Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866- 1884.

Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866- 1884. By Gilles Vandal (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2000. x plus 3l9pp.).

Gilles Vandal offers a comprehensive and informative analysis of southern violence in his study of post-Civil War Louisiana. Using a data set of 4,986 homicides drawn from newspapers, police records, and reports by state and federal agencies, Vandal shows how the pattern of violence varied between regions and over time in the first two decades after the war. In addition, he notes the higher rates of participation in homicide by white males as compared with African Americans and women, highlighting the use of violence as a means of social control.

Vandal begins with a comparison of urban and rural violence that contrasts the situation in New Orleans with that in the rest of the state. Having held a reputation for being an exceptionally violent city in the decades before the Civil War, New Orleans experienced a long-term decline in homicide rates after 1865. In contrast, violence increased dramatically in the rural parishes during Reconstruction, only leveling off again after 1877. Vandal attributes the difference to better law enforcement in the city and the smaller percentage of African Americans in the population. In later chapters, he concludes that these two factors also played a role in determining the levels of violence in rural areas. Homicide rates were highest in remote areas where African Americans were the majority, while parishes that were closer to New Orleans or easily reached by river tended to have fewer homicides because of the proximity of state and federal troops.

In both rural and urban areas, political motives were the most common cause of violence, accounting for 748 rural and 102 urban murders. Vandal attributes the spiraling homicide rate during Reconstruction to the unwillingness of the majority of white Louisianians to accept the new social order. This argument is further validated by the fact that most victims of violence in this period were black. White supremacists could not accept freed people voting, holding office, or participating as equals in the society, and embarked on a campaign of terror designed to eliminate African Americans and their white Republican allies from politics.

Vandal's discussion of collective violence also reveals the importance of the political context. Nearly half of all homicides in the Reconstruction period were committed by more than one person, with 71 percent of the murders of black people by white people occurring in this way. Moreover, 67 percent of collective homicides were politically motivated. Some white conservatives openly advocated murder as a political tool, portraying it as the only way to save the state from black domination. As Vandal states, "whites killed blacks not simply through personal quarrels between individuals but as members of a group and as a means of social control" (p. 25). Once the Redeemers regained control of the state, homicides reverted back to the prewar pattern of one-on-one violence, although lynching remained an important means of suppressing black aspirations for equality well into the twentieth century.

Political conflicts were not the only factor contributing to an increase in violence in rural Louisiana after the Civil War. Vandal reveals that many murders grew out of attempts to punish and control crime in areas where law enforcement was inadequate or non-existent. Bands of roving thieves and marauders plagued the western frontier region and parts of southern Louisiana, leading local citizens to form vigilance committees to protect their lives and property. The committees meted out punishments such as banishment, whipping, or hanging to captured criminals, and in some parishes whole gangs of thieves were lynched. Although Vandal notes that vigilance committees were more restrained in the use of violence than lynch mobs, he suggests that the two practices are related. Accusations of criminal activity often provided an excuse for lynching African Americans, with white people arguing that they could not obtain justice in the courts while the state was under "black" Republican control. After the end of Recon struction, white leaders fabricated threats of rape and violence by black men to justify continuing the practice.

One of Vandal's most interesting chapters discusses black people's responses to white violence. During the political battles of the 1860s and 1870s, African Americans engaged in armed self-defense, carrying weapons with them to meetings and even to work in the fields. Black communities frequently organized to protect themselves from attack. However, such actions invited massive retaliation from white supremacists and often resulted in massacres. Black people called on state and federal authorities to protect them from violence, to little avail. The number of troops stationed in Louisiana during Reconstruction was never enough to provide security in all parts of the state, leaving African Americans in most of the rural parishes to fend for themselves. Federal withdrawal from support for civil rights and disappointment with the Republican regime caused some black Louisianians to seek compromises with white conservatives, while thousands of others left the state in the late 1870s to seek better conditions elsewh ere.

Vandal believes the failure of the Reconstruction had lasting effects on African Americans. Whereas social scientists have noted higher rates of violence among black people in the United States than among white people in the twentieth century, Rethinking Southern Violence shows that the opposite was true in the nineteenth century. White people were responsible for the vast majority of homicides in Vandal's data set, while black people committed only a small proportion of these crimes in relation to their numbers. Vandal argues that higher rates of black violence have their roots in the frustration, alienation, and lack of police protection that resulted from the construction of a white supremacist social order at the turn of the century.

Rethinking Southern Violence makes a useful contribution to the history of Reconstruction and studies of the causes of violence. The book is clearly written and well researched, although the analyses of statistical data in the text sometimes disrupt the narrative and make the arguments difficult to draw out. Vandal's emphasis on local variations cautions against extrapolating his findings to the entire South, but the study provides a useful model for examining the extent and sources of violence in other states and in other time periods. The collection and processing of information concerning thousands of homicides, and the distillation of that information into a tightly organized book of just over 300 pages, is an impressive achievement.