New Orleans and Senegal in the Atlantic World

Two thirds of the Africans sold into slavery and brought to Louisiana before 1731 — nearly 3,800 men, women, and children — came from Senegambia, the West African region that lies between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. Although many more French colonists migrated to Louisiana during the same time period, they died at much higher rates than the Africans. By 1732, as the first era of colonization in Louisiana drew to a close, there were twice as many enslaved Africans as French people. Senegambia and its culture were thus powerful factors in shaping early New Orleans.

French merchants established a trading post in 1659 at the mouth of the Senegal River from which captives from the African interior could be sold to transatlantic slave traders. This entrepôt evolved into the city of Saint-Louis, which eventually became the capital of colonial French West Africa. In 1677 the French expanded their foothold on the African coast when they captured a Dutch trading post about 160 miles to the south of Saint-Louis at Gorée, a rocky island located off the coast of the Cape Verde Peninsula near Senegal’s present-day capital, Dakar. France granted a concession over the Senegambian slave trade anchored by the two posts to the Senegal Company in 1679. In 1727, the Senegal Company became part of the Company of the Indies, the trading company that controlled the colony of Louisiana and its capital, New Orleans until 1731.

New Orleans and Saint-Louis du Senegal were literally connected to each other by the slave trade between 1719 and 1731, and by the government of the Company of the Indies between 1727 and 1731. The cities resemble one another in striking ways. Both lie at the mouths of major rivers, each represented points at either end of slavery’s Middle Passage, and both bear the traces of having been French colonial capitals in their gridded street plans and architecture adapted to tropical settings.

There is a controversy among historians over whether a specific Senegambian ethnicity constituted the majority of captives who were brought to Louisiana and influenced its root culture. Some contend that a group known as the Bambara were overrepresented in the slave trade to Louisiana. Others argue that there was really no such group and that the label “Bambara” was a generic one that has little meaning for those attempting to trace the survival of African culture in Louisiana. Readings representing both points of view can be found in this unit.

The French established the colony of Louisiana in 1699 and laid out its capital city of New Orleans in 1718. Despite the elaborate maps drawn by colonial engineers in the 1720s, the city was a small, rather rough frontier outpost during French rule, which effectively lasted until 1769. The French hoped that Louisiana could be turned into a profitable enterprise through the cultivation of a staple crop. The Lower Mississippi Valley was not tropical enough to sustain the kind of sugar cane cultivation that made the French island colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue wildly profitable for the mother country. Tobacco, however, seemed a good bet. French people consumed loads of it, almost all of it sold by the British colonies of Virginia and Maryland. If tobacco could be successfully grown in Louisiana, money that was going into the pockets of British merchants and tax agents could be diverted to France.

The tobacco plan didn’t work. Louisiana’s climate produced leaf that was of very poor quality. And the enslaved labor that was deemed essential to the cultivation of any stable crop was hard to come by. Slave traders could make far more money selling their cargos in the Antilles, where the sugar boom created an insatiable market for laborers. New Orleans got the leftovers and after 1731, only one shipment of new captive Africans arrived at the port. Among the results of this turn of events was the creolization of the enslaved population. Without the arrival of continuous waves of newly enslaved Africans, the children and grandchildren of the first generation of captives grew up and created a culture shaped significantly by their experience in Louisiana.

Travel accounts provide readers with the most vivid descriptions of New Orleans and Senegal from the Atlantic era. Europeans who traveled to Africa and the Americas produced detailed accounts of the people, customs, geography, flora and fauna they encountered. Historians have long relied on these in their attempts to reconstruct the Atlantic world of the 17th-19th centuries. They do contain a mass of information that cannot be found elsewhere, but they also incorporate the prejudices, ideologies, and misapprehensions of their authors.

Le Page du Pratz, for example, betrays his racist ideas about enslaved African women in Louisiana in this passage:

“From what I have said, I conclude that a French father and his wife are great enemies to their posterity when they give their children such nurses. For the milk being the purest blood of the woman, one must be a step-mother indeed to giver her child to a negro nurse in such a country as Louisiana.”

(Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana or of the Western Parts of Virgiia and Carolina, (translated from the French), London, 1774, p. 382.)

At the same time, travel accounts sometimes offer surprising glimpses of very different European responses to Africans and Native Americans, as a passage from the letters of a young Ursuline nun writing from New Orleans in 1728 show.

“Our little community grows from day to day. We have twenty boarders, of whom eight today made their first communion, three ladies also board, and three orphans that we took through charity. We also have seven slave boarders to instruct for baptism and first communion, besides a great number of day students, female blacks and female savages (Native Americans) who come for two hours a day for instruction.”

(Marie Madeleine Hachard, Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727-1760, ed. Emily Clark, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007, p. 82.)

With the exception of Mungo Park’s, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, the best known and most informative travel accounts about Senegambia and Louisiana in the Atlantic era were written in French. The readings section of this unit provides a list of English translations of some of them.

Manuscript records created by the French are the richest and most reliable source for reconstructing the events and human experiences in Louisiana and Senegal during the Atlantic era. From them we learn of a free African woman who traveled from Saint-Louis du Senegal with two of her own slaves to join her French husband in New Orleans. The sacramental records of baptisms, marriages, and burials offer a treasure trove of intimate details about colonial New Orleanians, from the wealthiest plantation master to the enslaved mother presenting her baby to a European priest at the baptismal font. Colonial censuses tell us where people lived, what they did for a living, and how many people, enslaved and free, lived in any given household. Trial transcripts reveal that the top merchant of bear grease — a valuable commodity in colonial Louisiana — was a woman who drove as hard a bargain as any man. Another court record pulls back the curtain on the story of an enslaved man in Louisiana who murdered his wife because she couldn’t tell him where his pipe was.

The manuscript records of Senegal can only be found in archives there and in France. The rich archives of New Orleans are more accessible to residents of the U.S., though before the 1830s most of the records are in French and Spanish. Fortunately for the linguistically disinclined, more than a few of colonial Louisiana’s records have been digitized, indexed, or translated. They are listed in the readings for this unit, along with a wonderful book recently translated from French that explains the irresistible allure of the archives of this period.

If you are able, do visit the manuscript archives of New Orleans. Even if you can’t read the documents you will find there, the experience of holding a piece of writing produced by someone who lived in the 1700s will change the way you think about how we learn about the past. Information about New Orleans archives can be found in the Further Exploration section of this unit.

Catholicism was the state religion of France during the Atlantic age and the activities of missionary orders of priests, friars, and nuns were an integral part of the colonizing process. French missionaries came to Louisiana in the 18th century and Senegal in the 19th century in an attempt to convert Africans and Native Americans to Catholicism. The missionaries saw themselves as agents of salvation for the people they proselytized and stressed the spiritual nature of their enterprises in Louisiana and Senegal. Colonial authorities, on the other hand, saw Catholicism as a useful tool in the assimilation and control of non-French colonial populations. Historians who have studied the missionaries have found that they had both positive and negative effects on the people they evangelized and converted.

In Louisiana, Capuchin friars and Jesuit priests arrived in the first years of the 18th century to take charge of ministering to French colonists and converting Indians and enslaved Africans. In 1727 they were joined by the Ursuline nuns, whose specialty became the evangelization of enslaved women and girls. Sacramental records reveal that the nuns were more successful than their male counterparts in recruiting enslaved Africans to Catholicism. Neither group had much luck in the conversion of Native Americans.

The missionary effort in Senegal reached its height a century after the activity in New Orleans had reached its peak. There, the French colonial administration invited three French religious orders to send missionaries to Senegal. The main objective of these missionary undertakings by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph of Cluny, the Ploërmel Brothers, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, was to convert the majority Muslim population to Catholicism. They supplied the major source of French language education and Catholic religious instruction to the colonized Senegalese until the 20th century, when a secular education system was established.

The Atlantic World produced a dynamic of sustained encounter among Europeans, Native Americans and Africans and African-descended people. One of the most visible products of this phenomenon was interracial procreation, a topic that has long fascinated scholars and the general public alike. “Miscegenation” is the term most Americans are familiar with, but in this unit we promote the use of a different term that carries different connotations: métissage.

“Miscegenation” is a word that was coined by a racist pamphleteer in New York in 1863: Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The author intended it to be pejorative and its use is widely rejected by scholars of African American history and culture on that basis. There is another problem with using this term to describe what happened in the Atlantic world: since it didn’t exist before 1863 it is anacharonistic to use it to describe what happened in the 1700s. The term that French speakers used before 1863 was métissage, which means mixing. This is the term that scholars today prefer.

New Orleans, Gorée, and Saint-Louis du Senegal all had mixed race populations produced by métissage. A large population of free people of color emerged in late colonial New Orleans as a result of liberalized Spanish colonial manumission policies. While not all were the products of métissage, a mixed racial origin has been assumed for many of them. Although stigmatized by an increasingly racist culture, many free people of color achieved economic success and social prominence. Some were slave owners. Men served in a free black militia and fought on the side of the 13 colonies in the American Revolution. New Orleans free women of color were mythologized in the 19th century as “quadroons,” exotic sex virtuosos whose object was to seduce white men. Recent scholarship, however, reveals them to have been faithful wives to free men of color who met the same standards of respectability and piety that defined the ideal of true womanhood for antebellum white women.

In Senegal, the population produced by métissage, as well as their descendants, are known collectively as the métis. Unlike the free people of color in New Orleans, whose origins lie in manumission from slavery, the métis were descended from unions between free African women and French merchants and officials who came to Senegal in connection with the slave trade. This commerce depended on forging relationships with coastal African traders and leaders who controlled access to the commodities shipped from their coastal ports. One of the most common forms these relationships took was a partnership — of both a sexual and a business nature — between French men and well-connected African women in the port cities of Gorée and Saint-Louis. These women were known as signares, an honorific title for a woman of means and high social standing derived from the Portuguese who first established trade on the West African coast. Like the mythic quadroons of antebellum New Orleans, the signares were imagined to be principally engaged in satisfying the sexual desires of white men. In fact, they were powerful businesswomen who controlled European access to the source of captives who supplied the transatlantic slave trade. More than a few of them were slave traders themselves who kept their human merchandise in the basements of their elaborate two-story mansions until they were sold into the Middle Passage. The famous “House of Slaves” in Gorée was the home of one such signare.

The descendants of the signares and their French partners formed an influential métis population in Gorée and Saint-Louis. They spoke French and practiced Catholicism. Many became fabulously wealthy in the 19th century when the trade in gum arabic replaced the slave trade as Senegambia’s most profitable export. When France abolished slavery in 1848 and initiated a new, more intrusive colonial project in West Africa, the métis played a critical role in negotiating political and cultural space for Africans under the new regime.

The picturesque colonial architecture of New Orleans and Saint-Louis du Senegal is one of the most obvious similarities between the two cities. Tourists are drawn to both places to experience the charm of an imagined past through the medium of architecture adapted to tropical living in a colonial setting. Photographs or film of a typical street from Saint-Louis is eerily familiar to anyone who has visited the New Orleans French Quarter. There are balconies, shaded galleries, and courtyards, an open air market, a central house of worship, and the remains of colonial government buildings. The delta of the Senegal River, like the Mississippi delta, has no stone to be quarried, so buildings are constructed of wood and filler and faced with plaster.

Several scholars have studied the African influences that are detectable in the architecture of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Since we know that most of the region’s colonial buildings were constructed by enslaved Africans, there is a direct connection to Senegal. The scholarship on the colonial architecture of Senegal, however, is still very much in its infancy. For now, the visual evidence of the links between the architecture and town planning of the two places supplies the best starting point for a comparison of the built environment of the two places.

The origins of New Orleans jazz have long been thought to be a product of the meeting of African and European musical traditions in the city. Yet, there are no sources about the music played by Africans from the colonial era of New Orleans, the time when new African captives arrived in the city with their musical traditions intact and unaltered by exposure to European forms. In 1818 Benjamin Henry Latrobe supplied a way to connect a traditional African instrument played in the Atlantic age with and instrument that was destined to become part of the jazz tradition: the banjo.

Here is Latrobe’s famous description of a strange musical instrument he heard at a Sunday gathering of the enslaved at Congo Square:

“The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On top of the finger board was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash. It was played upon by a very little old man, apparently 80 or 90 years old.”

(Benjamin Henry Boneval Latrobe, Impressions Respecting New Orleans, Diary and Sketches, 1818-1820, New York: Columbia University Press, 1951, p. 50.)

The sketch that Latrobe made of this instrument shows that it is typical of the stringed, plucked instruments with gourd or wooden sound boxes that were played by enslaved Africans throughout the Americas during the Atlantic age. And it reveals what seems to be the ancestor of the American banjo. The recent discovery in a Paris museum of a well preserved stringed instrument brought from Haiti in 1841 and labeled “banza” sealed a clear connection between the instrument that Latrobe sketched in New Orleans and the banjo of 19th-century American minstrel shows.

In nineteenth-century America, the banjo replaced the traditional instrument and white musicians, instead of enslaved Africans, became its virtuosos. But in 21st century West Africa, the kind of instrument that Latrobe heard played in New Orleans in 1818 is still a vital part of living musical tradition.

In Senegal, the instrument is called a xalam in the Wolof language spoken in coastal Senegal and a hoddu in the Pulaar tongue of the inhabitants of the upper Senegal valley. Contemporary New Orleanians had a chance to hear the hoddu played in April 2013 by five masters of the instrument from the village of Njum Waalo who participated in a conference on the comparative and connected histories of New Orleans and Saint-Louis du Senegal sponsored by Tulane and the Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar and the École des Hautes Études in Sciences Sociales, Paris.