Gentilly: A New Orleans Plantation in the French Atlantic World, 1818-1851

Between 1818 and 1851, Auvignac Dorville, a Louisiana Creole, managed the day-to-day operations of the Gentilly plantation, located a few miles from New Orleans along Bayou St. John. The plantation belonged to Henri and Marguerite de Sainte-Gême, who entrusted their property to Dorville’s careful supervision when they left Louisiana for the Sainte-Gême ancestral home in France. Dorville wrote to the Sainte-Gêmes for more than thirty years, offering detailed glimpses of the plantation’s crops, financial situation, environmental challenges, and events surrounding the two dozen enslaved men, women, and children working there. Expertly translated and annotated by Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, Dorville’s letters illuminate nineteenth-century life on an urban plantation that connected the rural world of Louisiana to the urban sphere of New Orleans and reached far into the Atlantic world.

Nathalie Dessens is professor of history at the University of Toulouse and the author of Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans.

Virginia Meacham Gould is a lecturer in history at Tulane University and the editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South.