by Edward Ball
The invaders control New Orleans and its swamps, a radius of twenty miles. And they control the river, as far north as Baton Rouge. Outside of town, the rebels have rural, wet Louisiana—the Acadian parishes in the southwest. Rebels own dry parts, too, the cotton parishes north of Baton Rouge. A rebel camp appears a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, in the French-speaking town of New Iberia. There, a few hundred men retrench under the Confederate commander General John Pratt. Some come in after the evacuation of the Thirtieth Regiment, though not Joseph Lecorgne, who is sent east. General Pratt wants more soldiers to sneak out of the occupied areas and regroup on the rebel side. He writes a one-paragraph plea, gives it a headline, “Militia Men,” and sends the bulletin to a printer. When one thousand sheets come back to hand, Pratt gets them smuggled into New Orleans, where they are spread around—
“The country is not yet lost. The enemy may be checked and the insolent invaders of our soil will be ignominiously driven back from where they came.… Let every true and patriotic man capable of bearing arms rush to fight and all will be safe. There is no alternative. —John G. Pratt.”
Whites in New Orleans pass the message hand to hand, like pornography. If a Union soldier finds it, reprisal comes. Constant gets his hands on one of Pratt’s fliers. At least I imagine this is true, because his next step is to try to get to New Iberia. He will rejoin the fight there, and go rebel again.
* * *
The Yankee general Benjamin Butler is bald, squat, and orotund. He has a face that looks like a bullfrog’s. The general hangs a man accused of pulling down the U.S. flag, a deed that gives him a nickname, “Beast Butler.” Having made a martyr, Beast Butler raises the pressure. He orders all white men in the city to take a loyalty oath to the United States or to register with the Union Army as an “enemy of the state.” The U.S. Congress passes the Confiscation Act in 1861 and follows it with a stronger law in 1862. If whites in the occupied areas do not declare loyalty by signing an oath, the hammer falls. The Union can seize a house, a bank account, a piece of land. Fearing confiscation, almost all whites in the city, upwards of seventy thousand, put their names to a piece of paper that states they will be nice to the blacks, from now on—
“I solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God that I will … faithfully support all acts of Congress passed during the existing rebellion with reference to slaves … so help me God.” At this point, enslaved people remain slaves.
The Yankee army is “Anglo-Saxon,” like the rebel government it replaces. Beast Butler does not ask for a loyalty oath from the enslaved, because he knows every person of color prefers the Union Anglo-Saxon to the rebel. The plantations north and west of the city, where eighty percent of the state’s black people live, are in rebel hands. At night, thousands of workers escape them. They head for the city and its Union forts. Camp Parapet, seven miles upriver from New Orleans, is one; Fort Jackson, just downriver, another. By fall, ten thousand black people have freed themselves by stealing away from the bayous. At Parapet and Jackson, they are refugees. Union commanders put black people to work, digging trenches and cleaning tents, cooking for white soldiers and building fortifications. In return, they have housing, food, and pay of about $10 per month. The wages must stun the thousands who free themselves. None has ever been paid for work.
At the end of summer 1862, Beast Butler tells the banks in New Orleans to stop circulating Confederate money. He also tells them to burn their rebel bonds. When that happens, Constant and Gabrielle’s status as people of means suddenly disappears. Deep in debt to the Southern cause, they watch their money vanish.
Fearing a guerrilla movement, Butler orders citizens to surrender their firearms, and the Yankees start to collect guns that whites have at home. Constant probably sees this as theft. When a man gives up his gun, he feels the clothing being pulled off his body.
The Yankees keep coming. In Maryland, along Antietam Creek, near the Potomac River, two armies like giant beasts turn the water red. In the Battle of Antietam, more than five thousand men are killed in one day, September 17. The scale of killing is the highest for a twenty-four-hour period in any U.S. war, before or since. Constant knows from newspapers about the slaughter. He knows that some of his comrades, men from the Fourteenth Louisiana, are among the dead.
The slaughter is taken as a Union victory. It opens the door for Abraham Lincoln to make an announcement. After Antietam, the White House issues a draft of a document called the Emancipation Proclamation. It promises a mass act of freedom on January 1. The text circulates in the newspapers, and it is a little astonishing. Despite decades of agitation by abolitionists, few expect to see black people, in this life, walk out of enslavement. President Lincoln, when he writes the Proclamation, adds a sweetener for Southern rebels. It is a promise of compensation, money for people. If slaveholders release their workers, they will receive payment, reimbursement for human property.
At least one man in science, Louis Agassiz, the natural historian at Harvard, is worried by the idea of emancipation. Agassiz is one of the American tribunes of race thought. He holds tight to the theory of multiple evolution, the idea that races are different species and must be seen in rank. Agassiz writes to the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, set up by Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation. The scientist wants to warn about the dangers of freedom for the tribe or species of black people.
“Social equality I deem at all time impracticable … flowing from the character of the negro race,” Agassiz says. Blacks are “indolent, playful, sensuous, imitative, subservient, good natured, versatile, unsteady in their purpose, devoted, affectionate, in everything unlike other races, they may but be compared to children, grown in the stature of adults while retaining a childlike mind.”
Louis Agassiz says he is especially worried about interracial, or interspecies, sex—
“The production of halfbreeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community.… Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is … a perversion of every natural sentiment.”
For Constant, the news that enslaved people might be free if the South loses is the worst insult, unthinkable and possibly as disgusting as it is for the distinguished scientist. The Lecorgnes have lost too much already. Constant still has one worker, and his siblings hold another ten or twelve people. And there is no earthly reason for a government to take away a man’s property.
The Emancipation Proclamation has a loophole. It frees people only in areas of the South that are in rebellion at the time it is issued. Areas occupied by the Union Army are exempt. Which means that for now, it is symbolic and unenforceable. In Louisiana, rebels will not voluntarily free the 250,000 black people who live behind Confederate lines, and the 50,000 behind Union lines remain enslaved.
Caroline, the Lecorgnes’ last slave, is twenty. I imagine that when she hears of the freedom plan, she wonders hard what will come. It is not likely the Lecorgnes will let her go. Maybe that line in Gombo runs in her mind: Ça va rivé dans semaine quatte zheudis, “That will come to pass in a week with four Thursdays.”
* * *
Enter now two men of color. One is Paul Trévigne, the other, Nelson Fouché. Paul Trévigne is an educator, a free African American, and prosperous. For twenty years he has been teaching at a school for Creoles of color. In September 1862, Trévigne starts to publish a small weekly newspaper. He calls it L’Union, “The Union.” The paper is in French, and the first issue appears soon after the Proclamation. Trévigne hires a Creole of color, Nelson Fouché, as editor.
Les Cenelles, the poetry collection, is a birthplace of black American verse. L’Union is the birth of African American journalism in the South, the first “black newspaper” south of Virginia. It is a beginning for black public speech. The presence of the U.S. Army makes it possible that Paul Trévigne and Nelson Fouché can publish anything at all. New Orleans is occupied, and in the absence of the Yankees, the white city would not
allow a black man to print anything but gentle poetry. A black newspaper would be torched.
The so-called Native Guards, people of color who sign on with the Confederacy, come out of hiding. A Union soldier on every street corner means the game of pretend is over. Officers from the Native Guards pay a visit to General Butler and ask whether their company might be useful to the occupation.
Beast Butler likes the idea. He wants to recruit black men as Yankee soldiers. At the end of September, about one thousand gens de couleur are mustered for the Union—the First Regiment Louisiana Native Guards. That is their Yankee name, but they call themselves something different—Chasseurs d’Afrique, African Hunters. The name nods both at their blackness and at their identification with France.
The Chasseurs d’Afrique are a break in the mold, one of the first black regiments in the U.S. Army. They are paid the same as white soldiers. Eventually Louisiana will send twenty-four thousand blacks in uniform to fight for the Union, or about half of the black male population of military age.
Constant plans his return to the fight. It is one mess after another, and the Chasseurs d’Afrique are the last insult. Black soldiers who change sides prove that the most devious of fighters are niggers.
* * *
He has a friend in New Orleans named Charles Gauthier, whose family runs a brick manufactory just downriver from Bouligny. At twenty-four, Gauthier is younger, but he and Constant have something in common. Gauthier also has a botched tour in the war. He enlists in the Thirtieth Regiment, Joseph Lecorgne’s unit. Although Joseph escapes when the Yankees come, Gauthier’s company is captured, and he spends time in a prison camp. When Beast Butler orders the release of the rebels, Gauthier is paroled and goes home in shame.
Gauthier and Constant share frustrations. They talk about the war, and they talk more about the war, until one day, they disappear. Sometime in October, Gauthier and Constant say goodbye to their wives and children, and they sneak out of town. They cross Yankee lines and break out of New Orleans together.
I remember my Aunt Maud on this story. Her version of the tale makes it an adventure. She writes about it in one of her family history ledgers. What she says sounds like this.
—My grandfather, Constant Lecorgne, did not like the first company he enlisted in. Not very much. He had a bad time of it, and he resigned. Eventually he joined another unit. In the middle of the war, he walked up the Mississippi levee for fifty or a hundred miles and made his way to another company, where he signed up again. He liked that unit better, so he stayed till the end of the war.
Aunt Maud’s story overlooks the mutiny, the court-martial, the haircut. But she is right about the rest.
Constant and Charles Gauthier leave the city at night. The levee along the Mississippi is the only way north; the roads leaving town are guarded and patrolled. A few miles upriver, hard by the levee, lies the federal bulwark, Camp Parapet. The Yankee fortress is a garrison and a giant refugee camp for slaves, with several thousand people living in a tent city. Constant and Charles have to avoid Camp Parapet, so they must cross the river to the western bank. They take a ferry, or maybe steal a boat. On the west bank of the Mississippi, they resume walking north, atop the levee.
Their destination is New Iberia, the place where General John Pratt, author of the call-up plea (“there is no alternative”), sits in a tent-and-campfire village, gathering in a resistance army. If they could fly to it, New Iberia would lie one hundred miles west of New Orleans. But the town is really two hundred miles by swerving waterways and boot steps down meandering swamp paths.
Charles and Constant are runaways. If they were enslaved, there would be advertisements about the escape, patrols to capture them, and a price on their heads.
They walk night and day, until the town of Donaldsonville, probably, a distance of sixty miles, where they turn south. In Donaldsonville, they find a nasty scene. A month earlier, the Union sends gunboats up the river to bombard the town, and then burn it. The scorched earth is retaliation against rebel snipers who have been hiding here and shooting at Yankee boats.
Western Louisiana counts four big streams that run north to south: Bayou Lafourche, Tensas Bayou, the Atchafalaya River, and Bayou Teche. Go west from New Orleans and you cross the four waterways one after another. These slender and sometimes hidden rivers cut through swamps, open into rich bottomland, and return to swamps.
At Donaldsonville, on the Mississippi, Constant and Gauthier reach the first stream, Bayou Lafourche, and turn south to follow the current. The men get into a boat, borrowed or paid, to ease down the bayou. Bayou Lafourche is family ground for Constant. His mother was born on a plantation here, so he knows his way through the half land, half muck of the watershed. They come to a canal that leaves the bayou and cuts west through the swamp, ending at a place called Attakapas Landing. Here it is back on foot. A few miles through woods, then into the water again. The streams meander and shrink. Constant and Gauthier probably find themselves in a canoe. In Louisiana, a canoe is a “pirogue,” a dugout log made for shallows. Edging a pirogue along the creeks, the runaways come to Tensas Bayou, where they trudge again a few miles through mud, then cross over the Atchafalaya River, thread down more streams and rivulets, get up onto land, and finally reach Bayou Teche.
It is known as “the Teche,” a languid, narrow river that winds past a hundred or more sugar plantations. The Teche is the sugar bowl of Louisiana, for its plantations. It is the thickest black belt in the state, home to tens of thousands of enslaved. The rebel camp at New Iberia is huddled on Bayou Teche, and it is seething. Since the call for recruits, the camp is doubled in size, thanks to new joiners and to a rebel commander who just turned up. He is General Richard Taylor, lately fighting in Virginia, called to New Iberia to do the same in Louisiana. General Taylor has orders to make a fresh killing force west of the Mississippi, to fight the Yankees up and down the river, and to try to take back New Orleans.
It is mid-October. Constant and Gauthier look like ghosts as they stumble out of the woods and into the encampment. They have been slogging toward New Iberia for a week or more. They come at the right time. General Taylor wants warm bodies, and his minions are signing anyone who can walk.
There is no record of it, but I imagine a conversation something like this.
—What is your name?
—Terrance. Terrance Lecorgne.
—Previous service?
—None.
—Terrance Lecorgne, you are now with Company K of the Yellowjackets.
The “Yellowjackets” are the Eighteenth Louisiana Infantry. When Constant and Charles Gauthier join, Gauthier puts his name on the rolls, but Constant does not. Instead, he uses an alias, “Terrance.” By this time, the mutiny in the Fourteenth Louisiana is notorious. Confederate commanders do not want the drunks and dregs of Company B, Constant’s first unit. The name Terrance Lecorgne appears nowhere on a blacklist, and there are enough Lecorgnes in the service that “Terrance” is a plausible fake. Constant picks the name out of the air and dodges suspicion.
He is assigned to Company K as a sergeant. In his last berth, he was Lieutenant Lecorgne. To enlist as a sergeant means another demotion; it is a fall of six or seven ranks from the middling height of lieutenant to the low shelf of sergeant, just above the grunt’s rank, corporal. The long slog from New Orleans is a heroic show of devotion to the cause, and another man might have parlayed it into an officer’s status. But Terrance Lecorgne is a man who makes a poor impression.
A pattern is visible. Through friends and family, Constant finds his way into a nice position, one with authority—as captain or lieutenant, as a recruitment officer or sheriff’s deputy. But his superiors find a man different from the one they thought they had in hand.
* * *
Two weeks later, Sergeant Terrance Lecorgne goes into battle, his first. It takes place around a town called Labadieville. Beast Butler, down in New Orleans, wants to extend federal control in the state. Butler plans an invasion along Ba
you Lafourche, the plantation nest closest to the city and the homeplace of Sergeant Terrance’s mother, Marguerite. Butler names a commander, a thirty-year-old German immigrant, Brigadier General Godfrey Weitzel. The plan is for Weitzel to take a flotilla up the Mississippi, seize the town of Donaldsonville at the mouth of Lafourche, then move down the bayou, destroying its rice and sugar plantations and unlocking the chains of slavery from thousands. Four gunboats and three thousand men make up the force. Some of the infantry are the Chasseurs d’Afrique, or First Regiment Louisiana Native Guards, the first black unit in the federal army. It is their first fight, too.
Sergeant Terrance and the Yellowjackets cannot believe the vileness of the facts. A German interloper is set to plunder their French homeland. And worse, armed blacks are going to assist.
Union troops reach Donaldsonville on October 24. Hearing of the landing, the Yellowjackets make their way to the town of Thibodaux, far down the Lafourche stream. Two French Creoles command the rebels—Alfred Mouton, a man popular with rank and file, and Leopold Armant, a highborn twenty-seven-year-old colonel. Sergeant Terrance shares the French language with these men but little else. He is well below them, socially as well as mentally.
It is at the peak of sugar grinding season on Bayou Lafourche. Every worker on every plantation is cutting sugarcane, feeding it into the stone teeth of grinding machines, and boiling the sludge in churning cauldrons to make cane juice. Up and down the bayou, black smoke traces the air from the fires that feed the boil.
The day of the fight, October 27, is supremely cold, with frozen cane in the fields and a coat of ice on the cypress trees. The two thousand Yellowjackets move upstream from Thibodaux toward Labadieville. They stop at a choke point with impassable swamps on one side and the water of Lafourche on the other. Here the Yankees must push through a narrow field. Terrance Lecorgne’s Company K is placed at the center of the Confederate line, on a dirt stretch of Texana Road. According to the memoir of one soldier, as the Union column advances down Lafourche, enslaved people abandon the fields, flee the plantations, and join their line.