The Regulators: Organized Violence
Question: Did you ever hear any threats from any quarter going to show that you or your race were in danger?
Answer: I cannot say that I have heard that my race was in danger, but I have heard that “those damned politicians should be gotten rid of.” It was a kind of indirect expression made by the crackers”
-- Emanuel Fortune, Klan Hearings, 1871
Finding justification in the murder of Maggie McClellan, white Democrats launched a bloody crusade to demolish the Republican stronghold of representation in state Reconstruction politics. They only regained power with the help of young, foolhardy Democrats and the Jackson County Regulators.
Violence was central to reclaiming and maintaining white supremacy. The Jackson County Regulators was a terrorist organization connected to white democrats who worked to frighten the acting Republican government out of Jackson County by targeting white and black voters who were active in Republican politics. The violence perpetuated the racial caste system that had been overturned with Reconstruction. William Purman vaguely cites Colonel McClellan and James Coker’s political affiliations as collaborators in the violence that occurred. Undoubtedly, merchants and other middle class men were seeking to restore local rule to southern white men, but directly tracing acts of terrorism to professional and middle class white leaders against republicans was difficult to do.
While merchants and professionals held the most political power in the Democratic party, they were mostly involved in spreading rhetoric that influenced younger white men and poor whites against the acting interracial Republican leadership. As Malachi Martin testified, “They [Democratic Club] asked me if I knew of a secret republican organization, and they said that they had their own organization; that they would counteract and beat any organization the republicans, or as they said “the niggers” would get up.” Hearing thinly-veiled rhetoric like this in political organizations such as the Democratic Club, young white men who were aligned with the older Democrat who were leaders in the party committed much of the terrorism against black republicans. Furthermore, poor and working-class whites who were paid by the established democratic power structure perpetrated much of the organized violence against Republicans.
Many of the leading merchant and professional classes were worried about the political ascendancy of northern soldiers and newly-emancipated blacks who were involved in Reconstruction politics. They employed the use of what William J. Purman deridingly called “twenty dollar men” because some poor white men could be hired as assassins for a sum of twenty dollars. The established middle class men used the economic hardships to their advantage. As T. Thomas Fortune notes,"The bulk of the whites lived in a state of confusion and uncertainty because they were equally ignorant of what would happen next. The farmer and merchant suffered alike with the working people in the crippled consumption which goes with crippled production. And this is always the case where lawlessness prevails and law and legal process are suspended or overridden." So was the case with Luke Lott, a notorious criminal hired by some prominent whites to assassinate their Republican enemies.
This page has paths:
- Introduction: Understanding Jackson County, Florida, from 1865-1871 Annemarie Nichols