The celebration of the marriage of Edmund McIlhenny and Mary Eliza Avery in June 1859 on Petit Anse Island was a highlight of the social season that year in southern Louisiana.
The groom, forty-four at the time, was one of New Orleansâs wealthiest bachelors, a banker whose earnings were at the top rung of his profession. His young bride, more than twenty years his junior, had even more money than McIlhenny. The vast Avery fortune engineered by her father, Judge Daniel Dudley Avery, and the familyâs influence in Iberia Parishâtied to landholdings, the Southâs most cherished commodityâplaced her in economic strata that McIlhenny couldnât hope to equal alone. Mary Eliza was a glowing bride; coquettish, if plump and a bit severe looking. As was the case with all of the weddings of the wealthy in the area when a man married up, these nuptials were well covered in the book How to Get a Rich Wife, a gossipy tome issued periodically, eagerly devoured by the hoi polloi of the day.
Judge Averyâs servants and slaves prepared the wedding feast, set the tables and trimmed the lush gardens skirting the main house. Horses and carriages were draped in family colors. Just a half century before, Petit Anse Island had been virtually untouched, a primitive wilderness. But in that short time, the island, mostly during Averyâs control, had been tamed and transformed into a model farming community with roads, mansions and hutsâand customers in all parts of the world. With that type of metamorphosis possible, the prospects in southern Louisiana for families like the Averys, even with war on the horizon, seemed boundless.
On his wedding day, Edmund McIlhenny felt like an intruder on Petit Anse. He had never farmed in his life; urban areas were more to his liking. And while in time he came to appreciate the value of the plantation, when he first met Mary Eliza he hadnât yet given this much thought. McIlhenny could not have imagined that in a few decades the island would be his, and he would be amassing a treasure from a product whose primary ingredient grew out of its soil. Equally unlikely was the course that brought McIlhenny to Petit Anse.
Born in 1815 in Hagerstown, Maryland, Edmund was the second oldest of nine sons raised by John and Ann McIlhenny. His birthplace was a tiny apartment in the town square above what is now the Square Cup Cafe, but which then housed McIlhennyâs Tavern, owned by his father.
Edmundâs father was a swaggering Scottish immigrant with a rebellious streak. He had abducted his wife-to-be Ann Newcomer from a female seminary, where she had been sent to keep away from men like him. They married hours later, and for the next decade had children, one after another. Though John had been a woodsman, a bartender and a carpenter, among other things, to support his instantly large family, he became a doctor. He died suddenly in 1832 after contracting a fatal disease from a patient.
With his family short a breadwinner and facing financial ruin, Edmund discontinued his schooling at seventeen and went to work to help his mother care for and educate his seven younger brothers. He took a position as a messenger in one of the dozens of banks in Baltimore.
By mid-1837, the twenty-two-year-old McIlhenny had lost his job after the nationâs economic panic that year decimated Baltimoreâs banks. Desperate for money, McIlhenny begged his bank contacts to help him find work anywhere. Obviously, Baltimore wasnât an option anymore. But an associate who had powerful friends in New Orleans offered McIlhenny a letter of introduction to a manager of the Bank of Louisiana, the stateâs third-largest bank with $4 million in capital at the time. McIlhennyâs youthful willingness to dive into the most difficult or menial tasks and his sober, scholarly faceâintensified by his thick, dark beard, itself made even more prominent by the absence of a mustacheâparticularly impressed the bank executives in Louisiana. McIlhenny was hired on the spot.
The crash of 1837 hadnât spared the South. The region was dependent on agriculture, especially cotton and sugar, and the rising number of unemployed around the country led to a sharp downturn in clothing and fabric sales, sending the price of cotton tumbling. Moreover, a succession of weak British grain harvests had induced a growing foreign-exchange deficit with the United States. To repair this imbalance, the United Kingdom restricted American imports, primarily textiles and other cotton goods. This, of course, only made cotton prices drop even further.
And the Southâs slave economy, a bounty of cheap labor in good times, was a liability in bad times. As the economic historian George Green described it in Finance and Economic Development in the Old South, a survey of Louisiana banking in the early 1800s, âIn the South, labor was a fixed expense and excess field hands could not be laid offâ to reduce output. The planter would only âshut down his plant when market prices for cotton fell so far that he could not even cover the relatively small variable costs of harvesting his crop.â
But New Orleans wasnât like the rest of the South. Nestled on the mouth of the Mississippi River, it was, at least to a degree, immunized from the worst of the fiscal crisis and, in some important ways, able to take advantage of it. The city Edmund McIlhenny found when he arrived there in the late 1830s didnât resemble in any fashion the depressing, semilifeless, homogeneous streets of abandoned shops, beggars and petty gangsters that he had left behind in Baltimore. Instead, New Orleans was a revelation to him.
The nationâs fifth-largest urban area and second-leading port, nearly 30 percent of Louisianaâs population lived there. Unlike any other city in the United States, New Orleans was a cosmopolitan blend of all of the ethnic and cultural groups that had put down roots in the New World: Spanish, French, Anglos, Indians, free blacks (often from the Caribbean) and African slaves. To comprehend the full scope of this mix, consider that in 1840, 20,000 people out of a total population in New Orleans of slightly over 100,000 were free blacksâa racial amalgam unimaginable even in the Northâand about 10 percent were Spanish and French. It was the first real melting pot in the nation, and this produced an intellectual and artistic golden age that with its music, painting and architecture distinguished as pure New Orleans survived intact until Hurricane Katrina ravaged the old city. Even then, the nightlifeâdancing, gambling, drinking, theater, opera, cockfights, concerts and circusesâwas heady.
Edmund McIlhenny, however, saw New Orleans in a different light: he was drawn to the money in townâand there was plenty of it. To McIlhenny, money was the electric undercurrent that made the city buzz, the magnet that attracted the cityâs unique culture and gave it its uncommon personality, not the other way around.
New Orleans was the gateway to the Mississippi Valley region. Wheat, corn, lard, pork, furs and hides, whiskey, hemp and lead from the upper Midwest and cotton, sugar, molasses and tobacco from the South were shipped to the Northeast, Europe and the Caribbean through New Orleans. And luxury goods, salt, coffee, West Indian and Brazilian sugar, gold and silver from foreign ports entered the United States through the city.
The American economy before the Civil War was a network of separate regional marketsâroughly, the South, the West, the Southeast, the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwestâeach of them with independent systems of money and credit. As a result, the idea of international trade was a much more parochial notion than it is today, involving any transactions outside of the local region, even though they were within the United States. âTo the cotton planter, the rural storekeepers and the New Orleans retailer, exports to Charleston and New York or imports from Boston and Cincinnati were almost as truly âforeignâ trade as dealing with Liverpool, Paris or Havana,â wrote historian Green.
Even in the midst of an economic collapse in the rest of the country, New Orleans had enough trade to support an elite cadre of bankers, insurance companies, factors, attorneys and middlemen, who cut themselves in on all the capital flowing through the city as regularly as the Mississippi itself. It was among this strata of the city, not the artistes and the intelligentsia, that McIlhenny felt most at home.
Financial services companies in New Orleans were, in effect, downturn-proof businesses. They flourished during periods of expansion by providing loans for capital projects and handling the numerous details of the great number of commercial endeavors. And when the economy struggled, they were an indispensable life-line for Southern manufacturers, merchants and plantation owners who, lacking diversification of any kind to fall back on, could not afford to shutter poorly performing operations while waiting for the fiscal picture to improve, even with prices plummeting. Thanks to the ability of financial services firms to provide working capital as a bridge until the economy turned around, many of the businesses that traded through New Orleans during that period survived.
McIlhennyâs work put him at the dead center of the action. He started out as a bookkeeper at the Bank of Louisiana, but it was only a short time before he was named the agent in charge of paper money. This was a coveted position. In the decades before the U.S. Treasury produced the first United States note, the greenback, in 1862, there were as many as 30,000 different varieties of paper currency in circulation around the country, issued by 1,600 state banks, Each of the banks had agents, essentially loan officers, to allocate their institutionâs paper notes to businesses needing an infusion of cash for day-to-day operations or longer-term capital expenditures. The agentsâ compensation was tied to commissions on transactions they backed that paid off.
And while McIlhenny was in competition for clients with the other agents in the South, he and his New Orleans counterparts had a significant leg up: Louisianaâs paper notes were considered among the safest in the nation, primarily because the state had the most advanced banking laws in the country. In fact, there was so much confidence in Louisianaâs money and lending policies that the stateâs banknotes became a de facto currency in the surrounding states and even in areas outside of the region. The use of the term Dixie as a nickname for the South was inspired by the popularity throughout the United States of the Louisiana âDixâ, or $10 banknote, issued by New Orleans firms.
McIlhenny made the most of his tenure at the Bank of Louisianaâa two-decade run during which he accrued a personal fortune of well over $100,000 (more than $2 million in todayâs money). But what stands out about his success is the strategy he used to achieve it: a personal marketing campaign unheard of in financial services then and, except for rare exceptions, now. In this effort, McIlhenny made himself the star and his financial talent and access to money and powerful people the irresistible product. This spin was the first display of the sales and marketing skills McIlhenny would eventually hone to near perfection as the purveyor of his famous sauce.
It started with the notion that the sole way to profitably separate oneself from the pack is to be more desirable than the other wolves, certainly an apt metaphor for the financial services specialists in money-crazed New Orleans at the time. Edmund McIlhenny may have been sitting on a cache of Louisianaâs prized paper money, but he knew that any transaction offered him was simultaneously dangled before agents at other banks in town as well.
This gave too much power to the borrowers, McIlhenny believed. It assumed that one bank agent was just like another and that the deal makers were nothing but a commodity, while the deals themselves were the only thing of value. Unchanged, the job of being an agent was destined to be a business of shrinking margins and high risk as loan officers fought over potential business, offering lower and lower interest rates without properly assessing whether the deal was worth the costâand, as importantly, whether the transaction would result in compensation for the loan officers.
So McIlhenny differentiated himself from the other agents by imposing two rules that had to be met for him to fund a deal: first, he would exclusively do business with companies that were pitching their projects solely to him; and second, the companies he worked with had to have produced solid recent results or be able to provide unassailably convincing evidence that the project would succeed.
This proved to be an uncanny strategy in a community of quick-buck artists where the agents were usually in no position to call the shots. McIlhenny promoted himself as a premium agent who might be a bit more expensive to woo, but well worth the effort. In exchange for meeting McIlhennyâs demandsâand sometimes even accepting banknotes at somewhat higher interest ratesâcompanies received a series of perks from McIlhenny: financial advice; a favored position for future funding; and the chance to meet the widening group of local business graybeards who were drawing closer to McIlhenny as his influence in the commercial activities of the city grew.
As one competitor was said to recall some years later: âEdmund McIlhenny understood money and he understood that people of business wanted to be around people that understood money. He would sit across the desk from someone applying to borrow notes from his bank and stare at you with that serious, humorless expression. He would ask a lot of questions, sometimes for an hour or more, and then never say if he was approving the transaction immediately. That would happen in another day or two. But if he found out that you were talking to some other agent about your project, he would go to your office, unannounced, and tell you to your face that you have wasted his time and that he will not let you approach him again. He kept his word about that.â
McIlhenny keenly appreciated the aphrodisiac-like qualities of knowledge and wealth, and, to further attract clients, he pursued both. He was secretary of Louisianaâs Board of Currency, a state agency that supervised banknote activity. From that position, he received reports about virtually every new project or business plan that had been funded, extremely valuable information for making his own financing decisions and advising would-be clients about their commercial activities. As well, McIlhenny was a regular at some of the cityâs most exclusive clubs. He was on the governing committee of the Orleans Club, famous for lunches of seven courses of wild game, and he was vice commodore of the prestigious Southern Yacht Club. McIlhenny mostly used his time at these venues to pursue personal real estate and business partnerships, distinct from his banking activitiesâdeals that as much as his day job were responsible for the significant amount of money he amassed before he was even thirty.
McIlhenny traveled quite a bit to Bank of Louisiana branches as far north as Baton Rouge. And it was there, sometime in the early 1840s, that he unexpectedly met Daniel Dudley Avery, an attorney and businessman whose plantation on the island of Petit Anse in Iberia Parish would in time play a stunningly pivotal role in McIlhennyâs life.
Like McIlhennyâs fortuitous encounter with Avey, the history of Petit Anse up until then had been shaped by a series of chance meetings. Elizabeth Triett was the first white settler to set foot on the island. A mother with five children, by no means an adventurer, she was an unwitting pioneer. In 1780, Triett, her husband, Malachy Hayes, and hundreds of other Catholics from Fort Pitt (currently Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, sojourned west to escape British religious persecution. After months of wandering, they found shelter in Opelousas Post, a Louisiana village of 2,000 people near Iberia Parish. Ten years later, Hayes deserted his family, leaving Elizabeth Triett and their children, ages one to fifteen, to fend for themselves. A single, abandoned mother, Triett and her offspring were cast out by the Opelousas colony.
The trail they were forced to take was in hostile frontier territory, but salvation came deep in the southland, at the Gulf of Mexico, in the form of a much-weakened Indian tribe known as the Attakapas. At one point, this stocky, dark-skinned, tattooed people were warriorsâAttakapas means âEaters of Human Flesh.â By the time Triett was lucky enough to bump into them, they were docile, vanquished by their greatest enemies, the Choctaw, the Opelousa, and the Alibamon.
The Attakapas offered Triett an empty islandâa giant hillâthat their tribe had relinquished many years earlier after some unspeakable event had befallen them. Since the catastrophe, the Attakapas had refused to set foot on this islandâs soil or to speak in specific detail about it. With no other options, Triett gladly took the Attakapas up on their offer.
When Elizabeth Triett and her family forded the muddy bayou to reach the high ground of Petit Anse, they found a primeval forestâto the naked eye, unspoiled. The ground was wet in parts; unformed quaggy ponds drew water from the Gulf of Mexico or the tepid swampland surrounding the island. The air was hot and humid and felt even more tropical than the Louisiana mainland.
To generate income, she opened trading posts on the island for fur, meats and other goods, some of it indigenous and some of it brought by merchants, and built small footbridges over the thin bog separating the property from the mainland to give locals access to the concessions. By 1812, the same year Louisiana was admitted to the union, Eliza, as she was known to the locals, had a spacious house on the 400 acres of land she owned in Petit Anse Islandâs uppermost quadrant, her own cattle brand and seven slaves.
Yet, despite Triettâs role in founding the island, she is hardly remembered. In fact, when she is recalled, itâs often as the mother of her oldest son, John Hayes, who made an extraordinary discovery not long after arriving on the island that provided a tiny hint of how valuable the property really was and opened a small window into what the future held for Edmund McIlhenny. One day in 1790, the fifteen-year-old Hayes happened upon a clear pool of water and kneeled down to take a drink. Much to his surprise, it was saltyâextremely so. He had unexpectedly found a brine spring.
Although it would be years before anyone realized how deep the reserve was, this was the first sign, at least for white settlers, that the island was sitting quite literally on a mountain of salt. Hayes and his mother immediately saw the profit potential in his discovery. Salt was a precious item at the time, treasured as a food preservative, a spice and an ingredient in medicinal tonics. So Triett and her son devised a series of crude evaporation schemes to extract salt crystals from the water percolating out of the ground and then commercialized the operation. These brine works were a lucrative venture for Triett and Hayes until about 1815, when large-scale, modern European suppliers underpriced the fledgling business.
Elizabeth Triett died in 1815, at sixty-six years old. There are no records of her funeral and no extant descriptions of it. It is said that Eliza is buried on Petit Anse somewhere, but her grave has never been found. Soon after her death, John Hayes built a sprawling plantation on her 400-acre estate combined with adjacent property purchased from local authorities. He imported dozens of African slaves, horses, mules and oxen to clear the land, plant sugar and thrash the cane. And after just a few plentiful harvests his Petit Anse plantation had become one of the more profitable in the Iberia region. Hayes wouldnât have the island to himself for long, though. Nor would the future of Petit Anse include Hayes or his descendants.
Indeed, the events that would decide the immediate fate of the property were already unwinding many miles away on a dairy and vegetable farm in Rahway, New Jersey. There, in 1810, John Craig Marsh had begun to grow deeply concerned about the impact that the rising support for state legislation to ban slavery in New Jersey was having on the price of his slaves. Merely the passage of a weak-kneed bill intended to eventually outlaw human bondage in New Jersey had sent the price of an able-bodied male in his late teens tumbling to as low as $225 in the sta...
