Easter Baptisms 1860

Easter Sunday in 1860 fell on April 8. On that day Lezin Becnel III brought four enslaved people to Mass to be baptized and received into the Catholic Church. His family had helped found St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Edgard, just a few miles downriver from Evergreen Plantation. This church was where multiple generations of Lezin’s family, both black and white, as well as the enslaved workers he considered his property, were baptized and buried. It was the center of life in the rural Creole community.

We have many stories to tell about the people who shaped the history of Evergreen Plantation. Hundreds and hundreds of stories. Today we highlight the stories that have no proper beginning and ending, that are merely names on a page. For every biographical essay we can write, there are dozens of individuals who remain just a name in a document, seen once and lost to time. This is one example.

Enslaved Individuals Baptized in St. John the Baptist Catholic Church on Easter Sunday 1860:

Marie Rose, age 28 years, godfather Gilbert, godmother Rose

Pauline, age 25 years, daughter of Celina, godfather Robert, godmother Angelique

Victor, age 27 years, godfather Toussaint, godmother Josephine

Eugene, age 25 years, godfather Polin, godmother Josephine

We have no origin stories for Marie Rose, Pauline, Victor, and Eugene. We don’t know where they came from, if they were born on the plantation, born on a neighboring plantation and purchased, or bought at the slave market in New Orleans. Their names do not appear on any inventories before or after their baptisms. We have no sale documents for them. We don’t know where they went after the Civil War, if they stayed or left, or when they died.

These baptismal records are the only evidence we have that they existed, the only written trace left behind.

For every Catherine, whose story needs multiple posts from an extensive essay, there are dozens of Marie Roses and Paulines. For every Ned Edwards, whose life can be traced all the way to present-day descendants, there are scores of Victors and Eugenes.

This Easter, remember the hundreds of individuals who lived, loved, and died, who are now just fragments, letters on a page. They were so much more than just one document. Their lives were as full and robust as any of ours. They had stories, too; stories we may never know.

Easter 1860 was significant. One year later, the nation would be at war, a conflict that would ultimately result in freedom for Marie Rose, Pauline, Victor, and Eugene. We may never known their stories, but we can all hope they lived to see freedom.

Phelonise Haydel Dangluse. Part I: 1800-1850

Phelonise was born into slavery around the year 1800 at Evergreen Plantation. Her mother, Jacinte, was one of the first people enslaved on the plantation. Jacinte had also been born on there and baptized at the nearby Catholic Church in 1780. She and her mother Marianne were the property of Christophe Haydel. Records indicate that Marianne may have been from St. Domingue (present-day Haiti). Thus when Phelonise was born, multiple generations of her family had lived on the plantation. Her family and the family that owned hers---the Haydels---had been the first to establish the plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River during the colonial era, a time fraught with disease, warfare, famine, and constant labor. Not only had the two families been inextricably linked from the beginning, they were now in fact each other’s family, related by blood. For Phelonise’s father was a Haydel. Whether her father was Christophe’s son George, his brother Jean Jacques, or his nephew Jean Jacques Jr. has not yet been determined. Phelonise adopted the surname Haydel, as did her siblings, just as any daughter would take her father’s name.

Though all her life she was called Phelonise by her family, she appeared on plantation inventories and other documents as Arthemise. This was a common naming trend during an era when plantation owners often gave the enslaved Greek and Roman classically inspired names. Slaves often rejected these names when associating with their own families and communities.

Phelonise was raised to be a domestic, cleaning the house ,serving her white relatives, and catering to their every need. Phelonise and all of her siblings were of mixed racial ancestry and worked in the big house. When she was fourteen years old, she served as godmother at her sister Germine’s baptism. Her brother died in infancy, but her five sisters lived to adulthood and were all known as the Misses Haydels.

Christophe Haydel died shortly after Phelonise’s birth. The plantation, as well as Phelonise, her mother, and her siblings, were inherited by Christophe’s daughter, Magdelaine Haydel Becnel. Magdelaine ran the plantation for the next three decades, until her death in 1830, when the property went up for sale. The proceeds were to be divided amongst her heirs. This meant that Jacinte and her children would be sold apart. Phelonise and her sisters were each purchased by a different Haydel or Becnel family member. Phelonise became the property of Jean Jacques Haydel Jr., Magdelaine’s first cousin as well as son-in-law, for he was married to her daughter Clarisse. He purchased Phelonise for $400. She was described as a Creole mulatto domestic slave. She spoke French, was a member of the Catholic Church, and was both culturally and genetically connected to the man who owned her. She left Evergreen Plantation, where she had been born and raised, the only home she had known for thirty years, and was brought to Jean Jacques Haydel’s nearby plantation. But she would not remain there long.

Four years after she left Evergreen, Phelonise was freed by Jean Jacques Haydel. It was 1834, and she was around 34 years old. Though she had no children of her own, she remained very close to her sisters and especially her niece Pamela, the daughter of her sister Celeste. Records indicate that it is likely that Pamela was the daughter of Marcien Belfort Haydel. Their relationship illustrates the tangled web that characterized the Haydel and Becnel family trees, both free and enslaved. Marcien Belfort Haydel was Jean Jacques Haydel Jr.’s son. Like his father before him, he owned his own daughter. Pamela had a relationship with a man named Jean Gaillot, who had also married into the Haydel family. The couple had many children together. They could not marry, because interracial marriage was illegal in Louisiana and because slaves could not enter into a marriage contract. Even though their father, Jean Gaillot, was free, Pamela’s children remained enslaved, for all slave children had to take the status of their mother.

After she gained her freedom, Phelonise moved to New Orleans. This urban center had the largest population of free people of color in the South. The majority of them were Creoles like Phelonise. In this community, she found a sense of belonging. She began a relationship with Jean Baptiste Montplaisir Dangluse, a native of St. Domingue (present-day Haiti) who had arrived in New Orleans after the revolution there. Dangluse was a veteran of the War of 1812 and fought at the Battle of New Orleans. On December 19, 1814, he joined Major Louis Daquin’s Second Battalion of free men of color from Haiti. These soldiers played a crucial role in the victory on the plains of Chalmette. Their commanding officer urged them forward, calling out, “March on! March on, my friends, march on against the enemies of the country!” in French. They surprised the British force and weakened them in preparation for the major battle to come, prompting General Andrew Jackson to tell them, “You surpass my hopes.” In the midst of the actual battle, they were commanded to stay in reserve but pushed forward to the British line and proved themselves once again. Recalling the performance by the Second Battalion and the death of British General Edward Packenham on the battlefield, Andrew Jackson said, “I have always believed he fell from the bullet of a free man of color.”

For the rest of his life, Dangluse spoke frequently of his military service in defense of the city at the time of the British invasion. It was clearly a defining moment in his life. He was particularly proud that he had been accepted into the grenadier’s company because he was so tall. Dangluse was closely tied to the Haitian Creole community in the city, further expanding Phelonise’s contacts in the community of free people of color. Yet she never lost touch with her niece Pamela and her grand- nieces and nephews in the country.

A decade after her own manumission, Phelonise succeeded in freeing her grand- niece and namesake. Marcien Belfort Haydel was willing to emancipate Pamela’s daughter Phelonise, likely his own granddaughter. Though the little girl was named after her great aunt, she was called Philomene all her life, possibly her middle name. Philomene was described in the sale and emancipation documents as a six-year-old quadroon, indicating ¼ African ancestry. Phelonise purchased her for $120, with the understanding that she would care for the child while Marcien Belfort Haydel sorted out the bureaucracy required to emancipate her. The laws were always changing, making it harder to free slaves, and at only six years old, Philomene did not meet the age requirement.

By entering into a contract for Philomene’s freedom and taking in the child, Phelonise essentially adopted her. Her grandniece became the child she never had and was raised in her home. Philomene considered Jean Baptiste Dangluse to be her father and took on his surname. She was present when her adoptive parents were married on March 29, 1847, at Annunciation Catholic Church on Marais Street in New Orleans. The Dangluses lived just blocks away from the church on Spain Street. But soon they would move across the river to Freetown, an area settled by free people of color that would later be called McDonoughville.

The reason for the move was a result of Dangluse’s military service. He received a bounty from the federal government, which he used to obtain the land in McDonoughville. By 1850, the small family had established a home there, and Philomene was attending school. She would be the first generation of her maternal line to be literate. It was forbidden by law to teach a slave to read and write. Now that she was free, Philomene could have an education.

Jean Baptiste Dangluse died on May 27, 1851, at three o’clock in the afternoon. He was around fifty-seven years old. Phelonise reported her husband’s death at the recorder’s office and made her mark on the death certificate as she was unable to sign her name. On this document, as on all legal documents, she declared her maiden name as Phelonise Haydel, an indication that her father was one of the white Haydel men related to the woman who had owned her.

Now in addition to being free, Phelonise Haydel Dangluse was a widow of property. For the first time in her life, she owned land and a house. Along with the forty- acre bounty that her husband had received, Phelonise was given an additional 120-acre bounty as a widow of a veteran of the War of 1812.  Unfortunately a crevasse, a break in the river levee, inundated the property and caused such significant damage that Phelonise chose to sell the land to a broker. She and Philomene moved back to the city in the 1850s in reduced circumstances.

To be continued in Part II.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SLAVE COMMUNITY

Evergreen Plantation provides an excellent model of the evolution of Louisiana’s slave society from the colonial era into the early national and then antebellum periods.  In 1790, upon the death of her husband Pierre, Magdelaine Haydel Becnel opened his succession.  An inventory was made of the Becnels’ property.  Surviving records document a total of fourteen slaves.  All of the Becnels’ slaves were described as negroes (black) with the exception of twenty-six year old Therese, listed as a metis, or of an indeterminate mixture of European and Native American ancestry.  Though worth 350 piastres, Therese was “granted her freedom by the authority of a judge due to her Indian heritage,” in keeping with Spanish laws of the time.  By 1790, Indian slavery was illegal and was nearing an end in practice. 

The Becnels’ also had a family group of slaves, including a mother, Marie Joseph, and her two sons and two daughters, worth together 650 piastres.  As ordered by the Code Noir, Marie Joseph and her children were inventoried together and could not be sold separately, as the children appeared to be under the age of ten. Eight male slaves were included in the inventory, valued at a total of 2850 piastres.  All possessed French names, with the exception of Tetemac, and ranged from twenty to thirty years of age.  None of the men were Creole, or born in the colony. Two were Bambara, two Fulbe/Pular, and the rest of various African groups, including Mandingo, Moor, Soso, and Konkomba.  Four shared the Mande dialect or language, while the other four spoke another West African language.

By 1810, Magdelaine Becnel significantly increased her wealth through sugarcane production, a burgeoning new crop due to Etienne de Bore’s successful crystallization of sugar on a commercial scale in 1795. According to the St. John the Baptist parish census of 1810, Magdelaine Becnel owned forty slaves, making her the largest slaveholder of the parish’s twenty-five households headed by women. In the 1820 census, she appeared as “Widow Becnel and Son,” indicating that she had made her son a partner in a plantation that included ninety slaves, seventy-three of whom were engaged in agricultural labor.  Thirty of the fifty women on the plantation and twenty-five of the forty men there were between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five.  There were ten children of each gender, and ten women over forty-five as compared with only five men over forty-five.

Upon Magdelaine’s death in 1830, a significant portion of her inventoried estate consisted of ninety-four slaves.  With twenty-seven female slaves and sixty-seven male slaves on the plantation, the sex ratio was severely skewed.  While most of the men worked in the cane fields as carters, plough hands, or laborers, most of the women functioned as domestics, serving as cooks, children’s nurses, washerwomen, and maids.  Some of the slaves were afflicted with entropied limbs, including Albert and Lenhem, whose right hands were damaged, and Cloe, whose feet did not function.  Several American male field hands were listed as being “fourteen years in the country” or “eight years in the country,” suggesting that they were familiar with the labor associated with a sugar cane plantation and had adapted to life in Creole Louisiana.  This detail may have been mentioned to entice buyers to pay more for them, as Creole slaves often fetched higher prices than American. 

Of special interest is Sally, a thirty-year-old American negresse who was “good for nothing” and worth only 5 piastres, the lowest priced slave under the age of sixty.  Perhaps she was physically or mentally handicapped, considered defiant, or a habitual runaway.  Magdelaine’s estate inventory contained another aberration: Sam, a thirty-year-old American griffe listed with his two-year-old child, together worth 400 piastres.  Usually slave children were inventoried with their mothers and when a mother was absent due to sale or death, the child was listed alone as an orphan.  This child, whose name was omitted in place of the classification “orphan,” was estimated with his father, indicating that they would remain together as a family unit.

Nearly three decades later, Magdelaine’s great-grandson, Lezin Becnel, and his brother Michel were operating the plantation, which now had a work force of ninety-six adult slaves and twenty-one slave children, for a total of 117 enslaved individuals.  With sixty-seven adult male slaves and twenty-nine adult female slaves, the sex ratio on the plantation was still skewed in favor of women.  In contrast, there were six male children and fifteen female children.  Sixteen of these slaves served as domestics, probably managed by Amelia Becnel, Lezin’s wife.  Of these sixteen, ten were women, emphasizing that house slaves were typically female.  While the slaves’ names remained primarily French, some names indicate the Anglo-American influence and the influx of American slaves, who often had last names from previous owners, including Starling, Tom Brown, and William Boone.

 On the eve of the Civil War, the Becnels had amassed $150,000 in real estate and $125,000 in personal property. Evergreen had grown into a major plantation complex and could be considered representative of a typical Creole plantation of its time.           

Magdelaine Haydel Becnel: Creole Matriarch and Entrepreneur

Magdelaine Haydel Becnel rose to a position of power and authority at time that most people today would not consider particularly supportive of women’s rights. Upon the death of her husband Pierre in 1790, Magdelaine assumed the role of head of household and family matriarch. She gave birth to eight children, four boys and four girls, the eldest eighteen at the time of his father’s death. She also inherited Evergreen from her father Christophe Heidel. Though Magdelaine could easily have left the management of the plantation to her son or one of her brothers, or possibly even sold the plantation for a nice profit, she chose not only to keep the plantation but to manage it herself. In the 1810 census of St. John the Baptist parish, Magdelaine Haydel Becnel appears as “Veuve Becnel” (French for “Widow Becnel”) and the head of her household. Living with her were a boy and girl under the age of ten, two boys and two girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, all presumably her children or grandchildren, and forty slaves. At this time, due to the death of her son Drausin and his wife during the smallpox epidemic of 1804, she also served as the guardian of Pierre Clidamont Becnel, her grandson.

Magdelaine witnessed the flags of France, Spain, and the United States fly over Louisiana. Born in 1754 when France controlled Louisiana, she spent her married life under Spanish rule. Her transformation of the plantation into a thriving sugarcane operation occurred simultaneously with the Americans’ rise to power. In addition to running her own successful agricultural enterprise, Magdelaine encountered cultural shifts and challenges to her family’s identity. With the onslaught of Americans into the vast new territory, all mostly Anglo, Protestant, and English speakers, Louisiana natives like Magdelaine realized the unique nature of their culture. Because of this, natives of Louisiana began to redefine themselves not as Frenchmen or Spaniards but as Creole, also known as l’ancienne population or l’ancienne regime. Aware of their cultural bond, Creole Louisianians united and challenged what they perceived as an American assault on their politics, law, religion, language, and culture. Determined to maintain their position of power in Louisiana as well as to assert the superiority of their culture, Creoles continued to speak French, resist republican government, worship as Catholics, and strengthen their distinct traditions. Laussat described the collision of cultures that occurred at the ball celebrating the transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States.

Hoisting of American Colors Over Louisiana, Painting by Thure de Thulstrup

Although it was their fathers, brothers, and husbands who struggled for power in the political arena, Creole women stood as the guardians of their culture in the midst of the chaos of what they deemed an invasion, insisting that only French be spoken at home, raising their children as good Catholics, and instructing them in proper etiquette and matters of class. Magdelaine Becnel proved no exception. Her children married other Creoles, her obituary was printed only in French, and her home remained in the Creole architectural style during her lifetime, no mere coincidences. As the matriarch of her family, she provided for her children and grandchildren spiritually and monetarily, but perhaps she also provided stability by instilling in them the importance of tradition in a society facing enormous change. However, while Creole society was based in many ways on paternalism, it was not decidedly male-dominant. From the beginning, women in Louisiana possessed more rights than women in other sections of the country, including the South. Deviating from the norm, Creole women possessed dower rights and the right to own property independent of their husbands. Even in the earliest days of colonial Louisiana, Creole women sued for divorce and were active participants in other legal suits as well. Most telling of all, a large number of Creole women owned and operated their own plantations, thus turning the typically patriarchal household into a matriarchy. The lack of stability in early Louisiana, stemming from the fact that it was both settled later and more sparsely inhabited, led to a broader role in society for women. With the coming of the Americans and their cultural ideas, including the notion of paternalism that dominated the rest of the Anglo South, Creoles’ views of women became more constricted, yet throughout the nineteenth century, the older and more fluid idea of women’s roles would remain pervasive.

1831 Survey of Landholdings along the Mississippi River in St. John the Baptist parish, including Veuve Becnel’s. General Land Office Records, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Department of the Interior.

In 1810, eighty-five women, including Magdelaine Haydel Becnel, headed households in the river parishes of St. John the Baptist, St. James, and Ascension. These parishes contained nine hundred and forty-eight households. Nine percent of households in these parishes were headed by women. Seventy-three percent of these women owned slaves. Perhaps one of the reasons women like Magdelaine were capable of living as heads of their own households was due to their wealth as slaveholders. Sixteen of the eighty-five women, or nineteen percent, owned ten or more slaves.

In contrast to the large number of women who owned their own plantations and headed their own households in the Creole sugar parishes of St. John, St. James, and Ascension, parishes in North Louisiana, dominated by Protestant Anglo Americans who grew cotton instead of sugar, had far fewer women in such authoritarian roles. Ouachita, Catahoula, and Concordia parishes bordered the river, like the River Parishes, and would eventually produce much of the state’s cotton and develop a plantation culture of its own. In 1810, of the five hundred and thirty-two households in these three north Louisiana parishes, only seventeen were headed by women. Thus, only 3.2 percent of households in these three northern parishes in the cotton belt were headed by women, compared to 9 percent of the households in the River Parishes that had women as heads.

While differences such as population and economic status might have influenced this statistic, cultural differences between the predominantly Anglo American parishes in the north of the state and the Creole parishes in the south certainly contributed to the number of households run by women.