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Article Excerpt
Although Louisiana was one of the Old South's chief producers of agricultural commodities, its most crucial economic contribution to the region was the commercial traffic steered through the port of New Orleans, a city whose business and financial district constituted one of the most intensely concentrated sites of capital in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic World. As plantation development had shifted steadily westward over the antebellum decades, the South's only metropolis had become its premier banking and mercantile center, and by the 1850s half of the region's total cotton production routinely passed through New Orleans. In addition, the city was important for its slave markets, as a source of imported manufactured goods, and as a prominent bulk-break point for Midwestern foodstuffs. Presiding over all of this wide-ranging commerce was New Orleans's large community of merchant capitalists: its banks, factorage houses, commission firms, brokers, wholesalers, and retailers. (1)
At the onset of secession winter in 1860, New Orleans's privileged position at the nexus of slave-based plantation agriculture and transatlantic trade networks seemed to herald a leadership role for Louisiana in any new southern nation. But although it would eventually provide the Confederacy with several important statesmen, Louisiana generally suffered from the deep suspicion with which its mercantile and banking elites were widely regarded throughout the South. Its merchants' connections to northern and foreign capital caused contemporaries and historians alike to underestimate the depth of their support for slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Their commitment to southern goals, born of their long-standing relationship to plantation slavery, has been partly obscured by the independent streak they sometimes displayed toward the Confederate government before the Union occupation of New Orleans in May 1862. Most notably, the New Orleans banks initially resisted aligning their currency policies with those of the Confederate Treasury, and the city's merchants organized a cotton embargo against the Davis administration's wishes during summer 1861. However, such reactions to government policies by the state's commercial and financial community should be understood within the context of the rapid and largely unique economic deterioration that Louisiana experienced as a result of the unprecedented pressures of secession and war. Understanding their reactions will help illuminate the global ramifications of the American Civil War during what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the "Age of Capital." The proud Crescent City business community's failed efforts to assert the primacy of "King Cotton" forced them to confront the dependent nature of southern merchant capitalism in an era of ascendant industrialization elsewhere, and the war's outcome would rapidly seal New Orleans's fate as perhaps the last major urban outpost of an increasingly anachronistic, trade-based Atlantic World economy. (2)
In summer 1860, Dr. Joseph Slemmons Copes, a New Orleans commission merchant, took a hiatus from the city's notorious fever season to attend to his firm's interests in the Old Northwest. Referring to the escalating national political crisis in a letter to his business partner, Copes reported that he had found "scarcely any persons who are not sympathizers with the South" in Ohio business circles. Like many merchants, Copes clearly expected that the ties of commerce would provide a restraining influence on disruptive intersectional tensions. The year before, the New Orleans Delta, in an article titled "Commerce as a Peace-Maker," had asserted that the powerful New York City merchant community was "becoming, through the influence of commercial relations ... essentially Southern in sympathies," and as the crucial elections of 1860 approached, New Orleans merchants appealed to their northern brethren for their help in averting a constitutional crisis. At the same time, some Louisiana businessmen also hoped that interregional ties based on the Mississippi River grain trade would promote similar political cooperation between southern and western states. (3)
Events had acquired a terrible momentum of their own, however, and uncertainty over the future began to be adversely reflected in the marketplace. In October, Walter Cox, another Crescent City factor, advised an Arkansas planter-client about the "growing distrust in the commercial mind at the unsettled condition of domestic politics": "In the event of Mr. Lincoln's election, trouble may ensue. Large depreciation in the value of Southern property would not be unlikely. These considerations are ... lending weight to our moneyed transactions and rates are well up. We think that Southern planters and merchants cannot exercise too great a caution until after the deciding election of November." Already, he concluded, the New Orleans cotton market "has suffered largely on the mere strength of such apprehensions." (4)
Cox's letter highlights how commercial and financial markets weakened in 1860 as the wider web of exchange relations was undermined by a political environment of generalized, endemic "apprehensions." Even more so than production-oriented industrialists, commodities merchants like Cox were dependent on a stable business climate for profits to be routinely extracted by common consent at various geographic way stations. Widespread political instability threatened the interlocked structure of contingent promises inherent to long-distance exchange contracts, with uncertainty most immediately reflected in the higher cost of money, and increases in discrete transaction costs had a ripple effect that affected profit margins all along the extended commodity chain. Contrary to the quixotic hopes of intersectional business cooperation held by Joseph Copes and others, one New Orleans newspaper feared that the national political crisis would cause "conflicts of material interests" between the regions to be "almost, if not absolutely, insurmountable." (5)
Abraham Lincoln's victory in the November 1860 presidential election further heightened tensions over the nation's future among New Orleans merchants, and with increasingly serious consequences. The city's tri-weekly commercial organ, the Price-Current, reported in early December that conditions in the city's money markets were "grow[ing] more and more severe from day to day" because of political anxieties. The British consul in New Orleans, William Mure, who also did business as a cotton broker, described the city's "Commercial panic" in a mid-December letter to London. "Over 30 Factorage houses have suspended within the last fortnight," he reported. Although some firms sought to reassure their customers (as well as northern creditors) that their suspensions were only temporary, one merchant admitted that "the panic is infinately [sic] worse than that of 1857 on account of the uncertainty over political matters." Further evidence of uncertainty over the impact of secession on trade was reflected in the quickened pace of exports from New Orleans that winter. Walter Cox observed in January 1861 that, in spite of the suspensions, the city was nevertheless enjoying "an active and buoyant market" in cotton, which he attributed to concerns among New York houses about "future supplies" of the staple. Later that month, local newspapers noted the unusually rapid pace of ships leaving the port. (6)
Evidence of mercantile uneasiness over the commercial implications of secession has been used to support characterizations of business opinion in New Orleans as firmly pro-Union during the crisis of 1860-61. Orleans Parish precincts had delivered nearly 80 percent of their presidential votes for one or the other of the moderate Union candidates, John Bell or Stephen A. Douglas. However, such political conservatism in favor of a stable status quo was to be expected from southern merchant capitalists, for whom the slightest threat of disruptions to the routinized patterns of long-distance trade were anathema. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish the real intention behind the support of many New Orleans businessmen for John Bell's Constitutional Union Party. For most merchants, a vote for Bell was not an expression of unconditional Unionism against southern extremism; instead, they hoped that a Bell administration might be able to negotiate a settlement to the political crisis, as had occurred in the famous Compromises of 1820 and 1850. But even this moderate pro-Union stance was contingent on a favorable outcome to the election. As historian Gerald M. Capers has noted, the Republican Party's victory in November 1860 provoked an "immediate change in attitudes" in New Orleans. Alluding to the city's business community, British consul Mure observed in December that "even the motives of interest have [now] given place to antipathy and hostility to the Northern and Western States." The president-elect's pledge to prevent any further extension of slavery in the territories, as well as more radical antislavery intentions he and his allies were believed to harbor, made him unacceptable to Louisiana's merchant-elites. Their support for the "peculiar institution," born of their long-standing ties to the planter class, quickly assumed priority over their Whiggish preference for stable government and business-as-usual. (7)
As with misunderstandings of the city's presidential vote, the showing of the state's Cooperationist faction in the state's January election for delegates to a secession convention led many contemporaries to overstate the strength of Unionist sentiment in Louisiana. New York newspapers harped on alleged voting irregularities to assert the existence of a conspiracy that had managed to drag an ostensible Unionist majority in Louisiana into secession. But the crux of the Cooperationist position on secession was procedural, not oppositionist: its supporters maintained that the South should withdraw from the Union in concert rather than as individual states. In this sense, the short-lived Cooperationist movement was less an expression of Unionist loyalties or even doubts about the South's political course than it was an issue-based extension of long-standing political factionalism that centered around the bitter rivalry between the Slidell and Soule wings of the Louisiana Democratic Party. The simplistic, mistaken conflation of moderate but prosecession Cooperationism with unconditional Unionism had later policy consequences, leading the Lincoln administration to severely underestimate pro-Confederate feeling in the state during Reconstruction. (8)
Even their fellow southrons, however, were apparently not immune to skepticism about Crescent City loyalties. The New Orleans Daily Crescent expressed regret after the January 7 election that "the Cooperation party here has caused the South to look upon New Orleans with doubt, and this doubt [is] very reasonable, considering the cosmopolitan character of the city." Many rural Louisiana citizens had long been frustrated by what they perceived as the domination of state politics by Crescent City-based commercial interests. Similar hostility had often appeared in the wider plantation South, with long-standing complaints about inefficiency, high costs, and corruption at the port of New Orleans usually blamed on wealthy, complacent bankers and merchants who benefited from the city's monopoly on the regional export trade. As the South drew further into a defensive posture during secession winter, such attitudes helped undermine any claims New Orleans might have to serve as the capital of a new southern nation. (9)
Also worrisome to many southerners were the extra-regional connections maintained by Crescent City merchants. Many prominent New Orleans firms were considered to be little more than appendages of New York-based interests, not only in the export trades but also among wholesalers and retailers, particularly in the lucrative dry goods business. Powerful old firms of European origin, such as the Barings and the Browns, had played a prominent role in New Orleans since its colonial days, and the city's banking community was especially distrusted for its links to northern and foreign capital. Perhaps most troubling to many was the large number of New Orleans businessmen who had been born in the North. Years before carpetbagger became a term of southern derision, New Orleans was widely viewed as home to a large community of opportunistic northern-born migrants who had established a foothold for Yankee business culture in the heart of the deep South. Among such migrants were powerful lawyer-politicians like John Slidell, a native New Yorker who had made his fortune in Louisiana land speculation and whose niece was married to the New York banker August Belmont, himself an agent of the European house of Rothschild. But there was also a plethora of relatively more anonymous merchants in the city, men like Joseph Copes, a Delaware native who had moved there in 1849. Like many others, Copes continued to visit and correspond frequently with his northern friends and relatives. Whether the loyalties of such transplanted men could withstand the pressures of secession and possible war was a question pondered by many southerners during the winter of 1860-61. Furthermore, businessmen generally had to endure more suspicion than...
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