RICE UNIVERSITY Remaking African America in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790–1860 By William D. Jones A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE James Sidbury James Sidbury (Apr 13, 2020) James Sidbury Professor, History William McDaniel (Apr 13, 2020) W. Caleb McDaniel Associate Professor, History Jeffrey Fleisher Associate Professor, Anthropology HOUSTON, TEXAS April 2020 Copyright © 2020 by William D. Jones ABSTRACT Remaking African America in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790–1860 by William D. Jones This dissertation is a history of black life in the wake of forced migration to the lower Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. It is a history of bought and brought enslaved people, of the local material and environmental conditions that drove their forced migration; of the archives that recorded their plight; of the families and churches they remade; and of how they resisted. Its focus is Louisiana because the consequences of the domestic slave trade there were intense, and unique local archives can measure them. If Africans and their descendants made African America in the coastal plains of North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a narrative that historians have extensively explored in colonial Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and Louisiana, their descendants remade African America in the lower Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. Stripped from their homes to supply the labor for the nineteenth-century cotton and sugar revolutions, black men and women brought to Louisiana remade friends, families, and communities in the new sites of their enslavement. And they remade identities. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century polyglot and diverse communities of enslaved people in Louisiana revealed the varied trajectories of seventeenth and eighteenth-century black Atlantic peoples. On the other hand, the slave trades to the lower Mississippi Valley also clarified transatlantic black identities. The power of race and the shared plight of black people were never more evident than where diverse diasporic African and African-descended people lived and survived enslavement together. Documents from local parish archives, Civil War widows’ pension, Works Progress Administration narratives, church documents, and lawsuit casefiles, the major sources consulted for this dissertation, attest that black men and women brought to the lower Mississippi Valley between 1790 and 1860 remade African America in the slave trade’s wake. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, members of my graduate cohort at Rice and fellow students in the graduate program have heard, commented on, and improved various versions of this project, not to mention shaped who I have become as a historian and scholar. They include Patricia Bell, Bill Black, John M. Crum, Thomas Blake Earle, Hannah J. Francis, Arang Ha, D. Andrew Johnson, Cami Rose Beekman Jones, Maki Kodama, Keith D. McCall, Maria R. Montalvo, K. James Myers, David Ponton III, Christina Regelski, Erika Rendon-Ramos, Kelyne Rhodehamel, William “Wes” Skidmore, Sean Morey Smith, Edward Valentin, and Miller Shores Wright. I thank the members of my dissertation committee, James Sidbury, W. Caleb McDaniel, and Jeffrey Fleisher for the time and energy they spent reading and re-reading my work. In addition to directing my reading of the scholarship, Sidbury and McDaniel have read multiple iterations of my project, guided me along the way, and raised many important questions, including a handful that had never occurred to me. I first broached many of the questions that this dissertation addresses in a seminar directed by Randal L. Hall, and I first articulated my dissertation in another led by John B. Boles. Both historians were helpful in encouraging and orienting this dissertation at an early stage. If there is active prose and brevity to be found in the following pages, it is attributable to the persistent writing instruction that Jared Staller gave the graduate students who took his seminar on west Africanist historiography; Staller also direct my field in African history. I would also like the acknowledge the labors of the other faculty members at Rice under whom I have studied, including Peter C. Caldwell, Moramay López- Alonso, Ussama S. Makdisi, Alida C. Metcalf, Kerry R. Ward, and Fay Yarbrough. At the Journal of Southern History, managing editor Bethany L. Johnson and assistant editor Suzanne vi Scott Gibbs made my transition to editing book reviews seamless; in their capacity as editorial assistants, Rebecca M. Earles, Bryson Kisner, James Myers, Nina D. Nevill, Andrew W. Sanders, and Miller Wright have been invaluable at ensuring I still had time to finish my dissertation. Finally, as the graduate program administrator, Lydia Westbrook has made navigating the university’s bureaucracy possible, even during a time of worldwide pandemic. Research for this dissertation was funded by the Louisiana Historical Association, Louisiana State University Libraries, the Humanities Research Center at Rice University, and the graduate research and travel funds of Rice University’s History Department. The final year of my graduate education was supported by the John B. Boles Editing Fellowship at the Journal of Southern History. Archivist Chris Brown ensured my visit to the Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church in the Archives and Special Collections of Centenary College of Louisiana was a productive one, and he was an accommodating host. I found many of the sources cited in chapter 4, especially the obituaries of formerly enslaved pastors, by following leads he provided me. While I was doing research in Shreveport, Louisiana, at Centenary, my wife and I stayed with Tom and Tracy Pressly, who were gracious and generous hosts; they ensured our trip to Shreveport was fun. The archivists at Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library guided my search through their collections, supported my research, and allowed me to talk about my work with them over lunch. Archivists in the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Ellender Memorial Library at Nichols State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, made available a digital copy of Philip D. Uzee’s translation of Father Charles M. Menard’s “Annals of St. Joseph.” I would also like to thank the staff of the University of Notre Dame Archives and the Louisiana Research Center at Tulane University. vii Finally, the staff of the clerks of court of St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, Plaquemines, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. James, Ascension, St. Mary, and St. Martin Parishes in Louisiana were kind, patient, and more than willing to tolerate my daily presence in their collections of Original Acts. The same can be said for the staff of the Houston Public Library’s Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family. My parents, Glenn and Mary Ann Jones, and my sister, Anna Schwartz, have nurtured my love of history from a young age and been nothing but supportive. Willard and Kim Beekman have treated my accomplishments like those of their own children, for which I am extremely grateful. Old friends, Cayman Clevenger, Matt Deal, Nick Callais, and Joe Ramsey, you have been with me through this long haul. The partners of the Bridge Montrose, thank you for the family we have made together in Houston; you have showed me the love of God, a gift that this acknowledgment does little to repay. Dani and Derek Aschman, Andrew and Denise DuComb, Libby and Travis Hall, Carrie and Jason Hartman, Amber and Heath Haynes, Curt and Mariann Keiffer, Jon and Rheena Luchansky, and Lorie and Matt Stephens: thank you. Jason and Mary Beinemann, Jared Hamilton, Catherine and Mason Herring, Keith and Nicole Legrone, and Bethany and Joshua Montgomery—you deserve mention here too. Finally, to Cami. You have already been acknowledged once here, but I could not have written this dissertation without you. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 19 Death, Labor, and the Political Economy of Remaking African America CHAPTER TWO 48 Remaking African America and the Archives of the Lower Mississippi Valley CHAPTER THREE 80 Re-creating Black Families in the Wake of the Domestic Slave Trade CHAPTER FOUR 113 Re-creating the Black Protestant Church in the Lower Mississippi Valley CHAPTER FIVE 153 Commodification, Criminalization, and Resistance CONCLUSION 185 BIBLIOGRAPHY 197 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES TABLES Table 1: 45 Percentage of Enslaved People in the Populations of Parishes watered by Bayou Lafourche, 1820–1860. Table 2: 88 Home Counties of People on the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831. Table 3: 89 Home Counties of People on the Schooner Say Splendid, 7 Nov. 1831. Table 4: 95 Nations of Enslaved People, St. John the Baptist Parish, 1790–1860 Table 5: 101 Marriage Patterns of Brought People, St. John the Baptist, Terrebonne, and St. Mary Parishes, 1870 FIGURES Figure 1: 89 Counties of the People on the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831 (southern Virginia counties omitted). Figure 2: 90 Counties of the People on the Schooner Say Splendid, 7 Nov. 1831. Figure 3: 165 Plantations of People Who Escaped with the British Army, 1815. 1 INTRODUCTION When formerly enslaved people and their descendants in Louisiana remembered enslavement, they told stories of ships, boats, and barges. “We come here on de ship—dis was before de war—and I remembers it well. Dey made us go by de sea because den we can’t go back,” Ceceil George told an interviewer from the Louisiana Writers Project in 1940.1 “She remembers coming over on a boat and standing on a block with her ma and her grandma,” another interviewer wrote of Frances Doby in 1938.2 When in 1902 and 1907, Frederic Bancroft interviewed people formerly enslaved in a black neighborhood of New Orleans, he learned that “all but 2 or 3 had been brought down by traders.”3 In the early 1990s, Emma Dell Peters remembered her maternal great-grandfather telling her that, “When they left from North Carolina, all of them was on this boat, in a big boat.”4 Her father told a similar story in his own vernacular.