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Robert L. Paquette, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718–1819. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. xxvi, 490 pp. Cloth, $60.00, isbn 1-57233-023-6. Paper, $25.00, isbn 1-57233-024-4.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1053–1054, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700416
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In 1810, two years before Orleans Territory attained statehood as Louisiana, an official census counted more slaves than whites (36,660 to 34,311) and a free colored class that amounted to about 7 percent of the total population. By then, as Thomas N. Ingersoll reminds us, a slave society had existed in and around New Orleans for almost a century. Historians have distinguished New Orleans slave society from mainland counterparts by investigating the interplay of French, Spanish, and African cultural influences during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In gersoll's sprawling synthesis dissents from the prevailing scholarship: The slave society that developed in and around New Orleans not only departed from Caribbean models, it looked “remarkably similar to … the slave society of the Virginia Tidewater.”
In reaching this somewhat surprising conclusion, Ingersoll has read widely in the relevant secondary sources and performed considerable archival research in Paris and New Orleans. The book's title reflects his spirited attempt to interpret the history of early New Orleans in a way that elevates mammon, the slaveholder's covetousness of riches, over Manon, a fictional French temptress who has come to symbolize profligacy and lust in the Big Ea sy. Where other scho la rs ha ve found s ig nificant racial intermixing in a relatively loose and fluid system of urbanoriented social relations, Ingersoll argues for an essential and persistent orderliness maintained by a cohesive class of planters who dominated a dehumanizing racial hierarchy that in basic structure showed remarkable continuity and remained largely impervious to amelioration by cultural forces. Along the way, as the endnotes make clear, he jabs and punches nearly every notable historian who has written during the last several decades on slavery in Louisiana.
