Colfax 1873

Grant Parish had been created by the Reconstruction-era Louisiana legislature in 1869, carved from Rapides Parish as a new Republican stronghold. It was named for Ulysses S. Grant. The parish seat, Colfax, was named for Grant's vice president, Schuyler Colfax. The naming itself was a political statement. The parish was majority Black. Its government was majority Black and Republican.

The Louisiana gubernatorial election of 1872 was one of the most contested in American history. Both the Republican candidate, William Pitt Kellogg, and the Democratic candidate, John McEnery, claimed victory. The White League and allied paramilitary groups organized across the state to install McEnery by force. In Grant Parish, the Republican slate,which included several Black officeholders,had been installed in the courthouse by federal district court order.

In late March 1873, rumors spread that white paramilitaries were planning to attack Colfax and install the Democratic slate. Roughly 150 local Black men,most of them freedmen, many of them Union Army veterans,gathered at the courthouse to defend the elected government. They dug earthworks around the courthouse. They kept a watch. They waited.

On the morning of Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, more than 300 armed white men surrounded the courthouse. They were led by Christopher Columbus Nash, a former Confederate officer. They had rifles. They had a four-pound cannon, taken from a Confederate battery that had been recovered from a river after the war. The defenders had a handful of rifles and no artillery.

The siege lasted most of the day. By late afternoon, the white attackers had maneuvered the cannon into position to fire directly at the courthouse. Some attackers set fire to the courthouse roof. The defenders, facing death by fire, began to surrender. Most were killed as they emerged,shot at close range, or executed after surrender. Forty-eight more were taken prisoner and held overnight, then executed before dawn on Monday morning.

Three white men died. The exact number of Black men killed has never been established. The conservative historical estimate is 62. The upper estimate,based on contemporary Black testimony and later scholarship,is 153. Federal investigator James Beckwith, who arrived within days, wrote that he believed the true figure was closer to 100.

The federal government, under the Grant administration, took the massacre seriously. U.S. Attorney James Beckwith secured indictments against 97 of the white attackers. Nine were ultimately brought to trial. Three were convicted. The Cruikshank defendants appealed.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process and Equal Protection clauses applied only to state action,not to the actions of private individuals or groups. The convictions were overturned. The practical effect was to end federal prosecution of racial paramilitary violence for the next ninety years. The decision was not overturned until the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s.

Within two years of Cruikshank, the Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction. Federal troops withdrew from the South. Colfax's Black population was disarmed, disenfranchised, and reduced to sharecropping. Grant Parish became a reliably Democratic parish until the mid-twentieth century.

For more than a century, a state-erected historical marker at the Colfax courthouse site described the massacre as "the Colfax Riot" and claimed it "marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South." A separate monument in the white cemetery honored the three white men who died as "Heroes who fell fighting for White Supremacy." The state marker was finally removed and replaced in 2021. The cemetery monument remains.