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This article describes the rapid economic decline of New Orleans after the Civil War and examines some of the reasons for it. It focuses on the elite merchant community of New Orleans, which had been the Old South's primary urban commercial and financial center. The article details how complacent attitudes among these long-powerful commodities merchants contributed to a variety of poor decisions and inadequate responses to radically changed postwar conditions. In addition, the wartime devastation of the city's banking sector, along with broad structural changes to postemancipation southern agriculture and the reorientation of intra- and interregional trade patterns, are all shown to have quickly combined to push the former first-rank American city down onto the dependent lower rungs of the American urban system during the decades immediately following the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a dissertation on the epochal events of the "Age of Capital" experienced by merchants in New Orleans, Louisiana. The author states that Louisiana was located on the nonindustrial periphery of the Atlantic World, yet the commodities produced on its slave plantations, played an important role in the new forms of capitalist development. He mentions that although the economy of New Orleans grew during the 1850s, their stake in the perpetuation on the slave-labor system that supported agriculture plantation , grew accordingly. He relates that the cosmopolitan character caused New Orleans to be widely disparaged as corrupt and dissolute throughout the Old South, and the high prices that Crescent City factors charged for goods further weakened its reputation.

Assesses issues related to New South sharecropping in America. Interpretations of sharecropping by scholars; Resemblance of southern sharecropping to the nineteenth-century contract labor; Questions on the efficiency of southern sharecropping as an economically ambigous form of production.