SHERIDAN'S SECRET MISSION

A sobering history of the failure of Reconstruction in the defeated former Confederacy.

Philip Sheridan (1831-1888), writes Cwiklik, was no icon of civil rights: “He shared most of the prejudices against black people harbored by white Americans in those days.” He was, however, a fierce unionist, as well as the designer of several scorched-earth campaigns against the secessionists during the Civil War. It was for that reason that Ulysses S. Grant sent Sheridan to Texas and Louisiana under the cover of a pleasure tour in order to report on the progress of Reconstruction. There was much to report, for even as Black Americans were entering government, they were being terrorized by the newly formed KKK and the far less secretive White League, a “paramilitary group unhinged by black voting and officeholding.” The White League stormed New Orleans, murdering Black police officers, and they executed some 70 Black militiamen captured in western Louisiana. Sheridan filed a widely circulated report denouncing the killers as “banditti,” and Grant prepared to send in federal troops. However, “at every turn,” Cwiklik writes, quoting Grant, “obstacles had been thrown in the way of federal efforts to prosecute the killers, while ‘so-called conservative’ newspapers ‘justified the massacre’ and denounced U.S. law enforcement officials as agents of ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism.’ ” It didn’t help that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of states’ rights on matters of voting, thus limiting federal jurisdiction and effectively disempowering Reconstruction. This ruling allowed the Confederacy to remain alive, at least in theory, a matter that’s playing out in the government today as white supremacists in power seek to limit civil rights. Grant later rued the “death by suffocation” of laws meant to secure Black rights as one of the great failures of his time in office.

A timely contribution to the history of Reconstruction and civil rights.