The Great Southern Babylon

Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865--1920

Alecia P. Long

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780807159422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city's sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.
Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans's lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.
"Long brilliantly charts the historical roots and evolution of the culture of commercial sexuality in New Orleans.... The result is a landmark book all should read." -- Darlene Clark Hine, coauthor of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America

1
“It’s Because You Are a Colored Woman”

SEX, RACE, AND CONCUBINAGE AFTER
THE CIVIL WAR

The sexual status quo in antebellum New Orleans made all enslaved women vulnerable to their owners’ sexual whims, while those sold as fancy girls were implicitly marketed as sexual slaves. Long-term affairs between white men and free women of color in New Orleans were also virtually institutionalized in the form of plaçage. Emancipation ended some of these practices and posed a challenge to others, but sex across the color line continued in the city, even if it took new forms. In fact, there was a range of historical situations and contexts in which sex across the color line occurred in New Orleans between 1865 and 1920. For the city’s women of color, those situations could include unwanted sexual advances or violent rape, exchanging sex for money or other favors on an intermittent or ongoing basis, being a mistress to one or a series of men, marrying across the color line, which was legal in Louisiana from 1870 until 1894, or living with a man in a committed relationship without benefit of marriage. No matter what the race of the participants, the latter relationship was called concubinage.¹

Although concubinage is not normally considered an aspect of commercial sexuality, such relationships in New Orleans historically had important economic dimensions, including but not limited to formalized agreements that spelled out the financial terms between white men and their concubines of color. Although concubinage was considered illicit per se, its longevity and exclusivity generally distinguished it from prostitution. The public or private character of these relationships varied with the desires and domestic situations of individual participants, but economic issues often brought concubinage to broader public attention and imprinted it on the historical record. In fact, we know about many cases of cross-racial concubinage only because of the court cases and legal settlements that sprang from them.

In writing about the antebellum period, historian Judith Schafer points out that Louisiana’s laws on concubinage were “identical for all involved in these liaisons, male and female, Negro, mulatto and white.” She concludes that, “in this instance Louisiana law was oblivious to gender and color.” While the wording of the statutes supports Schafer’s argument, in the postbellum period the adjudication and outcome of concubinage cases often hinged on the color, gender, or social class of the parties involved. This was certainly the case when Adeline Stringer filed suit against Louis Mathis, her deceased lover’s brother, in 1887. Because Stringer was “a colored woman” who had been involved with a white man, the courts considered her claim in ways that made clear their acceptance of an ideology that defined light-skinned, mixed-race women primarily in sexual terms. And while nearly all women involved in similar suits were at a disadvantage because of their gender and their participation in illicit sex, white women often received the benefit of the doubt when it came to questions about their virtue, respectability, or culpability in becoming concubines in the first place.²

Although concubinage in Louisiana’s state statutes was not defined in race- or gender-specific terms, New Orleans’s long history of concubinage between white men and women of color contributed significantly to the stereotypical eroticization of light-skinned, mixed-race women. Certainly the ubiquity and virtual institutionalization of such relationships in the fancy-girl sales, quadroon balls, and plaçage of the antebellum period played some role in the blasé toleration of such relationships in New Orleans immediately after the Civil War. Their persistence is also explained in no small part by the double standard that many white men applied to themselves when it came to crossing the color line sexually.³

While interracial sex evoked discomfort and increasing social disapprobation as the nineteenth century wore on, prostitution across the color line remained a lucrative and much touted feature of the city’s culture of commercial sexuality for decades after Emancipation. But white men and women of color who engaged in committed relationships found themselves subject to rising social disapproval and the passage of laws that sought specifically to end the existence of concubinage across the color line as the nineteenth century came to an end.

The well-documented relationship between Joseph Mathis and Adeline Stringer illustrates how this process occurred. Joe and Adeline initially became involved while both were relatively young and while she was still enslaved. The details of their life together are compelling but, beyond the particulars, the evolution of their long-term, committed love affair mirrors changes in race relations in New Orleans and throughout the South following the Civil War. It also illustrates important aspects of the city’s evolving culture of commercial sexuality. Joe and Adeline’s relationship endured, but it changed significantly in response to the profoundly altered social, political, and economic conditions that prevailed in the city following Emancipation. Although sexual relationships between white men and women of color play a central role in the city’s romanticized erotic mythology, there is very little extant first-person documentation of such relationships. Joe’s letters to Adeline provide the narrative device for this chapter. They are also rare and important historical documents that provide insight into the complexities of a single relationship and guide us toward an understanding of its larger historical significance.

Their story is singular, but its unusually well-documented history offers a unique opportunity to explore a relationship across the color line in great detail. The issues at stake in Stringer v. Mathis also enable us to explore the economic dimensions of concubinage. Because state laws severely limited the amounts concubines could bequeath to one another, Adeline’s ability to share in Joe’s estate was always circumscribed. For other plaintiffs in similar cases, gender, skin color, social class, and assumptions about white female respectability contributed to more successful outcomes and financial settlements.⁴

One caveat should be offered. Because this chapter is about a relationship between a white man and a woman of color, the reactions of the parties involved were certainly a great deal less vehement than if the relationship had been between a white woman and a man of color. In fact, Martha Hodes has argued persuasively that it was only after Emancipation that sex between white women and black men began “to provoke a near-inevitable alarm, one that culminated in the tremendous white violence of the 1890s and after.” Even in New Orleans, a city long known for its lax sexual morés and forays across the color line, white women began to receive warnings in local newspapers about the potential dangers of engaging in sex with men of color. Marriage between white brides and “dusky grooms” also evoked harsh journalistic commentary.⁵

The historical toleration, if not acceptance, of relationships between white men and women of color in New Orleans certainly contributed to the lack of alarm with which most people involved in the court case viewed Joe and Adeline’s relationship. Some witnesses—Joe’s brother Louis in particular—expressed distaste and disbelief at the idea of a white man’s being involved in a long-term, committed relationship with a woman of color. But no one ever suggested that physical violence should have been used to separate Joe and Adeline, or that the relationship was particularly dangerous to the emerging social or political order. When it came to sex across the color line, for white men at least, such admonitions would be the exception rather than the rule for several more decades in New Orleans.

“I Remain Yours Faithfully until Death”

Joseph Mathis died in the early morning hours of April 1, 1887, in a boardinghouse at 466 Magazine Street. He left behind two residences, two families, and the remnants of two very different lives. Dr. Samuel Olliphant, a close friend and a prominent physician from whom Joe had rented a room for several years, owned the house on Magazine Street. At 14 Dryades Street, less than two miles but in many respects a world away, Adeline Stringer, Joe’s companion of more than thirty years, must have received word of his death second-hand. Adeline had not been allowed to see Joe since Dr. Olliphant had escorted him from her home two weeks earlier. Perhaps she even had to learn the specific details of Joe’s death from the April 3 issue of the Daily Picayune, in which his brief obituary stated “on Friday April 1 at 3:35 o’clock a.m., [died] Joseph Mathis aged 54 years and 8 months, a native of this city.”⁶

Although Mathis’s obituary was modest, his estate was substantial, and the battle waged between Adeline Stringer and Louis Mathis over that estate ensured that the story of Joe and Adeline’s thirty-year romance would become a permanent part of state and local court records. Those records tell the story of an enduring romantic relationship between Joe, the son of immigrant parents, and Adeline, a mixed-race woman who had been a slave before the Civil War. Joe once ended a letter to Adeline with the words, “I remain yours faithfully until death,” but the state of race relations in New Orleans at the time of his death, and laws designed to limit the inheritance of concubines, meant that Joe’s relationship with Adeline became most controversial after he passed away.

During her lifetime, Adeline experienced both slavery and freedom. In her post-Emancipation incarnation she was a boardinghouse keeper. Yet, during the trial over Joe’s estate, Louis Mathis, his lawyers, and other defense witnesses described her most often as Joe’s concubine, and they discounted her role and her economic success as a domestic entrepreneur. Although she ran a small business, remained in a monogamous relationship, and lived out her life as a free woman in a domestic environment, she could never have been considered a southern lady. Her skin color, if nothing else, ensured that. Slave and free, boardinghouse proprietor and concubine, described as both griffe and mulatto, Adeline presents us with an intriguing example of life “in-between” for light-skinned women of color in postbellum New Orleans.⁷

Joe too was a liminal figure, albeit in strikingly different ways from Adeline. He was the oldest surviving son of prosperous immigrant parents, and, thanks to a generous inheritance, could have become a prominent, respected, and wealthy businessman like his younger brother Louis. Instead, Joe lived in relative obscurity, especially after the Civil War, first in a series of boardinghouses with Adeline and later moving between two separate residences to continue his clandestine relationship with her. It is not exaggerating to say that, by the end of his life, Joe was living both a white life and a life across the color line. Very likely, in fact, it was the combination of his relationship with a woman of color and his severe though intermittent physical disabilities that guaranteed his liminality. Unlike Adeline, whose marginality and inferiority were assumed in a racist culture, Joe chose, at least on some level, to become a marginal figure by continuing his committed relationship with a woman of color in a time and place in which such connections were increasingly problematic.

The lives of individuals, although they defy strict historical categorization, simultaneously reflect and illuminate important aspects of the times in which they lived. Peering into the particulars of Joe and Adeline’s story gives the historian an opportunity to cut through the myths about interracial relationships in New Orleans and to look at the evolution of at least one enduring love across the color line. Charting the turbulent yet touching course of Joe and Adeline’s life together gives us a glimpse of how the day-to-day aspects of their romance ebbed and flowed in response to the vicissitudes of larger social and political processes at work in late-nineteenth-century New Orleans.

Because of the illicit or legally informal nature of most enduring affairs and other interracial sexual connections, there has been little historical evidence to date that directly chronicles the thoughts and experiences of the participants. Although painstaking genealogical research and forays into the city’s rich notarial archives can yield impressive data about such relationships, the discovery of a cache of love letters from Joe to Adeline offers us a unique window into the intimate details of their relationship. The letters also illuminate evolving ideas about sex and race in New Orleans after the Civil War.⁸

“Your Sincere and True Lover, Joe”

Mobile

June 11, 1877

My Dearest and Only Addie,
Your kind letter of the 7th inst. only reached me this minute and I immediately hasten to respond. You have no idea how glad I was to hear from you, as it is the first letter that I have received from you in many, many years, it carried me back to twenty years ago, when we met, [and used] to write love letters to each other and I never hailed a letter then from you with more pleasure than I do yours now....

I shall remain in Mobile a few days longer (“to see and to be seen”) perhaps until next Sunday as I can save 4 or 5 dollars in fare. I have not seen any of Miss Hettie[’s] friends yet but the Capt. has introduced me to half of Mobile already. I suppose it will surprise you when I inform you that I have not spoken to a female except Miss Hettie since I left home, but such nevertheless is a veritable fact and now give me credit for being better than you thought I was. Mr. Cruzat has just arrived and wishes me to remember him very kindly to you and all.

Miss Hettie says you are putting in a dam sight of frills by not writing to her although she owes you one. Buddie says he is going to New Orleans with me but will take Mobile night shirt with him this time, he like New Orleans, loves his auntie (and especially Marie) but objects to New Orleans night shirts.

Little Hettie feels very much hurt that Marie did not send her remembrance to her. Miss Hettie, the Capt. and Mr. Gus all wish to be remembered to you. Kiss Marie for me and receive a thousand for yourself....

I will write again, dream of me and only me and may they be pleasant ones. Answer this and oblige your sincere and true lover, Joe⁹

The first preserved letter from Joe to Adeline was written the same year the Compromise of 1877 resulted in the removal of Union troops from New Orleans. The letter above and the thirteen that accompany it make it clear that their relationship endured beyond the demise of political Reconstruction. Joe was in his mid-forties and on a sojourn in Mobile when he wrote this affectionate, playful letter to Adeline. The letter reveals the length of their affair, the complex web of family, friends, and acquaintances they had in common, and the abiding affection Joe felt for Adeline more than twenty years after they had originally become involved.

The letters became a part of the court record when they were taken from Adeline and introduced as evidence after she sued Louis for a portion of Joe’s estate. The case first went to trial in the spring of 1888. Many witnesses repeated what Joe’s letter to Adeline confirmed—that their affair had begun sometime in the last half of the 1850s. Louis asserted that Adeline “had been his brother’s girl” before the war. Godfried Gaisser, who had “grown up with Joe,” also confirmed that the relationship had begun when Joe was a young man. According to Fanny Brickell, who had been a slave in the Mathis household, Joe “could have been 22 somewheres along there,” when the relationship began. That would put the beginning of the affair in 1855.¹⁰

Brickell also confirmed that Adeline Stringer was called “Addie before the war and that she was a slave girl.” On the stand Louis, who was four years younger than Joe, recalled that before the war “my brother as a general thing boarded or staid [sic] out—he was very seldom at home.” It is unclear whether Joe’s relationship with Adeline was the reason for his separation from the family household, but Louis’s testimony does suggest that Adeline’s visits to the Mathis home caused some tension. He recalled, “she used to come there often and inquire about my brother Joe until I ordered her away.”¹¹

Louis’s testimony on this matter suggests two things about slave life in late antebellum New Orleans. First, as many scholars have suggested, urban slave life often included a freedom of movement that life on isolated rural plantations did not. Especially in a city like New Orleans, slaves, even young female slaves like Adeline, had enough freedom of movement to go to the Mathis household many times and inquire about Joe. Her visits to the Mathis home also suggest a boldness on her part that one does not often associate with women, let alone slave women, in the pre-war South. The act of calling on Joe upset both the established etiquette of color deference and gender expectations in the antebellum South. But Louis’s ability to “order her away” also suggests that there were limits to Adel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. “It’s Because You Are a Colored Woman”
• 2. The Business of Pleasure
• 3. “Where the Least Harm Can Result”
• 4. “Unusual Situations and Remarkable People”
• 5. “As Rare as White Blackbirds”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index