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Building the Land of Dreams
New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America
By Eberhard L. Faber PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-7352-4
CHAPTER 1
Mississippi Schemes
THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL ELITE, 1717–1803
This Country whose riches now attracted the Arms of the English had at various periods both before & after its settlement been the object of Extravagant Designs and Romantic hopes, followed naturally by Distress and Disappointment. The Conquerors of Mexico left the Gold & Pearls of their new Empire to search in this neighborhood for the fabulous fountain of eternal youth. They found miserable graves and ended their lives before their natural term by a ridiculous attempt to prolong them beyond it. The Commerce of the great River that waters this Country was a prominent feature in the gigantic speculation of Law, which at a later period Convulsed the Kingdom of France, and a Mississippi Scheme became the proverbial appellation for every undertaking in which extravagant Expectations were succeeded by the Ruin of those who formed them. — Edward Livingston, unfinished history of Louisiana, 1815
Don Vicento José Nuñez was a pious man, and that was how the trouble started. On the morning of Good Friday, March 21, 1788, the army treasurer solemnly lit no less than fifty devotional candles in the private chapel he had constructed in his house at the corner of Condé and Toulouse Streets. At one thirty in the afternoon, while Don Nuñez was taking supper, one of the candles ignited the ceiling. A strong southerly wind soon spread the fire to nearby buildings, and New Orleans's cypress structures proved ideal kindling for the blaze. Caches of gunpowder stored in private homes exploded, quickening the fire's spread. The town's two fire engines were consumed before they could be mobilized. Within five hours, 856 buildings had been destroyed — over four-fifths of the town, including the church, the convent, and the casa capitular, plus hundreds of warehouses, shops, and houses. Only the structures fronting the river survived. The property damage was estimated at three million pesos.
A second fire in 1794 consumed another 212 buildings, including many costlier structures including the barracks and armory. Rebuilding, in a new, Spanish-inflected architectural style, was rapid, financed both by ambitious private developers and interest-free loans from Madrid. The town that Americans encountered in 1803 was thus literally a brand-new city. It had the appearance of fresh, recent construction, not colonial dilapidation.
The newness that Americans would encounter was more than a matter of appearance. The rebuilding of New Orleans that followed the fire of 1788 coincided with a decade of continental transformations and global upheavals. In Madrid that December, three decades of imperial modernization came to a close with the death of the venerable absolutist reformer Carlos III. Carlos IV's coronation was celebrated in New Orleans with the naming of a stately new boulevard; but while St. Charles Avenue would one day become famous as one of the most beautiful streets in North America, the monarch it was named for was a disappointing mediocrity, under whose rule the vast Spanish empire would begin to disintegrate. Meanwhile, in New York, only weeks after Carlos's coronation, a different sort of reign began, over a different sort of empire, when George Washington was inaugurated as the American republic's first president. That new republic would soon be closely connected with New Orleans, in ways stemming directly from Don Nuñez's carelessness, as Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró, seeking to hasten the city's recovery, eased restrictions on trade with American settlers in the trans-Appalachian West.
The most momentous changes of all took place in Paris, as Louis XVI of France summoned the Estates-General in a desperate attempt to resolve his kingdom's financial crisis, touching off a revolution whose ideological, military, and economic repercussions would agitate the entire Atlantic world for the next quarter century. One dramatic consequence, closer to Louisiana, was the colonial-uprising-turned-slave-rebellion in the affluent Caribbean sugar colony of Saint Domingue, which not only affected slave societies throughout the Americas but also spurred the advent of sugar production around New Orleans. With the concurrent rise of upcountry cotton cultivation and the newly opened trading connections to the United States, what had long been a sleepy outpost, retained mainly for its strategic military value, began its transformation into a nascent capitalist economy based on plantation slavery and transatlantic commerce.
The new, dynamic city that arose during the late Spanish period thus had few points of continuity with its earlier colonial history. It had the French language, its precarious location on the Mississippi's unpredictable bank, and the racially mixed population that characterizes it to this day (although in truth the racial order had changed considerably with increased slave importations and altered laws under the Spanish). By 1803 most living New Orleanians could not even have remembered the period of French rule; those who could undoubtedly felt as if their city had become something unrecognizable. The creole colony would be made anew as a republican United States city, from a template developed during the final tumultuous years of Spanish control, with ideological and demographic materials of the postrevolutionary nineteenth century. Even its "Frenchness," ironically, would be reinvented — and in some ways intensified — in the American period, when "foreign French" arrivals brought new strains of French culture (literary, legal, and culinary) along with a conscious Gallicism that had been mostly absent during the years that France actually ruled Louisiana.
But in one crucial way, the colonial period left a potent and durable legacy for the republican era to grapple with. This was to be found not in New Orleans's architecture, culture, or economy but in its society: the evolution of an elite creole class. Concentrated around New Orleans, and with wealth derived from planting, trade, and construction, this class was marked by a constant turnover in its membership but a remarkably stable corporate identity. Through intermarriage among a finite group of wealthy families, shared conservative, hierarchical values, and close connections to colonial government, the creole elite retained its coherence and continuity through the dizzying upheavals that convulsed colonial Louisiana. They were well versed in patriotic displays and fluent in whatever register of royal rhetoric seemed appropriate to the monarchy they wished to influence, but their underlying loyalty was only to their own autonomy, prestige, and wealth. The colonial period, for them, was one long lesson in how to conserve and strengthen that autonomy against distant rulers and regimes. After 1803 their existence was a thorny problem in the eyes of some representatives of the American republic, but their cooperation and support were indispensable in the making of an American Louisiana.
FROM COMPANY LEDGER TO CREOLE REBELLION: A HALF CENTURY OF FRENCH RULE, 1717–1768
New Orleans was a latecomer to the Atlantic world. It was not until September 9, 1717 — two centuries after the Spanish began colonizing the Americas, a century after the first British Atlantic settlements, and thirty-five years after La Salle first navigated the Mississippi — that a one-line directive was entered in the ledger of the French Company of the West "to establish, thirty leagues up the river, a burg which should be called New Orleans, where landing would be possible from either the river or Lake Pontchartrain." Earlier that year, the regent, Philippe, duc d'Orleans, had put Scottish financier John Law in charge of Louisiana; there followed the speculative frenzy later known as the Mississippi Bubble. The Company of the West, now renamed the Company of the Indies, was granted monopolies on colonial trade and taxation; Law sold over five billion livres worth of shares; colonists were recruited from France, Germany, and Switzerland with glowing (but false) reports of lush prosperity; and the first African slaves, 450 of them in 1719 alone, were brought to Louisiana. Then in 1720 the bubble burst. Share prices collapsed, Law fled to Belgium, and the embarrassed French Crown's brief fascination with Louisiana was definitively extinguished.
New Orleans was thus founded as part of a financial scheme that collapsed before its ambitious city plan had even been drawn. The early demise of such grand colonial dreams led to an enduring image of the city, in European minds, as a transgressive realm of immorality and decay. But thanks to the tenacity of its major booster, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville, it nonetheless hung on to eclipse its older rivals — Natchez, Mobile, and Biloxi — and become the capital of French Louisiana. Not that this was much to celebrate. While France concentrated on colonies in Canada and the Caribbean, Louisiana spent the next four decades as a forgotten backwater. Engineer Adrien de Pauger's plan for New Orleans (which encompassed what is now the French Quarter) was a rectilinear model of absolutist rational symmetry, an attempt to implant classical order by decree in the American wilderness. But the plan remained an ideal, on paper only, while the real town grew haphazardly, a hodgepodge of modest cabins and shacks. In 1722 a hurricane destroyed what little there was. After that, Pauger decided it was necessary to raise massive earth embankments along the Mississippi to keep out future floodwaters; this was the beginning of the city's levee system, which would be expanded throughout the next century. The company sought desperately to people the new colony, sending shiploads of hapless convicts, vagrants, and prostitutes who died in massive numbers both before, during, and after their Atlantic crossings. A convent of Ursuline nuns arrived in 1727 and established the town's first school. And throughout the decade, African slaves were brought to Louisiana — over 2,000 by 1723 and over 3,500 more by 1729. The paternalistic Code Noir of 1724 served as the legal basis for African slavery throughout the French period.
By 1732 there were about 6,000 people living in French Louisiana. Two-thirds of them were enslaved. Most lived in or near New Orleans and on scattered plantations further upriver, producing tobacco, indigo, and lumber. Even the moderate growth of the 1720s, however, came to a halt in November 1729, when Natchez Indians slew some 237 French men, women, and children at the Fort Rosalie outpost 180 miles upriver. There followed two years of intermittent Indian war, during which a moat and ramparts were hastily built to defend New Orleans. The fortifications would last until well into the American period. But the Company of the Indies had had enough. In late 1730 they asked the Crown to take the vast, unprofitable colony off their hands, and Louisiana became a royal possession.
For the next three decades Louisiana quietly stagnated. Slave ships, which the company had operated, stopped coming. Would-be European emigrants, hearing tales of Louisiana's restive Indians, treacherous slaves, and tropical diseases, stayed home or went elsewhere. Eventually France's disastrous defeat in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) resulted in the loss of its entire American empire with the exception of the Caribbean sugar colonies. Evicted from the North American continent, Louis XV still wanted to keep the Mississippi out of British hands. So in 1762 he secretly ceded to his cousin, King Carlos III of Spain, "from the pure impulse of his generous heart, and from the sense of the affection and friendship existing between these two royal persons, all the country known under the name of Louisiana." The population of the colony was virtually the same as it had been thirty years earlier.
From the perspective of Versailles, French Louisiana was a disappointment, marked by hardship, cruelty, and economic stagnation, matching neither the demographic vitality of the British Atlantic colonies nor the vast mineral wealth of New Spain. In local terms it was not entirely a failure. Over the three decades following the company's departure, a native-born generation forgot their parents' dreams of easy riches through plunder or precious metals and settled down to the harder work of staple agricultural production. After the frightful mortality of the earliest years, the white population finally began, sometime in the 1730s, to grow through natural increase. Planters and slaves in and around New Orleans cultivated cattle, tobacco, rice, and indigo and chopped lumber. Although these products generally could not compete on the world market, together with the Indian fur trade, they formed the basis of a "frontier exchange economy" that yielded just enough to sustain this second generation, who now placed themselves at the head of an emerging social order based not on nobility nor royal connections but on land, slaveholding, and a nascent kinship system.
This newborn creole elite had little or no sentimental allegiance to France. (Many were Bienville loyalists and keenly aware of their patron's shoddy treatment.) Their fortunes were due to their own initiative, not to the royal regime, which had cut costs after 1731; if anything, they bitterly remembered the rejection from the mother country experienced by their parents and grandparents in the wake of the company's abandonment. On the other hand, some of them did conspire, famously, to thwart the imposition of Spanish rule. But the rebellion of 1768 was not due to any patriotic Gallic pride, nor was it a move toward independence, like the concurrent unrest over the Stamp Act in the British colonies, but only a clumsy case of overreaching by second-generation creoles determined to assert their autonomy but not yet sure how to go about it.
Spain had dragged its feet taking control of its newest colonial possession. The colony's cession was not made public until 1764, and the new Spanish governor, Don Antonio Ulloa, did not arrive in New Orleans until March 1766. When he did arrive, he had little money and few troops, and he remained dependent on the French acting director-general, Charles Aubry. In this confused situation a cabal of creole conspirators attempted to seize control of the colony under the authority of the recently outlawed Superior Council. The council was dominated by the attorney general, a charismatic second-generation creole named Nicolas Chauvin de Lafrénière, whose faction organized mass meetings, printed stormy manifestos, and deported Ulloa on a ship to Havana. Then they enjoyed a fleeting nine months of political autonomy — until the new governor, General Alejandro O'Reilly, arrived in August 1769 with over two thousand troops and proceeded to suppress the council and execute Lafrénière and five other conspirators by firing squad.
The executed rebels were canonized as martyrs in the eyes of a later, Francophile generation of nineteenth-century creoles, but their ill-fated rebellion was much less a popular uprising than an oligarchic conspiracy, battling neither for liberty nor for nation but simply for the preservation of their own status and wealth built up over three decades of French neglect. In any case, after this violent beginning, Lafrénière's successors in the local elite realized that cooptation was a better plan than confrontation; they invited Spanish officials into their ranks through marriage and business partnerships, placated Madrid with lip service and superficial compliance with royal decrees, and learned to conduct trade with non-Spanish partners clandestinely rather than imperiously demanding its legalization. Their various accommodations were rewarded with prosperity, and an aversion to rebellious confrontations in the mode of 1768 was incorporated into their collective ethos.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Building the Land of Dreams by Eberhard L. Faber. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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