One of the most common justifications for increasing state police and military power is that it guarantees the security of citizens. Without basic security, it is impossible for people to devote themselves to the pursuit of their social and economic goals. In the US there are proposals to send in the military to help enforce a crackdown on illegal immigration. In the UK, some police stations have proposed to send armed police patrols to Christmas markets, to keep traders and shoppers safe from terrorists. Yet it is less often recognized that the police state, which may be defined as “an enormous government apparatus of prisons, prosecutors, police, and bureaucrats,” is inimical to economic liberty.
Debates on the role of the police state are also pertinent in understanding the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) in the American South. One of the main justifications given for the presence of federal militia in the South was that this was necessary to maintain law and order. It is too often presumed that social and political upheaval in the Reconstruction South was entirely explained by the fact that “racists” did not like the idea of black people being armed or enfranchised. The federal militia was said to be required to protect black people from such racism.
This reduction of Reconstruction history to a tale of racism disregards all the other factors involved, including a phenomenal rise in the role of state militia in daily life. It overlooks the fact that the presence of federal and state troops across the South was an ever-present sign of living under occupation, one that was greatly resented by Southerners.
The Black Militia
In the early months of Reconstruction, it so happened that federal troops were disproportionately black because the federal authorities did not wish to arm any “rebels.” Most white Southerners had been loyal to the rebel cause, so the federal authorities did not look to them to serve as law enforcement. William A. Dunning observes that with few exceptions, “there was no disharmony among the white population: all had committed themselves, actively or passively, to a cause that was lost, and all awaited in uniform humiliation and dejection the fate that should come to them from the will of the conqueror.” Moreover, while white soldiers from the North, loyal to the Union, tended to return to civilian life after the war, black troops regarded being in the military as living their best life. Dunning observes that “their desire to leave the service was, to say the least, not urgent.”
It is in that context that Dunning explains why the federal militia who occupied the South were not met with enthusiasm or even equanimity. As Dunning observes,
Protests against the presence of black troops began very early from the southern whites, and demoralizing effects of such garrisons, and especially of small posts in rural districts, where discipline was not the most rigorous, became more and more evident as time went on.
The attempt by neo-Marxists to reduce these events to nothing but racial hostility overlooks the role played by state intervention in provoking that hostility. A typical history reports that:
Populated by more than a thousand freedpeople, this de facto militia marched on the courthouse, routed the white insurgents, and recovered their votes. The leaders of this march, David Fisher and Joseph C. Oliver, served as constable and sheriff respectively, and were two of the thousands of Black Americans that ascended to local offices during the height of Reconstruction efforts in the states of the former Confederacy. Though the actions of Black state and federal congressmen defined much of what made Reconstruction a period of hope for many Black Americans, perhaps even more important to freedpeople was Black Americans’ entrance into law enforcement.
Dunning also highlights the fact that federal authorities took steps “to prevent any attempt of the old legislatures to meet.” After all, they did not want any rebels launching themselves back into political life. This only served to fuel racial unease, provoking disquiet among whites that, while the federal government had installed a militia to protect the interests of blacks, there were no political avenues through which whites could defend their interests. This, in turn, inevitably led to heightened tension and violence surrounding voting and elections. The stakes were high, as elections were an opportunity to acquire a voice in influencing the reconstruction process. The ensuing riots were then seen as justification for even more state interventions. As usual, court historians supposed that the solution to problems caused by state militia would be to give even more power to the militia. A typical example:
Not only did this event [riots in Louisiana] convey to Northern Republicans the need for far more expansive protections for Black Americans, but it also illustrated the deep need for Black Americans to have some measure of control over the police force. Congressional Reconstruction offered Black Americans an opportunity to wring control of the local police forces from those that despised them and bring about a form of “law and order” that actually protected Black Americans’ rights and dignity.
The Freedmen’s Bureau
Another provocation which impeded peaceful reconstruction was the role of the Freedmen’s Bureau—a federal agency established to ensure the successful incorporation of free blacks into social, political, and economic life. Some of the agents attended to relatively innocuous bureaucratic duties, such as record keeping and monitoring employment contracts, but as Dunning observes, others “appeared to lecture the southern whites on the sinfulness of slavery and on their general depravity.” From this it is inevitable that further hostilities arose. Dunning explains:
Hence the working of the bureau, with its intrusion into the fundamental relationships of social life, engendered violent hostility from the outset on the part of the whites. The feeling was enhanced by the conduct of the ignorant, unscrupulous, and deliberately oppressive agents who were not rare.
These agents, whom neo-Marxist revisionists now pointedly insist on referring to as “white allies of African Americans,” led free blacks to believe that they need not seek employment on white-owned plantations, as each of them would be getting “forty acres and a mule” from the federal government. They explained that the land would be seized from rebels and given to free blacks. This promise, which was never fulfilled, still features prominently in black history lessons and forms part of contemporary demands for slavery reparations:
We’ve all heard the story of the “40 acres and a mule” promise to former slaves. It’s a staple of black history lessons, and it’s the name of Spike Lee’s film company. The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government’s massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves.
The idea that General Sherman’s motivation in seizing Confederate plantations was that he wanted to offer “reparations” to slaves is fanciful. His motivation is more likely to have been conquest of his Confederate opponents. Dunning points out that “though the officials of the bureau strove energetically to destroy the misleading belief of the freedmen and to counteract its baneful influence, it long persisted in one form or another and played its part in forcing the races asunder.”
Was state intervention necessary?
It might be thought that the upheaval of Reconstruction was only to be expected in the aftermath of war, and some might argue that in such circumstances state intervention is necessary to restore law and order. Dunning’s analysis suggests that, without federal interventions, the men returning from war would soon have applied themselves to rebuilding their ravaged economy. Conditions were certainly difficult. No doubt there were challenges. Uncertainty of title was one pressing issue. Dunning observes that,
…the title to much of [the cotton] was, under the now rigorously applied war legislation of Congress, subject to dispute. Treasury agents and army officers were very active in seizing all that could in any way be made to bear the taint of service, either actual or promised, to the Confederate cause.
Nevertheless, there were prospects for recovery: “The price of cotton was fabulously high, and the South might have entered with happy prospects into the business of meeting the world’s demand for this commodity.”
Dunning notes that, “before such economic results were to be attained the South was destined to pass through a social and political struggle of such intensity as only race antagonism can produce.” What caused, or at least magnified, this race antagonism was not that most white people were “racist” in the simplistic contemporary sense, but that, under the guise of stamping out racism, the federal government sent in black troops who only succeeded in rousing a degree of racial antagonism that would not otherwise have occurred.
As Murray Rothbard argued, the state is, by its nature, a predator, and the events of the Reconstruction era illustrate how state interventions only create further problems. Lew Rockwell explains:
Following the great Murray Rothbard, we should ask, do we need a State at all? Rothbard’s answer was a clear “No.” And not only do we not need a State; the State is a menace… But you may wonder, how is this possible? Whatever its defects, don’t we need a State to ensure that we have law and order? If we have property rights, don’t we need a legal order defining these rights? The answer is that we do need law and order, and we do need a legal system. But people can establish law and order without the State.
