How Many Died in the Colfax Massacre?

 On April 13, 1873 approximately 140 heavily armed white men, led by ex-Confederate officers, attacked a roughly equal number of Black men occupying the courthouse in Colfax, seat of Grant Parish, Louisiana. In the wake of the state’s disputed 1872 elections, which led to rival sets of officeholders claiming election across Louisiana, the Black men had assembled to defend a slate of Republican Grant Parish officials. The ensuing slaughter of Black men – mostly killed trying to flee or after being taken captive – became known as the Colfax Massacre. Federal authorities arrested nine massacre perpetrators in late 1873, and secured convictions against three of them in 1874. On March 27, 1876, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the verdicts in U.S. v. Cruikshank, a precedent that undermined federal efforts to prosecute violations of African Americans’ civil and voting rights. Further Supreme Court backsliding on civil rights soon followed.^[1]

Despite the notoriety of the massacre and its consequences, a definitive estimate for the  Black death toll on April 13, 1873 remains elusive. Over the years, claimed death tolls have ranged from as low as 50 to as high as 400. Numerous recent accounts offer a figure of 150, between the extremes, but still in triple figures. For instance, Elizabeth Varon’s 2023 James Longstreet biography mentions a death toll of “at least 150” Black men; and the Equal Justice Initiative’s website claims “nearly 150 Black people were killed.”^[2]  Meanwhile, in June 2026 Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson’s concurring opinion in Trump v. Barbara cited the toll of 280 mentioned by the Black Louisiana legislator John G. Lewis in Eric Foner’s field-defining 1988 Reconstruction study.^[3]

Our efforts to provide a more accurate estimate started with co-author Charles Lane’s work consulting on the text for the Colfax Massacre Memorial unveiled in 2023, when he sought to identify as many of the victims as possible, so they could be memorialized by name. Here we extend this research, re-examining demographic data and the voluminous documentary record, in an effort to provide not only a total count of the Black dead but to name many of them as individuals.^[4]  The result is a considerably lower estimated toll than often appears in the literature: the most plausible range is between 62 and 80.^[5] It bears emphasis that our goal is not to minimize what happened at Colfax on April 13, 1873. We write, rather, in the belief that discussions of the massacre can, and should, rest on the strongest possible factual basis.

* * *

The highest claimed death tolls – those ranging up to several hundred Black men – can be discounted quickly.  The number of Black men defending Colfax courthouse on April 13 was far lower than the approximately 432 Black males of fighting age – 18 to 45 years old – residing in Grant Parish in 1870. Witness testimonies at trials of the perpetrators suggested an upper limit of 150 Black men defending the courthouse – at least 50 of whom, we found, survived the onslaught and testified in at least one of the two trials in 1874.^[6] As we demonstrate below, the most well-informed near-contemporary estimates varied in some important respects, but none supported a triple-digit body count.

The first official report came from two U.S. deputy marshals, Theodore W. De Klyne and William Wright, who arrived near Colfax on April 15, 1873, sent by Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg in their dual capacity as state militia officers. En route, the two men heard of a fight in the town in which 150 to 200 Black men had been killed. Upon arrival, they saw bodies scattered around the smoldering courthouse, but in numbers well below the rumored total. As their report, published April 18 in the New Orleans Republican noted, DeKlyne and Wright supervised the burial of 54 Black men in a mass grave; family and friends of five others removed their corpses for burial elsewhere. In addition to those 59 bodies, the two officers left a sixtieth one – a nearly incinerated skeleton – where it lay under the ruined courthouse. People in Colfax identified 52 of the dead by name, along with 12 wounded — two of whom were so badly shot, the report said, that they “will certainly die.” We confirmed the deaths of these men from other sources. Thus, the DeKlyne-Wright report implies a minimum death toll of 62.^[7]

About two weeks after the DeKlyne-Wright mission to Colfax U.S. Army troops arrived to keep the peace. The company’s commanding officer, Lt. Jacob Smith, wrote to his superiors that he had scoured the area for unburied bodies and concluded that “the number killed or died from wounds of the Negroes proves to be 71,” but provided no further elaboration.^[8]

In May 1873, a Secret Service detective, J. J. Hoffman, operated undercover in the area of the massacre, assigned by the Justice Department to investigate the crime. Hoffman saw the mass grave in Colfax where, he reported, “fifty-five negroes” had been buried. Four others,  he noted, were “found in the woods, mainly eaten up by buzzards, making fifty-nine negroes known to have been killed.” This report also acknowledged “conflicting” reports as to the death toll. The death toll, 59, implied by Hoffman’s report approximates that of DeKlyne and Wright, but likely errs on the low side. Hoffman either did not know, or did not mention, that DeKlyne and Wright had allowed the burial of five bodies separate from the mass grave.^[9]

In his closing argument at the first of the two trials of the Colfax Massacre defendants in early 1874, U.S. Attorney James R. Beckwith referred to “64 or 65 human beings so inhumanly butchered.” In his instructions to the jury, Judge William B. Woods stated facts of the case that both prosecution and defense accepted – specifically, that, “[i]n addition to the fifty-nine dead bodies found” by DeKlyne and Wright, “some charred remains of dead bodies were discovered near the court-house.” In 1875, Beckwith testified under oath to a congressional committee that the dead numbered “probably about seventy, to a certainty.”^[10]

On May 29, 1875, another Colfax-based U.S. Army officer, Lieutenant Edward L. Godfrey, wrote to his superiors that 144 men, Black and white, had died in all political violence in Grant Parish and neighboring Rapides Parish since 1868. Godfrey’s report listed names for most of these people, including many that DeKlyne and Wright had listed (albeit sometimes under different spellings). Of those 144 names, 80 were said to belong to Black men killed on April 13, 1873. Godfrey added that he believed “at least one hundred and five (105) colored . . . were killed in the Colfax riot, or in connection therewith.” However, he used an expansive definition of “in connection with” the massacre, adding seven individuals killed on other dates in April 1873 to his list of 80 named victims from April 13. Additionally, Godfrey’s total includes 18 “bodies buried but were not identified,” a reference that invites skepticism, given that Godfrey compiled the information second-hand over two years after the event.

Finally, Godfrey’s report mentioned that “between 15 and 20 were shot on the banks of the river and their bodies thrown in the river,” though he did not include these in his estimate of 105 dead in the massacre or “in connection” with it. DeKlyne and Wright had heard a similar story of an indeterminate number of bodies “hurled in the river.”^[11] We are skeptical of this claim. First, none of the prosecution’s trial witnesses—including massacre survivors—mentioned it. Second, many of the dead were captives shot after dark on April 13, 1873 while white men were marching them in pairs in the opposite direction from the river. We therefore believe the most plausible estimate from Godfrey’s report is 80 Black men killed on April 13, 1873.^[12]

Less than two months later, on July 22, 1875 Major George A. Forsyth sent a lengthy report on political violence in Louisiana to Lieutenant General Philip H. Sheridan. This document includes more than 70 pages of lists of named individuals reportedly killed in every Louisiana parish during Reconstruction to that point. The entry for Grant Parish named 140 men, Black and white, who had been killed in the parish since 1868. It also included an entry for “eighteen unknown colored men,” purportedly killed during the massacre, likely derived from the same unnamed sources as Godfrey’s similar notation.  Forsyth’s report implies a total Grant Parish death toll of 158 Black and white men over the preceding seven years.^[13]

The Forsyth list suggests that 96 named Black men were killed on April 13, 1873, but does not appear to reflect any original research. He constructed it by combining previous reports, including Godfrey’s, and it contains clear errors. For example, it lists the names of three Black Grant Parish men – Hamp Henderson, Charles Vincent, and Tom Milton – twice. In addition, it mistakenly says that the three died in April 1873; they were actually killed in late 1873 in retaliation for an alleged interracial rape. Two names Forsyth presented as victims killed on April 13, 1873 – “John A. Smith” and “D. Foster” – may be erroneous as well. They appear nowhere else in records relating to the massacre, nor in the US Census for Grant or Rapides in 1870.^[14]

It is clear from the context that one of Forsyth’s main sources was a document compiled – probably in 1874 or 1875 – by William B. Phillips, then a white Grant Parish Republican. The first 58 names on Forsyth’s list were copied from the Phillips document, in the same order, but sometimes with different spellings. Phillips’ list included two white men, as well as eight Black men we confirmed as having been killed either before or after the massacre. Forsyth reported that all 48 of the remaining Black men were killed during the April 13 massacre, but the Phillips list itself does not indicate that: it provided no dates for any of the men’s deaths. Cross-referencing the names on Phillips’ list against the DeKlyne-Wright and Godfrey lists and other primary sources, we could confirm only 36 of the 48 Black men Phillips identified as killed at the Colfax Massacre. That leaves 12 names of Black men that appear only on the Phillips and Forsyth lists, for which there is no independent confirmation of them having died on April 13. Deducting those 12, as well as the “John A. Smith” and “D. Foster” names, from Forsyth’s list of 96 names of men killed on April 13, 1873 leaves 82 dead – only two more than the 80 we derived from Godfrey’s report.^[15]

In short, documentary sources support a range of body counts from a low of 59, in the Hoffman report, to a high of 82, derived from the Forsyth list. However, slight anomalies in those two sources argue against using them to define the likely death toll’s upper and lower limits. We favor instead the on-scene count of 62 by DeKlyne and Wright as a minimum and Godfrey’s later list of 80 as a maximum. There is insufficient space here to unpack the evolution of claimed death toll figures in subsequent decades. In general, though, the highest numbers originated in contemporary hearsay, evolving later through the prism of white supremacist nostalgia – according to which a magnified Black death toll magnified the glory of the white paramilitary victory at an event that passed into white Southern memory not as a massacre but as a “riot.” In 1951, state and local authorities erected a historical marker at the Colfax courthouse celebrating the “riot” and its supposed death toll of “150 negroes.”^[16]

Beyond a concern for accuracy, the role that 20th-century white supremacist propaganda played in shaping the massacre’s reported death toll provides another reason to get it right today. Those who cite a triple-digit estimate today are mostly relying on secondary sources; if they have any open agenda, it is, typically, and appropriately, sympathy with the victims and condemnation of the perpetrators. A higher body count highlights the gravity of the crime. Nevertheless, such numbers originated partly in the retrospective exaggerations of the massacre perpetrators and their twentieth-century apologists. In that sense, we honor the victims of the Colfax Massacre by carefully counting them, even if they were not quite as numerous as many have contended.

 

For details on how we arrived at our conclusions, please see the spreadsheet (Appendix 2). It shows that we were able to verify 35 names with high confidence (green rows on the spreadsheet), 14 with moderate confidence (yellow), and 18 with low confidence (blue). This produces a total of 67 names, well within our overall estimate of 62 to 80 dead.

Appendix 1 (List of Names)

Colfax Appendix 1 (List of Names)

Appendix 2 (Color Coded Spreadsheet of Names)*

Colfax Appendix 2

 

*The rows colored in red indicate names that were mentioned somewhere in the record but that we definitely eliminated as possible victims of the Massacre.

^[1] For key recent works on the Colfax Massacre, see especially Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, The Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt and Company, 2008); LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2008); Joel M. Sipress, “From the Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Murder in Grant Parish,” Louisiana History 42, no. 3 (2001): 303–21. On memories of the massacre, see also David T. Ballantyne, “Remembering the Colfax Massacre: Race, Sex, and the Meanings of Reconstruction Violence,” Journal of Southern History 87, no. 3 (2021): 427-66. For a recent account of the Supreme Court’s backsliding on civil rights in the 1870s and 1880s, see Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press, 2021), chap. 3.

^[2] Elizabeth R. Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon and Schuster, 2023), 194; Equal Justice Initiative, “Louisiana Massacre,”   https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-louisiana-massacre/ (accessed Dec. 22, 2025).  Scholarly accounts since the 1980s have often provided a wider range of possible victim counts.  Eric Foner’s hugely influential Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (Harper and Row, 1988) notes that approximately 50 African Americans were murdered after surrendering, before quoting John G. Lewis’s 1880 claim that “the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes” had been the result of Black self-defense at Colfax. Foner, Reconstruction, 437.  For accounts that provide estimates between approximately 70 and 300, see Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin Press, 2017), 759; Nicholas Lemann, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2006), 22.  For accounts that give a range of approximately 70 to 165, see Keith, Colfax Massacre, 109; Carin Peller-Semmens, Unreconstructed: Slavery and Emancipation on Louisiana’s Red River (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), 196.  As slight outliers, George Rable writes that “perhaps as many as one hundred died,” and Joseph Dawson contends that “probably more than one hundred were killed and wounded.” See Rable, But There Was No Peace, 128; Joseph Dawson, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 144. James Hogue uses Manie White Johnson’s 1929 work (published in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly in 1930) to provide a 64 to 400 Black deaths estimate, but notes the figure “is probably closer to the lower end of the range of estimates.”  See James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 111-12 (quotation on 112).

^[3] Ketanji Brown Jackson, Concurrent Opinion, Trump v. Barbara, 609 U. S. ___ (2026), 6 fn 15, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf.

^[4] In reassessing the body count at Colfax, this piece complements a rich field of research focussed on quantifying and publicizing the extent of historical instances of racial violence, attempts that began during Reconstruction with the efforts of freedpeople, Freedmen’s Bureau agents and others to produce reliable evidence of anti-Black violence.  See, for instance, Monica M. Martinez, “Lives, Not Metadata: Recovery Methods for Digital Histories of Racial Violence,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694 (2021): 67–75. For research pitched at a wider public audience, see especially Equal Justice Initiative, “Documenting Reconstruction Violence: Known and Unknown Horrors,” Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876 (Equal Justice Initiative, 2020), http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep30690.6.  On attempts to detail racial violence in the early years of Reconstruction, see, for instance, Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York University Press, 2012); William A. Blair, The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight for Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

^[5] These figures apply only to the date of the massacre itself; they do not include the wave of white supremacist violence in central Louisiana that both preceded the massacre and continued thereafter, for which the toll is well above 100.

^[6] For figures used to arrive at the 432 estimate, see A Compendium of the Ninth Census (Government Printing Office, 1870), 52-3, 569. For information about Black witnesses at the trials see Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 154-185, and also coverage of the trials in the New Orleans Republican, New Orleans Times-Picayune, New Orleans Bulletin, and L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans.

^[7] “From Grant Parish; Official Report of Staff Officers; On the Ground Tuesday Morning; Horrible Massacre; Burial of Sixty Bodies; An Interview With Nash; The Killed and Wounded,” New Orleans Republican, April 18, 1873, p. 1.

^[8] Jacob H. Smith to Acting Assistant Adjutant General, Department of the Gulf, April 29, 1873, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General (Main Series), 1871-80 (National Archives Microfilm Publications, M666, Roll 93), file 4882 (1872), Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780-1917, Record Group 94, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

^[9] Hiram C. Whitley to George W. Williams, June 1, 1873 (letter containing report of Secret Service detective J. J. Hoffman), Letters Received by the Department of Justice from the Treasury Department, 1871-1884, Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60, National Archives, College Park MD.

^[10] “The Grant Parish Prisoners; Trial in the United States Circuit Court; Closing Arguments in the Case,” New Orleans Republican, March 13, 1874, p. 1; “The Grant Parish Prisoners; Trial in the United States Circuit Court; Judge Woods’ Charge – Waiting for the Verdict,” New Orleans Republican, March 14, 1874, p. 1; Louisiana Affairs: Report of the Select Committee on That Portion of the President’s Message Relating to the Condition of the South; Testimony Taken by the Committee, 43rd Cong, 2nd Sess., H. Rep. 261, Pt. 3 (Government Printing Office, 1875), 416.

^[11] 44th Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 30, Use of the Army in Certain of the Southern States (Government Printing Office, 1877) [hereafter Use of the Army], 436-8 (quotations on 438, original emphasis).  Ted Tunnell made a similar claim in Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 192.

^[12]See Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 105-106.

^[13] Use of the Army, 456-546 (full report). 511-15 (Grant Parish report of killed and wounded, quotation on 513).

^[14] Use of the Army, 511-15 (Forsyth list), 437 (Godfrey list). There are slight variations in spelling: for instance, Godfrey lists a “H. Harrison” as one of the November 1873 deaths rather than “Henderson” reported twice in Forsyth’s list and in 1873 newspaper sources about the alleged rape. The Forsyth list mentions “Tom Middleton” and “Tom Milton,” in addition to “Charles Winston” and “Charley Vincent.” The Middleton/Milton and Winston/Vincent entries are almost certainly referring to the same two persons. On the rape allegation, see also, for instance, Ballantyne, “Remembering the Colfax Massacre,” 434-6.

^[15] Use of the Army, 306 (Phillips list).

^[16] For contemporary non-eyewitness Black accounts, see, for example, “The War of Races: Nearly Three Hundred Negroes Burned to Death by Whites in Louisiana—A Horrible Affair,” New York Times, April 16, 1873, p. 1; Horrible Massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana… (New Orleans, 1873), p. 14. In a study sympathetic to the white paramilitaries written more than half a century after the massacre, Manie White Johnson noted the wide range of claimed death tolls in white paramilitaries’ retrospective recollections.  See Johnson, “The Colfax Riot,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1930): 418. 418 fn 115 read: “Mr. [A. L.] Hopkins said Dr Milton Dunn… estimated that about four hundred were killed; according to Mr. Jonas Rosenthal, four hundred; Judge [R. B.] Williams, about ninety; Colfax Chronicle, ninety-five; [Robert H.] Marr, sixty-four; [George] Hoar, fifty-nine; and to the majority testifying before the Congressional Committee, about sixty or seventy. Clearly an exaggeration is the statement of Mr. Duplissey to the effect that later in the summer, Major Smith… remarked that ‘when he got there he found three hundred and seventy-two bodies that he had his soldiers put in their own trenches and cover up, and he said the negros [sic] has been hauling off bodies all the week.’”  The 1941 Federal Writers’ Project-produced Louisiana: A Guide to the State noted “about 120” Black deaths, but this figure contradicted a draft produced under the auspices of the project’s Alexandria office that referred to “about ninety-five” African American deaths. See Louisiana: A Guide to the State (Hastings House, 1941), 49, 661; “Colfax,” File 42, Drawer 7, Works Progress Administration Papers, Louisiana State Library, Baton Rouge. The public prominence given to the 150 deaths figure likely stemmed from the wording chosen for a 1951 courthouse marker commemorating the “riot.” See, for instance, Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 260.