Colfax Massacre - Background

Background

In 1864 federals in Louisiana gave the vote to only a few blacks based on Union military service, payment of taxes and "intellectual fitness." In March 1865 Unionist planter James Madison Wells became governor and at first opposed Negro suffrage. However, attempts by ex-Confederate legislatures to make blacks work under a system of contracts that closely resembled slavery caused Wells to support allowing blacks to vote and disfranchising ex-Confederates (whites) instead. To accomplish this, he scheduled a convention for July 30, 1866. It was postponed because of the New Orleans Massacre, which left thirty-eight dead, all but four of them black. When President Andrew Johnson blamed the massacre on Republican agitation, a popular national backlash against Johnson's policies caused voters to elect a majority Republican Congress in 1866. The Civil Rights Act, passed on April 9, 1866 over Andrew Johnson's veto, ended the Black Codes, which had limited the rights of freed slaves and other blacks. On July 16, 1866, Congress extended the life of the Freedman's Bureau over Johnson's veto. Beginning on March 2, 1867 the Reconstruction Act, passed over Johnson's veto, required that blacks be allowed to vote and that reconstructed Southern states ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.

By April 1868, Congressional legislation resulted in a Republican state government for Louisiana. However, opposition in Louisiana to suffrage for blacks resulted in 1,081 political murders from April to November 1868. Almost all of the victims were black, and some of the whites who were killed were Republicans. In addition to the dead, other men were flogged or had their homes burned to discourage them from voting. President Johnson prevented the Republican governor of Louisiana from using either the state militia or U.S. forces to stop terrorist groups such as the Knights of the White Camellia from threatening blacks who tried to vote.

William Smith Calhoun owned a 14,000-acre (57 km2) plantation in the area that later became Grant Parish. Although Calhoun was a former slaveowner, he lived with a mixed-race woman as his common-law wife and supported black equality. On election day of November 1868, he led a group of freedmen to vote. The ballot box was originally to be at a store owned by John Hooe, who threatened to whip blacks who tried to vote. Calhoun arranged for the ballot box to be switched to a plantation store owned by a Republican instead. Republicans got 318 votes, with only 49 for the Democrats. A group of whites threw the ballot box into the Red River, and Democrats arrested Calhoun for alleged election fraud. With the ballot box thrown out, Democrat Michael Ryan claimed a landslide victory. After black Republican election commissioner Hal Frazier was shot by whites, Calhoun drafted a bill which created a new parish out of part of Winn Parish and part of Rapides Parish. Calhoun hoped that he would have more political control over things that happened in the new parish, named after Grant.

After Ulysses S. Grant became President in 1868, he lobbied hard for the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified February 3, 1870), which guaranteed that blacks, most of whom were newly freed slaves, would have an equal right to vote. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other supremacist groups continued violent attacks and killed scores of blacks in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere to discourage their voting in the 1870 elections. On May 31, 1870 Congress passed an Enforcement Act based on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They followed this with the Ku Klux Klan Act, enacted April 20, 1871. Grant used this authority to suspend writ of habeas corpus and use the army to stop Klan violence.

Governor Henry Clay Warmoth struggled to maintain political balance in Louisiana. Among his appointments, he installed William Ward, a black Union veteran, as commanding officer of Co.A, 6th Infantry Regiment, Louisiana State Militia, a new unit to be based in Grant Parish to help control the violence there and in other Red River parishes. Ward, born a slave in 1840 in Charleston, South Carolina, had learned to read and write as a valet to a master in Richmond, Virginia. In 1864 he escaped and went to Fortress Monroe, where he joined the Union Army and served until after General Robert E. Lee's surrender. About 1870 he came to Grant Parish, where he had a friend, and quickly became active among local blacks in the Republican Party. After his appointment to the militia, Ward recruited other freedmen for his forces, several of whom had been veterans.