Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy by Edward Ball published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2020) $28.00 Hardcover $14.99 Kindle.
Edward Ball won the 1998 National Book Award for Slaves in the Family, a retelling of his paternal ancestors’ lives as the filthy rich owners of human beings in South Carolina. His new book Life of a Klansman looks at his mother’s Louisiana family of struggling working people and their own embrace of white supremacy in Louisiana.
Ball’s Klansman is Constant Lecorgne, a man who over the course of two decades would go from respectable middle class minor slave owner to Confederate soldier, guerrilla, terrorist of the Knights of the White Camellia, Ku Kluxer, and finally White League militiaman. The book begins with a night-time raid by Constant and other former Confederates on a police station in 1873. They are fighting to install a member of the White Man’s Democratic Party as the governor of the Pelican State. The attack on the police station is just one part of a plan to wrest power away from the Republicans and the Blacks. It will fail, but the failure will serve as a rehearsal for an even larger mobilization of white militamen the following year.
The book gets off to an exciting start. Unfortunately, It bogs down for several dozen pages early on as Ball retells the story of New Orleans and of the place of the Lecorgne family in it. Because the Lecorgnes were not from the elite class, their papers have not been preserved. We can only catch glimpses of their lives in the documentary records of baptisms and funerals at the local French-speaking Catholic Church, court records, and real estate deeds, including those related to the purchase and sale of the Lecorgne’s few slaves. Ball does supply insights into the thoughts of Constant, but these are based on educated guesses. While he alerts the reader to the paucity of documentary evidence for these surmises, they can be troubling none the less.
The book picks up again when the Civil War begins. By 1861, Constant is no longer a slave owner. A skilled carpenter who lives by the sweat of his own brow, Lecorgne would seem to have little at stake in the Confederate project. Yet he enlists as soon as the war breaks out. He is commissioned as a captain in the “Eighth Regiment, First Brigade, First Division of the Louisiana Militia.” Soon after he is demoted to lieutenant. Ball wonders what screw-up led to his decline in rank. He concludes that whatever it was, it fits a pattern; Constant was a follower, not a leader. In August, Constant joins the Confederate Army in the 14th Louisiana, the “Polish Brigade”, which was neither a brigade nor mostly Polish.
Before Constant and his regiment get very far in their train journey east, a difficulty arises. Here is how Ball tells the story:
As I remember it, my aunt Maud Lecorgne pauses at this point in the story of our Klansman. Her words, which appear in one of her genealogical notebooks, are restrained. “My grandfather Constant joined one unit, but he did not like it much, apparently.” It is a diplomatic sentence that hides more than it discloses. Because what happens next to Constant’s unit is the subject of a court-martial.
Constant’s train moves slowly, easing into Mississippi before turning north to head toward Tennessee. At every stop, groups of men from Company B get off to buy liquor, then climb back in the car. There are many stops. When the train reaches Grand Junction, Tennessee, just over the Mississippi line, much of the unit is drunk.
It is night in Grand Junction, time to make camp. In a field near the train stop, the men of Company K have already pitched tents and built fires. They arrived hours earlier. Half of Company B leaves the train to join Company K in camp, half stay behind at the station to drink. In the middle of the night, the drinkers finish their bottles and stumble into the campsite to discover that no dry place on the grass is cleared for them. Some of the men pick fights about the noise, and about the tight space, and soon a hundred men are swinging fists and tent poles.
It is unclear from the military report whether Lieutenant Lecorgne is among the drinkers who crash the campsite, or he is with the defenders who lunge at them, teaching the drunks a lesson.
A lieutenant named Myatt, in charge of the camp guard, has the task of keeping order. Lieutenant Myatt and several guards manage to arrest two dozen of the brawlers—the drinkers are incapacitated—and start them marching back to the town center. Myatt plans to lock up the group at the Percy Hotel, in the middle of town. On the march, a few prisoners bring out knives and attack their guards. Myatt’s men have guns but no bullets. The guards fight back with bayonets and rifle butts.
Lieutenant Myatt sends a runner for reinforcements and to alert officers. The upper ranks have rooms at the Percy Hotel, the would-be jail. The prisoners are enraged that they are to be dressed down, and the drunks chase their captors to the Percy Hotel. A few in Company B rush around the yard to collect kindling and wood. They are mad enough that they will burn down the building.
A fire is growing on one side of the Percy Hotel when Colonel Valery Sulakowski, commander of the Fourteenth Louisiana, rides up on his horse. Colonel Sulakowski is a military man from eastern Europe. Born in Poland, age thirty-four, he is a former officer in the Austrian army, the experience of which has given him both a volatile temper and the habit of wearing a sword. A revolver in each hand, Sulakowski forces his horse into the boiling crowd. He shouts an order that every soldier must return to camp or expect to be shot. When one refuses, Sulakowski shoots him. Eleven men from among the drinkers of Company B are shot, almost all of them by their Polish commander. [pages 124-125]
When the regiment arrives in Virginia, it is broken up. Constant resigns his commission, probably to avoid court martial, and returns home to New Orleans in disgrace along with some of the other former officers of the regiment. While he failed as an officer, Constant decides to invest his money in Confederate war bonds, a decision that will leave him broke four years later.
After the Union army occupied New Orleans in 1862, Constant crosses through Union lines to join Dick Taylor’s forces at new Iberia. Constant joins under the assumed name of Terrance, presumably so no one will associate him with his disgrace in 1861. He is enlisted in the Eighteenth Louisiana Infantry, the “Yellowjackets,” as a sergeant.
While Constant is out of New Orleans in the fight to preserve slavery, his wife Gabrielle remains behind in Union-occupied territory. The city is being transformed from the premier slave market in the United States into a place where new Black freedoms are on display. By October 1863, 1,700 Black children were enrolled in the new schools begun in the wake of Union General Ben Butler’s revolutionary reforms, which included allowing Blacks to testify against whites in court and to ride the street cars. When Gabrielle is seven months pregnant she slips out of New Orleans to give birth to her new child with her husband at his army camp. They are hard core. Constant does not leave the Confederate Army until May 28, 1865, a month and a half after Lee’s surrender.
He goes home to new Orleans where Black Union soldiers patrol the street, Blacks walk freely through the town, Blacks demand citizenship and the right to vote. He becomes a follower of Alcibiade DeBlanc, a former Confederate officer. DeBlanc was the city’s leading advocate of violent resistance to Black equality. He soon founded the Knights of the White Camellia, a Louisiana manifestation of the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ball’s exploration of the attractions of White Supremacist terrorism for a man like Constant is among the strongest sections of the book. Constant is not a monster, but he supports monstrous acts against Blacks. His easy movement from the White Camellia to the Klan and the White League indicate that he and thousands of other discharged Confederates saw the militant struggle against civil rights as part of the same conflict they had been a part of during the Civil War. DeBlanc set out just weeks after Appomattox the terms by which many former Confederates would try to live in the post-war Southern society in a published manifesto:
“I write from the illustrious ruins of our departed Confederacy,” DeBlanc says. “I think now as I did on the day I enlisted as a soldier. Our cause was a just and sacred cause, and there is nothing of the past that I would repudiate. Had we been successful, the whole world would have courted our friendship … but we have failed, and we are now seen as criminals and traitors!” It is defiant talk. DeBlanc says that since the surrender, he has taken the loyalty oath and reluctantly “aligned” with the United States. Yet “I am loyal as long as the cost of that allegiance shall not be the degradation of our race.” DeBlanc says that the abolition of slavery is illegal, because slavery appears in the Constitution, and it is incontrovertible. Abolition is also irrational, he says. The end of slavery “is nothing less than the abolition of labor, and will convert our laborers into hordes of vagrants, useless to themselves, their families, and the state.” [p, 184]
One of the strengths of Ball’s earlier book Slaves in the Family is that it did not just tell the slave owner’s story, it also told the stories of the enslaved. Ball sought out the descendants of those his ancestors kept in bondage to try to add their voices to his book, While Constant did briefly own a couple of slaves, he was a white supremacist without extensive intimate contact with slaves or free blacks. Instead of locating someone owned by Constant, Ball tracked down a descendant of Louis Roudanez, the publisher of the city’s Black newspaper The New Orleans Tribune, and an opponent of all that Constant stood for in politics. On July 25, 1865 Roudanez wrote in opposition to DeBlanc:
As far as the ‘degradation of our race,’ I very much regret that Mr. DeBlanc uses these words, for he puts me in the position of answering that unfortunately, for some years now, the white race has generally been degraded by immorality. It has been degraded by … first-degree crimes committed in the cities, in broad daylight, on white abolitionists; by the mass killings at Fort Pillow … and that is not to mention the slaughters that have taken place on the boulevards, without any repercussions, sometimes even without burials. Is that the sublime race of Mr. DeBlanc, the one that cannot suffer degradation, the one of which he is so proud? [p. 185]
For those who believe that the United States has always been an English speaking country, it might come as a surprise that this argument was carried on in both French and English.
A short while later, former Confederate Colonel Fred Ogden helped draft the local Democratic Party platform which said; “Resolved, that we hold this to be a Government of White People, made and to be perpetuated for the exclusive political benefit of the White Race.… [We hold] that the 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.” Ogden would later form the paramilitary White League which Constant would join.
In 1866 the Democratic mayor of New Orleans beefs up the police as a force to put Blacks back in “their place.” He also encourages the carrying of weapons by “respectable” white people to increase control of white over Black. As with other parts of the South, the top of the white agenda in New Orleans is the reestablishment of the racial hierarchy. Constant and hundreds of other Confederate veterans take up the challenge and join in the 1866 New Orleans Massacre during which 34 Blacks were killed and over one hundred were wounded. Ball struggles with what the meaning of his ancestor’s acts of violence against African Americans are for him today:
The reality is that Constant, my grandmother’s grandfather, is a murderous actor on behalf of his family—on behalf of us. And it is a vile taste in the mouth. I must own it, in some way. He was a fighter for our gain, for my benefit. To say anything else is to prevaricate. It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now… [p. 207]
The following year Constant will involve himself in an ongoing terror campaign against Blacks through the newly organized Knights of the White Camellia led by DeBlanc. On April 17, 1868 the Knights announce their intentions by killing a Black man who called for ratification of the new color-blind Louisiana constitution. That Spring, the Knights adopt a constitution of their own. It says:
You are being initiated into one of the most important Orders which have ever been established on this continent.… Our main and fundamental object is the MAINTENANCE OF THE SUPREMACY OF THE WHITE RACE. History and physiology tell us that we belong to a race which nature has endowed with an evident superiority over all other races. The Maker intended to give us over inferior races a dominion from which no human laws can derogate.… It is a remarkable fact that as a race of men is more remote from the Caucasian and approaches nearer to the black African, the more fatally that stamp of inferiority is affixed to its sons, and irrevocably dooms them to eternal imperfectability and degradation. We know, besides, that the government of our Republic was established by white men, for white men alone, and that it never was in the contemplation of its founders that it should fall into the hands of an inferior and degraded race. It then becomes our solemn duty as white men to do everything in our power in order to maintain, in this Republic, the supremacy of the Caucasian race, and restrain the black or African race to that condition of social and political inferiority for which God has destined it. [p. 256-257]
On June 4, 1868 Constant was inducted into the Knights in a solemn ceremony. the script for the ceremony went like this. A guard brought Constant to the door where the ceremony was to take place and knocked. The Commander opened the door and asked the guard:
COMMANDER: Who comes there?
GUARD: A son of your race.
COMMANDER: What must be done?
GUARD: The cause of our race must triumph.
COMMANDER: What must we do?
GUARD: We must be united as are the flowers that grow on the same stem.
COMMANDER: Let him enter.
The Commander then asked these questions of Constant:
COMMANDER: Do you belong to the white race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Did you ever marry any woman who did not, or does not, belong to the white race?
CANDIDATE: No.
COMMANDER: Do you promise never to marry any woman but one who belongs to the white race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Do you believe in the superiority of your race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Will you promise never to vote for any one for any office of honor, profit, or trust, who does not belong to your race?
CANDIDATE: I do.
COMMANDER: Will you take a solemn oath never to abstain from casting your vote at any election in which a candidate of the negro race shall be opposed to a white man attached to your principles?
CANDIDATE: I will.
COMMANDER: Are you opposed to allowing the control of the political affairs of this country to go in whole or in part, into the hands of the African race, and will you do everything in your power to prevent it?
CANDIDATE: Yes.
COMMANDER: Will you under all circumstance defend and protect persons of the white race in their lives, rights and property, against all encroachments or invasions from any inferior race, especially the African?
CANDIDATE: Yes.
Constant then swore the Knights oath:
I swear to maintain and defend the social and political superiority of the White Race on this Continent; always and in all places to observe a marked distinction between the White and African races;… and to protect and defend persons of the White Race, in their lives, rights and property, against the encroachments and aggressions of an inferior race. [p. 259]
Ball follows his ancestor’s career in the Knights, his involvement in the Klan and his migration in 1874 to Col. Fred Ogden’s White League militia which would stage a coup on September 14, 1874 involving at least 5,000 armed white men trying to kill their way into power.
This book is a unique contribution to the study of ordinary men willing to kill and be killed to maintain white supremacy under slavery and after slavery was abolished. The section on the history of New Orleans is a slog, but the retelling of the Confederate career of Constant Lecorgne and his deep involvement in white terror afterwards is fascinating. You may find Ball’s occasional attempts to imagine the feelings of his ancestor disconcerting, but there is plenty here that is well-documented. There are a few errors the author made, but overall the book is well-written and engaging.
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