Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  When he leaves, the sergeant takes back his name. He is once again “Constant.”

  “Polycarp Constant Lecorgne is honorably discharged at Natchitoches on about May 28, 1865,” an officer in the battalion writes. The date means his company is among the last two or three Confederate units to surrender anywhere in the South.

  Constant, hard and intransigent, gets on a barge and drifts down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where Gabrielle and the children are waiting.

  * * *

  The Northern war prisons are emptied. On May 8, 1865, the secretary of war Edwin Stanton issues General Order No. 85, which releases all Confederate prisoners on condition they take an oath of loyalty to the United States. In Ohio, Joseph Lecorgne is let out of his prison camp, after five months. In May, two thousand men leave the jail at Camp Chase. Joseph takes the oath May 13, is released, and walks out of the prison yard.

  The prisoner-of-war camp stands on the Scioto River, which drains into the Ohio River, which drains into the Mississippi. The water route home to New Orleans is a weaving trip of 1,500 miles. Newspapers describe the line of steamboats that brings home prisoners of war.

  Louisiana sends fifty-five thousand white men to fight. More than half are killed or wounded, or die of disease.

  Joseph Lecorgne comes down from jail in Ohio. His brother Constant comes down from insolence in the town of Natchitoches. They reach the wharf in New Orleans at about the same time.

  It is a nauseating and lurid war. Four years of suffering and defeat. At home, the good order of things crumbles to nothing. Caroline-the-mulatress frees herself, and the Lecorgne family is forced to answer to the invaders. New Orleans is saved but conquered. The eyes of a soldier see a hundred friends killed by guns, a hundred more by gangrene. The waste of it. And meanwhile, all of les nègres are doing just what they want. The world is turned inside-out. The shame of it, the goddamn shame.

  The crackers are not content. That is how they look.

  Joseph and Constant step onto the levee of the river at the edge of New Orleans. The brothers seem to appear from nowhere. They are famished and sick from exhaustion. They reek with their dirt. They look down at the city. It is a new sort of place. The blacks are in the street. The tribe swarms in uncountable numbers, many more than before the war. Emancipation comes, finally, for the three hundred thousand enslaved in the state. The city seems to be seething. Constant and Joseph see the niggers in the streets. Their celebration is vile. And the Lecorgne brothers are touched with rage.

  PART IV

  INTRODUCTION TO AN ATROCITY

  13

  Les nègres look happy. They wear polished shoes and low-cut dresses. They stay out late, restless. They stream out of the country parishes, flow in thousands to the city. They look glad to be alive, at least the ones not begging for bread.

  It is summer 1865. Constant Lecorgne does not appreciate seeing a happy colored man. They copy their betters, and it is disgusting. They are the reason everything has come to grief. The blacks are the root and branch of the disaster.

  Before the war, a nigger does not smoke. Now the men stand on corners and bring out cheap cigars. Look at them on display. Before the war, a black man does not go out to drink. He keeps it in his shack, he never drinks on a white street. Now they walk the roads in a posse, sharing a bottle. They make noise. The streets are quiet before the war, because the blacks do not want the patrol to shut them down. Now you cannot take a streetcar down a black block for the din. They stand on the corner with their banjos from the jungle and howl their stupid songs.

  Constant, Joseph, and uncountable more returning from the fight do not like what they feel. The traditional and wholesome awe of the white race that has kept les nègres in subjection is gone. In the aftermath of the war, whites feel the great perversion.

  New Orleans doubles its black population between 1860 and 1870, and the number of whites dwindles. Ten thousand rebels come home in coffins. Another ten thousand whites decide to get out and leave for Texas and Mexico. Things are freer out west, freer farther south. A man can make a life there that looks more like the old. Some two thousand men and women leave North America altogether, for Brazil. Slavery lives on in Brazil, thank the Lord, and a sugar planter there can do the things he knows how to do with the blacks.

  President Lincoln is dead. It is good he went down. The assassination is a gift. Let the nigger-lovers grieve, for a change.

  The ex-rebels do not like what they see: black soldiers on patrol, a special insult. When the Union brings in African Americans, the occupation army fills up with black recruits. In New Orleans, a thousand ex-slaves patrol the streets with guns lowered. Everyone knows that a black man is supposed to wear torn pants and a belt made from a piece of rope. Instead, he struts with a rifle, in a blue jacket with brass buttons.

  The editor at the Louisiana Courier is having none of it. “We would have received white troops with kindness and respect,” the paper says. “Instead, our people are jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards, halted in rude and sullen tones by negro sentinels. To see our own slaves freed, armed, and put on guard over us is a deliberate, cruel act of insult and oppression, an exercise of tyranny.”

  * * *

  Constant the veteran, thirty-four, is weary like a much older man. Gabrielle and the three children see a withered father. Numa is eight years old, Louis is four, Estelle two. For three years, Gabrielle Duchemin is a single mother, income gone, less to eat, and Caroline-the-slave out the door. Gabrielle does the housework, for a change, cooking and minding the children. She is not used to it, and she is exhausted. She turns to the good help of her in-laws, but her husband’s sisters and brothers have also lost their workers. Except Yves of God. He is always the exception. Yves has managed to hold on to one or two of “the help.”

  What Gabrielle knows, when she thinks about it, is this: at least they do not come after her with guns, like they did to cousin Camille, at Seven Oaks.

  The reunion when the veteran returns is sharp and disappointing. Gabrielle last saw her husband two years ago, outside a Confederate camp, when she gave birth to Marie Estelle, and then retreated with the baby back to New Orleans. Now the rebel pageant has come to dust, and women like Gabrielle have questions. Where have you been? Most of the men fight a thousand miles away, but Constant has stayed in the state, on the bayou, eating étouffée and boudin and doing God knows what with the camp women. His wife knows that a good commander provides his men with service from a maison de tolérance, a brothel.

  Some of the bitterest rebels come home to find wives who do not care for their touch. The touch is the hand of a man who has wrecked the family.

  Constant looks up and down the street. His house is still beautiful, the big cottage with a wraparound porch and ample rooms, but they do not own it anymore. And what is more, the black people are moving in. Five years ago, all the neighbors are white—Creoles, Germans, maybe an Irish family. Bellecastle Street is turned black. Colored families live in five houses on the block. The people next door are French, name of Porée, but they are sang-mêlés, mixed-race. Next to them, another mongrel family called Dejoy, griffes or mulattoes, you hardly know anymore. After that, the street is black all the way down. Constant sees on the block one other white address, belonging to the Bouche family. The Lecorgnes and the Bouches are like white bars of soap floating in brown water.

  * * *

  Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and publisher, living now in Washington, D.C., describes what he sees when four million African Americans, a third of the population of the South, leave enslavement—

  “The government leaves the freedmen in a bad condition.… He is free from the individual master, but the slave of society. He has neither money, property nor friends. He is free from the plantation, but he has nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He is free from the old quarter, but a slave to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He is turned loose, naked, hungry and destitute to the open sky.”

&n
bsp; The war causes the deaths of 750,000—about one in ten white men, North and South. It is not a death toll, it is more like a cull. In the South, about half of white men younger than thirty are killed or maimed. Add to the roll of decimated the half-million women who might have chosen to marry, but who live their lives single, because the men have vanished.

  Andrew Johnson, Abraham Lincoln’s vice president, moves into the White House. Lincoln was an Illinois Republican, Johnson a Democrat from Tennessee. He is a former slaveholder—a minor master, like the Lecorgnes. He comes from the white South and understands it. The ex-rebels are lucky to have him. The idea of “reconstruction,” making a new union, falls into his hands.

  Lincoln’s hope was to set up new governments in the eleven rebel states with the ten percent plan, building out from a tiny white minority that would accept an end to slavery as the ticket to rejoin the Union. Eventually this might start to drain some of the pure whiteness from around institutions of power. With Lincoln dead, President Johnson’s hope is to dissolve slavery but keep white domination, no adjustments needed.

  Louisiana has a new governor, James Madison Wells, a rich planter and former slave master from Rapides Parish, in the northwest of the state. Wells is for the Union and for mending the nation but not too much. He knows who his constituents are, the men coming home from the war.

  A month after Lincoln is killed, Governor Wells goes to Washington to see President Johnson. The men, both fresh in power, sit across a table to talk. Johnson is pleased with a man like Wells, a prince of the old plantations. Andrew Johnson never owned a village of slaves, and the idea of it seems majestic. Governor Wells and President Johnson have drinks and get along smartly. Each is conservative. Each wants to go soft with the ex-rebels, treat them easy. Johnson does not want slavery to return, but he wants things to feel familiar, coloreds below, whites above. Johnson does not want reconstruction, he wants what he calls “restoration.”

  President Johnson retreats to his office. On May 29, 1865, he signs an order to give amnesty to Southerners who fought. It is the first of several amnesty decrees. Constant and a million other men put on gray jackets and tried to overthrow the government. To escape reprisal and regain the vote, a rebel must sign an oath that states how he accepts both allegiance to Washington and the ban on enslavement.

  For Constant and the Lecorgnes, it is easy to sign. They signed a similar oath during the occupation and will sign more oaths after this one. As they see it, oaths buy a voice. Freedom for negroes may be wrong, but it is the future. Emancipation is a legality, a status change, like going from married to widowed. A man may miss his wife when she dies, but life continues.

  Constant finds himself downtown on Carondelet Street near the seat of city government, a block called Lafayette Square. Thousands of men jam the streets. He heads to the office of the army’s provost marshal. The provost marshal handles amnesty papers. A crowd of ex-rebels wants to sign the oath and get the amnesty. It takes all day, but finally he reaches the office, and everything is settled.

  It may be a charade, but it means you will not be prosecuted for treason, and it means you can vote in the next election. The blacks do not vote. If the world is sane, they never will vote.

  The new Louisiana state constitution says black people are free and there must be public schools for blacks as well as whites. But it says nothing about citizenship, and it is vague about the vote. In 1865, black people are not citizens, neither in the South, nor the North, nor the West. The Supreme Court with its neutral majesty ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in 1857, that people of color “whose ancestors were imported … and sold as slaves” are “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

  After Emancipation, the thought of black citizenship is strange, and the idea of black suffrage radical.

  Constant and Joseph Lecorgne, plus their many cousins who fought, plus thousands more white men who detest the presence of the Union Army in the South, fill the new voting rolls. All are Democrats, followers of the old proslavery party. When the election comes in August to set up a new state legislature, they are the only people who vote. Faced with a ten-to-one rout, the Republican Party boycotts the election, and so do the very few whites who support the Union.

  * * *

  Constant knows the man with the flowery name, Alcibiade DeBlanc. He knows the flamboyant lawyer from old family connections on Bayou Lafourche. He may also know DeBlanc through the channel of his brother, the Lecorgne in government, the justice of the peace Yves of God.

  Alcibiade DeBlanc is forty-four years old, with a strong jaw and bushed eyebrows. He is an attorney and a sophist, a man known in court and in the newspapers as a mellifluous talker who can move a jury and persuade a room of people to do anything. He rose to the rank of colonel during the war and commanded a regiment. In summer 1865, DeBlanc is back from the fight and in his hometown, St. Martinville. He is brooding and angry. He writes an essay for the local paper, The Courier of the Teche, and the editor publishes it as DeBlanc’s “Address to the People”—

  “I write from the illustrious ruins of our departed Confederacy,” DeBlanc says. “I think now as I did on the day I enlisted as a soldier. Our cause was a just and sacred cause, and there is nothing of the past that I would repudiate. Had we been successful, the whole world would have courted our friendship … but we have failed, and we are now seen as criminals and traitors!” It is defiant talk. DeBlanc says that since the surrender, he has taken the loyalty oath and reluctantly “aligned” with the United States. Yet “I am loyal as long as the cost of that allegiance shall not be the degradation of our race.”

  DeBlanc says that the abolition of slavery is illegal, because slavery appears in the Constitution, and it is incontrovertible. Abolition is also irrational, he says. The end of slavery “is nothing less than the abolition of labor, and will convert our laborers into hordes of vagrants, useless to themselves, their families, and the state.”

  The Lecorgnes look up to DeBlanc. He is one of their betters, a nobler version of themselves—a high officer, a lawyer, even a writer. The Lecorgnes are also disappointed by the war. DeBlanc is a man who diagnoses their malaise. His “Address to the People” is passed hand to hand in New Orleans.

  Alcibiade DeBlanc is a man to follow, and soon Constant will walk in his footsteps.

  In New Orleans, Louis Roudanez, publisher of the New Orleans Tribune, the black daily paper, answers DeBlanc’s bulletin. He runs a sardonic editorial about whiteness and its virtues. The Tribune quotes DeBlanc on the “degradation of our race” and continues:

  LA TRIBUNE DE LA NOUVELLE ORLÉANS

  21 juillet 1865

  Jusqu’à la ‘dégradation de notre race,’ je regrette beaucoup que M. DeBlanc ait employé ces mots, car il me met dans la nécessité de lui répondre que malheureusement, depuis quelques années, la race blanche généralement a pris sois de se dégrader elle-même par l’immoralité.…

  NEW ORLEANS TRIBUNE

  21 July 1865

  As far as the ‘degradation of our race,’ I very much regret that Mr. DeBlanc uses these words, for he puts me in the position of answering that unfortunately, for some years now, the white race has generally been degraded by immorality. It has been degraded by … first-degree crimes committed in the cities, in broad daylight, on white abolitionists; by the mass killings at Fort Pillow … and that is not to mention the slaughters that haven taken place on the boulevards, without any repercussions, sometimes even without burials. Is that the sublime race of Mr. DeBlanc, the one that cannot suffer degradation, the one of which he is so proud?

  A white lawyer named Thomas Durant is making speeches about black people and the right to vote. He favors it, which makes him unusual. A journalist calls Durant, who is forty-eight, “tall, thin, sallow, and cadaverous.” Durant has lived in New Orleans for thirty year
s. He is the former U.S. Attorney for Louisiana, appointed by President Lincoln, and the head of the so-called Free State Party, a small group of whites loyal to the Union. The white newspapers call him a “negro-worshipper.”

  The Republican Party forms a branch in New Orleans in 1863. After the war, it consists of a few hundred whites who withstand the experience of being shunned, “traitors to their race.” Thomas Durant pulls together a few Republicans and forms the Friends of Universal Suffrage, a group to agitate for “the negro ballot.” Members are some blacks, some Creoles of color, and some whites. Durant calls a rally at the Carrollton Train Depot, near Bouligny, and a crowd of some thousand turns out to shout for the voting rights of black men.

  The house on Bellecastle Street is not far from the rally. If Constant does not quite hear the cheers and drums and speeches, he certainly hears about them. I imagine he has a thought—Où il y a charogne, il y a des busards, “Wherever there is dead meat, there are buzzards.”

  The Lecorgne in-laws are the first to react.

  Paul Fazende, a cousin as well as an in-law, owns a sugar plantation across the river from Bouligny, in the village of Gretna, near Camille Zeringue’s Seven Oaks. He used to own his farmworkers; now he pays them $14 a month. He does not like the change. Seventeen farmhands live on the Fazende place, along with their twenty-six children. These forty-three were once like money in the bank that paid interest in the form of new children every year. Now the asset is a liability. Fazende detests giving people wages; there is no justice in it.

  One day, Paul Fazende is out of his house, walking a field of vegetables and fruit, carrying a gun. Before the war, a man walking his garden did not carry lethal force. Now, some whites wear holsters, and they are angry. Near the strawberries, Fazende encounters a black man, Lew. He is a former slave, and he is foraging. Fazende does not like trespassers. He lifts his gun and shoots Lew. Fazende tells a judge he thinks Lew “was stealing my watermelons.”