Judge R. K. Howell was elected as chairman of the convention, with the goal of increasing participation by voters likely to vote for removal of the Black Codes.

The New Orleans massacre was a continuation of a longer shooting war over slavery (beginning with Bleeding Kansas in 1859), of which the 1861–1865 hostilities were merely the largest part.

The national reaction of outrage at the earlier Memphis riots of 1866 and the New Orleans massacre helped the Radical Republicans win a majority in both houses of Congress in the 1866 midterm elections.

The riots catalyzed support for the Fourteenth Amendment, extending suffrage and full citizenship to freedmen, and the Reconstruction Act, to establish military districts for the national government to oversee areas of the South and work to change their social arrangements.

The State Constitutional Convention of 1864 authorized greater civil freedoms to Blacks within Louisiana yet provided no voting rights for any people of color.

Free people of color, who were mixed-race, had been an important part of New Orleans for more than a century and were established as a separate class in the colonial period, before United States annexation of the territory in 1803.

On the corner of Common and Dryades streets, across from the Mechanics Institute, a group of armed whites awaited the black marchers.

[14] This group was composed largely of Democrats who opposed abolition; most were ex-Confederates who wanted to disrupt the convention and the threat to white supremacy the increasing political and economic power of blacks in the state represented.

The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.Federal troops responded to suppress the riot and jailed many of the white insurgents.

In both houses of Congress, the faction known as the "Radical Republicans" prevailed and imposed much harsher terms of Reconstruction on the states of the former Confederacy.

Ex-Confederate soldiers and leaders, most of whom were white supporters of the Democratic Party, were temporarily disenfranchised, and the right of suffrage was to be enforced for free people of color.

On assuming command of the district, the general had announced his intention to avoid the wholesale removal of civil officials unless the authorities failed "to carry out the provisions of the law or impeded reorganization".

Displeased with the civil authorities' handling of the New Orleans riot the previous summer and their failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, Sheridan dismissed Mayor Monroe, State Attorney General Herron, and Judge Edmund Abell from office and replaced them with Republicans whom he believed would faithfully execute their duties.

If his own assertion be correct as to the present relation of Louisiana to the Union, the President convicts himself of the most extraordinary and passionate act of executive usurpation and federal centralization recorded in our history.

Every negro hater and every disloyal ruffian knew from the President's dispatch that the right of the citizens to assemble and declare their views would not be protected.

The men who had bravely resisted it for four years were murdered under its encouragement, and while they were still lying warm in their blood the President telegraphed that they were "an unlawful assembly," and that "usurpation will not be tolerated" – words which he had no shadow of authority to utter except by the same right which empowered him to save all those lives; a right which he declined to exercise.Benjamin Butler, an early advocate for the prospect of impeaching President Andrew Johnson, as early as October 1866 proposed alleged complicity in the massacre as one of several grounds for impeaching Johnson.

[23] After his election to the United States House of Representatives in the November 1866 House elections, Congressman-elect Butler continued to assert that, among several grounds for impeaching Johnson, was that Johnson allegedly, "unlawfully, corruptly, and wickedly confederating and conspiring with one John T. Monroe...and other evil disposed persons, traitors, and rebels," in relation to the massacre.