While the exact number of citizens arrested by the Lincoln Administration during the war is unknown (13,000-38,000) we really know the stories of only a handful. Clement Vallandingham and Rose O’Neal Greenhow come to mind. Louis de Bebian is not one of those names, but, in August 1861, he was arrested.
Louis was born in 1829
on the French Island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. In 1855, he moved with his
family to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he taught French and worked as a
partner in O. G. Parsely & Company, lumber and commission merchants. Once
the war commenced, he engaged in blockade running, traveling through the French
Antilles, working on acquiring supplies for the Confederacy. It was determined
to send de Babian to England and France, and on August 6, 1861, he boarded the
schooner Adelso in Wilmington, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Running
into bad weather, the Adelso was forced to put into port in Newport,
Rhode Island, on August 12. Upon hearing that the Adelso had sailed from
a Southern Port, the USS Henrietta seized the ship’s cargo of spirits,
turpentine, and rosin, and de Bebian.
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| William H. Seward |
A lengthy paper
trail soon developed. De Bebian wrote Count Montholon, the French Consul in New
York, of his plight. He then wrote to Price Napoleon, and the French Consul in
Washington, D.C. De Babian’s children,
who lived in New York City, wrote to both the French Consul in New York, and to
Seward, asking for their father’s release. In September, due to an attack of “violent
diarrhoea,” de Bebian was paroled and allowed to visit his family in New York,
a parole that was extended. In the meantime, but to the chagrin of Seward, the incriminating
papers found in de Bebian’s trunks, were lost. On October 4, Seward ordered the
release of de Bebian, and about a month later, he was on his way to Britain and
France. Once in France, de Bebian complained of his treatment, and the loss of
his papers, which the French Consul in Washington took up, asking for
indemnity. Eventually, Seward came to the conclusion that de Bebian was not an “innocent
passenger,” nor was the Adelso “a neutral vessel.”[1]
Louis de Bebian
spent little time in Europe. A North Carolina newspaper reported that after he
was released, Seward granted him a passport, with an endorsement that de Bebian
was “not to enter into any of the insurrectionary States.” He sailed to Britain,
and then France, where he met with Emperor Napoleon. “The Emperor said that he
should be allowed to return to his place of business, and the French Minister
of Foreign Affairs prepared the necessary papers for the French minister at
Washington.” De Bebian “returned to Washington and applied for a passport to
Wilmington, but Seward refused it. The next day the French minister called on
Seward and showed his papers, when Seward granted the passport.”[2]
De Bebian was reported to be in Norfolk, Virginia, on February 4.[3]
Emperor Napoleon III
There is not much
of a record of de Bebian for the rest of the War. Following the conflict, he
moved to New York City, becoming an agent for a French steamer company. Louis
de Bebian passed in December 1893, and is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery,
Bronx County, New York. An obituary on findagrave states that his casket was
carried into the church by twelve French sailors, all in uniform. It is not
really clear just who de Bebian was working for. While he denounced the United
States government, he might have just been seeking stock for his company. He
does not appear in Bullock’s The Secret Service of the Confederate States in
Europe, or in Wise’s Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running
During the Civil Way. De Bebian’s arrest and imprisonment could have caused
an international incident with France, something that Seward and the Lincoln
administration wished to avoid.
