Socially, the problem was largely a race question, though the bitterness of feeling toward her conquerors and contempt of carpet-bagger and scalawag enter to complicate the matter. The intensity of her bitterness toward the North found expression in such paragraphs as the following:
The black and bloody chapter of American subjugation reads so much like the scenes of the Netherlands and the Palatinate that it cannot claim even the vile merit of distinguished infamy. Let it be blotted out and closed. Let the American government publish and execute this amnesty in good faith. Let them seek new fields of glory and cease to promote men merely because they have distinguished themselves by the slaughter of Americans or by laying waste the regions that Americans have planted.[30]
In moments of calmness appeals to the better sentiment of the North are heard, coupled with promises that a spirit of conciliation would be seconded by the masses of the South, which were prepared to accept all necessary and reasonable conditions imposed by the result of the war.[31]
Their particular spleen was vented now vindictively, now humorously, on the carpet-baggers: “Only call off the carpet-baggers and you are welcome to substitute an army of hand-organists in their stead. No sounds can punish our nerves, our patience, and our tympanums so much as the ‘base bawl’ of carpet-baggers.”[32] The host of traders, capitalists, and adventurers, who had come down during and just after the war to seek a new field for investment in the conquered country, were, naturally, regarded more or less as harpies. The number was formidable, for already by the fall of 1866, between five and ten thousand Union soldiers had settled in the State.[33] The exasperating feature was that they immediately undertook to run the government for the natives, securing office through negro votes.[34] Capital, energy, and talents were desired, but not men to tend to their politics.[35]
Two great facts are to be remembered in the negro question in Louisiana. In the first place the negroes were in a slight majority. After the war the Southerner saw his former slaves avoiding him, careless, insolent, acquiring habits of vagrancy, manifesting little fear in indulging their propensity for theft, believing that under the guidance of disinterested councillors, they would soon become landed proprietors without labor, scholars without study, and the social equals of their former masters. For so many years the fear of a servile insurrection had hung over him that he instinctively tried to erect a defense against it. The officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau had also helped to complicate the situation. For the most part, indiscreet army officers, often bent on their own fortunes, the directors managed the work in such an inefficient manner that the planters found it an intolerable nuisance. In the general demoralization of labor, the Southerner turned in despair to the legislature for relief and its impolitic response was the so-called “Black Codes,” which subjected the negro to oppressive restrictions not imposed upon the whites and smacked strongly of the slave codes. But it is to be remembered that the extremely rigorous code of this State was passed before the dreaded holidays of 1865-6 when the negroes were confidently expecting Uncle Sam’s gift of “forty acres and a mule.”[36] In the second place, the Gulf States had an element of especially vicious negroes, due to the fact that before the war criminals for offenses less than murder were traditionally sold “South.” There were also more free colored persons in Louisiana than in all the other Southern States, negroes who were likely to have developed some leadership and initiative,[37] but were on the average less intelligent than in most of the former slave States.[38]
Every effort was made by the radicals to encourage the negro to claim full equality with the whites, political and social, until by 1868 they were demanding not only the franchise, but mixed schools, a share in public affairs and even social rights. The Southerner, as has been said so many times, did not hate the negro, but he did not believe that he could rise in the scale of civilization. He felt that most of the negroes had not sufficient intelligence to desire the franchise, and hence that it was superimposed upon him. Nordhoff declares that “without whites to organize the colored vote—which means to mass it, to excite it, to gather the voters at barbacues, to carry them up with a hurra to the polls, to make ‘bolting’ terrible, to appeal to the fears of the ignorant and the cupidity of the shrewd; without all this the negro will not vote.” And it was a well-known fact that the “organizers”[39] were Federal officers with little else to do. And, in addition, the campaigns did interfere with the work rendered. The following passage from Nordhoff, the words of the bitterest Democrat he met in the State, shows how direct this was: “And they work just about as well (as in slavery), except when some accursed politician comes up from New Orleans with a brass band, and sends word, as was done last fall, that General Butler had ordered them all to turn out to a political meeting.”[40]
Nowhere, perhaps, is this sentiment more accurately reflected than in a speech of Senator Ogden’s in the State Assembly: “Do you not know as well as I that all the disgust, all the anger and bitterness that arose between these different political factions was engendered by the ill voices of certain politicians, who haranguing the ignorant and superstitious, in private and in public, poured into their ears voices as poisonous as nightshade.”[41]
Negro suffrage was the burning question, and they were not reconciled, even after it had become a fact, even when they consented, as they did in the fall of 1868, to use the negro vote. But valiantly did the Democratic party in that election turn to win them; helped them to form clubs, promised protection, and offered to give Democratic negroes the preference in employment, enlisted negro orators; and often had them speak from the same platform as white Democrats. Yet all this was but for the purpose of securing white ascendency, for it was in this very year that the Knights of the White Camelia became perfected into a Federal organization, pledged to secure white supremacy, and to prevent political power from passing to the negro. The negro franchise might be a fact, but, if organized effort could prevent it, negro office-holding should not.[42] The Southerner felt that the last scourge of defeat, Congressional reconstruction, was founded on falsehood and malice. He declared that the reports concerning outrages on negroes had been distorted and exaggerated. The only purpose he could see in the zeal to put the ballot in the hands of men too ignorant to use it without direction was to prolong party power.
This hostility to the negro vote led to ingenious modes of reasoning to evade the results of the polls. On the eve of the assembling of the legislature of 1869 one of the city papers suggested that a certain negro Senator had been rendered ineligible by the adoption of a new registry law. As his ballot had been the casting vote which seated another negro, the latter held his seat illegally, and the article closes with the pertinent query whether laws made by such legislators would have any validity.[43]
Another factor in the social problem, unique to the South, was not absent from Louisiana—the numerous “poor whites” in the northern part of the State. Living close to the subsistence line on the thin soil of the pine hills back of the bottom lands, without schools, with but few churches, given to rude sports and crude methods of farming, their ignorance and prejudice bred in them after the emancipation of the negro a dread of sinking to the social level of the blacks. The dread, in turn, bred hatred, and it was from this class, instigated very probably by the class above them, that the Colfax and Coushatta murders[44] took their unfortunate rise.