A History Lesson for the Courts

My almost-finished memoir Telling about the ‘Ole’ South and My Self stretches back to the nineteenth century with Reids in Scotland and Kentucky and Bullocks and Baltzells in Greene County, Alabama. My research has enabled me to connect riots and brutalities in 1868 fostered by my mother’s ancestors to those in early 2021 fostered by Donald J. Trump.

In March, 1868, fifteen white men from Eutaw viciously horsewhipped a northern Methodist minister for teaching freed slaves to be citizens capable of reading, writing, and doing numbers. Badly injured, the teacher managed to board a train headed north. He never returned.

Members of the Union’s Fifteenth Infantry arrested the vicions men who had attacked the teacher and paraded them through Eutaw streets in irons. A military court sent the prisoners to the dismal Dry Tortugas prison in the Gulf of Mexico, where the editor of the Klan-supporting Monitor was already imprisoned. General George Meade, Commander of the South, was in Atlanta overseeing the reentry of five southern states into the union. His deputy, General O. L. Shepherd was stationed nearer Eutaw in Montgomery, Alabama. I’m guessing that J.J. Jolly, a Confederate hero and KKK leader, threatened violence against the sparse number of Union troops near Eutaw. Generals Grant and Shepherd abruptly ordered the prisoners released. (I suspect the Generals were at odds since the New York Times on April 7, 1868, published General Meade’s warning about KKK brutalities.) The prisoners were shipped to New Orleans and then trained to Eutaw. They were met by a parade of Eutaw citizens who took them as martyrs to northern rule. The Monitor editor who’d advised every Alabama county to sponsor its own KKK was hailed as a hero. Klansman J.J.Jolly made a speech, and the ladies of Eutaw gave teas and even staged some sort of tableau for the released prisoners. A terrorist campaign against the witnesses who’d testified in the flogging trial cautioned citizens not to report crimes.

As a direct result of the immunity conferred on former prisoners, Greene County became a Klan ‘hotspot.” Night riders staged “Negro hunts,” killing outspoken Blacks, burning their homes, and destroying any Black-owned crops. The KKK became, as Allen Trelease writes, “the terrorist arm of the Democrratic Party.” (The political parties have almost swapped identities since then.) The KKK controlled the courts and erased any pretense of Justice in Greene County. In 1870, the Klan massacred the duly-elected Republican solicitor investigating former slave “owners” for cruelty. By 1872, the Freedman’s Bureau, unable to fight the Klan, quit trying to help ex-slaves. My great-great-uncle Billy Baltzell was appointed Justice of the Peace, apparently for riding with the Klan to intimidate Blacks.

The 2021 rampage on the U.S. Capitol echoes the 1868 Greene County riot in many ways, including making heroes of rioters. Donald Trump called rioters to the U.S. Capitol and celebrated them as “patriots” for trying to stop the counting of the Electoral College vote. These “patriots” did about $3,000,000 of damage in the grand historic House of Congress, injured many, and killed five. In addition to exonerating violence, the rioters both used empty rhetoric (slogans like “white supremacy” and “stop the steal”) to justify villainy.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, President Joe Biden, Congressman Adam Schiff, former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and many others have written eloquently about the wrongness of the July 2 Supreme Court decision. My account of 156-year-old evidence about the consequences of granting immunity to convicts should add to public outrage over the Supreme Court’s immunity decision excusing Donald Trump and future presidents from any (ANY) prosecution for unlawful acts while in office.

Panthea Reid, July 5, 2024