Confederate music culture.

Great source!

I wonder what kind of affects liberal New Orleans will have on a largely conservative Confederate States' culture.

New Orleans will be a very interesting place in the confederacy. While I’m not one of the confederate optimists, nevertheless the city will play a much bigger role than OTL. It will be the confederacy’s largest city, port, and principal financial center. It will also be a major transportation nexus, controlling the headwaters of the Mississippi and being the principal transit and communication point between the Confederacy and its western states/territories. I imagine this will produce a fair bit of industry as well. I’d suspect that in many ways Texas will be a defacto colony of the New Orleans’s financers, dry goods sellers, and cotton wholesalers.


New Orleans will also be the most cosmopolitan city in the confederacy. New Orleans will likely have the largest concentration of free blacks who would continue to occupy an uncertain and perilous position. The city’s size would grant blacks comparatively more freedom, as its harder to control the entirety of an individual’s life in a city, than it is to do so in a self-contained plantation. The city has strong ties to both the Caribbean and Latin America. There should also be fairly strong ties towards the franco-sphere. The New Orleans’s elite are likely to be as drawn to the styles and culture of Paris rather than those of London. The ongoing French clusterf**k will for a time further strengthen those ties. The city is likely to attract immigrants who would otherwise avoid the CSA. I’d imagine New Orleans would possess fairly large communities of Italian, Irish, French, and Spanish immigrants.



The combination of this is likely to give the city a liberal, if not a decadent reputation. Its size, comparable permissiveness and wealth will keep as a center for the arts and music. New Orleans will likely continue to host one of the largest red light districts on the continent. Its elite would ape France rather than England, speak French, eat Cajun cooking and generally roll their eyes at the other confederate aristocrats. They would likewise picture New Orleans as Sodom on the Mississippi, with every backwoods preacher denouncing it every Sunday.
 
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