in several places, one or two islands sunk for ever, and the inhabitants fled in dismay towards the eastern shores.”22) A few days after passing New Madrid, he came upon two men and a woman in a skiff, “Too Lazy to Make themselves Comfortable, Lie on the Damp earth, near the Edge of the Watter, have Racoons to Eat and Muddy Watter to help that food down.” Later still, he saw “two Women the remainder of a party of Wandering Vagabonds … these Two Wretches, Never Wash, Comb, or Scarcely clad themselves,” barely surviving by doing a little sewing and washing and otherwise relying on the generosity of neighbors. Audubon painted, on the whole, a depressing picture of human jetsam washed up on the banks of the river, people who apparently headed westward “to proceed to the Promised Land” but wound up hopelessly stuck in the Mississippi mud. Still, he could hardly hold himself above them: “To Look on those people, and consider Coolly their Condition, then; compare it to Mine, they are certainly More Miserable to Common Eyes—but, it is all a Mistaken Idea, for poverty & Independance are the only friend that Will travel together through this World.”23
Like many other American travelers of the time, Audubon made an exception for native people. “The Indian is More decent, better off, and a Thousand time More happy” than the wretched-seeming white people in the same region, he wrote, and he idealized their own “poverty & Independence” as a positive virtue: “Whenever I meet Indians I feel the greatness of our Creator in all its splendor, for there I see the Man Naked from his Hand and Yet free from Acquired Sorrow.” But rather than truly finding a model for life in the native inhabitants, Audubon instead saw them, as he did almost everyone, as useful sources of ornithological information. He heard about an Indian chief on the Arkansas River who had shot three swans, one with a nine-foot wingspan, but “these Indians had Left when We arrived—a View of Such Noble Specimen would have been very agreeable.”24
“New Orleans at Last”
When Audubon eventually reached the end of his Mississippi trip—“New Orleans at Last,” he wrote on January 7, 1821—he found little that would immediately improve his mood. On his first day in the city, he received an invitation to a dinner party with some “good, well disposed, Gentlemen,” but the loud talk and too much wine left him with a “bad head Hake.” On the second day he walked around town “absolutely to Kill time, the whole City taken with the festivals of the day” in commemoration of the Battle of New Orleans, but someone picked his pocket, leading him to write acerbically that he would “remember … the 8th of January for ever.” On the third day he made the rounds of a few acquaintances to begin looking for work, but when nothing turned up, he went back to Berthoud’s keelboat and “remained on board … opposite the Market, the Dirtiest place in all the Cities of the United States.” “My Spirits very Low,” he wrote, and over time, Audubon’s experience in New Orleans would take him lower and lower.25
The city itself shouldn’t have been the problem. By the time Audubon got there, New Orleans was the fifth largest city in the United States—behind New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston—having come into the United States in the same year Audubon had, 1803, when Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase added the whole Louisiana Territory to the new nation. Throughout the eighteenth century, since the city’s founding by the French in 1718, New Orleans had developed a remarkably mixed population, with some of the region’s original Native American inhabitants, primarily Caddos and Choctaws, who remained on the scene; Europeans, above all French and Spanish, but also immigrants from all over the continent, particularly southern Europe; people of African descent, both slave and free; and more recent arrivals from the West Indies, including several thousands from Saint-Domingue, slaveowners and slaves alike, refugees from the rebellions that had rocked the region at the turn of the century. The United States’ acquisition of Louisiana created yet another influx of immigrants in the years before Audubon’s arrival, making the city’s 27,176 inhabitants the most diverse population of any other urban area in the nation.26
Some observers celebrated the city’s mix. One of the best accounts of a newcomer to New Orleans comes from Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the British-born architect, who came to New Orleans in January 1819, exactly two years before Audubon arrived. Almost immediately, Latrobe’s artistic eye quickly took in the sights of the exciting city, beginning with the main outdoor market, where he beheld a remarkable array of goods: “wretched meat & other butchers meat,” but also fresher fare, “wild ducks, oysters, poultry of all kinds,” along with a great variety of vegetables and fruits, including bananas, oranges, apples, sugar cane, potatoes, “& all sorts of other roots,” and then “trinkets, tin ware, dry goods … more and odder things … than I can enumerate.” But the goods were not the only things on display. Latrobe also described an energetic and cacophonous scene of five hundred or more people, “sellers & buyers, all of whom appeared to strain their voices, to exceed each other in loudness,” all of whom reflected the rich ethnic and racial diversity of the city: “White men and women, & of all hues of brown, & of all classes of faces, from round Yankees, to grisly & lean Spaniards, black negroes & negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly & straight-haired, quarteroons of all shades, long haired & frizzled, the women dressed in the most flaring yellow & scarlet gowns, the men capped & hatted.”27
To his credit, Latrobe took the time to look closely into other areas of New Orleans society, peering into all corners of the local culture and taking care to describe the different ethnic and racial groups that made the city so special. He liked the white women he saw at a fancy ball, for instance, writing appreciatively of their unpainted faces: “A few of them are perfect, and a great majority are far above the mere agreeable.… I could not see one face that had the slightest tinge of rouge.”28 In addition to looking into the polite entertainments of New Orleans’s elite, Latrobe also took in the sights of the more vigorous outdoor dancing among the city’s other major population, the people of color, hundreds of whom assembled each Sunday—the slaves’ one day off—for a weekly festival of expressive celebration. Place Publique (or what was more commonly, albeit unofficially, called Congo Square) became the site of an open-air market and meeting place, where people of African descent rejoiced in their cultural heritage through dance and song. The city authorities often looked fearfully askance at such a large congregation of black people, and they occasionally tried to outlaw, or at least regulate, the jubilant gathering. Other white people came to the site as curious spectators to look on from the fringes, and Latrobe soon became one of them.
Like most white observers, Latrobe probably did not fully comprehend the cultural significance of everything he saw, but as a modern historian of slave culture in the city has noted, “His account is probably the best, most thorough observation available from the heyday at Congo Square.”29 Latrobe wrote that he happened to stumble on the gathering by accident while out for a walk one Sunday afternoon, when he “heard a most extraordinary noise” and discovered that it came from some “5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square.” Making a quick estimation of the racial identities involved, he noted that “all those who were engaged in the business seemed to be blacks. I did not observe a dozen yellow faces.” He did observe the dancing men and women formed in circles, moving to music made by two drums and a stringed instrument, but he didn’t completely appreciate what he saw: “A man sung an uncouth song … & the women screamed a detestable burthen on one single note.… I have never seen anything more brutally savage, and at the same time dull & stupid, than this whole exhibition.” Latrobe might have noted that there was nothing more “brutally savage” than slavery itself, but he failed to make that connection. Still, he concluded, rather charitably and even credulously, that there “was not the least disorder among the crowd, nor do I learn on enquiry, that these weekly meetings of the negroes have ever produced any mischief.”30
Latrobe took a dimmer and essentially dismissive view of New Orleans’s Native American population, mostly Choctaws, whom he saw as “outcasts, the fag end of the tribe, the selvage, the intermediate existence between annihilation & savage vigor.” After going through an exceedingly unflattering description of their
