On October 27, 1868, mobs of white people continued a massacre of at least 35 Black people in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, days before the presidential election. The terror campaign succeeded in suppressing Black political participation in the parish.

In 1868, the majority of people living in St. Bernard Parish, a plantation community located just outside New Orleans, were formerly enslaved Black people. At the beginning of the Reconstruction era—the period of legal, political, and social re-creation that followed the Civil War—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteed Black men the right to vote. As a result, Black people comprised the decisive bloc of voters in St. Bernard Parish for the first time.

The 1868 presidential election was the first after the end of the Civil War. In it, Republican candidate and former Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who had led the Union Army to victory and championed Reconstruction, faced Democrat Horatio Seymour, who promised to halt Reconstruction, restore states' rights, and allow states to determine voting rights for their citizens.

In 1868, Seymour billed himself as the “white man’s” candidate and accused his opponent, Ulysses Grant, of standing for “Negro supremacy.” Seymour infamously campaigned on the slogan “This is a white man's country: Let white men rule.”

On October 25, days before the election, Seymour supporters—who were vastly outnumbered in St. Bernard Parish—took up arms and held a demonstration. As they marched past a Black citizen named Eugene Lock, they demanded that he cheer for Seymour. When Mr. Lock refused, they shot and stabbed him to death.

Rightly fearing that Mr. Lock’s death, as well as the mob’s subsequent killing of a white police officer who had fought in the Union Army, would lead to mass killings of Black people, many Black residents fled their homes. Over the next three days, mobs of armed white Seymour supporters violently rioted against the Black residents who stayed.

According to later congressional testimony, “armed white men…prowled around the parish killing and maltreating every colored man that appeared on the road, and not content with this went to their residences, robbed them of their money, provisions, clothing, registration papers, and in some instances the discharge papers of discharged soldiers were taken.”

By the time federal troops arrived to quell the violence, at least 35 Black people had been killed. Some sources suggest this number was significantly higher.

The mob succeeded in suppressing the Black vote. Ulysses S. Grant received only a single vote in St. Bernard Parish despite its Republican majority.

No mob member was ever arrested or held accountable for their participation in the massacre.