by Edward Ball
If I am not distorting the facts, this appears to be a cooler time during the Ku-klux ascendancy. The election brought a blaze of antiblack violence. For the next three years, New Orleans is like a pit when the flame dies. The status quo remains, somewhat charred, punctuated by flares from the embers.
The prevailing mood among both blacks and whites, I imagine, is a kind of fatigue and a sort of disgust. Whites get what they wanted—the Ku-klux chokes every voice that opposes white command. But the Lecorgnes and other petits blancs are not happy. The loathsome Ulysses Grant is in the White House, and so-called radicals run the state. The governor of Louisiana is a white Republican, Henry Warmoth, his lieutenant governor a black man named Oscar Dunn. The Louisiana Senate counts twenty-three Republicans, seven of whom are black, and thirteen Democrats, all white. In the state House of Representatives are sixty-five Republicans, thirty-five of them black, and thirty-six Democrats, all white. Adding things up, three out of ten state lawmakers are black or Creoles of color. The newspapers describe this black representation of one-third as “negro domination.”
With a two-to-one Republican majority, the Louisiana Assembly passes the Election Act. The bill bans the kinds of things done by night riders like Constant and the White Camellia. It becomes illegal to shoot a gun in the direction of a school, a house, or a church; becomes illegal to use threats that force people to leave town. Because white judges friendly to the Ku-klux mysteriously lose their paperwork, the Election Act makes it illegal to mutilate or pilfer court files, such as indictments for crimes.
These are niceties, some say. Let the coon politicians enforce them.
Another law is proposed that hits close to home. It bans the wearing of costumes and masks, hoods and robes, “to prevent people from going abroad disguised.” The law is aimed at the Ku-klux, but New Orleans is the Carnival city, where people like to mask. The costume ban goes to a committee, where it dies. Another law that bans concealed weapons has the same fate, it goes conference and disappears.
The legislature tries other things. Politicians turn to disease and hygiene. Weirdly, a public health law makes the race war worse. In 1869, lawmakers pass the “Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans.” In order to stop slaughterhouses upstream of the city from fouling the Mississippi with dead animals, the law creates a monopoly company for the slaughter of livestock, with a killing plant downstream. A butchers’ group files suit, arguing that the brand-new Fourteenth Amendment, with its “equal protection” clause, meant to defend freed slaves, is really meant to protect them, businesspeople. Eventually the so-called Slaughterhouse Cases, triggered by the Louisiana health law, go to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in 1873, just a few years after the Constitution stretches its tent of protection over people of color, the Court uses the Louisiana act to cut away at the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court rules that the “privileges and immunities” named in the amendment do not protect individuals from actions of state governments that may rob them of their civil rights. The result is that the federal government loses much of its power of law to shelter blacks from domination. It is another reversal, and bitter. The Slaughterhouse Cases, born on the Mississippi wharfs, are an alarm that announces the beginning of the end of the experiment in race equity.
Gabrielle and Constant probably raise an ear when another bill comes up at the statehouse. Democrats propose a law that redeems old Confederate bonds; they want the state to buy up the scrip the rebel government used to raise a war chest. The Lecorgnes lost a lot when they invested in the fight. Now it looks as though their fall from grands blancs to the ranks of the petits might be cushioned, or even reversed. Their hopes are raised; the money could very well come back. But the bill is parked in committee, where it dies. Constant and Gabrielle are disappointed. For them, it is another reversal, and bitter.
White terror is shelved, for the time being. Around the South, the Ku-klux retreats from violence. In October 1869, in Tennessee, the so-called Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, issues a proclamation that orders the secret society to cease attacks. Forrest adds, in his bulletin, “This is not to be understood to dissolve the Order of the Ku Klux Klan,” merely to keep it quiet until “any emergency that may come.” Terror goes dormant in Louisiana, as the White Camellia also stops night-riding. The headman Alcibiade DeBlanc moves from New Orleans back to his hometown, St. Martinville, and disappears from notice. There is no need for terror, he would say. Blood is not needed now, since the idea of social equality, blacks and whites sharing power and money, is going nowhere. The public schools that are open to blacks in the city are not merging with schools for whites. Calls by Creole radicals like the Roudanez brothers for the redistribution of land are having no effect. There is little sharing in white and black work life, none in worship life, and not much in cash. All seems frozen in place. In the statehouse, lawmakers pass a civil rights bill, an attempt to implement the equal accommodations clause of the 1868 constitution. The Picayune expresses mainstream white opinion. “This … social equality bill … is a sham and a snare. It is the convocation of … mongrel mulattoes who have read the mischievous books of … ridiculous theorists.” The white governor, a Republican who came to office on the votes of black men, vetoes the law, claiming he cannot enforce it.
On the other hand, this is a time when the first blacks are seated in the U.S. Congress. In 1870, the state of Mississippi sends Hiram Revels, a black minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, to join the U.S. Senate. At the end of the year, South Carolina sends Joseph Rainey, a black barber born into slavery, to enter the U.S. House.
Voting rights for blacks appear to be made permanent, as the Fifteenth Amendment comes within reach. The Fifteenth Amendment is a single sentence: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” In February 1869, Congress sends the amendment that gives black men the vote out to state legislatures for approval. White feminists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and no doubt tens of millions of other people, want to lengthen the single sentence of the amendment with one word, “sex,” to hand the vote to women. The campaign fails. The Louisiana legislature passes the Fifteenth Amendment as written.
It is a cold kind of war, in which disaster comes less often. In 1870, the Metropolitan Police publish a status report. “We have, during the year just past,” it says, “no riots to report, nor any massacres of men on account of race or color.” This is the paltry definition of a good year: no race massacres to report.
* * *
The cold war comes to an end with a new eruption in Bouligny. Police and firemen in Jefferson City have decided to seal off the municipality from the Yankee army and its comrades, the Metropolitan Police. It is a kind of town coup d’état, as the suburb cuts itself off from New Orleans. It appears that the two Lecorgne brothers, Yves of God and Constant, are involved. Yves helps to lead things. As comptroller, he holds the money levers of Jefferson City, with power second only to the mayor. Yves decides that he and the town should withhold all taxes from the state and use the money instead to run the local police and courts. Next, a paramilitary force made up of Home Hook & Ladder men puts up barricades to keep the army out of Bouligny. The Home Hook men begin patrols. Constant seems to be among the two or three hundred who police the perimeter of the sealed town.
The stunt continues for eight months, until May 1869, when the “secession” comes under siege. That month, Governor Henry Warmoth appoints a new mayor, comptroller, and board of aldermen in Jefferson City. When Yves of God and the rest of the local rebels refuse to surrender their offices, the case goes to trial, and the state supreme court rules against the coup d’état. Comptroller Yves Lecorgne still refuses to leave the courthouse.
On May 17, 1869, the Metropolitan Police sent by the governor try to seize the station house of Precinct 7 in Bouligny. The contingent of twe
nty Metropolitans is overwhelmed and arrested by Home Hook militia. Constant may or may not be in that group of guerrillas, but I suspect he is. Three years later, he will be back at Precinct 7, this time with different commandos, to seize the same station house, and to face arrest.
The Metropolitans return the next night, May 18, now with two hundred men. They reach Lawrence Square, at the center of Bouligny, to find two hundred guerrillas defending it. The two sides open fire. Everyone has a pistol, nobody a rifle, and the two gangs stay far apart. The shoot-out lasts for an hour and involves poor marksmanship. None of the Jefferson militia is killed, but two Metropolitans die, with twelve or thirteen wounded. They retreat. It is hard to imagine Constant is not one of the gunmen.
On the third day, May 19, the U.S. Army gathers four hundred men—two companies of soldiers, two pieces of artillery, and more Metropolitans. This time, some of the soldiers are a company of “colored infantry,” the better to provoke the whites. Governor Warmoth joins the force on horseback. At about 8:30 a.m., the army marches up St. Charles Avenue, turns left on Napoleon Avenue, toward the river, and enters Lawrence Square. They find the square abandoned. When a white butcher in the food market off Lawrence Square insults the company of black soldiers, the Union men drag the butcher from his stall and beat him bloody. A white crowd gathers. The army men are black, while their comrades, the Metropolitans, are white. The crowd floats words like “nigger-lover” on the air, and the police are enraged. The white cops start to beat and club local whites.
Flanked by soldiers, Governor Warmoth places the new officials at their desks. Yves of God, plus the mayor and other white-collar rebels, are driven from the courthouse. Governor Warmoth swears in the new mayor of Jefferson City, a man named Felix Leche.
As it happens, Felix Leche is a Lecorgne in-law. Aurora Lecorgne, sister of Yves, was married to Felix’s brother, Numa Leche, before Numa died of yellow fever. Felix Leche is thus the brother-in-law of Constant, Joseph, and Yves. Mayor Felix Leche of Jefferson City is one of the few in the circle of the Lecorgnes—in fact, he is the only one—who takes the side of Reconstruction. Leche is the only person who seems to believe in the failing idea that blacks and whites might belong to the same tribe.
* * *
In spring 1870, President Ulysses Grant asks Congress for laws that ban voter intimidation. Grant knows that in the South, intimidation can mean murder. The Republican majority passes three laws. The first, the Enforcement Act of May 1870, bans the infamous robes and hoods of the Ku-klux. Gangs that “go in disguise upon the public highways, or upon the premises of another” and violate the constitutional rights of citizens break federal law. In the bill’s floor debate, the Massachusetts congressman Benjamin “Beast” Butler waves a shirt stained with dried blood. He says the Ku-klux in Mississippi whipped the man who wore it, the superintendent of a school for African American children.
The second Enforcement Act defines Ku-klux terror as a conspiracy, and because the blood of the South shows that states cannot run a fair vote, the law puts national elections in the hands of the federal government. A third law, in 1871, allows the president to summon the army to protect voting and to suspend habeas corpus, the limit on detention of citizens. It permits group arrests without the requirement of one-at-a-time arraignment. It is this law that acquires the memorable name the Ku Klux Klan Act.
Before long, Constant Lecorgne will find himself charged under the Ku Klux Klan Act.
In June 1870, Congress creates the Department of Justice. The department is formed expressly in order to use the Enforcement Acts against the Ku-klux. After two years, white terror is returning. White terror spreads in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and the other ex-rebel states. President Grant appoints a man named Amos Akerman as the first attorney general to head the Justice Department. Akerman hires a legal staff, and the first assignment of the new department is to bring cases against the Ku-klux. Akerman picks the state of South Carolina as the place to make an example.
In South Carolina, the army rounds up more than one thousand Ku-klux members, local sheriffs among them, and prosecution starts. The Ku Klux Klan trials run for eighteen months, beginning in summer 1871.
Louisiana is safe from federal action, and so is Constant, at least for now. Or almost. Congress appoints the “Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States” and sends investigators across the South to document the Ku-klux violence. The bloody trail they find turns into a thirteen-volume report. It is an encyclopedia of terror—beatings, rapes, whippings, executions. Witness testimony chronicles perhaps one thousand individual incidents. These can only be a fraction of the actual number. A reader can spend a week and not get through half the catalog.
23
The city of Memphis wants to imitate New Orleans, putting on its own festival of masked balls and parades on Mardi Gras. It is Tuesday, February 20, 1872. The streets of Memphis fill up with the first Carnival processions Tennessee has ever seen. There is music, masking, and drinking. In the crowning event, a marvelous parade rumbles down Front Street, following the levee that runs beside the Mississippi. One wagon in the Memphis parade attracts more attention than the rest. A reporter for the Daily Appeal describes the Ku-klux float, the parade car that draws notice—
“The Ku-klux had a wagon of their own in the procession in which were representatives of the Klan from all the states of the South,” the paper says. “All the terrible scenes alleged to have been enacted for years were presented, and the Ku-klux appeared in full regalia.”
A deep crowd on the sidewalk waves and laughs at the Ku-klux wagon. The men on the float, wearing hoods and robes, perform a skit in which they pretend to kill a black man. The role of the victim is played by a white Ku-kluxer slathered in blackface. “One of their number impersonated a living ace of spades, the veritable butt-end of midnight,” the reporter writes, “and the poor negro was executed according to all the familiar forms … including the death-struggle, and the efforts to escape.…” Parades run long on Mardi Gras, and so the revelers must entertain by repeating their sketch over and over, mock-killing the mock–African American many, many times. It is all in good fun. The laughter dies slowly, Carnival season comes to an end, and the hoods and robes return to closets.
* * *
A few months later, still in Tennessee, the Grand Wizard of the Ku-klux, Nathan Bedford Forrest, writes a bulletin and sends it to his followers, whom he estimates to number forty thousand. “It will be impossible for us to make ourselves useful until we get the reins of government out of the hands of the nigger leaders,” it begins. It is July, and the race for the White House is again under way. “The cussed niggers are the cause of all our woe,” Forrest writes. He adds a second source of irritation, namely, President Grant’s “pigheaded refusal to remunerate the Southern people for their Slave property, of which they were so wickedly robbed by Lincoln.” The bulletin is sent far and wide. It will do well to raise morale. “The South must be avenged,” Forrest concludes. “The negro slave must not be our final conqueror.—Forrest, Worshipful Chief, K.K.K.”
Governorships around the South are up for grabs. In Louisiana, the Republican Party runs a candidate, William Kellogg, a white U.S. senator; he pairs with the politician Caesar Antoine, a Creole of color from upstate, who runs for lieutenant governor. The Democrats put up the longtime politician John McEnery for governor. In an early campaign parade, on August 12, McEnery leads a crowd of supporters through the streets of New Orleans. The parade line carries an enormous banner that reads “White Supremacy.” The New Orleans Republican newspaper observes, “We regard the McEnery ticket as representing the negro hating, schoolhouse burning, fire-eating Bourbonists.”
The Democrats are “Bourbons,” after the name of the royal family in France. A clever and caustic analogy. It is said that the Democrats, like the French royals, were run out of power by a revolution—defeat in the Civil War—and yet they expect to be resto
red to their place of reverence, having learned nothing.
The 1872 campaigns are quieter than the ones in 1868. I suspect Constant and other guerrillas are following the Ku-klux trials in South Carolina, where 220 have been indicted, and those events curb their enthusiasm for marauding. The Ku-klux carries out minimal gang terror—although to their victims, the half truce is little comfort.
Voting occurs November 4, and the election is full of fraud. No one knows who wins the governor’s race in Louisiana. The Returning Board—a panel meant to verify elections and diminish vote rigging—gives a split opinion. Some on the board name McEnery winner, some name Kellogg. Ulysses Grant wins the White House (and Louisiana), at least that is known. Grant’s Democratic opponent, Horace Greeley, dies as returns are being counted.
Both gubernatorial candidates claim to have won, but William Kellogg gets the prize for maneuvering. He brings a case to a federal court, where a judge rules in the Republican’s favor and orders the U.S. Army to protect Kellogg’s government. Governor Warmoth, accused of mishandling election returns, is impeached. He resigns office in December. And when that happens, his lieutenant governor, Pinckney Pinchback, is promoted to governor. By this Byzantine accident, Pinckney Pinchback becomes the first African American governor of any state. He serves for six weeks, until Governor Kellogg is inaugurated. Governor Pinchback remains the only black governor to hold office anywhere in the United States until the year 1988.
Democrats do not like that the election goes against them, and in January 1873, both Kellogg and McEnery hold installation ceremonies. Democrats also dislike the color of the new legislature, which counts sixty-eight blacks and seventy-seven whites.
Charles Gayarré, a distinguished historian of Louisiana who lives through the events, observes, “We are completely under the rule of ignorant and filthy negroes scarcely superior to the orang-outang.”