A first draft of this manuscript was completed in late 1983, just prior to the 1984 New Orleans World Exposition. Revisions and updates were undertaken in1991 and are continuing today. The manuscript is being entered by my loving wife, Jerrelyn Jessop Madere, as her available time permits. She is kind enough to humor me in all of my various endeavors. Thanks Jerre.

 New Orleans may be the most written about of all American cities. Yet, very few serious studies have been made that haven't fallen into either the "moonlight and magnolia" romantic view or become stridently critical, perhaps baffled at a place which constantly confounds preconceptions. Tropical in climate, lush in setting, exotic in architecture, sensual, if not hedonistic, in atmosphere, New Orleans is a worldly, yet bustling seaport whose very name evokes romance and myths. No wonder, then, that most writers perpetuate old myths, create new ones, or at the least get lost in the intellectual and critical miasma that is as natural to New Orleans as the fogs of the swamps and lakes that surround it. It is the intent of this book to penetrate the myths, fable and romance that have so often obscured the true uniqueness of New Orleans--that it is a city where no city, in fact, should be and has been a remarkably successful city for a very long period of time. To do so, we shall examine the peculiar geographical, geological, political, social, and economic conditions that determined New Orleans' founding and growth.

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Pierce Lewis, perhaps its most knowledgeable scholar, describes New Orleans as the "inevitable city on an impossible site." His reasons for saying so were as obvious to early explorers as to modern geographers and geologists. A glance at the map of North America reveals that the continent's interior is drained by a single river system--the Mississippi. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the Mississippi with its vast network of tributaries, particularly the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, provides a natural waterway system for moving people and goods across the midcontinent of North America and down the Mississippi to its outlet on the Gulf.

 Another glance at the North American map reveals that there should be a city at the mouth of so splendid a transportation system. Any city so strategically situated could control the trade between the vast interior of North America and the rest of the world; and a city in so strange a situation might even determine the political future of North America. These facts were as obvious to seventeenth century French explorers as they were to Thomas Jefferson, who said of New Orleans: "There is one spot on the globe, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans."

 The French had established themselves in the norther part of North America (Canada) in the mid-seventeenth century by securing control of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Paris sought to limit the English to the eastern coast of the continent by claiming the Mississippi and its tributaries, thereby gaining control of the interior of North America. The key to securing the Mississippi was to control access to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico, but the French explorers discovered there was a problem. From the mouth of the Mississippi to a point about 200 miles upstream (Baton Rouge), there was no ground high enough to provide a natural site for a city. While the great river demanded a splendid port city, it seemed to provide no place for one.
 
 

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The problem of finding a site for the "inevitable city" has to do with the nature of the lower Mississippi itself. The Mississippi is unusual for North American rivers in that it has a large delta and is not embayed, i.e., the sea does not enter and flood the river's mouth. Rivers that are embayed provide natural sites for cities. London, New York, Hamburg, Quebec City are all located at a narrow inland neck of an estuary, the first site where ships could go no further and where land traffic could cross the river.

 The Mississippi, however, lacks any such well defined head of navigation before Minneapolis; and south of Cairo, Illinois, the Mississippi is almost uniformly wide, with no one spot easier to cross than any other. Moreover, the river is most shallow and treacherous at the sandbars crossing its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Where the river meets the gulf is nothing but marsh and watery muck, a desolate scene that extends so far out into the gulf, it created more difficulties for both seagoing and coastal vessels. With no distinguishing features except mud banks and salt marsh tufts, the river's several mouths and labyrinth of bayous made the three true entrances difficult to find. Moreover, with no way to enter, save through one of the mouths, an with no way to cross the river upstream, coastal ships had to leave the sheltered coastal waterways and enter the Gulf to round the delta.

 Early mariners were forced, then, to ask three basic questions as to where their vessels could go and where a city could be located. The basic questions were: Was there a way for deep-water vessels to reach the river other than by entering its mouth far out in the Gulf? Was there a sheltered way through the delta for coastal vessels to avoid the open waters of the Gulf? Was there a place in the delta's featureless slimy muck where goods could be unloaded and stored without risk of frequent flooding?

 The answer to each question, the French found, was "yes," but a tentative yes. There was a site for a city, but there were numerous problems associated with it. The site where New Orleans would be founded and eventually flourish can best be described as "wretched." The geologists Kolb and Van Topik describe it as "a land between earth and sea, belonging to neither and alternately claimed by both." The Mississippi's delta is noted not only for its swampy, geologic terrain, but also for its difficult environment. The delta is a region prone to excessive heat, annual floods, heavy rain, hurricanes, mosquitoes and disease. The delta environment has shoe-horned New Orleans into a constricted site and forced the city into strange shapes and curious, even eccentric internal patterns of growth. The environment, like the city's personality, is an off-spring of the Mississippi River and a direct result of its behavior in its lower course over the last several thousand years. Like the city it spawned and nourishes, the Mississippi is unusual, not just for its size and delta, but for other eccentricities.

 From Cairo, Illinois south, the Mississippi follows a downwarp, the Mississippi embayment, in the earth's crust. At its lower end, the embayment sinks at an average rate of three inches per century. However, the Mississippi's flow of water and volume of sediment is such that the river extends its delta into the Gulf and fills its embayment, even as it sinks. A cross-view of a section of the delta from east to west would reveal pre-glacial bedrocks filled with layers of deltaic material--i.e., silt, clay, sand, and a large bulk of soupy organic matter produce by rotting swamp and marsh vegetation. The bedrock itself is not really "rock," but instead is a varied mix of semi-compacted clay, silt and silty sand. This Pleistocene bedrock lies seventy to one hundred feet beneath New Orleans (explaining why, until recently, it was a chancy and expensive business to build skyscrapers; requiring pilings to be driven down to at least seventy feet), runs below Lake Pontchartrain, and crops out on the north side of the lake, where it forms a low bluff that gives way to low hills covered with spindly pines. A cross section, then, resembles a shallow saucer filled with layers of jello.

 The Mississippi's methods of building its delta have determined differences in elevations in the city and differences in sub-surface materials, thereby determining the city's historical and current patterns of growth and development. The Mississippi basically goes about building its delta in two ways: by depositing sediment where river meets sea, and by periodic flooding, with the occasional making and abandoning of distributaries. When the river deposits sediments, material accumulates, forming sandbars or mudbanks. When enough deposits accumulate, an island forms and the river splits into two or more distributaries. The Mississippi has done this recently south of Venice, Louisiana, where it divides into three major distributaries--the South Pass, the Southwest Pass, and Pass a l'Outre, with the Southwest Pass being the deepest and carrying the largest volume of river traffic. Shallow and lacking the scouring power of a single channel, the three channels are prone to silting, which means that keeping the river open to water traffic is a serious, full-time matter. The problem of silting was largely resolved by Col. James Eads, now a New Orleans folk hero, who designed and built the Eads Jetties at Southwest Pass in the late 1870's to force the river to scour a reliable, deep-water channel for ocean vessels. Today, the Army Corps of Engineers has the responsibility for maintaining the clear channel of forty feet.

 In its past, the Mississippi built and abandoned several distributaries. Two abandoned distributaries that meander through the New Orleans area have left important marks on the city. One was the Bayou Metairie Gentilly, which left the Mississippi about twenty miles above the French Quarter at Kenner Ridge, and wandered eastward towards the Gulf, parallel and north of the river. Never an important water route, the bayou was paralleled by a ridge of well-drained land that offered a dry land route into New Orleans, from the west via Metairie Road (Metairie Ridge) and from the east via Gentilly Road and the Chef Menteur Highway (Gentilly Ridge). Metairie Road was always, until recently, a bucolic path, since it ran parallel to River Road, the only road to Baton Rouge. But Gentilly Ridge was always the mainland route into New Orleans from the east, carrying first the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and later U.S. Highway 90. The other abandoned distributary, Bayou Barataria, has always been less important, since it led south into the swamps where no one but Cajuns and pirates (Jean Lafitte) wanted to live until recently, when suburban developments began to appear.

 The river's other method of creating land is more spectacular and usually wreaks radical geographical changes in its delta. Periodically, the Mississippi overflows its bank, dropping its coarsest sediment (silt) in a belt along the riverbank. Further away from the banks, as the overflow slows, very fine, almost microscopic particles are deposited, taking days to settle, in areas one or two or more miles from the river that until recently were perennially flooded, low swamps. Here, in these forlorn and pestilential areas, called "backswamps," the sub-microscopic material, or ooze, mingled with rotting vegetation to produce peat, and eventually soil, but soil of a peculiar nature -- a black, slimy material the consistency of which varies between thick glue and thin soup.

 The backswamp in "Uptown" New Orleans (upriver) was an especially odious place, rounded on three sides by the great semicircular "Crescent Curve" of the Mississippi. The three banks, or natural levees, of the Mississippi together with the lower natural levees of the abandoned Bayou Metairie (Metairie Ridge) created an area like a shallow "bowl," with the center below sea level and prone to filling up with water after heavy rains or flooding. Until ways were found in the twentieth century to pump water out, the center of much of modern Uptown and Mid-City was always wet. In pre-historic times, when water rose too high in the "bowl," it would spill over the lowest spot in the Metairie Ridge, eventually forming a slow sluggish stream, Bayou St. John.

 With each flood, the Mississippi has also raised its banks or natural levees higher. At New Orleans, the natural levees average ten to fifteen feet above sea level and one to two miles in width, sloping gently and almost imperceptibly into the backswamp. So uninviting was the backswamp as a place to build, that for some 200 years New Orleans was confined to its natural levees of the Mississippi and the Metairie and Gentilly ridges. In southeast Louisiana, since only the natural levees are well-drained, relatively safe from flooding and allow the building of roads and structures, nearly all settlements, urban and rural, are located on the natural levees of the Mississippi and its distributaries.

 While building its levees higher, the Mississippi extends then further into the Gulf. As it does so, the river also raises its riverbed higher. To maintain its current, the river requires a gradient. Whenever the current slackens, material is deposited in the riverbed. So, as the river extends itself into the gulf, its upstream stretches rise higher and higher with each new flood and each addition to the natural levees. Consequently, in many of its stretches in south Louisiana, the Mississippi stands higher than its adjacent flood plain. For this reason, all small streams in south Louisiana flow away from or parallel to the Mississippi's natural levees. Since none of the small streams can cross the Mississippi, intra-coastal shipping was impossible in the Mississippi's delta until a canal with locks was built in 1909. In the New Orleans area, the Mississippi stands ten to fifteen feet above sea level, perched on a ridge above much of the modern city.

 Throughout its geologic history, the Mississippi has changed its course numerous times. The river's former main courses largely determined the pattern of modern settlement and transportation routes in southeast Louisiana. One, the Bayou Teche, is the main artery of Cajun Louisiana; its natural levees supporting such Cajun centers as St. Martinville, Breaux Bridge, New Iberia and Lafayette. Halfway between the Teche and New Orleans, Bayou Lafourche is a more recent ancestor of the Mississippi. The St. Bernard Delta, east of New Orleans, is another former course of the Mississippi. These former courses all run parallel to one another, but they are separated by swampy troughs. Until recently, all roads in southeast Louisiana were limited to natural levees and ran parallel to one another, which made travel in and through Cajun country difficult and left New Orleans poorly connected with its immediate hinterland.

 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Mississippi has been on the verge of jumping courses again. If the river jumped below New Orleans, only a new navigation system would be required from the city to the Gulf of Mexico. But, a jump above New Orleans would leave the city located not on the Mississippi, but on a stagnant bayou. One such diversion threatened for awhile about thirty miles north of New Orleans at Bonnet Carre. Had it occurred, the Mississippi would have gone into Lake Pontchartrain and thereby directly to the Gulf, instead of 130 miles by the current route, eventually filling the lake with mud.

 A second, even more ominous diversion threatened at Morganza above Baton Rouge. A break there would send the river into a slot between the Mississippi's present natural levees and the ancient levees of Bayou Teche now occupied by the Atchafalaya River. This would be a more direct route to the Gulf, saving the Mississippi about half its current distance. The Army Corps of Engineers saved both danger points and assured New Orleans a flood-free future by building huge concrete floodgates, or spillways, that prevent breaks, but can be opened to save New Orleans, if threatened by a flood crest.

 So, although New Orleans' situation is geographically magnificent, located at the mouth of the great Mississippi with its vast network of tributaries, the actual site is miserable, swampy land located in a dangerous, hostile environment, where the Mississippi debouches into the Gulf. The site's problems are numerous. The older and main parts of New Orleans rest on the natural levees of the Mississippi, about fifteen feet above sea level, with the firmest, most solid soil being silt. Most of the modern city is at or below sea level, with the Mississippi usually flowing past the city at a height of ten to fifteen feet above sea level, flooding at twenty feet. Behind the old city, between river and lack, until recently, was a backswamp, with no solid building foundations, which was a breeding ground for malaria until 1900. During heavy rains, the area filled up with water.

 Much of modern New Orleans is built on muck, with no solid bedrock until a depth of seventy feet is reached below the surface. Natural levees, which could be breached in floods, provided the only land access to the city, making land transportation tenuous at best. Until recently, there was a serious threat of the Mississippi jumping course, isolating New Orleans on a stagnant bayou.

 Because of the swampy terrain, most of the nearby areas of south Louisiana were unpopulated, leaving New Orleans without an adjacent hinterland. What scanty population there was lived on natural levees that run parallel to one another and the Mississippi, separated by swamps that made transportation and communication overland and by water difficult. New Orleans was for long a city better connected to the outside world by the river than to its immediate hinterland. Also, the Mississippi's entrances were 120 miles downstream and had a tendency to silt up, making navigation hazardous. The city is also open to hurricanes that periodically roar out of the Gulf, driving high tides ahead of them. The areas several feet above sea level are safe, but most of modern, especially suburban New Orleans is below sea level. Finally, New Orleans is built on land that is gradually, in some cases even rapidly, sinking.

 However, despite all the dangers and hazards of the site, the city was built and has flourished. Since the situation was so excellent, the site has been altered by man to "make do," although not all problems have been banished by twentieth century technology, as witness occasional flooding, hurricanes, and sinking foundations. But, today, over one million people inhabit the metropolitan area, and most seem delighted to be there, despite the numerous environmental problems that were so obvious to the early French explorers.

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The first Frenchman to explore the lower Mississippi was Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, who passed by New Orleans' site in April 1682 on a float down the Mississippi from Canada. De La Salle claimed the entire river basin from the Appalachians to the Rockies for France, naming the area Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV and his Austrian bride Queen Anne. The French explorers who followed La Salle into the region kept looking for high ground, but at first found none satisfactory enough for a settlement south of Baton Rouge. So, the French at first tried to get around the geological and environmental problems posed by the Mississippi's delta by founding Baton Rouge and by building a string of forts along the Gulf of Biloxi, Dauphin Island and Mobile. However, Baton Rouge soon proved unsatisfactory as a portage point between the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the coastal forts made for a too insecure hold on the Mississippi. The route from Baton Rouge to the Gulf -- through the Mississippi Sound to Lake Borgne, then via Pass Manchac into Lake Maurepas and finally up the Amite River to the back side of Baton Rouge -- proved to be too long and out-of-the-way.

 An easier, shorter route between river and gulf was found as early as 1699 by the brothers Bienville and Iberville, with the aid of the Choctaws, who had used it for centuries. From the Gulf, sailing vessels at first followed the same route as that to Baton Rouge -- through the Mississippi Sound into Lake Borgne, then through the Rigolets into Lake Pontchartrain. However, once in Lake Pontchartrain, the route turned south into the Bayou St. John, a four-mile long stream which flowed off the backslope of Metairie Ridge into the lake. From the headwaters of Bayou St. John to the Mississippi was only a two mile portage across the relatively well-drained land of the natural levee created by the river's great crescent curve. Besides being the shortest route to the Gulf, the site had obvious geographical, military and commercial advantages. The French had soon realized that their forts along the Gulf Coast were unable to assure control of the Mississippi. A garrison town near the mouth of the river with a shorter backdoor route to the Gulf that could be protected by forts would assure control of the river and the lower Mississippi Valley. In 1718 Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established New Orleans as the capital of Louisiana and a fortress to control the wealth of the North American interior.

 At first, however, New Orleans was more important as an image than it was in reality. Surrounded by the waters of river, lake and swamps, the French referred to New Orleans as the "Isle d'Orleans." And, indeed, New Orleans was an island, not just in the physical sense -- which was true after slight improvements were made at the site, namely a three-foot artificial levee which kept out all but the worst floods -- but a cultural island, too. New Orleans was far better than the surrounding swamps, and quickly became a haven for travelers on the Mississippi. The city became an island of civilization in an ocean of wilderness: a particularly brilliant beacon in the surrounding darkness, and a prize eagerly sought. Once New Orleans had that image, no other city could hope to compete for command of the Mississippi Valley. New Orleans, then, began as a cultural as well as a physical island, an island poorly connected with the immediate hinterland, but with superb connections with the larger world. As an oasis of civilization in a hostile swamp, New Orleans came to feel itself a very special place. Having conquered the dismal swamp, New Orleans was confident of a brilliant future.

 Cities, like individuals, go through stages and growth. Lewis argues that New Orleans has experienced several major "historic-geographic" ages, each different because dominated by different people, attitudes and technology. Each period left New Orleans changed, with new sections attached to old ones. New Orleans changed as the technology available to manipulate the physical environment changed and as the ways of communicating with and relating to the outside world changed. The city's population also changed in size and ethnic composition as new jobs appeared and old ones disappeared. The city's appearance changed as architectural styles, street patterns, and land use also changed. When each period was over, New Orleans found itself fundamentally different, with new economic and social connections with the outside world, a new internal geography, a new position with respect to other American cities, and facing the world in new directions. During each period, New Orleans' fortunes were linked with different parts of the nation and world.

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 During the eighteenth century, New Orleans' growth was slow and difficult. Although its geographical situation, strategically important site, and master plan for development guaranteed New Orleans a bright future, the realization of that promise was dependent upon the ambitions of the dominant political powers of the day, the limitations of the physical environment, the technology, the social institutions and the political, philosophical, and psychological habits that determine what we think we can do, or cannot do. In particular, for early New Orleans, the promise of its strategic situation depended upon which political power controlled the interior of North America. In the eighteenth century, three European powers, France, Spain, and Britain were rivals for dominance. However, all three would give way before the first independent North American power -- the emergent United States.

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The forty-five years of French rule were the slowest and most painful for New Orleans. The reason for this had to do as much with the French attitude towards emigration as it did with the economic policies of the French Crown. In Louisiana, as in Canada, the French failed to populate their territories adequately. The Bourbon government feared heretics and Englishmen (the two, often synonymous in French minds), and preferred conservative, Catholic Frenchmen as settlers. All settlers were screened carefully, but most conservative Catholic Frenchmen much preferred France to the Mississippi Delta. The French who did emigrate were suspicious of outsiders; and, the rural Acadians ("Cajuns") who settled the countryside around New Orleans in the 1760's, after being hounded out of Canada, especially disliked Protestants and Englishmen.

 France's economic policy -- mercantilism -- also worked against rapid growth. Mercantilism essentially held that all economic activity should be regulated by the state for the benefit of the state. Thus, colonies existed solely for the benefit of the state, providing the mother country with raw materials and markets for finished goods -- i.e., a minimum investment in, but a maximum return for the colonies. For most of her rule, France saw little indication of large financial returns from her Louisiana colony. The French thought of Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley as a buffer against British expansion westward from their seaboard colonies, and as a challenge to Spanish predominance in the west and southwest of North America. France, then, saw no point in investing large sums in Louisiana, except for the brief period from 1716-1722, that saw the founding of New Orleans.

 The reason French opinion changed in these years was a brilliant financial scheme hatched by John Law, a Scotsman, gambler, and financial advisor to the Duc d'Orleans, who was regent for the young Louis XV. Orleans, a rake and a gambler himself, as regent was struggling to meet the huge debts that were the legacy of Louis XIV's numerous wars and extravagant palaces. Orleans eagerly agreed to Law's scheme that the Mississippi Company be formed to assume the French Crown's debt in return for a charter to operate Louisiana as a colony. Law's ingenious proposal called for the proceeds from the sale of shares in the Mississippi Company to the French public to be used to back the Crown's debt and currency. Shareholders would receive dividends on the profits the Mississippi Company would reap from the riches to be found in Louisiana.

 Law launched one of the first modern public relations campaigns to convince thousands of Frenchmen of the fortunes to be made in a Louisiana rich in gold and fertile land. For two years, frenzied speculation shot the value of Mississippi Company stock upwards as Frenchmen of all persuasions rushed to invest their savings. But, by 1720, when no bonanza of dividends had been forthcoming, the "Mississippi Bubble" burst. The company collapsed when thousands of Frenchmen rushed to unload their shares, and Law fled France just ahead of an irate mob.

 Law had few problems financing his company, but he had great difficulty in developing Louisiana. The colony had no gold, and although there was much fertile land, the people, technology, and infrastructure to develop agriculture were lacking. Law tried various schemes to attract settlers for Louisiana and New Orleans, but his efforts were undone by rumors of the excessive heat, mosquitoes, humidity, and disease, and by the natural reluctance of Frenchmen to emigrate. Law did settle some 2,000 Germans from France's eastern border on the Mississippi just north of New Orleans, where they began farming and also soon "gallicized" their names. But, his attempt to import prisoners from French jails failed since, once loose in Louisiana, they simply resumed their antisocial behavior.

 In the end, nothing could save Law's company. The collapse of the Mississippi Company in 1720 ruined thousands of middle-upper class Frenchmen and destabilized the French currency. Most importantly, France, from the King's court to the King's kitchen, was left traumatized by the very idea of stock companies and Louisiana. The Crown resumed control of Louisiana, but for the remaining years of its rule, France did little to develop the colony. New Orleans grew slowly, starved of both necessary capital and labor. Slow immigration created labor shortages which encouraged the importation of slaves, so that by 1800 more than 50% of the colony's population was African-American.

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Defeated in the Seven Years War (1756-63), France was compelled by the Treaty of Paris to cede Canada and all the territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, including West Florida and Louisiana, north of Lake Pontchartrain, to Britain. The rest of Louisiana, including New Orleans, was handed over to the Bourbons of Spain. Spain's 41-year rule was ultimately beneficial to New Orleans, but for reasons only indirectly related to Spanish ownership and economic policies. Plagued with even worse domestic problems than France and with growing unrest throughout her extensive, but tottering, empire in Central and South America, Spain was too preoccupied to see New Orleans as anything more than a sideshow. Not until 1769 did the French population even acknowledge Spanish rule, and then only when faced with a Spanish military force. New Orleans was never really integrated into Spain's Empire, although shippers and merchants were allowed to trade with Spain and France and their colonies in the Caribbean.

 New Orleans did grow under Spanish rule, primarily because of English Colonial and then American settlement of the Ohio Valley. Spain was as nervous as the French had been about the English colonists and the British. It was obvious after 1763 that New Orleans' close geographical ties to the British colonies in North America were pulling the city into what would later become the American orbit. Anglo settlers in the Ohio Valley sought trade outlets through the city, an within New Orleans itself, the direction of growth was upriver. The Spanish at first allowed Colonial and British traders to undertake much of the high risk commercial shipping on which New Orleans depended; but in the late 1770's, a worried Spain revoked Colonial and British trading privileges. However, the Anglo-Saxons, established in West Florida (north of Lake Pontchartrain) continued to ship goods through Lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain and Maurepas, setting up a thriving entrepot at Pass Manchac. The Spanish soon realized that this thriving, but illicit trade between the Anglo and the Latin commercial interests in the city was absolutely essential for moving goods in and out of New Orleans. Spain and her empire were unable to supply the necessary provisions to New Orleans or sufficient markets for the products of the Mississippi Valley.

 With the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States, American involvement in trade with and through New Orleans grew at a rate that increasingly alarmed the Spanish. Spain worried that New Orleans' rapidly growing economy was tied too directly to the new United States, but her final efforts to stem the American flood backfired. Measures such as offering enhanced trading privileges to Americans who would accept Spanish citizenship in New Orleans only increased the inevitable linkages between New Orleans and the American economy.

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Both Spain and France proved unable to hold New Orleans as part of an empire against the Americans flooding into the Mississippi Valley after 1800. As the nineteenth century began, France was completing her revolution and was periodically at war with half of Europe; and Bourbon rule in Spain and throughout Latin America was near collapse. Napoleon tried to reestablish the French Empire in Louisiana, taking control of New Orleans from Spain in 1802; but financial troubles and the difficulty of holding French conquests in Europe and the Caribbean led him to sell all of Louisiana, including New Orleans, to the United States. The restored French rule had been brief; on December 1, 1803, official word of French ownership reached New Orleans. A scant three weeks later came news that Louisiana and New Orleans were American. Thomas Jefferson, who negotiated the "Louisiana Purchase," had pulled off one of the great real estate buys in history.

 The addition of Louisiana to the United States was inevitable. The young republic was moving inexorably westward, and its major transportation system for moving people and goods was the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system. New Orleans was the natural outlet for the agricultural products and manufactured goods produced by the Americans flooding west of the Appalachians. Since there were too few Europeans to hold New Orleans against the American tide, it was New Orleans' destiny to become part of the United States. In December 1803, New Orleans' legal and political realities finally became aligned with its obvious geographic and economic realities as a critical part of a rapidly growing United States. New Orleans' situation was too important, its reputation too flamboyant to be ignored by the United States any longer. New Orleans' fate was determined by its particular political and economic conditions that dictated its founding as a city. These conditions dominated its economic development to the Civil War and have been influential ever since. New Orleans' situation on the Mississippi, the Industrial Revolution, international power struggles, and the emergence of the United States as a major power have embedded the city deep within the heartland of the American economy and have made it an important factor in the world economy.

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Perhaps the most important resources of any economy are people and their skills. Few census were taken during New Orleans' colonial period, but it is estimated that about 250 people lived in the town during the early 1700's. By 1760, the population numbered about 4,000, and by 1803, it was upwards of 8,000. As a port city, New Orleans had a varied ethnic composition. The few thousand Choctaw Indians living in the area when the French arrived had, by 1803, either left or mingled their blood with other groups. The French -- soldiers, settlers, prisoners, and casket girls (girls of good reputation who were given transportation and a casket, i.e., trunk of household items) -- made up the bulk of the population for most of the eighteenth century. Africans were first brought to New Orleans in the 1720's and sold as slaves, mainly to planers. The labor shortage was so acute in the countryside that few African-Americans lived in the city. Even by 1803, there were probably fewer than 5,000 African-Americans in New Orleans with more free men of color than slaves.

Commercial families from many European countries established branches in the city, and John Law's efforts accounted for 2,000 German immigrants. Spain made serious attempts to encourage Spanish emigration, settling several thousand Canary Islanders in the 1780's twenty miles south of New Orleans and also to the west of New Iberia. Ironically, the biggest influx under Spanish rule was that of French-speakers: the Acadians who, expelled by the British from Canada, settled from the late 1760's through the late 1700's on all sides of the city, particularly to the west, near modern Lafayette. In the last years of Spanish rule, growing numbers of Americans settled and around New Orleans.

Under French rule, New Orleans' trade was largely a one-way affair: flour and most other necessities imported from France or her other colonies, and virtually nothing to fill ships for the return trip. Bienville complained throughout the 1730's about the lack of provisions, but given the many wars of the eighteenth century and the numerous pirates and privateers, France was able to provide only minimum aid. Although any goods delivered in New Orleans commanded high prices, private traders were reluctant to risk shipment to the city because of the dangers, the fact that New Orleans was not on the way to any other port (it was less expensive to unload in Caribbean ports for eventual transshipment to New Orleans), the low likelihood of payment in hard cash, and the lack of valuable goods to fill the ships' holds for the return trip.

During France's rule, New Orleans and the area upriver produced few goods that could be exported. A few lumber mills were built, and lumber, pitch, and other such products were exported. But lumber, while it might fill the ship's hold was usually much less valuable than the load of incoming necessities it replaced. For a while, ships were required by law to accept a certain amount of lumber products aboard before being permitted to leave port. Some indigo was exported from the plantations near New Orleans, and tobacco was grown on drier land upriver of Baton Rouge. Furs from trappers in the Midwest arrived in New Orleans along with some flour from Indians or settlers in Illinois. But flour was usually imported from Europe. So, throughout the French Period, a serious imbalance of trade existed between New Orleans and the outside world. Such a negative balance is typical of developing areas and is usually counter-weighted by an inflow of investment funds. The French, however, stung by the "Mississippi Bubble," saw little chance of profit from any investment in New Orleans.

Economic conditions improved under the Spanish, but not because of their attitude toward investment. Spanish colonial policy followed strict mercantilist lines. Spain sought the maximum expropriation of wealth, with minimum time and effort. Nevertheless, the years of Spanish rule, from 1762-1803, saw steady growth in commerce, mainly stimulated by British and Latin American businesses willing to speculate in bringing goods to New Orleans. After 1730, there was an increasing flow of agricultural products and even some manufactured goods down the Ohio and Mississippi River to New Orleans, both for export to Europe and for shipment to the eastern seaboard of the new United States. The technology of the day made water transportation the most efficient means of moving goods.

Two technological breakthroughs of the 1790's also dramatically altered the composition and quantity of trade through New Orleans. The first was planter Etienne Bore's introduction of an improved process for refining sugar, which led within one season to a wholesale substitution of sugar cultivation for indigo on the plantations surrounding New Orleans. The second was Eli Whitney's cotton gin which transformed the highly labor-intensive step of removing seeds from raw cotton into a speedy mechanical process. As cotton cloth became the nearly universal standard for wearing apparel, English factory demand for cotton greatly increased. Cotton quickly supplanted tobacco in the drier areas north of Baton Rouge. At the same time, rice continued to be cultivated in south Louisiana. By 1800, New Orleans had become a center for the preparation, storage, shipping, and financing of local sugar and rice crops, cotton from further up the river, and wheat and other products from the American midwest. Clearly, no matter what Spain's wishes or policy, New Orleans' natural economic development was tied to its position near the outlet of the greatest river in the United States.

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The physical character of New Orleans had changed tremendously by 1803. In 1718, Bienville had only managed to construct several huts, a wooden house for himself, and a storehouse; no brick building was built until the late 1720's. The "Cathedral" on Place d'Armes remained a simple wooden structure for years, while the square itself was overgrown with weeds. On three sides, the walls were simple wooden palisades, and a three-foot levee faced the river. Throughout the French Period, hurricanes, floods, and fires plagued these vulnerable structures. New Orleans was not really a "city" until well into the Spanish period. Most of the French wooden buildings were destroyed by the devastating fire of 1788, and the Spanish had hardly rebuilt the city, when a series of three hurricanes and another fire, all in 1794, destroyed the few buildings that had escaped the 1788 disaster, as well as most of the new ones. As a result, the architecture of the Vieux Carre is Spanish, not French, and most of the existing structures date from 1795 or after.

Adrien de Pauger's plan for New Orleans was impressive on paper, but until the 1790's the streets were more like canals much of the year. Drainage was non-existent, and the banquettes, raised structures of mud used as miniature levees around houses and sidewalks, kept sewage and garbage trapped inside their parameters. To say that disease was a threat to everyday living in eighteenth-century New Orleans is an understatement. The chronic labor shortage was largely attributed to the high infant mortality rate and the high death rate in general to yellow fever, small pox, and numerous tropical ills. Mosquitoes, poor sanitation, close living quarters, dampness, and heat were problems to be dealt with before New Orleans could modernize. The Spanish slowly improved drainage by building better levees; but with no pumps to remove water, improved levees offered only limited benefits. An important step forward came with the building of the Carondelet Canal in the 1790's by Governor Carondelet. The canal not only marked an advance in drainage, but was also an aid to commerce, bringing boats from Bayou St. John to the rear of the city; and it later led to the building of a turning basin, creating a thriving commercial waterfront area. But the usual method of avoiding disease (and hurricanes) was for those who could afford it to leave the city between July and September of each year.

The Cabildo, of City Council, selected by the Spanish governor, did succeed in establishing an elementary lighting system and the beginnings of a police force; but more than a few lamps and policemen were needed to deal with a city whose second industry, after shipping, may be described as elementary "hotel, restaurant, and tourism." New Orleans was a wide open town of drinking and carousing, the market for which was supplied by pirates, river boatmen, soldiers, local citizens of all races, and even a few legitimate tourists. No wonder that the Anglo-Saxons preferred to settle across Canal Street, the western border of the Quarter, in what came to be known as the American sector. The Creoles, or older French and Spanish monied community, made their escape from the rowdier elements by refining their codes of behavior into a culture of "polite" society, trying to recreate the manners of pre-revolutionary, aristocratic France.

Both Creoles and Anglo-Saxons welcomed the end of Spanish rule in 1803. The Creoles regarded Spain's political rule as threatening their French heritage, although prominent Spanish families eventually married into the Creole "aristocracy." The Anglo-Saxon merchants welcomed the increased American trade, government, and culture that was bound to follow. The majority of New Orleans' working population -- white, African-American, or Indian -- of whatever occupation have left no documentation of their opinions on Americanization, but they, too, would find a fantastically expanding New Orleans' economy after 1803.

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New Orleans' growth between 1810 and 1860 was the result of its unique geographical situation, the increasing industrialization of the American Northeast and Great Britain, and the westward movement of the young United States. The United States from 1803 to 1860 had many of the problems common to developing countries of today. The young nation was largely agricultural, underpopulated, and undercapitalized. But the country had rich natural resources, a unified legal system, a constitution that created a large free trade area, and common language -- English. The young republic needed to develop its resources, populate its lands, establish communities, and build transportation systems. Before the advent of the railroad, the country's only major transportation network was the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi river system. New Orleans, at the mouth of this system, could only benefit from the development of the Louisiana Purchase, the West, and the Industrial Revolution that was transforming the economies of the Northeast and Great Britain. The city's business and commerce would boom as the Northeastern and British demand for western foodstuffs and southern cotton increased.

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The direction of American economic development, then, was extremely important to the growth of the New Orleans economy. In the early nineteenth century, American leadership was divided on economic policy. Thomas Jefferson spoke for many who felt that the United States should remain a society of small independent farmers, producing agricultural products for an increasingly urban, industrial Great Britain and Western Europe. Other Americans, led by Alexander Hamilton, urged federal government cooperation with Northeastern banking interests and protective tariffs to encourage the immediate industrialization of the United States.

The issue of free trade versus forced industrialization was never settled before the Civil War, but protectionism did receive a test during the Napoleonic era. Between 1793 and 1807, the United States was virtually the only neutral country in a Western world divided by war between Britain and France. As neutrals, Americans could trade with both sides, reaping such profits from agriculture and other exports that there was little call for the development of domestic manufacturing. These years brought home to the federal government the importance of the purchase of the Great Plains and the port city of New Orleans.

Until 1807, New Orleans profited greatly from America's booming agricultural and export trade; but by 1808, Jefferson's embargo, followed by Madison's Non-Intercourse Act, had led to recession and a harsh testing of protectionism for New Orleans and the United States. From 1808 to 1815, the United States halted almost all trade with the belligerents to protest interference with American shipping. Unable to trade agricultural products for finished manufactured goods, the United States turned to producing its own goods. But lacking the technology, skilled labor, and machine tools for such a rapid transformation of the economy, the result was depression. New Orleans, however, escaped the worst of the depression, as some products continued to come downriver for coast wide shipment to New England.

Peace in 1815 brought stiff European competition, forcing fledgling industries to fold, and the United States soon reverted to its earlier economic pattern. Industry continued to develop in the East, while agriculture grew apace in the West, with the Mississippi serving as the main route for the agricultural products that earned America the foreign exchange to buy the physical and financial tools of development. New Orleans benefited in these years not just from the general upward trend in exports, but also from the technological advances -- the cotton gin, spinning jenny, and steamboat -- that made the plantations of the lower Mississippi Valley highly efficient and profitable sources of cheap cotton for clothing the world.

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The years from the Purchase to the Civil War were golden ones for New Orleans, witnessing intense growth and development and significant changes in the internal structure of its economy. In 1803, New Orleans was basically 8,000 people directly or indirectly tied to moving goods from river vessels to dock to ship and vice versa. Its primary industry was the port, moving and storing goods. Ship chandling, repairing, and building were a distant second industry, but rapid economic growth after 1803 spawned new economic interests. By the 1820's and 1830's, New Orleans was the commercial entrepot and financial intermediary for goods from all reaches of the Mississippi. There were many more merchants to handle the growing trade and the financing of farms, plantations, and communities upriver. There were growing wholesale, retail, an transient service sectors to supply the food, clothing, and goods of growing population of residents and visitors: and there was the inevitable growth of government to provide police, fire, and health services and to administer docks and levees.

In addition to the emergence of new economic sectors, the focus of New Orleans' economic activities began to change in the late 1830's. Until then, about 90% of the city's trade consisted of downriver shipments of Midwestern foodstuffs. In the 1830's and 1840's, the growing world demand for cotton led to the development of vast, efficient slave plantations in the lower Mississippi Valley that produced more cotton at lower prices. By the late 1840's cotton was king, and New Orleans and the Mississippi River planters were prosperous. Increased world demand for cotton had pushed New Orleans into a less national, more regional orientation and role. On the eve of the Civil War, port activity was way up, but more than ever it centered around the exportation of cotton and the importation of plantation-destined goods. Aiding this process was the completion of the Erie and other canals in the 1820's and 1830's which drained away much of the upper Midwest grain trade. But, as yet, the railroad did not threaten the city's cotton business as it would after the Civil War. In retrospect, the 1850's were the high water marks of cotton shipping, cotton culture, and cotton wealth in nineteenth century New Orleans.

In terms of trade, between 1821 and 1835, the average total of exports and imports per year through New Orleans was $22 million ($15 million exports, and $7 million imports), a fourfold increase in exports alone. The exports represented for the period 1821-35 about 18% of all United States exports, and for 1852-60, 30% of the same. Cotton shipment peaked during the 1860-61 season, totaling over 2,200,000 bales, worth $110,000,000 and representing 60% of the value of all products received from the upcountry. Sugar and tobacco were distant runners-up to cotton, and foodstuffs made up the bulk of the rest of the exports. Most of the cotton was shipped from New Orleans to Liverpool and other British ports, either directly, or by transhipment through New York. New Orleans, then, was a transhipment point for cotton, and the city never developed into a major manufacturing center for the primary products it transhipped, financed or stored.

Cotton was the sinews of business in Ante-bellum New Orleans, the economic rhythms of the city revolving around the cotton seasons. Cotton was picked and baled from September through December. Shipments into the city ran from a low in October to a high in January, tapering off in the spring, with most of a year's crop exported by May. In summer, the port was virtually deserted as the heat, humidity, and falling water levels slowed dock workers, rotted any agricultural products on the levee, and hindered the river traffic, especially at the silted mouth of the river. Many merchants and their families left the city to avoid the heat, yellow fever, cholera, and hurricanes. However, between January and March, many plantation owners and their families would visit in the city, partaking of the social whirl of Mardi Gras, shopping, and meeting with their cotton factors, who acted as agents, bankers, and financial advisors.

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The increased output of cotton was borne by a new, more efficient means of water transportation -- the steamboat. The first steamboat came downriver in 1812. In 1821, 287 steamboats arrived in New Orleans; by 1826, there were 700 steamboat arrivals. In 1845, 2,500 steamboats were recorded, and during the 1850's an average of 3,000 steamboats a year called at the city. After 1830, then, steamboats were in general use on the Mississippi, allowing two-way packet lines to operate, carrying both cargo and passengers on regular schedules. Flatbed boats, which were once the main river vessels, virtually disappeared after 1857.

In spite of the huge volume of steamboats that called at the city annually, New Orleans never became a center for building either ocean vessels or riverboats before the Civil War. In 1803, New Orleans was only a small town of 8,000 and lacked the skilled labor force to devlop a shipbuilding industry. As it grew larger, the city's location at the bottom end of the steamboat market made it a less attractive choice for steamboat construction than more centrally located cities, like St. Louis or Cincinnati.

Ocean-going ship building was slow to deelop for similar reaons. Attempts were made in the 1850's to enlarge New Orleans' shipyards, but Northeastern financinal sources were not interested in starting new shipyards to compete with the established Atlantic seaboard shipbuilding industry. By 1860, New Orleans did have fledgling machine shops, ironworks, several shipbuilding firms, located mainly on the westbank in Algiers. Algiers also supported a dry dock and a ship repair industry, so that in all, over 500 men were employed in ship repair and buildng by 1861. However, the Civil War slowed the development of the indsutry, delaying for decades the emergence of a major shipbuilding industry in New Orleans.

Some light manufacturing did develop by the 1850's, but much of it was worn out, destroyed or carried off by the end of the Civil War. As the city's prot and commerce expended, machine shops, boilermakers, blacksmiths, cartwrights, and other businesses developed; but they were, for the most part, all small-scale, private enterprises, more like the "craft system" of masters and apprentices than the factory system emerging in the industrializing Northeast.

Although industry was not that large or important in aspect of Ante-bellum New Orleans' economy, commerce was. From 1810 to 1860, not jsut shipping and storage, but wholesale trade, entertainment, travel services, and finance boomed. Wholesale trade developed naturally as the city and its hinterlands, which until Chicago and St. Louis emerged included most of the Mdiwest, grew. New Orleans was ther nearest distribution center for the upriver and inland communities of the Mississippi Valley for most of the period. In the 1850's, St. Louis, the closest rival wholesale center, was far behind New Orleans and mainly oriented westward. New Orleans' fast growing population also provided an increasing market for her thriving wholesale business.

Retail trade, too, benefited from a growing market of wage earners, renters, and plantation owners, whose income and wealth, new and old, supported a multiplicity of retail shops and artisans. New Orleans's close contacts with Europe, both in trade and in visitors, made for a cosmopolitan atmosphere that made shopping in New Orleans an international experience. D.H. Holmes, Maison Blanche, Werleins, and other modern retailers trace their histories to the boom times of the 1830's, 40's, and 50's.

As a seaport and major point of entry for the country, New Orleans always had a transient population of seamen, immigrants, and tourists, and what might be called a "hospitality" industry -- restaurants, theatres, operas, bars, gambling houses, and redlight establishments. This industry has always been much larger than what the resident population alone would support. The streets near the docks -- in, above, and below the French Quarter -- were lined by bars, flophouses, and clip joints. Restaurants offered foods of many cultures, as well as the distinct local cuisine -- "Creole" cooking. The first operas in America were performed in New Orleans in the 1790's, and fancy balls kept the numerous musicians fully employed. Ante-bellum New Orleans was the music capital of America. The city also boasted two particularly opulent hotels, the St. Charles and the St. Louis, whose restaurants, bars, and shops, constituted entire small cities themselves. Each took up an entire city block and could sleep and feed 1,000 guests. Visitors of all classes seemed to enjoy the luxuries, and perhaps the depravities, of the city that care forgot. Residents also enjoyed cultural and recreational opportunities far beyond what most cities of New Orleans' size could offer.

With the cotton boom, New Orleans became the banking and financial cneter for the lower Mississippi Valley. All major forms of national and international credit were I use in the icty. The first Bank of the United States had a branch in the city until 1811, when Congress abolished the Bank. However, the bank of Orleans was organized in 1811, joining the Bank of Louisiana and the Louisiana Planter's Bank as state-chartered facilities in the city. Throughout the period, banks in New Orleans, like banks elsewhere, were established for particular projects: the Canal Bank was formed in 1831 to finance construction of the New Basin Canal to run from the lake to the warehouses in the "American" district. However, the ultimate source of credit, the large pools of investment funds, generally originated elsewhere. During the Pre-Civil War period, a scarcity of capital in New Orlneas forced seekers of large-scale investment ot look to New York, London, or Paris. New Orleans merchants were critical sources of credit for planters who borrowed in the spring and repaid in the winter from crop sales; but the merchants and their banks received credit from the New York or Liverpool cotton shipping and manufacturing interests. New Orleans was a city of small businessmen, and no one monopolist ever acquired sufficient fortune locally to influence trade and investment. And, although many plantation owners had large net worths, their wealth was generally tied up in slaves and land.

After 1803, New Orleans was seldom troubled by labor shortages, except during epidemics. The city's labor foce grew rapidly after the Purchase and was composed of individuals of different races, nationalities, and skills. In 1803, of the city's 8,000 residents, approximately 3,000 were whites, 3,000 free persons of color, and 2,000 slaves. The last Pre-War census in 1860 showed how dramatically the city had grown and how the character of the population had changed. The 1860 census breaks down the population as follows:

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1860 Census of Population

Persons	Number	Percent
Total Population  African-American  Slaves Free Persons of Color  European-American  Native Born Immigrants  Irish German French British Spanish Italian  Other Immigrants	168,675 24,074 13,385 10,689 144,601  78,333 66,268 24,398 19,675 10,564 3,849 1,390 1,019 3,373	100 % 14 % 8 % 6 % 86 % 46 % 39 % 14 % 12 % 6 % 2 % 1 % 1 % 2 %

The figures indicate that only 8% of the population, or one out of every twelve persons in the city, were slaves. Most slaves in the city were not used for manual labor, but were instead mainly household servants. In 1850, the slaves had comprised 16% of the population; and the decrease in the percentage of slaves relative to the population as a whole reflected the increasingly high demand and price of slaves for plantation work. In 1860, in the New Orleans slave markets, which were the centers of the Mid-South salve markets, slaves were selling for $2,000, skilled slaves (such as blacksmiths) for $2,500, and females for about $1,800 (for prices in today's dollars, multiply by ten). Increasingly during the 1850's, it was more profitable to sell the houseboy an replace him with an Irish immigrant whose death from yellow fever would not represent a loss in his employer's assets. Also, slaves often lerned skills and hired themselves out, paying their owners a commission on their earnings. In this way, many individual slaves bought their freedom, further reducing the slave population. By 1860, only two persons in the city owned in excess of 100 slaves. After subtracting these atypical holdings (which were usually rented out as day labor), the 4, 162 remaining slaveholders in the city each kept an average of three slaves.

Free persons of color comprised 6% of the population. Some were freed slaves or their offspring; most, however, were free persons of color (personnes de couleur libres). Free persons of color spoke French, were Catholic, and generally prized civility and cultured behavior, characteristics that set them socially above the slaves. Most free persons of color generally were small businessmen and artisans, operating both retail and machine shops. They were an important part of the retail and repair business of the city.

The 86% of the population that was white included 78,000 native born and 66,000 immigrants. The native born supplied most of the business leadership and middle class, although many of the British and some of the Irish were also middle class. New Orleans' mythology usually characterizes ante-bellum society as one of constant conflict between the older, more cultured French/Spanish Creoles and the crude, nouveau riche Anglo-Saxons from such foreign places as Baltimore or Philadelphia. Questions of commerce, supposedly, were routinely translated into points of honor to be decided under the dueling oaks. The truth, however, was less exciting, but more typical of the New Orleans tradition of evolutionary accommodation to changing forces.

For the first years of American rule there was some antagonism between Creoles and Americans that was reflected in housing patterns and in the structure of city government. Canal Street was literally the "neutral ground" between the old Quarter and the new Americna part of town. But even before 1803, Americna and British businessmen had been important in business and commerce, and by the 1840's many "cultivated Creoles" had come to see "American" businessmen as potential partners in business and in marriage unions that strengthened their own wealth and traditions with new blood and money. By the 1850's, may prominent merchant families were of mixed "Creole" American names, and society was open to appropriate persons of the opposite background. "Old Creole families" had even begun moving to the Uptown or American residential section of the city, and French names were enve found in the vestries of the Episcopal Church. Directorates and partnerships of leading business institutions also reflected an integration of surnames on their membership. Final proof of the intermingling of the Creole and Amerinca merchant classes was the revival in the 1850's of the social customs of Creole Mardi Gras by Anglo-Saxon "Krewes" that were soon laced with Creole men, pleased that the "American" had adopted "their own" celebration.

Although many native born whites were laborers, the bulk of the unskilled, service-skilled, and mechanical labor so necesssary to a nineteenth-century port was provided by the hordes of immigrants who poured into the city, particularly after the Irish famines and the German revolutions of the late 1840's. According to the 1860 census, immigrants made up nearly 40% of the ciyt's population. Fully 46% of all whites were immigrants, with 37% of them being Irish, 30% German, and 16% French. The booming commerce of the port demanded laborers to load and off-load goods. This, along with spiraling prices of slaves, made the immigrants a welcome sight in the eyes of the city's commercial leaders. Even unskilled immigrants could find work in the growing demand for labor on the levee or in replacing earlier immigrants who had succumbed to disease or epidemic. The heart of the city's proletariat was definitely white. No businessman could risk losing a $2,000 slave investment to a wayward crane or sudden jerk in cargo, when a lsot Irish soul might at best call for contribution of a $20 gold piece to the widow and a mass at St. Patrick's. Living conditions of the immigrants, like those in cities of the eastern seaboard, were generally appalling, but with the added hazards of the New Orleans climate.

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In general, residential and commercial land-use patterns followed the dictates of geography and the whims of developers. The way the city grew from 1803 to 1860 was important in detremining future expansion and living patterns for New Orleans into the twentieth century and also for influencing the character and development of the city's political structure and public services. In 1804, New Orleans consisted of the French Quarter, some scattered structures beyond the Quarter along the river and Bayou St. John, and plantation or undrained swamps stretching above, below, and across the river, as well as "back of town," toward Lake Pontchartrain. The expectation of continued growth after the Napoleonic Wars led American businessme to being developig the section above Canal Street known as the Faubourg St. Mary for both commerce and residence. Below the French Quarter, the Creole aristocrat, Bernard de Marigny, followed suit, subdividing his plantation into tracts that became the Faubourg Marigny, the pie-slice area between Esplanade and Elysian Fields. By the 1830's, there were three main sections of the city: the original French Quarter, the American sector, and the Faubourg Marigny.

In 1838, American businessmen began the building of the New Basin Canal as a rival to the Creole built Carondelet Canal, and to connect the American sector to the lake. The project required the hiring of thousands of immigrants, mainly Irish, who settled in areas near the docks, north of the American sector that came to be called the "Irish Channel." As the city grew, the American elite leap-frogged the Irish Channel, gobbling up old sugar plantations and establishing the Garden District in the 1830's and 1840's. By 1852, the city had grown upriver to Louisiana Avenue, forming an area known as Lafayette; and during the 1850's, the area from Louisiana Avenue to somewhat beyond Jefferson Avenue was settled and called Jefferson City. Upriver from that point ran farms and woods reaching to the boundaries of the city of Carrollton, then the seat of the Jefferson Parish government. Across the river from the French Quarter, Algiers with its dry docks and shipbuilding had expanded into a small city. And, from the French Quarter running towards the Lake along the Esplanade ridge, the Creoles were building fine homes on Esplanade Avenue.

As the city grew upriver, plantation property lines came to determine patterns. Uptown, the natural levee was about two miles wide and was divided into narrow lots perpendicular to the river and running to the backswamps. But, the river curves and the boundary lines fanned out from the backswamp to the river. Drainage canals, which were built along the plantation property lines, later became wide avenues such as Melpomene, Jackson, Louisiana, and Napoleon. Cross streets followed the river in concentric circles, crossing the radical boulevards. Lacking drainage canals, the cross streets, like Tchoupitoulas and Magazine, were usually narrow, except for one great boulevard -- Nyades, later St. Charles Avenue. St. Charles, midway between the swamps and the river, became the main American residential artery and site of the Carrollton Railroad, the second railroad built in the United States. Later, Claiborne and Fountainbleau-Broad were also built as major cross arteries.

Street patterns in New Orleans influenced racial geography. Whites built along the main boulevards and avenues, forming super blocks, with African-American domestics and craftsmen and immigrant whites living on small streets within the cores of the super blocks. African-American neighborhoods, until the twentieth century, were small and separated from one another. African-Americans also lived near whites, both rich and poor, which later made for social stability and less racial tension, although some African-Americans were isolated in neighborhoods along the backswamps, or battures (the riverside of the levee).

The structure of New Orleans' government was reorganized twice before the Civil War. In 1836, with the aid of the state government, the Americans set up a trinity of city government: three independent municipalities (one for each sector), each with its own police and other public services. The combined into a nominal, overall New Orleans government that had few powers except over the docks. The troika was a failure and in 1842 was voted out in favor or a new one-city, one-council, strong mayor system of government. The American sector was named the First District; the French Quarter and Bayou St. John areas, the Second District; and the Faubourg Marigny and other settlements below the Quarter, the Third District. Lafayette City, just upriver of the American sector was admitted to the city as the Fourth District. Algiers and Jefferson City were also later annexed, but Carrollton remained an independent city until 1869, when it, too, was annexed, requiring the relocation of Jefferson Parish's government seat across the river to Gretna. After 1852, New Orleans still, in some ways, had two self-sustaining centers, but as the years passed, the city came less and less to resemble a double-yolked egg.

Besides maintaining order, collecting taxes, and filing records, city government had other important public duties. The constant fight against water -- oozing from below, falling from above, and attackingl laterally from both river and lake -- was an effort requirieng public coordination, maintenance, and finance. Government managmeent was also necessary for sanitaiton, fire protection, and public health. However, the city government was not always able to meet its responsibilities. In the early part of the centruy, revenues fell far behind the inundation of people, and evern police protectionwas minimal. Fire protection, well into the 1850's was carried out by volunteer fire departments that were alsmost as exclusive in membership as the social elite found in some Carnival Krews of today. The commercial class, which controlled CityHall into the late 1850's, considered maintenance of the levee system and wharf facilities to be the highest priorities. Consequently, the docks always received the attention needed to carry out the city's majro economic function. During th period 1836 to 1852, when the city had in effect three separate governments, one of the few responsibilities of the overall New Orleans city govenemrnt was the collection of wharfage fees. Whatever else, the life of the port was never endangered for lack of funds.

Other civic functins, however, fared less well. The three independent police, sanitation, street, and court systems initiated in 1836 were unparalleled examples of chaotic lack of coordination and relinquishment of responsibility. The 1852 consolidation imposed some sanity on muniipal functions, but not until the military government of the Union Arny occupation did urban government gain some semblance of control over the city.

The most frustrating case of the city government's inability to deal with the wiles of clime and nature was in the eares of public health. A lack of both scientific undrrstanding and basic sanitation left the city open to deathly epidemics. As the city's population incresed, so did the number od deaths fromdisease. In 1818, 1847, and 1853, 2,200, 2,800 and 9,000 persons respectively succumbed to yellow fever. After the 1850's, improved prevention treatment and understanding would almost eradicate this disease. But until then, the period July through October of each year was dreaded more for "Yellow Jack" than for hurricanes, and the city's seasonal evacuation each year approached one-third of its population. Small pox had been the scourge of the eighteenth century, but after an 1804 epidemic, the new American government convicned the lcoal population to experiment with the newly imporved small pox vaccination, which greatly reduced the incidence of the disease. Asiatic cholera arrived in New Orleans in 1832, causing over 1,000 deaths before its inexplicable departure. In 1849-50, cholera ravaged the city again, taking 3,000 lives. The disease slacked off through the 1850's, not returning until after the Civil War. The medical profession, though limited in its medical weapons, was active int he city' and by the end of the century, New Orleans was recognized as a leading center for research in epidemiology.

In the 1850's, New Orleans might have been dubbed a city of fever and fortune, or catchier yet, a port of pestilence and prosperity. Yet, these ills were not unknown to more temperate cities of large population, nor to most port cities of the nineteenth century. It was the "fortune" and "prosperity" that stood out in this city of contrasts. So, New Orleans entered the Civil War as an economy of competitive merchants, basically trading one raw material beteeen a landed class of slave-plantation owners and a factory class of industrial capitalists. How such a specialized economy, devoid of financial capital and a manufacturing base could survive the national economic changes of the Post-Civil War period is a question whose answer will reveal much about the peculiar assets of New Orleans.

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 Continued, more available in Spring 1997.