Category: White Supremacy

• The Negro Plot (Post-Civil War)

  This theory held that after emancipation, freedpeople were being secretly armed and organized by northern “carpetbaggers,” Radical Republicans, and other white allies for a coming race war or mass slave uprising in reverse. Across the Reconstruction South, many white communities imagined “the big insurrection” as an imminent event, even when evidence was thin or wholly absent. The historical record clearly shows that these fears were widespread and that they helped justify white paramilitary violence, disarmament campaigns, and the repression of Black political participation. What remains unproven is the central conspiratorial claim that former slaves and carpetbaggers were coordinating a region-wide hidden insurrectionary network.