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
