Connections: The Sweep of History
Members of two families, linked by the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions, were among the thousands of people who migrated from Saint Domingue to Cuba by 1803 and from Cuba to New Orleans in 1809.
In my last post (“Connections: Entitled,” https://www.garciapubco.com/blog/2018/3/22/connections-entitled), I wrote about coincidental connections that link different sides of the same family. I described and made conjectures about the single meeting on record that occurred between my maternal great-grandfather and my paternal great-grandfather on September 24, 1891, in New Orleans.
Another kind of connection among families is equally captivating. Research reveals connections that occur between families who are unrelated, yet become linked when they are both swept up into the great events of history.
I have a client whose ancestor emigrated from France to Saint Domingue (then still a colony of France), then to Cuba, and finally to New Orleans. Those movements were part of a larger migration of people who were pushed and pulled to different places because of the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, European wars, and the Louisiana Purchase.
This client is also a family friend. My family and his family have been friends for at least three generations, or so we thought. In researching his ancestor, Christian Miltenberger, I discovered that my family and his may have been linked for six or more generations—at least since the 1780s. Their stories reveal a fuller view of the big picture than any set of historic facts often dryly told without context or personality.
Christian emigrated to the Caribbean from the Alsace region of France in 1789, the year the French Revolution broke out. My paternal grandmother’s family, the Langes, left Bordeaux, France, for Saint Domingue at approximately the same time.
By 1790, my ancestors—Joseph Lange and his wife Isabel—were living in Jérémie, Saint Domingue, the same town as Christian. Joseph and Isabel’s first child was born in Jérémie, as were their next four children. Christian and his future wife, Aimee Marie Mersier, met in Jérémie.
In June of 1803, the last remaining white French colonials fled the Haitian Revolution. Both the Langes and the Miltenbergers moved to Cuba that year, to the same town—Santiago de Cuba. Christian and Aimee Miltenberger’s oldest three children were born there. Joseph and Isabel Lange’s youngest three children were born in Santiago de Cuba.
In 1809, when Napoleon invaded Spain, the Spanish government in Cuba kicked the French refugees out of Saint Domingue. Both families then moved to New Orleans.
The movements of these two families—most likely unknown to one another in France—were shaped by the outbreak of revolutions in two places and the decision of a dictator in a third place. They were drawn to New Orleans by its French culture, a culture seemingly at risk because of the Louisiana Purchase, the formation of the Louisiana Territory, and the increasing “Americanization” of the region that would become the state of Louisiana.
Living in the same small town of fewer than 20,000 people in Jérémie, the chances are good that the families knew one another. Then, moving to Santiago de Cuba, another town of about 20,000 people (until the influx of refugees from Saint Domingue), the likelihood of their acquaintance is high. The fact of close friendship in more recent generations is indisputable. Did that begin in the 1790s on a Caribbean island instead of in New Orleans during the early 20th century?
The lives of the Miltenberger and Lange families in New Orleans, like the lives of all of the 9,000-plus refugees—white, enslaved Africans, and free people of color—from Saint Domingue, helped shape the life and culture of their adopted city.
As Caryn Cossé Bell has written, “the multiracial influx nearly doubled the size of the city's urban population. With the entry of 2,731 whites, 3,102 free persons of African descent, and 3,226 enslaved refugees in the 1809 migration, the city's total population jumped from 8,475 in 1805 to 17,242 in 1810 with 6,331 whites, 4,950 free people of color, and 5,961 slaves.” (See “Haitian Immigration to Louisiana in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” http://www.inmotionaame.org/texts/viewer.cfm?id=5_000T)
But numbers don’t tell the whole story of the impact of these immigrants on New Orleans:
This huge addition of French speakers (although they also communicated among themselves in Creole), imbued with French culture and instructed in the Catholic faith, was an invaluable contribution to the New Orleans Creoles’ attempt to preserve their heritage. Numbers, however, only account for the immediate preservation of a Francophone majority among New Orleanians, and can hardly explain the predominance of French language and Gallic culture in New Orleans for most of the nineteenth century. The social dynamism of the refugees must also be considered to explain the phenomenon. Because social and economic integration of the refugees was rapid and successful, they also reinforced French cultural predominance in New Orleans.
(From “The Saint-Domingue Refugees and the Preservation of Gallic Culture in Early American New Orleans,” Nathalie Dessens, French Colonial History, Vol. 8 (2007), pp. 53-69, Michigan State University Press)
The Saint Domingans began to participate in and soon dominated the key professions of law, education, journalism, and the arts in New Orleans and the territory (soon state) of Louisiana.
In the legal profession, Louis-Casimir Moreau-Lislet mightily influenced maintaining Roman law in Louisiana’s legal system through his presence on all commissions responsible for revising the Civil Law of Louisiana upon statehood, and through his co-authorship of the “Digest of Civil Law” and his “Compact of Civil Code Procedure.” In the political realm, Pierre Derbigny, another Saint Domingan, was Governor William C. C. Claiborne’s interpreter.
In journalism, an earlier immigrant to Louisiana from Saint Domingue, Louis Duclot, founded Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, New Orleans first newspaper, in 1794. Claude Beleurgey and Jean Renard founded Le Tèlègraphe in 1803. Jean Renard was the printer for the city and Orleans Parish. J. B. Thierry and J. C. de St. Romes started Le Courrier de la Louisiane in 1807. Jean Leclerc began L’Ami des Lois. Alexis Daudet co-founded the Louisiana Gazette.
La Société des Artisans, which became a platform for writers to present their works, was formed by free black artisans and veterans of the Battle of New Orleans. Hippolyte Castra wrote a poem, ‘The Campaign of 1814-15,” that protested the treatment of black soldiers after the War of 1812.
In education, Moreau-Lislet, along with Auguste Davezac and Paul Lanusse, founded Le Collège d’Orlèans, the first university in Louisiana, in 1805. Paul Tulane, the son of a refugee, founded the Medical College of Louisiana (which became Tulane University in 1883). Hypolite Canonge became superintendent of public schools.
Fifteen Saint Domingue refugees from Cuba advertised their educational services as private tutors in French newspapers. Michel Séligny started a school for free blacks, Académie Sainte-Barbe, which became a literary center for the interracial community. Séligny and his half-brother Camille Thierry headed a Romantic literary movement, one in which “native-born Creoles of color and French-speaking emigré artists, like writers in France and Haiti, protested injustice in their literary works,” according to Bell.
In the arts, the first professional actors to perform on stage in New Orleans were trained in Saint Domingue’s Cap Francais theater. Opera staged by refugees began production soon after the mass migration. In fact, the first performance of Le Barbier de Séville at the New Orleans Opera House in 1823 beat the New York production to the stage by three years. A student of Séligny’s at the Académie Sainte-Barbe, Victor Séjour, began his career as a poet in New Orleans, but became a famed playwright in Paris. He produced more than twenty plays for the French theater.
Both the Lange and Miltenberger families were patrons of the Théâtre d’Orléans and its successor, the French Opera House. Members of both families were founders of social organizations that were popular and influential among white New Orleanians.
In agriculture and business, French colonial refugees also had a powerful impact. Jean Joseph Coiron, a native of Martinique and the business manager for plantations owned by Christian Miltenberger, introduced to Louisiana plantation owners a hearty strain of sugarcane from the Savannah region that supplanted previous varieties that were vulnerable to cold weather. Coiron’s varieties reinvigorated sugarcane production in Louisiana, especially in northern parishes. Both Langes and Miltenbergers were influential in the buying and selling of cotton throughout the 19th century. Members of both families formed cotton factor businesses in New Orleans that had branches throughout the cotton-growing region of the state, especially Pointe Coupee, Ascension, and Terrebonne parishes.
The speaking and writing of the French language lasted through three-plus generations after the arrival of the refugees. The Miltenbergers and the Langes spoke and wrote French in New Orleans for several generations. My grandmother did not learn English until she was six years old. Wills were written in French, including that of Christian Miltenberger, partly because families hoped to be compensated by the French government for property they lost during the Haitian Revolution.
That kind of large event—a revolution in a small Caribbean colony or in a great European nation—undoubtedly alters history. The movement of people of a dynamic culture from one region to another impacts the way we live 200 years after the migration.
These large-scale changes obviously affected the lives of the millions of people who lived in those places of profound transformation. Yet, it is in discovering the particular stories of only one or two families caught up in those great events, that we can more fully understand and appreciate our history.