Bruce E. Baker

New Orleans history resources

(keyed to HIS2170: History of New Orleans)

Sample Research Report

Bruce E. Baker

Statement of Scope of Report (153/150-200)

The question for this report was quite broad: “What can this source tell us about criminality related to the cotton trade?” Given the date of the source (1866) it is important to note that it gives us a snapshot of a particular time, immediately after the Civil War, when the cotton trade had been severely disrupted and was being reconfigured. It was also a time when New Orleans had seen a considerable influx of people, especially African Americans, from outlying areas, so these impoverished new residents might have contributed to higher rates of property crime. This report considers the question as presented, and it gives particular attention to the relationship between the “river police” and the courts and cotton theft. It does not, however, devote any attention to what became of the cotton once it was acquired by the river pirates or how they disposed of it.

Discussion of Primary Sources (128/100-150)

They key primary source is a newspaper article: “River Pirates—Stealing Cotton,” New Orleans Crescent, November 27, 1866, p.2. As a major city, New Orleans had several newspapers. The Crescent was edited by James Oscar Nixon and had in the 1850s been aligned with the Know-Nothing Party. While Nixon served in the Confederate army, this earlier political alignment and the claim that “postwar issues of the New Orleans Crescent were politically moderate” suggests that it is probably no more or less reliable than any other source when it comes to reporting on crime and social disorder.1 This sort of article, reporting the details of a crime and putting it in the context of broader patterns of criminality, is quite common in the city’s newspapers in this period.

Historiography (473/300-500)

We need to situate this source within several historiographies, some much more developed than others. Most broadly, we should see this as part of the historiography of New Orleans during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Justin Nystrom has written the most recent and comprehensive book on this, but work by James Illingworth, John K. Bardes, and parts of John Blassingame’s older monograph provide context for the social history surrounding this source. Much less attention has been paid to the cotton trade and the details of the New Orleans waterfront in this period. They key scholar here is Harold G. Woodman, in a series of articles and his monograph King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925. Labour historian Eric Arnesen has detailed the work that went on at the waterfront, though his focus is primarily organised labour and his book Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 covers a long period with very little devoted to the immediate postwar period. Studies of criminality in New Orleans focus overwhelmingly on prostitution, especially in the early twentieth century, along with some attention to the history of organised crime and racial violence. The only historian looking in detail at crime on the waterfront in this period is Bruce E. Baker, and his article on the loose cotton economy of the New Orleans waterfront is very relevant here.2

Report (631/500-1000)

This newspaper article uses an account of the discovery of fourteen sacks of cotton, presumably stolen, recovered by the police to crack open the world of the cotton trade and cotton theft on the New Orleans waterfront immediately following the Civil War.

Even in such a brief account, we glean important information on how shipping of cotton out of New Orleans worked in this period. The incident happens in late November, in the midst of the port’s cotton season. Since the sacks were discovered on the batture at the foot of Julia Street, there is a very good chance that this is where they were being loaded, especially since the article suggests they were seized because (somehow) they were identified as being stolen from the steamship Reindeer. This tells us something about how the waterfront was configured and where cotton was shipped from. The sacks were found on the batture, so it is unclear whether the Reindeer would have been moored at a wharf, but it does suggest that the waterfront was a busy, crowded place in this period. It is possible that if the cotton trade had declined during the Civil War that the wharves had not been properly maintained and thus more loading and unloading might have taken place on the batture instead.

The river police were the ones who responded to this. It would be worth learning more about the river police, but presumably they were a division of the police force responsible for the river itself and the immediate waterfront area. They took the sacks to the central police station, and there is a suggestion that this was common practice and that the cotton was often unclaimed, becoming property of the city. This could have provided a regular stream of income, possibly to the police themselves.

The article provides some useful information on how cotton thieves, described here as “river pirates”, operated. First, it seems that theft of entire bales of cotton as less common than theft of smaller quantities that could be carried away in sacks. It is useful to learn that a ship’s mate “has the right of disposing of the sweepings”, which probably means the bits of cotton lying around when bales were being loaded and unloaded. These customary rights to work products are something that was much more common in an earlier phase before the full transition to waged work, as Peter Linebaugh argues about shipbuilding in The London Hanged.3 This would provide a rationale for a ship’s mate having cotton to sell and could provide a cover for theft of cotton. The article also mentions that the mate had engaged a “private watchman” to supervise the sacks of cotton, suggesting that there may have been some system of watchmen making a living by guarding cotton (and probably other goods) along the waterfront in this period. It is not spelled out here, but it seems that John McGuire is the mate of the Reindeer. The article suggests that cotton thieves would drop their sacks of cotton if they had to escape the police, but they knew that unclaimed cotton could be regained through the courts. By filing a writ of sequestration, the thief was able to assert his right to the cotton, and if no one came along to contest the claim, he would wind up with legal ownership of the property he had been trying to steal when interrupted by the police, in some ways a more secure position than if he had made a clean getaway. This seems to be what McGuire was trying to do, except that the police were already suspicious about this particular lot of cotton and arrested him.

Further Research (203/200-250)

This newspaper article suggests several possibilities for further research. It would be useful to understand more about the role of ships’ mates and their customary rights since the source suggests they had a right to gather loose cotton as a supplement to their wages. Perhaps literature on maritime history generally would shed light on this; Leon Fink’s book Sweatshops at Sea might be a good place to start. The use of a writ of sequestration by thieves is intriguing and seems to have been common enough that the reporter could explain it. Were judges and court officers complicit? Figuring out the web of connections and interests would be complex but probably worthwhile. Since this is a maritime environment, these cases were presumably under admiralty jurisdiction, so the records would be at NARA in Fort Worth, though the newspapers may have listed these cases in their regular reports on the U.S. federal courts. It would also be helpful to look at secondary literature on maritime law to understand how a writ of sequestration works. If this particular incident was worth writing about as an example, it would probably be possible to learn more about the Reindeer and McGuire through further newspaper searches and perhaps Lloyd’s List.4

Notes

1. https://lib.lsu.edu/collections/digital/dlnp/newspaper-histories/Neworleans-Crescent.↩

2. Justin A. Nystrom, New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); James Illingworth, "’Erroneous and Incongruous Notions of Liberty’: Urban Unrest and the Origins of Radical Reconstruction in New Orleans, 1865-1868,” in Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly, eds., After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 35-57; John K. Bardes, "Redefining Vagrancy: Policing Freedom and Disorder in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1862–1868," Journal of Southern History 84: 1 (Feb. 2018): 7-38; John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860-1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990 [1968]); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Elizabeth Parish Smith, “Southern sirens: disorderly women and the fight for public order in reconstruction-era New Orleans” (PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013); William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Bruce E. Baker, "The Loose Cotton Economy of the New Orleans Waterfront in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson, eds., Capitalism's Hidden Worlds (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 67-80↩

3. Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2003), 371-401.↩

4. Leon Fink, Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).↩

Weekly Resources

  • Week 1: 27 January 2020
    • Lecture - Introduction: Origins of New Orleans
      • QUESTION: To what extent was New Orleans founded in an inevitable and natural location?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: If we understand why New Orleans was located where it was, we will understand how it fit into the larger imperial context of which it was a part and how its establishment affected, but did not determine, the city’s future trajectory.
      • IDEA #1: At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the future site of New Orleans was on the periphery of several imperial systems and Native American groups.
      • IDEA #2: New Orleans was established to be an administrative and commercial centre for a French settlement that would challenge Britain and Spain for hegemony in North America and link up with France’s Caribbean sugar colonies.
    • Seminar - A River and Its City (Prologue, Ch. 1)
      • This map shows the drainage basin of the Mississippi River.
      • You can click on parts of this map to see the drainage basin of various rivers in the United States.
  • Week 2: 3 February 2020
    • Lecture - Colonial New Orleans
      • QUESTION #1: What role did Louisiana play in the imperial systems and struggles of the late eighteenth century?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: Once we see Louisiana within a broader imperial context, we will understand why it came into American hands in the early nineteenth century.
      • IDEA #1: France’s goals for New Orleans turned out to be harder to achieve than they had hoped in the forty years after the city was founded, and by the time of the Seven Years’ War, they were glad to get rid of it.
      • IDEA #2: New Orleans thrived under Spanish rule, but it did not serve the ends of the Spanish Empire very well, so by the end of the eighteenth century, they too were glad to get rid of it.
      • QUESTION #2: In what ways was Louisiana as a society similar to and different from the British colonies (later states) in North America?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: It is all too easy to project a sense of national homogeneity within the United States, which may be applicable to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, back to an earlier period, when it was not, and we need to appreciate the strangeness of the past.
    • Seminar - research report workshop
  • Week 3: 10 February 2020
    • Lecture - The Americanization of New Orleans
      • QUESTION #1: What effects did the Haitian Revolution have on New Orleans?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: When we understand how the Haitian Revolution was connected to New Orleans, we can see the U.S. acquisition of the city as part of a broader process of Caribbean history and not just as an episode in American expansion.
      • IDEA #1: The Haitian Revolution brought ideas about race and slavery in the Age of Revolution to New Orleans, and Haitian immigrants strengthened the city’s ties to the Caribbean, France, and ultimately to Africa.
      • IDEA #2: The United States wanted to have New Orleans in order to consolidate control over its territory as laid out in the 1783 Treaty of Paris and alleviate separatist tensions in the trans-Appalachian region.
    • Seminar - A River and Its City (Ch. 1, Ch. 2)
  • Week 4: 17 February 2020
    • Lecture - Slavery and Steamboats in Antebellum New Orleans
      • QUESTION: What role did slavery play in New Orleans at a local level and what role did New Orleans play in the institution of slavery at a national level?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: The institution of slavery was central to the economic success of New Orleans in the nineteenth century, both locally and in terms of the city’s role in the broader economic, social, and political context of the South.
      • IDEA #1: As the leading urban centre in the South, New Orleans occupied a crucial place in the domestic slave trade.
      • IDEA #2: The large gens du couleur libres population and the urban setting gave the experiences of enslavement a different character in New Orleans than elsewhere.
      • QUESTION: How did the rise of steamboats affect the economic basis of New Orleans?
      • SIGNIFICANCE: The introduction of artifice (in the form of steam power) enabled New Orleanians to exert greater control over nature (in the form of the river) and both expand its commercial hinterland as an export entrepôt and also become a significant importing location.
      • IDEA #1:
      • IDEA #2:
    • Seminar - New Orleans in a Caribbean Slave Economy
  • Week 5: 24 February 2020
  • Week 6: 2 March 2020
    • Surgery (2 hrs)
    • Seminar - group project workshop
  • Week 7: 9 March 2020
    • Lecture - Civil War and Reconstruction
    • Seminar - Politics in Postreconstruction New Orleans
  • Week 8: 16 March 2020
    • Lecture - Postbellum New Orleans in a Caribbean context
    • Seminar - A River and Its City (Ch. 4)
  • Week 9: 23 March 2020
  • Week 10: 27 April 2020
    • Lecture - Literary New Orleans and the Civil Rights Movement
    • Seminar - tourism
  • Week 11: 4 May 2020
    • Film - When the Levees Broke (2hrs out of total of 4hrs)
    • Seminar - group project presentations
  • Week 12: 11 May 2019
    • Surgery (2hrs)
    • Seminar - revision

 

Page revision date: 13-Feb-2020

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