Narrator: It was mid-afternoon in New Orleans when the crowd began to gather at the foot of Canal Street. The date was February 25, 1873, and the city -- like the rest of the American South -- had yet to emerge from the long shadow of Civil War.
Captured by Union troops not long after the conflict began, New Orleans had endured three years of military occupation and a ruinous interruption of trade before the Confederates finally surrendered in 1865. The years since had been marked by unrelenting turmoil and steady economic decline -- and the city was now hovering on the brink of chaos.
To New Orleanians, it was an ideal moment for a party. By the time the sun went down on Canal Street, thousands of them had turned out to witness the procession of "Rex," the self-proclaimed King of Carnival and the official leader of the annual Mardi Gras parade.
Kalamu ya Salaam, Writer: It's Fat Tuesday. It's the last chance to fatten yourself up before Easter. And so it's a religious holiday with pagan roots that never caught on in the rest of the United States because the rest of the United States was Protestant and not Catholic.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: Carnival was something that came over from, from France and it began as a street celebration where people would mask and they'd have dances and balls so actually it percolated up from the streets, but the, the, the Carnival that a lot of people know today that's around these "krewes," these parades, these organized parades is something that was superimposed on Carnival.
George Schmidt, Painter: the Creoles celebrated it. And they celebrated it so well, that at a point, in the mid 19th century, the Americans in their, "We can do anything" attitude say, "Well, we are going to take it and improve it." "We are going to give it some shape, some order." So they decide they were going to put on a procession. And it was unbelievably popular.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: If you really begin to, peel away the layers of meaning and symbolism you have a, a governing group there that's never really felt entirely in control. They've tried to rule, but this has been a city too unruly to rule. The organized parade is something to kind of assert their primacy and to say, "Well, we can be arbiters of culture."
Narrator: The parade rolled on hour after hour, well into the night -- a river of masked revelers and extravagant floats, jugglers and torch-bearers and marching bands. As New Orleanians liked to say, it was by far "the greatest free show on earth."
But for the spectators in 1873, the most vivid impression would be left by the last division, the members of a secret Carnival society -- or krewe -- called Comus, after the ancient god of mirth.
They emerged out of the gathering darkness, all wearing enormous papier-mÂché animal heads that poked fun at Charles Darwin's controversial theory of evolution by portraying well-known public figures as missing links in the chain. Benjamin Butler, the Union General responsible for the wartime occupation of New Orleans, appeared as a hyena; President Ulysses S. Grant, a man rarely seen without his cigar, a lowly tobacco grub. But the most pointed lampoon came late in the evening, during the exclusive Comus ball, with the crowning of the "The Gorilla" -- a caricature of Oscar J. Dunn, who recently had served as Louisiana's lieutenant governor and had been the first black person elected to that office anywhere in the United States.
Harpers Weekly magazine hailed the Comus pageant as "irresistibly laughable." But the spectacle was hardly all in jest.
James Gill, Journalist: The intent was to mock Darwin's theory itself and also the absurdity that a black man should be at the apex of society. So you have an attack not just on the Darwin theories, but on the social disruption that they feared it might contribute to and which of course they thought was already happening in their view during the Reconstruction era.
Narrator: To the men behind the fanciful Comus masks, members of the secretive and socially-exclusive Pickwick Club, there were few words in the English language more loathsome than "reconstruction."
The term referred to an 1867 act of Congress that had subjected the states of the former Confederacy, including Louisiana, to federal military rule; but to the Pickwickians, it was synonymous with defeat and humiliation.
Before the Civil War, the men of the Pickwick Club had been the elite of New Orleans. In their dealings as prominent businessmen and bankers, professionals and politicians, they had considerable contact with blacks, especially with the free people of color. But such racial mixing always had taken place against the backdrop of an unquestioned social hierarchy: slaves on the bottom rung, free people of color in the middle, whites on top.
Reconstruction had changed all that. With Congress dictating the terms of Louisiana's readmission to the Union, and U.S. Army forces on hand to ensure compliance, blacks had been given rights previously unheard of anywhere in the United States. First, they had been made voters and officeholders. Then, in 1868, Louisiana had passed its Reconstruction Constitution, which granted to all citizens of the state -- black and white -- absolute equality under the law.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: The 1868 constitution was in racial terms the most radical and progressive constitution anywhere in America. And it was pushed by the free people of color in New Orleans who not only were wealthier but ... and more educated, but I think more politically sophisticated and self-confident. And they said, "Listen, equality isn't just legal, it doesn't mean we have the right to vote or the right to sit in juries. It means we have a right to equal standing in the public order."
Kalamu ya Salaam, Writer: The Constitution reflected the thinking of black people who had a stake in governing their lives in ways in which in other parts of the country black people had not yet achieved. You had blacks who were lawyers, who were doctors and what have you, who were bi and tri-lingual. And not just people who were ex-slaves. So these people have a different consciousness and it manifests itself in political terms.
Ari Kelman, Historian: And of course there's an entrenched white power structure that finds that abhorrent, distasteful, profoundly threatening, and those people do everything in their power to sort of turn back the clock.
Narrator: Inspired by the Ku Klux Klan, aggrieved Pickwickians now joined with other whites in New Orleans and formed a volunteer militia called the Crescent City White League. According to the League's published platform, their aim was to put an end to Reconstruction -- and to what they called "the most absurd inversion of the relations of race."
On September 14, they took action. That morning, the leaders of the White League held a mass rally on Canal Street and urged the several thousand men in attendance to return to their homes, arm themselves and seize control of the state government.
During the tense hours that followed, White Leaguers marched on the Customs House, where Louisiana's governor was holed up in an office, and demanded his resignation. When he refused to step down, a force of several hundred White League members opened fire on the city's bi-racial police force, leaving eleven dead and sixty more wounded.
By the end of the day, the White League was in full control of New Orleans.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: Basically what they did was launch a coup d'etat. But President Grant and Republicans in Washington said no, this is too much of a defiance of legitimate order.
Narrator: Grant immediately dispatched federal troops -- and within a week, the insurrection had been subdued. But the federal intervention would only fuel the resistance to Reconstruction.
James Gill, Journalist: You could look at that as the beginning of the end of the Reconstruction era because the White League remained strong, in fact was patrolling the streets in 1877 when the federals finally decided to withdraw and then once the federals went, then white society was free to undo what had been done in Reconstruction. So in fact the Confederates had lost the war but of course were about to win the peace.