Charles C. Cordill (October 13, 1845 – November 22, 1916), was a cotton planter[1] and politician from Tensas Parish in the northeastern portion of the U.S. state of Louisiana.
He was a member of the Louisiana State Senate from 1884 until 1912 in which he represented both Tensas and neighboring Concordia Parish to the south.
Cordill's political power rested on the firm support from the white landowners at a time when the African-American constituency was disenfranchised despite the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
[4] Cordill's power was challenged in the 1878 general election by a coalition of former Confederate white yeoman farmers and blacks who joined together in the "Country People's Ticket".
[5] In 1878, Judge Cordill, a staunch segregationist,[6] pursued a band of African Americans who had killed a Captain Peck of Catahoula Parish.
According to "Vignettes" of the American Civil War by Francis McRae Ward, Cordill and his posse of one hundred reached Bass Lane, about a mile north of Waterproof in southern Tensas Parish, in the area near Cordill's plantation, and came upon some approximately one thousand blacks.
Rather than wait for reinforcements, Cordill ordered an attack with the expectation, correct as it turned out, that the blacks would flee, rather than fight.
The posse members included Carneal Goldman, Sr., a Waterproof planter, and William Mackenzie Davidson, later the first mayor of St. Joseph after incorporation.
[3][7] In 1894, Cordill introduced a bill that would have allowed set up dual voting systems for majority-Black and majority-white parishes.