African Americans in Covington

By Eva Semien Baham and Rev. Mallery Callahan

Covington is the seat of St. Tammany Parish government and sits north of Lake Pontchartrain in the New Orleans metropolitan area. Records from 1727 show 11 Africans on the north shore. One person of African descent was present at the founding of Covington on July 4, 1813. Most African Americans in antebellum Covington were slaves, with a modest number of free people, all of whom covered nearly every occupation needed for the development and sustenance of a heavily forested region. For more than 200 years in Covington, African Americans transformed their second-class status by grounding themselves in shared religious and social values. They organized churches, schools, civic organizations, benevolent societies, athletic associations, and businesses to address their needs and to celebrate their joys.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781439651650

Eva Semien Baham

Looking back in time, author Eva Semien Baham traces the core of Covington's African American community members to their faiths' emphases on timeless endurance, perseverance, and active work for change. Residents have a rich history and a contemporary experience rooted in both spiritual and civic involvement on behalf of the social, cultural, and economic advancement of their community, town, and country.

Book preview

century.

INTRODUCTION

The saga of the Broxton and Maples families offers a glimpse into slavery in Covington. Philip Broxton traveled to Louisiana as Nathan Maples’s slave in 1807. Maples joined a wave of white South Carolinians who, in the early 1800s, moved west. Opportunity existed in territory opened by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. However, Maples appeared to be on the very low echelon of slave owners, as Philip Broxton seemed to be his only slave. To remedy that, Maples returned to Sumter County, South Carolina, in 1807 and purchased Broxton’s wife, Jennie, and their children, Matilda (Mitty) and Sarah, and brought them back to Louisiana.

In 1820, Maples owned five slaves: Philip, Jennie, Mitty, Sarah, and the Broxton’s young son, Philip Jr. Freedom came for Jennie in 1825 and for the elder Philip in 1826, although not for their children. Broxton bought property in Covington and lived with his family until his death in 1838. Jennie and extended family members purchased her children and grandchildren from the Maples family: her daughter Mitty and Mitty’s son Joseph Robigo in 1831, and other daughter Sarah and her three children, Arabella, Susan, and Mary Jane, in 1840. Jennie Broxton appeared before Judge Lyman Briggs in Covington, and the required advertisement to purchase her slave children appeared in the Covington newspaper, the Advocate. The sale was recorded in 1842. That should have sealed Broxton family freedom. It did not.

During the 1850s, the Maples children filed a legal complaint against the free Broxton children. They claimed that their father, Nathan Maples, who died in 1841, did not have command of his senses when Jennie Broxton tricked him into selling the remaining Broxton family members. In the district court of St. Tammany at Covington, the heirs of Nathan Maples petitioned for the revocation of all sales of the Broxton family, including that of the deceased Philip and Jennie. This would return the Broxton children to the Maples children as slaves and force the Broxtons to pay market rates for their deceased parents, Philip and Jennie. The jury from the district court sided with the Maples family. Jesse R. Jones, one of the founders of Covington, represented the Broxtons and filed an appeal with the Louisiana Supreme Court.

In John A.P. Maples, et al. v. Mitty and Sarah, f.w.c. [free women of color] (1857), the state supreme court rejected any consideration to revoke the freedom of Philip and Jennie because both of those persons were dead at the time of the institution of the suit. To the remaining issue of the sale of Jennie’s children and grandson, the court found no evidence of simulation—that is, deception—when Jennie transacted this sale with Nathan Maples and his wife, Mary. The same day, January 31, 1840, that she bought her children for $800, the supreme court noted, Jennie exchanged property in Covington with Nathan and Mary. In essence, Jennie Broxton gave the Maples family cash plus property for her children and grandson. The supreme court even noted that Jennie might have overpaid, given the combined value of the property and the cash. Because both Nathan and Mary were parties to the sale, the court could not find in favor of their heirs. Here, the proof leaves no doubt on our minds, the court held, "that there was a real bona fide consideration for the sale of Sarah and her children, passing from Jenny Broxton to Nathan Maples." This reversed the lower court’s decision and set the Broxton children and grandchildren free at last.

This saga from slavery to freedom describes historical experiences of antebellum African Americans in Covington. Permanence did not always define enslavement or guarantee freedom, both of which had long histories in St. Tammany Parish. Among the French, Spanish, and British who claimed this region at one time or another, Spanish slave laws gave the most rights to slaves and the most opportunities to gain their freedom. Historian Gilbert Din recorded that under both French and Spanish rule, Catholic priests denied blacks extreme unction, or last rites. That was a moral aberration compared to death for a slave for stealing animals or striking a free person. British law made emancipation difficult and punishment . . . severe. Under Spanish law, however, slaves could buy their freedom . . . and owners could free slaves for any reason before a notary. Din notes that the Spanish did not view enslavement as a permanent condition. However, slaves were chattel under all the regimes, and slave owners and governments protected their property.

For example, in 1821, Louisiana’s legislature empowered parishes to police slaves. St. Tammany Parish had little interest in slave patrols before 1821, as there were very few slaves in the parish. According to historian E. Russ Williams Jr., only Terrance Carriere of Mandeville owned a significant number of slaves, and he had only 29. There were 631 total scattered over the parish, held by numerous small-scale slave-owning families. After 1830, with an increase in slaves to a total of 1,360, fear of slave rebellions became more acute. Terrence Carriere now had 69, and Terrance Cousin owned 37. No one in Covington came remotely close to those numbers. Most whites owned no slaves; those who did possessed between one and twenty. Despite so few slaves in Covington and the parish at large, Russ notes, the police jury found reason to implement the state’s patrol ordinance of 1821. Poor, non-slaveholding whites—simple farmers, for example—found work as patrollers.

St. Tammany’s forested terrain accounted for its few slaves. Slaves, as early as the 1730s, provided long-term labor in nearly every aspect of the timber industry and in brick manufacturing. Parish historian Judge Frederick Ellis recorded that slaves sawed trees and that French rulers encouraged industries associated with timber. Acres of pine forests, complicated by crisscrossing rivers with connecting and nearly impassable bayous, prohibited large-scale commercial crop plantations. Instead, slavery in St. Tammany Parish survived because of a strong market, particularly in New Orleans, for its natural long-leaf yellow pine forests and its by-products, tar, pitch, and turpentine. Brick making and kilns, where a large number of slaves worked, necessarily accompanied this process. Male slaves worked as skilled laborers: brick makers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, masons, carpenters, sailors, and rowers. Female slaves often worked fields and small gardens to supply food; they also cooked, cleaned, and made clothes. Since slavery was small-scale, proximity defined relationships between masters, slaves, and free people of color.

The families of Adeline Hosmer Terrell and Duplin and Zoe Dupere Rhodes illustrate this master-slave relationship in Covington. Adeline’s husband, Elijah Martin Terrell, died during the 1840s, and she lived in Covington near what is now Florida Street. In 1850, Zoe, illiterate and going by the last name Rhodes, acquired two unimproved lots . . . adjoining the town of Covington, taken from the land of the said Mrs. Adeline Terrell for $20. Although Zoe, born free in 1834, lived in Algiers with children Mary, Peter, Alfred, and Julia through