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Ω 9 Ω “A Terrible Aftermath of Injustice” Violence in the Postwar Era P eace did not come to northern Louisiana after the war. Within months of the cessation of hostilities, the city officials in Monroe enacted repressive measures against the freedmen. Among their first acts was implementing a registration policy for persons of color who lived in the town or operated a business there. The resolution was adopted on June 19, 1865, and African Americans were granted less than a week to comply. Individuals who failed to register would be arrested and if convicted, would perform ten hours of labor for the city. People who hired unregistered blacks were subject to a ten-dollar fine. In June and July, the city council passed six additional ordinances specifically directed at persons of color. Some concerned drunkenness and vagrancy. One measure even reinstituted the pass system, ostensibly in an effort to comply with an order issued by the U.S. Army commander of the area. Some of the ordinances affected the day-to-day business of the city. If a resident dismissed a black employee, the employer had to provide a written notice of discharge to the employee. A mere scrap of a note would not do. Instead, it must provide the reason for discharge, the length of time the person had been employed, and a statement about the employee’s “character.” A black person without a paper discharge, upon conviction, would be fined $2.50 or, if unable to pay, sentenced to work ten hours on the public works. It is unclear if the employer—almost certainly a white person—suffered any penalty for not providing the necessary paperwork to their former employee. It is easy to see how local whites could manipulate this process to create trouble between city officials and black residents. Through no fault of their own, black residents could be forced to pay the penalty for their employer’s negligence. The African American residents of Monroe must have strongly protested these regressive efforts, for ordinances were soon passed concerning persons of color who resisted arrest “in word or deed,” refused to show passes, or made false entries in the town registry. A little relief came in September, when some milliken’s bend 158 of these ordinances were struck down by a General Order emanating from the U.S. War Department.1 Between the end of the war and 1868, circumstances grew far worse for Ouachita Parish’s black residents. Early in 1868, white men gathered in a mass meeting in Monroe to defend their “supremacy as the ruling race on this continent ” and to protest the new Louisiana constitution, then being drawn up in New Orleans. Fear was rampant that the new constitution would place the former slaves in a superior position—“an abhorrent and unnatural proposition .” The meeting at Monroe passed a series of resolutions that held the Radical Republicans responsible for an impending race war throughout the state. Furthermore, it was imperative that blacks recognize that the Radical position was “utterly subversive of their future prosperity as a separate race, and wholly destructive of the cordial feelings which have hitherto subsisted between the two races.” To the relief of Monroe’s white residents, there was no “desire on the part of the blacks to infringe upon the recognized social rights of the white race,” and the situation remained calm. The white men there “supported” local African Americans, declaring that laws should protect white and black alike— with the caveat that black men should not have the right to vote.2 The language and expressions used in the resolutions echo similar dichotomies expressed by Southerners during slavery, particularly during times of fearfulness over incipient slave insurrections. Negroes were a threat, yet local blacks were content. Blacks might try to be politically active elsewhere, but African Americans within the parish knew their “place.” The contradictions and mental machinations that are apparent to us today upon a reading of the resolutions make it clear that the white citizens were merely trying to reassure themselves and the black residents, hoping that each race would contain any violent impulses toward the other over politics, civil rights, and social customs. Words were not enough to alleviate any vengeful tendencies, however. By the summer of 1868, violence was becoming so commonplace that the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana devoted an entire ledger to the subject, entitling it, “Murders and Outrages.” It covers only eight months from May to December...

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