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Making Sense of “Senseless Violence”: Thoughts on Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence during “Reconstruction” in South Africa and the American South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

John Higginson
John Higginson*
Affiliation:
History, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
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Abstract

Key moments of the American Civil War and the 1899–1902 South African War and their tragic immediate aftermaths remain powerful features of national memory in both countries. Over the past century, vengeful politicians and ideologues in both have transformed them into formidable stock-in-trade. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand accounts of the alleged churlish manner of the victorious armies, especially soldiers of African descent, were made into combustible timber for reactionary political campaigns. The perceived cruel turns of fate have made their way into literature, stage, and screen. The two wars afforded people of various races and social conditions opportunity to act upon their conceptions of a just society, albeit amid terrible carnage and loss. They also underscored the permanence of the industrial transformation of both countries. In the decades following these two wars most of the black and white agrarian populations discovered that state and agrarian elites had cynically manipulated and then extinguished their aspirations. Most often, for black agrarians, violence was the preferred instrument to pursue desired outcomes. Reconstruction in the American South was a paradox. The Civil War emancipated the slaves but left the entire South, especially upland cotton regions, economically backward. In Louisiana, especially, politicized violence to coerce black labor was pervasive. After the South African War, white violence against rural black people was widespread. Lord Milner’s Reconstruction Administration was more concerned to bring South Africa’s gold mines back into production than to stem the violence. The low-intensity violence of the postwar countryside became the backland route to apartheid.

Keywords

collective violenceemancipationlandwarpeasantsfreed peopleReconstructionSouth AfricaAnglo-Boer Warapartheid
Type
War and Labor during and after Slavery
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 851 - 880
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Ernest Allen, Rod Aya, Joye Bowman, Dale Tomich, Barbara Fields, Mwangi wa Githinji, Thavolia Glymph, Barbara Krauthamer, Jason Moralee, Joe Reidy, Julie Saville, Michael West, and Nan Woodruff for their insightful criticism and careful reading of this article. I am responsible for any errors.

I have shamelessly cribbed the first part of this title from Anton Blok’s essay “The Meaning of ‘Senseless’ Violence,” in Honor and Violence (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 103–17.

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13 After General Ulysses S. Grant seized Vicksburg, rumors of black insurrection rippled through the Louisiana parishes closest to Mississippi such as Franklin and Tensas. The account of an unnamed ex-slave woman, who was born a slave in Franklin Parish, Louisiana, recounts one of the incidents that gave resonance to such rumors: “De morning I was going to be born de overseer began to fight my mother and a colored man took a hoe and said if the man hit her again he would knock his brains out”; “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–1938,” Missouri Narratives, vol. X, narrative 240044, Edison County, 170–72, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn100/. See also Hair, William Ivy, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 148–49.Google Scholar

14 Jan Smuts, one of the architects of the guerrilla phase of the war, claimed that Koos du Plessis, the former jailer for the town of Rustenburg, “spread terror among the smaller fry of political sinners” during such missions. Of the larger enterprise Smuts claimed, “I therefore started now raising and training such a corps and under my personal supervision and, though my departure at the end of the year to other fields severed my connection with these enthusiastic young veterans, I was happy to know that before and after my departure they did splendid work for de la Rey’s commandos”: see Hancock, W. and van der Poel, Jean, eds., Selections from the Smuts Papers, vol. 1 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 599, 634.Google Scholar

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16 In 1887, George Washington Cable, a Confederate veteran from Louisiana and a successful journalist, assessed Reconstruction thus, “Northern men often ask perplexedly if the Freedman’s enfranchisement was not … premature and inexpedient; while Southern men as often call it one vindictive act of the conqueror, as foolish as it was cruel. It was cruel…, but certainly it was not cruel for its haste, but for its tardiness. Had enfranchisement come into effect, as emancipation did, while the smoke of the war’s last shot was still in the air, … and civil order and system had not yet superseded martial law, the agonies, the shame, and the incalculable losses of the Reconstruction period that followed might have been spared the South and the nation.” See his The Negro Question, Arlin Turner, ed. (Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday Anchor, 1958[1903]), 139–40. See also Barrington Moore, “The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution,” in The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 111–55; and Foner, Eric, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 79–80.Google Scholar

17 See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar, Series K-554, U-274, U-278.

18 Jaynes, Gerald David, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 148.Google Scholar

19 For the usefulness of the comparison, see Ted Tunnell, The Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1984). See also Charles Francis Adams, Lee at Appomattox and other Papers (New York: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1902), 3–6; John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982) 10–12; and George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 223–30.

20 For example, see Charles Chestnutt’s novel on the Revolt of the Red Shirts and the overthrow of the duly elected state government of North Carolina in 1898: The Marrow of Tradition (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993). See also Tillman, Struggles of ’76; Arney Robinson Childs, ed., The Private Journal of Henry William Ravenel, 1859–1887 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1947), 70–83Google Scholar; and Tunnell, Ted, ed., Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

21 See Tillman, Struggles of ’76, 47. See also Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 79–88.

22 For example, see James Maurice Thompson, “White Men Must Rule,” Edgefield Advertiser, 6 May 1868. See also “Remarks of Gen. M. W. Gary at the Democratic Meeting at Edgefield C.H. on the 1st June,” Edgefield Advertiser, 10 June 1868; and anon., “Another Gin House Burnt,” Edgefield Advertiser, 1 Dec. 1870; anon., “Regulation of Labor,” Edgefield Advertiser, 8 Dec. 1870; and W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 55–83.

23 See M. C. Butler, “The Difference between Social Equality and Equal Political Rights,” Edgefield Advertiser, 6 Aug. 1873. See also “General M. W. Gary Interviewed by a Herald Correspondent,” Edgefield Advertiser, 18 Sept. 1873.

24 An excerpt from an editorial in the Shreveport South-Western for Wednesday, 23 January 1867 reveals just how closely ex-slaveholders monitored Union Army activities: “We learn from the Baton Rouge papers that the 65th colored infantry had left that place for St. Louis to be mustered out of service. This leaves only two more regiments of colored infantry on duty in the State—the 80th and a heavy artillery regiment. These we learn will shortly be mustered out of service and their places supplied by regulars.” See also Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 45–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 On 20 February 1867, the Shreveport South-Western reprinted an excerpt of a speech given by former Confederate General Jubal Early that succinctly captured the sentiments of the ex-slaveholders: “As for all the enemies who have overrun … my country, there is a wide and impassable gulf between us, in which I see the blood of slaughtered friends, comrades and countrymen, which all the waters in the firmament above and the seas below cannot wash away.…” See also Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 425; Downs, Gregory, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 61–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 See Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-day Saints (henceforth: FHLCLDS), microfilm 0265728, “Louisiana Civil Suits: Bignon vs. Perkins, Gilmer vs. Gilmer, Reneau vs. Wilkinson”; see also Shugg, Roger, Origins of the Class Struggle in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 68–71.Google Scholar

27 See the Shreveport South-Western and other newspapers on the Red River Parishes; and also Olmstead, Frederick Law, Journey to the Cotton Kingdom (New York: De Capo Press, 1996), 326–32Google Scholar; Shugg, Origins of the Class Struggle, 64–66; and Keith, Leanna, The Colfax Massacre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–20.Google Scholar

28 Olmstead, Frederick Law, Journey to the Cotton Kingdom (New York: De Capo Press, 1996), 326–32.Google Scholar

29 See FHLCLDS microfilm 0265728, “Louisiana Civil Suits,” nos. 917–20 (esp. Gilmer v. Gilmer, Reneau v. Wilkinson, and Bignon v. Perkins). Also in FHLCLDS, see microfilm 0265886, “Louisiana Conveyances, 1874–1876” (in particular the transfer of property from Valentin Sheidet to Auguste Drouin; and that of Ben Gilliland and T. J. Leaton). For an account of the support that slaveholders received from “Cotton Whigs” in states such as Massachusetts, see Richard H. Abbott, Cotton & Capital: Boston Businessmen and Anti-Slavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 20–23.

30 See Barbara J. Fields, “The Nineteenth Century South: History and Theory,” Plantation Society 2, 4: 22–24. See also Wright, Gavin, “From Laborlords to Landlords: The ‘Liberation’ of the Southern Economy,” in Old, South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 31–33.Google Scholar

31 See Wade Hampton’s speech before the Democratic Club of New York City at the St. Augustine Hotel, on 9 July 1868, repr. in the Shreveport South-Western, Wed., 29 July 1868. See also the lead editorial, “Whose Fault Is It?” Shreveport South-Western, Wed., 29 Apr. 1868 (election issue); the poem “Death’s Brigade,” Shreveport South-Western, Wed., 6 May 1868; and Tillman, Struggles of ’76, 7–8.

32 See Adams, Lee at Appomattox, 8–10; and Rable, George C., But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 3–4;Google Scholar Brown, Richard Maxwell, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Graham, Hugh Davis and Gurr, Ted Robert, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 48 Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, “‘Extravagant Expectations’ of Freedom: Rumour, Political Struggle, and the Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865 in the American South,” Past and Present 157, 1 (1997): 122–38;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hahn, Steven, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

33 See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 580–630; and Foner, Reconstruction, 404–20.

34 See “An Affray at Cross Lake,” Shreveport South-Western, Wed., 12 Aug. 1868.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid.

37 The drafting of the “Edgefield Plan,” for example, was apparently the work of the former Confederate Lieutenant-General Mart Gary and George D. Tillman. Tillman concluded, “Never threaten a man individually if he deserves to be threatened the necessities of the times require that he should die.” After the July 1876 massacre of African-American militia men in the town of Hamburg and Stevens Creek, South Carolina, Tillman’s prescription became the order of the day. In many respects, the pogroms at Stevens Creek and Hamburg exhibited the same approach and tactics as those at Cross Lake and Black Bayou in Caddo Parish, Louisiana in 1868; see Vernon Burton, “Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina,” Journal of Social History 12, 1 (Fall 1978): 42–43; and Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 138; and Tillman, Struggles of ’76.

38 Vernon Burton, “Race and Reconstruction: Edgefield County, South Carolina,” Journal of Social History 12, 1 (Fall 1978): 42–43. See also Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence, 138; Tillman, Struggles of ’76.

39 See Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 130; and Report on Cotton Production, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing House, 1884), 111.

40 See Table 1 in Gilles Vandal, “‘Bloody Caddo’: White Violence against Blacks in a Louisiana Parish, 1865–1876,” Journal of Social History 25, 2 (1991): 373–88, 374.

41 See White, Howard A., The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 91–92 Google Scholar.

42 After interviewing virtually every Freedmen’s Bureau agent in Louisiana after the debacle of 1868, General Oliver Howard, the head of the Bureau, concluded, “In these sections the character of the local magistracy is not as high as could be desired, and many of them have connived at the escape of offenders, while some have even participated in outrages. In other sections lawless ruffians have overawed the civil authorities, ‘vigilance committees’ and ‘Klu Klux Klans,’ disguised by night, have burned the dwellings and shed the blood of unoffending freedmen.…” See Senate Report, Forty-Second Congress, 2d Session, report 41, pt. 1, 20–22. See also Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 155–57.

43 See Vandal, Gilles, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866–1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 183.Google Scholar

44 See Senate Reports, 42nd Congress, 3d Session, no. 457, pt. 1, 688–712.

45 See Anon, “Go Work Him Well,” Shreveport South-Western, 15 Apr. 1868: 1; and Anon, “River Intelligence,” Shreveport South-Western, 20 May 1868.

46 See House Reports, 43d Congress, 2d Session, no. 261, pt. 3, 176, 389.

47 See Ted Tunnell, ed., Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 4. See also Trelease, White Terror, 130.

48 See William Tecumseh Sherman Papers, mss 16, 927, reel 20, 37–39, “Correspondence between W. B. Lawrence and General William Tecumseh Sherman (Ochre Point, Newport, Rhode Island, September 24, 1874)”: “Dear General, The present situation of the Southern States, culminating in the recent popular revolution in Louisiana, suppressed in its turn by the Executive in the North may evidence the enquiry as to what would have been their condition had the Sherman-Johnston Convention received the necessary sanction….” See also Scott, Rebecca, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 61–93.Google Scholar

49 See Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 188–93. See also Taylor, Joel Gray, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 230–34Google Scholar; and Johnson, Manie, “The Colfax Riot of April, 1873,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 13 (1930): 391–427.Google Scholar

50 See “Investigation into Contested Election in Louisiana, 1873,” Senate Reports, 42d Congress, 3d Session, no. 457, pt. 1, 837; and Melinda M. Hennessey, “To Live and Die in Dixie: Reconstruction Race Riots in the South,” PhD diss., Kent State University, 1978, 211–14.

51 H. Lestage, Oscar, “The White League in Louisiana and Its Participation in Reconstruction Riots,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 640 Google Scholar. See also Snyder, Perry, “Shreveport, Louisiana during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” PhD diss., Florida State University, 1979, 224–40.Google Scholar

52 See Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 200.

53 As reported in ibid., 202. See also House Reports, 43d Congress, 2d Session, no. 261, pt. 3, 176, 389.

54 See Gilles Vandal, “Bloody Caddo,” 377, 384. Also FHLCLDS, microfilm 092852, “Register of Signatures of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, 1865–1874,” Shreveport, La., accounts 149-1320, 11 Feb. 1871–29 June 1874.

55 See ibid. (FHLCLDS), particularly the depositions made by Robert Knauff, Mattie Hine, Spencer Martin, Nathan Booker, James Hollin, and John Jones. See also Gerald Jaynes, Branches without Roots, 62–77.

56 See Report on Cotton Production, 6, 68, 77.

57 In 1907, Jan Smuts wrote, “A student of history cannot but be struck by the remarkable parallel between the Magaliesberg Valley in this war and the Shenandoah Valley in the American Civil War. The Moot is the Shenandoah of the Transvaal, and de la Rey is its Stonewall Jackson. From the beginning of September 1900 till the end of the year a furious and uninterrupted contest was waged between de la Rey and various English commanders for the possession of this most fertile valley, and the contest ended only when the complete devastation of the valley had rendered it useless as a prize to either party.” See Hancock and Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, 604.

58 See, for example, Antjie Krog’s journalistic reprise of the contemporary perceptions of the war during its centenary, “A Hundred Years of Attitude,” Daily Mail and Guardian, 11 Oct. 1999: 1; and the Verskroide Aarde (Scorched Earth) series of South Africa’s News 24, a day-by-day recapitulation of the war using the diaries (dagboeke) of famous and ordinary participants, 8 Sept.–12 Oct. 2001, http://www.news24.co.za/News24/ScorchedEarth/Dagboek/o,4345,2-1114-1121_987655,00.html (no longer online). See also Helen Bradford, “Gentlemen and Boers: Afrikaner Nationalism, Gender, Colonial Warfare in the South African War,” in Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Grundlingh, and Mary-Lynn Suttie, eds., Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 37–66; and Bill Nasson, “The War a Hundred Years On,” in the same collection, 3–17.

59 For example, Lionel Curtis, a member of Lord Milner’s staff and mayor of Johannesburg after the war, wrote his mother to this effect five months after the outset of the war: “I don’t think I should say this war has made men cruel but I do think that 200,000 odd Englishmen will come out of it with a hazier sense of meum and tuum, and that will not help them to govern justly.” In With Milner in South Africa (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1951), 80.

60 See Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop Journal 8, 1 (1979): 50–81, 56–57. See too Yudelman, David, The Emergence of Modern South Africa (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 52–123 Google Scholar; Dubow, Saul, “Colonial Nationalism, The Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of ‘South Africanism,’ 1902–10,” History Workshop Journal 43 (Spring 1997): 53–85.Google Scholar

61 See Krog, “Hundred Years of Attitude.”

62 Adams, Lee at Appomattox, 7–9; “A British Officer,” “The Literature of the South African War, 1899–1902,” American Historical Review 7, 2 (1907): 299–321.

63 See John Higginson, “Hell in Small Places: Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence in the Western Transvaal, 1900–1907,” Journal of Social History 35, 1 (2001): 96–124; and also Krikler, Jeremy, “Agrarian Class Struggle and the South African War,” Social History 14, 2 (1989): 152–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64 See anon., “Gold Stocks,” Engineering and Mining Journal, 4 July 1896: 21; and Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Avon Books, 1979), 40–43.

65 Anon., “Gold Stocks,” 21.

66 See Silas Molema/Sol Plaatje Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, A979, file Aa31. See also Morton, R. F., “Linchwe I and the Kgatla Campaign in the South African War, 1899–1902,” Journal of African History 26, 2 & 3 (1985): 169–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67 See Silas Molema/Sol Plaatje Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, A979, depositions of E.H.J. Botha of farm Rietvlei, Marico district, and E. J. Snyman of farm Witrand, Marico district, taken in December 1913 on the armed contestation over farm Rietfontein. See also Warwick, Peter, Black People and the South African War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 31.Google Scholar

68 See Marks and Trapido, “Lord Milner,” 61; see also Mark Twain, Following the Equator II (Hollcong: Wildside Press, 2001), 354–55; John Higginson, “Privileging the Machines: American Engineers, Indentured Chinese and White Workers in South Africa’s Deep-Level Gold Mines, 1902–1907,” International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 1–34.

69 See ibid.; and Kynoch, Gary, “Controlling the Coolies: Chinese Mineworkers and the Struggle for Labor in South Africa, 1904–1910,” International Journal of African Studies 34, 2 (2003): 309–29.Google Scholar

70 Higginson, “Hell in Small Places,” 122–24. See also Krikler, Jeremy, Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 See statement of H.D.M. Stanford in Report of the Select Committee of Native Affairs (Cape Town: Cape Times, 1911), 90–91, as quoted in Morton, “Linchwe I,” 188.

72 National Archives of South Africa/Compensation Judicial Commission (henceforth NASA/CJC) 441 (Marico), M. G. Lezar.

73 See British Parliamentary Papers, CD 2786, LXXX, 1905, “Further Correspondence Relating to Labour in the Transvaal Mines,” encl. 23, Selborne to Lyttelton, 30 Sept. 1905; and encl. 36, Lyttelton to Selborne, 24 Oct. 1905.

74 See H. Kemball-Cook Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, A62f, Correspondence with M. Dammes, Clerk of the Rustenburg Urban District Board, 3 June 1904; and, in the same Kemball-Cook Papers, testimonial on behalf of H. Kemball-Cook made by Reverend D. Postma in De Volkstem, n.d.; Donald Denoon, Grand Illusion: The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony during the Period of Reconstruction 1900–1905 (London: Longman, 1973), 63–68; Dubow, “Colonial Nationalism.”

75 NASA/CJC, 448, “Petition of David Christiaan Christophel van der Linde (6 Sept. 1902–26 Oct. 1906).

76 Ibid.

77 Ibid. See also NASA/CJC 441 (Marico), “Petition of Marthinus Gerhardus Lezar.”

78 See “Van der Westhuizen vs. McDonald and Mundel,” Transvaal Law Reports 1907 (Grahamstown, Cape Colony: African Book Company, 1908), 933–35.

79 The names of many of these men were conspicuous by their absence from the rolls of eligible voters for the proposed elections of 1906–1907 in the Transvaal. The voters’ rolls were compiled by British military intelligence for Lord Milner’s government: see FHLCLDS microfilms K22262/1295355, items 5 and 7, and J47878/1367182, item 8, “Latest List of Burghers of the late South African Republic entitled to vote for Members of the First Volksraad; compiled for the use of Registering Officers appointed under the Transvaal Constitution Order in Council, 1905”; see also See FHLCLDS, K22262/1295355 “List of Farms and Inhabitants West of Pretoria: R. A. Brownlea for ‘Daag’ Intelligence, General Dixon’s Force,” 10 Apr. 1901.

80 See Sharecropping and Tenancy Project, AG2738, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, interview with Kas Maine (The Rebellion War), M. M. Molepo (interviewer), 17 Sept. 1980, tape 234.

81 See Donald Rolfe Hunt Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (henceforth DRHP) A1655, Bk2 and reports on relations of force in Pilansberg and Lydenburg.

82 See DRHP, personal correspondence in Ab file. See also Krikler, Revolution from Above, 42–50; Warwick, Black People, 25–26.

83 See DRHP A1655, “Hunt to T. W. Purdy,” 15 July 1902 (Department of Native Affairs); see also Krikler, Revolution from Above, 39–41; Warwick, Black People, 45–46.

84 Ibid. (all three).

85 DRHP A1655, Ab2, “Hunt to T. W. Purdy, Department of Native Affairs, 22 Oct. 1902.

86 See Pat Hopkins and Heather Dugmore, The Boy: Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking (Rivonia, South Africa: Zebra Press, 1999), 30–31. See also Higginson, “Hell in Small Places,” 119–22.

87 See Thomas Pakenham, Boer War, 605–9.

88 DRHP, A1655, Bk2 and reports on relations of force in Pilanesberg and Lydenburg.

89 See Frederick John Newnham Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, A1375, “The Native Locations in the Transvaal (September 1905),” 1–30; see also the testimonies G[eorge] G[laser] Munnik and W. Windham, in South African Native Affairs Commission, 1903–1905 (Cape Town: Cape Times Government Printers, 1906) (henceforth SANAC), vol. 4, 477–78, 431–36.

90 Report of the Select Committee of Native Affairs (Cape Town: Cape Times, 1911), 90–91, as quoted in Morton, “Linchwe I,” 188.

91 Krikler, Revolution from Above, 63.

92 DRHP, Personal Correspondence, “Hunt to T. W. Purdy, Department of Native Affairs,” 22 Oct. 1902.

93 van Onselen, Charles, “The Witches of Suburbia: Domestic Service on the Witwatersrand, 1890–1914,” in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, vol. 2 (London: Longman 1982), 1–73.Google Scholar

94 Baden-Powell was also the founder of the Boy Scouts, for which the South African Constabulary was the obvious prototype: see Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 44–45; and British Parliamentary Papers, LXIX, Cd 820 (901), “From Lord Kitchener to the Under Secretary of State for War….”

95 See R.S.S. Baden-Powell Papers, on microfilm at Murray State University, Paducah, Kentucky, Staff Diary and Personal Correspondence, 21 June 1902; and British Public Record Office/Colonial Office (henceforth BPRO/CO), 526 (1903), no. Z/1178, confidential, from Inspector General, South African Constabulary, to Military Secretary, South Africa, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, 29 July 1903; and BPRO/CO 526 (1903), correspondence between Captain H. E. Burstall, District Commandant, S.A.C., Rustenburg, and Colonel H. Steele, Divisional Commander, S.A.C.

96 Ibid.

97 See NASA/CJC, 441 (Marico), M. G. Lezar.

98 See BPRO/CO 526 (1907), copy confidential 14/38, “Application for Promotion Colonial Service: Lieutenant Ernest James Matthews,” 12 Sept. 1907. See also BPRO/CO (1908), Certificate of Discharge of W1760, Sgt. James Geddes, S.A.C., Zeerust, 31 Dec. 1907.

99 See DRHP, (Personal Correspondence) Hunt to T. W. Purdy, Department of Native Affairs, 22 Oct. 1902.

100 DRHP, Ab2, Hunt to Purdy, Lichtenburg, 28 Mar. 1903.

101 See Krikler, Revolution from Above, 39; Colin Bundy, Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (Woodbridge: James Currey, 1988), 208.Google Scholar

102 See “Testimony of G. G. Munnik,” South African Native Affairs Commission, vol. 4 (Pretoria: Government Printers Office, 1905), 477; and “Testimony of W. Windham,” in the same volume: 431–36.

103 See DRHP, Personal Correspondence, Hunt to T. W. Purdy, Department of Native Affairs, 22 Oct. 1902.

104 Morton, “Linchwe I,” 188–93.

105 Keegan, Rural Transformations, 144–46; Denoon, Grand Illusion, 63–68.

106 The farmers’ persisting anxieties compelled the Milner administration, through the agency of the SAC, to divide the Transvaal and Orange River Colony into a series of military or police precincts by the time of the 1904 census: see R. S. Godley, Khaki and Blue: Thirty Five Years’ Service in South Africa (London: Lovat Dickson and Thompson Ltd., 1935), 94–95. See also Results of a Census of the Transvaal Colony and Swaziland Taken on the Night of Sunday the 17th April, 1904, Presented to His Excellency the Lieutenant-Governor May, 1906 (London: Waterlow and Sons, 1906), ii; and Krikler, Revolution from Above, 47.

107 John Gaspar Gubbins described this overarching sentiment in a lengthy letter to his sister Bertha Tuffnell about the shortcomings of the South African Constabulary in his portion of Marico: “In Ottoshoop we have eleven policemen and practically no population (as General [John] Nicholson who commands the police told me in Johannesburg, ‘You must remember that the SAC are really the army of occupation and are only called the Constabulary by courtesy’),” John Gaspar Gubbins Papers, Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, Gubbins to Bertha Tuffnell, Ottoshoop, 20 May 1904.

108 See Krikler, Revolution from Above, 42–50.

109 See DRHP A1655, personal correspondence in Ab file; and Krikler, Revolution from Above, 42–50.

110 Pakenham, Boer War, 595. See also South African National Archives, SAB JUS 3/610/11, file 1074/5/4, Acting Chief: Division of Economics and Markets, Crop Section to Mr. C. Mathews, P. O. Lindleyspoort,” Crop Reporting,” 12 Nov. 1937.

111 DRHP A1655, Ab2, “Hunt to Purdy,” Lichtenburg, 28 Mar. 1903. See also National Archives of South Africa, Pretoria, SAB JUS 3/610/11, file 563/29, Secretary for Justice to Secretary for Agriculture and Forestry, 24 Nov. 1937.

112 Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 200.

113 Paradoxically, in Caddo at least, the specter of black insurrection was partly the creation of the former slave owners themselves. As early as May 1861, several slaveholders in the parish had armed their most trusted slaves for purposes of “security.” A local observer noted the net effect of the gesture, “Insubordination was of frequent occurrence, and insolence was heard from slaves such as none would have been guilty of six months since.” See anon., “Important from Louisiana,” New York Times, 31 May 1861.

114 See Woodward, Origins of the New South, 203–5; Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 193–94; and Foner, Reconstruction, 393.

115 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 206–7.

116 Ayers, Promise of the New South, 192–97. See also Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence, 81, 112–13.

117 See Hancock and Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, vol. 1, “Smuts to W. T. Stead, Van Rhynsdorp, Cape Colony, 4 January 1902,” 486.

118 NASA, SAB K373, “Commission to Enquire into the Assaults on Women or ‘Black Peril’ Commission,” vol. 3 (Transvaal).

119 Patrick Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika.

120 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 5–8.

121 The visceral reactions of a portion of South Africa’s white population to the murder of white supremacist leader Eugène Terrre’Blanche, and that of a portion of the U.S. white population to the presidency of Barack Obama appear to bear this out. In the wake of Terre’Blanche’s 2010 murder, an article in the Financial Times quotes a twenty-four-year-old unemployed Afrikaner, David de Gavea, as saying, “The main thing that was wrong about apartheid was its name. We should have called it “diversity”; Richard Lapper, “A People Set Apart,” Financial Times, 10 and 11 April 2010: 6. See also Michael Tomasky, “Something New on the Mall,” New York Review of Books, 22 Oct. 2009: 4–7; Jonathan Raban, “Inside the Tea Party,” New York Review of Books, 25 Mar. 2010: 4–9.