Jack's Uncle Louis

John de Saulles had one other uncle – his father's younger brother Louis de Saulles Jr. He was the third of three boys, the rest being daughters, born in New Orleans in 1845/1846. He was about 8 years old when his father Louis de Saulles Sr. decided to quit the cotton export business at the peak of the “boom.” The family moved to New York and stayed for a few years, then relocated to a villa in the south of France.

Louis Jr. was about 13 years old and living in France when the Civil War broke out. His older brother Henry signed up for the Confederacy, and so did his second brother Arthur (who is John de Saulles's father.) Henry was killed in action, Arthur survived the war, but all the while Louis Jr. stayed safely in France with his parents and his sisters. I don't know if he felt frustrated or glad to be left behind, or if he would have lied about his age to enlist if he weren't living in France. I don't know if he admired his “war hero” brothers or if he condemned the foolishness of fighting for the losing side.

What I do know is that Louis Jr. returned to the U.S. after the Civil War ended, leaving behind his parents and sisters in the south of France. He married Miss Carrie Manwaring, daughter of Simon Manwaring, in New York City on January 4, 1870 (certificate #1688, LDS microfilm #1544275)

They lived for a while in Atlanta, Georgia where their only son Louis Manwaring de Saulles was born on Feb. 8, 1874. Then Louis Jr. followed in his brother Arthur's footsteps, also moving to Pennsylvania around the turn of the century to work in the developing steel, coal, and coke industry. His detailed obituary appears in Coal Age, a mining and engineering journal, that pays tribute to Louis for being part of a group that opened one of the first coke plants in Fayette county.

He is in the 1900 federal census of Uniontown, Pennsylvania living comfortably on E. Church Street with his wife Caroline, his son Louis M., and his two daughters Ella and Odele, ages 22 and 18. His occupation is listed as superintendent of the coke works, and his 25 year old son works as a bookkeeper.

Things would fall apart for Louis in the next few years. His daughter Odele died in 1904, his wife Carrie died in 1905, and he became mired in a lawsuit starting in 1906 to prevent the Percy Mining Company from ravaging his private property to excavate coal deposits. He won an injunction from the courts, but I assume it was a hollow victory without his wife to share it.

The 1910 federal census finds Louis de Saulles living alone, a broken man at the age of 64, renting a room in a home on Pittsburgh Street in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He lived long enough to see Jack marry Blanca Errazuriz, but I don't know if they ever met.  

Louis deSaulles committed suicide on September 6, 1915 by shooting himself in the head.

  

The Scandalously Fabulous Joan Sawyer

When Jack and Blanca divorced in 1916, the grounds were that he had cheated on her. The “other woman” was a successful Broadway dancer named Joan Sawyer.

From about 1914 to 1918, Joan Sawyer was one of the country's most popular and successful dance stars. Her main competitors were the dance team of Vernon & Irene Castle who promoted their wholesome image as a married couple. Joan Sawyer – a single, unmarried woman – went through dance partners like satin shoes.

As a self-reliant business woman, she managed a New York nightclub called “Joan Sawyer's Persian Garden” and her business manager was also a woman. She marketed herself to a general audience beyond the vaudeville theater goers. She made records on the early Columbia label and published sheet music with instructions on how to dance her versions of the fox-trot, the waltz, or the maxixe heel step.

Sawyer used her fame to promote the cause of women's suffrage (the right to vote) though ironically her business manager Jeanette Gilder was anti-suffrage.

Pushing the envelope, Sawyer employed black musicians at her nightclub, calling them her “Persian Garden Orchestra” and would not perform without them. Under the direction of Dan Kildare (of the Clef Club) and later Seth Weeks, the orchestra earned rave reviews wherever they played. Sawyer's role in sponsoring talented black musicians in these early days of ragtime and jazz is mostly forgotten.

Sawyer is mostly remembered for being the one who gave silent film star Rudolph Valentino his first break into show business. Sawyer and Valentino danced on stage in New York, Philadelphia, and once did a performance for President Woodrow Wilson. Valentino left New York to pursue a career in silent films. On his job application to the Hollywood studios, he wrote that he was tired of ballroom dancing.

Joan Sawyer also tried getting into films when exhibition dancing fell out of fashion during the First World War, but her movie career fizzled. Eventually, she faded away into obscurity.

Jack's Uncle Henry

Jack never knew his Uncle Henry who died in the Civil War.

Along with Jack's father Arthur de Saulles, another uncle and several aunts, Henry Longer de Saulles was born in New Orleans when the family lived on a prosperous cotton plantation. Their historic mansion still stands at 2618 Coliseum Street in the Garden District of New Orleans – drop by when you're in the neighborhood. 

Henry went to college at Harvard University, class of 1857. When the “boom days” of cotton started to show a decline in the years leading up to the Civil War, the patriarch Louis de Saulles sold his New Orleans home and relocated everybody to New York City. They only stayed there a few years, and then Louis kept going – over the Atlantic ocean to his native France, and settled in a villa in a picturesque town called Pau at the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains near the border of Spain.

Henry did not accompany the family to France but stayed in New York to work as a financier. His father was disappointed, and it looks like the rift between them never had a chance to mend.

When the Civil War broke out, and his home state Louisiana seceded from the Union, Henry abandoned his Harvard education and his career on Wall Street. He enlisted on May 10, 1862 as a Confederate in Company F, Louisiana Volunteers. Under the command of Colonel William R. Miles, Lieutenant Henry de Saulles participated in a series of battles and skirmishes around Port Hudson, Louisiana in late May 1863. At the Battle of Plains Store, his company defended a vulnerable position in a shallow ditch behind a barricade of rails covered loosely with dirt. The men alternated shooting off their rifles with shoveling out the trenches.

On June 3, 1863, Henry took a bullet to the chest and, after languishing through the night, died the next day at the age of twenty-four.

Colonel Miles wrote a condolence letter to Henry's parents to say, "He lingered until the night of the 4th, when he calmly passed away. I was with him most of the night of the 3rd; and at intervals, when sufficiently calm to converse, three subjects alone seemed to occupy his thoughts—his mother, his father, and his country. I cannot refrain from saying of your son that a truer gentleman never lived; a braver soldier never died."

One reference source was Helen P. Trimpi's study of Crimson Confederates, Harvard Men Who Fought for the South. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010) where I learned that Henry was not alone in returning to his native shores to fight for the Confederacy. Her book makes no judgments on the men – she simply tells their stories. If you have a chance to find it in a library, it's a fascinating collection of hundreds of little biographies.

Trimpi's book includes a photograph of Henry that is available for order from the archives of Harvard University. Below is a scan from the book.

The other reference was from Google Books, a scanned out-of-print copy of J. Wilson and Son's Report of the Class of 1857 in Harvard College, Prepared for the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Its Graduation. Published in 1882, the authors of this book contacted the surviving family members of deceased alumni which in this case was Mr. Louis de Saulles himself writing a letter dated in May 1882 from his villa in France. This book has the precious quote of Henry's father (who is Jack's grandfather), “After leaving Harvard... but six years more of life was granted to him. The first one of those was passed in a friend's counting room, at New York. He elected for commerce rather than for law, which I had wished him to prefer.” And this book has the full version of Colonel Miles's condolence letter that Trimpi's book abbreviates.

Henry's body was buried first in New Orleans and later was moved to the prestigious Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. This is the same cemetery, in the same family plot where – in 1917 – Jack was laid to rest.