Have you ever been in New Orleans?
If not, you’d better go;
It’s a nation of a queer place;
day and night a show!
Frenchman, Spaniards, West Indians,
Creoles, Mustees,
Yankees, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans,
lawyers and trustees.
Clergymen, priests, friars, nuns,
women of all stains;
Negroes in purple and fine linen,
and slaves in rags and chains.
White men with black wives,
et vice-versa too.
A progeny of all colors—
An infernal motley crew!
James R. Creecy, 1829
New Orleans was, and still is, the most un-American of cities. Its founder, the Frenchman Sieur de Bienville, looking for a place to site a village in 1718, chose swampland on the banks of the Mississippi some thirty leagues (about one hundred miles) from the sea. In this humid wilderness, infested with snakes, alligators, and mosquitoes, he set his reluctant workforce of convicts and settlers to clear trees and dig ditches. He named the village La Nouvelle Orléans, a name intended to curry favor with the extravagant and self-centered Regent of France, the Duke of Orléans—a man, his distracted mother once said, who had been given every gift excepting that of making use of them.
Bienville’s choice of such an unpromising site for his royal colony was dictated by geography. He well understood that those who controlled passage up and down the Mississippi could aspire to rule the great valley it drained. Command of the Mississippi required a trading post within the protection of a fort close by where the river entered the sea. But where? Ideally, a trading village should be sited on land high enough to be safe from floods and storms, close to the sea, and on the banks of a river narrow enough to be spanned by a bridge. The lower Mississippi met none of these requirements. From Baton Rouge, about two hundred miles upstream, to its entry into the Gulf of Mexico, the river is uniformly wide (almost half a mile); held in by natural levees, much of its water is actually higher than the surrounding land.
On a voyage of exploration some years earlier, Bienville had seen a small area rising above swamp water on the banks of a crescent-shaped twist of the river. He carefully calculated the advantages of such a site. It was halfway between the French colonies at Natchez and Mobile. An alternative access to the Gulf of Mexico lay through Lake Pontchartrain, located only several miles along an old Indian trail. It was far enough inland to be safe from hurricanes and storms. And when enemy ships slowed down to navigate the curve in the river, they could be fired upon from both shores. This was where he commenced to build a fort.
For the next forty-five years, La Nouvelle Orléans was run either by a succession of military officers appointed as governors, who saw their office as a source of personal income, or by chartered companies more interested in fleecing shareholders than in economic development. Dreams of picking gold and diamonds up off the ground, and of farming lands so fertile they only had to be tickled to yield their abundance, evaporated like marshland fogs. Convinced it was abandoning nothing of value, France transferred the colony to Spain in 1762. The Spanish did no better in extracting wealth from swamps, and in 1800, transferred it back to France. Seemingly in no great hurry to reclaim this problem colony, three years were to pass before the French flag was raised, and by then Napoleon had passed it on again—this time to the United States.
The Louisiana Purchase of April 1803 was the biggest land sale in history. The whole of the Mississippi Valley up to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, an area of 828,000 square miles, was sold by Napoleon to President Jefferson for fifteen million dollars. With this one transaction, the size of the United States was doubled and from its lands a dozen states would eventually be carved. A fledgling nation, barely two decades old, now possessed an empire straddling an entire continent.
The new territories of the South grew with astonishing speed. Almost anything a man wished to grow—cotton, tobacco, wheat or livestock—seemed to thrive. However it was one crop, cotton, which was the economic powerhouse carrying all the others with it. Whereas under Spanish rule Louisiana had exported the modestly profitable indigo, corn, tobacco and flax, after its acquisition by America, its main exports became sugar—and cotton, cotton and more cotton. Two inventions—one in the Old World, the other in the New— provided the spur to cotton’s dominance. The wire teeth in Whitney’s cotton gin deftly freed the fiber from the pods and allowed planters to adopt the hardy short-staple plant that was ideally suited to the land in the South. Meanwhile, in England, Watt’s steam engine provided the power to spin, weave, and print cloth in the dark mills of Lancashire.
The lower Mississippi Valley became a vast, efficient, cotton-growing machine. Plantation production of cotton with slave labor became so widespread and so profitable that the wealth and culture of the South came to depend on it. Plantations without slaves couldn’t compete. An antislave moralist attempting to produce cotton with white labor would go broke. With cotton (and later sugar) commanding the Southern economy, subjected blacks were required in the thousands.
”No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” This was the roar from James Henry Hammond of South Carolina in a speech to the U.S. Senate. Hammond was saying what he believed everyone in the nation knew, if only they cared to admit it: that cotton was an unstoppable economic force that had entrenched slavery into the way of the South. David Christy, a Cincinnati journalist, expressed it even more strikingly:
HIS MAJESTY, KING COTTON, therefore, is forced to continue the employment of his slaves; and, by their toil, is riding on, conquering and to conquer! He receives no check from the cries of the oppressed, while the citizens of the world are dragging forward his chariot, and shouting aloud his praise! KING COTTON is a profound statesman, and knows what measures will best sustain his throne. He is an acute mental philosopher, acquainted with the secret springs of human action, and accurately perceives who will best promote his aims. He has no evidence that colored men can grow his cotton, but in the capacity of slaves. It is his policy, therefore to defeat all schemes of emancipation.39
Nowhere was the dominance of the kingdom of cotton more evident than on the waterfront of New Orleans. Lines of cotton bales, stacked three high, formed broad avenues leading to ships waiting to carry them to the four corners of the earth. Cotton was the ideal cargo—almost indestructible, valuable, and easy to handle. Within two decades of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the Mississippi River became one of the great trade routes of the world, in the process making New Orleans the largest city on the western frontier and the third largest in the nation.
Journalists from eastern newspapers, sent to describe the new state of Louisiana, were apt to report that the wharves of New Orleans were the most exotic place in the United States. It was an ant’s nest where things were packed and unpacked, sold or auctioned, and then sent elsewhere—either up the Mississippi to the heartland of America, or downriver to the great cities of Europe. They wrote of cargo garnered from every port from Maine to the Gulf being stacked on the levee, ready to be taken to a thousand towns and cities on the vast western plains. There were kegs of nails from Boston, bolts of cloth from New York, and sacks of coffee beans from Cuba. They wrote of near-naked slaves, shiny with sweat, unloading tea chests from India, crates of fine crockery from England, boxes of wine from Bordeaux, and oak chests of dueling pistols from France. They described teams of horses pulling drays piled high with bales of cotton and slaves rolling hogsheads of sugar up the gangplanks of ships bearing the flags of a score of nations. They marveled at the medley of tongues to be heard among the milling throng on the wharves. Jewish traders from Russia wearing beaver-skin hats and frock coats examined crates of tobacco. French and Spanish merchants of the city supervised the dispatch of their produce to agents in states upriver. Flatboat men dressed in the furs of animals from the hills of Kentucky walked side by side with bearded sailors from South America. Elegant men and women disembarked from steamers to be immediately harried by pedlars. Black men in ragged pantaloons sold roasted peanuts; women offered sugary biscuits for sale, while black youths danced slapfoot in front of their begging bowls. All this, while the whistle of the steamboat, getting ready to embark for St. Louis, sounded in the background.
The city manufactured practically nothing itself. New Orleans grew, and became rich, by taking a cut of whatever was being carried across its docks. Wharfingers charged for cartage, storage and insurance. Bankers skimmed both ends of the market by providing planters with credit at the beginning of each year, reaping the harvest with interest when the crops were sold, and then financing the exporters who bought it. Attracted by the wealth moving through the city, Yankee traders, Philadelphia lawyers and New York bankers came from the east. Within a few years, Louisianan brokers were boasting that they had more money at their disposal than their counterparts in New York City.
In the years following the Louisiana Purchase the population of New Orleans increased dramatically. Adding a heady spice to the ethnic mix of the city were the 10,000 refugees who arrived in New Orleans from Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti).40 Some were white, but many (about 3,000) were gens de couleur. These were no humble children of freed blacks—many had been masters themselves in that decadent mountain paradise that had been run as a French sugar colony until half a million slaves, goaded by intolerably cruel treatment, revolted against their white and mulatto owners. The refugees were French-speaking, Catholic, and educated, and many brought their slaves with them, including their sang-melee mistresses, called Les Sirènes because of their great beauty. At the Café de Refugies, the refugees drank le petit Gouave and regaled listeners with their tragic tales of lost wealth and power. These gracious, licentious people with their fine clothes and luxurious morals had an immediate impact on the fashion and culture of the city.
Many of the refugees from Saint-Domingue believed in voodoo, which has remained a secretive and mysterious cult in New Orleans ever since. Like the city itself, voodoo was a mix of cultures and religions. It twisted Christian saints and liturgies to its cause. From Catholicism it derived a preoccupation with sex, sin, and sacrifice. Symbols of dread, such as bats, black cats, and serpents, were procured from the medieval lore of Europe. To this were added West African mysticism, devil worship, and zombies. The city’s most famous voodoo queen was Marie Laveau, a mulatto of African, Amerindian, and white descent, who told fortunes and dispensed hexes and love charms. In ritualistic ceremonies, she led performers in dances with twisting snakes, while her adherents drank rum and blood from the severed necks of roosters, and simulated sexual congress before the weeping statutes of saints. Voodoo had adherents (and curious spectators) among all classes and colors, although its main hold was on the colored and Creole communities.
During the boom years following 1820, almost half a million immigrants from Europe poured into New Orleans. The majority came from Ireland and Germany. Attracted by cheap land and the availability of work on the waterfront and in nearby factories, they settled upriver of the city. The area around Adele Street became known as the Irish Channel, while a few streets away, on Sixth Street, the Germans lived in an area dubbed Little Saxony.
New Orleans was fondly called Sin City by the river men. Notoriously decadent, irreligious, Catholic in name, but not in church attendance, the only Roman tradition followed with any conviction was the Continental Sunday. Entertainment varied from high opera and performances of the latest plays from London and Paris, to the artless and grotesque. As an example of the latter, a handbill circulating in the city in 1817 announced an “extraordinary fight of Furious Animals”:
1st Fight—A strong Attakapas Bull, attacked and subdued by six
of the strongest dogs of the country.
2nd Fight—Six Bull-dogs against a Canadian Bear.
3rd Fight—A beautiful Tiger against a Black Bear.
4th Fight—Twelve dogs against a strong and furious Opelousas
Bull.
If the Tiger is not vanquished in his fight with the Bear, he will be sent alone against the last Bull; and if the latter conquers all his enemies, several pieces of fire-works will be placed on his back, which will produce a very entertaining amusement.
The doors will be opened at three and the Exhibition begins at four o’clock precisely.
Admittance, one dollar for grown persons, 50 cents for children.
A military band will perform during the Exhibition.41
Down the Mississippi, like a gutter in flood, were washed gamblers, prostitutes, vagabonds, and thieves from six states. The Kaintocks, after spending weeks guiding their flatboats of massive planks downstream, found an array of bawdy houses, billiard halls, clip joints, and gambling dens awaiting their pleasure. They had the reputation of being the roughest, toughest, and dirtiest fighters in the whole of the South. The red-light districts were located along the waterfront and on Girod Street. The most notorious of all, The Swamp, was an area of flimsy shanties in marshlands behind the city, where drunkenness, knifings, and sordid sex were on nightly offer.
Those defending New Orleans’s reputation of having the highest crime rate of any city in the United States, and a murder rate higher even than Kansas City, pointed out that almost all the criminal activity was confined to the riverboat men, sailors, and the Irish and German laborers. This sort of thing happened in all port cities, and after all, New Orleans was one of the greatest port cities in the world. The Creoles, in their fine houses in the Vieux Carré, and the Americans, living a life of gracious wealth in the Second Municipality, found little reason to be concerned about the nightly mayhem in the gambling dens and brothels of the backswamps.
Opposed to this perpetual and unchecked crime wave was not so much a police force as a small detachment of city guards armed with half pikes and sabers. Soundly and repeatedly defeated whenever they ventured forth to take on the riverfront ruffians, they were usually to be found in the safety of the guardhouse, or walking the beat in the respectable areas of town. No one expected them to visit The Swamp or Girod Street, particularly at night. It wasn’t so much that criminals in those areas escaped detection, but rather that detection wasn’t even attempted.
Most men in New Orleans carried concealed weapons of various types: stilettos, switchblades, sword canes, slugshots, and pocket-sized revolvers. The Englishman Edward Sullivan in his book, Rambles and Scrambles in North and South America, describes what happened to him when he attended one of New Orleans’s famous quadroon balls:
These balls take place in a large saloon: at the entrance, where you pay half a dollar, you are requested to leave your implements, by which is meant your bowie-knives and revolvers; and you leave them as you would your overcoat on going into the opera, and get a ticket with their number, and on your way out they are returned to you. You hear the pistol and bowie-knife keeper in the arms-room call out, “No. 46—a six-barreled repeater.” “No. 100—one eight-barreled revolver, and bowie-knife with a death’s head and crossbones cut on the handle.” “No. 95—a brace of double barrels.” All this is done as naturally as possible, and you see fellows fasten on their knives and pistols as coolly as if they were tying on a comforter [woolen scarf] or putting on a coat.
As I was going upstairs, after getting my ticket, and replying to the quiet request, “whether I would leave my arms,” that I had none to leave, I was stopped and searched from head to foot by a policeman, who, I suppose, fancied it impossible that I should be altogether without arms. Notwithstanding all this care murders and duels are of weekly occurrence at these balls, and during my stay at New Orleans they were three….
If liberty consists in a man being allowed to shoot and stab his neighbor on the smallest provocation, and to swagger drunk about the streets, then certainly the Crescent City is the place in which to seek for it, for they have enough and to spare.42
The Creoles, swamped by the number of foreigners settling in their city, retreated to the elegant terraces of the Vieux Carré, with their upstairs galleries of Spanish wrought iron, lush enclosed courtyards, and stone cellars lined with Bordeaux wines. There they tenaciously clung to an exaggerated mimicry of the social value of the ancien régime of prerevolutionary France. They were emphatically Catholic in name, if not in morals, they despised Protestantism, and the excesses following the French Revolution had taught them to be wary of democracy. Few, in fact, were descendants of aristocrats—their forebears in colonial Louisiana had been soldiers, traders, and farmers, and even in a few cases had been sent from the house of correction in Paris. Slaves had made them wealthy. Thirty-five years of Spanish rule hadn’t caused them to believe that the old ties with France had been snapped, and most were determined to treat the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States in the same way. They regarded the Américains as ill-mannered money-grubbers, without taste or nobility, and their women as brash and lacking femininity. The Americans’ response was to create a stereotype of the Creoles that was just as negative. The author Charles Seals field wrote that “the drawbacks from their character are, an overruling passion for frivolous amusements, and impatience of habit, a tendency for the luxurious enjoyment of the other sex, without being very scrupulous in their choice of either the black or white race.”43
Although Creole males revered the ideal of the virtuous wife, they saw no inconsistency in indulging in a highly formalized and uniquely Louisianan system of concubinage. Called plaçage, the institution saw white men of wealth place young colored women (called the placée) in a semipermanent relationship as their exclusive mistress. The arrangements were often made at the quadroon balls under the supervision of the placée’s mother, usually an ex-courtesan herself. Dressed in exquisite finery, the women were put on display with the intention of catching a man of quality, by coquettish conversation and dainty dancing. According to James Silk Buckingham, an Englishman on a grand tour of America in 1842:
[The quadroon balls] furnish some of the most beautiful women that can be seen, resembling in many respects, the higher order of women among the Hindoos, with lovely countenances, full, dark, liquid eyes, lips of coral and teeth of pearl, long raven locks of soft and glossy hair, sylph-like figures, and such beautifully rounded limbs and exquisite gait and manner, that they might furnish models for a Venus or a Hebe to the chisel of a sculptor.44
Only light-skinned colored women were admitted to the quadroon balls; pure Africans of both sexes were excluded, and the presence of white women was unthinkable. The price of admission was fixed so high that only men of means could afford to attend. If a man was entranced by what he saw, negotiations began. To the young woman’s mother a desirable catch was a gentleman with sufficient wealth to provide her daughter with a house (customarily, one of the neat white houses set in a row along the Ramparts), attendant slaves, money and, if she was particularly beautiful or he excessively rich, a cabriolet.
The arrangement was described as a left-handed marriage. According to the singular mores of New Orleans, a placée was considered virtuous if she was faithful to her provider, never, ever approached his wife, home, or children, and was decorous in her declining years as his ardor waned. She could never expect to be taken by her gentleman into polite society, nor could she dare risk arousing his jealousy by cavorting in public. The permanency of the relationship depended on the honor of the gentleman (always an unreliable commodity), although if he abandoned the relationship without just cause, he was expected to maintain her, or set her up in some modest business such as millinery or dressmaking. No one expected him to take responsibility for her children. Her daughters, yet another shade lighter, were available for a similar arrangement when they grew up, while her sons were left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, placage was one of the few Creole customs adopted by American males of wealth.
The Creoles and the Americans resolved their mutual dislike by living in different parts of the city. The Americans found green fields upriver of Canal Street where they built mansions in spacious gardens. They created a square in Lafayette, not overlooked by a cathedral, a governor’s residence, and a priest’s house as in the French Quarter, but with banks, a Masonic lodge, and nonconformist churches. By the 1820s the Americans had installed gas lighting to guide patrons to the fabulous American Theater on Camp Street built by James H. Caldwell, actor, impresario, and property developer. In 1837 he built the even grander St. Charles Hotel, taking up an entire block. It was one of the great hotels of its era and its landmark white dome was an unmistakable navigation beacon for miles up and down the river. Five blocks away in the Vieux Carré, the French built the equally grand St. Louis Hotel. The two nationalities then proceeded to build separate markets, canals, docks, and railway lines. The broad thoroughfare of Canal Street (the canal was never built) served as the neutral ground between the feuding sides.
By the late 1830s the breakdown in relations between the Creoles and Americans was so complete that divorce, rather than separation, became necessary. Put aside was the fact that a little over two decades earlier they had stood together to rout the British in the Battle of New Orleans. The Crescent City was cut into three areas of governance. The result, looking very much like wedges of a pie, created the First Municipality, centered on the Vieux Carré (primarily French); the Second Municipality upriver (primarily American, but with Irish and German migrants on the riverfront); and downriver the Third Municipality, inhabited by the poor of all nationalities. To add to this troika of overgovernance, a mayor and a general council from the three municipalities sat once a year in the Cabildo to discuss matters of overall concern to the city. New Orleans was always ripe for the picking and, with three municipalities, the opportunities for graft, kickbacks, and bribery tripled. Only propertied white men could vote (thus disenfranchising over two-thirds of the population), on the grounds that only they had the requisite good sense, a doubtful proposition since they consistently voted into office the most corrupt band of robber barons in all of America. Politicians of all persuasions created a complex system of patronage, so that government officials, the police, and contractors owed their appointment to a particular political party. On election days, gangs of ruffians roamed the streets, carrying billyclubs and intimidating voters into supporting their particular candidate.
Kept apart by culture, religion, and politics, the Creoles and the Américains mingled for food, sex, and amusement. They rubbed shoulders in the elegant coffeehouses, in the plush bordellos, at the quadroon balls, and in the tiered cockfighting pits of the French Quarter. They met over the green felt of the gambling tables, and on the horse track at Metairie. They were also likely to meet on the dueling field.
Nowhere was the Code of the Duello held in greater veneration than in New Orleans. Pride, passion, and honor hung in the air whenever gentlemen met, and the least slur upon a person’s character, or the merest slight on a woman’s reputation, whether intended or not, could lead to an invitation to settle the matter on the dueling fields. No man, if he wished to be considered a gentleman of character, could refuse. Duels were sometimes fought merely as an expression of courtly behavior. The historian Charles Gayarré relates the story of how six young men returning from a ball, upon observing the moon lighting an expanse of grass, remarked what a beautiful night it would be for a joust. They paired off, drew their swords, and after a fine display of skill with the blade, two of the youths lay dying.
Duels were held in the gardens behind St. Louis Cathedral, under the trees on Metairie Road or beside the Dueling Oak in Louis Allard’s plantation. In colonial times, duels were fought with the colichemarde, the rapier, and the broadsword, and only occasionally with pistols. Honor was satisfied when blood was drawn (the merest scratch would suffice) and deaths were few. All this changed when the Americans entered the scene armed with pistols or shotguns, and a serious intention to kill. The city’s golden age of dueling was in the decades following 1830. It is said that on one Sunday morning in 1837 under Louis Allard’s oaks, ten sets of opponents, with their seconds and supporters in watchful attendance, lined up for ten duels, fought one after the other, resulting in the deaths of three men.
In 1818, when Salomé Müller arrived in New Orleans, the city’s population was predominantly black. About a third of the population were slaves, a quarter were free persons of color, with whites making up the remainder.45
They may have been counted in the census, but the state of Louisiana didn’t regard free persons of color (called gens de couleur libres by the French) as its citizens. They couldn’t vote or stand for public office. They couldn’t serve on juries. Prejudice and practice meant that they were excluded from the professions and government positions, and the only schools available to their children were a few run by the nuns or organized by black communities. A myriad of petty affronts emphasized their subordinate status: they were segregated in theaters and on omnibus lines, they were banned from most hotels and restaurants, they couldn’t carry a firearm without official approval, and intermarriage with whites was forbidden. A provision in the Louisiana Black Code stamped their social inferiority into law:
Free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to the white; but, on the contrary, they ought to yield to them in every occasion, and never speak or answer to them but with respect, under the penalty of imprisonment, according to the nature of the offence.46
Yet Louisiana accorded free persons of color many rights denied black people in the slave-free North: they could leave property by wills, they could sue in court, even where the defendant was a white person, and they could be witnesses in court cases against whites. There was no prohibition on free blacks owning slaves, and many did so.* A thriving middle class of free black people lived in the Faubourg Tremé (located in the First Municipality), which lays claim to being the oldest black urban neighborhood in the United States. They ran small businesses, the men working as tailors, bricklayers, day laborers, gardeners, carpenters; the women as seamstresses, laundresses, and tavern proprietors. A few became wealthy enough to send their children to schools in France and to build large houses for themselves.
And there were slaves.
In no state was the chattel nature of slavery expressed in more forthright terms than in Louisiana:
A slave is one who is in the power of a master to whom he belongs. The master may sell him, dispose of his person, his industry and his labor: he can do nothing, possess nothing, nor acquire anything but what must belong to the master.47
This definition could equally apply to a horse.
Southern law regarded slaves as property, and just about every transaction involving property could be accomplished with slaves. They were hired out. They were given as security for loans. They were left to relatives in wills. They were seized by creditors. They were given as wedding presents. A “Negro girl, thirteen years of age, of good size” was once bartered away for twenty-nine dollars in pork.48“With us, nothing is so usual as to advance children by gifts of slaves. They stand with us instead of money,” said a judge in old Virginia.49
Governments provided slaves to the widows of heroes who died in wars.50 They were donated to charities. They were stolen. Like all valuable property, they were insured. They were squabbled over in divorce proceedings. Masters were taxed for owning slaves; traders were taxed for selling them; freed slaves were taxed for the privilege of being free.
In 1819 a man announced in the Louisiana Courier that he was holding a lottery of only fifty tickets at twenty dollars each, the prize being Amelia, his thirteen-year-old Negro girl.51 In 1843 a man named Thomas took a boy to the races at the Metairie track in New Orleans and bet him on Lady Dashwood. The charger won Thomas five hundred dollars. The affair ended up before the courts because Thomas had promised one of his backers a half share of the winnings. The judge made no particular comment about wagering boys, but Thomas (a cad for not honoring his word as a Southern gentleman) was ordered to share his winnings.52
Several people might jointly own a slave. For example, Ann Williams of North Carolina once owned one-third of a slave.53 Miss Hamilton of Kentucky held a quarter share of over 100 slaves.54 A slave in Kentucky, named Fleming Thompson, once had five owners. They argued among themselves because three wanted to free him, while the other two didn’t. Could Thompson be three-fifths free?*
Slave babies were given to little white girls as pets to be brought up. In the traditional ceremony, the hand of the slave was placed in the white child’s hand and the black child was told she now belonged to the other, and it was the duty of one to obey and serve, and the other to command and care.55 Even yet-to-be-born children could be sold, with consignment delayed until the birth. The Supreme Court of North Carolina upheld such a provision in 1833. Clement Arnold owned a female slave who had produced six children for him. While she was pregnant with a seventh, he bargained her away with four of her children, “including the unborn one … at a price of $1,000.” Under the agreement, he was “allowed to select, at his choice, three of the children to be kept by himself”; delivery “was to be made as soon as the mother should recover after the birth of the next child.”56Louisiana was unique among the American slave states in prohibiting the sale of children aged under ten apart from their mothers.
Unborn children were also left by wills, especially where a man with no great range of assets wanted to treat his children equally— typically the deceased left a female slave to one child, and the slave’s progeny (including those yet to be conceived) to another.57 A person named Nelson wrote such a will, which was upheld by a court in North Carolina in 1843. He had three daughters. He left his slave, Leah, to one, and wrote: “And if there should be any increase from my negro woman Leah, I want that equally divided, between my three daughters Jane Magee, Elizabeth, and Aley Amanda; some to buy and pay the others as I would not wish any sold out of the family.”58
The law may have designated slaves as property, but legislation has never been able to change human nature. No property was more rational and intelligent. None was more devious and emotional. Slaves became the confidants of family members. Slave women acted as wet nurses and read to white children at bedtime. They nursed the elderly. Slaves became the agents of their master in business dealings. They accumulated wealth. They committed crimes at the behest of their owners.* They got into bed at night with their masters and had the master’s children and were named in divorce proceedings. A few, away from prying eyes, committed the illegal act of behaving as if they were married to their master or mistress.
It was the slaves’ very humanity that made them such desirable property. The most expensive slaves were young, tractable males of obvious African appearance, who well understood the need to demean themselves before whites. Uncle Toms were especially valuable. Slaves who were uppity, runaways, or violent were marked down in value. The old, diseased, or very young were worth even less. In 1821, at the Virginian markets, a crippled slave was sold for a shilling.59 White colored slaves were of reduced value because they were unlikely to be questioned if they ran away. Albert, a slave who fled to Canada (or was it Ohio?—there were multiple sightings),“could not be distinguished from a white man.” Witnesses said that “they did not consider him to be worth more than half as much as other slaves of the ordinary color and capacities.”60
Generally, women were worth less than men. An exception was pretty, honey-colored females. Life could be a lottery for them—some were purchased to look after children in grand homes, while others were sold to masters looking for a concubine. The value of slaves might stall during a general economic downturn, but the market never fell as hard as other holdings, and always bounced back higher. In 1820, at the slave auction in New Orleans, a good, medium-sized slave aged fifteen could be bought for three hundred dollars. A decade later, the same slave would fetch between four hundred and six hundred dollars. In 1837, at the height of an economic boom in New Orleans, a girl, “remarkable for her beauty and intelligence” sold for seven thousand dollars.61 A white laborer would have to toil for a lifetime to earn as much.
In an admirable mixed metaphor, a commentator once described New Orleans as a melting pot of humanity in a dismal swamp. Or as Colonel Creecy put it, in the poem that heads this chapter:
“A progeny of all colors—
An infernal motley crew!”
When the German redemptioners arrived in 1818, New Orleans was little bigger than the original grid planned by Bienville a century earlier. Over the next two decades it more than tripled in size. From a city entirely within the call of the bullfrog, it became a metropolis, and it would take a man more than half a day to walk it from end to end.
The first steamboat had come down the river in 1812; by 1835, over one thousand steamers docked each year. Vessels with double smokestacks, three stories in height, and huge paddle wheels could churn their way from the falls of the Ohio River at Louisville to New Orleans in an astonishing five days. Some were pleasure palaces, filigreed with fretwork, cupolas, and wrought-iron lace, carpeted with Belgium weave and lit by sparkling crystal gasoliers, and carrying musicians, barbers, chefs, Southern belles, and fancily dressed riverboat gamblers.
New Orleans reveled in its newfound wealth. Day and night it was a show town. Theaters produced plays in English, French, and German. Rival opera houses were established in the French and American quarters. Dancing was the passion, enlivened by spicy food, wine, and low bodices. There were costumed balls and gaiety. Ice was brought downriver from the frozen North and sold for five dollars a ton. On sunny afternoons the levee provided the city with a promenade where men and women of fashion could stroll and be seen. Fortunes were being made, and great houses were being built. Real estate values rocketed, and river land that ten years earlier had been sugar plantations was subdivided for housing and sold for three times its price.
But for all its affluence, apart from a few streets in the American Quarter, the roads of New Orleans were still unpaved in 1830. Depending on the weather, they were either gluey with black mud or dust beds cut with deep ruts. Drainage was still a problem, and in wet weather city blocks were marooned by ditches of gamy water into which, each morning, householders deposited their sewage and food scraps. In the more established areas, pedestrians could walk on raised paths of thick planks, called banquettes—the wood obtained by breaking up flatboats, those huge, lumbering vessels that carried cargo downriver on a once-only journey. Because the Mississippi was higher than much of the metropolis, gardeners digging in their backyard usually found a puddle of brown water a few feet down. Flash floods, and not prayer, could raise the dead in New Orleans, and holes had to be bored in coffins, and black men employed to stand on them, to make sure they stayed sunk during burials. Those determined to keep their relatives dry in the afterlife built vaults (called ovens) into six-foot-thick cemetery walls.
Given its lack of proper sanitation, and its location in a swamp, it’s not surprising that New Orleans had the deserved reputation of being the unhealthiest city of any state in the Union. Periodic cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox plagues carried off hundreds. Although in most years the death rate of New Orleans exceeded its birthrate, the city continued to grow, all through immigration.
Madame Hemm spent four years in the service of a family in Baton Rouge. One day she met Henry Müller in the streets of the city. He told her that he was serving a master in the nearby village of Bayou Sara. He asked her if she had heard anything of Daniel or his children. She hadn’t. Henry said he couldn’t understand what had happened to them. Daniel hadn’t written. No one seemed to know where they were. Madame Hemm asked Henry about his own children, and he proudly told her that they had grown so much she wouldn’t recognize them. They were no longer starved for food as they had been in Germany. They had shot up. He reckoned they were bound to be taller than he was.
Years later Henry’s son Daniel gave evidence in the trial to free Salomé Müller. He said that his father, right up until his death in 1824, talked continually of finding his brother. If ever he met strangers, he would ask them if they knew anything of a German immigrant with a young boy and two girls. In 1820, or perhaps 1821 (Henry’s son wasn’t sure of the date), a man told his father that he had heard of two German orphan girls going by the name of Miller living up Natchez way. Although the man was vague about where they lived, Henry had bought a horse and wagon and set off north. He lost the horse attempting to cross the Homochitto River but walked on to Natchez. When he arrived he had asked people endlessly about the two orphan children, but no one knew anything of them.
After serving as a domestic in Madame Borgnette’s school for young ladies for two years, Eva Kropp earned her right to freedom. At eighteen years, she married a fellow redemptioner, Francis Schuber, who had plans to open a butcher shop in the market of the Faubourg Marigny.
Mrs. Fleikener spent a year and a half on Colonel White’s Deer Range Plantation in the southwest of the state. She returned to New Orleans in the early 1820s. Mistress Schultzeheimer, after completing her service on the Hopkins plantation, returned to New Orleans where she rented rooms near Beekman’s cotton and tobacco yard, and resumed her practice as a midwife. The Wagner brothers came out of service and set up a dry goods store on Chartres Street. Dorothy Kirchner married a man named Brown and went to live with him on a farm in Mississippi.
Francis Schuber’s butcher shop opened, and customers came. The Wagner brothers’ dry goods store flourished, and there were plenty of babies for Mistress Schultzeheimer to deliver. The immigrants all learned English, and even more important, they learned how things were done in America. They shared in the growing fortunes of the city, and told themselves that if they were prepared to work hard, wealth would be sure to come their way.
These were the ones who prospered. Many did not. Charles Seals-field, writing in 1828, told what happened to them:
There are a great number of Germans in New Orleans. These people, without being possessed of the smallest resources, embarked 8 or 10 years ago, and after having lost one-half, or three-parts of their comrades during the passage, they were sold as white slaves, or as they are called, Redemptioners, the moment of their arrival. Thus mixed with the Negroes in the same kind of labor, they experienced no more consideration than the latter; and their conduct certainly deserves no better treatment. Those who did not escape, were driven away by their masters for their immoderate drinking; and all, with few exceptions were glad to get rid of such dregs. The watchmen and lamp lighters are Germans, and hundreds of these people fell victim to the fever, between the years 1814 and 1822.62