Book Review: Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana

Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana. By David T. Ballantyne. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2025. 309 pp. $45.00.

Reviewed by Neil P. Chatelain

Louisiana is a fantastic place to study the post-Civil War Reconstruction of Southern states. Many former Confederate leaders moved there in retirement, and it was one of the few places where Abraham Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan created a loyal state constitution. Most of the work delving into Louisiana’s Reconstruction however, focuses on New Orleans, where those former Confederate leaders lived. With Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana, David Ballantyne takes a different approach by using rural Rapides Parish as a case study to see how Reconstruction worked, how it failed, and how local political activity could go against state trends.

Rapides Parish was predominately rural sugar plantation land, though the city of Alexandria, astride the Red River, sits within its borders. It was also predominately populated by African Americans in the Civil War era. Though the parish shrank in size after the Civil War, as new parishes were created, it still sat astride wartime and postwar military and political activity. For example, the 1864 Red River campaign burst through the parish, and the 1873 Colfax massacre occurred just outside the parish in land that was part of Rapides during the war.

Ballantyne’s primary argument is that Rapides Parish experienced a Reconstruction that saw an effective establishment of Republican control, at least for a time, thanks in large part to the Black majority population. This Republican resurgence focused around a core of Black voters and Reconstruction military and civilian officials and bureaucrats. The book contains six lengthy chapters, one focusing on the war, one on the immediate postwar struggles for land ownership and crop cultivation, one on building the Republican Party within the parish, one demonstrating a high-water mark of Republican power as the 1870’s began, one focusing primarily on the Colfax massacre and immediate efforts to shape its memory, and a final chapter on the collapse of Republican control in the parish as Reconstruction ended.

While championing efforts to build a more equal and pro-Black Rapides Parish, Ballantyne takes pains to point out that both Republicans and Democrats exercised political corruption in attempts to dominate state and local politics. Those familiar with Louisiana politics, both in the 19th century and today, will find familiarity in the rampant corruption, with details explaining how both parties came to establish their own statewide offices, declare their own election victories, and challenge one another’s results as proof of corrupt opposition. These actions are highlighted in Rapides Parish as part of statewide trends that eventually led to Republican political collapse.

Besides covering politics, the book explores multiple dimensions of the parish’s power struggle. Black militias formed to support the military occupation of Alexandria, while the Knights of the While Camelia and Ku Klux Klan countered with violence and intimidation. Masculinity and gender were weaponized by both sides to encourage political and social action. Schools became metaphorical battlegrounds, both over the funding of educational facilities for Freedmen and in what was taught.

Ballantyne uses ample archival material to paint this picture of central Louisiana, though because of significant Black illiteracy, most of the archival letters and diaries come from White speakers. Significant government data, like census and voting records, are also utilized to provide in depth statistical analyses of shifts across space and time. The author prolifically quotes from and deconstructs Alexandria’s Louisiana Democrat newspaper to demonstrate contemporary political rhetoric and trends.

Ballantyne’s efforts demonstrate not that Rapides Parish became a utopia of equality, but that Black residents living there during Reconstruction lived a life slightly better than in other parts of the South. Political corruption remained, violence occurred, and efforts were undertaken to disenfranchise Black voters there. This all occurred however, even as a functioning, but segregated, postwar school system developed and as Black men from Rapides were elected to local and state offices. Efforts in Rapides could not stem the tide of a collapsing Reconstruction elsewhere, and the parish largely ended up like everywhere else in early 20th century Louisiana.

As someone from New Orleans, but whose Civil War ancestors lived in Avoyelles Parish, adjacent to Rapides, it was refreshing to see this focus on the rural and sparsely populated central Louisiana parishes. Those interested in Louisiana history and the history of Reconstruction should likewise enjoy this refreshing case study.