The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre

by C. Dier

  Jackson utilized the Macarty Plantation in Chalmette as his headquarters after launching a few surprise skirmishes on British outposts. Both sides exchanged artillery blows as they prepared for inevitable battle. On the morning of January 8, 1815, a contingent of British troops crossed the Mississippi River to attack from the west bank. The British misjudged the intensity of the river and landed farther south than anticipated. The main British forces attacked Jackson’s main lines but were continually repulsed. The British retreated after multiple failed waves of attack. Approximately 285 British soldiers died, while only 13 American soldiers were killed. The Battle of New Orleans was a strategic blunder for the British.

  One New Orleans merchant wrote that “the field of slaughter was covered with bodies of British soldiers, lying either dead or wounded. I call it the field of slaughter; for it really was slaughter.” Many women of color assisted the wounded. One British officer wrote, “Several women of colour offered their services, and were employed in tending them, without any compensation but the pleasure of relieving suffering humanity.”40

  General Pakenham was mortally wounded during the mayhem. His heart and other organs were cut out and buried under pecan trees. His body was embalmed in a barrel of rum for conservation and returned home. One writer wittingly remarked that Pakenham was sent back in good spirits.41

  The British withdrew from the region after a month of failed attempts at taking Fort St. Philip in Plaquemines Parish and failures elsewhere along the Gulf coast. The victory sent shockwaves throughout the country and birthed a renewed sense of nationalism. Many participants went on to more famous roles. Jacques Villeré, who commanded the Louisiana militia, was the first Creole governor of Louisiana and the only St. Bernardian to hold that office. Renato Beluche, a French Creole who lived on the Chalmette Plantation, was another local who participated in the battle. After the battle, he joined Simon Bolivar’s revolutionary campaigns across South America. Andrew Jackson eventually became president.

  Some of the enslaved ran in fear during the British invasion. Many were whipped upon return. Another popular French Creole song sung by African Americans well into the late nineteenth century highlighted a slave who decided to run during the battle:

  The English muskets went bim! Bim!

  Kentucky rifles went zim! Zim!

  I said to myself, save your skin!

  I scampered along the water’s edge;

  When I got back it was day break.

  Mistress flew into a passion;

  She had me whipped at the “four stakes,”

  Because I didn’t stay with master;

  But the “four stakes” for me is better than

  A musket shot from an Englishmen.42

  Cannons align the Chalmette Battlefield where the Battle of New Orleans was fought. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.

  The Battle of New Orleans had a profound impact on St. Bernard Parish. The immediate aftermath was one of utter destruction not seen until Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Many Isleños had to sell their land grants to sugar planters who consolidated the tracts into sugar estates. Other planters whose plantations were ruined from the battle or other skirmishes sold their properties and were financially ruined. Decades later, the victory against the British gave the parish a proud identity. It was an era when multiple ethnicities joined forces to tackle a common foe. A list of volunteers showed many Isleños fought with their new country. Chalmette received its namesake from one of the battleground plantations. Many streets in Chalmette, notably around Andrew Jackson Middle School, are named in honor of officers from both sides. A main thoroughfare is named after Jean Lafitte. However, one group might not have celebrated as loudly as the rest. Thousands remained enslaved on the plantations of St. Bernard Parish as the parish entered the antebellum era.

  Chapter 2

  ANTEBELLUM

  And if you say, “Lawd a-mercy,” de overseer whip you.

  De old people, dey just set down and cry.

  —Ceceil George, former slave

  Many prominent figures visited St. Bernard Parish because of the Battle of New Orleans. In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, a renowned French military officer who fought in the American Revolution, arrived on the steamboat Natchez to thunderous applause at the Macarty Plantation during his triumphal tour of the United States. Harriet Martineau, an English social theorist and early feminist sociologist, wrote in 1838 about her visit to St. Bernard Parish in Retrospect to Western Travel. Martineau remarked on the aesthetics of the area: “With the Mississippi on the right hand, and on the left gardens of roses which bewildered the imagination. I really believed at the time that I saw more roses that morning than during the whole course of my life before.” The battlefield itself garnered different feelings: “It was a deadly battlefield. It makes the spectator shudder to see the wide open space, the unsheltered level, over which the British soldiers were compelled to march to certain destruction.” Martineau wrote heavily about slavery in other writings; however, despite visiting plantations, it was not a center of focus for her visit to St. Bernard Parish.43

  The year 1838 saw another visitor to St. Bernard Parish, a writer from the New Orleans–based Weekly Picayune. The writer’s article, “Some Interesting Glimpses of Louisiana a Century Ago,” highlighted the Isleños and their customs in the years before the “overwhelming tide of improvement, innovation and all kinds of Americanism” completely eradicated their archaic way of life. The Isleños, to him, appeared relatively unchanged from colonial days. His article described how they lived off the land, mastered the art of training oxen and sold their goods in New Orleans markets. The Isleños’ trips to the markets were family affairs. According to the author, planters came from other areas of Louisiana to learn how to properly train oxen from the Isleños. He described their homes as “rude” and claimed that the people were incredibly polite, shared their excesses, upheld societal virtues, respected their elders and were overall blissful. His New Orleans audience was intrigued by the nearby communities they hardly knew existed.44

  There was an influx of American newcomers during the antebellum days to Terre-aux-Boeufs to establish plantations. Most purchased fertile land from the Isleños, pushing the Isleños geographically closer to African Americans. According to Gilbert Din in The Canary Islanders of Louisiana, the parish was shaped into three distinct regions around this time: upper St. Bernard, which was made up mainly of wealthy plantations; middle St. Bernard, which was primarily small farms in Terre-aux-Boeufs held by Isleños; and the lower parish, which consisted of Delacroix and nearby areas, where the Isleños lived in proximity to the water and were relatively secluded from the outside world.45

  THE DEMOGRAPHIC MAKEUP of the parish remained relatively unaltered during the antebellum period until St. Bernard Parish received an influx of immigrants from Europe and former Spanish colonies. Most immigrants hailed from Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Cuba and Mexico. Many had likely heard of the settlement while in New Orleans and were attracted to the area for its land and agricultural opportunities and its already sizeable population of Spanish speakers. The slight addition of Cubans and Mexicans contributed to the existing Hispanic character of the parish, but the census of 1850 shows that the influx of whites had a much larger impact on area demographics. As a result of the influx, Isleños now composed slightly less than 50 percent of the white population and were no longer the white majority. The loss of this majority, coupled with black male voter enfranchisement, played an essential role in the violence to come.46

  The overwhelming majority of Isleños lived humble lives, with the notable exceptions of Estevan Nunez and Antonio Marrero. Nunez accrued some wealth as a sugar cane planter and became a slave owner. Marrero owned seventy-one slaves in 1850, and his property, which spanned over 1,500 acres, was valued at more than $100,000. Modern-day Marrero, a town with a population of approximately thirty-seven thousand on the west bank of the Mississippi River, is named after his cousin Louis. The majority of Isleños
were far removed from the wealth acquired by Marrero and lived antiquated lifestyles that attracted the attention and fascination of those who visited the parish. In 1851, a visiting New England woman expressed her admiration in a letter to a friend: “There is a kind of fish caught here called a cat fish which nobody thinks fitting to eat but the Spaniards [Isleños] over the river, and there they sit with their dogs all day long in the sun, close to the water’s edge, fishing and singing at their work. I love dearly to hear them; in the evening they build large fires along the bank for decoys, they look beautifully in the dark.”47

  AS WITH MANY sugar cane parishes, the brutality of slavery dominated antebellum St. Bernard Parish. If a man was coerced to wear a spiked collar that forbade him to rest for the mere thought of leaving, one might imagine the lack of humanity with which punishment was meted out to those who acted on their fierce desire to escape the violence of the plantations. Victims who gave testimonies after the massacre of 1868 were likely enslaved prior to the Civil War, though their testimonies focused not on their experiences as enslaved people but on the events of the massacre itself. Perhaps the most detailed account of the slave experience in St. Bernard Parish comes from Ceceil George, who was interviewed by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1940. George was born in 1846 and was ninety-four years old at the time of the interview. Her account began with her upbringing in South Carolina until the day she was sold: “De missis and her daughter, dey kept de Big House and some of de slaves, but some of us had to go. Dey sold us like a gang of chickens, my family and plenty more. I remember well. We all cried [when we had] to leave de old country [South Carolina], but we had more tears dan dat to shed.”48

  George was sold to a wealthy plantation owner in lower St. Bernard Parish. George continued her narrative by describing the journey by steamship, which left South Carolina, curled around Florida and ventured up the Gulf of Mexico before arriving at her new quarters. She believed that her transporters had chosen to move slaves by sea not because it was an efficient means of travel but because it effectively undermined efforts to escape. “Dey made us go by de sea because den we can’t go back,” she noted. She continued describing her new quarters:

  It was a big place, twenty houses in de quarters, all de houses packed wid people. O Lawd, I come up in hard times, slavery-times.

  Everybody worked, young and old. If you could only carry two or three sugar cane [stalks], you worked. No school, no church—you couldn’t sing—and Saturday night dey always have a dance, but you worked. Sunday, Monday, it all de same. And if you say, “Lawd a-mercy,” de overseer whip you. De old people, dey just set down and cry. It [was] like a heathern [sic] part of de country. You has to put your candle out early and shut yourself up, den get up while it’s still dark and start to work.

  In de old country you never have a scratch. Dey never whips deir slaves—lock dem up, yes, but don’t whip dem. Down here dey strip you down naked, and two men hold you down and whip you till de blood come. Cruel! O Lawd.

  So mind I tell you what I seed wid my own eyes. De people take sick and dey die, [but] dere ain’t no coffin for dem. Dey take planks and nail dem together like a chicken coop.49

  She remarked about the “old clothes, one pair [of] shoes a year, no stockings, and in de winter sometimes you so cold.” Thousands of slaves in St. Bernard Parish undoubtedly faced similarly horrific conditions. The 1860 census shows an enslaved population of 2,240, with 120 slaveholders, 14 of whom owned more than 50 slaves. The overall 1860 population of the parish, including enslaved people, stood at 4,076. Thus, more than half the population was locked in bondage, and despite being the majority, they possessed no opportunity for political or economic advancement.50

  The phenomenon of a politically and economically hamstrung majority existed throughout all sugar cane–dominated parishes. In 1860, the white population of the sugar-producing parishes, excluding New Orleans, was 60,356, with the enslaved population totaling 88,439. Although the majority of whites in St. Bernard Parish and other sugar parishes were not slave owners, the entire white population benefited from the institution of forced labors, especially in terms of local politics due to white male suffrage.51

  Before the Civil War, the presence of slavery in what is now the current borders of St. Bernard Parish spanned at least 138 years. As the demand for sugar increased, the parish transformed from a society with slaves to a slavery-dependent society. As such, the systemic brutality became ingrained within the fabric of the parish. The area’s slave-operated sugar plantations were mainly owned by French Creoles and incoming opportunistic Americans, some of whom established their plantations on land purchased from Isleños. The Isleños during this period continued to live simply and, for the most part, kept to themselves.

  THE YEAR 1861 was the last in which many wealthy plantation owners enjoyed undisrupted success in St. Bernard Parish. Throughout the nation, a battle waged over the divisive issue of slavery. Slavery remained deeply entrenched in the antebellum South, despite its fading from most of the Western Hemisphere. The Southern elite believed that slavery was vital to their economic success and were fiercely opposed to anything that would jeopardize their ability to profit at the hands of free labor. Abraham Lincoln, despite consistent concessions to the institution of slavery, threatened the delicate fabric of the South’s economic core. Lincoln won the presidency in November 1860, despite having received not a single electoral vote from the South.

  The Republican victory sent shockwaves throughout the South. Before Lincoln’s inauguration, seven Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America (CSA). The Louisiana Secession Convention consisted primarily of influential political and economic elites heavily invested in slavery. Only twenty-three parishes sent delegates, and the secessionist movement was led primarily by sugar cultivators. The delegates in Louisiana’s secessionist convention “collectively owned more Negroes than any other political convention of equal number in the entire South.” The delegates voted in favor of secession by a lopsided vote of 113 to 17 in January 1861. Antonio Marrero represented St. Bernard Parish and voted in line with economic interests of other planters in the parish. Louisiana governor Thomas Moore and the business community desired to make New Orleans a free and neutral city to ensure a safe flow of capital. Despite this goal, Louisiana succumbed to pressure from the planter elite and officially joined the Confederacy on March 21, 1861. A divided nation, and a divided state, mobilized for inevitable war.52

  It’s uncertain how whites from St. Bernard Parish reacted to Louisiana’s secession from the United States and the resulting call to arms. Most had no personal stake in slavery and were not sympathetic to the ideals of the Anglo-American South. Some may have likely reacted in similar fashion to other Southern whites if they adopted the common mentality of the majority of white Anglo-Americans at the time. It is evident that although some Isleños men joined the Confederate army, most waited until the end of the war.

  It’s also uncertain how many whites from St. Bernard Parish joined the Confederate forces. The St. Bernard Mounted Rifles reported seventy-eight men. Wealthy slave owner Antonio Marrero organized an additional contingent of locals, and the Fifth Regiment of the Confederate Infantry contained Company B, the Chalmette Rifle Guards. Others joined lesser-known units as well.53

  Many local whites joined the Chalmette Regiment, led by local planter Ignatius Szymanski. Szymanski, nicknamed “Colonel Ski,” was a native of Poland with a lengthy military history. While in Poland, he had fought in the 1830 November Uprising that unsuccessfully attempted to expel the Russian Empire from Poland. In 1835, he immigrated to Louisiana, purchased land in St. Bernard Parish and married local socialite Charlotte Lacoste.54

  The Isleños yielded to the demands of their newly formed nation, as they had with Spain during the American Revolution and with the United States during the War of 1812. As with most whites, many probably joined their local regiments for
different reasons: ideologies on race, preservation of an institution that benefited them, a belief in states’ rights or simply the belief that they were fighting for their homes and states. Overall, twenty thousand Louisiana whites enlisted for the war in the first nine months.55

  ON APRIL 12, 1861, Confederate troops led by General Pierre Gustave Toutant “P.G.T.” Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter, a Federally occupied fort in South Carolina. Lincoln responded with a call for troops to squash the rebellion. Arkansas, Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina joined the Confederacy soon after, and the Civil War had officially begun.

  Beauregard was a St. Bernard Parish native and a descendant of European nobility. He was a Creole who grew up on Contreras, a sugar cane plantation in lower St. Bernard Parish. His first languages were French and Spanish; he did not begin learning English until he was sent to school in New York City at age twelve. His military record was expansive prior to his entrance in the Civil War, as he’d been an engineer and captain during the Mexican-American War. Because of his fluency in Spanish, he was one of the first officers to enter Mexico City to administer its surrender. He briefly served as superintendent at West Point before resigning from the U.S. Army to serve his state with the newly established Confederacy.56

  The site of the former Contreras Plantation, the birthplace of P.G.T. Beauregard. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.

  Beauregard was among the wealthy planter class in the parish and was well known to the nearby Isleños. In June 1848, a party was thrown in St. Bernard Parish at the return of his arrival from the Mexican-American War. The Daily Picayune reported: