Negro Ironworkers of Louisiana, 1718–1900

By Marcus Christian

Historian and journalist Marcus Christian reveals how African Americans were the true artists behind New Orleans’ classic iron architecture.
 
When people think of New Orleans, they envision the complex ironwork of balcony railings in the French Quarter or the delicate lacelike gates of the city’s cemeteries. It is the city’s florid ironwork that gives New Orleans its unmatched, memorable beauty. But few people realize that most of this ironwork was created in the antebellum South—the golden age of Southern culture—by black slaves.
 
Negro Ironworkers of Louisiana, 1718–1900 examines the history of African American ironworkers in Louisiana. It is the first in-depth study of the sophisticated blacksmith skills for which most Negro ironworkers were not appreciated. Marcus Christian examines the development of agricultural and metallurgical technology in Africa, the slaves who brought those technologies to the United States, and the ironworkers’ roles in the making of New Orleans.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2002
• ISBN: 9781455609253

Book preview

NEGRO

IRONWORKERS

OF LOUISIANA

1718-1900

[graphic]

NEGRO IRONWORKERS OF LOUISIANA

1718-1900

By Marcus Christian

[graphic]

PELICAN PUBLISHING COMPANY

GRETNA 2002

Copyright © 1972, 2000

By Marcus Christian

All rights reserved

First printing, August 1972

Second printing, November 2002

The word Pelican and the depiction of a pelican are trademarks of Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., and are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christian, Marcus Bruce, date

  Negro ironworkers of Louisiana: 1718-1900 /

  by Marcus Christian.

      p. cm.

ISBN 1-58980-118-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Blacksmithing—Louisiana—History—18th century.

2. Blacksmithing—Louisiana—History—19th century.

3. African American blacksmiths—Louisiana—History—

18th century. 4. African American blacksmiths—

Louisiana—History—19th century I. Title.

TT220 .C45 2002

  739.4'08996'073076335—dc21

                                              2002015377

[graphic]

Printed in Canada

Published by Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

1000 Burmaster Street, Gretna, Louisiana 70053

INTRODUCTION

One of the newest and most important branches of history deals with the Negro. Until quite recently almost nothing was known of his past. His background in his native Africa was unexplored and his role in shaping the history of the New World ignored.

Suddenly all that is changed. As a result of a tremendous and concerted effort on the part of scholars, both in this country and in Europe and Africa, the outlines of the Negro's history have begun to emerge. Building on foundations laid in previous generations by the few scholars working in the field, historians have begun, during the past decade or so, to make the world aware that the Negro had developed in Africa, long before the coming of white man to that continent, civilizations comparable to any on the globe. Black Africans, organized either in sprawling inland empires or in closely knit coastal states, developed to a high degree of sophistication their own agricultural and metallurgical technologies—including ironworking-and at the same time maintained trans-Saharan trade routes with the Mediterranean world.

Similarly, close and careful historical investigation is gradually revealing the part played by the Negro in the making of America. To reconstruct the history of African slaves in America, historians have had to adopt many of the methods used so effectively by their colleagues in African history. They have had to broaden the traditional view of their discipline and employ new tools and techniques borrowed particularly from literary scholars and anthropologists. The written records upon which history has been traditionally based, official documents and publications, private and corporation papers, as well as newspapers, have proved disappointing for Negro history. Though such sources can provide some information on the Negro, it is usually on an impersonal nature. There was rarely any reason to refer to individual slaves or even free Negroes in such sources, and when they were mentioned, it was hardly ever by name.

But account was taken of individual black men in other ways. Local and family traditions in the white communities preserve some knowledge of individual slaves and freedmen and their work, and the Negroes' own folksongs and stories contain important bits of historical data. Such oral accounts are often fragments, frequently contradictory and chronologically confused, but they constitute nonetheless a valuable—indeed, perhaps our most valuable-source for the life of the Negro American before the twentieth century.

Such sources can provide valuable insights into the Negro past, but to make proper and profitable use of them requires an unusual combination of talents. To untangle fact from fantasy, to fathom the human behind the hero, and then to relate these gleanings to the hard data found in the more traditional sources requires both the critical mind of a historian and the soul of a poet.

Fortunately for us, the author of the essay that follows has both. Marcus Christian, who is equally well known for his poetry and his historical essays, is uniquely qualified to undertake a search into the Negro past. He has long been widely regarded by both literary figures and scholars as one of the country's outstanding Negro poets and historians. Not only has he known personally many of the most important Negro scholars and writers of the past half-century, but he has been constantly sought out by them for his advice and help. Marcus Christian combines, as few others do, the necessary knowledge, talent, and sensitivity needed to make history out of the varied assortment of folklore, fable, oral tradition, and documentary evidence that constitutes our only sources for the subject.

In his essay Mr. Christian reports the results of his investigations into the work of Negro ironworkers in Louisiana, particularly in New Orleans, from the early days of the city and the colony to the opening of the present century. After first