Changes

'''Your previous book, ''Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era'', focused on the impact of Justice Samuel Freeman Miller on the Supreme Court. How did you shift from looking at the Supreme Court to examining Reconstruction in New Orleans?'''

For my first book, I did a lot of research on New Orleans during Reconstruction because Justice Miller authored the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in a case, the famous Slaughter-House Cases, that emerged from the fearsome political and legal struggles that took place in New Orleans during that era. I stumbled across the Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case while doing that research. Every historian has had a moment like this. You are immersed in old letters or newspapers when a different story from the one you are working on catches your eye. In the documents you find an account of something no one has written about before, an untold story begging to be told. Usually when this happens, you pause, shake your head, think “wow, that would be great to tackle someday,” and then return to the task at hand. Seldom do you go back to it. The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is an example, for better or worse, of what happens when you actually take the bait and decide that the event you stumbled across is too rich, too full of historical implications, to pass up.

When I first found the Digby case, I was reading all of the 1870 New Orleans newspapers, looking for references to the Slaughter-House Cases and the efforts by ex-Confederates to obstruct Reconstruction in the state and local courts. When I reached the June 1870 editions, the story of an alleged Voodoo abduction demanded a quick read. ‘That can’t possibly have happened,’ I thought to myself. The press had to have been spreading unfounded rumors. The New Orleans papers, after all, also reported ghost sightings. But to my amazement, each day’s paper contained new articles about the Digby kidnapping—including reports of the police arresting and interrogating Voodoo practitioners. And by the time it was clear that the human sacrifice rumors were exaggerations, the story had taken other compelling turns. (Editor's note: Ross has more about the human sacrifice allegations at his Tumblr blog - michaelaross.tumblr.com.)

One of the things that I found so compelling about the case was how quickly it became intertwined with the momentous events of Reconstruction. New Orleans was a city on edge in June 1870 when the papers reported that two African American women abducted 17-month-old Mollie Digby from in front of her family’s home in the working-class “back of town.” It was the height of Radical Reconstruction. African American men could now vote, serve on juries, and hold public office, and black men and women now demanded service in formerly whites-only restaurants and saloons. Reconstruction Governor Henry Clay Warmoth had also just integrated the New Orleans police force and black officers now patrolled the streets. Many white residents, still emotionally wounded by Confederate defeat, seethed as the new order emerged.

After the Voodoo abduction rumors began, the white press seized on the Digby case as an example of a world turned dangerously upside down, and they predicted that the integrated police force would let the crime go unsolved and unpunished. Governor Warmoth responded by getting personally involved the case, offering a state reward of $1,000 for recovery of the child or the arrest and conviction of the abductors, and he ordered New Orleans’s chief of police to put his best African American detectives in charge of the investigation. If black detectives could solve a high-profile, racially explosive case, it could build public confidence in all of the new African American public servants.

In the Digby case, lead Detective John Baptiste Jourdain became the first African American detective ever to make national news. Right there I knew I had a story worth telling, but there was even more to come. When private citizens supplemented Warmoth’s reward and the promised amounts reached $5,000, the case became the “Powerball” of 1870. Everyone who saw an African American woman walking with a white baby wondered if the child was Mollie Digby. Leads poured in from across the South and the detectives even consulted clairvoyants. Eventually, the police arrested and put on trial two strikingly beautiful and stylish Afro-Creole women and a sensational, headline grabbing trial followed.

'''How would you recommend using this book in a class? How can your book help students better understand the issues surrounding Reconstruction?'''