Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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eleven months I had a little girl born to me. I did not want more children, but my
mother-in-law told me it was a terrible sin to do anything to keep from having chil-
dren and that the Lord only sent just what I could take care of and if I heard of any-
thing to do I was told it was injurious, so I did not try.
In eleven months again, October 25, I had another little puny girl. In twenty-three
months, Sept. 25th, I had a seven-lb. boy. In ten months, July 15, I had a seven-
months baby that lived five hours. In eleven months, June 20, I had another little girl.
In seventeen months, Nov. 30, another boy. In nine months a four months’ miscar-
riage. In twelve months another girl, and in three and a half years another girl.
All of these children were born into poverty; the father’s health was always poor,
and when the third girl was born he was discharged from the road because of his
disability, yet he was still able to put children into the world. When the oldest child
was twelve years old the father died of concussion of the brain while the youngest
child was born two months after his death.
Now, Mrs. Sanger, I did not want those children, because even in my ignorance I
had sense enough to know that I had no right to bring those children into such a
world where they could not have decent care, for I was not able to do it mys elf
nor hire it done. I prayed and I prayed that they would die when they were born.
Praying did no good and to-day I have read and studied enough to kno w that I
am the mother of seven living children and that I committed a crime by bringing
them into the world, their father was syph ilitic (I di d not know about suc h things
when I was a girl). One son is to be sent to Mexico, while one of my girls is a victim
of the white slave traffic.
Source: Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race (New York: Brentano’s, 1920), 74–82.
536 Women’s Movement (1870s)
Colfax Massacre (1873)
During the spring of 1873, a siege and massacre occurred between black and white
Civil War veterans. William Ward, a former slave, a Union Army veteran, and a
Republican state representative, led the blacks of Grant Parish, Louisiana. They
were opposed by a white paramilitary force, led by Sheriff Christopher Columbus
Nash, a captain in the Confederate Army. Three white supremacists and about 150
blacks were killed, including about 48 execut ed as prisoners hours after the fight
ended. Earlier estimates of the number of blacks murdered ranged from 64 to 400.
During th e antebellum period, Meredith Smit h Calhoun owned 14,000 acres
and 700 slaves in what was known as Calhoun’s Landing. Later named Colfax,
in h onor of Schuyler Colfax (1823–1885), the v ice president under Ulysses S.
Grant, it became the parish seat to Grant Parish, which was named for the 18th
president.
Henry Clay Warmoth (1842–1931), a carpetbagger from Illinois, was elected
governor of Louisiana in 1868. He created Grant Parish in 1869 and gerryman-
dered the region so that black electoral majorities were adjacent to white parishes.
Grant Parish was juxtaposed between fertile cotton fields to the west and the
northern limit of sugarcane area of Louisiana. The Calhoun plantation previously
had s ugarcane planted, but the sugar culture had since moved southward—by
Reconstruction, the area produced cotton, corn, and pecans. The Red River pro-
vided not only fertile soil, but steamboat transport to New Orleans.
By 1870, over 364,000 African Americans, over half of that sta te’s residents,
lived in Louisiana, and of these, 210 held political office. Grant Parish had 2,400
blacks to 2,200 whites, as the governor deliberately set the borders to favor
Republican rule. The rural settle ment of Colfa x could not be considered a town
as such, but a collection of old plantation buildings at the summit of the east bank
of the Red River. It was inhabited primarily by white lawyers and merchants, in lit-
tle houses with extras rooms for travelers, which they called hotels. A black settle-
ment within one mile north and west of Colfax was called “Smithfield Quarters.”
Also, Colfax lacked telegraph lines, so communications with the governor in
New Orleans required traveling downstream in steamboats.
On May 13, 1870, Congress enacted the Enforcement Act, which made racial
terrorism a federal offense. To put this law into effect, Grant created the Department
of Justice. His first attorney general was Amos Tappan Akerman (1821–1880), a
537
native of New Hampshire, who had lived in Cartersville, Georgia, where he
despised the K lan. Amendments to the Enforcement Act, known as the Ku Klux
Klan Act, were added by Congress on April 20, 1871. These laws were desig ned
to enforce provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment that provided citizenship and
voting rights to anyone born in the United States. This act would be tested in the
case about the Colfax Massacre, United States v. Cruikshank (1876).
The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872 was particularly contentious.
Both candidates claimed victory: the Republican, Vermont-born William Pitt
Kellogg, had served as a colonel in the Union Army; in 1868, he was appointed
to the U.S. Senate, and h e resided in New Orleans; the Conservative John O.
McEnery, a cotton planter’s son from Monroe, Louisiana, was a colonel in the
Confederate Army. Three state returning boards, charged with authorizing elec-
tions, delivered three different verdicts. Both men held simultaneous inaugurations
on January 13, 1873, in the Reconstruction-era capital of New Orleans. McEnery
approved the selection of Alphonse Cazabat as judge and C. C. Nash as sheriff of
Grant Parish. Kellogg c ertified two Republicans, Robert C. Register as judge,
and Daniel Shaw as sheriff.
On March 23, four of Kellogg’s associates appeared in Colfax, including Green
Brantley, the black tax colle ctor; Eli H. Flowers, a black fr om Pennsylvania; and
Captain William Ward, the black representative from the Louisiana legislature.
On March 25, Register and Shaw broke into the courthouse, ousting Sherriff Nash;
by March 31, Shaw had deputized several blacks to defend the courthouse. White
citizens then proposed a meeting, open to all, on April 1, in Colfax, but this meet-
ing never occurred, due to the blacks blocking white entry into Colfax. On April 5,
a group of unidentified white men murde red Jesse McKinney, an unarmed black
man, while he constructed a fence in front of his house. On April 9, Colfax attor-
ney William R. Rutland met Kellogg at the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans,
informing the governor of unlawful activity that had occurred. Although the adju-
tant general, James Longstreet, expressed willingness to go to Colfax with some
police, none was sent.
The major assault by Nash took place on Easter Sunday, April 13, when he led a
paramilitary force of about 300 men armed with Winchester repeating rifles or pis-
tols. This far outmatched the 150 black militia’s Enfields and shotguns. Nash’s
troops also exhibited mobility, as each man owned a horse. On Saturday, April 12,
the militiamen dug a t rench around the courthouse as a defense. But by Sunday
morning, the trench w as only two feet deep and encompassed only three sides of
the small rectangular building.
At noon, Nash met Levi Allen at Smithfield Quarters, demanding that Allen and
the blacks surrender. Mindful of the previous week’s murder of McKinney, Allen
refused. Nash’s attack began a half-hour later, as he occupied Smithfield Quarters,
538 Colfax Massacre (18 73)
and moved to the center of Colfax. About 2:00 p.m., Nash’s cannon fire inundated
the militia’s trenches, and they retreated to the courthouse. The paramilitaries then
forced Benjamin Brimm, a black prisoner, to to rch the courtho use roof. As the
building burned, Nash sent James West Hadnot and Sidney Harris into the court-
house to secure another surrender, but both were shot, likely by Nash’s men. By
3:00 p.m., fighting had ceased, and at least 37 blacks w ere taken prisoner. That
night, William J. “Bill” Cruikshank took charge of the prisoners, telling them that
he was transferring them to a sugar house for the night, before they would be taken
to jail. Instead, each prisoner was marched out of the camp and summarily
executed. Brimm survived two shots and later testified.
Kellogg finally sent two marshals, Theodore W. DeKlyne and William Wright,
to Colfax on April 12, but they did not arrive in Colfax until April 15. When
Cruikshank and others were tried in February 1874, it ended in a mistrial. The sec-
ond trial, in May 1874, concluded with four acquittals and found five guilty of
conspiracy against a peaceful assembly. The case went through appeals, and the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1876 that the Enforcement Act of 1870 and Four-
teenth Amendment applied only to actions taken by state governments, not private
individuals or private militaries.
Although the exact death toll from the massacre cannot be ascertained, the
courthouse was only 75 feet in length, and could not hold more than 100 people.
T. W. DeKlyne, the federal marshal who investigated the scene, counted 59 bodies
at the courthouse site. One result of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the South was
the creation of the Department of Justice.
—Ralph Hartsock
See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741);
Antebellum Suppressed Sl ave R evolts (1800s– 1850s); Nat Turner’s Re bellion (1831);
New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906);
Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race
Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots
(1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).
Further Reading
Hogue, James K. Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of
Radical Reconstruction . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Johnson, Manie White. “The Colfax Riot of April, 1873.” Louis iana Historical Quarterly
13 (1930): 391–427.
Keith, LeeAnna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Block Power, White Terror,
and the Death of Recons truction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the
Betrayal of Reconstruction . New York: Henry Holt, 2008.
Colfax Massacre (1873) 539
Freedmen
The massacre that took place at Colfax, Louisiana, on April 13, 187 3, was, in
essence, another of the numerous violent confrontations that took place betwee n
the white “New South” and the newly freed slaves, or freedmen. In the first years
following the end of the Civil War, the Reconstruction-era “carpetbagger” govern-
ments had given the freedmen their first real taste of political freedom: the free-
dom to par ticipate in government. However, it was thos e very governments that
stirred such fierce resentment in the white population of the South, leading to both
the rise in violent altercations like Colfax a nd the creation of numerous white
supremacist groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan.
As early as 1866, a school for the education of the freedmen was established by
the Freedmen’s Bureau, with the assistance of missionaries and one former slave
owner (William Calhoun) and his family. However, such participation was cer-
tainly unusual for Louisiana. Calhoun was atypical in more ways than one. His
marriage to a mulatto woman and his aligning himself with the carpetbagger gov-
ernments certainly would not have made him popular among his white peers.
However, his encouragement and participation in the Freedmen’s Bureau school
was his most outrageous act in t he eyes of local whites. The state’s Freedmen’s
Bureau superintendent described the situation this way. “The feeling [among Lou-
isiana whi tes] is unani mous that [fre edme n] should not own an acre of land nor
have any schools. ...They are more hostile to the establishment of schools than
they are to owning land” (Keith 2008, 51).
The education of the freedmen, an a udacious act in and of itself, was t he first
real step necessary to both poli tical participation and economic empowerment.
The participation of the freedmen in the system of sharecropping that allowed
white landowners to reassert their economic and social dominance in the South
was absolutely vital to the resurgence of a “New South.” All of this was threatened
by the education being offered by the Calhoun family at Colfax. The election of
1872, which saw liberal Republican s and Democrats (Fusionists) win control in
Louisiana, brought the p olitical opposition of the freedmen to a head, leading to
the conflict that took place between the Republican officeholders along with their
freedmen supporters and the newly elected Fusionists at the Colfax courthouse on
April 13.
—Steven L. Danver
Further Reading
Foner, E ric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York:
Harper & Row, 1988.
541
Keith, LeeAnna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror,
and the Death of Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the
Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2008.
Klanism
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by former officers in the Confederate
Army. Klan members were almost exclusively white men, and they relied on gue-
rilla tactics and terrorism to continue the battle for white supremacy in the South.
African Americans were t he primary targets of early Klan violence in the post-
bellum South because their newfound freedom and citizenship rights greatly
threatened the racial caste system upon which the Southern way of life so heavily
relied. Klan members targeted African American leaders, politicians, business-
men, and land owners to maint ain control over sout hern blacks. Northern politi-
cians, often referred to as Carpetbaggers, and southern Republicans, known as
Scalawags, were often t argets of violence as well because their political values
contradicted the goals of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. This first version
of the Ku Klux Klan lasted fewer than five years before dissolving i nto other
organizations and its members being targeted by southern state militias in 1869
and 1870.
The Klan was revived in 1915 by William J. Simmons during a ceremony at
Stone Mountain, Georgia. The second Klan was founded by a generation of south-
erners who sought to reclaim the losses incurred by the Civil War and
Reconstruction. Unlike the first Klan, this second version quickly gained main-
stream support. Its foundation was part of a larger cultural movement in the United
States, and this resulted in greater acceptance of the terrorist organization. Part of
the driving force behind this cultural phenomenon was the movie Birth of a Nation
(1915) by D. W. Griffith. This film depicted Reconstruction as a period when Afri-
can Americans and Republicans were unable to control their animalistic impulses
and proceeded to destroy c herished Southern traditions, run amok in political
office, and rape white women. The support garnered by Birth of a Nation is
immeasurable, but the movie turned a profit of over $300 millio n in modern-day
dollars.
Because of its greater mainstream acceptance, the second Klan gained popular-
ity in the North as well as the South. Klan membership skyrocketed in the 1920s,
and cities such as Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia were home to tens of thou-
sands of Klan members. By its peak in the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan counted
542 Colfax Massacre (18 73)
between four and five million members, or over 10 percent of the population of the
United States. The Klan’s northern popularity and acceptance also increased its
targets. Northern Klan members discriminated and attacked all ethnic, racial, and
religious minority groups, especially Jews, Eastern Europeans, and black
migrants.
The second Ku Klux Klan diminished greatly by the 1950s as growing segrega-
tion decreased the demand for such an organization. However, remaining
Klansmen played prevalent roles in advocating housing discriminati on and vio-
lence against minority groups throughout the late 20th century. The Klan’s num-
bers have continued to dwindle over the last several decades, but the legacy of
the Klan and several thousand current members ensure that it is one of the most
hated and feared terrorist organizations in the history of the United States.
—William Sturkey
Further Reading
MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Trelease, Allen. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern
Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.
Wade, W. C. TheFieryCross:TheKuKluxKlaninAmerica. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Colfax Massacre (1873) 543
Brooks-Baxter War (1874)
For about one mo nth in 1874, two men claimed to be the governor of Arkansas,
Elisha Baxter and Joseph Brooks. This followed the disputed election of 1872, in
wh ich Baxter was declared the governor. This dispute eventually escalated into
an armed confli ct, when forces led by Brooks ousted Baxter from the governor’s
office.
In the wake of the Civil War, carpetbaggers from the Union governed many of
the states formerly in the Confederacy, including Arkansas. Congress had enacted
the Reconstruction Act (1867), which required states formerly in the Confederacy
to adopt new constitutions that allowed African American males to vote. The 1868
Arkansas constitution enhanced powers of the governor, restoring the four-year
term for servic e and granting him authority to appoint executive branch officials
and judges.
In Arkansas, there were three major political factions during Reconstruction.
The Democrats, supporting the Ku Klux Klan, wished to continue the practices
of ea rlier times. The Republican Party was split. The Minstrel Republicans, led
by Senator Powell Clayton, who had served as governor until 1871, were so named
because one of their leaders, musician John G. Price, had performed in minstrel
shows. Th e Brindletail Republicans were led by Joseph Brooks, whose voice
resembled a brindle-tail bull. Brooks supported civil rights for former slaves and
economic assistance to blacks and lower-class whites, and allied himself with the
Liberal Republicans, those who backed Horace Greeley for president. These Re-
form Republicans nominated carpetbagger Joseph Brooks on a platform that
would reduce taxes, end disfranchisement, and limit specific powers of the gover-
nor (appointments). This ticket was also supported by former governor Harris Fla-
nigan (1817–1874), a Democrat.
The gubernatorial election, held on November 5, 1872, was particularly conten-
tious. Minstrels had nominated a native Unionist, Elisha Baxter, from Batesville to
face the Brindletails’ nominee, Joseph Brooks. Results were not known for several
days. By November 30, the Fayetteville Democrat declared Brooks the winner. But
the Gazette, publis hed in Little R ock, published official returns on December 13.
These showed that Baxter received 41,68 1 votes to 38,41 5 f or Brooks. But four
counties, Greene, Poinset, Johnson, and Scott, had not filed their returns. Following
what some called voter fraud, a majorit y commi tted by the Minstrels, Baxter was
545