April lessons: in truth, the South won the Civil War, not the North

…and Trump is the heir to that toxic legacy

[Dear readers: DemocracySOS is a reader-supported publication. Here is a link to our $5/month subscription page. Can you throw a few coins into the cup? Thank you.]

April was a momentous month in the American Civil War. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses Grant, commander of the Union forces at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, marking the culmination of the war. Over the next two months, the remaining Confederate troops were defeated and surrendered by the end of May. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, after fleeing the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia on April 2, was captured in Georgia on May 10. He fared better than his Union counterpart, President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated by Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865.

The Civil War would prove to be the deadliest conflict in US history, with new estimates of 698,000 dead, both military and civilian. Victorious General Grant, after witnessing up close the war’s barbarity, ordered compassionate terms of surrender, allowing Lee’s men to keep their sidearms and their horses so that they would “be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” Lincoln himself had set a tone of reconciliation in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, only 41 days before his assassination, calling for a peace…

“…with malice towards none, with charity for all… to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Those were noble and magnanimous sentiments, the hallmark of a gracious victor. And so it appeared that the Union – the North – was victorious over the Confederacy – the South -- and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” had not perished from the earth, to use Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg phrasing. This is what schoolchildren have been taught for 160 years as a core part of our National Myth.

And yet…it’s a historical invention, meant to feed a belief system about the ever-evolving greatness of the United States of America.

To be sure, initially former black slaves in the South enjoyed a level of emancipation and enfranchisement they had never known. A number of them got elected to public office, began to own property and to benefit from the sweat of their own labor and the genius of their own minds. Initially, it was a time of great promise, with real potential for building a multi-racial society that, if successful, would have set the United States of America on a new and truly blessed course into a humanistic future.

But that’s not what happened. In fact this part of the National Myth, which narrates that the Union won and the Confederacy lost, is dead wrong. As myth goes, it ranks right up there with young America allegedly being a high-minded place where “all are created equal” despite the denigrated status of slaves, women and native Americans, and the daily use or threat of violence that enforced that regime.

Truth be told, the Civil War did not end in 1865. It continued for the next 11 years in the form of a bloody, vicious guerrilla insurrection across the South. Those former Confederate soldiers who had been shown such mercy by Lincoln and Grant traveled back home and, along with their white supremacist leaders, who led them and took over the Democratic Party in the South, began to regroup.

Over the next few years, vigilante campaigns by murderous gangs on horseback, now called names like the Ku Klux Klan and the White League, terrorized and disenfranchised black voters and intimidated and even murdered black officeholders. They threatened white officeholders from the pro-civil rights Republican Party, and mounted armed coups against elected governments that made Donald Trump’s January 6 fiasco look like a Mickey Mouse operation. Before too long, both now-President Grant and the war-weary North lost their nerve and willingness to confront the resurging Confederate evil. Relentless subversions of racial justice were then sanctioned and ratified by a US Supreme Court ruling in 1875 and a political deal over the controversial US presidential election of 1876. By that point, vengeful and cruel white supremacy had once again reasserted itself as the new “Jim Crow” Confederacy.

The dream of a multi-racial society was dead, and it would not revive for another 90 years. Even then, the dream struggled and faltered, two steps forward one step back, as the tribalism of race has continually re-asserted itself in one form or another throughout American history. It is still with us today, still lurking like chattering skeletons in our national closet.

Another April day…in Colfax, Louisiana

The real story of what happened in that post-Civil War period to undermine racial progress can be ascertained by jumping into a time machine and zooming back to April 1873. A disputed gubernatorial election in Louisiana became the spark to light the powder keg that caused national politics to re-explode. Although the GOP candidate for governor emerged victorious, his foes refused to concede the election. For months, both Republican and Democrat candidates claimed to be governor, even holding competing inaugural celebrations.

After a federal judge ruled in favor of the Republican slate, a pitched battle ensued for not just political control but proto-military dominance of various parts of Louisiana. One of those contentious places was Grant Parish in the Louisiana heartland, which had become a hotbed of former Confederate insurgents. While Grant’s Republican Party was the liberator of slaves, the Democratic Party – ironically today’s party of civil rights -- was the vehicle for reasserting white supremacy. To prevent a takeover of Grant Parish, black Republican leaders surrounded the courthouse in Colfax, the county seat, threw up earthworks and trenches around the building, and dug in with 130 or so men for what was to come. They held the town for several weeks and requested troops for reinforcement from the Republican governor.

But the ex-Confederates and their white Democrat allies counter-mobilized with the help of inflammatory propaganda from the white-dominated local media. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, a mob of several hundred whites on horseback, armed with rifles and a cannon, opened fire on the badly outnumbered courthouse defenders, blasting away for several hours. Completely outgunned, the black defenders finally ran up a white flag of surrender. They were told to throw down their weapons and come outside. Instead of a surrender and acts of mercy, like Grant once had showed to soldiers just like these Confederates, what happened next was mass murder.

The white paramilitary group killed every black man they could find, including those hiding in the courthouse, and chased down and killed those attempting to flee. They dumped some bodies in the nearby Red River. One body was charred beyond recognition, another man's head beaten to a pulp, another had a slashed throat, others shot in the head from close range, execution-style. Heaps of dead black bodies were scattered everywhere, from the courthouse all the way through town to the river boat landing. Historians guesstimate from available evidence that 150 Blacks and three whites were killed that Easter Sunday, April 1873. The Colfax massacre has been described as the worst instance of racial violence during the Reconstruction era.

The publicity about the Confederate victory at Colfax spread like wildfire, launching the proliferation of new white paramilitary organizations. One historian described them as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." This was just the beginning of the horror to come. Domestic terrorist groups used violence, murder and intimidation to win election after election and slowly retake the South. In August 1874, the White League threw out Republican officeholders in Coushatta, Louisiana, assassinating six whites and five to 15 freedmen (the number is disputed) who were witnesses in what has become known as the Coushatta massacre. Although twenty-five men were arrested, none were brought to trial.

Then on September 14, 1874, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana led a coup attempt of thousands of whites, many of them former Confederate soldiers, who barricaded the streets of New Orleans, overpowered a black militia and attacked the racially integrated Metropolitan Police Force which was led by James Longstreet, a respected former Confederate general. They occupied City Hall and the state house, killing more than 20 people. The mutineers announced that the Republican governor was overthrown. President Grant had to dispatch 5000 troops and three gunboats, and only this federal military intervention reinstated the rightful governor.

And then…judicial injustice

But that wasn’t the end of the injustice. Besides being a slaughter ground of white on black racial violence and electoral thuggery, the South during so-called “reconstruction” was also a hellhole of rampant judicial prejudice. It was nearly impossible to get a local court to convict white perpetrators for the most heinous acts.

The Colfax massacre gained national headlines from Boston to Chicago. Only one black man had survived, and he served as one of the Federal government's chief witnesses against the indicted attackers in the ensuing criminal trials. Various government forces spent weeks rounding up members of the paramilitary perpetrators, and a total of 97 men were indicted for Colfax. In the end, only nine men were charged and brought to trial for violations of the Enforcement Act of 1870, which had been championed by President Grant to provide federal protection for civil rights of freedmen under the 14th Amendment (the “equality amendment,” passed in1868). That law was passed to protect Americans against actions by terrorist groups such as the Klan.

If justice is supposed to be blind, what happened next is an example of justice with no eyes to see. There were two jury trials, both in 1874. In the first, one man was acquitted and a mistrial was declared in the cases of the other eight. In the second trial, a federal jury found three men guilty of sixteen charges, but the presiding judge later dismissed the convictions.

The federal government appealed the second case and it was heard by the US Supreme Court as United States v. Cruikshank in 1875. In a bizarre twist, the Supreme Court ruled that the Enforcement Act applied only to actions committed by the state, and was not applicable to actions committed by individuals or private conspiracies. This meant that the federal government could not prosecute cases such as the Colfax killings, and plaintiffs had to seek protection inside the state’s (in this case Louisiana’s) court jurisdiction. Since the state courts were in the pockets of the white Democratic politicians, no justice would be found there. In the end, Louisiana did not prosecute any of the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre.

Not only that, this notorious ruling legitimized the post-Civil War unraveling of legal justice for black Americans throughout the South. For it not only exonerated massive crimes and cold-blooded murder but established a federal legal precedent that would protect Klan-type activity everywhere. What Cruikshank showed was that, ten years after the Civil War, the supremacy of states’ rights had come roaring back with a vengeance.

According to an investigation in 1875, “2,141 Negroes had been killed by whites in Louisiana and 2,115 wounded” since the end of the Civil War, yet no one had been punished for those crimes. Such violence, when combined with the failure of the police and the courts to enforce the law, served to intimidate voters and officeholders alike. By terrorizing freed slaves as well as white Republicans throughout the South, white supremacists repressed voting all during the 1870s and 80s. On numerous occasions, elected officials were dragged from their homes and in some cases murdered in the streets; elections that resulted in racially-integrated governments were overturned at the point of a rifle.

Terror and disenfranchisement became the primary methods that white Democrats used to gain control of Southern state after state. Following the hotly disputed presidential election of 1876, which led to a deal to withdraw all federal troops from the South, this became the playbook to dismantle civil rights gains all across the South.

The Confederate victory was complete. Cruikshank and the tainted presidential election of 1876 established the precedents, as well as the necessary political conditions, to launch the brutal Jim Crow apartheid regime that would dominate US politics for the next 90 years.

And today?

So who really “won” the Civil War?

What should we learn from this vicious and dehumanizing history? The most important lesson is the most disturbing: that the South won the Civil War, not the North. In the end the “blue helmet” peacekeepers -- the federal troops protecting black civil rights – pulled out. They left the different tribes of the South alone to brutally fight it out. Black civil rights got to enjoy a few brief “golden years,” during which black officeholders, business leaders, farmers, families and schoolchildren made impressive gains toward integration into a new America straining toward a national vision of “charity for all.” And then, under the constant pressure of Southern white brutality and insurrection, as well as the failure of the North (which suffered from its own brand of racism) to remain steadfast in its commitment to equality and justice, the election deal of 1876 to remove the federal troops snuffed it all out.

Looking back down the long tunnel of history, it’s clear that what Southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote is prophetically true: "The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the massacre in Thibodaux, Louisiana in 1887 by white plantation owners, politicians and their paramilitaries, who murdered hundreds of black sugar cane workers and their families for going on strike, the most violent labor dispute in US history; to the massacres and lynchings of blacks by whites in more than three dozen US cities after World War I, including Chicago, Washington DC, St. Louis, Baltimore and Omaha, after black military veterans returning from the war tried to assert their labor rights, resulting in the murder of hundreds of black Americans; to the mass slaughter in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June 1921, when whites burned to the ground the prosperous black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering hundreds and burying them in forgotten mass graves, only recently excavated; to the genocide in Rosewood, Florida on New Year's Day,1923, when a white mob of 300 men murdered dozens of black men, women and children, completely torching the town into oblivion and wiping it forever off the map, only recently excavated.

That straight line then connects to the ugly stain of Sheriff Bull Connor's clubs, fire hoses and police attack dogs used to enforce racial apartheid in the South, and Democratic governor George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block desegregation of schools in the 1960s; to the brutality unleashed on civil rights marchers in Selma, Birmingham and elsewhere, the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; to the present-day incidents of white nationalist and police violence perpetrated on people of color, with the FBI reporting that white supremacists pose a “persistent threat of lethal violence” that has produced more fatalities than any other category of domestic terrorists since 2000; to attempts to suppress minority communities from voting in recent elections.

Donald Trump, the latest in the line

And then there is Donald Trump. From propagating his ludicrous birther conspiracy theory falsely claiming President Barack Obama was not born in the US, and then stoking the same birther theory against Kamala Harris, to his false accusations of the Central Park Five, mostly African American teenagers, as being responsible for the 1989 rape of a white woman despite their innocence; to his attacks against a judge who Trump said could not be impartial because he was “Mexican,” to his comments following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that implied moral equivalence between the white supremacist marchers and those who protested against them; his claim to have done more for blacks than Abraham Lincoln, and then hinting that the “end result” of Lincoln’s actions ending slavery were “always questionable;” to Trump’s defense of Confederate symbols and opposing their removal from the public sphere, which is tantamount to defending Nazi symbols in Germany, Donald Trump has consistently invoked this toxic race-based legacy that is threaded all the way back to Colfax and beyond, throughout his career.

His frequent attacks against immigrants, even those in the US legally, by spewing things like they are "poisoning the blood of our country," echoes language often used by racial supremacists who fixate on “blood and soil” purity (“Blut und Boden,” Blood and Soil, was a Nazi slogan expressing the nationalist ideal of racial purity united with geographic dominance). Trump even used similar race-baiting attacks against Republican candidate Nikki Haley, of East Indian ethnicity, during the 2024 Republican presidential primaries. And Trump's blatant disregard of Supreme Court and lower court rulings over his administration’s recent unlawful kidnapping of an immigrant to a jail in El Salvador and refusing to repatriate him back to the US, and shipping to that Salvadoran jail other immigrants alleged to be terrorists without any legal due process or evidence beyond the presence of body tattoos, is reminiscent of the random use of imprisonment as an intimidation and polarization tactic during Jim Crow.

These are just a few examples of things Trump has said and done as he tries to bait certain demographics of voters. Some defend Trump by saying his bark is worse than his bite, or that he is just a show man entertainer playing to his audience. But the baiting only works because of this centuries-old legacy founded on maintaining racial tribalism and white supremacy amidst the antiquated institutions of divisive "winner take all" politics. Whatever his motivations, Trump is tapping into a toxic, hateful legacy, which he knows perfectly well. He is a master at dancing along these wedge issue lines of controversy and conflict to achieve political success, even as he rips apart the country by fanning these flames instead of displaying a different, more Lincoln-esque type of leadership, trying to promote national and tribal healing and unity.

Donald Trump’s entire political career has basically been one long, race-baiting Willie Horton ad, always provoking white voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police and subsequent nationwide protests, Black Lives Matter was used as a stand-in for Willie Horton. More recently, the “immigrant horde” at the border is serving nicely in this scapegoating role. In such a race-marinated climate rooted in a past of white supremacy, a campaign rally for a major presidential candidate could feature speakers attacking black and brown Haitian immigrants, loudly making unverified claims that immigrants are eating pets, belittling Jews and Palestinians, and transgender people and immigrants. In such a environment of race-based suspicion, even learning about this bloody history and cruel legacy -- such as via the 1619 Project -- is threatening to some white people and has provoked a backlash.

During a time of advancement of illiberal democracies and authoritarian governments, even the world’s “paragon of democracy” – the formerly “united” states of America – appears to have taken a perilous step too close to the cliff’s edge. But in fact, it never really left the cliff, from the civil war to Colfax to lynchings, to 1960s race wars to 2025. If you connect the dots that stretch just beneath the surface, going back two centuries of American life, you find racial animosity and white supremacy have been one of the major driving forces of US politics. Sometimes it fades for a time, goes subterranean, only then to reemerge. Donald Trump is the latest resurgence.

E Pluribus Unum – “out of many, one” – has transmogrified to E Unum Pluribus – “out of one, many.” America will continue to be bedeviled by these dark impulses and instincts until some patriotic leaders decide to step forward to help figure a way out of the tribal intolerance of our forever racially-intertwined lives, expressed so toxically via our “winner take all” political system.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776