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The Catholic Historical Review 88.3 (2002) 618-620



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Book Review

A Black Patriot and a White Priest:
André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans


A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans. By Stephen J. Ochs. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000. Pp. xxiv, 304. $39.95.)

Thousands of black New Orleanians thronged the streets of the Union-occupied city in July, 1863, to pay their last respects to Captain André Cailloux, an Afro-Creole U.S. officer whose courageous leadership in the doomed Federal assault at Port Hudson exploded racist claims that black men-at-arms would not fight. Cailloux's widow, Felicie, defied the city's pro-Confederate Catholic hierarchy by choosing a schismatic French-born priest, Claude Paschal Maistre, to [End Page 618] officiate at her husband's funeral services. Maistre, an outspoken opponent of slavery who opened his church to slavery's black refugees, had forged close ties to Afro-Creole Catholics by ministering to Louisiana's three regiments of black Union soldiers. Ochs uses the dramatic intersection of these two men's lives to shed new light on African American military history, the city's Catholic religious culture, and race relations in nineteenth-century Louisiana.

The Cailloux/Maistre alliance, Ochs explains, grew out of colonial Louisiana's liberal, Latin European version of Catholicism. In such an environment, black New Orleanians blended traditional Catholic religious beliefs with African survivals and local customs. The author's references to religious folk songs, intercessory prayers which resembled African conjuring, and other manifestations of popular devotionalism are particularly intriguing.

Ochs enhances the narrative with a Cailloux family genealogical chart, demographic tables, a dramatic image of the charred remains of Maistre's schismatic St. Rose of Lima Church, and numerous maps including illustrations of military campaigns at Port Hudson and Fort Blakely in Mobile, Alabama. But readers will be especially indebted to Ochs for the previously unpublished photographs of the 2nd Louisiana Native Guards Regiment of black Union soldiers and a Union-clad Major Francis E. Dumas, the highest-ranking African American combat officer during the Civil War.

The extraordinary photograph of Dumas is particularly noteworthy for, as Ochs explains, he was a key Creole military and political leader during the Civil War and Reconstruction. With the Union occupation of New Orleans in 1862, Dumas freed his slaves and recruited them into his military unit in the tradition of Catholic, free black slaveholders in the Haitian Revolution. In 1863 in hostilities at Pascagoula, Mississippi, Dumas rescued a contingent of black Union soldiers who were being fired on by both Confederate and Union forces. And, as the 1868 gubernatorial candidate of radical Afro-Creole activists, Dumas lost the Republican party's nomination for Louisiana governor to white conservative Henry C. Warmouth by only one vote. Together with photographs of the 2nd Louisiana Guards, Dumas' vivid image adds a new and vital element to our understanding of Louisiana's military and political history.

In 1891, as white segregationists legislated a rigid color line, New Orleanian Louis A. Martinet, a leading Afro-Creole attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, described the city's Creole inhabitants: "There are the strangest white people you ever saw here.... You would [be] surprised to have persons pointed out to you, some as white and others as colored, and if you were not informed you would be sure to pick out the white for colored and the colored for white." 1 In his exhaustively researched study of Cailloux and Maistre, Ochs traces the origins of the city's ethnically diverse Creoles to a Latin European sensibility—a [End Page 619] sensibility informed by a universalist, Catholic ethic. In the city's relatively relaxed social milieu, as Ochs skillfully demonstrates, native New Orleanians breached the barriers of caste and ethnicity to produce a new people—a Creole people of mixed ethnic ancestry. In A Black Patriot and A White Priest historian...

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