History of the United States I / Unit 16 USH1 2299 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Abram Colby
The idea
Abram Colby was fifty-two, formerly enslaved, and elected to Georgia's lower house in eighteen sixty-eight. He testified in Atlanta on October twenty-seventh, eighteen seventy-one, before the congressional committee investigating the Klan. Two days before the attack they had offered him five thousand dollars to turn and go with them, and two thousand five hundred cash if he would let another man go to the legislature in his place. He refused. On the twenty-ninth of October they came to his house, broke his door open, took him out of his bed and took him to the woods and whipped him three hours or more and left him in the woods for dead. They asked whether he would ever vote another damned Radical ticket. He answered that if there was an election tomorrow he would vote the Radical ticket, and they set in and whipped him a thousand licks more. His testimony was given under oath.
In practice
A sitting state legislator offered five thousand dollars to give up his seat, refusing, and then tortured for three hours in the woods for it.
Where people slip
Colby's testimony shows the mechanism and not only the cruelty, which is why it closes this unit. Take the sequence in order. First the bribe, which means the Klan preferred his resignation to his death and understood exactly what it wanted. Then the beating, which came only after he refused. Then the part students miss. Colby said he would have come before the court, but he knew it was no use to try to get Ku-Klux condemned by Ku-Klux, and he noted that a member of that week's grand jury was the father of one of the men who whipped him. The violence worked because the courts were staffed by the people committing it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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