Port of Call to Arms: New Orleans and the Greater Caribbean in the Long 19th Century

Throughout the long nineteenth century (1803-1914), New Orleans occupied a special place of prominence within the Greater Caribbean. As the Gulf South’s most active port, the entrepôt of the Mississippi River Valley, and the merchant-capital magnet of the Cotton Belt, the city’s commercial expansion was a crucial factor in the United States’ economic development. At the same time, the New Orleans’ long-standing and multifaceted connections with the neighboring ports of the Gulf of Mexico and Central America made it a focal point of U.S.-Latin American relations and a frequent site of annexation plots, filibustering schemes, and insurgency efforts. Eager to extend the reach of North American commercial interests, New Orleans merchants and financiers embraced the pursuit of foreign trade and investment, and they were at the forefront of initiatives to construct an interoceanic canal believed to be essential to reconfiguring global shipping patterns.

Despite boosters’ conviction that New Orleans’ geographic position guaranteed the city a central role in the regional and international economy, expectations far outpaced reality. Trade with Latin America grew slowly, reflecting the United States’ overall failure to invest in maritime infrastructure and the Gulf Coast’s meager progress on railroad construction. The aspiration of Louisianians to exert a controlling influence over commerce in the Greater Caribbean repeatedly faltered in the face of diplomatic flare-ups and market forces, stunting what should have been mutually beneficial transnational partnerships.

Involvement in the region’s revolutionary politics was part and parcel of enterprising New Orleanians’ quest for commercial empire, but rather than facilitating greater regional integration, such endeavors often undermined diplomatic engagement and diminished the potential of broadening trade relations. The Texas Revolution (1835-1836) and the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) disrupted the progress of cross-border business along the Gulf Coast, and filibustering disasters in Cuba (Narciso López, 1850-1851) and Central America (William Walker, 1856-1860) complicated the international ambitions of Crescent City capitalists. Although these are among the better-known incidents of territorial aggrandizement, New Orleans served as an organizational hub and launching pad for a number of more obscure coup conspiracies, colonization plans, and invasion attempts up through the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). One of the primary objectives of this project will be to determine the degree to which that history of militant agitation facilitated or hampered inter-American trade and cooperation.

This poster presentation of my dissertation project takes a transnational and transregional approach to situate New Orleans as a critical axis of the expansion of U.S. empire and the extension of American capitalism. As the first major port of contact between the United States and the Greater Caribbean, New Orleans played an outsized role in the development of U.S.-Latin American diplomacy and commerce and operated as a primary hub of communication and exchange for both state and non-state actors.