Election Riot of 1874

Election Riot of 1874
Part of the Reconstruction Era
Date November 3, 1874 Location Barbour County, Alabama Result Republican government overthrown
Belligerents
White League	United States Local Republican government Voters
Casualties and losses
None	8 dead, 70 injured

United States

The Election Riot of 1874 or Coup of 1874 took place on election day, November 3, 1874, near Eufaula, Alabama in Barbour County, where blacks comprised a majority of the population and had been electing Republican candidates to office. Members of an Alabama chapter of the White League, a paramilitary group supporting the rise of the Democratic Party, attacked black Republicans, killing at least seven and wounding 70, while driving away more than 1,000 unarmed blacks at the polls. In attacking the polling place in Spring Hill, the League killed the 16-year-old son of a white Republican judge. They turned all Republicans out of office and declared the Democrats as winners.

The White League had formed in 1874 as an insurgent, white Democratic paramilitary group in Grant Parish and nearby parishes on the Red River of the South in Louisiana. It started with members of the white militia who had committed the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana in 1873. Historians such as George Rabe consider groups such as the White League and Red Shirts as a "military arm" of the Democratic Party, as its members worked openly to disrupt Republican meetings, and attacked and intimidated voters to suppress black voting. They courted press attention rather than operating secretly.

Chapters spread to Alabama and other states in the Deep South. A similar paramilitary group were the Red Shirts, who originated in Mississippi and became active in the Carolinas. Both paramilitary groups contributed to the Democrats' regaining control in the state legislatures in the late 1870s. The Red Shirts were still active in the 1890s and were implicated in the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 in North Carolina.

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