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Bricktop: The Notorious Woman and Her Impact on Civil War New Orleans

Between 1857 and 1864, Mary Jane Jackson—known throughout New Orleans as "Bricktop"—killed at least four men and violently assaulted dozens more, yet she died free, having escaped meaningful accountability for her accumulated violence. This book reconstructs Jackson's life from fragmentary newspaper accounts and court records to tell the story of a woman who entered prostitution at age thirteen and developed a pattern of lethal reactive violence that made her one of the most dangerous criminals operating in the city's vice districts. Yet Jackson's story is not merely a biography of a violent offender but rather a comprehensive analysis of the institutional failures that enabled her career. Incompetent forensic medicine failed to identify murder as the cause of death. Underfunded police declined to investigate crimes in marginalized neighborhoods. Prosecutors with limited resources selectively pursued cases based on victim worthiness. Prison overcrowding during the Union occupation led to her release after serving only nine months of a ten-year manslaughter sentence. By examining Jackson's case through multiple analytical frameworks—institutional history, comparative criminology, gender analysis, and critical media studies—this book illuminates how nineteenth-century criminal justice failures mirror contemporary debates about police resources, prosecutorial discretion, prison reform, and the unequal application of law, demonstrating that the fundamental challenges of building adequate institutional capacity and ensuring equal protection persist across historical periods despite dramatic technological and social changes.