Samuel sojourned in Arkansas Territory for part of 1821-2 and then, various records suggest to me, went to south Louisiana and began his work as an overseer on the Pointe Celeste plantation of Joseph Biddle Wilkinson in Plaquemines Parish, some 35 miles down the Mississippi River from New Orleans. The posting linked at the head of the preceding paragraph tells that story. As it indicates, after leaving the employ of Joseph B. and Catherine Andrews Wilkinson, Samuel worked in 1829-1830 for Bradish and Johnson. Around 1823, he had married or had begun a common-law marriage with Eliza Jane Smith, and the couple had a son Ezekiel Samuel Green in 1824 or 1825.

According to Ezekiel in his complaint inaugurating the lawsuit he filed against his father Samuel in Pointe Coupee Parish in 1856, his parents separated when he was not more than five or six years old, and Samuel then “took possession” of Ezekiel as his son, giving Ezekiel the name Green and acknowledging Ezekiel as his son — and raising him.[1] As the previous posting indicates, I think Samuel and Eliza Jane had separated by 10 May 1829 when Eliza Jane bought a family of enslaved persons from New Orleans-Baltimore slave trader Samuel Martin Woolfolk, using her maiden name Eliza Jane Smith for the transaction.[2] Women normally appear in official records in Louisiana of this period under their maiden names even when they have married, so the use of the maiden name is not unusual. But the fact that Eliza Jane bought these enslaved persons entirely separate from Samuel and he is mentioned nowhere in the conveyance record suggests to me that he and Eliza Jane had separated by this date.

After having ended his employment with George Bradish and William Martin Johnson, Samuel K. Green then began working as an overseer for James Hopkins Sr. of New Orleans. This information appears in testimony Hopkins gave on 13 March 1857 in the Green vs. Green trial in Pointe Coupee Parish.[3] Hopkins testified that he was 72 years old, a planter living in New Orleans, who had known Samuel K. Green and his son Ezekiel for over 20 years. Ezekiel was eight to ten years old when Hopkins first met him, and Samuel introduced Ezekiel as his son. James Hopkins also testified that he had become acquainted with Samuel K. Green through J.M. Reynolds of New Orleans, a merchant, who introduced Samuel as an overseer, and Hopkins then employed him as such.

James Maxwell Reynolds (1779-1864)

James Maxwell Reynolds (1779-1864) was a Pennsylvania native who created a cotton- and tobacco-shipping firm with George Ralston in New Orleans by 26 September 1820, when an announcement in the Louisiana State Gazette of New Orleans states that James M. Reynolds and George Ralston had created the firm of Reynolds & Ralston to engage in selling and shipping cotton and tobacco.[4] Ads in New Orleans papers in the 1820s state that the counting house of James M. Reynolds and George Ralston was one door above Morgan, Dorsey, and Co. on Magazine St.[5] In 1830, Reynolds had New Orleans builder William Brand build warehouses for his business at 501 Magazine Street on the corner of Poydras, bonded by Camp and Lafayette Streets.[6] By July 1832, Reynolds had entered into a business arrangement with John B. Byrne, William Ferriday, and L.F. Hermann, according to an announcement in the Natchez Weekly Courier on 6 July 1832.[7] The announcement states that the firm, which was doing business in New Orleans and Natchez, had been dissolved, that the partners had purchased Ferriday’s interest, and L.R. Marshall had been added as a partner. James M. Reynolds spent his final years in Natchez, having left New Orleans due to his Union sympathies during the Civil War. He died in Natchez in March 1864.

Reynolds had extensive business interests in New Orleans. In 1827 James M. Reynolds and John Hagan, who was, as I’ll explain in a moment, the business partner of James Hopkins, were among the directors of the Bank of Louisiana.[8] Ship registration records for the port of New Orleans show James M. Reynolds as a co-owner of the ship Natchez when it was registered in New Orleans several times in 1832.[9]  An act of the Louisiana legislature on 27 March 1832 to incorporate the Western Marine and Fire Insurance Company in New Orleans appointed a list of men to receive subscriptions to the newly incorporated company.[10] These included James M. Reynolds and Maunsel White, who, as I’ve previously noted, may have played a role in introducing Samuel K. Green to his first employers in south Louisiana, the Wilkinsons. 

James Hopkins (1785-1867)

James Hopkins, Samuel K. Green’s employer in the early 1830s, was an Irish-born immigrant to New Orleans, according to information shared by his son Aristide Hopkins (1839-1925) with William T. Hearne, who published Aristide Hopkins’ account of his father’s life in the1895 book Brief History and Genealogy of the Hearne Family.[11] Aristide Hopkins states that his father James Hopkins was the youngest son of his family and came to New Orleans from Belfast in 1795 — evidently with his parents or other older family members. Aristide wrote the following about his father James to William T. Hearne:

Early after my father’s settling at New Orleans (1795) he amassed great wealth and became one of the richest sugar planters of his day. His sugar plantation home at “Gentilly,” a few miles from New Orleans, was the resort of all the aristocracy of those days of festivity and lavish expenditure, and his entertainments were on a princely scale. His second sugar plantation, in the Parish of Point Coupee, was during the civil war laid waste by the Federals, who burned and utterly destroyed everything on the place. This added to the freeing of his hundreds of slaves, and the total destruction of his immense fortune, so embittered his last days that he died of a broken heart. At the battle of New Orleans, war of 1812-1815, he served with distinction and at our old summer home on the Gulf coast at Biloxi, Mississippi, I still have the sword that he so valiantly carried and many other mementoes of those early days, and all the old family furniture of that period.

James Hopkins’ War of 1812 service papers and a pension application filed by his widow Julienne Elizabeth Nellie Miltenberger Hopkins in New Orleans on 30 April 1878 confirm that James Hopkins was a private in Captain Peter V. Ogden’s Louisiana Militia from 20 December 1814 to 14 March 1815.[12]

Note the important information in Aristide Hopkins’ memoir that the New Orleans plantation of his father James Hopkins — the plantation on which Samuel K. Green worked as an overseer in the early 1830s — was in the Gentilly section of the city, a few miles from the center of the city. A number of documents allow us to place the Gentilly plantation precisely. On 21 April 1851, the Times-Picayune published an account of the practice maneuvers of the local Artillery Battalion on the 12^th of April, noting that after having marched through the city on that day, the battalion, under command of Major Gally, bivouacked for the night at the plantation of James Hopkins, Esq., on Gentilly Road near the old Louisiana Race Course.[13] The encamping of Gally’s battalion at James Hopkins’ plantation was evidently a recurring event, since a report in the Times-Picayune on 2 May 1846 also notes that the battalion would be marching through New Orleans on that day and then camping at James Hopkins’ plantation on Gentilly Road for the night.[14] Three years earlier on 23 April 1843, an announcement in the Times-Picayune states that the plantation of James Hopkins, Esq., at Gentilly was to be used for target practice by the Battalion of Artillery on that day.[15] This notice also states that the cars of the Pontchartrain railroad started every half hour from 5 in the morning until noon, going to the plantation.

The plantation on Gentilly Road evidently included the Louisiana Race Course mentioned in the 21 April 1851 notice cited above, since, on 26 April 1854, Hopkins placed an ad in the Times-Picayune offering the grounds of the race course and all its buildings for rent.[16] This was the first race course in New Orleans, and covered nearly 100 acres, according to John Smith Kendall in his history of New Orleans.[17] Kendall says the race course was reached either by carriage from the city along Bayou Road or by the old Lake Pontchartrain Railway, which began operation in 1825. An 1849 map of New Orleans compiled for use of the federal census shows the Hopkins plantation on both sides of Gentilly Road at the intersection of that road with Elysian Fields.[18]

This is the locale at which Samuel Kerr Green worked from not long after 1830 to around 1835. The plantation house was destroyed by fire in March 1868, when articles in the Times-Picayune and New Orleans Republican on 6 March 1868 state that the day before, fire had completely destroyed the house known as James Hopkins’ plantation on Gentilly Road.[19] James Hopkins and his family were not living on the plantation when James died on 6 June 1867: the 1867 New Orleans city directory and James’s obituary both state that he was living at 81 Barracks Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans by 1867.[20]

As the memoir of his son Aristide cited previously indicates, James Hopkins’ plantation on Gentilly Road was a sugarcane plantation, the same sort of plantation on which Samuel K. Green had worked in the previous decade in Plaquemines Parish when he was an overseer for the Wilkinsons and then Bradish and Johnson. New Orleans slave manifests in the 1820s and 1830s show him actively purchasing and selling enslaved people, with the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a primary location for his sale of enslaved persons. Federal censuses from 1820-1840 (I do not find him on the 1850 or 1860 federal census) show him located in New Orleans with enslaved persons included in his household on each census — five in 1820 and ten in 1830 and 1840.[21] On 26 May 1821, the Louisiana State Gazette published an ad by James Hopkins offering a reward for the apprehension of an enslaved man named Jim who had run away from James Hopkins’ plantation in New Orleans.

By 1815, James Hopkins had formed a business partnership with another Irish immigrant in New Orleans, John Hagan (1785-1856), who had a cotton-brokering business, engaged in slave trading, and, along with James Hopkins, speculated in real estate in New Orleans. On 11 August 1815, Hopkins and Hagan sold Jean-Baptiste Longpré a plot of land and buildings at the corner of Bourbon and Conti Streets in the French Quarter of New Orleans.[22]  

About 1816, James Hopkins and John Hagan acquired lots at 131-141 Decatur Street in the French Quarter from the widow of Eugene Dorsiere and others. On the lots, Hopkins and Hagan had five four-story brick stores fronting on Decatur and Droopier Streets built after 1829. These Decatur Street stores were bounded by Canal, Iberville, and Dorsiere Streets.[23]

When the Hibernian Society of New Orleans was incorporated by the Louisiana legislature on 28 February 1824, founding members of the society included James Hopkins and John Hagan, who are listed next to each other in the act of incorporation.[24] Hopkins and Hagan also both played key roles in governing banks in New Orleans: in 1827, James Hopkins (along with fellow Irishman Maunsel White — again, note that name) was among the directors of the Branch Bank of the United States in New Orleans, and, as previously noted, John Hagan and James Maxwell Reynolds were among the directors of the Bank of Louisiana.[25] James Hopkins was among the first seven directors of the Bank of Louisiana when it was incorporated in April 1824.[26] The Hopkins-Hagan partnership also included buying shares in the ownership of a steamboat: when the steamboat St. John, built at Cincinnati, was enrolled at New Orleans on 12 January 1828 and on 1 May 1829, James Hopkins and John Hagan were named among its owners.[27]

When Mechanics and Traders Bank was incorporated 1 April 1833, James Hopkins and Maunsel White were among those incorporating it.[28] Hopkins was then made president of this bank, on whose board Aristide Miltenberger, a brother of his second wife Nellie Miltenberger, sat.[29]

While operating his plantation, engaging in the banking business, and continuing his mercantile business with John Hagan, James Hopkins continued buying and selling property in the Vieux Carré. On 31 December 1835, he bought from Mary Ross and Richard Owen Pritchard lots and buildings at 334-336 North Rampart Street. He then resold this property, with his wife Nellie also signing the conveyance, on 3 July 1839 to Bernard Casimir Lecarpentier.[30]

On 31 October 1849, John Morgan Hall sold the lot and building on 204 Decatur Street to James Hopkins’ sons Henry and William Hopkins, with the conveyance noting that they were business partners. Their business evidently included their father as a partner, since on 21 June 1849, James, Henry, and William Hopkins sold this property to Eugene Troisgros, with the Hopkins acting along with the Banque de Commerce de la Nouvelle Orleans in conformity to a court judgment.[31]

As I noted previously, James Hopkins died at his French Quarter residence on 81 Barracks Street near the corner of Barracks and Royal Street on 6 June 1867.[32] In addition to his obituary and death notices printed in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, the Times-Picayune, and the New Orleans Republican, which I’ve discussed above, an obituary appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin  on 8 June 1867. It read,[33]

THE LATE JAMES HOPKINS

A large concourse of our oldest and most respectable citizens yesterday followed the remains of this old resident to their last resting place. Mr. Hopkins was a native of Ireland, and came here about the year 1804, since which time he has resided here, raising a large family, several of whom are themselves among our prominent citizens. Deceased was one of the veterans of 1812, having served in Capt. Beale’s rifle corps at the Battle of New Orleans — several of his comrades being present at the funeral. He died at the advanced age of 83, and one group of his old friends present we noticed five of them whose ages, with that of the deceased, amounted to the sum of four hundred and fifty years — and average of seventy-five years to each. Few cities can furnish an instance of such wonderful longevity.

At his tree entitled “Randolph Byrd Ancestors” at Ancestry, Randolph Byrd transcribes two letters written by James Hopkins’ nephew John Pollock on 7 and 8 June 1867 to William Murdock Hill, husband of James’ daughter Aimeee, telling Willie Hill and his wife Aimee, who lived in Maryland, of her father’s death, funeral, and entombment in St. Louis cemetery in New Orleans.[34]

James Hopkins was twice married. On 2 May 1812 in New Orleans, he married Marie Delphine Lasmartres, daughter of French-born Alix Lasmartres and Maria Magdalena Castaignet of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). After her death on 16 November 1832, James remarried on 20 November 1835 to Julienne Elizabeth Nellie Miltenberger, daughter of Louis Christian Miltenberger of Alsace and Marie Aimee Mercier/Mersier of Dominica.

John Hagan (1785-1856 )

Some additional notes about James Hopkins’ business partner John Hagan: as Kendall’s History of New Orleans states, Hagan was “a rich land speculator” in New Orleans during the 1840s, who laid out a faubourg, Faubourg Hagan, behind the Vieux Carré adjoining Tremé.[35] The New Orleans street now named Norman C. Francis Parkway, formerly Jefferson Davis Parkway, was originally named Hagan Avenue to honor John Hagan. His business dealings in the early period of New Orleans included dealings with the Marquis de Lafayette. Hill Memorial Library of Louisiana State University holds the papers of John Hagan’s nephew James Hagan, who began his business career working for John Hagan at a branch of Hagan’s firm in Mobile.[36] The papers held by the James Hagan collection include correspondence of his uncle John Hagan in the period 1833-1848, with letters pertaining to his land transactions with Lafayette.

Among the businesses John Hagan operated in New Orleans was a slave-trading house. A marker at the intersection of Esplanade and Chartres Streets in Faubourg Marigny entitled “New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade” notes that John Hagan’s slave-trading house was one of over a dozen slave-trading firms within a block radius of the marker.[37] Quite a bit has been written about the story of an enslaved woman whom John Hagan bought and kept as a concubine, and by whom he had children.[38] Hagan purchased thirteen-year-old Lucy Ann Cheatham at a slave market in Richmond in 1848 and had her shipped to New Orleans, where he set her up as his concubine. Their first child, a daughter Dolly whom Lucy Ann secretly named Frederika Bremer Hagan after a Swedish anti-slavery reformer, was born in 1850 when Lucy Ann was fifteen years old. Before Hagan’s death in 1857, Lucy Ann bore him three sons in addition to Frederika.

Shortly before his death in France in March 1857, on 10 May 1856 John Hagan emancipated Lucy Ann and their children Frederika and William Lowndes Hagan.[39] John died a very rich man, leaving Lucy Ann and their children a small inheritance of $10,000 and a house on Esplanade Avenue, with the rest of his fortune going to his mother and siblings. By 1863, Lucy Ann had to declare bankruptcy, though she recouped some of her financial stability following the Civil War.

In a lawsuit that ensued regarding John Hagan’s estate following his death, James Hopkins testified, noting that John Hagan’s brother Thomas Hagan lived at the corner of Customhouse and Royal Streets in New Orleans.[40] Thomas died in Paris on 6 April 1850 with John Hagan as his sole heir. The lawsuit concerned real property left by Thomas Hagan whose ownership was disputed following his death.

As the next posting will discuss, by 1835, Samuel K. Green had settled in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, where he purchased a 640-acre plantation from John Sibley in that year.

---

[1] Ezekiel S. Green vs. Samuel K. Green, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, 9th District Court, file #1525.

[2] Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, Notarial Bk. 4, #714, p. 276 (Register 17, #4, p. 714).

[3] See supra, n. 1.

[4] Reynolds and Ralston firm announcement, Louisiana State Gazette (26 September 1820) p. 2, col. 5.

[5] See e.g. the firm’s announcement in ibid., (15 January 1821), p. 1, col. 3.

[6] See Samuel Wilson, Jr., “Julia Street’s Thirteen Sisters,” in New Orleans Architecture, vol. 2: The American Sector, ed. Mary Louise Christovich et al. (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican, 1978), p. 185; and Tara A. Dudley, Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2021), p. xcix. A black-and-white photo of 501 Magazine Street taken in 1956 by Franck-Bertacci photographers is in the Charles L. Franck and Franck-Bertacci Photograph Collection of the Historic New Orleans Collection: see Louisiana Digital Library. New Orleans Architecture, vol. 1: The Lower Garden District (Gretna: Pelican, 1971), has an essay on the history of the Lower Garden District by Samuel N. Wilson which states that the Robert Slark mansion on Annunciation was built on the site of an earlier house with an elaborate parterre garden that James M. Reynolds bought in 1832 from John Green (p. 22).

[7] “Notice,” Natchez Weekly Courier (6 July 1832), p. 6, col. 2.

[8] T.P. Thompson, “Early Financing in New Orleans—Being the Story of the Canal Bank—1831-1915,” Publications of the Louisiana Historical Society 7 (1913-4), p. 22.

[9] WPA, Ship Registers and Enrollments of New Orleans, Louisiana, vol. I: 1804-1820 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), pp. 152-3.

[10] Acts Passed at the Third Session of the Tenth Legislature of the State of Louisiana (New Orleans: Stroud and Pew, 1839), p. 114.

[11] William T. Hearne, Brief History and Genealogy of the Hearne Family from A.D. 1066, etc. (Kansas City, Missouri: Hudson-Kimberly, 1895), pp. 718-9.

[12] NARA, Index to Compiled Service Records of Volunteer Soldiers Who Served During the War of 1812 War of 1812, RG 94, available digitally at Fold3; and Pension and Bounty Land Warrant Application Files, RG 15, WO 18513 and WC 16866, Nellie Miltenberger Hopkins pension application for James Hopkins’ War of 1812 service, Louisiana, available digitally at Fold3.

[13] “The Artillery Battalion,” Times-Picayune (14 April 1851), p. 1, col. 4.

[14] “Grand Military Display,” Times-Picayune (2 May 1846), p. 2, col. 1.

[15] Notice of target practice by Battalion of Artillery, Times-Picayune (23 April 1843), p. 2, col. 2.

[16] “To Let,” Times-Picayune (26 April 1854), p. 3, col. 1.

[17] John Smith Kendall, History of New Orleans, vol. 2 (Chicago and New York: Lewis, 1922), pp. 757-8.

[18] “Diagram showing the inundated District Sauvé’s Crevasse May 3rd 1849. Facsimile of an old drawing,” from George E. Waring Jr., comp., Report on the Social Statistics of Cities (Washington, DC: US Census Office, 1886, available digitally in the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at University of Texas at Austin. According to Niala Lynn Howard, cotton broker Thomas Barrett was allotted a parcel of land that began at Gentilly Boulevard to the north and ended at New Marigny suburb to the south, and James Hopkins and others purchased tracts of land from Barrette, with Hopkins buying a tract east of the Darcantel plantation: see “Sugar Hill: Architectural, Cultural and Historic Significance of an Early Twentieth Century African American Neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana” (2007), unpublished master’s thesis, p. 46, available digitally at the website of University of New Orleans.

[19] “Fire Yesterday,” Times-Picayune (6 March 1868), p. 2, col. 4; and “Fire Yesterday,” New Orleans Republican (6 March 1868), p. 3, col. 1.

[20] James Hopkins’ obituary, New Orleans Times-Democrat (7 June 1867), p. 4, col. 4; and “Another Veteran Gone,” Times-Picayune (7 June 1867), p. 4, col. 1.

[21] 1820 federal census, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, p. 62; 1830 federal census, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, p. 258; 1840 federal census, New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana, p. 33.

[22] The Jean-Baptiste Longpré archive in the Williams Research Center of the Historic New Orleans Collection has the notarized document of this sale, two folded sheets in French stitched on ribbon, MSS 627, folder 58.

[23] Betty Swanson, et al., “Architectural Inventory,” in New Orleans Architecture, vol. 1, The Lower Garden District, p. 161. See also the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey in the Historic New Orleans Collection, which indicates that James Hopkins bought the lot and house at 131 Decatur on 16 September 1829 from Alexandre Labranche for $10,000 and resold it on 16 March 1840 to François Xavier Martin for $90,0000. This source says that Hopkins and Hagan had Lee Walton & Co. and Henry Haynes Co. construct five four-story brick stores on their row of lots on Decatur Street.

[24] Louis Moreau Lislet, A General Digest of the Acts of the Legislature of Louisiana Passed from the Year 1804, to 1827, Inclusive, and in Force at this Last Period, vol. 2 (New Orleans: Benjamin Levy, 1828), pp. 408-9.

[25] Thompson, “Early Financing in New Orleans—Being the story of the Canal Bank—1831-1915,” p. 22. As James B. Scot notes, James Hopkins and Maunsel White were connected as early as 1810, when the first Masonic chapter was established in New Orleans with these two men among its founding officers: see Outline of the Rise and Progress of Freemasonry in Louisiana (Clark & Hofeline, 1873), p. 22.

[26] Henry Rightor, ed., Standard History of New Orleans, Louisiana, etc. (Chicago: Lewis, 1900), pp. 586-7.

[27] WPA, Ship Registers and Enrollments of New Orleans, Louisiana, vol. 2: 1821-1830 (Baton Rouge: LSU, 1942), pp. 140-1.

[28] Rightor, Standard History of New Orleans, p. 593.

[29] Thompson, “Early Financing in New Orleans—Being the Story of the Canal Bank—1831-1915,” p. 30. See also James Hopkins’ death notice “Death of a Veteran,” New Orleans Republican (8 June 1867) p. 1, col. 6, noting that he had been president of this bank; and Sylvia Starns Mince, “The power struggle between Americans and Creoles in the first half of the nineteenth century and its influence on the architecture of New Orleans” (2010), unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Louisiana State University, p. 130, available digitally at Louisiana Digital Commons.

[30] See the Collins C. Diboll Vieux Carré Digital Survey in the Historic New Orleans Collection.

[31] See ibid.

[32] See supra n. 20 and 29 for death notices.

[33] The text of this obituary is transcribed by Randolph Byrd at his “Randolph Byrd Ancestors” tree at Ancestry. Note that the information in the obituary that James Hopkins came to New Orleans in 1804 conflicts with what his son Aristide states in his memoir cited by William T. Hearne, which indicates that James came to New Orleans in 1795.

[34] See ibid.

[35] Kendall, History of New Orleans, vol. 2, pp. 674, 684.

[36] “James Hagan and Family Papers,” Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, ms. collection 1485.

[37] See “New Orleans and the Domestic Slave Trade” at Historical Marker Database, which has photographers of the marker by Cosmos Mariner in 2016.

[38] See especially Alexandra J. Finley, An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[39] Orleans Parish, Louisiana, Parish Court petition #20885631, transcribed digitally in the Digital Library on American Slavery Race and Slavery Petitions. John Hagan’s date and place of death are stated in W.S. McLean Testamentary Executor v. Keegan & McCann and Eugenie Guillaume, 24 La. Ann. 240 #67: see Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana and in the Superior Court of the Territory of Louisiana. (1809-1896), Book 33 (St. Paul: West, 1909).

[40] W.S. McLean Testamentary Executor v. Keegan & McCann and Eugenie Guillaume; see supra.