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c h a p t e r o n e POOR NEW ORLEANS! 1861–1862 BBB It is the custom here to keep up a continual firing of guns, pistols, all night long on the demise of the old year. Long after we retired, shot after shot echoed thro’ the still moonlight. . . . Long may we be unused to, ought save the mimicry of war, and its stern realities forever averted from this eminently peaceful soil. —Thomas K. Wharton, December 31, 1854 E Ezekiel John Ellis looked on with dismay at the chaotic scene unfolding around him. Telegrams carrying news of Louisiana’s secession had reached New Orleans from Baton Rouge early that January afternoon, and word of the ordinance’s passage quickly spread throughout the city. Boisterous crowds spilled into the streets in noisy celebration, while the roar of cannons firing salutes echoed from Jackson and Lafayette squares. Through the tendrils of smoke and amid the wild cheering of those around him, Ellis had “a strangely throbbing heart” as he watched the U.S. flag being pulled down from Armory Hall. When Louisiana’s pelican flag unfurled in its place, the crowd broke out in a stirring rendition of the Marseillaise. “That song of revolution and civil strife,” recalled Ellis, “made me think of the convulsive struggles of the French capitol, and the exclamation of Mme. Roland while on her way to the guillotine.”1 Time eventually revealed the merit of Ellis’s analogy to the French Revolution . The passage of Louisiana’s ordinance of secession on January 26, 1861, marked a point of departure from which there was no true return. Like the French revolutionaries before them and the Leninists, who came later, the secessionists placed into motion a set of uncontrollable forces that revolutionized the society in which they lived. It took a costly war and decades of political turmoil to restore a facsimile of the hard-handed stability that the slaveholding regime had once imposed upon Southern society. In the meantime, New Orleans served as a battleground on which the advocates of competing visions for a reincarnated South- P o o r N e w O r l e a n s ! 7 ern society vied for supremacy. Ellis thought the artillery salutes fired in honor of secession had “sounded like the ‘sod falling upon the coffin lid’ of pride.” Indeed, this most pernicious of the seven deadly sins had engendered in Southern slaveholders feelings of both self-righteousness and invulnerability. It did not take long, however, to discover just how wrong their assumptions had been.2 At the moment of secession, New Orleans stood at the apex of its wealth and strength relative to the rest of the nation. The Crescent City was not just the economic locus of the vast Mississippi Valley; it was the financial capital of the entire South. With nearly 170,000 residents in 1860, it was more than four times the size of Charleston or Richmond. New Orleans’s strategic location on the Mississippi River, combined with westward expansion and the advent of steampowered river transportation, had transformed it from its status as a colonial port at the time of the Louisiana Purchase into the unrivaled economic capitol of the antebellum South. It grew by a staggering 45 percent during the decade of the 1850s alone, outpacing both Boston and Cincinnati and nearly matching the population growth of the bustling port of New York City. Louisiana’s antebellum per-capita income was second in the nation and first in the South. It was New Orleans’s role as the primary commercial gateway for the nation’s booming midsection that made the accumulation of such wealth possible. More than 659,000 tons of imported goods arrived at the city’s wharves in 1859, making the city third in the nation in this respect, behind only Boston and New York. With these wares lashed to their decks, steamboats traveled upriver from New Orleans to waiting markets in countless towns and plantation landings, and then the boats returned loaded to the gunwales with the enormous agricultural bounty of the West. All along New Orleans’s waterfront, an army of stevedores transferred this valuable cargo to warehouses and eventually to the holds of oceangoing vessels. Such commercial activity also required a corresponding army of merchants, lawyers, and bankers capable of handling the thousands of financial transactions that took place in the city every day. On the eve of war, New Orleans was one of the...

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