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The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case - Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Hardcover)
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The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case - Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Hardcover)
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In June 1870, the residents of the city of New Orleans were already
on edge when two African American women kidnapped seventeen-month
old Mollie Digby from in front of her New Orleans home. It was the
height of Radical Reconstruction. The old racial order had been
turned upside down and black men now voted, held office, sat on
juries, and served as policemen. Nervous white residents fearing
impeding chaos pointed to the Digby abduction as proof that no
white child was safe now that slavery had ended and the South had
been "Africanized." Newspapers opposed to Louisiana's biracial
Reconstruction government stoked those fears by reprinting rumors
that the stolen Digby baby had been sacrificed in a Voodoo ceremony
on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Louisiana's twenty-eight year
old Reconstruction Governor Henry Clay Warmoth, in turn, hoped to
use the kidnapping to prove that his newly integrated police force,
trained in the latest investigative techniques from Boston and New
York, could solve the crime. He offered a huge reward for the
return of Mollie Digby and the capture of her kidnappers, and his
police chief put his best Afro-Creole detective, the dashing Jean
Baptiste Jourdain, on the case. The Associated Press sent the story
out on the wire and newspaper readers around the country began to
follow the New Orleans mystery. Leads poured in from across the
Gulf Coast and from as far north as Ohio and New York, and Jourdain
became the first black detective in the United States to make
national news. Interest in the story only grew when police and
prosecutors put two strikingly beautiful Afro-Creole women on trial
for the crime and a tense courtroom drama unfolded against the
backdrop of a yellow fever epidemic and the momentous events of
Reconstruction in the South. A stunning work of historical
recreation, Michael Ross's The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is
the first full account ever written about an event that electrified
the South at one of the most critical moments in the history of
American race relations. Ross brings the era back to life, leading
readers into smoke filled concert saloons, Garden District drawing
rooms, sweltering courthouses, and squalid prisons, and he uses the
Digby kidnapping, investigation, and trial to offer important new
insights into the complexities and possibilities of the
Reconstruction era.
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