In February of 1873, James Shepherd Pike, a radical Republican journalist and longtime advocate for black suffrage, was assigned by the New York Tribune to cover a Deep South state legislature in the midst of Reconstruction. At the time, governments across the region, thanks to the policies enacted by the federal government, had begun to see an influx of black men among their ranks, and Pike sought to explore the reality of such a swift change of fortune. The resulting work was Pike’s infamous 1874 book, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government. As he detailed over the course of 300 pages, Pike viewed the governance of a southern legislature by black politicians as one of the most egregious forms of democracy he’d ever witnessed. Citing widespread corruption amongst the black legislators and their general disenchantment with their white counterparts, Pike posited the grand experiment of Reconstruction was a failure.

“The ignorance manifested is black with its denseness. And it is not too much too [sic] say that, as the negro, in slavery had absolutely no morale, he comes out of it entirely without morale,” Pike wrote. “The black constituency of Charleston itself is today represented by men who belong in the penitentiary.”

The Prostrate State was regarded as an authoritative declaration when it hit shelves. Published as a series of newspaper articles before being bound together as a book destined to find a place on the nightstand of any politically literate white supremacist, Pike’s racist analysis was deemed at the time an upstanding work of contemporary history. It wasn’t until 1957 that historian Robert Franklin Durden would debunk the notion that Pike’s work was a foundational text. Pike didn’t seek to examine the efficacy of black politicians in the first years they were allowed access to the democratic process, wrote Durden, but instead simply railed against President Ulysses S. Grant.

Long before then, though, the damage was done—by Pike and a plethora of others. Come the turn of the 20th Century, the more truly representative governments that had sprung up across the South after the Civil War had largely been undone by the efforts of organized white supremacy. It would reign more or less uninterrupted in the region for the next 65 years.

The underlying fear—from the perspective of the white politicians and news moguls and businessmen who backed their efforts—was that a government run in part by black citizens would be a government wealthy whites could not control. To have a seminal work from an abolitionist such as Pike to point to was the intellectual excuse for stealing back these governmental bodies.