Feeding a People: The “Free Market” of New Orleans as a Social-Patriotic Playground for German-Confederate Entrepreneurs, August–December 1861

With a population of almost 170,000, large for a Southern city, New Orleans was the first city in the Confederacy for which food procurement became a severe problem. The city fathers had managed to overlook the poverty, need, and hunger of the inhabitants during the antebellum period. The war aggravated this situation, because many local companies specialized in armament production rather than food production. German immigrant entrepreneurs were no exception – they, too, used the war to increase their business profits.  In New Orleans the German community numbered twenty times the size of that of Charleston or Richmond. New Orleans’ free market existed for 137 days from mid-August to December 1861 and gave out food valued at more than $22,000, feeding as many as 7,550 people per day, c. 5% of New Orleans’ white population. During the war an average of 3% of the New Orleans inhabitants were homeless, many of them single, unskilled, or foreign-born. Among all the donations of money for which the Free Market wrote receipts, only three amounted to the exorbitant sum of $1,000 or more: The “Deutsche Gesellschaft” was one of them. In no other city of the South was German participation in Confederate food distribution across ethnic boundaries as extensive and numerous as in New Orleans: German businessmen, plantation owners, consuls and other dignitaries, who had invested heavily in the Confederacy and had no intention to let go of their economic success through a war, used the “Free Market” as a showcase of their social-patriotic engagement, and by doing so often  committed themselves to a cause that they did not actively defend on the field of battle.