The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction by William A. Blair (review)

In this book, William A. Blair, former director of the Richards Civil War Era Center and emeritus professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University, examines the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands' gathering of statistics on racial violence during the Reconstruction era. In a relatively short five chapters and an epilogue, he addresses three major questions concerning those statistics. First, he looks at the purpose behind their gathering and finds that bureau leadership, which had become aware of violence in the South in reports from local agents, began a more systematic collection of information on what was happening in an attempt to bring about a change in the policies that had been pursued by President Andrew Johnson since the war's end. Second, he examines the process of amassing the statistics. He details the bureau's lack of any uniform procedure in reporting violence, but concludes, as have most contemporary scholars, that the statistics accurately portrayed events in the South. Third, asking what impact this recording of racial violence had, he traces its effect on public perceptions of events in the former Confederate states and on the minds of politicians and sees it as a significant factor in Congress's ultimate decision to intervene in the South in 1867 and to begin military reconstruction. In his epilogue, Blair looks briefly at similar efforts to influence government policy, such as that to document lynching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the current effort by the Equal Justice Initiative to document the lives of other Black victims of violence. He considers awareness and acknowledgement of these attempts to catalogue violence as a critical and necessary step towards the creation of an alternative to a White-centered view of history.

While Blair does not emphasize it as a major theme, another thread that runs through this book is how, in the midst of political polarization, those who supported President Johnson's Reconstruction policies and opposed further action by Congress discounted the evidence. Rather than challenge directly the reports of a Southern blood bath and provide evidence that it was not happening, the opposition chose rather to discredit the men and the agency that gathered the information, thus raising doubts about the validity of the evidence. In this case they ultimately failed, at least in the North, since the men who collected and catalogued the record of violence were either soldiers of the United States Army or in many cases ex-soldiers who served with the bureau. As such, they had credibility in the public eye. Blair points particularly to the example of General Philip Sheridan, who was aggressive in gathering evidence of Southern violence. To reject his reports one would have to believe that the general was providing false information. Few individuals were willing to take that step.

Because this is a book on violence, Texas receives the focus of an entire chapter, roughly 20 percent of the work. According to bureau reports, Texas was the most violent state of those under reconstruction. Between 1865 and 1868, the bureau reported some 859 murders there. Only Louisiana and Alabama came close, with 529 murders in the former and 160 in the latter. Blair attempts to explain this considerable variance, although he relies largely on the extensive work by scholars who have examined the state during this period to do so. Anyone familiar with the works of Donaly Brice, Gregg Cantrell, Barry Crouch, James Smallwood, and William Richter (to name a few) on the Freedmen's Bureau, the United States Army during Reconstruction, or violence will find little new. Blair's conclusions draw on this scholarship and point to the state's frontier character and traditions, the presence of bands of outlaws, the persistence of remnants of guerilla bands, and racial politics as factors in...