Building the Land of Dreams

New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America

Eberhard L. Faber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780691180700, 9780691166896
• eBook ISBN: 9781400873524
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The history of New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century

In 1795, New Orleans was a sleepy outpost at the edge of Spain's American empire. By the 1820s, it was teeming with life, its levees packed with cotton and sugar. New Orleans had become the unquestioned urban capital of the antebellum South. Looking at this remarkable period filled with ideological struggle, class politics, and powerful personalities, Building the Land of Dreams is the narrative biography of a fascinating city at the most crucial turning point in its history.

Eberhard Faber tells the vivid story of how American rule forced New Orleans through a vast transition: from the ordered colonial world of hierarchy and subordination to the fluid, unpredictable chaos of democratic capitalism. The change in authority, from imperial Spain to Jeffersonian America, transformed everything. As the city's diverse people struggled over the terms of the transition, they built the foundations of a dynamic, contentious hybrid metropolis. Faber describes the vital individuals who played a role in New Orleans history: from the wealthy creole planters who dreaded the influx of revolutionary ideas, to the American arrivistes who combined idealistic visions of a new republican society with selfish dreams of quick plantation fortunes, to Thomas Jefferson himself, whose powerful democratic vision for Louisiana eventually conflicted with his equally strong sense of realpolitik and desire to strengthen the American union.

Revealing how New Orleans was formed by America's greatest impulses and ambitions, Building the Land of Dreams is an inspired exploration of one of the world's most iconic cities.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Notes on Terminology
• Introduction: The City and the Nation
• 1. Mississippi Schemes: The Making of a Colonial Elite, 1717–1803
• 2. New Orleans, 1803: Infant City under the Gaze of Three Empires
• 3. The Passion of Citizen Laussat: New Orleans Is Ceded from Spain to France to the United States
• 4. Pathways to the Place d’Armes: The Generation of 1804
• 5. Quel Triste Gouvernement: The Early Crisis of American Rule, 1804
• 6. Liberty in Louisiana: Accomplishments and Compromises of American Rule, 1804–1805
• 7. Creoles and Americans: Confrontations and Accommodations, 1805–1807
• 8. A Strong Case of Wanton Oppression: Livingston, the Corporation, the President, and the Batture
• 9. Creation of an Un-American Republic: Rebellion, Reaction, and the Anxious Road to Statehood
• 10. January 1815: Louisiana Is Still American
• Appendix 1. New Orleans Exports, 1804–1820
• Appendix 2. Parish Populations: White, Slave, and Free People of Color, 1810–1820
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index