City Business: Commerce and the Short Fiction

New Orleans has long enjoyed its status as a major commercial hub in the United States. Dating back well before the Civil War, the city served as a primary location for distributing and receiving items produced up and down the Mississippi River, as well as exporting products to Europe and the Caribbean. Goods such as midwestern wheat, corn, lard, pork, animal furs and hides, alcohol, hemp, lead, cotton, sugar, molasses, and tobacco were loaded onto steamboats, flatboats, and keelboats headed to the city for warehousing and later distribution (“Antebellum Louisiana”). Located at the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans has always been ideally positioned for commerce, including its infamous practice of trading in human slaves, as discussed earlier in this study. The flow of money and goods through the city has paralleled the steady, powerful flow of the river by its side.