The Lost German Slave Girl

by John Bailey

  Eva Kropp drew the children to her waist. She asked how he could possibly look after three young children. She pleaded with him to at least let her take the youngest. It would only be until he called for her and then he could have her back. Daniel shook his head. Salomé would be staying with him. He was her father and he would never give her up. He began to cry. Ashamed of earning the pity of a fifteen-year-old girl, he then turned away and, taking Salomé’s hand, walked off while his other two children followed behind.

  FOUR

  NEW ORLEANS

  Have you ever been in New Orleans?

  If not, you’d better go;

  It’s a nation of a queer place;

  day and night a show!

  Frenchman, Spaniards, West Indians,

  Creoles, Mustees,

  Yankees, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans,

  lawyers and trustees.

  Clergymen, priests, friars, nuns,

  women of all stains;

  Negroes in purple and fine linen,

  and slaves in rags and chains.

  White men with black wives,

  et vice-versa too.

  A progeny of all colors—

  An infernal motley crew!

  James R. Creecy, 1829

  New Orleans was, and still is, the most un-American of cities. Its founder, the Frenchman Sieur de Bienville, looking for a place to site a village in 1718, chose swampland on the banks of the Mississippi some thirty leagues (about one hundred miles) from the sea. In this humid wilderness, infested with snakes, alligators, and mosquitoes, he set his reluctant workforce of convicts and settlers to clear trees and dig ditches. He named the village La Nouvelle Orléans, a name intended to curry favor with the extravagant and self-centered Regent of France, the Duke of Orléans—a man, his distracted mother once said, who had been given every gift excepting that of making use of them.

  Bienville’s choice of such an unpromising site for his royal colony was dictated by geography. He well understood that those who controlled passage up and down the Mississippi could aspire to rule the great valley it drained. Command of the Mississippi required a trading post within the protection of a fort close by where the river entered the sea. But where? Ideally, a trading village should be sited on land high enough to be safe from floods and storms, close to the sea, and on the banks of a river narrow enough to be spanned by a bridge. The lower Mississippi met none of these requirements. From Baton Rouge, about two hundred miles upstream, to its entry into the Gulf of Mexico, the river is uniformly wide (almost half a mile); held in by natural levees, much of its water is actually higher than the surrounding land.

  On a voyage of exploration some years earlier, Bienville had seen a small area rising above swamp water on the banks of a crescent-shaped twist of the river. He carefully calculated the advantages of such a site. It was halfway between the French colonies at Natchez and Mobile. An alternative access to the Gulf of Mexico lay through Lake Pontchartrain, located only several miles along an old Indian trail. It was far enough inland to be safe from hurricanes and storms. And when enemy ships slowed down to navigate the curve in the river, they could be fired upon from both shores. This was where he commenced to build a fort.

  For the next forty-five years, La Nouvelle Orléans was run either by a succession of military officers appointed as governors, who saw their office as a source of personal income, or by chartered companies more interested in fleecing shareholders than in economic development. Dreams of picking gold and diamonds up off the ground, and of farming lands so fertile they only had to be tickled to yield their abundance, evaporated like marshland fogs. Convinced it was abandoning nothing of value, France transferred the colony to Spain in 1762. The Spanish did no better in extracting wealth from swamps, and in 1800, transferred it back to France. Seemingly in no great hurry to reclaim this problem colony, three years were to pass before the French flag was raised, and by then Napoleon had passed it on again—this time to the United States.

  The Louisiana Purchase of April 1803 was the biggest land sale in history. The whole of the Mississippi Valley up to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, an area of 828,000 square miles, was sold by Napoleon to President Jefferson for fifteen million dollars. With this one transaction, the size of the United States was doubled and from its lands a dozen states would eventually be carved. A fledgling nation, barely two decades old, now possessed an empire straddling an entire continent.

  The new territories of the South grew with astonishing speed. Almost anything a man wished to grow—cotton, tobacco, wheat or livestock—seemed to thrive. However it was one crop, cotton, which was the economic powerhouse carrying all the others with it. Whereas under Spanish rule Louisiana had exported the modestly profitable indigo, corn, tobacco and flax, after its acquisition by America, its main exports became sugar—and cotton, cotton and more cotton. Two inventions—one in the Old World, the other in the New— provided the spur to cotton’s dominance. The wire teeth in Whitney’s cotton gin deftly freed the fiber from the pods and allowed planters to adopt the hardy short-staple plant that was ideally suited to the land in the South. Meanwhile, in England, Watt’s steam engine provided the power to spin, weave, and print cloth in the dark mills of Lancashire.

  The lower Mississippi Valley became a vast, efficient, cotton-growing machine. Plantation production of cotton with slave labor became so widespread and so profitable that the wealth and culture of the South came to depend on it. Plantations without slaves couldn’t compete. An antislave moralist attempting to produce cotton with white labor would go broke. With cotton (and later sugar) commanding the Southern economy, subjected blacks were required in the thousands.

  ”No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” This was the roar from James Henry Hammond of South Carolina in a speech to the U.S. Senate. Hammond was saying what he believed everyone in the nation knew, if only they cared to admit it: that cotton was an unstoppable economic force that had entrenched slavery into the way of the South. David Christy, a Cincinnati journalist, expressed it even more strikingly:

  HIS MAJESTY, KING COTTON, therefore, is forced to continue the employment of his slaves; and, by their toil, is riding on, conquering and to conquer! He receives no check from the cries of the oppressed, while the citizens of the world are dragging forward his chariot, and shouting aloud his praise! KING COTTON is a profound statesman, and knows what measures will best sustain his throne. He is an acute mental philosopher, acquainted with the secret springs of human action, and accurately perceives who will best promote his aims. He has no evidence that colored men can grow his cotton, but in the capacity of slaves. It is his policy, therefore to defeat all schemes of emancipation.39

  Nowhere was the dominance of the kingdom of cotton more evident than on the waterfront of New Orleans. Lines of cotton bales, stacked three high, formed broad avenues leading to ships waiting to carry them to the four corners of the earth. Cotton was the ideal cargo—almost indestructible, valuable, and easy to handle. Within two decades of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Mississippi River became one of the great trade routes of the world, in the process making New Orleans the largest city on the western frontier and the third largest in the nation.

  Journalists from eastern newspapers, sent to describe the new state of Louisiana, were apt to report that the wharves of New Orleans were the most exotic place in the United States. It was an ant’s nest where things were packed and unpacked, sold or auctioned, and then sent elsewhere—either up the Mississippi to the heartland of America, or downriver to the great cities of Europe. They wrote of cargo garnered from every port from Maine to the Gulf being stacked on the levee, ready to be taken to a thousand towns and cities on the vast western plains. There were kegs of nails from Boston, bolts of cloth from New York, and sacks of coffee beans from Cuba. They wrote of near-naked slaves, shiny with sweat, unloading tea chests from India, crates of fine crockery from England, boxes of wine from Bordeaux, and
oak chests of dueling pistols from France. They described teams of horses pulling drays piled high with bales of cotton and slaves rolling hogsheads of sugar up the gangplanks of ships bearing the flags of a score of nations. They marveled at the medley of tongues to be heard among the milling throng on the wharves. Jewish traders from Russia wearing beaver-skin hats and frock coats examined crates of tobacco. French and Spanish merchants of the city supervised the dispatch of their produce to agents in states upriver. Flatboat men dressed in the furs of animals from the hills of Kentucky walked side by side with bearded sailors from South America. Elegant men and women disembarked from steamers to be immediately harried by pedlars. Black men in ragged pantaloons sold roasted peanuts; women offered sugary biscuits for sale, while black youths danced slapfoot in front of their begging bowls. All this, while the whistle of the steamboat, getting ready to embark for St. Louis, sounded in the background.

  The city manufactured practically nothing itself. New Orleans grew, and became rich, by taking a cut of whatever was being carried across its docks. Wharfingers charged for cartage, storage and insurance. Bankers skimmed both ends of the market by providing planters with credit at the beginning of each year, reaping the harvest with interest when the crops were sold, and then financing the exporters who bought it. Attracted by the wealth moving through the city, Yankee traders, Philadelphia lawyers and New York bankers came from the east. Within a few years, Louisianan brokers were boasting that they had more money at their disposal than their counterparts in New York City.

  In the years following the Louisiana Purchase the population of New Orleans increased dramatically. Adding a heady spice to the ethnic mix of the city were the 10,000 refugees who arrived in New Orleans from Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti).40 Some were white, but many (about 3,000) were gens de couleur. These were no humble children of freed blacks—many had been masters themselves in that decadent mountain paradise that had been run as a French sugar colony until half a million slaves, goaded by intolerably cruel treatment, revolted against their white and mulatto owners. The refugees were French-speaking, Catholic, and educated, and many brought their slaves with them, including their sang-melee mistresses, called Les Sirènes because of their great beauty. At the Café de Refugies, the refugees drank le petit Gouave and regaled listeners with their tragic tales of lost wealth and power. These gracious, licentious people with their fine clothes and luxurious morals had an immediate impact on the fashion and culture of the city.

  Many of the refugees from Saint-Domingue believed in voodoo, which has remained a secretive and mysterious cult in New Orleans ever since. Like the city itself, voodoo was a mix of cultures and religions. It twisted Christian saints and liturgies to its cause. From Catholicism it derived a preoccupation with sex, sin, and sacrifice. Symbols of dread, such as bats, black cats, and serpents, were procured from the medieval lore of Europe. To this were added West African mysticism, devil worship, and zombies. The city’s most famous voodoo queen was Marie Laveau, a mulatto of African, Amerindian, and white descent, who told fortunes and dispensed hexes and love charms. In ritualistic ceremonies, she led performers in dances with twisting snakes, while her adherents drank rum and blood from the severed necks of roosters, and simulated sexual congress before the weeping statutes of saints. Voodoo had adherents (and curious spectators) among all classes and colors, although its main hold was on the colored and Creole communities.

  During the boom years following 1820, almost half a million immigrants from Europe poured into New Orleans. The majority came from Ireland and Germany. Attracted by cheap land and the availability of work on the waterfront and in nearby factories, they settled upriver of the city. The area around Adele Street became known as the Irish Channel, while a few streets away, on Sixth Street, the Germans lived in an area dubbed Little Saxony.

  New Orleans was fondly called Sin City by the river men. Notoriously decadent, irreligious, Catholic in name, but not in church attendance, the only Roman tradition followed with any conviction was the Continental Sunday. Entertainment varied from high opera and performances of the latest plays from London and Paris, to the artless and grotesque. As an example of the latter, a handbill circulating in the city in 1817 announced an “extraordinary fight of Furious Animals”:

  1st Fight—A strong Attakapas Bull, attacked and subdued by six

  of the strongest dogs of the country.

  2nd Fight—Six Bull-dogs against a Canadian Bear.

  3rd Fight—A beautiful Tiger against a Black Bear.

  4th Fight—Twelve dogs against a strong and furious Opelousas

  Bull.

  If the Tiger is not vanquished in his fight with the Bear, he will be sent alone against the last Bull; and if the latter conquers all his enemies, several pieces of fire-works will be placed on his back, which will produce a very entertaining amusement.

  The doors will be opened at three and the Exhibition begins at four o’clock precisely.

  Admittance, one dollar for grown persons, 50 cents for children.

  A military band will perform during the Exhibition.41

  Down the Mississippi, like a gutter in flood, were washed gamblers, prostitutes, vagabonds, and thieves from six states. The Kaintocks, after spending weeks guiding their flatboats of massive planks downstream, found an array of bawdy houses, billiard halls, clip joints, and gambling dens awaiting their pleasure. They had the reputation of being the roughest, toughest, and dirtiest fighters in the whole of the South. The red-light districts were located along the waterfront and on Girod Street. The most notorious of all, The Swamp, was an area of flimsy shanties in marshlands behind the city, where drunkenness, knifings, and sordid sex were on nightly offer.

  Those defending New Orleans’s reputation of having the highest crime rate of any city in the United States, and a murder rate higher even than Kansas City, pointed out that almost all the criminal activity was confined to the riverboat men, sailors, and the Irish and German laborers. This sort of thing happened in all port cities, and after all, New Orleans was one of the greatest port cities in the world. The Creoles, in their fine houses in the Vieux Carré, and the Americans, living a life of gracious wealth in the Second Municipality, found little reason to be concerned about the nightly mayhem in the gambling dens and brothels of the backswamps.

  Opposed to this perpetual and unchecked crime wave was not so much a police force as a small detachment of city guards armed with half pikes and sabers. Soundly and repeatedly defeated whenever they ventured forth to take on the riverfront ruffians, they were usually to be found in the safety of the guardhouse, or walking the beat in the respectable areas of town. No one expected them to visit The Swamp or Girod Street, particularly at night. It wasn’t so much that criminals in those areas escaped detection, but rather that detection wasn’t even attempted.

  Most men in New Orleans carried concealed weapons of various types: stilettos, switchblades, sword canes, slugshots, and pocket-sized revolvers. The Englishman Edward Sullivan in his book, Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, describes what happened to him when he attended one of New Orleans’s famous quadroon balls:

  These balls take place in a large saloon: at the entrance, where you pay half a dollar, you are requested to leave your implements, by which is meant your bowie-knives and revolvers; and you leave them as you would your overcoat on going into the opera, and get a ticket with their number, and on your way out they are returned to you. You hear the pistol and bowie-knife keeper in the arms-room call out, “No. 46—a six-barreled repeater.” “No. 100—one eight-barreled revolver, and bowie-knife with a death’s head and crossbones cut on the handle.” “No. 95—a brace of double barrels.” All this is done as naturally as possible, and you see fellows fasten on their knives and pistols as coolly as if they were tying on a comforter [woolen scarf] or putting on a coat.

  As I was going upstairs, after getting my ticket, and replying to the quiet request, “whether I would leave my arms,” that I had none t
o leave, I was stopped and searched from head to foot by a policeman, who, I suppose, fancied it impossible that I should be altogether without arms. Notwithstanding all this care murders and duels are of weekly occurrence at these balls, and during my stay at New Orleans they were three….

  If liberty consists in a man being allowed to shoot and stab his neighbor on the smallest provocation, and to swagger drunk about the streets, then certainly the Crescent City is the place in which to seek for it, for they have enough and to spare.42

  The Creoles, swamped by the number of foreigners settling in their city, retreated to the elegant terraces of the Vieux Carré, with their upstairs galleries of Spanish wrought iron, lush enclosed courtyards, and stone cellars lined with Bordeaux wines. There they tenaciously clung to an exaggerated mimicry of the social value of the ancien régime of prerevolutionary France. They were emphatically Catholic in name, if not in morals, they despised Protestantism, and the excesses following the French Revolution had taught them to be wary of democracy. Few, in fact, were descendants of aristocrats—their forebears in colonial Louisiana had been soldiers, traders, and farmers, and even in a few cases had been sent from the house of correction in Paris. Slaves had made them wealthy. Thirty-five years of Spanish rule hadn’t caused them to believe that the old ties with France had been snapped, and most were determined to treat the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States in the same way. They regarded the Américains as ill-mannered money-grubbers, without taste or nobility, and their women as brash and lacking femininity. The Americans’ response was to create a stereotype of the Creoles that was just as negative. The author Charles Seals field wrote that “the drawbacks from their character are, an overruling passion for frivolous amusements, and impatience of habit, a tendency for the luxurious enjoyment of the other sex, without being very scrupulous in their choice of either the black or white race.”43