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The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction - Hardcover

Lane, Charles

 
9780805083422: The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0805083421 ISBN 13: 9780805083422
Verlag: Henry Holt & Co, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The untold story of the slaying of a Southern town’s ex-slaves and a white lawyer’s historic battle to bring the perpretators to justice
 
Following the Civil War, Colfax, Louisiana, was a town, like many, where Negroes and whites mingled uneasily. But on April 13, 1873, a small army of white ex–Confederate soldiers, enraged after attempts by freedmen to assert their new rights, killed more than sixty Negroes who had occupied a courthouse. With skill and tenacity, The Washington Post’s Charles Lane transforms this nearly forgotten incident into a riveting historical saga.
 
Seeking justice for the slain, one brave U.S. attorney, James Beckwith, risked his life and career to investigate and punish the perpetrators—but they all went free. What followed was a series of courtroom dramas that culminated at the Supreme Court, where the justices’ verdict compromised the victories of the Civil War and left Southern blacks at the mercy of violent whites for generations. The Day Freedom Died is an electrifying piece of historical detective work that captures a gallery of characters from presidents to townspeople, and re-creates the bloody days of Reconstruction, when the often brutal struggle for equality moved from the battlefield into communities across the nation.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Charles Lane discovered the Colfax Massacre case while covering the Supreme Court for The Washington Post. His journalism career has taken him from Washington to Tokyo, Berlin and Bosnia, Havana to Johannesburg. A former editor of The New Republic, Lane has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from harvard and studied law at Yale. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Charles Lane discovered the Colfax Massacre case while covering the Supreme Court for The Washington Post. His journalism career has taken him from Washington to Tokyo, Berlin to Bosnia, Havana to Johannesburg. A former editor of The New Republic, Lane has written for Foreign Affairs, The New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard and studied law at Yale. He lives in the Washington, D.C., area.

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The Day Freedom Died
CHAPTER ONE
"WHOLESALE MURDER"
A cloudy evening was fading into darkness as the steamboat Southwestern approached the eastern bank of the Red River on April 13, 1873--Easter Sunday. The boat had reached a bend in the river where Captain Thornton Jacobs was certain he would find pine logs for his vessel's four hungry engines. The woodpile was about a mile north of Colfax, Louisiana.
The Southwestern carried its own gangplanks: a pair of long wooden walkways which jutted like alligator teeth from the vessel's bow. Jacobs's crew had just lowered them when a young man charged out of the gloom onto the boat. Heavily armed, he was obviously agitated. Jacobs's crew looked him over, preparing for a fight; in these lawless times, robberies and gunplay plagued river traffic. Yet this gunman was not out to empty the safe or hijack the cotton. He wanted Jacobs to take the boat straight to Colfax.
The Southwestern was a 180-foot packet steamer, three years old and valued for insurance purposes at the princely sum of ten thousand dollars. Usually stacked high with cotton and crowded with passengers, it ran the New Orleans-Shreveport route along the Mississippi and the Red, twice a week in high-water season. Captain Jacobs had a schedule to maintain, but the wise river hand, careful of both his customers and his cargo, granted the gunman's request. He maneuvered his 411-ton steamer away from shore as gritty clouds, smelling of resin, poured from its smokestacks. In the stern, a paddlewheel churned the water with a steady slap-slap-slap.
There had been a gun battle in Colfax, the new passenger claimed; two men lay seriously wounded and needed to see the doctor in Alexandria, twenty-two miles downriver. Relaxing a bit, the man elaborated, even joked a little about all the killing. The fight had pitted white men against Negroes, he explained, and the latter had been soundly defeated. "If you ever wanted to see dead niggers," he mused, "this is your chance."
It was rare to see large numbers of people in Colfax; it was not aproper town but a scattering of buildings on flat "bottom land" sandwiched between the Red to the west and pine-clad hills in the east. Just a few white men--lawyers and merchants--actually lived within Colfax. Their little houses had extra rooms, grandly labeled hotels, which they rented to the odd traveler. In the country around the town lay cotton plantations, their tumbledown fences and skinny livestock showing the impact of the war and ensuing economic distress. The planters' houses were a bit grander than those in Colfax, but even their paint was peeling. In and around the cotton fields lived hundreds of Negroes, most still occupying the cypress-board cabins they had built before emancipation. They survived on modest wages from white employers--augmented by hogs, chicken, corn, and vegetables they raised, and small game they shot or trapped in the nearby woods.
Though Colfax epitomized Southern languor, it was the capital of Grant Parish, a new jurisdiction carved out of two older ones in 1869. A courthouse had been fashioned from the stable of a cotton plantation; parish court met here, as did the five-man legislature, known in Louisiana's distinctive parlance as the police jury. The sessions could be contentious, because there was a lot at stake: taxes, the control of stray animals, the fate of cattle thieves. Congress, the president, and the state government could affect how life in Grant Parish was lived, but generally locals were more concerned with what happened inside that stuffy old brick building, where the judge and the sheriff wielded power over life and death.
 
 
IT WAS RAINING WHEN THE SOUTHWESTERN PULLED INTO COLFAX AT ABOUT 8:00 p.m. The boat's passengers and crew went ashore over the gangplanks, moving gingerly through the dark and wet. In the damp grass, the men sensed something strange underfoot, as a lantern flickered and glowed, casting ghostly shadows. Gradually, they realized they were stumbling over dead Negroes, most facedown and shot almost to pieces. One of the men from the Southwestern, a Texan named R. G. Hill, counted eighteen. But the young gunman who had invited him and the others on this grisly tour boasted that was barely a quarter of the total.
Fewer than one hundred yards to the east, flames danced in the sky. The courthouse was on fire, and a terrible stench attacked the passengers' nostrils, making them ill. At least one of the dead, apparently, had been literally broiled in the courthouse. Hill could make out his charred remains. "Let's go back," someone cried.
But they did not go back. Somehow, they could not, and soon theycame upon more dead. Smoke was still winding upward from one corpse's scorched clothing. A passenger commented that he looked alive, and, hearing this, one of the local whites cocked a six-shooter. "I'll finish the black dog," he promised--but Hill and others from the Southwestern restrained him. When somebody turned the body over, it was stiff, and there was no life left in it. A tall, muscular Negro, probably a veteran of many years of labor in the fields, lay on the grass, propped up on one elbow as if he had died in the middle of a rare afternoon's rest. The white man with the six-shooter angrily kicked the corpse. "Oh, he's dead as hell," he muttered.
A crowd of armed white men milled around on the bank. Walking their guests back to the boat, they confirmed the story of a battle between the races. Three weeks earlier, they said, armed Negroes, stirred up by white Radical Republicans, seized the courthouse, throwing out the rightful officeholders: the white judge and sheriff. Then the Negroes installed defeated Republican candidates and rampaged around the town, driving out white families and robbing homes. They dug military-style trenches around the courthouse and even built a couple of cannon out of old pipe. Openly proclaiming their intention to kill all the white men, they boasted they would use white women to breed a new race.
In self-defense, the whites continued, men from Grant Parish and surrounding parishes had organized a posse, which had offered the Negroes a chance to lay down their arms. But the blacks refused, leaving the posse no choice: at midday, about eight hours ago, the whites counterattacked. Fighting was fierce; one white man died. The blacks retreated into the courthouse. The only option was to smoke them out, and a Negro was bribed to set fire to the building's wooden roof. At that point, the Negroes waved a white flag. Whites approached, but the blacks fired again, seriously wounding the two men now in need of a doctor, one of whom was James W. Hadnot, the Grant Parish state representative. After that treachery, the whites resumed firing and kept shooting at the Negroes even as they ran from the flames. They did not stop until they had killed or captured every black man they could find.
 
 
AS HADNOT AND SIDNEY HARRIS, THE OTHER WOUNDED MAN, WERE TAKEN aboard the Southwestern, R. G. Hill glanced at the Negro prisoners, huddled together in a wooden storehouse. About eight wounded captives were lying on the porch, trying to stay dry as white guards, heavily armed, eyed every twitch they made. Hill asked one guard if he might speak with the Negroes. "No," came the brusque response.
Hill did not press. He understood that ex-slaves and their white Republican instigators were forcing decent whites to endure the unendurable all over the South. In Hill's own hometown of Marshall, Texas, not far from the Louisiana border, a Negro policeman had shot and killed a white schoolteacher. Last Hill heard, it appeared a judge would grant the...

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Verlag
Henry Holt & Co
Erscheinungsdatum
2008
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0805083421
ISBN 13 
9780805083422
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
326
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Verantwortliche Person
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