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The Gulf and Its City

The flat-bottomed scow schooners carrying thousands of refugees fleeing the Caribbean for New Orleans during the two decades straddling the Louisiana Purchase followed a similar route to the Crescent City. They traveled westward along the coast of present-day Alabama and Mississippi before entering Lake Borgne. From there, the vessels passed through one of “several narrow channels called the Rigolets which lead into Lake Pontchartrain.” They then entered Bayou St. Jean, “which communicate[d] with New Orleans by an artificial canal dug by the efforts of Baron Carondolet, the [former Spanish] governor of Louisiana.” The canal led the schooners to the back of the city, near present-day Rampart Street and the public space that came to be known as Congo Square, where the passengers disembarked. From there it was a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk to the levee in the front of the city, where the refugees would have seen the expansive Mississippi River for the first time.

The Lake Pontchartrain route to New Orleans was “much shorter and safer than by way of the mouth of the Mississippi.” The former was no more than fifty leagues (125 miles) in length and could have been made in two days. It was sheltered from both storms and enemy attacks. The river route, on the other hand, was much longer (eighty leagues or 200 miles) and much more dangerous. The storms are frequent along the Chandeleur Islands, and ships were vulnerable to enemy attack. Travelers to the city commented, moreover, that “the land at the river’s mouth is so low that it can be seen only when one is very near and hence is very dangerous to approach.” Once at the mouth of the Mississippi, furthermore, it sometimes took “twenty or thirty days to get up to New Orleans” due to the swift current of the river. “When the wind was from the north, ascent was impossible, because a sailing ship could only move against it by tacking back and forth across the river whose current would cause the ship to lose as much, or more, distance as it gained by tacking. Ships would therefore have to anchor below English Turn and wait for a favorable wind.”¹ Most people in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries arrived in the city from the Gulf rather than from upriver, and since the river’s current was a hindrance to access to the city from the Gulf, ships with little drag that could navigate the shallow waters of Lake Pontchartrain circumvented the Mississippi altogether.

While the importance of the Mississippi River to New Orleans can hardly be overstated, the Gulf of Mexico has also profoundly influenced the city’s history. Jean Baptiste Le Moyne (Sieur de Bienville) chose the site for the city not only because there is no higher ground closer to the river’s mouth but also because of its proximity to Bayou St. Jean, Lake Pontchartrain, and an alternate route to the Gulf. In the era of the Louisiana Purchase, moreover, New Orleans’s ties to the West Indies through the Gulf of Mexico were much stronger than its ties to the North American heartland through the Mississippi River as reflected in the city’s economy, demography, and culture. This chapter provides the socioeconomic framework of New Orleans in this Age of Revolution and locates the city’s free people of color within this framework, identifying where they resided, what they did for a living, and how they spent their leisure time. It also introduces the reader to both the West Indian influence on the Crescent City and the material conditions that would help shape the city’s developing legal structure, which is the subject of chapter 2.

The “Inevitable City on an Impossible Site”: The Geography

About 100 miles (as the crow flies) from the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans’s French Quarter sits on soil deposited by the river as it twists and turns its way through its expansive delta into the Gulf of Mexico. The lakes, marshlands, and bayous that surround this natural levee give New Orleans the feel of an island city as much as a river city. Its humid, semitropical climate is kept from extreme temperatures by surrounding waters, and rainfall occurs throughout the year. The elevation ranges from five feet below sea level to fifteen feet above, with the highest ground bordering the river.² New Orleans geographer Pierce Lewis described the Crescent City as an “inevitable city on an impossible site.”³ Bienville’s 1718 decision for the siting of New Orleans was based on geographic reasons of accessibility and defendability, as well as a lack of better alternatives. According to Bienville:

The capital city … is advantageously situated in the center of the French plantations, near enough to receive [their] assistance … and … reciprocally to furnish the settlers with the things they need … from its warehouses. Bayou St. John which is behind the city is of such great convenience because of the communication which it affords with Lake Pontchartrain and consequently with the sea that it cannot be esteemed too highly.⁴

From its founding New Orleans’s commercially and strategically advantageous situation had to be balanced against its precarious site. After visiting New Orleans in 1722, Jesuit priest Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix shared his ambivalent feelings about the city. On first arriving he praised the fertility of its soil, the mildness of its climate, and its proximity to “Mexico, the Havana, the finest islands of America, and lastly, to the English colonies.” With these observations he asked, “Can there be any thing more requisite to render a city flourishing?” Within just a couple of weeks, however, Charlevoix had changed his tune about New Orleans. Claiming that there was “nothing very remarkable” about the country around New Orleans, Charlevoix asked his readers to imagine “two hundred persons … sent out to build a city … who have settled on the banks of a great river, thinking upon nothing but upon putting themselves under cover from the injuries of the weather, and in the mean time waiting till a plan is laid out for them, and till they have built houses according to it.” Charlevoix complained about the marshy soils downriver from the city, whose “depth continues to diminish all the way to the sea.” “I have nothing to add,” he wrote dismissively, “about the present state of New Orleans.”⁵ The same ambivalence remained around the time of the Louisiana Purchase, as reflected in the comments of French-born traveler François Marie Perrin du Lac: “New Orleans, at which I arrived in six weeks, does not merit a favorable description. All that can be said in defense of its founder is that there is not for a great distance a finer, more elevated, or healthier position. If higher, it would be too distant from the sea; if lower, subject to inundations.”⁶

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 Mississippi valley, which both produced a great demand for enslaved labor and encouraged immigration of whites seeking to benefit from the expanding economy. Between 1796 and 1810, nearly 10,000 African slaves passed through the port of New Orleans. This was the first major wave of Africans since 1743, when just under 2,200 slaves arrived in the Louisiana colony.¹⁸ Some of the trade in the later period was illegal, as the Spanish government, out of fears concerning the “contagion of revolution,” had prohibited the introduction of slaves on several occasions during the 1790s, and Congress briefly forbade the transatlantic slave trade in Louisiana almost immediately after the Louisiana Purchase. Between 1805 and 1808, a legal slave trade also developed that brought African slaves to New Orleans via other U.S. port cities, mostly Charleston, South Carolina.¹⁹ Most of these African slaves were purchased for labor on cotton, sugar, and indigo plantations in the region and did not remain in New Orleans. Nevertheless, the slave population in the city itself almost tripled from 1,631 in 1785 to 4,618 in 1810.

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, conveys the seemingly exceptional nature of this group of people.²⁹

The refugee immigration bolstered this tripartite social hierarchy while also altering it. Following the lead of the census, city officials categorized the refugees into three groups based on status and race, something that was familiar to both the then-existing population in Louisiana and the refugees themselves. Official records produced at the time show the immigrants to have been roughly evenly divided between whites, slaves, and free people of color, as illustrated in table 1.1. But these numbers invite criticism and deserve deeper analysis. First of all, as Rebecca Scott has astutely observed, depending on when and the circumstances under which those classified as slaves left the island of Hispaniola, many had been freed by colonial officials, the French National Convention, invading armies, and/or their own martial efforts. Thus, potentially thousands of men, women, and children who had been freed in St. Domingue were reenslaved in Cuba and/or Louisiana.³⁰ In the four decades following the immigration, the various courts of New Orleans heard dozens of lawsuits in which the status of refugees of African descent, as enslaved or free, was disputed.³¹ Therefore, the numbers assigned to each “category” of people coming from the West Indies to New Orleans were both dubious and temporary.

One of the most noticeable aspects of the refugee immigration from Cuba is the imbalance of the sexes. As shown in table 1.1, among whites there were far more men than women, while among both slaves and, especially, free people of color, there were far more women than men. This is not surprising, however, when viewed in the context of the sex demographics of colonial St. Domingue and the results of the Haitian Revolution. Due to the harsh environment of the French colony, relatively few white women ever settled in colonial St. Domingue. The male-to-female ratio of the white refugee immigrants, therefore, reflected the ratio of the colony before the revolution.³² On the other hand, due to the gendered dimensions of warfare, formerly enslaved men and free men of color were much more likely to stay behind and fight rather than flee.

Table 1.1. Refugee Immigration from Cuba through August 1809

Many of the white refugees had aspirations to be sugar planters, so few of them stayed in the city for long. Anglo-American city and state officials, most of whom were slaveholders themselves, sympathized with their plight but worried that the “preponderance of French influence” would make it much more difficult to Americanize the city.³³ Yet none of the white refugees from 1809–10 made as notable an impact on New Orleans as some of the white refugees who had arrived earlier, such as Moreau-Lislet.

Of the three groups, the free colored refugees had the most significant impact on the demography of the city. First of all, free people of color saw the largest percentage increase in New Orleans during the Age of Revolution, primarily as a result of the refugee immigration. Free people of color accounted for 11 percent of the population in 1785, rising to 16.5 percent in 1803, and then to 27 percent in 1810. Refugees accounted for the great majority of New Orleans’s free colored community in 1810. Moreover, the immigration greatly exaggerated the preexisting numerical dominance of women and children over adult men within the free colored community.³⁴ As table 1.1 illustrates, adult men made up less than 14 percent of the 3,102 free colored refugees arriving through July 1809. Because more than 40 percent of the free colored refugees were children under the age of fifteen, the immigration ensured a strong presence of refugees throughout most of the antebellum period.³⁵

The demographics of the immigration had two other important consequences for New Orleans society throughout the antebellum period. First, it further skewed the already imbalanced sex ratios among both whites and free people of color in New Orleans. As late as 1820, men made up almost 60 percent of the white population in New Orleans, while women constituted more than 60 percent of the free colored population.³⁶ These skewed sex ratios among the two groups contributed, in part, to the large number of intimate relationships between white men and women of color in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, a subject that chapter 4 covers in greater depth. Second, as shown in chapter 6, women and, especially, children of African descent were more vulnerable than men of African descent to illegal enslavement. In response to the unusual number of female and minor refugees who brought suits against their enslavers, the courts developed the Adele rule. In making “people of color” a racial category separate from “Negroes” with different presumptions as to status, the courts did something the census makers did not—they made race.

Before the Adele decision, however, anxious white officials in New Orleans had mixed feelings and sent mixed messages about the free colored refugees. In 1806, the territorial legislature passed a law creating a presumption of enslavement for all “free people of color from Hispaniola [then] residing” in New Orleans. While the legislature repealed this act less than a year later, it replaced it with a law that prohibited “the emigration of free Negroes and Mulattoes into the Territory of Orleans.” This act imposed a penalty on free colored violators “in the amount of $20 a day for every day past two weeks” that they remained in the territory and stated that “failure to pay such fine will result in commission to jail and [the violator] may be sold for a time sufficient to pay the fine.”³⁷ During the 1809–10 immigration, however, the government in New Orleans appeared powerless to enforce the law. Claiborne first attempted to selectively enforce it against men of color above the age of fifteen, but even this proved unsuccessful. He then resorted to pleading with American diplomats in Jamaica and Cuba for assistance. In separate letters to Maurice Rogers, in St. Iago, and William Savage, in Kingston, he asked the consulates to “discourage free people of color of every description from emigrating to the Territory of Orleans” because New Orleans already had “as much proportion of that population, than comports with the general Interest.”³⁸

Mayor James Mather defended the free colored immigrants in a letter to the governor, writing that “few characters among the free People of Colour have been represented to me as dangerous for the peace of this Territory.” Mather’s opinion was shaped by his understanding that “these very men possess property, and have useful trades to live upon.” With regard to the territorial law, Mather wrote, “In the application of the Territorial law relative to free people of color, I have been particular in causing such of them as had been informed against, to give bond for their leaving the Territory within the time allowed in such cases—in the mean time there has not been one single complaint that I know of, against any of them concerning their conduct since their coming to this place.”³⁹ Mather appears to have been trying to justify his inability to enforce the territorial law.

The refugees labeled as slaves presented a more pressing legal issue for American officials because Congress had prohibited the importation of slaves from areas outside the United States as of January 1, 1808.⁴⁰ In 1809, the legislature for the Territory of Orleans passed a law excepting slaves coming from Cuba and Jamaica from the congressional prohibition. After the constitutionality of the act was called into question, Claiborne and other Louisiana officials asked the national government to make an exception in the case of the refugee immigrants. American officials in Orleans tried to convince the national leaders (and, perhaps, themselves) that these slaves from “Santo Domingo” did not pose a threat to security in the territory. Mayor Mather wrote to Governor Claiborne that they were “trained up to the habits of strict discipline, and consist wholly of Affricans bought up from Guineamen in the Island of Cuba, [and] of faithful slaves who have fled with their masters from St. Domingo as early as the year 1803.” Congress passed a law on June 28, 1809, that gave the president the power to suspend enforcement of the law of Congress with regard to these slaves coming from Cuba and Jamaica.⁴¹ Like the forced migrants from Africa, the majority of the slaves arriving in New Orleans during the first few years of the nineteenth century were destined for the sugar plantations in the parishes upriver from New Orleans. While the special exception to the slave trade ban was billed as a humanitarian act allowing refugees to keep their property, it effectively deprived thousands of people of their liberty—indeed, in many senses, the act deprived them of their humanity.

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 of color at the time of the Purchase worked outside of the manufacturing sector. They dominated such skilled trades as carpentry, masonry, shoemaking, and barrel making.⁵³ The great majority of the adult male refugees of color were skilled artisans, and the young men among them were apprenticed in a variety of trades, too numerous to list.⁵⁴ The militiamen in St. Domingue were, generally speaking, artisans, and many of them found their way to New Orleans in the 1809–10 immigration. Recall that in the midst of this immigration, Mayor James Mather informed Governor Claiborne that the men among the colored immigrants “had useful trades to live upon.” The wealthiest and most successful artisans of color in the territorial period, however, were Louisiana Creoles as opposed to immigrants. Among them was Rafael Bernabee, who accumulated several thousand dollars in savings while working as a carpenter in the city and its environs in the last decade of the Spanish period.⁵⁵ He invested his money in real estate in the Vieux Carré and newly emerging suburbs, making close to 100 percent profit on three lots that he held for less than ten years. In each real estate purchase, Bernabee secured his mortgage with one or all of his three slaves, Henriette, Marie, and Jean Pierre.⁵⁶ In addition to Bernabee, some other prominent free black artisans in the period were Carlos Brulet (carpenter) and Marcellin Gilleau (mason).

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, 59 free people of color, and 76 slaves. As a commercial rather than an industrial city, New Orleans had few districts where only one ethnic or economic group lived and worked. Although some neighborhoods had distinguishing characteristics, in general, blacks and whites, natives and foreigners mingled in the city’s shops, streets, and residential areas.⁶⁹

As the metropolitan area grew in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the city of New Orleans developed distinct suburbs. In 1778, Bertrand Gravier and Charles Trudeau laid out the plan for what would become New Orleans’s first suburb on part of the land Gravier owned just upriver from the city. This land on the other side of the commons (Canal Street) became Faubourg St. Marie. In 1796, Trudeau expanded it back from Nayades (St. Charles Avenue) to Phillipa St. (Dryades). This part of Faubourg St. Marie is what is today the Central Business District. After Bertrand Gravier died in 1797, his brother Jean expanded the survey back to Circus Street (now Rampart). Americans began moving into the suburb as soon as it was developed and came in droves after the Louisiana Purchase. There were around a thousand residents of Faubourg St. Marie in 1805, most of them Anglo-Americans.⁷⁰

Less than two years after the Louisiana Purchase, Bernard Marigny subdivided his plantation to create New Orleans’s first suburb downriver from the Vieux Carré, the Faubourg Marigny. At twenty years of age, Marigny was a minor according to Louisiana law and thus had to first get permission from the government. In April 1805, the territorial legislature authorized Marigny “jointly with Solomon Prevost, his guardian, … to lay out his said plantation into such lots, streets, and squares as they with the consent of the city council of the city of New Orleans may deem proper.” It further authorized Marigny, “notwithstanding his minority status,” to sell or lease any of the lots so created.⁷¹ Marigny then commissioned two men who had been architects and engineers under the Spanish administration, Nicolas de Finiels and Barthelemy Lafon, to draw up plans and design the streets for the new suburb. Marigny created hundreds of lots from his former plantation. The lots varied in size, but typically they were 60 feet in width and 120 feet in depth. The price of the lots depended, in part, on whether or not they had been improved with buildings. Unimproved lots could go for as little as $450, while lots with buildings on them could go for as much as $900.

Whether it was Marigny’s intent or not, the vast majority of people who bought land in Faubourg Marigny were francophone. Contemporaries referred to Faubourg Marigny as the “Creole quarter” because few Anglo-Americans lived there.⁷² Dozens of free people of color purchased lots in the faubourg. Because the development and rapid expansion of Faubourg Marigny coincided with the arrival of the refugees from Cuba in 1809–10, one might assume that the suburb was populated by refugees. A comparison of the names on deeds to lots in the Marigny with the names of known refugees, however, produced few matches, suggesting that the refugees were not themselves an important group of early purchasers of property in the Faubourg Marigny.⁷³ Nevertheless, the presence of dozens of “Creole cottages” represent a West Indian influence on the architecture in the quarter. These small houses with high slate rooftops built close to the banquettes (sidewalks) resemble houses built in the cities of the French West Indies. Perhaps some of the builders in Faubourg Marigny were refugees even if few of the purchasers were. In any event, a rivalry developed between the Anglo-American quarter located upriver in Faubourg St. Marie and the French “Creole” quarter located downriver in Faubourg Marigny. The antagonism between the sections lasted for several decades and got so heated that in 1831 the legislature amended the city charter to divide the city into three municipalities, the Vieux Carré, St. Marie, and Marigny.⁷⁴

While Faubourgs St. Marie and Marigny developed on high ground along the river, other suburbs emerged in the territorial period as a result of New Orleans’s relationship with Lake Ponchartrain. For decades, hundreds of people, mostly slaves working the land, had lived along Bayou St. Jean leading into the lake. In 1785, there were 91 whites, 14 free people of color, and 573 slaves living either along the road leading from the Vieux Carré to the bayou or along the bayou itself. After the Louisiana Purchase, however, this plantation land was slowly but surely subdivided and urbanized. In 1804 and 1805, Daniel Clark bought plantation land that bordered Bayou St. Jean and hired Barthelemy Lafon to draw up a plan for Faubourg St. Jean. The suburb had a fanlike formation with a focus at Place Bretonne (where today Bayou Road meets Dorgenois Street, just below Broad) resulting in thirty-five irregularly shaped blocks. Then, in 1810, the city purchased the plantation of Claude Tremé, partly out of the necessity to provide housing for refugee immigrants. The plantation was subdivided by Jacques Tanesse with a plan similar to that of the Vieux Carré. Faubourg Tremé bordered both the back of the Vieux Carré and, on its upriver side, the newly formed Faubourg St. Jean. It also bordered, on its downriver side, the Carondolet Canal, providing water access to the bayou, Lake Pontchartrain, and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico.⁷⁵ While St. Jean and Tremé did not develop as early or as rapidly as St. Marie or Marigny, they did, within a few years, provide an irregularly shaped but continuous urban area connecting the river to the lake.

New Orleans in the Age of Revolution was a very cosmopolitan and active city. In the daytime, the levee was “lined with its forests of masts and sooty cylinders, - the products of a foreign and domestic world crawling with warehouses and shops.”⁷⁶ At night, the city was teeming with activity. Whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color gathered in homes, in taverns, and on the streets to dance, drink, and gamble. By the late 1790s, Spanish officials and some planters had become concerned about the “dens of vice” operating in the Crescent City, prompting Louisiana’s governor, the Baron de Carondolet, and Attorney General Don Pedro Dulcido Barran to shut down numerous gambling halls and taverns. By 1797, only ten out of a previous several dozen taverns were still operating, and potential tavern owners required a license from the mayordomo de proprios to operate a bar. After Carondolet left Louisiana in 1798, the number of drinking and gambling establishments began to increase again. Beginning in the 1790s, residents of New Orleans also had an opportunity to experience “high culture.” The first public ballrooms began operating in 1792, the same year New Orleans’s first theater (known as the Coliseo) was built. New Orleans was also home to the first opera house in what is now the United States, which opened its doors in 1796.⁷⁷

By the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, New Orleans was home to several dance halls. Two blocks upriver from the cathedral, at the corner of Rue Conde (today Chartres Street) and Rue Dumaine, stood the Conde Street Ballroom, a “whites only” ballroom that opened in October 1792. One more block upriver and one block closer to the river, Bernard Coquet offered dances for free people of color in his home at 27 Rue St. Phillipe. The dances at “la Maison Coquet” began in 1799 and immediately attracted both whites and enslaved blacks as well as the intended patrons. The house also hosted the first quadroon ball in 1805, when August Tessier rented Coquet’s home for this purpose and renamed it La Salle de Chinoise. In 1808, Coquet opened La Salle de Spectacle, a “magnificent building of Philadelphia brick,” located several more blocks away from the river at 721 Rue St. Phillipe. This building, later renamed the Washington Ballroom, hosted free colored balls and quadroon balls throughout most of the antebellum period. The Anglo-American perceptions of all these interracial gatherings and the government’s attempts to regulate intimate relations across the color line are discussed in greater detail in chapter 4.

One block back from the Conde Street Ballroom, at the corner of Royal and Dumaine, stood a small building that operated as a courthouse in the early years of American rule. According to an early historian of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson was tried here for contempt of court in 1815.⁷⁸ This may have been the building that housed the New Orleans City Court for part or all of its eight-year tenure (1806–13). The City Court was probably the most influential site at which free people of color asserted and protected their status and rights. In eight years, this court heard around 350 cases involving free colored litigants (about 10 percent of the total number of cases it heard), including the cases that begin chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6.

Another site that was equally if not more influential in shaping New Orleans’s society in this period was the slave market.⁷⁹ It stood where the French Market is today, just on the other side of the levee from the Mississippi River on the downriver end of the Vieux Carré. Adjoining the levee at the lower end of town, “the flesh market [was] entirely enclosed, each separate stall, of which there [were] about 7 or 8—being a distinct apartment with a door & window.” According to John Pintard in 1801, the New Orleans slave market was “the most filthy” of its kind he had ever seen, and he could not say “whether it be ever hoed out or not.”⁸⁰ Yet, by the time Louisiana became a state in 1812, the slave market in New Orleans was on its way to becoming North America’s largest. The slave market showed that whatever its similarities to the great port cities of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, and whatever its economic ties to the grain- and livestock-producing Northwest, New Orleans remained a slave society and, in fact, the main supplier of enslaved labor to the cotton South. The slave market served as an ominous symbol for free people of color as well. It reminded them that because of their African ancestry, partial or not, they always risked enslavement themselves, whether this be actual (if illegal) enslavement through kidnapping or fraud, or virtual enslavement through restrictive black codes.

* * *

As the St. Domingan refugees disembarked in New Orleans, whether at the port of New Orleans on the Mississippi River, the depot at Bayou St. Jean, or the Carondolet Canal basin, they were entering a world that was both different and familiar. On the one hand, the region was the territory of an English-speaking republic rather than a colony of a French- or Spanish-speaking empire. If St. Domingue had been the “jewel of the Antilles” due to its unprecedented production of cash crops, the lower Mississippi valley was still on the American frontier. And New Orleans, though seemingly destined for commercial greatness, was much less refined than the well-established port cities of the Caribbean such as Le Cap, Port-au-Prince, Havana, or even St. Iago de Cuba. On the other hand, these differences were small compared with the similarities. Although officially inhabitants of the United States, most of the residents in New Orleans spoke French as their primary language—there was no language barrier for the refugees. Indeed, because the refugees themselves made up a significant portion of the population in the late territorial period, many of the sights and sounds would have been familiar. Most important, however, the refugees’ new home in New Orleans, like their previous homes in St. Domingue, Jamaica, and Cuba, was a slave society. Once they had been in the city for a few days, possibly even a few hours, they would have likely encountered both the slave market and the courthouse. The slave market was symbolic of the material structure that dominated the lower Mississippi valley—the commerce in slaves and slave-grown products. The courthouse was symbolic of the legal structure that supported this material structure. The legal structure is the subject of the next chapter.