Unpunished Murder by Lawrence Goldstone

Author:Lawrence Goldstone [Goldstone, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2018-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

NO MATTER HOW HORRIBLE the events at Colfax, obtaining justice for the victims was going to be extremely difficult. Grant Parish was in a remote area, with no permanent army presence, and white supremacists were now in charge. In fact, C. C. Nash, who had both murdered Delos White and led the force that massacred perhaps a hundred black men, was now back in place as sheriff. Freedmen, who had already gained a great deal of experience with unpunished murder, were all too aware that they would likely be killed themselves if they even hinted they might testify against the mob. To make finding, arresting, and punishing the killers even more of a challenge, most whites in Louisiana either secretly supported Nash’s invaders or openly applauded them.

It would, then, take a man of exceptional commitment and courage, someone whose belief in equal justice for all was more important than public acceptance or even career advancement, to successfully pursue these killers.

It turned out that just such man was in New Orleans, occupying the very position from which prosecution of Nash and the rest of the Redeemer band must come.

James Roswell Beckwith was born in Cazenovia, in central New York State, about twenty miles southeast of Syracuse. The Cazenovia of Beckwith’s boyhood was known for two things—farming and abolition. Antislavery ran deep in central New York, and fugitive slaves could always find many local people to either shelter them or pass them along to the next stop on the Underground Railroad. When Beckwith was seventeen, a huge rally against the Fugitive Slave Law was held in Cazenovia, in which Frederick Douglass was one of the speakers.

Beckwith’s father was a successful farmer, but Beckwith himself felt a calling in the law. He moved to New York City to learn the profession, and after being admitted to the New York bar—which meant he was licensed to practice law in the state—he headed to Michigan, where he found a job as a district attorney. There he met and married Sarah Catherine Watrous, a cultured, educated woman who shared his views of slavery. She would become well known for her novel The Winthrops, a family saga that was published under the name Mrs. J. R. Beckwith in 1864.

For reasons that are not totally clear, the Beckwiths moved to New Orleans in 1860. While, as a thriving port, the city offered many opportunities to a young lawyer, there were other cities of that description that had neither slavery nor the oppressive heat and frequent epidemics of yellow fever and cholera that plagued New Orleans. When war broke out and Louisiana seceded, James and Catherine left the city, but returned in 1862 when New Orleans was captured by Union troops.

By the time the Civil War ended, J. R. Beckwith had a thriving law practice. But under the white supremacist, Andrew Johnson Reconstruction government, New Orleans was the scene of numerous incidents in which freedmen were beaten, tortured, and murdered. Soon after Johnson’s allies were kicked out and Republicans took over, Beckwith was asked to become United States attorney for the region.

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