The prosperity and rapid growth of antebellum New Orleans seemed to indicate its destiny as the economic locus of the nation’s vast interior, but a series of reversals in the second half of the nineteenth century forever derailed its chances of remaining one of the nation’s largest cities. The minor physical damage that the city suffered during the Civil War masked the extent to which the war had crippled the commercial systems that once fed New Orleans’s fortunes. Silt-choked river passes and damaged levees, unstable commodities markets, and the collapse of the city’s once well-capitalized banking system all depressed commercial activity. The emergence of inexpensive steel helped reorient trade along an east-west axis, diminishing the geographical advantages of the city’s port. At the same time, the extended political acrimony of Reconstruction undermined investor confidence causing both city and state to founder at precisely the moment when the nation’s other urban centers boomed. While renewed immigration and increased trade with Latin America fueled growth in the last two decades of the nineteenth centuries, political corruption, disease epidemics, the birth of organized crime, and episodic civil disorder blunted civic optimism. Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century, New Orleanians already had already developed a deeply entrenched mindset that the city was not only falling behind more enterprising cities, but that its glory days forever belonged to the past.
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