ABSTRACT
A few hours’ ride on the railroad south-west from New Orleans, or on horseback along the Mississippi River to Donaldsonville and then down Bayou Lafourche, there occurred in 1887 a most remarkable set of events. The formal end of Reconstruction was already a decade in the past, and the electoral disfranchisement of African Americans in Louisiana would be completed over the next 11 years. A white-supremacist Democratic governor was entrenched in the statehouse and the state militia had become almost a branch of the White Leagues. But somehow into this unpromising environment there erupted a tenacious expression of militancy by thousands of plantation workers, the great majority of whom were either former slaves themselves or the direct descendants of former slaves.
