USA > Louisiana > Orleans Parish > New Orleans > Standard history of New Orleans, Louisiana, giving a description of the natural advantages, natural history settlement, Indians, Creoles, municipal and military history, mercantile and commercial interests, banking, transportation, etc. > Part 58
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The height of New Orleans' commercial prosperity and prestige was reached about 1840, when there seemed every certainty that it would become the greatest port in America, but about that time new conditions arose which threatened New Orleans' monopoly of the trade of the Mississippi Valley. The merchants of the city did not see the danger at the time, and did not fully realize that their territory was being invaded. To the superficial observer, it was impossible to see that the commerce of the city was affected when its receipts of produce and its exports and imports continued to grow larger from year to year. None the less the city was rela- tively losing ground commercially, for it was losing its hold upon the trade of the great West, then forging ahcad so rapidly in population and production, and was con- centrating itself too much on handling a single product-cotton-which the South unfortunately believed to be the king and master of the commercial world. New Orleans had, up to that time, been the port not for a section only, but for the whole great valley ; it had handled the sugar of Louisiana, the tobacco of Kentucky, the flour of the Ohio, and the products of all the States of the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri valleys. It let these slip away from it to worship at the shrine of cotton.
The first diversion came from the canals which entered the field as com- petitors with the Mississippi river, upon which New Orleans placed all its de-
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pendence, imagining that its prosperity was coincident with that of the river traffic. The Erie and Ohio canals were begun in 1823. By 1832 the waters of the Upper Ohio were connected with Lake Erie by canal and the latter with the Hudson river by the Erie canal. This gave New York a direct all-water route to the Ohio valley. It was a somewhat long and circuitous route, slow, because of the many locks in it, and completely closed during the winter; but on the other hand, the route to New Orleans down the Ohio and Mississippi had many obstacles and difficulties. The river was full of snags and lined with wrecks, and the winter closed the Ohio as well as the canals. In 1835 the State of Ohio alone shipped 86,000 barrels of flour, 98,000 bushels of wheat and 2,500,000 stavcs to New York, all of which had formerly come to New Orleans. It was a startling commercial change, the first blow that the trade of the city received. Hitherto all the heavier products had gone down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans to be shipped thence to New York, a roundabout route of 3,000 miles, whereas, the direct distance by canal was not more than five or six hundred miles. Many shipments were now made by way of Cleveland and Buffalo. New Orleans scarcely felt the diversion at first and paid too little attention to it. It had as much business as it could well handle and did not see anything to fear from the com- petition of the canals; and indeed, though the canals continued to improve their business, and to handle each year a large amount of Western produce, they did not seem to affect the trade of New Orleans in any material way. The period between 1825 and 1850 showed a greater increase in the river than in the canal trade; and it became at once apparent that the canals were only a makeshift, and were not destined to control the commerce of the country. The fifteen years of competition from 1825 to 1840 between the canals, representing New York, and the river, representing New Orleans, showed the latter to still hold its own well. The products of the lake country of Northern Ohio and those of Western Penn- sylvania found their way to the seaboard by the canals, but as far up the Ohio as Wheeling goods were shipped mainly by river. The competition was scarcely felt at Cincinnati before 1850. All the leading tributaries of Ohio, but particularly the Cumberland and the Tennessce, sent all their produce down the river to New Orleans in steamers and flatboats. A comparison of the business done by the rivers and canals in 1840 shows that the increase in the canal traffic did not keep pace with the rapidly increasing population and production of the valley.
But a new and more dangerous competitor was entering the field, one that was destined to seriously cripple the commerce of the New Orleans, and to transfer
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to other ports much of the trade it had monopolized. A few miles of railroad had been constructed in 1830. The experiment was successful and the railroad mileage increased each year. For the first fifteen or twenty years the railroads were almost wholly local, and of very short mileage. There was no idea of competition with the water routes, and the roads were regarded as excellent institutions to supply trans- portation to market where there were no waterways open. For many years there was no through line connecting the seaboard with the West. There were breaks and gaps in all of the then existing companies. From such transportation as this New Orleans had nothing to fear, and the merchants of the city unfortunately flattered themselves with this idea, that they would be safe years after the railroads had proved their strength and shown that they were likely to control the trade of the country.
In Spanish days, about forty per cent of the exports of New Orleans had consisted of Louisiana products and sixty per cent came from the Ohio valley, and was what is called to this day "Western produce." With the annexation of Louisiana to the United States, the Western produce became a larger element in the com- merce of the city. About 1815, when the steamboat came into vogue, cotton constituted only 12 per cent of the commerce of New Orleans, and all the Southern products only 20 per cent, while 80 per cent of the articles reaching New Orleans were from the West, the upper Ohio and the Mississippi. By 1840 the Western produce had fallen to 61 per cent of the total commerce of New Orleans and 28 per cent was from Louisiana and the neighboring States. From 1840 on, the proportion of Western products reaching New Orleans steadily decreased and cotton correspondingly grew in importance.
Some of the more far-seeing political economists of the time, and a few, but only a few, of the merchants of New Orleans began to see that the city was losing a very valuable part of its trade; and there were demands upon Congress that it improve the Mississippi so as to get rid of the dangers to navigation at the bar. It was still insisted that the river would suffice for all the needs of the valley if only it was put in good condition, the snags removed, the rapids and falls obviated by means of canals around them and the shallow places deepened.
At the time of the meeting of the great Memphis convention of 1845, over which Henry Clay presided, and which called for the improvement of the Missis- sippi and its tributaries by the Federal government, it was found that two-thirds of all the steamboat tonnage was owned and controlled in New Orleans, which had regular steamers running as far up the Ohio as Pittsburg and on the Missis- sippi as St. Paul.
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STANDARD HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS.
In 1849 the river commerce of New Orleans, that is the receipt of produce at that port from the interior, had in spite of canals and railroads, reached the mag- nificent total of $81,989,692. It was at this time that New Orleans began enter- ing on its career as the great cotton city of the world. The twenty years between 1840 and 1860 were years of great prosperity in New Orleans, when its merchants won fortunes and could rank among the mercatores principes of the world; but it cannot be said that the commerce of the city was in as good a condition as in the previous quarter of a century. New Orleans was devoting itself too exclu- sively to one article. Instead of being the port for the valley, it was becoming the port only for the cotton country. Its prosperity was based on cotton and on slavery, and any injury to either of these meant a commercial downfall. The South insisted on the sovereignty of King Cotton, and New Orleans claimed, like Mahomet, to be its prophet. It was overflowing with money in those "flush times." Its banks had larger capitals and larger deposits than they have even to-day, and they loaned their money readily, thus establishing the credit system which became universal among the planters, particularly those engaged in raising cotton and sugar. New Orleans became not only the lender of money at a high rate of interest, but the depot of Western supplies-corn, pork, etc., which it advanced in large quantities to the planters in the vast region tributary to it. The whole agricultural country along the lower Mississippi became in a manner commercial slave and was not allowed to sell to or to buy of any one else. The Western produce shipped down the river did not stop at the plantations, but went direct to the city, and was transshipped thence and sent up the river to the plantations by the very same route it had come down.
The prediction that Jefferson had indulged in when he purchased Louisiana, that New Orleans "will be forever the mighty mart of the merchandise brought from more than a thousand rivers, leaving the emporia of the Eastern world far behind," was again repeated and thoroughly believed in by New Orleans. So disinterested a witness as the British Quarterly Review declared that New Orleans, because of the Mississippi, must ultimately become the most important commer- cial city in America, if not in the world; and that eminent statesman and political economist, De Boro, stated that "no city in the world has been advanced as a mart of commerce with such gigantic strides as New Orleans."
Nor was this an idle boast. Between 1830 and 1840 no city in the United States kept pace with it. When the census of 1840 was taken it was fourth in population, exceeded only by New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore;
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STANDARD HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS.
and it stood fourth in point of commerce among all the ports of the world with only London, Liverpool and New York ahead, and only slightly behind the last of these cities, with every prospect that it would pass it before the century ended. It was ahead of New York in the exports of domestic products; but unfortunately its import trade was small. It shipped coffee, hardware and many heavy articles up the river, but it left the West dependent upon New York and the other Atlantic cities for nearly all the finer class of manufactured goods. Later on, when Cin- cinnati, Pittsburg and other Western cities engaged in manufacture, New Orleans bought their goods and reshipped them to the plantations. Of these shipments up-stream more than 75 per cent, strange to say, were articles which had pre- viously been shipped down-stream. There was no trade between the Western manufacturing cities and the Southern plantations, very little even with the towns on the lower Mississippi. All this traffic paid tribute to New Orleans. Some thirty-two steamboats of a tonnage of 48,726, was required for the trade between St. Louis and New Orleans, and thirty-six steamers, of 26,932 tons, for the Cincinnati trade.
The change in the commerce of New Orleans from Western to Southern produce is most marked during the second decade of the period. In 1815 cotton had constituted only 12 per cent of the receipts of the city. In 1850 the value of the cotton received at New Orleans was $41,885,156, against $55,012,675 for all other articles, cotton being then 43 per cent of the total trade. It continued to increase both in the aggregate and proportionately up to the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1855 the value of the cotton received at New Orleans was $51,390,729; in 1856, $70,371,729; in 1857, $86,255,079; in 1858, $88,127,340; in 1859, $92,- 037,794; and in 1860, $109,389,228. All the other exports amounted to only $75,822,026. Cotton constituted 58 per cent of the total trade of the city. If the other Southern products-sugar, molasses and tobacco-be included, only $42,- 881,486 remained for Western produce. Those articles which had contributed at one time 80 per cent of the commerce of New Orleans had sunk to only 23 per cent. The city had largely abandoned its Western trade for what it believed to be more profitable-the cotton business.
In 1845 it was estimated that half the produce of the Mississippi Valley shipped to seaboard found its way to market via the canals, railroads and other routes, and half by way of the Mississippi to New Orleans, thus showing how much business had been diverted as compared with the period when New Orleans had a practical monopoly. In 1846 the receipts of flour and wheat at Buffalo exceeded
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STANDARD HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS.
those of New Orleans for the first time. This created somewhat of a sensation and was discussed at length in the newspapers. The New Orleans press expressed the sentiment that this diversion was merely temporary, that an artificial waterway could never compete successfully with a natural one; and that sooner or later this flour and wheat trade would return; but it never did return. On the contrary, Western produce was more and more diverted over the Eastern route. The Erie canal captured the flour trade. The Pennsylvania canal took annually some twenty thousand hogsheads of tobacco that had formerly been marketed in New Orleans, all the pig iron manufactured in the Pittsburg district, and large quantities of lard, bacon and other Western produce from the upper Ohio. It supplied in re- turn manufactured goods, chinaware, dry goods, hardware, hats, shoes, etc., and as early as 1846 it furnished the Ohio basin with more manufactured goods than New Orleans did.
In 1846 the rate on flour from Cincinnati to New York was $1.53 per barrel by the Erie canal; $1.40 per barrel by way of Pittsburg and the Pennsylvania canal, and $1.30 by way of New Orleans, but on the other hand the river route was much the longer, and far more dangerous, so that, the insurance added, it was really more expensive than to ship the flour by canal.
The result was the loss of the grain and flour trade, save such flour as New Orleans reshipped to the cotton and sugar planters of the territory tributary to it, or exported to Cuba, and other countries of Latin America. It lost, also, and from the same causes, its tobacco trade, which in the earlier days, had outranked cotton in importance. In 1852, the lead trade of Illinois and Missouri, which had formerly passed through New Orleans, was lost to it, in consequence of the railroads having made through connection with Galena, the center of the lead industry. In 1846 New Orleans had received a maximum of 785,495 pigs of lead, and the average for the decade was 600,000 pigs. The trade sank suddenly. In 1856 New Orleans received but 15,291 pigs of lead, and soon afterward the trade disappeared altogether from the commercial records, or was of too little import- ance to deserve separate enumeration. The merchants of New Orleans took their losses philosophically and congratulated themselves upon the fact that there was more money in the cotton business than in these other lines of trade diverted elsewhere. The exports of Western produce had become, they said, merely a transit business. The wheat, flour, etc., from the West left but little money in the . city, whereas the cotton trade paid splendidly. They got an advance on the cotton, on the supplies furnished the merchant, and it returned a profit in many other ways ; there was, in fine, more money in it.
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STANDARD HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS.
But about this time another difficulty assailed the trade of New Orleans, which proved extremely injurious to it and affected it for nearly thirty years, until Congress took the matter in hand; this was the difficulty of getting the produce from New Orleans to the ocean on account of the bar at the mouth of the river. The use of steam had greatly increased the size of vessels engaged in the New Orleans trade. As early as 1829 attention had been called to the mouth of the Mississippi and the changes which were going on there in consequence of the formation of bars. In 1837 Northeast Pass, through which a majority of the vessels had previously entered the river from the Gulf, shoaled up and became use- less. Southwest Pass then came into vogue and was used by most of the entering vessels up to 1850, it being from fifteen to sixteen feet deep. The draft of many of the vessels was sixteen feet or more and those of one thousand tons or over encountered great difficulty in getting over the bars in this Pass. In 1852, within a few weeks there were forty vessels aground on the bar, suffering a detention there of from two days to eight weeks. Many of them could not get over the bar with their cargoes and had to discharge the latter into lighters. In 1853 the same difficulties occurred, and in a memorial presented to Congress by the merchants of New Orleans, it was represented that vessels with cargoes valued at $7,367,339 were delayed at the mouth of the Mississippi, being unable either to get into it or to get out. This naturally increased the freight rate from New Orleans and tended to injure the commerce of the city. The trouble was constantly recurring for the next twenty years or more, and was only cured in 1874 by the construction of the Eads jetties. It is difficult to determine to what extent the trouble about low water at the passes affected the trade of New Orleans. That port had always been a very expensive one from the earlier days, because of the high insurance rates ; but it could afford to be expensive. As the rates of transportation were decreased elsewhere it began to feel the influence of the decline and it became evident that New Orleans would have to cut down its port charges and expenses and that freight could not stand several weeks' detention at the passes.
The decade which ended at the outbreak of the Civil War saw New Orleans at the height of its commercial prosperity according to some ; but in reality, having failed in its great destiny, what Jefferson and other enthusiasts had seen for it was that it would become the port and emporium of the entire Mississippi valley, shipping all its products to the markets of the world and supplying it in return with all it needed in the way of European or manufactured goods. There seemed, indeed, at one time every chance of this prediction coming true, and New Orleans
-
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STANDARD HISTORY OF NEW ORLEANS.
narrowly missed this destiny, which would have made it the greatest commercial city of the world. The lack of a power that would take its boats up-stream stood in . the way of success at first. There was no difficulty in getting the produce to the city and thence to market, either in Europe or on the Atlantic scaboard of America ; but there was a difficulty in furnishing return supplies, such as the people of the interior needed. The discovery of steam and its application to boats so that they could ascend the river against the current overcame the difficulty and gave the merchants of New Orleans an opportunity of controlling and monopolizing the entire commerce of the Mississippi Valley, the imports as well as the exports; and, for a time, it looked as though they would do so, in which event New Orleans would have accomplished all predicted of it; but the chance had been lost and, instead of becoming the port of the whole valley, it had been satisfied to pin its faith on cotton, to become the metropolis of only a section. It had allowed the canals and afterward the railroads to divert a large amount of business to the Atlantic ports, and this diversion was at its height when the firing on Fort Sumter brought on the cataclysm in which the commerce of New Orleans was, for a time, completely overwhelmed, and the city had to go to work to build up its trade once more and on entirely new lines.
When the Civil War came on, a few far-secing economists saw the danger ahead of New Orleans and issued frequent warnings to its merchants, declaring that tlie trade of the city, however prosperous it might appear to be, was not built on safe foundations, and that there was a danger lest it might be lost. But these warnings were as futile as those the prophetic Cassandra sang to the Trojans. Mr. De Bow, editor of De Bow's Review, the leading commercial authority of New Orleans, and one of the best commercial and financial papers ever published in the United States, complained, month after month, of the apathy that the merchants of New Orleans showed in the matter of railroads; pointed out that the railroads were likely to become the chief means of transportation, and that the Eastern ports, by constructing them in to the West, territory formerly tributary to New Orleans, were diverting from that city trade rightly belonging to it. Mr. De Bow suc- ceeded in arousing interest among some of the Southern financiers and capitalists in this matter. A railroad agitation was started, which resulted in the construc- tion, largely through the assistance of New Orleans, of a line which was to connect with the Ohio river and thus bring back to the city the trade it had recently lost. This road was completed in part on the very eve of the Civil War, but New Orleans had no favorable chances to test what it could do. Save the Opelousas railroad,
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running some eighty miles westward to Morgan City, the old Pontchartrain rail- road, one of the first constructed in the country, had been, for twenty odd years, the only line New Orleans possessed. Thus it will be seen, that New Orleans, after starting out with the Pontchartrain road to build railways had stopped there, and, like Rip Van Winkle, had slept for twenty years, while the Atlantic seaboard cities were extending their railroads into the interior.
Whether the railroad agitation, which began in New Orleans in 1858-60, would have accomplished any important results in keeping the trade of the West can only be surmised, for the work was completely stopped by the Civil War. It is doubtful if the people of New Orleans could at that time have been brought to realize the possibilities of railways. Public sentiment was decidedly hostile to them. It was a prevalent idea that it was a great commercial battle between New York, for whom the railroads were fighting, and New Orleans, whose success de- pended on the Mississippi, and it was impossible to convince the people of the lower valley that any transportation could be as cheap and as satisfactory as the river, free and open to all. The railroads were regarded in the Southwest simply as feeders to the Mississippi or its tributaries, and it remained for a future year to see rail- roads built parallel to the river and along its very banks in the face of the steam- boats.
The season before the Civil War, 1859-60, saw the largest receipts of produce at New Orleans, and the heaviest and most profitable trade the city had ever done ; and it stands on record to-day as the summit of its commercial prosperity. The number of steamboats arriving at New Orleans was, it is true, not as great as in 1846-7, but the boats had, in the meanwhile, more than doubled in size, and the tonnage reaching New Orleans by the Mississippi has never been equaled since. The total receipts of produce amounted to 2,187,560 tons, and the total trade in the receipts and shipments of produce and in the exports and imports coastwise, and to foreign ports was: River trade, $289,565,000; ocean trade, $183,725,000; total commerce of New Orleans, $473,290,000. To-day, forty years afterward, when the production and wealth of the country have increased five-fold, the trade of New Orleans is no greater than it was in the last year of peace.
The wide extent of the river trade then is well shown in the several regions or districts with which New Orleans was carrying on business. No less than thirty- Three different lines, or rather, different points of communication, are given in the commercial reports of the day. Not only did New Orleans have a complete monopoly of the business of the adjacent States of Louisiana and Mississippi, but
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it had no less than twelve steamboat arrivals from Cairo, Illinois, in direct com- munication with New Orleans. From Cincinnati 206 steamboats arrived during the year; from the Cumberland river, 66; from Evansville, Indiana, 8; from Louisville, 172 ; from Memphis, 110; from Pittsburg, 526; Paducah, Kentucky, and St. Louis, 472; Tennessee river, 16; Wheeling, 9; and White river, Arkansas, 4.
Divided by States in order to give some idea of the region commercially tribu- tary to New Orleans at that time, the arrivals of steamboats and other vessels navigating the Mississippi, the following is interesting :
ARRIVALS AT NEW ORLEANS OF RIVER VESSELS BY STATES
Louisiana
1,835
Pennsylvania 134
Missouri
672
Illinois
112
Mississippi
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