In 1868, Henry Warmoth was elected as the first Republican governor of Louisiana. This volatile environment created strife. Disenfranchised whites quickly scapegoated African-Americans for any inconvenience, even though the living conditions of whites still surpassed those of African-Americans. The federal government established the Freedmen’s Bureau to help enslaved people transition (whether they did enough is debatable) and new amendments gave African-Americans more rights, albeit persecution never ceased. On the contrary, African-Americans received more rights than any other previous time in U.S. The Civil War revoked some privilege of many wealthy whites and disenfranchised many poorer whites, who were newly engaged in labor competition with eager freedpeople. This pro-Union mentality contrasted starkly with the slave-owning elite and their avidly racist counterparts. This is unsurprising as the population contained thousands of gens du couleur libre– free people of color- and it was more commercially similar to Northeastern ports than Confederate cities. New Orleans, the most populous city in the Confederacy, surrendered without a shot fired as it was more cosmopolitan, industrial, and more sympathetic to the Union than the rest of the Confederacy. During the Civil War, many Louisianans fought with the Union. Reconstruction Louisiana was a tumultuous era. In order to understand the violence, we must understand the circumstances associated with it. It was not chaotic, but a deliberate, systematic slaughter of humans who were just liberated from their chains circa six years prior à la the Emancipation Proclamation. It has been recognized and used by the very few who mention it, but I choose to label it by a much more appropriate term: The St. That term does not give it justice, and implies mass chaos must’ve ensued. What’s in a name, anyway? The term riot was provided by whites, whether in the newspapers or remaining government records. Bernard Riot, but it really has no official name. Congressional inquiries into the massacre paint an atrocity. Bernard, I started to unravel a brutal massacre absent from almost any historical narrative. As I studied the history of my own parish, St. Race violence was all too common throughout American history.
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