Dixie After the War

CHAPTER XXXI

Crime Against Womanhood

The rapist is a product of the reconstruction period. In the beginning he commanded observation North less by reason of what he did than by reason of what was done unto him. His chrysalis was a uniform; as a soldier he could force his way into private homes, bullying and insulting white women; he was often commissioned to tasks involving these things. He came into life in the abnormal atmosphere of a time rife with discussions of social equality theories, contentions for coeducation and intermarriage.

General Weitzel, resigning his command, wrote from La Fourche and La Teche to Butler in New Orleans: “I can not command these negro regiments. Women and children are in terror. It is heartrending.”25 General Halleck wrote, April, 1865, to General Grant of a negro corps: “A number of cases of atrocious rape by these men have already occurred. Their influence on the coloured people is reported bad. I hope you will remove it.” Similar reports were made by other Federal officers. Governor Perry, of South Carolina, says: “I continued remonstrances to Secretary Seward on the employment of negro troops, gave detail of their atrocious conduct. At Newberry … (Crozier’s story). At Anderson, they protected and carried off a negro who had wantonly murdered his master. At Greenville, they knocked down citizens in the streets without slightest provocation. At Pocotaligo, they entered a gentleman’s house, and after tying him, violated the ladies.” Mr. Seward wrote that Northern sentiment was sensitive about negro troops. When Governor Perry handed Generals Meade and Gillmore the Pocotaligo report, General Meade said he was opposed to negro troops and was trying to rid the army of them, but had to exercise great caution not to offend Northern sentiment. General Gillmore had some offenders executed. Federal commanders largely relieved the South of black troops, but carpet-bag officials restored them in the form of militia.

I have told elsewhere Crozier’s story. Let me contrast his slayers with a son of industry it was my honour to know, Uncle Dick, my father’s coachman. During the war, when my father had occasion to send a large sum in gold coin through the country, Uncle Dick carried it belted around his body under his shirt. My father’s ward was attending the Southern Female College in Danville when the President and his Cabinet, fleeing from Richmond, reached that place. Knowing that Danville might become a fighting center, Mr. Williams T. Davis, Principal, wrote my father to send for Sue. The way to reach Danville was by private conveyance, seventy miles or more. Uncle Dick, mounted high on his carriage-box, a white-headed, black-faced knight-errant of chivalry, set forth. Nobody knew where the armies were. He might have to cut his horses loose from his carriage, mount Sue on one, himself take the other, and bring her through the forest. In due time the carriage rolled into our yard, Uncle Dick proud and happy on his box, Sue inside wrapped in rugs, sound asleep, for it was midnight. That is the way we could trust our black men.

The following account by an ex-Confederate captain shows how General Schofield handled a case of the crime which is now under discussion: “A young white girl on her way to Sunday School was attacked by a negro; ‘attempted’ assault, the family said; it is usually put that way; ‘consummated’ nails the victim to a stake. Our people were in a state of terror; they seemed paralysed; they were inured to dispossession and outrage. No one seemed to know what to do. I picked up several young men and trailed down the ruffian. Then I sent a letter to General Schofield (with whom I had some acquaintance, as we had met each other hunting), asking instructions. He sent two detectives and a file of soldiers, requesting that I call for further assistance if occasion demanded. I wrote full statement of facts, had the girl’s testimony taken in private; evidence was laid before General Schofield; the negro was sent to the penitentiary for eighteen years. The promptness of his action inspired people here with hope. We had no Ku Klux in Virginia – one reason, I have always thought, was the swiftness with which punishment was meted out in that case.”

I have, as I believe, from Judge Lynch himself particulars of another case in which, the law being inactive, citizens took justice into their own hands:

“Two young girls, daughters of a worthy German settler, were out to bring up cows, when attacked by a negro tramp; they ran screaming, but were overtaken; he seized the older; the younger, about ten years old, continued to run. Some passers on the nearest road, a private and lonely one, rushed to the relief of the older girl, who was making such outcry as she could. We found her prostrate, the negro having her pinioned with one knee on either arm. His jack-knife open, was held between his teeth, and he was stuffing his handkerchief in her mouth to stifle her cries. We rescued her, took him prisoner, carried him to the nearest magistrate, a carpet-bag politician, who committed him to jail to await the action of the grand jury. He made his escape a few days afterward, was recaptured and relodged in jail. Ten days later a band was organised among respectable citizens in and around our town; a Northern settler was a member. One detachment set out about dark for the rendezvous where they met a score more of resolute, armed men, some with masks, some without. They effected entrance into the jail, but their way was arrested when they found the prisoner in a casemated cell, which other negroes readily pointed out, one offering a lamp; a railroad section hand procured crow-bars with which the casemate was crushed in; the prisoner was taken in charge. He stood mute; seemed calm and unmoved; was put in a close carriage, the purpose being to drive him to the exact spot of his crime, but it coming on day, the company thought best to execute him at once. He was placed upon a mule; a rope attached to his neck was tied to the limb of a tree about ten feet above. The leader now learned of an intention to riddle his body with bullets when the drop occurred. Each member had pledged obedience to orders; each had been pledged to take no liquor for hours before, or during this expedition – pledges so far rigidly observed. The leader addressed them: ‘We are here to avenge outrage on a helpless child, and to let it be well known that such crime shall not go unpunished in this community. But mutilation of this fiend’s remains will be a reflection upon ourselves and not a dispensation of justice.’

“The negro, seeing his end surely at hand, broke down, pleading for mercy; confessed that he had appreciated in advance the great peril in which his crime might place him, but had argued that, as a stranger, he would not be liable to identification, and that as the country was thickly wooded, he was sure of escape. ‘But, fo’ Gawd, gent’mun, ef a white man f’om de Norf hadn’t put’t in my hade dat a white ’oman warn’ none too good fuh – ’

“Word was given, and he dropped into eternity. It was broad daylight when the party got back to town. They overtook several negro men going to work who knew full well what they had been about. But there was no sign of protest or demur. The Commonwealth’s Attorney made efforts to ascertain the perpetrators of the deed, but as the company entered the town and jail so quietly and left it with so little disturbance that only one person in the village had knowledge of their coming and going, no one was discovered who could name a single member of the party or who had any idea of whence they came or whither they went. So of course no indictment could be found.” This was in 1870; since then till now no similar crime has occurred in that community. Within the circumscribed radius of its influence, lynching seems to eradicate the evil for which administered.

The moderation marking this execution has not always accompanied lynching. Reading accounts of unnecessary tortures inflicted, of very orgies of vengeance, people remote from the scenes, Southerners no less than others, have shuddered with disgust, and trembled with concern for the dignity of their own race. Only people on the spot, writhing under the agony of provocation, comprehended the fury of response to the crime of crimes. Vigilants meant to make their awful vengeance effective deterrent to the crime’s repetition. No other crime offers such problems to relatives and officers of justice and to the people among whom it occurs; it is so outside of civilisation that there seem no terms for dispassionate discussion, no fine adjustment of civil trial and legal penalty.

Listen to this out of the depths of one Southern woman’s experience: “I stood once with other friends, who were trying to nurse her back to life and reason, by the bedside of a girl – a beautiful, gentle, high-born creature – who had been outraged. We were using all the skill and tact and tenderness at our command. It seemed impossible for her to have one hour’s peaceful sleep. She would start from slumber with a shriek, look at us with dilated eyes, then clutch us and beg for help. But the most unspeakable pity of it all was her loathing for her own body; her prayers that she might die and her body be burned to ashes. I heard her physician say to an officer who came to take her deposition: ‘I would be signing that girl’s death warrant if I let you in there to make her tell that horrible story over again.’ When a grim group came with some negroes they wanted to bring before her for identification, her brothers and her lover said: ‘Only over our dead bodies.’”

Lynching is inexcusable, even for this crime, which is comparable to no other, and to which murder is a trifle. So we may coolly argue when the blow has not fallen upon ourselves or at our own door. When it has, we think there’s a wolf abroad and we have lambs. Those to whom the wrecked woman is dear are quiveringly alive to her irreparable wrong. The victim has rights, they argue; if, unhappily for herself, she survive the outrage, she is entitled to what poor remnants of reason may be left her; it is naturally their whole care to preserve her from memories that sear and craze, and from rehearsal before even the most private tribunal, of events that the merciful, even if not of her blood, must wish her to forget. Under such strain, men see as the one thing imperative the prompt and informal removal from existence of the offender, whom they look upon, not as man, but beast or fiend.

The “poor white” is the most frequent sufferer from assault; the wife of the small farmer attending household duties in her isolated home while her husband is in the fields or otherwise absent about his work; or the small farmer’s daughter when she goes to the spring for water, or to the meadow for the cows, or trudges a lonely road or pathway to school; these are more convenient material than the lady of larger means and higher station, who is more rarely unattended. In cases on record the ravished and slain were children, five, six, eight years old; in others, mothers with babies at their breasts, and the babies were slain with the mothers. Here is a case cited by Judge M. L. Dawson: A negro raped and slew a farmer’s five-year-old child. Arrested, tried, convicted, appealed, sentence reversed, reappealed (on insanity plea); people took him out and hung him.

In full-volumed indignation over lynching, the usual course of the Northern press was to almost lose sight of the crime provoking it. It was a minor fact that a woman was violated, that her skull was crushed or that she sustained other injuries from which she died or which made her a wreck for life – particulars too trivial to be noted by moulders of public opinion writing eloquent essays on “Crime in the South.” Picking up a paper with this glaring headline, one would have a right to expect some outburst of indignation over the ravishment and butchering of womanhood. But there would be editorial after editorial rife with invectives against lynching and lynchers, righteous with indignation over “lawlessness in the South,” and not one word of sympathy or pity for the white victim of negro lust! The fact that there was such a victim seemed lost sight of; the crime for which the negro was executed would often escape everything but bare mention, sometimes that. What deductions were negroes to draw from such distinctions, except that lynching was monstrous crime, rape an affair of little moment, and strenuous objection to it only one feature of damnable “Race Prejudice in the South”?

“They do not care, the men and women of the North,” I have heard a Southern girl exclaim, “if we are raped. They do not care that we are prisoners of fear, that we fear to take a ramble in the woods alone, fear to go about the farms on necessary duties, fear to sit in our houses alone; fear, if we live in cities, to go alone on the streets at hours when a woman is safe anywhere in Boston or New York.”

From the Northern attitude as reflected in the press and in the pulpit, negroes drew their own conclusions. Violation of a white woman was no harm; indeed, as a leveler of social distinctions, it might almost be construed into an act of grace. The way to become a hero in the eyes of the white North and to win the crown of martyrdom for oneself and new outbursts of sympathy for one’s race was to assault a white woman of the South. This crime was a development of a period when the negro was dominated by political, religious and social advisers from the North and by the attitude of the Northern press and pulpit. It was practically unknown in wartime, when negroes were left on plantations as protectors and guardians of white women and children.

“There was only one case,26 as far as the writer can ascertain, of the negro’s crime against womanhood during all the days of slavery,” said Professor Stratton in the “North American Review” a few years ago, “while his fidelity and simple discharge of duty during the Civil War when the white men were away fighting against his liberty have challenged the admiration of the world; but since he has been made free, his increase in crime and immorality has gone side by side with his educational advancement – and even in greater ratio.” The Professor gave figures, as others have done, which proved his case, if figures can prove anything. Considered with reference to the crime under discussion, it is difficult to see how purely intellectual training tends to its increase, if there is any truth in the doctrine that brain development effects a reduction of animal propensities. Only in moral education, however, rests any real security for conduct. Negroes educated and negroes uneducated, in a technical sense, have committed this crime.27

The rapist is not to be taken as literal index to race character; he is an excrescence of the times; his crime is a horror that must be wiped out for the honour of the land, the security of womanhood, the credit of our negro citizenhood. The weapon for its destruction is in the hands of Afro-Americans; overwhelming sentiment on their part would put an end to it; they should be the last to stand for the rapist’s protection; rather should they say to him: “You are none of us!” They should be quick to aid in his arrest, identification and deliverance to the law. Such attitude would be more effective than any other one force that can be brought to bear upon this crime and that of lynching. I chronicle here as worthy of record, that in June, 1870, William Stimson, rapist, was tried before a negro jury, convicted on negro evidence, and hung November 4. This happened in North Carolina during negro rule.

The negro guilty of this hideous offense has committed against his race a worse crime than lynching can ever be. By the brutish few the many are judged – particularly when the many in vociferous condemnation of the penalty visited upon the criminal seem to condone his awful iniquity against themselves. Black men who have been and will be womanhood’s protectors outnumber the beasts who wear like skins as many thousands to one; and it is not fair to themselves that they pursue any course, utter any sentiment, which causes them to be classed in any way whatever with these. Black men are seeing this and are setting their faces towards stamping out the crime which causes lynching. Utterances from some of their pulpits and resolutions passed by some of their religious bodies indicate this.