The Unsinkable Ursulines

“Goodbye, my very dear Father, I beg you to let me hear from you. I have nothing in the world dearer than you and my dear mother. Nothing less than the glory of God and the needs of the poor inhabitants could have made me leave you.”

In early August 1727, two pirogues carrying twelve Ursuline nuns, precariously perched on top of their baggage, glided up to the banks of the Mississippi River at five in the morning. Having waved goodbye to France five months earlier, the French nuns, whose average age was thirty-three, set foot in their new hometown of Nouvelle Orléans for the first time.

The long Atlantic passage had presented pirates and rude weather, but the Ursulines chanted and sang their way from one side of the ocean to the other. Sister Marie-Madeleine Hachard, who considered Louisiana to be the Promised Land, wrote again to her father: “It would be too long and even useless to express to you, my dear Father, our joy at the sight of the land, for which we had longed for such a long time and how great our consolation when we set foot on land.”

Marie-Madeleine was twenty-three years old at the time. New Orleans was nine. The city and its Ursuline sisters have been together ever since.

To be sure, the fledgling town of New Orleans, established in 1718, was nothing to write home about. Promotional brochures may have painted a pretty scene of the territory; but in reality, it amounted to a community of enslaved people, soldiers, and societal misfits, a population sprinkled with only a few skilled laborers and wealthy land-grant recipients. 

Hachard wrote in 1728: “In the end, the devil has a great empire here, but this does not take away from us the hope of destroying him, with God’s love.” And in the same letter: “… not only do debauchery, bad faith and all the other vices reign here more than in any other place, but they do so in abundance.”

France’s finest urban troublemakers, men and women who weren’t likely to “take to the plow with enthusiasm,” were rounded up and shipped off in hopes that they would make Louisiana a profitable venture, notes Tulane professor Emily Clark in her book, Masterless Mistresses. No such luck. Those early settlers enthusiastically practiced their vices instead, all the while feasting on giant river catfish, fighting off mosquitos and other natives …  and dying of fever and flux.

Enter the Ursulines.

It took five years to fulfill colonial administrator Jacques de la Chaise’s request for “four good gray sisters to come and settle here and take care of the sick …” Monsieur de la Chaise had a different order of nuns in mind when he made that request (the Daughters of Charity, who specialized in nursing, were all booked up); but he set in motion the 1727 arrival of these twelve zealous Ursulines, who had been praying fervently to be sent to Louisiana from their cloisters in France. For the Ursulines, the idea of converting America’s native populations to Catholicism was the height of ecstasy, the ultimate ambition for an order steeped in the Counter-Reformation movement.

To the dismay of de la Chaise, the Ursulines were not a nursing order, though they would eventually take on that role in New Orleans and excel as caretakers of the military hospital. Their primary mission was, in fact, the universal education of females, the uncompromising pursuit of which led to a superlative legacy of success in colonial Louisiana.

The Ursulines strove to prepare all females for Catholic family life, and byproducts of that mission were higher -than-average levels of female property ownership and literacy. “At one point in the eighteenth century, more women than men were able to read and write, an extremely unusual situation in colonial America,” says Clark. She also points out that “girls who were born and grew up in New Orleans were nearly twice as likely to be literate as French girls who came to Louisiana.”

In addition to conducting lessons with their boarders in reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, and needlework, the nuns also took in dozens of orphans and welcomed both Native Americans and Africans who trickled to their corner of town for the free catechism classes during the day. It was no-girl-left-behind as the nuns touched the lives of the haves and have-nots, whites and blacks, the free and the enslaved.

As these activities took place in a cloistered environment on the edge of town, it is possible that the male community at large was not fully aware of the inclusive nature of the nuns’ efforts. But the nuns and their many devoted female followers certainly made themselves known in 1734, when they staged a formal procession from their temporary residence to the newly constructed convent on Chartres Street.    

With students dressed in costumes, the nuns and their veritable rainbow of female supporters marched across the city to the beat of fifes and drums played by soldiers. A lay confraternity of women from all walks of life participated in the procession, too, endorsing their Ursuline mentors.

Clark notes, “When the nuns closed their new convent gate behind them at the end of that summer’s day in 1734 and resumed the physical invisibility dictated by their rule of cloister, they left the city’s inhabitants with a powerful set of images to serve as reminders of their enduring presence and spiritual authority.”

When New Orleans fell under Spanish rule beginning in 1763, new people, perspectives, and policies landed in the city. Less comfortable with the mélange that the French administrators had allowed, the Spanish era was characterized by more rigid divisions among the races and classes in the young territory. New policies were instituted restricting clothing and adornments among lower classes, disallowing masking at festivals or dances among some people, and requiring that free people of color carry certificates of emancipation. Dances were officially segregated in 1792.

Behind the convent walls, however, the Ursulines continued their inclusive work, and by the end of the colonial era they had facilitated the creation of a large Afro-Catholic community and an integrated congregation. According to Clark, New Orleans’ multiracial Catholic church “did not know congregational segregation until the era of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century.”

The nuns were not perfect, but they were certainly progressive and created life-altering opportunities for those girls and women who sought their instruction and guidance. Their efforts cannot be overstated. Clark asserts, “Over the course of the eighteenth century … they and their convent worked to lay a stable foundation of healthy, educated people for the growing city and acted as a safety net when families failed through death, poverty, or violence to carry out the tasks society asked of them.”

Today, over two hundred years after the colonial period ended, New Orleans’ Ursuline Academy is the oldest continually operating school for girls in the United States and now stands in the University District. Just four Ursulines reside there, busying themselves with a variety of ministries to the underprivileged. Sister Rosemary Meiman, who assists with the preservation of the Ursuline archives, has her own perspective on her spiritual forebears. Pointing out that those early Ursulines certainly did not set out to earn bragging rights for their pioneering practices, she asserts, “It was an age of exploration. These women were anxious to do something new and different.” Well, mission accomplished.

Bibliography

Clark, Emily. Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Hachard, Marie-Madeleine. Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie-Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727-1760. Translated and edited by Emily Clark. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Heaney, Sister Jane Frances. A Century of Pioneering: A History of the Ursuline Nuns in New Orleans, 1727-1827. New Orleans: Ursuline Sisters of New Orleans, 1993.

Lemmon, Alfred E., ed. French Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursuline Convent (1736). New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2014.  

With special gratitude to Mary Lee Harris and Sister Rosemary Meiman for access to letters, annals, photographs, and other materials held at the Ursuline Convent Collection, Archives and Museum of New Orleans. The museum is open by appointment; call (504) 473-6750.

Spiritual Songs

In 1736, a woman in Paris who identified herself only as C.D. created a manuscript of a contemporary publication entitled Nouvelles poesies spirituelles et morales sur les plus beaux airs de la musique francoise et italienne avec la basse. By hand she copied the music and lyrics and added her own artistic embellishments. She could not have known that her manuscript would be sent as a gift nearly two decades later to a group of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans by a man known only as Monsieur Nicollet. And none among them could have predicted that the manuscript—a collection of nearly three hundred spiritual songs—would survive to be the one and only existing musical document from the Mississippi Valley’s colonial period. As such, it is the earliest musical document held by The Historic New Orleans Collection, an institution that absorbed the Ursulines’ library in 1998, facilitated an album of recordings based on the manuscript in 2000, and, in the fall of 2014, published the manuscript itself.

Their beloved music, as art forms so often are, is our ticket to the inner lives of the Ursulines who persevered in Louisiana’s earliest years. As a former expat teacher myself, I know in my bones that Sisters Marie Madeleine, Marguerite, Charlotte, Jeanne, Marie Thérèse, and the others must have clung to the manuscript of music from the old country when it arrived at their Chartres Street convent. Though evidence of such activities does not survive, I imagine they used the manuscript in their classrooms to introduce their Creole and other students to Europe’s most popular baroque composers, and the sisters surely sang and hummed the melodies in their quiet time, reflecting on former lives in France, lives that bore little resemblance to the ones they now led in Nouvelle Orléans.

The manuscript is available for purchase from The Historic New Orleans Collection as is a CD of music from the most important section of the manuscript. Visit hnoc.org/publications/books.html for details.

Pictured: manuscript sheet music; 98-001-RL.58 “French Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursuline Convent (1736)” (THNOC 2014). Photograph courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection.