Lionel Jobert and the American Civil War

An Atlantic Identity in the Making

Stephen D. Bosworth

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781438485102
  9781438485096
• eBook ISBN:
  9781438485119
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

Tells the exciting tale of a highly ambitious Frenchman who commanded a New York Regiment during the American Civil War.

Millions of soldiers and civilians passionately supported one side or the other in the American Civil War. For Colonel Lionel Jobert d'Epineuil of the Fifty-Third New York Volunteer Regiment, however, his own advancement mattered more than the outcome of the conflict. This biography analyzes the remarkable exploits of a man driven by ambition-and unhindered by scruples-to attain position and prestige in the Atlantic region during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Lionel Jobert (1829–1881) was born in France, but is described as having an Atlantic identity. A ship captain by trade, Jobert exploited unstable governmental conditions in Haiti and the United States to pursue his private interests. Drawing on previously unused sources, Stephen D. Bosworth allows us to view the Civil War from the perspective of a foreign participant whose life constitutes one colorful tile in the vast mosaic that makes up the history of the nineteenth-century Atlantic.

Chapter 1

The Allure of Aristocracy

“Je me rejouis bien sincerement de la naissance de votre petit Garçon,” wrote Marianna de Lamartine to her cousin Frances Jobert on December 8, 1829.1 The two Englishwomen, both in their thirties, came from a prominent family. Marianna and Frances were granddaughters of William Birch, a London lawyer, and Sally Holwell, daughter of John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798), a survivor and memoirist of the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta. Both women married established Frenchmen: Marianna married the aristocrat, writer, and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine, and Frances wed Louis Edme Jobert, grandson of the Count d’Epineuil. Writing from Lamartine’s native Mâcon, France, Marianna’s letter conveyed the news of her mother-in-law’s death and alluded to Lamartine’s nomination to membership in the prestigious Académie Française. Yet in the opening sentence, after a reference to Alphonse’s mother, Marianna expressed her joy at the birth of her cousin’s first boy, Edme Lionel Holwell Jobert, born seven weeks earlier on October 20, in Caen, France.2 The child’s family connections augured well for his future—a future that revolved around the Atlantic.

The Jobert clan’s roots in Caen went no deeper than Lionel’s paternal grandfather, Edme Pierre Jobert. He was born in the Parisian parish of St. Gervais in 1767, the son of a wine merchant and his wife, Catherine Claude Baroche. Pierre’s father, also named Edme Pierre, was a man of some distinction in the region of Burgundy. He represented the department of Tonnerre in the provincial assembly of L’Isle de France in 1787 before departments were reorganized during the French Revolution. The Burgundy hamlet of Epineuil, known for its wine production, lay just north of the town of Tonnerre, and the prestige-minded Monsieur Jobert had purchased the title of Count d’Epineuil when his namesake son was still a youth. However, Edme Jobert—wine merchant, property owner, and Seigneur d’Epineuil—mismanaged his estate in pursuit of a life of luxury. His firstborn son, Edme Pierre, left behind the memory of family failure and moved northwest to the coastal department of Calvados in the region of Normandy, working as a purveyor of military supplies. In the city of Caen, his wife Marie Louise Olympie Turpin bore two sons: Louis Edme Jobert and Edme Charles Ambroise Jobert, born in 1795 and 1797, respectively.3

Louis Jobert did not use his grandfather’s title of Count d’Epineuil among his fellow citizens in Caen, who knew him simply as St. Edme Jobert, businessman, civic leader, and lifetime resident. As a young man searching for his niche in life, St. Edme tried selling fire insurance, and even invented a shale pencil with superior qualities to that of existing leads. Then late in 1821, urged by Alexis Haudry, chief engineer of the port of Le Havre, located some ninety-eight kilometers (sixty miles) northeast of Caen—or half that distance as the crow flies—St. Edme Jobert began his career as a quarry master, extracting and shipping local Calvados stone. Less than two years later, St. Edme and his brother Charles teamed with Jacques Breard from March 1823 to April 1824, buying out their associate Breard at the end of the yearlong partnership. The Jobert brothers thenceforth built up their business in the ensuing years. Surveying seventy-four shipping entries in a local newspaper from 1825 to 1829 reveals that stone, predictably, was the company’s main export, and plaster and boards the most common import. The firm did business mostly with the interior city of Rouen and at several ports along the northern coast of France. Jobert Frères had become a thriving concern, despite a rumor in 1828 that they sought to abandon their quarry. The brothers squelched that speculation, informing the public that “[n]ever have we had more zeal and more activity, and it is not at the point when we have just renewed all our markets and when we receive positive proof of public confidence that we would abandon an establishment we pride ourselves of having created.” Indeed, in addition to extracting stone in the department of Calvados, Jobert Frères also began operating a quarry in Sainte Honorine la Guillaume in the department of Orne, immediately south of Calvados. The granite supplied by Jobert Frères became such items as pedestals, pillars, sidewalks, steps, and troughs. Last (and perhaps least), they made pencils. Their enterprise opened new markets beyond French borders in Belgium, and eventually across the English Channel in England.4

During the early years of the business, St. Edme and his English bride Frances Birch had married in the British embassy in Paris in October 1826, and returned to Caen to start their family on Rue de la Fontaine in the heart of the city. Daughter Clémence entered the world in 1827, followed by Lionel in 1829, and another son, Edme Pierre Ambroise Jobert, early in 1832. The children grew up knowing their father not only as a quarry master, but also as a firefighter. In November 1830, St. Edme served as a first lieutenant in the local National Guard fire company. Soon rising to second captain, Jobert distinguished himself as a firefighter to such a degree that in 1837 the government awarded him a silver medal “for acts of courage and devotion.” St. Edme became the fire company’s commanding captain in November 1840 after a decade of service. When the Duke of Nemours, son of King Louis Philippe, reviewed the National Guard in Caen in the summer of 1843, it was Jobert who introduced the duke to a young orphaned boy whose father had died the previous year while fighting a blaze in Caen, and who the company of firefighters had adopted. That same summer also brought the highlight of Captain Jobert’s firefighting career: he became a chevalier in the Royal Order of the Legion of Honor.5

St. Edme’s wife matched her husband’s energy and ambition in her own way. Intelligent and cultivated, Frances surely served as the source of son Lionel’s English language proficiency. She undertook the daunting translation into English of cousin-in-law Alphonse de Lamartine’s lengthy and celebrated poem Jocelyn; her opus appeared the year after the French language publication of the 1836 original. Frances would receive criticism for her approach to the translation that she characterized as “a translation of a novel species, but which I recommend to my countrymen, as being peculiarly adapted, from its very great literality to give an idea of the beautiful poem of M. de Lamartine, of which it is a very faithful copy.” With evident relish, Fraser’s Magazine used the fourth installment of the serial offering “Our Club at Paris” to ridicule mercilessly Madame Jobert’s effort at a literal rendering of Jocelyn as, among other things, “arrant nonsense.”6 If her talents were not appreciated by some, Frances did not lack for friends in Caen. Among them was the chief engineer of Calvados, Jacques Pierre Guillaume Pattu, with whom St. Edme and Frances became well acquainted. After Monsieur Pattu died in 1839, Frances penned a detailed memorial that only one of his inner circle of friends could have written. “Modest, gentle and affable in his personal relationships,” wrote Madame Jobert in French, “Mr. Pattu was in intimate society more secure and more enjoyable. His great literary and scientific education gave his conversation a special charm to his few friends, who he was able to keep through the difficult phases of our political upheaval.”7

Thus, Lionel Jobert spent his youth in a prosperous household headed by accomplished parents. His native city of Caen had a population of just over 44,000 inhabitants in 1841, comparable in size to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1840, yet far smaller than New York City’s nearly 313,000 people in that same year and the more than 935,000 Parisians in 1841.8 Bisected by the Orne River and surrounded by farmland, the city’s built environment boasted centuries-old structures, including the castle erected and occupied in the eleventh century by the Norman Duke William, later known as the Conqueror; the men’s and women’s abbeys, also built by William (whose remains lie in the men’s abbey); the Saint Pierre church; and on the opposite east side of the Orne, the Saint Michel church of Vaucelles. The busy trade conducted on the Orne and Caen’s proximity to the sea—approximately fifteen kilometers from la Manche, or the English Channel—likely figured in the selection of a maritime career for both Lionel and his brother Pierre.

But the desire to train as a seaman may not have been Lionel’s. In July 1844, when Lionel was fourteen years old, his parents sent him to the port city of Brest on the Atlantic Coast, where France had been operating a school for seafaring instruction since the 1830s. In Brest, Lionel began his preparation as a mousse, or ship’s boy, the entry-level maritime position. However, on February 1, 1845, after six and a half months of training, school officials sent him back to his parents’ home in Caen, now on Rue Guilbert. Lionel’s mousse record gave “did not appear at the office” as the reason for his dismissal; apparently, he had not followed orders.9 Why he did not do as he was directed one can only guess, but Lionel may have been resisting a choice that his parents had made for him. The immediate result was that the Jobert home once again rang with the clatter of three teenagers: seventeen-year-old daughter Clémence, thirteen-year-old Pierre, and the returned Lionel, age fifteen.

St. Edme Jobert bore his paternal responsibility into the next—and his most trying—year, 1846. On March 21, laborers were busy working in one of the Jobert brothers’ quarries in Allemagne (now Fleury-sur-Orne), a commune adjacent to Caen. The workers had left unsecured wooden rollers on the rim of the quarry overhead. One of the rollers fell down into the quarry, striking a worker in the head and killing him. Already shaken by this tragedy, in May the company lost a legal decision stemming from an earlier contract to construct and maintain sidewalks in Paris. Jobert Frères had eyed the capital’s market as the company expanded in the 1830s. In 1837, a group of associates received legal permission to form the Compagnie des Berlines de Caen in order to operate a transportation network that would carry passengers and merchandise between Caen and Paris. St. Edme Jobert served on the Berlines company board in Caen, while brother Charles served on the board in Paris. The Jobert brothers also established their own office in the French capital, and in 1841 reached an agreement with that city to build sidewalks using Normandy stone. The following year, likely for cost effectiveness and to avoid exhausting their quarries in Calvados, Jobert Frères secured authorization from the prefect of the Nièvre department to extract stone from Clamecy, well to the southeast of Paris; the French minister of public works also approved the plan. However, Monsieur Lemoyne, the owner of the land in Clamecy from where the stone was to be extracted, took Jobert Brothers to court, arguing the company had no right to take stone from his private property without his consent. The court ruled in favor of Lemoyne in 1843, annulled the authorizations unduly granted by the Nièvre prefect and the minister of public works (the latter defending his decision, unsuccessfully, to the court), and ordered Jobert Frères to pay costs. In May 1846, in order to avoid potential additional expenditures, Jobert Brothers challenged the authority of the Seine prefecture council to assign costs at their discretion, but the Joberts lost that challenge.10

The lone bright spot of 1846 for St. Edme Jobert came in midsummer when he was reelected to the Caen municipal council. But that celebration was short-lived, as less than two weeks later the most devastating event of the year befell Monsieur Jobert. Frances, St. Edme’s wife of nearly twenty years, died on August 20 at age fifty-two, two months before son Lionel’s seventeenth birthday. The elder Jobert now found himself juggling workplace headaches, his town council responsibilities, and providing for his three teenage children on his own. It was in this context that in March 1847, Lionel Jobert felt obliged to sign up as a novice seaman, a position that would last the better part of four years and take him around the world.11

Lionel thus embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe, learning the craft of seamanship and expanding his horizons while maturing from age seventeen to twenty-one, the transition from adolescence to young manhood. The newly constructed sailing corvette La Bayonnaise served as the vessel that carried Lionel on this voyage. Commissioned for the French Navy, the warship La Bayonnaise bore twenty-eight cannons of thirty caliber, and carried a crew of 240 men. Among Captain Edmond Jurien de la Gravière’s principal responsibilities was to transport Alexandre Forth-Rouen to his new position as French charge d’affaires in distant China. The long journey began on April 24, 1847, when La Bayonnaise set sail from Cherbourg, a port on Normandy’s Cotentin Peninsula that juts out into the English Channel. The ship reached Falmouth in Cornwall, England four days later, staying another four days in that British port. After a sojourn in Lisbon lasting the better part of three weeks, La Bayonnaise sailed down the Atlantic coast of North Africa to Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands. From Santa Cruz on June 14, the corvette began its twenty-three-day Atlantic crossing, reaching Bahia, Brazil on July 7. The voyage resumed sixteen days later, leaving South America and navigating the South Atlantic to Simon’s Town, a port near Cape Town, resting there for two and a half weeks before rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope and venturing across the Indian Ocean.12

Lionel Jobert’s education abroad was just beginning. Six months and one week removed from his native Normandy, La Bayonnaise reached Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. Captain Jurien de la Gravière’s description of the island, equal parts travel account and botany lesson, conveys the lure of an exotic realm far from Caen.

A magical spectacle is offered to the sight. The banyan figs, jackfruit with digitated leaves, the cassia with pink clusters and monstrous pods, lining the edge of the forest and mixing various shades, the odd cut of their dark mass of foliage and uniform cut of the lataniers or the cycas [species of palm tree]. The yellow-crested cockatoos inhabit the dense shelter of the tamarind and at the tops gigantic canaries; pigeons frolic amid the wild nutmeg; the lories, of carmine and azure plumage, gently lull themselves on the long petioles of the palm trees, while around emerging bunches flit numerous swarms of bee-eaters and sunbirds, living jewels that insert their beaks bent to the bottom of the tubular corolla to seek insects and the nectar of flowers.

Ambon, the next island port of call where La Bayonnaise spent eight days in November, provided another lesson. “On all the points where our corvette was previously stopped,” the captain noted, “in Lisbon, in Tenerife, in Bahia, the Cape of Good Hope, our foreign quality was enough to ensure an eager and sympathetic reception. In Ambon, it was not as strangers, it was as compatriots that one greeted us.”13 Lionel Jobert would make effective use of his distinction as a foreigner in the future.

La Bayonnaise finally reached Macau in China just after the new year dawned, on January 4, 1848. Macau’s Portuguese governor invited the impressive warship into the port’s inner harbor on one of its visits early that year, but the vessel could not enter because, laden as it was with its weighty cannons, it could not pass the bar into the harbor, and the captain thought it imprudent for a warship to remove its guns to lighten the craft even for a short while. Nevertheless, during the next two years, the well-armed La Bayonnaise made multiple stops in the harbors at Macau, Hong Kong, and Manila; it called at Singapore and Guam;14 and everywhere it went in Asian waters the ship advertised French power and global reach. Even for a novice seaman like Lionel Jobert, the various encounters over the course of the long voyage must have reinforced in his mind the widely held continental sense of superiority over the inhabitants of the non-European world.

The Pacific crossing of La Bayonnaise began with its departure from Macau for the last time on May 4, 1850. The ship paused in Honolulu for a few days at midyear, leaving Hawaii on July 4 en route to French Polynesia, where it stayed for the first three weeks of August. From there, Captain Jurien de la Gravière set a course for Rio de Janeiro, where he arrived in mid-October. On December 6, 1850, aft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1 The Allure of Aristocracy
• Chapter 2 Opportunity and Indiscretion: Commander of the Haitian Naval School
• Chapter 3 Atlantic Sisyphus
• Chapter 4 A Second Ascent: The Rise of d’Epineuil’s Zouaves
• Chapter 5 A Second Descent: Shattered Hope Amid Civil War
• Chapter 6 Paternity and Performance in Philadelphia
• Chapter 7 The Count and Countess d’Epineuil
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover