Rillieux

Norbert Rillieux was born on March 17, 1806, to a wealthy white man and his longtime mistress. Norbert s father, Vincent Rillieux, was a cotton merchant and engineer. His mother, Constance Vivant, was a free African American from a rich real estate family in New Orleans she herself was the daughter of a white father and a black mother. 

Vincent Rillieux freely acknowledged his family. Norbert was baptized by a Roman Catholic priest in St. Louis Cathedral, where blacks and whites knelt side by side to pray. The child s birth was registered in City Hall in a mixture of French and English as Norbert Rillieux, quadroon libre, natural son of Vincent Rillieux and Constance Vivant. The words, quadroon libre, stipulated that Norbert was a free African American with more white ancestry than black. 

As heirs to prime New Orleans real estate, a number of free African Americans became quite wealthy before the Civil War. Norbert Rillieux s cousins included members of some of New Orleans richest families. A few of his cousins were so confident of their social status and their ability to pass as white that they signed their names without the required term free man of color, or f.m.c. Many free people of color also invested heavily in slaves. When Norbert Rillieux was in his twenties, more than 700 of New Orleans free African Americans owned an average of three slaves apiece, often family members who were eventually freed. Each of the 23 richest free people of color in New Orleans owned between 10 and 20 slaves. 

Southern Louisiana became a one-crop region during Rillieux s youth. Sugar cane was expensive to grow, and its refining consumed enormous amounts of firewood and slave labor. Each plantation needed an animal-powered mill to crush the heavy canes and release their juices and a sugar-house to evaporate the syrup. 

Most important as far as Rillieux was concerned, the French were passionately debating their laws about slavery and the slave trade. For brief... 

Norbert s father, however, surely did not send his son to France to enjoy its heady freedoms but to master its science and sugar technology. Vincent Rillieux, who had invented a steam-operated cotton-baling press, would have understood Louisiana s desperate need for modern technology. 

In any case, the young Rillieux was hardworking, aggressive, and scientifically gifted, and France recognized his talents. By 1830, when Norbert was 24, he was already teaching applied mechanics at the Ecole Centrale in Paris. 

Rillieux s idea was brilliant, but scaling up his laboratory experiment to a factory process would be difficult. He tried to interest French machinery... 

Rillieux s reputation as a young man with modern ideas must have reached Louisiana, however, because Edmund Forstall, a planter and banker in New Orleans, asked him to become the chief engineer of a sugar refinery under construction there. Forstall had already hired Norbert s cousin and brother, who were also young free men of color. 

New Orleans had changed dramatically since Rillieux s birth. Four hundred steamboats wheeled up and down the Mississippi River, and the city s population had multiplied six times. Crime was flourishing, and murders seemed to be everyday occurrences. In the golden age of New Orleans dueling, almost every white man in public life had fought at least one duel. Defending one s honor was a serious matter, and Rillieux s prickly pride may have reflected this part of his New Orleans heritage. 

New Orleans was also filthy, no different in this respect from Paris. Garbage and waste clogged the streets of both cities, and disease was epidemic. During Rillieux s last year in Paris, cholera killed 18,402 people, most of them desperately poor. The year Rillieux arrived home, yellow fever struck New Orleans 8000 people, one-sixth of the town s population, died. 

Great fortunes could be made, and Norbert Rillieux was an ambitious, energetic man. Louisiana sugar growers were wealthier than any other group of Southerners before the Civil War. John Burnside, who started his career as a peddler with a backpack, owned one of the biggest plantation operations on record. His 7600 acres were as flat as a billiard table and worth 1.5 million his 937 slaves were valued at half a million more. 

Within a year of his return to Louisiana, Rillieux realized that he would have to finance his project himself or attract investors. During the next decade, he tried both. He convinced several planters to let him build and test his equipment in their sugarhouses, but each time his locally built machinery failed. He amassed an enormous fortune in land speculation and then lost it in a bank failure. At one point, he offered to spend 50,000 of his own money to build his system on the plantation of A. Durnford, a rich free man of color whose patron was the eccentric white founder of Liberia. Durnford refused the offer because he did not want to give up control of his people, i.e., his 75 slaves. 

Norbert Rillieux s diagram accompanying his second U.S. patent. He built the equipment in 1844 at Theodore Packwood s plantation called "Scarsdale" in Louisiana. It was his first apparatus to operate successfully. (From Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 2, London Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1950.)... 

Traveling around the state installing his machinery, Rillieux had to stay on slave-operated plantations. Like many free people of color, Rillieux may have regarded himself as the equal of the white ruling class, far above dark-skinned slaves. But in the antebellum South, Rillieux could not stay in the plantations mansions. Rumor had it that he stayed in slave quarters, but a firsthand observer reported that on Benjamin s plantation Rillieux was given a special house and slaves to serve him. 

Sadly, only about 13 of Rillieux s systems were installed before the Civil War. Most planters had no idea how his apparatus worked and remained suspicious. They were more accustomed to buying slaves than technology and did not adopt Rillieux s evaporator until the 1880s or 1890s. Only then did Rillieux s mechanization of the manually operated Jamaica train have an impact on Louisiana agriculture like that of Eli Whitney s cotton gin. 

Rillieux, for example, had trouble filing for U.S. patents. An official who returned one of his forms wrote, It is required that the applicant shall make oath or affirmation of citizenship and as the laws of the United States do not recognize slaves as citizens, it is impossible for the negro slave to bring his application before the office. Rillieux exploded furiously, Now, I was the applicant for the patents and not the slave. I am a citizen of the United States and made oath of the facts in my affidavit.. . . How could the Commissioner arrive at such a monstrous conclusion against the express declaration to the contrary ... 

Leaving Louisiana and its racial problems behind, Rillieux returned permanently to France around the time of the Civil War. Fearful of losing their federal subsidies, most Louisiana sugar planters initially opposed secession. Nonetheless, when their state seceded in January 1861, most supported the Confederacy. In the end, the war destroyed their sugar plantations and freed their slaves. According to some reports, Rillieux returned to France before the war, but his closest French associate wrote that Rillieux left the United States after the war, exhausted and asking for nothing but rest. ... 

Whatever happened, Rillieux was certainly not in New Orleans when a cousin, the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas, came to visit his mother s relatives for five months from 1872 to 1873. Norbert s father was Degas ... 

At the time of Degas visit, the men in Rillieux s white family were briefly involved in the Unification Movement, an abortive attempt by pragmatic white and black businessmen to head off Reconstruction by radical Republicans and voluntarily integrate local governments and public schools. After the Unification Movement failed and Degas returned to France, Rillieux s relations moved on to support whites-only political movements. In a pitched street battle, an all-white militia fought an integrated city police force 32 people died before federal troops restored order. 

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