by Wesley Harris
In the turbulent years after the Civil War, north Louisiana often seemed only a spark away from open war.
Reconstruction brought federal troops, bitter elections, contested courts, charges of fraud, armed political clubs, racial terror, and deep resentment between white Democrats and Republican officeholders. In some Louisiana parishes, the bloodshed after Appomattox exceeded the violence local people had experienced during the war itself. Lynchings, assassinations, political intimidation, and retaliatory raids filled newspaper columns and left communities divided for generations.
Lincoln Parish was born into that storm.
Created in 1873 from portions of Bienville, Claiborne, Jackson, and Union parishes, Lincoln Parish was still organizing itself when Reconstruction politics reached one of its most volatile moments. The parish seat was Vienna, an older settlement that served as the center of government before Ruston existed. Courthouse politics, federal authority, and local resentment converged there in 1874, producing a tense confrontation that could easily have turned bloody.
Instead, it became one of those rare Reconstruction episodes in which angry men with guns stepped back from the edge.
The trouble grew out of the 1874 election season. Across Louisiana, Republicans, backed by federal power, struggled to hold office while Democrats sought to regain control of local and state government. U.S. troops were stationed throughout the state to support federal marshals and enforce federal law. To Republicans, the soldiers were necessary protection against violence and intimidation. To many white Democrats, they were an occupying army.
In north Louisiana, no federal officer was more despised by Democrats than Major Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry. Merrill had previously been used against Ku Klux Klan violence in South Carolina, and in 1874 he was sent to Louisiana to help suppress political intimidation. Democratic newspapers called him “Dog Merrill,” a nickname that reflected the venom of the times.
Under Merrill’s command, Lieutenant Benjamin Hodgson led cavalrymen in support of Deputy U.S. Marshal Edgar Selye. In October 1874, Selye and the soldiers began making arrests in Claiborne and Lincoln Parishes. They first went to Homer, where they arrested Judge Nelson J. Scott, Parish Recorder John H. Ramsey, and Dr. Sterling R. Richardson, mayor of Homer. The men were accused of interfering with a Republican meeting of mostly former slaves—now American citizens. The arrested officeholders insisted they had tried to prevent a riot.
The party then moved toward Lincoln Parish. Accompanying the cavalry was Congressman Frank Morey, a Republican from Massachusetts who had gained the northeast Louisiana Congressional seat. A favorite target of Democratic newspapers, Morey stopped at Greensborough, the home of Allen Greene. Greene was Lincoln Parish’s leading Republican figure, and he and his sons had become deeply unpopular with many local Democrats. Their influence was so strong that critics accused them of moving parish government to their plantation. Their lives had been threatened if they didn’t return parish records to Vienna and resign their offices.
At Vienna, Selye hoped to arrest many of the 78 Lincoln Parish men named in warrants. Only three men were found, among them James Grisham Huey, the former Jackson Parish sheriff who lost his seat when his home was taken in by the newly created Lincoln Parish. Also arrested were Ainsley H. Mayfield, a Lincoln Parish deputy sheriff and P. L. Phillips. They were accused of participating in the throng that went to Greensborough and demanded the resignations of the Greenes, U.S. Commissioner David J. M. A. Jewett, and other Republican officeholders.
Huey, Mayfield, and Phillips surrendered without resistance. Yet the manner of the arrests inflamed local opinion. The prisoners were hurried away without time, according to Democratic accounts, to consult their families or even gather a change of clothes. When Huey asked by what authority he was being arrested, Lieutenant Hodgson reportedly drew his revolver and answered, “This is my authority.”
That was precisely the kind of gesture that could have turned Vienna into a battleground.
The prisoners from Claiborne and Lincoln were held overnight in the Vienna jail. Local men armed themselves and gathered in town. The next morning, federal authorities rushed the prisoners toward Monroe. Fearing hostile citizens might alert Monroe by telegraph, Hodgson and Selye ordered the telegraph wires cut.
Meanwhile, Eleventh District Judge James Trimble issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering the prisoners brought before his court and requiring the marshal and soldiers to explain their detention. The writ was served by Claiborne Parish Sheriff W. F. Aycock. Hodgson refused to honor it. Aycock later reported Hodgson surrounded him with troops, faced him with a pistol, and declared that he would not respect parish officers.
More plainly, Lt. Hodgson had said he would use the judge’s order to wipe himself next time he went to the outhouse.
The prisoners were taken to Monroe, where U.S. Commissioner Jewett set bail. But the legal and political battle had only begun. Trimble’s authority had been defied. Telegraph property had been damaged. Local citizens believed federal officers had trampled civil law. Federal officers believed local authorities were interfering with national enforcement.
On November 6, Lincoln Parish Deputy Sheriff Edgar Howard went to Monroe with warrants for Hodgson and Selye. He was accompanied by a posse of twenty or thirty men. Hodgson was arrested at a hotel. Selye fled and was later found hiding in the attic of Chief Justice John T. Ludeling’s home. The posse disarmed him and promised he would not be harmed.
That restraint mattered.
Howard and his men returned Hodgson and Selye to Vienna. Congressman Morey immediately warned Major Merrill the two men had been arrested by the Lincoln Parish sheriff and “two hundred men” and taken to Vienna. Merrill feared mob violence and ordered troops toward the parish seat. More soldiers were placed on alert. Lawyers were dispatched. Telegrams flew between Shreveport, Monroe, Vienna, and New Orleans.
For a moment, the situation looked dangerous enough to bring north Louisiana into open conflict between local citizens and federal troops.
Yet the confrontation did not explode.
Captain George E. Head, commanding infantry at Monroe, wired Merrill that he anticipated “no danger.” Attorney William R. Hardy, representing Hodgson, sent an even more revealing message from Vienna: “Everything quiet here, perfectly, as much so as in Boston.”
That sentence is striking. Vienna was full of anger. Armed men had gathered. Federal troops were nearby. A U.S. cavalry officer and deputy marshal were in the parish jail. Yet the town did not descend into bloodshed.
Judge Trimble sentenced Hodgson and Selye to ten days in jail, a $100 fine, and costs for contempt of court. Governor William P. Kellogg issued pardons. Local citizens asked Trimble to reconsider Hodgson’s sentence, and the judge discharged him. A grand jury then indicted Hodgson for cutting the telegraph wires, but he was taken into military custody and sent to New Orleans. He later faced court-martial and received a reprimand. He died at the Little Big Horn with George Custer in 1876.
Selye’s case took an even stranger turn. After bail was arranged, his own attorney, John Dinkgrave, announced he was acting as a deputy U.S. marshal and held a warrant charging Selye with embezzlement. Many viewed the move as a ruse for removing Selye from local jurisdiction. He was taken to Monroe and then sent by steamer to New Orleans. Neither he nor Jewett returned to Lincoln Parish to face local charges.
The episode later cast the federal side in an even harsher light. In 1876, Selye testified before Congress that the raid’s purpose was to remove prominent Democrats from Claiborne and Lincoln until after the election. He also said Jewett, who issued the warrants, had not been properly commissioned at the time and that Congressman Morey was behind the scheme. If true, the arrests that brought Vienna to the brink rested on invalid authority.
But the most important local lesson may be what did not happen.
Lincoln Parish in 1874 had all the ingredients for Reconstruction violence. It was a new parish with unsettled political institutions. Its parish seat was caught in a fight between federal power and local courts. Its citizens were angry, armed, and suspicious. A federal officer had defied a judge. A deputy marshal had been found hiding in an attic. Telegraph wires had been cut. Troops were moving. Telegrams from military officers spoke of danger and possible mob action.
In another parish, under slightly different leadership or with a few rash shots fired, the Vienna affair might have become a massacre.
Instead, local authority asserted itself through warrants, courts, bonds, and grand juries. Federal commanders, though alarmed, ultimately allowed legal processes to proceed. Citizens who despised Selye and Hodgson did not lynch them. The posse that found Selye promised his safety. Even those most offended by the arrests worked through Judge Trimble’s court rather than through vengeance.
This is not to romanticize Reconstruction in Lincoln Parish. The era was bitter, unjust, and unstable. Black citizens faced intimidation. White Democrats often sought to regain power by suppressing Republican political activity. Republican officials sometimes used federal authority in heavy-handed and corrupt ways. The law itself became a battlefield.
But compared with the worst Reconstruction violence elsewhere in Louisiana, Lincoln Parish’s first years were marked less by bloodshed than by brinkmanship. Vienna saw fury, armed men, federal troops, jailings, and legal defiance. It also saw restraint.
In the end, that restraint kept Lincoln Parish from joining the list of places where Reconstruction politics became wholesale slaughter. The parish was born in chaos, but in Vienna, at least for one dangerous week in 1874, cooler heads prevailed.
