Men and Mansions of the Postwar Bubble

Abstract

In one sense, the era of Reconstruction did not exist in New Orleans. No shelling had preceded the entry of Union forces into the city, and the Federal occupation had improved rather than destroyed the port facilities. Hence there was nothing to reconstruct. To many contemporaries, however, it seemed the war had caused the normal order of life to collapse. The Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer surveyed the situation after the conclusion of the peace accord and wrote, “Just now the earth is very dark….”¹ J. W Labouisse, a commission merchant of Thalia Street, reached a similar conclusion in 1868. “Everything,” he said, “is going to the devil here in a hard gallop.”² More than a few New Orleanians would have concurred with the judgment of later historians that the years following the Civil War were a “dreadful decade,” a “tragic era.”³