The Chisolm Massacre: The Politics of Violence at the End of Reconstruction

In April of 1877 in Kemper County, Mississippi, 2-300 armed men, led by the Gully family, reputedly Ku Klux Klan leaders earlier in the decade, attacked and killed former sheriff and Republican congressional candidate William Wallace Chisolm, two of his Republican allies, and Chisolm’s teenaged daughter and son. Called the “Chisolm Massacre,” the incident became national news, was spun in different directions by political partisans, and became a symbol of Reconstruction as the new president Rutherford B. Hayes signaled Reconstruction’s end.

Competing books about the killings were quickly published by partisans on both sides: one tried to use the Kemper County incident to “wave the bloody shirt” again and call the nation back to the postwar idealism that had cast Reconstruction as a “second founding.” Another tried to portray it as a popular uprising against tyranny that exemplified the White supremacist “Redemption” of the South. But the actual bloody shirts from that day in Kemper County, like the rhetorical “bloody shirt” waved to invoke past suffering to motivate political action, lost cultural power as (White) Americans tried to move past Reconstruction-era violence and reconcile North and South. For the conservative Redeemers, the collateral killings of Chisolm’s children made the episode too awkward for commemoration and celebration. In the revisionist history begun in the Civil Rights era, which cast Reconstruction as an African American struggle against the enemies of Black freedom, the Chisolm Massacre is a sideshow of feuding white families. Still, this study of the Chisolm Massacre, based on published accounts, court records, and a rich family archive of manuscripts, demonstrates how violence was political and politics violent in ways that linked local struggles for social power, regional party politics, and national culture wars over the meaning of America in the wake of the Civil War.