The New Orleans police force, consisting largely of Confederate veterans, plotted to break up the convention. On July 30 the police and a white mob attacked a march of twenty-five convention delegates and two hundred supporters, mostly black veterans. The police and white mob were well armed; the Radicals were not. When the mob invaded the convention hall, they denounced the American flag as “a dirty rag” and ignored the white handkerchiefs the white Unionists waved as a sign of surrender. They beat to death or shot any black man they could seize. A carpetbagger described how, as a wagon
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