Coming to the defense of the whites, some said that much of the persecution with which the blacks were afflicted was due to the fear of Negro uprisings, the terror of the days of slavery.  The whites, however, did practically nothing to remove the underlying causes.  They did not encourage education and made no efforts to cure the Negroes of faults for which slavery itself was to be blamed and consequently could not get the confidence of the blacks.  The races tended rather to drift apart.  The Negroes lived in fear of reenslavement while the whites believed that the war between the North and South would soon be renewed.  Some Negroes thinking likewise sought to go to the North to be among friends.  The blacks, of course, had come so to regard southern whites as their enemies as to render impossible a voluntary division in politics.

Among the worst of all faults of the whites was their unwillingness to labor and their tendency to do mischief.[2] 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.