History of New Orleans

Based on Wikipedia: History of New Orleans

A City Built on Silt and Defiance

In 1721, a French priest named Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix stood in the swampy settlement that would become New Orleans and saw "a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators." He was describing one of the most miserable patches of land imaginable. And yet, somehow, he became the first person to predict that this snake-infested mud flat would have an imperial future.

He was right.

New Orleans has been burned to the ground twice, devastated by hurricanes, conquered by three empires, nearly captured by the British, and drowned by a storm named Katrina. It keeps coming back. Understanding why requires understanding how this improbable city came to exist in the first place—and why everyone from French kings to Spanish governors to American presidents decided this particular bend in the Mississippi River was worth fighting for.

Before the French: A Place of Many Tongues

The land itself is young, geologically speaking. Around 2200 BCE—roughly when the Egyptians were building the Great Pyramid of Giza—the Mississippi River was depositing the silt that would form the delta region where New Orleans now sits. The river created the land, and the river would shape everything that happened on it.

Native Americans settled this area for about thirteen hundred years before Europeans arrived. They weren't just passing through. The Mississippian culture peoples built mounds and earthworks, the remnants of a sophisticated civilization that stretched across much of what would become the American South. Archaeological evidence shows continuous settlement dating back to at least 400 CE.

The indigenous peoples called this place Bulbancha. The name means "place of many tongues" in Choctaw, and it was prophetic. Bulbancha served as a trading hub for thousands of years, a place where different peoples met to exchange goods and ideas. The Native Americans had created something crucial: a portage route between Bayou St. John and the Mississippi River. The bayou flowed into Lake Pontchartrain, which connected to the Gulf of Mexico. This portage—a land route where canoes and cargo could be carried between two bodies of water—would become one of the most strategically valuable pieces of real estate on the continent.

The French Gamble

French explorers, fur trappers, and traders began trickling into the area during the 1690s. Some built settlements alongside the Native American villages of thatched huts that dotted the bayou. By the end of the decade, the French had established an encampment called Port Bayou St. Jean near the head of the bayou. They also built a small fort at the bayou's mouth in 1701, constructing it atop an ancient Native American shell midden—a trash heap of discarded shells that had accumulated over centuries, dating back to the Marksville culture.

These early settlements didn't thrive. In 1708, the French government granted land along the bayou to settlers from Mobile, but most abandoned their claims within two years. They had tried to grow wheat in the subtropical swamp. It didn't work.

Then came 1718, and a decision that would change North American history.

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the governor of Louisiana, founded La Nouvelle-Orléans—New Orleans—in early 1718. His site selection was brilliant. The location sat on relatively high ground along a sharp bend in the flood-prone Mississippi River, where the river's own deposits had created a natural levee. An abandoned Quinipissa village had once occupied this exact spot, suggesting the Native Americans had already identified it as viable.

More importantly, the site was adjacent to that ancient portage route. Anyone controlling New Orleans controlled access between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico without having to navigate an additional hundred miles of treacherous river to reach the sea. This single advantage meant controlling the entire Mississippi River Valley—the drainage basin for about forty percent of the continental United States.

The French didn't name this mosquito-ridden outpost after a saint or a king. They named it after Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was serving as regent of France at the time. The regent had a scheme in mind, and New Orleans was central to it.

The Mississippi Bubble

Philippe II allowed a Scottish economist named John Law to create something that had never existed before: a private bank backed by colonial real estate. Law's Mississippi Company sold shares based on the promise of Louisiana's riches—gold, silver, precious gems, all the treasures that had made Spain wealthy from its American colonies. Investors across France went mad for Mississippi Company stock. The share price rose from five hundred livres to ten thousand livres. Fortunes were made on paper.

The company used this money to ship colonists to Louisiana, dramatically increasing New Orleans' population. For a brief moment, the scheme seemed to be working.

Then, at the end of 1720, the bubble burst. Investors realized that Louisiana's swamps contained no gold, no silver, nothing but mud and mosquitoes. The Mississippi Company collapsed. The money stopped flowing. Law fled France in disgrace, eventually dying in poverty in Venice.

But New Orleans remained. In 1722, it became the capital of French Louisiana, replacing Biloxi. The city had outlasted the speculation that birthed it.

The Character of Early New Orleans

The early colonists were not, as a rule, respectable citizens. French colonial governors filled their letters with complaints about "the riffraff sent as soldiers." Many colonists were deported galley slaves—criminals sentenced to row in French naval vessels, then shipped to Louisiana when the navy didn't need them. Others were trappers, gold-hunters, and various adventurers who had exhausted their welcome elsewhere in the French empire. As late as the 1750s and 1760s, during Governor Kerlerec's administration, officials were still receiving the dregs of French society.

Shortly after the city's founding, enslaved people were required to build public works for thirty days after the harvest. This practice—forcing enslaved laborers to construct the infrastructure of their own oppression—would continue in various forms for the next century and a half.

Nature seemed determined to destroy what humans had built. In September 1722, a hurricane struck New Orleans and blew most of the structures flat. The colonial administrators used this disaster as an opportunity: they finally enforced the grid pattern that Bienville had originally planned but that the colonists had mostly ignored. This grid still defines the French Quarter today, the same street layout surviving three centuries of floods, fires, and hurricanes.

Spain Takes Over

The Seven Years' War—known in America as the French and Indian War—reshaped the map of North America. When Britain emerged victorious in 1763, France was forced to choose which territories to surrender. Rather than let New Orleans fall to the British, France secretly ceded it to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762, formally confirmed the following year. Spain had lost Florida to Britain; Louisiana was compensation.

The French colonists were not consulted. They were not pleased.

No Spanish governor arrived to take control until 1766, three years after the transfer. French and German settlers saw their chance. In the bloodless Rebellion of 1768, they forced the Spanish governor to flee all the way back to Spain. For a brief moment, it appeared that the colonists might restore French rule through sheer belligerence.

Spain's response was not bloodless. A year later, Spanish forces reasserted control. Five ringleaders were executed. Five more were shipped to prison in Cuba. The remaining rebels were forgiven—provided they pledged loyalty to Spain. New Orleans would remain under Spanish rule, administered from the Spanish garrison in Cuba, for the next three decades.

The City Burns—Twice

On Good Friday, March 21, 1788, fire swept through New Orleans and destroyed 856 buildings. Nearly the entire city burned to the ground.

The colonists rebuilt.

In December 1794, another fire destroyed 212 more buildings.

This time, the Spanish administrators made a decision that would define New Orleans' architectural character forever. They mandated that the rebuilt city use brick instead of wood. The result is the French Quarter we know today—which, despite its name, is almost entirely Spanish colonial architecture. The multi-story buildings centered around interior courtyards, the large arched doorways, the decorative wrought iron balconies—all of these reflect Spanish building traditions and the Spanish colonies' architectural vocabulary.

Three of the most impressive structures in the city date from this period of Spanish rebuilding: St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo (the old city hall), and the Presbytere. They stand today as monuments to a fire that erased French New Orleans and created something new from the ashes.

Commerce and the River

During the final decades of Spanish rule, New Orleans transformed from a struggling colonial outpost into a genuine commercial center. In 1795 and 1796, sugar processing was established on a firm industrial basis—the beginning of the plantation economy that would define Louisiana for generations.

The Carondelet Canal opened in 1794, connecting the back of the city along the river levee with Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John. That ancient Native American portage route had been upgraded into an actual canal. Commerce could now flow more efficiently between the Mississippi and the Gulf.

In 1795, Spain signed Pinckney's Treaty with the United States, granting Americans the "Right of Deposit" in New Orleans. This meant American merchants could use the city's port facilities to store goods waiting for shipment. For farmers in the Ohio River Valley and the American interior, this was everything. Without access to New Orleans, they had no practical way to get their crops to market. The Mississippi was their highway, and New Orleans was the toll booth at the end.

Three Flags in Twenty Days

In 1800, Spain and France signed the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, agreeing that Spain would give Louisiana back to France. Napoleon Bonaparte had plans for a renewed French empire in the Americas.

Those plans collapsed when a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue—modern-day Haiti—destroyed France's most profitable Caribbean colony. The Haitian Revolution, which raged from 1791 to 1804, established the second republic in the Western Hemisphere and the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people. Without Haiti, Napoleon's American ambitions were pointless. The entire strategic rationale for holding Louisiana had vanished.

In April 1803, Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase—approximately 828,000 square miles of territory for fifteen million dollars, roughly four cents per acre. The deal included portions of what would become more than a dozen American states.

The actual transfer of power became a comedy of flags. A French prefect named Pierre Clément de Laussat arrived in New Orleans on March 23, 1803, to take possession of Louisiana on France's behalf. He formally received the colony from Spain on November 30. He created New Orleans' first city council and abolished the Spanish cabildo. He was, briefly, the ruler of an enormous territory.

Twenty days later, on December 20, 1803, he handed Louisiana to the United States. Three flags had flown over New Orleans in less than a month: Spanish, French, American. Laussat's entire tenure as colonial administrator had lasted less than three weeks.

A City of Many Peoples

An 1805 census counted 8,500 people in New Orleans: 3,551 whites, 1,556 free Black people, and 3,105 enslaved individuals. Contemporary observers and later historians believe this was an undercount; the true population was probably around ten thousand.

What those numbers couldn't capture was the extraordinary diversity of origins. The city's population included French colonists and their descendants, Spanish administrators and settlers, German farmers from upriver, Americans flooding in from the eastern states, and a complex hierarchy of people of African descent—some enslaved, some free, some who had been free for generations.

And then came the refugees from Haiti.

The Haitian Revolution sent waves of displaced people across the Caribbean and beyond. White plantation owners fled with whatever they could carry—and often with enslaved people they claimed as property. Free people of color, the gens de couleur libres, also escaped the violence. They arrived in New Orleans speaking French, practicing Catholicism, and carrying cultural traditions that would reshape the city.

Louisiana's Governor Claiborne and other American officials wanted to exclude additional free Black men, fearing their influence on the enslaved population. But French Creoles—people of French descent born in the Americas—wanted to increase the French-speaking population and preserve the city's character against the tide of English-speaking American newcomers. The Creoles won. Refugees kept coming.

In 1809, a massive wave of Haitian émigrés who had initially fled to Cuba arrived in New Orleans after Spanish authorities expelled them. This single migration brought 2,731 white refugees, 3,102 free people of African descent, and 3,226 enslaved individuals. The city's French-speaking population doubled almost overnight.

The German Coast Uprising

The Haitian Revolution had demonstrated that enslaved people could successfully overthrow their masters. This was not an abstract lesson. The refugees who arrived in New Orleans carried stories of the revolution—and so did the enslaved people they brought with them. Ideas of resistance spread through the plantation country surrounding New Orleans.

In January 1811, those ideas became action.

Between sixty-four and one hundred twenty-five enslaved men gathered on sugar plantations near present-day LaPlace, about twenty-five miles upriver from New Orleans on what was called the German Coast—named for the German immigrants who had settled there a century earlier. They began marching toward the city, collecting more men as they went. Some accounts claim the total reached two hundred to five hundred participants.

Over two days and twenty miles, the insurgents burned five plantation houses, destroyed sugar mills, and torched crops. They were armed with the tools of their oppression: cane knives, axes, hoes. The weapons of field labor became weapons of rebellion.

This was the largest slave revolt in United States history. And yet the rebels killed only two white men during the entire uprising.

The response was overwhelming and brutal. White militias formed immediately, backed by United States Army troops under Brigadier General Wade Hampton I—himself an enslaver—and Navy forces under Commodore John Shaw. Over the next two weeks, planters and officials conducted summary tribunals in three locations: St. John the Baptist Parish, St. Charles Parish, and Orleans Parish.

Ninety-five Black people died. Some were killed during confrontations with the militia. Forty-four captured insurgents were executed after these hasty tribunals—by hanging, firing squad, or decapitation. The authorities then displayed the bodies as warnings. Heads were mounted on pikes along the River Road and in the Place d'Armes in New Orleans, a gruesome display intended to terrorize the enslaved population into submission.

Since 1995, the African American History Alliance of Louisiana has held an annual commemoration of the uprising each January. Some descendants of the participants now join the remembrance.

Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans

The War of 1812 between the United States and Britain brought New Orleans to the center of world attention. The British planned to capture the city, which would give them control of the Mississippi River and potentially reverse the Louisiana Purchase. They assembled a massive invasion force.

The American government received early intelligence about the British plan and sent forces to defend the city under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson. Jackson's army was a strange coalition: regular troops, Kentucky and Tennessee militiamen, local Louisiana volunteers, free Black soldiers, Choctaw warriors, and—most colorfully—pirates.

Jean Lafitte ran a smuggling operation out of Barataria Bay, south of New Orleans. The British had approached him with offers of money and a naval commission if he would help them take the city. Instead, Lafitte warned the Americans and offered his men's services to Jackson. The pirates knew the local waters, had artillery experience, and brought desperately needed flints for American muskets.

The British advance came by way of Lake Borgne. Their troops landed at a fisherman's village on December 23, 1814, with Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham taking command on Christmas Day. An immediate attack on Jackson's still-incomplete defenses might have succeeded. But the British waited, and Jackson used every hour to strengthen his position.

On January 8, 1815, the British finally attacked the American entrenchments at Chalmette, near the Mississippi River. The assault was a catastrophe. Out of nine thousand British soldiers engaged, two thousand became casualties. Among the dead were Pakenham himself and Major-General Gibbs, his second-in-command. The American losses were negligible.

There is a bitter irony to the Battle of New Orleans. The Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, had been signed on December 24, 1814—two weeks before the battle. News traveled slowly across the Atlantic. Neither Jackson nor Pakenham knew the war was officially over when they fought. Two thousand men died in a battle that, legally speaking, didn't need to happen.

But the victory transformed Andrew Jackson into a national hero and future president. And it secured American control over the Mississippi River and the vital port of New Orleans for good.

What Remains

New Orleans would go on to become the largest city in the American South by the time of the Civil War, the nation's greatest cotton port, a center of jazz music, cuisine, and a culture unlike anywhere else in the United States. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 killed over a thousand people and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. The city rebuilt, as it always has.

But the New Orleans that emerged from Katrina was changed in ways that statistics struggle to capture. Much of the Black population that had defined the city's culture for three centuries never returned. New residents arrived—different ethnic groups, different cultural traditions. The city continues, but something was lost that cannot be replicated.

Still, the essential character remains: a place of many tongues, built on silt and defiance, conquered by empires and disasters alike, always burning down and always rebuilding. Father Charlevoix saw a hundred wretched hovels in a snake-infested swamp and somehow perceived an imperial future. Three centuries later, that future continues to unfold—strange, resilient, and utterly unlike anywhere else on Earth.