Transcripts For CSPAN3 American History TV 20141227

Tvs afterwards, damon root on the long standing battle of Supreme Court activism and ju additional restraint and sunday at 10 00 p. M. , jonathan yeardley, who retired after 33 years with the washington post. And on American History tv on cspan saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war, historians and authors discuss president lincolns 1864 Reelection Campaign and sunday afternoon at 4 00 on reel america, tried by fire. A 1965 film that chronicles the 84th Infantry Division of the battle of the bulge. Find our complete schedule and let us know about the programs youre watching. Join the cspan conversation. Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. Next on American History tv, author and history professor michael ross discusses his book on the 1870 kidnapping of molly digby. The child of poor irish immigrants in new orleans. She was abducted by two black women and the case exacerbated racial tensions brought about by reconstruction. The Pratt Library hosted this 50minute event. Good evening. Its very nice to be here at the Pratt Library surrounded by pictures of Edgar Alan Poe and books about poe. Baltimore in many ways has a feel a lot like new orleans, an old port city with traditions and quirky and sometimes spooky history. I always kind of feel at home in baltimore just as i feel at home in new orleans. Where i lived for ten years. Introduce you to this case that has kind of disappeared from the american memory. But for the summer of 1870 captivated the nation. Newspaper readers across the country. Try to explain it to you so that you can see what i saw as i stumbled across it. I began writing i found this story while i was doing much more traditional legal history. I was researching the famous slaughterhouse cases, the first case where the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th amendment. I was reading every single day of the new orleans newspapers in 1870. Suddenly, theres this story about a white baby being abducted by two africanamerican women. The rumor begins to circulate that the baby has been abducted for use as a voodoo sacrifice. I was like, holy smokes, could that be or was that just the press telling a story. The new orleans newspapers talked about ghost sightings. The story picked up steam. The police are arresting voodoo practitioners. There was all these other implications tied with politics of reconstruction. I realized i had stumbled on to something really quite interesting. So what i want to do is show you what interested me so much. This is new orleans around the time of 1870. The digby family were irish immigrants who had come with a great wave of famine irish. Back in the late 1840s. They lived in a swampy area known as the back of town. Its back in here. It was a low rent district because it flooded all the time. It was a place where people of different races and immigrant backgrounds all lived on top of one another. It is here that on a summer evening in 1870 the digby children are playing out in the street and a neighboring teenager is watching them. And two africanamerican women come by and coo molly digby the child. Eventually the teenager allows the women to hold a baby. And she goes off to look at the fire down the block and these women leave with the child. In a crimefilled city, this normally particularly in a poor neighborhood, this would have ended up on the second or third page of the paper in the city intelligence columns where every day there was murders and knifings and things going on. nkp it would have disappeared into the mist. Until it gets entangled in the politics of reconstruction. This is where that neighborhood is today. The digbys back of town street is the street you walk down as you entered super dome to go to saints football games. The neighborhood torn down and urban redevelopment plans in the 50s and 60s. Every time i went to a saints game, i was walking down the street of my story. People were getting ready for game time, i was haunted by the story. Here is the thing i saw in the newspaper. This is from the mobile paper reporting the events in new orleans. You will see what it says. A horrible suspicion is connects in the mind with the abduction of infant child of mr. Digby which took place on the 9th of june. Its important to this story because two weeks later was saint johns eve. Saint johns eve is a sacred night in the voodoo religion and they consider themselves to be catholic. They practice a version of african religion and catholicism. On saint johns eve they would have ceremonies on the lake. The newspapers of new orleans are now going to allege that molly digby has been abducted for use as a voodoo sacrifice at the ceremony. You see in the article, the secrecy in which the cruel deed is involved has excited a general suspicion that the child was stolen for sacrifice. According to the rites of voodooism which is prevalent among negros in louisiana. Its true, voodooism of the practicing of voodoo was a flourishing religion in 19th century louisiana. During slavery, it was kept under wraps because slave owners found it threatening. When the civil war ends, voodoo practitioners can practice in the open. This lends to whites fears the society is being turned upside down. This is a depiction of a ceremony that isnt too critical. But this is the next one is the one that you would see more often, kind of sensationalize depictions. This is out of a new orleans newspaper. Depravity and lust locked arms at a voodoo dance. Again, you might write this off as just a sensational story. But i very quickly realized, particularly from the newspapers that were highlighting it, thatx the story was being used by the conservative white press by conservative, i mean people at the time who were opposed to reconstruction. Many of them were exconfederates, former democrats and wigs who were appalled that the north backed by federal bayonets, had created reconstruction governments in the south where africanamerican men could vote, where about a third of the Louisiana Legislature was africanamerican, where africanamericans are serving in government positions, serving on juries and in new orleans on the police force. The reconstruction governor integrates the new Orleans Police force. These are africanamerican members of the Louisiana Legislature during reconstruction. Y b and they were about a third of the membership of that body. Here is africanamerican pictures of africanamerican men in louisiana voting after the military reconstruction act of 1867. And then the 15th amendment. And here is a black policeman in new orleans, a couple of depictions of black policemen in new orleans. You can see the caption from the man who wrote this book. The polite but consequential negro policeman. They were on the street with full authority to arrest white people for many whites in new orleans, it was almost too much to bare, a world turned upside down in a short time because of the civil war. This is a critical depiction of the new Orleans Legislature of the Louisiana Legislature at the time where the critics of the legislature depicted it as a place where former slaves in from the fields illiterate, elected to office run amok in the legislature along with poor whites from the dirt perishes and the north of louisiana who they called scallywags. This will be depicted in a movie and still haunts the american imagination that somehow the reconstruction legislatures were places where where things had gone awry. So as this case gets sensationalized, as the white press is arguing, this is what we can expect, now that africanamericans are free from slavery, over 10,000 move from the plantations into the cities. Now that theres black policemen on the street who they suspect will wink and not when black people commit crimes against white people, the newspapers will start to demand that the reconstruction governor solve this crime. In particular, theyre going to listen to the calls that this crime be solved by the elite white women of new orleans, the wives of the most prominent financiers in the city who are going to adopt the digby case as their own and travel to the back of town bringing baked goods to the house and a neighborhood they normally would never go. They would be in the french French Quarter townhouse and marching to the home of the reconstruction governor demanding that he solve the crime. I just want to read you a paragraph from the book. n give you some sense of how the book is written about these activities by elite women and why i found it so interesting. As the coverage of the digby abduction became more sensational, prominent white women from the most famous new orleans families adopted the case as their own. In late june and early july, wealthy women of new orleans would usually be preparing to leave town for cooler climbs. Just as many theaters and restaurants closed for the season each summer, elite families put linen covers on furniture, packed white dresses, suits and hats into trunks and set off by rail and steamboat for the coast, the north or europe. In 1870, many women took time to march to Police Headquarters to demand resolution of the digby case. They also went to the back of town, a neighborhood they avoided, bringing food and gifts to the digbys house. The case provided an opportunity tore the citys women to enter the public debate over a reconstruction and to express ab governor, his police force and the emerging racial order in louisiana. Raised in a culture that required them to behave, most elite women left public commentary on politics to men. But in early july, 61 women presented a petition to the governor urging him to do something so that the painful feeling of the community in regard to this lawless outrage may be allayed by the early restoration of the child to those who love it. The press applauded the petition made to the governor by our ladies and demanded that he offer a state reward for mollys return. This is the reconstruction governor of louisiana, 28yearold henry clay warmoth, a former Union Soldier elected to office largely by the votes of africanamerican men. His critics thought he was too young to be governor. They dubbed him the boy governor. But he believed that he was actually doing gods work. Theres this image of the northerners in the south after the civil war where they are called carpetbaggers that they were there to make themselves rich and to exploit the populous. The votes of socalled ignorant negros for their own gain. Warmoth actually believes in what some people have called the public of prosperity. He believed in they could bring improvements that they could lure into the fold economically minded businessmen who would realize that the republicans were doing things that they had long called for and that they might be willing to put racial animosity aside in return tore economic development. This is warmoths goal. He is desperately wants to prove that his new integrated new Orleans Police force can solve this crime. And he accepts the petition. He puts up a state reward for the return of molly that eventually goes up to 5,000. About 40,000 today. Which is a lot of money after the civil war. It will turn the case into the powerball of 1870 as everyone who sees an africanamerican nanny with a white baby thinks they have found the kidnappers of molly digby. And he has a group on his side that is going to make new orleans and perhaps mobile the places where many historians argue if reconstruction was ever going to succeed, here it had the best chance. The group in new orleans that i speak of are the afrocreoles. They are a very interesting group, largely in louisiana and mobile. They emerge from the culture of French Colonial louisiana where÷ wealthy white men often had romantic relationships with mixed race and black women. And in this situation, when children were born, the white fathers, while they couldnt mary the women, made sure that their children had a start in life, made sure they had money, got an education, they would attend baptisms. As a result, theres a class of free persons of color before the civil war who are going to continue on in leadership roles after the war that you dont normally think of when you think of the slave south. I want to take a moment and just read to you from the book about the afrocreoles so you understand why they are so important and why warmoth will have the majority of his police force and elected black officials in louisiana are afrocreoles because they are a polished class of people who could put the lie reactionary whites argument that africanamericans were illiterate and couldnt join in government. Let me explain this to you. Let me add one point so this makes sense. What warmoth will do is he will have his police chief choose his best afrocreole detective, the first black detectives in American History, to be the lead detective in the digby case. The detective that he chooses is a man named john baptist jordan person of color class and then joins the union army when he gets the chance and then becomes a detective in the police force. And our afrocreole detective, in some way the protagonist of my story, im going to place him within the context of his afrocreole heritage. As a creole of color or afrocreole, detective jordan belongs to a class unique to the gulf coast. In colonial louisiana, anyone born in the colony is a creole. And white, who identified with french culture and language and feared being overwhelmed by the americans who arrived in new orleans after the Louisiana Purchase selfidentified as creoles. Afrocreoles of his class considered themselves to be cosmopolitan gentlemen and lady. Bilingual and mannerly, they looked to paris for inspiration. Many elite afrocreole men wore silk pants and fine jackets. They dined with silver utensils, filled homes with books and furniture, attended the opera, published their own newspaper, studied classical literature, formed lodges and drew inspiration from the ideals of the french revolution. Their ranks included writers, poets and composers as well as doctors, merchants and skilled art sans. They constituted only 7 of the souths free black population in 1860, louisianas afrocreoles held almost 60 of the real estate owned by the free black people. On under the slave regime, creoles of color took pride in the identity they shared with white creoles. They relished food, wine and French Colonial architecture. White creoles patronized black butchers, carpenters, mechanics, they attended plays, fights and circuses together, albeit on a n segregated basis. You get the idea. John baptist jordan comes out of this class. Again, what warmoth wants to prove is the police force had been previously largely a group of thugs. Every mayor that came in would turn the police force into his private army appointing their supporters. In the 1850s when the no nothings controlled new orleans, they filled the police force with thugs who would beat up the irish and germans. Right after the civil war, they fill it up with the men from henry hazes brigade but who were kind of antireconstruction. When reconstruction begins, the police force now will get afrocreoles along with white officers who are committed to reconstruction. The mannerly educated polished well dressed detective jordan is exactly the person that warmoth wants leading this investigation. Images of white and black creoles strolling in new orleans this is the police chief of new orleans, whose job it is to direct jordan and the other detectives in this investigation. Interesting to a baltimore audience, he was part of the massachusetts regiment that arrived on pratt street at the beginning of the civil war in response to lincolns call for volunteers thats attacked by a baltimore mob. They have to fight their way across the city. He was a member of that regiment. He knew how fearsome resistance could be. One quick side light. I had hoped he would play more of a role in the story. Jordan is my lead detective. One other detective that plays an early role in the case but vanishes, i have to mention because its fun, is a detective named jordan noble who is 72 years old. He was Andrew Jacksons drummer boy. He is africanamerican and goes on to be the drummer boy as white new orleans forces fight t in the mexican war. And then becomes an officer in the union army during the civil war. And then becomes a detective. Early on, he and jordan go in disguise into black neighbors to get evidence dressed as common laborers. Unfortunately, jordan who is my badger is directing the case. Again, people are now looking for any africanamerican woman who is seen with a white baby. All over new orleans and the south, that had been the condition of things through all time. So everyone who now sees an africanamerican woman with a white baby goes running to the police, i want to collect the reward. The newspaper fills with leads. Cincinnati, all over the place. At one point they actually there was a travelingpi it. These are homes standing in uptown new orleans at a Street Corner called bell castle and camp. They are stand across the street from homes that are that were central to my story, since torn down, but look like those buildings would have looked. This is what i want to tell you. Im not going to tell you tonight what happens to molly digby. I want you to read the book to i will tell you who the republican reconstruction government eventually accuses of having committed the crime. And they eventually commit accused of committing the crime two afrocreole sisters, one who lived in mobile and one who lived in the houses across the street from these. Those sisters ran a very interesting business. They were proprietors in both cities of lying in hospitals. What that meant was they were places where when wealthy white women got pregnant in difficult sirs, out of we had log, they could go to one of the sisters houses and spend the time there during their pregnancy and have the baby outside of prying eyes. If a woman from a plantation family in mobile, in alabama, got in trouble, the sister in mobile would bring the woman to her sister in uptown new orleans. The reverse was true of a fine new orleans family got in trouble, she would go to mobile. The reason why they were able t pull this business off is because both of these women have exquisite taste. When at their trial all the papers do is fawn over what they are wearing, how beautiful their hair is, how strikingly beautiful they are and how their home was filled with rosewood furniture and paintings. This is an interesting Business Model where these women in a world where there were limited career possibilities for africanamerican women could use their refined afrocreole sensibility to create a special niche in the economy of lying in hospitals. It is these women that get accused of the crime. The trial is in many ways what you think of as a classic southern courtroom drama, standing room crowds and a sweltering courtroom fanning themselves. But unlike the trials that you know from real life and stories like to kill a mockingbird where the outcome of the trial is predestined, reconstruction makes this trial so complex that in many ways it is nothing like what a trial had the same trial happened shortly thereafter during the era of jim crow, you know these women would get convicted. But what makes this trial so compelling is that you have an integrated jury. There are at least three afrocreole men on the jury. A hung jury is a possibility. You have once these women are accused of this crime by the republican government, the confederate bar sign up to defend them. So you have this unique world where the republican government, which is the government committed to integration, is trying to convict these women who they think are guilty of the crime in order to prove that their police force works. But at the same time, they going after two africanamerican women in a way that when you know the history of southern trials, you are like its a very complicated situation. It makes the verdict one in doubt right until the moment when the foreman stands up in the final trial which takes place against the backdrop of the mardi gras parades. No one has written about this story. This is the first time this story has been told. Im doing the wrong thing. This is the hang on. Let me go back a little. Thats the courtroom where the trial took place. But i also want to i dont know what im doing here. There we go. This is a headline as the story begins to unfold. The Associated Press puts it out on the ap wire. Both the investigation and the trials all make national news. They are trying to figure out if reconstruction is going to work is following the kidnapping in the way today as we look for good news in americas effort to reconstruct other nations, you look for stories o look for stories of successful Public Schools or something to tell you this is working. People are searching for examples. Here we have this glamourous afrocreole detective and the a dashing young governor trying to show an Efficient Police force. This story is being read all over the country. And so that at one level i want the story to be a who done it, i want it to be one where you wait to find out what happens to molly. You wait to find out if the women get convicted. But i also want it to be a story that will interest people in that narrative, but at the same time get them interested in reconstruction by building the context about reconstruction. Some people of lets say who went to Public Schools before 1954, lets say, were raised in a world where their Elementary School textbooks, north and south, gave the southern version of reconstruction, that it was a tragic era of carpetbaggers run amok. Many of are you familiar with the movie gone with the wind and the famous scenes where the plantation overseer becomes a scalawag and africanamerican carpetbaggers. Home from the lost adventure came the tattered calf leaves. They came back to the desolation that had once been a land of grace and plenty. And with them came another invader, more cruel and vicious than any they had fought, the carpetbagger. The carpetbagger, he is holding a carpetbag in the movie, is allegedly someone carpetbags were in the era of railroad travel, a cheap bag. If you didnt have a lot of money, you could buy your luggage made out of carpet. And came down to the south backed by federal troops to exploit the white south. The story that historians have been telling since the 1960s, but still hasnt managed to remove root and branch the old vision in the american memory, is that the carpetbaggers, the free men the free persons who its a more complex story. There are examples of corruption but theres lots of them who believe they are evangelicals of progress who think they are bringing needed change to the south. My story helps reinforce that. I hope to get people to read the book who may be still wedded to the old visions of row construction and will get a more complex view. Novel here. The alternative vision begins back at the turn of the century, but then it picks up steam. 9 theres been American Experience documentaries. Somehow, it doesnt sink in. Go to the amazon reviews of my book. Theres one reader after another says, wow, this isnt the the story of reconstruction we were taught in school. Somehow despite all of this work of historians, either people still are wedded to the old view or they dont know anything about it. I like people who love the civil war and i often go out and see the reenactments and talk to everybody. They know every last detail of the battles. But then you ask what happened after the war. They dont know anything. Its kind of theres this disconnect. The civil war is important. We need to know every detail. What happens afterwards, its murky. What i heard i dont like. We will ignore it. I think its an extraordinarily compelling time. Im hoping my book where im trying to tell the story is a  brings that to life. This is on left is harold bakaey. What i want to do now is ill start wrapping this talk up. When i started writing this story, i thought i was the only person alive who knew anything about it. No one had ever written about it before. It was completely forgotten. None of my colleagues in history departments knew anything about it. And then as i started giving conference papers and other things, i started to get these emails. I got an email from a woman named isabelle, a family genealogist, who turns out to be a famous new orleans family. In tracing her genealogy, realized they are descendents of detective jordan. We started doing research to put meat on to the bones of these figures who left very little historical footprint. When he get into the history of afrocreole families its extraordinarily complex and rich. It takes tons of work to get the story just right. Im pleased that i have become friends with isabelle and her uncle wayne, the famous new Orleans Creole restaurant family sfn brothers is from new orleans. I will be at their creole restaurant where we will have a book event. With the descendants of detective jordan, the first africanamerican detective in history to make national news. On the right are descendants of the digby family, of which there are many that are going to be coming to events as well and these are members of the digby family. Susan golden perkins and gary golden family. Who live in perry, north carolina, which has u you know people have moved from all over the country. But its also relocated new orleanians and these are two people, two groupser who were descendanted from the digbyes, lived a couple of miles from each other in kerry, north carolina. I got them all together in a house, and they all pulled out these documents, a box full of family documents and everything that came out of the box, im like, no way. Aelia aealiv aealivewas in a stylish apartment in times square. It turns out that are the descendants of and it turns out, that what happened with their family, is that after many of the children of these women who were mixed race, afro creole women, moved to new york, cincinnati, detroit, and passed for white. Because in the era of jim crowe, getting out from the stigma of all these laws, is great Economic Opportunity for someone who passes as white. So over time, the family didnt know they had africanamerican an zesezest ancestors. Found out that they have africanamerican relatives and were fascinated by it. So this story and its the memory of the story and people who have stumble into the story, was very much alive and i didnt know that until i wrote it, but its one of the things that makes history so much fun, when you have is these moments when youre like holy cow. Thats wayne vacay, he has the famous creole restaurant in new orleans, who will be hosting me next week. And the photographer, very quickly was a photographer in new orleans who i had contracted to take pictures for the book through a grant i received before i realized theeej,w vacad any connection to the book, so suddenly my photograph sir is a descendant of the detective. This is one of the things that the press has put out. E0f v but im hoping in addition to the whodunit, youll realize the courtroom logistics, i try to tell 2ory as a lived experience, which is i hope a good microhistory does. Im happy to answer any im sorry, for cspan purposes, if you could speak at the microphone. I know that you dont necessarily want to drop a quickie, number one, did he ever find the girl . Cant tell you. Okay, that answers that question. Number two, the creole, african creole women who were accused, what white families were they desended from that from the fathers let me put it this way, as far as we can ascertain, they are women that came to the United States from haiti, after the haitian revolutions, a lot of the haitian slave owners moved to north america and settled in mobile, and as far as we can glean there, descended from that class, but theyre deeply immersed in the african creole culture. Were you able to get to the Court Records of the actual trial . Good question. Some of the key pieces of the court record were missing, but most of it was there. What i found was to the Court Stenographer basically summarized what was going on. And really the best blow by blow accounts are in from all of the reporters, who i dont know how they did it, because its clearly different reporters in each of new orleans newspapers creating these frantranscripts. They managed to take down these blow by blow accounts that run the next day in the newspapers and those were really the best seri sources for what went on in the courtroom. The Court Records are good, lots of data about where witnesses lived, good, official data, but the newspaper transcripts are really the ones that brought the scenes to life. U thank you. What impact did this case have on the relationship between the creoles of color, the free creoles and the White Community . Can you quickly state that you are a new orleanian and a descend dent of a cree owe family. Yes. So your question was . This indication, what relationships did change from the afro creoles and the white population in the city . Heres the tricky part, theres a lot of mutual with respect between the white creoles and the african creoles in new orleans that is deeply strained by the fact that so many afro creoles who fight in the war, fight for the confederacy. And then continues to be deeply strained when the afro creole joined the governments. Yet you can still see, in the trial transcripts, in the relationships, you know, theres still this mutual wall respect, theirgyn mutual pride in their traditions. Whats going on happen, and i dont know if this case is the cause of it. But after reconstructionen on f and White Supremacy is theres a push comes to shove moment as jim crowe descends. Where many noncreole whites say to the afro creoles, youre either with us, or against us. Youre intermingling and thats against every rule that were trying to put in here. And white x r creoles start to differ themselves from their afro creole compatriotcompatrio. And i will get people arguing over the word creole. What it is, who can claim it, et cetera. Ive given you my version of it. But its still a very contested word. And but i would argue that through the reconstruction period, its not clear that that split is going to happen. Theres a brief moment where something happens called the Louisiana Unification Movement, where some white elite businessmen, including again beauregard, convince a number of elite afro creole leaders to say that they will abandon the republican party, join them in a new party committed to business, called the Louisiana Unification Movement and the socalled best men of louisiana will now rule. It completely collapses as the white creole members are lam basted by noncreoles for doing it. Things completely fall apart and that is probably the last time the coalition worked. Thank you. Thank you. Again as i was mentioning, were in the ed gar allen poe room. But across the street from the ho home, i found this story while i was living with my wife ashley at 5229 camp street began with the story of the kidnapping and we got to rock island where these women who were accused of operating this line in the hospital. 5229 camp street is across the street from these houses on the exact site where these women ran their line in hospital and a good portion of my portion took place and im sitting in my study looking out at the houses that they would have looked out at, realizing i have stumbled into this case where these women are the central characters. And i started drinking. Any other questions . Okay, well, thank you, youve been a great audience. Feel free to email me with your comments on the book. I would love to hear from you. Thank you for coming. During this holiday season, during this holiday season, were4d tv programs. Heres a look at whats ahead. Next Supreme Court justice is john roberts and Stephen Breyer talk about the 800th anniversary of the magna carta, and a look at the scott case. And Supreme Court chief Justice Roger tommy, his role in the scott case and the civil war