This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
Chapter
47
: freedmen's aid societies and an act of congress creating a Bureau of refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands
Chapter
55
:
first
appropriation by congress for the bureau; the reconstruction Act,
March
2
,
1867
; increase of educational work
Chapter
60
: opposition to Bureau and reconstruction work became personal; the
Congregational Church of
Washington
Chapter
62
: life in
Washington, D. C.
,
1866
to
1874
; assigned to duty in regular army as commander,
Department of the Columbia
Chapter
63
: in the
Northwest
, among the
Indians
; trip to
Alaska
; life in
Portland, Ore.
;
1874
to
1881
Chapter
64
: superintendent of the
United States military Academy
; commanding
Department of the Platte
,
Omaha, Neb.
Chapter
68
:
French
army maneuvers,
1884
; promotion to
Major General
,
United States army
,
San Francisco
1886
-
88
[378] Of course such conduct, bad as it seemed for the community, could not properly be charged to any of the people beyond those who were guilty of the barbarous acts, or those who, in their blindness of prejudice, sustained them. It became evident in studying the letters and communications which reached me, usually cautiously written, so as not to anger the whites around them if they should happen to be published, that in the early summer of 1868, the former irregular and local hostility to freedmen's schools had taken on a new strength. It involved in its meshes Unionists and well-to-do industrious negroes, as well as teachers and scholars. Further examples will illustrate the procedure: On May 16th, L. S. Frost, a white teacher in Tennessee, was taken at night from his room by a mob of disguised young men and carried to a field near by, men choking and beating him all the way; they were flourishing their pistols over his head, and threatening to kill him instantly if he did not cease resisting. They made him promise to leave town the next morning. They then blackened his face and portions of his body with a composition of spirits of turpentine, lampblack, and tar, and released him. About a dozen persons were engaged in the outrage, some of whom were recognized by Mr. Frost. John Dunlap, a teacher educated in Ohio, was in July, 1868, in charge of a colored school at Shelbyville, Tenn. On Independence Day, about ten o'clock at night, a body of Ku-Klux, some fifty strong, masked, armed with pistols and bearing an emblem resembling the bleeding heart of a man, were paraded in front of his house. When he presented himself, they gave him commands which he resisted. They fired through his window, made him surrender his pistol, caused him to
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