The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction

The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction

LeeAnna Keith

Language: English

Pages: 219

ISBN: 0195393082

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


On Easter Sunday, 1873, in the tiny hamlet of Colfax, Louisiana, more than 150 members of an all-black Republican militia, defending the town's courthouse, were slain by an armed force of rampaging white supremacists. The most deadly incident of racial violence of the Reconstruction era, the Colfax Massacre unleashed a reign of terror that all but extinguished the campaign for racial equality.

LeeAnna Keith's The Colfax Massacre is the first full-length book to tell the history of this decisive event. Drawing on a huge body of documents, including eyewitness accounts of the massacre, as well as newly discovered evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the fateful encounter, during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered, and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South. Keith also recounts the heroic attempts by U.S. Attorney J.R. Beckwith to bring the killers to justice and the many legal issues raised by the massacre. In 1875, disregarding the poignant testimony of 300 witnesses, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in U.S. v. Cruikshank to overturn a lower court conviction of eight conspirators. This decision virtually nullified the Ku Klux Klan Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871--which had made federal offenses of a variety of acts to intimidate voters and officeholders--and cleared the way for the Jim Crow era.

If there was a single historical moment that effectively killed Reconstruction and erased the gains blacks had made since the civil war, it was the day of the Colfax Massacre. LeeAnna Keith gives readers both a gripping narrative account of that portentous day and a nuanced historical analysis of its far-reaching repercussions.

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3,800 bales in 1859, a quantity that outstripped the second-largest Louisiana grower by 50 percent and the third-largest by 90 percent. With cotton selling for $44 a bale that year, the total value of the crop was $167,000—worth more than $3.5 million in 21st-century terms.36 Coming on the heels of several bumper harvests for both cotton and sugar, the 1859 revenues swelled one of the greatest fortunes of the day. Plantation revenues supported two sharply divergent lifestyles, with only five white

Cabin in his direct observations of Louisiana plantations and their owners. Who was Simon Legree, the cruel master in the book, who murdered Tom and otherwise embodied all the evils of the system? Olmsted did not pretend that the question was not on his mind, admitting that the peddlers of “cheap literature” on his Red River steamboat had sold three copies to other passengers during his journey to Natchitoches. the philosopher S 27 Engaging some Louisiana natives on the topic in the elegant

106 S the colfax massacre Other whites betrayed more ambivalence toward the executions. “[G]o ahead, I am not going to shoot you,” said the man assigned to escort Benjamin Brimm and a man named Baptiste White. “Come here old man I don’t think I am going to shoot you. I am going to carry you to the sugar house.” Moments later, the man shot Brimm and White, hitting Brimm in the back of the head. Neither of the black men died from their wounds. Meekin Jones had better luck: I asked a man if they

eight defendants—William Cruikshank, J. P. Hadnot, and getting away with murder S 143 Bill Irwin—were convicted of conspiracy. The results convinced the heartbroken district attorney that the jury had been intimidated by threats of violence—a possibility he understood from personal experience. Conditions in the state, complained Beckwith, made it impossible to convene a jury “with courage enough to convict under any pressure of proof.”29 The defense filed again their motion in arrest of

brother, Eugene, found his way into the household of railroad financier Jay Gould, whose interest in the New Orleans Pacific Railroad brought him briefly to Central Louisiana in the late 1880s. William Smith Calhoun, who served as a director of the line, known locally as the Backbone, must have made Gould’s acquaintance at this time and sought accommodations for his son. As a servant in the Gould mansion at 579 Fifth Avenue in New York, where elaborate security measures were employed to protect the

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