White Supremacy and Fraud: The "Abolitionist" Work of Henry Frisbie

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• White Supremacy and FraudThe "Abolitionist" Work of Henry Frisbie
• William Horne (bio)

On January 13, 1875, just four months after a White League coup toppled the Louisiana state government, Henry Frisbie warned Maj. Gen. Régis de Trobriand that the state was on the verge of another rebellion. "The same hatred of America, its name, its history, its traditions, [and] its glory," he observed, had inspired the September 1874 "Liberty Place" insurrection under the banner of white supremacy. If Americans were unwilling to punish those who orchestrated the coup or to prevent their paramilitary organizing in the future, they would lose the "right of American citizens to live wherever the flag floats, without danger of assassination for being loyal to American unity." The state that had led the way in Black military service, voting, and civil rights, and integrated education teetered on the brink of destruction at the hands of a violent white backlash. "Is liberty and republicanism," Frisbie challenged, "so poor [that] none will fight for them?"¹

Frisbie began his letter to Trobriand with an allusion to his military service and a withering attack on white Southerners, whom he worried might "repeat history" in yet another insurrection. In his thinking, the Rebellion was ongoing [End Page 69] in the literal battles of Reconstruction, and only treating this insurrectionary violence with the seriousness it required would prevent the gains of the war from being overturned.

new orleans, January 13, 1875

my dear general: you are fighting the same battle we commenced at Pea Ridge. The spirit that drove the Third Louisiana from this city to the distant field of Elk Horn, to meet in battle face to face, and die under the fire of Illinois' Thirty-Seventh, is rampant here today, and would repeat history to-morrow, if not controlled by superior power.

The Same Hatred of America, its name, its history, its traditions, its glory, its Yankees, and the glorying in the "South" and in being southrons, that marked and darkened their character in that epoch, are distinguishing characteristics of them to-day.

White southerners were incapable and seemingly incapable, in Frisbie's estimation, of living in a free and equal society.

During the Rebellion, Frisbie had gained a reputation as a steadfast defender of Black equality, often embracing explicitly abolitionist language. Yet while he trumpeted the cause of freedom in January 1875, he had by then also established himself as a well-known fraudster, and he would be removed from his post as a US commission agent by the end of the year. Indeed, his letter reads both as an indictment of white conservative "threats, ostracism, violence, and murder" and as a request for a commission. He reminded Trobriand, "There is a good many of the old officers and soldiers here, ready to respond to your call; white men, not generally known as such" as well as "the old Corps d'Afrique." Frisbie pronounced himself "one of the leading officers" of Louisiana's Black regiments, with "great faith in its ability to reorganize on very short notice." He conveniently left out that the men of his regiment would almost certainly refuse to fight for him after he had defrauded them of thousands of dollars, enlisted them as plantation workers, and then left them penniless and on the brink of starvation after stealing their crops and wages.

This article builds on several important and burgeoning bodies of literature. It advances research into the nature of abolitionist rhetoric and especially into the substantial gaps in both ideology and praxis between Black and white proponents of abolition. The Black men who fought under Frisbie demanded nothing less than true equality and, with their families, pioneered a postemancipation collectivist labor arrangement. Frisbie defrauded them by adopting the rhetoric [End Page 70] of white radical abolitionism, promising to promote the Black racial equality and financial security demanded by his troops. Frisbie's case also engages a growing literature on the relationship between fraud and capitalism in the Civil War era, on both sides of the war effort, and the ways that both fraud and capital worked in tandem to undercut the labor unrest that animated the conflict. Finally, this essay builds...