On January 6, 1873, the city of New Orleans woke to an uneasy calm as three armed groups gathered in the streets. First was the militia called up by the biracial Republican state government to preserve its authority. Second were the armed White supporters of the conservative Democrats, many carrying the same rifles they bore in the Confederate army, massing to defend their shadow legislature. Third were the Federal troops that had occupied the state since the end of the Civil War, trying to keep the peace. New Orleans was the Reconstruction-era capital of Louisiana, and since the gubernatorial election last November, when both Republicans and Democrats claimed victory, the city was home to two governors insisting on their own legitimacy. Two rival legislatures now met within blocks of each other, bringing to the fore conflicts unresolved in the Civil War about the inclusion of Black Americans in political life. Tensions had been rising for weeks, and everyone expected that before the day came to its end there would be violence; that someone would flinch. But as the sun fell in the sky, the civilians, the militia, and the federal troops collectively exhaled. The fragile peace had held for one more day, and their attention could turn to a lighter matter. It was the Twelfth Night, and that meant revelry.
Every year, celebrations on the twelfth night after Christmas marked the beginning of Carnival season, which would culminate a month and a half later with Mardi Gras. At each of these events, different White men’s social clubs, called krewes, would compete to put on elaborate themed processions and balls. Krewes were a relatively new development, and the Twelfth Night Revelers had formed just three years before. Beginning in 1870, the Revelers led elaborate, often allegorical parades through the city, and they’d already introduced innovations like King’s Cake and trinkets thrown to the crowd that would eventually become indispensable Mardi Gras traditions.
This year, the theme of the parade, and its starting point, were both closely-kept secrets. So as the sun set, the crowds that had flooded Canal Street buzzed with excitement, jockeying for a good position along the brilliantly-lit street. A roar spread through the crowd at the first sight of the heralds leading the procession—three Revelers on horseback dressed as a flamingo, a scarlet ibis, and a reddish egret. Behind them was an arch holding a globe-shaped banner announcing the parade’s theme: The World of Audubon. Behind the banner came a float carrying a man in pure white, seated atop a pillar, representing John James Audubon himself, with paintbrush raised. He was flanked on his right, according to one newspaper account, “by his well-known Indian guide and companion, and on his left his equally well-known negro cook,” presumably enslaved. These two subservient companions explicitly reinforced a racial hierarchy that Audubon lived in his own life, and which the Democratic governor and his supporters hoped to restore.1
In the tributes to Audubon that flooded the newspapers after the parade, many began, like that of the Times-Picayune, by saying “His genius is too well known and appreciated to need comment here.” In the twenty-two years since Audubon’s death, the mythology around his life and art had only grown. Audubon was born in the French colony of Saint-Dominque, today’s Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French plantation owner—facts that he’d spend his life trying to obscure. When he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1803 at eighteen years old, he fabricated his passport to say that he’d been born in French Louisiana, a lie that led the state to embrace him as their own. Audubon wouldn’t actually reach New Orleans until 1808, when he spent a few years in the city as a businessman, returning for a few years more in 1820 to paint birds. Though he was in no respect a Louisianian, the state considered him their favorite son.
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Audubon came at the head of a procession of fifteen floats, all pulled by horses and supporting a cast of revelers dressed as Audubon’s birds acting out humorous and allegorical scenes. As fanciful as these scenes were, the designers of the costumes tried to be as faithful as they could to Audubon’s original paintings. The birds on the float weren’t generic—in nearly every case an educated spectator could guess the species and the meaning it carried. “In selecting from the works of the immortal Audubon the models and the inspiration of their pageant,” wrote a reporter for The New-Orleans Times, “the Twelfth Night Revelers have tendered a delicate and graceful tribute to the greatest artist America has ever produced.” These are the floats that came after, painted by Charles Briton in 1873, who was also their designer:
Float 1: Parrot Teaching School. A teacher, clearly a now-extinct Carolina parakeet, stands at the head of an unruly class of macaws and cockatoos. The macaw at the front of the class wears a dunce cap. In this float, as with those that followed, each bird was portrayed by a man wearing an elaborate costume and enthusiastically acting his part.
Float 2: The Sick Owl and Attendants. A miserable, sick owl is surrounded by a host of animals, none of whom seem to be of much help. From left to right, the animals seem to be a saw-whet owl; a woodcock (or possibly a kiwi?); a frog; a bewigged “hawk owl” writing either a prescription or the sick owl’s last will and testament; a scaup duck; the ailing snowy owl; and a final great horned owl that one newspaper called “a monument of preternatural stupidity and indecision.”2
Float 3: The Dove’s Wedding. A cardinal (get it?) in all his priestly vestments performs the wedding ceremony for a ground dove and a “White Dove.” They’re joined in celebration by a roseate spoonbill, a “red bird,” and a “gold and purple finch.”
Float 4: The Kingfisher’s Banquet. This “admirable burlesque of the old feudal banquet hall” featured, from left to right, a common (European) kingfisher, a dodo, an oystercatcher, a tufted puffin, a boat-billed heron, a belted kingfisher, a great auk mother and children, and a frigatebird—then called man-o’-war bird, hence the nautical outfit. These last two, according to one observer, “were about the drunkest birds any one ever saw.”
Float 5: The Political Barnyard Meeting. In this clearly allegorical scene, the smoothtalking fox wins the admiration of an enthusiastic crowd of barnyard fowl, “the very tenderest morsels known,” including geese, a mallard, a hen, a rooster, and what I believe is supposed to be a guineafowl, third from the left. Here’s the interpretation of one newspaper: “Poor foolish fowls, they were evidently ‘taken in’ by the oily words of the wily fox—true type of a certain class of politicians—and like the followers of these politicians to be lured in by his smooth talk and fair promises only to prove his victims in the end.”3
Float 6: The Woodpecker’s Workshop. A bird that the newspapers call a Chicken Hawk (looking more like a peregrine falcon) reads aloud to a seated bobwhite and four busy carpenters. The three woodpeckers on the right are clearly an ivory-billed woodpecker, a red-headed woodpecker, and a pileated woodpecker. The green, red, and white woodpecker in the center-left is more of a mystery. I’d guess it’s supposed to be some sort of tropical woodpecker, but I couldn’t find any that come close—if you recognize the bird please speak up!
Float 7: The Battle Royal. Another political allegory, this one international. America’s bald eagle sits on an elevated dais, flanked by eagles representing Mexico (with the snake) and France (with the shield and military uniform). The three watch a deadly conflict play out between Russia’s eagle (with two heads) and Prussia’s (with one). A newspaper provided the interpretation based on rising tensions in Europe: “The whole was only a foreshadowing of what may come when Russia, jealous of the growing might and glory of Prussia, shall hurl her millions at her.”
Float 8: The Bird Club. Birds here include: red-headed woodpecker, great egret, horned grebe, yellow-crowned night heron, whooping crane, and a royal flycatcher, which newspapers called a “king toddy.” I can’t find it in the picture, but newspapers also mention “a Canvas-back Duck in a melancholy state of inebriation.” Journalists watching the parade interpreted this debaucherous scene as a critique of “club men at their revels,” and a society “disposed to overlook such little failings in individuals who can afford it.”
Float 9: The Mocking Bird’s Choir. Here we have a group of creatures all known for their song: the mockingbird as conductor, a bluebird with a guitar, a lark on the organ, a canary on the flute, a Cape May warbler on violin, and a bullfrog on the bass. What caught my attention here is that two separate newspapers label the violinist as a Cape May warbler—a species that incredibly few non-birders today could identify. It’s clear that the parade’s designers wanted to do justice to Audubon’s work, and that they had a well-justified faith in the abilities of the spectators.
Float 10: The Birth of Tom Tit. Young Tom bursts from an egg resting on a stump, while his adoring mother and father—a Carolina chickadee and tufted titmouse—look on. They’re joined by what newspapers identify as a barn swallow and a seagull. On the left two jovial sportsmen join in celebration: a woodcock (a popular game bird, here with roles reversed, loading his musket), and a curlew.
Float 11: The Grand Turk-ey. A graphic play on the two meanings of the word. This might be the most disturbing image I’ve come across in all my years of research. A turkey dressed as an Ottoman Sultan, seated by his wife, is presented with the head of a chef who must have displeased him. As one journalist interprets the scene, with less than a decade separating him from the end of American slavery: “that awful, grinning head is the head of a negro, and the raiment which clothes the body says, in the jacket and apron, that it belonged to servitude. Justice is appeased, no doubt.”4
Float 12: The Cocks of the Walk. A parade of the proudest gentlemen of the bird kingdom. From left, a game cock holding boxing gloves, followed by a silver pheasant, a “Buff Rooster,” a a “Multon Rooster” with a snowy egret and a tricolored heron (formerly called a Louisiana heron) hanging on each arm, and finally a peacock and his golden pheasant lady on their horses.
Float 13: Crows in Council. Here’s the float that speaks most clearly to elite White opinions of the state’s political situation. A collection of black birds—a vulture, crow, rook, ravens, a bat, and what looks to me like a smooth-billed ani—gathered at Louisiana’s statehouse, mocking African American legislators. One journalist who attended the parade littered his account with racist tropes, leaving no doubt as to what he thought of Reconstruction:
“At the rostrum, behind which the arch stands, is a venerable but excited crow, who pounds wildly on the desk with a most energetic umbrella. He is the presiding genius of the scene, as you may read in the overwhelming importance of his mien, the unaccustomed splendor of his dress and the fierce truculence of his glance . . . . A pert looking bat is secretary, and regards with impatience the length of brother raven’s discourse; for his turn comes next, and these little organic forms of office are sweet to the nouveaux arrives. A solemn rook in livery, with imposing cap and radiant staff of office, sits bolt upright in his chair, his eyes closed in the rapt ecstasy of his sense of elevation . . . . beside him, carpet-bag in hand, the ominous carrion crow uprears his ugly front.”5
Float 14: The Bird Ball. Eight colorful birds dance around a maypole to a cricket’s serenade. Some, like the magpie, bluebird, and blue jay would have been easy for spectators to recognize. The newspapers identify the other birds, undoubtedly with some help from the float’s designer, as some of the most fantastical birds on earth: a red bird-of-paradise, a greater bird-of-paradise, and two hummingbirds: a tufted coquette and a white-booted rackettail.
Float 15: The Pelican. The final float of the parade was the symbol of the state, feeding fish to three of her restless chicks. One journalist wished for this to mean an end to Federal interference, whose corollary was, of course, the wolf whistle of states’ rights: “May we not accept this as a promise that our mother State will yet minister to her loving children as was her wont? That the time will come when we may once again be a happy and contented family, and need to take no charity at the stranger’s hand?”6
The next morning, the city turned its attention back to the political crisis. While the various factions managed to avoid violence for a few more days, peace would not last much longer. In April, White paramilitary forces attacked the Black militia at Colfax, slaughtering as many as a hundred and fifty men after they’d surrendered. The following year, five thousand White and mostly ex-Confederate militia attacked and seized the statehouse, overwhelming the outnumbered, integrated Republican militia and municipal police, before Federal forces arrived three days later. Over the following years attacks like this continued, eventually leading to the fall of the Republican government and contributing to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. African Americans would be excluded from the state’s politics for another ninety years.
While I was researching my last piece on game dinners, I saw a small reference to the 1873 Twelfth Night parade. I was intrigued, but didn’t dream that such a rich visual record of the event might still exist. I’d like to thank Zoe Grueskin and Tyler Gunther for their help digging it up! Zoe goes birding in novels at her Substack All The Birds In. Tyler doubles as the medieval pageant designer Greedy Peasant—follow him on Instagram and Patreon.
And finally, this might be my last post for a little bit—over at the Bird History household we’re expecting a baby in early March! Stay tuned…
- “XIIth Night.” The Times-Picayune, Tuesday, January 7, 1873, p. 8; “The 12th Night Revelers.” The New-Orleans Times, Monday, February 24, 1873, p. 5. ↩︎
- “XIIth Night.” The New-Orleans Times, Tuesday, January 7, 1873, p. 1. ↩︎
- “XIIth Night.” The New-Orleans Times, Tuesday, January 7, 1873, p. 1; “XIIth Night.” The Times-Picayune, Tuesday, January 7, 1873, p. 8. ↩︎
- “XIIth Night.” The New-Orleans Times, Tuesday, January 7, 1873, p. 1. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎