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By Root 686 0

there were hundreds of booths, stalls, and tables in a line more than a mile long. Latrobe described the sellers: “White men and women, and of all hues of brown, and of all classes of faces, from round Yankees to grizzly and lean Spaniards, black negroes and negresses, filthy Indians half naked, mulattoes curly and straight-haired, quadroons of all shades, long haired and frizzled, women dressed in the most flaring yellow and scarlet gowns, the men capped and hatted.” Their goods, laid out in the shade of ragged canvas tents and awnings or set on palmetto leaves fanned out on the ground, formed a garish collage of strange colors and textures and smells. There were fresh fish in endless profusion and cuts of what Latrobe thought “wretched” red meat (a lot of it had arrived in port already butchered and in the hot climate was getting rank). There were wild ducks and other game fowl, shellfish and poultry and eggs, Irish potatoes and sweet potatoes, root vegetables of all sorts, pyramids of oranges, heaps of bananas and ears of corn, oozing stacks of sugarcane, and all manner of dry goods and tinned goods, curios and trinkets—there were, Latrobe said, “more and odder things to be sold in that manner and place than I can numerate.” Latrobe was particularly surprised to find bookstalls; something of a collector, he was delighted to turn up, among the saints’ lives and the deeds of notorious criminals, a rare set of bound volumes of political pamphlets from the Revolutionary War.

But large and garish as the market was, it was only a pocket curio itself amid the immense movements of cargo through the port. The harbor was swarmed: there was an armada of schooners and freighters from the Gulf, and of rafts and barges and flatboats and keelboats from upriver; the steamboats clustered in such mobs that they were sometimes stacked four deep waiting for a turn at the levee. All around the levee crews unloaded cargo. The warehouses were overflowing with the harvest of the river valley and with the manufactured goods coming in from the North and from overseas. In the shadowy coolness of the arched warehouse interiors were mountain ranges of barrels and crates and tuns and hogsheads: fine silk from China and crude ingots of lead from Iowa, handcrafted furniture from France and raw pine lumber from Minnesota, perfumes from the Middle East and rye whiskey from Pennsylvania. All kinds of basic goods were waiting for transport up the river—coffee, salt, flat-head nails, vinegar, whale oil, rolls of gingham, and crates of window glass. There was also quite a lot of food coming in, not only tinned delicacies from Europe but staple foods—flour and grains and legumes, enormous barrels of beef and pork—and corrals and pens were crammed with livestock. And spilling out from all the warehouses were the goods for export—the cotton bales, the raw sugarcane, the sheaves of tobacco. Millions of bales of cotton were transshipped through New Orleans every year, along with hundreds of thousands of hogsheads of sugarcane and tens of thousands of hogsheads of tobacco. Almost all of it was bound for New York for consignment sale in New England and in Europe. The planters of the lower valley dealt exclusively with brokers, factors, and commission men in New York City and had no direct dealings with their ultimate buyers around the world. The outflow of cotton and sugarcane was growing every year, making New Orleans and the lower valley enormously rich—but also building up destabilizing pressures in the regional economy that would shortly prove catastrophic. No one cared much, as long as the money was pouring in. But there was a reason why the levee was groaning under that weight of imported food and livestock. Even though the lower valley had some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, so much of it had been planted with cotton and sugar that by midcentury the region was no longer self-sufficient in food.

If there was a heart to the city, it was down from the old French Quarter, behind the warehouse district at the southwest curve of the waterfront