Diversity

• Since Louisiana had seen the settlement of French, Spanish and Anglo-American people, cultural tensions developed between the groups in the early 1800s. In addition to the French and Spanish descendants, often known as Creoles, there were Cajuns, or Acadian refugees, and African slaves. Louisiana's whites feared that rebellious blacks would join forces with the state's other ethnic groups in a society comparable to a caste system. The diversity of the population and their differing beliefs could be seen everywhere. The state's legal system was a compromise of French civil law and English common law, and Louisiana played home to the largest concentration of Catholics in the South in the early 1800s.
  
  

Plantations

• In the early 1800s, Louisiana was home to plantations of varying sizes, from grand cotton plantations to small, single-acre vegetable farms. There were also sugar and tobacco plantations, as these were profitable staples of the "antebellum" period between the American Revolution and Civil War. The larger plantations, known as plantation complexes, were self-sufficient. This meant that slaves produced everything from the clothes they and their masters wore to the food they ate and the crops they sold. Men owned and controlled the plantations, but wives were often essential in the day-to-day operations. Nearly all the owners were white men, though there were a few wealthy free black men as well. There are several former plantation complexes in Louisiana that operate as present-day museums. The Magnolia Plantation Complex in Derry is an example. It is home to eight cabins, a slave quarters, a cotton press and a two-and-a-half story plantation home.
  
  

Trade

• During the "antebellum" period, the port of New Orleans was the United States' second leading port. The Mississippi River served as a means for trading throughout the Midwest. Wheat, corn, lard, pork, furs and hides, whiskey, hemp and lead came down from the upper Midwest, while cotton, sugar, molasses and tobacco went out from the South. Goods from New Orleans could be shipped to the Northeast, Europe and the Caribbean, bringing tremendous wealth to the new state. By the 1820s, canals and railroads would assist in getting goods out to the rest of the nation.
  
  

Skilled Labor

• Skilled labor in Louisiana was available in the form of freed blacks, whites and slaves that were "rented out" by their masters. The demand for labor in the early 1800s was high because of the development of the territory and the increased demand for exports via expanding trade routes. Trades like carpentry, masonry, barrel-making, bricklaying, painting, blacksmithing, shoemaking and baking were common work fields in Lousiana.