Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819

Abstract

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxv, 490. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 1-57233-024-4; cloth, $60.00, ISBN 1-57233-023-6.) Thomas N. Ingersoll's Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans is an ambitious of synthesis that attempts comprehensive history of the Crescent City's first one hundred years. Divided into three equal parts that focus on the French (1718-1769), Spanish (1769-1803), and Republican periods (1803-1819), the book is based upon research in archival collections scattered across the United States, Canada, France, and Spain. In the absence of newspapers, tax lists, legislative documents, detailed diaries, extensive family papers, and other sources available to students of colonial British North America, Ingersoll has relied heavily on imperial reports, travel accounts, and especially judicial records. The author has also borrowed freely from the work of other historians, though he insists that much of the existing literature on eighteenth-century Louisiana is seriously flawed. Ira Berlin, Laura Foner, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Arnold R. Hirsch, Joseph Logsdon, and James T. McGowan are among the scholars Ingersoll criticizes for contributing to misconceptions about the nature and evolution of what would become the South' s greatest city. Ingersoll begins by challenging the popular view of early New Orleans as chaotic and immoral frontier outpost. Instead New Orleans appears in this account as remarkably stable, upright, and tight-knit little community ruled by planters. The domestic discord, divorce, bigamy, incest, concubinage, prostitution, and other social ills found in nineteenth-century New Orleans played an insignificant role in the city's formative years; indeed, the author goes so far as to contend that colonial New Orleans a wholesome environment in which to raise children (p. 54). Ingersoll also dismisses the currently fashionable contention that colonial New Orleans should be seen as part of the Caribbean world. In his view New Orleans, no less than lowcountry South Carolina or tidewater Virginia, indisputably North American in character and after the Louisiana Purchase easily incorporated into the United States without significant cultural conflict or social dislocation (p. xix). The only change experienced by the planters, for example, was that their traditional domination now improved to the point of absolute supremacy (p. …