Heading: (African American, 1837)
Author: Green, Jr., Caleb
Title: Letter from New Yorker in antebellum Louisiana, equivocates about Slavery
Place Published: Opelousas, Louisiana
Publisher:
Date Published: Jan. 18, 1837
Description: 4 pp. Autograph Letter Signed, with stampless address leaf. To his father, Caleb Green Sr., Mechanicville, New York.
The 40 year-old transplanted New Yorker writes his aging father that he was a leading candidate for the lucrative position of Court Clerk and that he had just become a father, his wife of three years being a Louisiana woman of French descent. He was thinking of moving back to New York as he had “always felt a desire to escape from the noise and physical influences of this country,“ but he chose to remain, still refusing to own slaves, even if he was compelled to lend a polite ear to the pro-slavery views of Judge T.H. Lewis, probably his legal mentor. “An eminent civilian of this State, Judge Lewis, had written a pamphlet against the Abolitionists of the North, which I sent you ...He is a very religious man and doubtless is sincere in [his] opinions. When you receive it I should like to have your opinions in such fashion that I can read them to him. It is a subject on which I have nothing to say here. I have no negroes and the sin of slavery lies not at my door“. He had read some Abolitionists newspapers sent by his uncle and “I am sure I find no such infringement upon the rights of the South as to create the jealousy and alarm that pervade this country...“
The Methodist pamphlet Lewis had argued that “many men of profound and extensive learning“ who were “deeply versed in Scripture“ had declared biblical Jewish slavery to be the same as slavery in the American South - sanctioned by divine law “and therefore not a sin“.
While Caleb Jr. and his wife owned no slaves, the same could not be said of his wife‘s Arcadian family. Emelie Broussard Green was the daughter of a French Canadian who had fought the British invaders of Nova Scotia and was sent as a prisoner of war to Haiti, but from there had fled to Spanish Louisiana where he raised cattle for the New Orleans market. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, he was a successful cattle rancher and plantation owner - and a slave owner. When another “Emelie Broussard“ - probably a cousin of Mrs. Green - died in 1848, her estate included five Negro slaves, one a teenage boy and another a 6 year-old girl. When Emelie Green herself died five years later, she owned no slaves, yet, curiously, another “Emelie Broussard Green“, born in Louisiana in the 1920s, was a Black woman. Caleb Green never returned to New York, but was so well regarded in Louisiana that he ended his life wearing judicial robes.

Good.