Garden District of New Orleans by Fraiser Jim; Freeman West;

Author:Fraiser, Jim; Freeman, West;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

WAXING AND WANING GARDEN DISTRICT FORTUNES

Although not wishing to appear as radical as Bullitt, other native northerners in the Garden District made the most of their northern ties during the war. Merchant Julius Weis made a fortune as a wartime profiteer, trading cotton and goods with northern interests, while George Hansel sold fourteen Garden District lots he had purchased in 1859 for $12,500 for $27,500 in 1864. Frederick Starr has opined that carpetbaggers had great difficulty “operating in the Garden District in that many local residents could outbid them, utilizing the fruits of wartime profiteering.”

Many southerners, such as Walter Robinson, or ex-northerners with pro-Union sympathies, or foreigners with no stake in the conflict at all, including William Perkins, Florence Luling, Bradish Johnson, John McGinty, and Thomas Smithfield Dugan, simply took what capital or cash they could muster and fled the state, and, in some cases, the country. Others who remained behind, like Jacob Payne and the widow Amenaide Fortin (2618 Coliseum Street), accumulated extraordinary debt from which they never fully recovered. Robert Short, whose Fourth Street mansion General Banks confiscated during wartime occupation, eventually got his property back after he returned to the city, but was unable to reboot his cotton factor business. Consequently, he was forced to run a distillery at the corner of Clio and Locust streets to pay his debts and make a living.

Leave or stay, many wealthy citizens of the Garden District suffered greatly, albeit not the privation endured by the poor. Their losses were felt not in their breadbaskets but in their pocketbooks. This was particularly so for the planters, factors, and merchants associated with the cotton, sugar, and tobacco industries. Cotton receipts fell from 1861 to 1863 in the amount of 39,000 to 22,000, while sugar receipts dropped by 1864 from 460,000 hogsheads to less than 10,000, and tobacco receipts fell from 80,000 hogsheads to less than 2,500 in 1862.

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