The Day Freedom Died

On the forty-second page of “The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction” author Charles Lane (who was recently a guest blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy blawg) wrote (emphasis & hyperlinks added):

Frazier at the mill. The murderers grabbed three hundred dollars in cash from Frazier's pockets, mounted their horses, and rode away.

Delos White had resigned the Freedmen's Bureau in September 1868. But he had become deeply attached to the colored people he met in the Red River Valley, and devoted to their cause. Before his resignation, he had told his superiors at the bureau in a letter that he would stay with the local freedmen "to the last." Thus he stayed on as a commissioner of elections in Winn Parish, despite death threats from whites angered by his efforts to register black voters. He did not quit when white terrorists broke up Freedmen's Bureau schools for black children. But he could not withstand the murder of Hal Frazier. Two days after the attack, White fled Montgomery, taking refuge on the Calhoun estate. In a letter to Phillips in New Orleans, Willie Calhoun reported that he, too, feared for his life, adding, "The fact is, Phillips, if you were here I would not give two bits for your hide." Calhoun was receiving so many threats that he no longer felt safe to travel in Rapides Parish.

The situation called for a solution that was both drastic and inventive. If Rapides Parish was incurably hostile to Calhoun and his Republican allies, white and colored alike, they would have to shift their political operations to a new parish where they would be safe. Calhoun decided to create such a parish, centered on his own vast estate. Calhoun was chairman of the state house of representatives committee on parish boundaries. His protégé, Phillips, was the committee clerk. They drafted a bill to combine part of Winn Parish, which lay north of Calhoun's Landing, with a portion of Rapides Parish lying to the south and east. The statute transferred Michael Ryan's illegal-election case against Calhoun from the Rapides Parish court to the new parish, where a court sympathetic to Calhoun would quickly dismiss it.

Willie Calhoun's new parish officially opened for business on March 4, 1869, the day that Ulysses S. Grant took the presidential oath for the first time—flanked by his new vice president, Schuyler Colfax. Calhoun leased the parish a brick stable his father's slaves had built at Calhoun's Landing; the dingy but sturdy structure would be the new courthouse. The population of the parish totaled about 4,500, of whom about 2,400 were Negroes living on the lowlands along the eastern bank of the Red. The white minority, other than a few white Republicans clustered around Calhoun's place, consisted of a handful of planters and a larger number of piney woods yeomen. Negroes also made up the majority of registered voters.

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Comments

[Dean B Cleverly]

I finished this book today and herewith return it to your well-stocked bookshelf. The book was well written and engaging from page 42 to the beginning and all the way to the end. An important look at a difficult period in our nation's history. A definite thumbs up, I'd give it a 5 on a scale of 5.