An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866

Abstract

Bell reviews "An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866" by James G. Hollandsworth Jr.

An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. By James G. Hollandsworth Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. [xviii], 168. $28.95, ISBN 0-8071-2588-1.)

On Monday, July 30, 1866, a large, enthusiastic crowd of "black men, women, and children dressed in their Sunday best" gathered outside the Mechanics' Institute in New Orleans to show their support for black suffrage (p. 92). Inside the hall, white Unionists prepared to amend the 1864 Louisiana constitution to enfranchise black Louisianians. From the Faubourg Marigny at the other end of the city, approximately seventy to a hundred black supporters of the voting rights proposal, many of them U.S. Army veterans, set out on a march through the French Quarter to join the crowd at the institute. In An Absolute Massacre historian James G. Hollandsworth Jr. documents the 1866 race riot that ensued when a white mob attacked the black marchers and over-ran the Mechanics' Institute, and his skillful use of riveting firsthand testimony and dramatic recreation of key events offer chilling insight into the deadly assault.

In their rampage, white rioters killed between forty and fifty black New Orleanians and wounded well over a hundred others. Three white conventioneers also died in the assault. Among the white attackers, one died of sunstroke and ten suffered injuries. Despite the horrendously disproportionate number of black casualties, Hollandsworth concludes that there were "no villains and no heroes, for everyone who participated in the deadly affair was both victim and instigator" (p. 4). And even though President Andrew Johnson's dangerously misguided Reconstruction policies set the stage for the New Orleans riot (as well as similar incidents in Memphis and Charleston), Hollandsworth maintains that "Lincoln's death had created a void that no one, least of all the new president, could fill" (p. 1). A careful reading of the author's own account of the tragedy tells a different story.

President Johnson's May 1865 amnesty proclamation and wholesale distribution of pardons enfranchised Confederate veterans. By the end of the year, Louisiana and most other southern states were governed by ex-Rebels who enacted Black Codes to ensure white dominance of liberated black laborers. Under Johnson's restoration of white "home rule," former Confederate soldiers controlled the city government at the time of the New Orleans riot. In fact, as Hollandsworth explains, Orleans Parish sheriff Harry T. Hays, an ex-Rebel brigadier general who preferred to recruit his deputies from Confederate veterans, deputized two hundred members of his old brigade on the Sunday evening before the riot.

After their ouster from office under Johnson's plan of Reconstruction, white Unionists had moved to reconvene Louisiana's 1864 constitutional convention to enfranchise black Louisianians and prohibit former Confederates from voting. Delegates proposed to establish a new state government on the basis of a loyal electorate. Jubilant at the prospect of a biracial democracy, black New Orleanians rallied in support of the conventioneers. As Hollandsworth explains, however, the white mob at the Mechanics' Institute stopped them dead in their tracks.

General Absalom Baird, the acting Federal commander and Johnson's handpicked head of Louisiana's Freedmen's Bureau, anticipated violence in the days leading up to the riot. Though he could easily have justified military intervention, he did nothing to protect black New Orleanians. Still, Hollandsworth concludes that "Baird was too good an officer to be shunted aside" after being removed from his Louisiana post (p. 151). Indeed, in 1885 Baird was named inspector general of the U.S. Army.

In his attempt to steer a middle course between "one-sided explanations" of the riot (p. 4), Hollandsworth has allowed his concern for evenhandedness to cloud his moral judgment. Under the circumstances, readers would be well advised to consult Gilles Vandal's The New Orleans Riot of 1866: Anatomy of a Tragedy (Lafayette, La., 1983) for a more balanced study of the tragic events in New Orleans.