Colfax 1873

Grant Parish had been created by the Reconstruction-era Louisiana legislature in 1869[1], 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 courthouse, an unfinished brick warehouse on a bluff over the Red River that had been converted into a parish seat, was the tangible sign of that new authority.

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[5]. The White League and allied paramilitary groups organized across the state through the winter of 1872 to 1873 to install McEnery by force. Parish-level elections were contested in much the same way. 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[1], and the Democratic slate immediately began organizing to dislodge them.

The prosecution power the Republican officeholders expected to call on was recent. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871, passed by Congress to implement the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, had criminalized the conspiracies of Klan-era paramilitary groups and authorized federal marshals and United States Army units to intervene in state elections[5]. The Grant Administration's Department of Justice, created in 1870, had used the Acts to convict hundreds of Klansmen in South Carolina in 1871 and 1872. White paramilitary leaders in Louisiana knew the Acts well. They planned around them.

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, including several who had served in the United States Colored Troops[2], gathered at the courthouse to defend the elected government. The force assembled into an informal militia under the command of William Ward, the Republican state senator from Grant Parish, and captains including Daniel Shaw and Benjamin Allen. They dug rifle pits and earthworks in a rough perimeter around the courthouse. They kept a watch through the three weeks that followed. They sent several messengers to New Orleans and to Washington asking for federal troops. No troops came.

Meanwhile the white attackers were assembling. Over the first weeks of April, men arrived in Colfax by steamboat, on horseback, and on foot from Rapides, Natchitoches, Winn, Catahoula, and Caddo parishes[1]. Some were formal White League members. Others came on their own. All were armed. By Holy Saturday, April 12, a force of more than 300 men had massed at the Rutland plantation just outside Colfax and elected Christopher Columbus Nash, a former Confederate officer who had served in the 10th Louisiana Infantry, as their commander[2].

On the morning of Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873[3], more than 300 armed white men surrounded the courthouse. They were led by Nash. They had rifles. They had a four-pound cannon, recovered earlier that spring from the wreck of a Confederate-era river steamer and mounted on a borrowed wagon frame[1]. The defenders had a handful of rifles, no artillery, and the earthworks they had dug three weeks earlier. Nash sent a rider under a white flag demanding surrender. Ward, who was away from the courthouse collecting additional arms when the attack began, had left command to Shaw and Allen. The demand was refused.

The siege lasted most of the day. For several hours the two sides exchanged rifle fire across the rifle pits. By late afternoon, the white attackers had maneuvered the cannon to within a hundred yards of the courthouse walls and begun to fire directly. A white fighter named Sidney Harris was detailed to set the courthouse roof on fire by shooting flaming arrows into the shake shingles. The roof caught. The Black defenders, facing death by fire, began to surrender. Most were killed as they emerged under white flags, shot at close range on the courthouse steps, or executed after surrender in the churchyard across the road[1]. Forty-eight more were taken prisoner[2], held overnight under guard in a low shed, and executed two at a time before dawn on Monday morning in what survivor Levi Nelson, who was shot and left for dead but lived to testify, described as a procession to the riverbank[4].

Three white men died. The exact number of Black men killed has never been established. The conservative historical estimate is 62[1]. The upper estimate, based on contemporary Black testimony collected by U.S. Attorney James Beckwith's office and the later LeeAnna Keith monograph, is 153[2]. Federal investigator Beckwith, who arrived within days with a small detachment of deputies and a stenographer, wrote that he believed the true figure was closer to 100[4]. Many of the bodies were dumped into the Red River or buried in unmarked mass graves around the courthouse grounds. A local farmer named Jeff Yawn later testified to Beckwith's office about spending two days using a mule team to bury bodies in a trench near the town.

The federal government, under the Grant administration, took the massacre seriously. U.S. Attorney James Beckwith secured indictments against 97 of the white attackers under the Enforcement Acts[3]. Nine were ultimately brought to trial in the United States Circuit Court for the District of Louisiana. Three were convicted, including William Cruikshank, whose name the subsequent Supreme Court case would carry. The Cruikshank defendants appealed on grounds that the Enforcement Acts exceeded federal constitutional authority.

In United States v. Cruikshank (1876)[3], 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[5]. The First and Second Amendment assembly and arms claims in the indictment were held similarly inapplicable to private conduct. The convictions were overturned. The practical effect was to end federal prosecution of racial paramilitary violence for the next ninety years; the Enforcement Acts remained on the books but were effectively unenforceable against the Klan and its successors. The decision was not overturned until the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s and the revisions to federal conspiracy law that followed.

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. The Knights of the White Camelia and the White League, by then open organizations in Louisiana, moved into local government. Many of the Easter Sunday attackers held parish office within a decade.

James Beckwith, the U.S. Attorney who had built the federal case, was left without a professional future in Louisiana. He was targeted professionally and personally in the months after the Cruikshank ruling and eventually left the state. He continued to correspond with the Department of Justice about southern racial violence for the remainder of the decade and wrote the principal federal report on the conditions under which the Enforcement Acts could no longer be enforced.

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."[1] 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[6] after a multi-year campaign led by the Colfax Heritage Committee and the Louisiana Division of Archaeology. The new marker names the event as a massacre, gives the death-toll range, and identifies the Enforcement Acts prosecution and the Cruikshank reversal as the legal outcome. The cemetery monument remains standing.