Symposium Spotlight: Clash at Canal Street: The 1874 Battle of Liberty Place
Welcome back to our spotlight series, highlighting speakers and topics for our upcoming symposium. Over the coming weeks, we will continue previewing of our speaker’s presentations for the 2025 Emerging Civil War Symposium. This week we feature Joe Ricci’s topic.
Clash at Canal Street: The 1874 Battle of Liberty Place
After the American Civil War, New Orleans stood as the South’s largest, wealthiest, intact city. Defeated Rebels, formerly enslaved masses, displaced Southerners, advocates of Reconstruction Era policies, and U.S. Army officials flocked to the Crescent City and attempted, in many ways, to start a new life for themselves after four years of bloody, brutal war. The bloodshed, however, was far from over. Protests to the policies and progress of Reconstruction exploded across the South, and while New Orleans avoided major conflict from 1861 to 1865, in September 1874, violence erupted in the streets. The Battle of Liberty Place, as it has come to be known, pitted former Confederates and white supremacists against an integrated police force led by an unlikely member of the Republican Party. The outcome of a contested election and equality in the eyes of the law hung in the balance.
In the dying days of Reconstruction, the events that transpired in New Orleans spelled doom for the progress made since the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. As Black Codes and Jim Crow laws undid the successes of Reconstruction, so too did certain forces erect a monument to the city’s White League for their attempted “overthrow of carpetbag government.” Even following the 2017 removal of this monument, the battle over this uncomfortable chapter of history and its place in New Orleans’ historical memory rages on.
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My father owned a printing business in New Orleans and was a friend of the owner of Pelican Publishing. He was given a copy of “The Battle of Liberty Place” (1955), written by Stuart Omer Landry and published by Pelican. For a long time, all I knew about the book (and the event) was that it sat on a small bookshelf in my parents’ bedroom. After his death in 1987, my mother offered his books to me, and I ended up with several, including the Landry volume, now 70 years old. When I read it some years back, I was surprised to learn that many of the events of Sept. 14, 1874 happened within two blocks of my father’s office in downtown New Orleans; the military leader of the White League had his horse shot from underneath him literally right around the corner from where my father’s business would be. As many times as I worked in my father’s office and walked those streets (usually delivering completed printing jobs), I had no idea of the history under my feet.