Bradish Johnson was the type of Southerner who gave slavery a bad name and the type of capitalist who inspired Communism. Fortunately, he was related to the Lawrences only by marriage.

Background

Bradish Johnson’s father, William Martin Johnson, was a sea captain from Nova Scotia, He became a partner of the river pirate (in some versions, pilot) and slaver Jean Lafite on the Mississippi. In 1795 he purchased land in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, along with a partner from Salem, Massachusetts named George Bradish. The partners built a sugar plantation there called Magnolia Plantation that was later owned by Effingham Lawence. In the 1830s, William Johnson moved his family to a new plantation four miles further up the Mississippi River, in Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana. He named his new plantation Woodland.

Johnson bought out his brother’s share of the Woodland Plantation before the Civil War and became its sole owner. He eventually purchased a number of other plantations in the area: Pointe Celeste, Bellevue, and the Orange Farm. He also acquired two plantations above New Orleans which he renamed after his married daughters: Whitney Plantation and Carroll Plantation. These plantations supplied the raw materials for his New York distilleries.

New York Connections

Bradish Johnson was named after his father’s business partner, George Bradish. By 1820, Captain William Johnson had also begun purchasing property on the West Side of Manhattan and had gone into the distillery and sugar refining business in New York. Bradish Johnson, who was born in Louisiana, attended Columbia College in New York City, graduating in the class of 1831. He then studied law and was admitted to the bar. When his father became ill, he abandoned the legal profession to enter the family business.

Johnson started out as a partner in the distilling company William Johnson and Sons. After his father's death, he went into business for decades with a man named Moses Lazarus, the father of poet Emma Lazarus, as Johnson and Lazarus. Upon the retirement of Lazarus, the firm was renamed Bradish Johnson and Sons. The Johnsons owned several properties. The largest facility occupied two city blocks near the Hudson River, from Ninth Avenue to Eleventh Avenue between 15th and 16th Streets. The distillery was east of Tenth Avenue, while the cow barns and dairy were located west of Tenth.

Swill milk Scandal

The swill milk scandal was a major adulterated food scandal in the state of New York in the 1850s. The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk.

Swill milk referred to milk from cows fed swill which was residual mash from nearby distilleries. After the extraction of alcohol from the macerated grain, the residual mash still contains nutrients. Therefore, keeping cows stabled near distilleries and feeding them with swill was profitable. It was made even more profitable by adulterating the milk, whitening it with plaster of Paris, thickening with starch and eggs, and coloring with molasses.

The New York Academy of Medicine carried out an examination and established the connection of swill milk with the increased infant mortality in the city. In May 1858, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper did a landmark exposé of the distillery-dairies of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases. These cows were fed boiling distillery waste, often leaving the cows with rotting teeth and other maladies.

Frank Leslie's exposé caused widespread public outrage that strongly pressured local politicians to punish and regulate the distillery-dairies. But the Tammany Hall politician Alderman Michael Tuomey after late-night visits to Johnson’s house, defended the distillers vigorously—in fact, he was put in charge of the Board of Health investigation. Tuomey argued that swill milk was as good or better for children than regular milk. Tuomey successfully blocked any serious inquiry into the dairies and stymied calls for reform. The Board of Health exonerated the distillers, but public outcry led to the passage of the first food safety laws in the form of milk regulations in 1862.

Slavery

In 1863 Johnson took a leading part in the Conservative Unionists, a group of businessmen with interests in the South who wanted occupied Louisiana let back into the Union with her 1852 constitution intact. They claimed that the state constitution had not been dissolved and the secession was illegal, so the President should allow the state back into the Union with slavery intact. Johnson and two other plantation owners made their argument in a letter to President Lincoln, reinforced by a personal visit. Lincoln was not impressed. In his dismissive response he wrote “I do not perceive how such committal could facilitate our military operations in Louisiana, I really apprehend it might be so used as to embarrass them.”

In 1863 the Union Army's “Office of Negro Labor” was sent to Woodland to investigate conditions there. They found that on the plantation “great ill feeling and discontent” existed. The slaves begged to be given permission to enlist in the Union Army. They complained that their rations were “unfairly curtailed” by the overseer and that he was “lecherous toward their women.” The slaves (now called “laborers” by the Union Army ) said that they would “accept even the Devil for an overseer, if you will only remove this man!”

In 1863 Johnson brought a suit against a Union general. The suit claimed that in 1862 the occupying Union Army, under the command of General Neal S. Dow of the 13th Maine Regiment, “took from Johnson's plantation twenty-five hogsheads of sugar, plundered the dwelling-house hereon and took one silver pitcher, one-half dozen silver knives, one-half dozen silver spoons, one fish knife, one-half dozen silver teaspoons and other articles.”

Johnson presented himself as a loyal citizen of the Union, residing in New York, who had simply been robbed by the Union Army. He was awarded $1750 in damages by the court. When Dow failed to pay him, he sued Dow in Dow’s home state of Maine after the war. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which handed down a decision in 1876 against Johnson, pointing out that his holdings were in conquered territory during a time of war, and that it would be very hard to engage in warfare if the enemy could sue for damages. “Johnson v. Dow” became a hot topic of debate during the heated Tilden-Hayes Presidential election of 1876, as the country's people tried to figure out the confusing nature of the status of the defeated Confederate states.

The Union Army report presents a very different picture from the one that appeared in Johnson’s New York Times obituary and in the official history of the Chemical Corn Exchange Bank, which claimed that he had freed his slaves prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Money is a great reagent for purging a reputation.

After the War Johnson built a mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans at 2343 Prytania Street, now known as the Bradish Johnson House.