The Chautauquan, Vol. 05, February 1885

by Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle; Chautauqua Institution

The attempt to let the sugar interests of Louisiana and Mississippi go in favor of the productions of Cuba and the East Indies, distinctly points the people at the mouth of the Mississippi to the fact that their alliance is probably to be with the Northern states, not merely in politics, but in commerce.

New Orleans is not the only French city in the United States, but it is the only one which preserves the French quality and language perfectly, and in that respect resembles Montreal and Quebec. St. Louis had a French and Spanish basis, but when that post became American the small Latin element was compelled, in self-defense, to adopt the language and living of the Anglo-Saxons. New Orleans, however, had a sufficient start when the Americans occupied it in 1803, to grow relatively with the American settlers and consequently two cities arose side by side, which still preserve their differences as much as if a quarter of London and a quarter of Paris had been cut out and united. Besides, there was a large rural and planting element in Louisiana, of the French stock, which has assisted to keep up the French infusion, and hence the market at New Orleans is the most characteristic thing in the city, where the habitants and the hucksters, the fishers from the Gulf, and the porters and carters, carry us back to a scene anterior to the France of to-day, or before republican ideas had reached the far French colonies. New Orleans, too, constantly received emigration from neighboring French and Spanish islands and coasts as they were affected by negro insurrections, or by internal revolutions. Naturally the fleeing planters from Hayti and the Lesser Antilles made their way to the nearest large town, and the steam shipping of the Gulf all concentrates at the two centers of the ellipse, New Orleans and Havana. The Mississippi River, which is the only river of the first class on the globe to pass through a cultivated land and an enlightened population, sufficiently marks New Orleans as the eye of its destiny adjacent to its mouth. There are many Americans who have never been to New Orleans, who are unaware that it, like New York, has two distinct harbors or outlets. As New York has Long Island Sound and the Bay of New York, one opening a hundred miles to the east of the other, so New Orleans has a lake system close by which gives her internal communication far to the east, or almost to the bay of Mobile, and saves her two hundred miles of round-about river navigation to reach her own coasts. It may be thought that New Orleans is too far from the mouth of the Mississippi to command that the commerce of the Gulf should come a hundred miles up that river for her benefit, yet Philadelphia and Baltimore are quite as far from the ocean, and these cities have easily commanded a great interior trade through the communications they possessed, and from the products they had to supply. Coal, for example, makes the most effective article of the commerce of both Baltimore and Philadelphia, and coal is more valuable in the Gulf because farther from the mines, than it is on the near east coast. The coal furnished to the shipping at New Orleans has descended the entire line of the river, yet by such easy facilities that at New Orleans it is probably the cheapest coal in the world for the distance it has to come to get a market. Great floats, of which dozens are hauled by a small tug or tow boat, go down the Ohio to its mouth, and pass on to New Orleans and are there so easily discharged that the lumber in them finds a market with the coal.

Besides, the railroad projectors, without other inducement than their own sagacity, have concurred in running all their railroads to New Orleans, for the country at the mouth of the Mississippi is neither so healthy nor so strategical for trade as this old town which was founded by the French under the direction of their government when they picked slowly and carefully the sites of future trade and military empire. These same French located St. Louis, and it has not been found advisable by any succeeding generation to try a better situation.

We may ask whether New Orleans has as great an antiquity as our own English cities? It is not as old as Philadelphia by almost thirty years, and is somewhat younger than Charleston, and is about fifteen years older than Savannah. Of course it does not compare in antiquity with the colonial cities of the northeast, such as New York, Albany, Boston, Montreal and Quebec. But it is nearly a century older than any of our important Anglo-Teuton cities of the West. It is more than half a century older than Cincinnati, and we may almost call it a century older than Chicago. St. Louis was its Albany, or upstream neighbor, and was under the same political domination. Mobile was the parent place the French established on the Gulf, and Governor Bienville made New Orleans his capital as late as 1723, or about nine years before the birth of General Washington.

Soon after this a levee was built in front of the new town, and the early French authors and novelists took pleasure in visiting it, and even at that date they called it “the famous place.” As in Quebec and Montreal, the early French settlement was almost simultaneous with the bringing out of monks and nuns, and soon a cathedral was conceived and nunneries were built. The French, however, had not the vigorous nature of the English in founding new places, and after nearly half a century of occupation there were hardly three thousand persons in it to transfer to the Spanish who took possession of the place in the midst of a revolution, and had some of the best French citizens shot in order to be a terror to what the Spanish governor, O’Reilly, already suspected to exist in French Louisiana, the spirit of independence, which Spain wanted to extirpate in all her colonies, fearing that they would speedily rise to importance and overwhelm the parent power. Spain had been dismembered by a treaty early in the eighteenth century, and was left with enormous American possessions, and with a very small Spain to handle them. The Spanish cabinet then conceived the policy of preventing the growth of the colonies, so as to keep them down, use them merely for trade, and not let that spirit of municipal independence which makes great fermentations in states commence anywhere. Some of the Spanish governors, however, ordered public buildings to be constructed, and the American residents at New Orleans say that the Spanish sway of about forty years has left better monuments than the French.

A Spanish infusion of settlers marks the present population, and the Americans call all the Latin races, no matter whether they come from France and her islands, or Spain and her coasts, by the name of Creoles.

A curious feature of New Orleans is the existence of considerable elements there from states as foreign to ourselves as Yucatan.

At the close of the American Revolution there were less than five thousand persons in New Orleans. During that Revolution a considerable number of respectable British settlers who wanted to avoid the War of Independence, settled in West Florida and about Natchez, and in other spots contiguous to New Orleans. Hence the Revolution was hardly over before the first chapter of manifest destiny was directed from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky upon the opening of the Mississippi River. That physical achievement was so important to the producers on the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers that schemes of every sort were tried to hasten the opening of commerce to the Gulf. One Senator of the United States was expelled from his place for an intrigue partaking of the nature of treason with the British who still backed up the Spanish on the Gulf; and a Vice President was actually pursued nearly to the Gulf and brought back and tried for treason at Richmond. How long the United States might have had to wait the slow course of diplomacy or the rough chance of war to get New Orleans, is uncertain, but Napoleon, who had acquired Louisiana by his mastery over Spain, believing that he could not hold it against the English fleets, made haste to sell it to the Americans for a sum of money and old commercial claims.

Eighty-two years ago, or about the rounded lifetime of an old man, the Americans occupied New Orleans, and much of the city burnt up the year our forefathers were voting for the first President of the United States. A French newspaper had been issued in New Orleans several years before the American possession. There were perhaps eight thousand persons in the city when it was transferred to us. Twelve years after the transfer, the Americans under General Jackson had to give battle to hold the city, which the English attacked with the best troops they had used in Spain against Napoleon who had already fallen. Napoleon was contemplating his last endeavor to astonish the world at Waterloo, when the English and Americans, unconscious that a treaty of peace had been made between themselves, fought the battle of New Orleans, which resulted in more disaster to the British arms than any battle on land during our second conflict for independence. In St. Paul’s Cathedral stand the monuments and statues of Packenham and Gibbs who lost their lives in the marshes around New Orleans.