1. New Orleans Times, December 29, 1867, Supplement, 1.

2. Foner, Eric, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 1–20Google Scholar, 55–92, makes a similar point. For a recent critical perspective on the “state action doctrine,” see Minow, Martha, “Alternatives to the State Action Doctrine in the Era of Privatization, Mandatory Arbitration, and the Internet: Directing Law to Serve Human Needs,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 52 (2017): 145–67Google Scholar. See also “Developments in the Law: State Action and the Public Private Distinction,” Harvard Law Review 123 (2010): 1248–314. Brandwein, Pamela, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially chapter 6, examines the historical traces of an alternate “state neglect” framework, which would bring protection from some private discriminatory action under Fourteenth Amendment guarantees.

3. Several scholars have explictly placed post-Civil War lawmaking in the framework of transitional justice, noting that the amendments to the federal constitution were crafted by a body that did not include any representatives of the groups whose rights were most immediately at stake. See Primus, Richard, “The Riddle of Hiram Revels,” Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 1680–734Google Scholar; and John Fabian Witt, “The Achievements, and Compromises, of Two Reconstruction-Era Amendments,” Washington Post, October 31, 2019, B.7.

4. See Constitution Adopted by the State Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana, March 7, 1868 (New Orleans: Printed at The Republican Office, 1868). The quoted phrase is in Title I, Art. 2.

5. For the assumption that “social rights” were generally beyond the scope of government action before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 1988), 231. In his most recent work, Foner does address the concept of “public rights.” Foner, The Second Founding, 13, 19, 94, 128, 140–42, 156. On the futility of drawing firm divisions among such categories of rights, see Richard A. Primus, The American Language of Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 127–76; and Rebecca J. Scott, “Public Rights, Social Equality, and the Conceptual Roots of the Plessy Challenge,” Michigan Law Review 106 (2008): 777–804.

6. See “This Convention. Twenty Fifth Day, The Constitution a Night Mare,” New Orleans Times, December 28, 1867, Supplement, 1. The reporting in the New Orleans Times was hostile to public rights claims, and mocked their proponents. This quotation nonetheless seems consistent with statements by the delegate in question, Edward Tinchant, as recorded in the official proceedings of the convention. See the discussion of Tinchant in this article.

7. See Louisiana Constitution of 1868, tit. II, art. 13.

8. On the dignitary component of dispossession and exclusion, see Bernadette Atuahene, “Dignity Takings and Dignity Restoration: Creating a New Theoretical Framework for Understanding Involuntary Property Loss and the Remedies Required,” Law & Social Inquiry 41 (2016): 796–823. On harm imposed on individuals and communities by selective humiliation, see Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact. The Stories behind the Numbers, the Impact on Our Communities (New York: Center for Constitutional Rights, 2012) and Jeffrey Fagan, Floyd v. City of New York, 08 Civ. 1034 (SAS) (SDNY), October 2010. Tom R. Tyler, Jeffrey Fagan, and Amanda Geller, in “Street Stops and Police Legitimacy: Teachable Moments in Young Urban Men's Legal Socialization,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 11 (2014): 751–85, at 756, emphasize the consequences of “assaults on dignity.”

9. The phrase “common life” (which sounds much like the French vie commune , shared life or life of the community) appears in “No Separate Schools,” Tribune , April 26, 1867, 4. English-speaking activists also used the word “caste” to critique practices of subordination. See “Later from the North,” Picayune , July 2, 1862, 1; and “From Boston,” Tribune , May 25, 1865, 1, reporting a speech by Wendell Phillips. The term continued to appear into the 1890s. On the need for juries free of the “bias, caste and prejudices incident to the same in this country,” see “Afro-American Proclamation, Solemn and Extraordinary,” Southwestern Christian Advocate (New Orleans), May 11, 1899, 2 (also cited in Thomas Ward Frampton, “The Jim Crow Jury,” Vanderbilt Law Review 71 [2018]: 1593–694, at 1611). See also Scott Grinsell, “‘The Prejudice of Caste’: The Misreading of Justice Harlan and the Ascendancy of Anticlassification,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 15 (2010): 317–67, especially 339–53. On republicanism from a transnational perspective see David Prior, Between Freedom and Progress: The Lost World of Reconstruction Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), Introduction.

10. On uses of the term in nineteenth-century Louisiana, see Rebecca J. Scott, “Dignité/Dignidade: Organizing against Threats to Dignity in Societies after Slavery,” in Understanding Human Dignity, ed. Christopher McCrudden (Oxford: For the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 2013), 61–77. See also the 1908 essay by Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Courts and the Negro,” in his Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 262–70.

11. The phrase “right to be treated as one of the public” was attributed to “Mr. Tinchant, colored.” “This Convention. Twenty Fifth Day, The Constitution a Night Mare,” New Orleans Times, December 28, 1867, Supplement, 1. Activists writing in French often used phrases such as “haine de caste” (caste hatred) and “préjugé de caste” (caste prejudice). See for example “La Liberté,” L'Union, October 18, 1862, 1; and “Nos Détracteurs,” L'Union, January 13, 1863, 1. An exploration of anti-caste thinking in modern jurisprudence is Reva B. Siegel, “Equality Talk: Antisubordination and Anticlassification Values in Constitutional Struggles over Brown,” Harvard Law Review 117 (2004):1470–1547, especially 1493, 1504, 1540.

12. An act “to enforce the Thirteenth Article of the Constitution of this State, and to regulate the Licenses mentioned in said Thirteenth Article,” was approved on February 23, 1869. See La. Rev. Stat. No. 38 (1869).

13. For recent overviews on rights during Reconstruction, see Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and David Blight and Jim Downs, eds., Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2017). Other Reconstruction state legislatures also passed civil rights bills with public accommodations provisions, generally beginning in 1870. See Foner, Reconstruction, 370; and A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, “Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America,” Law and History Review 23 (2005): 53–94, 58.

14. As Thavolia Glymph points out in her article in this issue, South Carolina's 1868 Constitution employed the term “public privileges” with much the same intent: “Distinction on account of race or color, in any case whatever, shall be prohibited, and all classes of citizens shall enjoy equally all common, public, legal and political privileges.” South Carolina Constitution of 1868, art. I, § 39. For documentary compilations that illuminate vernacular understandings of rights, see Ira Berlin, Leslie S. Rowland, et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, 6 vols. to date (New York: Cambridge University Press; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982–). On initiatives in the District of Columbia, see Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 9, 87–126, 158–73.

15. The phrase “public rights” later appeared in the platform of the national Republican Party for two cycles (1872 and 1876), only to disappear thereafter. Kirk H. Porter and Donald Bruce Johnson, National Party Platforms, 1840–1964 (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 46–47, 53–54. Pamela Brandwein analyzes the intraparty conflicts that yielded both a verbal endorsement of the concept (in language perhaps borrowed from Louisiana precedent) and a half-hearted pursuit of the goal. See Brandwein, Rethinking the Judicial Settlement, 60.

16. A vivid explication of this subtext of the phrase “social equality” is the short story by W. E. B. Du Bois, “On Being Crazy,” The Crisis June (1923): 56–57. Opponents of various provisions charged, on the floor of the 1867–68 Constitutional Convention, that the public rights guarantee sought to impose “social equality.” See the statement of Mr. Dearing explaining his vote against the Constitution, the protest of John T. Ludeling and John. L. Barret, and the repeated objections from Judge Cooley, endorsed by several of his colleagues; all in Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Convention for Framing a Constitution for the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: J. B. Roudanez and Co., 1867–1868), 278, 290–92.

17. See “Strike at the Root of Prejudice,” Tribune, December 25, 1867, 4. This newspaper published sections in French and in English. Subsequent citations distinguish these as The Tribune or La Tribune. The 1866 act did not explicitly mention public accommodations or public action. See Civil Rights Act of 1866, ch. 31, 14 Stat. 27–30. For a modern study of the act that reads its guarantees as indeed being wide in scope, see George Rutherglen, Civil Rights in the Shadow of Slavery: The Constitution, Common Law, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

18. Joseph William Singer points out the limitations of using the licensing function to define the boundaries of the duty to serve in “No Right to Exclude: Public Accommodations and Private Property,” Northwestern University Law Review 90 (1996): 1283–497, especially 1315–21; and “We Don't Serve Your Kind Here: Public Accommodations and the Mark of Sodom,” Boston University Law Review 95 (2015): 929–50. On frameworks for a cause of action against discrimination, see Amnon Reichman, “Professional Status and the Freedom to Contract: Toward a Common Law Duty of Non-Discrimination,” Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 14 (2001): 79–132.

19. See La. Rev. Stat. No. 38 (1869). See also La. Rev. Stat. No. 84 (1873), “An Act to protect the civil rights of citizens. . . making certain acts in violation of civil rights a misdemeanor and declaring the punishment therefor.” Individual misbehavior, such as unruliness or drunkenness, remained permissible grounds for refusal.

20. On the licensing of businesses in the nineteenth century, see William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 90–95.

21. On contested interpretations of such duties, see Sandoval-Strausz, “Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow,” 53–94; Masur, An Example for All the Land, 100–112; Kenneth W. Mack, “Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875–1905,” Law & Social Inquiry 24 (1999): 377; and Kenneth W. Mack, “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2005): 256.

22. See La. Rev. Stat. No. 38 sect. 3. (“That all licenses hereafter granted by this State, and by all parishes and municipalities therein, to persons engaged in business or keeping places of public resort shall contain the express condition that the place of business or public resort shall be open to the accommodation and patronage of all persons without distinction or discrimination on account of race or color. . . .”). Conviction for violation of this condition was to lead to forfeiture of the license, and liability to civil suit. The 1873 statute charged the state attorney general with initiating suit for termination of license upon receipt of complaint from a citizen. See La. Rev. Stat. No. 84.

23. See Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1. Rodgers focuses primarily on the English- and German- speaking North Atlantic. See also the concept of passeurs culturels in Louise Bénat Tachot and Serge Gruzinski eds., Passeurs culturels: mécanismes de métissage (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Marne-la-Vallée and Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2001).

24. Participants in the Haitian Revolution held many different ideas about freedom, rights, republicanism, monarchy, and property. Explicitly dignitary claims to equal treatment in the public sphere were central to the ideologies of some of the revolution's precursors, including Vincent Ogé (discussed in this article), and protagonists, including Julien Raimond. See John D. Garrigus, “Opportunist or Patriot: Julien Raimond (1744–1801) and the Haitian Revolution,” Slavery and Abolition 28 (2007):1–21.

25. Rossi believed that all persons were eligible for such “public rights,” which he saw as synonymous with “social rights,” but he defined them in terms of “public liberties” rather than in terms of access to public accommodations and public respect. Pellegrino Luigi Edoardo Rossi, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 Cours de Droit Constitutionnel professé à la Faculté de Droit de Paris (Paris : Librairie de Guillaumin, 1866), 10.

26. For news from France and from the French Antilles, see the articles published in Le Courrier (New Orleans) on April 2, April 6, April 10, and April 11, and then on May 10, May 13, and May 31, all 1848.

27. See the decree issued by Minister Arago for Martinique “Circulaire Ministérielle No. 358,” Bulletin Officiel de la Martinique, May 7, 1848, 594. See also Myriam Cottias, D'une Abolition, l'autre: Anthologie raisonnée de textes consacrés à la seconde abolition de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises (Marseille: Agone Éditeurs, 1998).

28. See Marieke Polfliet, “Émigration et politisation: les Français de New York et La Nouvelle-Orléans dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle (1803–1860)” (PhD diss., Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, 2013); and Rebecca J. Scott, “Asserting Citizenship and Refusing Stigma: New Orleans Equal-Rights Activists Interpret 1803 and 1848,” in New Orleans, Louisiana and Saint-Louis, Senegal: Mirror Cities in the Atlantic World, 1659 to 2000s, eds. Emily Clark, Ibrahima Thioub, and Cécile Vidal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 146–67. On the concept of a “protectable interest” in one's personal honor, see James Q. Whitman, “Enforcing Civility and Respect: Three Societies,” Yale Law Journal 109 (2000): 1279–398, at 1282.

29. See James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 55–69.

30. On recruitment to the Union Army, and the Tinchant family's frequent crossing of boundaries, see Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), ch, 6, especially 114–15. On claims of rights by free people of African descent, see Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

31. The activist Melvil-Bloncourt, discussed in this article, provides an example of this kind of solidarity from afar. See more generally George M. Blackburn, French Newspaper Opinion on the American Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 57–73.

32. Mark Charles Roudané, The New Orleans Tribune: An Introduction to America's First Black Daily Newspaper (Privately printed, 2014), 6, cites the information about Roudanez in Paris to an obituary written by Paul Trévigne, published in the New Orleans Daily Crusader, March 22, 1890. https://roudanez.com/the-new-orleans-tribune/ (accessed August 1, 2020).

33. On the community around the Tribune see Nathalie Dessens, “Louis Charles Roudanez, A Creole of Color of Saint-Domingue Descent: Atlantic Reinterpretations of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” South Atlantic Review 73 (2008): 26–38; and Kristi Richard Melancon, “An African American Discourse Community in Black & White: The New Orleans Tribune” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2011).

34. The exchange between Lanusse and Tinchant is discussed in Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 121–39.

35. Ibid. 122–24.

36. See Melvil-Bloncourt, untitled, from Phare de la Loire , October 4, 1865, as reprinted in La Tribune, December 30, 1865, 1.

37. See Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 122–24; and Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010): 51–52. Struggles over access to streetcars had simultaneously emerged in the District of Columbia, which was similarly under direct federal authority. Congress took a step toward mandating equal rights on public transport in Washington, making the incorporation of the Metropolitan Railroad contingent on the adoption of an antidiscrimination provision. Masur, An Example for All the Land , ch. 3.

38. John K. Bardes cites an early petition to General George F. Shepley in which men of color protested the behavior of police who stopped them in the streets of New Orleans as presumptive “vagrants.” The affront was not just the risk of imprisonment, but the very visible humiliation that came from being singled out for police attention on the grounds of color. See Bardes, “Redefining Vagrancy: Policing Freedom and Disorder in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1863–1868,” Journal of Southern History 84 (2018): 69–112.

39. This was not a simple matter of “Latin” or “Gallic” idiosyncrasies in racial norms and social customs. Speakers of French could be as hostile to equal rights as any Anglo-American resident or newcomer. See Polfliet, “Émigration et politisation,” 128–30; and Scott, “Asserting Citizenship,” 155–56.

40. A “Memorial” in Liberator, April 1, 1864, 3. Jari Honora, “‘Cast Your Eyes Upon a Loyal Population’: Lincoln and Louisiana's Free People of Color,” La Créole, A Journal of Creole History and Genealogy 1 (2009): 1–8, transcribes the signatures. Given the ease of mistaking the cursive n for u, and t for d, the E. Tinchaud who appears on p. 16 is probably Edward Tinchant.

41. Houzeau's writings might be read in the light of Edoardo Grendi's argument for the study of exceptional documents that are revealing of the “normal.” See Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 12 (1977): 506–20, at 512. Jacques Revel rephrases this in terms of the exceptionnel normal, the otherwise marginal event or figure whose experience casts light on underlying processes. Jacques Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social,” in Jeux d’échelles: La micro-analyse à l'expérience (Paris:Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1996): 15–36.

42. See the introduction by David Rankin in Jean-Charles Houzeau, My Passage at the New Orleans Tribune: A Memoir of the Civil War Era, ed. David Rankin, trans. Gerard F. Denault (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press: 1984), 1–67; and Albert Lancaster, Notices biographiques sur J.-C. Houzeau (Brussels: F. Hayez, Imprimeur de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, 1889). A portion of Houzeau's correspondence is reproduced in Hossam Elkhadem, Annette Félix, and Liliane Wellens-De Donder, eds., Jean-Charles Houzeau: Lettres adressées des États-Unis à sa famille, 1857–1868 (Brussels: Centre National d'Histoire des Sciences, 1994).

43. Houzeau's political stance in the late 1840s was variously described by his Belgian colleagues as “democratic,” “republican,” and favorable to “social equality.” See Lancaster, Notices biographiques, xii, xi. My translation here and throughout the article.

44. Ibid., xii.

45. Ibid., xiii.

46. Ibid., xvi.

47. Romy Sánchez, “Quitter la Très Fidèle. Exilés et bannis au temps du séparatisme cubain (1834–1879)” (PhD diss., Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2016), 216. See also Romy Sánchez, “Le réformisme cubain et 1848. Exils croisés et circulations politiques,” in Exils entre les deux mondes: Migrations et espaces politiques atlantiques au XIXe siècle, ed. Delphine Diaz, Jeanne Moisand, Romy Sánchez, and Juan Luis Simal (Paris: Éditions les Perséides, 2015), 115–42.

48. See Houzeau, Lettres, 137–283; and Jean-Charles Houzeau, La Terreur blanche au Texas et mon évasion (Brussels: V^e Parent & Fils, 1862).

49. See Houzeau, Lettres, 303–430, at 373.

50. See the introduction by David Rankin to Houzeau, My Passage, 41.

51. See Bryan LaPointe, “‘Moral Electricity’: Melvil-Bloncourt and the Trans-Atlantic Struggle for Abolition and Equal Rights,” Slavery and Abolition 40 (2019): 543–62; and Willy Alante-Lima, Melvil-Bloncourt: le communard marie-galantais? (Saint-Maure-des-Fossés: Éditions Sépia, 2014). See also Melvil-Bloncourt, “A Monsieur le Rédacteur en chef de la Tribune de la Nouvelle-Orleans,” La Tribune, November 15, 1864, 3, 4; “La Revue du Monde Colonial,” La Tribune, November 17, 1864, 3; and “Adresse des Créoles de Couleur de la Guadeloupe,” La Tribune, July 21, 1865, 1.

52. This was probably Victor Hébert, son of a Frenchman, who listed himself as a “painter” in 1860, but seems to have taken over his father's bookshop by 1864. See United States Census Bureau, Entry for Ward 5, New Orleans, Population Schedule for Louisiana (1860), microformed on United States National Archives, Publication No. M653, Roll 418, accessed through ancestry.com.

53. See Melvil-Bloncourt's successive letters to the editor of La Tribune, published May 19, 1865, 1; June 15, 1865, 3; July 20, 1865, 1; and July 21, 1865, 1.

54. See Melvil-Bloncourt, “Chronique de l'Amérique du Nord,” Revue du monde colonial, asiatique et américain 12 (1864): 457–64. On such arrests, see John K. Bardes, “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation: Fugitive Slaves, Poor Whites, and Prison Development in Louisiana, 1805–1877” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2020), chs. 5, 6 (257–354).

55. See the installments of Melvil-Bloncourt, “Les Héros de la Race Africaine, Vincent Ogé,” in La Tribune, August 21–24, 26–28, 30, 1865, each on page 2. On Ogé, see John Garrigus, “Vincent Ogé Jeune (1757–91): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution,” The Americas 68 (2011): 33–62.

56. This phrase appears in Melvil-Bloncourt, “Les Héros de la Race Africaine, Vincent Ogé, Chapitre IX,” La Tribune, August 30, 1865, 2.

57. On the convention, see the typescript transcripts available from the University of Delaware's Colored Conventions Project, http://coloredconventions.org/items/show/271 (accessed August 1, 2020) and Jean-Charles Houzeau, “Le journal noir, aux Etats-Unis, de 1863 à 1870 (1),” Revue de Belgique 11 (1872): 5, 21. The French pages of La Tribune announced the gathering as the convention of the “Ligue Nationale pour l'Egalité des Droits.” See La Tribune, January 7, 1865, 3. See also “Réunion à l’École de Liberté,” La Tribune, January 11, 1865, 3. Articles titled “Convention d’État” conveyed daily reports in French on the deliberations. See La Tribune, Jan. 10–15, 1865, each on page 3.

58. “Convention d’État,” La Tribune, January 13, 1865, 3.

59. A report on the final session was published in both the English and French pages of the Tribune on January 15, 1865.

60. Frederick Douglass, “Une Lettre de Frederic Douglass à Monsieur Melvil-Bloncourt,” La Tribune, December 16, 1865, 1.

61. See Houzeau, Lettres, letter to his brother, dated August 5, 1866, 395–99. See also James C. Hollandsworth, An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); and Justin Nystrom, New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), ch. 2.

62. Foner, Reconstruction, 263.

63. The first statute was titled “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” and was passed by the 40th Congress on March 2, 1867.

64. On the convention, see Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), ch. 6 and Appendix 2; and Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 121–39.

65. The official report contains very brief descriptions of the debate. See Official Journal of the Proceedings. Competing accounts of the interventions on the floor of the convention appeared in the New Orleans Times and the New Orleans Tribune during the days of the proceedings.

66. See “‘This Convention.’ Twenty Fifth Day, The Constitution a Night Mare,” New Orleans Times, December 28, 1867, Supplement, 1.

67. The delegates were quoted—with what degree of accuracy cannot be determined—in ibid.

68. Tinchant at one point apparently invoked his personal honor, much as he had in the polemic with Lanusse 3 years earlier, “As for himself, if refused, he would still go; resisted, he would throw off his citizenship, appear as a man, and fly at the throat of the proprietor who would refuse. Under this regime the bakers might refuse to sell bread.” See “Talk on Social Rights,” New Orleans Times, December 29, 1867, 3.

69. See “Constitutional Convention,” The Tribune, December 29, 1867, 4.

70. Houzeau, Lettres, 427.

71. Houzeau's analysis of the election strategy appears in a letter to his parents dated March 2, 1868. Ibid., 427–28.

72. Ibid.

73. Donald W. Davis, “Ratification of the Constitution of 1868–Record of Votes,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 6 (1965): 301–5. In his memoirs, Warmoth denounced the leadership of the Tribune as “three San Domingo negroes” who were part of a “Pure Radical” party that sought to create an “African state government.” Henry Clay Warmoth, War, Politics and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 51–52.

74. Roudané, The New Orleans Tribune, also mentions some weekly issues in 1870.

75. On the composition of these postwar legislatures, see Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana during Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 71–113. See also Roger A. Fischer, The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974). On the contemporaneous struggles over labor rights, see Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); and John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001).

76. The first bill was introduced by Representative R. H. Isabelle of Orleans Parish and was passed by the General Assembly in September of 1868. See “The General Assembly,” New Orleans Times, September 19, 1868, 3. On its veto, see Vincent, Black Legislators, 92–93.

77. Vincent, Black Legislators, 92–96, quotation from the Tribune at 96. Discussion of the second round of legislative debate can be found in the New Orleans Crescent, February 20, 1869, 4, which deemed the bill an “ill-timed, tyrannical, and infamous measure;” and in the Tribune, February 23, 1869, 1. Edwards, in A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 131, observes that during Reconstruction African Americans “stretched the framework of rights” and “turned issues that had been considered social rights into civil rights.”

78. La. Rev. Stat. No. 38 (1869) Sect. 4; Stephen Darwall, “Equal Dignity and Rights,” in Dignity: A History, ed. Remy Debes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 182–201. Thomas C. Holt emphasizes the crushing everyday dignitary offenses involved in forced segregation. See Holt, The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2020).

79. The case reached the Louisiana Supreme Court as Sauvinet v. Walker, 27 La. Ann. 14 (La. 1875) and the United States Supreme Court as Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U.S. 90 (1875).

80. See Thomas Morris Chester, Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent. His Despatches from the Virginia Front, edited, with a biographical essay and notes, by R. J. M. Blackett (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 1–91; and the article in the Christian Recorder, July 3, 1869, as transcribed in the database “Accessible Archives,” http://www.accessible-archives.com/collections/african-american-newspapers/the-christian-recorder/

81. Beth Kressel Itkin found Chester listed as the lawyer for several plaintiffs seeking to enforce Louisiana's 1869 antidiscrimination statute. See Beth Kressel Itkin, “Creating ‘What Might Have Been a Fuss’: The Many Faces of Equal Public Rights in Reconstruction-era Louisiana,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 56 (2014): 42–74. Chester's legal practice is discussed by Blackett in Chester, Thomas Morris Chester, 72–74, 87.

82. See Brian J. Costello, A History of Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana (Donaldsonville, LA: Margaret Media, Inc., 2010), 102, 106–7, 132; Loren Schweninger, “Antebellum Free Persons of Color in Postbellum Louisiana,” Louisiana History 30 (1989): 345–64; Charles Vincent, “Aspects of the Family and Public Life of Antoine Dubuclet: Louisiana's Black State Treasurer, 1868–1878,” The Journal of Negro History 86 (1981): 26–36; and Jack Beermann, The Journey to Separate but Equal: Madame Decuir's Quest for Racial Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, forthcoming, 2021). I have greatly benefitted from discussions with Jack Beermann about the case.

83. See the testimony of the steamboat captain Barranco, in Transcript of Record, Mrs. Josephine Decuir v. John G. Benson, Eighth District Court for the Parish of Orleans, No. 7800, transferred to Fifth District Court, No. 4028, reproduced in United States Supreme Court Records and Briefs, Docket No. 294, John G. Benson v. Josephine Decuir (hereafter TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC), Testimony of Captain V. B. Barranco, 32–41. (After the case went on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, Benson died and the case was taken over by his heirs. The final decision is therefore styled Hall v. Decuir.)

84. TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, testimony of Captain V. B. Barranco, 32–41.

85. See the testimony of P. G. Deslonde in TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, 64–69. (In 1873, at the time that he provided testimony, Deslonde was Louisiana's secretary of state.) A generation of scholars of women's history have traced African American women's efforts to negotiate propriety as they moved through a world filled with risks to their dignity and safety. See Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7(1994): 107–46; Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); LaKisha Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); and Masur, An Example for All the Land.

86. TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, testimony of D.E. Grove, 23–29; testimony of E. K. Washington; and testimony of Seymour Snaer [his surname is misspelled in the print transcript], 72–73.

87. See TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, including Petition of Mme. Antoine Decuir, 1; testimony of J. H. Mossof, describing a “recess” as “a place for children to play in more than anything else, and servants to stay, and the like of that. There are no accommodations there for sleeping or anything of that kind.” 9; testimony of the clerk D. E. Grove, describing events on board the Governor Allen, 24, 26, 28; testimony of Barranco, on the “freedmen's bureau” or “colored department,” 38; testimony of the steward John Cedilot, 50.

88. Washington and Snaer were law partners with Simeon Belden, who had been a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1867–68. On the partnership, see Mary Frances Berry, We Are Who We Say We Are: A Black Family's Search for Home Across the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92–94.

89. TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, Petition of Mme. Antoine Ducuir, 1.

90. The statute is La. Rev. Stat. No. 39 (1870), repealed 1902. I thank Jack Beermann for noting that other steamboat owners appear on the appeal bond for Benson. TR Decuir v. Benson, USSC, 82–83.

91. Decuir v. Benson, 27 La. Ann. 1 (La. 1875); and TR, Decuir v. Benson, USSC, testimony of John Benson, 42. Familiar figures from the Constitutional Convention of 1867 now sat on the court, including John T. Ludeling, whom the Times had quoted as saying that “public rights mean nothing,” and James G. Taliaferro, who had presided over the convention, and had been supported by Roudanez in the gubernatorial election of 1868. See Evelyn L. Wilson, The Justices of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, 1865–1880 (Lake Mary, FL: Vandeplas Publishing 2015), 63–154.

92. The potential Commerce Clause problem posed by the application of Louisiana's antidiscrimination law to a steamboat on the Mississippi River had been left aside, consistent with the unsettled state of Commerce Clause jurisprudence as of the early 1870s. One scholar notes that the case “came to a Supreme Court still in search of a clear set of dormant Commerce Clause rules.” Joseph R. Palmore, “The Not-So-Strange Career of Interstate Jim Crow: Race, Transportation, and the Dormant Commerce Clause, 1878–1946,” Virginia Law Review 83 (1997): 1773–817. For a recent analysis of the case in the context of the Commerce Clause, see Beermann, The Journey to Separate but Equal.

93. Marr had earlier provided assistance to Benson's attorney in preparing petitions to the Louisiana Supreme Court. See Beermann, The Journey to Separate but Equal. On the anti-equal-rights bar in Louisiana, see Michael Ross, “Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the Legal Campaign against Louisiana's Republican Government, 1868–1873,” Civil War History 49 (2003): 235–53.

94. For background on R. H. Marr, see Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2008), 155–57; and Rebecca J. Scott, “Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription,” Law and History Review 35 (2017): 9–30. On Marr's behavior at the September 1874 Battle of Canal Street, recounted by his admirers, see Louisiana State Museum, Carpet-Bag Misrule in Louisiana: The Tragedy of the Reconstruction Era Following the War Between the States (New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum, 1938), 40–42.

95. See Ross, Obstructing Reconstruction, 241–51; and Lane, The Day Freedom Died, 156–57, and passim.

96. Hall v. Decuir, 95 U.S. 485 (1877), 488–89.

97. Charles Sauvinet, who had been refused service at a bar in New Orleans, won damages in the Louisiana courts, which were then upheld on appeal to the United States Supreme Court in 1876. The procedural posture in that instance, however, was quite different. Those attacking Sauvinet's victory claimed the right to a jury trial in a civil case, and failed to prevail on that claim. Walker v. Sauvinet, 92 U.S. 90 (1876).

98. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1875—which itself might have been invoked against the steamboat owner––was not directly applicable to Hall v. Decuir, having been passed after the episode on the Governor Allen.

99. Twelve years after the issuance of the decision in Hall v. Decuir, the Louisiana state legislature passed a bill imposing separation by color, rather than prohibiting it. A new generation of equal-rights activists, well aware of the Hall v. Decuir precedent, immediately challenged the 1890 Separate Car Act (Act 111, 1890) as unconstitutional. Their challenge proved successful in a test case that dealt with a journey (undertaken by Daniel Desdunes, son of one of the activists) that was itself explicitly interstate. The activists’ concurrent challenge based on an intrastate journey, however, famously went down to defeat in Plessy v. Ferguson. See Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Companies, 2003). On the multiple dimensions of these struggles, see Barbara Welke, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race and the Road to Plessy, 1855–1914,” Law and History Review 13 (1995): 261–316.

100. A classic older account of Reconstruction instability in the state can be found in Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974). An astute modern interpretation is Lawrence Powell, “Centralization and its Discontents in Reconstruction Louisiana,” Studies in American Political Development 20 (2006): 105–31.

101. On this point, see, among others, Richard A. Primus, “The Riddle of Hiram Revels.” Harvard Law Review 119 (2006): 1680–734.

102. Marr was joined on the court by Alcibiades De Blanc, a founder of the Knights of the White Camellia, one of Louisiana's main white supremacist vigilante groups. See James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 126, 167.

103. I thank Jack Beermann for having shared a photograph of a copy of the mandate sent to the Louisiana Supreme Court, and the dispositions then ordered, as preserved in the City Archives, Louisiana Division, New Orleans Public Library.

104. Constitution of the State of Louisiana Adopted in Convention at the City of New Orleans, the Twenty-Third Day of July, A. D. 1879 (New Orleans: Jas. H. Cosgrove, 1879).

105. La. Rev. Stat. No. 38 (1869). Repeal in La. Acts 1954, No. 194, § 1.

106. On Tinchant's involvement with the G.A.R., see Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 125.

107. See “Dernières Nouvelles,” Le Petit Journal, June 7, 1874, 1.

108. On the activities of Isabelle, Trévigne, and Belden, which included litigation in pursuit of school integration, see Kousser, J. Morgan, “Before Plessy, before Brown: The Development of the Law of Racial Integration in Louisiana and Kansas,” in Toward a Usable Past: Liberty under State Constitutions, eds. Finkelman, Paul and Gottlieb, Stephen E. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 213–70Google Scholar.

109. I have borrowed the idea of a woman “at odds with her circumstances” from Fitzgerald, Penelope, Consequences (New York: Penguin Group, 2007), 1Google ScholarPubMed.

110. An article had made this point during the initial discussion of the statute: “When one or a few colored men are excluded from certain public rights enjoyed by all white men, not the few alone but the entire colored population are wronged.” The Tribune, February 14, 1869, 4.

111. “Après avoir été témoins en France ou en Angleterre de la libéralité des institutions, après y avoir joui de l’égalité civile, ils ne pouvaient plus porter qu'avec impatience, le joug unique et flétrissant du Code Noir.” See Houzeau, “Le journal noir . . . (Part I),” 8. The term “Code Noir” was often used to refer generically to regulations governing persons of African descent, and not just to the specific French-language texts bearing that name.

112. For the generations of Louisiana activists who followed, this legacy of Reconstruction became a memory to be nourished across ensuing long years of legal defeat. On continuities into the 1890s, see Joseph Logsdon with Powell, Lawrence, “Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Forgotten Organizer of the Plessy Protest,” in Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866–2000, ed. Hyde, Samuel Jr. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 42–70Google Scholar. On the early and mid-twentieth century, see Emanuel, Rachel L. and Tureaud, Alexander P. Jr., A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 5Google Scholar, 8, 19.