The Colfax Massacre Trial

Levi Nelson and Benjamin Brim
From Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality

Interesting Links

Book Review: The Day Freedom Died by Charles Lane and The Colfax Massacre by LeeAnna Keith (Eric Foner)

“Reconstruction, Rights, & Retaliation” (National Museum of African American History & Culture)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Destruction of a Free Ballot,” Joseph H. Rainey
• “They All Fired at Her,” Cynthia Townsend
• “The Murder of John Walthall,” Maria Carter

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“The Louisiana Murders—Gathering the Dead and Wounded,” from the May 10, 1873, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Courtesy New York Public Library.

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Tensions had been rising across the state of Louisiana during the months following the election of 1872. Two candidates declared victory in the governor’s race: John McEnery, supported by a “Fusion” ticket of Democrats and conservative Republicans, and William Pitt Kellogg, the Republican nominee. Both parties held inauguration ceremonies on January 14 and established rival state governments and legislatures, although President Ulysses S. Grant recognized Kellogg as the legitimate governor. “It has been bitterly and persistently alleged that Kellogg was not elected,” Grant wrote two years later. “Whether he was or not is not altogether certain, nor is it any more certain that his competitor, McEnery, was chosen. The election was a gigantic fraud, and there are no reliable returns of its result.” The tensions reached a climax with the Battle of Liberty Place in September 1874, when five thousand members and supporters of the Crescent City White League attempted a coup against Kellogg’s government in New Orleans and held the city for three days, disbanding only when federal troops were dispatched to the city.

During the two years leading up to the skirmish, similar actions occurred across the state, as local factions vied for control. Grant Parish, which had been formed in 1869 in north-central Louisiana out of portions of two existing parishes, was named after the recently inaugurated president; its seat was named after Grant’s vice president, Schuyler Colfax. Black citizens outnumbered white, yet in January 1873 the two Confederate veterans who ran on the Fusionist ticket for sheriff and judge assumed control. During the night of March 25, however, the Republican candidates took possession of the courthouse in Colfax and established as guards an improvised militia of Black citizens. Brawls and arguments continued over the next two weeks and attempts to negotiate a peaceful resolution were shattered on April 5, when Jesse McKinney, a Black farmer, was shot by white men on horseback in front of his wife and six-year-old son. His murder caused hundreds of African American men, women, and children to flee to the Colfax courthouse for safety.

Christopher Columbus Nash, the ousted Fusionist sheriff, formed a posse to retake the courthouse, and entered Colfax on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873. What happened next is perhaps best summarized by U.S. Attorney James R. Beckwith, who had sent a representative to the town after hearing what turned out to be false reports of an earlier “riot” by Black residents. Beckwith’s telegram to the Attorney General on April 17 was soon published in newspapers throughout the country:

Deputy Marshal DeKlyne has returned from Colfax. He arrived there the day after the massacre. The details are horrible. The democrats (white) of Grant parish attempted to oust the incumbant parish officers and failed, and the sheriff protecting the officers with a colored posse. Several days afterward recruits from other parishes, to the number of 300, came to the assistance of the assailants, when they demanded the surrender of the colored posse. This was refused. An attack was made and the negroes were driven into the court house, the court house fired, and the negroes killed as they left the burning building. After resistance ceased, 65 negroes terribly mutilated, were found dead near the ruins of the court house, and 30 known to have been taken prisoners, are said to have been shot after they surrendered and thrown into the river. Two [of] the assailants wounded. The slaughter is greater than in the riot of 1866 in this city [New Orleans]. I will send a full report by mail.

At least seventy and probably more than a hundred Black men were murdered in the confrontation and the subsequent massacre. According to the judge’s summary at the trial the following year, the corpses were left where they were until Tuesday, when they were “buried by a deputy marshal [DeKlyne] and an officer of the militia from New Orleans. These persons found fifty-nine dead bodies. They showed pistol-shot wounds, the great majority in the head, and most of them in the back of the head.” Other charred remains were found near the courthouse, and six other bodies were discovered under a warehouse. Three members of the white posse also died from their wounds; two of them—including James Hadnot, the state representative from the parish—appear to have been struck by fire from their own men.

Beckwith indicted more than one hundred men for the massacre but was unable to arrest most of them because of local resistance. He ended up bringing nine of the ringleaders to trial in New Orleans on February 23, 1874, and charged them with conspiring to violate the Enforcement Act of 1870, a federal statute passed to prevent attacks by state officials and by organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Among the survivors who testified were Levi Nelson and Benjamin Brim, and their testimonies are presented below as our Story of the Week selection.

The trial ended with the acquittal of one man, but the fate of the remaining defendants was delayed by a hung jury. Beckwith retried the case from May 18 to June 10, and won convictions against three of the defendants, who faced possible sentences of ten years in prison. William B. Woods, the federal circuit court judge who tried the case, rejected motions for a new trial, but Joseph P. Bradley, the U.S. Supreme Court justice assigned to the Fifth Circuit, overturned the verdicts. The case, United States v. Cruikshank, went on appeal to the full court, which unanimously upheld Bradley’s decision on March 27, 1876, and the perpetrators were never punished for their crimes.

In his opinion for the Court, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite severely limited the reach of the Enforcement Act, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment did not enable the Federal government to protect the right to assemble, to bear arms, or to vote. “Sovereignty, for this purpose, rests alone with the State,” concluded Waite. “It is no more the duty or within the power of the United States to punish for a conspiracy to falsely imprison or murder within a State, than it would be to punish for false imprisonment or murder itself.” Similarly, Waite contended, the Fourteenth Amendment did not protect citizens against the criminal acts of private individuals: it merely “prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another.” The Cruikshank decision effectively eviscerated federal post–Civil War civil rights acts, led to the rule of “Jim Crow” in the South, and inhibited prosecutions of white supremacist terrorism cases for ninety years.

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Notes: The nine defendants were William Cruikshank, Austin P. Gibbons, John Hadnot (brother of James Hadnot, who had been killed during the massacre), Tom Hickman, Bill Irwin, Alfred Lewis, Donas Lemoine, Prudhomme Lemoine, and Clement Penn. All but Gibbons are mentioned in the testimony reprinted below. Lewis was the sole defendant aquitted in the first trial.

Alexander Tillman, a Black farmer, was one of the leaders of the courthouse defenders. Daniel Wesley Shaw, the white Republican sheriff of Grant Parish who had helped wrest control of the courthouse from the Fusionists in late March, ended up testifying as a defense witness, claiming implausibly that he had been held prisoner by the Black defenders of the courthouse and denying that he had authorized them to act as guards or as a posse against the intruders. After the massacre, both Shaw and Robert A. Register, the Republican who had been installed in March as judge, retained their positions. .

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Fifth day’s proceedings in the trial of J. P. Hadnot and others, charged with conspiracy and murder in Grant parish, in April of last year. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!
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Letters from Matamoros

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885)
From My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife

Interesting Links

“General Grant in Love and War” (Gilbert King, Smithsonian Magazine)

Julia Dent Grant (National Park Service)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Armies of the Wilderness,” Herman Melville
• “The Fall of Richmond,” Sallie Brock
• “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” James Thurber

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My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife
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Steel engraving by Scottish American artist Alexander Hay Ritchie (1822–1895), based on a daguerreotype of brevet second lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant in 1843. From A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant by Albert Deane Richardson, 1885. Daguerreotype of Julia Dent Grant, c. 1855–61. Courtesy of National First Ladies’ Library.

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In the January and February 1909 issues of Circle and Success Magazine, Emma Dent Casey published a charming memoir, in which she recalled a meeting sixty-six years earlier at the White Haven plantation near St. Louis:

I was a very little girl when General Grant first came to our house; in fact, I was not yet seven years old. It was I whom he first met, and in years after when my sister Julia had become his wife it used to be my teasing boast that I knew him best because I had known him longest.

Months before little Emma met her future brother-in-law, twenty-one-year-old Ulysses S. Grant had been promoted to brevet second lieutenant after graduating from West Point, where Emma and Julia’s brother, Fred Dent, was his roommate. When Grant was ordered to report to Jefferson Barracks outside of St. Louis in the fall of 1843, Fred suggested a visit to White Haven. As it happened, seventeen-year-old Julia, the eldest daughter, was not home for that first visit, nor were any of her four brothers, “so the burden of entertaining Fred’s friend fell upon my parents and sister Nelly [Ellen],” who was fifteen at the time.

Grant continued to make visits to the family over the winter, and in early 1844 he finally met Julia. By the summer he had proposed, and she had accepted—although the couple kept their engagement a secret from her family. The following April, while he was stationed outside Natchitoches, Louisiana, he requested leave, traveled to St. Louis, and surprised the Dent family by showing up at their door. Grant sought an audience with Julia’s father, Colonel Frederick Dent, and in her memoir Emma repeats the story that became family lore:

“Mr. Dent,” he said, “I want to marry your daughter, Miss Julia.” . . .
“Mr. Grant,” my father spoke at last, “if it were Nelly you wanted, now, I’d say, ‘Yes.’”
“But I don’t want Nelly.” said the soldier bluntly. “I want Julia.”

Colonel Dent opposed Julia’s marrying an officer; her past health issues had convinced him that she would never be able to withstand the rigors of army life. But, according to Emma, “When Julia wanted a thing of my father she usually got it.” The couple agreed, however, to hold off for a year or two, as things were heating up along the Mexican border.

On March 1, 1845, Congress voted to annex Texas; on July 4, Texas voted for annexation; on December 29, Texas was admitted to the Union as a state. These events increased tensions with Mexico. “The flashpoint of controversy,” write Ron Chernow in his recent biography of Grant, “was whether the Nueces River formed the southern border of Texas, as Mexico believed, or the Rio Grande, 130 miles farther south, as the Polk administration insisted.” Grant’s regiment was already encamped in the disputed territory when Mexico declared war on April 24, 1846.

Throughout the conflict, Lieutenant Grant wrote letters to his fiancée. In July, during a lull in the hostilities (between the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in May and the Battle of Monterrey in September), he sent two letters from the Mexican city of Matamoros (which Grant spells Matamoras). Strategically located on the southern bank of the Rio Grande below the southernmost tip of Texas, the city had been captured and occupied by American forces in mid-May. These two letters, which show a side of Grant unfamiliar to most readers, have been included in a new collection, My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife, and we present them here as our Story of the Week selection.

Note: A bracketed space [ ] is used to indicate where words are missing or illegible as a result of damage to the manuscript of the letter.

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If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links

Video: James Thurber interviewed in 1956 by Alastair Cooke (YouTube)

“Pour One Out for Ulysses S. Grant” (Adam Gornik, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Greatest Man in the World,” James Thurber
• “The Man Who Came to Dinner, With George Kaufman Directing,” Morton Eustis
• “Battle of Gettysburg,” Arthur James Lyon Fremantle

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“I was wrassling some general. Some general with a beard.” James Thurber’s drawing for “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox.”      
© 1935 James Thurber. Image reproduced by arrangement with Rosemary A. Thurber c/o The Barbara Hogenson Agency.

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At the end of 1930 Scribner’s Magazine began publishing what would prove to be a short-lived series of “alternative history” pieces. The first installment, in the November issue, was “If Booth Had Missed Lincoln.” This was followed by a contribution from none other than Winston Churchill, who turned the concept on its head. It was bafflingly titled “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg”—but, as we all know, Lee didn’t win the Battle of Gettysburg. Instead, Churchill’s essay purported to be written by a historian in a world in which Lee had won not only the battle but also the entire war. This fictional historian, in turn, speculates what might have happened if Lee had not won the battle. This type of dizzying zaniness brought out the parodist in Thurber, who published “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” in The New Yorker in December. The next month Scribner’s published a third essay (“If Napoleon Had Escaped to America”) before bringing the series to an end. All three pieces were soon forgotten, but Thurber’s parody became one of his most famous and beloved works.

Three decades later “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” enjoyed a second life when it was included in the hit revue A Thurber Carnival. Virtually every review proclaimed it as one of the show’s highlights. During an interview, a reporter admitted to Thurber that “the Grant skit” was one of her favorite parts of the show. Thurber responded, “A woman said to me, ‘I don’t like the bastardization of history,’ That woman didn’t know the point of the thing and she didn’t know history. And I don’t like my humor to be called mild and gentle.”

A Thurber Carnival opened on Broadway in early 1960 and received excellent reviews, but it closed after seventeen weeks because of a citywide actor’s strike. When the show reopened for three months in the fall, Thurber agreed to play himself in the quasi-revival. His old college friend Elliott Nugent, a stage and screen actor who collaborated with Thurber on the 1940 Broadway comedy The Male Animal, remarked, “That S.O.B. has been trying to get on the stage for forty years, to my certain knowledge.” Yet Thurber was a self-described perfectionist and had a reputation for stubbornness, and the crew and actors were understandably nervous about including the untested writer in such a prominent role.

They need not have worried; his stage debut was an extraordinary success, and he ended up appearing in eighty-eight performances. “He received crashing applause upon entering, exiting, and at curtain call,” writes biographer Harrison Kinney. “He rarely flubbed a line.” Even when he made a mistake, he recovered quickly and his ornery ad-libs often earned even more laughter. Once, in a scene that depicted him dictating to his “secretary,” he gave his address as “Westport, Connecticut” rather than West Cornwall and promptly sneered, “These publishers have me so mixed up I don’t even know where I live.”

A Thurber Carnival has been revived numerous times in the last half century—and it is still a staple among regional theaters. And now “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” has been given yet another theatrical life in an altogether different form. Over the next few months the actor Bill Murray, with cellist Jan Vogler, violinist Mira Wang, and pianist Vanessa Perez, are on the North American tour of their New Worlds show, which blends classical music, American standards, and literary readings—including Murray’s innovative rendering of Thurber’s classic story.

Note: “An army surrenders on its stomach” is Thurber’s distortion of the saying “An army marches on its stomach,” which has been attributed to both Napoleon and Frederick the Great. There is no evidence for either attribution; the quote first appeared in English in the early 1900s.

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The morning of the ninth of April, 1865, dawned beautifully. General Meade was up with the first streaks of crimson in the sky. General Hooker and General Burnside were up, and had breakfasted, by a quarter after eight. The day continued beautiful. It drew on toward eleven o'clock. General Ulysses S. Grant was still not up. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Fall of Richmond

Sallie Brock (1831–1911)
From The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
“Did My Great-Grandfather Beat Robert E. Lee?” (Paul Donnelly, The New York Times)

“Lincoln’s Visit to Richmond” (National Park Service)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Union Looters” (December 1865), Mary S. Mallard
• “Our Visit to Richmond” (July 1864), James R. Gilmore

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The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It
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The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It
Four volumes • 3,624 pages

“Ruins of Richmond, VA, 1865,” by photographer Mathew Brady (1822–1896). National Archives and Records Administration, College Park. Wikimedia Commons.

By the spring of 1865 Robert E. Lee’s army of about 60,000 men held a line in Virginia that extended from outside the Confederate capital, Richmond, forty miles south to Petersburg. In an attempt to open an escape route to the west for his army, Lee attacked Fort Stedman, a Union strongpoint east of Petersburg, on March 25. The attack failed, and about 3,000 Confederates were killed, wounded, or captured.

The defeat marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. After heavy fighting on March 31, Union forces advanced on Five Forks, a crossroads about twelve miles southwest of Petersburg defended by a force of 10,000 under Major General George E. Pickett, who had been ordered by Lee to hold the position “at all hazards.” On the afternoon of April 1 the Union Army broke the Confederate lines at Five Forks. General Ulysses S. Grant then ordered an assault on the Petersburg defenses at dawn on Sunday, April 2. Within hours Lee telegraphed the Confederate War Department that both Petersburg and Richmond would have to be abandoned that night.

It is with Jefferson Davis’s receipt of that message that Sallie Brock begins the following account, which describes the fall of Richmond—and the devastation caused entirely by the actions of the fleeing Confederate military. After a triumphant entry, Union soldiers struggled to put out the fires, but it is clear from accounts that the conflagration was far too widespread—and the damage was already far too extensive—for any effort to save much of the city. On Tuesday, April 4, President Lincoln ignored the concerns for his safety and entered Richmond with his son Tad to meet with Union leaders, speak with the residents, and survey the damage.

In a later chapter of her account Brock describes the effects of the city’s destruction on the population:

The miseries of our situation which would have been incalculable at best were inconceivably enhanced by the disastrous burning of the business portion of the city. Nearly all the supplies of food were kept in the stores which were consumed by the fire and our poor people were almost totally dependent upon the mercy of the captors. For several months no remunerative employment could be obtained by the masses and they were compelled to live by charity.

Born in Madison County, Virginia, Brock had moved with her family to Richmond in 1858. In early 1861 she was working as a tutor about fifty miles away, in King and Queen County, but returned to Richmond when the war began and remained there for its duration. After the fall of Richmond she moved to New York City and two years later anonymously published her account of the war, which has remained in print for most of the past century and a half. In 1873 she published a poorly received (and soon forgotten) novel, Kenneth, My King, described by one recent scholar as “four hundred pages of courtship.” In 1882 Brock briefly returned to Virginia to marry Richard Putnam, an Episcopal minister from Boston. The couple lived in Brooklyn for the rest of their lives, but both were buried in Richmond.

Notes: The footnote on page 643 refers to the marriage of Lieutenant Colonel Walter H. Taylor, an assistant adjutant general on General Lee’s staff, to Ellen Selden Saunders. A receiving ship (p. 644) is a vessel where new recruits were sent to await service assignments. The “long lines of negro cavalry” (p. 646) were members of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, commanded by Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr. The “morbidly sensitive clause” mocked on the last page was included in General George Shepley’s order of April 3: “No treasonable or offensive expressions insulting the flag, the cause or the armies of the Union will hereafter be allowed.”

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The morning of the 2d of April, 1865, dawned brightly over the capital of the Southern Confederacy. A soft haze rested over the city, but above that, the sun shone with the warm pleasant radiance of early spring. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Armies of the Wilderness

Herman Melville (1819–1891)
From The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links
Driving Tour: The 1864 Overland Campaign (Civil War Talk)

“Melville’s About-Face”: about the two versions of his “Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh” (Cynthia Wachtell, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Fiddler,” Herman Melville
• “The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming

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The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It
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Previous volumes:
The First Year
The Second Year
The Third Year

Skull and bones of unburied soldiers along Orange Plank Road in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, photographed by G. O. Brown, 1864. Image courtesy of Civil War Saga.

Herman Melville and his brother Allan arrived in Virginia on April 16, 1864, to visit their cousin Lieutenant Colonel Henry Gansevoort— but the soldier was away from base when they arrived. By the time Gansevoort returned to camp, the Melville brothers had departed on a scouting mission in search of the Confederate rangers led by John S. Mosby, whose guerilla tactics plagued Union troops in a region around Middleburg known widely as “Mosby’s Confederacy.” A full five days after their arrival, then, the brothers finally met up with Gansevoort, and they were able to spend less than two days together.

During this period General Ulysses S. Grant was amassing his forces for a push against the Army of Northern Virginia, led by General Robert E. Lee. In early May Grant moved his army across the Rapidan River and the two sides clashed in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, where the ground was already littered with the unburied skulls and bones from the previous year’s Battle of Chancellorsville. By mid-May the action moved from the Wilderness to the crossroads at Spotsylvania Court House.

For the forty-four year old novelist, the journey in April was something of a lark; “I enjoyed my visit very much, & would not have missed it on any count,” he wrote to his cousin on May 10, when Gansevoort would have been in the midst of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Melville closed this same letter with effusive well-wishes: “Farewell. May two small but choice constellations alight on your shoulders. May your sword be a terror to the despicable foe, & your name in after ages be used by Southern matrons to frighten their children by. . . . Farewell, my hero & God bless you.”

Yet, in spite of the holiday-like spirit of Melville’s jaunt (and the patriotic bravado of his letter), the horrors of the war were very much in evidence and presented him with the raw material for his first book of poetry, Battle-Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, published in 1866. The experiences of his visit to the front in April 1864 are immediately obvious in two of the book’s poems, “The Scout Toward Aldie,” about Mosby and the fear he instilled among Union forces, and “The Armies of the Wilderness.” A century later Robert Penn Warren would write:

It is, in many ways, a very remarkable document in the history of American poetry, and a remarkable commentary on the moment in American history. . . . In a very profound way it can be said that the Civil War made Melville a poet. . . . [It gave him] the kind of big, athletic, overmastering subject which he always needed for his best work, and it was bloodily certified by actuality.

Melville’s book, Warren notes, “reads like a log of the conflict, running in chronological order from the execution of John Brown to the Reconstruction.” In a more recent study, Cynthia Wachtell examines how these poems defied the conventions of the day by scorning comfortably bloodless images of the battlefield: “Melville boldly ventures to address topics that other Civil War writers of his day studiously avoided. . . . He refuses to disguise war’s horror.”

Notes: In Genesis 21, Paran (page 104) is the wilderness dwelling place of the outcast Ishmael. In 1719 Thomas, sixth Lord Fairfax of Cameron, inherited title to more than five million acres of land in Virginia—i.e., Lord Fairfax’s parchment deeds (p. 105). A stanza on page 107 refers to Confederate Lieutenant General Stonewall Jackson’s successful attack against Union forces during the Battle of Chancellorsville (May 3, 1863)—and his death when his own men accidentally opened fire on a returning scouting party.

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