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

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. Photograph. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxvi, 490 pp. Cloth, $60.00. Paper $25.00. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Thomas Ingersoll presents a clearly-written account of New Orleans in its first century. This is no easy task. Building on the work of Peter Wood and Alan Kulikoff, Ingersoll sets out to overturn conventional scholarship that paints colonial New Orleans as a place of "Mammon"--a city of illicit sex and vice. Instead, the author contends that New Orleans "was marked by a remarkable degree of continuity over time," and that "Manon"--greed and avarice--characterized the city's growth under the French, Spanish, and United States regimes (p. xvii). Further, New Orleans existed in a unique context of "urban setting and plantation" life (p. xv) and "was indisputably North American in character, not Caribbean" (p. xix) Finally, "the basic character of society was the same in New Orleans as in Wood's South Carolina, Kulikoff's Prince George's County, or anywhere else where the labor of black slaves was the mainstay of the economy" (p. xviii). The author makes these points with partial success.

Ingersoll splits his book into three parts, covering French, Spanish, and U.S. ownership of New Orleans, and does an excellent job of synthesizing scholarship on the growth of the planter class, the advent of the sugar industry, and the place of planters, slaves, and free blacks under each successive political master. He admirably negotiates primary and secondary sources in Spanish, French, and English--a task that few historians are willing or able to undertake. Ingersoll uses these sources to insightfully compare the three regimes.

This work contains two related weaknesses. First, Ingersoll downplays the differences between the three governments in New Orleans. By placing New Orleans within the North American context, and outside the Caribbean and Latin American framework, the author is sometimes forced to make connections that simply do not exist. He contends, for instance, that Charleston and Savannah were the two closest neighboring towns (p. xvii). Aside from Pensacola and Mobile, Havana was a closer journey, raising questions about economic and cultural influences regardless of who owned the town. Ingersoll argues quite well that New Orleans society was not European in character (pp. 10-18), and compares the city to the French Caribbean and Latin America in separate chapters. However, the French comparison with Saint Domingue and Martinique mostly shows that New Orleans was unlike the nearby island slave societies, while the Spanish comparison is taken up with an argument against the Tannenbaum thesis. Since Ingersoll discounts Tannenbaum anyway, it is less clear how New Orleans was not Latin American in nature.

Second, his contention that in each successive regime "laws or religion had little or no effect on either the planter class or the condition of black slaves or free blacks" is problematic (p. xviii). While arguing against coartación and the Siete Partidas as the linchpin of Spanish slave relations, Ingersoll nonetheless notes that in the years of Spanish rule, 1,496 slaves purchased their freedom--an opportunity that simply did not exist under the French and U.S. systems of law. As Charles Cutter has demonstrated, legal culture was the way that Spanish subjects related to each other and to society. For the New Orleans community, then, it was not simply the action of self-purchase that affected master-slave relations, but the possibility of such a purchase. This is a major difference from the French and U.S. regimes, and one that this book underestimates.

Nonetheless, Mammon and Manon is a work that all historians and students of early Louisiana should read. It combines a fascinating account of the...