America's Deadliest Election by Dana Bash

Author:Dana Bash
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2024-07-12T15:20:46+00:00

10

There was no place in the state of Louisiana that did not suffer from the political turmoil. No place.

The town of Colfax was three hundred and fifty miles from New Orleans, although it barely qualified as a town. It consisted of four or five houses, several of which offered rooms to passing travelers, three stores, a schoolhouse and one brick building, a stable that had been converted into the parish courthouse.

Colfax served as the seat, the administrative center, of Grant Parish. The parish and the town had been carved out of four adjoining parishes in 1868, as much to provide additional political patronage as for any other reason, and had been named after President Grant and his vice president, Schuyler Colfax. Grant Parish had an estimated forty-five hundred residents, many of them freedmen who now worked the fields for a wage. Politically, it was split roughly evenly between the two parties.

The area had once been part of the sprawling Calhoun Plantation. In the late 1830s Meredith Calhoun purchased as many as a thousand slaves in Huntsville, Alabama, the majority of them teenagers, and brought them chained or yoked together in a half-mile-long caravan to Louisiana. It was believed to be the largest overland movement of slaves in cotton industry history, requiring one hundred wagons and a thousand mules.

He brought them to an unusually lush area on the banks of the Red River. It was estimated the fertile soil could produce as much as a bale and a half of cotton or forty bushels of corn per acre. Calhoun’s slaves cleared an estimated twelve thousand acres, cutting trees, shrubs and bush, filling swamps, and using the timber to build magnificent homes for the masters as well as rudimentary slave quarters. They also built the second-largest sugar refinery in the country. The abundant cotton harvests and sugar revenue from his plantations made Meredith Calhoun wealthy enough to live in splendor in Europe, where he purchased a title, Count Calhoun, from France.

Calhoun had no moral qualms about slavery and was known for imposing brutal punishments to maintain control. Author Harriet Beecher Stowe supposedly said that the villainous slave master she depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Simon Legree, was based at least partially on Meredith Calhoun.

Through the early years of the Civil War, Calhoun remained confident that England and France, in need of the South’s cotton and sugar, would break the Union’s naval blockade. But Lincoln’s Red River campaign, with its fifty-boat flotilla, ended that belief. When the Union army arrived, almost four hundred thousand slaves declared themselves war contraband, walked off Southern plantations and surrendered to the Union Army. Nearly half of them enlisted to fight for their freedom.

Meredith died in 1869 and by the beginning of Reconstruction, what remained of the once-vast plantations were being run by his son William. “Willie” Calhoun was a hunchback who committed the most grievous act possible by a Southern gentleman: he fell in love with a mixed-race woman named Olivia Williams. Following the war, reported the Shreveport Times, Calhoun had gone to New Orleans to purchase mules and supplies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.