*CONTENT CAUTION: Racist, dated imagery and vocabulary
— By Yvette Rubio
“Besides, all the Chinese are not opium eaters, nor are all negroes dirt eaters.” Theodore Bailly Blanchard, Jr. in his 1854 pamphlet Remarks on the Chinese and Coolies
My ancestor Theodore Bailly Blanchard, Jr. (1820-1892), or Bailly Blanchard, was a well-known merchant in the city of New Orleans before the Civil War. His family came to the United States in 1810, fleeing from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, and the Haitian revolution. They were part of the 10,000 Haitian immigrants—white, free people of color and the enslaved—who flooded New Orleans during that time, ensuring the tripartite racial system continued well after Louisiana became part of the United States in 1815. Bailly Blanchard was my first cousin, 3x removed, and contemporary with my great-grandparents, working for my great-grandfather at the end of his career in the insurance business.
In 1854, Bailly Blanchard authored a fifteen-page pamphlet entitled “Remarks on the Chinese and Coolies”. I found this document while researching my family history at the Williams Research Center at the Historic New Orleans Collection in 2021. Its contents revealed a disturbing fact of history completely unknown and deeply disturbing to me, and, I believe, little known to most people.
The pamphlet is an analysis of the benefits of using Chinese immigrants (“coolies”) as paid laborers in lieu of Black enslaved people. The introduction to the pamphlet ends, “We further state that we are prepared to receive orders for the importation of Chinese and hoping that you will favor us with your confidence.” In other words, as a merchant, Bailly Blanchard was offering his services to import Chinese workers, and this pamphlet was his sales pitch to potential customers.
In 1854 Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of the world’s sugar and was the largest slave market in the United States. Bailly Blanchard cites the increasing expense of enslaved labor and low sugar prices as a reason to consider other sources of labor. He wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. British sugar planter John Gladstone shipped indentured South Asian workers to his sugar plantation in British Guiana after slavery was abolished in England in 1830. Chinese labor was also employed successfully in the West Indian islands of Mauritius and Bourbon. There was a large migration of Chinese to the colonies all over the world during this time. After the Civil War, the use of Chinese indentured workers was successfully implemented in Louisiana, but it appears that his business had failed by this time.
Bailly Blanchard set out to convince enslavers that it was worth their while to pay wages to Chinese workers by dispassionately providing mathematical formulas to show that the investment would be a good one. He claimed that paid Chinese labor would be more productive due to their “better” temperament. The pamphlet begins this way:
It is a well established fact that there is no objection whatever, on the part of the Chinese and Coolies to intercourse with the negro slaves. They are docile and intelligent, and evince no jealousy on account of the whites being able to obtain higher wages than themselves, because they respect and acknowledge the superiority of the white race, and on the other hand, they are neither quarrelsome nor disputatious in their intercourse with slaves.
He made the case that Chinese workers would be more productive, more docile, more congenial, and more fit for field labor than enslaved men. He reassured potential buyers that there would be no “Opium Eaters” among the unmarried Chinese men 13 – 35 years of age, as they would be inspected daily for signs of addiction and possession of opium among their belongings. He stated: “Besides, all the Chinese are not opium eaters, nor are all negroes dirt eaters.” He described the housing, the nutritional needs and wages that would be part of a typical five-year contract. He wrote page after page of financial analysis, from the relative cost of the enslaved to the cost of wages for Chinese laborers, to predicted death rates, and the costs of those deaths. He acknowledged the loss of capital already invested in enslaved men, but asserted that this loss would pale in comparison to the money saved hiring Chinese laborers. The pamphlet ended with a sample contract for engaging a Chinese worker.
I’m not certain how successful Bailly Blanchard was in his efforts to import Chinese workers to Louisiana, but a recent book Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation by Moon-Ho Jung states that more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build railroads. Jung is quoted in the Asian Times: “Though now a largely forgotten episode in history, their migration played a key role in renewing and reinforcing racist foundation of American citizenship. Recruited and reviled as “coolies,” their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.”
The chilling and dispassionate arguments for the use of human labor as put forth in this pamphlet are painful and shocking to read, but then again, I wonder, how different is this from today? We watch our government officials debate endlessly on livable and sustainable wages, provide OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) only with a shoestring budget, resist providing true, affordable health care, pass laws against the LGBTQ community, work hard to repress unions, and continue Jim Crow incarceration of the Black community. I cringed when I read my cousin’s pamphlet, realizing that these inhumane attitudes and practices towards workers –embodied in terms like “human capital” — continue today.
I’m hoping that by sharing this story, I can add to the efforts being made by many others in this BitterSweet blog to tell the truth about the past and contemplate how this story links to the present. I was raised with romantic family stories about my ancestors who were corsairs, fought duels under oak trees, and helped build the city of New Orleans. These stories are true, but there are also other stories—like Bailly Blanchard’s, in which they participated and benefitted from a slave economy and settler colonialism—which are also true. It’s time to set the record straight.
Author: Yvette Rubio is a descendent from a family of enslavers in Louisiana. A twelfth generation New Orleanian, she currently lives in Ithaca, New York. The pandemic allowed her to delve into her family’s story that had not yet been told. She’s written a three-hundred-page document for her children and grandchildren about both her maternal family history in New Orleans and her paternal family history in Guatemala. In the Fall of 2022, she will be starting graduate school at the University of New Orleans for Public History: New Orleans concentration.
©2022, Yvette Rubio. All rights reserved.
Readings:
- A History Of indentured Labor Gives “Coolie” Its Sting, Code Switch, November 25, 2013
- Jessie G. Lutz, Chinese Emigrants, Indentured Workers, and Christianity in the West Indies, British Guiana and Hawaii
- Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation
- Austin Schultz, American Merchants and the Chinese Coolie Trade 1850-1880: Contrasting models of human trafficking to Peru and the United States
- Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: masters and management
Credits:
- Remarks on the Chinese and Coolies, by Bailly Blanchard, images courtesy of the Williams Research Center at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
- Madame Theodore Bailly Blanchard (Rosa Colon), Jean Joseph Vaudechamp, 1832, Louisiana State Museum.
- Chinese cheap labor in Louisiana–Chinamen at work on the Milloudon Sugar Plantation, 1871 engraving, Library of Congress.
- What shall we do with John Chinaman? [2 illustrations: 1. Irishman throwing a Chinese man over cliff towards China; 2. Southern plantation owner leading him to cotton fields], 1869 wood engraving, Library of Congress.
Hello I’m a Blanchard and I’m Haitian I wonder if there is any relationship
Michey,
I’m so sorry that I’m just now seeing this. I’m happy to talk to you about this possibility. You can reach me at yvettearubio@gmail.com
Best
Yvette
Thank you, Yvette, for letting us know about another piece of hidden history. I appreciate the way you linked the story of importing Chinese workers in the past with subsequent attitudes toward Chinese immigration and with contemporary treatment of workers, especially lower-wage workers.
Prinny, thank you so much for your comment and for supporting the work of this organization. ~Yvette
This is truly shocking. Thanks for your honesty, and for writing this.
Julie, you are welcome. Thank you for taking the time to comment on this essay. ~Yvette