Antebellum Louisiana I - Politics, Education and Entertainment

Antebellum Louisiana:
Politics, Education, and Entertainment

Louisiana Politics

Cultural differences and individual personalities, rather than party platforms and philosophies, defined political lines in antebellum Louisiana. Conflict between Anglo and Latin residents and between northern and southern sections of the state infused most political issues. Overall, wealthy planters and their merchant allies dominated state government during this time.

Map of LA. and the Three Municipalities

Map of Louisiana and the Three Municipalities
c. 1850
Sections reproduced from J. H. Colton and Company, The City of New Orleans, 1855
This map shows the general political divisions between strongholds of Democrats and Whigs in north and south Louisiana and between Latins and Anglos in the New Orleans municipalities.

In general, the Florida parishes (formerly English and Spanish possessions) and north Louisiana supported Anglo-American candidates of the Democratic party. Many of the voters living in these areas were Protestants of English or American descent. On the other side of the political arena stood the wealthier planters and their merchant allies from the sugar parishes of south Louisiana. Primarily Catholics and native-born descendents of French and Spanish colonists, south Louisiana voters supported issues championed by the Whig party and its candidates.

New Orleans reflected on a smaller scale the statewide conflict between Anglo and Latin factions. In 1836 the city was divided into three municipalities. Democrats drew support from an immigrant and Creole coalition of Catholics in the First and Third Municipalities. The Whig party and its successor, the American or so-called Know-Nothing party, attracted Protestant, native-born Anglo-Americans who mainly resided in the Second Municipality.

The Whig party dissolved in the 1850s, when slavery emerged as a national issue and the party could no longer retain support in both the North and South. Many former Whigs in Louisiana and other southern states joined the American party, whose members were called "Know-Nothings" because when asked about their secretive rituals, they replied, "I know nothing." The American party was anti-Catholic and anti-foreign, but Louisiana Know-Nothings downplayed the first and emphasized the latter. Several times in the 1850s riots broke out between Know-Nothings and Democrats over the issue of voter fraud, with both sides fraudulently registering and intimidating voters.

In 1846 legislators voted to move the site of the state capital from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Voters wanted to locate the capital outside of New Orleans so that not all power would be centralized in the Crescent City. Some also believed that the many diversions available in New Orleans distracted legislators from the business of running the state. Four years later workers completed the capital building, one of the best examples of neo-Gothic architecture in Louisiana. Baton Rouge remained the center of state government until the Civil War, when two governments operated: the Confederate in Shreveport and the Union in New Orleans. The Constitution of 1879 restored Baton Rouge as the state capital, where it has remained ever since.

Old State House, Baton Rouge, Louisiana
c. 1880

One of the most prominent political officials of the day was Zachary Taylor, who in 1848 became the only resident ever elected president. Taylor, a popular war hero, lead troops in the Mexican War of 1846-1848. Many troops from Louisiana fought in the Mexican War under General Taylor, and the military training that many of them, including Lieutenant P. G. T. Beauregard, used in that war would prove valuable a few years later in the Civil War.

Zachary Taylor
William Garl Brown, Jr.
1847
Gift of Hugh Flynn
This portrait was painted while Taylor was on campaign in Mexico.

Education: Private and Public

In antebellum Louisiana, as in years before, most people received no formal education at all. Tutors, private academies, and parochial schools trained the few who could afford an education. Some parents sent their children, free black as well as white, to the North or to Europe for schooling.

Catholic parochial schools remained the most numerous during the antebellum period as they had during colonial days, but Protestant schools rose in number, especially in north Louisiana.

New Orleans launched the first public school system in the state in 1841. From these first schools, public education spread throughout Louisiana, but very slowly and sporadically. At the time of the Civil War few parishes in Louisiana had public schools.

John McDonogh, a millionaire planter and merchant who had moved from Baltimore to New Orleans prior to the Louisiana Purchase, gave the New Orleans public school system a major financial boost. Upon his death in 1850, McDonogh's will left half his estate to New Orleans and half to Baltimore for the education of white and free black children. New Orleans established the McDonogh Fund with its settlement of $704,440, using disbursements from the fund to build several public schools, called McDonogh Schools, only one of which was completed before the Civil War.

Authorities excluded all African Americans from Louisiana's public schools and after 1830 even prohibited free persons from teaching slaves to read and write. However, the free black community of New Orleans, which numbered almost 20,000 in 1840, organized its own schools. The Catholic church also provided education for African Americans. Carmelite and Ursuline nuns taught free black children in classes separate from whites. In 1842 church leaders incorporated the Sisters of the Holy Family, an order of African-American nuns, who took charge of a parochial school in Faubourg Tremé. Black philanthropist Thomy Lafon built a home for orphans and donated it to the sisters in the 1860s.

Many of Louisiana's so-called colleges were little more than glorified high schools and only admitted men as students. Louisiana's first institution of higher learning was the College of Orleans, which operated between 1811 and 1826 in Faubourg Tremé in New Orleans. Other colleges and academies were incorporated during the antebellum period, including ones in Opelousas, Convent, and Jackson. Today, two major Louisiana universities trace their beginnings to the antebellum period: Tulane University and Louisiana State University.

Tulane University began as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 and was designated the University of Louisiana in 1845. State monies were never adequate to operate the school, and in the 1880s it became the private Tulane University with a large gift from philanthropist Paul Tulane.

University of La.

University of Louisiana
B. M. Norman
1848
Courtesy of Tulane University Archives
This school, forerunner of Tulane University, was first located on University Place in New Orleans, a site now occupied by the Fairmont Hotel.

Louisiana State University started as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, which opened in 1860 in Pineville. Its first superintendent was William Tecumseh Sherman, who along with his students abandoned the school during the Civil War. After fire destroyed the campus in 1869, authorities relocated the school to Baton Rouge and renamed it Louisiana State University.

Louisiana Seminary

Louisiana State Seminary
Colonel S. H. Lockett
1860
LSU Photograph Collection, RG # A5000, Louisiana State University Archives,
LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
The Louisiana State Seminary was originally founded as a military, agricultural, and mechanical college. The "Fighting Tigers" of LSU are said to have been named for the tiger mascot of the Washington Artillery, many of whose members attended the university after the Civil War.

Like white women in most of the South, Louisiana women rarely had a formal education, and when they did, it was in institutions separate from men. The major colleges did not admit women, and most private and public elementary schools had separate buildings or floors for male and female students. Female religious orders educated many of Louisiana's young women, particularly at the Between Convent in New Orleans and at the several Academies of the Sacred Heart around the state.

Entertainment: Something for Everyone

The love that colonial Louisiana had for music, dance, and performance flourished in the antebellum era. Newcomers and travelers to the state traced this emphasis on amusement to the Latin nature of south Louisiana, especially New Orleans. Like Europeans, most Catholic residents of south Louisiana practiced what is known as the "Continental Sunday," attending Mass on Sunday morning and socializing in the afternoon and evening. This custom, like many others common in Louisiana, shocked Protestants and visitors from the North, especially New England. In the mid-1830s Henry Didimus New Orleans's Sunday habits to a northern friend:

It is the Sabbath! A Sabbath in New Orleans! here the noisiest day of the week--so full of strange contrasts of the grave and gay, saints and sinners, each engaged in his vocation. It is not the Sabbath of New England.

One of antebellum America's great theater towns, New Orleans was also the earliest, and for many years the only, city on the American frontier featuring regular opera productions. Throughout the antebellum period, residents and visitors to New Orleans could attend plays in French, English, or German.

The oldest playhouse in the Crescent City was the St. Peter Street Theater, built originally in 1792 and reconstructed in 1804. Workers completed the St. Philip Street Theater in 1807, with a seating capacity of 700. Productions at both theaters were in French. The first American theater opened in 1823 on Camp Street, and in 1839 German immigrants built a theater on Magazine Street to offer German plays. The Théâtre de la Renaissance, which opened in 1840, had an all-black cast, orchestra and musical director.

The French Opera House opened in 1859 on the corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Streets in New Orleans, with seating for over 2,000 guests. Laborers and artisans constructed it in less than six months by working night and day, aided by light from large fires built in the streets. Before the French Opera House burned in 1919, it was home to hundreds of public performances as well as many of the city's lavish Carnival balls.

Interior of the French Opera House
Louis T. Fritch
c. 1910
Gift of Louis T. Fritch

In addition to plays and operas, audiences could attend balls, concerts, and variety acts at the many theaters in New Orleans. Most places of public entertainment segregated their patrons by race. Theaters sold less desirable seats to slaves and free blacks, confining them to balconies or galleries. As in the later part of the colonial period, ballrooms held dances for whites and free people of color in separate halls or on different nights of the week.

Most famous of all were the "Quadroon Balls," where white men met young light-skinned women of color. According to legend, free black mothers placed their daughters with eligible white bachelors, who agreed to provide them with suitable housing, clothing, and spending money. Several of these arrangements resulted in long-term relationships and children.

Dances, music, and parades also accompanied the Carnival season in southern Louisiana. This was a carryover from the colonial era, but in the antebellum period Carnival balls and parades started taking on their modern forms. Groups of maskers began using vehicles to parade in 1837. In 1857 nineteen men established the first formal Carnival organization in New Orleans, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, which flourished into the 1990s.

Rural slaves gathered on neighboring plantations and farms and urban slaves met at market sites and other open areas to dance. In the antebellum period more of Louisiana's slaves were natives of the United States than of Africa. However, they retained African customs and fused them with American ones to create new African-American dance steps, lyrics, music, and instruments.

On Sundays, their day off, slaves from New Orleans and the surrounding countryside gathered at large expanses near the edge of town to exchange goods, news, and dance steps. In 1819, English-born architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe witnessed one such Sunday gathering, whare he saw this scene:

An old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand & fingers. The other drum was an open staved thing held between the knees & beaten in the same manner. They made an incredible noise. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.

The Bamboula
E. W. Kemble
February 1886
From Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine
The name of this African dance is derived from the large drums, called bamboulas, used during the performance.

Traveling shows brought plays, concerts, and variety acts to the smaller towns outside of New Orleans. Although many Protestant churches in rural northern Louisiana discouraged dancing, Acadians, or Cajuns, in the south continued to enjoy fais do-dos (public community dances) and bals de maisons (private dancing parties) as they had during colonial times.

New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk was the first musician from the United States to win worldwide praise and recognition for his compositions, many of which were based on Creole, African-American, and other native Louisiana melodies. Gottschalk's father was Jewish immigrant from England, and his mother was the daughter of Saint-Domingue refugees. One of his most famous pieces is Bamboula, a composition influenced by songs he learned as a child from his maternal grandmother and his African-American nurse, both Saint-Domingue refugess.

Berceuse
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
1862
Gift of Mrs. Anthony Guarino
This sheet music bears the likeness of Gottschalk.

Edmond Dédé, the son of two free blacks from the West Indies, was also one of New Orleans's leading musicians. Born in New Orleans in 1829, Dédé studied the violin there and later in Mexico, England, and France. He conducted the classical orchestra of L'Acazar in Bordeaux, France, and wrote more than forty compositions before his death in 1903.

Jenny Lind, the world-renowned Swedish Nightingale, was among the many touring attractions who performed in Louisiana. Accompanying Lind on her grand American tour was her manager, P. T. Barnum of circus fame. People from all over the Mississippi Valley converged upon New Orleans to hear Lind sing. During her stay, Lind was the houseguest of the Baroness de Pontalba in a townhouse specially furnished for the singer. After Lind left New Orleans, the Baroness auctioned off the furniture and personal items left in the townhouse to Lind's many adoring fans.

Jenny Lind
c. 1850

Louisiana native Adah Isaacs Menken earned acclaim as an actress on both sides of the Atlantic. A child prodigy who spoke several languages, wrote poetry, and sculpted, Menken made her acting debut in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1857 at the age of twenty-two. She performed in most major United States cities and in London and Paris. During her short lifetime of thirty-three years, Menken's four marriages and divorces gained her as much notoriety as her acting did.

Adah Isaacs Menken
William Henry Baker
c. 1860