Copyright, Michael J. Pfeifer, 2001“…the already scarlet record of Jefferson parish”:
Analysis of a Lynching Syndrome, 1892-1897
Professor Michael J. Pfeifer, Faculty Member, American Social History, The Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Washington 98505, tel: (360) 867-6009, e-mail: pfeiferm@evergreen.edu,
home page: http://academic.evergreen.edu/p/pfeiferm/home.htm
A paper presented at the Southern Historical Association’s Annual Meeting,
New Orleans, Louisiana, November 17, 2001
In September 1896, a white woman living on a Mississippi River houseboat characterized race relations on the outskirts of New Orleans in a letter to a Massachusetts relative: "...Jefferson Parish of which Gretna is the county seat seems to have a great antipathy to the nigger in general and are daily shooting and lynching1 them: without apparent cause...".2 This evaluation of racial attitudes and violence in the mixed suburban/plantation district adjoining the growing Crescent City was not hyperbolic. A small group of whites styling themselves as “Regulators” killed Jack Tillman, a black lumber laborer accused of arguing with white men, at Harvey’s Canal in March 1892.3 Mobs killed eleven more persons, ten of them African American, in the parish by the end of 1897.
Responding to the September 1897 mob killing of William Oliver, who had been jailed for a ferry law violation and a dangerous weapon charge, the New Orleans Picayune opined that the act of "summary justice" committed by a mob of three whites who pulled the 28-year-old African American from the jail at Amesville and shot him dead, was "murder of the most revolting order…. [which] adds another stain to the already scarlet record of Jefferson parish."4 The triviality of William Oliver's offense indicates the pervasive nature of the racial domination that whites in Jefferson Parish sought to exercise during the 1890s lynching frenzy. In fact, political disputes between black community leaders and white Democrats strongly influenced several of the collective killings. In Jefferson, lynching violence punctuated the transition in social and political arrangements, particularly in regard to the regulation of race, on New Orleans’s expanding urban periphery.
The example of Jefferson Parish suggests how mob murder could become endemic in a particular locale.5 The parish adjoins New Orleans at the city's western boundary north of the Mississippi River, but also lies "above" it south of the
River, stretching to the Gulf of Mexico. Like much of the Bayou in the late nineteenth century, Jefferson entailed extensive wetlands that supported sugar plantations and extractive enterprises such as moss-gathering.6 The lynchings in the 1890s all occurred in the immediate environs of the growing city of New Orleans, the majority directly across the river: in the parish seat of Gretna, along the series of canals that radiated from the river, or on a riverside plantation facing the city’s outlying neighborhoods. The concentration of collective violence on the outskirts of what was then the South's largest city echoed the instrumental and symbolic role assumed by lynching violence in the rural Louisiana parishes where race and social and political order were most contested.
Historians have viewed the 1890s as a crucial decade in the history of the postbellum South. 'De Jure' segregation emerged from state legislatures and municipal governments; a formidable Populist political challenge to Democratic control ended after the middle of the decade and was followed by the disfranchisement of poor whites and most African Americans. The number of lynchings surged early in the 1890s and this "festival of violence"7 continued into the latter part of the decade; Louisiana manifested all of these southwide trends. Although more lynchings, as yet undocumented by historians, may have occurred in the Reconstruction era than in the last decade of the nineteenth century,8 historians have found explanations for the latter decade's intensifying pace of lynching violence in an up-and-down economy, in the racial and sexual phobias of a generation of adults who had been born and raised amid the social chaos of the Civil War and Reconstruction,9 and in the reaction to the threat that the Populists,10 and most particularly, African American voters willing to defy planter political mandates, posed to the conservative political order that had reclaimed power in "Redemption" twenty years earlier. Each of these tendencies may have contributed to the lynching contagion in Jefferson Parish in the 1890s. Most vitally, though, whites living along the Mississippi River outside of New Orleans came to accept and expect collective killings whenever and however a rigidly construed racial order was challenged. Only small proportions of the white population participated in the violence, and the interests of elite planters, property owners, and officials were most often served.
The Jefferson lynching spree also took place in dialogue with an emergent understanding of legal order and race relations in the Crescent City. Denouncing rampant "lawlessness" and the alleged malfeasance of the criminal justice system, particularly the jury system, New Orleans' American entrepreneurial elite had endorsed and participated in the March 1891 lynching of 11 Sicilians acquitted in the alleged ‘mafiosi’-linked murder of the police chief, David Hennessy.11 Earlier, quasilegal agencies staffed by white elites and styling themselves as "vigilante committees" had emerged several times in the 1880s, seeking to assist purportedly incompetent law enforcement and criminal courts in fighting crime in the city.12 Yet the nearby Jefferson lynchings provoked dismay from city opinionmakers. Sympathizing with the Jefferson white populace's anxiety about "lawlessness," New Orleans editors decried the racial lynching syndrome as an embarrassing and unreliable anachronism. A police force willing to resort to brutal excess and municipal laws codifying racial segregation may have seemed more dependable devices for social regulation to New Orleans residents.13 Race riots that targeted the entire "colored" population in the battle for political control in Reconstruction in 1866, and following the mass shooting of whites by an African American, Robert Charles, who lashed out lethally against racial humiliation, in 1900, became the characteristic form of collective violence in New Orleans and displayed the limits of the Crescent City's orderly and cosmopolitan urbanity.14
Attempting to explain the 1897 lynching of William Oliver for a ferry law violation and dangerous weapons charge, the Picayune summarized the intentions of the Jefferson mobs:Lynchings in Jefferson parish have been numerous; they have drilled the young minds into the belief that every offense committed by a black must be avenged with either the rope or the firearm, and sometimes by dashing the selected victim into the turbid waters of the Mississippi.15
The New Orleans editor's analysis is supported by an examination of the reasons given by Jefferson lynchers for their acts of murder. Only three mobs cited serious crimes such as rape or homicide. Revealingly, six groups of lynchers in the parish killed their black victims for minor offenses such as being a "dangerous character," miscegenation, the physical assault of a boy, and the violation of a quarantine.16 In September 1895, for instance, a mob of around ten whites took Aleck Francis, a New Orleans resident who worked in tie-camps "above and below the city," from the Kenner jail, where he had been placed after his arrest at the town's railroad station for being a "dangerous character." Francis' wife told a newspaper reporter that her husband had been merely waiting for a train into the city. Francis's corpse was found, with a rope tied around its neck, in the river near Gretna.17 In another example of a trivial offense that brought lethal consequences, in September 1896, a mob of masked men took Jim Hawkins from a small Gretna jail, strangled and shot him, and dumped his body in the river. Hawkins had scolded and allegedly struck a white boy playing with a group of children near a skiff that Hawkins was fixing. Hawkins reportedly resisted arrest by the boy's uncle, a police officer, and had fled before police took him into custody.18
Perhaps the most egregious episode of the 1890s cycle of violence in Jefferson Parish occurred in September 1893. Roselius Julian, an African American moss-gatherer and barber, murdered a planter and magistrate, Victor Estopinal, in Estopinal’s plantation courtroom "above" Carrollton. Julian, who had being arrested on a wife-beating charge, lived and worked on Estopinal’s plantation. The planter had “figured prominently in wresting the parish from Republican rule.” Whites threatened Julian after he backed an African American candidate for the judgeship which Estopinal won; the planter interceded for Julian and became the prominent black barber’s patron. Posses scoured nearby swamps for Julian, but could not find him. Seeking to avenge the judge's death, a mob that included elite whites hanged three of Julian's brothers and severely beat his mother and several of his relatives. New Orleans newspapers denounced the lynching, since there was little evidence for the brothers' guilt. Even the race-baiting Daily States, edited by "Major" Henry J. Hearsey, who satisfied a rural white readership in the Red River Delta with frequent white supremacist editorials that countenanced lynching, found it wrong that Julian's brothers were lynched for merely being his brothers.19
The political subtext that influenced the hanging of the three Julian brothers was replicated in several other Jefferson lynchings. In September 1892, a small mob of masked men seized Henry Dixon from the jail at Kenner and hanged him from a nearby oak tree. Dixon had been charged three months earlier in an alleged conspiracy of African Americans to assassinate Judge Henry Long, but had been released on bail from the Gretna jail after an energetic legal defense funded by the black community. Kenner law officers had rearrested Dixon at the corner of Jackson and St. Charles in New Orleans on a burglary warrant and conveyed him to the flimsy flatboat lumber jail across the parish line.20 Douglass Boutte, reportedly taken from a small jail along the Barataria Bayou and lynched, had been arrested for “going and coming” in violation of parish quarantine regulations. A Picayune newspaper correspondent asserted that Boutte “was a leader among his race….expounded the Bible to his class, and often boasted of his political influence.”21 The contest for political control of the parish, in which neither blacks nor whites had a secure preponderance of the population or of voters (indeed, whites had only recently achieved a majority, as enumerated by the census of 1890), increased the rewards that Jefferson whites anticipated reaping from lynching violence.
After the September 1896 murder of a white itinerant who lived on the river, Alice Thrasher, the wife of a tinsmith who worked out of a river sailboat, speculated about the fate of three African American men arrested for the crime. Writing to an in-law living in Massachusetts, Thrasher sought to rationalize the river locality's severe racial ideology as well as its penchant for collective violence. Thrasher found an explanation in what she characterized as a robust and impulsive black criminality.22There has been nothing done with “Hobo Jack’s murderers yet. Their trial does not come off until Dec. It is hard to tell what will be done with them. The evidence being circumstantial…The longer I am here, the more I dread and fear the nigger: They have no regard for their own lives: and seem to have no feeling. Consequently if they have some fancied wrong to avenge, the first thing they think of is to kill you. You rarely hear of their fighting fist fights. It is always a razor or knife: or revolver.
Last week a negro boy only sixteen years of age, was brought to the city for safekeeping: That had killed a whole family of five, with a hatchet and gun. Leaving a girl of 15 years of age. No one knew why. And one that was thought mortally wounded is recovering: So there is plenty of evidence against him: And yet the authorities think there must be some body else behind it. For he was a favored boy or nigger: One that worked for the man and slept in the house. And for that reason the sheriff brought him here to await developments. For had the neighbors got him they intended burning him at the stake. The murder occurred in the north part of the State, near the Mississippi State Line.23
In her commentary, Thrasher underlined the unpredictability of the criminal justice system, particularly its reliance on procedure and evidence in finding a defendant guilty. She also cited the criminal court's susceptibility to the influence of local elites, specifically the way in which an African American laborer's white patron might secure a removal to a distant jail for safekeeping, thus possibly averting a lynching, and might ultimately circumvent a capital conviction. She indicated that lynching was by contrast a more reliable instrument for the sustenance of white supremacy and the punishment of crime.
Yet the houseboat dweller also sensed the capriciousness of lynching violence and the way in which it devalued life and limb in Jefferson Parish. Nine months earlier, also in a letter to her New England brother-in-law, Alice Thrasher recalled the June 1895 hanging of alleged white "incendiarist" John Frey by a mob of 35-40 whites that seized him from a Gretna police captain, reportedly after a spate of arsons. Then Thrasher reported the January 1896 mob shooting and burning of Charlotte and Patrick Morris. The Morrises, a black woman and white man, lived together on a boat where they ran a groghouse, reportedly doubling as an interracial house of prostitution, on Company Canal. Patrick Morris had sought to defend himself and his wife with a gun when a small mob demanded that they submit to a flogging.We wrote to you this summer, I believe, about the lynching bee, at Gretna: where they disposed of a supposed firebug. Well, Saturday night a white man, and a colored woman were burned up in a beached house boat, at the canal just below Westwego. You know where it is very well. They were shot I believe, when they tried to escape, by armed men surrounding the boat. We haven’t heard full particulars: but will tomorrow. A man’s life is safe here, just as long as he has it; and no longer.24
Alice Thrasher's attempt to understand Jefferson Parish's lynching syndrome was informed by a knowledge of the lynching violence that was occurring elsewhere in the state. The majority of Louisiana's postbellum lynchings occurred in northern cotton belt parishes. There, cotton planters, backed by a white consensus favoring racial hierarchy and the drastic enforcement of the social control of African Americans, utilized lynching to reassert their unconditional authority over black laborers. The incidence of mob killing was heavily concentrated in particular cotton belt areas, namely the Red River Delta in the northwest and the Ouachita River Valley of northeastern Louisiana. Eleven parishes accounted for almost sixty percent of the lynchings.25 The mob murders that occurred in these subregions drew their meaning from the tensions that underlay exploitative arrangements in the rural cotton economy, domestic service, and the credit-based mercantile system. An undercurrent of black racial consciousness that protested the constriction of African American rights also fueled collective white violence. In lynching-prone cotton belt parishes, planter class whites disabled the formal legal system and imposed informal police powers to punish deviant black laborers. In areas where mob violence was deeply entrenched in local conceptions of jurisprudence and punishment, even African Americans utilized lynching to retaliate against blacks who committed serious crimes such as homicide and rape against blacks.26
Overall, lynchers in south Louisiana claimed slightly more than a third of the 415 lives lost to lynch mobs in Louisiana between 1878 and 1946.27 Mob violence in the southern portion of the Pelican State concentrated in the late nineteenth century, and collective killings in southern parishes became quite rare after 1900.28 In the vast Sugarland, an ethnically and racially diverse region of sugar plantations which formed the heart of south Louisiana, ruling elites most commonly enforced their racial dominance over an African American labor force through frequent use of the gallows, not with extralegal violence. While lynching occurred relatively infrequently in the Sugarland, its incidence nonetheless reflected the social, cultural, and legal relations of the sugar economy. Sporadic lynchings accompanied white sugar planters’ and merchants’ efforts to subdue a black labor force and ensure white supremacy in the Sugarland's social order in the two decades that followed Reconstruction.29 In heavily Cajun southwestern Louisiana, which was a marginal cotton area, lower class white farmers sometimes targeted their African American competitors in the rural economy. In Acadiana, nonetheless, a highly informal style of criminal justice mitigated impulses towards collective murder.30
The eastern Florida Parishes, a piney woods subregion north of New Orleans that experienced rapid industrialization and in-migration after Reconstruction, witnessed elevated rates of lynching comparable to those in Jefferson Parish and in northern Louisiana. In the eastern Florida Parishes, a period of drastic socieoconomic transformation catalyzed political factionalism that fractured legal authority. In this vacuum, plainfolk whites unfamiliar with cotton belt and sugar belt systems of racial control exercised their wrath on African Americans.31
Thus the 1890s lynching frenzy in Jefferson Parish was both consistent with some statewide patterns and anomalous in other respects. Lynching in Louisiana after Reconstruction was concentrated in the last decade of the nineteenth century and tended to be highly localized, as elites in areas where neither blacks nor whites made up commanding majorities of the population used lynching violence to demonstrate to African Americans the consequences of defying the racial order. Yet typically in the Sugarland, the Bayou, and New Orleans, perhaps influenced by Gallic legal traditions, whites used other means, particularly legal ones (the criminal justice system or law enforcement) to reinforce the prerogatives of white supremacy. Jefferson's syndrome of collective violence in some ways resembled that in the eastern Florida Parish of Tangipahoa, north of Lake Ponchartrain. The expanding Crescent City's proximity sparked in-migration to these areas on its periphery, altered older economic relations, and destabilized social arrangements by mixing blacks and whites unfamiliar with customary patterns of race relations. In Jefferson Parish, an urbanizing Bayou backwater lying just beyond the Crescent City, the lethal reinforcement of racial prerogatives became a characteristic feature of the last years of the nineteenth century.1 This analysis defines a lynching as experts on mob violence did at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1940: "there must be legal evidence that a person has been killed, and that he met his death illegally at the hands of a group acting under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition," with a group defined as "three" or more persons. For an insightful discussion of the historical problem of definition, see Christopher Waldrep, “Word and Deed: The Language of Lynching, 1820-1953,” in Michael Bellesiles, Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York, 1999). The Tuskegee definition, while historically contingent and imperfect, remains useful to historians of the phenomenon. Its emphasis on the collective, purposeful, ideological, lethal, and unlawful nature of lynching is in fact consistent with the popular usage of the term as well as the actual praxis of violence from the mid nineteenth century through the present day.
2 Letter from Alice Thrasher to Arthur Thrasher, September 28, 1896, Arthur P. Thrasher Correspondence, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
3 New Orleans Picayune (hereafter abbreviated as NOP), March 28, 1892.
4 NOP, September 30, 1897.
5 For the lynchings in Jefferson Parish, see NOP, March 28, 1892; NOP, September 9, 1892; NOP, September 16, 17, 1893; NOP, June 25,1893; NOP, September 27, 1895; NOP, January 13, 1896; NOP, September 24, 1896; NOP, September 30; NOP, October 16, 1897. For a complete list of lynchings in Louisiana, see http://www.evergreen.edu/users5/pfeiferm/Louisiana.html.
6 William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest, Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 39.
7 Recent monographs on southern lynching include W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana, 1993); Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill, 1997); Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana, 1995). Also see several recent important dissertations: Terrence Finnegan, "'At the Hands of Parties Unknown': Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940," (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1993); William Dean Carrigan, “Between South and West: Race, Violence, and Power in Central Texas, 1836-1916,” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1999); Crystal Feimster, "’Ladies and Lynching": the Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880-1930,” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000). Generally, this literature stresses the "multivariate" causes of lynching, particularly its role in reinforcing the racial hierarchy associated with the cotton belt. These scholars have found monocausal political or economic explanations inadequate.
8 George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and "Legal Lynchings" (Baton Rouge, 1990), 41-42.
9 Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York, 1984).
10 For research that attempts to link the frequency of lynching in Louisiana with the social turmoil created by the Populist movement, see James Inverarity, "Populism and Lynching in Louisiana, 1889-1896: A Test of Erikson's Theory of the Relationship Between Boundary Crises and Repressive Justice," American Sociological Review Vol. 41, 262-80. Inverarity's analysis relies upon flawed statistics compiled by anti-lynching organizations and neglects a reading of sources from actual lynching incidents. After extensive analysis of accurate statistics compiled from newspaper sources on southern lynchings, Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck argue that there is a little evidence for a significant correlation between political competition, including that offered in the 1890s by the Populists, and the lynching of African Americans. Conversely, southern counties where the Republican and Populist parties received substantial support were less likely to be the settings for mob killings of blacks. Tolnay and Beck, A Festival of Violence, 167-201.
11 For accounts of the lynching of the 11 Italians in New Orleans, see NOP, March 14, 15, 16, 1891; William Ivy Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm: the Life and Times of Huey P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 12-15; Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress (Baton Rouge, 1969), 247-253; Jean Ann Scarpaci, "Italian Immigrants In Louisiana's Sugar Parishes," (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1972), 246-248.
12 On the formation and activities of a "Committee of Public Safety" in 1881-82, see NOP, January 31, July 23, August 3, 10, 14, September 2, 3, 4, November 10, 11, 1881, January 17, February 26, March 16, 1882; and Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 240-241.
13 Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 237-241; NOP, August 21, 1879. For the New Orleans police, see Dennis C. Rousey, Policing the Southern City: New Orleans 1805-1899 (Baton Rouge, 1996). In the late nineteenth century, the Crescent City's police force was notoriously corrupt, undersized, and underfunded and had already acquired a reputation for brutality against blacks that would flourish in the twentieth century.
14 For the 1866 Race Riot, which claimed the lives of at least 46 African Americans and contributed to the evaporation of political support for Andrew Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction policies, see Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1984), 104-107. For the life of Mississippi-born Robert Charles and the massive reprisal of whites against New Orleans' blacks for his defiance of white supremacy, see William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge, 1976).
15 NOP, September 30, 1897.
16 NOP, March 28, 1892; NOP, September 9, 1892; NOP, September 16, 17, 1893; NOP, June 25, 1893; NOP, September 27, 1895; NOP, January 13, 1896; NOP, September 24, 1896; NOP, September 30, 1897; NOP, October 16, 1897.
17 NOP, September 27, 1895.
18 NOP, September 24, 1896.
19 NOP, September 16, 17, 1893; Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm, 5.
20 NOP, September 9, 1892.
21 NOP, October 16, 1897.
22 For a nuanced analysis of homicidal violence among blacks and whites in post-Civil War Louisiana that is attentive to the state's complex regions, see Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866-1884 (Columbus, 2000); and Vandal, "Black Violence in Post-Civil War Louisiana," Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 25, no. 1 (Summer 1994), 45-64.
23 Letter from Alice Thrasher to Arthur Thrasher, September 28, 1896, Arthur P. Thrasher Correspondence, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
24 Letter from Alice Thrasher to Arthur Thrasher, January 13, 1896, Arthur P. Thrasher Correspondence, Special Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
25 155 of the 260 lynching victims (59.6%) in north Louisiana from 1878 through 1946.
26 For a detailed discussion of lynching and criminal justice in north Louisiana, see Michael J. Pfeifer, "Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context: Iowa, Wyoming, and Louisiana, 1878-1946," (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1998), 252-310.
27 160 lynching victims out of a total of 415 deaths (38.5%) by lynching in Louisiana from 1878 through 1946.
28 114 of the 160 lynchings in south Louisiana from 1878 through 1946 occurred before 1900 (71%).
29 Michael J. Pfeifer, “Lynching and Criminal Justice in South Louisiana, 1878-1920,” Louisiana History Vol. XL, No. 2 (Spring 1999), 155-177.
30 Pfeifer, "Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context," 224-233.
31 Pfeifer, "Lynching and Criminal Justice in Regional Context," 242-251. Additional treatments of the relation between violence and social relations in the Eastern Florida Parishes, especially Tangipahoa, can be found in Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., Pistols and Politics: The Dilemma of Democracy in Louisiana's Florida Parishes, 1810-1899 (Baton Rouge, 1996); and John V. Baiamonte, Jr., Spirit of Vengeance: Nativism and Louisiana Justice, 1921-1924 (Baton Rouge, 1986).My thanks to Phyllis D. Jason.