter 15 Reconstruction Violence in the Lower Brazos River Valley by John Gorman T he end of the Civil War offered a new beginning for race relations in the United States. The passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which guaranteed freedom, citizenship, and political equality, offered hope to millions of freed slaves throughout the South. However, changes to southern political and economic institutions led white Southerners to use intimidation, violence, and outright murder in an attempt to maintain as much of their antebellum way of life as possible. As a result, former slaves and their families soon discovered that their ability to exercise their new-found civil rights was blocked by new legal restraints and outright violence. Newspaper articles and the Freedmen’s Bureau records provide insight into the horrors that the freedpeople living in the Brazos River Valley were confronted with on a daily basis as they struggled to assert their new political and economic freedom. From 1865 to 1868 there were a total of 939 murders committed in Texas and of that total, 429 (or roughly 1 percent of the adult black population ages 15–49), were blacks murdered by whites, while only ten were whites murdered by blacks (see table 1).1 This statistic led the Committee on Lawlessness and Violence to conclude that a race war was raging in Texas, a one-sided conflict that African Americans were losing.2 Freedpeople were not the only victims of this race war. Organizations of ex-Confederates and conservative Democrats were also targeting prominent Unionists within the state, including many Republican judges.3 However, the committee’s most striking findings were in the revelations of the degree to which the freedpeople of Texas were being persecuted, abused, and murdered.4 The Texas Freedmen’s Bureau further reported a staggering 2,225 physical acts of violence committed against the black population of Texas.5 One of the most striking characteristics of violence 388 John Gorman reported between 1865 and 1869 was the complete inability of the local authorities to do anything to prosecute and convict those persons responsible . The Bureau reported that between 1865 and 1867 there were only 249 indictments for murder found in the district courts and only five convictions , roughly 2 percent (see table 2). In all, for the approximately 900 reported murders committed in the state, there was only one capital execution . Taken together, these figures conclusively indicate that in many areas of Texas there was a complete breakdown in the civilian authority and a general lack of respect for human life.6 Violence in Texas tended to followed three major patterns: social violence, political violence, and labor violence. Social violence is an often overlooked dynamic in the study of race relations. There were no discernible patterns to incidents of violence for violations of accepted social norms. But, a small list of the social etiquette Texas blacks were supposed to follow included: not making insulting noises, speaking disrespectfully or out of turn, disputing the word of whites, standing at attention when a white passed by, and stepping aside when white women were on the sidewalk. Failure to comply with any of the expected social behaviors resulted in retaliation that included verbal threats and physical violence.7 Political violence was often directed at blacks who were involved in local politics, were members of civic organizations, or were leaders in their community. Once blacks organized politically they became a serious threat to the established political and social mores. Many times these acts of violence were perpetrated by small groups of whites, as was witnessed in the Millican race riot. The death rate of Texas blacks between 1866 and 1867 rose 50 percent and correlates with the rise of local blacks as they began to exercise their political rights (see table 3).8 In the immediate postwar years, a few blacks did become involved in politics, enjoying their greatest degree of participation at the local level, but even at the state level nine blacks participated in the constitutional convention of 1868–69, and eleven were elected to the legislature in 1871.9 However, in the post-Reconstruction years in Texas, black political participation steadily declined. It is significant to note that of all the southern states, Texas was the only one not to have a single black occupy an important executive or judicial post during the Reconstruction period.10 Planters, ex-Confederate soldiers, and small groups of whites appear to have been primarily responsible for acts of...

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