by Edward Ball
At the service in St. Stephen, a French priest named Xavier Jacquemet blesses Mathilde and sends her to another world. “I the undersigned give to the sepulcher ecclesiastic the body of Françoise Mathilde, daughter of Constant Lecorgne,” he writes in the register. She is going to a better place, he guarantees. Because she was christened, she has a key to the kingdom of God.
That leaves Numa. Pray to Mary, let him live.
Two days after the funeral, the secession convention meets in the capital, Baton Rouge, a day upriver by steamboat. Within hours, delegates pass an “ordinance of secession,” a one-page bulletin printed in French and English: “The union now subsisting between Louisiana and other States under the name of ‘the United States of America’ is hereby dissolved,” it says. Louisiana exits the country. Crowds of whites swarm down Canal Street, bordering the Vieux Carré. A cannon is wheeled to Jackson Square, in front of St. Louis Cathedral, and fires off rounds. The U.S. flag is pulled down from poles. In some parts of town, the white Creoles in the streets sing the Marseillaise, national anthem of France.
It may seem strange to sing the French anthem while breaking up the United States. But the Marseillaise is the best song of revolution.
To my ears, he has a name that sounds like a cake ornament. It is Alcibiade DeBlanc. A lawyer and a Creole, he is a friend of the Lecorgnes. DeBlanc has known the family for decades, probably since childhood. His father acted as witness at the wedding of Constant’s parents, Yves and Marguerite. Alcibiade DeBlanc is a delegate to the secession meeting and a signer of the declaration. It may even be that Yves of God helped DeBlanc to get on the ballot. When the secession comes, I suspect that Constant and the in-laws hear about the legal steps of the Southern revolt through their friend Monsieur DeBlanc.
Alcibiade DeBlanc makes his home in the town of St. Martinville, in the southwest of the state, where he is a small-town eminence, volatile and loquacious. Maybe the Lecorgnes and DeBlancs see one another in New Orleans, either across the dinner table or in church, because these things are unavoidable. DeBlanc gives speeches at the convention that tremble with anger. He has the skill of heating a room.
The name “Alcibiade” points to a Greek general and orator, of the fifth century B.C.E., Alcibiades, spelled with an s. Alcibiade seems to have been christened with the general’s name, and later to have dropped the last letter. His surname, “DeBlanc,” converts into English as “of white.” Together, “Alcibiade DeBlanc” might be rendered “the white tribune.” One day, DeBlanc will lead a racist militia in a war on blacks. One day, he will recruit Constant Lecorgne to his ranks. But a dozen years must pass before the ship carpenter will lock arms with the tribune of the Ku-klux.
The rebellion warms up. Before the new president takes office, seven states withdraw from the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
Carnival season comes to a crescendo. On Mardi Gras day—Fat Tuesday, February 12—you have parades and dancing, drinking and masking. Things are made more hysterical by all the war talk. The Carnival club known as Comus puts on the most memorable parade. On Mardi Gras night, a mass of white marchers comes down Canal Street. All are wearing blackface rather than masks, as though they are in a minstrel show. The men of Comus who wear blackface carry an effigy of Abraham Lincoln, a man whom they hate. It is a big puppet of Lincoln. The puppet rides a fence rail that has just been split in two—the country divided. Le Républicain noir, the Black Republican, has not yet taken office.
Constant is twenty-nine, Gabrielle twenty-five. One child taken, one living. They mourn.
Troops are being raised. In Jefferson City, hundreds join a new unit, the Lafayette Rifle Cadets. They drill on Napoleon Avenue through Lawrence Square, the center of Bouligny, with guns brought from home. The men march back and forth, stop to listen to speeches, march some more. No one has a uniform because none yet exist. Women like Gabrielle, the seamstress, are designing them in their sewing rooms.
Lincoln is inaugurated March 4.
Another militia forms, the Tirailleurs d’Orléans, the Orleans Sharpshooters. Tirailler is “to skirmish.” The “Skirmishers” sounds clumsy, but it captures the self-regard. They feel like bandits and guerrillas.
The war begins eight hundred miles east, in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12. Shots are fired on Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor. Right away, the Lecorgne brothers join the movement. Joseph, the youngest, is twenty-five. His wife, Estelle Daunoy, is six months pregnant with their first baby. From their bedroom on Jersey Street, Joseph and Estelle can hear the marching on Lawrence Square. Joseph signs up.
Yves of God, the oldest brother, thirty-four and unmarried, looks for a gainful angle. He does not want to fight, but maybe he can profit from the war. Yves pleads he is too old and offers himself as a recruitment agent who will sign up soldiers.
After the attack on Fort Sumter, the rest of the Southern states secede: Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The rebels have a name for their new nation, the Confederate States of America. Men in the militias are “Rebs,” a label used with a smile by the rebels themselves. Their enemies in the North are “Yankees,” said with disdain. Yankee is what the British called the Americans at the time of the Revolutionary War.
Yves of God helps out his middle brother. In May, Constant is named a captain in the Eighth Regiment, First Brigade, First Division, Louisiana Militia. The rank of captain is high, considering he has no military experience. But the newspaper explains: he is signed up and ranked by “Yves J. Lecorgne.”
Across the Mississippi is Camille Zeringue, the Lecorgne cousin, an exception to the family pattern. Cousin Camille does not want secession, and neither do some of the other rich sugar planters and slaveholders around New Orleans. Camille is no abolitionist. He worries that a breakaway South will be disastrous for his business. But Camille’s son, Fortune Zeringue, joins a militia.
In Washington, President Lincoln calls his generals around and devises a strategy. The North will starve the South. The North possesses a navy, the South none. The U.S. Navy will encircle the Confederate States like a snake and choke it off in a big blockade, starting with the most important port, New Orleans. The mouth of the Mississippi is sealed by summer 1861.
Joseph Lecorgne joins the same regiment as Constant. He pulls a rank of second lieutenant, far down the officer ladder. Yves of God himself takes the rank of captain, though he has no plan to command anyone. Captain Constant Lecorgne is given the assignment of recruiting privates from a square-mile section of Bouligny. A private is the lowest rank; he is cannon fodder and knows it. Yet men line up all day to enlist. Constant drills them on Lawrence Square, shouting orders. He shouts up marching orders in French, shouts them down in English.
The militias grow. By June, more than twelve thousand men in the state sign up. At the end of the summer, it is twenty-one thousand, or one in five white men in Louisiana.
Two weeks after he is appointed captain, Constant is demoted. He falls from his rank as captain to the rank of second lieutenant. A newspaper announces the change but gives no reason. Is it misconduct? Incompetence? Constant appears briefly to be a man with skills and command. Then he seems to screw up. It is a pattern in his life. He is not a leader but a follower.
A better-educated man, whom he knows, replaces Constant as a recruiter. He is Émile Chevalley, a young lawyer who lives across the street from Lecorgne row. The ship carpenter may look at the lawyer with skepticism. A few summers later, however, when this recruitment business is a memory and the war is over, a time will come when Émile Chevalley and Constant are again friends. They will sign on together with another militia, known as the Ku-klux.
* * *
Gens de couleur libres, free people of color, are under terrific pressure. The state has throttled them with higher taxes, a ban on dying slaveholders giving freedom to their children of color, and a prohibition on leaving and then returning to Louisiana. A few hundred free people hold a m
eeting. They decide that the best defense, in their impossible situation, is to put on a performance. They will pretend to support the white man’s revolt. African American craftsmen and small businessmen come together to form a militia. They call themselves the Native Guards. It is a survival tactic, a piece of theater. The 1,500 volunteers march and drill like the whites. It is a charade to keep them and their families safe. The rebel governor of the state, Thomas Moore, instructs the Native Guards to remain in New Orleans, because white Rebs make it clear they will quit the movement if a colored regiment is given anything to do.
* * *
Feeling his demotion from captain to second lieutenant is unfair, Constant quits the Eighth Regiment and finds another unit. He joins the Third Regiment, Fourth Brigade, and persuades the command to bump him up a half step to first lieutenant. The rank is common for a mason or carpenter with a thin education. Within a month, he is transferred to yet another unit, Company B of the Jefferson Cadets, a hometown corps. To judge from the roster, the Cadets are full of family and friends. He has a cousin in the ranks, Fortune Zeringue, son of Camille Zeringue of Seven Oaks, and an in-law, François Fazende. The roulette wheel finally stops when the Jefferson Cadets merge into the regular rebel army; the unit becomes Company B, Fourteenth Louisiana Infantry.
Constant makes friends in Company B, four in particular—William Zimmerman, Jules Michel, Peter Duffy, and James Hetherton. I cannot say how well they all do as rebels. After the war ends, however, they perform vigorously, as these four join Constant in a branch of the Ku-klux.
* * *
The first battles come. In June, in western Virginia, at the town of Philippi, the rebels lose in a first clash. A week later, twenty are killed on the Chesapeake near a church known as Big Bethel. The Yankees lose that one.
In New Orleans, Constant is inducted into the army with his unit at a ceremony in front of city hall. When she turns out to say goodbye to her husband, Gabrielle is round at the waist, six months pregnant. Gabrielle knows, I think, that she got the baby just before she buried her toddler, Mathilde. A pregnant woman sends her husband into a fight, and the killing has already started. Feeling is high.
At the send-off, Constant hears a politician tell the Fourteenth Infantry that they are part of a noble experiment. You are the bone and sinew of a new nation, he says. You are ordinary men, but your cause is great, and glory is yours to take. It is a scene repeated in cities and towns around the South—in Savannah, for instance. During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, in front of a similar crowd, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the infant Confederate States of America, sums up the rebel cause and names the high ideals of the rebellion.
“Our new government is founded upon exactly this idea,” Stephens tells his audience with new soldiers. “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
It is inspiring, a thought to raise the morale of young men as they march off to die. The teachings of science, race difference, and species difference are in rich harmony with the teaching of politics. They seem almost interchangeable, and not for the last time.
At twenty-nine, Lieutenant Constant Lecorgne is an older soldier. He and the other men of the Fourteenth Louisiana raise arms for their oath of allegiance, and they are gone.
Company B travels by train a hundred miles northwest, to the town of Amite. They make camp. Amite is a staging area where thousands of soldiers from around the state get ready to ship out to fighting in Virginia. The order comes that the Fourteenth Louisiana is going east. With a thousand men, the regiment must travel on two trains, as railcars come available. Company K of the Fourteenth leaves on one train, Company B follows a few hours later.
As I remember it, my aunt Maud Lecorgne pauses at this point in the story of our Klansman. Her words, which appear in one of her genealogical notebooks, are restrained. “My grandfather Constant joined one unit, but he did not like it much, apparently.” It is a diplomatic sentence that hides more than it discloses. Because what happens next to Constant’s unit is the subject of a court-martial.
Constant’s train moves slowly, easing into Mississippi before turning north to head toward Tennessee. At every stop, groups of men from Company B get off to buy liquor, then climb back in the car. There are many stops. When the train reaches Grand Junction, Tennessee, just over the Mississippi line, much of the unit is drunk.
It is night in Grand Junction, time to make camp. In a field near the train stop, the men of Company K have already pitched tents and built fires. They arrived hours earlier. Half of Company B leaves the train to join Company K in camp, half stay behind at the station to drink. In the middle of the night, the drinkers finish their bottles and stumble into the campsite to discover that no dry place on the grass is cleared for them. Some of the men pick fights about the noise, and about the tight space, and soon a hundred men are swinging fists and tent poles.
It is unclear from the military report whether Lieutenant Lecorgne is among the drinkers who crash the campsite, or he is with the defenders who lunge at them, teaching the drunks a lesson.
A lieutenant named Myatt, in charge of the camp guard, has the task of keeping order. Lieutenant Myatt and several guards manage to arrest two dozen of the brawlers—the drinkers are incapacitated—and start them marching back to the town center. Myatt plans to lock up the group at the Percy Hotel, in the middle of town. On the march, a few prisoners bring out knives and attack their guards. Myatt’s men have guns but no bullets. The guards fight back with bayonets and rifle butts.
Lieutenant Myatt sends a runner for reinforcements and to alert officers. The upper ranks have rooms at the Percy Hotel, the would-be jail. The prisoners are enraged that they are to be dressed down, and the drunks chase their captors to the Percy Hotel. A few in Company B rush around the yard to collect kindling and wood. They are mad enough that they will burn down the building.
A fire is growing on one side of the Percy Hotel when Colonel Valery Sulakowski, commander of the Fourteenth Louisiana, rides up on his horse. Colonel Sulakowski is a military man from eastern Europe. Born in Poland, age thirty-four, he is a former officer in the Austrian army, the experience of which has given him both a volatile temper and the habit of wearing a sword. A revolver in each hand, Sulakowski forces his horse into the boiling crowd. He shouts an order that every soldier must return to camp or expect to be shot. When one refuses, Sulakowski shoots him. Eleven men from among the drinkers of Company B are shot, almost all of them by their Polish commander.
I do not believe that at this point Constant sleeps peacefully in a tent at the campsite a quarter mile away. I believe he is in the middle of the chaos. Later in life, he will show his taste for a good riot and hand-to-hand fight that spills a good gallon of blood.
In all, seven are killed, nineteen wounded. When Sulakowski shrieks the order to put out the fire, some soldiers obey, and the Percy Hotel is saved. The injured and dying are put up in vacant rooms. Morning comes, camp breaks. Colonel Sulakowski gives orders to handcuff the worst fighters, who are to be charged with mutiny. Constant appears to be one of them. But the trial must wait until the trains reach Virginia.
The deadly riot is news both South and North, as stories about rogue Company B—“a Confederate mutiny”—run in all the papers.
Company B again boards a train. Sulakowski telegraphs ahead to Knoxville, Tennessee, four hundred miles east, the next place he plans to camp. He leaves word for Captain David Zable of Company K. Sulakowski tells Zable, whose company will arrive first, to see that all the taverns and barrelhouses in Knoxville are closed when Company B rolls into town. The train pulls out of Grand Junction. Constant and the mutineers are on board, hungover.
The Fourteenth Louisiana wants a fight with Yankees.
The battle of Manassas—twenty-five miles south of Washington, D.C.—has already taken place. Nothing else looks imminent, and that is a disappointment. A man feels cheated if a war does not hold a seat for him.
Constant’s first experience of war is also a disappointment. He dodges friendly fire, as Colonel Sulakowski shoots his own troops, and he is looking at punishment for misconduct.
Company B rolls east toward Bristol, Virginia. The Rebs in Bristol have heard what is coming, and the liquor stores been warned. Drinking is avoided till the train gets to Lynchburg, another two hundred miles along. By the time the transport reaches Lynchburg, a number of men have straightened up. The sober group marches to a fairgrounds to drill with other companies. But a hard core holds back, stays in town, and finds seats in a barroom.
Constant’s company again climbs aboard. The transport arrives in Richmond, capital of the Confederate States of America. Company B is sent to a depot on the south side of town. Colonel Sulakowski summons an armed band of military police to pull twenty men out of the group, the ones to be prosecuted. The Polish colonel and his superiors decide to break up the unit. Company B is dissolved, and many of its soldiers—the ones who escape arrest—are swept into another battalion. The rest are court-martialed.
At the trial in Richmond, convictions of the worst rioters are swift, and the men are sentenced. They do not face the common punishment for mutiny, hanging. Instead, the sentence is public shaming. The rebels are to have one-half of their scalps shaved clean. And in a public ceremony, they are to be cashiered. They are to have their stripes of rank ripped from their uniforms before being expelled from the army.