Download or read book The Louisiana Scalawags written by Frank J. Wetta and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the pejorative term "scalawag" referred to white southerners loyal to the Republican Party. With the onset of the federal occupation of New Orleans in 1862, scalawags challenged the restoration of the antebellum political and social orders. Derided as opportunists, uneducated "poor white trash," Union sympathizers, and race traitors, scalawags remain largely misunderstood even today. In The Louisiana Scalawags, Frank J. Wetta offers the first in-depth analysis of these men and their struggle over the future of Louisiana. A significant assessment of the interplay of politics, race, and terrorism during Reconstruction, this study answers an array of questions about the origin and demise of the scalawags, and debunks much of the negative mythology surrounding them. Contrary to popular thought, the southern white Republicans counted among their ranks men of genuine accomplishment and talent. They worked in fields as varied as law, business, medicine, journalism, and planting, and many held government positions as city officials, judges, parish officeholders, and state legislators in the antebellum years. Wetta demonstrates that a strong sense of nationalism often motivated the men, no matter their origins. Louisiana's scalawags grew most active and influential during the early stages of Reconstruction, when they led in founding the state's Republican Party. The vast majority of white Louisianans, however, rejected the scalawags' appeal to form an alliance with the freedmen in a biracial political party. Eventually, the influence of the scalawags succumbed to persistent terrorism, corruption, and competition from the white carpetbaggers and their black Republican allies. By then, the state's Republican Party consisted of white political leaders without any significant white constituency. According to Wetta, these weaknesses, as well as ineffective federal intervention in response to a Democratic Party insurgency, caused the Republican Party to collapse and Reconstruction to fail in Louisiana.

Download or read book A Thrilling Narrative written by Dennis E. Haynes and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2011-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Civil War memoir of Capt. Dennis E. Haynes is both unique and rare. Not only did few southern unionists write of their experiences after the war, Haynes’s is the only publication by a Louisiana unionist. Furthermore, it is the only account by a member of the First Louisiana Battalion Cavalry Scouts, a unit that existed for less than three months and saw its only real action during the Red River Campaign of 1864. Haynes’s memoir is a historic collection of his wartime experiences as a unionist in the Confederate South. Among his writings, Haynes describes how he opposed the secession of Texas and thus became a hunted man. He also tells of his harrowing odyssey to reach Union troops in Louisiana. Every step of the way, Haynes provides details, sometimes graphic, of the harassment and cruelty he and many others like him suffered at the hands of his Confederate neighbors.

Download or read book Crucible of Reconstruction written by Ted Tunnell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1992-07-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late April, 1862, Union warships slipped past the Confederate river forts below New Orleans and blasted the Rebel fleet guarding the city. Advancing overland, General Benjamin F. Butler occupied New Orleans on May Day, and for the duration of the war the Stars and Stripes waved over the Confederacy's largest city. The reconstruction of Louisiana began almost immediately. In Crucible of Reconstruction, Ted Tunnell examines the byzantine complexities of Louisiana's restoration to the Union, from the capture of New Orleans to the downfall of the Radical Republicans a decade and a half later. He writes with insight about wartime Reconstruction and the period of presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, but his ultimate concern is with Radical Reconstruction and that uneasy coalition of Unionists, free blacks, and carpetbaggers that formed the Louisiana Republican party after Appomattox and struggled fitfully for a biracial society based on equality and justice. One of the distinguishing features of Crucible of Reconstruction is its concern with the origins of Radicalism. Tunnell finds that nearly two-thirds of Louisiana Unionists were actually outsiders, men who had come to Louisiana from the North or from abroad. Of the remainder, many had either been born in the border slave states that sided with the North in 1861 or had been deeply influenced by Northern culture. The free blacks were the most radical element of the Republican party and for a brief but critical moment actually dominated the reconstruction process; with a black majority in the constitutional convention of 1867-1868, they drafted a civil rights program that made Louisiana's Reconstruction constitution, along with South Carolina's, a model of Republican Radicalism. In the end, though, the carpetbaggers dominated Republican Reconstruction. Although few in number, they controlled the immense federal bureaucracy centered in New Orleans, and in a government that depended on support from Washington for its very survival, they alone had influence on the Potomac. For a generation historians have struggled to explain the destructive factionalism that crippled the Republican regimes in Louisiana and other Reconstruction states. In a thesis of wide applicability, Tunnel shows how Republican factionalism was actually rooted in a larger "crisis of legitimacy." Louisiana Republicans confronted enemies who challenged not merely their policies but their very right to exist, enemies whose overriding goal was to expunge the Republican party from the polity. Led by Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, a carpetbagger from Illinois, the Republicans responded to the crisis with a twofold strategy embodied in what Tunnell calls the policy of force and the policy of peace. The policy of force, while it partially deterred assaults on Republican voters, undermined northern support for Reconstruction. The policy of peace not only failed to conciliate white Louisianians, it generated the vicious factionalism that destroyed the Republican party from within. The Warmoth strategies were in fact mutually contradictory; they negated each other and demolished his government. In his final chapter, Tunnell recounts the career of Marshall Harvey Twitchell, a Vermont carpetbagger who settled in north Louisiana in 1866. Twitchell's tragic story, gleaned from his unpublished autobiography and government records, provides a stunningly immediate reminder of the violent and unlawful conditions that existed during the final years of Reconstruction in Louisiana. Tunnell's analyses of Unionism, of black and white political leadership, of Republican factionalism, and of the brutal eradication of Republicanism in the state make this one of the most fascinating and provocative of recent books on Reconstruction.

Download or read book Journal written by United States. Congress. House and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Revolution that Failed written by Adam Fairclough and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A masterful and revelatory examination of Reconstruction populated by a cast of compelling characters who leap to life in all their glory, gore, and pathos."--Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "Illuminates a complex period, city, and state and advances a reinterpretation of Reconstruction politics that is both welcome and overdue."--Paul D. Escott, author of Uncommonly Savage: Civil War and Remembrance in Spain and the United States The chaotic years after the Civil War are often seen as a time of uniquely American idealism--a revolutionary attempt to rebuild the nation that paved the way for the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. But Adam Fairclough rejects this prevailing view, challenging prominent historians such as Eric Foner and James McPherson. He argues that Reconstruction was, quite simply, a disaster, and that the civil rights movement triumphed despite it, not because of it. Fairclough takes readers to Natchitoches, Louisiana, a majority-black parish deep in the cotton South. Home to a vibrant Republican Party led by former slaves, ex-Confederates, and free people of color, the parish was a bastion of Republican power and the ideal place for Reconstruction to have worked. Yet although it didn’t experience the extremes of violence that afflicted the surrounding region, Natchitoches fell prey to Democratic intimidation. Its Republican leaders were eventually driven out of the parish. Reconstruction failed, Fairclough argues, because the federal government failed to enforce the rights it had created. Congress had given the Republicans of the South and the Freedmen’s Bureau an impossible task--to create a new democratic order based on racial equality in an area tortured by deep-rooted racial conflict. Moving expertly between a profound local study and wider developments in Washington, The Revolution That Failed offers a sobering perspective on how Reconstruction affected African American citizens and what its long-term repercussions were for the nation.

Download or read book The Scalawags written by James Alex Baggett and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Scalawags, James Alex Baggett ambitiously uncovers the genesis of scalawag leaders throughout the former Confederacy. Using a collective biography approach, Baggett profiles 742 white southerners who supported Congressional Reconstruction and the Republican Party. He then compares and contrasts the scalawags with 666 redeemer-Democrats who opposed and eventually replaced them. Significantly, he analyzes this rich data by region -- the Upper South, the Southeast, and the Southwest -- as well as for the South as a whole. Baggett follows the life of each scalawag before, during, and after the war, revealing real personalities and not mere statistics. Examining such features as birthplace, vocation, estate, slaveholding status, education, political antecedents and experience, stand on secession, war record, and postwar political activities, he finds striking uniformity among scalawags. This is the first Southwide study of the scalawags, its scope and astounding wealth in quantity and quality of sources make it the definitive work on the subject.

Download or read book The Colfax Massacre written by LeeAnna Keith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a large body of documents, including eyewitness accounts and evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the Colfax massacre - during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered - and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South.

Download or read book The Carceral City written by John Bardes and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2024-03-27 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans—for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States—enslaved people were jailed at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but they are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance.

Download or read book An Absolute Massacre written by James G. Hollandsworth, Jr. and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2004-10-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1866, racial tensions ran high in Louisiana as a constitutional convention considered disenfranchising former Confederates and enfranchising blacks. On July 30, a procession of black suffrage supporters pushed through an angry throng of hostile whites. Words were exchanged, shots rang out, and within minutes a riot erupted with unrestrained fury. When it was over, at least forty-eight men—an overwhelming majority of them black—lay dead and more than two hundred had been wounded. In An Absolute Massacre, James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., examines the events surrounding the confrontation and offers a compelling look at the racial tinderbox that was the post-Civil War South.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era 2 volumes written by Richard Zuczek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2006-08-30 with total page 933 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstruction sought to bring order from the tremendous social, political, economic, physical, and constitutional changes wrought by secession and the Civil War, changes that included the abolition of slavery, the expansion of governmental power and constitutional jurisdiction, the rise of the Republican Party, the explosion of northern industry and the national market, and the appearance of a social dynamism that supported struggles by new social groups for political and civil equality. In American history, Reconstruction is the term applied to the period 1862-1877, when the United States sought to bring order from the tremendous social, political, economic, physical, and constitutional changes wrought by secession and the Civil War.The decision by eleven southern states to attempt secession and reject the national government, and the decision by the federal government under President Abraham Lincoln to deny that attempt and enforce federal law, unleashed forces that forever changed the American Republic. These changes included the abolition of slavery, the expansion of governmental power and constitutional jurisdiction, the rise of the Republican Party, the explosion of northern industry and the national market, and the appearance of a social dynamism that supported struggles by new social groups for political and civil equality. No one anticipated the totality, the viciousness, and the intensity of the civil war, and as a result no one was prepared to deal with its consequences. Topics covered include who should direct Reconstruction; how the federal government treated conquered states, their governments, and their soldiers; the role of the freed people in the new republic; and how the war altered the Constitution, the party system, and the American economy, among many others. Many entries describe and analyze the lives, careers, and impacts of the individuals, North and South, black and white, who shaped the course of Reconstruction, including the following: Ames, Adelbert Bruce, Blanche K. Douglass, Frederick Gordon, John B. Hancock, Winfield S. Howard, Oliver O. Pinchback, Pinckney B.S. Revels, Hiram R. Sheridan, Philip H. Wade, Benjamin F. Other entries deal with broad topics and themes related to Reconstruction and its consequences, including the following: Abolition of Slavery, Black Politicians, Black Suffrage, Bloody Shirt, Economic Policies, Race Riots, Reconstruction, Theories of Scandals During Reconstruction, State Constitutional Conventions, Violence During Reconstruction. Still other entries cover a wide variety of events, groups, acts, agencies, and amendments that were part of the story of Reconstruction, including the following: American Indians, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands Compromise of 1877, Democratic Party, Fourteenth Amendment, Joint Committee on Reconstruction, Loyalty Oaths, Military Reconstruction Acts, Stalwarts, Tenure of Office Act. Among the more than 270 entries are 11 that discuss the course and consequences of Reconstruction in each of the former Confederate states, and 6 that discuss the outcome and significance of the presidential and key congressional elections held between 1864 and 1876. The encyclopedia also offers a timeline of Reconstruction, a bibliography of print and electronic information resources, a selection of primary documents, a table of important dates, numerous illustrations, and a detailed subject index.

Download or read book Congressional Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1877 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Congressional Record Index written by and published by . This book was released on 1875 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes history of bills and resolutions.

Download or read book Doggett s New York City Directory written by and published by . This book was released on 1843 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fraud of the Century written by Roy Jr. Morris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America’s centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln’s in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes’s being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable—and largely forgotten—election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose Midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America’s industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation’s heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective “bloody shirt” campaign to tar the Democrats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, “Devil Dan” Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.

Download or read book History of Erie County Pennsylvania written by and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 1267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States written by United States. Congress. House and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 940 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some vols. include supplemental journals of "such proceedings of the sessions, as, during the time they were depending, were ordered to be kept secret, and respecting which the injunction of secrecy was afterwards taken off by the order of the House."

Download or read book The Louisiana Historical Quarterly written by John Wymond and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 1188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: