] As there were so many to live
on the labor of the Negroes they were reduced to a state a little better
than that of bondage. The master class was generally unfair to the blacks.
No longer responsible for them as slaves, the planters endeavored after
the war to get their labor for nothing. The Negroes themselves had no
land, no mules, no presses nor cotton gins, and they could not acquire
sufficient capital to obtain these things. They were made victims of fraud
in signing contracts which they could not understand and had to suffer the
consequent privations and want aggravated by robbery and murder by the Ku
Klux Klan.[3]

The murder of Negroes was common throughout the South and especially in
Louisiana. In 1875, General Sheridan said that as many as 3,500 persons
had been killed and wounded in that State, the great majority of whom
being Negroes; that 1,884 were killed and wounded in 1868, and probably
1,200 between 1868 and 1875. Frightful massacres occurred in the parishes
of Bossier, Catahoula, Saint Bernard, Grant and Orleans. As most of these
murders were for political reasons, the offenders were regarded by their
communities as heroes rather than as criminals. A massacre of Negroes
began in the parish of St. Landry on the 28th of September and continued
for three days, resulting in the death of from 300 to 400. Thirteen
captives were taken from the jail and shot and as many as twenty-five dead
bodies were found burned in the woods. There broke out in the parish of
Bossier another three-day riot during which two hundred Negroes were
massacred. More than forty blacks were killed in the parish of Caddo
during the following month. In fact, the number of murders, maimings and
whippings during these months aggregated over one thousand.[4] The result
was that the intelligent Negroes were either intimidated or killed so that
the illiterate masses of Negro voters might be ordered to refrain from
voting the Republican ticket to strengthen the Democrats or be subjected
to starvation through the operation of the mischievous land tenure and
credit system. What was not done in 1868 to overthrow the Republican
regime was accomplished by a renewed and extended use of such drastic
measures throughout the South in 1876.

Certain whites maintained, however, that the unrest was due to the work of
radical politicians at the North, who had sent their emissaries south to
delude the Negroes into a fever of migration. Some said it was a