There was no place in the state of Louisiana that did not suffer from the political turmoil. No place.
The town of Colfax was three hundred and fifty miles from New Orleans, although it barely qualified as a town. It consisted of four or five houses, several of which offered rooms to passing travelers, three stores, a schoolhouse and one brick building, a stable that had been converted into the parish courthouse.
Colfax served as the seat, the administrative center, of Grant Parish. The parish and the town had been carved out of four adjoining parishes in 1868, as much to provide additional political patronage as for any other reason, and had been named after President Grant and his vice president, Schuyler Colfax. Grant Parish had an estimated forty-five hundred residents, many of them freedmen who now worked the fields for a wage. Politically, it was split roughly evenly between the two parties.
The area had once been part of the sprawling Calhoun Plantation. In the late 1830s Meredith Calhoun purchased as many as a thousand slaves in Huntsville, Alabama, the majority of them teenagers, and brought them chained or yoked together in a half-mile-long caravan to Louisiana. It was believed to be the largest overland movement of slaves in cotton industry history, requiring one hundred wagons and a thousand mules.
He brought them to an unusually lush area on the banks of the Red River. It was estimated the fertile soil could produce as much as a bale and a half of cotton or forty bushels of corn per acre. Calhoun’s slaves cleared an estimated twelve thousand acres, cutting trees, shrubs and bush, filling swamps, and using the timber to build magnificent homes for the masters as well as rudimentary slave quarters. They also built the second-largest sugar refinery in the country. The abundant cotton harvests and sugar revenue from his plantations made Meredith Calhoun wealthy enough to live in splendor in Europe, where he purchased a title, Count Calhoun, from France.
Calhoun had no moral qualms about slavery and was known for imposing brutal punishments to maintain control. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe supposedly said that the villainous slave master she depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, was based at least partially on Meredith Calhoun.
Through the early years of the Civil War, Calhoun remained confident that England and France, in need of the South’s cotton and sugar, would break the Union’s naval blockade. But Lincoln’s Red River campaign, with its fifty-boat flotilla, ended that belief. When the Union army arrived, almost four hundred thousand slaves declared themselves war contraband, walked off Southern plantations and surrendered to the Union Army. Nearly half of them enlisted to fight for their freedom.
Meredith died in 1869 and by the beginning of Reconstruction, what remained of the once-vast plantations were being run by his son William. “Willie” Calhoun was a hunchback who committed the most grievous act possible by a Southern gentleman: he fell in love with a mixed-race woman named Olivia Williams. Following the war, reported the Shreveport Times, Calhoun had gone to New Orleans to purchase mules and supplies. While there he met “a handsome mulatto girl, became enamored of her and sought to win her to his soft embraces...
“The enraptured hunchback was forced to pay down to the mother five thousand dollars...and in a short time married his concubine in the most approved fashion.”
Rather than hiding this socially scandalous relationship, Willie and Olivia were married in New Orleans’s St. Louis Cathedral. As a result of this as well as several other civil rights programs he sponsored, Willie Calhoun gained the loyalty of the freedmen, among them many of his former slaves, and became a leader of the national Republican party. Supposedly, Grant Parish was created at his behest.
By 1872 the Calhoun plantations were in disarray, mortgaged for far greater sums than their current worth. Most of the fields were abandoned, fences were down, farm buildings were falling into disrepair, and the animal herds were gone. Willie Calhoun was rumored to be bankrupt.
Situated literally hundreds of miles from the political rancor of New Orleans, a rural place like Colfax might seem immune from the dangers created by a shattered government. But it wasn’t. Like a slowly spreading poison, the mayhem reached every part of the state.
Grant Parish was racially divided; its Black and white residents settled comfortably among their own folk. Most of the freedmen lived in and around Colfax, many of them in the former slave quarters on the nearby Smithfield Plantation. White residents generally built their homesteads in the hills or farmed land along the boundaries of the parish, as much as twenty to forty miles from the village, but the small white settlement of Montgomery was only about twelve miles away. As a result, the substantial Black population was surrounded by white farmers. The races generally didn’t socialize, but they mostly peacefully tolerated each other’s presence.
There was no reason to suspect that a torrent of Black blood would soon flow through the parish.
The seeds of conflict were planted in 1870. Warmoth’s appointed registrar of voters remained in Colfax only long enough to register every Black voter in the parish, then began moving around, making it difficult for white voters to find him to register. To ensure the election of Warmoth’s “Radical” Republicans, he also supposedly added another two hundred fictitious Black voters, placed ballot boxes in places difficult for white voters to reach and finally took the unopened boxes with him to New Orleans before a count could be made.
As Louisiana prepared for the 1872 election, white voters in the parish were determined they would not be cheated again. But the Republican candidate for a seat in the state legislature was a widely respected Black leader, Captain William Ward.
Ward was a hero in Colfax. He had been among the first Black men enlisted in the Union Army. As a member of the First Colored Cavalry, he fought in the Virginia campaign, rising to become sergeant, the highest rank available to a Black soldier. Following the war, he had joined General Longstreet’s Louisiana State Militia and, after obtaining weapons, organized his own eighty-five-man militia to combat the growing threat of white supremacist organizations. To avenge the murder of a popular former sheriff, Ward thrilled Colfax by turning his company into a posse comitatus, capturing the killers and handing them over to New Orleans law enforcement.
Noting his growing popularity, in 1871 Governor Warmoth named him to the five-member parish “police jury,” the local governing board. But within months a small group of wealthy white supremacists led by cotton planter William Cruikshank forced him out of office, claiming he was ineligible because he had not been a resident of the parish for the required two consecutive years. Cruikshank took his place.
That action made Ward even more popular among freedmen, and more threatening to the white population.
The specter of an armed, well-trained Black militia terrified white residents of Grant Parish. Many of them had grown up hearing terrifying stories about the horrific 1791 rebellion that had ended slavery in Santo Domingo, which had served as justification for the brutal treatment of American slaves—and still was used by white politicians to scare out the vote.
William Ward was the embodiment of the fear that lived deep in the minds of many white people. During the 1872 campaign, Conservatives warned that Ward had promised freedmen that if Kellogg was elected they would be given the land on which they had once toiled as slaves. While the Republican media portrayed him as “fierce, resolute and bold...brave and determined, a good man,” Democratic papers wrote he had become “an absolute dictator,” overruling Calhoun, who had “sunk into utter insignificance.”
In the election Ward ran against Democrat James Hadnot, a plantation owner who possibly had been behind violent efforts to prevent Black citizens from voting in ’68. The difference between the two candidates could not have been starker: the white supremacist against the Black militant.
Throughout the campaign both sides ginned up fear to excite and motivate its voters.
Election day was peaceful, as it was throughout the state. The trouble began afterward. The Fusion press claimed the votes were counted in the courthouse under federal supervision, with its doors wide-open to allow interested observers to monitor the count. The Radical papers reported that white state officials had held the locked ballot box overnight—and when it was produced the next day it had a suspicious hole in its side.
Although there were about one hundred more registered Black voters than white in Grant Parish, according to the Warmoth Returning Board, Democrats had won a landslide victory. McEnery had beaten Kellogg, Hadnot had beaten Ward, Alphonse Cazabat had been elected parish judge, and Ku Kluxer Christopher Columbus Nash had been elected sheriff.
William Ward was especially angered by the decision. With more Black voters than white voters in the parish it seemed improbable he had been beaten—especially when the announced tally included several hundred fewer Black votes had been cast than in the previous election.
The Picayune informed readers that Ward admitted he had lost, supposedly telling Hadnot, “You have beaten me fairly, but I will represent the parish in the legislature, notwithstanding.” It was highly unlikely Ward would have said anything like this, especially to a Klan leader, but the story helped plant the idea that Radical Republicans intended to take illegal—and maybe violent—steps to seize control.
Colfax may have been more than three hundred miles from New Orleans, with a population of less than a few of that city’s blocks, but the potential consequences of an unsettled election there were just as grim. It was as true then and there as it had been through all recorded history: people will kill for power.
Before officially leaving the governor’s office, Warmoth issued the necessary legal commissions to Fusionist candidates Cazabat and Nash, who took their oaths of office in the Colfax courthouse on January 2.
Weeks later new governor Kellogg issued commissions to the same offices to the Republican candidates, appointing Robert Register to the parish bench and naming Daniel Shaw the new sheriff. Neither man could be sworn into office though, as C. C. Nash refused to surrender the keys to the courthouse.
Kellogg tried to keep the peace, and after meeting in New Orleans with Fusionist lawyers from Grant Parish he supposedly offered a compromise: he would agree to keep several of their people in local office—but not Sheriff Nash.
Nash or no one, Judge William Rutland and attorney Wilson Richardson warned.
Kellogg refused. It couldn’t be done. The lawyers stormed out of his office into perilous territory. Rutland was heard to say, “There would be hell in Grant Parish.”
The Colfax Courthouse was the center of power in Grant Parish. There was nothing glamorous about it. A one-story whitewashed building facing the Red River, it was a drab, functional brick structure that held both a courtroom and several administrative offices. What had once been the hayloft was now used for storage. There was an open crawl space below and a cypress-shingled roof above.
But the courthouse was just as important to Grant Parish as the Mechanics Institute was to New Orleans. It was the symbol of government. Nash was not going to give it up. As long as Fusionists held it he would remain sheriff.
Late in the night of March 25, several Republicans, led by Robert Register, broke into the courthouse through a side window and took possession. The next morning, before the Fusionists even knew about it, Dan Shaw and several other men were sworn into office. They immediately sent copies of their signed oath to New Orleans, where the forms were legally filed.
They had staged a quiet coup, taking control of local government and law enforcement.
Nash told the story quite differently. In his far more self-serving version, a body of men “ejected the legally elected...they fired upon myself and others, compelling us to flee for our lives.”
Even then, Nash said, he returned with law officers to find a peaceful solution, “but was again fired upon and threats made by the rioters who said they would anyhow drink my blood.”
The Fusionists were certain of one thing: this would not stand. The freedmen, the former slaves, would not be allowed to overturn the election. They spread the word: Meet at the courthouse on April 1. Bring your guns. The attack was supposed to remain secret, but Hadnot had bragged to one of his Black laborers that he was going to lynch William Ward and all the other men who got in his way.
When Ward learned about the plot to kill him, he called for reinforcements. Sheriff Shaw swore in enough men to form a large posse to defend the courthouse. They, too, were told: bring your guns.
Newspapers fed the flames, writing that one of Ward’s men had promised “he would have Hadnot’s head on a pole in twenty-four hours.”
Both sides had been preparing for this fight since the end of the Civil War. Reconstruction and the three new constitutional Amendments had drastically changed their worlds. The scars of history were too deep and still raw.
Once fear had been loosed, it grew. Wild rumors spread among the white population. Men would be killed. Women raped. In the days leading up to the confrontation, white residents of Colfax moved away, some of them claiming they were driven out, while hundreds of Black people from surrounding areas gathered inside the town, squeezing into the Smithfield Quarters or setting up campsites.
As armed men raced into the parish to reinforce both sides, several incidents took place to further inflame the situation. Among those who left town was Judge Rutland, who sent his family to safety across the river and then was given safe passage by Ward’s men. After he was gone they broke into his house; readers were told that the men “took from there a coffin in which his child was embalmed, thinking that it contained money...broke it open but finding out what it was, left the dead body of the child on the road.”
After escaping, Rutland filed a criminal complaint against the men who had ransacked his house. He included Ward, Register and Calhoun in his papers, obtaining a warrant for their arrest—which provided legal protection for a posse to carry it out.
Weeks later Rutland corrected the story, explaining the coffin actually contained the embalmed body of a young girl who had died six years earlier in Lake Charles, which he intended to reinter in Red River. He also said he had been told that the coffin had been burned.
Additional stories recounted in detail Ward’s posse ransacking other houses, shooting at people, stealing jewelry, “which the scoundrels sold for two bottles of whisky,” and boarding a steamer that landed there “armed with cutlasses, sabers, guns and pistols...and declaring there was going to be ‘hell to pay here tonight.’”
But Nash’s militia was equally violent. In the first days of April former slave Jesse McKinney was repairing a fence in front of his house about three miles out of town. A dozen riders suddenly appeared; their horses leaped the fence and without warning, in front of his wife and child, they shot him in the head. McKinney died several hours later—and any doubt in the Black community that it was under attack died with him. Hundreds more people took shelter in the town.
Ward’s men began constructing a defensive perimeter. Men were stationed on all the roads within twenty miles of Colfax to provide early warning. Shallow trenches were dug and earthen works no higher than three feet stretched in a rough semicircle around the front of the courthouse. The defenders had mostly shotguns and not nearly enough for all the men. They began stockpiling ammunition, a good portion of it homemade. They cut lengths of cast-iron stovepipe into makeshift cannons and positioned them above the main road.
Then they waited.
The Fusionists were also preparing, drilling the volunteers in units, scouting the preparations being made in town, stealing horses and mules from Black homesteads, and taking the four-inch deck cannon from a steamship and mounting it on a wagon.
There were some minor encounters. On April 1, nineteen men, led by Hadnot, made a display of force, racing through the town carrying rifles. A day later, a patrol led by Register encountered a scouting party near Smithfield Quarters. After a harmless exchange of fire, the scouts retreated. On April 5, Ward and several of his men encountered several white riders. They killed one of the horses and shot the thumb off a rider. The men fled, one of them later saying, “it seemed to me to be 4000 more coming our way.”
Meanwhile, outside of Grant Parish, few people knew what was brewing there. Or even if they had heard the stories, they dismissed them. A small article in the Republican warned that the Black “majority” in Grant Parish was prepared to “clean out” the white “minority...in twenty-four hours if not prevented.”
Another story, this one in the Picayune, about the ransacking of Judge Rutland’s house, claimed “Fearful Atrocities” had taken place, with “No Respect Shown to the Dead.” The Republican refuted it, writing there was no evidence anything other than the ousting of “McEnery pretenders to office” had taken place.
Too much was happening around the world for people to be concerned about rumblings from a small town. Instead, headlines focused on the wreck of the steamship Atlantic, which had run aground and tipped over less than one hundred yards off the coast of Nova Scotia. The Atlantic was the pride of England’s White Star company and was considered one of the most modern ships afloat. According to Associated Press reports, the ship was well off course and traveling at full speed when it smashed into shoals in the middle of the night. As many as seven hundred people drowned in their berths or were swept overboard in waves reaching as high as fifty feet, including every woman on board and every child but one, making it the largest passenger-ship disaster in history.
In Opelousas people were reading about anti-Semitism spreading in Texas. One legislator there objected to an effort to incorporate the Hebrew Association, admitting, “I do not much like Jews.” In response, B. R. Plumly stood and said, “I do like Jews... It is a foolish and cruel custom to deride the Jews...
“We do nearly everything that Christ condemned,” he pointed out, “and we leave undone almost everything that He required to be done.” His stirring defense of Hebrews continued, paying “tribute to the Jewish race, the tenacity of its life, the courage and endurance with which it met and mastered all conditions; its existence as a great people at a period so remote that what we call history is lost in tradition...having laws which have become the laws of the world, and permeated its civilization, gifts and activities felt even now in commerce, finance, musical and dramatic art, statesmanship, literature and eloquence...
“...I realize the feeling of Disraeli when, in the British Parliament, taunted with being a Jew, he is said to have replied, ‘I am a Jew. When the gentleman’s ancestors were naked savages on these islands, mine were princes of the temple...’”
In Evansville, Indiana, the Journal cautioned readers about the dangers of carrying concealed weapons, relating the sad tale of a young man whose revolver, hidden in his hip pocket, discharged accidently when he was visiting his beloved. The accidental shot set his pants on fire, which caused both his intended and her mother to faint. Her father, hearing the shot and seeing his wife and daughter on the floor, attacked the man, who crashed through a window to escape, pursued by the family dog. As the man ran for safety he fired at the dog, killing it, and ending forever his relationship.
But no one in Grant Parish had time to be concerned about the shipwreck, anti-Semitism in Texas or the tragic end of a comical encounter: each hour brought them closer to open warfare. Both sides sent word to New Orleans requesting assistance. If their messages ever reached Kellogg, he did not respond.
Several cursory attempts were made to reach a compromise. On April 5 leaders of both sides met in an open field to exchange peace proposals. But those negotiations ended when riders interrupted to tell Ward that Jesse McKinney had been murdered. Days later Willie Calhoun delivered letters suggesting a compromise to both sides, in an effort, he said, “to prevent bloodshed.”
Just before Easter, William Ward boarded a steamer headed downriver toward New Orleans, where he planned to do whatever was necessary to meet with Governor Kellogg to plead for federal intervention. Ward was a sick man, weakened by tuberculosis and rheumatism, but he knew that Kellogg was the only one who could stop Nash. Kellogg was already aware that violence was stirring in Grant Parish. But rather than riling things up by sending troops, he dispatched General Longstreet to go there and investigate. Longstreet had difficulty finding transportation; most of the boatmen refused to take him there, fearing the loss of business if they cooperated with the Republicans.
On April 13, Easter morning, Nash—in his role as the Fusion Sheriff—set out for Colfax with an estimated hundred and sixty-five well-armed men. He carried with him arrest warrants for the men who had destroyed Rutland’s home. Grant Parish’s representative in the people’s legislature, forty-nine-year-old James Hadnot, rode with him, the bright red sergeant’s sash and rosette medallion he had worn while serving in a Confederate reserve unit draped across his chest and carrying his war sword.
The posse crossed a stream and paused yards from the now-deserted Smithfield Quarters. Holding aloft a white flag, Nash and three men came forward. Lev Allen, leading the defense with Ward in New Orleans, rode out to meet them. Men on both sides readied their weapons. Their conversation was brief. “We want the courthouse,” Nash said, meaning he would take his place as the elected sheriff. If Allen’s men put down their arms they would be allowed to leave in peace.
Nash could not be trusted. Too many Black men had been attacked in the past months. McKinney had been fixing his fence when he was killed. If they put down their guns, Allen knew, they would be helpless. His people would stay right where they were, he replied—but boldly suggested that Nash’s men should leave their guns and take off before people got hurt.
Nash gave one final warning: You have thirty minutes to move your women and children to safety, he said.
After parting embraces, the women and children walked down the road, out of the line of fire, heading for a nearby plantation. Three white men had remained at the courthouse, among them Republican Sheriff Shaw, and they left the town with them, leaving only the Black freedmen.
As the Fusion forces took strategic positions around the courthouse, the defenders dug in behind the breastworks. An hour passed. The noon sun beat down hard on all of them. Two hours. Some men traded insults and threats. A sniper on the courthouse roof took several potshots at men playing seven-up for one dollar a hand; when one bullet missed by only a few feet, the cardplayers finally quit their game.
The shooting began at two o’clock. Nineteen marksmen with Spencer and Sharps rifles, Smith and Wesson pistols and one Colt revolving rifle opened fire on the defenders. Those outgunned men crouched behind the breastworks, sporadically returning fire, trying to conserve ammunition. The attackers set up the wagon-mounted deck cannon in Willie Calhoun’s front yard, loaded it with trace chains, brickbats, rocks, canisters, milk cans filled with small deadly pellets known as “blue whistlers”—whatever they had—and began firing.
Shrapnel sliced open the abdomen of freedman Adam Kimball. As his intestines dripped out he was carried into the courthouse. The first man was dead. There would be so many more.
The thunder of the cannon, the shots flying, the tufts of dirt kicked up, the occasional screams of pain brought many of the men back a decade to the battlefields of the war.
The shooting continued through the afternoon. Several Black men were killed, but the defenders managed to hold out. Unable to make progress, Nash sent a few men down to the river to see if it was possible to outflank the men in front of the courthouse. His scouts moved quietly under the cover of the riverbank. Within minutes they came upon a gap in the unprotected levee behind the breastworks. It was a stunning discovery. It left the entire line of defense vulnerable.
Nash organized the attack. Thirty men crept into position. As the men in front of the defense began an assault, the river detachment raced through the gap and opened fire.
Outgunned, outflanked, outnumbered and outsmarted, the defenders left their dead and wounded in the trenches and abandoned their position. Dozens of them ran for the woods, many of them gunned down before they could get there. Some of them were captured, held briefly, then shot.
Lev Allen was among the few who managed to get into the woods and hide there. Other men made it to the river or a nearby pond—where they spent hours in the water, submerging themselves when the attackers came near.
Between thirty and forty men were taken prisoner.
About one hundred men, maybe more, reached the safety of the brick courthouse. They opened fire from the ten large windows. Nash’s three-man cannon crew moved their gun into position about eighty yards in front of the building. A shot from inside the courthouse nicked one of the crew, Stephen Decatur Parrish, in his leg, severing his femoral artery. The Picayune described his death thus: “The din of the battle were the last earthly sounds that fell upon the ear of as gallant a hero as ever glanced over a field of strife.”
What happened afterward was open to dispute, as the media reported events in a manner most favorable, and sympathetic, to their readers.
According to the Shreveport Times, at about three o’clock the gunfire from the courthouse slackened. Pieces of torn white cloth, signaling ceasefire, or perhaps surrender, popped out of several windows on the ends of rifles. The firing ended. After a few moments, a small group of white men, including James Hadnot and Sidney Harris, approached the courthouse.
“Mr. Harris and two other men were in front of Hadnot, and as the door was thrown open...they walked in,” the story continued. “Instantly a volley was fired upon Hadnot, and a door was closed upon Harris and his two companions and opened fire on them; that they were not literally torn to pieces is simply a miracle. They drew their six-shooters...and began firing. As Harris neared the door he was shot from the side, the ball entering his shoulder, and he fell against the door...the door swung open against his weight and he rolled out, and his companions jumped out...
“Mr. Hadnot received eleven buckshot in his leg and a ball through his stomach, from which he subsequently died... There was no possible way of dislodging the besieged...”
In fact, there was one way that would work: all reports agreed that the courthouse roof was set afire, though they disagreed about exactly how that was done. One version claimed a flaming arrow had started the blaze. An unnamed witness said a combustible material shot from the cannon caused the shingles to burst into flame. The Picayune would even write that the building had been set on fire by the men inside. The most detailed explanation was that Nash gave a captured elderly Black man, Pinckney Chambers, a choice: either set the courthouse on fire with a torch or be killed where he stood.
In that version a combustible material, either straw or cloth, was affixed to a long bamboo fishing pole, dipped in kerosene and lit. While sharpshooters kept the defenders away from the windows, “Pink” crept up to the courthouse and touched the makeshift torch to the eaves. The shingled roof caught instantly.
The order in which those two events took place, the shooting of Hadnot and the courthouse being set on fire, were disputed. Several survivors claimed that Harris and Hadnot were shot in the melee after the courthouse was burning, or that after being allowed to flee the fire Ward’s men produced guns and shot them. But no one denied what happened next.
As the now-unarmed defenders rushed out of the building the slaughter began. Nash’s men, irate at the shooting of Hadnot, opened fire from close range. They shot them down in the doorway or as they climbed through the windows. Wounded men were shot, stabbed with bowie knives or “pinned to the ground by bayonets.” Most of those who somehow got out of the courthouse were tracked down and shot. Bodies were found miles away. The New York Times, calling this “wholesale murder,” reported “one hundred of their number were shot as they fled.”
Several men, rather than being shot or burning to death, tore out floorboards and tried to take refuge in the crawl space or beneath a nearby warehouse. They died there.
That night forty or more prisoners were taken into the woods. Once again, the details are murky, but not the outcome. They were shot or hanged. Supposedly some of them were shot on the riverbank and fell into river. Others were lined up back-to-back, or three or four together, and shot in a quest to determine how many men could be killed with a single rifle bullet. Bill Cruikshank shot two men that way but Jim Hadnot’s son Luke lined up five men and killed them, although it required two shots.
No one was able to make an accurate count of the number of Black men killed that day, with estimates ranging from a hundred and fifty up to several hundred. It was agreed, though, that what was already beginning to be called the Colfax Massacre was the largest racial killing in American history.
Two white men were killed, and an unknown but small number were wounded.
A day later a hundred and twenty Metropolitan policemen landed in Colfax. They found sixty-five corpses on the ground, some of those remains still smoldering. Everywhere they looked they found more bodies. The police reported “The ground was thickly strewn with the dead.”
The papers spared none of the horrific details in describing the killing frenzy. The Republican cited the official report from Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to General Longstreet: “when forced by the fire to leave the courthouse they were shot down without mercy... Under the warehouse...were the bodies of six men who evidently crept under there for concealment and were there shot like dogs. Many were shot in the back of the head and neck; one man still lay with his hands clasped in supplication; the face of another man was completely flattened by blows from a gun, the broken stock a double-barreled shotgun being on the ground near him; another had been cut across the stomach with a knife after being shot and almost all had three to a dozen wounds. Many of them had their brains literally blown out...”
The massacre settled nothing. Ward and Nash had both escaped harm—Ward was safely in New Orleans when the fight began—and both men continued to claim the sheriff’s office. Governor Kellogg, meanwhile, did what was necessary for his own political survival: he blamed McEnery. He sent a letter to the state attorney general and a copy to the newspapers, in which he wrote the massacre in Grant Parish was “if not directly planned and ordered by this man [McEnery and his associates] [it] was the result of their treasonable acts against the State government.”
It was an extraordinary charge, based entirely on political calculation rather than fact. In his demand Kellogg pointed out that McEnery had broken the law by “openly referring to himself as Governor of the State...appointing people as public officers and in order to do so has forged the seal of the State.” Then, citing the attempted coup of March 5, he directed the attorney general to indict “McEnery and all others implicated with him, for treason.”
The penalty for treason was death by hanging. Making this accusation was a highly dramatic way of diverting attention and perhaps responsibility.
The massacre proved a new weapon to hammer home a political point. Even before all the bodies had been buried, the national media was assigning blame. The New York Sun knew whose fault it was: President Grant. The massacre was “a natural result of the lawlessness...encouraged by President Grant in order to give a member of his own family predominance...”
Fusionists placed the blame squarely with “the Kellogg–Casey [President Grant’s brother-in-law] party and the Administration,” which, the Picayune claimed, had encouraged Ward and others to take possession of offices to which they were not entitled.
Once again, Louisiana’s failed electoral system was on front pages throughout the country. As The Nation magazine wrote, this was what happened when confidence in that system was lost. “A state of things better fitted to produce explosions of violence...could hardly be imagined.”
The magazine placed at least some blame on “the disgraceful connivance at Washington at the state of things which has converted Louisiana into a South American banana republic and destroyed all confidence on the part of all classes, not only in the law, but in a popular vote which produces the law.”
As Warmoth had threatened weeks earlier, chaos had come to America.