Southern History Series: The White League of Louisiana

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

The following excerpt which appeared in The Franklin Enterprise before the election of 1874 describes the formation of the White League in Louisiana during the later days of Reconstruction. It comes from Stephen Budiansky’s book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After The Civil War:

“We ask for no assistance; we protest against any intervention. We own this soil of Louisiana, by virtue of our endeavor, as a heritage from our ancestors, and it is ours, and ours alone. Science, literature, history, art, civilization, and law belong alone to us, and not to the negroes. They have no record but barbarism and idolatry, nothing since the war but that of error, incapacity, beastliness, voudouism, and crime. Their right to vote is but the result of the war, their exercise of it a monstrous imposition, and a vindictive punishment upon us for that ill-advised rebellion.

Therefore we are banding together in a White League army, drawn up only on the defensive, exasperated by continual wrong, it is true, but acting under Christian and high-principled leaders, and determined to defeat these negroes in their infamous design of depriving us of all we hold sacred and precious on the soil of our nativity or adoption, or perish in the attempt.

Come what may, upon the radical party must rest the whole responsibility of this conflict, as sure as there is a just God in heaven, their unnatural, cold-blooded and revengeful measures of reconstruction in Louisiana will meet with a terrible retribution.”

Here is the platform of the White League: