A LOUISIANA SUGAR PLANTATION.
Two rather large towns, twelve hundred miles apart, held about one-third its whole population, and controlled all its trade. The first, New Orleans, was the commercial port for the Mississippi Valley and its products. The second, St. Louis, was a fur-trading post with its chief outlet in Canada. One had a mixed population of from eight thousand to ten thousand, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Americans and blacks; the other did not have more than twelve hundred people, all told, many of whom were boatmen, who passed much of their lives afloat on the rivers or domesticated among roving tribes. In both, the French were most numerous, but taking all Louisiana together, there were nearly, if not quite, as many slaves as white people, although, as compared with the Indians then occupying this vast territory, the whites were only a handful.
FRENCH SETTLEMENTS: GERM OF ST. LOUIS.
At the date of cession to the United States, New Orleans had perhaps fourteen hundred houses, mostly built of wood and uniformly homely. Two hours would have laid the whole of it in ashes. In the best part, a few houses were built of brick, some one, some two stories high, with the open galleries running round the outside, one is accustomed to see in the tropics; yet though it had been burned over so recently as 1794, New Orleans was little bettered in the rebuilding, showing, as before, a collection of hurriedly built barracks and dwellings, among which the Hotel de Ville and Parochial Church, alone, gave a certain metropolitan character to this city of wood and shingles.
Though spacious, the streets were unpaved, dirty, and ill-kept. No drainage could be had, and every thing was thrown into the street. Summer heats quickly developed epidemic fevers. It followed that New Orleans had the name of being the most unhealthy city in the United States.
Besides the church and Hotel de Ville, or City Hall, there were a military hospital, charity hospital, and nunnery,—all equally inconspicuous in point of architectural design. There was also a theatre in which a company, whom the revolt had driven from St. Domingo, acted plays for the gratification of the Creole population.