Doctor of Philosophy

Home , Atlantic Creole, Domestic slave trade, Henry Bibb, James Leander Cathcart, James Pitot, Scipio Kennedy

RICE UNIVERSITY

Remaking African America in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790–1860

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

ABSTRACT

Remaking African America in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790–1860

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.

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. He said they were “bought from the white folks on the boat.”5 Leonard Martin’s grandfather was also a “bought slave from somewhere else.”6 Such were the memories of people who lived in the wake of the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade to the lower Mississippi

River Valley. In response to the family separations and forced migrations that transplanted one million people from North America’s Atlantic coasts to its interior during the nineteenth century, survivors remade their identities and crafted origin stories from their memories of home and of

1 Ceceil George, interviewed by Maude Wallae, 15 Feb. 1940, in Ronnie W. Clayton, ed., Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York, 1990), 84. 2 Francis Doby, interviewed by Jeanne Arguedas and Robert McKinney, 6 Dec. 1938, in Clayton, ed., Mother Wit, 51. 3 Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 279n35. 4 Emma Dell Peters, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 12 Feb. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University. 5 Willie Jackson, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 2 Dec. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University. 6 Leonard Martin, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 10 Feb. 1993, ibid.

2 the trade. The roots they planted in the lower Mississippi Valley were strong, but they were shallow. They were transplanted from elsewhere—from Africa, the Virginia and Maryland

Chesapeake, the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, and the French and British Caribbean islands. Bought and brought were words that defined a generation of African Americans in the lower Mississippi Valley—a migration generation, as Ira Berlin has called them.7 Like Martin said, his grandfather “was brought here as a bought slave.”8

The following pages contain a history of black life in the lower Mississippi River Valley in the wake of nineteenth-century forced migrations. It is a history of bought and brought people, of the local material 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 enslaved migration were intense and the archives uniquely situated to measure them. If Africans and their descendants made African America in the coastal plains of North America during the eighteenth century, 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, they remade friends, families, and communities in the new sites of their enslavement. And they remade identities. The nineteenth-century slave trades to the lower Mississippi Valley forced together people from West and West Central Africa, the former British North American colonies,

Caribbean islands, and the former French and Spanish colony of Louisiana. This great diversity of people of African descent—comparable in Anglo-America only to Caribbean islands— comprised black men and women from communities with distinct diasporic histories. On the one

7 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. 8 Leonard Martin, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 10 Feb. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University.

3 hand, the polyglot and diverse communities of enslaved people clarified the varied trajectories of seventeenth and eighteenth-century black Atlantic peoples. Enslaved people from the

Chesapeake tidewater had created an African American culture distinct from their black

Louisiana Creole counterparts, for instance. Forced migration illuminated these identities by bringing together black Virginians and black Louisiana Creoles.9 Yet 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.

This dissertation begins by tracing the material and environmental conditions of enslavement in the lower Mississippi Valley, especially the sugar plantations of Louisiana, where death, disease, a punishing labor regime, and an expanding agricultural economy based on cotton and sugar drove a “massive and continuous” slave trade.10 These were the things that black women and men survived every day in the lower Mississippi Valley, but they were also often what brought them there. Measuring the scale of forced migration and its human consequences in

Louisiana is possible only because of distinct political transformations there that created an archive of the slave trade that exists nowhere else in the U.S. South. Chapter 2 provides a history of this often-utilized archive through a history of its makers, Louisiana’s notaries and parish judges. Despite historians’ exhaustive use of notarial records, they are imperfect for

9 On the emergence of black Virginian identity see James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11–49. The forced migration of enslaved people from Saint-Domingue after the Haitian Revolution created similar racial and cultural dynamics throughout the northern Atlantic world as westward forced migration to Louisiana did during the nineteenth century see James Sidbury, “Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 3 (August 1997): 531–52; Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas (Berkeley and other cities: University of California Press, 2012); John Davies, “Taking Liberties: Saint Dominguan Slaves and the Formation of Community in Philadelphia, 1791–1805,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison, ed. Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 93–110. 10 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 179.

4 understanding how black brought people remade African America because recorders erased black voices from their books of acts after the Louisiana Purchase. Other sources, such as Civil

War widows’ pension files, memorials of formerly enslaved black preachers, and case files from redhibition lawsuits, preserved stories of black lives remade in the wake of the domestic slave trade. The final three chapters of this dissertation thus analyze important antebellum black institutions in the context of forced migration to the lower Mississippi Valley. Chapter 3 tells the intertwined histories of black identities and black families remade after sale and separation using slave trade documents, fugitive slave advertisements, and the pension files of the widows of black Civil War soldiers. Chapter 4 explains the transportation and transformation of black evangelical Christian churches to the valley, since many black people sold to domestic slave traders recreated the churches that they were separated from in the Atlantic seaboard South; late- nineteenth century and early-twentieth century memorials of formerly enslaved black Methodist preachers and the correspondence of Catholic clergy are utilized, as well as the few surviving records of antebellum churches and church conferences. Finally, Chapter 5 is a history of resistant brought people, the communities they made by escaping lower Mississippi Valley plantations, and their concurrent criminalization through domestic slave trade regulations and redhibition codes. These thematic chapters address some of the important ways black enslaved migrants remade African America in the wake of the domestic slave trade to the lower

Mississippi Valley.

As a social and cultural history of African Americans’ lives in the lower Mississippi

Valley in the wake of forced migration, the chapters that follow contribute to recent developments in the historiography of nineteenth-century enslavement in the United States, especially forced migration. Since the 1980s, historians have transformed the narrative of the

5 domestic slave trade and forced migration. Forced migration and the havoc it wrought in black communities was once de-emphasized, but it is now a central part of nineteenth-century African

American and United States history11 In light of these revelations, historians have produced invaluable scholarship that emphasizes the horror and trauma of separation, especially by focusing on enslaved people’s families.12 These histories, which are often set in the upper South, background the parallel narratives related here of remaking and recreating in the lower South.

Though, as chapter 3 demonstrates, local and regional slave trades ensured communities of enslaved people in the lower Mississippi Valley were far from immune to the separations that

11 The most important revision has been clarifying the number of enslaved people transported west through the domestic slave trade, and scholars have used both coastwise ship manifests, census data, and New Orleans conveyance documents. This revision began with: Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Herman Freudenberger and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (winter 1991): 452; Jonathan B. Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” Journal of Economic History 52 (March 1992): 115–16; Jonathan B. Pritchett, “Quantitative Estimates of the United States Interregional Slave Trade, 1820–1860,” Journal of Economic History 61, no. 2 (2001): 467–75; Richard H. Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth, “A Troublesome Statistic: Traders and Coastal Shipments in the Westward Movement of Slaves,” Journal of Economic History 73 (September 2013): 792–809. Building on these quantitative histories, cultural historians of the slave trade have argued for the great importance of the trade in American history, beginning with Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Phillip Davis Troutman, “Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Virginia, 2000); Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); David L. Lightner, Slavery and the Commerce Power: How the Struggle Against the Interstate Slave Trade Led to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For an overview of histories of the slave trade see Richard Bell, “The Great Jugular Vein of Slavery: New Histories of the Domestic Slave Trade,” History Compass 11 (2013): 1150–64. 12 Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 102–40; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750- 1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 144–55; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 133–78; Thomas D. Russell, “Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption of Slave Families at Court Sales,” Utah Law Review 4 (1996): 1161– 1210; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160, 175–84, 204–57; Emily West, “Surviving Separation: Cross- Plantation Marriages and the Slave Trade in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of Family History 24, no. 2 (April 1999): 212–31; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migrations, Ex-Slave Narratives and Vernacular History,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 243–74; Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 31–35.

6 plagued women and men who lived in places like Maryland and Virginia, the cotton and sugar plantations of the valley were also often places where strangers appeared. Enslavers in Louisiana and elsewhere challenged communities of enslaved people to incorporate newcomers when they returned from the slave market. Family separation in the upper South and family re-creation in the lower South were interconnected through the destruction that forced migration wrought in people’s lives. This dissertation thus adds to a growing literature on the nineteenth-century history of black enslaved people who survived forced migration.13 Often written from the perspective of the plantation frontier, historians who have studied the lives enslaved people made after forced migration have demonstrated that the first half of the nineteenth-century were decades of radical cultural transformations that were bound to the slave trade and other forms of enslaved migration.

If historians of capitalism and slavery have demonstrated that the westward expansion of plantation agriculture and forced migration went hand-in-hand with the rise of American capitalism, the following pages are also a history of the cultural and social consequences of those intertwined developments.14 For instance, the rise of cotton and sugar agriculture in the lower

13 Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 101–43, 155–67; Allan Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 226–68; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 99–104, 138–50, 184–87, 192; Gail S. Terry, “Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship in Trans-Appalachian Migration, 1790–1811,” in Afro-Virginian History and Culture, ed. John Saillant (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 61–83; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 63–77; Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 62–87, 192–99; Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 161–209; Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’”; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 25–41; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21–58; Damian Alan Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 14 Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism; Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

Mississippi Valley meant an increasing population of black enslaved people from the eastern

United States through forced migration, and it also meant the westward movement of black evangelical Protestant Christians and their residence with black Catholics, as chapter 4 demonstrates. As chapter 5 shows, the criminalization of black men and women, so paramount in the histories of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, is also apparent during the era of slavery’s geographic expansion, when white Louisiana lawmakers criminalized black women and men sold in New Orleans and other slave markets by attempting to regulate the slave trade. There were cultural and social consequences to the transformation of slavery during the nineteenth- century era of American capitalism that included alterations in Louisiana’s slave-trade archive, the destruction of black families, the westward movement of black Protestant Christianity, and the criminalization of forced migrants. As Edward E. Baptist writes, the expansion of slavery to the lower Mississippi Valley and elsewhere “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation.”15 And it shaped the lives of black men and women. As slavery expanded, so too did African America.

These and other consequences are perhaps best understood in the context of narratives pioneered by historians of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century African diaspora. This dissertation is a history of African Americans in diaspora in North America. Scholars of African and African-descended people in North and South American colonies have long studied enslaved people’s lives in the wake of the slave trade, and they have developed sophisticated frameworks and methodologies to understand how people from western and West-Central Africa remade identities in the Americas.16 From studies of black lives in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade, it

15 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, xxi. 16 Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans

8 is possible to see parallels in the histories of African American lives in the wake of the United

States’ domestic one. For instance, Stephanie E. Smallwood’s contention that the Atlantic slave trade “held the community suspended in the unsteady state of an immigrant community in the making” and Joseph C. Miller’s observation that the “inherent, ongoing process of constant, complex, and contested movements . . . the varying rhythms of entering and leaving, was the historical focus of slaves’ lives” might have been written about the lower Mississippi Valley and the United States South.17 Historians of the nineteenth-century U.S. South have often leaned on histories of making African America, but, as Anthony E. Kaye writes, “The shift to a diasporic approach in the study of slavery left historians of the antebellum South, with its increasingly creole slave population, in an awkward position.”18 Yet communities of enslaved people in the lower Mississippi Valley between 1790 and 1860 were also communities of diasporic people, and they were also made so by forced migrations, whether those migrations were plantation

in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 122–45; Paul E. Lovejoy, “Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora,” in Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, ed. Paul E. Lovejoy (London and New York: Continuum, 2000); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007); Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 17–56; Walter C. Rucker, Gold Coast Diasporas: Identity, Culture, and Power (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015). 17 Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 200; Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 147. 18 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 642. For those who have analyzed African diasporas in the nineteenth-century South see: Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 186–243, 291–93; Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Sean Kelley, “Blackbirders and Bozales: African-Born Slaves on the Lower Brazos River of Texas in the Nineteenth Century,” Civil War History 54 (Dec. 2008): 406–23.

9 transportations, Atlantic and intercolonial slave trades, or the domestic slave trade.

Therefore, this is a history of African America’s remaking in the lower Mississippi

Valley, not its making, since most of the black women and men who lived in the era of the

United States’ domestic slave trade were the descendants of Africans. By the time slave traders moved them south and west, people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley lived in communities in the eastern seaboard South with their own cultures distinct from those that existed in eighteenth and seventeenth-century Africa but made from them. Years before black forced migrants arrived on cotton and sugar plantations, sometimes centuries before, their ancestors had made African America in the plantation districts of French, Spanish, and British

North American colonies.19 Those enslaved people whom brought men and women found in the lower Mississippi Valley, especially lower Louisiana, were also the descendants of Africans and had formed their own distinct African American culture.20 By 1803, the year of the Louisiana

Purchase, Africans had already made African Americas in the Virginia and Maryland

Chesapeake, South Carolina Lowcountry, and the bayous of the lower Mississippi Valley. And the descendants of the Africans sent to the Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina colonies had already begun to bring their cultures west to lands that the United States government had recently taken from Native Americans: the Chesapeake people to middle Kentucky and middle Tennessee and the Lowcountry people to the Georgia piedmont.21 It was in the lower Mississippi Valley and the

United States Gulf South where the slave trade and forced migration brought the African

American peoples of North America together during the nineteenth century, where creoles of

Virginia and South Carolina lived alongside creoles of Louisiana. Thus, African America was

19 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. 20 Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana. 21 Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 237–53; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 668–70.

10 remade there by the descendants of its makers.

Forced migration, whether through Atlantic, interregional, and local slave trades or plantation relocation, shaped the lives of black men and women who lived in the lower

Mississippi Valley. As this dissertation shows, brought was one of the most common words forcibly migrated black men and women employed when they told their stories to others. The word invokes the physical dislocation inherent in forced migration and the accompanying destruction of social ties. To describe someone as brought, as Martin described his grandfather, is to suggest forced migrants left people to whom they belonged, that they had left a home.22 The word also underscores the power of white enslavers who moved black men and women where they wished—both the slave traders who purchased people in the states of the United States’ southeastern Atlantic coast or the Ohio River and Tennessee River valleys for shipment south and west, and the migrating enslavers who abandoned lands in the East and transported their families and the people they enslaved. Wherever and whenever black or white people used brought to describe African Americans, the word was laden with assumptions about white racial power. If brought invoked a history elsewhere and of forced migration, it also conjured lives lived in the wake of enslaved migration. In the stories cited in the pages that follow, survivors of forced migration talked about being brought in order to tell of their lives after forced migration.

Finally, from the vantage of the present, it also unites the victims of the slave trades and other pernicious forms of enslaved migration under a shared history and provides a useful framework with which to understand the lives that black men and women made in the lower Mississippi

Valley. Brought describes the personal histories of a large and diverse group of people of African descent forcibly migrated to the region between 1790 and 1860.

22 Leonard Martin, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 10 Feb. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University.

If being brought characterized a generation of nineteenth-century Africans and African

Americans, black men and women in the lower Mississippi Valley also often spoke of having been bought. Though all forced migrants could tell stories of being brought, stories of being bought related the most common route of enslaved migration, the slave trade. When Martin labeled his grandfather a “bought slave,” he invoked the chattel principle, the blunt historical reality that, at one time, his grandfather’s body, his very personhood, was worth a price.23 The commodification of black people underwrote narratives of both the brought and the bought, and from analyses of the structures of the United States’ nineteenth-century economy, commodification often generated enslaved people’s migration through the slave trade. The power of white men and women to sell and buy black women and men allowed the interregional slave trade, which transported an estimated one million enslaved people west, local and regional trades, and countless other forms of transactions that sunk capital and futures into the bodies of the enslaved.24 This testimony from the grandson of a formerly enslaved man in Louisiana, who said his grandfather was a “bought slave from somewhere else,” illustrates how the traditional economic categories of capital and labor collapsed in the bodies of enslaved people.25 White

23 Johnson, Soul by Soul; Adam Rothman, Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 45; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017). 24 Johnson, Soul by Soul; Richard Holcombe Kilbourne Jr., Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825–1885 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); Edward E. Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, Collateralized and Securitized Human Beings, and the Panic of 1837,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornbluth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 69–92; Peter Depuydt, “The Mortgaging of Souls: Sugar, Slaves, and Speculation,” Louisiana History 54 (Fall 2013): 448–64; Bonnie Martin, “Silver Buckles and Slaves: Borrowing, Lending, and the Commodification of Slaves in Virginia Communities,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison, ed. Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 30–52; Karen Ryder, “‘To Realize Money Facilities’: Slave Life Insurance, the Slave Trade, and Credit in the Old South,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies, ed. Forret and Sears, 53–71; Michael Ralph, “Value of Life: Insurance, Slavery, and Expertise,” in Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, eds., American Capitalism: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 25 Leonard Martin, interviewed by Adrienne LaCour, 10 Feb. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana State University.

12 enslavers moved black people to the lower Mississippi Valley for their labor—so they could force enslaved people to plant and harvest cotton and sugarcane—but white people, particularly slave traders, commodified black men and women and profited from that migration. Not all people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley were also bought people, but by 1860 the highly developed and ubiquitous domestic slave trade in the United States ensured most were.

Hence the years that bind this study. From 1790 to 1860, the lower Mississippi Valley, especially Louisiana, experienced its most rapid transformations. Migrations, voluntary and forced, of white people hoping to earn fortunes, of the black people whom they planned to exploit, and of Native Americans coping with the consequences of demographic collapse and land appropriation, were central. In the final decade of the eighteenth century, the region transformed from a colonial backwater of the Spanish and British empires, where white people forced the few African and African-descended people they enslaved to grow tobacco and indigo amid Native American majorities, into the object of many white Americans’ dreams to earn fortunes from cotton and sugar.26 The revolution in France’s colony in Saint-Domingue rose sugar prices and made it possible for places formerly marginal to the Atlantic world sugar economy to enter the industry; landowners in those places, like the French-speaking colonists of

Spain’s Louisiana or their counterparts in Cuba, also benefited from the flight of Saint-

Domingue sugar makers, who brought knowledge about growing and processing sugarcane.27

26 John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770–1820,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Summer 2012): 180–87; Patrick Luck, “Creating a Deep South: Making the Sugar and Cotton Revolutions in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1790– 1825,” (Ph.D. diss.: Johns Hopkins University, 2012); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 45–54; Brian E. Coutts, “Boom and Bust: The Rise and Fall of the Tobacco Industry in Spanish Louisiana, 1770–1790,” The Americas 42 (Jan. 1986): 289– 309; Jack D. L. Holmes, “Indigo in Colonial Louisiana and the Floridas,” Louisiana History 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 329–49. 27 Daniel R. Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953), 4–5; Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and

Meanwhile, cotton prices too were high and the new cotton ginning technology began to appear in the valley, with the first Eli Whitney gin arriving by 1795.28 White Americans migrated to

Louisiana and Mississippi, incentivized by both cotton and sugar prices and Spain’s cheap land policies.29 The population of enslaved people boomed as a result, fed by intercolonial and

Atlantic slave trades.30 What had been a majority creole population, most of whose ancestors had been brought from the Senegambia region, became highly Africanized, specifically by women and men from the Congo River region.31 By 1800, white landowners and slaveowners laid the economic foundations that characterized the lower Mississippi Valley in the decades preceding the American Civil War, namely slave-based cotton and sugar production.

Land speculation, white American migration, and the slave trade intensified after 1803, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s military losses in Saint-Domingue and the subsequent declaration of

Haitian independence led to the sale of the Louisiana Territory—only recently ceded to France by Spain—to the United States.32 A land and population boom, fed by migration, followed, and it

Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 79-99; Eric Otremba, “Inventing Ingenios: Experimental Philosophy and the Secret Sugar-Makers of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic,” History and Technology 28, no. 2 (June 2012): 119–47; Maria M. Portuondo, “Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba,” Technology and Culture 44, no. 2 (April 2003): 231–57. 28 Rothman, Slave Country, 47; Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29. 29 Gilbert C. Din, “The Immigration Policy of Governor Esteban Miro in Spanish Louisiana,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (October 1969): 155–75; Gilbert C. Din, “Proposals and Plans for Colonization in Spanish Louisiana, 1787-1790,” Louisiana History 11, no. 3 (Summer 1970): 197–213; Gilbert C. Din, “Spain’s Immigration Policy in Louisiana and the American Penetration, 1792-1803,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 76, no. 3 (January 1973): 255–76. 30 Douglas B. Chambers, “Slave Trade Merchants of Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803: Clarifying the Colonial Slave Trade to Louisiana in Atlantic Perspective,” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 3 (December 2008): 335–46; Jean-Pierre le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46 (Spring 2005): 185–209; Rothman, Slave Country, 83–95; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana History 37 (Spring 1996): 133–61. 31 The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/AgggNICf; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 29–118, 275–315; Chambers, “Slave Trade Merchants of Spanish New Orleans,” 336; le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana,” 207. 32 Laurent Dubois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” Southern Quarterly 44 (2007): 18–41.

14 continued, with fits and starts, to the Civil War.33 Until the 1820s, plantation migration from the southeastern United States and the Atlantic slave trade, which was illegal after 1808 but unenforced until the 1820s, caused a rising population of African and African-descended people who supplied the labor on new cotton and sugar plantations.34 After the 1820s, well-financed and vertically integrated slave trading firms arose and created what became known as the United

States’ domestic slave trade, which fed the economic, demographic, and spatial growth of the lower Mississippi Valley’s plantation complex with black women and men from regions with enslaved labor surpluses.35 The black population of the valley, which had transformed from a predominantly Creole one to a majority African one between the 1790s and 1810s, transformed yet again into a majority African American one from the 1820s to the 1860s. To write a history of enslaved people in the lower Mississippi Valley from the end of the eighteenth century to the onset of the Civil War is thus to write about brought peoples.

The decades considered in this dissertation were also years of irrevocable transformation in Native America. The nineteenth-century Native American history of the lower Mississippi

Valley was characterized by migration and its intending cultural consequences. The rise of cotton and sugar agriculture caused the decline of the deerskin trade, on which Indian peoples who lived

33 Tom Henderson Wells, “Moving a Plantation to Louisiana,” Louisiana Studies 7, no. 3 (1967): 279–89; Donald F. Schaefer, “A Statistical Profile of Frontier and New South Migration: 1850–1860,” Agricultural History 59 (October 1985): 563–78; Jane Turner Censer, “Southwestern Migration among North Carolina Planter Families: ‘The Disposition to Emigrate,’” Journal of Southern History 57 (August 1991): 417–18; Morris, Becoming Southern, 42– 43, 163; Rothman, Slave Country, 183–88. 34 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 97–132; Joe Gray Taylor, “The Foreign Slave Trade in Louisiana after 1808,” Louisiana History 1 (Winter 1960): 36–43; Morris, Becoming Southern, 65; Rothman, Slave Country, 188– 96; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 40–62. 35 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 94–141; Richard H. Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth, “A Troublesome Statistic: Traders and Coastal Shipments in the Westward Movement of Slaves,” Journal of Economic History 73 (September 2013): 792– 809; Calvin Schermerhorn, “Capitalism’s Captives: The Maritime United States Slave Trade, 1807–1850,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 897–921.

15 in the valley depended.36 With their trade economy in decline, many Native Americans found themselves indebted to American merchants and could offer little in payment aside from their land; as Daniel H. Usner Jr. shows, this economic bind was the result of deliberate American policies to indebt Native Americans in the lower Mississippi Valley in order to acquire their land.37 Responding to lost land, many Native Americans found economic niches in the burgeoning plantation economy, and others migrated.38 Many Choctaws and some Creeks in the

Mississippi Territory moved to northern and western Louisiana, for instance.39 By the nineteenth century, the so-called petite nations of lower Louisiana had established ties with nearby colonists and their governments, and they too adapted their ways of life and migrated during the years of the booming plantation economy.40 The Tunica, for instance, lived on the Red River near the

Mississippi River in the 1790s, but during most of the nineteenth century, they lived farther northwest, near Marksville, Louisiana; there they lived in a village, maintained their tribal identity, and incorporated other small Native American groups.41 The Houma probably migrated from the Mississippi River to present-day Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes, Louisiana, during the 1830s. They lived much like the Tunica—on the margins of plantation society but autonomous and willing to incorporate outsiders.42 When James Leander Cathcart traveled

36 Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 297–304. 37 Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 299–304 38 Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 299–309; Daniel H. Usner Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 95–110. 39 Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 304. 40 Elizabeth Ellis, “Petite Nation with Powerful Networks: The Tunicas in the Eighteenth Century,” Louisiana History 58 (Spring 2017): 133–78. 41 “History Report on Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe,” pp. 5–11; “Anthropological Report on the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe,” pp. 6–9, 11–13, in Technical Reports Regarding the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe of Marksville, Louisiana. Office of Federal Acknowledgment, Bureau of Indian Affairs, United States Department of the Interior 42 Dave D. Davis, “A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians,” Ethnohistory 48 (Summer 2001): 481–86; Jack Campisi and William A. Starna, “Another View on ‘Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians,’” Ethnohistory 51 (Fall 2004): 779–91. The nineteenth-century history of the Attakapas Indians, who lived on Bayou Teche, may have been similar. Writing in 1886, a former plantation owner in the Teche region claimed “There

16 through the swamps of southern Louisiana in 1819, he stopped at an Indian village at the entrance of the Atchafalaya Swamp, where he hired a pilot, and he paused at another, called

Postion’s Station. The people who lived at Postion’s Station, were according to Cathcart, mixed- race families of Chitimacha, African, and European origin, and Pastion “is the chief of the tribe, speaking barbarous French, and a little English besides his own tongue, and the whole settlement are demi Roman Catholics.”43 Native American economic adaptations and cultural transformations during the nineteenth-century in Louisiana were sometimes so dramatic as to render federal recognition during the twentieth century controversial.44 Finally, an untold number of Native Americans and people of Native American and African descent were enslaved. Though the histories of these people remain uncertain, and the state supreme court declared them legally free in 1820, many probably toiled alongside other enslaved men and women in the cotton and sugar fields of the lower Mississippi Valley.45

The lower Mississippi Valley is the broad geographic scope of this dissertation, but its focus is a bit narrower, which bears explanation. Most of the men and women whose stories appear in the pages to follow lived in Louisiana, especially Louisiana’s southern section where sugarcane became the dominant crop. By focusing on these places, I have been able to uncover important stories about cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity in communities of enslaved

seems to have been little or no change in the status of the Attakapas Indians since 1830. They had then pretty much lost their identity as a tribe, though they still had nominal chief and owned their little reservation at the Indian Bend, where about the same number of wigwams or huts stood then as now.” See: F. D. Richardson, “The Teche Country Fifty Years Ago,” The Southern Bivouac 1 (1886): 597; Lauren C. Post, “Some Notes on the Attakapas Indians of Southwest Louisiana,” Louisiana History 3 (Summer 1962): 237–38. 43 Walter Prichard, Fred B. Kniffen, and Clair A Brown, eds., “Southern Louisiana and Southern Alabama in 1819: The Journal of James Leander Cathcart,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 28, no. 3 (July 1945): 782. 44 The Houma are the most well-known example, see Davis, “A Case of Identity”; Campisi and Starna, “Another View on ‘Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians.’” 45 Ulzere et.al. v. Poeyfarre, 8 Martin 155 (Louisiana Supreme Court 1820); Stephen Webre, “The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803,” Louisiana History 25 (Spring 1984): 117–35; Deborah A. Rosen, American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790–1880 (Lincoln, Neb. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 87–90.

17 people that are often absent from analyses of nineteenth-century African American life in the

U.S. South. French migrants to Louisiana colonized land in the southern section of the state first, and for most of French and Spanish colonial rule, the balance of the colony’s European and

African populations lived in what eventually became the sugar parishes, especially the regions nearest New Orleans.46 The communities that black Louisiana Creoles made in southern

Louisiana were, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century, some of the oldest in the region. Yet, every year during the nineteenth century, they were also inundated with forced migrants brought through slave trades from western Africa or eastern North America to work in the killing fields of sugarcane.47 The deep history of these parishes has also meant that they contain archives with some of the most detailed information about enslaved people, especially brought people. In particular, as chapter 2 demonstrates, forms of recording enslaved people’s nations, which were common in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, persisted in the francophone records of southern Louisiana and even transformed in response to the interregional domestic slave trade. Unlike elsewhere in Louisiana, or anywhere in

Mississippi, it is possible to identify from notarized court records enslaved people born in

Louisiana and people brought there. Finally, the sugar parishes were never so unique from elsewhere in the lower Mississippi Valley to merit their historiographical balkanization. The boundaries of “sugar country” shifted by the decade and were always porous.48 In some places, it

46 Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 112–15; Antonio Acosta Rodriguez, La Poblacion de Luisiana Espanola (1763–1803) (Madrid: Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, 1979). 47 Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (December 2000): 1534–75; Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 49–54. 48 Sitterson, Sugar Country; Follett, The Sugar Masters, 18–22. For an argument that stresses the industry’s geographic stability see Sam B. Hilliard, “Site Characteristics and Spatial Stability of the Louisiana Sugarcane Industry,” Agricultural History 53 (January 1979): 254–69.

18 was only until the 1840s that sugar cultivation began to dominate the local agricultural economy; until then, enslaved people toiled in cotton fields.49 In addition, by the late antebellum years, many of the families that owned sugar plantations in southern Louisiana also owned cotton plantations elsewhere in the Gulf South, and they sometimes transported enslaved people from one plantation to another; owners of cotton plantations also hired enslaved people to sugar plantations during harvest time.50 By virtue of its archives, colonial history, cultural diversity, and regional connections, Louisiana, especially its southern section, provides an important geography to study the lives that black men and women remade in the wake of forced migration.

49 Follett, The Sugar Masters, 21. Writing of the Lafourche district, which was the heart of the sugar region, W. W. Pugh remembered during the 1820s that “cotton was the general crop”; by 1835 “Many Americans had settled here, most of whom had directed their attention to sugar instead of cotton.” See W. W. Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1820 to 1825—Its Inhabitants, Customs and Pursuits, Part 2,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 6, 1888; W. W. Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1835 to 1840—Its Inhabitants, Customs and Pursuits, Part 3,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 13, 1888. F. D. Richardson also remembered that agriculture in the Teche region became predominantly sugarcane during the 1830s, see: F. D. Richardson, “The Teche Country Fifty Years Ago,” The Southern Bivouac 1 (1886): 593. 50 Malone, Sweet Chariot, 1–3; Follett, The Sugar Masters, 82–85. Some examples of families involved in both cotton and sugar production can be found in: Edward J. Gay and Family Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University; David Weeks and Family Papers, LLMVC, LSU; Mathews-Ventress-Lawrason Family Papers, LLMVC, LSU; Edward Butler Family Papers, LLMVC, LSU.

CHAPTER ONE

DEATH, LABOR, AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF REMAKING AFRICAN AMERICA

As Charlotte Brooks and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert sat together in Albert’s home in

Houma, Louisiana, sometime in the 1870s, Brooks remembered what it meant to be sold with no friends or family to a sugar plantation in lower Louisiana. “I was a poor lone creature to myself when I first came out of Virginia,” Brooks remembered telling Jane Lee, a fellow survivor of the domestic slave trade from Virginia, “I told her I had left all of my people too.”1 During the rest of Brooks’s enslaved years on a plantation carved from the canebrake of a Mississippi River distributary, she found new people and re-created what she had known in Virginia. She transformed strangers, fellow enslaved migrants, into friends and family. Conversations like the one Brooks and Lee had together in the lower Mississippi Valley were the substance of African

America’s remaking during the nineteenth century. They were how “alienated individuals persistently sought creative ways to stave off isolation and constitute themselves as social beings.”2 Prayers shared, songs sung, food eaten together: these were the things of life. Yet death surrounded enslaved people, and it was often the reason why they were brought to the lower

Mississippi Valley. Forced migrants, “alienated individuals,” and enslaved strangers arrived on

Louisiana plantations because sugar and cotton growers purchased increasing numbers of enslaved people to plant, harvest, and process increasing acres of cane and cotton. As Brooks and her fellow forced migrants grew and transformed sugar country for their enslavers at hazardous

1 Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1890), 8. 2 James H. Sweet, “Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (April 2013): 257.

20 speeds, they succumbed to the diseases of the alluvial swampland environment and became victims of gastrointestinal bacteria, parasites, and their own malnourished and exhausted bodies.

The so-called sugar masters wed their futures and fortunes to the market for enslaved humans, and for six decades they challenged the black people they bought to make communities of one another.3 Enslaved strangers forever appeared on the levee roads, in the cane fields, and at the entrances of slave quarters in the lower Mississippi Valley to replace the dead or augment the labor of the living. Once forced migrants arrived at the new sites of their enslavement, they remade African America as they performed back-breaking labor in a deadly environment. The slave trade wed the political economy and material conditions of enslavement in the lower

Mississippi Valley to the remaking of African America.

The slave trades of what scholars have called the “second slavery” made strangers of enslaved people, as slave traders tore apart black communities in Africa and the Americas.4 The

United States’ domestic slave trade fed the growth of Louisiana’s sugar and cotton economies.

The owners of land and slaves in the place J. Carlyle Sitterson years ago called “sugar country,” whom Richard Follett has dubbed “sugar masters,” amplified and replenished their labor gangs in the slave markets of New Orleans and the bayou towns of lower Louisiana.5 Historians have recently accounted again for what they did there: the money they spent; the credit they borrowed; the systems of exploitation and oppression they inherited, perpetrated, and innovated.6 And they

3 Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005 4 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 627–50; Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, M.D. and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). For domestic slave trades in an Atlantic context see Walter Johnson, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). 5 J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 (Lexington, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1953); Follett, The Sugar Masters. 6 Michael Ralph, Treasury of Weary Souls, http://www.treasuryofwearysouls.com/; Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston:

21 have followed the slaveowners to their plantations, where they have discovered that the sugar masters and their contemporaries in the cotton kingdom were accountants, labor managers, innovators, and capitalists, all in addition to the other roles historians have known slaveowners performed well: sadists, misogynists, bigots, rapists, and murderers.7 Often absent from these histories, though, are what Vincent Brown has called “a politics of survival” of the very people purchased by these agro-industrial capitalists.8 Enslaved people, Brown contends, developed that politics as they made meaning of the lives they lived together, lives that were never “beset” by their enslavement nor “reduced” to it, but instead conditioned by it.9 Remaking African America and transforming strangers into friends was a goal of that politics of survival. In order to understand how Charlotte Brooks and thousands of her contemporaries remade African America in the North American interior, this chapter recovers the challenges to brought people’s survival.

Labor, disease, malnourishment, and death were the human costs of making the United States’ plantation frontier in the wake of the domestic slave trade. They were the obstacles to remaking

African America.

Slaveowners designed a murderous labor regime in Louisiana’s difficult natural environment; they created double-digit rates of natural population decrease in the population of

Beacon Press, 2017); Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815– 1860 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018); Daniel B. Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Schermerhorn, Business of Slavery; Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 8 Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1246. 9 Ibid., 1246. Here Brown is developing Walter Johnson’s argument about agency, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 113–24.

22 enslaved people and replaced the dead through the slave market.10 Of course, those environmental and labor conditions existed alongside the violence, coercion, and trauma slaveholders inflicted on the enslaved. Surviving Justice of the Peace records are scattered with stories of slaveowners and overseers who murdered enslaved people in fits of rage or well- calculated torture, and the parish police jury minutes hold specific instructions to the vigilance committees about how best to maim enslaved people, which included loading their guns “with shot number five or six” and suggestions “not to give exceeding thirty-nine lashes; and these applied in such a way as not to break the skin, or draw blood.”11 As one Louisiana attorney argued “The slave is controlled only by fear, that fear arises solely from arms.”12 Only in such a violent place could a supreme court opinion acknowledge that a plaintiff attempting to win damages for the murder of a man he enslaved “had to contend against the prejudices of many planters, about the necessity of extreme measures, in the police of slaves, and the right of any one to shoot down a slave who does not instantly submit.”13 Slaveholders were often violent, and their violence sometimes turned deadly, but that was just one aspect of their deadliness. They also chose poorly drained, yet fertile sites of their plantations, where bacteria that caused gastrointestinal diseases flourished. Though contemporaries often blamed the environment for the death rates in Louisiana, a forward-looking New Orleans physician was closer to the mark when he argued in 1851 “that this climate is not lethale [sic] per se, but has been made so by

10 Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (December 2000), 1554. 11 Terrebonne Parish Policy Jury Minutes, 1 July 1841, Vol. B, Police Jury Transcriptions: Parish of Terrebonne, W.P.A. Collection: Historical Records Survey Transcriptions of Louisiana Police Jury Records, Lower Louisiana and Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University (hereafter cited LLMVC). Saint James Parish Justice of the Peace Ledger, LLMVC. 12 Argument of W. E. Edwards, p. 4, Arnandez vs. Lawes, Feb. 1850, No. 1572, Historical Archives of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter LSC, UNO). 13 Arnandez vs. Lawes, Feb. 1850, No. 1572, p. 12, LSC, UNO.

23 superadded or abused conditions.”14 The conditions he had in mind were hygienic ones, but the population sizes and densities of sugar-growing slaveowners’ plantations also contributed to their deadliness. As Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho summarized: “low living standards, poor sanitation, and dense human and animal populations made the slave quarters a haven for many pathogens that adversely affected human health.”15 Although McGuire and

Coelho conclude that the diseases that infected enslaved people “were not dramatic diseases that kill, but lingering diseases that debilitate,” enslaved men and women who were fatigued from their daily labor in the cane fields often succumbed to them.16 Moreover, the labor enslaved people’s owners forced them to perform cast a physical toll on enslaved people’s bodies, and they caused muscle, bone, and joint injuries, lifelong handicaps, and fatal accidents. Every year enslaved people succumbed to the “superadded or abused conditions,” and their communities suffered an estimated thirteen percent rate of natural decrease per decade during the first half of the nineteenth century.17 Disease and death went together with the slave trade.

Disease and population density went hand-in-hand. Although enslaved men and women who lived on sugar plantations were rural people, most of their lives took place on densely populated natural levees—the alluvial soil that lined the banks of waterways—that were only a quarter to one mile wide before they gave way to the flowing water of the rivers, streams, and

14 E. H. Barton, Report to the Louisiana State Medical Society on the Meterology, Vital Statistics and Hygiene of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Davies, Son and Co., 1851), 56. 15 Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2011), 132. 16 Ibid., 174; the literature on enslaved people’s health is vast, see: Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Katherine Kemi Bankole, Slavery and Medicine: Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum Louisiana (New York: Garland Publishing Inc.: 1998); Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). 17 Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1554.

24 bayous or the stagnant water of the backswamp.18 When Thomas S. Teas floated down the

Mississippi River in the 1820s, he observed “The country . . . has the appearance of one continued village. . . . The front being so narrow, a considerable part of it is occupied with the planter and overseer’s houses, negro huts, sugar houses and stabling; so that the river banks resemble the suburbs of a large city”19 Commenting on the same region in 1826, Timothy Flint saw “Noble houses, massive sugar-houses, neat summer-houses, and numerous negro villages succeed each other in such a way, that the whole distance has the appearance of one continued village.”20 Likewise, James Leander Cathcart explored the Bayou Teche region for the U.S.

Navy in 1819, and saw near St. Martinville, Louisiana, “several plantations close together which has the appearance of a town.”21 Normal methods of calculating population density fail to account for the crowds of people who lived on the natural levees of the lower Mississippi Valley because of the acres of remote backswamps, but suggestions from the 1850 census, which recorded improved and unimproved acreage, suggest population densities were on par with some of the U.S. South’s small cities.22 Most of the buildings in the “one continued village” that Teas and Flint saw on the Mississippi River or the town that Cathcart witnessed on the Teche were the homes of enslaved men and women. The size of plantations ensured that the slave quarters could be rather large. Flint wrote about them as if they “surround[] a planter’s house” and William

18 John B. Rehder, Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 15. 19 Edward Teas, Julia Ideson, and Sanford W. Higginbotham, “A Trading Trip to Natchez and New Orleans, 1822: Diary of Thomas S. Teas,” Journal of Southern History 7, no. 3 (August 1941): 390. 20 Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Co., 1826), 300. 21 Walter Prichard, Fred B. Kniffen, and Clair A Brown, eds., “Southern Louisiana and Southern Alabama in 1819: The Journal of James Leander Cathcart,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 28 (July 1945): 824. 22 In 1850, population density in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, when using total farm acreage and improved farm acreage was 37.5 and 159, respectively. In Lafourche: 76 and 151, respectively; in St. Mary: 42 and 204. By comparison, Nashville, Tennessee, had a population density of 52.5. These numbers have been calculated from Social Explorer.

Howard Russell described a “double row of single-storied wooden cottages.”23 Dense populations meant disease spread rapidly, and epidemics were catastrophic.

The diseases that black men and women contracted in the sugar plantation regions of the lower Mississippi Valley were often the consequences of population density. When enslaved men and women died of an illness in southern Louisiana, there was a good chance they had ingested food or water contaminated by human or animal waste. Excrement was everywhere in lower Louisiana because there was nowhere for it to go. The water table was high, the land never drained, and except for the Mississippi River, the waterways flowed slowly.24 When enslaved people drank or cleaned with the water that surrounded their homes, they could infect themselves with the bacteria shigella, vibrio cholerae, or Salmonella typhi. The first caused dysentery, the second cholera, the third typhoid. Nineteenth-century observers and statisticians confirmed that those who lived on waterways, the majority of whom were enslaved people in Louisiana, were the most susceptible. When a physician reported to his colleagues on cholera in St. Mary Parish, he observed “All the cases were confined to the [Teche] Bayou; not a case did I see or hear of in the prairies or at a distance of half a mile from the Bayou.”25 The Louisiana State Medical

Society resorted to statistics to study cholera in 1851, and they found that the disease rose the mortality of places they called “river parishes” in the state’s western section, which included St.

Mary parish.26 Cholera’s effect on mortality was negligible in the drier “upland parishes.”

23 Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 347; William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston and other cities: T. O. H. P Burnham, 1863), 273. 24 Rehder, Delta Sugar, 12. 25 James B. Duncan, “Report on the Topography, Climate and Diseases of the Parish of St. Mary, LA.,” in Southern Medical Reports, ed. Erasmus Darwin Fenner, (New Orleans: B.M. Norman, 1850), 1:192. 26 Barton, Report to the Louisiana State Medical Society, 51–52.

Similar ratios held for other sections of the state. The water-bounded plantations on which enslaved men and women lived and labored were places of death.

Many adult enslaved women and men had seen these gastrointestinal diseases kill their friends and loved ones. Cholera in particular was so devastating that “among the negroes, it is well known to every planter, cholera creates a panic.”27 Perhaps fearing just that, one plantation owner in Lafourche Parish concealed from her slaves that an enslaved man died of cholera during an epidemic in 1849.28 At other times, enslaved people feared other diseases. A

Mississippi physician wrote that the disease “most dreaded among the negroes is the typhoid, and the epidemic form it so frequently assumes among them, has made it perhaps the most formidable disease.”29 Nineteenth-century physicians never racialized cholera or typhoid, but they could have, for they disproportionately affected enslaved people in the American South.

One doctor’s observation in St. Mary Parish that cholera “occurred mostly among the slaves” was written by countless others, and census recorders demonstrated it in 1850 when they tabulated the country’s first mortality schedules.30 In parishes like Assumption, where the population of free and enslaved inhabitants was nearly equal in number, cholera killed four times more enslaved people than it did free men and women.31 Although cholera was a fact of life in the nineteenth century, it reached epidemic proportions in 1833 and 1849. Few slaveowners and physicians documented the 1833 epidemic, and it is possible, as former slaveowner W. W. Pugh remembered over fifty years later, “the victims (principally negroes) were not so great, because

27 C. B. New, “On the Treatment of Cholera on Plantations,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 7 (1851): 212. 28 William A. Booth, “On the Cholera of Lafourche Interior,” in Southern Medical Reports, ed. Erasmus Darwin Fenner, 1849th ed., vol. I (New Orleans: B.M. Norman, 1850), 233. 29 S.I. Grier, “The Negro and His Diseases,” New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal 9 (1853): 759–60. 30 Duncan, “Report on the Topography,” 192. 31 Barton, Report to the Louisiana State Medical Society, 53.

27 the slave population was not so numerous as in 1849.”32 By 1849, slaveowners had purchased more black people from slave traders and increased the enslaved population and population density of the plantation region (see Table 1). Months after the 1849 outbreak, a physician who attended plantations in Lafourche remarked “The stench from Mr. [Bibb’s] grave yard during the prevalance of the epidemic there, was disagreeably perceptible to the” neighbors.33 Bibb himself stated that “at one such period there were twenty-seven corpses in the houses at once.”34 Few communities suffered as many losses as those who lived on Bibb’s place, but according to the physician, infection rates of 25 to 50 percent per plantation were common elsewhere in

Lafourche Parish.35 In a four-parish sample of enslaved people whose owners reported that they died between spring 1849 and spring 1850 in the mortality schedules of the 1850 census, just under 40 percent died from cholera.36 As Pugh callously remembered, “As a general rule the disease was confined almost exclusively to the negroes, and in a financial point of view the losses were very heavy.”37 To Pugh and his contemporaries, they lost the investments they spent in the bodies of the deceased, and they had to return to the market to replace the dead.

Cholera and other gastrointestinal diseases made visible another constant scourge of lower Louisiana’s enslaved population: worms. When 12 year old Chio went to have a “passage”

32 W. W. Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1840 to 1850—It’s Inhabitants, Customs and Pursuits, Part 5,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 27, 1888. 33 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 229. 34 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 229. 35 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 224–35. 36 Schedule 3: Persons Who Died during the Year Ending 1st June, 1850 in St. James, St. John the Baptist, St. Martin, and Terrebonne Parishes, Seventh Census of the United States, United States Census Bureau, microfilm, Series T655, Roll 21, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D. C. (hereafter 1850 Mortality Schedules, U. S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 21, NARA). Recorders marked the deaths of 387 enslaved people, of whom 154 died from cholera. Given a number of factors, including: that the schedules relied on slaveowners to self- report the deaths of enslaved people; the populations of these parishes; the material conditions of enslavement; and qualitative sources that attested to the deadliness of cholera and lower Louisiana, the mortality schedules must have undercounted the number of total deaths significantly. 37 Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1840 to 1850.”

28 in 1849, his excrement “was thin and had a worm in it;” the same happened to Haywood, Chloe, and most of the enslaved people who lived on Episcopal Bishop Leonidas K. Polk’s plantation in

Lafourche Parish.38 According to the overseer there, who watched as 273 of the 365 enslaved people for whom he was responsible contracted cholera, “Almost all discharged worms; some in great quantities.”39 These parasites deprived their enslaved hosts of the few nutrients their diet afforded them. Worms were probably a reason why 69 people on Polk’s plantation died from cholera in just that one year.40 When they were not fighting an infectious disease, enslaved adults could live their entire lives with worms so long as they ate enough to nourish themselves and their parasites. Enslaved children though often succumbed to parasitic infections because they were malnourished, and worms were one of a few reasons why infant and child mortality was significantly higher for enslaved people in the United States than it was for contemporary white people.41 All of the enslaved people recorded in the sample from the 1850 mortality schedules who died from worms were under the age of 10; the same was true for all but one person ten years later.42 In lower Louisiana, child and infant mortality was so high that there were always more women of childbearing age than there were children.43 The sugar masters did everything they could to force their enslaved laborers to reproduce naturally, which included regulating enslaved women’s reproductive lives to an extent unmatched in the nineteenth-century United

38 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 222. 39 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 223. 40 Booth, “On the Cholera,” 221. 41 Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality: Some Nutritional Answers to a Perennial Puzzle,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 3 (Spring 1977): 290–91; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Ill and Injured Children on Antebellum Slave Plantations: A Dangerous Childhood,” The Southern Quarterly 53 (Spring and Summer 2016): 63–64. 42 1850 Mortality Schedules, U. S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 21, NARA; Schedule 3: Persons Who Died during the Year ending 1st June, 1860 in St. John the Baptist, St. Martin, and Terrebonne Parishes, Eighth Census of the United States, United States Census Bureau, microfilm, Series T655, Roll 22, NARA (hereafter 1860 Mortality Schedules, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 22, NARA). 43 Tadman, “Demographic Cost,” 1549n35.

States.44 Yet slaveowners had already made choices about where enslaved people lived and how they labored that wed the future of their labor forces to the slave market.

Worms and malnourishment may have contributed to a disease that nineteenth-century physicians racialized and labeled cachexia africana. They also called it by its primary symptom: dirt-eating. Physicians believed it was ubiquitous on southern Louisiana plantations. One wrote:

“On nearly every plantation persons will be found addicted to this habit. . . . Among those engaged in the cultivation of sugar cane it is more common than in the cotton-growing region.”45

James Duncan in the sugar-growing St. Mary Parish claimed “On examining negroes on plantations, a medical man is surprised to meet with so many of these cases. Almost every large plantation has three or four, and sometimes more of them.”46 Duncan differed from many of his contemporaries in explaining dirt-eating as “produced by a deficiency of suitable nutriment.”47

He blamed “the diet of negroes on most plantations being salt pork, corn bread and molasses— rarely eating fresh meat and vegetables.”48 Some historians have agreed with Duncan’s assumptions and conclude that cachexia africana was caused by mineral deficiencies, especially iron; Jerome K. Dotson Jr. has contended that geophagy had important cultural significance for

African-descended people but was racialized and medicalized by white physicians.49 As nineteenth-century slaveowners and physicians debated the disease’s causes, they watched as

44 Richard Follett, “‘Lives of Living Death’: The Reproductive Lives of Slave Women in the Cane World of Louisiana,” Slavery and Abolition 26 (August 2005): 289–304. 45 Grier, “The Negro and His Diseases,” 757. 46 Duncan, “Report on the Topography,” 194. 47 Duncan, “Report on the Topography,” 195. 48 Duncan, “Report on the Topography,” 195. 49 Kiple and Kiple, “Slave Child Mortality,” 297–98; Deanne Stephens Nuwer, “‘I’ll Be Blamed Ef I Hanker after Making My Bowels a Brick-Yard’: Dirt-Eating in the Antebellum and Early Modern South,” The Southern Quarterly 53 (Spring and Summer 2016): 141–55; Jerome K. Dotson Jr., “Consuming Bodes, Producing Race: Slavery and Diet in the Antebellum South, 1830–1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016), 84– 112.

30 enslaved people’s malnourished bodies failed them. This was how Patrick died in July 1850; he had been a “ground-eater” for a year.50

Not only did the disease environment conspire against the health of enslaved men and women, so did the labor their owners forced them to perform. Enslaved people worked year- round. They planted cane in the beginning of the year, harvested it at year’s end, and maintained the fields in between. Just as in the grinding season, all the work enslaved people performed on sugar plantations was synchronized. Government reporter Benjamin Silliman for instance wrote

“When the extent of the force on a plantation will allow, the land is planted as fast as the seed cane is cut.”51 They also kept the natural environment at bay. They dug and dredged ditches for better drainage, built and maintained levees to prevent floods, and cleared forests to fuel the boilers and steam-powered grinders for the fall harvest season. Enslaved laborers worked so hard on sugar plantations that enslaved women were often unable to conceive children.52 Of course, nothing compared to the physical strain put on enslaved people’s bodies during the harvest time.

Whereas laborers in cotton fields harvested up to twenty-five acres per person, cane cutters reached max productivity at only seven acres per person.53 Their labor was as fast as it was arduous. Enslaved people cut cane as quick as the kettles boiled it. As Follett contends, sugar planters “fashioned a labor order that toiled at the metered cadence of the steam age.”54 Enslaved men and women paid the costs of fast labor with their bodies and their lives.

50 1850 Mortality Schedule, St. John the Baptist Parish, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 21, NARA. 51 Benjamin Silliman, Manual on the Cultivation of the Sugar Cane, and the Fabrication and Refinement of Sugar (Washington D.C.: Francis Preston Blair, 1833), 12. 52 Richard Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Family History 28 (October 2003): 510–39. Follett contends that enslaved people in the sugar region may have consumed twenty to forty percent fewer calories than they needed in the months they were not harvesting. 53 Follett, Sugar Masters, 92. 54 Follett, Sugar Masters, 93.

The sugar masters recorded those costs in censuses, notarial documents, and their personal journals. The 1850 and 1860 federal censuses recorded mortality for the first time, and the mortality schedules were the only census documents that recorded enslaved men and women’s names. Before recorders of the seventh and eighth federal censuses trawled through lower Louisiana, slaveholders counted enslaved people’s injuries in notarial documents, and they recorded deaths in their journals. Both types of documents were intimately connected to the slave trade. When slaveowners composed estate inventories, conveyance documents, and mortgages, they attached prices to enslaved people, and they explained the values they gave to accident victims by citing their severed digits, missing eyes, herniated groins, and crippled bodies. They never priced dead men and women in most notarized documents, but they kept track of enslaved people’s deaths in their personal logbooks. There they accounted for who they needed to replace when they returned to the slave markets. When an enslaved person died on Joseph Girod’s plantation in St. Charles Parish, he opened his account book to the pages where he listed his enslaved people, drew a long dark slash through the deceased person’s name, and wrote the year in the margin. Girod bought a plantation in 1828 where 40 enslaved men and women lived, and by 1833 at least nine of them were dead; Girod failed to note the death date of another four, so the number might have been as large as thirteen people. One man escaped the “dead or sold” column in Girod’s journal; at some point, perhaps out of frustration, Girod wrote next to Moses’s name “maroon since 1833.”55 Unlike Scipio, Guillaume, and Polly, Moses escaped Girod’s killing fields alive. Not all were as fortunate. Many died in Louisiana’s sugar country.

55 Joseph Girod Plantation Journal, Joseph Girod Papers, LLMVC. Jaspar Gibbs engaged in a similar accounting, noting the years of purchase and death of the people he enslaved, see: Jasper Gibbs Plantation Ledger, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana, pp. 100–45.

Enslaved people suffered a host of physical ailments from the labor they were forced to perform. They wielded large sharp knives that they used to cut cane stalks. The speed they were forced to work meant they sometimes hacked off their digits and limbs or those of nearby workers. Probate inventories, conveyance documents, and mortgages reported one-eyed and one- armed people. 22-year-old Henry Polk had just one eye when one sugar planter sold him to another in 1850, as did 32-year-old Pierre when he was sold in 1840.56 Polyte was 24 when he appeared in an estate inventory, and he had already lost two fingers on his left hand; many more entered the records as “crippled.”57 Sometimes enslaved people died in work accidents, which census takers recorded. For example, in September of 1850 Cecil died on a St. John the Baptist

Parish plantation because of “sudden hemorrhaging.”58 Not every entry was as detailed. Jean died in February from a sudden accident, and Dick died in December in Terrebonne Parish from the same cause.59 Other recorders elucidated the gruesome details of enslaved people’s workplace deaths. James Knot was “killed by a portable saw mill” as he cleared forest in

November 1859, for instance.60 The men who operated the boilers sometimes fell into the fires and burned themselves, or they toppled the large casks of boiled sugar onto themselves and others. Perhaps this was what happened to Billy Foy, who “scalded” himself on a St. James

Parish plantation during the grinding season in 1850 and died thirty days later.61 In November

1860 Jim Fournet was “killed by the bursting of a boiler.”62 Accidents have always been a part of

56 Sale of Slaves from William A. Booth to Marcellin H. Davis, 17 Jan. 1850, Book N, Conveyances, Terrebonne Parish Clerk of Court, Houma, Louisiana; Sale of Slave from Martin Martin to Francois Bauchet St. Martin, 5 Aug. 1840, Book 57, Original Acts, St. John the Baptist Parish Clerk of Court, Edgard, Louisiana. 57 Michel Bergeron estate inventory, 13 Jan. 1840, Book 18, Original Acts, St. James Parish Clerk of Court, Convent, Louisiana. 58 1850 Mortality Schedule, St. John the Baptist Parish, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 21, NARA. 59 1850 Mortality Schedule, Terrebonne Parish, ibid. 60 1860 Mortality Schedule, St. Martin Parish, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 22, NARA. 61 1850 Mortality Schedule, St. James Parish, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 21, NARA. 62 1860 Mortality Schedule, St. Martin Parish, U.S. Census Bureau, T655, Roll 22, NARA.

33 human life, but sugar growers thrust long blades into the hands of their tired and malnourished enslaved laborers and demanded others work over vats of molten sugarcane. In that environment, exhaustion, inexperience, or carelessness ended the lives of enslaved men or women.

Although they injured themselves and others throughout the year, enslaved people were most susceptible to injuries during the grinding season, when they were sleep deprived, calorie- deficient, and dehydrated. During the grinding season, sugar planters forced enslaved people to work twelve to sixteen hour shifts, and they often worked through the night to feed the boilers.

When they were given breaks, enslaved people had to choose whether they wanted to eat or sleep. After weeks of harvesting they could never provide their bodies with the energy and water they needed. Even though average temperatures dropped in November and December, the enslaved people perspired as if they labored in the middle of the summer. Many enslaved people drank molasses during the grinding season, which likely kept them alive. Follett has combined modern research on nutrition and contemporary accounts to conclude that “Slaves who worked around the sugar kettles and consumed ‘sirop’ at will effectively gulped huge quantities of a concentrated version of a high-calorie sports drink.”63 The people working in the sugarhouses may have depleted their hydration levels the quickest. When William Howard Russell visited a sugar plantation he remarked that “the heat from the boilers. . . Seemed too much even for the all-but-naked negroes who were at work.”64 When sugar masters adopted vacuum pans, which replaced the boiling kettles that lined the walls of the sugar houses, sugar planter Judah P.

Benjamin extolled its virtues to his white slave-owning audience “as none need enter in the sugar-house, which is kept thoroughly warmed by the heat of the different steam-pipes, and of

63 Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar,” 523–24. 64 Russell, My Diary North and South, 264.

34 the pans in which the sugar is made.”65 Russell was only in the sugarhouse for a few minutes, but that was long enough to see how the people working there “were streaming with persperation as they toiled over boilers, vat, and cetrifugal driers.”66 Despite the contentions of men like

Richardson, who decided after the Civil War “there were pleasures for the negroes about a sugarhouse unknown to cotton plantations,” the grinding season killed an untold number of enslaved people, and when they died slaveowners returned to the slave market to replenish their labor forces.67

Like their counterparts in the Caribbean, Louisiana’s sugar planters tied their fortunes to the slave market. They traveled to the market to replace the enslaved people who died in their cane fields and to buy more people to plant and harvest more acres of cane. Michael Tadman has concluded that slaveowners masked the thirteen percent-per-decade rate of natural decrease in the sugar parishes by importing so many enslaved men and women from other regions in the

United States that the sugar parishes showed population expansions significantly above average rates of natural increase; they were comparable in their demographics to Caribbean islands.68 Not only did slaveowners develop a deadly labor regime in a natural environment that killed adult enslaved people, but their choices of plantation location, plantation size, and plantation management killed children at rates much more comparable to their counterparts in the

Caribbean than in other places in the United States.69 Slaveowners’ decisions created structures that wed them to the slave trade, for every year they watched as future generations of enslaved people, enslaved women’s “increase,” died on the natural levees in the swamps of southern

65 Judah P. Benjamin, “Louisiana Sugar,” DeBow’s Review 2, no. 5 (November 1846): 334. 66 Russell, My Diary North and South, 264. 67 F. D. Richardson, “The Teche Country Fifty Years Ago,” The Southern Bivouac 1 (1886): 593–98. 68 Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1544. 69 Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1549–50.

Louisiana. The sugar-planting slaveowners continued to expect the women they enslaved to provide new generations of laborers, but those women faced a demographic bind: they were just

40 percent of the population.70 When women gave birth, there was little guarantee their children would reach adulthood; the “superadded and abused” environment and the labor regime harmed children, infants, and pregnant women. Males predominated in the demography of the communities of enslaved people in southern Louisiana not because women died in greater numbers than men, but because slaveowners preferred to purchase men in the slave market.

Anywhere between 64 percent and 70 percent of the enslaved people sold from southeastern states to Louisiana’s sugar region were men.71 To slave buyers, men swung the cane knife harder and faster.72 As Follett argues, antebellum sugar planters “demographically engineered their slave forces,” and as Tadman concludes “far-reaching demographic and social consequences and costs stemmed from this.”73 Double digit rates of natural population decrease and a slave trade that was “massive and continuous” were some of them.74 So was the re-creation of African

America.

The re-creation of African America occurred in the material conditions and political economy of nineteenth-century enslavement in the United States, including death, disease, and the domestic slave trade. The slave trade between American states was never inevitable, but owners of the valuable lands in Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley decided they needed

70 Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1550. 71 Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1549; Jonathan B. Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” Journal of Economic History 52 (March 1992): 115– 16. 72 Meanwhile, their counterparts in Jamaica were fielding majority-female gangs in their cane fields, see Richard S. Dunn, “Sugar Production and Slave Women in Jamaica,” Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, eds. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 49–72. 73 Follett, Sugar Masters, 49; Tadman, “Demographic Cost of Sugar,” 1538. 74 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 179.

36 the trade early in sugar country’s history. Since at least 1795, when both cotton and sugar boomed in the lower Mississippi Valley, landowners pined for continuous, stable, and robust supplies of enslaved men and women, and they unilaterally opposed restrictions on the trade.

Under Spanish dominion in the 1790s, and during American reign after 1803, the people who owned land on the natural levees of lower Louisiana resented, resisted, and repealed attempts to restrict the slave trade. During the two decades before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, the governments that lorded over the lower Mississippi Valley attempted to restrict the slave trade. In response, slaveowners produced proclamations that equated the successful production of their lands with an unrestricted slave trade. Between 1795 and 1800 they chafed under the Spanish colonial government’s restrictions on the trade, and as France designed its government for Louisiana between 1802 and 1803, the slaveowners likewise worried about their ability to acquire slaves in the egalitarian republic.75 Perrin du Lac, who traveled through the region when he thought it would again become part of France’s American empire advised his readers “To derive advantage from the colonies, the importation of Negroes must be protected.”76 New Orleans merchant James Pitot blamed the small number of sugar plantations in the colony on Spain’s slave trade ban and hoped the future “importation of Negroes will provide all the manpower necessary” for sugar cultivation when France finally controlled the colony.77

After the United States purchased Louisiana, landowners again campaigned for free trade in enslaved people because the American Congress at first banned the trade to the territory in

75 Paul F. Lachance, “The Politics of Fear: French Louisianians and the Slave Trade, 1786–1809,” Plantation Societies in the Americas 1 (1979): 162–97; Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins, The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana’s First City Government, 1769–1803 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 153–82; Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999). 76 Francois Marie Perrin du Lac, Travels through the Two Louisianas, and among the Savage Nations of the Missouri (London: Richard Phillips, 1807), 94. 77 James Pitot, Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802, trans. Henry C. Pitot (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 76.

37 response to a petition from antislavery activists.78 Whether or not slave traders would be able to import enslaved people and sell them to slaveowners in Louisiana became a question Congress had to settle.

The slave trade involved many actors, many routes, and took many forms, which meant it was both difficult to police and open to political compromise. Lawmakers regulated some of its manifestations but not others. Between 1803 and 1804 Congress was racked with questions about the various slave trades to the Orleans Territory: would American citizens be allowed to transport enslaved people from the American southeast to the Orleans Territory, and if so, would they be able to sell those enslaved people in the territory? What about the transportation of enslaved people from Africa or the Caribbean to the territory for sale? Some wanted restrictions against Caribbean slaves just in case they received shipments from Saint-Domingue, while others regarded Africans as particularly dangerous since most of the formerly enslaved revolutionaries in the former French colony were African. Abolitionists of course wanted to end the trade in order to restrict and suffocate slavery in the United States altogether.79 Against these positions the slaveowners in the lower Mississippi Valley were united: they needed enslaved people to transform the rich alluvial lands created by the Mississippi River into productive plantations.

When John Watkins traveled through the Orleans Territory in the winter of 1804, he reported

“No Subject seems to be so interesting to the minds of the inhabitants . . . as that of the importation of brute Negroes from Africa . . . without it, they pretend that they must abandon the culture of both Sugar and Cotton.”80 Likewise, Hatch Dent quoted a petition of plantation owners

78 Application to Prohibit the Importation of Slaves into the Territory of Louisiana, 23 Jan. 1804, American State Papers, Miscellaneous, 386. 79 The only record of these debates is: Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1923), 110-43. 80 Dr. Watkins’ Report, New Orleans, 2 Feb. 1804, Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland, (Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 2:10.

38 who complained that restrictions against the slave trade made “the plantations of little or no value, as Sugar, Cotton, Rice or Indigo cannot be cultivated to any extent, nor raised in large quantities without employing a number of hands.”81 They were so desirous of peopling the natural levees of lower Louisiana with enslaved Africans and people of African descent that it was the only issue for which they felt they needed a territorial representative in Congress to voice their interests.82 After a brief period of restrictions immediately after the Purchase, the slaveowners won the day when the Orleans Territory advanced to the second stage of territorial governance.83 The meager restrictions Congress placed on the territory became null and void.

The federal ban on the Atlantic slave trade, which went into effect for the entire country on

January 1, 1808, was the only meaningful federal restriction on the slave trade in Louisiana during the nineteenth century. Until that time slave traders flooded the slave markets in

Louisiana with enslaved men and women from all points on the map, even Saint-Domingue.84 In

1807 the owner of a cotton plantation near Bayou Sarah reported “Great numbers of Africans has been brought to this country lately, as well as great numbers brought down the River from

Kentucky, Cumberland, Virginia, Maryland [and] yet there seems a great demand for such goods, the flourishing situation of the country, the great revenue made by sugar, cotton, &c enables the people to buy slaves very fast—here you will ask, what do they want with so many negroes, the answer is, to make more money.”85 Only in the halls of Congress and Claiborne’s office did people question the repeopling of lower Louisiana with enslaved Africans and their

81 Hatch Dent to James H. McCulloch, New Orleans, 14 July 1804 in The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, (Washington D. C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 9:265–66. 82 Dr. Watkins’ Report, Official Letter Books, ed. Rowland, 2:10–11. 83 “no slave or slaves shall directly or indirectly be introduced into said territory, except by a citizen of the United States, removing into said territory for actual settlement,” see “An Act for the Organization of Orleans Territory and the Louisiana District,” 26 March 1804, in The Territorial Papers, ed. Carter, 9:209. 84 Jean-Pierre le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46 (Spring 2005): 185–209. 85 John Mills to Gilbert Jackson, 19 May 1807, John Mills Letters, LLMVC.

39 descendants.86 For the people who owned land there, the slave trade and the people slave traders sold were as necessary as the levees that kept the water at bay.

Sugar planters thought they needed the slave trade to replace the enslaved laborers who died on their plantations, and they also understood the trade allowed them to augment their gangs so that they could harvest more acres of sugar cane. Sugar country’s borders expanded even as enslaved men and women succumbed to its environment and its labor, a process that began in the

1790s. That was when the descendants of French men and women converted their failing indigo, tobacco, and rice plantations into cotton and sugar plantations in response to rising prices caused by the Haitian Revolution.87 The white slave-owning Louisiana creoles, who liked to call themselves the ancienne population after 1803, credited their contemporary Etienne de Bore with Louisiana’s fist profitable sugar crop in 1795, though sugar cultivation in Louisiana had its roots in the capital of the Atlantic sugar economy: French Saint-Domingue.88 Sugarmaking after all had to be learned, and there were few in Louisiana to teach it. Unsurprisingly, De Bore’s teacher came from Saint-Domingue, a man named Antoine Morin, who no doubt fled the Haitian

Revolution.89 De Bore found Morin via Antonio Mendez, a Cuban who moved to Louisiana and who produce sugar in 1792, though without profit. For his part, Mendez had purchased his

Louisiana land and sugarmaking apparatuses from another migrant from Saint-Domingue named

86 For an example of Claiborne’s views and the reactions of white slaveowners see W. C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, 25 Nov. 1804, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers, 9:340. 87 Laurent Dubois, “The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” Southern Quarterly 44 (2007): 18–41; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 90–93, 102; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 3–12. 88 Joseph G. Tregle Jr, “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 140–41; Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2007), 79–81. When in 1809 New Orleans received thousands of migrants from Saint-Domingue via Cuba, many found employment for themselves and enslaved people in Louisiana’s burgeoning sugar industry, see Paul La Chance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration and Impact,” The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792–1809, ed. Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayetten, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1992), 271. 89 The following narrative is from: Sitterson, Sugar Country, 4–5.

Josef Solis, who arrived in the colony in the 1780s. The very sugarcane plants De Bore planted for his 1795 crop he purchased from Mendez, who had received them from Solis. Like his counterparts in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other members of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world’s sugar elite, de Bore learned how to make sugar from people who earned their expertise before

Saint Domingue exploded.90 After white men in the United States heard about the transmission of sugar culture from the Caribbean to Spain’s Louisiana colony, they traveled there to enter the sugar business and the burgeoning Mississippi River trade. They lived in an era when some of the wealthiest men were sugar cane planters, and the small islands in the Caribbean where they lived with thousands of enslaved people were the crown jewels of European empires. They had only to look at the fortunes of their contemporaries in the Caribbean to see how lucrative sugarcane agriculture was. They claimed, purchased, repurchased, and inherited natural levees, peopled and repeopled the land they acquired with the black men and women they purchased in slave markets, and transformed that land into deadly plantations.91

Nineteenth-century Louisiana was full of the “uninformed and honest Emigrant” who traveled there to established plantations.92 The state’s free white population who lived outside of

New Orleans increased at an astronomical average rate of 32.8 percent per decade from 1820 to

1860 according to the decennial censuses.93 Over half were men. Many wanted to grow sugar,

90 Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 79–99; Eric Otremba, “Inventing Ingenios: Experimental Philosophy and the Secret Sugar-Makers of the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic,” History and Technology 28 (June 2012): 119–47; Maria M. Portuondo, “Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba,” Technology and Culture 44 (April 2003): 231–57. 91 “An especially slow growth in the number of settlers and slaves inhabiting Louisiana, also marked by disease and disruption, meant that much of the Lower Mississippi Valley was being vacated or thinned during most of the eighteenth century—to be reoccupied only in the nineteenth century,” see Daniel H. Usner Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln, Ne. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 55. 92 William Darby, The Emigrant’s Guide to the Western and Southwestern States and Territories (New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1812), 75. 93 U. S. Census Bureau. Louisiana Counties: Total Population by Race, 1820–1860, prepared by Social Explorer.

41 and Louisiana became renowned in the minds of Americans for its sugar industry. Sugar, after all, had been the key to European coffers the century before, and few travelers in the first years of the nineteenth century traveled through Louisiana without publishing prophetic statements about the territory’s gilded future, many of which hinged on sugar. No traveler passed through the recently organized Orleans Territory without fawning over the Mississippi River sugar plantations near New Orleans. John Brackenridge “was enchanted with the mangificence of the scene” and Timothy Flint, though eventually bored by the monotony of over one hundred miles of a “country . . . so level, the mansions so uniform, the fields so exactly alike” thought he had seen “in no part of the United States such a rich and highly cultivated tract of the same extent” as along the Mississippi River.94 The early American sugarmasters communicated their self- importance when they called “The culture of sugar, a culture of the first importance to the prosperity and independence of the United States, a culture forbiden by nature to the other inhabitants of the Union, and confined exclusively to this favoured spot.”95 From the Mississippi

River planters, many of whom were members of the ancienne population, the “uninformed and honest Emigrant” saw what they could accomplish in lower Louisiana with just land and slaves, and as they read the descriptions of the uninhabited places and saw the uncleared natural levees, they imagined themselves in the place of the Mississippi River sugar masters. So enthusiastic were they, men like William Darby cautioned would-be sugar masters to remember “How far north the sugar cane can be cultivated, is an inquiry of very deep interest, and it is one of the many subjects where the human mind is extremely liable to deception. . . emigrants ought to be very cautious of implicitly believing in flattering pictures, drawn by persons interested in

94 Henry Marie Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana; Together with a Journal of a Voyage up the Missouri River, in 1811 (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear and Richbaum, 1814), 174; Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 299–300. 95 “Memorial to Congress by the Territorial House of Representatives,” 14 Nov. 1805, in Territorial Papers, ed. Carter, 9:531.

42 deceiving others, and from their avidity very liable to be decieved themselves.”96 All wanted to grow sugar, but few knew its geographic limitations. As the “uninformed and honest Emigrant” acquired land, sellers increased prices, and migrants moved west to Louisiana’s inland waters, away from the tried and true sugar lands of the Mississippi River. People who had for decades lived on the periphery of Spain’s Atlantic empire found themselves by the first decade of the nineteenth century at the center of a land boom they never expected.

Sugar growers acquired land throughout lower Louisiana, but land markets in some places boomed louder than others, and wherever white migrants landed they brought enslaved people with them to work on their places of death. Land on the Mississippi River near New

Orleans went for a premium, so men of moderate wealth looked west and north. They first scoured the natural levees around Baton Rouge before they took the Lafourche Bayou at

Donaldsonville south and west into the “Lafourche Interior.” There they found natural levees on both sides of the 106-mile-long waterway, which itself bore other, smaller bayous with their own high-grounds fit for planting. As early as 1811 Brackenridge found as he floated down Bayou

Lafourche “Lands have risen here in price, since they have grown in demand for sugar plantations, and many of the petits habitants bought out.”97 Others traveled farther up the

Mississippi River where it gave birth to Bayou Plaquemine. From it they took a long, slow route through the Achafalaya swamp, whose namesake river had yet to establish its own plantation- ready levees, to the calm waters of the Teche Bayou. Like the Lafourche, the Teche tracked a snaking course over 100 miles long through its natural levees to the Gulf of Mexico. Wherever

American migrants went, they met French-speaking European-descended people, who had taken

96 Darby, The Emigrant’s Guide, 75. 97 Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, 173.

43 similar courses to the alluvial lands of southern Louisiana decades before, and Native

Americans. The Native people in lower Louisiana were small in number, members of petite nations; white newcomers during the nineteenth century took what fertile land the Native

Americans claimed by purchasing it or indebting them.98 The white francophone residents were also few in number, and they lived near one another on farms and small plantations close to bayou villages, the few small centers of commerce and social life. Each bayou had its own;

Thibodouxville on the Lafourche and St. Martinville on the Teche were the only ones until the boom years of the nineteenth century. From those population clusters on the bayous of southern

Louisiana sugar country expanded. Migrants and incumbents purchased land farther and farther from town, and when they had gone far enough, they made a new one. During the nineteenth century, sugar planters made places like Napoleonville on the Lafourche, Houma on the

Terrebonne bayou, Franklin on the Teche, and Lafayette on the Vermillion. Their incorporation dates chart the geographic expansion of plantation agriculture down Louisiana’s western bayous from the Mississippi River, as did their location: Houma was south of Thibodouxville; Franklin was south of St. Martinville; Lafayette was south of Opelousas and west of St. Martinville. The formation of these towns also charted the administrative fragmentation of Louisiana’s local governments, for as property owners moved farther and farther from their parish seats—where they transacted and recorded business—they decided they needed new parishes with new parish seats closer to the land they purchased and made into plantations. From 1807, when state founders organized the initial parishes, to 1860 sugar planters organized five new parishes in

98 Usner Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 54–55, 98–110. For an example of credit being extended to Native Americans in lower Louisiana see Attakapas Post, Louisiana Daybook, 1812–1814, Acadiana Manuscripts Collection, Special Collections, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana.

44 sugar country.99 Wherever “the land on the banks of the [bayou]. . .rapidly fill[ed] up with settlers” there always followed enslaved people.100

The growth of the enslaved population of Louisiana’s parishes tracked land purchases and the geographic expansion of plantation agriculture. Take for example Assumption,

Lafourche, and Terrebonne parishes, all watered by Bayou Lafourche. Sugar growers brought plantation agriculture farther and farther from Bayou Lafourche’s outlet with the Mississippi

River, and they increased the proportion of enslaved laborers in the region’s always-growing population. As one man wrote who traveled through it in 1829 with the proud purchaser of land there, the Lafourche country “had been considered of little account till within a few years; when upon examination, it was found to contain the best sugar lands in the United States.”101 When the three parishes were just two in 1820, Assumption Parish, the one closest to the bayou’s outlet with the Mississippi River, reported 32 percent of its population were enslaved.102 In the same year, Lafourche Parish claimed 26 percent.103 By 1830 the sugar masters had cleared plantations from the natural levees of Bayou Lafourche and its distributaries, carved Terrebonne Parish from

Lafourche, and imported enslaved people. Whereas the proportion of enslaved people relative to the total population remained the same in Assumption Parish, the percentage increased in

99 Those parishes were Jefferson (from Orleans, established 1825), Terrebonne (from Lafourche, established 1822), St. Martin (from Attakapas, established 1811), St. Mary (from Attakapas, established 1811), Lafayette (from St. Martin and St. Landry, established 1823), and Vermillion (from Lafayette, established 1844). After the Civil War they created Iberia Parish from St. Mary and St. Martin parishes in 1868. Robert Dabney Calhoun, “The Origin and Early Development of County-Parish Government in Louisiana (1805–1845),” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 56–160. 100 Petition to Terrebonne Parish Police Jury, Terrebonne Parish Police Jury Minutes, 5 April 1858, Vol. B in Police Jury Transcriptions: Parish of Terrebonne, W.P.A. Collection: Historical Records Survey Transcriptions of Louisiana Police Jury Records, LLMVC. The petition was specifically in reference to Blue Bayou. 101 George Lewis Prentiss, A Memoir of S. S. Prentiss, Edited by His Brother (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), 95. 102 U. S. Census Bureau, Assumption Parish, Louisiana: Slave Population in 1820, prepared by Social Explorer. 103 U. S. Census Bureau, Lafourche Parish, Louisiana: Slave Population in 1820, prepared by Social Explorer. Lafourche and Assumption parishes had similar population totals.

Lafourche to 39 percent and was at 49 percent in Terrebonne.104 As the nineteenth century progressed, enslaved people constituted a higher and higher proportion of the parishes’ populations (see Table 1). Sugar growers purchased land in the region watered by Lafourche bayou, transformed that land into deadly plantations, and peopled the natural levees with enslaved men and women. Pugh laid out the simple calculus: “Most planters made money, and generally used it (as their wives said) to buy more land and more slaves to make more sugar.”105

The transition to sugar brought a dramatic growth in the number of enslaved strangers who appeared on the plantations of lower Louisiana.

Table 1: Percentage of Enslaved People in the Populations of Parishes watered by Bayou

Lafourche, 1820–1860106

Year Assumption Lafourche Terrebonne Combined Parish Parish Parish 1820 32.1 25.8 N/A 28.9 1830 33.2 39.1 48.7 38.1 1840 41.8 44.5 52.2 45.3 1850 50.7 45.8 56 50.5 1860 52.6 45.5 56.1 51.3

The story was similar throughout Louisiana and the lower Mississippi Valley. By the

Civil War, the valley was the middle of the so-called black belt, a string of counties dominated by plantation agriculture that stretched from eastern Texas to the Carolinas. On a map that the

104 Assumption Parish was the smallest of these parishes and had a higher population density. If Terrebonne and Lafourche were combined, as they were in 1820, they would have had a population of 7,624, of which 42 percent were enslaved. Data from: U. S. Census Bureau, Assumption, Lafourche, and Terrebonne Parishes, Louisiana: Slave Population in 1830, prepared by Social Explorer. 105 W. W. Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1840 to 1850—It’s Inhabitants, Customs and Pursuits, Part 5,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 27, 1888. 106 US. Census Bureau, Assumption, Lafourche, and Terrebonne Parishes, Louisiana: Slave Populations from 1820 to 1860, prepared by Social Explorer.

United States government produced during the Civil War from the 1860 census returns, the valley appears as a long and thick dark vertical line that bisects the southern U.S., a chasm made by the slave trade.107 In each county, shaded dark by the cartographer to represent the enslaved population percentage, were hundreds of plantations where black men and women had been brought to live and labor. Though a static representation of enslavement in the American South in 1860, the map depicts the culmination of a decades-long process of forced migration. It reveals the demographic consequences of the domestic slave trade. It shows the geography of a remade African America. Yet concealed behind its shades of black and its percentiles, which the cartographer scratched into the shapes of each county, were the human consequences of that remaking, the traumas that black men and women survived and the obstacles they surmounted.

The material conditions of enslavement differed from place to place, but in Louisiana they included the wholesale transformation of the wooded natural levees into cotton and sugar plantations; the gradual growth of those plantations as the owners of land and slaves increased the number of acres they planted; diseased, parasite-ridden, malnourished, and exhausted bodies made to work grueling schedules in dangerous work environments; double-digit natural population decreases both caused and exasperated by gender imbalances and high infant and child mortality; and a trade in enslaved people that separated them from their families and transported them below the “line where snow ceases, and sugar cane commences” to the alluvial bottomlands of the lower Mississippi Valley.108 That trade brought them as strangers to the communities of people who were already surviving there, and it continued to bring strangers to

107 Edwin Hergesheimer, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Henry S. Graham, 1861), https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3861e.cw0013200/?r=0.341,0.483,0.806,0.399,0. 108 William Darby, The Emigrant’s Guide to the Western and Southwestern States and Territories (New York: Kirk and Mercein, 1812), 12.

47 them after they had formed again and anew semblances of the communities from whence they were taken. Such were the conditions of enslavement there, the subjects of enslaved people’s

“politics of survival.” Amid death and disease, and in the wake of the domestic slave trade, forced migrants to the lower Mississippi Valley remade African America.

CHAPTER TWO

REMAKING AFRICAN AMERICA AND THE ARCHIVES OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY

Writing the history of African America’s remaking means reading notarized documents that are housed in Louisiana parish courthouses. Conveyances, estate inventories, and mortgages are crucial. Judges and notaries produced them, and those documents constitute an often-used, yet rarely contextualized archive of slavery. Louisiana’s notarial archives are essential to scholarly research on the domestic and Atlantic slave trades to the lower Mississippi Valley because they include detailed information about slave traders and the people they sold, information absent from census returns.1 Yet no historian has contextualized Louisiana’s notarial documents, even as they have used them to build databases that provide the foundations of our

1 The New Orleans notarial documents have the most extensive scholarly history, see: Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 155–57; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974), 49–53; Richard Tansey, “Bernard Kendig and the New Orleans Slave Trade,” Louisiana History 23 (Spring 1982): 159–78; Jonathan B. Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” Journal of Economic History 52 (March 1992): 115–16; Herman Freudenberger and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 21 (winter 1991): 452; Charles W. Calomiris and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “Preserving Slave Families for Profit: Traders’ Incentives and Pricing in the New Orleans Slave Market,” Journal of Economic History 69 (2009): 986–1011; Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 172–85. These are also the documents that Gwendolyn Midlo Hall built her invaluable database, see: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Louisiana Slave Database; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). Similar records existed in Natchez during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see: May Wilson McBee, The Natchez Court Records, 1767–1805: Abstracts of Early Records (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1953). Some scholars have utilized census returns and statistical analysis to understand forced migration, but these methods can only provide aggregated and anonymized estimates, see: Louis M. Kyriakoudes and Peter A. Coclanis, “The M- Factor in Southern History,” in Ambiguous Anniversary: The Bicentennial of the International Slave Trade Bans, ed. David T. Gleeson and Simon Keith (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2012), 125–37; Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (December 2000): 1534–75; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 21–46, 237–47. A final method, which preserves the identities of enslaved people, involves coastwise ship manifests, but this method does not account for overland or riverine travel routes. See: Richard H. Steckel and Nicolas Ziebarth, “A Troublesome Statistic: Traders and Coastal Shipments in the Westward Movement of Slaves,” Journal of Economic History 73 (September 2013): 792–809; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 22–25, 231–35.

49 understanding of the slave trade.2 Such neglect is unfortunate and perhaps dangerous, since, as

Saidiya Hartman writes, “The archive of slavery rests upon a founding violence. This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power.”3 Investigating how Louisiana’s notarial slave trade archives were formed, especially how they transformed during the nineteenth century in response to transformations in state power, illuminates how the archives’ founding violence shaped the stories that can be written about black life in the slave trade’s wake.4 Moreover, interrogating the nineteenth-century notarial archives demonstrates that they will rarely provide stories of remaking African America in the lower Mississippi Valley from the voices of the brought. The American purchase of Louisiana meant the erasure of black voices from the archive, and by the booming years of the domestic slave trade, black men and women appear most often as voiceless people as property. Yet because of the thoroughness of Louisiana’s recording system in documenting the slave trade, there are few archives better created in the

United States to measure the quantitative consequences of the domestic slave trade to the lower

Mississippi Valley.

By their record keeping, Louisiana’s recorders and notaries facilitated both the geographic expansion of plantation agriculture in the lower Mississippi Valley and its repeopling

2 Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told, 172–85; Freudenberger and Pritchett, “The Domestic Slave Trade,” 452; Hall, Louisiana Slave Database, https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, New Orleans Slave Sale Sample, 1804–1862 (Ann Arbor: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2008), https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07423.v2. 3 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12 (June 2008): 10. 4 Walter Johnson, “Possible Paths: Some Speculations on Time, Temporality, and the History of Atlantic Slavery,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 45 (2000): 485–99.Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jennifer L. Morgan, “Archives and Histories of Racial Capitalism, An Afterword,” Social Text 33 (Dec. 2015): 153–61; Greg L. Childs, “Secret and Spectral: Torture and Secrecy in the Archives of Slave Conspiracies,” Social Text 33, no. 4 (December 2015): 35–57; Jennifer L. Morgan, “Accounting for ‘The Most Excruciating Torment’: Gender, Slavery, and Trans- Atlantic Passages,” History of the Present 6 (Fall 2016), 174–207; Smallwood, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved,” History of the Present 6 (Fall 2016): 117–132.

50 with enslaved Africans and African-descended people by slave traders. Frequently, they created proofs of sale, especially sales of land and sales of slaves. They literally bound and archived the privatization of Louisiana land and the commodification of black people in massive volumes entitled “Original Acts,” which today remain in many of the same courthouses where their authors created them. Although crafted for the law and the economy, the notaries’ archives have great bearing on the social history of enslaved people. Notaries listed enslaved people’s places of birth or ports of embarkation, which were sometimes called nations. In accordance with a slave trade regulation in force between 1829 and 1831, they also listed a litany of previous owners, their residencies, and how enslaved people arrived in Louisiana.5 Few archives better capture the scale of forced migration to lower Louisiana. Few archives better depict the scale of the slave trade’s cultural consequences. Since the recorders’ archives were and remain public records, their story is also about politics, laws, and government. Transformations in Louisiana’s governments wrought transformations in who recorders were, what they recorded, and what stories survived for historians to write.

Though Louisiana’s notarial archives are distinct in the United States, notarial records are a staple of historical research in other places in the Americas and in Europe, which has led scholars to write critical analyses of notaries and their work. What was true of notaries in France,

New Spain, or the Yucatan Peninsula was true of Louisiana’s recorders. Notaries created confidence and trust in financial transactions by transforming those actions into writing, preserving their written records, and acting as disinterested third parties.6 They also injected the

5 Freudenberger and Pritchett, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade,” 452. 6 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1987); Kathryn Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” American Historical Review 110, no. 2 (April 2005): 352–53; Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010); Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University

51 state into civil life, as they ensured compliance with laws regarding property; when disgruntled parties turned to government to decide their grievances through lawsuits, lawyers and judges turned first to notarial records.7 They provided stability, even in places transferred between empires and nations; as Juliette Levy writes of notaries in the Yucatan, “They continued their record-keeping tasks no matter what the political, economic, or diplomatic circumstances, as their core activities were relatively impervious to wars and revolutions.”8 Finally, notaries’ records are as much cultural texts as they are formulaic legal documents.9 Just as it was notaries’ records that made them valuable in the historical societies in which they lived, so too is it their records that have made notaries important subjects of historical inquiry. Analyzing Louisiana’s notarial archives can add to the already-written histories of family life, informal financial markets, popular notions of the law, and the nature of historical truth, but there is little on notaries and enslavement, with the exception of manumission.10 Yet notarial archives were also archives of slavery, and by reading their records as both legal and cultural texts—and with the knowledge of historical transformation that entails—we can understand how notaries transcribed everyday realities of race and power, captured the commodification of black people, and preserved a glimmer of the social and cultural consequences of the domestic slave trade.

Press, 1998), 18–19; Juliette Levy, The Making of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatan, 1850– 1900 (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 64–65; Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2– 3. 7 Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” 372–77; Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy, 46–47; Levy, The Making of a Market, 64–65; Merwick, Death of a Notary, 2–3. 8 Levy, The Making of a Market, 6. 9 Burns, “Notaries, Truth, and Consequences,” 352–55; Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy, 42, 44–45. 10 Notaries and their documents are important in histories of free people of color and manumission in the Atlantic world see John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 83–108; Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Pierre Force, “The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of American History 100, no. 1 (June 2013): 21–45. Burns has written about notaries as instruments of colonialism. See Burns, Into the Archive.

Louisiana's civil law notaries, post commandants, and parish judges were the third parties in legal slave sales. They also inventoried estates and recorded mortgages. Recorders thus wrote about enslaved people often. When the economy of the lower Mississippi Valley expanded during the nineteenth century, men in New Orleans with legal backgrounds took advantage of the enormous number of transactions in the city and specialized as notaries. Though little is known about them before the 1850s, they were certainly educated, wealthy, and connected men. Many studied law, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, they had to prove their legal competency before a court.11 After the court approved them, notaries sought permits from the governor, who had power to approve, deny, or revoke notarial permits. Finally, they had to post bonds that ensured they fulfilled their duties. In 1855, the legislature set the bond at $10,000. In rural parishes, where it made little sense for men to pay the costs of becoming certified notaries, judges acted as ex officio notaries and recorded property transactions in their local courthouses.

Updated records were crucial to the economy, and private individuals and government officials ensured records of sales and mortgages of land and slaves found their way to the proper parish archive. For instance, Louisiana slaveowners who purchased enslaved people from New Orleans slave traders often purchased copies of the acts of sale and recorded them with their parish judges. Sales that slaveowners transacted in remote regions of the state also found their way into the recorders’ bound journals. For example, when David Shepard bought Eliza from John Finn, a

Mississippi River pilot who lived at the remote pilot’s village where the river met the Gulf of

Mexico, Shepard ensured he found Gilbert Leonard, the nearest parish judge, to record the sale in his records.12 Likewise, in order to ensure parish judges kept track of mortgages made in the

11 The following information about notaries is from the following: Gilles Vandal, “Le Système notarial de la Louisiane au XIXe siècle: profil et fonction des notaires,” Canadian Journal of History 32 (August 1997): 221–36. 12 Sale of Slave from John Finn to David Shepard, 9 March 1840, Book 8, Original Acts, Plaquemines Parish Courthouse, Belle Chasse, Louisiana.

53 commercial center of New Orleans, lest they authorize the sale of mortgaged properties when debtors were far from the prying eyes of their creditors, the state legislature required the

“recorder of mortgages at New Orleans, to send an extract of all the mortgages now in force on property in the different parishes of this territory to the respective parish judges.”13 After slaveowners left the slave markets and estate sales, they traveled to the notary, recorded their actions, and generated legal documents. Archives of the domestic slave trade proliferated during the nineteenth century, even in rural places far from the New Orleans slave market.

In Louisiana’s nineteenth-century plantation districts, recorders were powerful men who represented slaveowners and were slaveowners themselves. Recording was but one of their duties and responsibilities. They were also parish judges. It was at once an administrative, judicial, legislative, and executive elected position. As jurists they tried cases in parish courts; as recorders they created and archived original acts; as executives they presided over their parish’s board of executors—called police juries in Louisiana—and as legislators they introduced and voted on resolutions during police jury meetings.14 As radical French novelist Charles Testut wrote, “The Recorder, in the State of Louisiana is a combination of a police commissioner, a king's procurer, an investigating judge, and justice of the peace. The functions of this magistrate are so little defined, so extended in some cases and so restricted in others, and his authority is so elastic, so vague and above all sometimes exercised so singularly, that any analogy between his real functions and those of a magistrate in any other country is really impossible if one wants to

13 Meinrad Greiner, The Louisiana Digest, Embracing the Laws of the Legislature of a General Nature Enacted from the Year 1804 to 1841, Inclusive (New Orleans: Benjamin Levy, 1841), 1:422. 14 For an overview of parish government see: Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850, 3rd ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 145–48; Robert Dabney Calhoun, “The Origin and Early Development of County-Parish Government in Louisiana (1805–1845),” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 18 (1935): 56–160.

54 be exact.”15 In 1845, Louisiana jurist and lawmaker George Eustis described their everyday legal duties in plainer language when he said they were “notary publics, auctioneers, clerks of their own courts, recorders of mortgages and recorders of conveyances.”16 As W. W. Pugh remembered, “The parish judge did most of the law business. He acted as judge, settled successions, was a notary public, auctioneer, and held the elections.”17 Judges were thus often men of good standing in their communities, or men whom the majority of voters found politically acceptable. Unlike the professional notaries in New Orleans, the recorders in

Louisiana’s rural areas were also almost always slaveowners and plantation owners. William T.

Palfrey, a sugar plantation owner in St. Mary Parish, served as the judge of that Parish in the

1840s, for instance. Likewise, John Moore, the recorder in St. Mary Parish, owned eighteen enslaved people in 1840, and Leufroy Barras of Terrebone Parish owned sixty-four.18 Nearly every parish judge employed himself first and foremost as a plantation owner, and most judges were the elite of their parish.19 Some felt wealthy judges were independent judges. As one supporter of the judges said in the 1840s: “planters, who have wealth and leisure, will consent to dispense justice between man and man, without expecting to realize in the office a fortune in a few years.”20 According to another, “parish officers formed a clique among themselves and their friends before whom all must bow. They were little despots.”21 Since little differentiated parish

15 Charles Testut, “Excerpts from Old Solomon; or, A Slave Family in the Nineteenth Century,” trans. Heidi Kathleen Kim, PMLA 125 (May 2010): 809. 16 Robert J. Ker, Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of Louisiana Which Assembled at the City of New Orleans, January 14, 1844 (New Orleans: Besancon, Ferguson and Co., 1845), 706. 17 W. W. Pugh, “Bayou Lafourche from 1820 to 1825—Its Inhabitants, Customs and Pursuits, Part 2,” Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, October 6, 1888. 18 Population Schedule, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, p. 330, 1840, Sixth Census of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau, Record Group 29, microfilm, M704, roll 128, NARA; Population Schedule, Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, p. 27, 1840, Sixth Census of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau, RG 29, microfilm, M704, roll 129, NARA. 19 Michael Kelly Beauchamp, “Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1820” (Ph.D. diss.: Texas A&M University, 2009), 20–21, 45–48. 20 Ker, Proceedings and Debates, 702. 21 Charles M. Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans., Philip D. Uzee, p. 14, Charles M. Menard Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Ellender Memorial Library, Nichols State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana.

55 recorders in Louisiana from their fellow slaveowners, the recorders’ archives were the slaveholders’ ones.

They had been slaveowners’ archives since the mid-eighteenth century, when Spanish governors administered through commandants who lived in the coasts and posts of colonial

Louisiana. The legal, administrative, and notarial framework the Spanish imposed in its

Louisiana colony had profound consequences for the nineteenth-century archive of slavery, as it set the precedent for the types of documents that were created, who their creators were, and where those documents were archived. Louisiana was one of the first places in the Americas that the Spanish organized following the blueprint of the Bourbon reforms, no doubt in part because the French Bourbon government had already created a colonial administration there.22 Often notaries and local administrators, called commandants, were one in the same, especially in the far-flung places outside the colony’s capital at New Orleans. Thomas Jefferson solicited information about the territory’s government and legal system from Americans living in

Louisiana, and slave trading merchant Daniel Clark wrote that the Spanish commandants tried small claims civil suits, arrested criminal suspects, auctioned seized properties, inventoried intestate properties, and verified land grants, all as they acted “the Notary of the Post, and all

Sales of Slaves and landed property must be made and registir’d in his office.”23 Spanish governors appointed commandants from the local populace, and those commandants recorded

22 Lillian Estelle Fisher, “The Intendant System in Spanish America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 8 (February 1928), 4; John Lynch, “The Institutional Framework of Colonial Spanish America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 69–81. Crucial also to Spain’s administration in Louisiana was their understanding of it as a military borderland between Mexico and the British North American colonies. Hence every commandant was also a militia officer. See: Julia Frederick, “In Defense of Crown and Colony: Luis de Unzaga and Spanish Louisiana,” Louisiana History 49 (Fall 2008): 389–422. 23 Daniel Clark to James Madison, 8 Sep. 1803, in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1940), 9:39.

56 documents in French.24 As sugar planters told the American Congress when they complained about the territory’s organizing charter in 1803, the Spanish were “always careful, in their selection of officers, to find men who possessed our language, and with whom we could personally communicate; their correspondence with the interior parts of the province was also carried on chiefly in our own language.”25 The slaveowners who lived under Spain’s administration in Louisiana fought to retain the characters of their local governments when the

United States purchased Louisiana, and their successes led to Louisiana’s nineteenth-century system of local governance and its nineteenth-century archive of slavery.

With Spain’s reforms in local administration came the importation of Spain’s recording system to Louisiana. Notarial records established ownership over people and property, but they also identified the owned. Like the system of local commandants, the recording system was also meant to establish the government’s power, as recording inserted government administrators into the economic decisions of Spain’s subjects. Specifically, the notarial archives began as an attempt to eliminate fraud. In 1770 Spanish governor Luis de Unzaga, who hoped to battle “the different frauds and malpractices which are apt to be committed in all sales, exchanges, permutations, barters, and generally in all alienations” of enslaved people, land, and other property, mandated all people who “sell, alienate, buy, or accept as a donation or otherwise, any negroes, plantations, houses and any kind of sea-craft” to record their transactions before a notary.26 The notaries then retained copies of their acts, available for reference by anyone who wanted to see them. Notarial records thus became the foundation of Spanish Louisiana’s civil

24 Hans W. Baade, “The Formalities of Private Real Estate Transactions in Spanish North America: A Report on Some Recent Discoveries,” Louisiana Law Review 38, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 685. 25 “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana Against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them,” in American State Papers, Senate, 8th Congress, 2nd session, vol. 1, Miscellaneous, 1804, 399. 26 Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana (New York: Redfield, 1854), 3:631; Baade, “The Formalities of Private Real Estate Transactions in Spanish North America,” 691–99.

57 jurisprudence, and they remained so after the United States purchased the territory. In addition to identifying who owned property, the notarial records identified what and who were owned.

When they identified land, for instance, they wrote lengthy descriptions of tracts that included descriptions of the natural topography, nearby boundaries, and sometimes surveys. When notarial recorders identified enslaved people, recorders wrote their names, ages, complexions, and nations. In 1799 Spain’s Louisiana governor stated the importance of recording such detailed information about black people in conveyances after an enslaved person was murdered in the

American Mississippi Territory. The man was not described in a recent bill of sale, since no regulation mandated it in Mississippi, so neither his identity nor his value to the white man who claimed to own him could be determined.27 Thus the notarial records also acted as records of surveillance by identifying and describing which black men and women belonged to which white or free person of color. The slave trade archives that scholars have used so often to understand the scale and scope of the domestic slave trade were never neutral indexes of economic transactions but were imbued with the power of a racial state.

That power was most apparent in interrogation records, which appear with conveyances and mortgages in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century original acts books of Louisiana commandants and parish judges. Though these records are filled with invaluable information about enslaved men and women’s families and communities, they were produced when white men entered black communities to investigate crimes. Commandants in Spanish Louisiana captured the conversations and thoughts of enslaved people as they tried to understand who was guilty. Spanish commandants routinely ventured into the slave quarters to question enslaved men

27 Gilbert C. Din, “Slavery in Louisiana’s Florida Parishes under the Spanish Regime, 1779–1803,” in A Fierce and Fractious Frontier: The Curious Development of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, 1699–2000, ed. Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 74–75.

58 and women, either about dangerous conversations whites overheard, bodies they found floating in rivers, or fugitive enslaved people they captured. When commandants investigated enslaved men and women in their districts, they recorded their procedures for Louisiana’s governors. They often sent the original inquests to New Orleans, and retained copies in their books of original acts. These records are rich, for commandants always captured much more than what they intended. For instance, when Guillaume Duparc investigated a double-murder suicide in Pointe

Coupee in 1798, he ended up recording and archiving enslaved people’s ideas about marriage.28

Amousou found his wife Angelique in bed with Antoine and murdered both of them with an axe; they found Amousou’s body floating in False River a few days later. As Duparc searched for a motive, he had to ask the other people who lived on the plantation how they knew Amousou and

Angelique were together; he even stumbled into knowledge about enslaved elders’ governance of sexual mores.29 Something similar happened to Duparc’s predecessor, Valerien LeBlanc, in

1792. When he investigated a confrontation between Colin Lacour and a person he enslaved named André, LeBlanc uncovered a complex community marked by distinctions between enslaved Africans and Creoles, not to mention the fact that Lacour was a violent, temperamental liar.30 Commandants in Louisiana’s rural regions produced these rich qualitative sources into the early years of American governance.

Though American governors appeared to retain Spain’s system, small transformations in

Louisiana’s local government structure and legal culture produced profound consequences for the type of information available in the recorders’ nineteenth-century archives. Recorders gradually silenced black voices in the official acts. When William C. C. Claiborne arrived in

28 Copies déclaration centre les négres tués [appartenir à] Sr. Gr. Olive, 5 April 1798, Doc. 1992, Original Acts, Pointe Coupee Parish Courthouse, New Roads, Louisiana (hereafter PCOA). 29 Deposition of Venus, 13 April 1798, ibid; Deposition of Martin, 14 April 1798, ibid. 30 Procès entre Colin Lacour et son négre André, 5 July 1792, Doc. 1760, PCOA.

New Orleans to govern the territory for the American Congress, he maintained the commandant system until the territorial legislature organized a new system of local governance. Finding that the colony’s government had been disrupted by the temporary French governor, Claiborne explained to Thomas Jefferson, “I revived some of the Spanish Offices, and appointed

Magistrates, resembling those of the United States.”31 Local commandants were one of those

Spanish offices Claiborne revived, if they were ever abolished. When Claiborne appointed Julien

Poydras the civil commandant in Pointe Coupee in the beginning of 1804, the governor instructed the French emigre that “the same powers in Civil matters which heretofore were exercised by the Commandant of Districts under the Spanish Government, will devolve upon you.”32 Those powers included preserving “Archives, Public papers and documents of every description” that previous commandants had written, not to mention Poydras’s own responsibility to “preserve and record all of your Official Acts.”33 Poydras was still responsible for investigating crimes and policing slaves. At least that was how Poydras and his fellow members of Louisiana’s ancienne population interpreted the governor’s instructions. Though

Claiborne stripped commandants of some of the powers they enjoyed when Spain claimed

Louisiana—particularly their military power—the American migrants whom Claiborne appointed found themselves with local power unparalleled in the American states.34 For instance,

Claiborne also appointed the Virginian Edward C. Nicholls the civil commandant of the southwestern Attakapas district, and Nicholls’s son remembered “the emoluments were great and the situation was one of the most respectable in the state. . . . A Civil Commandant embodied all

31 W. C. C. Claiborne to Thomas Jefferson, 25 Nov. 1804, in Carter, Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:339. 32 Dunbar Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816 (Jackson, Miss.: State Department of Archives and History, 1917), 1:333. 33 Ibid. 34 Commandants’ duties were similar to those of frontier county courts, but they rested in one man and not a panel of justices of the peace. See: Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 61–66.

60 the law and equity jurisdiction within the limits of his county. In fact, his word was law.”35

Despite Claiborne’s clear and detailed instructions to his appointees in 1803, he was sure two years later “The Legislature are about establishing Courts in the different Parishes, in which the present powers of Commandants will be vested,” but that body simply renamed commandants judges.36 The legislature also created justices of the peace, who now shouldered the commandants’ responsibilities for gathering witness testimonies and trying small-claims civil suits, but on the same day it also made parish judges justices of the peace.37 In short, judges in

American territorial Louisiana were commandants in everything but name.

Different judges wielded their power differently during the early-nineteenth century.

What information scholars’ can learn about enslaved men and women depends on who the recorder was in each parish. Since each post, coast, and parish had their own commandant or judge, and since their duties shifted during the nineteenth century, what actions they recorded in their books of original acts depended on the recorder and the year. Even though the Spanish ensured commandants’ duties were clearly delineated, some commandants were more zealous than others, especially when it came to criminal proceedings. Guillaume Duparc, the

35 Lyle Saxon, Old Louisiana (New York and London: The Century Co., 1929), 105. Saxon reproduces excerpts from the memoirs of Thomas C. Nicholls written in 1840, which Saxon obtained from Nicholls’ namesake grandson. 36 “the offices of civil commandant and syndics . . . shall cease and become void, and such judges respecfully shall be and they are hereby vested with all the powers, and subject to all the duties . . . might lawfully have been exercised by the civil commandants, respectively, or which they were bound to perform in all cases respecting instancies, proofs of wills, inventories, insolvencies, the taking, authenticating, and recording of deeds, conveyances, and contracts, and the superintendance of roads and levees, and the police of slaves.” See: “An Act Relative to the Judges of the County Courts, and Justices of the Peace in the Territory of Orleans,” 3 May 1805, in Acts Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: James M. Bradford, 1805), 388. 37 “it shall be the duty of the several justices of the peace . . . to hear and examine all complaints of any breach of the peace or other crime or misdemeanor, committed in the body of the county.“ See: An Act Relative to the Judges of the County Courts, and Justice of the Peace in the Territory of Orleans, 3 May 1805, in Acts Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: James M. Bradford, 1805), 390; “there shall be appointed in and for each of the said counties, one judge, who shall be a justice of the peace.” See: “An Act Dividing the Territory of Orleans into Counties, and Establishing Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction Therein,” 3 May 1805 in Acts Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: James M. Bradford, 1805), 148.

61 commandant in Pointe Coupee in 1798, took testimonies from enslaved black people and free white people and summoned a surgeon to perform autopsies when he investigated the apparent double-murder suicide.38 As was the archiving custom, he recorded everything in his book of original acts alongside conveyances and mortgages. Though Edward C. Nichols still recorded that he had found a body in Bayou Teche in 1804—therefore fulfilling his duty as commandant—his investigation was brief.39 Duparc was apparently willing to go to lengths that

Nichols was not, and their archives reflected their tenacity as recorders. Still, from the late- eighteenth century to 1803, the archives of most of Louisiana’s parishes were relatively uniform in their composition, and the documents were similar in their legal formulas. After the Louisiana

Purchase and until 1812, the documentary record of Louisiana’s parish archives diversified, despite Claiborne’s contention that the civil duties of the local administrators would remain the same. Commandants who hailed from the ancienne population continued to notarize property transactions and investigate capital crimes and conspiracies; American migrants were less active, and simply notarized transactions.

Men like Edward C. Nichols or Edward D. Turner came from common-law backgrounds and the nascent American system of local governance, though neither were experienced administrators.40 Claiborne chose Turner to oversee the transition to American governance in

Natchitoches, Louisiana, because the man had experience negotiating with Native Americans; he was also an army officer, and Natchitoches was a frontier fort and trading center near the border

38 Copies déclaration centre les négres tués [appartenir à] Sr. Gr. Olive, 5 April 1798, Doc. 1992, PCOA. 39 “Identification of a Body Found Floating in Bayou Teche,” 14 Nov. 1804, in Land Records of the Attakapas District: Conveyance Records of Attakapas County, 1804–1818, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992), 2:1. 40 For background on Nichols see the antebellum memoir of his son, Thomas C. Nichols excerpted in: Saxon, Old Louisiana, 102–118; On Turner see: Glenn R. Conrad, “Edward D. Turner: Soldier, Jurist, Planter, Patriot,” Louisiana History 37 (Spring 1996): 217–25.

62 with Spanish Texas.41 Nichols was Claiborne’s second choice in Attakapas. He replaced Henry

Hopkins, who was also an army officer like Turner, and who embroiled himself in a local dispute that had percolated for decades.42 Claiborne liked Nichols, he spoke French, and he had served as

Claiborne’s clerk since Claiborne became governor of Louisiana in 1804.43 Turner and Nichols were two of many American migrants Claiborne installed in the western section of Louisiana, and they created archives distinct from their counterparts in Pointe Coupee or St. Charles parishes on the Mississippi River. Claiborne appointed them the civil commandants of the

Attakapas and Natchitoches posts. Any instruction they received on how to perform their duties as commandants they received from Claiborne, who himself was a migrant to Louisiana.44

Though they continued to record transactions, they rarely entered investigations or criminal offenses into their original acts. The rich qualitative sources so common in the original acts books from the Spanish period disappeared in the far-flung places of Louisiana wherever

Americans became commandants. Since most criminal proceedings involved enslaved men and women, what scholars can learn about their lives diminished with the arrival of American jurists.

Four similar cases, recorded by two francophone commandants and two anglophone ones between 1804 and 1812 demonstrate how the content of the recorders’ archives was linked to the recorders themselves. In 1808 in St. Charles Parish Ursin Chalaire captured a maroon named

Charles after a gunfight. Judge St. Martin decided to try Charles for attempting to murder

41 Conrad, “Edward D. Turner,” 220–23. 42 Michael Kelly Beauchamp, “Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1820,” (PhD diss.: Texas A&M University, 2009), 160–72. 43 Saxon, Old Louisiana, 104. 44 For instance, Turner wrote Claiborne in 1804 “if I might proceed to sell property attached upon Judgment confessed, and whether it is the custom of Spain to given an equal share of property left by an absconded Debtor to each creditor,” see: Turner to Edward D. Turner, 30 July 1804, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9: 273. See also: Claiborne to Turner, 28 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:384–85.

Chalaire. So St. Martin built a case. He questioned Lindor, an enslaved commandeur whom

Charles awoke at 4 o’clock in the morning as he rummaged through a plantation shed; he questioned Chalaire; and he even questioned two white men who had nothing to do with the case, except that they could provide an estimation of Charles’s character.45 These character witnesses claimed Charles was a lecher. They said he tried to break into houses where white women lived alone, and they claimed that he admitted that he wanted to rape them.46 Witnesses to Charles’ capture said the moon was bright enough to distinguish between black and white skin, so the tribunal decided Charles knowingly tried to kill Chalaire. They convinced themselves Charles was an attempted murderer and a rapist; he was a threat to the public peace.

So they hung him. Charles’s fate may have been sealed the minute he was captured, but St.

Martin ensured he recorded plenty of evidence anyway. His record of Charles’ capture, trial, and execution ran twenty manuscript pages. Jacques’s story two years prior was similar, though because the Virginian Edward C. Nichols was the recorder and not St. Martin, there is little historians can learn from the case aside from Jacques’s fate: he was “banished” to the New

Orleans slave market. Jacques’s trial record is only one page long; two if Ruth O’Reilly’s separate accusation that he raped her is included.47 Whereas St. Martin recorded his investigation, jotting down questions he asked witnesses and the accused, Nichols only archived his summaries of Jacques’s trial.

45 Deposition of Lindor, 8 Oct. 1808, Procès du Charles négre à M. Choppin, Original Acts, St. Charles Parish Clerk of Court, Hahnville, Louisiana (hereafter SCOA); Deposition of Ursin Chalaire, 6 Oct. 1808, ibid. 46 Deposition of Achilles Trouard, 8 Oct. 1808, ibid; Deposition of Francois Lavasseur, 8 Oct. 1808, ibid. Trouard was the judge of nearby St. John the Baptist parish, and he and his constituents had been after Charles from more than a year. Lavasseur was a resident of Natchitoches, and he said he knew Charles from birth. 47 “Sentence Passed on Negro Jacque the property of Neuville Declouet,” 3 Dec. 1806, no. 83, Original Acts, St. Martin Parish Courthouse, St. Martinville, Louisiana; Dismissal of Ruth O’Reilley’s case, 8 July 1806, no. 87, ibid. The man accused of raping Ruth O’Reilley was not named, except that he was the property of Neuville Declouet. The two cases were probably connected since Nichols filed the official dismissal of her rape, which occurred in July, after the sentence on Jacques, which occurred in December.

So too did commandants in territorial Louisiana differ when it came to recording enslaved people’s collective resistance to enslavement, as evidenced by the different responses of two commandants in the fall of 1804. Commandants and judges who came from the Spanish recording tradition continued to investigate potential conspiracies among the enslaved population. Slaveowners produced many letters in the fall of 1804 that the enslaved population throughout Louisiana were restless. For instance, in October and November, Claiborne received information from Julien Poydras, the commandant in Pointe Coupee, and Edward D. Turner, the commandant in Natchitoches, that enslaved people were plotting a rebellion.48 Though Poydras and Turner’s responses to the conspiracies may have been similar, Poydras left an archival trail.

Like commandants before him, he investigated and recorded his investigation in his book of original acts. He learned that some plantation owners overheard a conspiratorial conversation between enslaved men who were piloting a cotton barge on False River. He found who the interlocutors were and interrogated them.49 Close to 140 miles northwest up the Red River,

Turner was passive, and slaveowners chafed under his inaction. First they made a pact between themselves to police one another's’ slaves; they even levied their own taxes to support their agreement.50 Then they sent Turner a letter, signed by almost 50 slaveowners, which pleaded for him to act like a Spanish commandant. They made a case for the “danger which obviously threatens us” from maroons, and they begged the commandant to act on the “zeal you cite for the public good, [that] you enter into all your power, and do not neglect anything for the prompt punishment of the guilty and of their accomplices.”51 If Turner followed their advice, his archive

48 Eric Herschthal, “Slaves, Spaniards, and Subversion in Early Louisiana: The Persistent Fears of Black Revolt and Spanish Collusion in Territorial Louisiana, 1803–1812,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Summer 2016): 283, 290. 49 Interrogatoire et jugement de six négres à Ternant, 9 Nov. 1804, No. 2377, PCOA. 50 Special [Agreement] Among the Undersigned owners of slaves in the District of Natchitoches, November 1804, Original Acts, Natchitoches Parish Courthouse, Natchitoches, Louisiana. 51 Habitants of Natchitoches to Edward D. Turner, 14 Nov. 1804, ibid.

65 bears no evidence, but his response to a similar petition months earlier gives some indication.

Turner derided the Natchitoches slaveowners as “ignorant almost to Stupidity, and never having known any other Government than that by which the Spanish Governed them, they look upon a different one, as a sort of Hocus-Pocus, tending to worst their condition.”52 In 1804 the slaveowners of Natchitoches expected Turner to launch a full investigation into marronage and conspiracy, like the one Poydras created downriver. Instead, Turner filed their letters in his book of original acts. Men like Poydras archived like their predecessors in Spanish Louisiana; men like Turner archived as little as they could.

Perhaps more than anything, American officials hated recording the voices of black enslaved people, especially compared to their counterparts who staffed Spain’s colonial posts.

The differences between American and Spanish racial legal standards became stark soon after the Louisiana Purchase, when a legal case involving Spanish subjects, which had began before the Louisiana Purchase, became embroiled in a diplomatic controversy and emboldened

Claiborne’s political rivals. Francis Hulin purchased people enslaved by Pedro Villamil (perhaps for Villamil’s estranged wife Catherine Jolly) at public auction soon after the United States purchased Louisiana.53 The Spanish colonial government had seized Villamil’s slaves because he owed the government money for his service as the steward of the royal hospital in New Orleans.

Though Spain’s government had no authority over the territory, Claiborne allowed the auction to take place because it was in the interest of “a Speedy and complete evacuation of the

Province.”54 Soon after the auction, the Spanish colonial government changed its mind—the effects of complicated internal divisions—and Sebastián Calvo de la Puerta, Marquess of Casa

52 Turner to Claiborne, 30 July 1804, in Carter, Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:272. 53 Casa Calvo to Claiborne, 16 June 1804, in Jared William Bradley, ed., Intermin Appointment: W. C. C. Claiborne Letter Book, 1804–1805 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 147–48. 54 Claiborne to Casa Calvo, 5 Sep. 1804, in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, 2:322.

Calvo, the highest ranking Spanish official in Louisiana, asked Claiborne to nullify the sale.55

Though the case entered the diplomatic correspondence of Spain and the United States because

Claiborne took umbrage at what he perceived were attempts by Casa Calvo to delegitimize

Claiborne’s authority, Casa Calvo’s attempts to depose enslaved people irked Americans in New

Orleans, including Claiborne.56 American black codes, including Louisiana’s 1806 one, refused to recognize the testimony of black men and women in courts of law, especially when their words might be juxtaposed with those of white witnesses.57 Spanish laws made no such stipulations, especially after the 1789 Real cédula that guaranteed some rights to enslaved people and allowed them to protest their treatment to colonial governors.58 Enslaved people’s testimony became essential in cases they filed against slaveowners. Louisiana’s governor during much of the 1790s, Francisco Luis Hector, barón de Carondelet, pursued many allegations that enslaved people brought against their enslavers.59 Though members of the so-called ancienne population detested how Spanish slave regulations elevated enslaved people’s legal claims, it is clear that

Poydras, St. Martin, and other francophone early-nineteenth century judges continued to record interrogations of black men and women. Americans balked at this practice, as evidenced by the controversy that Casa Calvo stirred in 1804.

55 Claiborne to Casa Calvo, 5 Sep. 1804, in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, 2:322–23; Casa Calvo to Claiborne, 16 June 1804, in Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment, 147–148; Casa Calvo to Claiborne, 26 July 1804, in Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment, 148–50. For an American perspective of the internal division in the Spanish colonial government with regard to this case see Claiborne to James Madison, 19 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:373. 56 As Claiborne warned Casa Calvo, “I know of no Courts in Louisiana but those deriving their power from the Government of the United States.” See: Claiborne to Casa Calvo, 5 Sep. 1804, in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, 2:320. 57 Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 229–48. 58 Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 125–30. 59 Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves, 135–36.

Before Casa Calvo offended Claiborne, the American governor allowed him “to procure testimony touching the official conduct of” Casa Calvo’s predecessor.60 Little did Claiborne know that the Spanish official intended to depose the enslaved people involved in the case. As

Claiborne wrote to James Madison, he requested, “to gratify a wish of the Marquis,” that “Mrs.

Villamil . . . permit one of her Servants to attend at the Marquis’s House for half an hour.”61

While there, Casa Calvo apparently asked the enslaved woman about the nature of Mrs.

Villamil’s ownership. Though he learned from Hulin that “he left two female Slaves to Mrs.

Villamil to Serve her without compensation,” Villamil told Casa Calvo “She used to pay [Hulin] monthly for their wages.”62 Yet, “it is proved,” Casa Calvo wrote—no doubt purposefully failing to attribute the source of his facts—“that all the female Slaves paid the revenue of their daily wages into the hands of Mrs Villmil, it is also proved that after the auction, She, told herself to the said Slaves, that although they had been Sold, She was the person who had bought them, and therefore Still was their mistress.”63 Casa Calvo’s sources were certainly the enslaved women.

Spain’s highest ranking official in Louisiana contradicted the testimony of white people with depositions of the people they enslaved, and he asked the American governor to enforce his judgment. As Casa Calvo treaded on American sovereignty, he also impugned the legal racial order that white Americans were trying to construct. Not only did this affair enrage Claiborne, it also set his political opponents into action. Edward Livingston gave Claiborne a petition, which one of Claiborne’s clerks remembered “was upon the Subject of the Marquis’s improper interference about some slaves.”64 Casa Calvo so wanted to prove the impropriety of his

60 Claiborne to Madison, 19 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:373. 61 Claiborne to Madison, 19 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:373. 62 Casa Calvo to Claiborne, 12 Sep. 1804, in Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment, 156. 63 Casa Calvo to Claiborne, 12 Sep. 1804, in Bradley, ed., Interim Appointment, 156. 64 Certificate of Thomas S. Kennedy, 18 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 9:376.

68 predecessor, according to the clerk, “that he had gone so far even, as to take the Deposition of

Slaves.”65 This statement, the final words in a 2 paragraph deposition that explained the controversy to James Madison, was no doubt meant to impress its readers on Casa Calvo’s audacity and brazenness. After all, enslaved people’s testimonies against white people were not permissible in American courts, and as Claiborne warned Casa Calvo, “I know of no Courts in

Louisiana but those deriving their power from the Government of the United States.”66

Black voices thus disappeared from the original acts books of Louisiana’s parish officials. Witness interrogations, cadaver investigations, and other content so common in Spanish and territorial archives disappeared into the logs of the justices of the peace after Louisiana legislators tweaked their local government when their state was admitted to the federal Union in

1812. What scholars can learn about enslaved men and women from official documents was hampered by transformations in structures of government and jurisprudence. Judges continued to function as notaries, and they recorded transactions, estates, marriages, and the like.

Unfortunately, since no statute required that justices of the peace deposit their logbooks at parish courthouses, most have been lost.67 If investigators interrogated enslaved people after 1812, they never recorded it unless the crime was a capital offense, which fell under the jurisdiction of the

Supreme Court. Ad-hoc tribunals composed of a justice of the peace and other parish slaveholders tried enslaved people for lesser crimes, and the state did not require that they record their procedures.68 Even if the legislature mandated that Justices of the Peace record and archive

65 Certificate of Thomas S. Kennedy, 18 Jan. 1805, in Carter, ed., Territoral Papers of the United States, 9:376. 66 Claiborne to Casa Calvo, 5 Sep. 1804, in Rowland, ed., Official Letter Books, 2:320. 67 “Justices of the peace shall fully transcribe their judgements in civil cases in a well bound folio book, to be kept by them for that purpose,” see: “An Act Further Amending the Act, Entitled ‘An Act for Dividing the Territory of Orleains into Counties, and Establishing Courts of Inferior Jurisdiction Therein,’” 3 Jul. 1805, in Acts Passed at the Second Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: James M. Bradford, 1805), 46. 68 The first criminal code in American Louisiana stipulated that slave trials be “before the county courts shall be by the court and four discreet freeholders . . . Whose decision so given shall have the same force and validity as the

69 their procedures, there is doubt they would have followed it; the territorial legislature also stipulated that county judges record every fugitive slave in their district in separate books, but they did not.69 In short, there are more documents with more enslaved men and women’s voices in Louisiana between 1763 and 1803 than there are after the Louisiana Purchase. American governance erased black voices from the archive of slavery.

Of course, enslaved men and women still appeared in the recorders’ archives during the nineteenth century, but only as voiceless property. The number of enslaved people who found themselves named in recorded, notarized documents in any year was significant. For instance, the parish judge of St. Charles Parish recorded 701 enslaved men and women in 1840 in conveyances, mortgages, and estate inventories, just under 19 percent of the population of enslaved people whom census enumerators recorded in that year.70 Just as recorders did with all the people and property they recorded in their original acts, recorders reduced the presence of enslaved men and women to legal boilerplate. They captured enslaved people’s names, ages, phenotypes, and prices; they described enslaved people’s skills, familial relationships, and sometimes their histories of resistance; and they recorded enslaved people’s nations, often names recorders gave to the places from whence enslaved people came. In a single document recorders devoted only a line or two for descriptions, but altogether those lines betrayed the social and cultural consequences of the domestic slave trade. They are poor replacements for biographies or personal narratives, but for much of the nineteenth century these short descriptions of people

verdict of a jury in ther cases.” See: “An Act for the Punishment of Crimes and Misdemeanors,” 4 May 1805, in Acts Passed at the First Session of the Legislative Council of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: James M. Bradford, 1805), 450. 69 “Any inhabitant who shall have any runaway slave, shall be held to declare the same to the judge of the county. . . And it shall be the duty of the said judge to keep a book for that purpose.” See: “Black Code: An Act,” 7 June 1806, in Acts Passed at the First Session of the First Legislature of the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, 1807), 166–68. 70 Original Acts, SCOA.

70 who were property provide the only surviving information about enslaved people. They epitomize how the slave trade was, in the words of Gregory E. O’Malley, “always two things at once, commerce and migration.”71 The sources that captured enslaved people’s commodification provide a window into the slave trade histories of brought people and captured a fraction of

African America’s remaking.

Enslaved people’s nations, those terms recorders employed to reduce the homes, points of origin, or embarkation ports of the enslaved in their language of commodification, revealed the cultural consequences of the domestic slave trade in the lower Mississippi Valley. Notaries communicated information about enslaved people’s homes with a predictable lexicon of nationality. Often reductionist, this lexicon had existed for centuries, and it varied over time and place around the Atlantic world. The term Nago in the Francophone Atlantic often included people who were described as Yoruba where slaveowners spoke English and Lucumi where they spoke Spanish, for instance.72 Scholars have interrogated the words slaveowners used to describe enslaved Africans’ nations in their letters, newspaper advertisements, and logbooks, and they have found that they rarely corresponded to their corporate identities in Africa.73 Some of the words, like Ibo or Bamana, meant “outsider” or “slave,” and Africans endowed them with meaning in the Americas.74 Others, like Angola, Congo, Mina, or Guinea corresponded to

71 Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619—1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 342. 72 Robin Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Africa,” History in Africa 24 (1997): 205–19; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 23. 73 Douglas B. Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave-Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001): 25–39. 74 Peter Caron, “‘Of a Nation Which the Others Do Not Understand’: Bambara Slaves and African Ethnicity in Colonial Louisiana, 1718–1760,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997): 98–121; Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 17–31; Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,” Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997), 134–36.

Europeans’ understandings of the ports or regions where slave traders bought people.75 Still others were so specific they had to have originated from the mouths of enslaved Africans.76 The preponderance of evidence from Louisiana suggests this was the case there. Gwendolyn Midlo

Hall argues that eighteenth-century recorders were more likely to identify enslaved Africans by their nations after Africans had been in the colony for awhile; when notaries recorded the initial sales of enslaved Africans, they identified them only as bozales or bruts.77 Moreover, when

Spanish commandants interrogated enslaved people, they often asked them to identify their nations.78 Even though many of the nations that appeared in the archives of Louisiana probably originated from enslaved people, the recorders bore little witness in their archives of original acts to the meaning, if any, enslaved people gave to these words. For at least three decades scholars have shown that they must take into account the historical construction of the lexicon of enslaved nativity when they use nations to analyze the cultural consequences of forced migration.

For uncertain reasons, Francophone recorders in Louisiana, especially those who lived on the Mississippi River, continued to refer to enslaved men and women by their nations as late as

1860. As historians who study enslaved Africans and their descendants in British North America attest, English-speaking recorders abandoned detailed descriptions early, and their American successors almost never referred to enslaved people’s nations. Scholars often read white slaveowners’ increasingly binary and biological ideas about race into the abandonment of

75 Morgan, “Cultural Implications,” 131–32. 76 Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 8–11. 77 Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 42–45. 78 When Africans did not know their nation, they said so, as Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec has demonstrated through a man named Lubin see Jean-Pierre le Glaunec, “‘Un Nègre nommè [Sic] Lubin ne Connaissant pas Sa Nation’: The Small World of Louisiana Slavery,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cecile Vidal, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 103–22.

72 national descriptions.79 Yet Francophone Louisiana recorders transformed their lexicon to meet their distinct contexts and to make sense of the homes, birthplaces, and points of embarkation of enslaved men and women. The magnitude and diversity of the forced migrations to the region during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries certainly altered how Louisiana slaveowners recorded enslaved people’s places of birth. Those people born in Louisiana became creoles. English-speaking men and women from other American states became americains, and

Congos, Minas, Ibos, and other people from Africa became africains. These terms appeared in conveyance documents, probate inventories, and other notarized records; they even appeared in advertisements of slave sales and fugitive slave advertisements. Though the meaning that enslaved men and women gave to these words is absent from the notarial archive, they retain utility for the history of remaking African America. At the very least they captured the diversity of enslaved people’s communities, and they indexed who were and were not brought people. In short, they make it possible to comprehend some of the social and cultural consequences of forced migration.

After about 1820 francophone slaveowners categorized enslaved persons as américains, créoles, or africains. Créole négre was the oldest term of this lexicon, for its history in Louisiana dated to the mid-eighteenth century. Although people in Louisiana applied the term like their counterparts elsewhere in the Atlantic world—to describe men and women born in the

Americas—they reserved it only for people born in Louisiana during the first decades of the nineteenth century.80 After the 1820s, recorders also began paying less attention to Africans’

79 Walter Johnson, “Introduction: The Future Store,” in The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 10–11; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 86–89. 80 Virginia R. Dominguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 93–132; Connie Eble, “Creole in Louisiana,” South Atlantic Review 73, no. 2 (Spring

73 diverse origins. Though they commonly listed diverse African nations in the records during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the only specific African nativity recorders usually noted after the 1820s were Congos because of large populations of people from the Congo region and West Central Africa.81 Likewise, at the beginning of the nineteenth century they attempted to keep track of enslaved people’s ports of departure on the United States’ east coast, like John

Clay did when he advertised the sale of “30 Virginia Slaves,” in December of 1808, or Flagg when he told people they could buy a “Charleston born negro wench” in 1806.82 Similarly, the recorder in St. John the Baptist parish recorded two “créole de Charleston” and one “créole de la

Virginie” between 1803 and 1820.83 Yet by the second decade of the century the term americain negre gained favor in the lexicon of slave nativity to describe enslaved people from the southeastern United States, and it became ubiquitous in documents during the nineteenth century.

During the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth, when

Louisiana’s slaveowners bought more enslaved men and women than any other time in their recent history, they transformed how they recored enslaved men and women’s nations.

Evidence from St. John the Baptist parish, one of the oldest plantation regions in

Louisiana, illustrates the gradual homogenization of enslaved people’s birthplaces in the lexicon of description. According to a database of estate inventories prepared by Geneviève Piché and generously shared with me, the recorder there employed 126 different terms to describe the

2008): 39–53. 81 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/T71h9uLB; Kevin D. Roberts, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 101–52. 82 Louisiana Gazette, 31 Dec. 1808; ibid., 21 Nov. 1806. 83 Geneviève Piché, “À la rencontre de deux mondes: Les esclaves de Louisiane et l’Église catholique, 1803–1845” (Ph.D. diss.: l’Université de Toulouse and l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2015), 446–98. Piché reproduced her tabular data from estate inventories in the parish in her dissertation, and she was kind enough to supply me with it.

74 diverse origins of enslaved men and women between 1803 and 1820.84 He wrote of a “natif de

Baltimore,” ten people from the “nation Kiamba,” and nine “senegalaise,” for instance. He only described one person as “africaine.” By the decade between 1835 and 1845, however, slaveowners had shrunk the lexicon to 31 words, which was dominated by just three: africain, américain, and créole. Slaveowners especially disregarded African enslaved people’s diverse nations after 1820. From 1835 to 1845, the notary of St. John the Baptist parish listed just one

Congo person, but 79 africains. Also gone were phrases like “créole de Charleston,” “créole du

Tenessee” and “de la Georgie” in favor of the all-inclusive, homogeneous adjective américain.

In many other places, especially the regions west and north of New Orleans where white migrants from the coastal southern states instituted plantation agriculture, recorders stopped cataloging enslaved men and women’s nativities altogether.85 By the middle of the nineteenth century, slaveowners had limited the number and variety of enslaved people’s places of birth that they recorded.

If it is difficult to understand what slaveowners’ language of enslaved nativity meant to them and why it persisted so long into the nineteenth century, it is even harder to learn its meaning for the enslaved people it described. There is of course a significant chance it meant nothing, that the names white slaveowners ascribed to the origins of enslaved people bore no

84 Piché, “A La Rencontre de Deux Mondes,” 446–98 (hereafter Piché database); Geneviève Piché, email message to author, 3 Oct. 2017. Though Piché’s database in part reproduces Hall’s records for the years between 1803 and 1820, Piché recorded the words as they were written in the estate inventories, so her data is more useful for this type of word analysis than Hall’s database, which categorized nations into numbers. See: Hall, Louisiana Slave Database. Piché also recorded inventories from 1835 to 1845, whereas Hall stopped recording documents produced after 1820. 85 See for instance: St. Mary Parish Original Conveyances, 1830, Book C1; St. Mary Parish Original Conveyances, 1840, Book E, vol. 2, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, Louisiana. On Anglo-American migration to southwestern Louisiana, see: Dolores Egger Labbe, “Anglo-Americans in Antebellum Attakapas and Opelousas,” Attakapas Gazette 21 (1986), 13—17; D. L. A. Hackett, “The Social Structure of Jacksonian Louisiana,” Louisiana Studies 12 (1973), 328—29; John B. Rehder, “Diagnostic Landscape Traits of Sugar Plantations in Southern Louisiana,” ed. Sam B. Hilliard, Geoscience and Man, Man and Environment in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 19 (1978): 135–50.

75 weight in enslaved men and women’s consciousnesses, or that they only achieved resonance in diaspora. Certainly both were often true. Historians of Africa have demonstrated that Africans’ group identities were complex and fluid, and they rarely corresponded with the geographic regions or political allegiances that Europeans often created.86 Others have shown how African names for “outsider,” “stranger,” or “slave” became collective identities in the Americas.87 The nation ascribed to an African woman named Franchonette is an example of the difficulties posed in interpreting the African nations that appear in the historical record. Recorder LeBlanc said

Franchonette was a “negresse of the nation Senegal,” but no Senegalese national identity existed.88 Hall claims these people were Wolof, but that too was a problematic and complex identity.89 The Wolof, after all, were a warring, trading, slaving people divided into multiple kingdoms, so it was possible men and women like Franchonette were not Wolof at all but the people they enslaved in raids or purchased in the Senegambian inland slave trade.90 If they were captives of the Islamic Wolof kingdoms, they may have not been Islamic. Perhaps the “nation

Senegal” became a diasporic identity in Louisiana. Though Louisiana’s recorders never preserved the complex and intricate meanings that enslaved Africans may ascribed to their own nativity, they recorded one basic and important fact: whoever was not a creole had once been a

86 Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996); G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2011); Henry B. Lovejoy and Olatunji Ojo, “‘Lucumi’, ‘Terranoiva’, and the Origins of the Yoruba Nation,” Journal of African History 56 (2015): 353–72. 87 Caron, “‘Of a Nation Which the Others Do Not Understand'”; Law, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade”; Byrd, Captives and Voyagers. 88 Deposition of Franchonette, 30 July 1792, Procès entre Colin Lacour et son négre André, 5 July 1792, doc. 1760, PCOA. 89 Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 47. 90 James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Searing, “Aristocrats, Slaves, and Peasants: Power and Dependency in the Wolof States, 1700–1850,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 21, no. 3 (1988): 484-87.

76 newcomer and outsider to the plantation communities of lower Louisiana. In short, they indexed the cultural consequences of the domestic slave trade.

There is at least evidence that enslaved men and women distinguished between Africans and Creoles. When slaveowner Colin Lacour beat Andre with a cane in 1792 in Pointe Coupee, the recorder Valerien LeBlanc found that enslaved people distinguished between people they called bruts, or Africans, and Creoles. In fact, that was how they made sense of the events that presaged Lacour’s senseless violence. When Leblanc asked Pierre why Lacour beat Andre, he echoed a story that Lacour’s other slaves told: “his master fed his slaves with a pint of corn per day; his negro bruts, not having enough, asked Colin Lacour their master for another ration, and that the latter suspected that they had been induced by the negro Andre.”91 Fassou, identified as a

Bambara and a negro brut in the document, was one of the people who asked Lacour for corn. As he told LeBlanc, “the negro bruts named Nassi, Paul, Francois, Cezar and him the declarant asked for the ration.”92 That Fassou identified himself and others as all bruts was telling, since they claimed distinct African origins. Both Fassou and Nassi were Bambara; Paul was a Nago;

Cezar was probably a Mina; and Francois was either a Wolof or Congo.93 On Lacour’s plantation in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, in 1792 they were all negre brutes; in addition, they were all hungry. So they went together to request more corn. Andre the Afro-Creole went too, not because he instigated the Africans, as Lacour claimed, but because he was “hungry like the others.”94 Though everyone on the Lacour plantation described the diverse Africans as negres

91 Deposition of Pierre, 28 Jul. 1792, Procès entre Colin Lacour et son négre André, No. 1760, PCOA. 92 Deposition of Fassou, 28 Jul. 1792, ibid. 93 Deposition of Fassou; Deposition of Joseph Quetou, 26 Jul. 1792, ibid. Paul, Cezar, and Francois appeared in Lacour’s estate inventory and sale documents in 1797. See: Colin Lacour estate inventory, 22 Feb. 1797, No. 1923, ibid; Colin Lacour estate sale, 25 May 1797, No. 1941, ibidl; Lacour estate inventory, 27 Jul. 1820, No. 618, ibid. All in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Louisiana Slave Database. 94 Deposition of Franchonette, 30 Jul. 1792, Procès entre Colin Lacour et son négre André, PCOA.

77 bruts—different from the Afro-Creoles born in Louisiana—they understood their distinctions alongside their shared plight. All were hungry on the Lacour plantation, no matter how long they had been living there. Few documents exist from the 1790s or after to corroborate the social structure on the Lacour plantation, but German author Frederich Gerstacker wrote in the 1840s when he traveled through Pointe Coupee that slaveowners there still distinguished between people they called “Guinea negroes” and those born in the United States.95 Though this example is an isolated one recorded before the nineteenth century, what it meant to be African in enslaved communities probably heightened after the ban on the Atlantic slave trade.

Enslaved people may have been the source of some of the African nations recorded in documents, especially during the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. When Spain claimed Louisiana, court interrogators asked enslaved people what nation they were when they took down testimonies, and this may have been common practice in other instances. When Guillaume Duparc recorded the confessions of enslaved people involved in the conspiracy in Pointe Coupee in 1795, he made the accused answer “for what he was arrested, from what nation he is, if he is married, and what his occupation is.”96 The diversity of nations that recorders cataloged before 1820 also suggests they were self-reported. As Hall has argued, many Africans who were new to Louisiana probably never answered the question because they had no idea what was being asked of them. Hall found that recorders described most enslaved Africans as bruts in slave sale documents, and African nations were more likely to appear in estate inventories, especially for people who had been in

Louisiana for some time.97 Available qualitative evidence substantiates Hall’s claim. When

95 Irene S. Di Maio, ed., Gerstacker’s Louisiana: Fiction and Travel Sketches from Antebellum Times Through Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 40. 96 For instance, see Confession of Guillaume, 16 May 1795, fol. 170, Procès contre les Eslaves, PCOA. 97 Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities, 42.

LeBlanc tried to understand what happened between Lacour and Andre, he spoke to Pithon, who he noted was a negre brut. Pithon said nothing. After a round of questions it was clear to

LeBlanc that Pithon was “not versed in any language other than his own.”98 Unlike Fassou, who learned Creole and was able to communicate his testimony to LeBlanc, Pithon was left speechless in the historical record.

Something similar happened to an unnamed African man. A boat captain surnamed

Delcambre found him on the natural levee of the Mississippi River beneath New Orleans in

February 1805 as he guided his ship to the western Attakapas country. The man was cold, naked, and “trembling.” Delcambre and his crew had no idea what to do with him. He was probably a fugitive from a plantation or perhaps a slave-trading ship, but he spoke neither English, French, nor Spanish.99 Delcambre no doubt asked around the plantations of the Mississippi coast there, and he claimed he “heard in the language of the coast that they were five and that some were dead.”100 What exactly happened to the man, and how he came to be naked on the bank of the

Mississippi River, was hidden behind the same language barrier that kept him and his African contemporaries from entering their voices into the historical record.

That silent unnamed African may stand in for countless enslaved people who appeared in the recorders’ archives as commodities—people bought, sold, mortgaged, and inventoried.

Historians have utilized these records since the beginning of the twentieth century to understand the slave trades to the lower Mississippi Valley, yet none have historicized the recorders’ archives. The same databases that have made it possible to comprehend the magnitude of forced

98 Deposition of Pithon, 31 Jul. 1792, Procès entre Colin Lacour et son négre André, PCOA. 99 Delcambre Declaration, 21 Feb. 1805, Original Acts, Attakapas County, St. Martinville, Louisiana. Hereafter ACOA. 100 Ibid.

79 migration in Louisiana and make it possible to understand the social and cultural consequences of that migration are built on records that reified the legal commodification of black men and women. Other sources, which entered black voices into the historical record through white commandants intent on ascribing guilt and innocence, disappeared soon after the United States purchased Louisiana. Transformations in government brought changes in the archives of original acts, which wrought consequences for the stories historians can tell, just as developments in the domestic slave trade transformed the lexicon of black nations that white notaries recorded.

Writing the history of African America remade in the lower Mississippi Valley requires including these rich and voluminous records, but different sources must also be used in order to understand how black men and women overcame the dislocations and separations caused by the slave trade. In particular, nineteenth-century notarial records tell little of the two most important ways forced migrants remade African America in the North American interior: by recreating families and churches in the slave trade’s wake.

CHAPTER THREE

RE-CREATING BLACK FAMILIES IN THE WAKE OF THE DOMESTIC SLAVE TRADE

In 1993 Adrienne LaCour interviewed Leonard Martin in Four Corners, Louisiana. Four

Corners was one of those populated rural villages, surrounded then, as it is now, by sugar cane fields in St. Mary Parish. Martin was born there in 1908, but his paternal grandfather Frank

Martin was a “bought slave from somewhere else.”1 Leonard Martin often dropped his r’s when he spoke, and it was difficult for LaCour to understand if he said his grandfather was a “bought slave” or a “brought slave.” So he clarified: “He was brought here as a bought slave.”2 Leonard

Martin’s grandfather Frank was one of thousands of enslaved men and women sold to slave traders and sent to lower Louisiana to labor on sugar plantations. They were “bought slaves” and

“brought slaves,” people worth a price who were separated from their families and communities and forcibly migrated to the lower Mississippi River Valley to fuel the capitalist economy of the nineteenth-century United States. If Leonard Martin and his memory represented local

“vernacular histories,” the survivors of that domestic slave trade never forgot that they were bought and brought people, people who were newcomers to lower Louisiana and once strangers to the places they and their descendants were forced to live.3 Neither did they forget their lack of choice in the matter. They had been brought by someone else, and those people who brought them—white and male people—brought them because they bought them. If the history of the nineteenth-century U.S. South was “the history of two million slave sales,” some one million of

1 Leonard Martin, interview by Adrienne LaCour, 10 Feb. 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. 2 Ibid. 3 Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migrations, Ex-Slave Narratives and Vernacular History,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 243–74.

81 those sales moved black enslaved people across the country and repeopled the lower Mississippi

Valley with enslaved Africans and their descendants.4 Another million sales moved people from neighborhood to neighborhood, county to county, in a local trade that blanketed the U.S. South, including the many counties of the lower Mississippi Valley.5 These domestic slave trades wrought social consequences, including the destruction and re-creation of families. Scholars have emphasized family separation, but as prowling slave traders devastated black families and communities in the upper South, the people the traders sold to the cotton and sugar frontiers remade what they had known with new people in the lower Mississippi Valley.

The bought and brought people of the Lower Mississippi Valley re-created families on the cotton and sugar plantations where they ended the “Second Middle Passage.”6 To the prevailing narrative of family separation and destruction must be added a history of family re- creation. The two were intertwined, not least because black men and women arrived in the valley with adaptable ideas about family, which equipped them with the tools to transform strangers into family and were born from the social consequences that the trade’s social destruction wrought in the upper South. If black people adapted to the disappearance of their loved ones by crafting ideas about family that were broader than the male-headed nuclear ones of nineteenth- century, white, middle-class America, they also remade their identities as Virginians,

Marylanders, Carolinians, or Kentuckians in diaspora in the lower Mississippi Valley.7 Those

4 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 17. 5 Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157–73. 6 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15. 7 For the spectrum of familial relationship in the lower Mississippi Valley see Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 51–82. For the upper South see Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 160, 175–84, 204–205, 206–57.

82 new identities were rooted in memories of home—itself a concept constructed during the process of forced migration—and in hopes of reconnecting with the people they left behind. These remade identities of African Americans in diaspora shaped how brought people remade families in the lower Mississippi Valley. As brought people developed ideas of homeland, identities as

Virginians or South Carolinians in diaspora, they sought and forged friendships, alliances, and eventually families with others brought from their homes, “old country people” one formerly enslaved woman called them.8 Probate inventories, notarized slave sales, and census returns attest to what happened. Only the voices of the enslaved, whether recorded in Works Progress

Administration narratives, fugitive slave narratives, or Civil War widows’ pension files, attest to how brought people remade families. Together these sources suggest that during the decades of slavery’s most rapid transformations in the United States, black men and women re-created families from remade identities, and in so doing re-created African America in the lower

Mississippi Valley.

The histories of black enslaved families and the domestic slave trade have been intertwined in American scholarship. They must be, for nearly every slave sale meant the forced separation of a husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter. Narratives of enslaved life have emphasized family separation; and they should, since white historians for decades denied the destruction that the slave trade wrought in black communities. Despite the efforts of these apologist scholars, who tried in the first decades of the twentieth century to demonstrate slavery’s supposed banality, and despite Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s complicated revisionist equations, historians have reached consensus that forced migration wrought havoc in

8 Deposition of Ophelia Hall, 14 Jan. 1879, Rosa Young Pension File, Civil War and Later Pension Files, 1861– 1942, Records of the Veterans Administration, RG 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. (hereafter CWPF).

83 black communities.9 One historian has suggested recently that 20 percent of a hypothetical fifty- person extended kin network was sold south from Virginia.10 In his response to Fogel and

Engerman, Herbert G. Gutman estimated southern whites sold an enslaved person every 3.6 minutes.11 All told, slave traders separated an estimated one-third of first marriages of enslaved people in the upper South.12 Yet enslaved men and women also adapted their social lives in the era of the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade, and scholars have heretofore studied well those who lived where the routes of the domestic slave trade began. Slave traders journeyed to places like Virginia and Maryland and there bought black men and women to sell in the slave markets of the lower Mississippi Valley. As abolitionist John G. Palfrey wrote in 1846, “Virginia became the Guinea coast of America.”13 For forced migrants, black communities in the upper

U.S. South were places of leaving, and rarely places of return. Slave traders depopulated them at a scale measurable in census returns, separating families and depleting communities in the process.14 To stave off social destruction, black men and women crafted flexible and extended

9 Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918), 187–204; Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 155–59; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974), 44–58; 78–86. 10 Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 13. 11 Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 124. Gutman’s calculation was part of his longer rebuke of Fogel and Engerman’s arguments, see: pp. 88–140. 12 Jo Ann Manfra and Robert R. Dykstra, “Serial Marriage and the Origins of the Black Stepfamily: The Rowanty Evidence,” Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 33–34. 13 John G. Palfrey, Papers on the Slave Power, First Published in the “Boston Whig” (Boston: Merrill, Cobb and Co., 1846), 10. 14 For quantitative estimates of the slave trade in the upper South see William Calderhead, “How Extensive Was the Border State Slave Trade?: A New Look,” Civil War History 18, no. 1 (March 1972): 42–55; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 143; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 11–46; Phillip Davis Troutman, “Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Virginia, 2000), 24–29. For histories of family separation, see: Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game, 88–140; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 133–78; Thomas D. Russell, “Articles Sell Best Singly: The Disruption of Slave Families at Court Sales,” Utah Law Review 4 (1996): 1161– 1210; Emily West, “Surviving Separation: Cross-Plantation Marriages and the Slave Trade in Antebellum South

84 households, families, and marriage relations that reached beyond plantation boundaries and even into nearby counties.15 Since slave traders bought young men for their cotton and sugar-growing customers in the lower Mississippi Valley, women often led enslaved communities in the

“Guinea coast of America” and dominated their demography.16 Those who stayed sought employment and freedom from enslavement in the transforming economy of those regions, which they leveraged to protect themselves and their families from the prowling traders.17

Historians’ image of black life in the supply-side of the domestic slave trade has never been clearer, nor has the reality of family separation and community depletion ever been better demonstrated. Historians have likewise pored over the documents of the forced migration itself and produced stores of knowledge about the slave traders, their routes, and their economic, cultural, and political histories.18 Less clear are the trade’s social consequences in the places it terminated, though Edward E. Baptist and Susan Eva O’Donovan have written about nascent black communities in the nineteenth-century plantation frontier, and Damian Alan Pargas has

Carolina,” Journal of Family History 24, no. 2 (April 1999): 212–31. 15 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 160, 175–84, 204–205, 206–57; Manfra and Dykstra, “Serial Marriage”; West, “Surviving Separation”; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 31–35. 16 Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 160, 181–82, 204–205, 209, 222–27; Richard Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 178–81, 191–98. 17 Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom, 18–21. 18 Wendell Holmes Stephenson, Isaac Franklin: Slave Trader and Planter of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1938); Charles H. Wesley, “Manifests of Slave Shipments Along the Waterways, 1808- 1865,” Journal of Negro History 27, no. 2 (1942): 155–74; William Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy: Austin Woolfolk, A Case Study,” Civil War History 23, no. 3 (September 1977): 195– 211; Richard Tansey, “Bernard Kendig and the New Orleans Slave Trade,” Louisiana History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 159–78; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 47–108; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 117–34; Robert H. Gudmestad, “The Troubled Legacy of Isaac Franklin: The Enterprise of Slave Trading,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 62 (Fall 2003): 193–217; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back, 94–141; Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 148–68; Calvin Schermerhorn, “Capitalism’s Captives: The Maritime United States Slave Trade, 1807-1850,” Journal of Social History 47, no. 4 (2014): 897–921; Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America’s Coastal Slave Trade (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 37–65.

85 compared black lives in the wake of forced migration.19 For every family and community in

Virginia or the Carolinas that lost a son, husband, daughter, or wife there were others in

Louisiana and Mississippi that gained strangers. Black communities in the lower Mississippi

Valley were places of arrival. And they were places of re-creating.

If the re-creation of African America began in the slave trade, as Ira Berlin and Walter

Johnson contend, so too did the re-creation of black families begin on the way to the lower

Mississippi Valley, though the relationships they made from fellow bought people rarely survived the valley’s trading blocks.20 Still, those social connections that survived resale in

Natchez, New Orleans, or points between attested to the bonds black men and women forged on river steamers, coastal schooners, and overland coffles. People who were bought and brought together forged bonds that they transported to the new sites of their enslavement. They sometimes found themselves in groups from similar homelands because slave buyers in the upper South often purchased men and women from nearby counties before they traveled to coastal ports or river towns. The traders’ many decisions concerning where to go, who to buy, and when to depart ensured that the domestic slave trade was anything but random.21 In shipping and conveyance records, traders left behind patterns of their buying practices, patterns that wrought social consequences for the people they bought. According to those patterns, the people who composed coffles and slave ships often lived near one another, either in the same counties or adjacent ones, before they fell into the hands of the traders. Family, friends, and acquaintances

19 Edward E. Baptist, Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 62–87, 192–99; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21–58; Damian Alan Pargas, Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kaye, Joining Places, 4–5, 26–41, 54–55. 20 Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 173; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 63–77. 21 Gudmestad, “The Troubled Legacy of Isaac Franklin,” 195–98, 204–206; Calderhead, “The Role of the Professional Slave Trader in a Slave Economy,” 197–201; Stephenson, Isaac Franklin, 22–33.

86 might have found themselves bought together by traders bound for the slave markets of the

Mississippi Valley. The strangers they met might have known acquaintances, or local landmarks, or people and events of local notoriety. Like the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, people sold to the United States’ interregional domestic slave trade forged social bonds with those they were migrated with.

Slave traders’ circuits in the upper U. S. South meant black men and women sometimes experienced the trials of forced migration with people from their homes. Sometimes they even found themselves in the same places in the lower Mississippi Valley. In St. Mary Parish, the heart of Louisiana’s sugar country, Robert and James McCarty established slavetrading routes between St. Mary and Hawkins County, Tennessee. In 1830 Robert lived in Franklin, Louisiana,

St. Mary’s parish seat, and sold black men and women whom James purchased in Hawkins

County. In winter 1829, James bought Rolly from John McKinney in Hawkins County, just as he purchased Lotty from George Hale. James probably forced them and at least six others down the

Mississippi River aboard a raft or steamboat. Somehow James McCarty navigated them into the

Teche to Franklin, where he sold them to diverse buyers, perhaps on a boat landing in front of the parish courthouse.22 Whether or not those people from Hawkins County knew one another before their removal from Tennessee has escaped the record that preserved the conveyance documents in which they appeared. If they were strangers when they boarded the boat that took them on their long journey down the Mississippi River and the Bayou Teche, they surely created

22 Sale of slave from Robert and James P. McCarty to Godfroy Provost, 13 May 1830, Original Conveyances, St. Mary Parish Courthouse, Franklin, Louisiana; sale of slaves from Robert and James P. McCarty to Marie Provost, 12 May 1830, ibid.; sale of slaves from Robert and James P. McCarty to Leufroy Provost, 15 May 1830, ibid.; sale of slave from Robert McCarty to Thomas Wallace, 11 May 1830, ibid.; sale of slave from Robert McCarty to Francois Louveire, 21 June 1830, ibid. Emma Dell Peters’s grandparents were sold on the boat landing on the Teche in front of the St. Mary Parish courthouse, and black people retained a place retained a memory of that space as the place where people were sold. See: Emma Dell Peters, interview by Adrienne LaCour, 1993, Adrienne LaCour Four Corners Series, T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History, LLMVC.

87 relationships along the way. Those relationships no doubt strengthened in St. Mary Parish, as the

McCartys sold all of them to members of the Prevost family. On the Prevost plantations they probably met other brought people. The ubiquity of the slave trade ensured that brought black men and women confronted people who might share similar memories of home, and similar memories of being bought and brought.

The people the McCarty’s trafficked to St. Mary Parish were not unique: slave traders often bought black men and women from adjacent counties in the upper South, and many of the bought people in the interregional domestic trade traveled to the lower Mississippi Valley with people from their homes, even as they met new people in the trade.23 Though historians have been unable to document the home counties of enslaved people who boarded specific slave trading vessels, detailed manifests of seventeen ocean-going and riverine slave ships that disembarked in New Orleans in November 1831 recorded the home counties of their human cargo.24 They make it possible to understand the geographic distribution of the human cargoes of domestic slave trading ships. Take for instance the people confined aboard the brig Ajax, which tacked up the Mississippi River to New Orleans in fall 1831, probably from Norfolk. They came from coastal counties in northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia (see Table 1 and

Figure 1). The trader, James B. Diggs, or his agents bought Stephen and twenty-one others in

Craven County, North Carolina.25 They probably bought them before they traveled north to

23 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 106–19. 24 Lists of Slaves Imported for Sale in the City of New Orleans, Records of the Office of the Mayor, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library (hereafter NPOL). Coastwise ship manifests did not record the counties of origin of the enslaved people who embarked slave ships, and between 1829 and 1831, Louisiana slave conveyances recorded the counties of enslaved people imported into the state, but not the ships on which they arrived. This unique, though small collection may have been an attempt to continue slave trade regulations repealed by the state legislature in 1831. See: Steckel and Ziebarth, “A Troublesome Statistic,” 796–98; Pritchett and Freudenberger, “The Domestic United States Slave Trade,” 447–51. 25 List of slaves recieved by the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831, Lists of Slaves Imported for Sale in the City of New Orleans, Records of the Office of the Mayor, City Archives, New Orleans Public Library. On agents, see: Deyle, Carry Me Back, 113–19.

Gates County, where they purchased Sophia and five others on their way to Norfolk.26 John

Woolfolk executed a similar strategy in Georgia as he accumulated people to force into the berth of the schooner Say Splendid. He made his way from east to west across the state and boarded the schooner in Mobile, purchasing people as he went: 19 people in Richmond County, where

Augusta was; another 19 people in Muscogee County, near Columbus; and more in counties between (see Table 2 and Figure 2).27 Though Diggs and Woolfolk sold these people in New

Orleans to the highest bidders and separated them from the friends they probably made on the

Ajax or the Say Splendid, the structures of the trade often cast black men and women from nearby places into the trade together.

Table 2: Home Counties of People on the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831.

County Number of People

Carteret, N.C. 2

Craven, N.C. 22

Gates, N.C. 6

Jones, N.C. 2

Lenoir, N.C. 1

Perquimans, N.C. 2

Wayne, N.C. 1

Petersburg, Va. 1

Suffolk, Va. 1

26 List of slaves recieved by the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831, Lists of Slaves, NOPL. 27 List of negroes belonging to John Woolfolk, 7 Nov. 1831, Lists of Slaves, NOPL.

Figure 1: Counties of the People on the Brig Ajax, 19 Nov. 1831 (southern Virginia counties omitted).

Table 3: Home Counties of People on the Schooner Say Splendid, 7 Nov. 1831.

County Number of People

Muscogee, Ga. 19

Richmond, Ga. 19

Washington, Ga. 5

Talbot, Ga. 2

Harris, Ga. 1

Figure 2: Counties of the People on the Schooner Say Splendid, 7 Nov. 1831.

Yet slave trading vessels were also the first places in the slave trade where black men and women encountered fellow purchased people from well beyond their homes. To maximize cargoes, large slavetrading vessels from Baltimore, Washington, D. C., or Alexandria, Virginia, sometimes stopped at ports on the Atlantic coast.28 The people aboard domestic slavetrading ships were thus combinations of groups of people collected from local trading networks. The men and women forced aboard the brig Bourne exemplify this pattern. They were 187 when they landed in New Orleans in November 1831, and they came from Maryland, Virginia, and North

Carolina in almost equal numbers. These groups of people had been bought in local slave-trading

28 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 98–106; Kerr-Ritchie, Rebellious Passage, 37–53, 77–91.

91 circuits. C. W. Diggs, perhaps a partner of James B. Diggs, shipped coastal North Carolinians and some people from southeastern Virginia, and Robert M. Simington claimed mostly people from coastal counties north of Norfolk.29 Benjamin Lewis shipped Marylanders and Virginians, including some people from the Shenandoah Valley, and John Woolkfolk boarded most of the

Marylanders and a few people from Virginia’s Eastern Shore.30 Groups of black Virginians,

Marylanders, and North Carolinians, which were assembled by slave traders as they purchased people from the counties near their offices, found themselves together in the hull of the Bourne and shipped to the lower Mississippi Valley.

The traders’ records attest to the structures of the trade, and the words of the people they trafficked evidenced the relationships they made on the way to the lower Mississippi Valley.

Most evident were those people whose relationships survived the valley’s slave markets, since they continued to interact as bondspeople on cotton and sugar plantations. The tale of George

Rice, Griffin Racks, and Lucinda Smith bear witness. According to Racks, in 1851 Rice “came with him from Virginia to this state at the same time . . . that he worked with him on the same plantation” in St. John the Baptist Parish.31 Smith may have come with Rice and Racks from

Virginia too—she never said—but she was with them in Bourbon County, Kentucky, where in

June 1851, Smith was “taken as a wife by said George Rice . . . at Nathan Bell’s negro trading camp.”32 Like many before them, Rice and Racks had been bought by a trader in Virginia, perhaps Nathan Bell or one of his agents, and walked west to the Ohio River Valley. There they boarded a river boat that took them to lower Louisiana, where in 1851 Norbert Lonque bought

29 List of Eighty Slaves Imported by C. W. Diggs in the Brig Bourne, 8 Nov. 1831, Lists of Slaves, NOPL; List of Fourteen Slaves imported by Robert M. Simington in the Brig Bourne, 8 Nov. 1831, ibid. 30 List of Slave per Brig Bourne . . . Shipped by Benjamin Lewis, 9 Nov. 1831, Lists of Slaves, NOPL; List of 53 Negroes Received by Brig Bourne, 8 Nov. 1831, ibid. 31 Deposition of Griffin Racks, 4 Oct. 1869, Lucinda Rice Pension File, CWPF. 32 Widow’s Claim for Pension, Lucinda Rice, 26 Aug. 1865, Lucinda Rice Pension File, CWPF.

92 them to work on his sugar plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish. According to Lonque, George

Rice and Lucinda Smith “were at the time man and wife and so bought by him.” 33 He purchased

Griffin Racks too, and the three toiled for Lonque until 1863, when Rice joined the United States

Army and died from pneumonia, which he contracted working in the swamps miles from where he was enslaved.34 Though George Rice died, Racks lived, and in 1876 Lucinda Rice and Griffin

Racks married one another in a Baptist church in New Orleans.35 Rice, Racks, and Smith had known one another since the early 1850s, when they met in the domestic slave trade to the lower

Mississippi Valley - perhaps in “Nathan Bell’s negro trading camp.” They labored on the same sugar plantation, and though Rice died before the Civil War ended, Racks and Smith continued their relationship into the 1870s, when they formally married. They were a few of the people who re-created African America on their way to the lower Mississippi Valley.

The advertisements slaveowners submitted to local newspapers likewise attested to the relationships bought and brought people made on the way to the new sites of their enslavement.

Those sold to the same neighborhoods as their trafficked friends sometimes left the plantations together. They had little difficulty finding one another, as black men and women lived in the planned, densely populated “quarters” on the narrow strips of land between the waterways and the swamps. Plantation districts were densely populated places, often more like rural villages

(see chapter one). Louisiana’s dense plantation neighborhoods allowed some shipmates to find one another after they had been purchased by different slaveowners in New Orleans. An enslaved man from the Congo River region named Dick and his shipmate found one another

33 Affidavit of Norbert Lonque, 25 Aug. 1870, Lucinda Rice Pension File, CWPF. 34 Testimony of James Cornelius, n.d., Lucinda Rice Pension Application, n.d., Lucinda Rice Pension File, CWPF. 35 Six years prior, Racks and the minister who married them appeared as a witness to one of Rice’s depositions, in which she attested to the cause of George Rice’s death see Deposition of Lucinda Rice, 27 May 1870, Lucinda Rice Pension File, CWPF.

93 after they arrived on different Mississippi River sugar plantations below New Orleans in 1807.36

Dick and his friend were not alone. Kongo men and women often fled the sugar plantations together, especially newcomers to lower Louisiana. Of the Kongos who fled in groups of two or more between 1803 and 1815, more than half left plantations with other Kongos.37 What was true in the era of the Atlantic slave trade to the lower Mississippi Valley was true decades later for black men and women of African descent. Davis Brown and James Burnet found themselves in the St. James Parish jail in February 1828. They told the jailer they belonged to a man in New

Orleans named James Young, but “that they came from Virginia with their master in a vessel with many slaves.”38 In October 1846, Henry Randolph, Henry Armstrong, a man who went by

Fountain or Thornton, and another who went by Isom or Isaac, left Benjamin Cross’s plantation in Lafourche Parish, not far from Thibodaux. According to Cross, the four “were brought from

Kentucky one year since.”39 They were brought people who either knew one another in

Kentucky or met on the way to the lower Mississippi Valley’s slave markets. As they left their homes for the fertile lands south and west, black men and women re-created African America on the way to the Lower Mississippi Valley.

By far the majority of the people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley came from six adjoining states: Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

In the local parlance of the time they were “American negroes” or “négres américains.” By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, white recorders were rarely more specific (see chapter

2). As the slave traders wrote in the 1820s of “American slaves such as were brought from

36 New Orleans Moniteur de la Louisiane, 10 June 1807, in Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec and Leon Robichaud, Le Marronnage dans le monde Atlantique: Sources et Trajectories De Vie, http://marronnage.info/fr/index.html. 37 9 groups out of 15 listed in fugitive advertisements. See: Le Glaunec and Robichaud, Le Marronnage dans le monde Atlantique, http://marronnage.info/fr/index.html. 38 New Orleans Argus, 25 Feb. 1828, in Edward E. Baptist, et. al., Freedom on the Move, www.freedomonthemove.org. 39 New Orleans Daily Picayune, 7 Oct. 1846, in Baptist, et. al., Freedom on the Move.

Virginia, Maryland and the Western country,”40 American negroes meant people brought to

Louisiana from elsewhere in the United States. A marriage contract written in 1820 in French and English clarifies the term. In French, the francophone assessors claimed Jack, Tom, and

Jenny were “négres américains”; in English, they wrote that they were “born in the United

States”; according to court testimony, the three were from South Carolina.41 If samples of conveyance documents and probate inventories can substitute for census data, “American negroes” became the majority of the enslaved people in lower Louisiana by the 1840s, just as the region shifted to sugar and after the appearance of vertically integrated slavetrading firms.42 In some sections of the state, they had been so since soon after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, especially those places little populated by Europeans and Africans in the eighteenth century.

Within two decades of the commercialization of domestic slavetrading firms, brought people outnumbered their creole peers in even the longest populated places of the lower Mississippi

Valley, such as St. John the Baptist Parish (Table 3). Such was the rapid transformation of the valley during the nineteenth century and the scale of the problems of reincorporation.

40 Deposition of John Clay, Emile Lénet, and Joseph Lecarpentir, 22 May, 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves Liberated by British Forces after the Battle of New Orleans, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana. 41 Marriage Certificate between James Mitchel and Benjamin Jewel, 14 Dec. 1819, pp. 6–7, Mitchel vs. Jewel, No. 499.1, December 1820, Supreme Court of Louisiana HIstorical Archives, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter LSC, UNO). 42 Schermerhorn, “Capitalism’s Captives.”

Table 4: Nations of Enslaved People, St. John the Baptist Parish, 1790–1860.43

Year Négres Négres Négres Unrecorded américains créoles africains (all nations) 179044 0 19 33 6 180045 5 39 45 5 1810 0 11 5 40 182046 13 35 34 9 1835- 318 215 101 183947 1840 334 199 73 1850 58 62 14 37548 1860 56 140 1 211

Once in the neighborhoods where their second Middle Passages ended, black men and women found friends in the ranks of the brought, especially those who shared similar origins.

Origins mattered, less because of shared static cultural identities and more because brought people sought connections to the homes and families from which the slave traders had wrenched them. When Brooks heard through the neighborhood grapevine that a newcomer from Virginia had arrived, she thought first of the family she had been separated from four years before: “‘That might be some of my kinsfolks, or somebody that knew my mother,’” she remembered thinking.49 So one Sunday she walked to meet the woman named Jane Lee, and after hours of

43 Sources: For 1790 to 1820: Hall, Louisiana Slave Database. For 1835–39: Geneviève Piché, “À La Rencontre de Deux Mondes: Les Esclaves de Louisiane et l’Église Catholique, 1803–1845” (Ph.D. dissertation, Toulouse-Jean Jaures, France and Sherbrooke, Can.: l’Université de Toulouse and l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2015); For 1840 to 1860: Original Acts, St. John the Baptist Parish Courthouse, Edgard, Louisiana. 44 Also recorded 1 person from Jamaica. 45 Also recorded 2 people from Jamaica and 1 other person from somewhere in the Caribbean. 46 Also recorded 1 person from St. Domingue. 47 Four years were used here because Piché’s sample size was smaller, since she relied exclusively on probate inventories. 48 The number of people whose “origins” went unrecorded jumped in 1850 and 1860, which reflected the proclivities of the recorder and also, perhaps, the ubiquity of négres américains in the enslaved population. There were more men with unrecorded “origins” than women in 1850 and 1860, which suggests they were bought people. 49 Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1890), 7.

96 commiserating about their shared plight, their sale and separation from their families in Virginia and their arrival as strangers in Louisiana, they began to re-create the families they had been torn from. As Brooks said, “Aunt Jane was no kin to me, but I felt that she was because she came from my old home.”50 Brought people’s search for old country people perhaps led the brothers

Ned and Dick to a slave trader’s yard in New Orleans in 1854, where an enslaved man trained as a carpenter (his name was never recorded) waited to be purchased. All three were from Talladega

County, Alabama. According to the carpenter, and to Ned and Dick’s former owner, Walker

Reynolds, the two had escaped or been stolen from a plantation in Talladega County in early

September 1845 when they were teenagers.51 They ended up in New Orleans, where they worked as stevedores for their new owner. When the carpenter was sold to the city, the three connected.

They talked, so the carpenter wrote to Reynolds, and Ned and Dick told him “they want to come home to see their mother Venus and Morris and Lottey.”52 According to the man who hired the brothers, “[t]he carpenter was raised in Alabama” and said that he knew “these boys personally.”53 Even if the carpenter had never met Ned and Dick before New Orleans, he knew quite a lot about their personal histories, information that was repeated by white Alabamans in written affidavits and verbal testimony in the lawsuit Reynolds brought against Ned and Dick’s

Louisiana buyer. The carpenter knew the names of Ned and Dick’s kin in Talladega County; he knew how and when they left Alabama; and he knew their former owner. Brought people often swapped such information with old country people they met in the lower Mississippi Valley in hopes of reconnecting with lost friends and loved ones.

Black men and women brought to Louisiana told those they met where they came from,

50 Albert, House of Bondage, 8. 51 Petition of Walker Reynolds, 20 Jan. 1855, p. 6, Reynolds vs. Batson, No. 4291a, Dec. 1856, LSC, UNO. 52 Unknown to Walker Reynolds, n.d., p. 93, Reynolds vs. Batson, No. 4291a, Dec. 1856, LSC, UNO. 53 D. Kinney to Walker Reynolds, 12 Dec. 1854, p. 96, Reynolds vs. Batson, No. 4291a, Dec. 1856, LSC, UNO.

97 and homelands became important information they remembered about one another, along with when they arrived, who they married, and how many children they had. When a pension agent asked Laura Duncans about Mary J. Fontenot in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, Duncans recalled

“She came here from New Orleans but I understood she was originally from Kentucky.”54 As they told the stories of their lives to one another, they recited tales of the slave trade: where the traders took them from, where they brought them, and who they left behind. Black people continued to tell their stories of being brought long after emancipation. Martha Brooks started her story thus: “I was born five miles of Port Tobacco Md. I belonged to John Chapman. I was sold to John Campbell a trader who brought me to New Orleans, La. and sold me from the traders yard to Whitman Pugh.”55 Brooks met her future husband on the Pugh plantation, and she knew his story as a bought slave too. She reported that “Pugh bought Wallace before he bought me. Wallace said he had come from Missouri and that he had been on the plantation two years before I came.”56 When enslaved men and women told people their birthplaces, they indicted the domestic slave trade: “I was born in Virginia and was sold to John Tilquey and lived near Bayou

Sarah”; “I was born in Maryland so my mother told me and brought here when a child”; “I was born in South Carolina but raised up Red River.”57 They made sale, separation, and forced migration definitive chapters of their personal stories, stories that they shared with one another.

Though brought people came from different places, they had all survived sale, separation, and forced migration.

No wonder then when Frederick Law Olmsted visited lower Louisiana and struck up a

54 Deposition of Laura Duncans, 24 Feb. 1902, Mary J. Fontenot Pension File, CWPF. 55 Deposition of Martha Brooks, 4 March 1887, Martha Brooks Pension File, p. 4, CWPF. 56 Deposition of Martha Brooks, 4 March 1887, Martha Brooks Pension File, p. 9, CWPF. 57 Deposition of Isaac Rose, alias Scott, 23 Aug. 1911, p. 46, Mary Bray Pension File, CWPF; Deposition of Elizabeth Robinson, 7 Apr. 1893, p. 11, Elizabeth Robinson Pension File, CWPF; Deposition of Isabella Windor, 2 Nov. 1917, p. 6, Isabelle Battice Pension File, CWPF.

98 short conversation with an enslaved man from Virginia named William, he learned the man’s history with the trade. Olmsted never asked of course. He was more interested in convincing

William that he was better off in the United States than Africa, but also that he should go to

Liberia were he to become free, but William chose to talk about the trade.58 He told Olmsted he was from Virginia early in the conversation; he told him he was thirteen when slave traders took him from his mother; and he told him about walking across the Blue Ridge Mountains to

Louisville, where he boarded a steamboat that took him to the lower Mississippi Valley.59

Virginia was William’s home, and he wanted to return there to see his mother, but it was also a place where slaveowners “were selling their servants . . . all the time.”60 William knew the reason too: there were more black people there than in Louisiana.61 By the time William drove the carriage that Olmsted borrowed from William’s owner, the man had lived in lower Louisiana for two decades. Yet in one carriage ride he had told Olmsted about his life as a brought man.

For six decades slave traders peopled the lower Mississippi Valley with commodified black men and women like William from states where there were more laborers and too many black bodies than America’s economy required. Enslaved peoples’ stories of forced migration were integral to their personal histories. For decades, thousands of men and women explained to one another, and perhaps themselves, how they arrived to the new sites of their enslavement. They told of home, of the sellers and buyers, and after some time on the cotton and sugar plantations of the lower

Mississippi Valley, they told of the people they met there. Olmsted reported that William “had got used to this country, and had all his acquaintances here, and knew the ways of the people.”62

58 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 678–80. 59 Olmsted, A Journey, 676–78. 60 Olmsted, A Journey, 678. 61 Olmsted, A Journey, 677. 62 Olmsted, A Journey, 677.

He had built a new home, but he never forgot his old one.

When they met one another before and after the Civil War, black men and women who were brought to Louisiana recited the places they had once called home, which provided many occasions for old country people to find one another. When Mathew Johnson overheard Ophelia

Hall mention she had once lived in South Carolina, he announced that he too was from there and

“asked her to come to his house and have a talk about the old country, meaning South

Carolina.”63 Hall told a pension agent that she objected, citing Victorian sexual mores and asserting her gentility “that it was not the custom of ladies to call on gentlemen,” but Johnson defended himself and claimed his wife “liked to have old country people come to see him."64

Apparently Johnson often entertained fellow South Carolinians in his home in New Orleans.

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert had a similar conversation with John Goodwin. “[Y]ou formerly lived in the State of Georgia,” Goodwin told Albert, “I came from there when I was young. . . .

Won’t you come around to see me some time and have a good talk about our native home?”65

Sally Snowden’s relationship with her husband might have begun with such a conversation.

Snowden was from Talbot County, Georgia, and her “husband come from Georgia too, but we never saw each other until we was in Louisiana.”66 Solomon Northrup learned that Rose, one of the people William Ford enslaved, was from Washington, D.C., “and had been brought from thence five years before.”67 They talked of a woman Northrup met in the trade named Eliza, who was also from the city, and Rose made fast friends with Berry, another man whom Ford bought in the New Orleans slave market. According to Northrup, “they knew the same streets, and the

63 Deposition of Ophelia Hall, 14 Jan. 1879, Rosa Young Pension File, CWPF. 64 Deposition of Ophelia Hall, 14 Jan. 1879, Rosa Young Pension File, CWPF. 65 Albert, House of Bondage, 59. 66 Sally Snowden, interview by Rouceive Baham, c. 1936, in Ronnie W. Clayton, ed., Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York, 1990), 194. 67 Sue Eakin, Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2007), 95

100 same people, either personally, or by reputation. They became fast friends immediately, and talked a great deal together of old times, and of friends they had left behind.”68 From such conversations, brought people used their shared memories of their former homes to build new communities in the Deep South.

In time, brought people found new spouses in the lower Mississippi Valley. Trevon D.

Logan and Jonathan B. Pritchett have found from New Orleans hospital admission records that enslaved people who had lived in the city for at least five years were more likely to be recorded as married than new arrivals.69 When brought people married, they often married others who came to the valley through the slave trade, at least according to the 1870 census. That was the first federal census that recorded the birthplaces of black men and women in the lower

Mississippi Valley. Though recorders traveled through the region five years after the Civil War, most of the black people whom they tabulated in their schedules had once been enslaved.70 Not surprisingly, the schedules from Louisiana revealed black men and women born in the upper

U.S. South, and since employees of the census bureau also recorded households, the 1870 census confirmed the marriage patterns that brought people revealed in their testimonies: they found one another in the new sites of their enslavement. In a sample culled from the census returns of three parishes in lower Louisiana, survivors of forced migration made partners of one another more than they married or cohabitated with men and women born in Louisiana; both partners were born outside Louisiana in 35 percent to 51 percent of the couples involving brought people.71

The 1870 census also revealed the demographics of the brought. Since slave traders bought more

68 Eakin, Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave, 95–96. 69 Trevon D. Logan and Jonathan B. Pritchett, “On the Marital Status of U. S. Slaves: Evidence from Touro Infirmary, New Orleans, Louisiana,” Explorations in Economic History, (June 2017): 7. 70 On the problems with the 1870 census, see: Richard Reid, “The 1870 United States Census and Black Underenumeration: A Test Case from North Carolina,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 28, no. 56 (1995): 487–99. 71 Population Schedules, Terrebonne, St. John the Baptist, and St. Mary Parishes, Louisiana, 1870, Ninth Census of the United States, United States Census Bureau, microfilm, M593, rolls 529, 531, 533, NARA.

101 men than women in the upper U.S. South, many men brought to the valley partnered with women born in Louisiana; brought women entered into partnerships with Louisiana men less often (see table 3). Marriage patterns evident in the 1870 census laid bare the social consequences of the domestic slave trade, but these numbers reveal little of the experiences of the brought, of how they found one another in the new sites of their enslavement.

Table 5: Marriage Patterns of Brought People, St. John the Baptist, Terrebonne, and St.

Mary Parishes, 1870

Parish Percent of total Percent of total in Percent of total in Total Number of in Parish of Parish wives born Parish of both Couples husbands born outside Louisiana partners born outside Louisiana and Husbands outside Louisiana and wives born in born in Louisiana Louisiana St. John the 45 15 40 344 Baptist Terrebonne 55 10 35 258 St. Mary 36 13 51 762

After formerly enslaved women’s husbands died during the Civil War, they told the stories of their marriages in the context of the slave trade. When pension agents investigated their claims, they told stories of quick courtships. Martha Brooks remembered she and Wallace

“commenced living together about a year after I went to the plantation.”72 Ellen and James

Hunter were both bought by Harry Knoblock through the local slave trade decades before the

Civil War, and “It was about six months after [James] was bought that we were married.”73

W.P.A. narratives too evidence the quick conjugal alliances black men and women made. Julia

72 Testimony of Martha Brooks, 4 March 1887, Martha Brooks Pension File, p. 9, CWPF. 73 Testimony of Ellen Hunter, 25 May 1887, Ellen Hunter Pension File, p. 5, CWPF.

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Woodrich’s mother was practiced at making partners as a person brought to and fro through the local trade: “Every time she was sold she would get another man.”74 Many enslaved people who lost partners through the local trade found new ones from brought men and women. Eliza B.

Dorsey had a child by “William Francis . . . . They sold him away from me before I ever knew

Houston Bray,” the man she later married.75 The enslaved seldom had much choice, as slaveowners in lower Louisiana attempted to free themselves from their reliance on the slave trade by managing black women’s reproductive lives.76 For instance the man who owned Mary

Jane Taylor and Valleny Fontenot forced them to replace the partners they lost from the trade with one another. Mary had been married to Sam Washington and the two had four children together, but they “were sold to different parties, thereby becoming separated.”77 A white man surnamed Fontenot purchased Mary, probably in 1853, and on his plantation near Opelousas she found Valleny.78 Valleny though was married to a woman named Malena. By Malena’s recollection they had been married for two or three years, but they had no children. Since the value of enslaved women was tied to their reproductive capacities as much as their labor, the man who owned Malena “threatened to sell her and afterwards made Volne Fontano [sic] and this Mary live and cohabit together.”79 So they did, and the slaveowner surnamed Fontenot never sold Malena. Enslaved men and women created dynamic and flexible families that responded to

74 Julia Woodrich, interview by Flossie McElwee, 31 May 1940, in Clayton, ed. Mother Wit, 217. 75 Deposition of Eliza B. Dorsey, 16 Aug 1911, p. 14, Mary Bray Pension File, CWPF. 76 Richard Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Family History 28, no. 4 (October 2003): 510–39; Richard Follett, “‘Lives of Living Death’: The Reproductive Lives of Slave Women in the Cane World of Louisiana,” Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 2 (August 2005): 289–304. 77 General Affidavit of Malena Fontano, 20 Nov. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF.. In her pension application, Mary Jane Taylor Fontenot stated she had been married three times, though never to a Sam Washing, see: Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 15 June 1864, CWPF. 78 Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 8 Aug. 1865, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF. In her first pension application, Fontenot claimed she was married in 1855, but she revised the date to 1853 a year later. 1853 is preferred here because Malena claimed she married Valleny in 1851 and was forced to separate from him after two or three years. See: Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 15 June 1864; General Affidavit of Malena Fontano, 20 Nov. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF. 79 General Affidavit of Malena Fontano, 20 Nov. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF.

103 the white men and women’s powers to purchase and sell black people.

Enslaved people in Louisiana even allowed for multiple, simultaneous partners, as demonstrated by the case of Fontenot’s two wives. After Valleny’s death during the Civil War, pension agents were forced to adjudicate his ruptured marriage because both Mary and Malena claimed his pension. As they gathered evidence from past acquaintances, they revealed, though never stated, a truth uncomfortable to Victorian sexual mores and unrecognizable by American pension law: Valleny Fontenot considered both Mary Jane and Malena his wives. Both women secured witnesses who attested that they were married to Fontenot. Mary Jane found Dennis

Wayne, who lived on an adjoining plantation, and Louisa Fontenot, Valleny’s sister. In keeping with the prescribed formulas of widows’ pension applications, they testified that they were present at Valleny and Mary Jane’s marriage in 1853 and that “from said marriage to the death of said deceased the said parties habitually recognized each other as man and wife."80 When Malena applied for her widows’ pension in 1897, she too found a witness who attested that Valleny considered her his wife. Sam Allen lived in the same barracks as Valleny in New Orleans and

Port Hudson during the Civil War, and when their regiments were in Port Hudson, he remembered “that Fontano's wife called on him at that place, and if the affiant's memory serves him correctly, the claimant [Malena] is the woman whom Fontano told him was his wife.”81 Of course, both Mary Jane and Malena needed to be considered Fontenot’s only wife, since their prospective benefits from the federal government hinged on marital fidelity. As Malena acknowledged though, the type of fidelity that pension agents expected was impossible for her, since her owners had separated her from Valleny, just as they separated Mary Jane from Sam

80 Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 8 Aug. 1865, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF. Dennis Wayne and Louisa Fontenot also appear as witnesses to their marriage in Mary Jane Fontenot’s first pension application. See: Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 15 June 1864, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF. 81 Deposition of Sam Allen, 20 Nov. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension File, CWPF.

104

Washington when they purchased her. With the survival of their marital relationships beyond their control, enslaved men and women like Valleny, Mary Jane, and Malena Fontenot created flexible ideas of marriage that allowed Valleny to consider both Mary Jane and Malena as his wives. Black men and women’s lives required such creativity in the face of the slave trade.

Some of the people who brought black men and women met escaped the terrors of the interregional domestic slave trade, yet they could still swap stories about sale and separation with the survivors of long-distance forced migration. Their parents, who were sometimes brought people themselves, birthed them in the lower Mississippi Valley, where the United States’ capitalist economy most needed the labor of their bodies. Because of the trajectories of eighteenth-century European colonialism in North America, others laid claim to an African

American history distinct from their Tidewater and Lowcountry peers. Their African ancestors were enslaved where France, then Spain, colonized Native American land on the Mississippi

River near its outlet with the Gulf of Mexico. Only in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and the first of the nineteenth, did enslaved forced migrants arrive in the lower Mississippi

Valley and forge anew communities from the ones they had once known in eastern and northern places. Ever after, they arrived on land where other enslaved people lived. Many of those people who forced migrants met had also been forced to move there from places as distant. Others were born in Louisiana, though their birth in the lower Mississippi Valley never rescued them from the many tentacles of the local trade. In sheriff sales, estate sales, local conveyances, and the occasional in-kind exchanges and donations, economical owners transported enslaved people from failing to profitable plantations, from the lands of dead owners to the lands of living ones, from economically stagnant parishes to bountiful ones. Even those born in lower Louisiana were

105 never safe from sale and separation.82 All were in some way bought and brought people.

In the 1790s forced migrants from the African continent and the United States, who arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley to fuel the booming cotton and sugar revolutions, found there communities of enslaved creole peoples of African descent. These were the négres créoles of the recorders’ archives. They were the descendants of the few forced African migrants who arrived in the European colony in the early eighteenth century to labor on the indigo and tobacco plantations that preceded cotton and sugar ones. They developed an Afro-Creole culture distinct from their contemporaries in the new American republic. They molded the French languages of

Louisiana’s colonists to their own use, and they appropriated Catholic rites, especially baptism, to formalize social ties and incorporate newcomers.83 Perhaps because their nativity gave them authority in black communities, Louisiana’s Afro-Creoles filled the ranks of the commandeurs.84

They also were overrepresented in the files of skilled and semiskilled trades.85 By the 1790s, their communities were in no way static. For decades, they had incorporated the enslaved

Africans whom their owners bought from the few slave traders that did business in New Orleans.

From the 1790s to the 1810s, they were between 34 percent and 36 percent of Louisiana’s

82 Tadman contends the local trade was less common in the lower South, see: Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 175– 76. Malone suggests few were safe from separation in Louisiana, though without quantitative estimates, see: Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 205–17. On the local trade generally, see: Deyle, Carry Me Back, 157–73. 83 Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 157–200; Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852,” The William and Mary Quarterly 59 (April 2002): 409–48. Kevin D. Roberts, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 101–52; Thomas A. Klingler, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 25– 92. 84 Between 1790 and 1820, 123 commandeurs appeared in the notaries’ archives, and recorders marked that 40 had been born in Louisiana. They left unrecorded the birthplaces of another 63 men, and all but 5 bore European names. It is possible then that almost 80% of the commandeurs recorded in the notarial archives of southern Louisiana were born in Louisiana at the turn of the nineteenth century. See: Hall, Louisiana Slave Database. 85 There were 2,837 people who were not recorded as field laborers between 1790 and 1820 and whose birthplaces were also recorded. 45 percent of them were Afro-Creoles. Of those enslaved blacksmiths for whom we have evidence of birthplaces, 34 percent were born in Louisiana. The same was not true of the 988 field laborers whose birthplaces were recorded; only 21 percent were born in Louisiana. See: Hall, Louisiana Slave Database.

106 enslaved population; the rest were Africans, people from Caribbean islands, or men and women from the United States.86 Afro-creoles were never safe from the slave trade, despite their birth in

Louisiana. Though their culture was distinct from the bought people who arrived during the nineteenth century, they were often bought and brought people too.

Enslaved people born in lower Louisiana were spared the distant dislocations of the domestic slave trade, but they were never safe from sale or separation. Like those who arrived to the lower Mississippi Valley from the upper U.S. South, men and women born in Louisiana were also often brought people. Slaveowners transported black men and women around the valley in a local slave trade of sheriff sales, estate liquidations, in-kind transfers, and basic conveyances. At least twenty-six enslaved people were moved to different plantations in St. Mary Parish and from other Louisiana parishes in 1840.87 Mary G. Weeks and others bought fourteen people from

Iberville Parish sugar planter Anthony Gilbert Marionniane, and others purchased twenty-six men and women from Philip J. Brison and Charles Sevier of Madison County, Mississippi.88

Debt and white death were the biggest drivers of the local slave trade in the lower Mississippi

Valley. For instance, Louis Loroque Turgeau was forced to sell twenty-two enslaved people in

Ascension Parish in 1840, and his liquidation attracted twelve buyers from Ascension,

Assumption, and St. James Parishes.89 In a set of slave sale documents recorded in 1840 in courthouses in parishes on the Mississippi River, slaveowners bought and sold people from their

86 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, “Percent of Origin, Atlantic Slave Trade,” Image Charts, Dr. Hall’s Calculations, Afro- Louisiana History and Geneolody, 1718–1820, https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/calculations.php. 87 Original Conveyances, 1840, Book E, St. Mary Parish Clerk of Court, Franklin, Louisiana. 88 Sale of slave from A. Gilbert Marionniane to Joseph V. Fanny, J. A. Firere, Mary G. Weeks, and Euphrosy Carlin, 16 Nov. 1840; 23 Nov. 1840; 28 Nov. 1840; 10 Dec. 1840, Original Conveyances, St. Mary Parish Clerk of Court, Franklin, Louisiana. 89 Sale of slaves from Noel Barthelemy LeBreton, syndic for the creditors of Louis Loroque Turgeau to Edward Duffel Jr., Ignace Duger, David A. Barry, Nicolas Babin, Marie St de Gaalon, John M. Brooks, Jean Pierre Morousse, Eloi Melancon, Eugene Lacroix, Andre Gouvier, Austides Landry, and Solomon Comes, 26 May 1840 and 27 May 1840, Edward Duffel notary, Original Acts, Ascension Parish Clerk of Court, Donaldsonville, Louisiana.

107 friends, family, and neighbors often.90 This local slave trade ensured that the black communities of the lower Mississippi Valley were far from stable.

Slaveowners matched their local demand for laborers and separated families and destabilized communities in the process. Though John was born in lower Louisiana, he was brought 70 miles from St. Mary Parish to Opelousas to satisfy James Lee’s labor demands. In

1854 Lee wanted to sell him and advertised his sale in Opelousas, but he also asked his friend J.

W. Lyman to inquire for buyers in St. Mary. Lyman thought Lee ought to sell John in St. Mary for two reasons: most importantly, he was worth more in the sugar parish, and “a proper regard to humanity, would urge you to sell him in the neighborhood where he was born and raised, provided you could do so without material sacrifice.”91 Though born in St. Mary, John had spent many years of his life 70 miles north, away from his family and community. They must have still lived in St. Mary Parish, and perhaps they inquired about John often. Why else would Lyman think it “a proper regard to humanity” to sell John back to where he was born and raised? John and his family were not alone. In 1911 Alfred Edwards recounted the many local forced migrations he, his family, and his second cousin Houston Bray were made to endure in Louisiana after their owner, Job B. Rawles, had supplanted them from their roots near Little Rock,

Arkansas: “J. B. Rawles brought Houston Bray and his mother to St. Mary Parish at the same time he brought me. . . . About ten years before the civil war J. B. Rawles moved to a place on

Bayou Courtableaux in St. Landry Parish and took all his slaves to that place. He stayed there several years and then moved to Opelousas . . . When he moved to Opelousas he sent me and my

90 Original Acts, St James Parish Courthouse, Convent, Louisiana; Original Acts, St. John the Baptist Parish Courthouse, Edgard, Louisiana; Original Acts, Ascension Parish Courthouse, Donaldsonville, Louisiana; Original Acts, Plaquemines Parish Courthouse, Belle Chasse, Louisiana. 91 J. W. Lyman to James A. Lee, 21 August 1854, Gebert, Ray, and Lee Family Papers, Acadiana Manuscripts Collections, Special Collections, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana.

108 brothers Henderson Edwards and Wesley Edwards and Houston Bray to New Iberia to work for

Jasper Gaul in his sawmill. He hired us out to Jasper Gaul by contract about five years before the war and we worked for Jasper Gaul in his sawmill four years.”92 Pursuing his own financial gain,

Rawles transported the people he owned hundreds of miles around southwestern Louisiana. In the mid-1850s he separated three young men from their families in order to earn money from their labor in a sawmill some 70 miles away. At least the Brays and the Edwardses were able to maintain some connection among themselves, even if their constant forced movements prevented them from growing deep roots in the neighborhoods where Rawles landed. This was never the case for Henrietta Butler’s brothers in Lafourche Parish. According to Butler, her owner Emily

Haidee was “sellin’ the boys and keepin’ the gals.”93 Though the people born in the lower

Mississippi Valley were spared the trials of the interregional domestic slave trade, propagators of the local trade still separated them from their families and communities.

Such interregional and local separations were the subject of an apocryphal story that enslaved people no doubt repeated to one another as they reckoned with the trauma of sale and separation through the local slave trade. Its survival into the twentieth century spoke to its cultural resonance. It told of Pierre Aucuin and his wife Tamerant in 1866 on the Madewood

Plantation near Napoleonville, Louisiana. Freed by the Civil War, they prepared to leave for

Lafourche Parish, not far from where they now lived. According to the teller “Pierre Aucuin was full of thoughts of his departure for Lafourche. The thought of home was more than ordinarily pleasant to him. His beloved Tamerant had been born in Lafourche too.”94 Pierre and Tamerant were brought to Madewood against their will and separated from their families, who lived across

92 Deposition of Alfred Edwards, 27 Jul. 1911, Mary Bray pension file, p. 18, CWPF. 93 Henrietta Butler interview by Flossie McElwee, 28 May 1940 in Clayton, ed., Mother Wit, 38. 94 Pierre Aucuin in Clayton, ed. Mother Wit, 20–21.

109 the parish line. Pierre asked Temerant to cut his hair as they prepared to return to their home. As she cut Pierre’s hair, Temerant uncovered a scar on the back of his head, which jolted her memory and inspired her to tell Pierre about her family in Lafourche. She said she had a brother there, who was sold away from their parents five years before she was, and she told that she had scarred her brother on the back of his head with an oyster shell. The story ends as Pierre jumps from his chair in disbelief, exclaiming, “I is dat little brother you cut in de head, Tamerant!” 95

Black men and women indicted the morality of the slave trade, even the local one, when they talked of Pierre Aucuin and Tamerant. Though its tellers plotted a tragic, comedic, and unlikely story, they argued that the local slave trade separated family members from one another to such an extant that they were unable to recognize one another from strangers. The slave trade, they said, made incest possible.

None were safe from sale and separation, even those born in the places where the United

States’ nineteenth century capitalist economy most needed their labor. This shared history of the slave trade and enslavement both caused and resolved cross-cultural tensions between forced migrants from the eastern United States and their Louisiana creoles; it also muddled the distinctions between them, especially as so-called negres americains and negres creoles married one another. Forced migrants to Louisiana remarked on the linguistic differences between them and their creole counterparts. When Allen V. Manning's owner “refugeed” him and his fellow enslaved people from Clark County, Mississippi, to Lafayette, Louisiana, during the Civil War,

Manning remembered, “All us Negroes thought that was a mighty strange place. . . It was all full of French people. We would hear white folks talking and we couldn't understand what they said, and lots of the Negroes talked the same way, too.”96 Enslaved people in the lower Mississippi

95 Pierre Aucuin in Clayton, ed. Mother Wit, 23. 96 Allen V. Manning, interview by unknown, 19 August 1937, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the

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Valley also mapped cultural distinctions onto their human geographies, like William did when he told Olmsted as they passed a Mississippi River plantation, “Dem's all Creole niggers. . . . ain't no Virginny niggers dah.”97 Yet cross-cultural marriages occurred, especially because of uneven gender ratios. When John Richard Dennett met a formerly enslaved man named William in 1865 who lived on a plantation on the Mississippi River, the man told him how he had been born in

Tennessee but sold to Louisiana when his owner went into debt; William’s sale separated him from his wife in Tennessee, but he eventually married again. As Dennett learned when he went to William’s cabin, “She spoke French better than American, as she called it, for she had been bred in a creole family.”98 How their children identified, if they had any, probably depended on those around them. Clementine Baptiste exemplifies the futility of placing enslaved people in clearly defined cultural categories from evidence like language or choice of partner. Her maiden name was Hickman, and she was born on Bayou Lafourche; in 1917 she told a pension agent “I am a Creole negro and cannot talk very plain English, my father was Henry Hickman . . . he came from the north and was not a Creole.”99 This daughter of a brought person who identified as creole was under investigation because she had married a man named Valentine Baptiste— perhaps a creole man–after the Civil War, yet she had claimed a pension as the widow of John

Barnet. Barnet, according to his enlistment papers, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina.100

Mary Mosee’s identity was as complex as Baptiste’s. She was born in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, and her maiden name was McPherson, yet she told a pension agent in 1878 “That she is Creole

French; does not understand English very well; belongs to the Methodist Church . . . has always

United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, (Washington, D.C.: Federal Writers’ Project, 1941), 13:220. 97 Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 684–85. 98 John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is: 1865–1866, ed. Henry M. Christman (New York: Viking, 1965), 337, 340. 99 Deposition of Clementine Baptiste, 1 May 1917, Clementine Barnet Pension File, CWPF. 100 Clementine Barnet pension application, CWPF.

111 lived in the French part of [New Orleans].”101 She met her husband, Augustus Mosee, during the

Civil War, and he told her he was from Minnesota.102 Black diasporic people mixed in the lower

Mississippi Valley, and since none were safe from sale and separation, they crafted flexible ideas about identity and family, like their contemporaries in the upper U.S. South.

Time and again black men and women quickly transformed strangers into acquaintances, friends, and even lovers. Forced migration south and west transformed how black men and women understood their identities. The places from whence they came became homes to them, indelible parts of how they understood themselves and those they met in the lower Mississippi

Valley. People sought and marked others as old country people, and old country people often made families of one another. These nascent identities attached to home and belonging, which brought people created in response to their forced separation and removal, proved crucial to their recreating African America. Though they were often strangers to one another, and arbitrary social connections made old country people of strangers, enslaved people attached memories of home and possibilities of reunion to those other brought people they met. Where brought people were from, and who they might know in the old county, were often the first subjects of conversations between strangers in a land made by the slave trade. Communities from old country people and those from elsewhere arose, communities that spawned families, including marriages and conjugal relationships, that withstood the brutalities of enslavement. They began on the boats and in the coffles, on the way to the new sites of their enslavement. When still in the grips of the slave traders, they were likely to share similar stories with the people bound, chained, or confined next to them, stories of home, perhaps of shared acquaintances or local collective memories. Sometimes their relationships survived the auction blocks of the lower

101 Deposition of Mary Mosee, 14 Dec. 1878, Mary Mosee Pension File, CWPF. 102 Ibid.

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Mississippi Valley; sometimes enslaved men and women found themselves brought alone to new plantations; sometimes they came with people from elsewhere, but who had also been bought in the valley’s many slave markets. Made to live their lives in new places, surrounded by strangers, migrated men and women looked for others from the places they now understood as their homes as they sought connections to the people they had left behind. They swapped stories. They told of their homes, of the people they might never see again, of the horrors of the slave trade. And they heard the stories of others. They met people like them, people who were brought to the places where they were now told to live and labor. Some came from faraway places, like Virginia or

Kentucky; others came from elsewhere in the lower Mississippi Valley; some came from across the parish line. Like Leonard Martin’s grandfather, all were “brought here as a bought slave.”

The domestic slave trade wrought social and cultural consequences, and as the next chapter will attest, it wrought spiritual ones as well.

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CHAPTER FOUR

RE-CREATING THE BLACK PROTESTANT CHURCH IN THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY

In 1892 famed black Methodist minister Anthony Ross died in New Orleans. He was one of many formerly enslaved ministers who began his preaching career when still enslaved and continued ministering after emancipation. Ross was one of the founders of New Orleans’s

Wesley Methodist Episcopal Church, which was one of the city’s first black churches, and was for decades one of its few. Ross was also a brought person and a bought person. The slave trade transformed the trajectory of his life and ensured he would spend most of it in Louisiana instead of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he was born. At Ross’s funeral in Wesley Chapel, the presiding pastor recited the deceased preacher’s self-penned memorial to the throngs who attended. He began with a short history of his life before Louisiana. He told of his birth in Rich

Neck, Maryland, on December 25, 1805, to his father Ben Ross and his mother Rebecca. He told of the events that found him in Louisiana, how he “was stolen from them and brought to New

Orleans in 1831 by a Negro trader by the name of Woodfork.”1 Here Ross paused his life’s narrative and injected a moral question: “Oh, what will God do to that man in the judgment?”2

Ross lived six decades after the slave trader, surely Austin Woolfolk, separated him from his family, and in his final prepared remarks he came to that pregnant rhetorical question that pronounced God’s judgment on the man who purchased him in Maryland and sold him in New

Orleans. Ross believed the slave trade had spiritual consequences, consequences that the “Negro trader by the name of Woodfork” would feel for eternity. And as Ross pronounced eternal

1 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fifth Session (New Orleans: New Orleans University Press, 1893), 85. 2 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fifth Session (New Orleans: New Orleans University Press, 1893), 85.

114 judgment on the slave trader, his life exemplified another profound consequence of the buying, transporting, and selling of black people: the domestic slave trade brought black evangelical

Protestant Christians to the lower Mississippi Valley, where they re-created the black church in the trade’s wake.

“Brought” black preachers and lay leaders gathered those around them in New Orleans or on sugar and cotton plantations, and they made spiritual brothers and sisters of the people sold to the lower Mississippi Valley. The community-generating nature of the church—mediated by religious rites and rituals—was never more important than in the lives of men and women who were taken from the people and places they called home. As black men and women sought new social connections after they had been torn from their families and communities in the upper

U.S. South, they created black churches and joined the unrecorded rolls of existing ones. The black Protestant churches of New Orleans trace their founding to brought enslaved people, and brought people created informal churches in plantation regions. Those churches, and the people who made them, were crucial when bought and brought people re-created families and communities. Enslaved religious leaders oversaw communal gatherings and rituals like Sunday worship and prayer meetings, which joined brought men and women in shared religious experiences. They also performed rites and ceremonies like marriages and baptisms, which formalized personal ties among the brought. Important Christian concepts, like heaven, took on special meaning for a people separated from their loved ones, and black preachers used illustrations inspired by the slave trade in their messages. The histories of the United States’ domestic slave trade, the black church, and the re-creation of African America were intertwined.

Anthony Ross was just one of thousands of black Christians who rebuilt the black church in the lower Mississippi Valley.

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Little has been written of the transportation of the black evangelical church, though it was one of the most important developments in African American history. The United States domestic slave trade is nearly absent from scholarship on Protestant evangelicalism in the U.S.

South, and historians of nineteenth-century African Americans rarely connect the growth of black Christianity and the domestic slave trade.3 For understandable reasons, scholars of

Anglophone North America often study specific Protestant evangelical denominations and ground their studies in places with voluminous denominational archives; Virginia is perhaps the most common place of study, though historians have also written about South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky.4 Focusing on the North Atlantic plantation regions also allows scholars to address the question that often animates historical research in African American Christianity — its origins — though recently, scholars like Jon F. Sensbach have stressed the Atlantic dimensions of black Protestant Christianity.5 As a result, there is more scholarship on black evangelical

3 For an important exception see Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 193–95. Perhaps in writing Generations of Captivity, Berlin identified the parallel histories of the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade and black Christianity as the topic of productive future inquirites, see: Ira Berlin, “The Transformation of Slavery in the United States, 1800–1863,” in The Problem of Evil: Slavery, Freedom, and the Ambiguities of American Reform, ed. Steven Mintz and John Stauffer (Amherst, Mass. and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 93–94. 4 John B. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1815 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 51–69; John B. Boles, Religion in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 80–100; Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 128–43; Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in the Old South (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Jewel L. Spangler, “Becoming Baptists: Conversion in Colonial and Early National Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 67 (May 2001): 243–86; Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Ellen Eslinger, “The Beginnings of Afro-American Christianity Among Kentucky Baptists,” in The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promied Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 197–216. 5 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 44–150; Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 79–180; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 1–117; Spangler, “Becoming Baptists”; John W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism: Black Identities in the Atlantic World (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016), 15–149; Patricia U. Bonomi, “’Swarms of Negroes Comeing about My Door’: Black Christianity in Early Dutch and English North America,” Journal of American History 103 (June 2016): 34–58. For an overview of this and other questions, see: Sylvia R. Frey, “The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau,” Slavery and Abolition 29 (March 2008): 83–110. For the Atlantic dimensions of black Protestantism see: Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); John W. Catron, Embracing Protestantism:

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Protestantism in the places where enslaved men and women were forced to leave during the nineteenth century than where they were forced to migrate. And the two important studies of religion in the nineteenth-century plantation frontier pay little or passing reference to the domestic slave trade.6 Likewise, the few historians who have studied the re-creation of African

America in the North American interior have ignored religion, save Susan Eva O’Donovan.

O’Donovan argues that enslaved men were more active in churches in southwestern Georgia in the 1840s and 1850s than they were in the long-settled places of the U.S. South because women’s mobility was restricted and churches were few and distant.7 The origins of those churches and discussion of other forms churches may have taken, is absent. Focusing on the lives enslaved people made in Louisiana in the wake of the domestic slave trade forces questions about the migration of the black Protestant church.

Enslaved men and women who were brought to the lower Mississippi Valley through the domestic slave trade came from places burnt over by evangelicalism. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Baptists and Methodists had remade the religious world of the United States’ southern section, and they counted enslaved men and women among their congregants.

According to Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, evangelical Christianity was the dominant religious form in the black communities of the former British North American colonies by 1815.8

The plantation districts of Maryland and the Carolina piedmont were hotbeds of Methodism, and

Black Identities in the Atlantic World (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2016). 6 David T. Bailey, Shadow on the Church: Southwestern Evangelical Religion and the Issue of Slavery, 1783–1860 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 30–32, 178–96; Randy J. Sparks, “Religion in Amite County, Mississippi, 1800–1861,” in Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870, ed. John B. Boles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 66–67; Randy J. Sparks, Religion in Mississippi (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 38, 77–79. 7 Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 46–52 8 Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 118.

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Baptists claimed more congregants in Virginia and the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry.9

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Virginian and Maryland evangelicals brought their religions to Kentucky and Tennessee, where they established churches and re-created the outdoor revivals that first rocked the colonial religious establishment.10 Black men and women were integral to the revival movements of the U.S. South, and in many evangelical conferences and churches they composed the majority of members, not to mention the positions they filled in teaching and leadership roles.11 In the first half of the nineteenth century, the black and enslaved founders of evangelical churches, their children, and the people evangelized by them were sold to slave traders who brought them south and west to the lower Mississippi Valley to work on cotton and sugar plantations.

Brought people found in Louisiana a Christian world with contours quite different from their homes in the East. In contrast to the hotbeds of evangelical denominations, the lower

Mississippi Valley, especially Louisiana, was bereft of organized Protestant Christianity for most of the first half of the nineteenth century.12 There were few church buildings, few organized congregations, and few ordained religious leaders there. This scarcity was especially true of

Protestant denominations, but also the case for the Catholic Church, even though Catholic clergy were present in Louisiana since its founding. A brief chronology of the major Christian denominations demonstrates the paucity of formal churches in Louisiana. Catholic clergy were

9 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 152–57. For Virginia see: Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, 135–53. For the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry see: Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 114–117. 10 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 140–41, 161; Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, 94; Bailey, Shadow on the Church, 25–29. 11 For membership rolls see: Bailey, Shadow on the Church, 181–82; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 149– 61; Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, 154; For teaching and leadership rolls, see: Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 117–29, 165–67; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 166–71; Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, 175–79. 12 This may have been the case in many regions of the plantation frontier. For another example see: O’Donovan, Becoming Free, 43–42.

118 of course the majority of ordained religious leaders in the first decades of the nineteenth century, since Catholicism was the only legal religion of French and Spanish colonial Louisiana. Still their reach in Louisiana’s rural parishes was limited to those places on the Mississippi River near

New Orleans. After the Louisiana Purchase, many Spanish clergy, including almost all of the

Capuchin priests, left the territory, which left the New Orleans diocese short staffed.13 For instance, only in 1817 was a church constructed in Thibodaux, Louisiana, on Bayou Lafourche, even though Catholic Acadians had migrated to the region during the eighteenth century.14

Numerous American Protestant denominations shared similar stories. Though they traced their histories to the years proceeding the Louisiana Purchase, they had a difficult time organizing permanent congregations, even in New Orleans. The Protestant Episcopal Church organized the first Protestant congregation in New Orleans in 1805, but it remained small and was without its own building until 1816; for much of the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was even without a pastor and for a few years relied on the services of a missionary sent by the Methodist

Episcopal Church to New Orleans.15 That Methodist was no more successful than his Episcopal counterparts; and not until 1825 did Methodism gain a small foothold in the crescent city.16

Baptist histories credit a mixed-race former slave named Joseph Willis as the first Baptist preacher west of the Mississippi River. Willis ventured into Louisiana in 1804 and converted white and black people to Baptism, but it was only until 1812 that the Baptists founded their first

13 John Bernard Alberts, “Origins of Black Catholic Parishes in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1718–1920,” (Ph.D. diss.: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1998), 56. 14 Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans, 1939), 292; Carl A. Brasseaux, The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765–1803 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 90–115. Acadian mistrust of Spanish clergy may have been to blame for the lack of a church, see: ibid., 150–66. 15 Hodding Carter and Betty Werlein Carter, So Great a Good: A History of the Episcopal Church in Louisiana and of Christ Church Cathedral, 1805–1955 (Sewanee, Tenn.: University Press, 1955), 3–44. 16 Ray Holder, “Methodist Beginnings in New Orleans, 1813–1814,” Louisiana History 18, no. 2 (1977): 187; Walter N. Vernon, Becoming One People: A History of Louisiana Methodism (Bossier City, La.: Everett Publishing Co., 1987), 8–13.

119 church in the state.17 This was an isolated success. They tried multiple times to found a church in

New Orleans, but they often folded; in 1828 there was still no Baptist church in the city.18 In major plantation regions, like Lafourche Parish, there were no Baptist churches even in 1850.19

Presbyterian churches faired similarly. As Episcopal Bishop and Louisiana sugar plantation owner Leonidas K. Polk wrote in his travel diary in 1839, “There is no portion of the whole country so destitute . . . as Louisiana. She has not, so far as I know a single church west of the

Mississippi River.”20 Polk’s observations were exaggerated—and they were from his Protestant point of view—but his point rang true. In 1850 there were only 307 churches in the state of

Louisiana; in South Carolina, which had a similar population as Louisiana in 1850, there were nearly four times as many churches.21 The same was true of Mississippi, which was a southwestern state like Louisiana.22 Though Christian denominations tried to build churches in

Louisiana during the 1850s, producing an 86 percent increase in the number of churches by

1860, there were still nearly three times as many churches in Mississippi and more than twice as many in South Carolina.23 As a result of this lack of churches, men and women, black and white, who participated in church life often did so without respect to denomination; much about their religious lives went unrecorded; and black men and women often met beyond the gaze of white

17 William Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists, From 1804 to 1914 (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing Board, 1915), 19. 18 Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists, 24. 19 “Churches by Faith, Lafourche Parish” 1850 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1850/R12529541. 20 Carter and Carter, So Great a Good, 55. 21 “Churches by Faith, Louisiana” and “Churches by Faith, South Carolina” 1850 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1850/R12529540. In 1850, Louisiana’s total population was reported as 517,762 and South Carolina’s population was 668,507 see “Total Population, Lousiana and South Carolina, 1850 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1850/R12529530. 22 “Churches by Faith, Mississippi,” 1850 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1850/R12529539. In 1850, Mississippi’s population was 606,526 people see “Total Population, Mississippi,” 1850 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1850/R12529536. 23 Churches by Faith, Louisiana”; “Churches by Faith, Mississippi”; “Churches by Faith, South Carolina”; 1860 Federal Census, Social Explorer, https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/Census1860/R12529542.

120 ecclesiastical authority.

Not only were Christian congregations less available, they were also less visible and less permanent than their counterparts in the plantation U.S. South. In southern Louisiana, many

Protestant denominations met in parish courthouses, others shared buildings, and some met in private homes. According to a Methodist minister who traveled through the western Attakapas region in 1851—one of the hotbeds of sugar cultivation—Protestants often held Sunday service in parish courthouses.24 The same traveler remarked that the two Protestant church buildings on

Bayou Lafourche were financed by “The contributions from various denominations, and from persons belonging to none; hence these churches are always opened to other sects, when not occupied by the Methodists.”25 Catholic priest Charles M. Menard pastored the Catholic parish watered by the Lafourche Bayou for most of his life, and he remembered that the Episcopals in

Thibodaux “held their services in the [Parish] Court House which served as a church for all the

Protestant sects [in the village].”26 Menard also attested to ecumenical church buildings in

Lafourche Parish. According to him, after the Episcopals built a brick church in the 1840s: “The poorer Americans who could not afford such a beautiful facility constructed a wooden church which served all denominations . . . . Presbyterians being in the majority called it the

Presbyterian Church. However, because this church was too aristocratic for the common people and especially the slaves, a small wooden church was built later where everyone went to hear the crudest sermons and to receive the Holy Spirit (so they said) who came down the walls.”27 T. J.

24 “Attakapas Correspondence,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 17 May 1851. 25 “Attakapas Correspondence,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 17 May 1851. 26 Charles M. Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans., Philip D. Uzee, p. 12, Charles M. Menard Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Ellender Memorial Library, Nichols State University, Thibodaux, Louisiana. The original in French is held by the Houma-Thibodaux Diocese Archives, Thibodaux, Louisiana. For more on Menard, see: Philip D. Uzee, “Father Charles M. Menard: The Apostle of Bayou Lafourche,” in Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (New Orleans: Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993), 375–87. 27 Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans. Uzee, p. 14.

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Lacy found a similar situation in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, on the Mississippi River when he arrived at the Methodist building there “incorporated by the Legislature of the State of Louisiana, giving other Protestant denominations privilege to occupy it when unoccupied by the

Methodists.”28 Lacy was an itinerant minister, a position Methodists perfected in rural regions during the eighteenth century. Instead of organizing congregations, they organized circuits.29

Because congregations were few, and church buildings were even fewer, many enslaved people joined denominations through “missions.”30 For instance, the Methodists created “colored missions” in Louisiana’s plantation districts and tasked specific ministers, who they often called missionaries, with traveling to plantations, catechizing, and baptizing the enslaved people there.

In many years, the Methodist church’s “colored missions” went without missionaries. As one man complained, “The missionary field among the colored people in this Conference is very large and important, but it has been reluctantly cultivated for want of laborers.”31 There was ample opportunity for enslaved men and women to create religious communities far from the gaze of white religious authorities.

Histories of Christian religion in the lower Mississippi Valley thus must utilize an ecumenical definition of church, one that gives little significance to the walls and roofs of steepled buildings or the refined theological distinctions of Christian denominations.

Throughout, I will use church as a shorthand for buildings, denominations, or collections of people who identified as Christians or who participated in Christian rites and rituals, as they defined them. Of course, denominational and theological distinctions were important for many

28 “Donaldsonville and Preston’s Plantation,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 8 May 1852 29 Hunter Price, “The Traveling Life of John Littlejohn: Methodism, Mobility, and Social Exchange from Revolutionary Virginia to Early Republican Kentucky,” The Journal of Southern History 82 (May 2016), 237–68. 30 Janet Duitsman Cornelius, Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). 31 “Macedonian Call,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 1 May 1852.

122 authors of primary sources, especially clergy; authors often voiced their denominational distinctions when enslaved men and women brushed against white definitions of church, denomination, and Christianity, and I will note when that was the case. Though eliding denominational distinctions risks simplifying nuanced theological and historical disagreements, a broad definition of the church allows me to use diverse sources from many white Christian denominations so that I can better identify the religious experiences of black men and women.

Moreover, it accounts for the great religious plurality in the plantation districts of the lower

Mississippi Valley, especially when it came to Christian denominations, and it better captures a black ecumenical tradition so evident in the religious archive of slavery.32 Black Baptists remained black Baptists—the people whom white Methodist minister Robert T. Parish ministered to in the fall of 1861 certainly felt strongly about their denominational choices, since he complained that they “are all Baptists. They are very superstitious. They want Baptism by immersion and give as a reason that they generally receive God’s love in falling”—but this broad definition of church also accounts for black men and women baptized by Methodist ministers weeks before they were baptized by Catholic priests; and it addresses enslaved people who started their own undocumented churches in their slave quarters.33 For this rural world distant from the major population centers of North America, utilizing a broad definition of church reveals, rather than obscures, black religious experiences.

32 Enslaved people were apparently not the only nineteenth-century people who adopted ecumenicalism in times of trial, as Benjamin L. Miller has found for soldiers during the Civil War, see: Benjamin L. Miller, In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019). 33 Robert T. Parish Diary, 14 Sep. 1861, Lower Louisiana and Mississippi Valley Collection, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana (hereafter LLMVC, LSU). In 1852 a Catholic priest baptized all the children under three years old on Rice Ballard’s plantation in Mississippi because a Methodist minister had been on the place three years before and baptized the children then; the priest hoped to rebaptize them. See: John A. Fierabras to Antoine Blanc, 29 June 1852, Archdiocese of New Orleans Collection, University of Notre Dame Archives (hereater ANOC, UND).

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As a result, there are fewer sources in Louisiana from the major religious denominations of North America than there are for many other places in the U.S. South. When white Methodist ministers Joseph Travis and Seymour B. Sawyer arrived in New Orleans in 1836, they explained

“There being no record of the Methodist E. Church in New Orleans found in the station, the following record must necessarily be very imperfect as there is nothing but the names to record - no dates nor other facts can be satisfactorily ascertained. Indeed, it was only yesterday that we were able to obtain a list of the colored members.”34 Writing the history of religion west of the

Mississippi then requires using diverse sources to reconstruct the black church. Of course, those records that do exist privilege white voices and white religious experiences. Others, like baptismal records and attendance sheets, lend themselves to quantification and network analysis rather than qualitative study.35 The decennial censuses cataloged church buildings in 1850 and

1860, which give some indication of local religious loyalties and opportunities for black

Christian worship, but buildings were necessarily limited indexes of religiosity. Since they were literally fixed in place, their scope was limited in the rural plantation districts of the lower

Mississippi Valley. For most of the first decades of the nineteenth century few churches dotted the valley anyway, and people relied on itinerant ministers of diverse denominations. Much of southern Louisiana was bereft of Protestant denominations, and those that did exist outside New

Orleans kept few records. Black men and women’s interactions with Catholic bureaucracy were better recorded, though less during the nineteenth century than the century before; most Catholic priests ignored their black and enslaved parishioners until they arrived at the baptismal font with

34 Methodist Episcopal Church book for New Orleans City and Faubourg and Lafayette Mission, 1825–1859, Record of the Colored Society, Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Archives and Special Collections Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana. 35 Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727– 1852,” The William and Mary Quarterly 59 (April 2002): 409–48; Kevin D. Roberts, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2003), 101–52.

124 their children.36 Without resort to diverse and disparate sources from multiple Christian denominations, it would be excusable to describe the black church in the lower Mississippi

Valley, especially lower Louisiana, as paltry or nonexistent. Until a black enslaved preacher appears in a medical report about cholera, or a nun relates that the convent’s slave performed religious ceremonies, or a Catholic priest logs significant amounts of game and produce given to him by enslaved women.37 Such is often the nature of the evidence.

There are two crucial exceptions: the correspondence of Catholic clergy and the obituaries of formerly enslaved Methodist ministers. A few scholars have used the former to analyze Catholic priests and slavery, but none have yet read the words of the white priests against the grain to glimpse the religious lives of enslaved men and women.38 Catholic priests, laypeople, and nuns corresponded with one another and their bishop throughout the nineteenth century, and the University of Notre Dame archived their letters with other documents from the

Archdiocese of New Orleans. They often discussed church politics, but priests also wrote about enslaved men and women.39 They were also often outsiders to the parishes where they were assigned to shepherd. Few of the clergy during the first half of the nineteenth century were from

36 Randall M. Miller, “The Failed Mission: The Catholic Church and Black Catholics in the Old South,” in Catholics in the Old South: Essays on Church and Culture, ed. Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983), 149–70. 37 William A. Booth, “On the Cholera of Lafourche Interior,” in Southern Medical Reports, ed. Erasmus Darwin Fenner, 1849 ed., vol. I (New Orleans: B.M. Norman, 1850), 231; Dorothea Olga McCants, ed., They Came to Louisiana: Letters of a Catholic Mission, 1854–1882 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 57; Joseph Michel Paret, Mon Journal D’Amerique 1853: De Pelussin a La Louisiane, ed. Marcel Boyer (Saint Etienne, France: Centre de Documentation Pedagogique, 1993). 38 Miller, “The Failed Mission”; James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 137–45; Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 167–202. 39 In Michael Pasquier’s words: “The overarching concern of French missionary priests with internal ecclesiastical politics prevented even modest attempts to reform the religious beliefs and practices of local laity unique in the United States for its racially diverse composition.” See: Michael Pasquier, “When Catholic Worlds Collide: French Missionaries and Ecclesiastical Politics in Louisiana, 1803–1845,” in In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World, ed. Owen White and J. P. Daughton (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 41.

125

Louisiana; most arrived to the region via a French mission society based in Lyon, France, named the Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi.40 The religious consequences of the domestic slave trade were never hidden, as one Catholic priest in southern Louisiana wrote to Archbishop Antoine

Blanc in 1851, “We lack English for some negroes and for attracting some Protestants.”41 The correspondence of Catholic clergy provide important insights into the world of the black church in the lower Mississippi Valley, since, perhaps more than most, they had the most to lose by the re-creation of black Protestant churches.

The obituaries of formerly enslaved Methodist clergy form another important archive for the history of the black church, one few scholars have investigated since the authors of an unpublished black history of Louisiana wrote in the 1940s.42 The Louisiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church (M. E. C.) published these in the decades following the Civil

War with their annual session minutes. Formerly enslaved Methodists created the conference following the Civil War with a few white abolitionists who traveled to Louisiana to educate and evangelize freedpeople. The Conference was meant to be biracial, and during the conservative era of the 1880s and 1890s many of its black and white leaders fought to keep it that way.43 Still, the Louisiana M. E. C. was a majority black church, led by black men, because the state’s white

Methodists controlled their own conference, part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

When the Louisiana M. E. C. published the obituaries of its black male and female leaders, they wrote stories of slavery and the slave trade. They are amazing stories that range in length from a

40 Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 107. 41 J. E. Blin to Antoine Blanc, 25 March. 1851, ANOC, UNDA. 42 They were part of the Dillard University Project, an army of the Louisiana Writers Project. See: Marcus Christian and the Members of the Dillard Unit of the Louisiana Writers’ Project, “The Negro in Louisiana,” unpublished manuscript, 1942, ch. 19, in Marcus Christian Collection, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans, http://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/uno-p15140coll42%3Acollection. 43 Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 42–70.

126 few sentences to a few pages. They appeared in the “memoirs” section of the annual minutes, and they included the obituaries of Methodist ministers and their family members. Sources for the information in the obituaries are never given, but since the annual minutes were published for the denomination’s leaders, the information was probably provided by the families and friends of the deceased. Many of those who read the obituaries probably knew the subjects’ stories of slavery, the slave trade, and Methodism already. At least one minister, Emperor Williams, had his story published before his death.44 They are invaluable sources for writing the re-creation of the black church in the lower Mississippi Valley.

Since the obituaries of the Louisiana M. E. C. minutes are a particular genre, it is relevant to remark on some patterns. First, men predominate, and ministers’ obituaries are the longest. When they published women’s obituaries, the women were often the wives or daughters of living or deceased Methodist ministers, and their obituaries were less detailed. Second, the authors of the obituaries sometimes told that the subject learned how to read or write during slavery, usually from a supposedly kind or indulgent slaveowner. Deceased preachers were often said to have been born gifted preachers, roles that they exercised from young ages. Stories of religious persecution also abound, as do stories of the slave trade, especially in obituaries from the 1870s and 1880s. By the 1890s and early 1900s, authors began to elide or omit references to the trade. For instance, Marshall Smith’s obituary, published in 1883, related his birth in Virginia in 1832 and how “He was sold and brought down to Louisiana and sold to Mr. A. Carruth, where freedom found him and burst loose his slavery chains.”45 In contrast, when Annie Bowers died,

44 W. D. Goodman, Gilbert Academy and Agricultural College: Sketches and Incidents (New York, 1893), 46–49, in John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 621–22; Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Ninth Session (New Orleans: Paul J. Slendker, 1897), 84–87. 45 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Fifteenth Session (New Orleans: Elliott and Sagendorph, 1883), 155.

127 her obituary in 1907 simply wrote that “She was born in Virginia and came to Louisiana when quite young,” making it sound as if she had moved to the lower Mississippi Valley out of her own choice.46 The bulk, though, indict the slave trade and slave traders, and they tell stories of black Christianity in their wake.

The religious consequences of the domestic slave trade can be best measured in New

Orleans, where brought enslaved people created their own churches under white Baptist and

Methodist organizational authority. The city was the terminus of the domestic slave trade, the country’s largest slave market, and the incubator of black evangelical Protestantism in the lower

Mississippi Valley. Though most of the black men and women who were bought in the upper

U.S. South to work the fertile lands of the valley came to New Orleans only to be resold, some stayed because they were purchased by white city dwellers. Others went to nearby plantations and made their way to the city on Sundays. Robert Young and Rosa Richardson were enslaved on the north bank of Lake Ponchartrain, but they were married in New Orleans nonetheless.47

Though enslaved, brought black people had in the city more freedom of movement, more opportunities to gather with other free and enslaved black men and women, and anonymity.48

New Orleans was also a target for white evangelical Protestant clergy, who went first to the valley’s economic capital to start congregations; their ostensible oversight of black congregations protected black churches from white police power for most of the nineteenth century.49 All of these factors were favorable to open black spiritual gatherings and their

46 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Confence of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Thirty-Ninth Session (New Orleans: Merchant Printing, 1907), 74. 47 Exhibit A, Rosa Young Deposition, 13 Jan. 1879, Rosa Young Pension File, Civil War and Later Pension Files, 1861–1942, Records of the Veterans Administration, RG 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. (hereafter CWPF). 48 Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 143–79; Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 24–84. 49 Theodore Clapp was one of those white clergymen who traveled to New Orleans to start a church. Later, he

128 recording in the historical record.

New Orleans then was home to a number of documented Protestant black churches, all of which traced their founding to the mid-nineteenth century. In 1826 enslaved people created the

First African Baptist Church in New Orleans; when it fizzled after the death of the founding pastor—a free black migrant from Rhode Island named Asa C. Goldsbery—forced migrants re- created the church in 1834, and again in 1837.50 Black Baptists created another church in 1850, ostensibly “under the watch-care of their white brethren.”51 By the Civil War, there were four black Baptist churches in the city.52 Black Methodists also created their own churches in New

Orleans. The first was Wesley Chapel, which grew from the Faubourg and Lafayette Missions of the white Methodist church; the written records of the missions began in 1836, but the white pastors intimated that the mixed-race congregation’s meetings before then were unrecorded.53

Black men and women started to meet in their own church in 1844.54 By then it was one of the largest Methodist churches in the state.55 Those same denominational statistics hid the black leaders of the church, who went unrecognized by white Methodist authorities; according to their

characterized white Protestant clergy’s views of New Orleans well, see: Theodore Clapp, Autobiographical Sketches and Recollections During a Thirty-Five Years’ Residence in New Orleans (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Co., 1857). 222–24. 50 Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists, 24; W. E. Paxton, A History of the Baptists of Louisiana from the Earliest Times to the Present (St. Louis: C. R. Barns Publishing Co., 1888), 121–22. 51 Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists, 25; Paxton, History of the Baptists of Louisiana, 126. 52 Sobel, Trabelin’ On, 347–49. 53 Methodist Episcopal Church book for New Orleans City and Faubourg and Lafayette Mission, 1825–1859, Record of the Colored Society, Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Archives and Special Collections Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana. 54 W. Scott Chinn, “The Story of Mother Wesley of New Orleans,” 1923, Wesley United Methodist Church, Methodist Church Louisiana Conference Histories, Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Centenary College of Louisiana Archives and Special Collections, Shreveport, La., pp. 2-4. Chinn was the son of one of the formerly enslaved founders of Wesley Chapel and the church has repurposed and rearranged his history multiple times during the twentieth century. Though Chinn does not cite his sources, it is safe to assume his history of Wesley Chapel is the constellation of the congregation’s oral history about itself, carried forward in time by Chinn’s father, his contemporaries, and their descendants. This version was arranged by Joseph Mack Joles, Wesley’s minister in 1972. 55 In the second edition of the Louisiana Methodist Church’s annual minutes in 1848, published after Louisiana clergy organized left the Mississippi Conference, Wesley Chapel was listed with 865 black congregants. See: Annual of the Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Second Session (1848), 22.

129 tables, Wesley Chapel was without elders, deacons, lay preachers, or teachers.56 Postbellum memoirs argued otherwise. In local history, the church is also remembered as “Mother Wesley,” a title that recognizes the church-founding actions of the many congregants who left Wesley to start other churches in New Orleans and the surrounding region, including Soule Chapel in 1847 and Winan’s Chapel in 1848.57 Though New Orleans’s African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.

M. E.) was in a different denomination, Wesley was crucial to its founding too; Charles

Doughty, who was integral to starting the New Orleans A. M. E. Church in 1847, was a leader at

Wesley for many years.58 Though policed by New Orleans officials and ostensibly under the authority of white churches and their clergy, the First African Baptist Church and Wesley Chapel were places where black men and women could worship beyond the gaze of their owners, under the leadership of their own people.59

The histories of these black Protestant churches in New Orleans were tied to the domestic slave trade. They were founded and attended by brought people. The short-lived church that

Reuben Madison and Betsy Bond formed in New Orleans with a woman named Fanny was perhaps one of the first. Bond was born in Essex County, Virginia, in 1763 and converted to

Christianity when she was in her 20s; in the 1780s many other black men and women in Virginia began to join evangelical churches in droves.60 Bond was taken from her husband and children,

56 Annual of the Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South: First Session (1847), 32; Annual of the Louisiana Conference (1848), 22; Annual of the Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South: Third Session (1849), 26. 57 A. E. P. Albert, “Methodism in the Life of New Orleans,” Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church 41 (1909), 82. 58 Charles Doughty appears in Wesley Chapel’s minutes as a steward or exhorter, beginning in 1844, see: Methodist Episcopal Church book for New Orleans City and Faubourg and Lafayette Mission, 1825–1859, Record of the Colored Society, Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Archives and Special Collections Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana; Charles Spencer Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Book Concern of the A. M. E. Church, 1922), 33–36. 59 When the cornerstone of a black church was laid in 1840, the New Orleans police arrested the white minister who presided over the ceremony for “officiating an ‘unlawfull assemblage’ of colored persons. See: “S. L. L. Scott,” The Daily Picayune, 27 May 1840. 60 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 119–20; Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia, 141.

130 probably sometime in the 1790s, when she was purchased by one of the many lower Mississippi

Valley slaveowners who traveled to Virginia to purchase enslaved people in the years before slave traders organized domestic slave trading firms. Bond’s new owner brought her from

Virginia to the Natchez region, where she lived for nineteen years before the man died. In 1812 she was sold from his estate and purchased by a man who lived in New Orleans, where Bond capitalized on the city’s bustling labor market, hired her time, and purchased her freedom. There she also met Fanny, one of “a large number of slaves [who] were brought to New Orleans from

Virginia” around 1821.61 Bond and Fanny became friends, largely because Bond found that

Fanny was “a sister in Christ,” and purchased her freedom with the help of Reuben Madison, another Virginian who had purchased himself and traveled to the city. Madison came in search of his wife, who many years before was “sold without his knowledge, and transported to a distant

Spanish territory”—probably Louisiana.62 He never found her, but he met Betsy Bond and they built a small home in New Orleans “in which they set apart a room for religious purposes.”63

Though unrecognized by white Christian denominations, Bond, Fanny, and Madison “assembled with others every Sabbath for the worship of God.”64 They started a church, one that probably attracted other brought people. The slave trade brought them to the lower Mississippi Valley, and the church brought them together.

Other churches of brought people followed the one that Bond, Fanny, and Madison made in New Orleans. Though few records from them survive, their congregants and their leaders preserved their histories into the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. When in 1876 the

61 Abigail Mott, “The Injured Africans,” African Observer I (Tenth Month, 1827), 222–224, in John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 187. 62 Ibid., 185. 63 Ibid., 187. 64 Ibid., 187.

131 white editor of the New Orleans Baptist Messenger sought the story of the First African Baptist

Church, he found “Lewis Banks, an aged colored Baptist from Virginia, who resided here many years.”65 Banks told the story of the church to the editor before he died, and he had in his possession the church’s minutes. According to Banks, “several other colored Baptists came from

Virginia and elsewhere” in 1834 and restarted the church.66 In 1914 William Hicks wrote a history of Black Baptists in New Orleans and turned to John Marks, who pastored the Sixth

Baptist Church in New Orleans, to tell of Baptist beginnings in the region. To conjure the church’s history, Marks had “to go back to 1833 when the Rev. Nelson D. Sanders, a Negro

Baptist minister, was sold in Virginia and brought to New Orleans in chains by Negro slave traders. . . . He gathered 32 slaves in a little house” and there started the First African Baptist

Church.67 Using slave ship manifests, Eva Semien Baham has identified when the male leaders of the First African Baptist Church arrived in New Orleans: Nelson Sanders came from Norfolk,

Virginia, in early 1828; Lewis Banks arrived on the Brig Ajax in fall 1827; Virginian Robert H.

Steptoe was brought to New Orleans in 1832, followed by North Carolinian Richard Satterfield; finally Esau Carter was sold to the lower Mississippi Valley in 1840.68 These men and the yet unnamed women who started the First African Baptist Church came to New Orleans by slave ships, carrying them against their will from their homes.

The leaders of Wesley Chapel were also brought people. Joseph Davenport was listed as one of the “colored leaders” on the first page of the church’s records in 1836, and according to the 1850 census, he was from Virginia; by then he was also free and married to Diana Williams,

65 Paxton, History of Louisiana Baptists, 120. 66 Paxton, History of Louisiana Baptists, 121. 67 Hicks, History of Louisiana Negro Baptists, 26. 68 Eva Semien Baham, “In the Moral Vineyard to Dispel the Darkness of Ignorance: African-American Baptists in Louisiana,” American Baptist Quarterly 35 (Fall-Winter 2016): 282-83.

132 who was also a Virginian.69 Lewis A. Reed, who served as the church’s secretary for many years, may have been trafficked to the city in 1836 from Alexandria, Virginia, aboard the brig

Tribune.70 Anthony Ross was from Maryland, as was another early leader named Henry Green.

The life of another founder, enslaved preacher Scott Chinn, was one of coerced itinerancy.71

Chinn was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and lived there until 1825, when he was sold to

Nashville, Tennessee; after Nashville, Chinn was sold to New Orleans and there with Ross,

Green, and many others helped lead Wesley.72 Charles Doughty, who left Wesley to start the A.

M. E. Church in New Orleans, was a Virginian according to the 1860 census; his wife Patience was also born in that state.73 In 1858 William P. Forrest also left Wesley and joined the A. M. E.

Church; he was from North Carolina and “brought to this city [New Orleans]” in the 1840s.74

Though African American people often told the stories of their churches through the biographies of male religious leaders, they were also tales of communities of brought people—the “several other colored Baptists” of Banks’s history; the lists of names here omitted for brevity; and the unnamed men and women who gave men like Nelson Sanders or Scott Chinn stories to tell and congregations to pastor. For them, let Rose Mastique’s obituary stand in; when she died in 1902

69 Free inhabitants in 2nd ward in the City of New Orleans, 4 Sep. 1850, p. 159, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, microfilm, M432, roll 235, NARA; Marriage License, Joseph Davenport to Dianah Williams, 13 Sept. 1865, Justice of the Peace Marriage Licenses, 4 March 1865 to 12 Oct. 1865, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, Louisiana. Methodist Episcopal Church book for New Orleans City and Faubourg and Lafayette Mission, 1825–1859, Record of the Colored Society, Archives of the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, Archives and Special Collections Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana. 70 Manifest of Negroes, Mulattoes, and Persons of Colour, taken on board the brig Tribune, 19 March 1836, Slave Manifests of Coastwise Vessels Filed at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1807–1860, microfilm, M1895, roll 7, Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36, NARA. 71 For Ross’s life see: Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fifth Session (New Orleans: New Orleans University Press, 1893), 85; for Henry Green’s memorial see: Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-First Session (Cincinnati: Western Methodist Book Concern Press, 1889), 46–47. 72 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Fifteenth Session (New Orleans: Elliott and Sagendorph Printers, 1883), 155–57. 73 Free Inhabitants in 8th Ward in the City of New Orleans, 31 July 1860, p. 335, 1860 U.S. Census, population schedule, microfilm, M653, NARA. 74 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Eighth Session (New Orleans: Crescent City Printing House, 1896), 371.

133 at the age of 70, the publishers of the M. E. C.’s Official Journal said she too was “one of the founders of Wesley M. E. Church New Orleans.”75 Black enslaved survivors of the domestic slave trade, brought people, made the evangelical Protestant black churches of New Orleans.

They made churches in the vast plantation regions of the lower Mississippi Valley as well, though the scattered nature of white-led evangelical Christian denominations meant they were often unrecorded until after the Civil War. The attendance reports for the “colored missions” of the Methodist Episcopal Church give a rough indication, though they were more an index of white slaveholders’ willingness to allow itinerant ministers on their plantations than they were a measure of black men and women’s religiosity. Instead of converting enslaved people, ministers often found themselves correcting black men and women’s beliefs in order to impose orthodoxy. As Methodist minister Zach Thompson informed the readers of the Methodist newspaper New Orleans Christian Advocate in 1851, enslaved people who came “[u]nder strong religious excitements they are very liable to the error . . . of loosing [sic] sight of the nature of religion, and placing it more in feeling that in principle.”76 He went on to describe ways of religious thought and modes of spiritual expression common to enslaved men and women and evident in the narratives of the 1930s—miraculous sights and godly voices—but foreign and radical to white clergy in the first half of the nineteenth century.77 Perhaps enslaved people found little value in the lectures of zealous Protestant white ministers. In 1853 the minister for the

Methodist Church’s Lafourche Colored Mission was only allowed on twelve plantations. He claimed his scope was 1400 to 1500 people, yet the circuit only registered 345 enslaved men and

75 Official Journal of the Thirty-Fifth Session of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church (1903), 45. 76 “Domestic Missions,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 23 Aug. 1851. 77 Clifton H. Johnson, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves (Cleveland, Oh.: Pilgrim Press, 1993).

134 women as members.78 Enslaved men and women instead met on their own, under the leadership of fellow brought people.

When white Protestant missionaries gained traction with enslaved men and women, the enslaved people still exercised significant control over their spiritual lives. In the 1840s a

Methodist minister asked to preach to the people Joseph B. Cobb enslaved on his plantation near

Natchez, Mississippi, “after a conference with several of my elder slaves.”79 The missionary harvested much fruit from this group of people even though he only traveled there every three weeks. His ministry success was no doubt little of his own doing. The Protestant enslaved men and women on Cobb’s plantation had probably already organized themselves into a congregation and formed their own leaders—the people who met with the minister and invited him to the plantation. The minister’s arrival only made visible to white eyes the church that black men and women had already created. According to Cobb “This minister is their own, the house of worship is theirs, they lead in all the forms of church adoration.”80 The people enslaved on Cobb’s plantation made an uncommon choice when they decided to invite the white Methodist minister to their church. More often, enslaved men and women met together without white clergy. As an overseer on a plantation on Bayou Boeuf wrote in 1853, “the negroes held, every Sunday, a meeting among themselves” on a number of nearby plantations.81

Those meetings were often led by brought men and women, people sold to the lower

Mississippi Valley through the domestic slave trade. Men predominate in the historical record of the re-created black church because they became ordained ministers after the Civil War.

Ebenezer and James Hayward eventually became ministers in the Methodist Episcopal Church

78 Lewis A. Reed, “Lafourche Colored Mission,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 19 Nov. 1853. 79 Joseph B. Cobb, “Missions to the Slaves,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 1 Oct. 1853. 80 Joseph B. Cobb, “Missions to the Slaves,” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 1 Oct. 1853. 81 C. Y. J. “Letter from an Overseer.” New Orleans Christian Advocate, 8 Oct. 1853.

135 after the Civil War, but before emancipation they led undocumented churches in Lafourche

Parish. They were born in Maryland, Ebenezer in the 1820s and James in some unknown year.

Ebenezer Hayward converted in Washington, D.C., and in the 1850s he and his brother were sold to New Orleans, where they “aided to build Wesley Chapel.”82 There Ebenezer became an exhorter, one of the few leadership positions white clergy gave to black men in the 1850s. In

1852 Ebenezer “was removed by his owner to Bayou Lafourche, where he suffered many persecutions for Christ’s sake. He was forbidden to pray . . . . In 1854 his brother James was shot by the same owner for his devotion to Christ.”83 Such stories of martyrdom were typical of formerly enslaved men and women’s religious narratives, and so too were hints that the protagonists formed unrecognized and policed religious organizations. According to Ebenezer’s obituary, “Many times, hidden away from their persecutor's sight and ear, did they lift up their hearts to God.”84 James Madison Bryan, an enslaved man born in North Carolina in 1817, also lived in Lafourche Parish. When he was seventeen years old Bryan’s owner moved to Tennessee and took Bryan with him; five years later, the man sold Bryan to W. W. Pugh in Lafourche

Parish. There Bryan joined the Episcopal Church, probably then the only Protestant congregation in the region, but he eventually became “a useful Preacher” in the Methodist Church, “gathering the people around him, and winning many souls to Christ.”85 Bryan was a brought person who became a church leader. He arrived at the receiving end of the domestic slave trade after sale and separation, and he gathered together other enslaved men and women, people who probably called elsewhere home. Peter Brown’s story was similar. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1821 and

82 Minutes of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Sixth Session (New Orleans: Southwestern Advocate Print, 1874), 18. They had a third brother as well who accompanied them in Louisiana, though little is known about him. 83 Ibid., 18. 84 Ibid., 18. 85 Minutes of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Eighth Session (New Orleans, Southwestern Advocate Print, 1876), 27.

136 joined the Methodist Church there before “He was sold to a negro trader and brought to

Louisiana and sold to Dr. Lewis Perkins, who took him to his place near Clinton [Louisiana].”86

Like the Haywards and Bryan, Brown too was a busy evangelist and church builder; according to his obituary “He was instrumental in having many fellow servants converted.”87 Thomas

Kennedy, from Alexandria, Virginia, likewise “In his early manhood he was called to preach, and exercised his gifts as a local preacher for many years before the war” in Louisiana.88

Evangelical black Protestants who were sold to the lower Mississippi Valley evangelized when they arrived and re-created the black church. They gathered those around them into churches that went undocumented and unrecognized until emancipation.

Post–Civil War memorials from the minutes of the Louisiana Conference of the

Methodist Episcopal Church extolled formerly enslaved black men as Christian leaders who created congregations under slavery, but black women were integral to the re-creation of the

Protestant black church. They too were forced migrants, and they were usually the majority of church members in the upper U.S. South.89 In Betsy Bond and Reuben Madison’s story of the church they made in New Orleans in the 1820s, Madison’s contribution was an afterthought.90 In

Terrebonne Parish, Jane Lee led a small congregation of people who lived on nearby sugar plantations. According to Charlotte Brooks, one of Lee’s students, “Aunt Jane was the cause of so many on our plantation getting religion. We did not have any church to go to, but she would talk to us about old Virginia, how people done there.”91 Lee was so crucial to the lives they

86 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Twelfth Session (1880), 37. 87 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Twelfth Session (1880), 37. 88 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Sixteenth Session (New Orleans: Hopkins’ Printing Office, 1884), 208. 89 Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion, 121–22, 149, 164–72. 90 Abigail Mott, “The Injured Africans,” African Observer I (Tenth Month, 1827), 222–224, in John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 185. 91 Albert, House of Bondage, 13.

137 remade in Louisiana that when her owner moved her to Texas in the 1850s, her former students would meet and “talk of Aunt Jane Lee, and we would sing some of her hymns.”92 Brooks first replaced Lee as leader.93 Some information can be gleaned from the memorials of preachers’ wives. Diana Williams came to New Orleans from Maryland in 1847 and converted in 1858.

Though Williams’s husband, a Tennessean, was known as an accomplished church builder, she

“was never at a loss for words in which to give advice to others, or in which to tell the story of her own conversion and happy Christian life.”94 Williams’s memoir was couched in the gendered language of the nineteenth century, but her narrative described her as a teacher and evangelist.

By the time Williams converted, brought people had made black churches in New Orleans, including Jane Hodge, who “was a native of Nashville, Tenn., and was one of the oldest members of Wesley Chapel,” the church that Rose Mastique helped found in the 1840s.95

Unfortunately, there are no records of antebellum black churches in Louisiana that tracked congregants’ genders, but these anecdotes demonstrate that brought women were crucial to remaking black churches. The churches that brought people made became important incubators of social life in the black communities of the lower Mississippi Valley, institutions where bought and brought people re-created the families and communities from where they had been wrenched. They grew yearly as slave traders brought an endless stream of black men and women to the valley’s slave markets.

Of course, black churches already existed in Louisiana by the time most forced migrants from the eastern section of the United States were sold there, though they were ones that few

92 Albert, House of Bondage, 26. 93 Albert, House of Bondage, 26. 94 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Twelfth Session (1880), 34. 95 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church: Twenty-Fourth Session (Cincinnati: Western Methodist Book Concern Press, 1892), 277; Official Journal of the Thirty-Fifth Session of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church (1903), 45.

138 contemporary white Protestant Americans recognized as legitimate religions or expressions of the Christian faith. As one white Methodist minister reckoned in 1816, those evangelical

Protestants who arrived in Louisiana came “in the midst of French superstition and American infidelity.”96 “French superstition,” a indelicate name for Catholicism characteristic of nineteenth-century white Americans’ religious ideas, was the dominant Christian religion in

Louisiana during the eighteenth century and continued to be so for most of the nineteenth. And it was a religion that black enslaved men and women made their own, much to the chagrin of the white Catholic clergy. They appropriated baptism; they created lay religious leaders of black men and women associated with the church; and they courted priests when they could use them in their worldly struggles with white people.97 Other religions, especially those derived from syntheses of Catholicism and religions from western Africa, added to the complexity of

Louisiana’s nineteenth-century black religious world.98 The Catholic priests who staffed local parishes certainly noticed the religious consequences of the domestic slave trade, and black migrants to the lower Mississippi Valley certainly observed the Catholicism of the people they met there. Because of the domestic slave trade, the lower Mississippi Valley became one of the few places in the Atlantic world where black Catholics and evangelical Protestants lived side by side.

96 Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church for the Years 1773–1828 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane, 1840), 276. 97 For baptism see Emily Clark and Virginia Meacham Gould, “The Feminine Face of Afro-Catholicism in New Orleans, 1727–1852,” The William and Mary Quarterly 59 (April 2002): 409–48; Geneviève Piché, “À La Rencontre de Deux Mondes: Les Esclaves de Louisiane et l’Église Catholique, 1803–1845” (Ph.D. dissertation, Toulouse-Jean Jaures, France and Sherbrooke, Can.: l’Université de Toulouse and l’Université de Sherbrooke, 2015), 339–404. When a convent in Louisiana purchased an enslaved man named Simon, he became “esteemed by his people who consult him like they would an oracle;” they even asked him to perform marriages. See: Mary Hyacinth Le Conniat to her parnts, 6 Dec. 1856 in McCants, ed., They Came to Louisiana, 57. Finally, in St. Charles Parish, Catholic priest Joseph Michel Paret recieved an inordinate number of gifts from enslaved people on Sundays. See: Paret, Mon Journal D’Amerique 1853. 98 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 75–87; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 302. On the trouble of finding voodoo in Louisiana archives see Michael Pasquier, “The Invisibility of Voodoo, or, the End of Catholic Archives,” American Catholic Studies 125 (Fall 2014): 12–15.

139

Many enslaved people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley quickly noticed Catholic churches, Catholic clergy, and Catholic lay people. For most forced migrants, Catholic communities could only be found in some urban centers in the U.S. South, like Charleston, South

Carolina, or Baltimore, Maryland.99 For some, it seemed as though they had entered a Catholic world. When Jane Lee arrived in Terrebonne Parish she asked Charlotte Brooks if “the people have churches here,” and Brooks answered in the negative.100 There were churches there, but they were Catholic ones. Brooks, however, was a Virginian like Lee, and she knew that Lee wondered about Protestant churches, most likely Methodist or Baptist ones. According to

Brooks, where Lee lived in Terrebonne Parish “the black folks were all Catholic, and she could not do much with them.”101 Enslaved men and women sensed Catholic numerical superiority no doubt because there were fewer Protestant churches and fewer Protestant ministers than there were in the southern homes of Protestant and evangelical Christianity. That slowly changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, as domestic slave traders populated the lower Mississippi

Valley with black men and women born and raised in the hotbeds of southern Protestant evangelicalism.

No one better recognized the recreating black church than Catholic priests. Some wrote about the evangelical Protestantism of enslaved African Americans in matter-of-fact observations, and others wrote with scorn. To a priest in Avoyelles Parish named Rabalais, black evangelical Protestants threatened Catholicism, as they led black Catholics away from the true faith. He wrote to Antoine Blanc in 1839 that “The [barbarians] dance around, and prophesy lies.

The African race already listens to them and abandons the Catholic worship and profanes the

99 Miller, “The Failed Mission,” 151. 100 Albert, House of Bondage, 8. 101 Albert, House of Bondage, 19.

140 sabbath in the [woods], on the [river banks], in the [trees].”102 He bemoaned “the danger of our parish . . . of so many sects: breaches . . . [are] profound in the ranks of the negroes.”103 What had begun in Avoyelles on the Red River in 1839 became a fact of life two decades later.

Writing in 1858 from his assignment near present-day Lafayette, Louisiana, Stephen Foltier wrote of enslaved people “they are Methodists for the most part.”104 In the same year, Augustine

Marechaux wrote to Stephen Rouselon of a white slaveowning woman he identified only as widow Foley. Foley was apparently an active customer in the slave markets of the lower

Mississippi Valley, since the people she owned in Assumption Parish were “all Americans, all

Protestants.” Foley baptized their children in the local Catholic church, but according to

Marechaux “Becoming adults, all these negroes declare themselves Protestants;” Marechaux though was skeptical, and he thought they had forsaken their Catholic religion “to not come to church, because, at heart they are nothing.”105 Such were Catholic clergy’s diverse reactions to the religious consequences of the domestic slave trade: fear of disintegrating Catholic superiority; indifference; and doubt.

From white Catholic clergy’s perspective, black men and women fled the Catholic church during the nineteenth century for diverse Protestant churches, though they found no explanations beyond heresy and ignorance. None of their explanations accounted for the most obvious reason black men and women left the church: race. To priests like Rabalais in Avoyelles or Menard in

Terrebonne Parish—the latter wrote of “Poor humanity, when it strays from the path of truth” in a description of the local Protestant church—Protestant clergy were false teachers who misled

102 E. Rabalais to Antoine Blanc, 19 Oct. 1839, ANO, UNDA. 103 E. Rabalais to Antoine Blanc, 19 Oct. 1839, ANO, UNDA. 104 Stephen Foltier to Antoine Blanc, 21 Aug. 1858, ANO, UNDA. 105 Augustine Marechaux to Stephen Rousselon, 20 Oct. 1858, ANO, UNDA.

141 black men and women.106 To Marechaux, Protestantism masked black men and women’s religious indifference.107 Finally, to Blin, the problem of encroaching Protestantism was a linguistic one, since, as he wrote of his parish, we “lack English for some negroes and for attracting some Protestants.”108 They also had few black or enslaved leaders. The church refused to ordain black male clergy and unlike its counterparts in the Caribbean, it gave few opportunities for enslaved men and women to create and lead lay fellowships.109 The few

Catholic churches and organizations that free people of color created during the nineteenth century—St. Augustine Church and the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans; and the

Chapel of St. Augustine in Natchitoches, Louisiana—were important exceptions.110 In

Louisiana’s Catholic regions, white priests were the most common religious leaders who black

Catholics had access to. And they often cared too much about the financial support of local slaveowners to involve themselves in enslaved people’s lives. Many refused to perform marriages; many disallowed black people to participate in church rites and ceremonies; many even refused to catechize enslaved men and women.111 No wonder that enslaved people left

Catholic church pews when enslaved black preachers arrived in their neighborhoods.

Lorendo Goodwin’s conversion from Catholicism to Methodism illustrated how enslaved people experienced white Catholic clergy. She told her narrative after the American Civil War to

Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, the wife of Methodist minister, newspaper editor, and political

106 E. Rabalais to Antoine Blanc, 19 Oct. 1839, ANO, UND; Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans. Uzee, 15. 107 Augustine Marechaux to Stephen Rousselon, 20 Oct. 1858, ANO, UNDA. 108 J. E. Blin to Antoine Blanc, 25 March. 1851, ANO, UNDA. 109 Matt D. Childs, “Re-creating African Ethnic Identities in Cuba,” in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 85–100; Nicole Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2006). 110 Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 131–33; Gary B. Mills, The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, revised edition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 171–88. 111 Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 174–83; Miller, “The Failed Mission,” 159–61.

142 activist A. E. P. Albert.112 Goodwin left the church after a “priest was about to have my cousin hung.”113 Her cousin had asked the priest to pray for his freedom, and the priest told her cousin’s owner. Though the priest managed to quell the slaveowner’s anger, Lorendo said “I could not follow my Catholic religion like I had.”114 Goodwin married an enslaved man named John, who had been wrenched from his wife and children in Georgia and brought to Louisiana, and she started to go to his Protestant church, where they practiced what she called “‘Merican religion.”115 Race, not theological differences, animated Goodwin’s conversion story and even

Albert’s memorializing of it. The white Catholic priest betrayed her black enslaved cousin who dared to speak of freedom, which prompted Albert to claim to Goodwin that Catholics “believe

God has made the black man to serve the white man,” even if she conceded that Louisiana’s churches exhibited less “caste prejudice so clearly manifested among all the other denominations.”116 Thousands of other black men and women made similar choices as Lorendo

Goodwin, which Catholic priests only realized until after the Civil War, when Catholic slaveowners could no longer compel the people they owned to be baptized in the church.117 As

Menard remembered, “Many blacks who were baptized Catholics before the war, but whose religion was contained to this sole activity became Protestants — Anabaptists and

Methodists.”118 By 1867 Menard saw the problem of race. Then, he understood black men and

112 The Alberts were no friends of the Catholic Church, and Octavia Albert no doubt published Goodwin’s story because it served their campaign against the Catholic Church in Louisiana. They also published her narrative when black religious leaders in the state fought Jim Crow laws in the state house and in their church conferences, a competition in which black Protestants and Catholics allied, and in which A. E. P. Albert was a vocal leader of ecumenical black political alliances. On Albert and the rise of Jim Crow, see: Bennet, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans, 71–100. 113 Albert, House of Bondage, 69. 114 Albert, House of Bondage, 69. 115 Albert, House of Bondage, 68. 116 Albert, House of Bondage, 70. 117 Miller, “The Failed Mission,” 168–70. 118 Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans. Uzee, p. 57.

143 women’s conversion to Protestantism as “the work of certain preachers who stated that Catholics were enemies of the freedom they enjoyed.”119 Menard thought black Catholic churches were the only solution, but his acknowledgment of race came too late. Before the Civil War, the only official black Catholic congregations in rural Louisiana were those few organized by free people of color.

Those Protestant churches that were led by enslaved and freed black men and women took on new meaning in the recreating enslaved communities at the terminus of the domestic slave trade. Though black Protestant churches, their leaders, and their congregants performed many of the same rites and rituals in the lower Mississippi Valley as they did in the upper U.S.

South, Sunday worship, baptisms, and marriages became founts of communal regeneration. They provided spaces where brought black men and women met fellow survivors of the slave trade and transformed them into the families they so desperately missed. Brought people, separated from their loved ones in the long-cultivated plantation districts of the United States, became

Christian brothers and sisters in Louisiana. They constituted and reinforced their new relationships on Sundays as they sang spiritual songs, listened to teaching, and cleansed one another of eternal sin. Marriages of brought people sprang from the re-created black church, as did friendships with ties as strong as family. Historians have never been blind to the importance of the black church to enslaved men and women, and they have analyzed in depth many of the same rites and rituals. Yet the church’s role in black communities and its place in African

American history take on new light when its history is told alongside the history of the slave trade. Not only did black churches provide communal spaces of consistency as the trade whirled people to the lower Mississippi Valley and around its many plantation regions, but the

119 Menard, “Annals of St. Joseph,” trans. Uzee, p. 57.

144 transportation of black evangelical Christianity and the re-creation of African America were intertwined with the trade in human souls.

Sunday meetings were the regular ceremony of the re-created black Protestant church in the lower Mississippi Valley, and their importance for the re-creation of African American communities cannot be understated. They provided fixed times and spaces for brought black men and women to congregate together, and until the 1850s they were often sanctioned by white authorities.120 Because meetings were evangelistic, they were also often open, even the clandestine ones. Anyone attended. When the decade-old African Methodist Episcopal Church

(A. M. E.) sued the New Orleans city government in 1858 to prevent the city from seizing its property, numerous white witnesses stated that the meetings of the church’s three congregations were open to anyone. According to H. Weber “the church is always open during such times for all who may go in, either white or black.”121 Other white witnesses, Louis Metz, Frederick

Marsaer, and R. H. Yale, stated they had attended the church on a number of occasions, and Yale reiterated that “The church was free for all who chose to enter.”122 Hence when Frederick Law

Olmsted entered a black church in New Orleans, the congregants were neither surprised nor uncomfortable.123 Open meetings protected black congregations in the city, at least for a time.

They communicated to white authorities that the black men and women inside the church had nothing to hide, which was especially important for the A.M.E. church, since it was unaffiliated

120 Doc. H, Mayoralty of New Orleans, 1 Dec. 1855, pp. 55–56, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, Supreme Court of Louisiana Historical Archives, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter LSC, UNO). 121 Testimony of H. Weber, 4 March 1859, p. 23, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, ibid. 122 Testimony of R. H. Yale, p. 66, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, ibid. 123 Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 1:306–309. The same was true when Scottish Presbyterian minister entered a black church in New Orleans in 1845. See: G. Lewis, Impressions of America and the American Churches (Edinburgh: W. P. Kennedy, 1845), 194.

145 with a white denomination, unlike the African Baptist church, Wesley Chapel, or their counterparts. Open meetings also meant that newcomers to the region could find churches on

Sunday mornings, which they no doubt did by listening for church noises. Olmsted found the black church he attended because he “was attracted by a loud chorus signing, to the open door of a chapel or small church.”124 Perhaps brought black men and women who traversed the city on

Sunday mornings also found churches by listening for them. In 1858 the white witnesses who testified in the A.M.E. church’s defense remarked that the congregations could be heard from outside their walls, though they insisted the noise was no bother. Metz stated that “they sometimes make a little noise in their worship,” and Weber said “they sing and pray like all other congregations.”125 The A.M.E. church had a choir, since an 1855 permit issued by the New

Orleans mayor’s office allowed the church “to meet twice a week for religious purposes and to practice the choir.”126 These characteristics were of course common to most evangelical

Protestant churches, but open meetings and church noises took on new significance in a place teeming with men and women who had been separated from their friends and family. They announced that black men and women were together, and they invited strangers into the fold.

Beyond New Orleans, where black churches were less well documented, brought people still worshiped together, and their meetings were important rituals for communities of strangers.

The character of those meetings varied greatly. Irreligious slaveowners who forced black men and women to work on Sundays and disallowed them from practicing Christianity were common abolitionist tropes, and they also appeared in postbellum narratives from former slaves. They

124 Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 1:306. 125 Testimony of Louis Metz, p. 23, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, LSC, UNO; Testimony of H. Weber, p. 23, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, ibid. 126 Document H, Mayoralty of New Orleans, 1 Dec. 1855, p. 56, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, ibid.

146 both illustrated the depravity of slavery and identified enslaved people as religiously persecuted, a motif that has long had purchase in American history. Some formerly enslaved people thus remembered that they worshiped in secret when they could, either at night in cabins or in the swamps, lest they be whipped or beaten for praying and singing together. Others recalled that they gathered in public on the plantation grounds, sometimes in large plantation buildings like the sugarhouse. Whatever the case, black churches met in Louisiana’s rural regions, and their meetings were evangelical spaces where brought men and women re-created the communities they knew in the Upper U.S. South. The Virginians Jane Lee and Charlotte Brooks organized their relationship around religious meetings, which for them were clandestine affairs in Brooks’s cabin on a sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish. Lee read scripture—she learned how to read in

Virginia and somehow retained a Bible—and the men and women who joined them listened, prayed, and sang.127 Over time their meetings grew and eventually included seven women and four men, but they always invited more to attend. According to Brooks, Lee often invited an enslaved Afro-Creole man named Sam Wilson, but he stood outside and scoffed at their meetings.128 To him, evangelical Protestantism was “‘Merican Niggers’ religion.’”129 Elizabeth

Ross Hite was born on a sugar plantation in lower Louisiana, but her parents, Artemise and

Brooks Ross, were people brought from Richmond, Virginia. Hite was a child of brought people, and she remembered that the black men and women on the plantation met in secret every night in the brickyard, where “Old man Mingo preached and dere was Bible lessons. . . . He gave sacraments in a cup."130 These ceremonies knit the black communities of enslaved people together as they were forever forced to reincorporate newcomers brought there by the domestic

127 Albert, House of Bondage, 8–9. 128 Albert, House of Bondage, 22. 129 Albert, House of Bondage, 23. 130 Elizabeth Ross Hite, interview by Robert McKinney, n.d., in Clayton, ed. Mother Wit, 103.

147 slave trade.

The lessons enslaved evangelical Protestant leaders learned from the domestic slave trade and its heart-wrenching experiences bled into their Christian messages. Of course, little has survived of the teachings of the churches of brought people, but what has endured indicates that preachers and lay leaders understood that the domestic slave trade was the most horrific transformative event in their congregants lives. Perhaps Anthony Ross referenced the “Negro trader by the name of Woodfork” often when he took the pulpit to discuss God’s judgment and human sinfulness, as he did in the homily he wrote for his own funeral in 1892.131 Slave traders were the picture of human sinfulness, and their image no doubt had currency in congregations of brought people, who knew firsthand the evils that traders propagated. Biblical language helped others comprehend the slave trade’s evils. When Reuben Madison wanted to communicate to evangelical white abolitionist Abigail Mott how he felt when his spouse was sold away, he said it

“‘was the severest trial of my life, a sense of sin only excepted.’”132 Perhaps when black evangelicals transformed their Christian rhetoric in response to the horrors of the slave trade, they fashioned a message attractive to the brought people who had yet to accept Jesus.

Black Protestant Christians certainly rearticulated heaven in response to the slave trade’s assault on their families. Heaven was of course always a place of refuge, but for black men and women who had experienced sale and separation, it was a place where they would be free from the slave trade, where they would see again the family who had been taken from them and from whom “‘we should never be separated.’”133 Jane Lee, Charlotte Brooks, and the people who

131 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Twenty-Fifth Session (New Orleans: New Orleans University Press, 1893), 85. 132 Abigail Mott, “The Injured Africans,” African Observer I (Tenth Month, 1827), 222–224, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 185. 133 Abigail Mott, “The Injured Africans,” African Observer I (Tenth Month, 1827), 222–224, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 185.

148 gathered with them in Terrebonne Parish understood heaven as a place free of forced migration.

When Lee was forced to move to Texas in the 1850s, she recognized “she might never see us any more in this world,” but she told everyone to promise her they would meet her in heaven.134

Abream Scriven relied on a similar understanding of heaven after he learned he was “Sold to a man by the name of Peterson atreader [sic] and Stays in New Orleans.”135 In the tragic goodbye letter he penned to his wife Dinah Jones, their children, and his parents from a Savannah,

Georgia, slave pen, he hoped “if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven.”136

James Gipson relied on a similar sentiment when he wrote to his family, “I hope that if we dont met here that we will meet here after.”137 Christians had often seen heaven as a place for family and friends to reunite after death, but heaven became a place for enslaved people transported by the slave trade to reunite with those taken from them by slave traders.

Of course, those who gathered in open meetings in New Orleans were cryptic when they taught at the pulpit. One of the white witnesses who attended the A.M.E. church stated that he had “never heard the preacher preach anything like abolition doctrines” and another said that he never “heard that this minister was guilty of preaching doctrines calculated to create insubordination among the servile population."138 Olmsted was at a loss to understand much of the teaching at the black church he attended in New Orleans, and later wrote that “Much of the language was highly metaphorical . . . . the grammar and pronunciation were sometimes such as

134 Albert, House of Bondage, 19. 135 Abream Scriven to Dinah Jones, 19 Sep. 1858, in Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 58. Before he was sold to Peterson, Jones was the property of Methodist Minister Charles Colcock Jones. 136 Scriven to Jones, 19 Sep. 1858, in Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage, 58. 137 James Gipson to unknown, 6 June 1804, in Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage, 59. 138 Testimony of Louis Metz, p. 24, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, LSC, UNO; Testimony of B. Hebrard, p. 66, The African Methodist Episcopal Church vs. The City of New Orleans, June 1860, Docket No. 6291, ibid.

149 to make the idea intended to be conveyed by the speaker incomprehensible to me.”139 Perhaps black preachers taught “abolition doctrines” in open meetings, but with language deaf to white ears. What teaching Olmsted captured certainly referenced the domestic slave trade in metaphor.

As the preacher taught the congregants of the incompatibility of sin, particularly intemperance, and the Holy Spirit, he painted an image that relied on the slave trade experiences that many of his congregants must have shared. “You may launch out upon de ocean a drop of oil way up to

Virginny, and we’ll launch annudder one heah to Lusiana, and when dey meets—no matter how far dey been gone—dey’ll unite!”140 Oil unites with itself, he concluded, because it shared affinities; alcohol and the Holy Spirit could never exist together. Though the preacher’s lesson was about intemperance, he crafted a metaphor from two common nodes of the domestic slave trade, Virginia and Louisiana, and the most common transportation route between them, the ocean. The horrors of the slave trade, of being bought in one place, forced aboard ships or shackled in coffles, and sold in another, infected the sermons that black men and women heard about topics as far removed from forced migration as salvation or intemperance.

Re-created nuclear families sprung from the re-created black Protestant church, and brought men and women married one another in religious ceremonies overseen by enslaved preachers. Neither white Protestant nor Catholic clergy recorded marriages between enslaved people, but widows of Civil War veterans and their acquaintances attested to the role of black religious leaders in marrying men and women and the communal celebrations that accompanied weddings. To be sure, some of these stories may have been exaggerated, fabricated, or varnished.

Stories of religious nuptial ceremonies were sure to persuade skeptical pension officers. Yet too many diverse stories of plantation marriages filled the record, and many were testified by

139 Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 1:310. 140 Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, 1:315.

150 external documents. Take, for instance, the marriage of Samuel Gallery and Fanny Robichaux. In

1850 Augustus Pugh purchased Gallery to work on his New Hope Plantation in Lafourche

Parish; Gallery was brought from Orange County, Virginia, “where he said he had a wife and child.”141 Gallery met Robichaux there, and three years later they were married by Washington

Whitley “who was also a slave, but not a minister of the gospel or magistrate or otherwise authorized to perform the marriage ceremony.”142 At least that was what B. A. Johnson said, the man who purchased Pugh’s plantation after the Civil War and retained its antebellum records, from which Johnson learned of Gallery’s birthplace, his marriage to Robichaux, and Whitley’s religious leadership. In his 1874 affidavit to the pension agent, Johnson downplayed Whitley’s credentials, yet in 1853, when Whitley married Gallery and Robichaux, Pugh recognized

Whitley as an authoritative figure by recording him into the plantation records as the man who married the two. Formerly enslaved people attested to the ubiquity of enslaved black preachers in the plantation districts of the lower Mississippi Valley. “A colored Baptist preacher named

Preacher George,” escaped the white antebellum written record, but Mary Jane Taylor remembered that he was the man who married her to Valleny Fontenot on August 16, 1855; before their owner purchased Taylor, Preacher George had married Valleny to Malena Cofee in

1851.143 Wallace Brooks and Martha Wheeler also met on a Pugh plantation; Brooks was from

Missouri and Wheeler from Maryland. They lived together and only married just before Brooks left to join the United States Army during the Civil War. As Wheeler remembered “Taft Nixon said the ceremony. He was the preacher on the place.”144 The pension records of widows of Civil

141 B. A. Johnson to J. Gaude, 18 May 1873, Fanny Gallery Pension Application, CWPF. 142 Affidavit of B. A. Johnson, Exhibit A, 21 Dec. 1874, Fanny Gallery Pension Application, CWPF. 143 Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, 8 Aug. 1865, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, CWPF; Malenoa Fontenot Declaration for Pension, 26 Aug. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, CWPF; Affidavit of John Ranell, 20 Nov. 1897, Mary Jane Fontenot Pension Application, CWPF. 144 Deposition A, Martha Brooks, 4 March 1887, p. 9, Martha Brooks Pension Application, CWPF.

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War soldiers contain similar stories of men and women marrying one another in ceremonies directed by enslaved preachers. As black men and women re-created the black evangelical

Protestant church, they re-created families in the lower Mississippi Valley.

Not all of those families were formalized by marriage ceremonies, as fellow members of the re-created black church made kin of one another. In Terrebonne Parish Jane Lee became like a mother to Charlotte Brooks and the people who attended their prayer gatherings. Brooks always referred to her as Aunt, even though she conceded “Aunt Jane was no kin to me, but I felt that she was because she came from my old home.”145 Brooks, Lee, and the kin they made in southern Louisiana forged bonds over prayer meetings, scripture readings, and spiritual songs.

They spent evenings together; they ate lunch together; and they consoled one another.146 They were all, as Lee and Brooks once sang together, a “Pilgrim through this barren Land.”147

Sometimes relationships forged by brought people survived into the late nineteenth century.

When Robert Hodge died in 1881, his memorial related his birth in Virginia in 1807, and how he

“was sold as a slave in this city [New Orleans] when but a boy.”148 Anthony Ross gave Hodge’s eulogy because when Ross was “brought a slave to New Orleans forty years ago [he] first met

Bro. Hodge . . . . Between them there has been a life-long friendship.”149 Ross and Hodge were certainly just two of thousands of brought people who made kin of one another through the re- created black church.

The re-creation of black families and black churches in the lower Mississippi Valley thus went hand-in-hand, and both were integral to African America’s re-creation in the lower

145 Albert, House of Bondage, 8. 146 Albert, House of Bondage, 10–12, 19–20, 23, 26, 27–28. 147 Albert, House of Bondage, 9. 148 Journal of the Louisiana Annual Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church, Fourteenth Session (New Orleans: Hopkins’ Printing Office, 1882), 87. 149 Ibid., 87.

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Mississippi Valley. The domestic slave trade brought evangelical black Christians to the cotton and sugar lands watered by the Mississippi River. There they created new churches, whether they were formal meetings recognized by white denominations or clandestine, nocturnal, and ad-hoc gatherings, where brought people from the seaboard South met one another and began to reconstitute African American communities in the wake of the slave trade. Church documents, the late-nineteenth century memorials of black preachers, and correspondence from Catholic priests all attest to the intertwined histories of black Christianity and the domestic slave trade. By supplying black laborers from the seaboard South to the nineteenth-century agricultural capitalists who propagated the cotton and sugar revolutions, slave traders wrought spiritual consequences in the heart of the United State’s national plantation complex. From the perspective of the present-day, the historical consequences are clear and profound: black evangelical Christianity became a national institution instead of a phenomenon relegated to the former sites of slavery in colonial British North America. As Anthony Ross opined in 1892, whether or not the dealers in humans wrought their own divine and eternal judgment must remain an open question.

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CHAPTER FIVE

COMMODIFICATION, CRIMINALIZATION, AND RESISTANCE

The commodification and criminalization of black people intersected with the re-creation of African America in the lives of the people sold to the lower Mississippi River Valley. Brought people were resistant people. They left plantations after they were bought. And when they left— when they partit maron, as the Francophones said—they often did so with the help of others, with people they had met on the way or with new allies from the new sites of their enslavement.

Africans, Louisiana Creoles, and people from the eastern seaboard U.S. South crossed language barriers and trusted people they had just met. Resisting their enslavement, sometimes resisting the very migration that forced them to Louisiana, brought people re-created African America in the North American interior. They relied on fragile and new relationships to survive in

Louisiana’s ubiquitous swamplands; to reverse the direction of their forced migration and return home; and to flee enslavement altogether when opportunities arose, like the British invasion in

1815. In response to their resistance, white men with political power criminalized brought people. They passed regulations on the domestic slave trade that created suspects of the black men and women sold into Louisiana; they elaborated a legal code that made resistance, actions like running away or theft, redhibitory vices worth returning recently purchased people to slave sellers; they placed resistant brought people in jail until notes were paid or sales canceled. If the slave trade epitomized the theoretical transformation of black men and women into exchangeable goods, and if the black code made criminal their otherwise benign actions, redhibition codes and slave trade regulations made suspects of the people bought and sold.

Writing the history of resistance and remaking in the lower Mississippi Valley thus

154 requires reading against sources that criminalized and commodified black brought people. In slave trade regulations, white Louisiana state legislators encoded their fears and anxieties of brought people into laws that, in the minds of white people, were made necessary by the resistance of the brought. The recently purchased, who fled the new sites of their enslavement or who refused to labor as their buyers demanded, daily confirmed in the minds of white people the need for checks on the slave trade and the necessity of buyer protections.

Redhibition was one of those protections that slave buyers and slave sellers utilized most.1 In redhibition court cases, white slave sellers and buyers told stories of the slave trade and black resistance; from them, it is possible to reconstruct histories of resistance and remaking, especially when the cases involved instances of collective flight. Also, in depositions that white slaveholders filed after the War of 1812, they told stories of brought black men and women who left Louisiana with the British army. That exodus of brought people in January 1815 presaged the history of resistance and remaking that characterized the nineteenth-century black communities of the lower Mississippi Valley. Contemporary sources recorded the actions of black people, not their words, and the words written by white hands should be read, as Walter Johnson has written, as if they contained lies.2 Redhibition cases were, after all, trials about white fraud that hinged on the actions of the enslaved and black men and women’s personal histories of the slave trade.

And since brought people were also property, redhibition cases always concerned hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. To avoid payments or to recoup losses, white men accused one another of concealing stories of flight and resistance. When they lied, they told believable

1 Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 127. 2 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 12.

155 stories.3 So they entered into the written legal record narratives of collective black resistance in the wake of the domestic slave trade.

Redhibition, according to the Louisiana Civil Code, “is called the avoidance of a sale on account of some vice or defect in the thing sold, which renders it either absolutely useless, or its use so inconvenient and imperfect, that it must be supposed that the buyer would not have purchased it, had he known of the vice.”4 As people who were property, enslaved men and women were subject to redhibition. The authors of the civil code stipulated specific “vices of character” that, if they appeared within a certain period of time of the sale, allowed for purchasers to return enslaved people to sellers unless sellers disclosed those vices when sales took place.5 Such language reflected early-nineteenth-century ideas about the causes of criminal behavior.6 Vices included theft, fugitivity, and histories of criminality.7 The civil code thus translated the criminalization of black resistance—already present in the black code—into the slave market in order to protect Louisiana slave buyers. The civil code’s authors went out of their way to craft complex rules that regulated the buying and selling of human beings. As Vernon

Valentine Palmer argues, “there was nothing absolutely necessary or historically inevitable about the decision to introduce slavery into the” civil code; “nothing required it” and lawmakers

3 Johnson, Soul by Soul, 12. 4 Article 2496, Louisiana Civil Code, in Thomas Gibbes Morgan, ed., Civil Code of the State of Louisiana with the Statutory Amendments, from 1825 to 1853, Inclusive (New Orleans: J. B. Steel, 1853), 334. 5 The period of time changed; until 1834 it was 3 days, accrding to Article 2508, but in 1834 that period was extended to two months for fugitives and thieves, see: An Act To Repeal the Several Acts Relative to the Introduction of Slaves into the State, and for other purposes, 11th Legislature, 2nd session, 2 Jan. 1834, section 3, p. 7, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0171&i=1. On litigating slave character in the courtroom, see: Ariela Gross, “Pandora’s Box: Slave Character on Trial in the Antebellum Deep South,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 7 (January 1995): 267–316. For warranties in general see Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 104–113. 6 David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston and other cities: Little, Brown and Co., 1971), 62–78. 7 Article 2505, Louisiana Civil Code, in Morgan, ed., Civil Code of the State of Louisiana, 335.

156 already had passed a slave code in 1806.8 Yet in 1808, when Saint-Domingue migrant Louis

Moreau-Lislet and James Brown published “A digest of civil laws now in force in the Territory of Orleans,” Louisiana slave buyers were reliant on an illegal Atlantic slave trade and a growing domestic one.9 They remained reliant on the domestic slave trade in 1825, when Moreau-Lislet and others crafted the civil code.10 Thus the civil code protected slave buyers to an extent unmatched by other codes; the codifiers mixed French and Spanish statutes regarding redhibition in order to craft a set of rules that regulated slave sales in favor of slave buyers.11 The civil code’s so-called protections against thieving, resistant, and rebellious enslaved people reflected the structures of the domestic slave trade and white Louisianians’ anxieties. Buyers in New

Orleans and in the many bayou and river towns of the state had no information about the black men and women who arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley; slave traders brought black men and women whom white enslavers thought were suspicious, and slave trade jurisprudence in the

U.S. South resisted the rise of caveat emptor, or buyer beware, in nineteenth-century American law.12 Louisiana slave buyers feared that white enslavers in the upper South sold resistant black people to traders. News of rebellions and plots in places like Virginia and South Carolina substantiated these ideas, as did laws in Virginia and Maryland mandating the export of enslaved

8 Vernon Valentine Palmer, Through the Codes Darkly: Slave Law and Civil Law in Louisiana (Clark, N.J.: Lawbook Exchange, 2012), 123. 9 A Digest of the Civil Laws now in Force in the Territory of Orleans (New Orleans: Bradford and Anderson, 1808). Jean-Pierre le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates,” Louisiana History 46, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 185–209; Joe Gray Taylor, “The Foreign Slave Trade in Louisiana after 1808,” Louisiana History 1 (Winter 1960): 36–43. 10 As Judith Kelleher Schafer reminds historians, “A civil-law digest is a compilation of preexisting law, rather than a coherent and complete code. The writers of the 1825 Civil Code intended to replace the old Digest with an instrument that was complete, coherent, and sufficient unto itself.” See: Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana, 18. 11 Palmer, Through the Codes Darkly, 158. 12 Andrew Fede, “Legal Protection for Slave Buyers in the U.S. South: A Caveat Concerning Caveat Emptor,” The American Journal of Legal History 31 (October 1987): 322–58. On information disparities, see: Jenny B. Wahl, “The Jurisprudence of American Slave Sales,” The Journal of Economic History 56 (March 1996): 143–69.

157 convicts.13 On the other hand, redhibition laws reflected, indeed documented, resistant actions by black people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley and the communities that brought people created by resisting enslavement and the slave trade after sale and separation.

If Africans created diasporic communities by resisting enslavement, African Americans re-created them in the North American interior through the same means. Once historians disabused themselves of certain notions about fugitive enslaved people, particularly that they embodied individual acts of resistance caused by specific conflicts between enslaved and enslaver that failed to produce collective resistance and overturn the system, the communities that Africans and African Americans made in diaspora through resistance came into focus.14

Careful attention to fugitive slave advertisements and black voices has made clear that escaping enslavement, if even for a time, required help.15 That help had cultural consequences, especially when these resistant actions are understood in the wake of the slave trade. According to Philip D.

Morgan, enslaved Africans and creoles in both the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry “cooperated when they ran away.”16 Escaping enslavement required black men and women who spotted maroons to remain silent; it required people who remained on plantations to share food and

13 Joe Gray Taylor, Negro Slavery in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: The Louisiana Historical Association, 1963), 40–45; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 49–55. 14 Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 68–81; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 648–49, 656–57. 15 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 67–71, 291–93; Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 44–55; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 129–36; Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014), 72–83, 87–93. 16 The quote here is in reference to Africans, but Morgan makes a like conclusion regarding creoles. See: Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 446–51, 464–67; Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles, 48–54, 59–64; Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 113–19; Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 195–97.

158 shelter; it often required allies who lived together in maronage. Despite the thousands of fugitive slave advertisements that appeared in the newspapers of the lower Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century, which mostly proclaimed the flight of individuals, no one fled enslavement alone.17 As Walter C. Rucker writes, “rebels, conspirators, runaways, and maroons facilitated the creation of new historical realities and identities. The principle outcome of their resistance activities was a unique ethnogenesis out of which African American consciousness and culture emerged.”18 The nineteenth-century domestic slave trade ripped members of that black consciousness and culture from their families and communities in the North American southeast and brought them west to the lower Mississippi Valley, where they met strangers on sugar and cotton plantations. They too escaped enslavement, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, and sometimes—though rarely—forever, and they too relied on fellow brought people to resist enslavement. When brought people left the plantations of the lower Mississippi Valley, they relied on new bonds they made with people they met at the new sites of their enslavement. Just as enslaved men and women created African America through resistance, so too did they re- create it.

Those with the most to lose from resistant brought people and re-created African

American communities created legal structures that coded trafficked people as suspected criminals. If black men and women were made commodities in the slave market, so too were they made criminals there.19 Scholars typically consider commodification and criminalization together when researching the late-nineteenth-century convict-lease system. It was not until after the Civil War that white southerners crafted laws that made criminals of black men and women,

17 Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 229–30. 18 Rucker, The River Flows On, 7. 19 Johnson, Soul by Soul.

159 especially men, in order to re-enslave them in state penitentiary systems run by private firms, which leased their labor for state-building infrastructure projects or private enterprises.20 Black criminalization, the end of Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow went hand-in-hand. The domestic slave trade, where black men and women were commodified, and the criminal system, where they were made suspects, are understood as discrete subjects in histories of the first half of the nineteenth century. The domestic slave trade has yet to enter the history of southern crime and punishment. Yet lawmakers in Louisiana counted on the penal system, especially its local jails, to regulate the domestic slave trade by imprisoning resistant people sold to the state.

If white southerners feared brought people, black enslaved people in the upper South feared the lower Mississippi Valley. They were primed to resist enslavement there, since they understood New Orleans and Louisiana as places of death and misery. If sent there, they would never see their families again. For some, gone too would be the lives they had managed to make in the diverse economies of the upper South, especially its urban areas.21 As Jacob Stroyer wrote, who never left South Carolina while enslaved there, “Louisiana was considered by the slaves as a place of slaughter.”22 Kentuckian William Wells Brown lived his life in constant fear of sale to

20 Though Matthew J. Mancini is adamant that convict leasing and slavery be understood as discrete versions of coerced labor, he is also clear that “convict labor was a perfect commodity for speculation.” See: Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia, S. C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 24. Alex Lichtenstein calls convict leasing “penal slavery.” See: Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 11. Edward L. Ayers, Vengence and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 185–222; Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 12–80; Milfred C. Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System, 1865–1933 (New York: Africana Studies Research Center, Brooklyn College, 1994), 14–81; David M. Oshinksy, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996); On the use of imprisoned enslaved people on infrastructure projects before the Civil War, see: Aaron R. Hall, “Public Slaves and State Engineers: Modern Statecraft on Louisiana’s Waterways, 1833–1861,” The Journal of Southern History 85 (Aug. 2019): 563–64; For Louisiana-specific studies see: Jeff Forret, “Before Angola: Enslaved Prisoners in the Louisiana State Penitentiary,” Louisiana History 54 (Spring 2013): 143-51. John K. Bardes, “Redefining Vagrancy: Policing Freedom and Disorder in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1862–1868,” The Journal of Southern History 84 (Feb. 2018): 69–112. 21 Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 22 Jacob Stroyer, My Life in the South (Salem, Mass.: Salem Observer Book and Job Print, 1885), 42.

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New Orleans, perhaps because he spent much of his time traveling on slave steamboats with his slave-trading enslaver to the city; when his mother was sold to a slave trader he wrote she “was about being carried to New Orleans, to die on a cotton, sugar, or rice plantation.”23 Another

Kentuckian, Henry Bibb, wrote of the fear of being “taken to the extreme South, to linger out my days in hopeless bondage on some cotton or sugar plantation,” a fear that eventually came true, until he escaped.24 Solomon Northrup learned to fear transport south from his fellow captives in a Washington, D.C., trader’s pen. Of Clemens Ray, Northrup wrote that “The thought of going south overwhelmed him with grief.”25 From these sentiments came the ominous phrase, still in use today, of being “sold down the river.” So feared and hated was the lower South’s largest slave trade entrepot that a rumor circulated in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 that a national coalition of black men and women were going to assault it. As William Paul said, “It was told to me that our colour from the North to the South, had combined together to fight against New

Orleans.”26 Such rumors held currency in the black communities of Charleston and its environs, which by 1822 had partially fed the slave trade to New Orleans for nearly two decades. Many of the people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley had experienced the very thing they dreaded, and they found themselves in the places they had been told were the worst in the United States.

So they resisted.

The community-generating nature of resistant brought people was evident when a British army landed in Louisiana in the winter of 1814 and 1815. Though they were defeated at the

23 William Wells Brown, A Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (Boston: Andrews and Prentiss, 1847), 77, 64, 75. 24 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave (New York: MacDonald and Lee, 1849), 47. 25 Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, N.Y. and other cities, 1853), 48. 26 Lionel Henry Kennedy and Thomas Parker Jr., An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes (Charleston: James R. Schenck, 1822) in Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette, The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2017), 212.

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Battle of New Orleans in January 1815, the British provided the opportunity for the black men and women who labored on the sugar plantations of lower Louisiana to flee their enslavement.

Louisiana Creoles, Africans, and so-called Americans left Louisiana with the British in great numbers. Though the total who fled was unclear, “it was notoriously known and universally acknowledged that about two hundred slaves . . . were taken by the British,” after they retreated to Dauphin and Ship Islands in Mobile Bay.27 Slaveowners listed the names of 163 enslaved men and women when they drafted depositions in the 1820s for the international committee that settled the postwar dispute between Great Britain and the United States over these and other enslaved people. Of them, 82 percent were men and most were probably Louisiana creoles; of the 64 people whose nations were identified, 69 percent were from Louisiana. This number did not include the 53 people once enslaved by Jacques Villere, who according to Francois Deux and others, “form one of the best gangs of creole and african climated negroes”; neither listed were the nations of the 20 people formerly enslaved by Charles Jumonville De Villiers, who according to Jacques Monlon “were either creole or african used to the climate.”28 Such plantation demographies were common in lower Louisiana in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Men often composed the majority of the populations of nineteenth-century Louisiana sugar plantations.29 This gender imbalance was not true during the eighteenth century, and a relatively large creole population that naturally reproduced was the result.30 With the Atlantic slave trade

27 Deposition of Antoine Croizet, n.d. Depositions Concerning Slaves Liberated by British Forces after the Battle of New Orleans, The Historic New Orleans Collection, pp. 27–28 (hereafter Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC). Arsene Lacarriere Latour, Historical Memoire of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814–15 (Philadelphia: John Conrad and Co., 1816), clxxxi. 28 Deposition of Francois Deux, 18 May 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 9; Deposition of Jacques Monlon, 23 May 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC. 29 Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (December 2000): 1551–52. 30 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 171–76, 294–302.

162 legal until 1808, maritime trans-Atlantic slave traders supplied the labor demands of the lower

Mississippi Valley’s earliest sugar and cotton lords with enslaved Africans.31 By 1815, the domestic slave trade to Louisiana was still nascent, and men and women from the southeastern

United States had yet to be brought in large numbers. Still they were there, as were black men and women from the French Caribbean, particularly the enslaved Saint-Dominguens who arrived in 1809 from Cuba with their transient enslavers. Thus the 163 people who left Mississippi River plantations for British military camps in Mobile Bay represented a cross section of the African diaspora. They were people born in and brought to the lower Mississippi Valley, where they were forced to labor on the sugar plantations that lined the Mississippi River between New

Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

The social histories of the people who left Mississippi River plantations in 1815 diverged from their counterparts who left plantations in the Chesapeake in 1814. The lower Mississippi

Valley was a place made by the slave trade, and the Chesapeake was one increasingly unmade by it.32 The social patterns of escapees from each region reflected the social engineering of the slave trade. Though men still composed the majority of the people who escaped in Virginia and

Maryland, there were more women and children in the Chesapeake than in lower Louisiana, and thus more women and children left plantations with the British in Virginia; for instance, twenty- four adults brought forty-five children to British lines from St. George Tucker’s Corotoman plantation in Virginia.33 Fugitives were also members of families and extended kin networks, so

31 le Glaunec, “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana,” 185–209; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “The Slave Trade and the Ethnic Diversity of Louisiana’s Slave Community,” Louisiana History 37 (Spring 1996): 133– 61. 32 Phillip Davis Troutman, “Slave Trade and Sentiment in Antebellum Virginia” (Ph.D. diss.: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2000), 23–29; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790–1820,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 143–71. 33 Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013), 237–40, 252–56, 271–73.

163 much so that Alan Taylor concludes “Family relationships largely determined who fled and who stayed;” for some, escape meant reuniting with families separated by estate divisions and slave sales.34 British raids in the Chesapeake allowed black men and women to escape enslavement with their families and loved ones, and they illustrated the emancipatory possibilities of black kin networks. The British occupation of lower Louisiana sugar plantations required enslaved people with diverse histories—often single men—living in new communities made by the slave trade, to rely on new bonds of kinship. Even the postwar commission that settled the dispute between

Great Britain and the United States over these enslaved people recognized the importance of the slave trade to the lower Mississippi Valley when it settled on an average value of $280 for enslaved people emancipated from Virginia and Maryland and $580 for people emancipated from southern Louisiana.35 The black communities that the British entered in lower Louisiana in

1815 were made by the slave trade, and the people there lived in its wake.

When enslaved people left lower Louisiana plantations, they left together. What information about them that was recorded provides a glimpse into the communities these black men and women had formed in the lower Mississippi Valley after the early-nineteenth-century slave trades had brought them there. The flight of black men and women from Louisiana plantations in the winter of 1814 and 1815 was a neighborhood affair. The lists from claimants probably disguised networks that crisscrossed a cluster of Mississippi River plantations in St.

Bernard Parish. Almost 71 percent of the enslaved people who left with the British were from a strip of adjoining plantations owned by Villeré, De Villiers, Lacoste, Bienvenue, and Delaronde

(Figure 1). Others came from plantations nearby that were behind the British lines; some were

34 Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 238, 254–55. 35 Arnett G. Lindsay, “Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Great Britain Bearing on the Return of Negro Slaves, 1783–1828” The Journal of Negro History 5 (1920), 416.

164 hired to these places as seasonal laborers. Jacques Villeré claimed that 53 people he enslaved on his sugar plantation left with the British, an argument he easily established when witnesses stated that the British used Villeré’s plantation as their headquarters. As soon as Bartholomew Macarty and Villeré’s son heard that the British had withdrawn, they went to Villeré’s plantation; there in his house they found a fowling piece they believed belonged to British General John Lambert, and in the slave quarters they “did not see any of the slaves of Mr. Villeré, except five or six of them that had chosen to remain, who told them that the slaves had gone away with the British, as well as a number of others belonging to” other nearby slaveowners.36 British officers who published their narratives of the Louisiana campaign made little mention of the enslaved people their army liberated, but black men and women nevertheless appeared in British camps. John

Henry Cooke camped on Villeré’s plantation, where he noticed “Temporary sheds, constructed of wood, were clustered round the proprietor's house for the use of the black slaves”; according to Cooke, “Many of the negroes and negresses continued in these dwellings, but most of them had escaped to New Orleans.”37 At least Cooke assumed they went to New Orleans to be with the Americans. The man distrusted the enslaved people who seemed to be always behind British lines; as he wrote after the British defeat in January 1815, the British threw straw over their artillery so “that their departure might not be noticed by any of the negroes wandering about the houses, and to prevent them giving any information to the enemy that we were about to decamp.”38 Far from American spies, many enslaved people probably melted into the dense swamps of southern Louisiana when the British army suddenly arrived. Such marronage certainly explained their sudden appearance at a small fishing village on Lake Borgne—

36 Deposition of Bartholomew Macarty, 19 May 1821, Depositions Concering Slaves, THNOC, p. 12. 37 John Henry Cooke, A Narrative of Events in the South of France and of the Attack on New Orleans in 1814 and 1815 (London: T. And W. Boone, 1835), 168. 38 Cooke, A Narrative of Events, 271.

165 accessible only through the swamp—where the British infantry waited for the naval ships that would take them to Dauphin Island. According to Cooke, “Some black slaves had preceded us to these huts, with the hope of escaping from their masters.”39 Perhaps the enslaved men and women knew the direction of the British retreat; perhaps they knew the British ships had disembarked the infantry at the fishing village, and they went there with hopes of finding naval vessels; perhaps the enslaved people ran through the swamp to the fishing village once the campaign started. Whatever the case, the British army found them waiting there as it left the sugar plantations below New Orleans.

Figure 3: Plantations of People Who Escaped with the British Army, 1815

Source: Original Survey, 1836, Township 12S, Range 12E, St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana,

General Land Office Records, Bureau of Land Management.

39 Cooke, A Narrative of Events, 275.

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Others served the British. A man named Yoyo from Martinique, enslaved by John Joseph

Coiron, “was seen the last day . . . carrying a bundle in the company of and for a British principal officer.”40 Yoyo and the other people Coiron enslaved were brought to the lower Mississippi

Valley just years before from Savannah, Georgia.41 That may have been were Coiron purchased

John, an enslaved American man who also left with the British.42 The Lousiana Creole man

Osman—who was probably the son of someone from Senegambia—also helped the British. He lived near Pearl River, which flowed into Lake Ponchartrain at its northern shore, and he learned a Native American language, perhaps Chickasaw or Choctaw.43 Osman was crucial for the

British to carry out their diplomatic strategy with the Indian people who lived near New Orleans.

According to Louis Allard and Hyacinthe Challon Osman “was among the British and their interpreter with the Indians.”44 Antoine Judice said that in December 1814 he was on a plantation on the Pearl River and “saw there the said negro Osman who was employed by the British and very useful to them, because the said negro Osman being perfectly acquainted with the country in the vicinity of Pearl river procured them oxen and other provisions for their troops.”45 Judice said he first saw him on a British barge and apparently, “the British were very much attached to

Osman because he was not only a very smart, active, and cunning fellow but could speak with the Indians whose language he understood very well.”46 Like those who arrived at the fishing

40 Deposition of John Joseph Coiron, 22 June 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 51. 41 Deposition of Louis Nicolas Allard and Pierre Gregoire Allard, 22 June 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, pp. 52–53. 42 A list of two slaves carried away from the plantation of M. John Joseph Coiron, 22 June 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 50. 43 Cooke, A Narrative of Events, 182; George Robert Gleig, The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans (London: John Murray, 1827), 269–71. 44 Deposition of Louis Allard and Hyacinthe Challon, August 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, pp. 78–79. 45 Deposition of Antoine Judice, August 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 79. 46 Deposition of Antoine Judice, August 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 79.

167 village on Lake Borgne, Osman too left the lower Mississippi Valley with the British.

What to Cooke and his fellow soldiers must have been a precarious amphibious retreat in the face of a victorious American army was to the black men and women at the fishing village a moment for celebration. So they danced. They had brought their instruments with them (their flight was apparently not chaotic but determined, allowing them to gather and carry possessions), what Cooke called “a sort of rude pipe and tabor,” and danced in the style found in

New Orleans’s Congo Square.47 Their dance was a communal celebration of black people,

Africans in diaspora and descendants born in the Americas, brought and enslaved on neighboring plantations in lower Louisiana but freed by their collective flight during the invasion of a British army.48 Cooke made no mention of how many were at the fishing village, but it must have been most of the people who fled lower Louisiana because there were no other embarkation points for the British army. The many creoles and Africans of the Villeré and Jumonville de Villiers plantations might have danced there with Allen and Robert, men brought from the United States’

Atlantic coast and enslaved by Antoine Bienvenu.49 Yoyo, from Martinique might have found himself at the fishing village with Pierre, Martegaille, George, and Victor from Saint-

Domingue.50 Osman, the translator and guide, might have been there as well. The fishing village on Lake Borgne was just the first place these escaped people forged community.

The brought people of the lower Mississippi Valley who fled with the British in 1815 continued to be brought. Eventually this group of Louisiana Creoles, Africans, Americans, and

47 Compare Cooke’s descriptions of the dancing at the fishing village to Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s descriptions of Congo Square. Cooke, A Narrative of Events, 275; Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1905), 180–82. 48 Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, 25th anniversary edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11–15. 49 A statement of the thirteen negro slaves carried away from the plantation of M. Antoine Bienvenu, 30 May 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 23. 50 Deposition of Francisco Berquier, 22 June 1821, Depositions Concering Slaves, THNOC, p. 64.

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Caribbean Islanders created a new identity with other formerly enslaved people from the

Virginia and Maryland Chesapeake. The British took them first to Dauphin Island in Mobile

Bay. There they resisted white slaveowners’ attempts to re-enslave them. Though the white

Louisiana slaveholders created a fictional narrative that the people they had once enslaved were under the influence of the British, the only quote from an enslaved person to enter the record of the depositions probably expressed the sentiments of everyone who left. As Jean Baptiste told

Pierre Lacoste, “you may carry my head along with you but as to my body it shall remain here.”51 From Mobile Bay, the British took them to Bermuda.52 There they awaited transport to

Trinidad, where they eventually started new lives as freed black people on an island where enslaved African and African-descended people still labored. The governor in Trinidad settled the people the British liberated in the lower Mississippi Valley and the Chesapeake in their own agricultural villages, keeping their group integrity intact.53 If those who left the plantations of lower Louisiana in 1815 were strangers to one another, they forged a community together in

Trinidad, one that also included men and women from the Chesapeake. The cultural consequences of the forced migration to Trinidad paralleled those that occurred as a result of the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade to the lower Mississippi Valley. As free British subjects, the black men and women liberated from enslavement in the United States even forged a new collective identity, one denoted by the name given to them by the island’s local populace. In

Trinidad, black Louisiana Creoles, Africans, Virginians, Marylanders, and even Saint-

Dominguans became Merikens. Through resistance they remade African American identities.

51 Deposition of Pierre Lacoste, 28 July 1821, Depositions Concerning Slaves, THNOC, p. 77. 52 Taylor, Internal Enemy, 375–80; Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 181–202. 53 Taylor, Internal Enemy, 375–80. Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis, 166–68, 194–96; John McNish Weiss, The Merikens: Free Black American Settlers in Trinidad, 1815–16 (London: McNish and Weiss, 2002); K. O. Laurence, “The Settlement of Free Negroes in Trinidad Before Emancipation,” Caribbean Quarterly 9 (March and June 1963), 26–52.

169

The exodus of 1815 was neither the first nor the last collective flight of brought people from lower Mississippi Valley plantations into the surrounding swamps. Swamps were, and still are, ubiquitous in the landscape, and brought people were forever fleeing to them from the new sites of their enslavement. Swamps comprised the largest element of enslaved men and women’s

“rival geography,” the places where they found independence from white power over their bodies.54 People sold to the region soon learned of their power. As a man enslaved south of New

Orleans named Robert St. Ann remembered, Thompson West who “never worked a day from de tim dey took him from de tradesyard. Dat’s de place in de city where dey sell de slaves. . . . he hide in de woods. . . . when de Yankees come, he walk out and say, ‘I’m a free man!’”55

Charlotte Brooks remembered a Creole man named Sam who “would run off and stayed in the woods two and three months at a time. . . it looked like Sam could go off and stay as long as he wanted when the white folks got after him.”56 Rebecca Gordon remembered a story her father told her, when he “run off one day [and] stayed in de woods for about six weeks before he came out.”57 It is impossible to write about black resistance to enslavement in Louisiana without writing about the swamps. When stories of maroons appeared in the archives of redhibition, they often appeared as solo actors, but when black men and women spoke about marronage, they described resistant actions that required communities.

Swamps became the sites of African America’s remaking through resistance, as black people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley through the slave trade found one another there and made transient, temporary communities. In 1805 a slave patrol in St. Charles Parish,

54 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 7. 55 Robert St. Ann, interviewed by Maude Wallace, 1940, in Ronnie W. Clayton, ed., Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York, 1990), 191. 56 Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1890), 22. 57 Rebecca Gordon, interviewed by Flossie McElwee, n.d., in Clayton, ed. Mother Wit, 88.

170 immediately upriver from New Orleans, captured three men and one woman who were members of a larger maroon community of brought people. Authorities questioned Celeste, a forty-year old woman from the Congo, who said she had been with a group of thirteen people before they split up; she also knew about another group of people living in the swamps along Lake

Ponchartrain.58 When questioned, John said he was from Jamaica and that he knew about yet another group of people living in yet another section of the swamp led by a man named Francois; according to John, one of the other men who was captured was Celeste’s husband.59 The swamp was a place where a man from Jamaica and a woman from the Congo, people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley by the slave trade, resisted their enslavement together by living together beyond the boundaries of white control. It continued to be a site of African America’s remaking during the era of the domestic slave trade. In 1841, when Stephen Van Wickle began to manage a plantation in Pointe Coupee for an absentee owner, all of the black men and women

“ran off and dispersed themselves through the woods.”60 Van Wickle and the overseer he hired

“went in the woods for about a month both night and day in search of the negroes.”61 They found some in the various slave quarters of the adjoining plantations, but “heard that there was a camp formed by the negroes back of Madame Zenon Porche’s.”62 After failing to find them, the overseer “still heard that those negroes were back of the [front] plantations making baskets, etc.

58 Procès verbal de la négresse et le négres marons, 9–10, Oct. 1805, no. 17, Original Acts, St. Charles Parish Clerk of Court, Hahnville, Louisiana (Hereafter SCOA). The original of this document is very difficult to read, and sometimes illegible, so I have supplemented it with Glenn Conrad’s thorough abstract, see: Glenn R. Conrad, The German Coast: Abstracts of the Civil Records of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes, 1804–1812 (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1981), 21. 59 Ibid. 60 Brief of Plaintiffs and Appellees, p. 9, Benjamin Poydras de la lande et. al. vs. Francoise Poydras de la lande et. al., no. 2941, March 1855, p. 67, Louisiana Supreme Court, Louisiana and Special Collections Department, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (hereafter LSC, UNO). 61 Testimony of Abraham Alfred, ibid., p. 67, LSC, UNO. 62 Testimony of Abraham Alfred, ibid., p. 67, LSC, UNO.

171 which they sold for bread.”63 This community of people, like all in the lower Mississippi Valley, was made by the slave trade. They were Africans, Louisiana Creoles, and Americans.64 And like in 1815, people emerged from the swamps when the American army appeared in lower

Louisiana in 1861. Octave Johnson, who eventually joined the army, told a government interviewer in 1863 that “he [ran] away to the woods” in St. James Parish to avoid being beaten by his overseer; he stayed there for a year and a half, which was long enough to gather 30 people in a maroon community just “four miles in the years of the plantation house.”65 If resisting enslavement through maronage forged bonds between brought people, the woods and swamps that surrounded lower Mississippi Valley plantations were the sites of their making. For decades, they were the most common places where brought men and women fled.

Yet maronage never removed maroons from the webs of social connections they had made on plantations, since maroons often relied on the people who remained for food and other items. As Johnson said, “we obtained matches from our friends on the plantations.”66 When

Hattie left a plantation in Terrebonne Parish for the swamps to avoid her owner’s rapacious son, she relied on her friends who remained for food.67 When Honore was captured in the house of a free man of color in St. Charles Parish in 1808, he told interrogators that he and another man named Gabriel lived behind Delhomme’s plantation for about a month, largely because a woman named Rosette, who lived there, gave them food.68 Lindor was captured with Honore, and when

63 Testimony of Abraham Alfred, ibid. p. 68, LSC, UNO. 64 This plantation was owned by Julien Poydras and the enslaved people’s nations were recorded in his estate. Inventory of the Property Depending on the Estate of the late Julien Poydras, 22 July 1824, Doc. 1582, Original Acts, Pointe Coupee Parish Courthouse, New Roads, Louisiana. 65 Octave Johnson, interview, 1863, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Interviews, in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 395. 66 Johnson interview, 1863, in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 395. 67 Albert, House of Bondage, 71. 68 Procès verbal de deux négres marron trouvé dans le cabane de Charles Paquet griffe libre, 1 June 1808, No. 38, SCOA.

172 he was asked if he had lived anywhere besides the house of the free black man, he said he had stayed “in the cabin of a negress named Ciba belonging to Mr. Adelard Fortier.”69 A man named

Charles who was captured in St. Charles Parish in 1808 said that he “always kept behind the woods, and went to the coast of Mr. Casterelle to see my mother,” when he first left his enslaver in New Orleans.70 Black men and women who left plantations to live in the Louisiana swamps thus never removed themselves from the region’s black communities. Maronage created opportunities for enslaved men and women to rely on one another, and it extended the geographies of black life beyond the plantation boundaries and beyond the control of white authorities.

Stories of brought people resisting their enslavement with new friends appear in the archives of redhibition during the decades before the Civil War. In Louisiana courtrooms, white slave buyers and sellers told stories of black resistance in the wake of the domestic slave trade.

The six men who fled the sugar plantation that Manuel, Michel, and Hortense Andry owned near

New Orleans in 1819 were part of a group made by the trade. Though no information survived about their homes, Prosper Foy purchased them in New Orleans between 1814 and 1818 from diverse people; in May 1819 he sold them to the Andrys. The enslaved men had known one another for at least a year. During and after the sale, they resisted. According to Foy’s overseer

Joseph Aquila, Manuel Andry visited Foy’s plantation several times to inquire about purchasing them, and “when Mr. Andry came to take possession of the 9 negroes, 4 of them to wit, Tom,

Anthony, Sandy [or Samedi—or Saturday], and Isaac [or Arie] ran off on seeing him.”71 Foy had purchased Tom from Fort and Clement in 1817; he purchased Anthony and Sandy two months

69 Procès verbal de deux négres marron trouvé dans le cabane de Charles Paquet griffe libre, 1 June 1808, No. 38, SCOA. 70 Procès du Charles négre à M. Choppin, 6 Oct. 1808, no. 52, SCOA. 71 Testimony of Joseph Aquila, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, p. 15, LSC, UNO.

173 later from James Hopkins; and he bought Arie in May 1818 from Lamcest Millaudon.72 This was not the last time they fled enslavement together. Foy sent the nine people he enslaved to Andry’s plantation for a fifteen-day trial period, and by all accounts, they were obedient to Andry and his sons.73 Since four fled when Manuel Andry came to “take possession” of them, only five arrived to work on Andry’s plantation. Six or seven days after they went there, Foy came with Tom,

Anthony, Sandy, and Arie, who had “returned that same evening” that Andry arrived.74 At that time, Foy tried to finalize the sale; he even pressured Andry by telling him that he was selling his

Louisiana interests and returning to France (a statement that Andry later used to get the court to act swiftly).75 Foy’s tactics worked, and Andry agreed to purchase the nine people already laboring on his plantation. Within days, six of them had fled. Sandy, Anthony, and Arie—who left Foy’s place when Andry arrived to transport them to his plantation—were among them, as were Jean Baptiste, Lindor, and Bernard.76 They left at different times, with different people, and from witness testimony and sale documents, it is possible to reconstruct the networks they had crafted after their sale to Foy. That network can be best reconstructed by focusing on Anthony and Sandy, who had known each other since at least February 1817, when James Hopkins—the man who sold the two men to Foy—purchased Anthony.77 According to Hopkins, Sandy and

Anthony had little value to him because “they had been in the habit of running away; the said

72 Sale of slaves from Prosper Foy to Manuel, Michel, and Hortense Andry, 21 May 1818, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, pp. 3–4, LSC, UNO. 73 Testimony of L. Glapion and testimony of Joseph Aquila, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, pp. 13–14, LSC, UNO. 74 Testimony of Joseph Aquila, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, p. 15, LSC, UNO. 75 Testimony of Manuel Andry, 4 Nov. 1818, p. 10; Testimony of A. Abat, 4 Nov. 1818, p. 11; Testimony of L. Glapion, p. 13; Petition of Manuel Andry et. al., 24 Aug. 1818, p. 2, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, LSC, UNO. 76 Petition of Manuel Andry et. al., 24 Aug. 1818, p. 1, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, LSC, UNO. 77 Hopkins disclosed who he had purchased Anthony and Sandy from in his sale to Foy, which was recorded in the trial record. Hopkins’s purchase of Sunday from Thomas Thompson, a Kentuckian, can be found in Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Louisiana Slave Database, see: Slave sale from Thomas Thompson to James Hopkins, 19 Dec. 1816, Orleans Parish, no. 629.

174 slaves were in prison at the time the sale [to Foy] took place.”78 Anthony, Jean Baptiste, and

Bernard left Andry’s plantation on the same day.79 Anthony thus left Sandy at Andry’s place.

But Sandy left soon after the sale as well, and when Sandy left, Arie followed.80 Within months of their sale from Prosper Foy to Manuel Andry and his sons, six of the nine men whom Foy had cobbled together from the New Orleans slave market had left the Andry plantation.

Little was recorded in the trial record about the homes of the men purchased and sold by

Prosper Foy, but other cases detailed the slave trade stories of resistant brought people. Jack,

Tom, and Jenny were part of “the gang brought from Charleston” by Benjamin Jewel to his cotton plantation in Pointe Coupee in August 1819.81 According to Samuel Richardson, Jewel purchased Tom “at a place commonly called the Sugar House . . . . a kind of prison where runaway and other bad slaves are confined.”82 Jewel probably purchased Jack and Jenny in one of Charleston’s slave markets. All three were listed as américains by white creole assessors who estimated their value when Jewel decided to bequeath them to his future son-in-law James

Mitchell (they appear in the marriage contract as “born in the United States”).83 Shortly after their arrival on Jewel’s plantation, they left for short periods of time. According to Jewel’s overseer John O’Neil, Jack was put in irons within a month of arriving from Charleston because he had fled the plantation.84 Tom left once, but was found by another enslaved person before the end of the day.85 As William Kennedy said “Jack, Jenny, and Tom have almost always been run away since he is overseer at Mr. Jewell's.”86 After Jewel transferred the three to Mitchel, their

78 Testimony of James Hopkins, p. 12, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, p. 12, LSC, UNO. 79 Testimony of L. Glapion, p. 13, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, LSC, UNO. 80 Testimony of L. Glapion, p. 13, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, LSC, UNO. 81 Testimony of Henry Gould, 5 May 1820, pp. 14–15, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 82 Testimony of Samuel Richardson, 17 April 1820, p. 11, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 83 Marriage Contract, 14 Dec. 1819, p. 3, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 84 Testimony of John O’Neil, p. 17, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 85 Testimony of John O’Neil, p. 17, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 86 Testimony of William Kennedy, p. 18, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO.

175 resistance continued. They left Mitchel’s plantation together; Salvadore Pamias said “He found a calf of his killed and buried in the cabane where were the three negroes of Mr. Mitchell.”87

According to Kennedy, when Jack and Jenny “ran away from Mr. Mitchell he found them behind

Madame Valleny’s plantation in a quarter made by them.”88 Isolated from their stories of the slave trade, the testimony about Jack, Jenny, and Tom read only as stories of enslaved resistance, stories historians have written and read since the 1950s. But there was more to their narratives, context that gave significant historical meaning to their actions. They were brought people, men and women taken from South Carolina to the lower Mississippi Valley to work on a cotton plantation in Louisiana. Their escape from Jewel’s and Mitchel’s plantations together, even if temporary, required coordination, planning, and trust between them, people who probably knew little about one another before they boarded a ship in Charleston. By the time they had arrived in

Louisiana, or within days of arriving, they had formed a community of one another. Such communal bonds formed in the wake of the domestic slave trade were the substance of a remade

African America in the North American interior.

If Jack, Jenny, and Tom sought refuge in the nearby woods, Charles and Bill tried to return home. Archibald W. Goodloe took them and ten others from Richmond, Kentucky, in

March 1828 to New Orleans, where he sold them to Nathaniel and Benjamin Hart. “Shortly after the said purchase,” according to the Harts, Billy and Charles “ran away and absconded.”89 The lawsuit initiated by their flight produced a letter that Goodloe had written to the Harts from

Kentucky in June that reported the men had returned to Kentucky. For at least three months, they

87 Testimony of Salvadore Pamias, p. 18, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. This testimony was recorded in English, but it may have been given in French. If so, cabane may be a poor translation of cabanage a term often used in contemporary documents from Louisiana to describe shelters made by maroons. 88 Testimony of William Kennedy, p. 18, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 89 The Answer of N. and B. Hart to the Petition of A. W. Goodloe, Goodloe vs. N. and B. Hart, June 1831, no. 2154, LSC, UNO.

176 literally reversed the migration that Goodloe had forced upon them. Word came to Goodloe of a man 40 miles away who looked like Billy, and Goodloe planned to go “fitch” him, and if he

“should be so fortunate enough to fitch him, I will extract from him where Charles is if he knows.”90 Goodloe left unstated his knowledge about the bonds of friendship, alliance, or cooperation between Billy and Charles, the type of relationship he might have observed as he brought them to New Orleans that led him to believe that Billy might know where Charles was, or that Billy and Charles returned to Kentucky together. The manner of their return—how they resisted their forced migration—was even something he and the Harts hoped to understand, though Goodloe assumed they reversed their second Middle Passage by steamship.91 As he wrote, “when I catch him I will in all probability ascertain how he got hear [sic].”92 Goodloe did capture Billy, but by the time he sued the Harts, Charles was still at large, and the record makes no mention of his fate. Perhaps Billy held strong under Goodloe’s interrogations. The two men relied on bonds between one another to resist their forced migration.

Few enslaved men and women who fled plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley escaped accusations of theft, another redhibitory so-called vice that criminalized black resistance. People who left plantations stole things when they lived beyond the confines of white authority. They almost always stole things that helped them survive in the swamps. They stole clothes; they stole food; they stole guns; and they killed livestock. Dead or missing cows, chickens, and pigs were signs to white plantation owners that maroons were in the neighborhood.

Thus people who left plantations were often accused of two so-called vices, running away and theft. Tom, Jack, and Jenny killed a cow and ate its meat; Tom was accused of stealing fowls and

90 A. W. Goodloe to N. And B. Hart, 2 June 1828, Doc. B, Goodloe vs. N. and B. Hart, June 1831, no. 2154, LSC, UNO. 91 Goodloe to N. And B. Hart, 2 June 1828, Doc. B, Goodloe vs. N. and B. Hart, June 1831, no. 2154, LSC, UNO. 92 Goodloe to N. And B. Hart, 2 June 1828, Doc. B, Goodloe vs. N. and B. Hart, June 1831, no. 2154, LSC, UNO.

177 also a sheep.93 Octave Johnson told the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission that when he went to live in the woods “I had to steal my food, took turkeys, chickens and pigs . . . sometimes we would rope beef cattle and drag them out to our hiding place.”94 Honore told interrogators that he, Gabriel, and Lindor lived behind Delhomme’s plantation in St. Charles Parish for a month “doing some privateering, sometimes in the prairie, sometimes on the [river], and down the bayou [St. John] near the fort when Gabriel went to look for provisions in town.”95 Though they had, in Honore’s words, “forced open a cabin at the home of Mr. Delhomme, in which they found five piastres,” most of their so-called privateering was livestock hunting.96 Honore said that he and another maroon named Lindor “had each a rifle, and had killed . . . a young bull.”97

Lindor told a much more detailed story. When Lindor met Honore and Gabriel together in the swamps, the two had killed a calf; the three stayed in that area for awhile, as others joined and left them, and then they moved to the swamp behind Reine’s plantation “where they killed an ox.”98 At least two weeks later, their numbers again grew and shrank, and they and some others moved to the swamp behind Destrehan’s plantation “where they remained around two months, killing in that time a few beasts of the plantation nearby.”99 They relied on rifles to kill livestock, rifles they also stole. Honore said he “had stolen it almost a year ago in the pirogue of a caboteur who he found alone and sleeping” on the property line of two plantations.100 Charles told a similar story when white interrogators asked him how he got his rifle. He said that soon after he

93 Testimony of Salvadore Pamias, p. 18, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO; Testimony of Henry Gould, 5 May 1820, Mitchel vs. Jewel, December 1820, no. 499.1, LSC, UNO. 94 Octave Johnson interview, 1863, American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission Interviews, in Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 395. 95 Interrogatoire du nègre nommé Honore, Procès verbal de deux négres marron trouvé dans le cabane de Charles Paquet griffe libre, 1 June 1808, no. 38, SCOA. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Interrogatoire du nègre nommé Lindor, ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Interrogatoire du nègre nommé Honore, ibid.

178 left his enslaver in New Orleans, he “saw a small barque where there was no person, I entered it, there found a rifle with a bag of powder.”101 Through slave trade regulations, white people transformed these stories of resistance and survival into vices of character, and they made criminals of resistant bought and sold people.

Resistant brought people like Jack, Jenny, Tom, Charles, or Billy produced a powerful reaction from white men who wielded state power. The legal code that allowed for redhibition criminalized brought black people and reflected white anxieties that bought people were also resistant people. There is perhaps no better evidence for white fears of brought people than

Louisiana’s recurrent attempts to regulate the domestic slave trade during the nineteenth century.

For decades, brought people were suspected people. Two years after the ban on the Atlantic slave trade in 1808, the state legislature attempted to regulate the characters of the black men and women sold to the state by empowering slave buyers, punishing slave sellers, and empowering local officials—namely parish judges—with policing the slave trade. Enslaved people who were accused of committing capital crimes “from any of the territories or states of the United States of

America” were the subject of an 1810 law, and judges were empowered to institute slave trials if any person brought to their parish was accused; those enslaved people found guilty of committing capital crimes before they were brought to Louisiana were to be seized and sentenced to hard labor for life.102 Seven years later, the legislature elaborated on this law and transformed the punishment from hard labor to instant seizure and sale; it also levied fines and penalized ship captains who imported criminalized black people. According to the law’s

101 Procès du Charles négre à M. Choppin, 6 Oct. 1808, no. 52, SCOA. 102 “An Act Concerning the Introduction of Certain Slaves from any of the states or territories of the United States of America, 3rd Legislature of the Territory of Orleans,” 1st Session, 23 March 1810, pp. 44–48, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0034&i=1.

179 preamble, it was needed because “the several acts which have been passed for the purpose of preventing the importation into this state of any slaves or other persons, the introduction of whom might be dangerous, have been deficient in execution.”103 White anxieties about brought people vacillated during the nineteenth century, at least if attempted regulations indexed fears.

Those fears peaked in 1826, when the legislature outlawed the slave trade.104 Two years later, the legislature repealed the ban, but it returned in 1829 with regulations that mandated that slave traders document the characters of brought people by filing affidavits from at least two white people from the county where the black people came from.105 Legislators hoped this regulation would be adopted in other states of the United States’ plantation frontier, as they requested the governor to send the text of the law to his counterparts in Mississippi and Alabama “to recommend similar legislative enactments on their part”; they also asked the governor to publish the law in the newspapers of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri—no doubt for the benefit of the many slave traders who purchased black people there.106 This law was in force for two years, and six months after its repeal in 1831 the legislature enacted another ban on the domestic slave trade, no doubt in reaction to the Nat Turner rebellion.107 This ban, which also

103 “An Act Supplementary to an Act Concerning the Introduction of Certain Slaves from any of the states or territories of the United States of America,” 3rd Legislature of the state of Louisiana, 1st Session, 29 Jan. 1817, pp. 44–48, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0080&i=1. 104 “An Act to Prohibit the Introduction of Slaves for Sale into this State,” 7th legislature, 2nd session, 22 March 1826, pp. 114–118, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0128&i=1. 105 “An Act to Repeal An Act to Prohibit the Introduction of Slaves for Sale in this State,” 8th legislature, 2nd session, 4 Feb. 1828 in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0137&i=1; “An Act Relative to the Introduction of Slaves in this State, and For Other Purposes,” 31 Jan. 1829, 9th legislature, 1st session, pp. 39–50, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0139&i=1. 106 “Resolutions,” 2 Feb. 1829, 9th legislature, 1st session, p. 50, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0140&i=1. 107 “An Act Relative to the Introduction of Slaves,” 9 November 1831, 10th Legislature, Extraordinary Session, pp. 5–8, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0159&i=1.

180 did not allow slaveowners who owned slaves in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, or Florida— and later Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri—from moving to the state with the people they enslaved, lasted until 1834.108 After that year, the state’s legislators passed no stricter regulations on the trade. By the 1830s and 1840s, Louisiana’s sugar economy had began to expand and intensify, a process that required as many enslaved laborers as possible; the politically powerful sugar lords would surely have defeated any attempts to close the state’s slave markets.109 White fears about brought black people still persisted of course, but white people banked on the redhibition laws to keep them safe from the suspected criminals who they thought were sold to the lower Mississippi Valley. The 1834 repeal of the 1831 ban liberalized redhibition. Whereas buyers had to prove that enslaved people with so-called vices of character exhibited them before sale, the 1834 law allowed redhibition “whenever said vice shall have been discovered within two months after the sale.”110 Through redhibition, Louisiana slaveowners protected their material interests from enslaved people they suspected, and they criminalized brought people in the process.

Perhaps nothing better exhibited the criminalization of brought people than the use of parish jails to regulate the domestic slave trade. As slave buyers and slave sellers fought over the

108 Ibid.; “An Act to Amend the Act Entitle ‘An Act Relative to the Introduction of Slaves,’ Approved November 9, 1831,” 2 April 1832, 10th legislature, 3rd session, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0164&i=1; “An Act Amending the Acts Now in Force, Relative to the Introduction of Slaves, 26 March, 1833,” 11th Legislature, 1st session, p. 81, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0168&i=1; “An Act to Repeal the Several Acts Relative to the Introduction of Slaves into the State, and for Other Purposes,” 2 Jan. 1834, 11th Legislature, 2nd session, pp. 6–7 in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0171&i=1. 109 Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 20–25. Political representation in the state was weighted in favor of sugar districts. See: John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824– 1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 10–12. 110 “An Act To Repeal the Several Acts Relative to the Introduction of Slaves into the State, and for other purposes,” 1834, 11th legislature, 2nd session, p. 7, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0171&i=1.

181 terms of their sales, parish jails contained resistant brought people who were also contested property. Of course, white people often locked all fugitives from enslavement in parish jails to await retrieval by their enslavers, but men and women brought to the lower Mississippi Valley often waited in jails for redhibition cases, which they initiated through their resistance, to be decided in court.111 Regretful buyers were loath to pay the jailers’ fees to release imprisoned enslaved people whom they were attempting to return to slave traders. Jails were also where suspected criminals brought to the state had to await their fate. In 1810, enslaved people from the

United States brought to Louisiana who were suspected of capital crimes were to be imprisoned, tried, and if found guilty, forced to labor on infrastructure projects for the state.112 In subsequent regulations, lawmakers never utilized jails to imprison brought people—they preferred to seize brought people, sell them to the highest bidders, and pocket large portions of the proceeds for the state’s benefit—but jails figured prominently in redhibition lawsuits, which were the most effective and longstanding slave trade regulations.113 When Manuel Andry and his sons sued

Prosper Foy, Sandy and Isaac were held in jail, where they died.114 When Foy purchased Sandy

111 Lawmakers bestowed the imprisonment of fugitives from enslavement to local jails in the first Black Code, and they explicitly outlined how parish jailers were to handle fugitives. See: “Black Code. An Act Prescribing the Rules and Conduct to be observed with Respect to Negroes and other Slaves of this Territory,” Sec. 27, 1st. Legislature Orleans Territory, 1st session, 7 June 1806, p. 163, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0017&i=1; “An Act to Regulate the Police Jails and Public Prisons Within the Several Parishes of this State,” Sec. 2, 2nd legislature, 2nd session, 6 March 1816, pp. 24–26, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0074&i=1; Ayers, Vengence and Justice, 101–102. 112 “An Act Concerning the Introduction of Certain Slaves from any of the States or Territories of the United States of America,” Sec. 1, 3rd legislature Orleans Territory, 1st session, 23 March 1810, p. 44, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0034&i=1. 113 “An Act to Prohibit the Introduction of Slaves for Sale into this State,” sec. 1, 7th legislature, 2nd session, 22 March 1826, p. 114, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0128&i=1; “An Act Relative to the Introduction of Slaves in this State, and for other purposes,” sec. 6, 9th legislature, 1st session, 31 Jan. 1829, p. 46, in Slavery Statutes, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law, HeinOnline, https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.slavery/ssactsla0139&i=1. 114 Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, p. 24, LSC, UNO.

182 and Anthony, they were in jail, according to their former owner.115 An enslaved man named

January also died in jail during a redhibition suit. Marked as a criminal the day he arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley, much of his life there was indeed in a cell. He was from South

Carolina, and the man who owned January there sold him to a Charleston slave trader named

Thomas Fleming because of “his running away from him without any cause, and he fears the influence he may have on the rest of his slaves.”116 According to Fleming, January “was influenced to Runaway by the owners of the remainder of his family who wished to purchase him at an under value.”117 So in December 1823, Fleming consigned January to James Ramsay, forced him aboard the Wade Hampton, and shipped him to New Orleans.118 When January arrived in January 1824, Ramsay sent the man with a history of escape—who was also not his property—straight to the city jail, where he lived for seven months until Ramsay sold him to

Louis Bonnet and his family.119 Bonnet took January to their plantation in St. Tammany Parish north of Lake Ponchartrain, and within fifteen days January left.120 By the time Bonnet sued

Ramsay in July 1825, January had escaped from the plantation three times, sometimes for months, and Bonnet locked him in the New Orleans jail.121 There he stayed for another eight months, until he contracted smallpox in the winter of 1826 and was sent to the hospital where he died.122 The jailer wanted January out of his custody after he contracted the disease, but as

Bonnet told him, “he could do nothing with the slave as he had commenced a suit against the defendant to take him back and did not know whether the slave would be declared to be his

115 Testimony of James Hopkins, p. 12, Andry et. al. vs. Foy, June 1819, no. 342, p. 12, LSC, UNO. 116 Thomas Fleming to James Ramsay, 23 Dec. 1823, Doc. A, p. 14, Bonnet et. al. vs. Ramsay, June 1827, no. 1468, LSC, UNO. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Testimony of Simon Miller, 15 Jan. 1827, Bonnet et. al. vs. Ramsay, June 1827, no. 1468, LSC, UNO. 120 Testimony of Eugene Pichon, p. 12, Bonnet et. al. vs. Ramsay, June 1827, no. 1468, LSC, UNO. 121 Ibid. 122 Testimony of Simon Miller, 15 Jan. 1827, p. 17, Bonnet et. al. vs. Ramsay, no. 1468, LSC, UNO.

183 property or that of Mr. Ramsay.”123 Bonnet could, of course, have paid the jailer’s fees and taken

January back to St. Tammany Parish while the lawsuit was tried, but doing so meant risking another escape and the complete loss of his property if the lawsuit failed. The jail served Bonnet as a convenient, perhaps no-cost, solution to January’s resistance while Bonnet attempted to annul the sale he had contracted. Through these private means, indeed by harnessing the self- interest of slave buyers, redhibition codes regulated the domestic slave trade and jails became public versions of slave traders’ holding pens.

January’s story exemplified the intersection of the slave trade and the Louisiana criminal system, of commodification and criminalization. January sat in jail when he was sold in the New

Orleans slave market, and he sat in jail again as he awaited the court decision that would uphold or nullify his sale. From the day that January arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley, he was suspected. In the lives of men and women like January, the fears about the slave trade that plagued white slaveowners came true. When enslaved people fled from cotton and sugar plantations, they confirmed to the valley’s slaveowners that the upper South slaveowners were indeed selling their criminals and malcontents to the lower Mississippi Valley. Of course, all black men and women resisted enslavement, but the resistance of purchased people became problems, in the minds of white slaveowners, that required legal and political action to protect the presumed stability of the lower South’s plantations. Redhibition codes proved to be the most consistent forms of protection, since they pitted buyers against sellers in courtrooms overseen by judges with sequestration powers, powers that allowed courts to seize human property and imprison them until cases were completed. Yes, white elites demonized slave traders, and

Louisiana’s attempts to regulate the domestic slave trade were attempts to control slave traders

123 Ibid.

184 and were born from suspicions about their character. But slave traders were demonized as unscrupulous marketers of humans because of the types of people they were presumed to sell in

New Orleans, not because buying and selling people was inherently immoral. Attempts to regulate slave traders were also attempts to police the people they sold. The commodification and criminalization of black people occurred simultaneously.

Yet redhibition codes produced something else: an archive of slavery that countered narratives of migrated black criminals with stories of collective black resistance. When slavebuyers entered courtrooms to persuade juries to compel slave traders to nullify sales, they entered into the record stories of the slave trade, of forced migration, and of the black communities formed in its wake. Through flight and escape, migrated people resisted their migration, and they resisted enslavement on the sugar and cotton plantations of the lower

Mississippi Valley. Like the 163 people who left sugar plantations below New Orleans with the

British in 1815, the thousands of men and women who arrived in Louisiana via the domestic slave trade utilized friends, allies, and whole communities of people that they had made on the way or at the new sites of their enslavement. Brought people formed communities of one another in the plantation backswamps, where they also relied on the people who remained on plantations for food. Flight and escape were often collective actions, even if only one person left the plantation boundaries for the woods behind it, and collective action took on new meaning in a land populated by black men and women from somewhere else. Escape, even if temporary, was indeed a cause and consequence of African America’s remaking.

185

CONCLUSION

In January 1862 soldiers of the United States Army under General Benjamin F. Butler recovered New Orleans from the white southerners who had seceded from the Union just months before. Though it took years for the American government to regain sovereignty over the lower

Mississippi Valley, a local manifestation of what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the “general strike” began immediately after American ships appeared in the Mississippi River and white men wearing blue coats patrolled New Orleans streets.1 Sometime in June, the enslaved people on

Babbillard Lablanche’s plantation, twelve miles upriver from the city, crossed the river and went to the U.S. garrison under General John W. Phelps at Camp Parapet. They arrived “with bag and baggage as if they had already commenced an exodus,” according to one report, and they were led by a man named Jack, who spoke for them to army officers.2 When Butler heard of the people from the Lablanche plantation at Camp Parapet, he correctly surmised that the abolitionist

Phelps “intends making this a test case for the policy of the Government” regarding slavery.3

After all, as Phelps admitted in his long screed to Butler on the matter, which was less a military report than it was an abolitionist tract, the Lablanche people “are but a small portion of their race who have sought and are still seeking our pickets and our military stations, declaring that they cannot and will not any longer serve their masters.”4 These enslaved people set off a controversy that reverberated to Washington, D.C., and culminated with Phelps’s resignation. Many remained at Camp Parapet, which became one of the largest refugee camps during the Civil War.

1 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 55. 2 John W. Phelps to Benjamin F. Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1886), 15:486; Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, 18 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:486. 3 Benjamin F. Butler to Edwin M. Stanton, 18 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:486. 4 John W. Phelps to Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:490.

186

The story of the enslaved people on the Lablanche plantation repeated across the U.S. South and the lower Mississippi Valley during the Civil War, and historians are emphasizing how black refugees problematized military and political strategies.5 The story of black national protest during the Civil War is profound, and it deserves retelling from as many perspectives as historians can write. One yet untold concerns the nineteenth-century slave trade and the remaking of African America in its wake. In many places in the U.S. South, the general strike of the Civil War years was undertaken by men and women new to one another and by communities remade after forced migration.

Many were brought people, men and women who had been taken from the places of their birth and transported to the valley to work cotton and sugar fields. To Phelps, the enslaved people brought to the lower Mississippi Valley were reasons enough for the United States government to decide a course of action on the slavery question. To him, indecision opened the door for a racial revolution in the shape and form of Saint-Domingue, especially in the plantation districts watered by the Mississippi River. Phelps was never blind to the re-created nature of the black communities of the lower Mississippi Valley, perhaps because he spoke with many of the enslaved people who appeared at his camp, perhaps because he knew well the political economy of slavery and the realities of the chattel principle. As he explained to Butler, “Many of the slaves here have been sold away from the border States.”6 Like contemporary slaveholders,

Phelps connected the slave trade to criminalized blackness. He thought enslaved people were sold there “as a punishment, being too refractory to be dealt with there [in the border states] in

5 Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016). 6 Phelps to Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:487.

187 the face of the civilization of the North.”7 Phelps also remarked on the transportation of the black church and the separation of families when he wrote that “They come here with a knowledge of the Christian religion . . . with a feeling of relationships with the families from which they came, and with a sense of unmerited banishment, as culprits.”8 To Phelps this combination of banishment, familial separation, and black Christianity brought “upon them a greater severity of treatment and a corresponding disinclination ‘to receive punishment.’”9 In short, the domestic slave trade conditioned black enslaved life in the lower Mississippi Valley, and those conditions warranted immediate response by the United States government, lest the survivors of the second

Middle Passage slaughter the white people who bought them. In those early days of the

American Civil War, the consequences of the domestic slave trade and the re-creation of Africa

America were reasons for immediate abolition.

In one paragraph, Phelps drafted a narrative that has eluded many histories of enslavement in the nineteenth-century United States, a history of black life in the wake of the domestic slave trade at the places where it terminated. This dissertation has shown that those sold people remade communities in the lower Mississippi Valley, and they remade African America in the process. They were torn from their families and communities in the upper U.S. South; they were placed on ships, boats, and barges or forced to walk; and they were sold to cotton and sugar plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley. There they attempted to escape death, which came from arduous labor and punishing discipline or contagious diseases born in the crowded swampland environment. They did more than survive enslavement. They remade families, they remade churches, and they resisted their enslavement together. They sought fellow migrants

7 Phelps to Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:487. 8 Phelps to Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:487. 9 Phelps to Butler, 16 June 1862, in The War of the Rebellion, 15:487.

188 from the places they learned to call home, places they might never see again. They swapped stories of the trade, and they exchanged homeland information in search of people who might be kin to them, or who might have at least known someone in common. Men and women who became Virginians or Marylanders or Kentuckians in Louisiana, whose lives had been marked by the slave trade, married one another. They also forged bonds of kinship with other brought people, people who became aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters. Marriages were often performed by black preachers, who had also come from elsewhere, and in evangelical Christian ceremonies as part of remade black churches, which bore a likeness to the ones associated with the evangelical denominations that swept through black communities in the Chesapeake and

Lowcountry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Ideas of Christian brotherhood and sisterhood took on new and important meaning in places made by the trade. If the slave trade separated family and kin from one another and forced the people it brought to re- create communities, those same people brought black evangelical Christianity to the lower

Mississippi Valley. The black family and the black church, long understood as sources of strength and stability, were remade in the wake of the nineteenth-century domestic slave trade.

The strike of 1862, in practice an exodus of enslaved people from the plantations of the lower Mississippi Valley, was no unprecedented or unpracticed affair. Fifty years before enslaved people left southern Louisiana plantations after seeing American boats enter the

Mississippi River, others—no less strangers to the slave trade—left together when a British army invaded. In the decades between those mass self-liberation events, black men and women left plantations for the woods and swamps behind the cleared fields of cotton and sugar, where they met others and forged temporary and transient maroon communities. They killed livestock and they stole food, but they were also aided by those who remained on plantations. So ubiquitous

189 was the problem, white lawmakers attempted to regulate the characters of people sold to

Louisiana by passing bans, strict regulations, and liberalizing redhibition codes. The criminalization of black and brought people became the consequence. No one escaped enslavement alone, including those brought to the lower Mississippi Valley. Escape required help and trust, and escape and resistance became a cause and consequence of remade black communities. Perhaps more than any consequence of the slave trade, it was this criminalization of resistant black brought people that Phelps referenced when he envisioned a redux of Haiti in the lower Mississippi Valley and argued for immediate emancipation.

This dissertation has engaged questions of African American history under slavery that historians have previously addressed, and it has recast them in the context of the nineteenth- century slave trade and forced migration to the lower Mississippi Valley—the black family, the black church, and black resistance—but there remain many important questions left unaddressed that bear great relevance to this study and need further inquiry to be incorporated into the narrative of African America’s remaking. For instance, the lives of nineteenth-century forced migrants to the lower Mississippi Valley paralleled those of enslaved people who lived in other places formerly marginal to plantation slavery in the Atlantic world. This study may raise questions about the histories of interregional forced migrants in Cuba and other Caribbean islands or Brazil’s Paraiba Valley. Though few places in the Atlantic world developed an interregional slave trade at the scale of the one in the United States, in large part because the

Atlantic slave trade continued to supply enslaved laborers for many decades into the nineteenth century, historians’ knowledge of these interregional domestic slave trades is growing.10 If

10 Herbert S. Klein, “The Internal Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Study of Slave Importations into Rio de Janeiro in 1852,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (Nov. 1971), 567–85; Joseph C. Dorsey, “Seamy Sides of Abolition: Puerto Rico and the Cabotage Slave Trade to Cuba, 1848–73,” Slavery and Abolition 19 (April 1998), 106–28; Laird W. Bergad, “American Slave Markets During the 1850s: Slave Price Rises in the United

190 histories of intercolonial slave trades inspire inquiries into nineteenth-century forced migration, and since the Intra-American Slave Trade Database will include data about domestic voyages in the nineteenth century, perhaps historians will raise questions about the lives domestic forced migrants remade in the Atlantic world in the new sites of their enslavement.11 Perhaps a second creolization accompanied the second slavery; or perhaps there is an unwritten history of black creoles in American diaspora.12

Just as making African American was gendered, so too was African America’s remaking.13 The demographics of the domestic slave trade and of the places where it terminated alone argue for a gendered analysis. Most of the enslaved people sold to Louisiana’s sugar region, between 64 and 70 percent, were men, and just 40 percent of the enslaved population in the sugar parishes were women.14 Sexual competition between men may have been fierce, and

States, Cuba, and Brazil in Comparative Perspective,” in Slavery in the Development of the Americas, ed. David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 219–35; Hilary McD. Beckles, “‘An Unfeeling Traffick’: The Intercolonial Movement of Slaves in the British Caribbean, 1807–1833,” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 256–274; Richard Graham, “Another Middle Passage? The Internal Slave Trade in Brazil,” in ibid., 291–324; Robert W. Slenes, “The Brazilian Internal Slave Trade, 1850–1888: Regional Economies, Slave Experience, and the Politics of a Peculiar Market,” in ibid., 325–70; Kim D. Butler, “Slavery in the Age of Emancipation: Victims and Rebels in Brazil’s Late 19th-Century Domestic Trade,” Journal of Black Studies 42 (2011), 968–92; Joice Fernanda de Souza, “A Malungo Community within the Brazilian Internal Slave Trade, 1850–1888,” (Ph.D. diss.: Rice University and Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2019). 11 Gregory E. O’Malley and Alex Borucki, “Patterns in the Intercolonial Slave Trade Across the Americas before the Nineteenth Century,” Tempo 23, no. 2 (May 2017): 314–38; Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Alex Borucki, “Trans-Imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526–1811,” Itinerario 36 (2012), 29–54; Alex Borucki, “The Slave Trade to the Rio de la Plata, 1777–1812: Trans-Imperial Networks and Atlantic Warfare,” Colonial Latin American Review 20 (April 2011), 81–107; Alex Borucki and Greg O’Malley, “Coverage of the Intra-American Slave Trade,” Intra-American Slave Trade Database, https://www.slavevoyages.org/american/about#methodology/0/coverage/1/en/. 12 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75 (August 2009): 642–48. 13 Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Early American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 107–43. 14 Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas,” American Historical Review 105 (December 2000): 1549–1550; Jonathan B. Pritchett and Herman Freudenberger, “A Peculiar Sample: The Selection of Slaves for the New Orleans Market,” Journal of Economic History 52 (March 1992): 115–16.

191 communities may have been riven with tensions between single black men.15 On the other hand, black brought people may have transformed sexual ideals in response to the imbalanced communities in which they lived and allowed for multiple concurrent partners, especially for women, or male homosexual relationships.16 Although this study has reiterated how black men and women transformed ideas about family and marriage in response to the slave trade’s separations, how the gender and sexual dynamics of black communities at the places where the slave trade terminated intersected with remaking black families remains to be studied. So too does their implications for remaking black churches. In the coastal American South, black women were often the majority of evangelical Christian churches, but that may have not been the case in the lower Mississippi Valley, where some communities were majority male or, as Susan

E. O’Donavan contends, attending church in the plantation frontier required the freedom of movement that only black men often enjoyed.17 Black church’s regulations of sexuality may have taken on new meaning—or perhaps been discarded—in response to the consequences of the imbalanced ratios described above.18 Finally, as historians have argued that resistance to enslavement was gendered, so too must it have been gendered where brought people remade

African America.19 Though this dissertation has surfaced stories of black men and women who fled enslavement to live as maroons in the swamps of the lower Mississippi Valley, scholars

15 David Stefan Doddington, Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 127–70. 16 James H. Sweet, “Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 70 (April 2013): 254. 17 Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 121–22, 149, 164–72; Susan Eva O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 46–52. 18 Jeff Forret, “The Limits of Mastery: Slaveholders, Slaves, and Baptist Church Discipline,” American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 1 (2017): 1–18. 19 Morgan, Laboring Women, 166–95; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 63–96.

192 have argued from quantitative evidence that such a strategy was one open most often to black men.20 How black brought men and women resisted, and what their resistance meant for their gendered identities, is an open question. Transportation south and west to the plantation frontier certainly occasioned gender’s remaking.

If brought people remade African America in the North American interior, then they remade spaces and places there. The important contributions of Stephanie M. H. Camp and

Anthony E. Kaye to the histories of enslaved black men and women may be elaborated with the consequences of the domestic slave trade and forced migration in mind.21 Forced migration moved black men and women from one natural landscape to another, perhaps transformed how they related to geographies in the new sites of enslavement. Certainly, Charlotte Brooks’s exclamation that “nobody could get me to run away in those Louisiana swamps . . . I just thought if I’d run off in those swamps I’d die,” reflected a transformation in the landscape where Brooks was forced to live that differed markedly from her home in Richmond, Virginia.22 Solomon

Northrup includes detailed descriptions of the natural landscape where he arrived in the Red

River region, even going so far as to distinguish between the plantations on Bayou Boeuf and those in the Pine Woods, which were just twenty miles from one another.23 In addition to new landscapes, learning neighborhood boundaries and the rival geographies of the new sites of their enslavement must have been one of the first things black men and women did when they arrived.

The swamps that Brooks so feared were evident as sites of resistance to brought people when they arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley (as the evidence cited in chapter 5 shows). Yet how

20 Morgan, Laboring Women, 178–83; Camp, Closer to Freedom, 36–47; John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 210–13, 21 Camp, Closer to Freedom; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 26–34. 22 Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1890), 22–23 23 Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn and other cities: Derby and Miller, 1853), 92–95,106.

193 one went about surviving in the swamps required knowledge that could only be gained from those who had done it before. How black men and women learned how to live in different landscapes may provide a rich environmental history of the domestic slave trade.

Finally, so long as historians of Reconstruction are committed to understanding how enslavement informed the post–Civil War actions of formerly enslaved people, histories of black life in the wake of forced migration must begin to take center-stage, especially in the lower

Mississippi Valley.24 How the newness of black communities in the valley affected the general strike and wartime reconstruction is little understood and should be counterpoised to histories set in the birthplaces of African America.25 The domestic slave trade was on Phelps’s mind when he arrived in the New Orleans region with the U.S. Army, and maybe he was not alone. Black men and women’s postwar migration decisions must have been informed by the long nineteenth- century history of forced movement and everything that black men and women had made and remade in its wake.26 Perhaps the recent history of migration and the shallowness of brought people’s ties to the cotton and sugar plantations freed the black men and women of the valley to move to nearby cities or to distant places like Kansas or Liberia; Henry Adams, a leading postwar emigrationist, was after all a brought person born in Georgia but forced to migrate to De

Soto Parish, Louisiana before the Civil War.27 How life in the places where the domestic slave

24 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2003), 1–61; Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Susan O’Donovan, “Writing Slavery into Freedom’s Stories,” in Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation, ed. David W. Blight and Jim Downs (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 26–38. 25 Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964); Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2017). 26 Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9–15. 27 Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 318; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977); Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978).

194 trade terminated affected Reconstruction-era black politics in the lower Mississippi Valley is also little understood. Certainly, the opening salvos of the New Orleans Black Republican—a newspaper that included a directory for the black churches discussed in chapter 4—that announced the newspaper “will be conducted by American colored men. It will be printed in the

English tongue, the tongue that brought us freedom. . . . It will be the true organ of the American colored people of Louisiana,” was informed by the history of the domestic slave trade in the lower Mississippi Valley and its social and cultural consequences, not to mention the slave trade documents that labeled brought people negres americains.28 Perhaps a reevaluation of the black politicians of Louisiana is in order, like the one that Charles Vincent has written but with the consequences of the domestic slave trade in mind.29 For instance, many black male leaders were pastors in the black evangelical Christian church, an institution that forced migrants brought to the lower Mississippi Valley; some creoles, like Pierre Caliste Landry, had converted from

Catholicism.30 If the domestic slave trade was one of the most important events in nineteenth- century African American history, its social and cultural consequences deserve consideration by historians of emancipation and Reconstruction.

Afterall, forced movement had characterized enslaved African American men and women’s lives in the first decades of the United States, just as it had shaped the lives of their

African ancestors in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Forced migration to the cotton and sugar plantations of the North American interior, whether by the

28 “The Editor’s Address: The Black Republican,” The Black Republican, 15 April 1865. Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). 29 Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976). 30 Pierre Landry, From Slavery to Freedom (unpublished manuscript), 1–2, in Charles Barthelemy Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937), 39; James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 62–65.

195 domestic slave trade or plantation migration, drove the brought to remake in new lands of enslavement what they had known from the places they learned to call home, the “old countries” of the upper and eastern American South. Many of the black communities of the lower

Mississippi Valley, indeed of every river valley west of the Appalachian Mountains, and the

African American cultures they re-created, trace their origins to this generation of migrants— whether they were the first congregants of “Mother Wesley” church in New Orleans, men and women like George Rice, Griffin Racks, and Lucinda Smith, who met “at Nathan Bell’s negro trading camp,” or the people who appeared in Jasper’s Gibb’s plantation journal.31

Someone traced the family histories of this last group backward and forward in time in a section of the journal labeled “J. Gibbs’ Negroes.”32 In those pages, Gibbs recorded when he purchased people, who he purchased them from, who the enslaved people eventually married, who their children were, and when they died. Decades after the Civil War—perhaps in the

1880s—someone began updating the information in “J. Gibbs’ Negroes.”33 In pencil, this person added deaths, children, marriages, and other family relations, information that mattered to

African Americans a generation removed from enslavement. Gibbs had recorded his purchase of

Patrick on April 3, 1843, when Patrick was ten years old, and he recorded that he bought Milly in the same year from “Madm. M. Berry”; they were married on July 17, 1852, and their first child,

Scott, was born a year later. Then, in pencil, around and through Gibbs’s inked scrawl, the anonymous recorder wrote that Patrick’s surname was “Gibbs but after [the] war took [the] name of his father Wright Scott and W. S.’s wife was a slave—he was part Indian.”34 Patrick Scott’s

31 Widow’s Claim for Pension, Lucinda Rice, 26 Aug. 1865, Lucinda Rice Pension File, Civil War and Later Pension Files, 1861–1942, Records of the Veterans Administration, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C. 32 Jasper Gibbs Plantation Ledger, 1847–1870, The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana. 33 “1881” is written in pencil on one of the pages with updated information, see Jasper Gibbs Plantation Ledger, p. 119, ibid. 34 Jasper Gibbs Plantation Ledger, pp. 118–119, ibid.

196 son Abner, born in 1859, was killed by a tree limb while hunting; his brother Daniel, born in

1862, was to the penciled scrawler “Uncle Dan Scott” who married Debby Hamilton and Patsy

Ely; Abner and Daniel’s sister Mattie, born in 1864, “married Joe McNeil in Lincoln Parish,” a parish created in 1873 by state Republican legislators and named for the Great Emancipator.35 A document that recorded the slave trade, enslaved laborers, and the lives they made in the slave trade’s wake, has, in different hands, become a document of African American family history west of the Mississippi River, a memoir of the remade African America.

35 Jasper Gibbs Plantation Ledger, p. 118, ibid.

197

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