George Washington Cable's antecedents were not typical for a southern writer born prior to the Civil War. His father, George Washington Cable, Sr., came from an established Virginia line, while his mother, Rebecca Boardman Cable, was from a Calvinistic family that had settled in New England during the seventeenth century. In 1837, after residency in Indiana, both parents settled in New Orleans, where their fifth child, George Washington Cable, Jr., was born in 1844. The differing backgrounds of Cable's parents were further enhanced by the diversity of the New Orleans population--genteel "yankee" Americans (the descendants of Americans who settled there after the Louisiana Purchase), Kentucky and Tennessee boatmen, Creoles (the descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers), Acadians, and free and enslaved blacks.

After his father's death in 1859 Cable left school to help support the family by taking a clerkship at the customhouse where his father had been employed...