Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
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Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey

Melissa Daggett

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Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey

Melissa Daggett

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About This Book

Modern American Spiritualism blossomed in the 1850s and continued as a viable faith into the 1870s. Because of its diversity and openness to new cultures and religions, New Orleans provided fertile ground to nurture Spiritualism, and many séance circles flourished in the Creole Faubourgs of Tremé and Marigny as well as the American sector of the city. Melissa Daggett focuses on Le Cercle Harmonique, the francophone séance circle of Henry Louis Rey (1831-1894), a Creole of color who was a key civil rights activist, author, and Civil War and Reconstruction leader. His life has so far remained largely in the shadows of New Orleans history, partly due to a language barrier. Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans focuses on the turbulent years between the late antebellum period and the end of Reconstruction. Translating and interpreting numerous primary sources and one of the only surviving registers of séance proceedings, Daggett has opened a window into a fascinating life as well as a period of tumult and change. She provides unparalleled insights into the history of the Creoles of color and renders a better understanding of New Orleans's complex history. The author weaves an intriguing tale of the supernatural, of chaotic post-bellum politics, of transatlantic linkages, and of the personal triumphs and tragedies of Rey as a notable citizen and medium. Wonderful illustrations, reproductions of the original spiritual communications, and photographs, many of which have never before appeared in published form, accompany this study of Rey and his world.

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Year
2016
ISBN
9781496810090

CHAPTER 1

Father and Son

Twenty years later, the boy who landed in New Orleans after being exiled from Cuba was now a young man preparing for his upcoming nuptials less than a mile away from where he had disembarked on that life-changing day in 1809. On July 1, 1829, Barthélemy Rey and his future wife appeared before the New Orleans notary, Carlile Pollock, to legally affirm their intentions to share future property as man and wife and, perhaps more importantly, to legalize their three-month-old daughter, Elizabeth.
The bride was Rose AgnĂšs Sacriste, natural daughter of Jean Marie Sacriste and Rositte FrĂšre; the groom was the son of Joseph Rey and Elizabeth Mickline.1 The notary duly inscribed the letters H.C.L. (homme de couleur libre—free man of color) for BarthĂ©lemy and F.C.L. (femme de couleur libre—free woman of color) for Rose, thereby conforming to the Louisiana law that required all legal documents to identify free people of color.
Upon completing the document, Carlile Pollack read it to the young couple and the witnesses. The notary then asked them to sign the marriage contract. Rose, unable to read or write, took the quill and scratched a shaky black “X” in the two-inch space dividing the names “Rose AgnĂšs” and “Sacriste,” which the notary had already written on the document. BarthĂ©lemy signed his first and last names underneath and added a flourish of several decorative loops as if to emphasize his firm agreement to the legal document.
The union of the Sacriste and Rey families represented in one small way the cohesiveness and solidarity of émigrés with Saint-Domingue roots. Barthélemy and Rose were both first generation immigrants from Cuba and Saint-Domingue. In the marriage contract, Barthélemy listed his birthplace as Santiago de Cuba, which had been the initial destination for many refugees fleeing the chaos of the Saint-Domingue (Haitian) Revolution, and Rose was originally from Saint-Domingue.2
Legal documents, like the marriage contract between BarthĂ©lemy Rey and Rose Sacriste, attest to the significance and legacy of Saint-Domingue ancestry. The connection was important literally from cradle to grave. Baptismal records often mentioned a parent’s place of birth if the parent had been born in Saint-Domingue or in a primary immigration location like Cuba. Death certificates and succession papers frequently mentioned the connection of the deceased to Saint-Domingue. This enduring link to the lost French Caribbean colony was important for both whites and free people of color.3
Once the marriage contract was completed with its requisite signatures, Rose and BarthĂ©lemy left the notary’s office on the corner of Chartres and Conti Streets behind Exchange Alley.4 Less than a block away was an auction house, Hewlett’s Exchange, a two-story building with arched openings, a tile roof, and a stucco exterior. The daily slave auctions took place from 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m., with a huge attendance of local businessmen, visitors, and buyers from Louisiana and Mississippi. New Orleans was the premier city for the domestic slave trade in the United States, and Hewlett’s was the premier auction house and something of a tourist attraction. Visitors to the city often documented what they had witnessed at Hewlett’s Exchange—some appalled with the selling of human flesh, but others ambivalent about the auctions. Many of the notaries’ offices were located near Hewlett’s to make it convenient for the slave owners to record their new purchases.5
Chartres Street was the most prominent shopping street in New Orleans during the early part of the nineteenth century and earned the sobriquet of “The Broadway of New Orleans,” alluding to the bustling, fashionable shopping and the place to be seen while promenading on the banquettes.6 From Canal Street to St. Louis Cathedral, the shoppers purchased the latest Parisian fashions. The fashionable Creole and Anglo-American ladies could select such luxurious fabrics as silks, organdies, and French calicoes and then order custom-made dresses. The fabrics were tastefully displayed on shelves and counters, and generally there were no show windows, which were considered too gauche for the refined upper crust.7
In 1829, Chartres Street ran parallel to the Public Square, and on the other side of the St. Louis Cathedral the name of the street was later changed to Condé, named for Louis Henri, the powerful Prince of Condé who was father of the Duke of Bourbon in the ancien régime. It was here on rue de Condé that the Reys first lived as man and wife with their infant daughter, Elizabeth.8
To support his new family, BarthĂ©lemy Rey worked a few blocks away on rue Bourbon, famous today for its bars and lively nightlife. City directories in the early 1830s identify Rey as a tailor at 261 Bourbon Street (old numbering). At this time, Bourbon Street was in a filthy condition with deplorable sidewalks and huge potholes dotting the earthen streets, with the holes collecting water that later stagnated and produced mosquitoes, algae, slime, and stench. Geographer Richard Campanella characterizes Bourbon Street in this era as “middle class, generally residential, and mostly francophone, Catholic, and Creole.” Because tailoring was a profession that many Afro-Creole men successfully undertook, they were considered to be superior to white tailors and were the preferred choice for any tailoring needs of the white upper class.9
The Reys welcomed their first son and second child, Henry Louis Rey, on Sunday, February 20, 1831. Eight months later, on October 30, 1831, the Reverend Felipe Asensio baptized the baby boy at St. Louis Cathedral. Joseph Rey, his grandfather, stood as his godfather, and his godmother is listed as Marie Antoinette Godin, but it is unclear who she was or what her relationship was with the younger Rey.10
After Henry Rey’s birth, his parents welcomed five more children to a total of seven: four girls and three boys. All seven children lived to adulthood, which was extremely unusual in the nineteenth century, particularly in New Orleans with its frequent outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera epidemics.11
BarthĂ©lemy Rey’s days as a modest tailor on Bourbon Street ended in the mid-1830s when he embarked upon a new career as a real estate broker in the booming markets of New Orleans, the suburbs, and even across Lake Pontchartrain in St. Tammany Parish. His business partners were typically free people of color with Saint-Domingue roots. Two frequent partners were Nelson FouchĂ© and Chazal Thomas, who both later were teachers at the Couvent School. Often sellers and buyers were white Creoles and the foreign French at the pinnacle of their success. The foreign French were people who were born in France and entered the city from 1820 to 1860, shoring up the existing Gallic community, which had been declining in numbers and importance since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.12
The New Orleans Notarial Archives contain numerous records of BarthĂ©lemy Rey’s real estate dealings beginning in the early 1830s and continuing until his death in 1852. Louis Bouligny and Pierre SoulĂ© occasionally appear in the notarial records as sellers or buyers involved in Rey’s real estate transactions, especially in the mid-1830s. Historian Joseph Tregle characterized Pierre SoulĂ© and Louis Bouligny’s father, Pierre, as “mainstays of the foreign French faction.”13
Pierre SoulĂ©, an idealistic and handsome lawyer, was expelled from France for attacking the restored Bourbons in a series of newspaper articles. After moving to England, Haiti, and Baltimore, the young revolutionary eventually settled in New Orleans. He later served as a US senator, ambassador to Spain, and Confederate official. In My Travels in America (1963), Henry Herz described Pierre SoulĂ© as “the most eloquent lawyer in New Orleans” and his home as “the meeting place of the distinguished people in the region.” Contemporaries remarked on his amazing resemblance to Napoleon, which he apparently relished and cultivated by styling his long raven black hair like the emperor’s.14
The career path chosen by Barthélemy Rey proved to be a lucrative one, rewarding his family with wealth and the prestige accorded to the upper echelon of the black Creoles. The Rey family had many close friends in the black Creole elite: Bazile Crocker, Drausin Macarty, Pierre Casanave, François Boisdoré, and François Lacroix.15 Interestingly, Barthélemy Rey was a slave owner. According to the 1850 Schedule of Slaves, Barthélemy Rey owned eight slaves ranging in age from two months to fifty years old.16 The notarial acts of Paul E. Laresche from 1847 to 1852 document six transactions in which Barthélemy Rey either bought or sold slaves. The question arises whether the elder Rey was a benevolent slave owner who was protecting people of his race against harsh white owners or an exploitive owner, no different from white owners who treated slaves as property and as vastly inferior to them, socially and legally.17
The perplexing issue of slave ownership among the elite free people of color is a subject that has long hidden in the shadows of historiography but is currently a subject of an ongoing debate among historians of the era. The traditional view is that free people of color who owned slaves were related to the slaves and had simply bought them to protect them from exploitive whites who might mistreat them or possibly resell them to plantation owners who lived far away from New Orleans. There is some evidence to support this benevolence theory. Legal scholar Judith Schafer documents numerous manumissions of slaves owned by free people of color during the 1850s. Schafer proposes the theory that the manumitted slaves were actually family members. First, despite the free people of color’s relatively small numbers in the city’s total population, this enclave of slave owners made up nearly half of all who freed their slaves in the 1850s. Second, demographics support Schafer’s theory because the now-freed slaves were overwhelmingly women and described as “mulattoes,” a phenotype that generally meant of half white and half African descent. This would correlate with the demographics of the free community in New Orleans. And third, court cases stipulated that the freed people must be allowed to remain in Louisiana. This legal condition was deemed necessary because of the Louisiana Act of 1852, which stipulated that manumitted slaves depart for Liberia after manumission. Putting all of the court evidence together, Judith Schafer maintains that the slave-owning free people of color were basically benevolent owners protecting relatives and friends from a harsher and crueler form of slavery.18
More recent scholarship of 2006 depicts a more nuanced view of slave ownership among the free black community, one that reveals a darker and more exploitive picture. Using the records of the Orleans Parish Notarial Archives Research Center, which document the purchase, sale, transfer, or manumission of a slave, Ben Hobratsch found numerous transactions that recorded the sale of English-speaking slaves from Virginia who were obviously not relatives of their new black owners. The notarial records also document that the gens de couleur libre sold slaves at a greater frequency than they purchased them and that many of these transactions were to white buyers. And finally, the Hobratsch study found that manumission records were mostly for biracial slaves with French heritage, leaving the black anglophone slaves still in bondage. This more recent study contradicts the Schafer study, and the trend now is to view many free black slaveholders as exploitive of their slaves’ labor rather than being benevolent and protective of their racial brothers and sisters.19
So where did BarthĂ©lemy Rey fall in these divergent categories of slave owners? Looking at the number of transactions recorded in the Notarial Archives of New Orleans and considering that he owned more than a few slaves, the elder Rey fell into the category of the more exploitive type of owner who viewed slaves as property to sell or buy according to his individual economic and domestic interests. Perhaps some slaves were related, but that is unlikely in the case of the transaction of March 9, 1852, in which BarthĂ©lemy Rey sold Fanny—who was noted in the records as a “negress about 42 years old”—and fetched the price of $260 from a white buyer, Louis Mestier. Rey distanced himself from the city’s black and enslaved population and was more akin socially to the white slave owners.20
The next question to consider is why his son later emerged as a prominent leader of a civil rights movement on behalf of all men of color and how this change came about. It is difficult to determine the answer, but perhaps it was a combination of a generational shift to move away from an antiquated form of social structure, slavery, and a recognition that during the postbellum years, the three-tiered racial system conflated to a binary one in which all people of African descent were amalgamated into just one class. Whatever the reasons, Henry Louis Rey became a leading civil rights advocate for all people of African descent in his séance circles, the Louisiana legislature, and on the Orleans Parish School Board.
Despite the negatives of his slave ownership, BarthĂ©lemy Rey provided leadership for the free black community in education and in the exploding real estate market. BarthĂ©lemy Rey and other Afro-Creoles helped to build the two Creole suburbs: Faubourg Marigny and Faubourg TremĂ©. The Faubourg Marigny developed when Bernard de Marigny inherited his father’s downriver plantation in 1800. Five years later, the land was subdivided, and Marigny began to sell 30-by-120-foot lots to the French and Creoles. Americans tended to congregate on the other side of Canal Street in the Faubourg St. Mary (Ste. Marie), sometimes called the American Sector, marking a physical, cultural, and political division between the Creoles and the Anglo-Americans in New Orleans.
Bernard Marigny became a very successful real estate broker and sold lots for $300 to $400. Temporary Creole cabins of two rooms were often built on the lots and were later replaced with larger and more substantial houses. After the 1809 migration of the Saint-Domingue refugees, Marigny’s sales experienced a major upswing because of the greater need for housing.
Joseph Rey, BarthĂ©lemy’s father, bought a lot on Craps Street from Bernard Marigny on April 5, 1820, for $400. Joseph Rey is listed in the 1822 City Directory as a grocer, so he probably had his place of business in or near his residence. Marigny named Craps Street for the dice game that contributed to his financial ruin. BarthĂ©lemy Rey later moved to another house on Craps Street from his French Quarter residence on CondĂ© Street.21
The second Creole suburb, Faubourg TremĂ©, was originally owned by the Frenchman Claude TremĂ© and his Creole wife, Julia Moreau (sometimes written as MorĂł). TremĂ© had acquired the land in 1794 through his wife’s inheritance of the Morand-Latil-PrĂ©vost-Moreau holdings. After his marriage and the clearing of the title, Claude TremĂ© began to sell lots between 1798 and 1810, mostly to free people of color. He then sold the remaining tract to the City Corporation in 1810, and the TremĂ©s moved downriver. Like the Faubourg Marigny, the influx of Ă©migrĂ©s from Saint-Domingue in 1809 and 1810 ensured the economic viability of Faubourg TremĂ©.22 The Faubourg TremĂ© was located north of the French Quarter in what was then dubbed “the back of the city.” TremĂ© was bordered by Rampart Street on the south, Broad Street on the north, St. Louis Street on the west, and Esplanade Avenue on the east (see map on page 47).
Leading into Tremé from the north was the Carondelet Canal (sometimes called the Old Basin Canal), which made it possible for boats to sail from Lake Pontchartrain into Bayou St. John and continue on the canal into Faubourg Tremé, where the boat would unload its cargo on or near the turning basin. Once unloaded, the boat would turn around in the rectangular-shaped turning basin, float up the Carondelet Canal, and return to the lake. From that point the boat could sail either to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain or out to the Gulf of Mexico. Boats that used the Carondelet Canal avoided extra miles and the tricky navigation of sailing against the strong current of the Mississippi River, especially before the invention of the steamboat. Thus, New Orleans consistently received produce, lumber, and many other products, which contributed to an economic boom in an area already experiencing rapid growth.
Just east of the Carondelet Canal was the heart of TremĂ©, the famed TremĂ© Market, which was built in 1839. The original plans in the Notarial Archives Research Center show buildings to be erected on Orleans Street for $27,000, a considerable sum of money in those days. The architectural plans were based on the existing Poydras Market and included cast iron fluted columns with wood coffered butchers’ tables, fifteen market stalls under arcades, and cast iron arch fan inserts with exquisite cornucopia details.23 Crowning the archway over Villere Street was a cupola, which dominated the neighborhood and served as a beacon of community cohesion.24
Adjacent to the TremĂ© Market was the Orleans Parish Prison, erected between 1832 and 1836 on the site of an old soap factory that over the years had become a nuisance to the neighborhood and a blighted piece of property. The prison’s twin, three-storied buildings complemented the architecture of the marketplace with its two belvederes for surveillance and alarm bells. The rat-infested prison was notorious for its horrid conditions, even by nineteenth-century standards. A contemporary account described the prison cells as a hell on earth—filthy, overcrowded, smelly, unventilated, and overall appallin...

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