Unpunished Murder Read online

  TO NANCY AND LEE

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Prologue: Bloody Easter—Levi Nelson

  Chapter 1: A New Government—Alexander Hamilton and “Brutus”

  Chapter 2: The Supreme Court is Born—John Marshall

  Chapter 3: Less Than Human—Roger Taney and Dred Scott

  Chapter 4: Remaking America—Andrew Johnson and Thaddeus Stevens

  Chapter 5: Some Odd Arithmetic—Who Won the War?

  Chapter 6: Two Amendments and a Dream of Equality—John Bingham

  Chapter 7: The Klan—Nathan Bedford Forrest and Mary Polk Branch

  Chapter 8: Reconstruction in Black and White—Harriet Ann Jacobs and Frank Alexander Montgomery

  Chapter 9: An Island for Freedmen—Colfax

  Chapter 10: Fraud Runs Wild—Samuel McEnery and William Kellogg

  Chapter 11: Reconstruction Ascendant—Blanche K. Bruce

  Chapter 12: Massacre—James Hadnot

  Chapter 13: The Wheels of Justice—J. R. Beckwith

  Chapter 14: Civil Rights on Trial

  Chapter 15: Is Justice Language or an Idea?—Joseph P. Bradley

  Chapter 16: The Most Important Judge in the Nation—Morrison Waite

  Chapter 17: Civil Rights—Charles Sumner

  Chapter 18: One Hundred Years of Freedom—Philadelphia and the White League

  Chapter 19: The End of the Line

  Chapter 20: President By One Vote—The Fifteenth Man

  Epilogue: Unpunished Murder

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Source Notes

  Illustration and Photograph Credits

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AT THE END OF the prologue in Unpunished Murder, historian Lawrence Goldstone writes, “The story of Colfax, then, is the story of America.” No truer words could be written. Yet very few Americans know the story of the Colfax Massacre, in which more than one hundred African-American men were slaughtered by white supremacists on Easter Sunday 1873.

  For more than two centuries, our students have learned only partial truths about the racial hatred and denigration underlying much of our nation’s history—for example, the false claim that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War was widely taught for many years. It is important, perhaps now more than ever, to move past such myths, and to confront this nation’s true racial history.

  My own experiences as a student illustrate precisely why Unpunished Murder is such a vital contribution to young readers’ literature. Too many of the history lessons I received during my primary and secondary school days in Texas public schools erased the impact that African-Americans, including slaves, made on the building and development of our nation, and sanitized the abominations of slavery and other racist systems and practices. As a young black student in the South, I not only felt alienated by the incomplete and, in some instances, inaccurate history that I was learning in the classroom, I also felt cheated by the fact that, in order to learn about African-American history, Mexican-American history, and Native American history, I had to seek out such knowledge for myself. I wish books like Unpunished Murder had been available to me then.

  In this fine work, Lawrence Goldstone not only traces the complex and often inspiring experiment in self-government that was the United States, he also compellingly describes how its political system, and especially the United States Supreme Court, repeatedly failed to protect the rights of African-Americans. In fact, Goldstone details how, during and after Reconstruction, the Court went still further and actively opposed any effort to guarantee equal rights for black citizens. During this period, few Supreme Court decisions were more infamous than that which freed the Colfax Massacre defendants, a travesty that led directly to the horrors of Jim Crow.

  Goldstone’s retelling of the founding of Colfax, a town led by freedmen; the Colfax Massacre; two ensuing trials; and other events leading up to and following the tragic massacre is not only an honest and shrewd collection of many narratives of and about America, but it is also an American treasure in that he provides a solid foundation upon which readers can better understand the inequities and racial tensions that still exist in our society.

  Unpunished Murder tells the story of a conflicted America that has long been ignored by many—a story about an America that impressively charted a path toward becoming the most powerful country in the world, while never living up to its promise of genuine equality for African-Americans. It is a tale of unparalleled opportunity for whites through the Homestead Act, which provided many white settlers each with 160 acres of public land in the West, alongside the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for each newly freed slave who had toiled on plantation soil.

  In the end, after describing the events and lives that have undergirded the “great battles that determined not only the laws of a new nation, but also its soul,” Goldstone proclaims that “[t]hose battles continue today.” Indeed they do, but I for one am hopeful that, with the guidance of books such as Unpunished Murder, our souls—the nation’s soul—will one day be healed.

  Angela Onwuachi-Willig

  Chancellor’s Professor of Law

  University of California, Berkeley School of Law

  IN 1873, EIGHT YEARS after the end of the Civil War, Levi Nelson was finally free to toil as a blacksmith for his own sake rather than for the white man who had owned him. He lived in Grant Parish, Louisiana, an isolated area on the Red River in the northcentral part of the state. There were many other “freedmen”—as emancipated slaves were called—in Grant Parish, more black residents than white.

  Three years before, in 1870, the United States Constitution had been amended to guarantee adult African-American males the right to vote, a privilege unthinkable just a decade before. And so, for the first time in his life, Levi Nelson could choose to be governed by men whose skin color was the same as his own. In another radical change, Colfax, the parish seat, was home to a unit of the Louisiana militia commanded by William Ward, a black Union army veteran, and many of Ward’s recruits were freedmen as well, although few of them had any military training.

  If Levi Nelson’s freedoms were new, so was the district in which he lived. Grant Parish had been created only in 1869, carved out of adjacent Winn and Rapides Parishes, both of which remained largely white. (A “parish” is the same as a “county.”) Almost the entire area had been part of the Calhoun plantation, owned by Willie Calhoun, one of those rare Southern white men who believed that black people deserved the same rights as every other American. At Calhoun’s urging, Louisiana’s Republican legislature had created the new parish to give freedmen a base of political power. They had named it after President Ulysses S. Grant, and named the town after Vice President Schuyler Colfax. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and almost all African-Americans, had become a force in Southern politics since the United States Army had been sent into the conquered Confederacy to guarantee the very rights that Levi Nelson now enjoyed.

  Democrats, virtually all of whom were white, loathed these changes—most considered freed slaves little more than beasts. The most ferocious of the white supremacists, who called themselves Redeemers, had banded together across the South in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to fight any attempt to raise the political and economic status of freedmen. Their weapons were terror and murder. In one period, between April and November 1868, more than one thousand freedmen were murdered by whites.

  In Grant Parish, the freedmen fought back. Colfax was the scene of a number of skirmishes, and in the first week of April 1873, whites attempting to take over the town government had
been repeatedly beaten back by black defenders. On April 13, 1873, Easter Sunday, Redeemers decided once and for all to take Grant Parish back.

  The invaders arrived at dawn—perhaps two hundred armed white men, some on horseback, others dragging a four-pound cannon. Many were Confederate war veterans and came armed with modern rifles, pistols, and shotguns. Some had journeyed from up to four hundred miles away to participate in the assault. Fearing this very sort of attack, William Ward had earlier ordered trenches to be dug around the courthouse. Ward himself had traveled to New Orleans to explain how desperate the situation was and to attempt to persuade the governor to send reinforcements.

  Word had arrived days earlier of the impending Redeemer attack and many local black men, including Levi Nelson, along with women and children, perhaps four hundred in all, had gathered in and around the courthouse for protection. More than one hundred freedmen, about half of them armed, but only with antiquated shotguns, had taken up positions either in the courthouse or in the surrounding trenches.

  One of the Redeemers’ leaders, James W. Hadnot, a former Confederate colonel, was among the first to approach the town square. The cannon was brought into range. Although no one knows who fired first, shots were soon exchanged. The white men, who were deployed in a semicircle around the courthouse, were so eager that they fired wildly until another of their leaders, Christopher Columbus “C. C.” Nash, also a former Confederate officer, screamed that they might be firing on their own men. Soon, three of the invaders, including Hadnot, were mortally wounded, Hadnot and one of the others likely shot by their own comrades. A number of the defenders had been shot dead as well.

  The outcome of the battle was never in doubt. After six volleys from the cannon, the courthouse was set on fire, and the hopelessly outgunned freedmen gave up. The whites instructed the black men to stack their arms and march out, assuring them they would not be harmed.

  The Redeemers moved through the ranks of their captives and collected their weapons. Then, as the prisoners were marched off, without warning, the white invaders opened fire.

  Colfax was so difficult to get to that neither army units nor reporters could reach the town until days later. What they found shocked the nation. As the New York Times reported in a special dispatch, “It now appears that not a single colored man was killed until all of them had surrendered to the whites … when over 100 of the unfortunate negroes were brutally shot down in cold blood. It is understood that another lot of negroes was burned to death in the Court-house when it was set on fire.” The killing had gone on well into the night and took place not only in the town, but also in the surrounding woods, where freedmen trying to flee were killed on sight. “The details of the massacre … are positively appalling in their atrocity, and would appear to be more like the work of fiends than that of civilized men in a Christian country.”

  Colfax victims.

  The Redeemers had been determined to kill every black man they could find, but some survived, many of them with terrible wounds. One survivor owed his life to a bit of hubris of one of the white invaders. The white man had bragged that he could kill two men with a single bullet fired at close range. The first man struck had died, but the bullet had lost sufficient velocity so that the second man was only wounded. That man lay on the ground until hours after dark, pretending to be dead, and then, after most of the Redeemers had left Colfax, he crawled into the woods.

  And thus Levi Nelson lived to bear witness to what would be known in the North as the Colfax Massacre.

  But not in the South. There, and in some Democratic newspapers in the North, such as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the incident was referred to as the Colfax Riot. The Daily Eagle, which boasted “the largest circulation of any evening newspaper published in the United States,” blamed the incident entirely on the freedmen, claiming, without any proof or eyewitness testimony, that James Hadnot had been shot down in cold blood after offering a flag of truce, and that the white invaders had merely taken possession of government buildings that were rightfully theirs, all with a minimum of force. A memorial headstone was later erected in Louisiana in honor of the three Redeemers “who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for white supremacy.”

  The tragedy of Colfax did not end with the massacre, however, but in the most hallowed courtroom in the land, a place where the Founding Fathers, in particular Alexander Hamilton, had promised that the rights of oppressed citizens would be protected.

  The story of Colfax, then, is the story of America, and it begins where America began, in the State House in Philadelphia, now known as Independence Hall. From there, a new Constitution was issued, signed on September 17, 1787, which spawned a series of great battles that determined not only the laws of the new nation, but also its soul. Those battles continue today.

  WHEN INDEPENDENCE WAS SECURED by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the United States was not really united at all. Under America’s governing document, the Articles of Confederation, which called itself a “compact of friendship,” each state was allowed to operate as almost a separate country—with its own laws, its own militia, even its own money. Such a system could not serve the needs of the new nation, but it would be difficult to change. Most Americans identified more with the state they lived in than with the United States.

  Alexander Hamilton.

  But some, like James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York, believed the new nation could not grow, and perhaps not even survive, unless it truly became one. In May 1787, they tricked twelve of the thirteen states into sending delegations to Philadelphia, supposedly to reform the Articles. Rhode Island, nicknamed “Rogue’s Island” for its freewheeling style in business, was perfectly happy with the Articles as they were and refused to send anyone to fix them. Once in this “convention,” Madison and Hamilton intended to draft an entirely new system of laws and then to persuade the other delegates to accept it. But the odds were not good. The issues that divided the states were stronger than those that bound them together, and no issue divided the states more than slavery. Madison himself said, “The real difference of interests, lay not between large and small, but between the Northern and Southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences formed a line of discrimination.”

  James Madison.

  The delegates fought for four months behind locked doors, often in sweltering heat, and when the Convention finally ended, Hamilton, Madison, and their supporters had won. On September 17, 1787, in a ceremony both solemn and joyous, thirty-nine delegates, including the Convention’s presiding officer, George Washington, signed the newly drafted Constitution of the United States.

  The “Supreme Law of the Land” contained seven major divisions, called “Articles,” the first three of which discussed who would govern and what powers those who were elected and appointed would have. Article I dealt with the legislature—Congress—which almost every delegate believed would be the most powerful branch of government. Congress was divided into two chambers, a House of Representatives, which would be elected directly by all those who were allowed to vote, and a Senate, whose members—two per state—would be chosen by state legislatures. (After the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, senators, too, would be elected by popular vote.) Article I is by far the longest since, with the British Parliament as a model, there was a greater understanding of what a legislature should and should not be able to do.

  But the British Parliament never had to deal with whether or not slaves would be counted for representation, while in the United States this question was of equal or even greater importance than anything else the delegates had to decide. The white slaveholding South wanted slaves to be counted to determine how many seats a state would be granted in the House of Representatives; the North, which had almost no slaves, was opposed.

  Alexander Hamilton’s June 1787 notes for a speech proposing a plan of government at the Federal Convention.

  Madison’s July 14 notes, when he acknowledges that slavery is what most divides the nati
on.

  The issue put delegates from both sections in an odd position. White Southerners, who usually insisted slaves were property, had to in this case insist they were people. Northerners, who were equally firm that human beings could not be property, had to here insist they were. In the end, they compromised. For every five slaves, three would be counted for deciding representation. Since slaves could not vote, this of course meant that the vote of a white man from a slaveholding state was worth more than one from a free state. If the North had not given in on this question, however, Southern delegates would have walked out, and the effort to draft a Constitution would have failed. The “Three-Fifths Compromise” became the best known, but not the only, accommodation that the North made in Philadelphia to the slaveholding South.

  The delegates next turned to Article II, the election and powers of the president. Drawing up this article was more difficult—it took more than 160 different votes—because, although they knew they didn’t want a king or queen, the delegates had no model on which to base an alternative. Deciding whether or not to call the president “Your Excellency” aroused passionate debate, and there were even proposals that the presidency be a council of three. In the end, although the president would be the commander in chief of the army and navy—almost all the delegates assumed the first president would be General Washington—he (and someday she) was not expected to be nearly as powerful as presidents turned out to be.

  There was great disagreement on how the president should be elected. Very few of the delegates favored a popular vote, which would mean that each eligible individual voter had the same influence on the outcome as every other voter. Most delegates wanted the states to have the strongest voice. After much debate, the idea of an electoral college was agreed to. Under this system, each state would choose electors equal in number to its combined number of senators (always two) and members of the House of Representatives. With slaves giving Southern states more representatives than they would have been entitled to with only whites counted, this meant that slave states also got a larger voice in selecting a president. Each state was free to choose electors any way they wished, by popular vote, by the state legislature, or by any other formula they decided on.