Using the authority of the Military Reconstruction Act, Major-General Philip Sheridan, the military governor of the Fifth Military District, acted swiftly to remove from office several Louisiana officials, including New Orleans mayor John Monroe, state attorney-general Andrew Herron, and Judge Edmund Abell. Sheridan held all three conservatives largely responsible for the death toll in the riots of the previous year and the lack of legal pursuit of the perpetrators, many of whom were New Orleans policemen. In strenuous efforts to promote reconstruction against fierce former Confederate opposition, Sheridan would remove Louisiana governor J. Madison Wells on June 3, 1867, but was himself reassigned in August 1867 when complaints poured in to President Johnson from Democrats. (By John Osborne)
Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 47.
