1 Lamanière, L. to Sauvigne, J.H. Esq. “Tampico Mco,” November 14, 1862. Catholic Institution English Composition Copybook II [hereafter Copybook II], Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans [hereafter AANO], 255. The date of Lucien's admittance to the school is not clear. His brother(?) Louis entered the Catholic Institution in 1852 at age nine. But this L. Lamanière would have been nineteen in 1862, and likely too old to be enrolled in school. Journal des Séances de la Société Catholique pour l'instruction des orphelins dans l'indigence commencé le 26 de Avril, 1851, 2 Fevrier 1852, p. 58. According to the 1870 Census, a 22-year-old “mulatto male” named Lucien Lamanière was living in the Seventh Ward and working as a general clerk. This would make Lucien 14 years old in 1862, closer in age to the other students than his brother would have been in that year. United States Census, 1870, manuscript schedules, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, Seventh Ward, p. 252, Reel 522.Google Scholar

2 On the Afro-Creoles of Louisiana and their intellectual and political activism see Bell, Caryn Cossé Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997). On the creation of Afro-Creole culture in the colonial period see Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press; 1992).Google Scholar

3 Rankin, David C. “The Origins of Black Leadership in New Orleans During Reconstruction,“ Journal of Southern History 40 (August 1974): 417–440; Bell, Cossé Revolution, chap. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Devore, Donald E. and Logsdon, Joseph P. Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841–1991 (Lafayette, La: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1991), 42. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice “People of Color in Louisiana, Part II,” Journal of Negro History 2 (January 1917), 65.Google Scholar

5 The Catholic Institution, opened in 1852, had been founded at the bequest of Couvent, Marie Justin a wealthy woman of color. Though ostensibly under the guidance of the Catholic Church, following the terms of Couvent's will, the school admitted children of any denomination and remained a largely secular school. On the Catholic Institution see “History of the Catholic Indigent Orphan Institute,” 1916?, AANO; Christian, Marcus B. “Dream of an African Ex-Slave,“ The Louisiana Weekly, February 12, 1938; Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien Our People and Our History; trans. Dorothea, Sister McCants, Olga Daughter of the Cross, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); originally published as Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire (1911); 14–22; 101–108 [Originally published as Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire, 1911]; Roussève, Charles Barthelemy The Negro in Louisiana: Aspects of His History and His Literature (New Orleans: Xavier University Press, 1937), 43–44; Blassingame, John W. Black New Orleans 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 108; Bell, Cossé Revolution, 123–126. In the 1850s, the state granted annual sums to the institution, but for the most part the school was funded through private charitable contributions from wealthy Creoles of color. Bell, Cossé Revolution, 125, 127. In 1867, a legislative report on charitable institutions stated that there were 280 children attending the Catholic Institution, all of them “descendents of the original ‘free’ colored population” of New Orleans. “Report of the Committee on Charitable Institutions to the Legislature of the State of Louisiana,” Documents of the Second Session of the Second Legislature of Louisiana (New Orleans: J.O. Nixon State Printer, 1867), 6.Google Scholar

6 See Reinders, Robert C. “The Free Negro in the New Orleans Economy, 1850–1860,“ Louisiana History 6 (Summer 1965): 273–285, and Schweninger, Loren “Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790–1880,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990): 40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Prospectus de l'Institution Catholique des Orphelins Indigents Encoignure Grands Hommes et Union Troisième Municipalité, Nouvelle-Orleans (New Orleans: Maitre Desarzant, 1847), Howard Tilton Memorial Library, Louisiana Collection, Tulane University.Google Scholar

8 The first large-scale, but unsuccessful, migration to Haiti occurred during the administration of President Boyer of Haiti in the 1820s. See Miller, Floyd J. The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), viii–ix. Miller suggests a link between the lull in colonization and the growth of a strong biracial abolitionist movement in the northern states. On Boyer's attempts to attract colonists (especially skilled artisans) see Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714–1938 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 70.Google Scholar

9 “Local Intelligence, Emigration to Hayti,” New Orleans Daily Delta, July 21, 1859; Christian, Marcus WPA Newspaper Transcriptions, Marcus Christian Collection, Special Collections Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans [hereafter UNO].Google Scholar

10 Sterkx, H.E. The Free Negro in Antebellum Louisiana (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), chap. 4; Schafer, Judith Kelleher Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 20–21; Reinders, Robert C. “The Decline of the New Orleans Free Negro in the Decade Before the Civil War,” Journal of Mississippi History 24 (April 1962), 90. On the cultural and political activities of free black people in colonial Louisiana see Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) esp. her introduction.Google Scholar

11 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 (U.S.) 393 (1857). See Franklin, John Hope From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 267–268. After the Scott verdict, according to the New Orleans Daily Picayune, public opinion favored the revocation of “any political rights” still enjoyed by free persons of color in certain states. “For our part,” the editors noted, “we should not at all lament to see such a result brought about” but there appeared to be “no such compulsory effect in the decision of the case.” Daily Picayune, March 21, 1857.Google Scholar

12 By the 1840s, antislavery leaders estimated that between 7,000 and 10,000 free blacks migrated to Haiti from the U.S. See Hunt, Alfred N. Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 170; Everett, Donald “Free People of Color in New Orleans, 1830–1865,” (M.A. thesis, Tulane University, 1952), 130. The papers in New Orleans reported several voyages of free blacks to Haiti in 1859 and 1860. See the New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 22, 1859; January 15, 1860; November 11, 1860; New Orleans Daily Delta, July 21, 1859; New Orleans Daily Crescent, June 21, 1859; New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, May 4, 1859.Google Scholar

13 I determined as many of the boys’ ages as possible, using census rolls and records of their admission to the Catholic Institution in the school's Seance Books (which usually contained their ages at the time of entrance, though every student's admission was not recorded). There are few references in the letters themselves to the writer's age or time remaining in school. In the mid-nineteenth century, these students were probably considered “older boys.” Yet from reading the students’ letters, age (their own and that of other boys) seems to have been much less important to them than the fact that the classmate in question had left school to learn a trade, something which could happen at thirteen or at eighteen. That they were nearing the end of their education and preparing to enter an occupation made it especially important, from their teachers’ perspective, to impart to their students a social, political, and racial consciousness that would benefit them outside of the schoolroom. On the ages of apprentices see Cunningham, Hugh Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1995), 97–99. As Philippe Ariès argued in this classic study of childhood Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Baldick, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1962), 29–30 even after a “vocabulary” for infancy developed (in the nineteenth century) “an ambiguity remained between childhood and adolescence on the one hand and the category of youth on the other. People had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the idea was a long time taking shape.” Ariès believed that “youth” (which came to be equated with adolescence in the twentieth century) did not emerge as a category until the end of World War I, during which “the troops at the front were solidly opposed to the older generations in the rear.”Google Scholar

14 This raises questions, which go beyond the scope of this paper, about the role that gender played in the creation of what Benedict Anderson has termed “imagined communities”—that is, whose work was acknowledged as the means for the creation of communities and whose work was not. See Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983). On antebellum colonization see Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality and Stuckey, Sterling The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). Newspaper reports noted that families comprised a large portion of the emigrants traveling to Haiti. See New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 22, 1859. Also, the students made frequent reference in their letters about Mexico to setting up a house for their families.Google Scholar

15 Desdunes, Our People and Our History, 65; Roussève, The Negro in Louisiana, 48; Bell, Cossé Revolution, 85–87. In 1855, a wealthy Afro-Creole named Lucien Mansion helped to fund the migration of free people of color from the Attakapas region of Louisiana after they had been threatened by “vigilance committees.” According to Roussève, Mansion contributed funds for migrations to both Mexico and Haiti.Google Scholar

16 Mexico and the United States have markedly different histories of race and racial ideology, particularly with regard to mestizaje, or racial mixture. New Spain was the New World colony in which Africans, Indians, and Europeans were most fully integrated, both biologically and culturally. See Colin MacLachlan, M. and Jaime, E. Rodriguez, O. The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [1980]), introduction. Free black people from New Orleans may have chosen to migrate to the state of Veracruz because it was a part of Mexico with a relatively large population of African descent since the colonial period (to 1820). See Patrick J. Carroll, “Los mexicanos negros, el mestizaje, y los fundamentos olvidados de la ‘Raza Cósmica': una perspectiva regional,” Historia Mexicana 44 (enero-marzo 1995): 403–438. See also idem., Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). With the founding of Eureka in 1857, Mexico's president, Ignacio Comonfort, welcomed Louisiana's free people of color, insisting that they would have “the same rights and equality enjoyed by the other inhabitants [of Mexico] without at any time having to feel ashamed of their origin.” Memoria de la Secretaria de Estado y Del Despacho de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio de la Republica Mexicana escrita por el ministro del Ramo C. Manuel Siliceo, para dar cuenta conella al soberano congreso constitutional (Mexico: Imprenta de Vicente García Torres, 1857), 57.Google Scholar

17 See Steedman, Carolyn Past Tenses: Writing Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1992), 194. According to Steedman, “‘the child’ is a historical construct,” the product of adult imagination and projection, whereas “children” are individuals experiencing childhood.Google Scholar

18 My thinking about children's writing, and what writing allows children to do, is influenced by Steedman's, Carolyn Book The Tidy House: Little Girls Writing (London: Virago. 1982).Google Scholar

19 Green, William to Green, Samuel Esq., Monterey, Mexico, November 28, 1856. Catholic Institution English Copybook (Hereafter Copybook I), AANO, 10.Google Scholar

20 Walker, On his failed adventures, and his popularity among southern slaveholders in favor of slavery's expansion, see May, Robert E. The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), chap. 4; Brown, Charles H. Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) part 3; and McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 110–116.Google Scholar

21 Green, William to Green, Samuel Esq., Monterrey, Mexico, November 28, 1856. Copybook I, AANO, 10.Google Scholar

22 The Picayune's publisher had a network of pony riders in Central America to carry the news to the port of Veracruz. From there, steamers could reach New Orleans in just two weeks time. Black, George The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 5.Google Scholar

23 See for example Claiborne, J.A. to Wallace, John Esq., Boston, Mass., December 5, 1856 and Claiborne, J.A. to Dufour, P. Esq., Marseilles, France, December 18, 1856, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

24 Grègoire, A. to Peunel, Joseph Esq., Hartford New Haven, December 12, 1856, Copybook, I. AANO. See also Green, William H. to Armand Nicolas, Esq. Galveston, Texas, December 15, 1856 and Claiborne, J.A. to Franklin, John Esq., Vicksburg, Miss., December 15, 1856. Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

25 Green, Wm H. to Nicolas, Armand Esq., Grand Lake, La., February 2, 1857. Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

26 Nicolas, A. to Green, Wm. Esq., Boston, Mass. December 10, 1856, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

27 Grègoire, A.A. to Dupart, Léon Esq., Cincinatti, Ohio, July 5, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

28 Green, W.H. to Green, John Esq., City of Veracruz, Mexico, May 7, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

29 Nicolas, Armand to Lombard, M. Esq, Puebla, Mexico, May 8, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

30 Nicolas, Armand to Posthel, L. Esq., Cincinatti, Ohio, June 26, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

31 On the debate over free labor (and slavery) in the antebellum United States, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War [1970] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. his new introduction.Google Scholar

32 Nicolas, Armand to Homoca, L. Esq., Huasacoalca, Mexico, June 19, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

33 Green, William H.P. to Dupart, Leon Esq., Mobile, Alabama, June 20, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

34 Grègoire, A. André to Lompré, Ernest Esq., Paris, France, June 26, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

35 In his address “The Political Destiny of the Colored Race,” delivered in 1854, Delany, Martin proclaimed that emigration was the only remedy for “the great political disease” that afflicted black people in America. It was time for all descendents of Africans to confront “the politician, the civil engineer, and skilful economist, who direct and control the machinery which moves forward, with mighty impulse, the nations and powers of the earth” and if possible “to meet them on vantage ground, or, at least, with adequate means for the conflict.” Reprinted in Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, 199, 204. On similar ideas expressed by Holly, James Theodore concerning colonization in Liberia see Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 235.Google Scholar

36 See Peunel, J. to Grégoire, A. Esq., Tampico, Mexico, September 9, 1857; Armstrong, L. to Dupart, L. Esq., Tampico, Mexico, September 11, 1857; W.H.P. Green to Nicolas, Armand Esq. Tampico, Mexico, September 14, 1857; and Dupart, M.L. to Brunetter, E. Esq. Tlactotalpan, State of Vera Cruz, Mexico, September 18, 1857; Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

37 New Orleans Daily Delta, January 16, 1860, cited in Everett, “Free People of Color in New Orleans,” 129.Google Scholar

38 Memoria del Ministerio de Fomento, Colonización, Industria y Comercio Presenta al Congreso de la Union (Mexico: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1863), 102, 99. These memorias were printed annually, but because of the civil war, the government's records are silent for the years between 1857 and 1863, when Eureka and other colonies were in operation in Mexico.Google Scholar

39 The tension between Spain and Mexico the writer refers to appears to have been a diplomatic squabble blown to great proportions. This reference serves as further evidence that the students were reading the Daily Picayune since the paper followed the story very closely. See, for instance, the Daily Picayune July 26, July 30, and August 3, 1857.Google Scholar

40 Emphasis added. Dupart, M.L. to Barthelemy, R. Esq., Tampico, Mexico, September 11, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

41 Grégoire, Antoine to Picou, Florville Esq., Tampico, Mexico, September 18, 1857, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

42 Frilot, A.F. to Armstrong, L. Esq., Attakapas, La., May 27, 1858, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

43 Dupart, L. to Green, Wm Esq., Rouge, Baton La., May 28, 1858, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

44 Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, 3; Haiti also had particular significance for the French-speaking population of New Orleans. The city received the majority of St. Domingue's emigrés after the Haitian Revolution, including slaveholders (white and mulatto) and the slaves they brought away with them. The emigres at first sought refuge in Cuba, but were forced to resettle in New Orleans when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, threatening the safety of French subjects in the Spanish colony. In 1809 alone, some 5,800 of Haiti's emigres arrived from Cuba, and 4,000 of these were free blacks (affranchis). As a result of the influx of Haitian refugees, the number of free people of color in the city doubled, and many of these new arrivals became prominent members of New Orleans’ free black community. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice “People of Color in Louisiana, Part II,“ Journal of Negro History 2 (January 1917), 52; Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America, 4, 48; Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, 163–170.Google Scholar

45 Nicholls, David From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5. Evidence of Haiti's importance in the creation of black identity and resistance in other parts of the Americas surfaced throughout the nineteenth century. In Rio de Janiero, for example, slaves wore necklaces with the image of Dessalines etched on them just one year after the Haitian leader declared independence for St. Domingue. Reis, João José Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Arthur Brakel, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 48.Google Scholar

46 Bell, Cossé Revolution, 98–99. Cossé Bell points out that although Creoles of color in Louisiana did not have the freedom of expression of their French counterparts until the 1860s, the French literary movement “served as a vehicle for the expression of some of their feelings and attitudes” in the decades before the Civil War.Google Scholar

47 Sterkx, The Free Negro, 302; Desdunes, Our People and Our History, 112–113; Bell, Cossé Revolution, 86.Google Scholar

48 The original inscription read: “à Fabre Geffrard, temoinage de sympathie et d'admiration des compatriots de la Louisiane.” On the other side were the words “Union et Fraternité.” The group's departure was reported in the Daily Picayune (evening edition) June 22, 1859.Google Scholar

49 Redpath, James (ed.), Guide to Hayti (Boston: Haytien Bureau of Emigration, 1861).Google Scholar

50 Ibid, 168.Google Scholar

51 Bell, Cossé Revolution, 86.Google Scholar

52 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 56.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 53–54.Google Scholar

54 Ibid., 61–65.Google Scholar

55 “Hayti and Immigration Thither,” New Orleans Daily Picayune (afternoon edition), July 5, 1859.Google Scholar

56 New Orleans Daily Picayune, November 11, 1860.Google Scholar

57 “Local Intelligence, Emigration to Hayti,” New Orleans Daily Delta, July 21, 1859.Google Scholar

58 New Orleans Daily Picayune, August 14, 1859. The Daily Delta also reported that emigrants had returned from Port-au-Prince because “it didn't suit their fastidious tastes. We presume they are ‘highfalutin’ folks.” Though some did sail back to New Orleans in the first years of emigration, many of them returned, as the Picayune noted, just long enough to gather supplies and equipment. See Donald Everett, “Free People of Color in New Orleans,” 128.Google Scholar

59 Arthidore, L.C. to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 7, 1859, and Bordenave, Célicour to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

60 Cloud, Armand to Grégoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, September 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

61 Blandin, John to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO. Google Scholar

62 Reprinted in Redpath's Guide to Haiti was a list of queries directed to Geffrard, posed on behalf of “certain blacks and persons of color in the United States and Canada who are desirous of emigrating to Hayti.” This letter to Geffrard and his response were dated August of 1859, which suggests that the children may have seen this document before they wrote their letters to Grègoire. (The Guide itself was dated 1861.) The first question read: “Would Emigrants be subject to military duty? If so, how long and what kind of duty?” In the “Reply of the Government,” Geffrard states that “the Government, as an evidence of its good intentions in favor of emigration, has resolved to exempt the emigrants from military service. But this exemption shall not extend to their children when they have attained the proscribed age of drawing lots.” [Emphasis added.] It is not clear whether children traveling with their parents to Haiti would be considered “emigrants” and therefore exempt from this rule. The boys seem to have wanted very much to know if the rule might pertain to them. Redpath, Guide to Hayti.Google Scholar

63 The term “Creole” has a long and intricate history in Louisiana beginning in the early colonial period when the term was used to describe slaves born in the French colony rather than in Africa. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, black, white, and mixed-race native Louisianans called themselves “Creoles” to distinguish themselves from Anglo-Americans. In the 1820s, members of the growing population of free people of Afro-European descent began to claim a racial and ethnic identity distinct from both whites and enslaved blacks by referring to themselves as “Creoles of Color.” See Hall, Midlo Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 157.Google Scholar

64 Denis, Arthur to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti. October 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

65 Toussaint, T. to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

66 Blandin, John to Grègoire, A. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 7, 1859, Copybook I, AANO.Google Scholar

67 As further evidence of the relationship between the school's directors and Haiti, a letter signed “les amis de Geffrard“ arrived at the institution with eighteen dollars enclosed, money raised for the Catholic Institution at the church of St. Anne in memory of young Cora Geffrard. Journal des Seances de la direction de l'institution Catholique pour l'instruction des Orphelins dans l'indigence commencé le 23 de avril 1859, December 23, 1859, 26.Google Scholar

68 Denis, Arthur to Leonidas, J. Esq., Alexandrie, La., October 21, 1859, Copybook I, AANO. As other students had noted, many colonists decided against moving to Haiti. The colonization of Haiti by free people of color from the United States, according to one historian, ultimately failed because the government did not supply the emigrants with sufficient lands and supplies. See Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality, 245–247.Google Scholar

69 Lavigne must have gone to Haiti with his family, since the school directors hired a “Mr. S. Chézan” to replace “Mr. J. Lavigne” (the younger Lavigne's father or brother) “pour cause de départ“ in June of 1861. Séancebook II, 1 Juin 1861, 53. The student also noted that Lavigne left on the Laura, a ship that regularly sailed to Haiti in that period. See New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 30, 1861 also cited in Everett, “Free People of Color,” 129.Google Scholar

70 Bordenave, J. to Frilot, A. Esq., Metz, France, May 22, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.Google Scholar

71 Richard, T. to Lavigne, J. Esq., Port-au-Prince, Hayti, October 2, 1861, Copybook II, AANO.Google Scholar