The Opelousas Massacre: 200–300 Killed to Deliver a Zero-Vote Election

Erasmus Bentley was a white Northern Republican — a "carpetbagger" in Democratic parlance — who had come to Opelousas to teach in the freedmen's schools and who published a Republican newspaper, the St. Landry Progress. In the weeks before the 1868 presidential election, the newspaper urged Black residents to register and vote for Ulysses Grant. This was intolerable to local Democrats.

On September 28, 1868, a group of Democrats attacked Bentley's office. In the confrontation that followed, Bentley wounded several of his attackers. He fled to the house of a local Black man for protection. Democrats surrounded the house, took Bentley prisoner — and then used his act of self-defense as a pretext to declare that armed Black insurrection was underway in St. Landry Parish.

There was no insurrection. But the pretext was all that was needed. Democratic rifle clubs fanned out across the parish over the following weeks.

What followed Bentley's arrest was not a single massacre but a sustained terror campaign across St. Landry Parish. Democratic paramilitary forces — some estimates put their number at several hundred — rode from community to community, killing Black men identified as Republican organizers or voters, burning freedmen's churches and schools, and dispersing any gathering of Black residents at gunpoint.

The Congressional Joint Select Committee on Conditions of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States later collected testimony from survivors. The accounts describe men dragged from their homes and shot in front of their families; bodies left in fields and on roadsides; Black people fleeing into the bayous and swamps for days without food or shelter. Estimates of the death toll range from approximately 150 to over 300. The number of those who were wounded, displaced, or driven from their homes was far higher.

In the 1868 presidential election, St. Landry Parish — which had a large Black Republican majority — returned 4,787 Democratic votes and zero Republican votes. Not a single Republican voted in the parish. The result was not a political outcome. It was a measurement of how completely the terror campaign had succeeded.

Louisiana as a whole was carried by the Democrats in 1868, despite having a Black majority, because the same campaign of violence was replicated in parish after parish. Bossier Parish saw a similar massacre that same election season, with estimates of 150–200 Black people killed. The combination of these campaigns — all operating on the same template, all coordinated by Democratic Party leadership — delivered Louisiana to the Democrats and demonstrated, for anyone paying attention, that mass murder was an effective and consequence-free electoral strategy.

The Opelousas Massacre preceded the Colfax Massacre by five years and the Hamburg Massacre by eight. It was the first large-scale demonstration that mass killing before an election could successfully nullify Black political power in a majority-Black jurisdiction. The template — manufacture a pretext, unleash paramilitary violence weeks before the election, drive Black voters from the polls, deliver the election to Democrats — was replicated across the South with minor variations from 1868 through at least 1876.

The Opelousas Massacre is almost completely absent from American history curricula. There is no national memorial. The perpetrators were celebrated locally as defenders of white civilization. Bentley, whose act of self-defense was used as the pretext, fled Louisiana and was never able to return safely.