Editing New Orleans (section)

===Port of New Orleans===
[[File:Hippolyte Sebron - Bateaux A Vapeur Géants 1853.jpg|thumb|Mississippi River [[Steamboats of the Mississippi|steamboats]] at New Orleans, 1853]]

As a [[port]], New Orleans played a major role during the [[Antebellum South|antebellum]] period in the [[Atlantic slave trade]]. The port handled commodities for export from the interior and imported goods from other countries, which were warehoused and transferred in New Orleans to smaller vessels and distributed along the Mississippi River watershed. The river was filled with steamboats, flatboats and sailing ships. Despite its role in the [[History of slavery|slave trade]], New Orleans at the time also had the largest and most prosperous community of free persons of color in the nation, who were often educated, middle-class property owners.<ref name="pbsjazz">{{cite web |url=https://www.pbs.org/jazz/places/places_new_orleans.htm |title=New Orleans: The Birthplace of Jazz |website=PBS – JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns |format=primarily excerpted from Jazz: A History of America's Music |access-date=May 17, 2006 |archive-date=August 12, 2006 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060812000720/http://www.pbs.org/jazz/places/places_new_orleans.htm |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=History of Les Gens De Couleur Libres |url=http://www.creolehistory.com/ |access-date=May 17, 2006 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060522221017/http://www.creolehistory.com/ |archive-date=May 22, 2006}}</ref>

[[File:Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda at New Orleans, 1842.jpg|thumb|Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda at New Orleans, 1842<ref>{{cite web |first1= |last1= |first2= |last2= |title=St. Louis Hotel & Exchange: Auctioning Off Lives |url=https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/926 |website=New Orleans Historical.org |publisher= |date= |access-date=2025-04-26 |quote= |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20250426142315/https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/926 |archive-date=2025-04-26 }} </ref>]]

Dwarfing the other cities in the Antebellum South, New Orleans had the U.S.' largest slave market. The market expanded after the United States ended the international trade in 1808. Two-thirds of the more than one million slaves brought to the [[Deep South]] arrived via [[forced migration]] in the domestic slave trade. The money generated by the sale of slaves in the [[Upper South]] has been estimated at 15 percent of the value of the staple crop economy. The slaves were collectively valued at half a billion dollars. The trade spawned an ancillary economy—transportation, housing and clothing, fees, etc., estimated at 13.5 percent of the price per person, amounting to tens of billions of dollars (2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) during the antebellum period, with New Orleans as a prime beneficiary.<ref>Walter Johnson, ''Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market'', Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 2, 6</ref>

According to historian Paul Lachance,

{{blockquote|the addition of white immigrants [from Saint-Domingue] to the white creole population enabled French-speakers to remain a majority of the white population until almost 1830. If a substantial proportion of free persons of color and slaves had not also spoken French, however, the [[Gaul|Gallic]] community would have become a minority of the total population as early as 1820.{{sfn|Gitlin|2009|p=159}}}}

After the Louisiana Purchase, numerous [[English Americans|Anglo-Americans]] migrated to the city. The population doubled in the 1830s and by 1840, New Orleans had become the nation's wealthiest and the third-most populous city, after [[New York City|New York]] and [[Baltimore]].<ref>Lewis, Peirce F., ''New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape'', Santa Fe, 2003, p. 175</ref> German and Irish immigrants began arriving in the 1840s, working as port laborers. In this period, the state legislature passed more restrictions on [[manumission]]s of slaves and virtually ended it in 1852.<ref name="manumission"/>

In the 1850s, white Francophones remained an intact and vibrant community in New Orleans. They maintained instruction in French in two of the city's four school districts (all served white students).{{sfn|Gitlin|2009|p= 166}} In 1860, the city had 13,000 free people of color (''gens de couleur libres''), the class of free, mostly [[Multiracial Americans|mixed-race]] people that expanded in number during French and Spanish rule. They set up some private schools for their children. The census recorded 81 percent of the free people of color as [[mulatto]], a term used to cover all degrees of mixed race.<ref name="manumission">[http://www.kotlikoff.net/sites/default/files/The%20Manumission%20of%20Slaves%20in%20New%20Orleans,%201827-1846.pdf Lawrence J. Kotlikoff and Anton J. Rupert, "The Manumission of Slaves in New Orleans, 1827–1846"] {{Webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140408225223/http://www.kotlikoff.net/sites/default/files/The%20Manumission%20of%20Slaves%20in%20New%20Orleans,%201827-1846.pdf |date=April 8, 2014 }}, ''Southern Studies'', Summer 1980</ref>{{page needed|date=February 2024}} Mostly part of the Francophone group, they constituted the artisan, educated and professional class of African Americans. The mass of blacks were still enslaved, working at the port, in domestic service, in crafts, and mostly on the many large, surrounding [[sugarcane]] plantations.

Throughout New Orleans' history, until the early 20th century when medical and scientific advances ameliorated the situation, the city suffered repeated [[List of epidemics and pandemics|epidemic]]s of [[yellow fever]] and other tropical and [[Infection|infectious diseases]].<ref>{{cite news |title=How Yellow Fever Turned New Orleans Into The 'City Of The Dead' |url=https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/10/31/415535913/how-yellow-fever-turned-new-orleans-into-the-city-of-the-dead |work=NPR |date=October 31, 2018 |access-date=July 21, 2023 |archive-date=June 28, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230628214054/https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/10/31/415535913/how-yellow-fever-turned-new-orleans-into-the-city-of-the-dead |url-status=live }}</ref> In the first half of the 19th century, yellow fever epidemics killed over 150,000 people in New Orleans.<ref>{{cite news |title=A lesson from history: How the yellow fever epidemic changed society |url=https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2020/05/10/a-lesson-from-history-how-the-yellow-fever-epidemic-changed-society#:~:text=Yellow%20fever%20killed%20more%20than,with%20references%20to%20yellow%20fever. |work=[[Palo Alto Weekly]] |date=May 10, 2020 |access-date=July 21, 2023 |archive-date=July 21, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230721161220/https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/news/2020/05/10/a-lesson-from-history-how-the-yellow-fever-epidemic-changed-society#:~:text=Yellow%20fever%20killed%20more%20than,with%20references%20to%20yellow%20fever. |url-status=live }}</ref>

After growing by 45 percent in the 1850s, by 1860, the city had nearly 170,000 people.<ref name="nystrom">{{cite book |last=Nystrom |first=Justin A. |title=New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom |url={{google books |plainurl=y |id=ZXYUCz-PjCAC |page=6}} |year=2010 |publisher=JHU Press |isbn=978-0-8018-9997-3 |pages=6–}}</ref> It had grown in wealth, with a "per capita income [that] was second in the nation and the highest in the South."<ref name="nystrom"/> The city had a role as the "primary commercial gateway for the nation's booming midsection."<ref name="nystrom"/> The port was the nation's third largest in terms of tonnage of imported goods, after Boston and New York, handling 659,000 tons in 1859.<ref name="nystrom"/>