The black Americans, newly freed, the already freed black Americans and creoles, and their white allies in the Republican Party (the Party of civil rights) tried to vote instead and establish democracy for 14 years. They fought for an believed in democracy, not in the Union, but in America. Many black Americans who testified to the Department of Justice Attorney General who was investigating the stolen election of 1878 in Louisiana, and who then risked their life’s before Congress to give sworn testimony in the Senate in 1880 (from the 1500 page report published in 1880, Senate 46тн
CONGRESS, 20 Session, REPORT No. 693) said they all they had been fighting for for 13 years was the right to vote. The black American soldiers, black Republican Party organizers and voters, and some white allies, were shot, massacred, intimidated, blocked from voting, threatened constantly not to vote at all or to vote Democratic Party. One political party was cheating, changing the laws, slaughtering literally members of the other party for 13 years leading up to the 1878 vote in Louisiana.
Many of the black Americans in Louisiana gave differences of opinion in their testimony, where 153 witnesses, mostly black and some whites who included the US Marshall assigned to Louisiana, but all said they wanted the vote or the franchise. One said he would go back to working on the white plantation willing as long as he could keep the franchise, his vote. Most still believed the North and white Republicans would continue to work with them as they had for the first 13 years of political murder and cheating they had endured by the white supremacists, organized by the Democrats in the that state, many of whom are quoted. Instead, the Attorney General of the USDOJ in the trial, voided the charges after all the evidence was collected and the trial against the treason Party of killers had started. The decision is called “Nolle Prossed” and it stands for voiding the case, but back then it meant abandoning the black American voters who gave their lives fighting without weapons for the vote and voting for thirteen years. It meant that after that point, from 1879 to 1903, only one party won all the elections in every county (parish) and district across the state, as written about by Louisiana state historian JR Ficklen in 1903. The period he described created a white supermajority of one party white rule because the federal government and USDOJ at the highest levels turned their backs on the black Republican Party of freedmen, freed slaves, and white allies, who had been fighting and organizing fairly to establish democracy for 13 years in that state.
After that, many black Americans in Louisiana were so demoralized from over a decade of killing (all established on federal record, much in Senate report), organized a great exodus to Kansas. Over 60,000 organized to leave to get “40 acres and mule” (one hundred and twenty actually). The first wave who made their suffered a brutal winter and were unprepared for the extreme cold and snow in Kansas. Many died on the boats and froze to death. The food and aid gathered by donors from the North ran low, and new comers were kicked out of town or prevented from landing their boats full of refugees. The Kansas whites lost the little empathy they had. Many of the ones who survived return to Louisiana, and many of them accepted their fate, losing their vote, their rights, their possessions, and put back under new “contracts” binding them to the plantation owners and put in onerous debt that only grew and grew with each year, living in the shacks on their plantations, continuing to harvest cotton. They who believed most in democracy, fought hardest for it through peaceful organization to vote, and risked their lives to give testimony as whistleblowers, or move to another state under exodus for a piece of land to work on their own, were abandoned, were betrayed by the USDOJ. The whites in Louisiana damned them did vote, and then were damned when they couldn’t. The Great Betrayal of 1879 and 1880 were some of the worst in the history of our democracy.
Thank goodness those major betrayals of newly freed black Americans was taken out of textbooks and buried by the CRT wave of the 1910s and 1920s. Otherwise, school children—and probably most black Americans— would have gotten quite angry at the federal government for abandoning the democracy that was given to them and then they earned for the sake of “unity.”