Jean Baptiste Moussier

Jean Baptiste Moussier (died 1831) was an American merchant and slave trader from New Orleans, Louisiana. A French Louisianian, in the 1810s he became involved in the coastal slave trade, moving enslaved persons from the Chesapeake to Louisiana. A diversified entrepreneur, Moussier later pursued real estate and finance, and is credited with inventing the concept of Louisiana property banking which allowed his customers to purchase enslaved persons on credit.

Biography

Moussier was a Francophone resident of New Orleans. A merchant by trade, he first sold cotton and sugar from other French Louisianans and Creoles to buyers elsewhere in the United States and in Europe. Based in New Orleans' French Quarter, Moussier conducted his business in the neighborhood of today's Burgundy and Dumaine streets.

Slave trader

In the 1810s, Moussier looked to diversify his trading activities through the coastwise slave trade, which more insulated from price volatility as compared to other goods. New Orleans throughout the 1800s was one of the biggest markets for the domestic slave trade in the United States. He first travelled to Maryland and Virginia to purchase slaves to send south as an individual. An ambitious entrepreneur, he financed his own journeys, managed his own financing and understood the needs of his customers well, allowing him to take strategic risks. He would later build connections with the Tabb family of Norfolk, Virginia, who were known primarily as traders of cotton and tobacco. The Tabbs would work as an agent for Moussier in the upper South, shipping enslaved people for him south as they moved Southern goods northward. In 1819, as he was entering the interstate slave trade, Moussier and his New Orleans Creole business network developed the concept of the Consolidated Association, which would later be refined by Edmund Jean Forstall and others. Moussier's property banks would later attract outside investors from Britain and Europe, allowing Southern planters to access advance funding and credit to purchase slaves.

Personal life A 1853 map of Grande Terre Island. On the right of the island, "Forstall's Plantation" marks Moussier's former sugar plantation. Forstall was one of the creditors who managed the plantation after his death. Moussier was married to Marie Elizabeth Chloé Lezongar de Lasalle and the couple had four children, Stephen Gustave Moussier, Victorie Amelie, Marie Ann Celine and Marie Emma. The island, formerly the domain of pirate, privateer and slave trader Jean Lafitte, is at the mouth of Barataria Bay where it meets the Gulf.

Moussier managed the plantation until he died at home in New Orleans on June 11, 1831.

Due to Moussier's respect in his community, in 1836, Citizens' Bank of New Orleans, a bank that had not existed when Moussier was alive, issued "a sum of $2500" to provide for the welfare of Moussier's daughters who by that time were living in a destitute situation.