Mardi Gras Parade 1873-Darwin’s Missing Link Was Black and Grant Was a Bug!

You might think that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was unpopular in the South, but in 1873 it was the theme of the city’s largest Mardi Gras parade.

The Mardi Gras parades of the Reconstruction Era sometimes had political themes critical of Republican efforts to establish civil equality among the races. The parades then, as now, were put on by Krewes drawn from their cities’ elite. While New Orleans had the best-known and most established parades, other cities along the Gulf and the Mississippi River also celebrated Mardi Gras  some years.

Charles Briton drew the Mardi Gras costumes for the Mistick Krewe of Comus’ “Missing Links to Darwin’s Origin of the Species” parade in 1873. The costumes satirized the Republicans whom elite whites blamed for the racial reset of Reconstruction.

The first drawing is of Union General Ben Butler, depicted a hyena. It shows him making off with a spoon. Butler was rumored to have stolen spoons when visiting a home while he was in command of Union forces during the occupation of New Orleans. After the war, Butler had been elected to Congress where became a leading Radical Republican, an opponent of Andrew Johnson, and a champion of civil rights.

Henry Warmoth, Louisiana’s former Republican governor, was depicted as a rattlesnake. Warmoth was elected with the support of the African American community, but his efforts to conciliate white elites led to charges that he sold-out the Black voters who had once been his base.

Algernon Badger was the head of the Metropolitan Police in New Orleans. This was the first large police force in the South to be integrated. Because Black officers had the same powers as white, a Black officer could arrest a white suspect, an outrage in the minds of many whites. Badger was particularly hated because of his efforts to suppress the region’s white supremacist terror groups. He would be nearly killed in 1874 during the Liberty Place insurrection led by the White League.

The heavy smoking Ulysses S. Grant was depicted as a tobacco grub. As president, Grant supported the extension of civil rights in New Orleans.

A decade earlier many of the city’s Blacks had been slaves. However, change was in the air and two Black men served as Lieutenant Governor during reconstruction, one of whom was briefly governor when Warmoth resigned. Integration was underway in the public sector, but it had never even begun among the private, and very exclusive, Mardi Gras Krewes. Following racist tropes of the day, the real Missing Link was depicted as the recently enfranchised African American who was depicted as a man-ape in the parade.

The “Gorilla Africanus,” proclaimed Comus, was the missing link.

Here is the headline from what is now the Times-Picayune: