The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence

This in-development digital monograph presents a case study at a hinge moment in American history: 1877, when the nation backed away from its first great experiment in racial justice. In a small town in Kemper County, Mississippi in the spring of that year, a political mob murdered five people, including Republican Judge William Wallace Chisolm, former state senator J.P. Gilmer, and two of Chisolm’s children. To ask why the “Chisolm Massacre” occurred is to plunge into a complex web of local, regional, and national causes and effects, motives, and consequences. National press coverage and two quickly produced books demonstrated that the meaning of the event was and is embedded in the larger moral history of Reconstruction. Politics was violent and violence was political in ways that linked this small place to the nation. The digital publication will feature thematic document clusters, including part of an extensive private archive of Chisolm family papers, enabling readers to explore a variety of primary sources, surfacing epistemological issues and the practice of historical interpretation.