John Slidell, Loser

Name-changing is in the air. Streets are getting new names, university buildings are getting new names, and people are starting petitions to change the names of their cities, (and seriously, nothing needs to be named Plantation at this point, no matter when the city was founded). And on that note, I’d like to suggest another city change its name, specifically the New Orleans suburb I spent most of my formative years in, Slidell, Louisiana. I’m not particular about what it’s changed to, so long as the new name doesn’t celebrate some other part of Slidell’s racist heritage.

Back before the pandemic, I had this idea to write short bios of people whose names were living on but whose accomplishments didn’t really warrant that legacy, and that idea grew out of my curiosity about John Slidell, the man for whom Slidell is named. We didn’t talk about him a lot way back in high school history class, which should have been a warning sign given that our town was named after him and that he did play enough of a role in the Civil War that his name showed up in the textbook a couple of times. You’d think that might warrant a day of class devoted to the guy at least, maybe even a week. I mean, he was at various times the New Orleans District Attorney, State Representative, US Representative, Senator, and a negotiator for the US government with Mexico about the border, where he helped start a war/land grab. And then after the Civil War started, he was appointed as a diplomat to France representing the Confederacy. That’s a résumé that a lot of current people whose statues are being pulled down and dumped into storage would love to have.

Honestly, I think there are a couple of reasons why we don’t see John Slidell valorized more. One is that he was never really all that great at his job. He never made much of an impression as a legislator, and he seemed to want war with Mexico rather than a negotiation. But it was during the Civil War where he really failed to shine.

His job was to go to France and get them to side with the Confederacy, but first he had to get there. The ship he was on ran the blockade from Charleston, SC successfully, but he was bagged by the US Navy on a British mail boat leaving Havana, where he was taken captive. Lincoln eventually released him so as to avoid a confrontation with Britain, as he had his hands full with the Confederacy at the time, and Slidell eventually made it to France, where he met with the foreign minister. His job was to try to get France to support the Confederacy and, failing that, get France control of Confederate cotton if the blockade were broken (a prospect which had almost zero chance of success). He got neither. France wouldn’t move without Britain. Instead, he got a loan from Emile Erlanger and Company, a banking outfit that issued cotton bonds in 1863 to support the Confederacy. Oh, and Erlanger married one of Slidell’s daughters. He also got a ship named Stonewall, an ironclad built in France, but it didn’t get to the US until after the Civil War had ended. The US sold it to Japan in 1869, and that’s mostly what the ship’s Wikipedia page talks about.

What about after the war? How did he shape the postwar south? Short answer. He didn’t, because he never came back. Yeah, he moved to Paris after the war and eventually to the Isle of Wight, where he died. He’s buried in Paris. Far as anyone can tell, Slidell never even walked on the land that bears his name.

The city of Slidell was founded around 1882-3 during the construction of the N.O.N.E. railroad. I’m not making that up. It stands for the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad. The guy who financed the railroad was Baron Frederick Erlanger, who named the city after his deceased father-in-law. And that’s pretty much the whole story. Oh, when you look up the history of the city, everyone talks about the creosote plant like it was some great thing. I only remember it because it polluted Bayou Bonfouca so badly you couldn’t eat anything you caught fishing in it.

Now I’m not going to pretend I have any deep emotional connections to Slidell. I moved away in 1989 and I think I’ve been back just to see the place no more than 3-4 times in the intervening years. And any thoughts I had of going back one day to live were swiftly killed not long after I joined Facebook long ago and came across most of the people I went to school with. (The biggest lie Facebook ever sold was that you wanted to get back in touch with people you went to high school with I swear to god.) I mean, Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise is their US representative. He won his last election with 71% of the vote. This is my way of saying I know that whatever meager chance there would be normally to get the citizens of Slidell to change its name are shot by my arguments here. He’s their kind of guy.

Still, it would be nice, when someone asks me where I’m from, to say “a place outside New Orleans that used to be named for a Confederate loser but is now called Almost Anything Else, Louisiana.”