Mr. Beauchet was born on January 5, 1822 at Shady Grove Plantation near Des Allemandes, St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, the fifth of sixth children of a prominent French Creole family. He was reared in the life of an antebellum aristocrat, assisting his father and brothers in the management of their vast sugar plantation and pursuing an active social life among the finest families of New Orleans.

Mr. Beauchet enlisted in the Mississippi Rifles under Colonel Jefferson Davis in 1846 and served in the Mexican War. He inherited Shady Grove after the death of his eldest brother, Claude, at the battle of Oak Hills (Wilson's Creek) in August of 1861.

Shortly after the imposition of the Union blockade, Beauchet purchased and outfitted a sleek blockade runner, the Marguerite, which smuggled vital supplies into New Orleans from Havana, Cuba until the fall of New Orleans to Union forces in April of 1862. By this time, Mr. Beauchet had mortgaged his sugar plantation and set up a new berth for the Marguerite in Wilmington, North Carolina.

He purchased a small home in Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed him to a cabinet position as Assistant Secretary for Foreign Affairs, designed to obtain official diplomatic recognition of the Confederate government in Paris, London and Madrid.

Right: Miss Charlotte and Mr. Beauchet at the Spotswood Hotel in Richmond, Virginia, Winter, 1862.

It was there that he met and fell in love with Miss Charlotte Wilkins, daughter of a prominent Savannah family and proprietor of a prominent finishing school for young ladies in the Confederate capital.

After the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, Mr. Beauchet relocated to Savannah, Georgia with Miss Charlotte. They were married by Commander John Newland Maffitt, CSN, aboard the C.S.S. Florida in Brest, France on Christmas Eve 1863.

Proceeds from the cargo of the Marguerite allowed Mr. and Mrs. Beauchet to purchase a vacation home in Paris, where they moved in the spring of 1864 after Sherman invaded Georgia.

The Marguerite was sunk off the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the fall of 1864, by which point Beauchet had transferred all his financial assets to secret accounts in Bermuda, Nassau and Geneva.

The Beauchets remained in Paris until the summer of 1869, when they purchased a sugar plantation on the Big Island of Hawai'i and moved there under the alias of Bouchart. He became a prominent subject of the Hawaiian monarchs and died there in 1897, shortly before Hawai'i was annexed by the United States.

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