A German's Perspective of Louisiana's Côte des Allemands in 1802

The Heidels (Haydels), founders of Evergreen Plantation, were among the first settlers of Louisiana’s German Coast. Located upriver from New Orleans, the Côte des Allemands, as the French called it, was home to Germans attracted to Louisiana by John Law’s campaign to help settle the struggling colony in 1721. John Law was the head of the Company of the Indies, which was overseeing colonial Louisiana. In an effort to help settle the colony and make it economically viable, Law sought agricultural workers to farm his landholdings, known as concessions. Law distributed pamphlets that described Louisiana as a paradise, a land of opportunity where newcomers could thrive. This appealed to a struggling population in areas of Germany, Switzerland, and Alsace-Lorraine, an area that had both German and French influences. They had been demoralized by war and their land forcibly taken from them. They looked to Louisiana to start a new life.

Unfortunately Law’s idyllic portrait of Louisiana proved false. From the start, the Germans faced serious hardship. Disease and death characterized their journey aboard the “Pest Ships” that transported them to Louisiana. Six thousand Germans left French ports for Louisiana. Only two thousand survived the voyage. Upon arrival, they discovered that Louisiana possessed a brutal climate, was disease-ridden, and lacked basic food and supplies. Law was a fraud, and the Company of the Indies a failure.

Yet the Germans made the best of things and set to work establishing small farms that would ultimately be successful. They soon began bringing their produce to market in New Orleans. Many believe that the Germans’ food supply prevented residents of the city from starving. Without their hard work, the colony would not have survived.

A letter written by a German immigrant in 1802 provides a glimpse of life on the German Coast just prior to the Louisiana Purchase. It is unique in that it was written by a German drawn to the colony long after the initial wave of Germans had arrived. Johann Joachim Lagemann, born in Germany in 1757, emigrated to America in 1785. His brother Heinrich Peter Lagemann had been charged with paying for Johann’s university studies, but the money did not arrive regularly. This made it impossible for him to continue his studies and probably led to his decision to travel to Louisiana to seek other opportunities. He found an already well-established community on the German Coast, where the early settlers had intermarried with French and later Acadians.

Several years after he arrived in Louisiana, he wrote to his brother of his marriage, his new home, and his impressions of Louisiana. What follows is a transcription of his letter.

From Mathew Carey's "General Atlas;" one of the first maps of Louisiana after statehood in 1812, Louisiana State Museum Historical Map Collection.

Beloved Brother, and remaining relatives and friends;

One other thing I must let you know: that I am still alive, where I live and that (thank God!) My present circumstances are very bearable.  I live on the Mississippi, 13 hours over New Orleans. (Lat: 30N, Long: 2.16 E).  Northside of the river, Cote des Allemans [German Coast], paroisse St. Jean Baptiste [St. John the Baptist parish].

February 28, 1800 I was married to Catharina Vickner, widow Marchand, with two children: Johann Baptist, age 7 and Catharina age 4 and a wealth of 15000, and what’s more, we live in unity and happiness together.  Nov. 28 my daughter Magdalene Celeste was born.

My wife’s father Adam Vickner, her mother Margareta Tracgern, both are out of two of the first and most numerous families here.

As I write this, we are subject to Spain, free from all taxes and tributes, and are bothered by nothing, since all are a member in the militia for our own safety, because of the blacks, for there is degradation of the human soul here: slavery-----we have only 5 black slaves, who work the fields, and 4 little ones, some have hundreds.

The fields yield: rice, Indian corn, Indigo, sugar, cotton, fruits, as you know it in Germany there is none, only oranges, peaches and figs.  Garden-produce is available year-round.  Caterpillars and other damaging insects are great inconveniences.  The great heat in summer, the quick change of the weather are dangerous to health and life, especially to foreigners.

All tradesmen are free, everybody does what he can.

The only salvation providing religion is only a shadowplay here of the true Roman Catholic.  No other church has public service; but freedom of conscience goes into the widths, even into the crazy.

The true spirit of commerciality reigns supreme!  The right and moral value of a person is measured by the size of his moneybag—the scoundrel who can deceive and cheat most is called a “Homme bien poli” that is, a man, who knows hot to live.

What is called rightfully pressing poverty, does not exist, thank God!  Everyone can make enough to get by,—slavery is barbarical enough, but not as tyrannical as the unfortunate serfdom in the civilized Holstein by far.  For the nights and the Sundays are for them, and necessary clothing and board have to be given them, yet happy is the land that knows no slavery, for it is a pest for morals, insolence, stealing, and all shame and vice are rampant among the people—they are slaves and make their masters into slaves too, or relentless, unmerciful barbarians and avengers.

The main language is French, English, Spanish, German, Cathalone is spoken too.

I never did write, and I suppose I have been forgotten long ago, but I still mean to take a trip to Germany, but I am and will never be well at sea—so I fear my illness more than the sea, and my wife shows much reluctance—the otherworld will reunite us. . . .

Aux Allemans

March 1, 1802

Johann Joachim Lagemann

***Johann Joachim Lagemann’s letter can be found in the Manuscripts holdings of the Louisiana Division at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library.

Tomb of Anastasie Lagemann Rodrigue, Johann Lagemann’s daughter, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church cemetery, Edgard, Louisiana.

The Arrival of the First Africans in Louisiana

The first slave ships from Africa arrived in Louisiana in 1719, only a year after the founding of New Orleans.  Twenty-three ships brought slaves to Louisiana in the French period alone, almost all embarking prior to 1730. The need for labor on the large concessions proved so great that officials found themselves unable to satisfy the colonists’ demand for slaves. Thus, the large number of slaves brought over to supply colonists with free labor soon resulted in enslaved Africans outnumbering free whites.  In 1741, four African slaves lived in the colony for every 1.2 free white.  Although by the end of French rule, the ratio had balanced out to 4.6 slaves for every 3.7 free people, slaves still existed as the majority and would continue to make up a large percentage of Louisiana’s population for the next century.

This imbalanced population combined with high mortality, the threat of conflict with Native Americans, shortages of food and goods, and isolation produced a colony in which African, French, and Spanish cultures blended to create a unique culture known as Creole.  Because most of the Africans who first arrived in Louisiana were of one nation, the Bambara, they succeeded in preserving their language and culture and, through their solidarity, ultimately acted as an Africanizing influence on Louisiana.  European colonists, aware of their precarious position in the colony, were inclined to work together with slaves and afford them some rights under the Code Noir.

While the system was certainly brutal for African slaves, the harsh conditions of life in Louisiana resulted in difficulties for all settlers.  Since many of the colonists were themselves rejected by French society and forced into exile in Louisiana as criminals or debtors, historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall states, “Africans arrived in an extremely fluid society where a socio-racial hierarchy was ill defined and hard to enforce.” Hall expertly sums up the situation in colonial Louisiana, writing, “Desperation transcended race and even, to some extent, status, leading to cooperation among diverse peoples.” Though the arrival of Anglo-Americans with the Louisiana Purchase resulted in stricter laws governing slavery and narrower views in terms of race, Louisiana society would remain more diverse, fluid, and racially ambiguous than the other Southern slave states.

NOTES:

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo.  Africans in Colonial Louisiana.  Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA: 1992, 57, 59, 64, 10, 131.

The Code Noir was established in 1724 to regulate slavery in colonial Louisiana.  The Code Noir stated that slaves were to be instructed in the Catholic faith, given food and clothing allowances, and allowed to rest on Sundays and the right to petition a public prosecutor if they were mistreated.  Also, young children had to be sold with their mothers.  The Code Noir prohibited slaves from owning property or testify against whites.  For more on the Code Noir see Schafer, Judith Kelleher.  Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana.  Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, LA: 1994, 1-2.

Other historians, such as Peter M. Caron and Gilbert C. Din challenge Hall’s assertion that the Bambara tribe from the Senegambia region made up the majority of slaves sent to colonial Louisiana.  Instead, Caron and Din state that bambara was a term used throughout Africa and that often Africans in colonial Louisiana were imprecisely labeled with the generic term bambara.  However, even if the origin of slaves was more diverse, the profound influence of Africans on Creole culture cannot be denied.  See Din, Gilbert C.  Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in  Louisiana, 1763-1803.  Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX: 1999, 5-6.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SLAVE COMMUNITY

Evergreen Plantation provides an excellent model of the evolution of Louisiana’s slave society from the colonial era into the early national and then antebellum periods.  In 1790, upon the death of her husband Pierre, Magdelaine Haydel Becnel opened his succession.  An inventory was made of the Becnels’ property.  Surviving records document a total of fourteen slaves.  All of the Becnels’ slaves were described as negroes (black) with the exception of twenty-six year old Therese, listed as a metis, or of an indeterminate mixture of European and Native American ancestry.  Though worth 350 piastres, Therese was “granted her freedom by the authority of a judge due to her Indian heritage,” in keeping with Spanish laws of the time.  By 1790, Indian slavery was illegal and was nearing an end in practice. 

The Becnels’ also had a family group of slaves, including a mother, Marie Joseph, and her two sons and two daughters, worth together 650 piastres.  As ordered by the Code Noir, Marie Joseph and her children were inventoried together and could not be sold separately, as the children appeared to be under the age of ten. Eight male slaves were included in the inventory, valued at a total of 2850 piastres.  All possessed French names, with the exception of Tetemac, and ranged from twenty to thirty years of age.  None of the men were Creole, or born in the colony. Two were Bambara, two Fulbe/Pular, and the rest of various African groups, including Mandingo, Moor, Soso, and Konkomba.  Four shared the Mande dialect or language, while the other four spoke another West African language.

By 1810, Magdelaine Becnel significantly increased her wealth through sugarcane production, a burgeoning new crop due to Etienne de Bore’s successful crystallization of sugar on a commercial scale in 1795. According to the St. John the Baptist parish census of 1810, Magdelaine Becnel owned forty slaves, making her the largest slaveholder of the parish’s twenty-five households headed by women. In the 1820 census, she appeared as “Widow Becnel and Son,” indicating that she had made her son a partner in a plantation that included ninety slaves, seventy-three of whom were engaged in agricultural labor.  Thirty of the fifty women on the plantation and twenty-five of the forty men there were between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five.  There were ten children of each gender, and ten women over forty-five as compared with only five men over forty-five.

Upon Magdelaine’s death in 1830, a significant portion of her inventoried estate consisted of ninety-four slaves.  With twenty-seven female slaves and sixty-seven male slaves on the plantation, the sex ratio was severely skewed.  While most of the men worked in the cane fields as carters, plough hands, or laborers, most of the women functioned as domestics, serving as cooks, children’s nurses, washerwomen, and maids.  Some of the slaves were afflicted with entropied limbs, including Albert and Lenhem, whose right hands were damaged, and Cloe, whose feet did not function.  Several American male field hands were listed as being “fourteen years in the country” or “eight years in the country,” suggesting that they were familiar with the labor associated with a sugar cane plantation and had adapted to life in Creole Louisiana.  This detail may have been mentioned to entice buyers to pay more for them, as Creole slaves often fetched higher prices than American. 

Of special interest is Sally, a thirty-year-old American negresse who was “good for nothing” and worth only 5 piastres, the lowest priced slave under the age of sixty.  Perhaps she was physically or mentally handicapped, considered defiant, or a habitual runaway.  Magdelaine’s estate inventory contained another aberration: Sam, a thirty-year-old American griffe listed with his two-year-old child, together worth 400 piastres.  Usually slave children were inventoried with their mothers and when a mother was absent due to sale or death, the child was listed alone as an orphan.  This child, whose name was omitted in place of the classification “orphan,” was estimated with his father, indicating that they would remain together as a family unit.

Nearly three decades later, Magdelaine’s great-grandson, Lezin Becnel, and his brother Michel were operating the plantation, which now had a work force of ninety-six adult slaves and twenty-one slave children, for a total of 117 enslaved individuals.  With sixty-seven adult male slaves and twenty-nine adult female slaves, the sex ratio on the plantation was still skewed in favor of women.  In contrast, there were six male children and fifteen female children.  Sixteen of these slaves served as domestics, probably managed by Amelia Becnel, Lezin’s wife.  Of these sixteen, ten were women, emphasizing that house slaves were typically female.  While the slaves’ names remained primarily French, some names indicate the Anglo-American influence and the influx of American slaves, who often had last names from previous owners, including Starling, Tom Brown, and William Boone.

 On the eve of the Civil War, the Becnels had amassed $150,000 in real estate and $125,000 in personal property. Evergreen had grown into a major plantation complex and could be considered representative of a typical Creole plantation of its time.