The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials: 1871-1872.

• Author: Witt, John F.

Led by James Goodman's Stories of Scottsboro,(1) a number of recent studies have sought to situate legal practice in a complex and fragmented cultural context by telling the stories of particular legal proceedings.(2) The attractiveness of trial histories to cultural and legal historians is readily apparent. A trial episode is a narrow story that can be described in all of its depth and complexity, giving due weight to the meaning of legal practice for multiple constituencies. But if the risk of local histories is a parochialism that loses sight of how the particular is embedded in broader networks of power, the trial history can provide a narrative that links local histories to a broader public sphere in which issues of power and meaning are actively negotiated. By fusing these two elements -- local complexity and what historian Thomas Bender has called "public culture"(3) -- trial histories at their best can weave intensive microstudies into nuanced conceptions of a whole.

Lou Falkner Williams's The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 is a trial history that seeks to forge these kinds of links between the particular and the general. In this case, the particular is a series of prosecutions of Klansmen in South Carolina under newly minted federal civil rights legislation; the general is the moment of constitutional flux during the years immediately following the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment. Concentrating on the roles of the lawyers for both sides and the bench, Professor Williams argues that the South Carolina trials represented "in microcosm the reasons why constitutional doctrines and a rule of law sufficient to protect the former slaves in all the rights of citizenship did not emerge" from the debate over the relationships among nation, state, and citizen during Reconstruction (p. 146). The trials, she claims, pitted an intransigent white South against a white North that was hampered, first, by traditional theories of dual federalism, and, second, by growing pressure for sectional reconciliation. Ultimately, "ongoing dependence on federal muscle" proved to be "no substitute for the consent of the governed" (p. 126). Williams's argument is plausible -- even convincing. But it seems to present only part of the story. Focusing her account almost exclusively on the legal professionals in the case, Professor Williams glosses over the critical roles of a wide variety of actors in the trials; in the process, she misses much of the complexity that characterizes the best trial histories.

The story of the South Carolina Klan trials is familiar terrain to historians of Reconstruction.(4) Following the white Union Reform Party's defeat in the state elections of 1870, the Klan initiated a reign of terror in the upper Piedmont that continued through the fall of 1871 (pp. 28-29). Under authority of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871,(5) President Ulysses S. Grant suspended habeas corpus on October 17, 1871 in nine upcountry counties; mass arrests followed.(6) Beginning in November, federal prosecutors brought indictments against Klan members under the Klan Act and the Enforcement Act of 1870,(7) which sought to protect black political and civil rights from both public and private violation.

There is something of a scholarly consensus that the apex of Klan violence in the Reconstruction South was reached in South Carolina's upcountry,(8) and Williams's first two chapters describe the charged political context from which the violence emerged. Williams argues that when...