The Jim Crow Militia: Paramilitary Police Reform and Law-and-Order Liberalism in Mississippi

The Jim Crow Militia: Paramilitary Police Reform and Law-and-Order Liberalism in Mississippi Justin Randolph (bio) Writing in 1877, a former U.S. congressman and Confederate general named Winfield Scott Featherston grieved Mississippi's reputation in the world. "The impression prevailing abroad," he feared, was "that our people look with too much leniency upon those who violate the law & slay their fellow men, that ours is a land of bloodshed & violence." In an unpublished treatise titled "But Much Yet Remains to Be Done," Featherston called for state laws to be "faithfully administered," to ensure that "life, liberty & property are well protected without regard to race, color or previous condition." If lawlessness continued, he feared for Mississippi's future: "The assurance must be given to immigrants from every land & country, that ours is a community of peace, where law & order are properly respected & enforced before they will seek a home in our midst. Desperados and bad men may voluntarily locate in a state where turmoil and strife, violence & bloodshed exist, but good citizens never will."1 Until his death in 1891, Featherston pursued state police power to curb violent disorder, including instances of racial violence with which he disagreed. Rather than turning to county sheriffs or local policemen, he hoped to professionalize Mississippi's volunteer paramilitary police force, at times called the state militia, the state troops, or the Mississippi National Guard.2 [End Page 285] Featherston focused on law enforcement in the aftermath of a years-long coup that overthrew biracial Republican government in Mississippi. A Democrat, lawyer, and state legislator from Holly Springs, he showed no remorse for the Black and white residents brutalized and killed in campaigns that "rescued the state government from the grasp of our political adversaries." Rather, he worried about press coverage. "Such violations of law here," he wrote, "are made to appear as immense mobs of almost daily occurrence." To his mind, this bad press explained the state's inability to modernize, to attract "men of families" who might bring capital, labor, and expertise to promote an industrial economy. "The sure & speedy enforcement of all laws for the prevention & suppression of crime," Featherston wrote, "will be the most effective means of removing erroneous impressions already made & the most unanswerable argument that can be used in drawing immigrants & capitalists to us."3 This essay asserts that paramilitary police reformers like Featherston constituted an important class of New South thinkers and state builders. Corporate lawyers, warriors, historians, and political theorists, these white elites were architects of Jim Crow's authoritarian order who [End Page 286] shared important ideas with New South liberals and progressives who looked more toward Woodrow Wilson than Jefferson Davis. They responded to real and imaginary threats to elite white rule that emerged after Reconstruction, from both African American and white political enemies, including agrarian and labor radicals. Ruling police reformers condemned both mob rule unauthorized by state actors and police abuses prone to damaging press coverage.4 These reformers viewed themselves as protecting the fundamental preconditions on which a New South could grow richer while avoiding revolution. They were professionals and intellectuals who reckoned that general prosperity demanded unequal economic growth to benefit private property owners, which in turn demanded a centralized and professionalized state militia to trump the ineffectual or embarrassing violence of local law enforcement. When viewed this way, as a means of everyday counterinsurgency, the ideas around Gilded Age paramilitary policing enrich the field's understanding of the thought and politics that became the ever-evolving racial capitalist order of segregation, civic disenfranchisement, sexual violence, and labor exploitation that Sarah Haley calls "Jim Crow modernity." It also sheds light on the politics of white reconciliation that upheld local and national systems of racial apartheid through most of the twentieth century despite diverse forms of African American resistance, what N. D. B. Connolly calls "Jim Crow liberalism."5 [End Page 287] Reformers like Featherston are largely missing from histories of the New South; their movement is disconnected from histories of modern policing. One thread of the literature on postwar paramilitarism emphasizes how the violence of irregular white supremacist militias delivered Democrats' overthrow of Reconstruction and the continued...