New York and New Orleans: Abraham Oakey Hall and the Romance of the Capital City

Abstract

This essay engages with a largely forgotten figure of nineteenth-century travel writing. Abraham Oakey Hall, who served as Mayor of New York City from 1869–1872, began his life with the hopes of being a writer. With family ties in both New York and New Orleans, he circulated between the two capitals of the nineteenth century, cities that are now regarded as ego-ideals for one another: the former the ever-moving 'capital of capital' and the latter the static repository of lost history. The Manhattaner in New Orleans (1851) locates the moment when these two 'new' cities were not opposites, but competitors. Hall uses his travelogue not only to promote Northern investment in Southern economies, but to persuade Americans to stake their claim in the formerly Latin city. He advocates a cash and land grab, a moment of wild acquisition before resources have been hoarded by a handful of entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, in nearly two hundred pages, he scarcely mentions slavery, the mechanism of capital acquisition in each of those industries. I argue for Hall's travelogue as a foundational text of neoliberalism–scarcely a new phenomenon, but the tried-and-true method by which capitalism elides the relationship between profits and human suffering.