History of New Orleans

During the American Civil War, the Union captured New Orleans early; the city was spared the destruction suffered by many other cities of the American South.

During Reconstruction, New Orleans was within the Fifth Military District of the United States. Louisiana was readmitted to the Union in 1868, and its Constitution of 1868 granted universal manhood suffrage. Both blacks and whites were elected to local and state offices. In 1872, then-lieutenant governor P.B.S. Pinchback succeeded Henry Clay Warmouth as governor of Louisiana, becoming the first non-white governor of a U.S. state, and the last African American to lead a U.S. state until Douglas Wilder's election in Virginia, 117 years later. In New Orleans, Reconstruction was marked by the Mechanics Institute race riot (1866). The city operated successfully a racially integrated public school system. Damage to levees and cities along the Mississippi River adversely affected southern crops and trade for the port city for some time, as the government tried to restore infrastructure. The nationwide Panic of 1873 also slowed economic recovery.

Reconstruction ended in Louisiana in 1877. Since 1874, the White League, an insurgent paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, had succeeded in disrupting and suppressing the black vote in several elections and running off Republican officeholders. With their help, the white Democrats, the so-called Redeemers, regained control of the state legislature. They imposed Jim Crow laws, imposing racial segregation and, with the new constitution and election laws at the end of the century, disfranchising freedmen. Unable to vote, African Americans could not serve on juries or in local