Nolte, Vincent

Submitted by Mike Miller

The following extract is from the autobiography of a cotton buyer and merchant, a German-Italian, Vincent Nolte, who settled in New Orleans in 1806, when her commerce was in its infancy, and is instructive and graphic. He was connected with the house of Hope & Co., of Amsterdam, a friend and agent of the Barings, and enjoyed the confidence of the Rothschilds. He was a man of courtly address, cultured mind, young and unmarried. He was at once received in the best society and lionized as the leading capitalist and cotton buyer in the community, a position he maintained with honor until his house failed through unforeseen commercial disasters. He is still remembered by the old citizens as a remarkable man, who deserved a better result in his bold speculations, and for the confidence he manifested by large investments in real estate, predicted on the brilliant commercial future of his adopted borne. He contributed to develop, through vast cotton transactions with his European correspondents, the budding commerce of the city and state, and he invested largely in cotton presses, wharves and ships to carry out his projects. He fought as a private in the battle of Chalmette, and was honorably discharged by General Jackson. After his bankruptcy his summer friends seem to have fallen away from him "like leaves in Vallambrosa," and some became his bitter enemies; the result was he returned to Europe a ruined, crippled and brokenhearted man. Perhaps he was "more sinned against than sinning," as in his book, written on the threshold of the grave, he contends with considerable plausibility. His eventful life threw him in personal contact with the most distinguished bankers, financiers and officials in Europe during the great events of the Napoleonic era, up to Waterloo and after the restoration of the Bourbons to the revolution in France of 1848.

Biographical and Historical Memoires of Louisiana, (vol. 2), p. 492. Published by the Goodspeed Publishing Company, Chicago, 1892.