Lords of an Empty Land (27 page)

After a disputed election in 1872, Southern Democrats forcibly took control of the Louisiana governorship and legislature. A Federal judge eventually deemed that they had not won the canvassing, and President Grant ordered the anti-suffrage government be removed from the State House by Federal troops. The army replaced them with a pro-Northern government. The action resulted in an outcry, North and South, for the restoration of states' rights.

Four years later, the presidential race of 1876 was one of the most contested in American history. After the fall election, no candidate for the nation's highest office had an electoral majority. In a back room in the Capitol, Southern Democrats assented to give their support to the Republican candidate, Rutherford Hayes, if Federal troops would be recalled from the South and Congressional Reconstruction ended. On April 24, 1877, and to the cheers of thousands of bystanders, the last Federal troops in the South boarded an outbound steamer in New Orleans.

In just a few years, the Democrats reclaimed complete control of the South. With this, the secret clans all but exterminated the carpetbagger element from Southern society. The newly emancipated freedmen were left to fend for themselves. Under such conditions and constant intimidation, they rarely voted and remained mired in an existence little better than before the Civil War.

No one knows the true magnitude of those slain during the years of Reconstruction, mostly ex-slaves, Southern unionists, and Northerners, but these surely number in the thousands in Louisiana. A Congressional investigation documented more than a thousand political murders in Louisiana just in 1868. The Parishes of Red River, Winn, and Grant were the epicenter for much of this violence.

The history books tell us that local citizens, mostly ex-Confederate soldiers, put the leaders of the West and Kimbrell clans in front of a firing squad in Winn Parish in 1870. For years after the Civil War, army officers, most notably Majors A. R. Chaffee and Lewis Merrill, and Captain N. B. McLaughlin, forayed into this area chasing the mysterious night riders and white militia leaders. They killed many in Louisiana and east Texas, almost always employing clan tactics, simply shooting down the criminals in the open and in cold blood. The army's efforts had little impact. In 1874, US Marshal J. B. Stockton wrote to his superior from Red River Parish: “As soon as I go away with the cavalry, they intend to kill all the prominent white and black Republicans in the parish.”

Marshall Twitchell, one of the most famous Northern invaders to the area, arrived in Sparta, Louisiana, as a Freedmen's Bureau Agent in 1865. Though apparently honest, well intentioned, and no doubt a brave man, he seemed to epitomize the word carpetbagger. He married the beautiful daughter of one of the region's first families and bought a plantation. He soon moved much of his family from Vermont to Coushatta in Red River Parish, got himself elected to the state senate, and many of his kin elected to prominent local offices, largely with the support of black constituents. This all ended in 1874 when the Knights of the White Camellia gunned down six of Twitchell's family and friends in broad daylight. Two years later, Twitchell himself had both his arms shot off, again at high noon and in town. Shortly after, he departed Louisiana for good, supplanted in the state senate by one of his opponents, an ex-Confederate captain.

New Yorker Delos White, a decorated Union cavalryman in the Red River Campaign, became a Freedmen's Bureau agent in Winn Parish in 1866 after his predecessor in that position had been murdered. He established numerous schools and rode with the army in pursuit of the area's white militia and outlaws. In 1871, while White slept at the home of Judge William Phillips, a group of vigilantes arrived in the middle of the night. The gang of white terrorists shot White dead and burned the judge's house.

Judge Phillips, a Confederate war veteran, Southern unionist, and Freedmen organizer, prospered during Reconstruction, acquiring several large land tracts. He lived with a mixed-raced woman, fathering a child by her during this time. Unheard of for the era, he gave the son his name and all legal rights that accompanied it. Appointed judge in Grant Parish by the carpetbagger governor, he also pursued the parish's desperados relentlessly. One of the most hated men in the area by the people and press, he survived several attempts on his life, but in 1872 resigned as judge and fled, fearful for his life. Penniless and destitute, like many Southern unionists, Phillips eventually sold out to the Democrats and campaigned for their ticket in 1876 for a nominal fee.

Black political leaders also suffered. Hal Frazier, the black election commissioner in Montgomery, was shot dead by a gang one afternoon in front of his sawmill after the 1868 elections. Captain William Ward, an ex-slave and the colored commander of a black regiment of the Louisiana State Militia tasked with supporting Republican leaders in Grant Parish, fought the Knights for years. Elected to the state legislature, he was later expelled from that body at gunpoint and barred from returning to Grant Parish.

Christopher Columbus Nash was an ex-Confederate soldier and one of the more vocal and violent white supremacists in the area. He shot Delos White, and on Easter Sunday, 1873, led a mob of three hundred white militia into Colfax. In the battle that ensued, over a hundred blacks were killed. After Reconstruction, Nash founded the White League, was elected parish president, and appointed deputy sheriff. His family purchased some of the plantations from the now bankrupt or vanquished Republicans in the area. He finally died in 1922 and was buried in Natchitoches in a ceremony befitting a general.

The Louisiana press of this time was extremely partisan. Albert Leonard, the owner and editor of the
Shreveport Times,
the largest newspaper in north Louisiana, was a general in the White Militia. James Cosgrove, the editor of the ultra-right-wing
Natchitoches Vindicator,
was arrested in the Twitchell murders, but never convicted. He was later appointed brigadier general of the Fifth Military District of Louisiana and elected to the state legislature.

Both the Coushatta and Colfax incidents garnered extensive national headlines, but in each case, no one was ever convicted. These are only a sampling of the events and characters from this area during Reconstruction. It would take a book or two to list all the murders and crimes. The battles of Liberty Place and Cabildo, the riot at the Mechanics Institute, and the Shady Grove and Opelousas massacres are a few more well publicized tragedies. Many more, nameless to history, occurred in the decades after the war. In almost all cases, the perpetrators went unpunished and remain largely unknown to this day.

In 1951, at the site of the Colfax Massacre, the State of Louisiana erected a historical marker. It still remains in place today. It reads:
On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.

In fact, it was not until the second half of the twentieth century that the mysterious societies that promoted or participated in most of the heinous crimes, terrorizing African Americans and exterminating Northern interests, were disbanded or brought to justice.

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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3536-6

 

 

First electronic edition: April 2015

 

ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3537-3
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