Negro Misrule and the Counterrevolution

The idea

White southerners called Reconstruction government negro misrule, complaining of corruption by freed people and northerners. Some corruption was real. Legislators bought hams and perfumes and voted themselves inflated salaries, though the anchor records that such examples were relatively few and comparable to nineteenth-century national corruption. The claim of Black domination fails on arithmetic. Over six hundred African Americans served as legislators in Reconstruction governments, and Black members held a majority in only one chamber of one state, the lower house of South Carolina's legislature. In every other southern legislature they were a minority. The anchor states the correction directly: the narrative that the South was unfairly sacrificed primed the country for accepting the fallacy that White southerners frequently experienced violence at unrestrained Black hands, when reality was opposite, and White southerners orchestrated a sometimes violent, generally successful Reconstruction counterrevolution beginning in the eighteen sixties. The six hundred figure and the South Carolina exception come from a witness, not the anchor.