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Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South. By Thomas N. Ingersoll. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxv, 490. Figures, maps, tables. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $25.00.)
"Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction": Slavery in Richmond; Virginia,1782-1865. By Midori Takagi. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Pp. xi, 187. Illustrations, tables. $37.50.)
"Order," remarked Alexander Pope in An Essay on Man, "is Heaven's first law." If true, New Orleans (1718-1819) and Richmond, Virginia (17821865) came, it appears, surprisingly near to achieving divine stability. Both Thomas N. Ingersoll and Midori Takagi suggest that urban slavery represented a relatively ordered environment, the important tensions between master and enslaved notwithstanding.
Cluttered though Thomas Ingersoll's rich study sometimes is, Mammon and Manon offers determined readers many rewards. Based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research in French, Spanish, and North American archives, Ingersoll's study aims to retire the prevailing stereotype of New Orleans as a hotbed of saturnalia and social dislocation. Instead of Manon, "the enduring popular image of New Orleans as a place where women of both colors gave themselves up to illicit sex with men," Ingersoll finds that "Mammon ruled" (xvii) by 1731. Sensitive to the tense, negotiated, and complicated social and political evolution of the Deep South's first slave society, Ingersoll shows that the coming (and achievement) of order was the preeminent characteristic of early New Orleans. The presence of an acquisitive, class-conscious planter elite was the key to the society's stability while slaves, by dint of their ethnic, cultural, and occupational backgrounds often found themselves divided. Moreover, by the early national period, order had been achieved not least because "like blacks throughout the South, those of New Orleans had...