Communications

To the Editor:

In response to Emily Clark's review of my book Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans in the William and Mary Quarterly (3d Ser., 57 [2000], 855–57), perhaps your readers will allow me to make the following points. First, my thesis is that early New Orleans was in several senses one of the most distinctive slave societies in North America, social relations changed there in significant ways over time, and free blacks played a special role in shaping the town's basic character.	1
Any fair-minded reader will see that I am deeply indebted to and repeatedly cite in an approving way all of the recent historians of early Louisiana. Clark fails to mention several who are cited very abundantly and shape my thesis. Ann Patton Malone has demonstrated the remarkable extent of family formation among Louisiana slaves and the slave family's resiliency against the odds. Judith Kelleher Schafer has revealed that Louisiana slaves were circumscribed by a thicket of laws, much as in other states, and that they constantly challenged these laws when they could. Paul Lachance has explored how white ethnic groups interacted and intermarried, and he wrote a landmark article on slave rebellion. As for those Clark does mention, I agree emphatically with their major arguments, and they are frequently cited to that effect. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has shown that the popular cultural character of early New Orleans society was markedly African American. The late Kimberly Hanger demonstrated in a remarkable outpouring of scholarship that the free blacks of New Orleans developed a strong community with extraordinary speed during the Spanish reign of guaranteed freedom-purchase. Daniel Usner brought to fruition a new style of frontier history by describing the Mississippi Valley exchange economy, which was brokered in New Orleans. This is not to mention over one hundred other specialists on New Orleans or Louisiana whom I cite to support my arguments. I disagree respectfully only with certain aspects of interpretations by those Clark mentions. The only historian about whom I might be described as "acerbic" is the nineteenth-century antiquarian Charles Gayarre, whose frank anti-American bias in favor of his Spanish compatriots has dominated Louisiana scholarship too long without challenge, in a book that is republished from time to time.	2
My argument is that New Orleans was as distinctive as any other colonial society, but its special character was not cultural. Its geographic position meant that it had a peculiar role in the Atlantic economy that made it unusual, having virtually no slave supply for decades, and a special incentive to develop direct trade relations with the West Indies and the United States. Above all, in the third section, it is argued methodically that New Orleans's distinctiveness in 1819 was owing primarily to its sudden and explosive urban growth in the South.	3
As for change over time, I put a great deal of effort, for example, into demonstrating changes in domestic relations. Particularly laborious was the assembling and analysis of data on the rising age at marriage for white women and the change over time in their treatment by male authorities when they accused spouses of abuse. The slave trade is detailed in all three sections with attention to the cultural background of the Africans and how their diversity impacted social relations in the black community in different stages of its development. It is shown that very rapidly, by 1750, slaves had obtained a degree of control over local marketing that was regarded with extreme apprehension by authorities. As for free blacks, I find criticism on this head especially painful, for if there is a dramatic tale in the book it is the story of the spectacular self-creation of their community through the self-purchase guarantee introduced by Spanish authorities. So far from arguing that the Spanish "had little appreciable impact," I expand on my WMQ article to show that they had a huge impact in this regard.	. . .