A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 69)

a minor lashing under slavery. Social control, even during the liberalizing efforts of Reconstruction, was maintained by repressive laws and vigilante groups such as the Knights of the White Camellia, founded in St. Mary Parish and modeled on the Klu Klux Klan. Taylor notes the paradox of this moment in the Louisianan imagination: “For a generation or more after political reconstruction was over, the politicians cultivated their myth of horror, to avoid the necessity of dealing with real social and economic issues. Paradoxically, white Louisianians who were on the losing side in the bloody American Civil War remember it was ever convicted of any of the killings. This was closely followed in New Orleans by the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874 instigated by the unrepentant and recalcitrant White League against the Republican administration, a pitched battle complete with Gatling guns and artillery in which dozens more were killed. Other dramatic social changes reshaped the Louisiana landscape, society, and economy during the decades following the Civil War. Sicilians and Chinese were recruited to work in the plantation fields, both in South Louisiana and in the cotton as a glorious struggle. The battle for political Reconstruction they won, but they remember those years as the worst in their history.” Two of the most dramatic incidents signaling the violence and power of the former Confederates’ resistance to Reconstruction were the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which it is variously estimated between sixty-nine and a hundred blacks were killed; no one CHARLES F. FISCHER Louisiana Civil War Zouaves on the Battlefield, ca. 1866 Oil on canvas; 17 x 22 in. Louisiana State Museum fields of the northern delta parishes. Sicilian immigrants congregated in large numbers in the French Quarter and altered CIVIL WAR THROUGH THE NEW CENTURY 69 

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