By Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston 
and David Cason, University of North Dakota 

Donald Trump is the third U.S. president to pardon a large group of insurrectionists. His clemency toward those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – including seditious conspiracy and assaults on police officers – was different in key ways from the two previous efforts, by Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1873.

But they share the apparent hope that their pardons would herald periods of national harmony. As historians of the period after the Civil War, we know that for Johnson and Grant, that’s not what happened.

When Johnson became president in 1865 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he faced a combative Congress. Though Johnson had opposed the secession of the Southern states before the Civil War began, he agreed with former Confederate leaders that formerly enslaved people did not deserve equality with White people.

Further, as a Southerner, he wanted to maintain the social conventions and economic structure of the South by replacing enslavement with economic bondage. This economic bondage, called sharecropping, was a system by which tenant farmers rented land from large landowners.

Tenants rarely cleared enough to pay their costs and fell into debt. In effect, Johnson sought to restore the nation to how it was before the Civil War, though without legalized slavery – and sought every avenue available to thwart the plans of the Radical Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress to create full racial equality.

Johnson signed an amnesty that gave a blanket pardon to all former Confederate soldiers. However, he required formerly high-ranking Confederate officials to individually seek pardons for their involvement in the rebellion. These officials faced permanent disfranchisement and could not hold federal office if they did not seek a pardon.

When Congress was in recess, Johnson vetoed two bills that had been passed: one to help find homes for formerly enslaved people who could no longer live on the property of their enslavers, and the other to define U.S. citizenship and ensure equal protection of the laws for Black people as well as White people.

Johnson also told Southern states not to ratify the 14th Amendment, whose purpose was to enshrine both citizenship and equal protection in the Constitution.

When Congress came back in session, it continued its effort of Reconstruction of the former Confederate states – reforming their racist laws and policies to comport with the liberty and equality the Union was committed to – by overriding Johnson’s vetoes and requiring former Confederate states to ratify the 14th Amendment as a condition of readmission to the Union, but Congress could not override the pardons the president had granted.

This continued political warfare resulted in Johnson being impeached – but not convicted or removed from office. But the back-and-forth also stalled Reconstruction and efforts toward racial equality, ultimately dooming the effort.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was not covered by Johnson’s general amnesty. As a former Confederate general, he had to apply for a personal presidential pardon, which Johnson granted on July 17, 1868. Two months later, Forrest represented Tennessee at the Democratic Party’s national convention in New York City.

He also took command of the Ku Klux Klan, the unofficial militant wing of the Democratic Party. Forrest initiated the title “Grand Wizard,” a bizarre title derived from his Civil War nickname, “Wizard of the Saddle.” He became a leader of former Confederates who resisted Reconstruction through violence and terror.

After his pardon, Forrest perfected a rhetorical technique for his extremism. His biographer Court Carney described it as a multistep process, starting with, “Say something exaggerated and inflammatory that plays well with supporters.” Then, deny saying it “to maintain a semblance of professional decorum.” Then, blur the threats with “crowd pleasing humor.” It proved an effective way of threatening violence while being able to deny responsibility for any violence that occurred.

Under Forrest’s leadership, membership in the violent, racist Ku Klux Klan spread almost everywhere in the South. Records are sketchy, so it’s impossible to say how many people were lynched, but the Equal Justice Initiative has documented 2,000 lynchings of Black Americans during Reconstruction. Black women and girls were often raped by klansmen or members of its successor militias.

It’s also not possible to say how many pardoned ex-Confederates participated in the lynchings. But the violence was so widespread that just about everyone, North and South, thought the political violence was a resumption of the Civil War.

In the Piedmont of the Carolinas, klan violence amounted to a shadow government of White nationalists. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to apprehend the klansmen, and a newly minted Department of Justice prosecuted the insurrectionists for violating Civil Rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments.

After several trials that proved to be what the federal judiciary’s official history calls “dramatic spectacles,” federal judges handed down conviction after conviction.

The federal government’s decisive action allowed for a relatively free presidential election in 1872. Black voters helped Grant win in eight Southern states, contributing to his landslide victory.

But after his reelection, Grant appointed a new attorney general, who dropped the pending klan cases. Grant also pardoned klansmen who had already been convicted of crimes.

Grant hoped his gesture would encourage Southerners to accept the nation’s new birth of freedom.

It didn’t. The pardons told former Confederates that they were winning.

John Christopher Winsmith, an ex-Confederate who embraced racial equality and whose father had been shot by the KKK, wrote to Grant in 1873, “A few trials and convictions in the U.S. Courts, and then the pardoning of the criminals” had emboldened what he called “the hideous monster – Ku Kluxism.”

And a new gang arose, too: the Red Shirts, who began to murder Black people openly, not even in secret as the klan did. Two of the Red Shirts were later elected to the U.S. Senate.

Paramilitary groups established anti-democratic one-party rule in every former Confederate state, imposing discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow, which were enforced by lynchings and other forms of racial violence.

The federal government took no substantive action against this for a century, until the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement sparked change. And it wasn’t until 2022 that Congress passed an anti-lynching bill.

Joseph Patrick Kelly is professor of literature and director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston, and David Cason is associate professor in Honors, University of North Dakota 

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By Stacy M. Brown

NNPA Newswire 

Four innocent young girls getting ready for Sunday services died when the Ku Klux Klan detonated a devastating bomb inside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church sixty years ago. Today, as the nation commemorates the somber 60th anniversary of that fateful September 15, 1963, day, two remarkable women, Lisa McNair, and Tammie Fields, stand united not only by their shared tragedy but also by their unwavering message to combat hate. McNair’s sister, Denise, was one of the four girls who tragically died in the bombing. In contrast, Fields’ father, Charles Cagle, was initially questioned as a potential suspect in the horrific church bombing but was never charged. Decades after this devastating event, the two women crossed paths at a Black History Month event, forging a seemingly improbable connection and an enduring friendship.

Despite being born on opposite sides of one of the most heinous events of the civil rights movement, McNair and Fields shared a common goal: to speak out against hate. As the nation reflects on the 60th anniversary of this tragic event, McNair implored people to remember what transpired and contemplate how to prevent such hatred from rearing its head again. “People killed my sister just because of the color of her skin,” McNair passionately declared in an interview with the Associated Press. “Don’t look at this anniversary as just another day. Instead, consider what each of us can do individually to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

The explosion occurred when dynamite, surreptitiously placed outside the 16th Street Baptist Church underneath a set of stairs, exploded. The four girls, ages 11 to 14, were assembled in a downstairs washroom before Sunday services when the devastating blast occurred. Tragically, 11-year-old Denise McNair and her friends, 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, all perished in the explosion. A fifth girl, Sarah Collins Rudolph, Addie Mae’s sister, was also in the room and sustained severe injuries, including losing an eye.

The vile act of violence took place during the zenith of the civil rights movement, just eight months after then-Gov. George Wallace defiantly proclaimed, “segregation forever.” It occurred a mere two weeks following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. Three Ku Klux Klansmen were convicted in connection with the bombing: Robert Chambliss in 1977, Thomas Blanton in 2001, and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002.

Tammie Fields, now 64, was a toddler during the bombing. She vividly remembers her father, who died several years ago, harboring deep-seated hatred and bitterness toward Black individuals. Racial slurs were commonplace, and she was encouraged to despise her Black classmates. Fields credited her preacher grandfather with showing her a different path in life. “The most important thing to me is that my children will never know the hate that I’ve known,” Fields shared.

Lisa McNair, 58, was born a year after her sister’s tragic death, and she grew up witnessing the profound sorrow that haunted her parents. Her mother often took her and her siblings to the cemetery, where she would grieve or sit solemnly. In her book, “Dear Denise: Letters to the Sister I Never Knew,” McNair candidly wrote about her life in the aftermath of the bombing. When she first heard of Tammie Fields and learned that both were scheduled to attend the same church program, she admitted to being hesitant. “Originally, I didn’t really want to meet her,” McNair confided to AP. “I was kind of nervous about it, even though she didn’t do it. It was almost like meeting the person who killed your sister, in a way. You’re trying to figure out how I should feel about this?”

Despite her reservations, the two women eventually met at another church where Fields was speaking. McNair listened from a pew, and when the event concluded, the two women shared a heartfelt embrace, tears streaming down their faces. “I was extremely, extremely nervous. She had every right not to accept me, but she did,” Fields remembered in a discussion with the AP. McNair recognized the authenticity of Fields’ desire for reconciliation. Fields, now a grandmother with Black children and mixed-race grandchildren, refrained from discussing the bombing for an extended period. However, she now firmly believes that open dialogue is essential for progress. “How is it ever going to change in the world if we’re not honest?” she pondered.

Lisa McNair also expressed concern about the current political climate, where some politicians appear to be deliberately stoking divisive rhetoric. She sees valuable lessons in the events of 60 years ago for today’s society. “So much hate, so much racism is coming back up. That’s the thing that upsets me and saddens me; we should have made more progress. I think we’re going backward instead of forward,” McNair lamented.

During a recent speech in Montgomery, Alabama, McNair unveiled a small box that the funeral home had given to her family and contained items found with Denise, including patent leather shoes, a pocketbook, and a delicate handkerchief. Among these items was a chunk of concrete, about the size of a rock, embedded in Denise’s head, ultimately causing her death. “It shows that racism can kill. Hateful words can kill. And this is a tangible piece of that,” McNair declared solemnly.

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