Address
of
Citizens of Louisiana
to the
People of the United States

This 30‑page pamphlet, authored and signed by a committee of Louisiana citizens 44 strong, details their grievances in the matter of a state election in 1872, against what seems to have been some very high-handed hanky-panky on the part of a group of local politicos backed by the full bayoneted force of the U. S. Federal army: the kind of thing, in sum, that gave post-Civil War "Reconstruction" its enduring bad name. We're still, however, reading a piece of propaganda: the situation was by no means as clear as the pamphlet states, and the disturbances would continue for several more years, the most salient flare‑up being the riot of September 14, 1874.

Technical Details

Edition Used

This transcription is based on the printed work once available as as a raw scan on the Universal Library site of Carnegie-Mellon University; I'm glad I transcribed it when I did, since with the continued shrinkage of the Web, it has been removed from that site. The pamphlet appears to have been published in 1872; it is thus in the public domain: details here on the copyright law involved.

Proofreading

Exceptionally, I first copied the scanned transcription at Carnegie-Mellon; after that, I followed my usual procedure: my version has thus been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

I found three typographical errors in the text, and fixed them, marking the correction each time with one of these: º. Inconsistencies in punctuation have been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different color — barely noticeable on the page, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">. Bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles. Finally, odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked in the sourcecode with <!‑‑ sic or some other brief comment, just to confirm that they were checked. Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated by local links in the sourcecode, and made apparent in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ). In addition, I've inserted a few other local links: whatever links might be required to accommodate the pamphlet's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a colorized version of an engraving, found on p307 of Kendall's History of New Orleans, of the Mechanics' Institute in that city: that building was the scene of much of the foofaraw that occasioned the pamphlet.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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