by Edward Ball
Gabrielle and Constant have only one daughter left, Corinne. They hover over her, I imagine, as though she is the only girl in creation.
* * *
The petits blancs, like Constant, are in more direct competition with black craftsmen, as African Americans sell their labor. The petits blancs, like the Lecorgnes, are more likely to live among blacks, as people of color move to get nearer a wage. Maybe these social facts provoke something in the unconscious of many working-class whites, a visceral desire to put up boundaries and to draw a brighter race line. Are the petits blancs more crude, more cruel, and more volatile than the sedate and cunning elites who run the economy, and who employ them? It does appear that the working poor carry the knives and clubs of white supremacy. It does seem that white businessmen and politicians prefer not to use violence themselves; they prefer others to do that necessary work. The grands blancs, the landlord and the entrepreneur, look out at the black and white world and do what they can to make conditions right for the militias.
The “white man’s party” promised by The Caucasian newspaper comes together. It rises up like the thing before it, the Knights of the White Camellia, which flourished six years earlier. It involves many of the same people.
Alcibiade DeBlanc, having left New Orleans, lives where he grew up—St. Martinville, the old town on Bayou Teche. DeBlanc’s domain is St. Martin Parish, in French-speaking Louisiana. Constant and Gabrielle bury Estelle about the time DeBlanc leads a meeting to form the party of the white man in St. Martinville. DeBlanc is good with names, having coined “the White Camellia.” It seems to be DeBlanc who names the new movement. He calls the new party la ligue blanche.
La ligue blanche, the White League, erupts in St. Martin Parish, Rapides Parish, and St. Landry Parish—each one hundred miles from the other two—like mushrooms that blurt above ground. Each gang has a headman. A politician named John Moncure takes leadership at Shreveport, in the north of the state. East of Lafayette, it is Charles Mouton, a lieutenant governor before the Civil War, “fearless champion of our Caucasian birthrights,” as The New Orleans Bulletin describes him. At the organizing meeting in Lafayette, Mouton “addressed the assemblage in both French and English, holding the audience spellbound for two hours.” La ligue blanche does not lack publicity. In the town of Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish, the Courier newspaper surrenders to it: “From this date the control of the editorial columns of the Courier passes into the hands of the White League,” the paper says. The New Orleans Bulletin adds a motto to its masthead: “This government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men and by none other whatsoever.”
In May, a second trial for the Colfax nine begins. The first prosecution of the mass killers had ended in mistrial. In a few days, four men are acquitted and the other five found guilty of a charge much milder than murder, “conspiracy to disrupt a peaceful assembly.” The five go free during appeal. Two years later, their case will end in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The White League compresses the message of race, distilling to a few words the ocean of identity. A bulletin summarizes its program. “We are for white men in everything—in our public offices, in our stores, on our steamers, on our drays and floats, in our families and in our fields. Everywhere.”
New Orleans joins the White League movement six weeks after its first flourish in St. Martinville. In June, Fred Ogden, leader of the failed coup d’état, calls a meeting of the Crescent City Democratic Club. The CCDC is one of the marching clubs that menaced black voters during the election of 1868. Ogden revives the club in a rally at Eagle Hall, corner of Prytania and Felicity streets. “I can readily picture Ogden’s violent, explosive, and convincing eloquence,” says one man who attends. I doubt that Constant is there. It is a small meeting, mostly English speakers, and the crowd is better educated and richer than the ship carpenter. They are more grands blancs than petits. But he certainly knows about it. The event takes place at the old headquarters of Council No. 9 of the White Camellia, and Constant’s two lawyers in the Klan and treason case, James Lingan and Frank Zacharie, lead the roster.
Fred Ogden steps to the front of the room at Eagle Hall. He says that he and his old comrades must join the wave of White Leagues washing in from the parishes. They must regroup. Let the old marching club come back together, now with a stiffer spine. There is a new and monstrous enemy, Ogden says. It is a nigger menace like none we have seen. It goes by the name of the Black League.
As it happens, there is no such thing as a Black League. But in a few days, on June 30, the Picayune runs a story about Ogden’s imaginary enemy. The paper reports that black men are arming themselves outside the city, that an invasion is planned for New Orleans. Reconnaissance has uncovered the plot, and its nature is bloodcurdling, the paper says. Black League marauders plan to swarm into the city like a night-riding militia and claim their spoils. “If resisted, they are at once to light fire to businesses and kill as many white men as possible,” the Picayune tells readers, “and then keep for themselves all the women.” Fortunately, good citizens like Colonel Fred Ogden are taking measures. The Picayune announces the new organization, the Crescent City White League, with Ogden as president. A manifesto from the group, just drafted, happens to be available. It is the new “platform of the white race in Louisiana.” The manifesto shows beyond a doubt that blacks are on a campaign to replace whites. “Anyone who has … overheard their private conversations knows that they dream of the exodus of the whites, which will leave Louisiana to their exclusive control, like another Haiti.”
The Picayune publishes the White League manifesto. The White League “has solely in view the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization,” it says. La ligue blanche will fight until whites “resume that just and legitimate superiority in the administration of our State affairs to which we are entitled by superior responsibility, superior numbers and superior intelligence.”
There is a rush on Eagle Hall as hundreds of men mass to declare their allegiance. Stevedores, tinsmiths, and teamsters sign up. Carpenters, grocers, draymen, and hostlers sign. They join the money caste of factors, accountants, lawyers, insurance dealers, businessmen, and clerks. The marching clubs from the party of “the Democracy” sign up en masse. One paper lists thirty groups that fall in with the League cause. A few of them: the Minute Men, the Pendleton Guards, the Constitution Club, the Fulton Street White Club, the Eighth Ward Wide Awakes, the Swan Cadets, the Seymour Southrons, and the Fossil Guards. All rebrand as White League affiliates.
Among the joiners is René de Gas, brother of the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. Another joiner, according to family tradition, is Constant Lecorgne.
* * *
In Washington, the Civil Rights Bill moves through thick resistance in the House, pushed along by Benjamin “Beast” Butler. The old overlord of New Orleans during the Civil War is now a representative from Massachusetts. The Civil Rights Bill outlaws race differences in “places of public accommodation”—anywhere you spend money—as well as in churches, schools, transportation, and cemeteries. By this time, most of the Radical Republicans in Congress are gone, having been voted out, or having sold out. Few in the Capitol feel any longer that it is their job to try to design race equity; few want to make the attempt at reducing white domination. Thanks to the Ku-klux, thanks to years of bad news, Reconstruction looks impossible and thankless. When news comes to Washington that White Leagues are cropping up in Louisiana, and then in Mississippi, in Texas, and in Arkansas, most in Congress receive the word with resignation.
The House puts off considering the Civil Rights Bill until after the fall 1874 elections. In Louisiana, the White Leagues celebrate the setback for “Beast” Butler and schedule armed drills for a show of public morale. Frank Zacharie, lawyer for Constant in the treason case, is encouraged. He writes a friend, “The North is becoming tired of the eternal nigger, to whom th
e greatness, glory, and prosperity of the Country has been sacrificed.”
* * *
The artist Edgar Degas has left New Orleans and gone home to Paris. His uncle, the cotton dealer Michel Musson, presides over a big White League rally in the city. Musson’s son-in-law, William Bell, is at the center of command. William Bell becomes treasurer of the New Orleans Ligue blanche, while Bell’s business partner, Fred Ogden, is leader of the whole White League operation.
As tension mounts, the Catholic Church, which dominates religious life in the lower half of the state, offers its ethical guidance. The Catholic Messenger, newspaper of the diocese of New Orleans, runs an editorial. “They, the colored people, are and have been carrying on a relentless war upon the whites … a war of ruin and extermination.… They grow fat, strong and insolent.” The message from the church is plain: black people should be made to beg. “There is but one way now to manage the negro,” a clergyman writes in the church paper. “He is as a class amenable to neither reason nor gratitude. He must be starved into the common perception of decency.”
A musician named Annie Bowles writes a song, the “White League March.” Bands play it at rallies. The men march up and down the block, and sometimes they march in circles. Some carry broomsticks, because they do not yet have rifles. The Republican newspaper makes a prediction: “We declare that the organization of the order of the White League in Louisiana is the revival of the Ku-klux under another name; that it is a step toward the assassination of negroes.”
The attacks resume. In late July, five black people are lynched near the town of Lafayette. The White League kills black people. But it approaches whites who support Reconstruction somewhat differently. In the towns of Natchitoches and St. Martinville, mass meetings draw up petitions demanding the resignation of white Republican judges, police, and mayors. Gangs of night riders pay visits to the homes of white officials. Most resign or leave town.
In the northwest of the state on the Red River lies the village of Coushatta. La ligue blanche selects it for mob action. Coushatta, population some two hundred, with two out of three people black, sees three days of skirmishes among a dozen combatants. When local whites send out the familiar tribal call that an insurrection is afoot, White League recruits stream into the parish from around the state to form a strike force of several hundred. The public mobilization shows a difference between the White League and earlier Ku-klux gangs. The White Camellias were secret; they acted at night, and they liked a good disguise. Whereas the White League hides nothing; its guerrillas swarm in large numbers during the day.
On August 29 in Coushatta, a gang takes prisoner a dozen blacks and six whites, all Republicans. A tribunal extracts confessions and promises from the prisoners that they will leave the parish. When the Republicans march off the next day, guerrillas intercept them. Six are shot to death and two are hanged.
The Coushatta massacre dominates newspapers in the North for the next several weeks. I imagine that Fred Ogden—in New Orleans, hearing the news—has a thought: It looks like the beginning of the end.
26
Fred Ogden and his officers recruit twenty-six infantry companies, 1,500 men ready to fight without hoods and robes. It is late summer 1874. The traditional enemies, black women and men who can be tormented one at a time, are no longer enough. The White League wants a bigger prize, state power. The government is to be brought down.
Constant is a veteran of the March 1873 coup d’état, when Ogden led a failed putsch. It was Ogden who ordered the assault on police precinct 7. When Constant and his gang succeeded, Ogden came to the station at midnight to visit. The carpenter shook the leader’s hand and bathed in his charisma. Constant, I think, feels about Ogden the way he feels about his Creole commander, Alcibiade DeBlanc. If the White League says it will take the statehouse, Constant will be with them.
On September 1, a rally for the White League brings several thousand into the Varieties Theater, on Canal Street. The auditorium is lit with torches. Flagmen wave banners, and bands rattle through tunes. Speakers remind the crowd of the good news from Texas. In Austin, White League crowds have laid siege to the state capitol and driven out the Republican governor, ignoring a Texas court ruling that the Reconstruction politician won reelection to office. What’s more, President Grant has refused to intervene, sending in no troops, for a change. The great state of Texas has been redeemed. A cheer at the word—redeem. The League will do the same here and in all of the South. It is the time of redemption for the superior race.
The end of the war came in spring 1865. Since then, Reconstruction has cut the first road through the rainforest of white supremacy. African Americans have gotten to vote, or some of the men have, mainly for white politicians, a few of whom try to share power. Ex-slaves have begun to earn money, or some have, those who can get free of sharecropping on the land of their ex-masters. New schools have enrolled many thousands, clearing a way for blacks to sit in classrooms built with money from the North; it is literacy at low cost, at least until the Ku-klux burns a third of the schools down. The colored elite has grown during the years of Republican rule. New Orleans has the oldest and largest class of propertied blacks in the South, free people of color, moneyed since before the Civil War. Their numbers have gone up, but there are few things that irritate petits blancs as much as a prosperous Negro. The economy of New Orleans is still built on two words—cotton and sugar—moving them, selling them, a job helped by a new, third word, railroads. The city remains the richest in the South, with little palaces rising along a fresh, golden boulevard, St. Charles Avenue, and along the streets between Bouligny and the French Quarter.
Constant and Gabrielle do not see the money in their hands, not the countable kind. Just maybe, they might see their whiteness as a kind of money, natural and bankable and deserved. They really do not want to see that disappear, the way the other kind of capital they once had went away, the kind you can count.
Companies of militia drill in the streets, like a field army, as though for war. The White League drills in Bouligny, in Carrollton, in the Marigny, and in Lafayette—all the faubourgs. The League identifies its main foes: the state militia, the Metropolitan Police, and the U.S. Army. By good fortune, most troops in the Union Army are gone from town. Federal commanders are afraid soldiers might catch Yellow Jack in the steam of August, the wettest month of a New Orleans summer. The Yankees have sent most of their regiments to camp in the pinelands of Mississippi, where it is hot but dry.
The Metropolitan Police are the state cops, under the leadership of a man named Sidney Badger. An integrated force, the Metropolitans have both black and white companies. The Louisiana State Militia, the third foe, is chiefly black. Its ranks are under the command of General James Longstreet, an ex-Confederate who flipped after the Civil War and joined the Reconstruction cause.
Pamphlet about the White League
The White League has staff officers, rank-and-file men like Constant, and a goal—redemption—but the guerrillas do not have the guns they want. Many have pistols or shotguns, and some have single-load muskets. They want long guns, especially Springfield rifles. In the western territories, the U.S. Army is using breech-loading Springfields to kill and drive away Native people and secure land for white settlement. It is the gun that wins when people of color are in the way.
Another election is scheduled in November. Observers in the North worry the vote in Louisiana will go to the Democrats. “Every midnight marauder and assassin from the Tennessee to the Gulf, the Ku-Klux and the White League, the fiends who strip and scourge and banish and massacre, the murderers of Coushatta, the women-whippers and the minions of the terror, all pray fervently for a Democratic success,” says Harper’s Weekly, in New York. In New Orleans, the Democrats expect to drive out the Republicans by manipulating the vote. Fred Ogden and the League plan to stage a coup just before the election in order to guarantee the outcome. Harper’s Weekly takes them seriously, calling the new wave of Ku-klux “a band of assass
ins who, under the name of a White Man’s League now rule by terror … in midnight raids and orgies in the negro cabin.”
Ogden and his commanders have arranged shipments of guns from a source in New York. Hearing of the plan, General Longstreet sends a team from the state militia to look for weapons at the railroad terminal. Nothing. He sends another team to search ships docked at the wharfs. Nothing again. On September 8, a wagonful of rifles turns up at the corner of Canal and Camp streets. When this happens, the White League decides to move up the coup by six weeks, from November to September. On September 11, a team from Longstreet’s militia finds six crates of Springfield rifles in a ship named City of Dallas. The next day, a steamer called the Mississippi docks near Jackson Square, within sight of St. Louis Cathedral. When officers in the state militia board, they find the ship’s hold stuffed with guns.
The coup d’état is kicked into motion. On the night of September 13, rifles stored at a factory, Leeds Foundry, are handed out to White League fighters. This first force numbers 224, according to one fighter who writes a memoir. With his long battle credentials, Constant would be a good choice for the first ranks.
Ogden and his gang plan a mass meeting downtown for Monday the fourteenth. The idea is to stage a rally, then send a mob to the Mississippi to take the guns. From there, guerrillas can storm the statehouse. The statehouse has lately moved. It now occupies the former St. Louis Hotel, in the French Quarter. And the St. Louis Hotel, as everyone knows, was once called the City Exchange. Which means that the statehouse inhabits the old auction center of the slave trade.
On the morning of September 14, a big crowd masses downtown around a landmark, a statue of the politician Henry Clay. The life-size bronze of Clay stands at the corner of Canal and Royal streets. It is a place where the white elite gathers when it is time to take the law into vigilant hands. From the statue, five or six angry whites take turns giving speeches to one thousand angry whites. Meanwhile, Fred Ogden heads a second rally uptown, at the intersection of Prytania and Felicity streets, around the well-used Eagle Hall, a half mile from Bouligny. I believe Constant is in that crowd, as close as it is to Lecorgne row.