As the United States approaches what are bound to be particularly contentious November midterm elections, profound questions regarding the might and meaning of the vote in American society are seemingly everywhere. Battles over voter ID laws and felon disfranchisement, lawsuits that seek to overturn gerrymandered districts, and allegations of voter fraud and election tampering by foreign powers all demonstrate that arguments about who gets to vote and whether votes are fairly counted are central to the electoral process.

Such struggles are nothing new. Today marks the 152^nd anniversary of one of the deadliest attacks on voting rights activists in American history. In New Orleans on July 30, 1866, a white mob, led by police and firemen, massacred delegates and spectators at a state constitutional convention convened to guarantee voting rights to African American men. The attack left over forty African Americans dead, over 150 wounded, and a nation reeling.

In 1864, Union forces had almost entirely liberated Louisiana from Confederate control, and the state’s all-white electorate had drafted and ratified a new state constitution that acknowledged the abolition of slavery. Still, the document sanctioned restrictions on African American civil and political rights, and in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Louisiana voters, many of whom were Confederate veterans, returned numerous Confederate officials to state and federal offices under the banner of a Democratic Party that openly proclaimed to be in favor of white supremacy. “We hold this to be a Government of white people,” the platform of the state party maintained, “made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race.” Indeed, the platform announced, “people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States.” It came as no surprise that the state legislature promptly passed discriminatory laws known as Black Codes that targeted the formerly enslaved, nor that the mayor of New Orleans, former Confederate John T. Monroe, instructed city policemen to single out the formerly enslaved for arrest.

Frustrated by this ongoing racial discrimination and the resumption of Confederate rule, in 1866 leading African American suffrage activists convinced a handful of white former delegates to Louisiana’s 1864 Constitutional Convention to reconvene the convention in New Orleans, and to draft a state constitutional amendment enfranchising African American men. Their plan relied upon a technicality, namely that the motion to adjourn the 1864 Convention had contained a provision authorizing it to reconvene to pass amendments at any later date.

Supporters of universal male suffrage argued that without African American political participation, former Confederates would continue passing racially discriminatory legislation, recreating slavery in all but name. “Liberty is but a word as long as taxation, elections, and the whole political machinery are confined in the hands of an inimical race,” warned Oscar Dunn, a formerly enslaved leader among suffrage activists in the city. Activists also recognized that the vote bore profound symbolic significance. In a world where women could not vote and political participation signified manhood and status, exclusion from the polls was both emasculating and humiliating. African American men demanded “political rights,” argued black Union army veteran and future Louisiana Governor P.B.S. Pinchback, but they also demanded “to become men.”

The vote was no less meaningful to embittered Confederate army veterans, who already felt emasculated by military defeat and saw the prospect of African American enfranchisement as an amplification of that emasculation. State Democratic officials declared the reconvening of the Constitutional Convention illegal. When judicial challenges to the reconvening failed, Mayor Monroe, the police chief, and former Confederate officers secretly resolved to annihilate the convention delegates instead. They covertly enlisted hundreds of Confederate army veterans as emergency police officers, and police and fire stations received orders to prepare for a showdown on July 30, 1866.

On the morning of the convention, a jubilant parade of African American suffrage supporters carried a large American flag and followed a marching band through the streets towards the hall where the convention delegates were assembling. The marchers’ elation shifted towards apprehension as crowds of hostile onlookers began to gather. A fight broke out. Distant pistol fire cracked.

Inside the hall, the chairman called the convention to order. Realizing that they lacked a quorum, the delegates agreed to reconvene in one hour. But as delegates and spectators drifted towards the doorway as the beleaguered parade arrived, the city’s fire bell rang twelve tolls, the traditional code for summoning residents to defend the city against imminent enemy attack. As the bell fell silent, police, firemen, and white civilians surrounded the parade and the hall.

Then they opened fire.

Lucien Jean Pierre Capla, a freeborn storekeeper and Union army veteran, had brought his teenage son Alfred to witness the historic assembly. They watched rioters slaughter marchers kneeling in surrender, and mutilate their bodies. “I saw the people fall like flies,” Capla later recalled. “They shot them, and when they done that, they tramped upon them, and mashed their heads with their boots, and shot them after they were down.” Father seized son and tried to flee, but the mob tore the pair apart. Lucien Capla suffered a fractured skull and a gunshot wound; Alfred received four bullets, three knife wounds, and the obliteration of his right eye. Police threw both in jail, but both survived.

Inside the hall, Dr. A.P. Dostie, a white dentist and leading convention delegate, tried to calm the trapped delegates and spectators. “The flag will protect us!” Dostie cried from the podium. Then a bullet pierced his arm. The rioters entered the hall, firing indiscriminately. Two policemen dragged Dostie to the city’s main thoroughfare, where the mob took turns striking, clubbing, and shooting him.  As Dostie lay dying, police flung his body into a cart, parading him before the cheering crowds.

When federal troops finally arrived hours later, the floor was sticky with blood. Three white delegates and more than forty African American supporters lay dead.  Another 150 lay wounded. Only one white Democrat had been killed, by a policeman’s stray bullet.

Yet the attack backfired. News of the brutality swept the nation and horrified the North, galvanizing northern white support for African American political and civil rights. Republicans swept the 1866 Congressional elections. In 1867, Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act, placing the South under federal military control and calling for new constitutional conventions in which African American men could vote for delegates.  Federal officials removed Mayor Monroe and other former Confederate officials from office. Louisiana’s new legislature dissolved the New Orleans’ police department and replaced it with a racially integrated force.

In November 1867, under the protection of federal troops, an interracial coalition of white, freeborn, and formerly enslaved political operatives convened another state constitutional convention in New Orleans. Delegates included survivors of the 1866 massacre. The assembly wrote one of the most radically advanced constitutions in the nation’s history. The document, which remained in force for just over a decade, guaranteed equal justice before the law, equal political and civil rights for men, and universal access to public transportation and public accommodations. It also mandated the creation of a state funded and racially integrated public education system.

Both perpetrators and victims of the 1866 Massacre recognized that the vote formed the basis of the nation’s political fabric. Yet in fighting to stamp out African American political participation, the 1866 rioters had inadvertently helped usher in a democratic revolution, the likes of which Louisiana would not see again for another century.