User:Flaggingwill/Valentine Chase

Valentine Chase (July 25, 1811–October 17, 1868) was a lawyer and politician in Ohio and Louisiana. In 1868, while he was parish judge of St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, he was assassinated by members of the white terrorist group the Knights of the White Camelia. Also killed in the attack was St. Mary Parish sheriff Henry H. Pope.

Early life and Ohio politics

Chase was born in Butler County, Ohio to Valentine Chase, Sr. and the former Elizabeth Ogle. His father, a member of the Chase family, left the family's base on Martha's Vineyard for southwest Ohio shortly after statehood. Chase attended Miami University, though he did not graduate, dropping out to begin the private study of law.

He worked as a lawyer in Hamilton, Ohio and entered Democratic Party politics. In 1848, he was elected for the first of two terms in the Ohio Senate. While a member, he proposed a law that would block black or mulatto Americans from moving to Ohio. He also served on the local school board, invested in a local railroad, and finished second for the 1853 Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor.

Chase's first two wives died relatively young, and his third marriage in 1857 was to Elizabeth "Bettie" Sanders, a native of Brashear (now Morgan City in St. Mary Parish. (She was a member of the politically powerful Sanders family, which produced future Louisiana Gov. Jared Y. Sanders, Sr. and Congressman Jared Y. Sanders, Jr..) Chase left Ohio and moved to Louisiana.

In Louisiana

Chase was a Democrat, like most of his white neighbors in St. Mary Parish, but he was a staunch Unionist. When Louisiana seceded in 1861, Chase fled for his safety back to Ohio, where he spent a year editing the Unionist Democratic paper the Hamilton Telegraph. Once St. Mary Parish had come under Union control, he returned to Louisiana.

As a Unionist with political experience, he was sought after to fill local offices in the early days of Reconstruction. In 1867, he was appointed postmaster at Brashear. In 1868, under Louisiana's new constitution — which extended voting and other political rights to Blacks — Chase was elected St. Mary Parish judge.

By the time he took office, opposition to Reconstruction was already fierce among St. Mary Parish whites. The year before, the Knights of the White Camelia — a white terrorist group akin to the Ku Klux Klan — had been founded in St. Mary's parish seat, Franklin, by sugar planter Alcibiades DeBlanc and Daniel Dennett, editor of local newspaper the Planter's Banner. The Knights had by 1868 spread into neighboring states, particularly Arkansas, but their area of greatest strength was in south Louisiana.

Soon after taking office as parish judge, Chase officially recognized the election of Sheriff Henry H. Pope, a former member of the Union Army who had been elected on the strength of Black votes. This angered local whites, who feared law enforcement would not be as allied with the white population as it had been. Both Chase and Pope began being threatened by local whites, including members of the Knights, which ​in September 1868 led the Opelousas massacre, killing somewhere between 150 and 300 black people and several dozen whites.

On September 3, Chase wrote a letter to a friend from Ohio, Lewis D. Campbell, who was then between terms representing the Hamilton area in the U.S. House of Representatives. "It is with deep feeling of anxiety that I address you this note of inquiry," he wrote. "Are we rushing headlong into another revolution? The inquiry may surprise you, if you are a stranger to the wild fury which is hurling this community into a state of anarchy, and is inaugurating a reign of terror similar to that of 1861. The leaders are becoming bold, and openly avow their intention to murder all the newly elected State and parish officers, or drive them from the State...There is an extensive secret organization pledged to it."

Dennett, as a leader of the Knights of the White Camelia and editor of the local paper, seemed to call for the assassination of the unionist officials. Writing of Pope: "If he dies, the shell of an English walnut would make a good sarcophagus in which to convey his precious remains to his Northern friends."

Assassination

In the early evening of October 17, 1868, Chase was visiting Sheriff Pope in his room at O'Neill's Hotel in Franklin. At about 8:30 p.m., a group of Knights attacked the room, firing shots into both men. Pope was killed instantly from multiple bullets to the head; Chase, shot multiple times, was able to stagger out of the room and died on a street behind the hotel.

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