Life of a Klansman

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Life of a Klansman Page 13

by Edward Ball


  Military records say the riotous officers and men “resign.” The record of Lieutenant Lecorgne states that he “resigned” the same day his unit is expelled from the Confederate Army. It looks like he was allowed to flee, rather than face prison. During the first week of August, he is kicked out and told to go home to Louisiana.

  New Orleans lies a thousand miles southwest of Richmond, Virginia. The usual route would be to take a steamship from the Virginia coast, around the tip of Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Mississippi. But the ports are sealed by the Yankee blockade. Constant and his disgraced comrades are taken back to the train, and they retrace their abject journey in practically empty train cars, the transports going to Louisiana to fetch more men. He is home by the end of the summer.

  When Constant sees his wife, Gabrielle, she is large and round, eight months pregnant. She must be surprised. He has a haircut that makes him half-bald. Her husband is home, and he is a disappointment. Men disappoint.

  Disgrace trails him. The Lecorgnes and the in-laws know, and everybody knows, what has happened. I am sure that many laugh behind his back, or deride him to his face. Les nègres know, and as the race philosophers will tell you, blacks laugh louder than anyone. He is a failure as a soldier. His father was a failure, too, as a soldier. It cannot be hard to remember that fifty years back, Yves César Le Corgne, sailor in Napoleon’s navy, made port in New Orleans and quit the French fleet. Of course he did, people say, yet there is a difference. Constant does not desert the service, he is thrown out.

  About three weeks after he reaches home, on September 1, Gabrielle gives birth. They name the boy Louis Constant.

  Louis Constant Lecorgne is a great-grandfather of mine. My mother used to talk about Louis Constant, her grandfather, whom she knew well. He became a carpenter, like his father, and then a contractor, building houses in uptown New Orleans. My mother lived in the same house with Louis Constant when she was a girl, growing up at the edge of Bouligny. Louis was an old man then. He liked his game of bridge. None of this is long ago, when you think of it.

  10

  The war warms up, people die. But the sugar still comes in from the bayous, and the slave markets are still open. On Esplanade Avenue, in the sale rooms, handlers rub oil on the field hands and cooks to make their skin shine. They hand out jackets and dresses for les nègres to wear on the auction platform. Outside, herders line up women and children for sale on the banquette, like living mannequins.

  The newspapers are discouraging. The blockade grows at the mouth of the river—ten gunboats, then fifteen. Word comes that the U.S. Navy has intercepted a dozen barges and schooners in a day, seizing their loads of cotton and sugar. In October, Governor Moore issues a proclamation that bans the shipment of cotton to New Orleans, to keep the golden crop out of the hands of the Yankees. The stream of money to the city ceases.

  Constant tries to protect his wounded pride. All the men younger than thirty-five have signed up and left. Except his brothers. Yves of God, with his important airs and shirker’s job as a recruiter. And brother Joseph, who is camped in town with his battalion, the Thirtieth Louisiana Infantry. Joseph’s regiment is assigned to defend the city.

  If Constant were to make a show of support for the rebellion, it might be better for him—and for Gabrielle, Numa, and little Louis. If he were to make a gesture, a symbolic act, it might take him off the list of losers and laughingstocks. An opportunity comes. The Confederate States of America wants cash, because the rebellion is expensive. To raise money, the government in Richmond is selling bonds. From family tradition, I learn that Constant and Gabrielle invest a lot of money in the Southern cause. I look at the evidence in property records, and something I find tells me that in fall 1861, Constant puts down everything he has. If the Lecorgnes can sink a big sum into the fight for slavery, and they can let this be known, then the shame of the mutiny, the family stain that sticks to the ship carpenter, might be whitewashed.

  Constant has been home just a month. Louis gurgles at Gabrielle’s breast. The parents decide they can sell their house to raise cash. They make a deal with a man named Thomas Savage to sell him the house, and then rent it back. On September 28, 1861, Thomas Savage pays $1,500 for the house on Bellecastle and Live Oak streets and the big lot on which it stands. The Lecorgnes stay put, now as tenants, paying rent. They have money left over from the sale of Ovid. Add this to the fat envelope of cash from the house sale, and they can put down a good stake. They will invest in the rebellion, and this may open a path to redemption for the disgraced soldier.

  It is important to make a show of paying for the war. In the winter, the rebel government sets up its first funding scheme, a bond issue. The idea is to borrow money from the good white people of the South. New Orleans is the richest city in the Confederacy, and so it is no surprise that nearly half of the war loan, or $6 million in bonds, is raised in New Orleans. Constant and Gabrielle decide to buy.

  Downtown near city hall, the bonds can be viewed in banks, spread out on tables. It is money that could soften a family’s nest, money that could educate the children. But a patriot has to think of his country. If the rebel army is wanting, the Yankees will soon be at the door. Constant and Gabrielle, once a prosperous young couple, mortgage family and future to the great philosophical and moral truth of the superior race. Now they have no security. Their hope to remain a nice middle-class family is that the South wins the war, the Confederacy pays its debts, and slavery stays alive.

  Meanwhile, Yves of God is determined to remain rich. He has no desire to squander his own family’s future. Yves of God keeps his money in specie, gold and silver, and does not buy Confederate bonds. Because the rebellion is not a sure thing.

  * * *

  The bombastic name for the Yankee army is the “Grand Army of the Republic.” To avoid having to say all of it, and because the fight will decide whether the United States stays in one piece, everyone calls the Northern army “the Union.”

  In early 1862, General Ulysses S. Grant captures Fort Henry, in Tennessee, and then nearby Fort Donelson. The Union command looks south, down the Mississippi Valley, contemplating New Orleans. In February, Union gunboats take possession of Ship Island, a big sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, off the state of Mississippi. Ship Island is a stepping-stone to Louisiana. From Ship Island, the Union looks north, again to New Orleans.

  The siege of Louisiana takes shape. Two Yankee officers, Captain David Farragut and General Benjamin Butler, arrive at Ship Island and collect their tools. Farragut brings forty vessels fitted with guns, and General Butler an infantry of 10,000.

  In April comes a prelude, a slaughter in Tennessee. Far to the north of New Orleans, around a nondescript farm town called Shiloh, 10,000 Yankees meet 10,000 rebels for two days of shooting. The fight kills 3,500 and wounds 16,000. Nothing of this scale has been seen in North America; the entire Mexican War killed 2,000 U.S. soldiers. Black Americans see routine cruelty in the sadism of slavers, but whites have reserved some of their finest viciousness for one another.

  The Union claims victory, and for the next few days, trains full of Louisiana soldiers roll down to New Orleans and into the station on Basin Street. The railcars are loaded with the bodies of dead rebels and with the groaning and gangrenous wounded. White families swarm the train station to look for their men, to see the freak sight of the war come home, and to mourn. Constant and Gabrielle may well join the crush on the train platform. They no doubt know men in these units.

  The fight at Shiloh is the first strike of the Union campaign to strangle Louisiana and to shut down the rebellion in the Deep South. Ten days after the battle, the Confederate Congress in Richmond hands down the Conscription Act, creating the first army draft. Until now the rebel military has relied on volunteers. The Conscription Act requires uniformed service for white men aged sixteen to thirty-five.

  Twenty-nine-year-old Constant is back on the hook with the draft. He must find a way to reenter the war.

 
Brother Yves of God is a Confederate patriot. But if he joins a fighting unit, he risks losing his nine slaves and his nest egg of $8,000. Fortunately, at thirty-six, he is a year older than the upper age of the call-up. Yves of God can breathe a sigh of relief that he will not be drafted. He remains on light duty, drilling on Lafayette Square during the weekend, recruiting new men.

  The Union invasion cannot reach New Orleans by land. The swamps are impassable and the dry causeways that run through them easily blocked. A river route is the only military path. If an army can come down the Mississippi from Tennessee, or a flotilla can travel up the river from the Gulf of Mexico, the city is a prize.

  Half of Louisiana’s white men have already left for the war. The defense of New Orleans consists in two forts that lie downriver, plus three thousand men in the Thirtieth Louisiana, the unit of Second Lieutenant Joseph Lecorgne.

  The two forts, St. Philip and Jackson, lie seventy-five miles downstream, facing each other on opposite banks. The Confederate general in command, Mansfield Lovell, orders crews of enslaved to build a boom across the river near the forts. It is a bitter drink for an enslaved man to work on behalf of the rebel defense. But to resist is to face brutal punishment. The crews contrive a string of cypress logs, each sixty feet long, chained together by cables and anchored at points on the river bottom. The line is meant to stop ships coming upstream.

  Brother Joseph Lecorgne is stationed in New Orleans, but the main events take place downstream. Constant lies low.

  In early April, a flotilla of Union gunboats commanded by Captain David Farragut leaves its launch on Ship Island and enters the mouth of the Mississippi. The flotilla wends upstream, moving at night, lights out. Gunshots come from the levee but no artillery. The Yankee ships reach the forts, St. Philip and Jackson, the last defense of the city against invasion. At night on April 17, the federals pull up abreast of the forts and begin bombardment. The rebels set fire to barges loaded with pitch and timber and send the flaming hulks downstream. Union men hook them with lines and tow the fire rafts to shore to burn out. A Confederate squadron arrives from upstream. The Yankee gunboats kill some sixty rebels. The shooting continues for days, with the federals firing thirteen thousand shells. In the middle of one night, Union scouts cut through the chains of the boom across the river. On the night of April 24, Captain Farragut puts his flotilla in single file to pass in front of the forts. Two hours later, hit by cannons, the Yankees have a hundred dead, and they are steaming to New Orleans.

  Whites in New Orleans feel panic, but no source that I can find names what three hundred thousand enslaved people in Louisiana feel, think, or do during these days. Are black people watchful? Is it the end of something? Are African Americans jubilant, or are they worried about reprisal? I imagine it is all of these things.

  From Ship Island, in the gulf, the army of General Benjamin Butler, numbering fifteen thousand, ships out toward the city.

  The city government gives orders to merchants to destroy the goods in the warehouses to keep them out of enemy hands. Storerooms are emptied onto the street and made into bonfires. Arson teams sent out by the mayor burn fifteen thousand bales of cotton that lie strewn along the levee. Gangs board empty steamboats, set them on fire, cut their moorings, and send them downstream.

  There is no evidence Constant joins the marauding. But as a soldier from a delinquent unit, the ill-fated Company B, capable of menace, Constant is comfortable in the role. He is available to plunder and knows what is required.

  On April 25, in a rainstorm, the city watches the Union fleet pull up and drop anchor. The level of the river is higher than the streets of the city. Captain Farragut points cannons down at the Vieux Carré. Joseph Lecorgne’s superior, General Lovell, the Confederate commander, gives the order to his troops to evacuate the city and take what supplies they can carry. The Thirtieth Louisiana packs ordnance, stores, and the city’s archives. Joseph Lecorgne helps to load the trains.

  The regiment makes its way to the station, boarding the same boxcars that brought in the dead from Shiloh. Constant and Yves of God must say goodbye to their younger brother, then Joseph is gone. His train heads toward Camp Moore, a military depot eighty miles north.

  The mayor surrenders New Orleans on April 29.

  For Constant, it is an occasion for disgust. It is also the day after his thirtieth birthday. The invaders run the United States flag up the pole in front of the main federal building, the U.S. Mint, where metal currency was once stamped before the war.

  General Butler’s waterlogged army arrives after dark on May 1. The Grand Army of the Republic enters the city, marching in thousands behind a drum corps that plays “Yankee Doodle.” They meet jeering and curses from gangs, spitting and high noses from white women. They hear people yell at them that the sooner the Yankees die from Yellow Jack, the better.

  I can see Constant in the mob. I cannot see Gabrielle. She may be nursing, she may not be such a rebel as her husband. The week New Orleans is occupied, the little boy Louis Constant is eight months old. Caroline-the-mulatress hovers over him.

  Most whites are furious at the rebel military. Most blacks, I think, are the reverse—gleeful might describe it—but unsure about what is coming. It is a season of revulsion for the Lecorgnes and one hundred thousand other whites. It is jubilee, maybe, for the city’s twenty-five thousand slaves.

  For the first time in 150 years, the auction houses empty their jails, and the slave traders cannot be found.

  * * *

  These are some of the thoughts good Creoles like the Lecorgnes might have—

  The Yankees are godless and despicable. All you need to know can be seen in the eyes of the blacks. Les nègres are happy, and so are the gens de couleur. And now we fall under the heel of the race traitors.

  Most of General Benjamin Butler’s troops camp outside of town, but 2,500 patrol the streets, where crowds of whites heckle them. Butler is irritated that white women are among those who show their contempt. When Union soldiers step onto the sidewalk, women pull tight their bareges, the long scarves on their heads, step off the banquette, and show their backsides. Two weeks into the occupation, a white woman spits in the faces of two officers, and Butler issues General Order No. 28, the so-called Woman Order.

  As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans, in return for the most scrupulous noninterference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.

  Most white women of the city do not wish to be likened to prostitutes. Newspapers cry outrage, calling the decree an invitation to rape. Resentment washes through town, and fear. It is a rhetorical coup: in one paragraph, the Yankee general intimidates tens of thousands. The Woman Order becomes national news, then international, with newspapers in Europe running stories.

  And the drama has a familiar racial smell. Far from the streets of the Vieux Carré, in distant London, the British prime minister Viscount Palmerston denounces General Butler for his attack on the white tribe. Rising in the House of Commons, Palmerston says that the Woman Order in New Orleans is a disgrace. “All good English stock must blush to think such an act has been committed by one belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race,” says the prime minister.

  * * *

  Gabrielle Duchemin does not write down her feelings, or if she does, no papers survive. But a woman whom Gabrielle resembles does write some things, in a diary. Her name is Julia Le Grand, and she lives on Prytania Street, at the edge of Bouligny. Julia Le Grand was raised on her father’s plantation in Mississippi, Millican’s Bend, and at the age of thirty-three, she runs a school for white girls in New Orleans.

  “I do hate those bloody wretches who have made war upon us,” Le Grand writes. “Theirs is a most cowardly
struggle—and I glory in our Southern chivalry.”

  Julia Le Grand is of French descent, like Gabrielle, though seven years older. And like Gabrielle, she was brought to New Orleans in childhood. Both women are white slaveholders; each lives in comfort but not luxury. Each sees the world from a house in the same faubourg.

  “It is rumored that we are to have a negro insurrection,” Le Grand says, voicing a fear that runs through the white world. The Yankees are “inciting them by every means to rise up and slay their masters. Some of the Federals preach to the negroes in the churches, calling on them to sweep us away forever. I feel no fear, but many are in great alarm. It may come at last. Fires are frequent and it is feared that incendiaries [arsonists] are at work.”

  Le Grand points out, and I think Gabrielle would say the same, that in the presence of black people, the Yankees are not the loving souls that many Northerners believe themselves to be.

  “The generality of the Yankee soldiers hate the negroes and subject them to great abuse whenever they can,” Le Grand says. “This poor silly race has been made a tool of, enticed from their good homes, and induced to insult their masters. They now lie about, destitute and miserable, without refuge and without hope.”

  Gabrielle and Constant do not regret they sold their man Ovid. He brought them a windfall, now sunk into Confederate bonds. Ovid lives across town, where he works for the family of Valsin Gourdain. Gabrielle and Constant do not regret that they sold Ovid, especially because he is suddenly worthless to the Gourdains.

  Caroline-the-mulatress is the Lecorgnes’ last worker, their final slave. She must wonder, is it time to leave?

  * * *

  Whites normally fear a black uprising. The invasion brings a reversal of expectations, as the Union Army worries about a white uprising. General Butler bans all public gatherings but church services. No more than three whites are allowed to meet on the streets.

 

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