Peculiarities of American Cities

by Willard W. Glazier

The geological history of this section of the country is extremely interesting. The whole region south of New Orleans is made land, having been brought down from the Rocky Mountains and the western plains, by that tireless builder, the Mississippi, which has heaped it up, grain by grain, probably changing the entire course of its lower waters in doing so, filling up old channels and wearing itself new ones, until it finally extends its delta, like an outstretched hand, far out into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The river has a history and a romance, all its own, beginning with the time when French and Spanish, alike, were searching for the "Hidden River"—that mysterious stream which, according to Indian tradition, "flowed to the land from which the sweet winds of the southwest brought them health and happiness, and where there was neither snow nor ice," and which was known by so many different names—and ending with the construction of the gigantic jetties, which have given depth and permanence to the channels of its delta.

The visitor finds the city very unlike northern towns with which he has been familiar. To the Creole quarter especially there is a foreign look, which is intensified by the frequent sound of foreign speech. It is as if one had stepped into some old-world town, and left America, with its newness and its harshness of speech, far behind. But it is not so far away, either. It is only around the corner, or, at best, a few squares off. New Orleans of the nineteenth century jostles New Orleans of the eighteenth on every hand. It has seized upon the old streets, with their quaint French and Spanish names, and carried them to an extent never dreamed of by those who originally planned them. It has reared modern structures beside those hoary with age, and set down the post common school building and the heretical Protestant church beside the venerable convent and the solemn cathedral.

The main streets describe a curve, running parallel to the river, and present an unbroken line from the upper to the lower limits of the city, a distance of about twelve miles. The cross streets run for the most part at right angles from the Mississippi River, with greater regularity than might be expected from the curved outline of the river banks. Many of the streets are well paved, and some of them are shelled; but many are unpaved, and, from the nature of the soil, exceedingly muddy in wet weather, and intolerably dusty in dry. The city is surrounded by cypress swamps, and its locality and environments render it very unhealthy, especially during the summer season. Yet, notwithstanding its insalubrity, it is constantly increasing in population and business importance. Certain sanitary precautions, adopted in later years, have somewhat improved its condition.

New Orleans has a history extending further back than that of most southern towns. While others were making their first feeble struggles for existence with their treacherous foes, the red-skins, New Orleans was stirred by discontent and insurrection. In 1690, d'Iberville, in the name of France, founded the province of Louisiana, and Old Biloxi, at the mouth of the Lost River, as the Mississippi was still termed, was made the capital. The choice of site proved a disastrous one, and the seat of government was moved to New Biloxi, further up the river. Meantime, Bienville, his younger brother, laid out a little parallelogram of streets and ditches on a crescent-shaped shore of the river, in the midst of cypress swamps and willow jungles. A colony of fifty persons, many of them galley slaves, formed this new settlement. Houses were built, a fort added, and the little town received its present name, in honor of the Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans. In the same year John Law sent eight hundred men from La Rochelle. They had no sooner landed than they scattered to the four winds, a number of Germans among them alone remaining in or near the promised city. Amid many discouragements the town prospered, and when, one after another, three cargoes of women were sent out from the old country, to furnish wives for the new settlers, their content was complete. Thus many of the proudest aristocrats of New Orleans trace their descent from these "Filles de Casette," as they were called, each one being endowed with a small chest of property.

Here the French Creoles were born, and lived a wild, unrestrained life, valorous but uneducated, and became such men and women as one would expect to find in a military outpost so far from the civilized world. For sixty-three years the little colony struggled for life, enduring floods and famines, and the terrors of Indian warfare, when, in 1762, the province of Louisiana was transferred by an unprincipled king to Spain. The news did not reach the remote American settlement until 1764. It was hardly to be expected that a colony so separated by time and distance from the mother country should be intensely loyal, but the people felt themselves to be French and French only, and they resented this unwitting transfer of their allegiance as an unendurable grievance.

The Spanish Governor, Ulloa, did not land in New Orleans until two years later; and though he showed himself to be a man of great discretion, and inclined to adopt a conciliatory policy, the people made the little town so hot for him, that in two more years he was glad to return to Spain. They sent a memorial after him, which, being a most unique document, is worth recording, in substance. Says a recent historian, Mr. George W. Cable:—

"It enumerated real wrongs, for which France and Spain, but not Ulloa, were to blame. Again, with these it mingled such charges against the banished Governor as—that he had a chapel in his own house; that he absented himself from the French churches; that he inclosed a fourth of the public common to pasture his private horses; that he sent to Havana for a wet nurse; that he ordered the abandonment of a brick-yard near the town, on account of its pools of putrid water; that he removed leprous children from the town to the inhospitable settlement at the mouth of the river; that he forbade the public whipping of slaves in the town; that masters had to go six miles to get a negro flogged; that he had landed in New Orleans during a thunder and rain storm, and under other ill omens; that he claimed to be king of the colony; that he offended the people with evidences of sordid avarice; and that he added to these crimes—as the text has it—'many others, equally just and terrible!'"

In 1769 the colony was in open revolt, and was considering the project of forming a republic. But the arrival of a Spanish fleet of twenty-four sail checked their aspirations towards independence, and paralyzed their efforts, and they yielded without a struggle.

In 1768 New Orleans was a town of 3,200 persons, a third of whom were black slaves. After the establishment of Spanish rule, although the population was thoroughly Creole, and opposed to the presence of English traders, the government at first winked at their appearance, and finally openly tolerated them, so that English boats supplied the planters with goods and slaves, and English warehouses moored upon the river opposite the town disposed of merchandise.

In 1776, at the breaking out of the American Revolution, the Creole and Anglo-American came into active relations with each other, a relation which has since qualified every public question in Louisiana. The British traders were suddenly cut off from communication, and French merchants commanded the trade of the Mississippi. Americans followed close after the French, and the tide of immigration became Anglo-Saxon. France was openly supporting the American colonies in their rebellion against England, and in 1779 Spain declared war against Great Britain, so that the sympathies of the Creoles were led, by every tie, to the rebels. Galvez, then Governor of Louisiana, and also son of the Viceroy of Mexico, a young man, brave, talented and sagacious, who had adopted a most liberal policy in his administration, discovered that the British were planning the surprise of New Orleans. Making hasty but efficient preparations, with a little army of 1,430 men, and with a miniature gun fleet of but ten guns, he marched, on the twenty-second of August, 1779, against the British forts on the Mississippi. On the seventh of September, Fort Bute, on Bayou Manchac, yielded to the first assault of the Creole Militia. The Fort of Baton Rouge was garrisoned by five hundred men with thirteen heavy guns. On the twenty-first of September, after an engagement of ten hours, Galvez reached the fort. Its capitulation included the surrender of Fort Panmure, a place which, by its position, would have been very difficult of assault. In the Mississippi and Manchac, four English schooners, a brig and two cutters were captured. On the fourteenth of the following March, Galvez, with an army of two thousand men, having set sail down the Mississippi, captured Fort Charlotte, on the Mobile River. On the eighth of May, 1781, Pensacola, with a garrison of eight hundred men, and the whole of West Florida, surrendered to Galvez. One of the rewards bestowed upon her Governor for his valorous achievements was the Captain-generalship of Louisiana and West Florida. He never returned to New Orleans, however, and four years later succeeded his father as Viceroy of Mexico. Thus, while Andrew Jackson was yet a child, New Orleans was defended from British conquest by this gallant Spanish soldier.