Southern Redemption by David Barton

They did not oppose emancipation. They were not “Ku-Klux” . . . They did not scourge, and hang, and shoot, and murder men for opinion’s sake. They did not organize the Louisiana white league or the South Carolina rifle clubs. They did not drench the South with the blood of inoffensive colored men. . . . The piece concluded with a simple question: Can the Democratic Party and all Democrats say as much?

A further indication that the Democrats were well known for their bloody atrocities against blacks is seen in an illustration from Harpers’ Weekly showing the major elements and influences of the Democratic Party. The illustration showed the various banners under which Democrats gathered, and those banners included the Stars and Bars carried by Confederate soldiers; the pro-slavery banner; the Ku Klux Klan banner; the New York Rioters banner; and finally the Democrats’ banner of repudiation. These were the various movements led by Democrats, and Americans in that day knew exactly what Democrats stood for.

By the 1880s, a movement called “Southern Redemption” had begun in earnest. Southern Redemption was a political movement to “redeem” the south from the Reconstruction Acts and civil rights laws passed by Republicans – laws and acts hat southern Democrats believed threatened their version of a southern society. So firmly were southern Democrats opposed to the constitutional amendments and civil rights laws imposed on them during Reconstruction that one southern newspaper declared:

It is safe to say that had the southern people known in 1865 what was in store for them, they would not have laid down their arms – and should not have laid them down.

Southern Redemption was the effort of southern Democrats to restore the South to the racial condition of white supremacy that had existed before the Civil War. The best way for the newly restored Democratic legislatures to “redeem” their State from what had occurred to them following the Civil War was to deprive black Americans of their political rights by the passage of State laws that restricted, removed, or even blatantly violated their civil rights 308 as well as through the prompt repeal of State reconstruction laws that had suppressed Klan violence. Rep. John Roy Lynch – who not only had helped pass the original federal civil rights laws but had also, witnessed their subsequent violation at the State level throughout the democrats congratulating themselves on their victory over African Americans period of Southern Redemption – accurately noted: The opposition to civil rights in the South . . . is confined almost exclusively to States under Democratic control.