Returning, p.9
Returning, page 9
In the concrete realm of plantation balance sheets, emancipation was a disaster for the planters not only because it entailed the loss of their enslaved labor force, but also, perhaps even more, because slaves were financial assets—sellable, tradeable, and, most important in credit-hungry, bank-deprived sugar country, usable as collateral for loans. “The impoverishment of the South’s propertied class is a unique event in American economic history,” another Southern historian wrote; he thought the only comparable situation ever, anywhere, was the Russian Revolution. And one could add to this picture of utter bleakness in the planters’ minds a large element of political uncertainty. Would the United States now abolish slavery in the areas it controlled? Whom would it compensate after the war, the slaveholders or their former slaves? All this was unclear, and would remain unclear for quite some time. (One reason the 1864 crop was so small is that many Black Louisianans hoped they would gain access to land—so why go back to work as field hands?)
In 1863, Benjamin Butler was replaced as commander in New Orleans by Nathaniel Banks—like Butler a former Massachusetts politician, but a much more physically commanding figure, handsome, with a bristly moustache, than the overweight, rheumy-eyed Butler. In 1864, Banks took a step toward actually abolishing slavery in sugar country by establishing a system of payment for Black people who worked on plantations: initially, two dollars a month for male field hands, one dollar a month for female, for no more than twenty-six days a month of work. Anyone who wanted to operate a plantation under these rules first had to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States government. This ruled out many of the plantation owners; the Confederacy hadn’t surrendered yet.
In this situation, Jacob Lemann detected opportunity. Why? Why wouldn’t he have resumed his life in New York, or have remained in Germany? For Jacob and other Jews in particular, there was an additional concern. In December 1862, General Grant had issued an order banning all Jews from the territory that was under his control in next-door Mississippi, because he felt Jewish cotton traders were using the Union army’s presence as an opportunity to look for quick profits. (Father’s mother’s family were cotton traders in Mississippi at the time, so I may well be related to some of these people.) This was the only official, stated government ban on Jews in American history. It drew immediate strong condemnation, and within days President Lincoln reversed the order. But surely one could not have been entirely confident that such sentiments would not reappear; the impulse to blame the Jews has very often presented itself, in many different places at many different times, when people are suffering. And for Jews, there’s always a lurking wariness that, no matter how well things seem to be going, everything can always be abruptly snatched away, as has happened so many times in the past.
Over the years I’ve known a number of self-made businessmen. There’s a fierce protectiveness that they feel about their laboriously built-up enterprises, an unwillingness to walk away—could that have been Jacob’s motivation? Or did he see some kind of bright future for sugar country—as a site of possibilities, not the smoldering wreckage of a vanished society—that eluded the vision of other white people? (His civilization hadn’t vanished.) Or perhaps he felt that the chaos of the situation made his in-person presence in Donaldsonville necessary, and made his previous life as someone who could live in New York while operating business interests in Louisiana impossible. In any event, what he had at that point was the loans he’d made to midlevel planters, and all of them had failed. Just as he’d started in the mid-1830s as a backpack peddler, he started over in the mid-1860s as a defaulted-on lender. He couldn’t have thought it was possible that his creditors would pay him back.
What he could get that had value was their land, not their money. One could say: business is business, what’s the difference? But for a Jew, acquiring agricultural land was a momentous step to take. In Europe, down through the centuries, we had almost always been forbidden to own land. Traditionally we had made our living from what we could carry on our backs and in our heads. We moved around. We walked down country roads with full backpacks and laden carts, buying, selling, lending, trading. The Lemanns had moved around quite a lot during the previous ten years, maintaining the tradition at a higher level of luxury. When your business is owning land, you can’t do that. You’re attached to one place. The Lemanns were Americans, having sworn the required oath of loyalty; they were also Jews—perhaps still, at that moment, principally; but now they would also be Southerners. Jacob’s return to Louisiana may have been an exigent economic decision, but for the rest of us, the as yet unborn, its effects went beyond immediate practicality. It meant that we would be Southerners too.
Bernard, after a couple of months in Donaldsonville trying to helping his father collect on his delinquent loans, spent most of 1864 and 1865 back in the North. The Civil War was still raging, through dozens of brutal battles that produced hundreds of thousands of casualties, but in New York Bernard returned to the life of a culturally and intellectually inclined young Jewish socialite. His diaries record many parties lasting long past midnight, where he’d dance with Esther Cohen, Bertha Jacobs, Bertha Hess, Lizzie Joseph, and many other girls. He went to the theater and the opera, sometimes to see productions in French and German. He bought a pair of yellow kid gloves. He had his portrait painted. He rode a horse his father owned through the open expanses of brand-new Central Park. He fasted on Yom Kippur. He read Thoreau, Poe, Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, and the firsthand accounts of British explorers.
Bernard Lemann in his early twenties, in New York, just before he moved back to Louisiana, circa 1865.
A way of being Jewish in America was presenting itself to Bernard, entailing—it looks from this distance, at least—the promise of comfortable participation in both the growing, thriving Jewish community and the larger life of the nation. Bernard paid close attention to politics and current affairs. He read The Cotton Kingdom, by Central Park’s principal designer, Olmsted—declining in his journal, typically, to comment even privately on its fierce condemnations of slavery. He attended a speech by George McClellan, the vain former Union commander who’d been fired by Lincoln and then ran against him as the Democratic nominee in the 1864 presidential election on a platform of nonendorsement of abolition. He took his little brother to see a grand parade through the city, culminating in a mass meeting in Union Square, to celebrate a string of Union victories. In addition to keeping up with the debates about American politics, Bernard also kept up with the debates about the future of the Jews in Europe. He read works by Heinrich Heine, one of the first German Jews to write for a wider audience, and Gotthold Lessing, one of the first Germans to write sympathetically about Jews. He and Myer Isaacs, his old schoolmate, organized a Purim Association—Bernard was its inaugural president—that held a grand masquerade ball, where the guests were costumed as characters from fairy tales and Shakespeare, dined on a kosher repast, and danced to music by the Seventh Regiment Band, from which he didn’t get home until 3:30 a.m. He rented out the family’s substantial townhouse on Twenty-Third Street and moved to its smaller wooden home in Newport, and then he took care of the details of the sale of both houses.
The Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender in April 1865, followed a few days later by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in a Washington theater, which Bernard reported in his diary, showing more emotion than he usually did: “The death of Prest. Abraham Lincoln took place this morning. He was brutally murdered last night in Washington at Ford’s Theater by a pistol shot from the hand of John Wilkes Booth, the tragedian. The city goes into spontaneous mourning. An attempt was made also to assassinate Sec. Seward.” A few days later Bernard, like many other shocked and grieving New Yorkers, was out in the street to see six matching black horses pull a canopied caisson bearing Lincoln’s coffin through Union Square and on to City Hall for a two-day public viewing. He joined what he described as an “immense crowd” lined up to see the embalmed corpse in an open casket. This was one of the last times when Bernard would have seemed like a New Yorker, or, more broadly, like a mainstream Jewish American. He was headed for another country (no longer literally, but in fact): the South. As the war that had launched his years of well-heeled wandering came to an end, so did his long absences from Louisiana—forever, except for brief trips. By the end of November 1865, he had returned to Donaldsonville, obviously intending to stay. On the last page of his diary for that year is pasted an ornate printed business card:
bernard lemann,
Dealer in
dry goods, clothing, notions, boots
shoes, hats, hardware, crockery
groceries, furniture, carts, paints
oils, saddlery, buggies, iron, steel, nails, paper, liquors
&C. &C. &C.
Donaldsonville, La.
Planters
It seems that Jacob’s and Bernard’s att to plantations around Donaldsonville were unsuccessful. There’s evidence: in early 1865 Myer Isaacs, Bernard’s empts to collect on the loans Jacob had made school friend in New York, wrote a letter to General Banks, the commander of the U.S. Army of the Gulf in New Orleans, on behalf of Jacob Lemann. The letter appears to have followed a brief in-person meeting with Banks that Isaacs had somehow been able to obtain. At this moment, Grant was months into a siege of Petersburg, Virginia, not far from the Confederate capital of Richmond, and Lee’s army was reduced, isolated, and starving. A Union victory was plainly imminent. Jacob, Isaacs explains, is a loyal citizen of the United States who owns five mortgages on sugar plantations, together worth more than $100,000. Three of the five mortgage holders have died in the war. A fourth has disappeared and is rumored to have fled to Mexico. Only one is still in Louisiana, and, in common with the others, he isn’t making interest payments. Hence Isaacs’s request: Would Banks order a forced sale of the five plantations to Jacob? In return, Banks promises, Jacob will operate the five plantations himself and make them fruitful again.
It’s obvious that Banks did not instantly agree to Jacob’s request and issue an order, because it took some time to resolve the failed loans. But Jacob was relentless, and eventually successful, in pursuit of his goal. Through a combination of means, including purchases at bargain prices, lawsuits, conventional foreclosures, and forced sheriffs’ sales, within five years after the end of the Civil War he had acquired all the plantations that owed him money, plus several more. He acquired Peytavin plantation, just downriver from Donaldsonville, in 1865, Palo Alto and Bouchereau in 1867, and then Dugas, Souvenir, Diaz, Rodriguez, Crescent, Perseverance, Pedesclaux, Raccourci, and Viala. Together these holdings formed a contiguous semicircle of land surrounding Donaldsonville; you could not enter the town without passing through Lemann lands. Our family had become Jewish lords of the manor. Not so long ago, in upstate New York, I met a Southern expatriate who, after we were introduced, complained bitterly about his family’s beloved plantation having been lost to the Lemanns after the war. And it’s hard to imagine that as his family handed down the story, our being Jews—moneylenders, ruthless—would have been omitted.
Bernard had to devise a way of life for himself, as a bachelor in his twenties, in this rough, rural, ruined place. The performances he had attended in New York and in Europe were out of reach. He could still read. He was able to hold on to his love of dances and parties, but now his social circle was no longer exclusively Jewish. Social occasions were less frequent, but, because people had to travel a considerable distance on rough roads to get to them, they lasted even further into the night, at a higher level of gaiety, than parties in New York did. In May 1866 he attended the wedding of one of the Ayrauds (who were Catholic, like almost everyone in Ascension Parish), the same family who had owned Palo Alto before the Lemanns acquired it. But in June he noted that he was “not invited!” to the wedding of one of the Landrys (also Catholic), who had owned Souvenir and Peytavin. Was being Jewish the reason?
The Lemanns did not instantly remake themselves from merchants and moneylenders, their traditional occupation, into landed gentry. Instead, they reopened their store in the center of town and created a small-scale business empire that integrated it with their agricultural interests. When Jacob had sold his store to Bienvenue Mollere a decade earlier, in connection with his move to New York, Mollere was supposed to pay in installments. With the coming of the war, he, like Jacob’s planter-creditors, stopped paying. Jacob sued him and repossessed the store and the land where it stood. Now, with the reopening of the store, Jacob was a sugarcane planter, a factory owner (because his sugarhouses converted cane into processed sugar and molasses), a retailer, a lender (because the store extended credit to its customers), and, to some extent, a practitioner of his old vocation of buying and selling all sorts of assets. He had wound up using what Jews had always been permitted to do, small-scale moneylending (in this case, to plantations), to attain the status of a kind of back-country tycoon. It’s hard to imagine that this wasn’t resented, but Ascension Parish as the war was ending was a place where not many people would have been equipped either to stand in Jacob’s way or to compete with him.
Most other whites saw Donaldsonville’s surrounding plantations as irreparable, because, they believed, their successful operation had to rest on the enslavement of a Black labor force. Jacob disagreed. Two German-Jewish families in New York, the Schiffers and the Jacobses, were his principal financiers and occasional business partners. (Another name I found in the family business records was Ben Toledano, probably the grandfather of the man who introduced me to All the King’s Men; this would indicate that the Toledanos were indeed Jewish, since that’s mainly whom Jacob traded with.) In 1867, Bernard, acting as Jacob’s scribe, wrote to the Schiffers: “Business is better here than it was before. All the negroes work and have money, which they spend in the stores at Donaldsonville.” Sugarcane plantations, because of their factory aspect, mainly paid Black workers cash wages; Jacob had put himself in a position in which the Lemann field and factory hands, forced to live as quasi-serfs after emancipation, had little choice but to spend their wages, or buy goods on credit, in the Lemann store in Donaldsonville or one of its small branches out in the countryside.
Recent historians have jettisoned the old view of Southern planters as landed aristocrats; now they’re likely to be portrayed as having been the most efficient and hard-hearted capitalists the world has ever known, practically the inventors of the global financial system. (As one historian put it, referring to the textile mills in the north of England, “Without Mississippi there is no Manchester.”) I would guess that Jacob more likely thought of the prewar planters as non-Jewish quasi-incompetents who had been too passive or sentimental in looking after their interests during the war, and too firmly committed to slavery as the only possible basis for prosperity in the sugarcane business—which created an opening for him. In 1872 his future son-in-law, the Alsatian-born Lazard Kahn, who was twenty-one years old, trying to start a business in Selma, Alabama, and already fluent in English, wrote to a Jewish friend in Cincinnati, “The men who still continue to plant may be divided into two classes: first, those who have abided by the results of the late war, who have energetically gone to work and have now, since the war closed, acquired a snug fortune; second, are those who after the war having become deprived of their slaves have never looked the future straight in the face and insist on declaring it an impossibility to work or manage ‘free labor.’ ”
Some years ago, an amateur historian, a lawyer in Washington named Elliott Ashkenazi, wrote a book called The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840–1875, which has a chapter devoted to Jacob. Ashkenazi made his way through the large collection of family papers at Tulane University and wound up with a highly favorable, not to say cheerleading, view of Jacob and Bernard. They were competent and, compared at least with the more florid prewar planters, prudent in business and frugal in their personal lives. The reports on the Lemanns by the business inspectors from R. G. Dun, when they passed through Donaldsonville in the years after the war, were far more uniformly glowing than they had been back in the 1840s and ’50s. It hadn’t taken the Lemanns very long to go from being sleazy Jews to upstanding business leaders, whose tribal identity was barely worth mentioning; success brought respectability.
One of the Dun inspectors, visiting in 1870, said this about Jacob: “Doing a good business, in trade several years, age about 50 [actually, he was about 60]. Character habits and capacity good. Owns real estate worth $50 to 100m, and is certainly worth $50m clear. He is shrewd [is that code?] and intelligent business man. Commenced life about 20 years ago as a pedlar and has accumulated enough of wealth to purchase several plantations. Prospects fair.” Bernard, a couple of years earlier, as he was just starting out in retailing under his own name, got an even better review: “Bernard Lemann age about 30 [actually, he was 26], single, stock worth about $15 or 20m. Temperate honest and reliable. He is also a son of Jacob Lemann, a very wealthy planter of the parish. Bernard has succeeded very well, is very attentive to business.” A year later: “Good character, temperate, thrifty. Makes money, pays promptly, general confidence is on him in this community. Received goods on consignment and sells some on commission. Future very promising.” One could read this and think, optimistically: this young man, and no doubt his descendants, are now completely accepted.
