by Edward Ball
The gunfire ends, and the courthouse steps are empty, except for the victims who lie groaning on the pavement. Firemen carry Rolande and Reese to the firehouse of Home Hook & Ladder. The wounds spill a trail of blood two blocks long. At the firehouse, Harry Rolande soon dies. Henry Reese holds on for several hours, then he also dies.
Home Hook & Ladder has two martyrs, and vengeance is required. The marauding begins as roving gangs of whites pick out black men in the street and savage them with fists and clubs. A sense of dread falls, and African Americans in Bouligny lock themselves indoors. White newspapers say that a “black uprising” is imminent. It is likely there are deaths, but court records do not cite them, and the Jefferson City Police arrest no one. That is because the Bouligny police do not intervene when a black man is being beaten.
Felicity Street, near Bouligny, resembles the Lecorgne family’s neighborhood.
Someone gets word to the Union Army, whose barracks are five miles downtown, beyond the Vieux Carré at Fort Jackson. A company of sixty soldiers marches into Bouligny and surrounds Lawrence Square. The Yankees brandish rifles in front of St. Stephen Church, where the Lecorgnes worship. The men of Home Hook put their truncheons away, and the army pitches its tents on the square. They plan to stay for a time.
Things have come to this—we have the army in the neighborhood. Their blue uniforms insult the eyes. Yankee bastards are here for no other reason than to pamper les nègres.
* * *
The Radical Republicans have taken half the white voters off the rolls, using a new loyalty oath. In order to vote, whites must swear they never supported the rebellion, and only half choose to lie. Meanwhile, ninety thousand black men vote in Louisiana for the first time. The referendum on making a new constitution passes, and delegates to write it are voted in. Half of the ninety-eight delegates are white, half are black or Creoles of color. They meet in Mechanics Hall, at the end of November 1867.
A joke goes around: it is the “black and tan convention.” The joke is about hunting dogs, raccoons, and “coons.” The black and tan coonhound is a dog—mostly black, with pale tan markings on the snout and legs—that hunters train to track raccoons. Some people, also known as “coons,” used to be forced to run from coonhounds. Now some of them will make the new constitution—at the black and tan convention. It is a nasty joke, really.
In Washington, President Johnson is angry. He sees the new constitutions being cooked up around the South as poison. Johnson sends a message to Congress—
“The subjugation of the States to negro domination will be worse than military despotism,” he says. “People will not degrade themselves by subjection to the negro race.” President Johnson defends the principle of white rule. Power for black people is “clothing torn from white men,” he tells Congress. “The great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics is obvious.… Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to the effort now to Africanize the half of our country.” The president is afraid of the tide of blackness. An ugly fear, really.
Republicans in Congress do not care for the president’s lectures on race. Three months after the warning about “Africanization,” in March 1868, the House of Representatives votes to impeach the man in the White House.
The fight between President Johnson and Congress is about black rights, black power, and white rule. But the conflict moves to an area where it wears a mask. Congress writes Articles of Impeachment with charges about a law called the Tenure of Office Act. A year old, the Tenure of Office Act requires Senate approval for changes that the president makes in the cabinet. The law is meant to keep Johnson from firing Republicans left in office since Lincoln. When the president fires Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln man, it is a pretext for impeachment.
President Johnson is about to go on trial, and everyone knows that the reason is the way things are going down South.
* * *
“The place of meeting, the constitutional convention, is the place where white manhood is degraded to the level of the ignorant, brutal, untutored African,” says the thoughtful New-Orleans Times.
Delegates write for three months before wrapping their business. The new constitution affirms that black men can vote and bans segregation in public services like transportation and schools. It tries to level the field of race in the law. The charter is published March 7, 1868, and a plebiscite is announced: the constitution is to be ratified by voters. Five days later, the guerrilla resistance surfaces. The word “Ku-klux” appears for the first time in the New Orleans press. On March 12, the Crescent newspaper—which backs the Democrats, like eight of ten city papers—runs a single sentence: “There appears to be a new secret political and social organization in Tennessee, known by the queer name of the ‘Ku-Klux-Klan.’”
Another five days pass. Other papers pick up the thread. The Daily Picayune tells of a planning meeting for the Ku-klux. The paper runs this strange advertisement:
In hoc signo, X 22.
The Great Past Grand Giant commands you.
The dark and dismal hour draws nigh.
Some live today—tomorrow die.
The bullet red and the right are ours.
Today, the 17th of the mortal’s month of March, you will begin to scatter the clouds of the grave. By order of Great Grand Cyclops, G.C.T.
It is a cute piece of code. The notice describes a meeting set for March 22 at 10:00 p.m. But where the meeting is to take place, I cannot decipher. Similarly I cannot place the initials, “G.C.T.” The Ku-klux, from the first, is hard to read.
It appears that at this moment, Constant steps forward to take part.
The new guerrillas have their meeting. Black voters are set to cast another ballot—in April, for a new state assembly. A week before the election, there is the eruption. According to the Tribune, gangs of whites wearing disguises carry out raids “in the country parishes,” the rural districts outside New Orleans. Close to the city, in Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, “the Ku Klux Klan parade the streets, masked, visiting the houses of well-known Republicans, white and black. The gangs affix to their doors threatening placards, breathing blood and murder, and bearing such emblems as pistols, bowie-knives, death’s heads, and coffins.” Louis Roudanez’s paper predicts that New Orleans is next. “We may expect soon to see this new organization boldly parading our streets, and committing outrages.”
It is the moment when the branches of whiteness produce their flower.
Alcibiade DeBlanc and the Knights of the White Camellia come to the surface. Witnesses at Congress put the date of appearance of the White Camellia and the Ku Klux Klan at the same time, in spring 1868. In early April, DeBlanc and his comrade Daniel Dennett run an editorial in white newspapers around the state.
Klansman, circa 1868
THE RELATIONS OF THE RACES
That the black man is not the equal of the white man in any respect, and was never intended by the Creator of the universe to be so, is a fact. There is not prejudice about it, because Nature has implanted the distinction. It has been the pleasure of the Creator to give every being in the universe his place, and to make the negro a servant to his white brother. This is a fact which no body denies.
It is a fact that no one denies if you believe the teachings of science, if you accept the ideal of whiteness in the work of Samuel Morton, the skull collector. It is a truth that no one refutes if you absorb the notion of polygenesis, which Louis Agassiz and Arthur Gobineau and Samuel Cartwright develop into theories of separate races. It is a flattering story that Josiah Nott and James DeBow have massaged into fact. These ideas and these people are all present. The science of “niggerology” is in public circulation, implicit to thought and speech.
DeBlanc moves the headquarters of the White Camellia to New Orleans. He leaves rural St. Mary Parish to take up a campaign in the capital of the state. A killing announces the move. On April 17, election day, a white man named Philip Michae
l shoots and kills in the street a black man named David Hutchinson. The offense of Hutchinson is that he says aloud, “We are ratifying the Constitution.” I am not certain, but Philip Michael may be under orders from DeBlanc.
In New Orleans, the KWC begins recruitment. DeBlanc probably makes a personal appeal to family and friends, and Constant belongs to that group. The ship carpenter is militant, and he is a joiner.
Democrats win the mayor’s race in the April election, thanks to what one paper calls “perversions of the ballot,” or vote fraud. The Republicans sweep the legislature and win the governor’s office, thanks to black votes. Ninety percent of black voters approve the constitution; only three percent of white voters approve it. In Jefferson Parish, population seventeen thousand, the charter wins only seventy-five white votes. I do not think the Lecorgnes of Jefferson City are within the handful. The tide of black ballots lifts the constitution into law.
Ten days after the vote, white gangs promise revenge, publicly and anonymously. The Ku-klux runs newspaper ads with verses about coming attacks, signing the little doggerel “Ku-klux.” On April 29, in The Louisiana Democrat:
Thrice hath the lone owl hooted,
And thrice the panther cried,
And swifter through the darkness,
The Pale Brigade shall ride.
No trumpet sounds its coming,
And no drumbeat stirs the air,
But noiseless in their vengeance,
They wreak it everywhere.
Ku-Klux
The verses appear in many papers and end with a boast about the killing to come:
The misty gray is hanging
On the tresses of the East,
And morn will tell the story
Of the revel and the feast.
The ghostly troop shall vanish
Like the light in constant cloud,
But where they rode shall gather
The coffin and the shroud.
Ku-Klux
We have fallen into a tactic, accidentally. The Ku-klux figures out the formula for menace, namely, keep threats half hidden, under a mask. It magnifies the fear.
Here we come to the uncanny part of Constant’s story, and the story of the Ku-klux. Things “uncanny” are like a scene or a lurid memory that is meant to be secret and disguised, and yet has instead come into the open. The Ku-klux and the White Camellia are uncanny. They are like things known but unseen, or things seen but unknown. They are the way that we arrange race itself, into background and foreground, into scene, seen, and unseen.
* * *
Rumors of gangs called “Ku-klux” come in from the country parishes. The reports are that guerrillas ride horseback into black villages, but they are robed and masked, like at Carnival, or like minstrel men.
But the Ku-klux does not exist, says The Daily Picayune. The “hell-born cabal” is a fiction. “We have heard nothing of the kind,” the paper tells readers. “Men who have a real purpose do not express themselves in such ridiculous rodomontade.”
In fact, many whites like the excitement. There are a few months of uncanny menace, reports of night-riding by Ku-klux, and attacks on black people. Then in June in New Orleans, the Ku-klux is celebrated in a playhouse—with a musical show. The Commercial Bulletin announces the opening of an exciting new piece of theater at the Academy of Music, on St. Charles Avenue.
“A Fresh Bouquet of June Flowers,” says the paper. “The first night of the New Sardonic, Sensational, Musical Mysticism, by J. E. Durivage, called ‘Ku-Klux-Klan.’” The mysterious night riders, whoever they might be, deserve the welcome. Before six months have passed, the Ku-klux are made into characters on a stage.
19
After the Ku-klux musical closes, the Knights of the White Camellia hold a convention in New Orleans. It is a recruitment drive. The white newspapers know that Alcibiade DeBlanc is running the event but honor the guerrillas by publishing nothing. Hundreds of angry men—including, I believe, Constant—are drawn to the auditorium by word of mouth. The meeting probably fills Odd Fellows Hall, a lodge on Camp Street near Lafayette Square.
I am trying to imagine my way into the room. It is June, and the scene is a hot hall, with two hundred or more men. Cigars for the rich, pipes for the common. Drinks go around. Wine or liqueur for Creoles; ale or lager for Anglos and Germans. Voices are high from the drink and from the cause. Music warms the crowd. Maybe a band plays “Dixie,” or the newer standard, “A Good Old Rebel Soldier.” Regnant and manly, Alcibiade DeBlanc climbs the platform. He gives a speech full of menace. The nigger is taking it all from us. The White Camellia will make things good again. Constant sees the man he knows, the man he admires. The lawyer and ex-colonel is high, the carpenter low. It is sweltering in the room. DeBlanc waves a handful of papers. The White Camellia has its constitution, and the author stands in front of you, he says. Our constitution is nothing like the dirty new charter of the wounded state of Louisiana. Ours is a precept of the clean and the right. The White Camellia does things comme il faut, the way they should be done.
Copies of the KWC constitution are circulated. The text lays out principles and rites. It names passwords, diagrams secret handshakes. It describes special door knocks and coded greetings to be used by recruits on the street. It gives a script for the induction of members, and it contains an oath of allegiance. The constitution of the Knights of the White Camellia is a white supremacist manifesto. I believe it is the first statement of its kind in the United States, the first paper platform that announces race superiority and claims political power on the basis of it. To read through this document—which Constant would have known, and which he may have studied—I am somewhat disgusted, and also fascinated.
I want to be in the room with these conspirators at Odd Fellows Hall. Alcibiade DeBlanc takes a page and reads aloud from the text—
Brothers: You are being initiated into one of the most important Orders which have ever been established on this continent.… Our main and fundamental object is the MAINTENANCE OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE. History and physiology tell us that we belong to a race which nature has endowed with an evident superiority over all other races. The Maker intended to give us over inferior races a dominion from which no human laws can derogate.… It is a remarkable fact that as a race of men is more remote from the Caucasian and approaches nearer to the black African, the more fatally that stamp of inferiority is affixed to its sons, and irrevocably dooms them to eternal imperfectability and degradation.
A murmur in the room, and grunts of assent.
We know, besides, that the government of our Republic was established by white men, for white men alone, and that it never was in the contemplation of its founders that it should fall into the hands of an inferior and degraded race.
It then becomes our solemn duty as white men to do everything in our power in order to maintain, in this Republic, the supremacy of the Caucasian race, and restrain the black or African race to that condition of social and political inferiority for which God has destined it.
Cheers, maybe applause. DeBlanc is commanding as he sprays out what needs to be said. I have to picture the part when DeBlanc reaches out to Constant. I am sure he says something direct and touching to the carpenter.
—Think of your father. Our parents were close. I remember them, and I know they would want this. They would want you to be with us.
The manifesto contains all of the rules, all of the secrets. DeBlanc assigns his deputies to teach the little mysteries. If one member of the KWC meets another, they are to use a secret greeting—
“The sign of recognition on the street is made by drawing the index finger of the left hand across the left eye (all the other fingers of that hand closed). If the person addressed be a member of that order he will respond in like manner. If either party have any doubts he will ask the question, ‘Where were you born?’ The answer is, ‘On Mount Caucasus.’”
For a new recruit to seal his membership, he must pass through initiation
. It is possible that at this meeting, on the night of Tuesday, June 4, 1868, Constant is inducted. According to script—
The Candidate is introduced into an anteroom, accompanied by a Guard. He is blindfolded and led to the door of the Council Chamber. The Guard shall give two raps on the door. The Commander shall open the door. The following dialogue shall take place between the Commander and the Guard.
COMMANDER: Who comes there?
GUARD: A son of your race.
COMMANDER: What must be done?
GUARD: The cause of our race must triumph.
COMMANDER: What must we do?
GUARD: We must be united as are the flowers that grow on the same stem.
COMMANDER: Let him enter.
DeBlanc is the author of these lines. The ceremony, the greetings, and the handshakes show a familiarity with Greek orders and secret societies. They resemble fraternity rites. I do not think anymore it is necessary to imagine how Constant and the Knights of the White Camellia do their business. The script supplies the scene in every detail.
The Guard shall take the candidate by the right hand and conduct him into the presence of the Commander, who shall offer the following questions …
COMMANDER: Do you belong to the white race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Did you ever marry any woman who did not, or does not, belong to the white race?
CANDIDATE: No.
COMMANDER: Do you promise never to marry any woman but one who belongs to the white race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Do you believe in the superiority of your race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Will you promise never to vote for any one for any office of honor, profit, or trust, who does not belong to your race?