Alexandre Etienne de Clouet

[3] After the Confederacy's defeat, de Clouet worked to take away the rights, most prominently suffrage, granted to freed slaves during Reconstruction.

In 1874, he became one of the first leaders of the White League, a violent paramilitary group formed to prevent freedmen from voting, including through an insurrection that temporarily overthrew the state's governor at the Battle of Liberty Place.

De Clouet described the league's goal as "consolidating the white race in another effort to restore our state to its rightful rulers" and taking power away from the "unscrupulous adventurers, knaves, and office-seekers" that influenced the "blind and ignorant negro voters.

[6] By October, the state of mob rule in St. Martin led the federal government to send armed forces into the parish, arresting de Clouet and several other leaders of what one newspaper called "the DeClouet rebellion.

"[7][8] Witnesses testified to a Congressional committee that de Clouet's White Leaguers had run "many colored men...into the swamp" and lynched at least one black man in the lead-up to the November election: "White Republicans did not dare to go out unless with a soldier; no colored man could have registered or voted had not troops been there; a commissioner could not obtain a posse to assist him.