Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 - (Page 71)

one week after the seizure of the courthouse, a party of 19 men led by a state representative and reputed Klansman, James West Hadnot, made a show of strength in the town, riding fast and holding their rifles in sight. A smaller white reconnaissance party on April 4 discovered one of the white residents “under bars and lock and key — laying on fire arms” in anticipation of a black assault. Former parish judge Jim Rutland became so unnerved by the militarism of his black neighbors that he vacated his home and took up residence with friends on the opposite bank of the Red River. In an incident that became notorious, blacks in Colfax robbed Rutland’s vacant house early in the month. The burglary provided the justification for a new push to get Governor William Pitt Kellogg to recognize Fusion Party candidates Christopher Columbus Nash, a Confederate Surviving family members tended to the dead following the Colfax Massacre, as illustrated in this drawing from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1873. veteran, and Alphonse Cazabat as parish officers rather than R.C. Register (a black) for sheriff and Daniel Shaw (a white) for judge. After meeting with the governor, white militia commander James Longstreet, and U.S. district attorney J. R. Beckwith — who refused to invoke the federal Enforcement Acts against blacks in Colfax — Rutland and his conservative allies despaired of gaining assistance from the state government. “As he left the room,” remembered Beckwith, “[Rutland] told me that there would be hell in Grant Parish the next thing we heard from there.” ••••• Ward pleaded for assistance in a letter sent to Governor Kellogg. He entrusted its delivery to one of the few white men willing to take risks for the Radicals, the scalawag Willie Calhoun. Calhoun — whose term in the legislature had expired in 1870 — remained heartily engaged in the political contest for his home parish, participating in the seizure of the courthouse and allegedly abetting or encouraging the attack on Judge Rutland’s home. He also had facilitated the exchange of a series of letters between Ward, Shaw, and Register and their counterparts on the Fusion side. He continued to participate at great personal risk. “I tried to prevent bloodshed,” he later explained. Placing the letter in his boot, Calhoun attempted to hail a steamboat at Calhoun’s Landing, using the standard daytime procedure of hanging a flag on a post by the landing, but the first to pass refused to take on passengers at Colfax out of fear or hostility. Making his way to a little-used landing some distance below the town, he boarded the steamboat LaBelle on Monday, April 7. Calhoun declined the offer of his usual stateroom, finding his way to a nook deep in the hold of the boat. Despite his precautions, he was discovered before LaBelle reached Alexandria and removed from the boat by his old nemesis, J.G.P. Hooe. Hooe delivered Calhoun to a large crowd of white men on the riverbank at Pineville who seized Calhoun’s personal documents and subjected him to an hour-long harangue on the dangers of friendship with Negroes. “They told him no harm would come to him if he was innocent, as he said he was, of creating the riot,” reported the steamboat captain, who contacted the Republican newspaper as soon as he arrived in New Orleans. It was all he could do. “The Belle was obliged to come down and leave Mr. Calhoun in their hands,” he explained, “and it is feared he will suffer violence.” Accompanied by an armed guard, who told him he ought to be hanged, Calhoun was forced to ride through the woods in the company of 40 or 50 white men. Reaching a secluded spot, the party suddenly halted, fired their weapons, and forced Calhoun to dismount. They stripped off his clothing, revealing the steel corset that helped him hold his torso upright. In his boot, they found the letter from William Ward to Governor Kellogg. Winter 2008-09/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 71

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008 Contents Friends Editor's Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Prospect.1 New Orleans The Historic New Orleans Collection The Enduring Performance of Michael P. Smith Jazz Notes Louisiana Foodways Birds of a Feather: Windfowl Carvings in Southeast Louisiana Louisiana Association of Museums Louisiana Architecture O. Winston Link in Louisiana The Ogden Museum of Southern Art The Colfax Massacre Louisiana State Museum Unlocking the History of Greek Key Architecture Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2008

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