New Freedoms, New Battles: Tangipahoa Parish During Reconstruction

In the last public speech at the White House on April 11, 1865, Abraham Lincoln called for emancipation for the entire nation.

This plan was, in advance, submitted to the then Cabinet, and distinctly approved by every member of it. One of them suggested that I should then, and in that connection, apply the Emancipation Proclamation to the theretofore excepted parts of Virginia and Louisiana; that I should drop the suggestion about apprenticeship for freed-people, and that I should omit the protest against my own power, in regard to the admission of members to Congress; but even he approved every part and parcel of the plan which has since been employed or touched by the action of Louisiana. The new constitution of Louisiana, declaring emancipation for the whole State, practically applies the Proclamation to the part previously excepted. It does not adopt apprenticeship for freed-people; and it is silent, as it could not well be otherwise, about the admission of members to Congress. So that, as it applies to Louisiana, every member of the Cabinet fully approved the plan. The message went to Congress, and I received many commendations of the plan, written and verbal; and not a single objection to it, from any professed emancipationist, came to my knowledge, until after the news reached Washington that the people of Louisiana had begun to move in accordance with it. From about July 1862, I had corresponded with different persons, supposed to be interested, seeking a reconstruction of a State government for Louisiana.

A genealogy researcher can gain insight into Reconstruction by exploring genealogy and local history research in Tangipahoa Parish. In 1866, my maternal third great-grandfather, Robert, and his family entered into a contract with Eliza Andrews in St. Helena Parish, Louisiana, to work as tenant farmers on the property where he lived with his wife, 30, son Alex Harrell, 16, son John, 12, and daughters Millie, 10, and Anna Harrell, 8.

Pioneers like Rev. Arthur Tasker, who founded the Tasker A.M.E. Church in Ponchatoula in 1872 and became the first and only African American elected Mayor of Ponchatoula, Louisiana, left a legacy. Armfield Mitchell Strange established the Tangipahoa Parish Color Training School in Kentwood, Louisiana. Thomas Freeman, a free man of color, was the first African American to purchase land in Livingston Parish.

Robert "Free Bob"  Louis Vernon, Jr.,  acquired thousands of acres in Tangipahoa Parish for his family and donated land for a school, church, and cemetery. Charles Daggs of Hammond, Louisiana, founded the first African-American church in 1877. These leaders attended meetings to improve African Americans' lives in the parish.

Tangipahoa Parish was formed in 1869, and Reconstruction ended in 1877. African Americans' lives during this period were poorly documented in the Louisiana-Florida Parish. Wikipedia notes that between 1877 and 1850, 24 blacks were lynched by whites in the parish as an act of racial terrorism and intimidation.

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/last.htm