Returning, p.10
Returning, page 10
I’ve been through the family’s business records myself, in the library at Tulane, and I can see what the inspectors were talking about: there are endless ledger books, letter books, conveyance records, loan agreements, and orders to suppliers, transforming agricultural toil and commercial self-supply into neat, irrevocably logical rows of figures, meticulously recorded in impeccably inked handwriting. Every field hand’s wages and purchases at the store are noted to the penny, and so are the sales of every barrel of sugar and hogshead of molasses. Wagons, implements, and seed are paid for. Problems—bad weather, broken equipment—are noted, solutions planned. In a few photographs that have survived, you encounter half a dozen formally dressed, moustachioed clerks sitting at desks in a room in back of the store, creating these records. They stare implacably at the camera, practically nailed in place, communicating a sense that they occupy a definite and fixed place in a fully designed social order.
Bernard’s life was changing during these postwar years, more devoted to business, less to parties, performances, and reading. His wandering, culture-devouring youth was drawing to a close. For a time he still traveled to New York occasionally and temporarily took up life in his old social circle, but that didn’t last very long. In the spring of 1870, at a Purim ball in New Orleans, where immigrant German-Jewish families who had prospered in the plantation economy presented their daughters as debutantes, following days of nervous and expectant dress fittings and hairdressings, he met the “stately and beautiful” (as Bernard’s sister Coralie put it, many years later) nineteen-year-old Harriet Friedheim, born in a small town in the Rhine River Valley not far from the Lemanns’ German home, and raised in New Orleans from the age of three.
Harriet was one of ten children. What I know about her is that her parents died when she was young and she was then looked after by a large network of cousins, that two of her brothers served in the Confederate army, that she played the piano, and that, when she went back to Germany and visited her relatives many years later, she found that most of them were quite religious. Within just a few weeks of their first meeting, Bernard and Harriet were married in the large, stolid living room of a family friend, by New Orleans’s leading rabbi, Isaac Leucht, who was also born in the same part of Germany. A photograph of them from their early years together shows Harriet wearing a heavy, floor-length, shiny, ruffled black dress, with a mass of dark hair someone had carefully arranged in a pile above her head, and a level, steady, serious look. She’s standing, with a protective hand on the shoulder of Bernard, who’s sitting. He looks just a shade more insouciant, with a thin moustache, wavy pomaded hair, and a bow tie, his legs crossed.
The newlywed Bernard and Harriet Lemann, circa 1870.
Before Bernard and Harriet had been married twenty years, they had produced ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. Just twelve years after her last child was born, Harriet died, at the age of forty-six. It seems that the two of them didn’t spend a lot of time apart, so very little correspondence between them has survived. An exception is a very long and excited letter Bernard wrote in November 1870, six months into their married life. He was at Palo Alto and Harriet was in New Orleans, already pregnant with their first child. On the morning after Election Day, Bernard reported, a group of men had been seen on the opposite bank of the Mississippi from Donaldsonville—a weedy, muddy, forbidding, uninhabitable, ungoverned stretch of land—preparing to board a boat, cross the river, take the ballot boxes from the Ascension Parish courthouse, and bring them back across the river to be counted. These men were Republicans, meaning that they were the party of the Union, and, more recently, of Donaldsonville’s newly enfranchised Black majority. They were afraid that the Democrats, unrepentant former Confederates who not so long ago had been conducting raids on Union troops in Donaldsonville, would steal the election.
This wasn’t a misplaced fear. During the decade following the end of the Civil War, Louisiana was in a state of unremitting bloody political chaos. Just as the Civil War wasn’t so clearly about abolishing slavery, the Reconstruction period, after the war, can be understood as a kind of low-grade second Civil War, fought over the question of what kind of lives the former Confederacy’s millions of no longer formally enslaved Black people would live. Violence was constant, though sporadic, and it may have been all the more horrific because it didn’t involve armies meeting on a field of battle, but, instead, what we’d now call terrorism, ruleless and unexpected, aimed mainly at denying Black people the right to vote. The success of my family’s postwar business ambitions depended on how well they could navigate through this environment. That and also, perhaps, what call their conscience placed on them.
Just after the war, Louisiana, like other Southern states, passed laws meant to reinstitute a racial order that was as close to slavery as possible. The passage of new federal constitutional amendments (the Fourteenth in 1868, the Fifteenth in 1870) conferring citizenship and voting rights on Black Louisianans, enforced by the still occupying U.S. army, was meant to override the South’s intentions. But whites launched an organized armed resistance that lasted through the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Campaigns, elections, and inaugurations were especially prone to attacks by white paramilitary organizations with names like the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League (as well as the one whose name we still remember, the Ku Klux Klan), which were made up of die-hard Confederate veterans and were informally affiliated with the Democratic Party. When these groups’ attention shifted from their primary object, Black people, other people who were identifiably different could be subjected to their malign activities: Italians, Jews. In 1866, an attempt to hold a state constitutional convention in New Orleans produced a violent killing spree by ex-Confederates and their allies, who furiously shot, stabbed, and clubbed to death a group of politically organized Black people. As in most incidents of Reconstruction violence, the whites worked themselves up into an uncontrollable frenzy, as if something pent up within them had been released; they kept attacking even the bodies of people who were already dead. The incident left forty-six Black people dead and sixty more wounded.
During and after the 1868 elections, in incidents of political violence all over the state, nearly eight hundred Black people were killed. Things got worse in the 1870s. After the 1872 elections, two men, one from each party, each with an armed force under his command, both claimed to be the duly elected governor of Louisiana. A few months later, on Easter 1873, the bloodiest incident during the entirety of Reconstruction in the South took place in the town of Colfax, Louisiana, on the Red River, when dozens of Black men were murdered during another political conflict. Whites set a Black-occupied courthouse on fire, murdered anyone who tried to escape, and then went rampaging through the countryside looking for more Black people to kill. In September 1874, a force of five thousand white militiamen staged a victorious battle in the heart of the New Orleans business district against federal troops and held the government offices for three days, until fresh army troops dislodged them.
In rural places like Donaldsonville, the violent outbreaks followed a script. Plantation country was Black-majority and essentially all Black voters were Republicans, so Republicans would almost certainly win elections that were fair. The Democrats developed techniques to prevent this. Sometimes they would stage armed confrontations at Republican political rallies or at polling places, aiming to prevent Black people from voting; sometimes, afterward, if the Republicans claimed victory, the Democrats would seize power by force, claiming fraud; sometimes in these cases they would hear that a Republican militia was coming to unseat them, and would ride off into the countryside to stage a battle. For most whites, there was essentially no psychological distinction between one of these election confrontations and the eternally feared advent of a “Negro mob” bent on pillage, theft, and the despoilation of white women that was assumed to be every Black man’s most cherished aim.
Since he had returned to Donaldsonville, Bernard made note in his diary whenever there was a local murder, which was occasionally. The Lemanns, being white, wouldn’t seem to have to fear for their lives in this environment, but they might have to fear for their ability to do business. That they were immune to other white planters’ end-of-civilization fantasies didn’t mean they were guaranteed safe passage through a postwar period that felt more like a guerrilla war than peacetime. In 1867, Jacob, communicating via Bernard, wrote to one of the men in New York who were financing his postwar reestablishment in business in Donaldsonville, “In reference to the political trouble which you mention as being a hindrance to the prosperity of this section of the country, I assure you I have no fear that they will injure the sugar plantations.” But in November 1870, the violence came to Donaldsonville, in more than episodic form—and this was one of those cases where its most prominent victim was not Black. He was a Jew.
The Democrats were in Donaldsonville, on the west bank of the Mississippi, in control of the courthouse. The Republicans, who wanted to get their hands on the ballot box, were on the east bank. As their boat was crossing the river, Democrats positioned on the west bank opened fire. One Republican was wounded and the boat turned back. Bernard, who was at the family store, just a short distance from the river, heard the gunfire and hurried to Palo Alto to look after his mother, who was there alone. While he was there, a visitor arrived, and, as he wrote Harriet, “we heard that a force of militia several hundred in number were halted on the road a little way below our house, while opposite the house and a little above were men from town, all armed with muskets, to prevent the other from getting to town.” The election dispute had attracted more participants and had spread beyond the banks of the river. The militia Bernard had heard about was mainly Black. Its aim was to get to the courthouse and take possession of the ballot box, since the party crossing the river by boat had been repulsed. The men from town with muskets were white.
Soon Bernard heard gunfire again, which sounded like it came from quite near Palo Alto. He took his mother to the factory building on the plantation where sugar was refined, figuring that would be a safer hiding place than the house itself. Bernard’s letter to Harriet went on: “After a while a negro came running along the levee and reported that they were coming in great numbers from St. James”—the neighboring parish—“and would set fire to the town.” To picture this, it’s necessary to understand that in our part of Louisiana, the countryside doesn’t mean reassuring pastureland. It means swamps, jungles, uncharted streams, wild animals: a territory where, especially in the white imagination, anything is possible. Bernard hurried back to the store to retrieve his business records. There he heard that the Republican boat had once again crossed the river to get the ballot boxes, and that Donaldsonville’s leading Democrat, a Confederate veteran named William C. Lawes, and its leading Republican, a Jewish merchant named Marx Schoenberg, each of whom claimed to be Donaldsonville’s rightful mayor, had decided to go meet the militia together and plead for peace.
“In the town I am told no one slept all night,” Bernard wrote. Morning brought the news that both Lawes and Schoenberg were dead, killed on land owned by one of the Lemanns’ business partners from New York, the Jacobs family. Believing that the militia was going to march into town and destroy everything, Bernard’s first impulse was to protect Donaldsonville’s Jews. He helped arrange for horse-drawn carts to take what Jewish women and children he could round up—including Marx Schoenberg’s three small children, whom somebody had dropped off at Palo Alto—away to safety, as if this were an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence back in Germany. By nightfall, as invariably happened at the denouement of these rumored destruction-bent Negro uprisings in the rural South during Reconstruction, the militia had inexplicably dispersed and calm had returned to Donaldsonville. “I tell you we have had exciting time, but I thank God it is all over,” Bernard wrote. He was aware that Harriet, a city girl, might not have been enthusiastic about the prospect of spending her adult life in the environment he had just described. “I am glad you were not here. You must not feel uneasy at all for everything is perfectly quiet, as usual.” Bernard promised to send her fresh pecans and cane syrup, and brought his letter to an end: “With my love, dearest darling, and hundreds of kisses. Your fond & devoted Bernard.”
In accordance with religious law, Marx Schoenberg was buried the day after he had died, in Donaldsonville’s Jewish cemetery. His tombstone carries this legend: “In memory of Marx Schoenberg, Born in Germany, 1833, Murdered November 9, 1870. May he rest in peace.” What happened? Schoenberg was like one of those central characters in a murder mystery whom many people want dead. A report on him from an R. G. Dun inspector, not long after Schoenberg had arrived in Donaldsonville, said: “Makes it a point never to pay a just debt unless sued. Is fond of lawsuits, gives no care to his business and loses ground. Anyone giving him credit is sure to need a lawsuit.” Another report, a few months later: “Not doing much. Bad pay and often sued, is very fond of litigation. About 35 suits have been brought against him since 66. Paid the amount sometimes before and sometimes after judgments. Has family. No business capacity. Credit very bad.” But these deficiencies would pale compared to the offensiveness, to local whites, of a white man’s having been a highly visible radical Republican, which is to say allied with Donaldsonville’s Black voting majority. In the language of the white South, Schoenberg had been a scalawag. During the 1868 election season, recently appointed as postmaster of Donaldsonville, he received death threats and had to hide out in New Orleans for a while. When he returned and became mayor, the Democratic city council reduced his salary to one dollar a year.
As always with incidents of racial political violence in the Reconstruction South, there were two versions of how Schoenberg had died. They appeared in newspapers affiliated with the two political parties. In the Democratic version, he had been killed by the Negro mob—just deserts for his having believed that Black people would treat a white man as an ally. In the Republican version, he had been killed by William Lawes, the Democratic pretender to the mayoral throne. Another theory, which came later from a U.S. government investigator, was that the militia, intending to shoot Lawes, had also shot Schoenberg by accident. What’s indisputable is that Schoenberg’s body was found with six bullet holes, but Lawes’s was found shot and then hacked to pieces with the short, razor-sharp, machetelike knives that plantation workers used to cut down stalks of sugarcane.
Most whites in Donaldsonville could hardly believe what they were seeing during Reconstruction. An Army officer named Joshua Addeman, in a memoir he published in 1880, told a story about being posted to Donaldsonville as commander of a regiment of Colored Troops, just after the war. One of his duties was to act as a judge in disputes, and in one case he ruled in favor of a recently enslaved woman against a white man. “I presume this was the first occasion in the experience of many of the spectators, in which the sworn testimony of a negro was received as against that of a white person,” he wrote. Such a thing was unheard of, before and after Reconstruction: white people were always right, Black people were always wrong. The whites who were present, Addeman wrote, “scowled upon the proceedings with the intensest malignity,” but for the Blacks, “it was evident that the year of jubilee had come at last.” People were more religious when Addeman was writing than they are now, so his readers would have known he was referring to God’s commandment, recorded in the Book of Leviticus, that every fifty years masters must free their slaves.
Another item on white Southerners’ standard list of the horrors of Reconstruction was the short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau (1865–1872), a small new federal agency charged with overseeing the transition out of slavery, through education, health care, housing, and possibly land ownership for the formerly enslaved, which was operating in Donaldsonville. Most white planters refused to pay the tax levied to support the bureau’s activities. As the bureau’s local administrator noted bitterly in a report he sent to one of his superiors, “No palpable reason for thus withholding their aid is assigned, other than that the Freedmen has no business to have the least degree of Education.” The formerly enslaved, to the minds of their former masters, should not have economic options except for being field hands and house servants, or any political knowledge that would acquaint them with concepts like rights or would make them aware of how different conditions were in other parts of the country. Better to ensure that they’d be incurably stuck where they were.
What was Bernard politically? As someone who had left Donaldsonville to avoid serving in the Confederate army and who had returned and sworn an oath of allegiance after the Union had established control of the town, he obviously was not a Democratic bitter-ender. He faithfully paid the Freedmen’s Bureau tax, noting every occasion in his journal. A few years after Schoenberg’s murder, in 1873, he was one of the organizers of a biracial but white-majority “Merchants’ Ticket” that ran in the local elections on a platform of Donaldsonville’s honoring the bonds it had issued in 1866 to finance its postwar rebuilding. That would indicate that he was a moderate Republican of sorts. But within a few years, Reconstruction had ended, and within a few more years, there was no Republican Party to speak of in Louisiana, thanks to the success of the Democratic terrorists. The year of jubilee that Addeman wrote about had not come; instead, it soon became inconceivable—for another century—that a Black woman could successfully testify in court against her white employer. The Lemanns didn’t work to create this reactionary regime, but after it had arrived, they took operating within it as a given. They attended to business. In 1881, Myer Lemann, Bernard’s much younger brother and business partner, became the second Jewish mayor of Donaldsonville, after Marx Schoenberg. He evidently served without ruffling anyone’s feathers. In the early twentieth century, Bernard’s son Walter was also mayor. There’s a bronze plaque memorializing his service mounted at the foot of the levee in Donaldsonville.
