The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction by William A. Blair

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction by William A. Blair Gregory Laski (bio) The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction. William A. Blair. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1-4696-6345-6. 184 pp., paper, $19.95. In his latest book, William A. Blair trains his sights on “The Records Relating to Murders and Outrages,” one piece of the voluminous archives of the Bureau of [End Page 434] Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. The Freedmen’s Bureau papers have been vital to scholars of Reconstruction, especially those investigating law and lawlessness, military and civil justice, and anti-Black violence. As Blair explains, however, “the story of the record itself ” has not yet been told (4). That is the task he takes up in The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction, which makes a signal contribution to our understanding of this historical period and its afterlife in American memory. In Blair’s account, more familiar aspects of Reconstruction—on-the-ground battles in the former Confederate states or political contests in Washington, DC—get convincingly recast as conflicts over names and numbers: in short, over what counts as “trustworthy information” and how the very idea of “truth” congeals in real time (2). Focusing on the years 1865 through 1868, Blair unfolds this story across five short, readable chapters. (That The Record effectively advances an argument and supplies rich supporting evidence in under two hundred pages is among the remarkable aspects of the book.) As chapter 1 explains, in September 1866, Gen. Oliver Otis Howard began “tracking more systematically the murders committed against freedpeople” in the South, and that information, communicated in both numbers and narratives, fueled the work of Radical Republicans like Senator Henry Wilson, who sought to wrest control of Reconstruction policy from the executive branch (26). As Blair later details, “the situation turned the Freedmen’s Bureau . . . into a de facto investigatory arm of the legislative branch” (54). How those findings were interpreted—and accepted or rejected—is at the heart of The Record. Political partisanship and racism played prominent roles in the reasons some (especially Democrats) rejected the information collected and presented by the bureau. As chapter 3, “Black Lives in the Record,” makes clear, even as it fueled debates in Washington, this information only existed by virtue of the risks African Americans took to report crimes to bureau agents, the majority of whom were scarcely Black allies. In this regard, The Record connects well with scholarship on African American testimony by Kidada Williams, whom Blair cites throughout the study. Yet if this information about racial violence was derived, often precariously, from human resources, it was necessarily “filtered through textual sources,” unlike the visual and photographic media that have been central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century civil rights campaigns (24). The Reconstruction-era reliance on texts, and attendant questions of textual interpretation, means that Blair’s claims might be profitably put into interdisciplinary dialogue with the growing number of studies about the fiction of Reconstruction. Recent literary histories by Brook [End Page 435] Thomas and Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, as well as a forthcoming collection examining the writing of Albion W. Tourgée (edited by Sandra Gustafson and Robert Levine), show that though Reconstruction-era authors turned to imaginative works as their weapons, they were no less invested in discerning how to get the reading public to accept as true information about conditions in the South. In a moving epilogue, Blair extends his exploration into the latter decades of the nineteenth century with an exploration of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching activism. Like the Freedmen’s Bureau reporting, the work of Wells and other African American activists drew on data collection techniques to center the perspectives of Black citizens and influence policy; however, as Blair points out, in contrast to the efforts of the 1860s, “the anti-lynching campaign lacked the backing of the federal government” (135). Further, the supposedly empirically motivated scholarship on Reconstruction that...