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McIlhenny's Gold
How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire
Chapter One
The Forebears
The celebration of the marriage of Edmund McIlhenny and Mary Eliza Avery in June 1859 on Petit Anse Island was a highlight of the social season that year in southern Louisiana.
The groom, forty-four at the time, was one of New Orleans's wealthiest bachelors, a banker whose earnings were at the top rung of his profession. His young bride, more than twenty years his junior, had even more money than McIlhenny. The vast Avery fortune engineered by her father, Judge Daniel Dudley Avery, and the family's influence in Iberia Parish—tied to landholdings, the South's most cherished commodity—placed her in economic strata that McIlhenny couldn't hope to equal alone. Mary Eliza was a glowing bride; coquettish, if plump and a bit severe looking. As was the case with all of the weddings of the wealthy in the area when a man married up, these nuptials were well covered in the book How to Get a Rich Wife, a gossipy tome issued periodically, eagerly devoured by the hoi polloi of the day.
Judge Avery's servants and slaves prepared the wedding feast, set the tables and trimmed the lush gardens skirting the main house. Horses and carriages were draped in family colors. Just a half century before, Petit Anse Island had been virtually untouched, a primitive wilderness. But in that short time, the island, mostly during Avery's control, had been tamed and transformed into a model farming community with roads, mansions and huts—and customers in all parts of the world. With that type of metamorphosis possible, the prospects in southern Louisiana forfamilies like the Averys, even with war on the horizon, seemed boundless.
On his wedding day, Edmund McIlhenny felt like an intruder on Petit Anse. He had never farmed in his life; urban areas were more to his liking. And while in time he came to appreciate the value of the plantation, when he first met Mary Eliza he hadn't yet given this much thought. McIlhenny could not have imagined that in a few decades the island would be his, and he would be amassing a treasure from a product whose primary ingredient grew out of its soil. Equally unlikely was the course that brought McIlhenny to Petit Anse.
Born in 1815 in Hagerstown, Maryland, Edmund was the second oldest of nine sons raised by John and Ann McIlhenny. His birthplace was a tiny apartment in the town square above what is now the Square Cup Cafe, but which then housed McIlhenny's Tavern, owned by his father.
Edmund's father was a swaggering Scottish immigrant with a rebellious streak. He had abducted his wife-to-be Ann Newcomer from a female seminary, where she had been sent to keep away from men like him. They married hours later, and for the next decade had children, one after another. Though John had been a woodsman, a bartender and a carpenter, among other things, to support his instantly large family, he became a doctor. He died suddenly in 1832 after contracting a fatal disease from a patient.
With his family short a breadwinner and facing financial ruin, Edmund discontinued his schooling at seventeen and went to work to help his mother care for and educate his seven younger brothers. He took a position as a messenger in one of the dozens of banks in Baltimore.
By mid-1837, the twenty-two-year-old McIlhenny had lost his job after the nation's economic panic that year decimated Baltimore's banks. Desperate for money, McIlhenny begged his bank contacts to help him find work anywhere. Obviously, Baltimore wasn't an option anymore. But an associate who had powerful friends in New Orleans offered McIlhenny a letter of introduction to a manager of the Bank of Louisiana, the state's third-largest bank with $4 million in capital at the time. McIlhenny's youthful willingness to dive into the most difficult or menial tasks and his sober, scholarly face—intensified by his thick, dark beard, itself made even more prominent by the absence of a mustache—particularly impressed the bank executives in Louisiana. McIlhenny was hired on the spot.
The crash of 1837 hadn't spared the South. The region was dependent on agriculture, especially cotton and sugar, and the rising number of unemployed around the country led to a sharp downturn in clothing and fabric sales, sending the price of cotton tumbling. Moreover, a succession of weak British grain harvests had induced a growing foreign-exchange deficit with the United States. To repair this imbalance, the United Kingdom restricted American imports, primarily textiles and other cotton goods. This, of course, only made cotton prices drop even further.
And the South's slave economy, a bounty of cheap labor in good times, was a liability in bad times. As the economic historian George Green described it in Finance and Economic Development in the Old South, a survey of Louisiana banking in the early 1800s, "In the South, labor was a fixed expense and excess field hands could not be laid off" to reduce output. The planter would only "shut down his plant when market prices for cotton fell so far that he could not even cover the relatively small variable costs of harvesting his crop."
But New Orleans wasn't like the rest of the South. Nestled on the mouth of the Mississippi River, it was, at least to a degree, immunized from the worst of the fiscal crisis and, in some important ways, able to take advantage of it. The city Edmund McIlhenny found when he arrived there in the late 1830s didn't resemble in any fashion the depressing, semilifeless, homogeneous streets of abandoned shops, beggars and petty gangsters that he had left behind in Baltimore. Instead, New Orleans was a revelation to him.
The nation's fifth-largest urban area and second-leading port, nearly 30 percent of Louisiana's population lived there. Unlike any other city in the United States, New Orleans was a cosmopolitan blend of all of the ethnic and cultural groups that had put down roots in the New World: Spanish, French, Anglos, Indians, free blacks . . .
McIlhenny's Gold
How a Louisiana Family Built the Tabasco Empire. Copyright (c) by Jeffrey Rothfeder . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
