Capitol Men (26 page)

The positive response to both Horace Greeley's urgings for reconciliation and the writings of James Pike were indicators of a shifting national mood regarding Reconstruction and the South's growing desperation to be free of the policy's constraints. When P.B.S. Pinchback returned to Louisiana from President Grant's second inaugural in March 1873, he was grieved to find his state still paralyzed by dual claims to control of the statehouse, a conflict that had led the Senate in Washington to postpone a ruling on his own status as senator-elect. Although Grant had authorized the administration of William Pitt Kellogg, the Democratic followers of John McEnery had formed a shadow government and had begun commissioning their own public officials.

This impossible predicament soon turned deadly. In April 1873 it triggered the Reconstruction period's most lethal violence, which took place at a remote hamlet in central Louisiana known as Colfax Courthouse. One of the many tragic results of this bloodletting would be a seminal Supreme Court decision to reverse a constitutional guarantee to protect the freedmen.

Colfax lay in Grant Parish on the banks of the Red River, about 350 miles north of New Orleans. The parish, with a racially mixed population of several thousand, had in 1869 been cut out of Rapides and Winn Parishes by the legislature as part of an effort to diminish Democratic authority in the Louisiana countryside; the parish was named for the U.S. president. Similarly, the name of the courthouse village, a former sugar plantation with a handful of buildings and about seventy residents, honored Vice President Colfax. The two-story courthouse itself was a converted stable.

The Democrats C. C. Nash and Alphonse Cazabat had been "certified" as the parish's sheriff and judge by the McEnery forces. However, on March 23, 1873, several Kellogg loyalists, led by William Ward and R. C. Register, who were black, and Daniel Shaw, who was white, took over the courthouse and ejected the McEnery men. Shaw, the new sheriff, instructed local black residents to defend the building from Democratic reprisals. Ward and two other black army veterans—Levi Allen and a Pennsylvanian named E. H. Flowers—began drilling men from the neighborhood in an impromptu militia, although most were armed only with antiquated weapons and some were forced to parade with a hoe or pitchfork in lieu of a rifle. They also busied themselves in constructing earthworks, anticipating that Nash and Cazabat would attempt to retake the courthouse.

Half-hearted efforts were made at some sort of negotiated settlement, but rumor-mongering and fears of a widespread Republican-led black insurrection were rampant. Some freedmen allegedly warned a white settler that "they intended to go into the country, and kill from the cradle up to old age"; another white reported that blacks planned to massacre all the white men in the neighborhood and then "seduce" all the white women, in order to create a "new race" of people. Whites particularly distrusted Ward, a state legislator whose deeply scarred face made him resemble an outlaw; it was widely believed he had been involved in the unsolved murder of a white farmer named Jeff Yawn in 1871. Even the Kellogg legislature had once admonished Ward for "ruffianism," perhaps because he had falsely promised his black constituents that the governor intended to give them their former masters' lands.

One of the worst accusations, however, was made against Ward's friend, E. H. Flowers. The "little sleek black negro," it was told, had broken into the home of the prominent local Democrat Judge William R. Rutland, ransacked the place, then pried the lid off a coffin holding the corpse of one of the judge's children, a little girl who had drowned years earlier and whose remains Rutland was planning to re-inter, and dumped it face-down on the ground. Then, with two jugs of Rutland's wine under his arm, he had departed to spend "the night in riot and debauch."

The story of Flowers's invasion of Rutland's home and his ghoulish act was probably exaggerated. As at lynchings, where lurid descriptions of alleged sexual outrage against virginal Southern maidens stoked mobs to fury, here the rumors of murderous black depravity fed anxiety among white parish residents, helping to drum up the sizable citizens' army that eventually challenged Republican control of the courthouse.
"To get up a body of men for the unwarrantable attack on the peaceable and inoffensive citizens of Colfax and vicinity," the
New York Times
noted, "it was necessary to resort to perfidy, and every conceivable and infamous lie was industriously circulated through the pine woods to accomplish the purpose."

Any hope of a peaceful resolution likely ended when Judge Rutland himself traveled to New Orleans to apply for help from federal troops or state militia but was rebuffed by Governor Kellogg and General Longstreet. Kellogg apparently shared Rutland's request with the federal commander William H. Emory, but like Kellogg and Longstreet, Emory was not convinced the standoff in Grant Parish merited a military response. He knew that because the parish was in a fairly remote part of Louisiana, it would be difficult (as well as politically unpopular) to send and maintain troops there. It's also likely that Kellogg and the others wanted to believe that the contingent of blacks now guarding the courthouse would be up to the job of defending it; black self-sufficiency in such matters was almost always viewed as preferable to outside intervention. In the meantime, troubling news arrived. Jesse McKinney, a black farmer and father of several children, had been murdered by a group of mounted whites near Bayou Darro, three miles east of Colfax, as he was at work building a fence on his property. What provocation, if any, he had committed was unknown. Not long afterward, gunshots were exchanged near a place called Boggy Bayou, and a white man named Jack O'Quinn, "of Kuklux notoriety," was shot out of the saddle and killed.

By Easter Sunday, April 13, the deposed sheriff, C. C. Nash, had gathered from Grant and neighboring parishes about 150 armed whites who assured him that they were "not afraid to die for white supremacy." He then requested and obtained a parley with Levi Allen, the black man left in command of the courthouse by Ward, Register, and Flowers, who had themselves gone to New Orleans to meet with the Kellogg government.

"What do you depend upon doing in there?" Nash asked Allen.

"We are doing nothing more than we were before, standing still as we've been standing," Allen replied.

Insisted Nash, "We want that courthouse."

"We're going to stand where we are until we get United States troops, or some assistance."

"Then go in there and say to your people that I advise them to get out of there."

When Allen again said that his force would hold their ground, Nash
extended a thirty-minute truce so that the blacks could send women and children away from the line of fire.

Then Nash brought his men closer to the courthouse, and the two sides began a general exchange of shotgun and rifle fire, which continued with little effect for almost three hours. The blacks had prepared well, building solid defensive breastworks, but their shotguns lacked enough range to hurt the whites. Combat was at first so leisurely that the black defenders had to step up onto their works, showing themselves, in order to draw any white fire; with equal nonchalance, several whites at one point broke off the siege for a meal and a few hands of cards.

During the days leading up to the battle, the blacks had improvised two cannon out of old stovepipes by stopping up the ends, drilling touchholes in each, and mounting them on carriages. These homemade weapons used makeshift ammunition such as pieces of chain, bolts, and nails. The blacks had fired these randomly in the preceding days, frightening nearby residents, although it's not entirely certain whether they were functioning on Easter Sunday. The whites, however, knowing of their existence, countered the opposing "artillery" by appropriating a small cannon from the steamboat
John'T. Moore,
which was tied up at a nearby landing.

A breakthrough in the siege came when Ezekiel B. Powell, one of the whites, scouted the blacks' position and suggested to his comrades that they flank the courthouse by having a party quietly maneuver down the river and climb up to an opening in the breastworks. As Powell was new to the area, some were unsure whether to act on his idea, but C. A. Duplissey spoke on his behalf, saying, "This man is an old Confederate soldier, and he has been down examining things, and [he] says if we can take them trenches we can drive them out."

Powell's party carried the small steamboat cannon with them, and seizing a vantage point where the defenders' lines opened, they began pouring steady fire at the enemy and the courthouse itself. As some blacks retreated, the courthouse suddenly burst into flames. Isaiah Atkins, a black survivor of the attack, later said that Nash's men had captured a handful of black defenders and coerced one, a man named Pinckney Chambers, to hold a pine torch to the end of the building; others would claim that the whites ignited the structure; it was also alleged that blacks set the courthouse ablaze to spite those trying to recapture it. Amid the smoke, two white flags of surrender appeared at the windows. "Don't shoot, we are whipped!" cried someone inside. But
shots continued to come from the courthouse, and two whites fell. James Hadnot, a Democratic politician, was wounded, shot through the lower abdomen, and another white, Sidney Harris, was also hit. The attackers, infuriated by the false surrender and seeing Hadnot fall (blacks disputed this version, claiming there had been no trick surrender and that Hadnot was shot by his own men), swarmed the black defenders as they fled the burning courthouse and tried to escape toward the river; several blacks were killed. Many "were ridden down in the open fields and shot... [and] those lying wounded on the court house square were pinned to the ground by bayonets." Others tried to get away through a cypress pond; while wading through water up to the waist, they were shot from behind. One witness recalled that "by the time the job was finished it looked to me like any one could have walked on dead negroes almost an acre big."

The wound to Jim Hadnot, which proved mortal, evidently at least partly inspired the atrocities committed by the whites. After many blacks were slaughtered in the initial assault, an even less defensible act took place: black prisoners held in a nearby cotton field were led away in pairs under the ruse that they were being to be taken to a nearby town, but then instead they were summarily executed. "I heard Luke Hadnot [the brother of the white man expected to die] say, 'I can take five,' and five men stepped out. Luke lined them up and his old gun went off, and he killed all five of them with two shots. Then it was like popcorn in a skillet. They killed those forty-eight."

"It is our opinion," stated an account by a deputy U.S. marshal who arrived soon afterward, "that when forced by the fire to leave the courthouse [the blacks] were shot down without mercy. The position and condition of many of the bodies go far to prove this." According to the official,

under the warehouse, between the courthouse and the river, were the dead bodies of six colored men, who had evidently gone under for concealment, and were there shot like dogs. Many were shot in the back of the head and neck. One man still lay with his hands clasped in supplication; the face of another was completely flattened by blows from a broken stock of a double-barreled gun, lying on the ground near him ... Many of them had their brains literally blown out.

When passengers aboard the steamboat
Southwestern,
happening to pass Colfax the next day, learned that it was possible to tour a "battle ground" with dozens of dead bodies still on it, many disembarked and
ascended the bluff to the courthouse area. R. G. Hill, one such passenger, later explained that a young, heavily armed white man had come aboard to ask that the
Southwestern
convey the two wounded whites, Hadnot and Harris, downriver to Alexandria, at the same time telling the passengers

that if we wanted to see dead niggers, here was a chance ... Almost as soon as we got to the top of the landing, sure enough, we began to stumble on them, most of them lying on their faces, and, as I could see, by the dim light of the lanterns, riddled with bullets. One poor wretch, a stalwart looking fellow, had been in the burning courthouse, and as he ran out with his clothes on fire, had been shot. His clothes to his waist were all burnt off, and he was literally broiled ... I counted eighteen of the misguided darkies, and was informed that they were not one-fourth of the number killed.

Walking among the prostrate forms on the ground, the visitors were alarmed to find one that still seemed alive. Revolvers were quickly drawn, and a white man said, "I will shoot that black dog." But when the body was turned over, it was evident the man was already dead. Smoke from the courthouse, which was still on fire, and the stench of burning flesh from the littered corpses, Hill reported, soon drove the tourists back to their boat.

In New Orleans, Kellogg and Emory were staggered by reports of the apparent magnitude of the violence. Now faced with the necessity of moving troops into the area, they met resistance from several steamboat operators, who refused to provide passage on the grounds that visibly aiding federal forces would harm their business. Although the Metropolitan Police from New Orleans and at least one federal officer made it to Colfax within a few days of the battle, the first contingent of a hundred federal troops did not arrive at Colfax until April 21, eight days later. The commanding officer, Captain Jacob H. Smith, listened to various accounts of the affair, including that of C. C. Nash, and concluded that most of the victims had been gunned down after surrendering.

Scholarly and official estimates of how many blacks died at Colfax have always varied widely, from sixty to as many as two hundred. Calculating the death toll was complicated by the fact that many bodies were badly burned, others were lost in the river or in the cypress pond, and some were carried away by friends or relatives. Because many black families were too frightened to claim their dead, dozens of the victims were
interred in mass graves—the very trenches they themselves had dug as fortifications to defend the courthouse.