Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  Ogden’s gang starts to move downtown along Prytania Street toward the Canal Street mob, two miles away. By this time, late morning, the Louisiana State Militia has formed a defensive line within the French Quarter. It runs from the arsenal at the Cabildo, around the statehouse, and west along the streets next to the river. As they march downtown, Ogden’s gang comes to the headquarters of city government, Gallier Hall on Lafayette Square. A contingent manages to cut the telegraph lines, so that word of the revolt spreads more slowly.

  The guerrillas with Ogden stop on Poydras Street, off Lafayette Square, a quarter mile short of the rally at the Clay statue. The men build barricades at the intersections along Poydras. They knock streetcars off their tracks, drag furniture and mattresses to the middle of the road, and pile up iron fencing pulled up from buildings. At the rally around the bronze of Henry Clay, a lawyer named Robert Marr yells for the crowd to go the hell home and to come the hell back with what guns they have. Most of the mob leaves, as ordered. Three hours pass, during which Ogden’s rebels fortify their barricades. By 2:00 p.m., thousands return from home with guns from closets, guns long secreted from the Union.

  The White League has Poydras Street, to the west; the state militia and Metropolitans have Canal Street, to the east. The white uprising now numbers about 3,500; the defenders, some 3,000, a third of them black. I cannot place Constant in one or another company, or on one or another street, but I have no doubt he is there.

  The fighting starts about 3:45 p.m. White League guerrillas move east along the levee, attempting to flank and go around the state militia. Their target is the statehouse at the St. Louis Hotel, a quarter mile away, in the French Quarter. The Metropolitans place a Gatling gun—the first machine gun, run with a hand crank—in the middle of Canal Street. They open fire on the levee. From the river, hidden behind bales of cotton, White League companies shoot back. Sharpshooters manage to kill the Metropolitans who man the machine gun—first one, and then his replacement, and then another. The Metropolitans’ commander, Sidney Badger, is shot off his horse and his leg crushed under the animal. When this happens, most of Badger’s men break and flee. Some ten White League guerrillas and ten defenders are killed in the first wave of the fight.

  General James Longstreet, the ex-rebel who flipped, commands the black militiamen. Something happens, and he is thrown from his horse and disabled. The state defenders are leaderless. White League fighters stream off the levee and charge north on Canal Street. The state militiamen retreat into the French Quarter. Fred Ogden leaves his redoubt on Poydras Street and rides to Canal Street. Then he, too, falls from his horse. He hobbles around, shouting murderous orders.

  At this point, Constant himself may be injured and carried off the street by comrades. I am reminded of something. The keeper of the Lecorgne story, my aunt Maud Lecorgne, says that her grandfather Constant “has his head split open” in this wheeling street fight, which is the biggest Ku-klux action of any during Reconstruction. With flak in the air and hand-to-hand combat, the White League coup is a good place for Constant to be smashed in the skull. Admission records for Charity Hospital, where some of the injured are taken, do not show his name. Although I do not know exactly how he fares in the climactic fight, I do know that he shares in its glory for the rest of his life.

  Constant is personal friends with at least two of the dead. A Bouligny man named Albert Gautier is one. Gautier is twenty-six. His family runs the Ocean Sawmill on Tchoupitoulas Street, where Constant gets building material. Another of the dead is a man named Jean Gourdain. Long ago, before the Civil War, it is Gourdain’s family that buys the last man Gabrielle and Constant enslave, Ovid. When you buy a man from someone, it is the kind of thing that seals a friendship.

  What are black people in New Orleans doing during the crisis and bedlam? Most African Americans have no weapons. Most of the black city is possessed of a desire to remain alive. In the battle that will bring down the curtain, whites are mostly fighting whites. I imagine that most black people are working hard to stay out of the way, except for the handful of thousand black men who staff the state militia. They are on the front line. But about most in the city of color, someone might say that it is a good day when the main targets of the Ku-klux are other crackers.

  Engraving in Harper’s Weekly depicting the Battle of Canal Street

  The shooting goes on, and another twenty are killed. The state militia retreats toward the Cabildo and the statehouse. Many barricade themselves inside the Cabildo armory, others barricade at the statehouse. A spur of White League fighters reaches the steamship Mississippi and unloads its weapons. While the fighting unfolds, hundreds more men appear to join the uprising and claim some of its glory. Around New Orleans, several of these factions seize police stations. By 6:00 p.m., the uprising is armed and patrolling through the city, and the state defenders have just two buildings in hand.

  At night on the fourteenth, guerrillas form cordons around the Cabildo armory and the statehouse. They demand surrender, and the soldiers give in. One at a time, and then in groups, they strip off their uniforms and disappear into the night. The White League gangs let them go.

  By sunrise, the Ku-klux are telling one another that they have ended Reconstruction and restored righteousness to the world.

  It is a military battle in the middle of a big city. But the harvest of dead is not so large, compared with the massacres. The White League has sixteen dead and nineteen wounded. The Metropolitans and state militia have sixty wounded and thirteen dead, seven of them black. A couple of thousand spectators watch the battle as though it is a piece of theater. Six of them are killed.

  * * *

  The White League coup succeeds, and for three days, the rebels put on a show of running the state. Railroad workers stall the trains so that U.S. Army regiments, away at camp in Mississippi, cannot return to the city. A Democratic politician, Davidson Penn, is sworn in as governor during a rally at the statehouse, and there is talk of seating a new legislature. Fred Ogden’s officers run citywide patrols, acting the role of police.

  Late on September 17, the army reaches New Orleans. White League guerrillas decide not to fight another day, and on September 18, they give up their posts. As quickly as it had appeared, the uprising surrenders. Governor William Kellogg takes back his office, and the Republican legislature meets again.

  Yet most whites are exhilarated. Everyone knows that the superior race has regained its throne. The September coup wins back the narrative. It is the glorious overthrow of Reconstruction. The “Redemption” is come.

  President Ulysses Grant sends three more regiments and batteries of artillery to New Orleans, showing the Washington fist, and navy gunboats appear on the Mississippi. General Philip Sheridan, army commander in New Orleans, writes the secretary of war in Washington—“I think that the terrorism now existing … could be entirely removed and confidence and fair-dealing established by the arrest and trial of the ringleaders of the armed White Leagues.” But no one is arrested, and none prosecuted. The Enforcement Acts cannot be enforced. The Ku Klux Klan Act is a dead letter.

  Harper’s Weekly describes New Orleans as the author that has just written the end of the story—

  Never did so small a community as Louisiana in so few years exhibit such a succession of horrors. In 1868 we have the raids on the negro voters … when the White Camellias dominated in the streets of New Orleans.… In 1872 they re-appear. In 1873 they burned and shot down … negroes at Grant Parish, and attempted an insurrection in New Orleans. In 1874 they have murdered the United States officials at Coushatta and a large number of negroes; they have risen in rebellion in New Orleans and shot thirty or forty Unionists in a deadly contest.… Louisiana is the most unlucky of all the States, because it has been tormented by a horde of traitors.

  Extending their victory, White League fighters next attack the city’s integrated schools. Vigilantes go from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, pulling black students out of the classrooms. The sons of Pinckn
ey Pinchback, the black politician, are roughed up. Segregation is made the basis of education policy once again. Eliza Lecorgne no longer teaches in the schools, but if she shares the same opinion as her brothers, she must watch these events with satisfaction.

  Six weeks after the Battle of Canal Street, the 1874 election takes place. White morale is high, black morale low. Democrats deploy familiar violence, and the “white man’s party” wins parity in the state legislature, which splits 53–53, Democrat/Republican. In Washington, the Republican Party loses control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in fifteen years. “Beast” Butler of Massachusetts loses his seat. He decides to finish his career by pushing through the Civil Rights Bill in his final weeks before leaving office.

  White League guerrillas take up patrols, because the state militia and the Metropolitans no longer command the streets. Companies of White League guerrillas drill openly, marching like an unmasked Ku-klux, and armed.

  In the North, whites are fatigued with the Reconstruction drama. Most have lost interest in its plot.

  In February 1875, the U.S. Congress passes the Civil Rights Bill. But the law has no enforcement teeth and gives no one authority to prosecute. The law requires individual black litigants to sue for their rights as citizens, an infrequent event.

  White Leagues do similar work in the state of Mississippi, next door to Louisiana. During an election in 1875, Mississippi falls into White League terror, and Governor Adelbert Ames asks Washington to send soldiers. Ames gets only a skeptical telegram from Edwards Pierrepont, the new attorney general under President Grant. “Governor Ames,” the attorney general writes on September 14, anniversary of the White League coup in New Orleans, “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the Government.… I suggest that you preserve the peace by the forces in your own State.”

  In Mississippi, and throughout the South, most whites either condone attacks on blacks, or they are indifferent to them. If they feel a touch of regret, as some do, they choose to ignore it.

  I have to admit that some of the indifference and regret are familiar. They might even be recurring. You can feel regret about the acid hand of racism. No, it is not quite as busy in the 2000s as it was during Constant’s time. But it is nevertheless front and center in life. And then you can ignore it.

  White opinion acknowledges the rampage, and then washes the bloody sheets. “White men may have burned and killed in Louisiana,” The Shreveport Times says on Christmas Eve 1875. But whites are not to blame, because “the responsibility belongs to the Radical government of the state.”

  The Colfax massacre, when the Ku-klux kills 150 blacks, comes to its end in a case known as U.S. v. Cruikshank, which reaches the Supreme Court. The case does not involve murder, but conspiracy. U.S. v. Cruikshank turns on the question of whether the Colfax killers conspired to deny the constitutional rights of their victims. In March 1876, the Supreme Court overturns three convictions in the case; and for good measure, undermines the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment grants rights to due process and equal protection, but the Court rules that the amendment does not apply to violations perpetrated by individuals, such as acts of discrimination or even gang violence; it applies only to state action. The decision means that both race bias and the menace of the mob are constitutional. U.S. v. Cruikshank vindicates the White Camellia massacre and paralyzes the federal prosecution of gang rule.

  An 1874 cartoon on the common cause of the masked Ku-klux and the unmasked White League: “Worse than slavery”

  In 1876, the United States is one hundred years old, with a presidential election set for the fall. This is the year that nails down white supremacy for good. The Redemption in Louisiana spreads to the rest of the country in a vote that turns into a referendum on race.

  Constant is forty-four, and his wife forty. Gabrielle Duchemin has carried eight pregnancies to birth. Two of her children are dead. She has four sons and two daughters still living—the oldest nineteen, the youngest three. And in fall 1876, she is pregnant again.

  In July, Harper’s Weekly runs an essay, “The Ku-Klux Democracy,” which asks, “Shall the Ku-Klux select the next President of the United States?” and then answers, yes, probably. “Louisiana is the State in which these merciless have committed their worst deeds,” the magazine says. “The Ku-Klux [is] steeped in the blood of their fellow-citizens, and would bring war and desolation, had they the power, to the whole nation.”

  In the race for president, the Democrat Samuel Tilden wins a majority of the popular vote, but his opponent, the Republican Rutherford Hayes, claims a one-vote victory in the Electoral College. Democrats charge fraud. In Washington, they decide to contest the vote count in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Representatives start a filibuster in Congress, blocking the certification of Hayes’s win. November ends, and Christmas season begins, with the election outcome suspended.

  Gabrielle’s ninth child is born December 16. Her parents call the girl Marie Constance. By custom, they set the baptism for a month later.

  In mid-December, President Grant also makes a delivery. He sends to Congress a dossier that summarizes the Louisiana atrocities. The portfolio, made from reports by Freedmen’s Bureau agents and Yankee officers, runs ninety-eight pages. It describes the whippings and murders, rapes and maimings perpetrated in the state by the Ku-klux, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the White League. Some four thousand African Americans are disabled or dead in Louisiana, Grant reports.

  Infants, according to Catholic doctrine, are born with a fallen human nature. Every person is polluted by original sin. Such is the teaching of the church, for Constant and Gabrielle. A child may be cleaned of the filth of sin by a new birth in the rite of baptism. Baptism frees the faithful from the weight of the fall and brings the possibility of redemption, cleaning the believer’s eyes to see the white light of godliness, and dispelling the cloud of sin that threatens to damn the sinner.

  On January 10, 1877, Constant and Gabrielle walk to St. Stephen and christen their last child, washing away the pollution and evil into which she is born.

  Two days before, on January 8, White League regiments surround the statehouse, take possession of the courthouses, and occupy the police stations. Federal troops do nothing, and the state militiamen put up no fight. A slogan of “the Democracy” appears in the newspapers—“One party, one race.” It is like a caption written on the times.

  In Washington, the filibuster in Congress about the presidential vote rambles on.

  Both parties say they won in the three states that still have Republican rule—Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. (Two of the three have more black residents than white.) But no one really knows who won, since both Republicans and Democrats have used vote suppression, on the one hand, and fake ballots, on the other. The arguments go up, the payoffs go down. The Democrats relent and affirm the Republican win in Florida and South Carolina. That leaves Louisiana. The choice of president falls to the White League state. What the Creole parties do with their eight electoral votes will determine the White House.

  On February 13, Mardi Gras, the Mistick Krewe of Comus marches in its customary and majestic parade. Most whites are happy, but not many blacks are heard to applaud when the Krewe reveals the theme for this year’s celebration. It is “The Aryan Race.” In twenty-three decorated floats, Comus tells the story of the rise to command of whites. The tale begins with float #2, “Greek Tragedy, 400 B.C.,” and ends with float #24, “Our Future Destiny, the year 1976.” A program printed for the masked ball explains: “The Aryans have been the devotees of luxury, and from the earliest period of their existence as a distinct race, they have been the dictators.”

  Sixteen weeks after the election, on February 26, Democrat and Republican dealmakers come together at Wormley House, a hotel near the Capitol. The parties reach an arrangement. Democrats will lift t
he filibuster against the vote, Louisiana will throw its electors to the Republican side, and Rutherford Hayes will get the White House—in exchange for the national acknowledgment of white rule. For twelve years, the U.S. Army, white politicians, and black activists have tried to plant the seeds of equity between blacks and whites; they have only managed to share a little power and turn a little soil. In the election deal, Hayes is to become president, provided that he removes Washington’s hand from the South. The army is to be withdrawn from the Southern states where it remains—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. America is to end its quarrel with white supremacy.

  W.E.B. Du Bois describes the events in his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction: “The Louisiana Democratic State Convention frankly called itself ‘we, the white people of Louisiana’.… The crucial election of 1876 came and … the whole nation waited on the outcome in Louisiana which would settle the presidential contest.… The white folk of Louisiana with threat of civil war entered into negotiations with the President and President-elect.… Finally the filibuster was dropped … and Louisiana was free for a new period of unhampered exploitation.”

  Rutherford Hayes is inaugurated March 4. Very soon, he orders the withdrawal of federal soldiers from South Carolina and tells U.S. Army troops stationed in Louisiana to return to their barracks. And that is all. White power wins.

  In Congress, Democrats win passage of an amendment that bars the executive from using federal troops to enforce any law—the so-called posse comitatus rule. The mandate is intended to make sure Washington does not try again to engineer a different balance of tribal power.