The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn: Illustrated Sketches from the Daily City Item

Notes on Columns

131 NOTES ON COLUMNS THE HAUNTED AND THE HAUNTERS The titular source of “The Haunted and The Haunters” is a story by Edward BulwerLytton . Hearn also borrowed from his own exposé “Balm of Gilead,” which he wrote years earlier for the Cincinnati Commercial. However, the purpose of this piece and Hearn’s other editorials on correctional institutions was to advocate prison reform. The campaign was partially successful: Hearn’s editorials precipitated a Grand Jury investigation of conditions in Orleans Parish Prison and the founding in 1881 of the Board of Prisons and Asylums, whose members included George Washington Cable. The Grand Jury reported the prison was indeed infested with bats, causing the air to be “vitiated, pregnant with noxious gases and, of course highly prejudicial to health” and recommended daily removal of the guano. The City Item’s continuous drumming on the issue also persuaded health inspector Dr. Mandeville to bring up the bat nuisance during August’s meeting of the Board of Health, which decided against eradication, due to a belief the bats protected against yellow fever. The board’s prescience was remarkable, as it was more than a decade later that scientists concluded that the disease is caused by a virus spread by the bite of the Aëdes aegypti mosquito. The Parish Prison was located in a poorly drained area of the city, which bred mosquitoes—a steady food source for the bats. After a new prison was built in 1892, the prison compound was abandoned and in 1895 was demolished. Sources: “Balm of Gilead,” Cincinnati Commercial, October 3, 1875; Hearn, “Penitentiaries and Punishments,” City Item, February 17, 1880 (collected in Editorials); “The Prison and Asylum Commission,” City Item, November 6, 1881; City Item, August 1 and 27, 1880; Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 242. FREE BOARD AND LODGING FOR THIEVES Hearn used the same woodcut for this column, which was published on June 3 and a counterpoint to “The Haunted and The Haunters” above. (He also repeated several other woodcuts; the image always appeared on an inside page the second time it was used.) Prison labor in Louisiana has a long history of controversy. In 1880 the City Item insisted prisoners would work on projects otherwise neglected by a city virtually bankrupt , unable to pay its teachers and police. “In a moral point of view the enforcement of hard labor as a penalty for those offenses which are usually punished by incarceration in this hideous building, would have an excellent effect. Loafers dread hard labor for a week more than they dread imprisonment for a month. A committal to the Parish Prison has been regarded by many of them as a sort of vacation—a term of free board and lodging .” Later Orleans Parish Prison inmates were used as a labor force by the city, but the legality of the practice was challenged in court, resulting in a policy change: only volunteers among the prison population could be assigned work duty. Sources: Hearn, “The Parish Prison and Dr. Jones,” City Item, September 5, 1880; Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 243. For a history of prison labor in Louisiana, see Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton Rouge, 1971). THE NEW ORLEANS OF LAFCADIO HEARN 132 THE DELIVERING ANGEL Depicted here is Lt. Gov. Samuel D. McEnery, at the time acting governor due to the serious illness (tuberculosis) of Gov. Louis A. Wiltz. Wiltz had been criticized for pardoning several convicts serving time in the state penitentiary, but McEnery nonetheless pardoned more, for which he was ridiculed. An editorial of a City Item contemporary stated that “at this time the voice of mercy for criminals should not be raised or heeded in this city. With a disorganized police and a town full of lawless and daring characters, the law should deal with the utmost vigor with the criminals who are in its grasp.” The ten whose sentences were pardoned or commuted by Wiltz and McEnery included a murderer, a rapist, a grand-larcenist, and a forger. In “Condoning Crime,” Hearn highlighted the serial forger who, having also been pardoned by a previous governor , had obvious political influence. “In some respects the Lieutenant Governor’s mental vision may have been blinded—political dust thrown into it; but on the whole we believe that in making himself the friend of convicts he has made himself the enemy of the decent portion of the community. Pardons should...