This article describes the rapid economic decline of New Orleans after the Civil War and examines some of the reasons for it. It focuses on the elite merchant community of New Orleans, which had been the Old South’s primary urban commercial and financial center. The article details how complacent attitudes among these long-powerful commodities merchants contributed to a variety of poor decisions and inadequate responses to radically changed postwar conditions. In addition, the wartime devastation of the city’s banking sector, along with broad structural changes to postemancipation southern agriculture and the reorientation of intra- and interregional trade patterns, are all shown to have quickly combined to push the former first-rank American city down onto the dependent lower rungs of the American urban system during the decades immediately following the Civil War.
Whitelaw Reid, After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865-1866 (1866; repr., New York, 1965), 240 (first quotation), 237 (second quotation). Mercantile support for secret societies was noted by John Richard Dennett in The South As It Is, 1865-1866, ed. Henry M. Christman (Athens, GA, 1986), 308; also see Lawrence N. Powell, "Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics," Slavery & Abolition 20 (April 1999): 127-49. On political violence and factionalism in Reconstruction-era New Orleans, see James G. Hollandsworth Jr., An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866 (Baton Rouge, 2001); James K. Hogue, Uncivil Wars: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge, 2006), esp. 129-31; and Scott P. Marler, "Merchants and the Political Economy of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana: New Orleans and Its Hinterlands" (PhD diss., Rice University, 2007), chap. 7. Ella Lonn’s Reconstruction in Louisiana after 1868 (1918; repr., New York, 1967) is a Dunning School interpretation of political events, parts of which may still be used with caution; but for an excellent recent corrective, see Lawrence Powell, "Centralization and Its Discontents in Reconstruction Louisiana," Studies in American Political Development 20 (October 2006): 105-31.
2.
T. Harry Williams, "The Louisiana Unification Movement of 1873," Journal of Southern History 11 (August 1945): 349-69; Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1974), 283-84, 291-96. On machine politics in postbellum New Orleans, see Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880-1896, 2nd ed. (Lafayette, LA, 1997); and Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (Urbana, IL, 1991), chap. 3. The complexities of state and municipal politics before the Civil War are described by John M. Sacher in A Perfect War of Politics: Parties, Politicians, and Democracy in Louisiana, 1824-1861 (Baton Rouge, 2003). Charles Nordhoff, The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875 (1876; repr., New York, 1971), 41-44 (quotation 42); The Nation, April 24, 1873.
3.
Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 279. The historiographical dominance of racially focused political narratives is manifest in the works by Hollandsworth and Hogue cited above, but also see Ted Tunnell, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism, and Race in Louisiana, 1862-1877 (Baton Rouge, 1984); and Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, NJ, 1978). A valuable recent exception is Michael A. Ross, "Resisting the New South: Commercial Crisis and Decline in New Orleans, 1865-85," American Nineteenth-Century History 4 (Spring 2003): 59-76.
4.
"Annual Review of the New Orleans Market," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 5 (September 1868): 877; for a similar view by a former New Orleans bank president, see Robert M. Davis, The Southern Planter, the Factor, and the Banker (New Orleans, 1871). Durant Daponte, "New Orleans and Ship Island Ship Canal," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (January 1869): 21-22; Robert Somers, The Southern States since the War, 1870-71 (1871; repr., University, AL, 1965), 191-92 (quotation 192); Thomas W. Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field: Southern Adventure in Time of War (New York, 1865), 396; "Why New Orleans Was Destroyed," New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 16, 1873; also see the letter from "B.J.S." (Opelousas, LA), in ibid., July 19, 1873.
5.
Daponte, "New Orleans and Ship Island Ship Canal," 22; "Annual Review of the New Orleans Market," 877. The historiography on antebellum New Orleans’s economy is more extensive than that on the post-Civil War era, although it is not as well developed as one might expect given its importance to the Old South; see, e.g., John G. Clark, "New Orleans and the River: A Study in Attitudes and Responses," Louisiana History 8 (Winter 1967): 117-35; Lawrence H. Larsen, "New Orleans and the River Trade: Reinterpreting the Role of the Business Community," Wisconsin Magazine of History 61 (Winter 1977-1978): 112-24; Merl E. Reed, New Orleans and the Railroads: The Struggle for Commercial Empire, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge, 1966); and Robert Earl Roeder, "New Orleans Merchants, 1800-1837" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1959).
6.
William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 99-101; J. Mills Thornton, "Fiscal Policy and the Failure of Radical Reconstruction in the Lower South," in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1982), 351, 383-84; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 67; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 59-61. Also see Edward King, The Great South; A Journey through Louisiana (Hartford, CT, 1875), chap. 1-8. H. C. Warmoth, War, Politics and Reconstruction: Stormy Days in Louisiana (New York, 1930), 79-80; New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 29, 1873. In 1881 the Picayune published statistics showing that New Orleans ranked last in municipal services compared to five other U.S. cities; see the chart compiled from these data in Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 97-98.
7.
Andrew Morrison, The Industries of New Orleans . . . Historical, Descriptive, Statistical (New Orleans, 1885), 27-29; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 358-61; Davis, Southern Planter, 5-6; "Annual Review of the New Orleans Market" [1868], 889; John B. Legler and Richard Sylla, "Integration of U.S. Capital Markets: Southern Stock Markets and the Case of New Orleans, 1871-1913," in Finance, Intermediaries, and Economic Development, ed. Stanley L. Engerman, Philip T. Hoffman, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff (New York, 2003), 148-51 (quotation 151). Aggregate bank capitalization in Louisiana continued to drop through the end of the century; it stood at only $3.73 million in 1875 and was less than $2.5 million in 1897; Stephen A. Caldwell, A Banking History of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1935), chap. 7 and appendix II (128).
8.
New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 6 and 10 (quotations), March 13, 1866; James E. Boyle, Cotton and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange: A Century of Commercial Evolution (Garden City, NY, 1934), 68-71; Morrison, Industries of New Orleans, 27-29. Also see L. Tuffly Ellis, "The New Orleans Cotton Exchange: The Formative Years, 1871-1880," Journal of Southern History 39 (November 1973): 545-64. For antebellum merchants’ failure to establish a cotton exchange, see "Cotton at New Orleans," Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 42 (January 1860): 105-6.
9.
Ellis, "New Orleans Cotton Exchange," 548-51.
10.
Minute Book B [April-May 1875], 142-51, 205 (first quotation 143), August 1873 circular in ibid., 43 (second quotation), ibid. (November 29, 1876), 292 (third quotation), all in New Orleans Cotton Exchange Collection (Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University; cited hereinafter as NOCEX Records, HTML-Tulane). In November 1876 exchange president William C. Black noted "how far from peculiar to New Orleans were the irregularities" in the cotton trade; ibid., 311-12. The New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 25 and 27, 1879, also waxed smug about cotton thievery in New York markets.
11.
Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans, 42-73; James P. Baughman, Charles Morgan and the Development of Southern Transportation (Nashville, 1968), 172-77; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 353. The comparative estimate of shipping costs is from Daponte, "New Orleans and the Ship Island Ship Canal," 26-27. For similar postwar complaints about port costs and operations, see "Through Freights and Close Connections," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (July 1869): 571-74; and New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 6, 1866. On the tugboat monopoly, see the critical article from the Chicago Tribune reprinted in New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 22, 1873. Raymond J. Martinez, The Story of the River Front at New Orleans (New Orleans, 1955), 33-36.
12.
George S. Pabis, "Delaying the Deluge: The Engineering Debate over Flood Control on the Lower Mississippi River, 1846-1861," Journal of Southern History 64 (August 1998): 423-25, 450-54; John M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York, 1997), chap. 1-6; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 58-59. For examples of General Beauregard’s high-profile meddling with river policies, see New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 15, 1873, and June 28, 1879; also see T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray (1955; repr., Baton Rouge, 1995), 288-90. On the New Orleans Cotton Exchange and levees, see Minute Book B, 19-20, 70, NOCEX Records, HTML-Tulane.
13.
Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, NM, 2003), 55-56 and figure 11; Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 149; James P. Baughman, "The Evolution of Rail-Water Transportation Systems in the Gulf Southwest, 1836-1890," Journal of Southern History 34 (August 1968): 372-73; Minute Book B, 9-10, 88 (quotation), 122-23, NOCEX Records, HTML-Tulane; King, The Great South, 51; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 65-67; Warmoth, War, Politics and Reconstruction, 81-84; "Railroad Policy for the South," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 5 (July 1868): 607-11; New Orleans Daily True Delta, December 3, 1865; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 58. Also see Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity: Aid under the Radical Republicans, 1865-1877 (Princeton, NJ, 1984). For a brief, acerbic account of state railroad development in the nineteenth century, see George Washington Cable, The Creoles of Louisiana (1884; repr., New York, 1970), 246-52.
14.
Legler and Sylla, "Integration of U.S. Capital Markets," 136-39 and appendix 5.1 (quotation 139).
15.
Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 157; New Orleans Cotton Exchange report appended to Henry G. Hester to Alcee Fortier, October 4, 1900, in Series 5, Cotton Trade Series (Mss 537; HTML-Tulane); Norman Walker, "Manufactures," in Standard History of New Orleans, ed. Henry Rightor (Chicago, 1900), 532-33. In fact, the overall pace of cotton mill growth in the late nineteenth-century "New South" has been overstated by some historians, as is reflected in regional data on cotton retained for domestic consumption. Compared to late antebellum figures, the total crop retained in the South actually fell in proportion to that used by the North during Reconstruction, when the ratio was about 10-1 in the North’s favor. At the end of the century southern consumption of cotton was still less than half that used by northern mills; see Statistical Abstract of the United States, no. 22 (1899; repr., New York, 1964), table 72 (331).
16.
A detailed account of the history of the Louisiana Lottery Company by a contemporary "muckraking" journalist is Clarence C. Buel, "The Degradation of a State; or, The Charitable Career of the Louisiana Lottery," Century Magazine 43 (February 1892): 618-33. Also see Berthold C. Alwes, "The History of the Louisiana State Lottery Company," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 27 (October 1944): 933-1118, esp. 1020-23; and Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard, 291-303. Data on the total capital invested in Orleans Parish manufacturing is from the 1880 U.S. census, as available through the University of Virginia Libraries’ Historical Census Browser, located online at http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/ histcensus/ (accessed September 23, 2009).
17.
Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 19, 25-27; Ellis, "New Orleans Cotton Exchange," 559; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 68. Also see [Illinois Central Railroad], The Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Outlook for New Orleans (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1894), 10; Morrison, Industries of New Orleans, 13-15; and typescript history (c. 1966), in folder 1, box 1, Standard Fruit & Steamship Company Papers (Mss 653; HTML-Tulane). Ironically, the term banana republic was coined by the writer O. Henry in the 1890s, after he had fled first to New Orleans, then to Honduras, after his own indictment on embezzlement charges. On New Orleans merchants’ efforts to establish themselves in the cotton trade from Mexico during the Civil War, see Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, 38 Cong., 2nd Sess. (3 vols.; Washington, DC, 1865), III, 17-19; and James W. Daddysman, The Matamoros Trade: Confederate Commerce, Diplomacy, and Intrigue (Newark, DE, 1984), 61-63.
18.
"New Orleans at Rest," New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 14, 1873; Somers, Southern States, 191; also see Larsen, "New Orleans and the River Trade."
19.
"An Abstract of . . . the New Orleans Commercial Convention, May 1869," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (August 1869): 688-95; also see "The Bulk Grain Trade," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (May 1869): 837-45. "Chicago and the Mississippi Outlet," De Bow’s Review 2d. ser., 6 (March 1869): 251-56 (quotations 252-53); Braxton Bragg, "The South and the Northwest" [1862], De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (August 1869): 696-99 (quotation 698).
20.
James Parton, "The City of St. Louis," Atlantic Monthly 19 (June 1867): 658 (quotations), 662, 670-71. Parton was familiar with Civil War-era New Orleans because of his recent collaboration with Benjamin F. Butler on a highly sympathetic account of the general’s eight-month rule over the city; see Parton, General Butler in New Orleans; Being a History of the Administration of the Department of the Gulf in the Year 1862 (New York, 1864). On prosouthern sympathizers in St. Louis and Missouri, also see Knox, Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field, 23-34, 55-56; and Christopher Phillips, Missouri’s Confederate Governor: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia, MO, 2000), esp. 290-94. On St. Louis businessmen’s late antebellum competition with Chicago and their tilt toward the South, see Jeffrey S. Adler, Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West (New York, 1991), 172-74; Wyatt W. Belcher, The Economic Rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850-1880 (New York, 1947), 101-25; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 295-309; and Timothy R. Mahoney, River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870 (New York, 1990), 213-19, 239-42.
21.
Autobiographical manuscript of Charles Winder Squires (3 vols.), III, 19-20, 23-25 (quotations 23 and 25), in W. H. T. Squires Papers (Mss 1644-Z, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). For the shift of other New Orleans cotton factors into the western trade, see the signatories to the notice published by "Western Produce Merchants," New Orleans Daily Picayune, June 15, 1873. On the rapid postwar resumption of river trade between St. Louis and New Orleans, see J. E. Hilary Skinner, After the Storm; or, Jonathan and His Neighbours in 1865-6 (2 vols., London, 1866), I, 299-300; and Oscar O. Winther, The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 1865-1890 (New York, 1964), 74-75. Examples of New Orleans’s sudden infatuation with the possibilities of trade with St. Louis are "St. Louis, a Port of Entry," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 1 (March 1866): 309-10; S. Waterhouse, "St. Louis, the Future Capital of the United States," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 5 (December 1868): 1096-1100; "The Grain Movement," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (May 1869): 440; and William M. Burwell, "Plan of Through Trade between St. Louis and Liverpool by Way of New Orleans," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (August 1869): 633-42.
22.
New Orleans Price Current, September 1, 1865, quoted in William E. Highsmith, "Louisiana Land-holding during War and Reconstruction," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 38 (January 1955): 43; also see "Annual Review of the Mobile Cotton Market," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 5 (October 1868): 972. "Abstract of the New Orleans Commercial Convention," 692 (quotation); Belcher, Economic Rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago, 101-2; Winther, Transportation Frontier, 84-85; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 61-62.
23.
Reid, After the War, 482; Nordhoff, Cotton States, 70-71; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 374-80. On the emergence of sharecropping as the dominant mode of production in the South during Reconstruction, see Gerald David Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York, 1986); and Scott P. Marler, "Labor Systems," in Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Richard Zuczek (2 vols., Westport, CT, 2006), I, 367-70. The embrace of cotton production by white yeoman farmers after the war is described in Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York, 1983); for the similar but more gradual trend in Louisiana, see Roger W. Shugg, Origins of Class Struggle in Louisiana (1939; repr., Baton Rouge, 1968), 269-73.
24.
Davis, Southern Planter; "Monthly Markets," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 6 (May 1869): 442; Edwin De Leon, "The New South," Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 49 (September 1874): 557; Somers, Southern States, 197. Data on New Orleans receipts as a proportion of total antebellum cotton production were compiled from E. J. Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton (1872; repr., Wilmington, Del., 1973).
25.
For the impact of emancipation and sharecropping on the postbellum southern financial system, see Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, 2nd ed. (New York, 2001), 51-52, 87-113; and John A. James, "Financial Underdevelopment in the Postbellum South," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (Winter 1981): 443-54. Richard H. Kilbourne Jr. emphasizes the role of slave collateral in his Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 1825-1885 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1995).
26.
New Orleans Price Current, March 15, 1871; Davis, Southern Planter, 10; "The Factor and the Planter," New Orleans Price Current, March 15, 1871. Also see Somers, Southern States, 198; Richard H. Kilbourne Jr., "The Ongoing Agricultural Credit Crisis in the Florida Parishes of Louisiana, 1865- 1890," in A Fierce and Fractious Frontier: The Curious Development of Louisiana’s Florida Parishes, 1699-2000, ed. Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (Baton Rouge, 2004), 128-30; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 117-28; and Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925 (Lexington, KY, 1968), 296-303.
27.
On the Mann-Fischer Brothers relationship, see Mann, Fischer & Co. Account Books, 1869-1880 (Mss 896, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge); see the similar arrangements in East Feliciana Parish described in Kilbourne, Debt, Investment, Slaves, 110-29, 141-51; and Elliott Ashkenazi, The Business of Jews in Louisiana, 1840-1875 (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1988), 67-91. "Plantation stores" seem to have been most common in the rich alluvial parishes that bordered the Natchez District; see Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (1983; repr., Urbana, IL, 1990), 186-91. New Orleans Price Current, March 15, 1871.
28.
Boyle, Cotton and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 99-100 (quotation 100), 104-9, 164; New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 14, 1873; M. B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry: An Essay in American Economic History. Part I: The Cotton Culture and the Cotton Trade (New York, 1897), 291-99; Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 273-77.
29.
De Leon, "New South," 558; John F. Stover, The Railroads of the South, 1865-1890: A Study in Finance and Control (Chapel Hill, NC, 1955), 190-93; Hammond, Cotton Industry, 298-300; E. Merton Coulter, "Commercial Intercourse with the Confederacy in the Mississippi Valley, 1861-1865," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 5 (March 1919): 385-87; Legler and Sylla, "Integration of U.S. Capital Markets," 151.
30.
Squires autobiographical manuscript, III, 25; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 61-62 (quotation 62), 67. For early Crescent City expressions of concern over St. Louis’s designs on the Red River Valley trade, see "Railroad Connections between Texas and Missouri," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 1 (March 1866): 319-20; and "Trade between St. Louis and Arkansas," De Bow’s Review 2nd ser., 1 (April 1866): 424-25. On urban and commercial growth in postbellum Mississippi, see John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), 80-113; on Tennessee and Alabama, see Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 76-110. On Galveston, Houston, and the Texas trade, see Baughman, Charles Morgan and the Development of Southern Transportation, 191-97; also see New Orleans Daily True Delta, December 3, 1865. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 274-75.
31.
Joseph Nimmo Jr., Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States, 48 Cong., 2nd Sess., Ex. Doc. 7, part 3 (Washington, DC, 1885), 77-85 (first and second quotations 79, third quotation 82). Also see Emory R. Johnson, T. W. Van Metre, G. G. Huebner, and D. S. Hanchett, History of the Domestic and Foreign Commerce of the United States (2 vols.; Washington, DC, 1915), I, 278-81. Cotton receipts at Galveston roughly doubled every decade between 1870 and 1900. In 1899, its cotton exports briefly surpassed those of New Orleans for the first time, but after the island port was laid flat by a hurricane in September 1900, its commerce never fully recovered; see Statistical Abstract of the United States, table 57 (282).
32.
Nimmo, Report on Internal Commerce, 79-80, 85 (quotation 85); Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers, 288-94. The 1860-1861 crop figures are from Donnell, Chronological and Statistical History of Cotton, 503-5.
33.
All figures are calculated from the data in Table 1. The "five cotton states" are those identified as such in Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom. Nimmo, Report on Internal Commerce, 85 (quotation).
34.
[Illinois Central Railroad], Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Outlook for New Orleans, 4; Ross, "Resisting the New South," 71-73; New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 6, 1878, quoted in ibid., 67; Caldwell, Banking History of Louisiana, 111. On devastation and slow recovery in the Louisiana sugar industry, see Charles P. Roland, "Difficulties of Civil War Sugar Planting in Louisiana," Louisiana Historical Quarterly 38 (October 1955): 58-59; and John A. Heitmann, The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 (Baton Rouge, 1987), 68-90. On the participation of outside capital in the postwar southern agricultural sector, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951; repr., Baton Rouge, 1971), 118-20. As Woodward notes, development of the lumber industry in western Louisiana during the late nineteenth century was sponsored by outside capital, and most profits were siphoned off to Texas-based interests backed by English investors. Much the same was true of the nascent rice industry concentrated in the sparsely populated coastal plains of southwestern Louisiana. Moreover, like the slow-recovering Louisiana sugar sector, rice production faced stout competition from neighboring states after the turn of the century; by 1910, both Arkansas and Texas produced more rice than Louisiana, and in terms of value, the staple accounted for less than one-third of the state’s agricultural output at its proportional peak through World War II; see Edward Hake Phillips, "The Gulf Coast Rice Industry," Agricultural History 25 (April 1951): 91-96. The postwar economic trajectories of Louisiana and Texas are suggestively compared in Linda Kay Murphy, "The Shifting Economic Relationships of the Cotton South: A Study of the Financial Relationships of the South during Its Industrial Development, 1864-1913" (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 1999), 76-78. On the developmental symbiosis between nineteenth-century Chicago and its hinterlands, see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis.
35.
Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 150-51 (quotation 150); Legler and Sylla, "Integration of U.S. Capital Markets," 153. New Orleans’s rapid descent from a first-order U.S. banking center to third-rank status is described in James, "Financial Underdevelopment in the Postbellum South," 446-47, 453-54; and Michael P. Conzen, "The Maturing Urban System of the United States, 1840-1910," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67 (March 1977): 88-108. The reinscribed map of regional banking imposed by the Federal Reserve not only assigned northern Louisiana’s cotton parishes to the Dallas bank’s supervision but also added insult to injury by relegating New Orleans itself to the administration of Atlanta’s. For other insights into New Orleans’s anomalous status in the gradually urbanizing New South, see Lawrence H. Larsen, The Rise of the Urban South (Lexington, KY, 1985), 148-52; Morton J. Rothstein, "The New South and the International Economy," Agricultural History 57 (Fall 1983): 385-402; and David Goldfield, "A Regional Framework for the Urban South," in Region, Race, and Cities: Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge, 1997), 45-49.
36.
For data on the composition of New Orleans commerce and its relative position compared with other ports at the turn of the century, see Statistical Abstract of the United States, 136, 145, 364, 366; on the grain trade, also see U.S. Treasury Department, Bureau of Statistics, Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance of the United States, January 1900 (Washington, DC, 1900), 1981-83. Historian Ari Kelman places questionable emphasis on the postbellum grain trade as a spur to local economic development in A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley, CA, 2003), esp. 135-36; cf. Larsen, "New Orleans and the River Trade," 124. On port reforms after the mid-1890s, see Boyle, Cotton and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, 135-36; and Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 153-57.
37.
Daponte, "New Orleans and Ship Island Ship Canal," 26; H[enry] Grady Meador, "Port Commerce and the Industrial Development of New Orleans," Port Record 1 (September 1942): 17; also see Richard Tate, "Latin American Trade Will Help Unify New Orleans and the Mid-West," Port Record 1 (April 1943): 28.
