Merchant; law-enforcement officer
founder of the
white league
Christopher Columbus Nash (July 1, 1838 – June 29, 1922) was a Louisiana merchant and
Democraticsheriff.[1] In 1873, Nash led a company of white
militiamen in the
Colfax Massacre to take the courthouse in
Colfax, from armed
African-Americans.[2] Three white men were killed; the number of African-Americans killed is estimated to have been between 60 and 150.[2][3]
Nash participated in the formation of the
White League,[4] a white supremacist organization that claimed to defend a "hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization".[5] He was later buried in
Natchitoches, Louisiana.[6]
^A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, in its article on Nash, uses these sources: Milton Dunn, Christopher Columbus Nash (1925), Mabel Fletcher Harrison and Lavinia McGuire McNeely, Grant Parish, Louisiana: A History (1969), and Manie White Johnson, "The Colfax Riot of April, 1873," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XIII (1930).
^James K. Hogue The Battle of Colfax: Paramilitarism and Counterrevolution in Louisiana (June 2006), p. 21