Reconstruction corruption and the redeemers’ prosecution of Francis Lewis Cardozo

Abstract

This essay recreates in detail the 1877 trial of Francis L. Cardozo, who was state treasurer and a leading African American political figure in Reconstruction South Carolina. Cardozo's trial and conviction provides a quintessential example of the white Redeemers' racially perverted reaction to the supposedly systemic corruption of the state's Reconstruction government. The essay reveals how much the prosecution of Cardozo was motivated and permeated by racial and political motives. The detailed examination should encourage a re-evaluation of the history of Reconstruction corruption in the South, and of the Redeemers' reaction to it. We have been cheated out of our rights for two centuries, and...I want to fix them in the Constitution in such a way that no lawyer, however cunning or astute, can possibly misinterpret the meaning. If we do not do so, we deserve to be, and will be, cheated again. Nearly all the white inhabitants of the state are ready at any moment to deprive us of our rights, and not a loophole should be left that would permit them to do it constitutionally.