Francis T. Nicholls

Who was Francis T. Nicholls?

Francis Redding Tillou Nicholls was an American attorney, politician, judge, and a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He served two terms as the 28th Governor of Louisiana, first from 1876 to 1880 and then from 1888 to 1892.

Nicholls and such fellow Democrats as Richard Coke of neighboring Texas and Wade Hampton of South Carolina were called "Redeemer" governors because their elections, coupled with the accession to the White House of moderate Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes, essentially ended the power of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. As things developed, the "Redeemers" imposed a one-party system on the defeated South which lasted for nearly a century.