The Past as Prelude: New Orleans 1718–1968

The People of New Orleans

Charles L. Dufour

Many years before the founding of New Orleans, Jean-Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, had spotted, while exploring the Mississippi, one of the most beautiful crescents of the river.

This wide arc in the great stream brought the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain within six miles of each other and the land between the river and the lake had long been used by the Indians as a portage.

Here it was that Bienville decided to establish the city, which existed in name on a map in Paris almost six months before the work of clearing the canebrakes along the river's edge began.

It was probably sometime in the month of September, 1717, that John Law's Company of the West passed a resolution to establish, thirty leagues up the river, a town which they will name New Orleans, which one may reach by the river and Lake Pontchartrain. This resolution in the company's register in Paris bears no date, but another resolution, dated October 1, 1717, named a M. Bonnaud as cashier and warehouse keeper for the commercial office which is to be established at New Orleans.

The exact date when Bienville set to work to clear the ground for New Orleans has not been fixed, but the probability is that it was between March 15 and April 15, 1718. In June, Bienville reported to Paris that he was working on the establishment of New Orleans, but progress must have been very slow for Le Page du Pratz, who settled on Bayou St. John late in 1718, wrote in his History of Louisiana that at the time of his arrival in the colony, New Orleans existed only in name.

One hundred and seventy-five years before Bienville founded New Orleans, the first Europeans saw the place—or could have seen it—as they went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. These were Spaniards, survivors of Hernando dc Soto's expedition, who, despairing of the long and arduous march to Mexico, built ships and floated past the site of the future French capital of Louisiana.

Three and a half decades before New Orleans was conceived by John Law, Ren6 Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, had passed the site on his way to the mouth of the Mississippi, where on April 9, 1682, he claimed all the land drained by the great river for France's Sun King, Louis XIV. Four years later LaSalle's lieutenant, Henri de Tonty, searching for his chief, twice passed Bienville's beautiful crescent.

And in 1699, Pierre LeMoyne, Sieur d'Iberville, accompanied by his brother, Bienville, and a party of fifty, also passed the future site of New Orleans although there is no evidence that it made any impression upon Bienville at that time.

Before the Spanish, French and Canadians cruised past the site of New Orleans, the place was, of course, thoroughly familiar to the Indians of the vicinity. So it is with the Indians that the story of the people of New Orleans must begin.

The first Indians recorded in the New Orleans area were tourists with La Salle—eighteen Mohegans and Abnakis, with ten Indian women and three Indian children.

These Indians undoubtedly were of a higher quality than some of the tribes the French encountered on the lower Mississippi. Of the latter, one French missionary, the Jesuit Gabriel Marest, exclaimed: Nothing is more difficult than the conversion of these savages . . . We must first make men of them, and afterwards work to make them Christians.

Andre Penicaut, the articulate ship's carpenter who accompanied Iberville to Louisiana and remained for twenty-two years in the colony, described a visit to an Indian village:

"As it was near the end of August and very hot, all the savages—the men and the boys—went as naked as one's hand; but the women and the girls wore a single hank of moss which passed between their legs and covered their nakedness, the rest of their bodies being quite nude . . . Their huts . . . are made of mud and are of a round shape almost like a windmill. The roofs of the houses are made mainly from the bark of trees. There are others that arc covered with the leaves of a bush locally called latanier ... An observation I have made about the savages is that, however abundant their provisions may be, they do not overindulge themselves, but eat only what they need, yet very untidily, most of them eating with their fingers . . . They have some dishes made of wood and others of clay, which, even though by the hands of savages, are nevertheless very well made indeed."

The Choctaws, who abounded in the general vicinity of New Orleans, were, noted Le Page du Pratz, called Flat-heads, but for what reason he could not determine since all the nations of Louisiana have their heads as flat, or nearly so. Du Pratz's generalizations about all the natives of America, would surely include those Indians with whom he came in contact around New Orleans. Du Pratz wrote:

. . . Very few of them are to be seen under five feet and a half, and very many of them above that . . . they are long waisted; their head is upright and somewhat flat in the upper part, and their features are regular; they have black eyes, and thick black hair without curls. If we see none that are extremely fat . . . neither do wc meet with any that are so lean as if they were in a consumption. The men in general are better made than the women; they are more nervous and the women more plump and fleshy; the men are almost all large, and the women of a middle size . . . The infants of the native are white when they are born, but they soon turn brown, as they are rubbed with bear oil and exposed to the sun ... As the children grow up, the fathers and mothers take care each to accustom those of their own sex to the labors and exercises suited to them ... It must be confessed that the girls and the women work more than the men and boys.

About half a century after Penicaut and du Pratz, Bernard Romans, a Dutch surveyor in the British service, visited the area of New Orleans. The Choctaw Indians he later wrote may more properly be called a nation of farmers than any savages I have met with. Romans described how the Choctaws became flatheaded: The women disfigure the heads of their male children by means of bags of sand, flattening them into different shapes, thinking it adds to their beauty.

Louis LeClerc dc Milford, traveling in the 1770's, found the Choctaws cowardly, lazy and filthy. Rather than cultivate their fertile lands, they . . . prefer a life of mendicancy. Several times a year they go down to Mobile and New Orleans to beg. Continuing his description, Milford wrote:

These savages are so lazy and so filthy that they never clean any part of their bodies. As they go practically naked, their bodies are caked with dirt, which in the course of time becomes the color of soot.

Such, briefly, were the first inhabitants of what would become the city of New Orleans.

A certain Father Duval, who sent an enthusiastic letter about New Orleans to the Nouveau Mercure in Paris, must have possessed a lively imagination. The Mercure published in March, 1719 his comments that the town was one league around and was composed of simple houses, low as in our rural regions, covered with immense barks of trees and large reeds.

Yet Le Page du Pratz, who was on Bayou St. John by the time of Father Duval's supposed visit, stated that the city was yet only marked out by a hut covered with palmetto leaves, and which [Bienville] had caused to be built for his own lodgings. Another Bayou St. John concessionaire, M. Pellerin, reported in April, 1719: There are at New Orleans three houses of Canadians and a warehouse for the Company.

And Father Charlevoix, who reached New Orleans late in 1721, wrote:

"Here I am in that famous city they call New Orleans . . . The eight hundred handsome houses and five parishes which the Mercure attributed to it two years ago are now reduced today to a hundred huts placed without much order, to a large warehouse of wood, two or three houses which would not embellish a village in France, to half of a wretched warehouse that they have consented to assign to the Lord and of which He had hardly taken possession before they wanted Him to leave it to lodge in a tent."

Where Father Duval was a man with imagination, Father Charlevoix was a man of vision. Both saw things at New Orleans that were not there. This savage and deserted place, wrote Father Charlevoix with the gift of prophecy, which the canebrake and trees cover almost entirely will one day, and perhaps that day will not be distant, be a wealthy city and the metropolis of a great and rich colony.

Although 300 concessionaires with land grants came out from France in 1718, and another hundred colonists arrived in Louisiana in the following year, it was soon obvious to John Law that volunteer colonization would be a slow process and that other means of securing colonists must be employed if New Orleans was to grow and prosper.

The simple device of deporting criminals to Louisiana assured a population in which quantity, not quality, would be the prime consideration. The riff-raff of Paris and provincial towns, thieves, cutthroats, prostitutes, were herded to French ports and among them might be found renegade sons of decent families sent to the colony to make something out of wasted lives. France was purged of its human dregs and worst derelicts, as prisons, detention houses and hospitals were emptied and denizens of the streets were rounded up and shipped to Louisiana.

One contingent of sixteen women, from seventeen to thirtyeight years of age, all branded on their shoulders with the fleurde-lis, the mark of the profligate female, had such descriptions by their names on the shipping list as thief, perfect debauchee, knife-wielder, given to all vices. Another group of 299 dissolute women, sent to Louisiana in June, 1719, was deported, reported a Paris police official, because they can cause only much trouble among the public, being of an extraordinarily depravation of habits.

Chained two-by-two, these wretched creatures were piled into carts and carried to the ports. In 1719, 600 were shipped. A similar number, but of both sexes, was deported in 1720. Among them, before they sailed, there were 108 marriages, and husband and wife, chained, mounted the gangplank together. Riots of these criminal groups frequently broke out. On one occasion, I 50 of the women rebelled at a port and mobbed the handful of soldiers who guarded them. They kicked and fought, scratched and bit, and beat upon the guards with their chains. In self-defense, the soldiers fired into the milling women, killing six and wounding three times as many more. Cowed by the gunfire, the riot subsided and the women went docilely aboard ship.

With such a system of colonization, it is not surprising that between 1717 and 1721, the population of Louisiana increased twenty-fold, from about 400 to 8,000, including Negro slaves, the first large shipment of which, numbering 147, reached the colony on July 7, 1720.

This growth, however, imposing as it looked on the books of John Law's company, brought with it only a handful of respectable colonists. Father Charlevoix, writing from New Orleans in 1721, declared:

The people who are sent here are miserable wretches driven from France for real or supposed crimes, or bad conduct, or persons who have enlisted in troops or enrolled themselves as immigrants in order to avoid the pursuits of their creditors. Both classes consider the country as a place of exile. Everything there disheartens them; nothing interests them in the progress of a colony of which they are only members in spite of themselves, and they are very little concerned with the advantages which it may procure to the state; the greater part are not even capable of appreciating them. Others have only found misery in a country for which they have incurred expenses.

Bienville's impatience grew as shipload after shipload of undesirables disembarked in Louisiana. On October 20, 1719, he protested to Paris that all he had for the defense of the colony was a band of deserters, smugglers and scoundrels, who are all ready not only to abandon you but also to turn against you. Bienville inquired:

What attachment also can people have for the country who are sent to it by force and who no longer have any hope of returning to their native land? ... It appears to me that it is absolutely necessary if we wish to preserve this colony for the King to send to it as far as possible only men of good will . . .

Even before the Regent forbade on May 9, 1720, the further deportation of criminals to Louisiana, John Law had cast his eyes on more substantial prospective colonists. Law sought families, not only for the colony as a whole, but for his own large concessions, granted him by the Company of the Indies.

Law's agents spread to Germany where landless peasants lured by the glowing propaganda of the Company and the opportunitv to get a fresh start in life with land, livestock, seeds and tools, agreed to go out to Louisiana as colonizers.

Poor, and weary from the interminable wars in which they were involved, thousands of Germans from Alsace-Lorraine, the Palatinate, Baden-Wurtemburg, Mayence and Treves enlisted for Louisiana. German historians estimate that 10,000 left their homes to establish a new life on the Mississippi. J. Ilanno Deiler of Tulane, a pioneer investigator of German emigration to Louisiana, believed that no more than 6,000 Germans actually sailed from France. The others, Deiler stated, either succumbed to illness, returned to their homes in Germany, or settled in France. Deiler concluded that unsanitary conditions on crowded ships took a frightful toll among the German emigrants and that of the 6,000 Germans who left Europe for Louisiana only about one-third—2,000—actually reached the shores of the colony. Continuing, Deiler added: By this I do not mean to say that 2,000 Germans settled in Louisiana, but only that 2,000 reached the shores and were disembarked in Biloxi and upon Dauphin Island in the harbor of Mobile . . . Many of them perished in those two places . . .

More recent research, especially that done in 1924 by a French historian, Rene" Le Conte, indicates that Deiler's figures may be high. Le Conte estimated no more than 2,600 Germans became John Law's engages, of which about 1,600 actually sailed for Louisiana.

The first Germans to reach Louisiana, a mere handful, arrived as early as 1718 and in November, 1719, Les Deux Freres brought a large group to Ship Island. These were not, in all probability, the indigent peasants Law rounded up, for Penicaut noted that they brought with them all kinds of merchandise and personal possessions.

The survivors of the hazardous Atlantic crossing were hardy, stout-hearted, substantial stock, usually families in which no members shied from hard work. They were in marked contrast to the worthless vagabonds who had first been sent out as colonists. The Chevalier de Champigny, who was in New Orleans during the Spanish regime, noted this difference half a century later:

You cannot find twenty of these vagabond families in Louisiana now. Most of them died in misery or returned to France, bringing back such ideas which their ill success inspired. The most frightful accounts of the country of the Mississippi soon began to spread among the public, at a time when German colonists were planting new and most successful establishments on the banks of the Mississippi, within five leagues of New Orleans. This tract still [1776] occupied by their descendants, is the best cultivated and most thickly settled part of the colony, and I regard the Germans and the Canadians as the founders of all our establishments in Louisiana.

The last significant shipment of John Law's Germans was an ill-fated one. On January 24, 1721, four vessels carrying 875 Germans and 66 Swiss colonists sailed from Lorient. The ships—Les Deux Freres, La Garonne, La Saone and La Charente—were swept with disease before the voyage was fairly underway. By the time the pest flotilla reached Louisiana, almost four fifths of the passengers had died from the epidemic.

Most of the Germans who settled about New Orleans spoke no French and most of the officials or priests who enrolled them knew no German, so as a consequence new French surnames appeared in Louisiana. A few examples are: Casbergue for Katzenberger, Cambre for Kamper, Hymcl for Himmcl, Delmaire for Edelmaier, Clampetre for Kleinpeter, Chaignc for Schoen, Fauquel for Vogel, Quisingre for Kissinger.

The story of what happened to Johann Zweig's name is an oft-told one. In desperation at the lack of comprehension his repeated: Zweig! Zweig! Zweig! drew from the notary, he broke off a small piece of branch of a tree and waved it before the official, crying out again: Zweig! Zweig!

The notary's face lighted up: Ah, La Branche! La Branche! And Johann Zweig was enrolled as Jean La Branche, which name 250 years later is still borne by a prominent Louisiana French family.

Amusing but purely mythical stories have existed for years concerning the Schecksnyder family, which according to Deiler's research, has had 27 variants to the name since it first appeared in Louisiana in 1721. One story relates that a Jacob Schneider, familiarly known as Jake to his shipmates, was identified as Jake Schneider when he came down the gangplank. This sounded like Schecksnyder to the non-Teutonic ear of the official and so, goes this fable, Jake Schneider became Schecksnyder. A second version of this imaginary tale has it that there were six Schneider brothers who came to Louisiana together. Identified as the Six Schneiders it might be understandable, considering the language barrier, that the family name would emerge as Schecksnyder.

Unfortunately for the validity of these two legends which still persist in Louisiana, there actually was a Hans Reinhardt Schecksneider who arrived in Louisiana in March 1721 and who became the progenitor of the vast family which is still represented bv many of the variants in the New Orleans telephone book.

There can be no doubt that the Germans brought the first measure of stability to the colony, as noted by the Chevalier de Champignv. This fact was remarked more than a quarter of a century later by Pierre C16ment de Laussat, who came to New Orleans to prepare for a Napoleonic empire and remained to transfer Louisiana from France to the United States. Laussat wrote:

What is called here the 'German Coast' is the most industrious, the most populous, the most at ease, the most upright, the most respected part of the inhabitants of this colony.

Although established in 1718, New Orleans did not become an ordered town until 1721 when Adrien de Pauger began, in March, to lay out what today is called the Vieux Carre. Paugcr's New Orleans had 4,000 feet frontage on the river with a depth of 1,800 feet and this tract was divided into squares of 300 feet.

At this time, including troops, the city's population was fewer than 250, but by November 1721, enough people had settled in New Orleans to call for a census, the enumeration of which follows:

The taker of this first census of New Orleans also counted 36 cattle, nine horses, but no pigs or sheep. The metropolis on the Mississippi envisioned by Father Charlevoix was yet in the distant future, but settlement in the environs of the infant city, both up and down the river, argued well for the eventual growth of New Orleans. The census of nearby concessions revealed that almost three times as many people lived on the outskirts of New Orleans as within its confines. These included 684 Europeans—293 men, 140 women, 96 children and 155 servants—and 533 Negro slaves and 51 Indian slaves, making a total of 1,259. Accordingly, New Orleans and its environs numbered more than 1,700 people as the year of 1721 drew to a close.

It was these people who bore the brunt of the first recorded tropical hurricane in New Orleans' history. The town was virtually wiped out by the devastating winds which struck on September 11, 1722, destroying fully two thirds of the houses and damaging the others so badly that complete reconstruction was necessary. The hurricane winds and wind-swept waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi uprooted crops.

The people dug themselves out of the storm debris as New Orleanians have done many times since and the flimsy dwellings were replaced by more substantial structures.

To avoid the dangers of one man rule in Louisiana, the Company of the Indies created the Superior Council. Its decrees give, 250 years later, some idea of how the early inhabitants of New Orleans lived.

Seemingly, good food was an early consideration in New Orleans and the Superior Council acted to prevent profiteering in delicacies by regulating the prices of brandy, wine, venison, buffalo beef, poultry and eggs. A few years later, when the Ursuline nuns arrived, the 18-year-old novice, Sister Marie Madeleine of St. Stanislas (she was Madeleine Hachard of Rouen) wrote enthusiastically to her father of the variety of the table:

We cat here meat, fish, peas, wild peppers, and many fruits and vegetables such as bananas which are the most excellent of all the fruits. In a word, we live on buffalo, lamb, swans, wild geese and wild turkeys, rabbits, chickens, ducks, pheasant, doves, quail and other birds and game of different species . . . They use much chocolate with milk and coffee.

Although Sister Marie Madeleine was writing in 1727-1728, she found that luxury was not unknown to New Orleans at that early date in its history:

I can assure you that I do not seem to be on the Mississippi, there is as much of magnificence and politeness as in France. Cloth of gold and velours are commonplace here, albeit three times dearer than at Rouen . . . The women here, as elsewhere, employ powder and rouge to conceal the wrinkles in their faces; indeed, the demon here possesses a great empire.

How did the early New Orleanians spend their leisure? Two Superior Council decrees in 1723 indicate several popular pastimes. In April, legislation forbade anyone to play billiards on Sunday and . . . feast days or at late hours under penalty of a fine of one hundred livres both against the keeper of the billiard room and against the players. Proof of the antiquity of New Orleans' addiction to gambling is embodied in a Superior Council decree issued in May:

It is forbidden to play at home any game of chance such as lansquenet, hoca, biribi, faro, basset, dice, and all other games of chance or with stakes ... It permits only games of recreation.

Twenty-five years after the founding of New Orleans, its first Golden Age was inaugurated with the arrival in Louisiana of the Marquis de Vaudreuil in May, 1743. Pierre Cavagnial de Rigaud de Vaudreuil did not come without good reason by the sobriquet Grand Marquis during his ten years as governor of Louisiana. Unlike the last ten years of Bienville in Louisiana, a decade of frustration for the founder of New Orleans, who had given almost fortv years to the colony, Vaudreuil's regime was characterized generally bv peace and prosperity—and by the elegance which the Grand Marquis introduced into the city. He and his wife, who was fifteen years his senior, delighted New Orleans. Balls, fetes, banquets, card parties, promenades— everything that could divert the wealthy—soon became the rule, reaching their peak during the pre-Lenten Carnival season.

A French officer in New Orleans, writing to a friend in Paris in 1743, has provided posterity with a critical description of the people of the period. His letter, seized when the British captured the ship that was bearing it to France, was translated into English and published in a pamphlet in London in 1744. Here is an excerpt:

"The French live sociably enough, but the officers are too free with the Town's People; and Town's People that are rich are too proud and lofty . . . Everyone studies his own Profit. The Poor labour for a Week, and squander in one Day all they have earned in six; from thence arises the Profit of the Publick-houses, which flourish every day. The Rich spend their Time in seeing their Slaves work to improve their lands, and get money, which they spend in Plays, Balls and Feasts; but the most common Pastime of the highest as well as the lowest, and even of the Slaves, is Women; so that if there are 500 Women married, or unmarried in New Orleans, including all Ranks, I don't believe, without Exaggeration, that there are ten of them of a blameless Character; as for me, I know but two of those, and even they are privately talked of . . .

"Laws are observed here much in the same Manner as in France, or worse: The Rich Man knows how to procure himself Justice of the Poor . . .

"The Youth here are employed in hunting, fishing and pleasuring; very few learn the necessary Sciences, or at best it is what is least attended to. The Children, even of the best Sort, know how to fire a Musket or shoot an Arrow, catch Fish, draw a Bow, handle an Oar, swim, run, dance, play at cards, and understand Paper Notes, before they know their letters or their God. A Child of six Years of Age knows more here of raking and swearing than a young Man of 25 in France; and an insolent Boy of 12 or 13 Years of Age will boldly insult, and strike an old Man."

In 1762, by a treaty signed at Fontainebleau, the King of Spain, Charles III, reluctantly accepted Louisiana as a gift from his Bourbon cousin, Louis XV of France.

Although Spanish rule, de jure, over Louisiana dates from November 3, 1762, it was not until 1766 that the first Spanish governor, Antonio de Ulloa, a savant more learned in science than in the art of governing, arrived in New Orleans.

Ulloa, with only a handful of Spanish troops, never formally took possession of Louisiana for Spain and Captain Charles Philippe Aubry, the ranking French officer after the death of Jean-Jacques Blaise d'Abbadie, director and commandant of Louisiana, found himself in a most peculiar situation. My position is a most extraordinary one, Aubry wrote. I command for the King of France and at the same time I govern the colony as if it belonged to the King of Spain.

The Revolution of 1768, led by Nicolas Chauvin de Lafr6niere, attorney general, Nicolas Denis Foucault, the French commissary, and a group of the chief merchants, lawyers, planters and military men of Louisiana, expelled Ulloa from New Orleans. This brought out from Spain General Alexander O'Reilly with a large force to establish the Spanish rule firmly in Louisiana and to punish the guilty parties.

This O'Reilly did effectively and the benign rule of Spain began, de facto, in 1769, to last until November 30, 1803, when the crimson and gold flag of Bourbon Spain came down in the Place d'Armes in New Orleans. The French Republic's tricolor replaced the Spanish flag, but twenty days later, it too came down and the American flag was run up the pole to signal a new era for New Orleans and the vast province of Louisiana.

It was during the Spanish regime, in the governorship of Esteban Miro, that the largest trans-Atlantic migration in American colonial history reached Louisiana in 1785, a fact completely ignored by writers of American history textbooks. These were Acadians, who had sought refuge in France after their expulsion from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755.

Although a tradition exists among the descendants of some Acadians that their ancestors reached Louisiana and settled in the bayou country before 1760, the earliest documentary evidence is that the first group of exiles reached New Orleans in 1763 or 1764. On April 4, 1764, d'Abbadie wrote in his journal: Four Acadian families, numbering twenty persons, arrived here [New Orleans] from New York, where they had been detained until the peace. Their passage cost them 2,200 livres and exhausted their savings. A few Acadians may have drifted in earlier, but this is the earliest record of their coming. Aubry, who assumed command for France in Louisiana on the death of d'Abbadie in February, 1765, wrote in May of that year:

When I saw the arrival of sixty Acadian families from Santo Domingo, I did not foresee the many others who were to follow and who kept arriving and will soon make Louisiana a new Acadia. At this instant, I learned that there are 300 on the river . . . We do not speak of them in hundreds anymore but in thousands. I am told that there are at least 4,000 who have picked Louisiana as their destiny . . . This unexpected event puts me, as well as M. Foucault [Nicolas Foucault, commissary] in the greatest of difficulty. Nothing was foreseen to settle so many people; and the circumstances we find ourselves in are, to say the least, critical. Never was the colony so short of food as it is today . . . However, under such circumstances, it is our duty not to abandon them.

Aubry's estimate was high, for by 1768, when the Acadians became innocent pawns in the revolution against Ulloa, their number probably did not exceed 500. These were settled on the Mississippi above New Orleans and on the banks of Bayous Lafourche, Teche and Vermilion.

Across the Atlantic, in France, some 3,000 Acadians had eventually settled, but assistance from the King, which they had expected, never came and years of precarious existence followed one another. Meanwhile their kindred had established themselves in Louisiana where, under Spanish rule, they thrived. Doubtless word of their happy lot reached the Acadians in France. Accordingly, when the Spanish government proposed to them a fresh start in life with a promise of land, seeds, tools and livestock and free transportation to Louisiana, heads of nearly 400 families seized the opportunity.

Between May and December, 1785—thirty years after the grand derangement in Acadia—more than 1600 Acadians came out on seven ships from France to Louisiana, completing the largest movement of colonists in American colonial history.

The Spanish authorities were delighted with the stability and industry of the new settlers who disembarked at New Orleans. The intendant, Martin Navarro, who located the newcomers on lands, reported to Madrid: I can assure you that after four years these Acadians will be America's most prosperous and sturdiest colonists, because they love their new home, and are determined to give Louisiana in 1786 its best harvest. Governor Miro reported in similar tone: The enthusiasm, industry and loyalty of these new colonists will boost the prosperity of our province and increase its local and foreign trade.

Today in Louisiana, it has been estimated that fully half a million Louisianians have Acadian blood in their veins.

During the governorship of Bernardo de Galvez (1776-1785) a group of Canary Islanders was settled in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and other Iberian colonists were settled on the Teche, one such settlement subsequently taking the name of New Iberia.

It was during Galvez's administration that the Americans began regularly to visit New Orleans, floating down the river from the Ohio Valley on flatboats loaded with produce. Even earlier, during the American Revolution, Oliver Pollock served as American agent in New Orleans to procure from the Spanish authorities arms, powder and ammunition.

When the upriver people reached New Orleans it marked the first time that the American frontiersman had come upon a culture far superior to his own. And, as has frequently happened with Americans in a similar situation, the rough, tough, pugnacious river boatman sometimes did not know how to behave. His outrageous conduct and the impression it made on New Orleanians undoubtedly planted the seeds of antagonism which would endure between the Creoles and Americans after the Louisiana Purchase and for many decades thereafter.

But, however they misbehaved, the wild Kaintucks, as the Creoles called them, ultimately supplied the pressure on the Washington government to acquire New Orleans and with it the free use of the Mississippi River. It is not necessary to dwell here on the ramifications of the granting and withdrawal of the right of deposit of American goods at New Orleans, tax free, until transhipped up the Atlantic seaboard. The upshot of the agitation from the Ohio Valley was that Thomas Jefferson set out to buy New Orleans from France—Spain had secretly retroceded it to Napoleon—and wound up acquiring all of Louisiana, approximately one third of the present United States.

Thomas Jefferson named a young protege\ William C. C. Claiborne, as governor, first of Louisiana, and then of the Territory of Orleans, which corresponded to the present State of Louisiana. Into a free and easy Latin environment, with a French-speaking Catholic population, came this twenty-eight year old strait-laced, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It was inevitable that they would misunderstand each other. Claiborne reported to President Jefferson that he thought the people of Louisiana generally speaking, honest, and he continued:

But they are uninformed, indolent, luxurious—in a word, ill-fitted to be useful citizens of a Republic. Under the Spanish Government education was discouraged, and little respectability attached to science. Wealth alone gave respect and influence, and hence it has happened that ignorance and wealth so generallv pervade this part of Louisiana. I have seen, Sir, in this city, many youth to whom nature has been apparently liberal, but from the injustice and inattention of their parents, have no accomplishments to recommend them but dancing with elegance and ease. The same observation will apply to the young females, with this additional remark, that they are among the most handsome women in America.

When Louisiana became American in 1803, New Orleans was a town of about 8,000 persons, more than half of whom were Negroes. Hardly had the American flag been run up the pole in the Place d'Armes, than New Orleans experienced its first of two population explosions. The town almost doubled its population in seven years and the 1810 census takers counted 17,242 inhabitants. The heterogeneity of the population can be gathered from a comment in The Western Gazette, or Emigrant's Directory, published in Auburn, N.Y., in 1817:

Here [in New Orleans] in half an hour you can see, and speak to Frenchmen, Spaniards, Danes, Swedes, Germans, Englishmen, Portuguese, Hollanders, Mexicans, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, New Englanders and a motley group of Indians, Quadroons, Africans, etc.

French refugees from Saint-Domingue arrived in large numbers in the first decade of the nineteenth century, many having fled to Cuba from the insurrection, and later continuing to New Orleans. German immigrants began to arrive by shiploads, seeking a new life in Louisiana. Unable to pay their passage across the Atlantic, the Germans became indentured servants and worked for a specified time for the person who paid the ship captain for their crossing. These Germans were called Redemptioners—that is they worked under a bond to redeem their freedom after some years.

In the 1830's and 1840's, when the potato famine struck Ireland, and Irishmen came to the United States in great numbers, New Orleans as a port received many sons of Erin. But there had been an Irish Colony in the city long before then. In 1809, St. Patrick's Day was celebrated for the first time by what the Louisiana Gazette called a respectable party of Irishmen in this city, and the traditional seventeen toasts were drunk.

New Orleans' second and largest population explosion occurred in the decade between 1830 and 1840, when the city more than doubled its population, due mainly to the Irish and German immigration. The 1840 census showed New Orleans with 102,193, an increase of nearly 54,000 over its 1830 population of 49,826.

On the