Abstract
Coordinated, violent political attacks increased throughout the months leading up to the 1868 presidential election in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Among the various Democratic organizations involved in election campaigning and voter intimidation, the group that received the lion’s share of credit for political attacks was the Innocents. The Innocents were a multi-lingual organization, made up mostly of Sicilians and other immigrants from modern Italy, but the club was helmed by well-connected Creole gentlemen. This paper explores the alliance between the Innocents’ Creole officers and Italian membership. That New Orleans’s fledgling Italian community found itself at the forefront of coordinated Democratic Party efforts to suppress the black vote calls into question the characterization of this group as non-white: Italian immigrants could support and benefit from white supremacy while continuing to experience prejudice. Such alliances have a history in New Orleans, where before the Civil War the local Know-Nothings held the unusual policy of embracing Catholics and even courting the immigrant vote. Indeed, several former Know-Nothings and their allies can be found among the Innocents’ leadership. Not all of the Innocents supported their organization’s role in the reactionary violence of 1868, and the actions of the club’s liberal members provides interesting complications to the Democratic Party’s courtship of the Italian community in New Orleans. This paper concludes by tracking the Innocents into their next iteration, as the Columbus Legion, and the association between the Democratic Party and Italians in New Orleans through several elections and state constitutional conventions.
