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If whites required more than verbal assurances that blacks could exercise the vote responsibly, black leaders in some regions organized mock elections, scheduled them to coincide with the regular elections, and told their people to register and cast their ballots. As early as May 1865, blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, participated in the election of state legislators. Excluded from the regular political process, they held their own ward meetings, conducted a registration drive, improvised a polling place in the local African Methodist Episcopal Church, and on election day voted their preference among the regular candidates. After tabulating the results, making certain to add to them the votes of the black voters, they appealed to both the state legislature and the United States Congress to recognize the legitimacy of their actions and the validity of their ballots. To no one’s surprise, they had voted almost unanimously for the “men of tried fidelity to the Union, and of liberal sentiments.”66 Similar elections were reported in places like Beaufort, South Carolina (November 8, 1864); Fernandina, Florida (where black votes were counted in a mayoralty election); and New Orleans.67

With the presence of an outspoken black press and an articulate, well-organized leadership drawn from the free colored community, the situation in New Orleans was unusual. Although slaves constituted more than half the black population, the well-entrenched mulatto “aristocracy” quickly assumed a dominant influence after Union occupation in April 1862. The tens of thousands of field hands who poured into the city from the outlying rural districts during and immediately after the war might have found this colored leadership both bewildering and alien. Enjoying privileges not available to the slaves, such as the right to acquire property (including slaves), they tended to be light-colored mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons, proud of their Creole heritage, literate and educated, and occupying skilled and professional positions. Within this exclusive group, moreover, classes existed, based upon gradations of wealth and color, ancestry, cultural pretensions, education, and church affiliation.68

No sooner had Union troops entered New Orleans than the demand for full admission to political privileges surfaced in the colored community. Obviously, the usual objections to extending the vote to poor and ignorant blacks could hardly be sustained against such an educated, propertied, and politically conscious colored population. When these blacks called for an end to taxation without representation, as they immediately did, they were not referring to future expectations of taxable property but to an already prevailing condition. Hard-pressed as to how to respond to the demand for voting privileges, whites ultimately came up with a solution that would neatly resolve the difficulty while at the same time split the mulattoes from the black freedmen and uphold the essential principles of white supremacy. The so-called Quadroon Bill introduced into the state legislature in 1864 defined as a “white person” anyone possessing no more than one fourth of Negro blood and admitted such individuals to the same privileges enjoyed by other whites, including the suffrage.

Not only was the proposition inviting but it promptly brought to a head the charge that the mulatto community acted indifferently toward the mass of black people in Louisiana, most of whom resided outside of New Orleans and were only beginning to emerge from the degradation of slavery. But the response to the Quadroon Bill contradicted that assumption soon enough. Neither the New Orleans Tribune, the principal voice of the colored community, nor the colored leaders would lend any support to the proposal; instead, they denounced it as divisive (creating distinctions of “white, white-washed and black”) and preposterous (“If a quadroon has a right to vote, why not a mulatto? … If we take one-half or one-third of the colored population, to make citizens and voters, why not two-thirds or