New Orleans and the Texas Revolution

4. The Big Men

With life experiences already beyond his years, twenty-year-old Ambrose Cowperthwaite Fulton arrived in New Orleans in late 1831. Born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, he left his parent’s farm in 1827 to work as an assistant to a Philadelphia builder.1 Two years later he became a sailor, traveling along the Atlantic seaboard shipping routes. On one voyage in August, 1829, from Havana to Boston,his ship,the schooner Thaddeus, was attacked by Spanish pirates .The experienced captain of the Thaddeus outwitted the brigands by leading them into an area of sunken rocks, where the pursuing ship abruptly ran aground. The bandits abandoned ship, leaving it at the mercy of the rocks and the crew of the Thaddeus. The crew cautiously boarded the sinking pirate ship only to find, to their horror, the body of a young girl left to face an ocean grave when the ship sank. Fulton convinced the captain to give the girl a proper burial at sea before continuing their voyage to Boston.2 In 1831 Fulton followed his youthful wanderlust down the Mississippi River to Louisville,Kentucky,and on to New Orleans.On a second Mississippi River trip, Fulton traveled as a deck passenger on the famed steamboat Yellow Stone on the Yazoo River, which was “set adrift” in Mississippi. He arrived in Benton just in time to hear David Crockett,theTennessee backwoodsman and congressional legend, give one of his stirring speeches. Fulton recalled that Crockett’s speech instilled in him a sense of direction and hope in his thendismal condition.The speech was filled with populist exhortations identifying greatnesswiththecommonworker,farmer,andbuilder.Crockettthen“gavethe Jackson Cabinet a broadside with his heaviest guns, and set into motion a tidal wave of eloquence which hoisted me aloft,to float upon an upper gently waving sea of bliss, from which I descended again to earth with bewildered eyes and regret.”3 After Crockett’s inspirational speech, Fulton traveled on to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and along the way slept in a massive Mississippi canebrake. Upon arriving in New Orleans, the young man took another job as a sailor, traveling to Haiti, Cuba, and Chile. In the early 1830s, on one such voyage from the At4 § the big men lantic seaboard,Fulton met Simon Cameron,who was transporting Irish workers to New Orleans for work on the New Basin Canal.4 In the mid-1830s, Fulton had acquired enough money to start his own construction business, so he returned to New Orleans.5 The year 1835 was an eventful one as Fulton became embroiled in a race riot and the explosive events in Texas. James H. Caldwell, owner of the St. Charles Theater, was finishing the building’s construction when the issue of his hiring a free mulatto, B.Alexander, to oversee the finishing work, became a volatile issue .The white workers,who were scheduled to work under the mulatto supervisor , assembled outside the theater calling for his removal. Resolutions were passed denouncing the training of blacks in the building trades. Caldwell appealed to the workers,stating that if there were a white worker who believed he was qualified to complete the job, then he would fire Alexander and hire the white worker in his place. Fulton recalled that not one man stepped forward.6 The unrest continued in Lafayette Square (Fulton remembered the location as Jackson Square) the next day. The local militia companies from the Louisiana Legion and the city guard were sent into the plaza under the command of General B. Plauché, a veteran of the battle of New Orleans, to break up the assembly.7 General Plauché marched his men into the square,slashing as they went. Curious bystanders were injured, including sailors who had walked over from their ships to view the assembly, and some of them were actually imprisoned . Fulton and his men were present and witnessed the legion’s march into the square.William Christy was hired to defend the sailors who had been imprisoned merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. J. C. Pendergast , editor of the Louisiana Advertiser, asked Fulton to provide his observations on the incident. Fulton was critical of the actions of Plauché’s men, and, as Louisiana historian JosephTregle Jr.describes it,“The editor of the Louisiana Advertiser published a few days later, a series of crude jokes ridiculing the militia unit’s competence and commenting disparagingly on the national origin of its members.”8 It is unclear how much of editorial...