Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  In New Orleans, Paul Trévigne writes an editorial in L’Union. Voting is “the rightful capacity of all native and free born Americans, by virtue of their nativity in the country, irrespective of national descent, wealth or intelligence.” L’Union is read by Creoles of color. No whites pick it up, let alone advertise in it. Most African Americans speak only English. The paper struggles for two years. Paul Trévigne and his editor, Nelson Fouché, do not think they can continue in business. What is more, threats come from whites, anonymous threats, violent threats. In 1864, Fouché and Trévigne decide to shut down L’Union.

  An angel of the press steps forward. He has a familiar name—Louis Charles Roudanez. He is the brother of the petitioner, Jean Baptiste Roudanez, the one just back from the White House. The angel of the press is well-known in the French Quarter. Louis Roudanez is a physician, he is rich, and he is a man of color. When Paul Trévigne folds l’Union, Roudanez takes out his wallet.

  Louis Roudanez (pronounced Roo-dah-ney) has his office on Conti Street, a few blocks from the first Lecorgne house, on Dauphine. When L’Union closes, in early July 1864, Louis Roudanez buys the paper’s physical plant and reopens the shop. As publisher, he wants to put out a different newspaper. It is to be bilingual, so as to double its reach. Roudanez gives it a new name, the New Orleans Tribune (in French, La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans). The new publisher has deep pockets and plans to lose money, like a good angel.

  He is born in 1823, the son of two free people of color. Louis Charles Roudanez is a young man during the 1840s, when he lives in the Vieux Carré as a bond trader dealing in municipal securities. He is one of a small group of men of color—maybe there are five hundred in New Orleans—who make serious money in business before the Civil War. In the late 1840s, cash in pocket, Roudanez takes himself to Paris. He stays for several years and studies to be a physician, taking a degree at the Faculté de Médecine de Sorbonne Université. Roudanez returns to New Orleans during the 1850s and marries a free woman of color named Célie Saulay. He opens a medical office that serves both blacks and whites. When the war comes, Roudanez decides that treating the venereal infections of white businessmen and the diarrhea of colored children is not satisfying enough. His friends are getting into politics, and he does the same.

  The New Orleans Tribune, Roudanez’s newspaper, calls itself an “organ of the oppressed” and advocates the radical idea of a nonracial democracy. The paper calls for a fair deal for people of African descent. Roudanez says in print that he will “spare no means at our command” to take the momentum out of white supremacy.

  The Tribune’s first issue appears July 21, 1864. An editorial reads—

  “The old plantation system should be summarily abolished, the plantations divided into five-acre lots, and partitioned among the tillers of the soil. [Black people] should be armed [and] educated as fast as possible, taught to honor the flag and to hate their former rebel masters.”

  Do the Lecorgnes read the Tribune? I do not know, but I doubt it. Do they hear about the paper? They must. What I believe they feel is that the newspaper is a rich black man’s disgusting trick.

  The Tribune starts publishing three times a week, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It runs two pages in French, two in English, and sells for five cents. African Americans read it, and a few whites. By October, the Tribune becomes a daily. The paper becomes the strongest voice of the black South. The idea is surprising: during the Civil War, deep in bedlam, in a state that is fighting to keep slavery, it is here that a black newspaper is born.

  In 1864, occupied Louisiana writes a new state constitution. It is a step in President Lincoln’s so-called ten percent plan for restoring the United States. He laid out the scheme in a December 1863 statement, the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. If ten percent of the state’s voters take an oath of allegiance to Washington, and a new constitution is produced that bans enslavement, Louisiana can return to the Union. In New Orleans, a constitutional convention is arranged, with delegates elected under pressure from the U.S. Army. Whites behind the rebellion, the big majority, stay away from the polls, not least because many are off in the war. But at least ten percent of the white men still in town make their way to voting stations.

  Louis Charles Roudanez, physician, Creole of color, founder of the New Orleans Tribune

  The capital city of Louisiana has moved back to New Orleans, its old seat, from the town of Baton Rouge. The governor’s office, the legislature, and functions of state again inhabit the Crescent City. But the government center is not a white, classical building with columns and pediment. It is an ad hoc statehouse, a brown brick meeting hall known as the Mechanics Institute.

  The constitutional convention—ninety-four white men—meets at the Mechanics Institute. When the work is done, the 1864 constitution contains a provision for the abolition of slavery and a promise of public education for both whites and blacks in a dual system of separate schools. Emancipation becomes the law—the demand from Washington—but the constitution does not create a mechanism to fund the black schools, only the white. It is a clever omission. Most of the black schools that open in Louisiana are funded by the Union occupation and by charities in the North, so-called freedmen’s aid societies.

  The Lecorgnes have schoolteachers in their ranks, like Constant’s sister, Eliza Lecorgne. I do not think Eliza would be interested in work at a black school, like the ones the new law proposes. When Eliza hears of the Constitution, she must give it thought. It is not likely she applies for a new teaching job.

  * * *

  The armies of the South, defending the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, have victories through the hot summer of 1864, at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg, Virginia. But toward year’s end, the outcome of battles tilts to the North—in September, the fall of Atlanta to the Union; in October, the Yankee control of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; and in December, the end of General Sherman’s so-called March to the Sea, with the fall of the city of Savannah, Georgia. Along the way, in mid-November, President Abraham Lincoln is reelected.

  Two weeks before Christmas 1864, Joseph Lecorgne is in central Tennessee, along with thirty thousand other rebel soldiers. The multitudes are sent by their commanders to attack Nashville, a Southern city in the hands of the Union. It is another giant, wheeling fight. Joseph’s company is attached to the Army of Tennessee, which is thrown against fifty-five thousand Union soldiers in and around Nashville.

  Joseph and the other rank and file of the Thirtieth Louisiana are not happy when they learn that their beast of an enemy has brought to Tennessee no fewer than eight regiments of U.S. Colored Troops. To fight against eight thousand black soldiers is not the first choice of Joseph Lecorgne or other plain men of the Confederacy. It is especially not the pleasure of one rebel general, who rides toward the battle as the fight begins. His name is Nathan Bedford Forrest. General Forrest’s cavalry division is going to Nashville to try to save the city.

  For two days, Joseph’s detachment, Company F, meets clouds of grapeshot and a rainfall of artillery. Grapeshot is a cluster shell, a bundle of metal slugs packed together in a canister and fired from cannons. And again, Joseph escapes injury. The Confederate general Stephen Lee commands Joseph Lecorgne and one thousand other men. On December 17, the corps is seven miles south of Nashville, dug into trenches, fighting against white troops, when suddenly a line of black soldiers appears to their left. The black unit is the Thirteenth U.S. Colored Troops. The Thirteenth Colored attacks the hill called Peach Orchard, which Joseph is helping to defend. The Thirteenth Colored overruns the rebels, the Yankees losing 220 officers and men in one afternoon. It is the first time Joseph has fought against black soldiers. With buckets of blood, they have the victory and Joseph the defeat.

  The rebel defense of Nashville breaks down, and a column of the Army of Tennessee forms to march a retreat south. Union runners chase them along a turnpike that leads to the town of Franklin. Somewhere in the disarray, Yankee
s surround Joseph’s detachment and capture some two thousand rebels. Joseph’s luck runs out, and he is made prisoner.

  The Thirteenth Colored is among his captors. He is stripped of his gun and led away. When Joseph falls into black hands, it is as though he has entered a twisted world. At home in New Orleans, Joseph knows many black people, but this is the first time he has taken orders from a black man. He has never heard a black sergeant tell him to get up and move. Many of his captors, Joseph knows, were slaves the year before. They have been unlocked from plantations and signed on to help the Yankee cause. To be made prisoner by black soldiers bends belief.

  It is wrong, madness, and unforgivable. This day is one to tell to the grandchildren, to bewitch them with the story of how the order of things failed. The day Joseph is taken prisoner by a coon will have a red letter marked on the calendar. I would like to have seen Joseph when his hands were tied by a black sergeant, when the light went out in his eyes. I feel empathy for him, because he must have been in psychological torment.

  A memoir by a Confederate soldier named John H. King, made prisoner like Joseph, has something to say about the experience of being handled by black soldiers.

  “We are thrown into the gloom of abject dejection, greatly increased by the insolence of the negro soldiers,” King writes. “They with insulting injunctions are not slow in letting us know that they are now our masters.”

  The day after Joseph’s capture, the cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forrest arrives. General Forrest is a notorious figure, a man hated by the Union Army for a massacre of Yankee troops, which he supervised. In May 1864, two hundred miles west of Nashville, Forrest and his regiment took possession of Fort Pillow, a Union outpost on the Mississippi. When the black soldiers in the fort surrendered, instead of taking them prisoner, Forrest and his men executed some three hundred. Every man in the Yankee rank and file knows and remembers this event. It was only six months ago. The Thirteenth Colored remembers better than any.

  General Forrest tries to protect the rest of the rebel retreat from Nashville as it swarms south. Joseph Lecorgne does not see the chisel-faced Forrest, who appears on the scene after his capture. But the sinewy General Forrest will come back to our story, with the Ku-klux. Three years later, when this battle is in the past, ex-general Nathan Bedford Forrest will be found in a nearby part of Tennessee, seething—a Confederate loyalist, his war lost, a man sunk deep in resentment. Out of a well of anger and disgust, Nathan Forrest will help mobilize a new rebel force, a second uprising. His resistance army, raised during the peace after the war, is that militia with a mysterious name, the first wave of Ku Klux Klan. And it is the Ku-klux that will put to right the deformed world in which blacks give orders to whites.

  The Yankees keep Joseph and one thousand other prisoners on hand for several days near Nashville. He is processed as a prisoner of war, boards a train with his remnant of Company F, and the men are sent to Louisville, Kentucky, where they arrive January 2, 1865. At Louisville, Joseph’s prison gang crosses the Ohio River on a ferry, armed sentries all around them. They climb into railroad cars and the next morning find themselves in Cincinnati. Rebel prisoners pass through Cincinnati often enough that their appearance is a local attraction, like captured animals arriving to populate the zoo. In the Cincinnati terminal, as John King describes it, “we are surrounded by a rabble of men, women and children who with jeer and gibe insult us in every way their filthy language permits.”

  From the taunting crowd, Joseph learns that he is going one hundred miles northwest to a place called Camp Chase, near Columbus, Ohio. A jail for ten thousand war captives, Camp Chase is a place “looked upon by both North and South as being the hardest on Confederate prisoners of all the federal prisons,” as one veteran sees it. At Cincinnati, Joseph gets on another train, and a few hours later, shy of the city of Columbus, he steps off. Company F marches at gunpoint through some woods, crosses a turnpike, and arrives at the stockade walls of Camp Chase.

  The prison covers five acres. A palisade wall fifteen feet high forms a giant rectangle, and guards patrol the parapet that sits atop. When Joseph walks through the gate, he steps onto a naked grass yard and faces another wall, the footprint of a second rectangle inside the first. A walk through the spiked gate, and he is in the first prison yard.

  Camp Chase has three separate jails, three prison yards, their occupants determined by rank. Commissioned officers go in yard #1; junior officers in yard #2; and common soldiers in yard #3. Second Lieutenant Lecorgne goes in #2. Once inside, he sees the “dead line” that runs along the yard perimeter, ten feet from the wall. If a prisoner comes up to the line, a guard yells from the parapet above, “Fall back!”—before he shoots. Yard #2 has two rows of wooden barracks with a center street running between. Eighteen identical barracks, each long, skinny, raised up on brick piers. Within every building are eighty bunks made from naked planks, two men in each bunk, the bunks stacked three high for the length of the room. On the long wall are three windows—wood casement, no glass—and on the narrow end of the building, a single door. Against the Ohio winter, two box stoves, one at each end.

  Joseph is put in barracks #15, with 140 other men. The prison detail is white. Everyone is aware that if the jailors are black, rebels will turn defiant and unmanageable.

  Camp Chase, Ohio, 1864

  It is winter when Joseph Lecorgne arrives, and dead prisoners are a common product of Camp Chase. A prisoner named William Duff remembers the scene—

  “There was much sickness and many deaths.… When a man died, his comrades would get a coffin from under barracks no. 19 and put him in it, then notify the authorities about him. A dump cart would be sent and the dead would be taken away. Sometimes it happened that the coffins were too short. The foot piece would be knocked out, and the man’s feet would be exposed.”

  The straw bedding on which prisoners sleep in the barracks is filled with lice. But merely to have a roof and door gives Joseph a living situation better than some of his Yankee enemies. On the other side of the fight, many Union captives of Confederates are jailed at Andersonville Prison, 125 miles south of Atlanta. At Andersonville, some forty thousand soldiers are held outdoors in a vast pen. During 1864, the year Joseph is at Camp Chase, thirteen thousand Union men die of dysentery and starvation at Andersonville.

  By contrast, Joseph Lecorgne is housed and fed. In early March, he signs a piece of paper to confirm that Yankee jailors are giving him a new shirt and pair of socks. He stands in line for the clothing handout with a friend from New Orleans, a man apparently captured with him in Tennessee. The friend signs his name “M. K. Chandler.” He is Kendrick Chandler, from Bouligny. Joseph and Chandler know each other from back home.

  Joseph Lecorgne and Kendrick Chandler put on their new shirts. In a few years, Chandler will once again become a fighting comrade of the Lecorgnes. He and Joseph’s brother Constant will join arms as raiders with the Ku-klux.

  * * *

  A soldier with the Yellowjackets reports that by March 1865, “disasters befall our armies” on a daily basis, and “a gloom settles upon our minds.” Confederate money, when the men are paid, is worthless. Desertions empty the ranks. During one week, Sergeant Terrance Lecorgne’s regiment, the Eighteenth Louisiana, loses 150 men to desertion. The men leave all at once, walking off en masse to make their way home.

  Terrance, for his part, is not one to let go. To his commanders, he has grown into a good soldier. He listens to orders, no matter that they may be suicidal. His commanders know that when his wife lies in her birthing bed, Terrance joins a gruesome battle, rather than steal away to be with his newborn son. Strangely, as his officers must also see, Sergeant Terrance always gets out unscathed.

  He is no longer the unstable recruit who stumbles through a mutiny. He runs ahead into every fight. At the battle of Mansfield, the Yankees are shot as he takes them captive. He is hardened, effective, and a killer.

  The biggest of the Southern armies surrenders in Virginia on April 9.
Less than a week later, President Abraham Lincoln is killed in Washington, D.C., by a man named John Wilkes Booth, a stage actor. In Louisiana, at the far western end of the South, I suspect the remaining men of the Eighteenth Regiment greet the news of Lincoln’s death with a bitter smile.

  The Yellowjackets are part of the so-called Trans-Mississippi Army, a group of battalions to the west of the great river. Two weeks after the surrender in the east, word comes that the commander of the Trans-Mississippi, General Kirby Smith, is negotiating terms for his army. The war really is over. When the curtain comes down, the Eighteenth is camped in the town of Natchitoches. The men who are left refuse to give in. Sergeant Terrance and his comrades defy the order to hand in their weapons. They refuse for many reasons—maybe from stubbornness, or from fear; from exhaustion, or for masculine show; from delirium caused by too much death and not enough food. Other units in the Trans-Mississippi unload their rifles and throw them onto a giant pile, turn and look for a way home. The Yellowjackets stay in Natchitoches, holding out, loaded guns in their laps.

  The standoff continues for two weeks. The governor of Louisiana, Henry Allen, travels to Natchitoches to visit the insubordinate men. He tells the shrunken battalion that the war is over and that they must surrender. They are die-hards for the rebellion. The men listen and shake their heads.

  Finally, on May 18, their discipline breaks. In an explosion of anger, the holdouts seize the regiment’s wagons, mules, and supplies. “The division became a mob and rabble,” an officer reports, “disregarding the authority of their superiors and governed alone by a spirit of lawless plunder and pillage.” Accounts differ about when Sergeant Terrance’s unit gives up. It appears that the eighteenth never hands over its guns. Instead, the unit disintegrates as a few at a time leave camp in pilfered wagons. Sergeant Terrance is one of the last to go.