Colfax Massacre - The Louisiana Election of 1872

The Louisiana Election of 1872

In Louisiana, Republican governor Henry Clay Warmoth defected to the Liberal Republicans (a group that opposed Reconstruction) in 1872. Warmoth previously supported a constitutional amendment that allowed former Confederates to vote again. A "Fusionist" coalition of Liberal Republicans and Democrats nominated ex-Confederate battalion commander John McEnery to succeed him as governor. In return, Democrats were to send Warmoth to Washington as a U.S. Senator. Opposing McEnery was Republican William Pitt Kellogg, one of Louisiana's U.S. Senators. Voting on November 4, 1872 resulted in dual governments, as a Fusionist-dominated returning board declared McEnery the winner while a faction of the board proclaimed Kellogg the winner. Both administrations held inaugural ceremonies and certified their lists of local candidates.

It took some time for a Republican federal judge in New Orleans to order that Kellogg and the Republican-majority legislature were to be seated, and for Grant to authorize U.S. army troops to protect Kellogg's government. McEnery's faction tried to seize the state arsenal at Jackson Square, but Kellogg had the state militia seize dozens of leaders of McEnery's faction and control New Orleans. Unrest was so marked that McEnery organized his own paramilitary group. In March he took control of the state house and police stations in New Orleans, where the state government was then located, in what was known as the Battle of Jackson Square. His forces retreated before the arrival of Federal troops. Warmoth was subsequently impeached by the state legislature in a bribery scandal stemming from his actions in the 1872 election.

Warmoth appointed Democrats as parish registrars who ensured the voter rolls included as many whites and as few freedmen as possible. A number of registrars changed the registration site without notifying blacks. They also required blacks to prove they were over 21, while knowing that former slaves did not have birth certificates. In Grant Parish one plantation owner threatened to expel black Republican voters from homes they rented on his land. Fusionists also tampered with ballot boxes on election day. One was found with a hole in it, apparently used for stuffing the ballot box. As a result, Grant Parish Fusionists claimed a landslide victory, even though blacks outnumbered whites by 776 to 630.

Warmoth issued commissions to Fusionist Alphonse Cazabat and Christopher Columbus Nash, elected parish judge and sheriff, respectively. Like many white men in the South, Nash was a Confederate veteran (as an officer, he had been held for a year and a half as a prisoner of war at Johnson's Island in Ohio). Cazabat and Nash took their oaths of office in the Colfax courthouse on January 2, 1873. They then dispatched the documents to Governor McEnery in New Orleans.

William Pitt Kellogg countered by issuing commissions to the Republican slate for Grant Parish on January 17 and 18. By then Nash and Cazabat controlled the courthouse. Republican Robert C. Register insisted that he, not Alphonse Cazabat, was the parish judge, and that Republican Daniel Wesley Shaw, not Nash, was to be the sheriff. On the night of March 25, the Republicans seized the courthouse and took their oaths of office. They sent their oaths to the Kellogg administration in New Orleans.

Grant Parish was one of a number of new parishes created by the Republican government in an effort to build local support in the state. Both the land and its people were originally tied to the Calhoun family, whose plantation had covered more than the borders of the new parish. The freedmen had been slaves on the plantation. The parish also took in less-developed hill country. The total population had a narrow majority of 2400 freedmen, who mostly voted Republican, and 2200 whites, mostly Democrats. Statewide political tensions were reflected in the rumors going around each community, often about fears of attacks or outrages, which added to local tensions.