Day after day the local papers carried testimony about the women in the Dimitry family, trying to establish their racial identity. That the maternal ancestors carried some blood other than white was quickly established: Pandelly’s great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother had been slaves during the latter part of the eighteenth century at a time when only Indians or Africans were enslaved. The question was, to which race did they belong?
The oldest residents in town were rounded up and brought to court, where a team of lawyers questioned them about the texture of the Dimitry women’s hair (crépu, or crisp, suggested African blood), the height of their foreheads (a high brow indicated Indian ancestry), and the quality of their gaze (Africans were said to have dull eyes, while the Natives’ eyes were piercing). The lawyers asked, Did whites or blacks call at their home? How did people address the women in the street: Madame—reserved for white women? Or Man—a familiar term used for colored? Where did the women attend school? In what part of the classroom did they sit?
If the trial revealed the depth of fear in the white Creole population about their racial purity, it also exposed the city’s many contradictions around race. Readers discovered, for example, that back in the 1820s, Alexander Dimitry had been thrown out of a society ball for being colored, only to be spotted a little while later dining at a local restaurant with his very accusers. Pandelly won in the end, but the case marked the beginning of a resolve within the white Creole community to divorce the notion of color from Creole for once and for all.
For Henry Broyard, though, it was too late in many ways. If his racial identity had been put to trial, he’d have had a hard time defending his whiteness. No matter what he looked like or what his ancestry actually was, he could be considered black by association. His family had worked in a colored trade for generations, he’d been seen around town with free people of color, other Broyards were known to be of mixed race, and he’d consorted with at least two women of color. Perhaps, ultimately, he didn’t care what people thought he was.
In the early winter of 1855, Henry accompanied a very pregnant Pauline to the justice of the peace, where they obtained a marriage license that described them both as “FPC,” free people of color. And then on February 12, 1855, the couple went to St. Ann’s Church, on the north end of Tremé—not St. Augustine’s, where they normally worshipped. The priest, after inspecting their license, asked the congregation if anyone knew of a reason to object to the union. With no objections coming, he blessed the nuptials before a group of witnesses, and that is what the moment of mixing in the Broyard family was like.
Henry, Pauline, and Pierre Gilbert moved into a house on St. Ann Street with one of Pauline’s half sisters and her family. The following summer, on July 21, 1856, my great-grandfather was born. (Pierre Gilbert died sometime before 1860, making my great-grandfather the oldest child in the family.) The family headed back to St. Ann’s Church, where the infant was christened Paul after his godfather, Paul Trévigne. This choice of godparent suggests how immersed Henry had already become in the colored Creole community: Trévigne was one of its most prominent members.
A writer and language instructor at the new Couvent School, Paul Trévigne embodied the principles of the colored Creoles. Born in New Orleans to free people of color of Spanish descent, Trévigne was fluent in the classical and Enlightenment traditions, strongly influenced by the republican ideals in France, and an outspoken champion of racial equality. A colleague described him as a charming blend of playfulness and poise, “with a little of the pride (the good kind) of the Castilian character.”
At the party back at the house that customarily followed christenings, Trévigne would have held forth on the news of the day. While none of the colored men could vote (nor could Henry, having forsaken this right along with his white identity), they followed local and national politics closely. Of particular interest would be the upcoming presidential election. A candidate from a new political party called the Republicans had recently entered the race, and the party’s platform gave the colored men reason to feel hopeful.
The Republican Party had been formed by a coalition of political groups united by their opposition to extending slavery into the western territories. Already the question of whether Kansas would enter the Union as slave or free had sparked bloody unrest in the state. And recently in Washington, on the floor of the Senate, Senator Charles Sumner had been beaten almost to death in retaliation for a speech he made against slavery.
Closer to home, New Orleans’s largest local paper, the Daily Picayune, had called for the expulsion of all free Negroes from the city, claiming that they were “a plague and a pest in our community, besides containing the elements of mischief to our slave population.” The white Creole paper, the New Orleans Bee, had come out in favor of the free blacks’ colonization to Liberia the year before. At the same time, the Louisiana legislature kept chipping away at the rights of people of color, most recently barring them from forming any new scientific, religious, charitable, or literary societies.
As Paul Trévigne and the other men stood outside smoking their cigars, they might have speculated about what would happen next. Forced emigration of free blacks to Africa was being debated in some of the other southern states, with a threat of reenslavement if people didn’t comply. Any conversation along these lines must have been hard for Henry to hear. It was one thing for him to voluntarily enter this circumscribed life, but he’d also hung this fate on his children.
The Democratic presidential candidate, James Buchanan, won the November election. In his inaugural address, Buchanan came out in support of “popular sovereignty,” the policy put forth by Democratic senator Stephen Douglas in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed territories to decide the slave question for themselves, thus postponing resolution of the slavery debate for the time being. But the Republicans’ respectable showing in the election—winning 38 percent of the electoral college in a field of three candidates—highlighted the growing division in the country. Then, two days after Buchanan was sworn in, the Supreme Court announced its decision in the Dred Scott case, intensifying the split even more.
The court case focused on the status of a slave named Dred Scott, who had sued for his freedom on the basis of his four-year stay on free soil. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, writing the majority opinion, held that slaves were not citizens of the United States, and therefore Scott was not entitled to sue in the federal courts. Taney also declared that blacks, free and enslaved, were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Furthermore, the court determined that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories, overturning the Missouri Compromise and other legislation that had maintained the balance in the country between slave and free soil. The decision greatly alarmed antislavery forces and gave the Republican Party a key issue around which to rally support.
The more threatened the southerners felt their peculiar institution to be, the more they attacked the blacks who were already free. In 1857 Louisiana governor Robert C. Wickliffe appealed to the state legislature “that immediate steps should be taken at this time to remove all the free negroes who are now in the State, when such removal can be effected without violation of the law. Their example and associations have a most pernicious effect upon our slave population.” The state lawmakers still weren’t ready to take this step—some of them had relatives who were free people of color—but they did decide to put an end to all manumissions. Slaves could no longer be freed for any reason. Also they forbade free blacks from assembling without white supervision to worship (which had been previously excluded from laws restricting their congregation), as well as banning them from running coffeehouses, billiard halls, or any establishments serving liquor, a ruling that put many colored proprietors out of business.
In 1859 the Louisiana legislature went so far as to pass an act that allowed free blacks to choose masters and voluntarily enslave themselves for life. By this time Henry and Paul
ine had three small children: my great-grandfather Paul, his brother, Pierre, and his sister, Pauline. Surviving family photos suggest that the kids wouldn’t have looked recognizably black, but their baptisms identified them as free people of color. If the government started to round up the free Negroes of New Orleans for expulsion or enslavement, their names would be on the list too.
Henry and Pauline’s neighbors and friends began leaving the city in droves. In early 1860 the city’s Daily Delta observed that “scarcely a week passes but a large number of free persons [of color] leave this port for Mexico or Haiti.” The Broyards, however, stayed put. Pauline’s maternal grandmother, who was living with them, was more than eighty years old, and she’d been moving all her life, from Jamaica, where she was born, to St. Domingue until the slave revolt forced her out, to Cuba until they were expelled, and finally to New Orleans. How could the family ask her to pick up and move again?
For the 1860 election, the Republicans put forward a young candidate from Illinois who had recently garnered national attention in a series of debates on the slavery question. His name was Abraham Lincoln, and his conciliatory stance—he was against slavery’s extension into the western territories, but he wasn’t calling for immediate emancipation—helped to gain him the party’s nomination. Then infighting among the opposition propelled him into the White House. By the time Lincoln was sworn in, on March 4, 1861, seven Southern states, including Louisiana, had seceded to form the Confederate States of America.
A few weeks later, Alexander Stephens, the newly elected vice president of the Confederacy, made a speech in Savannah, outlining the Southern states’ reason for secession. “Our new government is founded upon...the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Then on April 12, 1861, Louisiana native General Pierre G. T. Beauregard fired on a boat bringing provisions to federal forces at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and the Civil War began.
Almost immediately the free men of color of New Orleans, along with the white men of the city, began organizing themselves into volunteer militia units to help defend against a Yankee invasion. Among those who signed up was Henry Broyard. The colored men later explained that they’d been threatened with death or destruction of their property unless they volunteered. One man claimed that a policeman advised him to join up if he didn’t want to be hanged. But some men also volunteered with the hope of improving their position in society. Throughout Louisiana’s history, men of color had taken up arms with this aim in mind (only to be disappointed time and again). Also many free men of color owned property, which they intended to defend, no matter the moral implications. In any case, more than 80 percent of the free blacks in New Orleans were of mixed race in 1860, and they’d already been emulating white social mores for years.
The Confederate government regarded the Native Guard (as the colored troops were called) as mostly for show. The men were never given arms, uniforms, or any tactical assignments. Henry and his fellow troops did little else but parade up and down the streets in the gray coats and trousers they had purchased themselves, carrying their own antiquated muskets or walking empty-handed. But the troops made a good story for the local papers, with one predicting that the colored men would “fight the Black Republicans with as much determination and gallantry” as their white brethren.
When the time came, however, with the run of Union admiral David Farragut’s fleet past the Confederate forts guarding the mouth of the Mississippi, neither militia took a stand against the Yankees. The white soldiers fled when they heard the twelve tolls of the church bells, notifying citizens of the approaching federal forces, and the Native Guard troops were ordered by their commander to disband. They did as they were told, first hiding their muskets in buildings around the city, including the Couvent School, before returning home to their families.
Soon after Union general Benjamin F. Butler took control of New Orleans on May 1, 1862, he published an edict in the local papers, ordering the citizens to turn over any weapons. After some deliberation the Native Guard members dispatched a committee to visit Butler and offer their guns and service to the federal cause. But Butler had already contemplated using black troops and dismissed the idea, observing in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton that black men were “horrified of firearms.”
In any case, President Lincoln was hesitant to employ black soldiers for fear that arming the former slaves would push some of the border states still in the Union into siding with the South. Furthermore, Butler had read the local newspaper accounts describing the colored men’s enthusiastic response to the Confederate call to arms. Despite the Native Guard’s explanation about the coercion accompanying their previous enlistment, the general was skeptical about their loyalty to the Union. Circumstances soon forced him to change his mind.
In early August the Confederates launched an attack on Baton Rouge and were rumored to be heading for New Orleans. Butler lacked the forces for an adequate defense. He’d already enlisted all the white Unionists in the city, and Secretary of War Stanton refused his request for reinforcements, claiming they were more badly needed elsewhere. Finally the general decided to “call on Africa to intervene.” He issued a general order requesting the men of the Native Guard and the rest of the free colored population to volunteer for the Union army. Immediately the most prominent colored men of New Orleans began trying to raise companies. A fifty-three-year-old free man of color named Joseph Follin recruited men for Company C, and one of the first he signed up was Henry Broyard, age thirty-three.
Opposition to slavery played a role in motivating the enlistment of many colored men. They’d also grown up hearing romantic tales of heroism from their fathers and grandfathers who had taken up arms against the British in the War of 1812. But the men had practical considerations too—work and food were growing scarce under the war conditions. They needed the pay and rations to feed their families. Within two weeks two thousand colored men from across the city presented themselves at the Touro Building in the French Quarter to volunteer.
Still passing as black, Henry Broyard entered the regiment of the First Louisiana Native Guard as a colored corporal. When his turn came to swear in, his white appearance probably didn’t even cause the federal marshal to look twice. As a reporter for the New York Times observed, several officers in the colored regiment “were, to all superficial appearance, white men.” Butler himself claimed to Secretary of War Stanton that the darkest member of the new regiment would resemble in complexion the late senator Daniel Webster. In fact out of the ninety-five men originally enrolled in Henry’s company, twenty-six were identified as “fair, bright, yellow, or light,” while another thirty-four were described as “brown,” with the remaining thirty-five listed as “black.”
Some of those listed as black in the new regiment were runaway slaves. Despite the legal and social differences that had existed between the castes of free men and slaves, a spirit of solidarity and common cause now united them. In a letter to a new Republican newspaper, a captain in one of the regiments wrote, “In parade, you will see a thousand white bayonets gleaming in the sun, held by black, yellow, or white hands. Be informed that we have no prejudice; that we receive everyone in camp; but that the sight of human salesmen of flesh makes us sick.”
On September 27, 1862, my great-great-grandfather Henry’s regiment, the First Louisiana Native Guard Infantry, was mustered into service, becoming the first black regiment in the history of the U.S. Army. Following their enlistment, the thousand colored men marched to Camp Strong, four miles outside of town near the racetrack, to set up their tents and begin their training. The sight of these men in the dark blue coats and light blue pants of the Union uniform filled members of the local colored community with pride. They lined the streets to cheer them, and hiked out Gentilly Road to
watch them drill and parade.
A few whites cheered the troops as well. The reporter from the Times praised the soldiers’ bearing and conduct. And a white officer privately complimented the colored men’s deportment in a letter: “I find them better deposed [sic] to learn, and more orderly and cleanly, both in their persons and quarters, than the whites.” The men of Henry’s company benefited from the experience of their first lieutenant, a man named Emile Detiege, who’d been schooled in military deportment by his uncle, an old Belgian who’d fought in Napoleon’s army.
But the majority of the white community, including Union soldiers, displayed their hostility for the colored troops at every turn. The Union paymaster refused to release funds for the colored troops; the supply officers neglected to fulfill requests to outfit them. The men had to scavenge their belts and knapsacks from the discards of the white units. Their commanding colonel, Spencer H. Stafford, described the regiment as “the most indifferently supplied regiment that ever went into service.”
Black soldiers returning to camp at night risked being jumped by white Union soldiers, who stripped them of their uniforms, forcing them to walk the rest of the way back in their underwear. Whites lined Canal Street during parades to shout insults at the soldiers; they turned their families out of their living quarters for late rent despite explanations about the holdup in their pay. Police officers imprisoned the soldiers’ wives and mothers on trumped-up charges and arrested members of the colored regiment at the slightest provocation.
Perhaps most insulting to the Native Guard was the whites’ constant disparagement of their fitness for military service. Even before the regiment had been officially mustered in, the Daily Picayune forecast the men’s imminent failure as soldiers because of the Negro’s “innate inferiority, natural dullness and cowardice, indolence, awe of the white man, and lack of motivation.” People on the street claimed that any three white men could send the whole regiment running with a whip and a few shouts.
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