It’s time for another episode of Kreyolicious History 101…in which curious facts about Haiti and History are presented.
Did you know that a Haitian man by the name of William de Fleurville was the personal barber and confidant to future U.S. President Abraham Lincoln?
William de Fleurville was born in Cap Haitien, Haiti in 1807, and was nicknamed Billy the Barber.
Records indicate that he immigrated to the United States in 1820. What could have led him to do leave a brand new country of free black people to go to one, that was at this point, still under the yoke of black slavery in most of its parts?
Well, what was going on in Haiti in 1820? Jacques Nicolas Leger in Haiti, Her History and Her Detractors indicate that King Henri Christophe committed suicide in October of that year. De Fleurville, a native of Cap Haitien, where Christophe’s rule was based, may have had been part of the prominent families under the King’s protection perhaps?
Discussing de Fleurville in a chapter entitled “Lincoln and The Negro” in the book The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers, the editors maintain that de Fleurville first went to Baltimore, Maryland to be with his godmother. They go on to state that after her death, the entrepreneur hitchhiked his way to the state of Illinois in search of opportunities.
By the time he met Lincoln in 1831, either because people were having issues with pronouncing his name, or whether he wanted to gain anonymity in his adopted land, de Fleurville began to call himself Florville.
Lincoln is credited with giving him his first clients, according to historian Benjamin Quarles in the book The Negro In The Civil War. Mr. de Fleurville’s barbershop, according to historians, became a meeting place for Lincoln, and one of his favorite spots until his subsequent marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln in 1842. Furthermore, some historians speculate that many of the barber’s jokes and humor pieces found their way into Lincoln’s later speeches as president.
But de Fleurville’s barbershop wasn’t the only venture he had. Guess this Mr. de Fleurville was an early advocate of the multiple streams of income mentality so often proselytized by entrepreneurs, because, it turns out (according to Quarles) that he also had a catering business, and was a big investor in real estate. As a matter of fact, he had retained Lincoln as his lawyer and tax advisor in matters related to his real estate holdings (still according to Quarles).
The writer and historian William Loren Katz maintains that although a Catholic, de Fleurville became one of the founders of the Saint John Baptist Church in Springfield, and gave back to the community, supporting several causes (particularly religious ones). Quarles maintains that Abraham Lincoln and Mr. de Fleurville kept in touch over the years and that when Lincoln died, de Fleurville was listed as a pallbearer, but a skilled clarinet player and musician, he played in the funeral march instead.
A 1951 article in Jet magazine reported that a treasure trove of papers—including a letter exchanges between Lincoln and de Fleurville (Florville)—were among the papers released by the state of Illinois that year.
De Fleurville died in 1868, leaving a host of descendants in the United States. Katz’s aforementioned book stated that the entrepreneur had married Phoebe Roundtree, a local girl. His funeral, asserts the book Black Pioneers: An Untold Story, was cited by a local newspaper as one of the largest and widely attended send-offs the town had ever seen.
This has been another episode of Kreyolicious Haiti History 101…in which curious facts about Haiti and History are presented.
