Southern Sirens: Disorderly Women and the Fight for Public Order in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans

Southern Sirens: Disorderly Women and the Fight for Public Order in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans Elizabeth Parish Smith A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall William L. Barney W. Fitzhugh Brundage Laura F. Edwards Barbara J. Harris ©2013 Elizabeth Parish Smith ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Elizabeth Parish Smith: Southern Sirens: Disorderly Women and the Fight for Public Order in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans (Under the direction of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall) Whether enticing men into brothels, brawling on city backstreets, or pocketing employers’ trinkets, the working women of New Orleans threatened the public order that city authorities desperately wished to define by and for themselves alone. They were “disorderly” women, sometimes criminal, sometimes unchaste, and always ultimately ungovernable. “Southern Sirens” examines thousands of women’s criminal cases in New Orleans, Louisiana, from 1865 to 1877 and finds that, in this tumultuous era, the common women of the Crescent City became a cipher through which public order and political authority were contested. From drinking to stealing to fighting, even killing, their behaviors exposed municipal leaders’ limited ability to “keep the peace,” even through the city’s new, innovative regulation of the sex trade. That these transgressions so often drew from across New Orleans’s broad racial spectrum, involving white, black, Creole, and foreign-born women alike, further frustrated conservative efforts to reassert white supremacy over southern society. City officials and the local conservative press attempted to contain women’s disorder through shame, stricture, and incarceration, but more often than not penalties were minimal and enforcement sporadic. The city thus effectively conceded its ability to control fully these women who, by flouting laws and libels against them, sought to claim their labors and pleasures for themselves. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No project like this is possible without the help of colleagues, friends, family, and other assorted miracle workers. Chief among these has been Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Her example in the most essential skills of an historian—how to tell good stories and ask tough questions—has guided my career. I am also indebted to my committee, William L. Barney, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and Barbara J. Harris, for their many insights on different aspects of this work. Particular thanks go to Laura F. Edwards, who generously came into the project when it most needed her expertise and discernment. Irene Wainwright and Greg Osborn at the New Orleans Public Library’s Louisiana Division, City Archives, and Special Collections guided me through the archive’s wealth of materials, and Greg in particular patiently ferreted out the smallest, flimsiest of documents. It is due to their efforts that the material base of this project is as rich as it is. Support from the Graduate School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for the Study of the American South made this research possible. UNC’s Department of History, UNC’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the History Department at the University of Arkansas all provided dynamic environments in which to research, write, and teach. I have been blessed with wonderful colleagues who have become friends, none of whom are as dear to me as Tim Williams and Joshua Lynn. Gail Murray has been both mentor and friend through my academic journey, and Oline Eaton, Jessica Engebretsen, Melissa Kotačka, Dean Mundy, and the Goldstein iv family demonstrate the value of friendship through thick and thin and, at times, over great distance too. The memory of Cornelia Parish, just Gran Gran to me, inspires me in difficult moments, and no acknowledgement is enough to express my gratitude to my parents, Mark V. Smith, who taught me that perseverance is the most important of virtues, and Patricia Parish Smith, who is certainly the best kind of “disorderly” woman. Finally, this work is dedicated to my husband, Tom Goldstein. We met on our first day of graduate school, both made it through, and will have many more adventures together. As we say in our family, this work is “To T, From E.” v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: “Fascinating Sirens”: Regulating Prostitution in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans.....................................................................................................30 Chapter Two: “Females on the Rampage”: Women’s Everyday Violence on the Streets of New Orleans....................................................................................97 Chapter Three: “Suspected a Servant Girl”: Thefts by Domestic Servants...........................159 Chapter Four: “Both woman and money was gone”: Larcenies in New Orleans’s Regulated Sex Trade......................................................................................196 Chapter Five: “Miserable, low, unredeemable butchery”: Women and Deadly Violence....253 Conclusion: The End of Reconstruction and the Erasure of White Female Deviance..........301 Bibliography..........................................................................................................................319 vi Introduction To imagine arriving in New Orleans after the Civil War, modern-day travelers must reorient themselves to that most defining feature of the city, the Mississippi River. Like so much else here, it can turn you around. In this wide bend, the river flows south to north and flips the city’s sense of direction in its path. Disembarking at the foot of Canal Street in the muggy uncertainty of spring 1865, the French Quarter, the oldest and most diverse neighborhood in the city, lay to your north but was known as “below Canal” in reference to the flow of the river (a usage that is still commonplace today). To the south “above Canal” was uptown New Orleans, also called the American Sector after its more recent settlement following the Louisiana Purchase. The two sides of Canal, the French Quarter and the American Sector, marked so much of what made the city unique in the nineteenth century: the Caribbean-inflected multicultural port meeting the clearinghouse of the Southern plantation economy, its wealth and its savagery alike. The first blocks of Canal showcased the city’s economic and political power to the eager eyes of new arrivals. Banks, exchanges, and markets filled the same streets as City Hall, the Louisiana State Capitol, and the U.S. Custom House. That these sites were violently contested in the postwar period testifies to the tremendous power one could wield from them, not only in the city, but in the state and country at large. Within five blocks of the river, though, one would hear a different song. In a shift so rapid that it seemed, on second thought, to have been present all along, the city once against disoriented you and 1 displayed its cacophony of inhabitants—their races and nationalities, their labors and leisures—in an unapologetic tumble. And nothing so captured this tumult as the diverse women of the city who were as enchanting and dangerous as New Orleans itself. For many visitors and locals alike, these women personified New Orleans and its famous, frustrating “disorder.” So much of the mythology of the Crescent City draws upon its female inhabitants, and the late nineteenth century shared in this tradition. Family stories of filles à la cassette, young French girls who immigrated with only a small trunk (or “casquette”) of belongings in the city’s first fragile years, circulated alongside reveries about the exotic beauties on display at quadroon balls in the early nineteenth century. Belles enraptured high society with their coquettish ways, rough women conspired with riverboat gamblers and other seasoned New Orleans criminals, and “voodoo queens” such as Marie Laveau exercised mysterious powers well beyond their lowly status as women of color in a society based on exploitation by race and gender. These legendary figures of New Orleans’s history cast long shadows over the women of the late nineteenth-century city, in whose actions one could perceive echoes of their city’s lore. The Union army captured New Orleans in April 1862, and much of the city’s experience of wartime occupation concerned the behavior of its women. If southern- sympathizing local men made Major General Benjamin Butler and his troops feel unwelcome after their arrival in the city, many of New Orleans’s women went even further: they made them feel unmanly. Expecting deference due to their status as both conquerors and men, Union officers and soldiers instead found themselves ignored, insulted, and spat upon. Women festooned themselves in Confederate colors, played southern songs on their pianos, 2 refused to ride streetcars with Federals aboard, and in one especially unpleasant incident emptied a pot of “not very clean water” over the head of Admiral David Farragut. Marveled one Union general, “Such venom one must see to believe . I look at them and think of fallen angels.”1 Such behavior, unambiguously mocking federal authority, occasioned Butler’s infamous “Woman Order” on May 15, 1862. It stated, As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults

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