| |||||
| Return to Table of Contents Go to Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] | |||||
PAGE 4
| Itemized bill for work done by the African
American carpenter Bernardo for the city's Lighting Department in 1797. Bernardo's work comprised repairs
to the stepladders that the department's workers used to reach the lamps in order to light them each
evening. Note at bottom right the notation by Manuel Fernandez Munilla that he was preparing the bill for
Bernardo, who himself did not know how to write.
|
According to historian Kimberly Hanger ("Almost All Have Callings: Free Blacks at Work in Spanish New
Orleans," 1994), a census taken in 1795 shows that free blacks numbered twenty-one of the city's
thirty-seven carpenters, ten of the nineteen shoemakers, thirty of the fifty-nine seamstresses, and all but one
of the thirty-three laundresses. Free black residents of New Orleans continued to play an important
economic and social role in the municipality up to the time of the American Civil War.
| 
| |||