Alcibiade DeBlanc was an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War. At the end of the conflict he became a leading spokesman for Confederate veterans in his native Louisiana. Soon after surrender he began speaking out against the Post-Emancipation regime.

The document below is the July 1865 letter he had published that served as a manifesto for the veterans’ resistance to African American civil rights.

DeBlanc offers a stark admission that the former Confederates only admit to the sovereignty of the United States because they have been overpowered by force. He charges that the triumph of the Union is leading to the “degradation of our race.” He warns that abolition of slavery has made Black people “useless to themselves their families and the state.”

Most of the letter is self-pitying bombast, yet it commanded a large audience in Louisiana when it was published. DeBlanc would soon turn his words of defiance into action when he began organizing the violent former Confederates into the terrorist Knights of the White Camellia, Louisiana’s manifestation of the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan. More on that later.

At the end of the Reconstruction Era DeBlanc became a justice of the state supreme court.

New Orleans Tribune

Friday, Jul 21, 1865