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.