One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  As white people continue to discover their own black roots, the question becomes more pressing: What drove so many individuals to reject their black ancestry in the first place? In the wake of the Civil War, black Americans felt hopeful about their future. When and how did the scales tip so that this hopefulness became outweighed by despair?

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  When Henry Broyard returned to New Orleans in October 1863 after the battle at Port Hudson, he found Paul Trévigne and the rest of his colored friends engaged in a battle of their own. President Lincoln was eager to bring the conquered Confederate territories back into the Union, a process that had been dubbed Reconstruction, and Louisiana, as the rebel state under federal control the longest, was the obvious starting place. For Lincoln the goal was to establish a state government that would be loyal to Washington as quickly as possible, but the Trévigne camp wanted to seize this opportunity to realign race relations in the South—a divisive issue that would surely cause delays.

  The first step in the reconstruction process was the election of delegates to write a new state constitution. These delegates would face many thorny questions, beyond emancipating the slaves. For example, would a reconstructed Louisiana continue to enforce segregation in public spaces? Would blacks be allowed to vote? How would the economy accommodate this sudden transition from slave to free labor? And what about schools to educate the newly freed men and women? Even those whites who recognized the need for abolishing slavery weren’t prepared to accept civil and political equality for Negroes.

  Paul Trévigne, however, wouldn’t settle for half measures. For him the future health of the country depended on finally honoring the Founding Fathers’ vision that all men were created equal. Using his newspaper as a platform, Trévigne helped to organize a rally in the beginning of November in support of voter registration of blacks for the upcoming election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The colored radicals figured they had some bargaining power. The majority of white Louisianans had supported the Confederacy; the administration in Washington could hardly now turn to these rebels to restore the Union. Since there weren’t enough white Unionists in Louisiana to make up a representative electorate, the free colored community was going to be needed for its sheer numbers.

  The white Unionists at the rally finally agreed to draw up a resolution requesting the registration of blacks who were free before the rebellion to present to Louisiana’s military governor, General George F. Shepley. (They had convinced the Creoles of color that amending their original request, which included newly freed blacks too, would give the petition a better chance for success.) Elsewhere in the country, the question of Negro suffrage had barely been considered.

  General Shepley never responded to the petition, and then President Lincoln disappointed the colored men too. Impatient with delays, Lincoln issued his own guidelines for the reconstruction process in early December of 1863. His plan called for the use of existing election laws, thus excluding black voters, and pardoned most Confederates, as long as they swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution and support abolition. Soon enough, Michael Hahn, a German immigrant who had been elected to Congress shortly before the war, won the gubernatorial race on a platform opposing Negro suffrage. At the same time, a labor program instituted by General Banks forced the ex-slaves back onto the plantations and sharply curtailed their movements. It was beginning to look as if reconstructed Louisiana would be indistinguishable from its antebellum days.

  Trévigne helped to organize another petition, signed by one thousand colored property owners, twenty-seven veterans from the War of 1812, and twenty-two white radicals, in which the colored men’s right to citizenship was demanded on the basis of paying taxes and serving the country. Julie Hilla’s grandfather, Arnold Bertonneau, as a captain in the Union army and prosperous wine merchant, was selected, along with Jean-Baptiste Roudanez, the brother of the cofounder of Trévigne’s paper, to deliver the petition to the White House and to Congress.

  Lincoln had declared his opposition to Negro suffrage during his debates with Stephen Douglas back in 1858, but his meeting with the two colored delegates from New Orleans made him reconsider the question. After hearing their case, the president explained that he could only act if the issue was “necessary to the readmission of Louisiana as a State in the Union.” (It went without saying that blacks and the ballot box weren’t exactly a unifying cause.) But Lincoln was impressed enough to pen a note to Louisiana’s Governor Hahn the following day: “I barely suggest for your private consideration whether some of the colored people may not be let in [to the franchise]—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.”

  Governor Hahn ignored Lincoln’s suggestion. When the white delegates convened during the summer of 1864 to draw up Louisiana’s new constitution, they failed to grant blacks voting rights. They did establish public schools for black children but ordered their segregation from white schools. Slavery was abolished, as Lincoln’s plan required, and some radicals sneaked in a loophole that allowed the Louisiana legislature at some future date to extend suffrage to certain Negroes who had “demonstrated their capacity...by military service, taxation, or intellectual fitness.” But the end result guaranteed a two-tiered postwar society, with whites on top and the formerly and newly free blacks below them.

  At the same time, General Banks began an assault on Trévigne and his colored cohorts. The general had his eye on the White House, and his success with Reconstruction, on top of his military victories, would go far in furthering his campaign. The Creoles of color’s constant agitation over suffrage was interfering with the general’s plan. Bertonneau and Roudanez’s trip to Washington had been covered extensively by the New York and Boston newspapers. The colored men’s quest for the vote had also gained support from various Northern Republicans, including influential congressmen. Louisiana’s readmission into the Union ultimately depended on the approval of Congress, and Banks wanted to prevent Trévigne and his fellow radicals from persuading their new friends in Washington to make universal suffrage a necessary condition.

  By mid-July 1864, one of Banks’s lackeys had forced Trévigne’s paper into bankruptcy. Luckily L’Union’s founder was able to fund a new enterprise, the New Orleans Tribune. A white radical from Belgium, Jean Charles Houzeau, joined Trévigne as coeditor and launched an English section to reach a wider public. Contributors from Boston, Washington, and Paris began reporting from the national and international fronts. By the fall the expanded Tribune—published in the heart of the Deep South in the midst of the Civil War—became the first daily black newspaper in the United States. Copies were sent to every member of Congress.

  The paper’s launch on July 21, 1864, coincided with my great-grandfather’s eighth birthday. To a boy the life-and-death crusade embodied by the newspaper must have seemed both exhilarating and frightening. Paul Trévigne bursting into the Broyard house on young Paul’s birthday, the first issue of his new platform in hand, declaring that their cause could not be stopped, would set a much different tone than the mass exodus of friends and neighbors to Haiti and Mexico just a few years before. But as the call for universal suffrage widened, uniting New Orleans’s free and newly freed Negroes with black leaders and white radicals across the country, the stakes grew even higher, with opponents of the movement willing to stop at nothing to prevent the colored men from winning the franchise.

  On the evening of April 11, 1865, President Lincoln stood on the balcony of the White House and addressed a crowd of a few thousand people gathered on the lawn below him. Two days earlier General Robert E. Lee, the commander in chief of the Confederate army, had surrendered at Appomattox, effectively bringing about the end of the war. When the news reached the nation’s capital, cannon fire began booming throughout the city, rousing people from bed and shattering their windowpanes. Eventually the city’s residents made their way to the White House, where they gathered on the mansion’s lawn and called for thei
r president to speak.

  “We meet this evening,” Lincoln began, “not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart.” He took a moment to acknowledge Ulysses S. Grant, the general who had led the Union army to victory, along with his “brave soldiers”—tens of thousands of whom had died and hundreds of thousands of whom had been injured. Then the president turned to the matter of Reconstruction. “It is fraught with great difficulty,” he explained.

  Indeed Louisiana’s new state government had yet to be restored to the Union, and members of Lincoln’s own party couldn’t agree about how to proceed. The radical wing of the Republicans argued that the president’s plan didn’t go far enough in restructuring the South. Thanks in part to the lobbying efforts of Trévigne and the other New Orleans Creoles of color, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania and Senator Charles Sumner from Massachusetts had begun to call for Negro suffrage and civil rights as a necessary condition for readmission to the Union.

  In his speech that night, President Lincoln focused on Louisiana. He had consistently taken the position that the rebel states must first be returned “to their proper practical relation with the Union” before other concerns about reshaping Southern society could be addressed. Lincoln now posed for his audience: “Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”

  But in recognition of the growing movement for universal suffrage, the president declared publicly for the first time what he had expressed in private to Louisiana’s Governor Hahn a year earlier. Regarding the vote for colored men, Lincoln told the people gathered below him, “I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.”

  For many in the crowd, this was a startling admission. And for one man standing toward the back, a militant white Southern separatist named John Wilkes Booth, it was the last straw. Booth turned to his companions and muttered, “That means nigger citizenship.” He’d been plotting to abduct Lincoln and deliver him to the Confederacy, but the war’s end was forcing him to amend his plans. Booth now swore: “That is the last speech he’ll ever make. By God, I’ll put him through.” Four days later, on April 15, 1865, Booth sneaked up on Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, placed a pistol to the back of his head, and fired.

  In New Orleans the Tribune mourned the passing of the president, who had “willingly jeopardized [his] life for the sacred cause of freedom.” Despite Lincoln’s gradualist approach to Reconstruction, his death dealt the Negro suffrage movement a severe blow.

  President Andrew Johnson, like his predecessor, wanted to restore the Union as quickly as possible—a goal he thought best accomplished with as little oversight from Washington as possible. A Tennessee Democrat and former slaveholder, Johnson was disinclined to force Negro suffrage on the Southern states. Within a few months’ time, the new president’s priorities became clear when he granted amnesty to nearly all returning Confederate soldiers and officials. In November white voters across the South flocked to the polls to reinstall the rebels in the political offices they’d held before the war.

  In Louisiana the Confederates swept the elections with a Democratic platform that was hardly discernible from their secessionist stance: “We hold this to be a government of white people, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive benefit of the white race....People of African descent cannot be considered as citizens of the United States, and that there can, in no event nor under any circumstances, be any equality between the white and other races.”

  Across the South and in Louisiana, black codes were instituted to allow the state to seize any freed person lacking proof of a “comfortable home and visible means of support” and hire him or her out to the highest bidder. At the same time, Louisiana lawmakers dragged their feet in establishing public schools for Negro children, despite the provision in the new state constitution requiring them to do so. As a final blow, in March of 1866 John T. Monroe, the Confederate mayor of New Orleans before the war—a man who’d been expelled from the city by Union forces for his refusal to take an oath of allegiance to the United States—was reelected to his former office.

  The outlook for Southern blacks was growing bleaker by the day. For those who were already free, such as the Broyards, their standing in society was actually worse than before the war. After a century of occupying a legal and social middle ground, they were now subject to the same black codes as the ex-slaves. Most galling of all for my great-great-grandfather Henry must have been the fact that despite his having risked his life for the preservation of the Union—and belonging to the winning side—the reins of the South were now being handed over to the very men who had started the rebellion.

  The colored radicals joined forces with local white Unionists, who were equally alarmed by the Confederates’ sudden return to power. Some of the Unionists came up with a plan to use a technicality as an excuse to reconvene the Constitutional Convention of 1864—the delegates had neglected to formally adjourn it—during which they could disenfranchise anyone who supported the Confederacy while at the same time granting Negroes the vote. There was concern, however, among the Tribune staff that the uncertain legality of amending the constitution would taint its validity. Beyond that, they worried that the proposed convention would incite racial violence. The planning continued without the newspaper’s support, and the organizers scheduled a meeting of the original convention delegates at the Mechanics’ Institute at noon on July 30, 1866.

  Events in Washington were helping to push the matter forward. In June, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all people born in the United States, regardless of their race, along with equal protection under the law. In addition the amendment barred from elected office any Confederates who had been officeholders before the war—which effectively destroyed the existing Democratic power base—while also limiting a state’s congressional representation to the percentage of eligible citizens, including blacks, it enfranchised. President Johnson submitted the amendment to the Southern states for ratification (as he was required to do), but he included a caveat advising them to reject it.

  Not surprisingly, Johnson also refused to give his support to the reconvening of the Constitutional Convention in New Orleans. When an emissary from Louisiana sought his position on it, the president replied that if the local authorities needed to break up the meeting, he’d make sure the federal troops stationed in New Orleans didn’t interfere.

  On the morning of July 30, 1866, about an hour before the convention was scheduled to begin, a crowd of local black families started forming outside the Mechanics’ Institute, in New Orleans’s business district. The men, women, and children had all turned out in their Sunday best. They’d heard that the conventioneers were going to give their race the vote, and they dressed up in honor of the momentous occasion. A Baptist minister, who was white, took to the steps of the hall and urged the onlookers to disperse. “You will only create more trouble by remaining here,” he told them. A half a block away, another group was gathering: rowdy white men and boys who’d begun to jeer at the black supporters as they passed by on their way to the institute. The women and children apparently heeded the minister’s request and headed home, but their men stayed on and soon had doubled their number.

  Inside the Mechanics’ Institute, another two to three hundred spectators were assembled, nearly all of them black, in addition to the twenty-seven white delegates belonging to the convention. A handful of the men carried pistols or sword canes, but most had left their arms at home. The convention organizers were determined to keep the peace. They’d assured the local authorities that they wouldn’t put up a fight if the police came to break up the meeting. If trouble did start—as talk in town predicted—they were counting on the federal troops to restore order. Unbeknownst to them, the bulk of the Union force was stationed at Jackson Barracks, at least an hour’s travel tim
e away. The commander, General Absalom Baird, mistakenly thought that the convention didn’t commence until 6 p.m. Anyway his hands were tied. President Johnson had specifically ordered him to stand down.

  With the federal troops out of the way, the responsibility of peacekeeping fell to the local police force, nearly two-thirds of whom were Confederate veterans. Barely a year off the battlefield, these rebels were still smarting from their defeat and the economic hardships that came with belonging to the losing side. For their troubles they blamed “the Yankee sons of bitches” along with “the damned niggers,” and viewed the efforts to reconvene the Constitutional Convention as nothing short of insurrection.

  The white press fanned the racial tension with its sensationalist coverage of black-white relations. Two days before the opening of the convention, one local paper ran a front-page story with the headline “A NEGRO ATTEMPTS TO VIOLATE A WHITE WOMAN,” despite the incident’s being three weeks old.

  The police chief ordered the entire force of 499 men to report to duty on convention morning. New Orleans’s sheriff had sworn in an additional 200 deputies, also all Confederate veterans. A few officers were posted at the Mechanics’ Institute itself, with the bulk of the men held at surrounding station houses, from where they could be quickly summoned.

  By midmorning about 100 policemen were lounging on the grass at Lafayette Square. Although the men were only supposed to carry nightsticks when on duty, all of them had guns, with some carrying two. When a passerby asked an officer if the men were planning on breaking up the convention, he replied, “I won’t say, but by and by we will likely have some fun.”