Free men of color worked in the trades, in part, because they were excluded from the professions. James Durham was an exception to the rule. A report given in August 1801 gave the names of six unlicensed physicians in New Orleans, one of them a free black man named Santiago Derum (James Durham). Born a slave in Philadelphia in 1762, Durham learned to read and write as a young boy. As a young adult, he was the enslaved assistant of three different doctors, John A. Kearsey, a Philadelphia physician and loyalist during the American Revolution; George West, a surgeon in the British army; and Robert Dow, a New Orleans physician.57 After the Revolutionary War, Dow brought Durham to New Orleans, where he sold him his freedom a few weeks before his twenty-first birthday for the sum of 500 pesos. By the late 1790s, Durham was a practicing (if not licensed) throat specialist. In an 1801 law that specifically mentioned Durham by name, the Spanish government in New Orleans prohibited any person without a medical degree from practicing medicine in New Orleans. In the United States, however, only 5 percent of practicing physicians had medical degrees, and after the Louisiana Purchase, Durham became the first known licensed African American physician in the United States.58
Free women of color were just as, if not more, important to the early American New Orleans economy, if for no other reason than they greatly outnumbered free men of color. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, 60 percent of free black heads of household were women, and most of them worked in the service or commercial sector. Free colored refugee women fit right in, working as “hairdressers, washerwomen, seamstresses, milliners, and needlewomen.” They also took jobs as wet nurses.59 No free women of color were listed in the official records as artisans, since women were barred by custom from the trades. But the labels can be misleading. The Negress Marie Louise Dupre, for example, is listed as a domestic servant even though she worked in the blacksmith shop of Nicholas Duquery from the late 1790s until Duquery died in 1812. More than half of the colored female heads of household in the territorial period were either seamstresses or laundresses. The fact that seamstressing was considered a part of the service sector, and not a skilled trade, further reveals the gendered assumptions of the government officials who created the categories.60 Almost a fourth of the colored female heads of household were either shopkeepers or retail dealers. Mrs. McCoy, the woman who provided lodging for Christian Brengle and his daughters, for example, was one of several women of African descent who owned and operated a boardinghouse. Hers was on Canal Street and catered to newcomers to the town, of all races. Many of New Orleans’s free colored businesswomen in the territorial period were refugee immigrants. The mythical image of women of color in New Orleans is that they were set up in business by wealthy white “gentlemen” as a type of compensation for sexual services. There is little evidence to support this position. While dozens and possibly hundreds of women of color formed long-term relationships with white men in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution, they usually contributed to the household income. Many refugee free women of color had been the mistresses of planters in St. Domingue. Yet these ménagères, as they were called, performed valuable services for the plantation. These multifaceted relationships are discussed more fully in chapters 4 and 5.61
While precious few free people of color were as wealthy as elite white merchants and planters in New Orleans and the surrounding area, they were, as a community, far more prosperous than in any other region of the United States. In terms of property holdings, only the Charleston District in South Carolina, another place influenced by Caribbean social and economic patterns, was remotely close. Perhaps most tellingly, there were far more free colored slaveholders in Louisiana than in any other state, and most of these resided in Orleans Parish.62 Out of 565 free colored heads of household in the 1810 census, 248 (44 percent) owned slaves. These households owned, on average, two and a half slaves each. Most of these slaves were likely either house servants or shop workers. In the Spanish period, free people of color often owned relatives as slaves, but this became less and less common after the Louisiana Purchase.63 Dozens of immigrants of color entered the port of New Orleans with people they claimed as their slaves. Many others, no doubt, had owned slaves back in St. Domingue but had lost them in the revolution. As shown in chapters 5 and 6, for free people of African descent, especially refugees, slave ownership was an effective way of securing their own freedom.
The Vieux Carré and Beyond: The Layout and Expansion of the City
Throughout the period of this study, most of New Orleans’s population lived in the confines of what is today called the French Quarter and was then called the Vieux Carré, or old quarter. The Vieux Carré “was spread out in the form of a parallelogram extending, roughly speaking, some 1300 yards along the river front with a depth of 700 yards, or thereabouts.”64 Its borders were the Mississippi River, Le Chemin Derrière de la Ville (present-day Rampart Street), the plantation of Madame Delachaise (Esplanade Avenue), and the commons (Canal Street). Perched atop a natural levee created by centuries of the river’s flooding over its banks, the Vieux Carré was (and still is) some of the highest ground in the area, though still only twelve to fifteen feet above sea level.65 The Place d’Armes, now known as Jackson Square, occupied a strategic location front and center at the peak of the natural levee in New Orleans’s Vieux Carré. As the name suggests, this piece of land is where the militia and the regular army drilled. The St. Louis Cathedral and the Cabildo building, both constructed in the 1790s, face the square, symbolizing the three prongs of Spanish monarchical authority over its subjects, laws, church discipline, and military might.66
By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the cost of real estate in the old city was rising due to the city’s population and economic booms, and “lots of ground in the principal streets [were] very high for so new a city.”67 Houses facing the river on Levee Street ranged from 4,000 to 6,000 pesos (a peso roughly equaled a dollar in value), those on the second and third streets (Chartres/Conde and Royal) cost 3,000 to 4,000 pesos, and lots in the back of the city sold for 1,200 to 2,000 pesos. These prices represented a three- to fivefold increase over the period of a decade. Most of the buildings were new, even in the established part of town, because the city had twice within a few years suffered severely by fire. In March 1788, fire destroyed more than 850 houses, leaving only about 200 remaining. Then, in December 1794, an additional 212 buildings were burned to the ground, mostly warehouses, government structures, stores, and barracks. Most of the new buildings were built of brick with tile roofs pursuant to regulations enacted after the second fire.68
Whites, slaves, and free people of color lived side by side and in some of the same households on every occupied street in the old city. According to the 1805 city directory, the most populated streets were Bourbon, with 697 residents, and Royal, with 645. Rue Dauphine du Nord, with 51 whites, 115 free people of color, and 83 slaves, had the highest percentage of free people of color of any street. By contrast, Rue Dauphine du Sud had 122 whites,