Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South

Abstract

and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in Deep South. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxv, 490. Figures, maps, tables. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $25.00.) Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction: Slavery in Richmond; Virginia,1782-1865. By Midori Takagi. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. xi, 187. Illustrations, tables. $37.50.) Order, remarked Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man, Heaven's first law. If true, New Orleans (1718-1819) and Richmond, Virginia (17821865) came, it appears, surprisingly near to achieving divine stability. Both Thomas N. Ingersoll and Midori Takagi suggest that urban slavery represented a relatively ordered environment, important tensions between master and enslaved notwithstanding. Cluttered though Thomas Ingersoll's rich study sometimes is, and Manon offers determined readers many rewards. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research in French, Spanish, and North American archives, Ingersoll's study aims to retire prevailing stereotype of New Orleans as a hotbed of saturnalia and social dislocation. Instead of Manon, the enduring popular image of New Orleans as a place where women of both colors gave themselves up to illicit sex with men, Ingersoll finds that Mammon ruled (xvii) by 1731. Sensitive to tense, negotiated, and complicated social and political evolution of Deep South's first slave society, Ingersoll shows that coming (and achievement) of order was preeminent characteristic of early New Orleans. The presence of an acquisitive, class-conscious planter elite was key to society's stability while slaves, by dint of their ethnic, cultural, and occupational backgrounds often found themselves divided. Moreover, by early national period, order had been achieved not least because like blacks throughout South, those of New Orleans had made special contributions to forging of American values-ambition, diligence, creative expertise, moral austerity-and had pursued American dream of personal and economic independence with same enthusiasm as their white fellows (352). Part One describes French colonization of New Orleans, formation of city's white and black communities, and concludes with a chapter on creolization of second generation and a comparative analysis situating New Orleans firmly within context of North American slavery. Parts Two and Three repeat analysis for Spanish period and end by stressing orderliness of New Orleans slavery and similarities it shared with other Deep South slave societies. Throughout, Ingersoll talks intelligently and authoritatively on a variety of issues ranging from activities of free blacks, women, comparative manumission rates, and strength of planter class. A brief review can in no way do justice to this study's breadth. Some readers may balk at Ingersoll's rather binary framework. and Manon were not, after all, mutually exclusive. Furthermore, Ingersoll aims to dismantle a stereotype that he fails to explore as fully as he might. From whence did image of an unruly, salacious New Orleans come? And which modern historians, if any, still subscribe to it? Ingersoll neglects to interrogate origins of image and instead bases his argument on dubious assumption that any slave society is by definition disorderly (xvii). Yet it is worthwhile recalling that proslavery ideologues, while often fretting about disorder and vice they discerned in southern cities, nonetheless saw northern urbanism and its embodiment of liberal capitalism as real locus of societal licentiousness and unruliness. Towns per se were not problem for such thinkers; cities anchored by liberal social and economic relations were real worry. …