By 1833, the family moved to Fort Jessup, Louisiana, the westernmost outpost of the United States at that time.

Later, Joseph Elam read law with his cousin John Waddill in Alexandria, Louisiana.

In 1853, Waddill helped obtain freedom of Solomon Northup, a kidnapped man from New York and the subject of the film, Twelve Years a Slave, who had been sold into slavery in Louisiana.

Under its 1841 law, the state of New York commissioned an attorney to help find and free the kidnapped man.

[1][page needed] Elam was admitted to the bar in October 1843 and began his practice in Alexandria.

In 1861, Elam was elected a delegate to the Confederate Constitutional Convention and signed the Louisiana Ordinance of Secession on January 26, 1861.

Because of violence and intimidation associated with elections, conducted in part by the Ku Klux Klan trying to suppress black and other Republican voting, the Radicals passed legislation in 1870 to establish "returning boards," which were authorized to review elections and dismiss results from ones in which fraud was committed.

That year, the U. S. Congress passed the Force Act, intended to aid in suppressing the power of the KKK in the South.

[7] The elections continued to be marked by violence by the White League, a paramilitary group that supported the Democratic Party, disrupted Republican gatherings and worked to suppress black voting.

A national political compromise of that year allowed him and other Democrats to take office, along with the accession of Republican Rutherford Hayes as President.