A little later we have the New Orleans of 1723. It is a low swamp, overgrown with ragged forests, and cut up into a thousand islands by ruts and pools of stagnant water. There is a small cleared space along the river's channel but even this being only partly reclaimed from the surrounding marsh, is often inundated. It is cut up into square patches, round each of which runs a ditch of black mud and refuse, which, lying exposed to the rays of an almost tropical sun, sends forth unwholesome odors, and invites pestilence.
There is a palisade around the city, and a great moat; and here, with the tall, green grasses growing up to their humble doors, live graceful ladies and noble gentlemen, representatives of that nation so famed for finesse of manner and stately grace. It is an odd picture this rough doorway, surrounded with reeds and swamps, mud and misery, and crowned with the beauty of a fair French maiden, who steps daintily, with Parisian ease, upon the highway of the new world.
She is not, however, alone in her exile. Along the banks of the Mississippi, for miles beyond the city, stretch the fertile plantations of the representatives of aristocratic French families. The rich lands are worked by negro slaves, who, fresh from the African coast, walk erect before their masters, being strangers to the abject, crouching gait which a century of slavery afterwards imposes upon them. No worship save the Catholic is allowed, and to remind the people of their duty wooden crosses are erected on every side.
The next picture of New Orleans is in 1792. It has passed into other hands now, for the king of France has ceded it, with the territory of Louisiana, to his cousin of Spain, and has in fact, with a single stroke of the pen, stripped himself of possessions extending from the mouth of the Mississippi to the St. Lawrence. The type of civilization is now changed, and we see things moving in the iron groove of Spanish bigotry. The very architecture changes with the new rule, and the houses seem grim and fortress-like, while the cadaverous-cheeked Spaniard stands in the gloom with his hand upon his sword, one of the six thousand souls now within this ill-drained city. Successive Spanish governors hold their sway under the Spanish king; and then the Spaniard goes his way.
Spanish civilization cannot take so firm a hold in New Orleans as the French, and many privately pray for the old banner, until at last France herself determines to again possess her old territory. Spain, knowing opposition to be useless, and heartily sick of this distant colony, so hard to govern and so near the quarrelsome Americans, who seem ready to fulfil their threat of taking New Orleans by force if their commercial interests are interfered with, yields a ready assent. The city becomes the property of Napoleon the Great; but hardly have the papers been signed, when, in 1803, it is ceded to the United States. Half a generation later the conflicting national elements are settled into something like harmony, and the state of Louisiana has a population of fifty thousand souls.
In 1812 war is declared between Great Britain and the United States. Soon after, General Andrew Jackson wins a victory over the English on the lowlands near New Orleans, when, with the raw troops of the river states, he drives off; and sends home, fifteen thousand skilled British soldiers. Bowing his laurel-crowned head before the crowd assembled to do him honor, the brave American general receives the benediction of the venerable abb, while his memory is kept ever fresh in the public mind by the grand equestrian statue which now stands a monument to his prowess.
But the New Orleans of to-day is not like any of these we have seen. The Crescent City has passed beyond the knowledge of even Jackson himself, and most startled would the old general be could he now walk its busy streets. Rising steadily, though slowly, from the effects of the civil war, her position as a port insures a glorious future. Much, of course, depends upon the success of Captain Eads in keeping open a deep channel from the mouth of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. This great river deposits a large amount of alluvium at its North-east, South-east, South, and South-west Passes, which are the principal mouths of the Mississippi. When the light alluvium held in suspension in the fresh water of the river meets the denser briny water of the Gulf, it is precipitated to the bottom, and builds up a shoal, or bar, upon which vessels drawing sixteen feet of water, in the deepest channel, frequently stick fast for weeks at a time. In consequence of these bars, so frequently forming, deep sea-going vessels run the risk of most unprofitable delay in ascending the river to New Orleans.
Captain Eads, the projector of the great St. Louis bridge, which cost some seven or more millions of dollars, has succeeded, by narrowing and confining the river's current at the South Pass by means of artificial jetties, in scouring out the channel from a depth of about seven feet to one of more than twenty feet. Thus the most shoal pass has already become the deepest entrance to the Mississippi. If the results of Captain Eads's most wonderful success can be maintained, New Orleans will be able to support a fleet of European steamers, while the cereals and cotton of the river basins tributary to New Orleans will be exported from that city directly to Europe, instead of being subjected to a costly transportation by rail across the country to New York, Baltimore, and other Atlantic ports. Limited space forbids my presenting figures to support the theories of the people of New Orleans, but they are of the most interesting nature. A few words from an intelligent Kentuckian will express the views of many of the people of that state in regard to the system of transportation. He says:
"Nearly all the products of Kentucky have their prices determined by the cost of transportation to the great centres of population along the Atlantic seaboard, or beyond the sea. Its tobacco, pork, grain, and some of the costlier woods, with other products, find their principal markets in Europe, while cattle, and to a certain extent the other agricultural products of the state, have their values determined by the cost of transportation to the American Atlantic markets. Hitherto this access to the domestic and foreign markets of the Atlantic shores has been had by way of the railway systems which traverse the region north of Kentucky, and from which the state has been divided by opposing interests and the physical barrier of the Ohio River. All the development of the state has taken place under these disadvantages.
"A comparison of the tables of cost, given below, will show that the complete opening of the mouth of the Mississippi to ocean ships will result in the enfranchisement of the productions of Kentucky in an extraordinary way. They are taken from published freight rates, and give time and cost of transit from St. Paul, on the Mississippi, about two thousand miles from New Orleans, to Liverpool by the two routes: one being by rail, lake, canal, and ocean; the other by river and ocean: