their chattels
the news.[99]

From the time of the accession of General Banks to 1876, the history
of Louisiana becomes a turmoil of struggle, centering around the
brother in black.[100] It is no longer romance; it is grim war, and
the colored man is the struggle, not the cause of it. Political
parties in 1862 were many and various. The Free State party was in
favor of abolishing slavery, but wanted representation based
altogether on the white population. This was opposed by the Union
Democrat party, which repudiated secession, but wished slavery
continued or rather revived, believing that emancipation was only a
war measure, and that after cessation of hostilities, slavery could be
reestablished. But the plans of both parties fell to the ground.[101]
The colored man became more and more of a political factor from day to
day.

Cognomens here too proved to be another difficulty. Louisiana had two
classes of colored men, freedmen and free men, a delicate, but
carefully guarded distinction, the latter distinctly aristocratic. In
1863, the free men of color held a meeting and appealed to Governor
Shepley for permission to register and vote. In the address to him,
they reviewed their services to the United States from the time of
General Jackson through the Civil War, and stated that they were then
paying taxes on over $9,000,000. Several petitions of this sort failed
to move General Banks,[102] for he thought it unfeasible to draw the
line between free men of color and the recently emancipated Negroes.

The war of Reconstruction in Louisiana was fairly well launched in the
Constitutional Convention of 1864. The issue on which this body
divided was what treatment should be accorded the freedmen. The two
parties had much difficulty in reaching an agreement.[103] P. M.
Tourne was sent to Washington to see President Lincoln. He had already
suggested the ratification of the Emancipation Proclamation and the
education of the colored youth.[104] In a letter congratulating the
recently elected Governor Hahn on his election as the "first
free-state governor of Louisiana" in 1864, Lincoln suggested suffrage
for the more intelligent Negroes, and those who had served the country
in the capacity of soldiers. This letter of Lincoln's, says Blaine,
was the first proposition from any authentic source to endow the Negro
with the right of suffrage.[105] In his last public utterance on April
11, 1865, Lincoln again touched the subject of