Reimagining Saint-Domingue: Anticipatory Nostalgia and the Reinvention of New Orleans, 1830–60

This paper argues that the romanticism and nostalgia associated with the “Lost Cause” ideology of the Civil War began to take shape and form during and prior to the antebellum period, as a result of the close ties between Haiti (the former French colony Saint-Domingue) and New Orleans, Louisiana. Although nostalgia is a fundamental aspect of post-Civil War historiography, scholars of American history have not focused on its rootedness in the antebellum period. This paper bridges this gap by examining colonists in Louisiana, who followed a familiar pattern seen across the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and aimed to imitate the successful plantation society of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s revolution and subsequent declaration of independence as a free Black state in 1804, however, sent planters and colonists scrambling to divert New Orleans from the same path towards emancipation, relying on the fabrication of narratives to attempt to silence Haiti and its influence across the Atlantic. Haiti’s calculated absence from narratives about New Orleans was foundational to the invention of New Orleans as a liminal urban space that encouraged other states in the antebellum South to invent sensationalized narratives about enslavement, race, and a new idea of the ‘urban.’ White European and American travel writers, planters, and enslavers carefully curated narratives about New Orleans at a pivotal time in its urbanization and emergence as a part of the United States, linking it to ‘miscegenation fantasies’ and the light-complexioned, mixed-race “quadroon” girl. As a site of fantasy, and therefore a seemingly less-threatening image and model of Haiti, New Orleans became foundational to the spread of romanticization of and an anticipatory nostalgia throughout the United States. New Orleans was not a case of exceptionality, but rather a carefully crafted narrative that reflected the interests and contestations over power of its time.