The struggle over democracy remains a central theme in nineteenth-century American history. In the Early Republic, the ideological legacies of the Revolution, the rise of a market economy, and the expansion of white male suffrage collectively democratized American life. “The people reign in the political world,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted during his visit to the United States during the 1830s, “as the Deity does in the Universe.” The Civil War and Reconstruction extended beyond racial boundaries by freeing the slaves and adding the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Voting participation expanded to new heights during the Gilded Age that followed. Toward the end of the century, the populist movement again challenged Americans to live up to their democratic ideals, a struggle that continued during the Progressive Era.1
Yet various forces curbed the trend toward democracy during the nineteenth century. Vestiges of aristocratic political and social orders endured in places like New York’s Hudson River Valley and the lowcountry of South Carolina. Paradoxically, the economic transformations that opened up new opportunities also generated inequalities in wealth distribution. The rapid growth of industrial capitalism fostered a stratified social order that threatened the democratic ideal. Additionally, some Americans questioned the wisdom of popular sovereignty. In 1869, the New York Journal of Commerce stated openly that the “tendency among thoughtful men who desire honesty, economy, and a good deal of intelligence in legislation is towards a restriction of the right of suffrage considerably inside its present limits.”2
The conflict between democratic and antidemocratic impulses was especially poignant in the American South. During the Revolutionary Era, as historian Edmund S. Morgan showed brilliantly in the mid-1970s, the rise of American freedom in the South was accompanied by a growing commitment to chattel slavery. By the nineteenth century, however, the South was defined by a fierce egalitarianism among the Southern yeomanry and a tradition of herrenvolk democracy, in which whites constructed an ideology of equality within their own race that served to mask inequalities and class conflicts among them. When lower-class whites challenged the hegemony of wealthy planters and merchants, white elites raised the bugbear of racial equality and amalgamation. At the same time, they took efforts to restrict voting, not only by blacks but by some whites as well.3
Perhaps at no other time was the conflict over democracy as intense as during the era of Reconstruction (1865–77). The place of the African American in American life was the central question in politics after the Civil War. To what extent was American democracy to be expanded to include blacks? Reconstruction also raised thorny problems about suffrage. How far would the federal government go to protect American citizens seeking to exercise their rights of suffrage? Should former Confederates be disfranchised?
The problems of democracy in the late Reconstruction South can be profitably explored by looking at the White League of Louisiana. At first glance, it would seem odd to look for democracy in a violent white supremacist group. Yet sources on the league reveal class tensions among whites. Rather than simply unifying Southern whites along lines of race, these sources suggest that moments of heightened racial consciousness might have opened a door for farmers and laborers to challenge the supremacy of men of property.4
I.
The White League of Louisiana played an infamous role in the drama of Reconstruction. Originating in 1874 in opposition to Gov. William P. Kellogg, a Radical Republican, it was instrumental in the overthrow of the Republican government in Louisiana. The first White League meeting took place in Opelousas on April 27. Another chapter was formed in New Orleans months later. There is also evidence of White League activity in the neighboring states of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. The Louisiana White League engaged in a campaign of intimidation and violence against the Republicans, suspending local Republican governance, harassing African American workers, and targeting Republican officeholders for assassination. Its members were responsible for two of the most violent episodes associated with the end of Reconstruction in Louisiana—the Coushatta Massacre of August 27, 1874, and the Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans on September 14 of that year. The goal of the White League, as summed up in a letter by E. T. Lewis, one of its leaders, was “to place the control of the State in the hands of white men, and to combine upon this as the leading object to be accomplished.” The White League was successful in meeting this goal. In April 1877, federal troops who had been supporting Gov. Kellogg’s administration were withdrawn under orders from President Rutherford B. Hayes. Reconstruction in America had come to an ignoble end.5
In several key ways, the White League continued the pattern of violent racial repression established earlier during Reconstruction. Most obvious were its similarities to the Ku Klux Klan. Like the Klan, the White League resisted black aspirations to communal autonomy, economic independence, and political equality. The league’s propensity to violence has been well documented. In August 1874, a mob of league members caught and shot African American political leader Eli Allen, broke his arms and legs, and tortured him over a fire until he died. Perhaps the most notorious episode of league violence concerns native New Englander Marshall H. Twitchell, who in the 1870s served as a courageous Republican leader in Louisiana’s Red River Parish. Already by 1874, Twitchell had suffered the deaths of his wife and young son Daniel. At the end of July 1874, White League activity in the Red River area forced Twitchell to travel to New Orleans, where he appealed in vain for federal troops to support local Republican officials. On August 31, 1874, while he was recovering from his fruitless efforts at a friend’s house in Mississippi, he learned that his brother Homer and two brothers-in-law had been among many whites and blacks murdered by White Leaguers in an attack known as the Coushatta Massacre. One body was reportedly so mutilated that it could barely be kept together during internment.6 Two years later, in 1876, Twitchell survived an assassination attempt so serious that both of his arms had to be amputated.
Along with violence, the White League continued the racist campaign of the Ku Klux Klan. “Let the glorious wave of White Supremacy roll on to whiten and purify,” proclaimed a Mississippi editor speaking for the White League. A league chapter in Winn Parish, Louisiana (the future birthplace of Huey Long), similarly resolved that “it was the intention of the founders of this Government that this should be a White Man’s Government.” The Franklin Enterprise explained the peculiar logic of racial superiority: “Science, literature, history, art, civilization, and law belong to us, and not to the negroes. They have no record but barbarism and idolatry, nothing since the war but that of war, incapacity, beastliness and crime.” The ideology of white supremacy was set forth with clarity and power in an editorial in the Alexandria Caucasian entitled “The Negro—His Past and Future.” Echoing racial attitudes that had served Southern whites since the Revolution, the editor stated that the black man was a “mere savage when left to himself, with the lowest instincts.” The roots of black inferiority lay deep in the past. Africa was “without a history.” Even its traditions “tell no story of a negro hero.” This Southern editor constructed a timeless racial identity. In his eyes, the African American was “the same today that he was 3000 years ago, without letters, without art, without science and without a government.” The inherent inferiority of the African American, according to this racial—and racist—logic, justified the subordination of the black race. Slavery had thus been a blessing for the African for it “left him clothed and in his right mind and upon the threshold of civilization.” The close proximity of the races, albeit in an unequal relationship, would continue to prove beneficial to blacks. Around whites, blacks “heard and saw all that was intelligent and elegant in Southern life.”7
The White League’s recourse to violence and its ideology of white supremacy underscore its similarities to the Ku Klux Klan. The continuity did not go unnoticed at the time. The editor of the Alexandria Caucasian pointed out that Northern journals “are beginning to speak of the White Man’s Party in the same manner, declaring it to be the remnants of the bloody spirit of Ku-Kluxism, disloyalty, etc.” The leading Republican journal in Mississippi, the Weekly Mississippi Pilot, described the White League as “an oath-bound secret organization.” Many historians have followed the lead of these editors of the 1870s, lumping the White League in with the Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia in a long line of post–Civil War violence. In his documentary collection of Reconstruction sources, for instance, Walter L. Fleming terms the White League chapters of Louisiana as “later manifestations of the Ku Klux movement.”8
Yet the White Leagues differed in at least three significant ways from the Ku Klux Klan. First, they operated publicly, in the open. They did not employ the practices and rituals of secrecy so characteristic of the Klan. William A. Dunning, a biased but nonetheless astute twentieth-century student of Reconstruction, insisted that the local White Leagues “were distinct from the earlier order in maintaining little of mystery as to their doings and purposes.” In 1874, a Louisiana editor sympathetic to the league explained “that here the White Man’s Party is no secret organization and has no ritual.”
The White League’s widespread use of print culture in its campaigns was a second dissimilarity between it and the Ku Klux Klan. Several newspapers, such as the Alexandria Caucasian and the Natchitoches Vindicator, appeared simultaneously with the beginning of the White League movement in Louisiana. In fact, newspapers and their editors often played leadership roles in the movement. During the summer of 1874, when league organization was on the rise, the Daily Shreveport Times assumed the role of calling for a convention, “believing that we are giving expression, shape, authority, and circulation to the wishes of the white people of the State.”9
Finally, the version of racial supremacy advanced by the White League had been significantly transformed since the time of the Ku Klux Klan. White League newspapers and spokesmen expressed what historians call the New Departure in Southern Democratic strategies, an acceptance of the constitutional amendments providing civil rights for African Americans. “We do not propose,” explained the Alexandria Caucasian, “to interfere with any of the rights of the colored man nor drive him from us.” In calling a mass meeting in Rapides Parish, the White League declared similarly (and perhaps equally disingenuously) that its members did not intend to deprive the black man of “any one of the rights secured to him by the Constitution and Laws,” while the editor of the People’s Vindicator, another White League newspaper, offered what he called the “right hand of fellowship” to African Americans. The New Departure was a product of the later years of Reconstruction, after the Grant administration had actively attacked and subdued the extremist measures of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a Democratic attempt to return to power through moderation, reconciliation, and an acceptance of the results of the Civil War. Of course, New Departure rhetoric was often hollow, as its adherents still wanted to keep African Americans out of politics.10
How can these differences between the Ku Klux Klan and the White League be explained? Part of the answer lies in chronology. Simply, the context for racial violence had changed significantly between the late 1860s and the mid-1870s. Factionalism within the Southern Republican Party and economic problems caused by the depression of 1873 had seriously weakened Republican governments and the appeal of Reconstruction among Southern whites. Moreover, the White League movement built on growing dissatisfaction with specific measures of the Kellogg administration in Louisiana, like the Returning Board and Registration Law of 1874, which the New Orleans Bulletin labeled “the most monstrous attempt to gag and manacle the free citizens of Louisiana.”11
Still, the differences between the Ku Klux Klan and White League belie the notion of a uniform strand of white supremacy during Reconstruction. If post–Civil War racial violence was not monolithic, should historians be asking new questions about groups like the White League? How significant were time and place in shaping racial violence? More specifically, how did shifting political, social, and economic conditions influence the strategy and tactics of white opponents of Republican Reconstruction? What other grievances might have been incorporated into or masked by campaigns of white supremacy? White League newspapers offer a valuable source for pursuing these questions. My own examination reveals far more than a preoccupation with white supremacy and the evils of Republican Reconstruction. Two themes in particular stand out. The first is a disillusionment with political partisanship and a serious questioning of the social bases of Southern politics. The second is a rural distrust of urban, machine-dominated politics and consequent demands for a more inclusive political sphere. These two strains of White League thought suggest that the mid-1870s were a transitional period, not only marking the end of Reconstruction but also the visible outlines of the kind of social and economic dissent that defined the politics of the “New South.”12
White League writings evinced a strong strain of agrarianism. A supporter of the movement from Caledonia, Mississippi, called himself “a voice from the unpretentious rural districts.” As the White League was taking shape in Louisiana, A. L. Tucker of St. Mary’s Parish expressed his beliefs as a “COUNTRY SENTIMENT.” The Alexandria Caucasian even referred to its readers as “‘country bumpkins.’” Such identifications reinforce the common understanding that the White League movement had strong support from rural areas in Louisiana. In June 1874, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that White Leagues were being formed in “country parishes.” The league was strong in the northern part of the state and in the parishes along the Texas and Arkansas borders.13
Rural White Leaguers expressed an especially strong resentment against political domination by New Orleans. “There is no room for doubt,” stated the New Orleans Daily Picayune, “that the city and country are, under existing circumstances, utterly at variance with each other.” Farmers and planters in rural parishes and counties saw the White League movement as an opportunity for greater political inclusion, hinting strongly at longstanding feelings of exclusion. “The country,” insisted the editors of the Alexandria Caucasian, “is determined to be heard and recognized in the interest of the White Man’s Party.” An emerging political movement based on whiteness seemed to offer poorer farmers a greater chance of equality. The Hon. A. L. Tucker called for an inclusive political organization “which admits within its fold all members of the white family of men who are disposed to cast their lot with their own race in this emergency.” The editors of a rural White League newspaper called for the party convention to be held in Alexandria rather than in New Orleans.14 This voice of agrarian protest in White League writings undoubtedly reflected the economic distress that plagued farmers across the cotton South during the 1870s. In Louisiana, the persistence of large landholdings after the Civil War created a steady growth of tenancy for both black and white farmers. The depression of 1873 hit Louisiana hard. “We once had plenty of money,” explained one Louisiana planter in 1877, “but now the ‘golden fleece’ has departed and even our mule market is a poor one.” Periodic flooding and a diversion of trade from New Orleans to Texas aggravated these other problems.15
In the second major theme, White Leaguers tended to characterize themselves as “a people’s movement, independent of all past party affiliations and regardless of all past party names and organizations.” The Alexandria Caucasian regarded the White Man’s Party as “the people in their grand uprising” who could no longer be confined “to old party names and prejudices.” White League leaders contrasted the populist dimension of their revolt to the political establishment. Another Louisiana editor claimed that the White League arose from the ashes of the “follies and failures” of the established parties. Several White League leaders mounted an explicit attack on the Democratic Party, insisting that it was a political machine that not only had failed to stem the tide of Radical Republicanism but also had become unresponsive to the popular will. By the summer of 1874, White League dissidents were calling for a white man’s convention that would not be dominated by the regular Democrats. The editor of the Brashear News explained that “it is time for the Democratic leaders to give way to the loud and strengthening demand for a convention over which no party chief will preside; at which no party measure will be considered, into which no party tradition will enter.” The pressure of the White League in the parishes forced the New Orleans Democrats to agree to a state convention in Baton Rouge in August 1874. This hostility to established party practices was expressed in the opposition to the convention system and in calls for open primaries. In Mississippi in 1875, primary elections were introduced for nominating local Democratic candidates.16
These two themes in White League writings anticipate the ideology of late nineteenth-century Southern agrarian dissent. In the 1870s, the Grange (formally the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867) spread across the Midwest and South. The first Grange in Louisiana was organized in Jefferson Parish in March 1872. By 1875, 44 parishes in Louisiana boasted Grange chapters. White Leagues newspapers carried many notices about the Grange. As the Grange declined in importance, agrarian protest was rechanneled through the Farmer’s Union, founded in Lincoln Parish in 1885. By 1891, there were 529 local unions in Louisiana. The Farmer’s Union was strongest in northern Louisiana, an area that had long nursed grievances against the sugar parishes to be found in the southern part of the state. Throughout the New South, farmers challenged the planter and business interests that had secured hegemony of the Democratic Party. At various points, farmers were joined by factions of the Republican Party, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Independents. In 1879, New Orleans citizens chafing under the rule of city bosses created the Anti-Ring Democratic Association. Agrarian unrest culminated, of course, in the populist movement of the 1890s.17
Along with agrarianism and a distrust of existing political structures, the White League shared with the agrarian movements of the late nineteenth-century grievances against privilege, corruption, economic hardship, and class oppression. During this period, Southern Democratic leaders were forced to confront, placate, or defeat insurgent movements from Southern white farmers and laborers. New South governments, as C. Vann Woodward argued in Origins of the New South, exhibited a “pervading distrust of the electorate and of popular government.” Elements of this larger national retreat from democracy can be glimpsed in the many taxpayer’s associations that sprang up in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina toward the end of Reconstruction. Even the Alexandria Caucasian, a newspaper arising in tandem with the White League, not only criticized Democratic elites but also insisted that the primary motive of Radical Republicanism in the South had been the exclusion of “the intelligent tax payers” from political office.18
Geography provides a more compelling link between the White League movement and agrarian protest in Louisiana during the 1880s and 1890s. Both movements seem to have flourished in the northern part of the state. In 1874, the Minden Democrat, a north Louisiana newspaper, estimated that at least ten thousand men in that part of the state were active in the White League. In 1884, the Republican candidate for governor carried four parishes in the north. There were even closer connections between Grant Parish, which bordered Rapides Parish (the county home of Alexandria), and agrarian radicalism. In the 1880s, an active branch of the Louisiana Farmer’s Union (LFU) operated in the parish. In fact, Donna Barnes, a recent scholar of agrarianism in Louisiana, calls the parish an LFU “stronghold.” Not surprisingly, populism was also strong in Grant Parish. Grant was one of six parishes in the state that gave a majority to the Republican–Populist Party coalition in 1892. For our purposes, it might also be suggestive that Alexandria was both home to the newspaper Caucasian and the birthplace of the People’s Party in 1891. Indeed, leaders of the Louisiana Farmer’s Union called the sheet “a paper that is worthy of our warmest support.”19
There is also evidence that the racism so deeply embodied in the White League survived into the agrarian crusades of the late nineteenth century. This continuity can be illustrated through the career of Thomas Hickman of Grant Parish. Hickman was clearly involved in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, which hastened the collapse of Radical Reconstruction in the South. A decade later, Hickman was a member of Grant Parish’s LFU.20
Yet we must be careful in rushing too soon into regarding the White League as a form of embryonic populism, for there were significant differences between the two as well. The agenda of the Alliances and People’s Party, calling for cooperative buying, merchant lien laws, railroad regulation, and the subtreasury plan, did not appear in White League writings. Moreover, some Southern populists did invite the participation of black farmers, while the White League sought to block black participation in politics.21 Furthermore, the White League was not exclusively a rural phenomenon. New Orleans boasted very strong urban chapters of the White League, based around the Crescent City Democratic Club, a paramilitary group formed in 1868 to counter Radical Reconstruction. Its constitution was similar to those of the rural parishes. New Orleans White League chapters took the leading role in the attempt to oust Louisiana’s Republican government in the infamous Battle of Liberty Place on September 14, 1874. By that day, the commander of White League forces had enrolled twenty-six companies of infantry.22
This interpretation of the White League, admittedly tentative, still presents a possibility for revisiting two orthodoxies of Reconstruction and Southern historiography. First, it suggests that the traditional chronological boundaries of Reconstruction, 1865 and 1877, have obscured a perhaps more fundamental reorientation of Southern society and politics. The 1870s—encompassing agrarian unrest, labor conflict, and an economic depression—might well be considered as much a prelude to populism as an epilogue to Reconstruction. Second, the history of the White League might also lead us to reconsider the dynamics of race and class in Southern history. We have long been told that class conflict among whites in the South could be successfully muted by racist appeals to white supremacy. The history of the White League in Louisiana hints at a contrary interpretation—that racially motivated campaigns in the South might well have opened the possibility for whites to challenge an entrenched ruling elite.
NOTES
1.Qtd. in John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 303; James S. Allen, Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy, 1865–1876 (New York: International Publishers, 1937). For the nascent progressivism at the end of the century, see Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, ed. Anne Frior Scott (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), 6. The rise of democracy in the United States during the nineteenth century can be traced through three recent books: Gordon S. Wood, Empire for Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
2.Qtd. in Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2007), 167–68. In his book, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), Sven Beckert skillfully documents the antidemocratic impulse in the second half of the nineteenth century.
3.The literature on race, class, and democracy in the nineteenth-century South is vast. The starting point still needs to be Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). For the antebellum era, see especially J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977); Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009); and George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). See also William W. Freehling, “The Divided South, Democracy’s Limitations, and the Causes of the Peculiarly North American Civil War,” in his The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994). For the postbellum era, the place to start remains C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1951).
4.Two classics in Reconstruction historiography recognize the problems of democracy in Reconstruction; see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; rpt., New York: Atheneum, 1975); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
5.Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974), 285; E. T. Lewis, “The White League” (letter), Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), May 23, 1874 (quote); “Affairs in Louisiana,” Senate Executive Document No. 13, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, 30; Foner, Reconstruction, 550–51. The White Leagues are treated most fully in histories of Louisiana Reconstruction; see, for example, Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed; Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana after 1868 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1918); and Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984). They are also discussed in Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006). The fullest study remains the essay by Oscar Lestage Jr., “The White League in Louisiana and its Participation in Reconstruction Riots,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 617–95. On White Leagues in Mississippi, see William C. Harris, Day of the Carpetbagger: Radical Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 205, 677, 686; and Weekly Mississippi Pilot (Jackson, Miss.), Jan. 9, 1875.
6.Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 199, 194–201. See also his biography of Marshall Twitchell, Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2001); and Twitchell’s autobiography, edited by Tunnell, Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1989).
Historian James Hogue has recently argued that “the White Leagues became the unofficial paramilitary wing of the Conservative/Democratic Party at a time of intense political crisis.” Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2006), 126.
7.Star of Pascagoula (Pascagoula, Miss.), Aug. 8, 1874; Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), July 25, 1874; “Affairs in Louisiana,” 31; Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), May 2, 1874. Forrest Wood’s Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), remains a useful survey of the racial attitudes of white Southerners. See also Dan C. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985).
8.Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), Aug. 1, 1874; Weekly Mississippi Pilot (Jackson, Miss.), Jan. 2, 1875; Walter L. Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Education, and Industrial, 1865–1906 (1907; rpt., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 2: 327.
9.William A. Dunning, Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (1907; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 269; Daily Shreveport Times (Shreveport, La.), Aug. 7, 1874; New York Times, Oct. 6, 1874; Weekly Mississippi Pilot (Jackson, Miss.), Jan. 16, 1875; Shreveport Times (Shreveport, La.), qtd. in the Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), July 25, 1874.
10.Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), Apr. 25, 1874, Aug. 15, 1874; People’s Vindicator (Natchitoches, La.), Nov. 4, 1876, qtd. in William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969), 4. For further evidence of the acceptance of the Reconstruction amendments, see the Daily Shreveport Times (Shreveport, La.), Aug. 9, 12, and 15, 1874; and E. T. Lewis, “The White League” (letter), Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), May 23, 1874. The best introduction to the Democratic Party’s New Departure strategy, introduced toward the end of Reconstruction, remains Michael Perman’s The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984).
11.“The Registration Law,” New Orleans Bulletin, July 28, 1874, qtd. in the Daily Shreveport Times (Shreveport, La.), July 31, 1874.
12.On the significance of chronology within Reconstruction, see John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 153; and David Herbert Donald, Jean Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 603.
13.Columbus (Miss.) Weekly Index, July 16, 1875; Daily Picayune (New Orleans, La.), July 22, 1874; Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), June 27, 1874, and June 20, 1876; “Affairs in Louisiana,” 11.
14.Daily Picayune (New Orleans, La.), July 17, 1874, qtd. in the Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), July 25, 1874, 3; editors of the Caucasian, qtd. in the same issue, 2; A. L. Tucker, qtd. in the Opelousas Courier (Opelousas, La.), Aug. 1, 1874, 1.
15.John A. Buckner to Hubbard (G. Buckner?), Jan. 20, 1877, Buckner Family Papers, Filson Club Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.
16.Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), Aug. 15, 1874, 2, Aug. 22, 1874, 2; Daily Picayune (New Orleans, La.), July 17, 1874, qtd. in the Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), July 25, 1874, 3; Brashear News, qtd. in the Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), Aug. 1, 1874; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 297; Harris, Day of the Carpetbagger, 675.
17.Lucia Elizabeth Daniel, “The Louisiana People’s Party,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 26 (Oct. 1943): 1063; Henry C. Dethloff, “The Alliance and the Lottery: Farmers Try for the Sweepstakes,” Louisiana History 6, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 146–47; Matthew J. Schott, “Class Conflict in Louisiana Voting since 1877: Some New Perspectives,” Louisiana History 12, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 159; Marguerite T. Leach, “The Aftermath of Reconstruction in Louisiana,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 32 (July 1949): 675.
On White League support of the Grange, see the Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), Apr. 11, May 9, and July 25, 1874; and the Columbus (Miss.) Weekly Index, July 16, 1875. On the Granger movement in the postbellum South, see Theodore Saloutos, “The Grange in the South, 1870–1877,” Journal of Southern History 19, no. 4 (Nov. 1953): 473–87; and James S. Ferguson, “The Grange and Farmer Education in Mississippi,” Journal of Southern History 8, no. 4 (Nov. 1942): 497–512.
Woodward, Origins of the New South, remains the essential starting point for studying agrarian protest and third-party movements in the postbellum South. Also valuable are Michael R. Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill-Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990); and Mathew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth Century South (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2007).
18.Woodward, Origins of the New South, 346; Caucasian (Alexandria, La.), May 9, 1874. On taxpayer movements in the late Reconstruction South, see Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 168–69.
19.Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, 199; Donna Barnes, The Louisiana Populist Movement, 1881–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2011), 66, 71; Dethloff, “The Alliance and the Lottery,” 147; qtd. in Barnes, Louisiana Populist Movement, 98.
20.Barnes, Louisiana Populist Movement, 99. It should be acknowledged, however, that the Louisiana Farmers Union did contain some agrarian leaders, like Benjamin Brian and his son Hardy Brian, who pushed for interracial alliances between black and white farmers in Grant Parish. On blacks in the Populist movement, see especially Gerald H. Gaither, Blacks and the Populist Revolt: Ballots and Bigotry in the “New South” (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1977). Historians have long debated the extent to which Southern populism represented a genuine attempt a biracial democratic coalition. For some examples, see C. Vann Woodward, “Tom Watson and the Negro in Agrarian Politics,” Journal of Southern History 4, no. 1 (Feb. 1938): 14–33; Charles Crowe, “Tom Watson, Populists and Blacks Reconsidered,” Journal of Negro History 55, no. 2 (Apr. 1970): 99–116; and Lawrence Goodwin, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,” American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (Dec. 1971): 1435–36.
21.As is often the case, Woodward’s Origins of the New South, especially chs. 8–10, remains the starting point for studying Southern populism. Major studies include Robert C. McMath, Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975); Bruce C. Palmer, “Man over Money:” The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980); Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983); and Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). For historiographical essays, see Patrick E. McLear, “The Agrarian Revolt in the South: A Historiographical Essay,” Louisiana Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 1973): 443–63; and James Turner, “Understanding the Populists,” Journal of American History 67, no. 2 (Sept. 1980): 354–73.
22.Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 283–84; Hogue, Uncivil War, 131–38. See also Foner, Reconstruction, 551.