White Creole Print Culture, Community, and Identity

IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE,

COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY

NEW ORLEANS

AN ABSTRACT

SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013

TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS

OF TULANE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE DEGREE

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Rien T. Fertel

--- ABSTRACT

! ! This dissertation traces the development, growth, and eventual fall of a white Creole intellectual and literary community in New Orleans, beginning in the

1820s and continuing for a century thereafter. In histories and novels, poetry and prose, the stage and the press, white Creole New Orleanians—those who traced their parentage back to the city’s colonial era—advocated both an intimate connection to France and a desire to be considered citizens of the United States of America. In print, they consciously fostered, mythologized, and promoted the idea that their very bifurcated nature made them inheritors of a singularly special place, possessors of an exceptional history, and keepers of utterly unique bloodlines. In effect, this closely-knit circle of Creole writers, like other Creole literary communities scattered across the Atlantic World, imbued the word Creole as a descriptive identity marker that symbolized social and cultural power.

! In postcolonial Louisiana, the authors within this white Creole literary circle used the printed word to imagine themselves a uniﬁed community of readers and writers. Together, they produced newspapers, literary journals, and art and science-based salons and clubs. Theirs was a postcolonial exercise in articulating a common identity, a push and pull for and against their French and

American halves to create a creolized Creole self. ! Looking to their American brothers and to their French motherland, they participated in idealistic, literary, and wider cultural movements witnessed on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Over the course of the long-nineteenth century, these movements included romantic historicism, religious reformation, pan-linguistic nationalism, racial refashioning, a preoccupation with genealogy, and a social feminization.

! Though few of these white Creole authors are still read today, their fashioning of a city and state literature continues to resonate in most all literary representations of New Orleans and Louisiana. By the turn of the twentieth century, and the end of their era of prominence, the white Creoles had popularized the idea of a New Orleans centered in the city’s mythologized white,

Gallic past. They had imagined the “Creole City.”

IMAGINING THE CREOLE CITY: WHITE CREOLE PRINT CULTURE,

COMMUNITY, AND IDENTITY FORMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY

NEW ORLEANS

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED ON THE SECOND DAY OF APRIL 2013

TO THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

OF THE SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS

OF TULANE UNIVERSITY

FOR THE DEGREE

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

APPROVED:

Lawrence N. Powell, Ph.D.

! In addition to overseeing research, offering ideas in conversation, challenging my scholarly interpretations, and carefully reading each and every page, each member of my dissertation committee made a key contribution to the formulation and completion of this monograph. Knowing my interest in the nineteenth-century shifts in the meaning of the word Creole, Dr. Lawrence N.

Powell encouraged me to take a look at white Creole-centric manuscripts collections that belonged to the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley

Collection at Louisiana State University’s Hill Memorial Library. After watching me conduct archival research and read seemingly every book on the subject over a two year span, Dr. Emily Clark told me to “stop reading and start writing,” some of the best advice I have ever received. And ﬁnally, Dr. Randy J. Sparks, my advisor and dissertation director, advised me to take as many non-dissertation writing and research assignments as I could handle. Writing outside and alongside the topic of white Creole literary culture made me a better academic writer.

! Gratitude goes out to each and every individual who read various chapters and/or conversed with me on the subject of this dissertation. Dr. Jana K. Lipman was a superb doctoral examination committee member who pushed me to read deeply in the realms of fact and ﬁction. Dr. Thomas J. Adams read and offered

ii rich commentary on the prospectus. Russell Desmond, proprietor of Arcadian

Books in New Orleans, is a saint; he translated documents at moment’s notice, read several chapters, and has helped me hunt down down rare Louisiana books, aiding in research and adding to my collection since 2007. My Tulane

History Department colleagues Liz Skilton and Walter Stern read various iterations of chapters and offered helpful commentary. Dr. Oz Frankel and Dr.

Julia Ott, members of the Historical Studies faculty at The New School for Social

Research in New York, inspired me to take up a scholarly career in the study of history. Among the conferences at which I’ve presented this work, the participants from the Toulouse Interculturalité: La Louisiane au carrefour des cultures conference (January 2012) were especially helpful—particularly Dr.

Nathalie Dessens, Dr. Jean-Pierre Le Glaunec, and Emilie Urbain—in thinking about Chapter Two. Pableaux Johnson has fed my stomach most every week over the past three years, while Andre Stern has fed the mind and Charlie

Gallagher the body. Kira Henehan and Brett Martin graciously provided me with a place to live during the crucial last few months of writing and defense. Susie

Penman is one of the best readers and editors around, and though she came late to this manuscript, her input ﬁlls its pages. The mentorship and dinner companionship of my uncle, Randy Fertel, has been rewarding in ways that stretch way beyond the research and writing of this dissertation.

iii ! This work is dedicated to my family, especially my grandmother, Ruth

Fertel, who all encouraged my reading of the higher and lower branches of literature.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... ii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1 ! “Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole.” — Creating the !!White Louisiana Creole

CHAPTER ONE ...... 22 ! “Procuring the higher branches of literature.” — Charles Gayarré !!and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir

CHAPTER TWO ...... 59 ! “Cette terre catholique.” — Catholic Priest and Poet Adrien Rouquette !!Bridges the Atlantic Ocean

CHAPTER THREE ...... 91 ! “Conservons la langue immortel.” — Alfred Mercier, the Athénée !!Louisianais, and the Fight to Preserve the French Language

CHAPTER FOUR ...... 130 ! “Today we see walking together the representatives of two important !!races.” — George Washington, Blood Matters, and the Creole !!Backlash

CHAPTER FIVE ...... 173 ! “His place among us . . . belongs to the future.” — Grace King’s Lost !!Creole Cause and the Feminization of New Orleans’s Creole !!Culture

CONCLUSION ...... 214 ! “New Orleans is a world.” — Creating the Creole City in the Twentieth !!Century

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 222

v 1

Introduction “Que né créole, je veux vivre et mourir créole.” — Creating the White Louisiana Creole

! In the autumn of 1827, two New Orleanians waged a war of the printed word. Though both men were cultivated, politically powerful French Louisianians,

Bernard de Marigny and Étienne Mazureau exercised their American rights to free speech and suffrage by supporting opposing presidential candidates. Born in

1785, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville’s lifestyle mirrored his aristocratic French name. In 1822, as President of the State Senate, in a move he called “one of the happiest days of my life,” Marigny overturned a Louisiana

Supreme Court decision to make “null and void” any minutes of meetings not written in English. He was thusly deemed “the Defender of the French language.”1 Francophone paladin aside, he was also an infamous libertine and an even more notorious gambler. Within six years of inheriting his father’s immense plantation landholdings, one block downriver from the city, Marigny’s dice habit forced him to subdivide the property. He would become—and forever remain—an Andrew Jackson supporter in 1824, primarily because Old Hickory’s

1 Bernard Marigny, To His Fellow Citizens (New Orleans: s.n., 1853), 3 (italics in original). 2 presidential opponent, John Quincy Adams, had been adverse to the Louisiana

Purchase two decades prior.2

! Étienne Mazureau, conversely, was an adamant Adams man. A three-term

State Attorney General, and Louisiana Secretary of State, in 1827 he ranked as one of the city’s most accomplished, and ﬁery, lawyers and orators. Mazureau

“possesses a most extensive and profound knowledge of the civil law, . . . but on certain occasions his eloquence becomes tempestuous,” one historian of the period noted. “He is a perfect specimen of the Southern type.”3 When selecting juries, Mazureau often challenged every single potential Anglo-American juror, hoping to place as many French-speaking citizens on the panel as the judge would allow.4 In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville visited the home of the learned

Louisiana advocate, whom he called “the eagle of the New Orleans bar,” to consult on a series of local issues.5 “They say that in New Orleans is to be found a mixture of all the nations?” Tocqueville queried. “That’s true; you see here a mingling of all races. . . . New Orleans is a patch-work of people,” answered the eagle. Tocqueville inquired further, “But in the midst of this confusion what race

2 For biographical information on Marigny, the following were consulted: Marigny, To His Fellow Citizens; Edward Larocque Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1932), 299-327; Edward Larocque Tinker, The Palingenesis of Craps (New York: The Press of the Wooly Whale, 1933).

3 Charles Gayarré, “The New Orleans Bench and Bar in 1823,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 77:462 (November 1888), 890.

4 Ibid., 891. On Mazureau, see also Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane, 344-350.

5 George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (1938; reprint ed., Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 625. 3 dominates and gives direction to all the rest?” Mazureau answered: “The French race, up to now. It’s they who set the tone and shape the mœurs [the mores].”6

! Marigny and Mazureau’s opinions on French Louisiana identity deviated as ﬁercely as their presidential politics. In a series of late 1827 newspaper editorials and pamphlets, the pair of Francophile New Orleanians attacked the other’s candidate, while questioning each other’s allegiance to the state and nation. Additionally, both men published under a pseudonym, each beﬁtting their place of birth. Mazureau labeled himself the “Citoyen Naturalisé,” because, though born in France in 1777, he proudly considered himself, for at least the past two decades, a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.

! Marigny, on the other hand, adopted the sobriquet “Un Créole.” No less proud of his American citizen than his adversary, he could make one claim that

Mazureau could not. Bernard de Marigny’s birthplace was colonial Louisiana.

Born the son of two French-ethnic, New Orleans-born parents in 1785, Marigny, before even reaching his eighteenth birthday, lived under the ﬂags of the

Spanish, French, and nascent U.S. empires. He made sure Mazureau and any readers knew the difference this birth made. In the last lines of his ﬁnal riposte,

Marigny signed off with, “I will say that Creole born, I live and die Creole.”7

Mazureau might be a French Louisianian and a French American, but he would never, like Marigny, be a Creole Louisianian nor a Creole American. In

6 Ibid., 627-628.

7 This phrase appears in its original language the title to this introductory chapter. Un Créole [Bernard de Marigny], Aux Electeurs de l’Etat de la Louisiane: Réponse du Créole au dernier pamphlet du Citoyen Naturalisé (New Orleans: s.n., 1827), 22 (translation mine). 4 nineteenth-century New Orleans, that word Creole operated as a birthright, a symbol of exceptionality, and an identity marker. There was power embedded in the word Creole.

! Certainly unbeknownst to him at the time, Bernard de Marigny was at the forefront of a white Creole literary and intellectual culture that thrived during the long-nineteenth century.8 Supported by a democratic right to expression, the eruption of the modern print culture, and a burgeoning Francophone readership, an elite circle of cultured Creole French-Americans produced a Creole New

Orleans literature. This Creole body of letters lasted roughly one hundred years, from the 1820s through the 1920s. During this era, they used Creole as a marker of status and power.

! The ﬁrst French-language publications appeared in Louisiana during the

Spanish-colonial era of Marigny’s birth. In the late 1770s, French-born poet

Julian Poydras penned a trio of odes honoring Spanish Louisiana Governor and military hero Bernardo de Gálvez. By the time Marigny had sold off his landholdings piecemeal to create what would become the Faubourg named in his honor, the stage drama La Fête du Petit-Blé; ou L’Héroisme de Poucha-houmma, written by the Frenchman Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, was being performed in New Orleans. In the same late 1827 season that Marigny and

Mazureau battled in print, the Saint-Domingue refugee François Delaup began publishing the city’s ﬁrst serious semi-weekly newspaper. Taking advantage of the nearly 20,000 Saint Domingue exiles who relocated to New Orleans (along

8 Throughout this monograph, the word “Creole” will be used to refer to Louisiana’s white Creole population. 5 with a not unsubstantial, contemporary French immigration), L’Abeille de la

Nouvelle-Orléans (The Bee), provided a Francophone forum for real journalism, political editorials, and art and literary criticism.9

! In the following two decades, the Creole intellectual circle would become fully formed. By the time Marigny published his brief memoirs in 1853—in both

French and English—readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean devoured the works of Creole authors like Charles Gayarré and Adrien Rouquette. In the year of Marigny’s death, 1868, the Creole literary circle found itself falling apart.

During and following the Civil War, the occupational government and Republican

State Congress fought to enact a series of Constitutional acts that would curb the use of the French language, first in all governmental proceedings, and finally in every public school. Near the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, a new generation of Creole writers sprung up to continue the work of the French- language defender. They started Francophile clubs, journals that promoted a purely Franco-Louisiana platform, and celebrated official Creole Days.

! But it was too little, too late. By the turn of the twentieth century, the

French language had largely disappeared as a working language in New

Orleans. French was forbidden as a language of instruction in public schools, laws were no longer published bilingually, and French presses and periodicals evaporated. The ﬁrst generation of Creole writers passed away, replaced by a second wave of authors who carried the torch of Creole letters, many of whom could not claim a Creole birthright. This second generation of non-Creole Creole

9 Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Inﬂuences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 19. 6 writers, in effect, cemented the idea of a Creole city, a New Orleans built by

Creoles, dominated by Creole history, culture, and thought.10 “Each sphere of life,” the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote, “produced its own tribe of storytellers.”11 And for New Orleans and Louisiana, this storytelling tribe was the

Creole circle of writers.12

! This dissertation will document the rise, crest, and fall of a white Creole print culture in New Orleans. Bernard de Marigny was among the ﬁrst of hundreds of Creole Louisianians—mostly men—who composed countless histories, novels, poetic verses, plays, operas, and songs. Along with the numerous newspapers, journals, cultural organizations, and benevolent societies, this print culture enabled New Orleans’s white Creole population to imagine itself a uniﬁed community of readers. Together, these Creole intellectuals attended the same salons and clubs. They called each other friend, traveled abroad together, and often posted each other written letters. They positively

10 Contrary to other scholars, I trace the foundations of the “creation,” or mythologizing, of New Orleans to an earlier era, and give credit to another group of ideological pioneers. For contrasting views, see S. Frederick Starr, ed., Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001); J. Mark Souther, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006).

11 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 85.

12 This dissertation was informed by, and endeavors to take a place among, other monographs covering nineteenth-century print communities in the United States, including Philip D. Beidler, First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999); Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 7 reviewed each other’s books and prepared each other’s obituaries.

Contemporary readers of Louisiana literature rarely dip into the Creole canon today; only a handful of the authors and books even remain in print. But their ideologies, arguably, have filtered throughout most all subsequent literary representations of Louisiana and New Orleans, fiction and non-fiction alike.

! As this circle of white Creole intellectuals created their Creole personas in print, they rewrote how we think of the geographical space that is Louisiana, but especially urban New Orleans, in three ways. First, the Creoles promoted the idea that their city and state were exceptional. From the state’s soil and river, to the city’s history and their history, most everything was singularly special about

New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Creoles. Second, the Creoles claimed not only an intimate connection to their motherland, France, but, relying on memories of the past, maintained that they were the true inheritors of Francophone blood, language, and culture. Third, they petitioned for the right to be citizens of the

United States, while at the same time advocating the idea that they were uncommon Americans. For the white Creoles, bi-culturalism begat a wholly mythologized exceptionalism.

! Occasioned by postcolonial thought, the spread and popularization of new print media forms, and an inﬂux of Francophones from Saint Domingue and

France, this Louisiana Creole print culture had a nationalizing effect. Creoles, through writing and reading, created a bifurcated identity: French and/or Spanish- blooded Louisiana Creoles and American citizens of the United States. They endeavored to build a vital French-reading and speaking print community at 8 home, yet still wished to be incorporated into the nation. In many aspects, their lives bridged two worlds. Many were educated in France, especially Paris, and in the northern United States. Cultured and bilingual, they spoke and wrote in

French and English (and occasionally Spanish, Italian, and German). They worshipped at the altar of both Napoleon Bonaparte, who authorized the selling of their city to the United States in 1803, and President Andrew Jackson, who masterminded the city’s salvation during the Battle of New Orleans a dozen years later. This dissertation will argue that as the Creoles created Creole and

American identities simultaneously, they became more cultural and socially creolized.13

! This print-based community mirrored other postcolonial, creolized peoples in its causes and effects. Marigny’s adoption of the sobriquet Un Créole exhibited the ﬁrst stirrings of a bifurcated Old World/New World sensibility, an identity shift historians working in colonial Latin America today have termed a “Creole

13 Nick Spitzer deﬁnes “cultural creolization” as the formation and development of “new traditions, aesthetics, and group identities out of combinations of formerly separate peoples and cultures,” but not without an embedded and intrinsic “tension between traditional and transformed” between the old and new. Nicolas R. Spitzer, “Monde Créole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures,” The Journal of American Folklore 116:459 (Winter 2003), 58-59. On creolization, also see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context,” in From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, ed. Brian Keith Axel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002): 189-210; Charles Stewart, “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory,” in Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, ed. Stewart (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007): 1-25; Berndt Ostendorf, “Creole Cultures and the Process of Creolization: With Special Attention to Louisiana,” in Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, ed. John Lowe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008): 103-135. 9 consciousness.”14 Combating Old World pretensions that saw individuals born across the ocean as lesser than themselves, elite Creoles, both white and black, throughout the Americas eventually declared their locales “to be the center of human civilization and the highest peak of New World religiosity.”15 Patriotic

Creole nationalist movements sprang up throughout the postcolonial Atlantic

14 D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 343-361; Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, eds. Bauer and Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 25-32.

15 Bauer and Mazzotti, 26. 10

World, and New Orleans was no exception.16 As with Marigny, postcolonial

Creoles across the Americas appropriated the identity-signiﬁer Creole, a word that before had implied a “Eurocentric disdain.”17 “Lettered creoles . . . responded time and again to [their] marginalization,” the literary scholars Ralph Bauer and

José Antonio Mazzotti aptly suggest, “producing numerous pages of their own dedicated to exalting the character and appearance of the distinguished descendants of the conquerors.” That is, Creoles performed themselves new

16 On Creole patriots, nationalism, and consciousness, see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Carole Shammas, “English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia,” in The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, eds. Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979): 274-296; D. A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 20, 85, 93; Brading, The First America; Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); José Antonio Mazzotti, ed., Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epstemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), especially 204-265; Juan R. González Mendoza, “Puerto Rico’s Creole Patriots and the Slave Trade after the Haitian Revolution,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001): 58-71; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (New York: Routledge, 2002); David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Creole Colonial Spanish America” in Stewart: 26-45; Joyce Chaplin, “Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance,” in Stewart: 46-65; Stephan Palmié, “The ‘C-Word’ Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics,” in Stewart: 67-83; Miguel Vale de Almeida, “From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde,” in Stewart: 108-132; Bauer and Mazzotti, eds., all essays, but especially Carlos Jáuregui, “Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and Criollo Subjects”: 61-100 and Jeffrey H. Richards, “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the Literary Chesapeake, 1680-1750”: 135-161; Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

17 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. Carlos Jáuregui calls this “the compensatory appropriation-translation of colonial tropes” in Jáuregui, 100. Also, see Richards, “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks.” 11 identities.18 Bauer and Mazzotti continue, “these creole intellectuals carried out the immense task of creating a discursive corpus to articulate their own conception” of a communal Creole identity.19 Creole literatures became the

“watchword of nationalistic movements.”20

! Prior to the chronological scope of this dissertation's narrative, New

Orleans and Louisiana was a site of overlapping, contesting empires. Up until and through the ﬁrst decades following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, few New

Orleans residents identiﬁed themselves as French or Spanish, or Americans.

Rather, "people identiﬁed themselves with varied communities—ethnic, racial, national, imperial—in ways that upset the notion of identity itself."21 This term

Creole resonated with each of these community classiﬁcations, and carried over into the mid to late, postcolonial, nineteenth century. Eventually, for the white

18 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. On Creole performativity, see Roger D. Abrahams, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Susan Castillo, Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing America (London: Routledge, 2006), especially 187-237; Andrew J. Jolivétte, Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 59-70; Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, “Cruel Criollos in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s First New Chronicle and Good Government,” in Bauer and Mazzotti: 118-134.

19 Bauer and Mazzotti, 27. On Creole discourses, also see Brading, The First America; Ralph Bauer, “Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán,” American Literature 69:4 (December 1997): 665-695; Mazzotti; Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World; Lambert; Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Cañizares-Esguerra, “Creole Colonial Spanish America.”

20 Carolyn Allen, “Creole: The Problem of Deﬁnition,” in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, eds. Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002), 52.

21 Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, “Introduction,” in Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, eds. Kastor and Weil (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 8. 12

Creole community, Creole became synonymous with a Gallic-American, white, largely masculine nationalism.

! But New Orleans, Louisiana, like other postcolonial Creole sights across the Atlantic World, contained not one, but two Creole literary corpora: that of the white Creole community and the literature of the black Creoles (also known as the Afro-Creoles or Creoles of color). Like the white Creole population under examination here, these French-speaking peoples of African descent, spurred by their own awakening of Creole consciousness, crafted a body of literature to fashion and perform a Creole identity. Though these two Creole literary communities have most often diverged to the point of not recognizing the other, this pair of racialized groups did in fact, for a brief period in the late 1860s, unite forces under a common cause.22 But while the white Creoles have generally been ignored by academics in the past half-century, the coterie of Afro-Creole

22 See chapter three below. 13 writers have received a bounty of scholarly attention in the past several decades, and will thus remain largely outside the scope of this study.23

! Serious efforts to catalogue and analyze the literature of white

Francophone Louisiana began just as the individual members of the Creole intellectual circle were dying off and the local use of the French language largely ceased to exist. In 1894, white Creole New Orleanian Alcée Fortier, the chair of

Romance Languages Department at Tulane University, compiled the ﬁrst compendium of Louisiana letters.24 His son, Edward Fortier, continued in the scholarly footsteps of his father, becoming a French professor at Columbia

University and publishing several bibliographical studies of Creole literature.25

Throughout the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, numerous theses and

23 For the literary lives of New Orleans’s Creoles of color, see Charles Barthelemy Roussève, The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937); Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, trans. and ed., Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (1911; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 10-60, passim.; Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 89-136, passim.; Michel Fabre, “The New Orleans Press and French-Language Literature by Creoles of Color,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998): 29-49; Caroline Senter, “Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001): 276-294; James L. Cowan, La marseillaise noire et autres poèmes français des Créoles de couleur de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 1862-1869 (Lyon: Éditions du Cosmogone, 2001); Jean-Charles Houzeau, My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, ed. David C. Rankin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 126-129, 210-260, passim.

24 Alcée Fortier, Louisiana Studies: Literature, Customs and Dialects, History and Education (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1894).

25 Edward Joseph Fortier, “Study of the French Literature of Louisiana” (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1904); Edward Fortier, Les Lettres françaises en Louisiane (Québec: Québec: Imprimerie L’Action sociale limitée, 1915); Edward J. Fortier, “Non-English Writings I: French,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Later National Literature, Part III,, eds. William Peterﬁeld Trent et. al. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921): 590-598. 14 dissertations biographically examined individual members of the white Creole literary circle. One standout from this period remains Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild’s bibliographical French Literature of Louisiana (1929), which added many French

Creole authors overlooked by the Fortiers. Caulﬁeld included some biographical information, without much historicization or analysis.26 Edward Larocque Tinker’s masterly, yet problematic, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle (1932) contains the most bibliographically and biographically complete information on Creole and French writers up until the present day.27

! But by the 1960s, the white Creole intellectuals and their literary corpus had faded into obscurity. A liberalized academy moved on to studying the lives and letters of the black Creole literati. For several decades following the 1960s, those few historians who studied the white Creoles of New Orleans focused on that group’s postbellum, conservative attack on the city’s creoles of color, to the detriment of any discussion of their cultural or literary legacy. While, this dissertation readily acknowledges the white Creoles’ intense reactionary racism during this period, it also rejects the claims of these earlier historians as blatantly false characterizations, vestiges of the 1960s-era liberal turn in historiographical modes of thought. For instance, in 1981, Liliane Crété claimed that antebellum

26 Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild, The French Literature of Louisiana (1929; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998).

27 Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane. Tinker’s work contains some bibliographical omissions, more biographical errors, and a wholly biased view in favor of the white Creoles, to the detriment of the Creoles of color, see Auguste Viatte, “Complement à la bibliographie louisianaise d’Edward Larocque Tinker,” Revue de Louisiane 3:2 (Winter 1974): 12-57. 15

Creoles did not own books because they could not read.28 Similarly, in an inﬂuential essay entitled “Creoles and Americans” (1992), Joseph G. Tregle, Jr. used a handful of condescending traveller accounts to demonstrate the Creoles’ complete benightedness, while claiming that they were “pitifully ill-equipped” for incorporation into the United States.29 But as John Milfred Goudeau’s study of early-Louisiana libraries shows, Creoles did, in fact, publish, collect, and consume plenty of reading material. Several mid-nineteenth century Creole New

Orleanians owned thousands of volumes, while many others checked out livres from the private Bibliothèque de Société de la Nouvelle-Orléans located on Royal

Street.30

28 Liliane Crété, Daily Life in Louisiana, 1815-1830, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 66-67.

29 For example, Tregle quotes Frenchman Berquin-Duvallon, who wrote in his travel journal, “A Creole told me with great naiveté one day, that a never failing method to make him fall asleep, was to open a book before him.” Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds., Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 141-143 (both quotations appear on 142). Himself a white Creole New Orleanian, Tregle wrote several articles along a similar vein, see Tregle, “Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal,” The Journal of Southern History 18:1 (February 1952): 20-36; “On that Word ‘Creole’ Again: A Note,” Louisiana History 23:2 (Spring 1982): 193-198; Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 27-30.

30 Also known as the New Orleans Library Society, the Bibliothèque functioned as a members- only lending lyceum. Organized in 1805-06, it operated as a joint effort between Creoles and Anglo-Americans. The Bibliothèque moved to St. Peter Street in March 1808, and by 1824 incorporated 7,200 volumes in French and English. Goudeau concluded that though Americans contributed more to library development in the city, Creoles often cooperated with them. John Milfred Goudeau, “Early Libraries in Louisiana: A Study of the Creole Inﬂuence,” (PhD diss., Western Reserve University, 1965), 149-159 for an analysis of the Bibliothèque de Société, 188 and especially 220 for his conclusions. For further discussions on Creole consumption of literature, see Roger Philip McCutcheon, “Libraries in New Orleans, 1771-1833,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly (LHQ) 20:1 (January 1937): 152-158; McCutcheon, “Books and Booksellers in New Orleans, 1730-1830,” LHQ 20:3 (July 1937): 606-618; Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32-33, passim. 16

! However, other recent researchers have heeded Francophone scholar

Auguste Viatte’s position, from Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française (1954), that colonial and postcolonial French language prose and poetry written in the

Americas should be recognized and studied as both Continental French and

Franco-American literature.31 These historians and literary scholars, who, for the most part, are based in France and Canada, have resurveyed, anthologized, and reexamined Louisiana’s white Creole literary culture as products of both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.32 This dissertation takes its place among these contemporary studies, but further historicizes Louisiana’s white Creole literature as a product of transnational and multi-cultural, and nationalizing and Americanizing processes.

! The Creoles’ literary circle came late in the American republic’s “Age of

Print,” a ﬂourishing of print media in the early nineteenth century. Chapter One traces the life and literary output of Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré, the ﬁrst great

Creole man of letters and the founding father of Louisiana literature. Gayarré believed that his homeland literally exuded exceptionality, that Louisiana’s place, past, and people were singularly special. In the 1830s and early 1840s, Gayarré published several volumes of French-language chronicles of Louisiana history

31 Auguste Viatte, Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française: des origines à 1950 (Laval, Quebec: Presses Universitaires, 1954), 1-3.

32 Most of these Gérard Labarre St. Martin and Jacqueline K. Voorhies, Ecrits Louisianais du dix- neuvième siècle: nouvelles, contes et fables (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Mathe Allain and Barry Ancelet, Littérature française de la Louisiane: anthologie (Bedford, NH: National Materials Development Center for French, 1981); Réginald Hamel, La Louisiane créole: littéraire, politique et sociale, 1762-1900 (Ottawa: Les Editions Lemeac, 1984); Patrick Griolet, Cadjins et créoles en Louisiane: histoire et survivance d’un francophonie (Paris: Payot, 1986); Frans Amelinckx, “La littérature louisianaise au XIXe siècle: perspective critique,” Présence Francophone 43 (1993): 10-24; Norman R. Shapiro, trans., and M. Lynn Weiss, intro., Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Germain Bienvenu, “The Beginnings of Louisiana Literature: The French Domination of 1682-1763,” in Lowe: 25-48. 17 that contained real research and objective insight. But beginning with his

Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848) and continuing well into the 1890s,

Gayarré published English-language popular histories that romanticized and embellished episodes in the city and state’s past. These later histories, rather than the earlier ones, precipitated the white Creole print culture, making Gayarré the primary architect of the New Orleans mythos.

! New Orleans’s white Creole population, like Gayarré, regularly sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to France for schooling, social and cultural education, or just to visit the motherland. Perhaps no member of the Creole intelligentsia crisscrossed the Atlantic more repeatedly than Adrien Rouquette, the subject of

Chapter Two. In a life deﬁned by movement and exile, art and religion, Rouquette was a member of, what I term, the cosmopolitan Creole elite, New Orleanians who sought to deﬁne their dualistic postcolonial selves through two metropoles:

New Orleans and Paris. A popular poet of his day, Rouquette used the Catholic

Church as his spiritual compass to guide his restless spirit, a place to tame his frequent feelings of in-betweenness, and simply as a home. Rouquette became the ﬁrst Louisiana-born Catholic minister and the Church’s ﬁrst Creole priest, living a bifurcated life in more ways than one.

! Many Creoles took to writing and publishing in French to wrestle with their liminal American and Latinate identities. Chapter Three narrates the history of several Civil War and Reconstruction-era print journals, newspapers, and, especially, one literary-scientiﬁc social organization. The founders of the La

Renaissance Louisianaise (1861), Le Carillon (1869), and the Athénée 18

Louisianais (1876) sought to revive a floundering Francophone New Orleans community by fighting to defend and preserve the French language. Headed by the medical doctor and amateur linguist Alfred Mercier, the Athénée Louisianais sought to overturn recent developments that banished French from public school and state government. During the Civil War, the Creole-Francophone defenders worked alongside members of a transnational pan-Latin movement that sought to combat the creeping influence of Great Britain and the English language.

Afterwards, they brought the linguistic struggle to New Orleans.

! In the 1880s, the Creole literary circle was likewise outdone by an Anglo,

English-speaking and writing author. Chapter Four outlines the often told story of

George Washington Cable and the Creole backlash his New Orleans-set short stories and novels engendered. This chapter will take the Creoles’ attacks on the author and his works as its focal point. Gayarré, Rouquette, and many other

Creoles charged that Cable, one of the most nationally popular authors of his day, had disrespected their Creole culture and, even worse, inferred that they were not of pure white blood. The Creoles’ vicious barrage occurred in newspaper columns, published pamphlets, and speeches. This literary battle over blood, race, and identity occurred at a time when white Southerners were reconciling nationally with their northern brothers and sisters, while strengthening bonds steeped in the language and theory of white power. During this period, the

Creoles, like other ethnic American communities, became white by redeﬁning the word Creole to indicate a purely white, Latinate Louisianian. 19

! By the end of the 1890s, the core founding members of this white Creole myth were marginalized or dead. Chapter Five appraises the life of Grace King, literary heir to the Creole cause. King, an Anglo-Protestant New Orleanian, headed a second wave of non-Creoles dedicated to further pursue the defense of the Creoles’ language, literature, and history. She became the Creoles’ champion par excellence through the writing of short stories, novels, short and long form histories and biographies, memoirs, and literary and social criticism, that, for the most part, gloriﬁed the city and state’s founding families. In her landmark work

Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), King detailed the family trees of the most august Creole lineages, while whitewashing their bloodlines. She too operated not only inside the whiteness paradigm, but also within a cross-national movement that regendered and feminized history and genealogy. King cemented the myth of white Creole racial purity, while solidifying the redeﬁnition of New

Orleans as a Creole city.

! Throughout this monograph, the word Creole will be used to refer to

Louisiana’s white Creole population. The slippery nature of this term continues to produce confusions, controversies, and conﬂicts throughout New Orleans,

Louisiana, and the wider postcolonial world. Its “meaning differs according to location, as it does with historical period and from one [scholarly] discipline to another,” according to the best recent analysis of the word and its transnational 20 etymological history.33 Scholars have posited that creole derives from Portuguese

Brazil, the Caribbean, Spanish America, or simply the Latin root meaning “to create” (creare). But in her essay “Creole: The Problem of Deﬁnition,” Carolyn

Allen writes that the word’s obscure origins perhaps matter not; instead we should focus on the fact that each and every transnational usage of the word

“expresses the result of the Atlantic crossing and colonisation,” resulting in the cross-pollination of New and Old World peoples. Furthermore, creole, especially when used to describe individuals and communities, always emphasizes “cultural nationality, racial indeterminacy and implicit social class.”34

! The white Creoles of New Orleans and Louisiana were no different. They were a intermediary people, simultaneously American and French, who culturally, racially, and socially defined themselves against Anglo-Americans and Creoles of color. The white Creole print culture circle additionally sought to redefine and broaden the word from its original use as an identity descriptor. Throughout the nineteenth century, this Creole community endeavored to define Creole in the abstract. Creole became an idea to shape Louisiana’s past, a conception indicating social and cultural exceptionality in the present, and a birthright conferring dominion over New Orleans’s future. These white Creoles wrote

33 Allen, 48. Perhaps creole should be added to the list of what Leftist critic called “keywords,” that is terms in which we ﬁnd “a history and complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meaning.” Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; reprint ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 17.

34 Allen, 48-50. For more on creole, the word, see Thomas M. Stephens, “Creole, Créole, Criollo, Crioulo: The Shadings of a Term,” The SOCOL Review 7:3 (Fall 1983): 28-39. 21 themselves to shape Creole identities, while rewriting New Orleans to fashion the

Creole City.

Chapter One “Procuring the higher branches of literature.” — Charles Gayarré and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir !

! “The history of Louisiana is eminently poetical.”1 As these words reverberated across the brick walls of the Methodist Church, the members in the audience that early-Spring evening in 1847 undoubtedly nodded in agreement and satisfaction. Here in New Orleans, history, at times, must have seemed quite poetic. Anyone over the age of forty-five would remember living under the flag of three empires, a seemingly impossible battlefield victory just outside the city’s perimeter, breathtaking population growth, a municipality split in three due to political-ethnic squabbles, and the decennial ebb and flow of yellow fever wasting the city’s populace. Life in antebellum Louisiana might have certainly contained a romantic poeticism for many of its most privileged citizens, while the extraordinariness of late-Jacksonian era New Orleans was unquestionable.

Though Charles Gayarré’s speech that evening involved a histrionic retelling of history, his portrayal of his city and state rang true.

! New Orleans, so the myth goes, is a place that infamously works despite itself, but the city of the 1840s could especially be described as a study in contradiction and cooperation. This was harmonious chaos. That evening’s elocutionist could claim impeccable credentials as the crème de la crème of

1 Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I (1854; reprint ed. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974), 11. 23

Creole society; his maternal and paternal grandfathers were respectively among the French and Spanish founding fathers of colonial Louisiana. Gayarré’s life was a study in contrasts: always ﬂaunting his Latinate roots, at different times he identiﬁed as a Creole, a Southerner, and an American. And though an elegant, if not bathetic, composer of French prose, this night, he lectured in English. The

New Methodist Church, perched on the uptown-river corner of Poydras and

Carondelet, sat in the center of the American sector, just one block behind

Lafayette Square, the Americans’ public park and political and commercial capital.2 Largely because of European immigration, the city’s population had more than doubled in the past decade. In 1836, the competing Creole and

American factions that struggled to control the city, acquiesced to the seemingly uncontrollable “pattern[s] of segregation,” due to the population explosion, and split the city into three self-governing municipalities.3 The trio comprised the

French quarter, the American sector, and the downriver neighborhoods— basically the Faubourg Marigny—that harbored many of the tens of thousands of

Germans and Irish that poured into antebellum New Orleans, along with many white and Afro-Creoles.

2 Mary Christovich, ed., New Orleans Architecture: The American Sector (Faubourg St. Mary): Howard Avenue to Iberville Street, Mississippi River to Claiborne Avenue (New Orleans: Pelican, 1972), 27-28.

3 Urban historian Mary Ryan describes New Orleans to be “the most obvious, distinct, and actually de jure” city, in a period of urban American social segmentation. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 35. 24

! A simultaneous economic boom produced dollar amounts that one historian perspicaciously described as “mind-boggling.”4 These dollars would be generated by the Crescent City’s river port—one of the ﬁrst New World global markets—its outlying cotton and sugar plantation system, and North America’s largest slave market.5 The city, one Alabama visitor speculated in 1847, would, within a century, “reach out her arms and encompass within her limits every town and hamlet for miles around. It will then all be New Orleans, the largest city on the continent of America, and perhaps in the world.”6

! New Orleans, this supposedly exceptional place, deserved an exceptional history, and the Creole Charles Gayarré sought to write those pages. He dismissed this ﬁrst monologue, titled “The Poetry, or the Romance of the History of Louisiana,” as a “triﬂing production, the offspring of an hour’s thought.”7 But his

ﬁrst Methodist Church speech—a free event held on March 26, 1847—proved so popular that the People’s Lyceum, that night’s sponsors, invited Gayarré to deliver three future lectures. His mythic telling of Louisiana’s history, this weaving together of “the legendary, the romantic, the traditional, and the strictly historical elements,” struck a chord not just with New Orleanians but a vast Southern and

4 Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (2003; reprint ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 62.

5 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1-2; Kelman, 62-63.

6 Albert James Pickett, Eight Days in New-Orleans, in February, 1847 (Montgomery, AL: self- published, [1847]), 18.

7 Charles Gayarré, Romance of the History of Louisiana: A Series of Lectures (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1848), 11. 25 national audience.8 Firmly inﬂuenced by Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticized historical novels he praised as “fascinating” and “immortal,” Gayarré considered himself both a historian and a romanticist.9 Prefacing the four lectures, collected under the title Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848), he admitted to “embellish[ing]” and making “attractive” historical events.10 By mixing historic objectivity with the subjectivity of the poetic storyteller’s pen, he set

Louisiana’s history, in his words, “in a glittering frame.”11

! Gayarré was not the ﬁrst to frame Louisiana with an ornamental gilding.

Years before the settlement of New Orleans, promoters sold the French

Louisiana province to prospective settlers as “the Paradise of America” and “one of the ﬁnest Countries in the World.”12 Over a century later, antebellum commentators followed suit by painting New Orleans as the “stately Southern

Queen.”13

! Gayarré believed that Louisiana’s past oozed exceptionality. Literally.

“There is poetry in the very foundation of this extraordinary land!” he roared in the

8 Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I, 8.

9 Ibid., 7.

10 Gayarré’s first four lectures would first be printed in Romance of the History of Louisiana: A Series of Lectures, quotations appear on 15-16. This first lecture series is most easily found in Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I, 9-186.

11 Gayarré, Romance of the History of Louisiana, 16.

12 Gay M. Gomez, “Publicizing a Vast New Land: Visual Propaganda for Attracting Colonists to Eighteenth-Century Louisiana,” in Printmaking in New Orleans, ed. Jessie J. Poesch (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006), 55, 58.

13 John W. and Elizabeth G. Barber, Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes (New Haven, CT: J. W. Barber, 1850), 178; also, see Thomas Ruys Smith, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Continuum, 2011). 26 opening minutes of his ﬁrst lecture.14 This intangible poetic property pervaded everything—the place, the past, and the people—to make Louisiana special. In a trilogy of histories, Gayarré mined the soil of Louisiana’s past to cultivate a local literary landscape, a true Creole Terroir.15

! Gayarré’s literary project developed at the tail end of the “Age of Print,” an early republic and antebellum era when Americans “fashioned a distinctive literature and culture” through numerous print media. The ascent of a Louisiana literature mirrored the rise of similar, fragmented local print culture communities throughout the United States.16 One such fragment was located in Richmond, where the Southern Literary Messenger’s ﬁrst issue, released in 1834, encouraged the South to “build . . . up a character of our own, and providing the means of imbodying and concentrating the neglected genius of our country” through the spilling of ink on paper.17 Gayarré likewise urged the cultivation of a homegrown republic of letters, a culture he likened to immortality. “Literature,” he wrote, “is the manifestation of how much soul there is in a social body; and those nations which have been without a literature, whatever of power and material

14 Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I, 14.

15 Gayarré expressed a similar idea in the following line: “The fertility of the brain should correspond with that of the soil.” Charles Gayarré, “Literature in Louisiana,” Belford’s Magazine 5:27 (August 1890), 342.

16 Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

17 [James E. Heath], “Southern Literature,” Southern Literary Messenger 1:1 (August 1834), 2; Robert A. Gross, “Introduction: An Extensive Republic,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, eds. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 13. 27 wealth they may have obtained, have been nothing but corpses ﬂoating like dead logs on the stream of history.”18

! Though he was hardly the ﬁrst Louisianian to publish, Gayarré should be considered the founding father of the state’s literature. By peering into the past and by breathing life into local memory and myth, Gayarré birthed a New

Orleans-Louisiana print culture community. He was the ﬁrst to chronicle the history of his people. Issued in French and printed locally, the Essai historique sur la Louisiane (1830) and the two-volume Histoire de la Louisiane (1846-47) provided Francophone Louisianians with a shared written history. His Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848), later included in his magisterial History of

Louisiana (in four volumes, 1854-1866), romanticized and mythologized the place and people’s past.19 Written in English and published in the print capital of

New York City, this second round of histories more than found local and national success, they changed the way Creoles and Americans, citizens of Louisiana and the world thought about New Orleans. Gayarré precipitated not just a white

Creole print culture that lasted for another century, but he inﬂuenced how New

Orleans and Louisiana have been written and read ever since. Nearly a half- century ago, one scholar hoisted upon Gayarré a weighty, and contestable, title:

18 Gayarré, “Literature in Louisiana,” 338.

19 One biographer characterized Gayarré’s switch as being from “dry scholarship . . . to the other extreme—popularization.” Philip D. Uzée, “An Analysis of the Histories of Charles E. A. Gayarré,” The Proceedings of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences VII (April 1943), 123. The three volumes following the ﬁrst are Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume II (1852; reprint ed. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974); History of Louisiana: The Spanish Domination, Volume III (1854; reprint ed. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974); History of Louisiana: The American Domination, Volume IV (1866; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974). 28

“the greatest historian of the Old South.”20 But Gayarré transcended historical writing by becoming the primogenitor of a Louisiana Creole literature. In that sense, it is necessary to reconsider Charles Gayarré on the microlevel, as the elder statesman of a Louisiana Creole literature and the architect of the New

Orleans mythos.

Three Steps to a Louisiana Creole Republic of Letters

! The stars aligned for the issuing of Gayarré’s Essai historique sur la

Louisiane in last months of 1830. New Orleans of that decade saw the right combination of readers, authors, and printers to foster a true Creole print culture.

In his inﬂuential study The Order of Books, Roger Chartier characterizes this triangular relationship between writers, their audience, and the technology needed to produce books as the “three poles” necessary in constructing “a history of reading.”21 Gayarré’s ﬁrst compendium of history happened in the right place at the right time; it could not have been published at any earlier moment.

! In the ﬁrst 120 years following the settlement of New Orleans, Creoles and other colonists read newspapers, novels, and non-ﬁction from abroad: from

France, other parts of Europe, especially England, and the United States. “An outpost of the Republic of Letters,” according to historian Shannon Lee Dawdy,

French New Orleans was “Louisiana’s port for the importing and exporting of

20 Clement Eaton, The Waning of the Old South Civilization (1968; reprint ed., New York: Pegasus, 1969), 54.

21 Chartier classiﬁes the three poles as the “technological, formal, and cultural.” Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (1992; reprint ed., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 1-23. 29 books, ideas, letters, news, and learned people.”22 But colonial New Orleans and its surrounding frontier produced mostly government reports and edicts, generating hardly any cultural or artistic print matter for public consumption. Two early French-born authors act as counterexamples. Brittany-native turned Pointe

Coupée politician and merchant Julian Poydras issued several popular odes in praise of Spanish Louisiana Governor and military hero Bernardo de Gálvez in the late-1770s.23 Three decades later, Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, a transplant from the Alpen region of southeast France, composed a short stage work dramatizing the local Choctaw people. First produced in 1809, La Fête du

Petit-Blé; ou L’Héroisme de Poucha-houmma (The Festival of the Young Corn;

Or the Heroism of Poucha-Houmma), was published ﬁve years later.24 Though references to the existence of other contemporary plays have been uncovered, no copies of these have been discovered. More recently, a manuscript containing

Priest Etienne Viel’s pastoral drama Evandre miraculously appeared. First presented in 1769, Evandre can only half be considered a Creole creation—Viel wrote the play outside of Paris and chose to set it in a bucolic European

22 Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 32.

23 Edward Larocque Tinker, Louisiana’s Earliest Poet: Julien Poydras & the Paeans to Gálvez (New York: The New York Public Library, 1933).

24 Paul Louis Le Blanc de Villeneufve, The Festival of the Young Corn; Or, the Heroism of Poucha-Houmma, ed. and trans. Mathé Allain (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1964). 30 landscape. The importance of Viel’s work instead rests in the fact that it could be considered the “ﬁrst literary creation of a native of the Mississippi Valley.”25

! It must be remembered that a reading public is made, not born. Thus, in constructing a history of Creole letters, we must start with a network of readers.

Colonial New Orleanians, especially women, could boast of an impressive literacy rate.26 But the era in which Viel and the others published lacked any sort of critical readership mass. Simply put, there were not enough persons in New

Orleans—numbering just 8,222 in 1805, the year of Gayarré’s birth—to sustain a homegrown body of literature.27 But by 1840, six years prior to the publication of

Gayarré’s Histoire de la Louisiane, the city’s population had mushroomed to just over 100,000, ranking as the nation’s third largest city.28 New York, Baltimore, and other urban areas saw similar growth throughout the Jacksonian Era, but the

Crescent City’s rate of expansion outmatched them all.

25 Charles Edwards O’Neill, Viel: Louisiana’s Firstborn Author with Evandre the First Literary Creation of a Native of the Mississippi Valley (Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991), 8-33.

26 Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 113-121.

27 This population number drops when considering the number of people who could freely obtain books; the breakdown follows: 3,551 whites, 1,566 free people of color, and 3,105 enslaved persons. Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), graph on 22.

28 Whites made up over half of New Orleans’s 1840 population. Paul F. Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), graph on 118. 31

! Only recently have scholars given a serious look to the Saint-Domingue refugees that instigated this surge.29 Between 1791 and 1815, tens of thousands of whites, free persons of color, and enslaved ﬂed the French colonial island of

Saint Domingue during the revolutions, counter-revolutions, and wars from which emerged the free republic of Haiti in 1804. Scattered throughout the French,

British, Spanish, and American Atlantic Worlds, perhaps as many as 20,000 refugees (and at least 15,000) found their way to the lower Mississippi Valley.

According to historian Nathalie Dessens, they eventually converged here because of its geographic proximity to their homeland, because of the potential freedoms the newly purchased Louisiana territory provided, and because of the region’s French colonial culture. Louisiana and New Orleans, especially following the third and ﬁnal wave of migrants in January 1810, became “the meeting place for the diaspora.”30 The nearly ten thousand exiles who resettled there virtually doubled the population of the city.

! As Saint-Domingue refugees ﬁrst began pouring into New Orleans, they found a city without newspapers. The earliest pioneers of the city’s journalism trade arrived from the French-speaking island. Louis Duclot, a French printer who

ﬂed during the earliest days of the island’s slave uprising, landed in New Orleans and immediately launched Le Moniteur de la Louisiane in March 1794. Despite

29 Nathalie Dessens gives the best modern appraisal of the Saint-Domingue exodus in Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Inﬂuences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007). Also helpful on the subject are Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Inﬂuence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 37-83; Lachance, passim.; and the collected essays in Carl A. Brasseaux and Glenn R. Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792-1809 (Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992).

30 Dessens, 30-32, quotation appears on 30. 32 obstructions from Spanish authorities, Le Moniteur survived as a semi-weekly for two decades. The Moniteur and the journals that followed were ineptly crude, usual for the time. Editors ﬁlled their pages with advertisements, ship passenger lists, and foreign affairs culled from visitors to the city and months-stale newspapers brought from abroad. In September 1827, refugee François Delaup issued the ﬁrst installment of L’Abeille (later renamed the L’Abeille de la

Nouvelle-Orléans); English and Spanish-language sections would be added to

The Bee-La Abeja over the next couple of years. Garnering widespread support from the city’s blossoming Francophone community, the L’Abeille would endure for nearly a century. Its focus on honest journalism, editorial commentary, and literature and art reviews inspired dozens of later gazettes. Bibliographer Edward

Larocque Tinker describes the 1840s as the “golden era of French journalism in

Louisiana.” At least thirty-three French-language newspapers and periodicals originated in that decade. Though the majority of these early Francophone newspapers and periodicals lasted hardly a year, this proliferation of print by mid- century points to dynamic changes in New Orleans’s social, cultural, and economic spheres.31

31 In the 1840s, seventeen additional Francophone journals started in the Louisiana Parishes outside New Orleans. Edward L. Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers and Periodicals of Louisiana,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 42 (April 20/October 19, 1932), 250-252, 283, 305-307, quotation on 256; William Beer, “Moniteur de la Louisiane, New Orleans 1794,” Proceedings and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America XIV (1920): 127-131; John S. Kendall, “The Foreign Language Press of New Orleans,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 12:3 (July 1929): 363-380; Samuel J. Marino, “Early French-Language Newspapers in New Orleans,” Louisiana History 7:4 (Autumn 1966): 309-321; Hunt, 52-54. 33

! These newspapers acted as “instruments of cultural cohesion.”32 The journals not only aided in the preservation of the French tongue in New Orleans, they united disparate Creole Louisiana and Saint-Domingan populations to birth a true and unique Francophone community on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Besides ofﬁcial administrative announcements, newspapers operated for several decades as the only locally produced and readily consumable form of print culture. “All the people in New Orleans love to read,” one French visitor observed. “There are no book shops or libraries, but books are ordered from

France.”33 Before 1803, judicial and administrative public notices composed the great majority of city imprints.34 The French Interregnum, which predated the

American takeover of Louisiana, allowed a free press.35 Printers, alongside booksellers, moved into the city from Saint Domingue, the United States, and

32 Hunt, 52.

33 Quotation from Pierre Clément de Laussat, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Agnes-Josephine Pastwa, ed. Robert D. Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 119n31. Another contemporary traveler, a Saint-Domingue refugee, strongly disagreed with Laussat’s pronouncement. He wrote, “Louisianians refuse to exchange their perishable coin for lasting knowledge, . . . There is neither a college, nor a library here, whether public or private. The cause of the last defect is obvious. A librarian would starve in the midst of his books, unless he could teach his readers the art of doubling his capital at the end of the year. There is only one printing ofﬁce in the city.” Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas, in the Year, 1802, Giving a Correct Picture of Those Countries, trans. John Davis (New York: I. Riley & Co., 1806), 52. However, Laussat’s impression of Berquin-Duvallon call into question the detractor’s statement: “He described the colony [Louisiana] in bilious colors. His work was ﬁlled with sarcasm. He saw nothing but marshland and reptiles. . . . He had a narrow and warped mind.” Laussat, 101-102.

34 Florence M. Jumonville, “Frenchmen at Heart: New Orleans Printers and Their Imprints, 1764-1803,” Louisiana History 32:3 (Summer 1991), 287-288.

35 Florence M. Jumonville, “‘The Art Preservative of All Arts’: Early Printing in New Orleans,” in ed. Poesch, 88. 34

France in the decades following the Louisiana Purchase.36 Urban development aided and complemented New Orleans’s printmaking industry.37 Though the next several decades saw a steady increase in French and English-language New

Orleans-published imprints, New Orleans never became a major Francophone publishing center, meaning many Creole authors looked to further metropoles

(Paris and New York) to print their works.38

! Hailing from diverse occupational, educational, and social strata, the white

Saint-Domingue refugees revolutionized New Orleans’s social and cultural sectors besides the newspaper industry. They pioneered inceptions and innovations in agriculture (notably in the sugar industry), medicine, and the arts.

They introduced professional theater and opera to the city. In 1812, three Saint

Domingans founded the French-styled academy the Collège d’Orléans, one of the city’s ﬁrst institutions of secondary education.39 Of all the young men who studied within its halls, the Collège and its Saint-Domingue professors left a deep impression on the young Charles Gayarré, who long maintained a student- teacher relationship with the school’s second president, a Monsieur Rochefort, professor of literature. Gayarré reminisced that Rochefort knew nothing about

36 Florence M. Jumonville, “Books, Libraries, and Undersides for the Skies of Beds: The Extraordinary Career of A. L. Boimare,” Louisiana History 34:4 (Autumn 1993), 438.

37 Jessie J. Poesch, “Introduction: Printmaking in New Orleans,” in ed. Poesch, 11.

38 Florence M. Jumonville’s comprehensive bibliography shows that the number of French- language, New Orleans imprints doubled between the 1830s and the 1840s. Jumonville, Bibliography of New Orleans Imprints, 1764-1864 (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989). Three thousand plus items were printed in New Orleans prior to the Civil War. Jumonville, “Frenchman at Heart,” 310.

39 Hunt, 55-57; Dessens, 88, 142-143. 35 any subject besides “the Latin classics, the histories of Rome, Greece and

France.” The Creole’s fondness for Greek and Roman antiquity, analogically appearing often throughout his histories, might be traced to his mentor. On his deathbed, Rochefort told his inveterate pupil, “You are my work, boy; you are my work—never forget it!” Writing in his memoirs, Gayarré contended that he forever stayed true to his professor’s wishes.40 Certainly, Rochefort and his colleagues, all refugees of the Haitian Revolution, impressed on the young Gayarré the conception of white Francophone exceptionality across the Atlantic World, an idea which informed his future histories.

Procuring the Higher Branches of Literature

! Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré’s origins constituted the stuff that his cherished Sir Walter Scott novels were made of: drama and romance, war and heroism, history and myth. In an early autobiography, he wrote that his family was “historic in all its branches and roots.”41 His braggadocio rang true: the

Gayarré family tree sprouted and grew as the Louisiana colony ﬂourished.

Estevan de Gayarré landed in New Orleans with Antonio de Ulloa in March 1766.

A war hero in his native Navarre, Gayarré served as the ﬁrst Spanish Louisiana

Governor’s Contador Real, or royal accountant. In 1771, Estevan returned to

Spain but not without leaving behind his son, Juan Antonio. The sixteen-year-old

40 Charles Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos: Truth and Fiction (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1872), 12-18, quotations appear on 13 and 18. Also, see Hunt, 56-57; Dessens, 142-143.

41 Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, “Charles E. Arthur Gayarre [sic],” Cyclopaedia of American Literature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 401. 36

Juan Antonio Gayarré accepted the post of colonial Commissary of War as the

New Orleans Rebellion of 1768 warmed up. Despite his role in suppressing the

French-Creole led revolt, Juan Antonio, like his father, kept friendly relations with the French populace; in 1773, he married Constance de Grand-Pré, a privileged

French-Canadian Creole whose father could be counted as an Bienville-era pioneer. The ﬁrst of their three sons, Juan Antonio Gayarré, who also took up service to the Spanish crown, fathered the future historian.42 Charles Gayarré’s mother, Marie Elizabeth de Boré, was the youngest daughter of Jean Etienne de

Boré, nicknamed the “Savior of Louisiana” for his success in refining the first commercial batch of Louisiana granulated sugar and the cane-based plantation system his process created.43 Boré would be rewarded with the first mayorship of

American-owned New Orleans.

! Charles Gayarré was born on January 9, 1805, just months following the

United States’s purchase and territorial inclusion of Louisiana. Though “known for

42 Charles Gayarré is in need of a new and fuller biographical treatment beyond the scope of this present chapter. The best biography remains Edward M. Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954). The following works have additionally been helpful in exploring his life and career: Paul Hamilton Hayne, “Charles Gayarré: The Statesman” and “Charles Gayarré: The Author,” The Southern Bivouac 5:1-2 (June; July 1886): 28-37; 108-113; Edward Clifton Wharton, Biographical Sketch of Hon. Charles Gayarré, by a Louisianian (New Orleans: C. Eden Hopkins, 1889); Grace King, Creole Families of New Orleans (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), 256-290; Stephen Scatori, “Gayarré: Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres,” (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1914); Edward Larocque Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1932), 218-245; Earl Nolan Saucier, “Charles Gayarré, the Creole Historian,” (PhD diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, 1933); Mary Scott Duchein, “Research on Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré,” (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1934); Charles Roberts Anderson, “Charles Gayarré and Paul Hayne: The Last Literary Cavaliers,” in American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd, ed. David Kelly Jackson (Durham: Duke University Press, 1940): 221-281; Mary Isabel Lund, “Charles Gayarré as a Man of Letters,” (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1943); and the Charles Gayarré commemorative issue of The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 33:2 (April, 1950).

43 Charles Gayarré, “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Régime,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74:442 (March 1887), 607. 37 his intense attachment to French interests,” Boré, born in the Illinois Country of

Upper Louisiana, counted himself a Creole Louisianian through and through.44 In

May 1804, he resigned his mayoral position to protest the American government’s partition of the immense, French-built Louisiana Territory. Despite his French attachments and this perceived slight by the new power, Boré wanted to be a United States citizen. The sugar baron, retired from public life, sided with the petitioners Jean Noel Destréhan (a Louisiana Creole), Pierre Sauvé, and

Pierre Derbigny (both French-born), wealthy plantation owners all, who in a

January 4, 1805 entreaty to the United States Senate argued for immediate statehood instead of a territorial probationary period. Embedded in their petition, the Creole and French power brokers complained that “travelers, [and] residents, who neither associate with us, nor speak our language,” (coded words for Anglo-

Americans), had made “superﬁcial remarks” regarding the French and Creoles’ education and intelligence. They conceded that area residents have had difﬁculty, because of provincial circumstances, “procuring . . . the higher branches of literature.”45 But it would remain the task of a new generation of Creoles to create their own homegrown republic of letters.

! Gayarré’s life echoed the post-colonial sensibilities of his grandfather Boré and the rest. He, like Destréhan, Sauvé, and Derbigny, negotiated the role of an

American citizen blessed and cursed with French blood and a French tongue.

The trio’s ﬁght obviously reverberated with the historian; in the fourth and ﬁnal

44 Ibid., 608.

45 Gayarré, History of Louisiana: The American Domination, 16-68, quotations appear on 59. 38 volume of his History of Louisiana, Gayarré spilled more than a couple pages’ worth of ink on the 1805 Senate petition, which serendipitously was issued just

ﬁve days before his birth.46 Throughout his long career, which spanned the nineteenth century, Gayarré sought to create a Louisiana literature, ﬁrst in

French, then in English, for Louisianians. He hoped that it would reach branches as high and distinguished as those of his own family tree. Literature, Gayarré believed, must be written by the elites, an aristocracy of authors, because the printed word never dies. “The republic of letters is like other republics in one respect,” he wrote. “Although of longer duration than her sisters, for she is immortal, whilst they are from the earth and perishable, her rewards are not always for her most meritorious sons.”47

! Gayarré was born to be a writer and looked the part. One biographer described his features as “French, but thoughtful; severe, but genial. His forehead is large, and very full in the region of what the phrenologist calls

Comparison, Memory, and Human Nature.”48 Since phrenology carries little weight these days, we can say that the beard and balding temples he wore in his later years gave him the look of a Creole Socrates, the godfather of Louisiana literature. However, his ﬁrst signiﬁcant contribution to the state’s letters could more or less be described as a hack job. Nonetheless, it was a project that necessitated action for the author and the state. Late in 1830, recently returned

46 Ibid., 58-68.

47 Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos, 72.

48 James Wood Davidson, The Living Writers of the South (New York: Carleton, 1869), 223. 39 from a two or three year period of legal study in Philadelphia, Gayarré published the ﬁrst of two volumes of his Essai historique sur la Louisiane.49 Largely a translation of François Xavier Martin’s dual volume History of Louisiana: From the

Earliest Period (1827-29), Gayarré’s Essai, like that of the previous chronicle, counts as the ﬁrst full state study in its respective language.50 In 1810, Martin, a

Marseilles native and long-time North Carolina jurist, accepted President James

Madison’s offer to preside as the Territory of Orleans’s Superior Court Judge.51

Gayarré remembered Judge Martin as a man “so near-sighted that, when he read or wrote, his robust and fully developed nose touched the paper and sometimes was tipped with ink.”52 For his Louisiana history, the near-blind Judge utilized several colonial-era primary sources, from which he largely borrowed extensive and exact quotations.53 This non-analytical approach to history does not encourage a second, much less a ﬁrst, reading. In a later novel by Gayarré, a character declares, “I have read [Martin] with pleasure and much proﬁt, but they are as lifeless as the minutes and records of proceedings in a court of justice.”54

49 After New Orleans, Philadelphia was the major resettlement center of Saint-Domingue refugee populations, having held long-standing ties to the island’s pre-revolutionary era, see Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 11-37.

50 Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” 21-34.

51 William Wirt Howe, “Memoir of François-Xavier Martin,” in The History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period, by François-Xavier Martin (1882; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000), xxxi-xxxvi.

52 Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos, 247.

53 Robert C. Reinders, “A Critical Study of François Xavier Martin’s ‘History of Louisiana,’” in Martin, The History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period, xvii-xxix.

54 Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos, 246. 40

Gayarré’s similar, French-language non-stylization makes for no less turgid writing. Though reviews deemed the historian’s second volume (1831) “highly superior to the ﬁrst” and a work by a “young and promising writer . . . [whom]

Louisiana may proudly rank . . . among the most favored of her sons,” the Essai is best remembered for not being the author’s later, still readable, chronicles of

Louisiana.55 Gayarré’s Essai could have been, and in many ways were, written by anyone, while his histories that lay in the future could have only been produced by a proud son of Louisiana, a Creole with a deﬁant message of local exceptionality.

! As he frantically translated Martin’s history, Gayarré worked on a far more interesting piece of Louisiana proselytism. On January 8, 1830, one day before his twenty-fifth birthday, Charles Gayarré delivered his first known public speech at New Orleans’s St. Louis Cathedral, the opening oration in a public career that would stretch for another sixty-five years. His address marked the fifteenth anniversary of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. In his final years, he would reminisce over the “furious cannonading and the distinct charges of musketry” that echoed from the Chalmette battlegrounds, seven miles across the “dead city” that “held its breath in silent suspense,” to his family’s Boré plantation.56 Just a decade and a half following skirmish, New Orleanians held the event in reverence, probably the most “memorable circumstance” in the life of the

55 “Gayarré’s Essai Historique sur la Louisiane,” New Orleans The Bee (September 10, 1831), 2.

56 Gayarré, “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Régime,” 613. 41 century-old city.57 Read in le français standard, Gayarré’s lengthy, grandiloquent lecture compared the Greece and Rome of antiquity to the nascent United States and highlighted Providence’s role in General Andrew Jackson’s against-all-odds battleﬁeld victory against the invading British Army’s crack troops. In his concluding remarks, Gayarré extolled the beauty of Louisiana’s “gifts of nature,” celebrated its booming economic forces, and, lastly, encouraged Louisianians,

Creoles, and Americans alike, to “rid [them]selves . . . of prejudices and petty individual passions, which can harm the common prosperity.”58

! Though Gayarré’s call to save the city’s future rested with every New

Orleanian, he especially singled out his Creole brethren. Recalling the blood spilled in America and Louisiana’s stand against the English, Gayarré incited his audience to remember the “French blood” that “runs . . . in our veins.” Continuing the analogy, Gayarré declared that an “animated . . . air of freedom” supplements and strengthens the Creole’s spirit. This amalgamation of the European corpus with the American body of laws and its liberty ethos created and deﬁned

Gayarré’s brave Louisianians, or, in his words that day, “citizen warriors.” Gayarré admitted that ﬁfteen years earlier, as in 1830, the United States viewed these

“citizen warriors,” the inhabitants of the Union’s newest state, with “distrust” because of their “foreign language.” In the run-up to the Battle of New Orleans, rumors spread that Louisiana’s French and Creoles would not ﬁght alongside

57 Charles Gayarré, “Address by Charles Gayarré in the St. Louis Cathedral on the occasion of the Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, January 8,” reprinted in L’Abeille (January 7, 1830), 2, and New Orleans Le Courrier de la Louisiane (January 11, 1830), 2. Thanks to Russell Desmond for translating this speech on short notice.

58 Ibid. 42

Jackson’s troops.59 The future historian of Louisiana cautioned that such

“prejudices and petty individual passions . . . harm the common prosperity.” Thus, state and nation, Creoles and Americans, must join together in the “most intimate union.” Louisiana’s future, Gayarré argued, must stand with the United States.60

! In the November following the publication of the second Essai volume

(1831), Gayarré forsook history for governance, accepting the appointment of

Presiding Judge of the New Orleans City Court. If his showing on the St. Louis pulpit did not foretell a political career, his very ﬁrst publication, a jejune 1826 pamphlet arguing against Edward Livingston’s proposed banning of capital punishment, certainly did. In late 1833 through the summer of the following year,

Gayarré ran as Democratic candidate for Congress, but lost to former Louisiana

Governor Henry Johnson.61 This early defeat did not sway the young Creole from making a run for United States Senator in January 1835. After three balloting rounds, Democrat Gayarré won a surprising victory in the Whig-dominated

Louisiana legislature.62 In a letter to a Boston friend, anti-Jacksonian Louisiana politico Henry Adams Bullard explained how a circle of Whigs could refuse to elect one of their own: “the truth is we have raised up in our Louisiana politicks

59 Jackson’s leading scholar makes clear that these rumors were just that; Creoles and Americans, in fact, “united . . . in a common cause” over their dedication to Louisiana and hatred for the English. Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (New York: Viking, 1999), 190, see also, 31, 37, 42, 72.

60 Gayarré, “Address by Charles Gayarré in the St. Louis Cathedral on the occasion of the Anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, January 8.”

61 Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” 40-43.

62 Charles Gayarré, Letter to the Editor of the Washington Union, Oct. 23, 1859 (New York: s.n., 1859), 3-4. 43

[sic] an element unknown in the other states, an element difﬁcult to manage or to estimate its effects—I mean creolism—a kind of national native feeling— principally operating on moderate minded natives of French origin.”63

! In his defense, Gayarré chalked up his bipartisan win to the “personal devotion of three Whig friends,” but the creolism stigma rankled the Jacksonian- era atmosphere, entering not just the political realm but every layer of Louisiana society.64 For the next year, New Orleans simmered under a haze of French-

Anglo animosity, the threat of interethnic violence became increasingly apparent.

Both sides agreed to split the city into three semiautonomous municipalities. The tripartite structure would remain in place through the next decade and a half.65

Let Them Tell the History Themselves: Histoire de la Louisiane

! Senator-elect Charles Gayarré would not be around to witness the social split of New Orleans. He would have to leave home in order to write his own, wholly original chronicle of Louisiana history. Almost immediately following his

Senate victory, and perhaps suffering from a nervous breakdown, he resigned his seat and ﬂed to France. A persistent medical problem—one prominent doctor declared that the Creole’s “constitution was completely ruined by the deleterious

63 Henry A. Bullard to Amos Lawrence, February 28, 1835, quoted in Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Personalities (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 298.

64 Gayarré, Letter to the Editor of the Washington Union, 4.

65 The city was reconsolidated in 1852. Tregle, 307-308; Albert E. Fossier, New Orleans: The Glamour Period, 1800-1840 (1957; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998), 119-137; Lewis William Newton, The Americanization of French Louisiana: A Study of the Process of Adjustment Between the French and the Anglo-American Populations of Louisiana, 1803-1860 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 184-188. 44 climate of Louisiana”—sent the promising historian and politician abroad.66 If, as his contemporary Thomas Gold Appleton said, “good Americans, when they die, go to Paris,” then it may also be said that nineteenth-century Americans traveled to Paris to keep from dying.67 Gayarré suffered from frequent feelings of boredom and despair that he once characterized as “my dark ﬁts.”68 Beginning in the early

1830s, a new wave of spa hospitals throughout Europe catered to ailing

Continental and American patients.69 In Gayarré’s semi-autobiographical novel

Fernando de Lemos (1872), the pseudonymic title character attempts hydrotherapy in Leuk, Switzerland, where he “bathe[d] with a sort of fanatic perseverance during three mortally tedious weeks, at the rate of ﬁve hours a day.”70 But for all his need for the restorative waters of Europe’s spas, Gayarré could not help but enjoy his stay in Paris, a city he “loved . . . second only to his

66 At the age of eighty-three, Gayarré joked that he was “professionally a sick man, . . . dying from my tenderest infancy to the present moment.” His friend Dr. Rudolph Matas diagnosed the suffering as bronchial asthma. Charles Gayarré, Address of the Annual Orator, Hon. Chas. Gayarre [sic] to the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Association, December 3, 1887 ([New Orleans]: s.n., n.d.), 2, 8. Rudolph Matas, “An Evening with Gayarré,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 33:2 (April 1950), 273.

67 Jennifer Speake, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.

68 Gayarré, Romance of the History of Louisiana, 14; see also Faye Phillips, “Writing Louisiana Colonial History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Charles Gayarré, Benjamin Franklin French, and the Louisiana Historical Society,” Louisiana History 49:2 (Spring 2008), 178-179.

69 Douglas P. Mackaman, “The Tactics of Retreat: Spa Vacations and Bourgeois Identity in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, eds. Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001): 35-62.

70 Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos, 54-55. Also, Gayarré, Address of the Annual Orator, 8-15. 45 native city.”71 He could not have known, so early in his journey, that his medical exile would extend to over eight years.

! Almost nothing is known of the Creole’s time abroad. He left no journal or letters behind from this period. If we may treat Fernando de Lemos as a sort of travelogue, then we know he meandered through France and Spain, while spending most of his time in the former’s capital. Gayarré’s long Parisian stay coincided with the heart of the July Monarchy, a nearly two-decade long era

(1830-48) of conservative, haute bourgeoisie dominance with King Louis-Philippe

I acting as representative ﬁgurehead. Upon taking the throne, Louis-Philippe acknowledged the popular protests that installed him by proclaiming himself the roi des Français (King of the French) rather than the roi de France (King of

France). Early on, the regime took steps to overcome the Kingdom’s high social inequality levels by attacking the population’s poor literacy rate. Though France retained its stratiﬁed civic system for nearly another half-century, Louis-Philippe’s educational advances worked. A new wave of journalism and literature swept the nation-state, creating a true popular culture that united several social classes.72

An enthusiastic follower of literature and the arts, Gayarré presumably enjoyed some of what Paris had to offer. He also undoubtedly came under the spell of nationalist, romantic historian Jules Michelet, whose contemporary, multi-volume

Histoire de France (1830-67) altered that nations’s scholarly and literary

71 Grace King, “Charles Gayarre [sic],” in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, xvii.

72 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg, eds., The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-4. 46 landscape.73 The Louisianian did record that he occasionally visited the Marais district to hole up in the Archives nationales, copying books unavailable back home and wading through the library’s deep archival collection. Forever searching for information on his illustrious lineage, he proudly found a few tidbits that “shed some light on [the] family papers.”74 In his later years, according to a close friend, the frequently depressed writer could brighten his dreary spirits by reminiscing on this time abroad.75

! Back in New Orleans by the spring of 1844, Gayarré’s political acumen would be prized; in early February 1846, Governor Isaac Johnson appointed him

Secretary of State.76 Only days earlier, the ﬁrst folio of the Histoire de la

Louisiane hit the streets. In the preface, Gayarré presented his Histoire as that of a “more mature mind,” the output of a true scholar.77 Gayarré based this new

Louisiana history, published in two volumes, on three signiﬁcant collections copied from Parisian repositories and housed in the Louisiana State archives,

73 Lionel Grossman, “Jules A. Michelet (1798-1874) and Romantic Historiography,” in European Writers, Volume 5: The Romantic Century, ed. Jacques Barzun (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985): 571-606.

74 Charles Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume (New Orleans: Magne & Weisse, 1846), ii (translation mine).

75 King, “Charles Gayarre,” xvii.

76 As Secretary of State (1846-53), Gayarré advocated the collection of Louisiana colonial records from abroad and the development of the Louisiana State Library. Faye Phillips, “To ‘Build upon the Foundation’: Charles Gayarré’s Vision for the Louisiana State Library,” Libraries & the Cultural Record 43:1 (2008): 56-76.

77 Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume, i. 47 supplemented with a bit of his own research accomplished in Paris.78 Using these primary documents, he aimed to create an objective history, to “remove himself” from the narrative and let historical actors “tell the history themselves.”79

At this he failed. The Histoire begins as a near rewrite of the Essai Historique and eventually, in the second volume, becomes a documentary storage house of

“oppressive dimensions”: quotations that run for pages and pages without any subjective introspection.80 Monotonously, historical time and not the author shaped the narrative. The critic for The Southern Quarterly Review complained that the reader must “wade through a dry document, a tedious memorial, and incidents apparently unimportant.” However, the actual telling of a people’s history is meritorious. To the Louisianian “the slightest matters connected with the growth of his state must be valuable,” wrote the reviewer.81

! Gayarré not only wrestled to construct a historical narrative, he struggled to ﬁnd the right audience. He questioned whether to write for the French or the

English reader. He wrote that he initially desired to compose the book for the latter—it would sell more copies—but settled on the former because French was

78 Pierre Margry copied documents from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives de France; Félix Magne duplicated materials from the Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies. Gilles-Antoine Langlois, “Introduction to the Surrey Calender,” accessed March 21, 2012, http:// www.hnoc.org/surrey/index.php?page=essay_EN_GAL; Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” 57-58; Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume, ii-iii.

79 Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume, iii.

80 The second volume would follow the next year. Book review of Histoire de la Louisiane, North American Review 65:136 (July 1847), 4; Charles Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Second Volume (New Orleans: Magne & Weisse, 1847); Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume, iii.

81 J. S. W., review of Histoire de la Louisiane, The Southern Quarterly Review 9:18 (April 1846), 362-363. 48 the language of his characters.82 By telling their own stories in their native tongue, Bienville, D’Artaguette, Vaudreuil, and other key ofﬁcials would themselves become “alive.” Gayarré likened his colonial source documents to the most intricate paintbrushes in order to “contemplate Louisiana with a microscope.”83 The portrait that resulted from his Histoire was hardly a great artistic accomplishment or a ﬁnancial success. He would have to abandon his mother language and leave the little publishing world of Louisiana behind to gain commercial success as an author.

What Materials for Romance!

! Charles Gayarré’s ﬁrst lectures, grouped under the title The Romance of the History of Louisiana, chronicled Louisiana before the settlement of New

Orleans from the pre-European “primitive state of the country” to De Soto’s 1539 expedition to ﬁnancier Antoine Crozat’s investment in the failing French colony

(1713-17).84 Over four lectures he focused solely on the lives of the great men who founded New Orleans—kings, explorers, soldiers, and priests. Covering nearly two centuries of history, Gayarré often spent pages dramatizing the most

82 One reviewer disagreed with Gayarré’s final language decision: “That a work should be published in the United States and for the use of American citizens, in the French language, has been thought not a little singular by many with whom we have conversed. . . . Such a work can only be intended for the people of Louisiana, for those of France have long since lost all interest in their ancient possession. The Louisianians of French origin, or even of French birth, as a general rule, have acquired a sufficient knowledge of English to be able to read and speak it with ease and fluency, we mean the enlightened portion of them, for it is only in this class that Mr. Gayarré could expect readers at all.” [J. D. B. De Bow], “Louisiana,” The Commercial Review of the South and West 1:5 (May 1846), 389.

83 Gayarré, Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume, iii-v.

84 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 9. 49 insigniﬁcant of events in Louisiana’s development while occasionally glossing over more meaningful developments. The historian also played loose and fast with historical facts. In his defense, he acknowledged his saccharine writing style, the fabulist tales, and excessive subjectivity. In a preface to the collected lectures, Gayarré denied that he disﬁgured history through “inappropriate invention” while still admitting that his “artful preparation honies the cup of useful knowledge, and makes it acceptable to the lips of the multitude.”85 Written in

English, printed by major New York publishing houses (D. Appleton & Company,

1848, and Harper & Brothers, 1851), and riding the wave of popular history, the

Creole historian’s embellished scenes from Louisiana’s past could now reach the widest audience possible.86

! Gayarré’s popular histories, like those of his contemporaries George

Bancroft and Evert Duyckinck, wrote “in the shadow of eighteenth-century tastes.”87 The literary precursors who inﬂuenced the European Romanticists like

Walter Scott continued to sway his ideals and shape his prose. At the time, the

United States remained under the spell of what Mark Twain, while traveling in

New Orleans, deemed the “Sir Walter disease.” This epidemic craze for the

Scotsman’s romanticized historical novels generated a chivalric cult that “had so large a hand in making southern character,” according to Twain, that it is “in great

85 Ibid., 7.

86 Also, the English language had since gained ground over the French. Gayarré much later acknowledged that “nobody in Louisiana who has mastered the language of Shakespeare and Milton, of Prescott and Longfellow, will henceforth resort to any other in writing a book.” Gayarré, “Literature in Louisiana,” 335.

87 Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 593. 50 measure responsible for the [Civil War].”88 Twain exaggerates as he so often did, calling his diagnosis a “wild proposition.” But literary critics have since blamed

Scott for stoking the ﬁres of a Southern visionary embrace of “a world that never was: a world of a White southern gentility and aristocracy, built on the backs of a vile and brutish institution that they would wish into the margins.”89 Pre-

Enlightenment masters like Homer, Dante, the Bard, Cervantes, and Spenser also lined Gayarré’s Louisiana chronicle, which he compared to “an Odyssey of woes” and “a Shaksperian [sic] mixture.”90 But he did not just look across the

Atlantic and deep into antiquity for inspiration. The tales contained in the lectures could “grace the pages” of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.

Moreover, according to Gayarré, the authentic characters and real incidents from

Louisiana history superseded the creations of Washington Irving’s imagination.91

The Creole historian endeavored to situate his birthplace on the same literary plane as Scott’s Scotland, Cooper’s early American frontier, and Shakespeare’s

88 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883), 468.

89 Ibid., 469. For recent scholarship on the Sir Walter Disease, see Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001), 122-141; Cynthia Wachtell, War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 32-40; Scott Horton, “How Walter Scott Started the American Civil War,” Harper’s Magazine Online (July 29, 2007), accessed March 23, 2012, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000662. This bookish disease earlier infected Britain, see Simon Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conﬂict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 225-227.

90 Werner Sollors writes of an “American Odyssey” trope in the nations’s ethnic literature that mirrors the experiences of European explorers in Gayarré’s romantic histories. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 237-241. Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 20, 86.

91 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, quotation appears on 26, Irving comparison on 128. 51 world. Louisiana’s past and place like those of these more famous authors’ provided “What materials for romance!”92

! And what romantic materials Louisiana bestowed upon Gayarré for his

ﬁrst lecture! Her annals constituted “a rich mine, where lies in profusion the purest ore of poetry . . . forming an uninterrupted vein through the whole history.”93 Poetry permeated all. There was poetry in “the forests” and poetry in the “landscape,” poetry in the “barbaric manners, laws, and wars” of the ﬁrst

American peoples and poetry in the “mysterious migrations . . . of human transformations.” A future rhapsodist might write “heroic poems” because who, according to the author, “could sit under yonder gigantic oak, the growth of a thousand years” and not have their “whole soul glowing with poetical emotions.” (It should be noted that these examples are all found on the same page.)94 From its soil, climate, and environment to the people who trod its ground, Louisiana radiated distinctiveness. Early European discoverers found themselves in paradise, “the most magniﬁcent country in the world,” Eden at the end of the Mississippi Valley, the landscape for a Creole Terroir.95

! Placed on a pedestal and distinguished from the wider world, Gayarré’s

Louisiana was exceptional but not to the detriment of its place within the United

States. Louisiana could both rightly call itself a member of and outshine all other states in the American ﬁrmament. Gayarré’s native state assumed the form of the

92 Ibid., 15.

93 Ibid., 29.

94 Ibid., 13.

95 Ibid., 39. 52

“star which has sprung from her forehead to enrich the American constellation.”96

Gayarré further traced Louisiana’s ties with the United States to before the 1803 transfer, deeper into an imagined past. He fantasized that despite their French origins, the ﬁrst New Orleanians might have looked high into the sky in 1718 and observed “the American eagle . . . towering with repeated gyrations, and uttering loud shrieks which sounded like tones of command.”97 Louisiana and the United

States shared a common destiny—the former inevitably would “fall into the motherly lap” of the latter—and the future unraveled to ensure that this held true.98 Louisiana under France and the United States embodied two temporal poles. In one poignant passage, Gayarré visited a crumbling fort near Biloxi, one of the original, pre-New Orleans, French Mississippi River Valley settlements.

Though a clearing in the overgrowth, just to the right of this primordial site,

Gayarré spied “a beautiful villa, occupied by an Anglo American family, . . . replete with all the comforts and resources of modern civilization.” On the fort’s opposite side, there stood the living remnants of French era, “a rude hut, where still reside descendants from the ﬁrst settlers, living in primitive ignorance and irreclaimable poverty.” Close enough to walk over and shake hands, the French

96 Ibid., 11.

97 Ibid., 235. Gayarré’s use of the word “command” is interesting. As he wrote his four volume History of Louisiana over several decades, his language became more strident. Published after the Civil War, the ﬁnal volume, The American Domination (1866), when compared to the bright romance of the lectures contained in the ﬁrst volume, is “marked by darkness.” O’Brien, 295-296.

98 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 496. 53 and American families were separated by the “immense distance” of history, the gulf of time that both connected and cleaved the past and the present.99

! As works of history, Gayarré’s lectures were suspect. He ﬁlled his speeches with “legend and fancy designed to amuse his readers,” according to one historian.100 His second address began with a nautical showdown between the French and English navies, an event that, if read literally, he himself witnessed. Gayarré described watching Iberville, the French-Canadian explorer, proudly standing on deck, staring down the enemy forces: “What a noble face! I see the peculiar expression which has settled in that man’s eye, in front of such dangers thickening upon him! . . . By heaven! a tear! I saw it.”101

! Gayarré not only romanticized history and entered himself as a witness into the narrative, he distorted facts, knowingly and admittedly misrepresented reality. Concerning one particularly embellished passage detailing the countenance of future Louisiana governor Antoine de La Mothe-Cadillac (“His ponderous wig, the curls of which spread like a peacock’s tail,” “His eyes . . . possessed with a stare of astonishment,” etc.), Gayarré confessed to another historian decades later that he “somewhat fancifully sketched his personal appearance” of which he knew “nothing historical about.”102

99 Ibid., 77-78.

100 Tregle, 46.

101 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 33.

102 Ibid., 119. Gayarré to Michigan historian Silas Farmer, quoted in E. M. Socola, “Gayarre’s [sic] History of Louisiana,” in Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, n.p. 54

! But the Cadillac episode cannot compare in artistic enhancement with

Gayarré’s treatment of the life and career of Antoine Crozat (ca. 1655-1738), a story that ends the fourth and ﬁnal People’s Lyceum lecture. Gayarré repeated the ludicrous legend that Crozat, the private proprietary owner of French

Louisiana, invested in the French experiment to enable his daughter to marry a duke. After canceling his charter for the ﬂoundering colony, Crozat watched as his daughter Andrea, anguished from love unfulﬁlled, perished in the most melodramatic fashion. Then he too dropped dead in grief. Certainly the historian desired to end his lecture series in dramatic style, privileging fancy over fact. It makes for a distressing but hardly disastrous inclusion, until one reads the only footnote contained in the collected volume of lectures. Included by Gayarré, the addendum explains that Andrea Crozat’s real name was Marie Anne, and that she, in fact, wed her love, Le Comte D’Evreux. The author apologized for “having slightly deviated from historical truth” and blames the name-switch on a

“capricious whim” and “some spell in the name of Andrea.”103

! Contemporary readers would be used to this melodramatic illumination of history, but Gayarré’s theatrical ﬂights stretched the patience of critics to the breaking point. One reviewer, a close friend, cautiously called The Romance of the History of Louisiana “a very poetic, graphic and attractive production” but hardly a “legitimate history.”104 A critic for the Southern Literary Messenger was less kind:

103 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 107-113, 184-186.

104 [J. D. B. De Bow], “The Spanish Rule in Louisiana,” De Bow’s Review 13:4 (October 1852), 383 (italics in original). 55

The work of Mr. Gayarré is a pleasing romance of history, which will always ﬁnd readers. Its pages glow with a poet’s imagination. . . . but it is not history. It may therefore be doubted whether this volume, so ambitious in style, so redolent in invention, will create the same interest that was accorded to his ﬁrst work in French.105

! Throughout his writings, Gayarré scattered encouragements to other

Louisiana artists to pick up his lead. One missionary’s forest sanctuary, where the

Tunica tribe gathered for mass, would make “a beautiful subject for painting!”106

He wrote that “An American audience,” would clamor to see the adventure-ﬁlled life of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, an early explorer of Louisiana, presented

“on the stage.”107 A bizarre love triangle between Bienville, Cadillac, and the latter’s daughter, should be captured by “a novel-writer,” because, as Gayarré commented, “what fact or transaction, commonplace as it would appear anywhere else . . ., does not, when connected with Louisiana, assume a romantic form and shape?”108

! Gayarré continued to write histories large and small into his ninetieth year.

Borrowing from the works of the Creole Godfather of Louisiana history and literature became commonplace, expected even. Nearly every Louisiana writer, not just French Creoles, acknowledged their debt to Gayarré.109 For over a

105 S. T. G., “Early History of Louisiana,” Southern Literary Messenger 18:5 (May 1852), 312.

106 Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, 60.

107 Ibid., 173.

108 Ibid., 134.

109 in the year preceding Gayarré’s death, the premier scholar of Louisiana letters and language wrote of him, “no one is more venerated and esteemed in Louisiana than our historian.” Alcée Fortier, Louisiana Studies: Literature, Customs and Dialects, History and Education (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1894), 25. 56 century and a half, historians have continued to read and reference Gayarré’s

History of Louisiana. Professional and amateur scholars alike still ﬁnd his works

“useful and entertaining,” to quote the most recent historian of New Orleans.110

The Creole historian has also inspired writers of ﬁction. Just a year after the publication of Gayarré’s Romance of the History of Louisiana, French émigré- turned Louisianian Charles Testut planned a series of drama-laced novels that traced the region’s past.111 Simply designated Les Veillées Louisianaises, série de romans historiques sur la Louisiane (Louisiana Evenings: A Series of

Historical Novels about Louisiana), the ﬁrst of two volumes in the series (both issued in 1849) collected four tales of Louisiana historical ﬁction, including Louis-

Armand Garreau’s Louisiana and Testut’s own Saint-Denis.112 Both novelists borrowed heavily from Gayarré, even at times copying whole pages from his histories.113

110 Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 401.

111 For more on the life of Charles Testut, see Marie Louise Lagarde, “Charles Testut: Critic, Journalist, and Literary Socialist,” (MA thesis, Tulane University, 1948); Norman R. Shapiro, trans., and M. Lynn Weiss, intro., Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 198-199; Sheri Lyn Abel, Charles Testut’s Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry (Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009), 1-6.

112 Charles Testut, Les Veillées Louisianaises, série de romans historiques sur la Louisiane, 2 vols. (New Orleans: Imprimerie de H. Méridier, 1849).

113 Edward J. Fortier, Les Lettres françaises en Louisiane (Québec: Imprimerie L’Action sociale limitée, 1915), 15; Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild, French Literature of Louisiana (1929; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998), 25-28, 36, 134; Alide Cagidemetrio, “‘The Rest of the Story,’; or, Multilingual American Literature,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 24. 57

! In 1833, Thomas Wharton Collens published one of the ﬁrst dramatizations of Louisiana history. His ﬁve act tragedy, The Martyr Patriots; or,

Louisiana in 1769, romanticized the French Creole and German rebellion against the territorial handover to the Spanish government and the state-sponsored execution of the conspirators that followed.114 Staged at the St. Charles Theatre,

Collens’s play likely prompted three later French-language portrayals of the same historical episode.115 In April 1836, the budding playwright, just twenty-three year old, penned Gayarré a fan letter to profess the inﬂuence the historian’s ﬁrst effort impressed on him. For Collens, Gayarré’s life and work exhibited a dualistic quality: an essence of locality imbued and matched with a patriotic allegiance to the nation.

You have by the publication of your Historical Essay [Essai historique sur la Louisiane] done more than any other man to inspire a love of Country, and an attachment to our free institutions to the youth of Louisiana. You have shown that even the infant state to which they belong has heroes and glorious deeds to boast of; and that the union of Louisiana with a republican nation was one of the greatest blessings that could befall her and her children. . . . The enclosed dramatic composition is the result of the vivid impressions left upon my mind by your historical essay. To whom can I dedicate my work rather than to you?116

! Gayarré had fulﬁlled his promise to procure the higher branches of literature for his state and people by laying the foundations of a Creole print

114 T. Wharton Collens, The Martyr Patriots; or, Louisiana in 1769, an Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts (New Orleans: Dillard, 1836); Thomas M’Caleb, ed., The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State (New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894), 286, 421-472; Henry Rightor, ed., Standard History of New Orleans, Louisiana (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1900), 363.

115 The three include Auguste Lussan’s Les Martyrs de la Louisiane (Donaldsonville, LA: E. Martin & F. Prou, 1839), the above mentioned Louisiana (1849) by Garreau, and Placide Canonge’s France et Espagne ou la Louisiane en 1768 et 1769 (New Orleans: s.n., 1850). Caulﬁeld, 31-36.

116 T. W. Collens to Charles Gayarré, April 27, 1836, quoted in Duchein, 161. 58 terroir. By promoting and popularizing the poetry allegedly inherent in Louisiana and its Creoles, Gayarré inﬂuenced generations of writers up until the present day. But it would be a Creole poet and priest who would most artfully mine the resources—the romantic materials, to paraphrase the historian—embedded in the history and culture of Creole Louisiana. 59

Chapter Two “Cette terre catholique.” — Catholic Priest and Poet Adrien Rouquette Bridges the Atlantic Ocean

! On January 8, 1846, to commemorate the Battle of New Orleans’s thirty-

ﬁrst anniversary, the ﬁrst Louisiana-born Catholic priest addressed his congregation in French.1 Climbing the pulpit of the cracked and crumbling St.

Louis Cathedral—its Spanish colonial façade numbering its ﬁnal years—youthful

Father Adrien Rouquette radiated anxiety and religious fervor.2 This was not

Rouquette’s first sermon, but perhaps because of the occasion’s significance, the thousand-plus parishioners and curiosity-seekers in attendance, or the celebratory cannon fire that rumbled through Jackson Square, the priest crossed the sanctuary “with a degree of nervous agitation natural to his years.”3 He began his oration quietly, deliberately, by acknowledging the solemnity of the event and the feelings of enthusiastic intimacy and emotions that pervaded the room;

1 Roger Baudier, The Catholic Church in Louisiana (New Orleans: [A.W. Hyatt stationery mfg. co., ltd.],1939), 330.

2 Work commenced on the Cathedral’s reconstruction in the spring of 1849. See, Leonard V. Huber and Samuel Wilson, Jr., The Basilica of Jackson Square and its Predecessors: Dedicated to St. Louis King of France, 1727-1965 (New Orleans: A. F. Laborde and Sons, 1965), 29-40.

3 “Celebration of the Eighth of January,” New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin (January 8, 1846), quoted in Adrien Rouquette, Discours prononcé à la Cathédrale de Saint Louis (Nouvelle- Orléans, 1846), a [sic] l’occasion de l’anniversaire du 8 janvier, par l’Abbé A. Rouquette, de la Louisiane (Paris: Librairie de Sauvaignat, 1846), 30. “Cannonading was [New Orleans’s] earliest method of enhancing religious occasions and ceremonies,” according to Mackie J. V. Blanton and Gayle K. Nolan, “Creole Lenten Devotions: Nineteenth Century Practices and Their Implications,” in Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, ed. Glenn R. Conrad (New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993), 528. 60

Rouquette, in his speech, deﬁned these emotions as “d'un coeur Louisianais, d'un coeur patriote” (“a Louisianian’s heart, a patriot’s heart”). His coeur, or core of his being, belonged to two places, the local and the national. In this monologue, given to immortalize a victory fought on Louisiana soil that punctuated the last United States war, he preached that New Orleanians owed allegiance to two places, nation and state, and that patriotism to one should not and could not subsume the other. Five years earlier, Rouquette’s slim volume of poetry, titled Les Savanes: poésies américaines (The Savannas: American

Poems) and originally published in Paris, announced his adoration for both his

Creole home and his American nation. By suggesting the bifurcated nature of his own heart, and linking that with the hearts and souls of his “audience of strangers,” Rouquette, in effect, emblematically created a church full of Creole-

Americans.4 Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, each

January 8 morning, St. Louis Cathedral ofﬁcials duplicated the ceremonial pomp of General Andrew Jackson’s Battle of New Orleans post-victory visit with a Te

Deum, the hymn of praise and thanksgiving, and a High Mass. Charles Gayarré delivered the speech sixteen years earlier, while a toned-down version of this stately event still occurs annually.5

! Despite the various native origins of that morning’s attendees—one journal noted with surprise “the many young Creoles” in the pews—Rouquette

4 Rouquette, Discours prononcé à la Cathédrale, 9 (translation mine).

5 Marie Louise Points, “New Orleans,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference . . . , Volume XI, Charles G. Herbermann et. al. (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), 11; Baudier, 338, 342. 61 situated New Orleans as a trans-Atlantic nexus between New and Old Worlds,

American and European identities. Louisiana was “l'étoile brillante” (“the bright star”) incorporated into “the already radiant constellation” of “our nation[’s]” ﬂag.

New Orleans, meanwhile, became that “noble” place because she remained always “hospitable[,] generous[, and] open to all foreigners.” This openness blossomed into a prosperity that made “the Queen of the South and West” the

“twin sister, the equal” of New York. Rouquette named New York and New

Orleans “the two powerful lungs that drive . . . and breathe for the United States.”

The two cities provided for the “movement” of commerce, the oxygen that linked the maritime with the internal by acting as “the vital ﬂuid circulating in all the veins of the American Union.”6 By making this point, Rouquette placed New Orleans

ﬁrmly in the United States at a time when the city was also wrestling with two identites: on a local level between Creoles and Americans, and on a larger scale between the North and South.

! But despite its integral function as an organ in the greater American body,

New Orleans still maintained a place in its European colonial past. Louisiana, according to Rouquette, was “the daughter of Catholic France and Spain.” He reminded his listeners that the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de

La Salle planted one of the ﬁrst crosses in the New World “on the edge of the

[Mississippi] River.” With that cross, La Salle sowed a symbolic European seed, and Louisiana became God’s country, its soil “cette terre catholique,” meaning,

6 Rouquette, Discours pronouncé à la Cathédrale, 19 (“the . . . Creoles”), 11 (remaining quotations) (translations all mine). 62 literally, “this Catholic earth.”7 The Catholic Church, preached Rouquette, bridged the two halves of his bifurcated heart. By attending Mass a Creole New

Orleanian could become or would remain both French-Creole Louisianian and

American, thus the Catholic Church should remain at the forefront of not only

Creole spirituality but the community’s identity.

! Catholic devotion underscored all that Adrien Rouquette thought, wrote, and accomplished throughout his life. He rarely, if ever, doubted his own spiritual sincerity, but he struggled constantly with his place in the postcolonial world, his role as a nineteenth-century American citizen and intellectual, and his own

Creole identity. He was the ultimate liminal being, perpetually in exile. He was a member of a cosmopolitan Creole elite that crossed back and forth between

Atlantic metropoles. And he was an artist who, like Louis Moreau Gottschaulk and Victor Séjour, brought New Orleans’s Creole culture to the world, over a century before Louis Armstrong became the city’s global ambassador.8

! Rouquette travelled frequently, and his early years were especially deﬁned by movement; from 1829 to 1846 he embarked from New Orleans for France on

ﬁve separate occasions. Moving to la patrie ﬁrst to study in Brittany then later to write poetry in Paris, Rouquette would be seized by homesickness as soon as leaving port. In private journals and published verse he referred to himself as an exile, a man with a home in which he could not bring himself to live contentedly.

During these self-banishments, Rouquette, in time, formulated the patriotic ideal

7 Ibid., 11-12 (translations mine).

8 Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 63 that eventually deﬁned the support and ardor he maintained for his state and nation.

! By the end of 1846, and back for good in the United States, the newly- ordained Creole priest suffered a second identity crisis. Finding himself exhausted with his priestly duties and exasperated by New Orleans’s cosmopolitan bustle and its burgeoning immigrant population, he asked to be transferred to the city’s Choctaw Indian-settled hinterlands. Rouquette sought the solitary life regularly gloriﬁed in his poetry, but desired to fulﬁll his dedication to the Church by becoming a missionary to the Choctaws, the First Peoples’ nation he lived near as a child. He contrasted the pastoral Choctaw life with the avarice and advancement of modern urbanity. In Choctaw country, on Lake

Pontchartrain’s northshore above the city, Rouquette built a series of “cabin- chapels,” ﬁve hand-built structures where he could contemplate, compose, and undertake Catholic conversions.

! Rouquette and Charles Gayarré represented two sides of the same Creole coin. The former, a romantic poet and priest, a lifelong restless spirit, eternally exiled. The latter, Louisiana’s first notable native-born historian, the Senator-elect who refused office to flee to France for one lengthy stay.

! This chapter examines the ways in which Adrien Rouquette attempted to come to terms with his ethnic, civic, and national in-betweenness. Wrestling with multiple identities and frequently self-exiled, Rouquette exempliﬁed the cosmopolitan Creole intellectual. 64

Strangers Nowhere in the World

! There are many ways to conjecture as to why Adrien Rouquette saw himself as the consummate outsider, a man inhabiting two ethnicities and two nations, but the simplest may lie in examining his childhood.9 In the ﬁnal years of his life he wrote a biographer, “You must know the child, the young man, the man, before knowing the priest and missionary.”10 Born on February 26, 1813,

Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette was the product of a French-Creole union and the middle sibling of ﬁve surviving children. His father, Dominique Rouquette, hailed from the tiny southwest French town of Fleurance, whose founder ostentatiously named the village after the Tuscan capital city. He emigrated to New Orleans in

1800, opened up a wine-import business, and quickly accumulated considerable wealth and a two-story house on Royal Street, the Creole thoroughfare that crossed the old town. The vintner Dominique attracted enough prestige in Creole circles to marry Louise Cousin, the daughter of François Cousin, a ﬁrst- generation French-Creole who owned, besides several properties in the city, the

9 Of all the Creole-born members of the Creole intellectual circle, Adrien Rouquette has garnered the most attention by professional and amateur historians. The following materials have also been helpful in gathering in information on Rouquette’s life: John Dimitry, “‘Chahta-Ima’—Father Rouquette,” Harper’s Weekly 31:1597 (July 30, 1887): 537-538; Susan B. Elder, Life of the Abbé Adrien Ro[u]quette “Chahta-Ima” (New Orleans: L. Graham Co., 1913); J. A. Reinecke, Jr., “Les Frères Rouquette, Poètes Louisianais,” Comptes-rendus de l’Athénée Louisianais (January 1920): 12-30, (April 1920): 37-62, (July 1920): 70-84; G. William Nott, “Adrien Rouquette: Poet and Mystic,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 6:3 (July 1923): 388-394; Dagmar Renshaw LeBreton, Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947); Germain J. Bienvenu, “Adrien, l’Américain,” (MA thesis, University of New Orleans, 1985); Blaise C. D’Antoni, Chahta-Ima and St. Tammany’s Choctaws (Mandeville, LA: St. Tammany Historical Society, Inc., 1986); Dominic Braud, “Père Rouquette, Missionnaire Extraordinaire: Father Adrien Rouquette’s Mission to the Choctaw,” in Conrad: 314-327.

10 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, November 29(?), 1883 (underscores in original), Folder 6, Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette papers, Manuscripts Collection 267, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (LRC). 65 largest landholdings in St. Tammany Parish on Lake Pontchartrain’s northshore.

By Adrien’s second birthday, his father had defended the city under General

Jackson’s command and developed a ruinous gambling habit. Four years later, he drowned himself in the Mississippi River. Dominique Rouquette would seemingly disappear from the memory of his son; no mention of him appears in

Adrien’s voluminous writings. But the father undoubtedly passed on a high regard for literature to his young sons; a notice by auctioneers Dutillet and Sagory in Le

Courrier de la Louisiane reported a sale of the elder Rouquette’s 1,300 volumes- plus library, a substantial New Orleans collection for its time.11

! Following their father’s suicide, the Rouquettes moved to the Bayou St.

John region, then a pastoral, swampy area just outside the conﬁnes of New

Orleans proper. There Adrien experienced and enjoyed near-constant contact with the local Choctaw Indians.12 The Rouquettes also spent time along the

Bayou Lacombe, a vast stretch of land owned by his mother’s family on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where an even greater number of Choctaws lived.

Elder brother François-Dominique’s childhood recollections recorded that “golden age of life,” those “free and happy years of my half savage childhood” along the

Bayou, a time when the Rouquette siblings and their “young Indian friends” hunted, played raquette, and built pine-bark huts deep in the encompassing

11 John Milfred Goudeau, “Early Libraries in Louisiana: A Study of the Creole Inﬂuence,” (PhD diss., Western Reserve University, 1965), 88-89.

12 LeBreton, 4-14. 66 woodlands.13 Soon, Adrien’s mother was shuttling her eight-year-old son between French and American preparatory schools: ﬁrst the Collège d’Orléans, where Charles Gayarré also matriculated, then, accompanied by younger brother

Félix, to Kentucky’s Transylvania University, a place popular with French

Creoles.14 The sudden death of Louise Cousin Rouquette in 1824 once again uprooted the young Adrien, this time to the Mantua Academy, a French-styled school located outside Philadelphia and run by one Victor Value. Before packing for Mantua, Rouquette accompanied Dominique to Philadelphia, where the older brother, joined by Gayarré, studied law.15

! By the spring of 1829, Rouquette, again following Dominique, decided to leave for France. The transatlantic route the pair of Rouquette brothers separately traced mirrored that of elite Americans who, between 1830 and 1860, took the same voyage by the thousands. They came for work, they came for art, they came to escape, and they came to arrive. They came with their families and they came alone. They came for adventure and they came to relax. They left

13 Dominique Rouquette, The Choctaws (circa September, 1850), trans. Olivia Blanchard, from the original manuscript, Volume 1, Box 1, p. 5, François Dominique Rouquette papers, Manuscripts Collection 508, LRC.

14 Around this same time, Paul Tulane observed Louisiana Creole sons sent to Kentucky houses of higher learning, including Transylvania University. In his words, “It seemed a strange thing to me, and I remembered it; and I had not lived long in Louisiana before I thought I would like to see a good college built there where the boys could be educated at home.” Quoted in Edwin Whitﬁeld Fay, The History of Education in Louisiana (Washington: Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1898), 179; LeBreton, 18-22.

15 LeBreton, 18-24; Edward M. Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 22. 67 from every port in America.16 They were nineteenth century Atlantic cosmopolitans, ﬂuid citizens of the oceanic world who searched for, and sometimes successfully found, in the words of a group of scholars, “ways of living at home abroad or abroad at home—ways of inhabiting multiple places at once, of being different beings simultaneously, of seeing the larger picture stereoscopically with the smaller.”17

! White Creoles and Creole of Color often headed for France, a nation they claimed as their “spiritual home.”18 They joined a larger American contingent that the French philosopher Denis Diderot deemed “strangers no where in the world.”19 These Creole cosmopolitans could, especially in their fatherland,

France, more easily and rapidly attempt to—linguistically, religiously, and, on a larger scale, culturally and socially—assimilate.

! Charles Gayarré relocated to France for health reasons, perhaps to escape a eroding Creole society, and stayed behind in a scholarly quest.

16 David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011); Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998); Michel Fabre, From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

17 Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitanism, eds. Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 11. The following texts were especially helpful in wading through Cosmopolitanism theory: Pollock, “Cosmopolitanism and Vernacular in History,” in Cosmopolitanism (2002): 15-53; Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in the World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Margaret C. Jacob, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

18 Michel Fabre, “New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France: Romance and Reality,” in Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, ed. Sybil Kein (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 179.

19 Quoted in Jacob, 1. 68

Similarly, elite Creoles, black and white, sent their children abroad to advance their young lives, to complete their schooling, or, in the case of white Creole

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, compete on an international stage.20 Dispatched by his parents to Paris in 1841, the thirteen-year-old Gottschalk, a piano composer extraordinaire, found himself a perpetual exile. Over a globe-spanning and remarkably brief career, Gottschalk quickly matured to become, according to a leading biographer, “America’s first regionalist composer, its first multiculturalist, and its first true nationalist. . . . the bearer of a new cosmopolitanism.”21

Gottschalk and others comprised a small, but signiﬁcant, circle of Creole intellectuals. Gens de couleur libres such as poets Armand Lanusse and Camille

Thierry, dramatist Victor Séjour, and musician-composer Edmond Dédé found varying degrees of success in France.22 In New Orleans, the former two Creoles published Les Cenelles, choix de poésies indigènes (1845), the ﬁrst poetry collection composed by African Americans.

! These Creole cosmopolitans, much less the other Americans, who traveled abroad in those antebellum years, faced the numerous hardships associated with being innocents abroad. In the words of one group of scholars, cosmopolitanism is, now as ever, “grounded in the tenebrous moment of

20 Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 9-21; Fabre, “New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France,” 179-181.

21 S. Frederick Starr, Bamboula!: The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 44-45, quotation appears on v.

22 There is some debate as to whether or not Armand Lanusse ever traveled to France; his protege Rodolphe A. Desdunes denied that he had. Fabre, From Harlem to Paris, 9-21, 11 for a discussion on Lanusse in France; Fabre, “New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France,” 179-195. 69 transition.”23 Simply put, the ability to experience the wide world did not occur without difﬁculties, painful experiences, and ill thoughts.

! Adrien Rouquette’s ﬁrst oceanic passage certainly began inauspiciously.

The sixteen-year-old crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of education. “Not having discovered in Louisiana the fruit of the tree of knowledge,” he scribbled in a journal, “I determined to cross the sea like the migratory fowl and taste of it in a foreign land.”24 Within hours of the thirty-seven day maritime crossing he was miserably homesick. He pined for the place he called his “native land,” especially its trees and waters.25 A rapturous connection with nature fills his first journal entries; wildlife is never mentioned and people rarely, except for the Choctaws that guided the Rouquette siblings though the bucolic Louisiana backwoods and bayous. On the ship deck of the Waltham, an inclination toward familial companionship transformed into the “love of solitude.”26 These themes, emotions, devotions, and pursuits—nature, melancholia, the solitary life—would define Rouquette and his work for the remainder of his years. All that remained for the twenty-six-year-old was to find God.

! Rouquette did not arrive in France as a outwardly religious man. Enrolled at the Collège Royal in Nantes, on the Breton banks of the Loire River Valley, he

23 Pollock, et. al., “Cosmopolitanisms,” 5.

24 Adrien Rouquette, “L’Abbe [sic] Rouquette’s Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 11:3 (December 17, 1942), 12.

25 Rouquette, “Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 10:50 (November 12, 1942), 10.

26 Rouquette, “Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 10:49 (November 5, 1942), 5; quotation from Rouquette, “Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 10:51 (November 19, 1942), 8. 70 plunged into his studies, reading Byron and Shakespeare and translating the

English masters into French.27 But Brittany could not match his adoration for

Louisiana. He compared the college to “a gruesome prison,” where he felt completely alone among one-hundred students.28 Undoubtedly and understandably, Rouquette suffered from depression; he had lost his father and mother in extremely painful circumstances, he missed his siblings. But

Rouquette’s ennui, like that of Gayarré’s, might have been part of a larger social pandemic of American melancholia. Historians Drew Gilpin Faust and Bertram

Wyatt-Brown contend that “feelings of personal loneliness, social alienation, and intellectual futility” raged through the antebellum South.29

! It’s not as if his classmates helped matters. Despite his French roots,

Rouquette was a stranger in a strange land, and was treated as such. His schoolyard nicknames in France, “Monsieur l’Américain” and “le Sauvage,” marked him as decidedly foreign.30 Writing late in life to a dear friend, he included a portrait of himself as a young man with the inscription, “notice the costume of a

27 Rouquette, “Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 10:52; 11:1 (November 26; December 3, 1942), 8; 7.

28 Rouquette, “Leave from Louisiana,” trans. Stanley J. Guerin, Catholic Action of the South 11:4-5 (December 24; 31, 1942), quotation 7; 8.

29 Quotation from Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 2; Bertram Wyatt- Brown, Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Contemporary French author too struggled with the melancholia, see Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism, trans. Mary Seidman Trouille (1987; reprint ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).

30 LeBreton, 34-35. 71 young Creole in Paris.”31 This liminal existence could be a burden for New

Orleans Creoles, abroad and at home. The in-betweenness of their physical appearances could be notably problematic. In 1851, New Yorker A. Oakey Hall attended a early December sugar plantation fête and, in his account, emphasized the French-Creole physiognomy of the gathered: “the complexion of the rooms was decidedly French, and yet with a dash of American feature and manner just sufﬁcient to suggest a contrast.”32 An unnamed reporter for the English-language

New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin, taking in the January 8th sermon that introduced this chapter, seemed transﬁxed and slightly puzzled by the

Rouquette’s countenance. After admitting that “we know not when we have been more deeply interested in the appearance of a christian minister,” the writer described in detail the newly ordained priest’s hair (“long, black, luxuriant locks fell back in curls”), forehead (“wide, though not elevated”), eyes (“which glowed dark and eloquent . . . full of ﬁre and expression”), eyebrows (“arched . . . black as his hair”), nose (“well deﬁned, yet delicate, such as we often see in the paintings of the ancient masters”), and head (“statuesque in lineament and intellectual in expression”). Following this pruriently detailed list of physiological features, the reporter decided that Rouquette looked utterly foreign, perhaps even “Italian in [his] character,” but conceded that “he was in fact a Creole—a

31 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, November 30, 1883, Folder 6, Mss. 267, LRC.

32 A. Oakey Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of “Crescent City” Life (New York: J. S. Redﬁeld, 1851), 123. 72 native Louisianian, brought up under the eyes, and cherished by the sympathies of his fellow-citizens of the First Municipality.”33

! The young Creole turned to religion for comfort and guidance. There in

Nantes, Rouquette ﬂocked to the Catholic instruction of Abbé Louis-Anne

Dubreil. The Toulouse-born confessor administered First Communion rites to the twenty-year-old Rouquette, who described the service as “complete and spontaneous . . . an act of immense intensity, of pain, and love!” which engaged his “whole soul and . . . being.”34 Dubreil (also Dubreuil) was a poet-priest, one probable reason as to why Rouquette came under his influence; he penned religio-nationalist verse in the lyrical style of the era, poetry full of personal emotion.35 Rouquette later memorialized his first religious teacher in verse, “and you, Dubreil, and you, embodiment of the good shepherd;/Virtuous driver of a faithful flock.”36 Following his conversion, Rouquette left the Collège Royal for good.

! The Creole’s Breton schooling coincided with the earliest years of the July

Monarchy, a liberal constitutional monarchy headed by King Louis-Philippe I. In early 1830, before heading to Nantes, the just-arrived New Orleanian witnessed

33 “Celebration of the Eighth of January,” New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin, January 8, 1846.

34 LeBreton, 36.

35 Dubreil wrote several books of poetry, including one dedicated to his students, and later became the archbishop of Avignon. M. L’Abbé Dubreuil, Poésies (Paris: Auguste Vaton, 1857), 9-17 for biographical information; M. Dubreuil, Poésies dédiéesz a ses élèves (Saint-Pons, France: De L’Imprimerie de Semat, 1847); Tim Farrant, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature (London: Duckworth, 2007), 56; “Archbishop Louis-Anne Dubreil,” Catholic Hierarchy, accessed April 11, 2012, http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bdubreil.html.

36 Adrien Rouquette, Les Savanes, poésies américaines (Paris: Jules Labitte; Nouvelle-Orléans: Alfred Moret, 1841), 231. 73 the last days of Bourbon monarchal rule in Paris. Rouquette was around to see the overthrow of King Charles X, who had in turn deposed Napoleon Bonaparte and republican rule in France.37 Louis-Philippe’s government retained the

Concordat of 1801, a radical policy of religious reform, resulting from the French

Revolution (1789-99), which subordinated the Church to the State.38

! Rouquette soon fell under the spell of three Brittany natives, all celebrated writers, faithful Catholics, and impassioned romanticists: Lamennais, the liberal

Catholic activist, Lamartine, France’s most renowned poet-priest, and

Chateaubriand, the founder of French literary Romanticism. These three luminaries inspired Rouquette’s ﬁrst published work, Les Savanes, poésies américaines (1841). Released simultaneously in Paris and New Orleans, Les

Savanes took its name from the grassy ﬁelds that extended along the Bayou St.

John and Bayou Lacombe, the revered pastoral landscapes of his youth. The collected poems invoke “Dieu, la famille et la patrie,” a declaration of ﬁdelity to

God, family, and his homeland. In the preface, Rouquette challenged the

European view of the Americas, especially Chateaubriand’s false impressions of

Louisiana in his novella René (1802). Rouquette insisted that only Americans can faithfully depict the people and places of the New World: “To paint America with a touch of the truth, to paint with brilliant and local colors, it is necessary for children to be born of the soil, to be Americans.”39 Les Savanes’ verses

37 LeBreton, 30-31.

38 Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 40.

39 Rouquette, Les Savanes, 21 (ﬁrst quotation), 3-4 (second quotation). 74 romantically portrayed Louisiana’s, as well as Kentucky’s, native peoples and woodlands, its waters and wildlife. Journals on both sides of the Atlantic praised

Rouquette’s ﬁrst book; a Paris reviewer highlighting the poems’ “tenderness and fervent spirit of piety.”40

! Now a published poet, Adrien Rouquette once again sailed home from Le

Havre in November 1842. Just months earlier, between publishing Les Savanes and returning to New Orleans, he entertained the idea of a monastic life. He approached two holy orders, the Jesuits and the Congregation of the Mission, both of whom encouraged the Louisianian to remain a religiously-minded layman.41 He accepted their spiritual guidance, penned lines of poetic farewell to those cities—Nantes and Paris—that “in vain/ . . . have offered, in exile, pleasures and glory,” and embarked, for the fourth time in a decade, for his

“Creole city,” where he again attempted to become a Catholic priest.42

The First Creole Priest in the Worst Place on Earth

! Exactly two years before Adrien Rouquette gave his breakthrough sermon, a scandal that exempliﬁed the local diocese’s dilemma and would leave its mark on the young Creole, erupted in St. Louis Cathedral. On January 8, 1844, to commemorate the Battle of New Orleans’s twenty-ninth anniversary, Priest

40 New Orleans The Daily Picayune (October 29, 1841), 2.

41 LeBreton, 86-88.

42 The poem entitled “La Louisiane et la Nouvelle-Orléans” would be published in a collection that appeared nearly two decades later. Adrien Rouquette, L’Antoniade, ou la solitude avec Dieu, (trois ages) poème érémitique (Nouvelle-Orléans: [Impr. de L. Marchand], 1860), 23-26; LeBreton, 88. 75

Napoléon Joseph Perché made his way to the church pulpit. Despite what one reporter described as a “dark, dull, drizzly and dreary” day, civilians and military men, numbering in the thousands, turned out for the civic and religious ceremonies. All eyes would be on distinguished attendee Senator Henry Clay, who would win the Whig Party Presidential nomination four months later. It’s unknown whether Clay, after attending the military parade, remained for the

Catholic Mass.43 If so, he would have accompanied his sister-in-law Julie

Duralde, widow of his older brother John Clay and daughter to a distinguished

Creole family.44 Most certainly, Rouquette appeared in the Cathedral audience.

Just months before leaving Paris for New Orleans in November 1842, the young

Creole poet wrote Father Perché, acting chaplain of the Ursuline Convent

Chapel. If a French monastery would not take him, could he not ﬁnd a place in an

American institution, perhaps even the newly opened Ecclesiastical Diocesan

Seminary of St. Vincent de Paul, the ﬁrst clerical college in Louisiana?45

! The eloquent Joseph Perché soon became Rouquette’s spiritual advisor.

Not much older than the repatriated Creole, the French-born Perché, like

Rouquette, had spent time in central Kentucky.46 And as right-hand man to

Bishop Antoine Blanc of the New Orleans Diocese, the Abbé Perché injected himself into a controversy that threatened to rend the city’s Catholic congregation

43 “The Glorious Eighth!,” The Daily Picayune (January 9, 1844).

44 Grace King, Creole Families of New Orleans (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), 446.

45 LeBreton, 86-87, 86-87fn45, 89-90; William Lemuel Greene, Antoine Blanc, 1792-1860: Fourth Bishop and First Archbishop of New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Claitor’s, 2008), 116-118, 148; Baudier, 329-330.

46 LeBreton, 89-91. 76 in two. Installed as Bishop in 1835, Blanc inherited and ampliﬁed a sectarian schism, dating back to the Louisiana Purchase, between the clergy and a laymen group of wardens who administered most of the church parish’s day-to-day operations.47 For four decades, slander, lawsuits, and even physical violence marred the Catholic Church, and speciﬁcally the St. Louis Cathedral. Thus, by taking those steps toward the St. Louis pulpit that hallowed day, Perché became a marked man.

! What happened next that Jackson Day, as Perché advanced to make his oration, shocked the gathered witnesses. As Perché reached the foot of the stairs, an unidentiﬁed group of “young men” blocked his path, while telling the priest, “you will not go up.” Unwilling to deepen the scandal, Perché turned away.

Taking charge, Bishop Blanc intoned the Te Deum, explained the situation to the congregation, and called an end to Mass.48

! Jackson Day marked not only the future President’s triumph over invading

British forces but signiﬁed a rare moment in United States history. That day, an all-inclusive group of men fought under one ﬂag; three branches of the federal military and four state militias fought alongside nationless pirates from Barataria

Bay, Choctaw Indians, the enslaved, and Creoles white and black. The event might be remembered as the Battle of New Orleans, but this was more certainly

47 Emily Clark traces this schism back even further, see “Refracted Reformations and the Making of Republicans,” in Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, eds. Peter J. Kastor and François Weil (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009): 180-203.

48 Another account says one young man blocked the priest’s path. “Abbé Perché . . .,” The Daily Picayune (January 9, 1844); Brother Alfonso Comeau, “A Study of the Trustee Problem in the St. Louis Cathedral Church of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1842-1844,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 31:4 (October 1948), 952. 77 the battle for a United States. In this Church, this house of God, where General

Andrew Jackson later prayed thanks for his impossible victory, on the day proclaimed “the Glorious Eighth,” this was not supposed to happen.49 Rouquette left no surviving account of the event behind, but decades later, in the ﬁnal years of his mentor’s life, he honored Perché by calling the priest “the valiant Apostle who . . . show[ed] his powers on the ﬁeld of battle.”50

! Rouquette entered the seminary at a time when the Louisiana Diocese endured the darkest period of its half-century existence.51 The schismatic conﬂict began in those chaotic days when three empires laid claim to New Orleans. Just prior to the successive transfers of the Louisiana Territory to France and then the

United States, the Diocese’s leadership post remained empty, a bishopless vacuum that hobbled the Church. In July 1804, ﬁrst American Louisiana

Governor W. C. C. Claiborne accepted Father Patrick Walsh, acting Vicar

General for the past three years, as the local “head of the Catholic Church.”52

! Meanwhile, the pastorate and, more importantly, the laymen trustees, who governed the Saint Louis Cathedral—the spiritual heart of Catholic New Orleans

—backed Father Antoine de Sedella to remain as pastor of that church. He had held the position since 1795, or, ignoring a ﬁve-year lapse, from 1787 onward.

For decades, barefoot and clad in his brown Franciscan robe, rope-tied at the

49 “The Glorious Eighth!,” The Daily Picayune (January 9, 1844).

50 Quoted in LeBreton, 90-91.

51 Spain incorporated the combined Diocese of Louisiana and the Two Floridas on April 25, 1793.

52 A Vicar General acts as the principal deputy of the diocese’s bishop. Quoted in Charles Edwards O’Neill, “‘A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities’: New Orleans, Lay Trustees, and Père Antoine,” The Catholic Historical Review 76:2 (April 1990), 238. 78 waist, Sedella remained one of the more famous sights in the young city. To New

Orleanians he was famously unconventional. To the American Church authorities and his priestly colleagues, Sedella’s liberalism pegged him as a dangerous radical. He tolerated unorthodox Catholic practices, like the Jansenism and freemasonry movements, and even infamously allowed a Protestant minister to address his Cathedral congregation. Remembered and cherished then as now as

Père Antoine, he baptized, married, and buried seemingly everyone in New

Orleans over his long reign as priest of Saint Louis, including black Catholics. He ignored church doctrine and abuse from American authorities to administer

Catholic sacraments to free and slave unwed black women and their illegitimate children. While Church leaders denounced the mud and the blood and the beer that characterized the city—another priest called New Orleans “this sewer of all vice and refuge of all that is worst on earth”—Sedella worked to recognize, under the watch of his Savior’s Cross, the dregs of society, the prostitutes and courtesans, divorcées and freemasons.53 !

! The Sedella-supporting Creoles that composed the body of lay ofﬁcials, known as the marguilliers, would be opposed by not only John Carroll, Bishop of

Baltimore and thus the highest-standing Church authority in the United States, but also Washington, D.C.54 The trustees acted as the parish treasury, board of governors, and, because the Spanish Crown sanctioned the process back in

53 Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romantisicm, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 66-73. Baudier gives a far less sympathetic account of Sedella’s life and activities, 209-212, 275-176, passim. (quotation on 275).

54 O’Neill, 235-260, 268-271. 79

1805, its property holders too.55 In the eyes of the American Church authorities and the federal government, the marguilliers possessed too much power. In

1805, James Madison, who worried that New Orleans’s Creoles would realign with France or Spain, entered the fray. Referring to the ecclesiastical ﬁght as just another example of “a quarter already marked by sundry peculiarities,” the

Secretary of State publicly wished that the Church would force the marguilliers and Sedella into permanent subordination.56 Sedella and Walsh both appealed to

Rome and sued in secular court. The Supreme Court of the Orleans Territory judged in Sedella’s favor; he remained Saint Louis Cathedral pastor until his death in 1829.57 The following year, Leo-Raymond de Neckère became the ﬁrst priest consecrated under the title Bishop of New Orleans and thereafter served as head of the Cathedral.58

! Now dedicated to giving his life to the Church, Rouquette sought out the counsel of Priest Napoléon Joseph Perché. In 1842, New Orleans Bishop

Antoine Blanc, Neckère’s replacement, promoted Perché to Ursuline Convent chaplain, a notable position. From then on, Perché acted as the Bishop’s righthand man. After a nearly two-decade-long lull in hostilities, the never- resolved parishionary struggle remained openly hostile, with the marguilliers

55 The Marqués de Casa Calvo, former military commander of Spanish Louisiana, remained in Louisiana following the Louisiana Purchase and oversaw the church property. In 1805, without a bishop in place and with Sedella’s support, he transferred the parish’s property to the newly formed group of marguilliers. See Baudier, 257-259; O’Neill, 258; Bell, 68-69.

56 John Gilmary Shea, Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore . . . (New York: John G. Shea, 1888), 594.

57 O’Neill, 242-243, 268-271.

58 On Neckère, see Baudier, 315-324. 80 challenging Blanc’s authority. In November of that year, just as Rouquette set sail for home, the Ursuline Chaplain started the city’s ﬁrst ecclesiastical newspaper,

Le Propagateur Catholique, to win support for Blanc.59 The paper dove into the battle. Its mission to “explain, develop, and defend the different points of Catholic doctrine . . . is very peaceful,” editorialized Perché in the ﬁrst issue (November

13), “the means that we employ shall not be less so.”60 Using print, Church inﬂuence, and lawsuits, Blanc and Perché eventually forced the marguilliers out of power. In the 1830s and 40s, the Bishop christened other churches to serve the thousands of Catholics—mostly Irish, German, and Italian immigrants—while splitting the power of Saint Louis Cathedral, the city’s only Catholic parish until the 1833 opening of St. Patrick’s. For a predominantly Irish congregation, St.

Patrick’s preceded St. Augustine Church in 1842 (built for the city’s Afro-Creole population), St. Joseph’s in 1846 (Italian), and Holy Trinity in 1847 (German).

! Adrien Rouquette completed his schooling at the St. Vincent de Paul seminary just as Bishop Blanc’s series of moves consolidated the diocese’s power over the lay rebels. In a 1844 State Supreme Court ruling, the Creole marguilliers forfeited the ability to appoint pastors.61 With the blessings of

Baltimore and the Vatican, and strengthened by the city’s burgeoning non-Creole

Catholic numbers, Bishop Antoine Blanc forced the marguilliers to de-liberalize

59 Schisme de l’eglise St. Louis, Nlle.-Orleans, (New Orleans: s.n., 1842); Elisabeth Joan Doyle, “Mightier Than The Sword: The Catholic Press in Louisiana,” in Conrad, 249-251; LeBreton, 86-87fn45, 89-90.

60 New Orleans Le Propagateur Catholique 1:1 (November 12, 1842); quoted in Doyle, 250-251.

61 Pierre Soulé, The Wardens of the Church of St. Louis of New Orleans, vs. Antoine Blanc ([New Orleans]: J. L. Sollée, 1844); O’Neill, 236. 81

St. Louis Cathedral. But Rouquette’s concurrent ordination should be seen less as a move of appeasement to the city’s Creole population than a act of deﬁance by a determined individual. Though they supported the Church, Louisiana Creole fathers, historically, would not allow their sons to become priests, instead supporting the Parish’s mainly French and Spanish born priests, like Blanc and

Sedella. Rouquette reﬂected on this odd contention decades later: “the determination to leave the world, the departure of a Creole for the seminary to study for the priesthood, was an event which caused general astonishment and made an impression as sad as it was profound. Was it possible? A Creole to become a priest!”62 Rouquette saw himself as a spiritual soldier for Louisiana

Catholicism. He delighted in his July 2, 1845 ordination, took pride in being the

ﬁrst native Louisianian priest since the state’s cession to the United States, and often referred to himself in letters as the “Creole” priest.63

Back Home

! Just months after delivering his Jackson Day Speech, Rouquette once again felt the pull of the fatherland and crossed the Atlantic on his ﬁfth and ﬁnal voyage. From June to November 1846, he indulged in as much solitude and peace as Paris could allow (and again interviewed at several religious orders).64

The anonymity France afforded revitalized the young priest. Le Propagateur

62 Quoted in LeBreton, 94.

63 The United States Catholic Magazine and Monthly Review 4:3 (March, 1845), 199.

64 LeBreton, 113-117. 82

Catholique boasted that their homegrown luminary preached with “so much soul and feeling and art” that he had “captured the attention and excited the admiration of his large audience.” According to the same account, despite the history of animosity between non-Creole clergy and the Creole congregation,

Rouquette’s January 8th sermon attracted “many young Creoles” to the St. Louis

Cathedral.65 Rouquette had gained a following, and, as much as this prospect excited Bishop Blanc and the pastorate, it dismayed New Orleans’s newest, post-

Sedella, celebrity priest. Back in Louisiana and holed up on his family’s homestead along the Bayou Lacombe on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain,

Rouquette penned a letter to his superior on the state of the modern world:

It is repugnant to me, my heart suffers and bleeds at the slightest shock; my conscience is tortured and to accomplish the smallest duty requires such violence to my will that my health is impaired. Let me hide in some solitude; a misﬁt soul is a tortured soul.66

! Gradually distancing himself from the Church, while continuing to minister,

Rouquette refocused doubly on living as Louisiana’s bard. He deemed himself a

“nascuntur poetae” (“a born poet”).67 In a preface to another “young Creole bard[’s]” poetry collection, Rouquette railed against literary critics who “judge harshly” rather than “feeling and admiring with an open heart, and artist’s

65 Rouquette, Discours pronouncé à la Cathédrale, 28.

66 Quoted in LeBreton, 117.

67 Adrien Rouquette, Wild Flowers, Sacred Poetry (New Orleans: T. O’Donnell, 1848), 1. 83 heart.”68 He expected this volume of verse, Charles Oscar Dugué’s Essais

Poétiques (1847), to join the pantheon of Louisiana letters, a youth movement built on the twin ideas of “revolution and progress,” which would, in the end, make New Orleans a literary capital to rival Marseilles, the ancillary to Paris.69

! The following year, Rouquette added another column of letters to the print pantheon. This thin selection of “Sacred Poetry,” as the subtitle denoted, again featured the bard’s favorite subjects: exile and patriotism, and the spiritual solemnity found in nature. Though thematically dissimilar, Wild Flowers (1848) deviated from the poet’s established path. Written in English, “that unknown language” in the author’s words, these poems also rejected the traditional French alexandrine structure, seen in Les Savanes, for “the measures, rime schemes, stanzaic, and other poetic devices common among the conventional American poets.”70 Rouquette chalked up this language swerve to divine inspiration, rather than the shifting ethno-linguistic demographics and, thus, the potentiality of selling more books in English.71 While secluded at Bayou Lacombe, “a mystic and inwrapping spirit breathed within” his soul, completely enraptured and with

68 Adrien Rouquette, “Préface,” in C. O. Dugué, Essais Poétiques (New Orleans: A. Fortier, 1847), iv, ix. Born in Jefferson Parish in 1821, Charles Oscar Dugué was another of the legion of young Creoles shipped off for a French education. Returning to Louisiana in 1843, the Chateaubriand disciple’s verse appeared in several Francophone journals; he also published two stage dramas and served as an editor for the l’Orléanais newspaper. He died in Paris while working to get his Homo, poëme philosophique (1872) published there. Edward Larocque Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise en Louisiane au XIXe siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: H. Champion, 1932), 151-153.

69 Rouquette, “Préface,” i-iii (quotation on i).

70 Rouquette, Wild Flowers, 2 (italics in original); Bienvenu, 49.

71 Charles Gayarré penned his Romance of the History of Louisiana in English of that same year for these exact reasons. 84 feverish spontaneity, Rouquette wrote in the dominant tongue of his nation.72 His

Muse had more completely become America and her mysterious, ethereal wilderness.

! By retreating back into the wild, Rouquette forged a new sort of cosmopolitanism. Uprooted to another world, he again lived not, to paraphrase

Diderot, like a stranger. Beginning in late 1847, he resided “far from the city, separated from all society,” with no neighbors except “the friendly Indian,” the same Choctaw peoples with whom the adolescent Rouquette brothers cavorted along Bayou St. John.73 Rouquette resided near the area’s largest Choctaw village, Buchuwa, at the headsprings of Bayou Lacombe. There the villagers raised cattle, hogs, and food crops in proximity of their log cabins.74 Rouquette called his own cabin home the Nook, a place for solitude, writing, worship, and contemplation—a shelter away from New Orleans.

! Like his more gifted and justly famous contemporaries Emerson and

Thoreau, Rouquette struggled with modernity and progress during the transitionary Jacksonian era marked by turbulent waves of social ﬂuidity,

72 Rouquette, Wild Flowers, 2.

73 Ibid., 4, 5.

74 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 122; John H. Peterson, Jr., “Louisiana Choctaw Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” in Four Centuries of Southern Indians, ed. Charles M. Hudson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975): 101-112. 85 economic ﬂourishing, political fracturing, and cultural upheaval.75 Throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s, Rouquette gradually developed a mystic-meets- naturalist spirituality, a unifying relationship between the soul, God, and the natural world, that paralleled the philosophical underpinnings of those two giants of American thought. The Creole cultivated a correspondence with both thinkers, sending them copies of his verse.76 Rouquette, like the transcendentalist and the naturalist, sought out authenticity, modes of living and being that “were at least partly imitative and trying to recover passing forms of life.”77

! Echoing previous travels, Rouquette followed his brother Dominique from

New Orleans into the wilderness. Equally, if not more, numinous and restless of mind and body than Adrien, the elder Rouquette acted as the younger’s

“songline,” a path into the past.78 It was Dominique who shepherded Adrien back for the ﬁrst time to France, the Church, poetry, and the Louisiana frontier. Also

Collège d’Orléans and Nantes-educated, Dominique published, in Paris,

Meschacébéenes (1839), taken from a Native American name for the Mississippi

River.79 He dedicated the collection’s ﬁrst poem, “Exile et Patrie,” to his younger

75 Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Lewis Perry, Boats Against the Current: American Culture between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 1993); Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

76 Adrien Rouquette to Ralph Waldo Emerson, June 30, 1853, Folder 1, Mss. 267, LRC; Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1939), 362.

77 Perry, 59.

78 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987).

79 Tinker, 414-424. 86 brother of three years.80 Contemporary and later critics agreed that Dominique’s lyricism overshadowed that of his more famous brother.81 Adrien agreed; he bragged that Longfellow himself praised Dominique and said that the writerly world resembled “literary shrimps” compared to his brother’s poetical gifts. Adrien worshiped Dominique, idealizing his binary existence as sinner and saint: he

“smokes like a Spanish ﬁsherman, drinks like a French trooper, and swears like a

Western steamboat captain, albeit he goes to church, kneels down, and prays like a child or a woman.”82 He was the perennial vagabond, “fond of this roaming and free life.” Dominique portrayed himself circa 1850 living “this Bohemian and savage existence of the New World.”83 He adopted a Choctaw name, Soukbo-

Loussa (literally, Black-blanket), for the dark-colored robes he wore year-round, even in the intense humidity of the summer months.84 According to New Orleans lore, Soukbo-Loussa formed a picturesque sight while in the city, roaming the streets, prodigiously clad, carrying a cudgel in one hand and a ﬁstful of ﬂowers in the other.85 These sightings, however, were all too infrequent; though New

Orleans contained “sacred associations, the sweetest and dearest

80 Dominique Rouquette, Meschacébéenes: poésies (Paris: Librairie de Sauvaignat, 1839), 7-10.

81 Bienvenu, 2.

82 Adrien Rouquette, “Shookbo-Loosah; or, The-Man-With-the-Black-Blanket,” clipping from the Morning Star and Catholic Messenger (May 22, 1870), Folder 9, Box 25, John Minor Wisdom collection, Manuscripts Collection 230, LRC.

83 Dominique Rouquette, “The Choctaws,” Volume 1, Box 1, Mss. 508, LRC, 11.

84 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, November 27, 1883, Folder 6, Mss. 267, LRC.

85 Edward J. Fortier, “Non-English Writings I: French,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Later National Literature, Part III, ed. William Peterﬁeld Trent, et. al. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 595. 87 remembrances of childhood and youth,” Dominique also considered the city “a dull commercial, matter of fact place.” In the same newspaper editorial he exasperated, “whither shall I direct my ﬂight? To France? To California? God knows. But I must live anywhere but here.”86

! Though it developed slowly, the younger Rouquette’s urban-generated ennui eventually matched that of the elder brother. Nature embodied freedom, the truest American place, and a spiritual haven, while the steamboat-era city stood as a prison of materialism and godlessness. “Society, as now constituted,” he wrote in 1859, “is fast relapsing into wild disorder and true savageness.”87 The

Bayou Lacombe, Choctaw-settled frontier, represented for Rouquette “a space deﬁned less by maps and surveys than by myths and illusions, projective fantasies, wild anticipations, extravagant expectations.”88

! Here, not distant yet isolated from New Orleans, Rouquette merged his

“love for solitude and contemplation” with his “apostolic instinct of charity and special vocation,” the poetic life with his religious calling.89 He became a missionary to the Choctaw people, a calling that his Catholic ofﬁcials initially looked upon with disdain. Bishop Antoine Blanc discouraged Rouquette, telling him that they “have Savages enough in the cities to go and hunt them up in the

86 Dominique Rouquette, “Correspondence to the Fort Smith Herald,” March 9, 1851, Volume 6, Box 2, Mss. 508, LRC.

87 Adrien Rouquette, “Indian Missions,” clipping from the New Orleans Catholic Standard (October 20, 1859), Folder 6, Box 25, Mss. 230, LRC (italics in original).

88 Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 11.

89 Adrien Rouquette, “Camp Lomee,” clipping from the New Orleans Catholic Standard (December 16, 1858), Folder 4, Mss. 267, LRC. 88 woods; convert these.”90 But the Creole priest would not be swayed. Man built cities and God created the woods, according to Rouquette. In the forests and savannas of the frontier, “where life is freedom, and freedom is adoration,” he could communicate directly with God and better spread his Word.91 By 1858

Rouquette lived full time among the Choctaws. Though the Choctaws distrusted the missionary at ﬁrst, within a year they granted Rouquette the nickname

Chahta-Ima, “he who resembles a Choctaw.”92 Chahta-Ima found the peace and solitude for which he had long searched.

! But the Civil War’s savagery and disorder slammed into Rouquette’s eden with category ﬁve-scale violence. As ever an ardent American patriot, he remained an anti-secessionist to the very end. “A monstrous farce, Secession,” he sneered, “and played by most wicked actors!”93 With the inevitable conﬂict creeping closer he maintained hope for peace: “others may doubt, others may despair; but I . . . believe in the youth and strength of our great republican na- nation [sic].” He believed further, writing in the New Orleans Catholic Standard, that only a widespread Catholic conversion, alongside “the contemplative silent prison” that he himself cherished, could save the republic.94

90 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, December 12, 1884, Folder 6, Mss. 267, LRC.

91 Adrien Rouquette, “The young Choctaw Mont-ho-he,” clipping from the New Orleans Catholic Standard (March 20, 1859), Folder 6, Box 25, Mss. 230, LRC.

92 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, December 12, 1884, Folder 6, Mss. 267, LRC.

93 Quoted in LeBreton, 224.

94 Adrien Rouquette, “Missionary Feast at Buchuwa,” clipping from the New Orleans Catholic Standard (June 10, 1859), Folder 6, Box 25, Mss. 230, LRC. 89

! At some point during the siege of New Orleans in spring 1862, advancing and retreating Union and Confederate Armies crashed into Buchuwa; the machine had literally entered the garden.95 Holed up in his Nook, Rouquette welcomed ﬂeeing Choctaws, who came to him, as he later painfully remembered,

“with blood streaming from their wounds, and look[ing] for consolation. . . . Many died of, many were killed, and many more went away and never returned.”96 With his flock decimated, Rouquette defiantly rebuilt. He would remain in the piney woods that once enveloped the Bayou Lacombe through the mid-1880s, when health and advancing age sent him reluctantly back to New Orleans. In the final years of his life, just before being placed in Catholic hospice, Rouquette expressed, in a letter to a biographer, his final thoughts on Buchuwa: “If the Civil

War of Secession had not come to destroy everything, I should be today the happiest man on earth, in this village far removed from the civilized world.”97

! Despite this tragedy, Adrien Rouquette retreated back into the woods, deeper into the psychological expanses that Buchuwa and poetry provided. He continued to write, preach to the Choctaw, and live simply among the oaks. Trees were a prime spiritual symbol for the Creole priest. An allegoric tree proved the image for a lesson at the heart of his 1846 Jackson Day sermon. Midway through his oration, he reminisced on a recent stay in Paris and a visit to the Jardin des

95 Leo Marx describes the machine/garden literary trope as “a sudden, shocking intruder upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction.” Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 29.

96 Quoted in William D. Kelly, “An American Hermit,” The Catholic World 46:272 (November, 1887), 263.

97 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, December 12, 1884, Folder 6, Mss. 267, LRC. 90

Plantes. Passing with indifference between the foliage, he eventually came upon an unnamed species, “an exotic tree” from his homeland. At its roots, he fell upon his knees and kissed its trunk while proclaiming, “tree of my country! Tree of my country!” This tree convinced him to return home. It represented, to Rouquette, one half of his two-sided patriotic ideal. One half of patriotism he deﬁned as

“political” deference to laws, nation, and state. The second half contained a love for what Rouquette called the “natural,” those cultural attributes such as the

Creole Louisianian’s blood ties, language, and history. Rouquette contended that the Catholic Church, the institution itself, bridged the political and natural divides.

Meanwhile, the Saint Louis Cathedral ﬁguratively operated as the Louisiana

Creoles’ rock of salvation, like the oak tree and the Creoles themselves, originating on one side of the Atlantic while thriving on the opposite’s shores.

Though he relinquished his position at the Cathedral, he never deserted the

Church. Adrien Rouquette, the Creole priest and eternal exile, ﬁnally found a home. 91

Chapter Three “Conservons la langue immortel.” — Alfred Mercier, the Athénée Louisianais, and the Fight to Preserve the French Language1

! In 1879, the South still labored, fifteen years later, to revive itself following the worst bloodshed witnessed in the history of the United States. At the same time, New Orleans found itself in the midst of a sometimes violent, often times dynamic transitional period. This was a city fighting to fix its very real reputation as a racially non-integratable society. Five years earlier, a clique of white supremacists—calling themselves the White League—routed the desegregated police force to win the Battle of Canal Street (later refashioned as the Battle of

Liberty Place) and, for a few days, seized control of the metropolis. Five years later, the quadrennial World’s Fair, held on the far upriver end of New Orleans, would look to the past to showcase the city’s revitalized industrial and port economies by celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the nation’s ﬁrst cotton shipment to England in 1784. At the corner of Girod and Baronne Streets, during an unseasonably cold winter in January 1879, Dr. Alfred Mercier stepped out of the physician’s ofﬁce he shared with his brother Armand.2 Since before

New Years’ Day, the city’s “streets, gardens, and roofs were covered with small

1 C[harles] Testut, “A la propagation de la langue française en Louisiane!”, Box 3, Folder 3, l’Athénée Louisianais records, Manuscripts Collection 108, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (LRC).

2 L. Soards, Soards’ New Orleans City Directory, for 1879 (New Orleans: L. Soards & Co.), 474. 92 icicles with steely reﬂections,” wrote the Creole doctor on day one, page one of his new diary.3

! The freezing temperatures made time for writing, inspiring a published analytical study on sleet from the diarist.4 Since returning to New Orleans after his latest voyage to France in 1874, an uncommonly brief stay of several months,

Dr. Mercier relentlessly pursued his many projects and passions: a successful medical practice; a recently published and contentiously received novel; and his pet project, L’Athénée Louisianais, the literary-cum-scientiﬁc, entirely French- speaking society and its accompanying journal, Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée

Louisianais.

! On May 28 of that same year, Alfred Mercier sailed the 3,215 nautical miles and 245 hours from New York to Le Havre, along the traditional route that fewer and fewer New Orleans Creoles, white and black, seemed to be traversing in these impoverished post-war years.5 His time in Paris would be brief. By

June’s end he set south for Lyon, Marseilles, then Algeria.6 Occupied by the

French since 1830, exotic, mysterious, though still comfortingly familiar, Algeria and its capital Algiers would have been irresistible to a touring Louisiana Creole.

During a September 24 lecture presented to the learned men of the L’Athénée

Louisianais, Dr. Mercier took his audience on a “simple promenade” around the

3 Alfred Mercier, Journal intime, Folder 2, p. 1, Alfred Mercier papers, Manuscripts Collection 444, LRC.

4 Alfred Mercier, “Pluie Glaciaire,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:6 (May 1, 1879), 262-263.

5 Ibid., 127.

6 Ibid., 31, 62, passim. 93

Algerian capital and its ancient, walled quarter, the Casbah. “The city is an amphitheater,” began the speaker, “its white houses contrast with the background sometimes green, sometimes red.”7 He would likewise paint the Algerians in

Orientalist tones easily understood by his all-white, all-male Creole audience.8

“The Arabs foremost attracted my attention. . . . They clearly resemble, in their complexion, our mulattoes, others our griffes, while some our Indians.”9 Mercier completed his speech with another comparison:

Although Algeria is a land of mountains and Louisiana a land of plains, there are between the two countries . . . analogies it would be useful to highlight; these similarities are noticeable not only in things, but also among the people. Studying them may lead us to pose questions [and ﬁnd] an answer that concerns as much the future of Louisiana’s population as that of the Franco-Algerian.10

The Doctor wrapped the speech by promising to elucidate these comparisons at the group’s next meeting. That lecture would never come.

! A poet and novelist, Dr. Alfred Mercier could be regarded as the most brilliant of white Creole writers. One critic admitted that though “Louisiana French literature was never great and only sometimes good,” it is Mercier’s postbellum novels that most deserve critical re-examination from literary scholars.11 As little

7 Alfred Mercier, “Alger. — La Casbah,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 4:3 (November 1, 1879), 307.

8 A popular novel of the period was Joseph Holt Ingraham’s The Quadroone; or, St. Michael’s Day, which similarly painted New Orleans as an Orientalized “ancient town . . . composed mostly of Moorish-looking ediﬁces.” Ingraham, The Quadroone; or, St. Michael’s Day (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841), vii. On Orientalism in literature, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; revised ed., New York: Vintage, 2003).

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 310.

11 George Reinecke, “Alfred Mercier, French Novelist of New Orleans,” in In Old New Orleans, ed. W. Kenneth Holditch (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 145. 94 read then as today, his ﬁction frequently attacked the very proprieties and institutions that Louisiana’s French-reading public cherished. Lidia (featured in an

1873 newspaper and re-published in book form in 1887), an idyllic look at student life in Paris, assailed the clergy. His followup (1877) went innumerable degrees further, as evident in the title: La Fille du prêtre (The Daughter of the Priest).12 His most admirable, interesting, and republished piece of ﬁction came in 1881.

L’Habitation Saint-Ybars ou Maîtres et Esclaves en Louisiane (The Saint-Ybars

Plantation, or Masters and Slaves in Louisiana) is a pro-South, anti-slavery, social novel kin to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mary Cashell argues that Mercier’s novel should be read as a quintessential post-colonial text in which identity, multiple vernaculars, and power intertwine: throughout L‘Habitation Saint-Ybars,

“language informs our perceptions of the Creole [white and black] population’s cultural autonomy.”13

! Most importantly, Mercier counted as a scholar. He considered himself a serious student of music, art, Greek and Latin Literature, and the sciences. A leading biographer deemed him “an impeccable grammarian of French” and “the foremost student of the Creole [as in Afro-Creole] patois of Louisiana.”14 A

12 The most helpful English-language commentary of Mercier’s ﬁction remains Ibid., 145-176.

13 Mary F. Cashell, “Literary Expressions of Creole Identity in Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint- Ybars and Johnelle” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2012), 198. See also Mary F. Cashell, “Postcolonial Writing in Louisiana: Surpassing the Role of French Traditionalism in Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint-Ybars” (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 2008). For a similar reading, see Lawrence Rosenwald, “Alfred Mercier’s Polygot Plantation Novel of Louisiana,” in American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, ed. Marc Shell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002): 219-237.

14 Gloria Nobles Robertson, “The Diaries of Dr. Alfred Mercier: 1879-1893” (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1947), 1. 95 practicing physician who composed a Faculté de médecine de Paris dissertation on typhoid fever, Mercier brought an academic respectability to the tiny world of white Creole print culture.

! Rather than rehashing his North African voyage and drawing tenuous connections between Algeria and Louisiana, Dr. Alfred Mercier instead focused on the composition of two locally focused long-form essays for inclusion (both published in 1880) in the Comptes-rendus. The ﬁrst, “Étude sur la Langue Créole en Louisiane,” became the ﬁrst true linguistic study of the black Louisiana Creole

French vernacular.15 The follow-up, “La Langue Française en Louisiane,” explored, in frustrating terms, the disappearance of the French tongue—and thus, by correlation, the French Creoles—throughout the state.16 In these twin essays, Mercier endeavored to document what little remained of French culture in Louisiana, because for him, Francophonism deﬁned French culture.

! This chapter focuses on the importance of language to the white Creole circle of authors from the Civil War through Reconstruction’s end. Creoles embraced and emphasized French-language ﬂuency as they did history and religion. If the past constituted the foundation and Catholicism the structural underpinnings of a white Creole identity, Francophonism provided the blueprint, the functionary code that made their print culture project entirely possible.

Though the French language always ranked as signiﬁcant to the Creoles, the

15 Alfred Mercier, “Étude sur la Langue Créole en Louisiane,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 5:1 (July 1, 1880), 378-383.

16 Alfred Mercier, “La Langue Française en Louisiane,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 5:3 (November 1, 1880), 402-404. 96

1860s and 1870s unfolded in auspicious ways for those South Louisianians who spoke primarily in the mother tongue. Spoken English had overtaken French on the streets, in the mayor’s ofﬁce and the riverfront warehouses, and among the classroom voices of New Orleans. Following the Union occupation of the city in early-1862, laws virtually prohibited Francophone instruction in public schools, while a series of Reconstruction-era state Constitution rewrites gradually illegitimated the French language.

! Creoles fought back against the Anglophonization of New Orleans in a number of ways. During the war, a small cadre of men living abroad in France, including Alfred Mercier, published propaganda pieces arguing that French speakers of all kinds should band together to combat what they saw as the onslaught of English speakers the world over. Subscribing to a recent idea

ﬂoating around Paris, Mercier promoted a concept of Pan-Latinism—a nationalism based on linguistic and ethnic heritage. Back in North America, this was not a lingua-centric doctrine limited to Louisiana Creoles; Francophone organizations spread from Quebec to Detroit and southward to St. Louis.17

Exactly two weeks after the Civil War’s outbreak, New Orleans-residing French nationals banded together, on April 26, 1861, to form the Légion Française, vowing to defend “against unjust aggressors of their families, their homes, and the city that gives them hospitality.”18

17 Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 168-183

18 Réglements de la Légion Française formée à la Nouvelle-Orléans le 26 Avril 1861 (Nouvelle- Orléans: J. Lamarre, 1861), 3-4. 97

! In the 1860s, Louisiana Creoles and Frenchman joined together like never before to defend and preserve their common Francophone vernacular. From the thoughtful La Renaissance Louisianaise (beginning in 1861) to the shrilly satirical

Le Carillon (1869), a new wave of print journals, incorporating the bylines of black and white Creoles, advocated the idea of a new New Orleans, an urban intellectual capital where the French language provided the key to learning. “La

Nouvelle-Orléans c’est la nouvelle Athènes!” shouted the poet Charles-Oscar

Dugué in the pages of La Renaissance. Then later in his poem, aptly titled “La

Renaissance”:

Science, the arts have changed the homeland More than once: It’s your turn now, dear Louisiana; Hope and believe!19

This biracial Francophone effort to create a Creole-American Athens would be short-lived. Black Francophone Creoles found purpose and strength in the Civil

War’s aftermath, while the white Francophone population reacted by further turning inward.

! In January of 1876, Alfred Mercier’s Athénée Louisianais sought to become the leading scientiﬁc and artistic organization in New Orleans’s

ﬂoundering Francophone community. A highbrow club for white men only, the

Athénée’s founding fathers were Creole and French (and one Cuban) and represented the New Orleans’s French-speaking elite. Their goal was simple: the

19 My translation of C. O. Dugué, “La Renaissance,” New Orleans La Renaissance Louisianaise 1:1 (May 5, 1861), 8. 98 perpetuation of the French language in Louisiana.20 Twice monthly, except during those grim seasons when yellow fever struck the city, Athénée members gathered to read papers on science, arts, literature, and language.21 Their quarterly journal, the Comptes-Rendus, and the occasional public meeting would allow women and others to devour nearly a university-sized variety of lecture topics. They promoted the retention of French by sponsoring annual awards for the best essays on a given topic submitted by adults and students (separate gold medals would be given to men and women from the second year onward). A sample prompt from the 1881-82 men’s prize: “the use of the French language in the United States.”22

! Alfred Mercier habitually used two mottos throughout his career. The ﬁrst,

“Allons toujours!” (“Ever onward!”) spoke of his tireless efforts to promote and protect New Orleans’s Francophone heritage from disappearing.23 His second axiom was far less optimistic; it spoke to the conservation of French as a fool’s errand, a language without a future in Louisiana, an emphasis not on community

20 See the front cover of Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:1 (July 1, 1876).

21 James F. Bezou, “L’Athnee [sic] Louisianais,” Folder 13, page 3, Athénée Louisianais Collection, Manuscripts Collection 16, Louisiana and Special Collections Department, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans.

22 “Séance du 27 Mai 1881” and “Concours des Adults,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 6:1 (July 1, 1881), 474-475.

23 Lawrence Rosenwald, Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 53. 99 but on self-preservation. “La vie est un naufrage, sauve-qui-peut” (“Life is a shipwreck, save yourself”).24

A War at Home and Abroad

! By the time Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, the proud Creole

Confederate, “the South’s first paladin,” ordered the first cannons fired on Fort

Sumter inside Charleston’s harbor, Alfred Mercier knew Paris better than New

Orleans. He had, after all, spent more years in Europe than in the United States of America.25 Born in McDonoghville, across the Mississippi River from New

Orleans, on June 3, 1816, Mercier grew up French. His father, Jean Mercier, born in the the southwestern town of Blanquefort in Aquitaine, ﬂed France for America immediately following the bloody onset of the 1789 Revolution. Settling in New

Orleans, the elder Mercier married a French-Canadian, became a planter, and sired two daughters and four sons. The youngest, Jean Justin Charles Alfred

Mercier, simply called Alfred, was baptized by Père Antoine Sedella. Alfred

Mercier often followed the Parisian-pedagogic trajectory of his middle brother

24 Mercier, Journal intime, 243. The ﬁrst part of the phrase also appears in some epic verse published in the last years of his life: La vie est un naufrage; et l’étude est la port Dù l’homme qui se sauve attend la douce mort. [“Life is a shipwreck; and study is the port Of the man who escapes expecting the sweet death.”] Alfred Mercier, Réditus et Ascalaphos (New Orleans: Imprimerie Franco-Americaine, 1890), 23.

25 T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), 61. 100

Armand: ﬁrst to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand, at the age of fourteen, then, following a brief return to Louisiana in 1838, to medical school.26

! Before matriculating in the Parisian doctors college, Mercier switched career paths several times. As was the case with many Creoles abroad, restlessness engulfed him. Straight out of the Lycée, he ﬂirted with becoming a lawyer; he was then perhaps under the inﬂuence of his distinguished brother-in- law, the French-born Pierre Soulé, advocate, U.S. Senator, and Ambassador to

Spain. Mercier travelled extensively in France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland,

England, and Italy. These peregrinations, including a ﬁve-month journey to Sicily on foot, informed numerous novels written decades later. In 1842, a Parisian press published two long-form romantic poems under the dual title La rose de

Smyrne, et L’ermite de Niagara in addition to a collection of shorter verse, Erato.

Like his bookish Creole contemporaries, Mercier wore his inﬂuences on his sleeve: Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Byron, and Walter Scott.27 The themes and facile couplets contained in the opening lines of one poem from this period, titled

“Patrie,” was worthy of the Creole bard himself, Adrien Rouquette:

Now, after my eight years spent countryless, I look once more upon my fathers’ skies:

26 Though most biographers place Alfred’s father Jean as the ﬁrst Mercier to reach Louisiana’s shores, the family’s local roots might stretch back much further, see Robertson, page 28. For biographical details on Alfred Mercier, see X [Charles Deléry], “Ecrivains Louisianais: Alfred Mercier,” Renaissance Louisianaise (June 12, 1870)], Folder 1, Mss. 444, LRC; Rena LaCroix, “Dr. Alfred Mercier, the Man and His Works” (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1929); Edward Larocque Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise en Louisiane au XIXe siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: H. Champion, 1932), 351-364; Robertson, 25-75; Auguste Viatte, Histoire littéraire de l’Amerique française des origines a 1950 (Québec: Presses universitaires Laval, 1954), 287-290; Réginald Hamel, “Introduction,” trans. Richard Lanoie, in Alfred Mercier, L’Habitation Saint-Ybars, ou, Maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane (Montréal: Guérin littérature, 1989): 343-399.

27 Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 351-352; Reinecke, 146. 101

Sweet memories of my childhood happiness, I pray you loom again before my eyes!28

At some point, he married his landlord’s daughter, Virginie Vézian, a woman who nursed him back to health from a near-fatal ailment and with whom he had three children. Parisian critics probably ignored his poetry; the literary life was far from lucrative and, now a husband and father, he entered medical college in 1850 in search of a gainful career.29

! Shortly after securing his medical degree in 1855, Mercier returned to New

Orleans, a city assigned, in the words of one traveler of the period, “the unenviable character of being the most unhealthy in the world.”30 Alfred joined the struggle of his brother Armand, working alongside other Parisian-educated doctors to combat the endless tides of cholera, typhus, and, that scourge of scourges, yellow fever.31 But he would not stay long in Louisiana; with secession’s threat looming, he recrossed the ocean, carrying wistful memories of

France, in 1859.32 Whether the debates over slavery and states’ rights weighed upon his mind during his four-year stay in New Orleans, or if the imminent

28 Alfred Mercier, “Patrie,” in Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana, trans. Norman R. Shapiro, ed. M. Lynn Weiss (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 128-129.

29 The distinguished historian of Francophone literature, Réginald Hamel, could ﬁnd no praise of Mercier’s published verse in the French press circa 1842-43; see Hamel, 351-356, especially 352. Edward Larocque Tinker however says Mercier’s poems “were warmly received by the reviewers,” Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 351-353.

30 Arthur Cunynghame, A Glimpse at the Great Western Republic (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), 220.

31 On the sick in the city see chapter six of Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (1964; Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1998), 87-111.

32 [Deléry], “Ecrivains Louisianais: Alfred Mercier.” 102

American war encouraged his return to safer shores, Alfred Mercier left behind no clues.

! Back in his adopted home country, Mercier joined a small set of Louisiana

Creoles in Paris who had laid the propagandistic groundwork in defending the

Confederacy. The longest Parisian pamphleteering career of any Creole belonged to Pierre Paul Pecquet du Bellet de Verton. Born in New Orleans in

1816, the son of a France-via-Saint Domingue refugee, Pecquet du Bellet returned to his father’s homeland for reasons of health, six years before secession, according to his great-grandson’s family biography.33 There, Pecquet du Bellet, an attorney and ardent defender of states’ rights, penned several

Southern cause articles for the Parisian Le Pays—under the editorship of conservative, pro-slavery ﬁrebrand Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac—two months before the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.34 Translated and reprinted in the

New York Herald, Pecquet du Bellet’s articles advanced the economic argument that the European nations’ reliance on Southern cotton and tobacco in addition to

33 For biographical information see Paul Pecquet du Bellet, “American Civil War,” with a foreword by Nicholas Kariouk, Folder 5, Box 1, Pecquet du Bellet de Verton and Kariouk Family Papers (Mss. 4207), foreword, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La (LLMVC); Wm. Stanley Hoole, “Foreword,” in Paul Pecquet du Bellet, The Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet of Richmond and Its Agents Aroad: Being Memorandum Notes Taken in Paris During the Rebellion of the Southern States from 1861 to 1865, ed. Hoole (Tuscaloosa, AL: Confederate Publishing Company, 1963), 9-10.

34 The Le Pays articles appeared in February 8, 13, 20, 1861. Wm. Stanley Hoole, 9-10; Pecquet du Bellet, “American Civil War,” LLMVC, 6. 103 their intrinsic rivalry with the matching power of Northern commerce should force the Continent to side with the Slave States.35

! Towards the end of his ﬁrst Herald piece on March 5, 1861, Pecquet du

Bellet pushed beyond this commercial debate to survey the scene back home.

Without naming Creole Louisianians speciﬁcally, he wrote that Southerners shared a cross-Atlantic afﬁnity with their Gallic cousins. “In fact, they have not forgotten that France was their mother country,” du Bellet wrote. “And, faithful to the traditions of their fathers, they have preserved their manners and customs, and are well aware that France alone can furnish those thousand and one notions which crown her industry with renown.”36 This assertion of Latinate blood ties between Southerners and the French mirrored similar sentiments across

Europe by Confederates and Unionists.37 Both sides in the War Between the

States sought to foster familiar transoceanic relations that relied on pseudo- rational claims of origin.

! Throughout his wartime writings, Pecquet du Bellet repeated this claim of a contemporary world shaped not by political or economic powers but rather by racial, or what today we would deﬁne as ethnic, ideologies. In Letter on the

American War (1862) he characterized the Northern States as a “steamroller,” in

35 [Paul Pecquet du Bellet], “The Policy of the Western Powers Towards the Southern Confederacy,” New York Herald (March 5, 1861), 8; [Pecquet du Bellet], “The American Crisis— Necessity of a Recognition of the Southern Confederacy in Europe—The Value of Southern Trade to French Interests, &c., &c.,” New York Herald (March 13, 1861), 2.

36 Pecquet du Bellet, New York Herald (March 5, 1861).

37 Confederate and Union sympathizers organized the propaganda and counterpropaganda campaigns in England throughout the war, see Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House, 2010), 215-216, 395-397, passim. 104 the words of one biographer, an overpowering force that, strengthened by the

Monroe Doctrine, ﬂattened the other peoples of the Western Hemisphere through the absorption of Canada, Mexico, and Central America, as well as the extermination of the “black race” following the decimation of the Native

Americans.38 The Yankees’ ﬁnal pursuit, Pecquet du Bellet warned, was “the radical exclusion of European inﬂuence in the Americas.”39 In the Letter and other pamphlets from the period, Pecquet du Bellet appealed to Frenchmen to stand with the South because of their shared bonds and blood. “If we place . . . our hand on the chest of the Southern people,” he wrote in Le Pays, “we shall feel a

French heartbeat.”40

! Back in France, Alfred Mercier joined his Creole compatriot defending the

Confederacy from Anglo advances with his tract Du Panlatinisme: Nécessité d’une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du Sud (1863).41 In its opening lines, Mercier’s pamphlet divided the world into “three forces, or elements of civilization”: “Russo-Slavism, Anglo-Saxonism, and Gallo-Latinism.”42 Mercier sought to band together all Romance language-speakers: French, Spanish,

38 P[aul] Pecquet du Bellet, Lettre sur la Guerre Américaine (Paris: Imp. Schiller, 1862), 16; Salwa Nacouzi, “Les créoles louisianais défendent la cause du Sud à Paris (1861-1865),” Transatlantica 1 (2002), 13, accessed June 29, 2012, http://transatlantica.revues.org/451.

39 Pecquet du Bellet, Lettre sur la Guerre Américaine, 16.

40 This quote, from the June 3, 1861 edition of Le Pays, was included in a letter from a Washington D.C. critic of Pecquet du Bellet. Adam Gurowski to Paul Pecquet du Bellet, June 20, 1861, Folder 1, Box 1, Mss. 4207, LLMVC.

41 Mercier seems to have spent most of the war years not in Paris proper, but in Bray-et-Lû, seventy kilometers northwest of the capital. Hamel, 357.

42 Alfred Mercier, Du Panlatinisme: Nécessité d’une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du Sud (Paris: Librairie Centrale, [1863]), 5. 105

Portuguese, Italian, and all the denizens of their past and present colonies from across the globe. Taking its name from an 1860 Paris-published book of the same name, Du Panlatinisme surfed the mid-nineteenth century wave of movements dedicated to uniting peoples under pan-linguistic, pan-nationalistic federations. In 1848, a group of East European nationals inaugurated the ﬁrst

Pan-Slavic Congress in Prague. A dozen years later, Cyprien Robert, a former professor of Slavic language and literature Collège de France, and others posited a Latin-speaking alliance to counter the growing Pan-Slavism trend in their Le

Panlatinisme: Confédération Gallo-Latine et Celto-Gauloise.43

! One of the foundational tenants of any pan-linguistic movement was, of course, paranoia, anxiety over being eclipsed by another language group. In his version of Panlatinisme, Dr. Mercier sounded the alarm concerning Anglo-Saxon global dominance. He admired but feared the Anglo-Saxon-blooded Yankees’ advancements throughout North American.

While England teaches commerce and European civilization to peoples in Asia, Africa, et Oceania, the descendants of his sons, reinforced by endless emigration from Germany and Ireland, . . . in this immense theater, . . . has erased or tends toward erasing all the others: the Dutch on the banks of the Hudson; the Swedes in Delaware; the French in Missouri, Michigan, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Alabama; the Spanish in Florida, California, and New Mexico; it is in the process of absorbing all the varieties of the white race.44

43 [Cyprien Robert et. al.], Le Panlatinisme: Confédération Gallo-Latine et Celto-Gauloise, contre- testament de Pierre le Grand, et contre-Panslavisme, ou projet d’union fédérative des peuples Gallo-Latins (Paris: Passard, 1860); Ezequiel Adamovsky, Euro-Orientalism: Liberal Ideology and the Image of Russia in France (c. 1740-1880) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), 144, 180fn2.

44 Mercier, Du Panlatinisme, 9-10. 106

Mercier feared the conquering inﬂuence of a white race, a singular white race that just so happened to not speak his mother tongue, a white race that was not his own.

Purely Franco-Louisianian

! Though he had not spent much time in New Orleans in the three decades leading up to the 1860s, Mercier and his Parisian Creole cohort would have been aware of the goings-on back home. Seemingly every aspect of Creole culture succumbed to rapidly multiplying German and Irish numbers. As was observed in the previous chapters, in the decades following the Louisiana Purchase, the

Creoles of New Orleans gradually lost their majority numbers in terms of overall population and church membership. By the 1830s, the city’s Francophone community forfeited its critical mass to emigrants from Europe and the Northern

United States. In the following decade, Creoles involuntarily relinquished their control of the Catholic Church, due to the progressive addition of non-Latin parishes for non-traditional worshipers and ultimately following the 1844 State

Supreme Court ruling that barred the Creole marguilliers from appointing their own pastors.

! As for local politics, up until 1846 every mayor of post-Louisiana statehood

New Orleans was born in New Orleans or France. In that year’s election, held in a still tripartite-sectioned city, Abdiel Daily Crossman, a Maine-born haberdasher and Whig of Massachusetts and Puritan stock, won in a tight race against a pair of Creoles, A. J. Guirot and incumbent Edgar Montégut, who split the Democratic 107

Party vote, allowing the unorthodox candidate to carry the First Municipality, the traditional Francophone enclave.45 Crossman’s election signaled a sea change; he would go on to win four two-year terms in total, while his antebellum successors carried decidedly non-Latinate names and roots: John L. Lewis (born in Kentucky), Charles M. Waterman (New York), Gerard Stith (Virginia), and John

T. Monroe (Virginia).46 Of course, these political contests were being decided by an increasingly English-speaking electorate. The Jacksonian Louisiana

Constitution of 1845, which theoretically promised universal white male suffrage, ensured that more new transplants could vote.47

! Additionally, New Orleans’s educational system undoubtedly churned out more Anglophones than Francophones throughout the antebellum years.48 The project of Americanizing through language instruction and education had long been a dream of American ofﬁcials. In 1810, ﬁrst territorial governor William C. C.

Claiborne envisioned a public school system that would enroll

45 John S. Kendall, History of New Orleans (Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1922), 161-163.

46 For a list of mayors with biographical sketches see E. D. Friedrichs, ed., “Administrations of the Mayors of New Orleans, 1803-1936” (New Orleans: City Hall Archives, 1940); a digitized copy may be found at http://nutrias.org/info/louinfo/admins/adminintro.htm (accessed October 9, 2012).

47 For discussions on just how universal the State Constitution of 1845 extended the vote to all white males see Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840-1875 (1939; revised ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 121-156; John M. Sacher, A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 205-208.

48 The Minutes of the Second School District, situated in the former First Municipality, supposedly a Creole stronghold, show that between 1852 and the following year, native English speaking public school students (jumping from 968 individuals to 1109) caught up with their native Francophone peers (1288 to 1122). See the table in Donald E. DeVore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841-1991 (Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991), 29. 108

the children of native Louisianians and the native Americans, of the native Frenchmen and the native Spaniards . . . to induce the rising generation to consider themselves one people, and no longer to feel that jealousy and want of conﬁdence which exists among their fathers.49

The city’s 1836 tripartite split allowed the Anglo-American-governed Second

Municipality to develop a separate public school system in January 1842. The founders of the free school program, Joshua Baldwin and Samuel J. Peters, consulted with noted Massachusetts education reformer Horace Mann. First

Public School Superintendent John A. Shaw instituted a New England-style teaching philosophy with Northeastern source material. He purchased the same textbooks used in his hometown of Bridgewater, Massachusetts and hired mostly

New Englander instructors.50 According to historian Robert Reinders, the curriculum forced students to answer completely provincial questions such as,

“how far is Bellows Falls from Boston, and in what direction?”51 Despite such regional departures, the district’s successes encouraged the First and Third

Municipalities’ school boards, including Charles Gayarré as a member of the former, to fully adopt the Second’s teaching system. Soon, French-ethnic schoolchildren attended bilingual schools, where English-language classes were taught by Northerner teachers using Massachusetts textbooks. In the prewar decades, English quickly became the language needed to prosper in the United

49 Stuart Grayson Noble, “Governor Claiborne and the Public School System of the Territorial Government of Louisiana,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 11:4 (October 1928), 547-548.

50 On public school education in New Orleans, see DeVore and Logsdon, 5-23; Reinders, 131-137.

51 Reinders, 132. 109

States, even in the Francophone-rooted state of Louisiana.52 Just as Creoles headed across the Atlantic to learn their French heritage, they frequently travelled to the northern states to become proﬁcient in Americanness. Like the young Charles Gayarré in Philadelphia and Adrien Rouquette in Kentucky, Alfred

Mercier spent a year of his early twenties studying the English language in

Boston.53!

! Though locally published Francophone newspapers continued to feed their readers with political, economic, and social dispatches, the 1840s, that

“golden era of French journalism in Louisiana,” saw the ascent of literary periodicals.54 These artistic journals, modeled after contemporary Continental magazines and tagged with self-reﬂective titles like Revue Louisianaise and Les

Veillées Louisianaises (Louisiana Evening Conversations), placed the former

French colony on the same level as the French Republic. The cultivated magazines of the period contained local gossip, criticism of the latest literature of stage performance, the occasional news piece from Europe, and most popularly feuilletons—serialized novels from home and abroad. Many feuilletons involved popular historical tales of colonial Louisiana life, and were often republished as

52 DeVore and Logsdon, 23-30; Reinders, 132.

53 One biographer claims that Mercier could not handle the Massachusetts winter. Hamel, 382

54 Edward L. Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers and Periodicals of Louisiana,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 42 (April 20/October 19, 1932), 258-261, quotation 256. 110 individual titles.55 Probably the most celebrated and versatile man of artistic letters in antebellum New Orleans was Mercier’s cousin Louis-Placide Canonge, whose dramatic plays France et Espagne (1850) and Un Grand d’Espagne

(1851)—previously serialized in Le Courrier de la Louisiane and L’Orléanais respectively—detailed life and liberty in the years following Louisiana’s handover from one empire to another.56

! But perhaps the most important Francophone cultural periodical—defined in terms of years active—was La Renaissance Louisianaise, a weekly magazine that, as the subtitle asserted, reviewed local, national, and global issues concerning the Politique, Scientifique et Litteraire. Discharged just a month following the official commencement of Civil War hostilities, Creole publishers

Emile Hiriart and Henri Vignaud hoped their paper would ignite ﬁres under the lagging political and literary aspirations of their Creole compatriots. Printed on cheap, yellow paper—common in an era of wartime rationing—La Renaissance

Louisianaise quickly attracted the minds and pens of the city’s most distinguished

Creole writers, including Gayarré, Canonge, and Dominique Rouquette among many others.57

55 Edward J. Fortier, “Non-English Writings 1: French,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Later National Literature, Part III, ed. William Peterﬁeld Trent, et. al. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 593; Sam Riley, “Exotic Americana: The French-language Magazines of Nineteenth Century New Orleans,” Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 1:2 (Fall 1999), accessed December 9, 2012, http://www.bsu.edu/web/aejmcmagazine/journal/archive/Fall_1999/ Riley.html.

56 The fullest biographical and bibliographical account of Canonge remains Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 66-73, to which can be added Auguste Viatte’s appendage “Complement à la bibliographie louisianaise d’Edward Larocque Tinker,” Revue de Louisiane/Louisiana Review 3:2 (Winter 1974), 19.

57 Reinders, 214. 111

! In these politically shattered and sanguinary times, there could not have been a better ﬁt for the political section’s editor-in-chief position than Emile

Hiriart. In an era when hot-headed, French-blooded gentlemen, who thought themselves aristocrats of a certain sort, defended their honor against the slightest of provocations with duels of honor, Hiriart, as the period’s romanticists fondly remember, once accepted two guns-under-the-oaks engagements from a pair of gentlemen who took exception to his negative newspaper review of an opera singer. He ﬁrst shot to a draw with Canonge, who later went on to write for his magazine, and days later killed Edouard Locquet.58 If a tuneless aria could kill a man, what would come of “the gigantic pretensions,” Hiriart wrote in the ﬁrst issue (May 5, 1861) of La Renaissance Louisianaise, “of the northern element

[that] so frightened our people”? Secession already, bloodshed most probably, but hope, certainly, for a Southern victory. A Southern ascendance, Hiriart hypothesized, would create “a unity and harmony” for Louisiana’s Francophones, a place and people failingly “set in her traditions, enveloped in her memories, . . . almost entirely in her past, a stranger to the progress and the spirit of her times.”59

! Along with his editorial co-conspirator, literary manager Henri Vignaud,

Hiriart endeavored—like Gayarré, Rouquette, and other Creole literati—to engender a Louisiana rebirth in print. Forming a common linkage with their

58 John Augustin, “The Oaks: The Old Duelling-Grounds of New Orleans,” in The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State, ed. Thomas M’Caleb (New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894), 85-86.

59 Emile Hiriart, “La Renaissance Louisianaise,” La Renaissance Louisianaise 1:1 (May 5, 1861), 1-2 (translation mine). 112

Creole conspirators in France, La Renaissance Louisianaise argued that it had simply become hopeless to “reconcile American citizenship with Louisiana patriotism.”60 Hiriart and Vignaud, as with Pecquet du Bellet and Mercier abroad, hoped to forge a lasting identity of Louisiana Creole nationalism. In the words of

Creole poet Charles-Oscar Dugué, who tackled the theme of “Renaissance” in the ﬁrst pages of Hiriart and Vignaud’s deﬁant newspaper, the retention of the

French tongue should become the primary feature with which to build a French- rooted Creolism. It made the Creoles rebels.

The Creole also has his origin Retained features; That seem to take hold like the root In French soil.

He has not abandoned the usage of his tongue, Remaining a rebel A foreign accent peculiar to the harsh language Of the sons of the North.61

Based on a common language, this deﬁant Franco-nationalism would make the

Creole New Orleanians wartime rebels of a different sort.

! Remarkably, this rebellious Gallicism initially was not restricted to white

Creoles. La Renaissance Louisianaise widened the circle to include New

Orleans’s Creole gens de couleur libres into its pages. Michel Séligny, who publicly identiﬁed as a free man of color, penned three stories for Hiriart and

60 Ibid. (translation mine).

61 The life of Dugué resembled that of most other Creoles featured here: Paris-educated, Chateaubriand-worshipping, middling scribe of les belles-lettres. Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 151-153. Lines of verse from Dugué, 8. 113

Vignaud’s journal from May to November 1861.62 The biographies of Séligny and many other black Creole men of letters mirrored the lives and careers of their white Creole counterparts. These colored Creole cosmopolitan men of privilege relocated to France for education, publishing opportunities, and in search of their roots. In New Orleans, they published their own artistic journals (like L’Album littéraire of 1843) and romantic poetry collections (in 1845, Les Cenelles became the ﬁrst African-American anthology of verse printed in the Americas), and founded benevolent and literary societies (La Société des Artisans founded in

1834).63 The New Orleans-born and French-educated Creole of color, Adolphe

Duhart, for example, devoted “considerable energy and talent to creating, cultivating, and preserving Louisiana’s francophone literature.” He administered a

French-language school for African-American orphans and wrote poetry for both black and white Creole periodicals, La Tribune and La Renaissance.64By the war’s halfway point, La Renaissance Louisianaise tacked on the subtitle, Organe des Populations Franco-Américains du Sud. This self-proclaimed “Journal of the

62 Michel Séligny also wrote for the white Creole Le Courrier de la Louisiane and l’Abeille. Michel Fabre, “The New Orleans Press and French-Language Literature by Creoles of Color,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 39; Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 431.

63 According to Michel Fabre, colored Creoles represented one-tenth of the total 1860 New Orleans population of 150,000. Fabre, “The New Orleans Press,” 29-39, statistic on 39.

64 Shapiro and Weiss, quotation on 67; Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, trans. and ed. Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (1911; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 68; Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 210, 212; Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 153. 114

Franco-American populations of the South” sought ﬁt to include all Francophone

Creoles under its masthead.65

! This white-black Creole print alliance was especially curious considering the fact that Henri Vignaud consistently ﬁlled his La Renaissance Louisianaise columns with the sort of racist, anti-métissage screed rampant throughout the slave-owning South. (It is a wonder that Vignaud found time to write at all; before his magazine was a month old, the Confederate Army commissioned the Creole as captain of the 6th Louisiana Regiment.)66 In a trio of summer 1861 articles

Vignaud echoed the ideological canon of what scholars have since deemed the mid-eighteenth century “American school of anthropology.”67 Propagated by admired learned men—like the phrenologists Charles Caldwell and Samuel

George Morton, and the polygenesists Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz—the tenets of this unofﬁcial school of scientiﬁc racism asserted that different races embodied different species derived from several separate ancestral creations.68 “Slavery is the normal state of the black man,” the Renaissance literary editor contended in early 1862, just as the Union Navy’s stranglehold of the Mississippi River Valley became palpable in New Orleans, “White and Black do not belong to the same

65 This change occurred, in 1863, with volume III. Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers,” 315.

66 Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 481-491.

67 Henri Vignaud, “Le problème de l’Unité des races humaines,” La Renaissance Louisianaise 1:9 (June 30, 1861), 136-138; “De l’origine des Nègres,” 1:10 (July 7, 1861), 152-154; “Le Probleme de l’esclavage,” 1:11 (July 14, 1861), 169; Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), 190-200.

68 Painter, 190-200. A fuller account on the subject is Bruce Dain, A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 115 species.”69 Vignaud’s callous racism traveled hand-in-hand with Gallic lingua- nationalism. The Renaissance’s Creole staff would have been familiar with

French racial theorist Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855). The title of Vignaud’s ﬁrst racialist essay, “Le problème de l’Unité des races humaines,” mirrored that of the Aryan aristocrat and author, who argued that as nations lose their purity of blood, they degenerate. This racial decay, Gobineau believed, was readily apparent in the deterioration of their language. The ﬁfteenth chapter of his treatise claimed that

“Languages, unequal among themselves, perfectly correspond with the relative merit of their races.”70 It becomes readily evident, however, while ﬂipping through the ﬁrst years of La Renaissance Louisianaise, that Vignaud’s anxiety over race- mixing took a backseat to dispatches from the warfront. Vignaud’s “virulent negrophobia” hardly ripened into the journal’s “dominant theme,” as one notable historian claimed.71 In fact, as late as 1869, free man of color Auguste Populus, a

Cenelles-anthologized poet, placed rhymed acrostics in many issues of La

Renaissance.72

! The same year, as La Renaissance Louisianaise’s long print run drew to a close (eventually ending in 1871), a new current events and arts weekly more

69 H[enri] Vignaud, “Des sources de l’esclavage,” La Renaissance Louisianaise 2:5 (February 2, 1862), 56 (translation mine).

70 Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, tome premier (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Fréres, 1853) 307-349.

71 Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 168.

72 Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 378; Desdunes, 55-56. 116

firmly married the twin doctrines of faithfully protecting New Orleans’s Franco- linguistic community while espousing a white supremacist zealousness. The founding editor-in-chief, Dr. Pierre-Forester Durel, chose for his reactionary journal a “noisy title,” Le Carillon (“The Alarm Bell”), set to roust awake the city’s white Creole, French-reading populace.73 A man transformed by the Civil War, the Creole Dr. Durel attended medical college in Paris, practiced in New Orleans, and served as a field surgeon in the Confederate Army for the conflict’s duration.

At war’s end, he returned to New Orleans only to ﬁnd his family’s wealth (he married a banker’s daughter), like that of many of their Creole compatriots, had completely evaporated.74 Outraged and degraded by the state of affairs in Union- occupied New Orleans, Durel began printing Le Carillon with the help of benefactors on September 12, 1869. His paper’s subtitle deemed itself a Journal peu politique, encore moins litteraire pas de tout serieux (“A slightly political, even less so literary, and not at all serious journal”). Symbolically, Le Carillon restored a ringing voice and a bit of levity to a state that had lost approximately

10,000 Confederate soldiers in battle or from disease, saw nearly ﬁfty percent of its total population (the enslaved numbered 331,726 in 1860) emancipated, its plantation and shipping economies plunged in ruins, and even countless church and plantation bells sacriﬁced to the war cause. In reality, however, Durel dashed off Le Carillon—and he did compose much of the editorial writing himself—as a mean-spirited and satirical propaganda rag directed at the “swarm of vermin” that

73 “Le Carillon!” New Orleans Le Carillon 1:1 (September 12, 1869), 3 (translation mine).

74 Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 174-183; Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers,” 267-272. 117 overran Reconstruction-era New Orleans: carpet-bagging Yankees, hated

Republicans, Northern-leaning Catholic priests, dastardly Southern scalawags, and socially and politically empowered African Americans (both Creole and not).75

! In the ﬁrst months of its existence, Le Carillon focused, like that of La

Renaissance Louisianaise just prior, on a purely local, ethnic agenda. Dr. Durel promised, in the paper’s eighth issue, that Le Carillon would remain “purement

FRANCO-LOUISIANAISES.”76 At the time, Durel’s commitment would have appeared as very much a losing proposition. New Orleans’s white Creole elite had placed all of their faith in an ascendant Gallic nationalism tied to a

Confederate victory. That hope dissipated after the Federal victory, matching the rapid disappearance of the French language from the city’s streets, schools, and newspapers. Soon after New Orleans’s capture in May 1862, General Benjamin

Butler—on his way to becoming perhaps the most hated man in the city’s history as Union commander of the Department of the Gulf—consolidated the three public school districts into an immense English-language academy, thus ending the use of French-language instruction. With few Creole families, white and black, able to afford to send their children abroad to master the French tongue, the number of Catholic schools in New Orleans proliferated following Butler’s

75 “Le Carillon!” Le Carillon 1:1 (September 12, 1869), 3 (translation mine).

76 “Changement de Direction et de Propriété du ‘Carillon,’” Le Carillon 1:8 (October 31, 1869), 1 (italics and uppercases in original). 118 consolidation plan.77 During the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1864— chieﬂy held to abolish slavery by the proxy order of President Abraham Lincoln through Butler’s replacement General Nathaniel P. Banks—Alfred C. Hills, who believed in “a homogenous people, in one language and one system of law,” quibbled that the “publication of the laws of this State . . . in the French language, is a nuisance and ought to be abolished in this State or any other.”78 The irascible delegate ultimately did not receive his wish, and proceedings were published in

French, English, and German.79 However, the assembly passed laws to eliminate the requirement for any state ofﬁcials to be bilingual (Article 128) and cemented

English as the language of instruction in State public schools (Article 142).80 The revolutionary, bi-racial conclave of gentlemen that met to hash out the 1868

Reconstruction Constitution ﬁnally expelled French from Louisiana government

(this despite the fact that there were several black Creole delegates in attendance) with a new article that read: “the laws, public records, and all records of judicial and legislative proceedings of the State shall be promulgated and

77 Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900,” in eds. Hirsch and Logsdon, 242. We can compare the following numbers from the State Superintendent of Public Education’s annual report of 1871. For the school year 1870-71, there were 19,401 white and black students in 222 private and denominational schools in New Orleans. In the school year 1867-68, there were 21,507 pupils in 55 public schools in the city. Thomas W. Conway, Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Education, Thomas W. Conway, to the General Assembly of Louisiana, for the Year 1871 (New Orleans: Republican Ofﬁce, 1872), 317, 321. Also, see Mary Di Martino, “Education in New Orleans during Reconstruction,” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1935), 159-181; Roger A. Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862-77 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 115-119.

78 Debates in the Convention for the Revision and Amendment of the Constitution of the State of Louisiana. Assembled at Liberty Hall, New Orleans, April 6, 1864 (New Orleans: W. R. Fish, 1864), 47.

79 Gitlin, 166.

80 Debates in the Convention, 640, 642. 119 preserved in the English language only. All publication of the same in any foreign language is hereby forever prohibited.”81 The knockout blow came with an article that simply stated that “public schools shall be conducted in the English language.”82

! The Creoles’ world had turned upside down. The German language put on an equal footing with French! Black Americans not only citizens but voters and legislators! No rising generations of French speakers in the future! Furious, Durel took aim at this forced anglophonization of Louisiana with a sly attack on the ofﬁcial inclusion of German. “We reproduce below a law recently enacted by the

Secretary of State,” Le Carillon reported in an irreverent article dated late-March

1870, “and whose existence is ignored by many of our citizens. This law is simply a monstrosity, . . . the desire for the germaniﬁcation of Louisiana.” The mock- report, titled “Adieu, vieille Louisiane!,” joked that “we,” the legislature, “have hastened to abolish the French language—the mother tongue of more than one- hundred thousand Louisianians! . . . and hasten to order that legal notices must be reproduced in German.”83 Durel’s purely Franco-Louisianian enterprise could not survive in this ﬂuid linguistic and increasingly violent political environment and

Le Carillon ceased publication, for lack of subscribers, on May 1.84

81 Ofﬁcial Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention, for Framing a Constitution for the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: J. B. Roudanez & Co., 1867-1868), 39.

82 Ibid., 269. French had since moved

83 “Adieu, vieille Louisiane!,” Le Carillon 1:29 (March 27, 1870), 2 (translation mine, italics in original).

84 Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers,” 269. 120

! For the next two years, while Dr. Durel simmered, New Orleans rose to a boil. He would resuscitate his satirical paper on November 3, 1872, a year after the demise of La Renaissance Louisianaise, but more signiﬁcantly, just the day before a contested gubernatorial election reignited the ﬁres of war throughout

Louisiana. Voting Day 1872 ended the cold war of restless peace between white

Republicans, black Republicans, and white Democrats that deﬁned the ﬁrst ten years following the Federal occupation of New Orleans. The subsequent chapter will survey the conversion of Le Carillon, a resurrection marked by a transition from its support of the purely Franco-Louisianian to the purely white Louisianian, a swing from a focus on language to an obsession with blood.

From Athénée To Autochthon

! As the lingua-partisan differences began to recede in the 1870s, the city and state witnessed a sharp decline in the number of French-language newspapers and periodicals. Numbering around 150 titles, only two nineteenth- century New Orleans Francophone journals would survive to see the twentieth century.85 L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans, a political, commercial, and literary

(mostly) daily paper, founded in 1827 by San Domingue refugee François

Delaup, struggled into the 1920s.86

! The public voice of a very private organization, Comptes-Rendus de

L’Athénée Louisianais sought to replace the mass of failing journals while taking

85 Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers,” 281-282, passim.

86 Ruby Van Allen Caulfeild, French Literature of Louisiana (1929; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998), 40-43. 121 one last leap at revitalizing written French. Literally meaning the “reports” of the

Athénée Louisianais, the Comptes-Rendus sought to rebuild the Francophone community, a “collective force” in the words of likely author Alfred Mercier, based on their “common heritage.”87 Shunning the direction of the satirical, and eventually hostile and racist, Le Carillon, the Athénée’s agenda involved the strengthening of the the city’s collective minds. The group aimed higher, to intellectually remake the Creole individual. The members’ intellectual pursuits addressed the “scientiﬁc, literary, artistic,” and, following in the steps of La

Renaissance Louisianaise, a “defense” of white Creole culture and the French

Language. A manifesto of sorts, printed in the journal’s ﬁrst issue, warned, in revolutionary tones, that “inaction is death,” while promising that the quarterly journal would act as “the ark” and “the light” in the current times of darkness and distress.88

! Founded in 1876, the Athénée Louisianais arrived at a time of commercial and industrial revival. Stymied by the War and Reconstruction, French and Anglo-

New Orleanians capitalists, in the last days of Federal occupation, struck out to rebuild their fortunes. “This is an age of work and activity,” read J. Curtis Waldo’s

English-language Visitor’s Guide to New Orleans, “when the majority of men

87 “Journal de l’Athénée Louisianais,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:1 (July 1, 1876), 1 (translation mine).

88 Ibid., 2 (translation mine). The Athénée Louisianais and the Comptes-Rendus thus marked the real beginnings of a “Defend New Orleans” movement, a slogan that became a post-Hurricane Katrina rallying cry, lifestyle, and clothing brand “dedicated to celebrating, preserving, and promoting New Orleans culture.” Defend New Orleans Facebook page, accessed November 8, 2012, https://www.facebook.com/pages/DEFEND-NEW-ORLEANS/7205526108. 122 demand facts in short sentences.”89 To combat this vulgar Anglicization of urban life in Louisiana, the Athénée would function as the complete opposite: an exclusive group of elite, erudite French-speaking men meeting salon-style to spout prolix prose on a variety of subjects. In the exact same month (November

1875) that Waldo’s guidebook appeared, an idea, most likely sprouted from the brain of Alfred Mercier, spread within a group of learned Creoles. The twelve organizing members convened at the home of Olivier Carriere in early January, adopted a constitution, elected ofﬁcers, and set about to inaugurate a French- language academy of higher learning for New Orleans.90

! The founding fathers of the Athénée Louisianais joined together with common credentials: all had reached the loftiest levels of education and social rank.91 The list of the dozen originating members included six doctors (Alfred and

Armand Mercier, Charles Turpin, Sabin Martin, Just Touatre, and Juan Hava, all of whom held degrees issued by Parisian institutions), two attorneys (Paul

Fourchy and District Court Judge Arthur Saucier), and one wealthy merchant (the aforementioned Carrière).92 No respectable Southern group of gentlemen would be complete without some Confederate heroes among its patrons, and the

89 J. Curtis Waldo, Visitor’s Guide to New Orleans (New Orleans: Southern Publishing & Advertising House, 1875), 11.

90 “Extrait du Compte-rendu [sic] de la Séance d’organisation,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:1 (July 1, 1876), 3.

91 A fact the group readily acknowledged in an 1884 pamphlet: “Our contests and conferences have revealed [men of] admirable intelligence, who, at the same time, occupy advantageous social positions.” “Athénée Louisianais. Circulaire” (translation mine), Box 1, Folder 1, Mss. 108, LRC.

92 Bezou, 1-2. 123

Athénée could claim two: Colonel Léon Queyrouze and the Creole General P. G.

T. Beauregard.93 And though the nation’s most famous Creole joined their scholarly company, not all of the founders shared the General’s pedigree. The yellow fever expert Dr. Touatre counted as a Frenchman, as would the inventor

Auguste Jas, while Dr. Hava (sometimes spelled Havá) originated from Cuba.94

! Despite their somewhat diverse backgrounds, these twelve men represented a cross-section of New Orleans’s elite Francophone community.

They founded the Athénée to “perpétuer la langue française en Louisiane,” the

ﬁrst rule of order always printed on the front cover of the Comptes-Rendus. This was a goal that ranked as near impossible. Even Charles Gayarré, who had long ago switched to writing in English, sent along his lecture notes for the June 28,

1876 meeting in English. Armand Mercier made sure to translate and read the paper on “Louisiana’s cession to France,” en française.95

! The organization’s second tenet dictated that they would “work within, in order to protect, the scientiﬁc, literary, and artistic ﬁelds of study.”96 Topics

93 Léon Queyrouze’s daughter, Leona, would go on to become an formidable Creole poet and essayist. The Comptes-Rendus included many of her compositions throughout the 1880s, but would never honor her a member. Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 384-388.

94 On Just Touatre, see Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 474. For Auguste Jas, see J. G. Havá, “Biographie d’Auguste Jas,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 2:5 (March 1, 1878), 148-150. Juan Hava spoke and wrote French, and wrote two Comptes-Rendus articles on Spanish emigration to Louisiana, see J. G. Havá, “Emigration Espagnole en Louisiane,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 5:4 (January 1, 1881), 417-423; Havá, “Emigration Espagnole,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 5:5 (March 1, 1881), 442-444; Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise, 264-265.

95 “Séance du 28 Juin 1876,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:6 (May 1, 1877), 58-60 (translation mine).

96 See the front cover of the Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:1 (July 1, 1876) (translation mine). 124 covered in a single evening (March 8, 1876) could span the necessity of establishing a ﬂower market in the city, to the latest news from Genoa, to a lecture on a volcanic eruption on the island of Réunion.97 The third and ﬁnal credo stated that the group would “organize a Mutual Assistance Association,” a worthy idea promoted throughout their existence but never put in motion.98

! But it was language, and specifically the preservation of the French tongue, that compelled the Athénée Louisianais. The fifth article of the group’s bylaws outlawed anything but spoken French at all meetings.99 By dedicating their group to French, Alfred Mercier and his followers believed that they could keep New Orleans French-speaking, and thus perpetuate their culture, community, and identity. But they also, perhaps foolishly in these postbellum years of American ascendency, still conceived of a spreading French cultural influence, a Latinate world. In the early years of the company, the Creole doctor wrote that “We propose to combine our efforts and give them a single objective: the continental popularization of the French language by using it to study topics of general interest.” He stressed that two million contemporary North Americans spoke French and that his new “coalition” would be the “rallying point and center of action.”100 The Athénée would act as the head and soul of a truly Pan-

Francophone world.

97 “Séance du 8 Mars,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:4 (January 1, 1877), 29-32.

98 Front cover of the Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:1 (July 1, 1876) (translation mine).

99 “Réglements,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 1:2 (September 1, 1876), 15.

100 Robertson, 52 (translation mine). 125

! The French-speaking circle quickly attracted attention. Within three years, inaugural President Dr. Armand Mercier, speaking at the organization’s ﬁrst public celebration, could boast of establishing relations with Francophone organizations over four continents, and Comptes-Rendus subscribers stretching from Quebec to Montevideo and as far aﬁeld as St. Petersburg and Alexandria,

Egypt.101 By 1880, the French government took notice. “One result of the [Civil

War] victory of the North, representing the Anglo-Saxon element, was and should have been a reduction in wealth and inﬂuence among the French Creoles . . . in a word, our race,” Paul d’Abzac, French Consul in New Orleans, communicated to his superiors in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris.

Intelligent and energetic men founded the Athénée Louisiana to react against the erasure of our race. . . . In the presence of such evidence of vitality in the French-Creole race, in a land that separates the ocean from France and is covered by another ﬂag, it is not difﬁcult to believe in a future increase and vigorous renaissance of the French element in Louisiana.102

Even English-language voices, rather than feeling threatened, considered the

Athénée a vital supporter of Louisiana culture. An editorialist for The Country

Visitor, a New Orleans weekly journal, visited a meeting circa early-1880, afterwards expressing that, “the Athénée is one of the best institutions in the

State. Its membership mainly embraces literary and professional men. Its object

101 “Discours du Président,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:5 (March 1, 1879), 238.

102 Letter from Paul d’Abzac to the French Foreign Minister, February 22, 1880, Box 3, Folder 7, Mss. 108, LRC (translation mine). 126 is the promotion of good and pure French literature, and it should be the pride of

Louisianians to sustain the institution and promote its welfare.”103

! This was the age of “American Salons,” an era of urban, elite gentleman and ladies, an intelligentsia inﬂuenced by European institutions, who banded together and convened regularly to share and discuss ideas.104 The Athénée

Louisianais hardly counted as the only French-language organization in New

Orleans. Founded four years before the Athénée and composed of Creole and

French members—though the latter greatly outnumbered the native born—

L’Union Française originally aided residents of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the

Germans following their victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Despite not attracting many Frenchman to Louisiana, the alliance stuck around, altering its ambitions. The early and active Athénée member François Tujague, a French- born transplant, presided over the Union Française from 1879 to 1892, during which time the organization established French-language separate schools for boys and girls.105 The Union Française survives today as the oldest Franco-

Louisiana society in existence, dedicating its non-proﬁt mission to “promoting the

103 Undated clipping from The Country Visitor, Box 3, Folder 13, Mss. 108, LRC. The Daily Picayune newspaper frequently covered the Athénée Louisianais and the Comptes-Rendus, agreeing with The Country Visitor that “much credit is due to the ofﬁcers and members of the society, whose indefatigable energy contributes so materially to the advancement of the society.” “Comptes Rendus de L’Athenee [sic] Louisianais,” New Orleans The Daily Picayune (December 31, 1876), 12.

104 Robert M. Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). On the foundations of the American urban intellectual, see the ﬁrst part of Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). For the origins of salon life in France, see Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2005).

105 Caulfeild, 68-69, 146. 127 usage and love of the French language in the city of New Orleans” through education.106 Additionally, Les Enfants de la France (1892) and La France (1894) operated as mutual and benevolent societies; the Alliance Franco-Louisianaise de l'Enseignement du François (1908) fought for French-language education in public schools; and the Comité France-Amérique de la Nouvelle Orléans (since the early 1900s) operated to foster better relations between the two nations.

! Two years into the Athénée’s existence, French-born member François

Tujague introduced an essay contest open to all Louisianians to further encourage the preservation of state’s disappearing vernacular, while also spreading the group’s reach within the dwindling Francophone community.107

Rules dictated that a selected committee of Athénée members would judge the anonymously submitted, French-composed manuscripts and bestow prizes on the winning authors.108 The ﬁrst contest prompted its entrants to explore “the power of education and the need to work in all conditions of life,” directly and appropriately referencing the two domains in which the Creoles had receded behind their Anglo-American brothers: schooling and labor.109 The grandly- conceived awards ceremony, open to the public and attended by a host of local notables, featured a piano recital and a speech by President Armand Mercier

106 L’Union Française homepage, accessed November 8, 2012, http://lunionfrancaise.org.

107 Letter entitled “Monsieur le Président, M.M. les Membres de l’Athénée,” Box 2, Folder 1, Mss. 108, LRC; “Séances du 27 Mars et du 10 Avril,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 2:6 (May 1, 1878), 163.

108 “Séance du 27 Novembre 1878,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:4 (January 1, 1879), 221-223.

109 Ibid., (translation mine). 128 chronologically placing the Athénée Louisianais last in the lineage of past learned institutions. The assembly frequently interrupted the reading of Alcée Fortier’s

ﬁrst-place, gold medal-winning paper with applause and bravos. Selected from nineteen submissions, the triumphant essay would have certainly pleased

Charles Gayarré and Adrien Rouquette. In it, Fortier historically chronicles the development and importance of education and work though the rise of Western

Civilization and Christianity. Alfred Mercier, who found an ideological soul mate in the young Fortier, simply and proudly stated that the victorious author attacked the assigned question with “strength and brilliance.”110 Undoubtedly, Fortier’s digressive references to “the enemy . . . at our gates” and the necessity of acting

“like the sailor in the storm, . . . [as] the ship that we must defend, is civilization” undoubtedly pleased the Athénée’s secretary and founder, who more than once compared life to a shipwreck.111

! It could only have felt, within New Orleans’s close-knit Francophone community, that destiny governed Alcée Fortier’s inaugural essay contest victory.

Only twenty-three years old when he collected the Athénée’s gold medal, Fortier already exempliﬁed the sort of young Creole man of letters for which the previous generation clamored. The scion of an elite Creole family and educated entirely in

French, his background prepared him for a quick ascension into the Athénée’s most elevated circle of thinkers. Fortier’s avocation, a French-language professor

110 “Historique de Concours par le Secrétaire Perpétuel,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:5 (March 1, 1879), 239 (translation mine).

111 Alcée Fortier, “Autochthone,” Comptes-rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:5 (March 1, 1879), 240-243 (translation mine). 129 at an all-boys high school, would make the Creole intelligentsia nod with afﬁrmation: this was a precocious individual dedicated to advancing the Creole agenda. Finally, the title of his winning paper, reprinted in the Comptes-Rendus,

“Autochthone,” struck all the right notes. From the Greek, an autochthon signiﬁes an indigenous inhabitant of a particular place. And though the word “creole” does not appear in Fortier’s paper, the very idea of the Creole—the importance of place and culture and blood to a distinct civilization in contrast to another civilization—was the silent thread throughout his composition. Louisiana’s

Creoleness remained Fortier’s credo in a wide swath of publications, until his death in 1914. Alcée Fortier would be faced with leading the Creoles from the brink of cultural obliteration, from the shipwrecked shores of war and

Reconstruction, and into the twentieth century. But the task at hand would be arduous to the ostensible point of hopelessness; in the battle for the continued existence of white Creoledom blood would be spilled. 130

Chapter Four “Today we see walking together the representatives of two important races.” — George Washington, Blood Matters, and the Creole Backlash

! The Jackson Day of 1886 resembled no previous Battle of New Orleans commemoration. Civic and social leaders expanded the seventy-ﬁrst anniversary of Louisiana’s salvation “on the bloody plain of Chalmette” to incorporate a newly invented, and ultimately ephemeral, tradition: Creole Day.1 The day’s planned festivities honored the city’s “heroic defenders, its own Creole population,” while celebrating the Louisiana autochthons’ “essential and important” contributions to the state and nation’s histories.2 Held on the park grounds of the former World’s

Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, the long-form appellation of the

1884-85 World’s Fair, Creole Day featured exultant speechifying, horse racing, and a cultural-historical Creole exhibit with art, music, and dance. The

Archbishop of New Orleans, Francis Xavier Leray, ushered in a procession of luminaries and digniﬁed guests (the clergy and foreign consuls, parochial school pupils and a vast multitude of less fortunate orphans, and, of course, the

1 “Le Huit Janvier: Creole Day,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (January 8, 1886), 1 (translation mine).

2 Interestingly, the English-language Daily Picayune gave more ink to coverage of Creole Day than the Creole’s ofﬁcial Francophone newspaper, l’Abeille. First quotation, “The American Exposition: Creole Day Celebrated with Eloquent Speeches,” New Orleans The Daily Picayune (January 9, 1886), 8; second quotation, “Creole Day,” The Daily Picayune (January 7, 1886), 4. 131 members of the Athénée Louisianais) into the grand Music Hall at noon.3 An advertisement boldly summed up the entire program—the live-orchestral waltzing, the Gottschalk piano compositions, and lengthy program of speakers— as “Special ceremonies of the MOST ATTRACTIVE AND INTERESTING

CHARACTER.”4 Five to six thousand patrons braved brutally freezing temperatures to attend Creole Day, estimated L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans, also noting that the ladies far outnumbered the gentleman, a fact the city’s leading French-language newspaper considered a great shame but nonetheless made the crowd altogether more charming.5

! The celebrations commenced with an English-language appeal by the master of ceremonies, Creole and United States District Attorney Charles

Parlange, to the patriotic hearts and minds of “every Louisianian whatever be the

European stock from which his ancestry may have sprung.” This event symbolized the apex of what Parlange deemed a Louisiana-wide “movement” of white citizens who “feel the deepest interest” in the “early history of our common

State.” Parlange hoped that this devotion to the past would unify all of the state’s whites, Creole and not, who felt they owed their “all to Louisiana.”6

! The evening’s successive speakers frequently referenced the past, especially the Civil War, to reconcile not only the South and the North, but more

3 “The American Exposition: Great Preparations for Creole Day,” The Daily Picayune (January 8, 1886), 3.

4 “Creole Day Advertisement,” The Daily Picayune (January 7, 1886), 1 (capitalization in original).

5 “Le Creole Day: Grande Manifestation,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (January 9, 1886), 1; “Creole Day,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (January 23, 1886), 4.

6 “The American Exposition: Creole Day Celebrated with Eloquent Speeches.” 132 importantly, Creole-American and Anglo-American New Orleanians. Similar to contemporary movements witnessed throughout the nation, the numerous Creole

Day orators used the impact of the Civil War to fashion a collective, sanguinary, and completely Caucasian “republic of suffering.”7 The program’s ﬁnal speaker, the Creole Dr. J. J. Castellanos, ended his remarks by acknowledging the extraordinary reconciliation movement taking place, while praising the “pride of patriotism . . . united with the memories of our fathers” that linked all white New

Orleanians in brotherhood. “Today we see walking together on the same ﬂoor and underneath the same roof the representatives of two important races—the

Latin and the Anglo-Saxon, Creoles and Americans. Do not blush.”8

! Even Creole wunderkind Alcée Fortier got into the reconciliation spirit. In his speech, he drew a comparison between the American triumph on the plains of Chalmette and the Confederate victory at Ft. Sumter. Creoles and Americans patriotically worked hand-in-hand as brothers. Creoles fought in Andrew

Jackson’s army, while Creole P. G. T. Beauregard ordered the attack on the fort and commenced the Civil War. Fortier messages was clear: Creoles led the charge and shed their blood.

! Blood and race carried weight in the late nineteenth century United States, and especially in New Orleans. Blood deﬁned war and patriotism, history and

7 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2008). For others monographs on reunion and reconciliation, see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (1998; reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1999); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

8 “The American Exposition: Creole Day Celebrated with Eloquent Speeches.” 133 race. In the 1880s, matters of blood and race metaphorically symbolized and literally designated Creole identity like never before. The shipwrecked pieces of war and ruin, Republican radicalism and Reconstruction, racial uplift and the downfall of the French language, had washed upon the shores of Louisiana.

Alfred Mercier had foretold the future, and it was here: Creoles must be on the defensive to save themselves and their identity.

! Charles Gayarré and Adrien Rouquette, Mercier and Placide Canonge— the whole Creole literary circle—turned towards championing their whiteness, rather than, as they had for the past four decades, their Frenchness. Like other ethnic American groups during this period, the Creoles socially constructed a white identity to retain their social privilege.9 As many scholars of whiteness studies demonstrate, white ethnics needed an antipodean group of people on which to base their claims of not being like them, and thus promote themselves to a higher, whiter, social status. The Creoles of New Orleans were no different.

Alongside white Anglo-Louisianians, the Creoles ﬁrst targeted black Louisianians

—Creoles and Anglos alike—to install home rule and forge a white republic. In

1872, Pierre-Forester Durel revived his Carillon newspaper in the name of white brotherhood.

! Second, the Creole literary circle assailed one man in particular, the author George Washington Cable. An Anglo-New Orleanian, Confederate

9 For whiteness studies, see Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hale, Making Whiteness; David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 134 veteran, and one of the nation’s most popular ﬁction writers and essayists, Cable

ﬁrst made a name for himself authoring stories of Creole New Orleans. In his speech, Fortier singled out Cable’s Creole-centric ﬁction as pure balderdash, hardly mirroring the people’s true history and culture.10 The “story of the old

Creoles is veracious, beautiful and noble; it is not that told in ‘Old Creole Days’ and the ‘Grandissimes.’”11

! To his fans and followers—and there were many—Cable was a devoted husband and father and Presbyterian; a skilled author; an able stage performer who toured alongside Mark Twain; and a progressive-minded workhorse of an author who could just as ably turn out a social-problems essay on prison reform or race relations in the South, as he could a short story or novel. Though he is rarely read there today, and only lived half of his years there, he will always be tied to the literature and history of New Orleans. J. M. Barrie, the Scottish creator of Peter Pan, wrote that “the quickest way of reaching the strange city of New

Orleans” is to “sit in a laundry and read [his most famous novel] The

Grandissimes.”12

! To the Creole populace, however, Cable was, to quote one luminary among the Francophone print circle, a “false devotee, steeped in prejudice, . . .

10 Fortier would remain obsessed with repudiating Cable’s ﬁction for decades, see Alcée Fortier, A Few Words about the Creoles of Louisiana: An Address Delivered at the Ninth Annual Convention of the Louisiana Educational Association (Baton Rouge: Truth Book and Job Ofﬁce, 1892).

11 “The American Exposition: Creole Day Celebrated with Eloquent Speeches.”

12 We can only assume that Barrie’s comparison to New Orleans to a laundry is a subtle jab at the city’s humid climate. J. M. Barrie, “A Note on Mr. Cable’s ‘The Grandissimes,’” The Bookman 7:5 (July 1898), 401. 135 who casts us all in the same mold . . .; [and] who throws his dirty water among us, and wallows in the stream for the pleasure of splashing others.”13 And it was

Cable’s 1880 novel The Grandissimes that initiated a decades-long, one-sided war of words amongst the Creole literary community. This novel could still, years later, provoke “several delightful Creole ladies” to warn Barrie that “Mr. Cable misrepresented them; Creoles are not and never were ‘like that.’”14

! From 1880 to 1884, Creoles mercilessly waged a war in words against

Cable for portraying them “like that.” They denounced the author for misrepresenting their language, culture, and race. They charged that in a series of short stories and novels, he painted them as a community overtaken by their

Anglo-Saxon neighbors, a rag-worn gentry, a people without a future. And more viciously, they accused Cable of soiling their blood, or “painting them with the tarbrush,” to use the contemporary phrasing, of insinuating that all Creoles were at least partly of African descent. Race was at the heart of the Creoles’ complaint against Cable. They called for Cable’s head and threatened to spill his blood.

This literary ﬁght exempliﬁed not only the uniting of Creoles and Americans in white solidarity, but a larger battle over race and blood in late-nineteenth century

United States.

13 L. Placide Canonge, “Paul Morphy,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans (July 12, 1884), 1.

14 Barrie, “A Note.” 136

Purely Franco-Louisianian becomes Purely White Louisianian

! After ceasing publication of his satirical weekly journal on the ﬁrst of May,

1870, for want of readership, Dr. Pierre-Forester Durel spent the next two years designing a way to resurrect Le Carillon, to reset the clock on the Creole community’s reactionary alarm bell. We might safely deem Durel a proud man, an individual for which failure was not an option—he named all six of his sons

Pierre (Pierre-Henri, Pierre-Georges, and so on). Suffering from dropsy—picked up during his war service—and altogether unhappy with his newspaper’s failure, the South’s defeat, and the Reconstruction regime in New Orleans, he eventually raised enough funds—purportedly from the sale of his wife’s family jewels—to begin republishing. Aided by four of the six Pierre ﬁls, Durel reestablished his paper and proceeded to sound the alarm, with more urgent clanging than before, on November 3, 1872.15 Though his “purement FRANCO-LOUISIANAISES” journal endured only up until his death, two and a half years later, this time around, Le Carillon would make a far greater impression on New Orleans.16

! Durel revived Le Carillon as a profoundly more political paper; for the ﬁrst time, election endorsements appeared alongside the standard reviews of the weekly stagings at the New Orleans Opera House. The following day, election day, a Governor’s election “so shot through with fraud that no one ever had any idea who had actually won” caused waves of white supremacist, paramilitary

15 Edward Larocque Tinker, Les écrits de langue franc̜aise en Louisiane au XIXe siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris: H. Champion, 1932), 174-183; Edward L. Tinker, “Bibliography of the French Newspapers and Periodicals of Louisiana,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 42 (April 20/October 19, 1932), 268-272.

16 “Changement de Direction et de Propriété du ‘Carillon,’” New Orleans Le Carillon 1:8 (October 31, 1869), 1 (italics and capitalization in original). 137 violence that rippled from the streets of the Vieux Carré, and the Carillon’s Royal

Street ofﬁces in the Quarter’s center, to the furthest of Louisiana’s borders.17 Until the federal government and the local Republican Party’s ﬁnal resignation that ended Louisiana’s Radical Reconstruction regime in 1877, publicly sanctioned mayhem and bloodshed, according to historian Justin Nystrom, became a

“legitimate extension of political discourse.”18 Disgraced by black enfranchisement and defeated by the collapse of Democratic Party politics, former Confederates and other white, conservative reactionaries, Creole and not, banded together and engaged in a “bare-knuckle struggle for power” throughout

Louisiana to restore home rule, self-governance by and for white elites.19 Calling themselves the White League, these men battled to sway elections by terrorizing voters.

! In the disputed 1872 governor’s race, both the Republican and conservative Democratic candidates (William P. Kellogg and John McEnery) declared victory, held inaugural ceremonies, set up dual governments, and, when each side refused to relent, called their factions to arms. As these men squabbled, the disgraced and impeached incumbent Republican Governor Henry

Clay Warmouth forcibly relinquished his ofﬁce to Lieutenant Governor P. B. S.

Pinchback, who became the nation’s ﬁrst African-American gubernatorial leader.

In the spring of 1873, organized groups of white supremacists occupied Jackson

17 Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 241.

18 Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans after the CIvil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 77-81, quotation on 80 (italics in original).

19 Ibid., 85. 138

Square, in what was deemed the Battle of the Cabildo, before being driven out by

Federal troops.20 The political-racial battle erupted throughout the state, ﬁrst in the tiny town of Colfax, Grant Parish’s governmental center in north-central

Louisiana. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, white paramilitary forces brutally slaughtered as many as 150 black state militiamen and other African Americans who sought to defend the parish courthouse from armed insurrectionists.21

Following the Colfax Massacre—or what whites supremacists deemed the Colfax

Riot—similar incidents sprang up from the Livingston and Tangipahoa parishes north of New Orleans to the southwest Acadiana parishes of Iberia and St.

Martin.22

! Le Carillon openly encouraged this white terror and exhausted plenty of ink supporting “La Ligue Blanche” and “Ticket des Blancs.”23 In just one article

Durel denounced the “Negro aggressors” behind the “affair of Grant Parish,” rallied armed militias to protect “white women [who] have been violated and their homes burned,” and epithetically classiﬁed the black Creole Lieutenant Governor

Caesar Antoine as an “orangutan.”24 Articles dehumanizing of African Americans

20 James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 91-106.

21 Ibid., 106-115; LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008).

22 Hogue, 112.

23 See, for example, “La Ligue Blanche,” Le Carillon 3:35 (June 28, 1874), 3; “Ticket des Blancs,” Le Carillon 3:44 (August 30, 1874), 1.

24 Bobs M. Tusa, “Le Carillon: An English Translation of Selected Satires,” Louisiana History 35:1 (Winter 1994), 70-71. 139 appeared in nearly every issue, and often stretched to include their Radical

Republican cohorts, whom Le Carillon deemed a menagerie of “bêtes” (literally

“beasts”).25 Durel’s paper thus marched in lockstep with the era’s modernized

Mardi Gras celebrations. Renewed and racialized mainly by Anglo-Americans,

Reconstruction-era Carnival societies, especially the Mistick Krewe of Comus, featured “a host of beasts, each unmistakably representing some despised

ﬁgure.”26 For Le Carillon’s Creole readers, like their Anglo-New Orleanian

“Confederate Krewemen,” home rule meant white rule.27 “We must be either

White or Black,” the newspaper proclaimed on the eve of Bastille Day 1873. “The

Carillon ﬂies the ﬂag of the whites, with the profound conviction that only within its folds can Louisiana be saved.”28 Thus Durel’s purely Franco-Louisianaises platform of old quickly became overshadowed by a front page cry for “Vive le . . .

Blanc.”29

The Most Cordially Hated Little Man in New Orleans

! Just as Durel’s Le Carillon poked the ﬁery embers of racial purity and white supremacy on a weekly basis, another New Orleanian simultaneously

25 “Menagerie Legislative,” Le Carillon 2:7 (December 15, 1872), 3.

26 James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 101. For the history of a white-supremacist Carnival tradition, see also: Reid Mitchell, All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 51-112.

27 Ibid., 123-143.

28 Quoted and translated in Joseph G. Tregle, Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, eds. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 172.

29 Le Carillon 2:33 (June 15, 1873), 1. 140 made race a primary feature throughout his early literary output. After working as a journalist for several years, George Washington Cable published a series of short stories outside of his home city. In these Creole-centric tales, later collected and reissued as Old Creole Days (1879), Cable placed the complexities of race and blood in New Orleans front and center in the national imagination. The very

ﬁrst character introduced in his ﬁrst published story, “’Sieur George,” would signal decades of coming troubles with leading members of the white Creole print community. Printed in the New York-based Scribner’s Monthly literary periodical

(October, 1873), “’Sieur George” features Kookoo, a buffoon of a man described as an “ancient Creole of doubtful purity of blood.”30 Living as a Vieux Carré landlord, Kookoo dreams of stealing the conjectured wealth of his mysterious lessee Monsieur George, an American, while overseeing a building that carries a

“solemn look of gentility in rags.”31

! From 1880 through the century’s end, Creoles rallied against Cable, accusing him of insinuating that they were not of pure white blood and for implying that they, like Kookoo and his apartment building, were a people in decline, a culture and language resembling that of so many ﬂowers in the dustbin of history. “’Sieur George” and Old Creole Days signaled a new type of Creole literature, stories that highlighted more than one side—the exceptional, aristocratic face—of Creole New Orleans. Cable himself realized that his stories were breaking new ground, a fact made apparent in a letter to his friend Hjalmar

30 George W. Cable, Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life (1879; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001), 248.

31 Ibid., 247. 141

Hjorth Boyeson, a Nowegian professor of literature and languages at Cornell

University,

I have been working on my story tonight and . . . I cannot help hoping I have done something really good. The task has long been, and must for some time continue to be a very severe one. I have grasped at so much. It is the wild, virgin soil that I have to break up; a ﬁeld never plowed before. The Creole character, the Creole society, the philosophy of these things, Creole errors and defects & how to mend them.32

! The problem was, the Creoles did not feel their character and society required mending. Cable had done the unthinkable, he made a proud people question their own identity. When it came to matters of identity, especially race and descent and legacy— and thus blood—those affairs often ended, as they do in Cable’s Old Creole Days, disastrously and crimson-soaked. Blood matters are never simple. “Blood is blood,” Faulkner insisted generations later, “and you can’t get around it.”33

! By 1873, the not-quite-thirty-year-old George Washington Cable had, like many Southerners of his generation, already witnessed enough bloodshed to last a full lifetime. Born in New Orleans on October 12, 1844, he was not yet old enough—being three days short of his nineteenth birthday—to enlist in Company

J of the Fourth Mississippi Calvary (he lied about his age to his enlistment officer). After the fall of Vicksburg that previous July Fourth, the reeling Southern forces conscripted every able body available. Standing just five foot five inches tall and rarely weighing more than a hundred pounds throughout his life, Cable

32 George Washington Cable to Hjalmar Hjorth Boyeson, December 28, 1878, George Washington Cable papers (MS Am 1288-1288.4), Houghton Library, Harvard University (HLHU).

33 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929; reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 243. 142 looked hardly the soldier. On his second day in the Confederate Army, Cable was slightly wounded in a brief encounter with the enemy near Port Gibson,

Mississippi. Four months later a Union bullet again found its mark.34 At war’s end, he returned to New Orleans “without one spark of loyalty to the United States

Government.”35

! Back home, Cable settled into a life and career that could be characterized as prosaic at best: a dutiful husband, father of ﬁve, and accountant at a series of cotton exchange ﬁrms. A prodigious epistolarian during the war and a lifelong voluminous reader, he began anonymously publishing, on February 27,

1870, under a column titled “Drop Shot” in The Daily Picayune’s Sunday edition

(for a brief period, a year later, the feature would appear on a daily basis). Part journalism, part thought pieces, the “Drop Shot” essays ranged, according to one biographer, “from the trivial to the momentous, from the solemn to the ludicrous, from the real to the fanciful.”36 His ﬁrst article, a satirical announcement declaring

34 Details of Cable’s wartime experiences and other biographical data found throughout this chapter come from a variety of biographical sources, but especially: Arlin Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography (1956; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), on Cable and Civil War combat, see 25-34. Of the numerous monographs on the life of Cable, the following have also been helpful: Lucy Lefﬁngwell Cable Bikle, George W. Cable: His Life and Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928); Edward Larocque Tinker, “Cable and the Creoles,” American Literature 5:4 (January 1934): 313-326; Philip Butcher, George W. Cable: The Northampton Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Butcher, George W. Cable (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962); Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 548-587; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic (New York: Pegasus, 1969); William H. Roberson, George Washington Cable: An Annotated Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1982); John Clemen, George Washington Cable Revisited (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996); Lawrence N. Powell, ed., The New Orleans of George Washington Cable: The 1887 Census Ofﬁce Report (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).

35 George W. Cable, “My Politics,” in The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South, ed. Arlin Turner (Garden City, Ny: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), 5.

36 Arlin Turner, “George Washington Cable’s Literary Apprenticeship,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24:1 (January 1941), 171. 143 his mayoral candidacy, urged a “time for a radical change” and mockingly pledged to “begin the study of law, grammar and the history of New Orleans” only after being installed into ofﬁce.37 Cable lampooned the pretensions of opportunist

Reconstruction-era politicians who accepted legislative assignments before knowing anything about governance or even their constituents.

! Interestingly, in this bit of political burlesque, Cable diagnosed his own limitations as a Louisiana writer and anticipated the germinating influence of local history on the young author. Over the two-year lifespan of “Drop Shot,” the ninety-odd columns reveal a turn from the superficial (a pseudo-comical report on contemporary women’s wear, for instance) to the serious.38 “I was naturally and emphatically unfit,” he would admit much later, “for the work of gathering up and throwing down heterogeneous armloads of daily news. I had neither the faculty for getting more news, nor the relish for blurting out news for news’ sake.”39

! Instead, Louisiana’s history and culture, the place and the people, soon populated his writings. Cable ended his ﬁnal “Drop Shot” column, on February

25, 1872, afﬁrming his metamorphosis into a local writer. “Louisiana’s brief two centuries of history is a rich and proﬁtable mine. Here lie the gems, like those new diamonds in Africa, right on top the ground,” he penned, directly echoing

Charles Gayarré’s Romance of the History of Louisiana, published a quarter- century earlier. “Only one man, if I know aright, has culled among these nuggets,”

37 [George Washington Cable], “Drop Shot,” The Daily Picayune (February 27, 1870), 4

38 Turner, “George Washington Cable’s Literary Apprenticeship,” 171.

39 Bikle, 39-40. 144 he write, alluding to, without naming, the great Louisiana Creole historian. Cable wrapped up his column by offering up himself as Gayarré’s literary descendent:

“But the half, I am sure, has not been told . . . The mines are virgin.”40

! New Orleanians received their ﬁrst taste of the radical change Cable had in mind for mining Louisiana’s history, in late 1871, with a short parable signed under the pseudonym “Occasionally” and entitled “A Life-Ebbing Monography,” published.41 This antebellum-era “dark story”—a tale “without a moral,” the author ironically asserted three times—recounted the life of Irisella, “a fair mulatto” in love with the white American Mr. H. Because pre-war law prohibited interracial marriage, the latter proposed that the couple switch blood through transfusion, thus making them both “of black blood” and he no longer of “the pure order of man.” The author claimed that the tale is both “true” and a slice of “legendary lore,” a mix of the historical and the literary, fact and ﬁction.42

! WIth the publication of Old Creole Days stories, Cable’s consolidation of the historical and the literary soon surpassed Gayarré, Rouquette, and the rest of the white Creole circle of writers.43 But the sparks of envy and annoyance leading to violence would come a decade later. Contrary to the national and local press’

40 [George Washington Cable], “Drop Shot,” The Daily Picayune (February 25, 1872), 6.

41 Arlin Turner submits that Cable wrote this story because of its great similarities to the author’s 1874 short story “‘’Tite Poulette.” Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 50, 59.

42 Occasionally [George Washington Cable], “A Life-Ebbing Monography,” The Daily Picayune (December 10, 1871), 12.

43 On May 31, 1875, Cable defended a Boston Literary World review that questioned the accuracy of the dialects contained in his short story “Jean-ah Poquelin,” by referring to himself as a Creole. “Though it does not absolutely prove anything I will add that I am a creole myself.” This letter was not published at the time, and there is no evidence that Cable ever made similar false claims publicly. Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 70. 145 laudatory praise, L’Abeille—New Orleans’s last remaining French-language daily and the ofﬁcial newspaper of the Athénée Louisianais—greeted Cable’s collected tales with a cool brushoff. “Old Creole Days.—We have received from Charles

Scribner’s Sons, of New York, a little volume that carries the preceding title. The author G. W. Cable has claimed to find scenes and characters from the old days in New Orleans, a claim, that to us, appears barely justified.”44 Interestingly, the editors and writers of L’Abeille, including the literary gadfly Placide Canonge, seemed completely oblivious to the short stories’ increasing popularity.45

! The Creole backlash commenced, months later, with the publication of

Cable’s next book, The Grandissimes. Serialized in Scribner’s Monthly beginning in the November 1879 edition and running for the following eleven issues, the novel, subtitled “A Story of Creole Life,” became Cable’s grand work, and was quickly recognized, by the author and his audience, as such. As in his earlier short stories, Cable pulled from history to construct this antebellum-era parable of Reconstruction. “In The Grandissimes,” conﬁded the author in an essay on story-telling, “every prominent character [save one] is drawn from a model.”46 The

44 Notice of Old Creole Days, L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (May 29, 1879), 1 (translation mine).

45 For over a half-century, several of Cable’s biographers have claimed that L’Abeille scorned his short stories from the very onset. Arlin Turner, in his George W. Cable: A Biography, claimed that the newspaper “continued disdainful of the stories” immediately following the publication of Old Creole Days, see page 85, and 101, 130. Also see, Rubin, 58, 74; Roberson, 3; Clemon, 47. I have searched issues (1873 through 1880) of L’Abeille for mentions of Cable and his short stories, to no avail except the brief notice above. As we will see, the French newspaper’s attack on the author only commenced in 1885, following the publication of the historically based George W. Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884) and a pair of articles arguing for racial equality in 1885.

46 George W. Cable, “After-Thoughts of a Story-Teller, The North American Review 158:446 (January 1894), 21. 146 same could be said of the scene (late 1803), setting (“the little Creole capital”), and, to a lesser extant, though still substantially, the novel’s events (which encompass Louisiana’s cession to the United States, the rise of American inﬂuence in the city, and the story of the escaped slave Bras-Coupé).47 At its heart, Cable’s novel is a drawn-from-life narrative of New Orleans’s Creoles, white, black, and every jumble of blood union and mixed-up family tree in between.

! In The Grandissimes, Cable’s Creoles are even more beholden to blood ties and history than in his previous works. The novel’s narrator, Joseph

Frowenfeld—a newcomer from Philadelphia and, thus, an obvious stand-in for the outsider author—learns about the two great families that inhabit the Creole capital through a discourse on blood. “Their name is De Grapion— . . . Best blood of the province; good as the Grandissimes. Blood is a great thing here, in certain odd ways. . . . Very curious sometimes.”48 The pages of this novel, in fact, drip with references to blood: violence-spilled blood, a blood-boiling climate, and a city full of people deﬁned solely by blood. One character carries “dancing Gallic blood,” another “a share of Spanish blood,” while the “’ot [hot] blood of Louisiana” envelopes and permeates all.49 New Orleans, for Cable, is a place characterized

47 George W. Cable, The Grandissimes (1880; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001), 1.

48 Ibid., 21.

49 Ibid., 126, 230, 429. 147 by racial mixing—in peoples, culture, and blood—a “little, hybrid city,” as he terms it in the novel’s opening pages.50

! But at its core, Cable’s masterpiece is the story of a pair of mirror-image half-brothers separated only by divergent mixtures of blood, each bestowed with the same name. They are Honoré Grandissime, a white Creole, and his doppelgänger, Honoré Grandissime, f. m. c., a free man of color. The dilemma at the novel’s center centers on Honoré’s decision to honor either his white, aristocratic Creole family or the blood he shares with his brother, the so-named

“darker Honoré.”51 Eventually the pure-blooded Honoré finds a way to fulfill familial, and extraordinarily complicated, obligations to his brother, while strengthening his own blood and family tree by wedding the daughter of the other great white Creole dynasty. But societal constructs leave the darker Grandissime with few options; he survives a lynching, flees to France after killing his attacker, and, there in the homeland of some distant blood kinsman, commits suicide.

Cable, in the role of the sympathetic Frowenfeld, forcefully articulated his feelings on the gravity of blood in the Creole capital: “That mixture of blood which draws upon you the scorn of this community, is to me nothing—nothing! And every invidious distinction made against you on that account I despise!”52

! Cable’s story of the Grandissime brothers fomented hateful reactions just as strong, if not more ﬁerce, among the author’s early detractors. Just months

50 Ibid., 15.

51 Ibid., 154 and passim.

52 Ibid., 151. 148 following its 1880 publication, an anonymous pamphlet, printed in English under the pseudonym E. Junius, offered a ferociously satirical look at Cable’s novel that paralleled the Carillon’s biting take on New Orleans. In twenty-four short pages, a

Critical Dialogue between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book, or a Grandissime

Ascension managed to lampoon The Grandissimes’ carbon-copy characters with an exchange between a white Creole and his ghostly twin; lambast Cable’s historical knowledge, French language ability, and literary artistry; and insult the author—and his editors, audience, and, yes, even his mother—in just about every conceivable fashion. Aboo and Caboo exempliﬁed a Southern sentiment, popular since well before the Civil War but enjoying a resurgence during the late-

Reconstruction era, that any representations of the South written by or published in the North were hostile to the former Confederate States.53 “It has been, evidently, most submissively, written FOR the prejudiced and inimical North,”

Rouquette wrote, “against the olden customs, habits, manners and idiosyncrasies of the Southern Creole population of Louisiana, therein so slanderously misrepresented.”54

! It would very likely come as a surprise to readers of the caustic pamphlet then, as now, that the pseudonymous E. Junius was none other than the Creole poet and priest Adrien Rouquette, for whom Aboo and Caboo endures as a consummate and mysterious outlier in his bibliography. Rouquette never

53 One literary scholar called this sentiment “the Southern rage to explain, the compulsion to tell about the South.” Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 8.

54 E. Junius [Adrien Rouquette], Critical Dialogue between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book, or a Grandissime Ascension (Mingo City [New Orleans]: Great Publishing House of Sam Slick Allspice, 1880), 9 (capitalization and italics in original). 149 expressed revulsion for the North during the war nor Reconstruction. He seemed not to have known Cable, who several years earlier praised him as the “sweet woodland poet,” and a scribe of “beautiful lines.”55 And unlike many of his New

Orleans contemporaries, his writings never evinced any of the fear that white

Creoles and their French past and culture were slipping beyond that of their

American cousins. But his biographers all agree, Rouquette’s hatred for the words of another author were there, spilled all over the page. Cable is “the unﬂedged dwarf who has insulted a noble population,—high-bred, high-minded and high-souled,—noble, and proud of its French and Spanish descent.”56 While his stories “were given as novels . . . they have been taken for HISTORY. The most historical and honorable creole families are therein pasquinaded.”57

! What remains most astonishing about Aboo and Caboo is the vehemence that Rouquette unleashed against Cable. In the dialogue, Aboo articulates a desire to burst Cable’s soaring bubble: “It might be with a dagger-pen, or it might be with the still more inﬂictive fouet sanglant [bloody whip] of indignation.” No,

Caboo asserts, strike deeper, with more vicious intent to harm; “Why not with a scalping knife. [sic] a bloody hatchet, or any other savage instrument of slow and ruthless torture? I would not stoop to crush the venom-swollen, dust-covered insect, suddenly brought to light by his interested fellows!”58

55 Rouquette saved the clipping that contained these remarks among his personal papers. Dagmar Renshaw LeBreton, Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 319.

56 [Rouquette], 15.

57 Ibid., 4 (italics and capitalization in original).

58 Ibid., 14 (italics in original). 150

For a former man of the cloth to voice, even anonymously, such outright violent designs on another human should have shocked the Creole community.

L’Abeille, however, commended the anonymous author of the “lovely little booklet” for his “very witty and very sharp” critique of Cable’s works.59 Rouquette wrapped up his nasty little pamphlet with a rallying call for others to attack Cable in print, to ﬁght ﬁre with ink. “Put down on paper what you have said to-day, and publish it, realize it. . . .” Caboo tells Aboo to forswear sympathy for the man to focus on disparaging the author, “While writing his book, has he thought of any one of us,—feelingly? I tell you, write and publish.” 60 Rouquette’s opening salvo against Cable would pale in comparison to future protests and threats of violence from not just the city’s Francophone-centric literary circle, but the Creole community at large.

! In The Grandissimes, with that novel’s denunciations of social distinctions based on blood types, Cable showed glimpses of becoming a social reformer.

Within a year, he rose to become one of the nation’s great liberal-minded progressives. In June of 1881, New Orleans mayor Joseph A. Shakespeare sent

Cable on a New England fact-ﬁnding mission to gain insight and formulate ideas for local prison improvement. What Cable saw in the jails and insane asylums in

Boston and elsewhere would set him on a reform-oriented path that would continue for the remainder of his life. Back home, over the next year, he helped

59 “Dialogue critique,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (December 18, 1880), 1 (translation mine).

60 [Rouquette], 19-21 (italics in original). 151 form the New Orleans Board of Prisons and Asylums, penned a half-dozen-plus articles on the subject for the local Times-Democrat, and quit his accounting position at the cotton ﬁrm.61

! From prisons, Cable next sought to reform the printed word. On June 28,

1882, the increasingly famous author delivered the commencement address to the literary societies at the University of Mississippi. Provided with a platform for his ﬁrst public oration outside of New Orleans, and presented with an opportunity to think on a more national scale, Cable voiced his thoughts on “Literature in the

Southern States.”62 In the speech, he condemned the failure of the Southern culture of letters, a collapse he blamed on Southerners’ positions of reaction and isolation, owning to their reliance on the plantation system—slavery and sharecropping alike—which he denounced as “semi-barbarism.”63 He urged

Southern writers and readers to reject sectional literature and to support a national union of letters: “We shall be Virginians, Texians [sic], Louisianians,

Mississippians, and we shall at the same time and over and above all be

Americans. . . . Let us hasten to be no longer a unique people.”64

! Cable’s anti-provincialism rejected the theory of local literary exceptionalism spouted from most every Creole from Gayarré to L’Athénée

Louisianais. In an even more brazen act, Cable gave his speech in the home

61 Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 124-128.

62 Guy A. Cardwell, “The First Public Address of George W. Cable, Southern Liberal,” in Studies in Memory of Frank Martindale Webster (Saint Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1951): 67-76.

63 George W. Cable, “Literature in the Southern States,” in The Negro Question, ed. Arlin Turner, 48.

64 Ibid., 47. 152 state of Jefferson Davis, whose The Rise and Fall of the Confederate

Government, published the year before, acted as a apologia for the former

Confederates’ Lost Cause. It is thus surprising that the speech, which went as far as calling the Civil War “our crime and our curse” and wishing that “there will be no South,” hardly rankled Deep South newspaper editorialists. In fact, reports were rather generally favorable.65 Cable’s fame had not yet occasioned and deserved a hearty condemnation. After bringing his Creole characters to the masses, he would receive a vicious reproach from Southerners, Louisianians, and especially Creoles.

! In the spring of the following year, Cable parlayed the Mississippi speech into a sextet of lectures, titled “The Relations of Literature to Modern Society,” at

Johns Hopkins University. The lecture series proved so popular that the

University’s president invited Cable to extend his stay in Baltimore with a reading from his own works. In that seventh night on stage, he delivered selected passages from Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes in Creole French- inﬂected English dialect. The crowd went wild, laughing and applauding “where nothing funny is intended,” he wrote his friend Mark Twain. Cable had found his new pursuit.66 He quickly abandoned the role of literary theorist for that of stage performer. For the next two years, he crisscrossed the Northeast—with large crowds especially turning out in Boston, New Haven, and New York—and then the Midwest, performing his Creole pieces. He almost always ended each show

65 Ibid., ﬁrst quote appears on page 42, second on 47; Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 134-135.

66 Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 136-139, quote appears on 138. 153 by singing a medley of Afro-Creole songs, and often sated the audience’s encore cries with one more tune.67 At times, he averaged a performance a day, and sometimes multiple night stands in one auditorium to satisfy his adoring crowds.

From November 1884 through the following February, he joined his friend Twain

—who released his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in December—for a whirlwind, sixty city, 103 performance tour promoted as the “Twins of Genius” tour.68

! Fame and money soon ﬂooded Cable’s way. Midway through the Twins tour, the semi-annual World’s Fair, the 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton

Centennial Exposition, geared up in New Orleans after some false starts and

ﬁnancial miscues. Guidebooks used Cable’s works to help Exposition visitors navigate the city’s streets and history. The Historical Sketch Book and Guide to

New Orleans reprinted local color writer Lafcadio Hearn’s 1883 essay “The

Scenes of Cable’s Romances.” The article used streets and architecture found in

Cable’s stories as a Vieux Carré walking map for “Louisiana dreamers,” those like Hearn who had been smitten by the city’s “exotic picturesqueness.”69 The agenda of this and similar 1885 travel guides—all of which were published in

67 Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 150-159, passim. Cable, like his New Orleans contemporary Lafcadio Hearn, entertained a great interest in French Creole-language songs of black New Orleans. He recorded songs in situ, included tunes in many of his books and stories, and published historical/anthropological pieces on the subject, including “The Dance in Place Congo” and “Creole Slave Songs,” Century Magazine XXXI (February 1886; April 1886), 517-532; 807-828. Also, see Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 230-232.

68 Guy Cardwell, Twins of Genius (Michigan: The Michigan State College Press, 1953); Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 171-193; Stephen Railton, “Touring with Cable and Huck,” accessed February 1, 2013, http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckﬁnn/hftourhp.html.

69 Will H. Coleman, Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 293-299, ﬁrst quote appears on 294, second on 293. 154

Northern cities—was readily apparent: promote Cable as the face and voice of the city.70 An earlier chapter entitled “Creole New Orleans,” encouraged tourists to “try speaking English to any of the [Vieux Carré’s] dwellers.” The “charm” found in Cable’s books, the guidebook explained, perfectly emulated the

Creoles’ speech, “the carressing [sic] accents and delicious dialect” of “old New

Orleans.”71 The “more sensible” Exposition visitors even carried Cable’s stories themselves as a tour guide to the city, according to one commentator.72

Gayarré’s disciple Grace King, a non-Creole groomed as his heir apparent, disgustingly referred to the tourists who roamed the city’s streets clutching

Cable’s volumes as “the cult of the guide book.”73

! Contrary to Cable’s atmospheric rise, the Creole literary luminaries very much resembled antiquated remnants of another place and time, emblematic inhabitants of a New Orleans of old. Charles Gayarré had squandered his inherited fortune betting on a Southern victory in the Civil War. His postbellum publications failed to sell. And, turning eighty years old in 1885, the Creole aristocrat ﬁnally gave up all hopes to obtain any political ofﬁce and a steady

70 See, for example, A Guide to New Orleans and the Principal Cities in the South (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1885), 86; W. E. Pedrick, New Orleans as It Is. With a Correct Guide to All Places of Interest (Cleveland: W. W. Williams, 1885), passim.

71 Ibid., 149.

72 Edward E. Hale, “Mr. Cable and the Creoles,” The Critic: A Literary Weekly, Critical and Eclectic 89 (September 12, 1885), 121.

73 Quoted in Melissa Walker Heidari, ed., To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004), 193. 155 salary, instead relying on, as we will see below, donations and speaking engagements to escape poverty.74

! Gayarré’s Creole compatriots fared no better. Adrien Rouquette’s La

Nouvelle Atala (1879), a romantic-cum-spiritual tale of Native Americans and the natural world, seemed quaint and old-fashioned, achieving notoriety only after his death. During the World’s Fair, sick and living in a New Orleans Catholic hospice, the septuagenerian poet-priest was a sort of revered minor attraction. “I receive many visits from travellers [sic] who come to New Orleans to see the Exposition,” he wrote his friend John Dimitry. “I wish I were in the woods!” he pined, “I long to be alone!” Rouquette died two years later.75

! L’Athénée Louisianais struggled on, despite a drop in the city’s numbers of

Francophone speakers and readers. In 1881, president Armand Mercier resigned his ofﬁce after a nearly ﬁve year battle over an Comptes Rendus essay he published on the use of anesthesia during childbirth, an article that many members, including his brother Alfred, found upsetting. This fraternal split led, according to one scholar, to the society’s slow decline.76 Of course, the Athénée could have boosted their national standing by including the most famous chronicler of the Creoles, George Washington Cable. According to the Moscow law professor Waldemir Kowaledsky, who visited the city and met Cable in the

74 Edward M. Socola, “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography,” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954), 247-265.

75 Adrien Rouquette to John Dimitry, May 29(?), 1885, Folder 6, Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette papers, Manuscripts Collection 267, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (LRC).

76 Gloria Nobles Robertson, “The Diaries of Dr. Alfred Mercier: 1879-1893” (MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1947), 61-67. 156 summer of 1882, the author had been denied Athénée membership, despite having been recommended by none other than the prominent French Consul

Paul d’Abzac. Kowaledsky further claimed, in a published account of the incident, that he witnessed P.G.T. Beauregard, in the role of the Athénée’s second president, insultingly refuse to shake hands with Cable. The Creole Henri Pene

Du Bois refuted the Russian’s charges.77 Whether there was truth in this story or not, in February 1882, traveling Philadelphia painter Joseph Pennell did ﬁnd his new friend and future collaborator Cable unable to consort with “the better class” of Creoles. Pennell went on to describe Cable, in a letter to his future wife, as

“the most cordially hated little man in New Orleans, and all on account of the

Grandissimes.”78

! If New Orleans’s Creole population felt injured by Cable’s Creole stories, if any of L’Athénée Louisianais members cursed his name in silence or conspired to put an end to his building esteem from behind closed doors, they did so without publicly denouncing him in print.79 But the Creoles undoubtedly felt emboldened following his release of a pair of non-Creole works that spanned a

ﬁfteen-month period coinciding with the run-up to the opening of the city’s World’s

77 Personal recollections of various people about Cable, folder 14, Edward Larocque Tinker papers concerning George Washington Cable, (MS Am 2196), (HLHU). Also, see Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 122-123.

78 For both quotations, see Joseph Pennell to Elizabeth Robins, February 19, 1882, in Elizabeth Robins Pennell, The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume One (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929), 57.

79 The exceptions to the rule being Adrien Rouquette, in his Aboo and Caboo, and Placide Canonge, who in the July 12, 1884 edition of the Abeille transformed a front-page obituary written for his friend, the world-acclaimed Creole chess player Paul Morphy, into a platform for his anti- Cable screed. Canonge, unlike the Creole priest, signed his name to the article. Canonge, “Paul Morphy.” 157

Fair festivities in the winter of 1884-85. First, The Century Magazine, a progressive monthly published in New York City, serialized Dr. Sevier in twelve installments beginning in October 1883. A social problems novel, Dr. Sevier sprung from the reform-minded work Cable had begun two years earlier, while attempting to rehabilitate the nation’s prison system. Favorably reviewed in the

Northern press, the historical novel incited a sweeping rebuke in the Southern papers. Most Southern critics focused on a single passage, concerning one character’s encouragement to a battalion of marching Federal soldiers: “‘go marching on,’ saviors of the Union; your cause is just. Lo, now, since nigh twenty-

ﬁve years have passed, we of the South can say it!”80

! The stink over Sevier would soon be forgotten by Cable’s next publication,

“The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” Printed in the January 1885 edition of The

Century, this essay would quickly become Cable’s most famous, and in the

Southern States, most notorious, piece of writing. In an impassioned defense of black civil liberties, Cable sought to encourage his countrymen to acknowledge, as stated in the essay’s opening lines, that “the greatest social problem before the American people today is, as it has been for a hundred years, the presence among us of the Negro.”81 The essay, Cable professed in a posthumously published autobiographical piece, treated the African-American social problem not as “party policy” but rather “political ethics.”82 And Cable’s politics boiled

80 George W. Cable, Dr. Sevier (1884; reprint ed., New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918), 377. For Southern reactions to the novel, see Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 166-170.

81 George W. Cable, “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” in The Negro Question, ed. Turner, 56.

82 Cable, “My Politics,” 23. 158 down to answering a single vexing question: “Is the Freedman a free man?”83 As the United States inched toward the twentieth century, the political and social gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction contrarily ebbed into the past. The Compromise of 1877 allowed white Southern Democrats to redeem their regional politics, from the local to the Federal level. In the Civil Rights Cases of October 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had previously made “white only” public facilities unconstitutional, further muddling the African Americans’ situation in the South. With these political regressions in mind, Cable answered his own question with an ardent “No.” It was a response that would rank the author, according to one historian, as “the most forthright defense of black civil and political rights ever penned by a nineteenth-century white southerner.”84

! Deviating so drastically from the era’s accepted racial convictions, “The

Freedman’s Case” earned George Washington Cable a deluge of detractors and new enemies throughout the South, especially in New Orleans. By January 6,

1885, The Daily Picayune would take a soft view concerning racial relations:

Mr. Cable’s position is more eccentric than original. Its novelty consists in the fact that it is assumed at this late day by a Southern man from whom one would have expected a better appreciation of those inexorable afﬁrmations and denials of nature which he proposes to ignore. He ought to understand, though apparently he does not, that the persistent and ineradicable distinctions of race lie deeper . . . The fact of an movable and impassable difference may be hard, but it is a fact.85

83 Cable, “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” 81.

84 First quote: Ibid., 81; second: Powell, The New Orleans of George Washington Cable, 2.

85 “The Freedman’s Case in Equity,” The Daily Picayune (January 6, 1885), 4. 159

Two days later, an editorialist for the Times-Democrat took the hardline approach, labeling Cable a “negrophilist.”86 Exactly two weeks later, another anonymous editorialist for the same paper dispensed the venomous contempt with the accusation that Cable “attacks not the South alone, but the white race the wide world over.”87 Still another article, titled “Fie! Fie! George!” satirically incriminated

Cable “and a colored man named Arthur B. Lee, of Wisconsin” with “writing love- letters to each other.”88

! These mostly anonymous attacks circulated throughout Southern newspapers, but the Times-Democrat spewed the most poison in Cable’s direction. The periodical additionally allowed Creole New Orleanians to more openly voice their opinions, to declare open hunting season, on the author. Here, they asserted that Cable did not represent their community or their history. In the

ﬁnal week of January 1885, an unnamed Creole columnist cruelly teased that though Cable, nicknamed “the prophet” here, “is not a Creole,” and he had turned quite a proﬁt on the page and stage exploiting their good name.89 Another mocked that “it would be as just to point to ‘Frankenstein’ as a specimen human, as it is to take Mr. Cable’s Creoles as specimen Creoles.”90

86 B—Z, “Mr. Cable, the ‘Negrophilist,’” The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State, ed. Thomas M’Caleb (New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894): 203-205.

87 “Cable and the Negroes,” The Times-Democrat (January 22, 1885), 4.

88 “Fie! Fie! George!,” The Times-Democrat (February 15, 1885), 4.

89 “Mr. Violet Cable,” The Times-Democrat (January 25, 1885), 4.

90 “Who Are the Creoles?,” The Times-Democrat (April 25, 1885), 4. 160

! Though hardly the voice of the city’s Francophone population, the English- language Times-Democrat served as the Creoles’ most vocal counter-Cable mouthpiece. The reasons for the Times-Democrat’s anti-Cable platform are as muddled as the biography of its owner and managing editor, the man known as

Major Burke. Besides being a newspaperman, Edward Austin Burke, a Louisville,

Kentucky-born Confederate veteran turned White Leaguer, was a wheeling and dealing entrepreneur, the longtime Louisiana State Treasurer (1878-88), and director-general of the 1884 Cotton Centennial Exposition.91 He published

Cable’s early prison-reform pieces, and rented the author’s own house during the early months of the Exposition.92 Still, his daily paper established a quasi anti-

Cable cottage industry that would continue to exist in its pages for years. In 1887, the Times-Democrat found space to lob abuse at the author: “Cable is now teaching a Union bible class . . . and if he does not illustrate the life of a Christian any better than he did that of the Creoles he will not bring many lambs to the fold.

The great trouble with George is he cannot stick to the truth in anything. He is by nature a thin-voiced romancer.”93

No One Has Yet Challenged the Creole’s Courage

! It would be left to the Creole’s preeminent romanticist to ﬁnally answer

George Washington Cable. In a two-part, feature-length essay printed in the

91 Thomas D. Watson, “Staging the ‘Crowning Achievement of The Age’ —Major Edward A. Burke, New Orleans and the Cotton Centennial Exposition,” Louisiana History 25:3; 4 (Summer; Autumn 1984), 229-257; 341-366.

92 Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 156.

93 The Times-Democrat (September 7, 1885), 4. 161

Times-Democrat just as the fateful “Freedman’s Case” hit the newsstands,

Charles Gayarré recapitulated his romanticized, Creole-centric version of colonial

Louisiana history. But in contrast to his earlier versions of local history, the first part (December 28, 1884) of “The Creoles of Louisiana” led off with a racialist twist. The first paragraph outlined a definitive and absolutist definition of the word

Creole. “‘Créole,’ in French, or ‘Criolle,’ in Spanish,” Gayarré answered, originally designated “a child born of European parents in the colonial possessions of those two nations in America and Africa.”94 Gayarré wished to make clear his historical determination that Creoles could only be of pure white ancestry. To wit, he continued: “For this reason, the negroes, mulattoes and Indians never were, strictly speaking, entitled to the appellation of ‘Creoles’ in Louisiana. . . . [Creole] signiﬁes only one of pure and unmixed European blood.”95

! Turning his back on his thesis that Louisiana and its Creole population embodied exceptionality, an idea that he had promulgated since his writing career’s beginnings almost four decades prior in The Poetry, or the Romance of the History of Louisiana lectures, Gayarré now sanctiﬁed all Caucasian colonial

Louisianians.

The whole white race, whether of high or low standing, and in its multifarious social branches, on account of its color alone, which was looked upon as a comparative mark of distinction, a heraldic emblem devised by nature itself, constituted a sort of aristocracy of different degrees, but still an aristocracy conferring a privilege on the humblest of its members.96

94 Charles Gayarre [sic], “The Creoles of Louisiana: From 1700 to 1803,” The Times-Democrat (December 28, 1884), 12.

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid. 162

He ended the essay’s second part (January 4, 1885) with a further reiteration of these thoughts, naming the peoples, “the various elements,” responsible for colonial Louisiana’s “social formation”: the French-Canadians, Crozat-era French and German colonists, Spanish, Acadians, Anglo-Saxons, and the Revolutionary- era French.97 These six groups fused together, according to Gayarré, to form “a kaleidoscopic whole,” a bleached-out rainbow described, without any hint of irony, as comprising “all the endless combinations of its prismatic colors.”98

! Gayarré aspired to fashion an all-white Creole history and identity because he believed that Cable and others had promoted the idea that Creoles could be black. “The majority of the population of the United States,” he fretted,

“have adopted the strange idea that ‘creole’ means a colored person, partially of

African descent, when in fact it is the reverse.”99 Though Gayarré never mentioned Cable in “The Creoles of Louisiana,” his resentment directed toward the Grandissimes author is unmistakably present. Alongside Cable, Lafcadio

Hearn also popularized the fact that Creoles could be biracial.100 In widely disseminated, locally written articles, the Greek-born author shared his

97 Charles Gayarre [sic], “The Creoles of Louisiana: From 1700 to 1803—No. 2,” The Times- Democrat (January 4, 1885), 5.

98 Ibid.

99 Gayarré, “The Creoles of Louisiana: From 1700 to 1803.”

100 On Lafcadio Hearn, see Jonathan Cott, Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Knopf, 1991). 163 fascination with the city’s Creoles of color.101 White Creoles increasingly found themselves embarrassed by the supposed racial “errors” of uninformed visitors.

One prominent Creole related a story to a vast audience concerning “a party of

Northern ladies and gentlemen” entertained for dinner at a house of “a well- known Creole family of New Orleans.” At the meal’s end, the host found himself

ﬂabbergasted when his guests asked him “to do them the favor of showing them some ‘Creoles.’” The Yankees found themselves doubly “bewildered” that they had just shared a table with, and not for the ﬁrst time, a white Creole gentlemen.102

! Gayarré continued on the offensive in the weeks immediately following

“The Creoles of Louisiana” essay, in another two-part Times-Democrat article, a review of “The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” Here, for the ﬁrst time, Gayarré targeted Cable for misrepresenting his people. He pegged Cable’s Creoles as

“effete and imbecile creatures” who speak in “the jargon of the negro.” He further blamed the author for having potentially “damaged . . . their reputation and good name” on a national scale. If there was any doubt in the matter, Gayarré reminded his readers that “Mr. Cable, although born in Louisiana of Northern parents, we believe, is not a Creole.”103

101 See [Lafcadio Hearn], La Cuisine Créole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes, From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1885); Lafcadio Hearn, “Gombo Zhèbes”: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885); Creole Sketches, ed., Charles Woodward Hutson (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1924).

102 F. P. Poché, The Creoles of Louisiana (New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1886), 6.

103 Charles Gayarre [sic], “Mr. Cable’s Freedman’s Case in Equity,” The Times-Democrat (January 11, 1885), 8. 164

! Though he had only now publicly named Cable, the Creole historian undoubtedly harbored some feelings of annoyance with the novelist before 1885.

In May of 1883, Gayarré issued an accusation in the Times-Democrat that “Mr.

Cable had copied my statements and republished them as his own,” making reference to the author’s recent series of historical-heavy stories published in

The Century.104 Two weeks later, Gayarré rescinded his allegation, insisting instead that Cable quoted from rather than plagiarized his histories.105 But

Gayarré continued his snipping. The following month, Gayarré penned an editorial article in the newspaper expressing his contempt for historians who—as he admittingly had with The Poetry, or the Romance of the History of Louisiana— turned toward writing ﬁction. He maintained conversely, in a thinly veiled warning to Cable, that romance writers should not dare try their hand at history.106

Apparently, Gayarré had forgotten the pair of exceedingly bland semi-historical novels he released in the past ten years. Two months later, in the same newspaper, Gayarré’s passive-aggressive crusade expanded. In a bombastic three-column satire entitled “The Nineteenth Century Interviewed in Louisiana,” he blamed Cable, who remained conspicuously unnamed, for having falsely

104 Charles Gayarre [sic], “Gen. Wilkinson’s Treason,” The Times-Democrat (May 20, 1883), 7. The Century ran a half-dozen stories from January to July, 1883 that Cable wrote for an 1880 U.S. Census report, which would be embellished and published under the title The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), a book ignored by New Orleans’s Creole population, a fact that surprised most of all the author himself, who wrote, “Not one of the writers who have accused me of slandering the Creoles has considered, either in the government report or in the expanded volume.” Cable, “My Politics,” 18. The original Census report would ﬁnally be issued in 2008, see Powell, The New Orleans of George Washington Cable.

105 Charles Gayarre [sic], “Gen. Wilkinson,” The Times-Democrat (June 3, 1883), 7.

106 Charles Gayarre [sic], “History vs. Romance,” The Times-Democrat (June 24, 1883), 12. 165 portrayed the Creoles of the nineteenth century, for having “warred against everything that is old, good or bad, simply because it is old.”107

! In need of money, hungry for attention, and enraged that Cable had stolen his platform as the leading chronicler of old Louisiana, Gayarré turned to the stage. On January 25, a week following the second part of his “Freedman’s

Case” review, he addressed the Athénée Louisianais at the Union Français’s headquarters. This speech, “La Race Latine en Louisiane,” outlined an entirely

French and Spainish-centric view of colonial Louisiana’s founding. Contrary to his

“The Creoles of Louisiana” piece, the non-Latinate kaleidoscopic peoples were left out of this oration.108 The historian certainly knew his audience, and the

Union Français invited him to deliver the speech a second time.109

! In late March, Gayarré again strode the Union Français stage, this time for a lecture-style review of Cable’s most famous work. For over two hours the

Creole exhaustively dissed and dismantled The Grandissimes, forcing one audience member to exclaim that “Mr. Cable has written few pages where cannot be found [the] most abominable solecisms.”110 These speaking engagements seemed to energize the impoverished and frequently depressed octogenarian.

107 Charles Gayarre [sic], “The Nineteenth Century Interviewed in Louisiana,” The Times- Democrat (August 12, 1883), 5.

108 Charles Gayarré, “La Race Latine en Louisiane,” Comptes-Rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais 3:1 (March 1, 1885), 78-100.

109 “Conférence,” L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orleans (March 8, 1885), 4.

110 “Les Grandissimes,” The Times-Democrat (March 23, 1885), 3. 166

The Times-Democrat critic declared that Gayarré’s prose bounded with

“springtime freshness and almost youthful grace.”111

! On April 25, Gayarré gave perhaps his most accomplished speech, an

English-language lecture at Tulane University that certainly became his most widely disseminated. Covered as far aﬁeld as the New York Times and reprinted in pamphlet form, “The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance” melded his earlier discourses on “The Creoles of Louisiana” and The Grandissimes.112

Throughout the extraordinarily lengthy lecture, the Creole bashed Cable’s work and career while, once again, blaming the author for misappropriating and misunderstanding everything Creole—the people, their history, and the word itself. But here Gayarré also slightly expanded his previous deﬁnition of the word

Creole “to apply, not merely to children born of European parents, but also to animals, vegetables and fruits, and to everything produced or manufactured in

Louisiana.” Thus, according to Gayarré, in Louisiana there were “creole horses, creole cattle, creole eggs,” and naturally continuing with this extension, “negroes born within her limits were creoles to distinguish them from the imported

Africans.”113 This noun versus adjective modiﬁer distinction would ﬁll dictionary entries and determine State civil court cases for the next century.114 While the

Creoles of color stayed largely silent on the issue, until black Creole Rodolphe

111 Ibid.

112 “A Eulogy of the Creoles,” The New York Times (April 27, 1885).

113 Charles Gayarré, The Creoles of History and The Creoles of Romance: A Lecture (New Orleans: C. E. Hopkins, 1885), 3.

114 See, Virginia R. Domínguez, White by Deﬁnition: Social Classiﬁcation in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 15. 167

Lucien Desdunes’ 1911 Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire (Our People and Our

History), which the author penned as a “hommage à la population créole.”115

! Throughout “The Creoles of History and the Creoles of Romance,”

Gayarré, in fact, dropped thirty explicit references to “the pure white ancestry” of his people, insisting that “the Creoles of Louisiana, whose number to-day may approximately be estimated at 250,000 souls, have not . . . a particle of African blood in their veins.”116 It is impossible to know how many of the assembled audience knew that Gayarré’s own son not only numbered among those 250,000 souls, but did, in fact, have African blood coursing through his veins. The St.

Louis Cathedral’s Baptismal Register contains a Father Antoine de Sedella- signed entry (May 5, 1826) for one Carlos Harthur Nicolas [sic], a child born on the third day of August the previous year, the son of Delphina Les Maitre and

Carlos Gayarré.117 Next to the entry, marginalia scribbled by Père Antoine notes that the child’s mother is a person of color.118 In his papers and published writings, Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré never made mentioned of his only child;

Charles Arthur Nicolas had not only been ignored, but literally erased by his father. But Charles Arthur Nicolas Gayarré appears throughout city directories and census records. In 1880, the younger Charles Gayarré worked as an

115 Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire: notices biographiques accompagnées de reﬂexions et de souvenirs personnels, hommage à la population créole, en souvenir des grands hommes qu’elle a produits et des bonnes choses qu'elle a accomplies (Montreal: Arbour & Dupont, 1911).

116 Gayarré, The Creoles of History and The Creoles of Romance, 3. For the reference count, see Domínguez, 143.

117 The correct spelling of the child’s middle name is undoubtedly “Arthur.”

118 Socola, 320-323. 168 upholsterer and lived with his wife Sophie, a music teacher, in the Seventh Ward.

Though both the craftsman profession and the neighborhood were indicative markers of the city’s black Creole population, the younger Gayarré, and his wife, identiﬁed as white.119

! This Tulane speech would be the ﬁnal anti-Cable oration of Gayarré’s life.

For the next decade, he occasionally lectured on the stage and sold articles to

Harper’s Magazine and other national periodicals. Despite this income his rejuvenated career brought in, he ate and survived almost solely through the donations of benefactors. Cable’s career continued to skyrocket; he became one of the bestselling and best paid authors in America. Yet Gayarré and his Creole cohorts could declare a victory on a local scale—they had made life uncomfortable for Cable, who spent more and more time away from New

Orleans. He told friends and correspondents that now New England felt like

“home,” but the aspersions and threats of violence could not be ignored.120

! It started with accusations. One friend read in the papers that it had been

“declared positively [that Cable] had never been in the Confederate army.”121

Another Creole family swore that Cable “was of a family with negro blood.”122 It escalated to more menacing provocations. A New York journal wrote, in July of

1884, that “the Creoles are buzzing about his ears and stinging him with redoubled fury,” adding that a recent New Orleans paper carried a letter, signed

119 U.S. Census Bureau (1880), series T9, roll 462, page 660.

120 Quoted in Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 222.

121 Marion Baker to Julie K. Wetherill, September 6, 1885, folder 14, MS Am 2196, (HLHU).

122 Reminisces of the Carrieres, folder 14, MS Am 2196, (HLHU). 169

“Old Creole,” that summarized the populace’s feelings towards the author: “1. We are more civilized than Mr. Cable. 2. We are sufﬁciently intelligent to judge of fools. 3. We possess French politeness and courtesy, the equal of the American.

4. In many important public functions, Creoles are preferred. 5. No one has yet challenged the Creole’s courage. 6. If Mr. Cable doubts the fifth proposition he is given a free field.”123 Such talk of courage and challenges denoted the first steps leading to a duel of honor, a bloody ritual still not uncommon in 1880s New

Orleans. In the archival notes of the Creole and Cable scholar Edward Larocque

Tinker can be found a scrap of paper reading that “50 of the Creoles of [the] best families signed a paper ordering Cable out of town & threatening to lynch him if he did not go[.] Is this so?”124 Whether there was truth behind this tale or not, one woman remembered years later that her father, a member of the prestigious

Creole Freret family, urged Cable to leave New Orleans “before something serious happens.”125 Though Cable could count Creoles among his supporters, they were very few and far between.126 Cable heeded Mr. Freret’s advice and in the fall of 1885 permanently relocated his family to Northampton, Massachusetts and sold his New Orleans residence. The author rarely returned to his native city for his remaining forty years.

123 “The Lounger,” The Critic: A Literary Weekly, Critical and Eclectic 2:27 (July-December 1884), 6.

124 Chronology of Cable's life, folder 11, MS Am 2196, (HLHU).

125 Reminisces of a Miss Freret, folder 14, MS Am 2196, (HLHU).

126 The Creole Dr. Ernest Lewis went on the record as believing that Cable correctly portrayed the Creoles, see Reminisces of Dr. Ernest Lewis, folder 14, MS Am 2196, (HLHU). Also, Henry Clements, an artist and Creole, supported Cable throughout the author’s career, see Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography, 113. 170

Coda — The Creole Pompeii

! On February 7, 1886, the proprietors of the American Exposition at the former Cotton Centennial fairgrounds sponsored a second Creole Day to make up for the freezing temperatures and sparse crowds. Though the program of speakers was much shorter than that of the prior Creole Day, an advertisement exulted that the sky was “full of brilliant sunshine, tempered by a gentle breeze,” and should bring in a crowd of 50,000.127 Charles Gayarré led off with a rote speech on the meaning of the word Creole. He was, once again, a hero to the

Creoles of New Orleans. That same year, a triangular plot of land at Esplanade

Avenue and Bayou Road was dedicated to the historian. At the center of Gayarré

Park still sits a statue, purchased from the Cotton Centennial, representing “the

Goddess of History—Genius of Peace.”128

! Next the Honorable Felix Pierre (F. P.) Poché—a Creole, Louisiana

Supreme Court Judge, and one of Louisiana’s “brightest ornaments” as described by Gayarré—took the stage as lead orator.129 Taking a note from the previous speaker’s career, Poché provided a fast and easy romanticized history of Louisiana with its Creoles solely at the center. But Poché’s “Creole race” is a community of victims, “with the infancy of the colony . . . unremittingly subjected . . . [to] great and trying vicissitudes,” not least of all the humiliation of having been “at all times misrepresented as to their origin, their character, their

127 “The American Exposition: Celebration of Creole Day,” The Daily Picayune (February 8, 1886), 2; “American Exhibition” advertisement The Daily Picayune (February 7, 1886), 1.

128 Mary Louise Christovich, et. al., New Orleans Architecture, Volume 5: The Esplanade Ridge (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 1971), 107.

129 “The American Exposition: Celebration of Creole Day.” 171 morals and their customs.”130 Creoles, according to Poché, have been labeled and mistaken as “hated Frenchmen,” “quasi foreigners,” and, most complicated and insulting of all, Creoles of Color.131 Rather, Creoles professed “pride more in the title of ‘Americans,’ which is their birthright.”132 Poché further lingered on this theme of labels and identities: his people desire to be called not French Creoles but “American Creoles,” joined in fellowship, and whiteness, with their

“neighbors, friends and brothers of Anglo-Saxon origin.”133

! At the closing of Poché’s address, the crowd dispersed to the many exhibition halls to view the “Creole repository of natural, scientiﬁc and historical curiosities, of literary and artistic works appertaining to Louisiana to be traced up to that Latin race.”134 At seven-thirty in the evening, the festivities climaxed with a

“Huge and Marvelous Spectacle,” a Barnumesque stage drama—complete with gladiator battles and circus animals—and massive pyrotechnics display entitled

“The Destruction of Pompeii.”135 That night, Professor James Pain’s traveling exhibit played to the largest assembled crowd ever to witness his the so-called

130 Poché, 1-2.

131 Ibid., 5-6.

132 Ibid., 6.

133 Ibid., 5.

134 “The American Exposition: Celebration of Creole Day.”.

135 “American Exhibition” advertisement. 172

“pyrodrama.”136 If any of the assembled crowd of New Orleanians observed the towering ﬁre and ﬂame consume the ersatz ancient Roman town, while contemplating the ironic parallels between the burial of Pompeii and the suffocation of Louisiana’s Creole culture, those thoughts, much like the

Francophone voices of the previous decades, were smothered by the thick, detrital layers of Anglo-American history.

136 “The American Exposition: Celebration of Creole Day.” From the late-1870s to the 1910s, Pain’s Pompeii “pyrodrama” toured throughout the United States. See “A Drama in Pyrotechnics,” The New York Times (June 12, 1885); “Pompeian Entertainments,” The J. Paul Getty Museum website, accessed December 4, 2012, http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/pompeii/ entertainments.html; “The Last Days of Pompeii at the Getty Villa,” Culture Spot LA website, accessed December 4, 2012, http://culturespotla.com/2012/10/the-last-days-of-pompeii-at-the- getty-villa. 173

Chapter Five “His place among us . . . belongs to the future.” — Grace King’s Lost Creole Cause and the Feminization of New Orleans’s Creole Culture

! In the late 1910s, a “humble student of Louisiana” and a close reader of

Charles Gayarré and Xavier Martin commenced work on her own chronicle of

New Orleans history. Instead of tracing the city’s narrative from Bienville’s beginnings to its late-nineteenth century rebirth, Grace King wrote a genealogical account of New Orleans. Published in March of 1921, King’s study functions as a sort of New Orleanian Old Testament, an elaborately diagrammed Creole kinship system. This Creole family tree begins appropriately enough with the Marignys; she dedicates a chapter each to Bernard de Marigny and his great-grandfather

François Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville. Focusing solely on those of “good blood,” the landmark work Creole Families of New Orleans rewrote and reestablished the ethos of the Creoles and the city’s exceptionality just as it was dying. Composed in the afterglow of the city’s Creole literary culture, during the

ﬁnal years of George Washington Cable’s life, and just as tourists and writers were rediscovering New Orleans for a second time in a generation, King’s Creole

Families re-remembered a nearly forgotten people and re-associated Creoles with New Orleans history, memory, and myth.1

1 Grace King, Creole Families of New Orleans (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921), vii, 9-58. 174

! Grace King was not a Creole but was the Creoles’ champion par excellence. She today remains perhaps New Orleans’s greatest booster. In a literary career that spanned nearly a half-century—and comprised short stories, novels, short and long form histories and biographies, memoirs, and literary and social criticism—she rarely failed to write about her home city. There are a countless number of stories written about the Creole city, her “brilliant little world” as she called it in one short story, and King told many of them.2 And it was the

Creoles, “the founding families” and their descendants, “that have carried on their work and their good names” that ﬁrst made New Orleans great. According to

King, her genealogical research showed that the Creoles had preserved their

“purity of blood and family prestige” and ensured “their ‘maintenances de noblesse’ [maintenance of nobility].” King assured her readers that white Creole nobility still existed, and Creole society continues to thrive in the second decade of the twentieth century. For King, “the end of the book, [is] not the end of the story.” Mirroring her apropos choice to begin her book with the Marignys, King chose the Fortier family, personiﬁed by Alcée Fortier to end it. The renowned

Creole linguist and historian, who died in 1914, “does not yet belong to the past of New Orleans,” according to King, but “his place among us in the family of its citizens is still warm.” The determination of Fortier’s greatness, like that of New

Orleans and its Creole families, “belongs to the future.”3

2 Grace King, Balcony Stories (New York: The Century Co., 1893), 23.

3 King, Creole Families, vii, ix, 8, 461-465. 175

! King’s outlook for the Creoles’ future presented a more optimistic view than that of an earlier local genealogical study. A January 1893 issue of the New

Orleans Times-Democrat invited its readers to peer into the homes and lives of the city’s Creole families. Charles Patton Dimitry, author and scion of an well- established Creole lineage, dreamed up a scene that many a New Orleanian and city visitor had undoubtedly experienced in a evening walk along the Vieux

Carré’s banquettes. “Sometimes a pedestrain [sic] wending his way late at night along a city’s streets will hear,” he wrote, “coming from a dwelling in one of the streets, the sounds of music, the murmur of many voices, the echoes of merry laughter.” Pausing to voyeuristically gaze through the windows, this stroller “will behold a goodly company, gallant men and graceful women.” This company exempliﬁes not only New Orleans’s joie de vive, but also its storied Creole past.

According to Dimitry, these Creoles are one of the true and few remaining

“Louisiana Families.” He cautions that “there must come a time when the merriment is over,” when “silence and quiet” replace “bustle and motion,” an hour when “the lights are extinguished” and “the gallant men and the graceful women disappear,” an era when this Creole company simply “vanishes.” Dimitry used this scene as the ﬁnale for a year-long series of genealogical studies, the ﬁrst of its kind in New Orleans. The series featured only those “families of merit and distinction” of the area’s “ancient population.”4 Appearing ever Sunday in a newspaper that in the 1890s created an industry of reminiscing and reporting on

4 Charles Patton Dimitry, “Louisiana Families,” New Orleans Times-Democrat (January 29, 1893), reprinted in Stanley Clisby Arthur and George Campbell Huchet de Kernion, Old Families of Louisiana (New Orleans: Harmanson, 1931), 17-20, all page references to Dimitry will indicate the Arthur and Kernion publication. 176 the city’s past, these genealogies located Creoles in the distant past.5 By taking a page from Charles Gayarré’s glamorized historical framework, Dimitry, like King, traced the beginnings of Louisiana’s colonial lineages to a chimerical European past characterized by chivalry, romance, and nobility.6 Linking the mythic past with an uncertain and malleable present, Dimitry lamented that Creole families would be “seen no more.”7

! In reality, Dimitry’s fear held true. The so-called ancient families were integrating with non-Creoles. The writers and activists that composed the Creole literary circle were quickly disappearing: Adrien and Dominique Rouquette,

Placide Canonge, Alfred and Armand Mercier, and Charles Gayarré would all pass away in the decade following 1885. The deaths of these men highlighted a generational and linguistic shift in New Orleans, with fewer French speakers and readers, and thus far fewer Francophone publications. The last local French- language newspaper, the Abeille, slowly sputtered out and eventually faded away in 1925, leaving the Athénée Louisianais’ Comptes Rendus as the city’s only

Francophone journal.8 Cable’s ﬁction, according to his Creole antagonists, had done its damage.

5 In December 1892, as Dimitry’s series was coming to an end, the Times-Democrat started publishing, every Sunday, Creole Henry C. Castellanos’s antebellum-era anecdotes, vignettes, and biographies in a column titled “New Orleans as It Was.” See Judith Kelleher Schafer’s introduction, in Henry C. Castellanos, New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life (1895; reprint ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006): ix-xx.

6 Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 64-65.

7 Arthur and Kernion, Old Families of Louisiana, 20.

8 The Comptes-Rendus would itself succumb to a lack of interest and French-readers in 1975. 177

! Dimitry’s Creole genealogical work jumpstarted the myth of the vanishing

Creole by documenting a fading people, society, and culture. But it was Grace

King who showed that genealogy was central to the understanding of New

Orleans’s Creole history. If Charles Gayarré can be symbolized as the architect of Creole history and culture, King became the city and the people’s preservationist.9 King reconceptualized and rewrote the popular Confederate- glorifying, Lost Cause movement by further localizing this Southern myth, by narrowing the focus of her historical lens to capture the vanishing culture, society, and cause of New Orleans’s white Creole population. She, in effect, created what

I call the “Lost Creole” ideal. King’s writings added the concept of conservation to the Creole literary circle’s ethos of exceptionality by actively documenting the culture in order to save it. Furthermore, as a female writer who regularly wrote about women, King blanketed her Lost Cause meets Lost Creole discourse with a feminine regendering. In defending New Orleans and its now legendary Creole aristocracy from modernity, Yankees, and her great antagonist, George

Washington Cable, King also feminized the history of the city and its people.

! King began as a ﬁction writer, pumping out several collections’ worth of well-received short stories in the mid-to-late 1880s and early 1890s. Her numerous and varied writing projects over her long and, for a Southern woman, illustrious career can be overwhelming to consider. King wrote ﬁction (short

9 King credited Gayarré, along with Lafcadio Hearn, “but no one else” in her words, as her literary inﬂuences. Grace King to Fred Lewis Pattee, January 19, 1915, Grace King Collection (Mss. 1282), Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La (LLMVC), reprinted in Grace King, Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings, ed., Robert Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 398. 178 stories and novels), history (local, national, and international), biography

(sketches and book-length), autobiography, and literary and social criticism. She was a voluminous correspondent and diarist. She counted the literary luminaries of the day, most notably Mark Twain, as her pen pals and vacation partners. King called herself, and titled her memoirs, A Southern Woman of Letters, a ﬁtting description for someone who wrote for nearly a half-century. In composing both

ﬁction and fact, King relied on “the crumbs of memory.”10 History mattered for

Grace King. The ﬁrst words in her posthumously published memoir tell as much:

“The past is our only real possession in life. It is the piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. It never leaves our consciousness.” Foreshadowing Faulkner’s famous line, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past,” King ended the beginning of her memoirs with equally weighty thoughts on Southern memory: “In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.”11

! Grace King’s earliest conscious memories clung to her and never let go.

The Civil War inhabited a central place in the majority of her writing, while its

10 Grace King, Notebook, Journal 1904, February 20, 1904 entry, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in Grace King, To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910, ed., Melissa Walker Heidari (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004), 122.

11 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), 92; Grace King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 1. The scholarship on Southern memory is burgeoning, see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Bruce E. Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 179 aftermath consumed her. Conﬂict and destruction deﬁned these memories.

Speaking through the eyes of her long-deceased father four decades following the war’s end, King saw only “ruin . . . ruin, that is, of all.”12 Soon after publishing her first short story in 1886, King became a central figure in two intellectual and literary flourishings. First, the local color movement, a mostly Southern genre that mixed antebellum-era romanticism with a new push toward realism, and which appealed to Northern publishing houses, magazine editors, and readers.13 And, second, the Lost Cause movement, a postbellum crusade to portray the defeated

Confederacy as the noble ﬁghters for a purer American way of life, an imaginary world based on Southern moral, cultural, and social exceptionality and white supremacy.14 Historian Jane Turner Censer writes that “the Civil War gave new justiﬁcations for women’s writing,” and King numbered as one of a countless

12 Grace King, Notebook, Journal 1904, April 11, 1904 entry, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in King, To Find My Own Peace, 138.

13 For a recent reading on the local color movement’s beginnings, see Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 250-251, 259-268.

14 For the historiography of the Lost Cause, see Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (1985; reprint ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); William C. Davis, The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, eds., The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 180

Victorian era women who spread the Lost Cause gospel through the celebration of what another historian deems “Confederate culture.”15

! As a chronicler of Creole ﬁction, King also counted as one of a handful of Crescent City women pursuing the life of a full-time, published author.

Publishing houses and literary magazines, both centered mostly in the urban cities of the Northern states, more frequently welcomed women writers in the

1880s and 1890s. Their local color stories dramatized, exoticized, and romanticized the local place and people. Kate Chopin, a French Creole from St.

Louis, remains the most famous of these female local color Louisiana authors; her early feminist novels At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899) portray the struggles of women involved in ethnically mixed, Creole-American, marriages.

Ruth McEnery Stuart, Mollie Moore Davis, Cecelia Viets Jamison, and Sidonie de la Houssaye, among others, likewise produced Creole-based prose and poetry.

They wrote stories about “experiences, reminiscences, episodes, picked up,” in the words of King, “as only women know how to pick them up from other women’s lives . . . and told as only women know how to relate them.”16 These women, like King, wrote mainly from and about the perspective of white Creole

New Orleans. Sympathetic portrayals of fully realized African-American characters were exceedingly rare in their works. These women authors were middle to upper-class Lost Causers. One recent essayist recalled that all he took

15 See, Jane Turner Censer’s chapters on “Becoming an Author in the Postwar South” and “Women Writing about the North and South” in Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 207-274, quotation on 210. For the second quote, see Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, 1.

16 King, Balcony Stories, 2. 181 from his adolescent readings of Chopin’s stories were “ole negresses mocked for their ignorance on what seemed like every page.”17

! These women wrote at a time of ﬂux, an era of postbellum rebirth, a time when a search for a new social order was underway.18 New Orleans faltered in its goal to become the “Paradise Regained” that journalist Edward King had hoped for two decades prior.19 Instability and violence reigned throughout the streets.20

The city’s ethnic and racial melting pot, according Edward F. Haas, “at times resembled a pressure cooker.” Progressive Era New Orleans was hardly progressive; the Regular Democrats—named because they kept white supremacy the norm—lost control for only one mayoral cycle.21 The 1890 murder of police chief David Hennessy led, the following year, to the lynching of eleven

Italian men.22 In 1894-95, bloody waterfront labor riots, and accompanying white on black violence, ended the biracial unionization that highlighted the hopeful

17 Darryl Pinckney, “Deep in the Bowl: Memory of a Shrinking City,” Harper’s Magazine 323:1936 (September 2011), 43.

18 Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper, 2009); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

19 Edward King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1875), 17.

20 Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880-1896 (1969; revised ed., Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Association, 1997), 165-182.

21 The Regular Democrats’ opponents, the Citizens’ League, counted among its charter members double as many White Leaguers as their political rivals. Edward F. Haas, Political Leadership in a Southern City: New Orleans in the Progressive Era, 1896-1902 (Ruston, LA: McGinty Publications, 1988), quotation on 4, 112 and 120 for White League data, passim for the period’s political history. Also, see Lawrence N. Powell, “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk‐stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics,” Slavery & Abolition 20:1 (1999): 127-149.

22 Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 173-179. 182 decade of the 1880s.23 Stemming from a local black activist group’s ﬁght against a Louisiana railroad state law, the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson (1892) decision legalized Jim Crow segregation.24 Racial tensions crested after the black nationalist Robert Charles killed a police ofﬁcer, followed by a white mob murder and rampage through African-American neighborhoods.25 Though Grace

King did not write about, at least for publication, all of these events, the pressure cooker undoubtedly affected her. One King expert likens her body of literature to a series of “pietas,” lamentations and a “strong loyalty to the principles in which she had been reared, her feeling for family, for her native city, and for the

South.”26

! Few Louisiana writers have generated as much scholarship as the life and letters of Grace King. In the 1970s, Robert Bush’s expansive readings of the author’s vast archives and his edited volume of her writings spawned a true

Grace King revival.27 His superlative full-length biography, Grace King: A

23 Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 128-131, 139-146.

24 Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

25 William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976).

26 Robert Bush, “Grace King: The Emergence of a Southern Intellectual Woman,” Southern Review XIII:2 (April 1977), 282.

27 Robert Bush, “Grace King and Mark Twain,” American Literature XLIV (March 1972): 42-51; Grace King, Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings, ed., Bush (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); “Charles Gayarré and Grace King,” Southern Literary Journal 7:1 (Fall 1974): 100-131; “Grace King,” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 8:1 (Winter 1975): 42-51; and, “Grace King: The Emergence of a Southern Intellectual Woman.” Bush’s work on King began with his dissertation “Louisiana Prose Fiction, 1870-1900,” (PhD diss., State University of Iowa, 1957). 183

Southern Destiny, arrived in 1983, and literary scholars have since closely examined many aspects of her literary career.28 But while academics continue to pump out dissertations, peer-reviewed articles, and book chapters dedicated to deconstructing King’s ﬁction, the academy ignores her historical works, while also

28 Robert Bush, Grace King: A Southern Destiny (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Recent, post-Robert Bush, literary analyses of Grace King’s work, of which gendered readings are far and away the most popular, include the following: David Kirby’s psychological study of King, incorporating a close reading of several works, in Grace King (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980); Anne Goodwyn Jones compares King to a dozen other postbellum, pre- Southern Renaissance women fiction writers, in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 93-134; Etta Reid Lyles historicizes King’s fiction and deems her as a transitional figure, affected by the Civil War and Reconstruction, in “A Transitional Generation: Grace King’s World, 1852-1932,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1987); Ahmed Nimeiri investigates the modernist aspects of King’s Reconstruction-era novel, in “‘Reconstruction, which was also war . . .’: Realism and Allegory in Grace King’s The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard,” Mississippi Quarterly 41:1 (Winter 1987-88): 39-54; Anna Shannon Elfenbein looks at the liminality of the quadroon character in King’s work, in the third chapter of Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 74-116; linking feminist theory with race theory and historical contextualization, Helen Taylor examines several key King texts, in the first chapter of Gender, Race and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 28-83; Joan DeJean argues, unconvincingly, that King redefined Creole identity to include people of color, in “Critical Creolization: Grace King and Writing on French in the American South,” in Southern Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Jefferson Humphries (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990): 109-126; Linda S. Coleman provides a broad overview of racism and sexism in King’s writings, in “At Odds: Race and Gender in Grace King’s Short Fiction,” in Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography, eds. Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992): 32-55; Zita Z. Dresner studies King’s “use of opposing systems of signification” to evoke feelings of sympathy and humor in one short story, in “Irony and Ambiguity in Grace King’s ‘Monsieur Motte,’” in New Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. Regina Barreca (Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992): 169-184, quotation on p. 172; Violet Harrington Bryan questions the gendered mythification of New Orleans, in the third chapter of The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 44-53; Lori Robinson looks at notions of gender in one collection of King’s short stories, in “‘Why, why do we not write our side?’ Gender and Southern Self-representation in Grace King’s Balcony Stories” in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, eds. Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997): 54-71; Ellen Catherine Falvey explores the gothic dimensions of King’s bibliography, thus defying her traditional categorization as a local-color writer, in “Reconstructed Virtue: Grace King’s Gothic Realism,” (PhD diss., New York University, 1998); Melissa Walker Heidari reprints, edits, and comments on King’s journals in King, To Find My Own Peace; Mary Ann Wilson gives the most recent appraisal of King’s career, in “Grace King: New Orleans Literary Historian” in Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, eds. Janet Allured and Judith F. Gentry (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009): 137-154. 184 largely failing to historicize the author.29 Both of these omissions need to be addressed, especially since King may be considered one of the incipient female historians of the South, if not the very first.30 !

Grace King’s Lost Cause

! The New Orleans of 1885 was suddenly fashionable. The popularity of

George Washington Cable’s stories and the Cotton Centennial Exposition caused

Northern writers and editors to ﬂock to the city. It was the place for a promising young author to be discovered, and the right time for a bold writer to discover her own artistic drive. With an acumen as sharp as her aquiline nose, Grace

Elizabeth King looked and thought every bit like the eminent author she sought to be and eventually would become. A precocious child, born in 1852, she declared her desire to be a writer around the age of ten.31 She later commenced writing in the midst of the “monotonous and dull years of family life.”32 She need a way out, or instead, a way in to the world of letters. And in 1885, with the what seemed

29 In a book review of the Robert Bush edited Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings, Claude M. Simpson, Jr. highlighted the importance of her “historical imagination at work” over her purely ﬁctionalized stories. Simpson, “Grace King: The Historian as Apologist,” Southern Literary Journal 6:2 (Spring 1974): 130-133, quotation appears on 131. The exception is Lyles’s dissertation, which does a fair job of placing Grace King within a historical context and contains a short focus on the author’s historical bibliography, see “A Transitional Generation,” 182-208, passim.

30 No female historian of the South predates Grace King in Jennifer Scanlon and Shaaron Cosner, eds., American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), King entry on 134-135.

31 Other sources give King’s birth year as 1851 and 1853. In a 1885 letter to her sister May, King writes that she is celebrating her thirty-third birthday, Grace King to May King McDowell, November 29, 1885, Folder 15b, Box 4, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

32 King, Memories, 46. 185 like the entire literary world descended on New Orleans, Grace King would have her chance.

! Using her title as director of the Cotton Exposition’s Women’s Department,

Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, suffragist, and poet, and other Northern social reformers accelerated the women’s rights agenda in the South by building an alliance based on gender and not geography or recent history.33 The

Massachusetts-born Howe brought to New Orleans the women’s club movement, a form of social campaigning devoted to the informal education of women and community service.34 Howe, whom King admired as “the embodiment of the

Victorian ideal of womanhood,” resuscitated the local Pan Gnostics club, an erstwhile men’s-only literary clique that her devotee enthusiastically joined and served as Secretary.35 At their tenth meeting, King read her comparative study of

American and continental literature, “Heroines of Novels,” to which the group gave “hearty applause” and encouraged the timid author to publish in the Times-

Democrat.36 Charles Dudley Warner, novelist and Harper’s Magazine literary critic, attended a Pan Gnostics gathering at King’s house, in April 1886, and

33 Lyles, “A Transitional Generation,” 233-234.

34 Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, 7-8.

35 King, Memories, 54; Grace King, Minute Book (“Pangnostics”) 1885-1886, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, 1.

36 King’s article, presented at the Pan Gnostics tenth meeting on May 16, 1885, would be her ﬁrst published work; she signed the essay “P. G.” for Pan Gnostics. Grace King, Minute Book (“Pangnostics”) 1885-1886, Mss. 1282, LLMVC; P. G. [Grace King], “Heroines of Novels,” Times- Democrat (May 31, 1885). The King scholars Bush and Elfenbein agree that this ﬁrst article’s merits lie in its seriousness of research and dissatisfaction with male authors’ handling of female characters. Bush, Southern Destiny , 52-55; Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 75. 186 discoursed on the symbol of the environment in Longfellow’s poetry.37 By then

Warner and King, having met a year earlier, were close friends. Their relationship, lasting until his death ﬁfteen years later, would survive arguments over race relations, their oppositional ﬁdelities to the North and South, and

Warner’s friendship with Cable.

! Grace King’s life and work would always be closely linked with that of

George Washington Cable, star and scoundrel of New Orleans’s brief moment on the world’s stage. A Cable-centric conversation with Richard Watson Gilder,

Union veteran, poet, and, since 1881, editor of the nation’s most important magazine The Century, led King to ﬁction writing. On a late postprandial walk home, Gilder, in town for the Exposition, asked King about the city’s opposition toward its most famed hometown scribe. King’s explanation centered on the national issue of race and local affairs of ethnicity and culture. She heatedly told

Gilder that Cable’s ﬁction “proclaimed his preference for colored people over white” while his provincially bound beliefs “assumed the inevitable superiority . . . of the quadroons over the Creoles.” “‘If Cable is so false to you,’” Gilder reposted,

“‘why do not some of you write better?’”38 Gilder’s challenge devastated King but also presented her with a sense of literary purpose. For the remainder of her literary career the white/African-American and Creole/American controversies would remain King’s two lost causes. She, like many New Orleanians, believed

Cable to be an outsider, “a foreigner,” writing books “against home institutions.”

37 Grace King, April 10, 1886 entry, Minute Book (“Pangnostics”) 1885-1886, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

38 King, Memories, 60. 187

Cable lacked integrity, he “makes false returns,” she stormed in her diary, and he

“waves a bloody pen.”39 The Grandissimes author betrayed New Orleans, the ultimate crime according to King; the traitor had “stabbed the city in the back.”

But King would write all of these attacks over the coming decades. That night, after this revelatory conversation, she “could not sleep . . . for thinking of Gilder’s rankling taunt.”40

! King’s racist attitude is easily recognizable and traceable because of her birth, her time and place, her upbringing in an unapologetically Confederate- glorifying family, and her history as an wartime exile. She saw American racial relations in stark black and white terms. She wrote in her diary that “the highest virtues [Cable] gives blacks means moral degradation for whites,” a zero- summed sentiment no less different from that expressed by any of her educated

Southern contemporaries.41 Her father, the son of a Baptist family, came from

Alabama by way of Georgia, his birth state, and Virginia before settling in New

Orleans in 1835. He would become a successful attorney. The stock of Grace

King’s mother, Sarah Ann Miller, also originated in Georgia—speciﬁcally

Savannah—before relocating to the Louisiana town of Covington.42

39 King, To Find My Own Peace, 4-5.

40 King, Memories, 60. In 1915, King wrote Pennsylvania State College English professor Fred Lewis Pattee that “Cable doubtless gave a true picture of the Creoles as he knew them (mostly quadroons)—I have always considered his works a libel on the Creoles I knew. However, he pleased the audience he wrote for, & he has made money.” Grace King to Pattee, January 19, 1915, LLMVC, reprinted in King, Grace King of New Orleans, 398.

41 King, To Find My Own Peace, 5.

42 Bush, Southern Destiny, 5. 188

! In the morning following her encounter with Richard Watson Gilder, King awoke, immediately grabbed pencil and paper, and began her lifelong quest to defend New Orleans. She felt that she must write or “forfeit all her allegiance to self-respect.” The pencil seemed to put down words “by itself,” and unconsciously and effortlessly she began to write of her childhood. She created a short story that mirrored parts of her own young life. King set “Monsieur Motte” at a girls’ boarding school modeled after the St. Louis Institute. Taking place over several

June days, the story concerns the orphaned student Marie Modeste and her guardian, and Mammy-type ﬁgure since childhood, Marcélite, whom King also

“took from [her own] life.”43 King completed “Monsieur Motte” in one sitting, mailed it to Gilder, in care of The Century Magazine, unsigned.

! “Monsieur Motte,” passed on by Gilder, would eventually be featured in the

New Princeton Review’s first issue in January 1886. After receiving $150 in payment, King confided to her sister May in a letter that the short story’s publication marked “the first really well satisfied moment of my life.”44 Only King’s closest friends and family knew of her newly chosen career, what she referred to, at the time, as “a deep and bloody secret.”45 As literary scholar Helen Taylor points out, women of the era agonized over the possibility of being “defeminized through the very act of writing for publication and thus engaging in public

43 King, Memories, 61.

44 Grace King to May McDowell, December 22, 1885, LLMVC.

45 Grace King to F. Brevard McDowell, November 29, 1885, Folder 15b, Box 4, Mss. 1282, LLMVC. 189 discourse.”46 Charles Dudley Warner wrote King of the story’s success in northern literary circles: “The N. Y. Tribune had ten lines of hearty praise. . . . All of my friends, who have read it, are thoroughly entranced with it, think it very strong, vigorous, pathetic, and wonderful in giving pictures with a few strokes of the pen.” Besides the favorable reviews the press guessed at the author’s anonymity; one paper judged it to be the work of a foreigner, while the New York

Post attributed it to George Washington Cable.47

! Readers could be excused for their mistaken, and highly ironic, assumption that Cable could have written King’s story. “Monsieur Motte,” like much of Cable’s early ﬁction, is a local color piece that attracted attention for its skillful depiction of the cosmopolitan and polyglot community of Creole New

Orleans. Cable and King would again be compared two years later in a Harper’s lead article, “The Recent Movement in Southern Literature,” on twelve contemporary regional writers. Naturally, a sketch of the celebrated Cable begins

Charles W. Coleman’s article, after which follows a short biography of King.

Despite having published no novels and only four short stories at the time, she found herself in rare company: Joel Chandler Harris, compiler of the bestselling

Uncle Remus tales; the Old South apologist extraordinaire, Thomas Nelson

Page; and, strangely enough, because of his foreign birth, Lafcadio Hearn. The article featured just as many female as male authors; by including so many women in this new Southern literary canon, an early Southern renaissance of

46 Taylor, Gender, Race and Region, 24; also, see 40-41.

47 Charles Dudley Warner to Grace King, January 5, 1886, Folder 16, Box 4, Mss. 1282, LLMVC. King initially hid her published writings from even her mother, see King, Memories, 66. 190 sorts, Coleman recognized a disruption in the region’s society and culture.

Antebellum conditions were “unfavorable, if not openly antagonistic” to female writers, which Southerners saw more as a diversion to be “cultivated as a gentleman’s recreation.” Still, Coleman used gender as a determiner of literary quality and tone, his description of King highlighted her femininity, the “warmth of coloring” in her fiction and the “delicate touch” with which she depicted “the passionate and romantic in the life of her native city.” Furthermore, Coleman could not help but compare the two authors of Creole fiction through genderfying terms. Cable was “the recognized master over the the enchanted, semitropical realm, beautiful with flowers, yet marked by the trail of the serpent.” Alternatively,

King was “a young lady of New Orleans” who might have “naturally been deterred from following in [Cable’s] footsteps,” but at last “modestly came forward with a short story.”48

! The story itself was hardly modest. A trio of characters frame “Monsieur

Motte”: the young Creole, boarding-schooler orphan Marie Modeste; the eponymous Motte, Marie’s uncle and benefactor, whom she has never met; and

Marcélite, the mammiﬁed caretaker of Marie. In a letter to Charles Dudley

Warner, King, upon hearing that “Monsieur Motte” had been accepted for publication, outlined her ﬁrst short story’s thesis: “The only vocation I feel, is the desire to show you that a Southerner and a white person is not ashamed to acknowledge a dependence on negroes. Nor to proclaim the love that exists

48 Charles W. Coleman, “The Recent Movement in Southern Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74:444 (May 1887): 837-855. Decades later, Grace King wrote that, for a young author, being included in Harper’s pages “was equivalent to the presentation of a débutante at Court. The writers who were thus presented never, in truth, forgot the honor.” King, Memories, 68. 191 between the two races.”49 The Lost Cause ethos drew its staying power, according to David W. Blight, “from the image of the faithful slave and the overall ideology of white supremacy.”50 Lost Cause sympathizers, like King, crafted story after story about postbellum, emancipated African Americans who retained that loyalty to and love for the mythic master race. This culture of segregation, appearing in ﬁctionalized literature and de facto everyday life, was created by whites to combat the advancing black middle class, or “to stop the rising,” in the words of Grace Elizabeth Hale.51

! Initially, King used the loyal slave caricature in opposition to George

Washington Cable’s more complex views on Southern race relations. She believed that “great instances of devotion were found among even the worst treated slaves. I love to dwell on this, which I would call [the] holy passion of the negro women, for it serves to cancel those other grosser ones.”52 In “Monsieur

Motte,” Marcélite works as a hairdresser, successful enough to support Marie, in the guise, as the author gradually uncovers, of the imaginary Uncle Motte.

Marcélite tells her ward, “‘you know I would kill myself for you, mon bébé.’”53

49 Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, November 22, 1885, Folder 15b, Box 4, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

50 Blight, Race and Reunion, 284.

51 Hale, Making Whiteness, 21.

52 Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, October 4, 1885, Folder 15a, Box 4, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

53 “Monsieur Motte” would eventually engender three sequels; the four short stories then appeared together under the title Monsieur Motte. Grace King, Monsieur Motte (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1888), 40 (italics in original). 192

! Throughout her career, King featured the myths of the formerly enslaved who accepted their inferiority and remained loyal to their former masters. To choose just one example of many, in her later Reconstruction-era novel, The

Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916), the Talbot family slave Aglore refuses freedom numerous times, while proudly exclaiming that she would not accept freedom “as a gift from ‘strangers.’”54 King’s ﬁdelity to the Lost Cause code consistently guided her literary voice: “My over endeavor,” she admitted to

Warner, “[is] to call attention at least to some of those relations brought out by slavery, honorable to all concerned.55

! Along with espousing her views on racial relations, King continued ﬁghting for the Lost Cause by waving her literary guns at the historical memories of the

Civil War and Reconstruction. She begins her memoirs with a remembrance of when “the enemy were in possession of the city.” For the ten-year-old Grace, the

Union’s New Orleans occupation was a time of fear and nightmarish scenes: uncontrolled ﬁres, raids of the family home and possessions by marauding

Yankee soldiers, and a twilight escape to the King’s L’Embarras Plantation, located deep in the Cajun country of southwest Louisiana.56 Exiled and imprisoned on the plantation, King and her siblings became Confederate partisans; in a journal she wrote that “the Confederacy was the great dominating

54 Grace King, The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916), 68.

55 Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, September 17, 1885, Folder 14c, Box 3, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

56 King, Memories, 4-22, quotation appears on p. 5. 193 circumstance . . . it structured & stretched & shaped us.”57 The ruin the Union invasion and Confederate defeat left behind would characterize King’s career, and Reconstruction, which she would deﬁne simply as “also war,” became a second conﬂict.58 Her semi-autobiographical The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard is her most richly developed description of life during this second wartime. King’s foremost biographer called the novel “as genuine a picture of the true tenor of life in the Reconstruction South as we have.”59 In St. Médard, the Talbot family returns much like the Kings to a New Orleans where all that they held dear “had disappeared like a meteor from the sky.” The family had lost their home, their belongings, and the patriarch his law practice. Adding insult to injury, Yankee soldiers crowded the city as do freedmen and women in the public schools. In this novel, “we,” all white, non-Union New Orleanians, “are a ruined people.”60

If There Were Women, It Might be More Interesting

! Knowing her background and the circles she traveled in, Grace King’s

Lost Cause stance is easily understandable. However, her vehement defense of the Creoles, and the impassioned provincialism that deﬁned her later writing, is less conceivable. King, though a New Orleanian by birth, could not, and never dared, call herself a Creole. But, she was brought up as a Creole. Mrs. King,

57 Grace King, Journal 1904, June 3, 1904 entry, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in King, To Find My Own Peace, 148.

58 King, Memories, 78.

59 King, Grace King of New Orleans, 25.

60 King, St. Médard, ﬁrst quotation p. 22, second p. 238. 194 born Sallie Ann Miller, but called Mimi, raised her children to speak ﬂuent French, as she had once learned.61 King remembered Mimi, despite being raised

Presbyterian, drinking wine with breakfast and practicing her piano on Sundays, two behaviorisms that labeled her as if “she too were a good little Creole.”62 Mimi and the King family, following the lead of most Creole New Orleanians, refused to honor the July Fourth holiday. Instead, every year on July 14th, the thoroughly creolized Kings sang the Marseillaise and read aloud the French Revolution’s bill of rights, Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen.63 The Kings sent their four daughters to Catholic schools, thus ensuring that they would get the same

Creole education Mimi had in her youth. Grace attended a typical Gallic-style academy, the Institut St. Louis on Dauphine Street, which she would recall as being “unique in a picturesque way” and full of “peculiarly interesting” Creole girls. Overseen by the Parisian-educated Mme. E. Deron, this private institution modeled itself on the Ursuline convent and stressed a history and foreign language-heavy curriculum, two disciplines King excelled at throughout adulthood. Birthplace, education, and friendships forged in young Grace an allegiance to Creole culture and society that she would accuse Cable of lacking.64 For a Gallic-cultured American, even one who had not yet visited the

61 Bush, Southern Destiny , 2-6.

62 King, Memories, 2.

63 Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, July 12, 1885, Folder 13a, Box 3, Mss. 1282, LLMVC.

64 King, Memories, 61; Bush, Southern Destiny, 22-23. 195 patrie-mère, “the routine of life in New Orleans” could, as King posited, seem perfectly “French.”65

! In her ﬁrst visit to Paris in late autumn 1891, King found the French capital, “the mother of New Orleans” in her words, not as strange as she previously imagined. The City of Lights appeared very much like home; King felt

“so natural” because “New Orleans is very much like it.” But Paris could still, as it so naturally does for many Americans, hold sway over her. During several lengthy stays the city became, for King, a place to better understand New

Orleans history and her own connection to the Creoles. Paris, King’s “greatest pleasure ground in the world for memory,” allowed her to think like a historian.66 It was in Paris, her newfound home away from home, where Grace King would

ﬁnalize her ﬁrst work of history. Contracted by Dodd, Mead and Company to produce a book for their series, “The Makers of the Nation,” King chose Jean-

Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, founder of New Orleans. King would be filling in a major gap in Louisiana Creole history; the biography would be the first to chronicle the life of the French-Canadian explorer whom Gayarré credited with overseeing “the first creole” birth in the French colony.67 She first consulted

Gayarré’s History of Louisiana, then the historian himself.

65 King, Memories, 223.

66 King, Memories, 117, 290.

67 Charles Gayarré writes that Claude Jousset, “the son of a Canadian who carried on a small trading business at Mobile,” became the ﬁrst Creole born in May, 1733, Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination. (1854; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974), 458-459; King, Memories, 69-70. 196

! Since 1867, King and Gayarré had carried on a student-teacher relationship that fomented the former’s appreciation for Creole and French culture and history. The King and Gayarré families had long been intimates.

Grace’s father William Woodson King and Charles Gayarré were friends and once shared ofﬁce space, and both men lost their fortunes during the Civil War.

Throughout her teens and early twenties, Grace and her sister May often summered at the Gayarré country home, Roncal, near the Mississippi border town of Osyka, north of New Orleans. On her ﬁrst visit, at ﬁfteen years of age,

Grace found the Judge, as the Kings always deferred to him, to be “an impressive ﬁgure, very tall.” Waiting for the sisters at the train station, the Judge, dressed in a long, black coat and top hat, appeared “majestic,” his austerity contrasting with the bucolic pinewood forests of Tangipahoa Parish. The King sisters initially found Roncal unimpressive, “a little low, brown cottage,” but its interiors “looked French and foreign and different from the usual American country place.” Its residents, likewise, were extraordinarily European. Roncal was more French than even New Orleans: “It was the salon of a Paris apartment. . . . a corner of France.” Mr. and Mrs. Gayarré imbibed “full goblets of Spanish wine” instead of water, and pots of chocolat chaud as an alternative to café. Grace and

May spent days swimming in the neighboring creek and evenings listening to

Mrs. Gayarré, Shadie Ann Sullivan, sing and strum her guitar.68 The Gayarrés’, with no children of their own, adored the sisters, whom they nicknamed the

68 King, Memories, 30-43; Grace King to May King, September 7, 1875, Folder 3b, Box 1, Mss. 1282, LLMVCC; Bush, A Southern Destiny, 26-27. 197

“merry Kings.” Charles Gayarré often wished that he could “have such a daughter” as Grace.69

! Gayarré’s thoughts regarding the Bienville biography must have been extremely disappointing for the woman who considered herself his pupil. Gayarré immediately dismissed King and her selected nation maker. “‘What could anyone of today write about Bienville?’” Gayarré cholericly challenged King, “‘a very ordinary man, not worth writing about!’” Nevertheless he advised her about which archives to consult.70 Gayarré’s own Louisiana history commissions had long dried up, perhaps inducing his less than enthusiastic response. Additionally, he believed that although women could be occasionally encouraged to pen ﬁction, history was written by men, about men, for men. The series containing the

Bienville biography took this Great Man Theory approach typical of popular history of that day. A press release marked the collection as documenting “the lives of discoverers, colonizers, statesmen, men of war, men of letters, theologians, and inventors—men who, in their respective walks of life, ‘have been of sufﬁcient force to stamp their impress on their times and to help shape the affairs of the continent.’”71 Bostonian Anna Laurens Dawes’s biography of

Charles Sumner counted as the only other female-composed title in the twenty-

69 Charles Gayarré to Sarah Ann Miller King, November 3, 1875, quoted in Bush, “Letters of a Louisiana Friendship,” 102.

70 King, Memories, 181.

71 The Publishers’ Weekly: American Book-Trade Journal XXXVII (January-June 1890), 563. 198 three volume series.72 The academy would not allow Southern women the opportunity to join the historical profession until the 1920s, but King certainly found a place for women in Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (1892).73

Early on in the narrative, she included a sketch of Bienville’s mother, Catherine

Primot. Married to Charles le Moyne at the age of fourteen, Catherine birthed fourteen children and admirably administrated his vast land-holdings following his death.74 King compared the search for archival documents to big-game hunting, and the stalking and capturing that went into the Bienville biography incited in

King a new passion for historical writing and research.75 She hunted down sources, not always successfully, in New Orleans, Montreal, and Paris to create a true scholarly biography.76 Though she lacked professional historical training and support, Grace King had become a historian.

! King’s Parisian research engendered more publications. An article for

Harper’s on Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, Bienville’s older brother and founder of

72 See the “Makers of America” list in the back of Grace King, Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1892), no pagination; Lyles, “A Transitional Generation,” 186.

73 Anne Firor Scott, “A Different View of Southern History,” in Scott, ed., Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1993), 1-71.

74 King, Bienville, 1-7.

75 King, Memories, 70-72, 133; Bush, A Southern Destiny, 168-172.

76 Though King uses few footnotes in the text, she adds a preface to the Bienville text crediting the documents and archives consulted, King, Bienville, v-vi. 199 the French Louisiana colony, followed in 1894.77 The year prior, King collaborated with Tulane History Professor John Rose Ficklen on a pair of Louisiana textbooks. She aspired to ﬁx a signiﬁcant problem; the state’s public school curriculum shirked the teaching of Louisiana history. No task would be for her

“more worth striving for.”78 King wrote the ﬁrst half, covering the French and

Spanish colonial eras, of A History of Louisiana (1893), while Professor Ficklen half encompassed statehood through the present-day.79 Stories from Louisiana

History, the duo’s second composition, intended for younger readers and as a lead-up to the ﬁrst, followed in 1905. The textbooks contained simple historical tales, but the authors made sure to inform their readers that “not a single detail has been introduced from the realm of ﬁction.”80 The King and Ficklen volumes were two in a wave of locally written and produced, pro-Southern textbooks that sought to stamp out “Yankee lies.” Beginning in the 1890s, groups such as the

United Daughters of the Confederacy and the United Confederate Veterans

77 The article is signiﬁcant for its incorporation of Iberville’s map of the Mississippi River Valley and Gulf Coast which King found with the aid of archivist Gabriel Marcel in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Grace King, “Iberville and the Mississippi,” Harper’s Magazine 89:533 (October 1894), map on page 727; see also King, Memoirs, 150-151, for her story concerning the map’s discovery.

78 King, Memories, 218-219.

79 Grace King and John R. Ficklen, A History of Louisiana (1893; reprint ed., New Orleans: The L. Graham Co., 1905), preface, no pagination.

80 King and Ficklen advertised this second textbook, that covered up through the Battle of New Orleans (1815), as a “simpler” narrative of the “romantic incidents in the early history of the Mississippi Valley. Grace King and John R. Ficklen, Stories from Louisiana History (New Orleans: The L. Graham Co., 1905), preface, no pagination. 200 pressured states and school boards to adopt Southern-leaning curricula.81 In the preface to their ﬁrst collaboration, King and Ficklen boasted that “the artistic and mechanical portion of the work was done in New Orleans—the book is entirely a home product.”82 It was also an entirely ﬁctional product. Printed at the Perdido

Street ofﬁces of the L. Graham Company, their grassroots projects whitened

Louisiana’s colonial experience, endorsed slavery, and exalted the White

League. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, A History of Louisiana’s ﬁnal paragraphs glorify the state’s “new literature,” created by “brilliant . . . Creole and

American authors.” Composing in French and English, these writers had uncovered a treasure trove, “an interesting ﬁeld to explore, for no history is richer in romantic incidents than that of Louisiana.” King and Ficklen ended their

Louisiana narrative by proclaiming that this local circle would undoubtedly attain a most honorable position in the ﬁeld of letters.83

! Contrasted with these earlier historical works, King’s next assignment allowed the author, now in her prime, more freedom to romanticize key incidents

81 New York City housed the most successful nineteenth-century textbook publishers. James M. McPherson, This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93-106; Karen L. Cox counts the proliferation of pro-Confederate history and education, through their textbook campaign, to be one of the signiﬁcant legacies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in Dixie’s Daughters, 121, 123-127, 160-163; also, see Fred Arthur Bailey, “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75:3 (Fall 1991): 507-533; Herman Hattaway, “Clio’s Southern Soldiers: The United Confederate Veterans and History,” Louisiana History 12:3 (Summer 1971): 213-242; Janney, Burying the Dead, 172-173.

82 King and Ficklen, A History of Louisiana, no pagination (italics mine).

83 Page one introduces the Louisiana narrative as “the struggle for its possession by the three great European powers, Spain, France and England”; the enslaved were said to be “suited both to the climate and to the occupation of the people”; and the White Leaguers are described as “brave citizens” whose spilt blood, during the Battle of Liberty Place (September 14, 1874), sanctiﬁed the Southern struggle. Ibid., 1, 210, 239-240, 250-251. 201 in Creole and Louisiana history. The Macmillan Company’s commission, issued in 1893 or 1894, to prepare a book on New Orleans for a series on great

American cities initially overwhelmed King. Gayarré, as she later admitted in her memoirs, should have been given the task, but the New York publishing house sought younger writers for the series. Sensibly, King must have realized that her mentor’s days were numbered—the Creole historian would die at the age of ninety on February 11, 1905. She privately consoled herself with the words “‘si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.’”84 Her New Orleans: The Place and the

People (1895) carries a relaxed tone; the book’s narrative reveals a writer detailing and discovering her love for the city and its inhabitants, rather than a scholar studying its history. The book thus reads as more of a biographical sketch than a city’s chronicle.85

! In The Place and the People Grace King came into her own as a female historian by writing a gendered history of the city. She wittily began the book’s introduction with the observation that people invariably ascribe cities with the feminine gender, yet just as there are “many women whom we call women only by grammatical courtesy,” there existed cities which hardly deserved the womanly personiﬁcation. New Orleans, on the other hand, was indubitably ladylike. It was, “among cities, the most feminine of women, always using the old standard of feminine distinction.” Throughout the text, King consistently feminized

New Orleans and its people. Though much of the city’s history is documented

84 “If youth but knew, if old age but could.” King, Memories, 182.

85 Bush, Southern Destiny, 175-176. 202 within its pages, it was women, mothers, and the intimacy of home life that routinely materialized. In the ﬁrst chapter’s opening sentences King described the city as “home” and “nothing less than . . . family.” The city thus acted as mother to all its people. “It eternalizes us to ourselves,” thus creating a grand imaginary family. King’s historical community knew no bounds. It incorporated “old, young, white, black, free, slave,” linking all New Orleanians “together, by name and circumstance, by afﬁliation and interdependence, by love and hate, justice and injustice, virtue and crime” into one familial unit.86

! As she had done in her short stories, Grace King sought to portray the lives of real Louisiana women in The Place and the People. When King set out to write her new narrative history, she perhaps thought back on one of her ﬁnal conversations with her mentor Charles Gayarré. King recorded the words of the

Creole godfather as he struggled with pain while evidently suffering from visions.

He described what he saw: “The people that pass before my eyes all the time— people I don’t know—that I have never seen before . . . men & negroes.” The characters that inhabited Gayarré’s fever dream could also stand in for the way he once wrote the history of the state, as a chronicle of great men. In his histories, as in his deathbed hallucinations, Gayarré saw “never a woman”; but he conﬁded to King that “if there were women, it might be more interesting.” King

86 Grace King, New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895; revised ed., New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), xv-xvi, 1-2, 348-349. King could also characterize New Orleans, at her worst, as a woman. In the historical romance La Dame de Sainte Hermine, she compares the hurricane-battered city to a “whipped woman, humiliated and degraded.” Grace King, La Dame de Sainte Hermine (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 113. 203 took these words to heart when composing New Orleans: The Place and the

People.87

! The most important New Orleans mothers in King’s narrative, the Ursuline nuns, could not have been mothers in the literal sense, but after their 1727 arrival in the city, the Ursuline sisters became “the spiritual mothers of the real mothers of Louisiana.” The Ursulines educated the French colony’s women and girls in literacy and religion practice, becoming, in effect, the maternal face of the New

Orleans family. Because of the nuns, “it is not exaggeration to say that there is no

Louisiana woman living to-day who, directly or indirectly, is not beholden, for some virtue, charm, or accomplishment.”88 But just as women birthed and embodied New Orleans, they could also be the root of its social predicaments.

There were family problems. The city’s culture of mixed-race coupling and the children born from these relationships created problematic and ﬂuid identities. In typical white alarmist fashion, King warned that “the great ambition of the unmarried quadroon mothers was to have their children pass for whites, and so get access to the privileged class.” She damned mixed-race mothers as “the most insidious and the deadliest foes a community ever possessed.” According to King’s twisted history, a group of young women, “descendants of three of the oldest and most respectable free coloured families in the city,” came to their own

87 King, Notebook, 1886-1901, January 13, 1895 entry, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in King, To Find My Own Peace, 87.

88 King, ibid., 54, 71. On page 60, King states that the Louisiana mission originally consisted of eight Ursuline from France; there were, in fact, twelve nuns. See, Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), passim. 204 race’s rescue, by combating the practice of racial passing, and thus the

“unwholesome notoriety of the quadroon women.” In 1842 this unnamed trio established the Sisters of the Holy Family in order, through faith and charity, to keep “young coloured girls” on their side of the color line.89 King’s feminized descriptions of the city’s history delighted even herself, later boasting that “New

Orleans was never more attractive as a heroine of literature.”90 This gendered study of the city’s history astounded readers. Reviewers almost unanimously praised the book, and the public bought up new Macmillan editions in 1907 and

1912.91 Literary critic William Dean Howells, a writer later celebrated as “the

Dean of American Letters,” wrote King: “I should like so much to tell you that your history of New Orleans is almost the most perfect book of its kind that I know.”92

The accolades for The Place and the People continued for decades. In 1926, after visiting New Orleans, noted American man of letters Edmund Wilson sent

King a letter with even loftier praise: “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the book; I believe I learned more about the South from it—not merely from the point of view of information but from that of dramatic communication of the spirit and

89 King, New Orleans: The Place and the People, 348-349. The history of the Sisters of the Holy Family is, unsurprisingly, more complicated and its members did not count themselves as benefactors of white racial purity; Henriette DeLille and others, in fact, clung to their mixed-race heritage and refused to pass as white. See, Sister Mary Bernard Deggs, No Cross, No Crown: Black Nuns in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, eds. Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

90 King, Memories, 182.

91 Bush, Southern Destiny, 178-179.

92 William Dean Howells to Grace King, December 7, 1900, LLMVC. 205 ideas of society—than from any other book I’ve read.”93 Twenty years after New

Orleans: The Place and the People’s publication she conﬁded that: “I consider it my best best work, I may say the one work I have accomplished.”94

! Though King considered The Place and the People to be her greatest work, Creole Families of New Orleans, without a doubt, ranks as her deepest piece of historical research. She began her research in 1919, combing through old city newspapers, her trusty set of Gayarré histories, and the birth, baptism, marriage, and death certiﬁcates at the St. Louis Cathedral Bureau of Records.

Additionally she contacted and interviewed dozens of the first Creole families’ progeny.95 The aid and input of many Creole representatives ensured that this outsider’s work would be accepted as an insider’s view, and also allowed these family members to participate in a form of “consumer genomics,” the crafting of their own family trees, more than a half-century before Alex Haley’s Roots.96 No mention is ever made in Creole Families of family trees that are anything but pure white. When reality did not fit the Creole myth of racially purity, King erased history by manufacturing family trees to fit her imagination. As historian Shirley

93 Edmund Wilson to Grace King, April 11, 1926, LLMVC, reprinted in King, Grace King of New Orleans, 29-30.

94 King to Pattee, January 19, 1915, LLMVC.

95 King’s notes for Creole Families may be found in the Grace King papers, Manuscripts Collection 564, Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (LRC).

96 Jack Temple Kirby, “ANCESTRYdotBOMB: Genealogy, Genomics, Mischief, Mystery, and Southern Family Stories,” The Journal of Southern History LXXVI:1 (February 2010): 3-38, quotation on p. 12. For a discussion on the crafting of genealogical identities, Martin Saar, “Genealogy and Subjectivity,” European Journal of Philosophy 10:2 (August 2002): 231-245; François Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy,” The New England Quarterly 80:3 (September 2007): 408-434; Saar, “Understanding Genealogy: History, Power, and the Self,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2:3 (September 2008): 295-314. 206

Elizabeth Thompson aptly demonstrates, although King’s chapter on the Macarty patronymic presented the “good old Creole name” as “extinct . . . only a memory in New Orleans,” there were, in fact, as there are still today, Macarty men, relatives of the white Creole Macartys, who lived openly as Creoles of color.97

Undoubtedly, the sketching, and imagining, of over thirty-ﬁve family trees made for tough work; one Creole, who aided her in the collection of family anecdotes, empathized with King: “You will see the difﬁculty I had getting at the true story.

You will have to wade through a lot to get a little.”98 But once King got what she wanted, it made for an interesting compendium of New Orleans history.

! King’s Creole Families more than updated Charles Patton Dimitry’s earlier genealogical sketches, the book served as a reminder of Creole exceptionality and a defense of the southern aristocratic ideal. Using archival research to explore links between Continental royal ties and New World Creole nobility, she constructed the thesis that wellborn European blood founded the Louisiana colony and continued to define New Orleans.99 The chapter on the Villeré family, whose “name spreads like a fruitful vine over all the genealogical records,” finely illustrates King’s motive. She located the Villeré name first in feudal Italy; the

Rouer de Villerays, according to family tradition, belonged to the distinguished house of la Rovere, which supplied two Popes to the Church, many princes to

Italian city-states, and “possessed chevaliers innumerable of the most

97 On the Macarty family, Thompson, Exiles at Home, 190-209. King, Creole Families, the Macarty family chapter is traced on 368-382, quotation appears on 368.

98 [Name illegible] to Grace King, June 16, 1919, Mss. 564, LRC.

99 I disagree with Robert Bush’s assertion that Creole Families represents “a summing up for posterity, almost a swan song devoted to Creole history.” Bush, A Southern Destiny, 285. 207 distinguished orders of France.” The family eventually became French, and

Raymond de Rouer of Languedoc maintained his name’s royal ties by commanding the King’s armies in the mid-sixteenth century. Louis Rouer de

Villerày is the ﬁrst family member found in Canadian records; he served as the

President of the Sovereign Council of Canada. King’s sources, unnamed, point to another Villeré who accompanied Iberville on his voyage to the Mississippi

River’s mouth in 1699. Etienne Roy de Villeré became the first Villeré to live in colonial Louisiana, and the first to leave a well-defined historical and archival footprint; his tenuous ties to the preceding Villerés mentioned in this chapter did not keep King from fabricating the family tree. Etienne’s proud son Joseph Roy de Villeré acted, and died, as one of the ringleaders that expelled first Spanish

Governor Antonio de Ulloa in the Rebellion of 1768. Fatherless Jacques Philippe

Roy de Villeré, son of Joseph, was taken to France, becoming a page in the royal court of King Louis XVI and later a lieutenant in his Majesty’s Army. As if the

Louisiana annals were not already overstuffed with Villeré family lore, Jacques

Philippe returned to Louisiana and built wealth in the sugar industry; the Villeré plantation’s vast acreage became the site of Andrew Jackson’s ﬁnal charge against the British invaders in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, during which

Jacques Philippe wielded a sword given him by King Louis XVI. And just to gild the magnolia, the state’s ubiquitous blossom, Jacques Philippe de Villeré served as the ﬁrst Creole Governor of Louisiana. His descendants went on to become, and remain still today, luminaries in several sectors of the city’s business life.100

100 The history of the Rouer de Villeray family is contained in chapter VII of King, Creole Families, 133-153, quotations from 153, 133. 208

! In composing Creole Families of New Orleans, King was riding an

American genealogical wave of popularity that had only begun in the early 1890s.

King’s founding family narrative mimicked elite hereditary organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The DAR’s membership call, issued in July 1890, sent for “every woman in America who has the blood of the heroes of the Revolution in her veins” to attend the founding meeting. Hereditary groups rapidly expanded following the 1876 Centennial national blowout; eighteen forerunners to the DAR were established before the year’s end. Within a decade that count rose to twenty-four, including the United Daughters of the

Confederacy (UDC).101 Founded in 1894, the UDC aimed for the vindication of the Southern States’ cause and memorialization of their “Confederate culture.”

Eligibility for the UDC required that one be a descendent of men who honorably fought for the Confederacy.102 Although men also participated in their own hereditary associations—the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of

Confederate Veterans counted as two popular fraternal societies—genealogical organizations and the congruous national club movement was very much a woman’s game. Grace King counted herself a member of many local women’s reform clubs. Her greatest contributions would be to the Louisiana Historical

Society, revived in 1893 after years of decline, to continue the work of Gayarré.

She ﬁrst served as the vice president and then as secretary, edited the

101 O’Leary, To Die For, 78-81, quotation appears on 79.

102 Cox, Dixie’s Daughters, quotation appears on 1, see 22 for a discussion on eligibility. 209

Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society from 1895 to 1917, and helped found the Louisiana Historical Quarterly in 1917.103

! Creole Families jumpstarted a Creole hereditary movement. New Orleans genealogists Stanley Clisby Arthur and George Campbell Huchet de Kernion followed King’s lead. Their Old Families of Louisiana (1931) collected, reprinted, and expanded Charles Patton Dimitry’s earlier sketches, by adding ﬁfty-four additional dynasties, or what they called “foundation families,” to the distinguished Creole roll.104 Arthur and Kernion, like King, whitened the Macarty family tree by stressing that Eugène Macarty “did not marry,” thus forever extinguishing the family line. In fact, Eugène Macarty produced several children with a free woman of color, Eulalie Mandeville, who, ironically and almost impossibly, counted as the half sister of crème de la Creole Bernard Marigny.105 It goes without saying that Arthur and Kernion dutifully erased any non-white blood from Dimitry himself, whose ﬁrst cousin George Pandelly, a black man, in 1854 successfully sued to be considered white in the law’s eyes.106 Some would say that this ancestor worship and whitening continues in New Orleans today, as many of these same families compete to see how “deeply rooted in the soil” their

103 King’s name may be found on the rolls of a mixture of reformist and progressive clubs, including the suffragette Portia Club, the Christian Woman’s Exchange, the Woman’s Club of New Orleans, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She later helped organize other clubs, including the Association for the Advancement of Women’s local chapter (1895), the Equal Rights Association Club of New Orleans (1896), and the Southern Women’s Economic and Political Association (1917). For a closer reading of King’s women’s club activity, see Lyles, “A Transitional Generation,” 222-277.

104 Arthur and Kernion, Old Families of Louisiana, no pagination [9-10].

105 Ibid., 333. Also, see Thompson, Exiles at Home, 190-209.

106 Thompson, Exiles at Home, 28-66. 210 foundations lie.107 With Creole families scattered throughout the state and the entirety of the former New France colony, the sketching of Creole family trees was not limited to the Crescent City. Herman de Bachellé Seebold’s Old

Louisiana Plantation Homes and Family Trees, published in two volumes (1941).

Other French-American communities, St. Louis and Mobile most notably, documented their own Creole genealogies.108

! For Grace King, Creole life and letters began and ended with Charles

Gayarré. In an introduction she wrote for the fourth edition of Gayarré’s History of

Louisiana (1903), King bestowed upon him the exalted title of not only “the historian of Louisiana but the history of it as well.” She eventually reworked this biographical sketch of her beloved Judge into two complete chapters in Creole

Families, one on the man himself, and a preceding chapter on his family roots.109

Though their relationship would be marked by conﬂict, King remained dedicated to her ﬁrst and foremost teacher.

! Anecdotes of the esteemed Louisiana historian’s ﬁnal years appear often in King’s published works and private journals and correspondence. In his last months, she visited his home on Sundays, sitting by his bedside and taking notes on his remembrances: witnessing the sacking of the famed Lalaurie mansion,

107 Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009), 41.

108 Paul Beckwith, Creoles of St. Louis (St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1893) traces the ﬁrve branches of that city’s Chouteau family to 1749 New Orleans, 7; Johnnie Andrews, Jr., Creole Mobile: A Compendium of the Colonial Families of the Central Gulf Coast, 1702-1813 (Prichard, AL: Bienville Historical Society, 1974).

109 Grace King, “Charles Gayarre [sic],” in Charles Gayarré, History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination (1854; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974), i; King, Creole Families, 256-290, quotation on 269. 211 past conversations with Battle of New Orleans ofﬁcers, dislike for Jefferson

Davis, and friendship with the Baroness de Pontalba.110 These could not have been all joyful visits; since the Civil War’s end, Gayarré lived in penury and inﬁrmity. He was now going blind, and his intense misery, especially at being unable to write, emerges in King’s journals: “How uninteresting life is—without future—without projects. Never grow old! Try never to grow old!” In recording

Gayarré’s final words and days—though they are scant in number—King served as more than a mere documentarian. Instead, she actively labored to preserve the memories of a man who, years earlier, had chosen to destroy nearly all of his papers. One unidentified day outside his Mississippi home, Gayarré carried trunks, bags, and boxes filled with an entire lifetime of personal accumulated paper—research notes, drafts, and letters—and burned them. After hearing the story from Gayarré himself, King wrote that “he destroyed them for fear [that] one sentence might escape and reveal to the world what he would conceal.” Later, in her memoirs, King changed the story of Gayarré and his conflagration; she wrote that, after selling his beloved Roncal plantation in 1881, he merely needed to consolidate his belongings. She would defend the eminent Creole to the very end.111

! While Grace King ﬁnalized the New Orleans: The Place and the People manuscript, Gayarré died, a day after their ﬁnal Sunday meeting, at ninety years

110 King, Notebook, 1886-1901, “The Value of Published Impressions of Travellers” [circa 1886], June 15, November 26, 1894 and December 10, 1894 entries, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in King, To Find My Own Peace, 10, 79-85; Bush, Southern Destiny, 182-187.

111 King, Notebook, 1886-1901, January 13, 1895 entry, Mss. 1282, LLMVC, reprinted in King, To Find My Own Peace, 86; King, Memories, 43-44. 212 old. King inherited what remained of his papers, while the King family became the caretakers of his widow. Mrs. Gayarré wanted her late husband buried immediately, but his protégée argued for “a little pomp & ceremony over the poor old Judge.” Hence, on one of “the bleakest winter days the city had known for half a century,” King solemnly accompanied the three carriage-procession from the Gayarrés’ North Prieur home to the St. Louis Cathedral. The “dirty” New

Orleans streets had never seemed so “foreign-looking,” so exceedingly non-

Creole to Grace King. As the deceased’s cofﬁn reached the vestibule and the

Cathedral’s doors were thrown open, King, weary and now horriﬁed, took in the scene. The altar’s devotional candles outnumbered the funeral congregation. The church was “simply empty.”112

! Naturally, Grace King could and would again rewrite history. King dedicated her opus, The Place and the People, to Gayarré’s memory, but even more appreciatively, culminated her history “with a tribute to his memory and name.” She concluded the book with a mythical description of Gayarré’s entombment in his grandfather Étienne de Boré’s crypt, located within the bricked walls of the city’s oldest cemetery, St. Louis No. 1. King envisaged that New

Orleans “herself head[ed] the ﬁle of mourners” to “weep bitterly at the tomb.” The memory of the city’s most luminous Creole star would not be lost. Gayarré, born into Creole nobility, devoted “his pen” to New Orleans and became the city’s

“courageous knight” defending “her” against “the aspersions of strangers, the

112 Grace King to May King McDowell, February 13, 1895, Folder 56a, Box 8, Mss 1282, LLMVC (italics in original). Also, see Joseph G. Tregle Jr., “Creoles and Americans,” in eds. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 185. 213 slanders of traitors.” He matured into the holder of the the city’s archives “not only in his memory but in his heart.” New Orleans owed everything to her favorite son, primogenitor of “the world[s] of history, romance, and poetry,” leader of the local cultural circle, and thus ﬁrst among Creoles. King’s history of Creole New

Orleans began and ended with Charles Gayarré.113

113 King, New Orleans: The Place and the People, 400-402. King misidentifies Gayarré’s final month as January, when he, in fact, died on February 11, 1895, a day after her final Sunday visit with him. 214

Conclusion “New Orleans is a world.” — Creating the Creole City in the Twentieth Century

! Up until her death in 1932, Grace King remained the “unofﬁcial hostess and society leader of New Orleans.”1 Fourteen years earlier, the French government decorated her with the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, an honor reserved for individuals who have made major contributions to French national education and culture.2 King was rewarded for bringing Creole New Orleans into the twentieth century. During a memorial service for the author, held one week after her passing, one speaker commemorated her as “the incarnation of New

Orleans. She has embedded its history, its romance, and its poetry in the amber of her matchless prose.”3

1 Etta Reid Lyles, “A Transitional Generation: Grace King’s World, 1852-1932,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1987), 278.

2 Grace King, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 371.

3 Henry P. Dart, ed., “The Death of Grace King,” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 15:2 (April 1932), 331. 215

! Among the mourners at King’s service, and one of her pallbearers, was

Lyle Saxon, a journalist turned romantic historian and novelist.4 Saxon idolized

New Orleans’s “literary lioness,” and like her, could claim Louisiana birth, but not a Creole birthright.5 He remembered his idol with the words: “Memorials of stone may crumble; plaques of bronze may corrode, but the books of Grace King will endure as long as New Orleans endures.”6 Beginning with his pseudo-historical chronicle of Louisiana’s great river, Father Mississippi (1927), Saxon emulated

King, as she had with Charles Gayarré decades before. In this book, as in Old

Louisiana (1929) and Laﬁtte the Pirate (1930), Saxon mixed fact and ﬁction, inserted personal reminiscences, and, to appeal to the city’s tourists and a national audience, “exploited New Orleans’s negative national stereotypes.”7

! In Saxon’s works, and especially in Fabulous New Orleans (1928), the past—always scrubbed of any blights—echoed in the present. He shrewdly

“fabricated living history or the ruins of a fading society,” according to one historian.8 The last remnants of the original Creole literary circle were evaporating. From 1916 through 1921, a series of State Legislative Acts made

4 On Saxon, see Lyle Saxon and Edward Dreyer, The Friends of Joe Gilmore and Some Friends of Lyle Saxon (New York: Hastings House, 1948); Cathy Chance Harvey, “Lyle Saxon: A Portrait in Letters, 1917-1945,” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1980); James W. Thomas, Lyle Saxon: A Critical Biography (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1991); Anthony Stanonis, “‘Always in Costume and Mask,’: Lyle Saxon and New Orleans Tourism,” Louisiana History 42:1 (Winter 2001): 31-57; Chance Harvey, The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2003); Lawrence N. Powell, “Lyle Saxon and the New Orleans City Guide,” in New Orleans City Guide, 1938 (1938; reprint ed., New Orleans: Garrett County Press, 2009).

5 Thomas, 32.

6 “The Death of Grace King,” 334; ibid.

7 Stanonis “‘Always in Costume and Mask,’” 37.

8 Stanonis “‘Always in Costume and Mask,’” 32. 216 the French language superﬂuous. As one scholar noted, “The 1921 [Louisiana] constitution contained no references to the French language and required that all public school instruction be in English.9 Two years later, on December 27, 1923,

L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans ceased publication, four years shy of its centenary.10 The Athénée Louisianaise would continue to meet, publishing the

Comptes-Rendus de L’Athénée Louisianais through 1975. Interestingly, in

Fabulous New Orleans, Saxon transformed his hometown into a Creole city, “a strange city, a city that had been ﬁrst French, then Spanish, and which was now

Creole, a blending of both.”11 Saxon had brought Gayarré’s claims to a poetic environment, innately exceptional, full circle. The Creole city trope was one to which Saxon kept returning. In his telling, antebellum Louisiana “was now a part of the United States, but New Orleans was not in any sense an American city. It was essentially Creole.”12

! Saxon numbered among a new generation of writers, a disparate and disjointed literary circle, Creoles and not, who promoted New Orleans as the

Creole city. The years following World War II saw a ﬂood of books and articles that followed in the footsteps of Grace King and the Creole literary circle. In the mid-twentieth century, public and private boosters packaged and commodiﬁed an

9 Sandra Del Valle, Language Rights and the Law in the United State: Finding our Voices (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2003), 17.

10 Carl A. Brasseaux, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 32.

11 Lyle Saxon, Fabulous New Orleans (1928; reprint ed., Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1988), 169.

12 Ibid., 188. 217

“Old New Orleans” version of the city to sell to visiting tourists and a national reading audience. White Creoles stood as the foundational cultural and societal pillars of this marketed, further romanticized vision of the Creole city.13 Most of these works purported to be histories. In Harnett T. Kane’s Queen New Orleans

(1949), “Spaniards courted Frenchwomen” from behind Vieux Carré wrought iron

“lacework,” and “from their alliances emerged a new designation—Creole.”14

Creole Pierre Paul Ebeyer, in his historical novel Paramours of the Creoles

(1944), compared the Creole city to Alice’s Wonderland, while arguing for its singularity: “No matter where you go, you will never ﬁnd the customs of this community duplicated anywhere on this planet.”15 The Romantic New Orleanians

(1950), which contains a frontispiece of Grace King rather than the author,

Robert Tallant, went even further than Ebeyer’s global schema. Tallant insisted that the Creole city’s exceptionality stretched to intergalactic reaches: “New

Orleans is a world. If Boston is the hub of the solar system, New Orleans is a planet of quite another system.”16 And ﬁnally, between January 1933 and

November 1960, Roger Baudier, “a Creole to the manor born,” published over

1,300 Creole-focused articles in the newspaper Catholic Action of the South under the column heading “Historic Old N’Orleans: Pen Point Sketches.” In his

13 Anthony J. Stanonis, Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), 195-234.

14 Harnett T. Kane, Queen New Orleans: City by the River (New York: Bonanza Books, 1949), 9.

15 Pierre Paul Ebeyer, Paramours of the Creoles: A story of New Orleans and the method of promiscuous mating between White Creole men and Negro and colored slaves and freewomen (New Orleans: Windmill Publishing Company, 1944), 153.

16 Robert Tallant, The Romantic New Orleanians (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950), 12. 218 sketches, Baudier captured “the lifestyle, manners, and mannerisms of the city’s long-gone but ever so picturesque ‘character.’”17

! All of these authors reminded the perplexed reader that “Creole” forever and anon still referred to the white progeny of the original French and Spanish

Louisiana colonists. In The Creole Aristocracy (1952), M. H. Herrin wrote an entire book to answer the question, “What is a Creole?” Herrin encouraged the reader who engaged in “fanciful legend” to forget all images of individuals

“possessed of antecedents coming exclusively from somewhere either on the

‘dark continent’ of Africa, or from some one of the so-called ‘black’ republics down Caribbean way.”18 Any “well-informed reader” would know, Herrin wrote, that a Creole is, simply put, “a person of European blood corporally modiﬁed by the inﬂuences of a tropical climate.”19

! By the 1950s, Edward Larocque Tinker, working with a major New York press, could publish a book entitled only Creole City, and have this appellation understood by the general reading public.20 Tinker’s articles, books, and bibliographies stood out in a wave of academic and pseudo-academic studies that occurred concurrently with the Grace King-inspired books. A New York

17 Leonard V. Huber, “one of the most assiduous collectors of Creoliana,” compiled dozens of Baudier’s sketches in Huber, Creole Collage: Reﬂections of the Colorful Customs of Latter-Day New Orleans Creoles (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1980), all quotes from the unpaginated page with the heading “Avant-Propos.”

18 M. H. Herrin, The Creole Aristocracy: A Study of the Creole of Southern Louisiana, His Origin, His Accomplishments, His Contributions to the American Way of Life (New York: Exposition Press, 1952), 27.

19 Ibid., 31.

20 Edward Larocque Tinker, Creole City: Its Past and Its People (New York: Longmans, Greens, 1953). Also, see 219 philanthropist and renaissance man—he earned Ph.D.’s in literature the

University of Paris and the University of Madrid—Tinker collected and donated a trove of white Creole literary ephemera, in effect saving much of Louisiana’s

French-language oeuvre from what he called the “murderous combination of rats, termites, ﬁres, crevasses and the spring cleanings of implacable and illiterate housewives.”21 His biographical bibliography, Les Ecrits de langue française en

Louisiane au 19ème siècle, documented the white Creole’s literary output alongside that of the black Creoles and Saint Domingue refugees. But Tinker privileged the white Creoles—Gayarré, the Rouquette and Mercier brothers,

Placide Canonge, and Alcée Fortier—as the brain trust behind “the most fertile and most successful literary period that Louisiana has ever known.”22

! And as for the Creole libertine, Bernard de Marigny, Tinker lauded him as

“the man who lived the history of his state.”23 Today, Marigny’s image is overshadowed by the immense plantation landholdings he squandered, which have metamorphosed into the ﬂourishing New Orleans neighborhood that bears his name. His lavish life and wasted fortune became a bit of New Orleans lore, depicted in most every popular history written about the Creole city. But Marigny also appeared in ﬁction, as the city’s opulent Creole potentate in Everett and

Olga Webber’s novel Rampart Street (1948).24 But as far back as the late-

21 “History of the Foundation,” The Tinker Foundation website, accessed February 22, 2013, http://www.tinker.org/content/history-foundation.

22 Edward Larocque Tinker, Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1932), 5 (my translation).

23 Tinker, 3-21.

24 Everett and Olga Webber, Rampart Street (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948). 220 nineteenth century, the Creole circle became larger than life, with readily identiﬁable characters ripe for portrayal in New Orleans-centric ﬁction. In A

Mystery of New Orleans (1890), a strange novel about hypnosis and homeopathic medicine written by William Henry Holcombe, the main character attends a Gayarré lecture after reading George Washington Cable’s novels.25

The use of Creole characters crossed the Atlantic decades later in Jackie

Landreaux’s Paris-published Les Créoles trilogy, the ﬁrst two of which trace the life of the Rouquette brothers throughout post and antebellum New Orleans.26

! Most recently, in December 2010, Marigny appeared on stage in playwright John Guare’s A Free Man of Color, a dark farce on the subject of race in America. The two-act play’s protagonist, Jacques Cornet, is a freewheeling gambler and lascivious lover, a bewigged and purple-satined peacock, a slaveowner, an inveterate dueler and the wealthiest man in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.27 For those theatre attendees with a keen and careful eye for New Orleans history, Cornet is an obvious stand-in for Bernard de

Marigny, who just so happens to be black, a homme de couleur libre, the titular

“free man of color.” The opening scene takes place during Cornet’s Mardi Gras

25 Wm. H. Holcombe, A Mystery of New Orleans: Solved by New Methods (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1890), 58-59.

26 Les Créoles trilogy is composed of Jackie Landreaux, Trinity; Les Héritiers de la Liberté; La Bannière de l’espoir (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2006; 2007; 2008). Landreaux had earlier published a young-adult novel on the life of Adrien Rouquette: Jackie Valabrègue-Landreaux, Chahta-Ima: La voix des Indiens (Paris: Hachette jeunesse, 1999).

27 One scene in Guare’s show contains a word-for-word scene taken from the life and lore of Bernard de Marigny, a joke involving a duel to take place in Lake Pontchartrain in six-foot deep water using sledgehammers. Compare John Guare, A Free Man of Color (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 16 and Will H. Coleman, Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans (New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885), 17-18. 221 soiree, an evening in which “the few social barriers that exist in New Orleans are down tonight—white—black—everything in between.”28 The Carnival backdrop is a exaltation of the so-called “free-est city in the world,” a ballroom ﬁlled with

Americans, French, Spanish, Canadians, and Creoles of every color, a place where “Race is a celebration!” Amid the pageantry, the feasting, and the performance of Haydn’s Trio in G Major, one of Cornet’s Carnival guests shouts,

“In New Orleans you can be whatever you declare yourself to be.”29

! So it was for Cornet’s historical proxy, Bernard de Marigny, and all the members of the Creole intellectual circle that followed. Through print they constructed an identity, in writing they created an imagined community, a mythic

Creole city. In New Orleans, perhaps you can be whatever you declare yourself to be.30 You can be a Creole because of place of birth, parentage, or, like Grace

King and George Washington Cable, literary association. More than being born a

Creole, living and dying a Creole, Charles Gayarré, Adrien Rouquette, Alfred

Mercier, and the rest of the circle of white Creole authors wrote and performed themselves a Creole identity.

28 Guare, 4.

29 Ibid., 5.

30 Of course, as we saw with the white Creoles struggle with the black Creoles, you can also not be whatever the ruling majority says you can not be. 222

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Sources

Houghton Library, Harvard University (HLHU):

George Washington Cable papers, Manuscripts Collection Am 1288-1288.4

Edward Larocque Tinker papers concerning George Washington Cable, Manuscripts Collection Am 2196

Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La (LLMVC):

Pecquet du Bellet de Verton and Kariouk Family Papers, Manuscripts Collection 4207

Grace King Collection, Manuscripts Collection 1282

Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University (LRC): l’Athénée Louisianais records, Manuscripts Collection 108

Grace King papers, Manuscripts Collection 564

Alfred Mercier papers, Manuscripts Collection 444

Adrien Emmanuel Rouquette papers, Manuscripts Collection 267

François Dominique Rouquette papers, Manuscripts Collection 508

John Minor Wisdom collection, Manuscripts Collection 230 223

Louisiana and Special Collections Department, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans (UNO):

Athénée Louisianais Collection, Manuscripts Collection 16

Newspapers and Periodicals

New Orleans L’Abeille L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans New Orleans The Bee New Orleans Le Carillon Catholic Action of the South The Catholic World Century Magazine The Commercial Review of the South and West Comptes Rendus de l’Athénée Louisianais New Orleans Le Courrier de la Louisiane The Critic: A Literary Weekly, Critical and Eclectic New Orleans The Daily Picayune New Orleans De Bow’s Review The Louisiana Historical Quarterly New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin New York Herald The New York Times The North American Review Le Propagateur Catholique The Publishers’ Weekly: American Book-Trade Journal New Orleans La Renaissance Louisianaise Southern Literary Messenger The Southern Quarterly Review New Orleans Times-Democrat The United States Catholic Magazine and Monthly Review

Published Primary Sources

Andrews, Johnnie, Jr. Creole Mobile: A Compendium of the Colonial Families of the Central Gulf Coast, 1702-1813. Prichard, AL: Bienville Historical Society, 1974.

Arthur, Stanley Clisby, and George Campbell Huchet de Kernion. Old Families of Louisiana. New Orleans: Harmanson, 1931. 224

Augustin, John. “The Oaks: The Old Duelling-Grounds of New Orleans.” In The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State, edited by Thomas M’Caleb, 71-87. New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894.

Barber, John W., and Elizabeth G Barber. Historical, Poetical and Pictorial American Scenes. New Haven, CT: J. W. Barber, 1850.

Barrie, J. M. “A Note on Mr. Cable’s ‘The Grandissimes.’” The Bookman 7:5 (July 1898): 401-403.

Baum, Dan. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009.

Beckwith, Paul. Creoles of St. Louis. St. Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1893.

Bellet, Paul Pecquet du. The Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet of Richmond and Its Agents Abroad: Being Memorandum Notes Taken in Paris During the Rebellion of the Southern States from 1861 to 1865. Edited by Wm. Stanley Hoole. Tuscaloosa, AL: Confederate Publishing Company, 1963.

———. Lettre sur la Guerre Américaine. Paris: Imp. Schiller, 1862.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reﬂections, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Berquin-Duvallon, Pierre-Louis. Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas, in the Year, 1802, Giving a Correct Picture of Those Countries. Translated by John Davis. New York: I. Riley & Co., 1806.

Cable, George W. The Creoles of Louisiana. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.

———. Dr. Sevier. 1884. Reprint, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918.

———. The Grandissimes. 1880. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001.

———. The Negro Question: A Selection of Writings on Civil Rights in the South. Edited by Arlin Turner. Garden City, Ny: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958.

———. Old Creole Days: A Story of Creole Life. 1879. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2001.

Canonge, Placide. France et Espagne ou la Louisiane en 1768 et 1769. New Orleans: s.n., 1850. 225

Castellanos, Henry C. New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life. 1895. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. New York: Viking, 1987.

Coleman, Charles W. “The Recent Movement in Southern Literature.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74:444 (May 1887): 837-855.

Coleman, Will H. Historical Sketch Book and Guide to New Orleans. New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885.

Collens, T. Wharton. The Martyr Patriots; or, Louisiana in 1769, an Historical Tragedy, in Five Acts. New Orleans: Dillard, 1836.

Conway, Thomas W. Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Public Education, Thomas W. Conway, to the General Assembly of Louisiana, for the Year 1871. New Orleans: Republican Ofﬁce, 1872.

Cunynghame, Arthur. A Glimpse at the Great Western Republic. London: Richard Bentley, 1851.

Davidson, James Wood. The Living Writers of the South. New York: Carleton, 1869.

Dart, Henry P., ed. “The Death of Grace King.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 15:2 (April 1932): 330-338.

Debates in the Convention for the Revision and Amendment of the Constitution of the State of Louisiana. Assembled at Liberty Hall, New Orleans, April 6, 1864. New Orleans: W. R. Fish, 1864.

Defend New Orleans Facebook page. Accessed November 8, 2012. https:// www.facebook.com/pages/DEFEND-NEW-ORLEANS/7205526108.

Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien. Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire: notices biographiques accompagnées de reﬂexions et de souvenirs personnels, hommage à la population créole, en souvenir des grands hommes qu’elle a produits et des bonnes choses qu'elle a accomplies. Montreal: Arbour & Dupont, 1911.

———. Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits. Translated and edited by Sister Dorothea Olga McCants. 1911. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Dubreuil, M. L’Abbé. Poésies. Paris: Auguste Vaton, 1857. 226

———. Poésies dédiéesz a ses élèves. Saint-Pons, France: De L’Imprimerie de Semat, 1847.

Dugué, C. O. Essais Poétiques. New Orleans: A. Fortier, 1847.

Ebeyer, Pierre Paul. Paramours of the Creoles: A story of New Orleans and the method of promiscuous mating between White Creole men and Negro and colored slaves and freewomen. New Orleans: Windmill Publishing Company, 1944.

Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951.

———. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Fortier, Alcée. A Few Words about the Creoles of Louisiana: An Address Delivered at the Ninth Annual Convention of the Louisiana Educational Association. Baton Rouge: Truth Book and Job Ofﬁce, 1892.

Gayarré, Charles. Address of the Annual Orator, Hon. Chas. Gayarre [sic] to the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Association, December 3, 1887. New Orleans: s.n., n.d.

———. The Creoles of History and The Creoles of Romance: A Lecture. New Orleans: C. E. Hopkins, 1885.

———. Fernando de Lemos: Truth and Fiction. New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1872.

———. Histoire de la Louisiane, Premier Volume. New Orleans: Magne & Weisse, 1846.

———. Histoire de la Louisiane, Second Volume. New Orleans: Magne & Weisse, 1847.

———. History of Louisiana: The American Domination, Volume IV. 1866. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974.

———. History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume I. 1854. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974.

———. History of Louisiana: The French Domination, Volume II. 1852. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974.

———. History of Louisiana: The Spanish Domination, Volume III. 1854. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974. 227

———. Letter to the Editor of the Washington Union, Oct. 23, 1859. New York: s.n., 1859.

———. “Literature in Louisiana.” Belford’s Magazine 5:27 (August 1890): 329-342.

———. “A Louisiana Sugar Plantation of the Old Régime.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 74:442 (March 1887): 606-622.

———. “The New Orleans Bench and Bar in 1823.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 77:462 (November 1888): 889-900.

———. Romance of the History of Louisiana: A Series of Lectures. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1848.

Gobineau, Arthur de. Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, tome premier. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Fréres, 1853.

Guare, John. A Free Man of Color. New York: Grove Press, 2011.

A Guide to New Orleans and the Principal Cities in the South. Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1885.

Hall, A. Oakey. The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of “Crescent City” Life. New York: J. S. Redﬁeld, 1851.

Hearn, Lafcadio “Gombo Zhèbes”: Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs. New York: Will H. Coleman, 1885.

———. Creole Sketches. Edited by Charles Woodward Hutson. Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1924.

———. La Cuisine Créole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes, From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine. New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1885.

Herrin, M. H. The Creole Aristocracy: A Study of the Creole of Southern Louisiana, His Origin, His Accomplishments, His Contributions to the American Way of Life. New York: Exposition Press, 1952.

Holcombe, Wm. H. A Mystery of New Orleans: Solved by New Methods. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1890.

Houzeau, Jean-Charles. My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era. Edited David C. Rankin. 1872. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. 228

Ingraham, Joseph Holt. The Quadroone; or, St. Michael’s Day. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841.

Kane, Harnett T. Queen New Orleans: City by the River. New York: Bonanza Books, 1949.

King, Edward. The Great South: A Record of Journeys. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1875.

King, Grace. Balcony Stories. New York: The Century Co., 1893.

———. “Charles Gayarre [sic].” In History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, by Charles Gayarré, i-xxxii. 1854. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974.

———. Creole Families of New Orleans. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1921.

———. La Dame de Sainte Hermine. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924.

———. Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings. Edited by Robert Bush. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

———. “Iberville and the Mississippi.” Harper’s Magazine 89:533 (October 1894): 722-731.

———. Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1892.

———. Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932.

———. Monsieur Motte. New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son, 1888.

———. New Orleans: The Place and the People. 1895. Revised, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917.

———. The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916.

———. To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910. Edited by Melissa Walker Heidari. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004.

King, Grace, and John R. Ficklen. A History of Louisiana. 1893. Reprint, New Orleans: The L. Graham Co., 1905. 229

———. Stories from Louisiana History. New Orleans: The L. Graham Co., 1905.

Landreaux, Jackie. La Bannière de l’espoir. Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2008.

———. Les Héritiers de la Liberté. Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007.

———. Trinity. Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2006.

Laussat, Pierre Clément de. Memoirs of My Life. Translated by Agnes-Josephine Pastwa, edited by Robert D. Bush. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Lussan, Auguste. Les Martyrs de la Louisiane. Donaldsonville, LA: E. Martin & F. Prou, 1839.

Marigny, Bernard de [published under Un Créole]. Aux Electeurs de l’Etat de la Louisiane: Réponse du Créole au dernier pamphlet du Citoyen Naturalisé. New Orleans: s.n., 1827.

———. To His Fellow Citizens. New Orleans: s.n., 1853.

Martin, François-Xavier. The History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period. 1882. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000.

Matas, Rudolph. “An Evening with Gayarré.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 33:2 (April 1950): 269-293.

Mercier, Alfred. L’Habitation Saint-Ybars, ou, Maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane. Montréal: Guérin littérature, 1989.

———. Du Panlatinisme: Nécessité d’une alliance entre la France et la Confédération du Sud. Paris: Librairie Centrale, [1863].

———. Réditus et Ascalaphos. New Orleans: Imprimerie Franco-Americaine, 1890.

New Orleans City Guide, 1938. 1938. Reprint, New Orleans: Garrett County Press, 2009.

Ofﬁcial Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention, for Framing a Constitution for the State of Louisiana. New Orleans: J. B. Roudanez & Co., 1867-1868.

Pedrick, W. E. New Orleans as It Is. With a Correct Guide to All Places of Interest. Cleveland: W. W. Williams, 1885. 230

Pickett, Albert James. Eight Days in New-Orleans, in February, 1847. Montgomery, AL: self-published, 1847.

Pinckney, Darryl. “Deep in the Bowl: Memory of a Shrinking City.” Harper’s Magazine 323:1936 (September 2011): 43-50.

Poché, F. P. The Creoles of Louisiana. New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1886.

Réglements de la Légion Française formée à la Nouvelle-Orléans le 26 Avril 1861. Nouvelle-Orléans: J. Lamarre, 1861.

Robert, Cyprien, et. al. Le Panlatinisme: Confédération Gallo-Latine et Celto- Gauloise, contre-testament de Pierre le Grand, et contre-Panslavisme, ou projet d’union fédérative des peuples Gallo-Latins. Paris: Passard, 1860.

Rouquette, Adrien. L’Antoniade, ou la solitude avec Dieu, (trois ages) poème érémitique. Nouvelle-Orléans: [Impr. de L. Marchand], 1860.

——— [writing as E. Junius]. Critical Dialogue between Aboo and Caboo on a New Book, or a Grandissime Ascension. Mingo City [New Orleans]: Great Publishing House of Sam Slick Allspice, 1880.

———. Discours prononcé à la Cathédrale de Saint Louis (Nouvelle-Orléans, 1846), a [sic] l’occasion de l’anniversaire du 8 janvier, par l’Abbé A. Rouquette, de la Louisiane. Paris: Librairie de Sauvaignat, 1846.

———. Les Savanes, poésies américaines. Paris: Jules Labitte; Nouvelle- Orléans: Alfred Moret, 1841.

———. Wild Flowers, Sacred Poetry. New Orleans: T. O’Donnell, 1848.

Rouquette, Dominique. Meschacébéenes: poésies. Paris: Librairie de Sauvaignat, 1839.

Saxon, Lyle. Fabulous New Orleans. 1928. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1988.

Saxon, Lyle, and Edward Dreyer. The Friends of Joe Gilmore and Some Friends of Lyle Saxon. New York: Hastings House, 1948.

Schisme de l’eglise St. Louis, Nlle.-Orleans. New Orleans: s.n., 1842.

Soards, L. Soards’ New Orleans City Directory, for 1879. New Orleans: L. Soards & Co. 231

Tallant, Robert. The Romantic New Orleanians. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1950.

Testut, Charles. Les Veillées Louisianaises, série de romans historiques sur la Louisiane, 2 vols. New Orleans: Imprimerie de H. Méridier, 1849.

Tinker, Edward Larocque. Creole City: Its Past and Its People. New York: Longmans, Greens, 1953.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1883.

L’Union Française homepage. Accessed November 8, 2012. http:// lunionfrancaise.org.

U.S. Census Bureau. 1880.

Valabrègue-Landreaux, Jackie. Chahta-Ima: La voix des Indiens. Paris: Hachette jeunesse, 1999.

Villeneufve, Paul Louis Le Blanc de. The Festival of the Young Corn; Or, the Heroism of Poucha-Houmma. Edited and translated by Mathé Allain. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1964.

Waldo, J. Curtis. Visitor’s Guide to New Orleans. New Orleans: Southern Publishing & Advertising House, 1875.

Webber, Everett, and Olga Webber. Rampart Street. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948.

Z, B—. “Mr. Cable, the ‘Negrophilist.’” T In The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State, edited by Thomas M’Caleb, 203-205. New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894.

Secondary Sources

Abel, Sheri Lyn. Charles Testut’s Le Vieux Salomon: Race, Religion, Socialism, and Freemasonry. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2009.

Abrahams, Roger D. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 232

Allain, Mathe, and Barry Ancelet. Littérature française de la Louisiane: anthologie. Bedford, NH: National Materials Development Center for French, 1981.

Allen, Carolyn. “Creole: The Problem of Deﬁnition.” In Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, edited by Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, 47-63. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002.

Allured, Janet, and Judith F. Gentry, eds. Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Almeida, Miguel Vale de. “From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart, 108-132. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

Amelinckx, Frans. “La littérature louisianaise au XIXe siècle: perspective critique.” Présence Francophone 43 (1993): 10-24.

Anderson, Charles Roberts. “Charles Gayarré and Paul Hayne: The Last Literary Cavaliers.” In American Studies in Honor of William Kenneth Boyd, edited by David Kelly Jackson, 221-281. Durham: Duke University Press, 1940.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in the World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

“Archbishop Louis-Anne Dubreil,” Catholic Hierarchy. Accessed April 11, 2012. http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bdubreil.html.

Arnesen, Eric. Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Axel, Brian Keith, ed. From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Bailey, Fred Arthur. “The Textbooks of the ‘Lost Cause’: Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 75:3 (Fall 1991): 507-533.

Bainbridge, Simon. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions of Conﬂict. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Baker, Bruce E. What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. 233

Barreca, Regina, ed. New Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992.

Barzun, Jacques, ed. European Writers, Volume 5: The Romantic Century. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985.

Baudier, Roger. The Catholic Church in Louisiana. New Orleans: [A.W. Hyatt stationery mfg. co., ltd.],1939.

Bauer, Ralph. “Creole Identities in Colonial Space: The Narratives of Mary White Rowlandson and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán.” American Literature 69:4 (December 1997): 665-695.

Bauer, Ralph, and José Antonio Mazzotti, eds. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

———. “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Bauer and Mazzotti, 1-57. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Beer, William. “Moniteur de la Louisiane, New Orleans 1794.” Proceedings and Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America XIV (1920): 127-131.

Beidler, Philip D. First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1999.

Bell, Caryn Cossé. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718-1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.

Bender, Thomas. Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Bienvenu, Germain J. “Adrien, l’Américain.” MA thesis, University of New Orleans, 1985.

———. “The Beginnings of Louisiana Literature: The French Domination of 1682-1763.” In Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, edited by John Lowe, 25-48. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. 234

Bikle, Lucy Lefﬁngwell Cable. George W. Cable: His Life and Letters. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928.

Blanton, Mackie J. V., and Gayle K. Nolan. “Creole Lenten Devotions: Nineteenth Century Practices and Their Implications.” In Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, edited by Glenn R. Conrad, 525-538. New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Bokenkotter, Thomas. Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Brading, D. A. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State, 1492-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

———. The Origins of Mexican Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Brasseaux, Carl A. French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Brasseaux, Carl A., and Glenn R. Conrad, eds., The Road to Louisiana: The Saint-Domingue Refugees, 1792-1809. Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1992.

Brathwaite, Edward. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Braud, Dominic. “Père Rouquette, Missionnaire Extraordinaire: Father Adrien Rouquette’s Mission to the Choctaw.” In Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, edited by Glenn R. Conrad, 314-327. New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993.

Breckenridge, Carol A., Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. Cosmopolitanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says about Race in America. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. 235

Brown, Dorothy H., and Barbara C. Ewell, eds. Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

———, ed. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Bryan, Violet Harrington. The Myth of New Orleans in Literature: Dialogues of Race and Gender. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1993.

Burnard, Trevor. Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bush, Robert. “Charles Gayarré and Grace King.” Southern Literary Journal 7:1 (Fall 1974): 100-131.

———. “Grace King.” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 8:1 (Winter 1975): 42-51.

———. “Grace King and Mark Twain.” American Literature XLIV (March 1972): 42-51.

———. Grace King: A Southern Destiny. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

———. “Grace King: The Emergence of a Southern Intellectual Woman.” Southern Review XIII:2 (April 1977): 272-288.

———. “Louisiana Prose Fiction, 1870-1900.” PhD diss., State University of Iowa, 1957.

Butcher, Philip. George W. Cable. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962.

———. George W. Cable: The Northampton Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.

Cagidemetrio, Alide. “‘The Rest of the Story,’; or, Multilingual American Literature.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, 17-28. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Canby, Henry Seidel. Thoreau. New York: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1939. 236

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. “Creole Colonial Spanish America.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart, 26-45. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

———. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epstemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Canny, Nicholas, and Anthony Pagden, eds. Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Cardwell, Guy A. “The First Public Address of George W. Cable, Southern Liberal.” In Studies in Memory of Frank Martindale Webster, 67-76. Saint Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1951).

———. Twins of Genius. Michigan: The Michigan State College Press, 1953.

Cashell, Mary F. “Literary Expressions of Creole Identity in Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint-Ybars and Johnelle.” PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2012.

———. “Postcolonial Writing in Louisiana: Surpassing the Role of French Traditionalism in Alfred Mercier’s L’Habitation Saint-Ybars.” MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 2008.

Castillo, Susan. Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing America. London: Routledge, 2006.

Caulfeild, Ruby Van Allen. The French Literature of Louisiana. 1929. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998.

Censer, Jane Turner. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Chambers, Ross. The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism. Translated by Mary Seidman Trouille. 1987. Reprint, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. “Cruel Criollos in Guaman Poma de Ayala’s First New Chronicle and Good Government.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 118-134. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 237

Chaplin, Joyce. “Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart, 46-65. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. 1992. Reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Christovich, Mary, ed. New Orleans Architecture: The American Sector (Faubourg St. Mary): Howard Avenue to Iberville Street, Mississippi River to Claiborne Avenue. New Orleans: Pelican, 1972.

Christovich, Mary Louise, Sally Kittredge Evans, and Roulhac Toledano, New Orleans Architecture, Volume 5: The Esplanade Ridge. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 1971.

Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate, and Gabriel P. Weisberg, eds. The Popularization of Images: Visual Culture under the July Monarchy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

———. “Refracted Reformations and the Making of Republicans.” In Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, edited by Peter J. Kastor and François Weil, 180-203. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

———. The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

Clemen, John. George Washington Cable Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996.

Coleman, Linda S. “At Odds: Race and Gender in Grace King’s Short Fiction.” In Louisiana Women Writers: New Essays and a Comprehensive Bibliography. Edited by Dorothy H. Brown and Barbara C. Ewell, 32-55. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Comeau, Brother Alfonso. “A Study of the Trustee Problem in the St. Louis Cathedral Church of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1842-1844.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 31:4 (October 1948): 897-972. 238

Cott, Jonathan. Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn. New York: Knopf, 1991.

Cowan, James L. La marseillaise noire et autres poèmes français des Créoles de couleur de la Nouvelle-Orléans, 1862-1869. Lyon: Éditions du Cosmogone, 2001.

Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.

Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. Translated by Teresa Waugh. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2005.

Crété, Liliane. Daily Life in Louisiana, 1815-1830. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Dain, Bruce. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

D’Antoni, Blaise C. Chahta-Ima and St. Tammany’s Choctaws. Mandeville, LA: St. Tammany Historical Society, Inc., 1986.

Davis, William C. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee. Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Deggs, Sister Mary Bernard. No Cross, No Crown: Black Nuns in Nineteenth- Century New Orleans. Edited by Virginia Meacham Gould and Charles E. Nolan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

DeJean, Joan. “Critical Creolization: Grace King and Writing on French in the American South.” In Southern Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Jefferson Humphries, 109-126. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Del Valle, Sandra. Language Rights and the Law in the United State: Finding our Voices. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2003.

Dessens, Nathalie. From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Inﬂuences. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 239

DeVore, Donald E., and Joseph Logsdon. Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841-1991. Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991.

Dimitry, John. “‘Chahta-Ima’—Father Rouquette.” Harper’s Weekly 31:1597 (July 30, 1887): 537-538.

Domínguez, Virginia R. White by Deﬁnition: Social Classiﬁcation in Creole Louisiana. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Doyle, Elisabeth Joan. “Mightier Than The Sword: The Catholic Press in Louisiana.” In Cross, Crozier, and Crucible: A Volume Celebrating the Bicentennial of a Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, edited by Glenn R. Conrad, 249-261. New Orleans: Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993.

Dresner, Zita Z. “Irony and Ambiguity in Grace King’s ‘Monsieur Motte.’” In New Perspectives on Women and Comedy. Edited by Regina Barreca, 169-184. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992.

Duchein, Mary Scott. “Research on Charles Etienne Arthur Gayarré.” MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1934.

Duyckinck, Evert A., and George L. Duyckinck, eds. “Charles E. Arthur Gayarre [sic].” Cyclopaedia of American Literature, 401-403. New York: Charles Scribner, 1855.

Eaton, Clement. The Waning of the Old South Civilization. 1968. Reprint, New York: Pegasus, 1969.

Elder, Susan B. Life of the Abbé Adrien Ro[u]quette “Chahta-Ima.” New Orleans: L. Graham Co., 1913.

Elfenbein, Anna Shannon. Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

———. “New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France: Romance and Reality.” In Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, edited by Sybil Kein, 179-195. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. 240

———. “The New Orleans Press and French-Language Literature by Creoles of Color.” In Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, edited by Werner Sollors, 29-49. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Falvey, Ellen Catherine. “Reconstructed Virtue: Grace King’s Gothic Realism.” PhD diss., New York University, 1998.

Farrant, Tim. An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century French Literature. London: Duckworth, 2007.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

———. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Fay, Edwin Whitﬁeld. The History of Education in Louisiana. Washington: Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1898.

Fischer, Roger A. The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862-77. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Foreman, Amanda. A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2010.

Fortier, Alcée. Louisiana Studies: Literature, Customs and Dialects, History and Education. New Orleans: F. F. Hansell & Bro., 1894.

Fortier, Edward J. “Non-English Writings I: French.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature: Later National Literature, Part III, edited by William Peterﬁeld Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren, 590-598. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921.

———. Les Lettres françaises en Louisiane. Québec: Imprimerie L’Action sociale limitée, 1915.

———. “Study of the French Literature of Louisiana.” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1904.

Fossier, Albert E. New Orleans: The Glamour Period, 1800-1840. 1957. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1998.

Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, The Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913. 1985. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. 241

Frankel, Oz. States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Friedrichs, E. D., ed. “Administrations of the Mayors of New Orleans, 1803-1936.” New Orleans: City Hall Archives, 1940. Accessed October 9, 2012. http://nutrias.org/info/louinfo/admins/adminintro.htm.

Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Geggus, David P, ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Gill, James. Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Gitlin, Jay. The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

Gomez, Gay M. “Publicizing a Vast New Land: Visual Propaganda for Attracting Colonists to Eighteenth-Century Louisiana.” In Printmaking in New Orleans, edited by Jessie J. Poesch, 53-67. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006.

González Mendoza, Juan R. “Puerto Rico’s Creole Patriots and the Slave Trade after the Haitian Revolution.” In The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by David P. Geggus, 58-71. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Goudeau, John Milfred. “Early Libraries in Louisiana: A Study of the Creole Inﬂuence.” PhD diss., Western Reserve University, 1965.

Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Greene, William Lemuel. Antoine Blanc, 1792-1860: Fourth Bishop and First Archbishop of New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Claitor’s, 2008. 242

Greeson, Jennifer Rae. Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Griolet, Patrick. Cadjins et créoles en Louisiane: histoire et survivance d’un francophonie. Paris: Payot, 1986.

Gross, Robert A. “Introduction: An Extensive Republic.” In A History of the Book in America, Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, edited by Gross and Mary Kelley, 1-50. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Gross, Robert A., and Mary Kelley. A History of the Book in America, Volume 2: An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Grossman, Lionel. “Jules A. Michelet (1798-1874) and Romantic Historiography.” In European Writers, Volume 5: The Romantic Century, edited by Jacques Barzun, 571-606. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985.

Haas, Edward F. Political Leadership in a Southern City: New Orleans in the Progressive Era, 1896-1902. Ruston, LA: McGinty Publications, 1988.

Hair, William Ivy. Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. 1998. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Hamel, Réginald. “Introduction” in L’Habitation Saint-Ybars, ou, Maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane, by Alfred Mercier, trans. Richard Lanoie, 343-399. Montréal: Guérin littérature, 1989.

———. La Louisiane créole: littéraire, politique et sociale, 1762-1900. Ottawa: Les Editions Lemeac, 1984.

Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Harvey, Cathy Chance. “Lyle Saxon: A Portrait in Letters, 1917-1945.” PhD diss., Tulane University, 1980.

Harvey, Chance. The Life and Selected Letters of Lyle Saxon. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2003.

Hattaway, Herman. “Clio’s Southern Soldiers: The United Confederate Veterans and History.” Louisiana History 12:3 (Summer 1971): 213-242. 243

Hayne, Paul Hamilton. “Charles Gayarré: The Author.” The Southern Bivouac 2:2 (July 1886): 108-113.

———. “Charles Gayarré: The Statesman.” The Southern Bivouac 2:1 (June 1886): 28-37.

Heidari, Melissa Walker, ed. To Find My Own Peace: Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004.

Hettle, Wallace. The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001.

Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

“History of the Foundation.” The Tinker Foundation website. Accessed February 22, 2013. http://www.tinker.org/content/history-foundation.

Hobson, Fred. Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Hogue, James K. Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Holditch, W. Kenneth, ed. In Old New Orleans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983.

Hoole, Wm. Stanley. “Foreword” in The Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet of Richmond and Its Agents Abroad: Being Memorandum Notes Taken in Paris During the Rebellion of the Southern States from 1861 to 1865, by Paul Pecquet du Bellet, edited by Hoole, n.p. [9-14]. Tuscaloosa, AL: Confederate Publishing Company, 1963.

Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton, eds. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Horton, Scott. “How Walter Scott Started the American Civil War.” Harper’s Magazine Online (July 29, 2007). Accessed March 23, 2012. http:// www.harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000662.

Howe, William Wirt. “Memoir of François-Xavier Martin” in The History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period, by François-Xavier Martin, xxxi-lxii. 1882. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000. 244

Huber, Leonard V. Creole Collage: Reﬂections of the Colorful Customs of Latter- Day New Orleans Creoles. Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1980.

Huber, Leonard V., and Samuel Wilson, Jr. The Basilica of Jackson Square and its Predecessors: Dedicated to St. Louis King of France, 1727-1965. New Orleans: A. F. Laborde and Sons, 1965.

Humphries, Jefferson, ed. Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Hunt, Alfred N. Haiti’s Inﬂuence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Inness, Sherrie A., and Diana Royer, eds. Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Jackson, Joy J. New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880-1896. 1969. Revised, Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Association, 1997.

Jacob, Margaret C. Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Janney, Caroline E. Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Jáuregui, Carlos. “Cannibalism, the Eucharist, and Criollo Subjects.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 61-100. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Jolivétte, Andrew J. Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. 245

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Jumonville, Florence M. “‘The Art Preservative of All Arts’: Early Printing in New Orleans.” In Printmaking in New Orleans, edited by Jessie J. Poesch, 87-101. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006.

———. Bibliography of New Orleans Imprints, 1764-1864. New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1989.

———. “Books, Libraries, and Undersides for the Skies of Beds: The Extraordinary Career of A. L. Boimare.” Louisiana History 34:4 (Autumn 1993): 437-459.

———. “Frenchmen at Heart: New Orleans Printers and Their Imprints, 1764-1803.” Louisiana History 32:3 (Summer 1991): 279-310.

Kastor, Peter J., and François Weil, eds. Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

———. “Introduction.” In Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase, edited by Kastor and Weil, 1-22. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Kein, Sybil, ed. Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Keith, LeeAnna. The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Kelley, Blair L. M. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy V. Ferguson. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

Kelman, Ari. A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. 2003. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Kendall, John S. “The Foreign Language Press of New Orleans.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 12:3 (July 1929): 363-380.

———. History of New Orleans. Chicago: Lewis Pub. Co., 1922. 246

Kirby, David. Grace King. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Kirby, Jack Temple. “ANCESTRYdotBOMB: Genealogy, Genomics, Mischief, Mystery, and Southern Family Stories.” The Journal of Southern History LXXVI:1 (February 2010): 3-38.

Lachance, Paul F. “The Foreign French.” In Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, 162-197. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

LaCroix, Rena. “Dr. Alfred Mercier, the Man and His Works.” MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1929.

Lagarde, Marie Louise. “Charles Testut: Critic, Journalist, and Literary Socialist.” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1948.

Lambert, David. White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Landers, Jane G. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Lane, Charles. The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008.

Langlois, Gilles-Antoine. “Introduction to the Surrey Calender.” Accessed March 21, 2012. http://www.hnoc.org/surrey/index.php?page=essay_EN_GAL.

“The Last Days of Pompeii at the Getty Villa.” Culture Spot LA website. Accessed December 4, 2012. http://culturespotla.com/2012/10/the-last-days-of- pompeii-at-the-getty-villa.

Lears, Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. New York: Harper, 2009.

LeBreton, Dagmar Renshaw. Chahta-Ima: The Life of Adrien-Emmanuel Rouquette. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947.

Levenstein, Harvey. Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Logsdon, Joseph and Caryn Cossé Bell. “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850-1900.” In Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, 247

edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, 201-261. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Loughran, Trish. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Lowe, John, ed. Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Lund, Mary Isabel. “Charles Gayarré as a Man of Letters.” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1943.

Lyles, Etta Reid. “A Transitional Generation: Grace King’s World, 1852-1932.” PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1987.

Mackaman, Douglas P. “The Tactics of Retreat: Spa Vacations and Bourgeois Identity in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America, edited by Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, 35-62. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Marino, Samuel J. “Early French-Language Newspapers in New Orleans.” Louisiana History 7:4 (Autumn 1966): 309-321.

Marshall, Bill. The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.

Di Martino, Mary. “Education in New Orleans during Reconstruction.” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1935.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.

Mazzotti, José Antonio, ed. Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad "colonial" en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000.

M’Caleb, Thomas, ed. The Louisiana Book: Selections from the Literature of the State. New Orleans: R. F. Straughan, 1894.

McCullough, David. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

McCutcheon, Roger Philip. “Books and Booksellers in New Orleans, 1730-1830.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20:3 (July 1937): 606-618. 248

———. “Libraries in New Orleans, 1771-1833.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20:1 (January 1937): 152-158.

McPherson, James M. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Mitchell, Reid. All on a Mardi Gras Day: Episodes in the History of New Orleans Carnival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Mizruchi, Susan L. The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Nacouzi, Salwa. “Les créoles louisianais défendent la cause du Sud à Paris (1861-1865).” Transatlantica 1 (2002). Accessed June 29, 2012. http:// transatlantica.revues.org/451.

Newton, Lewis William. The Americanization of French Louisiana: A Study of the Process of Adjustment Between the French and the Anglo-American Populations of Louisiana, 1803-1860. New York: Arno Press, 1980.

Nimeiri, Ahmed. “‘Reconstruction, which was also war . . .’: Realism and Allegory in Grace King’s The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard.” Mississippi Quarterly 41:1 (Winter 1987-88): 39-54.

Noble, Stuart Grayson. “Governor Claiborne and the Public School System of the Territorial Government of Louisiana.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 11:4 (October 1928): 535-556.

Nott, G. William. “Adrien Rouquette: Poet and Mystic.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 6:3 (July 1923): 388-394.

Nystrom, Justin A. New Orleans after the CIvil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

O’Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

O’Neill, Charles Edwards. “‘A Quarter Marked by Sundry Peculiarities’: New Orleans, Lay Trustees, and Père Antoine.” The Catholic Historical Review 76:2 (April 1990): 235-277.

———. Viel: Louisiana’s Firstborn Author with Evandre the First Literary Creation of a Native of the Mississippi Valley. Lafayette: The Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1991. 249

Ostendorf, Berndt. “Creole Cultures and the Process of Creolization: With Special Attention to Louisiana.” In Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina, edited by John Lowe, 103-135. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Palmié, Stephan. “The ‘C-Word’ Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Charles Stewart, 67-83. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. The Life and Letters of Joseph Pennell, Volume One. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929.

Perry, Lewis. Boats Against the Current: American Culture between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littleﬁeld Publishers, 1993.

Peterson, John H., Jr. “Louisiana Choctaw Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” In Four Centuries of Southern Indians, edited by Charles M. Hudson, 101-112. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975.

Phillips, Faye. “To ‘Build upon the Foundation’: Charles Gayarré’s Vision for the Louisiana State Library.” Libraries & the Cultural Record 43:1 (2008): 56-76.

———. “Writing Louisiana Colonial History in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Charles Gayarré, Benjamin Franklin French, and the Louisiana Historical Society.” Louisiana History 49:2 (Spring 2008): 163-190.

Pierson, George Wilson. Tocqueville in America. 1938. Reprint, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Poesch, Jessie J., ed. Printmaking in New Orleans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006.

———. “Introduction: Printmaking in New Orleans.” In Printmaking in New Orleans, edited by Jessie J. Poesch, 9-50. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi and New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2006.

Points, Marie Louise. “New Orleans.” in The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church, Volume XI, edited by Charles G. Herbermann, Edward A. Pace, Condé B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, and John J. Wynne, 5-17. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 250

Pollock, Sheldon. “Cosmopolitanism and Vernacular in History.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty, 15-53. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Pollock, Sheldon, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms.” In Cosmopolitanism, edited by Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, and Chakrabarty, 1-14. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

“Pompeian Entertainments.” The J. Paul Getty Museum website. Accessed December 4, 2012. http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/pompeii/ entertainments.html.

Powell, Lawrence N. The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

———. “Lyle Saxon and the New Orleans City Guide.” In New Orleans City Guide, 1938. 1938. Reprint, New Orleans: Garrett County Press, 2009.

———, ed. The New Orleans of George Washington Cable: The 1887 Census Ofﬁce Report. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

———. “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk‐ stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics.” Slavery & Abolition 20:1 (1999): 127-149.

Railton, Stephen. “Touring with Cable and Huck.” Accessed February 1, 2013. http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckﬁnn/hftourhp.html.

Reinecke, George. “Alfred Mercier, French Novelist of New Orleans.” In In Old New Orleans, edited by W. Kenneth Holditch, 145-176. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983.

Reinders, Robert C. “A Critical Study of François Xavier Martin’s ‘History of Louisiana’” in The History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period, by François-Xavier Martin, xvii-xxix. 1882. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 2000.

———. End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860. 1964. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1998.

Remini, Robert V. The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory. New York: Viking, 1999. 251

Richards, Jeffrey H. “Barefoot Folks with Tawny Cheeks: Creolism in the Literary Chesapeake, 1680-1750.” In Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, edited by Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, 135-161. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Rightor, Henry, ed. Standard History of New Orleans, Louisiana. Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1900.

Riley, Sam. “Exotic Americana: The French-language Magazines of Nineteenth Century New Orleans.” Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 1:2 (Fall 1999). Accessed December 9, 2012. http://www.bsu.edu/web/ aejmcmagazine/journal/archive/Fall_1999/Riley.html.

Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Roberson, William H. George Washington Cable: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1982.

Robertson, Gloria Nobles. “The Diaries of Dr. Alfred Mercier: 1879-1893.” MA thesis, Louisiana State University, 1947.

Robinson, Lori. “‘Why, why do we not write our side?’ Gender and Southern Self- representation in Grace King’s Balcony Stories.” In Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing. Edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, 54-71. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Roediger, David R. Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Rosenwald, Lawrence. “Alfred Mercier’s Polygot Plantation Novel of Louisiana.” In American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni, edited by Marc Shell, 219-237. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

———. Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Roussève, Charles Barthelemy. The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature. New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic. New York: Pegasus, 1969. 252

Ryan, Mary. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

———. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Saar, Martin. “Genealogy and Subjectivity.” European Journal of Philosophy 10:2 (August 2002): 231-245.

———. “Understanding Genealogy: History, Power, and the Self.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 2:3 (September 2008): 295-314.

Sacher, John M. A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. Revised, New York: Vintage, 2003.

Saucier, Earl Nolan. “Charles Gayarré, the Creole Historian.” PhD diss., George Peabody College for Teachers, 1933.

Scanlon, Jennifer, and Shaaron Cosner, eds. American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Scatori, Stephen. “Gayarré: Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres.” MA thesis, Tulane University, 1914.

Schafer, Judith Kelleher. Introduction to New Orleans as It Was: Episodes of Louisiana Life, by Henry C. Castellanos, ix-xx. 1895. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Scott, Anne Firor, ed. Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Senter, Caroline. “Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation.” In Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color, edited by Sybil Kein, 276-294. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Shammas, Carole. “English-Born and Creole Elites in Turn-of-the-Century Virginia.” In The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society, edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, 274-296. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 253

Shapiro, Norman R., trans., and M. Lynn Weiss, intro. Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Shea, John Gilmary. Life and Times of the Most Rev. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop of Baltimore. Embracing the History of the Catholic Church in the United States. 1763-1815. New York: John G. Shea, 1888.

Shell, Marc, ed. American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Shepherd, Verene A., and Glen L. Richards. eds. Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2002.

Shugg, Roger W. Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana: A Social History of White Farmers and Laborers during Slavery and After, 1840-1875. 1939. Revised, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Simpson, Claude M., Jr. “Grace King: The Historian as Apologist,” Southern Literary Journal 6:2 (Spring 1974): 130-133.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

Smith, Thomas Ruys. Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Continuum, 2011.

Smolenski, John. Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Socola, Edward M. “Charles E.A. Gayarré, A Biography.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1954.

———. “Gayarre’s [sic] History of Louisiana” in History of Louisiana, Volume I: The French Domination, by Charles Gayarré, n.p. 1854. Reprint, Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1974.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 254

———. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Soulé, Pierre. The Wardens of the Church of St. Louis of New Orleans, vs. Antoine Blanc. [New Orleans]: J. L. Sollée, 1844.

Souther, J. Mark. New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Speake, Jennifer, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Spitzer, Nicolas R. “Monde Créole: The Cultural World of French Louisiana Creoles and the Creolization of World Cultures.” The Journal of American Folklore 116:459 (Winter 2003): 57-72.

Stanonis, Anthony. “‘Always in Costume and Mask,’: Lyle Saxon and New Orleans Tourism.” Louisiana History 42:1 (Winter 2001): 31-57.

———. Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006.

Starr, S. Frederick. Bamboula!: The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

———, ed. Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Stephens, Thomas M. “Creole, Créole, Criollo, Crioulo: The Shadings of a Term.” The SOCOL Review 7:3 (Fall 1983): 28-39.

Stewart, Charles, ed. Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

———. “Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory.” In Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, edited by Stewart, 1-25. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

St. Martin, Gérard Labarre, and Jacqueline K. Voorhies. Ecrits Louisianais du dix- neuvième siècle: nouvelles, contes et fables. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Tate, Thad W., and David L. Ammerman, eds. The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century: Essays on Anglo-American Society. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. 255

Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Taylor, Joe Gray. Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

Thomas, James W. Lyle Saxon: A Critical Biography. Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1991.

Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Tinker, Edward Larocque. “Bibliography of the French Newspapers and Periodicals of Louisiana.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 42 (April 20/October 19, 1932): 247-370.

———. “Cable and the Creoles.” American Literature 5:4 (January 1934): 313-326.

———. Les Ecrits de langue française en Louisiane au 19ème siècle; essais biographiques et bibliographiques. Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1932.

———. Louisiana’s Earliest Poet: Julien Poydras & the Paeans to Gálvez. New York: The New York Public Library, 1933.

———. The Palingenesis of Craps. New York: The Press of the Wooly Whale, 1933.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Tregle, Joseph G., Jr. “Creoles and Americans.” In Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, 131-185. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

———. “Early New Orleans Society: A Reappraisal.” The Journal of Southern History 18:1 (February 1952): 20-36.

———. Louisiana in the Age of Jackson: A Clash of Cultures and Personalities. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

———. “On that Word ‘Creole’ Again: A Note.” Louisiana History 23:2 (Spring 1982): 193-198. 256

Trent, William Peterﬁeld, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van Doren, eds. The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume IV: Later National Literature: Part III. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Culture on the Edges: Caribbean Creolization in Historical Context.” In From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited by Brian Keith Axel, 189-210. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Turner, Arlin. “George Washington Cable’s Literary Apprenticeship.” The Louisiana Historical Quarterly 24:1 (January 1941): 168-186.

———. George W. Cable: A Biography. 1956. Reprint, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966.

Tusa, Bobs M. “Le Carillon: An English Translation of Selected Satires.” Louisiana History 35:1 (Winter 1994): 67-84.

Usner, Daniel H,. Jr. American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Uzée, Philip D. “An Analysis of the Histories of Charles E. A. Gayarré.” The Proceedings of the Louisiana Academy of Sciences VII (April 1943): 120-128.

Vaughan, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Viatte, Auguste. “Complement à la bibliographie louisianaise d’Edward Larocque Tinker.” Revue de Louisiane 3:2 (Winter 1974): 12-57.

———. Histoire littéraire de l’Amérique française: des origines à 1950. Laval, Quebec: Presses Universitaires, 1954.

Von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Wachtell, Cynthia. War No More: The Antiwar Impulse in American Literature, 1861-1914. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.

Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

Watson, Thomas D. “Staging the ‘Crowning Achievement of The Age’ —Major Edward A. Burke, New Orleans and the Cotton Centennial Exposition.” Louisiana History 25:3; 4 (Summer; Autumn 1984), 229-257; 341-366. 257

Weil, François. “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy.” The New England Quarterly 80:3 (September 2007): 408-434.

Wharton, Edward Clifton. Biographical Sketch of Hon. Charles Gayarré, by a Louisianian. New Orleans: C. Eden Hopkins, 1889.

Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. 1976. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Williams, T. Harry P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980.

Wilson, Mary Ann. “Grace King: New Orleans Literary Historian.” In Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times. Edited by Janet Allured and Judith F. Gentry, 137-154. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. 258

BIOGRAPHY

! Rien Fertel was born on July 17, 1980 in Lafayette, Louisiana. He graduated with a B.A. in Linguistics and Anthropology from Tulane University in

2003. He then paused his university studies for two years to run a grocery/deli in

New Orleans’s Warehouse District. Hurricane Katrina and the resulting Federal

Floods forced him to New York City, where he enrolled in The New School for

Social Research. He graduated there with a M.A. in Historical Studies in 2008.

He splits his time between New Orleans and St. Martinville.