| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. By LeeAnna Keith. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xviii, 219 pp. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-531026-9.)
On Easter Sunday, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, white supremacist paramilitary forces massacred approximately 150 black Republicans in one of the organized slaughters that did so much to destroy Reconstruction. In her original, detailed, insightful, and appropriately bloodcurdling microhistory, LeeAnna Keith fully analyzes this brutal outburst as well as events before and after it.	1
Post–Civil War Colfax was a black township created by William Smith Calhoun, a tiny, humpbacked maverick Keith characterizes as the "greatest slaveholder ever to embrace the cause of Black equality" (p. 55). His father, Meredith, had been a major northern investor who created a huge string of cotton plantations along the Red River in northern Louisiana in the 1830s. Meredith raised his family in Louis Napoleon's France; when he moved to Louisiana to manage the family plantations, Calhoun was an alien in a hostile land. He spoke with a French accent, shunned his neighbors, who doubtlessly shunned him, and "married" Olivia Williams, a mulatto woman with whom he openly shared his household wealth.	. . .

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