Terrible Swift Sword (45 page)

SHERIDAN SPENT JULY 1866 in Texas and with his troops along the Rio Grande. Juarez's and Escobedo's forces now controlled most of northern Mexico, but throughout Texas, Sheridan disgustedly observed, “a reign of lawlessness and disorder ensued.” The courts and Texas's state government, dominated by ex-Confederates, condoned flagrant acts of violence and intimidation. Colonel Charles Griffin, the former commander of V Corps, wrote to Sheridan from Galveston, “There is scarcely an officer in this state, whose duty it is to arrest crime, that will turn or raise his hand against the scoundrels. I begin to believe that there is more disloyalty here now than in '61.”

Indeed, in 1865 and 1866, five hundred white men were indicted for allegedly murdering blacks—without a single conviction. “Murder is considered one of their inalienable states' rights,” a Northern visitor said of Texas. Small wonder, then, that when a reporter in Galveston asked Sheridan how he liked Texas, he replied, “If I owned hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in hell.”
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ON THE NIGHT OF July 30, 1866, an army officer met Sheridan's ship as it carried him back to New Orleans from Texas. Earlier that day, the officer reported, whites and New Orleans police had slaughtered dozens of blacks as they met at the Mechanics Institute to elect delegates for Louisiana's constitutional convention. As Sheridan grimly listened, the officer said that up to 40 men had been killed and 140 others had been injured. In the chaotic aftermath, Major Absalom Baird, the ranking officer in Sheridan's absence, had taken control of the city government.
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Sheridan was not especially surprised; he had feared an explosion of violence in New Orleans. Before leaving for Texas, he had warned Baird to be on guard. He was disappointed that his troops had been unable to defend the freedmen, who looked to the Union for protection.

Unlike many Union generals with Southern commands, Sheridan strongly supported and sympathized with the black freedmen. The government's obligation toward them, he believed, could not be more obvious. “Their freedom had been given them, and it was the plain duty of those in authority to make it secure, and screen them from the bitter political resentment that beset them, and to see that they had a fair chance in the battle of life,” Sheridan wrote.
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BEFORE ADJOURNING IN I1864, the delegates to the Louisiana constitutional convention—all whites—had reserved the option of reconvening if needed. On June 23, 1866, they elected to do so in late July. Democrats and former Rebels were now running Louisiana, and Unionists knew that the survival of the Republican Party depended on giving the vote to the freedmen—and adopting new rules barring certain classes of ex-Confederates from state office. Before they could reconvene the convention, however, they had to elect new delegates to represent those parishes that during the 1864 convention were Confederate-occupied. At the meeting scheduled for July 30, delegates planned to discuss the new elections and proposed changes in the voting laws.

Every state official except Governor James Wells, the only statewide officeholder who was Republican, angrily condemned the convention and its goal of giving blacks the vote. Surprisingly, Wells supported black suffrage—surprising because he had become practically indistinguishable from his Democratic fellow officeholders in every other action that he took.

The threat of violence, as oppressive as the July heat and humidity, hung over the preparations for the meeting on Monday, July 30. Just three months earlier, Memphis police, firemen, and citizens had killed forty-six blacks during a three-day binge of violence that had destroyed hundreds of black homes, schools, and buildings.
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Acting under the pretext of preemptive riot control, New Orleans policemen, most of whom were former Confederate soldiers, crowded into their precinct houses during the morning of July 30, armed with clubs, bowie knives, and new pistols on loan from the local gun shops. The sheriff swore in dozens of special deputies; they included members of the emerging white supremacy societies, local thugs, and citizens.

Lieutenant Governor Albert Voorhies had warned Major Baird that the convention would be dispersed because it violated municipal ordinances; Baird said the convention was legal, and if delegates were arrested, the military would release them.
So Voorhies telegraphed President Johnson, who assured him that if he obtained a court order blocking the convention, federal troops would back the police. Voorhies had no trouble persuading District Judge Edward Abell to forbid the meeting. Baird was not informed of Voorhies's backdoor correspondence with the president.
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Twenty-six nervous white delegates—a quorum required three times their number—gathered at the Mechanics Institute as about 170 black men, women, and children looked on. Then, in a show of support, about one hundred black men marched to the institute up Burgundy Street, which was lined with jeering white men.

During the march, someone fired a pistol. Both sides began heaving bricks, and the marchers hastened to the institute building and disappeared inside.

Police and citizens rushed up and poured a torrent of gunfire through the windows. When a white flag appeared, they stormed inside. A Confederate veteran who had lost both arms during the war exhorted the mob, “Kill every damned son of a bitch in the building, and [do] not let any escape.”

The mob emptied its revolvers into the unarmed delegates and spectators. Police shot others cowering in the building yard. The wounded were stabbed and “pounded to jelly” where they lay. Dr. A. P. Dostie, a delegate and longtime Unionist, was specially singled out; he was shot through the spine, stabbed in the belly with a sword, and beaten. Others fled, only to be chased down. Blocks away, blacks with no involvement in these events were assaulted on the streets and beaten, stabbed, or shot dead.
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Cyrus Hamlin, son of former vice president Hannibal Hamlin and a Civil War veteran, wrote that “the wholesale slaughter and the little regard paid to human life” were worse than anything that he had seen during the war. Police threw wounded and dead blacks into jail cells indiscriminately and abandoned them there. A Sheridan aide who visited a precinct house reported that the jail was “more like a slaughter-pen for animals than a receptacle for human beings.”
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MAJOR GENERAL WILLIAM SHERMAN of the Division of the Missouri shared his outrage over the mayhem with Sheridan. “It was no riot, it was an absolute massacre by the police which was not excelled in murderous cruelty by that at Fort Pillow.”

Grant told Sheridan to continue martial law in New Orleans for as long as he believed it necessary to keep the peace, “and do not allow any of the civil authorities to act if you deem such action as dangerous to the public safety.” Grant also forwarded to Sheridan several questions about the riot that the president wanted answered.
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In his responses to Johnson, Sheridan wrote that while the convention was the riot's immediate cause, its “remote cause” was the rising violence in New Orleans under the regime of Mayor John Monroe, who, “in the organization of the police
force, selected many desperate men, and some of them known murderers.” Sheridan told the president it was debatable whether Northerners could even reside in New Orleans, “whether they can be protected in life and property, and have justice in courts.” Justice was unlikely: District Judge Abell, who presided over the city's only criminal court, had promised immunity to the rioters beforehand, and afterward, he convened a grand jury that indicted the victims, not the perpetrators.
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Sheridan protested when Johnson released an abridged version of his letter distorting his criticisms of the New Orleans officials. It was the beginning, Sheridan later wrote, of “Mr. Johnson's well-known political hostility toward me.” Johnson notoriously made personal enemies of anyone who disagreed with him.
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The riot, coming on the heels of the one in Memphis, turned public opinion sharply against the Johnson administration. During a speech in St. Louis just before the midterm congressional elections, Johnson threw fuel on the fire by blaming the riot on Congress and a “radical conspiracy.”

 

THROUGHOUT THE NORTH, FIERY wartime passions were rekindled. Northern newspapers overwhelmingly laid the responsibility on Johnson and his amnesties, pardons, and obvious sympathy for the defeated Confederates. “Blood is upon his hands, the blood of innocent, loyal citizens,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
, “who had committed no crime but that of seeking to protect themselves against rebel misrule, which he, Andrew Johnson, had foisted upon them.”
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Always a fighter, Johnson tried to counteract the criticism by forming the National Union Party, a coalition of administration supporters, Democrats, and former Copperheads, and then going on a speaking tour.

Grant told Sheridan that Johnson no longer listened to Union loyalists. Fearing a resumption of the war, Grant quietly ordered all arms removed from Southern arsenals and sent to Northern storehouses.

Although there was no renewal of open hostilities, voters overwhelmingly rejected Johnson and his new party during the November 1866 election. Radical Republicans, vowing harsher measures for the “conquered provinces,” won a veto-proof majority in Congress.
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The House appointed a Select Committee on the New Orleans Riot—two Republicans and one Democrat—which, in its majority report, blamed city and state officials and criticized the president. The effect of Johnson's assurance to Lieutenant Governor Voorhies that federal troops would not interfere with police operations, the report said, “was to encourage the heart, to strengthen the hand, and to hold up the arms of those men who intended to prevent the convention from assembling.”

Johnson's assigning blame to Congress for the riot was “an unwarranted and unjust expression of hostile feeling,” the majority report said. In his minority report,
the committee's lone Democrat contrarily asserted that blacks had “provoked” the deadly attack.
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THE RADICAL REPUBLICAN–DOMINATED CONGRESS began implementing its Reconstruction program on March 2, 1867. Over Johnson's veto, it enacted what became known as Reconstruction Act No. 1—creating five military districts to govern the ten Southern states that had rejected the Fourteenth Amendment. Sheridan became commander of the Fifth Military District, overseeing Texas and Louisiana.

No precedent for this existed in US history. Over the opposition of the president, one-third of the nation had been placed under martial law. The Reconstruction Act required the ten states to draft new constitutions establishing new governments that, hopefully, would ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and fully restore the states to the Union.

When the states did nothing, Congress passed a supplemental Reconstruction Act directing the military district commanders to register voters by September 1 to elect constitutional convention delegates. Barred from voting were ex-Confederate government officials and former US military officers who had gone on to serve in the Confederate army. But ex-Rebel soldiers, and even most officers, could vote if they pledged fealty to the United States. And for the first time, blacks could vote.

 

BEFORE MARCH ENDED, SHERIDAN issued General Orders, No. 1 to Louisiana and Texas. It made clear that the military now wielded veto power over all civilian government actions. Sheridan proceeded to remove the New Orleans judge and two elected officials whom he had long had in his sights for their roles in the riot eight months earlier. He had the authority for these actions under yet another supplemental Reconstruction Act, again passed over Johnson's veto, permitting district military commanders to remove any civil official who impeded Reconstruction.
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In a letter to Grant, Sheridan explained his reasons for removing New Orleans mayor John Monroe, Louisiana attorney general Andrew Herron, and District Judge Edward Abell. For at least nine months before the riot, Sheridan wrote, Abell had been “educating” the authors of the planned “outrage” and promising them immunity from prosecution. “He fulfilled his promise.” Herron, he said, had prosecuted the victims instead of the rioters, “making the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent.” And the mayor had encouraged the police to join the riot by assuring them they would not be punished if they did.
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Sheridan was aware that the removals, along with his aggressive drive to register Louisiana voters for the coming election of constitutional convention delegates, put him on thin ice with Johnson. The president's attorney general, Henry Stanbery,
had issued an opinion restricting the commanders' authority over voter registration. Stanbery's opinion also limited those prohibited from voting to just former high-ranking Rebel officials. Grant, however, informed his military district commanders that the attorney general's opinion was “advisory” only and directed them to act on their own interpretations of the voter registration law. Sheridan, of course, chose to give “the most rigid interpretation to the law,” excluding anyone from registering and voting if there was a question regarding his eligibility.
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