Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  An assessment meeting is called. Sometime in October, seventy-two guerrillas rendezvous at Eagle Hall, headquarters of Council No. 9, at the corner of Prytania and Felicity streets. Constant may be in the corner of the room when DeBlanc steps to the front. A man who is present later writes about the scene.

  “Brothers,” DeBlanc says, “all of you that can come to drill, do so. Because the armory is here.” The Grand Commander draws back a curtain to reveal one hundred rifles. He hands them out among the smiling men of Council No. 9.

  People stand to speak. One of the Knights mocks the governor of Louisiana and heaps special scorn on his lieutenant, a man named Oscar Dunn. Dunn is a sang-mêlé, a light-skinned black man elected in the last vote.

  “Here is a negro that could be bought for $1500 seven years ago, and now he is lieutenant governor of the state! How long are we to put up with it?”

  Governor Henry Warmoth asks Washington for federal aid. He describes the situation in a letter to President Johnson—

  “There is a secret organization throughout the State known as the Knights of the White Camellia.… It is founded for the purpose of placing and keeping the colored people in a condition of inferiority,” Warmoth tells the White House. “There are military organizations on foot in this city, under the auspices of this secret organization. They drill openly in our streets at night or in halls.… I fully believe that there is meditated a bloody revolution, the certain fruit of which would be hopeless confusions, disaster and ruin to the State.… Men women and children have recently been murdered … by bands of armed men.… From the best information, Mr. President, I have no doubt but that 150 have died … just in the last month.”

  The number of Union soldiers in New Orleans has dwindled to 2,500, and the number of Metropolitan Police is also down. Black policemen, singled out as targets, have been furloughed from the force. Warmoth asks the president for cavalry, infantry, and artillery. It is a futile plea. Andrew Johnson is weakened by his impeachment. And he does not see white terror as something he wants to restrain.

  * * *

  The Ku-klux in the north and the White Camellia in the south grow large, but I do not think the majority of white men join the two secret militias. Most whites express themselves tacitly. Most belong to a silent majority. Most seem to support the aims of the guerrillas, if not the tactics. They give unspoken approval of the ends, not necessarily the means.

  Many whites, less overtly militant than the White Camellia, join so-called ward clubs. Political clubs arise in the wards or voting districts of New Orleans. Their members sing “The White Man’s Banner” and back their candidate, Horatio Seymour. The aim of the Democratic ward clubs harmonizes with the White Camellias: it is white control in politics. Members of ward clubs wish for blanket white command in all corners of life, but they are less aggressive by half.

  Democratic ward clubs have names like the Broom Rangers, Chanticleer Club, Constitution Club, Crescent City Democrats, Fossil Guards, German Democratic Club, Jewell Cadets, Johnson Rangers, Minute Men, Rough and Ready Club, Seymour Cadets, Seymour Knights, Seymour Legion, Seymour Sentinels, Swamp Fox Rangers, Tiger Club, Walker Guards, and the Workingmen’s Democratic Club. One club, the Innocents, is a group more violent than the others. It has a largely Italian American membership. The men in ward clubs prefer marches and rallies to night-riding and hoods. They parade through their neighborhood with banners. They harass and sometimes beat up black people and white Republicans. But they are somewhat less bloody, and they are not secret. They reject the ritual style of the White Camellia, with its passwords and hand gestures and oaths.

  The most powerful ward club in Jefferson City is the Minute Men. It is allied with Home Hook & Ladder and holds meetings in the firehouse. In all likelihood, Constant Lecorgne joins the Minute Men. (The newspapers publish the names of ward club officers, not rank and file.) Constant’s friend Seymour Rapp is an officer in the club, as is a man named Maurice Lethieque, a politician close to Yves of God. Another leader in the club is Felix Lagroue, a brother-in-law of Constant. Constant’s fingerprints are in many places, even if they are not quite on the doorknob.

  The ward clubs like to costume, and clubmen wear coordinated uniforms. For the Minute Men it is a black frock coat, white pants, and white canvas cap with a black band. Clubmen pin a badge and insignia to the right breast of their coat. Like the twenty-odd other ward clubs, the Minute Men hold parades and rallies. They run newspaper ads encouraging the attendance of “all colored Democrats,” a call that yields three or four black outliers who hope to be rewarded for showing up. One event brings one thousand whites to Lawrence Square in Bouligny. The crowd marches through the neighborhood with torches and banners, a brass band, and floats decorated with campaign slogans. When the parade ends, the mass meeting is festive and angry. It is all shouted speeches and Andouille sausage, beer and curses.

  The figure of Frederick Ogden comes back into view. The ex-rebel general, a swaggering speaker on the platform, Fred Ogden is much like Alcibiade DeBlanc, only he is Anglo-American, not French Creole. A writer who sees Ogden work a crowd describes his “violent, explosive, and convincing eloquence.” Among its nicknames, New Orleans is the “Crescent City” because it sits on a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi. In June 1868, Fred Ogden talks his way to the head of the Crescent City Democratic Club, a ward club. He takes leadership of the group. The Crescent City Democrats count a membership of three hundred men in a ward a half mile downriver from the Lecorgnes, in the neighborhood of Lafayette. Most clubmen are English-speaking, and the Lecorgnes stay out. But the Crescent City Democrats share values with the Creoles. The reason the ward club comes together, as Ogden puts it, is “the growing insolence of the negro population.”

  The colors of white and black, important to these men, appear in their uniform. Crescent City Democrats wear white capes edged with a red border, a black sack coat, white duck trousers, and a white kepi—a hat from the rebel army—with a red band around it spelling the name of the club in gilt letters. They take possession of a clubhouse at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Prytania Street, a mile from Bouligny. By August 1868, squads of armed men in white capes patrol the city between Thalia Street and Napoleon Avenue, a wedge of uptown New Orleans at the shoulder of Jefferson City. It is Frederick Ogden’s debut performance, but not his denouement.

  * * *

  It feels to me as though this world is airless. There is little room to move, no space that is not commanded by a naked idea. The setting feels claustrophobic. But I have to remember that outside of it, you have everyday life. Life goes on for black people, in the middle of and despite the proxy war that singles out activists for attack. Republicans have their own ward clubs. They are mostly black. They are smaller than the Democratic ward clubs, and they are not dressed up. They rally and parade. They are less enraged. Sometimes they are even happy. I imagine the competition for public space that pits the clubs against one another. The Republican clubmen look over at the mob of Democratic marchers on the next street.

  See what the buckra man is doing with himself now. It ain’t good to see, and it gets worse.

  Congo Square is a symbolic heart in the black South. It is a place where West African music enters America, where traditional religions, which the church calls “voodoo,” are kept alive by lay priests and priestesses. The weekly dances that Constant would have witnessed as a child ended years ago, when the city shut them down. Yet the square remains a center of blackness. It is the entrance to the neighborhoods of Tremé and “Back of Town,” black stretches northwest of the Vieux Carré. It is because of the blackness of Congo Square that several Democratic ward clubs decide to occupy the space and stage a rally on the old dancing ground.

  It is October 17, and the election, Grant vs. Seymour, is two weeks away. About a thousand whites crowd the square. Angry speakers step to the platform. The first of them takes a moment to reassure the good whites who live near the Lecorgnes. A newspaper quotes but does no
t name the politician, who says, “The negroes in Jefferson City need looking after, as they are becoming extremely insolent and threatening.” The next speaker clarifies the challenge. “The Republicans have placed irresponsible, dishonest and greedy negroes in office,” he says. “They have armed the ignorant and degraded negro. They have goaded him with malice, hatred and revenge.… They have left nothing undone in their power to elevate the negro upon the ruin of the white man.… It is the duty of every white man to vote with us. Those who do not we condemn as unfaithful to their lineage and color, and false to the trust given to our race.”

  * * *

  On October 23, the White Camellia attacks, and this time, Constant is probably in the middle of it. The setting for him is familiar, the truck house of Home Hook & Ladder. There is a theatrical and grotesque side to the violence. In Jefferson City, at about 10:00 p.m., fifteen white men surround the house of a black man named A. J. Kemp and beat on his door. The Camellia guerrillas do not wear disguises. Robes and hoods are preferred for rural settings, less in the city. An investigation by the legislature tells the story.

  “Come down, you damned son of a bitch, you are the one we are looking for,” one shouts, according to testimony. The men drag A. J. Kemp from his house. They also seize a black man named Clark, hiding inside with Kemp. Actions of this kind are like certain raids Constant joined during the Civil War. You have a posse, you have stealth, you have a surprise strike. Constant takes pleasure in these memories. He remembers his face-to-face fights in the war, and it all must feel typical.

  The gang takes Clark and Kemp to the truck house of Home Hook & Ladder. Inside, the men have built a makeshift gallows. It is not so high as a regular gallows, and not so wide, but recognizable as a hanging machine. To build a gallows is a straightforward business, if you have a skilled carpenter on hand. Constant is a good builder, and he can improvise. One glance at a diagram and he would be able to put up a hangman’s kit in two or three hours. Maybe the diagram is even unnecessary. Here is the rope and here is the gibbet, and here is how they fit together.

  The investigation by the legislature is not clear on one point. Does Home Hook use its gallows actually to hang people? Or do they merely use it to torment victims they bring to the firehouse? I would like to know, really, but the evidence is sketchy.

  The gang begins with A. J. Kemp. In the shadow of the gibbet, they ask him where the guns might be that belong to the Loyal League. The Loyal League is a small group of Republicans, most of them black, a few white, who want Reconstruction to succeed. The Loyal League has held several rallies for its candidate, Ulysses Grant. The white newspapers say the Loyal League is arming black men by the hundred, that it plans a strike against white rule. The White Camellias tell Kemp that if he does not reveal the whereabouts of the guns, they will hang him at midnight.

  Theater and fantasy are important to the guerrillas. Their worst fantasy is the one about an African American uprising.

  Apparently there is extra room in the truck house, because the Camellias set up a mock courtroom. A judge’s bench is put out, a row of chairs for defendants, a witness box for testimony. The gang arraigns its two prisoners and pretends to cross-examine them. Kemp and Clark are interrogated three times, and each time they tell the same story: they do not know of a storehouse of guns.

  While Clark and Kemp are being tormented, someone back at Kemp’s house manages to get word to the U.S. Army. In an hour, a squad of soldiers is dispatched, and shortly before midnight, Union men reach the Home Hook truck house. They break open the door and put an end to the charade. Kemp and Clark are freed, and they leave. A report on the episode does not mention arrests. Everyone knows that the good police and courts of Jefferson would not put these firemen in jail. The army squad moves on to the next incident, and the guerrillas take themselves home.

  Klansmen in Alabama, 1868

  * * *

  A rule in history is that you tell stories based on evidence. With violent white supremacy, the evidence of the act is intermittent. The white terror does not keep records. It does not want to leave evidence. It undermines, it mutilates, and it disappears. It operates at night and in secrecy. It is evidence of the aftermath that remains—bodies, scars, damaged families.

  In the third week of October, there is a lynching in Jefferson City. It is executed by a gang of “disguised men,” according to a news item, and takes place in the jail a few blocks from Constant and Gabrielle’s rental. The men may be wearing blackface, or Mardi Gras masks, or hoods. It cannot be said: the evidence does not describe their disguise. In the event, which takes place on a Saturday morning, a gang of men shows up at the police lockup in Bouligny.

  Two men, Dennis and Samuel Milton, black and apparently brothers, have been “tried and found guilty twice on a charge of outraging a white woman,” as a reporter puts it. But the U.S. Army halts the case twice for lack of evidence. Proving the rule that gangs are the first form of justice, “a band of disguised men overpowers the jailor and takes summary vengeance on the two negroes.” The Bouligny gang shoots the Milton brothers to death in their cells.

  The perpetrators have no names, and no arrests are made, and so it is difficult to say whether Constant helps with the lynching in his neighborhood. I would like to think that he is home with the children and Gabrielle, who is eight months pregnant in October, with her sixth child. But I have no evidence of it.

  It is the first time I see the word “lynching” in the story of my city, New Orleans, a place I love. The newspaper throws it in. Reporters know what they are talking about. They have seen lynching before and will see a lot more of it in a few years’ time.

  * * *

  I find a 350-page report, a lot of evidence, about the weeks leading up to the election. It counts casualties statewide—784 killed, 85 wounded by gunshot, and 265 “maltreated,” whipped or beaten or maybe raped. Ninety percent of the killings are of black people, ten percent are killings of whites. “Much larger numbers are estimated,” says the legislative committee. It seems likely that half of the killings and assaults are not recorded.

  You start with the evidence, but it is not enough. Here are a few things that take place in New Orleans and in Jefferson City, according to evidence in the legislative report—

  THE MASSACRE IN THE PARISH OF ORLEANS IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER 1868.

  Large mobs occurred and great numbers of colored men and white Republicans were slaughtered successively in the parish of Orleans on September 22, and October 24, 1868 … and Jefferson, on October 23, 1868.

  Republican processions were continually assaulted and fired into. The streets at night were patrolled by armed men who marauded, plundered and killed at will. Flags bearing the words ‘No Quarter’ were borne at the head of these bands. Of the numbers thus clandestinely murdered no account can be obtained. Policemen were ambushed and shot while on duty. Private citizens were stabbed and assassinated.

  It is incontestably established that the attacks were exclusively by white Democrats upon Republicans, yet an attempt was made … to ring a general alarm on the bells of the city, upon the hollow pretext of a “negro riot.”

  On October 24, an unprovoked assault was made upon a Ulysses Grant procession [Republican parade], in which a number were killed and wounded.… The nightly murders and robberies increased; numbers of people were compelled to flee from their residences and remain concealed for weeks.

  The secret organization of the Knights of the White Camellia met and drilled with arms nightly, and it was their boast that at the looked-for signal they could demolish the United States troops in fifteen minutes.

  And …

  THE MASSACRE IN JEFFERSON PARISH OCTOBER 23, 1868.

  Bands of armed white men traversed the parish and under pretense of searching among the colored people for arms, committed murders and innumerable other outrages upon defenseless men, women and children.

  Investigators emphasize the existence of a secret political and semi-military organiz
ation in this state styled, the Knights of the White Camellia. The signs, ritual and operations of this society throughout the parish of Orleans have been made known by testimony.… The testimony shows that the order exposed in this report is the real organization which is known to the public as the “Ku Klux.”

  Mima Hughes states, on oath, that she is a resident of the State of Louisiana, and is residing in Jefferson Parish, and is twenty years old. That on the morning of October 30, 1868, between the hours of 8 and 10 o’clock, she saw a gang of fifteen or twenty white men running after a colored man named Harry Scott. These men were armed with pistols, spades and axes, and they were crying out, ‘Head him off!’ ‘Kill him!’ etc. Witness then saw Henry Carroll, a resident of Jefferson, shoot Scott in the back; she also saw a son of John Linton, a keeper of a coffee-house, and a Jew named Albert Lamben, both shoot him in the back. On the same day, a body of white men came to the house of a colored woman named Polly Gill—where witness was visiting—and after destroying most everything in the room, one of the white men raised his gun and shot a colored man named Euben Lindsey in the face, and a baby four months old, which he was holding in his arms.

  These are a few things that take place under the white man’s banner in New Orleans and in Jefferson City, according to evidence collected by the state.

  * * *

  Election day comes, November 3, and the White Camellia places gangs at the polls to linger and malinger. Half the city’s registered voters are white, half are black or Creoles of color. Nearly all white voters are Democrats. Nearly all Republicans are of color. On November 3, blacks do not vote at all, because they expect they will be killed for trying. In fact, two or three thousand blacks vote for Democrats, the whiteness party. They are coerced by threats or told by white employers to vote Democrat, or expect to lose a job or a limb. Ninety-five percent of white Republicans stay home, too. In New Orleans, only 276 votes for Republicans are cast, by whites who vote under armed guard. The Democrat Seymour wins Louisiana and seven other states. The Republican Grant wins twenty-six states, and the election. “The election in Louisiana was simply a sham, and a nullity,” says an investigation.