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.
 |
| 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.
Hello. I believe there is a confuson of de Bebian pere with de Bebian son. The Wilmington de Bebian (the father) died in the fire and sinking of the USAT General Lyon on March 31 1865. "In the 1870s, two more cases involving the Lyon and claims of monetary loss made their way through the court systems. The earliest was an action brought by Louis De Bebian, the eldest son of the Louis who had boarded the Lyon to go north and ensure that his property rights in cotton back in Wilmington were respected. The elder Louis’ death on March 31st, 1865 had enabled the Federal military authorities in Wilmington to dispose of two hundred and eleven bales of cotton from De Bebian’s warehouse before the younger Louis could assert his rights as administrator of his (intestate) father’s estate. The cotton had been shipped to New York and Washington and there sold. It is from the court case that we learn for certain that the De Bebian children who had reached their majority spent the war years in New York, while Margaret De Bebian and the younger children remained in Wilmington with Louis, Sr. As it turned out, the court recognized that seventy of the bales were the property of Alexander Oldham of Wilmington, an erstwhile informal partner of De Bebian. The younger Louis accepted that Oldham’s cotton had been part of the Federal haul and was content that the court also awarded him the proceeds the government had collected from the sale of the other 141 bales – $16,833.55 in all. There is a certain injustice to be found in a legal system that rewarded the family of a known participant in illegal blockade-running while doing nothing to relieve the situation of the families of Union soldiers killed on the Lyon. It is to be hoped that the widow De Bebian and her young children in Wilmington, equally as innocent as any other dependents, received the benefit arising from her husband’s death." The younger de Bebian that you refer to was involved in the shipping of the Statue of Liberty to NY See my book Going Home: the short life and death of the US Army transport General Lyon. Yours fraternally, Peter PS one of us is not correct - I hope it's not me or I have a massive rewrite! I see the same confusion on Wikitree . . . I am worried
ReplyDeleteFurther. https://ke.substack.com/p/identified-louis-de-berbieu
ReplyDeleteIn confirming biographical details for this piece, I realized that de Bebian was the son of the Louis de Bebian who shows up in the “War of the Rebellion” records. I’d previously considered whether this was the same Louis de Bebian Mary Lincoln wrote of, but dimissed the idea because this one had several adult children who begged for his release after he was imprisoned at Fort Lafayette. Louis was not among them, but ancestry records confirm this was indeed his father and siblings. (The date of death of the elder Louis de Bebian is incorrect at the linked record; others are not publicly accessible. It appears that their ancestry traces back to France, including the Pau region, and that one ancestor was a pioneer in the eduation of deaf students.) Perhaps the younger Louis didn’t want to call suspicion onto himself and jeopardize his own business, so he let his sisters make the case.
In 1861, the elder Louis was living in North Carolina and engaging in maritime commerce, which meant the Union blockade was a problem for him. He probably tried to evade it for the purposes of making money, and also to take letters from associates North Carolina into the North. (It appears his adult children all lived in NYC).