Web of Cotton
By the mid-1800s, the United States produced more cotton than any other nation in the world. Most of it left the country through New Orleans—to be spun, woven, cut, and sewn into clothing and countless other products. The cotton industry linked millions of lives. Its sprawling network included enslaved workers on cotton plantations, merchants in New Orleans, sailors and shipowners, textile workers in New England and Great Britain, and customers around the world.
Packet Ship Ohio
Coastal traffic between New Orleans and cities along the East Coast reflected the growing economic connections between American people and industries in the early 1800s. The Ohio carried passengers and cargo between Philadelphia and New Orleans. Cotton was the most common cargo shipped out of New Orleans in coastal packets like the Ohio in the 1830s.
Sold “Down River”
This reproduction of part of a ship’s manifest names and describes 83 enslaved African Americans taken aboard the schooner LaFayette in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1833. Bound for Natchez, Mississippi, via New Orleans, the people had been sold “down river” into the domestic slave trade that brought some 1.5 million people south to work the fields of the Cotton Belt. The Franklin and Armfield firm, which was responsible for this transaction, was a well-known and wealthy slave trading business in Alexandria.
New Orleans from the Lower Cotton Press, 1852
Ocean sailing ships tied up next to river steamboats in the busy port of New Orleans. To reach the city, seagoing vessels sailed roughly 100 miles up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico.
Fancy power loom patent model
William Crompton’s invention allowed weavers to create more elaborate designs on power looms. Widely adopted in textile mills on both sides of the Atlantic, the power loom was used to produce fancy designs in silk, wool, and even in cotton.
Patent No. 491, November 25, 1837
Transfer from U.S. Patent Office
Cotton’s Harvest, about 1892
The cotton shipped through New Orleans came from thousands of plantations throughout the South. Until well into the 1930s, it was laboriously planted, tended, and picked by hand, often by sharecroppers and tenant farmers.
From a stereoview published by J. F. Jarvis, Washington, D.C.
Cotton Aboard, 1878
Cotton was processed through a cotton gin, pressed, and baled at the plantation. For the trip to the “factors” or merchants in New Orleans, the bales were stacked into every available space aboard a river steamer. A staggering 7,818 bales of cotton were carried aboard the sternwheel steamer Chas. P. Chouteau, shown here in Natchez, Mississippi, in December 1878.
Deck Passengers
Deck passengers usually outnumbered cabin passengers three or four to one. The fares were cheap but the comforts few: without beds or shelter, they found room among the cargo crates. Diseases spread in such close quarters and were carried to unsuspecting communities along the steamers’ routes. The deck passengers in this image are suffering from cholera, an epidemic that spread along the Mississippi in 1873.
Steamboat J. M. White
Built at Jeffersonville, Indiana, 1878
Gift of John H. Leslie
A Mississippi Riverboat
The sidewheel steamboat J. M. White was designed for passenger service between New Orleans, Louisiana, and Greenville, Mississippi. The vessel was a masterpiece of the gaudy, glamorous style known as Steamboat Gothic and was one of the largest, most expensive, and most powerful river steamers ever built. The boilers produced 2,800 horsepower and the ship could carry 250 first-class passengers and 10,000 bales of cotton. Yet it sat only 6 feet 6 inches deep in the water fully laden. The J. M. White burned at a Louisiana landing in December 1886.
Main Cabin of the J. M. White
First-class passengers traveled in luxury aboard the J. M. White. Like most large riverboats, it was covered with painted wood ornament, particularly on the inside. Such elaborate decoration was both fashionable and relatively inexpensive. It decorated middle-class homes as well as riverboats.
