Capitol Men (21 page)

When the gathering convened, the delegates expressed their resentment of Warmoth by taking the unprecedented step of electing Dunn, not the governor, to preside over the Republican convention. Warmoth, who had showed up on crutches in the company of Pinchback, furiously pulled out his supporters and created a rump convention in a nearby building, Turner Hall, and staged a fake "celebration" down the length of Canal Street with his followers to mark his "revolution." But the Dunn faction, in a rapid exchange of telegrams with Washington, won a guarantee from the president that they were indeed the legitimate leaders of Louisiana's Republican Party.

Grant's willingness to recognize Dunn in preference to Warmoth boxed in the governor. Chastened by being abandoned by the national head of the Republican Party, he found himself denounced anew by Louisiana Democrats, who voiced their contempt at his weakness
and lack of discipline in failing to contain the breakaway Dunn element. Exasperated, Warmoth lashed out, accusing Dunn of wanting to "Africanize" Louisiana and railing at the libels printed against Warmoth himself in Democratic newspapers. "I have been called a carpetbagger, a czar, a Caesar ... a Political Leper, the Pest in the Executive Chair, a traitor to my political party, a robber of the state, and the oppressor of the people," he cried. "I have been accused of having made a fortune out of the office of governor."

Pinchback, siding with Warmoth, agreed to join a committee to travel north and explain the governor's predicament directly to the president. Pinchback and the others found Grant at his summer cottage in Long Branch, New Jersey, where they related the Dunn forces' recent shenanigans; Pinchback at one point dared suggest to the president that Grant's brother-in-law be removed from office (Pinchback would later tell a reporter that Casey "hasn't a handful of brains"). Grant listened to Pinchback but did nothing, refusing to extricate the federal troops who were protecting Dunn and what was now being called the Customhouse faction. This breakaway group had by now elected Dunn as their president, adopted an article expelling Warmoth from the Republican Party, and passed a resolution calling for the governor's impeachment. The charges against him were technical, citing "official misconduct" and "high crimes and misdemeanors in office," but stemmed essentially from his abandonment of the party's aims. The now-flailing governor, agreed the
New Orleans Picayune,
was a "War-moth" who needed to be "exterminated" as soon as possible.

In the midst of the crisis, in November 1871, Oscar Dunn came down with a nagging, debilitating cough, a condition he and his friends assumed had resulted from his strenuous duties. For about a month he had been suffering from what his doctor called "pulmonary catarrh," a respiratory inflammation, and had been taking Cherry Pectoral, a popular cure-all "recommended for weak hearts." The product, however, had been ineffectual in curing his weariness and hoarseness. On Saturday, November 20, Dunn gave a talk at the Third Ward Radical Club and was in good form. Sunday morning he ate a hearty breakfast and spent part of the day with his cohort Marshal Packard. After dinner, however, Dunn had a severe attack of vomiting, and on Monday, E. D. Beach, the family doctor, was called in. Beach diagnosed pneumonia, noting that the lieutenant governor's brain was "evidently much affected," and put him to bed, in the care of a nurse. During the night
Dunn slipped into unconsciousness, and Packard was summoned. Seeing his friend's desperate situation, he called in another physician, Dr. Scott, who declared that Dunn was suffering from congestion of the brain and lungs brought about by excessive vomiting.

Other leading physicians of New Orleans arrived, including Dr. Warren Stone, a local medical pioneer, and Dr. Louis Roudanez, a Paris-educated Creole physician, but they ventured no new diagnosis and expressed puzzlement at Dunn's rapid deterioration. Consulting in hushed tones, they cast pitying looks at the patient's wife, who, along with other family members, had convened a deathwatch by the bed, where Dunn lay emitting "a regular gurgling sob that occasionally changed to a harsh rattle." Mrs. Dunn, alternately clutching a handkerchief and lowering her face into her hands, came and went, unable to remain for long in the presence of a scene so unbearable. Dunn's nurse, "an intelligent quadroon woman," observed that she had "never seen pneumonia like that." Gently wiping the drops of blood and mucus from Dunn's lips, she assured her patient that "Jesus is coming—Jesus will soon be here to take you away." At the sound of her voice, Dunn opened his eyes and appeared to scrutinize the woman's face, "his blank stare mirror[ing] the baffied confusion of his soul." "They've given poison to the Governor," another servant said quietly. "They've poisoned the Governor." Late Tuesday night, November 23, he slipped from consciousness for the last time, and soon one of the physicians signaled that the struggle had ended.

When the local coroner, Dr. Creagh, arrived, he encountered a police physician, Dr. Avila, who was preparing to depart; Avila said that Dunn's family had turned him away. At Creagh's urging, Avila returned with him to the house, where Creagh explained to Dunn's survivors that a rumor of the lieutenant governor's poisoning was already abroad on the streets, and it was Creagh's duty under law to conduct a postmortem to ascertain the true cause of death. The family, supported by Beach and the other attending physicians, refused Creagh as they had Avila, insisting that Dunn had died of natural causes. They also rebuffed Creagh's request to examine a sample of Dunn's bodily waste, which might have helped confirm or dispel the suspicion of poisoning.

Creagh persisted because a week earlier he had handled a similar case involving a black prostitute who had arrived at a New Orleans charity hospital. Complaining of "break bone fever"—aches in her side, back, and head—she soon died. Creagh's autopsy found substantial amounts of arsenic in her stomach. His interest in Dunn's case may have been
piqued even more by the fact that two of the white doctors in attendance, Beach and Stone, had disagreed initially about the cause of death.

Was
Oscar Dunn poisoned? His overall condition and specific symptoms—vomiting, muscle spasms, shrunken features and whitened face, weak pulse, coma—correspond with classic accounts of arsenic poisoning. Because the symptoms arsenic causes resemble those of natural illness, and because, colorless and flavorless, it can be mixed undetectably with food, this poison was known as a handy means of retribution or a shortcut to an inheritance. Not for nothing was it sometimes called "succession powder." Certain arsenic compounds were used in the nineteenth century to treat syphilis, which might explain Dunn's family's demand for secrecy, although there's no evidence he suffered from the disease. It's also possible that Dunn was poisoned accidentally. The Cherry Pectoral he was taking contained a small amount of arsenic to calm the nerves. Then, too, in an era before refrigeration and government standards for shipping and storing food, tainted provisions were not unheard of; the very week of Dunn's death, the
New Orleans Times
ran an article titled "Beware of Herrings" about reports that containers of arsenic-laden fish had shown up on grocery shelves.

Of course, the theory that had "set tongues upon swivels" on the streets of New Orleans was that Dunn had been murdered for political reasons. Warmoth, in desperate political straits and under threat of impeachment, was a primary suspect. Another was Pinchback; having already replaced Dunn as Warmoth's leading black ally, he stood to succeed Dunn as lieutenant governor and even ascend to the office of governor if Warmoth was impeached. In a bizarre turn, another man in line for the governor's seat, House Speaker George Carter, complained the day after Dunn's death that he
too
was feeling sick, "in a way that he had never before experienced," with abdominal cramps and nausea; he confided to his physician that he feared he had been "dosed" and "foully dealt with." So certain was he that he was about to die, Carter at one point called for a close friend to help him settle his private affairs. He survived his fever and delirium, however, and soon repudiated the rumor that he and Dunn had been the target of a murderous conspiracy.

"Who delivered the fatal cup?" the Louisiana historian A. E. Perkins would ask, several years later. "It ill becomes an historian, or any other chronicler, to dignify rumor with notice. But when rumor swells to established fact, or rests upon evidence all but conclusive, then one may without hesitancy take full notice of it." The
Louisianian,
a newspaper in which Pinchback was an owner and partner, dismissed the rumors as a
"hallucination" and a "chimerical notion," and scolded those "classes of people, whose minds suspicion is always haunting, and whose ... lack of knowledge induce them to attribute every disaster ... to some secondhand agency." But the idea that something mysterious had attended Dunn's sudden passing would linger for many years. Several informants assured Perkins, whose research took place in the 1930s when many contemporaries of Dunn's remained alive, that the murder by poison had been "an open secret," that the conspirators were known, and that all had been hushed up.

Whether Dunn was poisoned, or his natural, if untimely, removal simply agitated local suspicion, what mattered was that a man who may have had a stabilizing effect on Reconstruction in Louisiana had been cut down in his prime.

While it seems unlikely that Dunn would have been added to Grant's presidential ticket in 1872, and even a politician of Dunn's caliber would have been hard-pressed to survive the local crusade for whites' home rule in the mid-1870s, it is intriguing to consider what impact Dunn might have had. Such questions surely occupied the mourners—numbering more than fifty thousand—who gathered for his funeral, the largest such event held for an African American in the nineteenth century. They lined the curb along a dozen blocks of Canal Street and joined the mile-long procession, which slowly trailed the caisson that conveyed Dunn to his final resting place in St. Louis Cemetery.

Pinchback was cautious in his response to Dunn's sudden death. He did not, like many others, rush to the lieutenant governor's home to sit in the parlor and console the widow, although he was in prominent attendance at the funeral. He discreetly mentioned his regard for Dunn in a speech in the state senate, where, alluding to his own keen interest in civil rights, he observed that Dunn's life, and his ascent to the office of lieutenant governor, "manifested to us the truthfulness of the sublime principle established by the fathers of our country that all men are born free and equal."

Warmoth, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his own troubles. Although no official inquiry investigated whether Warmoth had anything to do with Dunn's death, it was hardly forgotten that the last objective to which the lamented lieutenant governor had devoted himself was Warmoth's impeachment. Dunn's disappearance had, for the moment, left the Customhouse men disoriented, but Warmoth recognized the need to act. Fearful of allowing Carter, the house speaker, who was popular with the Customhouse faction, to remain in line for the governorship, he moved quickly to put the loyal Pinchback in Dunn's seat. His adversaries would be far less inclined to seek impeachment if it meant making Pinchback the governor. At the same time Warmoth had to assuage his white constituency. "Pinchback ... was a restless, ambitious man and had more than once arrayed himself against me and my policies," Warmoth later recalled. "He was a freelance and dangerous, and had to be reckoned with at all times. He was very distasteful to my conservative friends, and many of them openly condemned me for his election until they became aware of the situation and realized the political necessity for the action we had taken."

After attaining Pinchback's consent, Warmoth shrewdly convened the state senate, not the full legislature, for he knew the house was capable of starting impeachment proceedings against him. On December 6, the senate elected Pinchback as temporary presiding officer, an indication that he was their choice for lieutenant governor. Soon after the New Year, however, a resurgent Customhouse faction attacked Pinchback's elevation as illegal (Warmoth was rumored to have secured Pinchback's victory by paying $15,000 for the vote of a Customhouse-aligned senator) and again made known their aim to impeach Warmoth at the first opportunity.

The governor had executed several clever maneuvers, but the Customhouse clique responded in kind. To approve Pinchback as lieutenant governor, a senate quorum was needed. In order to make such approval impossible, eleven Republican senators and three Democrats were by nightfall sneaked aboard the federal revenue cutter
Wilderness,
which James Casey then ordered to sail offshore and keep the legislators out of sight. Marshal Packard met the vessel by launch every few days to resupply it with food, drink, and cigars, and the ship kept its human cargo secret for a full week. When Warmoth and Pinchback learned of the ruse, they complained directly to President Grant that an official U.S. vessel was being used for questionable political purposes, and Grant ordered the boat back to New Orleans. Officials who met it at the dock, however, discovered no Louisiana state senators aboard, for they had disembarked in Mississippi.

In addition to inserting Pinchback into the line of secession ahead of Speaker Carter, Warmoth sought to undermine Carter by making a show of strength against the Customhouse faction when the full legislature finally convened at the Mechanics Institute. Warmoth called up special police deputies to watch over the meetings; the opposition had
federal troops brought in. Cordons of armed men jostled as they surrounded the building. At noon on January 4, 1872, federal marshals entered and arrested Warmoth and Pinchback, Police Chief Algernon'S. Badger, and eighteen representatives and four senators. The arrests stemmed from alleged violations of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, involving interference with the Customhouse faction's civil rights, and were dubious in any case since each side was using similar tactics to undermine the other. The apprehended men immediately made bail, but by the time they returned to the institute, Carter had expelled additional senators loyal to Warmoth and put Customhouse men in their place.