(The Root) — Amazing Fact About the Negro No. 41: Which massacre resulted in a Supreme Court decision limiting the federal government's ability to protect black Americans from racial targeting?
In Colfax, La., on Easter Sunday 1873, a mob of white insurgents, including ex-Confederate and Union soldiers, led an assault on the Grant Parish Courthouse, the center of civic life in the community, which was occupied and surrounded — and defended — by black citizens determined to safeguard the results of the state's most recent election. They, too, were armed, but they did not have the ammunition to outlast their foes, who, outflanking them, proceeded to mow down dozens of the courthouse's black defenders, even when they surrendered their weapons. The legal ramifications were as horrifying as the violence — and certainly more enduring; in an altogether different kind of massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the U.S. Supreme Court tossed prosecutors' charges against the killers in favor of severely limiting the federal government's role in protecting the emancipated from racial targeting, especially at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Historians know this tragedy as the Colfax Massacre, though in the aftermath, even today, some whites refer to it as the Colfax Riot in order to lay blame at the feet of those who, lifeless, could not tell their tale. In his canonical history of the period, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, Eric Foner has called the Colfax Massacre "[t]he bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction era." A generation earlier, Joel A. Rogers cited it to African Americans as an instance of Your History: From Beginning of Time to the Present. As we will see, Rogers saw it through a different lens.
The Louisiana Election of 1872
In Louisiana in 1872, there was no line at all between political and actual warfare. Nominally, it was a gubernatorial race between a Republican and a Democrat. What made the election close was a split within the Republican Party, with one wing seeking to advance the goals of Reconstruction and the other so anxious to pull it back that it formed a "Fusionist" coalition with the Democrats. Anyone interested in the full intrigue should read Charles Lane's thrilling — and, to me, invaluable — account, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction.
Suffice it to say the results of the election were disputed, with each side accusing the other of fraud, while holding its own inaugural parade. Because the Reconstruction Republicans still controlled the federal courts, their candidate, William Pitt Kellogg, was ordered in with backup from federal troops President Ulysses Grant deployed. Yet, when the controversy failed to subside, even Kellogg waffled in appointing like-minded men to run the courthouse in Colfax.
Having none of it was William Ward, a black Civil War veteran, militia leader and outspoken Radical Republican of Louisiana soon to have his own seat in the state legislature. Ward is the hero of Joel Rogers' account of Colfax in Your History and for good reason: He warned Governor Kellogg about what caving in to his Fusionist rivals would mean to the black voters who'd helped put him in office. With pressure from Ward, Kellogg kept his commitments, and in doing so, triggered a chain of events in Colfax that would destroy its backwater anonymity, and with it, innumerable lives.
Prelude to a Massacre
Before the Civil War, the land on which Colfax stood was a sugar and cotton plantation; after the surrender, its owner, William Smith ("Willie") Calhoun readied his slaves for freedom by conveying to them his parents' livestock, renting out 800 acres for tenancy and even agreeing to a school for black children. "In all the South," LeeAnna Keith writes in her book, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction, Willie Calhoun "was probably the greatest slave master ever to embrace the cause of black equality." Soon Calhoun would have another role to play, to no avail.
The first violent contest over the Grant Parish courthouse took place April 1, 1873. William Ward's white rival in Colfax, the Fusionist James W. Hadnot, had told one of his black laborers that he intended to lead a posse on the courthouse and hang William Ward and the other Republican officeholders for what they'd taken. The black worker then told Ward, who raised a posse of his own.
Hadnot arrived at the courthouse with about 14 men on the morning of April 1, but what he found was so formidable that he departed without a direct confrontation. Recognizing the threat that Hadnot and his men presented, members of Ward's band moved out to raid their homes, seizing weapons, food and a horse. The acts that followed "may have been violent," Lane notes, "but they were not random." They were a proactive defensive strategy "aimed at people likeliest to organize another attack against the courthouse." There were no fatalities.
Word of the raids lit through the town, and the following day, April 2, a shootout erupted between whites and blacks near Smithfield Quarters, not far from the courthouse. No one was hurt, but the brief firefight only exacerbated the tensions in Colfax. Many blacks believed their best chance was to join forces with Ward's men at the courthouse. That evening, 150 blacks camped out. Hope remained for peace talks.
The Slaying of Jesse McKinney
The next trigger point took place three miles east of Colfax, when Jesse McKinney, a former slave, returned home from the courthouse to his wife and child. The next day, April 5, Lane writes:
McKinney was repairing his fence, no more than twenty-four paces from his front door. As he worked, a group of about a dozen white riders suddenly galloped up. Some of them jumped their mounts over the fence. A man in a white shirt and black vest raised a pistol and fired it at McKinney's head. McKinney let out a ghastly scream, like the wail of a slaughtered pig, and sank to the ground. "I got him, he's dead as hell!" his attacker cried. The group whooped and capered around his body. It had all happened in an instant — right in front of Laurinda McKinney, who was standing on the front porch, with her six-year-old son, Butler. She hugged Butler to her knees and waited for their turn to die.
Even though "the whites rode off," Lane explains, "that was the end of the peace conference. The whites had drawn first blood." Soon the number of blacks at the courthouse increased to 500.
Ward Departs
With sporadic fighting spreading over the following days, William Ward became convinced he needed the help of U.S. troops stationed in New Orleans, so he hatched a plan to send a written appeal to the governor. He enlisted the former slaveholder Willie Calhoun to deliver it. The only catch — Ward's white opponents intercepted Calhoun onboard ship, where they found the appeal hidden in his boot. Threatening Calhoun's life, they told him the only way he'd survive was if he went back to the courthouse and ordered Ward and his black defenders to disperse. When he did, Ward's men refused to back down; no friend could convince them to give up ground, especially in a courthouse so symbolic of their still new political rights.
Moving on to plan B, Ward decided to travel to New Orleans himself, and April 11, he and a group of fellow black Republicans departed with hopes of returning with federal enforcements. They had no idea that the battle was about to begin.
Easter Sunday
By Easter Sunday, April 13, the whites of Grant Parish had mobilized with rifles, shotguns, six-shooters, hunting knives — even a small cannon. "Roughly half of the men were former Confederate soldiers," Lane writes. "Among their leaders were four former rebel officers, including Christopher Columbus Nash," the Fusionist ex-sheriff in town. "There were even three former Union soldiers." Of the originals, 20 men decided not to ride all the way to the courthouse after David Paul, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, warned, "Boys, this is a struggle for white supremacy. There are one hundred and sixty five of us to go into Colfax this morning. God only knows who will come out. Those who do will probably be prosecuted for treason, and the punishment for treason is death." The 140 or so who stuck with it now knew what they were getting into, and they were willing to die instead of seeing black men control the future of Grant Parish.
Back at the courthouse, the black defenders, now without their leader, William Ward, dug a hasty trench and attempted to rig up some artillery, building a makeshift cannon out of steam pipes. Sensing trouble, the few remaining whites inside the courthouse fled, leaving approximately 150 black men to fight for the Republican cause.
At high noon, literally, the white riders galloped through town, with former sheriff Nash shouting at the women whose husbands had gone up to the courthouse: "You see these damned sons of bytches have run off and left you to take care of yourself. Now you women get out of here, and not a damn one of you will get hurt."
Once at the courthouse, Nash and the other members of the white mob set up their cannon and fired it and their guns. The blacks in and around the courthouse met their volley and tried using their own cannon, but in the heat of battle, it simply exploded. For two hours, the fighting continued without either side claiming the advantage until the whites relocated their cannon to an unguarded levee around the blacks' left flank. One black defender, Adam Kimball, was struck in the abdomen, and "[w]hen he looked down," Lane writes, "he saw his intestines falling out."
Outgunned, the black defenders inside the trenches retreated to the courthouse. Others fled, many of them captured or killed by the whites. The quickest way to smoke the rest of them out, ex-sheriff Nash decided, was to set the two sides' long-fought-over prize on fire, which his men did by hoisting kerosene-soaked cotton wads to the end of a bamboo fishing pole and forcing one of their black prisoners at gunpoint to take it inside. "You're a good old ******," his former boss, William "Bill" Cruikshank, proclaimed (quoted in Lane's The Day Freedom Died).
With the courthouse up in flames, its black defenders surrendered with handkerchiefs waving, but the whites kept firing. Their new goal: Kill every black person in sight. Among the three whites killed in the crossfire was the Fusionist instigator of the conflict, Jim Hadnot. The black defenders suffered far greater losses. In one ghastly flash, Alexander Tillman, in attempting to escape the fire inside the courthouse, was shot down, his dead body was beaten to a pulp, and his throat was slit.
As night fell, the whites of Colfax celebrated. Once again, they were back on top. Addressing the black prisoners who'd been caught fleeing during the battle, ex-sheriff Nash asked, "If we turn you loose, will you stop this damned foolishness?" But not even Nash could control the other whites now. "[H]ave you no better sense than to send them old ******s home?" one in the mob asked. "[If you do, you] won't live to see two weeks" (quoted in Lane). At that Nash left the scene, a symbolic re-enactment of the action taken by the KKK's first leader, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who, despite claiming to have killed two dozen Yankees personally during the Civil War, tried to disband the Klan for fear it was becoming too violent.
With Nash out of sight, Bill Cruikshank and others told the remaining black prisoners they were going to march them out two by two to spend the night in a temporary prison at the local sugar house, but when they commenced on foot, the white riders moved in along the line shooting their defenseless prisoners at point-blank range. Estimates vary, but according to Lane, anywhere from 62 to 81 blacks were killed between the initial fighting and the murder of prisoners in Colfax.
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