It was quietly ratified April 16 and 17, 1868, and State officers chosen. H. C. Warmoth was elected governor and the mulatto, O. J. Dunn, lieutenant-governor. The military governor was removed and the governor-elect placed in power at once although his formal inauguration did not occur until July 13, 1868. The first legislature of the new régime, in which a sweeping radical victory against the unorganized, disheartened conservatives had seated a strong Republican majority, was in session from June 29 to October 20. The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by this body opened the door of re-admission to the Union so that by the act of June 25, 1868, Louisiana was once more empowered to send W. P. Kellogg and J. B. Harris to occupy the seats in the Senate vacated defiantly seven years before by John Slidell and J. P. Benjamin. By July 18, five Representatives had been seated in the House, including the first colored person to present himself for admission to Congress; and reconstruction would seem to be a matter of history.[15]
But the military was not withdrawn, for Louisiana and Arkansas were created into the Department of Louisiana under General Rousseau. Troops were so stationed at different points throughout these States that they could be called upon to coöperate with the State authorities to preserve the peace and to sustain the new governments.
The Presidential election of the fall of that year once more centered attention on the State by an undesired and wholly unexpected victory for Seymour and Blair, and still more by the disorders and outrages on the negroes.[16] Congress was not allowed to forget that it had a right to a directing influence in the matter through committees of investigation and decisions on disputed elections to its own body.[17]
At the beginning of the year 1869 carpet-bag government was in full swing and the picture of the situation in the State is not a bright one.
The political condition might well have caused an aristocratic Louisianian to withdraw himself from the contamination of politics with a shudder of despair: a carpet-bagger the recipient of the first honor in the gift of the State, and a negro house-painter of the second. Warmoth, young, handsome, and magnetic,[18] was a native of Illinois, who had entered the army from Missouri. He had had trouble with General Grant after the battle of Vicksburg; was charged with circulating exaggerated reports of the Union losses while on parole North, was dismissed from the service by Grant, but restored to his command by Lincoln, evidence having shown his dismissal to be unjust. He retired from the army in 1865, went to Texas, where he was indicted for embezzlement and for appropriating government cotton. But when the case was called, no prosecutor appeared and the prosecution was abandoned. He returned to Louisiana and before reconstruction was sent as a delegate to Congress as narrated above. He was at this time only twenty-six years old, apparently at the height of his powers, social and political, for even his foes admitted the dignity of his appearance and the charm of his manners and conversation.
The balance of parties in 1868 stood twenty Republicans to sixteen Democrats in the Senate, fifty-six to forty-five in the House.[19] White members had been almost entirely supervisors of registration. Warmoth had selected for this office in the parishes a large number of men left in New Orleans as flotsam after the war. They had so impressed the negroes that they were returned to the legislature or were mysteriously counted in by the returning-board.[20] Almost one-half of the House were negroes, while there were at least seven sable-hued Senators.[21] The lower State and parish offices were given over largely to negroes and scalawags, not always chosen by the governor with wisdom.[22]
The comment of one of the New Orleans papers is suggestive of the sentiment of the people toward their legislature. Speaking of the revenue bill of 1869 it said:
It was the work of the lowest and most corrupt body of men ever assembled in the South. It was the work of ignorant negroes[23] coöperating with a gang of white adventurers, strangers to our interests and our sentiments. It was originated by carpet-baggers and was carried through by such arguments as are printed on green-backed paper. It was one of the long catalogs of schemes of corruption which makes up the whole history of that iniquitous Radical Conclave.[24]
Or note the Crescent: “The troupe which is now playing a sixty-day engagement at the corner of Royal and Conti streets,[25] which appears daily in the farce of ‘How to be a Legislature,’ a day or two since introduced among themselves a bill...”[26] And that paper printed later daily the following unique “ad,” “Go at once to the St. Louis Rotunda to see the astounding curiosity &.”
No less important to the State than its own political condition was the attitude of the National government. The defeat of the Republican party in the South in the fall election was like a dash of cold water. To an indifference or even a desire to be rid of the whole subject of reconstruction, which had characterized Congress in the fall of 1868, succeeded a resolute purpose to take advantage of every opportunity to gain an effective and permanent control for the Republican party. Even the law passed during the session of 1868-9, which provided that equal eligibility to office should inhere in those who had had their disabilities removed by Congress and had taken the oath to support the constitution in the act of July 11, 1868, was only a party measure to win more firmly the scalawags,[27] as the list of pardons reveals the fact that most had become Republicans.[28] Grant’s attitude was of importance to a degree that Johnson’s was not, for he came into office early in 1869, a popular and trusted executive, who would be free, to a large extent, to direct the policy of the government in the South. But, unfortunately for Louisiana, a brother-in-law, J. F. Casey, was soon put in charge of the port there and so completely won Grant’s ear that the latter approached Louisiana problems with a bias. Friction between the State and National authorities was bound to come, for already at the opening of 1869 the radicals had lost the respect of the army, and recrimination was passing back and forth between the military commander and the executive of the State.[29]