Imagining the Creole City

The Rise of Literary Culture in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

Rien Fertel

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780807158265
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807158258
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Social Sciences

In the early years of the nineteenth century, the burgeoning cultural pride of white Creoles in New Orleans intersected with America's golden age of print, to explosive effect. Imagining the Creole City reveals the profusion of literary output -- histories and novels, poetry and plays -- that white Creoles used to imagine themselves as a unified community of writers and readers.Rien Fertel argues that Charles Gayarré's English-language histories of Louisiana, which emphasized the state's dual connection to America and to France, provided the foundation of a white Creole print culture predicated on Louisiana's exceptionalism. The writings of authors like Grace King, Adrien Rouquette, and Alfred Mercier consciously fostered an image of Louisiana as a particular social space, and of themselves as the true inheritors of its history and culture. In turn, the forging of this white Creole identity created a close-knit community of cosmopolitan Creole elites, who reviewed each other's books, attended the same salons, crusaded against the popular fiction of George Washington Cable, and worked together to preserve the French language in local and state governmental institutions. Together they reimagined the definition of "Creole" and used it as a marker of status and power.By the end of this group's era of cultural prominence, Creole exceptionalism had become a cornerstone in the myth of Louisiana in general and of New Orleans in particular. In defining themselves, the authors in the white Creole print community also fashioned a literary identity that resonates even today.

1

Charles Gayarré and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir

Procuring … the higher branches of literature.
—Charles Gayarré

“The history of Louisiana is eminently poetical.”¹ As these words reverberated within the brick walls of the Methodist church, the members in the audience that early spring evening in 1847 undoubtedly nodded in agreement and satisfaction. In New Orleans, history at times must have seemed quite poetic. Anyone over the age of forty-five would have remembered living under the flag of three empires, a seemingly impossible battlefield victory just outside the city’s perimeter, breathtaking population growth, a municipality split in three due to political and ethnic squabbles, and the decennial ebb and flow of yellow fever wasting the city’s populace. Life in antebellum Louisiana might certainly have contained a romantic poeticism for many of its most privileged citizens, while the extraordinariness of New Orleans in the late Jacksonian era was unquestionable. Though Charles Gayarré’s speech that evening involved a histrionic retelling of history, his portrayal of his city and state rang true.

New Orleans, so the myth goes, is a place that infamously works despite itself, but the city of the 1840s especially could be described as a study in contradiction and cooperation. This was harmonious chaos. That evening’s elocutionist could claim impeccable credentials as one of the crème de la crème of Creole society; his maternal and paternal grandfathers had been among, respectively, the French and Spanish founding fathers of colonial Louisiana. Gayarré’s life was a study in contrasts. Always flaunting his Latinate roots, at different times he identified as a Creole, a southerner, and an American. And though an elegant, if bathetic, composer of French prose, on this night he lectured in English.

The New Methodist Church, perched on the uptown-river corner of Poydras and Carondelet, sat in the center of the American sector, just one block behind Lafayette Square, the Americans’ public park and political and commercial center.² Largely because of European immigration, the city’s population had more than doubled in the past decade. In 1836 the competing Creole and American factions that struggled to control the city acquiesced to the seemingly uncontrollable “pattern[s] of segregation,” due to the population explosion, and divided the city into three self-governing municipalities.³ The trio comprised the French quarter, the American sector, and the downriver neighborhoods—basically the Faubourg Marigny—which harbored many of the tens of thousands of Germans and Irish that poured into antebellum New Orleans, along with many white Creoles and Afro-Creoles.

A simultaneous economic boom produced dollar amounts that one historian perspicaciously described as “mind-boggling.”⁴ These dollars would be generated by the Crescent City’s river port, one of the first New World global markets; its outlying cotton- and sugar-plantation system; and North America’s largest slave market.⁵ One Alabama visitor speculated in 1847 that within a century the city “reach out her arms and encompass within her limits every town and hamlet for miles around. It will then all be New Orleans, the largest city on the continent of America, and perhaps in the world.”⁶

New Orleans, this supposedly exceptional place, deserved an exceptional history, and the Creole Charles Gayarré sought to write those pages. He dismissed this first of four lectures titled “The Poetry, or the Romance of the History of Louisiana,” as a “trifling production, the offspring of an hour’s thought.”⁷ But his first speech at the Methodist church, a free event held on March 26, 1847, proved so popular that the People’s Lyceum, that night’s sponsors, invited Gayarré to deliver three future lectures. His mythic telling of Louisiana’s history, this weaving together of “the legendary, the romantic, the traditional, and the strictly historical elements,” struck a chord not just with New Orleanians but with a vast southern and national audience.⁸ Firmly influenced by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticized historical novels he praised as “fascinating” and “immortal,” Gayarré considered himself both a historian and a romanticist.⁹ In his preface to the four lectures, first collected under the title Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848), he admitted to “embellish[ing]” and making “attractive” historical events.¹⁰ By mixing historical objectivity with the subjectivity of the poetic storyteller’s pen, he set Louisiana’s history, in his words, “in a glittering frame.”¹¹ Gayarré was not the first to frame Louisiana with an ornamental gilding. Years before the settlement of New Orleans, promoters had sold the French Louisiana province to prospective settlers as “the Paradise of America” and “one of the finest Countries in the World.”¹² And more than a century later, antebellum commentators painted New Orleans as the “stately Southern Queen.”¹³

Gayarré believed that Louisiana’s past oozed exceptionality. Literally. “There is poetry in the very foundation of this extraordinary land!” he roared in the opening minutes of his first lecture.¹⁴ This intangible poetic property pervaded everything—the place, the past, and the people—to make Louisiana special. In a trilogy of histories, Gayarré mined the soil of Louisiana’s past to cultivate a local literary landscape, a true Creole terroir.¹⁵

Gayarré’s literary project developed at the tail end of the age of print, an early-republic and antebellum era when Americans “fashioned a distinctive literature and culture” through numerous print media. The ascent of a Louisiana literature mirrored the rise of similar, fragmented local print-culture communities throughout the United States.¹⁶ One such community was located in Richmond, Virginia, where the Southern Literary Messenger’s first issue, released in 1834, encouraged the South to “build … up a character of our own, and provid[e] the means of imbodying and concentrating the neglected genius of our country” through the spilling of ink on paper.¹⁷ Gayarré likewise urged the cultivation of a homegrown republic of letters, a culture he likened to immortality. “Literature,” he wrote, “is the manifestation of how much soul there is in a social body; and those nations which have been without a literature, whatever of power and material wealth they may have obtained, have been nothing but corpses floating like dead logs on the stream of history.”¹⁸

Though he was hardly the first Louisianian to publish, Gayarré should be considered the founding father of the state’s literature. By peering into the past and breathing life into local memory and myth, Gayarré birthed a New Orleans–based print-culture community. He was the first to chronicle the history of his people. Issued in French and printed locally, the Essai historique sur la Louisiane (1830–31) and the two-volume Histoire de la Louisiane (1846–47) provided Francophone Louisianians with a shared written history. His 1848 Romance of the History of Louisiana (1848), later included in his magisterial, four-volume History of Louisiana (1854–66), romanticized and mythologized the place’s and the people’s past.¹⁹ Written in English and published in New York City, this second round of histories not only found local and national success but changed the way Creoles and Americans, citizens of Louisiana and the world, thought about New Orleans.

Gayarré did more than precipitate a white Creole print culture that lasted for another century; he influenced how New Orleans and Louisiana have been written and read ever since. Nearly a half-century ago, one scholar laureled Gayarré with a weighty and contestable title, calling him “the greatest historian of the Old South.”²⁰ But Gayarré transcended historical writing by becoming the primogenitor of a Louisiana Creole literature. In that sense, it is necessary to reconsider Charles Gayarré on the micro level, as the elder statesman of a Louisiana Creole literature and the architect of the New Orleans mythos.

“Procuring … the Higher Branches of Literature”

Charles Étienne Arthur Gayarré’s origins constituted the stuff that his cherished Sir Walter Scott novels were made of: drama and romance, war and heroism, history and myth. In an early autobiography, he wrote that his family was “historic in all its branches and roots.”²¹ His braggadocio rang true: the Gayarré family tree sprouted and grew as the Louisiana colony flourished.

Éstevan de Gayarré landed in New Orleans with Antonio de Ulloa in March 1766. A war hero in his native Navarre, Gayarré served as the first Spanish Louisiana governor’s contador real, or royal accountant. In 1771 Estevan returned to Spain, leaving behind his son, Juan Antonio. The sixteen-year-old Juan Antonio Gayarré accepted the post of colonial commissary of war as the New Orleans Rebellion of 1768 warmed up. Despite his role in suppressing the revolt, led by the French and the Creoles, Juan Antonio, like his father, maintained friendly relations with the French populace. In 1773 he married Constance de Grand-Pré, a privileged French Canadian Creole whose father could be counted as a Bienville-era pioneer. The first of their three sons, Juan Antonio Gayarré, who also took up service to the Spanish crown, fathered the future historian.²² Charles Gayarré’s mother, Marie Elizabeth de Boré, was the youngest daughter of Jean Étienne de Boré, nicknamed the “Savior of Louisiana” for his success in refining the first commercial batch of Louisiana granulated sugar and for the cane-based plantation system his process created.²³ De Boré would be rewarded with the first mayorship of American-owned New Orleans.

Charles Gayarré was born on January 9, 1805, just months after the United States’ purchase and territorial inclusion of Louisiana. Though “known for his intense attachment to French interests,” Boré, born in the Illinois Country town of Kaskaskia, considered himself a Creole Louisianian through and through.²⁴ In May 1804 he resigned his mayoral position to protest the American government’s partition of the immense, French-built Louisiana Territory. Despite his French attachments and this perceived slight by the new power, de Boré wanted to be a U.S. citizen. The sugar baron, retired from public life, sided with the petitioners Jean Noel Destréhan (a Louisiana Creole), Pierre Sauvé, and Pierre Derbigny (both French-born), wealthy plantation owners all, who in a January 4, 1805, entreaty to the United States Senate argued for immediate statehood instead of a probationary period as territory.

Embedded in their petition was the Creole and French power brokers’ complaint that “travelers, [and] residents, who neither associate with us, nor speak our language” (coded words for Anglo-Americans) had made “superficial remarks” regarding the education and intelligence of the French and the Creoles. They conceded that area residents had had difficulty, because of provincial circumstances, “procuring … the higher branches of literature.”²⁵ But it would remain the task of a new generation of Creoles to create their own homegrown republic of letters.

Gayarré’s life reflected the postcolonial sensibilities of his grand-father de Boré and the rest. He, like Destréhan, Sauvé, and Derbigny, negotiated the role of an American citizen blessed and cursed with French blood and a French tongue. The trio’s fight obviously reverberated with the historian; in the fourth and final volume of his History of Louisiana, Gayarré spilled more than a couple pages’ worth of ink on the 1805 Senate petition, which, serendipitously, had been submitted just five days before his birth.²⁶ Throughout his long career, which spanned the nineteenth century, Gayarré sought to create a Louisiana literature, first in French, then in English, for Louisianians. He hoped that it would reach branches as high and distinguished as those of his own family tree. Literature, Gayarré believed, must be written by the elites, an aristocracy of authors, because the printed word never dies. “The republic of letters is like other republics in one respect,” he wrote. “Although of longer duration than her sisters, for she is immortal, whilst they are from the earth and perishable, her rewards are not always for her most meritorious sons.”²⁷

Gayarré was born to be a writer and looked the part. One biographer described his features as “French, but thoughtful; severe, but genial. His forehead is large, and very full in the region of what the phrenologist calls Comparison, Memory, and Human Nature.”²⁸ Since phrenology carries little weight these days, we can say that the balding temples and the beard he wore in his later years gave him the look of a Creole Socrates, the philosophical figurehead of Louisiana literature.

However, his first significant contribution to the state’s letters might be described as something of a hack job. Nonetheless, it was a project that necessitated action for the author and the state. Late in 1830, recently returned from two to three years of legal study in Philadelphia, Gayarré published the first of two volumes of his Essai historique sur la Louisiane.²⁹ Largely a translation of François-Xavier Martin’s two-volume History of Louisiana: From the Earliest Period (1827–29), Gayarré’s Essai was the first full state study in Frenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Creating the White Louisiana Creole
• 1. Charles Gayarré and the Cultivation of a Louisiana Creole Print Terroir
• 2. Catholic Priest and Poet Adrien Rouquette Bridges the Atlantic Ocean
• 3. Alfred Mercier, the Athénée Louisianais, and the Fight to Preserve the French Language
• 4. George Washington Cable, Blood Matters, and the Creole Backlash
• 5. Grace King’s Lost Creole Cause and the Feminization of New Orleans’s Creole Culture
• Conclusion: Creating the Creole City in the Twentieth Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index