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
