by Edward Ball
In November, the Yellowjackets go up the Atchafalaya River to the town of Alexandria, on the Red River. In December, they leave for Monroe, one hundred miles farther north. On New Year’s Day 1864, the men march up the frozen Ouachita River toward Monroe. “For many of the men it is the first time they have ever set foot on ice,” a veteran remembers. Barefoot soldiers leave bloody footprints as they cross the frozen ground. When a Confederate supply train rattles past, bound for another camp, General Alfred Mouton confiscates it for his suffering men. When they reach Monroe, Terrance and the others build cabins to make winter camp. Sergeant Terrance’s hand in carpentry and millwork make the quarters tight and dry.
In the spring, three hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, a Yankee army numbering thirty thousand moves along the Red River, a tributary to the Mississippi. The Eighteenth Regiment marches in to meet them. On April 8, the Yellowjackets approach the village of Mansfield and a cotton farm known as Moss plantation. The place has a columned mansion in Greek Revival style and a complement of slave cabins.
By this time, General Alfred Mouton’s brigade is broken. Of 2,200 men once in his command, 760 have been killed or wounded. The rest prepare to face the Yankees in the bloodiest campaign of the war in Louisiana.
At Moss plantation, the Yellowjackets trade back-and-forth charges with the Union, and the first dozen fall dead. Two hours into the fight, Mouton throws his forces against the enemy center. He chooses Sergeant Terrance’s unit to make the charge and tells them that as commander, Mouton himself will lead it. For this kind of thing, Mouton is a hero to his men. The attack turns into slaughter. The Union line gives way in the charge, but Colonel Leopold Armant, commander of a pair of French companies, is killed. The rebel rank and file turns disgusted and angry. Some Yankees drop their rifles, some flee, some try to surrender. The charge continues, and mayhem with it. A Yankee soldier shoots General Mouton off his horse, dead. The rebels now have two of their commanders motionless on the ground. The rebels are enraged, especially the Frenchmen.
The Yellowjackets begin to kill the surrendered and fleeing Yankees. When all is done at Moss plantation, the Eighteenth Regiment counts 19 of its own dead, 75 wounded, 1 missing. The Union counts 113 killed, 580 wounded, and 1,540 captured or missing.
Paper evidence puts Sergeant Terrance Lecorgne in the middle of the revenge killing. He is with his company during the hours and at the location of the highest number of deaths. There is no proof that he shoots captured soldiers, and no sign he does not. Yet he is a veteran of one lawless gang, the soldiers’ mutiny.
What is happening to this thirty-two-year-old work-for-hire carpenter? The war gives a man who feels he is abused by les nègres a path to cathartic relief by attacking the scapegoats in front of him. It provides a man with a habit of resentment a way to get back his lost pride using the enemy’s blood. The war gives the drunken swill of vengeance. It is Constant’s first experience of a massacre, and not his last.
* * *
I have, like a reflex, a few questions. What would we do, in the impossible event that we lived at that time? How would we act? We would behave differently, of course. Because we fly high above the carpet of ignorance that so obviously covers this man and his comrades. We would make righteous choices, because we share nothing with these people. We live so far from their benighted world. The society they inhabit, the one that puts people in chains, is vicious and stupid. Whereas we are humane. To go and fight for the slave power is a decision of unusual cruelty. To kill captive soldiers in war is an act of sadism. It is what we call a “war crime.” Leave aside for the moment that war itself is ordered criminality. Within war, there are crimes more criminal, so-called war crimes. And here is one. We would be different, because we are not capable of this thing.
I look around the life of Constant and find that there are few places from which to observe him that are not above the man and superior to him. There are few places that do not look down upon the past from the height of condescension. It is comforting to glide over history at the moral altitude of the birds. What is wrong with this petty and uneducated failure of a man, this hewer of wood? He clearly hates black people. And we—I mean, we white folks—are more evolved than to wish anything but happiness and wealth for African Americans. If we were alive then, we would do it all differently.
It is a false question, What would we do? The self of a white everyman or everywoman, such as can be found in the United States of the twenty-first century, is not a self that appears in the Deep South of the old slave empire. A thought like this—I would not be a woman like Gabrielle who sells a man like Ovid—is incoherent. It assumes that a modern white woman might be transplanted to another generation, where she makes choices from ethics that have hardly been thought. It supposes we gentle moderns would be among the one in ten thousand who refuse to act in the pattern of an ungentle, early, and malign white supremacist. Can we afford the luxury of this self-portrait?
The promise of the thought experiment, the consolation of what-would-I-do, no-doubt-I-would-do-better, dissolves along the way. I wonder how I would behave in a firefight on a battlefield during the Civil War. The reality is that “I” cannot inhabit the war of Sergeant Terrance Lecorgne. Only he and other young white Creoles can inhabit it. But here is a different appraisal. Suppose the hypothetical was not impossible, and “I” were such a person, a young white Creole. The chances are better than half that I would shoot captive Yankees as they are rounded up.
12
Camille Zeringue, the enviable Lecorgne cousin, the sugar baron, tries to hold on to comfort at his manse, Seven Oaks. Since the occupation, his cloud of black workers has thinned to a wisp. Two-thirds of the workers on Seven Oaks have walked off. General Benjamin “Beast” Butler has been reassigned to Virginia, and the new commander of the army in New Orleans is another general, Nathaniel Banks. Cousin Camille complains to him.
“After the occupation, a state of tumult and malaise attacked my negroes,” he writes Banks in February 1863. Camille’s workers leave the plantation and move to the army’s refugee site, Camp Parapet. But when the Emancipation Proclamation is announced, in January 1863, most of the seventy workers return to their cabins at Seven Oaks, “anticipating that they would be treated as free and independent,” as Camille puts it. Somehow the army makes clear that black people are not free if they happen to be enslaved by planters who claim to be loyal to the Union. Camille has signed the oath, he claims to be loyal. When the workers at Seven Oaks learn this, the same group leaves the plantation again, heading to Camp Parapet. Which is easy to do, since the contraband camp is a fifteen-minute boat trip across the Mississippi.
Camille is disgusted. “It is a fact that les nègres are grown children,” he tells the army chief. “It is necessary always to direct, surveil, and control them. They live with only the care that they are fed, housed, and cared for when sick. The future doesn’t exist for les nègres. They live only in the present—to drink, to eat, to sleep, and to maraud.”
Gabrielle, across the river in Bouligny, and nursing Marie Estelle, probably sees things like this. Poor Cousin Camille, he is in a bad predicament. It is unfair what they are doing to him. He was the one in the family who did not want secession. Let him keep his coons with their hands on the sugarcane.
An army surveyor comes out to Seven Oaks and writes his report, scribbling on a survey form that “the number of niggers present” on Camille’s place is forty, whereas “niggers ran away” number seventy. The surveyor is a Union soldier who is not particularly antislavery.
The enviable Camille, the cousin with all the money, gets his comeuppance. Two weeks after Camille complains to the army, he looks out his front door and into the barrel of a gun.
It is early March. Six of the remaining sugar workers have armed themselves with guns. It is not clear how they acquire their pistols or how they pay for them. Perhaps a sympathetic army officer is involved. The armed guerrillas take themselves to Camille’s house, the ho
use with the sixty-foot columns on each of its four sides. The rebels—they are black rebels, this time, and the report does not give their names—shoot into the windows and through the doors of the house. No one is hurt. Perhaps Camille is hiding beneath the stairs. The house is shredded by bullet holes. The men make it plain that they want an audience with Camille, the man who claims to own them and their sisters and brothers and children.
Camille emerges and makes himself available, without enthusiasm. Once they have him, the armed workers say that they will not work and will not leave the place until Camille “gives them their freedom papers,” as the report says. Camille begs for time to consider. He talks his way through the ultimatum, saves his own life. I think of his likely words.
—Look around, it is good here. The farm works for everyone. Things are changing. It will be better when the war is over, it will be less hard. About freedom papers, it requires some thought. These things take time.
Fortunately for Camille, the rebels do not shoot, and they leave him to think.
Sergeant Terrance, far off in north Louisiana, does not hear about the events at Seven Oaks. However, if he could see the empty cabins behind the house, if he could witness the hostage taking of Camille, I imagine he would feel a bit of schadenfreude.
Camille Zeringue knows the hairsplitting terms of the Emancipation Proclamation, namely, that enslaved people within the Union lines remain enslaved. The law is on his side. He calls out the U.S. Army. The occupiers are his defenders, they will put down defiant blacks. A Yankee squad rides out to Seven Oaks. In the lead is the Union provost marshal, chief of the military police force. The army comes with officers from the Jefferson Parish Police, local men who are ex-rebels. The police detest the Yankees, who look down on them. The police also detest the black rebels.
The army marshals seize and disarm the six black rebels. They hand the six to the local police. Jefferson Parish lawmen are no friends of abolition. They consult with Camille, and a solution is determined. They will whip the perpetrators for their insolence. The men are stripped and tied to the ground. With a long whip, apparently borrowed from Camille, the police lay on “twenty-five to thirty lashes,” according to the army report. Union soldiers in the group stand aside to watch. They are curious. They want to see how the South’s Anglo-Saxon does his business.
If this scene were in a novel, it would turn into a moment of revelation and despair. The black men who push back at their confinement, who demand a key to full humanity, freedom papers, discover another false promise. They learn how whiteness must prevail, despite the Proclamation, despite army men come to end the old ways.
That will teach the bastards.
Work resumes at Seven Oaks.
* * *
After New Orleans falls, in summer 1862, and after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, the South starts to lose its way through the Civil War. The giant Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—7,000 dead, 11,000 missing, 34,000 wounded—ends with Union victory on July 3, 1863. Vicksburg, Mississippi, falls to the Yankees the same week, putting all of the Mississippi River in Northern hands. By this time, many in both the North and the South act as though it is a black and white war. In July 1863 in New York City, thousands of white men and some women riot against the Union’s military draft, marauding in black neighborhoods for nearly one week and killing hundreds of African Americans. If you put the question, few whites in the North would say they want to fight to free the enslaved. The war is the fault of the blacks, says the workingman, he who is a “wage slave.”
At twenty-seven, the youngest of the three brothers, Joseph Lecorgne is a second lieutenant with the Thirtieth Louisiana Regiment, a few ranks above his older brother, “Sergeant Terrance.” In three years of fighting, he sees less blood than his middle brother but far more than their older one, Yves of God, the homeboy who escapes the war altogether. Joseph’s Civil War is dramatic enough. Black Yankees nearly kill him, and he ends up in a lice-infested prison camp.
It is July 1863, and Sergeant Terrance fights with the Yellowjackets in upstate Louisiana. Joseph, meanwhile, is in Jackson, Mississippi, defending that city against a Union siege. The rebels have lost Vicksburg, fifty miles west. The Thirtieth Louisiana wants to keep Jackson, the state capital. But the Union Army seizes the city in a week, and the rebels flee. Joseph and his regiment escape farther south. Through the fall of 1863, five hundred miles away, big, cruel battles grind at Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee. In the winter, Joseph garrisons at Mobile, Alabama, with his unit, Company F of the Thirtieth. When spring comes in 1864, he and Company F are ordered to Georgia. That is because a giant army under the Union general William T. Sherman has marched out of Tennessee toward Georgia, aiming for Atlanta. Joseph and his comrades pass months of fighting near Atlanta. In July 1864, he is among tens of thousands of rebels who range around southeast of the city, trying to block an invasion. General William T. Sherman has brought his swarming army of 55,000 to take Atlanta, and the fight is a charnel house. Sherman’s legion loses 3,600 in dead and wounded, the rebels 5,500. Atlanta is kept from capture, for a time.
Joseph survives several battles untouched and falls back with comrades to a few days of rest. He seems to have the same luck or skill as his brother, Sergeant Terrance, in dodging flak and rifle fire. He misses all of those flying “Minié balls,” as bullets are called. Bullets in this war are named for their French inventor, Claude-Étienne Minié.
West of Atlanta, Joseph finds himself in a fight near a chapel, Ezra Church. This time, General Sherman’s mob nearly slaughters Joseph’s regiment. At Ezra Church, three-fourths of the men in the Thirtieth Louisiana are killed or wounded. But Joseph stays clean. The Yankees can no longer be kept from the city, and what is left of Company F slouches away in a ragged column, heading toward Tennessee. Its officers are dead, and Atlanta burns behind them.
Joseph is married and a father. In New Orleans, his wife, Estelle Daunoy, watches the newspapers and the mails, hoping for good news, which declines to appear. Estelle minds the couple’s three-year-old daughter, Alice. The girl has no memory of her father, whom she has not seen for two years. I have to wonder whether Alice and her mother, Estelle, visit Gabrielle and her children. The two war wives, five blocks from each other in Bouligny, compare lives. They talk, their children play. They tell the children about their daddies, far away at someplace important.
Like the other Lecorgne mothers, Estelle employs enslaved people. She has on hand Frank, eighteen, and Edward, nineteen, two men inherited by her husband. Estelle may also have a woman who runs the stove, scours the house, and stays awake at night when little Alice is sick. To enslave such a person would be comme il faut, how things are done, correctly.
If Joseph is like other infantrymen, now and then he writes his wife a letter. The news he sends softens the disaster he is living. If Joseph is like the others, his letters declare his love for Estelle and Alice, and he sends deep embraces. He names the Lecorgnes whom he misses, but he says nothing about the black people all around them. They are invisible, like ghosts in the corridors. Edward and Frank, the young black men at his wife’s side, whom he knows well, would fail to appear in Joseph’s letters. Now and then such a letter, scribbled at night in a tent lit by a candle, might make its way back to New Orleans.
The slaves are to blame for this wretched war, Joseph knows, though he is unable to say just how. If not for them, none of it would have happened. The Lecorgnes would be together, if not for them. We would be at peace, at home, and in good money, if it were not for the godforsaken darkies.
* * *
In February 1864, two Creoles of color take a steamship from New Orleans up to the Northeast. They are Jean Baptiste Roudanez, a mechanical engineer, and Arnold Bertonneau, who sells wine for a living. This is a lobbying trip. Their destination is the White House, where they have arranged a meeting with President Lincoln.
Bertonneau and Roudanez are leaders in the black bourgeoisie of New Orleans. They are clos
e to Paul Trévigne, editor of L’Union, as well as with the French-speaking African Americans who write for the paper. Bertonneau and Roudanez carry a petition signed by several hundred prosperous gens de couleur. It is an appeal for the right to vote among people of color. The wine merchant and the engineer plan to present the petition to the president.
The two get off their steamship in New York, where they visit with Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists. Then they go to Boston, where they meet William Lloyd Garrison, white publisher of The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper. They leave for Washington, and on March 12, they go to the White House. About one-half of Louisiana is under occupation—Union territory—and one-half is in rebel hands. Lincoln receives the gentlemen of color from New Orleans into his office when he is wondering what to do with this biggest piece of Southern turf in Yankee hands. Is Louisiana back in the Union de facto, and should elections be held?
Bertonneau and Roudanez enter Lincoln’s office. They are here to share words—Causer, c’est le manger des oreilles, “Conversation is the food of the ears.” They give Lincoln their petition. It has the signatures of a great many moneyed and literate Creoles of color. The two argue with the president that people who are not white should have the vote. They listen politely to his prevarication, and then pick up their hats and withdraw. The president is moved. He does not leap to his desk to write a proclamation of universal manhood suffrage. The next day, however, Lincoln sends a letter to the new governor of Louisiana, Michael Hahn. He mentions his meeting with Roudanez and Bertonneau and recommends that Louisiana try to give voting rights to educated and prosperous blacks. They are, after all, just like the white tribe.