Despite New Orleans’s problems with regard to climate and terrain, it had all the potential to be a great port city due to its location at the terminus of North America’s largest river system. Americans moving west of the Appalachians after the colonists’ victory in the American Revolution coveted access to the Mississippi River and its port city of New Orleans because it assured them of greater access to markets for their agricultural products and raw materials. Echoing the sentiments of many American travelers to the city in the years leading up to the Louisiana Purchase, New York merchant John Pintard predicted in 1801 that New Orleans would “very shortly become a vast commercial emporium.” Thomas Jefferson summed up the city’s importance to the West in 1802 when he said “there is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market.”7 The expansiveness of the Mississippi River seemed to predetermine the importance of New Orleans.
In fact, by the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was emerging as one of the most important cities in North America, but it was not because of the western river trade. As the pages that follow demonstrate, during the Age of Revolution New Orleans was a Gulf city more than a river city. French and Spanish colonists had forged ties with the Caribbean that were reinforced by immigration and remained strong for decades after the Louisiana Purchase. The West Indian influence is reflected in the demography, the economy, and even the architecture of the period.
Migrants and Refugees: The Demography
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, New Orleans experienced urbanization much more intensely than any other city in the Deep South. In general, as Douglass North has shown, “As the South shifted out of a diversified agriculture into cotton and its income increased, the effect was quite different from that generated in the Northeast by rising incomes from the re-export and carrying trade. Urbanization did not increase.”8 To be sure, Mobile, Savannah, and Charleston all grew along with the cotton trade. But Charleston’s growth from 16,000 residents in 1790 to 24,000 in 1810, for example, “was less than the rate of population growth for the country as a whole” and well behind that of other urban centers. New Orleans was the exception to the rule for cities in the South. The population of New Orleans grew rapidly and steadily, from 5,028 in 1785 to 27,176 in 1820, at which time it was the fifth most populous city in the United States.9 By the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, New Orleans had surpassed Charleston as the largest city in the Deep South, and this was just the beginning. By 1840 it was virtually tied with Baltimore as the second-largest city in the country with 102,000 residents.10
There were two main reasons for New Orleans’s rapid population growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first was directly related to the upheaval caused by the Haitian Revolution. In three main waves during the course of that revolution, tens of thousands of refugees fled St. Domingue (and smaller numbers fled Guadeloupe) for safer ground in Europe, North America, and the British and Spanish Caribbean. The first wave was set in motion by the burning of Cap Français in 1793, sending thousands of refugees to, among other places, the East Coast cities of the United States such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. The second wave occurred in 1798, when defeated British forces withdrawing from the war-torn island took shiploads of refugees with them to Jamaica. The final and largest wave came in 1803–4, after the insurgent forces led by Jean Jacques Dessalines defeated the French army. The great majority of these refugees fled to Cuba.11
The influx of immigrants from the French West Indies into New Orleans eventually dwarfed that of Anglo-Americans, but only a small percentage of these refugees followed a direct route to the city due to the restrictive immigration policies of the Spanish government in Louisiana. Although the first refugee immigrants arrived in New Orleans as early as 1791, only about a thousand refugees came to New Orleans prior to the Louisiana Purchase, usually after spending some time in other American port cities or in the English or Spanish Caribbean. Among the early arrivers was Antonio Morin, the man who was greatly influential in the birth of Louisiana’s sugar industry.12
A thousand more refugees came to New Orleans during the first year of American rule, more than the total number of West Indian immigrants in the previous eleven years, because American policies toward the refugees were much more liberal than the Spanish policies had been.13 Many of these men, women, and children came from Jamaica, but others came from Eastern Seaboard cities in the United States. Several of these refugees, who were welcomed by the native French-speaking inhabitants, proved to be very influential on New Orleans’s society and culture. Louis Moreau-Lislet, for example, a refugee immigrant from St. Domingue in 1804, made an immediate impact on the legal system. He was appointed the first judge of the New Orleans City Court in 1806 and was the principal author of the 1808 Louisiana Civil Digest.14
By far the largest wave of refugee immigration into New Orleans came five years after the American takeover. Napoleon invaded Spain in 1809, and the French-speaking refugees in Spanish Cuba were forced to either take an oath of loyalty to the Spanish crown or leave the island. Between May 1809 and February 1810, nearly 10,000 St. Domingan refugees fled Cuba for New Orleans on dozens of vessels. These schooners, sloops, ships, brigs, and chebecks had telling names such as L’Esperance, Triumph, Republican, and Le Sauveur. The vessels carried as many as 417 passengers (the ship Beaver) and as few as 17 (the schooner Fanny).15 The captains of smaller vessels, such as the chebecks, sloops, and some of the schooners, had the option of taking either the Mississippi River or the Lake Pontchartrain route. The larger ships and brigs, on the other hand, had too deep of a drag to navigate Lake Pontchartrain and were thus required to sail up the river, at times a difficult task.
The 1809–10 refugee immigration increased the population of New Orleans and surrounding areas by close to 60 percent, creating housing dilemmas, food shortages, and general chaos.16 In the midst of the nine-month-long influx of refugees, Governor Claiborne expressed concern about the ability of the city to accommodate them. In an effort to put a halt to the immigration, he wrote to William Savage, the consulate to Jamaica, that “New Orleans and its vicinity are crowded with strangers; House Rent and Provisions are extravagantly high, families of limited resources find them soon exhausted, and the number of the poor and distressed are daily augmenting.” He asked Savage to inform any refugees who “should pass by the way of Jamaica, that it is advisable for them, to seek an asylum elsewhere, than in the Territory of Orleans, for the Refugees from Cuba, who have arrived here, are so numerous as to be embarrassing to our own citizens.”17 While Claiborne had encouraged Anglo-American immigration during the territorial period, he was worried about the influx of refugees. Clearly, Claiborne’s concerns had to do with more than just logistics. The “strangers” arriving from the West Indies daily were making it very difficult for the governor to comply with his charge to Americanize the city.
The second main reason for New Orleans’s population growth in the era was expansion of slavery in the lower