The Clinton Massacre

The Clinton Massacre began on September 4, 1875, at a Republican rally and barbecue on the grounds of Moss Hill, a former plantation in Clinton that Union troops had wrecked during the Vicksburg campaign of 1863. Between 1,500 and 2,500 people came, nearly all freedpeople and their families, along with about seventy-five white people. State senator Charles Caldwell, born enslaved and a blacksmith by trade, helped organize the day as a debate. The Democrat Amos R. Johnston spoke first without trouble, but when the Republican Captain H. T. Fisher rose, armed White Liners from Raymond heckled him, and a quarrel among their wagons turned into gunfire.

Three white men and at least five Black people, two of them children, died that afternoon. Clinton's mayor telegraphed for help, and armed white men arrived by train and on horseback, several hundred by nightfall. Over the following days they hunted Black men across the countryside, and the dead are estimated at between thirty-five and fifty, many never named. William P. Haffa, a white Republican justice of the peace from Pennsylvania, was lynched. Governor Adelbert Ames asked for federal troops, and in mid-September the Grant administration refused.

With Republican voters terrorized, the election of November 2, 1875, returned Democrats to power and effectively ended Reconstruction in Mississippi, and the method became known as the Mississippi Plan. Caldwell was lured into a store cellar in downtown Clinton that Christmas season and shot. A United States Senate committee led by George S. Boutwell took testimony on the violence in 1876. The state placed a marker near the railroad in 2017, and a Mississippi Freedom Trail marker went up on West Northside Drive in 2021.