The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction

Following the US Civil War, the commissioners of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (the “Freedmen's Bureau”) collected victim testimony and compiled statistics to establish the extent of violence and racial atrocities that white southerners visited on formerly enslaved persons in the states of the ex-Confederacy. Historian William A. Blair, the Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor Emeritus of Middle American History at The Pennsylvania State University, happened serendipitously on the microfilm edition of these records, whose function and assembly supply the subject of his short but powerful book. Focusing on this incredible archive allows Blair to view “truth” as one of the key contested terrains of the Reconstruction Era. “The political struggles over Reconstruction,” Blair writes, “prominently featured arguments over the truth behind information” (p. 7).In the shadow of a bloody civil war during which soldiers and civilians alike plucked from the grapevine telegraph and fell victim to all varieties of rumor, it should come as little surprise that the essential trustworthiness of information—the veracity of “facts”—was up for grabs. “Racism” and “partisanship,” Blair contends, prompted many Democrats and “some independent-minded people” to dismiss (or else turn a blind eye to) reports of widespread violence in the postwar US South (p. 24). “Naysayers” alleged that the Radical Republicans embellished or even fabricated reports of political violence and terrorism in a self-interested effort to promote their own agenda for Reconstruction (pp. 24–25). As classical republicans, nineteenth century Americans had little appetite for military occupation, and Blair reminds his readers that white northerners “sharply divided over whether the racist violence existed to the degree that demanded military intervention” (p. 7).Much more surprising is the scope and ambition of the project that produced the “Records Relating to Murders and Outrages,” as well as its relative neglect by historians—especially those of the Freedmen's Bureau. Massing monthly reports that, if anything, underreported outrages, the Freedmen's Bureau inventoried “between 5,000 and 6,000” instances of racist violence in the post–Civil War South, especially in rural, outlying areas frequently overshadowed by “well-known massacres in Memphis and New Orleans” (pp. 4–5). Blair appropriately marvels at the “unusual situation”: “Military officers gathered data to instigate a policy change contrary to what their commander in chief wanted” (p. 28).Drawing parallels with the fugitives who, before the Civil War, made their bodies into urgent and compelling arguments against slavery by taking to the abolitionist lecture circuit, Blair notes that it was the courage and mettle of formerly enslaved men and women who testified as victims of rape and violence that “turned the Freedmen's Bureau . . . into an ally in the battle to define freedom” (pp. 45–46, 65). The testimony they offered “supplied hard evidence of the need for martial law” (p. 65). Wielded to powerful effect during debates on the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 (which divided the South into five military districts and required universal male suffrage as the price of a rebel state's readmission to the Union), the testimony “supported decision-making at a crucial moment” (p. 65). Just as African Americans plied the Union armies with intelligence that proved vital to winning the war, so too did they ply the US Congress with the intelligence it needed to advance meaningfully the work of Reconstruction.In a brief but poignant epilogue, Blair locates the daring Black men and women who testified about racial violence to the Freedmen's Bureau in a much longer lineage of those who have toiled to create a “record of wrongdoing” as prerequisite to “reconciling wrongs in the past” (pp. 138–39). Historians, he argues, share that pedigree. A slender book that packs a timely and considerable punch, The Record of Murders and Outrages would make a valuable addition to undergraduate courses on Reconstruction, African American history, or historical methods.