200 YEARS IN THE MAKING Guiding Questions Growth and 5 Change 1. Which nineteenth century antebellum new technologies led to growth and change in Louisiana? 2. How did migration and immigration affect antebellum Louisiana? he period following the War of T 3. How was the port of New Orleans 1812 brought growth and important to Louisiana and the United progress to Louisiana. States? Post-War Changes sugar production even more and frontier society. New profitable. Throughout this Orleans was already one of the The War of 1812 and the period, Spain’s control in the largest cities in the United Battle of New Orleans ended America’s diminished, States, and it had one of the the British threat to the United opening the door for Mexico to largest ports. In other areas of States as well as to New declare independence and for Louisiana, small towns and Orleans and the Mississippi the United States to pursue its settlements began developing River. The years following the boundary claims to the the basics of urban life. 1814 Treaty of Ghent saw southeast and southwest of improvements in transportation Louisiana. and agricultural technology During the early that revolutionized river travel statehood period, Louisiana Below: One Hundred Dollar Bill and trade and made cotton and was changing from a colonial Planter’s Bank, New Orleans, 1817. Randy Haynie Family Collection DCRT Education, www.crt.state.la.us/education 69 first steamboat to come down the Mississippi arrived in the Crescent City in 1812. By the 1850s, around 3,000 steamboats docked at New Orleans each year. Although most transportation in antebellum Louisiana was by water, residents also traveled and traded by overland road and railroad. The Pontchartrain Railroad was the second Above: Nouvelle Orleans/Nueva completed in the United States. Orleans The Port of New Orleans were offloaded and stored in It began operation in 1831, T. H. Miller warehouses or transferred carrying passengers and goods c. 1850 between the Mississippi River Louisiana State Museum directly to oceangoing vessels and shipped to the Northeast, and Lake Pontchartrain in New STUDENT ACTIVITY Europe, and the Caribbean. Orleans. A few years later Ask students to research how Robert Fulton and Henry Shreve In reverse, manufactured and developers of the West contributed to Louisiana’s luxury goods, salt, coffee, Feliciana Railroad began antebellum growth and change. West Indian and Brazilian building a line between sugar, gold and silver, and a Woodville, Mississippi, and St. wide variety of items entered Francisville, Louisiana. Trade and Travel Railroad travel was not always the city from foreign and Antebellum New United States ports. They were reliable, and passengers Orleans was the transfer point distributed in New Orleans or traveling to New Orleans from for American and foreign shipped upriver. Lake Borgne on the Mexican goods, and most of the goods During most of the Gulf Railroad often arrived that passed into and out of antebellum period New with clothes muddy from their Louisiana and the entire Orleans was the second efforts to lift the train back Mississippi Valley region leading port in the United onto the track. came through New Orleans. States, behind New York City. Wheat, corn, lard, pork, furs In the 1840s, it was the fourth Small Farmers leading commercial center in and hides, whiskey, hemp, and The Louisiana the world in value of exports. lead from the upper Midwest countryside was dotted with a Between 1830 and 1860, the as well as cotton, sugar, variety of landholdings value of the city's exports rose molasses, and tobacco from ranging from several-hundred- from $15.5 to $110 million the South flowed down the acre sugar plantations to one- while the value of its imports Mississippi River and its or two-acre vegetable farms. rose from $7.5 to $18.5 tributaries on steamboats, There were also a growing million. flatboats, and keelboats to number of cotton plantations Most river trade was New Orleans. These products as well as a few tobacco conducted by steamboat. The 70 DCRT Education, www.crt.state.la.us/education Right: Acadian Cabin near Bayou Teche, circa 1800 Evangeline-Longfellow State Historic Site www.crt.state.la.us/parks/ ilongfell.aspx Acadians, Creoles, American Indians, Africans, free people of color, Frenchmen, and Spaniards all contributed to the historical tradition of cultural diversity in the Teche region. plantations, livestock ranches, and grain farms. In the piney woods and hill country of northern Louisiana and on the prairies of the southwest there small land holdings and smaller holdings usually had at were small subsistence farms consolidated them into large least one enslaved carpenter or on which families produced plantations. The largest blacksmith. only enough for their own plantation complexes were needs. self-sufficient in that enslaved Louisiana Planters Many of Louisiana's Africans produced and small farmers and ranchers manufactured most of the Louisiana's planters, were Acadians (also known as food, clothing, and goods both white and free people of Cajuns), Germans, Isleños, needed on the plantation. Even color, were among the Anglo-Americans, blacks, and American Indians. They generally raised just enough Below: Maison Olivier Creole Plantation near Bayou Teche, circa 1800 food and livestock, Evangeline-Longfellow State Historic Site manufactured clothing and other items, fished, and hunted game for their own consumption. In addition, they sold any surplus goods, as well as small quantities of cash crops—like cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco—in neighboring towns and cities. When sugar and cotton became profitable in the nineteenth century, planters and real estate speculators purchased several adjacent DCRT Education, www.crt.state.la.us/education 71 Left: Cotton Gin Louisiana produced from one- Louisiana State Museum quarter to one-half of all sugar consumed in the United States. Louisiana's sugar harvest rose from 5,000 hogsheads (a large barrel that held an average of 1,000 pounds of sugar) in 1802 to 30,000 in 1823; 75,000 in 1833; and peaked in 1853 at 449,000. Sugar prices were highest in 1858, when hogsheads sold for an average price of $69 each, bringing the total value of Louisiana's sugar crop to $25 million. wealthiest in the South. Most labor force for the entire Population Groups planters poured profits back household, directing the into their plantations, while upkeep of all plantation Native Americans spending at least some of their buildings and the production, Numerous and earnings on luxurious purchase, and distribution of significant Native American consumer goods. Fine food and clothing. nations resided within furniture, tableware, artwork, Louisiana’s state boundaries in clothes, and jewelry added to Cotton and Sugar 1812. The Caddo Nation the planter family's comfort Cotton was king in resided on the northern Red and allowed them to show off Louisiana and most of the River region in the 1810s. their wealth to friends and Deep South during the They had been one of the most business associates. The antebellum period. Between powerful and influential tribes wealthiest planters also kept 1840 and 1860, Louisiana's in the American South during houses in New Orleans, where annual cotton crop rose from the French and Spanish they stayed during the winter about 375,000 bales to nearly colonial periods. With the cultural season. 800,000 bales. In 1860, influx of American settlers and Although men owned Louisiana produced about one- planters into northwest and controlled most large sixth of all cotton grown in the Louisiana after 1803, the holdings in Louisiana and United States and almost one- Caddo agreed to leave throughout the South, women third of all cotton exported Louisiana for Texas and contributed significantly to the from the United States, most of Oklahoma by the 1830s. In daily operation of plantations which went to Britain and 1835, the Kadohadacho band and frequently ran them in France. sold the rights to their land in their husbands' absences. Almost all the sugar Caddo Parish at a site that While the landowner or his grown in the United States became the town of Shreveport representative supervised the during the antebellum period in 1839. enslaved workers in the fields, came from Louisiana. In the lower Red River his wife managed the domestic valley of central Louisiana, the 72 DCRT Education, www.crt.state.la.us/education Tunica and Biloxi resided as Right: Self-Portrait, Julien Hudson separate nations, and eventually 1839 merged in Avoyelles Parish to Louisiana State Museum form one of Louisiana’s four Julien Hudson, a free man of federally recognized Indian color, had a successful career as nations. The Choctaw nation a painter and an art teacher. His father was an English merchant, resided largely in southwest and his mother was a free Mississippi, but in the 1800s, woman of color from New bands, including the Jena band, Orleans. Hudson was one of many free men of color during migrated west to Louisiana for the antebellum period who safety and isolation. The worked as professional artists, writers, and musicians in New Coushatta (Koasati) migrated to Orleans. southwest Louisiana in the early 1800s. The Chitimacha Nation had endured a war against France over their lands in the early 1700s and had withdrawn to the isolated Atchafalaya River citizens. With the basin in the 1800s for protection. Americanization of Louisiana and the Below: Marie Laveau The Houma nation, which Frank Schneider originally resided in the Tunica commercialization of sugar 1912 and cotton production, free Louisiana State Museum Hills north of Baton Rouge, migrated south to Ascension people of color encountered Marie Laveau, a free woman of color, Parish, where they resided before increasing discrimination was born in New Orleans in 1801.