Who was Madame LaLaurie?
According to Hannah Frishberg, was a Louisiana socialite married three times. She was born with the name Delphine Mccarty, and would acquire her final name after being married to a physician, Dr. Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie.
Delphine was born in New Orleans in March 1787 when it was still Spanish territory. Her father’s name was Louis Barthelemy de McCarty, whose father bought the family to New Orleans. Her mother’s name was Marie-Jeanne L’Érable, and would be called “the widow of Le Comte” — McCarty was her second husband.
Racially, the Mccarty family was of the European Creole community. They had a lot of family connections to power — Delphine’s uncle was the governor of Louisiana and Florida between 1785 and 1791, and her cousin was the mayor of New Orleans between 1815 to 1820.
When Delphine was four years old, the Haitian Revolution broke out, where Haitian slaves successfully violently rebelled against French oppressors. The Haitian Revolution made many slaveholders very afraid that their slaves would rebel violently against them. Locally, rebellions like the German Coast Uprising in 1811 caused slaveholders in New Orleans particularly to be scared of their version of the Haitian Revolution.
Delphine herself would first get married in June of 1800 to a man named Don Ramón de Lopez y Angulo, a Spanish royal officer in a New Orleans cathedral. Louisiana itself would be the subject of political football and the colony of several countries — first France, who obviously named Louisiana after King Louis XIV, then Spain earned possession of Louisiana after France lost the Seven Years’ War in 1960. In 1800, Napoleon pressured Spain to sign the Treaty of San Ildefonso, which pressured Spain giving France the Louisiana territory. And then in 1803, Thomas Jefferson famously pioneered the Louisiana Purchase, which put the whole territory, and New Orleans by extension, in American hands.
According to author Stanley Arthur, in 1803, Don Ramón had been appointed consul general for Spain in the Territory of Orleans and had to appear in Spain to court. Delphine was pregnant and traveled with him and when Don Ramon stopped in Havana, he died suddenly. She would have her first child a couple days later, a daughter named Marie-Borja Delphine Lopez y Angulo de la Candelaria (“Borquita”) — and they would go back to New Orleans.
In 1808, she married a man named Jean Blanque, who was a prominent person in New Orleans who was very involved in trade and the law. Together, they had four children, and then Blanque died in 1816. For her third marriage, Delphine married Leonard Louis Nicolas LaLaurie in 1825, someone a lot younger than her.
In 1831, They would buy a lot, and then build mansion on Royal Street, which Delphine mostly managed on her own. It would become, within the next year, a two-story mansion with a slave quarter attached.
Soon, however, the marriage ended up being unhappy. She filed for separation later in 1832, claiming that LaLaurie had treated her poorly and “rendered their living together unsupportable,” and that he had effectively abused her viciously — that he had:
“In the presence of many witnesses he beat and wounded her in the most outrageous and cruel manner.”
Her four children by Blanque would confirm these claims, but LaLaurie seems to have still lived partially at the mansion, having been present at the time of the 1834 fire at the residence.
Comments
0 comment