The Henry Kendall Carter papers document business dealings in Antebellum
New Orleans and feature odd details from an unusual life. I began processing the papers expecting to piece
together a coherent, integrated picture of the life of a Louisiana native and
cotton merchant. However, it turns out
that Carter was born in Connecticut and began doing business in New Orleans in his
30s. It is unclear how or why he landed in the Deep South, but his chosen
business necessitated Southern sympathies.
Ever the optimist, Carter was still carrying this $5 Confederate Government bond, issued in 1861, in 1869.
Carter was a cotton factor – essentially a trader or middle-man – and commission
merchant. This led to all sorts of other
business dealings – mortgage holdings, half ownership of a commercial newspaper
– and meant that despite being a Northern transplant, his fortunes depended
heavily on the viability of the South’s plantation- and slavery-based economy. Which, of course, meant that he was ultimately
invested in the success of the Confederate enterprise.
Carter’s company occasionally held plantation mortgages, presumably against their future profitability. I was startled to find that these mortgages clearly list slaves among the mortgaged “property.” Even if Carter himself did not hold slaves (it is unclear from his letters, though he could not have held them in Connecticut), he was deeply implicated in the practice. The collection even contains a bill of sale of a mother and child.
1858 Bill of Sale at auction of Nancy, age 27, and her daughter Cordelia, age 9
Despite
coming from a free state, he seems to have taken up without trouble the ways of
his adopted one. In piecing together
Carter’s life, it would have been nice to find some sort of personal commentary
on this – an expression of some qualm or hesitation about the enterprises he
found himself engaged in or even an indication of sympathy for the Southern
aristocracy – but no such reflection is evident.
Carter and
his wife, Henrietta Whitlocke, maintained a household in Hartford, Connecticut
while he worked in New Orleans, and letters indicate that both he and his wife
travelled extensively.
This pass allowed travel between North and South. Note the Union’s snarky reference to the “so-called Confederate government.” (1862)
Carter had a
business listing in the New Orleans city directory, but two censuses places him
in Connecticut. The sort of life he
lived would be difficult even now – it is surprising to see in the days before
business class.
The Whitlocke
and Carter families were also surprisingly mobile and far-flung, with members
spread among Connecticut, New York, Georgia, New Orleans, and Illinois. Almost all of the letters in the collection
were written to Carter’s wife, by members of her family and by Carter
himself. Carter’s letters show that
curious mix of banal details of business and weather with quaint poetic ardor
that you might expect to find in Victorian-era correspondence. He also seems to have bought her lots of
shoes.
Letter from Henry to
Henrietta, 1839. She practiced her own
penmanship in the margin.
Outside of
these letters, however, the papers reveal very little about Carter’s personal
life and thoughts. There is little
record of the war except in numbers on balance sheets. The occasional mention of fire or death
appears among meticulous records of household expenses, washing sent out, and
details of his travels.
Undated Inventory
of a liquor shipment. For business
purposes, of course.
The most
interesting part of the collection, for me, was a set of small memorandum books
and pocket diaries: blank books with
leather covers, tab closures, and accordion slots like you’d find in a
wallet.
Text of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as printed in a newspaper at the time.
This is where the oddest pieces
of ephemera turned up: a recipe for a home remedy for jaundice, which pops up
at least three times in the collection, a recipe for alcoholic bitters, an idea
for an elastic horse-shoe jotted on a scrap of paper, a pamphlet advertizing
remedies for “sexual exhaustion” (discretely mailed to P. O. Box 119).
(See our Facebook post for more wallet contents!)
Perhaps most curious, given Carter's sympathies, is
a newspaper clipping of the text of the 1875 Civil Rights Act. It was the third of three such acts passed in
the aftermath the Civil War, and prohibited discrimination in “public
accommodation.” The act was overturned
by the Supreme Court in 1883, and was the last Civil Rights Act passed until
1957.
Processing
personal papers can be an intimate endeavor but the Carter papers resist such
intimacy. Detailed and meticulous,
Carter listed every letter he wrote, by date and addressee, but we have none of
the personal letters he must have received.
The death of his wife (referred to as “Mrs. Carter”) is recorded in one
of his memorandum books, recounted with the same dispassion as the record of a
train accident that once delayed one of Carter’s trips. It’s easy to draw
certain conclusions from this, but hard to know whether the picture we get is
the result of a particular sort of personality, a culture with very different
attitudes towards love and death, or the idiosyncrasy and incompleteness of the
collection itself.
