A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 19)

Miller Shreve’s steamboat Enterprise in 1814. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers and their hundreds of tributaries became highways for steamboats laden with cotton, sugar, and other agricultural and manufactured goods en route to and from New Orleans and the many towns and cities that grew up along the state’s waterways. The centrality of these vessels to the economy and their effect on the ports and cities were documented by the visual arts for the next half century. With the coming of the railroads and the New Basin Canal in the 1830s and 1840s, New Orleans began to expand even more with major railroad lines connecting the city’s port with towns and cities across the state and into Mississippi and Texas. By the end of the antebellum period, eight major railroad lines crossed the state. With the burgeoning commerce in New Orleans and other port towns from Shreveport and Monroe to Baton Rouge, Alexandria, St. Martinville, and New Iberia to Lake Charles came the cotton mills and sugar refineries, importers and exporters, insurance companies and banking houses that were financed chiefly by investors in Northeastern states and in England. The banks were strong and the cotton crops were setting new records. European textile mills were buying all the cotton they could get. Sugar prices were kept high by protective tariffs and the ports at JOHN JAMES AUDUBON (b. 1785, Les Cayes, Saint-Domingue – d. 1851, New York, New York) Brown Pelican, Birds of America, plate 251, 1835 Hand-colored engraving on paper; 27 x 40 in. Louisiana State Museum New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria were in constant activity. A considerable amount of the commerce of the Midwest passed across the wharves at New Orleans. Aside from the city’s prosperity during this period, the people of New Orleans fascinated the American traveler and famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted when he visited New Orleans during his 1855-1856 tour of the South: “... there were not only the pure old Indian American, and the Spanish, the French, English, Celtic, and African, but nearly all possible mixed varieties of these, and no doubt of some other breeds of mankind. ... I doubt if there is a city in the world [like New Orleans], where the resident population has been so divided in its origin, or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits, manners, and moral codes of citizens.” During the last two decades preceding the Civil War, immigrants from Europe arrived in the city by the thousands. The vast majority of these COLONIAL THROUGH ANTEBELLUM LOUISIANA 19  http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=531 http://www.knowla.org/entry.php?rec=531

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A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana

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