Editing Jackson County, Florida (section)

===Jackson County war===
After the [[American Civil War|Civil War]], the county was convulsed by violence as [[Confederate States Army|Confederate]] veterans and their allies attacked and intimidated [[freedmen]] and their sympathizers. The county faced the worst economic conditions in the state, as it had been most extensively developed for cotton plantations before the war, and was adversely affected by the international decline in the market.<ref name=People />{{rp|461–462}} White planters resisted dealing with freedmen as free workers. Insurgent Confederate veterans formed a [[Ku Klux Klan]] chapter and carried out masked violence to exert power, intimidate freedmen and white sympathizers, suppress their voting, and restore [[white supremacy]].

{{cquote|Throughout the [[Reconstruction Era|Reconstruction]], Jackson County was the main site [in Florida] of political and class struggle between planters and black laborers.... Jackson County [was] so thoroughly dominated by the Klan at every level as to render the county and state governments completely powerless to stop them.<ref name=People>{{cite book
|title=A People's History of Florida 1513–1876. How Africans, Seminoles, Women, and Lower Class Whites Shaped the Sunshine State
|first=Adam
|last=Wasserman
|edition=4th
|year=2010
|place=Sarasota, Florida
|isbn=9781442167094}}</ref>{{rp|548–550}}}}

Planters were defaulting on tax payments due to the poor economic conditions, and Republican county officials began to sell thousands of acres in tax sales.<ref name=People />{{rp|462}} In addition the two representatives of the [[Freedmen's Bureau]], [[Charles Memorial Hamilton]] and [[William J. Purman]], worked to break the cycle of black labor exploitation. Planters would throw [[sharecroppers]] off the land at the end of the season with no payment, claiming infractions that the Bureau deemed minor. The Bureau agents worked to enforce labor contracts.<ref name=People />{{rp|549}}

Tensions broke out into violence and in 1869 Jackson County became the center of a [[guerrilla war]] extending through 1871; it became known as the [[Jackson County War]]. The local Ku Klux Klan, [[insurgent]] [[Confederate Army]] veterans, directed their violence at eradicating the Republican Party in the county, assassinating more than 150 [[Florida Republican Party|Republican Party]] leaders and other prominent [[African American]]s as part of a successful campaign to retain white [[Florida Democratic Party|Democratic]] power in the county.<ref name="weitz">Weitz, Seth. "Defending the Old South: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Political Immorality in Florida, 1885–1968," In ''[[The Historian (journal)|The Historian]]'', Vol. 71, No. 1 (Spring 2009), pg. 83.</ref> Another source says that in Jackson County, 200 "leading Republicans" were assassinated in 1869 and 1870 alone; no one was arrested or brought to trial for these crimes.<ref name=People />{{rp|549}}

{{cquote|The sheriff...Thomas M. West complained that public sentiment was so strongly opposed to him as sheriff that he did not feel safe to go outside of town and serve any legal process whatsoever. His life was constantly threatened.... He was even openly assaulted in the streets of Marianna, severely beaten to the near-point of death."<ref name=People />{{rp|552}}}} In 1871 he resigned, saying given the "lawlessness", he could not carry out the duties of sheriff. The last Republican official in the county, clerk of the circuit court John Dickenson, was assassinated in 1871. (The previous clerk, Dr. John Finlayson, was killed in 1869.)<ref name=People />{{rp|552}}

In testimony to Congressional hearings about the KKK, state senator [[Charles H. Pearce]], minister of the [[African Methodist Episcopal Church]], said, "Satan has his seat; he reigns in Jackson County."<ref name=People />{{rp|549}}