The construct of public rights anticipated many aspects of what we now recognize as the dignitary component of claims to equal access to public accommodations and public transportation. Follow thread in Fussell, “Population History” >Īt a crucial moment in Reconstruction New Orleans, one such set of beliefs was formulated as the entitlement of all citizens to the same “public rights.” Public-rights thinking took shape in the 1867–1868 Louisiana Constitutional Convention and was written into the state’s new constitution through fragile cross-racial and cross-ethnic electoral alliances. New Orleans’s origin story is often told as a cultural gumbo recipe that ignores the social forces mixing Spanish and French colonists, English mercantilists, African slaves, and later waves of German, Irish, Italian, and other migrants. If we pay particular attention to the Atlantic and Caribbean circuits, we can see how a vernacular anticaste ideology developed as people moved from experience to experience and found new names to describe the freedoms that they gained or lost at each step of the way. The city of New Orleans was at the center of what Shannon Dawdy has characterized as three overlapping areas of circulation of people and goods-one stretching up the Mississippi River, one reaching across the Atlantic Ocean to France and Europe, one spreading across the Gulf of Mexico to Havana, Veracruz, Port-au-Prince, and various smaller ports of the Caribbean. The continuing challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which such internal and external phenomena were linked. expansion into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines at the end of the century. The first step in taking a Caribbean perspective on Louisiana is to situate the United States South within a regional variant of the “long nineteenth century.” Scholars of slavery have helped integrate the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 into analyses of the antebellum South, and specialists on voting rights have noted that the formal disfranchisement of black voters corresponded to the moment of U.S. Their conceptual language and their experiences are worth recovering-to broaden our picture of southern history and perhaps also to enrich our thinking about constitutional frameworks of antidiscrimination. During Reconstruction and its aftermath, some of those migrants helped frame the struggle against caste in the state of Louisiana in an innovative way.
Throughout the nineteenth century, people circulated around the Caribbean Sea and the gulf in pursuit of work, security, and political alliances. The Gulf of Mexico has long been open to the movement of individuals and information as well as hurricanes.
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