Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the legal campaign against Louisiana's Republican Government, 1868-1873

Civil War History

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 235-253

  Ross, Michael A ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 67649525932     PISSN: 00098078     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cwh.2003.0070     Document Type: Review

References (119)

1. The literature on this topic is so extensive that only a selection of representative works can be mentioned here. See, for example, William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979)
2. Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863-1869 (New York: Norton, 1974)
3. Richard H. Abbott, The Republican Party and the South, 1855-1877: The First Southern Strategy (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986)
4. Richard H. Abbott, "The Republican Party Press in Reconstruction Georgia, ]867-1874," Journal of Southern History 61 (Nov. 1995): 725-60
5. Carl H. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1980)
6. Michael W. Fitzgerald, "Radical Republicanism and the White Yeomanry During Alabama Reconstruction" Journal of Southern History 54 (Nov. 1988): 565-96
7. J. Mills Thornton III, "Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 349-94
8. Lawrence N. Powell, "The Politics of Livelihood: Carpetbaggers in the Deep South," in ibid., 315-48
9. Sarah Woolfork Wiggins, The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865-1888 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1977), 125
10. Peter Kolchin, "Scalawags, Carpetbaggers, and Reconstruction: A Quantitative Look at Southern Congressional Politics, 1868-1872," Journal of Southern History 45 (1979): 63-76
11. Elizabeth Studley Nathans, Losing the Peace: Georgia Republicans and Reconstruction, 1865-1871 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1969)
12. and Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977)
13. Historians on both sides of the debate agree that a combination of internal party weaknesses, external violence, and a national recession brought down the Republican regimes. Some historians, however, place a greater emphasis on the impact of the violence. See, for example, John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction: After the Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), 153, 156, 176
14. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1971)
15. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 603
16. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984)
17. Michael Perman, "Counter Reconstruction: The Role of Violence in Southern Redemption," in The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, ed. Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991), 121-40
18. Scott R. Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999), 125-38
19. and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1984), 102-3
20. Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1984), 3, 111-72
21. Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1976)
22. Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974), 156-313
23. George Rable, "Republican Albatross: The Louisiana Question, National Politics, and the Failure of Reconstruction," Louisiana History 23 (1983): 109-30
24. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, "The Americanization of Black New Orleans," in Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1992), 201-61
25. Lawrence N. Powell, "The Centralization of Local Government in Reconstruction Louisiana: Democratic Contradictions and Republican Factionalism" (paper delivered at the Louisiana Historical Association Annual Meeting, Baton Rouge, Mar. 17, 1989), 14
26. and T. Harry Williams, "The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873," Journal of Southern History 11 (Aug. 1945): 349-69
27. Lawrence N. Powell, "Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics," Slavery and Abolition 20 (1999): 127-49
28. Trelease, White Terror, 127-136
29. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 1-2, 202, 212, 216-17
30. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 291-96
31. James G. Dauphine, "The Knights of the White Camelia and the Election of 1868," Louisiana History 30 (Spring 1989): 173-90
32. Foner, Reconstruction, 262-63, 437, 551
33. Joel Sipress, "From the Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Murder in Grant Parish," Louisiana History 42 (2001): 303-21
34. Gilles Vandal, "The Policy of Violence in Caddo Parish, 1865-1884," Louisiana History 32 (1991): 159-82
35. James Keith Hogue, "Bayonet Rule: Five Street Battles in New Orleans and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction," (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1998)
36. Ted Tunnell, Edge of The Sword: The Ordeal of Carpetbagger Marshall H. Twitchell in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2001), 213-15
37. Carolyn E. Delatte, "The St. Landry Riot: A Forgotten Instance of Reconstruction Violence," Louisiana History 17 (1976): 41-49
38. and Frank J. Wetta, "'Bulldozing the Scalawags': Some Examples of the Persecution of Southern White Republicans in Louisiana during Reconstruction," Louisiana History 21 (1980): 43-58
39. Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 14-15
40. Henry Clay Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (1930; reprint, New York: Negro Univ. Press 1970), 79
41. Foner, Reconstruction, 379-82
42. and Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1918), 32
43. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 79
44. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity, 14-15
45. Harold Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1968), 30, 166-70
46. Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 10-20, 127
47. William C. Chenault and Robert Reinders, "The Northern Born Community in New Orleans in the 1850s," Journal of American History 51 (Sept. 1964): 232-47
48. Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), 96-97, 99, 125
49. Louis R. Harlan, "Desegregation in New Orleans Public Schools during Reconstruction, "American Historical Review 67 (1962): 663-74
50. New Orleans Times, Aug. 21, 1867
51. See also Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2000)
52. John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans 1860-1880 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973)
53. David C. Rankin, "The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans During Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History 40 (1974): 417-40
54. David C. Rankin, "The Impact of the Civil War on the Free Colored Community of New Orleans," Perspectives in American History 11 (1977-78): 377-416
55. Joseph G. Tregle Jr., "Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal," Journal of Southern History 18 (Feb. 1952): 20-36
56. Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction, 79, 80
57. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 271-280
58. Howard N. Rabinowitz, The First New South 1865-1920 (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan-Davidson, 1992), 51-53
59. L. Tuffly Ellis, "The New Orleans Cotton Exchange: The Formative Years, 1871-1880," Journal of Southern History 39 (1973): 545-64
60. For New Orleans's role as a banking center, see Richard H. Kilbourne Jr., Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885 (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1995)
61. George D. Green, Finance and Economic Development in the Old South: Louisiana Banking, 1804-1861 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1972)
62. Henry Clay Warmoth, War, Politics, and Reconstruction
63. Ella Lonn, Reconstruction in Louisiana, 1, 12
64. Michael Les Benedict, The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union 1865-1877, rev. ed. (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1986), 44
65. Francis B. Harris, "Henry Clay Warmoth, Reconstruction Governor of Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 30 (Apr. 1947): 523-653
66. John V. Mering, "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South: A Reconsideration," South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (Winter 1970): 124-43
67. Warmoth's address reprinted in the New Orleans Bulletin, July 15, 1868
68. New Orleans Crescent, July 14, 1868
69. For a discussion of the black Creole leaders who opposed Warmoth and his program, see Logsdon and Belle, "The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900," 245-51
70. Perman, The Road to Redemption, 23-50, 88-92
71. William A. Russ, "Disfranchisement in Louisiana, 1862-1870," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (July 1935): 557-80
72. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 175, 209-11
73. New Orleans Daily Picayune, Apr. 20, 1870
74. James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: Univ. of Mississippi Press, 1997), 87
75. New Orleans Bee, Dec. 23, 1869
76. See also, Lawrence N. Powell, "The Politics of Livelihood: Carpetbaggers in the Deep South," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), 325
77. Daily Picayune, Apr. 23, 1868
78. See also F. Wayne Binning, "Carpetbagger's Triumph: The Louisiana State Election of 1868," Louisiana History 14 (Winter 1973): 21-40
79. William Barney, Battleground for the Union: The Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1990), 248
80. Entryon T. Wharton Collens in The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 12 (New York: James T. White, 1932), 86
81. Stephen S. Fish v. J. W. Collens, docket no. 21990 (1868), Sixth District Court Judicial Record Book 1868-69, City Archives Division, New Orleans Public Library
82. Commercial Bulletin, Jan. 19, 1869
83. Michael A. Ross, "Justice Miller's Reconstruction: The Slaughter-House Cases, Health Codes, and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1861-1873," Journal of Southern History 64 (Nov. 1998): 649-76
84. Wendy E. Parmet, "From Slaughter-House to Lochner: The Rise and Fall of the Constitutionalization of Public Health," American Journal of Legal History 40 (Oct. 1996): 476-505
85. New Orleans Republican, June 4, 1869
86. For a more detailed discussions of the history of the New Orleans, Jackson and Great Northern Railroad, and the McComb affair, see John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South 1865-1900: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955), 8, 44, 54, 161-66
87. Robert C. Black, The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1998), 221, 241, 290
88. T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard:Napoleon in Gray (1955; reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1995), 278-79
89. Liva Baker, The Second Battle of New Orleans: The Hundred Year Struggle to Integrate the Schools (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 19, 20
90. Daily Picayune, Mar. 21, 1870
91. Perman, The Road to Redemption, 50-51
92. Powell, "The Politics of Livelihood," 315
93. Binning, "Carpetbagger's Triumph," 39
94. Althea D. Pitre, "The Collapse of the Warmoth Regime, 1870-72," Louisiana History 6 (Spring 1965): 161-87
95. Campbell made this argument in the Fourth District Court in Orleans Parish. Daily Picayune, May 16, 1869
96. The case later became Joseph v. Bidwell, 18 La. Ann. 383 (1876). (By 1876 Campbell was no longer handling the case). See also Mitchell Franklin, "The Foundations and Meaning of the Slaughterhouse Cases [Part 2]," Tulane Law Review 18 (Dec. 1943): 218-62
97. "Against this law," the Picayune's editor said of the slaughterhouse law, "the people recognize the fact that no remedy can be found in the state judiciary." As a result, they now had to look to "the Courts of the United States under the amendments lately made to the Constitution, ... no matter how objectionable the mode by which those amendments were added to the constitution or how tyrannical those laws may be.... It has to be taken ... pretty much in the same manner that one poison would be swallowed as an antidote to another." Daily Picayune, June 17, 1870
98. See also Ross, "Justice Miller's Reconstruction," 666
99. The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873), 51, 53
100. Ross, "Justice Miller's Reconstruction," 667
101. Samuel Freeman Miller to William Pitt Ballinger, Mar. 18 and Oct. 15, 1877, Samuel Freeman Miller Papers, box 2, folder 2, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C
102. For critics of Miller's position on the privileges or immunities clause see Michael K. Curtis, "Resurrecting the Privileges and Immunities Clause and Revising the Slaughter-House Cases without Exhuming Lochner: Individual Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment," Boston College Law Review 36 (Dec. 1996): 1-106
103. Michael K. Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1990)
104. Pamela Brandwein, Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1999)
105. Akhil Reed Amar, "The Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment," Yale Law Journal 101 (1992): 1193
106. Richard L. Aynes, "On Misreading John Bingham and the Fourteenth Amendment," Yale Law Journal 103 (1993): 57-104
107. For the view that the Fourteenth Amendment did not incorporate the Bill of Rights, see Charles Fairman, "Does the Fourteenth Amendment Incorporate the Bill of Rights?" Stanford Law Review 5 (1949): 2; Felix Frankfurter's concurring opinion in Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 59-68 (1947)
108. Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), chap. 8
109. George C. Thomas III, "When Constitutional Worlds Collide: Resurrecting the Framers' Bill of Rights and Criminal Procedure," Michigan Law Review 100 (Oct. 2001): 145-233
110. For a third view that Miller actually intended for the Bill of Rights to be incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment, see Robert C. Palmer, "The Parameters of Constitutional Reconstruction: Slaughter-House, Cruikshank, and the Fourteenth Amendment," University of Illinois Law Review 3 (1984): 739-70
111. Bryan Wildenthal, "The Lost Compromise: Reassessing the Early Understanding in Court and Congress on Incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the Fourteenth Amendment," Ohio State Law Journal 61 (2000): 1051-74
112. Some scholars argue - wrongly, I believe - that Miller's opinion in Slaughter-House reflected the growing disgust among Northerners with Radical Reconstruction and was based on a conscious desire to restore white supremacy in the South. See, for example, Richard L. Aynes, "Constricting the Law of Freedom: Justice Miller, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Slaughter-House Cases," Chicago-Kent Law Review 70 (1994): 627-88
113. Robert J. Kaczorowski, The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice and Civil Rights, 1866-1876 (Dobbs Ferry: Oceana Publications, 1985), 143, 159
114. For the opposite view see Ross, "Justice Miller's Reconstruction," 649-76
115. Jonathan Lurie, "One Hundred and Twenty-Five Years After Slaughterhouse: Where's the Reef?" Journal of Supreme Court History 24 (1999): 269-81
116. Michael Les Benedict, "Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court," Supreme Court Review (1978): 39-62
117. For examples of Conservative whites' efforts to obstruct enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and the Enforcement Acts, see Lou Falkner Williams, The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials 187l-1872 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996)
118. Stephen Cresswell, "Enforcing the Enforcement Acts: The Department of Justice in Northern Mississippi, 1870-1890," Journal of Southern History 53 (Aug. 1981): 421-40
119. and Robert M. Goldman, Reconstruction & Black Suffrage: Losing the Vote in Reese & Cruikshank (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001)