Cotton and Sugar: The Economy
Although New Orleans was established as a planned slave society to compete with the English colonies that were producing wealth from staple crop production, its economy floundered for the better part of a century. When Bienville founded New Orleans in 1718, the French monarchy had planned that Louisiana would both grow tobacco, relieving French dependence on the British colonies, and supply the French sugar colonies in the West Indies with lumber and foodstuffs. But Louisiana-grown tobacco could not compete with that grown in Virginia, and the French monarchy had trouble finding would-be planters and farmers to settle the region. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, therefore, France had few reservations about ceding the Louisiana Territory to Spain. During the first two decades of the Spanish period, moreover, Louisiana was little more than a frontier territory serving as a buffer between the expansionist Anglo-Americans and the riches of New Spain.42 The government of the United States was less interested in the Territory of Louisiana itself than it was in open access to the Mississippi River. The 1795 Pinckney Treaty with Spain secured American westerners free use of the river as well as the “American deposit,” a place in New Orleans to dock their vessels and load and unload their goods. Spain then closed New Orleans to American trade in 1802, prompting Jefferson, then president, to step up his efforts to acquire the city for the United States.43
Despite the talk of the city’s importance to the western river trade, however, New Orleans’s rise to economic prominence began with the revolutionary events of the 1790s and was intimately tied to plantation slavery in the lower Mississippi valley. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 allowed for the profitable production of short staple cotton, and the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, created a void in the worldwide supply of sugar that was partially filled by sugar production in lower Louisiana. Sugar was grown profitably in Louisiana for the first time in 1794 after St. Domingue refugee Antonio Morin, who had granulated small quantities of sugar in 1792 on the plantation of Don Antonio Mendez, took his process to the plantation of Étienne Boré two years later.44 The rise of sugar and cotton plantations in the lower Mississippi valley dramatically increased the importance of New Orleans as a port city. By 1799, the port received $1 million worth of goods, and in 1802 the amount was $2,634,564. After the Louisiana Purchase, the trade continued to grow, reaching $5,370,555 in 1807 and $13,064,540 in 1816.45 While some of this was wheat, corn, lard, pork, furs and hides, whiskey, hemp, and lead from the upper reaches of the Mississippi River system, the vast majority of the products were cotton, sugar, molasses, and tobacco from the lower Mississippi valley.46
As demand for slave-grown products, especially cotton and sugar, increased worldwide and large, efficient plantations rose to meet it, commission merchants who acted as agents for planters in the region quickly emerged as the most influential, powerful, and prosperous businessmen in New Orleans. These staple merchants, also known as factors, “sold goods for planters; made remittances from such sales in cash, bills, or goods; shipped goods on consignment; provided storage, drayage, and additional packaging services; and procured shipping for staples.” Factors traded all sorts of agricultural products, but those that specialized in cotton and sugar were the wealthiest. A few prominent staple merchants controlled most corporate enterprises in early New Orleans.47 One of the most successful American merchants in early Louisiana, the partnership of Beverly Chew and Richard Relf, also engaged in the slave trade, at times circumventing the law. After Congress forbade the importation of Africans as slaves in 1808, Chew and Relf “used their business contacts with Spanish officials in West Florida to facilitate the landing of slave ships and the distribution of their cargos at the port of Mobile.”48 They acted as middlemen for other firms, many in Charleston, South Carolina, that wished to import Africans into North America.
The new wealth from commerce in slaves and slave-grown products contributed to New Orleans’s development as a banking and financial center in the era of the Purchase. The city’s bankers, lawyers, and insurance agents provided services that helped make planters’ and merchants’ commercial dealings more profitable and less risky. New Orleans’s law firms tried to keep their clients’ business affairs operating within the limits of the law. The New Orleans Insurance Company, chartered in 1805, insured vessels, cargoes, and money in port and in transit, assuming some of the risks (and profits) associated with shipping large quantities of slaves, agricultural products, and manufactured goods. Between 1804 and 1812, four banks in the Crescent City received their charters, the New Orleans branch of the First Bank of the United States (1804), the Bank of Louisiana (1804), the Bank of New Orleans (1811), and the Louisiana Planters Bank (1811). These banking companies loaned money for the expansion of plantations, the purchase of goods, and many other enterprises.49
In addition to banking and commerce, New Orleans also saw an increase in manufacturing interests in the two decades straddling the Louisiana Purchase. New businesses, such as cotton mills, sugar refineries, rice mills, tobacconists, sawmills, distilleries, and cordage factories, converted the raw materials being shipped down the Mississippi River into finished products. New Orleans also developed a small shipbuilding industry. The port required stevedores, dockworkers, and carters, while a growing and increasingly sophisticated population demanded clothiers, shoemakers, furniture makers, silversmiths, lithographers, daguerreotypists, printers, and bookbinders. The expanding plantations helped produce a variety of jobs in the city.
Nevertheless, New Orleans remained primarily a commercial, rather than a commercial-industrial, metropolis with an economy closely tied to plantation slavery. The biggest employer outside the government was the port. The manufacturing interests were “directly connected with the processing and movement of staple crops,” and the port’s main business was shipping these products. The top four exports in 1801 were raw sugar, cotton, tobacco, and indigo. By 1812, cotton accounted for more than half the value of the city’s exports, followed in value by sugar, foodstuffs, and then tobacco. The economy based on commerce in staple crops did not stimulate the development of an urban center as diversified as the emerging metropolises of the Northeast at this time or the cities that rose in the Northwest in the middle of the nineteenth century.50 New Orleans’s economy resembled that of the port cities of the Caribbean more than the port cities of the young United States.
Working mostly from their homes or in the homes of others in all parts of this urban center, free people of color made a living primarily in the manufacturing, commercial, and service sectors. Very few free people of color worked the land at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Out of more than 150 free black heads of household who listed their occupations in the last census of the Spanish period, only 2 listed farmer as his or her primary occupation. Instead, free people of African descent in New Orleans worked as skilled laborers, small-business owners, and, to a lesser extent, domestic servants. All in all, free people of color played an important role in the New Orleans economy, where labor was often in short supply. Many owned successful businesses or engaged in the professions and amassed substantial estates that included real, personal, and slave property.51
The important role that free people of color played in New Orleans’s economy was augmented by the refugee immigration. On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, the gens de couleur of St. Domingue were the wealthiest, most educated, and most privileged community of people of African descent in the New World. Some free colored refugees had the capital to invest in coffeehouses, inns, or taverns. Some brought with them “slaves” whom they sold or rented to planters in the region to provide capital or income to help them adjust to their new setting.52 Others, who had lost all of their wealth during the revolution itself or when they hastily fled the island, still brought with them skills and cultural capital that allowed them to succeed. For the most part, these refugees took the same positions in the economy as the free people of color born in Louisiana.
With very few exceptions, free men of color and free women of color performed separate tasks, with men’s work concentrated in the manufacturing sector and women’s jobs concentrated in the service or commercial sector. Many free men of color were artisans of some sort, as demand for skilled labor was high (as were wages) and few white artisans lived in the city at the time. Less than a third of the free men