Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence by Tara A. Dudley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence by Tara A. Dudley Jochen Wierich Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence. By Tara A. Dudley. Lateral Exchanges: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Practices. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 302. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-4773-2302-1.) This book explores the history of two families of free people of color who flourished in antebellum New Orleans in real estate and in the building trade. It should not be a surprise that in this metropolitan city in the southern United States, where European, Caribbean, African, and American Indian people mingled and intermarried, free people of color, or gens de couleur libres, made up a quarter of New Orleans’s population in 1830. And yet, the story of how the gens de couleur libres community contributed extensively and consistently to the built environment of the city through the first few decades of Louisiana’s statehood is remarkable. One of the great achievements of this book is that author Tara A. Dudley has identified two families, the Souliés and the Dollioles, whose role in the building of New Orleans townhouses, cottages, and the occasional factory was exceptionally strong and multigenerational. Through diaries, building contracts, marriage and death records, bank records, and many other sources, Dudley tracks the families’ presence in antebellum New Orleans from the territorial period in the late 1700s to the Civil War. What she discovers is a legacy of entrepreneurship—including master building, the ownership of real estate and enslaved people, the lending and borrowing of money, and the transferring of property through family inheritance. That legacy placed these families among the wealthiest of their class, free people of color with mixed white and Afro-Creole ancestry. To refer to this book as an architectural history of New Orleans after state-hood would describe only a fraction of its scholarly importance. Beyond the material culture that is manifest in the built environment and the building types that gens de couleur libres builders preferred, the reader gets many glimpses of the unique social and economic position of this mixed-race class and the racial politics they negotiated. These families proved adaptable over time, incorporating Americans’ preferred architectural styles into their familiar Creole architectural heritage. Geographically, they formed a close-knit community in the older neighborhoods of Vieux Carré and Faubourg Tremé and the newer Faubourg Sainte-Marie, while the expanding city became more Americanized. Based on historic photos of the prominent men in these families, helpfully included in the book, it is evident that they could easily pass as white. Tellingly, Dudley opens the book with a diary entry from Bernard Soulié where he proudly listed his French paternal ancestry but omitted any mention of his Black maternal heritage. While it only hints at these omissions and ambiguities, Building Antebellum New Orleans: Free People of Color and Their Influence reveals the rich and complicated social landscape created by free people of color in New Orleans and the privileges that came with belonging to old Francophone families. All of this success, one has to remember, took place in a city that was the center of the slave trade in the United States. Against this background, the small acts of resistance and rebellion among the builder families Dudley has focused [End Page 147] on—cases when gens de couleur libres offered apprenticeships to enslaved people, assisted manumitted people in registering as free, and provided property rights for family members of color—appear just as important as the many houses they built. In their own ways, these families were able to maintain a certain fluidity in racial relationships as Creole people, while gaining considerable financial security as American builders. Jochen Wierich Aquinas College Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".