The Colfax Riot

It is highly unlikely that you might just stumble upon Colfax, Louisiana; it's not on an interstate, and the only two things in the immediate vicinity that might qualify as conventional tourist attractions—a pair of Union warships that were sunk nearby during the Civil War—are, in fact, buried deep beneath the soil. But if, by some chance, you should find yourself in Colfax—as I did a few years ago—and take the time to look around a bit, you will discover that it is a place with a story you're unlikely to hear anywhere else. To be honest, you're not terribly likely to hear it in Colfax, either, unless you know whom to ask, and what.

Colfax sits on the Red River, about 220 miles northwest of New Orleans, in a largely Baptist part of the state that, according to my Official Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Highway Map, is known as "The Crossroads," though what those roads are and where they lead is left unspecified. It is anything but a stereotypical small southern town: no stately old courthouse, no picturesque courthouse square, no sprawling whitewashed Victorian mansions with expansive front lawns and cavernous front porches, no quaint little general store with an ancient Coke cooler and a checkerboard out front. That kind of southern town is dominated by shades of white and green; Colfax is gray and brown.

Colfax, population 1,659, is the seat of Grant Parish; both were created in 1869, the latter being carved out of Rapides and Winn Parishes and named by northern Republicans (sometimes called "carpetbaggers") and local Republicans (sometimes called "scalawags"). The parish is named for the Civil War general and our eighteenth President, its seat for his Vice President, Schuyler Colfax.

Logging was long the main industry here, but nowadays 34 percent of the parish is untouchable federal forest preserve, and most of the rest has been cleared. Consequently, there isn't much work to be had in Grant Parish. Ninety percent of its work force commutes to jobs elsewhere (most in Alexandria or Pineville, twin cities in neighboring Rapides Parish, about half an hour away). The combined population of Colfax and Grant Parish's other towns—Dry Prong, Georgetown, Montgomery, and Pollock—is about 3,500; the rest of Grant's residents, some 15,000 people, live, as the locals say, "in the woods." Colfax itself is mostly one street—Main Street—with a railroad crossing, a small supermarket, a gas station, an alcohol-and-drug-abuse clinic, a modern library shaped like a cog, and a modern courthouse shaped like a concrete box. As I pulled into the courthouse's parking lot for the first time, I noticed two young black men hosing down a van. Later I learned that the two were in fact prisoners—trusties, incarcerated in the jail behind the courthouse—who would wash any car, inside and out, for five dollars. For fifteen they'd add a coat of wax.

I spent that afternoon and much of the evening doing genealogical research (don't ask), first in the courthouse and later in the library; by the time I decided to quit for the day, the sun had long since set. I stumbled out of the library, tired and half dazed from hours spent poring over marriage licenses and census records, and lurched across the courthouse parking lot toward my car; the car-washing trusties had returned to their cells. Colfax was dark and quiet—deserted, really. For a moment, as I gazed across the courthouse's front lawn, I thought I spotted a human figure in the far corner, standing under a magnolia tree; but looking closer, I realized that it was actually a historic marker. I walked over to read it.

Some time later I was sitting at a table in a genealogy library in nearby Alexandria when I found myself eavesdropping on a conversation between what appeared to be two friends: a stocky, balding man in his forties, wearing an ID badge from a local power company, and a skinny, somewhat older man sporting a Caterpillar cap and a white brush moustache. "I found another wife in Ouachita, ten years later," the former said animatedly, pointing to some notes on a legal pad. "This one's even younger. He sure got around." The older man smiled back, nodding his head. I imagined they were regulars at the library, and I soon became enmeshed in a conversation with them as they sought to educate me about Louisiana history and the pitfalls of genealogy. We talked for the better part of an hour; then, as I was getting up to leave, I remembered the historic marker outside the Grant Parish courthouse. Now, I'd studied the Civil War and Reconstruction quite extensively, and I'd never even heard of the Colfax Riot. Neither had the half dozen history professors and the dozen Louisianans from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria I'd asked about it since I'd first read that marker. I had a feeling, though, that these two men might be able to tell me a little more about it.

I was right.

"You know," said the thin man with the white moustache, "after the Civil War these carpetbaggers came down from up north, and they played games back and forth with the local government, switching back and forth. So during one of these games a mob of blacks takes over the courthouse up in Colfax. They just take it, and decide they're going to run Grant Parish. You heard the expression 'gettin' uppity'? Well, that's what these people did—they got uppity, and decided they would run things, and of course they couldn't."

"After the war," his friend said, "the government took the blacks and said 'Here's your freedom,' but they didn't give 'em jobs and they didn't have the money to support them or feed them."

"And the whites," the other man continued, "started putting together militias to go up there and take the courthouse back. Some men from right around here put together a cavalry and rode up. And they got a two-pound cannon and brought it down on a boat, the first ironclad ship ever to sail on the Red River. They took it off the boat at Montgomery and wheeled it down, and they had to get a Union soldier to show 'em how to use it. And on Easter Sunday they set it up there and just fired the hell out of that courthouse. Killed a bunch of blacks, drove 'em out. Ben Littlepage up there still has that cannon, sittin' on his front lawn."

When I returned to the genealogy library the next day, the man with the white moustache handed me an eyewitness account of the riot, written fifty-four years after the event by one John I. McCain, of Montgomery, Louisiana, a white man who asserted with perfect confidence that the Colfax Riot was "one of the most important events in the history of the nation." As he recalled,

Back at the public library in Colfax, the librarian, Doris Lively, dug up more than a half dozen theses and term papers about the riot, written by local residents many years after the event. Most reiterated some of the starker details from John I. McCain's reminiscence—the vandalizing of the baby's coffin, the torching of the courthouse roof, the shooting of the white men sent to negotiate peace, the slaughter of the blacks fleeing the burning courthouse. Most also mentioned an epilogue that McCain left out of his account: that a large number of blacks—estimates ranged from about twenty to sixty—who surrendered and were taken prisoner were, that same night, shot or hanged. None of the authors expressed any dismay or even surprise that the prisoners were executed. One, Manie White Johnson, wrote in her master's thesis, "Privilege was given to the negroes to bury their dead but as only a few came to do this, most of the bodies were thrown into trenches, 'buried as it were in the graves dug with their own hands.'" In another passage Johnson referred to the captured as "darkies," and quoted an account that likened the sound of the shooting of forty-eight black prisoners to that of "popcorn in a skillet."

Whites I met in Colfax told a story remarkably similar to those old accounts (minus, for the most part, the racially loaded language), adding the modern detail about how the cannon involved could still be found in town, sitting on Ben Littlepage's lawn. Local blacks, without exception, told me that all they knew was that there had been a big riot in 1873, and that a lot of blacks were killed in it. Several whites recalled that in the 1960s, when the town was excavating the site of the old courthouse in order to build a new one, they disinterred the skeletons of blacks killed in the riot. Dru Richards, then the assistant publisher of The Chronicle, Colfax's weekly newspaper, told me that one day, as a child, he was playing in the rubble and found part of a human skull.

I found nothing about the Colfax Riot in any number of encyclopedias, and at the time only one reference to the event on the entire Internet—three sentences on a site maintained by the Louisiana State Museum, in New Orleans.

The last word came to me from no less an authority than the then mayor of Colfax, a white septuagenarian and lifelong resident named Connie Youngblood. "I don't talk about it in speeches or public or anything like that," she told me. "It just makes the blacks upset, and I don't see the point of doing that. But I will tell you two things about the riot: First is that the story about the blacks starting the whole thing by throwing out that baby in the coffin is just pure nonsense. That never happened. The second is that the next day the whites went to the blacks and said that if they had participated in the riot and if they stepped forward now, they would be granted pardons. So a bunch of the blacks came forward—I don't know how many, maybe a hundred—and the whites shot them instead."

Toward the end of my visit to Colfax, I took a walk through the town cemetery, which lies across Main Street from the library and the courthouse. Like many small-town southern cemeteries, it is one of the nicest spots in town—granite stones, chiseled and polished, interspersed with solid, proud slate markers more than a century old, all of them widely and evenly spaced apart. And, as in many small-town southern cemeteries, every last person buried there is white. There is not, I've been told, a racially integrated burial ground in all of Grant Parish.

I strolled slowly through the cemetery, perusing names and epitaphs, pausing for a moment to inspect a new grave that had been dug that very morning. Glancing up, I spotted—across all the neat rows of neat headstones, and standing near a stately old tree—a marble obelisk, a dozen feet high, towering over every other marker. I made my way over to it, picked some lichen off the weathered inscription, and squinted in the afternoon sun to read it.

It is the frankest monument I have ever seen.

As I was leaving town for the last time, I passed by Ben Littlepage's house. I decided I'd stop and see the famous Colfax Riot cannon, envisioning, somehow, a grand old armament of the kind I had seen in abundance at West Point and a half dozen Civil War battlefields. I pulled into his driveway and looked across his front and back lawns, but it was nowhere to be seen; I figured it must have been carted off. I was about to go when Mrs. Littlepage drove up. I told her why I had come, and asked what had become of the riot cannon.

"It's right there," she said, pointing toward the carport.

"Where?"

"There," she said. "Right next to the car." The car she referred to was a little red-plastic vehicle with a yellow roof, the kind favored by toddlers everywhere; and there next to it—partially hidden behind it—was the cannon. I walked up to it; the carriage and muzzle reached just halfway to my knee. So this, I thought, was the cannon that, according to legend, had been brought down by the first ironclad on the Red River, that had come with its own Yankee soldier because no one else knew how to fire it, that had been credited with driving perhaps a couple of hundred men out of the Grant Parish courthouse and killing an untold number of them. It looked as much like a toy as the plastic car that dwarfed it.