NEW ORLEANS

In the spring of 1862, only a year after Louisiana had seceded, the Union commodore David Farragut pushed his fleet up the Mississippi to New Orleans. As he approached, bonfires set by retreating Confederates blazed along the levee. In short order, the Union major general Benjamin Butler landed troops on the wharves and occupied New Orleans. That moment captured in tableau three nascent writers: George Washington Cable stood at a shop door watching in dismay as Union troops spilled into the city. Captain John William De Forest marched his Union company toward Lafayette Square amid the jeers of townsfolk. Ten-year-old Grace King, peering down from her room high above Camp Street, saw the approaching troops and feared they would massacre her family.

These writers would later respond in very different ways to the Civil War and its aftermath in New Orleans, a period in which the fortunes and politics of the city were dramatically altered. Once the wealthiest city in the South, New Orleans forfeited access to its markets in the upper Mississippi Valley, in the Northeast, and in other nations. It was occupied for almost a year by "Beast" Butler, so called because he treated New Orleanians like a subjugated people and because he issued the infamous "woman order" stating that any woman who reviled federal troops would be dealt with like a prostitute.

As federal troops moved through outlying plantation country, many thousands of former slaves left their former owners and fled to "contraband camps," one of them in New Orleans. African American soldiers, who were recruited—and sometimes impressed—by the Union army, fought in many major Louisiana battles.

Federal military Reconstruction officially began in 1867, in part as a Northern reaction to "Black Codes" adopted by Southern legislatures to effectively return freedmen to slavery and in part as a response to the New Orleans riot of 30 July 1866, in which dozens of black Unionists were killed by police. The Reconstruction Acts disenfranchised any man who had voluntarily aided the Confederacy; the acts thus nominally and briefly increased African American political power in Louisiana. White racists seethed under a Republican state administration propped up by the federal government. This tension reached a pitch in 1874, when armed insurgents calling themselves the White League defeated metropolitan police and black militiamen in the streets of New Orleans. President Ulysses S. Grant sent federal troops into the city to restore the Republican government.

In 1876 a bizarre political compromise with the federal government allowed Louisiana Democrats to elect a Confederate war hero governor. The next year, federal troops left New Orleans, and Reconstruction, an abysmal failure in Louisiana, came to an end. In the wake of Reconstruction, African Americans quickly lost what little ground they had gained and under Bourbon reactionaries and their successors suffered degrading political and social conditions as racism silenced even the old paternalist voices.

Though still a major port, New Orleans remained a poor city. Its cultural makeup had been changing rapidly after the initial waves of "Americans" following the Louisiana Purchase in the early nineteenth century had begun to threaten Creole dominance. In the 1850s and 1860s, the city was flooded with Irish and German immigrants; by 1910, Italians made up about 30 percent of the population. White Creole wealth and influence gradually declined.

LITERATURE

George Washington Cable (1844–1925) was born in New Orleans to parents from the Northeast. In a Catholic city, he was reared a Presbyterian. When his widowed mother refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Union and fled the city during Butler's occupation, Cable joined the Confederate army and was twice wounded. After the war, he adopted liberal views on race, which he expressed in both fiction and nonfiction and which made him, by one account, "the most hated little man in New Orleans." In the 1880s, Cable moved to New England.

Cable's major fiction includes a story collection, Old Creole Days (1879), and his masterpiece, The Grandissimes (1880). Set in 1803–1804, when the Americans assumed power in New Orleans, The Grandissimes imports an American outsider, Joseph Frowenfeld, as a liberal commentator on white Creole pride and prejudice. Drawn into the alien world of Creole caste, Frowenfeld discovers a friend in the white Creole protagonist, Honoré Grandissime, whose wealthy and educated brother of the same name bears the ignominious suffix "f.m.c."—free man of color. The novel is both a traditional romance, in which the white Honoré courts and wins the white Creole Aurore Nancanou, and a realist indictment of the Creole caste system, in which the patriarch Agricole Fusilier reigns as the ignorant and proud embodiment of white Creole aristocracy—dueling, scheming, and oppressing the "niggahs"—while African slaves and mixed-race Creoles are shunned, mutilated, or murdered. Honoré f.m.c., the white Honoré's doppelgänger, gives his fortune to rescue his brother's finances and takes his own life. William Dean Howells (1837–1920) remarked that the novel's "blend of romance and reality . . . does no wrong to either component" (Turner, p. 99). Contemporary southern readers could not have missed parallels between the 1803 American takeover of Creole New Orleans and the recent Union occupation of the city. Cable's denunciation of racial prejudice, though temporally displaced, struck a Bourbon nerve. His depiction of white Creoles likewise offended a litterateur of their number, Adrien Rouquette, who lambasted Cable's critique in A Critical Dialogue between Aboo and Caboo (1880).

In 1885 Grace King (1852–1932), a New Orleans native but a Protestant of Alsatian descent, launched her literary career the night after a northern editor, Richard Watson Gilder, asked her why New Orleanians who, like herself, hated George Washington Cable so much, did not "write better." She took up the gauntlet, wrote the first of her stories, "Monsieur Motte," sold it to Princeton Review for good money, and became a writer. King was well read in nineteenth-century thinkers—Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, and Thomas Carlyle, among others. She moved in literary circles and was a close friend of Sam and Livy Clemens. King considered herself part of the larger realist movement, once avowing, "I am not a romanticist, I am a realist" (p. 398).

In her collection Balcony Stories (1893) and in her novel The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916), King worked out her Confederate apologetics with a foot in both camps. For the most part, she rejected the romantic love interest as a plot device and wrote instead of frustration, loss, aging, and death. In nuanced and restrained prose, she captured the speech, dress, habits, political opinions, and economic circumstances of her characters. Her manner is analytical, sometimes sententious, and rhetorically unsentimental. Her plots, often involving refugees, are typically driven by historical circumstance. And her insights into contemporary gender issues are often frank and progressive.

However, King's professed realism was tainted by her own tempered nostalgia for a slaveholding culture. Her Confederate sympathies, which arose from her family's painful experiences during the Civil War, blinded her to the economic circumstances that had led to the war and shut off sympathy for African Americans who did not submit to gracious servitude. In her fiction, meddling Yankees sundered the warm bond between master and slave and blighted the virtues of Louisiana's white Creole and American aristocracy. For example, in "A Crippled Hope," when Butler's Union forces invade New Orleans and free its slaves, a lame slave woman who nurses other slaves in a slave auction house finds that the soldiers, like her slave-trading master, deny her "some master whom she could have loved, some mistress whom she could have adored" (p. 117). In "La Grande Demoiselle," African American Union troops occupy the resplendent plantation home of Idalie Sainte Foy Mortemart des Islets; when the house burns, the troops carry her out in her chemise de nuit. King renders this tableau, which adumbrates Idalie's descent into poverty as a teacher of black children, with the objective restraint of a patrician who would not stoop to sensational Negrophobia. But the message is plain. "The Little Convent Girl," one of King's best stories, follows a young woman who has just lost her father as she journeys from a Cincinnati convent to New Orleans, "the terminus of the never" (p. 156), to meet her mother for the first time. The crew of the steamboat is astonished when the mother, a "colored" woman, comes to claim her daughter. When the young woman returns to the wharf a month later seeking comfort from the crew she had befriended, she is rebuffed and either jumps or falls into the Mississippi and drowns. Without censure or sentiment, King's treatment of the tragic mulatta figure creates a resonant sympathy for the young woman who lives in three worlds and belongs to none.

John William De Forest (1826–1906), a Connecticut Yankee by birth, temperament, and military allegiance, gave no quarter to the city he helped to occupy in 1862. In Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), he juxtaposed liberal New England ideals and reactionary southern ideals. De Forest draws his ideological lines broadly, depicting New Orleans as a Sodom and the South as a land of barbarians, root diggers, Hottentots, and jackasses, but he has been justly praised for the nervous, grisly realism of his battle scenes, unmatched by his contemporaries.

A New Orleans native of black, white, and possibly Native American ancestry, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), born Alice Moore, published Violets and Other Tales (1895) when she was twenty. Its most striking piece is an essay called "The Woman," which champions the independent working woman who escapes "a serfdom . . . which too often becomes galling and unendurable" (1:25). The writer recast some stories from Violets and added new ones in The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899). In this collection of spare and formally assured tales, she wrote primarily about multi-ethnic characters in and around New Orleans—usually small, lonely figures in melancholy circumstances. Dunbar-Nelson's tonal and stylistic restraint deflects the sentimental trajectory of her plots. She attends social detail and dialect with painterly exactitude and thrift but forfeits subjective complexity in the bargain. The racial composition of her Creole characters is often coded, so that local readers recognize mixed-race characters whom outsiders may read as unraced. Her social criticism is objective and subdued. A deadly labor melee between Irish longshoremen and black stevedores (based on labor riots in 1892) rages offstage in "Mr. Baptiste" as the title character, a Creole, is murdered by an Irish laborer for siding with the "negroes." But the motives of Mr. Baptiste, who may be a mixed-race character, are apparently selfish, and the pathos of his death obscures the racial tension behind it. In "Tony's Wife," the title character, who is not Tony's wife, suffers regular beatings from her brutal Italian "husband." On his deathbed, he refuses to marry her and gives his business and all his money to his brother. Blunting the sentimental potential of this tale, Dunbar-Nelson makes the protagonist "meek, pale, little, ugly, and German," a woman whose eyes flicker to life only when she learns that Tony will die. Though in the end she has clearly been cheated by Tony and by convention, the feminist strain voiced earlier in "The Woman" is here subdued by the author's aversion to sentimentality.

The best story of this collection is "Sister Josepha," in which an orphaned New Orleans girl of mixed race who has been left on the doorstep of a white convent takes orders after refusing the guardianship of a white couple because the husband leers at her. She finds her regimen at the convent bleak and intolerable. The cool narrator understands Sister Josepha's romantic yearnings for "the ethereal airiness of earthly joys" and her distaste for "the ugly garb, the coarse meats," yet grudges her an escape: "Sister Josepha did not know that the rainbow is elusive, and its colours but the illumination of tears; she had never been told that earthly ethereality is necessarily ephemeral, nor that bonbons and glacés, whether of the palate or of the soul, nauseate and pall upon the taste" (1:164). Alternatives to the convent may indeed have been bleak for a young female orphan of mixed race. In the end the young nun weeps as the heavy door of her convent closes upon "narrow, squalid Chartres Street." Dunbar-Nelson's stoical vision of New Orleans holds romantic carnality, uncertain racial identity, and cloistral austerity in grim suspension.

Born in Greece to a British citizen and a Greek mother, Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) spent ten years in New Orleans, beginning in 1878. He was an editor at both the Item and the Times-Democrat. He published "Gombo Zhèbes": A Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs (1885), a cookbook, and Chita: A Memory of Last Island (1889). The last is a lyrical, impressionistic novella about a girl who survives the 1856 hurricane that destroyed the resort of Ile Derniére. Though dramatically flawed, the book is a stylistic tour de force by the polyglot Hearn, who wrote lovely, if occasionally cloying, English and captured both the dialects and native languages of Louisiana's marsh cultures.

Kate Chopin (1851–1904) may have married into Louisiana at nineteen, when she moved with her husband to New Orleans in 1870, but her maternal rearing was St. Louis French Creole. Even her Irish father spoke French. The decade she spent in New Orleans and seven subsequent years in Clotierville before she returned to St. Louis provided urban Creole and rural Acadian material for an early novel, At Fault (1890); two collections of stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897); and her classic novella, The Awakening (1899). The novella, in which Chopin brought her considerable literary and scientific learning to bear upon the life of young Edna Pontellier, was received with a mixture of praise for its formal accomplishment and censure for its moral latitude. The protagonist, a Kentucky Protestant by birth, marries a bourgeois New Orleans Creole, grows dissatisfied in her marriage, and awakens to her position in society as a mother and as a possession of her husband. With regard to sex, Creole society is, paradoxically, both verbally frank and conventionally rigid. This tension, coinciding with Edna's social and sexual awakening, abrades her romantic personality, and she drowns herself at the beach resort of Grand Isle.

Other New Orleans writers of the period included the local colorist Ruth McEnery Stuart, the historians Charles Gayarré and Rodolphe Desdunes, and the Bourbon journalist and fiction writer Sallie Rhett Roman.

CULTURE

Serial publications in New Orleans waned during the Civil War. The Picayune was the only English-language newspaper to endure it. Other English-language post-bellum newspapers included the Item, the States, the Times, the Democrat, and the Times-Democrat, which became the Times-Picayune in 1914. For almost ten years, beginning in 1889, the New Orleans Crusader, an African American newspaper, fought Bourbon oppression. The German-language New Orleans Deutsche Zeitung, founded in 1848, was succeeded fifty-nine years later by the Neue Deutsche Zeitung, which was published until 1917. New Orleans newspapers often printed serialized novels, such as Sally Rhett Roman's Tonie (Times-Democrat, 1900) and Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein's The Mysteries of New Orleans (Zeitung, 1854–1855). Influential magazines of the period included De Bow's Review, published from 1846 until 1880, and the literary Comptes-Rendus de L'Athéné Louisianais.

From 1880 until a massive failed strike in 1892, New Orleans witnessed a large growth of labor organizations and a number of small strikes. Black and white unions often competed against one another, a tension Dunbar-Nelson dramatized in "Mr. Baptiste."

Just after the turn of the century, yellow fever outbreaks that had plagued New Orleans throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century were ended when the city's open gutters were salted and its tens of thousands of open drinking water cisterns were screened and oiled.

A number of universities were established in or near New Orleans between 1860 and 1920: the Louisiana State Agricultural and Mechanical College (1874), later known as Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge; Tulane University (1884) and its adjunct H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College for Women (1886); Loyola College and Academy (1904); St. Mary's Dominican Academy (1861); three African American institutions, Dillard University (1869), Xavier University (1915), and Southern University (1880, later Southern University at Baton Rouge); and New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (1917).

The theater, always vigorous in New Orleans, also revived after the war. Major venues after 1880 included the Grand Opera House, the Crescent, and the Tulane, and after 1900 the Elysium, Lyric, Schubert, and Baldwin theaters and Welch's Hippodrome. Plays by black actors and writers appeared at the Orleans, Pythian Hall, Lyric, and Palace theaters.

Storyville, the notorious lower Basin Street district of legalized prostitution, thrived from 1897 until 1917, when the Navy Department effectively shut it down. For a quarter, patrons could purchase the Blue Book, which listed all working prostitutes, black and white. At the district's pitch about two thousand prostitutes worked in over two hundred houses.

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, one of the first great jazz pianists, played at least one of the Storyville houses. Other legendary figures of jazz (or "jass") music—Louis Armstrong, Buddy Bolden, King Oliver—built on an improvisational syncopated style that had evolved earlier in the nineteenth century from (among other sources) martial music played by roving brass bands. Remarkably, the diverse ethnic voices of antebellum New Orleans and the liberal voices of its postwar era survived Bourbon rule—in the fiction of Dunbar-Nelson, in Hearn's polyglot narratives, in Morton's jazz, and elsewhere—only slightly the worse for wear.

see alsoThe Awakening; New South; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore. The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Edited by Gloria T. Hull. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Howells, William Dean. Heroines of Fiction. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1901.

King, Grace. Balcony Stories. 1893. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1968.

King, Grace. "To Fred Lewis Pattee." 19 January 1915. In Grace King of New Orleans, edited by Robert Bush. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

Turner, Arlin. George W. Cable: A Biography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1956.

Secondary Works

Bush, Robert. Grace King: A Southern Destiny. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Davis, Edwin Adams. Louisiana: A Narrative History. 3rd ed. Baton Rouge, La.: Claitor's, 1971.

Gargano, James W., ed. Critical Essays on John William De Forest. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981.

Kirby, David. Grace King. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Larson, Susan. The Booklover's Guide to New Orleans. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Leavitt, Mel. A Short History of New Orleans. San Francisco: Lexikos, 1982.

Light, James F. John William De Forest. New York: Twayne, 1965.

Martin, Wendy, ed. New Essays on "The Awakening." New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Perry, Carolyn, and Mary Louise Weaks. The History of Southern Women's Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

Richardson, Thomas J., ed. "The Grandissimes": Centennial Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981.

Rubin, Louis D. George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic. New York: Pegasus, 1969.

Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Taylor, Joe Gray. Louisiana: A History. New York: Norton, 1984.

Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. New York: Morrow, 1990.

Kris Lackey