New Orleans
"Fine houses, huts; streets muddy and unpaved. Spanish architecture, flat English roofs. Bricks, small French doorways, massive portes-cocheres."
Tocqueville (Pierson 622)
"Population similarly mixed, faces of all shades of colour. Language French, English, Spanish, creole.
General appearance French; and yet signs, commercial posters usually in English. Industrial and trading
world, American. . . ."
Tocqueville (Pierson 622)
"Evening at the theatre. . . . Strange spectacle offered by the chamber. First stalls (loge) white,
second grey, coloured women, very pretty, white ones among them, but a remainder of African blood.
Third stalls black. Audience, we think ourselves in France, noisy, uproarious, turbulent, talkative, a
thousand leagues away from the United States. We leave at ten. Quadroon ball. Strange sight: all the men
are white, all the women coloured, or at least of African blood. Single tie created immorality between the
two races. A sort of bazaar. The women vowed as it were by law of concubinage. Incredible laxity of
morals. Mothers, young girls, children at the dance; still another harmful consequence of slavery.
Multitude of coloured people at New Orleans. Small number in the North. Why? Why, of all the European
races, is the English race the one that has best preserved its purity of blood and mingled least with the
natives?"
Tocqueville (Pierson 628-629)
"We would be unable to paint the dolorous impression that we received when, on examining the prison of
New Orleans, we saw there men thrown in pell-mell with swine, in the midst of excrement and filth. In
locking up criminals, no thought is given to making them better but simply to taming their wickedness;
they are chained like wild beasts; they are not refined but brutalized."
"The place containing condemned criminals in New Orleans could not by any stretch of the imagination be called a prison: it's a frightful cesspool into which they are dumped and which is suitable only for those unclean animals one finds there with them. It is noteworthy that all those detained there are not slaves: it's the prison of free men. . . ."
Tocqueville and Beaumont, penitentiary report (Pierson, 622)
Itinerary