In the last week of August 1874, the White League in Red River Parish arrested the parish's Republican officeholders, made them resign and sign a promise to leave Louisiana, and killed them on the road to Shreveport. Historians count ten dead over several days, six white Republicans and four Black Republicans. Others put the Black dead higher, from five to as many as twenty. No member of the mob was ever brought to justice.
A year after Colfax
On April 13, 1873, white men killed at least sixty and perhaps as many as 150 people, nearly all Black men, at the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax. The fighting grew out of the disputed election of 1872. Three years later, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Supreme Court sharply limited federal prosecution of the Colfax killers under the Enforcement Acts. The White League first met in Opelousas in late April 1874. It spoke of "home rule," and by summer its aims had shifted toward overthrowing the Republican government.
Red River Parish was created in 1871, with Coushatta as its seat, partly through Marshall H. Twitchell, a Vermont-born Union officer and Freedmen's Bureau agent. His brother Homer was tax collector, and his brothers-in-law Clark Holland and Monroe Willis held minor offices. That summer merchants and planters organized a White League chapter in Coushatta under Thomas Abney.
The road to Shreveport
About midnight on August 25, Thomas Floyd, a Black Republican, was killed at Brownsville, south of Coushatta. Two days later the League arrested six white Republicans: Homer Twitchell, Sheriff Frank Edgerton, parish attorney William Howell, Holland, Willis and Robert Dewees, tax collector of De Soto Parish. It also rounded up about twenty Black Republicans. Marshall Twitchell was in New Orleans at a Republican state convention.
On August 29 a panel of leading citizens heard the prisoners. They resigned and promised to leave the state in exchange for safe passage to Shreveport. The League's proclamation accused them of spreading "vicious ideas into the minds of the colored people of Red River." The next day about twenty-five guards set out with them. Near four in the afternoon, after the column crossed into Caddo Parish, forty or fifty riders led by Dick Coleman overtook it. All six prisoners were killed, and the record says the guards made no effort to protect them.
Afterward
Levin Allen, a Black leader south of Coushatta, was killed by a white mob. Louis Johnson and Paul Williams, held on an accusation of shooting a white man, were taken and hanged. On September 14 the White League fought the Metropolitan Police at Liberty Place in New Orleans, where more than thirty people died. Federal troops retook the city within three days, and no White Leaguer was prosecuted.
In 1876 Twitchell was shot while crossing the Red River toward Coushatta. His brother-in-law George King was killed, and both of Twitchell's arms were amputated. He never returned to Louisiana and died in 1905.
Shreveport, where the prisoners were promised safety, keeps the period's other side. The Spring Street Museum stands in a building that housed the city's Freedman's Savings and Trust branch, which opened in late 1870 under a Black cashier, Samuel Peters.