previous next

[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

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Tennessee (Tennessee, United States) (1)
Shelbyville, Tenn. (Tennessee, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
L. S. Frost (2)
Unionists (1)
John Dunlap (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
July, 1868 AD (1)
1868 AD (1)
May 16th (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: