Centralization and its discontents in reconstruction Louisiana

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 105-131

  Powell, Lawrence ^a  

^a TULANE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33845914611     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X0600006X     Document Type: Review

References (323)

1. Quoted in William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 107.
2. There has been a long-standing question about whether Lieutenant Governor Oscar Dunn's sudden death in November 1871 was due to arsenic.
3. Warmoth's counterpart in Illinois said he feared the Louisiana party was about to be commandeered by men "who will not scruple to use it for the overthrow of liberty itself." Governor John Palmer to Warmoth, 16 Aug. 1871. See also, H. L. Swords to Warmoth, 16 Aug. 1871; and D. Cady Stanton to Warmoth, 21 Aug. 1871, all in the Warmoth papers. Also, Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana After 1868 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1918), 103-5.
4. A superb overview of nineteenth-century nationalism is Eric Hobsbawm, Nations And Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
5. See also Steven Hahn, "Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective," American Historical Review 95 (1990): 75-98.
6. Because emancipation had rendered nugatory the three-fifths clause, southern Democrats stood to gain twenty-five additional seats, threatening Republican control of Congress. Richard Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 23-45.
7. Much of the Union Army was mustered out shortly after Appomattox. The rolls shrank from a million men in May 1865, to a mere 38,000 by the fall of 1866, and most of these were stationed on the Indian frontier. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 148.
8. The literature on state formation, or the lack of it, is examined in Steven Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1-35;
9. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA), 1977), 38-121;
10. Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1-17, 366-415.
11. Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997);
12. and Robert M. Goldman, "A Free Ballot and a Fair Count": The Department of Justice and the Enforcement of Voting Rights in the South, 1877-1893 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990) make strong cases for the persistence of Republican commitment, particularly among the Stalwart wing of the national party, to the Enforcement Acts. Yet the story is still one of national inconstancy.
13. It is possible to carry the "statelessness" theme too far, as Richard John reminds us in his "Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party," in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 53-54.
14. For a succinct and perceptive examination of how American constitutionalism predisposed the resurrection of national authority on the basis of "state-rights federalism," see Herman Belz, Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978).
15. Valelly, Two Reconstructions, ix.
16. Valelly, Two Reconstructions, Ibid., 75.
17. For an earlier formulation of Valelly's argument, see "Party, Coercion, and Inclusion: The Two Reconstruction's of the South's Electoral Politics," Politics & Society 21 (1993). In fairness, Valelly's nuanced argument pivots on the interplay between "party-building" and "jurisprudence-building." For analytical convenience - and because the courts are beyond the scope of my investigation - I have hewed closely to the subject of how the Louisiana Republican Party was cobbled together.
18. My registration estimate is based on a linear interpolation from the 1860 and 1870 U.S. Censuses. See also, Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 32-41, esp. Table 2.1 (p. 33).
19. Richard Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 110-31.
20. Quoted in Richard N. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 125.
21. See also Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 4-5.
22. Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 153-57;
23. Melinda M. Hennessey, "Race and Violence in Reconstruction New Orleans: The 1868 Riot," Louisiana History 20 (1979): 173-88;
24. James G. Dauphine, "the Knights of the White Camelia and the Election of 1868: Louisiana's White Terrorists; a Benighting Legacy," Louisiana History 30 (Spring 1989), 173-88.
25. Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 61-73;
26. Carpetbagger from Vermont: The Autobiography of Marshall Harvey Twitchell, ed. and intro. by Ted Tunnell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 121;
27. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 125;
28. Samuel Hyde, Pistols and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana's Florida Parishes, 1810-1899 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 172;
29. Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 340-45.
30. John Ray to A. W. Faulkner, 30 May 1868, Warmoth Papers.
31. Henry C. Dibble testimony, in "The Condition of Affairs in Louisiana: Political Troubles in Louisiana." H. Misc. Doc. 42 C. 2 S. No. 211 (Ser. 1527), 274;
32. hereafter cited as "Political Troubles." Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 178-81;
33. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 151-72;
34. Tunnell, idem, Edge of the Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 132-33;
35. Dennis Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Baton Rouge and London, 1996), 124-25, esp. 125n.
36. Martha Derthick, "How Many Communities? The Evolution of American Federalism," in Dilemmas of Scale in America's Federal Bureaucracy, ed. Martha Derthick (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1999), esp. 135-53, 130, and 149 (for the quotation). Local democracy came late to Louisiana. Modeled after the highly conservative Kentucky constitution, Louisiana's first state constitution (1812) gave the governor the power to appoint all parish officials except police jurors. (In Louisiana, of course, the jurisdictional equivalent of the county is the parish, tracking the ecclesiastical divisions handed down from Spanish colonial rule.) It was not until the 1845 Constitution that electors gained the right to elect the rest of their parish officials. The Whiggish 1852 constitution continued the democratizating trend by making most judicial positions elective as well. The 1868 constitution was in this reform tradition, contrary to the assertions of earlier students of local government. The difference, however, is that Republican lawmakers and governors circumvented the electoral system by arranging to appoint so many elective officials.
37. Robert L. Carleton, Local Government and Administration in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1935), 39-68;
38. Projet of a Constitution for the State of Louisiana, I, 310-73;
39. Robert Dabney Calhoun, "The Origins and Early Development of County-Parish Government in Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 103-60.
40. Geraldine McTigue, "Forms of Racial Interaction in Louisiana, 1860-1880" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1975), 277;
41. Joe Louis Caldwell, "A Social, Economic, and Political Study of Blacks in the Louisiana Delta, 1865-1880" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1988), 255-56.
42. There is no fine-grained study of parish government in nineteenth-century Louisiana, but, judging from a sampling of the police jury minutes prepared by the WPA, it is safe to generalize from examinations of county governments elsewhere in the antebellum South. For one Louisiana parish, see WPA Historical Records Survey, Transcription of Parish Records: No. 7, Bienville Parish. Series I. Policy Jury Minutes Book B, 1856-1869, copy available in Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University.
43. For local governance elsewhere in the South, see Ralph Wooster, The People in Power: Courthouse and State House in the Lower South, 1850-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 81-106;
44. Randolph B. Campbell, "Planters and Plain Folks: The Social Structure of the Antebellum South," in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 70-72;
45. J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 132-60;
46. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 147-55;
47. Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 88-90, 132-38;
48. and Joseph Logsdon's introduction to Albert T. Morgan, Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom: A Personal Narrative (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), xxv-xxviii.
49. For local government in the Louisiana Delta, see Caldwell, "A Social, Economic, and Political Study of Blacks in the Louisiana Delta," 250-56.
50. On the importance of surety bonds, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 95-96;
51. Charles Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819-1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 140;
52. and Calhoun, "The Origin and Early Development of County-Parish Government," 118.
53. There is a striking analysis of how big planters used grand juries and public meetings to enforce ideological consensus in matters affecting slavery, in Michael Wayne, "An Old South Morality Tale: Reconsidering the Social Underpinnings of the Proslavery Ideology," Journal of American History 77 (1990): 838-63
54. - and analysis he has broadened out in his fascinating, Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation From the Plantation South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
55. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 222.
56. If the defining characteristic of a state is the monopoly it exercises on the use of violence, the southern plantation clearly belongs in this category. See the insightful essays of the anthropologist, Edgar T. Thompson, Plantation Societies, Race Relations, and the South: The Regimentation of Populations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), esp. 35-37.
57. See, also, Foner, Reconstruction, 198-99 concerning efforts by one Mississippi planter to have each plantation declared a town, "with the planter as Judge of Police," in the manner of local magistracies in rural England.
58. "It is impossible to convey even a slight suspicion of the dread which prevails among our little party," wrote one embattled white unionist from Ascension parish. "The object seems to be to drive out of the parish and state every loyal man in the country, by incessant lawsuits and exorbitant taxation. The black man is arrested upon single affidavits without substantiary testimony, confined in jails without any right of defense" (J. P. Newsham to Henry Clay Warmoth, 5 Apr. 1866, Warmoth Papers, SHC).
59. Foner, Reconstruction, 355-56.
60. Thanks to a constitutional provision allowing planters to count their slaves as full persons for purposes of apportioning both houses of the General Assembly. On Louisiana's "government of gentlemen," see the still useful Roger Shugg, Origins Of Class Struggle In Louisiana; A Social History Of White Farmers And Laborers During Slavery And After, 1840-1875 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1939), 121-56.
61. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 24-6;
62. Joel Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 176-95;
63. John, "Affairs of Office," 64-65.
64. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 139-43. Carl Russell Fish still has something to say on this topic: It is an essential idea of democracy that ... leaders should be of the people; they must not be gentlemen of wealth and leisure, but they must - the mass of them at any rate - belong to the class that makes its own living. If, then, they are to devote their time to politics, politics must be made to pay. (The Civil Service and the Patronage [New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905], 156-57) Fish denied that a full-blown spoils system obtained in southern politics until after the war, a proposition that has never been tested, so far as I know.
65. Report of the Joint Committee of the General Assembly of Louisiana on the Conduct of the Late Elections.... (New Orleans: [n.p], 1868), 13, 18;
66. Journal of the Senate (1868), 71.
67. Act 58, "Providing a remedy against usurpation, intrusion into, or the unlawful holding or exercising a public office or franchise in this State" (8 Sept. 1868); Act 156, "To amend and re-enact an entitled "An act providing a remedy against usurpation." (15 Oct. 1868); both in Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1868). Compare the bond requirements in Act 92, "Relative to the Bonds of the State and Parish Officers" (12 Mar. 1855), Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1855), with those of Act 17, "To Amend and re-enact the First Section of "An Act Relative to the Bonds of State and Parish Officers" (1 Aug. 1868), Acts...of the State of Louisiana (1868).
68. Newsham to Warmoth, 26 Apr. 1866, Warmoth Papers, SHC. Dan T. Carter, When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1985), 31-49;
69. James L. Baggett, The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters In The Civil War And Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 196, 202.
70. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 138-42;
71. Richard Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 98-99.
72. Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974), 290-91.
73. Eric Foner and Michael Perman are obvious exceptions: "Section 3 aimed to promote a sweeping transformation of Southern public life" (Foner, Reconstruction, 260).
74. See also Michael Perman, Reunion Without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865-68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 236-37. Richard Valelly grasps how the two-thirds rule "allowed congressional Republicans to manipulate ex-rebel access to politics for partisan purposes" (Valelly, "Party, Coercion, and Inclusion," 44). For the Louisiana enactments, see Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1868).
75. James O. Fuqua to Henry Clay Warmoth, 9 Jul. 1868, in the Henry Clay Warmoth papers, Southern Historical Collection. The debates on the eligibility law were heated, with several senators, Republican and Democrat, claiming they had never seen the bill until it was placed on their desk for a vote and others criticizing its proscriptive features John Ray, the Republican floor leader, retorted: "If this is proscribing, he would proscribe.... The bill was printed a week ago and it was the fault of the senators themselves if they were not advised as to the points of the bill" ("Louisiana Legislature," New Orleans Daily Picaynue, 6 Aug. 1868).
76. The raw data for these tables resulted from combing the Senate Journals in which these appointments were recorded subsequent to their approval by the state senate. Most (though not all) of this information also appears in the "State Commission Books, March 1868-March 1877," available on microfilm at the State Archives of Louisiana in Baton Rouge. For reasons that will become apparent later in this article, an OLS regression analysis of the data points recorded in these tables fails to produce meaningful correlations. The frequency of "elective appointments," that is, don't increase in proportion to variations in the black population percentages. The incidence of white homicidal violence against blacks is a better predictor, but only in selected parishes (chiefly those bordering the Red River).
77. Charles Nordhoff, The Cotton States in 1875 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1876), 44-45.
78. Nordhoff was being hyperbolic, of course. Louisiana may have been under the Napoleonic Code but its bureaucracy (the state education department, for example, numbered two people at most) bore scant resemblance to the monistic French state. T. H. Harris, The Story of Public Education in Louisiana (New Orleans: [n.p.], 1924), 38.
79. Carter, When the War Was Over, 49-52;
80. Foner, Reconstruction, 188-89. It should be noted that some Johnsonian governors, such as W. W. Holden of North Carolina, made more appointments in two years than Louisiana's three governors did in eight. However, Holden's government was provisional, not constitutional.
81. A quick and dirty modern comparison is revealing. Fourterm Democratic governor Edwin Edwards made approximately 2,500 appointments during his first administration in the 1970s, about 650 more than Henry Clay Warmoth made during his fouryear tenure in office. The difference is that Louisiana's population during Reconstruction was only one-fifth what it is today, and state government was much smaller by comparison. For every 100,000 inhabitants in the state, Edwards appointed approximately 70 officials; the per capita ratio for Warmoth was nearly four times greater: 264 appointees for every 100,000 inhabitants.
82. Frank H. Morey to Warmoth, 4 Dec. 1872, Warmoth Papers.
83. See the discussion of the Morehouse parish assessorship in Louisiana Senate Journal. In Executive Session (1869), 6.
84. McTigue, "Forms of Racial Interaction," 289.
85. See also Hyde, Jr., Pistols and Politics, 158-59.
86. Hugh Campbell testimony, "Political Troubles," 112. For other evidence of Republican willingness to suspend the electoral process for safety's sake, see John S. Harris to Warmoth, 4 Aug. 1868, Warmoth Papers; and Louisiana House Debates (1869), 28-29.
87. Journal of the Senate. Executive Session (1870), 45.
88. Swann A. Miller to Warmoth, 16 Jun. 1868, Warmoth Papers. Until General Grant put a stop to it, newly-elected Republican lawmakers tried to purge Democratic legislators unable to take the stringent 1862 Test Oath. John Smith Kendall, History of New Orleans, vol. 1 (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1922), 328-29.
89. R. L. Elliott to Warmoth, 10 Jun. 1868; see also H. C. Farquar to Warmoth, 26 Apr. 1868 and 10 May 1868; W. S. Lamb to Warmoth, 30 Apr. 1868; J. H. Gannett to Warmoth, 23 May 1868; and Martin Flood to Warmoth, 17 Jul. 1868, all in Warmoth Papers. Not every legal effort to have an ineligible ex-Confederates removed from office was successful. See, for example, Michael A. Ross, "Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the Legal Campaign against Louisiana's Republican Government, 1868-1873," Civil War History 49 (2003): 243-44.
90. Carpetbagger from Vermont, 114-15, 118-20;
91. "Autobiography of M. H. Twitchell," chap. 17, M. H. Twitchell Papers, Louisiana Tech University;
92. Tunnell, Edge of the Sword, 128.
93. See Louisiana Senate Journals. In Executive Session, for 1868, 1870, 1871, and 1872. Percentages exceeding 100 percent indicate that more than one person occupied a term of office.
94. When asked by a "good government" delegation to name the individuals he alleged had offered him bribes - "the proposition of bribes is a matter of daily occurrence" - the tall and angularly handsome governor declined on the grounds Democratic papers would sneer he had already "made enough money and consequently didn't care to make any more" (New Orleans Times, 3 Feb. 1870).
95. See also, New York Herald, 6 Jun. 1872;
96. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 17-20, 76;
97. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 151-52.
98. See also John Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 9;
99. Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 11-21, 71-72;
100. Fayette Copeland, "The New Orleans Press and the Reconstruction," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 30 (1947): 149-337.
101. Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 45.
102. Warmoth tried the same maneuver in Jefferson City only to have the case end up before the state supreme court and his appointees denied their seats (ibid.). Kendall, New Orleans, 331-32;
103. 21 La. Ann., 483-85.
104. Kendall, New Orleans, 332-37;
105. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 178; Act 1, "An Act to amend the bill consolidating the city of New Orleans" (12 Mar. 1870), and Act 7, "An Act to extend the limits of New Orleans" (16 Mar. 1870), both in Acts...of the State of Louisiana (1870); Louisiana House Debates (1870), 235-37, 291-301.
106. Republican legislators often resorted to charter changes or municipal incorporations to win control of towns and cities still in the hands of unreconstructed conservatives. Through enabling legislation permitting the governor to appoint the first set of municipal officers, Republicans gained power over Alexandria, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, and Brashear City (now Morgan City). See Perry A. Snyder, "Shreveport, Louisiana, during the Civil War and Reconstruction"(Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1979), 185-87;
107. Terry Seip, "Municipal Politics and the Negro: Baton Rouge, 1865-1880," in Readings in Louisiana Politics, ed. Mark T. Carleton, Perry H. Howard, and Joseph B. Parker (Baton Rouge: Claitor's Pub. Division, 1975), 255.
108. Clara Lopez Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes, 1865-1890" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1971), 137; Act 111, "To Incorporate the Town of Alexandria" (29 Sept. 1868); Act 98, "To Incorporate the City of Shreveport ...," and Act 99, "To Incorporate the Town of Brashear ..." (27 Apr. 1871); and Act 114, "to Amend and Reenact an Act Granting Corporate Privilege to the Inhabitants of Baton Rouge" (31 Mar. 1874), all in Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1868).
109. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 157-59;
110. Tunnell, idem, Edge of the Sword, 138-39;
111. Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 173-74;
112. Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 83;
113. Thomas E. Jeffrey, "County Division: A Forgotten Issue in North Carolina Politics, Part I," North Carolina Historical Review 64 (1988): 314-54;
114. James A. Schellenberg, Conflict Between Communities: American County Seat Wars (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 26-73, 107-17. For a typical "new parish" bill, see Act 208, "To form a new parish to be called the parish of Iberia" (30 Oct. 1868), Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1868).
115. Act 120, "An Act Providing for the appointment of a District Attorney pro tempore ... (29 Sept. 1868), and "An Act Relative to Elections in the State of Louisiana ..." (19 Oct. 1868), both in Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1868); Act 68, "To Provide a Revenue for the Support of the State Government and the Manner of Collecting the Same" (4 Apr. 1870), Acts...of the State of Louisiana . In Extra Session (1870); Act 74, "To Establish a Constabulary ...," in Acts ... of the State of Louisiana (1870); Act 97, "An Act Reorganizing the Police Juries of this State ..." (27 Apr. 1871), in Acts...of the State of Louisiana (1871). See also Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 205-7;
116. William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 118-19.
117. Henry Clay Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 110;
118. Lonn, Reconstruction, 71;
119. "Political Troubles," 14, 56, 212-33, 437-39, 450, 552. Non-residency was apparently commonplace in the state legislature. When a Bossier parish legislator offered a resolution asking Governor Warmoth to declare vacant the Caddo house seat held by New Orleans Postmaster Charles Lowell, on the grounds that he couldn't be a Shreveport resident and a Crescent City official at the same time, Senator McMillen warned: "If Mr. Lowell was not a resident of Caddo, that matter had better not be resurrected at this time for it would render ineligible twothirds of the present General Assembly" (Louisiana House Debates [1870], 7). Lowell was also a speaker of the house.
120. Qtd. in John E. Leonard to Warmoth, 27 Apr. 1872, Warmoth Papers. "The New Registration of Voters," New Orleans Daily Picayune. 7 Aug. 1868, 1.
121. Qtd. in T. Harry Williams, Huey Long: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1969), 184.
122. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 168-69;
123. McTigue, "Forms of Racial Interaction," 298-99.
124. Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866-1884 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 46-64, esp. Table 2.2.
125. See also, Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 175 ( for the quotation);
126. William E. Highsmith, "Some Aspects of Reconstruction in the Heart of Louisiana," Journal of Southern History 13 (1947): 460-91;
127. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), passim.
128. See also George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984),
129. and Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
130. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 54-55.
131. Of the nineteen African Americans who served as Louisiana sheriffs during Reconstruction, only five held office during Warmoth's administration. See Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 222. To emphasize the obstacles ex-slaves ran into when trying to place members of their own race into local office doesn't gainsay Eric Foner's observation regarding the "remarkable ... growing presence of blacks in county and local offices scattered across the South." That presence was remarkable because of the difficulties that had to be surmounted.
132. Foner, Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), xxvi.
133. George P. DeWeese to Warmoth, 25 Apr. 1868, Warmoth Papers.
134. Nordhoff, The Cotton States, 55;
135. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 142-45.
136. For evidence that Warmoth's appointment policy was the explanation for the underrepresentation of African Americans in local officeholding, see Caldwell, "A Social, Economic, and Political Study of Blacks in the Louisiana Delta," 245, 255-56, 274, App. 34.
137. Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 32-33;
138. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana's Negroes," 49-50.
139. Caldwell, "Blacks in the Louisiana Delta," 274-75; William McMillen to Warmoth, 6 Jul. 1871, 24 Oct. 1870, 30 Oct. 1872, Warmoth Papers.
140. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 125-32, 139-42.
141. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," Ibid., 139;
142. Foner, Reconstruction, 354;
143. Vincent, Black Legislators, passim;
144. Tunnell, Edge of the Sword, 144-46.
145. On black officeholding in South Carolina, see Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana, IL, 1977).
146. New Orleans Tribune, 14 Apr. 1867.
147. The subject of "public rights" is brilliantly delineated in Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 42-45, (quotation, 44); and her unpublished work-in-progess, "Public Rights and Private Commerce: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Creole Odyssey" (2005 Sidney Mintz Lecture, Johns Hopkins University; mss. in author's possession).
148. My analysis of Afro-Creole radicalism is heavily indebted to Caryn C. Bell and Joseph Logsdon, "The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900," in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 201-61;
149. and Caryn Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
150. James Hollandsworth, Jr., has written definitively on The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).
151. Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978);
152. C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976);
153. and LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1981), esp. 94-95, are indispensable on the struggle for equal citizenship in wartime Louisiana.
154. For interpretations that emphasize the self-interested motivations of the gens de couleur libre, see David Rankin's important essays: "The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Colored Community of New Orleans," in Perspectives in American History 11 (1997-1998): 379-416;
155. and "The Politics of Caste: Free Colored Leadership in New Orleans During the Civil War, in Louisiana's Black Heritage, ed. Robert R. Macdonald et al. (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1979), 107-46;
156. and Roger Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 21-41, 47-49, 51-55.
157. Rodolphe Desdunes, Homage Offered in Memory of Alexandre Aristide Mary.... (New Orleans: [n.p.], 1893), 6 . I would like to thank Caryn C. Bell for providing me with a translation of the original eulogy, which was published in French.
158. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 51-54.
159. See also, Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 47;
160. Bell and Logsdon, "Americanization of Black New Orleans," 248.
161. Qtd. in Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 46-49, 77-78 (quotation, 49).
162. The New Orleans Tribune, 19 May 1867;
163. Bell and Logsdon, "Americanization of Black New Orleans," 247;
164. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 36-38, 46-48.
165. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 111-12.
166. The fifty-fifty principle found expression on the docks, as black and white unions for a spell devised half-and-half worksharing arrangement for distributing the work. Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class and Politics, 1863-1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69, 95, 133-34, 184-85, 249-51;
167. and Daniel Rosenberg, New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor, and Unionism, 1892-1923 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 69-92.
168. New Orleans Tribune, 14-15 Dec. 1867.
169. See also Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 48-51;
170. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 53-54.
171. Qtd. in Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 56, 124;
172. Bell and Logsdon, "Americanization of Black New Orleans," 246;
173. Vincent, Black Legislators, 192;
174. Bell and Logsdon, "Americanization of Black New Orleans," 648;
175. McTigue, "Forms of Racial Interaction," 265-69, 278;
176. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 111-12;
177. Francis Wayne Binning, "Henry Clay Warmoth and Louisiana Reconstruction" (Ph.D. diss, The University of North Carolina, 1969), 108.
178. T. B. Waters to James G. Taliaferro, 25 May 1867, Taliaferro Papers, LSU.
179. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 116;
180. Frances B. Harris, "Henry Clay Warmoth: Reconstruction Governor of Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 28 (1944), 547;
181. John Rose Ficklen, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (Through 1868) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1910), 194-95;
182. Fischer, The Segregation Struggle, 50.
183. In a fit of stubborn pique the Tribune faction supported a dissident
184. See also Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 63-65;
185. and Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 51-54.
186. McTigue,"Forms of Racial Interaction," 183-84, 300. Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 55, attributes the thinness of black officeholding to the affects of political violence. Actually, it had more to do with Warmoth's patronage policy.
187. The state supreme court had proven accommodating by exempting legislators from the 1868 constitutional ban against plural officeholding.
188. W. W. Farmer to Warmoth, [1872], and Thomas W. Conway to Warmoth, 21 Mar. 1871, both in Warmoth Papers. On the political-financial dealings of the Warmothites, see A. L. Lee to Warmoth, 17 Sept. 1869; J. H. Sypher to Warmoth, 13 Feb. 1871; Frank Morey to Warmoth, 22 Jun. 1871; and Henry C. Dibble to Warmoth, 26 Aug. 1871, all in ibid. Also, Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 93, 99, 133-37;
189. "Political Troubles," 393;
190. McTigue, "Forms of Racial Interaction," 158, 178-80, 299-300, 305.
191. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 68;
192. New Orleans Tribune, 12 Jan. 1869;
193. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 88;
194. and Robert E. Moran, "Local Black Elected Officials in Ascension Parish (1868-1878)," Louisiana History 37 (1986): 274.
195. James D. Wilson, Jr., "The Donaldsonville Incident of 1870: A Study of Local Party Dissension and Republican Infighting in Reconstruction Louisiana, "Louisiana History 38 (1997): 331.
196. A highly skilled former slave on the extensive Bringier plantations, Pierre Landry "found safety for his policy and life," as he explained in his autobiography, by surrounding himself with the leading white planters and political leaders in his community, receiving a substantial amount of construction work in the Donaldsonville vicinity after leaving office (Pierre Landry Autobiographical fragments, [no date], Landry-Dunn Collection, Amistad Research Center). This pattern also turns up in marginally white majority parishes, where the few black officials allowed to take office were "trusted Negroes ... [who had] the secret backing of white Democrats" (Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 125-32, 139-42 [quotation on 131] ).
197. "Political Troubles," 295;
198. Maurine Bergerie, "Economic and Social History of Iberia Parish, 1868-1900" (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1956), 26-27.
199. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 197.
200. Michael Perman treats this subject in Road to Redemption, 57-107. Eric Foner has expressed skepticism about the genuiness of the conversion: "Even among its advocates, the New Departure smacked less of a genuine accommodation to the democratic revolution embodied in Reconstruction, than a tactic for reassuring the North about their party's intentions" (Foner, Reconstruction, 417).
201. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 173, 178-79, 314-63;
202. Ross, "Obstructing Reconstruction," 235-53;
203. Ross, idem., "Resisting the New South: Commercial Crisis and Decline in New Orleans, 1865-1885," American Nineteenth Century History 4 (2003): 59-76.
204. William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: The Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 69;
205. Perman, The Road to Redemption, 3-56;
206. Foner, Reconstruction, 379;
207. Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 14-31.
208. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 187;
209. Foner, Reconstruction, 210-11.
210. The bipartisanship was not what it appeared to be, according to a perceptive roll-call analysis of the Louisiana legislature during Reconstruction. "Genuine convergence ... was a mirage," he concludes; "statistical measures of interparty 'cooperation' depended upon deep splits within the parties" (Aaron Charles Sheehan-Dean, "Politics, Violence and Voters: Reconstruction in Louisiana" [MA thesis, University of Virginia, 1999], 33-34). I would like to thank Professor Sheehan-Dean for sending me a copy of this excellent thesis.
211. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 202-6, 346-51.
212. On the tarnished credit reputations of southern and western states, see James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 387-88;
213. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 192.
214. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 118, 138, 156-57;
215. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 78-79, 99-100, 109-10;
216. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity, 206-9;
217. Foner, Reconstruction, 380-84.
218. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 61.
219. See also Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 243-45.
220. William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), 71-78;
221. Michael Les Benedict, Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 327-35.
222. Eric L. McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 214-38;
223. Foner, Reconstruction, 241-42;
224. Lawrence N. Powell, "The American Land Company and Agency: John A. Andrew and the Northernization of the South," Civil War History 21 (1975): 293-308.
225. Qtd. in Harris, "Henry Clay Warmoth," 636.
226. The new charter replaced the twenty-four-man board of aldermen with six administrators, and set aside the singlemember districts in favor of an at-large system of electing the city council.
227. New Orleans Tribune, 12, 19 (quotation), 22 Jan. 1869, 13 Feb. 1869;
228. Charles Lewis Rast, III, "The Characteristics and Activities of Political Clubs in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1868-1872" (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1982), 75-77;
229. Kendall, History of New Orleans, 1:333-36;
230. Perman, The Road to Redemption, 87-107, 116-18.
231. The banker declined the appointment, obliging Warmoth to name prewar northern resident, Benjamin Flanders, whose administrative experience and railroad connections commended him to the city press and business reformers (Kendall, History of New Orleans, 1:336-37).
232. For a revealing examination of how a small group of reactionary lawyers and judges were able to thwart Reconstruction in Louisiana and solidify white resistance to Republican government, see Ross, "Obstructing Reconstruction," 235-53.
233. In the case of the New Orleans charter change, he demanded undated, signed resignations from his appointees. Warmoth later told a congressional committee that the resignations were an insurance policy against dishonest and incompetent Republican appointees. "Political Troubles," 326, 523-54;
234. Rast, "Political Clubs," 85-87;
235. Kendall, History of New Orleans, 1:336-38.
236. Louisiana House Debates (1870), 213.
237. Qtd. in Harris, "Henry Clay Warmoth," 603;
238. New Orleans Times, 1, 3 Feb. 1870.
239. "Political Troubles," 53.
240. "Political TroublesIbid., 394;
241. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 100.
242. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 88.
243. Warmoth still recalled sixty-years after the event the lavish dinner hosted in his honor at Dr. William Mercer's palatial residence (now the exclusive Boston Club on Canal Street). attended by a veritable "Who's Who" of Louisiana Whiggery, including Richard Taylor, the former president's son and a celebrated former Confederate general (Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 89).
244. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, Ibid., 88;
245. "Political Troubles," 295, 327;
246. New Orleans Times, 6 Jun. 1872.
247. "Political Troubles," 382. F. L. Claiborne to Warmoth, 12 Dec. 1871; Will S. Lewis to Warmoth, 20 Jul. 1871; Frank Morey to Warmoth, 13 Mar. 1871; Julius Ennemoser to Warmoth, [30 Jul. 1871], all in Warmoth Papers.
248. "Governor's Executive Message," Senate Journal (1871), 26; Jno. Scollard to T. W. Conway, 6 Jun. 1871, Warmoth papers.
249. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 98-102.
250. "Political Troubles," 14, 56, 437-39.
251. House Speaker Carr won election from DeSoto parish by electoral chicanery. His wirepullers distributed to the illiterate black voters only ballots bearing his name. His black opponent contested Carr's seat, but later dropped the case after allegedly being bribed Political Troubles ibid., 439-40;
252. John C. Moncure to his wife, 22 Jan. 1871, qtd. in Campbell, "Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 164).
253. New Orleanian Gabriel DeFeriet, a white Creole who had led the "Committee of 100" delegation that had called on Warmoth the year before, and John C. Moncure, a Shreveporter who was himself involved in a contested election case, were the leading Democratic signatories. The chief Republican negotiator was the conservative scalawag and retired Union general J. R. West, "a Republican with Democratic friends and conservative predilections," whom Warmoth in 1870 had appointed to the New Orleans's city council. While the delicate negotiations were taking place, Warmoth engineered West's election to the U.S. Senate (Binning, "Henry Clay Warmoth," 217, 225 [quotation]);
254. John C. Moncure, et al., "Memoranda," [9 Feb. 1871], Warmoth papers;
255. "Political Troubles," 126, 386;
256. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 249;
257. Jewell's Crescent City Illustrated (1873), 43;
258. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 164.
259. The house record on the contested election cases is somewhat sketchy. Two of Warmoth's representatives were expelled, one with the help of Democratic votes. However, the other six were either reported on favorably by the Committee on Elections and Qualifications, or were not reported on at all during the 1871 session. Some of their cases surfaced during the stormy 1872 session, in which the legislature divided into rival bodies (Louisiana House Journal [1871], 38, 40, 49, 94, 147-48, 194).
260. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., ed., intro. by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 84.
261. On the contrast between democratization in America and Europe, see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 94, 128-29.
262. See also, John, "Affairs of Office," 59-65.
263. The factional fighting for control of the Custom House is too byzantine to dwell on here. It began with efforts by U.S. Marshal Stephen Packard and U.S. Postmaster Charles Lowell to have the Democratic Collector of Customs James Casey removed from the Collectorship, which Warmoth initially supported only to throw in with Casey in order to win favor with Grant. That alliance lasted about nine months, when Casey threw in with his erstwhile enemies, Packard and Lowell. On this, see Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 165-66. J. R. West to Warmoth, 18 Mar. 1871; Republican Auxilliary Committee to Warmoth, 15 Nov. 1870; Frank Morey, et. al., to Warmoth, 17 Nov. 1870; James Longstreet to Warmoth, 19 Jan. 1871; and Longstreet to U.S. Grant, Jul. 1871, all in Warmoth papers;
264. "Political Troubles," 437-49, 552.
265. Also Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 210-16,
266. and Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 245-49;
267. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 165-66.
268. "Political Troubles," 138, 253-54, 257, 273 (quotation), 354-57;
269. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 148-49;
270. Foner, Reconstruction, 348-49, 377;
271. Perman, Road to Redemption, 42-52;
272. Lawrence N. Powell, "The Politics of Livelihood: Carpetbaggers in the Deep South," in Race, Region, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (New York, 1982).
273. See also Leonard V. Huber, New Orleans: A Pictorial History (New York: American Legacy Press, 1981), 107-9. One looks in vain for a northern analogy to the state influence federal officials wielded in the Reconstruction South. The closest thing to it is the nineteenth-century New York City Custom House. Even closer are the federal officials in the territories.
274. West to Warmoth, 14 Mar. 1871, Warmoth papers.
275. The concept of equal accommodations had real meaning in the quotidian world of New Orleans' robust popular culture, where racial mixing in saloons and dance halls and theaters was rife and racial identity quite literally written in sand. There was also the growing need to rely on streetcar transportation now that the city was spreading beyond the "walking city" confines of the Latin Quarter. Contrary to some historians, this demand for equal access was not the hobbyhorse of an Afro-Creole elite. The 1867 campaign to abolish the "star cars" was a result of direct action mass protest. In New Orleans, desegregation was not an "elite issue." One doesn't have to agree with Roger Fischer's argument that the movement for open accommodations was "a campaign of black aristocrats for essentially elitist goals" to acknowledge that the issue didn't have the same resonance outside of the city. See Fischer, Segregation Struggle, 87.
276. Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 111-92;
277. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 220-23.
278. On patterns of violence in post-emancipation Louisiana, see Gilles Vandal, "Black Violence in Post-Civil War Louisiana," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (1994): 45-64.
279. Judith Shklar has written perceptively about citizenship as "standing" and why voting is constitutive of that standing, a judgment that Richard Valelly shares and enlarges to encompass officeholding as well. See Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); and
280. Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 6.
281. Cincinnati Commercial as qtd. in the New Orleans Daily Republican, 2 Sept. 1871.
282. Bell and Logsdon, "The Americanization of Black New Orleans," 223, 231, 248-50
283. Fischer, The Segregation Struggle, 69-72;
284. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 168;
285. New Orleans Republican, 12 Aug. 1870.
286. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 113, 145 (quotaton).
287. Warmoth said the constitutional amendment allowing him to run for consecutive terms incited the revolt, and he is probably correct. "We thought that if all his officers and the State government were under his control, there was no necessity of the Republican Party being also under his control," testified a leading member of the "Custom House" faction ("Political Troubles," 436 [quotation], 298-300). An array of personal and political motives also united the dissidents. Spoilsmen nursed grudges over Warmoth's vetoes of special interest legislation. Important federal officials were offended by the governor's open disdain and his efforts to have them cashiered. All of his enemies complained of his highhanded and dictatorial manner, his youthful arrogance, his abusive attacks on anyone who failed to toe the line. He once told Postmaster Lowell - who had also been improvised into the house speakership by Warmoth - that "I was a creature of his creation." An autocratic testiness defined Warmoth's style, and now a group of restless lieges, some of them occupants of independent patronage fiefdoms, were beginning to rebel ("Political Troubles," 437 [quotation], 521).
288. Now that political conventions have been transformed into theatrical spectacles, it is hard for the modern mind to comprehend the deadly seriousness with which nineteenth-century convention fights were waged. Unlike today, these gatherings were essential vehicles not merely for narrowing candidate choices and aligning voter allegiance with party platforms and ideologies, but for inducting ordinary citizens into rites of citizenship. Granted, bosses and professional patronage seekers, deploying personal blocs of committed partisans and party workers, rapidly took control of these affairs, thereby deepening anti-party suspicions on the part of average voters toward the entire apparatus. Yet, those same conventions, with their base firmly anchored in beats and precincts as resolutions and candidate choices ascended in building-block fashion from parish (or county) to state and national conclaves, could just as easily become conveyances of grassroots mobilization - especially if local wirepullers and politicians realized they had better get out in front of an aroused electorate if they hoped to remain gainfully employed. This up-from-the-bottom insurgency is pretty much what happened in Louisiana in 1871. For a still relevant analysis of the function of party conventions, see the classic work of M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. Volume II: The United States, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 25-112.
289. J. Mills Thornton is especially insightful about the machinery and management of political conventions in antebellum Alabama, from the beat level to the state level. Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 116-62.
290. See also, Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 260;
291. and Richard P. McCormick, "Political Development and the Second Party System," in The American Party System: Stages of Political Development, ed. by William Nisbets Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 104-6.
292. West to Warmoth, 14 Mar. 1871, Warmoth papers. In his next letter West hinted at the use of bribery to carry the convention: "Our only way is to get all the friends we can in the convention and then we know how to get the rest" (West to Warmouth, 24 Mar. 1871).
293. West to Warmoth, 14 Mar. 1871 (first quotation); W. W. Howe, 19 Jul. 1871 (second quotation), Warmoth papers.
294. See Table 3.
295. Frank Morey to Warmoth, 13 Mar. 1871, 13 Jul. 1871 (quotation); Julius Ennemoser to Warmoth, [30 Jul. 1871]; Robert J. Caldwell to Warmoth, 18 Aug. 1871; and J. E. Leonard, 27 Sept. [1871], all in Warmoth papers.
296. R. K. Diossy to Warmoth, 26 Jul. 1871. John Rodgrigue writes convincingly of the determination of the freedmen in the sugar parishes, where gang labor still obtained, to defend their rights of citizenship. Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 160-61.
297. Emerson Bentley to Warmoth, 30 Jul. 1871; W. B. Merchant to Warmoth, 28 Jul. 1871; see also, Bentley to Warmoth, 8 Dec. 1871, all in Warmoth papers.
298. James J. Cunningham to Warmoth, 17 Jun. 1871, Warmoth papers.
299. W. B. Gray to Warmoth, 30 Jul. 1871; "Political Troubles," 159. Republicans in Tangipahoa were seething at Warmoth by the summer of 1871: "if Gov. W. is the staunch Republican you take him why is it he invariably appoints the most ultra-democrats to offices of trust and emolument?", demanded a Republican from Amite City of the State Education Superintendent (Jno. Scollard to T. W. Conway, 6 Jun. 1871, Warmoth papers). See also, Hyde, Pistols and Politics, 173-74.
300. The governor was then convalescing in Pass Christian, a Mississippi Gulf Coast resort popular among New Orleanians, to mend a foot that had been badly injured in a freak boating accident. Dunn meanwhile had become acting governor in Warmoth's absence and was laying plans to make wholesale removals and intersession appointments before Warmoth made a surprise visit home to resume charge of the state government. M. Jeff Thompson to Warmoth, 14 Jul. 1871, Warmoth papers; Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 245, 249-51.
301. W. L. McMillen to Warmoth, 24 Jul. 1871; Henry C. Dibble to Warmoth, 24 Aug. 1871, 10 Oct. 1871, and Dibble to H. S. McComb, 3 Nov. 1871; H. S. McComb to Warmoth, 9 Oct. 1871, 30 Oct. 1871, and McComb to J. R. West, 6 Nov. 1871; and J. R. West to Warmoth, 15 Oct. 1871, all in Warmoth Papers. Warmoth had a personal stake in keeping the state's credit rating high. He profited handsomely from knowing when bond premiums would be paid, which always caused a spike in the price of state bonds. Since inside trading was not illegal at that time, Warmoth bought bonds when they were badly depreciated then sold them after the premium redemption had advanced them in value. This may help explain why he used his veto so liberally to keep Republican legislators from raiding the treasury (Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 191-95;
302. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers, 245).
303. On the use of hired hooligans in New Orleans politics, see Leon Soule, The Know-Nothing Party in Louisiana A Reappraisal (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Association, 1960);
304. Robert Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Co., 1964);
305. and Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004).
306. It is a measure of how far rightward Warmoth had drifted that he had no compunction about using the storm trooper services of the notorious street gang leader, Lucien E. Adams, a veteran of the 1866 New Orleans riot that had done much to discredit Andrew Johnson. On this and related matters see the series of illuminating affidavits, several of them from policemen themselves, concerning the battle of the ward clubs in "Political Troubles," 175-99. See also Rast, "The Characteristics and Activities of Political Clubs," 96-99.
307. For Lucien Adams's role in the 1866 riot, see Gilles Vandal, The New Orleans Riot of 1866: Anatomy of a Tragedy (Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1983), 166, 185.
308. Wm. H. Green to Warmoth, 15 Jul. 1871, Warmoth papers; "Political Troubles," 190-91.
309. "Political Troubles," 150-51;
310. Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 96-99.
311. Campbell, "The Political Life of Louisiana Negroes," 164-77;
312. Agnes Grosz, "The Political Career of Pickney Benton Stewart Pinchback," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 27 (1947): 544-45;
313. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 144-45;
314. Louisianian, 10 Sept. 1871.
315. W. W. Howe, 16 Jul. 1871, Warmoth papers.
316. "Political Troubles," 183, and passim;
317. Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 100-3.
318. In many respects, the two conventions represented rival patronage systems. Over half of the 105 Warmothite delegates who met in Turner's Hall were various tax collectors, assessors, election registrars qua legislators, New Orleans street commissioners, Metropolitan policemen, plus the usual array of patronage straw bosses from the countryside: M. H. Twitchell of Red River, O. F. Hunsacker of St. James, George W. Combs of St. John, and so on. A. Chevalon, the tax collector who talked too much, was there, although as a delegate from St. Tammany not Tangipahoa parish. Also in attendance were several members of Warmoth's inner circle, all of them higher-ups in the state administration. (Secretary of State Francis J. Herron; state militia general, state senator, and Land Register H. J. Campbell; and Register of Conveyances and New Orleans Republican editor W. R. Fish, to name a few.) State Senator Pinchback presided over the proceedings. For its part, the "Gatling Gun Convention" meeting in the Customs House, though smaller in absolute numbers, gave up nothing in its proportion of patronage beneficiaries: 36 of the 70 delegates were internal revenue collectors, Custom House employees, post masters, mail agents, U. S. deputy marshals, and the like ("Political Troubles," 126, 147, 151, 158-60, 419-20).
319. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 160-61.
320. Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 226 (first quotation), 88 (second quotation).
321. On the manipulation of the black vote by Deep South planters, see J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), passim,
322. and William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 107-41, 234-67.
323. The tension between egalitarianism and community, individual rights and upper-class prerogatives, is deeply embedded in the federalist structure of American governance, a subject Martha Derthick plumbs with great insight in "How Many Communities?" esp. 135-53. See also Thomas Sugrue's perceptive treatment: "All Politics is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century America," in The Democratic Experiment, ed. Jacobs, William J. Novak and Julian E. Zelizer, 301-26.