Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819

Thomas Ingersoll's richly detailed and painstakingly researched study of colonial and early republican New Orleans is an unusual contribution to the comparative historiography of slavery, unusual in that it actually does very little "comparing" in the strict and conventional sense of the term. Instead, Ingersoll largely relies on his subject matter itself to do the work of comparison, and in this reliance lies both the strength and weakness of his excellent book. He argues that eighteenth-century New Orleans--originally a French colony before it came under the control first of Spain and then (after a brief reversion to France) of the United States--can serve as a test case for the controversial comparative thesis set forth in Frank Tannenbaum's 1946 work Slave and Citizen. In that book Tannenbaum argues that Latin American slave regimes differed crucially from their British American counterparts in the respect the former held for the "moral personality" of the slave. Spanish and Portuguese slave law, on the one hand, and Catholic religious beliefs, on the other, combined to limit the dehumanization and favor the manumission of slaves in Latin America. In the British colonies, the brutality of slavery went unchecked by these humanizing influences, and a legal and cultural aversion to manumission inhibited the development of a free black buffer class that might have facilitated the transition to a post-slave society. (Slavery in the French colonies, Tannenbaum suggested, fell somewhere in between these two extremes.) Ingersoll wants to revisit this now somewhat dated thesis, and he believes that by studying New Orleans with the aid of what he calls a "social model" of analysis, the Tannenbaum paradigm and its progeny can be laid to rest for good.

Ingersoll's argument actually consists of two related but distinct strands of analysis, and though he not as clear as he could be about the relationship between the two, it will help to situate his book in the context of the comparative historiography of slavery if we first try to distinguish between them. His first claim is that of the "clear superiority" of social over cultural history. By a "cultural model" of comparative history, Ingersoll has in mind Tannenbaum's reliance on law and religion for understanding slavery. Ingersoll argues that a focus on these cultural factors blinds us to the reality and practice of slavery, causing historians to substitute an essentialist "gel" for the "naturally protean" materials that make up any society. In his view, the character of any slave community is far more a function of such phenomena as "class, population trends, agriculture, and physical relation to the transatlantic world." To the degree that slave societies differ from one another, they do so in the socia-historical terms that Ingersoll uses to identify the uniqueness of colonial New Orleans. But Ingersoll's second claim considerably complicates the first argument: "far more important than any other factor," he says, is "the internal and universal logic of slave society" (122). Ignoring for a moment the vagueness of this formulation, it is not at all clear that Ingersoll has done enough to sort out the relationship between considerations of similarity and difference and between the various levels of analysis in his comparative history. The tension between his allegiance to demographic and economic particularism, on the one hand, and his interest in of New World slave societies, on the other, results in a methodological ambivalence that is never entirely dispelled in this book. Ingersoll is surely right to insist that all slave societies in the Americas required a "basic, large degree of dehumanization...to define a group of people as a race and keep them legally degraded" (xviii). But it is precisely this insistence that complicates his effort to distinguish between "natural families" of slavery (xix) and to isolate the local character of specific colonial social formations.

The ambivalence is related to (and perhaps even generated by) Ingersoll's view of the relationship between New Orleans and both British North American and French Caribbean slavery. Ingersoll argues that because of its demography (a population in which blacks outnumbered whites, but not so disproportionately as in Saint-Domingue or Barbados), economy (indigo rather than sugar, at least until very late in the eighteenth century), and low rate of planter absenteeism, New Orleans belongs to the family of mainland rather than West Indian slave societies. This is so, he observes, despite New Orleans' formal subjection to the French and Spanish monarchies and their respective slave codes (most significantly, the 1724 French Code Noir). Having used the "social model" to distance his subject from the embrace of non-North American history, Ingersoll then tries to assimilate New Orleans to the experience of such colonies as Virginia and South Carolina. Here is where his book cuts against the grain of much recent scholarship on North American slavery, such as Ira Berlin's Many Thousands Gone or Philip Morgan's Slave Counterpoint. With these latter two works, Ingersoll's book shares an allegiance to the sub discipline of social history, but unlike those books he places much more emphasis on the commonalities than the distinctions between various North American regions. One wonders how he would reconcile his own work with the historiography that has dissolved the notion of a single American "version" of slavery.

There are other evident difficulties with Ingersoll's comparative approach. His critique of Tannenbaum fails to acknowledge the earlier revisionist contributions of David Brion Davis (in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Slavery and Human Progress) and Carl Degler (in Neither Black nor White). Granted, while it is unclear in precisely what direction the comparative study of slavery should turn today, Ingersoll's historiographical target in this book is surely passé by now. And even if that target were fresher than it is, the idea that a study focusing solely on New Orleans could be made to serve as a "test" of the Tannenbaum thesis is suspect. It is one thing to compare in rigorous fashion the histories of two or more colonies that began life under the purview of different metropolitan sovereigns, and quite another to limit oneself to a colony that merely passed between various national hands without undergoing surgical reconstruction. In this respect, Ingersoll's belief that New Orleans retained essentially the same organic identity throughout the eighteenth century and thereby defies the Tannenbaum hypothesis verges on tautology. This impression is confirmed by the link that Ingersoll rather conveniently establishes between his discrediting of Tannenbaum and the very different task of explaining why the colony "was incorporated so easily into the United States after 1803 without major cultural conflicts" (xix).

However, despite these problems, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans can and should also be read as a study of a fascinating and unique slave society, one that evolved from a community of plantations "clustered snugly" around a Mississippi river port into a genuinely urban and vibrant commercial center by the end of the eighteenth century. When he sets aside his comparative aspirations and focuses an eye on the internal mechanics of race, gender, and class in New Orleans, Ingersoll has some truly significant things to say, observing in his introduction that "the deeper one penetrates the archives, the more impressed one is by the inability of either [masters or slaves] to maintain solidarity consistently" (xvi). The claim is sustained throughout the text on the basis of exhaustive documentation from the judicial archives of New Orleans, neatly summarized in numerous tables and copiously illustrated in his discussions of such phenomena as marriage patterns among whites and the manumission of slaves (which Ingersoll insists was never as widespread under either the French or Spanish regimes as some historians have claimed). He convincingly argues that New Orleans slaveholders consistently prevented blacks from forming a united class with the potential to overthrow the plantation regime. "Blacks, The Slave Trade, and the Advent of Sugar, 1769-1803" is an excellent chapter that helps to clarify why it was so difficult for a slave community to congeal against the backdrop of periodic surges in the African slave trade to Louisiana. (On the other hand, as one might expect, this same chapter suggests that the problem of creating and maintaining "racial" solidarity was not a neatly symmetrical one but rather took on quite different dimensions for white and black communities.) Finally, the somewhat odd insistence throughout this study on the "moral orderliness" of colonial New Orleans--Ingersoll repeatedly refutes the supposedly popular image of New Orleans as Manon, the "sultry temptress" symbolizing illicit sexuality and chaotic interracial mixing--seems like a much less cogent argument and will probably only have meaning for those with a very specific interest in the history and historiography of this community.