Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  François Laizer: mayor and treasurer, Jefferson City—“Jefferson City, Minutes of the Board of Aldermen (Journal), 1 Sep 1857–20 May 1861,” AB 300, Louisiana Division, NOPL; Jefferson City described—Richard Campanella, Cityscapes of New Orleans (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2017), 16–18; “dance hall pays $50 a year”—taxes for types of business, in “Jefferson City, Minutes of the Board of Aldermen (Journal), 1 Sep 1857–20 May 1861.”

  Lavinia, aka “Fanny,” enslaved: Succession of Eleanor Vautrin, dec., widow of J. B. Labarriere, 29 Mar 1855, Third Judicial District Court, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana Division, NOPL.

  Marriage of Constant Lecorgne and Gabrielle Duchemin: “Le Corne Constantin Policarpe con Gabriela Du Chemin,” Matrimonios Blancos, 1850–62, Folio 63, N°6 (3 Abril 1856), registros sacramentales, parroquia de Santo Tomás, diócesis de Santiago de Cuba, Cuba; return to New Orleans—“Louisiana, New Orleans Passenger Lists, 1820–1945,” database with images, FamilySearch, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QKNP-FY4P, 13 Mar 2018, citing ship Elizabeth Segar, affiliate film no. 042, NARA microfilm M259 and T905 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL microfilm 200,182.

  CHAPTER 7

  Frederick Douglass: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999), 188–206.

  Laizer and Lecorgne households: François Laizer and Marguerite Lecorgne, holdings—Tax records, West Bouligny, Jefferson City, 1858, Louisiana Division, NOPL; “a scrap of land”—“Mme. V.S. Dufossat to P.C. Lecorgne,” Conveyance and mortgage, 13 Jan 1857, Jefferson Parish Conveyances, Book F, p. 374, Louisiana Division, NOPL; birth of Numa Lecorgne—“Joseph Gabriel Numa, legitimate son of Polycarpe Constant Lecorgne and of Gabrielle Duchemin, born 2 September,” Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Baptisms and Marriages, 1851–60, vol. 1, no. 63 (4 Oct 1857).

  Josiah Nott: “Negro slavery is consistent”—“Two Lectures on the Connection Between the Biblical and Physical History of Man, Delivered by Invitation from the Chair of Political Economy, etc., of the Louisiana University in December 1848 (New York, 1849),” 19; Josiah Nott’s “polygenesis”—Josiah Clark Nott et al., Indigenous Races of the Earth; or, New Chapters of Ethnological Inquiry; Including Monographs on Special Departments … Presenting Fresh Investigations, Documents, and Materials, chap. 5, “The Monogenists and the Polygenists” (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1857); and Josiah Nott, George R. Gliddon, Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, William Usher, and Henry S. Patterson, eds., Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (1868; Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969).

  Louis Agassiz and Arthur Gobineau: Agassiz—Joseph T. Zealy / Louis Agassiz, daguerreotypes (15), ca. 1850, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; Gobineau, “Aryan”—Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853–55), or The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (London: Heinemann, 1915), 205–12.

  Lecorgne family: land held—Tax Rolls, Jefferson City (West Bouligny), 1850–61, vols. 2–3 (1858 and 1859), Louisiana Division, NOPL; house sale—“P.C. Lecorgne to Mrs. Mary S. Lacoste,” 14 Jan 1859, Jefferson City Register of Conveyances, book 4, p. 506, Land Records Division, Office of the Clerk of Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans, Louisiana Division, NOPL; house purchase—“E. S. Dufossat to P.C. Lecorgne,” 11 Feb 1859, Jefferson Parish Conveyances, vol. 4 (1856–58), p. 527, Louisiana Division, NOPL; birth of Françoise Mathilde—Sacramental Records, St. Stephen [aka St. Vincent de Paul, Bouligny], Baptisms and Marriages, vol. 1 (23 Jun 1859); Constant and Gabrielle Lecorgne on Bellecastle Street—Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1861 (New Orleans: Charles Gardner, 1861); Yves J. Lecorgne, justice of the peace—“Notice to Taxpayers,” New Orleans Daily Crescent, 21 Nov 1859, 6; Joseph and Constant Lecorgne appointments—The Carrollton Sun (New Orleans), 30 Jun 1860; Constant Lecorgne sheriff’s sale—The Carrollton Sun, 1 Aug 1860; Constant Lecorgne, collector—Valmont Soniat Dufossat v. Claudine Claude, f.w.c., 7 Nov 1861, Third District Court case no. 16372, Louisiana Division, NOPL.

  CHAPTER 8

  Samuel Cartwright: in New Orleans—“Dr. Samuel Cartwright, 175 Canal Street,” Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1861 (New Orleans: Charles Gardner, 1861); Dysesthaesia Aethiopica (“Ethiopian dysesthesia”)—Samuel Cartwright, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” De Bow’s Review 11 (Sep 1851), 331–34; lecture—“Ethnology of the Negro or Prognathous Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 15 (Mar 1858), 149–63; more scientific racism—“Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal VII (Nov 1851), 369–73; “Dr. Cartwright on the Caucasians and the Africans,” De Bow’s Review 25 (Jul 1858), 45–56; “Unity of the Human Race Disproved by the Hebrew Bible,” De Bow’s Review 29 (Aug 1860), 129–36; “Negro Freedom an Impossibility Under Nature’s Laws,” De Bow’s Review 30 (Jun 1861), 648–59.

  Enslaved in Lecorgne households: Marguerite Lecorgne, death—Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Funerals, vol. 1 (2 Nov 1859); estate—Succession of M. C. Zeringue, Widow of Y. C. Lecorgne, Third Judicial District Court, Jefferson Parish, LA, case no. 1654 (19 Jan 1860); enslaved—Partition between Heirs of Mistress Marguerite Lecorgne, deceased, 18 Feb 1860, Conveyance books, 1827–1900, Jefferson Parish, Louisiana Division, NOPL; “Yves takes nine people”—the 1860 census records Yves J. Lecorgne as slaveholder of nine people, whose description matches his mother’s inventory, viz., two women, ages 70 and 50, two 23-year-old men, a 3-year-old girl, and four boys, ages 15, 14, 4, and 4, Slave Schedules, U.S. Census, 1860; estate inventories of other Lecorgne siblings show movement between households of domestic slaves.

  Sermon: Benjamin M. Palmer, The South: Her Peril, and Her Duty; A Discourse, Delivered in the First Presbyterian Church, New Orleans, on Thursday, November 29, 1860, by B. M. Palmer (New Orleans: 1860).

  Lecorgnes are Democrats: Yves Lecorgne, election commissioner—The Carrollton Sun, 9 Mar 1861; electorate at 7%—White men voted in all states regardless of wealth by 1860, when total U.S. population is 31,443,321, of which white males comprise 13,811,381, of which 5.8 million are vote eligible (above age 21); from the national electorate, 80% vote in 1860 (4.6 million, or 15% of the population); whereas in Louisiana, 1860 population 708,000, with white males numbering 178,000, 47% of whom (84,000) are vote eligible, 58.6% of voters cast a ballot in 1860 (49,200), placing the election in the hands of 7% of the state’s population.

  Sale of Ovid: Polycarpe Constant Lecorgne to Jean Valsin Gourdain, Sale of a slave, Ovid, 10 Oct 1860, New Orleans Notarial Archives, Conveyances, vol. 83, p. 505.

  Sen. Judah Benjamin: “servile race” speech in Senate, 31 Dec 1860—Marion Mills Miller, Great Debates in American History, vol. 5 (New York: Current Literature Publishing, 1913), 380–87.

  CHAPTER 9

  New Orleans, early 1861: Mathilde Lecorgne, death—Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Funerals (Whites), vol. 2, p. 1, no. 2 (23 Jan 1861); Secession convention, the Marseillaise—Gerald Mortimer Capers, Occupied City: New Orleans Under the Federals, 1862–1865 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 1; Estelle is pregnant—Marie Alice, b. 6 Sep 1861 to Joseph and Estelle Lecorgne, Sacramental Records, Parish of St. Stephen, Baptisms, vol. 2, p. 12, no. 77; Captain Constant Lecorgne—“Regimental Order,” The Carrollton Sun, 22 May 1861.

  New Orleans, mid-1861: Numbers of volunteers—Willie Malvin Caskey, Secession and Restoration of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1938), 41; Émile Chevalley—The Carrollton Sun, May 4, 15, 25, 1861; Constant Lecorgne, family, and friends in Confederate militias—Janet B. Hewett, Noah Andre Trudeau, and Bryce A. Suderow, eds., Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Part II—Recor
d of Events, vol. 24 (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1996), 726–27, 750–51; The Daily Picayune, 3 Apr 1861; The Carrolton Sun, 4 May 1861; “Cornerstone” speech—Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, Before, During, and Since the War (Philadelphia, 1886), 717–29; Native Guards—Mary F. Berry, “Negro Troops in Blue and Gray: The Louisiana Native Guards, 1861–63,” Louisiana History 8, no. 2 (spring 1967), 165–90.

  Constant Lecorgne’s Confederate service, 1861: Fourteenth Company B, Jefferson Cadets, Louisiana Regiment muster rolls, Louisiana Historical Association Collection, Series 55-BB, folder 153, LARC; Andrew B. Booth, Records of Louisiana Confederate Soldiers and Louisiana Confederate Commands, in Three Volumes, vol. 3, book 1 (New Orleans, 1920), 701.

  Fourteenth Louisiana Regiment mutiny: Christopher Blackburn, “The Grand Junction Riot of 1861,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 47 (1993); Hewett et al., Supplement to the Official Records, 309–16; The Memphis Daily Appeal, 7 Aug 1861; The Daily Picayune, 5 Aug 1861; Col. Valery Sulakowski’s regiment—Lawrence Lee Hewitt, “‘Wildcats’ in the Army of Northern Virginia,” in Louisianians in the Civil War, ed. Lawrence L. Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 122–25; Valery Sulakowski to Leroy Pope Walker, 11 Aug 1861, Letters Received by the Confederate Secretary of War, 1861–65, RG 109, NARA publication m437, no. 3249–1861, reel 7.

  Louis Constant Lecorgne: born 1 Sep 1861—Sacramental Records, St. Stephen Church, Baptisms, vol. 2, p. 12, no. 76.

  CHAPTER 10

  New Orleans, 1862–64: Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1974), 2–50; Union gunboats—The Daily Picayune, 5 Apr 1862; Yankee capture and Gen. Benjamin Butler—Capers, Occupied City, chaps. 1–2; Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston—quoted in Capers, Occupied City, 69; Julia Le Grand, imagined as Gabrielle Duchemin: Julia Ellen (Le Grand) Waitz, The Journal of Julia Le Grand, New Orleans, 1862–63, ed. Kate Mason Rowland and Agnes E. Browne Croxall (Richmond, VA: Everett Waddey, 1911), 58–60, 74; loyalty oath—Amnesty Oaths, 1864–66, Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, NARA, Washington, D.C.; Agassiz letter—Louis Agassiz to Samuel G. Howe (member of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, established by President Lincoln), letters of 9 and 10 Aug 1863, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 79–82.

  Constant Lecorgne in Eighteenth Louisiana Regiment: Marie Gabrielle Lecorgne, Widow’s Application for Pension, #2506, Orleans Parish, 19 Nov 1903, Confederate Pension Application Index Database, reel CP1.83, microdex 3, sequence 30, Louisiana State Archives; actions of Eighteenth Louisiana—Michael Dan Jones, General Mouton’s Regiment: The 18th Louisiana Infantry (CreateSpace, 2016), 72, 82–93; Christopher G. Peña, Scarred by War: Civil War in Southeast Louisiana (AuthorHouse, 2004), 147–212; John William De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), 50ff.; Arthur Bergeron, Jr., “Dennis Haynes and His ‘Thrilling Narrative of the Sufferings of … Western Louisiana,’” in Louisianians in the Civil War, ed. Lawrence L. Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 37–49; Arthur Bergeron, Jr., “Yellow Jackets Battalion,” in Louisianians in the Civil War, ed. Lawrence L. Hewitt and Arthur W. Bergeron (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 50–71; Arthur W. Bergeron, Jr., ed., The Civil War Reminiscences of Major Silas T. Grisamore, C.S.A. (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1993); Barnes F. Lathrop, “The Lafourche District in 1862: Confederate Revival,” Louisiana History 1, no. 4 (1960), 300–319.

  CHAPTER 11

  New Orleans, 1863: star cars—Capers, Occupied City, 93–96; “negroes … not fit for freedom”—Waitz, Journal of Julia Le Grand, 100–102.

  Marie Estelle Lecorgne: b. 15 Apr 1863—“Louisiana Births and Christenings, 1811–30; 1854–1934,” database, FamilySearch, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FWGF-HLK, 10 Feb 2018, citing St. Martinville, LA, FHL microfilm 6,010,604.

  Sergeant “Terrance Lecorgne” and Yellowjackets: Winter camp—Jones, General Mouton’s Regiment, 96–97; Battle of Fort Bisland—Bergeron, The Civil War Reminiscences of Major Silas T. Grisamore, 109–17; Peña, Scarred by War, 219–22; “Incomprehensible wandering”—Bergeron, The Civil War Reminiscences of Major Silas T. Grisamore, 118–36; Jones, General Mouton’s Regiment, 98–148; Battle of Mansfield—Hewett et al., Supplement to the Official Records, 118–19.

  CHAPTER 12

  Camille Zeringue and Seven Oaks plantation revolt: “les nègres are grown children”—Camille Zeringue (to Nathaniel P. Banks), 10 Feb 1863, box 4, Letters Received by the Provost Marshal General, 1862–65, Department of the Gulf and Louisiana, 1861–66, Record Group 393, NARA; Workers at Seven Oaks—Statistics of Plantations for Orleans and Jefferson Parish Right Bank, 20 Mar 1863, box 2, Letters Received, 1863–66, Record Group 393; Seven Oaks revolt—Provost Marshal, Jefferson Parish to Captain _______, 24 Feb 1863, Letters Received, 1863–65, Record Group 393; John W. Ela to (unnamed), 23 Feb 1863, Letters Received, 1863–65, Jefferson Parish (LA), Record Group 393; wide resistance of enslaved—W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (Philadelphia: A. Saifer, 1935), chap. 4, “The General Strike.”

  Abraham Lincoln, Jean Baptiste Roudanez, and Arnold Bertonneau: Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850–1900,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992), 220–30; Paul Trévigne editorial—L’Union (New Orleans), 14 Apr 1864.

  Louis Charles Roudanez and the New Orleans Tribune: Mark Charles Roudané and Matthew Charles Roudané, “The Color of Freedom: Louis Charles Roudanez, New Orleans, and the Transnational Origins of the African American Freedom Movement,” South Atlantic Review 73, no. 2 (spring 2008), 1–6; issue #1—New Orleans Tribune 1, no. 1, 21 Jul 1864.

  Joseph Lecorgne, Confederate service: enlistment—Joseph E. Lecorgne, “United States, Civil War Unfiled Papers of Confederate Soldiers, 1861–1865,” Papers of and Relating to Military and Civilian Personnel, 1861–65, NARA microfilm M347; actions of regiment—Arthur W. Bergeron, Jr., Guide to Louisiana Confederate Military Units, 1861–65 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1989), 142, 169–70, 181; Battle of Nashville—Joseph T. Wilson, The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States in the Wars of 1775–1812, 1861–65 (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1888), chap. 8; capture—John H. King, Three Hundred Days in a Yankee Prison: Reminiscences of War Life, Captivity, Imprisonment at Camp Chase, Ohio (Atlanta: J. P. Daves, 1904), chaps. 1–3; prisoner of war—Registers of Prisoners, Compiled by the Office of the Commissioner General of Prisoners, Dec 1863–Jun 1865, Selected Records of the War Department Relating to Confederate Prisoners of War, 1861–65, Camp Chase, Ohio, Military Prison, NARA microfilm M598: roll 94 (“Jos Lecorgne”), roll 92 (“Joseph Lecorgne,” 2 Jan 1865), roll 23 (“Joseph Lecorgne,” 13 May 1865), roll 36 (“J. E. Lecorgne,” 6 May 1865), Register of Receipt of Articles Delivered to Prisoners (Mar 1864–May 1865), and roll 26 (“Jos E Lecorgne,” 13 May 1865), List of prisoners released, March 1863–May 1865; Camp Chase, Ohio prison—William Hiram Duff, Terrors and Horrors of Prison Life; or, Six Months a Prisoner at Camp Chase, Ohio (Lake Charles, LA: Orphan Helper, 1907), 11–26; Lonnie Spear, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), 79–82; Confederate soldiers returning—The Daily Picayune, 18 May 1865.

  CHAPTER 13

  New Orleans, 1865–66: “insult and oppression”—The Daily Picayune, n.d., quoted in Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Southern Tour, May 1, 1865 to May 1, 1866 (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach & Baldwin, 1866), 422; “Bellecastle Street is turned black”—U.S. Census, 1870, New Orleans, “Constant and Marie G. Lecorne,” with four children, an
d neighboring households; “naked, hungry and destitute”—Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892), 458–59; thousands seeking amnesty: Reid, After the War, 239; New Orleans described—James Keith Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006), 17–26; “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”—Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856).

  “degradation of our race”: Alcibiade DeBlanc, “Loyalty in the Parishes,” The Courier of the Teche (St. Martinville, LA), 15 Jul 1865, reprinted in New Orleans Tribune (21 Jul 1865).

  Republican Party activists: Thomas J. Durant—Joseph G. Tregle, “Thomas J. Durant, Utopian Socialism, and the Failure of Presidential Reconstruction in Louisiana,” Journal of Southern History 45 (Nov 1979), 485–512; Durant described—Reid, After the War, 232–33; Friends of Universal Suffrage—Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1974), 73–76; “there are buzzards”—Lafcadio Hearn, “Gombo zhèbes,” 24.

  Paul Fazende shooting: Fazende plantation—Inspection Reports of Plantations, Jan–May 1866, Assistant Commissioner for the State of Louisiana, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–69, NARA microfilm M1027, reel 28; Records Relating to Murders and Outrages, Report of 21 Jul 1865, NARA M1027, roll 34; Letters—W. M. Vaudain to W. E. Dougherty, 21 Jul 1865, and W. E. Dougherty to Thomas W. Conway, 24 Jul 1865, Letters and Telegrams, Freedmen’s Bureau, NARA M1027, roll 7; Thomas Conway to W. M. Vaudain, 24 Jul 1865, Thomas Conway to ___ Hoffman, 25 Jul 1865, Thomas Conway to ___ Hoffman, 7 Aug 1865, all in Letters and Telegrams Sent, vol. 1, M1027, roll 1.