Geography, Writing, and Race in the Letters of Free
Children of Color in Civil War New Orleans
In the fall of 1861, Etienne Pérault wrote a letter to his cousin, “J. Jeansème,” in Paris. Etienne, a free boy of color some thirteen years of age, lived in New Orleans. At the time he was writing, however, the city of New Orleans, like other port cities in the Confederacy, was under blockade by the Union navy.1 And yet Etienne wrote to Jeansème about a voyage he had taken in July to the islands of Saint Marc and Haiti. He explained that he had signed up to work for the captain of the ship Laura (a vessel that sailed between New Orleans and Haiti before the Civil War) for six months, earning twenty-five dollars a month. He also described the two islands as though he had an eye for settling there, remarking that “Saint Marc is more habitable than Hayti because at Saint Marc there are more fruits and the soil is fertile.” When the boat started again for New Orleans, he wrote, “I was very angry that I could not stay longer.”2
What was Etienne’s fascination with islands in the Caribbean and why did he want to stay there rather than return to Louisiana? Indeed, how had he managed to sail through a blockade of Union ships? Etienne’s voyage, it seems, was an imaginary one, given the wartime context in which it was written, and the fact that Etienne was still in school without the liberty to be a sailor for six months at a time. Etienne attended the École catholique pour l’instruction des orphelins dans l’indigence, or Catholic Institution, in New Orleans, a school for free children of color. His letter was a composition written for an English class and we have no evidence that it was ever sent.3Though Etienne’s letter and those of his classmates (all boys) were written to fulfill an assignment, the boys made these letters their own, drawing on their imaginations and daily experience rather than an instructor’s template.4
These compositions, like Etienne’s description of his Caribbean journey, present an unfamiliar history of the sectional conflict in the United States. It is a narrative of the Civil War from the perspective of free children of color: a story about race and geography, childhood and war, writing and imagination. The students at the Catholic Institution placed the American Civil War on a map of their own drafting, one centered not on the United States, but on the wider Atlantic World. For them, the war was not just a hardship, a military conflict, or an unpredictable local event. Instead, it inspired them to a trans-Atlantic exploration of freedom, nation, and racial identity at a time when such ideas were the subject of violent debate in the United States.5
The students used letter writing to escape the bounds of the conflict, traversing battle lines, oceans, and national boundaries when the war, and the poverty that it brought, kept them in New Orleans.6 And they most often charted their course toward countries that were home to communities of free people of color like themselves—most especially France, Haiti, and Mexico. Unlike the United States, these countries no longer harbored a system of slavery that denied full freedom to people of color, slave and free. By writing letters, the students crafted tales of freedom and power that contradicted their uncertain status in the wartime South. However, if the exercise of letter writing allowed them to navigate past the sharp realities of war, it did something else, too. Their focus on societies where people of color lived free from slavery gave the boys a view of the possible. Writing of travels to other, freer nations in the uncertain light of the Civil War, the students began to consider the prospect of freedom in their own country.7
The students at the Catholic Institution were part of a vibrant community of free people of color that had endured increasing repression in the decade before the war. This relatively large population of free people of color was somewhat exceptional in the antebellum South. Southern Louisiana was characterized by a three-tiered racial system closer to that of Haiti (from which much of New Orleans’s gens de couleur had originated) than to the two-tiered (black/slave and free/white) system common to other southern states.8 Since the colonial period under France and Spain, free people of color in New Orleans had dominated many of the skilled trades and secured the legal rights of quasi-citizens: the right to make contracts, for instance, or to testify against a white person in court. But since the 1850s, the limited freedoms of the gens de couleur had suffered at the hands of southern legislatures and even the U.S. Supreme Court; state laws and federal rulings in the late 1850s shored up the system of slavery and began to erase legal distinctions between slaves and free people of color. The most notorious of these was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which determined that people of color, free or slave, could not be citizens of the United States.9
Given the precarious position of the gens de couleur in the South of the 1850s and 1860s, the leaders and teachers at the Catholic Institution believed they had a special duty to educate free children of color, both vocationally and politically. These leaders, who identified themselves as “Afro-Creoles,” were accomplished thinkers, writers, and poets. They were ardent in their desire to see slavery abolished, and deeply influenced by the Romantic literary tradition and the radicalism of the French and Haitian Revolutions.10 The kinds of letters Etienne and his classmates wrote reflect these intellectuals’ concerns with instilling in free children of color a desire to be economically successful and politically connected to people of color around the Atlantic. The children wrote letters in the late 1850s, for instance, about the migration of free people of color from Louisiana to establish colonies in Mexico and Haiti. The migrants left in hopes of escaping and overcoming the harsh economic and political environment in the South.11 The children’s letters relayed news about the best crops to grow in Mexico and covered political events in Haiti, based on what they had heard and read. These writing exercises served to educate them about the possibility of establishing themselves and prospering outside the United States. Etienne’s reflection on the fertility of the soil in Saint Marc and Haiti suggests that even after the start of the Civil War, the students were contemplating settling there. Yet as they would do with the letters they wrote during the war, the students also made their compositions about migration useful to their own understanding of the political uncertainties around them. Thinking about life in Mexico and Haiti, they exercised on the page the power and freedom that seemed further and further from their grasp at home.12
The arrival of the war meant even more uncertainty, as free people of color in New Orleans found themselves in a newly precarious position. Although most opposed the system of slavery, as “Creoles” (non-“American” people of African and/or French descent born in Louisiana) some felt a duty to defend their “native land” from northern invasion, particularly if Abraham Lincoln’s army threatened to destroy the city of New Orleans.13 When free people of color organized a Native Guard to fight for the Confederacy, however, they did so not only in the name of Louisiana, but also as a means to defend their community in the face of violent threats from local whites.14
Other free blacks chose migration instead of military participation, and set sail for Haiti before Lincoln’s blockade became fully operational.15 For free people of color, then, the beginning of war did not promise freedom and equality. Indeed, it was not assured at the outset that the North would win or that slavery and its oppressive social system would collapse. Instead, it was a moment of uncertainty about the prospects for people of color in the South.
Haiti was the only black republic in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World, and it held up the promise of a life free of racial discrimination. After a successful slave revolt in 1791 and the establishment of black rule, Haiti became a beacon of hope for people of color around the Atlantic, free and slave.16 Haiti clearly held a fascination for many of the students, too, since they had seen friends and acquaintances board ships in New Orleans bound for the island. John Bordenave, for instance, writing to a classmate (though choosing to address his letter to France) recorded the departure of his friend Joseph Lavigne on the ship Laura bound for Haiti just after the war began, in May of 1861. Young Bordenave was envious of his friend, reporting that he had gone to the docks “to make my last adieu to one of my friends named Joseph Lavigne who is going to leave us, and I believe he will be better than us for he will be in the country of our colour.”17 Indeed, Lavigne was going to a place where colored people were in control. Throughout the war, the students continued to address many of their letters to Haiti. Etienne’s choice in his composition to become a sailor and visit Haiti perhaps was a means of following those who had migrated.
Etienne’s letter, however, also reveals something of the importance of shipping to his experience of childhood in New Orleans. Living in the largest port in the South, the students were familiar with trading vessels and steamers and with the economic ties these ships signified between countries around the Atlantic. Boys like Etienne would have seen sailors arriving and departing on ships daily; perhaps they even knew some of them. Most important, the occupation of sailor gave a young man a transnational existence, along with the chance to be outside of the South. Yet with the blockade and the war, the flow of shipping commerce and overseas travelers into New Orleans was interrupted. The image of a once bustling port suddenly stilled makes the letters Etienne and his classmates wrote about imaginary voyages all the more interesting.
Some, like Etienne’s, did not mention the war explicitly. But their fanciful nature suggests a rejection of the circumstances of war. Ysidro Bordenave, for instance, adopted for himself the persona of an adventurer. His letter described a voyage he took to Europe, when he sailed on a ship named the Ceres. On his arrival in Paris, he had “the fever which obliged me to keep [in] bed since six weeks.” On his journey home, Ysidro wrote,
I saw the Emperor of France and he was very well with me and he wanted me to be the General of his army which was at Rome, but I told him that the weather was not good for me and that I was going to set off for England to night he makes me a present of a fine horse and gave me $3,000 in present. When I was in England I saw the palace of Queen Victoria and the monuments of Edward the III and on returning at New Orleans I make the addition of time that I took I saw that it was of seven years and I spent $30,000.18
The details of Ysidro’s letter involved large expenditures of money and clever relations with European royalty. But his underlying themes were mobility, political power, and great wealth—three things that were beyond the grasp of free boys of color in the Civil War South.
A few of the “voyage” letters did include the war in their narratives. But in these letters, the war appears as an obstacle to be navigated around rather than an event with which to engage. Henry Relf, for instance, took a tour as Ysidro did, but he focused on important architectural sites in the United States and Europe. He journeyed on a steamship, he wrote, “for the doctor told me that only a journey on the sea would cure me.” He chose to visit Fort Sumter in Charleston (where the Civil War began), the Royal Exchange in London, the State Houses in Philadelphia and in New Haven, and the Capitol building in Washington. “In returning,” he added, “I stopped at Richmond now the Capital of the Confederate States. I was at Manassas when the battle took place, and as I didn’t want to fight, I came right back home.”19
Henry also wrote another letter a few months later in which he imagined himself encountering the Union navy on his return from a trip to England. He told his friend that he had started for New Orleans before the blockade, and was returning by the steamship Israel. “When we were near Balize [sic] we saw three men of war of Lincoln who were coming to chase us,” he explained, “and I was obliged to pass by New York, Pennsylvania, and the other States to come to my country.”20 John Bordenave wrote a similar letter, though he had just been to Portugal when he encountered the “the men of war of Black Lincoln” and had to pass by Maine and New Hampshire “to come to my native one.”21
In the accounts of Henry Relf and John Bordenave, the war is less a sectional conflict than an impediment to be overcome on their travels. Indeed, despite their enthusiasm for watching soldiers “make their exercises” in New Orleans, the students rarely wrote about battles. Instead, they focused on the ways in which the war divided them from their correspondents (real and imagined) in other countries. Just as Bordenave and Relf sailed around Lincoln’s blockade, so the students often wrote their way around the war, steering clear of the conflict (as Henry Relf did at Manassas) whenever possible.
When the boys did write about battlefields and casualties, their reports came with a certain ambiguity about what was at stake in the conflict, and what, exactly, had inspired it. John Blandin, for instance, complicated the notion of North versus South when he wrote about a battle at Hampton, Virginia, “in which six hundred of the Lincolnites were slain and only fifty of our brave Southerners were killed.” He had heard that soldiers from Louisiana had been in the fight, too.
Hurrah! for our brave Louisianans and may God bless them and the whole Southern Confederate Army, that they might lick the Northerners every time they have an engagement and make them see that we Southern men are not to be played with. … The best thing [the northerners] must do, is to acknowledge our rights, for we will give them the best licking they ever had since they know themselves.22
From these words, it seems that John Blandin, a free boy of color, was on the side of the Confederacy. This is not surprising considering that some of the gens de couleur of New Orleans were enlisted with the South in 1861. But John addressed his letter about battles and “rights” to “Port-au-Prince, Hayti,” a nation born when slaves overthrew their masters and established a republic for people of color.
How, then, are we to interpret John Blandin’s enthusiasm for the Confederates? A clue comes, perhaps, from the way that he signed his letter: “from the heart of a Creole … who is proud to be a Southern man.” In addition to “Southern manhood,” the importance of being “Creole”—that is, identifying himself according to the geography of his birth as well as his heritage—seems to have underpinned his notion of rights. If John Blandin viewed the Civil War as a war about the “rights” of Creole men to defend their native land (and by extension, the South as a whole), then perhaps it made sense to him to include Haiti in his thinking alongside Hampton, Virginia. Wasn’t Haiti a country built from the demands of a people for their rights? The events of Haiti and the Confederacy were part of very different histories, to be sure. Indeed, one was created from the successful overthrow of slavery while the other was created for the sake of preserving it. But in Blandin’s interpretation of the Civil War, these two very unlike events served a common purpose. His geography of the war, therefore, had Atlantic proportions. It was sketched according to Blandin’s expansive notion of “rights” rather than simply by outlining the ground of military conflict in the United States. His interpretation of the war drew on both a deep history and a map much broader and more politically intricate than the battle lines at Hampton and Manassas would suggest.
This wider view of the war also appeared in the students’ response to local conditions, most especially to the poverty that had descended upon the city after 1861. Local circumstances, too, had encouraged the boys to think about places outside of the South. In a letter he addressed to one of his classmates in Madrid, Spain, Henry Relf wrote that he had “learned that the State of Missouri fell into the Confederate States” for which he was glad since “when the United States will see that the South is of the same numbers as they, they will give up.” Like most of the students, Relf wanted to see an end to the war that had put such a strain on life in New Orleans. “Here everybody is in great misery and every thing is out of price; the dearest of all is soap, we used to pay $5 for a box weighing 40 pounds, but now it is $19.”23 These dire circumstances led Henry Vasserot to think of escaping the states as soon as possible. “After the war I am going to put myself a sailor,” he declared, “till I reach a good country for the misery is too hard every body is in tears there is no work to give the poor men and women nor bread enough to give the soldiers.”24 Like Etienne Pérault, Henry Vasserot saw becoming a sailor as an opportunity to find a new “country” in which to settle, one that would be more prosperous and stable than wartime New Orleans.
Once the Union army occupied New Orleans in 1862, however, the boys began writing a bit more optimistically about life in the city. In a letter addressed to New York City, Ernest Brunet wrote to his friend, “I tell you if the Yankees would not come here we would be starving to death. About two weeks before the Yankees came in, you could not get a loaf of bread without fighting for it, and after fighting for it you would pay $40 a loaf.”25 Much of the students’ optimism was connected to a shift in military allegiance on the part of the gens de couleur. Soon after the Union army took the city of New Orleans in April 1862, the leaders of the Louisiana Native Guard (many of them also leaders of the Catholic Institution) presented themselves to Union officials, offering their services in the war against the Confederacy.26
The boys noted with great interest the large numbers of colored troops amassing in the city to fight for the Union that year. Etienne Pérault, in a letter to a friend addressed to Haiti, remarked: “dear friend, I had forgotten to tell you that there are about three or four thousand colored soldiers here. They had one regiment that has already been to the camp and that is at the camp now.”27 Pérault’s letter was a counter-narrative to the migration of free people of color to Haiti before the war. Where once his friends and relatives had fled the racially repressive South for the Black Republic, now there were thousands of armed black men in the city of New Orleans aiming to bring an end to the southern slave power. Lest we forget, armed black men had overthrown slavery in Haiti and at the time Etienne was writing, governed the country. Troops of black soldiers, therefore, signaled for the students the arrival of a new order within southern society. One student reported that when a colored regiment left town, “some amongst them were singing, some that were saying that they would bring the four limbs of old Jeff Davis and some [of] the other ones the head of Beauregard.”28
If large regiments of colored soldiers were an indication of the changes brought by the war, so were the actions of enslaved people on nearby plantations. After noting that anyone who sang the “Bonnie Blue Flag” in the city was “severely punished” by Union officials, Ernest Brunet reported that he also knew of “a great many Negroes who are running away from their masters and go away with the Yankees.”29 The students almost never referred to slavery in their letters, but they did take note of the political implications of emancipation for enslaved people as well as for free people of color. They understood the arrival of freedom within the context not only of their own country, however, but also in relation to other slave societies. Lucien Lamanière, for instance, noted the relationship between free people of color and the system of slavery, and was aware, too, of emancipation in the South as a transnational event. He wrote:
I am very glad since the Federals are here, they are telling that Gen. Butler is going to make the colored men of this city who were born free vote, if he do that the colored men will be very glad to see equality reign here and if he is ever to be elected President of the United States I am sure that he will be President because the colored men will vote for him, and I must tell you another thing. The [white slaveholding] Creoles of this city will die when they will see the Negroes vote as well as them, those Negroes whom they were always whipping in the plantations [will] take their tickets and put it in the box, I do not think that [the Creoles] will stay here, they are all going to Havana, and there, they are dieing like flies with the country’s disease, a letter which we received from a friend told us that [the Creoles] are very bad there, the Negroes of that country are cursing them when they pass by them.30
The end of slavery in the South, like the war itself, was a political event that could not be contained within the boundaries of the United States. Rather, as Lucien noted, it affected other slave societies like Cuba, thus throwing into question the longevity of slavery throughout the Americas.31
The Civil War, in Lucien’s interpretation, turned these slaveholding societies on their heads: giving political power to free men of color and “Negroes” in the United States and causing slaveholders to die “like flies” in Cuba. Etienne Pérault, too, had an impression of the southern social order turned upside down by the war. He wrote a letter within a letter, using the voice of a Confederate soldier writing to his sister. Etienne may have written this himself or he might have copied it from another source, perhaps a newspaper printing letters from the battlefront. Nonetheless, he chose to include this particular story, a story that speaks to the revolution taking place as he wrote. The soldier declared that he would rather “endure all the privations and perils of the service than to die the thousand deaths of the cowardly miscreants of Louisiana of French extraction.” Deriding the (white) Confederate soldiers of Louisiana (in words that ring more with Etienne’s playfulness, perhaps, than the thoughts of a Confederate), the soldier hoped that Union General Benjamin Butler “will conscript them, and work them in cleaning the streets, with collars on their necks.”32
Writing about the war, then, was not just an imaginative exercise for the students; it was an exploration into the nature of, indeed the possibility of, power. In this upended society, the Union general fighting to end slavery—and to whose armies enslaved people were fleeing daily—would put in shackles white southerners who had fought in the name of slavery’s preservation.33 It is fascinating to consider, too, that Etienne addressed this particular letter to Haiti, the only example of slavery successfully deposed by enslaved people themselves, thus placing masters at the mercy of their former slaves.
The Civil War was never separate in the minds of the students from their thinking about other points in the Atlantic World. Just before writing about the Creoles going to Cuba, Lucien had penned another letter.34 There would be nearly two more years of war, though Lucien could not know this. He recalled once visiting his aunt and cousin in Paris and told his friend: “I am going next year and I invite you to come. We will go to Paris together and before coming back to New Orleans, we will go and visit that fine country called Hayti and if you are not satisfied of those two countries, we will go and visit Mexico the finest country after Paris.”35
Charged and bright as his plans were, they were dimmed somewhat by the words he had written at the foot of his letter. “Since the blockade,” Lucien wrote in his postscript, “I have not heard any news from you. … “Captive in his own land, Lucien wrote of (dreamed of) finding a country where the system of slavery no longer held people like himself to a status neither slave nor free. Despite a civil war, he planned an ocean voyage. Yet if we consider Lucien’s two letters side-by-side, his plans do not seem so fantastic. It was his belief in the existence of “fine countries” like Paris, Mexico, and Haiti, perhaps, that encouraged his faith in the rapidly changing society in which he lived. His love of these places gave him cause to believe that after the war in the United States “free colored men” and “Negroes” would be able to vote—to “take their tickets and put it in the box”—and that his own country might one day be as “fine” as the rest.36
NOTES
1. See James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), chap. 12.
2. E. Pérault to J. Jeansème, Jr., Esq., Paris, France, October 2, 1861, Catholic Institution English Composition Copybook II (hereafter Copybook II), Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans (hereafter AANO).
3. Etienne’s letter and those of his classmates have survived because they were copied, by hand, into a large bound book by one of the students. The letters are housed in the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The author plans to publish them as an edited collection.
4. The letter writers were all boys between twelve and seventeen years of age. I determined the ages of as many of the boys as possible using census rolls and the records of the school’s board of directors. Etienne Pérault’s age, of which I have found no record, is estimated here according to the ages of his classmates. Girls also attended the Catholic Institution, but they were instructed separately from the boys and none of their work has survived. See Mitchell, “Raising Freedom’s Child,” chap. 1.
5. On the usefulness of different histories and the recognition of “silences” in historical narratives, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
6. On the varied experiences of American children during the war, see Marten, The Children’s Civil War.
7. My thinking about what writing allows children to do is drawn from Steedman, Tidy House.
8. On the imaginative aspects of nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983).
9. See Arnold Hirsch and Joseph P. Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
10. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 (U.S.) 393 (1857). See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 267–268. On free people of color in antebellum New Orleans, see H. E. Sterxx, The Free Negro in Antebellum Louisiana (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), chap. 4; Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 20–21; Robert C. Reinders, “The Decline of the New Orleans Free Negro in the Decade Before the Civil War,” Journal of Mississippi History 24 (April 1962): 90. See also Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: The New Press, 1974).
11. The Catholic Institution was founded in 1842 for the education of orphans and non-orphans of the gens de couleur. On the Catholic Institution, see Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People, Our History, Sister Dorothea Olga McCants, trans. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Mitchell, “Raising Freedom’s Child,” chap. 1; on the Afro-Creoles, see Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
12. See Floyd J. Miller, The Search for Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).
13. Mitchell, “Raising Freedom’s Child,” chap. 1.
14. For a definition of “Creole” see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 157–159.
15. Cossé Bell, Revolution, 229.
16. David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5; João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Arthur Brakel, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 48; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988).
17. J. Bordenave to A. Frilot, Esq., Metz, France, May 22, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
18. Ysidro Bordenave to A. Cloud, Esq., Louisville, KY, October 2, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
19. H. Relf to A. Cloud, Paris, France, October 2, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
20. H. Relf to J. Bordenave, Esq., Bonfouca, LA, December 4, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
21. J. Bordenave to R. Pavageau, Esq., Lavolle, Nand, December 11, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
22. John Blandin to H. Vasserot, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, May 29, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
23. H. Relf to T. Bordenave, Esq., Madrid, Spain, November 6, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.
24. H. J. Vasserot to A. Perroux, Esq., Mobile, AL, February 26, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
25. Ernest Brunet to L. Mension, Esq., New York, NY, September 24, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
26. Cossé Bell, Revolution, 229–231; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 7–10; Mary Frances Berry, “Negro Troops in Blue and Gray: The Louisiana Native Guards, 1861–1863,” Louisiana History, 8 (Spring 1967): 167–169.
27. E. Pérault to A. Salonich, Esq., Port au Prince, Hayti, October 16, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
28. Unknown to R. Duallim, Esq., Dubuque, IA, October 29, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
29. E. Brunet to O. Percy, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, June 10, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
30. L. Lamanière to E. Brunet, Esq., Dubuque, IA, November 26, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
31. Slave emancipation in Cuba was gradual, beginning in 1870, only five years after the end of the American Civil War. See Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
32. E. Pérault to A. Nicolas, Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, September 24, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
33. On the demands of Louisiana’s enslaved for their freedom after the start of the war, see Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, series I, vol. I, The Destruction of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 4.
34. Both of Lucien’s letters appear near the end of the surviving letters from the Catholic Institution. The last was written in the fall of 1863.
35. L. Lamanière to J. H. Sauvage, Esq., Tampico, Mexico, November 14, 1862, Copybook II, AANO.
36. Ibid.