Murder Before Breakfast: The French Market Killing That Shook New Orleans

Nicaud operated her coffee stall in the middle decades of the 19th century, a turbulent span of time that saw not only increasing restrictions for people of color in the years leading up to the Civil War and the war itself, but also unprecedented hope for political and social equality following it, with the policies of Radical Reconstruction. Nicaud’s café operated before and after the ratification of the 1868 Louisiana State Constitution, which guaranteed that all persons be granted “the same civil, political, and public rights and privileges, and be subject to the same pains and punishments.”  

With its racially diverse clientele, Nicaud’s stand in the French Market became a stress test for this ambitious statement of civil rights. Nicaud’s coffee stand had been a place where enslaved people, mixed-race shopkeepers, middle-class housewives, wealthy planters, and international tourists could occupy the same space, and she was adamant that it stay that way. “Everybody takes coffee at my stand,” she declared. Her witness statement to the grand jury—the only recorded account she ever gave—swayed the case and helped to enshrine her further as a local legend.  

Rose Nicaud was born enslaved in 1812 or 1813. As reported by HNOC’s Jari  C. Honora, she, her mother, and her five siblings were bought and sold six times within a network of French Quarter bakers who had immigrated from Saint-Domingue. Nicaud worked as a marchande de pain or vendeuse de pain, selling bread from a cart.  

Louisiana allowed enslaved people a day of rest on Sunday, but many used that day to sell their own goods in the French Quarter. It is likely that Nicaud followed this path, though it’s uncertain when exactly she began selling coffee from a pushcart. For les vendeuses, entrepreneurship provided an avenue to freedom, as they could use the money they earned for self-purchase. As a result, enslaved women between the ages of 16 and 49 were far more likely to purchase their freedom than were enslaved men.  

By June 1840, when she was 28, Nicaud was free. That year’s census lists her as a free woman of color and the head of her own household. It is uncertain when Nicaud first opened her coffee stand in the French Market, but according to one city directory, she was a “coffee-seller” by at least 1851. Her stand left quite an impression on journalist Martha Reinhard Smallwood Field (penname Catherine Cole) who described Nicaud in a 1916 French Market pamphlet.

Women of African descent traditionally sold a variety of foods in the streets and markets of New Orleans, but the fact that Rose Nicaud specifically chose to sell coffee over some other commodity is unsurprising. For one thing, she could be sure of high demand because its invigorating properties appealed to market workers, who opened their stalls in the wee hours of the morning. One journalist wrote in 1859 that among the first signs of life in the market each morning were the coffee tables “decorated with their array of cups of steaming Mocha, and visited by many for business or amusement.”

By the 1840s, New Orleans was the second largest importer of coffee in the United States, behind only New York. When European traders disseminated coffee cultivation from the Middle East to the Caribbean and South America, the port at the mouth of the Mississippi River became a logical entry point for coffee into North America. In 1850, New Orleans was home to over five hundred coffee shops and exchanges, with the city importing nearly half a million bags of coffee beans annually. Coffeehouse owners at the time were largely white. Their ranks got even whiter in 1859, when the Louisiana legislature voted to forbid any free person of color from owning a coffeehouse, billiard hall, or retail store where liquor was sold. But coffee stands and carts were operated mainly by free people of color.  

Because New Orleans’s coffee stands, and indeed all market stalls, were out in the open and public, they encouraged unpredictable encounters among consumers, vendors, and tourists. Everything and everyone that was normally kept separate in the socio-cultural order of antebellum New Orleans could unite in these spaces in unexpected, chaotic ways—often as forms of coded resistance.  

In his 1862 article on the French Market, English writer Thomas Butler Gunn observed the interaction among different groups. He noted that everyone, whether buyers or sellers, was always pleasant and civil to each other. “The demeanor of all present—white, black or parti-colored—struck me as being less brusque and more democratic than the observances of a similar scene in the North,” he wrote.  

The civility he observed was especially evident in the coffee stalls. “No wonder that he who sits down to drink but one cup, orders another; that she who meditated [over] two, lingers over her fifth,” Gun wrote. Coffee, it seems, encouraged not just socialization, but also relaxed contemplation.  

Nicaud’s stand was conveniently located next to the levee and probably drew customers from the river. When Nicaud brewed and sold her coffee each morning, she put into circulation a cadre of people who knew each other and who interacted daily, with an unpredictable assortment of other visitors, some who might be at the market on business, some simply visiting as tourists.  

Against this diverse backdrop, Reconstruction politics and roiling racial tension came to a head, both in the streets and at Nicaud’s stand.   

The delegation that met in the fall of 1867 to draft a new constitution for Louisiana under Congress’s Reconstruction program included 98 men—49 who were white and 49 who were Black. To a man, the Black delegation agreed that they would settle for nothing less than a constitution guaranteeing full political and civil rights to all people, without regard to race. The issue of racial discrimination in places of public accommodation was one of their foremost concerns.  

P. B. S. Pinchback, a leader of the Black delegation who would later become the first Black governor in US history, drafted a proposal that was adopted into the constitution as Article 13. The article forbade racial discrimination in any places of a public character. To ensure that people couldn’t skirt the law by claiming their businesses as private property, Pinchback devised a clever tactic to define “public” facilities as any that required a license by a state or local authority.

When the constitution was adopted in March 1868, Article 13 was included. Because coffee houses and stalls required licenses to operate, they were defined as public spaces. When the constitution was adopted, those spaces became, theoretically at least, legally open to anyone.  

But no constitution has much meaning without a way to enforce its principles. In July of 1868, R. H. Isabelle, a Black Republican from New Orleans, introduced a bill in the state legislature that took Article 13 a step further, making racial discrimination in public places a crime subject to steep fines and jail time for as long as one year. Both the House and Senate passed the bill, and it went to the desk of Republican Governor Henry Clay Warmoth for his signature.  

The bill was a problem for the governor. On one hand, he had been elected largely by newly enfranchised Black voters, and he owed his political success to them. But on the other hand, he feared the bill’s passage would not only alienate white voters but also provoke racial violence, which had been intensifying across the state.  

Local newspapers did much to fuel white fears of Black equality. One article argued the bill was “an outrage upon conscience and the freedom of opinion.” Another argued that the bill would bring about “a revulsion of feeling throughout the country against negro pretensions.” The papers were filled with similar rhetoric for the entire two months that Warmoth pondered the bill.  

Warmoth had to proceed cautiously. The bill criminalizing discrimination was clearly unpopular with much of the white population, but without it, the public accommodations provision of the constitution had no teeth. The bill sat on Warmoth’s desk until the late afternoon of September 25, 1868, when the shooting at Nicaud’s stand finally prompted him to action.  

Well before Arthur Guerin shot Edward Forrest, he had made a name for himself as a dastardly hothead. A former Confederate soldier, he was also a member of the violent nativist gang the Red Warriors. “Banded together and armed to the teeth, they paraded the streets at night, carrying terror and violence through the community,” reads one passage from Guerin’s obituary, which ran in both the Republican-controlled Semi-Weekly Louisianian and the conservative Times-Picayune.  

Guerin was fired from the New Orleans police force in 1856 for helping a bar owner escape to Havana after murdering someone; Guerin also threatened all the witnesses. A few years later, he stood trial for the killing of a Greek immigrant but was acquitted.  

According to numerous witnesses of the French Market incident, Guerin walked away from the scene of the crime after threatening to kill the young police officer who had accompanied Forrest back to Nicaud’s stand. For a day and a half no one could find Guerin for questioning until he turned himself in late the next night.  

Word spread quickly about Forrest’s death, and newspapers jumped to their own conclusions. While Guerin was still at large, the Daily Picayune claimed that it “has been proved” that the killing was done in self-defense. The paper also warned of “excited and threatening crowds of negroes” beginning to assemble in the streets “to avenge the death of a man of color.” Public schools were closed at ten o’clock that morning, after gun shots were fired into a school building, and children were urged to go straight home to avoid the mobs.  

When the governor got word of the unrest that had broken out, he quickly acted. On the same afternoon as the shooting, he returned the bill to the legislature without his signature, explaining in his veto message that the proposed bill would be impossible to enforce. Racial discrimination in places of public accommodation could not be legally called a crime.  

The question of whether the murder was racially motivated or a case of self-defense became the central focus of the grand jury that met in October to consider charging Arthur Guerin for murder.  

Guerin was white, and Forrest was mixed-race. Guerin had already earned a notorious reputation because of his temper and his association with the Red Warriors. Forrest, at least according to some testimony, had participated in a riot on Canal Street just two days prior. 

Two witnesses—Joseph Byrd, a market customer passing by Nicaud’s stall, and Pauline Victorin, who was seated having coffee—both said they heard Guerin say that he “wanted to kill a n—— this morning” even before Forrest arrived.  

Emily Jacob and a Mrs. W. Barrosiere, customers who were shopping at stands nearby, claimed that when Forrest asked Nicaud for a cup of coffee, Guerin told Forrest that he hoped he did not intend to sit down because “that coffee stand was not made for n——.” Both witnesses remarked that Forrest had rebutted with something along the lines of, “I may be Black, but my money is not.” Two white men who overheard the quarrel said they did not hear any racial remarks.  

E. M. Crozat, a white customer, claimed he saw Forrest putting a pistol behind his back before returning to where Guerin was standing. Emily Jacob, however, said that although Forrest and his companions did walk toward Guerin, none of them was armed and no one had made a move to strike him. Mrs. Barrosiere maintained that Forrest was shot in cold blood, “like a dog.”  

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the testimony came from a Mrs. Simon and Rose Nicaud herself. Mrs. Simon, a mixed-race woman, operated a vegetable stall next to Nicaud’s stand and had been chatting with her at the time of the shooting. Neither she nor Nicaud reported hearing any racial remarks. They both said they could not be sure that Emily Jacob or Mrs. Barrosiere were anywhere around the coffee stand when everything happened. In fact, Nicaud testified that although she knew Mrs. Barrosiere well, she had not been at the market that day. She also was quite certain that she had never seen Emily Jacob before in her life.  

Nicaud was called to give testimony multiple times, and she repeatedly stated that although she knew Edward Forrest from the market, he had never sat down at her stand, nor had he ever ordered a cup of coffee from her. She claimed that the entire business about the racial remarks was nonsense: Nothing of the kind was ever said, she emphatically proclaimed, because “everybody takes coffee at my stand.”  

The grand jury of two white men and three men of color concluded that there were too many inconsistencies in the testimonies and that there was not enough evidence to put Guerin on trial. He walked free.

It is difficult to discern with any certainty just who was telling the truth in the shooting death of Edward Forrest. Given the political turmoil of the time, it was likely risky for Mrs. Jacob and Mrs. Barrosiere to speak up and insist that the killing was racially motivated, especially if that is not what they heard. But perhaps they had felt buoyed by the new constitution and the impending public accommodations bill that guaranteed all people equal access. The transcripts of the constitutional convention had been published in the newspapers. Although the lack of signatures in the court documents suggest that both Mrs. Jacob and Mrs. Barrosiere were illiterate, they would have heard about the debates in the public spaces that they frequented. Indeed, it may be because they learned what was going on in town from their own interactions at the market that they felt compelled to speak out against Guerin’s attempt to deny that right for another person of color.  

Nicaud could have been mistaken, of course, when she claimed she did not overhear the racial remarks or see Emily Jacob and Mrs. Barrosiere. It is also possible that Nicaud herself heard the statements but consciously chose not to disclose this. She had a business to run, and by verifying the racial motive of the killer, she ran the risk of alienating part of her clientele. She counted on the patronage of both black and white customers.

It is tempting to think of Rose Nicaud’s announcement that “everyone” drinks coffee at her stand as a conscious, noble gesture of welcome and hospitality. More likely, however, her statement was born of economic practicality. For her coffee stand to be a success, she had to offer a quality product to anyone who was willing to buy it. Her long-held freedom to serve coffee to a mixed clientele emerged from the daily practices of her business, which drew from the organic diversity and interactions in the public space of the French Market.  

Nicaud died on September 13, 1880. Three years earlier, in 1877, the end of Reconstruction ushered in an era of increased restrictions on people of color, as “Redeemer” politicians sought to restore antebellum racial traditions. A redrafted state constitution and, later, the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision established white supremacy and segregation as law.  

We are left to wonder, had it survived, if Rose Nicaud’s coffee stand might have remained a democratic, public space. If history serves as evidence, it likely would have. From the antebellum era, through the Civil War, and in the years after, it was everyday practice—and good business sense—to ensure that everyone was indeed free to drink coffee at Rose Nicaud’s stand.