Labor Militancy and Black Grassroots Political Mobilization in the Louisiana Sugar Region, 1865-1868.

IN EARLY AUGUST 1868 THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU AGENT FOR IBERVILLE Parish, Louisiana, Charles E. Merrill, was called upon to mediate one of the countless labor disputes that occupied much of his and other bureau agents' time. In this instance, Merrill investigated the complaint of John Williams, a freedman and the "head laborer" on Belle Grove plantation, who claimed that his employer, Henry Ware, had dismissed him "on account of his political opinion." Merrill ultimately concluded that Williams's dismissal did not involve his political views. Nonetheless, because political and labor conflicts had become inseparable in the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the 1868 presidential campaign, Merrill found it necessary to remind the local justice of the peace, James C. Adamson (whom Williams had at first evidently petitioned without success), that planters must not be allowed to use their authority as employers to interfere with their workers' political rights. "Mr. Ware has no right to discharge any of his laborers on account of their political opinion," Merrill lectured Adamson, adding that "[i]f the planters carry politics into the fields they will find it bad business." Planters who could not convince freedmen "to join their party by fair and honorable means" were to leave them alone. "If Mr. Ware does not want republican laborers on his plantation, let him pay them in full for the time contracted for, and they will leave his plantation at once," Merrill insisted. "If he wants their labor, let them go to work, without regard to politics."(1)

Merrill's sentiments notwithstanding, planters in the Louisiana sugar region and throughout the South would have found it impossible--even had they been so inclined--to let freedmen go to work "without regard to politics."(2) As Eric Foner, Michael W. Fitzgerald, and Julie Saville have convincingly shown, black grassroots political mobilization profoundly shaped labor arrangements on southern plantations in the years after emancipation.(3) Instances of black political mobilization in the South had appeared before the war's end but tended to be dominated at first by the antebellum free black elite and confined largely to urban areas. With the onset of Radical Reconstruction in 1867, by contrast, this mobilization expanded to include the mass of former plantation slaves, who formed political organizations, held rallies and engaged in debate, registered and voted en masse, and banded together for self-defense and to preserve internal unity. These activities injected politics into questions concerning the freedmen's working lives, as conflict over seemingly mundane aspects of plantation routine underscored the larger contest over decision-making authority between former slaveholders and freedmen. Black politics transformed the social landscape by shifting the balance of power on the plantations. In the fluid labor markets of early Reconstruction, it even tilted that balance--albeit briefly--in the freedmen's favor.

While it is true that black grassroots political mobilization altered southern labor arrangements, most scholarly attention has focused on how this development unfolded in the cotton South, where the freedmen's success in rejecting gang labor and in gaining access to land had unintended consequences. The various forms of sharecropping and tenancy that came to dominate in cotton production, whatever their much-debated origins, eventually undermined the very solidarity that had strengthened the former slaves' bargaining position in the first place. As individual black families or households spread out over the cotton plantations, it became increasingly difficult for them to mobilize for self-defense or to act collectively in other ways. "Ironically," Michael W. Fitzgerald observed in his study of black political mobilization and the emergence of sharecropping, "the freedmen's success in renting land dispersed them widely throughout the countryside, making them more vulnerable to attack." This dispersal, he further noted, not only inhibited freedmen from acting collectively but also resulted in what he calls "social demobilization" and "the balkanization of the labor force."(4) If sharecropping eventually became an economic dead-end in the cotton South, it likewise had deleterious political consequences that contributed to Reconstruction's ultimate failure.

In the Louisiana sugar region, the link between political mobilization and labor arrangements produced very different results. Southern Louisiana also witnessed the kinds of labor upheaval precipitated elsewhere by the advent of black suffrage under Radical Reconstruction. In the sugar bowl, however, the centralized plantation regimen particular to sugar production--characterized by freedmen working in gangs under white overseers and living in the former slave quarters--as well as the specific demands of processing the crop distinguished the labor struggle there from the more familiar experience of the cotton South. Sugar's centralized production unified the plantation labor force and provided a foundation for collective struggle in both the economic and political arenas. Political mobilization, in turn, galvanized the freedmen's efforts to gain control over their working lives within the sugar plantation's closely coordinated routine. Moreover, although the persistence of gang labor thwarted the freedmen's desire for land and autonomous households, it afforded them a measure of solidarity with which to ward off white violence more effectively than was the case in the cotton South.(5) It is no coincidence that as southern Republican governments crumbled during the 1870s, the sugar region remained an enclave of southern Republicanism and a bastion of black voting and officeholding even after Redemption in 1877 and until the disfranchisement of black voters in the 1890s.

Although the labor arrangements particular to sugar plantations had long-term political ramifications extending beyond Reconstruction, this article will explore the advent of black political mobilization at its beginnings, when its effects on the emerging labor system were most keenly observed by planters, Freedmen's Bureau agents, and others. Despite the region's exceptionality within the American South, an examination of political mobilization and labor militancy in the Louisiana sugar bowl offers an opportunity to speculate on the ways that labor arrangements influence political formations, and, ultimately, on whether the story of Reconstruction's defeat might somehow have been different. To contend that any crop system--be it that of cotton, sugar, rice, or tobacco--shapes the political structure is not necessarily to endorse a rigid crop determinism, but it is to suggest that modes of labor organization have discernible political repercussions. And while one might argue that the persistence of black politics in the sugar bowl after 1877 owed as much, if not more, to sugar planters' tariff-driven dependence on the Republican party as it did to the particular mode of crop production, it is also true that most planters opposed the party or supported it at the national level only, and that they were still dependent on the tariff when they suppressed black political rights decisively in the 1890s.(6) The particular demands of a crop may not explain everything, but they can illuminate much about a society.

The persistence of black politics in southern Louisiana after Redemption is especially noteworthy since the freedmen's political mobilization came under attack almost immediately. The frightening implications of labor militancy and black political power provoked desperate responses from planters, who resorted to extra-legal methods in hopes of stymieing black political rights and reestablishing control over their workers. Hence, the allegation that Henry Ware had discharged John Williams because of his political views, while eventually decided to be untrue, probably came as no surprise to Charles Merrill. Black political mobilization, in fact, faced fearsome challenges. While Williams's complaint highlighted the freedmen's determination to resist assaults on their freedom, the violence pervading Louisiana during the summer and fall of 1868 revealed both the strength and the fragility of their collective struggle. The first postwar presidential campaign witnessed an organized crusade of intimidation and brutality that exposed the limits of black political mobilization even as it demonstrated the freedmen's resolve to exercise their rights as American citizens.

The forms that grassroots political mobilization assumed in southern Louisiana reflected the region's unique characteristics. By definition a large-scale enterprise, sugar production required high concentrations of land, capital, and labor, placing sugar planters among the South's wealthiest slaveholders and giving rise to the sugar region's considerable black majority (87,340 slaves to 54,677 whites) before the Civil War. Annual routine on a Louisiana sugar plantation, moreover, involved a series of tasks that needed to be completed on time. From spring planting through the "rolling season," or fall harvest, the plantation required a disciplined labor force that worked with clocklike precision.(7) Slaveholders customarily relied on coercion to secure their workers' cooperation, but with the Union's capture of New Orleans in May 1862, federal military authorities implemented a monthly wage-labor system. As an improvised response to the problems of reviving agricultural production and imposing order in occupied territory, wartime free labor was a pale replica of northern free labor. And because the army's wage-labor system attempted to reconcile the conflicting desires of laborers and planters, both found much about it to dislike.(8) Nonetheless, laborers' rights gradually expanded until the state's new constitution--written by New Orleans Unionists under the auspices of Abraham Lincoln's "10 Percent Plan"--formally abolished slavery in Louisiana in September 1864.(9)

After the Civil War, wage labor and centralized plantation routine prevailed in the sugar region. While the exigencies of sugar production did not preclude sharecropping or tenancy from taking hold (as the experiences of other sugar societies have shown), the crop did not lend itself easily to a decentralized plantation system, especially once wage labor had been established during the war.(10) Although daily routine on postbellum sugar plantations resembled that under the slave regime, a seismic shift had occurred in the way planters and workers related to one another. Planters no longer owned their workers but had to deal with them on equal terms, at least in theory. Free laborers translated their skills and knowledge of sugar cultivation--as well as their awareness of how easily they could disrupt the plantation's delicate equilibrium--into powerful leverage for creating a new labor system. Freedmen did not dictate terms to planters, but they often gained advantageous terms on wages, labor conditions, and other matters. The most important consequence of the sugar bowl's particular labor arrangements, however, is that freedmen in that region defined economic autonomy collectively rather than in the individualistic manner that characterized freedmen's aspirations in the cotton South. Freedmen of the sugar region did not repudiate gang labor and push for homesteads, as did their counterparts in cotton, nor did sugar planters impose wage labor upon workers who unequivocally opposed it. Instead, freedmen in sugar reconciled themselves to monthly wage labor by relying on a mix of antebellum communal traditions, wartime free-labor precedents, and the advantages they derived from a burgeoning postwar labor market.(11)

If wage labor's triumph was not inevitable, neither did it go unchallenged. During and immediately following the war, many freedmen successfully cultivated abandoned plantations, often with little or no white supervision.(12) Their desire for land received vital support from certain members of the New Orleans free black elite, who presumed to speak for the plantation laborers although they did not always share their interests. Two free black men in particular, Louis Charles Roudanez and Paul Trevigne, along with the white Belgian radical Jean-Charles Houzeau, relentlessly denounced wage labor and called for land confiscation in the pages of their bilingual newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune.(13) Due in part to Andrew Johnson's land restoration policy but also as a result of their own successes with wage labor, freedmen eventually abandoned their hopes of gaining land through confiscation. Nonetheless, the land question helped prompt the initial stirrings of black political mobilization in the sugar region, foreshadowing the future reconfiguration of southern Louisiana's political landscape.(14)

Freedmen vented their displeasure with other aspects of Johnson's Reconstruction policy. Although the black codes enacted by Louisiana and other ex-Confederate states were soon negated by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, planters continued to wield the mechanisms of state and local law enforcement in their efforts to regain control over their former slaves.(15) Unable to seek redress through the civil law, freedmen appealed to Freedmen's Bureau agents and to other federal officials for protection from abusive employers, for assistance in securing wages when planters cheated them, and for mediation in the many disputes over daily labor.(16) They also threatened to take matters into their own hands. When Louisiana civil authorities reactivated the state militia and revived the patrol system in the fall of 1865, freedmen "unhesitatingly avowed their determination," according to one federal officer, "to resist and if necessary, meet force with force."(17) Exclusion from presidential Reconstruction could not prevent former slaves from defending themselves or their freedom.

However important its early manifestations, black political mobilization took a decisive turn as a result of circumstances outside the sugar region. The struggle between Johnson and congressional Republicans over Reconstruction culminated in passage of the Reconstruction Acts beginning in March 1867, which imposed military rule upon the former Confederacy (except Tennessee), effectively removed most white men from the process of creating new state governments, and made black suffrage a requirement for readmission to the Union.(18) Federally mandated black suffrage portended political and social revolution in the South, especially in areas like the sugar region, where black majorities in most parishes augured powerful voting blocs and even black officeholding. Ironically, by creating black majorities before the Civil War, sugar planters had laid the foundations for black political power after it.

Voter registration by black males beginning in the spring of 1867 further invigorated an already burgeoning political movement. During the next two years, and indeed beyond that, freedmen throughout the sugar bowl organized "clubs" on their home plantations or attended political rallies in nearby towns. Decisions made in club meetings or at larger gatherings involved both abstract political matters and immediate concerns about daily life, and because such decisions expressed the general will of the black community, discipline and unity could be maintained. The collective organization of life and labor on sugar plantations provided fertile ground for black grassroots politics, which in turn propelled the freedmen"s efforts to shape their working lives. One planter likened this mobilization to a recent inundation in St. Mary Parish. "I look upon this flood of water as nothing compared to the political flood of fanaticism & anarchy, now sweeping over & desolating the land," he groused. "The former will subside, the latter will swell more & more."(19)

The freedmen's political mobilization immediately affected their attitudes and actions toward plantation labor. Not only did their political empowerment obliterate relations between themselves and planters with a fury that nearly matched emancipation, but the combination of political mobilization and labor militancy ignited a firestorm more intense than either could have produced alone. Planters, for their part, complained bitterly about what one Freedmen's Bureau agent described as "the discontent and uneasiness exhibited by the Freedmen on account of their new political relations"--relations, he added, that "affect their laboring ideas to some extent." Another bureau agent reported increased hostility between planters and freedmen owing to "the recent elevation (political) of the latter class." Planters interpreted the freedmen's behavior as "intended insolence which formerly they did not notice," while freedmen were "making themselves obnoxious by their remarks and actions."(20) Although previously planters had hardly overlooked behavior they considered insolent, the freedmen's political ascendence heightened planters' sensitivity to what was in fact growing black assertiveness.

Planters' complaints, however self-serving they were, provided an invaluable gauge of how profoundly politics had affected the freedmen's "laboring ideas." Planters' protestations also reflected their realization that black suffrage jeopardized any hopes they still might harbor of regaining control over their former slaves. The immediate threat of black political activity was the disruption of agricultural operations, which could have devastating consequences for the sugar crop. A longer-term threat was the potential breakdown of the post-emancipation labor modus vivendi in the sugar bowl. Planters were quick to pinpoint the connection between the freedmen's political power and their own labor difficulties. Recognizing that their economic destinies would be decided on political terrain as well as in the cane fields, they tried to intimidate their workers in order to forestall black activism. Some planters discharged individuals who had been singled out as "ringleaders," while others forced substantial numbers of workers off the plantations because of their political activity, even if doing so jeopardized their crops.(21) By resorting to such tactics, planters sacrificed short-term profits to achieve the long-term goal of labor control. Yet their actions also underscored an enduring racialist component to their thinking that overrode economic concerns. They were determined to reassert authority over black people as well as over black labor.

Freedmen responded to intimidation in ways that revealed their collective strength. In June 1867, for example, planter John Andrews of Iberville Parish reported to the local Freedmen's Bureau agent that his laborers refused to work after he had discharged two of them, John Williams and Alex Menken. Williams belonged to a political organization known as the "Moses Club" and had been ordered, along with Menken and others, to embark on an electioneering tour by the club's president, George Deslonde. Because the crop needed attention at the time, Andrews asked them to delay their tour, but the freedmen insisted on going since "George Deslonde had ordered it." Andrews, according to the bureau agent, "finding that the discipline on the plantation would be much impaired by such operations," discharged Williams and Menken. The following morning, however, all the freedmen on the place went on strike, announcing that unless Williams and Menken were reinstated they would quit the plantation. Facing the potential loss of his entire work force, Andrews summoned the bureau agent, who found the freedmen determined to carry through with their threat. Deciding to take a conciliatory route, the agent discussed the matter with both parties, and he succeeded in restoring jobs to Williams and Menken and in persuading the laborers to resume their duties. Emboldened by their success, the freedmen redoubled their political activities, later holding a July 4th barbecue at nearby Bayou Goula.(22) Freedmen did not always enjoy victory in such disputes, but neither did planters.

Despite planter obstructionism, the freedmen's mobilization intensified with the approaching election of delegates to the upcoming state constitutional convention that would adopt black suffrage. The campaign surrounding this election, which was scheduled for late September 1867, intruded upon preparations for the rolling season. "There is nothing of interest going on here except that the Negroes (generally) are having meetings and electioneering for the different candidates for the convention," Andrew H. Gay informed his father. Freedmen were arguably devoting too much time to politics, the bureau agent at Baton Rouge believed, "for they often neglect their crops & other work to attend political meetings at times when their work is most required." Louisiana's slight black majority, along with the fact that most white men were prohibited from voting or boycotted the election, insured that the results of a fair election were a foregone conclusion. Still, the drama of black men casting ballots precluded any sense of anticlimax. "[F]or the first time the Negroes are allowed to Vote and they seem to be proud of it [going] in large gangs some with guns," a planter noted. However predictable, the results were dismaying for the white opponents of Radical Reconstruction. Statewide, half of the ninety-eight convention delegates were black, and all but two were Republicans; in the sugar region, eighteen black delegates were elected, with every parish except St. Charles electing at least one black delegate.(23)

Confronting what had so recently seemed unthinkable, planters pondered the future. "The present political condition of the country, and what it will be the next year," one planter remarked to a neighbor, "you I have no doubt can form a better opinion than myself, and what effect it will have on the Labor for the next year." But the election's effects could already be seen in the "demoralization" of labor. While many former slaveholders throughout the South used this term to describe what they saw as the consequences of emancipation, sugar planters were expressing a very real concern. For them, demoralization was evidenced not so much by the freedmen's refusal to work as by their unwillingness to work with the elan or esprit de corps necessary for the arduous sugar harvest. As a collective endeavor, sugar production required a group of individuals to strive together toward a common goal, but once demoralization set in, it could spread like wildfire among sugar workers. Politics, in planters' minds, was more likely to increase demoralization than to decrease it. "Politics have crazed the negro here as elsewhere," one planter lamented, "and it may be some time in January before they could be procured & set to work." Echoing these sentiments, a Freedmen's Bureau agent noted in early 1868 that the freedmen "seem to think that the convention and next Election will give them all an office or a living without hard work." Such ideas, he feared, "will greatly demoralize the labor the coming season."(24)

Most freedmen, however, realized that the significance of what they were experiencing was not that they would receive sinecures but that they were about to become citizens. By March 1868 the convention had given Louisiana a constitution that not only incorporated universal adult male suffrage but also included a bill of rights and required all officeholders to swear an oath accepting "the civil and political equality of all men."(25) Because Louisiana's white voters represented a statewide minority, they could not defeat the constitution by boycotting the plebiscite on it and thus prevent its approval by a majority of the electorate, as required by Congress. Yet even though the vote on the constitution itself was not in doubt, the brief campaign to win ratification and to bring the Republican party to power--in elections scheduled for April--further heightened the freedmen's sense of purpose. With citizenship and manhood suffrage so close at hand, they were not about to squander those long-sought goals. Black Republican leaders such as John J. Moore formed "radical clubs" on the plantations and conducted weekly meetings during which they explained the constitution to the freedmen and urged them to ratify it. The message was not long in getting through. The freedmen "all believed that the constitution was something which gave them equal rights before the law," Moore later explained. "Ignorant as they [were], they got that idea. They believed it was something which would give them the right to be equal with all voters, and to be better off than they were in former times."(26)

Despondent over the disruption of their spring planting season and convinced more than ever that politics demoralized labor, planters reiterated their objections to the freedmen's political activities. "There is some excitement among the Freedmen in regard to the coming election," the bureau agent for St. Mary Parish reported, "and some complaints are made by planters that they quit their work too often or do not work well in consequence of this." Planters in Assumption Parish similarly protested that freedmen devoted "a little too much time to politics and a little too little to work."(27) They backed up their complaints with action. Contending that by missing work freedmen violated their contracts, planters again took to dismissing them for attending club meetings and engaging in other political affairs. Yet planters' concerns extended beyond the short-term goal of restoring order on the plantations. If they could not defeat the constitution by means of a white boycott of the election (as had occurred in Alabama in February), they might succeed in doing so by simultaneously turning out the white vote and intimidating the black vote (as would occur in Mississippi in late June). "The most persistent & energetic efforts are being made by the Planters of this Parish to defeat a reconstruction of their state in the coming elections," the bureau agent for Lafourche Parish reported. "Instances are daily and hourly coming to my notice, in which Planters are discharging laborers merely for visiting political clubs." Whereas freedmen reinforced their political efforts in order to ratify the constitution, planters stepped up their strong-arm tactics in hopes of defeating it.(28)

As freedmen responded to planters' "persistent & energetic efforts" to foil their political ambitions, it was perhaps inevitable that divisions within the black community would begin to appear--either between Republican leaders and the rank and file or among freedmen themselves. When a Republican candidate for office directed one freedman to attend the polls on both election days, the freedman replied that his contract did not permit him to lose so much time from work. The candidate nonetheless ordered him to "pay no attention to your contract but go." A party organizer likewise instructed freedmen at a meeting in St. Mary Parish that both election days "were their own, not the Planters'," and that "they were expected to devote those two days time at the Polls."(29) Such attempts to maintain solidarity also exacerbated potential divisions among the former slaves. Some freedmen, especially those with families, could ill afford to have their wages docked for time lost while engaging in politics, nor was the risk of dismissal or eviction a welcome one for most. Thus not every confrontation between freedmen and planters revealed black unity. While freedmen tried to present a united front, tensions, strains, anxiety, and even ambition divided them, as did differences over strategy.

Even after the election, disagreements between moderate and more militant freedmen remained acrimonious and threatened to spill over into violence. Such was the case on a St. Mary Parish plantation in early May 1868. In this instance, the plantation manager, one Mr. Bronson, became embroiled in a dispute with workers who demanded their wages before he was able to pay. One evening, according to the local Freedmen's Bureau agent, the freedmen held a "club meeting" and decided "on no more work till they were paid." Despite this decision, all but two of the laborers went to their jobs the following day, but when they tried to cross the bayou to work they were confronted by the two freedmen, "armed with Shot gun and Revolver, threatening to shoot the first man who would attempt to cross."(30) Although the bureau agent had them arrested, this was not an isolated incident. Many planters, observed another bureau agent, complained that whenever they tried to discharge one worker for violating his contract or engaging in misconduct, the rest "would immediately quit work & threaten to leave the place." The agent often found that the freedmen were advised to pursue this course by their "club leaders." He also discovered, however, that the vast majority in most cases were willing to remain at work but were "prevented from doing so by a few of the leaders among the freedmen threatening personal violence to those who should go to the fields to work. In some cases standing guard with loaded arms, and threatening to shoot any who attempted to go to work."(31) While violence did not occur in any of these instances, such infighting clearly had the potential to inflict immense damage upon their cause.

The internal divisions that occasionally rent the freed community--and that brought freedmen to the point of violence--should neither be overlooked nor overstated. The sugar plantation's centralized regimen may have provided freedmen a measure of unity, yet living and working under conditions that so closely resembled those of slavery also had its inevitable frustrations. Not only were freedmen beset by the same quarrels and jealousies that plague any people brought into regular and close contact, but tensions also resulted from differences between individuals who were loathe to risk their economic well-being by challenging authority and those who were more than willing to do so. To assume that ex-slaves always acted in unison--or even that they ought to have--is to deny the black community an internal dynamic. That freedmen disagreed, sometimes vehemently, over how best to defend themselves against violence and intimidation does not diminish the significance of their struggle. They knew what they were up against; they also knew that banding together offered the best hope of weathering the storm that surrounded them. Decisions made at club meetings were not trifling affairs, to be ignored or forgotten the very next day, but were instead essential to the black community's self-preservation. Political clubs and organizations helped to maintain discipline and unity, if not harmony, in the face of a common adversary.

Freedmen sometimes pointed guns at one another over strategy and tactics, but it was far more often the case that their political clubs and organizations helped to ensure solidarity. Their ability to act collectively became especially crucial on those occasions when planters dismissed them--either explicitly for engaging in politics or ostensibly for violating work rules when the intention was clearly to intimidate them. Former slaves on a St. Mary Parish plantation, for example, made good use of the gospel of unity preached by Republican organizers at the freedmen's political clubs. One evening in late April 1868 some sixty freedmen appeared at the office of the local bureau agent, R. W. Mullen, complaining that the overseer had dismissed laborer Henry Harris for violating what they considered to be an unfair work rule. Upon Harris's dismissal, the freedmen struck, for they had previously agreed, according to Mullen, "that if one hand was discharged for anything, every one were to signify their disapprobation and quit in a body." Mullen eventually convinced the freedmen to return to the plantation, but only after having promised to visit the next morning to settle the matter, with the freedmen insisting that they would not work until then. After much negotiation the next day, Mullen arranged a settlement in which the plantation manager rehired Harris and consented to change the work rule in question, while the freedmen agreed to return to work.

The episode appeared to have been yet another mundane dispute over plantation work rules, but there was more to it than that. In conversing with some of the freedmen, Mullen discovered that they had formed a political club where Republican speakers advised them to act together. He found that the freedmen "are instructed or ordered ... at their clubs, to act as one man on all plantations, [and] that whenever a man is discharged, for all to immediately strike, unless they can make the planter yield to them." The plantation manager expected the laborers to strike again should he try to enforce discipline. Nor was this manager alone, in Mullen's view; similar incidents made all sugar planters fearful lest unified and determined freedmen elude their control. "Such occurrences naturally make other planters feel uneasy in regard to their crops," Mullen observed, "for they say we do not know when [freedmen] will ask of us something we cannot grant, then leave us, and now just at this season the crops are looking finely and need all the attention they can be given."(32) There was a fine line between planters' concerns over maintaining discipline on the plantations and the freedmen's apprehensions that planters would attempt to discharge them for trifling reasons in order to interfere with their political activities. Given the demands of the sugar crop as well as the political stakes in the spring of 1868, that line was becoming increasingly difficult to draw.

The freedmen's unity of purpose was borne out by the vote on the 1868 constitution and by the election of a new state government. The constitution received a statewide majority of 66,152 to 48,739 (57.6 percent to 42.4 percent), while voters in the sugar parishes approved it by 20,864 to 8,326 (71.5 percent to 28.5 percent), with the black vote overwhelmingly for ratification and the white vote overwhelmingly against it (see table). Republican gubernatorial candidate Henry Clay Warmoth won handily, receiving 63 percent of the vote statewide and substantially more in the sugar parishes. He won more than 93 percent of the vote in both St. James and St. Charles Parishes, and 98 percent in Ascension Parish. Likewise, the Republican party easily captured both houses of the state legislature.(33) With its ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution imminent, Louisiana (along with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina) was readmitted to the Union in June 1868.

TABLE VOTE ON LOUISIANA'S 1868 STATE CONSTITUTION, BY RACE

                         FOR                   AGAINST

Parish         White    Black    Total   White   Black    Total

Ascension       53      1,791    1,844     425      50      475
Assumption      52      1,555    1,607     643      10      653
Iberville       39      2,111    2,150     329       7      336
Jefferson       75      2,722    2,797   1,578     635    2,213
Lafourche       54      1,576    1,630   1,166      41    1,207
Plaquemines     12      1,505    1,517     336       2      338
St. Bernard      9        498      507     264     150      414
St. Charles     12      1,266    1,278     122       8      130
St. James       53      2,105    2,158     220       3      223
St. John the
  Baptist       39      1,256    1,295     394       5      399
St. Mary        23      1,925    1,948     739      89      828
Terrebonne      62      1,562    1,624     591      48      639
West Baton
  Rouge          4        505      509     295     176      471
Totals          487    20,377   20,864   7,102   1,224    8,326
State Totals                    66,152                   48,739

SOURCE: Donald W. Davis, "Ratification of the Constitution of 1868--Record of Votes," Louisiana History, VI (Summer 1965), 301-5.

From the moment they assumed office, Republicans in Louisiana and the other southern states faced what Eric Foner has called a "crisis of legitimacy."(34) All but a handful of Louisiana's white citizens considered the government created by the Reconstruction Acts to be an abomination that they were morally obligated to resist, by force if necessary. It was not long before organized gangs such as the Knights of the White Camellia--Louisiana's version of the Ku Klux Klan--began terrorizing freedmen and the handful of white Republicans in the state. Republican control in Louisiana, moreover, increased the significance of the 1868 presidential election, the first since the war's end. Desperate to regain political power, conservative (or Democratic) Louisianians, like their counterparts elsewhere in the South during the summer and fall, embarked upon a crusade of intimidation and violence, or "bulldozing," designed to capture the presidency and end Reconstruction. Facing an organized and determined conservative onslaught, freedmen in southern Louisiana mobilized to defend themselves and to assert their rights, but the violence surrounding the 1868 presidential campaign revealed the limits of black political mobilization.(35)

As leaders of their communities, planters played an important role in the campaign of terror. Nonetheless, although they were determined to put an end to black politics, planters also displayed something of a divided mind on all-out political terror. Having convinced themselves that political activity bore much responsibility for labor's demoralization and therefore must be stopped, they were shrewd and realistic enough to recognize that overt, brazen brutality might also cause their workers to become demoralized and thus unwilling to work with the enthusiasm necessary to harvest the sugar crop. It was this concern over the potential demoralization of labor, especially during the critical rolling season, that caused some planters to refrain from endorsing or participating in at least the more extreme forms of political violence, and that, in turn, contributed to the persistence of black politics both during and after Reconstruction.

Apprehension over labor's demoralization, however, did not prevent planters from resorting to subtler forms of intimidation. In addition to dismissing freedmen for the slightest infraction of plantation rules or discharging them explicitly for engaging in political activities, planters exhorted them--in a manner that unmistakably conveyed an implicit threat--to vote Democratic. A freedman in Terrebonne Parish, for example, complained that his overseer had ordered away all those who did not pledge to vote the Democratic ticket. When summoned to the local Freedmen's Bureau office, the overseer claimed actually to have said: "Boy why don't you vote the Democratic ticket and live all right with us."(36) Either way, freedmen did not miss the message. Concern for their own welfare and that of their families prompted some to support the Democratic party. Others attended Democratic barbecues out of curiosity or because their employers encouraged them to do so. When planters sponsored Democratic meetings on their own plantations to rival nearby Republican ones, resident freedmen found it difficult to avoid attending.(37)

Planters and Democrats in general also offered other kinds of inducements. Laborers who pledged to vote Democratic, for instance, received "protection papers," or certificates, which planters could demand to see before hiring them, and which ensured freedmen some measure of protection in the event of violence--assuming marauders would take the time to read them. One local Democratic functionary admitted to this practice, insisting, however, that no efforts at suasion occurred before the election. Only after it, he contended, did freedmen receive certificates "stating that they had voted the democratic ticket, and that they were entitled to the confidence and protection of the democratic party."(38) Whether planters and their agents distributed protection passes before the election or after it, the intent was the same: to discourage freedmen from casting free and fair ballots.

Yet when intimidation or "positive" incentives failed, as they usually did, to persuade freedmen either to vote Democratic or to stay home on election day, a number of planters and their conservative allies resorted to stronger methods. Planters' fears of demoralization notwithstanding, political violence racked Louisiana during the autumn presidential campaign. Southern Louisiana's black majority and sugar planters' concerns over demoralization discouraged the kinds of violence that afflicted the northern part of the state, which itself was one of the most violent places in all the South during Reconstruction, but an atmosphere of fear pervaded the sugar bowl nevertheless.(39) "Much bitterness is existing at the present time between the whites and freed people arising out of political causes," reported the Freedmen's Bureau agent at Thibodaux. "Some threats have been made in case any negro dared to take the office to which he had been elected." The Donaldsonville bureau agent likewise noted that "politically a mutual animosity exists, which may break out on the slightest aggression offered by either party." While hoping for a peaceful election, he admitted that "a vague feeling of impending danger is felt by many." This feeling, however vague, was not imagined. In St. Mary Parish, the black Republican organizer John J. Moore overheard a white man cautioning freedmen that they must "let politics die" since it was "white peoples' [sic] business," whereas "the business of negroes is to go into the fields and work...." If freedmen insisted upon "voting against our interests and sinking the country," the white man warned, "[w]e will kill the last one of you...."(40)

Such were not idle threats. The most violent episode that befell the sugar bowl during the 1868 campaign--the late October "riot" in St. Bernard Parish, just downriver from New Orleans--portended Republicans' later difficulties in Louisiana. The incident began when a freedman was shot dead during an argument with local Democrats. To avenge their slain compatriot's death, a number of freedmen attacked the establishment of an Italian storekeeper of avowedly anti-Republican sentiments and allegedly murdered him and two family members. These slayings provoked retaliation by a group of Sicilian toughs from New Orleans, known as the "Innocents," who rampaged throughout St. Bernard until federal troops eventually restored order. In response to this and other similar incidents, Warmoth appealed to General Lovell H. Rousseau, commander of the military Department of Louisiana, for more troops to ensure a safe election. Instead, Rousseau, a Kentucky Democrat who was a personal friend and supporter of Andrew Johnson, asked Warmoth to issue a public statement discouraging freedmen from voting on election day since their safety could not be guaranteed. Believing he had no choice, Warmoth complied with this request. All in all, some sixty people, the vast majority of whom were freedmen, died in politically motivated violence in the countryside around New Orleans in the weeks before the election.(41)

Bulldozing and other forms of terror were clear evidence of white opposition to black political rights, but they also attested to the freedmen's determination to exercise those rights. Despite fears that the tiniest spark might ignite a firestorm of violence, freedmen continued to campaign, attend political gatherings, and register to vote in the fall of 1868, compelling many planters to postpone commencement of the rolling season--which usually began around mid-October--until early November.(42) "I suppose after the election we will be wiser and know if these inf[ernal?] negroes will work or not," remarked a New Orleans merchant. "Barbecues elections etc has caused me to progress slowly with all plantation work," a plantation manager similarly noted a few days after the election, "but I hope it is all over now & hope to be able soon to hire more laborers." If nothing else, the experiences of the previous two years proved that planters' disapprobation could not deter freedmen from enjoying the fruits of citizenship. "The freedmen have the stamina to maintain their views politically," the bureau agent at Donaldsonville reported, "and defend the principles they advocate, which as a matter of course the planter contends against, and tries to run them to the belief of his creed."(43)

Freedmen had the stamina to maintain their political views, but the election results showed that without federal protection they were vulnerable to well-orchestrated terror. Election day itself passed relatively quietly in Louisiana, and Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant captured the presidency without Louisiana's electoral votes. But the damage had already been done, as the hardly credible tally of 33,263 votes for Grant against 80,325 for Democrat Horatio Seymour, in a state with a black majority, confirmed bulldozing's effectiveness. The results in the sugar region were more ambiguous, but they nonetheless corroborated the partial success of political terror. Grant received 15,623 votes, compared to Seymour's 13,111 (54.4 percent to 45.6), yet Grant's share of the vote had declined markedly from Warmoth's lopsided Republican totals in the region just seven months before--and this despite the fact that the total number of votes cast remained about the same in the two elections.(44) The results validated one bureau agent's prediction that many freedmen would vote Democratic that November out of fear. "[T]he white people now say," he reported afterwards, "that the colored man has very good sense, and know[s] how to vote."(45) Bulldozing jeopardized planters' short-term profits by further disrupting labor and potentially causing freedmen to become "demoralized" on the eve of the rolling season, but, believing they had no choice, many planters deemed such tactics necessary in order to end Reconstruction. Although the Republican party regained the presidency in 1868 regardless of these coercive tactics, white terrorism carried the day in much of the Louisiana sugar bowl, as it did throughout most of the South.

The events of autumn 1868 would seem to cast doubt upon the contentions that the labor arrangements particular to sugar production gave freedmen tensile strength in mobilizing politically and that such mobilization enabled them both to defend themselves and to contest planters' authority. What good were the freedmen's political clubs, and how effective were admonitions that freedmen "act as one man on all plantations," if many of them could not fend off bulldozing and other forms of terror? Yet the events surrounding the presidential election did not so much demonstrate the freedmen's impotence against white violence as they demarcated the limits of black political mobilization, showing the degree of organization and the kinds of brutality necessary to suppress black political rights. Many sugar planters and other white conservatives were perfectly willing to mete out such brutality, to be sure, but the election results, however disappointing to Louisiana Republicans, proved to be only a temporary setback. Indeed, despite the violence, freedmen in the sugar region had reason for optimism. Not only did federal support for Reconstruction seem assured with Republican control of the presidency and the Congress, but the party also controlled the state government as well as many local and parish offices. And although Republican rule in Louisiana rested squarely on the black vote, freedmen in the sugar bowl had exhibited considerable resolve against overwhelming opposition. The white counterattack did not bode well for black political rights if federal protection were to be withdrawn, but such an outcome hardly seemed foreordained during what was only the opening phase of Radical Reconstruction.

The events of 1868 settled neither the contest over labor nor the battle over black political rights in the Louisiana sugar bowl. During the 1870s and beyond, sugar planters would continue to bemoan their "labor problem," and southern Louisiana would remain an enclave of independent black politics and Republican voting strength.(46) Various factors might account for the persistence of black politics in the sugar bowl after 1877, including sugar planters' dependence on the tariff, the sugar region's substantial black majority, or even southern Louisiana's supposedly more tolerant racial culture. While none of these factors can be ignored, the dramatic events of 1867-1868 showed that none was more important than the labor arrangements that sugar production spawned. Ten years later, a U.S. Senate committee report on the 1878 elections in Louisiana contrasted political conditions in the cotton South and the sugar bowl and spelled out the main reason for the difference. "It is a significant fact that the illegal, brutal methods of electioneering that are now known as bull-dozing have been confined for the most part since 1868 to the cotton-growing regions of the South," it noted. Owing mainly to the "exigencies of the cane crop," the report contended, "there have been no serious or systematic attempts made in the sugar-growing parishes to control by violence the negro vote." "[The] demoralization of agricultural labor," the report continued, "occurring at the time of the year when elections are held in Louisiana, would bring ruin to hundreds of wealthy planters in the sugar-growing region." Thus, "bull-dozing is not encouraged either by the concurrence or indifference of the wealthy classes of those sections.(47)

If the Senate report understated political terror in the sugar region during the 1870s, it overstated somewhat the significance of "the exigencies of the cane crop." It was less the demands of the crop per se than the specific labor arrangements best-suited though not limited to sugar production that explain the persistence of black politics in the sugar bowl after 1877. The agricultural insurgency and political mobilization of 1867-1868 were equally intense in the cotton South and the sugar bowl, yet there was nothing inherent in the way cotton was produced that led inevitably to sharecropping, nor was there anything intrinsic to raising sugarcane that could only have resulted in wage labor. Instead, sharecropping and wage labor arose from particular historical circumstances as well as from the contending desires of both freedmen and former slaveholders, as each came to terms with the destruction of slavery and the reconstitution of the plantation upon a free-labor basis. Freedmen of the cotton South had other options, however narrow, during early Reconstruction; the advent of sharecropping was not predestined While historians continue to debate sharecropping's origins, evidence from the sugar region shows specifically how alternative labor arrangements in cotton, much within the realm of the possible, could have had different historical consequences.(48)

For that matter, black political rights did not come to a decisive end in the entire cotton South after 1877. Areas like North Carolina's Second Congressional District, or the "black second," also stood out as bastions of independent black politics.(49) Yet these places, as was true of the sugar region, were exceptions to the larger story of the quelling of black politics following Redemption. For every area like the black second, there were other regions, such as the cotton parishes and counties of the Natchez District, just north of the sugar bowl, where, despite overwhelming black majorities, black officeholding and the ability of black voters to cast free and fair ballots were significantly undermined after 1877. Black political rights were eventually suppressed in the sugar region, as they were throughout the South, at the end of the nineteenth century. The historical circumstances that led to legal segregation and disfranchisement, however, were very different from those that resulted in Redemption two decades earlier, and indeed the former could hardly have happened without the latter. It remains a matter of speculation, but had labor arrangements more closely resembling those of the sugar region prevailed in the production of cotton, the South's dominant crop, the subsequent history of Reconstruction and its aftermath might have been very different.

(1) Charles E. Merrill to James C. Adamson, August 3, 1868 (quotations), and Charles E. Merrill to Henry Ware, August 9, 1868, both in vol. 428, pp. 21-23, Letters Sent, ser. 1842, Agent & Assistant Subassistant Commissioner (hereinafter Agt. & ASAC), Plaquemine, La., Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Record Group 105 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.) (hereinafter cited as RG 105; unless otherwise noted, all references to RG 105 in this article are to documents generated by the bureau's field offices in Louisiana).

The author thanks Michael W. Fitzgerald, Gaines M. Foster, Sylvia D. Frank, and four anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Southern History for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

(2) The Louisiana sugar region included the parishes (counties) of Ascension, Assumption, Iberville, Jefferson, Lafourche, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Mary, Terrebonne, and West Baton Rouge.

(3) Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge and London, 1983), esp. Chap. 3, and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York and other cities, 1988); Michael W. Fitzgerald, The Union League Movement in the Deep South: Politics and Agricultural Change During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge and London, 1989); and Julie Saville, "Grassroots Reconstruction: Agricultural Labour and Collective Action in South Carolina, 1860-1868," Slavery and Abolition, XII (December 1991), 173-82; Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Eng., New York, and Melbourne, 1994); and Saville, "Rites and Power: Reflections on Slavery, Freedom and Political Ritual," in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (London and Portland, Ore., 1999), 81-102.

(4) Fitzgerald, Union League Movement, 213-33 (first quotation on p. 215; second and third quotations on p. 230.)

(5) For a similar interpretation see Rebecca J. Scott, "`Stubborn and Disposed to Stand their Ground': Black Militia, Sugar Workers and the Dynamics of Collective Action in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl, 1863-87," in Frey and Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World, 103-26.

(6) On the politics of the tariff on sugar after the Civil War, see J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington, Ky., 1953), Chap. 16. On black (and poor white) disfranchisement in Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century, see J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974), 152-65.

(7) On the distinct world of antebellum Louisiana sugar plantations and their annual routines, see Sitterson, Sugar Country, Chaps. 2-7; V. Alton Moody, "Slavery on Louisiana Sugar Plantations," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, VII (April 1924), 191-301; and Walter Prichard, "Routine on a Louisiana Sugar Plantation under the Slavery Regime," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XIV (September 1927), 168-78. Population figures for the Louisiana sugar parishes are derived from U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Eighth Census (1860), Vol. I: Population (Washington, D.C., 1864), 194.

(8) Works on the sugar region during the Civil War and on the wartime origins of free labor include Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Ser. I (3 vols.; Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1985-1990), Vol. I: The Destruction of Slavery, Chap. 4, and Vol. III: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South, Chap. 2; Robert F. Pace, "`It Was Bedlam Let Loose': The Louisiana Sugar Country and the Civil War," Louisiana History, XXXIX (Fall 1998), 389-409; Walter Prichard, "The Effects of the Civil War on the Louisiana Sugar Industry," Journal of Southern History, V (August 1939), 315-32; C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1976); John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge and London, forthcoming), Chap. 2; Charles P. Roland, Louisiana Sugar Plantations during the American Civil War (Leiden, Netherlands, 1957; repr., Baton Rouge and London, 1997), and Roland, "Difficulties of Civil War Sugar Planting in Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (October 1955), 40-62; Sitterson, Sugar Country, Chap. 10; and William F. Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862-1865 (Lafayette, La., 1978).

(9) There is an extensive literature on Lincoln's wartime Reconstruction policy in Louisiana. The most thorough treatment is Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978). For a comprehensive work on Lincoln's Reconstruction efforts, including those in Louisiana, see William C. Harris, With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (Lexington, Ky., 1997). Because the Emancipation Proclamation exempted Unionist Louisiana, the former slaves' legal status remained unclear until the constitutional abolition of slavery.

(10) On this point see Rebecca J. Scott, "Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation," American Historical Review, XCIX (February 1994), 70-102.

(11) For further elaboration on the themes in this paragraph, see Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields. The proposition that freedmen in the cotton South defined freedom in individualistic terms would seem to run counter to Julie Saville's argument that freedmen drew upon communitarian or collective values and traditions in defining freedom. Saville's argument, however, is not necessarily incompatible with either mine or Michael Fitzgerald's, since she ends her study in the early 1870s--at the very moment, significantly, that the social demobilization that Fitzgerald sees as a result of sharecropping was beginning. Nonetheless, my interpretation attributes a greater willingness among freedmen to embrace the values of the capitalist marketplace in constructing free labor than does Saville's. See the works by Saville cited in note 3 above, and Fitzgerald, Union League Movement.

(12) On freedmen working land during the war, see Berlin et al., Freedom, ser. I, vol. III, 572-74, 617; and Paul K. Eiss, "A Share in the Land: Freedpeople and the Government of Labour in Southern Louisiana, 1862-65," Slavery and Abolition, XIX (April 1998), 46-89. On expressions by freedmen for land after the war, see Capt. Thomas Kanady to Lt. Z. K. Wood, December 28, 1865, Letters Received, set. 1757, Department of Louisiana, U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, Part I (National Archives, Washington, D.C.), copy filed as C-655, Freedmen and Southern Society Project (University of Maryland, College Park) (hereinafter cited as FSSP); 1st Lt. William E. Dougherty to Lt. D. G. Fenno, November 7, 1865, D-58 1865, Letters Received, set. 1303, La. Assistant Commissioner, RG 105, National Archives (FSSP A-8562); and Bvt. Col. Marcus A. Reno to Lt. A. A. Milliken, December 22, 1865, enclosed in Bvt. Col. Marcus A. Reno to Lt. A. R. Houston, January 2, 1866, Unregistered Letters Received, ser. 1846, Plaquemines, La., Subassistant Commissioner, RG 105 (FSSP A-8509). Throughout this article, the alphanumeric designations after FSSP refer to the filing system of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, where the documents they identify were examined; the originals of these documents, however, are housed at the National Archives.

(13) On the New Orleans Tribune see Jean-Charles Houzeau, My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, edited by David C. Rankin, translated by Gerard F. Denault (Baton Rouge and London, 1984); and William P. Conner, "Reconstruction Rebels: The New Orleans Tribune in Post-War Louisiana," Louisiana History, XXI (Spring 1980), 159-81. There is a considerable literature on the New Orleans free black community during the Civil War era, including John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago and London, 1973); Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge and London, 1997); Donald E. Everett, "Demands of the New Orleans Free Colored Population for Political Equality, 1862-1865," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXXVIII (April 1955), 43-64; David C. Rankin, "The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans During Reconstruction," Journal of Southern History, XL (August 1974), 417-40; and Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 1976). Some scholars insist that the free people of color immediately became spokesmen for plantation laborers and that their critique of army labor policy articulated laborers' thinking. While such criticism, to a degree, resonated throughout the countryside and accurately reflected the opinions of most former slaves, free people of color and plantation laborers did not always share common interests, nor did the former necessarily speak for the latter. These two groups occupied different social universes before the war, and tensions between them would continue for years after it. Moreover, free black criticisms of the labor system were often ambivalent, taking issue with white assumptions about black incapacity for independence but also reflecting conventional fears about vagrancy. See James D. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815-1880 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1998), 169-75; and Ted Tunnell, "Free Negroes and the Freedmen: Black Politics in New Orleans during the Civil War," Southern Studies, XIX (Spring 1980), 5-28.

(14) For examples of Louisiana freedmen's political mobilization in 1865, especially over land, see 1st Lt. William E. Dougherty to Lt. Lucien Crooker, October 18, 1865, A-8577, FSSP; Capt Jo. Rhodes to Capt. Benjamin B. Campbell, October 21, 1865, C-653, FSSP; 1st Lt. William E. Dougherty to Lt. Lucien Crooker, November 6, 1865, C-805, FSSP; and Capt. J. W. Greene to Maj. Charles W. Lowell, November 23, 1865, C-808, FSSP. On Johnson's land restoration policy and the resulting struggle over land redistribution during presidential Reconstruction, see William S. McFeely, Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen (New Haven and London, 1968), 92-129; and Foner, Reconstruction, 158-64 and 183-84.

(15) On the Louisiana black codes and use of the legal system against freedmen, see Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974), 93-94, and 98-103. On sugar planters' views on the need for state control of labor, see William W. Pugh to Robert C. Martin, June 23, 1865, Martin-Pugh Collection (Allen J. Ellender Archives, Allen J. Ellender Memorial Library, Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana); Col. Charles L. Norton to Lt. Col. Christian T. Christensen, June 27, 1865, vol. 167/316 DG, pp. 11-13, Letters and Endorsements Sent, ser. 926, Post of New Iberia, La., RG 393 (FSSP C-948); 1st Lt. Dougherty to Lt. Fenno, November 7, 1865; John Moore to William F. Weeks, December 8, 1865, David Weeks and Family Papers (Weeks Hall Memorial Collection, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge) (hereinafter cited as LLMVC); New Orleans Daily Picayune, November 17 and 26, 1865, and February 2, 1866; Franklin Planters' Banner, September 2, 1865, reprinted in New Orleans Daily Picayune, September 13, 1865; and Plaquemine Iberville South, June 9, 1866. On southern planters' pro-slavery views after the war generally see James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977), Chaps. 4 and 5.

(16) John C. Rodrigue, "The Freedmen's Bureau and Wage Labor in the Louisiana Sugar Region," in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Freedmen's Bureau and Reconstruction: Reconsiderations (New York, 1999), 193-218.

(17) Capt. Thomas Kanady to 1st Lt. Z. K. Wood, December 23, 1865, Letters Received, ser. 1757, Department of Louisiana, RG 393 (FSSP C-655). See also Col. H. Scofield to Lt. Z. [K.] Wood, December 30, 1865, Letters Received, ser. 1757, Department of Louisiana, RG 393 (FSSP C-656).

(18) On the Reconstruction Acts and their implications for Louisiana, see Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 129-32.

(19) Plantation diary entry, May 1, 1867, William T. Palfrey and Family Papers, in Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations, Kenneth M. Stampp, gen. ed., Ser. I: Selections from Louisiana State University, Part 1: Louisiana Sugar Plantations (microfilm; Frederick, Md., 1989), reel 4.

(20) Bvt. Capt. F. A. Osbourne to Bvt. Lt. Col. George F. Schayer, June 20, 1867, vol. 425, [n.p.], Letters Sent, ser. 1842, Agt. & ASAC, Plaquemine, La., RG 105 (first quotation); and 1st Lt. William H. Webster to Capt. William H. Sterling, June 10, 1867, vol. 217, p. 117, Letters Sent, ser. 1490, Assistant Subassistant Commissioner (hereinafter ASAC), Baton Rouge, La. (second quotation).

(21) Mortimer F. Smith to Bvt. Maj. Gen. George L. Hartstaff, June 11, 1867, Letters Received, ser. 1303, La. Assistant Commissioner, RG 105; and John T. White to [?], April 30, 1868, vol. 384, pp. 56-60, Trimonthly Reports, ser. 1789, ASAC, New Iberia, La., RG 105.

(22) Bvt. Capt. F. A. Osbourne to Bvt. Lt. Col. George F. Shayer, June 20, 1867, vol. 425, [n. p.] (quotations), and Bvt. Capt. F. A. Osbourne to Lt. L. O. Parker, July 24, 1867, vol. 426, pp. 12-13, both in Letters Sent, ser. 1842, Agt. & ASAC, Plaquemine, La., RG 105. It is unclear whether this John Williams of Iberville Parish is the same individual mentioned at the beginning of this article who was allegedly fired by Henry Ware.

(23) Andrew H. Gay to Edward J. Gay, September 20, 1867, Edward Gay and Family Papers, LLMVC (first quotation); 1st Lt. William H. Webster to Lt. L. O. Parker, August 31, 1867, vol. 216, pp. 38-45, Letters Sent, ser. 1486, Subassistant Commissioner (hereinafter SAC) of the 2nd Subdistrict, Baton Rouge, La., RG 105 (second quotation); and entry, September 27, 1867, Isaac Erwin Diary, LLMVC (third quotation). On the number of black delegates elected to the constitutional convention, see Vincent, Black Legislators, 47, 226-27. Making allowances for war casualties, emigration, and natural deaths, Joe Gray Taylor has estimated that of the almost 95,000 white males twenty-one or older in Louisiana in 1860, 45,000 did not register to vote in 1867. Moreover, a large majority of those who registered did not vote. Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 143-47.

(24) Thomas I. Garrett to Edward J. Gay, September 27, 1867 (first quotation), and M. Schlatre Jr., to Edward J. Gay, October 5, 1867 (second quotation), both in Gay Papers; and Charles E. Merrill to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, January 31, 1868, vol. 427, pp. 24-26, Letters Sent, ser. 1842, Agt. & ASAC, Plaquemine, La., RG 105 (third quotation).

(25) Constitution of Louisiana (1868), Title VI, Art. 100, repr. in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions of ... the United States of America (7 vols.; Washington, D.C., 1909), III, 1462-63 (quotation). See also Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 151-55.

(26) House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154: Testimony Taken by the Sub-Committee of Elections in Louisiana, in Two Parts (Serial 1435, Washington, D.C., 1870), Part 1, pp. 637, 641-42 (quotation). See also John T. White to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, April 20, 1868, vol. 384, pp. 54-56, Trimonthly Reports, ser. 1789, ASAC, New Iberia, La., RG 105.

(27) William H. Webster to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, March 31, 1868, vol. 284, pp. 83-93, Monthly Reports, ser. 1594, SAC of the 3rd Subdistrict, Franklin, La., RG 105 (first quotation); and Francis Sternberg to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, March 31, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 14-17, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105 (second quotation).

(28) Francis Sternberg to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, March 24, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 5-7, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105. See also R. W. Mullen to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, April 10, 1868, vol. 276, pp. 65-71, Letters Sent, ser. 1598, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105. On the defeat of the Reconstruction constitutions in Alabama and Mississippi see Fitzgerald, Union League Movement, 83; Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama (New York and London, 1905), 534-47; and William C. Harris, The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republican Reconstruction in Mississippi (Baton Rouge and London, 1979), 190-96.

(29) R. W. Mullen to Capt. Lucius H. Warren, April 10, 1868, vol. 276, pp. 65-71, Letters Sent, ser. 1598, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105 (both quotations). The election on the constitution took place over two days, April 16 and 17, 1868.

(30) R. W. Mullen to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 30, 1868, and May 10, 1868 (quotations), vol. 276, pp. 82-97, Letters Sent, ser. 1598, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105.

(31) William H. Webster to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 30, 1868, vol. 284, pp. 94-105, Monthly Reports, ser. 1594, SAC of the 3rd Subdistrict, Franklin, La., RG 105.

(32) R. W. Mullen to Capt. William H. Sterling, April 30, 1868, vol. 276, pp. 82-92, Letters Sent, ser. 1598, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105.

(33) For the statewide vote on the constitution of 1868 see Donald W. Davis, "Ratification of the Constitution of 1868--Record of Votes," Louisiana History, VI (Summer 1965), 301-5. For Warmoth's totals see Perry H. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana, rev. and exp. ed. (Baton Rouge, 1971), 425, 446-47. See also F. Wayne Binning, "Carpetbaggers' Triumph: The Louisiana State Election of 1868," Louisiana History, XIV (Winter 1973), 21-39; and Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 158-61. Warmoth faced little real opposition. Still hampered by the Reconstruction Acts, Democrats did not even bother to field a ticket. Instead, they threw their support to the breakaway "ultra-Radicals," headed by James G. Taliaferro, in hopes of fostering a split among Republicans; see Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 156-58. While factionalism among Louisiana Republicans at this point was not serious enough to jeopardize the party's electoral strength, the party would become increasingly divided over the following years; see ibid., Chap. 6.

(34) Foner, Reconstruction, 346.

(35) On the Knights of the White Camellia and the violence surrounding the 1868 presidential campaign in Louisiana see Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 162-64, 167-71; and Frank J. Wetta, "`Bulldozing the Scalawags': Some Examples of the Persecution of Southern White Republicans in Louisiana during Reconstruction," Louisiana History, XXI (Winter 1980), 43-58.

(36) M. W. Morris to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 31, 1868, vol. 295, pp. 71-74, Letters Sent, ser. 1634, Agt. & ASAC, Houma, La., RG 105 (quotation). See also Lt. Nelson Bronson to Bvt. Lt. Col. Lucius H. Warren, July 31, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 99-100, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105; and House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154, Pt. 1, p. 107.

(37) Lavinia Gay to Edward. J. Gay, July 22, 1868, Gay Papers; entries, August 27 and 30, 1868, Plantation Diary 36, William J. Minor and Family Papers, LLMVC; Robert C. Martin Jr. to Margaret Martin, September 7, 1868, Martin-Pugh Collection; R. W. Mullen to Acting Assistant Adjutant General, September 20, 1868, vol. 286, pp. 26-30, Trimonthly Reports, ser. 1604, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105; and House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154, Pt. 2, pp. 378-79.

(38) W. F. Loan to Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, November 1, 1868, vol. 286, pp. 41-43, Trimonthly Reports, set. 1604, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105; House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154, Pt. 2, p. 311 (quotation).

(39) On the 1868 presidential election in Louisiana see Carolyn E. Delatte, "The St. Landry Riot: A Forgotten Incident of Reconstruction Violence," Louisiana History, XVII (Winter 1976), 41-49; Melinda Meek Hennessey, "Race and Violence in Reconstruction New Orleans: The 1868 Riot," Louisiana History, XX (Winter 1979), 77-91; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 161-73; Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy, and Southern Reconstruction (New York, Evanston, and London, 1971), Chap. 8, esp. 131-35; and Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), 153-59. On Reconstruction violence in northern Louisiana see Gilles Vandal, "`Bloody Caddo': White Violence against Blacks in a Louisiana Parish, 1865-1876," Journal of Social History, XXV (Winter 1991), 373-88.

(40) Lt. Nelson Bronson to Bvt. Lt. Col. Lucius H. Warren, July 31, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 99-100, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105 (first quotation); Victor Benthien to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 20, 1868, vol. 264, pp. 153-54, Letters Sent, ser. 1577, Agt. & ASAC, Donaldsonville, La., RG 105 (second quotation); and House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154, Pt. 1, p. 636 (third quotation).

(41) Accounts of the St. Bernard riot and its aftermath include New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 27, 28, and 31, 1868; H. M. Whitterman to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 27 and 31, and November 28, 1868, vol. 536, pp. 17-22, Letters Sent, ser. 1823, ASAC for St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, New Orleans, La., RG 105; House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., I Sess., No. 13 (Serial 1402; [Washington, D.C., 1869]), Pt. 1, pp. 26-40; House Miscellaneous Documents, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 154, Pt. 2, pp. 76-98, 254-71, 376-84, and 465-69; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 169-72; and Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction, 155. On General Rousseau and his response to the violence surrounding the 1868 presidential election in Louisiana see Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 84-93.

(42) Victor Benthien to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 19, 1868, vol. 264, pp. 150-51, Letters Sent, set. 1577, Agt. & ASAC, Donaldsonville, La., RG 105; Lt. Nelson Bronson to Bvt. Lt. Col. Lucius H. Warren, August 31, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 110-11, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105; R. W. Mullen to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 21, 1868, vol. 286, pp. 37-41, Trimonthly Reports, ser. 1604, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105; Charles E. Merrill to Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 16, 1868, vol. 428, pp. 53-55, Letters Sent, ser. 1842, Agt. & ASAC, Plaquemine, La., RG 105; entry, September 20, 1868, Plantation Diary 3, Alexandre E. DeClouet and Family Papers, LLMVC; and entries, August 16 and October 22, 1868, Erwin Diary.

(43) A. Miltenberger to Thomas O. Moore, October 23, 1868, Thomas O. Moore Papers, LLMVC (first quotation); B. Stevens to Edward J. Gay, November 11, 1868, Gay Papers (second quotation); and John H. Brough to Bvt. Lt. Col. Lucius H. Warren, September 11, 1868, vol. 264, pp. 119-20, Letters Sent, ser. 1577, Agt. & ASAC, Donaldsonville, La., RG 105 (third quotation). For similar observations or complaints, see entry, October 15, 1868, Plantation Diary 36, Minor Papers; entries, October 10 and 12, 1868, Plantation Diary 4, DeClouet Papers; J. H. Van Antwerp to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, October 20, 1868, vol. 472, pp. 134-36, Letters Sent, ser. 1899, Agt. & ASAC, Thibodaux, La., RG 105; New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 30, 1868; and Louis Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana ... 1868-69 (New Orleans, 1869).

(44) Closer examination of the vote reveals that intimidation was effective in some sugar parishes but not others. While approximately 29,000 votes were cast in both April and November in the sugar bowl, the Republican total declined (and the Democratic total increased) by about 5,000 votes. Thus, either many freedmen were coerced into voting Democratic, or many of them stayed home on election day while more white voters turned out between April and November. In some parishes, such as Iberville, Plaquemines, and St. Charles, the Republican vote held strong in November, ranging from 73 percent to 83 percent. In others, it dropped significantly. In Ascension Parish, Warmoth won 98 percent of the vote but Grant only 57 percent; in St. Mary Parish, the corresponding figures were 71.3 percent and 38.6 percent. In St. Bernard, the scene of rioting and disorder days before the election, and where Warmoth had won 65.5 percent of the vote, Seymour received 473 votes against Grant's one. W. Dean Burnham, Presidential Ballots, 1836-1892 (Baltimore, 1955), 486-501; and Howard, Political Tendencies, 425, 446-47.

(45) W. F. Loan to Bvt. Maj. Benjamin T. Hutchins, November 1 and 10 (quotation), 1868, vol. 286, pp. 41-46, Trimonthly Reports, ser. 1604, Agt. & ASAC, Franklin, La., RG 105.

(46) On sugar planters' labor problem after Reconstruction see Louis Ferleger, "The Problem of `Labor' in the Post-Reconstruction Louisiana Sugar Industry," Agricultural History, LXXII (Spring 1998), 140-58; and Joseph P. Reidy, "Mules and Machines and Men: Field Labor on Louisiana Sugar Plantations, 1887-1915," ibid., 183-96. On black politics in southern Louisiana after Reconstruction see William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969); Howard, Political Tendencies, 156-59; and Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, Chap. 8.

(47) Senate Reports, 45 Cong., 3 Sess., No. 855: Louisiana in 1878: Report of the United States Senate Committee to Inquire into Alleged Frauds and Violence in the Elections of 1878, with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence (Serial 1840; Washington, D.C., 1879), xxi.

(48) There is of course a vast literature on the origins of southern sharecropping. Some of the more important works include Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia, 1850-1885 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); Ronald L. F. Davis, Good and Faithful Labor: From Slavery to Sharecropping in the Natchez District, 1860-1890 (Westport, Conn., and London, 1982); Fitzgerald, Union League Movement; Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York and Oxford, 1986); Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge and other cities, 1977); Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery, to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill and London, 1992); Saville, Work of Reconstruction; Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge and London, 1983); and Harold D. Woodman, New South--New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge and London, 1995). The emergence of wage labor and various forms of gang labor on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina after emancipation reveals certain similarities between developments there and in the sugar bowl. On labor arrangements and conflict on postwar rice plantations see Foner, Nothing but Freedom, Chap. 3; John Scott Strickland, "`No More Mud Work': The Struggle for the Control of Labor and Production in Low Country South Carolina, 1863-1880," in Walter J. Fraser Jr. and Winfred B. Moore Jr., The Southern Enigma: Essays on Race, Class, and Folk Culture (Westport, Conn., and London, 1983), 43-62; and Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 130-36.

(49) Eric Anderson, Race and Politics in North Carolina, 1872-1901: The Black Second (Baton Rouge and London, 1981). On the general persistence of black politics in the South between the end of Reconstruction and the advent of disfranchisement and legal segregation during the 1890s and early twentieth century, see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, 11-29. The contingent nature of race relations and of black political and legal rights in the post-Reconstruction South received its classic statement in C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3d rev. ed. (New York, 1974), esp. Chap. 2.

MR. RODRIGUE is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University.