Cabildo Online Project

Antebellum Louisiana: Immigration

Immigrants from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean and slaves brought against their will from other parts of the United States and smuggled in from Africa and the West Indies contributed to Louisiana's growth.

Wheel of Life
Pierre Joseph Landry
c. 1834
Gift of the Heirs of P. J. Landry
This carving represents the continuing cycle of life. Pierre Joseph Landry was born in France and immigrated to Louisiana in 1785. He became a successful planter in Iberville Parish and later turned to sculpting when he became confined to a wheelchair.

New Orleans was the second leading port of entry in the United States during the antebellum period. Between 1820 and 1860 over 550,000 immigrants came to New Orleans, although the Crescent City lagged far behind its top competitor, New York City. Still, by 1850 about one-quarter of Louisiana's and the majority of New Orleans' white population was foreign-born.

Several factors drew immigrants to New Orleans. European immigrants often found it less expensive to go to New Orleans than to Atlantic ports. The large vessels that carried southern agricultural products to Europe, especially cotton, returned to New Orleans with less bulky manufactured goods and had enough room to offer bargain fares to passengers.

New Orleans was also an attractive gateway to the western interior, made accessible and inexpensive by steamboats that opened inland waterways in the early years of the nineteenth century and offered cheaper passage to the West and Midwest than did overland modes of transportation from the East.

Other immigrants moved to Louisiana because their friends and families lived here. French-speaking people in particular felt somewhat at home in the Latin cultural environment of southern Louisiana.

Most immigrants found their conditions as human cargo aboard oceangoing ships less than desirable. The German Joseph Eder wrote from New Orleans in 1854 about his trans-Atlantic journey:

This water stinks like the pest, and in the end one could no longer drink it. Many a person there would have given a Thaler for a drink of fresh water, but we had to be glad to get the stinking water. Even that was not available in sufficient quantity, for through the heat and the salted meat we suffered such thirst that we would gladly have drunk the water in spite of the stench.

For all his objections, Eder adamantly believed that the rewards outweighed the risks of immigration:

If perhaps one of you wants to come to America, let him by no means be deterred by the many hardships of travel that he must endure. Once you are here all that is forgotten and you certainly do not regret it.

The number of foreigners coming through the port of New Orleans dropped dramatically during and after the Civil War. Federal blockades and occupation disrupted trade and passenger service. Completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad opened the West to cheap overland transportation and competed directly with water routes. In addition, the very large steamships of the postwar period went to New York rather than New Orleans because they could not pass through sandbars at the mouth of the Mississippi. The Crescent City also lacked the manufacturing jobs that drew eastern Europeans to the Northeast and Midwest in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Germans

Between 1820 and 1850 almost 54,000 Germans entered the port of New Orleans, with over 126,000 adding to that number in the first five years of the 1850s. While most continued on to the Midwest and California or fell victim to disease in Louisiana, enough remained to make up about one-tenth the population of New Orleans in 1860.


Louis Fasnacht c. 1850 Loaned by L. N. Forsyth	Mrs. Louis Fasnacht c. 1850 Loaned by L. N. Forsyth

Swiss-born Louis Fasnacht moved to New Orleans in 1846 and began a catering business. In 1852 he entered into a partnership with his brother Samuel and opened New Orleans's first brewery. His wife was a native of Bavaria.

Many of these mid-nineteenth century Germans were farmers, butchers, skilled workers, and professionals. As in other states, Germans gradually monopolized the brewing trade in Louisiana. Most New Orleans metalworkers, especially silversmiths, were German. German immigrants also dominated the art of lithography, which had been invented in Munich, Germany. Other Germans came to Louisiana as indentured servants.

Germans also contributed to the unique culture of Louisiana, adding German restaurants, dance halls, theaters, and music festivals. Architects from Germany left a significant legacy in New Orleans. German musicians introduced the accordion to Louisiana and made it popular as an ensemble instrument. Cajun bands later adopted the instrument into their eclectic musical tradition.

Accordion
c. 1850
This German-made accordion is of the type brought to Louisiana by German immigrants.

Jews

Spurred by immigration from Germany, Louisiana's Jewish population flourished in the nineteenth century. By 1860 Louisiana was home to the largest Jewish population in the South, numbering about 8,000 residents.

A good many Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish immigrants who came to Louisiana were also of the Jewish faith. Jews had lived and traded along the Gulf Coast since the early 1700s, many of them descendants of the Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Americas after Spain expelled them in 1492. Judaism was not firmly established in Louisiana, however, until the formation of a Portuguese congregation, the Gates of Mercy, in 1828.

Many small storekeepers and traders in rural Louisiana were Jews. They prospered by maintaining kinship and business ties with Jewish merchants in New Orleans and New York. In Louisiana's urban areas many retailers, especially dry-goods merchants, were Jews.

Touro

Judah Touro
Adolph D. Rinck
c. 1850
Loaned by Gaspar Cusachs
Touro was born in Rhode Island in 1775 and moved to New Orleans in 1801. Touro quickly established himself as a commission merchant, real estate developer, community leader, and generous philanthropist, using his wealth to build a synagogue, infirmary, and public library in New Orleans.

Irish

Immigrants from Ireland also settled in Louisiana early on. The Crescent City held its first St. Patrick's Day celebration in 1809. The major influx of Irish, most of whom were peasants, came after 1830, especially following potato blights of the 1840s. By 1860 Irish numbered over 24,000 in New Orleans.

St. Patrick's Cemetery
George François Mugnier
c. 1890
This photograph shows antebellum Irish tombs in New Orleans.

In contrast to German immigrants, most Irish who arrived at the port of New Orleans stayed in the city, primarily because they could not afford passage farther inland. Crowding into the city's riverfront neighborhoods, they strained its limited housing, employment, and education. Forced to compete with slaves and free blacks at the bottom of the economy, many New Orleans Irish took low-paying, often dangerous manual jobs, such as digging canals and ditches, building roads, levees, and railroads, and laboring on the docks and in the warehouses. The mortality rate was especially high among canal diggers, who were highly susceptible to yellow fever, malaria, and cholera.

Lumber Schooner, New Basin Canal
George François Mugnier
New Orleans, c. 1895

Many Irish, especially those arriving before 1830, held professional jobs and were teachers, lawyers, doctors, architects, and printers. Among women, Irish domestics sometimes replaced black maids, particularly in the Anglo-dominated uptown Garden District.

French

French nationals came to Louisiana directly from France and as refugees from the West Indies. During the nineteenth century New Orleans continually drew greater numbers of French-speaking immigrants than any other urban area in the United States. By 1860 New Orleans was home to over 10,000 French-born residents, some of whom were lawyers, merchants, physicians, or artists.

Ties between Louisiana and France remained strong in the antebellum period. Several Louisianians, both black and white, made frequent trips to France, maintained contact with friends and relatives there, and received schooling or training in France.

The French Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana
August 27, 1853
From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Saint-Domingue Refugees

In 1809 and 1810 over 10,000 French Saint-Domingue refugees came to New Orleans, doubling the city's population. These immigrants originally fled war-torn Saint-Domingue in 1803, as black slaves emerged victorious in the Haitian Revolution, the only successful long-term slave revolt in the Americas. The refugees first settled in nearby Cuba but left six years later when Spanish authorities expelled them in retaliation for Napoleon's invasion of Spain. This group was made up of about equal numbers of whites, free blacks, and slaves.
Saint-Domingue Refugees

Free Blacks from Saint-Domingue
Labrousse
c. 1790

Black refugees to Louisiana brought with them elements of African and Haitian culture in the form of voodoo/hoodoo practices, shotgun house architecture, and the language, oral traditions, and dance steps of Mardi Gras Indian rites.

New Orleans was the first place that voodoo appeared in North America. As an African religious system, voodoo helps keep the living in harmony with their spirit ancestors and with nature. Dahomean people brought their religion of vodu from West Africa to Saint-Domingue and then to New Orleans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Both black and white New Orleanians employed the services of the famed Marie Laveau and other voodoo priests and priestesses. Laveau was said to have often sold charms, including blue glass beads and pierced coins, to ward off evil spirits and to have staged elaborate rituals behind her house in the French Quarter.

Slaves: Forced Migration

By 1850 New Orleans was the South's largest slave-trading center. At that time there were twenty-five major slave depots within a half mile from the St. Charles Hotel where African-American slaves could be bought and sold, including hotels and the Masonic Temple. Most slaves were sold at public auction rather than in private transactions.

Slave Sale

Sale of Estates, Pictures, and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans
W. H. Brooke and J. M. Starling
c. 1860
Gift of J. B. Harter
This sale was conducted in the rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel.

Most of the slaves traded in New Orleans came from other states, particularly from the Atlantic seaboard. In 1804 the federal government outlawed the external slave trade in Louisiana, and the United States Constitution forbade the importation of slaves after January 1808.

Auction Broadside
March 13, 1855
This is an advertisement for the sale of one hundred seventy-eight slaves from the Waverly and Meridith Plantations.

Traders smuggled slaves into Louisiana by way of the state's many bayous and swamps. Rising slave prices in the 1850s produced an increase in this illicit traffic and prompted some white southerners, including many from Louisiana, to petition the federal government for repeal of the African slave trade ban. This petition was unsuccessful.

Most slaves resented being sold as property with very little control over their wellbeing and that of their children. They tried to persuade masters and traders from selling them away from family members and familiar settings, though sellers generally ignored family ties. Others injured themselves or pretended to do so in order to lower their monetary value. Some even committed suicide rather than face a new master and work regimen.

Slaves occasionally engineered mutinies aboard ships while they were transported from the Atlantic coast to Louisiana. One of the most famous mutinies took place on board the Creole in 1841, when slaves took over the ship on its way from Virginia to Louisiana and headed for the Bahamas, a British commonwealth that had abolished slavery in the 1830s. Over the protest of American authorities, the British granted freedom to all slaves aboard the Creole when it arrived in Nassau.

Other groups

During the antebellum period Louisiana began to attract increasing numbers of Italian immigrants, although large groups did not arrive until the 1880s and 1890s. New Orleans was also one of the few United States cities in the nineteenth century to draw immigrants from Spain and Latin America. The city was popular among Hispanics because of its Latin familiarity and geographic proximity. The port also maintained regular shipping lanes to Cuba and Central America.