The Battle of Liberty Place, or Battle of Canal Street, was an attempted insurrection and coup d'etat by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction Era Louisiana Republican state government on September 14, 1874, in New Orleans, which was the capital of Louisiana at the time. Five thousand members of the White League, a paramilitary terrorist organization made up largely of Confederate veterans, fought against the outnumbered New Orleans Metropolitan Police and state militia. The insurgents held the statehouse, armory, and downtown for three days, retreating before arrival of federal troops that restored the elected government. At least 32 people, including at least 21 members of the White League, were killed in the fighting. No insurgents were charged in the action.
The "Louisiana Outrages", as illustrated in Harper's Weekly, 1874
James Longstreet after the Civil War
"Battle at the Customs House", an egraving in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1874
Frederick Nash Ogden
The White League, also known as the White Man's League, was a white supremacist paramilitary terrorist organization started in the Southern United States in 1874 to intimidate freedmen into not voting and prevent Republican Party political organizing, while also being supported by regional elements of the Democratic Party. Its first chapter was formed in Grant Parish, Louisiana, and neighboring parishes and was made up of many of the Confederate veterans who had participated in the Colfax massacre in April 1873. Chapters were soon founded in New Orleans and other areas of the state.
White League and Ku Klux Klan alliance, in illustration, by Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, October 24, 1874
A sword-wielding Columbia in an 1874 Thomas Nast cartoon, protecting an injured black man from being beaten by a mob of White Leaguers
Julie Hayden, a 17-year-old Tennessee schoolteacher who was murdered by the White League in 1874.