Southern History Series: The Battle of Liberty Place (1874)

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

The following excerpt on the Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans comes from Stephen Budiansky’s book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After The Civil War:

“On a late summer day in 1874, General Longstreet rode his horse down Chartres Street through the silent French Quarter, south to the United States Custom House on Canal Street, and could see the barricades in the streets beyond. Every wall he passed was plastered with the placards that had suddenly sprung up across the city the day before.

“CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS. FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS YOU HAVE BEEN THE SILENT BUT INDIGNANT SUFFERERS OF OUTRAGE AFTER OUTRAGE HEAPED UPON YOU BY AN USURPING GOVERNMENT. MONDAY THE 14TH OF SEPTEMBER CLOSE YOUR PLACES OF BUSINESS WITHOUT A SINGLE EXCEPTION, AND, AT 11 O’CLOCK, A.M., ASSEMBLE AT THE CLAY STATUE IN CANAL STREET.”

Even the curbs at every street crossing were covered with long strips of paper, pasted there where everyone would see them as they walked about town on their business, repeating the time and place of the meeting.

Five thousand citizens had responded to the call that morning in New Orleans; doctors, bankers, lawyers, journeymen, clerks, and laborers, all gathering there at the foot of the statue of Henry Clay, the same spot made famous in city legend thirteen years before, when a prominent local physician had rallied the citizens of New Orleans to enlist in the Confederate army, leading them in a singing of the Marseillaise.

It had been his place all along to stay at the State House, the palatial old St. Louis Hotel that had been taken over by the state government in June as its new capitol building. He had 475 colored troops of the regular state militia in the State House itself, armed with rifles; he had parked his artillery in Jackson Square nearby; in Pirate’s Alley off the square thirty cavalry horses stood in a row tied to the St. Louis Cathedral fence; in the Cabildo, the old Spanish capitol that anchored the near corner of the square next to the cathedral, the Metropolitans crowded into the Third Precinct Police Station rooms on the ground floor and the Supreme Court rooms on the top. The surrounding streets were closed off. It was a solid defensible position. He would wait for the trouble to come to him, as was his wont.

The trouble in the city had been brewing for days, and Longstreet was well informed about what was afoot. When the Metropolitans were mustered into militia service they brought their thirty detectives with them, and some of them had infiltrated the White Leagues when the clubs began forming that summer, and they knew that the leagues were expecting a large shipment of illegal guns on the steamer Mississippi, which had just arrived that Saturday night and would begin got be unloaded that Monday. Worried about the loss of prestige they would suffer if the state authorities intercepted those arms, the White League leaders had then decided to precipitate a crisis and go for broke. The pretext would be a mass meeting called to deplore the violation of their “right to bear arms”; and in a sense the White Leaguers did want to test the waters to see if they could get a crowd whipped up enough to support desperate action. But in truth their plans had already been well laid. Longstreet was fully expecting an armed attack on the State House. His plan accordingly was to stay there, on the defensive with nearly a thousand men, and wait for them to come.

The mass meeting had broke up around noon with cries from the crowd, five thousand strong, for the “immediate abdication” of the state’s Republican governor, William P. Kellogg. A delegation of five was chosen, and they set off in carriages for the State House.

At one o’clock the milling men broke into deafening cheers as the carriages returned. The delegation read out the governor’s reply. He could not possibly receive a message from an armed assemblage in defiance of law. “Hang Kellogg!” the crowd shouted. “We’ll fight!” “Call out the troops!.”

The carpetbag government of Louisiana had no legitimacy outside of the occupied Louisiana State House. General Longstreet attempted to maintain a government which could only be preserved by force of federal troops.

The Battle of Liberty Place Monument

The Battle of Liberty Place monument in New Orleans was torn down with three other Confederate monuments in May 2015. I organized a protest with the League of the South and other groups to oppose its removal. In other countries, communists have routinely destroyed historical monuments in campaigns of cultural genocide in order to erase the memory of the past. Fortunately, they haven’t tended to be that successful in the long run as communist misrule invariably tends to run its course and collapse, but not before inflicting great damage on countries like Russia and China.