America's Deadliest Election

 

Dana Bash, “America’s Deadliest Election: (The Louisiana Election that led to the end of Reconstruction and imposition of Jim Crow), Hanover Square Press, 2024, 320 pp.

This book is a must-read for anyone needing to fill in their knowledge gap for the Jim Crow era.

Washington Post Review: 

The Reconstruction era was one of the most consequential chapters of U.S. history; sometimes called the Second Founding, but it was short-lived. Between 1867 and 1877, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments ended slavery, granted citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in the country, secured all people equal protection of the law, and expanded the franchise.

As transformative as those years were, however, they still need to be more thoroughly discussed,  the history of that period is often distorted or ignored by bad actors. In this light, it’s refreshing that, in their new book, “America’s Deadliest Election: The Cautionary Tale of the Most Violent Election in American History,” the veteran CNN journalist Dana Bash and the author David Fisher zoom in on some of the political figures and conflicts that defined Reconstruction.

Bash and Fisher examine Louisiana’s 1872 gubernatorial election. It was one of the first contests to occur under the state’s 1868 constitution, which had extended the right to vote to Black men about two years before the 15th Amendment was ratified. Diving into the chaos around the election, Bash and Fisher illuminate how far from settled the battles over race and power were in the years after the Civil War concluded in 1865.

The authors investigate Reconstruction mostly through the experiences of Henry Warmoth, an ambitious lawyer from Illinois. During the Civil War, Warmoth served in the Union Army; he was injured during the Siege of Vicksburg. After the war, he moved to New Orleans, establishing a law practice. Handsome and charismatic, the Republican carpetbagger was swiftly drawn to politics. In 1868, at 26, he was elected governor and allied himself with newly enfranchised Black Louisianans.

The atmosphere was tense. Louisiana’s burgeoning political landscape was rife with fraud; racist violence was common, too. The Knights of the White Camelia, a white-supremacist group, terrorized freedmen in the state, largely to keep them away from the ballot box so the “White man’s candidate,” Horatio Seymour, whose incarnation of the Democratic Party opposed Black equality, could defeat Republican Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential race. These tactics paid off, to a point. Though Grant carried the country, he was trounced in Louisiana.

Bash and Fisher explain that, by the time the next gubernatorial election arrived, in 1872, “at every step in the process there existed some type of intimidation, cheating or fraud intended to change the outcome.” Infighting plagued Louisiana’s Republican Party, and Warmoth, who wasn’t running again, decided to back John McEnery, a Democrat, over William Pitt Kellogg, a Republican. The results were fiercely disputed: Both men declared victory and legitimacy, and each held an inauguration ceremony. Louisiana basically had two governors.

The fallout was explosive. The bad blood between the dueling sides contributed to violent confrontations across the state — the Colfax massacre in April 1873, the Coushatta massacre in August 1874, the Battle of Liberty Place in September 1874 — targeting the ballooning political influence of Black Louisianans and their White supporters. After this final clash, Grant, who had won reelection in 1872, sent in federal troops and managed to return some degree of order to the state.

Still, by the end of the decade, when the federal government agreed to withdraw its forces from the former Confederate states, Reconstruction was over: “The phase that began in 1877 was inaugurated by … the abandonment of the Negro as a ward of the nation,” the historian C. Vann Woodward underscored in his 1955 book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow.” Louisiana had gone from being one of the country’s most progressive states to being one where around 90 percent of Black voters were disenfranchised.

Bash and Fisher distill key themes, including how elected leaders such as McEnery “let loose a monster” when they “approved violence as an acceptable means to resolve political disputes.” “America’s Deadliest Election” is the kind of book that might generate fresh interest in our country’s brief post-Civil War attempt at creating a multiracial democracy.

And yet, Bash and Fisher do the one thing that we ought to avoid doing with the past: They leave it in the past. If this election is a “cautionary tale” for our present day, as the book’s subtitle suggests, the authors never really connect the dots, leaving that deeper analysis unspoken. This feels like a missed opportunity to give the book more bite, and saps it of some of its momentum.

An obvious connection they may have explored revolves around Louisiana’s recent battle to secure a congressional map that more accurately reflects its Black population. Louisiana is more than 30 percent Black, but until this year, just one of the state’s six congressional districts was majority Black. Days after the equitable map was enacted, a group of self-identified “non-African American” voters brought litigation, claiming that the map “racially stigmatizes” and “racially maligns” them.

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the state to use these new congressional lines in this year’s elections. (Whether they’ll be used in the future is an open question.) But this conflict — this effort to protect political power for some and keep it away from others — is a sobering reminder to Black Louisianans that, even in 2024, their fundamental right to vote isn’t guaranteed.

“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read,” James Baldwin wrote in 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.”

“America’s Deadliest Election” is a worthy book. Readers will probably finish it with a far greater appreciation for Reconstruction’s complexities. But if the authors had more explicitly and rigorously interrogated how this history, as Baldwin put it, isn’t history — because it lives, even now, among us — they could have transformed their work into something truly great.