The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America by Julie Winch (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SUMMER 2012 87 The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America Julie Winch Jacques Clamorgan was a fascinating scoundrel . The Frenchman settled in St. Louis in the early 1780s, a relentless dealmaker and “perennial lawbreaker”(16). Clamorgan convinced Spanish authorities in the Louisiana country to grant him huge tracts of land in what would later become Missouri and Arkansas, cessions that Clamorgan then leveraged, reclaimed, and leveraged again withflagrantduplicity.Alongtheway,helivedwith (and abused and stole land from) a free woman of color, Ester, and had children with three different slaves. Julie Winch’s The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America traces these two family inheritances, monetary and racial, from the eighteenth century through the 1950s. Each generation believed it could become enormously wealthy if only they could confirm and gain compensation from the family’s title to Jacques’s millions of acres. It never happened beyond relatively small settlements with individuals who paid the family in order to clear, often temporarily, their own titles. Jacques’s financial legacy proved elusive , and many of his descendants died in poverty. Winch also documents some of the clan’s changing racial identification, both self-described and official. Racial fluidity was a tool in the arsenal of ambitious blacks, especially for people as light skinned as the Clamorgans. Passing, however, raised new risks and often proved emotionally and socially costly. Using a vast array of archival material, especially deed records and court proceedings,Winch recreates the Clamorgans over five generations. The litigation included three United States Supreme Court cases and seventeen that came before the Missouri Supreme Court. In addition, the U.S. Congress considered the family’s claims on a couple of occasions. The legal thicket, as Winch notes, is “enough to make anyone’s head spin” (217). Clearer are the persistent family characteristics of deceit and self-promotion. For example, Jacques’s daughter Apoline was heir to property that, according to a prior arrangement, could not be sold until she reached the age of twenty five. When only twenty four, she sold it to a friend, and then resold it to someone else after her birthday. The first sale, she argued, was void because she had been “underage,” and she had no intention of returning anyone’s money (108). Her youngest son, Cyprian, forced his Julie Winch. The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 416 pp. ISBN: 9780809095179 (cloth), $35.00. BOOK REVIEWS 88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY own half-brother to liquidate their partnership in a successful barbershop and bath—and then went into competition with him (178-79). Race and racial boundaries constantly change in this story, making them both important and unimportant by turns. Apoline shrewdly chose relationships with white men who might make her life comfortable. Her grandson, Henry Clamorgan Jr., became white physician Fordé Morgan, an expert in pharmaceuticals. Another grandson, Louis P. Clamorgan, saw his family rocked by the scandal associated with passing. The family lived in Maplewood, a “white” suburb of St. Louis, and called themselves Spanish. A daughter, Maud, and her husband, who also passed, had a baby whose appearance betrayed her African American heritage . Another daughter was outed by a rejected suitor. A third daughter’s husband sought an annulment when he learned of the family’s history. Apoline’s son, Cyprian, was white and then black in Reconstruction New Orleans and then white again when he returned north. Winch knows Cyprian well, having introduced and edited his 1858 book, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (1999), and she uses him and his family to close the story. Fast-dealing Cyprian is an apt bookend to his like-minded grandfather.Fashioninghimselfaswhiteattorney C. C. Morgan in Reconstruction New Orleans, he tried to “squeeze” five hundred dollars out of P. B. S. Pinchback, convicted of assault with intent to kill after a fight with his brother-in-law. The two became enemies and engaged in a gunfight on Canal Street. Had Cyprian been a better shot, Winch says, “he might have gone down in history as a notorious assassin” (337). Instead, his political aspirations thwarted, Cyprian was reduced to seeking...