Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans by Nathalie Dessens (review)

In Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, Nathalie Dessens uses the correspondence of Jean Boze to provide the reader with a fascinating glimpse of everyday life in New Orleans in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Boze, who arrived in the city as a refugee from Saint Domingue, wrote 158 letters to his friend and benefactor in France, Henri de Ste-Gême, between April 20, 1818, and August 6, 1839. Dessens convincingly argues that this correspondence provides three important narratives: Boze’s own story as a resident of New Orleans with a transatlantic connection to France; an account of the Saint Domingue refugee community in New Orleans; and a description of the urban evolution of New Orleans as an increasingly important North American port economically tied to Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

Born the son of a sea captain near Marseilles in 1753, Boze served in the merchant marine between 1775 and 1784 and later settled in Saint Domingue. After he saved a royal frigate from sinking, he became head captain of the harbor of Jacmel. He successfully integrated into Saint Domingue society through marriage to a third-generation white Creole woman whose family owned three plantations. The Saint Domingue slave uprising forced Boze to relocate to Curaçao, a Dutch island colony, which he used as a base for privateering expeditions. Boze and his family briefly returned to Saint Domingue near the end of the Haitian Revolution, but when Napoleon’s troops failed to retake control of the colony, Boze fled to Cuba. Spanish authorities there eventually forced him and other Saint Domingue refugees to leave that island in 1809.

Boze was not a young man when he arrived in New Orleans aboard a ship belonging to Henri de Ste-Gême, who had also lived as a refugee in Cuba and had been a corsair. In fact, Boze was in a state of semi-retirement for much of his time in New Orleans. This situation of relative leisure allowed Boze to do “little else besides visiting people, roaming the city, reading the newspapers, and writing to Ste-Gême” in France (p. 29). With time on his hands, Boze was able to make keen and detailed observations of New Orleans at a time when unprecedented economic growth attracted new waves of immigrants to the city and resulted in dramatic urban expansion.

In chapter 2 Dessens explains Boze’s descriptions of dangers New Orleans residents faced, including floods, epidemics, fires, crime, and the prevalence of duels. Chapter 3 focuses on Boze’s observations of economic and urban expansion and the development of a distinct urban society, as New Orleans became the third-largest city in the United States by 1840. Chapter 4 is an account of New Orleans as a crossroads in the Atlantic world. Boze’s letters reveal how the people of New Orleans had economic and familial connections to Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. In chapter 5 Dessens provides interesting analyses of New Orleans’s diverse ethnic communities and its racial system. Dessens’s final chapter is devoted to an exploration of how the intermingling of New Orleanians and immigrants who arrived from Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States made New Orleans the Creole capital of North America. A close reading of Creole City is a must for anyone who wishes to make sense of everyday life in New Orleans at an important turning point in the city’s history.