The Cabildo the Louisiana State museum part 4

Tureen

Adolphe Himmel for Hyde & Goodrich, New Orleans

1861-1877

Coin silver

1986.14

Image 6 of 7

Engraved 'To F and M.B.' on front; 'From your Father / M.B. / Dec. 16th 1874.' on back

This Rococo Revival style tureen was given by New Orleanian M. Burwin as a wedding present to his son in Boston in 1874, twenty years after its manufacture.

On the corner of St. Louis and Chartres streets in 1838, the St. Louis hotel opened. It was also called the City Exchange Hotel. Two years later it burned down but was quickly rebuilt. The main entrance to the hotel led into the exchange, a beautiful domed rotunda where every afternoon between noon and 3 p.m. the auctions were held. In this elegant hotel, the center of Creole society before the Civil War, was located perhaps the most infamous of the slave auction blocks. There was more than one.

In 1842, George Buckingham reported walking through the rotunda. The auctioneers, he said, were "endeavouring to drown every voice but his own. ... One was selling pictures and dwelling on their merits; another was disposing of some slaves. These consisted of an unhappy family who were all exposed to the hammer at the same time. Their good qualities were enumerated in English and in French, and their persons were carefully examined by intending purchasers, among whom they were ultimately disposed of, chiefly to Creole buyers; the husband at 750 dollars, the wife at 550, and the children at 220 each."

A wooden block that was once used in slave auctions 

On the corner of St. Louis and Chartres streets in 1838, the St. Louis hotel opened. It was also called the City Exchange Hotel. Two years later it burned down but was quickly rebuilt. The main entrance to the hotel led into the exchange, a beautiful domed rotunda where every afternoon between noon and 3 p.m. the auctions were held. In this elegant hotel, the center of Creole society before the Civil War, was located perhaps the most infamous of the slave auction blocks. There was more than one.

In 1842, George Buckingham reported walking through the rotunda. The auctioneers, he said, were "endeavouring to drown every voice but his own. ... One was selling pictures and dwelling on their merits; another was disposing of some slaves. These consisted of an unhappy family who were all exposed to the hammer at the same time. Their good qualities were enumerated in English and in French, and their persons were carefully examined by intending purchasers, among whom they were ultimately disposed of, chiefly to Creole buyers; the husband at 750 dollars, the wife at 550, and the children at 220 each."

Bell from Bernard de Marigny's Fontainebleau Plantation, cast in 1825.

Belle Grove plantation- Capital

Belle Grove plantation- Capital

Belle Grove plantation- Capital

Elegant furniture, clothes and bedding, are displayed among the more crude items. “Slavery produced the wealth and allowed planters to have china, silver, glassware and silk clothing. 

Elegant furniture, clothes and bedding, are displayed among the more crude items. “Slavery produced the wealth and allowed planters to have china, silver, glassware and silk clothing. 

Masters and Mistresses 

Although plantation owners and their families made up only a small part of the agrarian population, they controlled much of the wealth and political power in pre-Civil War Louisiana. Nevertheless, very few realized the myth of the planter family later idealized in novels and movies. Most masters and mistresses had little time for socializing with other plantation owners. Management of large landholdings, labor forces, and other investments required a lot of time, talent, and luck, and fortunes were hard to come by and easily lost.

Louisiana's planters, both white and free black, were among the wealthiest in the South. Many planters were good businessmen, buying and selling crops and slaves at the best price. They poured profits back into their plantations, while spending at least some of their earnings on luxurious consumer goods. Fine furniture, tableware, artwork, clothes, and jewelry added to the planter family's comfort and allowed them to show off their wealth to friends and business associates. The wealthiest planters also kept houses in New Orleans, where they stayed during the winter cultural season.

Although men owned and controlled most large holdings in Louisiana and throughout the South, women contributed significantly to the daily operation of plantations and frequently ran them in their husbands' absences. While the master supervised the slaves in the fields, the plantation mistress managed the domestic labor force for the entire household, directing the upkeep of all plantation buildings and the production, purchase, and distribution of food and clothing. In her spare time, the mistress bore and cared for numerous children, heirs to her husband's cotton or sugar estate.

Because plantation homes were so far apart, their mistresses so busy, and their masters so protective of white women, planter women lived in relative isolation from one another. Their letters reveal that they tried to maintain ties with friends and family, visiting other plantations or venturing to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other towns, where they attended balls, concerts, operas, and plays.

Elegant furniture, clothes and bedding, are displayed among the more crude items. “Slavery produced the wealth and allowed planters to have china, silver, glassware and silk clothing. 

Free woman of color Marie Therese Carmelite Anty Metoyer’s portrait, painted circa 1830. She was the wife of Auguste Metoyer and the granddaughter of Marie Therese Coincoin.

Some of Louisiana's most prosperous planters and farmers were free African Americans, the owners of more property than free blacks in any other state. In 1860 there were 472 free black Louisianians whose average real estate holdings were worth over $10,000. Far behind Louisiana in second place was South Carolina, whose 162 free blacks in the same category had an average real estate holding of less than $5,000 in 1860. In addition, three out of every ten free black estate owners in Louisiana were women.

The free black Metoyer family lived in the Natchitoches area and acquired vast holdings of land and slaves during the antebellum period. In 1830, at the height of their affluence, the Metoyers owned more slaves than any other free black family in the United States. This family traced its beginnings to Marie-Thérèze, also known by her African name of Coincoin, who created an empire with her fourteen children on the small plot of land that her white common-law husband, Pierre Metoyer, left her in 1778. 

Slave Collar

c. 1840

The sound of this belled collar made any slave wearing it easier to locate. Resourceful slaves silenced the bells by stuffing them with mud.

Slaves 

Slaves made up slightly less than half of Louisiana's total population but almost three-fifths of those living outside New Orleans in 1850, topping out at a high of 332,000 in Louisiana by 1860. Nine out of ten slaves in Louisiana worked on rural farms and plantations.

Slaves performed most of the manual, skilled, and domestic tasks on Louisiana plantations. Men and women labored in the fields and houses, the men specializing in skilled work and women assuming primary care of children. Most slaves worked from sunrise to sundown and beyond, although slaves often worked around the clock during the grinding season on sugar plantations.

Through perseverance, many slaves maintained stable families, although reluctantly permitted to take on partners at other plantations and rarely allowed to marry in formal church ceremonies. Familial ties were subjected to the whims and fortunes of the plantation master, who often broke up families by selling off unneeded members. Most planters, however, encouraged family formation, both to increase their holdings and to discourage adult slaves from running away from children and spouses.

Slaves, especially on large plantations, were able to carve out some space of their own and create a sense of community, developing values, activities, and identity separate from that of white plantation society. This community also developed a hierarchy, and slaves living in the quarters often saw slaves who worked closely by their masters and mistresses as informers and did not trust them. Hunters were held in high regard, since they were trusted enough by their masters to carry arms and supplied the slave community with meat. Religious leaders and midwives were also high within the social order.

Slaves reinforced their community ties by gathering together to eat, dance, sing, and tell stories. Through folklore and song, slaves passed down their collective historical memory from one generation to the next. Few masters allowed slaves to learn to read and write, and legislation passed in Louisiana in 1830 made teaching slaves to do so a crime. Slaves thus conveyed knowledge orally, just as their ancestors did in Africa and colonial Louisiana. 

Chest of drawers, or semainière

Dutreuil Barjon, Jr., c. 1855

Mahogany, yellow pine

1980.169.04

Barjon Jr. (c. 1821-1870) was a free man of color cabinetmaker who took over his father's New Orleans workshop in 1855.

Chest of drawers, or semainière

Dutreuil Barjon, Jr., c. 1855

Mahogany, yellow pine

1980.169.04

Barjon Jr. (c. 1821-1870) was a free man of color cabinetmaker who took over his father's New Orleans workshop in 1855.

Chest of drawers, or semainière

Dutreuil Barjon, Jr., c. 1855

Mahogany, yellow pine

1980.169.04

Barjon Jr. (c. 1821-1870) was a free man of color cabinetmaker who took over his father's New Orleans workshop in 1855.

Tureen

Adolphe Himmel for Hyde & Goodrich, New Orleans

1861-1877

Coin silver

1986.14

Engraved 'To F and M.B.' on front; 'From your Father / M.B. / Dec. 16th 1874.' on back

This Rococo Revival style tureen was given by New Orleanian M. Burwin as a wedding present to his son in Boston in 1874, twenty years after its manufacture.

The large market for silver goods kept New Orleans silversmiths busy. They supplied fine silver products to wealthy urban dwellers and to planters throughout the Mississippi Valley region. In addition, some silversmiths contracted with large retail establishments, like Hyde and Goodrich and D. H. Holmes, to provide them with merchandise. Many leading Louisiana silversmiths were German immigrants.

Furniture makers also flourished in New Orleans, supplying a large urban and agrarian market. 

A perique tobacco cutter of about 1850, a remarkable specimen of plantation craftsmanship.

Perique is a type of tobacco only grown in Saint James Parish, Louisiana, Often considered the truffle of pipe tobaccos known for its strong, powerful, and fruity aroma. When the Acadians made their way into this region in 1776, the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes were cultivating a variety of tobacco with a distinctive flavor. A farmer named Pierre Chenet is credited with first turning this local tobacco into what is now known as Perique in 1824 through the technique of pressure-fermentation.

A French mid 19th century Old Paris porcelain perique tobacco container 

A life-size carving of an Indian maiden. “This would be put outside a tobacco shop to let people know what they sold,” 

A life-size carving of an Indian maiden. “This would be put outside a tobacco shop to let people know what they sold,” 

A life-size carving of an Indian maiden. “This would be put outside a tobacco shop to let people know what they sold,” 

A life-size carving of an Indian maiden. “This would be put outside a tobacco shop to let people know what they sold,” 

Servant of the Douglas Family c. 1850

Individual portraits of domestic servants, like this one of a Douglas family servant, are extremely rare.

Gift of the Douglas Family

For the first four decades of the nineteenth century blacks, both slave and free, made up a majority of the New Orleans populace. In 1810 nearly two-thirds of all New Orleanians were black. By 1840, however, the percentage of African Americans in the Crescent City dropped to two-fifths and declined even further over the two decades preceding the Civil War, primarily because more whites moved into the city and more slaves were needed in rural cotton and sugar fields. 

A few masters, like New Orleans commission merchant and real estate investor John McDonogh, freed their slaves on the condition that they leave Louisiana or the United States entirely. McDonogh worked with the New York City and the American Colonization Societies to send freed slaves to Africa. McDonogh's slaves worked for their freedom, gradually over many years amassing enough earnings to be applied to their purchase price. 

Free blacks composed about forty percent of the African-American population in New Orleans, reaching a high of forty-six percent in 1820, although their number was greater in 1840 than in any other decade: almost 20,000 out of a total New Orleans population of slightly over 100,000. A growing slave and white immigrant population in the 1830s reduced the proportion of free blacks in the total populace. 

In response to increasing discrimination, oppression, and restrictive legislation in Louisiana and throughout the South, several free black New Orleanians moved to Haiti, Mexico, France, and other foreign destinations. Some returned to Louisiana after the Civil War. 

Free blacks played an important role in the New Orleans economy, where labor was often in short supply. Many owned successful businesses or engaged in the professions and amassed substantial estates that included real, personal, and slave property. Among free blacks women outnumbered men two to one and often established long-term relations with white men. United States laws--unlike those of France, Spain, and their former colonies--prohibited interracial marriages. In response, whites and free blacks or slaves formed common-law unions or traveled to France, Mexico, and the Caribbean to wed legally. 

Labor 

New Orleans was home to many skilled workers during the antebellum period, among them native whites, immigrants, free blacks, and slaves. Demand for skilled labor was high, as were wages. Free blacks dominated such skilled trades as carpentry, masonry, and barrel making, and male slaves were highly skilled in these and other trades, such as bricklaying, painting, blacksmithing, shoemaking, and baking. Several free black and slave women plied their trade as seamstresses.

Although many city slaves were skilled workers, most were domestic servants. They cared for their masters' homes, families, gardens, and animals, shopped and sewed for the household, and ran numerous errands. The number and appearance of one's servants indicated the urban resident's wealth and social standing. Thus, many prominent whites and free blacks in New Orleans and Baton Rouge outfitted their domestics in great finery when making public appearances.

Like many of the city's skilled laborers, domestics were sometimes hired out and earned extra money for themselves as well as their masters. Masters also occasionally gave their favorite servants monetary or material presents. With these earnings domestic slaves purchased their freedom or more commonly bought items not supplied by their masters, such as gold jewelry and other luxury goods

Municipal Services 

New Orleans officials provided residents with some services, many at the taxpayers' expense. The city maintained a police force, jails, courts, schools, waterworks, and a gas-lighting system. City workers and hired slaves also cleared roads, drained swamps, and collected garbage.

Authorities commissioned architect Benjamin Latrobe to design and build a system to supply water to New Orleans houses and businesses in 1811. The War of 1812 and other commitments delayed Latrobe's project until 1819, and he had not finished construction when he died of yellow fever in 1820. The city took over Latrobe's waterworks and completed them in 1822. Average daily consumption of water by 1837 was 250,000 tons, carried through 18 miles of cast-iron pipe.

Many residents were not connected to the city's waterworks, its expense making access to all a difficult task. Others preferred not to drink water taken from the Mississippi River. They relied on water collected in cisterns to supply their drinking and washing needs.

Because city services did not meet the needs of most New Orleanians, some established benevolent and voluntary associations to provide mutual support and defray the costs of living and dying in the Crescent City. Poor and working-class people, religious groups, immigrants, and people of like occupation pooled their resources to benefit needy members with such expenses as medical bills, funeral and burial costs, and support for widows and orphans.

Architecture 

Antebellum New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and surrounding plantations boasted many large public and private buildings in the Federal, Tudor, Italianate, and Greek, Egyptian, Roman and Gothic Revival styles. Among the many types of residential houses built in the Crescent City during this period were creole cottages, shotgun and double shotgun houses, and camelbacks.  

The large market for silver goods kept New Orleans silversmiths busy. They supplied fine silver products to wealthy urban dwellers and to planters throughout the Mississippi Valley region. In addition, some silversmiths contracted with large retail establishments, like Hyde and Goodrich and D. H. Holmes, to provide them with merchandise. Many leading Louisiana silversmiths were German immigrants.

Furniture makers also flourished in New Orleans, supplying a large urban and agrarian market.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard

Thomas Cantwell Healy after George Peter Alexander Healy

1861

Loaned by the Louisiana Historical Society

Thomas Healy's older brother, George Peter Alexander Healy, an internationally known portraitist, was commissioned in New Orleans to paint a large portrait of Beauregard. Thomas followed George to South Carolina as his assistant, continuing the painting until they had to evacuate the area following Beauregard's firing on Fort Sumter. Thomas returned to New Orleans, his sympathies being with the Confederacy, and his brother returned to his home in Massachusetts, describing himself as "a Northern man, with Northern feelings and anti-slavery principles." Thomas was then commissioned to create the smaller painting shown here, faithfully copying his own brother's earlier portrait but adding the soldiers and the cannon in the lower left. A respected painter, Thomas never achieved the recognition or accomplishments of his older brother.


P. G. T. Beauregard 

One of the most notable Louisianians to serve in the Civil War was P. G. T. Beauregard, a graduate of West Point and the Confederacy's first brigadier general. As commander of Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, Beauregard ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, firing the first shot of the Civil War. Liky many Civil War troops and officers, Beauregard received his early combat experience in the Mexican War of 1846-48. 

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard

Thomas Cantwell Healy after George Peter Alexander Healy

1861

Loaned by the Louisiana Historical Society

Thomas Healy's older brother, George Peter Alexander Healy, an internationally known portraitist, was commissioned in New Orleans to paint a large portrait of Beauregard. Thomas followed George to South Carolina as his assistant, continuing the painting until they had to evacuate the area following Beauregard's firing on Fort Sumter. Thomas returned to New Orleans, his sympathies being with the Confederacy, and his brother returned to his home in Massachusetts, describing himself as "a Northern man, with Northern feelings and anti-slavery principles." Thomas was then commissioned to create the smaller painting shown here, faithfully copying his own brother's earlier portrait but adding the soldiers and the cannon in the lower left. A respected painter, Thomas never achieved the recognition or accomplishments of his older brother.

Civil War-era newspaper printed on bright pink flowered wallpaper. Newspaper features news stories and advertisements for slaves.

Carpetbag

c. 1870