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The New Orleans Massacre in 1866 is one of the deadliest attacks on voting rights activists in American history. Read this excerpt from the #VRABlackHistory Article, originally written in 2022, entitled “A Legacy of Disenfranchisement: Black Massacres (1860’s – early 1900’s)”. Some of the massacres discussed were racially motivated insurrections meant to deter Black political power.
The Reconstruction Congress of 1867
In New Orleans on July 30, 1866, a White mob, led by police and firemen, attacked delegates, Black marchers, and spectators gathered at the Mechanics Institute during the reconvened Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The Convention reconvened in response to the state legislature enacting Black Codes and limiting suffrage. The attack left over forty African Americans dead, over 150 wounded.
“In 1864, Union forces had almost entirely liberated Louisiana from Confederate control, and the state’s all-white electorate had drafted and ratified a new state constitution that acknowledged the abolition of slavery. Still, the document sanctioned restrictions on African American civil and political rights, and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Louisiana voters, many of whom were Confederate veterans, returned numerous Confederate officials to state and federal offices under the banner of a Democratic Party that openly proclaimed to be in favor of white supremacy. ‘We hold this to be a Government of white people,’ the platform of the state party maintained, ‘made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.’ Indeed, the platform announced, ‘people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.’ It came as no surprise that the state legislature promptly passed discriminatory laws known as Black Codes that targeted the formerly enslaved, nor that the mayor of New Orleans, former Confederate John T. Monroe, instructed city policemen to single out the formerly enslaved for arrest.
“Frustrated by this ongoing racial discrimination and the resumption of Confederate rule, in 1866 leading African American suffrage activists convinced a handful of white former delegates to Louisiana’s 1864 Constitutional Convention to reconvene the convention in New Orleans, and to draft a state constitutional amendment enfranchising African American men. Their plan relied upon a technicality, namely that the motion to adjourn the 1864 Convention had contained a provision authorizing it to reconvene to pass amendments at any later date.
“Activists also recognized that the vote bore profound symbolic significance. In a world where women could not vote and political participation signified manhood and status, exclusion from the polls was both emasculating and humiliating. African American men demanded “political rights,” argued black Union army veteran and future Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback, but they also demanded ‘to become men’.
“The vote was no less meaningful to embittered Confederate army veterans, who already felt emasculated by military defeat and saw the prospect of African American enfranchisement as an amplification of that emasculation. State Democratic officials declared the reconvening of the Constitutional Convention illegal. When judicial challenges to the reconvening failed, Mayor Monroe, the police chief, and former Confederate officers secretly resolved to annihilate the convention delegates instead. They covertly enlisted hundreds of Confederate army veterans as emergency police officers, and police and fire stations received orders to prepare for a showdown on July 30, 1866.
“On the morning of the convention, a jubilant parade of African American suffrage supporters, [a delegation of 130 black New Orleans residents], carried a large American flag and followed a marching band through the streets towards the hall where the convention delegates were assembling. The marchers’ elation shifted towards apprehension as crowds of hostile onlookers began to gather.”
Newly reinstated acting Mayor John T. Monroe, an active supporter of the Confederacy who had headed city government before the Civil War, organized and led a mob of ex-Confederates, White Supremacists, and members of the New Orleans Police Force to block their way. The Mayor claimed their intent was to put down any unrest that may come from the Convention but the real reason was to prevent the delegates from meeting.”
“A fight broke out. Distant pistol fire cracked.”
“…[T]he city’s fire bell rang twelve tolls, the traditional code for summoning residents to defend the city against imminent enemy attack. As the bell fell silent, police, firemen, and white civilians surrounded the parade and the hall.
Then they opened fire.” “..[T]he group was allowed to proceed to the meeting hall…Now the police and mob surrounded the Institute and opened fire on the building, shooting indiscriminately into the windows. Then the mob rushed into the building and began to fire into the crowd of delegates. When the mob ran out of ammunition they were beaten back by the delegates. The mob left the building, regrouped, and returned, breaking down the doors and again firing on the mostly unarmed delegates.”
According to accounts of surviving spectators, rioters slaughtered marchers kneeling in surrender, and mutilated their bodies. People fell like flies as the mob shot at them, and when they were done, “they tramped upon them, and mashed their heads with their boots, and shot them after they were down.”
As the firing continued some delegates attempted to flee or surrender. Some of those who surrendered, mostly blacks, were killed on the spot. Those who ran were chased as the killing spread over several blocks around the Institute. By this point both the rioters and victims included people who were never at the Institute. African Americans were shot on the street or pulled off of streetcars to be summarily beaten or killed. By the end of the massacre, at least 200 black Union war veterans were killed, including forty delegates at the Convention. Altogether 238 people were killed and 46 were wounded.”
“When federal troops finally arrived hours later, the floor was sticky with blood. Three white delegates and more than forty African American supporters lay dead. Another 150 lay wounded. Only one white Democrat had been killed, by a policeman’s stray bullet.
Yet the attack backfired. News of the brutality swept the nation and horrified the North, galvanizing northern white support for African American political and civil rights. Republicans swept the 1866 Congressional elections. In 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under federal military control and calling for new constitutional conventions in which African American men could vote for delegates. Federal officials removed Mayor Monroe and other former Confederate officials from office. Louisiana’s new legislature dissolved the New Orleans’ police department and replaced it with a racially integrated force.”
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