ARGUMENT OF HON. D.T. CORBIN, IN THE TRIAL OF THE KU-KLUX, BEFORE THE UNITED STATES CIRCUIT COURT. NOVEMBER TERM, 1871- HELD AT COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA.
Washington, D.C. Chronicle Publishing Company, 1872. 33, [1 blank] pp. Disbound, else Very Good.
Corbin was the United States Attorney who prosecuted the Klan in the great South Carolina Ku Klux prosecutions. He was opposed by the respected Maryland lawyer Reverdy Johnson. The prosecutions arose out of the Klan's takeover of York County and much of the rest of South Carolina. This pamphlet prints Corbin's closing argument to the jury on behalf of the United States.
"Nowhere did the Klan become more deeply entrenched than in a group of Piedmont South Carolina counties where medium-sized farms predominated and the races were about equal in number. An outbreak of terror followed the October 1870 elections, in which Republicans retained a tenuous hold on power in the region...In York County, nearly the entire white male population joined the Klan, and committed at least eleven murders and hundreds of whippings; by February 1871 thousands of blacks had taken to the woods each night to avoid assault" [Foner, Reconstruction].
The Grant Administration's forceful response, in defense of the Blacks and the free exercise of the ballot, was unprecedented. The Administration's "legal offensive of 1871, culminating in the use of troops to root out the South Carolina Klan, represented a dramatic departure for the Grant Administration, which in its first two years had launched few initiatives in Southern policy" [Foner, 455, 471].
Corbin argues to the jury, "Gentlemen, we have lived over a century in the last ten years. The ballot, which is the symbol of power in this Government, has passed into the hands of those who were lately slaves, to be wielded by them in common with the white citizens of the country. The ballot, which has heretofore been, in the eyes of the colored race, the symbol of oppression, has now become to them the symbol of protection and the symbol of power."
IV Turnbull 2. Not at online AAS or in LCP, Fraser [Invisible Empire], Harv. Law Cat., Marke, Sabin. Item #42162
Price: $2,000.00