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Politics of Terror : Enforcing Reconstruction in Louisiana’S Red River Valley Issue Date: 2015-04-23 1

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Politics of Terror : Enforcing Reconstruction in Louisiana’S Red River Valley Issue Date: 2015-04-23 1 Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/32817 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Vries, Mark Leon de Title: The politics of terror : enforcing reconstruction in Louisiana’s Red River Valley Issue Date: 2015-04-23 1. Introduction 1. Introduction In her 1938 memoirs, Mrs. R. H. Coombs recalled her father saying that “the worst of the war was afterwards.”1 This succinctly captures the popular perception of the period, which held sway over the American imagination for nearly a century. This narrative reflected the Southern whites’ experience of the era, a point of view which they had actively promoted both during and after Reconstruction. In July of 1877, for instance, a Mr. Voligny, who had fought for the Confederacy, but fled to Paris before the war’s end, wrote his former army- buddy John C. Moncure, a prominent Shreveport lawyer and politician, of his hope that the time has come for bringing before the world this long array of political crimes against which unfortunately no redress is to be had. Could not some of the disgraceful facts, of which there are too many, be collected into a book duly certified to by unimpeachable men and published without any remark upon them – a list of horrors and of the villainies of the late administration – a charge to a universal jury, composed of men with upright consciences. I believe such a publication, translated into all languages, would carry weight with it, and I do not know of any one better qualified to undertake this task with reference to the state of [Louisiana] than yourself. It were only just that Grant and his army of carpet-baggers should be exposed before the world. 2 Although historians have since discredited the idea that Reconstruction subjected Southern whites to ‘horrors and ‘villainies,’ the fact remains that in the former Confederacy the end of the Civil War by no means meant an end to violence and disorder. Instead, it meant Reconstruction. For over a decade following the close of the Civil War, the national government committed itself, at least in theory, to providing greater political and civil equality for the recently emancipated black population of the South. The vast majority of Southern whites fiercely resisted this attempt to curtail the political, economic, and racial dominance they took for granted, presenting the federal government with challenges similar to those faced by a foreign army of occupation. Conservative whites, particularly in black-majority states such a Louisiana, regularly resorted to political terrorism in their struggle to reclaim political, economic, and racial 1 ‘Mrs. R. H. Coombs Memoirs, 1860 – 1870, [p. 6],’ Archives and Special Collections, Noel Memorial Library, Louisiana State University at Shreveport. 2 ‘July 2, 1877, Paris, Voligny to Moncure,’ J. Fair Hardin Collection, Mss.1014, LLMVC [Hereinafter: Hardin Collection], folder 9:45. 15 1. Introduction control over their communities under the banner of white supremacy. In the end, such violence thwarted attempts to substantially reform the racial hierarchy in the South. It did so in two related, but distinct ways. On the one hand, it undermined, and eventually destroyed, the organizational capacity of the local and state Republican Party, as its leadership either fled to safer areas, gave up on enforcing racial equality, or else suffered the often lethal consequences of standing firm. On the other hand, political violence served to increase the material, political, and ideological costs to the federal government involved in enforcing civil and political equality for the freedpeople. Soon these costs rose beyond the point that Northern politicians - and the electorate they depended on - were willing to sustain. Historians have only recently begun to systematically study the strategies and mechanisms that structured Southern whites’ violent opposition to Reconstruction and contributed to their ultimate success in reclaiming control of the South.3 Taking the Red River Valley in northwestern Louisiana as a case study, this research expands on these efforts.4 It seeks to elucidate and analyze the patterns of interaction between, on the one hand, conservative whites’ political terrorism, and, on the other hand, the local Republican leadership of both races, the freedpeople on whose votes they depended, and the agents of the federal government. Understanding these mechanisms can help us answer the crucial question of not only why, but also how Reconstruction failed in the kind of rural environment that characterized most of the South. It particularly clarifies the role that political violence played in undermining Reconstruction’s viability, as well as the closely intertwined question of why local, state, and federal authorities, failed to come up with an adequate response to this terrorist challenge, thus creating an atmosphere of impunity that allowed such violence to further flourish. Why, particularly, did the federal government, which, after all, had just emerged victorious from the far greater military challenge of the Civil War, fail to find an 3 Michael Perman first drew the outlines of these mechanisms as early as 1991, but only in recent studies of New Orleans and North and South Carolina have historians begun the work of fleshing them out: Michael Perman, “Counter Reconstruction : The Role of Violence in Southern Redemption,” in The Facts of Reconstruction : Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin , ed. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 121–40; James K. Hogue, Uncivil War : Five New Orleans Street Battles And the Rise And Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Mark L Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion : Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009); Carole Emberton, Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013). 4 The geographic scope of this research extends to the pre-Civil War parishes bordering on the Red River as well as those created during Reconstruction: Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, DeSoto, Grant, Natchitoches, Rapides, Red River, and Winn. 16 1. Introduction adequate response when white Southerners challenged its attempt to impose greater racial equality upon the defeated South? The answer to these questions, moreover, suggests that Reconstruction’s failure was not the more-or-less inevitable consequence of the essentially conservative nature of the national Reconstruction project, as many nationally oriented historians since at least the 1970s have implied.5 This study, by contrast, argues that even the limited program enacted by lawmakers might have achieved far more, had the federal government enforced its provisions vigorously when faced with extra-legal, often violent resistance by Southern whites. Reconstruction represented not so much a ‘Compromise of Principle,’ as an all-out capitulation in the face of terrorism. The federal government possessed the requisite power to guarantee civil and political equality for the freedpeople, although doing so would have required the long-term garrisoning of the South. Such a permanent military presence could have provided the necessary security and stability for the nascent Republican Party to establish its viability and for the freedpeople to acquire the educational and economic resources necessary to effectively claim the rights of citizenship that the national government had granted them on paper. However, over the course of Reconstruction Southern whites’ resistance became increasingly effective in thwarting such a policy. Instead of widespread violence and night-riding, a strategy that quickly provoked Northern outrage and a subsequent federal response, white militants increasingly used targeted violence and intimidation to erode the organizational viability and perceived legitimacy of the Republican Party. Southern Republicans’ dependence on the federal government, meanwhile, further undermined their legitimacy, not just in the eyes of conservative Southern whites, but also increasingly in the eyes of the northern public and the politicians they elected. Federal institutions, meanwhile, whether the army, the Freedmen’s Bureau, or the Department of Justice, consistently lacked both the resources and the mandate to deter the terrorist challenge to their authority. The contingent nature of Reconstruction’s failure is further highlighted by the potential for alternative outcomes. Besides exploring the ultimately successful strategy of Southern whites, this study also asks how, and to what extent, local Republicans and federal 5 This argument was initially developed by (among others) Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle : Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974); and William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). A similar argument has most recently been put forward by Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 17 1. Introduction officials achieved intermittent – and short-lived – successes in implementing civil and political equality for the freedpeople, even in one of the most violent regions of the
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