All her life Catherine said she was from Virginia. Even at her death, she still identified that state as her home. It was a fact she carried with her through every sale and every decade. Her Virginia roots were something she made known to her children. Yet the farthest back Catherine can be traced through written records is Mobile, Alabama. The paper trail on her stops, but it is probable that she was sold south from Virginia as a young girl, a common practice at the time. Louisiana had laws preventing the sale of children under the age of ten, but Virginia and other states did not. She could have been taken from her family and sold at a very young age. Or she may have been brought South by a slave trader once she entered her teenage years and purchased by James Crawford.
Crawford, a commission merchant, who worked as a factor and agent for cotton planters in Alabama, brought Catherine to the New Orleans slave market to be sold on August 8, 1847. Crawford had her “imported into the state,” and the sale was conducted by Elihu Cresswell, representing Crawford and acting as his agent. Elihu Cresswell was a well-known slave trader with a slave depot on Common Street, where Catherine was probably held. She was purchased by Charles Van Dyke, a ships’s captain, and his wife Nathalie. Catherine was sixteen years old, and this was at least the second time she had been sold. It would not be the last.
Common Street in New Orleans, once the location of a slave depot.
Image courtesy of www.neworleansslavetrade.oncell.com
Catherine had been the property of the Van Dykes for a year and four months when they decided to sell her. Just before Christmas 1848, Jean Pierre Barrere bought her from them. Barrere was a butcher and a very violent man. The Daily Crescent reported on May 11, 1848 that he had slapped a man and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Catherine had arrived in his household just one month before he married his wife Pauline, who a few years later went before a court of law and stated that Barrere was “guilty of ill treatment and outrageous conduct toward her.” He had assaulted and beaten his wife regularly and “menaced her of killing her.” Once he tried to murder her with a sword until a passing neighbor intervened. He had also “broken to pieces” all of the furniture in their bedroom to use to harm her. If this man behaved like this toward his wife, how might he have treated Catherine, the enslaved woman who was his property? It is likely that Catherine was also a victim of abuse during her time with Barrere. At one point Barrere sold her to Louis Cantin, but then Cantin sold her back to Barrere. It’s possible this was to prevent her seizure due to debt.
Catherine’s second purchase by Barrere occurred on February 12, 1849. She was sold as “a first rate seamstress, good washer and ironer, good house servant.” She also spoke both French and English.
Six months later, Barrere sold her for good, this time to Juan Ferran. She was sold with her three and a half month old son Charles. Ferran only owned her and her baby for a year and four months before selling them. Catherine encountered a familiar, though probably unwelcome figure: Elihu Cresswell, the slave trader who had acted as agent for her former owner and oversaw her first sale in New Orleans. On December 21, 1850, Cresswell purchased Catherine and her son Charles for $675. She was described as “a mulatress slave. . .aged about eighteen years sold as a first rate seamstress together with her child. . .a mulatto aged about three and a half months.” Throughout the seemingly endless cycle of buying and selling that Catherine endured, her age and that of her child were estimated and sometimes erroneously recorded.
Elihu Cresswell held Catherine and her infant son in his slave depot for only two months before he would again sell her. This would be the seventh time Catherine was sold in three and a half years. This bears repeating. In just three and a half years she had endured the sale process seven times. In the course of her entire lifetime, she had probably been sold eight or nine times. On February 7, 1851, Cresswell met with the agent of Lezin Becnel, owner of a sugar plantation in St. John the Baptist parish, to finalize the sale. Becnel paid $900 for Catherine, an eighteen-year-old mulatresse, and Charles, her mulatto baby again presented as three or four months of age. This would be the last time Catherine would ever be sold.
Final bill of sale for Catherine
New Orleans Notarial Archives, Achille Chiapella, Sale of Slaves Elihu Cresswell to Lezin Becnel; February 7, 1851, Vol. 22 #89. Courtesy of Chelsey Richard Napoleon, Clerk of Civil District Court, Parish of Orleans.
Elihu Cresswell died on May 29th of that same year. Had he held on to Catherine for three more months, she would have been freed. In his will, Cresswell freed all slaves in his possession at the time of his death. The executor of his will brought them up North to live in New York, a free state. Not only were they no longer enslaved, but they were in a place where their children and grandchildren would never experience the future Jim Crow South.
Catherine joined the Becnel household on Evergreen Plantation, a big change from the urban location in which she had lived for three years. Her son Charles was baptized at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in December. One week after his baptism at the church, he was buried in its cemetery. The priest noted in the record for the funeral that Charles was “around fifteen months old, son of Kate.” It was a name she would often use, perhaps the name her mother had called her long ago. It is likely her thoughts turned to the mother from whom she had been taken. Now she endured the tragic loss of her own baby son.
CATHERINE Part Two will explore her life on Evergreen Plantation and introduce her children and her relationship with Lezin Becnel.