by Edward Ball
Thank goodness Dr. Nott has chosen to work in New Orleans. More like him are needed.
Constant and the Lecorgnes, I feel sure, do not acquire copies of Nott’s Indigenous Races of the Earth, which is published the year Numa Lecorgne is born. Yet it is not out of the question that some in the family—perhaps Yves of God, the one with education—may find themselves at one of the scientist’s public lectures. In a hall at the university, Dr. Nott fulminates, his charts and drawings and data confirming the absolute rigidity of the racial order, the permanence of the social pyramid. In talks and popular articles, Nott lays out his discoveries in “cranioscopy,” the measurement of skulls. He shows that whites, due to the shape of their heads, are close to the “ideal human of the ancients.” Whereas blacks, who possess “notably misshaped heads,” are not only closer to the apes, but may descend from them.
In “The Monogenists and the Polygenists,” Nott explains how different types of human come to exist. He says the varieties arose simultaneously in separate events and on several continents, hundreds of thousands of years ago—the view of the “Polygenists.” The “Monogenists” say that all humanity emerges from a single origin—either from Adam and Eve, in Genesis, or from some foundational creature. I can see how this business of polygenesis is soothing. It comforts the insecurity of whites. It explains why whites are conspicuously superior, the high ring in the human chain of being, and why blacks appear to lie somewhere low and abject.
With James De Bow in the role of publisher, race theory burns brightly in New Orleans. “Negro slavery is consistent with the laws of God and with humanity,” says Josiah Nott to a roomful in a lecture series in New Orleans. De Bow runs Josiah Nott’s essays under headlines like “Diversity of the Human Race.” He offers scientific education for the many and makes science subordinate to the needs of exploitation. Josiah Nott, over time, is one of the loudest of apologists for slavery. He knows it can be justified by science. He writes that he wants to “confound the abolitionists” and prove that enslavement is a benign practice. Sometimes, in an aside, Nott calls his discipline of craniology and polygenesis “the nigger business”; sometimes he calls it “niggerology.” In the lecture hall, the heads of many nod and smile.
The names Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott are murmured and admired in New Orleans, not in the drunken barrelhouses, but in libraries and cafés, over coffee and beignets, pieces of fried dough with powdered sugar. A third name now joins the discussion, Louis Agassiz. A professor of zoology at Harvard, Louis Agassiz picks up the consensus on polygenesis and carries it to New England. Agassiz manages to persuade many scholars and sages in the North how whites and blacks represent different species. Louis Agassiz goes further and looks for visible proof. From his rooms at Harvard, Agassiz reaches deep down in the South and brings away evidence. He hires a photographer, a daguerreotype artist in South Carolina named Joseph Zealy. He tells Zealy to photograph specimens of the African race—naked, if possible. The results are splendid, proof positive of polygenesis. The fifteen daguerreotypes of Dr. Agassiz, housed in the Agassiz Library at Harvard, are some of the very few photographs of enslaved Americans that survive.
The naturalist Louis Agassiz hired a photographer in 1850 to prove with pictures—including this one, “Jem, Gullah”—the variation of African “species.”
White Creoles, and I think the Lecorgnes are among them, give credit to another writer on race, because he is a Frenchman. He is Arthur Gobineau. A Parisian aristocrat and self-nominated scientist, Arthur Gobineau publishes a long meditation that he calls Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (“Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races”). For tribal reasons, any word from France must be listened to in Louisiana, and so it is with Arthur Gobineau, during the 1850s, among a small but influential group of writers and talkers in New Orleans.
I think I can summarize the wordy view of Gobineau by quoting him in one thimble-sized passage—
“I have been able to distinguish, on physiological grounds alone, three great and clearly marked types, the black, the yellow, and the white.… The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character, that appears in the shape of the pelvis, is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny.” Whereas, Gobineau says, he sees unmistakable “superiority of the white type, and, within this type, of the Aryan family.”
Arthur Gobineau is important in part because his catalog of racial difference first puts in circulation the myth of the “Aryan.” A linguistic clan set apart by language, the so-called Aryans (from the Sanskrit ārya) are said to have ancient roots in northwest India and present-day Iran and to have spread into prehistoric Europe. It is with the help of a French royalist that one of the most caustic formulations of white supremacy is born.
Josiah Nott, the craniologist, is so enamored of Arthur Gobineau that in 1856, he publishes an English translation of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. He gives it a sedate title, The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, but the contents remain cruel.
* * *
Marguerite Lecorgne keeps good appearances. In 1858, she turns sixty. Not everyone has a half block of land and five grown children scattered in reach to look after you. Widow Lecorgne lives high. Not everyone has fourteen nègres to call “mine.”
Exit Marguerite’s house on Lyons Street, walk south one block, and you dead-end at the Mississippi. Some call the road that runs along the levee “Water Street.” Here are oyster shacks, barbershops, cafés and barrooms, boardinghouses, pharmacies, clothing shops, barrelhouse beer halls, shoemakers, tobacco shops, furniture stores, and confectioners. The bigger businesses lie on the side of the street that contacts the river. They have wharfs, like the Ocean Sawmill, Constant’s haunt, and the cotton press. The cotton press does such heavy business that it sometimes clouds the air with tufts of downy white.
Some call the road that runs along the levee by its real name, Tchoupitoulas. The name has its root in the Choctaw language. Natives who called themselves Tchoupitoulas (CHOP-uh-TOO-las) were the “river people” who lived here and traveled up and down the Mississippi to trade. In good American style, the settler colony drove out the people and kept their name as a remnant.
Jefferson City is bigger now. When the Lecorgnes arrived, fifteen years ago, fewer than five thousand could be found on the streets that branch from Napoleon Avenue. Now thirty thousand live in these parts, three miles upstream of New Orleans. The white suburb whitens more. Immigrants from Ireland, leaving behind the potato famine, have filled in much. Creoles do not like the Irish. They call their section at the edge of Bouligny “the Irish Channel.” Germans are coming, too, by the thousand. Creoles like them better, except for their beer.
Despite the Lecorgne family money, I do not believe Constant thinks of himself as fortunate. He leans over a bench with a plane in his hand, bends his shoulders to haul beams. He has an unconscious well in which to collect resentments. The real lucky one is his cousin, Camille Zeringue. When he thinks about Camille, Constant has reason to envy.
Look at Seven Oaks. Camille lives like a prince. He’s got all that money. He’s got 108 people! The more they cut the sugarcane, the more Camille counts his money.
Constant lays his saw on another eight-foot board and trims it into decking. He cuts a groove down the long edge to receive the bead of the next plank. He walks one more time to Ocean Sawmill, on Tchoupitoulas. He turns to Ovid, his shop man, his mother’s loan. Why does a man have to work with a nigger? There is no justice in it.
“Nigger” is a word the Creoles had to learn. Les Américains brought it with them when they flooded into Louisiana. Now they use it all the time. It is a sharper word, more useful than the gentle French words for African Americans, like les nègres. “Nigger” is nicely caustic and poisonous on the lips.
There is another word the Americans bring with their English, “darkey.” It is more mocking and contemptuous, and less aggressive. Nigger is all aggression, but d
arkey looks down with a smirk. Maybe Constant says something like this. Why does a man have to work with darkies? In fact, he would say the darkies. God bless them, they are always making mistakes.
The black population of New Orleans shrinks during the rush of white immigrants. By the end of the 1850s, people of color, enslaved and free, are fewer than one-quarter of the population.
In December 1858, baby Numa is fifteen months old, and the little house on Soniat Street is still not done. It is not clear what goes wrong. But again Gabrielle has stopped her periods, she is pregnant for the second time. There is no more room at the Laizer house, there must be an exit. In January, Constant puts the half-finished cottage on the market. It brings an offer from a widow, and it is gone. Sell it cheap, and say nothing to the buyer. Three weeks later, Gabrielle and Constant have a solution. They buy a cottage on a square lot. The place stands on the corner of Bellecastle and Live Oak streets, in Bouligny, five blocks from Lecorgne row. It is $540, with half borrowed from the seller. All that has to be done is to add a room or two. Ovid can do it, and finally they will have a bedroom door to close.
Gabrielle has Numa on her hip. A young white mother needs to be served. When they move to Bellecastle Street, Constant and Gabrielle take Rachel, a house slave, plus her two children, Frank and Louis. Rachel is thirty-five and one of Widow Lecorgne’s people. Marguerite inherited her from her father, and she has been working for nearly twenty years. Rachel had a partner, named Job, but at some point Job disappears. He might have died, or maybe Marguerite sold him. One thing is certain about Rachel, and that is her cost. She is appraised at $900—in other words, more than the new house.
The furniture goes in, the home is made. Rachel and her kids, Ovid, Constant and Gabrielle, plus Numa. In June 1859, Gabrielle has her first daughter. They name her Françoise Mathilde. The house is crowded, but it is away from the in-laws.
Yves of God, the family leader, age thirty-four, goes further into government. He runs for office and is elected justice of the peace for Jefferson City. A census enumerator asks Yves of God his profession, and he answers that he is a “judge.” In reality, he writes arrest warrants for drunkenness and fighting, and settles little property disputes. Now he has two jobs, city clerk and justice. As clerk, he manages tax rolls for Jefferson City. Fortunately, the job has a lucrative sideline, which is assessment. As one of three tax assessors, Yves sets property values, more lucrative than punishing drunks. It is not unusual for a tax assessor to accept gifts from businessmen unhappy about their taxes, and to make reductions on paid request.
Constant is a carpenter who can’t finish a house. But his father-in-law is still the mayor, and he has a fixer for a brother who works in city hall.
As soon as Yves of God wins election, he gives the youngest Lecorgne brother a job, deputy sheriff. Joseph has been working at a gristmill. There is little to the work: a big round stone in a small, cramped storefront grinds corn into flour. Like Constant, Joseph has not made a move from muscle labor to deskwork. Joseph is engaged to a woman named Estelle Daunoy, and he needs a better job. Deputy sheriff comes with a paycheck and a gun. The job is part-time. Joseph goes out nights to police fistfights in the Irish Channel, or he shuts down the cockfights the city is trying to ban. The pay is good. When there is nothing to do, slaves can always be stopped and roughed up.
The sheriff of Jefferson City is a man named Guy Dreux. Joseph Lecorgne and Guy Dreux arrest whites and blacks in equal number and bring them to the lockup on Magazine Street. The most frequent charge is disorderly conduct—fighting. When they arrest women, the most frequent charge is soliciting—prostitution.
Constant looks stable and reliable. The carpenter has a wife, house, two babies, two slaves. He is a homeowner.
In summer 1860, Constant joins his two brothers in law enforcement. Yves seems to throw him the job. Constant becomes a confiscation agent. It is the lowest kind of work as a cop. People who fail to pay their taxes are shirkers, and the sheriff’s office seizes their property. Enter the confiscation man. Sometimes, after litigation, the court impounds the assets of the loser. It might be a building lot, a horse, or an enslaved man. Enter the confiscation man. Yves, justice of the peace, writes the order to impound, which goes to the sheriff, who sends out an enforcer. Constant is deputy sheriff in charge of confiscation.
To seize a man’s belongings is neither easy nor safe; nor is selling things on the steps of the courthouse, the last part of the job. None of it is a way to make friends in Bouligny.
In August 1860, Constant runs an item in The Carrollton Sun—
“I shall proceed to sell at public auction, at the door of the Court House, the following described property, to wit … three lots of ground, bounded by Pearl, Washington, Burdette, and Commercial Streets.… This property was seized in the suit of George A. Freret vs. Abraham J. Wright. Terms of sale are cash on the spot.”
It is almost an acting role for a cop, a piece of theater. Constant puts on an authoritative look, walks to Magazine Street, climbs the steps of the courthouse. There is a chance of trouble, so he must be armed. I imagine that Abraham Wright, forced to surrender his real estate, turns up at the auction. He must know the sheriff’s deputy carries a weapon. He must know that all the Lecorgne brothers do enforcement.
On one occasion, Constant has the pleasure of shaking down a black family for money. It happens in the Third District Court, a venue for debt cases. When a white landlord named Valmont Dufossat sues a free woman of color named Claudine Claude for nonpayment of rent on a house he owns, 642 Rousseau Street, Dufossat recruits Constant to extract the money from the tenant.
Dufossat gets a judge to issue a “writ of seizure,” and Constant is sent out to enforce it. He is to drive the woman from her house and collect back rent. It is not clear from the papers whether he uses threats or physically roughs up Claudine Claude. Maybe he does both. He is the righteous fist of the law and does what is required. When he comes back to the courthouse, Constant carries a month’s rent in hand, and he has left Claudine Claude on the street. He is a cop and a punisher. The nigger must be put in her place.
8
They mind their business, they are God-fearing. The Lecorgnes are a few households on a few streets. They have some darkies, that is all, and people envy them. Everybody wants the same.
Leave our tribe alone, they might say. You covet us. It is not so different in your own time and place.
The Lecorgnes marry, they argue about property (the darkies), they have children. They sort out who among them is up, and who down. They work, shuffle houses, guide their children to a match. They praise the Lord, because all blessings cascade from Him.
* * *
A new race philosopher moves to New Orleans. He is Samuel Cartwright, from Natchez, Mississippi. A doctor born in Virginia, Cartwright has for years practiced medicine in Natchez. But his intellectual challenge, and his love, is crafting theories of race and behavior. James De Bow has already given Samuel Cartwright many pages in De Bow’s Review to elaborate his work. In one essay, Cartwright describes a disease he calls Dysaesthesia Aethiopica, or “uncomfortable blackness.” (“It is a disease peculiar to negroes, affecting both mind and body … a partial insensibility of the skin, and so great a lethargy of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half asleep,” Cartwright tells readers.)
When Dr. Samuel Cartwright moves permanently to Louisiana, the professional men of the New Orleans Academy of Sciences welcome him by sponsoring his first lectures. It is one November, at the end of the 1850s, and the first of the talks takes place at the University of Louisiana, center of mental life in the city.
Cartwright steps to the lectern and speaks. It is a room in which the dignitaries of Southern science smoke cigars and confer.
“There are three principal groups that have maintained the physical traits and mental characteristics unaltered by time for a period as far back as history extends,” he says. “Natural historians designate them as the white,
yellow and black: otherwise the Indo-European, Mongolian and Prognathous.”
The “Prognathous,” Cartwright explains, is the human species marked by a lower jaw that projects outward, like that of an ape.
“We behold four millions of the negro race, that group of mankind engaged mostly in agriculture, and under subjection to that other group, called … Aryan, Caucasian, or white.… The obedience of the negro to the Caucasian is spontaneous, because it is normal for the weaker will to yield obedience to the stronger.”
The room is full. Nods of assent are quiet, as the Caucasian is not prone to verbal ejaculations.
“The ultimate limit of progress the negro race has ever made, stops within the confines of barbarism,” he continues. “But the white type has ever forced its way and maintained its position in that high order of civilization where moral virtue, clad in intellectual light, rules society.”
Between James De Bow and Josiah Nott, and now Samuel Cartwright, New Orleans is a center of race theory. The position of whites is a deserving one, and the scientists who can prove it have a big audience. Samuel Cartwright takes questions, steps down from the dais, and finds the way home. He is a good addition to scholarship in the Crescent City.
* * *
Widow Lecorgne has cancer. The record says no more, but breast cancer is one kind that cannot be named. Marguerite lies in bed, her children and grandchildren visiting. The cancer grows, and Marguerite’s life drains. It is fall 1859, and her family watches her dying. The pain rises, until relief comes from the pharmacy. It is laudanum, liquid opium, diluted in tinctures for patients to ingest. If Marguerite can drink it, suffering flees for hours.
Constant’s new baby, Mathilde, is mewling—she is four months old—when the news comes that Marguerite Lecorgne is dead. She dies November 2, at sixty-two.
Marguerite Zeringue Lecorgne—daughter of planters, mother of five, slaveholder of fourteen, widow to a sailor, grandmother of a half-dozen. The ordinary and predictable life of a Creole woman, fitted to her times. Yet also: the complex and unique life of a Creole woman, full of exceptions. Most people in the South are not French, not white, not slaveholders.
