Grant

by Ron Chernow

the powder keg of Louisiana politics exploded in April 1873. William Ward, a black Republican, and Christopher Columbus Nash, a white Democrat, vied for control of Grant Parish in the center of the state. Ward summoned his black supporters and warned them that Democrats would try to seize by force the county seat of Colfax, a lush place of swamps and bayous and a black Republican stronghold. To avert this, they threw up earthworks around the courthouse, guarding it for several weeks. This display of black power was anathema to the white community. On Easter Sunday, Nash led a mob of several hundred whites, armed with rifles and a small cannon, who opened fire on the courthouse, setting it ablaze. Even though its black defenders ran up a white flag of surrender, begging for mercy, the mob butchered dozens of them. Black families were afraid to claim the many corpses that thickly littered the ground. When Longstreet sent Colonel T. W. DeKlyne to Colfax, the latter found heaps of dead black bodies being scavenged by dogs and buzzards. “We were unable to find the body of a single white man,” he reported. Many blacks “were shot in the back at the head and neck . . . almost all had from three to a dozen wounds. Many of them had their brains literally blown out.”9 It was the worst slaughter perpetrated against blacks during Reconstruction.