The 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre
Page 12
As St. Bernard Parish continued throughout the century, it was faced with ceaseless calamities that changed its character. The Great Depression hit St. Bernard Parish, as with most areas of Louisiana, hard. Fur was not in vogue, which caused the profits of trappers to decrease. Hurricanes and flooding continually ravaged lower St. Bernard Parish. White flight from New Orleans in 1960s altered the demographics and solidified a white majority. The relentless flooding from Hurricane Katrina that obliterated almost everything in its path rudely welcomed St. Bernard Parish to the twenty-first century. Overall, the St. Bernard Parish Massacre and its impact on the parish’s character became more distant as the voices of the era began to disappear and newer events took precedent.
An African American man working outside the old slave quarters, circa 1930s. Many African Americans lived on the property of plantations for decades after the abolishment of slavery. Courtesy of the State Library of Louisiana.
TODAY, MOST ST. Bernard Parish residents are unaware of the massacre. Many of the participants on both sides were illiterate and relied on others to transcribe their stories. Those capable of providing oral history accounts were rarely consulted, much less interviewed. Local documents were repeatedly lost due to negligence or from hurricanes and floods, with the last documents lost during Hurricane Katrina. The massacre is almost entirely lost through oral tradition. It was discussed in black churches until the 1990s. One pastor and community leader, the late Reverend Samuel Smith II, evoked the massacre in his sermons at First Baptist Church in Verret, located in the vicinity of the mayhem. The church was founded by Smith’s grandfather in 1871, and Smith’s son Reverend Raymond Smith is the current pastor. Reverend Samuel Smith II’s oral account of the massacre was recorded before his death, but it washed away during Hurricane Katrina. His account was arguably one of the last traces of any oral history of the event from St. Bernard Parish’s black community.
I SAT DOWN with Jerry Estopinal at the Los Isleños Heritage and Multi-Cultural Museum in lower St. Bernard Parish. Jerry is a direct descendant of Victor and Francis Estopinal, two of the men who participated in the massacre. His grandfather’s godfather was Albert Estopinal, the Confederate veteran and politician. I asked Jerry about aspects of oral history that he could recall from his family. He was familiar with the story of Pablo San Feliu but had heard various accounts of the story. “I heard as a child that they had killed Pablo San Feliu, and that up and down what is today Bayou Road down here…that they had riders up and down.” He knew from “what the old people would tell” that there was violence at that time, but he was unsure about any details.230
I asked him how the community could better remember the massacre. According to Jerry, “There needs to be some type of memorial.…They do need something. And it needs to be just a much better understanding of how all these groups get involved, and then you got these different people in government that are trying to manipulate all these people. Probably does sound familiar.” He summed up his views about the event in one word: “tragedy.”231
I wanted to speak to a descendant of one of the victims; however, connecting people today to those killed proved an impossible task. Although there are similarities in a few surnames, I could not ascertain direct connections due to lost or destroyed ancestral records. To my knowledge, all of the freedpeople killed were formerly enslaved, and the only ones mentioned were the few in Lieutenant J.M. Lee’s report.
Similar to many antebellum records in St. Bernard Parish, many of the aforementioned physical places are lost to history. In 1964, the National Park Service began demolition of the community of Fazendeville to expand the Chalmette Battlefield. The community had survived the violence of Reconstruction, the dreads of the Great Depression, African American migrations, the catastrophic devastation from hurricanes and the division of the Jim Crow era. The residents were not adequately compensated, and many moved to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The residents reopened their church, Battle Ground Baptist Church, on Flood Street. Although much of the Lower Ninth Ward was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, it is still in operation as of writing this work. The freedpeople cemetery located near Fazendeville, which was established in 1867 by the Freedmen’s Bureau, gradually faded to the elements.
Battle Ground Baptist Church was built in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward after its demolition from Fazendeville. Author’s collection.
Fazendeville prior to its demolition, circa 1960. Credit to the Louisiana National Guard.
I sat down with Peter Pierre in Meraux, a suburb in St. Bernard Parish, to discuss that event and the legacy of African American history in St. Bernard Parish. Pierre, born in 1942, resided in Fazendeville until its demolition. Pierre’s grandfather Eugene Pierre was born during slavery in 1863. We sifted through his ancestral records, peered over census data and discussed his upbringing in Fazendeville and experiences growing up in St. Bernard Parish. I first asked him about life in Fazendeville. He spoke fondly of a loving community where everyone knew one another and reminisced about playing with friends, “catching crawfish in ponds,” hunting rabbits in the nearby woods and taking “fruit from Mrs. Bonnie’s” trees.232
Pierre’s mannerisms changed as he discussed experiences outside Fazendeville. According to Pierre, African Americans were treated as “second-class citizens” and often faced discrimination. He spoke of bars and restaurants where he would have to enter through the back. Pierre remarked:
Everything was segregated down here.…Blacks, we couldn’t go into nothing down here. Everything you had to go to you had to go to New Orleans, but you could work for people down here.…I was really something.…Different times, different people. You would hear the “n” word. In that little town of Fazendeville, the police hardly ever come in there though.233
That harsh mentality is what led to the demolition of the black community. The decision to demolish the community came at the start of school integration and white flight. According to Pierre:
I was old enough to know why. I just think that they wanted black people out. Take ya, shift ya and force ya out.…I knew it was a racial thing behind it, ya know? Just get black people away from there, ya know? You see, at the time, they built that subdivision across the back part of Fazendeville, Buccaneer Villa. They just built that, and I thought that was another reason why they figured blacks that lived over there were too close to that subdivision.234
I then discussed with him in length the events of 1868. He knew of racial violence during that time but was unfamiliar with any details. I asked, “How do you think our parish or our community can memorialize the victims who fell in 1868?” Pierre said it should be incorporated into United States history. He elaborated, “I think they should build some kind of memorial. Something. And I don’t know if they could pay their descendants any sort of restitution depending on how it went down.”235
The majority of people I have talked with about this event reiterated similar sentiment: they want to see it memorialized or recognized in some manner. There is no marker or plaque, as with other historically significant events. Many of the physical reminders of the tragedy are lost to history. Florey’s Coffeehouse, the makeshift prison used during the massacre, burned down sometime in the 1970s. Toca, the area around Philippe Toca’s residence, is named after him and heavily used in the lexicon of parish residents today. Philippe Toca, similar to other participants, is buried in the St. Bernard Cemetery across from the St. Bernard Catholic Church. Much that survived to the twenty-first century was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The only physical reminder of the event is the tombstone of Pablo San Feliu, located a few tombstones from Toca’s. It reads:
Pablo San Feliu
Assassinated by Slaves
Incited by Carpetbag Rule
Died Oct. 1869
The mismarked epithet has many implications. Dates were not kept well among the poor in St. Bernard Parish, and the “1869” date gives credence to the notion that it was erected a significant time after, as the story
passed through oral tradition. The usage of “assassination” implies San Feliu was of some importance to the community. It also implies he was not at fault. Those who erected the tomb still considered freedpeople “slaves” or they could not recall if slavery was formally abolished yet. They also appropriated blame on carpetbaggers, the aforementioned derogatory term given to people from the North who migrated south during Reconstruction, for inciting the violence.
According to William Hyland, the current St. Bernard Parish historian, the tombstone was probably erected under the auspices of Leander Perez, a wealthy businessman and ardent segregationist who ruled St. Bernard Parish and Plaquemines Parish as his fiefdoms during the mid-twentieth century.
Victor Estopinal, despite being murdered outside St. Bernard Parish, is buried with much of his family a few tombstones away from Feliu. Other participants are buried in the same cemetery. The freedpeople were most likely buried in a cemetery that did not survive the test of time.
Some notable events discussed in earlier chapters do have markers. There is a plaque dedicated to the Colfax Massacre. There is a statue commemorating the Battle of Liberty Place that was relegated from the center of Canal Street to a less-traveled corridor in the French Quarter. It was added during the Bourbon Era to honor those who temporarily overthrew the Reconstruction government. In 2015, the New Orleans City Council declared it a nuisance and set up for its removal. The decision included the removal of three other statues: the General P.G.T. Beauregard Equestrian Statue, the Robert E. Lee Monument and the Jefferson Davis Monument. In 2017, the city commenced their removal, starting with the Battle of Liberty Place memorial first.
The tombstone of Philippe Toca. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.
The headstone of Pablo San Feliu in St. Bernard Cemetery. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.
The grave of Pablo San Feliu in St. Bernard Cemetery. Author’s collection.
A memorial in St. Bernard Cemetery dedicated to St. Bernardians who fought in both World War I and World War II. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.
Statues of angels mark the entrance to St. Bernard Cemetery. Courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.
I ASKED SAMANTHA Perez, author of The Isleños of Louisiana: On the Water’s Edge, how we can better memorialize this event in our regional history and how we can remember the victims as we remember the victims of other tragedies. Dr. Perez is a local historian who grew up in St. Bernard Parish and has taken a keen interest in the region’s history. Her book is one of the only works that gives the massacre noteworthy attention. Dr. Perez eloquently responded:
The best way to honor history is to learn from it. We should not shy away from our history, even the parts that make us uncomfortable, in conversations, in public discourse or in the classroom—especially in the classroom. The next generation should always be aware of the specific problems their community has faced and overcome so they can be better prepared to confront contemporary concerns and positively overcome those too.
A plaque or a memorial are wonderful ways to honor the past and inform viewers of what has value to the people who erected it, but I think what recent debates concerning the removal of Civil War–era statues has suggested is that a statue is still an object, whatever extra cultural meaning we attribute to it, that only really affects those who see the thing. It’s the memory of the event that matters, and what we do with that memory—how we learn from the past, all of the past—that matters most.236
As a history teacher in St. Bernard Parish, I try to incorporate the St. Bernard Parish Massacre, along with similar events, in the curriculum and in lessons so that students are aware of their history and its relevance to their lives. This massacre solidified white supremacy in the parish at a time when a marginalized group finally gained long-withheld freedoms and suffrage (for males). It helped determine policies and impacted the trajectory of the region for well over a century. It is important to never forget those who paid the ultimate sacrifice at the hands of greedy and misguided individuals. Furthermore, it’s imperative that history teaches us the devastating results of appropriating blame for economic concerns on those who are different and to be suspicious of those who seek to divide for their own advancement.
Perhaps Ceceil George, the enslaved woman who was sold to a planter in St. Bernard Parish, best captures the essence of hope in dire times. While she was enslaved in the “ole country,” they sang a song called “Inching Along” to pass the time as they worked. She sang it to conclude her interview; I will use an excerpt to conclude this work:
I’m inchin’ along, inchin’ along
Jesus is comin’, bye an’ bye!
Like de pore lowly worm,
I’m inchin’ along,
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye!
When I was a sinner, jus’ like yo’.
Jesus is comin’, bye an’ bye!
I did not know, what I could do ’cause
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye.
With worry I was like some one dead,
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye;
An ache in my heart, an ache in my head.
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye
I prayed over her’, an’ I pray over there
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye!
I prayed over yonder, then I stopped to ponder
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye!
I went on da wall to repent an’ pray
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye!
An’ I know my sin must be washed away,
Jesus is comin’ bye an’ bye.237
NOTES
Introduction
1. First Lieutenant J.M. Lee, Thirty-Ninth U.S. Infantry, St. Bernard Riot, 1868 (New Orleans, LA, November 27, 1868), 28.
2. Ibid.
3. Louisiana Congress, Supplemental Report of Joint Committee of the General Assembly of Louisiana, On the Conduct of the Late Elections and the Condition of Peace and Good Order in the State (New Orleans: A.L. Lee, State Printer, 1869), vi–vii, books.google.com/books?id=j9A-AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=riot&f=false.
Chapter 1
4. George Washington Cable, Creoles and Cajuns: Stories of Old Louisiana, ed. Arlin Turner (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959), 418–19.
5. Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 104–5.
6. Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 238; Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves, 95.
7. Samuel Wilson Jr., The Battle of New Orleans: Plantation Houses on the Battlefield of New Orleans (n.p.: Louisiana Landmarks Society), 6; Ned Sublette, The World that Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, n.d.), 59.
8. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 203.
9. Sublette, World that Made New Orleans, 112; Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012), 88; Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves, 98; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 213.
10. Powell, Accidental City, 244.
11. Ibid., 245; Din, Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves, 103.
12. Powell, Accidental City, 248.
13. Lafcadio Hearn, “Saint Malo,” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 27, March 31, 1883.
14. Samantha Perez, The Isleños of Louisiana: On the Water’s Edge (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011), 12.
15. Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 207.
16. Gilbert C. Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 15–16.
17. Perez, Isleños of Louisiana, 12, 52.
18. Ibid., 34.
19. Din, Canary Islanders of Louisiana, 51.
20. Ibid., 48–52.
21.
Ibid., 52–53.
22. Ibid., 54.
23. Ibid., 55; Perez, Isleños of Louisiana, 35.
24. George Morrison Rolph, Something about Sugar: Its History, Growth, Manufacture and Distribution (n.p.: J.J. Newbegin, 1917), 176–77; Marie Louise Points, “St. Bernard Parish: A Suburb of New Orleans Full of Historical Interest,” Daily Picayune, January 13, 1895, 23.
25. Din, Canary Islanders of Louisiana, 117.
26. Ibid., 59–60.
27. Ibid., 60.
28. Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 24.
29. Ibid., 28, 33.
30. Ibid., 34–36, 47–49.
31. Ibid., 58.
32. Ibid., 38.
33. Ibid., 54, 62; Arsène Lacarrière, Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana in 1814–15, expanded edition (New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 1999), 82–83.
34. Remini, Battle of New Orleans, 66–70.
35. Ibid., 68–69.
36. Din, Canary Islanders of Louisiana, 92.
37. James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888), 126–27.
38. Louise McKinney, New Orleans: A Cultural History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17.