On August 29, 2005, Matthew Broderick, the commander of the Homeland Security Operations Center in Washington, D.C., did not believe the early reports he was hearing that floodwalls had been breached in New Orleans. After all, the Army Corps of Engineers itself seemed to confirm that overtop-ping was the only source of rising water in Crescent City neighborhoods. Still undecided, the former U.S. Marine general saw a late Monday afternoon news report on CNN: The network broadcasted a scene from Bourbon Street, where some people were apparently partying. “The one data point that I really had, personally, visually, was the celebration in the streets of New Orleans, of people drinking beer,” Broderick recalled. So with this image from the French Quarter as sufficient evidence that the city had dodged the bullet of Hurricane Katrina, the Homeland Security administrator went to bed that night confident that no walls or levees had broken.1
One month later, federal officials were themselves trying to dodge bullets, in the form of mounting charges about their own irresponsible and incompetent behavior. The Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael Brown told congressmen, “My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional.” Tragically, these words were all too easily believed by too many people inside as well as outside the state—sufficient proof, like the party on Bourbon Street viewed by Broderick on August 29, that the United States government owed nothing more or better to New Orleans. Reflecting on what he saw as long-term, global threads of connection, one U.S. Senator from Idaho was absolutely certain that the government of New Orleans had always been the most corrupt in our country. “Fraud is in the culture of Iraqis,” Larry Craig told reporters, and “I believe that is true in Louisiana as well.”2
Where people look when they watch New Orleans and what they expect to find can make a big difference, even becoming a matter of life or death for too many Hurricane Katrina victims. So, like the city’s post-Katrina inhabitants and infrastructure, the history of New Orleans’s image and reputation demands renewed attention. The peculiar location of New Orleans in the American imagination—as celebrated by its natives with pride and enjoyed by its visitors for profit—has long been taken for granted. Growing up there, insiders learn how unique their past is. Seduced by touristic promotion, outsiders expect to visit the most un-American city in all of America. And the Big Easy delivers! Whether playing up the “Frenchness” of the French Quarter, the “looseness” of Latin politics, or the “openness” of sensual pleasure, New Orleans performs exuberantly for the rest of the nation and for the rest of the world.
Historians know to be cautious about uniqueness, as it is a quality possessed by every person, group, place, event, or period that we might select for investigation. Yet we also understand that comparisons and connections make what we study truly worthwhile.3 Therefore, not even a place as uncommon as New Orleans is so exceptional or exotic that it cannot contribute to a stronger knowledge about central themes and issues in American history. Recent studies have shown that the “Frenchness” or “Spanishness” of Louisiana’s colonial background made less of a difference than previously thought. Particular features of the early population and of the region itself, more importantly, permitted certain forms of cultural interaction to last longer here than in other colonies that would become parts of the United States: it was a frontier city, an environment conducive to mixing, a gathering place remote from imperial minders. New Orleans, furthermore, became a nineteenth-century immigrant city not unlike New York and Boston—the most important difference being the size and influence of its African American population. Yet until recently, the exoticization and marginalization of the city’s past caused historians to overlook how central it is for understanding such mainstream processes as territorial expansion and immigration. Whether looking at early advocacy for civil rights by free people of color or at the violent reaction of white supremacists to Reconstruction, no nineteenth-century city was more influential on the national scene than New Orleans. For the study of machine politics, reformism, urban sprawl, white flight, and desegregation, among other topics, the Crescent City is an essential example of major trends in twentieth-century American history.4
Even in the reliance on representing itself as a unique city, New Orleans is not as unusual or anomalous as we might think. By the end of the nineteenth century, many regions and cities turned to tourism as a means of profiting from cultural traditions and special attractions. While historians of the Crescent City are now explaining that much of its otherness and quaintness was self-consciously constructed over the years, attention to tourism and boosterism in other American places is showing how many different communities have exploited and distorted their pasts for the sake of self-promotion.5 The risks and costs of this process, however, can be higher in some cases than in others. And New Orleans might be paying an inordinate price for the success of its imagined location in American fantasy and fun.
Perhaps the truly outstanding feature of New Orleans history is how its natural environment and its human population have interacted with each other over the centuries. Its location on the map turns out to be far more valuable than its location in the historical imagination. No other coastal delta in the world arguably has been inhabited by as expansive a mix of migrants as those reaching south Louisiana. Beginning with Native Americans in Late Archaic times, the influx of Frenchmen, Africans, Canadians, Acadians, Canary Islanders, Haitians, Anglo-Americans, African Americans, Irish, Germans, Croatians, Sicilians, Filipinos, Texans, Cubans, Vietnamese, and now Latinos has profoundly shaped the culture in and around New Orleans. Sustainable and unsustainable uses of the environment, creative and destructive relationships with it, all together contributed to the Crescent City’s fame and shame—usually in unforeseen and unpredictable ways. But it is the incomparable interaction between the working-class culture and the bountiful wetlands of south Louisiana—for livelihood and recreation—that largely explains the city’s special blend of sights, sounds, and flavors today.
Twenty-first-century New Orleans offers many essential lessons about environmental management, urban sprawl, quality of life, public policy, race relations, governmental responsibility, and, yes, even self-representation—which apply to most American cities. As Billy Sothern wrote, “The story of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina is, even though it may be hard to accept, the story of America at the beginning of a new millennium.”6 Although Americans, especially those who call themselves New Orleanians, have wanted to see the city as different, even as exotic, now more than ever we need to realize how representative much of its history really is.
The commonplace perception of eighteenth-century New Orleans hardly makes the city seem typical. Shadowy barons, backwoodsmen, prison girls, privateers, quadroon partners, and voodoo queens have filled both popular and scholarly accounts of the region’s formative years, separating its colonial past sharply from that of other parts of the United States. French and Spanish influences upon the Gulf Coast serve to explain everything from carnival to carnal sin to corruption, causing contemporary residents alternately to cherish and curse their peculiar colonial progenitors. The quaintness and remoteness of colonial Louisiana, more than incidentally, also contributed to the New Orleans allure for visitors and other outsiders seeking an un-American destination still located inside the United States. Tourists entering the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in 1884–1885 were informed by an official guidebook that “New Orleans . . . having been so far removed in its earlier history from the rest of the colonies, and during its occupancy by the Spanish and French—took to itself usages, customs and even a patois of its own, the story of which has furnished material for romances equaled by few other cities in this country.”7
With a reputation so romantically appealing, how could Louisiana’s colonial past ever reveal anything meaningful about early America? How could eccentric Frenchmen and Spaniards compare in importance with the English founders of Jamestown and Plymouth? Thankfully, historians now understand how the eighteenth-century Lower Mississippi Valley does not match the old images of that place and time. New research on settlement patterns, economy, Indian-colonial relations, African American slavery, gender, family life, and print culture challenges many common assumptions about the exceptionalism of the region’s colonial past—in a phrase, these studies see New Orleans as a frontier city with characteristics reminiscent of the other places described in this volume. Simplistic notions about early New Orleans, however, persist in American popular and literary culture, still operating to minimize its importance in American history.
Treating early New Orleans as a frontier city in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World can break through these barriers. The tendency to treat the city’s distinctive features as the legacy of its French and Spanish regimes is a trope that originated with Anglo-American observers in the early nineteenth century. Historical narratives of the city ever since then routinely open with these visitors’ accounts of its odd appearance, contrasting its heterogeneous population with a homogenized mental image of the (English-speaking) Atlantic seaboard. But as part of an urban frontier, eighteenth-century New Orleans is not an anomaly but instead an especially instructive example of common patterns and processes in the Atlantic World. To find its value, however, we have to revise the model provided by Richard Wade fifty years ago.
Richard Wade’s central thesis in The Urban Frontier, that “towns were the spearheads of the frontier,” all too readily dismisses the role that non-English colonists as well as Native Americans played in the Mississippi Valley. “Planted far in advance of the line of settlement,” Wade argues, the towns of Pittsburgh, Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati “held the West for the approaching population.” Not needing any explicit definition, readers understand who is meant by “the approaching population.” This assumption is reinforced throughout the early pages of the book by scattered statements about the region being “merely the haunt of Indian and animal,” where “the French spun a loose web of forts and fur-trading posts.” Sure, Wade acknowledges that the “story of Western urbanism” began “not where one might expect, at the foot of the Appalachians, but rather in the remoteness of the Mississippi Valley.” But he then proceeds to emphasize the “slow growth,” “French customs,” and “curious mixture” of St. Louis’s population. And where does New Orleans appear in Wade’s study? Granted he focuses on the Ohio and Upper Mississippi Valleys as a coherent region unto itself. But important lessons implicit in the early development of New Orleans go completely unnoticed because it plays only a faint and distant role in Wade’s analysis—as the port for goods produced by his prized network of river cities.8
Richard Wade nevertheless provides some invaluable insights for anyone wishing to include New Orleans in a comparative analysis of frontier cities. His towns’ economic structures were shaped by their respective positions in a wider economy, what he calls the “outside world.” He also observes that military garrisons and mobilizations were instrumental in stimulating commerce in these frontier cities. Policing marketplaces and the behavior of slaves, according to Wade, comprised some of the earliest town ordinances in the trans-Appalachian West. Wade finds that “wage earners were not a static class,” and “in a loosely structured society, boundaries between groups were never rigid.” “Urban conditions and the hiring-out custom,” he also notes, “put severe strains on the structure of slavery.”9 These are helpful cues for anyone interested in the early history of New Orleans.
The exotic reputation of early New Orleans stems from the tension between desired colonial projects and the realities of frontier cities that was rather common in the Atlantic World between 1500 and 1800. As Shannon Dawdy has recently explained in Building the Devil’s Empire, expectations for New Orleans were overly idealized because of particular circumstances around its founding. The Crescent City began as a company town meticulously planned by royal engineers under the influence of Enlightenment rationality. “It will not be as easy to execute as it was to draw it on paper,” Father Pierre Charlevoix soberly wrote in January 1722 when two hundred people were camping on the banks of the Mississippi and waiting for royal engineer Adrien de Pauger to draw a construction plan for them to follow. The Jesuit had actually crossed Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf Coast on a boat with Pauger, and although he saw only about a hundred huts and a wooden warehouse doubling as a church upon reaching “this famous town they call New Orleans,” Charlevoix apparently had caught the engineer’s optimism. “This wild and deserted place that canes and trees still cover almost entirely,” he predicted, “will be one day, and perhaps that day is not far off, an opulent city and the metropolis of a great and rich colony.”10 In September of that same year, New Orleans was struck by a hurricane, and most of its buildings were blown down. But chief engineer Le Blond de la Tour actually expressed some relief, because all of the damaged and destroyed structures had been out of alignment with his new plan. They “would have had to be demolished” anyway, he reported.11
It is safe to say that residents in most colonial towns disappointed authorities in metropolitan centers, especially during the earliest years of settlement. As Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have written about later empires, “colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent.” The production of information that we now discover in colonial archives, therefore, was determined by “competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture” among metropolitan rulers and publics as well as among colonial bureaucrats and settlers.12 So reports of disorderly departure from desired plans are found everywhere, but the case of New Orleans reveals how local features gave particular shape to such a perception. While Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was still cutting the first river cane at the selected site, this new town became an entrepôt for a highly heterogeneous array of immigrants. Canadian, French, German, and Senegalese arrivals immediately began to improvise ways of survival and adaptation in this strange world. The diversity in background and status among Europeans themselves and the relatively high number of imported slaves posed plenty of frontier challenges to official planners inside and outside New Orleans. Cost-cutting measures taken by colonial investors only exacerbated tensions between groups encountering each other for the first time. During the 1720s, for example, numerous African slaves were apprenticed to European carpenters and blacksmiths in order to facilitate construction of the town and expansion of commerce. Even those artisans who took in enslaved apprentices, however, could anticipate the deleterious effects on their later income, admitting that they “do not seek to perfect the negroes in their trades.” Employment of slaves as skilled workers naturally lowered the wages of free craftsmen and heightened their resentment toward African workers.13 The city’s heavy dependence on neighboring American Indian villages for all kinds of assistance made matters even more complicated, with plenty of uncertainty accompanying the valuable foodstuffs and services provided by Acolapissas, Chaouchas, Houmas, and Chitimachas throughout the eighteenth century. The same group of Indians recruited by officials to catch runaway slaves on one occasion could just as easily fraternize with slaves on another.14
In addition to the composition of the town’s population, environmental features of its location played an important role in shaping what I call “frontier exchange” behavior. A hundred miles of winding river and shifting silt between New Orleans and the mouth of the Mississippi River made for a treacherous “front door” to Atlantic commerce, requiring ships to travel and wait for up to six weeks. But Lake Pontchartrain and Bayou St. John behind the city offered a convenient “back door” to the Gulf of Mexico, thereby encouraging an intercoastal network of trade that would trouble colonial control. Ecological conditions of the new town and its outskirts also facilitated “back-of-town” improvisation among residents and itinerants. Wetlands and waterways protected acts of defiance and resistance, while connecting the city easily to a wider hinterland network of fluid exchange activity.15
Contested uses of Bayou St. John quickly became a complex and enduring theme in the history of New Orleans. Because of the access to Lake Pontchartrain afforded by this bayou, Bienville told Company officials in 1726 that “it cannot be esteemed too highly.” But in order to improve navigation on Bayou St. John, “it would be necessary to clear it out, that is to say to remove from it all the tree trunks with which it is filled and even blocked in many places and to fell all the trees that hang over the banks and threaten to fall into it.” One settler on the bayou was already eager to undertake this improvement—if Company equipment would be provided and additional land would be granted to him—but seasonal overflow of adjacent land would also need to be managed by the creation of man-made drainage ditches.16 So began the vicious environmental cycle of deforestation and flood-control that would plague New Orleans into the twenty-first century, along with socioeconomic conflict between commercial and common interests.
New Orleans was inhabited by 25 percent of Louisiana’s entire colonial population by the end of its first decade. “The number of little inhabitants who carry on no other business here than of trading,” the Superior Council complained in 1725, undermined efforts to “find a servant or a workman to work in the fields that are in cultivation.”17 The mix of people living in bondage in and around New Orleans only made the maintenance of order and discipline more difficult. In 1726 the town by itself was home to seventy-eight African slaves, thirty American Indian slaves, and sixty European indentured servants—altogether comprising nearly 20 percent of New Orleans’s core population. Contributing even further to this ethnic diversity of coerced laborers and craftsmen was the fact that the rest of the urban population included 130 soldiers stationed in New Orleans that same year. For the imperial planners of an orderly society, interaction across so many lines proved doubly threatening. If not fearing collaboration among groups with varied reasons for discontent and rebellion, they were troubled by violence between individuals whose differences in status and origin were often aggravated by excessive drinking.18
In late September of 1739 four soldiers deserted from their post at Bayou St. John, absconding with a sailboat and their commanding officer’s trunk. Somehow they even managed to take four enslaved men and two enslaved women along with them onto Lake Pontchartrain. Lieutenant Henri de Louboey believed that this supposed confiscation of slaves by deserters had been instigated by a boatman who worked for a pitch and tar manufacturer on the north shore. Several settlers and soldiers were dispatched to pursue these fugitives, but found only their hastily abandoned boat near Pea Island. It contained two bottles of brandy, some old clothing, an army musket, and still-warm smoking pipes, together with traces of blood “indicating some quarrel that had taken place among these brigands.” The next day, travelers in a pirogue from Biloxi found the remains of a man half-eaten by alligators. Louboey assumed this was one of the missing who had been killed by his companions and dumped into the sea. Nine Biloxi Indians assisted the search party along Bay St. Louis, to no avail. The deserters probably wanted to reach Spanish Pensacola, but the possibility of their being lost in coastal marsh-lands motivated the lieutenant “to send men acquainted with the region, who know all these windings and turnings because they have long hunted there, in order to try to find them so as to make as severe an example of them as the case deserves.” Seven years later, it was learned from two runaway slaves—stowaways on a royal ship headed for Cuba who were arrested and returned to Louisiana—that a small neighborhood in Havana was inhabited by the very same soldiers and slaves who had fled New Orleans’ back-of-town in 1739.19
Not long ago, this eighteenth-century New Orleans story would have neatly fit into an American nationalist narrative that explained the fluidity and permeability across cultural lines as simply a quaint sign of French and Spanish imperialism in a land that Providence intended for an Anglo-American empire. Such episodes might be cited to prove that the French, in contrast with the English, lacked the vigor necessary for successful colonization, thereby reinforcing notions about Louisiana’s dysfunctional origins. But thanks to works on British North America from Peter Wood’s Black Majority to Jill Lepore’s New York Burning, our understanding of these matters has been drastically altered. Lowcountry Atlantic-seaboard towns like Charleston and Savannah obviously shared demographic, economic, and environmental circumstances with this Gulf Coastal town, and we now know that Chesapeake Bay and Mid-Atlantic ports likewise generated the kind of intercultural exchange that troubled New Orleans officials. In most Atlantic World frontier cities, a mixture of coastal and interior trade generated networks of exchange and migration that transgressed intercultural and intercolonial boundaries. Even in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony, the “experience of ye Indians Coming Dayly to Boston upon the occasions of Market & otherwise” warranted another in a series of attempts at legislative prohibition.20
New Orleans in the middle of the eighteenth century, therefore, actually resembled other Atlantic World ports, irrespective of their national affiliations. When an anonymous visitor from France described how “the inhabitants, sailors, Indians, and slaves run around freely inside as well as beyond the town,” he echoed observations made, at one time or another, about Montreal, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. And his passing of judgment over the Crescent City’s rabble likewise followed a familiar pattern: “They meet in a multitude of negro cabarets frequented by slaves who have fled their plantations either due to laziness or want, and who survive by trading stolen goods.”21 A Philadelphia grand jury, by way of comparison, complained in 1744 about an area called “Hell Town,” where taverns serving “strong liquor” attracted “Apprentices, Servants and even negroes.” Just upriver from the center of Philadelphia, between the Delaware River and Third Street, this was a space busy with exchange and entertainment among residents of North America’s largest colonial city. For some time, workers in various conditions of temporary and permanent bondage had appropriated fairs held every May and November in Philadelphia as a customary occasion for them to take time off for excessive amusement. By 1775 these festivities were outlawed by the provincial assembly because they tended to “debauch the Morals of the People.” Throughout the eighteenth century, however, taverns and bawdyhouses in Philadelphia continued to provide places where, as the Pennsylvania Gazette reported on August 8, 1787, “all the loose and idle characters of the city, whether whites, blacks or mulattoes . . . indulge in riotous mirth and dancing till the dawn.”22
Particular features of New Orleans’ physical environs, perhaps more so than for other colonial towns, seemed to play a notable role in enhancing frontier exchange. As that anonymous French observer added to his mid-century description, “They meet in the thick and intruding woods that border the town almost all around.”23 In a 1763 report to the Superior Council, attorney general Nicolas Chauvin de Lafrenière placed much of the blame for criminal activity, as well as for Louisiana’s economic weakness, on illicit trade being promoted back-of-town by colonists who strayed from colonial plans:
The rear of the City is infested with numbers of men without occupation. The just and severe ordinances of our Kings have always provided for the expulsion [of such people] from the Cities. These people require constant attention and deserve the utmost severity. Most of them were brought here at the cost of the King and lodged and fed on the plantations at his expense. The object was to establish cultivators on a rich and fertile soil and to provide the City through these people with the necessities of life. Living here they defeat the consummation intended, they increase the cost of living, they are the first at the markets and are consumers instead of creators.24
Groups of people who lived around New Orleans, this description also suggests, were as instrumental in sustaining the frontier-city conditions as were town residents themselves, ensuring that ordinary practices would continue to upset official plans throughout the eighteenth century. The black majority enslaved on nearby plantations developed important social and economic connections to the city, moving back and forth as peddlers, hired workers, and runaways.25 Several American Indian communities situated near New Orleans were also tied to the town’s market and public life. Before Europeans appeared in the Lower Mississippi Valley, Indian people had used the area that became New Orleans as a portage for seasonal gathering and traveling. Camps were built on narrow natural levees and on shell mounds, with larger settlements situated on higher ground. But after 1718, the site of New Orleans became an even busier nexus of Indian activity. Acolapissas, Houmas, Chitimachas, Tunicas and other nearby villagers regularly spent time in the colonial city selling foodstuffs and furs and even working for wages.26 After delegates from the Biloxis and other small nations met with Governor Jean-Jacques-Blaise d’Abbadie on one June day in 1764, “they assembled near New Orleans to play ball and for diversions, attracting there numerous spectators.” A space behind the city had become the grounds where Indian visitors often played stickball, otherwise known as lacrosse, which soon became the Crescent City’s most popular team sport. White, black, and mixed teams of “raquette” athletes competed before large crowds throughout the nineteenth century, representing a cultural legacy of frontier exchange in New Orleans only to be forgotten later by its residents.27
The middle decades of the eighteenth century saw very little immigration to New Orleans, thus providing a valuable example of how marginality in the empire could also influence a frontier city’s social and economic life. Interethnic patterns of exchange within the city—and between it and outlying communities—solidified into local customs through a process of creolization. Social interaction among multiple groups, in and around an urban space occupied by a slowly growing population, optimized conditions for the generation of new foodways, speechways, and other creole practices, creating that now famous cultural gumbo into which future groups of immigrants would add their own ingredients. But as Jennifer Spear has recently demonstrated, colonial elites during this same period directed instruments of law and order more aggressively against slaves and tried to racialize their own status as white.28 Nonetheless many of these merchant-planters committed to policing slaves’ behavior were themselves perceived as unruly, taking advantage of metropolitan neglect and engaging in illicit commerce. Frontier exchange practices among the various residents of New Orleans continued to destabilize colonial projects, to the chagrin of colonial officials like governor Louis Billouart de Kelérec’s secretary who wrote in 1761, “The marked independence of the inhabitants has always been their greatest vice.” Making imperial control even more difficult, the Superior Council of Louisiana by mid-century was occupied mainly by creole (born in the colony) planters and merchants from the New Orleans area. “The group which should be the instrument for the maintenance of the king’s authority,” as Thiton de Silègue reported to the minister of marine, “acts in truth just like the others. From this spirit of independence in all the classes, there come cabals, intrigues, and muttering.”29
After France ceded Louisiana to Spain, protection of these autonomous economic and political practices motivated the colony’s merchant-planter elite to lead an open rebellion in 1768. But even before that military effort would erupt and quickly fail, the very last French colonial governor was attempting to explain New Orleans’ reputation for independence. In a June 7, 1764 letter to the minister of marine, Governor d’Abbadie attributed “the disorder which has been in this colony for a long time” to the colonists’ passion for speculation and to the natural bounty of the land. “Immodest consumption of tafia [rum]” also contributed. Inhabitants were used to trading feverishly in both currencies and commodities, even selling merchandise bought from royal storehouses back to the King. Meanwhile, farmers were supposedly made “lazy” by “the facility with which the land renders its natural products.” “Out of this kind of life,” concluded this new governor, “there came an independent attitude and insubordination.” In a petition just handed to him by a group of merchants, d’Abbadie saw the latest “signs of the traits of sedition and insubordination.” And in the margins of this document complaining against recent changes in commercial policy, d’Abbadie responded to the petitioners’ grievances point-by-point. “Everyone wants to go into trading, which is kind of speculation,” he scribbled on the side of their protest against Indian trade being granted exclusively to one company. “Nobody wants to become a farmer.” He then dismissed the colonists’ plea of loyalty to the King by asking, “Don’t people know the problems that self-interest, extravagance, and speculation on every item imaginable have caused in the colony?”30
Migration into and through New Orleans began to accelerate significantly under Spanish rule, and the newest groups actually added to this Atlantic World port’s diversity and fluidity. After 1763, thousands of Acadians and Isleños settled upriver and downriver on the Mississippi and eventually along adjacent waterways.31 More than twelve thousand slaves also arrived in Louisiana during the Spanish period. Mostly African in birth, they were trans-shipped to New Orleans from Jamaica, Dominica, Martinique, and other Caribbean colonies.32 All of these newcomers found the frontier exchange economy in and around New Orleans to be beneficial during their adjustment to the Lower Mississippi Valley. Their own strategies of adaptation and resistance tended to reinforce the frontier city’s pivotal role in backcountry networking. During the American Revolution, mobilization of soldiers from Cuba for Spain’s campaigns against Great Britain’s towns and garrisons in West Florida added substantially to illicit interactions. Creole practices carried by soldiers and slaves from Havana even began to influence New Orleans music and dance.33 Spanish colonial law made manumission of slaves much easier than French law did, so the last third of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic growth in the size and prosperity of the city’s free people of color. As an increasingly distinct social group in this urban frontier, free Blacks further diversified its already heterogeneous society.34
For merchants, planters, and officials committed to expanding production in Louisiana for Atlantic World commerce, the perpetuation of frontier-city exchange among its inhabitants became less and less tolerable. Efforts to impose order and discipline, therefore, became more effective as law enforcement escalated. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, as the imperial officers tightened their grip, New Orleans was the primary locus of rising vigilance and punishment. Intercultural exchange practices consequently grew much riskier. Campaigns against runaway camps, restrictions against marketing activity, and prohibitions against slaves’ movement began to alter the social landscape of the New Orleans area. A large maroon community in swamps east of town was destroyed by a military expedition in 1784, and a runaway slave named Juan St. Malo and other leaders were executed in present-day Jackson Square.35 The influx of some twelve thousand African, Caribbean, and American slaves into Louisiana between 1804 and 1812 (in addition to nearly ten thousand white, free-black, and enslaved refugees from Haiti) further heightened anxiety over rebellion and intensified police vigilance.36 As long as slavery existed, however, runaway-slave camps would continue to form in back-of-town wetlands, utilizing the legacy of networks from the freer, frontier-city days. And the eighteenth-century fugitive named St. Malo would be immortalized as a heroic freedom-fighter in the songs of nineteenth-century slaves and, more recently, in the poetry of Brenda Marie Osbey.37
By 1810 New Orleans was a city of 17,200, making it the fifth largest city in the United States and the largest in the trans-Appalachian West. (The entire Orleans Territory—what became the state of Louisiana two years later—had a population of 42,000.) Expansion of cotton and sugar agriculture and entrenchment of plantation slavery did more than anything else to transform this frontier town into a commercial center. The “front door” became far more important than the “back door” to Crescent City merchants, as more and more ships traveled up and down the Mississippi. Construction of the Carondelet Canal during the 1790s, however, did make transportation through Lake Pontchartrain and Bayou St. John easier and more profitable by bringing the bayou’s water closer to town via a man-made connection and a turn-around basin. With a dual purpose of facilitating traffic along Bayou St. John and of helping drain New Orleans streets into the same bayou, it is little wonder that a French traveler noticed within a few years of its completion how “it is already so choked with mud that it can only be used by small pirogues.”38
In light of what happened on August 29, 2005, however, it is also worth noting that the Carondelet Canal cut through a natural ridge that had protected city residents from Lake Pontchartrain. Lake water pushed by high winds or hurricanes into Bayou St. John would henceforth more easily flow toward occupied parts of town. Control over this “improved” waterway and drainage system reduced illicit trade activity among common residents and sojourners, but also introduced a new environmental hazard.39 Political incorporation of Louisiana by the United States beginning on December 30, 1803, meanwhile, bolstered military and judiciary power over free and enslaved people still trying to maintain their own exchange network. In this regard, back-of-town New Orleanians resembled contemporaneous working people in Richmond, Virginia. A canal and basin diverting traffic around the James River falls, constructed during the late 1790s, immediately became the locus of interaction among slaves, free whites and free blacks. Public officials consequently heightened police vigilance over this area.40
The incorporation of New Orleans and the rest of lower Louisiana into the United States, as the newly created Orleans Territory, at first introduced new volatility and possibility for race relations inside and around the Crescent City. Peter Kastor has carefully explained for all of Orleans Territory how “White Louisianians, slaves, Indians, free people of color, and even malcontent Americans all attempted to realize their vision of a reconstituted Louisiana, in the process creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and potential violence.” But as he discloses in detail, mobilization of stronger martial and legal forces by the federal government of the United States steadily hardened barriers and restrictions against the region’s network of frontier exchange, while denying all people of color any means of participation in political democracy.41
A brief look at issues confronting the Orleans territorial government during its first year of administration reveals how quickly this process unfolded. At first, General James Wilkinson was confident that free men of color in their own militia were more attached to the new government of the United States than were white militiamen, many of whom were still expressing their attachment to France. Fifty-five free men of color had already delivered an address to William Claiborne, soon to be governor of this new territory, offering their services “as a Corps of Volunteers agreeable to any arrangement which may be thought expedient.” But Wilkinson also feared that people of color with firearms, if roused by a single incendiary, “might produce those Horrible Scenes of Bloodshed & rapine, which have been so frequently noticed in St Domingo.”42 An apprehensive response to the Haitian Revolution profoundly shaped American officials’ perception of the Louisiana Purchase. For the time being, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn decided to recognize this organization of free black volunteers in New Orleans, but advised Claiborne to reduce its size “if it can be done without giving offense.” Claiborne appointed two prominent white men to command the battalion of free men of color, but “a great dislike between the white Natives of Louisiana, and the free men of colour” caused persistent concern.43
Also troubling the territorial government early in 1804 were activities in the city’s public ballrooms and on its docks. With dances held twice a week during the winter season, “a very heterogenous Mass” was gathering quite frequently. As Claiborne reported, white men paying fifty cents at the door met “Ladies of every Rank [who] attend these assemblies in great numbers. Toward the end of the Spanish regime, “a Strong guard was Stationed at the Ball room, and on the first appearance of disorder the persons concerned were committed.”44 Meanwhile, shipments of slaves from the Caribbean into Orleans Territory worried Claiborne even more deeply. “Notwithstanding all my vigilance,” he reported to Mayor Jean Etienne Boré, “some improper and dangerous persons have been introduced into the Country.” Inspectors were boarding ships downriver from New Orleans, but the belief among citizens “that a great, very great supply of Slaves is essential to the prosperity of Louisiana” posed serious obstacles to this vigilance.45
Things really heated up for United States officialdom during the summer of 1804. When a printer was handed a letter inviting free people of color to assemble “for the purpose of Memorializing Congress,” white New Orleanians furiously demanded punishment of the perpetrators—free black men who had the audacity to think that incorporation into the American republic just might bring them some political rights. Thinking “that in a Country where the negro population was so great the Less noise that was made about this occurance the better,” Governor Claiborne met with a few of the most influential free men of color to “express in pointed terms my disapprobation of the letter to the printer and of their contemplated meeting.” Although “in-quietude” among whites over this event began to subside and the governor was sure there was “nothing to fear either from the Mulatto or Negro population,” he nevertheless expected that sometime in the future “the Misfortunes of St. Domingo” would occur in “this quarter of the Union.” As he confessed, “Slavery Where ever it exists is a galling yoke.” Slave insurrection would be hastened, however, if the United States Congress accommodated the will of most Louisiana planters and allowed continuation of the foreign slave trade.46 In clamoring “that the Territory cannot prosper without a great increase of Negro’s,” as Claiborne reported directly to Jefferson, Americans joined Louisianians to demand another few years of “uninterrupted Trade to Africa,” although he “frequently instanced the Horrors of St. Domingo, & reminded them of the just cause for apprehension.”47 While officials policed arriving ships in search of “Slaves that have been concerned in the insurrections of St. Domingo,” the most respectable residents of New Orleans protested loudly against the impending closure of this trade. Without this source of labor, they warned that sugar, cotton, rice, and indigo could not be cultivated and that the levees needed to prevent flooding from Pointe Coupée to English Turn could not be maintained.48
Slavery and race on this urban frontier were being welded to economic and environmental forces in ways that would affect New Orleans for a long time to come. Besides constraining the aspirations of free people of color and guarding against the arrival of anti-slavery insurgents, Claiborne had to thwart slaves’ ongoing efforts to escape enslavement. The governor was “informed that Negroes belonging to persons residing in this city and its vicinity often escape from the service of their Masters and by concealing themselves on board of Vessels (sometimes by the connivance of the Captain or Crew) pass out of the province.” So he urged the navigation pilot stationed at the mouth of the Mississippi River “to prevent for the future like practices, and in all instances where you can detect such runaway Slaves arrest & secure the same at the Balize.”49 To make management even harder for territorial and city officials, by late August New Orleans faced a shortage of food supplies as farmers grew reluctant to send meat, poultry, and vegetables due to rumors of a “contagious Malady.” Sure enough, yellow fever had begun to spread. The rapid growth of New Orleans was increasing the likelihood of such an epidemic, and by September seven to eight people were dying daily with “new cases . . . hourly occurring.” Noting the especially high mortality rate among emigrants from the United States and Europe, Claiborne wrote to Thomas Jefferson on October 5, “Lower Louisiana is a beautiful Country, and rewards abundantly the Labour of man;—But the climate is a wretched one, and destructive to human life.”50 In the midst of losing his own wife and daughter to yellow fever, the governor also had to deal with a panic over an “Insurrection among the Negro’s.” “From some menacing expressions which recently fell from two Slaves; a general Spirit of Insubordination which of late has been manifested, & the circumstances of several negro’s having been found travel’ing by Night with Arms in their hands,” he reported directly to President Jefferson, “the impression is general among the Inhabitants of the city, that they are in eminent Danger.” Claiborne strengthened patrols at night, alerted city militia into readiness, and was willing—if necessary—to “put a public Musket in the hands of every White man.” 51
Militarization of New Orleans played a powerful role in transforming its position in the Atlantic World from a frontier town into an urban center. Territorial laws expanded the police authority of white militia, and the United States Army increased its presence in and around the city. This escalation of police and military power was far from smooth, however. Local slaveowners one day might complain about negligent enforcement, as when some told Claiborne in 1806 “that the Taverns or Cabarets in the city were numerous, that Negroes and free people of colour were licensed as Tavern Keepers, and that their houses were resorted to by Slaves who passed most of their nights in dancing and drinking to their own injury and the loss of service to their Masters.”52 On another day New Orleanians might object to “Military Despotism,” an accusation raised, for example, because naval officers aboard a gunboat across the river from New Orleans once interfered with what they considered a slaveowner’s “cruel chastisement” of a slave woman and because French-speaking citizens traveling to and from the city in small boats were frequently threatened and detained by U.S. naval inspectors.53 But two events in particular convinced most white New Orleanians that federal authorities were essential for their protection: the slave insurrection of 1811 that began sixty or so miles above river and the invasion by British forces in the winter of 1814–1815. Preempting both of these serious threats went a long way to reinforce the dominance of plantation slavery for the economic future of New Orleans.54
As frontier exchange in and around New Orleans persisted into the nineteenth century, it faced accumulating proscriptions and prohibitions against perceived disorder. “The low orders of every color . . . mix indiscriminately,” one traveler disdainfully observed in 1802, “finding a market for their pilferings, and solacing their cares with tobacco and brandy. Gambling is practiced to an incredible excess. To dancing there is no end. Such a motley crew, and incongruous scene!”55 During the 1790s and early 1800s, however, city authorities were already directing a surge of police action against back-of-town activity, especially with the establishment of a permanent city guard by 1805. Dances attended by free people of color, slaves, and whites together were outlawed. Gatherings at taverns and in public places were discouraged, commonly broken up for gambling and drinking violations. Peddlers who bought merchandise from slaves away from the public market were fined. General marketing by slaves for their own benefit was more vigilantly monitored. Movement of runaway slaves from plantations to the city, and from the city to swamps, became more difficult to practice, while slaves hiring themselves out to city residents faced tighter restrictions. Slaves employed on boats, even with the permission of their owners, were more frequently detained at the mouth of Bayou St. John. Free and enslaved men leaving New Orleans to fish on Lake Pontchartrain needed to show identification passes.56
It is no longer commonplace to equate “frontiers” with “open spaces,” thanks to historians like Richard Wade who were challenging the Turner Thesis a half-century ago. But my own overview of eighteenth-century New Orleans, using the lens of the frontier city as suggested by this volume, can still emphasize how space matters.57 How people interacted in and around the environment of a colonial town, as I demonstrate here, influenced society and economy in ways that departed from metropolitan plans and priorities. In this regard, New Orleans sheds a bright light on urban practices that occurred in most early American towns. Frontier-city exchange among settlers, Indians, and slaves on the periphery began as a necessary means of survival in the formative years of town-building, but persisted among some people as a form of independence and even resistance—an option for a front door and a back door. Merchants operating in colonial ports also sought advantage and autonomy through commercial activities that skirted imperial rules and regulations. The particular location of New Orleans—on a vulnerable strip of land between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain—was embraced by occupants because of easy access to networks of inland as well as coastal trade. By the time official projects proved capable of forcing the city to serve Atlantic commerce above all other interests, frontier-city practices in spaces back-of-town made an enduring imprint on the culture and image of New Orleans.58
Two decades ago, photographer/ethnographer Michael P. Smith coined the phrase “cultural wetlands” to characterize the diverse neighborhood cultures that he had been documenting with his camera since the 1960s. His principle objective in using these words was to compare the need to protect New Orleans’ unique cultural heritage against destruction with the need to protect its surrounding biological environment against erosion. But Smith also understood the historical interplay between the city’s physical environment and its human society.59 Whether explaining the origins of Creole cuisine or second-line clubs or jazz music, an essential influence was how various people used the Crescent City’s surrounding wetlands for freer social and economic exchange than was permitted by authorities. Tension between colonial projects and frontier practices occurred throughout the early Atlantic World, shaping the character of port cities as well as interior borderlands across the Americas. But how this tension played out in conflicts and collaborations back-of-town in eighteenth-century New Orleans helped create long-lasting independent space for the evolution of a particularly complex cultural mix. The rapid erosion of frontier practices in and around the city after 1800, however, would also have an enduring effect on New Orleans society and environment.