The Colfax massacre, sometimes referred to as the Colfax riot, occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the parish seat of Grant Parish. Between 62 and 153 black men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
After the contested 1872 election for governor of Louisiana and local offices, a group of White men armed with rifles and a small cannon overpowered Black freedmen and state militia occupying the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax. Most of the freedmen were killed after surrendering, and nearly another 50 were killed later that night after being held as prisoners for several hours. Three Whites died, but the number of Black victims was difficult to determine because many bodies were thrown into the Red River or removed for burial, possibly at mass graves.
Historian Eric Foner describes the massacre as the worst instance of racial violence during Reconstruction. In Louisiana, it had the most fatalities of any of the numerous violent events occurring after the disputed gubernatorial contest in 1872 between Republicans and Democrats. Foner writes "...every election [in Louisiana] between 1868 and 1876 was marked by rampant violence and pervasive fraud". Although the Fusionist-dominated state "returning board," which ruled on vote validity, initially declared John McEnery and his Democratic slate the winners, the board eventually divided, with a faction declaring Republican William P. Kellogg the victor. A Republican federal judge in New Orleans ruled that the Republican-majority legislature be seated.
Federal prosecution and conviction of a few perpetrators at Colfax by the Enforcement Acts was appealed to the Supreme Court. In a major case, the court ruled in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) that protections of the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to persons acting individually, but only to the actions of state governments. After this ruling, the federal government could no longer use the Enforcement Act of 1870 to prosecute actions by paramilitary groups such as the White League, which had chapters forming across Louisiana beginning in 1874. Intimidation, murders, and Black voter suppression by such paramilitary groups were instrumental to the Democratic Party regaining political control of the state legislature by the late 1870s.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, historians have given renewed attention to the events at Colfax and the resulting Supreme Court case.
Background
In March 1865, Unionist planter James Madison Wells became governor of Louisiana. As the Democratic-dominated legislature passed Black Codes that restricted rights of freedmen, Wells began to favor allowing Black people to vote and temporarily disenfranchising ex-Confederates. To accomplish this, he scheduled a constitutional convention for July 30, 1866.
It was postponed because of the New Orleans massacre that day, in which armed Southern White Democrats attacked Black Americans who had a parade in support of the convention. Anticipating trouble, the mayor of New Orleans had asked the local military commander to police the city and protect the convention. The US Army failed to respond promptly to the mayor's request, and a group of White residents attacked numerous unarmed Black residents, resulting in 38 deaths (34 Black and four White) and more than 40 wounded, most of them Black folks.
When President Andrew Johnson blamed the massacre on Republican agitation, a popular national reaction against Johnson's policies resulted in national voters electing a majority Republican Congress in 1866. It passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 despite Andrew Johnson's veto. Earlier, the Freedmen's Bureau and the occupation armies had prevented Southern Black Codes, which had limited the rights of freedmen and other Black people (including their choices of work and living locations), from becoming effective. On July 16, 1866, Congress extended the life of the Freedmen's Bureau, despite Johnson's veto. On March 2, 1867, they passed the Reconstruction Act, over Johnson's veto, which required that Black men be given the franchise—in Southern states but not in Northern states—and that reconstructed Southern states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before admission to the Union.
By April 1868, a biracial coalition in Louisiana had elected a Republican-majority state legislature, but violence increased before the fall election. Almost all of the victims were Black and some White Republicans who were protecting the Black Republican freedmen. Insurgents also attacked people physically or burned their homes to discourage them from voting. President Johnson, a Democrat, prevented the Republican governor of Louisiana from using either the state militia or US forces to suppress the insurgent groups, such as the Knights of the White Camelia.
Grant Parish
The Red River area of Winn and Rapides parishes was a combination of large plantations and subsistence farmers; before the war, African Americans had worked as slaves on the plantations. William Smith Calhoun, a major planter, had inherited a 14,000-acre (57 km2) plantation in the area from his father Meredith Calhoun. A former slaveholder, he lived with a mixed-race woman as his common-law wife and had come to favor Black political equality, encouraging the political organization of the local African American-based Republican party.
On election day in November 1868, Calhoun led a group of freedmen to vote. The ballot box was originally at a store owned by John Hooe, who had threatened to whip freedmen "if they voted Republican". Calhoun arranged for the ballot box to be moved to a plantation store owned by a Republican. In addition, he oversaw the submission of 150 Black votes from freedmen on his plantation land. The Republicans received 318 votes, and the Democrats received 49. A group of Whites threw the ballot box into the Red River, and Democrats arrested Calhoun, alleging election fraud. With the original ballot box gone, Democrat Michael Ryan went on to claim a landslide victory.
The election was also marked by violence. Election commissioner Hal Frazier, a Black Republican, was murdered by Whites. After this, Calhoun drafted a bill to create Grant Parish out of parts of Winn and Rapides parishes, which passed the Republican legislature; as a major planter, Calhoun thought he would have more political influence in the new parish, which had a Black majority. Other new parishes were created by the Republican state legislature to try to develop areas of Republican political control.
Enforcement against the Klan
According to Lane, after Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, he "lobbied hard for the Fifteenth Amendment" (ratified February 3, 1870), which guaranteed that Black men, most of whom were newly freed slaves, would have the right to vote. However, the Ku Klux Klan continued violent attacks and killed scores of Black residents in Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere. In response, on May 31, 1870, Congress passed an Enforcement Act which prohibited groups of people from banding together to violate citizens' constitutional rights. Soon afterwards on April 20, 1871, Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which Grant used to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and sent federal troops to South Carolina, a state with particularly egregious Klan activity.
State militia
Governor Henry Clay Warmoth struggled to maintain political balance in Louisiana. Among his appointments, he installed William Ward, a Black Union veteran, as commanding officer of Company A, 6th Infantry Regiment, Louisiana State Militia, a new unit to be based in Grant Parish to help control the violence there and in other Red River parishes. Ward, born a slave in 1840 in Charleston, South Carolina, had learned to read and write as a valet to a master in Richmond, Virginia. In 1864 he escaped and went to Fortress Monroe, where he joined the Union Army and served until after General Robert E. Lee's surrender. About 1870 he came to Grant Parish, where he had a friend. He quickly became active among local Black Republican Party members. After his appointment to the militia, Ward recruited other freedmen for his forces, several of whom were veterans of the war.
Louisiana election of 1872
Warmoth defected to the Liberal Republicans (a group that opposed President Grant's Reconstruction policies) in 1872. Warmoth previously supported a constitutional amendment that allowed former Confederates, who had been denied the right to vote, to be re-enfranchised. A "Fusionist" coalition of Liberal Republicans and Democrats nominated ex-Confederate battalion commander and Democrat John McEnery to succeed him as governor. In return, Democrats and Liberal Republicans were to appoint Warmoth as a US Senator. Opposing McEnery was Republican William Pitt Kellogg, one of Louisiana's US Senators. Voting on November 4, 1872, resulted in dual governments, as a Fusionist (Liberal Republicans and Democrat)-dominated returning board declared McEnery the winner while a faction of the board proclaimed Kellogg the winner. Both administrations held inaugural ceremonies and certified their lists of local candidates.
After failing to win their case in state court, the Kellogg forces appealed to federal judge Edward Durell in New Orleans to intervene and order that Kellogg and the Stalwart Republican-majority legislature were to be seated, and for Grant to authorize US Army troops to protect Kellogg's government. This action was widely criticized across the nation by Democrats and both factions of the Republican Party because it was considered to be a violation of the rights of states to manage their own (non-federal-office) elections. Thus, investigating committees of both chambers of the federal Congress in Washington were critical of the Kellogg choice. The House majority ruled Durell's action illegal and the Senate majority concluded that the Kellogg regime was "not much better than a successful conspiracy". In 1874 a House investigating committee in Washington recommended that Durell be impeached for corruption and illegally interfering in the Louisiana 1872 state elections, but Durell resigned in order to avoid impeachment.
McEnery's faction tried to take control of the state arsenal at Jackson Square, but Kellogg had the state militia seize dozens of leaders of McEnery's faction and control New Orleans, where the state government was located. McEnery returned to try to take control with a private paramilitary group. In September 1873 his forces, more than 8,000 strong, entered the city and defeated the city/state militia of about 3,500 in New Orleans. The Democrats took control of the state house, armory and police stations, where the state government was then located, in what was known as the Battle of Jackson Square. His forces held those buildings for three days before retreating before Federal troops arrived. Warmoth was subsequently impeached by the state legislature due to a bribery scandal resulting from his actions in the 1872 election.
Warmoth appointed Democrats as parish registrars, and they ensured the voter rolls included as many Whites and as few freedmen as possible. A number of registrars changed the registration site without notifying Black residents. They also required Black voters to prove they were over 21, while knowing that former slaves did not have birth certificates. In Grant Parish, one plantation owner threatened to expel Black people from homes they rented on his land if they voted Republican. Fusionists also tampered with ballot boxes on election day. One was found with a hole in it, apparently used for stuffing the ballot box. As a result, Grant Parish Fusionists claimed a landslide victory, even though Black voters outnumbered Whites by 776 to 630.
Warmoth issued commissions to Fusionist Democrats Alphonse Cazabat and Christopher Columbus Nash, elected parish judge and sheriff, respectively. Like many White men in the South, Nash was a Confederate veteran (as an officer, he had been held for a year and a half as a prisoner of war at Johnson's Island in Ohio). Cazabat and Nash took their oaths of office in the Colfax courthouse on January 2, 1873. They dispatched the documents to Governor McEnery in New Orleans.
Kellogg issued commissions to the Republican slate for Grant Parish on January 17 and 18. By then Nash and Cazabat controlled the small, primitive courthouse. Republican Robert C. Register insisted that he, not Cazabat, was the parish judge and that Republican Daniel Wesley Shaw, not Nash, was to be the sheriff. On the night of March 25, the Republicans seized the empty courthouse and took their oaths of office. They sent their oaths to the Kellogg administration in New Orleans.
Grant Parish was one of a number of new parishes created by the Republican government in an effort to increase local control in the state. Both the land and its people were originally associated with the Calhoun family, whose plantation had covered more than the borders of the new parish. The freedmen had been slaves of the plantation. The parish also included the less-developed hill country. The total population had a narrow majority of 2,400 freedmen, who mostly voted Republican, and 2,200 Whites, who voted as Democrats. Statewide political tensions were represented in the rumors going around each community, often about White fears of attacks or outrage from Black people, which added to local tensions.
Colfax courthouse conflict
Fearful that the Democrats might try to control the local parish government, Black people started to create trenches around the courthouse and drilled to keep alert. The Republican officeholders stayed there overnight. They held the town for three weeks.
On March 28, Nash, Cazabat, Hadnot, and other White Fusionists called for armed Whites to retake the courthouse on April 1. Whites were recruited from nearby Winn and surrounding parishes to join their effort. The Republicans Shaw, Register, and Flowers and others began to recruit armed Black men to defend the courthouse.