Anglo-American migration, primarily from the Mid-Atlantic and Chesapeake states, accounted for a modest increase in New Orleans’s white population in the era. In 1790 most of New Orleans’s white residents were of French descent. The small Spanish population consisted of mostly officials and their families, and there were only a few American merchants and German farmers. The plantation revolution that began in the middle of the decade brought in scores of Anglo-American merchants from East Coast cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, as well as professionals from the Chesapeake and Mid-Atlantic seeking to profit from New Orleans’s booming economy. Staple merchant Richard Relf came to New Orleans from Philadelphia in the 1790s where he partnered with Beverly Chew. After the Louisiana Purchase, a new wave of Anglo-Americans flocked to the city, seeking political, as well as economic, power. Among the Anglo-American immigrants to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the purchase was Edward Livingston, a lawyer and politician from New York who would make an important, if controversial, impact on early New Orleans politics and law. President Jefferson and Governor William Claiborne, himself a recent arrival to the city, encouraged this migration, as they sought to bring Louisiana’s political and legal system in line with the rest of the United States.20 Yet the president and governor were powerless to prevent the upheaval in the French West Indies and its subsequent demographic impact on New Orleans.
At the time of the Louisiana Purchase there was a great variety of people living in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Among the whites there were individuals of French, Spanish, American, English, and German descent. The francophone population could be further broken down into those born in Louisiana, France, and the French Caribbean. The slaves consisted of Louisiana Creoles and “saltwater” slaves.21 The free people of African descent, most of whom were born in either Louisiana or the French Caribbean, were descended from a variety of European and African ethnicities and spoke French, Spanish, and English. Finally, many Native Americans still lived in the area, though they had already been marginalized to the point of not being recognized in the censuses.22
The heterogeneity of the population made an impression on dozens of travelers to the city in the early nineteenth century who contributed to racial and gender stereotypes in their accounts of their visits. Irish traveler Thomas Ashe, for example, made distinctions among the white men. The Americans, according to Ashe, were “so occupied by politics and legislation, that their minds have never been sufficiently unbent to form a course of pleasures for themselves.” The “French gentlemen” were a more culturally refined group. “Their pleasures are forever varied, and of a nature to be participated by the most delicate of the female sex. This casts over them a considerable degree of refinement, and the concert, dance, promenade, and petit souper, are conducted with as much attention as at Paris or Rome.” In reference to Spanish men, Ashe claimed that he had “more than once heard the guitar under the windows of a sleeping beauty or the harp delicately touched under a corridor over which some charming girl attentively reclined.” Ashe’s portrayal of the differences between English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking men in New Orleans both fed off of and contributed to common stereotypes.23
In describing the women living in New Orleans when he visited the city, Ashe claimed that “in point of manners and character [they had] a very marked superiority over the men.” Yet, instead of discussing differences between the American, French, and Spanish women, as he had done with regard to white men, Ashe categorized the women of New Orleans into “two ranks—the white and the brown.” According to Ashe, “Those [women] called the whites are principally brunettes with deep black eyes; dark hair and good teeth. Their persons are eminently lovely, and their movements indescribably graceful, far superior to anything I ever witnessed in Europe.” The women of color were “very beautiful, of a light copper colour, and tall and elegant persons. Their dress is widely different in general from that of the White Ladies; their petticoats are ornamented at the bottom with gold lace or fringe richly tasseled; their slippers are composed of gold-embroidery, and their stockings interwoven with the same metal, in so fanciful a manner, as to display the shape of the leg to the best advantage.”24 While Ashe claimed to have divided the women into two ranks, he then described two more:
Negresses and female Mestizes next follow: the first are principally employed as servants, of which every family has a considerable number; the second perform all kinds of laborious work, such as washing, and retailing fruit throughout the city in the hottest weather; and being considered as a cast too degraded to enter into the marriage state, they follow a legal kind of prostitution without deeming it any disparagement to their virtue or to their honor.25
Ashe’s description reveals the complex interactions of race, sex, and power in the heterogeneous society of post-Purchase New Orleans. He discusses white men in terms of the political, commercial, and cultural tendencies of the various ethnic groups, while neglecting to even mention enslaved men or free men of color. On the other hand, he describes white women and women of color almost exclusively in terms of their appearance, and black and mestizo women in terms of the labor they performed, sexual and otherwise. Several other travelers adopted this practice of dividing the (white) men into categories based on nationality or language while discussing women in terms of race.26
Other travelers during the period wrote explicitly and more extensively about the city’s population of African descent. French traveler Perrin du Lac spoke of the “badly fed” Negro slaves who were “naturally crafty, idle, cruel, and thieves; I need not add, that in their hearts they are all enemies to the Whites. The serpent endeavors to bite him that tramples him under his feet; the slave must hate his master.”27 Du Lac divided free people of African descent into several categories based upon their perceived degree of African blood. In reference to the attitudes that free blacks had about enslaved blacks, du Lac wrote, “It is difficult to account for the brutality and aversion of the free Blacks to those of their own species. They [the slaves] are treated by them [the free blacks] worse than by the Whites.” Yet, according to the Frenchman, free blacks were “far from being as dangerous as the Mulattoes. These seem to participate as much in the vices of both species as of their color; they are vindictive, traitors, and equal enemies to the Blacks and Whites.” The “men of color” (by which term Du Lac probably meant “quadroon” or “octoroon” men) were “still more dangerous” and responsible, in part, for the “intemperate conduct of the whites towards their slaves.”28 Du Lac, like several other European travelers to New Orleans at the time, supported slavery but opposed its excesses, and believed in the superiority of the European “race” while opposing, in theory, intimate relations across the color line.
While travelers to the city commented on the many distinctions within New Orleans’s heterogeneous population in the early nineteenth century, the census makers and government officials divided the people into three main groups: whites, slaves, and free people of color, reflecting a tripartite society that had developed during the Spanish colonial period. This method of categorization acknowledged the dominating influence of racial slavery in the region, but it did not reflect a three-race society. The distinction in the census between whites and free people of color was one of race, while the distinction between free and enslaved people of African descent was one of status. Whites were presumed to be free (and did not require a status descriptor), while slaves were presumed to be black (and did not require a racial descriptor). The term “free person of color,” which identifies both status and race,