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
