by Edward Ball
A government agent files a report that says Paul Fazende is “in the habit” of shooting at blacks who come near his house. Lew, the foraging man, is hit and wounded, but he will recover. It is assault with intent to kill, perhaps, but the referee in the case, a Justice Nandain, who is white (there are no black judges), does not jail Paul Fazende for attempted murder. He jails Lew for attempted theft. The judge puts the injured man in jail for three months and schedules his trial for larceny. Fazende leaves the courthouse and goes home to Gretna.
The story of Cousin Paul Fazende and the pilfering Lew is heard around the Lecorgne dinner table. Let them learn where they belong. A little gunplay is not too much to show them.
In hindsight, the prosecution of Lew and exoneration of Fazende looks to be an example of an American judicial rule that whites get off, and blacks pay.
Judge Yves Lecorgne would defend this principle. About the time Lew is shot, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the new federal agency with the assignment of helping ex-slaves, issues a report about the judicial temperament of Judge Lecorgne. The Union captain A. Morse calls Yves of God intransigent and biased on the bench. Lecorgne, he says, will not hear the testimony of black witnesses in court, only white. The Freedmen’s Bureau recommends Judge Lecorgne be removed from office. He disappears from the job, at least for a time.
* * *
Veterans stream back to New Orleans from the war. Among them is a rebel colonel, Frederick Ogden. During the fighting, Fred Ogden is a young commander, officered at twenty-seven and head of a cavalry regiment. Ogden and his mounted troops surrender in Alabama at the end of the war. He returns to Louisiana and hangs up his sword.
Fred Ogden is like Alcibiade DeBlanc. They are both commanders who do not lose their anger. Both remain hungry for the fight. Constant is an infantryman, a foot soldier. He does not know Fred Ogden. In time, they will meet, and Constant will follow Ogden into new battles.
In fall 1865, Colonel Fred Ogden enters New Orleans politics. He summons a band of veterans, calls them the Young Men’s Democratic Association, and puts himself at the head of it. The first election in which ex-rebels can vote is set for November. Ogden and his gang want to fix the outcome. The Lecorgne brothers know about Ogden and the Young Men’s Democratic Association (YMDA) and probably know some of its members. But I do not think the Lecorgnes join, in part because the YMDA is full of les Américains. The brothers prefer their French company, people like Alcibiade DeBlanc.
In early October, members of the Democratic Party, plus the YMDA, come together to plan. They meet at a neoclassical jewel of a building, the St. Charles Street Opera House. The ballroom hangs heavy with red velvet, cigar smoke obscures gold paint. The Democrats pass a resolution that denounces the 1864 state constitution, which had abolished slavery and promised schools for black students. Party leaders proceed to write a platform for the fall campaign. Colonel Fred Ogden helps to draft the text, which begins—
“Resolved, that we hold this to be a Government of White People, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive political benefit of the White Race.… [We hold] that the people of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States, and that there can in no event nor under any circumstances be any equality between the White and other Races.”
Lincoln has been in the grave five months. Black people have been away from the lash long enough to start new lives. And white supremacy is the central plank of the state’s Democratic Party.
Around the state, things are looking good for whiteness. In St. Landry Parish, west of Baton Rouge, authorities pass an ordinance that bans black people from owning or renting a house: “No negro shall be permitted to rent or keep a house within said parish,” it reads. St. Landry Parish is an area of 920 square miles. Blacks, by law, must live on white-owned property and carry work papers: “No negro shall be allowed to pass within the limits of said parish without a special permit in writing from his employer.”
The Republican Party is the party of the victors. It is the party that promises some equity of black with white. New and frail, the party stages rallies where a few whites run the proceedings and blacks by the thousand attend. Maybe one in a hundred whites in Louisiana defends the Republican program of integration and economic development. The state has a slight black majority, but no African Americans can vote.
Facing a big defeat by the Democrats, the Republicans sit out the election. Democrats run unopposed in most districts, and when the voting ends, ninety percent of the Louisiana Assembly is Democrat. Newspapers pin a name to it, the “Rebel Legislature.”
In a few weeks, the Rebel Legislature passes the Black Codes, and the governor signs them. A lawmaker named Duncan Kenner writes most of them. Once a rich slaveholder, Kenner loses his fortune to Emancipation, which makes him unhappy. One provision of Kenner’s statute gives the state authority to seize black children whose parents “cannot or will not support them” and place them in “apprenticeship” as servants or farmworkers—a form of legal captivity. Another requires black adults to sign five-year labor contracts with employers and allows their “recapture” if they leave a job. A third gives police the power to arrest “vagrants,” adults who make the mistake of being on the street without job papers. Convicted vagrants are to be “leased” to work for landlords and businesses. The Black Codes revive the old world.
The Lecorgnes feel good about the Black Codes. Some take advantage, like the family of Gabrielle Duchemin. Constant’s wife of nearly ten years, Gabrielle is also a good stepdaughter. She and her husband still see her adoptive parents, François and Adelaide Laizer, who live a few blocks from the house on Bellecastle. François Laizer is no longer mayor of Jefferson City. But like Yves of God, Laizer has managed to protect his money, and he is making a good living by speculating in land.
In early 1866, one month after the Black Codes become law, Laizer picks up a black child from the street and forces him into work. A court in Jefferson City “delivers to F.J. Laizer” a boy named Randall, “orphan of Mrs. Baker.” Randall, who is twelve, “is to serve Laizer for the term of nine years,” in exchange for food and a roof, but no wages. Although the arrangement is “an indenture,” it smells like enslavement, with this difference: Randall “shall receive sixteen weeks of schooling per year.” It seems to me now, 150 years later, that the slave days in which my people played a heavy role do not want to end.
* * *
Sometime in 1866, a few ex-rebels come together to drink. Reunions of soldiers happen around the South, but this one is different. The nighttime toast takes place in Tennessee, in a town called Pulaski, south of Nashville. Six men turn up, all of them ex–junior officers in the rebel army. They are not rural people but educated young men—three lawyers, a newspaper editor, a cotton broker, and the twenty-year-old son of a rich farmer. They come together in a small-town office to laugh and to drown their resentments. If the men’s group follows the common pattern, the veterans pour their bourbon and their beer, complain about the lost war, smoke cigars and pipes, and say vituperative things about the niggers.
It is a tribal meeting, and a theatrical one. From their college years, these six ex-rebels in Tennessee remember touches of performance. Some have been members of Greek societies—fraternities, as they become known. They know a smattering of Greek. They know about secret handshakes, and they may have taken a few oaths in their time. No notes survive from these nighttime drinks in the office of a lawyer in Pulaski. But I imagine that someone throws in a few lines of self-congratulation.
There must be a higher purpose to cursing and complaining, one might say. There should be a name to our thing. A lawyer in the room pulls a fraternity word from his memory and suggests a name for their bitching society. It is Kuklos, or “circle” in Greek. Things are under way.
James Crowe, a lawyer, is one member of this first Kuklos. In a letter written years later, Crowe remembers that the Kuklos takes shape in the winter of 1866. Crowe says that at one bullshitting session, a man in
the group named John Kennedy suggests that another K be added to Kuklos. Kennedy offers the word “clan,” but intentionally misspelled as “Klan,” because it looks better. I imagine there are laughs around the room.
It is not long before Kuklos, aided by drink, degenerates into “Ku-klux.”
Sometime later comes the distinctive term, “Ku Klux Klan.” But for now, the little cell in Tennessee, the bitter men who like to remember and console one another, men seething about the way things have turned out, are just the “Ku-klux,” with the nonword “Klan” sometimes attached for emphasis.
A boastful letter about the Ku-klux written by one of the group’s founders mentions that its first members are all Protestant. “We are three Presbyterians, one Episcopalian, and two Methodists,” says James Crowe. By this time, most of the South is Protestant, the main exception being Louisiana. James Crowe stresses the Protestant identity of the Ku-klux pioneers, because it is thought to demonstrate a kind of purity. To be Protestant means to have family with roots in northern Europe—excepting Ireland and France. It means not to have roots in southern Europe. To be Protestant means to be from among the chosen people, the ones who belong to the inner circle, the kuklos of whiteness.
The Catholic Church dominates the lower half of Louisiana, south of the city of Baton Rouge. When Ku-klux gangs spread through the South, which soon occurs, they do not thrive in southern Louisiana. It is not that white Catholics believe themselves to be less chosen than the other chosen people, white Protestants. But French Creoles in Louisiana, all Catholics, feel less a part of the Kuklos. In the end, they set up groups identical to the Ku Klux Klan but differently named. The Protestant Ku-klux does not shun the Catholic movement. But the Ku-klux militias and the Creole militias keep apart, dividing up the work of white domination.
If they were characters in the theater, the six men in the dreary office in Tennessee would say portentous things to one another. They would talk of the bloody glory that comes to the vigilant. This is a time when the crooked places will be made straight. We will raise the lantern and erase the shadow the blacks throw over us. In years to come, the men in the dreary office will be called “the holy six” by millions of grateful and admiring whites. That is what happens. It is not from a script for the stage.
The birth of the Ku-klux in Pulaski, Tennessee, makes no rapid impression in Louisiana. Few in the South in 1866 or 1867 hear that a ritual-loving sect is formed. Few, for the time being, know that a rite-heavy fraternity has come together to anoint and to defend the white tribe.
14
Here is the place where the firemen enter the story. Their appearance is unexpected and seemingly benign, but murderous.
Every few blocks in New Orleans you see a firehouse—a brick building with a carriage door, and inside, a water truck, hoses, and ladders. Six fire companies have station houses within walking distance of the Lecorgnes in Bouligny: Home Hook & Ladder Company, Vigilant Engine Company, Pioneer Engine Company, Perseverance Engine, Lafayette Hook & Ladder, and the Creole Engine Company. You have many squads, more than needed.
The fire companies are all white. Whites own almost all the real estate, and the thinking is that the other tribe, people of color, are inclined to use arson as a weapon. Politicians and priests point to mysterious fires as evidence that African Americans avenge themselves on whites by burning buildings. It is said and believed by many that during the slave years, the fire companies arise as a line of defense against black arson. They exist to protect whites and their property. That is not the end of it. Added to their practical and policing value, the firehouses are clubs for men and factories of social identity for their families. Most of the Pioneer Engine men are German immigrants. Most of the ranks of Home Hook & Ladder are French Creoles, like Constant Lecorgne.
I am interested in the details, like the money, which is important. Taxes pay for courts and judges, streets, and the police, but the fire companies are volunteer. Firemen do not work full-time or for wages; they run from home to a blaze at the sound of a fire bell, out of civic duty. The fifty or more companies in New Orleans are linked to a private group, the Firemen’s Charitable Association, which has a pot of money refreshed by fundraising. Every company has a meeting hall and runs banquets, concerts, picnics, and dances to feed its budget. The fire companies are a big public enterprise but outside of government.
In Bouligny, Home Hook & Ladder keeps a station house on Jersey Street near Napoleon Avenue, two blocks from Lecorgne row and four blocks from the cottage on Bellecastle where Constant and Gabrielle live. Evidence is good that for a number of years Constant is attached as a volunteer. He seems to be a back bench member, not a leader.
The Lecorgne company, Home Hook & Ladder, is one of the better-financed squads. It has a pretty Romanesque building, kept immaculate, the façade clad with stone on the first floor and red brick on the second. Their clubhouse is busy enough with social events that the company stores its firefighting gear in a separate “truck house” on Marengo Street. It is there that Constant and his comrades keep the nickel-plated fire truck polished to a mirror shine.
In 1861, at the start of the war, the men of Home Hook & Ladder disband the company to form a militia, the Jefferson Cadets. Constant is named a captain of the Jefferson Cadets but soon demoted to lieutenant in favor of another Home Hook & Ladder man, Émile Chevalley, a friend who lives across the street on Lecorgne row.
The firehouses play a big part in the tale of the Ku-klux. Home Hook & Ladder comes back together at the end of the war. In 1865, it has thirty-two volunteers, most of them older than forty. They elect as their fire chief Émile Chevalley. By 1866, something has happened, and Home Hook & Ladder has a roster of eighty-five, many of them young recruits. Eighty-five men in one company are far too many for the job of putting out the occasional kitchen fire in a radius of half a mile. Veterans swamp the station house.
In November 1866, Home Hook & Ladder has its portrait taken by the photographer Theodore Lilienthal. The picture has gone missing. Another portrait that the same photographer makes on the same day (of the Jefferson Steam Engine company) gives an idea of what Constant’s gang of well-dressed ex-rebels looks like.
The seventy-six-member Jefferson Steam Engine fire company, 1866
The city’s fire companies balloon with new volunteers, all of them veterans. They look like and behave like military units. The men wear uniforms. Home Hook & Ladder puts on blue shirts trimmed with white piping, and black pants. They stage parades. After the war, a parade of ten companies and five hundred men marching the streets is common. The men show off equipment, the hoses and the water trucks, the horses and hatchets and ladders. Firemen’s parades weave through town, stopping at Creole cafés for draughts of wine, or at German barrelhouses for pitchers of lager. On the route, women toss the men bunches of flowers. The men carry banners embroidered with the company’s name and motto. For Constant’s company, the motto is “Ready for Duty.”
At parade’s end, Home Hook & Ladder returns to its meeting hall for a night of toasts and curses about changes the war has brought.
* * *
On orders from the Freedmen’s Bureau, the court removes Yves of God, the judge who admits no testimony from blacks. But the oldest Lecorgne brother outmaneuvers the enemy and lands another sinecure. He is appointed comptroller of Jefferson City. The job makes him a town prince and opens the door to favors. It is a rare money handler who turns down bribes for city contracts or fails to reward friends.
Yves of God keeps the accounts of Jefferson City for two years. He files money reports and shows up in notes of the city treasurer. He is not very clean about the business. One newspaper says Yves is a bad bookkeeper (“derelict in his duties … with little or no system”) and that he fails to block fraud (“parties who forge cash warrants” are taking public money). Another paper makes charges against Yves’s partner, the city treasurer Felix Lagroue. Lagroue is close to the Lecorgnes. In a year, his brother plans to marry Yves’s s
ister, Eliza. Felix Lagroue is said to take cash from city coffers for himself. When Yves keeps the books, Lagroue cannot account for the whereabouts of $16,595, an amount equivalent to building fifteen nice houses.
* * *
I do not know how they find a home, or where they go, but in 1866, Constant and Gabrielle and their four children move out of the place on Live Oak and Bellecastle streets. Probably they rent a cottage in Bouligny. The move begins a phase of churning in their home life, of leaping from house to house. According to city directories, during the next seven years they move nearly every year, again and again.
The reason people move is money. Constant and Gabrielle are tenants who cannot pay the rent.
In New Orleans, the economy moves at half its former speed. Many plantations are back in business as sharecrop farms, as enslaved people go back to the fields for wages and some of the crop. But the cotton harvest upstate fails for two years, leaving the city thirsting for the old river of money that cotton once brought. Constant gets little work, because little is on offer.
* * *
The U.S. Congress passes the first Civil Rights Act in March 1866. The law defines birthright citizenship, the idea that anyone born in the United States belongs to the nation. It conveys citizenship on the nearly ten percent of the American population once enslaved, whose legal status is still persona non grata, alien invader. The Civil Rights Act makes clear that blacks can own property, sue or be sued, make contracts and enforce them, give evidence in court—ordinary things that whites think are natural.