The White League and My Great-Grandfather

This has happened before—that sick feeling deep in my interior where words do not exist to describe it. Usually, it was caused by something like seeing a bill of sale from one of my enslaver relatives about selling a child. Or buying one. This time it hits closer because I am named for the man about whom I have just learned participated in the White League. The man is my great-grandfather, and he is part of me. In today’s language the White League would be described as a white supremacist quasi-military terrorist organization. It started in 1874 in the South to intimidate freedmen into not voting and prevent the then Republican Party from getting power.

    What a shock this morning, Christmas only two days past, to get an email from Ancestry.com with a “hint” about William Marshall Richardson-- a newspaper clipping from 1874 about the formation of the white supremacist group in the Louisiana Parish, New Iberia, where he lived. His name was in the list of original members in the article. Articles about the Grande Assemblée de la Ligue Blanche were also printed in Louisiana's French newspapers.

     I thought I knew a lot about my great-grandfather. This latest revelation shocked me. I had heard of the White League but knew almost nothing about it until now. It turns out to be worse than the little I knew. And it exemplifies the return in current years of efforts to enable the reestablishment of the full force of white supremacy along with Black voter suppression efforts; these, like then, with occasional violence and the floating looming potential for more.

    Though my given name is spelled “Marcia,” it should have been “Marsha.” My middle name, Edwina, is after my father, which pleases me immensely. My feelings about my given name were mixed from childhood on and they are certainly conflicted now. I wrote about this in my 2023 book Unloose My Heart. Grandfather Richardson’s mother was Catherine Marshall from Anson County, North Carolina. Finding her gravestone with my Marshall

third cousin not long ago in the gloom of a copse of trees covered in brambles, an island in a cutover cotton field, is seared in my memory. Of course, her father and his line are the real origin of Marshall.  I knew from childhood that these families were slaveholders along with most of my maternal ancestors and relatives. At least William Marshall Richardson never owned people himself as far as I know. I had pictured him, a physician who graduated from UNC in 1851 and then from Jefferson Medical College in 1854 as imbued with a desire to heal and care for other human beings. He went on to serve in the Confederate Army as a 1st Lieutenant in the 43rd Alabama Infantry, his service very short due to illness. I recently learned the details of his brief time as a soldier; I had pictured him doctoring wounded soldiers and performing gruesome amputations throughout the war.

    That William Marshall Ricardson had a tender side was clear from many of his letters which have survived for a century and more. My cousins and I knew he was much admired and beloved by his family. He spent many long years in medical practice, first in Alabama, then in Louisiana. He persuaded his brother Clement to study medicine so they could practice together, which they did in Jeanerette, Louisiana. He delivered most of his two daughters’ babies, including my mother, this after he and his family moved to Florida. I knew he treated people of color from a few stories I heard. I knew he tended to his Florida neighbors, getting one of the first telephones in the area so he could be reached, even though he was officially retired. I knew his "colored" patients there went to his back door. I also knew he was a devout Methodist.

    So, to suddenly learn he was part of a terrorist group is hard to take in. But there it is-- his name in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl newspaper under “White League Mass Meeting,” October 22, 1874. No other white William Richardsons lived in New Iberia at the time so the W. M. Richardson in the newspaper is definitive. His profile fits. Most White Leaguers were

 Confederate veterans and the white elite. He had a well-established medical practice by then, which continued until his Florida retirement in the late 1880s.

    Tension between Blacks and whites had been building since the end of the Civil War as years of political and racial terror tore across the South, manifesting in resistance to Reconstruction programs carried out by the hated Yankees with their soldiers and Freedman’s Bureau. One result in Louisiana and a few other southern states was the quickly organized White League. Unlike the Klan, the White League eschewed masks and deeds committed in the dark. The League went about its terror-spreading in daylight and made sure articles were posted about their heinous deeds in every newspaper they could. The articles sometimes included threats to African Americans.

    The summer before the October 1874 meeting which involved my great-grandfather, members of the already formed White Leagues in Louisiana had ridden through Red River Parish where they had murdered four Black and six white Republicans in what is now called the Coushatta Massacre. Many citizens who hadn’t been attuned to the White League’s steady takeover of their state and their violence were shocked by these events. On September 13, the White League announced a mass meeting via flyers at Royal and Canal streets in New Orleans. The next day thousands gathered to demand the Republican governor resign. Remember, back then the Republicans were more like today’s Democrats and the Democrats were more like today’s Republicans. That League-led insurrection ended up with federal troops being called in and several dozen people dead. It became known as The Battle of Liberty Place, an event attesting to Confederate bravery and “Lost Cause” mythology.

    White League activities along with their violence continued to be widely reported in local and national newspapers. William Marshall Richardson had to be aware that Leaguers used weapons and shootings and lynchings and other forms of violence as part of their terrorist (my word) activities. If my great-grandfather was conflicted about his participation, even if all he ever did was become a member due to “social pressure,” his consciousness didn’t have to grapple long with politics, humanity, and morality. In hardly more than two years, due to the effectiveness of this violent white supremacy group, voting by Republicans withered away and the Democrats regained control of the state government. The Leagues’ efforts were aided by the threat of yellow fever outbreaks which caused Federal soldiers to leave for parts north, and farmers turned desperate due to failed crops. No longer needed after only a few years, the White Leagues disbanded. The terrorism had worked.

The parallels with what is happening now here in the mid-2020s are not subtle. In 1874 and 1875, the politicians, newspapers, and White League members in Louisiana instead of calling their killings and torture for what it was, used words like “battles for liberty,” and “patriotic efforts.” Their stated objective was to “reestablish a white man’s government.” Making this happen also shaped their voter suppression activities, especially against Black men. Historian David Blight summarized this dark history of Southern resistance to the Reconstruction Era thusly, “It tells us that we had a moment in our history when our politics broke down, our society broke down, our police power broke down; the government wasn’t functioning sufficiently enough to protect one group of citizens from another who simply engaged in wanton vigilante violence of the worst kind.”*

    Does this sound familiar?

Grandpa, as his grandchildren called him, was devoted to his family. His death in 1929

meant that most of us great-grandchildren never knew him except by letters and stories. We knew he lived a tragic life. He was blind the last some years of his life. He outlived all three of his wives; his first two wives and three of the five children he had with them were all dead within a few years of each marriage. I have never gotten clear on the exact causes, but malaria and tuberculosis were what I heard as a child. At least he and his third wife, my great-grandmother, lived to see their three children and most of the grandchildren reach adulthood. William kept up with his two surviving children from his second marriage, Mary and Rosa. Both of them were gone by 1899. A letter to Mary written in 1890 was mostly about his sorrow on learning of the death of one of his first cousins, Sallie Marshall. They were born within months of each other in 1831. I heard about Sallie early on and how she was my great-grandfather’s best friend in their youths and later. In the letter, he writes, “… we went to school together from six years of age until sixteen, how dear she was to me, perhaps no one ever knew. The lives and ties of friendship of youth… are the strongest and purist and much enduring. I loved her not because she was my cousin but because she was so good and because she loved me and because she was so cheerful and companionable. …as little children we trudged along to school three miles away and it was my pleasure to act as her defender. As we grew older our love intensified and no sister and brother loved more deeply each other than she and I.”

    We human beings are complex.

Addendum

When researching what I needed to write this piece, I learned more about my great-grandfather’s first two wives who had died so young. The father of his first wife Martha Elizabeth McRea, was a slave holder. She lived only four years after their 1855 marriage, but her death was not soon enough to spare her going through the loss of both children born to this union, the first in 1856, the second in 1857. His second wife, Olivia Caroline Johnson, married to my great-grandfather at the age of twenty, four months later inherited four enslaved people from her newly deceased mother. One was a mother, also named Carolina, with two children, Andy and Zilcole. The fourth inherited enslaved person was a twelve-year-old girl, Amanda. Amanda's mother, Hannah was given to one of Olivia's siblings along with three of Amanda's siblings. Caroline only lived nine more years. I don’t know if she brought her enslaved people into her new marriage or if she sold them.

*David Blight, interview by Llewellyn M. Smith, Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, American Experience, season 16, episode 4, aired December 12, 2004,